Federations

“The wasps?”

She clicked the steel fingers of her hand. “Overnight. Just over a hundred years ago.”

I tried not to look too overwhelmed. Intriguing as all this was, I wasn’t treating it as anything other than an outlandish attempt to distract me from the main reason for my being here, which remained killing the defector. Wendigo’s story explained some of the anomalies we’d so far encountered—but that didn’t rule out a dozen more plausible explanations. Meanwhile, it was amusing to try and catch her out. “So they got smart,” I said. “You mean our wasps, or theirs?”

“Doesn’t mean a damn anymore. Maybe it just happened to one machine in the Swirl, and then spread like wildfire to all the trillions of other wasps. Or maybe it happened simultaneously, in response to some stimulus we can’t even guess at.”

“Want to hazard a guess?”

“I don’t think it’s important, Spirey.” She sounded as though she wanted to put a lot of distance between herself and this topic. “Point is, it happened. Afterward, distinctions between us and the enemy—at least from the point of view of the wasps—completely vanished.”

“Workers of the Swirl unite.”

“Something like that. And you understand why they kept it to themselves, don’t you?”

I nodded, more to keep her talking.

“They needed us, of course. They still lacked something. Creativity, I guess you’d call it. They could evolve themselves incrementally, but they couldn’t make the kind of sweeping evolutionary jumps we’d been feeding them.”

“So we had to keep thinking there was a war on.”

Wendigo looked pleased. “Right. We’d keep supplying them with innovations, and they’d keep pretending to do each other in.” She halted, scratching at the unwrinkled skin around one eye with the alloy finger of one hand. “Clever little bastards.”

• • •

We’d arrived somewhere.

It was a chamber, large as any enclosed space I’d ever seen. I felt gravity; too much of the stuff. The whole chamber must have been gimbaled and spun within the splinter, like one of the gee-load simulators back in Tiger’s Eye. The vaulted ceiling, hundreds of meters “above,” now seemed vertiginously higher.

Apart from its apex, it was covered in intricate frescos—dozens of pictorial facets, each a cycling hologram. They told the history of the Swirl, beginning with its condensation from interstellar gas, the ignition of its star, the onset of planetary formation. Then the action cut to the arrival of the first Standardist wasp, programmed to dive into the Swirl and breed like a rabbit, so that one day there’d be a sufficiently huge population to begin mining the thing; winnowing out metals, silicates, and precious organics for the folks back home. Of course, it never happened like that. The Royalists wanted in on the action, so they sent their own wasps, programmed to attack ours. The rest is history. The frescos showed the war’s beginning, and then a little while later the arrival of the first human observers, beamed across space as pure genetic data, destined to be born in artificial wombs in hollowed out comet-cores, raised and educated by wasps, imprinted with the best tactical and strategic knowledge available. Thereafter they taught the wasps. From then on things heated up, because the observers weren’t limited by years of timelag. They were able to intervene in wasp evolution in realtime.

That ought to have been it, because by then we were pretty up-to-date, give or take four hundred years of the same.

But the frescos carried on.

There was one representing some future state of the Swirl, neatly ordered into a ticking orrery of variously sized and patterned worlds, some with beautiful rings or moon systems. And finally—like medieval conceptions of Eden—there was a triptych of lush planetary landscapes, with weird animals in the foreground, mountains and soaring cloudbanks behind.

“Seen enough to convince you?” Wendigo asked.

“No,” I said, not entirely sure whether I believed myself. Craning my neck, I looked up toward the apex.

Something hung from it.

It was a pair of wasps, fused together. One was complete, the other was only fully formed, seemingly in the process of splitting from the complete wasp. The fused pair looked to have been smothered in molten bronze, left to dry in waxy nodules.

“You know what this is?” Wendigo asked.

“I’m waiting.”

“Wasp art.”

I looked at her.

“This wasp was destroyed mid-replication,” Wendigo continued. “While it was giving birth. Evidently the image has some poignancy for them. How I’d put it in human terms I don’t know . . . ”

“Don’t even think about it.”

I followed her across the marbled terrazzo that floored the chamber. Arched porticos surrounded it, each of which held a single dead wasp, their body designs covering a hundred generations of evolution. If Wendigo was right, I supposed these dead wasps were the equivalent of venerated old ancestors peering from oil paintings. But I wasn’t convinced just yet.

“You knew this place existed?”