Abyss Deep

by Ian Douglas

  “Okay, so it’s like Wiseman here says,” Hutchison went on. “Maybe Kirchner isn’t neo-­Ludd, but he could be scared shitless that we’re gonna bump into the Qesh out here. GJ 1214 isn’t all that far from Eta Oph.”

  “Yeah,” Thomason said, “but you’re forgetting that the Qesh aren’t at Eta Oph anymore. They travel about as a fleet.”

  “Right,” I said. “Last we saw, the Predarian fleet was at Bloodstar. That’s a long, long way from here. No way they’re going to notice little ole us.”

  “Yeah?” Wiseman said. “And how do we know what they can do?”

  “Bullshit,” Dalton said. “Spotting us out here is like spotting one particular grain of sand somewhere along a twenty-­kilometer beach.”

  “It’s worse than that,” Thomason added. “With us tucked into our own private little universe right now, it’s spotting one particular grain of sand that isn’t there.”

  “We have to come out of our hole and play sometime,” Hutchison pointed out. “What then?”

  “I think the real question,” I said, “is what happened to Murdock Base? Was it knocked out by the local natives, whatever they are? Or was it the Qesh?”

  “If it was the Qesh,” Corporal Masserotti said, “then they’re not traveling in a single fleet anymore.”

  Lance Corporal Gerald Colby said, “We know the Qesh send out scouting parties, raiders, that sort of thing. They could have left someone at Abyssworld, easy.”

  “Yeah,” Wiseman said. “Yeah, that makes sense. Maybe Kirchner is afraid that we’re going to run into the Qesh at Abyssworld.”

  “So what if we do?” Thomason said. “We’ve had a research station on Abyssworld for . . . what? Nine years, now. Even the Qesh wouldn’t have a problem with us visiting our own outpost, for God’s sake.”

  “There you go, assuming that they’re going to think like us,” Hutchison said.

  “Yeah,” Wiseman said. “If they’re alien, they’re not going to think like we do. That’s what the word means, right? It’s like they’re insane!”

  “What do you think, Doc?” Thomason asked. “You’re the expert on aliens!”

  “I think that even the most alien life form we run into is going to act in a way that is logical for it. It’ll be a logic based on its evolutionary history, its psychology, its physiology, and the way it looks at the universe around it. We may not understand that logic at first, but there will be logic.”

  “Well, that’s just what I said, right?” Wiseman said. “If we don’t understand the logic, they’re gonna be acting crazy . . . at least so far as we’re concerned.”

  “Doesn’t mean we can’t understand them,” I pointed out. “But it’s never going to be easy.”

  In fact, there’s a whole science devoted to how aliens think—­xenoepistemology, the study of how nonhuman intelligences obtain and organize knowledge. There were expert AI systems, including one called Ludwig, resident in Haldane’s Net, designed to figure out just what an alien means when it says, “Good morning.” We had a long way to go in the field, though. We still didn’t always understand the Brocs, and we’d been communicating with them for 128 years.

  Eventually the conversation shifted, as it always did in this kind of free-­wheeling bull session, to other topics—­to women and sex, to hot liberty ports, to no-­shit-­there-­I-­was stories, to what each of them planned on doing when they got out of the ser­vice.

  I got up and left the group, sending a call to Chief Garner in sick bay. It was almost 1700. “Hey, Chief. It’s Carlyle. You have some extra duty for me?”

  “That’s a negative, Carlyle. You’re off the hook.”

  In fact, he hadn’t assigned me anything since I’d moved in with the Marines. “How are things with Dr. Kirchner?”

  “No problems.” His mental voice sounded a bit tight, though. I wondered if things were as smooth down in sick bay as he was making them out to be. Hell, if there was a problem, Garner wouldn’t tell me about it, not and risk adding to the scuttlebutt flying through the ship.

  “Okay, Chief. Thanks. I’ll check in tomorrow.”

  “Tell you what, E-­Car,” he said. “We’re going to record it that you’ve done your time, okay?”

  “Fine with me. What gives?”

