Asimov's Science Fiction: June 2013 (11 page)

His sadness was theirs. His grief and anguish made every face hurt. At that point, Pamir could have ended this chore. His plan was to walk out of this place and invent his death, using a stand-in body and fake damage from the crash landing. But the earnest smart watchful faces didn't want him to leave, and he didn't want solitude just now.

He was standing in the middle of the red granite round.

At the edge of the crowd was one young woman. She was Jon's relative. This many generations after his leaving, everybody was part of his family. And in her hand was a teapot that someone had remembered. Careful hands had taken it off its shelf and cleaned it up, and there was even cold tea inside, ready to be given in some little ceremony devised for this very peculiar occasion.

Pamir smelled the tea, and at that moment, for endless good reasons, he confessed.

No, he didn't name himself. Nor did he mention that his namesake died more than ten centuries ago. What he told them was the story that he had revealed only in pieces to the investigators and the overseeing captains. He told about Tailor's quest for enlightenment, and he described a fleet of exploratory ships racing out to neigh-boring galaxies. With minimal detail and words, he explained how the Kajjas was afraid of invisible sovereigns, and Jon admitted that he was temporarily sick with that fear, but then at the end, waiting for the engine to fire once more, he decided that there was no ground or heart to any of these wild speculations.

It took weeks for his pulverized body to be made into something living, and then into a man's shape, and finally into his old body.

After months of care, he was finally awake again. He was eating again. His attendant was a harum-scarum. The alien told him that two of his companions were sharing a room nearby, each a little farther in the healing than he was, and when the human asked about the other two, a grave sound emerged from the attendant's eating mouth. Then she explained that both had died instantly, and they had felt nothing, which was a sorry way to die, oblivious to the moment.

But his two wonderful friends had not died, of course.

In that bed, restrained by lousy health and the watchful eyes of doctors, Pamir could suddenly see everything clearly. G'lene's own words came back to him. Why would the galaxy have a thousand stardrives but only one basic mind? And how could the thousand or ten thousand original civilizations all vanish together in the remote past? Why can't there be forces at work and different minds at work, hidden in myriad ways?

Pamir paused.

Where-Peace-Rains listened to his silence.

He coughed weakly into a shaking fist, and the girl, urged by others, started forward with her offering of cold water infused with ordinary tea.

He stopped her.

"It's like this," he said. "If there are hidden captains, and in one measure or another they are steering our galaxy, then how can I deny the possibility—the distinct probability—that they would be naturally curious about some one hundred million year-old vessel that was getting washed up on our shore? Tailor believed that this mission was his, but that doesn't make it so. Maybe it never was. And in the end, our masters got exactly what they wanted, which was a viable sample of novel technologies, and with G'lene, a creature whom they could talk to and perhaps learn from."

When did the man begin to cry?

Jon wasn't certain, but he was definitely crying now.

Encouragement was offered, and once again, the girl and the tea came forward. She had a nice smile. He had seen that same smile before, more than forty millennia ago. He was crying and then he had stopped crying, wiping his face dry with a sleeve, and he said to the girl, "Give me the pot. I want to hold it, like old times."

She was happy to relinquish the chore.

But as she pulled back, she saw what was in her hands now. She felt the glass threads squirming of their own volition. Laughing nervously, she said, "What are these things?"

He offered his best guess.

Everybody wanted to see, including the cameras.

But he waved the others off, and then just to her, he muttered, "They could be a danger. G'lene had one inside her, and it made her halfway crazy. Tailor found several hundred more before we crashed, but on my own, on the sly, I found a few. I never told anybody, and that's five of them. You keep them. Put them somewhere safe, and give them to your next thousand generations. Please."

The girl nodded solemnly, putting the threads into her best pocket.

"What if?" he said.

"What if what, Jon?" she asked.

He sighed and nodded

"What if this brain of mine is designed to be stupid?" he asked. "What if the obvious and important can't be seen by me, or by anyone else?"

