This Alien Shore

by C. S. Friedman

  “I want to be normal,” she whispered. “Oh, please, I just want to know what that’s like again....”

  This is normal now, Verina thought gently. There’s no going back.

  To which Derik added, So fucking get used to it.

  Hands shaking, senses reeling, she dialed up a towel from the commissary outlet and slowly, shakily, began to clean up the evidence of her sickness.

  “Got it,” Tam announced.

  Allo and Sumi both looked up from the work they were doing as soon as the Belial spoke. They’d been waiting for such an announcement.

  “And?” Allo asked.

  “Take a look.”

  An inloading query flashed in Sumi’s field of vision. He answered with a go-ahead, and the ship’s innernet began to feed text into his brainware. He shut his eyes so as to see it more clearly.

  There was a picture, first of all. It was clearly the same girl they had on board, though taken when she was younger, and she looked every bit as prosperous as Allo had guessed her to be. Sumi quickly assessed her lo-G formalwear and matching jewelry to be in the neighborhood of a thousand corporates in value, and that was if there wasn’t a designer label inside to boost the price. He was willing to bet there was.

  He scrolled past the encrypted text of the message itself—Tam always included a copy of the original in his reports, he was a little bit anal in that respect—until he got to the translation. It was short and sweet, and all that Allo had hoped it would be.

  SUBJECT: JAMISIA SHIDO (MAY BE TRAVELING UNDER ALIAS)

  FUGITIVE FROM EARTH CORPORATE COUNCIL

  SUSPECTED STATION TERRORIST, WANTED FOR QUESTIONING IN CONNECTION WITH THE DESTRUCTION OF SHIDO HABITAT

  SEARCH AND DETAIN

  CONFISCATE ALL COMPUTERWARE

  DO NOT PERMIT SUBJECT TO HAVE OUTERNET ACCESS UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES

  NOTIFY OFFICE IMMEDIATELY UPON CAPTURE. FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS WILL BE GIVEN AT THAT TIME.

  ADDITIONAL DATA BELOW.

  “So,” Allo mused, “our little passenger’s a terrorist. Any thoughts on that, Sumi?”

  For a moment the Medusan did not respond. “Hard to believe,” he said at last. “But not impossible.”

  “She fits the bill,” Tam pointed out. “If terrorists were recruiting, they’d look for someone with an air of innocence, who wouldn’t draw suspicion. Someone just like her. Don’t you think?”

  “I think,” Allo said slowly, “that someone wants her very badly. I think there’s one hell of a crime involved, if an Earth Habitat was destroyed. I think there’s someone out there willing to transmit any lie it takes, to get hold of her.” He looked up at Sumi. “How about you?”

  Sumi didn’t answer right away; he was trying not to think about his own memories of the girl, for they were ill suited to the current conversation. The touch of her fingers, the taste of her skin ... he forced those images out of his mind and struggled to recover his objectivity. “I doubt she’s a station terrorist,” he said at last. “That being the one unforgivable crime in outspace ... who would give her refuge, once the truth was known? She doesn’t seem the kind to risk that. She isn’t ...” he struggled to find the right word.

  “Focused enough?” Allo suggested.

  “Gutsy enough?” Tam offered.

  “Polished enough,” Sumi said. He was thinking of her vulnerability, then how it gave way to a strange intensity on the bridge, and that in turn to a more seductive aspect. “A terrorist would have her act down better than this girl does. A real one wouldn’t have run through the docking ring like that, no matter what the cause. She’d have had a better story prepared to cover her ass than what she gave us, and she’d know how to access funds ... or how to do without them.”

  “True.” Allo nodded thoughtfully. “If so, then the contact data given here is a fake. And whoever sent this out is pretty damn confident ... because someone who saw her might lose track of this eddress and contact the real ECC. So they’d have to have their bases covered there, too, just in case that happened.”

  “That’s one hell of a high-level contact,” Tam mused.

