Asimov's SF, February 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  ::No!/NO!/[no!!!]::

  “Lies are a lubricant in the social machine. They ease the friction when two moving parts mesh imperfectly."

  ::Aristotle, asked what those who tell lies gain by it, replied: That when they speak the truth they are not believed::

  For a long moment Quivera was silent. Then he laughed mirthlessly. “I almost forgot that you're a diplomat. Well, you're right, I'm right, and we're both screwed. Where do we go from here?"

  ::To (sister-city)/Ur/[absolute trust]:: Uncle Vanya signed, while “You've said more than enough,” his suit (me!) whispered in Quivera's ear. “Change the subject."

  A stream ran, boiling, down the center of the dell. Run-off from the mountains, it would grow steadily smaller until it dwindled away to nothing. Only the fact that the air above it was at close to 100 percent saturation had kept it going this long. Quivera pointed. “Is that safe to cross?"

  ::If (leap-over-safe) then (safe)/best not/[reliable distrust]::

  “I didn't think so."

  They headed downstream. It took several miles before the stream grew small enough that they were confident enough to jump it. Then they turned toward Ararat—the Europans had dropped GPS pebble satellites in low Gehenna orbit shortly after arriving in the system and making contact with the indigenes, but I don't know from what source Uncle Vanya derived his sense of direction.

  It was inerrant, however. The mapsats confirmed it. I filed that fact under Unexplained Phenomena with tentative links to Physiology and Navigation. Even if both my companions died and the library were lost, this would still be a productive journey, provided only that Europan searchers could recover me within ten years, before my data lattice began to degrade.

  For hours Uncle Vanya walked and Quivera rode in silence. Finally, though, they had to break to eat. I fed Quivera nutrients intravenously and the illusion of a full meal through somatic shunts. Vanya burrowed furiously into the earth and emerged with something that looked like a grub the size of a poodle, which he ate so vigorously that Quivera had to look away.

  (I filed this under Xenoecology, subheading: Feeding Strategies. The search for knowledge knows no rest.)

  Afterward, while they were resting, Uncle Vanya resumed their conversation, more formally this time:

  ::(for what) purpose/reason::

  !

  ::(Europan vice-consul12)/Quivera/[not trusted]::

  !

  ::voyagings (search-for-trust)/[action]::

  ! !

  ::(nest)/Europa/(untranslatable) :: ::violate/[absolute resistance]::

  ! ! !

  ::(nest)/[trust] Gehenna/[trust] Home/[trust]::

  “Why did you leave your world to come to ours?” I simplified/translated. “Except he believes that humans brought their world here and parked it in orbit.” This was something we had never been able to make the millies understand; that Europa, large though it was, was not a planetlet but a habitat, a ship if you will, though by now well over half a million inhabitants lived in tunnels burrowed deep in its substance. It was only a city, however, and its resources would not last forever. We needed to convince the Gehennans to give us a toehold on their planet if we were, in the long run, to survive. But you knew that already.

  “We've told you this before. We came looking for new information."

  ::Information is (free)/valueless/[despicable]::

  “Look,” Quivera said. “We have an information-based economy. Yours is based on trust. The mechanisms of each are not dissimilar. Both are expansive systems. Both are built on scarcity. And both are speculative. Information or trust is bought, sold, borrowed, and invested. Each therefore requires a continually expanding economic frontier that ultimately leaves the individual so deep in debt as to be virtually enslaved to the system. You see?"

  ::No::

  “All right. Imagine a simplified capitalist system—that's what both our economies are, at root. You've got a thousand individuals, each of whom makes a living by buying raw materials, improving them, and selling them at a profit. With me so far?"

  Vanya signaled comprehension.

  “The farmer buys seed and fertilizer, and sells crops. The weaver buys wool and sells cloth. The chandler buys wax and sells candles. The price of their goods is the cost of materials plus the value of their labor. The value of his labor is the worker's wages. This is a simple market economy. It can go on forever. The equivalent on Gehenna would be the primitive family-states you had long ago, in which everybody knew everybody else, and so trust was a simple matter and directly reciprocal."

