The New Space Opera 2

by Gardner Dozois

  I mentioned I like old Earth movies, didn’t I?

  After I’d explained, Balcescu asked me a bunch more questions about how long we’d have to wait at Rainwater Hub and who else was waiting with us. For a guy who’d traveled to about fifteen or twenty different worlds, I have to say that he didn’t know much about politics or Confederation ships, but I did my best to bring him up to speed. When he ran out of things to ask, he thanked me, patted me on the head, then walked back to the view-deck. Yeah, patted me on the head. I guess nobody told him that any member of a Confederation crew can break a man’s arm using only one finger and thumb. He was lucky I had things to do.

  The weird stuff started happening as we entered the zone. Captain Watanabe and Ship’s Navigator Chinh-Herrera were on the comm with Rainwater Hub Command when things started to get scratchy. At first they thought it was just magnetar activity, because there’s a big one pretty close by—it’s one of the things that makes Rainwater kind of unstable. The bridge lost Hub Command, but they managed to latch onto another signal—comm from one of Rainwater’s own lighters—and so they saw the whole thing on visual, through a storm of interference. Chinh-Herrera showed it to me afterward, so I’ve seen it myself. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t.

  First there was the huge alien ship, although even after several views it takes a while to realize it is a ship. Shaped more like a jellyfish or an amoeba, all curves and transparencies, and not particularly symmetrical. In another circumstance, you might even call it beautiful—but not when it’s appearing out of a wormhole where it’s not supposed to be. The Visser ring wasn’t supposed to open for another several hours, and it certainly wasn’t supposed to open to let something out.

  Then that…thing appeared. The angry thing.

  It was some kind of volumetric display—but what kind, even Doc Swainsea couldn’t guess—a three-dimensional projected image, but what it looked like was some kind of furious god, a creature the size of small planet, rippling and burning in the silence of space. It just barely looked like a living creature—it had arms, that’s all you could tell for certain, and some kind of glow around the face that might have been eyes. Its voice, or the voice of the alien ship projecting it, thundered into every comm of every ship within half a unit of Rainwater Hub. Nobody could understand it, of course—not then—it was just a deafening, scraping roar with bits along the edges that barked and twittered. “Like a circus dumped into a meat grinder, audience and all,” Chinh-Herrera said. I had to cover my ears when he played it for me.

  If it had stopped there, it would have been weird and frightening enough, but right after the monstrous thing went quiet, some kind of weapon fired from inside it—from the ship itself, cloaked behind the volumetric display. It wasn’t a beam so much as a ripple—at the time, you couldn’t even see it, but when we played it back, you could see the moment of distortion across the star field where it passed. And the nearest ship to the Visser ring, a Malkinate heavy freighter, flew apart. It happened just as fast as that—a flare of white light and then the freighter was gone, leaving nothing but debris too small to see on the lighter’s comm feed. Thirteen hundred men dead. Maybe they were X-Malkins and they didn’t believe what we believe, but they were still shipmen like us. How did it feel to have their ship, their home, just disappear into fragments around them? To be suddenly thrown into the freezing black empty?

  A few seconds later, as if to show that it wasn’t an accident, the god-thing roared again and convulsed and another ship was destroyed, one of Rainwater’s lighters. This one must have had some kind of inflammable cargo, because it went up like a giant magnesium flare, a ball of white fire burning away until nothing was left but floating embers.

  This was too much, of course—proof of hostile intent—and a flight of wasps was scrambled from Rainwater Station and sent after the jellyfish ship. Maybe the aliens were surprised by how quickly we fought back, or maybe they were just done with their giant hologram: in either case, it disappeared as the wasp flight swept in. A moment later, the wasps were in range and began to fire on the intruder, but their pulses only sputtered and flashed against the outside skin of the jellyfish ship. A moment later, every one of the wasps abruptly turned into a handful of sparks flung out in all directions like spinning Catherine wheels—an entire flight gone.

