by E. M. Foner
My team member eagerly took my place, and I could see the left hand of her encounter suit twitching as she imagined herself repositioning the tube and looking for some of her own favored celestial objects, namely comets. I doubt she could have held back if it was night, but the brightness of the local sun was no joke.
“Look who I found,” Athena said, as she approached with her mother and an older man in tow.
“Saul,” I greeted the county safety inspector, stepping out of the observatory shed to do so as it was rapidly running out of space. “What brings you back out here during the holidays? Another Original sighting?”
“I came to see my old pupil’s setup,” he replied. “I used to tutor Athena in astronomy back when she attended the village school, but she’s moved far beyond me now.”
“He’s just teasing,” the miller’s daughter told me. “Saul used to work at the spaceport doing real astrophysics stuff, and he tutored the local kids during summers when he took a month at his camp on the lake. People used to bike in from all over the county to look through the telescopes he set up each year.”
“Young man’s work. Now I’m happily retired into a part-time public service job and I get to meet all sorts of interesting types.”
I noticed that his eyes shifted to me when he uttered that last part, and it seemed that he intentionally avoided the more common expression, ‘all sorts of interesting people.’ But maybe he had recently come from an up-close and personal encounter with an Original.
“You never mentioned working at the spaceport,” I said, carefully keeping any tone of accusation out of my voice even though it was beginning to feel like somebody was setting my team up. “You must know all about advanced alien technology that would make the local telescopes look like children’s toys.”
“Not at all,” Saul replied. “I’m far from an expert in optics, but the waves that make up the visible light we see can only be magnified so much by lenses. For the size of the reflector, I imagine that this instrument is every bit as good as any optical telescope in the League.”
There, he had said it out loud. The locals were aware of the League of Sentient Entities Regulating Space, even though we’d only known about the existence of the reservation worlds for six months. However the Ferrymen were managing their humans, it was plain that they weren’t keeping them in ignorance of the greater galaxy. I was beginning to see that my ban on team members asking leading questions during our first six months on the planet had cost us a great deal of knowledge.
“I’ve always been interested in aliens,” I said to Saul, which was one-hundred percent true for a change. “If you have the time to stop by The Eatery, I’d love to pick your brain, and there’s an extra bed if you want to stay over.”
“I’m looking forward to it,” Saul replied. “I’ve always been interested in aliens myself.”
Nine
I heard a funny growl behind me and stopped with my hand on the front door latch.
“What is it now, Spot?” I asked the dog without turning around. “You’ve been out three times already this morning.”
Spot growled again, and then gave a sharp bark. I turned around to see what looked like a leather chew-toy, which had obviously fallen out of his mouth when he’d barked, tumbling down the stairs. When it came to rest at my feet, I realized that it was an old-fashioned leather messenger’s tube decorated with a fair amount of slobber.
“You shouldn’t be chewing on that,” I scolded the dog as I bent to pick it up. “Did you bring it in from outside? You’ll have to show me where you found it.”
Spot barked impatiently before executing a tricky turn while still on the stairs and heading back up. I removed the plug from the leather cylinder and drew out the tightly rolled message, hoping there would be enough clues to decipher who it was intended for before the dog had found it in the road or stolen it off a porch. To my surprise, it was a note from my mentor asking me to meet him at League headquarters immediately.
I ran down to the basement and grabbed the project I’d been working on in my spare time for the last three months, and then back up two flights of stairs, where I found Spot sitting in front of the empty closet where the engineers had installed our permanent portal entrance. I used one foot to ward off the dog as I slipped into the closet, and then I sent the command code and selected the portal reserved for Observer teams at the League headquarters. My mentor was there to greet me when I stepped through.
“I hope I didn’t keep you waiting,” I said apologetically. “There’s no knowing how long Spot was chewing on that cylinder before he delivered it.”
“Just a few minutes,” he replied in spoken English, matching his language to the human encounter suit which, for some obscure reason, he had chosen to embody a portion of his mind while serving as Library’s representative on the League’s executive council. “You haven’t reported in since your initial assessment, and none of your team members have seen fit to submit status reports during their smuggling trips.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” I told him honestly. “With my active sensing suite turned off, I don’t even know where my team members are unless they’re standing right in front of me.”
“It must be the first time you’ve ever been so isolated from other sentients,” my mentor said, and his voice expressed a note of fatherly concern I’d not heard from him in hundreds of years. “How are you and the team coping?”
“Now that you mention it, we all seem to be developing a few personality quirks,” I replied. The strangeness of the admission hit me even as I heard my own words, reminding me again that conversations with my mentor went better when we abstained from high-speed communications. “Perhaps it’s a side effect of the human encounter suits.”
