by Peter Watts
And if the best toys do end up in the hands of those who've never forgotten that life itself is an act of war against intelligent opponents, what does that say about a race whose machines travel between the stars?
The argument was straightforward enough. It might even have been enough to carry the Historians to victory—if such debates were ever settled on the basic of logic, and if a bored population hadn't already awarded the game to Fermi on points. But the Historian paradigm was just too ugly, too Darwinian, for most people, and besides, no one really cared any more. Not even the Cassidy Survey's late-breaking discoveries changed much. So what if some dirtball at Ursae Majoris Eridani had an oxygen atmosphere? It was forty-three lightyears away, and it wasn't talking; and if you wanted flying chandeliers and alien messiahs, you could build them to order in Heaven. If you wanted testosterone and target practice you could choose an afterlife chock-full of nasty alien monsters with really bad aim. If the mere thought of an alien intelligence threatened your worldview, you could explore a virtual galaxy of empty real estate, ripe and waiting for any God-fearing earthly pilgrims who chanced by.
It was all there, just the other side of a fifteen-minute splice job and a cervical socket. Why endure the cramped and smelly confines of real-life space travel to go visit pond scum on Europa?
And so, inevitably, a fourth Tribe arose, a Heavenly host that triumphed over all: the Tribe that Just Didn't Give A Shit. They didn't know what to do when the Fireflies showed up.
So they sent us, and—in belated honor of the Historian mantra—they sent along a warrior, just in case. It was doubtful in the extreme that any child of Earth would be a match for a race with interstellar technology, should they prove unfriendly. Still, I could tell that Bates' presence was a comfort, to the Human members of the crew at least. If you have to go up unarmed against an angry T-rex with a four-digit IQ, it can't hurt to have a trained combat specialist at your side.
At the very least, she might be able to fashion a pointy stick from the branch of some convenient tree.
*
"I swear, if the aliens end up eating the lot of us, we'll have the Church of Game Theory to thank for it," Sascha said.
She was grabbing a brick of couscous from the galley. I was there for the caffeine. We were more or less alone; the rest of the crew was strewn from dome to Fab.
"Linguists don't use it?" I knew some that did.
"We don't." And the others are hacks. "Thing about game theory is, it assumes rational self-interest among the players. And people just aren't rational."
"It used to assume that," I allowed. "These days they factor in the social neurology."
"Human social neurology." She bit a corner off her brick, spoke around a mouthful of semolina. "That's what game theory's good for. Rational players, or human ones. And let me take a wild stab here and wonder if either of those is gonna apply to that." She waved her hand at some archetypal alien lurking past the bulkhead.
"It's got its limitations," I admitted. "I guess you use the tools you can lay your hands on."
Sascha snorted. "So if you couldn't get your hands on a proper set of blueprints, you'd base your dream home on a book of dirty limericks."
"Maybe not." And then, a bit defensive in spite of myself, I added, "I've found it useful, though. In areas you might not expect it to be."
"Yeah? Name one."
"Birthdays," I said, and immediately wished I hadn't.
Sascha stopped chewing. Something behind her eyes flickered, almost strobed, as if her other selves were pricking up their ears.
"Go on," she said, and I could feel the whole Gang listening in.
"It's nothing, really. Just an example."
"So. Tell us." Sascha cocked James' head at me.
I shrugged. No point making a big thing out of it. "Well, according to game theory, you should never tell anyone when your birthday is."
"I don't follow."
"It's a lose-lose proposition. There's no winning strategy."
"What do you mean, strategy? It's a birthday."
Chelsea had said exactly the same thing when I'd tried to explain it to her. Look, I'd said, say you tell everyone when it is and nothing happens. It's kind of a slap in the face.
Or suppose they throw you a party, Chelsea had replied.
Then you don't know whether they're doing it sincerely, or if your earlier interaction just guilted them into observing an occasion they'd rather have ignored. But if you don't tell anyone, and nobody commemorates the event, there's no reason to feel badly because after all, nobody knew. And if someone does buy you a drink then you know it's sincere because nobody would go to all the trouble of finding out when your birthday is— and then celebrating it—if they didn't honestly like you.
Of course, the Gang was more up to speed on such things. I didn't have to explain it verbally: I could just grab a piece of ConSensus and plot out the payoff matrix, Tell/Don't Tell along the columns, Celebrated/Not Celebrated along the rows, the unassailable black-and-white logic of cost and benefit in the squares themselves. The math was irrefutable: the one winning strategy was concealment. Only fools revealed their birthdays.
Sascha looked at me. "You ever show this to anyone else?"
"Sure. My girlfriend."
Her eyebrows lifted. "You had a girlfriend? A real one?"
I nodded. "Once."
"I mean after you showed this to her."
"Well, yes."
"Uh huh." Her eyes wandered back to the payoff matrix. "Just curious, Siri. How did she react?"
"She didn't, really. Not at first. Then—well, she laughed."
"Better woman than me." Sascha shook her head. "I'd have dumped you on the spot."
