Quarus

by S J MacDonald

  ‘Yes, I know, exodiplomacy is out there, by definition,’ Alex said. ‘But all the same, ‘My name is Trilopharus and I wish to be your friend?’ Really?’ He shook his head. ‘Altogether,’ he said, ‘the angel with the fanfares speaking perfect Standard and giving it the ‘I come in peace’ routine, no, really, I have to say I consider that has zero credibility. And the timing of it, too, I should have said, the timing and location – no hint of any kind of ship on any of our scopes, of course, and what are the odds that an exovisitor would come across us almost exactly when we’re half across the Gulf, or for that matter find me in my cabin, or for that matter address me by name. Honestly, Shion? I can’t believe for one second that that could have been genuine. But I’m willing to hear you out, of course, if you have other ideas.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’m thinking,’ she told him, ‘about Gide. There are points, I think, which should be considered. First, we know that they can see our ships from a very long way – that they can, in fact, observe them from Gide itself which is months over the border, so distance is not a factor in them being able to see and therefore locate our ships. Second, we know that they can project holographic representations of themselves in which they can see and experience the environment they are projected into in the same way as we do remote-access VR, yes? We don’t know exactly how they do it but it does look like some sort of exchange of data, a VR experience at their end and a holoprojection at the other. The Gider pop up like that all the time now on the Embassy III, and their ships may not even be visible on the big array there when they turn up on the ship, so the range of it is clearly beyond that of our own scopes. Third, we know that there is a race called the Chethari, and we know certain things about them. We know that they visit the Gider, we know that they have expressed curiosity about us, we know that they are also in communication with the Solarans and we know that they act in some manner as an intermediary between the Gider and the Solarans. We know that that is necessary because the Gider and Solarans don’t get on – not hostile of course but finding it almost impossible to communicate, with the Solarans being such a very slow people and the Gider so mercurial and fast. There is also a fundamental incompatibility of culture, as the Solarans are such a very solemn, serious people and the Gider are all about the fun and frivolity, hardly possible even for us to pin them down to any kind of serious discussion for more than ten seconds at a time. We also know that the Solarans are not happy with the Gider’s insatiable appetite for our movies and holovision which we know they find hilarious. And we know that the information pack passed out to other species by the Solarans is really not that helpful – I learned what I believed to be fluent League Standard from it myself and discovered when I arrived that I was speaking gobbledygook. The Gider, too, learned Standard from the Solaran guidebook which is why it took a little while for us to figure out what they were saying. But they are as fluent now as I am, and with a good grasp of idiom, too – smart people, the Gider. So the Chethari will know, too, that the Solaran guide isn’t very accurate or reliable, and if they’ve learned our language will be as fluent as the Gider are now. As for the fanfares, I would just draw your attention back to the fact that the Gider are mad about our movies, love them, can’t get enough – you yourself gave them a million-movie bundle as a greeting gift and that, I recall, made them so happy that they danced. They have more direct, factual information from the Diplomatic Corps, of course, but the current evaluation is that they are still obtaining the bulk of their information about us from movies and holovision. One of the references I have is of Gider visitors to the Embassy III greeting the Ambassador with ‘Howdy doody Doodlet’ which they’d picked up from a genre of teen-idiot movies. So if the Chethari are getting the bulk of their information second hand from the Gider, the B-movie fanfare becomes, contextually, more credible. Okay, marginally more credible,’ she conceded, as Alex gave her a sceptical look.

  ‘Infinitesimally, I’d have said, but go on.’

  Shion grinned. ‘Okay – flying into the realms of pure speculation, here, but I do wish you had a more accurate memory of exactly how that fanfare went. There is a high probability that the Gider have told the Chethari about us making contact with the mathematical signal – they obviously found that hilarious themselves and I don’t think it’s speculating too far to be pretty sure that they’ll have shared that joke.’

  She paused and knocked on the edge of the table in a rapid series Alex knew as intimately as his own heartbeat. He hadn’t devised it as such, merely adapted it from a very old handbook on first contact procedures issued to Excorps in the very earliest days of space exploration. In it, Excorps had been advised to indicate that they were intelligent beings by signalling mathematical constants or progressions which would be recognisable in any language. Alex had used a combination of two of the simplest mathematical progressions imaginable – squares and primes. The signal had consisted of pulses of square numbers, with the intervals between them rising in a sequence of prime numbers. It had taken several weeks of banging that signal out by hurling their ship at the Firewall before the Chethari picked it out from the background clamour, but as soon as they had spotted it they had known it was a purposeful signal directed at them and had come over at once to respond.

  ‘Anyway, I think it possible that either the Chethari have picked up the fanfare idea from movies and think a fanfare is appropriate for an important occasion or that it was in itself a mathematical progression which we might have analysed if we’d been able to record it, or maybe even a combination of both,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I wouldn’t dismiss what happened as exodiplomacy on the basis of the fanfare, or of the language, or of the trite nature of the ‘greeting, express a desire for friendship’ message, because it is frankly very difficult to do a first contact greeting without falling into the ‘we come in peace, we seek only friendship’ cliché. Anyway… moving on to why I think they came looking for you.

