Quarus (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 6)

by S J MacDonald

  ‘No,’ Alex agreed, with a grin. The Diplomatic Corps wore formal suits for air-encounters and thick, helmeted diving gear for going underwater. The swim suits provided for the Fourth bore a strong resemblance to their shipboard rig; close fitting overalls in Fourth’s grey with all the usual insignia. The key difference was that they were attached to the same kind of gloves as survival suits, which shrank to fit the wearer, and similar feet with a safe-grip sole. The neck, too, was a watertight seal, and as the suit itself was waterproof, pressure resistant and temperature controlled, it was dry, warm and comfortable. The mask adjusted itself automatically from shallow water breathing to a high pressure helmet, as required, and was barely visible. ‘Silvie and Shion designed it between them,’ Alex explained.

  ‘It’s good,’ said Othol, which was not a comment on the style of it but on the practicality and how comfortable Alex felt.

  ‘Excellent,’ Alex agreed, but his eyes had been drawn back to the mesmerising gaze of Marteyl.

  ‘What do you want to see first?’ she asked, and gave a trill of laughter before he could answer. ‘You can’t see everything first!’ she pointed out. ‘You have to choose!’

  It was almost impossible. He understood that they would take him wherever he wanted to go, show him whatever he wanted to see. And there was so much! The gardens around him were so spectacular in themselves that he would have loved to spend the rest of the day exploring them. But the city spread out before him, too, with all its intriguing buildings. What did he want to see most? Industry? Bioengineering? Cultural centres? Their homes?

  All of it, was the only honest answer. All of it and more. He wanted to see everything there was to be seen.

  ‘I can’t!’ he admitted frankly. ‘It’s overwhelming. Help!’ He was laughing, but sincere. ‘Take me to what you think are the most interesting things for a visitor to see, yes?’

  They conferred. It was fascinating to see in itself. In the nature of things, since Silvie was alone amongst them, Alex had only seen instances of quarians achieving consensus on training holos. They, as he’d always recognised, only showed half the picture as they couldn’t begin to convey the subtle empathic exchange which was such an essential part of quarian communication. Now it happened right there and he found that he could sense it, too, as strongly as he was aware of Silvie’s feelings when they were talking. Marteyl had a strong, motherly feeling of taking him under her wing and ensuring that he had a safe, happy time with them. That came across very clearly when she made her suggestion.

  ‘The gardens – some music?’

  Alex recognised that if she had her way they would have a gentle swim around the gardens so that he could be shown the pretty corals and allowed to pay with the safer creatures, and that there would then be some kind of musical performance put on for his benefit – a gentle introduction to their world.

  ‘We should go in,’ said Aleth. He himself was a visitor here and it was apparent that he felt he knew just what another visitor would like to see – the most beautiful buildings, special features of the city. If they went with his suggestion, Alex realised, he would be whisked around the city on a rapid sightseeing tour.

  ‘The engines,’ said Othol, and Alex caught a mental image of immense, fascinating technology. Othol was sure that as a starship captain he would be most interested in seeing their tech, and Othol was right. With his choices effectively reduced to three, Alex found that the decision made itself. As pleasant as it would be to browse about the gardens, and enjoyable to blitz about the city seeing as much of it as he could cope with, the suggestion which kindled instant enthusiasm in him was Othol’s. He did not need to express that in any way. Even as his eyes sparked with hope, all three of them laughed – consensus achieved.

  ‘This way, then,’ said Othol, and they set off swimming.

  The next two hours were amongst the happiest of Alex’s life. They took him first to a power plant, one of four which supplied the city with its needs. Alex had thirty two atomic units on his ship, any one of which could have supplied the power needs of Ewern and two other cities beside. Those units were so compact that one person could carry them about easily.

  Ewern’s power plants, however, were enormous. They were great turbines driven by the ocean currents, like giant fans laid down at an angle on the sea floor. The turbine hall itself was the size of a spaceport hangar, full of strange machines, the roar of water under high pressure and the buzz of electro-magnets.

