by Peter Watts
“Uh, live?” Emotions squabble in Doug’s cortex. The pain of failure. The hope of salvation. And now, a vague discomfort. “I don’t know. I mean, they are okay with this, aren’t they? The whole whale show thing?”
“Mr. Largha, not only are they okay with it—it was their idea. So how about it? A conversation with a real, alien intelligence?”
“I don’t know,” Doug stammers. “I don’t know what I’d say—”
Anna Marie snorts.
Finch draws a remote control from his blazer. “I’m sure you’ll think of something.” He points the remote at the flatscreen, thumbs a control.
Nothing obvious happens.
“Back in a moment,” Finch promises, and closes the door behind him.
Anna Marie turns her back. Doug wonders if maybe she’s offended by someone who would be in such a rush to line up for orca steaks.
Or maybe she just doesn’t like people very much.
A long, mournful whistle. “Sister Predator,” intones an artificial voice.
Doug turns to the flatscreen. A black-and-white shape looms up in the murky green wash of Juan de Fuca Strait. Lipless jaws open a crack; a zigzag crescent of conical teeth reflects gray in the dim light.
That whistle again. In one corner of the flatscreen, a flashing green tag: Receiving. “Fellow Sister Predator. Welcome.”
Doug gawks.
Clicks. Two rapid-fire squeals. A moan. More clicks.
Receiving.
“I am Second Grandmother. I trust you enjoy Aquarium and its many award-winning educational displays—”
Bzzt. In the upper left-hand corner of the screen: Line Interrupt. Silence.
At a panel on Finch’s desk, Anna Marie Hamilton takes her finger off a red button.
“Wow,” Doug says. “It was really talking.”
Anna Marie rolls her eyes. “Yeah, well, it’s not like they’re going to beat us on the SAT’s or anything.”
A reporter waylays Bob Finch in a public corridor on his way to the gift shop. She seeks a reaction in the wake of Hamilton’s demonstration. Finch considers. “We agree with the activists on one score. Orcas have their own values and their own society, and we’re morally bound to respect their choices.”
He smiles faintly. “Where Ms. Hamilton and I part ways, of course, is that she never bothered to find out what those values were before leaping to defend them.”
The door opens. Finch the Savior stands in the doorway with a wooden box in one hand, a plastic bag in the other.
Doug, rising with his hopes off the couch, forgets all about the Matriarch and his ankle. “Are those my steaks?”
Finch smiles. “Mr. Largha, it takes several days to prepare the merchandise. Each sample has to be measured, weighed, and studied in accordance to our mandate of conservation through research.”
“Oh, right.” Doug nods. “I knew that.”
“The gift shop is only taking a list of names.”
“Right.”
“And unfortunately, all of today’s specimen has already been spoken for. The line-up stretches all the way back into the Amazon gallery, in fact, so I brought a couple of items which I thought might do instead,” Finch says. He holds up the bag. “There was quite a run on these, I was lucky to get one.”
Doug squints at the label. “L’il Ahab Miniature Harpoon Kit. Rubber Tipped. Ages six and up.”
“Everyone wants to prove that they’re better shots than our guests.” Finch chuckles. “I suspect a lot of family dogs may be discomfited tonight. I thought your children might enjoy—”
“I don’t have kids,” Doug says. “But I have a dog.” He takes the package. “What else?”
Finch holds out the wooden box. “I was able to locate some nice harbor seal—”
Finch the False Prophet. Finch the Betrayer.
“Harbor seal? Harbor seal! Your gift shop is lousy with harbor seal! It was marked down! My in-laws are coming over this weekend and you want me to feed them harbor seal? Why don’t I just give them baloney sandwiches! My dog won’t eat harbor seal!”
Finch shakes his head. He seems more saddened than offended.
“I’m sorry you feel that way, Mr. Largha. I’m afraid there’s nothing else we can do for you.”
Doug wobbles dangerously on his good leg. “I was injured! In your aquarium! I’ll sue!”
