Asimov's SF, December 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Like what? Is it a compliment, like, ‘Nice tie you've got there?' Sexual overtones?” These things were hermaphrodites, weren't they?

  Another consultation. “It seems to be about dominance. You smell like you would be good to eat. But that's not the real meaning, just the literal one.” She stifled a giggle at the way it said leeeeeteral. Cat was the closest thing to a human she was going to see for the rest of her life—unless she met an uplifted Neanderthal or something—so there was no point in hurting its simulated feelings. It occurred to her that the way she'd piled him together wasn't so different from the way her own body had been taken apart and then Frankensteined back together after being accelerated to match velocities with the Bus.

  A ritual phrase. Maybe like saying inshallah automatically, or bless you when someone sneezed. Sidi told herself to look on the bright side. At least they had enough in common psychologically that she could understand the macho posturing. This was a promising contact, definitely a better prospect than any of the others she'd made since boarding the Bus as Earth's diplomatic representative. Should she tell the thing that she herself was fond of calamari in a lemon vinaigrette? No, she'd lose for sure if she tried to play the dominance game according to cultural rules that it knew and she didn't. Better to shift the battle to territory she was familiar with.

  “We have a problem,” she told the squirming mass of seafood salad. “When I meet with someone, I expect it to do its homework properly. Apparently you haven't bothered to learn anything of our customs. For an important meeting like this you need to provide bottled water and a tray of assorted muffins, and those need to be placed on a large conference table.”

  The crab-legs stopped threshing the air for a moment. “Virtual representations of these things would suffice?”

  “Yes,” pretending reluctance. “I suppose so.” It wasn't as if the thing would have real muffins in its shipboard personal food supply.

  “You should give the same things to me,” Snow White translated, a doubtful expression on her two-dimensional baby-face.

  “Of course.”

  “Very well,” Snow White said.

  “If you'll both step to one side,” Caterpillar asked politely.

  The two avatars jointly conjured the table and victuals. Sidi carefully pulled her real chair up to the virtual table, seated herself, and pretended to unscrew the cap from a water bottle. The medusoid whacked a simulated muffin with a knifelike appendage as if to slaughter it, and pretended to pop the halves into a different orifice than the one Sidi had been assuming was the mouth.

  * * * *

  The relationship with the alien she thought of as Mopsy flourished and then foundered in a single day of ship time—220 years on Earth. Mopsy's curiosity about the caterpillar icon—"is that a Homo erectus?"—inspired an attempt at cultural exchange: Lewis Carroll, Mother Goose, and Dr. Seuss in return for some proofs in number theory. Then Horton Hears a Who led to a discussion of Earth's wildlife. By that evening they were in one of the Bus's big kilometer-wide compartments hunting cartoon mammoths (Sidi with a simulated spear, Mopsy bare-clawed). But the next morning when Sidi woke up there was a message for her from Mopsy, translated as sorry things didn't work out better between us, and the comm showed that Mopsy was blocking calls from her.

  It wouldn't be long now until the Bus completed its circuit and this cohort was initiated into the mysteries of the GalCiv. Thirty-two days of ship-time had passed, and if nothing changed in the week she had left, it didn't look like Sidi would have a damn thing to show for her diplomatic efforts.

  Feeling glum, she kept her regular breakfast date in the oxygen-breathers’ refectory with the alien that she called Bonsai because it reminded her of a small, reddish pine tree. She slurped her millet porridge while Bonsai sat under the table and scraped daintily at the corn on Sidi's big toe. At least Bonsai really did want to eat her, as opposed to playing mind games about it. Too bad that they'd never been able to establish communication about anything more substantial than which tissues it could nibble at without hurting her. She hoped she was at least building up some of what the Chinese called guanxi, like giving a carton of Marlboros to your boss for the lunar new year.

