Gaudeamus

by John Barnes

  Most of the rest of the group of seven women had rushed off to newly invented identities—a covert income of around a hundred million a year will change the average professor or student’s lifestyle—but Lena Logan had let the curiosity bug bite her, and kept playing with Gaudeamus, since she hadn’t been told not to.

  Every couple of days she met a new group of aliens, who immediately lost interest in her when they discovered that she had already sold the Earth. For a while, the lab floor of her new mansion in Switzerland looked like the best sideshow she’d ever seen, as one bizarre creature after another paraded through.

  And then she met the cop.

  The cop from the galactic-multispecies-entity-that-would-be-the-galactic-government-if-there-were-such-a-thing-as-a-galactic-government-and-if-the-concept-were-meaningful didn’t look very much like the short little grays that people down in the San Luis Valley say they have been anally probed by. But he didn’t not look like them, either. He shrugged and said he’d had Earth as his beat for a long time, and not all of his native assistants and deputies had been discreet.

  His head was as flat as if he were in The Family Circus, and hairless, with a small triangular mouth that served as his breathing, eating, and excreting hole, and large bulging ovoid eyes that worked like a Newtonian reflector telescope. On his floor-length arms there were three-fingered hands on which every finger opposed every other, which was why Lena nicknamed him All Thumbs (she couldn’t make several of the sounds in his actual name). His legs, which had an extra knee or ankle (depending on what you counted as what) ended in gripping four-toed feet a bit like a lizard’s, with the toes pointing to the corners. Normally he carried his body-length tail in a gentle curl up his back, and most of it was muscular and relatively inflexible like a python, but the last ten centimeters was a delicate, prehensile structure that gave him, in effect, a third hand.

  “Kermit must have really spent a while describing that one,” I said.

  “Naw, he didn’t have to. We looked around, nobody was coming, so we went behind the rest rooms and All Thumbs got out of the back of the Explorer. I had no idea he’d been back there; I guess he can sleep or rest perfectly still for hours, under a blanket, in a box, whatever.

  “Since I have promised to tell the strict truth here, I really should admit that Hale was far cooler than I was about All Thumbs. Maybe because he’s always worked on the good side of the law, and really who this guy was, was Marshal All Thumbs. Galactic Marshal All Thumbs. Something like that. The Galactic law on this barbarian planet.”

  When Lena Logan met All Thumbs, he had explained just how awkward (but not at all unusual) humanity’s situation now was. Like law anywhere on Earth, particularly law among a diverse population, the law for the galaxy’s 89,000 (and increasing) registered civilized species was a series of compromises. Many species liked their laws altruistic and generous; many liked their laws property-oriented and market-driven; many liked law to foster cooperation, and many others to satisfy honor. The great majority were like human beings—they wanted the law to do all that, and make everyone else be moral, too.

  For a while Lena Logan thought that All Thumbs was essentially a commerce regulator dealing with primitives; then that he might be sort of a game warden whose special area was intelligent game; then that he was sort of like a BIA agent; then the equivalent of a Peace Corps volunteer; or a very pro-chicken chicken inspector. Finally it was most comforting to think of him as the marshal, and that didn’t seem to displease him. His job was to make local regulations to enforce Galactic law, and enforce those regulations, and somehow or other cause the judges who reviewed him, the species on whom he enforced the law (human and alien), and anybody who might look over his shoulder, to agree that he had done the fair thing. “Sort of like a U.S. Marshal given a copy of the Ten Commandments, the Endangered Species Act, and the Scout Law, sent west and told to make this happen and not violate the Bill of Rights while he does it, subject to review about every twenty years.”

  And what he explained to her was this. For a period corresponding to about twenty-four of our years, beginning from the first agreement to communicate, aliens making contact with a new species could buy the planet from them. Planets were bought for several different reasons. Organizations that were the equivalent of the Nature Conservancy bought planets to protect them, which sounded nice until you realized that they usually intended to exterminate most of the intelligent technological species, put the survivors permanently back into the Stone Age, and set up the planet as an eternal nature park. Other organizations bought planets to provide slaves, or to be converted into tourist spots, or sometimes just to strip for scrap—essentially they’d take all the finished and refined metal off the planet in a few seconds, which could be rough on anybody in a skyscraper or airliner at the time, but not as rough as the species that bought the planet to take all the protein.