A sorrowful face made her prettier. She wasn't yet twenty, which was nothing. It was barely even born by the man's count. But after struggling for something to say—something kind or at least comforting—she touched the man with her cool little hand. "Maybe you're right," she said. "But when you talk about that poor friend of yours, the girl and her suffering... I wonder if perhaps there is no treachery, no conspiracy. Maybe it is a kindness, making all of you a little foolish.

"Letting you forget the awful truth about the universe.

"Isn't that what you do with children, lending them the peace that lets them sleep through their nights....?"

www.gdnordley.com
> lives in Sunnyvale, California, where, on reaching age sixty-five, he strives to do less engineering and volunteer activity and more writing. His latest novel,
To Climb a Flat Mountain,
from
variationspublishing.com
is now available in ebook and POD format.
The Black Hole Project
and
After The Vikings
are now in the prepublication process at Variations. The author's latest tale takes us to a far future of indefinitely extended lifetimes, post singularity economics, and contact with vastly older civilizations where, nonetheless, decisions, character, and sacrifice still matter, as symbolized by...

We were newly arrived on Earth, and all four of our royal feet hurt. But we had a courtyard to cross and then a formal introduction to the empress of Earth to endure, before we could begin our plea. We would endure this gravity for the sake of the urgent diplomacy involved.

Ignoring the oppressive high pressure, a fountain in the palace courtyard gushed water upward many times our own four segment height—two meters in local measure—then fell down in curtains blown to our left by a slight breeze. It was a memorial; once before, human beings had gone to the stars to right a wrong, and not all had returned. That had been a tragedy—but it meant our mission was not without hope.

Awful news had poured in from lightyears away. All projections indicated that within one hundred to three hundred local years, one innocent intelligent race would be exterminated by another, whose intelligence was a matter of debate, but whose technological abilities grew exponentially. Preparations to do something about this would have begun promptly, and they would have to involve this planetary system's resources. There were no others close enough.

A dark sky with roiling clouds overhead promised a sprinkle or two, as did the slight ionization of the air sensed by our antennae. The lining of our mouths tasted the subtle tart chemistry of the brightly colored plants around us.

A tall thin human approached, clothed in the same standard dark blue of all the palace staff we had seen. It was a black-haired male, clean-shaven, and his decorations indicated a high place in the local hierarchy. As he came nearer, we recognized the Honorable James Omata, the royal coordinator of alien affairs with whom we'd
had many conversations during our hive-ship's deceleration from near lightspeed. We read his face through a mask of discipline to indicate curiosity and some excitement at meeting us in person despite our long virtual association.

As cosmic luck would have it, our voices could make the sounds of their speech fairly well, except for the "th" and "ch" sounds, which we approximated with a hard "sh." We turned to our spaceport escorts and said, "We thank you so very much; please enjoy the rest of your day."

The human woman who was their leader smiled and bowed slightly. With that they turned quietly, but with choreographed precision, and walked away from us as Omata approached. This species of individuals, only lightly bound to each other by instinct, evidently enjoyed the pretense of acting as if they had one mind.

"James, it is so good to see you," we said as we came nearer.

"I feel the same way, your Majesty. Her Majesty is concluding an audience," his eyes rolled up ever so slightly, "with the crown princess, and asked me to escort you to the throne room personally. I believe she wanted you and me to have a few moments together."

"And made a virtue of necessity!" Our hive-queen laughed, a series of staccato clicks in our species that James knew well. The behavioral eccentricities of the crown princess had become well known to us during our three-year-long deceleration near lightspeed.

"Such things are why she is called 'Her Wisdom...' "

"... but not to her face," we finished his sentence.

He nodded with a smile. "How are you holding up under all this gravity?"

"Our preparations have been excellent. Can you see the antenna stiffeners?"

He looked carefully. "Not at all."

"Our high collar looks natural to you?"

"I would not suspect it of holding up your head."

