Wolff glanced at Ariela. She was perfectly calm. He let out the breath he hadn't been aware he'd been holding in. "She'll be fine," he said to himself.
"My name is Ariela Rivers Wolff, known to my people as the Lion of God," replied Ariela. "I have the honor of being Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary for the United States of America on the Planet Earth, in the Sol System. I speak with the voice of my President, my Congress, and my people. To my right is my assistant and second, my father, Lieutenant Colonel John Conner Wolff, of the United States Space Force Marines. My friend Yuz8!rfk, I must rebut the charge of invasion of your space without warning. We were exploring, indeed, looking for you, based on radio signals we received emanating from your direction, when we entered the planetary system around the star we know as HD 167818. There was no possible way for us to know ahead of time your people had claimed that space. We therefore argue that at most this was a mere accident, born from our ignorance of that area of space, which is after all over seven hundred light years from our home. Indeed, we paid for this ignorance with a grazing shot from the Proven in Battle that did some small damage to our ship. We came in peace, in a small research vessel, with only minimal armament; yet we were met by a large cruiser of many guns. If this be willful invasion of your space, so be it, but we believe the situation to be self-mitigating; we are, after all, talking peaceably, are we not?
"Further," she added, "in my capacity as Saint Ariela, the Lion of God, I tell you that we come in peace, and will leave in peace, unless this negotiation fails and we fall to war between our races. I further tell you the latter would be a grievous error; the things we hold in common are far greater than the things that divide us. Thus, my friend and negotiator for the Shizzle, I give you this as fair warning:
"See, I set before thee today life and death, the blessing and the curse: The Water of Life, or the Pew of Death. Be mindful, therefore, of which ye choose."
And she held the whisky bottle and the gun out at arm's length, daring Yuz8!rfk to choose between them.
Unfortunately, the two Xzl5!vt reacted violently to this, pulling their kukris and taking up martial stances. The troops behind them roared, and shook their weapons in the air, preparatory to advancing.
"Fire Team Bravo, prepare to repel boarders!" shouted Wolff, and all the Bravo Marines save Fox leveled their weapons at the two Xzl5!vt negotiators. Fox, meanwhile, let his M11 snap back on its sling, unholstered his M18 service pistol, and moved to stand behind Ariela, his weapon likewise pointed past her, alternately, at Yuz8!rfk and Ejr3@lt.
"Treachery!" growled Yuz8!rfk.
"I assure you, nothing of the sort," replied Ariela. "You can drink the whisky with us, or we can shoot you full of holes. But know this – God is on our side. I am His saint and prophet. Who are you to threaten me?"
"Sir," came Morrison's voice, calmly, over the tac net, "What do we do?"
"Stay frosty, Lieutenant," said Wolff, quietly. "Not sure what's going to happen. Got an idea." He looked over at Adkins and the other Marines. "Follow my lead."
Adkins nodded.
Wolff let his M11 snap back as Fox's had, but he didn't pull a handgun. Instead, he raised his hands above his head, waited for a moment, then lowered his arms in two distinct motions.
The Marines in the shrine with him followed suit.
He caught Yuz8!rfk's eyes. The Xzl5!vt was looking at him in wonder.
Yuz8!rfk came to a sudden decision, and in a smooth movement, resheathed his kukri. "Ejr3@lt."
"But sir—"
"Stand down, youngling!" He turned to face his troops. "Stand down!" he shouted. "Stand down, all of you!"
Ejr3@lt slowly returned his kukri to its sheath.
"Morrison," said Wolff into the net. "Stand down. At ease. But stay frosty."
"Aye, aye, sir."
"Fox, stand down"
"Sir?"
"She'll be fine. He's not going to attack her. Stand down, son."
Fox did not look happy. "Aye, aye, sir." He holstered the M18 and stepped back from his fiancée.
By this time, Yuz8!rfk had turned back to face Ariela and Wolff. "Whence come ye, and whither are ye traveling?" he asked Ariela.
Ariela looked surprised.
Wolff answered for her. "From the West, and traveling to the East."
"Close enough. But why is the negotiator not responding for himself?"
