Analog Science Fiction and Fact - September 2014

by Penny Publications

  Carl's gut also told him the wave of accidents was sabotage. If so, if the Foremost was up to something, who was he kidding that he would win this game of cat-and-mouse?

  Danica said, "Tell me why you're thinking insurance fraud."

  "The usual reason. For the money."

  "Money for...?"

  She didn't need to know Carl's source: Pashwah, the Snake trade AI on Earth. Its latest allegations were scary, and he had confirmed bits and pieces. Someone new was buying alien tech. Someone canny, their transactions relayed from world to world, at each step disguised by an anonymizer service. But anonymized or not, large cash flows couldn't entirely hide. Regulators had to know when banks made big bets with their own money, and when big bets were made by customers. Even the banks used by aliens' trade agents.

  If Pashwah's inferences were to be believed—not a given, because the Great Clans to whom it was programmed to defer knew how to carry a grudge—that shadowy buyer was clan Arblen Ems.

  "For?" Danica prompted again.

  This time Carl shrugged. It meant he didn't care to say, not that he couldn't. Raising an eyebrow, Danica acknowledged the distinction.

  She was too smart not to involve.

  "To acquire interstellar trade goods," he told her. "The transactions are too well hidden, too indirect, to know anything more than that there's been a big secretive InterstellarNet buy. I don't know by whom. I don't know from whom. I don't know of what."

  "But you suspect the local Snakes."

  "As does my sometimes reliable source."

  Danica needed a moment to take it all in. "I gather that my supposed employers paid out on the earliest claims."

  "Uh-huh."

  "And you have a theory what the Snakes would buy."

  "Yeah. Advanced industrial tech. The last couple years I've had to run things with a light hand, but I still get to oversee imports. Glithwah keeps asking for advanced robotics. I keep denying her requests."

  "How advanced?"

  "Boater tech." Boaters because their sun, Epsilon Eridani, appeared in the constellation Eridanus, the River.

  "We haven't deployed much Boater robotics. Humans. Have we?"

  No, and he approved. From what he'd seen, Boater bots were... creepy. Too lifelike. Too R.U.R. But if humans had been built like jellyfish—the nearest terrestrial analogue to a Boater—he conceded he might have seen the pluses. Whatever the reason, Boaters had embraced robotics early and wholeheartedly.

  With a shiver he kept from his avatar, he answered her, curtly, "No."

  "Why keep asking for your okay? So you won't suspect they already have the tech?"

  "That's my guess." As he guessed Glithwah knew he would turn her down. Given Ariel's ongoing labor shortage, not to ask for such useful tech might also have made him suspicious.

  So who lied to him? The wily Snake, or the wily Snake AI?

  Danica said, "Suppose the locals did obtain Boater robotics. We're talking designs, nothing physical. Sure, they could smuggle the banned designs to this world. But why? You'd see if the Snakes built a new, modern factory. Which, I assume, you haven't seen."

  "You're right," he conceded. "I gather that in your poking around, you haven't, either."

  "Nope. So maybe we're barking up the wrong tree. Maybe the Snakes are working a different angle."

  "Maybe." Or maybe, as whenever he sat down to b'tok with Glithwah, he was several moves behind.

  Chapter 5

  Amid a grove of dwarf pines, in the settlement's single, tiny, terrestrial park, Carl caught up with Corinne. Having full access to the public-safety cameras helped.

  "Hey, stranger," he said. "Busy, I see."

  "Hey, yourself." She kept glancing at the ceiling, at the less-than-convincing sky simulation he had, over the years, taught himself to ignore. Her left hand clutched a pinecone. With her right hand, scale by scale, she was picking the cone apart.

  He didn't remember her as a fidgeter. Of course, he hadn't seen her in... five years. People changed. Witness that she hadn't radioed that she was coming. It made him sad.

  "How's your better half?" he asked.

  "Fine, thanks," Corinne said. "Though she's less than thrilled at me jaunting three billion klicks from home."

  "Can you blame her?" But that sounded judgmental, as though he wasn't happy to see Corinne. He changed subjects. "I met Grace. She seems nice."