*
My nightly constitutional up the spine: glorious dreamy flight along a single degree of freedom. I sailed through hatches and corridors, threw my arms wide and spun in the gentle cyclonic breezes of the drum. Bates ran circles around me, bouncing her ball against bins and bulkheads, stretching to field each curving rebound in the torqued pseudograv. The toy ricocheted off a stairwell and out of reach as I passed; the major's curses followed me through the needle's eye from crypt to bridge.
I braked just short of the dome, stopped by the sound of quiet voices from ahead.
"Of course they're beautiful," Szpindel murmured. "They're stars."
"And I'm guessing I'm not your first choice to share the view," James said.
"You're a close second. But I've got a date with Meesh."
"She never mentioned it."
"She doesn't tell you everything. Ask her."
"Hey, this body's taking its antilibs. Even if yours isn't."
"Mind out of the gutter, Suze. Eros is only one kind of love, eh? Ancient Greeks recognized four."
"Riiight." Definitely not Susan, not any more. "Figures you'd take your lead from a bunch of sodomites."
"Fuck, Sascha. All I'm asking is a few minutes alone with Meesh before the whip starts cracking again..."
"My body too, Ike. You wanna pull your eyes over my wool?"
"I just want to talk, eh? Alone. That too much to ask?"
I heard Sascha take a breath.
I heard Michelle let it out.
"Sorry, kid. You know the Gang."
"Thank God. It's like some group inspection whenever I come looking for face time."
"I guess you're lucky they like you, then."
"I still say you ought to stage a coup."
"You could always move in with us."
I heard the rustle of bodies in gentle contact. "How are you?" Szpindel asked. "You okay?"
"Pretty good. I think I'm finally used to being alive again. You?"
"Hey, I'm a spaz no matter how long I've been dead."
"You get the job done."
"Why, merci. I try."
A small silence. Theseus hummed quietly to herself.
"Mom was right," Michelle said. "They are beautiful."
"What do you see, when you lo
ok at them?" And then, catching himself: "I mean—"
"They're—prickly," Michelle told him. "When I turn my head it's like bands of very fine needles rolling across my skin in waves. But it doesn't hurt at all. It just tingles. It's almost electric. It's nice."
"Wish I could feel it that way."
"You've got the interface. Just patch a camera into your parietal lobe instead of your visual cortex."
"That'd just tell me how a machine feels vision, eh? Still wouldn't know how you do."
"Isaac Szpindel. You're a romantic."
"Nah."
"You don't want to know. You want to keep it mysterious."
"Already got more than enough mystery to deal with out here, in case you hadn't noticed."
"Yeah, but we can't do anything about that."
"That'll change. We'll be working our asses off in no time."
"You think?"
"Count on it," Szpindel said. "So far we've just been peeking from a distance, eh? Bet all kinds of interesting stuff happens when we get in there and start poking with a stick."
"Maybe for you. There's got to be a biological somewhere in the mix, with all those organics."
"Damn right. And you'll be talking to 'em while I'm giving them their physicals."
"Maybe not. I mean, Mom would never admit it in a million years but you had a point about language. When you get right down to it, it's a workaround. Like trying to describe dreams with smoke signals. It's noble, it's maybe the most noble thing a body can do but you can't turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something. It's limiting. Maybe whatever's out here doesn't even use it."
"Bet they do, though."
"Since when? You're the one who's always pointing out how inefficient language is."
"Only when I'm trying to get under your skin. Your pants—whole other thing." He laughed at his own joke. "Seriously, what are they gonna to use instead, telepathy? I say you'll be up to your elbows in hieroglyphics before you know it. And what's more, you'll decode 'em in record time."
"You're sweet, but I wonder. Half the time I can't even decode Jukka." Michelle fell silent a moment. "He actually kind of throws me sometimes."
"You and seven billion others."
"Yeah. I know it's silly, but when he's not around there's a part of me that can't stop wondering where he's hiding. And when he's right there in front of me, I feel like I should be hiding."
"Not his fault he creeps us out."
"I know. But it's hardly a big morale booster. What genius came up with the idea of putting a vampire in charge?"
"Where else you going to put them, eh? You want to be the one giving orders to him?"
"And it's not just the way he moves. It's the way he talks. It's just wrong."
"You know he—"
"I'm not talking about the present-tense thing, or all the glottals. He—well, you know how he talks. He's terse."
"It's efficient."
"It's artificial, Isaac. He's smarter than all of us put together, but sometimes he talks like he's got a fifty-word vocabulary." A soft snort. "It's not like it'd kill him to use an adverb once in a while."
"Ah. But you say that because you're a linguist, and you can't see why anyone wouldn't want to wallow in the sheer beauty of language." Szpindel harrumphed with mock pomposity. "Now me, I'm a biologist, so it makes perfect sense."
"Really. Then explain it to me, oh wise and powerful mutilator of frogs."
"Simple. Bloodsucker's a transient, not a resident."
"What are—oh, those are killer whales, right? Whistle dialects."
"I said forget the language. Think about the lifestyle. Residents are fish-eaters, eh? They hang out in big groups, don't move around much, talk all the time." I heard a whisper of motion, imagined Szpindel leaning in and laying a hand on Michelle's arm. I imagined the sensors in his gloves telling him what she felt like. "Transients, now—they eat mammals. Seals, sea lions, smart prey. Smart enough to take cover when they hear a fluke slap or a click train. So transients are sneaky, eh? Hunt in small groups, range all over the place, keep their mouths shut so nobody hears 'em coming."
