The Flowery War

by Tim Andersen

  Smith smiled in a vaguely grotesque way. “Courtesy of the Amida,” he said. “I convinced them to share their anti-gravity technology for this mission. This ship,” he said with the pride of a new father, “is the most advanced ship in possession of any human.”

  Smith’s smile faded. “I want to see you in my cabin in fifteen minutes Fenn.” He turned to Lika, “Lika.” The color drained from her face. She followed him aft where there were three narrow doors, two on the left side of a narrow hallway and one on the other. At the rear was another door marked, “Head”.

  As Smith and Lika disappeared through the door on the right, I, left to myself, took some time to examine the ship. It looked brand new. The sitting area in the center was comfortably furnished with a couple of sofas bolted to the floor and a low table with a vertical projector in the center. On the same side as the hatch was a small galley. I checked the refrigerator and found it stocked with prepared meals and cold drinks. The dry pantry was filled with the comforts of home: hot chocolate, nuts, crackers, even fresh fruit. In fact, the ship seemed to resemble a pleasure yacht more than a place of work. On the wall opposite the hatch were two curved consoles similar to those in room 551A, except that these were black instead of white and only half the size.

  I had been on interstellar ships before. They were utilitarian. Wheel ships had a lot of space but everything was configured linearly, following the curve of the rotating wheel. In that sense they were like old-fashioned trains on Earth. There were a few luxury ones, but they were not catching on even with the wealthy, as most of the colonies were seen as too wild for tourism and lacking in luxury comforts. Any alien race would have been confused if a luxury liner had showed up at its homeworld and would likely blow it to pieces. Non-rotating ships were even more austere with space conserved to the utmost to make room for fuel and engines. I had never even conceived that a ship like this had been possible, but, for the Amidans---

  My thoughts were interrupted with the arrival of Crispin. “How do you like the Drunken Seeker?” he said, gesturing to the interior.

  “The Drunken what?”

  “Mr. Smith picked it out. Don’t ask me why,” he said. “This is his baby to be sure.”

  “Did the Amidans really help build it?”

  Lars ran his finger along the chrome railing thoughtfully. “Well, not entirely. It’s true that the artificial grav was a gift. It took years for the engineers down below to figure out how to work it. Not that they didn’t have artificial grav before, mind you, but they were still trying to get molecules to fall down when the Amidans showed up. The ship is an experiment.”

  “Experiment?”

  “Yeah, well, no human ship has ever had artificial gravity before, and the government wanted to see if they could use it to build a better long term ship, something that would outclass a wheel-ship altogether. This is the result.”

  “Well, the artificial gravity is a luxury—“

  “Oh, it’s much more than that, Goshan. It doesn’t just keep us down on the floor. It’s the propulsion too. No ion-drive in this girl.”

  “The engines run on artificial grav?”

  “Sure, only regulations kept us from landing and saving all that shuttling. Hey, if you can pull people down, why not use gravity to push the ship, eh? Don’t ask me how it works. I just trained to fly it. I do know that it’s also part of what the mission is all about. The Amidans have a lot of advanced tech that we would love to get our hands on. They’ve shown a willingness to give up some of it. Some even say that we could have a trading partnership with them.” He laughed. “Now wouldn’t that be something.”

  “Sounds wonderful,” I said.

  “Oh, it is. The only trouble is that we’ve no idea what the Amidans want from us, if they want anything at all even.”

  “Anything at all? Surely they wouldn’t just give away all their technology for free.”

  “That’s a very human way of thinking, Goshan. Smith says we should be homo quid pro quo instead of homo sapiens. Perhaps he’s right too.”

  “Smith seems to think a lot of the Amidans,” I said.

  “He does indeed, knows a lot about them too, more than anyone to be sure. I wouldn’t be going too far to say that he thinks that they’re better than us all around. He even thought we shouldn’t bring any weapons with us as a show of trust. Ha. Regulations forbid it though, and I stuck to my guns.” He laughed again. “I promised him I’d keep the guns out of sight though, locked up in the hold.”

