Barry N. Malzberg - Phase IV.pdf - Barry N. Malzberg - widez2

PHASE IV

Barry N. Malzberg

This one is for Bob Gleason.

PHASE I

Time: Something clicked and in the nebula shaped like a spirochete, a

bolt of energy moved from one side to the other, seventeen light-years, and

then vaulted into pure space. Pure space was another two hundred

thousand light-years, and the energy, now compacted, whisked through it

like a fish through water, accelerating, the inside curiously static.

Time: Something attacked the energy, some cosmic turbulence or

another intelligence, impossible to tell, and the energy felt itself being

squeezed, became sentient then, and fought back. Somewhere in the Crab

cluster, the attacker and the intelligence fought, and the battle lasted for

fifteen thousand years. Then the attacker fell away like ash and the energy

continued on its journey. Intelligence withdrew. At some subliminal level

it meditated.

The system rotated around a small Class B star, the star almost a dwarf,

in a far sector of the Milky Way. The sun in normal cycle would approach

nova in fifteen billion years, burn out then and consume the system. Now

it was still on the upswing. The radiance from this star drew the

approaching energy to life once again and it became sensate. It probed

through channels of recollection in a way that both was and was not

conscious.

It landed on the third planet.

Although the energy, long compressed for the journey, was only the size

of a small stone now, three inches across, six inches wide and deep, the

impact tore at it as it skittered through the sands, and for a long, long

time it existed in a state of nonconscious-ness. At some base level, it

struggled for survival, to combat the injury of the impact, and it did not

seem that it would survive, but the traveler was strong—its makers had

prepared it for this—and after an inconceivably long time, it began to

gather strength once again. It had passed the point of survival. Moistened

by rain, sheltered by the sands, the energy slowly returned to its full

awareness, and then it broke free of the stone, probing with fine tentacles

of consciousness for contact.

Contact: It found the minds that it was seeking. The minds were

vegetative, possessed intelligence unlike any conventional notions of

reason . . . but they were linked in a clear dependency, a fine network of

connection spreading from one mind to the next, and in the midst of those

connections the stone sent, for the second time in its journey, a bolt of

energy, much weaker, but sufficient to do the necessary. Under the thrust

of that bolt, the minds quickened. Something happened to them, the

connections became broader, richer, deeper in stroke. They keened to one

another. Connection became a fine mesh.

Now under the guidance of the stone, the quickened intelligences were

working. From various parts there was a gathering: instructions were

passed and with precision the next part of the project, one that could only

be accomplished through directed effort, was started. The minds scurried.

The stone beneath them extended visual centers to see what was

happening, and all was going as it should and it felt pleasure. Available to

it was a welter of emotions, but it discarded all but the pleasure, worked

upon it, then sent it on a narrow thread to those it controlled. They

throbbed with gratification.

The slabs grew. Seven of them on the desert, white, six feet in height,

cunningly hollowed out, where at the stone's orders, their horrid secrets

began to pulsate. Complex readjustments were made in the biological

system of the intelligences; from those changes came something that both

was and was not like them. One within a slab, guarded from the

landscape, those things grew.

At length, the stone on the desert felt the vast weakness that comes

when a task is completed, knowing this without questioning. Although it

was very complex and subtle, it was ultimately only a tool, and when a

tool's work is done, it must be put away. Without remorse, regret, or a

sense of loss, the thing encapsulated in the stone considered the fact of its

death and then, almost casually, shut down certain intricate facets. The

energy within it flickered, flamed, and perished.

The thing died, and at the instant of its death, a hundred million

light-years away, in a checking-center that had been wailing since the

journey began, a message was received. OPERATIVE the message said,

although in no language that could be understood, for it was a language

not composed of sound but of light and distance.

Inside the towers, things grew.

The ants were breeding now, and what came out of the queens in the

slabs were ants of a different sort, inheriting the new method of

connection. The older ants, some of them, clung tenaciously to their own

habits, but the life cycles of ants are quite short, and those that emerged

from the queens were strong. The larvae burst from the eggs, rested

awhile, and then foraged out into the desert on their complex but

ultimately simple task.