  After that, everybody fell back, as you can imagine. “Ran like hell” might be a better way to put it. The Confederation ships met up in orbit around the nearest planet, several units away from Rainwater, and the officers began burning up the comm lines, as you can imagine. Nobody’d seen anything like the jellyfish before, or recognized whatever it was on that volumetric or how it was done.

  We accessed some of the Hub drones so we could keep a watch on Rainwater. The alien ship was still sitting there, although the Visser ring behind it had closed again. There were moments when the angry-god display flickered back into life, as if it was waking up to have a look around, and other moments when crackling lines of force like blue and orange lightning arced back and forth between the jellyfish and the ring, but none of this told anyone a thing about what was really going on.

  Our first major clue came when one of the Hub’s own lighters got close enough to pick up some of the wreckage of the Malkin jumbo. The ship had not been blown apart in any normal sense—no shear and no heat, or at least no more than would be expected with sudden decompression. The carbon ceramic bones and skin of the ship had just suddenly fallen apart—“delatticed” was Doc Swainsea’s term. She didn’t sound happy when she said it, either.

  “It’s not a technology I know,” she told Captain Watanabe the day after the attacks. “It’s not a technology I can even envision.”

  The captain looked at her and they stood there for a moment, face to face—two very serious women, Doc tall and blond, Captain W. a bit shorter and so dark-haired and pale-skinned that she looked like an ink drawing. “But is it a technology we can beat?” the captain finally asked.

  I never heard the answer because they sent me out to get more coffee.

  About two hours later, while I was bringing more whiskey glasses to the captain’s cabin—which meant, I assumed, that the doctor’s answer had been negative—I found Balcescu standing waiting for the lift to the bridge.

  “I think I have it, Mr. Jatt,” he told me as I went by.

  I was in a hurry—everyone on the ship was in a hurry, which was strange considering we obviously weren’t going anywhere soon—but something in his voice made me stop. He sounded exhausted, for one thing, and when I looked at him more closely, I could see that he didn’t look good, either: he was pale and trembling, like he hadn’t had anything but coffee or focusmeds for a while. Maybe he was sick.

  “Have what, Mr. Balcescu? What are you talking about?”

  “The language—the language of the things that attacked us. I think I’ve cracked it.”

  Two minutes later, we were standing in front of the captain, Chief Navigator Chinh-Herrera, Doc Swainsea, and an open comm line going out to the other Confederation ships.

  “I couldn’t have done this if it had been pure cryptography,” Balcescu explained, standing up after all the introductions had been handled. His hands were still shaking; he spilled a little of his coffee. He obviously needed some food, but I was damned if I was going to leave the room right then.

  Sorry. We spacemen swear a lot. But I wasn’t going to rush out to the galley just when he was about to explain.

  “What I mean to say is,” Balcescu went on, “if it is anything like the languages we already know—and I think it is—then they haven’t given us enough of a sample to do the standard reductions. For one thing, we couldn’t know that we were even hearing all of it…”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Chinh-Herrera. “Not heard it all? It nearly blew our comms to bits!”

  “We heard the part that was in our audio register. And there were other parts above and below human hearing range as well that we recorded. But
who could say for certain that there weren’t parts of the language outside the range of our instruments? This is a first encounter. Never make assumptions, Chief Navigator.”

  Chinh-Herrera turned away, hiding a scowl. He didn’t like our Mr. Balcescu much, it was easy to see. The Chief Navigator was a good man, and always nice to me, but he could be a bit old-fashioned sometimes. I actually understood what Balcescu was saying, because I’ve spent my life living with other people’s assumptions, too. That’s what happens when you’re my size.

  “So you’re saying that the sample wasn’t enough to form a basis for translation, Dr. Balcescu?” This was Doc Swainsea. “Then why are we here?”

