session.
I considered his question, which again came as a surprise. He really wanted to show me something. All three of the machines had something to do. So did a team of forty-odd marines, who I’d instructed to assemble the ships as the parts came out of the three factories. With the help of some tame worker Macros to do the heaviest lifting, the men were doing fine. The first gunboat took form with dramatic speed.
I almost asked what he was talking about, but stopped myself. Unlike humans, Marvin never forgot a topic during a conversation.
“Yes,” I said, turning my attention to Marvin. “Tell me about your preoccupation. Why were you late?”
“I’ve been trying to help humanity,” he said.
“Ah, a noble goal. Could you explain what form this help has taken?”
“I’ve grown a…colony.”
“A colony of what?”
“Microbes.”
I stared at him, then nodded slowly. His cameras whirred and zoomed. I knew they were evaluating my expression from a half-dozen angles, trying to calculate my response. Was I angry or elated? Was I going to approve or forbid his experiments? He clearly wanted to know.
“We are talking about the same type of Microbes we found on the Macro ship last year, aren’t we?”
“Yes.”
“The ones which are intelligent, when massed together?”
“Yes.”
“What have you done with them, Marvin?”
“I have collected samples, purified their environment and placed them in a suitable containment facility.”
I nodded, maintaining a poker face. I recalled he’d been messing about with mud puddles since we first landed on this world. Clearly, he’d had a good reason of his own to come here, and it wasn’t only to help me claim the Macro production facility.
“Show me,” I said.
He rose up on his writhing tentacles and led me to a pool of mud near the dome’s edge. I stared at it. The pool was about six feet wide and less than a foot deep. Really, it was easy to ignore. Not being placed too close to any of the major pathways, the Macro workers seemed to never come near the place. There were few footprints of any kind around the pool-except for the odd, swirling prints that Marvin made when he squirmed and wriggled overland like a bundle of snakes.
“They are in there? How many of them?”
“It’s difficult to achieve a precise population count. That’s one of the reasons I’m sharing my achievement with you. I need more equipment to work with them.”
“Hmm,” I said, frowning at the pool. “How many, in round numbers?”
“Between two and three trillion.”
“ Trillion? ” I asked incredulously.
“Admittedly, the culture is small, but I’ve only just started.”
My mouth sagged open, and I took a step back from the pool. I didn’t want the earthen sides to slip down into the water-it would be like an avalanche to them.
“I’m not accustomed to thinking a trillion of anything,” I said.
Marvin only had one camera on me now. Almost all of the rest studied his pool.
“The average human adult supports approximately two hundred trillion microflora. These beings are larger in size, however. They are closer to the size of a human cell. Still, for this volume of medium, three trillion is a very thin population. The environment here is too cold for them, you see. That’s one of the things I need, a proper warming system. It must be built to create a diffused heat. No single area of the pool should be hot or cold, and the circulatory action must be very gentle to create a minimum of accidental deaths. I think the best system would be an under-carpet of bubble-producing polymers. That way-”
“Marvin,” I said, interrupting. This gained me two extra cameras of attention. “I don’t understand what you are doing with these creatures. You found them here, on the planet surface?”
“Yes,” he said. “They are not quite the same variety we discovered on the Macro cruiser in their experimentation tanks. But they are quite similar. I believe they are a wild strain. They’ve adjusted somewhat to the colder climate, but not entirely. They don’t thrive on an icy world like this one.”
I nodded slowly, trying to absorb everything he was inferring. “You are saying they aren’t native to this world? They are from somewhere else?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“The sixth planet from the local star.”
“The tropical world, eh? I see. What are they doing here?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “But I believed they were used to exterminate the original indigenous population of Centaurs.”
— 24
After I got over my shock, I turned to Marvin incredulously. “Are you telling me these intelligent microbes were used as a biological weapon against the Centaurs?”
Marvin flicked a few extra cameras toward me, then panned them back to his soupy pool of mud. He snaked out a tentacle, probed the surface of the liquid gingerly, then retracted the appendage.
“Yes,” he said.
“What the hell are you doing growing a pool of them, if they are so dangerous?”
“They are no longer dangerous.”
I shook my head. “Okay,” I said. “This is a big deal, Marvin, if you are right. Let’s go over it, and I don’t want to hear any of your usual evasiveness.”
“I’m always forthright and compliant with your wishes, Colonel Riggs.”
“No,” I said. “No, you are not. But I’m not going to argue with you about that. What makes you think they were used as weapons?”
“They informed me of this. It is part of their historical record. Not all tribes of their people remember-it was thousands of generations ago. But some do. They corroborate the story.”
“What possible motivation would they have for coming to a Centaur world and killing the populace?”
“The same motivation humans had to invade Helios and exterminate the Worms.”
“Ah,” I said, suddenly understanding. “The Microbes made a deal with the Macros? They were used to kill other biotics-just like we were?”
“Yes.”
I stared at the pool, dumbfounded. “Why do you think they are harmless now?”
“They are the leftover remnants of an aerial bombardment. Since their duty was long ago completed, they are free of their obligation to kill other biotics on this world. Now, they are simply trying to survive.”
“What is your interest in them, Marvin?”
“Don’t you find them entrancing?” he asked seriously. “Didn’t the nanites fill you with curiosity-at least at first?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “Yes, they did.”
“Tiny creatures with an alien nature,” he said. “I’m drawn to them, I admit. I was fascinated with them from the first. A form of intelligence so different from my own-and yet not that dissimilar. My mind is a mass of tiny machines working in tandem. Yours is a cluster of structurally adhered cells. Theirs is a colony of independent cells, floating in a liquid medium.”
I thought about it, and realized the Microbes were more like me than Marvin was-even if there was a huge difference in scale. I walked around the pool at a safe distance, looking at it from all angles. It still looked like