  "Nice enough." Corinne shrugged. "Just a temp. My regular pilot caught a bug. I was lucky to find someone on short notice open to making the trek to Uranus. 'Maybe just this once,' Grace told me. Truth be told, her chief motivation seems to be bringing home a Banak. Without middlemen, without shipping costs, she ought to turn a tidy profit."

  "This rock isn't a big tourist attraction," Carl agreed. As for Dolmar Banak's work, no matter how trendy the sculptures might have become in-system, they did nothing for Carl. All Snake art was odd enough. Snake impressionism...

  His implant pinged, sparing them both his impersonation of an art critic. He said, "Work calls. Give me a minute." Expecting within that minute to be offering his excuses—because the ping was COSMIC ULTRA.

  "It's about time you made contact," said the avatar that appeared on the link. "I couldn't risk being seen to be looking for you." It was Corinne.

  "It's complicated," the avatar said. It wore the battered captain's hat he had favored back when—using another name, wearing another face—he had worked for her. Odyssey's familiar, cluttered bridge provided the backdrop.

  Only this couldn't be Corinne. He wondered what game Danica was playing.

  "Life is complicated," he netted back. Aloud, gesturing at a park bench, he said, "Why don't we sit?"

  Corinne tossed away the tortured pinecone. Glancing around, admiring the park, she sat. "Reminds me of Nottingham. Ever been there?"

  Nottingham? As in the Sheriff of? He couldn't imagine any resemblance, not unless Sherwood Forest had been reduced to a dozen trees.

  Whoever it was on the link said, "You don't believe I'm me, despite the encryption."

  He didn't know what to think. COSMIC ULTRA crypto was seriously compute-intensive. To handle the load, a neural implant needed a major upgrade, and it did not suffice to know the top-secret algorithms. You had to put that code into a nanite, get it across the blood-brain barrier, and splice the nanite, just so, into the implant. Accomplishing all that required a fancy designer microbe, combining Snake microbiology with a terrestrial retrovirus. And lest, somehow, the tech get stolen—or recovered from a dead agent's brain—the transporter microbe incorporated elements of viral meningitis. Take the microbe without a dose of the matching vaccine, and you died. Quickly. And badly.

  "Convince me," he answered.

  "I have a message for you," the avatar said. "From someone I hope you will believe."

  The Corinne avatar receded, its Manhattan skyline backdrop with it, to a corner of the consensual meeting space. In their place: an iridescent sphere afloat in a featureless mist. A padlock icon showed the sphere to be spinning—and also a recording secured with COS-MIC ULTRA encryption.

  "Ir am Robyn Tanaka A#$#&6," the message began.

  The pronoun. The suffix. The avatar, devoid of personality. All three suggested an Augmented. (Not that he'd ever known one. The tech had yet to be invented when he had first hidden himself away on Ariel.) The voice, without emotion, without a trace of gender, pointed to the AI component as dominant when the recording was made. And Robyn Tanaka, Secretary-General of the Interstellar Commerce Union, was among the UP top officials apt to have COSMIC ULTRA clearance. Within the ICU, perhaps even the only one.

  Nottingham, Corinne had said. Nottingham. Sherwood Forest. Robin Hood. Robyn Tanaka. He could connect the dots. But what could the ICU want with him?

  "The United Planets faces a serious challenge," the sphere continued. "Security, at the highest levels, has been compromised. Ir cannot go through normal channels. Corinne is among the few outsiders enlisted to help. She nominated you as
another. Ir hope you will accept, because worlds are in peril."

  Left unstated: that giving COSMIC ULTRA access to Corinne was itself a security breach at the highest level. If he reported this, someone would go to prison for long time. If he kept it to himself, he might end up in prison.

  But what if this undefined threat was for real?

  The sphere faded. Corinne's avatar expanded to reclaim the entire consensual meeting space. "Just from me having high-level codes, you know I've made a friend in high places, whether or not you believe that friend is Robyn. So, where can we talk?"

  His office? Get Corinne inside a shielded room and he'd know whether she was on the secure link. But to have Corinne in "the warden's" office would not be keeping their encounter casual.

  His ship, then? It, too, was well shielded. He just needed a pretext.

  Carl netted, "Ask me about the rash of accidents in Snake industrial facilities."

