Unseen Demons by Adam-Troy Castro

Author:Adam-Troy Castro [Castro, Adam-Troy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781625672964
Publisher: JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
Published: 2017-12-21T05:00:00+00:00

11

The hive Whalekiller had selected (Calcutta, he said), was nestled in a chain of remote rust-colored hills somewhere in the temperate band of Catarkhus’s southern hemisphere. It occupied pebbly ground that crunched with every step they took — the kind of terrain that would have rendered stealth impossible on any world where the deafness of the natives wouldn’t have rendered stealth irrelevant. The vegetation was so sparse and scrubby it seemed to have established a toehold here out of obstinacy alone.The main entrance to the Catarkhan hive was a spiral funnel, sinking diagonally into the earth. There were a handful of Catarkhan footprints near the entrance, but otherwise no sign that anything lived below.

Cort hesitated when, taking her first step into the tunnel, she sank up to her ankles into soft sand, considerably more yielding than the desert terrain she had just left. She was not yet ready to forgive Whalekiller enough to speak to him, but necessity obliged her: “Just how stable is this place?”

Whalekiller saw she was about to stumble, and steadied her with a tug on her upper arm. “Very stable, Counselor. The walls aren’t made of this stuff, fortunately; they would collapse in a second if they were. This is just flooring the Catarkhans carry from a sand quarry about seven klicks away. The walls themselves come from some tougher kind of gravel the locals gather somewhere else; they do something biological to it that makes it liquify into a kind of malleable cement. It’s an entirely different kind of construction than that used by their cousins in the other hive I showed you — but that was half a world away, where they have a different set of raw materials.”

She pulled free of Whalekiller, tested her footing with another step, and decided that it seemed safe enough, if a clumsy medium for human feet. Several steps further in, her eyes narrowed: “So their behavior isn’t all hardwired, after all.”

“Not entirely. They’re sentient, after all; they can override instinct when they absolutely have to. But it’s not so much creative thinking or the ability to learn as it is a facility for rewriting survival behaviors on a group-by group basis. For instance, the guys down here don’t have any decent farmland, like their cousins up north; they’d starve if they tried to support themselves that way. So they subsist on some kind of foul-smelling yeasty stuff they cultivate in ground water cisterns about half a kilometer straight down. Itís nasty, but it sustains life.”

“Which shows a certain degree of adaptability,” Cort said.

“Within a very narrow range. If you took a bunch of random Catarkhans from this hive and transplanted them to the location I showed you before, most of them would starve to death; a few of them would rewrite their personal software to match the new paradigm, and thrive up there while becoming totally helpless here. None of that equips them to deal with a truly random factor, like a cave-in, an offworld maniac cutting them up for fun, or…”

“Jury duty,” Cort said.

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