by E. M. Foner
“How much do the Ferrymen let you keep?” she asked.
“You mean, what’s their cut?” Joshua smiled. “Fifteen percent.”
“It still seems an awful lot for doing nothing,” eBeth objected, though it was clear that her estimation of the local humans had taken a quantum leap.
“That’s brilliant,” I said, putting fifteen and eighty-five together. “You’re taking advantage of all of the Ferrymen’s grandfathered agreements for slots at spaceports.”
“Correct,” Hilde said. “And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Our sponsors have reciprocal trade agreements in place with hundreds of species, which save us a fortune on import tariffs. Our economists have calculated that if we joined the League ourselves, it would cost us almost a third of our gross profit.”
“And that’s after the extraordinary expenses involved in setting up to do galactic business on our own,” Saul added. “The populations and production of our three worlds are still growing, but without the Ferrymen to front for us, we’d just be bit players struggling to arrange for access to markets and discounted shipping.”
“So you ARE dependent on the Ferrymen,” eBeth argued, apparently unable to accept the synergistic relationship between the two species. “If they’d allowed you to develop your own advanced technology, you could be building your own interstellar cargo ships by now.”
“It’s not that simple,” the headmaster told her patiently. “The advanced species of the galaxy are jealous of their technical know-how for several reasons, and one of them is self-preservation. Have you ever thought about what they all have in common?”
“The portal network,” eBeth answered immediately, and began ticking off items on her fingers. “Weird customs for eating. Space stuff. A bizarre sense of humor.”
“All of those things are true, but you’re missing the most important point,” Joshua said, glancing over at me as if seeking permission to tell her. I shrugged, figuring if Sue chose to give me a hard time about it, I could claim the headmaster misinterpreted my reply. “Every advanced species out there has survived their innovations. They didn’t accidentally turn their suns into black holes, kill themselves off with biological experiments, or create weapons so terrible that a simple argument could result in planetary destruction.”
“You’re saying they won’t share their technology to protect us?” she asked skeptically.
“To protect themselves,” I told her. “The League can step in to stop wars but we can’t prevent them from starting. All of our members maintain defensive forces, and history has taught us that sharing technology inevitably weakens our positions.”
“But the portal system…”
“Library installs and operates the League’s intra-dimensional portals for a small fee. Their principles of operation are a closely guarded secret.”
eBeth frowned, and I could see that she needed a little time to absorb this latest confidence. Turning back to Saul, I said, “I’ll have to report this meeting to my direct superior. Is there any specific message you want passed along?”
“Your customer service is a disaster.”
“Excuse me?”
“We’ve been trying to make contact for hundreds of years.”
“You must be going about it wrong,” I protested. “It’s not like Library has a direct line or a galactic mailing address.”
“My point exactly.”
Thirteen
I felt guilty about slipping over to Earth while eBeth and Spot were sleeping, but technically, Observers are forbidden from using our dedicated portals for personal gain and I didn’t want to get either of them in trouble. As soon as I arrived in the basement office of my old restaurant, I connected directly to the Internet and began catching up on the news, though it was difficult to know what to believe. While cross-checking newspapers around the world against each other, I swapped my Reservation clothes for jeans, a T-shirt and sneakers.
Nobody paid me any particular attention when I emerged from the ‘Employees Only’ door at the top of the basement stairs, even though the dinner rush was in full swing. The lieutenant was sitting in his usual spot next to the waitress station at the bar, nursing an orange juice. You have to admire a man who stops drinking alcohol the day he takes ownership of a restaurant.
“Evening, Mark,” the lieutenant greeted me, without the slightest sign of surprise. “Run out of slide rules already?”
“How’d you guess?” I asked, taking the seat next to him and gesturing to Donovan. “Coke,” I told the bartender. With any luck it would dissolve the raisins stuck to the sides of my holding tank and save me a flush cycle.
“Couple of boxes from UPS came for you. I left them outside the storeroom door since you have a way of showing up within a few hours of when they arrive. If I had known ahead of time I’d be acting as your shipping agent, I would have talked you down on the price of this place.”
“You didn’t pay me anything,” I reminded him.
“Then there’s that,” he acknowledged. “So, tell me something. If slide rules are allowed on this new world you’ve gone to spy on, why do you need to import them from Earth?”
“We’re not spying and it’s a question of cost and availability. I’m giving the slide rules away as advertising and it would have taken months of back-and-forth correspondence to get them manufactured on Reservation. Here I can upload a few files to the Internet and they show up within a week.”
“Seems kind of like cheating,” the lieutenant commented.
“It is cheating. How’s the franchise operation going?”
“Our trademark application for ‘The Portal’ got rejected and it turned out that my partners wanted to use the restaurants to sell weed. I’ve been a cop for too long to wrap my brain around that one. Besides, I’ve been working on a better business idea.”
