It was, he recognised, the same sound the Gider had made when they were asked about the phenomenon the humans called the Shadow Raider. And now Trilopharus was laughing, too, a great big hearty belly laugh.
‘Oh!’ he recovered himself. ‘That’s a very long arc!’ he remarked, as if he expected Alex to know what he was talking about.
Alex just managed to stop himself answering, ‘I’m sorry?’ because Trilopharus had commented before on his habitual apologising.
‘What,’ he asked, fascinated, ‘do you mean, Trilopharus? A long arc?’
‘Oh – don’t you know arc?’ Trilopharus was surprised, but explained, readily. ‘The arc is how many intermediaries it takes for two species to communicate. We…’ he gestured between himself and Alex, ‘have a zero arc, direct contact, excellent communication. The Perithin and Gider have a short arc – one, that’s us. Gider and Perithin can’t communicate with one another directly, the Gider can’t slow down enough to make themselves understood to the Perithin and they both find the other quite difficult, culturally. But they both talk to us, so we are the arc between them, the communications link. The more extreme the differences between species, the more links you might have to go through – people who know people who know people who know people who know the ones you’re trying to talk to, you get it?’
Alex nodded, feeling a surge of thrill at that discovery. ‘You mean – there are people even you can’t communicate with?’
‘Obviously!’ Trilopharus laughed. ‘Anthropoids,’ he observed, ‘are a very small part of galactic biodiversity, Alex. There are many species which don’t communicate in any way that we can understand, many species we can’t communicate with at all. The Dawn Timers don’t even notice us. That’s what we call the really ancient species, the ones we think were the first to arise as the galaxy was forming. They occupy the central heart, which we think was where life started, spreading out as stars were formed and the spiral coalesced. Anthropoid species, like us, we tend to be on the outskirts, relative newcomers on the biodiversity scene. But there is every kind of life form out here – life will out, life will always out in the cosmic pulse, so there are carbonate, silicate, sulphurate… oh, too many to list. The ones you’re talking about, the ones who keep taking your stuff, they’re way out there, beyond any chance that we could communicate with them.’
‘Oh!’ Alex said. ‘And that sound – is that their name?’
‘Nickname,’ Trilopharus said. ‘It’s the nearest we can get to rendition of the first part of the first sound of the first syllable of a name which would take about eight years to get through. We know they have… yes, let’s call it a research probe, investigating your ships and studying the cargo that they carry. We have already sent a message to tell them that this is a concern for you and to ask them to stop doing it – the Perithin asked us to do that when your people first raised it as an issue with them – but it will take many years for that message to be conveyed down the long arc. Yes, forty eight species will have to be involved in transmitting that and the longer the arc goes on, the slower the communication gets. So you’re looking at, oh, three hundred years or so before it can even get to the…’ the seismic growl, squeaks and rattles. ‘And when it does, even telling them the message will take another century. Allow for thinking time and their response, even if they pull the probe out immediately – immediately by their standards – that won’t be for another five or six hundred years. But I wouldn’t hold out any hope even of that. They are a difficult culture to engage with since their response to most objections to their probes taking samples here, there and everywhere and never with so much as a by your leave is always, eventually, ‘We do, we are.’ They don’t mean any harm by it, we know that, they’re just curious. But if you’re a little disconcerted at them just turning up and helping themselves to your stuff, Alex, all I can say is join the club.’
Alex laughed too, at that. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘I never imagined… long arc, right. I get it.’
Trilopharus beamed approvingly.
‘You are quicker on the uptake,’ he observed, ‘than the guys at the Embassy III. The Gider tell us how that’s going – and they’re finding it quite difficult. Too many questions, not enough dancing. Every question they answer seems to generate ten more and half the time the humans there don’t seem to be able to keep up with the answers anyway. You should tell them, Alex. If you want the friendship to develop - Fewer questions. More dancing.’
‘I will pass that along,’ Alex said. ‘Thank you.’
‘Thank you,’ Trilopharus returned and with that, gave a flourishing wave. ‘See you!’ He said and was gone.
Debriefing for that session was intense, with everything that Trilopharus had said being analysed and discussed by the multi-disciplinary team. And they were joined, too, by a member of the crew who asked to sit in on the session.
Kate Naos was not, strictly speaking, a member of the crew. She had been jumped aboard the Venturi at Cestus, officially as her shipboard posting for the final three months of cadet training.
This was, however, ridiculous. Kate had spent much of the last two years aboard ships; first the Heron and then the Assegai. She had still been required to take cadet classes and comply with Academy protocols, but for much of the time had been released to carry out what the Academy described as a research project.
The research project had taken Kate more than two years of engine observations, deep thought and hard work, culminating in a moment of inspiration which had produced the Pulsus Theorem. Academics across the League were only just beginning the decades-long argument over whether she was right, but Kate herself, having gestated the Theorem, had already moved on.
She had two things going on here. The first was that she complete the departmental round and tick off all the experiences a final year cadet on shipboard practice was required to do. This was normally an opportunity for fun and games for officers and crew alike, giving snotties the traditional wind-up. But nobody was doing that to Kate; her time was too important to waste and she was one of them already, anyway.
