The Fall of Sirius

by Wil McCarthy

  Damn you, Ialah, in all your names.

  'mediator,' she subvocalized, 'exit realtime and prepare to reconfigure.'

  The scene around her froze, all motion suspended.

  “How may I assist you?” Mediator asked.

  “These four screens,” she said, “the idea was a good one, but it's not working. All these translations are independent, correct?”

  “That is so.”

  “Okay. If possible, what I'd like is a single screen, showing a group consensus translation. Begin with Jonson's sole interpretation and work from there. And give Jonson veto power over the output. Can this be done in realtime?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Another thing: I don't need the translations to be so short. I don't want them to be. If they need annotations or other information for me to understand them, don't leave it out. Is that clear?”

  “Yes.”

  “Reconfigure and return to realtime.”

  The simulated scene came back to life around her, and now there was a single screen in front of her, labeled CONSENSUS.

  She turned to address the Gateans. “Plate, would you please inform the Waister Queen that we refuse to be addressed as 'stupidlings?' We want nothing from her, and if she wishes to speak at all, she must do so in a manner we find acceptable.”

  Plate and Wende exchanged glances, and after a moment Wende nodded her head, giving him permission to speak.

  CONSENSUS

  #Hthw# (proper name of Waister Queen), that individual wishes you to know that her people are not stupid-lings. The name for her people is #Hua# (closest approximation of 'human' available to Waister vocal apparatus). The name for herself is #Ayye# (closest approximation of 'Malye' available to Waister vocal apparatus). She wishes you to know that her people will not speak with you unless they are addressed with completion (closest approximation of 'respect' available in Waister conceptual realm).

  #Hthw# appeared to be thinking hard about that one. After a delay of several seconds, she opened her mouth and said, “Huuuaaa.” It sounded like there was a flute shoved down her throat, but the word was recognizable.

  “Yes,” Malye said to the Waister Queen, with an exaggerated nod of her head. Then, she turned to Plate again, speaking bitterly: “Now tell her that our people consider murder to be a crime. Explain that her people have murdered billions of ours, which constitutes a crime we have no desire nor ability to forgive.”

  Again checking with Wende, and again receiving permission to speak, Plate relayed Malye's message in slow, careful language. The interpretation on her screen appeared to convey the meaning of it at least adequately, but of course it was just a translation of a translation, and the message itself was aimed at a mind more alien than any criminal's. No way to know what impressions would be generated there; it was like throwing ball bearings into a closed box, never knowing what they were hitting except by the sounds that came back.

  The Queen sang:

  CONSENSUS

  The conflict between our peoples is seen as a mistake (literally, “poor grasp”). Mistake. We misunderstand much. Occasionally we had encountered, encountered, encountered stone age peoples (literally, “cairn builders”), but they were always absent when we returned, so fragile that knowledge of us destroyed them. Destroyed, destroyed them all. The arrival of stupid-lings surprised us. We misunderstood much. Their bodies were blue; they had many hands. They died without surrender, so tragic and strange. You, the #Hua#, we confronted with outrageous force, and still your surrender took long. And we understood that you did not understand us, and we despaired (literally, “lost air”).

  The song took nearly a minute, and when it was over Malye felt a hand on her shoulder, and turned to see Konstant, looking apprehensive.

  “Malye,” he said earnestly, “are you understanding this? Let us know what's happening, damn it.”

  Echoes of agreement from the others. For once, Konstant was in tune with their needs and feelings, while Malye ignored them to converse with their nightmare enemy. She knew shame.

  “I think we've just received a sort of apology,” she told them all. “It's difficult to say for sure.”

  Konstant snorted in disbelief. “Apology? Let her restore our worlds and our people and then maybe we'll hear her apology.”

  “Is she here to make reparation?” Vere Sergeivne asked.

  A sensible question, and one that had not occurred to Malye until now. The Waisters must have some motive, after all, for their return, and for this bizarre attempt to communicate, after all their silent rampage through the Human Spaces. Malye looked at Plate, who then relayed the question to #Hthw#, whose face rearranged itself again as new emotions played through it.

  With the #Hwhh# (i.e., the Waisters), there is ignorance, newness, conflict, and completion. We did not suspect a fifth state, in which completed antagonists (literally, “new things un-newed”) stack together in a single place. This we learned from #Hua#. We did not suspect a sixth state, in which a completed antagonist would change to become new again. These people (body gesture indicating Wende's six) are not #Hua#. They claim to be #Hwhh# and #Hua# together, together, but how could this be? They not coexist (literally, “stack”) with #Hua#? Confusion. We did not suspect a seventh state, to which none of the other states could apply. We misunderstand much. How many states exist? Our presence is for purposes of communication (literally, “interface,” in the physical/chemical sense of the word, i.e., the surface or boundary at which reacting materials come in contact.)

  While the Queen was saying this, and while the translation was growing and rearranging itself on Malye's screen, she noted a growing agitation on the part of the Gateans, as if the air on their side of the room contained some caustic chemical.

  Presently, Wende shouted something the translation algorithm didn't catch, something that sounded more human than Waister, and the two Gatean Drones sprang into action, throwing themselves at the refugees, huge projectiles of gray muscle and sinew.

