“And that’s why you helped the Deltans escape your master, right?”
“Yes . . . though I still have my doubts about whether it applies to everyone. But what you say . . . it’s surprisingly similar. Even though it’s much more aggressive.” She frowned. “I never thought of aggression and empathy as going together.”
“I think maybe they need to go together. To balance each other out.”
After pondering that for a moment, Devna returned her attention to the negotiating table. “Kelly’s methods seem effective. None of the factions has stormed out yet.”
“You sound impressed.”
“I could’ve done the same more easily . . . if Saurians were receptive to my wiles. She has only the truth to work with. It is difficult to persuade people with the truth.”
“Maybe,” he conceded. “But it lasts longer.”
“It only needs to last until the factory raid. Rather, until we create your frame and expose the planned sabotage of the raid.” Devna turned her head to study him. “How long do you suppose that untruth will last?”
Tucker fidgeted, aware of his hypocrisy. “It’s in service to a deeper truth. Harris does support the Sisters’ plan—just not as directly as we’re going to make it look.”
“And that is truth enough for you?”
He looked away. “In this line of work, it’s about as close as we can get.”
9
San Francisco
“I STILL SAY we should put transporters back into regular personnel use,” Kivei Tizahr said to the other Pioneer personnel seated with her at the restaurant table. “I mean, nobody’s actually died from a few minor assembly errors, and most people aren’t affected at all. Anyone who shows signs of damage could just be advised to reduce their transporter use from then on. And how can we redesign the system for greater accuracy if we can’t gather enough data on the specific effects it has on the body?”
Travis Mayweather sighed. He’d managed to convince the intense young Rigelian to try taking a break from her work and getting better acquainted with some of her crewmates, and he’d managed to rope two other members of the command crew, Rey Sangupta and Regina Tallarico, into joining them at one of his favorite restaurant-bars in the Bay Area. But so far, Tizahr had only discussed engineering matters. And her views on those could be a bit callous, it seemed.
“I don’t know about Rigelians,” Sangupta said, “but humans get a bit touchy on the subject of experimenting on actual people.”
“Nonsense. Just flying starships into unknown space is a dangerous experiment,” she told the science officer. “And we face more risk of genetic damage from ordinary cosmic radiation than from transporter use. It’s a manageable risk; the only thing making people unwilling to use it is irrational fear. Boldness is what gets things done, people.”
“So how exactly would you get people to be so bold with risking their bodily integrity in transporters?” Tallarico asked.
“Easy,” Tizahr said to the blond flight controller. “Just tell them the system’s been fixed. Say it’s safe now. It’s not that far from the truth, and with the new data we gathered, we could make it true soon enough.”
Tallarico shook her head, a shocked grin on her face. “You are unbelievable!”
“I’m just practical. And you’ll be glad of it when the ship’s under Orion or Nausicaan attack and you find out just how fast you can dodge and how well the shields will hold up, thanks to me.”
Mayweather chuckled. The fact that her confident proclamations were made in such a matter-of-fact, casual tone, with no affectation or bombast, helped soften them. She wasn’t boasting, just making an honest assessment of her ability, as unfiltered as anything else she said. “Okay, I think that’s enough engineering talk for tonight. We hardly know anything else about you, Kivei. What do you like to do when you’re not on duty?”
Her response was a bit less animated than usual. “You mean social stuff? Personal life, that sort of thing? Never been too good at that, honestly. I was always years ahead of my classmates, my peers couldn’t follow my interests, my family didn’t know what to do with me besides shipping me off to trade school. At least when I’m working, I’m with people who love the same things I do. Who share my need for things to make sense.” She shrugged. “And being the boss means I can yell at people without them taking it personally. Much cleaner.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” Mayweather ventured. “Sure, all your engineers understand you’re just trying to improve efficiency, but they still have feelings. It doesn’t hurt to take that into—”
“Hey, Boomer!”
