He let than hang in the haunted silence, then took another drink of his beer.
‘Thank you, Mr Jezno.’ Alex resumed the podium as the applause died away. ‘So,’ he said. ‘It is fair to say, I believe, that there is a majority concensus that implants like the artificial immune system are ethically acceptable because they make good a deficiency and enable people without such immunity to live on the same basis as the rest of us. At the same time it is generally agreed that seeking to prolong the lives of individuals by extreme measures is ethically abhorrent. But as with all such issues there is a grey area between, a line which is constantly subject to negotiation as we debate, as a society, what we regard as acceptable and what is not. So, bringing that debate to the present day, let me show you this…’ an image appeared on the screen behind him, a small, medical-looking gadget like a kidney bean with little hairy wires.
‘This,’ said Alex, ‘is a cortical interface. It’s a real thing. Illegal, of course, but they do exist. If you have this implanted in your brain it acts as a hard drive, recording all the information that comes in through the optic and aural nerves. So it records everything you see and hear. And it has an interface that you can access to play back those recordings. So it gives you, in effect, an eidetic memory – perfect recall.’ He read the slight envy which riffed here and there and smiled. ‘We are all,’ he observed, ‘studying courses. Some of us have to work harder at that than others. So how helpful would it be to just be able to take in a whole course at one glance and know you could access any of the information, any time? And how helpful, too, professionally? And the thing is,’ he looked calmly around at them, ‘I do have permission to use it.’ He paused at the outburst of exclamations.
‘Yes, for real,’ he confirmed. ‘Illegal as they are, there are circumstances under which our government is prepared to license their use. I have been authorised to use one of these myself – in fact, the suggestion was made quite strongly that it would have been extremely helpful in the initial incidents with Trilopharus appearing, to have a record of exactly what I’d seen. I refused, I can tell you, in no uncertain terms. Quite apart from the ethical considerations, those things have a very nasty habit of shorting out and frying your optic and aural nerves and they have been linked to all kinds of long term health issues including neurochemical dysfunction and brain cancer. Professor Penarth, I am sure, would be more than happy to discuss the side effects with you in detail if anyone is still inclined to think they want one.’
‘Form an orderly queue,’ said Simon, looking around as if expecting hordes of people wanting to apply for an implant. Then, seeing that everyone was avoiding his gaze, folded his arms and gave Alex a satisfied nod.
‘So,’ said Alex, with a grin. ‘My question for this evening is this – if it was safe and freely available, would you have one? And would you also want the optic and aural upgrades which give you the same visual and hearing range as a media camera?’ He smiled at the burst of amazement that that could be anything more than something you saw in movies. ‘And yes, that is real too,’ he said. ‘Zoom in on detail kilometres away, pick up conversations going on inside buildings. So – if it was there, safe, free, yours for the taking… who wants one?’
He ended the lecture with that and knew from the very animated buzz as the audience left that they’d be debating this for some time.
Mister LIA, though, was scowling at him again. Bad enough to have the existence of cortical interface devices revealed to people who had no right or need to know, but to put up a picture… Mister was shocked. And he was offended, too. The LIA had taken out his implants before deploying him onto the Venturi, since the full medical workup they’d insist on would find them. In fact, the Fourth had spotted that he’d had them anyway. Simon, being Simon, had commented that he’d had some right cowboys mucking about in his brain and that the cloned retina in his right eye was a Friday Night job if ever he’d seen one.
Mister, still clinging to what he believed was a viable cover at the time, had given some story about an accident way back and had refused to allow the medic to go in, as Simon put it and clean up the mess.
And now there was the skipper, giving a talk on the ethics of biotech implants. Mister felt got at. He strode out, stiff rumped and huffy and Alex glanced after him with a sympathy Mister would neither have credited nor understood.
