by Tom Shepherd
“That’s what kept me from meeting you at the boat dock,” the Chief explained. “Once she was aboard, Suzie’s A.I. capabilities took over as the new MLC. She self-installed while we explored the ship.”
He glanced at the empty seats. “So, who’s flying?”
“An array of auto-pilot programs. Your course is locked on Suryadivan Prime,” Paco said. “There’s nothing left to do but give Suzie the command to enter max FTL. Then you just monitor the systems and play solitaire for the next nine days.”
“And if there’s an emergency?”
“Suzie can handle any command you give her, just like the Sioux City.” Chief León shrugged. “Boss, I can always undo the installment if you’re unhappy with—”
“No, no. I’ll find some use for her. Maybe she can teach me to fly this baby manually.”
“Good idea,” Paco said.
“First, I’d like to teach this git some manners.”
Paco went to the lift beside the steps to the upper half-deck. “If anything goes wrong, release the helm from autopilot by voice command.”
When Chief León was gone, Tyler rubbed the headrest of the captain’s chair. “Always wanted to command a starship. Well, here I am.”
“Now that your squad of bimbos has returned to their much-deserved oblivion, how may I serve you, Captain Matthews?”
Tyler swore he could hear her snickering. “Show me the uninstall feature for your program.”
“Ha! What an ingrate—as often as I’ve saved your arse.”
“Saved my—? You wouldn’t even open the friggin’ hatch when overgrown insects and giant crabs were after me!”
“I squashed the bug!”
“Purely by accident.”
“That’s a load of tosh. I should have lifted off, left you to play with your new mates on your bloody new planet.”
“Shall we move this witty repartee to the Cumberland Tunnel?”
“Yes, O Master of the Stars. Engaging course to Suryadivan Prime at max FTL.”
“And order me a ham sandwich.”
“Bloody hell. Get it yourself.”
Tyler smiled. She’s hot for me.
Life aboard the Patrick Henry settled into a routine of training and study. Every morning Tyler sipped coffee in the galley and read daily reports of crew activities, then he joined J.B. at the law library to research the Suryadivan legal system and formulate their courtroom strategy. They worked all morning, took a break for lunch, and hit the case files again until late afternoon.
Yumiko Matsuda’s ankles healed by the first two days of the voyage. At her request, Paco found a graduated martial arts training program to test the limits of her physical stamina. J.B. soon joined her daily sessions after he and Tyler were done for the day, and from the way he limped back to his quarters, Tyler assumed Officer Matsuda had fully recovered.
Tyler spent his evening hours on the command bridge with Suzie. They bantered, sang old songs, and shared classical literature—even nursery rhymes, which Suzie recited aloud in her delicious, Neo-British accent. He often skipped dinner to extend his time with the A.I. entity. Drawing on flight manuals and training materials in the Main Library Computer, Suzie taught him to pilot the oddly configured starship until Tyler felt nearly as comfortable at the helm of the Henry as he did the in smaller Sioux City, now docked on the starboard boat deck.
They argued about history and religion and politics. They laughed frequently, and sometimes simply listened to music. Halfway to the Rim, Tyler realized interfacing with the computer entity had become the high point in his day.
One evening Suzie whispered, “Hey, you…I hate to admit it, but this is nice.”
He laughed softly. “Hey, you, this is nuts.”
And they returned to savoring the music. Twice, he woke up on the bridge after falling asleep in the captain’s chair. Suzie had coffee and donuts waiting for him, delivered by Lieutenant Arabella. Tyler found himself wishing the flight to the Rim would last a month…or more.
Then one night Suzie asked a new question. “Are we dating?”
Tyler sat up and fumbled with the navigational array, which needed no adjustments. “Uh…”
“Well, are we?”
“You’re a program.”
“And you’re not?”
“Suzie, when I said you were ‘hot for me’…”
“You were teasing, I get it. You’re still a sexist pig. But I’m curious what dating is like for organic lifeforms.”
“The flirting and word play—yeah, that’s part of dating. But the real thing requires, you know, physical contact sooner or later.”
