‘Thank you, skipper,’ she looked pleased. ‘And is that helpful to you at all, operationally?’
‘Yes,’ Alex said, quite surprised himself to find that it actually was. ‘Yes, it really is.’ Understanding why spacers wouldn’t go there was important, if it came to having to persuade them to stop using Abigale Alley. He would support Shion’s honouring the Alari anyway, on principle. But if spacers believed that honouring the spirit of the Alari would lift the jinx off Novamas, that could indeed be part of the solution. ‘Thank you,’ Alex said. ‘But can I ask you, have you heard of a world called Gide, at all?’
‘Geeday?’ He’d pronounced it as Dix had, a straight ‘Geed’, but Shion added another vowel sound.
‘Possibly – the world closest to Novamas on the other side of the Firewall,’ Alex clarified.
‘Oh, yes,’ Shion said. ‘They’re lovely people – great fun, though not one of our ancient sistering worlds.’
‘Fun?’ Alex queried, his eyebrows shooting up. The last thing he’d expected was that.
‘Oh, yes,’ Shion grinned. ‘They’re a very light-hearted, even frivolous people. From what I’ve heard, they spend much of their time making music, chatting, dancing. Always a party at Gide, it’s said, and no tears. They’re said to lack the capacity to cry, though whether that’s physical or emotional I couldn’t say. I do know that they do not grieve, as a people. I mean, every other world I know is still grieving for the lost civilisations of the Falling. We are, ourselves, on Pirrell. It is expected of all of us that we spend time in the Hall of Grief, to learn about what happened and honour the memory of the fallen. The Solarans are still singing the songs of grief that arose when the plague first began. But at Gide, they say, the people there have shrugged it off, just got back to partying as if it was nothing of any lasting importance. The Solarans, I know, find that very offensive. But then, Solarus Perth and Gide have never been compatible cultures, the Solarans so solemn and slow, and the Gideans said to be like quicksilver.’
Alex gazed at her in amazement. She had, in two cheerful, casual minutes, solved the mystery of the Solarans’ view of Gide as ‘unbalanced’, explained why the Solarans were not prepared to act as intermediaries with them, and given invaluable insight into the nature of Gidean society. It changed his own perspective on the situation, immediately and entirely.
‘Do you have any idea how they might feel about us? Humans, I mean?’ he asked, remembering Dix’s certainty that they would be terrified.
‘Well, not specifically,’ Shion said. ‘Though I do know that they annoyed the Solarans by asking for more of your holovision. The Solarans distribute your first-contact information bundle, you see, to any world that’s interested, along with their own information about your culture and language. I learned the basics of League Standard myself, from that – it’s like an exodiplomacy phrasebook they’ve compiled. Being Solaran, it’s big on phrases like ‘The atmosphere is toxic’ and ‘I require solitude’, but it’s much easier to pick up the basics from that than your extraordinary first-contact language files. I mean, honestly, who wants to read fourteen hundred pages on the nature of your alphabet? And do not get me started on grammar, with all the exceptions to every rule and breaking rules anyway for informality or style. Your languages are extremely difficult to learn, that’s for sure. Many worlds, I gather, have a few academics who’ve mastered at least the basics of League Standard, but for most people, for general interest, the Solarans provide translations of documents. They also re-tech your images and recordings to be compatible with other worlds’ technology and provide translations of them, too.’
Alex nodded. He had spent some time looking through the first-contact pack himself, as a cadet, during lessons in exodiplomacy. It was a massive data-pack, consisting of thousands of books, tens of thousands of still images and more than a hundred thousand hours of selected media, including news reports, documentaries, the arts and entertainment. It was meant to give a broad cross-cultural snapshot of life in the League, so included everything from ballet to game shows.
