Pilot X

by Tom Merritt

  He leaned back in his chair. “You saw all the best and worst qualities in yourself over those four years. And you had to do it three times. Nobody gets that kind of perspective, mostly because the risk to the timeline is usually too great. But in the rare chance that the conditions are right and it’s not wildly dangerous? Well.” He waved his hands toward Ambassador X. “We get you. A bit impertinent, maybe, but effective.”

  Ambassador X knew this might be true, but it just wasn’t in him to admit it. “I see where it could look like that from your end. Hope you never need to find out firsthand.”

  The Secretary laughed. “I hope not either.”

  Ambassador X glared. “Will that. Be. All?” he spat.

  “One more thing. Everything seems to be in order in your report. It will—as it should—remain locked and classified for our eyes only. But I have a question. Did you notice the one thing both the Progons and Sensaurians did in answer to my message? They had wildly different approaches to my message, but did you notice that one similar thing?”

  Ambassador X thought for a moment. The two reactions couldn’t be more different. But there was one similarity he could think of. “They wouldn’t acknowledge the Dimensional War,” he answered.

  The Secretary snapped. “Exactly! The Sensaurians didn’t deny it. They pretended like they didn’t know what you were talking about. The Progons just didn’t react at all. Typical Progon maneuver. You wouldn’t know this, but they can be very talkative and even nosy when they want. They are individuals. But they held you at more than arm’s length. Why?”

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “I don’t know either.” The Secretary giggled. “And that’s what’s so valuable about your report. We now have a piece of information we didn’t have. Both sides—the emotional, personality-driven machine race and the vast, clinical hive mind—feel it’s in their best interests to give nothing away about what they know or think of the Dimensional War. That will tell me something later. It’s a piece of the puzzle and an extremely valuable one.”

  The Secretary moved out from behind the desk. Ambassador X stood. The Secretary reached out and touched him on the shoulder. “Thank you, Ambassador X. Verity has your next assignment.”

  Ambassador X nodded, then left.

  Outside the door was a Messenger. Ambassador X recognized him.

  “Instructor X?” the Messenger asked.

  “Still too early. Ambassador, I’m afraid.”

  The Messenger looked upset and stared down at his instructions. “They swore these were the right coordinates. Apologies, Ambassador X.” And then he was gone again.

  Back at the Verity, he asked about his assignment.

  “The details were sent to me shortly after you departed. You are to proceed to Velkin 6 for postwar renormalization discussions.”

  “The Pineapple Planet?”

  “There are very few pineapples on Velkin 6,” stated Verity.

  “I know. That’s the joke. You’re supposed to say, ‘There are no pineapples there.’ I thought you were getting a sense of humor.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “Did what?”

  “You did think I was getting a sense of humor.”

  “See?! I knew it. OK, who am I meeting with?”

  “The President Pro Tem is Garrolan Four. He was the Secretary of Interior but is the highest-ranking member of the government left alive after the war.”

  “Looking over it now. Progons, Sensaurians, and us, all battling to keep each other away from that planet. It does have a rich biosphere, after all. Did. We almost wiped it out. But it looks like we drove everyone else off. Yay. We win.” He did not sound in the least bit triumphant. “Where are we meeting? It says here the government buildings are all destroyed.”

  “We are to meet President Four in the Zooarium. It’s how he survived the war. He was in charge of the department that preserves biodiversity. The Zooarium was never targeted for that reason.”

  “Wow. I’m getting this. Sensaurians moved in to try to add the biodiversity to their hive mind. Progons objected and started a war. Alendans came in to broker peace, and both sides turned on us. We set down on the planet and everybody came after us, burning as they went, destroying the thing they were fighting over. Eventually, we outlasted them. No armistice. They all just left. Poor Pineapple Planet. I’ll dive into the checklist later, but what’s the top line on the mission?”

  “Your mission is to offer aid in postwar renormalization and the assistance of an Economist to begin beneficiary trade talks. Perhaps you could offer to solve their pineapple trade deficit as a start?”

  Ambassador X wagged his finger. “Good try. You’re getting better.”

  THE PINEAPPLE PLANET

  Velkin 6 had once been among the most beautiful planets in existence. Anything could grow there. At one point in its history, the planet’s populace boasted they could grow even the most exotic offworld fruit. Someone had brought them an odd thing called a pineapple. It was a fruit that for some reason could not be made to grow anywhere but on its home planet, which was a sparsely populated water world of some sort.

  The Velkin botanists took to the task and made it work. They were able to keep two pineapple plants alive consistently. Not always the same two but always two. Velkin 6 became known as the planet that could even grow a pineapple. That got shortened to Pineapple Planet eventually. Then, as these things go, the origin of the name got lost and people began to joke about the fact that a place called the Pineapple Planet had only two pineapple plants. Or almost no pineapples. And eventually that saying became “the Pineapple Planet has no pineapples.”

  Velkin 6 resisted the derogatory nickname at first, but eventually gave in and embraced it, selling pineapple trinkets and souvenirs and the best imported pineapple in the universe, which was still a great rarity.

  That was all in its earliest past.

