The Night's Dawn Trilogy (60 page)

Ione walked towards it down the amaranthus-lined path from the nearest of the campus’s five tube stations, three serjeant
bodyguards in tow. Her hair was still slightly damp from her swim with Haile, and the ends brushed against the collar of her
formal green-silk suit jacket. She drew wide-eyed stares and cautious smiles from the few project staff wandering around the
campus.

Parker Higgens was waiting just outside the main entrance, dressed as ever in his hazel-coloured suit with red spirals on
the flared arms. The trousers were fashionably baggy, but he was filling out the jacket quite comfortably. His mop of white
hair hung down over his forehead in some disarray.

Ione forbade a smile as they shook hands. The director was always so nervous around her. He was good at his job, but they
certainly didn’t share the same sense of humour. He would think teasing was a personal insult.

She greeted Oski Katsura, the head of the Electronics Division. She had taken over from the former head six months ago; her
appointment had been the first Ione had confirmed. A seventy-year-old, taller than Ione, with a distinguished willowy beauty,
wearing an ordinary white lab smock.

“You have some good news for me, then?” Ione asked as they went inside and started walking down the central corridor.

“Yes, ma’am,” Parker Higgens said.

“Most of the stack’s circuitry was composed of memory crystals,” Oski Katsura said. “The processors were subsidiary elements
to facilitate access and recording. Basically it was a memory core.”

“I see. And had the ice preserved it like we hoped?” Ione asked. “It looked intact when I saw it.”

“Oh, yes. It was almost completely intact, the chips and crystals encased in ice functioned perfectly after they had been
removed and cleaned. The reason it has taken us so long to decrypt the data stored in the crystals is that it is non-standard.”
They came to a set of wide double doors, and Oski Katsura datavised a security code to open them, gesturing Ione through.

The Electronics Division always reminded her of a cyber-factory: rows of identical clean rooms illuminated by harsh white
lighting, all of them filled with enigmatic blocks of equipment trailing wires and cables everywhere. This room was no different,
broad benches ran round the walls, with another down the centre, cluttered with customized electronics cabinets and test rigs.
The far end was a glass wall partitioning off six workshop cubicles. Several researchers were inside, using robot precision-assembly
cells to fabricate various units. At the opposite end of the room to the cubicles a stainless steel pedestal sat on the floor,
supporting a big sphere made up of tough transparent composite. Thick environmental-support hoses snaked away from the lower
quarter of the sphere, plugging into bulky conditioning units. Ione saw the Laymil electronics stack in the middle of the
sphere, with power leads and fibre-optic cables radiating out of its base. More surprisingly, Lieria was standing in front
of the long bench in the middle of the room, her tractamorphic arms branching into five or six tentacles apiece, all of which
were wound through an electronics cabinet.

Ione was quite proud she could recognize the Kiint immediately.
Good morning, Lieria, I thought you worked in the Physiology Division.

The tentacle appendages uncoiled from the cabinet, flowing back into one solid pillar of flesh again. Lieria turned ponderously,
careful not to knock into anything.
Welcome, Ione Saldana. I am here because Oski Katsura requested my input in this programme. I have been able to contribute
to the analysis of data stored in the Laymil crystals; there is some crossover into my primary field of study.

Excellent.

I note your cranial hair carries a residue of salt water; have you been swimming?

Yes, I gave Haile a scrub down. She’s getting impatient to look around Tranquillity. You’ll have to let me know when you think
she’s ready.

Your kindness is most welcome. We judge her mature enough to be allowed outside parental restriction providing she is accompanied.
But do not permit her to impose upon your own time.

She’s no bother.

One of Lieria’s arms lengthened to pick up a slender white wafer ten centimetres square from the bench. The unit emitted a
single whistle, then spoke. “Greetings, Director Parker Higgens.”

He gave the xenoc a small bow.

Oski Katsura tapped the environment bubble with a fingernail. “We cleaned and tested all the components before we reassembled
it,” she told Ione. “That ice wasn’t pure water, there were some peculiar hydrocarbons mixed in.”

“Laymil faecal matter,” Lieria said through the wafer.

