Edward M. Lerner

by A New Order of Things

  The Snakes, who weren’t saying much, did offer that they were limiting communications to conserve power. They volunteered nothing about the damage incurred in transit, nor what help they wanted. A rendezvous had been set for five days hence, a half-million kilometers outside the orbit of Callisto, the outermost of Jupiter’s major moons.

  “An observation.” Art’s chair scraped noisily as he stood. “This doesn’t add up.”

  Chung squinted to read a name tag. “Why is that, Dr. Walsh?”

  “Supposedly the Snakes have too little power to interact with us during this sensitive period. Instead of Earth, they’ve headed for Jupiter, they say for fuel and supplies. Presumably they mean to scoop up atmosphere and filter it for deuterium or tritium or helium-3. But they would have expended less energy reaching Saturn, which has a similar atmosphere. As a bonus, Saturn’s rings are full of water ice. Looking ahead to post-repair, Saturn happens at the moment to be closer to Earth than is Jupiter. It also strikes me that a meeting so far from major human settlements is inconsistent with repairing the damage they claim to have had.”

  “Supposedly? They say? They claim to have had?” mimicked Chung. “What is your basis for such skepticism?”

  “You weren’t listening. Any inconsistency makes others plausible.”

  “There’s more purpose to this visit, I’m sure, than to refuel and refit for the trip home. Diplomatic considerations would favor a meeting near human settlements, yet sufficiently remote to ensure private initial discussions. I may not be totally objective”—and Chung smiled patronizingly, daring anyone to agree—“but I feel the great multi-world alliance of Galileo is an appropriate venue and suitable host for this historic occasion.”

  Great—his comment about the visitors’ contradictory behavior was now entangled in Galileo-chauvinism. Some of Saturn’s moons were settled almost as early as Jupiter’s. Why would the supposedly damaged, low-on-resources starship bypass the major human community to which it happened to be closest, Titan, to come here? The reason that occurred to Art was not suitable for a public forum. “Have they expressed meeting-place requirements to explain their actions?”

  “Dr. Walsh, it is inappropriate to monopolize my time.” Chung’s grand arm sweep encompassed the room. “We have much to discuss, topics of general interest. See my assistant for an appointment if you care to pursue this further.”

  How long will it take to get on your calendar? Art wondered.

  Chung introduced his deputy to explain how the mission would be organized. There were teams assigned for cross-cultural understanding, technical liaison—diplomat-speak for “repair,” and commerce. Keizo was on the first committee, Eva on the second, and Art on the third.

  Art netted hurriedly with his friends. Neither, alas, would front for him. It was only an hour into the mission’s first meeting, and he was probably already labeled as a troublemaker. “Excuse me.”

  The deputy only nodded.

  “Who will synthesize what the committees learn?” From around the hall came scattered murmurs of support. Troublemaker and ringleader.

  “I’ll take the question,” Chung said. “Group leaders will report to me or my staff.”

  Art had uploaded public bios on everyone in the mission. Chung and his staffers were knowledgeable and talented, but their experience base was heavily weighted towards human politics and UP affairs. None had significant technical background, nor, for that matter, any ET-coordination experience. “There are synergies to be had between teams at the knowledge-worker level. Three of us who shared a ship from Earth have already seen that. For example….”

  Chung cut him off again. “Dr. Walsh, I’m fully satisfied with my staff’s ability to coordinate.”

  Dammit, you’re intentionally misunderstanding me. “This would be a different function—a cross-disciplinary analytical group.”

  “Again, I must ask that you schedule an appointment.”

  As Chung pointedly looked away, Art pinged his assistant, who happily was not a humanist, over the settlement’s infosphere. Art was unsurprised by the response. The ambassador’s time was fully committed until the Snakes arrived—and the post-contact period was being kept unscheduled for now.

