The New Space Opera

by Gardner Dozois

  I took her to “my” kiosk, and we found a table. I was impressed by the way she handled the slights of her position. There goes Baal, surrounded by the mighty, while his partner is reduced to having coffee with a minder . . . It was a galling role to have to play in public. I had intended to lead up to the topic on my mind: but she forestalled me. “You must be horrified by what happened yesterday.”

  No hostility. “A little horrified, I admit.” I affected to hesitate. “The Balas/Shet say that what Baal did was a ritual, confirming his position as leader; and the Ki expected it. They may even have arranged for the victim to be available. And it won’t happen again. Are they right?”

  She sipped her cappuccino. “Baal doesn’t believe he did anything wrong,” she answered carefully, giving nothing away.

  I remembered her cry of despair. “But what do you think—?”

  “I can speak frankly?”

  “You can say anything. We may seem to be in public, but nothing you say to me, or that I say to you, can be heard by anyone else.”

  “Speranza is a very clever place!”

  “Yes, it is . . . And as you know, though the system itself will have a record, as your Social Support Officer I may not reveal anything you ask me to keep to myself.”

  She gave me eye contact then, very deliberately. I realized I’d never seen her look anyone in the eye. The color of her irises was a subtle, lilac-starred gray.

  “Before I left home, when I was a child, I ate meat. I hadn’t killed it, but I knew where it came from. But I have never killed, Debra. And now I don’t believe I ever will.” She looked out at the passing crowd, the surroundings that must be so punishingly strange to her. “My mother said we should close ourselves off to the past, and open ourselves to the future. So she sent me away, when I was six years old, to live on another world—”

  “That sounds very young to me.”

  “I was young. I still had my milk teeth . . . I’m not like Baal, because I have been brought up differently. If I were in his place, things would be better for the Others. I truly believe that—” She meant the Ki, the prey-nations. “But I know what has to be done for KiAn. I want this rescue package to work. Baal is the one who will make it happen, and I support him in every way.”

  She smiled, close-lipped, no flash of sharp white: I saw the poised steel in her, hidden by ingrained self-suppression. And she changed the subject, with composure. Unexpected boldness, unexpected finesse—

  “Debra, is it true that Blue people have secret superpowers?”

  I laughed and shook my head. “I’m afraid not. No talking flowers here!”

  Pelé tried to get the DP software to change our codenames. He maintained that “Baal” and “Tiamaat” were not even from the same mythology, and if we were going to invoke the gods, those two should be Aztecs: Huehueteotl, ripping the living heart from his victims . . . The bots refused. They said they didn’t care if they were mixing their mysticisms. Codenames were a device to avoid accidental offense until the system had assimilated a new user language. “Baal” and “Tiamaat” were perfectly adequate, and the Meso-American names had too many characters.

  I had dinner with Baal, in the Sensitive Visitor Facility. He was charming company: we ate vegetarian fusion cuisine, and I tried not to think about the butchered meat in the kitchen of his suite. On the other side of the room, bull-shouldered Colonel Haa’agaan ate alone; glancing at us covertly with small, sad eyes from between the folds of his slaty head-hide. Shamaz had been hard hit by what had happened in the Hopes and Dreams Park. But his orange and yellow aura-tag was still bright; and I knew mine was too. By the ruthless measures of interstellar diplomacy, everything was still going well; set for success.

  If things had been different I might have joined Pelé again when I was finally off duty. As it was, I retired to my room, switched all the décor, including ceiling and floor, to starry void, mixed myself a kicking neurochemical cocktail, and applied the popper to my throat. Eyedrops are faster, but I wanted the delay, I wanted to feel myself coming apart. Surrounded by directionless immensity, I sipped chilled water, brooding. How can a people have World Government, space-flight-level industrialization, numinal intelligence, and yet the ruling caste are still killing and eating the peasants? How can they do that, when practically everyone on KiAn admits they are a single species, differently adapted: and they knew that before we told them. How can we be back here, the Great Powers and their grisly parasites: making the same moves, the same old mistakes, the same old hateful compromises, that our Singularity was supposed to cure forever?

