THE DREAMING MOULD

AD 12,478

Tomm found a new patch of dreaming mould. Snuggled into the shade of a damp tree root, it had settled down into a grey circle the size of a dinner plate. Where it had crossed the crimson soil it had left a slimy trail. You often found moulds in shady places like this. They didn't like the brightness of the growth lights. The muddled starlight cast diffuse colours over the mould, but it was always going to look ugly.

Tomm pressed his hands into the mould. It felt cold, slimy, not bad when you got used to it.

And the mould started to talk to him.

As always, it was like waking up. Suddenly he could smell the ozone tang of the growth lights, and hear the bleating of the goat at the Gavil place over the horizon, and he seemed to be able to see every one of the one hundred and twenty thousand stars in the crowded sky.

And then he spread out sideways, that was the way he thought of it, he reached out, left and right. The crowded stars froze over his head - or maybe they wheeled around and around, blurring into invisibility. He was with the mould now. And he could see its long, simple, featureless life all of a piece, from beginning to end, pulled out of time like a great grey slab of rock hauled out of the ground.

Even his heart stopped its relentless pumping.

But there was a flitter, a spark against the orange stars.

He dropped back into time. He stood and wiped his slimy hands on his trousers, watching the spaceship approach.

He was eight years old.

Kard's metallic Eyes gleamed in the complex starlight. `Lethe, I love it all. Is there any sight more beautiful than starbreaker light shining through the rubble of a planet?'

This was a globular cluster, orbiting far out of the Galaxy's main disc. The sky was packed with stars, orange and yellow, layer upon layer of ancient lanterns that receded to infinity. But before those stars, paler lights moved purposefully. They were human-controlled ships. And Xera saw scattered pink sparks, silent detonations. Each of those remote explosions was the dismantling of a world.

The flitter's hull was transparent because Rear Admiral Kard liked it that way. Even the controls were no more than ghostly rectangles written on the air. It was as if Xera, with Kard and Stub, their young pilot, was falling defenceless through this crowded sky, and she tried to ignore the churning of her stomach.

Xera said carefully, `I compliment you on the efficiency of your process.'

He waved that aside. `Forget efficiency. Forget process. Commissary, this cluster contains a million stars, crowded into a ball a hundred light years across. It's only four decades since we first arrived here. And we will have processed them all, all those pretty lights in the sky, within another fifty to sixty years. What do you think of that?'

`Admiral-'

`This is the reality of Assimilation,' he snapped. `Ten thousand ships, ten million human beings, in this fleet alone. And it's the same all over the Expansion, across a great spherical front forty thousand light years across. I doubt you even dream of sights like this, back in the centre. Commissary, watch and learn ...'

Without warning, planets cannonballed out of the sky. She cowered.

Kard laughed at her shock. `Oh. And here is our destination.' Stub, the rodent-faced young pilot, turned to face them, grinning. `Sir, wake me up when it gets interesting.'

Stub called Xera a domehead when he thought she wasn't listening. She tried not to despise them both for the way they bullied her.

There were three worlds in this sunless system, locked into a complex gravitational dance. Xera could see them all, sweeping in vertiginously, pale starlit discs against a crowded sky. Only one of them was inhabited: she saw the blue of water and the grey-green of living things splashed against its rust-red hide. It was called, inevitably, `Home', in the language of the first human colonists to have reached this place, millennia before.

Xera was a xenoculturalist. She was here because the inhabitants of Home had reported an indigenous sentient species on their world. If this was true the planet might be spared from the wrecking crews, spared from demolition for the sake of its inner iron, its natives put to a more subtle use: mind was valuable. The fate of whole cultures, alien and human, the fate of a world, could depend on her assessment of the inhabitants' claim.

But her time was cruelly brief. Rear Admiral Kard's own impatient presence here - he hadn't wanted to spare any of his line officers to check out what he called `earthworm grunting' - told her all she needed to know about the Navy's attitude to her mission.