  She popped her daily blue pill—"Reduces depression, homicidal impulses, and gibbering!"—and clicked through the latest news from Earth as translated by Cat. French was a dead language now, English unrecognizable. A new world government had come to power and sent her its “vision statement,” which ran to well over a hundred pages. She was to publish it to the other representatives (there was a note from Cat saying that he'd already done so) and realign her diplomatic efforts accordingly. The first page was a preamble about mankind's spiritual destiny, weasel-worded in ways that suggested it had been written by a big committee that didn't agree on much. She stopped and checked the later news. Yes, that muddled theocracy had fallen in a coup, so she could skip studying its manifesto. She wished that Earth could have come up with a more peaceful mode of cultural stagnation since she'd left. At least the population was back up to seven digits after that nasty war with the mitochondrial weapons. The species seemed too crotchety to admit that its only important job right now was to avoid extinction until it was time to graduate. Maybe it would have helped if the GalCiv had been able to explain to the primitives what graduation really involved. Was H. sap. expected to start vacating the planet to make room for the whales or the bonobos to take over in a million years?

  Here was something interesting: a communication to her directly from an alien planet. She remembered the species, cryogenic pools of silvery liquid that lived in vacuum and ate infrared. Early in the trip she'd wasted half a day trying to communicate with its representative, doing it on an ornery whim because the AI matchmakers had ranked the species 837th out of the 837 in the cohort for compatibility with H. sapiens. As far as she could tell the AIs had been absolutely right. She'd never succeeded in teasing even one word out of Pool. The thing reminded her of a laconic postdoc from Minnesota her roommate had once set her up with.

  What could be the point of initiating direct contact from their homeworld? Wouldn't this cohort have graduated already by the time signals could make the round trip? She opened a map.

  Aha! Pool had been one of the first species to come aboard. The Bus's path was roughly a circle (you don't take tight corners at ultrarelativistic speeds), and now they were closing the loop, their trajectory taking them right past Pool's home planet again. The signal had only taken three days, ship-time, to get here.

  Esteemed human, we note with pleasure your visit to our representative. We regret that differences in our styles of thought may have made communication difficult. We operate by sequential computation, rather than the parallel style that we have learned is common in brains made of cellular tissues. As a group we can make up for this by cooperating on parallel trains of thought, but an individual of our race is at a great disadvantage in its ability to think at a pace that can match yours.

  Sidi's heart thudded. A real lead! She jumped up, eliciting a squeak from Bonsai. “Sorry,” she said, doubting that the apology would get across.

  She headed for the liftshaft, reading as she went. She realized that she was only wearing one sandal, kicked it off and stuck it under her arm. Pool lived outside the hull, on the upper deck. Sandals wouldn't fit in a pressure suit anyway.

  The GalCiv has tried to accommodate our special needs with AI support, but any binding decisions must be made by our representative, not an AI. We believe we may have found a solution to the problem. Hmm, still looking for a “solution” this late in the game? The implication was that Pool's diplomacy was going just as badly as Sidi's. The spacetime within the Bus's passenger compartment is nearly flat, but the region farther from the hull is highly noneuclidean, and there are fringing fields in the space in between, strengthening exponentially as one moves outward. Our representative has noticed that time on its deck runs slightly more quickly than in the rest of the ship. Extrapolation sugges
ts that if he was moved about ten meters farther out from the hull, his thought processes could be made comparable in speed to yours, probably without exposing him to unacceptable tidal forces.

  “Probably!” Merde, you'd need guts to venture out near the maelstrom of magnetic monopoles and microscopic black holes that surrounded the ship like a swarm of gnats. Most likely you'd get sucked straight out into space and find yourself pureed into a soup of particles that the physicists back on Earth didn't even have names for yet.

  The liftshaft accelerated her upward with an eerie lack of physical sensation. She skimmed the rest of the communique from the flimsheet, but it didn't say much more except to suggest the general idea that Pool might need her physical help carrying out the plan. She realized belatedly that she hadn't even commed him to let him know she was coming. She messaged him, wondering how much good it would do if his brain was really that slow. No wonder she'd had no luck before with two-way communication!

