Friends in the Stars

by Mackey Chandler

  “Please don’t feed them,” Lee asked when she saw Vic looking at them. “They grow bolder and are pests if you encourage them.”

  “One might say the same of a number of people,” Vic mused. He piled a generous portion of eggs and potatoes on his plate. Eileen took the rest which was near as much.

  “But not out loud, in polite company,” Eileen cautioned him.

  “Please don’t count on me being polite,” Lee warned them, “not in anybody’s company. I know bits and pieces of four cultures and still am not comfortable in any of them, maybe least of all with Humans. They all seem to require some things be unsaid.”

  “I do see the value in brutal honesty,” Eileen allowed. “Sometimes you don’t have time to pitch everything in gentle phrases. I’ve experience of the same quality in Jeff. Surely you got a hint of that when you met him on the Moon?”

  “I did, both the way he spoke as one of Heather’s peers, and the little bits and pieces of conversation about him,” Lee said. “Even when people were being snide about his lack of social graces, I just heard that he was honest instead of trying to soften his message. I suspect he has found the same thing I have, that people hear what they want you to say, so if you soften your message it ruins your effort to communicate. It’s no favor to confuse people about what your real intentions are by gentle words.”

  “No, and there’s little danger of that with Singh,” Victor said, smiling.

  “Have you had any news from the Moon or Earth I’d find interesting?” Lee asked.

  Eileen and Victor looked at each other. Victor with a bland poker face, and Eileen with the slight worry of knowing Victor might say anything outrageous.

  “Come on now,” Lee chided them, waving her fork at them. “I didn’t ask any military secrets. You could have had news sent by perfectly normal means such as regular ship mail or piggybacked on a commercial drone from Fargone. You have to be in some kind of communication with Central. I’ve seen how your ships and jump drones work, so it wouldn’t surprise me at all if you have passing central vessels drop off a drone out-system and let it jump in to send you a message.

  “I’d be surprised if even you guys can trust a drone to make multiple jumps from as far away as Earth. You may have better drives, but you’d have to have much better Artificial Stupids to pilot them so far, and I haven’t seen any indication you are much further ahead of everybody else in computers and programming.”

  “We’ve tried,” Eileen assured her. “We’ll use an Artificial Intelligence as a convenience on a manned ship. But like an autopilot on an aircraft, it needs a human backup for when it suddenly decides to be an Artificial Stupid. If you send expensive craft off unsupervised the losses are still too high.

  “Indeed, for all his success with other systems, Jeff doesn’t seem to have much talent for computers. I wish we did have a really brilliant computer person. The three have mentioned recruiting such a person from time to time. As for software, Jeff tried to create an improved AI that followed a decision tree which seemed logical to him,” Victor said. He then just rolled his eyes. He seemed to do that a lot, make statements and expect you to deduce the conclusion as if it were obvious.

  “It didn’t work out so hot?” Lee asked, forcing him to detail the end of the story.

  “It quickly became paranoid. Towards the end, when its learning algorithms had a chance to reinforce themselves by looping repeatedly, it would only answer questions with other questions,” Vic said.

  “If he created it to emulate his own pattern of thinking, my question then would be not why it went nuts,” Lee said, “but why does Jeff stay sane?”

  “He programmed too much of that brutal honesty you admire in it,” Eileen said. “Artificial intelligences, just like biological children, should be sheltered from the worst qualities of reality until they have enough experience of life to not be shattered by the realization it doesn’t make any sense and there often aren’t any solutions.”

  Lee thought on that while she ate and applied it to herself. “I was thirteen when my parents were killed,” she finally said. “Well, shy a week or two, as close as you could log by adding up all the flight times with relativistic corrections. Sometimes when we came back to civilization our clock was off a few minutes from the best local universal time.

  “The experience in the camp that night was pretty rough for anyone. I had nightmares and crying jags for months. If I’d had that dumped on me when I was three or four years younger, I don’t know what it would have done to me, nothing good. It might have broken me beyond what time and Gordon could heal.

  “Of course, some of that was how they died. Gordon never did let me see their bodies. I didn’t figure out how and why he was sheltering me until later, but he saw the need. One assumes he’d have done the same for a Derf child. At the time I never considered how horrible it must have been for Gordon too. It was traumatic enough to have the little dinosaur analogs trying to eat me, even if my folks had survived. I was zipped up in my sleeping bag that had a very tough ballistic cloth shell. I couldn’t see anything of course.

  “I was in the bag with no light on in the tent. I did have the sense not to look out. I’d just feel the jaws gnawing away trying to get a grip to get through the cloth. They were mute and the only sound was from what they were doing. I’d stick my pistol against the shape trying to gnaw through the bag and shoot him in the head,” Lee said, illustrating it with her first finger and cocked thumb.

  “After a while, there was such a pile of them around me the new ones had a hard time getting past the dead ones to reach the bag, but I thought I was going to be smothered under the pile of dead dinos, and they didn’t smell very good.”

  “And this is a class A planet for colonization?” Vic asked. “I don’t think I’d care to try to homestead where you have to deal with herds of carnivores like that.”

