The more she spoke of them, the more foolish her advocacy seemed.

Few on Hearth knew anything of the Gw'oth, and for good reason. The sea creatures were too scary to reveal to the public. Baedeker was in the small minority, one of the technologists asked to a.s.sess the implausible findings of the Explorer Explorer expedition. Only everything Nessus had reported was true! The Gw'oth had, incredibly, advanced from fire to fission in two generations. expedition. Only everything Nessus had reported was true! The Gw'oth had, incredibly, advanced from fire to fission in two generations.

No one ever told Baedeker the Fleet had veered to give the Gw'oth a wider berth. No one had had to. The nanotech process by which General Products built its hulls was sensitive to the slightest of perturbations. Soon after Explorer Explorer returned, transient gravitational ripples had disrupted production in the orbiting microgravity factory. Ripples such as a planetary course change might cause. returned, transient gravitational ripples had disrupted production in the orbiting microgravity factory. Ripples such as a planetary course change might cause.

In the few years since Kirsten last visited, the Gw'oth had added interplanetary travel to their capabilities. Who could say interstellar travel would not soon follow?

Baedeker was here, today, coerced onto this mission, because he had been immobilized by an existential question. Was it time for him to return to Hearth? Now he had his answer.

If a strike by the Fleet was not why the Gw'oth called for help, it would be-as soon as Baedeker returned to report what he now knew.

10.

"Five minutes to dropout," Kirsten announced calmly.

Sigmund's eyes refused to leave the ma.s.s pointer. It was by far the largest instrument on the bridge, a transparent sphere from whose center extended blue lines of varying lengths. The direction of a line showed the direction to the corresponding astronomical object. The length was proportional to the object's gravitational influence: ma.s.s over distance squared.

He sat, transfixed, in the copilot's crash couch. The longest line, aimed right at him, nearly touched the clear surface, and that terrified him. The line seemed somehow hungry hungry, ready to devour this ship, and that horrified him even more. Only a sentient mind could operate a ma.s.s pointer, which begged the question: What might be out there contemplating him him?

Five minutes!

The math was simple. Every extra second they remained in hypers.p.a.ce brought Don Quixote Don Quixote another two light-minutes closer to their destination. But a moment too late would be fatal. Sigmund gritted his teeth and said nothing. Kirsten was by far New Terra's best pilot. another two light-minutes closer to their destination. But a moment too late would be fatal. Sigmund gritted his teeth and said nothing. Kirsten was by far New Terra's best pilot.

"Sounds good," Eric answered from the engine room. "All ready back here."

Baedeker did not report from his cabin. Sigmund imagined the Puppeteer was a tightly rolled ball just now.

Five minutes!

After an eternity Kirsten began the final countdown. "Ten seconds, everyone. Eight, seven..."

"Pa.s.sive sensors only," Sigmund reminded her.

She nodded. "Two, one, now."

The ma.s.s pointer went dark. Sigmund activated the forward view screen. Ahead: stars.

DON QUIXOTE DOVE into the solar system at breakneck speed. DOVE into the solar system at breakneck speed.

It was a crawl compared to their moments-ago pace through hypers.p.a.ce-but with the mind refusing to see hypers.p.a.ce, how could you judge?

"Lots of background EM," Kirsten reported. "Data links. Video and radio chatter. It's all from the inner system. Nothing's intelligible from this far out."

"Radar?" Sigmund asked her. He raised his voice over the clatter of hooves in the corridor. Baedeker had emerged from his cabin.

"Not that I can tell, Sigmund. Nor lidar, nor deep radar, not that any of those matter in a stealthed ship." She took a deep breath. "It'll be hours before the Gw'oth can know we're here."

Because it would be hours before information from here could reach the inner system. Hyperwave radio was instantaneous where it worked-which was outside of gravitational singularities. They were almost 4.5 billion miles from the star, only a bright orange dot to the naked eye, and Don Quixote Don Quixote's black hull would reflect little of the faint light that reached out here.

"Unless they are already out here," Baedeker chided from the hallway, before Sigmund got out the caveat. Cowardice was not a bad subst.i.tute for paranoia.