The other thing that she had going on, tucked away under a gantry in engineering, was her project. Now that she understood the cosmic forces involved, she was experimenting with a pair of mix cores, moving from theoretical into applied physics. She was, she said, teaching the cores to sing together and that was as close as most people would get to understanding it, too.
The words which had brought her to the debriefing, almost feverish in her excitement, were Life will out, life will always out in the cosmic pulse.
‘If he’s saying what I think he’s saying, skipper,’ she said, ‘that life is a cosmic energy expressing through SUPAs, that is what the Pulsus Theorem says, too. I’d love to be able to show Pulsus to Trilopharus!’
Alex grinned at her. He liked the way that Kate just took it for granted that he would understand what she meant by SUPAs, or ‘Small Universe Perceived Actualities’. And he did, too, more or less. The small universe, to wave space physicists, was the one that they were inhabiting. And perceived actualities were the apparent presence of matter, energy and the passage of linear time, none of which had any fixed reality in the very much bigger and weirder twenty-four dimensional physics of wave space.
To Alex, wave space was something he could only perceive dimly, through its effects in the tiny little fragment of reality he knew as the universe. For Kate, though, wave space was where she lived. This could make it difficult for her to engage with the perceived actualities of everybody else’s normality. For that, she needed people around her to ground her in this universe at least part of the time.
Right now, Alex could see, the light of wave space was bright in her eyes.
‘I am sure you would,’ he said, ‘But…’
‘No questions!’ Kate held up her hands, assuring him, ‘No questions, skipper! Not one! But if I wrote it up around the gym and you asked him if he’d like to look at it…’
Alex laughed, not
without some sympathy.
‘Kate,’ he said, ‘That is a question. A silent question, maybe, but still a question!’
Kate looked at him with the appeal of a small child trying to hang on to a puppy. She was maturing into an attractive woman, recently turned twenty but still with the fresh-faced look of a younger girl. She had red hair, green eyes and a smattering of freckles which she had never learned to employ strategically. At no point in her upbringing in a Gifted Child Institute had anyone allowed her to discover that being adorably cute could get her her own way. So this was not, Alex knew, a coaxing manoeuvre, just Kate, being honest about her feelings.
‘I don’t want to ask if I’m right, skipper,’ she said. ‘I know I’m right. But it would just be so lovely, if he’d like – well, just to have someone to talk to about it.’
Alex felt his heart go out to her. For once, even Davie, Shion and Silvie had let her down as academic confidants. They could follow her theory well enough, with their off-the-scale intellects. But none of them could really understand it. Kate’s vision was unique. And that, Alex knew, had to be a very lonely feeling, at times.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘We’re not there yet. First phase, first contact, really isn’t a good place to start getting into complexities like the nature of the cosmos. We are still, basically, saying hello. And discussing physics, that’s always going to be a sensitive, if it could be perceived in any way as asking them for information they’ve already said they’re not prepared to share. So no, sorry, that is not one I’ll be putting on the list.’
Kate bowed her head briefly, the physicist at war there for a moment with the cadet. Then she lifted her head again and gave him a sad but accepting nod.
‘Skipper,’ she acknowledged and managed a smile in response to the looks of sympathy coming at her from all directions.
Alex was obliged to say no to another request, too, later in the day, and this from a source which surprised him. The head of the biology team, Inga, had been a hundred per cent supportive of the Pristine Environment protocols the Fourth had been using and would have fought them ferociously had they attempted to do anything else. Now, though, the combination of the shuttles going back and forth and the looming imminence of their departure a tantalising three days before they could explore in person… well, it had proven too much for her resolve.
‘I do believe,’ she said, ‘That we have mapped the biosphere so thoroughly that there can be no harm, either way, in bringing the quarantine forward a few days to explore selected habitats.’
Alex shook his head. ‘You,’ he observed, ‘of all people.’
Inga blushed a little, but held her ground.
‘I know, I said…’ she admitted, since she had indeed been forthright on the topic of not contaminating this amazing environment, or allowing any samples aboard. ‘But normally,’ she argued, ‘it would take years to map a biosphere, you’re usually looking at millions of species and hugely complex interactions. But here, astounding as it is, we have an extraordinarily tiny range of plants and fungi and with the probe data in from every habitat, I can confidently assert that we’ve found all the life here, we have a biomap and that being the case, I do think we could advance the quarantine to make the most of the time that we have.’
‘Inga,’ Alex said, ‘Don’t you think I want to go out there? I’ve dreamt of it – literally!’ He grinned. ‘I dreamt I was outside the ship, standing there, looking up at it and it felt so real, I woke up with a jolt. All of us, every single one of us, is burning to go out there, to see with our own eyes, to touch, to be there. Don’t you think I’d love to take Silvie for a swim? It’s so hard on her being that close to an ocean but not allowed to swim. She doesn’t complain, but I know how much she wants to go. It’s hard, it is, and I get that it’s so much harder for you, too, a biologist looking at the most extraordinary biosphere you’ve ever seen. But Excorps does the month-long quarantine for a reason, you know.’
