Tyrant's Test

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  “Master Lobot, are you certain that you wish to do this?” Threepio asked in a familiarly anxious tone. “Are you confident that the risk is justified? Given our present circumstances, and the alarming frequency with which warships seem to attack this vessel—”

  “I’m certain,” Lobot said. “The deeper we go into the core, the more it feels like an obstacle standing between me and the ship. When my shoulders brushed both sides at the same time, it felt like the ship was inviting me to shed the suit. I can’t explain this in acceptable terms, but I think I must do this to find what I am looking for.”

  “I see, sir,” said Threepio. “Artoo, are you still monitoring the air in this passage?”

  “The air is fine, Threepio,” Lobot said, patting the droid on the top of his head. “I am fine. I am simply following a hunch.”

  “Oh, dear,” Threepio fretted.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Very well, Master Lobot—since you asked, I shall tell you,” said Threepio. “If you’ll pardon my saying so, sir, Master Lando’s influence on your habits of thought is becoming manifest at the worst possible time.”

  “What influence would that be?”

  “Why, his unhealthy psychological dependence on the teleological self-deceptions of a gambler, sir—hunches, lucky streaks, wish fulfillment, feelings of entitlement, and the other trappings of magical thinking,” Threepio said. “I have come to regard you as an unusually practical and rational individual—for a human being.”

  “Thank you,” Lobot said. “But what makes you think that Lando ever really gambles?”

  “Sir, I have heard Master Han speak of it many times. I believe that Master Lando even considered himself a professional gambler during one period of his life.”

  “That’s true,” said Lobot. “And no one hates trusting to chance and fate more than a professional gambler. You’ve misread Lando all along, Threepio.”

  “Sir, I do not understand.”

  “Think about this, then—maybe it will help,” said Lobot, discarding the last piece of his contact suit. “When a human being—a sentient being—faces a question for which there is no known right answer, a decision for which there’s no obvious right choice, he will almost always end up following what feels right. The logician will construct one kind of justification, the magician another, but at the moment of choosing, the two are more alike than they are different.”

  “I see, sir. Thank you. But I do not believe a droid is capable of truly understanding a process that is so fundamentally subjective.”

  “No?” asked Lobot, raising an eyebrow. “Then tell me, what was going through your circuits when you grabbed that beckon call away from Lando and signaled Lady Luck? Were you doing the logical thing, or what you felt was the right thing?”

  “I am not entirely certain, sir.”

  “Good,” said Lobot approvingly. “I suggest you think on that a while, too. You may find it has something to do with the questions you asked me in chamber twenty-one. Now, let’s get going.”

  A few hundred twisting meters further, the passages narrowed still tighter, to the point where Lobot could barely wriggle through, and Artoo could not.

  “Go back to where we dropped off the grid and my suit and wait for me there,” Lobot said. “Artoo, the link I’ve been using to access your event log and memory registers—can you make it bidirectional, so Lando will know what happened to me if I don’t come back? Maybe you could isolate one of my transmit channels.”

  Artoo chirped reassuringly and relayed his assent over the link.

  “Master Lobot, may I say something before you leave?”

  “Quickly.”

  “It is possible that there is no command center as you envision it.”

  “I don’t have anything ‘envisioned.’”

  “I mean to say that rule-based logic can be encoded very compactly. My own language processors contain the equivalent of more than eight times ten to the twelfth decision trees, all within a space of approximately five cubic centimeters.”

  “And the giant dewback lizards of Tatooine have a neural cluster smaller than the brain of a newborn human. Yes, I understand your point,” Lobot said, looking back at the droids. “But I am not looking for the vagabond’s bridge, or its brain. I could easily miss those, or fail to recognize them. I am looking for its threshold of awareness, and it will know when I have found it.”

  Lando lingered in the auditorium as long as the question of whether the vagabond could heal its great wounds hung in the balance.