Belatedly she remembered to deploy her data desk; she needed to record the triple worlds' orbital dynamics. Here in this crowded cluster, stellar close approaches were frequent, and worlds were commonly ripped free of the stars that had borne them. Most planets floated alone, but this world, Home, was unusual in having its two gravitationally locked companion worlds. The nature of their mutual orbit was apparently puzzling to the Academicians, and they had asked her to check it out. Orbital dynamics were hardly her priority, but nobody else was going to get a chance to study this unique jewel-box of worlds. She held up her desk, letting it record.

But already the flitter had begun its brisk closing descent, and the opportunity was over.

She flew through a spectacular orbital picket of Snowflakes, the giant tetrahedral artefacts the Navy employed as surveillance and communications stations. Then Home opened out into a landscape that fled beneath her, a land of lakes and forests and farms and scattered townships, of green growing things illuminated by floodlights mounted on unlikely stalks.

It was all so complex, so fascinating, but she had so little time. This was the reality of Assimilation: the processing of alien worlds and species on an industrial scale. Out here, you just did what you could before the starbreaker teams moved in. It was rescue work, really. The only consolation was that you would never know what you had missed-

She was plunged into blackness. Impact foam encased her.

Xera had no idea what had happened. But she felt a guilty stab of satisfaction that Kard and his magnificent Navy had screwed up after all.

To Tomm the flitter had been an all but invisible bubble, sweeping down through the air, with its three passengers suspended inside. But then it stopped dead, as if it had run into a wall, and its hull appeared out of nowhere. Opaqued, the flitter was an ugly, lumpy thing. It hung for a heartbeat. Then the flitter tipped up until it pointed at the ground, and fell without ceremony.

On impact the hull broke up into compartments that dropped into the dirt. Hatches popped open, and a gooey white liquid ran into the rust-red ground.

Two people tumbled out. They were wearing bright orange skin-tight suits, to which the sticky liquid clung. They staggered a few paces from the wreck and collapsed to their knees. They were a woman and a man, Tomm saw.

The man had silvery fake eyes. He didn't see Tomm, or if he did he didn't care. He immediately got up and stalked back into the wreckage of the flitter, ripping debris out of the way.

The woman was younger. Her head was shaved. She got to her feet more slowly. She looked around, as if she had never seen stars, dirt, growth lights before. She looked right at Tomm.

Then, coming to herself, she ran to the flitter's wrecked forward section. Tomm made out splashes of blood in there. The woman stepped back, a look of horror on her face. She glanced around, but there was nobody in sight, nobody but Tomm.

She walked back and spoke to him. He waited as she tapped at a panel on her chest, and a box floated up into the air by her shoulder. `Can you understand me?' the box asked.

`Yes,' he said.

`I need help.'

Together they prised open the ripped hull. There wasn't much to see. Opaqued, the hull looked like scuffed metal, and all the pod's control surfaces were blank, dead. But there was a man - Tomm guessed he was the pilot - crumpled up into the nose of the pod, the way you'd wad a tissue into your pocket.

The woman bent over the pilot, feeling at his neck. `He's still alive. Fluttery pulse . . . Lethe, I'm not trained for this. What's your name?'

`Tomm.'

`All right, Tomm. I'm Xera. I need you to pass me a med cloak. In the compartment behind you.'

The door was stiff, but Tomm was strong. The cloak was brilliant orange, so bright it seemed to dazzle. Xera just threw the cloak at the pilot. It immediately began to work its way around the body, then it filled up with more white goo.

When the cloak had set hard Xera took the pilot's shoulders, Tomm his legs. The pilot felt lighter than he looked. They got him out through the ripped hull, and set him on the ground. He lay there in the dirt, wrapped up like a bug in a cocoon, only his bruised face showing.

`He looks young,' Tomm said.

`He's only fifteen.' She glanced at him. `How old are you?'

`Eight. How old are you?'

She forced a smile. `Twenty-five standard. I think you're very brave.' She waved a trembling hand. `To cope with all this. A crashing spaceship. An injured man.'