  Now the planet was desolate. Clouds of ash covered most of the once-green world. Ambassador X asked Verity to descend slowly so he could get a good view of the damage, yet there was little to see but clouds until they neared the ground.

  The Zooarium was in a large farming city, surrounded by an even larger refugee camp. Alendan aidcraft, parked in large numbers around the perimeter, came from all eras. Paradox Prevention had a mess to deal with, but the size of the devastation was enough to warrant the trouble. Alenda was doing good work here. Ambassador X allowed himself to feel a little pride mixed in with his sadness and horror.

  He set down a short walk from the Zooarium. The air looked clear but smelled burnt, like a building site that had exploded, caught on fire, and been doused by a chemical spray.

  People sat in clumps of two or three along the streets, some holding signs asking for the whereabouts of certain people, or making requests to trade for certain items. They identified him as an Alendan official and ignored him. They weren’t beggars or protestors. They were survivors, and they knew Alendans were giving what they could outside the city. And in any case, he carried nothing of use to them, not now.

  Velkin guards outside the Zooarium stopped him. They were the first non-Alendan military he had seen. They stood beside a temporary sign declaring the building the temporary capitol of Velkin 6.

  “State your business,” a dejected officer said. Lines crossed the man’s face, but the stress that caused them had gone and left him slack. His war was over; he wanted only to rest.

  “Ambassador X here to see President Pro Tem Four.”

  The officer nodded. He didn’t check any lists. There weren’t that many visitors. He didn’t look at ID. Ambassador X’s face was his ID. He only nodded and sat back down to rest. The other officer opened the door for him.

  Nobody told him where to go or escorted him to the President. This was barely a government anymore. The Alendans ran things now. He was expected to find his own way. And he would.

  The halls were only lighted every few hundred feet by small eternalights. These were a Velki
n invention that used ambient kinetic energy to charge a battery that lasted centuries. They might go out sometimes, but over time they would recharge and come back on. He saw several dark ones, but most were lighted. The gyrations of war had charged most of them quite well.

  He followed signs to the administration offices of the Zooarium, assuming the President would make that his center of command. He was wrong. Nobody was there but a maintenance person who didn’t speak any of the languages Ambassador X knew, including Velkin’s top three. Ambassador X thanked him anyway and set off toward the main exhibits. He figured if he wandered around long enough, he’d find someone who spoke a language he knew.

  Eventually, he found himself in a large room filled with huge black circular spheres held in suspension. The spheres moved randomly. They were surrounded by equally large industrial printing boxes that hummed loudly and fed printed matter into the spheres through great tubes.

  Near the front of the room the spheres were two or three times Ambassador X’s height. In the back were three gargantuan spheres more than ten times his height. And in between all kinds of other sizes hung in a bowl-like depression. Ambassador X leaned against a railing in the entrance walkway and examined the room. At the bottom of the well, an old man wearing a brown robe bent over one of the printing boxes.

  “Excuse me, sir, I’m afraid I’m lost,” Ambassador X yelled down to the man.

  “I doubt it,” the old man yelled back.

  “Say again?”

  “I said I doubt you’re lost.”

  “Yes, I thought that’s what you said.”

  The old man nodded and kept to his work.

  Ambassador X waited.

  After a while the old man seemed to finish his task. He let out a sigh that seemed to be a mix of exasperation and relief and stood up straight. For the first time he looked up at Ambassador X. “Well, come down from there so I don’t have to shout.”

  Ambassador X found his way down to the bottom of the well. It took him some time to navigate through the giant, slowly moving spheres. They moved without any discernible pattern. Some rolled slowly in place while others jerked in different directions. Finally, he reached the old man.

  “That’s better,” the man said as Ambassador X approached.

  “Yes, well, I was hoping you could direct me—”

  “You’re here,” the man sighed.

  “Right, well, I suppose that’s always true wherever I am. I can always say I’m here. Can’t rightly say I’m there. Well, as a matter fact, that’s not true. In fact, recently I could say I was both there and there at the same time I said I was here and still be telling the truth. But that’s neither here nor there.” The old man winced at this, but Ambassador X carried on. “Because I’ll always be here, no matter whether I’m also there. Time travel. Holy hell on your logic.”

  “Have it your way. I’m Garrolan Four, Secretary of the Interior and President Pro Tem of Velkin 6.” The man held both hands out wide to the side in a traditional Velkin greeting.

  Ambassador X returned the greeting. “You were right.”

  “About what?” the man said, surprised.

  “I’m not lost.”

  President Garrolan chuckled. “I knew you’d come around to my way of thinking eventually. I suppose we’re meant to go to some official state meeting area or something, except I haven’t got anything like that. Just a few offices and desks in the administrative area. We used to all work down here for the most part. Didn’t see the need for extra rooms that would go to waste.” The man’s voice began to drift and fade. “That’s all changed now.”

  “When you did need to spend time talking with someone, where did you go?” Ambassador X asked.

  “Often with the goat,” Garrolan answered.

  “The goat.”

  “Over there.” The man pointed at one of the gently rolling spheres nearby. “That one. She doesn’t smell, unlike the males. I do wish we had a good smelly male for her, though. Poor thing. That may never happen. Shall we?”