‘Yes, I know,’ she said. Excorps would have maintained quarantine on pristine environment worlds for a year if they could. Biospheres changed over time, after all, and something which was a virtually undetectable spore at the time of first survey could turn into something much nastier as the seasons progressed. And that had happened, too. Excorps had a store of ‘awful warning’ stories, passed down through their personnel as part of their training; case studies of when things had gone wrong. This particular case study was more than fifteen hundred years old, dating way back to the early days of wide-ranging exploration, but it was still the relevant study underpinning the pristine-world survey procedures: ‘The Serpent Spore.’
It had been named that by the Excorps expedition, presumably because the thing had snuck up on them with a venomous attack. Incredibly, back then, Excorps had only been required to spend a few days in orbit around a newly discovered planet, scanning it from space and sending in a very limited range of probes. Given the absence of intelligent life and with no obvious dangers they’d promptly shift themselves down there and set up a camp. And, even more incredibly, they would live there without suits, happily going about breathing the atmosphere and handling the flora. This particular camp had had to be removed in a hurry, though, after it was discovered that a fungi which was quite harmless during the mild weather had a very unexpected reaction to the first frosts of autumn. This snap of cold not only triggered it to fire off spores in massive quantities, but induced a chemical reaction which made those spores extremely toxic to humans. One of the expedition had died of cyanide poisoning before they’d realised what was happening. And Inga, reminded of that, sighed.
‘I just hoped…’ she said and as a last ditch effort, ‘Could we at least bring samples in? Under absolute quarantine, obviously? Not to be opened aboard ship?’
‘When we leave here,’ Alex said, ‘We are going to collect an ambassador who has no immune system whatsoever and eighteen attendants who may have an immune system but no acquired immunity to any of our pathogens. The ship will be stripping right down to full quarantine clean-room rules and that means we are going to destroy even the organic foods we have stored in the hold. And however many quarantine wrappers you packed any samples in, even in a duralloy sealed crate locked aboard a shuttle with the airlock double-sealed, it would still represent a psychological contaminant.’
As she looked at him in some surprise, he explained, ‘If we took you into an alien ship full of technology you didn’t understand and an environment that is so toxic you can only survive it with alien tech implanted in your body, how anxious would you be? And if the aliens, assuring you that they were keeping you safe, then mentioned that they had some stuff they were a bit worried about themselves so they’d put it in a box over there, how comfortable would you be with that?’
‘Ah…’ Inga grimaced. ‘See what you mean. You’d need a lot of trust in them, huh.’
‘Massive,’ said Alex and left her, regretful but resigned.
Inga was in the front row of the audience for that evening’s lecture, though, giving him a smile to show that there were no hard feelings.
This was, or could have been, one of the more challenging of the briefings, building as it did on the already very high impact of the Marek’s historical claim to the territory they now occupied as conquerors. Alex had expected the mood to be pretty serious, today, with a lot of big and difficult ideas under discussion.
What Trilopharus had said, though, had had unexpected impact on the crew. Suddenly, the universe was a lot lot bigger than the relatively tiny matter of the Marek still trying to assert sovereignty over space which was no longer theirs. Suddenly, they were talking about long arc, about people so strange even the Chethari didn’t understand them, about Dawn Timers who did not even notice their presence… the mood on the ship, the tone of discussions, was so thrilled and excited that Alex felt he almost had to bring them down to focus on the rather more immediate issue of the mission they were about to undertake.
Buzz had prepared a
model for this briefing, a diagram showing the situation in a simplified format. In this, the Marek occupied a planet at the centre, with only twenty of the human-occupied worlds around it identified, including Prisos, Arak and Samart.
‘So,’ Alex said. ‘Given that neither the Marfikians nor the human populations can move themselves out of this situation, the goal we have to be working for here is to turn this,’ he indicated the encompassing dodecahedron, ‘back into this.’ He shrank it back so that it fitted only around Marfik and its near environs. ‘There are only two methods to achieve that. The first is to compel their withdrawal by a massive, united military effort – and I think we all know what kind of casualties that would entail. Planets would burn. It really is not an option that anyone is willing to take. The second option, though, is to convince the Marfikians that the humans in this space are not a threat to them and that it is safe for them to withdraw. That, obviously, is not going to be any kind of quick or easy fix, but now we understand their motives for controlling this space as they do, we can at least evaluate what it would take to convince them to withdraw. And there are, we believe, two elements to that. The first is that they will need an absolute assurance that none of our disease-ridden ships will go anywhere near their planet. That isn’t something we can just promise them and they will take our word for it, we will need to figure out something we can put on the table which will guarantee that for them, some form of defence which is at least as good as a Veil. And yes…’ he smiled wryly as a wave of incredulity passed through the auditorium, ‘I am talking about developing the holy grail of system defences and handing it to our enemy so they can protect themselves from us. Not an easy thing to get your head around, I know, but give it some thought and it does make sense. If they feel safe, that their quarantine is secure, they will no longer feel the need to control the worlds around them, at least not from a biohazard control motivation. So, that’s one thing and obviously requires a long term technological development. But the other factor… well, that is rather more sensitive.’
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