“Quite. But the real challenge came from the data itself, it was like nothing we have found so far. It seemed almost totally
randomized. At first we thought it might be some kind of artform, then we began to notice irregular trait repetition.”

The same patterns repeated in different combinations,

Tranquillity translated.

The science staff always go through this rigmarole, don’t they?
she asked, half amused.

It is their chance to demonstrate to you, their paymaster, the effort they put in. Don’t disillusion them, it is impolite.

Ione kept her face neutral during the second-long exchange. “Which was enough to formulate a recognition program,” she said
smoothly.

“Quite,” said Oski Katsura. “Ninety per cent of the data was garbage to us, but these patterns kept appearing.”

“Once we had enough of them clearly identified we held an interdisciplinary conference and asked for best guesses,” Parker
Higgens said. “Bit of a long shot, but it paid off hand somely. I’m pleased to say Lieria said they resembled Laymil optical
impulses.”

“Correct,” Lieria said through the wafer. “Similarity approaching eighty-five per cent. The data packages represented colours
to a Laymil eye.”

“Once we’d established that, we ran a comparison on the rest of the data, trying to match it with other Laymil nerve impulses,”
Oski Katsura said. “Jackpot. Well, more or less. It took four months to write interpretation programs and build suitable interface
units, but we got there in the end.” A wave of her hand took in the benches and all their elaborate equipment. “We unravelled
the first full sequence last night.”

Dawning realization at what Oski Katsura was actually saying brought a sense of real excitement to Ione. Her eyes were drawn
to the stack in its protective bubble. She touched the transparent surface reverently, it was warmer than the ambient temperature.
“This is a recording of a Laymil senso-rium?” she asked.

Parker Higgens and Oski Katsura grinned like ten-year-olds.

“Yes, ma’am,” Parker Higgens said.

She turned to him sharply. “How much is there? How long does it go on for?”

Oski Katsura gave a modest shrug. “We don’t quite understand the file sequences yet. The one which we have translated so far
lasts a little over three minutes.”

“How long?” Ione let a waspish note creep into her voice.

“If the bit rate holds constant for the other sequences… approximately eight thousand hours.”

Did she say eight
thousand
?

Yes,
said Tranquillity.

“Bloody hell!” An oafish smile appeared on Ione’s face. “When you said translated, what did you mean?”

“The sequence has been adapted for human sensevise reception,” Oski Katsura said.

“Have you reviewed it?”

“Yes. The quality is below normal commercial standards, but that ought to improve once we refine our programs and equipment.”

“Can Tranquillity access your equipment through the communication net?” Ione asked urgently.

“It should be simple enough. One moment, I’ll datavise the entry code,” Oski Katsura said. “That’s it.”

Show me!

Senses which were fundamentally
wrong
engulfed her conscious thoughts, leaving her as a passive, faintly protesting, observer. The Laymil body was trisymmetric,
standing one metre seventy-five high, possessing a tough, heavily crinkled slate-grey skin. There were three legs, with a
double-jointed knee, and feet which ended in a hoof. Three arms with a bulbous shoulder which permitted a great deal of articulation,
a single elbow, and hands with four triple-jointed fingers as thick as a human thumb and twice as long, bestowing considerable
strength and dexterity. Most disturbing of all were the three sensor heads, emerging like truncated serpents between the shoulders.
Each one had an eye at the front, with a triangular bat-ear above it, and a toothless breathing mouth below. All the mouths
could vocalize, but one was larger and more sophisticated than the other two, which made up for their deficiency with a more
acute sense of smell. The feeding mouth was on the top of the torso, in the cleft between the necks, a circular orifice equipped
with sharp needle teeth.

The body Ione now wore constricted her own figure severely, pulping it below circular bands of muscle that flexed and twisted
sinuously, squeezing protesting flesh and bone into a new shape, forcing her to conform to the resurgent identity suspended
in the crystal matrix. She felt as though her limbs were being systematically twisted in every direction apart from the ones
nature intended. But there was no pain inherent in the metamorphosis. Feverish thoughts, electrified by instinctive revulsion,
began to calm. She started to look around, accepting the trinocular viewpoint input as best she could.

