The League of Peoples

by James Alan Gardner

  “By then it could be too late,” Chee said.

  “Almost certainly,” Yarrun agreed. “But we would still have time to communicate with the ship and describe the problem. Sickness is a valid reason to demand immediate pickup; and then we’d only have to hold out another five minutes before we were back on the ship. Even if we died on board, our bodies must be sent to the Explorer Academy for examination, at which point the whole secret would come out.”

  “Not if the High Council suppressed the information,” I muttered.

  Yarrun shrugged. “Secrets are flimsy things—spread them among too many people, and they get torn. Maybe the council could suppress information about a single Landing…maybe even a handful of Landings. But if people go missing on a regular basis, there are too many leaks to catch. Admiral, how many people has the council has sent to Melaquin?”

  Chee thought for a moment. “Maybe one or two a year. And they’ve been doing this for at least forty years. They certainly couldn’t suppress hard evidence that long.”

  “Which means that whatever the danger is on Melaquin, it hits the party too fast for anyone to collect hard evidence.”

  “Do you have any ideas what it might be?” Chee asked.

  Feeling like a cadet reciting a case study, I said, “On Canopus IV, there’s a plant that spreads its seeds by exploding violently. In the right season, the vibration from a single footstep is enough to set it off. Five parties were killed there before one team spread out and put a hundred meters between each party member. In that team, one Explorer was killed; the others reported back and Canopus IV was eventually tamed.”

  “So you think we should spread out?”

  Yarrun snorted a small laugh. “The planet Seraphar has a race of semi-sentient shapeshifters who would quietly stab Explorers in the back and take their place in the party. Spreading out just made it that much easier for the shape-shifters to do their work. Six parties were killed before one stumbled on the truth.”

  “Every decision is a gamble,” I told the admiral. “In this case, however, we don’t need to tax our brains. So many teams have landed on Melaquin, they must have tried all the standard approaches by now. None of those worked, so we’re free to do whatever the hell we want.”

  We spent several moments of silence, contemplating the wealth of freedom presented to us.

  No-Comm

  “Of course,” I said at last, “there’s a more pleasant alternative.”

  “I’m eager to hear it,” Chee answered.

  “According to my old instructor Phylar Tobit, teams exploring Melaquin don’t necessarily go Oh Shit; they just go no-comm. Suppose there’s something on the planet that interrupts communications—some kind of interference field.”

  Yarrun looked thoughtful. “Didn’t Tobit suggest that parties can broadcast for a while before being cut off? If the planet has natural interference, it should kill communications right from the start.”

  “Not necessarily,” I answered. “Suppose Melaquin has some kind of standing interference field; but when a ship drops its Sperm tail to land a party, the tail disrupts the field. The Explorers land, the tail is withdrawn…and for a few minutes the party has normal communications. Then the interference reestablishes itself and the party goes no-comm.”

  “Wouldn’t there be some warning?” Chee asked. “Static or something, as the field closed back in.”

  “If the field closes fast enough, it doesn’t matter,” Yarrun told him. “To pick up a party, the ship has to drop the Sperm tail in exactly the right spot; and the only way to do that is to lock onto the tracking signal put out by a communicator. The signal is a sort of hypermagnetic anchor that seizes the end of the Sperm and drags it to the party’s location. If the signal isn’t working, there’s no chance a ship could ever plant its tail stably on the surface.”

  “So you think,” Chee said, “there’s some kind of field—”

  “No, Admiral,” I interrupted, “I’m just saying it’s one possibility. There must be a dozen other ways to disrupt communications: a trace chemical in the atmosphere that corrodes D-thread circuits; bacteria that like to chew on transducer chips; semi-sentients with the equipment to jam transmissions; periodic bursts of positronic energy that are drawn to communicators like lightning rods…”

  “You’re pulling my leg on that one, Ramos.”

  “I hope so,” I told him drily.

