The Wrong Stars

by Tim Pratt

  Elena raised her gaze. Her eyes were so dark brown they were nearly black. “We found simple organisms on Europa, even before we set out. But that’s not the kind of life you mean, is it? Microbes don’t build space stations.”

  “No, they don’t.” Callie took a breath. “Just over three hundred years ago, humanity made first contact with intelligent alien life.”

  Elena surprised Callie by breaking into a wide smile. “I never doubted sentient life existed out there among the stars. The universe is just too big, too full of planets, for humans to be unique. I did wonder if we’d ever encounter such life, given the vastness of space – it would be like two particular particles of salt in the ocean happening to bump into one another. I was chosen for my mission not just to bring the stored embryos to term and establish our colony, but also to study any alien organisms we might find at our destination. We never dared dream we’d find intelligent life, though. What are the aliens like? Are they… friendly? That sounds so stupid. God. Are we able to communicate with them?”

  Callie smiled back. “Friendly? More or less. We can communicate, though it’s not always the smoothest.”

  Elena leaned eagerly forward. “What do they look like? Their physical structure, I mean?”

  “I’m not a biologist, or any other kind of scientist, but as I understand it, the aliens don’t correspond to any of the taxonomies we have for creatures on Earth. They’re smaller than humans – OK, I’m just going to say it straight out: superficially, they look more like octopuses than anything else on Earth.”

  Elena blinked. “Talking squid from outer space? Really? Like in an old sci-fi novel?”

  Callie snorted. “Actual scientists get mad when we call the aliens squid, or octopodes, because apparently there are a million major differences, but at a glance, the aliens have a central body with a sort of rounded hump surrounded by eyes, and a varying number of limbs that are more like tentacles than arms, though really they aren’t much like either one, and they’re mostly radially symmetric. When they stand up on their tentacles and run around, they’re about a meter high.”

  “Differing numbers of limbs, you said? They exhibit that much variation as a species?”

  “Ha. That’s just the beginning of their variations. We’re not sure what they look like in their natural, baseline form. Most of the Liars are big believers in self-improvement. Humanity has encountered something like fifteen hundred separate clans, or groups, or families, or tribes, and while there are broad similarities in their physiology, there’s a lot of variation, too. We’ve encountered tiny Liars the size of your palm – they look like skittering disembodied hands – and we met one group modified for unprotected space travel. Like, their bodies are ships. They’re the size of whales, drifting slowly through space, usually in hibernation. Those are extremes, but all the Liars augment themselves mechanically, or alter their genetic code, or reshape their bodies for different environments. That willingness to transform their bodies is the closest thing they have to a unifying culture.”

  Elena wrinkled her nose, and, damn it, Callie found the expression adorable. “They call themselves Liars?”

  “That’s just about the only thing they don’t call themselves. The various clans claim a lot of different names – well over three thousand have been recorded, last I heard. There’s a fancy designation scientists use for the species as a whole, but yeah, most people just call them Liars.”

  Elena nodded. “You said we can communicate with them, but it’s difficult. Because… they lie?”

  “Oh yes. The first Liars made contact with Earth in the most dramatic way possible, appearing out of nowhere in the vicinity of Jupiter and moving rapidly toward Earth in a fleet of what were, for the time, impossibly advanced ships, though they look pretty ordinary by modern standards. Shaped like starfish, most of them – a pretty high percentage of Liars have a fondness for radial symmetry in their designs. That first group of aliens took up a position near the moon and began broadcasting at Earth in every language – including several dead ones. The message claimed they were emissaries from a vast galactic confederation, come to trade with us, solve all our pressing ecological problems, and welcome us into a thriving interstellar community. We were invited to join a league of hundreds of sentient species. In exchange, all the visitors wanted was several million gallons of sea water, and permission to inhabit Venus in perpetuity.”

  “That’s unbelievable!”

  “You have no idea how right you are.” Callie made herself a cup of coffee while she talked. “Earth was a mess when you left – that’s why you left – but it was in even worse shape by the time the Liars arrived. So Earth made the deal, and got some remarkable technological advances in return – improved communications technology, an early version of the Tanzer drive that propels this ship, new forms of programmable matter – they were miracle workers. The Liars collected their seawater, promised to be in touch soon about taking human ambassadors to the galactic central hub… and then they disappeared into the clouds of Venus. As far as we know they’re still there. When we send probes, the probes stop working, and the one time Earth was dumb enough to send a drone military force, they didn’t come back either. Technically the agreement we made to give the Liars possession of Venus is still binding, even though it was made under false pretenses.”

  Elena frowned. “So… there was no confederation? I don’t understand.”

