Also, Bartan was drinking heavily again. With the realisation that the ship was vastly overstocked with all supplies, including brandy, Toller had given permission for the crew to drink freely—seemingly a small enough concession in the circumstances. It had soon become evident to him that Bartan was abusing the privilege, but he had lacked the will to issue a corrective. Matters of shipboard discipline, in which he would normally have been very strict, now seemed irrelevant and trivial in a universe where the impossible had become probable, and the bizarre had become commonplace.
Three days into the deceleration phase he found himself gazing through the forward porthole—which now faced aft—at the twin points of light which were Land and Overland, the worlds which had encompassed his entire life and which he had left far behind. They seemed more distant than the stars, and yet—from what he had learned—there was a human connection between Overland and Farland. What could it be? What could it be?
Toller’s frustration was increased by the fact that, no matter how insistent were the questions hammering in his mind, each time Sondeweere established communication he was overcome by the same mood of passivity and acceptance, and she was gone before the questions could be put to her. It was as if, for reasons of her own, she had used her strange powers to smother his spirit of enquiry. If that were the case, a new mystery had been added to a surfeit of mysteries, and it all seemed so… unfair.
He glanced around the upper deck, wondering if the rest of the crew shared his frustration. Wraker was in the pilot’s seat, holding the crosshairs on the current guide star, and the others were drowsing in their sleeping nets, seemingly unperturbed by their vulnerability, their total ignorance of what lay ahead.
“This is not the way things should be,” Toller whispered to himself. “We are entitled to more consideration than this.”
I have to agree with you, Sondeweere said, hovering before him, warping space around her to create strange geometries which defied perspective.
I confess that I have done my utmost to erect a barrier around your minds, but my concern was with your collective safety. You see, telepathy—direct mind-to-mind communication—is largely an interactive process. You have enemies here on Farland, powerful enemies, and I had to be certain that I could prevent the symbonites from becoming aware of your approach to the planet. That much I have been able to achieve, but it would still be best if you would agree to turn back et cannot turn back,” Bartan Drumme said, forestalling Toller’s response.
“Bartan speaks for all of us,” Toller added. “We are prepared to face any foe, to die if need be, but by the same token we are entitled to be apprised of the terms of the conflict. What are symbonites, and why are they hostile to us?”
There was a brief pause during which Sondeweere’s multidimensional image underwent several shifts and changes in luminosity, then she began to unfold a tale…
The symbons had been drifting in space for untold thousands of years before blind chance brought them into an unremarkable planetary system. It consisted of a small sun which had a retinue of only three worlds, two of them forming a closely matched binary. Under the influence of the sun’s gravity the tenuous cloud of spores—many of them linked by gossamer-like threads—sank inwards over a period of centuries.
Almost all of them continued the slow descent to the heart of the system, where they were destroyed in the sun’s nuclear furnace, but a few were lucky in that they were captured by the outermost planet.
There they settled in the soil, were nourished by the rain, and entered the receptive phase of their existence. They were doubly lucky in that all of them eventually came into physical contact with members of the planet’s dominant species—a race of intelligent bipeds who had recently discovered the use of metals. They entered their hosts’ bodies and multiplied and spread through them, showing a special affinity for the nervous system, and produced composite beings in which some of the characteristics of both species were enhanced to a great degree.
The symbonites were stronger and vastly more intelligent than the unmodified bipeds. They also had telepathic powers with which they sought each other out and formed a group of super-beings who easily dominated the indigenous species. The relationship was an amicable and peaceful one, bringing to an end the natives’ tribal squabbling.
It could even have been thought of as beneficial to the host race, except that the bipeds were cheated of the right to follow their own evolutionary course.
There followed two centuries during which the symbonites flourished. The offspring of a coupling between a symbonite and an ordinary native was always another symbonite, and with that overwhelming genetic advantage the superbeings inexorably increased their numbers. They developed their own culture, secure in the knowledge that in time they would entirely supersede the native population.
But millions of miles away, on one of the pair of inner worlds, a new development was taking place.
As the original cloud of symbon spores was drifting towards the sun, two of its members had been intercepted by one of the twin worlds. After they had floated down to the lowest levels of the atmosphere their link had been broken by wind forces, but they had entered the soil close to each other in a fertile region of the planet.
A symbon has no powers of selection. It has to merge into the first living creature with which it comes into contact, and one of the spores was quickly absorbed by one of the planet’s lowest life forms—a myriapod which combined some characteristics of scorpion and mantis.
The crawling creature reproduced itself, giving rise to a breed of super-myriapods. They had no brains as such, being controlled by groups of ganglia, so they could not become telepathic in the full sense of the word, but they had the ability to broadcast dim proto-feelings and images from their nervous systems.
They also perpetuated themselves on a downward evolutionary curve, gradually losing their special chracteristics, because as organisms they were far too primitive to form a viable symbiotic partnership.
In the case of that symbon spore, nature’s blind gamble had not paid off. The breed of super-myriapods was destined to revert to type within a few centuries, and their existence would pass unnoticed by the world at large—except for one relatively unimportant instance. The sub-telepathic emanations of their descendants caused disturbing mental effects among humans who chanced to settle in their locality.
In the case of the second symbon spore, however, the outcome was vastly different…
“Sondy!” It was Bartan Drumme who broke the spell cast by the cool overview of the reaches of time and space, and his anguish was apparent. “Please don’t say it! That can’t be what happened to you.”
That is what happened to me, Bartan. I came in contact with the second spore—and now I too am a symbonite.
There was an awed silence on the upper deck of the ship, then Bartan spoke again, his voice quiet and strained. “Does it mean I’ve lost you, Sondy? Are you dead to me? Are you now one of… them?”