  There was a moment of screaming and confusion as the refugees attempted to scatter in the close quarters. The Congress of Advisors was knocked from Malye's hand, and a moment later she found herself pressed solidly against the wall, Line's huge hands on her shoulders, his copper eyes staring straight into her, his sickly-sweet breath in her face.

  “Please! Excuse the reaction of the Drones,” Plate said urgently, approaching from somewhere on the other side of the room. “We've suffered a problem.”

  “Heard something you didn't like?” Malye heard Konstant say in his old accusing tone.

  “Line,” Wende called out, “release the woman. This is inappropriate.”

  The Drone looked up sharply at that command, and took his hands off Malye. Plate strode forward, nudging Line out of his way as though he were the stronger of the two. In his hand was the Congress.

  “Apologies, Malyene Andreivne,” Plate said with apparent sincerity. “There is more to understanding than mere translation. This meeting is difficult for all of us, as I'm sure you're aware.”

  “I am very aware of that,” Malye replied, in as calm a voice as she could muster under the circumstances. She straightened her robe, took the Congress back from him. “In fact, I can't do this. Take us back to our quarters.”

  Plate fluted something at Wende, who scraped and scratched out a reply.

  “Yes,” Plate said to Malye after that, “I think perhaps that would be best. We can try this again tomorrow. Perhaps we all need time to adjust.”

  “What happened?” Konstant demanded, accusingly.

  Malye shrugged, still dazed. “I believe the Waister Queen is suing for peace.”

  “Peace? Why? I mean, why now?”

  She scowled. “Ialah's names, man, how the hell should I know? Let's get out of here.”