"Good." Fashion and utility had fortunately converged. The exoskeletal supports beneath our capes cradled our four walking legs so perfectly that we hardly noticed them, and the capes covered the mechanism so well that we seemed to flow along as if on wheels, rather than clatter like metal spiders. The net supporting our lower abdomen seemed perfectly tuned to offset the local pull by six tenths. We nodded to James, a gesture that both recognized his compliment and demonstrated our costume engineering.

We did not mention our feet.

We chatted about the affairs of our coming; human tours of the hive ship, updates of the galactic library, the unfortunate problem of an aggressive new race only two hundred light years away. At length, he touched his head; unlike ours, their telepathy was biologically engineered and still had signs of being a new addition.

"It appears the empress is offering a slight change of protocol, should it suit you. Would you be willing to meet the crown princess along with Empress Marie today?"

We made some more clicks of laughter. "Tell her we would be delighted."

As we walked by the fountain, the wind shifted and we felt a very slight spray. What a luxury that would have been for our desert-dwelling ancestors, a billion years ago!

The ceremonial room was impressively huge, doubly so, given the gravity of this world. It was ancient by their standards, having once been the place of ritual for a religion, and before that, the local headquarters of a large empire. It once had several floors surrounding an interior courtyard; now it was a huge shell, with crossed wooden beams far overhead, along with, no doubt, as many invisible strengtheners as needed to keep the five-thousand-year-old structure together.

It had been, we remembered, ten times that amount of time since
we
had last seen
our homeworld. Such is the lot of galactic roamers. What must it be like for them, when the universe is new, bright, and full of the yet-to-be experienced? No hive-queen still lived from those days of our race, and records were never quite like experience.

A few dark-blue-clothed humans walked around the periphery, sneaking an occasional look at us, perhaps not realizing that our compound eyes brought everything to us in great clarity except for the half-steradian cone opposite our mouth, and not perhaps realizing that we were entirely comfortable with their curiosity. Our children did much more than look, as they were our extended eyes and ears and their images and sounds flowed seamlessly into our hive-queen. The humans were much more their own agents than our children were, but their experiences of our entrance would also find their way into what passed as Empress Marie's racial consciousness.

What we would do here was for all time. There are few first things to be had in this ancient Galaxy, and our presentation to the human Empress Marie was one of them.

They announced our presence in a formula perhaps as old as the building. Trumpets and drums played and those humans, who looked so alike and moved together in such coordination as to seem like hive children, marched alongside us, then peeled off to the sides of the huge room. Our hive children, as arranged, did likewise.

We drank in this ceremony, and greatly appreciated their staging it despite our aching feet. We were suitably awed, and thrilled by the experience—one of those moments of wonder all too rare in the cosmos. We thought again of their individuality and how difficult it would be to get an equal number of hive-queens to behave in such a ritualized, choreographed manner.

Our hive-queen alone walked up to a place before the platform on which sat the throne and stopped. In immense ages past, a hive-queen would never have been so alone; ancient emotions rose up and were quieted.

Empress Marie sat on a huge and much-gilded chair. To her right was a simply—even scantily, for them—clad young human female with a somewhat bemused smile on her face. She would be Crown Princess Ann Isabella Masami Windsor Carolina. To her left was a powerful-looking and well-decorated human male holding an ornamented stick of almost our hive-queen's height. He would be the Lord Master of the Staff, the right honorable Thaddeus Zwicky, who led the humans of this palace.

He thumped this staff twice on the wood of the platform and announced us again: "hive-queen Anathor of the Children of Light accompanied by his most honorable Royal Counselor of Alien Affairs, James Thelvin Krentin Omata."

James had spent many pleasant hours with us concocting a way of representing our title and provenance in their language; as a result, we were the "non-thunderers," a loose translation of our hive-queen's enlightenment name.

There was a slight pause as the empress looked from side to side at her courtiers, to make sure, we thought, that it was her turn to speak in this ceremony.

"Our greetings to you and your race, Queen Anathor," Empress Marie said.

"Our greetings to you and yours, Your Royal Highness. May this day be well met in our mutual histories." Those were our lines in this ceremonial play James and Thaddeus had written.