Anger, denial, Alex recognised. That and an inability to see beyond the immediate. Mister had been trained to be keenly observant and to spot and respond to all manner of risks, but he was a field agent, not an analyst. His IQ might be high, but he had never developed the skills of deep, reflective thinking, or the mental flexibility to empathise with a view which ran counter to his own. If he made any contribution at all to the debate, it would be to tell people angrily that using such tools and any other covert methods was fully justified by the priority of protecting the public. He might, even, churn out the LIA mantra on this, which was that you had to take whatever edge you could get. But he wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t admit any other view.
The next day’s lecture, Alex knew, was going to hit him like a truckload of bricks.
Ten
The next day Trilopharus showed them where he was calling from, at least narrowing it down to a blob on their enlarged chart. Alex got to ask a question, too, that had been on his mind since the very first encounter.
‘The fanfare,’ he asked. ‘Does that have mathematical significance?’
‘Er, no?’ Trilopharus seemed a bit baffled, but perhaps someone else he was talking to gave him a prompt. ‘It’s in the records you gave the Gider,’ he said, ‘as announcing a public appearance. We thought it would be helpful to you to know that we are about to arrive. The Gider say they like that, at the Embassy III.’
‘They do,’ Alex confirmed, grinning. ‘But the fanfare, Trilopharus – it happens at the same time you appear.’
‘Does it? No.’ Trilopharus was evidently checking. ‘It’s three tenths of a second ahead of… oh, right. I see what you mean. Not giving you enough notice, is it?’
‘Well, if it is intended as an alert,’ Alex said, ‘Three seconds would be better. And, perhaps… is it possible to have it just a bit quieter?’
Trilopharus agreed to this, explaining that they’d picked up from the Gider what level of noise it took to attract human attention.
‘We can be as quiet as you like,’ he said, ‘And…’
All the blinding folds of light which made it so difficult to make out any details or even see his face clearly just faded out, leaving Trilopharus standing there, fully visible for the first time.
‘Is that better?’
Alex gazed at him. Trilopharus’s face had perfect proportions according to the Golden Ratio – a theory of beauty which went way back to the time of the Cartasay Empire. That was why it looked unreal, like a computer generated image of androgynous perfection.
Now that it was fully visible, though, his expression could be seen – an intelligent, friendly, amused look, matching his voice and manner far more closely than the dazzling angel he had been until then.
‘Thank you,’ Alex said. ‘I can see you properly now.’
Trilopharus was still surrounded with light – clothed in it, Alex thought. If someone could take pale light and weave it into softly flowing fabric, then drape it into robes which fell from the shoulder, that was what it would look like. And his hair – he had hair, but it was the faintest, baby-like wisp, floating about his head as if affected by a static charge. The entire figure was surrounded by a halo glow.
‘You should have said,’ Trilopharus observed. ‘If you couldn’t see me properly before.’
‘I thought,’ Alex explained, ‘that was just how you looked.’
‘That’s how we are with the Gider,’ Trilopharus told him. ‘Much quieter, of course, with the Perithin. So, tomorrow…’ a graceful hand went to his lips. ‘Ssssh!’
Alex was laughing as Trilopharus vanished and agreed, in debriefing, th
at that had been a very productive session.
‘We could,’ Eldovan suggested, ‘ask if he’d stay a bit longer, tomorrow. Offer to take him on a tour of the ship, perhaps?’
Alex shook his head. ‘No,’ he said and as she looked enquiringly at him, ‘I’m going with my instincts here,’ he said. ‘I know they’ve said that they are pacing this out of consideration for us, not to over-tire us, but it is apparent that there are technical issues, too, in maintaining the call for more than a few minutes at a time. And I suspect that this is every bit as high impact for them as it is for us – maybe even more so. They’re clearly not a people used to dealing with change at all, let alone fast-paced new things. Its apparent that there is a lot of discussion going on their end, too, so they may need time, too, to process. So as frustrating as it is when we have a million questions and we only get to ask three a day, we’ll stick with that unless Trilopharus himself asks to stay longer or to come more often.’
‘Your call,’ Eldovan acknowledged. Which it was, quite literally, since Trilopharus rarely even acknowledged anybody else and didn’t seem interested in talking to anyone other than Alex.
