by Neil Clarke
I decided to tell the truth. A gamble. “No.”
“Too bad.” The regret sloughed off, to be replaced with resignation. “But we can’t poke around asking for Friends with that specific experience, or one of our competitors might put two and two together. I recommend you brush up on your training during the trip out.”
He stopped in front of a large, metal door. “Where are we going?” I asked.
“Here is your room for the next three days.” Oslo opened the large door to a five-by-seven foot room with a foldout bunk bed.
My heart skipped a beat, and I put aside the fact that Oslo had avoided the question. “That’s mine?”
“Yes. And the air’s billed with our shipping contract, so you can rip your sensors off. There’ll be no accounting until we’re done.”
I got the sense Oslo knew what it was like to be in debt. I stepped into the room and turned all the way around. I raised my hands, placing them on each wall, and smiled.
Oslo turned to go.
“Wait,” I said. “The harbormaster said you were freelance scientists. What do you do?”
“I’m the botanist,” Oslo said. “Meals are in the common passenger’s galley. The crew of this ship is Gheda, of course, don’t talk to or interact with them if you can help it. You know why?”
“Yes.” The last thing you wanted to do was make a Gheda think you were wandering around, trying to figure out secrets about their ships, or technology. I would stay in the approved corridors and not interact with them.
The door closed in my suite, and I sat down with my small travel case, no closer to understanding what was going on than I had been on the station.
I faced the small mirror by an even smaller basin and reached for the strip of black material stuck to my throat. Inside it, circuitry monitored my metabolic rate, number of breaths taken, volume of air taken in, and carbon dioxide expelled. All of it reported back to the station’s monitors, constantly calculating my mean daily cost.
It made a satisfying sound as I ripped it off.
*
“Gheda are Gheda,” I said later in the ship’s artificial, alien day over reheated turkey strips in the passenger’s galley. We’d undocked. The old ship had shivered itself up to speed. “But Gheda flying around in a beat-up old starship, willing to take freelance scientists out to some secret destination: these are dangerous Gheda.”
Oslo had a rueful smile as he leaned back and folded his arms. “Cruzie says that our kind used to think our corporations were rapacious and evil before first contact. No one expected aliens to demand royalty payments for technology usage that had been independently discovered by us because the Gheda had previously patented that technology.”
“I know. They hit non-compliant areas with asteroids from orbit.” Unable to pay royalties, entire nations had collapsed into debtorship. “Who’s Cruzie?”
Oslo grimaced. “You’ll meet her in two days. Our linguist. Bit of a historian, too. Loves old Earth shit.”
I frowned at his reaction. Conflicted, but with somewhat warm pleasure when he thought about her. A happy grimace. “She’s an old friend of yours?”
“Our parents were friends. They loved history. The magnificence of Earth. The legend that was. Before it got sold around. Before the Diaspora.” That grimace again. But no warmth there.
“You don’t agree with their ideals?” I guessed.
I guessed well. Oslo sipped at a mug of tea, and eyed me. “I’m not your project, Friend. Don’t dig too deep, because you just work for me. Save your empathy and psychiatry for the real subject. Understand?”
Too far, I thought. “I’m sorry. And just what is my project? We’re away from the station now; do you think you can risk being open with me?”
Oslo set his tea down. “Clever. Very clever, Friend. Yes, I was worried about bugs. We’ve found a planet, with a unique ecosystem. There may be patentable innovations.”
I sat, stunned. Patents? I had points on the package. If I got points on a patent on some aspect of an alien biological system, a Gheda-approved patent, I’d be rich.
Not just rich, but like, nation-rich.
Oslo sipped at his tea. “There’s only one problem,” he said. “There may be intelligent life on the planet. If it’s intelligent, it’s a contact situation, and we have to turn it over to the Gheda. We get a fee, but no taste of the real game. We fail to report a contact situation and the Gheda find out, it’s going to be a nasty scene. They’ll kill our families, or even people you know, just to make the point that their interstellar law is inviolate. We have to file a claim the moment of discovery.”
