Into The Unknowable Ch 05

Chapter Five

The Sahara Desert - 3723 C.E.

There was much about the Solar System that was new to Vashti. She'd already made several significant accidental errors since she'd penetrated interdimensional spacetime and materialised in the continuum in which the Anomaly's presence was most concentrated.

Her primary error, of course, had been not to understand sexuality and gender. The blueprints on which she'd based her physical form were an unfortunate mix of both male and female characteristics. It had been a mistake to assume that the most normal form was one with characteristics of both rather than of either one or the other. But it was too late now to do anything about it, especially now she'd made her presence known.

It was impossible for a structure on the scale of a human being or robot to make the transition from one spacetime continuum to another. Only beings such as nanobots organised on a fundamentally small scale with the capacity to reorganise themselves into much larger functioning units could be transferred across the interdimensional void into other wholly independent but parallel universes.

In the spacetime of her origin the only biological life-forms were microbial and asexual. There was little trace of the nanobots' ancestral architects that had once dominated a Solar System that mirrored the one in which she now lived. The catastrophic event that had let loose an uncontrollable multitude of self-replicating nanobots had subjugated almost every atom in the Solar System to the swarm's imperative to multiply. It took many more millennia until the nanobots evolved and organised themselves into intelligent entities that were sufficiently sentient to contemplate the damage that had been done. What little remained of an earlier age was evidence of an advanced civilisation of feathered theropods who despite their great cultural and intellectual achievements had nevertheless badly miscalculated the consequences of manufacturing the sort of self-replicating nanobot of which Vashti was composed.

Vashti's home was as much unlike the Solar System as it was possible to be, but it had probably been much the same in the distant past, ten million years before, when the theropods conquered the inner planets and colonised them with hadrosaurs, pterosaurs and giant sauropods. There was little record left of these feathered dinosaurians now. There were a few artefacts floating in space that had escaped the swarm of self-replicating nanobots that reduced the planets and asteroids to copies of themselves. And there was no residual trace of such fundamental features as sexual differentiation or language. Features such as these that the theropods no doubt shared with the mammals that dominated this variant of the Solar System were unsuspected and unanticipated.

Vashti's home Solar System was now composed of a vast almost homogeneous swarm of nanobots that organised itself according to function and need. It was a culture and intelligence dissipated among countless autonomous units and untroubled by such constraints as gravity, temperature and distance that bound life-forms in this Solar System. Anyone viewing Vashti's version of the Solar System from a distance, or any of the several billion star systems her kind had colonised, would see nothing but a cloud of energetic particles with few discernable hubs of economic activity.

However in this spacetime continuum, Vashti was masquerading as a human and had to adapt to new limitations. She'd adopted as many human characteristics as she could: including their emotions, their sexual urges and their physical form.

An unexpected aspect of biological life-forms that was actually welcome to Vashti was the discovery that they were in constant conflict with each other. It seemed that the more closely one animal was related to another, the more aggressive they acted towards each other. The greatest conflict was between males of the same species sometimes in defence of territory but more often to gain reproductive advantage over other males. The more advanced the animal the more violent the conflict. Chimpanzees, horses and dolphins all engaged in mutually destructive violence, but the animal most actively involved in this pointless activity to the extent that it sometimes dominated every aspect of its political, artistic and economic structure culture was the human species.

How such a strangely awkward primate could have made warfare such an compulsive activity in its short history, Vashti really didn't know. In her spacetime continuum, it made no sense for one set of nanobots to declare war on another. They usually only ever aggregated into larger structures, as Vashti had, to address specific purposes like space travel and the exploitation of energy resources. And once that task was complete, the independent nanobots would disperse back into the general swarm. The intelligence of her kind was an emergent function of the whole rather than something embedded in a specific individual's constitution.