  “The point still stands,” Yarrun said. “I’d rather believe in a phenomenon that blanks communicators than one that kills whole parties in the blink of an eye.”

  Silently, I agreed. I could live with the thought of machines breaking.

  The Poles

  “You know,” Chee said, “perhaps our future isn’t so bleak after all. We know the planet is Earthlike. The weather won’t be a problem if we pick our landing site carefully enough. We’ll have food and water and breathable air—it’s an official exile world, so that part is guaranteed.”

  I shook my head at his naïveté. “If we’re really planning to survive for any length of time, we’ll put down on the edge of polar permafrost and hope we can subsist on scrub vegetation.”

  “Why?” Chee sounded outraged.

  “Because,” Yarrun explained, “the colder the region, the less microbial activity there is. When we land, we’ll each have twelve hours of canned air; after that, we have to start breathing local atmosphere. Our tightsuits do their best to filter microorganisms from incoming air, but don’t expect a hundred percent effectiveness. Theory says we’ll live a lot longer if we go where the airborne microbe count is low.”

  “Theory says?”

  “Actual evidence is skimpy,” Yarrun shrugged. “No Explorer has come back to tell us either way.”

  Kicking a Lion in the Ass

  “Are we really going to land near the poles?” Chee asked with conspicuous lack of enthusiasm.

  Yarrun answered for me. “Festina was joking, in her way. When we land, we want the Jacaranda to remain in geosynchronous position above us so they can pick us up at a moment’s notice. However, the Jacaranda was designed as a deep-space ship, and its sublight engines are not very efficient. If it parks close enough to the planet to pick us up, it has to maintain a reasonable speed relative to the planet’s center of gravity, or else expend a lot of energy trying to hold altitude. Close to the poles, a hovering flight path is just too slow for the ship to hold very long. We’re pretty well restricted to the region between, say, forty-five degrees north and south latitude.”

  “Which gives us plenty of land to choose from,” I promised Chee, “and many types of terrain. To land safely, we’ll choose somewhere fairly flat. To survive the first few hours, we’ll pick a place with sparse vegetation and little animal life…”

  “But not too sparse,” Yarrun added. “We don’t want to find ourselves in the middle of a desert if we suddenly go no-comm.”

  “Close to fresh water, far from any oceans…”

  “I like the ocean,” Chee protested.

  “So do thousands of other lifeforms,” I told him. “We must think defensively, Admiral. We know nothing about this planet except that it’s dangerous. If we set down near an ocean, we have to worry about nasty ocean things as well as nasty land things. The fewer environments and ecologies we have to contend with, the fewer variables we need to think about and the more likely we are to be here this time tomorrow, drinking lukewarm chocolate and mushrooms. All right?”

  “You don’t have to snap, Ramos,” he pouted. “I’ll bow to your expertise on every point…which is generous of me, considering that standard Explorer techniques work like shit on Melaquin.”

  “Admiral,” Yarrun said quietly, “we recognize the standard methods have proved inadequate. Even so, we shouldn’t abandon them entirely. Sometimes all the procedures in the book can’t protect you from the perils of a planet; but that’s no reason to walk up to something that looks like a lion and kick it in the ass.”

  “On the contrary,” Ch
ee answered with a gleam in his eye, “suppose the first thing I did on Melaquin was boot some large toothy animal in the butt. What would happen?”

  “Depending on its ecological niche,” I replied, “it would run, kick you back, or bite off your foot.”

  “And what would you do?”

  “Depending on the size of its teeth, we would run, laugh, or shoot it with a stunner.”

  “What would happen to me?”

  I threw up my hands. “There’s no way to know. How fast is the animal? How deadly is its attack? How susceptible is it to stunner fire? Does it sever a major artery or just give a flesh wound? Does its saliva happen to be poisonous to human life? How fast can we get you back to the ship’s infirmary?”

  I stopped, realizing what I just said.

  Chee nodded happily. “Standard policy says when a party member is injured, you must request immediate pickup.”