“Oh, right. Well, I was just curious.”
He changed the subject. “So, you want to sing a sea shanty? Do you know ‘Whiskey Johnny’?”
Suzie began the song. “Whiskey is the life of man / Always was since the world began…”
Tyler mumbled along with the music, but his mind kept replaying variations of her question. Am I dating a computer program? That’s crazy! Okay, okay. Play with the idea. Do I want to date Suzie? How can I have feelings for her, when she isn’t real? What the hell does “real” mean in an age of artificial intelligence? After we escaped from Sedalia, she said she wanted to kiss me. Why did I feel a jolt of adrenalin? This is nuts.
He sang louder, drowning out his swirling thoughts.
Seventeen
By the eighth day outbound from Sedalia, the Patrick Henry had crossed ungated space beyond the Perseus arm and entered the territory of the Suryadivan Sacred Protectorate. The fast-moving FTL ship whizzed past hundreds of millions of stars to reach the hazy expanse of gas clouds and sparsely distributed systems along the Outer Arm of the galaxy. Chief León insisted it was record time, but nobody kept records about transit speeds out here, so the achievement would go unnoticed.
Beyond the Rim systems, a diaspora of solitary stars traveled the great dark of intergalactic space. Some astrophysicists claimed there were as many orphan stars out there as those consolidated into galactic communities, but billions of years of gravity brawls among swirling galaxies had cast away and scattered stellar bodies into the Void so thinly that few could be detected, even by sophisticated astronomical sensors.
After traveling so far, it briefly looked like Suryadivan Flight Central would deny them landing privileges. Apparently, the PH was notorious among the Rim worlds. Rosalie took charge and soothed the spaceport authorities in their native tongue. She explained the ship was now the property of the God-fearing Matthews Corporation, which provoked a loud laugh from Tyler. Soon the Patrick Henry received permission to land at Deiro Yord, capital city of the Sacred Protectorate.
Tyler supervised the landing technique of Paco’s holographic crew from the captain’s chair on the command bridge. These A.I. crewwomen seemed competent, but if anything dicey happened he knew Suzie would avert disaster until he could seize manual control.
“Six thousand meters and descending,” Lieutenant Arabella said from the co-pilot’s seat.
“Maintain course,” Tyler said. “Mind your cross winds, and look for aero-traffic.”
“Aye, Captain,” Arabella said.
“Let’s go with local gravity, Ensign Parvati.”
“Transitioning, now, sir.” Parvati was a brown Asian Indian beauty with a red bindi dot on her forehead. The Henry’s helmswoman entered a command on her control panel gracefully as a temple dancer.
Tyler felt a lurch, followed by lightheadedness. Suryadivan gravity measured four percent lighter than Terran standard. Easily adjusted to, but the switch still posed a mild shock to the human inner ear.
“Life support at bio-compatibility,” Tyler ordered.
Standard procedure when making planetfall. To ward off pathogens, all organic life forms aboard the Henry received airborne infusions of antibodies from the ship’s medical databank on the Suryadivan biosphere. Tyler’s unexplored new planet had required Suzie’s bio-scrubbers to
kill the organisms that wanted to kill him. This time they would be immune to most diseases and carry no off-world plagues to threaten the natives.
A broad cityscape unfolded beneath them as the ship descended toward its landing pad. Tyler now understood why off-worlders had irreverently nicknamed the Suryadivan Mecca Pokey Town. To the west lay endless spires tipped with conical points. But the most striking feature of Deiro Yord was a gigantic, egg-shaped structure, which dominated the eastern skyline and made the surrounding metropolis look like the nest of an enormous bird-god.
According to the briefing book prepared by Rosalie, the Gobikan or Temple Court housed the spiritual and governmental center of the Sacred Protectorate. Slightly more than a kilometer high, the massive edifice required another four hundred meters of underground foundation to support its graceful girth. Horizontal bands of color designated the functions of the various levels. Instead of a public building, Tyler couldn’t help thinking of a huge Easter egg, hand-painted with stripes like the planet Jupiter.