I’d heard hesitation in his voice. “You haven’t filed yet, have you?”
“I bet all the Gheda business creatures love having you watch humans they’re settling a contract with, making sure they’re telling the truth, you there to brief them on what their facial expressions are really showing.”
That stung. “I’d do the same for any human. And it isn’t just contracts. Many hire me to pay attention to them, to figure them out, anticipate their needs.”
Oslo leered. “I’ll bet.”
I wasn’t a fuckbot. I deflected the leering. “So tell me, Oslo, why I’m risking my life, then?”
“We haven’t filed yet because we honestly can’t fucking figure out if the aliens are just dumb creatures, or intelligences like us,” Oslo said.
THE DRONE
Welcome to the Screaming Kettle,” said the woman who grabbed my bag without asking. She had dark brown skin and eyes, and black hair. Tattoos covered every inch of skin free of her clothing. Words in scripts and languages that I didn’t recognize. “The Compact Drone is about to dock as well, we need you ready for it. Let’s get your stuff stowed.”
We walked below skylights embedded in the top of the research station. A planet hung there: green and yellow and patchy. It looked like it was diseased with mold. “Is that Ve?” I asked.
“Oslo get you up to speed?” the woman asked.
“Somewhat. You’re Cruzie, right?”
“Maricruz. I’m the linguist. I guess . . . you’re stuck here with us. You can call me Cruzie too.” We stopped in front of a room larger than the one on the ship. With two beds.
I looked at the beds. “I’m comfortable with a cubby, if it means getting my own space,” I said.
There was far more space here, vastly so. And yet, I was going to have to share it? It rankled. Even at the station, I hadn’t had to share my space. This shoved me up against my own cultural normative values. Even in the most packed places in space, you needed a cubby of one’s own.
“You’re here to Friend the Compact Drone,” Cruzie said. “It’ll need companionship at all times. Their contract requires it for the Drone’s mental stability.”
“Oslo didn’t tell me this.” I pursed my lips. A fairly universal display of annoyance.
And Cruzie read that well enough. “I’m sorry,” she said. But it was a lie as well. She was getting annoyed and impatient. But screw it, as Oslo pointed out: I wasn’t there for their needs. “Oslo wants us to succeed more than anything. Unlike his parents, he’s not much into the glory that was humankind. He knows the only way we’ll ever not be freelancers, scrabbling around for intellectual scraps found in the side alleys of technology for something we can use without paying the Gheda for the privilege, is to hit something big.”
“So he lied to me.” My voice remained flat.
“He left out truths that would have made you less willing to come.”
“He lied.”
Cruzie shut the door to my room. “He gave you points on the package, Friend. We win big, you do your job, you’ll never have to check the balance on your air for the rest of your damned life. I heard you were in air debt, right?”
She’d put me well in place. We both knew it. Cruzie smiled, a gracious winner’s smile.
“Incoming!” Someone yelled from around the bend in the corridor.
“I’m not going to fuc
k the Drone,” I told her levelly.
Cruzie shrugged. “I don’t care what you do or don’t do, as long as the Drone stays mentally stable and does its job for us. Points on the package, Alex. Points.”
Airlock alarms flashed and warbled, and the hiss of compressed air filled the antechamber.
“The incoming pod’s not much larger than a cubby sleeper,” Oslo said, his purple hair waving about as another burst of compressed air filled the antechamber. He smiled, fangs out beyond his lips. “It’s smaller than the lander we have for exploring Ve ourselves, if we ever need to get down there. Can you imagine the ride? The only non-Gheda way of traveling!”
The last member of the team joined us. She looked over at me and nodded. Silvered electronic eyes glinted in the flash of the airlock warning lights. She flexed the jet black fingers of her artificial right hand absentmindedly as she waited for the doors to open. She ran the fingers of a real hand over her shaved head, then put them back in her utility jacket, covered with what seemed like hundreds of pockets and zippers.