"And Jukka's a transient."
"Man's instincts tell him to keep quiet around prey. Every time he opens his mouth, every time he lets us see him, he's fighting his own brain stem. Maybe we shouldn't be too harsh on the ol' guy just because he's not the world's best motivational speaker, eh?"
"He's fighting the urge to eat us every time we have a briefing? That's reassuring."
Szpindel chuckled. "It's probably not that bad. I guess even killer whales let their guard down after making a kill. Why sneak around on a full stomach, eh?"
"So he's not fighting his brain stem. He just isn't hungry."
"Probably a little of both. Brain stem never really goes away, you know. But I'll tell you one thing." Some of the playfulness ebbed from Szpindel's voice. "I've got no problem if Sarasti wants to run the occasional briefing from his quarters. But the moment we stop seeing him altogether? That's when you start watching your back."
*
Looking back, I can finally admit it: I envied Szpindel his way with the ladies. Spliced and diced, a gangly mass of tics and jitters that could barely feel his own skin, somehow he managed to be—
Charming. That's the word. Charming.
As a social necessity it was all but obsolete, fading into irrelevance along with two-party nonvirtual sex pairing. But even I'd tried one of those; and it would have been nice to have had Szpindel's self-deprecating skill set to call on.
Especially when everything with Chelsea started falling apart.
I had my own style, of course. I tried to be charming in my own peculiar way. Once, after one too many fights about honesty and emotional manipulation, I'd started to think maybe a touch of whimsy might smooth things over. I had come to suspect that Chelsea just didn't understand sexual politics. Sure she'd edited brains for a living, but maybe she'd just memorized all that circuitry without giving any thought to how it had arisen in the first place, to the ultimate rules of natural selection that had shaped it. Maybe she honestly didn't know that we were evolutionary enemies, that all relationships were doomed to failure. If I could slip that insight into her head— if I could charm my way past her defenses— maybe we'd be able to hold things together.
So I thought about it, and I came up with the perfect way to raise her awareness. I wrote her a bedtime story, a disarming blend of humor and affection, and I called it
The Book of Oogenesis
In the beginning were the gametes. And though there was sex, lo, there was no gender, and life was in balance.
And God said, "Let there be Sperm": and some seeds did shrivel in size and grow cheap to make, and they did flood the market.
And God said, "Let there be Eggs": and other seeds were afflicted by a plague of Sperm. And yea, few of them bore fruit, for Sperm brought no food for the zygote, and only the largest Eggs could make up the shortfall. And these grew yet larger in the fullness of time.
And God put the Eggs into a womb, and said, "Wait here: for thy bulk has made thee unwieldy, and Sperm must seek thee out in thy chambers. Henceforth shalt thou be fertilized internally." And it was so.
And God said to the gametes, "The fruit of thy fusion may abide in any place and take any shape. It may breathe air or water or the sulphurous muck of hydrothermal vents. But do not forget my one commandment unto you, which has not changed from the beginning of time: spread thy genes."
And thus did Sperm and Egg go into the world. And Sperm said, "I am cheap and plentiful, and if sowed abundantly I will surely fulfill God's plan. I shall forever seek out new mates and then abandon them when they are with child, for there are many wombs and little time."
But Egg said, "Lo, the burden of procreation weighs heavily upon me. I must carry flesh that is but half mine, gestate and feed it even when it leaves my chamber" (for by now many of Egg's bodies were warm of blood, and furry besides). "I can have but few c
hildren, and must devote myself to those, and protect them at every turn. And I will make Sperm help me, for he got me into this. And though he doth struggle at my side, I shall not let him stray, nor lie with my competitors."
And Sperm liked this not.
And God smiled, for Its commandment had put Sperm and Egg at war with each other, even unto the day they made themselves obsolete.
I brought her flowers one dusky Tuesday evening when the light was perfect. I pointed out the irony of that romantic old tradition— the severed genitalia of another species, offered as a precopulatory bribe—and then I recited my story just as we were about to fuck.
To this day, I still don't know what went wrong.
"The glass ceiling is in you. The glass ceiling is conscience."
—Jacob Holtzbrinck, The Keys to the Planet
There were stories, before we left Earth, of a fourth wave: a fleet of deep-space dreadnoughts running silent in our wake, should the cannon fodder up front run into something nasty. Or, if the aliens were friendly, an ambassadorial frigate full of politicians and CEOs ready to elbow their way to the front of the line. Never mind that Earth had no deep-space dreadnoughts or ambassadorial spaceships; Theseus hadn't existed either, before Firefall. Nobody had told us of any such such contingent, but you never show the Big Picture to your front line. The less they know, the less they can betray.
I still don't know if the fourth wave ever existed. I never saw any evidence of one, for whatever that's worth. We might have left them floundering back at Burns-Caulfield. Or maybe they followed us all the way to Big Ben, crept just close enough to see what we were up against, and turned tail before things got ugly.