"I'm detecting interesting neutrino flux," Eric said over the intercom.

Kirsten frowned. "Check your instruments and I'll check mine. I'm still not seeing any deep radar."

"Because it's not deep radar. It looks like fusion reactors."

Sigmund glanced toward the nervous tap-tap of hoof pawing deck. Baedeker had to be thinking: fission to fusion in a few years. Sigmund knew how the Puppeteer felt. On Earth, if Sigmund remembered correctly, that transition had taken close to a century. Jeeves probably knew exactly, but Sigmund didn't ask. The details could wait. Or maybe, at some level, he didn't want to know.

Don Quixote was scarcely a minute out of hypers.p.a.ce-and a third of a million miles deeper into the solar system. Einstein s.p.a.ce (an attribution no one on New Terra but Sigmund understood) and hypers.p.a.ce velocities were independent. When Sigmund had recalled was scarcely a minute out of hypers.p.a.ce-and a third of a million miles deeper into the solar system. Einstein s.p.a.ce (an attribution no one on New Terra but Sigmund understood) and hypers.p.a.ce velocities were independent. When Sigmund had recalled Don Quixote Don Quixote, Kirsten came back as quickly as she could. It had meant a thirty-gee sprint out of the system that she had been scouting, to get where she could engage hyperdrive. Don Quixote Don Quixote still had all that Einstein-s.p.a.ce velocity, because they hadn't spent the time to slow down before swapping crews. Relative to this solar system, still had all that Einstein-s.p.a.ce velocity, because they hadn't spent the time to slow down before swapping crews. Relative to this solar system, Don Quixote Don Quixote traveled at about seven percent of light speed. traveled at about seven percent of light speed.

Well, they would have to slow down to meet the Gw'oth.

"Thrusters or gravity drag?" Kirsten had a hand poised above the thruster controls. Her preference, obviously.

Sigmund turned toward her. "Neither, just yet. Let's coast for a while and gather data."

Kirsten's hand pulled back. She used it to give Sigmund a perfunctory salute. He read disapproval.

Not so, Baedeker. From the corner of his eye Sigmund saw heads bobbing-high/low, low/high, high/low-in emphatic agreement.

Kirsten changed her tune within the hour. By then Eric had localized the neutrino readings. Fusion plants existed on every major moon of the lone gas giant and on two of the three rocky planets.

11.

Intelligence was overrated.

Since time immemorial the Gw'oth had lived and died beneath the world-encompa.s.sing ice. In just three generations all that had changed. Now they built mighty structures in the vacuum above the ice, ringed the world with satellites and water-filled habitats, even colonized nearby worlds. Intelligence had made all that possible.

But intelligence required you to give up so so much. much.

Er'o hovered in his meditation chamber, his tubacles rippling, seeking respite in the simple joys of motion. His hide was mostly cautious oranges and reds, shading to far red on the tips of his spines. But for an undertaste of lubricant from the pumps, he might have been below the ice. The water that endlessly circulated through this chamber was lush: rich with salts, thick with nutrients, ripe with the synthetic spoor of prey. Nothing was too good for those who made possible all the progress.

Except free will.

From tubacle tips curled downward, he gazed through the clear ice floor. Structures in every shape imaginable sprawled down the seamount slope and across the world's foundation until detail faded into a distant haze. The ancient city was built mostly in stone, of course, but here, there, everywhere jutted new steel construction. Artificial lights glowed everywhere. Cargo vessels glided about, over and among the buildings. Tn'ho Nation ruled the longest, most productive hydrothermal vent in all the ocean, and Lm'Ba was its greatest city.

But that power and wealth might vanish even more quickly than it had come.

Er'o bent and flexed, tensed and relaxed, until the stress flowed down the length of his tubacles and out of his body, until his hide recolored to more serene hues. Succulent worms and fat scuttlebugs had been delivered while he worked, and now he ate his fill. He voided his wastes. As best he could, he cleared his mind. He permitted himself a brief, timed rest period.

Food and elimination, motion and meditation: for true intelligence, one abstained from them all.