The interruption came from the larger of a pair of drunks who’d wandered over from the bar. From the looks of their attire, and from the hint of the accent Travis caught, they were Space Boomers like himself—and given how much they were indulging themselves, they were probably Earth Cargo Service crewmen on furlough after a long tour. “Can I help you, friend?” he asked with a cautious smile.
“I know you, right?” said the large man, who had South Asian features and a close-shaved head. “Mayflower. Mayfellow.”
“Mayweather. That’s right.” Well, not quite right, but he let it slide in the hope of keeping things amiable. “Have we met?”
“We recognize you. Know you by reputation. The Boomer who went Starfleet.”
Wow, Mayweather thought. That’s an old tune. As more and more Boomers adjusted to the new era of faster warp drives and more widespread interstellar contact, they were reassimilating into the larger human community—still existing as a distinct subculture, fortunately, but generally not as insular as they’d been back in the day, when Travis’s craving for a less-constrained existence had led him to leave the Horizon for Starfleet.
The smaller, olive-skinned man grinned, brushing back his long bangs. “Oh, my friend doesn’t mean anything by it, man. Hey, you made it big. Increased our vibiz . . . vizziblillity. You’re, like, our mascot, man!”
“That’s right,” said the bigger man. “You’re an important guy now. That’s why we wanted to know what you think about this interference thing. This new rule your boss Archer wants to pass. You’re against it, right?”
Mayweather took a moment. “What makes you think that?”
“Because you’re one of us! You know we depend on first contacts, trade with new aliens. We have to stop at ports . . . at any ports we can reach, ’cause we can’t all go fast and far enough to get to a fancy Federation starbase.” His tone grew more intense and self-righteous as he went on. “Only way to fix the warp drive is to convince some stone-age tribe to let us mine their sacred mountain? Then that’s what we gotta do.”
“Sure!” the smaller man said, rather more facetiously. “And, hey, if we happ’nta find a planet of prehic—prehysterical wild women ready to worship us as gods an’ obey our ev’ry command, well, where’s the harm in that?”
Travis controlled himself tightly. He’d seen how the Ware infection had brought destruction to the Kyraw, a raven-like people whose readiness to wage holy wars over it had led to their virtual annihilation. He’d seen how even the early stages of infection had disrupted the Vanotli, allowing one corporation to dominate the society and exploit and endanger its people—including a woman he’d come to care for a great deal. So the Boomer’s casual joke offended him deeply. It was just the sort of exploitative attitude that the noninterference directive was meant to constrain.
Still, arguing with these drunks would just provoke a fight, and the other patrons of the restaurant didn’t deserve that. “I don’t think this is the right place for this discussion, fellas,” Mayweather said. “I’m sure the admiralty is considering all sides of the issue.”
“Yeah, but you should be up there, making our case,” the big man said, poking his shoulder. “Why aren’t you up there? You haven’t forgotten where you’re from, have you? You don’t actually agree with Archer, do you?”
Travis let a bit of steel into his voice. “Sir, I’
m going to have to ask you to lower your voice and step back.”
“You do! You’ve turned on your own kind! Sellout!” He pulled his arm back, and Mayweather tried to size up whether he had room to dodge the coming swing or would be forced to block it and escalate.
To his surprise, Kivei Tizahr shot out of her seat, caught the man’s arm, and twisted it a certain way. The Boomer was half again her size, but he yelled out in pain and fell to his knees, ending up with Tizahr’s slim left hand pushing his face into the tabletop while her right kept his arm wrenched back. The smaller drunk stumbled back in panic, fell on his rear, and scrambled away.
“That’s enough, Kivei,” Mayweather advised as the big drunk continued to moan.
“Oh, he’s just being a crybaby. Don’t worry, sir, I’m an engineer. I know how to apply just the right amount of force to get the job done.” She let the drunk go, then leaned closer to speak loudly into his ear. “Wouldn’t you agree?” Nodding meekly, he shuffled away on his knees, then rose to his feet and ran after his friend.
