by John Barnes
“Oh, just that it’s only very mildly salty—much less tectonic activity here and a very thick crust, and it froze over so early in the planet’s history that the seas just didn’t get as much salt. It doesn’t taste very good but you could drink it if you had to, at least for a short while. All the seagoing organisms had to be modified to deal with it. And it’s also just-right warm. You’ll see. It’s just glorious.”
We followed her up the winding path a few more steps before she turned around and said, with that teasing smile that delighted me—and melted Shan, “You know, it’s not terribly dangerous up here, and there’s no need for a point guard. You could walk beside me.”
As soon as we caught up, she took my hand. “I’ve had four bodies, gentlemen, all healthy, and if there is anything to be learned by being incarnated, it’s not to waste a day like this one.” The breeze was just enough to make the trees move a bit; the swells out on the sea were long, slow, and calm; and Aurenga’s sun was just pleasantly warm. The few big fluffy clouds in the sky were to the west, already departing. And something smelled maddeningly good—some spicy mix of shrimp and peppers, I thought—from one of our packs.
“Based on a mere half century and one body, agreed,” I said.
We didn’t talk again most of the way up the hill; it wasn’t love or courtship, of course, nothing more than mutual attraction and the possibility of friendship as far as I was concerned, and perhaps no more than relief from intense loneliness for Shan.
But Reilis was right. There are days you don’t waste. Especially because to waste them seems to dare the gods to take them away forever.
Reilis knew how to pack a picnic so that every little, trivial grace note was there. We had jams, spices, and salt in neat little pots, and a full set of silverware and dishes, and a marvelous mixture of hot and cold foods, everything just perfect from the mixed vegetable bisque we began with through the cold chicken, the hot pescaroz and the shrimp jambalaya, to the green salad at the end. She even had the perfect surprise, waiting until I was full but not stuffed and then producing the flask of espresso and the little containers of exquisite vanilla ice cream. “What’s the point of indulging, if we don’t overindulge?” she asked, beaming. “How else will we know we did it right?”
We were sitting on an outcrop above the little pond; its whitesand bottom was visible even through the five or six meters of pure water. “Clean enough to drink,” she said, following my gaze, “but warm enough that it’s practically tea, in the noon sun.”
“I was watching the little lobsters.”
“Actually they’re giant crawfish. They and the big koi are getting a bit out of hand here. They tell me they were expecting birds to find this island a long time ago, and they haven’t yet, so they may have to import some herons or kingfishers. Meanwhile, though, it’s quite a sight, isn’t it?”
A koi, like a fire in the pure water, flashed by, on its way out of the sun and into the shadows, and the nervous crawfish scattered away, whooshing backward in clouds of white sand. I looked up from the clear view below, across the brilliant cyan of the pond, down the silver ribbon of the thundering creek, and out across the mighty turquoise sea. “Human beings, if left to themselves, could all choose to live in places like this,” I said. “We’ve had the technology for centuries. We could all just spend our days hiking, swimming, reading … making art … learning whatever we liked. We never realized we could all be doing that, and it would have been very nice, but now it looks like we have thousands of years, maybe, of war ahead of us, and no time at all for any of that anymore. Even if we win, we can’t keep them from hitting our rear; there won’t be any rear. Everyone, everywhere will have to live on guard.”
I could feel the responding thought forming in Shan’s mind—that in interstellar war there’s no rear area; nothing is ever significantly between any part of your forces and the enemy. It’s as if the enemy is on a hill two kilometers from a fence post, and you’re on a hill two kilometers on the other side of the fence post, and you’re both trying to hide behind the fence post. Can’t be done. There are so few stars and so much nothing, even in our fairly dense part of an outer spiral arm of the galaxy.
