by Larry Niven
Chaz shook his head. “I can’t do that.”
Nero’s simulacrum studied Chaz. “Do what you can. I have gone as far as I can with the present course of inquiry. Saturn’s kinesthetic signature is no fiction, unlike Lenore’s airport attack, but it doesn’t match anyone with a legitimate, logical access to such power. I seem to be looking for the wrong ‘Saturn.’”
“Suggestion?”
“The invisible postulate. We’ve assumed that the Saturn who confronted you is still waiting to be confronted.”
“What?”
“You people alter yourselves in many ways,” said the Nero persona. “You, Doctor, your knees have been replaced, you take chemicals to alter the behavior of the nerves in your brain, your exercise programs play you like a toy robot, and while you design and program computers, they shape you. Any Council member may have shaped himself into something beyond my grasp, by these means or by others known to you. Dr. Kato, this question wriggles in my mind like a double handful of fer-de-lances. Here am I, a mock-up of a fictional character from a line of puzzle stories. To know this is hard on my self-esteem. Here are you as you wish to be seen, and that too might be a matter of self-esteem. Here is Saturn, but is he human? Or a computer persona with an operator behind it, or a program running on its own? Or has he changed his intelligence and abilities until his programming technique is changed too? The Saturn we are investigating may be long gone. These are all possibilities, aren’t they, Dr. Kato? I cannot explore them.”
Chaz nodded. “But these suggestions lie squarely in my own line of research.”
“A security officer could tell you much about the needs and fears and abilities of any Council member. Clarise Maibang is not Saturn. You have been intimate in the past. Try to pry something out of her.”
Chaz logged off early. He should have time to exercise, to wear himself out. These sessions always left him twitchy, but this time he was in a rage. His mood might be noticed.
He stripped and chose a jump rope from his closet, a pulse-rate monitor built into the handles. “Sprint routine,” he said loudly, and a hologram blossomed in front of him, an idealized version of his own body, dressed only in shorts, muscles rippling in shoulders and back. He’d never looked that good in his life.
The image took him through four minutes of sweaty warm-up followed by twenty wind sprints: ten seconds of all-out action followed by a minute of slower-paced work. Ten cycles of this and his body was so filled with lactic acid, he was so oxygen starved, that all tensions were blotted out by pain and exertion. Five minutes of cool-down. Three minutes of stretches. A shower.
He felt human again. As he showered, he felt the muscles in his arms twitching a bit. He was still angry, but at least he was in control now.
All right. He remembered the computer’s words:
Try to pry something out of her.
Such cynicism was very like Nero. Chaz had bottled his rage then. He already knew that he was going to have to involve Clarise.
He had been lonely. He’d spent a year letting go, mourning his fantasy Lenore. Now he needed the woman he had pushed aside. But—he flinched. Clarise would be easy to hurt, and he’d seen the depths of her anger.
Ice and Mirrors Collaboration with Brenda Cooper
Ice crunched under her boots, loud in the silence. Trine’s harsh sunlight reflected from a world of multifaceted ice and mineral crystals, surrounding her with rainbows. She was too exhausted to appreciate the display…but hey, it was pretty. Dark blue sky, brilliant sun, even through her blue blockers: awesome. What would it really take to warm this world?
She shivered. Hunger was finally getting to her. She hadn’t been so cold the first few nights. Just alone. She was the only human on a planet surrounded by enemies; it left her very small and far away from home. She felt daggers of ice on her neck; the scarf and the parka’s collar kept shifting. Should she have kept the pressure suit?
The blazing sun touched the horizon and was gone.
Kimber tilted her head to the darkening sky. The lights of the Thray starship should be visible soon. She leaned back against a slab of rock rising out of the ice. After a moment, she settled her backpack between her feet. It had to be kept close. She would die for what was in it, unless Eric found her first.
Would that surprise the Thray? They’d certainly surprised her! What had these aliens known of Kimber Walker when they chose her to bring to Trine?