  We all pondered that a moment. Yarrun said, “Suppose the Admiralty have ordered Prope not to pick us up.”

  “They can’t do that!” Chee snapped. “Get it through your head—the Admiralty, the Technocracy, the whole damned galaxy, is constantly monitored by the League of Peoples.” He suddenly broke off. “Look,” he said in a lower voice. “Let me tell you a story.”

  And he did.

  Chee’s Story

  “Off in the Carsonal system,” Chee said, “there’s a planet with the stimulating name of Carsonal II. And living on Carsonal II was a species called the Greenstriders. Looked a lot like six-armed watermelons the size of a man, with long spindly legs.

  “Now,” he continued, “the Greenstriders joined the League of Peoples long before humans did, but they aren’t one of the ancient races. They still have physical bodies, they still have to eat and excrete…in other words, they’re small potatoes compared to the big boys in the League. But the Greenstriders had pretensions; they did indeed. And for a long time, the only contact between them and humanity was the occasional communicator message: ‘You are attempting to colonize a planet in Greenstrider territory. Please to vacate it immediately.’

  “The first time that happened, the Technocracy said, ‘Sorry,’ and left. The second time, we said, ‘All right, we’ll go, but give us a map of the territory you claim, so this won’t happen again.’ The third time, we said, ‘This planet wasn’t on your map, and it’s time we had a heart-to-heart talk…in front of League arbitrators.’

  “That’s where I came in,” Chee told us, “because the Admiralty always sent as many people as it could to an arbitration. Not to take part, but to watch. Or to spy, if you want a more colorful word. A few were assigned to spy on the Greenstriders, but most of us kept our eyes on the three arbitrators, to gather as much information as possible about the high mucky-mucks who really hold power in the League. In this case, the tribunal was a cloud of red smoke, a glowing cube, and a chair that sure as hell looked empty. But forget it, that’s not the point.

  “The point is that the hearing took place, the arbitrators asked a lot of questions, blah, blah, blah, everything you’d expect; and at the end, the tribunal decided the Greenstriders had been acting too highhanded. They got a slap on the wrist, and we got rights to colonize several new planets.

  “Admiral Fewkes, who was fronting for our side, tried to soften the blow in good diplomatic style. Too bad, he said, that there were misunderstandings in the past, but now the problems had been straightened out, Fewkes hoped that humans and Greenstriders could open friendly diplomatic relations…. You can fill in the rest. And then Fewkes held out his hand for a cordial little handshake.

  “Now you have to understand,” Chee said, “that as far as we knew, this was the first time humans and Greenstriders had ever been in the same place together. All previous communications were by radio and hypercom. And throughout the hearing, we had always been kept separate from the Greenstriders by order of the tribunal. Fewkes wanted this handshake to be a memorable moment, first contact, a photo-op to please the folks back home. But when the head strider chiggered over to shake the admiral’s hand, the moment was even more memorable than Fewkes expected. Within five seconds, he was lying on the floor gasping, and ten seconds later, he was dead.”

  Yarrun and I nodded gravely. “Secretions on Greenstrider skin,” Yarrun said. “Their perspiration acts as a lethal nerve toxin on human beings. We learned that in the Academy.”

  “Thank Fewkes for the information,” Chee replied. “He learned the hard way. Looked hellishly painful too, the way he screamed just before the end; but these things happen. It wouldn’t be the first time that alien lifeforms turned out to be intrinsically deadly to each other—just a tragic accident.

  “But…the arbitrators were still in the hearing room, and the cloud of red smoke said, ‘That was a non-sentient act.’ Seems there had been previous contact between humans and Greenstriders, and the red smoke knew all the details. A pair of Explorers had met some strider scouts, when both sides were checking out the same planet for possible colonization. There’d been diplomatic handshakes back then too; the Explorers had died so fast, they couldn’t report why.