“If you were injured, Mr. Largha, you were injured en route from somewhere that you weren’t legally supposed to be in the first place. Now, please …” Finch opens the door a bit wider, just in case Doug hasn’t got the point.
“Not supposed to be in! That was a fire exit route! Which, by the way,” Doug’s voice is becalmed by a sudden sense of impending victory, “was improperly signed.”
Finch blinks. “Improperly—”
“You can barely see that exit sign,” Doug says. “It’s buried way down in one of those stupid orca family trees. If there was ever a fire, nobody would even find it. I mean, who stops to read award-winning educational displays when their pants are on fire?”
“Mr. Largha, the viewing gallery is solid cement on one side and a million gallons of seawater on the other. The odds of a fire are so minuscule—”
“We’ll see whether the fire marshal’s office thinks so. We’ll see whether the News at Six Consumer Advocate thinks so!” Doug triumphantly folds his arms.
There is a moment of silence. Finally, Finch sighs and closes the door. “I’m really going to have to put my foot down with the art department about that. I mean, aesthetics or no aesthetics …”
“I want my orca steaks,” Doug says.
Finch walks to the wall behind his desk. A touch on a hidden control and a section of paneling slides away. Behind it, cigar boxes sit neatly arranged on grillwork shelves, lit by the unmistakable glow of a refrigerator lightbulb.
Finch turns around, one of the boxes open in his hands. Doug falls silent, disbelieving. It’s not cigars in those boxes
“As I said, there are no orca steaks available,” Finch begins.
“But I can offer you some beluga sushi from my private stock.”
Doug takes a hop forward. Another. It’s almost impossible to get beluga. And this isn’t the black-market, Saint-Lawrence beluga, the stuff that gives you mercury poisoning if you eat it more than twice a year. This is absolute primo Hudson Bay beluga. The only people harpooning them are a few captive Inuit on a natural habitat reserve out of Churchill, and even they only get away with it because they keep pushing the aboriginal rights angle.
Nobody’s figured out Belugan yet—from what Doug’s heard, belugas are probably too stupid to even have a language—so nobody needs to cut a deal with them.
The box in Finch’s hands costs about what Doug would make in a week.
“Will this be acceptable?” Bob Finch asks politely.
Doug tries to be cool. “Well, I suppose so.”
He’s almost sure they don’t hear the squeak in his voice.
To the untrained eye, it looks like rambunctious play. In fact, the cavorting and splashing and bellyflopping is a synchronized and complex behavior. Co-operative hunting, it’s called. First reported from the Antarctic, when a pod of killer whales was seen creating a mini-tidal wave to wash a crabeater seal off an ice floe.
Definite sign of intelligence, that, the first mate’s been told. He squints through his binoculars and the intermittent fog until the whales finish.
The first mate pulls open the wheelhouse hatch and climbs inside. The captain throws Dipnet into gear, singing: And they’ll know we are sisters by our love, by our—
The mate picks up the tune and rummages in a locker, surfaces with a bottle of Crown Royal. “Good show today.” He raises the bottle in salute.
Doug Largha safely departed, Bob Finch extracts a pair of wineglasses from the shelves beneath the coffee table. He fills them from a convenient bottle of Chardonnay while Anna Marie taps a panel beside the flatscreen. The distant gurgling of Juan de Fuca fills the
room once more.
Finch presents the activist with her glass. “Any problems on your end?”
Hamilton snorts, still fiddling one-handed with the controls.
“You kidding? Turnover in the movement has always been high. And nobody turns down a chance to commune with the whales. It’s a real adventure for them.” The wall monitor flickers into splitscreen mode. One side still contains Juan de Fuca, newly restricted; the other shows one of the Aquarium’s backstage holding tanks. A young male orca noses along its perimeter.
Finch raises his glass: first to the matriarch on the screen—“To your delicacies.” Then to the matriarch in his office: “And to ours.” Finally, he turns to the image of the holding tank. The whale there looks back at him with eyes like big black marbles.
“Welcome to the Aquarium,” Finch says.
