Heaven (38 page)

Why cannot these fools be more precise?
The podmaster sought clarification. “Bodies of polypoids?”

“Bodies of Fyx missionaries, Podmaster.”

Well, that was clear. Disturbingly so. “Any sign of live heathen?”

“No, Podmaster. We have secured the pools, and they are devoid of menace. Do I have permission to proceed with the plan?”

“Permission granted. Implement the plan with skill and precision!”

The monks were clad in class-nine armor. Beneath, they wore biological exclusion wraps of Precursor manufacture. They carried
several more such wraps, which they used to enclose randomly selected Fyx corpses. “Samples acquired,” the warabbot reported.

At last, some efficiency. The operation had gone exactly to plan. “Return with them to the pod. We will lift the moment you
are embarked.”

Just to be on the safe side, the transpod dropped a cluster of love bombs as it passed through the ten-thousand-foot level
at three times the speed of sound. Every living thing within the port area would be reduced to a cinder. The bombs had an
unusual feature: Before exploding, they emitted brief prayers for the lifesouls of the heathen that they were primed to slay.
The gist of the prayers was that it was all for the heathens’ own good, and that they should rejoice because they would die
in the glow of the love of the Lifesoul-Stealer.

The platoon’s specimens were sent for immediate analysis. It took the fleet’s biotechnicians thirty-six hours of uninterrupted
work to discover the trick that the reefwives had played. They had used tailored viruses, cunningly equipped with a genetic
time-delay system. Once activated, the viruses had hijacked the molecular replication machinery of the Fyx’s own cells and
subverted it so that it created more viruses. Such a specific structure could not have arisen by accident. This virus had
been specifically engineered to target Fyx nerve cells.

It was a filthy weapon. The effect had cascaded along the missionaries’ nerve fibers in a catalytic chain reaction. The damage
inflicted on the nerve cells was not immediately fatal, but it slowed down the transmission of neural signals to a snail’s
pace. The Fyx were unable to think, or to react, at their normal speeds. In particular, they were unable to control their
muscles. Limp, immobile, unable to grasp or feed, unable even to speak, they quickly died from a deficit of hydrocyanic acid,
without which their circulation could not convey vital sulfur compounds to their brains.

The technicians reported their findings to the commander of the No-Moon mission fleet, Archstrategist Oot’PurBimlin of the
mother ship
Virtuous Confrontation
. The archstrategist wondered where the polypoids had obtained such a sophisticated bioweapon. As far as he could find out,
the creatures were known only for their ceramic electronics. Did they have a secret ally? He would have to revise his plans.
He called a council with his defense advisers, and new orders went out:
Employ Strategy #8,442.

The reefwives had anticipated—not that this was quite the word, given their unusual attitude toward time—that their viral
weapon would quickly be countered. They could see that happening in several timechunks, two weeks before the actual event,
and by the time a further week had passed, every timechunk showed the same scenario.

The same thing had happened in past engagements, and they knew exactly what to do next. Cosmic Unity had evidently developed,
or soon would develop—it was all the same to the reefmind—a vaccine against a key viral fragment, which locked one of the
genetic switches into the “inactive” state. As a further precaution, antiviral femtomachines had been introduced into the
missionaries’ circulatory systems. The virus trick, even with modifications, would not work a second time.

The reefwives’ perceptions told them that having countered this antipersonnel weapon, Cosmic Unity would concentrate on rounding
up the remaining free mariners, to prevent more overt military action.

Their memories contained a method for mounting a highly effective counterattack.

The telescopes of the mission fleet had spotted a shoal of polypoids, one of several thousand detected that morning. This
particular shoal was heading for the Straits of Ingratitude, and it looked dangerous. The polypoids had come under fire from
small weapons, but significant casualties had not deterred them.

A substantial missionary force had been based just beyond this narrow waist of water, where the seabed fell away into the
depths and the land receded to form a wide, fertile plain. The shoal was obviously an attack force, and although the polypoids’
weaponry was primitive, Cosmic Unity had no wish to lose any more missionaries than it already had. Over the past few days,
the polypoids had become much more aggressive. The Church had underestimated the natives of No-Moon once; it would not do
so again.