  “Neither did we. A few months later another ship, this one all alone but much larger than the others, also appeared near Jupiter, seemingly out of nowhere. The aliens on board were clearly the same species as the ones we’d met before, though they called themselves by a different name. We asked about the galactic empire, and they said the first aliens we’d talked to were liars. There was no peaceful galactic confederation, just a war-torn galaxy where scores of races clashed for supremacy. We’d been duped by alien con artists who’d sold us a bunch of junk and empty promises, but these new aliens told the truth – or so they said. If we had any sense at all, we’d align ourselves with their faction, and accept their protection. Otherwise, we could expected to be invaded by an army of rapacious alien grasshoppers bent on stripping our planet of all its natural resources. And, by the way, if we weren’t doing anything with Mercury, could they have it in exchange for their help? Before we could respond to that request, another ship arrived, also out by Jupiter, and those aliens said the first two groups couldn’t be trusted, and, in fact, we should really accept help from these newcomers, because we’d need their help to escape a cosmic horror that was switching off the stars like lamps, one by one, and coming our way. Incidentally, they liked the look of some of Jupiter’s moons, and they only wanted four or five of them in exchange for helping us set up a force field to protect us from extermination…”

  Elena frowned. “Which group was telling the truth?”

  Callie sipped her coffee and shook her head. “None of them.”

  Chapter Four

  “It was all lies?” Elena said.

  “Mostly stories adapted from our own media, we think, literature and film and immersives – simple science fiction scenarios, playing on our hopes and fears. We figured out pretty quickly that none of the aliens could be trusted… and that’s still our policy. We keep trading with them, though.”

  “But how, if there’s no basis of trust?”

  “They lie about big things, like where they come from, what they believe, even the nature of the universe – you don’t ask a Liar to talk philosophy. And they’ll lie about insignificant things, like where they were yesterday, or who their friends are, or which way the bathroom is – you don’t ask a Liar for directions, either. But they like to talk about technology, and they like to tinker, and they like making deals, and they don’t usually lie about that. If you offer them something, in exchange for something else, and you make really sure the thing they’re selling you does what they claim, most of the time it works out all right.”

  “So they lie
. But why do they lie?”

  Callie shrugged. “Of the thousand and a half bands of Liars we’ve met, whether it’s a dozen on a small ship or a civilization of millions settled on another planet, each group has a different story about their origins, their goals, and the nature of the universe. Every time they’ve claimed to have an ancestral homeworld, and we’ve gone to look, we’ve found an uninhabited rock where nothing like the Liars could have plausibly evolved – and sometimes there’s no planet there at all. The Liars often claim there are lots of other intelligent alien species in the universe, but we’ve never met any of them, or seen any signs.”

  Elena rolled the mug back and forth between her hands, a worry line creasing her forehead. “I don’t understand. What do they say when they’re caught in a lie? Do they offer any explanation?”

  “Oh, sure. They say the lies are translation errors, or that we talked to heretics from a doomsday religion, or that our ambassadors are mentally ill pathological liars, or that our feeble human minds can’t comprehend their truths, or that we must have followed their directions incorrectly, or that reality is a glitched simulation. A Liar will tell you the sky on Earth is green, and when you object, he’ll explain that humans just have inferior color receptors. They’re absolutely unflappable and endlessly adaptable and totally infuriating and they’ve driven generations of xenopsychologists to the brink of madness.”

  Elena looked troubled. Callie had grown up knowing about Liars, but she could imagine how hearing about the aliens for the first time would be alarming. “If the only thing they have in common is lying, then clearly they have a culture built on lies. Do they lie among themselves, or just to humans?”

  “We’re not sure. Stephen agrees with you, and thinks it’s a cultural thing: we’re outsiders, and as such, the Liars are forbidden to tell us any real truths, possibly for religious reasons. That’s a fairly popular theory, but it’s no more verifiable than any other. Me, I hesitate to assume the Liars even share a single culture. What does it mean to meet a ‘human’, after all? Even here, in this system, there are enclaves of hardcore agrarians on Earth who refuse to have anything to do with space travel or any tech from the last few centuries: they try to live a pre-first-contact existence. There are people who live almost entirely in virtual-reality submersion tanks, and bicycle fanatics, and spaceborn who’ve never been down a gravity well and never will, and a thousand weirder cults and cultures. There are twenty-nine solar systems inhabited by humans, including one nobody ever comes back from, because the settlers there are isolationists, and probably violently so. Every system has developed its own cultural qualities over the centuries, and every settlement in every system has its own set of quirks. I figure Liars probably exhibit the same range of variation, except their original civilization is even older than ours, and a lot more fragmented. We’ve found them scattered all over the galaxy, after all, pretty much everywhere we go.”

  “I guess the idea of a planet full of monocultural humanoids with bumpy foreheads who all follow a thinly disguised version of the Bushido code is ridiculous,” Elena said. “Nothing’s that simple.”

  Callie chuckled. “Our contact with the Liars has been good for humanity overall, though. They’re never violent – if trading fails, and deception fails, they shrug and move on. They seem to believe the universe is plenty big, so it’s stupid to fight over resources when they can trade for them or look elsewhere instead. Also, to be frank, we can’t offer them too much beyond raw materials, since every Liar group we’ve met is more technologically advanced than we are. The Liars mostly settle on planets we don’t want anyway, ones with atmospheres that are toxic soup to humans – their tendency to body modification makes them wildly adaptable. Apart from the ones on Venus, who are totally incommunicado, the Liars don’t have any permanent settlements in our solar system, though some live on our planets and moons and space stations, often working as technicians and engineers. It makes sense – half the technology we use came from Liars in the first place. We pay them hourly, though, and never up front. They’re unreliable as a rule, but their knowledge is an asset. They do have to be watched, though. If left to their own devices, they like to… tinker.”