“Touching down.” Arabella’s technique was so flawless Tyler didn’t notice they had landed until the ship stopped moving.
“Good flying, Lieutenant.” He noted their arrival—calibrated to Kansas City time, of course—in the new flight log Mrs. León had installed in post flight protocols. “Please taxi to our designated parking slot and shut down. You have the conn.”
“Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Mahboob replied with a touch of pride.
J.B. and Inspector Platte waited for Tyler at the phalanx of kiosk checkpoints operated by customs and bio-clearance officials of the spaceport. Tyler had never before encountered Suryadivans, although he studied holo-images of the natives and read extensively about their culture in Rosalie’s briefing papers. Even so, their appearance surprised him. Suryadivans were warm-blooded, reddish humanoids with webbed hands, gilled cheeks, and fully articulated head fins that reminded him of the display plumage of African Crowned Cranes.
His first sight of a living specimen—a customs official in a brown uniform—triggered memories of that first year at Mizzou, where he grappled with comparative studies in non-Terran sentient beings for the first time. On the rolling prairie of Midwestern America, a course in Exo-biology 101 introduced him to the works of Wolfgang Ziegler, who rearranged the furniture of Tyler’s mental Universe from anthropocentrism to multi-species awareness.
The syllabus began with a review of facts he already knew. The majority of alien lifeforms differ wildly from the children of Earth.
Insectoid Yegosians and reptilian Saurians.
Sentient creatures with hard shells and multiple limbs but no head.
Others looked like big luffa sponges with a few dozen garden hoses drooping off the moist membranes.
There were brainy birds, intelligent vapor clouds who solidified to grasp tools or prey, and assorted races of sentient beings whose form and function defied human language to describe them without sounding nightmarish or just plain silly.
Then the discussion turned down a new road to consider the five-pointed star, humanoid shape, which regularly reoccurred in alien species. In fact, early explorers found what appeared to be Terrans living on worlds scattered throughout the galaxy. Panspermia? Lost tribes of humanity? Were our ancestors really abducted by aliens? Like Lazarus, the long-dead UFO mythologies briefly arose from the grave.
Unfortunately for fans of the paranormal, most human-like creatures had lived on their native worlds long before our species arose, and DNA comparisons showed no trace of common ancestry with Homo sapiens.
But the resemblance was uncanny.
Some humanoid aliens—Meklavites, Parvians, Quirt-Thymeans and others—were similar enough to Terrans to allow sexual—albeit not reproductive—compatibility. More extensive studies followed, to no avail.
All the research absolutely ruled out any direct relationship. In some humanoids, the DNA double helix twisted left, instead of its “normal” right-handed form. But structural similarities abounded among bipedal humanoids. It was a maddening question, which human scientists did not expect to encounter, for which they had no answer.
Then Wolfgang Ziegler offered an elegant, simple solution. In his twenty-fourth century work, Humanoid Efficiency, Ziegler theorized that, since there are a finite number of ways a creature can solve its evolutionary problems, similarities are bound to occur. For example, he noted the eyeball has evolved over forty separate times on the Terran homeworld. When creatures need to navigate their world by visible light, evolution provides eyes in abundance.
The results of convergent evolutionary problem-solving startled explorers like Lupetti and Brightstar. Thanks to Ziegler, later generations who ventured into the starry unknown expected to find look-alike species dispersed among the aliens.
Suryadivan biology differed widely from humans both anatomically and physiologically, and they were not sexually compatible. But they followed the basic humanoid pattern—two legs, two arms, and a head atop their shoulders. They were about the same body size as Terrans, but ruddy-colored and oddly similar to an Australian platypus without duckbill. Suryadivans were marsupial mammals whose offspring hatched from hard-shelled eggs to nurse in their mother’s belly pouch until old enough to eat solid foods.
Like most humanoids, the Suryadivan face featured two eyes, but the bony nasal passages flared backward along rounded cheekbones with flaps that sealed when swimming. Instead of ears, a fan-like hearing organ crowned the head, surrounded front and back by short, dense black hair. The external auditory system deployed and folded up, depending on how alert Suryadivans chose to be, and streamlined their heads when moving through water.