  Startled, Uncle Vanya signed ::How did you know about our past?::

  “Europans value knowledge. Everything you tell us, we remember.” The knowledge had been assembled with enormous effort and expense, largely from stolen data—but no reason to mention that. Quivera continued, “Now imagine that most of those workers labor in ten factories, making the food, clothing, and other objects that everybody needs. The owners of these factories must make a profit, so they sell their goods for more than they pay for them—the cost of materials, the cost of labor, and then the profit, which we can call ‘added value.'

  “But because this is a simplified model, there are no outside markets. The goods can only be sold to the thousand workers themselves, and the total cost of the goods is more than the total amount they've been paid collectively for the materials and their labor. So how can they afford it? They go into debt. Then they borrow money to support that debt. The money is lent to them by the factories selling them goods on credit. There is not enough money—not enough real value—in the system to pay off the debt, and so it continues to increase until it can no longer be sustained. Then there is a catastrophic collapse that we call a depression. Two of the businesses go bankrupt and their assets are swallowed up by the survivors at bargain prices, thus paying off their own indebtedness and restoring equilibrium to the system. In the aftermath of which, the cycle begins again."

  ::What has this to do with (beloved city)/Babel/[mother-of-trust]?::

  “Your every public action involved an exchange of trust, yes? And every trust that was honored heightened the prestige of the queen-mothers and hence the amount of trust they embodied for Babel itself."

  ::Yes::

  “Similarly, the queen-mothers of other cities, including those cities that were Babel's sworn enemies, embodied enormous amounts of trust as well."

  ::Of course::

  “Was there enough trust in all the world to pay everybody back if all the queen-mothers called it in at the same time?"

  Uncle Vanya was silent.

  “So that's your explanation for ... a lot of things. Earth sent us here because it needs new information to cover its growing indebtedness. Building Europa took enormous amounts of information, most of it proprietary, and so we Europans are in debt collectively to our home world and individually to the Lords of the Economy on Europa. With compound interest, every generation is worse off and thus more desperate than the one before. Our need to learn is great, and constantly growing."

  ::(strangers-without-trust)/Europa/[treacherous vermin]::

  !

  can/should/(untranslatable)

  ! !

  ::demand/claim [negative action]:: ::defy/(untranslatable)/[absolute lack of trust]::

  ! !

  ::(those-who-command-trust):: ::(those-who-are-unworthy of trust)::

  “He asks why Europa doesn't simply declare bankruptcy,” I explained. “Default on its obligations and nationalize all the information received to date. In essence."

  The simple answer was that Europa still needed information that could only be beamed from Earth, that the ingenuity of even half a million people could not match that of an entire planet and thus their technology must always be superior to ours, and that if we reneged on our debts they would stop beaming plans for that technology, along with their songs and plays and news of what was going on in countries that had once meant everything to our great-great-grandparents. I watched
Quivera struggle to put all this in its simplest possible form.

  Finally, he said, “Because no one would ever trust us again, if we did."

  After a long stillness, Uncle Vanya lapsed back into pidgin. ::Why did you tell me this [untrustworthy] story?::

  “To let you know that we have much in common. We can understand each other."

  ::(But)/not/[trust]::

  “No. But we don't need trust. Mutual self-interest will suffice."

  * * * *

  Days passed. Perhaps Quivera and Uncle Vanya grew to understand each other better during this time. Perhaps not. I was able to keep Quivera's electrolyte balances stable and short-circuit his feedback processes so that he felt no extraordinary pain, but he was feeding off of his own body fat and that was beginning to run low. He was very comfortably starving to death—I gave him two weeks, tops—and he knew it. He'd have to be a fool not to, and I had to keep his thinking sharp if he was going to have any chance of survival.

