Final Inquiries

by Roger MacBride Allen

"I would remind you that the SubPilot can hear you perfectly well and understands your speech. He merely refuses to address you. Perhaps it would not be wise to insult him."

  "Maybe it would be wise if he did not insult us," Jamie replied. "We've just been rousted out of our offices and hustled onto a starship the size of a midsized asteroid in order to rush to the scene of some unspecified crime. Someone would seem to need us very badly--and the Vixa are going to a lot of effort. But the first thing that happens is that we're told that we're not fit to speak with them."

  He glanced at Hannah, half-expecting her to be signaling him to back down. But if anything, her expression seemed to be encouraging him. "If the Vixa want our help, they will have to provide us with sufficient support, cooperation--and respect."

  "That is almost word for word the speech I made to a certain Vixan official not so many medium social duration units ago," Brox said. "Except, of course, I was telling them all those things about the Kendari."

  "The small slow human vehicle has now achieved a safe distance from the Eminent Concordance," SubPilot Greveltra announced, giving no sign at all that he heard any of what Jamie or Brox had said. "I will now commence maneuvers. Transport module to navigation station."

  Greveltra's trio of midbody limbs whipped around with startling speed and flickered over the control panels. Suddenly the whole compartment lurched to one side, and Jamie felt the sickening drop in his stomach he got whenever he rode a high-speed elevator that was a little too high-speed.

  "Perhaps it would be best to deopacify the hull to make the procedure clearer," said Brox.

  Another midbody limb whipped over to another control on another panel--and suddenly the compartment hull vanished altogether. Looking up with a gasp, Jamie saw that they were moving, and fast. What he had assumed was a compartment with a fixed position inside the ship was in fact something closer to an elevator car--and they were riding it straight up a cylindrical shaft.

  "I should explain," Brox said mildly. "The outer sphere we observed as we approached the Eminent Concordance is merely the propulsion unit, plus the power store for the ship and shielding. This smaller sphere comprises the crew compartment, the passenger space, life support, cargo space, the piloting systems, and so on."

  Jamie thought for a moment, and recalled his history-of-technology classes, and the lectures on the early days of spaceflight, when they had to jettison everything the moment they were done with it in order to save weight. "So this little sphere here is the, ah, command module, and all the rest of this giant ship is the service module? All of it is nothing more than a way to carry this little sphere around?"

  "That is it precisely."

  "That's insane," said Hannah.

  "Not in an emergency," said Brox. "Not to a species that has the technical and material resources that the Vixa have."

  "Why does the ah, command sphere, move around inside the ship?"

  Brox cocked his head to one side, obviously amused. "I should have made a transcript of my conversation with the SubPilot on the way here. I could have simply handed it to you to read. You are asking almost all the same questions I asked--and just about in the same order. The SubPilot explained that it is done to achieve a balance of safety and capability, with the sphere shifting positions as required by each phase of the mission. In order to achieve maximum safety from exterior radiation, to defend the command sphere against attack, and to permit the easy access of passengers and cargo, it is positioned in the center of the sphere whenever the combined vehicle is not actively maneuvering. During periods when precise navigation is required, and during periods when the high-velocity drive is active, the sphere is moved forward to the navigation blister."

  "And that's where we're going now," Hannah suggested.

  "Exactly."

  At the moment, the command sphere came to a sudden halt with a rattly bang, lurching hard enough that Jamie was nearly knocked off his feet. Then the whole sphere took off again, moving sideways, starting up fast enough that Hannah had to grab at Jamie's arm to stay upright. They stayed braced together, and it was a good thing they did. A few seconds later, they came to another too-abrupt halt, then resumed their upward movement.

  "They're not much for acceleration compensators, are they?" Hannah grumbled.

  "Their compensators work on the ship as a whole. The Vixa are not much bothered by sudden, minor stops and starts, and, as a safety measure to avoid field interference difficulties, they often do not activate the command sphere's compensators."