"Hi, Queen."

That was the princess, clearly off script. It saddened us only in that it would sadden those who had put such work into this once-in-the-history-of-the-Galaxy ceremony. The princess was at the age when many of her dozens of predecessors had abdicated, not wanting the duties of her mother; she clearly didn't think much of them, but she had not abdicated, yet.

We nodded to her, which was the best we could do in the way of a smile, and temporized, hoping we would not create a Galactic Incident and endanger the succession nor our mission, "Our greetings to you as well, Your Highness."

We heard James let out a slight sigh, probably of relief and probably not audible to those of his race. Thaddeus' face was immobile, but his eyes had begun to water slightly and his grip on the staff seemed very tight. Our antennae are quite sensitive across a variety of senses, and we realized we would need to bring all of them into play at this point.

We made a conscious effort to control the fluttering of our antennae and keep our posture straight; James at least would have recognized the signs of stress in our species, and some other humans may have put in the study effort, too. They were likely having quite a chitchat about us on their net, and while none of the individuals would match our organic brainpower, they would exceed it collectively. Anyway, organic brainpower was beside the point; their "Earthmind," an orbital cybernetic repository for generations who had given up physical form, would certainly be involved. Not that any of this vast assembly of brainpower could do much about the behavior of a young human female who was a hive-queen onto herself.

"You can call me Annie when this is over," she said. "Hey, we have the same name! Who would have thought that?"

She was looking right at James, who held his face rigid. But one did not have to be a well-sensed hive-queen with several years of studying human beings to tell that the man was extremely upset at this turn of events and would so much rather be somewhere else. We saw a slight frown on the Empress Marie's face. Not good.

Well, we are not for nothing a starfaring hive with twelve hundred and thirty-four first contacts behind our myriad lenses.

"We fear that we did, Your Highness. Many things went into selecting a name for us in your language, and the likeness of this one to your own pleased us greatly, even if our dear friend the honorable Counselor had reservations. If it does not please you, Your Highness, it is not a word of our language and it would be a small matter for us to make adjustments."

"It pleases
us,"
Empress Marie said quickly and somewhat severely. "It pleases us greatly. We are honored by your presence among the worlds of humanity and at our court."

She was back on script, and that was our cue. "And we are honored to be here."

"Let this be the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship between our races."

The princess laughed. "Fruitful? Fruitful?" She laughed again, then put a hand in front of her mouth in a belated gesture of decorum.

Empress Marie shut her eyes briefly and her lips tightened. James sagged. Thaddeus gripped the staff even more tightly, if that were possible.

"So shall it be," we added, hoping we did not offend the princess too badly by ignoring her remark.

The empress spoke to James. "We entrust our visitors to your care." Then she turned to our hive-queen. "Our world is your world, our house is your house."

"Maybe they'll put it on the market?" The princess giggled again, for the benefit of an audience that would eventually span the galaxy and beyond.

"By your leave, your Majesty," James said, ignoring the princess completely.

"You may leave." The empress said in a formal, controlled voice.

The humans and our children bowed to the empress. We nodded to her, and she back to us, not that we were her equal but that what we represented put us on equal standing. It was somewhat a condescending act to the representative of a ten-billion-year-old galactic civilization of twenty-eight thousand races and over a million inhabited star systems, and James had worried about that, but we had insisted.

We were here to ask a horrible thing of this bright new collection of worlds and its peoples, whose bad luck it was to drift through the wrong part of space at the wrong time.

Trumpets sounded. Then, to the sounds of horns and drums, we backed away from the throne about twenty meters, turned, and as our retinues flowed in behind us in stately choreography, walked slowly in recession from the throne room.

"Well, that's over," James said as massive doors closed behind us. It was clear he had no love of such ceremony. The showers had come and gone while we were inside and the air tasted of fresh and alien scents.

We stepped out of the anteroom into what had become a clear day, filled with the intense radiation of their star. We had taken effective measures of protection, but the light still had a sting to it.