Tomm shrugged. He had grown up on a farm. He knew about life, injury, death.

He waited to see what happened next.

The air was warm, and smelled of rust. The land was like a tabletop, worn flat.

Kard had dumped heaps of equipment out of the flitter onto the ground, and was pawing through it.

Xera said, `Admiral - what happened?'

`The Squeem,' Kard said bluntly. `Dead, every last one of them. All the systems are down. We didn't even get a mayday out.' He glanced at the complex sky. `The controllers don't know we are here. It's happened before. Nobody knows how the little bastards manage it.'

`You're saying the Squeem killed themselves to sabotage us?'

`Oh, you think it's a coincidence it happened just as we came into our final descent?'

The Squeem were group-mind aquatic creatures, a little like fish. Once, it was said, they had conquered Earth itself. Now, long Assimilated, they were used as communications links, as a piece of technology. Some humans had even taken Squeem implants. But it seemed that the Squeem were still capable of defiance. Maybe, she thought, the Assimilation wasn't as complete as it was presented by Commission propagandists.

Kard's hard gaze slid over the bundled pilot, as if reluctant to look at him too closely.

Xera said, `Stub is hurt. The cloak will keep him alive for a while, but-'

`We need to get to the base camp. It's north of here, maybe half a day's walk.'

She looked about dubiously. There was no sun, no moon. Even Home's sibling worlds were invisible. There were only stars, a great uniform wash of them, the same wherever you looked. `Which way's north?'

Kard glared, impatient. He seemed to see Tomm for the first time. `You. Aboriginal. Which way?'

Tomm pointed, without hesitation. His feet were bare, Xera noticed now.

`Then that's the way we'll go. We'll need a stretcher. Xera, rig something.'

Tomm said, `My home's closer.' He pointed again. `It's just over that way. My parents could help you.'

Xera looked at Kard. `Admiral, it would make sense.'

He glared at her. `You do not take an injured Navy tar to an aboriginal camp.'

Xera tried to control her irritation. `The people here are not animals. They are farmers. Stub might die before-'

`End of discussion. You. Earthworm. You want to come show us the way?'

Tomm shrugged.

Xera frowned. `You don't need to tell your parents where you are?'

`You're the Navy,' Tomm said. `We're all citizens of the Third Expansion. You have come here to protect us. That's what you told us. What harm can I come to with you?'

Kard laughed.

The ground was densely packed crimson dirt, hard under her feet. Soon she was puffing with exertion, her hips and knees dryly aching. After half a year in the murky gut of a Spline ship Xera wasn't used to physical exercise.

Kard, a bundle on his back, walked stiffly, with obvious distaste for the very dust under his feet.

At least the ground was level, more or less. And Stub, on his improvised stretcher, wasn't as heavy as he should have been. Evidently the smart med-care cloak contained some anti-gravitational trickery. Stub wasn't improving, though, despite the cloak's best efforts. Around his increasingly pale face, the cloak's hem glowed warning blue.

The boy, Tomm, just seemed interested in the whole adventure.

Away from the cultivated areas the ground looked nutrient-leached, and the only hills were eroded stumps, as dust-strewn as the rest. This was an old place, she thought. The population was evidently sparse, no more than this worn-out land could support.

And the sky was baffling.

Xera had grown up on a small planet of 70 Opiuchi, less than seventeen light years from Earth itself. There, in the Galaxy's main disc, three thousand stars had been visible in the night sky. In this globular cluster there were forty times as many. Shoals of stars swam continually above the horizon, casting a diffuse light laced with pale, complex, shifting shadows. There were too many of them to count, to identify, to track. This world had no sun and too many stars; it knew no day, no night, only this unchanging, muddy starlight. Here, time washed by unmarked, and in every direction the sky looked the same.

They had to cross a cultivated field. A floodlight bank loomed over the green growing things, presumably intended to supplement the starlight.

Kard hauled a semi-transparent suit out of the scavenged bundle he carried, and tied off the arms and legs. `You,' he said to Tomm. `Take this. We need supplies.'