“That’s Kepler,” Cruzie said.
The airlock doors opened. A thin, naked man stumbled out, dripping goopy blue acceleration gel with each step.
For a moment his eyes flicked around, blinking.
Then he started screaming.
Oslo, Kepler, and Cruzie jumped back half a step from the naked man’s arms. I stepped forward. “It’s not fear, it’s relief.”
The man grabbed me in a desperate hug, clinging to me, his hands patting my face, shoulders, as if reassuring himself someone was really standing in front of him. “It’s okay,” I whispered. “You’ve been in there by yourself for days, with no contact of any sort. I understand.”
He was shivering in my grip, but I kept patting his back. I urged him to feel the press of contact between us. And reassurance. Calm.
Eventually he calmed down, and then slowly let go of me.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Beck.”
“Welcome aboard, Beck,” I said, looking over his shoulder at the scientists who looked visibly relieved.
First things first.
Beck got to the communications room. Back and forth verification on an uplink, and he leaned back against the chair in relief.
“There’s an uplink to the Hive,” he said. “An hour of lag time to get as far back as the home system, but I’m patched in.”
He tapped metal inserts on the back of his neck. His mind plugged in to the communications network, talking all the way back to the asteroid belt in the mother system, where the Compact’s Hive thrived. Back there, Beck would always be in contact with it without a delay. In instant symbiosis with a universe of information that the Compact offered.
A hive-mind of people, your core self subjugated to the greater whole.
I shivered.
Beck never moved more than half a foot away from me. Always close enough to touch. He kept reaching out to make sure I was there, even though he could see me.
After walking around the research station for half an hour, we returned to our shared room.
He sat on his bed, suddenly apprehensive. “You’re the Friend, correct?”
“Yes.”
“I’m lonely over here. Can you sleep by me?”
I walked over and sat next to him. “I won’t have sex with you. That’s not why I’m here.”
“I’m chemically neutered,” Beck said as we curled up on the bed. “I’m a drone.”
As we lay there, I imagined thousands of Becks sleeping in rows in Hive dorms, body heat keeping the rooms warm.
Half an hour later he suddenly sighed, like a drug addict getting a hit. “They hear me,” he whispered. “I’m not alone.”
The Compact had replied to him.
He relaxed.
The room filled with a pleasant lavender scent. Was it something he’d splashed on earlier? Or something a Compact drone released to indicate comfort?
WHAT’S HUMAN?
That,” Kepler said, leaning back in a couch before a series of displays, “is one of our remote-operated vehicles. We call them urchins.”
In the upper right hand screen before her, a small sphere with hundreds of wriggling legs rotated around. Then it scrabbled off down what looked like a dirt path.
Cruzie swung into a similar couch. “We sterilize them in orbit, then drop them down encased in a heatshield. It burns away, then they drop down out of the sky with a little burst of a rocket to slow down enough.”
I frowned at one of the screens. Everything was shades of green and gray and black. “Is that night vision?”
Oslo laughed. “It’s Ve. The atmosphere is chlorinated. Green mists. Grey shadows. And black plants.”
The trees had giant, black leaves hanging low to the ground. Tubular trunks sprouted globes that spouted mist randomly as the urchin brushed past.
“Ve’s a small planet,” Kepler said. “Low gravity, but with air similar to what you would have seen on the mother world.”
“Earth,” Oslo corrected.
“But unlike the mother world,” Kepler continued, “Ve has high levels of chlorine. Somewhere in its history, a battle launched among the plants. Instead of specializing in oxygen to kill off the competition, and adapting to it over time, plant life here turned to chlorine as a weapon. It created plastics out of the organic compounds available to it, which is doable in a chlorine-heavy base atmosphere, though remarkable. And the organic plastics also handle photosynthesis. A handy trick. If we can patent it.”
On the screen the urchin rolled to a slow stop. Cruzie leaned forward. “Now if we can just figure out if those bastards are really building a civilization, or just random dirt mounds . . .”
