Interstellar Caveman

by Karl Beecher

  Colin’s face dropped.

  He played back the last few seconds of the conversation in his mind, convinced he’d misheard them. Nope, he was right. The green-haired one just suggested, in the most blasé manner possible, that her friend have sex with him.

  No doubt the red-haired one would share Colin’s horrified reaction at this bad joke.

  “Oh, my dog! That’s actually a good idea,” said red. She started discussing it as though it were no more outlandish than getting a mouth swab. “A type of behavioural ecology test. Differences in mating rituals. I could get a whole chapter out of that.” She glanced again at Colin. “Well, maybe a couple of paragraphs.”

  Green smiled. “Then you could say you had sex with the artifact in your dissertation. Who else could say that?”

  “Ha!” laughed red. “That’s so jocular!”

  Colin’s mouth hung open. What on earth was happening here? Surely he hadn’t drunk enough to be hallucinating. “Now, just a… I mean it’s really… I don’t…” He looked at Ade with a pleading expression. “Help?”

  The android stepped forward. “Would this be an appropriate time to invent another excuse for us to leave, sir?”

  “What did he say?” asked red.

  Colin laughed nervously. “Oh, you’ll have to excuse my android. He’s a little faulty at the moment. Says all sorts of weird things.”

  “I am not currently experiencing any faults,” said Ade. “Unless this is the fiction you wish me to ‘play along’ with, sir?”

  “Ade, listen…”

  Ade turned back to the ladies. “Mister Douglass would like me to inform you that he is at present contaminated1.”

  The red-haired student looked disgusted. “He is?”

  “Um… yes,” said Colin, deciding desperately to play along. In for a penny, in for a pound. “In fact, I just had an encounter with a young man in the street, and now his hand is contaminated. Poor fellow.”

  The two students looked nervously at each other. “Come on,” one said, “we’d better be going.”

  Colin watched them disappear into the crowds.

  “Can you believe that?” he said to Ade. “I mean, is that normal here?”

  “Students are encouraged to use their initiative when selecting dissertation topics,” explained Ade.

  “No,” said Colin. “I mean the thing she said about… you know… sex.”

  “An imaginative and original idea,” remarked Ade. “No doubt that would gain her extra marks.”

  “What? But it’s… I mean that’s just…”

  “Sir?”

  “It’s indecent. It’s unseemly.”

  “I don’t follow, sir.”

  “Such loose and easy talk about… sex?”

  “Sex is a normal topic of polite conversation, sir.”

  “Good god! You just walk up to strangers and propose… sex. Is that how things are around here?”

  “I believe it is customary to exchange names first, sir.”

  “Oh, really? They didn’t bother asking mine. I was just an ‘artifact’ as far as they were concerned.”

  “I can appreciate that must feel discourteous, sir.”

  In fact, he seemed to be an artifact to just about everyone around here. He was being treated like some sort of curiosity, a weird, old relic that someone had dug up and put in a display case for everyone to gawk at. “Maybe I am a caveman. Maybe I shouldn’t fight the label.”

  “But you weren’t found in a cave, sir.”

  “No,” said Colin, rubbing his eyes. “You miss my point. Thousands of years before I was born, humans lived in caves. They were primitive. They wore fur and used stone tools. Recently, I imagined what it would have been like if a caveman got frozen for millennia and then revived in my time. In Pepperton. How would he cope? Well, now I know: he’d be lost. The technology. The customs. The morals. He’d be completely overwhelmed, totally out of place. What could he hope to do with himself now, except become a freakshow attraction? He’d have been better off dying with his own kind.”

  Colin sat quietly for a moment, cradling his head in his hands. The drunk feeling was fading and being replaced with a growing sensation of nausea.

  “Are you all right, sir?” asked Ade.

  Colin nodded, but he knew he wasn’t all right. “I think I’d better be going back.”

  “Very good, sir.” Ade turned to the door.

  “No,” said Colin. “I think I’d prefer to go back alone. I remember the way, it’s not far.”