  ‘This bit is sensitive,’ she smiled wryly. ‘The Diplomatic Corps would rather this was not widely known, but the Gider, you know, hold you – okay, us – in very high esteem. You and me, specifically. You made first contact with them, you figured out how to do that. And when they compared what you did with the efforts being made by the Embassy III, their immediate conclusion was that you are a lot smarter than the guys on that ship. I’m not guessing, there, that is what they said. And what they’ve continued to say, too – I have many references for that, including one in which the ambassador was struggling to understand something and the Gider involved advised, ‘Get Alex to explain it to you.’’

  ‘Oh.’ Alex said, and having considered that. ‘Ouch.’

  ‘Yes – has to be said that they’re not huge fans of ours on the Embassy III,’ Shion said, with a grin which made Alex chuckle too.

  ‘Well, you know, understandable,’ he pointed out. ‘They’d been there for years doing everything they could to attract the Gider’s attention and we popped in with our mad head-banging stunt and did it in a few weeks. You can entirely understand how infuriating that is.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Shion agreed. ‘But the point is that there is now a standing policy at the Embassy III that whenever the Gider ask for your involvement they are to be told that, with regret, that cannot be because you are very busy elsewhere. And the Diplomatic Corps wouldn’t have put that in as standing policy unless it was a repeating request from the Gider. They ask after you, and I know that they are told in general terms where the Fourth is and what we are doing – they expressed keen interest, I gather, in the discovery of Carrearranis, though I only have first-reaction information in the latest updates from Korvold. But they will know, I guarantee that they will know, that we are on our way to Quarus. And it strikes me…’ she pulled up a star chart on a scale big enough to encompass the ovoid believed to define the space within the Firewall. It was not yet confirmed, and could not yet be confirmed, since the majority of that space was on the quarian side of the Gulf and League ships
had not even explored half of one per cent of it yet, but the shape of the Firewall identified so far did suggest a smooth ovoid perimeter. On that scale the Gulf was just a narrow wedge between the two galactic arms, and with a wider scale again it was apparent that the Firewall containment zone was itself hardly more than a bubble in the ocean of the huge spiral galaxy. ‘If you wanted to venture into our space,’ Shion pointed out, ‘without getting any closer to any of our worlds than you had to, this – right here in the middle of the Gulf – is the safest place to pick. And if you know that a ship is making its way from here, to here.’ She drew a line from Serenity to Quarus, ‘pretty straightforward, given an ability to see ships from months away, to intercept it at that safest point. So – pure speculation, of course, with no more than some indicative referencing, but I can envisage a situation in which, say, the Chethari ask the Gider for advice on how best to make first contact with us, and the Gider tell them that you are the best guy for that – and me, too, with all due modesty, the Gider do say that the only people they’ve been able to talk with properly are you and me, and even though they’ve learned our language now they still say it’s frustrating that our people are so very slow. So I can envisage a situation in which the Chethari ask for advice on how to make first contact and the Gider tell them ‘Go and see Alex, he’s smart, and Shion, she’s a great communicator, you’ll get on much better with them than the slow-bums at the Embassy, and they’re on their way to Quarus so you might meet them there, in the Gulf.’ As for finding you in your cabin – well, you remember, I’m sure, when we met the Gider and they asked us to identify the creatures they’d picked up in their scans of our ship.’

  ‘Yes, I remember,’ Alex affirmed. ‘They’d counted the dust mites. But honestly, Shion…’

  ‘I’m not saying it is,’ Shion said. ‘I’m just saying that I believe it is possible. On the wider scale, the fact that the Solarans have recently withdrawn from our space may have in some way triggered the Chethari into stepping up to take their place, I dunno, totally speculating, there, but it doesn’t seem impossible to me that the Chethari, who already act as intermediaries between the Gider and the Solarans, might be coming forward when our own relationship with the Solarans is obviously in some difficulties. It may even be that our discovery of Carrearranis could be a factor, the finding of a lost Olaret colony of just as much interest to them as it is to us and important too, perhaps, as they saw that we dealt with that with care and sensitivity, both in our quarantine procedures and respect for their culture. I may be unduly optimistic, but it seems to me that all these factors together may, may be sufficient to prompt the Chethari into attempting contact, and I do believe that it is possible that what you experienced was a holoprojection from a ship beyond our range.’

  ‘I can see your reasoning,’ Alex admitted. ‘Though I’d want to have a good look at your references and assign some weight of probabilities before I’d regard it as anything more than the most speculative kind of hypothesis. Nanotech, you know, is the obvious and near-certain probability.’

  ‘I’m not so convinced of that, myself,’ said Shion. ‘Though I understand, of course, that you will always weight higher probability to rational, known-science explanations. And if you will forgive me being so blunt, skipper, I wonder too whether you might be resistant to any suggestion that the visit was genuine because you did define it as a prank at the time, and your response was…well, if it turned out that it was genuine and you’d said ‘Oh, not now!’ to a first contact ambassador…’

  Alex flinched.