  “Let’s just say . . . let’s just say that we don’t want to have you hanging around in sick bay where Dr. Kirchner will see you. He’s still bent out of shape about you disobeying orders, and he thinks you got let off too light. Out of sight, out of mind, okay?”

  “Okay, Chief. Thanks.”

  It sounded as though Chief Garner was struggling to . . . to control Kirchner, to contain him, and that was serious stuff. It also sounded like Kirchner was spending an unhealthy percentage of his time in sick bay. He was at least spending his evenings there, times when I would have been down there pulling my extra-­duty shifts.

  I began then to seriously consider the possibility that what we were witnessing in Kirchner was some kind of pathology. He wasn’t just an asshole; there was something wrong with him.

  But what? There were no other doctors on board, certainly no one who could intervene with Kirchner, challenge his behavior, or get a solid diagnosis. Even if we had a diagnosis, it would take an act of God—­meaning Captain ­Summerlee—­to remove him from duty and force him to accept treatment.

  Besides, both the military and the medical hierarchies are weighted heavily in favor of officers and doctors over enlisted personnel and nursing staff. There’s an old saying that you can’t fight city hall. Turns out you can’t fight the medical old-­boy network either, or Commonwealth Military Command.

  I considered linking in to the medical AI that ran sick bay. Its name was Andries, short for Andries van Wesel . . . a physician and anatomist back in the sixteenth century better known by the Latin version of his name, Andreas Vesalius. Andries would have a complete program subset for diagnosing psychiatric problems. Military units, after all, had more problems with psychological conditions—­depression, anxiety disorders, PTSD, suicidal ideation—­than they did with sprains, strains, and broken bones.

  But . . . no. Andries worked for the medical department, and out here that meant Dr. Kirchner. I wouldn’t want him to see a report from Andries that suggested that I was checking up on his mental health. Besides, Andries was where Chief Garner had gone to find the deleted STS data. If I or he ended up in front of a court-­martial board, a record of my rummaging around in the sick bay AI’s files looking for psychiatric symptoms in my department head would look uncomfortably like mutiny.

  That was what we were looking at here, right? Mutiny . . . a damned ugly word.

  There was an alternative, though, another source of information on human psychiatric disorders.

  Its name was Ludwig.

  Ludwig was named for Ludwig Wittgenstein, an early twentieth-­century philosopher who’d done important work on the philosophy of language and how it intersected with the philosophy of mind—­mental functions, mental properties, and consciousness itself. Language, and how we use it, affects the way we think. We take that for granted today, but it was pretty revolutionary three hundred years ago. And the idea that language affects how we think becomes vitally important when trying to establish meaningful communication with a totally alien species.

  I knew that Ludwig had a lot of data stored on human psychological or psychiatric conditions. Wiseman had been right about one thing, though he’d been having trouble expressing it: nonhumans think differently from humans, and those differences can make them seem crazy. Ludwig had to know about human mental problems in order to understand how an alien might be thinking.

  I grew a chair for myself near the viewall, dropped into it, and opened the channel, passing up-­link my authorization code as I did so. “Ludwig? I need a fast consult.”

  “What is the nature of your question?”
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br />   “Somebody on board is acting strange. I need to assess his psychological condition.”

  “Why not consult with Andreis? This would be his specialty, rather than mine.”

  “My reasons are private.”

  “Understood. Select the behaviors that are troubling you.”

  A list of symptoms ran through my in-­head. Most I easily discarded. But a few . . .

  Difficulty conforming to social norms: In this case, “social norms” might mean military protocol and common courtesy.

  Acting impulsively; failing to consider the consequences of impulsive actions: Well, he’d decided not to give Pollard an STS, and hadn’t listened to my reasons for giving him one.

  Display of aggressiveness and irritability, possibly leading to physical assault: Okay, Kirchner hadn’t attacked anybody, but it sure felt like he was out to get me.

  Difficulty feeling empathy for others; an inability to consider the thoughts, feelings, or motivations of other ­people, sometimes leading to a disregard for others: Bingo.

