Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail

“Where’s this thing going now?” he asked Morah.

The security chief shrugged. “Wherever it wants. Probably to another of our planets, to burrow in once again. They go from system to system until they find a planet within our life zone around a stable sun, then they burrow in and remake the surface out of matter and energy. It’s never the same twice, but always something familiar to us, even the atmosphere. It’ll stay there a thousand years unless disturbed, as this one was, then rise again, move on, find the next planet, and start it all again. You know, when they leave on their own they do virtually no damage to the planetary systems their little symbiotic riders create? They just leave ’em. I think a number of mysteries about how so many worlds have formed within our life tolerances may be answered by the Coldah. As random as they are, most of the planets they use are not initially inhabitable, but they leave them that way. Once they leave their little symbiotes don’t destruct, as they do when in residence and taken away, but just sort of fade out. Normal evolution follows.” He chuckled. “You know, it’s even just possible that our own race, and the Altavar, grew up over the millions of years because of Coldah lifestyles. It’s a fascinating concept.”

“But the Altavar—they fought these things. And now they seem almost to protect them.”

“That’s true,” Morah agreed, telling one of his aides in an aside to get them all strong drinks, “but in the thousands of years they fought and studied the Coldah, a funny thing happened. Somewhere along the line they got tired of it, just got sick of futile head-knocking, and sort of mentally surrendered to the big bastards. To the Altavar, the Coldah became their whole life, and in a probably gradual switch they came not only to accept the existence of these creatures but to actually work with them. Don’t ask me to explain it—it’s certainly religious, or mystic, in a way, and those are unexplainable even when we’re talking about our faiths, yet they are coldly and scientifically devoted to the great project, as they call it. They protect the Coldah from outside interference whenever possible, and they try with their fleets to nudge the Coldah into worlds that need some work. Don’t ask me how that’s possible, bat the Coldah, once the Altavar started helping rather than fighting, seemed to go along with it.”

He nodded. “But not here.”

“Well, it was impossible, for one thing. When the Coldah originally came to the Warden system we were still stuck knee-deep on old Mother Earth. These four worlds were pretty piss-poor rock piles with nasty atmospheres and surface pressures, just perfect. And when a particularly big, fat, Coldah arrived, it did something the Altavar, with all their experience, had never seen before. It reproduced by fission. It made triplets, in fact, and the one old and three new ones entered into the four Diamond worlds. Shortly after, they released, or made and released, or whatever, their little beasties, and they went to work on the world, making it over. Lilith, with the original mama Coldah, had the most rigid system imposed on it. Then the Altavar moved in. In the years they have studied, fought, then served the Coldah, they learned a lot. They can make their own Wardens, and they can give orders to these synthesized versions, too. Within limits, they can even play games with the Coldah versions, and they did here. Looking at the climates, they elevated one species on each to dominance.”

“I figured that much out. Reptiles on the warmest world, insects on the lushest, water breathers on the wettest, and mammals on the coldest.”

“Right Part of their own grand project, really. Since die Coldah can leave, although not arrive, with a minimum of fuss—it’s sort of like a big mist rising, they tell me—leaving the worlds to natural laws, they’ve been trying to influence their direction. It’s a very long-term concept, naturally, but they are really trying to learn what factors and conditions produce intelligence one place and not another. Ifs pretty complex. Of course, our arrival screwed up the project here.”

“And because, somehow, the electrochemical wavelengths on which the human brain operates were just slightly off the wavelengths used by the Coldah to command the Warden organisms, we developed these wild talents.” He paused for a moment, then added, “I assume the Altavar are nowhere near those wavelengths?”

Morah chuckled. “No. Oh, they can tune in, as it were, mechanically, but not biologically.”

He whistled low and grabbed a drink as it arrived, drinking a bit more in one gulp than he should. He needed it. Finally he said, “Then we became the project.”