Paused at the top of a ridge, the urchin looked at a clearing in the black-leafed forest. Five pyramids thrust above the foliage around the clearing.
“Can you get closer?” Beck asked, and I jumped slightly. He’d been so silent, watching all this by my side.
“Not from here,” Kepler said. “There’s a big dip in altitude between here and the clearing.”
“And?” Beck stared at the pyramids on the screen.
“Our first couple weeks here we kept driving the urchins into low lying areas, valleys, that sort of thing. They kept dying on us. We figure the chlorine and acids sink low into the valleys. Our equipment can’t handle it.”
Beck sat down on the nearest couch to Kepler, and looked over the interface. “Take the long way around then, I’ll look at your archives while you do so. Wait!”
I saw it too. A movement through the black, spiky bushes. I saw my first alien creature scuttle around, antennae twisting as it moved along what looked like a path.
“They look like ants,” I blurted out.
“We call them Vesians. But yes, ants the size of a small dog,” Oslo said. “And not really ants at all. Just exoskeletons, black plastic, in a similar structure. The handiwork of parallel evolution.”
More Vesians appeared carrying leaves and sticks on their backs.
And gourds.
“Now that’s interesting,” Beck said.
“It doesn’t mean they’re intelligent,” Beck said later, lying in the bunk with me next to him. We both stared up at the ceiling. He rolled over and looked at me. “The gourds grow on trees. They use them to store liquids. Inside those pyramids.”
We were face to face, breathing each other’s air. Beck had no personal space, and I had to fight my impulse to pull back away from him.
My job was now to facilitate. Make Beck feel at home.
Insect hives had drones that could exist away from the hive. A hive needed foragers, and defenders. But the human Compact only existed in the asteroid belt of the mother system.
Beck was a long way from home.
With the lag, he would be feeling cut off and distant. And for a mind that had always been in the embrace of the hive, this had to be hard for him.
But Beck offered the freelance scientists
a link into the massive computational capacity of the entire Compact. They’d contracted it to handle the issue they couldn’t figure out quickly: were the aliens intelligent or not?
Beck was pumping information back all the way to the mother system, so that the Compact could devote some fraction of a fraction of its massed computing ability to the issue. The minds of all its connected citizenry. Its supercomputers. Maybe even, it was rumored, artificial intelligences.
“But if they are intelligent?” I asked. “How do you prove it?”
Beck cocked his head. “The Compact is working on it. Has been ever since the individuals here signed the contract.”
“Then why are you out here?”
“Yes . . .” He was suddenly curious about me now, remembering I was a distinct individual, lying next to him. I wasn’t of the Compact. I wasn’t another drone.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have asked.”
“It was good you asked.” He flopped over to stare at the ceiling again. “You’re right, I’m not entirely needed. But the Compact felt it was necessary.”
I wanted to know why. But I could feel Beck hesitate. I held my breath.
“You are a Friend. You’ve never broken contract. The Compact ranks you very highly.” Beck turned back to face me. “We understand that what I tell you will never leave this room, and since I debugged it, it’s a safe room. What do you think it takes to become a freelance scientist in this hostile universe?”
I’d been around enough negotiating tables. A good Friend, with the neural modifications and adaptive circuitry laced into me from birth, I could read body posture, micro-expressions, skin flush, heart rate, in a blink of the eye. I made a hell of a negotiating tool. Which was usually exactly what Gheda wanted: a read on their human counterparts.
And I had learned the ins and outs of my clients businesses quick as well. I knew what the wider universe was like while doing my job.
“Oslo has pent-up rage,” I whispered. “His family is obsessed with the Earth as it used to be. Before the Gheda land purchases. He wants wealth, but that’s not all, I think. Cruzie holds herself like she has military bearing, though she hides it. Kepler, I don’t know. I’m guessing you will tell me they have all worked as weapons manufacturers or researchers of some sort?”