  “As you wish, sir.”

  Colin stood and took a few paces, not all of them steady.

  “If I may be so bold, sir,” said Ade. “You are not a freakshow attraction. You are a human being. And I can assure you, sir, that freakshows have long since been discarded from Alliance culture.”

  Colin patted Ade on the shoulder. “That’s good of you to say, Ade,” he remarked, although it would have been nice if a human had told him that too. “Oh, and you’re wrong about freakshows. We told ourselves the same thing in my time: that we’d left those behind, that we were above all that now. But it wasn’t true. We just found new forms for them, that’s all. Remind me later to tell you about a TV show called The X Factor.”

  20

  Tyresa sat in her office, distracting herself by fixing up her latest injuries. She’d scraped her knuckles during her little jaunt to Solo, but the wounds weren’t deep. They’d heal up nicely. Even a cheap, hand-held epidermiser like this one could easily handle the job.

  The damage wouldn’t end up like the surrounding scars. Those older wounds had been picked up on earlier missions and ran deeper. She could have had a dermatologist restore the flesh properly, but they were just cosmetic problems now. Besides, she liked to keep those little reminders of those earlier scrapes she’d been in, both figurative and literal ones.

  Just as she finished sealing up the final bit of damaged skin, the office doorbell rang. A holograph of the visitor appeared above her desktop. It was Professor Ju-Desh.

  Tyresa tossed the epidermiser into her desk drawer. As the drawer slid itself shut, she toyed with the idea of ignoring the Professor. She was in no mood to talk right now. The meeting earlier had clearly not gone well, and she was feeling sour for it.

  The bell rang again.

  She had already set her door to display ‘Room Unoccupied’ to visitors, but that wasn’t enough to fool Ju-Desh. The Professor obviously knew Tyresa was there, probably through that surgically enhanced sixth sense the faculty all suspected she possessed.

  Tyresa gave up. “Come in!”

  The door slid open. Ju-Desh entered and looked around. From the look on her face, she was recalling why she rarely ventured down here from the thirty-first floor. Admittedly, Tyresa’s office was a drab little room. The small window let in barely enough light. It was packed with shelves and storage cabinets, but there still wasn’t enough space for everything. Rock samples littered the window ledge, books and slates spilled off the shelves, and artifacts from past expeditions covered whatever surfaces were available. Tyresa’s dad always used to say he’d seen asteroid impact sites tidier than her bedroom.

  Tyresa didn’t say anything to her visitor. She just stared expectantly.

  “I thought I told you to wait outside the meeting room,” said Ju-Desh, getting straight to the point as usual.

  “Yeah, I got bored. I saw no reason to hang around, waiting to get chewed out. So, what’s the verdict?”

  “The verdict is that Phrizbott’s angry with you.”

  “Situation normal, then?.”

  “Hardly. This incident is going to take some smoothing over, you know.”

  “Oh, come on,” said Tyresa. “You know what Phrizbott’s like. He’s paranoid. He blows every minor thing up into a disaster.”

  “I mean it,” said Ju-Desh. “The Transhackers are upset. Phrizbott is going to have to appease them.”

  “The Transhackers have the attention span of a fleegat1. Give it a
few weeks, it’ll blow over.”

  “Not this time,” said Ju-Desh. “The Transhackers want to see that someone is punished.”

  Here it comes, thought Tyresa. It always started like this. First, Ju-Desh would hint that Phrizbott advocated punishment. Then, she would say she’d persuaded him to moderate his stance… but at a price. That price would be Tyresa having to accept a job. A special type of job.

  Being an archaeologist and Predecessor specialist granted Tyresa preferential treatment. Most people found it hard to cross interstellar borders these days, but specialists like Tyresa were protected by the Archaeological Treaty. This made it easy for people in her line of work to cross borders.

  But it had another consequence.

