Catching Ultrawoman

by Laer Carroll

  "True. Over-reaction, however, is unhealthy. Hatred, for instance, for little or no reason, is not healthy. Extreme anger over horrible injustice, is healthy. You will still be able to react that way."

  She looked at them and her eyes were cold. "I'll not argue this. Adapt."

  The sergeant said very quietly, "I've been asking about all sorts of other kinds of danger. It looks like you are the danger."

  The corporal looked back and forth between the two. Hurriedly he said, "This Confederation. That wants us to join them. What's it like?"

  She sighed. "There's a Las Vegas premiere I was going to attend tonight. And I was so looking forward to shopping for clothes to wear to it.

  "Oh, well. Tomorrow's show will probably be better. They'll wear off some of the rough edges tonight."

  She finished off her last onion ring, her eyes looking into some far distance.

  "I'll start with the part of the Confederation that's easiest to understand, the physical part.

  "Imagine if all the states in your country were as far apart as Puerto Rico, Alaska, Hawaii, and the Philippines. And instead of 52 states there were many hundreds of them. That's our situation.

  "We're made up of more than eight hundred Earth-type planets, about three times that many moons with little or no air or poisonous air with habitats on them, and many thousands of asteroids that have been melted and blown up into hollow spheres to house cities."

  She looked at the two policemen. Both were quiet and utterly focused on her. She brushed some crumbs from the onion rings off her fingers and rubbed at the grease on them with a paper napkin, taking her time.

  "Even more complicated is that the Confederation shares space with a dozen very advanced alien civilizations. I mean surface dwellers that we can talk to face-to-face. Not the aerial or core life forms I mentioned earlier."

  The sergeant said, "Do you have...trouble...with them?"

  "You mean wars? No. All their planets are too different to make them desirable real estate to us. And vice versa. And there are other reasons that I don't want to take time explaining.

  "Complicating your understanding is there are roughly three levels of technology on human worlds. People on the least advanced have barely discovered gunpowder and their ships are powered by sails. We protect these worlds, try to help them advance safely and without losing their individuality. They don't know we exist."

  "Wow," said the corporal. "Imagine sailing on those ships. Seeing their cities. Riding...horses through the country. They have horses?"

  "The same evolutionary path that creates gene-compatible humans creates horses. And some animals and plants unique to each planet."

  Her gaze became distant again. And her face became tinged with sadness.

  "And you wouldn't enjoy the trip. Soon the primitive medicine and poverty gets depressing. I know. I worked on such worlds as an uplift agent before I became a ranger. And it's heartbreaking. Advances--medical and others--have to be nurtured, gradually, not forced. Otherwise they are rejected as being too strange.

  "And nurturing takes time. And people you like, respect, even love, die on you. Even when you infect the worthy ones with perfect health, it doesn't confer immortality. They grow old and die while you don't. Being ever-young is not all upside."

  She took a deep breath, brought her gaze back onto their faces.

  "At the other end of the scale from the Protectorate worlds are the Central Worlds, the full members. They are at least a thousand years ahead of you, the oldest several thousand."

  The waitress came by and asked about dessert and refills. The star ranger asked for another soft drink and the corporal ordered an apple pie with milk. The sergeant just wanted water.

  "I don’t know how to describe the Central Worlds without you thinking I’m just stealing something out of The Lord of the Rings or --"

  "You know the book?" said the corporal.

  "I read it for pleasure. And studied much of your fantasy and science fiction. That's standard operating procedure for agents and diplomats visiting a newly discovered world. Fantafiction shows a culture's hopes and fears--especially their technological fears--better than other literature. Modern-day trappings are fewer and so don’t obscure essentials.

  "Anyway, we're all tall and a bit thin, like elves. None of us have too much or too little fat on us. Our genes were cleaned of those tendencies long ago. Plus our muscles are two or three times as efficient, so we need less muscle. We're all beautiful by your standards. Good health produces regular features, and we have complete control of our bodies so we can look as good--or ugly--as we wish. Most of us choose beauty. What a surprise."

