The Lion in Paradise

by Brindle, Nathan C.

  "At any rate, the captain was aware of the change in the law, so he and his first and second officers promptly held a public trial in the liner's ballroom of all of the pirates – about twenty of them had survived – found them guilty, and spaced them. All according to the book. They even had defense lawyers – there were two or three on board who volunteered to represent them pro bono, just to ensure all the I's were dotted and the T's were crossed. And of course, as soon as the ship made port back at Earth and the news got out, a family sued on behalf of their dead pirate scum son for deprivation of civil rights, deprivation of due process, et cetera, ad nauseum.

  "Well, the news had been paraded in the press, of course, and public sentiment was pretty high that the right thing had been done, despite the press bleating about how awful it was. You know how they are – they do interviews with parents and siblings of the deceased, who all mouth platitudes like, 'he wouldn't hurt a fly, God-fearing man, attended church every Sunday, bottom line, dindoo nuffin'.'" Buford snorted at the very idea, and the others grinned. "So," he continued, "the courts found against plaintiffs all the way to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court tore plaintiff's attorneys a new asshole during argument. And it came back 9-0 to uphold. They gave the opinion to Barrett, who wrote a very workmanlike treatise, dripping with contempt for anyone who would pirate a ship in space. Literally called them inhuman and undeserving of any human compassion whatsoever. The case is Friends of Thomas A. Nilsson, deceased, v. Star Interstellar Cruise Lines, if you want to look it up," he added.

  "The law is the law, and pirates have never come off well against it when powerful seafaring, and I guess now starfaring, nations have become involved," noted Wolff. "Ask me how we treated the Somali pirates back in the day."

  "And still do," affirmed Buford. "The U.S. Navy still has a job to do in that part of the world, and they do it rather enthusiastically."

  "You'd think the dumb buggers would give up, already."

  "Oh, they will, one day. When we've exterminated them all."

  "But the bottom line," persisted Ariela, "is we're still just reacting."

  Buford looked grim, but admitted it.

  "You’ve given me an idea, though," he said, "and I think we have sufficient wiggle room under the law as written to offer a plea to a lower charge if they'll give up decent information. The only problem is, if we do that, it's unlikely they will get the kind of punishment they deserve – unless we choose to let them be tried by the civil courts on 'high seas' piracy charges instead of 'outer space' piracy charges, and that's where the life imprisonment thing comes in, as I've mentioned." He smiled. "Of course, if they renege, or intentionally give us information that leads us on a wild goose chase, we can always say, 'deal's off,' transport them to a ship, try them on the original charges, and give them a free spacewalk sans pressure suit."

  "We should try that," agreed Wolff. "I doubt it will work, but it's another tool in the toolbox."

  "I'll call Senator West today to give us some cover," promised Buford. "He's the chairman of the Space Law subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services committee. He'll get it looked at and will probably ram it through the Senate, if he thinks we need a legal change, and then hand it off to his buddies in the House. And I'm pretty sure the President will sign it, if it comes to that."

  "Meantime," said Wolff, "we'll keep plugging away at what we've got in SFMID, and hope we don't have another big piracy anytime soon."

  "Can't ask for more than that," said Ariela, relieved.

  Chapter 4

  Revelations, Revisions, and Recon

  "All right, Dr. Smith," said Ariela. "What do you think now?"

  They were sitting in Tumtum, which in turn had flown out to the place they were now calling "First Water" on the maps, after rotating back to al-Saḥra' from Earth. The academic team were still out there, too, doing soundings, taking cores, and doing other xenogeological work in preparation for the big report they were preparing for the Department of the Interior.

  Because of the sensitivity of the compartment, and because there wasn't a real SCIF within a hundred light years of the planet, Ariela had chosen to use Tumtum that way. It made sense; once you closed up both airlock hatches and disconnected anything that poked through the hull like antennas and suchlike (which could be done easily from the control panel; the ship had been designed with that function in mind), the hullmetal and aliglass that made up the exterior of the pinnace pretty much turned it into a Faraday cage. And then they'd shanghaied, er, invited Dr. Smith over to the ship for lunch, as Dr. Bisset looked on with a disapproving glare.