  “Which means ...” Allo drew in a deep breath. “Whoever wants her is probably powerful, and probably rich, and willing to do just about anything to get her.”

  He let that sit for a minute, then asked, “Any comments?”

  There were none.

  “Any questions?”

  None.

  “All right. Sumi, you keep an eye on her. Win her trust if you can, see if you can get her to disclose something useful. We still have to track down just who it is that’s looking for her, and do it very carefully. You keep her out of the way while we finish off our current business, then we can focus on her.”

  “Allo, I—”

  Silence.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” Sumi said quietly. His tendrils were held rigid in a submissive posture, communicating nothing. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Tam, try to trace this transmission back to its source. In the meantime I’m going to get that shit in the hold unloaded, and if we have to cut price to do that fast, so be it. We’ve got more valuable cargo now.”

  “You think she’s worth that much?” Sumi asked.

  For a moment there was silence. The pilot’s eyes shut halfway as he scanned through the message again, letters bright against the darkness of his inner lids.

  “No question about it,” he finally assessed. “The only question is, to whom?”

  God save us from an Earth in which all men are the same. God save us from a colony where that is the goal, or a culture which assumes that for its norm. Give me a thousand people speaking different tongues, worshiping different gods, and dreaming different dreams, and I will make of them a greater nation than you can make with ten thousand of your gengineered duplicates. For mine will have the spark of greatness in them, while yours will live for conformity, worship mediocrity, and take their carefully modulated delight in predigested dreams.

  Reigning in Chaos: the founding of Guera Colony (Historical Archives, Hellsgate Station)

  GUERA NODE TIANANMEN STATION

  THE FEAR didn’t really hit Masada until the waystation was in sight.

  He was good at ignoring things; it was a skill all iru had. A lifetime of dealing with senses that tended to go haywire had taught him how to shut down the part of his awareness that was causing irritation. Never mind that now he had his brainware do the job of correcting things, so that he was hardly even aware of the process taking place. He’d done it often enough as an adolescent that his mind still remembered the trick.

  So until the waystation was in sight he was capable of ignoring it. When Guildmaster Hsing came to tell him it was time to pack his equipment for transfer he managed not to think about why. When the steady hi-G of the trip became the slightly nauseating complex gravity of compensated deceleration, he released a few grains of a remedy into his bloodstream and went on with his work as if nothing were happening. Even when the ship gave out its instructions on what to do and where to do it in preparation for disembarkation, he managed to shunt that information to a part of his brain that wasn’t connected to the hotwires of fear and incapacity.

  But now ... now it was impossible. As he gazed out at Tiananmen Station—seat of Guild authority, and therefore the ruling center of all the human worlds—it was impossible to ignore the implications of where he was. It wasn’t so much because of the station itself, but the change in his traveling associates as they approached it. Even his limited iru sensitivity was capable of sensing the change in them ... and intellectually, of course, he understood its cause. They were within reach of the outernet now, and most of the passengers had clearly connected up to it. Children who had previously run wild now sat tucked quietly in corners, busy with their favorite multiworld games. Adults whispered comments to nothingness, as their favorite outernet drama coursed through their brains. Those who stared out the window did so with an intensity that told Masada thei
r view of the station was augmented by scrolling facts about Tiananmen, or the latest economic report, or maybe simply words of welcome from a loved one who was waiting for them.

  Guera had its own network, of course—as did all the civilized planets—and every transport that left the outworlds was capable of feeding data and entertainment to its passengers through their headsets. But though there was little difference in actual fact between Guera’s planetary network and the system that linked the outworlds, there was a universe of difference in how people used them. The outemet did more than provide data and communication, after all. It linked worlds, skipping messages along the ainniq with a speed that made the concept of “distance” almost meaningless. It linked cultures, feeding the databases from a thousand colonies into a grand gestalt consciousness which any human mind could access. It saturated daily life in ways the average human was not even aware of, so that a single casual thought broadcast on Hellsgate Station, meant for no more than a local audience, might affect the manner in which stock funds fluctuated on Sanctuary, five nodes away.