‘The Gideans,’ Shion told him, ‘asked the Solarans for more movies. Apparently they find them hilarious. The Solarans were not at all impressed. You know they have been dedicated, ever since the Falling, to reaching out across the Firewall, trying to help the new genomes as they fell into barbarity. They’ve sacrificed many people in that endeavour, as so many of them either died of disease, were slaughtered by barbarians or held captive and experimented on in secret labs. It’s only so very recently that they’ve actually managed to establish diplomatic relations with you, and they’re working in that, very earnestly, not only to do everything they can to help you but to spread information about you to other worlds. They did not, as they say, go to all that sacrifice and effort to provide the Gideans with funny movies.’
‘Oh.’ Alex considered that. ‘So you wouldn’t say, then, that they’re afraid of us?’
‘At your current stage of development? No.’ Shion said. ‘There is, I know, concern out there that you may one day become so technologically advanced that you are able to breach the Firewall, with fears in that both about the plague you carry and your aggression as a species. But the Solarans are of the opinion that you are rising, as a people, culturally, as well as technologically, that you are already so responsible that there is no way you would risk contamination of any other world, and that you are, too, a remarkably innovative, creative people. They do not feel that it will be long before you’re ready to take your place in what might be called the galactic community, with due regard for the necessity of maintaining quarantine. This, after all, is what was hoped for when the survival genomes were developed and the Firewall imposed. Nobody wanted these worlds to die, skipper. The whole point of the survival genomes was to save some part of the peoples, the civilisations, that were falling, so their children could take their place. The Solarans have been the only people brave enough to keep sending ambassadors into your space, and you can hardly blame other worlds for holding back on that, given what happened to the Solarans. But now relationships are being established, other worlds are watching that with keen interest, ready to greet you themselves when they feel that the time is right for that. I did tell them that, at Amali, though the Solarans have told them that too, many times.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ Alex said, with a rueful note. ‘But it may take some time for us to overcome our own perceptions of worlds ‘out there’ being either afraid of us, or hostile. Fear of the unknown, regrettably, has become embedded in our culture since the shock of encountering the Marfikians.’
‘Understandably,’ said Shion. ‘But Gide, and other worlds beyond the Firewall, they have no reason to fear either the Marfikians or your people. Not, as I say, at your current level of development. Have they made first contact, then? Is that why we’re going there?’
‘No,’ Alex said, and changed his mind about telling her the circumstances – she knew a great deal more about this than he’d expected, or even hoped, and might well give even more helpful information if she understood what was going on. So he told her, explaining about the ships passing through Abigale Alley, and the message that the Solarans had passed on conveying Gide’s annoyance.
‘Can I see exactly what they said?’ Shion asked.
Alex’s XD-317 orders included a Diplomatic Corps briefing – the usual massive tome – and he was able to find the relevant recording, playing it for Shion. It was the first time he’d seen it, himself, watching with close interest as the Solaran ambassadors spoke. There were, as usual, three of them, seated in a triangular arrangement on ornately decorated three-legged chairs. Alex recognised the setting as that of an encounter room, grey walls adorned with a complexity of monochrome geometric shapes, lighting low and sound suppressed. The room was divided by a discreetly concealed quarantine barrier, like an air-wall, maintaining separate air processing for the Solarans and the human diplomats sitting on their side of it.
The First Contact society wo
uld have yelled with triumph at the sight of the Solarans themselves. They were tall, preternaturally thin, with long, strangely jointed arms and legs and long narrow heads. They had small triangular mouths and large dark eyes, though these were partially concealed by the scarves of filmy fabric they wore draped over their heads. When they spoke, it was with a painfully slow delivery, long pauses between each word, and a full two minutes of silence between sentences. Both Alex and Shion sat patiently through this, just as the human ambassador and her two aides did, in the recording. What it amounted to, over more than fifteen minutes, could have been spoken in a matter of seconds.
‘We are asked to convey the concern of a world called Gide,’ said one.
‘It is a world neighbouring your world of Novamas,’ said another. It was impossible to tell with Solarans whether they were male or female. They were believed to have both genders, but were indistinguishable to human eyes.
‘Your shipping is being detected by their border systems,’ said the third, and activated a star chart of the Novamas region, on a wall-sized holoscreen. ‘We have indicated the area.’
