She gave a short snort of annoyance, but took a seat on one of the café chairs. Holt spoke to the hub police for a few minutes while a team of carrier robots dealt with the jumble of bones and tactical gear in the middle of the floor. With the sporadic orderliness of an ant colony, the hub began to return to normal.
Eventually, Holt made a smart-casual salute to the hub police and marched over to Arianne.
“Arianne,” said Holt hesitantly, “I’m intrigued by your appearance, but what are your intentions here?”
“Oh, just a spontaneous holiday,” said Arianne. Holt did not move any muscles. Arianne sighed, stood up and put on her best storytelling face.
“I’m trying to solve a mystery.”
Holt nodded gravely.
“La Quana’s not involved, by any chance?” he asked.
“He’s footing the bill,” she responded.
Holt’s eyes snapped back to meet Arianne’s.
“You’re working for La Quana? After everything that happened?”
“At least it rules him out as a suspect,” she said easily.
Holt hesitated, frowned, then shrugged his shoulders.
“Well I didn’t foresee this. What did you say to him?”
Arianne smiled.
“I get to pick my own team.”
Chapter 4
Arianne and Holt were walking to the dwarf star 47 Ursae Majoris. Or rather, they were walking through transport hubs from gate to gate, while being zapped asleep between each one, squeezed into a chryotube, packed into a superlifter ship, unpacked and re-positioned before being reanimated. All they saw of this was the scenery around them shifting slightly as they stepped through the transit gates.
“I’m surprised that you still trust chryosleep systems after your last adventure,” said Holt.
Arianne’s left eye winced involuntarily.
“They still creep me out. But there’s no option, really. Even this relatively short trip is nearly 50 years. More with delays and waiting for superlifters to come in.”
Holt nodded, apparently happy with the response.
“So what do we know?” he said.
Arianne smiled weakly. But Holt’s military briskness was what she had wanted, after all.
“La Quana’s team have been collecting reports from across the galaxy of languages slowly converging to become more similar. One of the first reports was from a transport hub where a severe electrical storm disrupted e-translation services, leaving people with just their meat brains to communicate. Two visitors from almost opposite ends of the galaxy found that they could understand each other perfectly well, even though they were probably the first two members of their communities to meet in a millennium.”
“That’s just one case, you said there were others?”
“Yes, a field linguist turned up at a remote mining community in the Oort cloud, only to report that she already spoke the language there. What’s stranger is that the linguist and the two transport hub folk from the first case were put on a show about weird coincidences, and it turns out that the three of them could understand each other. So that’s four completely unconnected communities who had all ended up speaking the same way. La Quana went on the net calling it “The Great Convergence”.”
“So maybe they were just speaking old languages that hadn’t changed?”
“Yeah, some weird stuff happens out there. Some cultures punish deviations from linguistic norms, or hibernate for thousands of years, or re-introduce a long-dead language. But I’ve been looking at the case and there’s plenty of evidence that the two languages started from very different points and changed to become more similar to each other.”
“Well, maybe it was just by chance?”
“Holt - the probability of that happening …” Arianne grimaced with mental effort required to imagine the possibility. “... is very small. But this isn’t an isolated incident - we’re getting a lot of similar reports.”
Holt nodded slowly. Arianne heard a beep in her ebrain.
Small Support Grant G67HS995A - Status: Received
She mentally flicked the message away.
“So what’s it like?” asked Holt.
“Eh?”
“The language.”
“Oh, it’s quite strange,” said Arianne, creases forming in her brow. “It has very little morphology, and a pretty free word order. It doesn’t seem to have a distinct future tense, which isn’t so odd, but it also has very few words that refer to the future. Like, there’s no word for ‘tomorrow’, people just use the equivalent of ‘not now’. There’s also very few modals, and no standard way of making promises.”
“So, a language for the here and now?” asked Holt.
“Yeah. Competitive too – the pronoun system is literally us versus them. And it’s not just language that’s changing - there’s been a rise in claims of intellectual property theft and plagiarism. In one case, two researchers submitted funding proposals so similar to each other that CAFCA was forced to investigate. They found that the pair’s light cones had never intersected. In fact, because of relativity effects, from their perspective they had each submitted the proposal before the other.”