  It was a wonder and a marvel to Alex, though not perhaps in the way that Othol had anticipated.

  ‘It’s like stepping into ancient history,’ Alex said, standing in the turbine hall and gazing about in profound amazement. ‘My people used power generation like this back in the Dark Ages.’

  They took no offence at that. They would have found it far more offensive if he’d tried to be tactful.

  ‘We prefer it,’ Othol said. ‘It’s very safe, clean and easy.’

  Alex was reminded vividly of a project he’d attempted at home after his parents had bought him a science kit for his birthday. With the best of intentions, he had proposed setting up a solar panel on the roof, a wind turbine in the garden and a hydroelectric turbine in the drain so that his parents could have ‘free electricity’. There had, he recalled, been extensive discussion of the safety issues involved with him attempting to rewire the house’s mains supply, the legality of such a procedure under Novaterran law and the fact that his little kit generators could in no way supply the needs of the household before he had agreed not to attempt it. It had been – yes, he remembered. His ninth birthday.

  This technology, though on a vastly bigger scale, was exactly the same. Easy, yes. Safe, clean, needing hardly any supervision and next to no maintenance.

  ‘Nobody needs to work here,’ Marteyl pointed out. ‘The turbines just run themselves. They broadcast a request for assistance if there are any problems, but that’s very unusual.’

  ‘And the biggest problem it can have, the worst catastrophe possible, is that it stops working,’ said Othol. ‘And you can’t say the same for your atomic plants, can you?’

  Alex opened his mouth to defend the safety of the kind of generators humans preferred, and stopped. True enough, atomic hydrogen generators were considered very safe and so stacked with safety cut-outs that it was said to be virtually impossible for them to overload. On the other hand, humans considered it necessary to have them under constant supervision with manual shut-down if required, they did need frequent checks and maintenance and there had been a couple of tragic incidents, put down ultimately to human error, which had left cratered wasteland. The worst case scenario, here, could take out half the city. They had a point, Alex recognised. The turbines were undeniably safer, a great deal less time consuming and extremely cheap to run. It just felt weird to see such primitive power production on a world which he knew to be, in several ways, more technologically advanced than his own.

  And that became evident, too, when Othol took him to see an agricultural plant.

  Alex had never seen anything like it. And since he was the first visitor to Quarus to be taken to see the inside of such a plant, he was in fact the first human being ever to see how the quarians manufactured their food.

  ‘It is very simple,’ Marteyl assured him, with some concern as she saw how bewildered he was when they first went into the plant. ‘Robots harvest and deliver ingredients to the hoppers over there.’ The ‘hoppers’ were the size of three storey houses. There were about two hundred of them. Robot drones were passing through an airlock, carrying circular bags each of which was, itself, about the size of an aircar. These were deposited through hatchways on the upper surface of the hoppers. Alex couldn’t see what they contained but there was a ripe seaweed smell. ‘Then the ingredients are processed…’ she indicated the enormous tangle of tubes, vats and incomprehensible machinery which filled a space nearly as large as the interior of the Heron, ‘and are produced as food, which other robots take to wher
e it’s wanted.’

  Alex stood silent, gazing at it all. He’d once been taken on a school trip to a food factory – a required experience common to the education systems on nearly all League worlds – and remembered being totally unimpressed by it. The factory had taken in already processed nutrients and turned them out as the kind of ready meals on which Novaterrans lived. Alex recalled being disappointed, having in some way expected that actual trucks full of grains and vegetables would have been involved. It was a disappointment to see that crops had already been reduced to a chemical-enriched mush before being re-formed into perfect mini-vegetable shapes.

  Here, though, was something like the factory he had imagined; harvested crops going through a fantastic array of pipes and mysterious machines to emerge at the other end as edible product.

  ‘What are they making?’ he asked, gazing up at something which bore some resemblance to a particle accelerator.

  The three of them looked at him in perplexity.