  "What did you do, Brox," Jamie asked, "memorize their technical manuals?"

  "No. I am just trying to answer your questions as diplomatically as possible--having asked them myself not so long ago. And I have been dealing with the Vixa for some time now. I have learned something about their attitudes."

  "What's had you dealing with the Vixa?" Jamie asked.

  SubPilot Greveltra was directing two of his three eyestalks at Brox, and Brox tossed his head in the Vixan's direction. "I may have said little, but I have said too much already," said the Kendari.

  "You may commence limited discussion soon," SubPilot Greveltra announced. "Our high-velocity drive will provide sufficient signal interference, and you will be able to provide a briefing on the general political situation."

  "Political situation?"

  "I think, perhaps, SubPilot Greveltra might also have said too much while saying too little," Brox replied. He looked up, through the overhead dome of the sphere. "But we are approaching the blister. There will not be much longer to wait."

  Jamie and Hannah looked up as well. Overhead, they could see that the vertical shaft they were traveling through ended in another, larger hatch. Jamie half expected Greveltra to barrel on through at full speed, trusting the machinery to flick the hatch open at the last possible moment, but instead he brought their sphere to an abrupt halt well aft of the hatch, waited for it to open fully, then started up again with a lurch. There were two more hatches after the first one, and the command sphere followed the same pattern going through all of them. It was like riding on a rickety old antique manually operated tram at a transportation museum--on a day when the tram operator was in a bad mood.

  Beyond the first hatch, and the second, was more vertical shaft. But beyond the third was--nothing. Just an empty hole, out into space.

  The command sphere slowed to a crawl, and eased to a halt when the floor of the deck they were standing on was exactly flush with the hull outside. The clutter of machines and hardware around the perimeter of the sphere obscured the view toward the apparent horizon. But the view overhead was breathtaking. The outer dome itself was utterly, flawlessly transparent, with no smudge of dirt or shimmer of reflection to spoil the illusion that it was not there at all. The planet Center hung in darkness and glory before them, ten times, a hundred times, the size of the Moon as seen from Earth. The planet was almost in full phase, a gleaming ball of swirling blue water, shimmering white clouds framing the lush greens and sturdy browns and tans of the land surface.

  Hanging in the middle distance, riding the rim of the world, was the dazzling, complex shape of Center Transit Station, home of BSI's orbital HQ, the Bullpen. Home, or the closest thing Jamie had to a home at the moment. Not much more than an hour before, Hannah and he had been catching up on paperwork in the Bullpen. But that had been a very fast-moving hour. Things had changed, and then some.

  "Commencing low-power acceleration safe-distancing maneuver," SubPilot Greveltra announced. Moments later, without any sensation of motion, without any shudder or vibration of any kind, the planet Center and Center Transit Station slid off to port side and rapidly receded out of view.

  "Good Lord," said Hannah, speaking in a half whisper, and in English, with words meant for Jamie's ears alone. "And that's their low-power acceleration. How many gees do you think we're doing right now, to get past the whole planet in just a few seconds?"

  With a start, Jamie realized that he had taken on the unconscious assumptio
n that he was seeing something on the scale of a boat sailing past an island, or an aircraft passing over a city. They had just accelerated from near-zero relative velocity to a speed of many hundreds or maybe thousands of kilometers a second in less time than it would take him to walk once around the Bullpen. "This ship is big enough that it's got to be naked-eye visible from the surface of Center," Jamie said. "And it must be sending every radar system pegging off-scale high all over the CenterStar system. Can you imagine how much they must be freaking out down there?"

  "Just about as much as we are up here," Hannah said, still more or less whispering. "Every once in a while it just gets rubbed in our faces, doesn't it? The sheer, effortless, incredible raw power that the Elder Races have."

  "Indeed it has that effect," Brox said, speaking in pretty fair English himself. "Please note that I answer this rhetoric question to be good sport, and to remind you that many of my fellow Inquirists know English just finely."