  It was chaos, plain and simple. A system so vast, with so much living input, that humankind could no longer predict exactly how it would function, or even understand exactly what it was. It had its own tides of connection and efficiency—much as the planets had weather—and humans could no more predict those tides than the planetbound could tell in one year if a tornado would form in the next. It was a truly living system, Masada had theorized, and like the biological systems whose terms were used to describe it, it could no longer be controlled by humans, only nurtured, goaded, cajoled. And people knew that, deep inside. They sensed that when they connected to the outernet they were becoming something more than human. They knew that the vid games and the stock scrolls and the group chats were but the surface markings of a creature with a heart and a soul all its own. A creature that might just as well be alive, for all that its systems mimicked life.

  He had spent his life studying it. He understood it better than any other man alive.

  It scared the hell out of him.

  They were strangers to him now, the humans on the observation deck, made alien not by the stream of messages feeding into their brains, but the casual way in which they absorbed those messages. Conversations went on with seeming normalcy, but too many eyes were focused inward. Words left unspoken were supplemented by phrases sent brain-to-brain, turning speech into a string of seeming non sequiturs. One adolescent walked through the observation chamber growling and snarling half-animal challenges to all who came near; clearly he was in the grip of some fantasy program, which translated all his surroundings into the venue of his choosing. It was an eerie world, enough that it affected even the iru in him, to whom the universe was always somewhat strange. And it confirmed his fears about coming to the outworlds, and intensified them, until he finally had to order his wellseeker to flood his system with sedatives in order to calm himself down. It wouldn’t do to arrive at Guild headquarters in such a state. They had nantana galore in the Guild, and at least a dozen other kaja who could read meaning into the slightest hesitation of speech, or the slightest hint of bodily tension. If they didn’t respect him when he first arrived then his work here was doomed from the start.

  With a start he realized just what he had been thinking. Did he fear the nantana now? That was a new concept, and a highly disturbing one. The nantana were his own people, after all, and they respected the rules of social interaction which governed all Guerans. This trip must really be getting to him, if he now thought of them as something to be feared.

  He drew in a deep breath and shut his eyes, imagining that he could feel the subtle flow of sedatives into his blood. Already his pounding heart had quieted somewhat, and his wellseeker had given up on bright red warnings and settled for a cautious gold. Yes, he told it, when it asked if it should adjust his adrenaline levels. Yes, to normalizing hippocampus function. Yes. Yes. Yes. What had it been like to live in a natural world, in the days before brainware and wellseekers and conscious control of one’s own body? He shuddered even to think about it. Terrifying horizons lay before humankind, but an even more terrifying primitive helplessness lay behind him. In some ways this was the only sane moment in human history, mind and machine as perfectly balanced as they would ever be. God help his species when the balance shifted once more.

  Living systems always change, he had written. And that change is never predictable.

  Not a comforting thought.

  You must learn not to think too much, his wife had told him. You must learn just to be. Taste life and enjoy it. Don’t analyze. Live.

  Impossible.

  She was no less driven than he was, though she’d never have admitted it. The difference was that her thoughts were voiced in music rather than language, notes rather than binary code. When she sat in her meditative silence with “no thoughts” disturbing her peace, there were symphonies stirring inside her soul. Notes fit together in her brain like facts did in his. She could not have lived in a world without music, any more than he could have lived in a world without logic.

  Had he loved her? Gueran science wasn’t sure if an iru could love. The chemicals were there for it. Sometimes they even combined properly. Wellseekers couldn’t tell the difference.

  But subjective experience? No one was certain. No iru understood the language of love well enough to confirm or deny it.

  He missed her terribly.

  The Prima met with him in person, of course. Privately. Given that she was simba, such an invitation was replete with social implications. This man is mine, it told her staff, as surely as if she had urinated on Masada to mark him with her smell. It made little difference to Masada. Status was the least of his concerns. If they had just picked him up at the dock and delivered him to his new workstation, instead of providing an honor guard to accompany him to her audience chamber, that would have been fine. As it was, he tolerated her simba need for precedence and ritual, as she was no doubt tolerating his own iru idiosyncrasies. Gueran society was a complex webwork of such tolerances, as natural to them all as breathing.