  In the beginning, a thin band of new material appeared around the edges of each opening in the hull. The smaller opening forward continued to close, just as Lando had seen demonstrated at the airlock. But for a long time, it seemed as though nothing was happening at the larger wound, as if the process had somehow stalled.

  Before giving up, Lando moved to a portal on the other side of the chamber. From there, the beam from his chest lamp revealed that the entire opening had skinned over with what looked like the same sort of transparent material he was peering through.

  That discovery held him there, even though it again seemed for the longest time as if nothing was happening. He remembered how when they had first boarded the vagabond, he had been able to see Lady Luck’s floodlights through the wall of the airlock.

  That should have told me something, he thought. Like shining a lantern through your hand. I should have been thinking organic right from the first. But we thought the genetic sequence was just some engineer’s idea of a clever little code.

  His eyes kept expecting the gossamer transparency to be momentarily transformed into solid bulkhead, just as the transparency in the auditorium went from one state to the other in a matter of seconds. But instead, a lattice of opaque material appeared first, echoing the crisscross pattern he had seen in the stringers in the interspace. Then, finally, each individual section of the lattice began to close over.

  That was when Lando tried to leave, feeling as though he had witnessed an exhibition of Qella ingenuity more impressive than the lost orrery.

  “Lobot, where are you now?” he called over the suit’s comlink, to no reply. “The hull breaches are nearly repaired—I’m heading back. Lobot?” He switched to the secondary comm channel and repeated the call, with the same result.

  Returning to the primary channel, he heard a voice he did not expect to hear: “—I would be glad to relay a message to him.”

  “Threepio, what are you doing on Lobot’s comlink? What’s going on there?”

  “Pardon me, Master Lando, but Master Lobot left his contact suit in our keeping.”

  “You mean he’s gone off by himself? Where is he? Where did he go?”

  “He said he was seeking the threshold of awareness,” said Threepio. “I’m quite sure I don’t know what that means.”

  “Where are you, then? Is Artoo with you?”

  “We are somewhere in the vagabond’s inner core,” said Threepio. “Artoo says that if you return to chamber two-twenty-nine, he can direct you to us from there.”

  “I’ll be there in three minutes.”

  But Lando had crossed through only two chambers when the portal ahead of him closed as he approached it. Turning, he saw the portal behind him had closed at the same time. Neither would respond to his touch. The portals to the interspace and the core were equally recalcitrant. He was sealed in.

  “Threepio, is anything happening there? All of a sudden, the express lanes out here are closed.”

  The only reply was a burst of white-noise static. Then the ship groaned, deep and long. The chamber shuddered around Lando.

  “Blast,” Lando said, his eyes searching the boundaries of his prison. “They’re back.”

  The groaning continued, and the shaking grew worse. The glow-rings around the portals dimmed and disappeared. In the darkness, Lando was thrown against the face of the chamber.

  She’s turning fast this time—the propulsion system, whatever it is, is back
online.

  “Propulsion—stang! No, please, don’t try it,” Lando implored the ship. “Not after taking hits like those—”

  The vagabond paid him no mind. Moments later, with the roaring growl and violent shaking at a terrifying peak, the vessel twisted realspace until it opened, then fell through infinity’s door.

  Twenty-seven hours after she had taken custody of the Qella remains, Joi Eicroth hand-delivered a stack of three datacards containing the cadaver’s genetic sequences to Admiral Drayson at his home on the north shore of Victory Lake.

  Drayson’s face was haggard and his greeting embrace distracted. “I expected you to transmit the sequences to me in a secure packet.” He rubbed his eyes. “I expected it several hours ago, in fact.”

  “That was before we knew how extensive the sequences are. It would have taken me nearly as long to encode and transmit the report as it did to fly down here,” she said, moving past him into the grand parlor. “And I wouldn’t have gotten to see you again.”

  A tired smile making a bid to reach his lips, Drayson followed her. “You’re saying that you found something surprising?”

  “Very,” she said. “What species was that creature, Hiram? I would love to know more about its ethology and ecological niche.”

