‘Hate?’
‘Fear it, oppose it, campaign and protest against it, smash it if they could,’ Alex admitted. ‘Not that any government would be so insane as to try to introduce it. Humans…’ he paused to find the words, ‘don’t trust machines which act independently of human control. They may justify that with all kinds of arguments – some would say that it is a social danger, making us dependent on machines which leaves us vulnerable to their failure, others would say that it is an economic issue, depriving people of their jobs. There would be major concerns about safety – ironically, really, since virtually all accidents come down in some way or another to human error, not the failure of tech. Some might even feel that it risked allowing machines to take over our world. But whatever argument they put around it, the real issue is one of control. It is important for us always to feel in control of machines and we really don’t like it when they do things autonomously. Even when we allow them to do that, we always want some kind of manual check on what they’ve done.’
Salomah shook her head. ‘Bonkers,’ she said. ‘Bots only do what you’ve told them to do. Your people have serious issues with anthropomorphising tech.’ She grinned at him suddenly. ‘Do you expect tables and chairs to sneakily take over your worlds, too?’
‘No.’ Alex chuckled. ‘Only machines which can self-evidently do things one heck of a lot better than we can ourselves. I think we feel a need to assert our control over that perceived superiority. And when it comes right down to it, we really don’t trust our tech to be completely efficient and safe. We spend a lot of our time on the Heron doing manual checks on automatic functions.’ He grinned. ‘We even do manual tests on our water quality, every day, because a system failed aboard one starship more than a century ago and people drank contaminated water. Everybody knows that such tests are completely unnecessary with the tech we have these days, but we still do them anyway, partly from tradition, partly as a ‘just in case’ precaution. It may not be logical, it may indeed be bonkers, but it is, I’m afraid, very human.’
‘I am not,’ Salomah decreed, ‘even going to attempt to understand that. I suspect that if I did come to understand it I’d end up as bonkers as you are. So we’ll do the ‘it doesn’t matter, it isn’t important’ thing and move on.’ She looked appraisingly at him. ‘Time for a break.’
They went to a spa, which was depressurised so that Alex could freshen up. There was considerable interest in his physiology from several other quarians who were using the facility at the time. Being naked and surrounded by curious quarians held no fears for Alex, though. The Excorps guys had given him a particularly thorough workout in conquering that kind of embarrassment. And, thanks to Silvie’s training, he was able to hold his own in a lengthy discussion about skin conditioners, too. By the time he got back into his freshly laundered suit his skin was soft and pleasantly scented and a slightly aching muscle in his shoulder had been expertly massaged back to comfort.
‘I didn’t know humans could enjoy using our facilities,’ Salomah observed. ‘They usually approach it as if they expect us to pull all their teeth out.’
‘It took us a while to get used to on the ship,’ said Alex. ‘But once you’ve got over inhibitions it is surprisingly relaxing, sociable, a pleasant time-out.’ He was amused by a thought as he said that, and seeing her enquiring look, explained, ‘I think many of the crew will be sorry to go back to standard Fleet showers when we’re heading back.’
‘Will you have to?’ She could see that he was feeling some regret, but not the reason for it. In fact the moment of regret was merely at the thought of having to leave here at all. He had been given a great deal of leeway but their stay here could not be indefinite.
‘Sorry?’ He was momentarily confused. ‘Oh, yes.’ He thought about the possibility of returning to service in the League with the quarian bathrooms still in operation, and cracked into laughter. ‘The admiralty will have fits as it is,’ he told her. ‘Behaving like that is just so outrageous under Fleet regs that even being naked in mixed-rank, mixed-gender groups is enough to get everyone involved dismissed the Fleet immediately. The only possible justification for it was an over-riding priority for exodiplomacy purposes, and as soon as that is no longer the case normal codes of conduct must resume.’
Salomah shook her head again with a grin. ‘No,’ she said decidedly. ‘Not even going to try.’ She gestured away from the building site. ‘Would you like to see how we have fun?’ She considered and corrected herself. ‘One of the ways we have fun?’
