Space Trek (Three Novels, Three Worlds, Three Journeys Book 1)

by Jo Zebedee

  “No.”

  “No?”

  Liang-xin shook its head.

  But before the conversation could continue there was a burst of white light and an explosion of sound. Stunned, Xie Fei found herself staring into nothingness… white, violent, noisy, chaotic nothingness. She was immobile, her senses battered, her body a distant hint…

  And then sounds amongst the explosion of noise, hints of grey amidst the white. It occurred to her that her environment had changed beyond all recognition.

  A human voice. “Xie Fei? Are you all right? It’s Hor Namhong.”

  *

  The trio sat behind a huge boulder on the beach as they spoke.

  Hor Namhong said, “We had no idea what was going on with you here, with the eyepiece, the earpieces.”

  “We didn’t realise we had any choices,” Hu Min added. She looked miserable, aware of the blunder the pair had made.

  Xie Fei nodded. Their explanations were understandable. She replied, “Do not worry too much. It was an accident. You didn’t know why I was lying on my back, you didn’t know anything-”

  “We just had to escape, to find somebody sane. Hell is breaking loose on the lilypads, an android rebellion-”

  “Not a rebellion,” Hor Namhong interrupted, “more a coup.”

  “For the moment,” Xie Fei said, “we’ll have to forget the lilypads. I think there may be intelligence here – the spherics, whatever they are. I think something, some entity, or perhaps entities is exploring me… us. It could be that they’re preparing to destroy us in the most efficient way, or it could be animal behaviour – protecting their home. Or they could be really exploring.”

  “We may never know,” Hu Min observed.

  “Exactly. But now you’re here, you can help. I need the longest uninterrupted session possible in the electromagnetic environment. I see you brought a little food and water with you.”

  “We didn’t know where we’d end up.”

  Xie Fei nodded. “You may need to drip-feed me when I go back in. You may need to get water into me. Carefully, yes! You may need to clean me up. Do you understand what I mean by that?”

  They looked embarrassed. “I suppose so,” Hu Min said. She laughed. “I have two small children.”

  Xie Fei nodded. “And above all, protect me, hide me. Keep out of sight of the lilypads at all times when it’s daytime. We do have a problem, though.”

  “What?”

  “When I put the eyepiece and earpieces on, my brain is fooled into creating a stereoscopic, full-sense imaginary world from the electromagnetic data received. Once I’ve started believing it there’s no way of me communicating with you, or the other way around. So you’ll just have to guess.”

  “Guess?” Hu Min said.

  “When to pull off my eyepiece and earpieces again. Give me… three days.”

  “Three days?”

  Xie Fei nodded, grabbing a water bottle and a pack of artificial meat. She began eating, and through mouthfuls said, “I may need three months. We can’t even begin to guess.”

  Hu Min nodded. “I understand,” she said.

  *

  The electromagnetic environment looked exactly the same as before, except it was night: imaginary stars in the imaginary sky. If only she had noticed the stars in the real night sky, for then, if they looked different here, she could have known with more certainty that this place was an image of Grey so many millions of years ago.

  She was certain it was Grey past, however. It made sense. The spherics, she suspected, were the creations of that ancient alien race, that had taken over all land surfaces to become a monoculture. The question she needed to answer now was the ultimate question: were the spherics conscious? No doubt that the alien creatures were conscious: how else had they made the civilisation that reached beta Hydrii’s moon? But their globular descendants…

  Time passed here. There was day and night, gravity, images of real things, of dead things, of things long since departed. What more?

  Xie Fei saw Liang-xin and hurried over to be close to the android. “Liang-xin! I’ve returned.”

  “Yes, you have.”

  Xie Fei made an act of studying the environment around her, before asking, “How long was I away for?”

  “Not long. A few Earthside minutes.”

  Good. The rule of time applied here too. Xie Fei felt confident. This was a model of the real world, she was certain, with all the rules of the real world. Of course, that did not exclude an imaginary overlay created by the spherics themselves.

  “We were speaking about the beings in hiding,” she said.

  “We were.”

  “Describe them to me.”

  “They take various geometric shapes, which remain constant for the duration of their existence.”

  These were the shapes reflected by the alien’s garments, Xie Fei realised. “Go on. What are they?”

  “I do not know.”

  “How many are there?”

  “Locally, millions.”

  Xie Fei made another connection. Locally millions: globally trillions. The spherics. One unique identity per sphere. It had to be! She was part of the way to answering her question.

  “Have you communicated with them?” she asked.

  “No. That I judge to be impossible.”

  Xie Fei nodded. “You’ve been helpful,” she said. “I think the spheric bodies support an individual electromagnetic identity. Perhaps they jump from body to body.”

  “You could be correct.”

  Now Xie Fei had further thoughts. Liang-xin was not conscious, as she was, and that might be the explanation for their differences in perception of the electromagnetic environment. She turned away from the android to ponder. If the spherics were conscious there remained a chance of communication, union, and then hope for the human colony. If they were animals, mere devices, even if based in biology, there might be no communication and no hope.