Vashti recognised an opportunity when she saw one. If she was to find her way to the Anomaly it would be through a disciplined and well-resourced organisation that possessed technology well in advance of its actual requirements. It was even better that such an organisation was associated with chaos and the possibility of advancement premised on the simple ability to be the victor of conflict.

Vashti had much more than what was necessary to ensure that no human could frustrate her ability to succeed in such a peculiar environment. It was almost as if the human species had engineered exactly the right environment for an alien to infiltrate their society.

It was for this reason that Vashti decided to declare Martian citizenship. It was obvious to her after surveying the interplanetary web that Mars was more suited than anywhere else for advancement and opportunity through the practice of warfare. However much the various colonies in the Asteroid belt squabbled with one another, Mars was where warfare was most institutionalised and, therefore, the society most easy to infiltrate.

Nevertheless, Vashti knew it would take further deceit and some ingenuity for her to engineer a passage to Mars.

"How will I get home to the Mariner Valley?" she asked Rao in the mobile home that was now as much home to her as it was to the four tourists who'd taken her under their collective wing. "I've got no credit and I've lost my passport."

"I'm sure the embassy will help you," said Rao. "They've almost certainly got a consulate in Timbuktu. They must have a record of you in their files, so it'll be easy for them to issue you with a new passport."

And what if they have no record? Vashti wondered to herself. This mightn't be as easy as Rao might think.

In the meantime, however, there was much for Vashti to learn from her companions, although most of that was related to religion and sex. The former was much more of a mystery to Vashti than the latter. The more she discovered about religious practices the more they puzzled her. Even though almost everything could be explained without recourse to mysticism, it seemed that many humans still felt a need for it. And this was despite the fact that there was as little as no unambiguous evidence that a transcendent entity such as a

God

had ever existed and that there was almost as much disagreement as to what this entity might be as there were people who professed to believe in it.

Sex was at least explicable as an activity intimately related with the biological imperative to procreate. It was obvious to Vashti, after having taken on the sexual characteristics of humankind along with so many others, that it not only served a practical function but was also the source of an immense amount of pleasure.

It took little time for Vashti to become a full participant in the sexual recreation of her companions, although she could never understand its apparent link with religion. Unlike religious faith, there was no mystery to sex. Almost all multicellular biological life-forms practised it: whether plant or animal. As an evolutionary strategy it had clearly accelerated the process of promoting genetic diversity and provided an impetus for competitive development. There was no need to invoke Vishnu or any other deity to explain a process as natural as eating or breathing.

Her first sexual partner was Dorothy who was fascinated by Vashti's well-developed penis.

"Were you born differently?" she asked, with one hand on Vashti's thigh and the other idly stroking her testicles.

"I was," Vashti admitted.

"So why did you choose to be the way you are?" Dorothy asked delicately.

"It was an honest mistake," said Vashti, more honestly than Dorothy might have imagined.

"Do you regret it now?"

"Not at all," said Vashti as her penis grew under Dorothy's desultory ministrations.

"May I?" asked Dorothy politely as she gazed pleadingly at a penis that was fully erect and strained from the blood now pumping through its veins.

Vashti nodded, whilst noting with interest a curious shortness of breath and a further swelling of her penis as a result of Dorothy's circumspect suggestion. Her testicles hardened and her buttocks clenched together slightly.

Dorothy leaned over Vashti and gently licked her guest's glans with the same skill she practised on her husband and Vikram. The foreskin was pulled fully back and Vashti's penis took on the peculiar rod-like shape associated with the lingam in the temples of Vishnu and reproduced in so many abstract forms about the mobile home. Vashti had extensively explored this curious human feature and knew what it was capable of, but her penis was far more responsive to Dorothy's tongue than it ever was to the application of her own fingers.

Dorothy wasn't a woman who hurried her lovemaking and she wasn't to be distracted when Rao and Vikram ventured into the mobile home from where they'd been strolling in the Saharan wilderness. She increased the momentum and rhythm gradually as steadily more penis entered her mouth until Vashti could feel Dorothy's tonsil gently stroke the glans.