An old worker ant, stumbling through one of the slabs, passed into the

queen's belly and attempted to rupture it. The queen screamed without

sound and in a few seconds there were one hundred, two hundred soldiers

that entered the slab and tore the worker ant apart before it had time to

flee. But the martyrdom of the worker seemed to inspire a horde of other

workers, the older ones, the ones who had been there before something

(which their intelligences could only understand as an intrusion) had

happened, and they fought fiercely, desperately, the green and red of their

bodies locked into the black and white streaked forms of the new soldiers.

The battle went on inside the slab under the strange, hollow eyes of the

great queen, five feet high, who watched implacably from a hundred

pinpoints of light, and for a while it seemed that the older workers might

actually win because they were fighting with the inheritance of a hundred

million years of knowledge. For them and their ancestors it had always

been this way, and their cilia and mouths stroked out vicious patterns . . .

but the battle turned, it would have to turn, the soldiers were faster and

cleverer than the older workers, and they had, under the eyes of the great

queen, a seeming contempt toward death that the workers simply could

not match. Five hundred, a thousand of the black and white ants fell, but

more were spewed forth into the slab, the unmoving queen watching, and

soon enough the older workers began to fall, first in hundreds and then

thousands, red and green bodies covering the bottom of the slab like ash,

spilling out into the desert, their juices mingling into and spotting the

sands and—

—The soldiers carried their dead out of the slab and buried them with

the corpses of the enemy and in the other five slabs the same thing, at

intervals, was happening.

Soon there were very few red and green ants left, and those that were

had merely inherited pigmentation.

All of this took about six years that, to the queens, were negligible. Time

was no factor. No one noticed the slabs.

III

The rabbit sprang from a clump of bushes, seeing something that its

brain registered as terrible danger, then attempted to break free and run

the length of the strip, past the slabs, into a clump of mesquite that looked

safe. Ants appeared in its path, leapt upon it, but the rabbit brushed them

off, one foot, then the other clearing its hindquarters, throwing off the

bodies of the ants, spewing them from its mouth. The ants were small, and

although the rabbit was possessed with fear, it did not seem that they

posed any danger; but they kept on coming, emerging from the sands to

seize the rabbit's throat, some of them getting into the corners of its eyes.

Blinded, the rabbit rolled on the sands to free itself, but everywhere it

rolled there were ants, they came into its ears, anus, nostrils, clambering

within. The rabbit continued to twist on the sands, but a hundred ants

raced through the snug caverns inside the rabbit's body, biting, severing,

tormenting . . . the spinal cord was severed with a thousand bites, and the

rabbit lay paralyzed on the desert floor. Unblinking, its distended eyes

looked up at the sun exploding before it.

The ants fed.

There was no wastage. They were very hungry, but the choicest parts

were taken back to the queens.

Ants now teemed through that area of the Arizona desert, working out

from the slabs in a fine spidery network. They were very busy and they

needed no rest. Their life cycles were only a month, but the queens

thriving on their diet, were spewing out a million a day now, and each of

the ants was as careless of its survival as were the queens. There was no

such thing as death for any of the ants because the intelligences resided in

the slabs. The ants were merely extensions. They worked like fingers on

the desert: patting, arranging, spreading. Occasionally they talked to one

another without language. They gave one another commands.

Some kind of poisonous spray was thrown over them and several million

died before the queens were able to breed immunology. These newer ants

and the survivors who had been originally immune buried their dead.

The slabs, parched by sun, now rose higher, ten feet or more, giving

room for the expanding queens. The sun had bleached them free of color,

and they stood gray against the desert, reaching.

The queens felt imminence and made certain adjustments. All thus far

had been preparation; now, inevitably, that time of preparation was done.

The enemy, heightened to awareness, was coming.

The queens sent out signals to the workers, who withdrew to safe

positions. They waited.

The queens in their slabs mused.

Barry N. Malzberg - Phase IV.pdf

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