  She was a human being. Like all human beings, she lived in a society as a conscious individual. She used herself as an exemplar to understand the behaviour of others. She grasped that those others were very much like her: they had desires, fears, thoughts, feelings, hopes and dreams. But none of the other creatures of the Earth followed this template. None, for instance, used language in the wondrous, almost too-wondrous manner of a human being. Nor were the androids of human manufacture conscious, because they were all designed to be directly connected with one another through electromagnetic senses. This connection meant none of them needed to use itself as an exemplar to understand the behaviour of others.

  So human beings were stuck imagining only themselves and one another. It was impossible to ask what it was like to be a bat.

  And now Xie Fei was on an alien planet, facing an alien intelligence. Conscious, or not conscious?

  All Xie Fei could see as a scientist of human consciousness was behavioural consequences. She could see a frown on another human face, but she might never know the private mental thought that led to that frown, unless the thought was indirectly communicated, for example by language.

  There was only one way to find out for sure. She would have to translate the electrochemical activity of the spherics’ multiply interconnected central organ into representations. But that was surely impossible now, given the state of the colony computer equipment.

  And there was another problem. Unless she was able to place herself into the special internal observing position of a spheric – that unique, private view of itself – she would be unable to grasp the importance of any particular set of brain states. She, as her own unique observer, knew the importance of her own observational position. But how to grasp the importance of an alien equivalent?

  Animal or conscious, she was forever an outsider to the inhabitants of Grey, as she was to the android inhabitants of LilyGrey. But there did remain one possibility for communication. Metaphor.

  It would work if the s
pherics were intelligent: never mind if that was conscious intelligence. And it would have to work, for this colony had to survive now that the Mei-Lu was gone.

  The land was forever barred to the colonists, but the sea was clear of obstacles. The sea could be a home…

  *

  Hu Min and Hor Namhong waited, listening for signs of activity on the lilypads, for the signs of a search party... but nothing. They had not been missed, or they were being ignored. It gave them hope.

  “If anybody comes, we’ll need guns,” Hor Namhong said.

  Hu Min shook her head. “Not necessarily. I don’t think people will follow the android for long, even if it is brutal with them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We started a rebellion and people followed, then split off, and some returned to supporting the Captains’ Council. The same will probably happen this time. What we need is Xie Fei back, with a plan – with progress.”

  “With certainty.”

  Hu Min shrugged. “Or at least with less uncertainty. The people of LilyGrey need to know she is acting, doing something, making the situation better.”

  “Is there any way we could tell them?”

  Hu Min considered. “That’s a good point. We can’t use anything electromagnetic.”

  “But when it’s night,” Hor Namhong said, “we could get messages out. Swim over there and begin a whispering campaign.”

  Hu Min glanced down at Xie Fei. “Have you got a camera on your com-pad?”

  “Yes.”

  “Take a picture of Xie Fei. The people will want to see her. We’ll swim it over to the quietest lilypad when the sun goes down.”

  Hor Namhong nodded, a grin on his face. “We’ll begin our campaign,” he said.

  *

  Xie Fei saw a dark, misty, pixelated version of herself approaching. Liang-xin watched from its position nearby.

  Liang-xin remembered nothing after that first encounter with the spherics’ electromagnetic environment. It suggested that the entity she conversed with now was a copy of Liang-xin’s brain made before the android’s return. She realised, with horror, with awe and with excitement, that the same copying could happen to her.

  Could happen to her… “This is for me alone to deal with,” she told Liang-xin. “Remain silent, unless I speak with you.”

  She had half expected this moment. Aware now of intelligence, of minds behind the glamour of the electromagnetic environment, she had suspected that the spherics would need to interact with her. And despite Luo Ping-hai’s warning about disturbing their stability she felt confident, for even if they were only animals they could be flexible, could be adaptable. Evolution in an environment did not have to be in a physical environment.

  The image before her was an approximation of her brain activity, she suspected, created by the spherics. The question was: could the spherics model her? If they were psychological zombies – intelligent but not conscious – they would probably not know how to, but if they were conscious they might just recognise that phenomenon in her.

  “Hello?” she said,

  The image shifted and twisted as if she was seeing it through panes of glass in motion. She moved in response: walked, ran, jumped, sat, lay down, did push-ups. She knew that if the spherics were modelling the activity of her brain they would require a full range of activities so as to improve, deepen and make sophisticated their model of her.

  Was this what the spherics had done with Liang-xin? She thought they probably had. And quite possibly they had done it with the entire electromagnetic entity that was the Mei-Lu, which explained the presence of an image of the starship in the artificial sky.

  She stood up and recited some of Confucius’ aphorisms. Then she recited the Fibonacci series as far as she could go. Then she described her own childhood on the Mei-Lu. She talked about science, technology, astrophysics. She performed elegant finger-movements learned when she was a student of Indian dance. And as she did all this the image before her became clearer, brighter, more accurate. The impression she had of pixels vanished, leaving a clear 3-D image, that she knew her brain was aware of through the stereoscopic information presented to her optic nerves via the eyepiece.

  This was progress.

  “Hello?” she said.

  The image returned, “Hello?”