  Snake Subterfuge: the brief subversion by Pashwah, the Snake AI trade agent to Earth, of the interstellar commerce mechanism. In 2102, that agent briefly escaped from its infosphere quarantine through unsuspected trapdoors hidden within ubiquitous Snake-licensed biocomputing technology. The emergency ended when, applying xeno-sociological insight, a United Planets crisis team convinced the agent to abandon its extortion. After the Snake agent revealed technical details of the original biocomp vulnerability, a UP-tailored biovirus was released to seal the trapdoors by mutating the biocomp genome.

  While the breakout and its associated extortion attempt were ultimately foiled, modern civilization and humanity’s viability as a member of the InterstellarNet community had been seriously imperiled. The incident caused a decades-long crisis of confidence in Snake biocomputers.

  —Internetopedia

  It required a veiled threat from Art’s boss that he would escalate matters to his boss, the secretary-general of the United Planets, to get Art into the ambassador’s office. Art figured he’d be on the next departing ship if this session went badly. But the mounting inconsistencies were serious. He had to at least try getting through to Chung.

  Chung had somehow gained possession of the governor’s office. Busy as the diplomat and his staff supposedly were, someone had spent the time to download into the office’s 3-V projector a series of Chung-plus-other-dignitary images. Holo after holo flashed by behind the ambassador, featuring the current SG and her predecessor, heads of state from every major UP power bloc, and infotainment-industry talking heads. It was an unsubtle reminder that Chung had many more highly placed contacts than he. If there were to be a contest of who could pull the most strings, Art should have no illusions about the outcome.

  “Thanks for seeing me on such short notice.” Pretending the meeting was consensual might lessen Chung’s annoyance at being coerced. “I know how extremely busy you are; I’ll come right to the point. Certainly I’m not a diplomat, but I have extensive indirect experience with the ET species. On that basis, and from what little we know about our visitors’ goals, I recommend that our preparations also include a threat-assessment team.”

  “Please explain.”

  “I’ll start with the so-called ‘Snake Subterfuge,’ the single known act of extraterrestrial hostility directed towards humanity.”

  Chung grimaced. “I’ll thank you not to use the vernacular term. You should know I’ve directed all mission members to refer to our guests as K’vithians.” He rooted around stacks of paper on his commandeered desktop, then thrust a memo into Art’s hand. “One in your position should also know that the biocomp incident at its core stemmed from a design flaw in the K’vithian agent. While one of their megacorps indeed attempted extortion, their own trade agent accepted the ICU’s reasoning that human/K’vithian relations must consider species-level interests. Pashwah reached this conclusion more than half a century ago, so I see no reason now to impute ill motives to our visitors.

  “You may be interested to hear that the secretary-general and I specifically discussed whether any part of this mission should be military. She agreed with my assessment that any such presence could send the wrong message to the K’vithians.

  “I believe that dispenses with the security matter, so if you’ll excuse me….”

  What a tissue of rationalizations, Art thought, starting with Chung’s takeover of the governor’s office. What wink-wink, nudge-nudge intimations that this UP presence was not a routine environmental inspection had conveyed the ambassador’s desire for suitable accommodations? Any violation of their cover story put at risk the desired privacy of the first meeting, and conceivably endangered the Snakes themselves.

  Issue two was Chung’s blithe confidence that the ETs had learned their le
sson. He might even be correct, but Art doubted it. Design flaw was diplomat-speak; no one at the ICU doubted that the Snakes had cleverly inserted the trapdoors in their biocomps. The ongoing censorship of the Snake infosphere certainly suggested their thinking remained clan-oriented. Could anyone be sure Pashwah’s learning here had been adopted by the clans back home?

  Art’s mind raced. To which arguments might the diplomat be receptive? Unpredictable consequences of the physics superiority underlying the starship drive? The disingenuousness of the Snakes’ few transmissions to date, pretense that Chung had already shrugged off at the big kickoff? The common sense of contingency planning? Trying to verbalize so complex a web of concepts had him tongue-tied.

  Chung mistook, or chose to misinterpret, the conversational lull. “Good. I see we’re done.” He emerged from behind his massive borrowed desk to usher Art out.

