The Trilisk Ruins (25 page)

“
Five Holy Entities,” Telisa
gasped. “That was high-voltage stuff!” She cradled her head in her
hands. The experience had been overwhelming, stepping into the
consciousness of another being. A nonhuman creature, with a body
beyond description, feelings that she had never felt before. Telisa
felt faint. Without warning, she fell forward and vomited, barely
managing to miss her backpack and the scanner. She lay to one side,
breathing heavily while her stomach tightened and her heart pounded
away.

“
Shiny... that was awful...
and wonderful all at the same time. It was so powerful.”

“
Device. Active. Caution,”
Shiny repeated.

“
Yeah. Active. No kidding,”
she said.

“
Partial view. You have two
parts in three.”

“
What? You mean the other?
That thing had three parts, first one was looking out the window
and I could see every tiny detail, enough to make my head hurt.
Then he stepped... turned, or something, and just started thinking
about what it all meant, and the details became more distant. But
there was some alarm or something, then the whole recording washed
out, like I was feeling it all secondhand.”

“
Two parts in three. Brain
sections. Telisa with two. Trilisk with three.”

“
Uh, wow. I guess our name
for them was better than we realized. We call them Trilisks because
the discoverer of the initial ruin decided that they must have been
trilaterally symmetrical.”

“
Yes. Trilisk, three parts.
Three stances. Three facings. Three minds.”

“
Yet I could feel the
others, some kind of underlying togetherness... like the way my two
hemispheres are connected!”

“
Similar. Analog.
Comparable.”

“
Well, what about you? You
could understand the Other? How many lobes do you have?”

“
Twenty.”

“
What! No way! Twenty...
hey, you have forty legs?”

“
Yes. Twenty nodes along
central connection. Analog of human spinal cord. Twenty lobes.
Generic. Nonspecialized.”

“
Generic? They each do the
same tasks equally well? Wow. But the Trilisk brains were super
specialized... more so than human left and right hemispheres, I
think. One did way more abstract thought than the first one. But
the Other, I don’t even know what it could be specialized to
do.”

“
Yes. Trilisk specialized.
Telisa understanding perhaps beyond Shiny. Brain is partially
specialized. Right lobe, left lobe. Alien. Fascinating.”

“
Yeah. Fascinating is an
understatement.”

Chapter
Twenty One

Telisa catalogued the other items,
scanning and tagging them one at a time. Each of the things had an
ultradense block that she could see through the passive scanner,
except for one artifact, a flat, square plate the size of her palm
that had ridges on its edges as if it were made of dozens of layers
of metal. It seemed as inert to her eye as it did to the passive
scanner.

Telisa tried to activate her link
recorder to take some notes. Her link gave no reply. She sighed and
summarized aloud anyway.

“
That’s fourteen Trilisk
items all together,” she said. Shiny seemed attentive. “So far I
only have a clue about one of them. It appears to be some sort of
communication device or maybe a memory recorder of some kind. What
is astounding about it is it can actually translate from an alien
consciousness to experiences that my brain can understand. Well,
partially understand, modulo my ‘missing’ third lobe. Although it
seems already that the... feelings, or senses, that the alien had
are fading from my mind.”

“
Trilisk. Ancient.
Enigmatic,” Shiny buzzed.

“
Very enigmatic,” she
agreed. Telisa pried herself up from her sitting position on the
deck and started to put things away.

“
You’re enigmatic to us too,
Shiny,” Telisa said. “You and your forty legs and your little
spheres.”

“
Thirty-eight legs,” Shiny
corrected.

“
I’m sorry. I forgot,”
Telisa said. “We’ll figure out how to grow them back, I’m
sure.”

“
Probable.”

“
Who are you at war with,
Shiny?”

“
Conflict, combat. Waged
against race you cannot name. Humans have not coined
term.”

“
What’re they like? Why do
you fight them?”

“
Competition for limited
resources. No optimal cooperative solution. Optimal solution, my
side wins.”

An insistent tone interrupted her from
the conversation. Her link awakened and responded to her first
query with the current time. Telisa smiled and sighed in
relief.

“
Yes! It’s so nice to have a
link back! Sorry, Shiny, gimme a second.”

Telisa queried for the date and
received it. She asked the link for her blood sugar and it replied.
It told her how long she had been awake and a list of other
personal links within range. She scrolled through a list of local
services offered by tiny computers placed throughout the ship. Once
again, a huge amount of information was back at her fingertips, the
temperature of hot water in the ship’s reserve, the number of
rations stored in the galley’s cabinets, and the volume of the
forward hold.

She could even see three-dimensional
images of the ship in her mind’s eye. Telisa asked for an overview
of her position and saw a tiny red figure, herself, sitting in a
transparent green technical drawing of the ship. She queried for
directions to the pilot seats and saw the route light up with a red
line.

“
Ha! My link works! Sooo
wonderful! How did humans ever live without links?”

“
Link dysfunction. Query.
Source, cause, root?” buzzed Shiny’s tiny sphere.

“
Yes... oh, ah the cause.
Hrm, well, the government, that is the UNSF... you know what that
is? The government thinks that I’m a danger because I’m a
xenoarchaeologist who won’t join the space force. But I won’t join
because they take everyone’s rights away, and my father chose the
force over my family when I was a kid. Or maybe it’s because I
joined a group of smugglers. I don’t know, all I do know is, they
control everyone too much, and they won’t let me live my life the
way I want to... the way I need to.”

“
Human government.
Oppressive, bureaucratic, inefficient. Corrective course, decouple
control of structure from organization being
structured.”