  “I have a small research team looking into that right now,” said Drayson. “I hope to be able to share their findings with you soon. What was the surprise? Something about the amount of genetic material?”

  She settled in a reclining chair facing the parlor’s lakeview transparency. “It’s that exactly,” she said. “This species has three—at least three—different types of cells that contain genetic material. The ordinary somatic cells have sixty-two chromosomes—”

  “That’s on the high side, isn’t it?” asked Drayson, settling on a small padded bench nearby. “Go on.”

  “Yes, it is. But that’s the smaller part of the whole,” she said. “This species has two other kinds of genetic material as well, in two different structures located in two different parts of their bodies.

  “I call them code capsules, because they’re encapsulated in a solid protein coat. There are billions of these capsules in that carcass. I almost mistook them for a massive parasitic infection—that’s why I started looking at them in the first place.”

  “How big are the capsules?”

  “Big. About the size of the biggest crystals of silicon dioxide out on your beach,” she said. “But the same oval shape as the creature’s torso. It took me five hours just to figure out how to extract them from their tubules and break through the protein coat without destroying the contents. The contents turned out to be nearly solid genetic material.” She gestured at the datacards. “Your DNA and mine together wouldn’t fill one of those. I barely got the creature’s genome to fit on three of them.”

  Drayson stared down at the objects in his hand. “This is one copy? I thought you were doing the triplicate thing.”

  “One copy. As near as I could tell, almost five percent of the creature’s body weight is genetic material. That’s unprecedented.”

  “What does it need with all that?”

  “That’s a good question,” she said. “I don’t know. I do know that it’s far more than information theory says would be necessary to specify and construct a organism of the size and complexity of the one you brought me.”

  “How much more?”

  She squinted as she thought. “Maybe two hundred times too much.”

  “Which means what?”

  “I don’t know,” she said with a shrug. “The context is missing. Maybe when your team reports—”

  “Speculate, please.”

  Eicroth frowned. “Well, there’s a lot of old biological history in our chromosomes, in the form of inactive genes. Maybe this is something similar, but covering a much longer history or a more convoluted evolutionary path.”

  “Any other ideas?”

  “One kind of weird one,” she said, showing a self-effacing smile. “Maybe it’s because I started off with the idea that these code capsules were parasites, but I keep wondering what good they are to the organism itself. The protein coat just about ensures that they’re inert. I also wonder how they’re passed on to offspring. The virus analogy is tempting—likewise for mitochondria.”

  “If you had to guess—”

  “If I had to guess, I’d say it almost looks like this species carries a giant catalog of spare genetic blueprints around inside itself.”

  “Blueprints for what?”

  “I don’t know. There’s a kinship in the genetic sequences—something recognizable as kin, anyway. Biochemically, there’d be a family resemblance.”

  “What about the analogy to the Fw’Sen?” Drayson asked. “Don’t they mate only once, before they’re sexually mature?”

  “You mean, could these be retained fertilized eggs? I don’t think so. The capsule tubules are completely separate from the somatic-cell reproductive anatomy.” She shook her head. “It’s very odd, and I don’t pretend to understand it.”

  Nodding, Drayson stood. “I have to go do something with this,” he said, holding up the datacards. “Will you stay?”

  Her smile brightened. “If my boss is willing to wait a little longer for the results of the dissection.”

  “I’ll have a word with him,” Drayson said. “Look, I’ll be downstairs for a little while with this—get yourself something to eat if you haven’t had a chance.”

  “When’s the last time you ate?”

  He shook his head. “I’ve had no appetite.”

  Eicroth knew better than to ask the reason. “I’ll see if I can find something for two,” she said, reaching for his hand and giving it a squeeze. “Come on back up when you can.”

  The instant that Lady Luck left hyperspace, its slave circuits relinquished control.

  “That isn’t supposed to happen,” Pakkpekatt said, showing teeth and hissing.