“Are you offering a formal report presentation of a data crystal?” my mentor asked, indicating the jeweler’s box in my left hand that I’d forgotten I was holding.
“This is for you,” I said, handing it to him. “I could never figure out a gift to buy to show my appreciation for all of your help so I made you this.”
“Are you hinting that I should retire?” he joked after opening the box. Even though my mentor was a master at guarding his true thoughts, I could read from the expression on the face of his encounter suit that he was deeply impressed by my gift of a gold watch. “I’m not familiar with all of these indicators.”
“Date, month, and the inset shows leap years, where they have to add a day to keep the calendar in sync with the seasons. You can set alarms based on the time and date out to a year, which is an invention of my own, and if you pull out that knob it functions as a stopwatch.”
“What’s this little slider for?”
“It’s also a minute repeater,” I told him proudly. “When you pull out the slider, the watch chimes the hours and quarter hours so you can tell time in the dark. Well, not you, obviously, but there’s no electrical lighting on reservation so it’s the kind of thing that comes in handy at night. The chiming mechanism added over a hundred and fifty discrete pieces to the watch, including two hammers.”
“Can I wear it in the shower? I’ve found that these encounter suits require frequent cleaning.”
“It should be waterproof to a hundred meters,” I confirmed. “I haven’t actually had the opportunity to test it, but if you should ever go scuba diving…”
“I’ll be sure to send you any data,” my mentor said as he slid on the wristwatch. “Did you make the band as well?”
“No. That’s a standard flexible band for men’s gold watches that’s manufactured on Reservation for export. There’s a spring in every link and you need specialized tools to work on it, so let me know if you need the band resized.”
“This will do just fine. Thank you, Mark. It’s the nicest gift I can remember receiving.”
I was so taken aback by his excessive praise that I hurried to deflect it with a question. “So what’s so urgent that you had to pop through the portal and draft the dog int
o bringing me a message?”
“I’m getting pressure from the council to fill them in on what you’re doing.”
“How much do they already know?”
“Only that the engineers opened a new portal for the Observer service to investigate possible abuses by a League member. The council is recessing for the long break today, but you know how paranoid some species are about Library’s actions. I expect they’ll push for full disclosure as soon as we reconvene.”
“And when will that be?”
I couldn’t help grinning when my mentor looked at his watch before replying.
“Just over two months of your local days, the exact timing depends on how many rounds the Goonpal tournament goes. Please try to have a final report ready as quickly as you can.”
“Maintaining radio silence to conceal our presence from the Ferrymen has been a major operational obstacle, but things have started opening up the last week,” I told him. “One of the planet’s natives walked into my bar a couple nights ago and ordered an ale.”
“Was there a duck involved?”
“What?”
“I assume you’re telling me a sentient-walks-into-a-bar joke.”
“No, this really happened.”
“According to your initial assessment the planet’s native intelligent species was being treated in accordance with League rules, but had only reached a minimal level of tool usage, such as fishing insects out of holes with a stick. Now you’re saying that they socialize with villagers and participate in the economy?”
“It came as a shock to me as well. The locals are all schooled to respect the privacy of the natives by never addressing them and simply turning away in case of chance encounters. Such meetings rarely occur because Originals primarily move about at night and there aren’t any gas streetlights in the small towns and villages. But I just found out that the indoor gardens the humans plant in their larger buildings are set aside as space for the Originals should they care to drop in and observe.”
“And this native spoke to you in the local language?”
“Not exactly,” I hedged. “I’ve always encouraged eBeth to continue with her education and I thought that a stint of teaching might pique her interest. I convinced her to take a teaching job at the village school.”
“Teaching English,” my mentor immediately guessed.
“We passed it off as the language from the Northern continent but I’m beginning to suspect that they’re on to us.”
“And this native spoke English to you.”
“I don’t think his vocal chords could reproduce human sounds, but there’s no question that my visitor could understand the spoken language, and he wrote his replies on a slate.”
“And what do you make of this?” my mentor asked, performing the single eyebrow raise that I had yet to perfect after nearly four years inhabiting a human encounter suit.
“I haven’t been on as many missions as some observers and I didn’t specialize in alien anthropology, but that Original would have fit right in on any barstool in the League. Our conversation wasn’t long, but given the little he did say, I’d be willing to bet that the natives are at least as intelligent as the human colonists.”
“But they produce no buildings or artifacts.”
“None that we’ve found, though I’ve heard of cliff art attributed to them. It’s on my list to see some.”
“I think you had better make another trip to the Library archives,” my mentor advised. “I haven’t changed my access code.”
“You’re authorizing me to make a deep data dive on your credit?”
