fucking football stadium through them, nothing is clearing, and I have unisolated conditional dependencies coming out of my ass. I have no fucking clue what the market believes. Someone get
me a drink.' Unquote." Akon looked at the Master of Fandom. "Any suggestions get reddited up from the rest of the crew?"
The Master cleared his throat. "My lord, we took the liberty of filtering out everything that was physically impossible, based on pure wishful thinking, or displayed a clear misunderstanding of
naturalistic metaethics. I can show you the raw list, if you'd like."
"And what's left?" Akon said. "Oh, never mind, I get it."
"Well, not quite," said the Master. "To summarize the best ideas -" He gestured a small holo into existence.
Ask the Superhappies if their biotechnology is capable of in vivo cognitive alterations of
Babyeater children to ensure that they don't grow up wanting to eat their own children. Sterilize the current adults. If Babyeater adults cannot be sterilized and will not surrender, imprison them. If that's too expensive, kill most of them, but leave enough in prison to preserve their culture for the children. Offer the Superhappies an alliance to invade the Babyeaters, in which we provide the capital and labor and they provide the technology.
"Not too bad," Akon said. His voice grew somewhat dry. "But it doesn't seem to address the question of what the Superhappies are supposed to do with us. The analogous treatment -"
"Yes, my lord," the Master said. "That was extensively pointed out in the comments, my lord. And the other problem is that the Superhappies don't really need our labor or our capital." The Master looked in the direction of the Lord Programmer, the Xenopsychologist, and the Lady Sensory.
The Lord Programmer said, "My lord, I believe the Superhappies think much faster than we do. If their cognitive systems are really based on something more like DNA than like neurons, that shouldn't be surprising. In fact, it's surprising that the speedup is as little as -" The Lord Programmer stopped, and swallowed. "My lord. The Superhappies responded to most of our transmissions extremely quickly.
There was, however, a finite delay. And that delay was roughly proportional to the length of the
response, plus an additive constant. Going by the proportion, my lord, I believe they think between fifteen and thirty times as fast as we do, to the extent such a comparison can be made. If I try to use Moore's Law type reasoning on some of the observable technological parameters in their ship -
Alderson flux, power density, that sort of thing - then I get a reasonably convergent estimate that the aliens are two hundred years ahead of us in human-equivalent subjective time. Which means it would be twelve hundred equivalent years since their Scientific Revolution."
"If," the Xenopsychologist said, "their history went as slowly as ours. It probably didn't." The Xenopsychologist took a breath. "My lord, my suspicion is that the aliens are literally able to run their entire ship using only three kiritsugu as sole crew. My lord, this may represent, not only the superior programming ability that translated their communications to us, but also the highly probable case that Superhappies can trade knowledge and skills among themselves by having sex. Every individual of
their species might contain the memory of their Einsteins and Newtons and a thousand other areas of expertise, no more conserved than DNA is conserved among humans. My lord, I suspect their version of Galileo was something like thirty objective years ago, as the stars count time, and that they've been in space for maybe twenty years."
The Lady Sensory said, "Their ship has a plane of symmetry, and it's been getting wider on the axis through that plane, as it sucks up nova dust and energy. It's growing on a smooth exponential at 2%
per hour, which means it can split every thirty-five hours in this environment."
"I have no idea," the Xenopsychologist said, "how fast the Superhappies can reproduce themselves -
how many children they have per generation, or how fast their children sexually mature. But all things considered, I don't think we can count on their kids taking twenty years to get through high school."
There was silence.
When Akon could speak again, he said, "Are you all quite finished?"
"If they let us live," the Lord Programmer said, "and if we can work out a trade agreement with them under Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage, interest rates will -"
"Interest rates can fall into an open sewer and die. Any further transmissions from the Superhappy ship?"
The Lady Sensory shook her head.
"All right," Akon said. "Open a transmission channel to them."
There was a stir around the table. "My lord -" said the Master of Fandom. "My lord, what are you going to say?"
Akon smiled wearily. "I'm going to ask them if they have any options to offer us."
The Lady Sensory looked at the Ship's Confessor. The hood silently nodded: He's still sane.
The Lady Sensory swallowed, and opened a channel. On the holo there first appeared, as a screen:
The Lady 3rd Kiritsugu
temporary co-chair of the Gameplayer
Language Translator version 9
Cultural Translator version 16
The Lady 3rd in this translation was slightly less pale, and looked a bit more concerned and
sympathetic. She took in Akon's appearance at a glance, and her eyes widened in alarm. "My lord, you're hurting!"
"Just tired, milady," Akon said. He cleared his throat. "Our ship's decision-making usually relies on markets and our markets are behaving erratically. I'm sorry to inflict that on you as shared pain, and I'll try to get this over with quickly. Anyway -"
Out of the corner of his eye, Akon saw the Ship's Engineer re-enter the room; the Engineer looked as if he had something to say, but froze when he saw the holo.
There was no time for that now.
"Anyway," Akon said, "we've worked out that the key decisions depend heavily on your level of technology. What do you think you can actually do with us or the Babyeaters?"