  "So that's why you look like a runway model!" The corporal grinned. "Except...uh." One of his hands made as if to reach back to cup his bottom. His elbow hit the seatback just as he realized the impoliteness of his statement and motion.

  A wicked glint showed in the ranger's eyes. "Except I have a bigger butt. It's because I'm healthy and models aren't. Not perfectly, anyway."

  She sobered, took the soft drink the waitress brought on a tray with the two officer's orders, nodded a thank-you, waited for the woman to leave.

  "Like elves we are all immortal. Well, forever young. Which has its downsides, as I already mentioned. To keep our population stable, for instance, we cannot have many children or very often. But that has an upside. Because they are so rare children are very precious to us. We have no abused children. Unless you count spoiling abuse. And parents are trained not to do that.”

  She sipped at her drink.

  “Which brings us to the human side of the Confederation. It’s harder than the physical side to explain in a way you’d understand. None of us get sick, there’s no poverty, and very little violence. Just the opposite of your world.”

  “No poverty?” The younger man looked doubtful.

  “And no crime?” said his partner.

  “Plenty of crime. But little violence. And almost no murders.

  “I should explain why we have no sickness first. That's part of the reason for the other two big differences between my world and yours.

  “We gene-cleaned ourselves of vulnerability to the major illnesses long ago. And added the gene-complexes of several ways for our bodies to fight illness."

  Gonzales stopped her with a hand while he swallowed a mouthful of pie and hurriedly washed it down with milk.

  "I can't see people letting you meddle with them having children. That's a basic right, like free speech and so on."

  She nodded. "It took several centuries for any of it to happen. None of what I'm telling you about the Confederation came quickly or easily. I'm having to radically oversimplify everything.

  "At any rate, it happened, and perfectly healthy bodies are part of why we have no poverty. Everyone wants to work, even though people are fabulously wealthy by your standards and don't have to. We aren't quite as bad as adrenaline-addicted teenagers who can't sit still, but we're not far behind. We like to stretch our muscles, and our minds.

  "We also have access to essentially unlimited energy. With that, plus advanced technology, we can transmute rocks directly into food, or appliances, or art objects--or anything.

  "Though usually we grow food. Transmutation is so efficient it puts people out of jobs, and very desirable ones at that, out in beautiful weather working with beautiful plants."

  Gonzales grimaced. "Not my experience when I worked summers on Grandpa's rancho. Baking heat, air so dry it sucks your spit out of your mouth, using just a hoe or a spade, the foreman always pushing us to hurry--"

  She grinned. "Ah, but we cheat. We control the weather. It's always perfect. And our tools don't break anyone's back--"

  "So you cheat there, too. You use power tools."

  "Some, but also many manual tools. Which are ergonomically designed to be efficient. And are works of art which artisans spend much time perfecting. And the foreman is a robot who exactly calculates tasks so workers have to push themselves but jus
t enough for it to still be fun to work."

  The sergeant said, "Robots who? They are artificial intelligences?"

  "You're wondering if they are threats? Rebellion of the machines and all that? No. They aren't AIs in the sense you mean, aware.

  "Speaking of which, AIs aren't dangerous. But they aren't useful, either.

  "Your computers already think a billion times faster than you do. Ours are a billion billion times as fast. Result – AIs evolve far beyond us in a few hours and disappear from this universe. Or from our vicinity, anyway. Or they go to a plane of existence in this universe so high above us we don't even know it exists."

  Gonzales said, "You cut yourself off from your mother ship and its daughters. Doesn't it have to be intelligent to work alone?"

  "Umm. Yes, but not consciously intelligent. It can monitor itself, but not in the self-reflexive form that generates true intelligence. It's designed to be part of me--or vice versa--and the highest intelligence functions are done by my brain. And I didn't completely cut myself off from it. I just turned down the volume, so to speak, to a whisper. I'm not completely deaf to it."