  ‘Don’t say that,’ he implored. ‘If I even thought that could be the case, I don’t think I’d ever be able to forgive myself.’

  Shion chuckled. ‘Sorry,’ she said, though clearly more amused than apologetic. ‘But if it is the case, I think it’s hilarious. Come on,’ she coaxed, as he looked taken aback, ‘That’s got to be the funniest first contact ever – hello, we want to be your friends, not now, okay, pff!’ She acted both parts as she said that and made a flashing movement with her hands… on the far side of the command table, Bonny broke into a helpless snigger and within moments, hilarity was bursting forth all over.

  Alex gave way to it and laughed too, though he was shaking his head and still felt pretty shaken even by the idea that he might have dismissed a first contact ambassador so rudely. Of course it was impossible, but still…

  ‘It wouldn’t be funny,’ he said. ‘It would be awful if that was our first encounter, rejecting a greeting, and so brusquely – no, that would be just horrible, Shion, terrible.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Shion said. ‘And if they were going to be put off by that, take offence and not come back, then the relationship was never going to happen anyway. If it’s real, if it was genuine, then I have no doubt that they’ll be back, probably bobbing up again and asking ‘Is now okay?’ Turn it around, hmmn? When we were banging at the Firewall, if the Gider had turned up with ‘Oh, not now’ we’d have stopped, backed off, given it some time and then tried again, right? Because it doesn’t mean ‘we don’t ever want to talk to you’, it just means ‘now is not a good time’. Which it isn’t, let’s face it – forget the fact that you were in bed and trying to sleep, operationally the last thing you want right now is to have to undertake a completely new first contact mission.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say ‘the last thing’,’ Alex said cautiously. ‘But it would certainly complicate our mission to Quarus and it would be difficult – practically impossible, really – to do them both justice. Though if it was the case that another species chose this time to contact us, however inconvenient that might be, I would obviously, if that needs saying, give that my very best effort and no way would I turn them away with ‘not now.’’

  ‘Well, you know, I think that you did,’ Shion said. ‘And if I was going to have a dollar on it, just trying to see this from their point of view – on the basis that they know that we are on our way to Quarus and that ‘not now’ means that we’re busy. If it was us, I believe we would wait until the ship was on its way back from operations in the hope that people might have time to talk to us then. So my dollar would be on them turning up again at roughly the same place on our return journey. Just a thought, skipper. But that is what I think happened. You, I know, will stick to your nanotech explanation until evidence proves otherwise. And Owun,’ she indicated the crewman sitting silently beside her, ‘will hold to his belief that you experienced a visitation from an angel. Which is really interesting, isn’t it?’ She gestured around at the three of them. ‘One incident, three different interpretations – hard tech, supernatural and exodiplomacy. And until we have conclusive evidence, no way to know which of us is right.’

  ‘I am right,’ said Alex. ‘I’m as certain of that as it is possible to be.’

  ‘Ditto, me,’ said Shion. ‘And ditto, Owun.’

  Alex looked at Owun, who held his gaze steadily.

  ‘All right,’ said Alex, as the long silence established that Owun was not going to express any opinion whatsoever until the skipper gave him permission to do so, ‘I am aware of what you believe, Mr Gwyn, and I respect your right to your private religious views, naturally. And I am sure, too, that you understand the reasons which have led the Fleet to forbid the teaching or preaching of religious views aboard ship.’

  ‘Yes skipper, totally understood,’ said Owun, and said no more.

  ‘I understand that, too,’ Shion said, drawing the conversation back to herself. ‘Obviously, religious beliefs are a minority in the League and it is inappropriate for people to be attempting to convert their shipmates on a Fleet ship – culturally unacceptable too, amongst spacers, and I do understand that, really I do – when you’re cooped up for weeks at a time in a small space with people you can’t get away from, there has to be an agreement not to let things get too personal, and not to discuss either politics or religion. There are, though, exceptional circumstances and I believe that this is one of them. Everyone on this ship knows tha
t Owun’s people have strong religious beliefs and it hardly takes much research to find out what they are. People are interested, skipper, which is natural in the circumstances, and refusing to allow them to talk about it is not making that go away, it’s just making it seem, well, like suppressed information. So what I’d like to suggest is that, given that the three of us represent the three different interpretations of what happened in your cabin, is that we discuss that, openly, through the format of a debate.’

  ‘A…?’ Alex reacted as if he had never heard the word before, and Shion grinned again.

  ‘Not a normal event on a Fleet ship, I know,’ she said. ‘But we’re the Fourth, after all, and we rarely do normal. Anyway I believe it would be a good forum to air and discuss views in a contained situation.’

  Alex thought about it. He knew that what she was really saying was that supernatural beliefs, being denied expression, were taking a strong hold in the crew, and that discussing that openly in the context of alternative explanations would help people to establish a more balanced perspective.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’m game.’ He looked at Owun. ‘If you are really happy to take part, Mr Gwyn?’