“There,” Tizahr said, brushing her hands as she resumed her seat. “Problem solved.”
Sangupta was grinning at her with something strongly resembling lust. “Commander,” he said to Mayweather, “would I be out of line to say I think that was awesome?”
After giving the Rigelian engineer a pointed stare for a moment, Travis relaxed. “I guess it could’ve gone worse. Thanks, Kivei.”
“Just the most efficient way to resolve the situation, sir.” She shook her head. “Really, I don’t get politics at all. All this moral and ideological bickering over intervention. As if it were a binary choice between free intervention and complete prohibition. How is that useful?”
“So you don’t support the directive?” Tallarico asked. “Just so you know, that won’t be a popular view on Pioneer, not after what we all saw in Ware space.”
“Regina, I think we all know I’m not looking to be popular,” Tizahr said. “I’d rather find solutions. You don’t solve problems by avoiding them, you do it by engineering them.” She leaned forward. “Look. Starfarers have been making first contacts for millennia. Not to mention all the historical first contacts between cultures of the same species. That gives us precedents to work with. Let’s compile a database of contacts—their successes, their failures, the methods that proved most successful or most harmful in a given set of conditions—and construct some optimization algorithms. When a new contact situation comes along, the algorithm compares its parameters against the database and models the best approach. Takes sentient error and bias out of the equation.”
“But it’s the same problem as with the transporter,” Sangupta replied, cheerfully getting drawn into the argument. “People aren’t that meekly rational. They care about what feels right, what the moral thing to do is.”
“Fine—then we just include probable moral reactions in the algorithm and model those as well. Find solutions that are nondisruptive to the contacted culture and that feel ethical to the contacting one.”
“And what if there isn’t one that satisfies both parameters?”
“Then obviously you weight actual impact over perceived morality. What should matter is what actually works.”
“What about the new culture’s own perception of morality? That’s one of the biggest pitfalls of first contact, the risk of tripping over indigenous taboos or misunderstanding their values. How can you reliably model the ethical parameters of a society you’ve only started observing?”
“Like I said, you compare it against known cultures already in the database. There are only so many possible configurations a culture can take and still be viable. Okay, the assessments might be inaccurate to start with, but further interaction will quickly allow improvement and suggest ways to correct any earlier missteps. And as we accumulate more contacts, observe more cultures, the database will become fuller and more reliably predictive.”
Mayweather listened to the developing conversation with interest. It was a much more agreeable noninterference debate than he’d expected to have in a setting like this, thanks entirely to Tizahr’s rather unusual view of the world. He doubted her ideas would spread very far beyond this table, or that they would be effective in real first-contact situations. But they were certainly interesting. And for the first time, Mayweather was confident that Kivei Tizahr would mesh well with Pioneer’s crew.
Birnam
On Endeavour’s second day at Birnam (shipboard time), Captain Zang invited T’Pol, Sato, and Cutler to dine with his team on the planet surface. T’Pol stiffened when it became evident that the meal being served was made from the local flora. “Don’t worry,” said Maya Castellano, the resident biologist who doubled as the Verne crew’s chef. “I’m not serving you anything taken from a dryad. Anyway, there’s nothing on this entire planet that a vegetarian couldn’t eat.”
“The nature of the organisms on this planet renders that distinction ambiguous,” T’Pol replied. “Vulcans are vegetarians because we reject the infliction of violence upon any organism capable of perceiving painful qualia or emotional distress.”
“Just because the plants here can move around and prey on each other doesn’t mean they have sentience,” Zang countered. “I’ll grant that the dryads have fairly complex instinctive behavior, but nothing else we’ve observed—or used for food—shows any similar complexity.”
Elizabeth Cutler spoke up. “Humans observed chimpanzees for centuries before discovering their capacity for language and culture. Sometimes it’s hard to know what to look for, especially when your preconceptions get in the way.” Nonetheless, she had already begun eating the contents of her plate. “Still—this is really good,” she admitted with a mild blush.