“Yes. We became the project. But in order to control it, and to minimize interference between ourselves and the Coldah, the Confederacy was in the way. The Coldah are headed, generally, in our direction—or back to it, I don’t know which. The idea of our race, who can, as it were, tune in on at least one Coldah band, threatened the Altavar, their lifestyle, their system of beliefs. I think they were actually afraid that, if we followed the same pattern as they did, we could eventually establish contact, even rapport with the Coldah. Maybe we can, although I think they may simply be too alien ever to understand or communicate with on more than a basic level.”

He smiled wanly and shook his head in wonder. “Then, to the Altavar, ve were the demons. They were scared of us stealing their gods. If the results weren’t so tragic they’d be almost funny, you know that?” He thought a moment. “But if we were that much of a threat to them, the snake that could steal their Eden, why not just wipe out everybody but the project people—the {)iamond?”

“They intended to do just that, as the old Altavar told us. But they are an enormous, mostly mobile population, spread out over half a galaxy, wherever there are Coldah. They faced an empire of vast proportions and unknown capabilities. They had to know how we thought, what our tactics were like, how we’d fight, all the rest. They had time. It’s still three hundred years until the scheduled hatching, or breakout, or whatever it is the Coldah do. It was over four hundred when we first arrived here. They spent fifty years or more just getting to know us through the Wardens, watching us work, and realizing just how different our relationship to the Wardens was from theirs, and only then did they really send for their fleet, which must be assembled from incredible distances and then can only be spared in small pieces. It was easier for them to establish factories on worlds beyond the Confederacy, even Warden worlds themselves, and build the force they needed, along with using the Wardens to breed the Altavar necessary for the fight. By the time they had their fleet and their military ready, Kreegan.was Lord of Lilith.”

“And he stumbled on the whole truth?”

“Much as I did. On each world there was one point, one weakness, that was the Coldah’s window to the outside. Don’t ask me how it works or why, I don’t know. But there was one point, usually in an inaccessible and nasty place on the globe, where this happened. On Lilith it’s very near the north pole. On Charon it’s a small island off the southern continent. I don’t know how Kreegan happened on the north pole, but considering that the descendants of the original exploiter team had set up a planet-worship religion on Lilith they must have put him on to it. The signal strength, as it were, at each of those points is so strong it bleeds over directly onto ours, exciting our own Wardens and our brain’s awareness and control.”

“No wonder, then, Kreegan became Lord.”

Morah nodded. “Local Altavar, bred for the conditions and for unobtrusiveness, try to discourage anyone from getting too close without blowing their cover, often masquerading as wild animals themselves. They mostly staff monitoring and control devices to keep tabs on the Coldah, whose signals increase consistently until they leave. By that monitor they can predict the Coldah’s eventual behavior and be ready for it.”

He thought a moment. “Then the ice demons weren’t the only ones. There were those nasty beasties in the Charonese desert with tentacles, too, if I remember.”

“Oh, the narils. Actually, they’re not Altavar, but Altavar pets, in a way. An attempt to breed an animal with their own biochemical structure that was sensitive to the Warden frequencies. It worked only slightly, though. Some got into the wild and adapted themselves to the desert, that’s all. The Cerberan bork is another botched attempt, only that time their result scared them so much they haven’t tried it again.”

“I still don’t understand why they’d go for Kreegan’s plan, though.”

“Oh, that’s simple. They still weren’t quite ready to tackle us yet. They were pretty sure he couldn’t succeed, but he hit it off with them for some reason, and they agreed to go along simply because, no matter what, it would give them the strategic and military information they craved. If it worked, so much the better. But they couldn’t stand for us in any event, a race with a powerful empire that also could reach, and even make use of, the Coldah and their symbiotes without a lot of mechanical aids.”

“So what will they do to the Confederacy now—and to us?”

Morah sighed. “They will use small but deadly forces to hit weakly defended planets throughout the Confederacy. Eventually the remnants of this fleet not concerned with the Medusan Coldah’s new habitat and settlement will join m scattered action. They will collapse the empire back into planetbound barbarism, but on hundreds of worlds. The Confederacy itself will continue to hold fanatically, all the while contracting to a defensible