  The Alliance government was naturally curious about what went on inside foreign states, but the hard borders made it difficult to get people into the right places to snoop around. That meant archaeologists had become an unlikely source of foreign intelligence. Government operatives spent a lot of time coaxing people like Tyresa into doing freelance espionage on the side.

  Tyresa didn’t like it, but these operatives were good psychologists. They used dirty tactics, knew how to analyse a person, and make them cooperate. Tyresa’s pressure point was her freedom to travel. Use of the Turtle— privilege granted to her by the university—was her ticket to roaming the galaxy. And she lived for that. Naturally, losing that privilege was a threat. Given how often she tended to land in trouble, a pretext for the threat came along often enough. When it did, Tyresa usually found herself being ‘offered a job.’ By now, she didn’t need to be told that taking it meant keeping her ship and her place at the university.

  Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be the first dirty job she’d been roped into. In the past, she’d spied, stolen information, even thrown a few punches when necessary. She’d gained her fair of share cuts and bruises. It didn’t always sit right with her, but in the end, she always managed to justify her actions to herself. She was no zealous patriot, but the Alliance was a decent enough nation compared to most. If she had to get her hands dirty for one of them, it might as well be the Alliance.

  “Punishment?” said Tyresa, going through the motions. “How bad?”

  “I won’t mince words,” replied Ju-Desh. “He wants to hang you out to dry. Properly this time. However…”

  Here it comes…

  “… I’ve managed to persuade him to moderate himself a bit.”

  Bingo.

  “You should take some leave. We’ll tell the Transhackers you’ve been put on academic suspension. Take yourself off-planet and lay low for a while.”

  “All right,” said Tyresa. “You recommend anywhere?”

  “Actually, yes.” Ju-Desh seated herself in the other chair by Tyresa’s desk. She didn’t usually do that. “We need your help with this Douglass character.”

  “Huh?” Tyresa felt wrong-footed. She had expected talk of a job, but this didn’t sound like it. “Colin? What about him?”

  “I’ve spoken to the doctors who examined him. Apparently, dealing with this neurodegenerative disease of his is trickier than expected. You see, it’s something we don’t know much about.”

  “You’re kidding. Surely they recognise what it is.”

  “They recognise it, that’s not the problem. Alliance citizens get gene therapy for these types of diseases in the womb, so we never develop it. What’s more, the specific one he’s got is very rare. So we… well, we don’t quite know how to cure it.”

  “Surely it’s not beyond our doctors,” said Tyresa. “This is a university, we’ve got some of the finest physicians in the galaxy.”

  “Of course, they could come up with a cure. But how long would it take? Weeks? Months? A year or more? Apparently, he hasn’t got that long left.”

  “You mean he might die before they find a cure.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So how can I help?”

  “Ironically—or fittingly—what he needs is more primitive medical attention. He needs to go somewhere where they still actually develop this disease and know readily how to cure it.”

  “Okay. Where?”

  “Abrama.”

  “Abrama?”

  That was unexpected. Abrama was a neighbouring state of the Alliance, one of the other large-sized powers. It was a deeply conservative state and strongly religious. Its suspicions of certain types of science had compromised its progress and left it technically inferior to the Alliance. But having remembered that, everything became clear. Manipulating genes was counter to their god’s will.

  “Oh, I get it. They don’t like gene therapy, so their people still develop the disease. And they already have a cure, I take it?”

  “Exactly,” said Ju-Desh. “There’s a superb neurological department at Saint Barflet’s you can take him to.”

  That made sense. Saint Barflet’s was a renowned hospital on Procya, the capital planet of Abrama. But something else about it seemed fishy. Why go to the trouble of shipping him all the way to Procya? Why not have them send the cure to an Alliance doctor or ship one of their specialists over?

  Then Tyresa remembered: the job. What ‘little task’ would be asked of her while she was in Abrama.

  “You’ll be laying low anyway,” said Ju-Desh. “You might as well keep yourself occupied. Since you’ll be in Abrama, you might do a little something for us while you’re there.”

  Tyresa sighed and sank back into her chair. This wasn’t so much carrot and stick as it was a pair of sticks. “Go on,” she nodded.