A signature whistle carries through the sound system. “Name is—” says the speaker. No English Equivalent, flashes the readout after a moment.
“That’s a fine name,” Finch remarks. “But why don’t we give you a special new name? I think we’ll call you—Shamu.”
“Adventure,” Shamu says. “Grandmother says this place adventure. Too small. I stay here long?”
Bob Finch glances at Anna Marie Hamilton.
Anna Marie Hamilton glances at Bob Finch.
“Not long, Grandson,” says an alien voice from the cool distant waters of Juan de Fuca. “Not long at all.”
AMBASSADOR
First Contact was supposed to solve everything. That was the rumour, anyway: gentle wizards from Epsilon Eridani were going to save us from the fire and welcome us into a vast Galactic Siblinghood spanning the Milky Way. Whatever diseases we’d failed to conquer, they would cure. Whatever political squabbles we hadn’t outgrown, they would resolve. First Contact was going to fix it all.
It was not supposed to turn me into a hunted animal.
I didn’t dwell much on the philosophical implications, at first; I was too busy running for my life. Zombie streaked headlong into the universe, slaved to a gibbering onboard infested with static. Navigation was a joke. Every blind jump I made reduced the chances of finding my way home by another order of magnitude. I did it anyway, and repeatedly; any jump I didn’t make would kill me.
Once more out of the breach. Long-range put me somewhere in the cometary halo of a modest binary. In better times the computer would have shown me the system’s planetary retinue in an instant; now it would take days to make the necessary measurements.
Not enough time. I could have fixed my position in a day or so using raw starlight even without the onboard, but whatever was after me had never given me the chance. Several times I’d made a start. The longest reprieve had lasted six hours; in that time I’d placed myself somewhere coreward of the Orion spur.
I’d stopped trying. Knowing my location at any moment would put me no further ahead at t+1. I’d be lost again as soon as I jumped.
And I always jumped. It always found me. I still don’t know how; theoretically it’s impossible to track anything through a singularity. But somehow space always opened its mouth and the monster dropped down on me, hungry and mysterious. It might have been easier to deal with if I’d known why.
What did I do, you ask. What did I do to get it so angry? Why, I tried to say hello.
What kind of intelligence could take offence at that?
Imagine a dead tree, three hundred fifty meters tall, with six gnarled branches worming their way from its trunk. Throw it into orbit around a guttering red dwarf that doesn’t even rate a proper name. This is what I’d come upon; there were no ports, no running lights, no symbols on the hull. It hung there like some forgotten chunk of cosmic driftwood. Embers of reflected sunlight glinted occasionally from the surface; they only emphasised the shadows drowning the rest of the structure. I thought it was derelict at first.
Of course I went through the motions anyway. I reached out on all the best wavelengths, tried to make contact a hundred different ways. For hours it ignored me. Then it sent the merest blip along the hydrogen band. I fed it into the onboard.
What else do you do with an alien broadcast?
The onboard had managed one startled hiccough before it crashed. All the stats on my panel had blinked once, in impossible unison, and gone dark.
And then doppler had registered the first incoming missile.
So I’d jumped, blind. There really hadn’t been a choice, then or the four times since. Sometime during that panicked flight, I had given my tormentor a name: Kali.
Unless Kali had gotten bored—hope springs eternal, even within puppets such as myself—I’d have to run again in a few hours. In the meantime I aimed Zombie at the binary and put her under thrust. Open space is impossible to hide in; a system, even a potential one, is marginally better.
Of course I’d have to jump long before I got there. It didn’t matter. My reflexes were engineered to perform under all circumstances. Zombie’s autopilot may have been disabled, but mine engaged smoothly.
It takes time to recharge between jumps. So far, it had taken longer for Kali to find me. At some point that was likely to change; the onboard had to be running again before it did.
I knew there wasn’t a hope in hell.
A little forensic hindsight, here: How exactly did Kali pull it off?
I’m not exactly sure. But some of Zombie ’s diagnostic systems run at the scale of the merely electronic, with no reliance on quantum computation. The crash didn’t affect them; they were able to paint a few broad strokes in the aftermath.
