This Alien Shore

by C. S. Friedman

  Apparently not, for as she came to him he made no attempt to escape her. She did not need to draw his arms around her, or make more than a token effort to invite his embrace. He tried once more to say something, and once more she stopped him, this time with a lingering kiss. It’s a fantasy. Just a fantasy. Words will make it real. Shhh.

  There were probably men who could resist such a lure, she mused. Not that she’d ever met one. Her men had all been delightfully predictable, from start to finish.

  This one was no exception.

  People of Earth.

  We have come back to you.

  Across alien vistas unimagined by your science, past dangers more terrifying than you can guess, through three years of slowspace travel to reach Terra from the nearest transit point. We have come to tell you that man has claimed the stars once more. And we are offering you a share in his triumph.

  Do not mistake my message, or my nature. My race is one of very few who still wear the outward form of our ancestors. All those Hausman mutations which you so feared, they have all come to exist. The galaxy is filled with creatures you would not recognize, all of whom call themselves human. My people, the Guerans, have committed themselves to finding them all, every lost and lonely colony, and bringing them back into the human fold. And we make the same offer to you now. Throw off your Isolation and embrace the stars; we will take you there, and show you how you can share the galaxy with us.

  But if you choose to remain here in solitude, know that this offer will never be repeated. My crew and I have all given six years of our lives to come here to say these words; if you turn us down, there will be no second chance.

  As for Hausman’s children, should you join us, you will attempt to accept them for what they are.

  They, in turn, will attempt to forgive you.

  Choose.

  SEARCH COMMANDER HARIMAN ALEXANDRIA, in his televised address to Earth. (Historical Archives, Hellsgate Station.)

  GUERA NODE TIANANMEN STATION

  THE DOOR chimed to let Dr. Masada know he had a visitor. It wasn’t a particularly welcome interruption, but when you weren’t in your own home you had to deal with such things. Back on Guera the portal mechanism would have made it quite clear that he was busy, and would rather not be interrupted.

  “Who is it?” he demanded.

  The voice that responded was unknown to him, but its owner claimed to be a Guild messenger. Very well. He flashed for the lock to disengage and it did; the heavy panel slid aside to reveal a man with the Guild sigil brightly embroidered on his uniform.

  “I’m here to inform you that you have a visitor,” the man said stiffly. “Guildmaster Anton Varsav.”

  Varsav? A Guildmaster? Why would such a man come here to him? He could think of no reason ... unless Varsav had discovered something that couldn’t be entrusted to the normal lines of communication.

  If so, that would be worth hearing about.

  He put his work on hold with a quickly flashed icon and stood. After so many hours staring at nothing but computer code in his head, the sudden motion made him dizzy. “Tell him to meet me in the forward reception room.”

  The servant bowed a crisp acknowledgment and left. Despite his excitement, Masada took the time to shut down all his programs and double-check his security guards. Was he reading this visit right? He was all too capable of mistaking alien protocol, and the Guild’s customs here in the outworlds were foreign to him. Nevertheless, the signs seemed unmistakable. Guildmasters didn’t make trips like this for casual reasons.

  The walk to the reception room was short, the more so since he walked it quickly. Varsav was already there. He was a darkly impressive man, whose long Gueran traveling robes were split open to reveal a tighter, more polished layer beneath. His dark eyes roamed about the room quickly, restlessly, absorbing all, and his hands moved likewise to the nearest furniture, as if to assure himself that it was solid. His kaja was primarily natsiq, with traces of the restless shru woven in. He stared at Masada’s own face for a minute, taking in its painted message, then said curtly, and without offering his hand, “Anton Varsav, Guildmaster of Adamantine Node.”

  Masada likewise offered no physical contact. The involuntary movements of the shru were hard enough on his iru nerves; putting his hand in the grasp of such a man was out of the question. “Kio Masada, Specialist in Data Security ... currently in service to the Guild.”

  Varsav looked about, noted several chairs grouped around a table, and gestured toward them. They took up positions opposite each other, Varsav’s hand roaming the edges of the nearer chairs as he spoke. In deference to Masada’s kaja—and perhaps his own as well—he jumped right into the business at hand.

  “I have a communication my people collected from one of the stations in my node. An Isolationist station, Terran extremists....” He exhaled noisily in what was obviously disgust, and pulled a thin plastic sheet out from his inner tumc. “This was going out to the Terran waystation.”

  Masada took the sheet from him, unfolded it, and skipped over the codes of interstellar communication to read the brief message beneath.

  TROUBLE COMING. THE ENEMY SEEKS CHILDREN. SEND ALL HOME ASAP. LUX AETERNA.

  Masada’s brow furrowed as he read the words once, twice, and then again. There were almost too many questions to ask; it was hard to pick which to start with.

  Restless with his extended silence, Varsav offered, “We had to sort through every fucking piece of mail in my node to get hold of that. My programmers must be cursing my name by now ... as I’m cursing this whole damned project.” He gestured impatiently toward the letter. “Well? What do you think?”