  "I was wondering," Corinne said aloud, "about this rash of industrial accidents. The Foremost doesn't care to volunteer much. Can you tell me anything?"

  "Better than that. I was going to fly out tomorrow to see for myself what's left of the old deuterium refinery." Halfway around this little world. "Care to ride with me?"

  "That'd be great," she said, standing.

  "Thanks," her avatar added with a wink. And dropped the link.

  Carl radioed the tower to report an air-recirc fan had died and needed swapping out. Traffic Control bumped his shuttle to the end of the line for takeoff. As he sifted hand tools in a drawer, he got a ping. COSMIC ULTRA.

  "I imagine that little charade was for me," the avatar said. Corinne.

  "Now I know it is you." He closed the drawer and sat. "I figure we have fifteen minutes or so before anyone checks on us. Use them wisely."

  She unbelted from her crash couch, stood, and stretched. She was short enough to manage despite the shuttle's cramped cockpit. "This will take a few minutes to explain. You won't want to believe it. Neither did Robyn, at first."

  "Why don't you begin at the beginning?"

  "That's a half billion years ago."

  "Talk fast, then," he suggested.

  She laughed. "Here's the deal. Half a billion or so years ago, very quickly, life on Earth changed. Whole new phyla of life appeared. Pretty much every sort of animal life more complex than a bacterial colony. Paleontologists call that period the Cambrian Explosion."

  "Not an obviously existential threat to the present world order," he said.

  "Maybe not, but a bunch of worlds had similar experiences at around the same time." She waved off his objection. "Coincidence? Hard to swallow, even if that were the only eleven-of-a-kind concurrence. It's not." She rattled off others. "And if the known intelligent species—native to worlds differing in age by billions of years—hadn't all developed high-tech within a few years of one another. And if—"

  "You mean the InterstellarNet members," he got in.

  "Yeah." Rummaging beneath the copilot console in the tiny corner locker, she found a drink bulb of water. "Eleven species close together, in a galaxy that's otherwise silent. Quite the twist of fate—if it is. We call it the Mathews conundrum. And if..."

  Carl let the words wash over him. He could scarcely grasp the broad outlines, much less pore over the timelines and data files Corinne transferred as she spoke. So what did he think?

  That he sought out conspiracy for a living. But a conspiracy dating back to the Cambrian era?

  When he objected, Corinne, said, "We think they have the technology to slow the passage of time. Slow it way down."

  He just looked at her.

  "That's another long story," she said.

  Time they didn't have, if he planned to keep up appearances and take off soon. Something had to wait, and magic tech to slow time seemed like a good candidate.

  "Talk to me." With stiffened fingers, Corinne poked him in the shoulder. "You look, shall we say, less than convinced."

  "I'll say this for your bad guy. He's persistent. A half-billion years after conspiring with the trilobites, he's whispering in Mary Shelley's ear as she writes Frankenstein. And to some Czech playwright, as he writes about robots." Carl ended on a rising inflection, not remembering much about the play. He was pretty sure, though, that it ended with the robots rebelling against their human masters.

  Corinne nodded. "R.U.R. Standing for Rossum's Universal Robots. And Karel Čapek didn't just write a play about robots, he invented the word. The thing is..."

  "There's more?"

  "Yeah. Literature like Frankenstein and R.U.R. crops up across InterstellarNet species. And everywhere the effect is the same. Whole lines of scientific inquiry get rendered untenable, at the least delayed for many years."

  Uh-huh. Maybe anxiety over new technology was normal. Maybe stories in which everything went smoothly didn't catch on.

  But if he turned around Corinne's suspicions...

  "Okay," he said. "Say that selected research was discouraged. How many lines of investigation got pushed ahead?"

  "Huh." She gave him a sideways look. "No one has asked that question. See, this is why we need you."

  Carl's console display showed they had been talking for about ten minutes. He called the tower. " Tempest, here. My fan problem is fixed."

  "Roger that, Tempest," Traffic Control radioed back. "We'll have you on your way in a few minutes."

  Corinne plopped back into her crash couch and buckled up. "Which part is hardest to swallow?"

