Women in Deep Time by Greg Bear Page A

said.
    “Noncombat,” he said. “Tuner of the mandates.”
    She knew very little about the mandates, except that law decreed every ship carry one, and few of the crew were ever allowed to peep. “Noncombat, hm?” she mused. She didn’t despise him for that; one never felt strong negatives for a crew member. She didn’tfeel much of anything. Too calm.
    “Been working on ours this wake,” he said. “Too hard, I guess. Told to walk.” Overzealousness in work was considered an erotic trait aboard the Mellangee. Still, she didn’t feel too receptive toward him.
    “Glovers walk after a rough growing,” she said.
    He nodded. “My name’s Clevo.”
    “Prufrax.”
    “Combat soon?”
    “Hoping. Waiting forever.”
    “I know. Just been allowed access to the mandate for a halfdozen wakes. All new to me. Very happy.”
    “Can you talk about it?” she asked. Information about the ship not accessible in certain rates was excellent barter.
    “Not sure,” he said, frowning. “I’ve been told caution.”
    “Well, I’m listening.”
    He could come from glover stock, she thought, but probably not from technical. He wasn’t very muscular, but he wasn’t as tall as a glover, or as thin, either.
    “If you’ll tell me about gloves.”
    With a smile she held up her hands and wriggled the short, stumpy fingers. “Sure.”
     
    The brood mind floated weightless in its tank, held in place by buffered carbon rods. Metal was at a premium aboard the Senexi ships, more out of tradition than actual material limitations. From what Aryz could tell, the Senexi used metals sparingly for the same reason—and he strained to recall the small dribbles of information about the human past he had extracted from the memory store—for the same reason that the Romans of old Earth regarded farming as the only truly noble occupation -
    Farming being the raising of plants for food and raw materials. Plants were analogous to the freeth Senexi ate in their larval youth, but the freeth were not green and sedentary.
    There was always a certain fascination in stretching his mind to encompass human concepts. He had had so little time to delve deeply—and that was good, of course, for he had been set to answer specific questions, not mire himself in the whole range of human filth.
    He floated before the brood mind, all these thoughts coursing through his tissues. He had no central nervous system, no truly differentiated organs except those that dealt with the outside world limbs, eyes, permea. The brood mind, however, was all central nervous system, a thinly buffered sac of viscous fluids about ten meters wide.
    “Have you investigated the human memory device yet?” the brood mind asked.
    “I have.”
    “Is communication with the human shapes possible for us?”
    “We have already created interfaces for dealing with their machines. Yes, it seems likely we can communicate.”
    “Does it occur to you that in our long war with humans, we have made no attemptto communicate before?”
    This was a complicated question. It called for several qualities that Aryz, as a branch ind, wasn’t supposed to have. Inquisitiveness, for one. Branch inds did not ask questions. They exhibited initiative only as offshoots of the brood mind.
    He found, much to his dismay, that the question had occurred to him. “We have never captured a human memory store before,” he said, by way of incomplete answer. ‘We could not have communicated without such an extensive source of information.”
    “Yet, as you say, even in the past we have been able to use human machines.”
    “The problem is vastly more complex.”
    The brood mind paused. “Do you think the teams have been prohibited from communicating with humans?”
    Aryz felt the closest thing to anguish possible for a branch ind. Was he being considered unworthy? Accused of conduct inappropriate to a branch ind? His loyalty to the brood mind was unshakeable. “Yes.”
    “And what might our reasons