When she arrived, e-Lisyss and his assistant Haykuz were seated in chairs in front of Acho’s desk. The light glittered on their hairless, green-tinted, iridescent skin and she was again reminded of some sort of large, terrestrial lizard. Mikko wondered if their distant, primitive ancestors had had feathers, like dinosaurs. She remembered the nicknames Captain Bitka had given e-Lisyss and Haykuz that first day—Little Sis and Haiku—and she suppressed a smile. Acho stood when Mikko entered.
“XO, thank you for joining us.”
Neither of the Varoki stood, of course.
“What can I do to help?” She sat in the third chair in the office and Acho sat as well, but the logistics officer’s rigidly erect posture was a blueprint of tension.
“The envoy e-Lisyss has been sharing with me his concerns concerning rations.” Acho frowned, probably realizing the awkward phrasing betrayed her nervousness.
“I’m afraid a military transport doesn’t have the quality or variety of food the envoy is probably accustomed to,” Mikko said. “I wonder if there’s a Varoki on board who has some experience in cooking and who might help the galley staff with meal preparation.”
Acho shook her head. “No, it’s not about the quality of the food. It has to do with quantity.”
“We have more than enough protein in stock for the small number of Varoki on board,” Mikko said. “If portion size—”
“No, Lieutenant Running-Deer,” the Varoki assistant Haykuz said, “the concern is not portion size for us. In fact, it is clear that we will still be alive after the entire Human crew has starved to death, which it will do in a little over four months by our calculation.”
“Lieutenant Acho has come up with some expedients to stretch that out a bit,” Mikko said. “But yes, that is our principle concern as well.”
“The Envoy’s mission for the Cottohazz is of the highest importance,” Haykuz explained. “It is essential that he survive to return, and he cannot do so without the Human crew of this starship remaining alive and functional.”
Mikko felt a shock of realization and then a rising throb of anger, but she pushed it back down. No. The son of a bitch couldn’t possibly mean that. He couldn’t be that big a son of a bitch, could he?
“As a member of that crew, I appreciate the value he places on us,” Mikko said and stood up. “Now, if that is all, I’ll—”
“No, it is not all,” Haykuz said and Mikko noticed for the first time his own flushed face, his own ears drooping and folded back, and the fact that he now looked down at the deck, refusing eye contact. Haykuz was an idiot and a toad, but at least he had decency enough to be ashamed of what he said next.
“There are many useless mouths among the Human passengers, who contribute nothing to our chances of survival. Hard decisions are required.”
So, he really was that big a son of a bitch. Humans were just servants and in a pinch, it made sense to only keep the really useful ones alive? Fuck you and the horse you rode in on! Mikko thought. But she was XO. It was her job to solve problems, not make them worse. She tried to make her mind work coldly and logically, tried to formulate a response which would end this right here and keep anyone outside this room from knowing what had been said. Except the captain, of course. She would have to tell him. So what was it she wanted to be able to tell him she had said to these two?
“I will explain this to you and save you the humiliation of having the captain say it later. We are serving officers in the Navy of the United States of North America, and we are bound by its regulations, as well as by the laws of our nation, the joint covenants of the Cottohazz, and common decency. All of those make us responsible for the survival and wellbeing of every person in this ship, regardless of station or situation. They do not empower the captain to execute passengers on the off chance we might need some of their food later.
“Lieutenant Acho, you will not to repeat this conversation to anyone else on the ship.”
“Aye aye, Ma’am.”
“As for you, Mister Haykuz, I will never make a record of this conversation and so officially it will never have taken place. But if you or the envoy make this proposal directly to the captain I assure you it will become part of the official record of this voyage. For your own good I recommend you do not do that under any circumstances. Do you understand me?”
Still looking down, Haykuz did not move. e-Lisyss stared at a place on Acho’s office wall and then grunted a single syllable. Haykuz relaxed slightly.
“It is understood, Lieutenant Running-Deer.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ten days later, aboard USS Cam Ranh Bay
8 March 2134 (twenty days after Incident Seventeen,
836 light-years from Destination)
Lieutenant Deandra Bohannon, communications officer, tightened the straps of her acceleration chair and closed her eyes, waiting for the jump. How many was this? Nineteen or twenty, she’d lost count. Too many.
She’d read about long-term effects of multiple jumps—effects on things like cognition. All the molecules of your body ended up someplace else exactly the same as when they started, but sometimes there was a stray atom or two of hydrogen in the space where you came out. That’s why your body temperature went up a little. But what if it was in your brain, what did that do? No one knew, but whatever it did, the more jumps the more damage.
Most people didn’t do twenty jumps in a three-year Navy hitch. They were doing almost thirty in one month. What would that do? What would they be like?
“Jump in five, four, three, two . . . ”
She wanted to scream but she didn’t. Officers don’t scream.
And then it was over and she felt dizzy from the elevation in temperature, felt herself suddenly soaked in sweat, her ears filled with a buzzing hum. She panted for air and turned up her suit’s cooling system.