Xera made to protest at this casual theft of somebody's crop. But Tomm was already running alongside Kard's long strides. They began pulling handfuls of green pods into the tied-off suit. Xera waited by Stub.

Kard snapped, `Tell me what you eat here.'

`Peas,' said Tomm brightly. `Beans. Rice. Wheat.'

`No replicators?'

Xera said, `Admiral, Tomm's ancestors are here because they fled the Qax Occupation of Earth, seven thousand years ago. Nano replicators are Qax technology. To the colonists here, such things are hated.'

Kard glanced around. `So how did they terraform this place?'

`The hard way. Apparently it took them centuries.'

`And now they grow wheat.'

`Yes.'

Kard laughed. `Well, our suits will filter out the toxins.'

`We have goats too,' said the boy.

`Oh, imagine that.'

They came to an ancient, tangled tree, and Kard bent to inspect its roots. He pulled out a handful of what looked like fungus. `What's this?'

`Dreaming mould,' said Tomm.

`Say what?'

Xera hurried over. `That is why we're here. It's a relic of the native ecology, spared in the terraforming.'

Kard hefted the greyish stuff. `This is supposed to be sentient?'

`So the locals claim.'

`It can't even move.'

`It can,' insisted Tomm. `It moves like slimy bugs.'

Xera held up her data desk, showing Kard images. `On the move it absorbs nutrients from organic detritus, local analogues of leaves and grass. Then the protoplasm hardens into a definite shape as the mould prepares to fruit. In some species you get little parasols and rods.'

This organism was actually like the slime moulds of Earth: a very ancient form from a time when categories of life were blurred, when the higher plants had yet to split off from the fungi, and all animal life had streamed in protoplasmic shapelessness. What was more controversial was whether these moulds were sentient, or not. Already she was wondering how she could complete her assessment - how could she possibly tell?

Kard saw her doubts. He turned to the kid. `How can this mould of yours be so smart if it can't use tools?'

`They used to,' said Tomm.

`What?'

`Once they built starships. They came from over there.' He pointed into the murky roof of stars - but the way he was pointing, Xera realised, was towards the Galaxy's main disc.

She asked, `How do you know such things?'

`When you touch them.' The boy shrugged. `You just know.'

`And why,' Kard asked, `would they come to a shithole like this? It hasn't even got a sun.'

`They didn't want a sun. They wanted a sky like that,' pointing up again.

`Why?'

`Because you can't tell the time by it.'

Kard was glaring at Xera, hefting the mould. `Is this all there is? What in Lethe are we doing here, Commissary?'

`Let's just try on the idea before we dismiss it,' Xera said quickly. `Suppose there was an ancient race, done with' - she raised a hand at the sky, where worlds burned - `with all this. Colonising, building-'

Kard snapped, `So they came to this worn-out dump. They dismantled their starships, and dissolved into slime. Right? But it isn't even safe, here in this cluster. Have you any idea what it would be like to live through a Galaxy plane-crossing?' He shook his head. He threw the native life form into the hopper, along with the pea pods and runner beans.

`Admiral-'

`End of discussion.'

On they walked.

The stars were sombre. Most were orange or even red, floating silently in their watchful crowds. All this cluster's stars were about the same age, and all were old. Even the planets were so old the radioactivity trapped in their interiors had dwindled away. Which explained the exhausted landscape: no tectonics, no geology, no mountain-building.

This was what you got in a globular cluster. Like a diffuse planet, this whole cluster orbited the centre of the Galaxy. Every hundred million years it plunged through the Galaxy's disc, and in those catastrophic interludes all the dust was stripped out of the spaces between the stars. Thus there was no unburnt gas to make new stars out of, no rock dust to make new planets. That was why the fleet needed to demolish planets for their iron. Rock, metals were scarce between the worlds.

Of course Kard was right about the hazards of a main disc crossing. This planet would be bombarded with spiral-arm hydrogen and dust. A single dust grain would deliver the energy of a fission bomb. The place would be flooded with X-rays, if the atmosphere wasn't stripped off completely.