  Unfortunately, the seven Moloch College women had sold the planet to the pTh’tong n’Wi, who were devoted to nature and wildlife—but only to the nature and wildlife of their own home-world. If their purchase held up in court, they would irradiate the Earth with enough hard gamma to wipe out everything right down to the microbes in the deepest hot springs under the oceans. They would then reseed the Earth with the full ecology of the pTh’tong n’Wi homeworld. In about three thousand years, Earth would be one among the hundreds of copies of the pTh’tong n’Wi homeworld.

  But, Lena had protested, she and the other six women had no actual authority to sell the planet. Surely All Thumbs could just arrest the seven of them for fraud, make them pay whatever the penalty for that was (even if it were death), and announce that the contract was void?

  Well, no.

  During that first-contact period, which corresponded to around twenty-four Earth years (or am I only remembering its being that number because Trav and I had already talked about significance?), every alien species that could find Earth people to talk to could buy the planet from any of them that hadn’t already sold it. This was regarded as permitting and yet controlling the natural tendency of advanced sophisticated societies to bilk and cheat more primitive ones.

  The rule that each individual could only sell the planet once was why all the freak-show aliens contacting Lena Logan were disappearing as soon as they found out she already had a contract.

  Sometime in early 2011, there would be a gigantic multi-sided lawsuit that might take eons in the courtroom but would be settled within four seconds from the perspective of our common consensus universe. At the end of those four seconds, it would be decided which of the many sales, if any, was actually valid. Human behavior and custom would be part of the evidence, but were not determining factors; the pTh’tong n’Wi’s having secured the very first contract would weigh heavily in their favor.

  Furthermore, “remember that thing that Marshall McLuhan is supposed to have said, John, that it steam engines when it’s steam engine time? Lena Logan’s monitoring system, right now, is showing that there’s about two to three re-inventions of Gaudeamus every month all over the world. People are getting the basic idea and building those damned machines out of parts from hobby stores, or things they pry off of old junked TVs, or parts from old PlayStations, nearly everywhere. And every time they do, the alien freak show comes rushing in. The pTh’tong n’Wi alone have bought the Earth more than eighty times, which All Thumbs says is actually pretty much in our favor because it can be taken as evidence that they didn’t think the first sale was valid all by itself.”

  “Can’t we just … keep the planet ourselves?”

  “That’s what All Thumbs is working on. Either that, or we end up as a Galactic protectorate, which I guess isn’t so bad except they send a police force to keep order, missionaries to straighten us out, and sanitation engineers to clean up the planet. Which isn’t all that good a deal when you consider that there’s thousands of things that are illegal in a Galactic protectorate that we’ve never thought about one way or another, and that we�
�d be getting envoys of about nine thousand religions, all of them empowered to suppress our local religions and compel everyone in the neighborhood to go to one of the alien temples or churches or whatever they called ’em, and that the first thing the sanitation engineers would do is sterilize everyone that they thought was unfit to breed, turn off all fossil fuel consumption even if it resulted in a couple winters of people freezing to death, and build a few thousand nuclear reactors. Then at whatever time in the future ninety-nine percent or so of our descendants all agree that this was the right thing to do, we get to join as full citizens. For whatever strange reason, All Thumbs kind of likes us, and he’d like to see us come in as junior members, but full-fledged citizens right from the start.”

  In typical cautious government research contractor fashion, the Xegon project had been doing Gaudeamus at such low power that it hadn’t been spotted yet; thus only the U.S. government, as far as anyone could tell, had operated Gaudeamus without getting a chance to negotiate the sale of the planet with aliens. And that had made it immensely valuable; Xegon and Negon were the only two projects going on the planet that were actually learning anything about Gaudeamus.

  The problem was that as soon as anyone turned on a working Gaudeamus experiment, aliens showed up to offer everything the experimenter ever could want. The happy inventor or scientist then sold the planet to the obviously advanced-yet-dim aliens, and took off to enjoy the proceeds.