The Lady 3rd sighed. "I really should get your independent component before giving you ours - you should at least think of it first - but I suppose we're out of luck on that. How about if I just tell you what we're currently planning?"
Akon nodded. "That would be much appreciated, milady." Some of his muscles that had been tense, started to relax. Cultural Translator version 16 was a lot easier on his brain. Distantly, he wondered if some transformed avatar of himself was making skillful love to the Lady 3rd -
"All right," the Lady 3rd said. "We consider that the obvious starting point upon which to build further negotiations, is to combine and compromise the utility functions of the three species until we mutually satisfice, providing compensation for all changes demanded. The Babyeaters must compromise their
values to eat their children at a stage where they are not sentient - we might accomplish this most effectively by changing the lifecycle of the children themselves. We can even give the unsentient children an instinct to flee and scream, and generate simple spoken objections, but prevent their brain from developing self-awareness until after the hunt."
Akon straightened. That actually sounded - quite compassionate - sort of -
"Our own two species," the Lady 3rd said, "which desire this change of the Babyeaters, will compensate them by adopting Babyeater values, making our own civilization of greater utility in their sight: we will both change to spawn additional infants, and eat most of them at almost the last stage before they become sentient."
The Conference room was frozen. No one moved. Even their faces didn't change expression.
Akon's mind suddenly flashed back to those writhing, interpenetrating, visually painful blobs he had seen before.
A cultural translator could change the image, but not the reality.
"It is nonetheless probable," continued the Lady 3rd, "that the Babyeaters will not accept this change as it stands; it will be necessary to impose these chang
es by force. As for you, humankind, we hope you will be more reasonable. But both your species, and the Babyeaters, must relinquish bodily pain,
embarrassment, and romantic troubles. In exchange, we will change our own values in the direction of yours. We are willing to change to desire pleasure obtained in more complex ways, so long as the total amount of our pleasure does not significantly decrease. We will learn to create art you find pleasing.
We will acquire a sense of humor, though we will not lie. From the perspective of humankind and the Babyeaters, our civilization will obtain much utility in your sight, which it did not previously possess.
This is the compensation we offer you. We furthermore request that you accept from us the gift of untranslatable 2, which we believe will enhance, on its own terms, the value that you name 'love'. This will also enable our kinds to have sex using mechanical aids, which we greatly desire. At the end of this procedure, all three species will satisfice each other's values and possess great common ground, upon which we may create a civilization together."
Akon slowly nodded. It was all quite unbelievably civilized. It might even be the categorically best general procedure when worlds collided.
The Lady 3rd brightened. "A nod - is that assent, humankind?"
"It's acknowledgment," Akon said. "We'll have to think about this."
"I understand," the Lady 3rd said. "Please think as swiftly as you can. Babyeater children are dying in horrible agony as you think."
"I understand," Akon said in return, and gestured to cut the transmission.
The holo blinked out.
There was a long, terrible silence.
"No."
The Lord Pilot said it. Cold, flat, absolute.
There was another silence.
"My lord," the Xenopsychologist said, very softly, as though afraid the messenger would be torn apart and dismembered, "I do not think they were offering us that option."
"Actually," Akon said, "The Superhappies offered us more than we were going to offer the Babyeaters .
We weren't exactly thinking about how to compensate them." It was strange, Akon noticed, his voice was very calm, maybe even deadly calm. "The Superhappies really are a very fair-minded people.
You get the impression they would have proposed exactly the same solution whether or not they
happened to hold the upper hand. We might have just enforced our own will on the Babyeaters and told the Superhappies to take a hike. If we'd held the upper hand. But we don't. And that's that, I guess."
" No!" shouted the Lord Pilot. "That's not -"
Akon looked at him, still with that deadly calm.
The Lord Pilot was breathing deeply, not as if quieting himself, but as if preparing for battle on some ancient savanna plain that no longer existed. "They want to turn us into something inhuman. It - it cannot - we cannot - we must not allow -"
"Either give us a better option or shut up," the Lord Programmer said flatly. "The Superhappies are smarter than us, have a technological advantage, think faster, and probably reproduce faster. We have no hope of holding them off militarily. If our ships flee, the Superhappies will simply follow in faster ships. There's no way to shut a starline once opened, and no way to conceal the fact that it is open -"
"Um," the Ship's Engineer said.
Every eye turned to him.
"Um," the Ship's Engineer said. "My Lord Administrator, I must report to you in private."
The Ship's Confessor shook his head. "You could have handled that better, Engineer."
Akon nodded to himself. It was true. The Ship's Engineer had already betrayed the fact that a secret existed. Under the circumstances, easy to deduce that it had come from the Babyeater data. That was eighty percent of the secret right there. And if it was relevant to starline physics, that was half of the remainder.
"Engineer," Akon said, "since you have already revealed that a secret exists, I suggest you tell the full Command Conference. We need to stay in sync with each other. Two minds are not a committee.
We'll worry later about keeping the secret classified."
The Ship's Engineer hesitated. "Um, my lord, I suggest that I report to you first, before you decide -"
"There's no time," Akon said. He pointed to where the holo had been.