He sighed. “Well, certainly we can’t put up a fence and hang out a ‘No Invaders beyond this point’ sign. There will never be a Great Wall of Human Space. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be secure. Hornets can’t make a nest so strong that a bull can’t cave it in, but they can make the bull decide not to fuck with them. We can probably attain the kind of security a nest of hornets has—if we’re willing to learn to behave like hornets. Which, at least for the human part of the alliance, comes almost naturally anyway.” He sighed, stretched, and leaned back on his arms in the warm sunlight. “Even while we’re doing that, though, I hope there can be many afternoons like this.”
“Besides, it is impossibly romantic,” Reilis said, “to imagine a young soldier and his girl having an afternoon like this, before he goes bravely off to fight the brain eaters … now, isn’t that the stuff of drama?”
“I’m hardly young,” I said, gesturing at my fifty-year-old body, “though I may seem so to Shan—”
“And my total experience across all copies is a bit over a thousand years, all of which I remember, and I have spent decades brooding between the stars, and I have hurled comets and moved moons to make new worlds,” Reilis said. “I have lived long enough to see people I knew well become legends and myths.”
“Oh, even I’ve done that,” I pointed out.
“Precisely. You don’t even need one lifetime to feel eons old. But today I am wearing a young, vigorous body, which now has a gloriously full tummy, and wants to lie out in the sun with two men, currently in one body, whom I hope to have as friends for a thousand years to come. Which is to say, whatever may be in my past, I’m just at the beginning of the life I expect to have. That’s more than enough to make me young, and I intend to enjoy it, and if you won’t join me in that, well”—she stuck her tongue out—“poopers on you.”
I laughed and said, “I couldn’t possibly argue with that.”
• And I wouldn’t if I could. •
• Right, Shan, now you’re getting it. • I let myself be distracted by the play of the brilliant amber light on Reilis’s hair. “You are truly jovent, you know that?” I told her. “In the way the old poets, the first Occitans, meant it, when they would say that this or that brilliant, lively man of fifty was jovent—”
“Or that that stuffy old monk of twenty-two was vielh,” she agreed. “Either you try to squish new experiences down to make them small enough so that they won’t disturb you—tike an old toothless tasteless geezer’s pap—or you open wide and gulp experience in. Jovent or vielh, it’s a matter of gusto and joy, not gray hair and the calendar.” She sighed happily, and said, “Shall we just undress and sunbathe a bit?”
That seemed like a good idea too; when both bodies were stretched out on the warm, comfortably crumbly stone, with the big pitcher of lemonade between us in easy reach, she rolled over to face me; I felt Shan stir.
• Don’t spook the pretty girl, you dirty old man, • I thought amiably. • There may not be many things you can learn from me, but I do think technique is one. •
• I watch and learn, oh guru. •
Reilis smiled warmly, and said, “Well, one way that we’re none of us as young as we used to be—I do want to talk some business. So, do you suppose we could share what we both know of the Invaders? We should do that soon, if we’re to have talks that are at all productive.”
I was about to object that neither Shan nor I had any authority to speak for the Council or even the OSP about anything so important, when I felt Shan’s impatience cut me off; to him, I realized, the OSP would always be his personal property, and the Council of Humanity’s job would always be to ratify, after the fact, the (absolutely and clearly correct) things Shan did.
He currently shared a skull with a kidnapped prisoner. Just now he was dozens of
light-years beyond where the Council writ ran, and no longer had a job—he had been replaced fifteen years ago, for being dead. But as far as he was concerned, now that he was back, he was in charge again.
I had to admire the old pirate. (If I hadn’t admired him I’d have had to wring his neck, and the only one he had to wring was also mine.)
6
“Well, then,” Shan said. “So based on the timing and the two definitely attacked worlds, we’d have to say that they’re coming from the direction of Ursa Major, and that they know about every inhabited world in both Council and Union space, and they could conceivably attack all of them tomorrow; they’ve had more than time enough to get springer probes into position to do it.”