"She is a female, and is not one of us as such. The fraternity is for males only in our society."
"Ah. As it is in ours. The negotiator will pardon me, but I was unaware she was a female. It is not our practice to send females into this sort of danger." Yuz8!rfk looked closely at Ariela. "I see the difference now, I believe. Smaller; lighter. Finer features; more delicate hands. Swelling at the hips. The, hmm, chest deformities."
Ariela blushed to her toes. Nevertheless, she said, "Negotiator, if it speeds things along, they are called 'breasts', and they are utilized in feeding infants of our species. They are also a secondary sex characteristic of females; the male, obviously, does not develop in the same way."
Yuz8!rfk nodded. "Xzl5!vt females also feed the younglings in this way, but the organs do not express in this manner."
Ariela snorted. "Lucky them," she said.
"Hmm." Yuz8!rfk permitted himself a small smile. "Negotiator, do I still have a choice to make? I believe I understand better now what you were saying."
"Ah, yes. I offer you either the Water of Life and Peace, or the Pew of Death and War, the latter being something I made up completely on my own, so our interlocuter apparently had trouble with it." Ariela smiled.
"I believe I will choose the Water of Life and Peace," laughed Yuz8!rfk. "And yes, indeed, we received a very poor translation. But it was better this time. The first time, it was highly insulting. This time, I understood 'pew' as 'bullet'."
"Join me at the drinks table?" invited Ariela.
"Of course. Ejr3@lt?"
"Yes, sir." The two Xzl5!vt mounted the steps and arrived at the cocktail table, where Fox was carefully opening the bottle Ariela had used as her prop.
"I see you do not have the Forbidden Mixer," approved Yuz8!rfk.
Ariela smiled. "No," she agreed. "That was made pretty clear during our pre-negotiation with your associate Ejr3@lt. I am not going to pretend, however, that we humans do not have among us certain barbarians who would adulterate perfectly good whisky with the Forbidden Mixer."
Yuz8!rfk looked both ways, then leaned in to Ariela and whispered, "Like Ejr3@lt, I'm agnostic about such things. But it's always best to try and get along, is it not?"
Ariela nodded. "We have a saying, 'when in Rome, do as the Romans do.' In other words, one should not insult his hosts by insisting on foreign customs in their homes."
"Yes, exactly. And who are these Romans?"
"Were," replied Ariela. "They were a nation of great warriors, statesmen, and philosophers, whose hegemony ended approximately two thousand years ago. But their civilization influenced half the world, including our part of it. So today we honor them for their contributions."
"Then," said Yuz8!rfk, as Fox handed him a tumbler of fine single malt, "let us toast the Romans."
"The Romans," acknowledged Ariela, raising the glass Fox had handed her. "May their example guide us in our deliberations and our future relations."
They drank.
Yuz8!rfk sneezed.
"Are you all right?" said Ariela, solicitously.
"Wow," said Yuz8!rfk, his eyes watering slightly. "That's the good shit, right there."
"Burns all the way down, right?"
"You ain't just whistlin' Dixie, Negotiator."
Ariela looked skyward, disgusted. "Really? Really? Colloquialisms? Gevalt!"
Morrison looked up, toward the shrine, at the sound of something that sounded like roaring. He couldn't tell exactly what was going on from his position, however.
"Colonel, Morrison here. Everything all right?"
Wolff responded, but M
orrison couldn't quite make it out from all the laughter in the background. In fact, Wolff himself seemed to be laughing about something. "Uh, sir, I can't hear you over the noise, but I can tell it's everyone laughing, so I'll leave you to it." He clicked off. His Gunnery Sergeant sidled over.
"Everything okay?"
Morrison shrugged. "I have no idea, but they're all laughing their asses off, Gunny."
The Gunny laughed himself. "Well, either everything's fine, or it's about to go to shit. Just another beautiful day in the Corps, Ell-Tee. Just another beautiful day in the Corps."
Morrison sighed. There really wasn't much else he could do . . .
Chapter 17
Truths and Consequences
In the end, Fire Team Bravo played bartender, and everybody on both sides got a drink. Most of them in plastic cups, of course, but it seemed nobody considered that an issue.
