The Lion and the Lizard

by Brindle, Nathan C.

  "What did he say to them?" asked Yuz8!rfk. "Though I'm fairly sure it's obvious from context."

  "Much the same as you would say to them in the same situation," answered Beam. "'What does it matter what you put in the whisky as long as the forms are observed?'"

  Yuz8!rfk went perfectly still. "Yes," he managed, after a moment, during which nobody killed either himself or Beam. "Nicely done. Nobody heard that but us."

  Beam smiled. "Well. Guardian, after all. Of course they heard it, but what they can't understand, they can't act on. I spoke in Terran, not in Xzl5!vt; but you understood it because you can now understand English. Likewise, these humans can now understand your language without my assistance." He shrugged. "Still won't be able to speak it very well, but it won't matter; whatever they say in Terran will come across in proper Xzl5!vt."

  "This Jzt3!sd," remarked Wolff, "had he been a Terran, would have been either immortalized as a martyr or hailed as a prophet for daring to come between the two warring factions and trying to establish a compromise."

  "Sadly enough, that's not how it works, here," said Yuz8!rfk. "Thus his name was not remembered and the factions continued to war."

  "Beam," interjected Ariela, impatiently, and vehemently. "You say you can answer our questions. So answer them. Don't let these OCD males lead us off into an unrelated subject for the next twenty minutes."

  "So," said Beam. "Well, then follow me." He walked back into the shrine. The two groups looked at each other, shrugged, and followed him.

  "Man of few words, when necessary," observed Wolff.

  "As long as it stops you from going off on fourteen unrelated tangents," Ariela fired back. "And yes, I mean, all three of you, though Ejr3@lt has, in truth, been quite the model assistant."

  Wolff said nothing, noticing the fire flashing in her eyes. He just sighed, quietly. Just like her mother.

  Inside the shrine, which was quite small, Beam waited until they were all assembled. "Inform your troops outside that we will be going into a small room under the shrine for extended deliberations," he told them.

  "Are we?" asked Wolff, skeptical.

  "In a manner of speaking."

  Wolff glanced at Yuz8!rfk, who shrugged. Both reached into pockets and pulled out their comms, and exchanged short conversations with their escorts.

  "I will bring you back," said Beam, "to this very place, in about five minutes' time. We simply need privacy which we cannot obtain here at the moment. The things I need to tell you are not for anyone's ears but yours."

  He stretched out a hand, and a fallen pillar blocking passage deeper into the shrine moved out of their way. In doing so, it revealed a set of stairs, hewn into the rock, going down into the cliff.

  "This way." He led off. Again, the other four followed him, curious to see where the passage led.

  It was a fairly prosaic stairwell, the sort one would expect to find in an old stone ruin; Wolff supposed von Barronov would be fascinated to see whatever lay beneath what he still thought of as an old distillery rather than a purpose-built shrine.

  At the bottom of the steps, they gathered again before a large, wood-plank door. Beam waved a hand at it, and it opened without a creak on hinges one would have expected more noise from. The room inside was dark, but Beam waved a hand again and very modern electric lights came on, illuminating . . .

  "A portal!" gasped Ariela.

  "This is how you arrived here?" queried Ejr3@lt, of Beam.

  Beam smiled. "Yes, and no. But it is how we will travel to our real place of quiet discussion. Something akin to what the humans would call a SCIF. If you will join me?" He mounted the stage, which was large enough to handle all five of them comfortably.

  They joined him. "Everyone ready?" inquired Beam. "Hands inside the railings, please try not to move suddenly, you must be this tall to ride this attraction."

  Ariela couldn't help it; she started to laugh.

  "It wasn't that funny," Wolff told her, with a straight face. Then he chuckled, too.

  "I don't believe I've been told that at an arcade midway for over fifty years," snorted Yuz8!rfk. Ejr3@lt had covered his snout, but was clearly failing to hold in a laugh.

  Wolff thought about it. "Yeah, close to seventy-five for me, I suppose."

  "Gentlemen," reproved Beam. "And lady. Are we ready?"

  "Hit it," replied Wolff.