  Their way was intersected by a long, low ridge and without comment Quivera and Uncle Vanya climbed up above the canopy of the steam forest and the cloud of moisture it held into clear air. Looking back, Quivera saw a gully in the slope behind them, its bottom washed free of soil by the boiling runoff and littered with square and rectangular stones, but not a trace of hexagonal beams. They had just climbed the tumulus of an ancient fallen city. It lay straight across the land, higher to the east and dwindling to the west."'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,'” Quivera said. “'Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’”

  Uncle Vanya said nothing.

  “Another meteor strike—what were the odds of that?"

  Uncle Vanya said nothing.

  “Of course, given enough time, it would be inevitable, if it predated the High Watch."

  Uncle Vanya said nothing.

  “What was the name of this city?"

  ::Very old/(name forgotten)/[First Trust]::

  Uncle Vanya moved, as if to start downward, but Quivera stopped him with a gesture. “There's no hurry,” he said. “Let's enjoy the view for a moment.” He swept an unhurried arm from horizon to horizon, indicating the flat and unvarying canopy of vegetation before them. “It's a funny thing. You'd think that, this being one of the first cities your people built when they came to this planet, you'd be able to see the ruins of the cities of the original inhabitants from here."

  The millipede's speaking arms thrashed in alarm. Then he reared up into the air, and when he came down one foreleg glinted silver. Faster than human eye could follow, he had drawn a curving and deadly tarsi-sword from a camouflaged belly-sheath.

  Quivera's suit flung him away from the descending weapon. He fell flat on his back and rolled to the side. The sword's point missed him by inches. But then the suit flung out a hand and touched the sword with an electrical contact it had just extruded.

  A carefully calculated shock threw Uncle Vanya back, convulsing but still fully conscious.

  Quivera stood. “Remember the library!” he said. “Who will know of Babel's greatness if it's destroyed?"

  For a long time the millipede did nothing that either Quivera or his suit could detect. At last he signed ::How did you know?/(absolute shock)/ [treacherous and without faith]::

  “Our survival depends on being allowed to live on Gehenna. Your people will not let us do so, no matter what we offer in trade. It was important that we understand why. So we found out. We took in your outlaws and apostates, all those who were cast out of your cities and had nowhere else to go. We gave them sanctuary. In gratitude, they told us what they knew."

  By so saying, Quivera let Uncle Vanya know that he knew the most ancient tale of the Gehennans. By so hearing, Uncle Vanya knew that Quivera knew what he knew. And just so you know what they knew that each other knew and knew was known, here is the tale of...

  How the True People Came to Gehenna

  Long did our Ancestors burrow down through the dark between the stars, before emerging at last in the soil of Gehenna. From the True Home they had come. To Gehenna they descended, leaving a trail of sparks in the black and empty spaces through which they had traveled. The True People came from a world of unimaginable wonders. To it they could never return. Perhaps they were exiles. Perhaps it was destroyed. Nobody knows.

  Into the steam and sunlight of Gehenna they burst, and found it was already taken. The First Inhabitants looked like nothing our Ancestors had ever seen. But they welcomed the True People as the queen-mothers would a strayed niece-daughter. They gave us food. They gave us land. They gave us trust.

  For a time all was well.

  But evil crept into the thoracic ganglia of the True People. They repaid sisterhood with betrayal and trust with murder. Bright lights were called down from the sky to destroy the cities of their benefactors. Everything the First Inhabitants had made, all their books and statues and paintings, burned with the cities. No trace of them remains. We do not even know what they looked like.

  This was how the True People brought war to Gehenna. There had never been war before, and now we will have it with us always, until our trust-debt is repaid. But it can never be repaid.

  * * * *

  It suffers in translation, of course. The original is told in thirteen exquisitely beautiful ergoglyphs, each grounded on a primal faith-motion. But Quivera was talking, with care and passion:

  “Vanya, listen to me carefully. We have studied your civilization and your planet in far greater detail than you realize. You did not come from another world. Your people evolved here. There was no aboriginal civilization. You ancestors did not eradicate an intelligent species. These things are all a myth."

  ::No!/Why?!/[shock]:: Uncle Vanya rattled with emotion. Ripples of muscle spasms ran down his segmented body.