The cafeteria at the Institute for Planetary Ecological Surveys was completely full. Graduating students milled about, competed for seats, shared laps when there were none, and moved nervously between groups. Kimber struggled to wait quietly with her best friends. There were four off-planet assignments available to a graduating class of over thirty students. Kimber feared getting stuck at the Institute as a teaching assistant or grant grunt. The last year had been hard; she’d fallen from third place to middle of the class.
Competing students had turned in psych profiles and agonized over résumés. They could have waited anywhere on campus. Most of them chose company and coffee.
Two of the three open surveys would take one student each. Those students would join groups of more experienced human surveyors doing spot checks on inhabited planets. One was a water world; the other was held by entitles who lived beneath desert sand. The third survey would take two students as the only human members of a joint expedition with the Thray, an older star-faring race. The Thray planned to terraform and then inhabit Trine, a currently unclaimed world.
There was a hierarchy among species with interstellar capability. The United Nations was trying hard to buy or lease the secret of the Shift Trick, but none of Earth’s visitors would even discuss the subject. Humans might join alien enterprises, riding spacecraft with interstellar capability. The Thray had ships that used the Shift Trick; but somewhere above them were unseen entities who enforced interstellar law.
The Thray could not approve their own occupation of a new planet. A neutral race must support any new planetary real estate deals. The Thray had drawn humans by lot. They would choose a survey leader and assistant surveyor from the graduating class.
Look the place over, then sign off on the Thray occupation. It sounded simple enough, but interstellar flight! A whole new world!
A frozen world to be reshaped. Thray had played tourist on Earth, always under wide-brimmed hats, with a dark glass hemisphere over each eye, except when they were exploring Earth’s caverns. They would want a world like Earth. How would they go about making it?
One day humanity would be doing this.
Kimber’s heart was set on the assistant job. It was the least of the off-planet assignments, but better by far than staying home. After six years she was desperate to test herself in the field.
The room was silent as results were read. The water planet went to Aaron Hunter of Hawaii. He groaned. Aaron was an amazing diver and swimmer, but he had developed a surfer’s ear problem: mushy hearing, loss of balance. The sophonts were sea dwellers. Aaron would be living underwater…but Kimber knew he’d take the job.
The sand dwellers went to Wendy Lillian, the best of them at languages. Eric Keenen got the assistant position for the coveted job with the Thray, and actually had the bad grace to look disappointed. First in the class all the way through, he had been expecting the lead on that team.
Kimber’s heart sank. She twisted her black hair around her index finger, grimaced as some of it caught in her rings. She stood up to leave, hoping her disappointment didn’t show. She almost tripped at the sound of her name.
“Kimber Walker, Trine, Chief Surveyor.”
She jumped, somehow tangling her hand further in her hair so she yelped. It was only when her friends Julia and Rick congratulated her that the job began to seem real.
Eric Keenen glared at her.
She’d be going down to the surface of a new world. Eric would fly between the stars, but it was unlikely he’d make planetfall. He wasn’t the type to take that with good grace
. She and Eric had fought each other throughout school after a bad relationship in her freshman year, but she had hardly seen him all semester.
It was a problem, but not enough to ruin her elation. That night, far from sleep, she watched the stars from her window until they faded to dawn.
The next month passed quickly, filled with finals and ceremonies, good-byes, and planning for the survey. She and Eric saw each other regularly as they completed plans, but always in the company of the advisor, Dr. Janice Richardson.
Star Surveyor II was the cabin and cargo section of a Space Shuttle affixed to the flat face of a massive silver cylinder with no breaks in it at all, no rocket nozzles, airlocks or access hatches, no windows or antennae or sensing devices, nothing. The Shuttle overlapped the edges a bit, like a cat fallen asleep on a hatbox. Dr. Richardson’s office had a display wall, and the Shuttle/Wayfarer Basic assembly lived there for two weeks. Richardson could pull close-ups; she could set the pilot’s display as a virtual flight test.
