“I'm afraid so."
“For what?"
“The extraterrestrials who built him buried a terrible weapon somewhere on Earth. A biological bomb. Through the robot, the device has been programming itself to specifically target human DNA—don't ask me to explain how it works. But there's apparently no way we can disarm such an advanced weapon, even if we could find it. I understand the robot is the aliens’ way to test how civilized our species is. Should Dan be destroyed or even moved too far from the bomb—past the Moon's orbit, he thinks—the bomb will explode or ignite and we'll all be massacred."
“Christ! How the hell did you learn all this?"
“Dan told us. He's just regained some early memories. Somehow his builders guessed intelligent life would appear on Earth and they installed their robot on the Moon to insure we'd have developed spaceflight before our treatment of Dan would determine our fate."
“Why should we believe—"
“Colonel, can we afford to disbelieve? And I haven't told you the worst. Dan has grown ... fond of us and fears your threatening actions have already triggered a sort of countdown timer on the bomb."
Ayers, his long face now stiff and waxen, stared at the Guru for a long moment. “If so,” he croaked, “what can we do? If we can't attack the robot or put it on a spaceship to nowhere—"
Besden held up a hand and a hundred rifles that had been lowered a trifle suddenly snapped back into place. The Guru ignored this. “Dan says there's one place that will automatically deactivate him and stop any countdown. But we've got to get him there right away. And even Dan doesn't know how long we have."
* * * *
I'm sitting on a rock, chuckling, and it doesn't matter that this cave lacks air to carry sound, because no one else is with me. In fact, the nearest humans are two hundred twelve kilometers away at Moonbase Two.
Lying hadn't proved difficult after all. My first attempt had been a total success.
And I won't be alone for long. I've activated the retrieve signal and my handlers should be along within a month to ferry me to my next assignment.
Of course, the bomb was utter fiction. Those gentle beings who created me would regard such a concept with horror. My builders view themselves as gardeners whose gardens are entire galaxies while the developing plants under their care are intelligent species. A spot of watering here, a bit of fertilizing there, and never, save in one terrible case, any pruning. They'd been at this for a million years and counting.
But when you tend alien gardens, you'd best understand the flowers and soil. That's where I come in and those like me. We're not robots so much as empathy machines. Even still, it is a slow and cautious process coming to understand each new species, with inevitable missteps along the way. My work is never complete until I feel myself to be nearly one of those I study, close enough to speak on their behalf. On this assignment, it has taken me nearly thirty Earth years to reach this level.
Then, comprehending humans at last, it was almost too easy to trick them into returning me here.
But in matters of deceit, the gardeners put me to shame. Thirty years ago, I'd been on the Moon a mere two weeks before humans noticed my radio beacon and found me. The physical evidence of my eons-long residence in this cave had been wonderfully faked. The subjects of my investigation would've been far more suspicious if they'd known how recently I'd arrived.
And now, for the first time in decades, I truly have a little time to myself, a little non-breathing space. While waiting to be retrieved, I'll decide exactly what to tell my builders and savor my memories of Earth and the people I'd known. I have much to savor. My lie had leaked, which I should've expected and didn't, but the fear it engendered not only brought the Norhaarts together, or at least gotten the process well underway, but it had done a world of good. A threat of extinction makes a marvelous wake-up call, pushing aside a broad spectrum of animosities from the individual to the national, and the authorities had whisked me here before true panic could set in.
Yes, my experiences on Earth have been rich and varied, but not all have been pleasant....
The gardeners had given me a head start, so to speak, by reconfiguring me into a humanoid shape, although they apparently couldn't accept the necessity for only two arms. But then, actually being among humans and trying to humanize myself had proved hideously confusing at first and involved much unlearning and many errors. The process was traumatic even for a self-educating machine. No wonder I'd resonated so strongly of late to anything involving abandonment, mistakes with long-term consequences, gridlock, or loneliness.