  And Beam waved again.

  Suddenly, they were somewhere else; the portal was the same, but the room was completely different. It was rather pleasantly lit, the air was cool and scented of some unknown floral derivative, and there was a large conference table and chairs in the middle of it. Green plants lined the sides of the room, and there was a small wet bar on the other side of the round room.

  "Nice place you have here," remarked Wolff. "Home planet?"

  Beam shook his head. "Not at all; too far away for that. We're in geosync over Xzl5!vt, in a cloaked and shielded station your technologies don't have the ability to scan." He waved a hand again, and ports in the walls opened, so they could see the planet below them.

  "Please, be seated," Beam urged them, "and if you will simply think of what you would like to drink or eat, it will be provided."

  They all walked to the table, pulled out chairs, and sat.

  Crystal glasses of caramel-colored liquid appeared before all of them except for Ariela, who apparently had thought "Moscato" rather than "whisky".

  "Now, that's service," said Yuz8!rfk, approvingly.

  "No one is hungry?" asked Beam.

  "Not really," said Ariela. "At least not me." She took a sip of her wine. "Wow, that's really good for a house selection. Anyway, we ate before we went down to the shrine."

  "As did we," agreed Yuz8!rfk. "Even so . . . "

  A bowl of bar snacks and a bowl of chips appeared in the middle of the table, with a stack of small individual snack plates next to them.

  Wolff laughed. "Now, that really is service," he said. He concentrated for a moment, and a bowl of buttered popcorn joined the other two bowls.

  "Hmm," remarked Beam, "that's not one of the snacks either of you provided to Bob."

  "Didn't think of it at the time," admitted Wolff. "Done properly, it doesn't come ready-made in a bag; you have to make it fresh for it to taste the best." He reached over and grabbed a couple of kernels out of the bowl, and popped them in his mouth. Chewing them and swallowing them, he nodded his head. "That's the stuff, right there."

  "That is not something we have," said Ejr3@lt. "But there are these." A bowl of brownish-colored ovoids appeared. "These are sehshe'ashe. A kind of a soft confection, made from a certain type of bean called s'ash. Please try one, I believe they go well with both wine and whisky."

  Ariela, who was closest, took a couple of them, looked at them carefully, sniffed them, broke one in half, and suddenly broke out in a huge grin. "They're chocolate!" she cried, and tossing the broken one into her mouth, chewed on it happily and swallowed it. "Mmmm," she said, contentedly.

  "Women in our society are particularly enamored of chocolate," explained Wolff.

  "In ours, as well," replied Yuz8!rfk. "That was an inspired choice, young negotiator," he said to Ejr3@lt, who ducked his head and looked pleased.

  Each of them filled a small plate with snacks, and sat back to enjoy them while they chatted.

  "Now," said Beam, who was toying with a glass of whisky himself, "please ask me your questions, and I will answer them. But one at a time, please, Doctor Wolff." He looked at her with a small smile, and she blushed a bit.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "I was a little off my game back there. But let's start with this, which I think sums up all the questions I threw out before you arrived: What really is the point of the Great Simulation with all these billions of civilizations that are in blissful ignorance of their status? Certainly it cannot be only to bring one new civilization out every several million years to take up the duty of maintaining the Simulation. There must be some other purpose – and it se
ems to me that there is another purpose in play having to do with why we and the Shizzle are meeting up at this time." She paused. "Does that lay out the groundwork succinctly?"

  "It does," Beam acknowledged, "and my main reason for having you restate it concisely was so you would better understand the answers. I already knew what I need to tell you, but it is wasteful of time to go back and forth to answer random questions in random order. So I will begin at the beginning, as I believe both of your peoples colloquially say, and tell you the truth about the Great Simulation.

  "There was," he went on, "some fifteen billion years ago, a single civilization living on a planet much like either of yours, orbiting a sun much like either of yours, about midpoint of an arm of a spiral galaxy in a universe that was young, but nevertheless, already four or five billion years old. This civilization rose rapidly, and was curious about everything. It had plenty to be curious about; it was in a system of twenty planets, and its own planet had two moons of considerable size, each much like Earth's moon, about a quarter of the size of the planet they orbited. Many stars in their night skies. This promoted a healthy interest in what might be out there, beyond the bounds of their small planet, even long before there was any capability on their part to go and look.