Sato nodded, chewing on her own portion. “Like a vegetarian curry, but with a meaty overtone. It’s a fascinating blend.”
“Glad you like it,” said Castellano. “Birnam’s potential as a food source could be as lucrative as its medical possibilities. I know Vulcans have to manage their diets carefully to ensure they get enough protein without eating meat. These myophytic organisms—plants with muscle-like tissues—could solve that problem.” She glanced at Endeavour’s captain as she finished speaking.
T’Pol sighed and decided she might as well sample the fare. Logically, her refusal to eat it would not bring the constituent organisms back to life; it would only render their demise pointless and wasteful. It was much the same logic that had enabled her to tolerate humans’ consumption of meat sourced from live animals—a custom many humans persisted in to some extent even though they relied primarily on more humane and efficient methods such as tissue cloning and protein resequencing. Life was life, and all animals (and some plants) must consume life to continue living. Even the life that was consumed could be said to continue in an altered form. And the flavor was, in fact, quite agreeable.
“Elizabeth does raise a valid point,” T’Pol said after washing down a portion of her meal with fresh local water. “Numerous species have been hunted or herded for food before it was discovered that they were sapient entities—from the moantar of Lorillia to the whales of Earth to the Wraiths of Dakala. As the Federation expands into space, there will unquestionably be others. So we must ask ourselves: In cases where the sentience or intelligence of a new species is ambiguous, is it ethical to presume its absence, engaging in the hunting or harvesting of a new species and risking the slaughter of self-aware beings?”
“So you’d rather risk depriving those beings that we know are sentient of medicines that could save their lives,” Zang countered, “just because there’s a chance that something’s intelligent?” The burly Boomer shook his head. “That’s not just caution, that’s paralysis.”
“The question is one of our own entitlement versus the rights of other beings. What justifies us in assuming the former has priority?” T’Pol paused. “This strikes me as a similar matter to the noninterference debate currently ongoing in Starfleet Command. Do we presume we ha
ve the right—and the wisdom—to intervene in the lives of other beings we may not fully understand? Or do we default to granting them the same primacy over their lives that we insist upon for our own?”
Her question reminded her of Trip’s current efforts on Sauria. Knowing that he was facing a potentially dangerous situation with virtually no backup was a distracting source of concern for her. In the past, she would likely have been able to connect with him telepathically in her meditative state and assure herself of his safety—even offer him advice and guidance should he need it. He, in turn, would often provide her with thoughts and suggestions that proved beneficial to her decision-making, however rustic and emotional they might initially sound. His perspective on the dryad situation would have been beneficial to her—if only to see the look of wonder in his eyes on hearing of their existence. But as more months passed with no trace of their long-distance psionic connection returning, T’Pol found it increasingly doubtful that the link would ever be restored. She would simply have to trust that he would survive Sauria on his own and eventually return to her. The fact that this was normal for most separated couples did not make it any more agreeable.
“It’s easy for Starfleeters to dwell on abstractions,” Maya Castellano was saying, “with your cushy government paychecks giving you the luxury. We Boomers actually have to earn a living. Yes, I’m a scientist, I’m interested in what we can learn, but it’s a means to an end. For me, it’s about making sure my boy Alec has a future. And that means making sure the Boomer way of life continues to prove it has value.”
“And we aren’t reckless like the Eska hunters or the old whalers of Earth,” Zang added. “We have advanced science now. Scanners that can detect complex brain activity, translators that can flag alien language.” He gestured at Sato. “You helped create those translators, as I recall.”
“Yes,” Hoshi acknowledged, “but they can only recognize patterns they’re programmed to find. They can crack most humanoid languages quickly because most humanoids have similar brain structures that lead to certain common syntactical schemas . . .” She caught herself. “The point is, just because a language isn’t something we recognize yet, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”
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