Kimber believed that Star Surveyor II was an embarrassment to Dr. Richardson.
“We can’t get into the Wayfarer Basic module. Contract says we don’t even think about it,” she said. “We didn’t even link up the Shuttle components. The Pillbugs did that, and they build the Wayfarer Basic too. But we can fly it.”
“Show me,” Eric said. And as she lectured, he questioned, argued, speculated, demanded. In Janice Richardson’s presence Eric was loquacious. He never addressed Kimber directly.
“Communications. Are we talking just to the Thray?”
“By no means! Eventually, you’ll send your results.” A view of the lower floor of the Shuttle cabin. “We fitted the Verification Link module into two of the locker spaces. It connects to the Wayfarer Basic—the hatbox. You’ll have a variety of sensing devices; we’ve labeled the sockets.
“But you, Eric, you don’t communicate results. I was told there’s no clear limit on what data you can store or request, so record everything in every interesting frequency. Make notes and speculations and complaints. You’ll keep and organize the samples and data Kimber gathers from Trine, what both of you discover using the VL. The Link gives you access to the libraries of a hundred species, instantaneous information, if you can learn to use it. But you’re barred from sending messages except library search queries.”
Eric looked away, dark eyes fixed pointlessly on a spot where two struts joined. Kimber watched his rigid back while Dr. Richardson ignored him and continued.
“Kimber, you’re the Chief Surveyor. Listen to Eric, but keep the decision yours. Only you can send results via the VL, and you only send once. You send all the data that might be pertinent, and your own verdict. Go or No Go. If you don’t get a response, the only thing you can do is send the same message again.” Dr. Richardson paused, looked them both in the eye. “Or a standard low-level SOS.”
Eric asked, “They don’t like to be bothered?”
Shrug. “Traffic across a galaxy, individuals in the trillions or higher…Eric, Kimber, how easy is it for a novice or a hacker to mess up just the Internet? You’ve the regular low-level access to query the libraries and can talk to the Thray all you want, but no other traffic, not even with us. We asked. There’s a special onetime code that lets you send survey results. Now, we don’t know where that message goes, or how. The Pillbugs, you’ve seen them, right? They’re the source of the VL and the Wayfarer modules and a lot more. We think they’re working for some other entity, some species at the Dyson Sphere level…but that’s not my field.”
Pillbugs were two and a half feet long and always came in groups. The workers she’d seen had hard-shelled back plates of silver armor that would lock when they rolled up. Any drop in pressure, a Pillbug could seal itself against vacuum and await rescue. Kimber had seen a dozen Pillbug workers do that at a loud noise.
While Richardson was instructing him on how to fly, Eric glanced aside just once. Kimber, are you picking up on this? But he still wouldn’t speak to Kimber. In later days he flew the virtual controls whenever Dr. Richardson was out of the office. If Kimber wanted to fly, he gave her the pilot’s seat and went elsewhere.
The day before take off, it changed. He became so insistent about little things in the supply-loading process that Kimber had to pull rank to make the final choices. The ensuing argument caused Professor Richardson to step in and deliver a lecture on chain of command and respect for commanders.
Star Surveyor II did not quite belong to Freedom Station. The aliens called Pillbugs leased them the Wayfarer Basic. They could reclaim it with ten months’ notice. Without it the partial Shuttle was junk.
But Kimber had flown it virtually, and Eric flew it better. Let the politicians worry about contracts with civilizations they didn’t understand yet—Kimber wanted stars and space.
They didn’t bother with gravity assists, complicated orbits, or finicky burns. Those days were gone. Eric just aimed away from the sun and left. The greatest moment of her life, their lives, passed in choppy formalisms and silence.
The second morning they sat together on the flight deck under half a gravity of thrust, with a glorious view of stars and two tiny crescents. Eric presently made coffee—a complicated procedure because the coffeemaker was designed to work in microgravity—and brought Kimber a cup. He said, “Captain?”