Meanwhile, the two sets of negotiators strolled out of the shrine and onto the meadow just in front of it. Ariela at first cursed her decision to wear stiletto heels, but as the ground was hard enough from centuries of being trampled on by troops and dragons, sinking in at the heel didn't turn out to be the problem she anticipated.
"But you are here simply because you were curious?" asked Yuz8!rfk. "We would not have sent a small ship this far simply to follow radio signals back to their source. At minimum we would have sent a small fleet. If we felt it was even worth the trouble in the first place. We understand our history; face it, we're warlike. Why put ourselves in a position where we might have to fight another race?"
Ariela shrugged. "We take a different view. We recognize our warlike nature, but we try to work around it. We believe it should be possible to live in peace with others, as long as we don't let our guard down. Trust, but verify. That sort of thing. And the distance was not an issue with our rotation ability."
"Yes." Yuz8!rfk assumed an expression that Ariela figured was similar to a human pursing her lips. "As you know, I have been fighting my government for years about allowing that capability to become generally known."
"I do. But we have that capability in only two of our ships." That I know of, Ariela didn't say.
Yuz8!rfk shook his head. "Any ship with a singularity drive may easily be fitted with controls to use the drive in that manner."
"Not ours," demurred Wolff. "You should see the levels of obfuscation and confusion we engineered into the system. If you're not me, or my henchdude, forget about it. Not even the guys who ran the math for us would be able to build a controller for it – let alone operate it, without help from someone we trained."
Yuz8!rfk considered Wolff for a long moment. "You invented the singularity drive?"
"I did. Along with my henchdude, Major Chris von Barronov, who's currently piloting our original testbed up there, along with the two dropships from the frigate."
"And you deliberately made it all but impossible to build a rotation control system."
"Hey, we're all about security by obscurity. But it was a stone bitch when we had to add rotation controllers to our six frigates to go fix a problem in Ariela's original timeline."
"Which you removed afterward."
Wolff rubbed his jaw. "Well. All but one of them. Which wasn't our idea; the boss wanted one frigate that could rotate. Which is the one we brought with us, of course."
Yuz8!rfk laughed. "I think I like you. That was an act of evil, cruel rat bastardy, and absolutely what I should have thought of myself."
"Heh." Wolff smiled. "We'll talk. We have something even better than this whisky to sip, when we do. Meantime, I'm not the negotiator." He pointed at Ariela. "She is."
"Indeed." The Xzl5!vt engineer looked back at Ariela. "We were discussing motivations to bring our peoples together. I see none; you see promise. Why?"
Ariela took a deep breath. And took the plunge. "You know a being called, 'Bob', right?"
Yuz8!rfk arched his . . . well. If he'd had eyebrows, he'd have arched them, thought Ariela.
"What do you know of . . . 'Bob'?" he asked, warily.
Ariela shrugged. "I've never met him. But I know he had a long conversation with Colonel Wolff and Major von Barronov, a few years ago. And your people's name came up."
Yuz8!rfk and Ejr3@lt exchanged glances.
"In what context?"
"Apparently you had a problem with timeline control after you discovered you were living in a simulation."
Ejr3@lt scratched the ground with one of his clawed feet. Apparently, that was a sign of agitation. Ariela filed it away.
"I see," said Yuz8!rfk, shortly.
"We had a problem, also," said Ariela. "My father . . . well . . . he is the analog in this timeline of my father in my own timeline . . . at any rate, I am talking about Colonel Wolff. He managed to create a timeline branch when he went back in time to try to save my mother from dying of an auto-immune disease, which she did in this timeline. They were, well, let's not beat around the bush, they were lovers, sort of, earlier in his personal time. Everything would have worked perfectly, except he wasn't aware of the control panels, or even that he was creating a branch in a simulation, and the line was started in a test mode. And the timeline was based on Dad's memories and, frankly, his rather fertile imagination; and the simulation extrapolated from there until it ran out of options."