  “Because it is a language, and I know what they’re saying,” said Balcescu wearily. By his expression, you’d have thought he was being forced to explain the alphabet to a room full of four-year-olds. “You see, we’ve enlarged the boundaries of human-contact space quite a bit in the last couple of hundred years—the Hub system has seen to that. Just a few weeks ago, I was out in the Brightman system doing something that would have been unthinkable only generations ago—xenolinguistic fieldwork with untainted living cultures.” He gave Chinh-Herrera a bit of a sideways look. “In other words, speaking alien with aliens. Our linguistic database has also expanded hugely. So I figured that it was worth a try to see if there were any similarities between what we heard at Rainwater Hub and any of the other cultures we’ve recorded on the outskirts of contact space. I spent hours and hours going through different samples, comparing points of apparent overlap…”

  “And, Dr. Balcescu?” That was Captain Watanabe. She wasn’t big on being lectured, either.

  “And there are similarities—distant and tenuous, but similarities nevertheless—between what we heard yesterday and some of the older speech systems we’ve found out toward the galactic rim. I can’t say exactly what the relationships are—that will take years of study, and, to be honest, a great deal more information about this latest language—but there are enough common elements that I think I can safely translate what we heard, at least roughly.” He looked around expectantly, almost as if he was waiting for polite applause from the captain and the others. He didn’t get it. “I used what we already know about these particular rim dialects as a ratchet, combined with some guesswork…”

  “Get to the point, Doctor,” said the captain. “Tell us what it said. A lot of good men and women are dead already, and the rest of us are stranded forty-six parsecs from the nearest Confederation hub.”

  “Sorry, of course.” He pointed to the comm screen and the picture of the monstrous apparition jumped back onto it. I’d seen it before, of course—everyone had been watching it over and over, trying to understand what had happened—but it still scared the brass marbles off me. It was like something out of an old ghost story, the kind they tell down in the engine bay on a slow shift, with the lights down. The thing was like some wailing spirit, a banshee heralding death—and not just the death of a few, but of the whole human race. How could we beat something like that?

  As the image billowed and stretched in achingly slow motion, like living flame, Balcescu spoke.

  “What it seems to be saying, as far as I can tell, is, unfortunately, just as bellicose as its actions suggest. It boils down to this.” He said it like a man reciting a memorized speech, all emotion squeezed out of his voice. “Your death is upon you. Only black ash will show that you ever lived. The Outward-reaching Murder Army—that’s the best I can do, that’s pretty much what they’re saying—will spit upon the stars that give you life, extinguishing them all. The cold will suck the life from you. All memory of you will be obliterated.” Balcescu shook his head. “Not exactly Shakespeare. In fact, a rather crude translation, but it makes the main points.”

  The monstrous shape still rippled slowly on the comm screen, its face glowing like a dying sun.

  “Well,” said Captain Watanabe after a long silence. “Now that we know what it said, I’m sure we all feel a lot better.”

  Everybody on board the Lakshmi continued to hurry around as the days went past, but with what seemed like an increasing hopelessness. Rainwater was one of the longest and most important holes—without it, it would take us years, maybe decades, to make our way back. There was no other shortcut from this part of the rim.

  Under emergency regs, most of the passengers had been put into cryo, except for those like Balcescu who had a job to do. I didn’t have much to keep me occupied, so I spent a lot of time with the people who had time to spend with me. Chinh-Herrera the navigator didn’t have much to do either, once he’d plotted the various ways back home that bypassed Rainwater, but when he was done, he didn’t really want to talk. I’d bring him wine and stay awhile, but it wasn’t much fun.

  One evening I got called up to Balcescu’s room, an unused officer’s cabin he’d been given. To my surprise, as I got there, Doc Swainsea was just leaving, dressed in civilian clothes—a dress, of all things—and carrying her shoes. She smiled at me as she went past but it was a sad one and she didn’t really seem to see me. Balcescu was sitting in the main room listening to music—kind of pretty, old-fashioned music for a change—and when he saw my face, he smiled a little bit too.