  Displays no remorse for behavior that harms others: That and the lack of empathy together were beginning to sound like sociopathy, but the diagnosis Ludwig was working toward turned out to be something else—­antisocial personality disorder.

  Some of the signs and symptoms were bang on. Others were borderline; Pollard’s case had resolved well, with no physical harm to him, so it was tough to judge whether Kirchner had shown any remorse or not. There simply wasn’t enough solid evidence for a diagnosis. That was the hell of psychological profiles like this one. Every person is different, and every single symptom can show up in a healthy individual. Psychiatric pathology, it turns out, is often a matter of degree.

  And if Kirchner could be clinically diagnosed as suffering from APD, it turned out there wasn’t a lot that could be done about it. Very few ­people with the condition ever sought treatment on their own; most ended getting treatment after some sort of altercation with the legal system. The only recognized treatment was something called cognitive-­behavioral therapy, which involved teaching the person to find insights into his own behavior and to change those behaviors and thought patterns that were socially maladaptive. It took a long time—­years, often—­and if the person wasn’t personally convinced that he was having trouble in social situations and that he was the cause, all the therapy in the world wouldn’t help him.

  Sure, I could just see it. Excuse me, Doctor, but your bedside manner sucks and you’re making impulsive decisions without thinking through the results. I think you need to seek professional counseling. . . .

  That would go over real well.

  So . . . was it even my business at all? I mean . . . some ­people, some doctors are simply just assholes, and it’s not up to me to fix any of them. I was no longer on the case, in a manner of speaking; I was under orders to stay out of Kirchner’s way. Fixing him was not my job.

  But there was another side to the issue. Navy Corspmen are responsible for the health of everyone on board ship, and that includes their mental health. Much more than on Earth or at a Commonwealth Navy base somewhere, the tight little community of men and women that make up a starship’s crew and passengers depends on the medical department to keep everyone’s mental health on an even keel . . . and that means watching out for developing problems before they reach critical and someone gets killed in a fight or as a result of bad judgment.

  I couldn’t do anything, but Chief Garner was the senior medical department petty officer. Maybe he could.

  I thanked Ludwig for its help, then composed a written message in my head.

  HEY, CHIEF,

  I’M NOT TRYING TO SECOND-­GUESS YOU OR DR. KIRCHNER, BUT I’VE NOTICED SOME DISTURBING BEHAVIORS AND I THOUGHT I SHOULD PASS THEM ON TO YOU. YOU MIGHT BE IN A BETTER POSITION TO JUDGE, SINCE YOU’RE SEEING HIM EVERY DAY.

  THANKS MUCH.

  ELLIOT CARLYLE, HM2

  I appended a link to the list of signs and symptoms I’d observed, and sent it off. I used a written message partly because I didn’t want to get into an argument with Garner, but mostly because I wanted him to see the whole list of signs and symptoms before he told me to shut the hell up.

  On the downside, it established a records-­trail that would be most useful for the prosecution if they decided to give me a court-­martial.

  I didn’t care, though. I hadn’t done anything actionable—­not yet—­and I really was concerned about Kirchner and the effect he might have on shipboard morale.

  I addressed it to Garner, marking it to his attention only, hesitated for a long moment, and then finally hit the SEND icon.

  Then I tried to get back to work, which meant going over the health records of the Marines in MSEP-­Alpha, making sure immunizations were up to date and that nanobot counts were within acceptable limits.

  And I tried to forget about the damnable fact that, at that moment, Kirchner was the only physician within something like thirty light years.

  My note to Chief Garner turned out to be something of a mistake. He came up to the squad bay the next day, furious, and reamed me a new one for sticking my nose in where it wasn’t wanted.

  “Damn it, E-­Car,” he growled, while a number of the Marines looked on in amused silence, “can’t you just leave well enough alone? I’ve got all I can handle juggling . . . problems in sick bay, hassles with the skipper, and Dr. Kirchner on the rampage. I do not need you trying to be helpful!”

  “I understand, Chief.”

  “No, I don’t think you do! Are you an expert in psychological pathology? Have you been trained in psychiatric medicine? Taken downloads teaching you intervention techniques in social path cases?”