  "It's a lot to take in all at once," said Fox. "We get that."

  Delaney was also comfortably situated in one of the comfortable seats, to make the fourth for bridge, as it were, since the compartment required three cleared people present to open it to someone else. "Personally, I was shocked when I heard about the Darkness," she added. "The Mesh, eh, I already knew about that from my experience in the field on a mission before I was read in. Who knew it had a 'but wait, there's more,' aspect to it. And a 'you can't tell your husband about this' aspect, too." She frowned. "And he still doesn't know."

  "Good," replied Ariela, tartly, giving Delaney a look. "We’re not here to tell personal stories, though there are reasons I think we should read Harb in, and you know what they are."

  Delaney shrugged.

  "It is somewhat nerve-wracking," admitted Smith. "I didn't expect learning about how to see and manipulate the structure of the universe was going to come with a side order of 'end of the world as we know it.'" He grinned, lopsidedly.

  "None of us did," confirmed Fox.

  "The good thing is," said Delaney, "it's still thousands of years off from being a problem for us. The bad thing is, we have to live with the foreknowledge."

  "And you said something about a grand simulation, that we were part of until we met the Shizzle. And the people who maintain it." Smith shook his head. "I'd heard wild stories and rumors about that sort of thing, but it died down years ago and went back to being just a science-fictional MacGuffin."

  "Yes," nodded Ariela, "because we – well, SFMID in concert with DIA and the reconstituted CIA – put on a massive, world-wide disinformation campaign to stop the rumors in their tracks. Because they were true, and potentially destabilizing. I thought it a terrible idea at first, but my father insisted it had to be done."

  Smith smiled. "It was done deftly, if so," he remarked, "because it went from something that sounded entirely plausible, that people claimed to have evidence of, to something you mentioned only if you wanted to get a laugh, within only a few months."

  "A few too many people got wind of the reality during a Space Force mission to my home timeline," explained Ariela. "Even though they were Space Force and Space Force Marines, with an ingrained concept of operational security, tongues do have a tendency to wag. We decided knowledge of the existence of different timelines was safe enough – after all, it had been a science fiction trope for decades – while suppressing as much as we could the reality that we were all part of the Great Simulation." She shrugged. "Several years later, in this timeline at least, it didn't make any difference anymore, because we were brought into the True Universe, along with the Shizzle, to prepare for the coming of the Darkness. But we still keep that particular bit of knowledge compartmented. It's not yet time to let humans and Shizzle know they were only characters in a simulation for their entire history, up till 2047. Doesn't really matter if there was free will or not, it's the whole idea of having been bits and bytes in an alien computer program as opposed to being 'real' flesh and blood."

  "I shall endeavor to keep my mouth firmly shut," chuckled the academic.

  "Do, Doctor. Do," said Ariela, solemnly. "Because otherwise, and as I began this conference warning you, unlawful disclosure of the information in this compartment is a violation of 18 USC Sections 793 and 798, and we'd unfortunately have to arrest you and put you in solitary confinement."


  "I see. Well, I'm glad you take it that seriously, if indeed, it is that serious."

  "It is."

  "I think I should make a suggestion, however."

  Ariela cocked her head, quizzically. "Yes?"

  Smith sighed, and relaxed into his seat. "Colonel, going forward, I think you need to split this compartment up. A fellow like me doesn’t need to know the grand overarching reason for the importance of training up Mesh manipulators, particularly since you . . . well, the Guardians and you . . . are convinced the urgent need for Mesh-savvy geometricists is more than a few millennia off. The 'coolness' factor of the whole thing is badly thrown off by the subsequent, 'and we'll have to use this as a weapon against this implacable race of inimical beings who will be here in several thousand years' thing." He grinned, wanly. "I think having a corps of people who are able to see and adjust the Mesh to fix problems like we have here on al-Saḥra' is more than sufficient to pull folks in, without giving them material for all their future nightmares. And as this corps gets larger and larger, it will be harder and harder to keep that information from getting out to the general public."