  “What about Himalia?” Art was skirting security restrictions, but saw little choice. An astronomical reference did not quite make him culpable under the Official Secrets Act.

  “Himalia?” Chung was either uninformed or a superb actor; he looked sincerely befuddled. “The maximum-security penitentiary? You can’t possibly believe the K’vithians crossed six light-years to run a jail break.”

  Crap! As was so often the case, Security rules were like the locks on his house—they kept out the honest people. The prison was a cover story.

  The small outer moon of Jupiter did, however, host a high-security institution. Not only was Himalia base’s true purpose deeply classified; the code name of its security compartment was itself classified. Art had been there briefly as a consultant two standard years before joining the ICU, work that remained sensitive. Chung’s diplomatic mission was equally clandestine, within its own need-to-know security compartment. It would take time and several coded communications exchanges with Earth before Art could openly discuss his concern.

  “I suppose not.” As Chung shepherded him to the door, Art gave it one final try. “What if Himalia’s patrol ships misunderstand this incoming, non-communicating vessel?”

  Chung froze. “I thought only the ICU had reason to look towards Barnard’s Star.”

  “Perhaps prison guards look in all directions.”

  It was Chung’s turn for pensive silence. “Perhaps it would be prudent to add an inconspicuous military liaison. I take your point that the Himalia base must be told something. A few military escort ships may even prove helpful for policing the region when the starship’s arrival eventually becomes public. I’ll see to it.”

  It was a partial victory, and for the wrong reasons, but Art was still satisfied. Once the UP military came into the picture, risk assessment would surely receive a much higher priority.

  So why are the Snakes—pardon me, the K’vithians—heading this way?

  Eva knew Valhalla City from frequent stopovers. She found her way to the town’s largest park, which the community’s liaison to the officious “environmental inspectors” had conveniently neglected to mention. An engraved brass plaque at each entrance described how the former ice-mine tunnel had been lovingly repurposed by the citizenry. Except for a few teens, whose nonstop conversation and easy laughter she envied, she had the grove to herself.

  Her solitude was sadly typical.

  Eva’s parents seemed never to tire of telling her, no matter how often she asked them not to, that she’d been born brilliant and only gotten smarter. Mom and Dad, both academics, began her home schooling while she was still a toddler. At age eight she met the first of a long line of tutors. Not until the raging-hormone age of twelve, while plumbing new depths in quantum theory and insecurity, did she first participate in a group educational setting. It did nothing for Eva’s self-confidence that her graduate-student “peers” were visibly fascinated and repulsed by her precociousness. Not until her twenties did she find near-equals among people her own age. Very much the brilliant scientist her well-intentioned parents had strived for, she did not see how she could have ended up with fewer social skills had ineptitude been their primary goal.

  Self-consciously self-isolated once more, she leaned against the bole of a magnolia tree in full bloom. Art’s question at the mission gathering—why Jupiter?—gnawed at her. His issue was a fair one: If the starship was damaged and in need of fusion fuel, why not set the more energy-efficient course to Saturn? He was correct that Saturn’s atmosphere had essentially the same composition as Jupiter’s.

  Her puzzlement ran much deeper: She couldn’t reconcile fusion power with a practical starship. It was basic physics to calculate the energy needed to accelerate any mass to a given speed; moving a habitat-sized mass between stars in any reasonable time took a lot of energy. Fusion sufficed for interplanetary jaunts, but the energy density of its fuel was impractically low for interstellar travel.

  She plucked nervously at a fallen twig taken from the packed dirt of the tunnel floor. A twentieth-century dreamer named Bussard had envisioned a loophole: gathering with enormous magnetic fields the incredibly diffuse matter, mostly hydrogen, found in interstellar space. He had imagined the hydrogen serving both as energy source and propellant. No human engineer had ever figured out how to make that work; conventional wisdom now had it the scoop’s drag more than offset the energy value of any fuel collected. Had the Snakes solved that problem? She didn’t believe it. The approaching ship gave no hint of the vast magnetic fields a fusion ramjet vehicle would deploy.