“
Hrm. Yeah, since when did
the government ever make itself smaller or reduce its own power?
Not since the last revolution. Maybe us humans will get it right
next time... if we ever manage to get control back
again.”

“
Government, humans apply
cyclical evolution strategy. Yes, improve framework on next
iteration.”

“
Anyway, Magnus cleaned it
up and it’s so nice to have it back... I bet you’d miss your
computers or whatever all that stuff you have attached to your body
is, if it were turned off... but now I need to go back and look at
the artifacts all over again!”

Telisa unpacked the scanner and linked
with it to check out its memory of the items that she had examined.
She had just brought up the first readout when she heard footsteps
approaching on the deck.

“
All better?” Magnus
asked.

Telisa looked up at her last human
companion. Magnus stood straight, in his Veer skinsuit as always,
regarding Shiny.

“
Much. Thanks!” she said.
“I’ve been looking at the artifacts and chatting with Shiny. By the
way, one of them is a memory recorder or something like that. I
picked it up and suddenly it was like being in a sim except I had
an alien body and alien senses.”

“
Amazing what we could
learn. Plus, if we can ever sell those things...”

Telisa nodded. “We’d be set for life.
Except for the minor detail of being hunted criminals.”

“
Jack was better about that
sort of stuff, but he taught me a thing or two. We’ll have to think
everything out carefully before we head back.”

“
I suppose we need to talk
about where we’re eventually going to go,” Telisa said.

“
We need to hang low.
There’re a few smaller frontier ports I know that we may be able to
get supplies from after a while without going through too much
security. On the other hand, that’s what they’d expect us to
do.”

“
Policy. Statement.
Destination. Control. Modification.”

“
We have to go hide, Shiny.
We must control the destination. We’re in danger, we may be hunted.
By the UNSF,” Telisa said.

“
Shiny. Destination.
Modification,” Shiny’s device said. Telisa tried to make sense of
this for a moment.

“
Telisa.” Magnus said it
gently. Telisa turned to regard Magnus.

“
Yes?”

“
Shiny has control of the
ship. He’s changed our course.”

Telisa’s mouth dropped open. She tried
to speak, but only an odd grunt came out. She took a deep
breath.

“
Control of the ship? He
just learned to speak a few hours ago.”

Magnus shrugged. “In some ways, he had
to master the computer systems to get that far. What I didn’t
expect was his ability to find and exploit security holes in our
systems. I’m convinced that he has very powerful computers of his
own at his control.”

“
Yes, part of his amazing
equipment there on the trunk of his body. Shiny, where are we going
now?”

“
Stronghold.
Sanctuary.”

“
Well, it sounds good enough
if you put it that way. One of your worlds?”

“
Outpost. Existence
uncertain,” Shiny droned. “War. Conflict. Damage probable,
destruction possible.”

“
Okay, now it’s sounding
less safe,” Telisa said.

“
Come with me, let’s talk
alone,” Magnus suggested.

“
Query. Magnus, Telisa,
communicate. Exchange privileged information?” Shiny asked. An
awkward silence ensued.

“
Uhm, we’re going to go
mate,” Telisa said. “Y’know, copulate. You can look that one
up.”

Magnus’s eyebrows rose. He smiled and
offered his hand, which Telisa took, and they marched out of the
cargo bay.

As soon as they left the bay, Magnus
raised his finger to his lips, signaling silence. Telisa nodded her
understanding. He led her to the forward most g-damper pod. Telisa
crawled into the tube. Magnus pulled the slugthrower off his back
and slid in next to her. He smelled good, and Telisa realized she
hadn’t been in such a private situation with a man in a long time.
She smiled.

“
We really ought to figure
out what to do about Shiny,” Magnus said. “He seems nice, but I
wonder if he’s dangerous. We’ve been over-anthropomorphizing
him.”

Telisa tore her eyes away and forced
herself to think about Shiny.

“
We have to take control of
the computers back, lock him out somehow. It occurs to me that we
didn’t even ask him to relinquish control. It just kind of freaked
me out, I haven’t really absorbed everything yet.”

“
We could always try to blow
a hole in his head,” Magnus said.

“
Seems extreme. Is he
threatening our lives?”

“
I guess that depends on
where we’re really going. I don’t know if attacking him would
work... those little spheres that follow him around seem to protect
him. I think we both doubt he’ll just give control back since he
took it away without asking.”

“
I wonder if he knows he’s
being rude, or if he cares,” Telisa said.

“
You mean maybe it’s
acceptable in his society to take over someone else’s ship? Sounds
unlikely.”

“
Shiny’s an alien. Who knows
what kind of codes of behavior he follows? Speaking of which, I
just got a dose of just how alien is alien.”

“
What do you
mean?”

“
That Trilisk artifact I
accidentally activated. It was sort of like a VR sim, except I was
an alien. I mean, in more than just form, but in frame of mind,
feelings, senses, everything. It wasn’t like anything I’ve ever
experienced before. Shiny told me that I couldn’t quite experience
it right because the recording was for a creature with three brain
lobes, and he said he has twenty!”

“
If he’s capable of behavior
that inexplicable to us, then he could kill us at any time. We have
no way of knowing if he even values our lives. There are just too
many unknowns.”

“
Alright. You work on
getting control back, and I’ll grill him about where we’re going
and what he means to do with us. He may not tell me the truth, but
it can’t hurt to try. We can save the blowing him away stuff for
later.”

Magnus nodded and stared at her for a
moment.

“
We should probably do some
of that mating stuff,” he said. “Just to throw off suspicion, of
course.”

Telisa laughed. It seemed like they
never had time to be alone, ever since things had started going
wrong. How many times had she daydreamed of a moment like this
since she met Magnus?