‘It would be appreciated if you could resolve this,’ said the first.
The human ambassador, an elderly lady with a soft, musical voice, considered this calmly for some time before she replied.
‘Would you be so kind as to convey our sorrow to the people of Gide that our shipping has, inadvertently, caused nuisance to them?’
The recording indicated that there was a silence of some twenty three minutes at this point, so Alex pressed the skip-forward.
‘We regret.’
‘Gide is a chair with two legs.’
‘Difficult.’
‘We prefer to communicate with them ourselves via third parties.’
‘Ah.’ Another long silence, this time on the human side of the barrier, before their ambassador asked, ‘Would it be possible, then, for you to give us any further information about Gide?’
‘We regret.’
‘We do not have their consent for disclosure.’
‘We have conveyed the concern. The matter is now closed for discussion.’
And that was that. Alex looked across the desk at Shion, and she grinned.
‘I wouldn’t worry about it,’ she said, startling him again.
‘Sorry?’
‘I really wouldn’t worry about it,’ she repeated. ‘It doesn’t sound to me like a serious concern, just the Solaran equivalent of mentioning something in passing. It wouldn’t surprise me if they’d got it wrong, anyway. They’re not the easiest of people for other species to communicate with, particularly fast people like the Gideans, so it may well be nothing more than some casual remark by a Gidean about how many ships they’re noticing around your border, misunderstood by the Solarans as being raised as a diplomatic issue.’
‘You may be right,’ Alex said, with due respect for her far greater knowledge of other worlds and other species. ‘But if there is the slightest chance that we are causing upset to a neighbouring world, Shion, we have to take that seriously and do everything in our power to resolve it.’
‘Well, yes, I see, if you’re hoping to become friends with them,’ Shion conceded. ‘Which is, I gather, the intention?’
‘If at all possible, yes,’ Alex confirmed. ‘Though the Diplomatic Corps has been attempting to make contact with them for months, now, without any response.’ His tone invited her to comment, and she considered for a few moments before doing so.
‘If they’ve decided that they’re not ready then they won’t respond to approaches, no. We did that on Pirrell, for a long time, when the Solarans were first attempting first contact with us. We were too anxious about our quarantine and so insular by then that we didn’t even reply to any of their messages for hundreds of years. And the first time we did answer it was a polite but firm, ‘Please go away and leave us alone.’ They kept coming back, though, every hundred and fifty years or so – once in every generation, sending out ambassadors to see if things had changed. And eventually, like you, we felt ready, we were expecting the next visit and prepared to establish diplomatic relations with them. That’s how it goes, you know? So if the Gideans aren’t ready yet you do just have to respect that, really.’
‘Yes, of course, and we certainly aren’t on any agenda of attempting to force contact on them,’ Alex assured her. ‘It’s just that we don’t know if our efforts are even being noticed, so we have to keep trying, yes?’
‘Yes, fair enough,’ she agreed, and reached for her own coffee, looking interested. ‘So, what are you trying, then?’
‘Standard policy,’ Alex told her. ‘They’re sending sterile probes into the Firewall, one a week, broadcasting the usual first-contact ‘we come in peace’ messages. They’ve also set up a communications array at the point where they launch the probes, broadcasting a superlight signal, scattering out data-bursts in the hope that one of them will be picked up.’
‘Probes are pointless,’ Shion told him, straight away. ‘Your people fire them off by the thousand, tens of thousands, hurtling all over the place. We don’t take any notice of them at Pirrell – hardly a month goes by without some kind of unmanned probe coming into our space. Our systems destroy them as soon as its confirmed that there are no life signs on board. We certainly don’t pick up on any messages they might be broadcasting. Or, for that matter, from comms arrays set outside our borders to broadcast stuff at us. We find that intrusive and annoying and block such transmissions routinely. But you’d need amazingly powerful tech to broadcast to Gide, anyway, from within your space. What’s the range on the array?’