“To share a detail, we have been doing rather extensive patrols against that possibility,” Reilis said. “We have made great strides in the acoustics of interstellar plasma, and we don’t think any probe big enough to be dangerous has evaded our detection—at least, not anything moving at above eighty-five percent of c. We destroy about four Invader springships per year, all moving at very close to lightspeed. They might be sneaking something in at a much lower speed, but we do have some tight-beam deep-field radar scouting for those, and of course they would be coming much more slowly.”
“Our acoustic devices are only good for objects at ninety-plus percent of c and above,” Shan said. “Or were fifteen years ago. That might be an area of exchange. We do have a scanning gamma laser that works reasonably well, so we might have an exchange possible right there.”
“Good, at least one potential agreement right off the bat. That should at least get Union and the Council talking.” Reilis looked thoughtful. “Interesting that the Invaders don’t seem to be trying to overwhelm us with a single big attack.”
“We thought they might be an opportunistic predator,” Shan said. “Constantly sampling and tasting, but only devouring when it’s convenient. From conquering Eunesia, and the Theta Ursa Major system, the Invaders learned that the rest of human space is here, all these ripe sets of experiences ready to harvest. They’ll get around to consuming us, but on the Invaders’ time scales, it will be no delay at all if they wait for a century, or a millennium for that matter. We think it has to do with digestion time, and extreme confidence; they haven’t lost against any other species in tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of stanyears. After all, twenty thousand stanyears ago, the Invaders overran and conquered the Predecessors, who were a much bigger and tougher outfit. Probably they’ve had a lot of experience since. So we have a lot to get ready for, and not many rehearsals or much experience—we stopped holding total, win-or-else, war to extermination after the Slaughter, more than half a millennium ago.”
You had to love the mischief when that woman grinned. “You sound like you regret that.”
Shan shrugged. “Well, no, of course, how could anyone? But strange as it sounds, I wish we were in better practice. Think about what happened when the Cheyenne, who basically practiced ritual war, or the Chinese, with a couple of centuries of police actions, met better-armed outsiders. You can recover from a bad start if you’re the size of China, but that recovery isn’t anything you’d voluntarily undergo; and if you’re the size of the Cheyenne, well, that’s the old ball game.
“By the standards of most of the centuries from the Renaissance to the Slaughter, we don’t have a military, we have a medium-sized police force with an unusually well equipped SWAT team. If the Invaders hit tomorrow, the Council worlds will give them a better fight than Addams or Eunesia, but we’ll still be crushed in no time at all, and they’ll barely feel our resistance.”
“We’re in about the same situation,” she said. “A bit better in some ways because we went public with what had happened to Eunesia very early, but a bit worse in other ways because we have only a fraction of your population. Do you have any intelligence you’re willing to share about what’s happening on Addams right now?” she asked.
“Sort of. As far as we can tell from probes that generally don’t make it down to the surface, and don’t last more than a couple of seconds after starting to transmit to us, the Invaders are still stripping the 102 cultures there and shipping all of the human and machine memories back for the aliens to consume as entertainment. Four hundred years of a human population, a hundred and two cultures, two billion brain holograms, an aintellect population of maybe ten billion, and the average aintellect is ninety times the size of a human mind—it takes a while to get it all chopped up, packaged, labeled, and ready for consumption. At least our xenosemioticians think that that is what the robots and aintellects on Addams are doing at the moment; getting it all fit to send back.”
Reilis nodded. “That’s consistent with what their robots and aintellects were doing on Eunesia when we got back. They had a few orbital defense stations that we overwhelmed and shot to pieces, and they shut off their springers as soon as we landed. The robots and aintellects still wandering around blew themselves up, or erased themselves, the moment they were cut off from home, probably to avoid capture.” She rolled onto her back for a moment, stretched and sighed. Shan and I admired the view and hoped she wouldn’t glance in a direction that would surely reveal how much we admired it. “All right,” Reilis said, now gazing up at the sky, “that’s the start of sharing information. The next one on my list was the Predecessors. What information are you willing to share about them that isn’t public knowledge?”