  "Eventually, of course, they developed industry, built spacecraft, visited their moons and most of the other planets in their system. Several of those planets, and most of their satellites, were rocky globes, and a few had oxidizing atmospheres that were anywhere from marginally to perfectly breathable by their species – again, similar to the atmospheres of your planets." Beam paused. "You may be noticing how similar they are to your species. Of course, that informed the building and programming of the Great Simulation, when they eventually determined to build it."

  "Did they find life?" asked Ariela.

  "They did," replied Beam, "but never sentient life. The planets with oxidizing atmospheres like theirs did in fact have plant life, and insects, amphibians, and even small mammals. One had large reptiles, similar to what the humans know as dinosaurs; the difference being, Earth's large reptiles died out after a large asteroid collided with the planet about 66 million years ago."

  He took a sip of whisky. "Eventually, they discovered the singularity drive. They knew it could be used to rotate in four dimensions; after a certain accident in testing, they chose not to use it that way. But they were long-lived folk, and long journeys even at Warp Five didn't faze them. So they explored millions of cubic light-years of space around their planet, looking for other civilizations and planting colonies in systems where no other people were found.

  "And they got lonely, which is the best description I can place on the feelings they had about the disappointment of not finding others to share the cosmos with."

  "So they built the Great Simulation," breathed Ariela, rapt.

  Beam nodded. "They did. At first it was mostly a game. They didn't find out until much later that they could literally merge a simulated time trunk with reality. The process is, in fact, called 'realization'. But at first, they simply watched civilizations being born, rising, and eventually falling; the simulation, naturally, runs much faster than the outside world. In the early days, they'd watch a trunk go from initialization – what you both think of as the Big Bang – all the way to heat death, in about a year. Thirty billion years or so of development from start to finish. And of course, the civilizations lived and died, having no idea they were nothing more than, as Doctor Wolff originally put it, 'random quanta' in someone else's experiment."

  He took another sip from his glass. "Eventually, someone figured out how to create a timeline branch they called a 'branch of branches', the use of which could cut a time trunk out of the simulation and drop it into the realspace universe, lock, stock, and barrel, just as if it had always existed in realspace. After extensive testing with existing time trunks that had run their courses without ever developing sentient life, the Originators – for they are of course of whom we speak – dropped the first trunk line into realspace that had produced sentients with which they felt comfortable interacting. And it worked perfectly." Beam, well, beamed. "That race of sentients became the first Guardian race. And so things have gone for close to fifteen billion years in realspace. And while Bob speculates that there may have been more than forty-two Guardian races in all that time, it's just speculation on his part; there have been, in reality, exactly forty-two Guardian races, and that's why that's the popular number, even though nobody today knows precisely what the history going all the way back to the Originators is."

  Now the four negotiators looked skeptical. Wolff looked at Yuz8!rfk, who grimaced, and said, "Negotiator Ariela, you have done well so far, please continue, as I think you hold the same opinion as the three of us."

  "Beam," said Ariela, carefully, "if nobody from your race of Guardians knows this history, how do you know this history?"

  Beam laughed. "I told Bob just the other day, I spend several hours a day talking to the Great Simulation – 'Simmy,' I call it, much to Bob's dismay. The Great Simulation's memory is much more complete than it generally lets on. And of course there are twenty sub-basements below the Great Simulation's complex on the Originators' home world, containing, along with quite a lot of accumulated junk as you can no doubt imagine, all of the records going all the way back to the very beginning of the Simulation Project."

  "Impossible," said Ariela, flatly.

  "Not at all," contradicted Beam. "The sub-basements are four-dimensional in nature, and are theoretically limitless, much the same in a physical storage sense as the zettabyte quantum quaternary holocubes you have aboard the Frumious Bandersnatch are in a data storage sense. You must understand that the Originators were the original masters of four-dimensional space; that was a simple job for them, even if it seems fantastical to you."