  The topmost interior deck was for low-gravity, low-pressure anaerobes. She stepped into the vestibule, which, through some technomagic, functioned as an airlock without having any physical doors. This was where she kept her pressure suit—she'd insisted on bringing an Earth-tech skinsuit, since that was what she understood. At least it was modern enough not to need prebreathing. A companionway led up to another spooky airlock, and then to the weather deck.

  She looked around and took her bearings. If she leaned way back she could get a view through her visor of the zenith, out ahead along the Bus's trajectory where the whole microwave sky shrank and dopplered itself into a crazy fisheyed view like a fuzzy little cotton ball. Her eyeballs were sneaking up sideways on these photons and clobbering them, making even the ones coming from behind the ship look like they were from out in front. As for the witch's cauldron of exotic particles that surrounded the ship, they seemed to be completely invisible. It was humbling enough to think about the godlike mastery of matter and energy that was needed to propel a giant spaceship so close to the speed of light, but even more of a comedown to be unable even to perceive the technology.

  Over there was Pool's living space. The gravity on the weather deck was pretty low. She loped across the charcoal-black deckplates, reminding herself that she'd better not let her strides take her too high, if all relativistic hell broke loose only ten meters up.

  There he was, looking as placid as ever in his little basin surrounded by Arabian Nights blobules. She was careful not to shine her helmet lamp directly on him. It would be a shame to start an interstellar diplomatic incident by boiling the ambassador.

  Now what?

  “Ah, hello, Pool? I realize that you can't process what I'm saying in real time, but anyway I'm honored to be invited back for a visit. Um, Cat?”

  Her AI popped, seated on a protuberance that looked like a bidet, and blew a smoke ring. “Yes?”

  “You know that message from Pool's home planet? I can't really discuss it directly with Pool because he doesn't think fast enough when he's by himself. Could you ping his AI?”

  “Certainly. Do you want me to manifest it as an image this time?”

  “Ah ... what's that flying sofa thing from the Oz books? They roped it all together and sprinkled the powder of life on it.”

  “The Gump? Okay.”

  The bundle of furniture rose gracefully from the quicksilver like Venus from the sea. Its elk's head looked down at her, lordlike, from the plaque it was mounted on. “Hello again,” it said in a thick American accent.

  “Hello. Ah, I assume you've seen the message from your principal's home planet?”

  “Yes, but I'm afraid I can't make any decisions on his behalf,” it said, with its whiskery chin held high as if it didn't really care very much. It reminded Sidi of the dean's secretary at MIT. “It will take him a while to think it over.”

  “If we were to do this, what would his life-support requirements be?”

  The Gump gestured with a palm-frond wing. “You can see that he doesn't need much. You'd need to keep him in one piece, and make sure he wasn't exposed to too much heat.”

  “So ... a bucket or something?”

  “That would be fine, as long as the bucket was cold. I think you could just leave it out here for a while and it would cool off enough.”

  “How big is he?”

  “About twenty liters, a hundred kilograms.”

  “A big bucket, then, but I think I could still lift it in this gravity. And, what, we just use a tall stepladder to get him up there?”

  “That might be difficult,” the mounted head said, a little toss of its antlers giving a strong impression that any difficulty would be due to Sidi's inadequacy. “The physicists from the home planet sent some calculations—”

  “—just a summary, please.”

  “He's affected by electromagnetic fields. Once he gets two or three meters up, they think the net force will be upward, and there may also be some lateral instability.”

  “So let me get this straight. I'm imagining tying a rope to the handle of the bucket, and it's swooping around over my head like a kite?”

  “Probably.”

  “Probably. I see. So I think we want a lid for this bucket. How much tension in the rope?”

  “Equivalent to a few hundred kilograms in Earth gravity.”

  “I'll need a pulley, then. And what happens if I lose control of the bucket-kite?”