  A hint of a smile flickered over Ju-Desh’s lips, the closest she ever got to a triumphant cackle. “There was an election in Abrama while you were away.”

  “Oh?”

  “There’s been a change in administration. The first in twenty years would you believe. The conservatives are back in power. Not only that, but we’ve heard stories that some members of the new government have links with the True Origin Society.”

  “Those nutbags? I thought they were just a fringe cult.”

  “They were. But we suspect they’ve been busy behind the scenes conspiring to get their members into key positions.”

  This was news to Tyresa. She knew about the True Origin Society, many people did. It was a weird, secretive coalition of fundamentalists and conspiracy theorists, suspicious of anything that didn’t loudly praise their ancient god. For people outside Abrama, the society was merely a laughing stock. But many of the more reasonable Abramans were deeply sceptical about it. They found it far too reactionary even by their standards, and they were the ones who would have to live under its influence if it ever gained real power.

  The society’s leadership remained largely unknown. Members of the TOS (or TOSers, as they were also called) tended to conceal their membership. Tyresa had had dealings with a TOSer only once to her knowledge.

  It was a guy who’d made the mistake of evangelising to her as she passed through Abrama last year, making the usual pronouncements about how her soul was in danger if she didn’t submit her body to the ‘Creator.’ (‘Bodily submission’ featured a lot in what these guys said.) At first, she thought the guy was coming onto her. But then he told her she was a wretched sinner, doomed to suffer for eternity, and a female to boot. That’s when she knew this guy was a TOSer.

  She’d ignored the usual advice for dealing with them (walk away quickly) and instead engaged with him, believing that embarrassing him would be a bit of fun to pass the time. It was then she learned just how impervious to logic TOSers were. Everything she tried failed to make a dent on his faith. He had an answer for everything.

  The universe is older than the ten thousand years you claim, she said. Scientific dating methods are flawed, he replied.

  We can go faster than the speed of light, despite your claims to the contrary, she said. The stars are much closer to each other than they appear, he replied.

  Your God has never been confirmed by experiment? The Creator is supernatural and beyon
d detection.

  The universe expanded from a singularity and didn’t poof into existence? You wouldn’t know because you weren’t there in person.

  And so on.

  After that encounter, Tyresa never thought about the True Origin Society in the same way again. Sure, what they said was as laughable as it was primitive, but she was no longer as quick to laugh after seeing the look in the man’s eyes that day: unquestioning belief, impermeable faith, and total determination. It shook her to think that a whole, organised group of people like that even existed.

  A group that, judging from the news, could well be on the march.

  “Jeez,” said Tyresa. “I shudder to think of what Abrama might do if those crazies got any real power. Will ordinary Abramans really listen to them?”

  “Who knows? There are plenty of traditionalists in Abrama who’ve just gone through two decades of liberal rule, or what passes for ‘liberal’ in Abrama at least. They might be persuaded the Society’s absolutist approach is just what’s needed now. Obviously, we’d like to know if their government now contains any extremists of the fire and brimstone variety who might upset interstellar relations. So, while you’re over there, snoop around. Find out if any government officials have links with these cultists. If they have any influence, we need to know it. Get names.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “Good.”

  This was normally the point where Ju-Desh would have got up and left. Instead, she remained in her chair, looking around and impulsively tapping her thumb on her lap. This was unusual.

  “Something else?” asked Tyresa.

  “Um… Yes. Nothing important, just… um…”

  Ju-Desh seemed almost embarrassed. Tyresa hadn’t seen the Professor like this since getting caught with Professor Randyman at the office party two years ago.

  “You’re a good archaeologist, Tyresa. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

  Ah, that was the problem. She was trying to deliver a compliment. They tended to stick in Ju-Desh’s throat.

  Tyresa shrugged. “Okay. Thanks, I guess.”

  “I just thought you might be down here brooding over what Phrizbott said, saying you were just a ‘treasure hunter.’”