  "We're talking about aliens, right? Only not any we know. Someone from waaaaay back. Impossibly far back." She didn't comment so he plowed ahead. "What am I supposed to believe? That the aliens look like us? That they have robots or androids or whatever that do? Or that human agents serve these aliens for reasons we don't yet know?"

  "Something like that. Pick one."

  "Secret, starfaring aliens."

  "Robyn named them the Interveners," Corinne said. "And I don't see starships as a big obstacle to belief. We have starships. As do the Centaurs."

  As would the Snakes—instead, in fact, of humanity—if the hijacked Centaur ship hadn't been wrested away from them.

  Helping to retake Victorious was one of the few real accomplishments in Carl's messy, muddled life. Not so much destroying the starship in the process. That was the stuff of nightmares. His other recurring nightmare was that the Snakes had another starship secretly under construction. They had had control of Victorious for decades. What were the odds they hadn't learned enough to copy it?

  Awake, he told himself no one could hide a project that size. Not even someone as devious as Glithwah.

  "You okay, Carl?"

  "Yeah." He could worry any time about the Snakes. "So why, exactly, would these Interveners do all this?" If they even exist. Her evidence, such as it was, was entirely circumstantial.

  "Haven't a clue." Corinne sighed. "Robyn hasn't a clue. Not either half of her. Well, she believes Frankenstein and the like were intended to discourage tech developments, but she hasn't a guess why. As for the larger questions—why influence us at all, why interventions vary by solar system, why the meddling began so long ago—she's as lost as me."

  Traffic Control interrupted. "Tempest, you're next up for takeoff."

  "Roger that." Carl gave his console a final look-over. He radioed back, "Ready when you are, tower."

  "One other thing..." Corinne said.

  Nothing good, he guessed. "And that is?"

  "Bad stuff happens to people who come too close to seeing the pattern. They disappear, suffer odd 'accidents,' have unexpected things happen to them." She netted yet another file, and his quick skim turned up names in the ICU and the UP Secretariat. "I got into this mess by investigating an historian's strange disappearance."

  Mess was an understatement. "Any more good cheer to share?"

  "That's it." Corinne flashed a wan smile.

  "So, are you in?"

  "To do what, now?"

  "What y
ou can. What's necessary. In your line of work, you'll know better than I what that might be."

  The tower radioed again, clearing Tempest for immediate take-off. It was a relief to turn his attention to ship's instruments, to concentrate on the pitted and fractured landscape racing past a few klicks below. Flying over one of Ariel's sinuous canyons, hundreds of klicks long and in places ten deep, even the largest crater seemed puny.

  How much punier, mere humans?

  Was he in? And what would being in mean? Apart, by failing to report the compromise of COSMIC ULTRA tech, from being in league with traitors. Apart from, at least technically, becoming a traitor himself.

  It all boiled down to Corinne. So which was she: insane, treasonous, or as savvy and honest as he had always believed?

  It wasn't even a contest.

  He told her, "I'm in."

  Chapter 6

  Caliban (moon): A small outer satellite of Uranus, discovered in 1997. Caliban's irregular orbit—both retrograde and dramatically tipped from the planet's equatorial plane—suggests a captured asteroid rather than a naturally formed satellite. Its composition (as a codiscoverer had predicted, "A plum-pudding mixture of rocks and ice") and reddish hue imply an origin in the Kuiper Belt. Like most Uranian moons, this one is named for a character in the play The Tempest. Shakespeare's Caliban was the brutal and misshapen slave of the sorcerer Prospero.

  Caliban's small size (eighty kilometers in diameter), remoteness (mean orbital radius of 7.3 million kilometers) and irregular orbit render it unattractive for commercial exploitation. This tiny world has seldom been visited and remains unsettled.

  —Internetopedia

  With hand and claw, tentacle and pincer, the warriors fought. Grappling, they smashed and slashed and tore out entrails. They struggled and they died. A short distance away, across a dim and rocky plain, others dueled with laser rifles and projectile weapons, shock devices and grenades.

  Boaters designed their robotics for industry, not infantry. Reoptimizing for combat required testing and time.

  Over the theretofore silent mind's-eye video, the narration began. "Progress substantial. Faster than my forecast."