  “We all deal with fear in different ways,” he said, as if that explained something. “Did you bring my coffee, Mr. Jatt?”

  I put the tray down. “There’s plenty of coffee down in the commons room,” I told him, a touch grumpily, I guess. “Cups, spoons, you name it. Even stuff that tastes like sugar. It’s practically a five-star restaurant down there.” I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I’d heard it in old movies.

  He raised an eyebrow. “Ah. Is it the revolt of the proletariat, then, Mr. Jatt?” he asked. “The Admirable Crichton? If we are all going to die, let it be as equals?”

  I’d seen The Admirable Crichton, as a matter of fact, but I didn’t remember anyone using a word like “proletariat.” Still, I got the gist. “Some would say we were already equals, Mr. Balcescu,” I said. “The Confederation Constitution, for one. I’ve read it. Have you?”

  He laughed. “Touché, my good Jatt. As it happens, I have. It has its moments, but I think it would make a dull libretto. Unlike this.” He gestured loosely to the air and I realized that he was drunk, so I started pouring the coffee. We might die as equals, but it probably wouldn’t be soon, and in the meantime, I’d be the one who’d have to clean up any messes. “I said, unlike this,” he told me again, more loudly. The music was getting loud too, some men singing in deep voices, all very dramatic.

  “I heard you!” I practically shouted back. “Here’s whitener if you want some. And sweetener.”

  “I haven’t been able to get this out of my head for days!” He waved his hand over the chair arm and the music got quieter, although I could still hear it. “Don Giovanni. That…thing…that alien projection we saw reminds me of the Commendatore’s statue. Come to drag us all to hell.” He laughed and reached clumsily for the coffee. I held the cup until he had a grip on it.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Mr. Balcescu,” I said. “Unless you want something else, I’d better be going.”

  “That’s what…Diana said.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Dr. Swainsea. Never mind.” He laughed again, another in a line of some of the saddest laughs I had ever heard. “Don’t you know Don Giovanni? My God, what do they teach cabin boys these days?”

  “How to deal with drunken idiots, mostly, Mr. Balcescu. No, I don’t know Don Giovanni. One of those old Mafia films?”

  He shook his head. He seemed to like doing it enough that he kept it up for a bit. “No, no. Don Giovanni the opera. Mozart. About a terrible man who seduces women—preys on them, really.” He began to shake his head again, then seemed to remember that he’d done that already, and for a good long while, too. “At the end, the murdered spirit of one of the women’s fathers, the Commendatore, comes after him in the form of a terrible statue. In his foolis
hness and his pride, Don Giovanni invites the ghost to supper. So the statue, the ghost, whatever you want to call it—it comes. It’s going to take him to his judgment. Listen!” He cocked an ear toward the music. “The Commendatore’s statue is saying, ‘Tu m’invitasti a cena, il tuo dover or sai. Rispondimi: verrai tu a cenar meco?’ That means, ‘You invited me to dinner—now will you come dine with me?’ In other words, he’s going to take him off to hell. And Don Giovanni says, ‘I’m no coward—my heart is steady in my breast.’ He’d rather go to the devil than show himself afraid—that’s panache!” Balcescu was lost in it now, his eyes closed as the music swelled and the voices boomed. “The ghost takes his hand, and Don Giovanni cries out, ‘It’s so freezing cold!’ The ghost tells him it’s his last moment on earth—repent! ‘No, no, ch’io non me pento!’ Don Giovanni tells him—he won’t repent!” Balcescu sat back in his chair, eyes still closed, and sighed. “That is Art. That’s what Art can do!”

  He said it—slurred it a bit, actually—as though it were the end of a beautiful dream, but I could hear the music in the background and nobody sounded very happy—not even the stony-voiced thing that I guessed was the Commendatore’s statue. Made sense. What did the poor old Commendatore have to look forward to after his revenge, anyway? He was already dead.