Alex assented with enthusiasm, so she led him over the city, up and across the rise to the west, and out to where the sea-bed fell away into a chasm. It was so huge and so deep that had it been on the surface of any world it would have been one of that planet’s great sightseeing destinations. Here, though, there was nothing to see but blackness, with a sense of yawning depth just a few metres over the rim of the ledge.
‘I can’t go very much deeper,’ Alex hung back a little as Salomah would have led him over that rim with the evident intention of diving into the abyss. His suit had been designed to be able to bring him to the deepest quarian cities with a good safety margin. Another three or four hundred metres at the most would be pushing it to the limit.
‘I know, don’t worry,’ Salomah held out her hand to him. ‘Trust me.’
He put his hand in hers, was drawn gently out over the edge of the cliff, and yelped in alarm as he felt himself being sucked down by a current so powerful that his wrist-jets, even on full power, would never be able to fight against it.
‘It’s okay, it’s fine!’ Salomah was amused, so confident herself that there was no danger that she found his moment of panic entertaining. To her, it was like someone shrieking in alarm at the first movement of an elevator, too silly to be taken seriously. ‘Trust me,’ she insisted, and Alex, recovering from that momentary wobble, did.
‘Sorry,’ he said, aware that his yelp was rather undignified and that the jolt of fear which had generated it could not have been comfortable for her. Salomah, though, just smiled. It was only then that Alex realised he could see her, not from the soft light in his own helmet but because both of them were being gently lit from somewhere behind him.
He managed to squirm around enough to see what that was, and saw that there was a strip of light following them down the cliff. He could see the cliff face, a gaunt and craggy volcanic rock. He couldn’t see any lighting systems, though, no lights, no wires. Just the glow, between two and three metres in length, tracking them as they were drawn down into the depths. As he saw how fast they were descending, alarm flickered back. He quelled it at once, looking back at Salomah. He did trust her. She would not take him into danger.
And, in fact, he felt the current stop pulling at him just a moment or two later, well within the safety limits of his suit. As Salomah drew him away from the cliff the glow of light there seemed to fade to no more than a glimmer.
‘It’s just a tow,’ She assured him, and he recognised that this was something like a ski-lift, then, a controlled system for bringing people down here. ‘Usually we go much deeper,’ she observed. ‘But this is enough for you to be able to see… ah, there,’ she spoke with satisfaction, pointing to draw his attention to something going on below them and back towards the cliff.
It took Alex some time to be able to see anything at all, then longer before he was able to make sense of it. A number of lights were moving up the cliff face – eight of them, he realised, evenly spaced across perhaps a hundred metres or so. They were keeping pace with one another, though that speed was not constant, with pauses, spurts and frequent changes in diagonal movement. They were coming up fast, though, and as they got closer and passed by he was able to see that the lights were tracking quarians who were swimming in formation. Dancing in formation, really, with the kind of spins and acrobatics Alex was quite familiar with in freefall. Quarians did them a lot faster, though, and with a precision which any freefall display team would have envie
d. They seemed so absorbed in what they were doing that they didn’t even notice he and Salomah hovering some distance away. They were close enough, though, for Alex to see that they all kicked one-footed off the cliff in exactly the same moment, flipping back out and up in a complex series of twists. Alex wasn’t sure whether it was an artistic performance, a sport, or what, but it was certainly impressive.
‘The current here flows straight up the cliff, which is vertical for fourteen kilometres,’ Salomah told him. Alex, the spacer, did not even quiver at the realisation of the drop beneath him, but was interested as he began to understand.
‘The tow takes you all the way down?’