"Ah." Yuz8!rfk scrubbed at his face with his hand. "Sounds familiar. And the reason the simulation ran out of options was because it couldn't branch, and it extrapolated itself into a corner."
"Yes! And the simulation – well – 'Bob' and his crew that run the simulation, I suppose – had to intervene after I crossed timelines to find Dad. This Dad." She waved at Wolff, who just nodded.
"Ah? How did you cross timelines?"
"Dad left a tracker with Mom, which she and my real Dad found later on and Dad reverse-engineered so they could send a message to Colonel Wolff – although he wasn't a Marine, then, he'd retired after being wounded nearly 50 years earlier. The message was just a 'thank you and look what we've accomplished' kind of thing. Apparently Colonel Wolff had just received it and was reading it when I came through, even though I didn't come through from my timeline until almost two years after the message was sent. Anyway, I had taken my Dad's notes and built something I thought would hop from my timeline to Other Dad's – I mean, Colonel Wolff's – timeline. And that's what I used to get there."
Yuz8!rfk shook his head. "No, I mean, if you were living in a test timeline, how did you cross to a fully-functional one? It should have scrambled your brains and, frankly, killed you on the spot."
"Bob said later it appeared that I had sufficient 'time essence', whatever that is, from my mother to survive the trip. I actually went back and forth a couple of times before that mess was cleared up."
Yuz8!rfk and Ejr3@lt looked at each other again. "It does not seem to conform to the geometries we worked out," said the latter, with a grimace. "Nor the advice we were given by Bob."
"Yes. We were unable to bring Yzl6!rfk through because of it – or so we were told. Had we rebooted the timeline into full active mode first –"
"I didn't ask," said Ariela. "I had to go. We were being invaded from our future."
"Now that is a story I want to hear told over a glass of whatever Colonel Wolff is holding back that is supposed to be better than whisky," chuckled Yuz8!rfk.
"It is quite a story," agreed Wolff. "But yes, it's not a story to be told here and now."
"Yuz8!rfk," said Ariela, "we're as much in the dark as you are about why it makes sense for us to meet at this point. We came to this negotiation because we have questions to be answered – about ourselves and our place in this crazy simulated continuum, the same for your people, and frankly, what the whole damn point of the Great Simulation is. We know enough about it to have an inkling as to what its builders were trying to do, but we don't know how we fit into that – and why we even know it exists, for that matter. Clearly millions, if not billions, of unique civilizations are born, l
ive, and die within the constraints of the program, and never even wonder if they are nothing more than random quanta, flitting around inside a massive computer, outside their local ken somewhere in a galaxy and a universe they know nothing about. What is the purpose? What is their purpose? Is there any purpose at all to this madness, other than to bring out a race every several tens of millions of years to take over for the race that's currently maintaining the Great Simulation?"
"I can answer all of those questions for you," came a voice from the shrine.
Startled, the negotiating teams and Fire Team Bravo swung around to face –
Beam. Still dressed like his namesake, in the hunting outfit in which he'd first appeared to the humans.
"Who are you?" asked Yuz8!rfk, reasonably, although his hand rested on the hilt of his kukri, as did Ejr3@lt's.
"My name is Beam," said the Guardian. "Doctor Wolff, and the rest of the humans, are hearing my name that way, and seeing me as a human who resembles a writer of science fiction who wrote a number of stories about parallel timelines and a few about time travel, as well. Fitting, as I oversee the Timeline Branching department of the Great Simulation.
"You, Yuz8!rfk and Ejr3@lt, are seeing me as a more-or-less generic Xzl5!vt, simply because there is no analogous person in your time trunk – or at least, not one you would remember, as he was killed centuries ago in one of your religious wars."
"On which side?" blurted Ejr3@lt, then looked somewhat embarrassed.
"Neither," said Beam. "He – Jzt3!sd, whose name and appearance I have appropriated to come before you – tried to broker a third-party peace between the two sides. He managed to get the Negotiators from both sides to meet under flag of truce, they listened to what he had to say, and they executed him for blasphemy – right here, on this very field upon which you stand. They could at least agree on that. And of course, they went right back to fighting."
The Lion and the Lizard Page 22
