Free Destroyer of Worlds by Larry Niven Page B

boots.
    Sigmund said, “Not a pretty sight, but important.” Perhaps the most important thing about the Gw’oth, if correct. “Make sure I understand this activity.”
    Kirsten ran a hand, the fingers splayed, through her hair. “Sure, Sigmund.”
    â€œAs best I can count, that’s a set of eight. Where I can see what’s happening, each Gw’o has linked to three others. Just as one end of each tube links into the central mass, at the other end, the nervous system remains accessible. What you decided on the
Explorer
mission is that Gw’oth link to form group minds. Biological computers.”
    â€œAn octuple like this . . .” She hesitated, not understanding his grin. She knew nothing of octopi.
    Penny, bless her, had come to terms with Sigmund’s apparent non sequiturs. Finagle, he missed her. “Go on,” he urged.
    â€œRight. We’ve seen groups of four and eight, and very rarely a group of sixteen. An octuple connected like this is suited to working 3-D simulations.” Kirsten leaned against an end of the table, putting her back to the imagery. “The big mystery about these guys was how they developed tech so quickly. But these . . . link ups. . . tell us.
    â€œI hacked Gw’oth netcams and databases to correlate these . . . episodes . . . with data growth rates in their archives. The correlation wasn’t perfect, but I wouldn’t expect it to be. Not all calculations produce data at the same rate. So a line of Gw’oth generates one kind of data, solving a particular class of physical problems. 2-D arrays of Gw’oth modeled another kind of problem. You’re looking at a 3-D array. They even do 4-D, but like sixteen-tuples that seemed to be rare.
    â€œWeird but true, these guys link into living computers. That makes the apparent speed of their technological spurt misleading. They had a lot of simulation to do before they ever moved above the ice to build a technological society.”
    Sigmund had left New Terra more or less this informed, only he had never really dwelt on it. It was hard to make time to contemplate the Gw’oth, a good ten light-years distant, when with a half-decent pair of binocs he could see the Fleet in the night sky.
    Only here, now, the Gw’oth weren’t distant.
    â€œKirsten, bear with me.” It took Sigmund a while to put his misgivings into a coherent question. “How far back do their archives go?”
    She shrugged. “The digital ones I hacked went back thirty years. Until then they lacked the technology to build such things.”
    â€œBut the Gw’oth have other archives, much older? Pre-tech archives?” He tried to imagine how such records would be kept. Scratched into soft stone with hard stone, perhaps.
    â€œThey must, Sigmund. Unless the older records are digitized, we have no way to know.”
    And unless Kirsten gets back into the archives. Between her last visit and this one, the Gw’oth had deployed network security. Sigmund respected the robustness of the aliens’ encryption and authentication methods, even as he cursed them for making his job more difficult.
    Explorer
had intercepted broadcasts in several languages, suggesting different societies, maybe distinct nations, among the Gw’oth. Rivalries could have spurred the new security measures. Or Kirsten might have brought this upon herself by leaving native-language messages with the radio beacon. It wouldn’t take geniuses—though the Gw’oth were—to infer alien visitors had tapped their comm.
    Most of what Kirsten had said made sense, but
must
? Her conclusion was too firm for the source data. He said, “What if the Gw’oth don’t have deep archives?”
    â€œThen they thought everything through quickly. But that can’t be.” She hesitated. “Can it?”
    Sigmund didn’t want to think so, either. Unpleasant