‘As deep as we want to go,’ Salomah agreed. ‘We wear suits, too, if our physiology doesn’t allow us to go as deep as we want to. The deeper you go, obviously, the longer you get to play, but this will be enough for you to get the idea. You’ll find that the current draws you in towards the rock. The technique is to kick off from that and use that impetus for gymnastic movements. It is a game, too – a matching game, in which everyone tries to do the same movements at the same time. Each time you kick, a different person chooses the movement. When it’s working well, it is wholly absorbing. You have to be so focussed mentally, the physical activity is so enjoyable, the emotional harmony so rich that it is, all round, extremely satisfying.’ She smiled. ‘You don’t have the skills to match me so I will match you, all right? Just have fun with it.’
And that was it, no training, no safety briefing, just ‘there it is, have fun.’
And he did, too. As they swam in towards the cliff he could feel himself being drawn both upwards and inwards. His freefall skills and experience made it instinctive to orient himself and kick off the cliff as he found himself about to be slammed into it. He wasn’t concerned even if he was slammed into it, as his suit would keep him safe. All the same, he took a few straightforward kick-off leaps just to get the feel of it before attempting anything more challenging. Even that felt exhilarating. He was effectively running straight up a sheer cliff. Doing that more than two kilometres under the ocean, in that pitchy darkness, was even more thrilling. And it didn’t take long for him to feel that the patch of light which was tracking him up the cliff was almost like a reflection dancing with him. When he kicked off the rock his feet and the bottom of the light patch bounced off one another in a way which reminded him of a high-five. Whichever way he moved, the light copied. Part of him was taken up with an intellectual curiosity as to how that was achieved with no visible systems creating it, but mostly he was just enjoying the sensation of moving like that.
Then he became aware of Salomah and the patch of light which was tracking her, moving identically with him. He knew that she was sharing his pleasure, and knowing that increased his own. It was like dancing with a partner who matched your steps instinctively, an effortless communion.
Gaining confidence, he ventured a somersault, then at the next kick, a spin. He didn’t have time to develop much of a repertoire, though. Within a few more leaps they were back at the rim of the cliff. It was just there, suddenly, and as they surged past it in the rising current Alex saw the glow of the city again, nestled into the valley.
‘Brilliant!’ said Alex, and did not need to ask Can we do it again?
He’d had four goes at the cliff dancing before he felt he’d had enough, at least for today, and seeing that he was starting to get tired by then, Salomah suggested that they go back to his ship.
‘I’d like to see it,’ she said.
So they went back to the Heron, switching roles along the way so that this time it was Alex who was her guide, showing her around, choosing things for her to eat and introducing her to freefall, which she’d never experienced till then.
‘Everything is so very small,’ Salomah commented, sitting with him on the command deck as the day’s activities wound down. Many of her fellow visitors were leaving already, as the last of the crew came back up from their own visits groundside. ‘It is a horrible thought, to be trapped in such a cramped space, not able to get out of it for weeks, even months at a time.’
‘That’s a difficult thing even for many humans,’ Alex acknowledged. ‘They say that we – spacers – are a breed apart, because we choose to live like this. And for us, you see, it isn’t something that we endure as a means to an end, just for the experience of travelling to other worlds. To be a spacer, a true spacer, this has to be something you really enjoy. There is much to be enjoyed in it, you know – the simplicity of it, with regular routines and none of the worries and complexities of life groundside. And even more, the sense of community, camaraderie, which is even stronger on a warship than on freighters. For us, this…’ he gestured at the ship, ‘is our natural environment.’
‘Oh, I see,’ she looked enlightened. ‘So, can you learn to be a spacer?’
‘Not really, no,’ Alex replied. ‘There’s an old saying that being a spacer isn’t what you do, it’s who you are. Corny, but it’s true enough. You can take every kind of training imaginable but if you don’t love being in space more than anything else you’re not going to stick at it for long.’
‘I can’t imagine any of my people wanting to spend time locked up in such a confined space for so long,’ Salomah said, ‘even with other quarians. To do so with humans…’ she shook her head with a rueful look. ‘I think Silvie may be the only one of our people able to adapt to such conditions.’
‘I hope not,’ Alex said. ‘I hope that we can work together to create conditions which would be at least tolerable for long enough for some of your people to come to Serenity.’