  “No, Chief, but—­”

  “ ‘No, Chief,’ ” he mimicked, then glared at me. “But me no buts, E-­Car. You wouldn’t know antisocial personality disorder if it jumped out and bit you. And linking in to a psychiatric subroutine won’t cut it.”

  “I’m sorry, Chief. I was worried and trying to help.”

  “You’ll help best by staying here, staying out of the doctor’s sight, and staying the hell out of my hair!”

  “Aye, aye, Chief.”

  There was more . . . but eventually Garner ran down and stalked off, leaving me with a bunch of grinning Marines. “Don’t take it too hard, Doc,” Colby told me. “Chiefs and gunnery sergeants—­they think they’re God.”

  “Uh-­uh, Colby,” Sergeant Tomacek said, shaking his head. “Captains think they’re God. Chiefs and gunnery sergeants know they’re God. Basic law of the universe, that.”

  A week and a ­couple of days later, we dropped out of Alcubierre Drive. GJ 1214 is a pipsqueak even compared to a red dwarf like Gliese 581. It’s sixteen-­hundredths of the Sun’s mass—­about half of Bloodstar’s, and our navigational program popped us into normal space less than half an AU out.

  And almost immediately, we realized that we were not alone in the system.

  Someone else had gotten there first, and was already in orbit around the planet.

  Chapter Eleven

  Kari and I stood silent on the mess deck, watching the final approach to the star and its watery world. A ­couple of dozen Marines were there as well, uncharacteristically silent. From a scant 2 million kilometers away, the star GJ 1214 spanned eight degrees, sixteen times the width of Sol in Earth’s sky, sullen red, glowering, a good 20 percent of its face blotched and pocked by black starspots. I could see the granulation of the photosphere, the roil and churn of the deep stellar atmosphere, the ghostly reach of prominences along far-­flung lines of magnetic force.

  And the world . . . was it world or titanic comet? As the digital avatar of Dr. James Eric Murdock had showed us in the docuinteractive briefing two weeks before, the planet called Abyssworld had a misty white tail streaming out from its nightside, stretching far out into the darkness away from that cool
red ember of a sun. Abyssworld’s dayside showed as a deep violet ocean beneath the hurricane swirl of clouds that covered most of the hemisphere. The nightside was made dimly visible by light reflecting from the cometary tail, and by the pale ring of aurorae around the planet’s north pole. What we could see of Abyssworld’s nightside reminded me forcibly of Europa—­ice from pole to pole, streaked and webbed and crisscrossed by filamentous networks of dark lines.

  A world divided, half ice locked and frigid, half boiling, storm-­tortured ocean.

  And an ocean, I reminded myself, that was ten thousand kilometers deep.

  What a world, I thought. What a world!

  Haldane’s instruments picked up the presence of the alien ship long before we were close enough to see it with our naked eyes, of course. The bridge threw an inset window up on the viewall showing the vessel, a gnarled and organic-­looking shape, vaguely like an egg but with blisters and twisted surfaces that made you dizzy if you tried to follow them with your eye. The color overall was black or a very dark slate gray with sky-­blue highlights or detailing; the color was a bit uncertain because we were seeing it by the ruby light of GJ 1214.

  “Do we know who builds ships like that?” I asked.

  “Maybe Haldane’s AI knows,” Gunnery Sergeant Hancock said.

  I linked through. Dozens of others were asking exactly the same question.

  “The design,” the AI’s voice replied, “is similar to Gykr vessels encountered at Xi Serpentis in 2201. I estimate the probability of identity at eighty-­five percent.”

  In the 128 years since we’d made our first ET contact with the Brocs, Humankind has directly met perhaps twenty alien species, though we know of hundreds more through the Encyclopedia Galactica. I remembered something about a short war with these guys, but not the details.

  “Tell me about the Gykr,” I said. And the data cascaded through my mind.

  Encyclopedia Galactica/Xenospecies Profile

  Entry: Sentient Galactic Species 12190

  “Gykr”

  Gykr, “Guckers,” “Gucks”