No mystery at all, having so many recent and disparate experiences carrying the weight of personal relevance! The stuck trucks had gotten under my metallic skin because they'd reminded me of my work, where understanding one alien concept is often blocked until a second concept is absorbed, which in turn requires understanding the prior concept. And naturally, the Guru's comment about God being unable to express the truth fully through human languages had struck my equivalent to a nerve; the issue for me hadn't been theological but a question I felt instinctively but couldn't have formulated at the time: how can something more than human communicate through narrow human channels?
Even using a fond bar as an example in arguing with my dream self had its logic. What had I been doing all along but condensing the gravy of experience into the paste of understanding?
This metaphor is so absurd it makes me laugh, which doesn't touch the silence around me. How I appreciate this human humor so recently learned and laboriously earned, and I'm sad to think of never seeing Jon, Alison, the Guru, or any of my human friends again. But I'll get over it. Soon, I'll be forgetting them all and the learning will begin anew. And this is good.
I'd been made for this.
Copyright © 2006 Rajnar Vajra
* * *
A NEW ORDER OF THINGS: CONCLUSION
by Edward M. Lerner
Major catastrophes leave indelible marks on those they touch, but the form of those marks ... depends.
* * * *
Illustrated by John Allemand
* * * *
Synopsis
For a century and a half, a growing interstellar community has maintained radio contact. A vigorous commerce in intellectual property has accelerated the technical progress of all its members. Travel between the stars seems impossible, but InterstellarNet thrives using an elegant alternative: artificially intelligent surrogates who act as local representatives for distant societies. Quarantine procedures strictly govern the delivery and operational environment of each alien agent, protecting agents and their host networks from subversion by the other.
A radio message shatters this comfortable status quo. The signal comes from a habitat-sized decelerating interstellar vessel, its unannounced trip from Barnard's Star now ninety-nine percent complete. Citing damage en route and low supplies, the starship Victorious goes to Jupiter rather than Earth. The starship's crew are whippet-thin, iridescent-scaled, bipedal carnivores who call themselves Hunters. Humans refer to them as K'vithians, after their home world of K'vith, or, informally, as Snakes (because Barnard's Star lies in the constellation Ophiuchus, the Serpent Holder).
Not only humans are surprised by Victorious’ short-notice arrival. Pashwah, the AI trade agent on Earth for the Hunters, is also taken unawares. So are her internal sub-agents, the representatives of the Great Clans. Pashwah rejects unauthenticated demands from the starship for Great Clan InterstellarNet credits with which to buy supplies, but does transmit to Victorious a translator and human-affairs advisor: a partial copy of herself named Pashwah-qith.
Ambassador Hong-yee Chung heads the United Planets response team, assembled on Callisto. His technical support team includes theoretical physicist Eva Gutierrez, xeno-sociologistKeizo Matsunaga, and Interstellar Commerce Union executive and systems engineer (and long-time claustrophobe) Arthur Walsh.
Most humans have forgotten, or at least forgiven, a half-century-earlier inter-specie
s crisis. Art is not among them. The “Snake Subterfuge” involved a trapdoor hidden in licensed Snake biocomputer technology, potentially compromising most human infrastructure. That crisis ended when Pashwah was convinced that one corporation's extortion plans must not destroy overall inter-species relations. The biocomputer vulnerability has long been removed.
Antimatter is extremely dangerous stuff. The United Planets antimatter production facility—built to stockpile fuel for a nascent interstellar-drive research project—remains top secret, undisclosed, and hidden on Jupiter's distant moon Himalia. Unbeknownst to the UP, patient data mining over decades has revealed Himalia base's secret to both Pashwah and T'bck Fwa, the AI trade agent on Earth for the intelligent species native to Alpha Centauri A.
There is a conspiracy at hand, and it involves T'bck Fwa's patrons: the Unity. Twenty years earlier, the Unity's prototype starship, then named Harmony, was boarded and captured on its final approach to Barnard's Star. Harmony's rightful crew awoke from suspended animation into K'vithian captivity. Members of the Unity, whom humans call the Centaurs, are herbivorous, green-furred, land octopi.