  Why is moral development so difficult? Why are predators charismatic?

  The knots in my frontal lobes were combed out by airy fingers, I fell into the sea of possibilities, I went to the place of terror and joy that no one understands unless they have been there. I asked my question and I didn’t get an answer, you never get an answer. Yet when I came to the shallows again, when I laid myself, exhausted, on this dark and confused shore, I knew what I was going to do: I had seen it.

  But there always has to be an emotional reason. I’d known about Baal’s views before I arrived. I’d known that he would hunt and kill “weakling” Ki, as was his traditional right, and not just once, he’d do it whenever the opportunity arose; and I’d still been undecided. It was Tiamaat who made the difference. I’d met her, skin on skin as we say. I knew what the briefing had not been able to tell me. She was no cipher, superficially “civilized” by her education, she was suppressed. I had heard that cry of despair and anger, when she saw what Baal had done. I had talked to her. I knew she had strength and cunning, as well as good intentions. A latent dominance, the will and ability to be a leader.

  I saw Baal’s look of challenge and trust, even now—

  But Tiamaat deserved saving, and I would save her.

  The talks went on. Morale was low on the DP side, because the refugee-camp incident had shown us where we stood; but the Ki delegates were happy—insanely, infuriatingly. The “traditional diet of the An” was something they refused to discuss, and they were going to get their planet rebuilt anyway. The young An leaders spent very little time at the conference table. Baal was indifferent—he had people to understand these things for him—and Tiamaat could not be present without him. This caused a rift. Their aides, the only other An around, were restricted to the SV Facility suites (we care assistants may be crazy but we’re not entirely stupid). Pelé and I were fully occupied, making sure our separate charges weren’t left moping alone. Pelé took Tiamaat shopping and visiting museums (virtual and actual). I found that Baal loved to roam, just as I do myself, and took him exploring the lesser-known sights.

  We talked about his background. Allegedly, he’d given up a promising career in the Space Marines to take on the leadership. When I’d assured myself that his pilot skills were real, he wasn’t just a toy-soldier aristo, I finally took him on the long float through the permanent umbilical, to Right Speranza.

  We had to suit up at the other end.

  “What’s this?” demanded Baal, grinning. “Are we going outside?”

  “You’ll see. It’s an excursion I thought you’d enjoy.”

  The suits were programmable. I watched him set one up for his size and bulk, and knew he was fine: but I put him through the routines, to make sure. Then I took him into the vast open cavern of the DP’s missile repository, which we crossed like flies in a cathedral, hooking our tethers to the girders, drifting over the ranked silos of deep-space interceptors, the giant housing of particle cannons.

  All of it obsolete, like castle walls in the age of heavy artillery; but it looks convincing on the manifest, and who knows? “Modern” armies have been destroyed by Zulu spears; it never pays to ignore the conventional weapons—

  “Is this a weapons bay?” the monster exclaimed, scandalized, on suit radio.

  “Of course,” said I. “Speranza can defend herself, if she has to.”

  I let us into a smaller hangar,
through a lock on the cavern wall, and filled it with air and pressure and lights. We were completely alone. Left Speranza is a natural object, a hollowed asteroid. Right is artificial, and it’s a dangerous place for sentient bipeds. The proximity of the torus can have unpredictable and bizarre effects, not to mention the tissue-frying radiation that washes through at random intervals. But we would be fine for a short while. We fixed tethers, opened our faceplates and hunkered down, gecko-padded bootsoles clinging to the arbitrary “floor.”

  “I thought you were angels,” he remarked shyly. “The weapons, all of that, it seems beneath you. Doesn’t your codename ‘Debra’ mean ‘an angel’? Aren’t you all messengers, come to us from the Mighty Void?”

  “Mighty Void” was a Balas/Shet term meaning something like God.

  “No . . . Deborah was a judge, in Israel. I’m just human, Baal. I’m a person with numinal intelligence, the same kind of being as you are; like all the KiAn.”

