Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

contorted. ’How gross.’
    ’More gross than a Ghost?’ Hex asked.
    He turned to her, his eyes stony. ’Well, now, that’s the question,
isn’t it? We know the Ghosts are some kind of colony creature too.
And we know that this wriggling, dissolving thing speaks a kind of
basic Ghost language. I think it’s time we asked him what is going on
here - and what he has to do with the Ghosts.’
    ’He may not know,’ Jul warned. ’He is technological, but
primitive. And we may turn him against us.’
    Borno snapped, ’So what?’
    ’I think Borno’s right,’ Hella said. ’We’re not getting anywhere
sitting in here. We have to take a few risks.’
    ’If he knows who’s shooting at him from the nightside,’ Borno
said, ’it would be a start.’
    Hex considered. She had been trained by the Commissaries in alien
psychology - or at least, how to manipulate it. ’We humans are very
self-centred,’ she said. ’Everything revolves around us. But for
Swimmer, we’re peripheral. He doesn’t care what we want, even where
we came from. He’s helping us stay alive for his own reasons - and
that’s our angle. Hella, try asking him why he’s helping us.’
    Hella murmured into her translator unit.
    He was helping them, Swimmer replied, because they were the
enemies of his enemies.
     
    Swimmer didn’t know that the ecology that had spawned him was the
second to have arisen on this battered world.
    His sun was dark and cold to human senses, but to the creatures
that evolved in its ruddy light it was a warm steady hearth. ’In
fact,’ Hella said, smiling, ’Swimmer doesn’t believe that life on a
planet like Earth is possible. A dazzling sun, a daily cycle of light
and dark, seasons, ice ages - how could any ecology evolve in such a
chaotic environment?’
    Life here, though, had taken a different route to Earth. The
continued cooling of the sun had exerted a selective pressure to
huddle, to share, to keep warm. Here large animals were rare,
cooperative organisms the norm.
    Hex had never seen another of Swimmer’s kind, but it seemed he
joined with others in the depths of the sea. There the bits that made
up the people danced in their own eager matings. And if you came out
of the great merging with a slightly different set of subcomponents,
so what? Hex suspected that ’identity’ meant something rather
different to these people than to her own.
    When intelligence evolved among Swimmer’s predecessors, their
biology shaped everything they did. Unlike humans their politics was
a matter of cooperation rather than competition, though there could
be disagreements, even wars. They crawled out onto land - surely the
low gravity helped them with that conquest - where there were raw
materials to be shaped, power sources like fire impossible under
water. Their different origins shaped their technology. They
discovered a genius for moulding themselves and their coevals; these
people were capable of advanced biochemistry, though their physical
technology was no more than Iron Age.
    They had even managed to achieve spaceflight. A handful of
Swimmer’s people cloaked themselves in a new kind of hide, a tough,
silvered skin capable of retaining inner heat while resisting the
harsh radiations of space. In time ice moons and comet nuclei had
become home to a new variant of Swimmer’s kind, who rarely visited
the home planet.
    But all the while the pulsar continued its slow, lethal work of
slicing away the substance of the sun.
    As this story unfolded, the Spear crew exchanged glances of
recognition.
    It had become increasingly clear that a crisis was approaching. A
decision emerged from the interconnected councils of the people. The
interplanetary wayfarers were summoned home. The most technologically
advanced of their kind, perhaps they could find a way to save the
world.
    The space-hardened wayfarers returned. By now the ice cap on the
nightside, hard and cold, was not so different a habitat from the ice
moons they had made their home. But they found they resented being
begged for help by those they regarded as a primitive, weaker form.
They saw ways to use this fat rocky world for their own purposes -
and all the better if the murky atmosphere and muddy oceans were
frozen or stripped off.
    Bringing the spaceborne home was a catastrophic mistake. They had
diverged too much from Swimmer’s kind. There were two species now,
too far apart, competing for the same space. Conflict was
inevitable.
    The nightsiders were