The shoal was too deep to be attacked from the surface, and the local commanders were under pressure to achieve results by
capturing as many mariners as they could, so waiting for them to pass through the shallows of the Strait was not an option.
Shock bombs would kill the heathens, but that was not the objective: Only if the polypoids lived could their lifesouls be
healed and cherished as they deserved. So the missionaries were obliged to risk their own lifesouls and take prompt and decisive
military action. By so doing, they demonstrated their boundless love for their fellow sentients, even heathens. If the Lifesoul-Stealer
took any of the missionaries, then the sacrifice would be in a just cause. All missionaries knew that their lives might be
forfeit for the sake of the Church—this was, after all, the content of the First Great Meme. They drew a sense of quiet pride
from this knowledge, but of course it would be sinful to express such an emotion, so they transformed it into a sense of humility
in the face of the awesomeness of the cosmos.

A multispecies raiding party of two hundred aquatics was rushed to the scene in a small convoy of light cruisers, accompanied
by a prison raft that was little more than a floating net. The aquatics were specialists, highly trained in the art of subfluid
combat, and their battlesuits had been preprogrammed for a watery environment. They descended on the free-swimming mariners,
wary now that the creatures had gained in courage and ferocity. Protected by sonic cannon that could blow their opponents
to pieces using focused shock waves, the Church’s subaquatic forces drove the mariners toward the surface, where more conventional
weapons would destroy them. The aquatics began congratulating themselves on how smoothly the operation was proceeding.

And then it wasn’t.

From the darkness of the deep ocean, miles beneath the polypoid shoal, something sleek and deadly emerged with breathtaking
speed. Its skin changed color to match its background, rendering it all but invisible to the naked eye. The aquatics had equipment
that could detect this swift enemy and fight it, but the attack was so sudden that they never got to use it.

At the surface, the cruisers waited for the raiding party to return. When the appointed time for rendezvous had passed and
there was still no sign of any returning aquatics, they cautiously sent down a slow but virtually indestructible benthosphere
to find out what had gone wrong. The benthosphere returned with the bodies of two members of the raiding party—all it had
room for. There had been plenty to choose from.

Once more, the corpses were analyzed. This time, the biochemists had to try virtually every trick they knew before they found
a few almost negligible traces of the degradation products of powerful neurotoxins—a different toxin for each species in the
raiding party.

Computer enhancement of visual recordings, made by the raiding party’s autoscribes, revealed the shape but not the nature
of the invisible killers. Computational filtering techniques exaggerated the inevitable errors that the killers had made when
matching themselves to their backgrounds; other methods tracked the vortices they shed as they surged through the water, and
reconstructed the shape that must have created such patterns. By a combination of such methods, Cosmic Unity’s analysts satisfied
themselves that their aquatic raiding party had been attacked by some kind of jellyfish.

They did not know that the jellyfish were female polypoids—a few of the reefwives remodeling their own biology and “going
predator.” Emerging from the comparative safety of their calcareous homes, a few ninesquares of the females could merge together
to form a single macroorganism, and in this case the reefmind had ordained that this should be a particularly nasty form of
jellyfish. She had also envisioned the makeup of the raiding party, species by species, and secreted suitable toxins for each
of them.

Know your enemy
. That was the reefwives’ motto.

The archstrategist issued new orders. This was almost getting interesting. He’d expected the war to be a pushover, but the
polypoids’ organization was proving surprisingly effective and, if anything, getting better. They
must
have a more advanced ally. But the ally’s tactics were nothing new to him, so it mattered little who the ally was.

There was a routine response:

Employ Strategy #2,515
.

