<You fear the whipping winds of indecision?>
*Of course. You did too, once. But I have observed the genes of the old, dead race emerge in you, gathering, reaching out. You will know better what to do in this grave whirl of chaos.*
<In conflict lies defeat. If the podia reflect the division among the Illuminates—>
*Yes. Then we are doomed. Only our single-minded ferocity has given us sway over this world and others.*
<Without that we fall to the mechs,> Quath said with absolute certainty.
*Then let us decide this matter before the howling storm of doubt besets us! Find your Nought and let us be done with it.*
Quath trumpeted a brave song-answer, clarion-clear and sharp. The blaring sound was ceremonial. Yet it was oddly gripping—even now, when she knew the falsity of all such gestures before the immense questions surrounding the podia, encircling all life.
Newly resolute, she lumbered up a fissured scarp. She found a crevice near the brow of the peak, as close as she could approach the Nought gathering without revealing herself.
Deftly she probed the night. She brushed against a faint reek of mechthought. It was clotted with pain and mired in agonized confusion. Probably, she thought, the last of its kind in this area. It seemed to be nearby, perhaps watching the Noughts as well. Its typical jangling and zigzag patterns were somehow immersed in Nought caterwauling, making it hard to find. Deal with it later, then.
She probed again. Voices, pale hungers, timid musics—and abruptly her electro-aura drew her into the field of a Nought. Its essence resembled that of her own Nought, but Quath was unsure if it was identical. A tender-skinned thing this was, excitable, with spotty aches distributed through its body. It had the same stubby but clever hands, knobby spine, the surprisingly long legs with impossibly small pods to balance them on. It radiated feeling-tones that rattled the air with their timbre, and Quath suddenly understood.
This one had the same flavor as her own Nought, because it had the same sex. How shockingly strange, to render the sexes so differently. Why? This one was taller, heavier, with 1.8 times the ratio of muscle mass to body mass than the last Nought she had entered. Was that the intention—specialization of function through altered bodies?
No, she sensed immediately that these differences descended from the natural origins of the Nought. What selection pressure would force such divergences among the sexes? What advantage could it possibly have? On the contrary, Quath could see immediate conflicts in such an arrangement. She had simply never suspected that the strong Nought flavors meant sexual differences—indeed, seemed to salt the very air between them.
So she had mistaken this Nought for her own because it, too, was muskily male.
She held its muscles semirigid, as it seemed to want to do. With some effort she made the unnecessarily complicated apparatus of bones and interlocked muscles contract and stretch, successfully bringing a tool toward the face. Smells wafted up into cavities in the head, where recognition-flares called warm welcoming cries.
She let the semiautomatic systems of the Nought bring the food into the primary mouth. She allowed it to chew. Sense-sounds exploded in Quath’s electro-aura, which she understood were the sensations of taste that this creature enjoyed. The savor of masticating food swam through it, building notes upon submelodies, making a small symphony of gratifying song.
Three others of its kind were gathered near. A primitive naked oxidation bristled yellow-hot at the center of their little group. The Nought basked in its infrared emissions.
Acoustic patterns played through the Nought’s head. Quath saw that this was their only means of communicating at short range. Had they kept this as a nostalgic tribute to their early forms? Or—startling thought—were they still this elemental?
Quath tried to sample the subminds of this Nought but found a mire. Where were the kernels of subsidiary intelligence? The interior bramble was too confusing to sort out now. She turned to more practical matters.
The Nought could say nothing without Quath’s taking more control. What was discourse like in this ancient acoustic mode?
Gingerly she released the mouth. Curved the lips. Curled the fat, soft tongue that—now that Quath concentrated on controlling it—seemed to swell to fill the entire mouth.
“Food good,” the Nought said.
Quath made sure the words carried a simple meaning. Less chance of error that way. The two words had bloomed naturally in the Nought’s mind, streaming up from the concept-swamp. Quath had inspected them carefully as the Nought’s nervous system began to transmit the instructions to the mouth to emit the sounds.
Two words, very nearly the simplest possible message. A good start. They complied with the language’s rudimentary grammatical rules, which were astonishingly one-dimensional, with hardly any methods of adding shadings of meaning in parallel dimensions of discourse. It was almost like speaking to a grooming mite in the Hive.
But this experiment seemed to bring disturbed features blooming in the faces of the other Noughts. She decided to cover this mistake, whatever it was.
“Mouth feels wrong,” the Nought’ s mind reported saying. Was something wrong with Quath’s control? The other Noughts displayed widened eyes, slightly opened mouths, and more of their curious, archaic white teeth.
“Fire is good,” she made the Nought say. Perhaps slightly complicating the sentence would settle the problem. She took special care to make the lips and tongue do their appointed jobs well.
Among its companions Quath saw more sliding of muscles and tendons beneath the sallow skin. These simple signais conveyed tension but she did not know how to read them accurately. Small furrowings deepened near the eyes. Mouth muscles struck lopsided positions. Yes, a lack of symmetry was probably supposed to communicate concern. Or anger, possibly including threats? It was all so confusing.
And they babbled at her, the acoustics coming in such a mixture of modes that Quath could not tell if they were speaking the same language as this Nought she had entered.
“I do not feel so good,” Quath made the Nought say.
She elevated it to its precarious two feet and walked it away. The others did not follow immediately. Good. Quath did not want to provoke these simple beings into suspecting what was happening.
The rattle of acoustic complexity that pursued her confirmed Quath’s suspicions. Each of these things spoke a kind of idiosyncratic self-language. Their mouths were so inelegantly and inexpertly made that each minor slide and hitch of muscle and cartilage rendered words differently.
How inefficient! Each word would have to be separately filed and tagged in the quick-mind, associated with a remembered word from some individual, and then in turn integrated with the other words in their primitive linear sequences—all in order to catch the meaning.
That would tie up enormous submind space. No wonder they had never advanced beyond a one-dimensional model of language!
They started at the beginning of a word sequence and had to march helplessly past every single sound group, before comprehending the whole. Yet that was essential, given the endless trouble they would have to go to in order to filter out and translate the infinite variety of pronunciation that came flooding into their knobby little ears. What conceivable purpose could there be to allowing this unending variation?
Whatever the reason, the Noughts were still concerned. One of them rose and called after Quath’s possessed Nought. Quath decided to vacate this being rather than try to repair the situation.
But when she tried to let go of the small mind, her connections would not sever.
She yanked. Nothing.
Harder. Still she could not free herself!
Some dim perception was trying to leak up from her sub-minds into foreground consciousness. No time for that. She had to get free before the Noughts understood. They might then damage this Nought in their tiny anger. If Quath was still present, the trauma might surge back along her own electro-aura and do her injury.
She needed something to jar herself loose from the curiously sticky, hampering aura of the Nought. She made the hands slide over the body, seeking some useful tool. Ah, there.