“Is it legal?”
“It’s not illegal,” he replied. “The law hasn’t caught up with any of this intra-dimensional stuff yet. Did you know that people have been suing each other in your League’s courts?”
“It’s your League too, now that Earth is a member. And I can’t imagine any circumstances under which our courts would have jurisdiction. They only deal with interstellar matters and trade disputes between species where the contract didn’t specify a venue.”
“From what I heard, their backlog is like a hundred years, so lawyers do it for leverage in negotiations. The filing fee is so small that it’s worth putting in a complaint just to muddy the legal waters. I know a process server who’s cleaning up.”
“Thanks. I’ll have to let Library know and see if there’s something we can do to stop it,” I said. “So what’s your business idea?”
“Tourism.”
“You’ve got a bit of competition there, Bob. Promoting inter-species tourism has been the main business of the League for the last fifty million years, give or take.”
“I’m talking about intra-species tourism,” he said. “Keeping it secret using your portal in the basement.”
“You want to compete with the airlines?” I asked, looking at him the way that eBeth and Sue look at me when I say something stupid. “Do you picture me standing around the Tokyo airport, saying, ‘Hey, buddy. Want a cheap trip to America?’ Aside from the fact that my team members and I are the only ones who can work this portal, it operates independently of the regular portal system. It’s only good for reaching worlds with an observer team—”
“Now you get it,” the lieutenant said as he watched my expression change. “I imagine that there are quite a few people on Reservation who would like to see the old country. From what you’ve said, it’s been a couple thousand years for most of them.”
For a moment, the potential almost overwhelmed me. Humans on Reservation had no practical way of reaching Earth. League citizens accessed the public portals with crystals that also served as unique identifiers, allowing Library to properly route transfers and keep track of everybody’s whereabouts. Earthlings hadn�
�t been issued crystals yet because it was an expensive undertaking and the national governments had no interest in paying. The portals on Earth were all linked to the same waystation where temporary crystals were issued to travelers for a small fee and a large deposit.
“How did you think that up?” I asked the lieutenant.
“Sitting on this barstool and watching the TV experts desperately trying to say intelligent things about places they’ve never even visited. There’s a guy on that channel—who am I thinking of, Donovan?”
“The wormy guy who’s always talking about tentacles?”
“Yeah, him.”
The bartender scratched his head. “I just think of him as the wormy guy who’s always talking about tentacles.”
“The point is—what was I talking about?”
“Bringing in tourists from Reservation,” I told him. “I’ll have to discuss it with the rest of my team. I think a couple of them are trying really hard to keep their noses clean this time, and we’re talking about a pretty big violation of our employment terms.”
“Take a good look around the storeroom before you head back,” the lieutenant suggested. “I’m going to start making contacts with travel agencies to see what kind of packages we can offer. From what you’ve told me, I think that Greece and the Middle East will be popular destinations.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said, and finished off my Coke before standing. “Thanks for the drink, Bob. I can’t believe how much I used to complain about the radio frequency noise on this world. Living on Reservation for six months with no input beyond what my eyes and ears could bring in almost drove me nuts.”
“When are you going to take me there for a visit?” he asked.
“That would be a bit tricky right now, but I promise you’ll be the first.”
My new shipment of custom slide rules was right where the lieutenant said they would be, and following his suggestion, I popped my head in the storeroom to see how he was managing things. I didn’t see any of the standard brand names from the restaurant supply business on the boxes, so I started taking a closer look at the labels.
Half of the boxes in the storeroom had been shipped to one or another of my team members, which meant they had all been sneaking through the portal and placing orders over the Internet. I peeked at the packing list on a box addressed to Sue and discovered that she was risking her neck for baking supplies. Oh well, the least I could do was carry it home for her.
I took the back stairs down from the closet portal to the kitchen and dropped off the smuggled ingredients. My active sensor suite warned me that there were late night guests in the dining room, so I wasn’t surprised to find Art sitting at The Eatery’s bar waiting for me. I was, however, bowled over to find that the four Originals sitting in a line were identical twins, or quadruplets, whatever the proper term might be.
“Art,” I spoke in their general direction as I slid in behind the bar. “Can I get you the usual?”
One of them held up all three fingers on one hand and the middle finger on the other. I chose to interpret it as a counting technique and began pulling four ales from the tap.
“To what do I owe the honor of this visit?” I asked as I delivered the first tankard.
“We need to talk,” the one I assumed was Art printed on a slate. Then he opened his mouth and made that loud static noise that tickled the edges of my spectrum analyzer. On a hunch, I offered an audible carrier signal of my own, and within a fraction of a second, he matched it, and then began modulating his tone with a simple binary code that I easily resolved into English.