Maybe, maybe. But - Xera learned, checking her data desk, which she'd hung around her neck - the last plane crossing was only a couple of million years ago. There were nearly a hundred megayears yet before that calamity had to be faced again. Time enough for anybody.

This wasn't an academic debate. If she could prove the planet harboured intelligence, it might be spared demolition, its human colonists allowed to continue their way of life. If not . . .

Kard stopped again, breathing hard. `Take a break.' He dumped the stretcher and squatted down, took a handful of pea pods from his improvised backpack, and crammed them into his mouth, pods and all.

The spare suit had extracted some water from the vegetable matter. Xera took one of its sleeves and dribbled water into the mouth of Stub. His breathing was irregular, his face pasty. She opened the cloak a little at his neck, trying to make him easier.

Kard recoiled from the stink that came out of the cloak, an earthy melange of blood and shit, the smell of a wounded human. `Lethe, I hate this.' He turned away. `You think the base is far?'

`I don't know. Not far, surely.'

He nodded, wordless, not looking at her.

Tomm sat quietly and watched them, bare feet tucked under his legs. He didn't ask for food or drink. Of the three of them he was by far the freshest.

Xera glanced again at her data desk. It had been working on the observations she'd been able to make before the landing. Now the desk showed that Home and its two siblings were locked into a figure-of-eight orbital motion. It was an exotic but stable solution to the ancient problem of how three bodies would swarm together under gravity. More common solutions resembled planets conventionally orbiting a sun, or three worlds at the corners of a rotating equilateral triangle.

She tried to discuss this with Kard. He knew a lot more about orbital dynamics than she did. But he was definitively not interested.

Xera pulled the dreaming mould out of the tied-up suit. A little dehydrated, it was cold to the touch but not unpleasant. She could tell nothing by just looking at it.

Uncertainly she handed it to Tomm.

The boy pressed his hands against the mould. He looked vaguely disappointed. `This one's too dry.'

`Tomm, what happens when you touch the mould?'

`Like if you're sick.' Tomm shrugged. `The mould helps you.'

`How?'

He said some things the floating translator unit couldn't handle. Then he said, `Time stops.'

Kard sat up. `Time stops? '

`Like that. The mould doesn't see time-' Tomm made chopping motions. `One bit after another. Step, step, step. It sees time all as a piece. All at once.'

Kard raised hairless eyebrows.

Xera felt like defying him. `We need to keep open minds, Admiral. We're here to seek out the strange, the unfamiliar. That's the whole point. We know that time is quantised. Instants are like grains of sand. We experience them linearly, like a bug hopping from one grain to another. But other perceptions of time are possible. Perhaps-'

Kard looked disgusted. `These dirt-diggers would call my ass sentient if it would hold back the starbreakers one more day.' He leaned towards the boy, who looked scared. `Do you understand what we're doing here? Planets like yours are rare, in a globular cluster. That's why we need to blow up your world. So we can use what's inside it to make more ships and weapons.'

`So you can blow up more worlds.'

`Exactly. Slime mould and all.'

`Isn't that what the Qax did to humans?'

Xera choked a laugh.

Kard glared. `Listen to me. You're just a snot-nosed earthworm kid and I'm a rear admiral. And any time I want to I could-'

Stub's med cloak abruptly turned bright blue.

Xera hurried to the dying pilot. Kard swore, stood up and walked away.

Tomm stared.

Xera felt for a pulse - it was desperately feathery - and bent her ear to Stub's mouth, trying to detect a breath. I'm here to stand in judgement on another race, perhaps much more ancient than my own, she thought. But I can't even save this wretched boy, lying in the dirt.

Kard stalked around. The crimson dust had stained his gleaming boots. `We walked all this way for nothing.'

`It was your call,' she snapped. `If we had gone to the farmers for help, maybe we could have saved him.'

Kard wasn't about to accept that. He turned on her. `Listen to me, Commissary-'

Tomm was pressing bits of the dreaming mould into Stub's mouth.