  “Don't go catatonic on me. Your ancestors didn't lie. Myths are not lies. They are simply an efficient way of encoding truths. We have a similar myth in my religion that we call Original Sin. Man is born sinful. Well ... who can doubt that? Saying that we are born into a fallen state means simply that we are not perfect, that we are inherently capable of evil.

  “Your myth is very similar to ours, but it also encodes what we call the Malthusian dilemma. Population increases geometrically, while food resources increase arithmetically. So universal starvation is inevitable unless the population is periodically reduced by wars, plagues, and famines. Which means that wars, plagues, and famine cannot be eradicated because they are all that keep a population from extinction.

  “But—and this is essential—all that assumes a population that isn't aware of the dilemma. When you understand the fix you're in, you can do something about it. That's why information is so important. Do you understand?"

  Uncle Vanya lay down flat upon the ground and did not move for hours. When he finally arose again, he refused to speak at all.

  * * * *

  The trail the next day led down into a long meteor valley that had been carved by a ground-grazer long enough ago that its gentle slopes were covered with soil and the bottomland was rich and fertile. An orchard of grenade trees had been planted in interlocking hexagons for as far in either direction as the eye could see. We were still on Babel's territory, but any arbiculturalists had been swept away by whatever military forces from Ziggurat had passed through the area.

  The grenades were still green [footnote: not literally, of course—they were orange!], their thick husks taut but not yet trembling with the steam-hot pulp that would eventually, in the absence of harvesters, cause them to explode, scattering their arrowhead-shaped seeds or spores [footnote: like seeds, the flechettes carried within them surplus nourishment; like spores they would grow into a prothalli that would produce the sex organs responsible for what will become the gamete of the eventual plant; all botanical terms of course being metaphors for xenobiological bodies and processes] with such force as to make them a deadly hazard when ripe.

  Not, however, today.

  A sudden gust of wind parted the st
eam, briefly brightening the valley-orchard and showing a slim and graceful trail through the orchard. We followed it down into the valley.

  We were midway through the orchard when Quivera bent down to examine a crystal-shelled creature unlike anything in his suit's database. It rested atop the long stalk of a weed [footnote: “weed” is not a metaphor; the concept of “an undesired plant growing in cultivated ground” is a cultural universal] in the direct sunlight, its abdomen pulsing slightly as it superheated a minuscule drop of black ichor. A puff of steam, a sharp crack, and it was gone. Entranced, Quivera asked, “What's that called?"

  Uncle Vanya stiffened. ::A jet!/danger!/[absolute certainty]::

  Then (crack! crack! crack!) the air was filled with thin lines of steam, laid down with the precision of a draftsman's ruler, tracing flights so fleet (crack! crack!) that it was impossible to tell in what direction they flew. Nor did it ultimately (crack!) matter.

  Quivera fell.

  Worse, because the thread of steam the jet had stitched through his leg severed an organizational node in his suit, I ceased all upper cognitive functions. Which is as good as to say that I fell unconscious.

  Here's what the suit did in my (Rosamund's) absence:

  1. Slowly rebuilt the damaged organizational node.

  2. Quickly mended the holes that the jet had left in its fabric.

  3. Dropped Quivera into a therapeutic coma.

  4. Applied restoratives to his injuries, and began the slow and painstaking process of repairing the damage to his flesh, with particular emphasis on distributed traumatic shock.

  5. Filed the jet footage under Xenobiology, subheading: Insect Analogues, with links to Survival and Steam Locomotion.

  6. Told Uncle Vanya that if he tried to abandon Quivera, the suit would run him down, catch him, twist his head from his body like the foul least-cousin that he was and then piss on his corpse.

  Two more days passed before the suit returned to full consciousness, during which Uncle Vanya took conscientiously good care of him. Under what motivation, it does not matter. Another day passed after that. The suit had planned to keep Quivera comatose for a week, but not long after regaining awareness, circumstances changed. It slammed him back to full consciousness, heart pounding and eyes wide open.