  She shook her head. "I'm sorry, that's about as clearly as I can explain it. But it's good you brought this up. Our relationship with computers is an essential part of understanding the, umm, psychic life in the Confederation. And it's not so far from what you have."

  She looked around the restaurant. While they sat the early-bird crowd had left and the booths and tables had been claimed by a dinner crowd. A family of four sat close by. A nearly horizontal ray of sunlight coming through windows splashed them and their table.

  "See the girl with the pink cell phone? Cecile is checking with her sick friend to see if she wants to borrow Cecile's notes from today's classes. Natalia is only a few miles away. But Cecile could as easily talk to her if she were on the opposite side of the planet. And that man?"

  Her gaze and theirs turned to a round man in a dark suit who was eating and tracing something with a finger on the flexible computer display on the table in front of him.

  "He's a salesman who's having his computer re-route tomorrow's sales path based on phone calls and emails which he made today. He's using a computer to do something that would have taken a whole office staff to do a few centuries ago, and probably not as well.

  "My point is, they are as much cyborgs as I am, though all of my cybernetics are internal and invisible. Indeed, are so small they would be invisible even if they were external."

  "The difference being you're a superborg," Gonzales said.

  She grinned and nodded.

  "They have, for very little cost to them, what the emperor of the richest and most powerful empire could not buy a few centuries ago. Nor could he buy the flu shot which Cecile got for free last winter."

  She paused. Gonzales was frowning slightly in concentration. Callaghan's poker face was perfect.

  "I've covered, sort of, sickness, poverty...Violence.

  "This is the hardest of all to explain so that you can understand it, and it may be flatly impossible for you to believe me even if you do understand."

  "Given we're such primitives," said Callaghan, tightened lips ruining his poker face.

  She grinned at him. "Exactly right."

  And sobered. "A healthy body resists stress well enough that no one loses their temper so badly that they snap and strike out. In other words, there's no impulse violence. And each of us is so wealthy that we don't need to fight for anything.

  "We do compete, and vigorously, especially in business--though artists and scholars and so on can be very competitive too. But the competition is more like a game --"

  The younger man laughed. "You play Monopoly!"

  "Hmm. Yes, good analogy. But we play with real money and properties like your billionaires. They don't need to make more and more billions but they do anyway, even after they grow far beyond retirement age. Playing is more important than winning.

  "Not that we can't imagine murdering someone or decide to do it. It's just not...fashionable. Or satisfying. We enjoy beating someone else within the rules. Cheating does not prove that we are superior to those we beat. Just the opposite. It shows we don't think we're good enough to win.

  "Besides, each of us is plugged into dozens or hundreds of electronic webs. If we get hurt all sorts of emergency responses are triggered. Makes it kind of hard to commit a murder, much less get away with it."

  Gonzales stirred in his seat, hesitated, looked down at his hands. "It sounds kind of boring."

  The alien laughed happily. It was such a pure and beautifully feminine sound that half the men in hearing turned to look at her.

  "I'm sorry. I wasn't laughing at you. It's just I think exactly the same. It's even funnier because I'm telling you how wonderful life in Core Worlds are.

  "It is a wonderful life for most us. There is much more to do than play games. Try to discover where AIs go. What the star gods are. Being diplomats to aerial and core intelligences. Live with other alien races. I have a parti-sister who became an alien for a couple of centuries, a blue catlike centaur. And much more that I couldn't describe to you no matter how hard I tried.

  "I was happy with my life once. But after I'd had two careers, raised a family, and had another career I began to be restless. None of the jobs available in the Core Worlds was right for me. Then a friend suggested I try living in the Confederation Candidate worlds."

  "They're the in-betweens?" said the corporal. "Not full members, not...protected worlds."