  Devlin Gaza, now ... that was a different matter.

  Masada knew of the man’s work, and had immense respect for his skill. He knew the standard that Gaza’s staff was held to, and was amazed at how often they met it. Masada wasn’t the kind of man to be impressed by rank, or wealth, or social grace, or any of the other superficial qualities that nantana obsessed about, but Gaza was rich in the one coinage he did value: the ability to think. The last program of Gaza’s which he had worked on had been a creation of true brilliance, and he had regretted that afterward he’d had no opportunity to see the man’s next project. But that had been Masada’s last commission for the Guild, at least until Lucifer raised its ugly head.

  Gaza programmed only rarely now. The staff of several hundred who answered to him took up most of his time, as did the thousand-and-some-odd electronic assaults which were launched against the Guild each day. Most of those were amateur efforts, would-be hackers buzzed on their own importance, trying to break into the most guarded system in the outerworlds just for kicks. Some were more serious threats, requiring targeted antibodies to be launched in return, or, occasionally, a rewrite of the security programs themselves. A few were so destructive that portions of the net had to be shut down for several seconds while a clean-and-strike program swept through suspect nodes, seeking their source.

  And then there was Lucifer.

  Masada knew that the best efforts of Gaza and his staff had already been assigned to the problem for an E-year now. He also knew they had made little progress. The corns sent to Masada’s ship had been short and nonspecific, due to security concerns, but even so they had expressed growing frustration with Lucifer, both from Gaza and his staff. Your fresh perspective is welcome, the last com had said. I hope to be able to help, he had responded with equal caution.

  The door at the far end of the chamber whisked open and Devlin Gaza entered. Masada r
ecognized him from his holo: lean, light-skinned, with aquiline features that played up the bony angles of his face, and a short crop of naturally blond hair above surprisingly dark eyes. His black jumpsuit was informal in its cut, but the insignia above his pocket spoke of the highest rank there was, the Prima’s Inner Circle. The combination of images—straightforward, unpretentious—pleased Masada. A man who believed in omens might say that things promised to go well.

  Gaza nodded slightly, a tight smile on his face. “Dr. Masada. We’re glad to have you here at last.” He didn’t offer his hand or in any other way seek physical contact, no doubt in deference to Masada’s kaja. Nor did he come as close as another man might. There were decorative squares on the chamber’s floor and he planted his feet precisely in the center of two of them, a feat managed without him ever seeming to look down. In another man Masada might not have noticed such things, but he had read enough about Gaza to know the nature of his Variance, and to see it reflected in such choices. It was, of course, what made Gaza such a master in his field. All Gueran Variances were like that, dark and light combined. Yin and yang. Pleasure and pain.

  “It’s a great honor to meet you,” Gaza said.

  Assuming the comment to be sincere—he lacked the social acumen to tell if it were otherwise—he responded, “The honor is mine.” And just in case his tone of voice failed to communicate his own sincerity, he added, “I’ve admired your work for years.”

  Something in the man’s posture seemed to ease up a bit. Had he expected ... what? Competition? Confrontation? “And I yours, Dr. Masada. I’ve waited a long time to meet the man who designed the Hellsgate-909 antibody. When they approved your coming here ... well, let’s just say that when this job is finished, I’d welcome a chance to sit down and talk shop with you.”

  There were few people in the outworlds whose praise could affect Masada; Gaza was one of them. “That would be an honor indeed:” His face had grown slightly warm at the praise, but he had his wellseeker put a stop to that. Biological display of any kind was distasteful to him. “I have some figures I’d like to check with you, and simulations to run—” He stopped suddenly, aware that in his haste to get started he might have missed some fine point of protocol, and added, “Assuming we move right on to business, of course.”