  “Oh!” Ambassador X said, finally remembering that they were in a Zooarium. “The goat’s in that thing, is it?”

  President Garrolan just looked at Ambassador X like one looks at a hopeless child. “Come,” he finally said.

  The sphere rotated on top of a short base with a rounded-out depression of sorts. Some kind of energy beam controlled the sphere’s direction. President Garrolan opened a door in the base. It was dark inside with only two small eternalights to see by. A short set of stairs led to a complicated mechanism that turned out to be some kind of door in the side of the depression at the top of the base. You could hear the metallic squeaks of the sphere turning and grinding.

  Garrolan worked the mechanism and opened a sliding panel. A bright light shone out from a green meadow under a beautiful blue sky. A goat wandered along in the distance.

  “You go first. It’s a little tricky the first time. Just wait until you think you can make a step without falling. Once you have both feet inside, it won’t feel like it’s moving. I’ll catch up.”

  Ambassador X stepped past Garrolan and saw what the man meant. The ground moved and shifted inside the sphere. As the goat walked, the sphere turned and grass near the edges slid around to keep the plain even. The blue sky was some kind of light panel that lined the interior of the sphere. When grass panels moved, sky panels disappeared underneath. They seemed to adjust their brightness as they rotated up, though.

  The goat stopped to chew some grass, and Ambassador X decided that was the best time to step out into the sphere. It was a magical shift in perception. Once he had both feet on the ground, he could have sworn he was standing in a flat meadow. The goat just seemed to be ahead of him a bit on a small rise. President Garrolan followed in after him.

  “It’s a clever piece of work, but we have to stay close to the goat,” the President said. He strode past Ambassador X and took the goat’s collar. Whatever Garrolan did made the goat act as if she were tethered.

  “That’ll keep Shelly in line. So. How do you want to do this, Ambassador X? Long speech? Hard-earned negotiations? Or should I just tell you what we need and then you tell me how much you can give us?”

  “I like the last,” said Ambassador X.

  “I thought you might. I hate negotiations. I’d rather let you ‘win’ than suffer through them just to gain a pittance.”

  “I intend to give you everything you ask for, if I can,” Ambassador X said with a tone of gentle correction.

  “Fine. Make the war not happen. This Dimensional War. Make it stop. Make it disappear. Can you do that? Can you give me my planet back?” The President’s eyes were steel gray and steady.

  “No,” Ambassador X admitted.

  “Of course not. Well. Here I said I wouldn’t negotiate, but I suppose I must. Since I can’t get what I really want.”

  The conversation turned to needs for security and food and resources. It was a reasonable list of requests, and Ambassador X found that he could easily grant most of it. The few things he didn’t have the authority to approve, he promised to fast-track.

  “We’re time travelers. We can take years to debate something and still have it fast-tracked. Will tomorrow be sufficient for all your requests?”

  “Thank you,” the man said, grateful but sad. “It will. I do wish you could grant my first request, but I know you can’t. No one can. One of your generals told me about fixed points and time threads and the limited nature of reality alteration and all that. I’m an expert in animals, not physics. But I suppose I understood enough. Still . . . Well. You’ve been more than fair. Let’s let Shelly go now, so she can enjoy herself.”

  He manipulated her collar again. The goat didn’t seem to notice. She methodically cropped the grass.

  President Garrolan looked around the sphere and sighed. “I’ve thought about making one of these for myself. Those printers out there keep the spheres filled with an endless supply of vegetation and air and all the things an anima
l needs. We try to keep them in natural situations. Packs for the pack animals, solitude for the loners. Families for those who need them. They hardly know they’re in a cage. Survival rate and health is a mere fraction of a percentage point less than wild specimens. Or was. The wild specimens all died in the war. So I wonder if I’d be happier in here sometimes. But I guess I wouldn’t be. Too curious. That’s our problem.”

  Garrolan slid the door out. The sphere wasn’t moving at the moment, so the two of them easily slipped out onto the staircase. The goat started to walk just as Ambassador X stepped off; he got vertigo for a second but recovered.

  Outside among the spheres again, Ambassador X made the traditional Velkin wide-open gesture of respectful parting. “It has been an honor to meet you, President Garrolan Four.”

  “You too, Ambassador X.”

  “My only regret is not seeing a pineapple plant,” Ambassador X deadpanned.

  “There are no pineapples here,” Garrolan said, frowning.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Take care, Ambassador X. Don’t let one sad old man get you down. But . . .” He paused, uncertain of himself for the first time since Ambassador X had met him. “If you ever discover—if you ever find a way by some chance—to put it all right, I hope you will.”

  Ambassador X nodded. Garrolan Four turned away and walked back into the spheres, disappearing.

  Ambassador X had no more meetings with the Secretary. He met with small civilizations just making their first steps onto the universal stage. He met with old civilizations just wanting to be left alone. Most often he met with devastation. A longtime enemy suddenly grew powerful and drove a civilization into exile. An unknown enemy appeared and waged war for no discernible reason. In all cases, Ambassador X was able to help the victims recover. But he could not help them understand. He didn’t understand himself.