“You okay, COMM?” Captain Bitka asked from the command chair beside her.
She gasped and nodded. “Hot flash, sir. I’m fine.” She smiled weakly at her own joke.
“Scopes are clear, Captain,” she heard the TAC boss Homer Alexander report. “No nearby objects, no energy sources, nothing identifiable as a tactical threat.”
“COMM?” The captain asked her.
Deandra sat there, trying to concentrate, but all she could hear was that same buzzing hum, rising and falling in intensity and pitch. She shook her head to clear it and then saw the rise and fall in pitch mirrored on the visual readouts of her workstation if front of her.
“Oh my God! I’ve got comms! I can’t make it out, sir, it’s faint, but it’s definitely electromagnetic in the radio spectrum. This isn’t background noise. Someone’s talking!”
“Descartes was full of shit!” Lieutenant Ma shouted as Sam and the XO entered the briefing room.
“Atten-HUT!” Running-Deer barked and the two officers present—the Ops boss Lieutenant Brook and Lieutenant Ma from Engineering—came to their feet: Sam had apparently arrived in the middle of an argument, or maybe just a rant. Since it was Ma’s rant, the room momentarily fell into an embarrassed silence. Sam sat down at the conference table and watched the three other officers follow his example.
Five of the six civilians he had chosen as his advisory board were present as well, but they did not stand, nor did he expect them to. The sixth civilian, the Buran linguist, was working with Bohannon on the incoming radio signals. These five—what an odd group, but it was the best he could assemble.
He’d surprised some of his officers when he tagged Choice, the American musician, to sit in with the group. Most of them hadn’t known that before Choice had become a professional musician she had earned an advanced degree in cybernetics. Running-Deer had drawn his attention to that in the VIP profile. Whatever civilization they encountered, there was a good chance the technology would be radically different. He wanted someone who knew the logic and limitations of data analysis. Choice had also turned out to be perceptive and articulate. Once he got used to her unconventional appearance,
he couldn’t help but notice she was strikingly attractive as well. He supposed it was harder to make it in music without that.
He’d hesitated before adding Boniface, the Nigerian journalist. Boniface had been embedded with the Marine cohort on K’tok so Sam had asked A. J. Merderet, the Marine commander, for her impression.
“He’s okay, him,” she’d said. “Didn’t pretend he wasn’t scared shitless but didn’t let his fear stop him from doing his job, either. He did what he was told, stayed out of the line of fire, never did anything stupid enough to get one of my Marines shot at. And another thing, he wasn’t trying to make sense of it or come away with some profound insight into war, you know? Just wanted to witness and report it. I got no complaints.”
Someone used to observing and analyzing facts, and who at least tried to keep his own lens from distorting what he saw. That was good enough for Sam.
Sam had formed a rough picture of the others but continued to find Dr. Manaia Johnstone, the New Zealand anthropologist, a bit of a mystery. He wanted someone with an insight into dramatically different cultures. So far, he had said almost nothing in any of their meetings. His heavily tattooed face—even more inked than Ms. Choice—gave him a ferocious appearance, but then that was the point of Maori tattoos, wasn’t it? All Sam really knew about him, aside from his curriculum vitae, was that he was apparently a very good listener.
e-Lisyss, the Varoki diplomat, was politically mandatory, being the senior Cottohazz official on the ship, and Sam figured they might need a diplomat later. And of course, that meant his assistant and translator had to be there as well. One saving grace was that ever since e-Lisyss had recommended summary execution of “useless mouths,” the two Varoki had mostly kept their mouths shut in these meetings.
Finally, Dr. Däng, the Indonesian xenobiologist, was an obvious pick. If they were going to encounter alien life, better have someone handy who had spent her entire adult life studying it, and had managed to pick up a Nobel prize along the way. Sam had quickly figured out Däng didn’t think much of him. He didn’t think she had figured out how little that mattered to him.
As Sam looked at them he noticed the variety of civilian clothing had gradually given way to standard issue blue enlisted personnel shipsuits. In the event of a hull puncture, having about ninety percent of a vac suit already on made a lot of sense. Ms. Choice naturally wore a custom black pressure suit, form following.
“I see you were in the middle of a spirited discussion,” Sam said. “I imagine it’s prompted by the discovery that we can now detect radio broadcasts from the star system we’ve dubbed Destination. Pretty amazing news, isn’t it? We suspected that there was intelligent life at Destination, and hoped for it. I haven’t wanted to mention it before, but I think we all understand that we need there to be intelligent life there in order to get back home. We need to contact the beings who reprogrammed our jump drive so we can persuade them to program it back.
“We are eight hundred and thirty-six light-years out from Destination. That means the radio transmissions we are monitoring were made eight hundred thirty-six years ago. We can’t translate them yet but Lieutenant Bohannon and Councilor Abanna Zhaquaan are working on the language. The important thing is that yesterday, when we jumped to nine hundred forty-eight light-years from Destination, there were no radio emissions. Something very important happened there between eight hundred fifty and nine hundred fifty years ago.