The Trojan signal contained at least one set of spatial co-ordinates. The onboard would have read that as a pointer of some kind: it would have opened the navigation files to see what resided at x-y-z. A conspicuous astronomical feature, perhaps? Some common ground to compare respective visions of time and space?
Zap. Nav files gone.
Once nav was down—or maybe before, I can’t tell—the invading program told Zombie to update all her backups with copies of itself. Only then, with all avenues of recovery contaminated, had it crashed the onboard. Now the whole system was frozen, every probability wave collapsed, every qubit locked into P=1.00.
It was an astonishingly beautiful assault. In the time it had taken me to say hello, Kali had grown so intimate with my ship that she’d been able to seduce it into suicide. Such a feat was beyond my capabilities, far beyond those of the haphazard beasts that built me. I’d have given anything to meet the mind behind the act, if it hadn’t been trying so hard to kill me.
Early in the hunt I’d tried jumping several times in rapid succession, without giving Kali the chance to catch up. I’d nearly bled out the reserves. All for nothing; the alien found me just as quickly, and I’d had barely enough power to escape.
I was still paying for that gamble. It would take two days at sublight for Zombie to recharge fully, and ninety minutes before I could even jump again. Now I didn’t dare jump until the destroyer came for me; I lay in real space and hoarded whatever moments of peace the universe saw fit to grant.
This time the universe granted three and a half hours. Then short-range beeped at me; object ahead. I plugged into Zombie’s cameras and looked forward.
A patch of stars disappeared before my eyes.
The manual controls were still unfamiliar. It took precious seconds to call up the right numbers. Whatever eclipsed the stars was preceding Zombie on a sunwards course, decelerating fast. One figure refused to settle; the mass of the object was increasing as I watched. Which meant that it was coming through from somewhere else.
Kali was cutting her search time with each iteration.
Two thousand kilometres ahead, twisted branches turned to face me across the ether. One of them sprouted an incandescent bud.
Zombie’s sensors reported the incoming missile to the onboard; the brainchips behind my dash asked for an impact projection. The onboard chittered mindlessly.
I stared at the approaching thunderbolt.
What do want with me? Why can’t you just leave me alone?
Of course I didn’t wait for an answer. I jumped.
My creators left me a tool for this sort of situation: fear, they called it.
They didn’t leave much else. None of the parasitic nucleotides that gather like dust whenever blind stupid evolution has its way, for example. None of the genes that build genitals; what would have been the point? They left me a sex drive, but they tweaked it; the things that get me off are more tightly linked to mission profiles than to anything so vulgar as procreation. I retain a smattering of chemical sexuality, mostly androgens so I won’t easily take no for an answer.
There are genetic sequences, long and intricately folded, which code for loneliness. Thigmotactic hardwiring, tactile pleasure, pheromonal receptors that draw the individual into social groups. All gone from me. They even tried to cut religion out of the mix but God, it turns out, is borne of fear. The loci are easy enough to pinpoint but the linkages are absolute: you can’t exorcise faith without eliminating pure mammalian terror as well. And out here, they decided, fear was too vital a survival mechanism to leave behind.
So fear is what they left me with. Fear, and superstition. And try as I might to keep my midbrain under control, the circuitry down there kept urging me to grovel and abase itself before the omnipotence of the Great Killer God.
I almost envied Zombie as she dropped me into another impermanent refuge. Zombie moved on reflex alone, brain-dead, galvanic. She didn’t know enough to be terrified.
For that matter, I didn’t know much more.
What was Kali’s problem, anyway? Was its captain insane, or merely misunderstood? Was I being hunted by something innately evil, or just the product of an unhappy childhood?
Any intelligence capable of advanced spaceflight must also be able to understand peaceful motives; such was the wisdom of Human sociologists. Most had never left the solar system. None had actually encountered an alien. No matter. The logic seemed sound enough; any species incapable of controlling their aggression probably wouldn’t survive long enough to escape their own system. The things that made me nearly didn’t.