"Yes," the Master of Fandom said, "we can always slit our own throats afterward, if the secret is that awful." The Master of Fandom gave a small laugh -
- then stopped, at the look on the Engineer's face.
"At your will, my lord," the Engineer said.
He drew a deep breath. "I asked the Lord Programmer to compare any identifiable equations and constants in the Babyeater's scientific archive, to the analogous scientific data of humanity. Most of the identified analogues were equal, of course. In some places we have more precise values, as befits our, um, superior technological level. But one anomaly did turn up: the Babyeater figure for Alderson's Coupling Constant was ten orders of magnitude larger than our own."
The Lord Pilot whistled. "Stars above, how did they manage to make that mistake -"
Then the Lord Pilot stopped abruptly.
"Alderson's Coupling Constant," Akon echoed. "That's the... coupling between Alderson interactions and the..."
"Between Alderson interactions and the nuclear strong force," the Lord Pilot said. He was beginning to smile, rather grimly. "It was a free parameter in the standard model, and so had to be established experimentally. But because the interaction is so incredibly... weak... they had to build an enormous Alderson generator to find the value. The size of a very small moon, just to give us that one number.
Definitely not something you could check at home. That's the story in the physics textbooks, my lords, my lady."
The Master of Fandom frowned. "You're saying... the physicists faked the result in order to... fund a huge project...?" He looked puzzled.
"No," the Lord Pilot said. "Not for the love of power. Engineer, the Babyeater value should be testable using our own ship's Alderson drive, if the coupling constant is that strong. This you have done?"
The Ship's Engineer nodded. "The Babyeater value is correct, my lord."
The Ship's Engineer was pale. The Lord Pilot was clenching his jaw into a sardonic grin.
"Please explain," Akon said. "Is the universe going to end in another billion years, or something?
Because if so, the issue can wait -"
"My lord," the Ship's Confessor said, "suppose the laws of physics in our universe had been such that the ancient Greeks could invent the equivalent of nuclear weapons from materials just lying around.
Imagine the laws of physics had permitted a way to destroy whole countries with no more difficulty than mixing gunpowder. History would have looked quite different, would it not?"
Akon nodded, puzzled. "Well, yes," Akon said. "It would have been shorter."
"Aren't we lucky that physics didn't happen to turn out that way, my lord? That in our own time, the laws of physics don't permit cheap, irresistable superweapons?"
Akon furrowed his brow -
"But my lord," said the Ship's Confessor, "do we really know what we think we know? What different evidence would we see, if things were otherwise? After all - if you happened to be a physicist, and you happened to notice an easy way to wreak enormous destruction using off-the-shelf hardware - would
you run out and tell you?"
"No," Akon said. A sinking feeling was dawning in the pit of his stomach. "You would try to conceal the discovery, and create a cover story that discouraged anyone else from looking there."
The Lord Pilot emitted a bark that was half laughter, and half something much darker. "It was perfect.
I'm a Lord Pilot and I never suspected until now."
"So?" Akon said. "What is it, actually?"
"Um," the Ship's Engineer said. "Well... basically... to skip over the technical details..."
The Ship's Engineer drew a breath.
"Any ship with a medium-sized Alders
on drive can make a star go supernova."
Silence.
"Which might seem like bad news in general," the Lord Pilot said, "but from our perspective, right here, right now, it's just what we need. A mere nova wouldn't do it. But blowing up the whole star - "
He gave that bitter bark of laughter, again. "No star, no starlines. We can make the main star of this system go supernova - not the white dwarf, the companion. And then the Superhappies won't be able to get to us. That is, they won't be able to get to the human starline network. We will be dead. If you care about tiny irrelevant details like that." The Lord Pilot looked around the Conference Table. " Do you care? The correct answer is no, by the way."
"I care," the Lady Sensory said softly. "I care a whole lot. But..." She folded her hands atop the table and bowed her head.
There were nods from around the Table.
The Lord Pilot looked at the Ship's Engineer. "How long will it take for you to modify the ship's Alderson Drive -"
"It's done," said the Ship's Engineer. "But... we should, um, wait until the Superhappies are gone, so they don't detect us doing it."
The Lord Pilot nodded. "Sounds like a plan. Well, that's a relief. And here I thought the whole human race was doomed, instead of just us." He looked inquiringly at Akon. "My lord?"
Akon rested his head in his hands, suddenly feeling more weary than he had ever felt in his life. From across the table, the Confessor watched him - or so it seemed; the hood was turned in his direction, at any rate.
I told you so, the Confessor did not say.
"There is a certain problem with your plan," Akon said.
"Such as?" the Lord Pilot said.
"You've forgotten something," Akon said. "Something terribly important. Something you once swore you would protect."
Puzzled faces looked at him.
"If you say something bloody ridiculous like 'the safety of the ship' -" said the Lord Pilot.
The Lady Sensory gasped. "Oh, no," she murmured. "Oh, no. The Babyeater children."
The Lord Pilot looked like he had been punched in the stomach. The grim smiles that had begun to
spread around the table were replaced with horror.
Three Worlds Collide Page 6