Shan grinned. “Well, since you started off the sharing process, I suppose it is my turn to start.” From the way he was looking her over while he talked, I wasn’t sure whether he meant to start talking about the Predecessors, but that was what he did. “What we know is that in all the advanced Predecessor ruins we have found so far, there’s evidence of a terrific fight. Those metal squids that overran Addams were exactly like the ones who attacked what was probably the Predecessor provincial capital on the planet we call Harmmarskjöld. We have an enormous dig going on there; a whole planet of wreckage, but almost no bodies. It would appear that the Predecessors came back entirely to reclaim their own dead, since they did nothing about all the wreckage of Invader equipment. There are burned-out and blown-up robots all over that planet, but nothing organic belonging to the Invaders, and only relatively small body parts here and there that were once part of a Predecessor. And based on things like deposits of seasonal plant matter and so on, we think that fighting must have gone on for years. The Predecessors must have raised a whole generation in caves and undersea habitats while they fought for their world. It is probably the biggest battle site human beings have ever found, and it was just one of many places the Predecessors made a stand against the Invaders.
“More than that, on at least six worlds we’ve found primitive ruins that probably mean the Predecessors there lost or decided to stop using all tech that put out any EMF signal or might be visible from orbit—basically they moved into the caves and lived pre-tech in order to avoid detection—and some of those places held out for thousands of years. We may yet find a lost Predecessor colony with live Predecessors, living in the Neolithic or early Iron Age. And our best guess is that that’s not something that ‘happened to happen’—it’s something that they chose to do, rather than surrender.
“Anyway, they were quite a species, and I would require a lot more proof than we have to say that there are no more of them. I want to meet them, and shake hands or whatever it is our species can mutually do, and have their respect as much as they have mine. Certainly the Invaders admire them greatly, in their own horrible way—we think the Invaders finally finished shipping Predecessor material out of Hammarskjöld after about two thousand years.”
“Seems like quite a while to just pack up all the recordings they made,” Reilis said.
“Well, the little we know of the Invaders is that they have a desperate fear of the unfamiliar balanced by an equally desperate craving for novelty. So their aintellects and robots have to predigest every new species or civilization i
nto readily consumable form. Imagine taking the minds and memories of everyone alive on a particular day in all of Imperial Rome, or Moghul India, or the South American Interbellis, then editing it so that it wouldn’t upset a very fussy and extremely sheltered child, but would still excite and thrill that same child. You might guess it would take a while, even at aintellect speeds.”
It was a warm and pleasant afternoon in a near-paradise, and the two of them were chatting like friends and colleagues contemplating becoming lovers, as if the Invaders were as abstract a concern as the Aztecs or the Ice Age. It was beginning to freeze my blood, so I spoke up. “And these things destroyed the Predecessors,” I said. “The popular science articles are saying that all of Council-controlled space—which took us six centuries to settle—might be a tenth of the volume of one single province of the Predecessor Empire, or Hegemony, or whatever their political structure was. And the Invaders defeated the Predecessors—”
“They defeated some Predecessors,” Shan said. “The ones around here. For all we know, sometime before the pyramids were built, the Predecessors launched a counter-offensive, and they’ll be coming back this way to pay the Invaders back in, oh, another ten thousand years. At which point we have to hope they have nicer habits than the Invaders, and we don’t want them to mistake us for friends of the Invaders!”
“Well,” Reilis said, “they apparently gave the Invaders a good fight. We can at least do the same. If there is an afterlife for species, I’d rather sit down with the Predecessors. As a species, they didn’t go into the box, and they resisted being cut up into data for amusement. So we have something in common with them.” She stood up. “We really only need to keep our shoes and our water bottles, but we might as well carry the clothes with us. A robot will come up here and collect the picnic leavings. So, shall we stroll down to the beach? I could easily find myself in the mood for a swim.”