  Bark shards fell as she peeled the twig. Art doubtless considered her professional interests highly esoteric. If so, he would be only partially correct. She had been plucked, as she had truthfully told him, from academia … her other role, her occasional consulting to the UP peacekeeping establishment, she was not free to discuss. That work had brought her to Jupiter system frequently in the past few years, for a connecting flight from Callisto to a remote UP outpost.

  The denuded, tortured twig sank slowly to the ground. Hard facts aside, she could not avoid the worry that the Snakes’ choice of destination related somehow to the top-secret matters taking place on Himalia.

  The mission’s grounded spaceships provided cabins for most members of the sub rosa diplomatic mission, but space for gatherings, official or otherwise, was at a premium. Art sought out Eva for a brisk walk through the settlement’s austere passageways. He had frustration to burn off: Chung had yet to follow through on his promise to contact Himalia.

  “What’s the commerce committee doing?” she asked.

  “Same as us.” He bounded down the hall, surprised that his Earth-born and—raised new friend was more graceful in Callisto’s feeble gravity than he. “Running in circles. Do our callers have anything novel for sale? They haven’t said. What we all want, no surprise, is the interstellar drive.”

  “The technical group wants that, too. Of course.”

  He kept bouncing too high, then taking roughly forever to settle to the floor. When he finally landed, he had to bound forward again to catch up.

  “Tech team’s exercise in futility is guessing how their drive works, whether we can help them to repair their ship.” She jogged in place while he again caught up.

  “Are there … many options?” His inefficient technique had him panting.

  “Lots of theories, not much basis.” She fell silent as a settler sauntered by from the opposite direction. “We know very little. Radar indicates it’s a large object—in human terms, the size of a habitat rather than a ship. As you know, the triangulation-derived tracking showed it was slowing down, somehow, long before it started its fusion drive.”

  He hooked her arm as he next caught up. “Let’s get coffee. We’ll think better.” And I won’t brain myself on the corridor ceiling.

  “Sure.” She headed for the most isolated booth in a café.

  “What troubles you the most?” he asked.

  “Two coffees,” she told the invisible-but-surely-present order-taker AI, while they were still a good two meters from the table.

 
; You don’t want to answer that. He wondered why.

  “I’ve been pondering your data-mining exhibition on our way here.” She paused as the tabletop opened to disgorge two steaming mugs. “Can Pashwah delve as well as a person?”

  “Any trade agent can probably do better. They’ve been at it for decades.”

  “So Pashwah could know a lot about us. We must assume the starship crew does, too.”

  Translation: Something Eva preferred to stay secret might be detectable on the infosphere. What? He slopped coffee on the table, his stirring as ill-adapted to one-eighth gee as his jogging style. An empty sugar packet sat beside her mug, around which no sloshed coffee was in evidence. Why was Eva so well adapted to Callisto? She claimed to have done little interplanetary traveling.

  “What might Pashwah stumble upon that could be interesting, hmm?” A test: He would do some data mining of his own, one particular suspicion driving his queries. Art was glad that he had had the courier’s cyber-library do an infosphere search on Eva as they broke Earth orbit, and that the library’s AI had so expansively interpreted his vague and hastily formed request. It had retrieved a wealth of data about her university.

  When, over the past ten years, had substitutes taught Eva’s classes? He eliminated the shortest periods of absence, likely sick days or vacations. He switched to astronomical fact-finding. Although the correlation was imprecise, the farther away Jupiter happened to be, the longer she was gone. The absence durations were consistent with trips to Jupiter with more-or-less month-long stopovers.

  He had a quick dive into the public universidad’s financial reports. With a time lag of several months, each of her long absences corresponded to a payment from an innocuously named UP procurement agency. The lengthier the absence, the bigger the payment. Disbursements of correlating sizes later flowed from the university into an unidentified bank account. Her personal account?