  His companion on the yacht’s flight deck was Bijo Hammax. “What’s supposed to happen?”

  Agent Pleck appeared at the hatchway. “The usual arrangement for a hyperspace beckon call is for the responding ship to ping the signaling unit when it jumps in,” he said. “The beckon call sends a local reference signal, and the ship follows it to the location of the transmitter. If the beckon call sends a wave-off instead, the responding ship should jump out again immediately.”

  “And we’re just sitting here?” said Hammax. “Maybe we were stood up.”

  “Contact sweep,” said Pakkpekatt.

  “Coming up,” Hammax said, turning to the displays at his station. “Something out there.”

  “A more detailed analysis would be considerably more useful,” Pakkpekatt said.

  “Something big,” said Hammax. “A lot bigger than we are. Look, this isn’t where I work. Pleck, maybe you’d better take the number-two position.”

  Pleck slid into the seat as Hammax vacated it. “Contact is capital, type three,” Pleck read off the board.

  “Too small,” said Pakkpekatt.

  “Range to contact, two thousand meters.”

  “Two thousand—stang, we’re right on top of it,” Hammax said, whirling toward the viewport. “We ought to be able to see it bare-eyed. They can sure see us.” He dug into a storage bin for the laser cannon controller.

  “Contact is blacked out, cold, and adrift. No transponder,” Pleck said, then frowned. “A scatter of little stuff out there, too, same neighborhood. One floater that might be a body.”

  “Nothing that might be the vagabond?”

  Pleck shook his head. “If she was here, she’s gone.”

  “The same is not necessarily true of General Calrissian,” Pakkpekatt said. “We’ll go in for a look. Agent Taisden, please stand ready with your recorders.”

  Lady Luck crept toward the wreck of Gorath as though wary of waking the dead. At five hundred meters, Pakkpekatt called for the bow lights, and a great metal corpse suddenly appeared before the
m.

  “Strike-class,” said Pakkpekatt.

  “Or used to be,” said Hammax. “She’s all stove in.”

  “This doesn’t match what we saw at Gmar Askilon,” said Pleck, studying the spectral display. “This is not the same weapon the vagabond used against D-Eighty-nine and Kauri. It doesn’t match anything in the database.”

  “I know,” said Pakkpekatt. His expression was unreadable, and remained so as he flew Lady Luck around the derelict at a distance of a hundred meters.

  Before the survey was complete, Hammax removed the targeting headset. “What would you expect to happen if the transmitter got toasted?” he asked, turning to the commander. “If Calrissian and his team were aboard—”

  “We need confirmation, Colonel Hammax, not speculation.”

  “That’s my job,” Hammax said, nodding. “I’ll go get suited up.”

  Taisden grunted in surprise. “Excuse me—Colonel Pakkpekatt, would you take a look at the comm queue, please?”

  Pakkpekatt spun his couch back toward the controls. “When did that show up?”

  “Just now,” said Taisden. “Is that your personal comm code, sir?”

  “No,” said Pakkpekatt. “How very interesting.”

  “What?” asked Hammax, leaning forward between the couches with a hand on the back of each.

  Taisden pointed. “A ready-to-transmit notice for a white-star dispatch, personal to the colonel.”

  “A notice that can be received only by a military-rated secure hypercomm,” said Pakkpekatt.

  “I thought we’d loaded one aboard,” said Hammax.

  “We did,” said Taisden. “This didn’t come over our gear. Calrissian apparently has a few more surprises tucked away under the service panels of this ship.”

  “There is something else,” said Pakkpekatt. “Look at the message size.”

  Hammax squinted. “That’s heavy lifting.”

  “It has to be a mistake. We should send back a verify request,” said Taisden. “Confirm the originating station, packet size, router. Or request a redirect to our own hypercomm transceiver.”

  “There is a simpler way to satisfy our curiosity,” said Pakkpekatt. “I would like the bridge to myself for a few moments. Colonel Hammax, I believe you were headed aft?”