‘I would like to hope so, too,’ she said, with a distinct lack of optimism. But then, seeing that it was approaching midnight, she got up with a smile.
For an instant, Alex was on the verge of telling her that she was welcome to stay. To do so would have felt very natural, as if she was somehow distinct from the ordinary run of quarian visitors. Even as he thought it, though, he knew that it would not be wise to make any exception to the rule which he had, himself, imposed for very good reasons. And besides, Simon Penarth was going around, just in case any quarians might be inclined to disregard the standing request for them all to leave the ship by midnight. Simon would not hesitate to remind him of all the health issues which had made that down-time essential. And he would be right, too. So, with some regret, Alex accepted her leaving, albeit with the strong hope that they would meet again before very long.
‘Soon!’ she said cheerfully, and went away with a wave.
Twenty Three
It was just a few days later that the quarians themselves instigated the next phase of contact.
Up until that point it had been accepted without question that they were only to meet the humans on the Heron and not those on the escort ships. Now, though, and increasingly, the quarians were aware of how sympathetic the Fourth themselves were to their colleagues, stuck on their ships and unable even to stretch their legs groundside.
‘You should do something about that,’ one of their visitors told Alex, quite firmly and with some reproof.
He did not make the mistake of treating this as no more than an individual comment from a random civilian. Such a statement, made so seriously, represented a consensus view from the quarians as a whole and was equivalent to a formal request from a president or appointed ambassador.
Alex, therefore, did something about it. That something was to go groundside with Skippers Stuart and Thurlough to agree conditions for their crews to have shoreleave there.
It was not a prepossessing spot. The Diplomatic Corps had established their groundside base and spaceport on one of the very few islands which remained above sea level even in the wildest storms. It was the third largest landmass on the planet, at seventy kilometres long and around eighteen kilometres wide.
This, though, was no kind of island paradise.
‘Ugh,’ said Bull Stuart, as they stepped out of the shuttle and looked around to get their bearing
s.
The island was bleak in the extreme. No soils formed here, since any sand or mud which might weather out from decomposing rock was either washed away by torrential downpours or blown away by howling winds. There was no life beyond an odd scrap of lichen, even in the most sheltered regions. Not until you came to the shoreline, where seaweeds and creatures of many kinds thrived in the churning water.
‘Hmmn,’ Alex agreed with the other captain’s reaction, which was not directed at the stark landscape or the fierce wind blowing around them, but at the really very horrible little spaceport.
The Diplomatic Corps had not done themselves any credit with this. It was really no more than a four-shuttle landing pad with one of their prefab pods alongside it as a spaceport building. The pod, however, was purely nominal, unmanned, and had a disused look. The harsh environment had taken its toll, dulling the paintwork and covering it with a dingy film of salt even in the few months it had been since the Embassy’s departure.
‘It’s really only used by our own people coming and going,’ Skipper Thurlough was quick to defend the Diplomatic Corps facilities, though his own expression as he looked around betrayed some dismay. ‘But perhaps,’ he conceded, ‘a bit of a brush-up might be appropriate.’
None of them said anything during the short walk from the landing pads down to the cove. Bull Stuart and Andru Thurlough were acclimatising, since this was Bull’s first visit to the planet and it had been many years since Andru’s own abortive attempt at diplomatic duties here.
Alex set a very slow pace, pausing frequently to let them get their breath and find their balance. He paused, too, to take in the view as they crossed a low headland and saw the encounter zone ahead of them.
This was a building the quarians had constructed in the most sheltered cove the island provided. It was a stunning building, readily recognisable as the same kind they used in their underwater cities. Above water, the opaque panels gleamed a vivid electric blue while the transparent parts gleamed like faintly iridescent bubbles. It had been built half in and half out of the water, with entrances onto the beach at one end and into the deeper water beyond the mouth of the cove. Some seven or eight kilometres beyond that was the nearest city.
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