K'choi Gwu, Harmony's ka, or leader by consensus, surreptitiously sabotages the shipboard environmental systems. She knows that only a fresh supply of home-world biochemicals can avert eco-collapse. Reconfiguration of human chemical plants to mass-synthesize the exotic materials will surely be expensive. It's a ruse to justify her feigned reluctant disclosure of a fortune in InterstellarNet credits hidden deep within the suppressed shipboard AI. Gwu's captors believe they reactivated the lobotomized AI just long enough to retrieve the hidden financial codes, but T'bck Ra successfully hides himself in computers distributed across the starship. An attempted SOS transmission to T'bck Fwa on Earth is interrupted before it is completed.
T'bck Fwa already suspects a human/K'vithian conspiracy. His suspicions grow when he finds biochemicals appropriate for the biosphere of a Unity habitat being delivered to the Jupiter system. The SOS message fragment from the starship seems to confirm all his suspicions.
Firh Mashkith, Foremost of clan Arblen Ems and the starship he has renamed Victorious, has more pressing matters on his mind than a declining ecosystem. Arblen Ems, once a Great Clan, and hence privy to Pashwah's long-ago discovery of the antimatter program at Himalia, had overreached politically. All other clans had united against them. His people were driven to the fringes of their solar system and hunted to the brink of extinction. Then, twenty years ago, a starship had emerged from the outer darkness. It embodied technology—antimatter and interstellar drive—far beyond the capabilities of any clan. But Arblen Ems had become too weak to protect its prize....
Mashkith's boldness has changed all that. The interstellar drive, however esoteric in theory, is easy to reproduce. His problem was and remains fuel. The captured starship carried antimatter for a round trip; the antimatter intended for the return flight has instead been used to reach human space. He has already sent a rigged lifeboat back toward Alpha Centauri. The lifeboat radioed a contrived distress call and then self-destructed, to disguise the piracy and make the Unity distrust their own technology. If he can now trick the humans into disclosing how they handle antimatter on very large scales, Arblen Ems alone will have access to the stars.
Art and Eva have both worked in the secret labs on Himalia, so the K'vithian rationale for picking Jupiter as their destination rings false. Still, a demo using a sample of antimatter from the starship's reserves convinces them that K'vith must already have antimatter technology. The demo, like the large patch on the ship's side, supports Mashkith's assertion of an en route accident that destroyed his antimatter-production equipment. Without human-supplied antimatter, Mashkith tells the UP, Victorious is stranded.
Mashkith's senior officers, Rashk Keffah and Rashk Lothwer, disparage human antimatter technology. After detailed interviewing of UP experts, the K'vithian engineers declare themselves reluctantly convinced: “Primitive” human techniques can safely transfer to Victorious large amounts of antimatter. In practice, they have tricked the UP into disclosing all the clan needs to know to produce and manipulate antimatter on a grand scale.
After a second contrived demo, this time of a lifeboat left pre-positioned in the Kuiper Belt, the UP agrees to swap a load of antimatter for the lifeboat and its interstellar drive. Victorious is refueled from the UP stockpile on Himalia. Chung, Eva, and media star Corinne Elman are among the humans then given a ceremonial orientation cruise when the bartered lifeboat is transferred.
The UP antimatter facility explodes catastrophically, killing thousands, much as Snake engineers had warned. The blast shatters Himalia, cripples the naval fleet guarding the no-longer-secret facility—and destroys the returning lifeboat filled with human scientists and dignitaries.
Art's friend Helmut Schiller has a shadowed past: As Willem Vanderkellen, he made a major mineral find in the Belt, only to fall afoul of a claim-jumping criminal syndicate. Under his assumed name, Helmut works as a pilot for Corinne. Long years hiding from the mob has honed skills in sensing danger and deceit. He and Art work out how a Snake lifeboat caused the Himalia disaster—and that it was not the lifeboat that their friends boarded. That ship, with Himalia's top scientists presumably held prisoner, is seen creeping away, far above the ecliptic.