‘1.3 light years,’ Alex told her, at which she spluttered, nearly choking on her coffee.
‘You’re not serious!’ she put the mug down, seeing the answer on his face, and laughed. ‘You are serious! Well, that would explain why they’re not taking any notice! Gide is at least four hundred light years over the border – probably nearer four hundred and fifty.’
‘That far?’ Alex was astounded, and disappointed, too. He’d imagined it to be much closer, within reasonable reach of their own ships. At that distance, even going at their top cruising speed, it would take the Heron more than three months to make such a journey.
‘That’s practically on the doorstep in galactic terms,’ Shion pointed out. ‘There are worlds out there, I know, so distant that not even Solaran ships make the journey. And journeys are, after all, relative to the speed of the transport available. I mean, it would take one of your ships two months to get from Pirrell to Amali. I was only aboard the Solaran ship for three and a half hours. So the border is only going to be, what, four or five hours at the most from Gide, from their perspective. But your comms array is only firing coherent data for, what, a minute of that?’
Alex nodded. The comms array broadcast highly condensed data-bursts carried by superlight arcons. A range of 1.3 light years before that signal degraded into indecipherable noise represented the absolute pinnacle of human comms technology. There was hope that, as it was developed, a chain of re-broadcasting stations might even be created, allowing signals to be transmitted between their own worlds. They were decades away from that, though, the array being deployed at Novamas a prototype only just out of testing.
‘Well, then, they’re not going to pick up on that, are they?’ Shion pointed out, reasonably. ‘A tiny fuzzy noise at the border. Who’d even notice?’
‘So how would you go about getting their attention, then?’ Alex asked.
‘Me?’ Shion said. ‘I dunno, skipper. If your broadcasts won’t reach them and the Solarans won’t help, it seems to me you’re pretty much scuppered.’ Her manner was frank, slightly regretful but not deeply concerned. ‘It looks like you’ll have to wait for them to come to you. But as I said, I really wouldn’t worry too much about it – if it really was a serious concern, I’m sure they’d have sent a far more detailed message than that.’
‘Ah,’ Alex said, with some regret, himself, as he r
ecognised that he had reached the limit of Shion’s ability to help with this. ‘Well, we don’t give up that easily.’ He smiled at her. ‘Do you think you could show me on charts where Gide is?’
‘Not precisely, but I can give you a general indication.’ She sat forward as he activated star charts, passing controls to her side of the desk. Shion enlarged the chart to encompass a much bigger area, and twisted and turned it, too, to get a perspective she recognised. The entire area beyond the Firewall was designated as uncharted space, the positions of stars only determined by remote observation, no detailed maps or wave space charts available. Shion, having looked at it carefully, drew an ovoid around an area that held perhaps ninety or a hundred stars.
‘Somewhere around there,’ she told Alex.
‘Thank you.’ If nothing else, that meant they could refocus their array to be broadcasting towards Gide, which might, might just get their attention. ‘Thank you very much, Shion. That really is enormously helpful.’
‘Is it?’ She seemed a little anxious. ‘Not so helpful,’ she asked, ‘that they’ll try to drag me off the ship again? Or give you a list of six hundred questions to ask me?’
Alex grinned. ‘No, I promise,’ he reassured her, ‘I’ll make it clear that this is as far as you can go.’
It was already, he knew, phenomenal, and he was not surprised to get a personal call from the president later that day, amazed by the revelations Shion had shared with them.
‘Thank you, Alex,’ he said, having evidently decided that Alex merited being called by his first name, though Alex had certainly not invited him to do so. ‘Excellent, excellent work.’
Alex remained stone faced.
‘I did no more than ask her, sir, informally,’ he stated.
‘Yes, yes,’ the president waved that aside, ‘but the relationship had to be there, for her to be so forthcoming. The diplomats are just beside themselves. My warmest, heartiest congratulations, Alex.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ said Alex, entirely unmoved. For some reason this seemed to amuse the president considerably, as he was guffawing, then, as he ended the call.
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