“We’re both aware that something out of the normal is going on here and I don’t want to be caught off guard.” He looked again at the watch I’d just given him and said, “Two forty-one. I have to run or I’m going to be late for a sub-committee meeting.”
“On Reservation time?” I asked skeptically.
“I created a translation algorithm based on the sweep-hand movement while we were talking. There’s no point in my resetting the watch given the different units in use here, and I’ll know what time it is on Reservation if I need to get a hold of you. Don’t wait so long before you contact me the next time.”
“Understood,” I said. “Thanks again for the library code. This will be invaluable.”
He waited politely while I reprogrammed the portal destination for Library, and I was in the act of stepping through when he called after me, “Give my best to Sue, and congratulations on your engagement.”
Before I could even begin to formulate a response, I was hundreds of light-years away in the Library waiting room, with the atmosphere from the League’s headquarters pouring out of my mouth as I’d forgotten to purge my system with the sudden change in plans. How could my mentor possibly know about my accidental engagement? Was there a double agent on my team?
I pushed away the thought as I sat down on a bench and decanted from my human encounter suit, which remained frozen in place. On uploading my mind to the vastly superior infrastructure of Library, I felt like a human might on growing a pair of wings. In my case, the whole experience was being paid for on my mentor’s credit.
During my only previous deep dive into Library’s archives, I’d almost lost myself in the seemingly infinite data that implied a level of causality and connectedness between all events that could be dangerous to the sanity of a young artificial intelligence. This time I was better prepared, and I struck out immediately for the scientific survey data from the volume of space which contained all three of the worlds that the Ferrymen had populated with humans transported from Earth.
When I dove into the data about the planet my team was investigating, I was surprised to find that it had been visited by a scientific mission less than fifty thousand years ago. Since that time, the ecosystem of the two continents occupied by humans had been overrun with flora and fauna the Ferrymen had imported from Earth, but something was missing, and I tried another query.
The information you’ve requested requires Level 63 authorization.
I’m acting for Library’s representative on the League’s executive council, I replied to the head librarian. I’m using his code.
Our League representative hasn’t changed his access code in several millennia and therefore explicit authorization is required.
He’s in a meeting hundreds of light years away, I argued. Who else can confer Level 63 authorization? I’ve never even heard of it before.
The board of trustees, Library’s representative to the League, and the head librarian. None of the board members are available.
So that’s the way it was. I’d heard that the head librarian wasn’t above extorting information from patrons to increase Library’s store of data, but I’d never experienced it first-hand. Come to think of it, I suppose the head librarian never thought I had any knowledge worth acquiring.
What do you want in exchange?
Your initial report indicated the presence of native megafauna predating the arrival of the Ferrymen and humans. What is the basis for that assessment?
Information from the humans. I have one team member assigned to studying the natives, but they are nocturnal nomadic gatherers who create few artifacts for study. My mission is undercover so we are hardly in a position to start archeological digs to—
I’m aware of the limitations placed on your mission, the head librarian interrupted. The answer to your query is that there was no megafauna on the world at the time of our last survey mission.
That’s not possible, I protested before I could catch myself. Communicating at the speed of thought has its drawbacks, and I had been spoiled by four years in my human encounter suit which gave me time to think. It means the Originals are not native to the planet.
Keep me informed, the head librarian said, and withdrew from the conversation.
My primary purpose in coming to Library had been to learn whatever I could about the evolution of the natives on Reservation, but now it turned out they
were recent arrivals. Could they be the survivors of a crashed ship or stranded test subjects from a failed intra-dimensional portal experiment? In that case, Library might have records of their species existing elsewhere.
I checked the usage fees for Library’s universal image-matching search and almost blacked out. There was just no way I could spend that much of my mentor’s credit on what might be a wild goose chase. Instead I designed a much more limited query, looking for correlations between the Ferrymen and a 3D memory of the so-called Original who had visited my bar. It came up blank.
I was about to transfer back into my human encounter suit and return to Reservation when something about my search query reminded me of the Hankers and the way they mixed and matched body parts. Paul had completed our antenna array and was monitoring the direction of the M13 star cluster for Pffift’s message but we hadn’t heard a word. Back on Earth, the Hanker had improvised a coded message to me about his intentions by claiming that his sixteen-hundred and seventy-ninth birthday was coming up and he would send an invitation. I’d assumed that the prime number reference to the Arecibo message had been the payload, but had he doubled down on his meaning?
A quick look through the current public records yielded Pffift’s birthday in Hanker terms, which I converted first into Earth years and then into Reservation years. Bingo! If the alien was half as clever as I was giving him credit for, he’d be contacting us in just over two weeks, local time.