The reefmind consulted her timechunk, and her apprehension grew. The enemy’s tactical choices had been foreseen, of course,
but the rapidity and sureness of Cosmic Unity’s replies to the reefmind’s defensive gambits was worrying. That, too, had been
foreseen, but not in all timechunks. Now even the most highly resolved perception showed that the reefwives were losing the
battles, and would probably lose the war unless they did something radical and unpredictable. The strategists of Cosmic Unity
were more practiced than the reefwives—the Church fought such wars all the time, and it had evolved strategies to combat every
defense yet imagined. The reefwives had fought maybe half a dozen wars since they had first evolved collective sentience;
their memories were sharp, and their intelligence was unparalleled, but their experience was limited. And they were up against
a professional, well-oiled war machine. Or “meme disseminator,” as Cosmic Unity preferred to call it.

There were several techniques that the reefwives had yet to use, but from now on each would generate dangerous side effects.
They could win the war but lose the planet, and that would be a futile victory. Nonetheless, if pushed, they would use every
weapon they possessed—even the suicidal Last Resort, if no other option remained.

Reviewing progress thus far, Oot’PurBimlin decided that early in the invasion he had made a slight mistake. The forces of
Cosmic Unity under his command had not employed a preemptive strike against No-Moon. Now the archstrategist was beginning
to regret that decision. His original reasoning had been straightforward: There seemed to be no indigenous cultural minorities
on the watery world. The wide availability of sea transport for thousands of years had pulled all polypoid cultures together
into a single global multiculture.

A preemptive strike always worked best when there was a small, easily identified, widely despised minority. Better still,
one that had inflicted its own limited brand of monoculture on all and sundry, convinced that it alone knew the right way
to behave and the right things to believe. Like those Huphun he’d been hearing about. That campaign was turning into a textablet
model. Hammering a hated minority group into the ground was a swift way to win over the lifesouls of those they had oppressed,
while sending a terribly clear message to everyone else.

However, in the absence of any such hate figures, the Church could simply have chosen to victimize a random subset of the
population. They had not done so, and it had been a mistake. They had overestimated the receptiveness of the polypoids to
the Memeplex, and underestimated their stubbornness.

No more Mr. Nice Guy.

The reefwives had come to the same decision, subject to a change of gender. No longer did small groups of reefwives join forces,
and bodies, to go predator. Now entire reefs were dissolving into swarms of jellyfish. The oceans were infested with monstrous
creatures, viciously aggressive, tenacious beyond belief, and deadly to the touch. Some could spit poison into the air over
a distance of several miles; Cosmic Unity lost thousands of troops that way. Others spat a thick goo that burst into flame
when it contacted living flesh, or corrosive acids that ate away at even the most resistant metals.

Employ Strategy #304
.

Having exhausted their standard tactics, the reefwives invented a new one. Once more they modified their polyps, and started
budding off biological warfare machines. These microorganisms were highly mobile and could penetrate any form of protective
covering. Once inside, they tunneled their way into whatever organism they found there, and took samples. Then they returned
to the reef, to be chemically reprogrammed and sent back. The new molecular programming, of course, was highly disruptive
to the normal biology of the victim.

For a few hours, the new tactic caused havoc.

Employ Strategy #4,431.

Now entire reefs were dying as Cosmic Unity’s missionary forces hit back with ever more disregard for sentient life—indeed,
life of any kind. Monks and missionaries on the ground were becoming a growing target for ever more massive strikes by the
polypoid resistance; they were reinforced with roving machines, backed up by the combined firepower of the mission fleet.

Cosmic Unity was blowing up islands and closing sea channels with fusion bombs. All over the planet, forests were ablaze,
to choke off sunlight and demoralize the remaining polypoid combatants. The missionary forces dumped volatile chemicals into
the seas and set them on fire, pumped nerve gas into the air.

By now the Church had not only given up its original plan A to convert the inhabitants of No-Moon voluntarily to the Memeplex
of Universal Tolerance; it had also given up on plan B, which was to enforce love and tolerance whether the polypoids wanted
it or not. Now Cosmic Unity was completely committed to plan C, which was to batter the planet with every weapon that the
Church possessed, until not a single living thing stirred on its surface. Yes, it was a pity, but that was what happened to
hopelessly intolerant species, and the strategy banks contained ample evidence that total destruction was the only sensible
way to handle such cases.