  “I think ...” He drew in a deep breath. “It could be part of this. Hard to say, with so little text.” He studied the text again. “Lux aeterna?”

  “Eternal light. Lucifer was the angel of light, in Terran mythology. That was one of my search clusters.”

  The enemy seeks children....

  “This could refer to the data I’m now seeking,” he said quietly. “If so ...” He shook his head, his mood dark. “Then someone is leaking very confidential information.” He looked up at Varsav. “You say this was going to Earth.”

  “No. The Terran waystation. I checked the routing string, it leads to a mail drop for Earth.” His dark eyes fixed on Masada; their sudden stillness was disconcerting. “The station that sent it might well be conspiring with Earth, don’t you think? First to steal our secrets, then to strike out at our pilots. They hate us enough to do that. Shit, they’ve got an outernet site that all but tells ‘true humans’ to go out and kill us. Practically gives them instructions on how to do it.”

  Masada nodded. That made sense. Process and motive all wrapped up in one neat little package. The letter was a slim lead at best, but in a game like this that was likely to be all they’d get. He’d work with it and see if Varsav’s hypothesis could be verified.

  He smoothed the letter down on the table and said, “We’ll start by investigating the mail drop—”

  Varsav reached out suddenly and put his hand on Masada’s own; the unexpected physical contact was jarring.

  “There’s more,” he said sharply.

  Masada withdrew his hand, said nothing.

  Varsav took out a second piece of paper from his tunic pocket and spread that out for the professor to look at. Masada did so, and recognized immediately the audit trail for the message. Long strings of code which would track where it had been written, what kind of machine it had been written on, and how and where and on what it had been transmitted. He glanced at the header to see if the serial code matched that of the letter. It did. So did the counter which was hidden in mid-string, meant to reveal if the code had been tampered with. It hadn’t been.

  Finally he looked up at Varsav, waiting for further information on exactly what he was supposed to be looking at.

  “Don’t you see it?” It took no great nantana skill to hear the hostility in his tone. “I thought this was your sp
ecialty.”

  “It traces this message from its origin on the New Terran Front Station—I assume that’s what this part refers to—to wherever you intercepted it.” He looked up at Varsav again. “These things can’t be faked, Guildmaster. The eddress on a letter, yes. The visible signs of where it came from. You can even alter the codes used to confirm such things, if you have the skill, so that it’s all internally consistent. But these audit codes, which are normally invisible to the sender ... if you knew enough to seek them out, then you know they can’t be changed. They’ve tracked every phase and movement of this message, from the moment it originated until the moment you intercepted it. Those facts can’t be altered.”

  Varsav rubbed the table with both his fists, a frenzied movement. “The machine, man. The thing that sent it out. Look at that.”

  He did so. “Sonroya model XSE 200+.” He paused, all too aware that he was failing to see whatever Varsav was driving at. “That’s one of the best portable computers made. I would assume anyone doing work with Lucifer would have at least something of that quality, if not—”

  “Don’t you see!” He snatched the paper back in frustration and shook it in Masada’s face. “Sonroya. That’s a Frisian-owned company, start to finish. A Variant company.” He paused, drawing in a long, noisy breath. “Now do you understand? These are Terran extremists on that station! They hate to breathe the same air as Variants. It bothers them to be within ten million miles of anything touched by a Variant. Now, you’re telling me they’re sending out their most secret data on a Variant-made machine? I don’t think so.”

  For a moment there was silence. A long and heavy silence, with those words hanging in the air between them, daring either one to speak.

  At last Masada dared, “You’re saying this letter didn’t really come from the Front.”

  “Damn right.” He settled back into his chair with an expression that might have been satisfaction. “Now you see it.”

  “But ...” He looked over the audit codes again. “All right. It had to be sent from the station. That doesn’t mean the signal couldn’t have originated on foreign machinery, if it was routed through—”

  “We’ve got all that,” Varsav said impatiently, cutting him off. “A mecho-pod buzzed the system several hours before this went out. Ten to one it bounced a signal off the station to get that initial ID. We tried to track it down to get confirmation and maybe some info on its source, but the damn thing apparently went right for the harvester station and smashed itself to pieces on a chunk of ore. Pretty clearly deliberate. We collected all the debris we could, but none of it showed any sign of manufacture.”

  “Frisia?”

  He shook his head. “Like you said, Sonroya makes the best in portables. Anyone could have bought that equipment and shipped it over to us. Anyone.” His hands rubbed against one another as he spoke, restlessly, frustrated. “So how do we find out who it was? And why they wanted the Front tp answer for it?”

  Masada wasn’t a master of human motivation, but it seemed in this case that the path to enlightenment was rather clear. “I suggest,” he said quietly, “that we start by looking at the Earth station.”

  “And see who this was being sent to?”

  “Among other things.”

  The enemy seeks children. Send all home ASAP.

  In his mind it was all coming together now, vague goals and suspicions coalescing into concrete patterns of potential action. Human motivation was not his forte, and the guildmasters knew that. They had hired him, knowing it. He needed to follow trails of data, not roads of emotional speculation. And this letter gave him a trail to start with.