Alex was happy with that, pleased with the way things were going and glad of the time between calls for them all to process what was going on.
And later that day, he went up to inspect the now completed leisure facility.
They’d done well with that, with very limited resources. Two thirty-berth survival domes had been popped up at the selected location on the eighth planet. Beyond that and limited use of the ship’s SEP, they’d only been able to borrow things from the ship and be creative.
They had certainly been that. Catering had devised a special menu for the domes, including the opportunity to sample what they claimed to be an authentic taste of mushroom steak and cabbage cooked three ways. There was a bar, too – non-alcoholic drinks only, of course, but with the atmosphere spacers expected from a hangout. There was a games room and plenty of outdoor activities. They’d even cleared a flickball court on the airless surface, with a schedule of games for a three day tournament.
‘Excellent,’ Alex said, knowing how much work had gone into all that. ‘Very well done, all of you.’ The first batch of shoreleavers were already there; five hour passes given for the afternoon and Alex nodded to them. ‘Enjoy.’
Everyone was back on the ship, though, for the now routine talk which the skipper gave at 2000, after people had had their evening meal but before the customary release to attend all the clubs and events which tended to start at 2100.
‘This evening,’ Alex said., ‘we are going to talk about the Marek.’
He put an image up on the screen. The figure on it looked like a pre-pubescent child, completely hairless and with a faint golden gleam to the skin.
‘Yes,’ Alex said, as there were hissed intakes of breath around the ship and, he was pleased to note, quite a few nods, too, from the brighter ones who’d already worked out where the lecture series was heading. Disgust for the alien… issues of tolerance… biotech implants… Didn’t take a huge leap, really, to recognise that they would end up discussing Marfikians.
‘The Marek,’ said Alex, with a dispassionate air, ‘as they were before the plague. Some of you will know this already but for those who don’t, a potted history. Prior to the plague, the Marek were an isolationist but perfectly peaceful society. They were not, we know, the warmest of neighbours, or hosts. They have been described to me as the kind of neighbours who not only make you take your shoes off at the door and give you a hand wipe but follow you around cleaning everywhere you’ve walked or sat or anything you’ve touched, while asking you repeatedly to take another shower. Their world was sterile, not a blade of grass, not a microbe. Hygiene, both physical and cultural, was so important to them that they eliminated anything about themselves that they felt was unhygienic, like body hair, and so balanced the nutrients of their diet that they no longer needed to excrete. This made them odd, no question, other species describe them as being eccentric, but they were peaceful, no kind of threat to anybody.
‘Then the plague came and they went down a desperate route. They devised an artificial immune system. Nobody else wanted to know. You’ve heard Shion on how hard it was for her to cope with the system we use, that she actually felt for a while that she would rather die. And that is how strongly other species felt about it, that they would rather die out as a people than live on those terms, dependent on machines to keep them alive. But the Marek felt that it was justified, at least as a temporary measure until more effective means of eradicating the plague could be found. So they installed that system in themselves and then they closed their borders, shut down entirely, total quarantine lockdown, not even comms. So, nobody knew what they were doing in eight thousand years or so of isolation. But at some point, we don’t know when, they moved beyond life-support systems and into biotech enhancement. At what point they crossed into what we term cyborgs, we don’t know. At what point they decided that emotions were unhygienic and eliminated them, we don’t know. All we do know is that when our ship discovered their planet, that process had resulted in the abomination we now call Marfikians.’
He looked around at the very quiet, worried faces.
‘I use the word abomination advisedly,’ he said. ‘Remember the tale of the Immortals. What the Marek had done to themselves is morally abhorrent to every species out there – regardless of what they have done, even what they are is a horror and atrocity. And this is what other species mean when they say that they grieve for the Marek. They do not mean the monsters that are living on that planet now. They mean the people that they were before, the odd, hygiene obsessive but decent people who vanished behind that quarantine and were lost, just as the Olaret and the Cartash were lost, leaving behind them their own kind of survival genome. A legacy which we, now, have to contend with.’