  I could see that the harsh environment of Right Speranza moved him, as it did me. There was a mysterious peace and truth in being here, in the cold dark, breathing borrowed air. He was pondering: open and serious.

  “Debra . . . ? Do you believe in the Diaspora?”

  “I believe in the Weak theory,” I said. “I don’t believe we’re all descended from the same Blue Planet hominid, the mysterious original starfarers, precursors of Homo sapiens. I think we’re the same because we grew under the same constraints: time, gravity, hydrogen bonds; the nature of water, the nature of carbon—”

  “But instantaneous transit was invented on the Blue Planet,” he protested, unwilling to lose his romantic vision.

  “Only the prototype. It took hundreds of years, and a lot of outside help, before we had anything like viable interstellar travel—”

  Baal had other people to understand the technology for him. He was building castles in the air, dreaming of his future. “Does everyone on the Blue speak English?”

  “Not at all. They mostly speak a language called putonghua, which means ‘common speech,’ as if they were the only people in the galaxy. Blues are as insular as the KiAn, believe me, when they’re at home. When you work for the DP, you change your ideas; it happens to everyone. I’m still an Englishwoman, and mi naño Pelé is still a man of Ecuador—”

  “I know!” he broke in eagerly. “I felt that. I like that in you!”

  “But we skip the middle term. The World Government of our single planet doesn’t mean the same as it did.” I grinned at him. “Hey, I didn’t bring you here for a lecture. This is what I wanted to show you. See the pods?”

  He looked around us, slowly, with a connoisseur’s eye. He could see what the pods were. They were Aleutian-built, the revolutionary leap forward: vehicles that could pass through the mind/matter barrier. An end to those dreary transit lounges, true starflight, the Holy Grail: and only the Aleutians knew how it was done.

  “Like to take one out for a spin?”

  “You’re kidding!” cried Baal, his eyes alight.

  “No, I’m not. We’ll take a two-man pod. How about it?”

  He saw that I was serious, which gave him pause. “How can we? The systems won’t allow it. This hangar has to be under military security.”

  “I am military security, Baal. So is Pelé. What did you think we were? Kindergarten teachers? Trust me, I have access, there’ll be no questions asked.”

  He laughed. He knew there was something strange going on, but he didn’t care: he trusted me. I glimpsed myself as a substitute for Tiamaat, glimpsed the relationship he should have had with his partner. Not sexual, but predation-based: a playful tussle, sparring partners. But Tiamaat had not wanted to be his sidekick—

  We took a pod. Once we were inside, I sealed us off from Speranza, and we lay side by side in the couches, two narrow beds in a torpedo shell: an interstellar sports car, how right for this lordly boy. I checked his hookups, and secured my own.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Oh, just around the block.”

  His vital signs were in my eyes, his whole being was quivering in excitement, and I was glad. The lids closed, we were translated into code, we and our pod were injected into the torus, in the form of a triple stream of pure information, divided and shooting around the ring to meet itself, and collide—

  I sat up, in a lucent gloom. The other bed’s seal opened, and Baal sat up beside me. We were both still suited, with open faceplates. Our beds shaped themselves into pilot and copilot couches, and we faced what seemed an unmediated view of the deep space outside. Bulwarks and banks of glittering instruments carved up the panorama: I saw Baal’s glance flash over the panels greedily, longing to be piloting this little ship for real. Then he saw the yellow primary, a white hole in black absence; and its brilliant, distant partner. He saw the pinpricks of other formations that meant nothing much to me, and he knew where I had brought him. We could not see the planet, it was entirely dark from this view. But in our foreground, the massive beams of space-to-space lasers were playing: shepherding plasma particles into a shell that would hold the recovering atmosphere in place.

  To say that KiAn had been flayed alive was no metaphor. The people still living on the surface were in some kind of hell. But it could be saved.