The timer rumbled, and Er'o roused himself. Somehow, he had managed to sleep. He jetted from his private meditation chamber, down the narrow access tunnel. His was one cylinder among many, arranged like spokes around the hub (wheeled vehicles above the ice being another small marvel of the age) that was the central work s.p.a.ce. High above the clear dome, great Tl'ho, radiant, striped, roiling with storms, dominated the sky. Two cold spots-whole worlds themselves-transited the great orb.

And Gw'oth like himself crept about on their arid, rocky surfaces!

He was first among the sixteen to reach the central work s.p.a.ce. Quickly the others arrived, emerging from their meditation s.p.a.ces, most colored the same anxious reds and far reds he now showed. Their common task, unchanged for several shifts, glowed on the a.s.signment board: Find the Others.

Er'o knew the task was urgent. Also impossible, unless the aliens responded to his people's plea.

He extended one tubacle, trembling, and then another. Both limbs were taken up. Within, ears went all but deaf, registering only the beating of hearts. Within, eyes and heat receptors went dark.

A jolt like electricity coursed through his thoughts.

More! He needed more! Switching to ventral respiration, he extended his remaining tubacles. He groped about for contact, felt probing in return. Limb found limb, aligned, conjoined ...

Ganglia meshing!

Feedback swelling!

Heart racing!

Electricity surging!

We will take over. The thought roared in Er' o's mind. His own musings, feeble things, plodding, inconsequential, faded... . The thought roared in Er' o's mind. His own musings, feeble things, plodding, inconsequential, faded... .

Ol't'ro, the group mind, had emerged.

Intelligence was wonderful wonderful.

"IT AIN'T WHAT YOU DON'T know that kills you," Sigmund recited softly. "It's what you know that ain't so."

"To what do you refer, sir?" Jeeves replied.

Sigmund had been talking to himself but chose not to admit it. "Our slithery friends."

"That's why we're here," Jeeves said.

It was a neutral response, signifying nothing. An answering noise, not an answer. Sigmund missed the reasoning power-and the friend-that had been Medusa. Wishful thinking got him nowhere.

Then what about some productive thinking? "Jeeves, bring up a picture of a Gw'oth ensemble." An image shimmered over the relax-room table. "Thanks, Jeeves."

Images of the Gw'oth had become familiar. A Gw'o had five limbs arrayed about a central disc, sort of like a starfish. Spines covered the skin, again like a starfish. There the resemblance ended. A Gw' o's skin changed colors like a squid or octopus. Its appendages were flexible, like those of an octopus, and hollow like tubeworms. Tier after tier of sharp teeth ringed the inner surface of each tube. Eyes and other as-yet unidentified sensors peeked out from behind the teeth. Almost certainly Gw'oth had evolved from some type of symbiotic carnivorous worm colony. Yes, Gw'oth had become familiar, singly and in groups. Except- Fascinated and repulsed, Sigmund examined a pile of writhing Gw'oth. The archival image was flat-in the era of Explorer Explorer's visits, the Gw'oth had yet to develop holography-and for that Sigmund was grateful. Those piled, pulsing tubes, ends swallowing one another, the throbbing flesh, the occasional limb disconnecting and groping free of the twisting ma.s.s (to breathe?) came just a little too close to ... what? A spill of loose intestines? A nest of snakes having an orgy?

No one would look Sigmund in the eye around pictures like this. Puppeteers wouldn't discuss s.e.x with anyone but Puppeteers, and not among themselves for all Sigmund knew. They had imposed much of their prudery on New Terrans. Not that this pile of protoplasm was engaged in s.e.x. Mature Gw'oth sprayed gametes into reefs and let nature take its course.

With a sigh, Sigmund called Kirsten's comm. "Can I pick your brain for a bit? I'm in the relax room."

"Be right up. Give me a few minutes to finish something." Faint background noises suggested she was in the engine room.

She strode into the relax room a few minutes later and suddenly noticed something interesting about her boots.

Sigmund said, "Not a pretty sight, but important." Perhaps the most important thing about the Gw'oth, if correct. "Make sure I understand this activity."