  Delaney laughed. "He's got a point," she said, nodding in agreement. "PTSD is bad enough without this tacked on to it."

  "In addition," continued Smith, "I think you need to edit the video down to remove the parts where Beam talks about being an avatar of the computer running the Great Simulation. You say you believe knowledge of having been nothing but code in a computer simulation until 2047 would be a great destabilizer, and I tend to agree. Without careful consideration regarding that information's eventual release, you risk destroying the underpinnings of just about every religion on Earth. When I think about the trouble we had with the people we deported to this planet," and he shuddered a bit, "I really don't want to see Earth go through that sort of upheaval again, but on a global basis this time."

  "Another good point," acknowledged Ariela. "I suspect the only people who would be more or less immune to the issue are Tibetan Buddhists. Maybe others, but certainly it does great damage to the creation mythos in Western religions." She smiled briefly. "The Shizzle have a different orientation; their religion itself is fairly cut-and-dried, it's the presentation of certain sacraments of their religion that causes most of the ruckus among them. Creation to them is along the lines of, 'All of a sudden, there the world was. Let's have some whisky.' The prime mover in that creation isn't seen as a Jehovah-like being, but as merely a sort of super-Shizzle who wanted to create a world of beings like himself."

  "I see. Could that super-Shizzle actually represent the Guardians, themselves?"

  "Could be; they may well have had a better grasp of who their Programmer was than humans did, but we’re going to have to leave the metaphysics for another day, Doctor."

  Smith chuckled. "Pity, that. My undergraduate minor was in Philosophy and Metaphysics. I'd really like to have a go at that, some time."

  "Hmm. That being said, I will take your suggestion under advisement, and will bring it to my father and the other people involved. This meeting is adjourned. Tab, eject data chip, sweep memory, close the compartment."

  The secure holotab on the little table ejected Ariela's data chip and beeped twice.

  "The compartment is closed, this temporary SCIF is now insecure," said Ariela, as she rose to replace the data chip in Tumtum's safe. "There's beer in the fridge."

  "I should have asked before, but is your Geometricists Corps something that can be discussed outside the compartment?" asked Smith.

  "It depends," replied Ariela, cautiously. "What do you want to discuss?"

  "Only how one is expected to receive the instruction required."

  Delaney laughed. "My Grumpaw would just grin and hand you a petition for his Masonic lodge at this point."

  Smith looked intrigued. "Truly? That seems odd. On the one hand, it is a secret society, but on the other hand, what has it to do with the current topic?"

  "Do you know anything about the Freemasons?" asked Fox.

  "Not too much," shrugged Smith. "They're all but gone from the public square; their lodges still exist, of course, but they are nothing like what they were in the mid-20th Century."

  "Indeed," nodded Fox, "that was what's known as the Golden Age of Fraternalism. But it's also beside the point. The Freemasons teach what amounts to a course in sacred geometry, on the way from the Entered Apprentice degree, through the Fellow-Craft degree, and culminating in the Master Mason degree. There are follow-on degrees, but not in what's known as the Blue Lodge, or the Craft Lodge. And none of the follow-on degrees claim to be higher than the Master Mason degree, but merely go further in depth to increase the brother's Masonic knowledge."

  "Hmm. I have heard of a thirty-second degree, and actually even a thirty-third."

  "Yep," said Fox, "and every Thirty-Second and Thirty-Third degree Scottish Rite Mason will tell you the highest degree they have is the Third. As the Jews among us tend to say, 'all the rest is commentary.'"

  "I see." Smith mused a bit on that. "Are you a Freemason, Sergeant-Major Fox?"

  "I am indeed," acknowledged Fox. "Like my father, my uncles, and my grandfather before me; so are my wife's father and uncle."

  "And what are we to make of the sinister conspiracy theories mooted here and there about the Freemasons and the Illuminati?" queried Smith, with something of a slight grin.

