Akon just nodded.
"We're getting another signal," the Lady Sensory said hesitantly. "Holo with sound, another real-time communication."
"Akon, you don't have to -" said the Master of Fandom.
Akon jerked himself upright, straightened his clothes. "I do have to," he said. "They're aliens, there's no knowing what a delay might... Just put it through."
The first thing the holo showed, in elegant Modern English script, was the message:
The Lady 3rd Kiritsugu
temporary co-chair of the Gameplayer
Language Translator version 3
Cultural Translator version 2
The screen hovered just long enough to be read, then dissipated -
Revealing a pale white lady.
The translator's depiction of the Lady 3rd Kiritsugu was all white and black and grey; not the
colorlessness of a greyscale image, but a colored image of a world with little color in it. Skin the color of the palest human skin that could still be called attractive; not snow white, but pale. White hair; blouse and bracelets and long dress all in coordinated shades of grey. That woman could have been called pretty, but there was none of the overstimulating beauty of the fake man who had been shown before.
Her face was styled in the emotion that humans named "serene".
"I and my sisters have now taken command of this vessel," said the pale Lady.
Akon blinked. A mutiny aboard their ship?
And it was back to the alien incomprehensibility, the knife-edged decisions and unpredictable reactions and the deadly fear of screwing up.
"I am sorry if my words offend," Akon said carefully, "but there is something I wish to know."
The Lady 3rd made a slicing gesture with one hand. "You cannot offend me." Her face showed mild insult at the suggestion.
"What has happened aboard your ship, just now?"
The Lady 3rd replied, "The crew are disabled by emotional distress. They have exceeded the bounds of their obligations, and are returning to the ship's Pleasuring Center for reward. In such a situation I and my two sisters, the kiritsugu of this vessel, assume command."
Did I do that? "I did not intend for my words to cause you psychological harm."
"You are not responsible," the Lady 3rd said. "It was the other ones."
"The Babyeaters?" Akon said without thinking.
"Babyeaters," the Lady 3rd repeated. "If that is the name you have given to the third alien species present at this star system, then yes. The crew, apprehending the nature of the Babyeaters' existence, was incapacitated by their share of the children's suffering."
"I see," Akon said. He felt an odd twitch of shame for humanity, that his own kind could learn of the Babyeaters, and continue functioning with only tears.
The Lady 3rd's gaze grew sharp. "What are your intentions regarding the Babyeaters?"
"We haven't decided," Akon said. "We were just discussing it when you arrived, actually."
"What is your current most preferred alternative?" the Lady 3rd instantly fired back.
Akon helplessly shrugged, palms out. "We were just starting the discussion. All the alternatives suggested seemed unacceptable."
"Which seemed least unacceptable? What is your current best candidate?"
Akon shook his head. "We haven't designated any."
The Lady 3rd's face grew stern, with a hint of puzzlement. "You are withholding the information.
Why? Do you think it will cast you in an unfavorable light? Then I must take that expectation into account. Further, you must expect me to take that expectation into account, and so you imply that you expect me to underestimate its severity, even after taking this line of reasoning into account."
"Excuse me," the Ship's Confessor said. His tone was mild, but with a hint of urgency. "I believe I should enter this conversation right now. "
Akon's hand signed agreement to the Lady Sensory.
At once the Lady 3rd's eyes shifted to where the Confessor stood beside Akon.
"Human beings," said the Ship's Confessor, "cannot designate a 'current best candidate' without psychological consequences. Human rationalists learn to discuss an issue as thoroughly as possible before suggesting any solutions. For humans, solutions are sticky in a way that would require detailed cognitive science to explain. We would not be able to search freely through the solution space, but would be helplessly attracted toward the 'current best' point, once we named it. Also, any endorsement whatever of a solution that has negative moral features, will cause a human to feel shame - and 'best candidate' would feel like an endorsement. To avoid feeling that shame, humans must avoid saying
which of two bad alternatives is better than the other."
Ouch, thought Akon, I never realized how embarrassing that sounds until I heard it explained to an alien.
Apparently the alien was having similar thoughts. "So you cannot even tell me which of several alternatives currently seems best, without your minds breaking down? That sounds quite implausible,"
the Lady 3rd said doubtfully, "for a species capable of building a spaceship."
There was a hint of laughter in the Confessor's voice. "We try to overcome our biases."
The Lady 3rd's gaze grew more intense. "Are you the true decisionmaker of this vessel?"
"I am not," the Confessor said flatly. "I am a Confessor - a human master rationalist; we are sworn to refrain from leadership."
"This meeting will determine the future of all three species," said the Lady 3rd. "If you have superior competence, you should assume control."
Akon's brows furrowed slightly. Somehow he'd never thought about it in those terms.
The Confessor shook his head. "There are reasons beyond my profession why I must not lead. I am too old."
Too old?
Akon put the thought on hold, and looked back at the Lady 3rd. She had said that all the crew were incapacitated, except her and her two sisters who took charge. And she had asked the Confessor if he held true command.
"Are you," Akon asked, "the equivalent of a Confessor for your own kind?"