  Elena made a low ahhh sound. “You think these Liars are the ones who ‘tinkered’ with my ship?”

  “That’s our working theory. We figure your ship ran into a group of Liars. Maybe even a band that’s never encountered humans before, and weren’t sure what to make of you. We’ve never documented any violent clashes or attacks, but sometimes… incidents happen. Some of the Liars enjoy making adjustments and improvements, even when no one asked them to. Many of them have a spirit of… experimentation.” Callie thought about Drake and Janice, but mentioning their experience as the sole survivors of a shipwreck “rescued” by a group of Liars wouldn’t be very comforting to Elena right now.

  “Why would they alter our ship, though?”

  “Maybe they thought it was broken, or lost, or just needed aesthetic improvements. Who knows?”

  Elena sat forward, eyes shining. “But they wouldn’t have hurt my crew? My colleagues might still be alive out there, somewhere?”

  “I have no idea, Elena. Something happened to your crew. Maybe you’ll get your memories back, and you can figure out where to go from there.”

  “If they’re still alive, I have to find them. Can I – would it be possible – to backtrack? Does the Anjou have a record of where it’s been?”

  “Ah. Yes. But it doesn’t make a lot of sense. It looks like you traveled about fifty light years in under thirty seconds.”

  Elena slumped. “That’s obviously impossible.”

  “Well… yes and no. It is possible to travel that far, or even farther, that quickly. But your ship couldn’t have done it. The Liars opened the galaxy to us, but the Anjou doesn’t have that kind of tech.”

  “The Liars gave you new propulsion technology?” Elena leaned forward, clearly deciding to focus on something other than the fate of her crew. “That Tanzer drive you mentioned? The Anjou could get up to about ten percent of light speed, but it took time to accelerate, and we used explosive nuclear reactions for propulsion. But the kind of speeds you’re talking about, don’t they violate the laws of physics?”

  “It’s not about speed. Our ships are faster than yours, and most are powered by Tanzer drives – they’re basically magnetoplasmadynamic thrusters, but they use a ridiculously efficient propellant the Liars developed… and I see your eyes glazing over.”

  Elena winced. “I’d blame my cognitive impairments, but in truth, physics and engineering were never my specialties. As long as our family car drove itself reliably, I never thought much about what was happening under the hood.”

  “Don’t let Ashok sit next to you during dinner, then, or you’ll learn more than you ever wanted to about thrust. Anyway, the Tanzer drives are great, and give us good speed and maneuverability within solar systems, but the big thing the Liars gave us – eventually – was the bridges. That’s how we travel light years in under half a minute. The reason those first Liars kept appearing near Jupiter was because there’s a wormhole there. Or a place where a wormhole can be – we call it a bridgehead. We think the bridges are artificial, constructed by someone, millions or billions of years ago – the Liars sometimes take credit for building the network, and sometimes claim it’s a natural phenomenon, and sometimes say other aliens made it. Who knows? The point is, if we bombard that particular spot in space with the right kind of radiation, it opens a passageway. We can travel almost instantaneously to any of twenty-eight other systems, scattered across the galaxy, with the destination dependent on the exact energies we bombard the bridgehead with. Once we pop out the other side, we have to make our way with conventional propulsion, but even so, the bridges have opened up a vast expanse of space for us. Over the past few centuries we’ve established scores of colony worlds, and ships routinely make supply runs to systems hundreds of light years away.”

  “That�
��s astonishing,” Elena said. “Though it does make my mission a bit redundant. I should be happy humankind has found so many homes among the stars, but it’s hard not to be disappointed. Five hundred years ago… things were bad. We thought the goldilocks ships were the last hope for humanity to survive. We believed our work mattered.”

  “It did, though. If nothing else, the goldilocks ships gave people hope, right?”

  “I didn’t anticipate my life’s work becoming a symbolic gesture.”

  Callie shrugged. “More than most lives amount to. Do you think you’ll go back to Earth?”

  “It seems almost cowardly, when there are all these new worlds to explore, but… What’s it like there now? In my time…” She grimaced. “Between the storms, the jellyfish infestations, the untreatable bacteria, the desiccation of the west…”

  “Earth… it’s a walled garden. It’s mostly where people live when they’re afraid to live anywhere else, I guess. The Liars gave us tech to scrub the atmosphere and sequester carbon, and there was a big exodus of colonists once the bridgeheads opened, so that reduced the population load significantly. Those left behind got busy on restoration. Earth is nice enough, but boring. I haven’t been there since I was a little girl, growing up in the Hawaiian Archipelago, spending summers with my grandparents in a bubble settlement near Old Lisbon. Gravity wells don’t agree with me.”

  Elena chuckled. “I suppose I should feel homesick, but I don’t, really. For one thing, the home I knew must be unrecognizable, and for another… I always wanted the stars.”

  “You were brave as hell to do it, way back then,” Callie said. “Traveling in space is dangerous now. In those days it was…”