  “They aren’t so bad,” Lee said. “I get general reports about how the planet is being developed beside specific financial reports for my shares. Gordon is no dummy, and he was right on the money predicting they can’t swim for anything. They sometimes have to cross some streams when hunting gets bad and they need to migrate. If they try to cross too far down the course of a stream they can lose a substantial part of the herd from stepping off a ledge or in a pothole and drowning. If the current knocks them over they aren’t very good at getting back vertical before they drown.

  “We had this figured out enough that I picked a large island as one of my personal claims, knowing the dinos couldn’t swim there from the main continent. That’s the property I’m letting Red Tree have to expand off-planet, although I’m retaining rights to use it myself and have a private residence.

  “Also, the dinos only hunt when they have digested the last hunt and fasted some days in cold-blooded mode. Then their metabolism kicks into gear and they turn warm- blooded to hunt. That’s why we didn’t see them in a drone survey. We saw other warm-blooded predators and assumed everything would be the same. We’d have been safe if we’d set up camp on a small island instead of putting up an electric fence, but who knew?” Lee said. “Now, they know if you want to keep them out a moat works just fine. When they camp to digest the last hunt they pick an open spot where the sun will reach and pile up in a big heap about fifty meters across. It doesn’t seem to bother the bottom ones to have two or three others piled on top.

  “They have decent satellite coverage on Providence now, so if the colonists see a big group trending their way, they won’t let them get closer than twenty or thirty kilometers away. They’ll let them mound up after a feeding and send out a plane with a single cluster bomb. Boom… that takes care of the whole mob.

  “Gordon was right about that too. He said in a few years they’d have to make a sanctuary for them if they wanted any to survive because that’s always how it goes for anything that threatens man or his livestock.”

  “Thank you for that story,” Vic said, “it helps me understand who you are, and how you
came to have your views and responses.”

  “And yet, we once again got into a long discussion about me, and you manage not to answer the question I put to you,” Lee said. “Don’t think I didn’t notice.”

  “We do get special reports, pretty much the way you guessed,” Eileen admitted when pressed. “If something is important enough to have a ship detour instead of sending it by slow mail. There’s not much worth doing that, and for sure they haven’t felt the need to send a special ship just to deliver news yet, only a few that were passing by anyway.”

  “And… what is happening on Earth?” Lee demanded.

  “They take forever to decide anything,” Eileen said disgusted. “I grew up watching how that worked, but then when we moved to Central it was a shock to see Heather would put out a proposal, ask for statements and studies with a deadline of weeks not years, then conference and make major decisions in a few days.

  “The major powers have flip-flopped and decided they do have to accept mining and planetary claims without any limits for distance. It makes them look stupid after they turned Lee’s Little Fleet and the aliens away from filing claims, but the public outcry and panic gave them little choice. To do otherwise would threaten to collapse their economy. They immediately had a mini-panic in the markets as soon as they let the public know they would set any limits to the claims they would administer.

  They had to rescind it even though it would take years to see any real damage to their economy. That was just the immediate panic response of people before there was any real change in supply. The public was better at taking the long-term view than the officials in this instance. I had my doubts, but the people at Central have convinced me the Earthies can’t effectively administer really deep claims with their present drive limitations. So the whole point is really moot. How long it will take them to learn that by trying and failing is another interesting question. It’s similar to the problems Britain faced trying to administer India when communication was still by ocean vessel.”

  “You can’t really,” Lee insisted. “I agree with Heather there. You can set basic policy and give your administrator broad powers to act for you. If they aren’t free to act they will be forced to do something stupid because central planning can never foresee every possibility. They will tie their hands because they never really trust their own people.”

  “That’s the only way Earth governments work right now,” Eileen insisted. “They all turned to central control once they had good radio and satellites after the first atomic war. It’s been how they have run things for a century now, and they’ve seemed unable to ease up on that control since they’ve gotten out beyond the speed of light lag to Luna where it really doesn’t work anymore. Right now, they are basically trying to decide who to publicly blame for turning away the claims you came to present for yourselves and the Badgers. The smaller countries who withdrew their ships are going to be cut off from any revenue sharing for sure.”

  “That ship has lifted,” Lee insisted. “They can announce they will accept claims again, but who would trust them now? We certainly won’t offer a claim again. My bank lady, Sally, is back from Earth now and has as much investor interest as we want to bring in. She’s going over the work her people and I did in her absence to create the forms and agency to deal with multiple races. We need uniform documents that everybody can agree with what they mean and can accept the terms. That means Humans, Derf, Badgers, and Bills. It’s probably going to need to be done all over again if the other minor races in the Badger civilization come onboard. We are very near ready to being open for business to register and administer our own claims. Like you just said, even if we changed our minds and were wooed to meekly go back to register our claims in their claims system, it’s near to breaking down fairly soon anyway,” Lee said. “We don’t need them now.”

  “Yes, you know that, and we know that,” Eileen agreed, “but after they plant the blame firmly on the smaller nations that precipitated the crisis, they will then move to try to rescind their decision. They will try to demand by force what has always worked because it was voluntary. That is when it may get ugly. We don’t really know how long it will take them to stop talking and act more decisively than the one silly obsolete ship they sent here. That was just a quick probe to test if Heather really meant her declaration that she’d protect Derfhome.”