“This tells us something else. There was always the possibility that some unrecorded early Varoki survey mission had reached and colonized this star system and then sent a probe back to Cottohazz space. We now know that cannot be the explanation. These broadcasts we are monitoring from Destination predate the Varoki invention of the jump drive by over five hundred years.
“I’m changing our standard procedure. From now on we’ll be jumping every other day instead of every day. That will give us time to deploy the big survey sensor array after each jump and spend about thirty-six hours collecting data. The important thing for now is we know there’s intelligent life at Destination—or at least there was eight hundred years ago.
“So with that in mind, please carry on, Mister Ma.”
Ma shifted in his chair.
“Well sir, I was just explaining to Ms. Choice why I think her theory of intelligent life in the galaxy is . . . flawed.”
Sam looked at the musician and smiled. “You have a theory of intelligent life in the galaxy, Ms. Choice? I’d love to hear it.”
Choice threw a wary glance at Ma and then cleared her throat.
“Well, it’s like this. You look at what we know about life in the six main ecosystems, and the top carnivores never last very long—maybe a few million years if they’re lucky.”
“Dinosaurs,” Ma said in a mocking, singsong voice.
Irritation flashed across Choice’s face.
“Yes, dinosaurs lasted for over a hundred million years on Earth, but no one dinosaur species did so as top carnivore. Individual species don’t last that long, but the galaxy’s been around for billions of years. Think how many intelligent species may have evolved and died off already. So, when a species dies, what does it leave behind? If it’s a tool-using culture it leaves its tools. Isn’t that right Dr. Johnstone?”
“Absolutely,” the Maori anthropologist said.
“Tools?” Sam said. “I’m afraid I don’t see the connection.”
An impatient frown darkened Choice’s face.
“A very advanced technological society will inevitably develop machine intelligence. A species may become extinct, but their machines will be more robust. The odds are overwhelming that the most common form of surviving intelligent life in the galaxy consists of self-aware machines left behind after the extinction of their creators.”
Lieutenant Ma snorted and Sam found himself smiling. Watching these two glare at each other and paw the deck was at least a momentary distraction from the looming threat facing them. And who knew? It might actually end up being relevant.
“I take it you disagree, Mister Ma,” Sam said. “Does that have anything to do with your negative opinion of Descartes?”
“Yes, sir. ‘I think therefore I am,’ Descartes said. But if he’d actually thought a little harder about it, he’d have realized that insects think, in a primitive sort of way. At least they calculate. What they don’t do is feel.”
“Of course they feel,” Choice said.
“I don’t mean they have no nervous system,” Ma answered. “I mean they have no emotional response to sensations. If Descartes had had the good sense to say, ‘I feel, therefore I am; I mourn, therefore I am; I desire, therefore I am,’ well, then he’d have been onto something. And all these sad generations of cybernetic engineers wouldn’t have wasted the best years of their lives chasing this false dream of a self-aware machine. Ms. Choice is lucky to have gone into something really useful, like music. Otherwise she’d have spent her life saying, ‘If only we link more processors together, and add more memory, then it will wake up.’”
“Well, it will!” Choice said.
Ma shook his head.
“Come on! You really think something capable of doing nothing except adding one and zero, over and over again, can somehow become a sentient self-aware being by doing that faster, and remembering more of its sums? That’s absurd!”
“Absurd?” she shot back, rising from her chair. “I stay in touch with people in my field. They’re close to having it, really close,” she said, pointing at him repeatedly for emphasis, as if she were punching his chest with her finger.
“How close?” Ma asked. “Ten years? Maybe as long as thirty?”
Choice’s eyes opened a bit in surprise. “Yes, about that. I mean, it’s hard to be precise—”
“Right,” Ma said and turned to face Sam. “Ask any cybernetic engineer how close we are to true artificial intelligence—a self-aware, conscious machine—and they’ll tell you either ten years or thirty years, depending on whether they’
re optimists or pessimists.”
“Yes, there’s a broad consensus,” Choice said. “You think that’s an argument against it being true?”
“No, but here’s the thing: that’s exactly the answer you would have gotten from any cybernetics specialist you asked, no matter when you asked the question, at any time in the last one hundred and fifty years.
“Think about that! We were ten to thirty years away from it in 1980! Take all of them at their word and it means we are not one year closer to having such a thing now than we were way back then.” He turned and looked at Choice, now jabbing with his own finger to emphasize his argument. “And we never will be, because you guys are looking for consciousness in all the wrong places.”
“We’re modeling brains,” Choice shot back, “neuro-pathways, breaking down how the brain calculates. Where should we be looking? In a church?”
Ma shook his head. “I mean you’re looking at the wrong things in the brain. It’s like the old saying: if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Calculation is all you can measure with precision, so that’s all you think matters, but you’re wrong.”
“What else are you talking about?” she demanded, “Magic? Invisible mental waves? Extra-dimensional souls? What?”
“Well, think about this. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, Dr. Däng, but the least advanced terrestrial animal which experiences pleasure during the act of sex is a frog. Isn’t that so?”
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