  “When are we going to Pipe?” I asked.

  “Oh, when Smith’s finished with you I suppose. He’ll give me the word when he’s ready. I think he’s about ready for you now too.” I turned around and saw Lika emerging from Smith’s cabin looking stressed and red-eyed. Instead of going to the consoles though, she went into one of the rooms across from Smith’s and failed to even glance at us. She slammed the door.

  “She’s a fine actress, that one,” he said quietly.

  “What?” I said.

  “Oh nothing,” he said, readopting his friendly look, “you’d best be getting to Mr. Smith now.”

  I was about to go to Smith’s cabin when a thought occurred to me. I pointed to the door next to the one Lika had gone through, “is that cabin mine, Lars?”

  “Sure it is. It’s a bit small compared to Earth standards but quite a luxury for space I dare say.”

  “But where’s yours?”

  He laughed. “Ah, well, I have a hammock up in the control room. I’m an old space pilot and don’t need a room of my own. Such luxury. I couldn’t get used to it.” He turned and went back into the control room.

  I headed down the hallway and, pausing in front of Smith’s door, heard a muffled sobbing coming from Lika’s room. I felt a surge of anger that surprised me. I knocked on Smith’s door.

  “Enter,” he said.

  Smith’s cabin was divided into two spaces. One side, to the right, was an office with an ordinary looking desk and a screen on top of it and looked as if it could fold down and to be put out of the way. The other side contained a bed, closet, washbasin, and a night stand. On the bed was Smith’s bag. I saw that it was open, and the small brown package was lying next to it, as yet unopened.

  “Fenn,” said Smith, “close the door and sit down.”

  I did as he asked, thankful that this time I would not need to stand as I had at our last talk.

  “Who did your grandfather bring with him when he met the Trolls?” he asked.

  Once again, he had caught me off guard. I tried to remember, but I could not. “I don’t know.”

  “You never asked him or read about it? I’m surprised at you Fenn.”

  “I don’t remember his mentioning anyone.”

  “You don’t remember because there was no one. He went alone with only a pilot who stayed on the ship.”

  “He went alone?”

  “You, his own grandson, should know this about him: As beloved as he is in memoriam, in life, he trusted no one. I too trust no one. I would bring no one as well, other than Crispin, if I could. There is no one my equal in alien negotiation, as there was, sadly, no equal to Vanchar Fenn in his day. However, unlike your grandfather, I need people to run my codes, which he did not have, people to interpret computer outputs, and I need people who will be trained in my methods so that future missions to which I cannot attend personally can be left in reasonably capable hands. I hope, Fenn, that you turn out to be reasonably capable.”

  I almost said, “I hope so too,” but thought that cheekiness would not earn me points with Smith.

  “Now, I must ask you some pointed questions,” he said, as if this were the real business at hand. His expression was one of intense scrutiny as if he were trying to bore a hole right through me. “Please answer truthfully because I will know if you’re lying.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “The military and the state department normally respect one another’s business,” he began. “Oftentimes we clean
up the mess they make with their missiles, and they likewise clean up after some of the fools of our glorious ministry of state. It is a symbiosis of stupidity that I have the skill to stay well out of. I would, therefore, be very put out to find the military interfering with this mission. I must, therefore, ask you if you have been asked by the military to spy on me or this mission.”

  “What?” I was aghast.

  “Your mother is head of the military. She may have an interest in this mission. Imagine her glee that her own son is coming along.”

  “But you chose me, not her.”

  “True,” he said, “although you will soon see that it was not I who chose you. I will not, however, mention the details till after we have Piped. Suffice it to say that the military had nothing to do with your being selected for this mission. Be that as it may, you may feel some. . .loyalty?” He said the word as if it were in another language.

  “Whatever loyalty I feel to my mother, neither she nor anyone from the ministry of defense asked me to spy,” I said. It was true since Trexel worked for the state ministry not the military---at least as far as I knew.