  “I suspect when they see they can’t send a fleet here to intimidate us they will try to use trade sanctions to pressure us,” Lee said. “That won’t work either. We can get tech and medicines from Fargone or New Japan that are as good or better than Earth goods. About all they can cut off are luxury goods. It will hurt them as badly as us. About the only thing I can think of we get from Earth that’s hard to replace cheaply is iodine.”

  “Just import kelp to cultivate,” Eileen suggested, “it bio-concentrates iodine even from very dilute seawater if Derfhome doesn’t have any natural brines rich in it.”

  “They can cut off the video dramas,” Vic threatened. “You’ll never know if Marge got back together with Ken, or that evil Megan stole his heart away.”

  “Oh, the horror,” Lee exclaimed. “At least we’ll never miss the ending, because those tear-jerker serials never really end. When Gordon was trying to teach me about Human society, I briefly tried watching some of those vids. You can imagine how messed up some of the ideas were that they gave me about how real people actually live.”

  “They will get a temporary economic boost by blaming all the little fellows,” Vic said, “They’ll use it as an excuse to cut off all the share payments to the minor space nations, and the claim shares to the non-space states that were basically welfare. The shame is, as Eileen said, that those smaller nations were mostly right. It is too far to control remotely unless they develop a much better drive.”

  “I hope not,” Lee said. “I really think that would make interstellar war and piracy possible. That would overshadow all the benefits.”

  “Certainly, Heather thinks Central would get the worst of that, being out-numbered so badly. Or she wouldn’t have sought a preemptive pact with you to keep gravitational jump tech secret,” Eileen agreed.

  “I suddenly see a different aspect of it I haven’t seen anybody consider,” Vic said.

  Eileen perked up, because this wasn’t anything they’d discussed.

  “Not even your Sovereign or her peers?” Lee asked.

  “No, not unless they saw it but never see fit to discuss it with us. Heather is methodically smart, and Jeff assembles bit and pieces of things to make a new whole. April is one of those thinkers who suddenly drops a new idea on you that doesn’t seem like it would be anything she would know or even be considering. She’s like the person lecturing who writes something on the screen and then draws a line and says – therefore – skipping so many steps you have no idea how she got there, so it wouldn’t surprise me if any of them followed the same line of thought I just had. I’ll have to run the idea past them when I get a chance, but nobody seems to be applying the law of supply and demand to the situation in which we find ourselves.”

  “Indeed, I think I’m stuck on the wrong side of that therefore from you,” Lee admitted. “How are you applying it to interstellar economics?”

  “Earth has always had an interstellar market of scarcity,” Vic said, scrunching his eyebrows up and looking serious. “They’ve always been able to readily absorb all the new materials and new biologicals, and they have always had buyers for the land and rights on new worlds, especially any living worlds. You didn’t destroy that with your new findings from the voyage of the Little Fleet, because your discoveries are so far away it keeps their price up.”

  “Yes, I follow you and agree, so far,” Lee said.

  “Now you’ve sent Thor off with the main elements of the Little Fleet and a Fargone destroyer for escort duty again. That’s public knowledge, right?” Vic asked.

  “Yes. It was all done publicly. I suppose you may wonder why I’m here and didn�
�t go back out with them,” Lee said. “That’s no secret even if I didn’t publicize it. It was to stay here and work with my bank to set up our organization to replace the Earth Claims Commission. It was my idea and there was no way I could just dump it on somebody else. I was very busy with that and waiting on Sally to return from Earth with new investors and partners. I sent the fleet back out primarily to preserve the talent pool or they would have all dispersed in a hundred directions.

  “Frankly, a lot of them wanted to cash out their shares but when the Claims Commission rejected us it put off their pay indefinitely. The Commission had the ability to start paying you immediately. It was backed by big Earth nations that could print their currencies at need in anticipation of the wealth flowing in. None of the space powers run on fiat money or allow deficit spending. We are creating a market in shares but sending a big chunk of our best people back out gave us some time to create a liquid market in their shares. Even though the Earth Claims Commission doesn’t want the job, I still expect Earth investors to buy a lot of the shares for sale. Earth investors will still be buying a lot of the rights, just by a more roundabout way than the Commission.”

  “All that is as smart as can be,” Vic said, with a nod of the head acknowledging her. “You should have a handle on it before the fleet returns with even more claims and discoveries. But let me ask you a question. Why aren’t you selling any of those mining claims or worlds to Heather or her partners?”

  Lee looked at him like he was daft. “They have a better drive. Unlike Earth, they can go get their own resources and worlds far easier than us.”

  It was stating the obvious.

  “Well, my young friend, if you get a fast drive of your own all these expensive to reach resources are going to suddenly be closer and cheaper. That means by the immutable laws of economics there is going to be a glut on the market and prices will crash. If you send out a third exploration fleet with a fast drive the shareholders won’t automatically all be millionaires on their return.