Harvey suddenly realized that the trajectory of the projectiles would lead directly back to his body. “Sorry,” he said. “Stupid of me.”
“Throw it up,” Sagan said. “Way up.” Harvey shrugged and launched the thing high into the air, in an arc that took the thing away from the three of them. The creature writhed in midair. The gun tracked the creature as far up as it could, roughly fifty degrees up. It rotated and shot the thing apart as soon as it came back into its range, shredding it with a spray of thin needles that expanded on contact with the poor creature’s flesh. In less than a second there was nothing left of the thing but mist and a few chunks falling to the ground.
“Very nice,” Harvey said. “Now we know the guns really work. And I’m still hungry.”
“That’s very interesting,” Sagan said.
“That I’m hungry?” Harvey said.
“No, Harvey,” Sagan said, irritated. “I don’t actually give a damn about your stomach right now. What’s interesting is that the guns can only target up to a certain angle. They’re ground suppression.”
“So?” Harvey said. “We’re on the ground.”
“Trees,” Seaborg said, suddenly. “Son of a bitch.”
“What are you thinking, Seaborg?” Sagan asked.
“In training, Dirac and I won a war game by sneaking up on the opposing side in the trees,” he said. “They were expecting us to attack from the ground. They never bothered looking up until we got right up on them. Then I almost fell out of the tree and nearly got myself killed. But the idea worked.”
The three of them turned to look at the trees inside their perimeter. They weren’t real trees, but the Aristian equivalent: large spindly plants that reached meters high into the sky.
“Tell me we’re all having the same bugshit crazy thought,” Harvey said. “I’d hate to think it was just me.”
“Come on,” Sagan said. “Let’s see what we can do with this.”
“That’s insane,” Jared said. “The Obin wouldn’t start a war just because you asked them to.”
“Really?” Boutin said. A sneer crept onto his face. “And you know this from your vast, personal knowledge of the Obin? Your years of study on the matter? You wrote your doctoral thesis on the Obin?”
“No species would go to war just because you asked them to,” Jared said. “The Obin don’t do anything for anyone else.”
“And they’re not now,” Boutin said. “The war is a means to an end—they want what I can offer them.”
“And what is that?” Jared asked.
“I can give them souls,” Boutin said.
“I don’t understand,” Jared said.
“It’s because you don’t know the Obin,” Boutin said. “The Obin are a created race—the Consu made them just to see what would happen. But despite rumors to the contrary, the Consu aren’t perfect. They make mistakes. And they made a huge mistake when they made the Obin. They gave the Obin intelligence, but what they couldn’t do—what they didn’t have the capability of doing—was to give the Obin consciousness.”
“The Obin are conscious,” Jared said. “They have a society. They communicate. They remember. They think.”
“So what?” Boutin said. “Termites have societies. Every species communicates. You don’t have to be intelligent to remember—you have a computer in your head that remembers everything you ever do, and it’s fundamentally no more intelligent than a rock. And as for thinking, what about thinking requires you to observe yourself doing it? Not a goddamned thing. You can create an entire starfaring race that has no more self-introspection than a protozoan, and the Obin are the living proof of that. The Obin are aware collectively that they exist. But not one of them individually has anything that you would recognize as a personality. No ego. No ‘I.’”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Jared said.
“Why not?” Boutin said. “What are the trappings of self-awareness? And do the Obin have it? The Obin have no art, Dirac. They have no music or literature or visual arts. They comprehend the concept of art intellectually but they have no way to appreciate it. The only time they communicate is to tell each other factual things: where they’re going, or what’s over that hill or how many people they need to kill. They can’t lie. They have no moral inhibition against it—they don’t actually have any real moral inhibitions against anything—but they can no more formulate a lie than you or I could levitate an object with our mind power. Our brains aren’t wired that way; their brains aren’t wired that way. Everybody lies. Everybody who is conscious, who has a self-image to maintain. But they don’t. They’re perfect.”