  “Now, the problem with this, John—and it’s a big one—is that we can’t afford not to have Gaudeamus up and working by February 4, 2011, just about twenty-four years with some Tennessee windage from when the pTh’tong n’Wi first contacted the seven women at Moloch. Because once there is one big mother of a suit, everybody except one lucky planet-seller is going to have to give the stuff, or equivalent value, back. That’s a few million tons of gems and precious metals, I’d guess, and god knows how many priceless artifacts time-traveled up to here, and a bunch of stuff like patentable cancer cures. And mostly it was given to people who did not have the right to sell the planet—”

  “None of them had the right to sell the planet.” I thumped each word out on the floor with my empty beer bottle. Corner watched the bottle go up and down with samurai concentration.

  “Right. None of them did. You’re totally right. That’s why I come here, because I need to talk to a guy who’s right. Another Fat Tire?”

  “Do I have to give you the planet for it?”

  “It’s your beer, bud, I’m just helping you drink it.”

  “well, thank god somebody is, or I could be drunk. Now, so, everybody is going to have to pay back—”

  “Except whoever the Galactic Court decides had the right to sell the planet, which they decide based on cafeteria—criberia—clitoria—aw, they got rules for deciding who owned the planet and who sold it. Then that deal stands and everyone else just fucks off. Except. If you sold the planet and you didn’t have the right to do that, you have to pay it back. Whatever you got from the aliens.”

  “How do you pay back a cancer cure?”

  “Not easily. Railroad cars full of diamonds, that’s bad enough. But eternal energy sources, very advanced tech … well, there’s just a lot. Now, the thing is, if everyone would just pay them back right now, that would indicate we never wanted to make a deal in the first place, and the court would say they had to go away and leave us alone. So Lena … she’s pretty cool, John, if she’d gain some weight she’d be damn sexy …”

  “You had sex with her—”

  “Not with enough of her. She’s not like Jenapha Lee though. Jenapha Lee has the most—”

  “Tell me more about paying back the aliens. Or about pissing up a rope, for that matter. Just tell me about something that isn’t Jenapha Lee and her mongous bazongas.”

  “‘Kay. So those are the two sides.”

  “What are?”

  “Lena Logan and Susan Glasgow.” He got very serious and breathed deep. “Got to get this one out, clearly, so you remember. Big part of the story. Now, Lena Logan learned a list of legal loopholes …” I was fascinated by the alliteration for a moment and missed everything he said next, but the short summary seemed to be that if enough of the human race paid back on those contracts ahead of time—returned whatever the aliens had given in exchange for the planet—it would be taken as very strong evidence that no one should have been selling the planet, and therefore all the deals would be voided, and the planet would be as safe as it ever was, at least in a universe where asteroids wander around randomly, supernovae go off every now and then, and so on.

  “Well, then, yay Lena,” I said. “Nice of her to save us all.”

  “But that’s the thing, it’s just her, and Negon, and now Xegon, and that’s about it. Everybody else stops doing Gaudeamus research as soon as somebody with three heads and an orange toupee shows up and offers them all their dreams come true in exchange for strip mining rights to the planet. And we have to have Gaudeamus because with it we can make all that stuff ourselves, eventually, and buy up all the contracts, and save the Earth …”

  I asked him what the Susan Glasgow side was about, and I thought he was too drunk to tell me. He just muttered “bitch” a couple of times, and then finally said, “She’s about keeping the stuff. Like the lottery. Most people lose in it but they vote for it cause they know that most people lose but they figure they themselves will win. So they all give Susan a little money to make sure things don’t get paid back because they want to keep their deals, even if it costs the planet—”

  “Won’t they die with the human race?”