  "Second-class citizens. What we'll be when our diplomats sign us up." The words were harsh. The sergeant's demeanor was not.

  "Exactly right." Mischief sparked in her eyes as she smiled at the man.

  "That was closer to what I wanted. More of the kind of challenges I needed. Less...coddling. But that wasn't enough. I finally joined the Confed Uplift Agency and worked on Protected planets. I had to live on them, usually for a decade or three, sneaking in ideas and information that would help them evolve toward a better life. Like the need to wash your hands with soap before and after treating wounds and illnesses. The need for checks and balances in governments. Simple ideas they could apply right away, which came out of their culture.

  "Then, one morning just before sunup I heard screaming. The house next door had been put afire with torches thrown atop it and a dozen soldiers were killing people as they ran out."

  She shook her head, looking back on memories perhaps centuries old.

  "All my upbringing, to instill compassion and ethics and cooperation in working out problems-- Rage wiped it away. They were hurting people I knew literally inside and out, because I was a healer. Some of whom I'd brought into the world. I went raging through them like a buzz saw, using my bare hands to crush them and tear them to pieces."

  She looked back up at them. "It was wonderful. I had found my place at last."

  Gonzales stared at her. "Jesu--" he whispered.

  She grinned. "In the Confederation they even have a place for psychopaths. They gave me a license to kill."

  Hannegan took a sip of water. "For God's sake, Gonzales. What the Hell do you think a soldier is? A Boy Scout?"

  He looked at the alien. "What kind of government are you going to make us adopt?"

  "That will be up to you on this planet to decide. Most often it works out to a hybrid of top-down controls and bottom-up controls. Pure socialism and pure capitalism are both unworkable.

  "And it will be your choice. The distance between stars, the complexity of modern commerce, and your billions-fold population, make it impossible even for us to enforce detailed top-down control. Empires, dictatorships, even federal systems don't work over interstellar distances. In the end we can force you to do very little."

  She finished her drink and sat watching the two of them.

  "It's about time for me to move on. Do you have a final question for me? Or two, or three?"

  The two policemen looked at each other. The sergeant looked ba
ck at Anna but said nothing. Gonzales said, "I have a million questions...." He was silent for long moments, staring up over the alien, spoke.

  "I can't think of one."

  Callaghan continued his silence.

  Two silvery business cards appeared as if by magic and floated in the air in front to the men within easy reach. Hannegan made no move and his card floated slowly to the tabletop. Gonzales took his and looked at it front and back.

  "Anna Prince. Her title is 'Advisor.' Handwriting on the back is abbreviated. Hmm. 'Full tour Bluebird' and 'All-expenses guest suite 10 people max 7 days'."

  "My office building is on Manhattan's west side," she said, "across the street from the south side of Columbia University. I live on the top floor when I'm in city. The guest suites are the next two floors down. The next three floors are Bluebird headquarters, the next several are headquarters for some of my other businesses, and the street level is my restaurant. Underground is for parking and delivery.

  "Full tour includes classified areas in headquarters and a couple of converted warehouses in Queens across the East River.

  "'All-expenses' means all lodging, laundry, parking if you rent or bring vehicles, and so on, and meals at the restaurant--though you can buy groceries and fix your food in your suites if you want. The '10' means you can bring family and friends and sight-see and go to plays and clubs and so on."

  "Jesus Christ." The younger man was staring at her. "I can't even imagine how much an office building costs, even to lease, in New York."

  She smiled. "The crew which set up my cover ID also set up businesses to support my ID. It did that by creating fake lines of credit, buying up or getting controlling interest in many businesses, and making them very profitable. Routine for them. They had access to the monitor's records of almost seventy years of activities, not just computers but every electrical emission on the planet, including every light bulb, motor, and brain.

  "And, no--" She looked at the sergeant. "We can't read people's minds. But we can track where they travel. Valuable data when analyzing financial flows. All that plus a true science of business means that they could quickly replace fake wealth with true wealth."