There were sober nods, some purposeful murmurs and a mutter or two which Alex ignored.
‘And that,’ he said, ‘brings me to a piece of information that’s been kept locked away on a nine-ack-alpha-plus need-to-know so tight that if you were a regular Fleet ship then I would keep it from you, no question. But that is not how we work, is it? Full mission disclosure, full team participation. And you will not be able to understand why the Pirrellothians are sending Chamlorn Lady Ursele to Lundane without full mission briefing. So, here it is. The Big Bad, as it is known in the very limited circles of people who even know it exists.’
He put up a chart and paused for a moment to allow everyone to take it in. It was a plain star chart encompassing both League space and Marfikian territories, but with no borders or even inhabited systems identified.
‘Bear with me,’ Alex requested, ‘While I take you through history as we have always believed it to be. In our understanding, significant history began two thousand years ago with the first superlight exploration heading out from Chartsey.’ He activated the chart and Chartsey flashed into brilliance, rapidly followed by the inhabited worlds which had been discovered in that golden age of exploration. ‘Here,’ he indicated, ‘we came to Prisos, a world which was itself already undertaking early space flight.’
He moved the indicator, showing Pirrell. ‘Here, we found a system we could not reach because every ship approaching it ran into increasing vibration and had to turn back, while probes were destroyed before they could get anywhere near. We found legends of this world on many other worlds in the region, most of them referring to it as the Clouded or Veiled world.’
He moved straight on as more and more systems flashed into brilliance. ‘And this,’ he pointed out one of the more remote specks, ‘is Arak. Arak too was an industrialised society at the time of first contact and it is arguable whether they or Prisos would have developed intersystem travel first, had it not been for our own ships arriving. Both Prisos and Arak developed rapidly with major League investment. They had their own spacedocks in under a decade and it wasn’t long after that they were exploring on t
heir own account and setting up colonies here, there and everywhere. There were, as you see, an abundance of habitable planets in this region, so many that its almost certain that many of them were terraformed. Some were uninhabited and others had populations considered so primitive that either the Prisosans or the Araki moved on on them, ostensibly as aid missions. The League had no control over what was going on out there, it was all happening too fast and we could barely even keep up with the worlds our own ships were finding. But it was clear from the outset that Prisos and Arak were rivals, both throwing everything they had into exploration and territory-grabbing as they tried to become the dominant power in the region.
‘It is at this point I should mention Junter’s Drift.’ He smiled wrily as a few of the more well informed members of his audience grimaced or even groaned. ‘This,’ he said, ‘was the cause of the first intersystem war in human history. The League – and heaven knows what we were thinking at the time – established a mining operation here, at the uninhabited system of Junter’s Drift, granting Prisos and Arak equal rights to share it. Within three years both were claiming it exclusively and the League had to intervene when the conflict escalated into declaration of hostilities. A temporary truce had been imposed and a League squadron was enforcing the shared use of the facilities when news arrived of the Marfikians’ first attack.’ He paused, speaking quietly now, his manner thoughtful. ‘It is important to understand that we view those events, in hindsight, knowing what had happened. But at the time nobody knew who the Marfikians were, where they’d come from or what they wanted. The Excorps ship which had made first contact with them was simply reported as missing, as so many exploration ships were and nobody made the connection till a long time after these events. So at the time all that anyone knew was that a small alien craft had appeared at Boran and broadcast a message telling them that they were now under the authority of Marfik and must acknowledge that or face the destruction of their cities until they complied. It was such a small ship and just there on its own, the Borani didn’t hesitate – they fired missiles at it. Word was that none of the missiles got anywhere close and that the Marfikians had in fact fired a devastating shot at one of Boran’s biggest cities, utterly annihilating it. We all know how things went after that, world after world falling to their conquest, the League’s first attempts to defend them, the decision to withdraw, to consolidate our forces and launch a full scale war of liberation. And it was, of course, the biggest defeat in League history, turned around with the stand the remnants of our forces made to defend Cherque.’
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