  “In the worst case, the Bus's automatic safety systems should intervene before he can fly off and accrete himself onto one of the micro-black holes.”

  “Good, no thermonuclear explosions, then.”

  “Probably not.” A dismissive flick of a palm-frond wrist.

  “Probably not.” Mon Dieu, the AI seemed almost as crazy as the Oz character she'd chosen to represent it.

  “We're quite certain there are good safety systems,” it said. “After all, the Bus has been flying for half a million years. We just don't know the details.”

  “Safety” would mean the safety of the Bus itself. Maybe they'd zap Pool like a bug to keep him from blowing everything up. The ship's mysterious absentee landlords seemed benevolent enough, but there had to be a limit to what they'd tolerate. Quand meme, the risk was Pool's to take. It looked like this plan was her best chance to accomplish something useful for her species, and it would be easier to ask forgiveness than permission. And anyway, what did she have to lose on a personal level? The unseen galactic top dogs claimed that it was impossible to explain much about what life would be like for the representatives after the Bus's circuit was complete, but it was clear that it was a one-way ticket. Maybe she'd stand around in a toga, reminiscing about Africa with the erectuses and habilises over brandy and cigars. Anyhow, this whole thing wasn't about her, it was about the job.

  “I'm willing to help,” she told Gump, “but it depends on whether Pool can make the decision soon enough.”

  She took her leave of the AI, wondering what to do next. How much could she trust these calculations? She imagined a bunch of silvery alien profs lounging in bathtubs around an equation-covered blackboard. They were extrapolating, and that was always risky. She retrieved the sandal from the airlock and came back out onto the deck. Hmm, it wouldn't take much of a pitch to make the sandal rise ten meters in this gravity, but throwing something straight up and then leaning back to watch it seemed like one of those tasks that was anatomically impossible in a pressure suit. She lay down on her back.

  “Cat?”

  He materialized over in the corner of her eye. “Yes?”

  “I'm going to throw this sandal up into the air—I mean into the vacuum—or—well, whatever that stuff is up there. I want you to observe from ten meters to the side or so. You can do that, can't you?” She was vague on how his interface to the GalCiv sensors worked.

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, so you can tell me how high it went, and catch the whole thing on video for analysis.”

  “All right.”

  She put the sandal bet
ween her palms like a Christian praying, then flicked it upward gently, being cautious about how hard she threw it. It took a long time to rise and come back down.

  “Two point six meters,” Cat said.

  “Did anything look strange do you?”

  “Strange in what way?”

  “Like, ah, you know, violating the laws of physics?”

  “Which laws of physics?”

  “Never mind.” Strengthening exponentially, Gump had said.

  She fetched the sandal and launched it again, faster. It rose for about ten seconds, then it reached a certain height and suddenly it was as if it had been hit by a gale-force wind. It seemed to shiver like a fish and get swept violently upward, its languid spin becoming a propeller-blade blur. Then just as suddenly the same invisible giant's hand slammed it back toward the deck, straight at Sidi. She rolled frantically out of the way, inadvertently bouncing herself several meters above the deck before she came back down.

  “Where did it hit?” she yelled when she had scrabbled to a stop.

  “It's still falling,” Cat said.

  She looked, and he was right. It was coming back down at an ordinary speed again.

  “Oh, those laws of physics,” Cat said.

  * * * *

  A bucket. Bargaining for material objects was surprisingly easy compared to sealing interstellar alliances. I have X, you have Y. Let's swap. It was a message that tended to translate well. Someone did have a bucket, she learned: a paranoid, fuzzy little creature that wouldn't allow her into the compartment where it spent all its time snuggled up in a pile of animatronic representations of its kind. Sidi didn't have what the fuzzy wanted, but she found someone who did, and constructed an intricate chain of trades. The sequence ended with four pairs of Sidi's cotton socks, which the final customer used to keep its pseudopods from drooping in the too-high gravity on the upper chlorine-breathers’ deck.