  ‘Food?’ they said, together, which made him grin.

  ‘Yes, I know, but what kind?’ He looked back at them and there was a moment in which it was apparent that they were just not understanding one another at all. He was just on the verge of acknowledging that, recognising it as the exodiplomatic Wall and pulling back with the automatic rescue of ‘It doesn’t matter, it isn’t important’ when Othol realised what he meant.

  ‘Whatever people want,’ he said. ‘When you order whatever food you want, the factory makes it. Doesn’t it work like that on your worlds?’

  Alex shook his head. It was beyond him to begin to explain the process by which companies competed for customers, producing their own range of foodstuffs, because that would involve trying to explain an economic system which even Silvie was only just starting to get her head around. She had told him that people on Quarus could order whatever food they wanted and it would just be delivered, but Alex hadn’t understood the reality of that until he stood there watching it happen.

  ‘Anything?’ he queried, still trying to grasp the scale of the thing.

  ‘Anything the factory can make, yes.’ Othol said, and the others chimed in too, eager to help him understand.

  ‘There are lots of things that people eat all the time, particular favourites,’ Aleth told him. ‘But you can create new dishes if you want, just tell the system exactly what it is you want, and it will be made for you. Our food is only harvested and made to order, so it’s efficient, no waste.’

  Alex knew that they would not have to pay for whatever they ordered. There was no money economy here. Housing, power, food, healthcare, whatever people needed was provided. If a decision was made by the community that they needed to build a new food plant, then they would do so, obtaining all necessary materials and skills from the social generosity of the region. If there were limited resources and more than one project which needed undertaking, consensus would be reached on which had the higher priority, and that would be that.

  ‘There’s nothing to be scared of, Alex,’ Marteyl assured him, with a concerned look.

  ‘I’m not…’ he started automatically, then corrected himself with a wry look. ‘A little unnerved, perhaps,’ he admitted, and gazed about him again. ‘This is beyond us. In theory I guess we could integrate processing into a made-to-order facility, but the idea of that whole system being so responsive all the way through that products are harvested only when an order is put in, that’s… no, we couldn’t make that work on any practicable scale.’ He gazed around again, awed. ‘Does this feed the whole city?’

  They laughed.

  ‘No, there are eighteen of these plants,’ Othol told him.

  Alex did some rapid mental maths. ‘So this feeds… about seventy two thousand people?’

  ‘They can each cater for up to a hundred thousand,’ Othol answered. ‘So there is spare capacity for visitors and times when one of the plants may be out of action.’ He could see Alex’s wondering fascination, and began pointing out to him some of the processing systems. Some were familiar enough, like the ovens and freeze-dry facilities, but others were complex processes beyond Alex’s limited knowledge of biochemistry.

  ‘He isn’t understanding,’ Marteyl observed, seeing Alex’s keen attention blurring into bafflement. ‘The best thing,’ she decided, ‘is to show you.’

  She drew a line in the air with one finger and a holographic screen dropped down as if from a hanging bar. Alex had seen that technology on holos but it was impressive to see in real life. To Marteyl and the others, clearly, this was absolutely mundane, a perfectly routine comms facility they expected to be able to use anywhere on their world. It made the wristcoms and hardware-based tech of human worlds look clumsy. Remembering those monstrous pre-atomic turbines, Alex could only marvel at the bewildering combination of such primitive and such advanced technologies.

  ‘You’d like to try some of our food, yes?’ Marteyl said, and it was more a comment than a question.

  ‘I’d love to,’ Alex affirmed. ‘As long as it’s not bloodweed or a plankton sandwich.’

  Once they’d stopped laughing and promised that they wouldn’t offer him anything unpleasant, there was a brief conference which concluded that the best thing for him to try would be a simple, everyday dish, very popular in the city at the moment as the main ingredient had recently come into season.

  ‘It’s called a Tarlatto salad,’ Marteyl informed him. ‘Shellfish on a salad of sea vegetables.’