  He scrutinized my face as if he were trying to read my thoughts. “Very well,” he said. “I believe you. Now, since Lika has shown that she is incapable of finishing this derivation for me, I have taken it upon myself to correct and complete her work. Therefore, I have given her the sole task of instructing you on this mission and helping you to begin applying my methods.” He pressed a button, and the computer console began to unfold again. His face disappeared.

  In the hall I listened at Lika’s door. Hearing nothing, I gently knocked. She opened the door, and I could see that her eyes were red from crying. I felt awkward. I said, “I can come back later.”

  She said, “no, I need to give you something to do. Come in.”

  Lika’s room was like Smith’s but without the office. Narrow bed, nightstand, etc. but I could see no real personal effects except a low cushion, a lurid color purple, on the floor, looking like a small beanbag chair. I wondered if she liked to sit on the floor, but she gestured to a small bench that folded down from the wall. She sat across from me on the bed. She looked at me and, with her features now softened, I remarked at how pretty she looked, her mouse-brown hair in disarray and her brown eyes large and liquid in the dimness of a single light panel over the bed. Then I realized she was talking and pushed the thought from my mind, inwardly embarrassed.

  “Tolan asked me to start you on our basic social models. I assume you already know how to use a translator?”

  “Yes,” I said, “that was one of the first things I learned when I was hired.”

  “That’s good and bad. Our translators are more complicated than the ones used by the rest of the Corps. Tolan likes them to provide much more information about nuances and probability distributions rather than making best-fit guesses about the meanings of language units. I’ll set you up with a tutorial I developed when I first joined the team.”

  “Language units?” I said.

  “Words,” she said, “but Tolan doesn’t like to call them that because aliens don’t always have words for things; sometimes they don’t separate the world into categories like the Amida.”

  “How do they talk?”

  “Well, they don’t do a lot of talking. They’re very conservative with their use of language. When they do talk about things, they’re more interested in processes. Their basic notion is one of flux and movement, not static objects inter-relating as in most human languages, especially European ones like English. They don’t think about objects because, for them, objects don’t exist separately from each other, and so they don’t need words as we know them. Here, look at this example:”

  She touched a button and a small console lit up. She touched the console, and I saw what looked like a waveform. “This is Amidan for the noun ‘star’. At least, that’s how we interpret it, but for them the unit can also imply the process of star formation, stellar dynamics, as well as life cycle and star death.”

  “All of that?”

  “Yes, the language is like nothing we’ve ever seen before. It’s highly mathematical. Every unit is like an equation and relates to other units in complex ways. You might like studying it. I heard you were a mathematician.”

  “I was only a graduate student,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said, blushing. “Anyway, the computer is what understands them. We try to interpret their meaning using our own translation matrices and mathematical formulas. It’s more important for us to understand what they’re going to do than what they’re thinking. That would require a new brain.”

  I realized that this was a joke and belatedly chuckled. This Lika was quite different than the one I had met down on Earth. Perhaps, whatever Smith assigned her having defeated her with finality, she was more at peace.

  Since we were getting along better, I ventured a question. “Say,” I said, “is Smith always like this?”

  Her face turned ashen. “Like what?”

  I was going to ask why he was such an asshole but thought I’d regret it. “Always so demanding?” I said.

  The color returned to her face. “Oh,” she said, “pretty much. He’s very demanding of himself, and he passes that along to us.”

  “Oh.”

  “He just doesn’t get along with people all that well. He’s really a very sweet man though.”

  “He is?”

  “Sure. Like, last Thanksgiving when I couldn’t go home, he invited me to his parents’ ski house. We had a wonderful time.”

  “Really, his parents?” The thought of Smith having parents was new.

  “Yes, they’re very proud of him.”

  “I bet,” I said, trying not to sound sarcastic.

