The visitors’ penchant for interruption struck yet again. “Oh, let’s not call it that,” the human insisted. “ ‘Surrender’ is such an unsociable term. I believe the official documents to be agreed upon are titled ‘Instruments of Eternal and Lasting Friendship between the Commonwealth of the Humanx and the Grand and Indivisible Empire of the Three Suns.’ They are already being communicated to your Polity for formal final review and execution.”
Gorelkii tapped his translator. In the course of negotiations he had fully expected to hear the term “execution” employed, but before now, and not in relation to bureaucratic formalities.
“We do have one last request.” The human was eyeing him thoughtfully.
Here it comes, Gorelkii thought. He steeled himself for whatever last-minute ultimate demand might be forthcoming. “Which is?”
Raising a spindly arm, the white-haired human pointed at the Admiral. “Would you wear that magnificent uniform, or whatever you call your current attire, when you attend our reception? I know that all of our military as well as diplomatic people will be as impressed by it as Col and I have been.”
Gorelkii found himself gesturing automatically. “Yes. Yes, that can be arranged.”
“Splendid!” Stepping forward, the human extended his arm once more. This time Gorelkii knew how to respond. They shook hands, gray enveloping beige. As the alien biped retreated, his thranx colleague advanced, dipped his head, and brushed the Admiral’s still extended trio of fingers with his antennae. The contact was negligible.
“We are most grateful for your hospitality,” the hard-shell murmured. “I personally look forward to greeting and entertaining you and your companions on board our vessel.”
Gorelkii sat in silence for a long time after the two Commonwealth diplomats had departed. Only an involuntary and irrepressible grunt of pain from Bardanat reminded the Admiral that his Adjutant was still locked in the ritual pose of Formal Reception.
“Straighten,” he told Bardanat.
“Gratitude, Admiral.” The Adjutant was relieved. “I…” He hesitated, then asked the question that he could not suppress. “It is not for me to determine, but from what I was witness to I am presuming that according to the hopes and expectations of the Polity and of your personal self, the negotiations went well enough?”
“You may presume correctly, Adjutant.” Gorelkii was gazing down the arched Corridor of Mortality through which the diplomats had taken their leave. “There’s just one thing of which I remain uncertain.”
Bardanat stared back at the Grand Admiral, Destroyer of Worlds, etc. “What is that, Excellency?”
Gorelkii looked over at him. “Remind me again: this war. We lost—didn’t we?”
SYMBIONT
by Robert Silverberg
Robert Silverberg—four-time Hugo Award-winner, five-time winner of the Nebula Award, SFWA Grand Master, SF Hall of Fame honoree—is the author of nearly five hundred short stories, nearly hundred-and-fifty novels, and is the editor of in the neighborhood of one hundred anthologies. Among his most famous works are Lord Valentine’s Castle, and the other books and stories in the Majipoor series, but all of his classic works are far too numerous to name.
The idea for “Symbiont”—which Silverberg described in The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg as a “somber tale of jungle adventure and diabolical revenge”—came from a young woman named Karen Haber that Silverberg met while on a book tour. She gave him the idea, and he worked his magic. Shortly after, the story was finished and appeared in Playboy. And shortly after that, Silverberg married Ms. Haber.
But you shouldn’t let that sweet story fool you; he wasn’t joking when he said this one is diabolical.
Ten years later, when I was long out of the Service and working the turnaround wheel at Betelgeuse Station, Fazio still haunted me. Not that he was dead. Other people get haunted by dead men; I was haunted by a live one. It would have been a lot better for both of us if he had been dead, but as far as I knew Fazio was still alive.
He’d been haunting me a long while. Three or four times a year his little dry thin voice would come out of nowhere and I’d hear him telling me again, “Before we go into that jungle, we got to come to an understanding. If a synsym nails me, Chollie, you kill me right away, hear? None of this shit of calling in the paramedics to clean me out. You just kill me right away. And I’ll do the same for you. Is that a deal?”
This was on a planet called Weinstein in the Servadac system, late in the Second Ovoid War. We were twenty years old and we were volunteers: two dumb kids playing hero. “You bet your ass” is what I told him, not hesitating a second. “Deal. Absolutely.” Then I gave him a big grin and a handclasp and we headed off together on spore-spreading duty.
At the time, I really thought I meant it. Sometimes I still believe that I did.
Ten years. I could still see the two of us back there on Weinstein, going out to distribute latchenango spores in the enemy-held zone. The planet had been grabbed by the Ovoids early in the war, but we were starting to drive them back from that whole system. Fazio and I were the entire patroclass="underline" you get spread pretty thin in galactic warfare. But there was plenty of support force behind us in the hills.
Weinstein was strategically important, God only knows why. Two small continents—both tropical, mostly thick jungle, air like green soup—surrounded by an enormous turbulent ocean: never colonized by Earth, and of no use that anyone had ever successfully explained to me. But the place had once been ours and they had taken it away, and we wanted it back.
The way you got a planet back was to catch a dozen or so Ovoids, fill them full of latchenango spores, and let them return to their base. There is no life-form a latchenango likes better as its host than an Ovoid. The Ovoids, being Ovoids, would usually conceal what had happened to them from their pals, who would kill them instantly if they knew they were carrying deadly parasites. Of course, the carriers were going to die anyway—latchenango infestation is invariably fatal to Ovoids—but by the time they did, in about six standard weeks, the latchenangos had gone through three or four reproductive cycles and the whole army would be infested. All we needed to do was wait until all the Ovoids were dead and then come in, clean the place up, and raise the flag again. The latchenangos were generally dead, too, by then, since they rarely could find other suitable hosts. But even if they weren’t, we didn’t worry about it. Latchenangos don’t cause any serious problems for humans. About the worst of it is that you usually inhale some spores while you’re handling them, and it irritates your lungs for a couple of weeks so you do some pretty ugly coughing until you’re desporified.
In return for our latchenangos the Ovoids gave us synsyms.
Synsyms were the first things you heard about when you arrived in the war zone, and what you heard was horrendous. You didn’t know how much of it was myth and how much was mere bullshit and how much was truth, but even if you discounted seventy-five percent of it the rest was scary enough. “If you get hit by one,” the old hands advised us, “kill yourself fast, while you have the chance.” Roving synsym vectors cruised the perimeter of every Ovoid camp, sniffing for humans. They were not parasites but synthetic symbionts: when they got into you, they stayed there, sharing your body with you indefinitely.
In school they teach you that symbiosis is a mutually beneficial state. Maybe so. But the word that passed through the ranks in the war zone was that it definitely did not improve the quality of your life to take a synsym into your body. And though the Service medics would spare no effort to see that you survived a synsym attack—they aren’t allowed to perform mercy killings, and wouldn’t anyway—everything we heard indicated that you didn’t really want to survive one.