She was wearing clothes. The first surprise; born of prejudice, the foreign physique was
animal
, unhuman, no anthropomorphism could possibly exist here to build a bridge. But the trousers were easily recognizable, tubes
of midnight-purple fabric, sleek as silk against the coarse skin. They came halfway down the lower leg, there was even a recognizable
belt. The shirt was a stretchy cylinder of light green, with hoops that hung over the necks.

And she was walking, a three-legged walk that was so easy, so natural that she didn’t even have to think how to move the limbs
to avoid tripping. The sensor head with the speaking mouth was always at the front, swinging slowly from side to side. Her
other two heads scanned the surrounding countryside.

Sights and sounds besieged her. There were few half-tones in her visual world, bright primary colours dominated; but the image
was flecked with minute black fissures, like an AV projection running heavy interference; the myriad sounds sliced with half-second
breaks of silence.

Ione glossed over the flaws. She was walking through a Laymil habitat. If Tranquillity was manicured perfection, this was
manicured anarchy. The trees were at war, thrusting and clashing against each other. Nothing grew upright. It was like a jungle
hit by a hurricane, but with the trunks packed so closely they couldn’t fall, only topple onto their neighbours. She saw trees
with their kinked trunks cupped together, trunks that spiralled round each other wrestling for height and light, young shoots
piercing old flaking boles. Roots the size of a man’s torso emerged from the trunks well above her head, stabbing down like
fleshy beige fork prongs into the sandy soil, producing a buttress cone. The leaves were long ribbons, curled into spirals,
a deep olive-green in colour. And down where she walked, where shadows and sunbeams alternated like incorporeal pillars, every
nook and crevice was crammed with tiny cobalt-blue flowering mushrooms, their pilei fringed with vermilion stamens, swaying
like sea anemones in a weak current.

Pleasure and peace soaked into her like sunlight through amber. The forest was in harmony, its life spirit resonating with
the spaceholm mother essence, singing their madrigal in unison. She listened with her heart, thankful for the privilege of
living.

Hoofs trod evenly along the meandering trail carrying her towards the fourth marriage community. Her husbands/mates awaited
her, the eagerness inside her was woven into the forest song and rejoiced over by the mother essence.

She reached the borders of the jungle, saddened by the smaller trees, the end of song, jubilant that she had passed through
cleanly, that she was worthy of a fourth reproduction cycle. The trees gave way to open land, a gentle valley swathed in high,
lush grasses and speckled with vivid reds and yellows and blues of bell-shaped flowers. Spaceholm reared around her, a landscape
of tangled greens, rampant vegetation choking the silver veins of streams and rivers, smeared with fragile tufts of cloud.
Sunspires stabbed out along the axis from the centre of each endcap, thin sabres stretching for twenty kilometres, furiously
radiant.

“Tree spirit song unity,”
she called with voice and mind. Her two clarion heads bugled gleefully.
“I await.”

“Richness reward embryo growth daughter,”
the space-holm mother entity replied.

“Male selection?” “Concord.”

“Unison awaits.”

“Life urge rapture.”

She started to walk down the slope. Ahead of her on the floor of the valley was the fourth marriage community. Blue polyp
cuboidal structures, rigidly symmetrical, arrayed in concentric rings. On the paths between the featureless walls she could
see other Laymil moving about. All her heads craned forward.

The memory ended.

The lurch back into the conformity of the electronics lab was as abrupt as it was shocking. Ione put a hand on the bench to
steady herself. Oski Katsura and Parker Higgens were giving her an anxious look, even Lieria’s dark violet eyes were focused
on her.

“That was… astonishing,” she managed to say. The hot Laymil jungle lurked around the fringes of sight like a vengeful daydream.
“Those trees, she seemed to think of them as alive.”

“Yes,” Parker Higgens said. “It was obviously some kind of mating selection test or ritual. We know Laymil females are capable
of five reproductive cycles, it never occurred to anybody that they might be subject to artificial restraints. In fact I find
it amazing that a culture so sophisticated should still indulge in what was almost a pagan rite.”