  “I’ll take this back to my room and see what’s out there, waiting for us to find it....” And then you can weave it all into some grand conspiracy theory, and use that to entrap the guilty parties.

  God, he was glad he wasn’t responsible for that part of the search.

  He started to get up, but once more Varsav reached out and grabbed his arm. His expression was dark, and even Masada could read the anger in it, raw and undisguised. “They designed it for me, you know that. They knew how much I hated that station and would jump at a chance to take it down. They figured if they gave me what I wanted I wouldn’t look too closely at it, but would just send you all searching in the right direction, ready to blame everything you found on the Front ... serving their purpose.”

  Gently but firmly, Masada disengaged his arm. “Then we’re fortunate you’re a logical man, not ruled by his emotions.”

  For a moment it seemed that Varsav stared at him with what seemed like it might be hatred. Then, unexpectedly, the Guildmaster laughed.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Very lucky.” He stood. “Come on, I want to be there when you check this out.”

  It was hard to work with Varsav in the room. At last he found an angle of view and an internal sensory adjustment that cut out all awareness of the fidgety, high-strung Guildmaster. Thank God for those sensory programs. Let Varsav watch him if he wanted to; all he was going to see was Masada sitting back in a molded chair, staring at the monitor he had brought with him, perhaps grunting now and then as a particularly frustrating piece of code slowed his search.

  Connecting to the outernet was less of a shock this time, as the monitor gave him a sense of distance from it, but it was still annoying. How did these people live with such a system, stalked by advertisements and “free” offers and icons that would take you to another site, unasked-for, the moment you gave them your attention? It was like wending your way through an obstacle course. Perhaps after a while you just learned to tune it all out ... or perhaps you could buy programs that did it for you. He would have to design himself one of those before he did any more real work on the outernet, though he suspected that the consumer programs which were stalking him were capable of adapting to anything he could turn out quickly. Advertising: the ultimate predator.

  He longed for the simplicity of the Gueran network, which simply did what it was supposed to and no more. When had these people lost touch with the fact that the purpose of a network was to facilitate communication, not impede it?

  With care he rode the skip out to the waystation that served Earth. It wasn’t a large one, and its datasphere was rather prosaic. Earth didn’t encourage tourists, and most of those who used the waystation as a transfer point got onto the first ship that would take them where they wanted to go. As a result, the station was lacking in the kind of frenetic activity which existed elsewhere, in which entrepreneurs and industrial spies and brain-modified hackers waged a secret war over every bit of code, and junk bits of dead viral matter trailed in the wake of every legitimate program.

  This was almost peaceful, by outernet standards. Too bad he couldn’t relax and enjoy it. But if this trail did lead to Lucifer’s maker, or was connected to him in any way, relaxing was the last thing he should be doing. God alone knew what was waiting for him up ahead.

  He had no problem working his way through the main gateways of the system, though it took inordinately long to manage it. How long had it been since Earth had last updated its master programs? They ran so slowly he could almost picture an ancient programmer with pad and pencil and slide rule, entering his data by hand. On the other hand, security was fairly easy to circumvent. Of course, it helped that the planet was too far away from its waystation to maintain a real-time connection. Most communication from the outernet wound up bundled into neat little packets on the waystation, waiting for one of the periodic transmissions to the home world. That minimized the need for live security, and what there was seemed to be no match for Masada’s skills. Not here, anyway. It occurred to him as he dodged his third or fourth security sniffer that perhaps it was just a little too easy getting in. Like perhaps, someone wanted him there?

  Aware that he might be heading into a trap, but seeing no other way to get the answers he needed, he pressed onward.

  The mail drop was a closed system, which normally accepted messages and then close
d up tight behind them. Under normal circumstances you couldn’t go in and rummage around inside, because the return signal which would tell you what you were seeing couldn’t get out. He had to dismantle a portion of the gateway program itself, and that took a while. The security there was tighter than it had been elsewhere, which befit a transfer point for sensitive data. He took it as a hopeful sign that he was going in the right direction.

  He could hear Varsav pacing as he worked on the gateway. A programmer would have known there was no point in rushing this part, but the Guildmaster clearly had no appreciation of such fine points. Masada could hear him muttering angrily to himself, and for a moment he nearly lost concentration and let the gateway close up again. Damn corrective programs; he flashed an icon to shut down his hearing so the man wouldn’t distract him, then went back to what he was doing. It was like cutting into a body, peeling back layer after layer of tissue to get to the organs inside. The only problem was that this body kept trying to heal itself, and security sensors imbedded in the skin threatened to sound an alarm every time he cut into it again.

  Then at last he was through. He waited a few seconds for something to respond to his intrusion, but nothing did. He had already shut down the input receptors in his brainware, and now he double-checked them to make sure they were closed up tight. He had no intention of wandering into an area that was possibly controlled by Lucifer’s designer with his brain wide open.