  “None of the machinery is strictly material,” I said, “in any normal sense. It was couriered here, as information, in the living minds of the people who are now on station. We can’t see them, but they’re around, in pods like this one. It will all disintegrate, when the repairs are done. But the skin of your world will be whole again, it won’t need to be held in place.”

  The KiAn don’t cry, but I was so close to him, in the place where we were, that I felt his tears. “Why are you doing this?” he whispered. “You must be angels, or why are you saving us, what have we done to deserve this?”

  “The usual reasons,” I said. “Market forces, political leverage, power play.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Then I don’t know what to tell you, Baal. Except that the Ki and the An have numinal intelligence. You are like us, and we have so few brothers and sisters. Once we’d found you, we couldn’t bear to lose you.”

  I let him gaze, for a long moment without duration.

  “I wanted you to see this.”

  I stepped out of my pilot’s couch and stood braced: one hand gecko-padded to the inner shell, while I used the instruments to set the pod to self-destruct. The eject beacon started up, direct cortical warning that my mind read as a screaming siren—

  “Now I’m going back to Speranza. But you’re not.”

  The fine young cannibal took a moment to react. The pupils in his tawny eyes widened amazingly when he found that he was paralyzed, and his capsule couldn’t close.

  “Is this a dream?”

  “Not quite. It’s a confabulation. It’s what happens when you stay conscious in transit. The mind invents a stream of environments, events. The restoration of KiAn is real, Baal. It will happen. We can see it ‘now’ because we’re in nonduration, we’re experiencing the simultaneity. In reality—if that makes any sense, language hates these situations—we’re still zipping around the torus. But when the confabulation breaks up, you’ll still be in deep space and about to die.”

  I did not need to tell him why I was doing this. He was no fool, he knew why he had to go. But his mind was still working, fighting—

  “Speranza is a four-space mapped environment. You can’t do this and go back alone. The system knows you were with me, every moment. The record can’t be changed, no way, without the tampering leaving a trace.”

  “True. But I am one of those rare people who can change the information. You’ve heard fairy tales about us, the Blues who have superpowers? I’m not an angel, Baal. Actually, it’s a capital crime to be what I am, where I come from. But Speranza understands me. Speranza uses me.”

  “Ah!” he cried. “I knew it, I felt it. We are the same!”

  When I r
ecovered self-consciousness, I was in my room, alone. Earlier in the day, Baal had claimed he needed a nap. After a couple of hours, I’d become suspicious, checked for his signs, and found him missing: gone from the SV Facility screen. I’d been trying to trace him when Right Speranza had detected a pod, with the An leader onboard, firing up. The system had warned him to desist. Baal had carried on, and paid a high price for his attempted joyride. The injection had failed, both Baal and one fabulous Aleutian-built pod had been annihilated.

  Remembering this much gave me an appalling headache—the same aching awfulness I imagine shapeshifters (I know of one or two) feel in their muscle and bone. I couldn’t build the bridge at all: no notion how I’d connected between this reality and the former version. I could have stepped from the dying pod straight through the wall of this pleasant, modest living space. But it didn’t matter. I would find out, and Debra would have been behaving like Debra.

  Pelé came knocking. I let him in and we commiserated, both of us in shock. We’re advocates, not enforcers, there’s very little we can do if a Sensitive Visitor is really determined to go AWOL. We’d done all the right things, short of using undue force, and so had Speranza. When we’d broken the privilege locks, Baal’s room record had shown that he’d been spying out how to get access to one of those Aleutian pods. It was just too bad that he’d succeeded, and that he’d had enough skill to get himself killed. Don’t feel responsible, said Pelé. It’s not your fault. Nobody thinks that. Don’t be so sad. Always so sad, Debra: it’s not good for the brain, you should take a break. Then he started telling me that frankly, nobody would regret Baal. By An law, Tiamaat could now rule alone; and if she took a partner, we could trust her not to choose another bloodthirsty atavist . . . I soon stopped him. I huddled there in pain, my friend holding my hand: seeing only the beautiful one, his tawny eyes at the last, his challenge and his trust; mourning my victim.