Kard grabbed Tomm's arm. `What are you doing?'

`The mould wants to help him. This is what we do.'

Xera asked quickly, `When you hurt, when you die, you do this?'

`You take him out of time.'

Kard said, `You'll choke him, you little grub.' He was still holding the boy's arm.

`Admiral, let the kid go.'

He said dangerously, `This is a Navy man.'

`But we failed him, Kard. The cloak can't help. He's dying. Let the boy do what he wants. If it makes him feel better . . .'

Kard's face worked. But he broke away.

Bleakly, helplessly, Xera watched the boy patiently feed bits of the mould into the pilot's mouth.

You take him out of time.

Could it be true? How would it be to loosen the grasp of time - to have a mind filled with green thoughts, like a vegetable's perhaps - to be empty of everything but self? Kard had said the mould had no goals. But what higher goal could there be? Who needed starships and cities and wars and empires, when you could free yourself at last of the fear of death? And what greater empathy could there be than to share such a gift with others?

Or maybe the mould was just some hallucinogen, chewed by bored farmers.

Stub's breathing, though shallow, seemed a little easier.

She said, `I think it's working.'

Kard wouldn't even look down. `No.'

`Admiral-'

He turned on her. `I know the sentience laws. What defines intelligence? You need to have goals, and pursue them. What goals has a slime mould got? Second, you need to have empathy: some kind of awareness of intelligence in others. And, most fundamentally, you need a sense of time. Life can only exist in a universe complex enough to be out of equilibrium - there could be no life in a mushy heat bath, with no flows of energy or mass. So tracking time is fundamental to intelligence, for a sense of time derives from the universal disequilibrium that drives life itself. There. If these creatures really don't have a time sense they can't be intelligent. How do you answer that? There's nothing here, Commissary. Nothing for you to save.'

She pressed her fingers to her temples. `Admiral - the history of human understanding is about discarding prejudices, about ourselves, about others, about the nature of life, mind. We have come a long way, but we're still learning. Perhaps even an insistence on a time sense itself is just another barrier in our thinking . . .'

Kard, she could see, wasn't listening.

But, she thought, it isn't just about the sentience laws, is it, Admiral? You can't accept that you made the wrong call today. Just as you can't accept that the humble creatures here, the farmers and this boy and even the mould, might know something you don't. You'd rather destroy it all than accept that.

Data scrolled across her desk. She glanced down. The desk had continued patiently to work on the orbital data. The figure-of-eight configuration was rare, the desk reported now, vanishingly unlikely. Surely too improbable to be natural. She felt wonder stir. Had they been vain, at the last? Before they dissolved down into this humble form, even gave up their shape, had they left a grandiose dynamic signature scrawled across the sky? . . .

But it's too late, too late. This place will be destroyed, and we'll never know what happened here.

Kard raised his engineered face, restless, trapped on the ground. `Lethe, I hate this, the dust and the pain. The sooner I get back to the sky the better. You know what? None of this matters. Whether you're right or wrong about the mould, your petty moral dilemmas are irrelevant, Commissary. Because the Assimilation is nearly over. We've cleaned out this Galaxy. There's nothing left to oppose us now - nothing but one more opponent.'

`I have my assessment to finish-'

`Nothing happened here, Commissary. Nothing.'

Tomm sat back, smiling.

It seemed to Xera that the young pilot's face relaxed, that he breathed a little easier, before he was still.

Personally I have more sympathy for Xera and her complex ethical dilemmas than with Kard.

But it was Kard's arrogant impatience that caught the flavour of the times.

Mayfly generations tick by terribly quickly. And almost all mayflies, embedded in history, believe that their epoch is eternal, that things will be this way until the end of time. Almost all. It takes a special mayfly to understand that he is living through a time of flux, a time when great forces are shifting - and even more special to be able to influence those forces.

Kard turned out to be one such.

Just as he had said, the Galaxy was cleaned out. Only one more opponent remained. Only one war remained to be completed.

But it had to be started first.