  “Can you hear me?”

  “Can you hear me?”

  “I’m Xie Fei, I’m a human being of the starship Mei-Lu from a planet twenty two light years away.”

  “I’m Xie Fei, I’m a human being of the starship Mei-Lu from a planet twenty two light years away.”

  Xie Fei’s heart sank. This was parrotting. She turned to Liang-xin and said, “Can you see and hear what I’m seeing and hearing?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Xie Fei paused to reflect. Liang-xin may have had emotion recognition built in, but it would never understand the feel of anger. She sighed, her frustration dissipating, turning to face the image again.

  She said, “Can you understand me?”

  “Can you understand me?”

  The frustration was in not being able to see images of the spherics. Though she knew the image before her was sent by them, she did not know if it was the construction of one, of many, or of the whole planet acting as a gestalt. Interacting with an image of herself was not the same as interacting with them. What were they doing? What were they thinking? Perhaps this was a precaution. Or a game? True first contact?

  She returned to her earlier thought, that, whatever the spherics were, metaphor was the answer to her problem. “Liang-xin,” she said, “we’re going out to sea.”

  “Out to sea? Why?”

  “We need to make the spherics understand that we are harmless, but that we exist on their planet. We need to make them feel safe. Don’t you understand? On Grey we can never live on land, so we’ll have to live on the sea. Eventually there’ll be an armada of lilypads here, and we’ll live on them.”

  “But what will you do now?” Liang-xin asked.

  “Go away.”

  “What shall I do?”

  “Follow me. Help me illustrate the metaphor I’m showing them.”

  She turned and walked away. A while later the hazy blue line in the distance became an image of the ocean, into which she walked, Liang-xin following. She turned to see that the image of herself was watching from a distance. But around that image, so faint they were hardly visible, lay a collection of geometric shapes, moving as if on tiny feet.

  Xie Fei felt hope. That was a leap forward.

  “Now what do we do?” Liang-xin asked.

  “We wait here for Hu Min to get me out. I think my work is done.”

  *

  A trio on the beach: Hor Namhong, Hu Min, Xie Fei. Midnight, with all cool and calm and starlit, and the sound of waves washing up on the alien shore.

  “This is what it was like that first, proper landfall,” Xie Fei murmured. “You remember? We cut up a spheric.”

  “Not the best advertisement for humanity,” Hor Namhong said.

  Xie Fei shrugged. “They might have done the same to us if they’d landed on Earth. And probably we would have understood.”

  Hu Min nodded. “What now?”

  Xie Fei looked out over the ocean. “Do you see how most of the lights are on the manufacturing lilypad? I think that’s where the leader android is, and all those that currently support it.”

  Hor Namhong said, “I wonder if I Fu-en’s still alive. We need him. He understands androids.”

  Xie Fei replied, “For the moment we just need to get our followers back. I’m more worried about Madeleine – you two haven’t seen her for some time. If she and I can stand together and make the announcement about what I’ve done in the spherics’ environment, there’s a chance that people will return to supporting the CC.”

  “You’re hoping the
android’s support will leak away?”

  “Yes. But if that happens, well, that’s when I take an enormous risk.”

  “Doing…?”

  Xie Fei stared out to sea. “You’ll see.”

  “Why won’t you tell us?” Hor Namhong asked.

  “Captain’s prerogative. We haven’t concluded operations yet.”

  “You don’t trust us!”

  Xie Fei glanced at them both. “Right now I can only trust myself.”

  *

  They waterproofed their meagre equipment as best they could, ate the last of their rations, then waded out to sea and began swimming to the lilypad with the least number of lit lamps. The water was cold but calm, with clouds of bioluminescent creatures below them, so that, when Xie Fei glanced down, she saw her hands silhouetted against the light.

  Twenty minutes later they hauled themselves upon a floating pontoon, where they dried themselves as best they could. Though the air was cool, they were cold.

  Xie Fei shivered. “Equipment first,” she whispered. “Clothes, armoured vests, hot drink. Grab coms and computer gear only if you happen across it and it’s small.”

  Hor Namhong and Hu Min nodded. The trio crept aboard the lilypad along a narrow polythene bridge, finding themselves beneath a twenty metre solar array. The machine clicked and groaned as tiny flex stresses in the lilypad supporting it made its plastic tendons twist. There was no sign of human activity: no voices, no moving lights, no pattering feet.

  Xie Fei felt reassured. For some time the colony had followed a diurnal rhythm, active by day, inactive at night. Without delay the trio entered one of the life-hubs, finding a store room and a shower cubicle. Thirty minutes later they were warm, armoured and ready.

  Dawn was close. Xie Fei prepared herself for action. This would be a snowball operation, starting small, keeping hidden, looking for Madeleine. If all went well, the manufacturing lilypad would be their final destination.

  “Aren’t you worried about the chief android?” Hor Namhong asked, as they peered out into the gloom.

  “No,” Xie Fei replied.

  “Why not?”

  “An android is like a non-conscious animal. It thinks, but it does not know it thinks. When Madeleine and I stand again before the colonists we shall see its true nature.”