Holt and Arianne walked through another gate and onto another space station.
“Is this really a problem, Arianne, in the grand scheme of things?” asked Holt.
“Hmm?”
“I mean, wouldn’t it be a great advantage if everyone spoke the same language?”
Arianne considered this with a half smile.
“It would be very convenient, sure. But human languages change, humans change. If you nail everything down so that everyone speaks the same way, then you’ve taken away a bit of what it means to be human. We’ve both seen what happens when someone tries to force everyone to be the same.”
Holt nodded, some part of his brain re-living their previous adventure, trying to extrapolate forwards to the current problem.
“You think there’s some conspiracy?” he asked. Arianne shrugged.
“Whatever is causing this has to be incredibly powerful, and at the moment we have no idea why it’s happening.”
Holt was not pleased with Arianne’s side-stepping, so tried another angle of attack.
“Let’s say that we do find out what’s responsible for this - what will you do about it?” he asked.
“That’s up to La Quana I suppose,” said Arianne. “But it’s not our job - let’s focus on the task at hand.”
Holt frowned. “And what, exactly, is that?”
“We need a team of people who’ve been out of the loop.”
“And why is that?” said Holt.
“Just a feeling,” said Arianne, “I want people who could not have been involved with CAFCA recently. After our last adventure I trust them less than a mixed effects model.”
“Hmm, even I know how unreliable those turned out to be.”
Holt held her gaze for a moment, squinted, then nodded.
“Alright,” he said, “so where are we going to find one of these outloopers?”
They had just gone through a gate to a hub with a massive window looking down on a brown planet marbled with long lines of green. Arianne gestured grandly.
“Cloister.”
Chapter 5
The shuttle ship Small Idea Factory nudged its way into the thin atmosphere of Cloister. Holt actually sat in the cockpit for the docking procedure.
“You know the ship computer can process information 10 times faster than you? Relax.”
Holt made a worried throaty noise.
“I’ve had some problems dealing with smart tech that was never supposed to go wrong.”
Arianne conceded a nod and looked out of the window. The ship was headed towards a small settlement on the coast. The buildings were no more than a few stories high each, and all built out of the local stone, a kind of white basalt. It gleamed in the midday sun.
“Come on, Holt,” said Arianne, “even if the main computer fails, the
re’s a backup, and if that fails, the ship can pretty much land itself without any computation, just by direct connections between light sensors and the drive engines.”
Holt remained attentive of the readouts across the screen.
“It just follows its nose?”
“Yeah, it just kind of works. Insects do a lot of their navigation just by moving towards things that look familiar.”
“And how about you, Arianne, do you have a plan or are you just moving towards something familiar?”
Arianne smiled.
“Ah, leave Kotlin to me.”
Kotlin was hunched over a tiny terminal in a massive room. The inner walls were made of the same stone as everything else in the city, but unpolished so it reflected light evenly about the space. When Arianne entered, it had taken time for her to work out the function of such a large space. It appeared to be an indoor maze of tall curving walls. There were small knots of people milling around, but Kotlin stood alone in a kind of central clearing. She was interacting intensely with her terminal, reaching out every so often to manipulate something on a high table. She unfolded the object in a swift movement and a beam of light drew itself under it. Arianne realized that the object was a book. In fact, the curving walls were shelves of books.
Arianne approached Kotlin’s tiny desk, but Kotlin showed no signs of noticing.
“Is the great Dr. Kotlin reduced to photocopying in the local library?” said Arianne.
Kotlin glanced up at Arianne, and did a slow double-take. She exhaled something that could have contained semantic content, then sat back in her chair.
“Ah, Dr. Arianne, I would ask whether you are reduced to disturbing other people’s research, but that’s what you’ve been doing as long as I’ve known you.”
Arianne took a chair opposite Kotlin.
“It’s nice to see you, too” said Arianne.
“A social visit, is it, then? Come on a spontaneous jaunt to the White City?”
“Oh, it would be great as a short break destination – nice weather, relaxed atmosphere. Hardly any distractions.” Arianne looked around the room. “Or Wi-Fi.”
