Aces High

Among the races of the Network, she was the enemy with a hundred names: the demonseed, the great cancer, hellmother, devourer of worlds, mother of nightmares. In the vast minds of the Kondikki godqueens, she was called by a symbol that meant simply dread. The Kreg machine-intelligences referred to her by a string of binary impulses that signified dysfunction, the lyn-ko-neen sang of her in notes high, shrill, and pain-wracked. And the Ly'bahr remembered her best of all. To those vastly long-lived cyborgs, she was Thyat M'hruh, darkness-for-the-race. Ten thousand years past, a Swarm had descended on the Ly'bahr birthworld. Encased in their lifesustaining shells, the cyborged Ly'bahr lived on, but those who had stayed behind to wear flesh instead of metal were gone, and with them all the generations to come. The Ly'bahr had been a dead race for ten thousand years.

"Mother?" Ekkedme had cried out, and Jube had not understood, not until he slit the cord on his stack of newspapers the day the buds landed in New Jersey. It must be some mistake, he had thought inanely when he saw the headlines. The Swarm was a horror from history and legend, it was the nightmare that happened to other planets far distant, not the one you were actually on. It was outside his experience and his expertise; no wonder he had suspected the Takisians when the singleship was lost. He felt as though he was a fool. Worse, he was a doomed and helpless fool.

She was up there still, a palpable living darkness that Jube could almost feel. Inside her festered new generations of swarmlings, the life-that-is-death. Soon her children would come again, and devour this perversely splendid race that he had come to have such affection for… devour him too, for that matter, and what could he do to stop them?

"You look like a pot of excrement this morning, Walrus," a voice like sandpaper rasped casually.

Jube looked up.. and up, and up. Troll was nine feet tall. He wore a gray uniform over green warty skin, and when he gri

"I feel like a pot of excrement," Jube said. "The holidays are the cruelest time, Troll. How are things at the clinic?"

"Busy," said Troll. "Tachyon keeps shuttling back and forth to Washington for meetings." He rattled the Times. "These aliens ruined everybody's Christmas. I always knew that Jersey was just one big yeast infection." He dug in a pocket, handed Jube a crumpled dollar bill. "The Pentagon wants to lob a few H-bombs at the Mother-thing, but they can't find her."

Jube nodded as he made change. He had tried to find the Swarm Mother himself, using the sensing satellites the Network had left in orbit, but without success. She might be hiding behind the moon, or on the other side of the sun, or anywhere in the vastness of space. And if he could not locate her with the technology at his disposal, the humans didn't have a chance. "Doc won't be able to help them," he told Troll glumly.

"Probably not," the other replied. He flipped a half-dollar into the air, caught it neatly, and pocketed it. "Still, you have to try, right? What else can you do but try? Happy New Year, Walrus." He strode off on legs as thick and gnarled as the trunks of small trees, and as long as Jube was tall.

Jube watched him go. He was right, he thought as Troll vanished around the corner. You do have to try.

He closed the newsstand early that day, and went home. Floating in the cold waters of his tub, awash in dim red light, he considered his options. There was only one, really. The Network could save humanity from the Swarm Mother. Of course, there would be a price. The Network gives nothing away for free. But Jube was sure that Earth would be only too glad to pay. Even if the Master Trader demanded rights to Mars, or the moon, or all of the gas giants, what was that weighed against the life of their species?

But the Opportunity was light-years off, and would not return to this system for another five or six human decades. It must be summoned, the Master Trader must be informed that a sentient race with enormous profit potential was threatened with extinction. And the tachyon transmitter had been lost with the Embe and the singleship.

Jhubben must build a replacement.

He felt hopelessly unequal to the task. He was a xenologist, not a technician. He used a hundred Network devices he could not begin to build, repair, or even comprehend. Knowledge was the most precious commodity in the galaxy, the Network's only true currency, and each member species guarded its own technological secrets zealously. But every Network outpost had a tachyon transmitter, even primitive worlds like Glabber that could not afford to buy starships of their own. Unless the lesser species had the means to summon the great starships to their scattered, backward worlds, how could trade take place, how could planets be bought and sold, how could profits accrue to the Master Traders of Starholme?

Jube's library consisted of nine small crystalline rods. One held the collected songs, literature, and erotica of his homeworld; a second his lifework, including all his researches on Earth. The others held knowledge. Surely the plans for a tachyon transmitter would be in there somewhere. Whatever knowledge he accessed would be noted, of course, and its value debited from the value of the researches here on Earth, but surely it was worth it, to save a sentient race?

There would be expenses, he knew. Even if he found the plans, it was unlikely that he would have the necessary parts. He would have to make due with primitive human electronics, the best he could obtain, and probably he would be forced to ca

There was a more serious problem. He could build a tachyon transmitter, he was sure of it. But how to power it? His fusion cells might be sufficient to punch a beam through to Hoboken, but there were a lot of light-years between Hoboken and the stars.

Jhubben rose from his tub, toweled himself off. He knew much of what had happened when the Sleeper went after Ekkedme's body. Croyd had told him, a week after that grim afternoon Jhubben had spent flushing the remains of his Embe brother back to the salt sea from which they had all risen, at least metaphorically. But none of it seemed to matter when the swarmlings landed.

Now it mattered.

He padded into his living room and opened the bottom drawer of the buffet he'd purchased from Goodwill in 1952. The drawer was full of rocks: green, red, blue, white. Four of the white rocks had bought this building in 1955, even though the old man in the green eyeshade had only paid him half of what the stones were worth. Jube had always used this resource sparingly, since no more stones could be synthesized until the Opportunity returned. But the crisis was here.

He was no ace, he had no special powers. These would have to be his power. He reached down with a thick fourfingered hand, and grabbed a handful of uncut sapphires. With these, he would locate the Embe singularity shifter, to power his transmission to the stars.

Or-at the very least-he would try.