Kirsten ran a hand, the fingers splayed, through her hair. "Sure, Sigmund."

"As best I can count, that's a set of eight. Where I can see what's happening, each Gw'o has linked to three others. Just as one end of each tube links into the central ma.s.s, at the other end, the nervous system remains accessible. What you decided on the Explorer Explorer mission is that Gw'oth link to form group minds. Biological computers." mission is that Gw'oth link to form group minds. Biological computers."

"An octuple like this ..." She hesitated, not understanding his grin. She knew nothing of octopi.

Penny, bless her, had come to terms with Sigmund's apparent non sequiturs. Finagle, he missed her. "Go on," he urged.

"Right. We've seen groups of four and eight, and very rarely a group of sixteen. An octuple connected like this is suited to working 3-D simulations." Kirsten leaned against an end of the table, putting her back to the imagery. "The big mystery about these guys was how they developed tech so quickly. But these ... link ups... tell us.

"I hacked Gw'oth netcams and databases to correlate these ... episodes ... with data growth rates in their archives. The correlation wasn't perfect, but I wouldn't expect it to be. Not all calculations produce data at the same rate. So a line of Gw'oth generates one kind of data, solving a particular cla.s.s of physical problems. 2-D arrays of Gw'oth modeled another kind of problem. You're looking at a 3-D array. They even do 4-D, but like sixteen-tuples that seemed to be rare.

"Weird but true, these guys link into living computers. That makes the apparent speed of their technological spurt misleading. They had a lot of simulation to do before they ever moved above the ice to build a technological society."

Sigmund had left New Terra more or less this informed, only he had never really dwelt on it. It was hard to make time to contemplate the Gw'oth, a good ten light-years distant, when with a half-decent pair of binocs he could see the Fleet in the night sky.

Only here, now, the Gw'oth weren't distant.

"Kirsten, bear with me." It took Sigmund a while to put his misgivings into a coherent question. "How far back do their archives go?"

She shrugged. "The digital ones I hacked went back thirty years. Until then they lacked the technology to build such things."

"But the Gw'oth have other archives, much older? Pre-tech archives?" He tried to imagine how such records would be kept. Scratched into soft stone with hard stone, perhaps.

"They must, Sigmund. Unless the older records are digitized, we have no way to know."

And unless Kirsten gets back into the archives. Between her last visit and this one, the Gw'oth had deployed network security. Sigmund respected the robustness of the aliens' encryption and authentication methods, even as he cursed them for making his job more difficult.

Explorer had intercepted broadcasts in several languages, suggesting different societies, maybe distinct nations, among the Gw'oth. Rivalries could have spurred the new security measures. Or Kirsten might have brought this upon herself by leaving native-language messages with the radio beacon. It wouldn't take geniuses-though the Gw'oth were-to infer alien visitors had tapped their comm. had intercepted broadcasts in several languages, suggesting different societies, maybe distinct nations, among the Gw'oth. Rivalries could have spurred the new security measures. Or Kirsten might have brought this upon herself by leaving native-language messages with the radio beacon. It wouldn't take geniuses-though the Gw'oth were-to infer alien visitors had tapped their comm.

Most of what Kirsten had said made sense, but must must? Her conclusion was too firm for the source data. He said, "What if the Gw'oth don't have deep archives?"

"Then they thought everything through quickly. But that can't be." She hesitated. "Can it?"

Sigmund didn't want to think so, either. Unpleasant implications hardly disproved the possibility. "Jeeves, do you have a full set of records from the Explorer Explorer mission?" mission?"

"I do, Sigmund."

"We're done viewing Gw'oth ensembles. Give us a map of cities versus data archives."

A black sphere popped up, with red filaments randomly zigzagging across its surface. Here and there, along the winding red threads, green dots shone. Jeeves said, "Red denotes population centers. Those stood out in Explorer Explorer's deep-radar scans. Green dots are archive locations, not to scale so you can see them. Steady dots are confirmed archives, the ones Kirsten hacked into. Blinking dots are archives inferred from address directories."