Kotlin sighed and reached out to turn the page on the book she was scanning.
“I couldn’t believe it when I heard the great Kotlin was living on Cloister. I mean, come on, it’s a backbelt, how did you end up here?”
“The quiet suits me quite well,” said Kotlin evenly. “Speaking of which …”
Arianne waited, but Kotlin just went back to working on her terminal. Arianne rolled her eyes.
“You don’t want to know why I’ve come to see you?”
“Huh. Probably some invitation to join a mumbo-jumbo, crackpot shot in the dark?”
Arianne wasn’t surprised at Kotlin’s grumpiness. She knew it was just her way of interacting.
“It’s a mumbo-jumbo crackpot shot in the dark with top-grade funding.”
“I’m not interested.”
“There’s a new problem to be solved, Kotlin! It’s the biggest mystery since -”
“We’ve got spaceloads of old problems that haven’t been solved yet” said Kotlin, gesturing towards the scanner.
“But it’s a chance to -” began Arianne.
“No, Arianne,” said Kotlin. She sighed and stood up. “Come on, if you insist on taking up my time, take a walk with me.”
They walked along the bookshelves of the library. Arianne fancied she could see Kotlin’s slow but steady progress where the dust was wiped away.
“I came to Cloister to get things done,” said Kotlin. Arianne knew that Kotlin was setting up the groundwork for a debate that would showcase why Kotlin was right. And she usually was right. But Arianne couldn’t help delaying the inevitable lecture a little.
“Things like scanning old books?” said Arianne, miming the drudgery of the scanning machine.
“That’s part of it, yes,” said Kotlin, not taking the bait. “How much do you know about Cloister?”
“Not a lot – it’s kind of anti-technology?”
“Not at all, Arianne. It’s just rewound time a bit. The whole planet is divided into time zones.”
“Not exactly a new invention.”
“No, but in this case we’re in UTC-87 million.”
It was typical of Kotlin to just assume that everyone could extrapolate logically from quite unusual statements. Arianne had to remind herself that she wouldn’t say something stupid or technically wrong. But in the end, her brain just took the easy way out.
“Huh?”
“Here, it’s the year 2004,” said Kotlin. “Over the water there it’s the late 20th century.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s no technology or information or culture here that existed after 2004. We’ve rewound the clock.”
Arianne tried not to just scrunch her face up in confusion. Had Kotlin gone into some kind of pseudo-religious cult? Or, more worryingly, retirement?
“I see you’re confused,” said Kotlin, matter-of-factly. “It’s not so hard to understand. Listen - out there in the rest of the galaxy, culture runs in parallel and nothing gets done. Knowledge is even being lost. Here we’re trying to rebuild things.”
Arianne suddenly realized that talking to Kotlin was basically like playing an early adventure computer game.
“Tell me more about culture running in parallel,” she said in a robotic voice. But Kotlin was unfazed.
“Well, put it this way: In the 7th and 8th decade of the 20th century, there was access to mass media, but also a sense of things moving forward. Particularly for music. For the first time, people all over Old Earth could hear things basically as they came out, but things also got lost or went out of print, so you had to keep moving forward. Culture had a kind of linearity. And bands and songs and art had more of a coherent identity.”
“Ah, I heard that a whole rock movement started in New Zealand basically because someone in Dunedin owned a Velvet Underground album.”
“Exactly! But now everything is available and there’s no direction. I could listen to a ballad from the 17th century, then glitch hop from the 21st then space whale opera from the 24th.”
“Doesn’t that just give us a great scope?”
“Sure, but a chryotank full of option anxiety, too. Access to everything is causing a creativity crisis. It’s like when you’re young - you haven’t had time to learn a lot yet, so you’re not afraid to try something out. But when you’re older you learn that a lot of stuff has been done before, and it makes you warier, less willing to start things. Our whole civilization has gotten old - every time you think about writing a book or composing a song, there’s immediate access a million examples of people doing basically the same thing. Or worse - a suspicion that someone else on the other side of the galaxy has done it before.”
Arianne still couldn’t tell if this was the ravings of a cultist.
Resister: Space Funding Crisis II Page 4