  "And to remind us you have good ears as well," said Jamie, shifting back to Lesser Trade Speech. And recording devices so his people can play it all back later if need be. He realized that Brox was doing something else as well--sending a signal that, this time at least, they were all on the same team.

  But he was also putting them in the habit of deferring to him, turning to him for information, accepting him as their guide, even their leader. Jamie could have recited word for word the warnings that Hannah would have given him if they had been free to speak.

  And though Brox was quite literally an enemy agent, Jamie and Hannah had every reason to believe he was also an honorable and trustworthy adversary. Until the moment came when they couldn't trust him any longer. Just because things were complicated on the surface, that didn't mean they weren't even more complicated underneath, Jamie told himself.

  "Safe distance and thrust vector now achieved," SubPilot Greveltra announced. "Commencing primary acceleration maneuver."

  "Look up," Brox said in a low voice. "You wouldn't want to miss this."

  Jamie and Hannah turned their heads upward toward the gleaming stars, the swirling glory in the blackness--and watched as the sky began to melt.

  It was the stars directly overhead, at the zenith, that first started to smear, to stretch, to blur, shift in color toward the blue, and fade to nothing. But the contagion spread outward from there, more and more stars smearing, spreading, growing dimmer and bluer.

  After only a few minutes, all the overhead stars had vanished altogether, and those near the horizon were mere compressed, misshapen blurs.

  Jamie understood what was happening. As a spacecraft moved faster and faster, and got closer and closer to the speed of light, the light from stars directly in the line of travel was affected so strongly by blueshifting as to vanish altogether, while the light of stars that were merely close to the direction of travel were affected to a lesser degree. The closer your ship got to the speed of light, the more pronounced and dramatic the effect.

  But on even the most powerful human-built ships, or for that matter, on any xeno-built ship Jamie had ever heard of, it took days, or at least hours, to generate enough velocity for the effect to be noticeable, let alone significant. The transition happened too slowly for the eye to notice. For any ship, to say nothing of a ship of this size, to accelerate from effectively motionless to a velocity this close to light-speed in a matter of a few seconds would require unspeakable amounts of power, power that they were expending in order to get James Mendez and Hannah Wolfson somewhere in one hell of a hurry.

  What had happened? Why were they so short of time?

  Time. Suddenly it struck him. Blueshifting wasn't the only effect of moving at near light-speed. "Time dilation," he said to Hannah. "A lot of it."

  "Quite right," said Brox. "To an outside observer, measuring in human units, our whole journey will appear to take about seven hours. But so far as we are concerned, we'll be there in something like four hours."

  Brox sat down on the deckplates, calmly folding his legs under himself and wrapping his tail around his body as if he were some giant, self-satisfied cat. "So," he said, "We are flying in a vehicle as massive as a small moon, we are shielded from all detectors by the full mass of the vehicle itself, as well as by the primary drive radiation--which is so intense the command sphere has shifted to the forward end to get as far from it as possible--and by the fact that we have just accelerated, in a matter of seconds, to roughly eight-ninths of the speed of light. I would expect there are all sorts of jamming and silencing systems running as well.

  "However, as noted, our Vixa friends feel we are not yet quite secure enough for me to brief you on the specific situation. But perhaps you can suggest something else for us to talk about in the meanwhile, so as to pass the time away.

  "Do you have any suggestions?"

  THREE

  THE PLANETS ON THE TABLE

  Hannah smiled, shook her head, and sat down tailor fashion on the deck facing Brox. Jamie did the same. "I can't think of a single thing we need to talk about," said Hannah. "Maybe we should just stare at each other until we get there."

  "It would be an unsuitable use of the time to stare at each other," SubPilot Greveltra announced. "Inquirist Brox must perform a briefing."