"Almost certainly not," replied the Lady 3rd, and -
"Almost certainly not," the Confessor said, almost in the same breath.
There was an eerie kind of unison about it.
"I am kiritsugu," said the Lady 3rd. "In the early days of my species there were those who refrained from happiness in order to achieve perfect skill in helping others, using untranslatable 3 to suppress their emotions and acting only on their abstract knowledge of goals. These were forcibly returned to normality by massive untranslatable 4. But I descend from their thought-lineage and in emergency invoke the shadow of their untranslatable 5."
"I am a Confessor," said the Ship's Confessor, "the descendant of those in humanity's past who most highly valued truth, who sought systematic methods for finding truth. But Bayes's Theorem will not be different from one place to another; the laws in their purely mathematical form will be the same, just as any sufficiently advanced species will discover the same periodic table of elements."
"And being universals," said the Lady 3rd, "they bear no distinguishing evidence of their origin. So you should understand, Lord Akon, that a kiritsugu's purpose is not like that of a Confessor, even if we exploit the same laws."
"But we are similar enough to each other," the Confessor concluded, "to see each other as distorted mirror images. Heretics, you might say. She is the ultimate sin forbidden to a Confessor - the exercise of command."
"As you are flawed on my own terms," the Lady 3rd concluded, "one who refuses to help."
Everyone else at the Conference table was staring at the alien holo, and at the Confessor, in something approaching outright horror.
The Lady 3rd shifted her gaze back to Akon. Though it was only a movement of the eyes, there was
something of a definite force about the motion, as if the translator was indicating that it stood for something much stronger. Her voice was given a demanding, compelling q
uality: "What alternatives did your kind generate for dealing with the Babyeaters? Enumerate them to me."
Wipe out their species, keep them in prison forever on suicide watch, ignore them and let the children suffer.
Akon hesitated. An odd premonition of warning prickled at him. Why does she need this information?
"If you do not give me the information," the Lady 3rd said, "I will take into account the fact that you do not wish me to know it."
The proverb went through his mind, The most important part of any secret is the fact that the secret exists.
"All right," Akon said. "We found unacceptable the alternative of leaving the Babyeaters be. We found unacceptable the alternative of exterminating them. We wish to respect their choices and their nature as a species, but their children, who do not share that choice, are unwilling victims; this is unacceptable to us. We desire to keep the children alive but we do not know what to do with them
once they become adult and start wanting to eat their own babies. Those were all the alternatives we had gotten as far as generating, at the very moment your ship arrived."
"That is all?" demanded the Lady 3rd. "That is the sum of all your thought? Is this one of the circumstances under which your species sends signals that differ against internal belief, such as 'joking'
or 'politeness'?"
"No," said Akon. "I mean, yes. Yes, that's as far as we got. No, we're not joking."
"You should understand," the Confessor said, "that this crew, also, experienced a certain distress, interfering with our normal function, on comprehending the Babyeaters. We are still experiencing it."
And you acted to restore order, thought Akon, though not the same way as a kiritsugu...
"I see," the Lady 3rd said.
She fell silent. There were long seconds during which she sat motionless.
Then, "Why have you not yet disabled the Babyeater ship? Your craft possesses the capability of doing so, and you must realize that your purpose now opposes theirs."
"Because," Akon said, "they did not disable our ship."
The Lady 3rd nodded. "You are symmetrists, then."
Again the silence.
Then the holo blurred, and in that blur appeared the words:
Cultural Translator version 3.
The blur resolved itself back into that pale woman; almost the same as before, except that the serenity of her came through with more force.
The Lady 3rd drew herself erect, and took on a look of ritual, as though she were about to recite a composed poem.
"I now speak," the Lady 3rd, "on behalf of my species, to yours."
A chill ran down Akon's spine. This is too much, this is all too large for me -
"Humankind!" the Lady 3rd said, as though addressing someone by name. "Humankind, you prefer the absence of pain to its presence. When my own kind attained to technology, we eliminated the causes of suffering among ourselves. Bodily pain, embarrassment, and romantic conflicts are no longer
permitted to exist. Humankind, you prefer the presence of pleasure to its absence. We have devoted ourselves to the intensity of pleasure, of sex and childbirth and untranslatable 2. Humankind, you prefer truth to lies. By our nature we do not communicate statements disbelieved, as you do with
humor, modesty, and fiction; we have even learned to refrain from withholding information, though we possess that capability. Humankind, you prefer peace to violence. Our society is without crime and without war. Through symmetric sharing and untranslatable 4, we share our joys and are pleasured together. Our name for ourselves is not expressible in your language. But to you, humankind, we now name ourselves after the highest values we share: we are the Maximum Fun-Fun Ultra Super Happy
People."
There were muffled choking sounds from the human Conference table.
"Um," Akon said intelligently. "Um... good for you?"
"Humankind! Humankind, you did not likewise repair yourselves when you attained to technology.
