Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [164]
"What is it you intend to do?"
"Your race is a very vigorous one. I expect it to be here, competing with us, within five hunded years. Perhaps much sooner. It will be necessary to make a thorough study of such a rival. I invite you to join our community on a permanent basis."
"What do you mean?"
"I invite you to become a symbiote. I have here a male and a female, whose genes are altered and threfore without defects. You make a perfect breeding pair. It will save me a great deal of trouble with cloning."
"You think I'll betray my race and deliver a slave species into your hands?"
"Your choice is simple, Captain-Doctor. Remain an intelligent, living being, or become a mindless puppet, like your partner. I have taken over all the functions of her nervous system; I can do the same to you."
"I can kill myself."
"That might be troublesome, because it would make me resort to developing a cloning technology. Technology, though I am capable of it, is painful to me. I am a genetic artifact; there are fail-safes within me that prevent me from taking over the Nest for my own uses. That would mean falling into the same trap of progress as other intelligent races. For similar reasons, my life span is limited. I will live for only a thousand years, until your race's brief flurry of energy is over and peace resumes once more."
"Only a thousand years?" Afriel laughed bitterly. "What then? You kill off my descendants, I assume, having no further use for them."
"No. We have not killed any of the fifteen other races we have taken for defensive study. It has not been necessary. Consider that small scavanger floating by your head, Captain-Doctor, that is feeding on your vomit. Five hundred million years ago its ancestors made the galaxy tremble. When they attacked us, we unleashed their own kind upon them. Of course, we altered our side, so that they were smarter, tougher, and, naturally, totally loyal to us. Our Nests were the only world they knew, and they fought with a valor and inventiveness we never could have matched.... Should your race arrive to exploit us, we will naturally do the same."
"We humans are different."
"Of course."
"A thousand years here won't change us. You will die and our descendants will take over this Nest. We'll be running things, despite you, in a few generations. The darkness won't make any difference."
"Certainly not. You don't need eyes here. You don't need anything."
"You'll allow me to stay alive? To teach them anything I want?"
"Certainly, Captain-Doctor. We are doing you a favor, in all truth. In a thousand years your descendants here will be the only remnants of the human race. We are generous with our immortality; we will take it upon ourselves to preserve you."
"You're wrong, Swarm. You're wrong about intelligence, and you're wrong about everything else. Maybe other races would crumble into parasitism, but we humans are different."
"Certainly. You'll do it, then?"
"Yes. I accept your challenge. And I will defeat you."
"Splendid. When the Investors return here, the springtails will say that they have killed you, and will tell them to never return. They will not return. The humans should be the next to arrive."
"If I don't defeat you, they will."
"Perhaps." Again it sighed. "I'm glad I don't have to absorb you. I would have missed your conversation."
Spider Rose
Nothing was what Spider Rose felt, or almost nothing. There had been some feelings there, a nexus of clotted two-hundred-year-old emotions, and she had mashed it with a cranial injection. Now what was