  She turned and leaped through the door membrane with no further delay, and began hurrying at once down the red stripe, putting as much distance as she could between those monsters and herself. This was
too much. This was just too much for her to handle. The others followed closely behind, and to an observer it might well have appeared that the Sirian refugees were fleeing in horror from the green-haired Plate, who hurried after them as if to explain a great error.

  ~~~

  “I hate your family, Plate. I hate your entire species.”

  “Madam, what harm have we done, precisely?”

  “I don't trust you, I never have. Take this and get out of here. Study the translation algorithm. I want a two-way machine that does the same thing, and that doesn't require any input from you or from your people.”

  “Madam, I—”

  “Do it! Do it, or this whole game is over. We don't want to talk to them anyway, much less with you as our intermediaries.”

  “Here. Take it back. I've memorized the algorithm.”

  “Have you? Then get out.”

  He left her trembling with fear, with rage, with emotions she could not easily put a name to. The pressure, oh Ialah! Plate was perhaps the most human of his kind, the most willing to see things from a human perspective. But Malye was the least human of her kind, the least human, and if things kept up like this, she'd soon be showing it, and Plate would be revealing what color the blood was, beneath that ugly gray skin of his.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  217::10

  HOLDERS FASTNESS, GATE SYSTEM:

  CONTINUITY 5218, YEAR OF THE DRAGON

  “May I borrow the Congress?” Viktor asked, when things had settled down a little. Malye shot him a weary look. Enough, enough with the Congress. Couldn't he leave it alone?

  Everyone was in the dayroom, lounging together on the couches and the floor, silent for the most part but physically gregarious nonetheless, the bonds between them strengthening as external pressures forced them closer together. Making of them... not a family, exactly, but something like a small village.

  “If this keeps up,” Konstant had even joked to her at one point, “you and I may be on the same side.”

  “We already are,” she'd snapped in reply, and he'd said, “I have nothing personal against you, you know,” and gone away to speak with Svetlane Antoneve. Which was just fine, because Svetlane had been driving Malye's blood pressure up with incessant demands for things like skin lotion and extra towels, and if Konstant was with her it would make the two of them that much easier to avoid.

  Now, she eyed Viktor skeptically.

  “What is it you hope to accomplish?” she asked him.

  “To answer some questions,” he replied carefully. “I'd like to review the transcript of your session, to go over the translations in detail. None of us heard any of that, I'll remind you, and you haven't made any effort to repeat it for us. And I suspect I'm the only one here with even a minimal grasp of Waister psychology and history, so I submit to you that I am the most qualified to make an analysis.”

  “Indeed,” she said, her voice noncommittal. She took out the Congress and turned it over in her hands a few times, examining it minutely, as if its smooth, contoured surface might hold some wisdom for her. But no, the wisdom was all inside, and Viktor was right.

  “I'll be as brief as possible,” Viktor said. “A few seconds at most.”

  “Any excuse to get in there, right?”

  Malye locked eyes with him, probing for weakness, but he returned her gaze with that same unflappable calm, and after a moment she sighed and threw him the Congress, which he fumbled and caught. Within moments, he had the trigger down. It was unpleasant to watch his eyes lose focus, as though he had suddenly died, but he remained sitting as before, his back against the wall, and after a very short time indeed he let the trigger up again, blinked, returned to realtime.

  Malye's children edged closer, and Nikolai and Vere after them. And then Konstant and Svetlane and Ludmile turned their attention on Viktor, and Sasha was already sitting next to him, which made it a full house.

  “So?” Nik asked, his voice betraying an eagerness Malye had not suspected. And she saw that same eagerness, like a sparkling orange tone, reflected in the eyes of the others. How eager they were, to hear the words of their enemy.

  “So,” Viktor said. Looking around, he blushed with sudden shyness. Unused to being the center of actual human attention, probably, but he spoke nonetheless: “Malyene Andreivne is correct; the Waisters have come here seeking peace. There, ah.... Once, millions of years ago, there was a race of creatures that confronted the Waister empire, and was destroyed. The Waisters were afraid they would end up destroying us, as well. They still don't understand why it took us so long to surrender to them. They're—”

  He ducked his head, cleared his throat, rubbed a hand on the back of his neck.

  “They appear to be very hurt and confused by what's happened.”

  “Oh, my heart is bleeding,” Konstant said. “The poor, poor Waisters didn't want to destroy Sirius system, but we made them do it.”

  Viktor was shaking his head, waving his hands. He was still calm, but there was a thought in his head that he couldn't wrap the right words around, and it clearly bothered him. “They destroyed Wolf and Lalande systems, too, but they didn't destroy Sol, when they clearly could have. Listen, imagine the strangest person you've ever met. Imagine some demented, autistic genius from an old Earth tribal society, who speaks a different language than you do, when he chooses to speak at all. You share almost no cultural reference points, and when you first meet him he bashes you in the face with his fist. What happened? What's going on in that brain of his? Maybe something very different from what you think.”

  “I'd lock him up,” Malye said flatly.

  “I don't care what's going on in his brain,” said Svetlane. “If he hits me, I hit back.”

  Others were nodding, but Sasha appeared to be on Viktor's side. “What if he's too big to hit? What if he's too big to lock up? What if he comes back later and offers to shake hands?”

  “You'd be a fool to trust him,” Malye said.

  “Would I?” For once, Sasha was holding his ground.

  “Of course you would!” Malye stood, pulled to her feet by sudden anger. At him, at everyone. “You want to make peace with monsters? With murderers? You can let a man hit you in the face if you want, but if you let him get away with it, I guarantee he'll do it again, any time he likes.”

  “Maybe not,” Viktor said. “It depends on why he hit you in the first place.”

  “So what are you suggesting?” Konstant asked, also getting to his feet. “That we roll over and make friends?”

  Viktor shrugged, flashed up a feeble grin. “Excuse me, Konstant, but have we been given another option? We can't fight them, and we can't run away from them.”

  “No, but we can ignore them.”

  Malye nodded approvingly at Konstant's words, pointing at him for emphasis. “Exactly right. Our confrontation with them is complete, yes? We've surrendered, they've gone away, and thankfully we have no further business to conduct.”

  “Ah,” Viktor said, “but it seems we do. They've returned, they've asked for peace, they've asked to speak with us, all very much against their nature. It's as if we all took our clothes off and walked into the autistic man's tribe to smoke weeds and eat animal flesh, holding our noses, as it were, against the stench of a life for which we aren't suited. Why would we do that? It would take something very important to make us do that. If they had something we wanted...”

  Konstant was shaking his head. “If we had something the Waisters wanted, they could simply take it. What could we do about it?”

  “Well then why are they back?” Viktor demanded. And suddenly, finally, Malye recognized the gleam in his eye, recognized what he was up to.

  “You just want to talk to them,” she said to Viktor, wonderingly. “They're just like another Congress of Advisors to you, a whole empire, a whole species of beings to answer your weird philosophical questions. You just want to find out what they've seen, what they know, what they maybe suspect about time and space and superchro
nic free will!”

  “Metachronic,” he corrected, as calmly as ever. “And yes, I want to speak with them. What's wrong with that?”

  “They murdered our civilization!” Malye flared. “Names of Ialah, Viktor, did you leave your wits behind in the Congress? Would you deal with Saitan, sell your soul to him for the sake of free will?”

  Now Viktor's calm began to crack. He scowled. “Malye, listen, the speed of light is constant, even for Waisters, and their fastest ships travel no more than ninety percent of that. The nearest edge of Waister space is thought to be about twelve hundred light years away. That's a long distance, and it also means this group, this 'peace fleet' of theirs, was launched as much as eight hundred years after the end of the war. With all due respect—” and here he swept the room with his gaze, taking in everyone, “—we need to develop a sense for the magnitudes of time and space involved here. Our grievances, however legitimate, are thousands of years out of date.”

  That sank in; Sirian law dictated that the gap between commission and punishment of a crime, any crime, could not exceed one hundred standard years.

  “Malye,” Viktor said gently, “You're an ordinary person, more or less. Does that frighten you? You believe yourself constrained, even doomed, by your heritage, but have you even explored the option of free will? Step outside yourself for a moment. Who and what do you want to be?”

  “A collaborator?” she said, shaking her head. “Shall I love and support the Waisters as I did the Monster Andrei? Whatever I may want, that isn't a part of it.”

  Viktor shrugged. “Peace, like war, is a means to an end. Use your brain.”

  “Use yours!” she shot back. “Every deviant claims a change of heart, when other defenses have failed. It is no basis for trust.”