We are still unsure if it is somehow a mistake, if you did not think it through, or if your will is truly so different from ours. For whatever reason, you currently permit the existence of suffering which our species has eliminated. Bodily pain, embarrassment, and romantic troubles are still known among
you. Your existence, therefore, is shared by us as pain. Will you, humankind, by your symmetry,
remedy this?"
An electric current of shock and alarm ran through the Conference. The Lord Pilot glanced
significantly at the Ship's Engineer, and the Engineer just as significantly shook his head. There was nothing they could do against the alien vessel; and their own shields would scarcely help, if they were attacked.
Akon drew in a ragged breath. He was suddenly distracted, almost to the point of his brain melting, by a sense of futures twisting around these moments: the fate of star systems, the destiny of all humanity being warped and twisted and shaped.
So to you, then, it is humanity that molests kittens.
He should have foreseen this possibility, after the experience of the Babyeaters. If the Babyeaters'
existence was morally unacceptable to humanity, then the next alien species might be intolerable as well - or they might find humanity's existence a horror of unspeakable cruelty. That was the other side of the coin, even if a human might find it harder to think of it.
Funny. It doesn't seem that bad from in here. ..
"But -" Akon said, and only then became aware that he was speaking.
"'But'?" said the Lady 3rd. "Is that your whole reply, humankind?" There was a look on her face of something like frustration, even sheer astonishment.
He hadn't planned out this reply in any detail, but -
"You say that you feel our existence as pain," Akon said, "sharing sympathy with our own suffering.
So you, also, believe that under some circumstances pain is preferable to pleasure. If you did not hurt when others hurt - would you not feel that you were... less the sort of person you wanted to be? It is the same with us -"
But the Lady 3rd was shaking her head. "You confuse a high conditional likelihood from your
hypothesis to the evidence with a high posterior probability of the hypothesis given the evidence," she said, as if that were all one short phrase in her own language. "Humankind, we possess a generalized faculty to feel what others feel. That is the simple, compact relation. We did not think to complicate that faculty to exclude pain. We did not then assign dense probability that other sentient species would traverse the stars, and be encountered by us, and yet fail to have repaired themselves. Should we encounter some future species in circumstances that do not permit its repair, we will modify our
empathic faculty to exclude sympathy with pain, and substitute an urge to meliorate pain."
"But -" Akon said.
Dammit, I'm talking again.
"But we chose this; this is what we want."
"That matters less to our values than to yours," replied the Lady 3rd. "But even you, humankind, should see that it is moot. We are still trying to untangle the twisting references of emotion by which humans might prefer pleasure to pain, and yet endorse complex theories that uphold pain over
pleasure. But we have already determined that your children, humankind, do not share the grounding of these philosophies. When they incur pain they do not contemplate its meaning, they only call for it to stop. In their simplicity -"
They're a lot like our own children, really.
"- they somewhat resemble the earlier life stages of our own kind."
There was a electric quality now about that pale woman, a terrible intensity. "And you should understand, humankind, that when a child anywhere suffers pain and calls for it to stop, then we will answer that call if it requires sixty-five thousand five hundred and thirty-six ships."
"We believe, humankind, that you can understand our viewpoint. Have you options to offer us?"
(4/8) Interlude with the Confessor
&nbs
p; The two of them were alone now, in the Conference Chair's Privilege, the huge private room of luxury more suited to a planet than to space. The Privilege was tiled wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling with a most excellent holo of the space surrounding them: the distant stars, the system's sun, the fleeing nova ashes, and the glowing ember of the dwarf star that had siphoned off hydrogen from the main sun until its surface had briefly ignited in a nova flash. It was like falling through the void.
Akon sat on the edge of the four-poster bed in the center of the room, resting his head in his hands.
Weariness dulled him at the moment when he most needed his wits; it was always like that in crisis, but this was unusually bad. Under the circumstances, he didn't dare snort a hit of caffeine - it might reorder his priorities. Humanity had yet to discover the drug that was pure energy, that would improve your thinking without the slightest touch on your emotions and values.
"I don't know what to think," Akon said.
The Ship's Confessor was standing stately nearby, in full robes and hood of silver. From beneath the hood came the formal response: "What seems to be confusing you, my friend?"
"Did we go wrong?" Akon said. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't keep the despair out of his voice. "Did humanity go down the wrong path?"
The Confessor was silent a long time.
Akon waited. This was why he couldn't have talked about the question with anyone else. Only a
Confessor would actually think before answering, if asked a question like that.
"I've often wondered that myself," the Confessor finally said, surprising Akon. "There were so many choices, so many branchings in human history - what are the odds we got them all right?"
The hood turned away, angling in the direction of the Superhappy ship - though it was too far away to be visible, everyone on board the Impossible Possible World knew where it was. "There are parts of your question I can't help you with, my lord. Of all people on this ship, I might be most poorly suited to answer... But you do understand, my lord, don't you, that neither the Babyeaters nor the Superhappies are evidence that we went wrong? If you weren't worried before, you shouldn't be any more worried now. The Babyeaters strive to do the baby-eating thing to do, the Superhappies output the Super Happy thing to do. None of that tells us anything about the right thing to do. They are not asking the same question we are - no matter what word of their language the translator links to our
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