  “So the Greenstriders knew what contact would do to us. Or more accurately, the knowledge existed somewhere in Greenstrider society. The strider who shook Fewkes’s hand didn’t personally know what would happen, but the Qloud of red smoke said that was no excuse. A warning should have been conveyed to all striders who might come in contact with humans. Anything else was homicidal negligence on the part of the Greenstrider government as a whole.”

  “Harsh,” Yarrun murmured. “If the strider who shook Fewkes’s hand really didn’t know…”

  “The tribunal said he should have known,” Chee answered. “When the Explorers died that first time, it was truly an accident. But after that, someone should have passed the word. I agree with the League on this. Someone in the chain of command was blatantly non-sentient if the information wasn’t deemed important enough to be conveyed through channels. Not even the Admiralty is that sloppy; every Explorer in the Corps is meticulously instructed in how to interact with known alien races for maximum mutual safety. Right?”

  “We hope so,” I replied.

  “You are,” Chee said. “If only because the High Council wants to avoid what happened to the Greenstriders. Their entire governmental system was declared non-sentient: negligently careless. The whole damned race was grounded—barred from interstellar travel until they reorganized into a more conscientious society. A few of them tried to defy the ban…and for the next few years, our fleet kept finding strider ghost ships drifting through space, every strider aboard killed the second they tried to leave their home star system. Not a mark on the bodies. Just dead. The League has no qualms against exterminating non-sentients to protect the rest of the galaxy.”

  Chee paused to let that sink in.

  “One question,” I said. “If the red smoke knew the handshake would kill Fewkes, why didn’t the smoke do something? Even if it had just shouted ‘Stop!’ before the strider made skin contact….”

  “The high echelons of the League prefer not to interfere with the actions of lower species,” Chee replied. “They say it has something to do with free will.”

  “Or,” Yarrun murmured, “giving us enough rope to hang ourselves.”

  The Admiral Volunteers

  “So,” Chee started again, “we were talking about Melaquin…and I was saying the High Council has to tread carefully. They can order us to explore a planet where there’s only a slim chance of survival, but they can’t send us on a total suicide mission. That’s why they use Melaquin so often: they’ve found they can get away with it. And they can’t get away with ordering a ship to refuse aid to the injured. That’s a blatant non-sentient act. The League would never let another Outward Fleet ship into interstellar space.”

  There was a long silence. I thought about Chee’s suggestion: deliberately getting hurt as an excuse to abort the Landing. It would have to be a real injury; faking or lying was d
ereliction of duty and we’d all be exiled back to Melaquin. But a genuine life-threatening wound was reasonable cause to cut short a mission…as was the death of a party member, for that matter. Whether or not Yarrun and I could save Chee’s life was immaterial.

  I turned to Chee. “Are you really volunteering to take the risk? It’s much greater than you may realize. Infection, for instance. Any wound exposed to alien microbes….”

  “Nice of you to care,” Chee replied, “but I have nothing to lose. If we stay too long on Melaquin, we’ll end up dead like the others. Even if we’re just stranded no-comm, I can’t survive long without YouthBoost—in case you were wondering, I’m fucking ancient. On the other hand, if I take a wound three minutes after we land, there’s a chance we’ll get back to the ship and I’ll pull through. I’d get a kick out of that…not just living but thumbing my nose at the High Council. Think of the looks on their faces when I come back from Melaquin again. I’d give ’em a raspberry so loud it’d be heard on every ship of the Fleet. Do you want to spoil an old man’s fun?”

  I looked at Yarrun. He murmured, “It would be more fair if we drew lots for who takes the risk.”

  “I’m an admiral,” Chee told him. “I don’t have to be fair. Besides, if someone gets chomped, it’s better to have two competent Explorers taking care of the victim than one competent Explorer and one senile old beanbag. Right?”

  Chee looked to Yarrun for agreement. Yarrun shrugged and looked at me—he chose the most annoying times to defer to my rank. “All right, then,” I sighed, “we’ll pick a Landing site where we can expect to find large predators. Anything else?”