  “All but one will. That one gets to check into the Hilton Galactic and spend the rest of eternity shopping, I guess. Or playing guitar in front of adoring crowds. Or whatever …”

  Tammy swears that Travis said “Check into the Hilton Galactic.” He swears it must have been something else because he has no idea what that could mean. I asked him if the successful planet-sellers ended up like wives of Third World strongmen, living in the best hotels with nothing to do but shop, and he said he’d ask All Thumbs, who—if Travis isn’t just making All Thumbs up—said that hotels was the wrong concept, and suggested either zoos or quilting bees, “except when it’s not.” So maybe we got it and maybe we didn’t. Anyway, it was midafternoon and time for a long nap. I knew now that Lena Logan was trying to buy back the planet, and Susan Glasgow was trying to keep it sold, and I had grown up on Saturday morning cartoons, so I knew which side the good guys were on.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Somewhere in the middle of all that, I fell asleep, or Travis did, and when we woke up, there in my living room, we both had hangovers and it was dark outside. Luckily, though, Skin2Skin’s gig at the Mutilated Cow started at ten P.M.—time enough for us to shower, shave, put on half-ass decent clothes (in the mountain West, sweatpants are suitable for anything short of a wedding or funeral, so getting dressed up isn’t much of a production), fill travel mugs with coffee, and get going. We stopped to pick up a sack of a dozen McDonald’s hamburgers and a big box of McMaggots and gobbled those as we went.

  Eight miles west of Gunnison, there’s a turnoff to C114, which is a narrow two-lane road that winds up through Cochetopa Pass, through all kinds of gorgeous scenery, and eventually descends to the even smaller town of Saguache, which is how the Spanish explorers spelled the same Ute word (probably meaning “green”) that American settlers spelled Sawatch. I seriously doubt that any Utes would recognize either the Spanish or the English pronunciation of the word, today.

  It’s dark and lonesome and about an hour and ten minutes, but I didn’t especially feel like talking. It seemed to me that either Travis had just told me his biggest bullshit story ever, bigger than the transvestite rodeo queens festival, bigger even than the All Naked Girls Marching Band for Gun Rights, and he had done it by the unfair use of one of America’s most popular and legal drugs. My head hurt, I was concentrating on the road, and I really didn’t want to talk.

>   So after a while the son of a bitch went and fell asleep, and I might as well have been doing this stupid night drive over a mountain pass in midwinter all by myself, for my own reasons, if I had any.

  I had worked myself into one fine mood by the time I got to Saguache.

  “John,” Travis said quietly, “I tossed my bag in your back seat. I can get a ride with someone else if you just want to go home. I can tell you’re pissed off and I guess you have a right. I wouldn’t have believed me either.”

  “Shit,” I said. “If I stay, I’m going to watch you moon all over this woman Jennifer—”

  “Jenapha.”

  “That’s the one, and listen to a band that you already say sucks, and hang around for hours with nothing to do and get depressed and bored and keep thinking that I could have just gone with Kara and enjoyed some warmth and sunlight and company. So that will suck. But if I turn around and go home now, afterwards you’re going to tell me some insane story about what happens tonight, and I’ll wish I’d been here, and always wonder whether you told me the truth about what happened here tonight. And that will suck even more. All right, I’ll try to cheer up.”

  The Mutilated Cow might have been the name of a very avantgarde steakhouse, or maybe an animal-rights coffeehouse, but in fact it took its name from the strange condition that dead cattle had been found in, all over the San Luis Valley, for decades. If you drive up and down that valley, from Saguache or Moffat down to the New Mexico line, and talk to ranchers, you’ll hear twenty cattle mutilation stories—their own and all their neighbors—and what was done to the cow will be different every time.

  The cow is always found dead. Sometimes all the blood is gone, with no puddles or pools anywhere. Sometimes internal organs are stacked neatly beside it, or have been removed through neat holes apparently cut with a scalpel or laser. Sometimes parts like the face or udder or the skin on the back have been slit partly away and folded back to expose what’s underneath, sometimes some distinct set of parts is missing. Cuts into the body are almost always made in a very sharp straight cutoff, not the sort of thing a coyote’s s or a cougar’s teeth or claws could do (though there are people who contend it’s actually being done by a few surviving, unknown grizzlies, which can sometimes make very precise cuts with their great strength and razor-sharp claws. If so, the San Luis grizzlies would be almost a thousand miles south of any other grizzlies that are known to survive—but if there were going to be unseen grizzlies anyplace in the Rockies, it would have to be somewhere like the San Luis Valley).