  Alex just looked at her eloquently and she gave another trill of laughter.

  ‘Just the salad, then.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Alex was prepared to be adventurous in eating offworld food, and could maintain a rigidly courteous demeanour even when swallowing the most nauseating stuff, too, should duty require. But quarians would see through that at once. ‘I might,’ he offered valiantly, ‘be able to cope with a piece of fish so long as it hasn’t got a head or bones or anything like that.’

  That had them laughing for quite a while, which he took in good part, recognising that his squeamish sensibilities made no sense at all to them.

  ‘Just a salad,’ Marteyl assured him, and they giggled again at Alex’s relief. ‘We’d better make it a tiny portion,’ Marteyl added, surveying Alex appraisingly. ‘Humans have such a very slow metabolism.’

  There were seven kinds of vegetable in the salad, each of them processed in different ways. Between them, the quarians pointed out the various vats and the main routes through the processes which the main ingredients were taking. Alex gathered that he didn’t actually have to wait for the ingredients to be harvested – they would be taken from the hoppers straight away and the harvesting drones instructed to replace them. The time it would take for the salad to be delivered was therefore determined by the longest of the processes, which would take several minutes.

  ‘The kelt goes through six processes,’ Othol told him. ‘It’s washed, chopped, steamed, chilled and passed into a high pressure digester with enzymes which break down the cellulose. Finally, for this recipe, it is passed through rollers which press and cut it into fine ribbons.’

  As they talked, they were walking him through the factory, leading him over to the area where processed ingredients were brought together to create the ordered dishes. There wasn’t much to see there, though, beyond a row of bus-sized machines with a great many tubes going into them and delivery bots popping out the other end. These, Alex noted, came out in water-filled tubes and were shot at high speed out beyond the unit’s walls.

  The one bringing Alex’s salad promptly brought it back into the factory for them, following the ‘find me’ instruction Marteyl had given it. Alex was almost more interested in the drone than he was in the food. He knew already that Quarus relied on robotics far more than any human world. Humans tended to use either large scale robotic systems in factories or very small ones, domestically, like the mouse-sized autobots which crept about cleaning floors and surfaces. Medium sized service robots came into fashion
here and there every now and again but the fad would die out within a few years. There was something about that scale of robot which most people found to be uncomfortable after a while. A giant car-making robot was clearly no more than a machine. So were the little autobots which trundled about cleaning floors and tables. In between that, though, robots which were between the size of small dogs and a little larger than people, they tended to be anthropomorphic. People weren’t quite sure whether to treat them as machines, or pets, or what, and the more the manufacturers tried to give them appealing personalities, the more uncomfortable people became having them in their homes. For many people it began to feel exploitative, like slavery, while for others there was an equally disturbing sense of the machine invading and taking over.

  That had never been an issue on Quarus, where robots were never given faces or personalities and never seen in any way as any kind of alive; they were less alive than seaweed, after all. So robots were everywhere, here, in many shapes and sizes and performing myriad functions.

  These, basic carrier bots, were rather like turtles, though limbless and covered in rainbow scales. The one which brought Alex’s salad made the transition from water to air without hesitation, as with all quarian tech, moving seamlessly from aqua jets to grav-lift. It cruised up to Marteyl at waist height, hovered in front of her and uncoiled its brightly coloured dome. No beep, Alex noted, no computer voice announcing the delivery, no display of any kind. You had ordered food and the food was there, why would you need any further communication?

  Marteyl took out the dish it contained and the bot promptly scooted away. Humans, Alex reflected, would not have been able to resist the temptation to make it say something like ‘Enjoy your meal!’ in a bright and cheery manner even though the designers themselves had to know how irritating that was. Quarians, though, didn’t expect bots to talk to them any more than they expected conversation from chairs.

  Marteyl put the plate in front of Alex and there was another outburst of mirth as she let it go in mid-air and he tried, instinctively, to catch it. Even as he realised that it wasn’t actually falling, the quarians burst out laughing.