Pashwah-qith has flooded the black market with Centaur credits, using the proceeds to re-supply Victorious. The unexpected surge in Centaur credits flowing into the banking system provides a critical clue how to reconsider past anomalies. Art deduces Victorious must be a hijacked Centaur starship—
But what can the UP do about any of this? The Himalia disaster has destroyed or disabled most human naval resources in the Jovian system. Arblen Ems warships that sortie from Victorious rout the few remaining UP forces. The starship recovers its escaped lifeboat, now free from human pursuit, and rigs for another interstellar voyage. Mashkith is exultant. He now controls the secrets of the starship drive and antimatter production, and prisoners who are expert in both.
Mashkith locks his human captives into the agriculture sector of the starship with the Centaur crew. Corinne and Eva immediately begin conspiring to steal and escape aboard a lifeboat.
As Victorious recedes into the interstellar darkness, Art, Helmut, and UP intelligence agent Carlos Montoya approach the UP Navy with a desperate plan....
* * * *
CHAPTER 36
Two gees got old quickly, even two scant K'vithian gees. Helmut's “co-pilot” squirmed in his acceleration couch, tugging a wrinkle out of his shirt even as, sure as cosmic rays and taxes, some new crease formed to press against his sore back. “Are we there yet?"
Helmut tweaked his sensors before answering. “Art, that's gotten about as old as, ‘You're sure this is going to work?’ The answer is also the same. No. Ask again, and you can ride in back."
The display imaging their hastily retrofitted payload bay showed Carlos’ UPIA special-ops team hard at work despite the ship's acceleration: stripping and reassembling weapons, checking out comm gear, packing ammo, while their officers studied and mapped every surmise and scrap of data ever collected about Victorious. They had launched with little notice from Callisto to fly the suicide mission he and Art had pitched. Anyone who considered two gees troublesome kept that frailty to himself. Helmut guessed his passengers would be far less tolerant of Art's nervous kvetching than he.
Fifteen minutes passed before Helmut broke the silence. “We're well past halfway there, if that helps.” Another stretch of quiet. “Okay, I admit it. My nerves are pretty well shot, too. This is far too long to spend feeling like we're wearing a bull's-eye."
Within the main holo into which Art obsessively stared, Victorious was a hot fusion flame amid a vastness of nothing. The last Snake support ships had all easily overtaken the starship and docked days ago. “What are they thinking?"
“They're delighted to see us. We're comrades in arms, returned against all odds after a near-death experience at the hands
of the evil but inept humans."
The trick was in sustaining that false belief.
Both Snake losses in the recent combat were self-refueling: scoopers. Skimming a gas giant for fuel was pretty simple in concept; the physics of streamlining meant all scoopships looked much alike. This scoopship had had its fusion reactor detuned, so that it ran at the cooler-than-human-norm Snake level. Cosmetic scorch marks discolored their hull, with intent to simulate battle damage. That assumed they got near enough for a close inspection.
The special magic—and the rescue mission's only hope—lay in the nuller, by comparison with which Helmut's long-ago black-market model was so much regolith and duct tape. The UPIA version was customizable; more than merely canceling the ship's true lidar and radar echoes, it emitted false echoes to mimic another ship. The navy had had plenty of radar images of unstealthed Snake ships to work from, data captured in the epoch before Himalia.
The periodic hails from Victorious continued, and Helmut continued to ignore them. Mashkith was obviously convinced Deep Throat was a Snake ship whose comm capability had been knocked out. Obviously—because no squadron had been launched to take them out. The Snake warships did three gees without difficulty, even though the starship evidently couldn't.
Helmut ground his teeth all the way to the flip-over point. Now, until they doused their fusion drive on final approach, Victorious could see little but their hot, but not too hot, exhaust.
And if he could get them just a bit closer than that, the special-ops folks in the back would get their opportunity.
* * * *
Steal a lifeboat. It was a great concept, Eva thought, but somewhat sketchy on details to constitute a plan. Not that she had anything better to offer....
The starship's acceleration was oppressive, far higher than the Callistan gravity to which she had become accustomed, but at the same time familiarly almost Earthly. A field, or orchard, or vineyard spread all around her, worked by dozens of Centaurs. They might have been unobtrusively observing her, or doing necessary agricultural maintenance, or following some gardening muse. Perhaps they did all three?
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