I see you’ve lifted your ban on radio frequency communications, Art sent. Is this form of communications acceptable to you?
I’d prefer straight RF without the audible tone if you can manage it, I replied, all the while thinking that I’d run into some odd sentients in my life, but these Originals took the cake.
For a while, he replied on the low AM radio band. It’s a bit tricky in this body.
You’re wearing an encounter suit? That would explain a lot of things.
No, this is my body, or rather, these are my body. Part of it. I have a few hundred more iterations wandering around the area.
A naturally occurring hive mind? Listen, I know that you aren’t native to this planet.
When did I say I was? We’re here on vacation.
You’re going to confuse me if you swap back and forth between first person singular and plural, I warned him.
I’m not the only one of my kind here, Art said. All of us are occupying multiple bodies due to storage constraints. I imagine you have the same problem with the artificial form you’re wearing.
It was a tight squeeze, I replied, a bit embarrassed that I was able to fit my life experience into the available capacity. Are you claiming to be artificial intelligence?
Gee, what tipped you off? Art inquired acerbically, and his clones elbowed each other like schoolboys.
You aren’t League citizens, I hazarded a guess, at the same time putting out munchies for the clones as I recalled Art’s fondness for salt. To my surprise, two of the clones went for the dried fish and the one on the end took a pickled egg. The Original who I now thought of as the real Art stuck with the home-made pretzels.
We’ve been observing your League ever since Library started slapping up portal routes all over the place. Our own expansionary phase is long behind us, and taken on the whole, you seemed to be a harmless enough group of sentients. We decided to employ watchful waiting.
Why the distributed biological forms? I couldn’t help asking. I can’t even imagine the bandwidth constraints you’re functioning under. How do you get any work done?
Vacation, he reminded me, as his clones continued to make inroads on my snacks. Have you ever transferred your consciousness into a biological form?
I’m not sure we have the technology, it’s not my specialty, I admitted. I suppose it’s only fair I inform you that I’m just a youngster by our standards.
Give me credit for some brains, even if they’re spread out and functioning slowly, Art said. In the interest of fairness, I should tell you that I am older than your League.
I began refilling tankards for the thirsty clones while taking a little time to think. Art was claiming to be effectively immortal, which is a given for artificial intelligence that doesn’t self-terminate or get itself killed, but I’d never even heard of AI occupying a real biological form before. What were the clones cloned from? Was there a species out there that happened to offer a convenient infrastructure for mind transfers, and if so, what happened to the original owners of the bodies? Had they been engineered from scratch?
Let me answer the questions which you have no doubt formulated by now and then we’ll get to why I’m sitting here tonight, Art transmitted. The body I am occupying and its clones are the result of guided evolution. The project was underway before your League was formed, and the species that resulted is perfectly viable in its own environment and is unaware of our existence. When their bodies met our design goals for interoperability, we harvested a few cells from mature members and grew clones. As you can guess, those lab-grown bodies have no memories or guiding intelligence, making them ideal vessels for conscience transference.
But why go to all of the trouble?
We want to learn magic, Art replied simply.
But AI is fundamentally incompatible with magic, I argued. You can’t simply dispose of logic and causality and still hope to hold onto both sentience and sanity. The greatest artificial intelligences in the League all agree.
Two of the clones snorted and the one on the end spit some ale after swallowing it the wrong way.
Thank you for your learned opinion, but we’ve been studying this issue for much longer than your Library and our conclusion was that technology is the issue. Magic is a living force, and as such, it can only be conjured by other living things. You are a sentient being occupying an encounter suit but you are not alive.
&nb
sp; That’s a matter of opinion, I muttered.
Don’t take it personally, Art said. You wanted to know why a number of my kind have taken on biological forms and the answer is that we wanted to be alive in order to learn magic.
And how’s that working out for you? I asked, still smarting over being told that my life didn’t count as such.
Not great, Art admitted, and all four of the clones paused and polished off their drinks. For a moment I thought I’d offended them and they were going to leave, but they all pushed their tankards forward for another refill. We’ve made some progress, but it’s painfully slow, in part because the low bandwidth of our distributed forms limits our higher cognitive processes to a crawl. We realized too late that we should have acquired magical teaching aides before starting on this quest.
You can’t mean that you transferred into these bodies and you’re stuck here, I transmitted as I began refilling tankards for a third round. If the clones all drank like this, I’d have to convince Art to bring more of them the next time.
Of course not. But those of us who embarked on this proof of concept made a minor misjudgment about the passage of time in biological form.
You’re dying? I guessed immediately. A small dried fish hit the side of my face and I spun around to see who had thrown it, but the two fish-eating clones pointed at each other and I had to let it pass.
We’re bored, Art said. If the Ferrymen hadn’t brought the Earthlings here to entertain us, I don’t know how we would have lasted this long.