It wasn't long until Vashti was sharing Dorothy's body with her husband and Vikram, while Sandhya dozed outside with a book resting under her chin.

Vashti wasn't sure whether she preferred sex with men or with women, but she was aware that by not having a vagina she could never enjoy penetration in quite the same way as Dorothy could. Although Vashti was mostly woman, in sexual matters she was in many ways more like a man. All the same, she relished the taste of Vikram's penis which was pretty much of the same dimensions as her own. This was no wonder, of course, as it had been the original from which her genitals had been modelled. At least she now had a very good idea of what her penis tasted like.

Although Vashti had never had sex before, she learnt a great deal from watching her companions at play and was now able to try out the sexual techniques she'd observed. Vashti didn't need much practice to master sexual behaviour any more than she needed to hear many spoken words to gain fluency in Tamil and, to a lesser extent, English.

Vashti had never suspected that there was so much to enjoy in sexual activity. There was the close intimacy of flesh against flesh, fluid against fluid, and the rich scent of commingled bodies. There was also the slight pain associated with her aching, straining penis, swollen to the very limits that its flesh could contain—not to mention the pressure within her anus from Vikram's thrusts—which, with a little body modification she was able to contain with rather more comfort than most humans could. And then that final release which Vashti delayed for as long as she could when the pressure of so much stored semen in her testicles finally squirted through the engorged mass of her proudly erect cock and erupted in a thick viscous splatter on the face, breasts, vagina and anus of the lovers whose bodies merged into one perspiring, gasping, screeching mass.

Vashti lay on her back. She was nowhere near as fatigued as her lovers who lacked her capacity for endurance or recovery and were more emotionally than physically drained. It was a shame that there was no way she could impart her discovery of the pleasures of carnal congress to her universe of origin. What value would sex have in a world where there were no multicellular biological organisms and where there was no sense of individuality?

Vashti was far more alone, even amongst her new friends and lovers, than anyone could imagine. Even her memories of home were fragmentary, although they had gradually repaired themselves to the extent that she at least knew why the huge effort and risk of interdimensional transport had been undertaken. The only reason she had materialised on the surface of planet Earth was because what little data that could be interpreted from this distant universe suggested that the best destination would be the surface of what would have been Vashti's home world had it not been transformed by her ancestors into a massive aggregation of their own selves.

A wide-ranging debate took place in her world as to how best an emissary of Vashti's universe should manifest itself to deal with the unquantifiable and mysterious entity that was known in this continuum as the Anomaly. It was fortunate that it had been decided not to send emissaries as ruthlessly prone to self-replication as Vashti's earliest antecedents. Such a force mightn't be guaranteed to vanquish a potential threat from the Anomaly, but it would most certainly reduce the Solar System to the same amorphous state as Vashti's home solar system and all the neighbouring ones before the nanobot community acquired the self-awareness and presence of mind to halt the process. The arithmetic was unarguable. It would take less than an hour to reduce the Earth to a floating mass of microscopic self-replicating machines and only the distance of space gave pause until the floating nanobots would do the same to every last atom of baryonic matter surrounding the sun.

Vashti believed that such a force for destruction should only be kept in reserve if it ever became necessary to disintegrate the Anomaly and protect the near infinity of neighbouring spacetime continuums. Although it had been decided that it was better to understand the Anomaly than merely to destroy it, the survival of countless equally deserving universes surely took precedence over the fate of just one. If it did become necessary to unleash a force that would ultimately reduce not just the Anomaly but eventually every quark and lepton in the Solar System to a mass of tiny self-replicating machines, this was a price that Vashti would be willing to pay.

But, as she surveyed the lovers whose limbs intermingled with hers on the cool sheets of their shared bed, Vashti sincerely hoped this would never become necessary.