“I thought I’d have your job, not mine,” Kimber said.
“I know. So did I. After all, Kimber, what jobs have you been responsible for?”
“You could look it up.” He had done that, of course. None.
“Doc Richardson thought I might manage this too, but the last night she reminded me Thray aren’t human. They might look at different characteristics than we would when choosing leaders.”
“Or teams.” Kimber reached for the right words. “It’s not like we got along in school. I hated it when you dumped Julie last year. It hurt her feelings a lot—”
“She pretend—”
“—Or me, years ago.”
“Didn’t you—”
“But that aside, whether I expected to lead or not, I’ve got to now. Eric, if you were me, you wouldn’t turn it down, you’d do your best. As yesterday’s grads, we’ve all got names to make. Reputations. I intend to succeed.”
“I’m behind you, Captain. Mission-oriented. But Kimber, something doesn’t feel right.”
“Besides me having the lead?”
“That too.”
“Well, all I feel is excited.” She sat at the small table and sipped carefully at the hot coffee: a major concession on his part, and she’d better drink it! “Now, let’s review today’s task list and see if it changes as we talk.”
For nine days Star Surveyor II was under thrust. The ship didn’t require much of Eric’s attention. Accommodations were roomy, and over the years students had added some modern amenities.
They played with the alien telescope, getting used to it, zooming on a handful of known asteroids, then amazing views of Saturn, Io, the tiny base on Titan.
Eric didn’t talk much. Kimber knew why. She wouldn’t raise that subject again.
The Verification Link filled two locker spaces on the Shuttle’s lower floor. It was an almost-cube with a big hole in the middle. Filigree ran along the rims. Some of that was plugs for cameras and recorders and such. Some was hardwired buttons that would summon a variety of virtual keyboards. Some might be only decoration.
The hole in the middle was half a meter across. It bore the curled DON’T TOUCH symbol that all the interstellar species seemed to use, that looked just enough like a proofreader’s takeout sign. There was a sense of optical illusion to the hole, as if it were deeper than the Shuttle hull. “Resonance cavity,” Dr. Richardson had called it, for no obvious reason. “Sure it’s been investigated. No, I don’t know what was done or what was found. You don’t touch the RC.” Or BH (Big Hole, Eric’s term).
Eric played obsessively with the Verification Link. Kimber had seen him in this state. In his fre
shman year, computer games had dropped him a full grade point before she talked him around. Now he was playing for higher stakes, for all the knowledge in the universe.
When Eric could tear himself away, Kimber took his place.
The VL set connected to a number of “libraries.” One was the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Others circled other stars. She found translation errors, misaddresses, and when she finally got something right there were floods of information more likely to drown her than inform her. How did Eric stand it?
She found she could connect to the Thray ship Thembrlish. Kimber used the Verification Link to exchange pleasantries with Althared. Althared had served as an ambassador’s aide to the United Nations; he had been at the Institute to choose the Trine verification team; but Thembrlish had never been near Sol system. The ship would meet them at Trinestar. It was currently light-years away.
Althared gave her an access code to the Thray home world library. Eric watched over her shoulder as she tried it out. It was murderously difficult. Thray had evolved as cave dwellers, and learned to expand and brace and carve their caves into vast city-sized networks. It affected every aspect of the way they thought. They loved the underground warrens of the Mars colony; they’d offered to help out. They’d terraformed a world in their own system. Trine would be their first interstellar project.
There was no way to test her link to the Overlord…or Overlord species, or Council of Species, or Overlord artificial intelligence program…the source of laws that even interstellar civilizations must obey. Kimber was to use the VL to reach that level only once. So much isolation made her uneasy.
Around Uranus’s orbital distance, but nowhere near Uranus, Eric prepared to do the Shift Trick. Kimber made him wait until she could use the Verification Link to speak to Althared. She was in conversation with the alien when Eric made his move. When the stars around Star Surveyor II swirled and vanished, Althared’s display—and Althared—never even blinked.