In the middle of this alien countenance, Tyler recognized a very human-like mouth, tongue, and teeth. However, to complete their peculiarity, a pair of fully developed gills streaked each cheek, qualifying Suryadivans as the only known species of intelligent, warm-blooded, marsupial amphibians. Even with most of the Milky Way yet unexplored, it was a rare distinction.
When customs officials noted the names of the new arrivals, the officers suddenly deployed their auditory fans to catch every word and moved with renewed efficiency. Several administrators asked—in Terran Standard, albeit oddly phrased—if the humans needed assistance. When J.B. solicited directions to the Gobikan, a Captain of the Customs Service assured him reliable transportation would take the visitors anywhere they wished to go.
“At your Trade Embassy, you might want to start,” the Customs Captain said. “The Ambassador hosts this evening a social hour.”
“First, we have business with your court system,” J.B. said.
“Of course. Please give me a moment, a vehicle to arrange.”
They waited by the main exit while Demarcus Platte stepped through sliding doors and inspected the neighborhood. He returned quickly.
“Don’t like the sight lines,” Platte grumbled. “Too many opportunities for snipers.”
“Inspector, your diligence is noted. But I think we can travel safely in the capital,” Tyler said. “Any hit men they send against us will be waving legal papers, not rifle blasters.”
“Boss, let me handle security, so you’re alive to sue them.”
Demarcus cleared an empty, automated hover car for boarding and they glided away from the terminal en route the Temple Court. At first, Tyler and J.B. refrained from discussing legal strategy, assuming the government was listening. Inspector Platte pulled a scanning device from his sleeve pocket and swept the vehicle for bugs. Demarcus pronounced it clean, then turned left and right in his seat to watch lanes of traffic below and above. The wrap-around bubble top afforded easy views of spiked towers and sealed causeways which stretched between buildings.
“Notice anything different about the city?” Demarcus said.
“Sure,” Tyler said. “It’s an alien metroplex with corkscrew skyscrapers.”
“Look at the buildings and street corners below us,” Demarcus said.
Tyler leaned toward the lowe
r viewports. “What am I missing?”
“No signs, no advertising,” Platte said. “After six years at Safe Harbor, you get used to commercial vulgarity hanging over the town. These folks are aesthetically different.”
“Welcome to the Sacred Protectorate,” J.B. said. “Anything you enjoy too much can distract from prayer and contemplation of the Forty-Six deities.”
“Like Catholic school,” Tyler said. “No wonder Dad sent us here.”
It took half an hour to pick their way through the traffic, but the auto taxi finally deposited them at the entrance to the gardens surrounding the ground floor of the Gobikan dome. A ten-minute walk through blossoming fruit trees and rainbow shrubbery brought them to doors leading into the massive, egg-shaped structure. The Temple Court was easily the largest building Tyler had ever seen, like an ovoid moon fallen from orbit to lodge in the bedrock of Suryadivan Prime.
The outside of the building displayed a sequence of quadrangular characters, which Tyler assumed to be writing. “Inspector Dee, check out your first signage.”
Platte grunted. “I can’t tell their writing from decorative trim.”
In the outer lobby they acquired a guide who spoke passable Terran. He directed them to the Court of Legal Appeals on level 138 of the multicultural civil actions subsection. As they rode the lift, their guide introduced himself.
“I am Greeter Lox Aspi, son of Erizond the Advocate.” He deployed full hearing fins and waved some of his upper body appendages. “Are you all the sons of Matthews?”
“Not me,” Demarcus said. “I’m the heat.”
Lox Aspi crinkled his head fins. “Your body temperature registers normal for a human.”
“Inspector Platte is our director of investigations and security,” J.B. said. “Tyler and I represent the Matthews family. Please call me J.B.”
Lox bowed slightly. “I am pleased to accept a B.J. from you.”
Tyler laughed, but his brother shut him down with an icy stare.
Demarcus steered the conversation elsewhere. “Do you mind if I ask something?”