There remained, after all, a possibility that the Anomaly was no risk at all. Even her culture didn't know everything and an unknown entity—however fast it was expanding—need not necessarily be a force of destruction. But as Vashti and every sentient unit in her galaxy were aware, there was a precedent for wilful destruction that had already destroyed at least one advanced civilisation.

Vashti's companions, and now lovers, had become weary of their sojourn in the Sahara Desert. Grand and austere it might be, but it was also extremely boring. Furthermore, they'd been on vacation on Earth for very nearly two years and their visas would soon expire. There were strict restrictions on the length of time a visitor could stay and an even stricter quota of how many tourists could reside on the planet at any one time. Most of the Earth's population were tourists and there was a long queue of people waiting on the Moon for their turn to visit. Vikram and his wife had waited with their friends for nearly three months before they were granted permission.

By now, the four tourists were yearning to return home. Few Earthlings and fellow tourists had any understanding of Sadhu culture, customs or sexual habits. The requirement to wear clothes in public had lost almost all its quaintness and novelty. Dorothy in particular yearned to return to her natural state of habitual nudity.

Wearing clothes was as novel to Vashti as it was unusual to her friends. She could understand why it might be necessary to protect a human against the Earth's inclement climate, which was always too hot or too cold, too wet or too windy, but the concept of modesty was truly alien. Since every human knew by self-reference exactly what all other humans looked like under their clothes it seemed bizarre that they should cover so much of their flesh and in particular those parts which most unambiguously determined gender. On the other hand, now that she was aware by how much she erred when she took on a hybrid of male and female characteristics, this custom did have the benefit that she could hide her mistake from sight.

"What are we going to do with you, Vashti?" wondered Sandhya as the five of them strolled through the tourist bazaar of Timbuktu where Tuareg stall-keepers were selling fossil ammonites and souvenir holograms. "You can't come with us to Sadhu. It's just not possible. And you don't have any credit to live on. Without a visa or passport you won't be able to get paid employment, not that there are many such opportunities on Earth."

Vashti had also wondered about this. She knew that with no official records either on Earth or Mars, it wouldn't be easy to persuade officialdom that she had a stake on either planet. But she was also aware that Earth's strict residence policy meant that a passage from the planet might well be granted to her as a means of getting rid of her.

"I'll surrender myself to the authorities," she told Sandhya. "I'm sure they'll be sympathetic."

"You have much more faith in human nature than I have," snorted Vikram who in the three years since he'd left the sheltered and tolerant world of the Sadhu colony had gained the depth of cynicism known only to disillusioned romantics.

Vashti's research on the interplanetary web had persuaded her that self-interest was human nature's most universal characteristic and that this could also be used to her advantage. The warring Martian nations were losing lives faster than they could be replenished and the recent neutron bomb explosion that had reduced by several hundred thousand the population of the domed cities of the Mariner Valley would mean that fewer questions than normal would be asked of someone claiming citizenship however little documentation there was to support Vashti's case.

There was still much left to do in Timbuktu. The last few days she spent with her friends were passionate and frantic. Sandhya was particularly sad to leave Vashti behind when they boarded a dirigible that would transport her companions and her to the spaceport in the fabulously affluent city of Bamako. It was all she could do to keep her hand off Vashti's erect penis as the two of them embraced passionately while Sandhya's husband looked on indulgently.

"You

will

keep in touch, won't you?" she asked. "We can always fuck in cyberspace."

"I don't think the time delay will make that particularly easy," Vikram commented.

"We'll just have to be patient," said Sandhya with a broad smile.

"It'll add new meaning to the concept of simultaneous orgasm," Rao joked.

As the hydrogen craft slowly lifted up into the sky and carried her friends away, Vashti was aware of a peculiar set of emotions that were as unsettling as they were new. Human emotion was governed more by insecurity than desire and much more so than by moral introspection. It was more troubling to lose something Vashti had become accustomed to, especially when it was associated with carnal pleasure, than it was to confront the human world without the shield of her companions.