  "But these records must be in horrible shape if they're that old!" scoffed Ariela.

  Beam shook his head. "Not at all," he said, "each section of the sub-basements exists in its own time. When one steps from one section to another, one actually steps into the time period represented by that sub-basement. It's not a stasis as you might consider it, it's just, 'that time'. So it's entirely possible to walk, or more likely ride, all the way back to fifteen billion years ago at the far end of the twentieth sub-basement, ride all the way back to the present, and not have been gone more than a few seconds as far as anyone who had not gone with you is concerned. But depending on how long your expedition – because, mark me, it would be an expedition – took, you would have aged however long in your personal time you had been down there."

  "So," interjected Wolff, "if this station were one of those sections, and we stayed here for two or three hours, we'd step back out of that portal back at the shrine having aged two or three hours while only a few seconds had passed down on the planet."

  "Correct, and while this station is not one of those four-dimensional constructs, only five or ten minutes will have passed at the shrine when we get back – as I already mentioned, because I set the portal up that way. But that is essentially how the sub-basement sections work. As you traverse into one, its time resumes, and it stays active as long as you're in it – a few seconds, a few days, whatever. It's like walking into a room with a motion-sensitive switch that turns on the light, and then turns it off after you leave. None of the sections have aged a single second since the last time someone was in them; some of them may not have had anyone in them since the last records from that age were stored in them. Thus, anything stored in those sections, even billions of years ago, will be pristine."

  "How long," asked Wolff, "would that expedition to fifteen billion years take in real time?"

  "Oh." Beam seemed surprised. He thought for a moment. "Understanding that nobody has ever actually tried it, the actual physical distance is probably something on the order of three or four thousand miles from the entrance to the sub-basement. So one would be quite some time traversing it, even in one of the trams tha
t are built in for that purpose."

  "So it's not something you've ever done."

  "Well, no, as I said, nobody has ever actually tried it."

  "Then how do you know all this?"

  "I told you; I talk to the Simulation. It's quite loquacious, sometimes."

  "I don't believe this," Yuz8!rfk retorted. "It sounds like you are well-versed in the history of the Originators and the Simulation, but you have never seen the actual records, and your knowledge is based on admittedly-extensive conversations with the Simulation. But it would be impossible for you to know as much as you claim to know simply by chatting with the computer. We had enough trouble getting the information out of it we needed to fix the problem we had."

  "As did we," Wolff pointed out. "It is not 'loquacious' at all, Beam. And anyone who has dealt with it directly should know that."

  "There's a simple truth, though, which you've not yet considered," said Beam.

  They looked at him. Ariela sighed.

  "What 'simple truth' have we overlooked, Beam? And this goes to the second part of my question, having to do with the Shizzle and ourselves. We've been over and over and over any particular reason why it should be imperative to the Simulation to bring us together, particularly when we weren't even part of the same timeline trunks to begin with. Why would the Simulation care? It's semi-sentient. It doesn't have feelings. It doesn't – well – it usually stays in its lane rather than stray from it and do something independently. And I say 'usually' because my personal experience certainly suggests either I'm badly wrong about that, or it's the exception that proves the rule."

  "Simple truths are usually, and you'll excuse me, simple," replied Beam, "because they unpack very neatly and cover all possibilities. Consider, for instance, unified field theory; something both of your races believe exists but neither have come up with, regardless of the sheer amount of effort and 'skull-sweat' your scientists have put into them over a very, very long period of time. Extremely smart individuals like yourselves – and no, I am being entirely honest, I am not trying to butter you up, or be sarcastic in any way – usually don't recognize simple truths straight off, because you think the truth surely most be more complicated. Humans call this 'Occam's Razor'; the Xzl5!vt refer to 'the Blade of Kpz9!lf', both referring to the mental act of shaving off or paring down all the unnecessary bullshit surrounding the irreducible kernel of the argument. Knowing this, can you really not apply these principles both of your races purport to reverence, and simplify your thinking sufficiently to see the truth that is sitting right in front of you?"