  "What, that they're all bullshit?" Delaney shot right back, fire in her eyes.

  "Easy, Del," soothed her father. "They've been saying that for over 400 years now, and you're right, it's as much BS today as it was in 1717. Like we say in lodge, 'We'll get on taking over the world as soon as we vote on whether to use single- or two-ply toilet paper in the lodge restrooms, and whether to serve decaf coffee at dinner.' By which we mean, jokingly, something like world domination is never going to make it onto our agenda – and intelligent people who think otherwise ought to go in for a brain scan."

  "I assure you I meant that tongue-in-cheek," Smith hastened to add. "The rumors abound on the hypernet, of course. The general disappearance of Freemasons from public life seems only to convince the nuttier dispensers of such stories of the truth contained in those old rumors." He raised a hand, palm up, and shrugged. "It's good to hear someone willing to say otherwise."

  "We try to stay off the 'nets, these days," said Fox. "Attempts to convince the already-convinced are a waste of time, and we've gone back to more traditional methods of recruitment – which is to say, we don't really recruit at all. But you'll see men with rings like this," and he raised his right hand to display a large gold ring with an inset blue stone, something like a college class ring, but with a gold square-and-compasses device set into the face of the stone, "and if you're a friend or acquaintance – or a son or grandson, as was my case – eventually curiosity will get the better of you, and you'll ask about it."

  "I see."

  "And in fairness, there are a lot more Freemasons today than you'd think. We're actually closing in on the numbers we had in the 1950's. Of course, many of those brethren are in the colonies, but even so, the Fraternity is very, very healthy." Fox took a breath. "Moreover, the Shizzle have a group called the Builders, that is more or less the same sort of thing, and also teaches what amounts to a course in sacred geometry. Their current ambassador to Earth is a member, and so was his predecessor."

  "And what about the women who join in our corps?" pressed Smith.

  Ariela put a roadblock into that line of inquiry, by saying simply, "Women aren't Freemasons."

  Smith cocked his head. "I'm sure I've heard of female Freemasons."

  "Sure," said Ariela, dismissively, "but they aren't really Freemasons. They can play at it all the live-long day, but in the end, only males can be Freemasons."

  Fox rolled his eyes. "Ari, the United Grand Lodge of England says . . . "

  "I know what they say, and since I'm not a Freemason, I can state for the record that even if UGLE did say a particular lodge of female
Freemasons was 'regular in practice' while refraining from formally recognizing it, it shouldn't even have said that." Ariela looked angry. "Anyone can prance about the floor in full dress regalia and reciting words out of a book, pretending to be a Freemason. It doesn't make them one."

  "So how do women get their instruction?" asked Smith, hastily, trying to head off what was becoming something of an argument.

  "None of any man's business, is how," said Delaney, firmly, looking right at her mother, who blinked, smiled slightly, nodded, and subsided.

  "I will say only this," said the older woman. "There is a similar organization, and I am its mère supérieure. And I am not talking about the Order of the Eastern Star, or Le Droit Humain, or any of the other well-known female or mixed Masonic-style organizations. Furthermore you will not find our fraternité splashed all over the conspiracy websites because nobody is aware it exists – except its sœurs and mères." She smiled again. "Well. And a few male Freemasons who keep their mouths shut about it; something they're quite good at. Finally, the organization is not French; we just like the titles."

  "And it exists primarily to instruct its members in Mesh manipulation," said Smith, more in the way of a statement than a question.

  Ariela winked.

  "Very well," sighed the professor, "I suppose I shall simply have to look up a lodge back in Fort Myers when we return to Earth."

  "Do you have your comm handy, Dr. Smith?" inquired Fox.

  "Certainly." He produced it and looked at Fox.

  Fox reached over with his comm and touched Smith's. The two comms beeped. "I've taken the liberty of providing you with contact information and a petition for a lodge there whose secretary is a friend of mine," he said. "I talked to him before we left Earth and he said he would be thrilled to have one of his old professors join his lodge."