  “Goshan, I remember you asking if I’ve seen a lot of people come and go. I thought I gave you the wrong impression. You see, most of the people who dropped out of this team. . . Tolan didn’t fire them,” she said. “They left because they thought Tolan was mean, that he didn’t respect them. You have to understand that that’s just the way he is, and he can’t change it. If you try to see the good in him and realize that he’s trying to help you, you’ll feel a lot better.”

  “Hmm,” was all I said. I wanted to change the subject. “So besides not having words, what else is strange about the Amidans?” She laughed and that surprised me. “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “Asking what’s strange about an alien species is like asking what’s wet about water. It’s the similarities that are striking.”

  “Okay, what’s similar about the Amidans?”

  “Hmm,” she said, “that’s difficult to say because we’ve known them for only a few years, just long enough to hammer out a translation matrix and a basic social model.”

  “Anything?”

  “Well, they seem ethically similar to us. In fact, they’re even more so. They don’t kill each other as far as we know. They don’t have a real notion of property so stealing is out. We don’t know how they reproduce, although I’m sure they have a way, so I can’t talk about sexual morals. Oh, and they’re concerned about hurt feelings. They don’t mind if you do something offensive towards them, but they try not to offend in turn. In fact, their language doesn’t contain any units that could be mean or hurtful.”

  “Sounds nice.”

  “They are,” she said. “They’re as close to a perfect society as we have ever encountered. That’s why I gave them the name Amida, which means ‘Infinite Light’, because they are a beacon of hope for us to aspire to.”

  “You named them?”

  She gave a wry smile. “Well, Tolan named them, but I was the one who suggested it. Their code name, Capella 2112, was set when they were first discovered five years ago, but the Interstellar Xenological Society let Tolan give them a real name.”

  We both paused for a moment, looking down. “You probably have never seen one of the Smith Social Models,” she said.

  “No, I’ve seen some other one
s though with the seven species parameters: aggressiveness, collectiveness . . . um,” I struggled to remember them, “. . . uh, defensiveness . . .”

  “Stop,” she said. “Those are useless here. Tolan’s model has over six hundred parameters, many of which have subparameters, for over eleven hundred numerical values describing a single species.”

  “Eleven hundred!”

  “Yes, and each is governed by a mathematical formula that relates it to the others. Tolan likes to be precise. No aspect of a species’ psyche and potential intra and inter species dialogues is left undescribed. Most of our parameter charts are not entirely filled out, even for species that have been known for a long time, because the research hasn’t been done. Initially the computer fills in values based on its best guess from the language.”

  “You can tell how a species behaves from its language?”

  “Of course! Consider our own language. It contains nouns connected with verbs: ‘the cat chases the mouse’. It shows how we divide up the world into objects, ‘cats’ and ‘mice’ that have interactions such as ‘chasing’. Human language is very motion oriented. We tend to think about the world in terms of how things move in time and space. The verb ‘chase’ implies relative motion of two objects, one following the other. Our language also talks about intentions, which is a very anthropocentric way of thinking. Things like rocks and subatomic particles don’t have intentions, but our language often implies that they do like when we talk about a photon making an electron want to jump into a higher energy state around an atom. Electrons don’t jump. They don’t want, but our language can’t get away from the notion of wanting.”

  “What does that say about how we behave?”

  “Well, it’s sketchy based on only a few ideas like that. There are species that have languages like ours but behave very differently from us. Tolan likes to say that the human brain is designed for one thing: ‘hunting down and killing animals’. It’s more complicated than that since humans have in our history been largely vegetarian at times, but there’s some evidence that tracking was a big source of the evolution of intelligence and language in our species millions of years ago. Because we’re tracking predators, we tend to think of everything, if only subconsciously, as prey, something to track down and kill. Whether it’s a math problem we’re working on or a ship we’re building or trying to communicate with an alien species, we see the problem as prey, the solution or accomplishment as the finding and the killing. Other species, like the Amida, don’t see the world the same way. They see the prey and the predator as the same. To them, the tracking and killing are part of the flux of the universe. Nouns and verbs don’t exist as such in their language. There are no hard edges, no finality, only interconnections.”