  "It would appear that SubPilot Greveltra can acknowledge your existence," said Brox, "and also that he lacks a sense of irony. But before you warn me about insulting our powerful host, I would assure you he takes that last statement as a strong compliment." Brox paused thoughtfully for a moment. "If anything, he is unhappy about my first statement, that he can acknowledge you--but since it is self-evident that he did respond to your statement, even if he did not address you directly, and it is therefore a matter of fact, he is, by his own lights, forced to accept it. So he can't be insulted."

  "I can think of plenty of humans who wouldn't be stopped by a little thing like that," said Hannah. "Anyway, the SubPilot does have a point, if not a sense of humor. You can at least brief us on the general situation now."

  "And so I shall. But the first thing I will tell you is that you must not believe a single word I say. You will have the chance to get everything confirmed--or debunked--by your own people, and your own senses, your own efforts. Do so. Get all the facts--and all the versions of the facts--you can. The second thing I will tell you is that you might as well pay very strict attention to me, because I am certain that your own people will debrief you as carefully as they can, in an effort to squeeze out every drop of the information I am about to give you. My people will be doing more or less the same with me, concerning you two, Commander Kelly, and the other humans I've dealt with since the--event."

  "In other words," said Hannah, "look forward to this being treated as a major situation. We'd gotten that impression already."

  "So get on with it," said Jamie. "Start at the beginning, and let's go."

  "Not the beginning," said Brox. "That might be a few million, even hundred million years ago. Back to when even the Elder Races weren't all that old. Leaving out a great deal of history, a star system, the Pentam System, has gone vacant. It is unusual for having not one, but two habitable planets, along with a number of other very attractive features. There have been meetings and negotiations going on since well before your race or mine came to the attention of the Elder Races, all revolving around who would be awarded the Pentam System--and who wouldn't. I won't propose going into the politics of the situation. To sum up, there were three or four shifting alliances, each made up of two or three Elder Races, each of which was mainly interested in making sure one or more of the other groups didn't get Pentam."

  "Two habitable planets in one system?" Jamie asked. "And you wouldn't want that for your own people?"

  Brox shifted, unexpectedly, into his somewhat awkward English. "No. If you be Elder Race, you would not. Because having new worlds is too much trouble. Because things have been way they are long time, and change cause trouble. Because your species already is rich enough, has power enough. Eld
ers say they mature enough not to want more just for sake of having." Brox paused briefly, then spoke again. "Kendari ask: What is maturity--What is decadence? Elder Races say things stay the same. Kendari ask--things stay the same or just seem the same? Kendari--and humans--say need new things, need challenge, to stay strong, stop decay."

  Hannah knew what Brox was talking about. She and Jamie had seen it, and not so very long ago. An Elder Race could seem to have an utterly stable and secure society--and not even be aware of the slow rot setting in. It could be in a state of decline so slow it was undetectable. A species, like an individual being, never really stayed the same. If it did not evolve, it would decline. It had either to grow or contract, renew or decay. There was no middle ground.

  A seemingly static society could become so utterly fragile, so unused to change, so incapable of adapting to it, that anything new or different could destroy it. Therefore, change of any sort--such as the arrival on the scene of the Younger Races, the humans and the Kendari--represented a very real threat. No wonder so many Elder Races were hostile to them. Hannah replied in English. "We view things in much the same way. Just bear in mind our hosts can record and translate, even if the SubPilot can't understand us."

  Brox gestured dismissively. "I tell no secrets. Elder Races know our opinions and laugh at them. Just not wish needlessly insult SubPilot to his face--if he can be said to have face."

  "I thought you said he wouldn't be bothered by any statement that was factual," Jamie objected.

  "Vixa find reason for anger if they need it. Be careful," Brox said, before shifting back to Lesser Trade Speech. "To continue, many alliances formed and broke up and shifted and so on. Ironically, they all accomplished their primary goals of preventing their rivals from taking over the Pentam System--but these were not permanent victories. Sooner or later, someone would settle Pentam, and undo the equilibrium. And then the Kendari emerged, followed not long after by the humans. Two small, weak races that posed no threat to anyone."