Clarkesworld: Year Four

by Kij Johnson

  “And?” Beck stared at the pyramids on the screen.

  “Our first couple weeks here we kept driving the urchins into low lying areas, valleys, that sort of thing. They kept dying on us. We figure the chlorine and acids sink low into the valleys. Our equipment can’t handle it.”

  Beck sat down on the nearest couch to Kepler, and looked over the interface. “Take the long way around then, I’ll look at your archives while you do so. Wait!”

  I saw it too. A movement through the black, spiky bushes. I saw my first alien creature scuttle around, antennae twisting as it moved along what looked like a path.

  “They look like ants,” I blurted out.

  “We call them Vesians. But yes, ants the size of a small dog,” Oslo said. “And not really ants at all. Just exoskeletons, black plastic, in a similar structure. The handiwork of parallel evolution.”

  More Vesians appeared carrying leaves and sticks on their backs.

  And gourds.

  “Now that’s interesting,” Beck said.

  “It doesn’t mean they’re intelligent,” Beck said later, lying in the bunk with me next to him. We both stared up at the ceiling. He rolled over and looked at me. “The gourds grow on trees. They use them to store liquids. Inside those pyramids.”

  We were face to face, breathing each other’s air. Beck had no personal space, and I had to fight my impulse to pull back away from him.

  My job was now to facilitate. Make Beck feel at home.

  Insect hives had drones that could exist away from the hive. A hive needed foragers, and defenders. But the human Compact only existed in the asteroid belt of the mother system.

  Beck was a long way from home.

  With the lag, he would be feeling cut off and distant. And for a mind that had always been in the embrace of the hive, this had to be hard for him.

  But Beck offered the freelance scientists a link into the massive computational capacity of the entire Compact. They’d contracted it to handle the issue they couldn’t figure out quickly: were the aliens intelligent or not?

  Beck was pumping information back all the way back to the mother system, so that the Compact could devote some fraction of a fraction of its massed computing ability to the issue. The minds of all its connected citizenry. Its supercomputers. Maybe even, it was rumored, artificial intelligences.

  “But if they are intelligent?” I asked. “How do you prove it?”

  Beck cocked his head. “The Compact is working on it. Has been ever since the individuals here signed the contract.”

  “Then why are you out here?”

  “Yes . . . ” He was suddenly curious in me now, remembering I was a distinct individual, lying next to him. I wasn’t of the Compact. I wasn’t another drone.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

  “It was good you asked.” He flopped over to stare at the ceiling again. “You’re right, I’m not entirely needed. But the Compact felt it was necessary.”

  I wanted to know why. But I could feel Beck hesitate. I held my breath.

  “You are a Friend. You’ve never broken contract. The Compact ranks you very highly.” Beck turned back to face me. “We understand that what I tell you will never leave this room, and since I debugged it, it’s a safe room. What do you think it takes to become a freelance scientist in this hostile universe?”

  I’d been around enough negotiating tables. A good Friend, with the neural modifications and adaptive circuitry laced into me from birth, I could read body posture, micro-expressions, skin flush, heart rate, in a blink of the eye. I made a hell of a negotiating tool. Which was usually exactly what Gheda wanted: a read on their human counterparts.

  And I had learned the ins and outs of my clients businesses quick as well. I knew what the wider universe was like while doing my job.

  “Oslo has pent-up rage,” I whispered. “His family is obsessed with the Earth as it used to be. Before the Gheda land purchases. He wants wealth, but that’s not all, I think. Cruzie holds herself like she has military bearing, though she hides it. Kepler, I don’t know. I’m guessing you will tell me they have all worked as weapons manufacturers or researchers of some sort?”

  Beck nodded. “Oslo and his sister London are linked to a weaponized virus that was released on a Gheda station. Cruzie fought with separatists in Columbia. Kepler is a false identity. We haven’t cracked her yet.”

  I looked at the drone. There was no deceit in him. He stated these things as facts. He was a drone. He didn’t need to question the information given to him.

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  He gestured at the bunk. “You’re a professional Friend. You’re safe. You’re here. And I’m just a drone. We’re just a piece of all this.”

  And then he moved to spoon against the inside of my stomach. Two meaningless, tiny lives inside a cold station, far away from where they belonged.

  “And because,” he added in a soft voice, “I think that these scientists are desperate enough to fix a problem if it occurs.”

  “Fix a problem?” I asked, wrapping my arms around him.

  “I think the Vesians are intelligent, and I think Kepler and Oslo plan to do something to them if, or when, it’s confirmed, so that they can keep patent rights.”

  I could suddenly hear every creak, whisper, and whistle in the station as I tensed up.

  “I will protect you if I can. Right now we’re just delaying as long as we can. Mainly I’m trying to stop Cruzie from figuring out the obvious, because if she confirms they’re really intelligent, then Oslo and Kepler will make their move and do something to the Vesians. We’re not sure what.”

  “You said delaying. Delaying until what?” I asked, a slight quaver in my voice that I found I couldn’t control.

  “Until the Gheda get here,” Beck said with a last yawn. “That’s when it all gets really complicated.” His voice trailed off as he said that, and he fell asleep.

  I lay there, awake and wide-eyed.

  I finally reached up to my neck and scratched at the band of skin where the air monitor patch had once been stuck.

  Points on nothing was still just . . . nothing.

  But could I rat out my contract? My role as a Friend? Could I help Oslo and Kepler kill an alien race?

  Things had gotten very muddy in just a few minutes. I felt trapped between the hell of an old life and the hell of a horrible new one.

  “What’s a human being?” I asked Beck over lunch.

  “Definitions vary,” he replied.

  “You’re a drone: bred to act, react, and move within a shared neural environment. You serve the Compact. There’s no queen, like a classic anthill or with bees. Your shared mental overmind makes the calls. So you have a say. A tiny say. You are human . . .-ish. Our ancestors would have questioned whether you were human.”

  Beck cocked his head and smiled. “And you?”

  “Modified from birth to read human faces. Under contract for most of my life to Gheda, working to tell the aliens or other humans what humans are really thinking . . . they wouldn’t have thought highly of me either.”

  “The Compact knows you reread your contract last night, after I fell asleep, and you used some rather complicated algorithms to game some scenarios.”

  I frowned. “So you’re spying on us now.”

  “Of course. You’re struggling with a gray moral situation.”

  “Which is?”

  “The nature of your contract says you need to work with me and support my needs. But you’re hired by the freelancers that I’m now in opposition to. As a Friend, a role and purpose burned into you just like being a drone is burned into me, do you warn them? Or do you stick by me? The contract allows for interpretations either way. And if you stick with me, it’s doing so while knowing that I’m just a drone. A pawn that the Compact will use as it sees fit, for its own game.”

  “You left something out,” I said.

  “Neither you, nor I, are bred to
care about Vesians,” Beck said.

  I got up and walked over to the large porthole. “I wonder if it wouldn’t be better for them?”

  “What would?”

  “Whatever Kepler and Oslo want to do to them. Better to die now than to meet the Gheda. I can’t imagine they’d ever want to become us.”

  Beck stood up. There was caution in his stance, as if he’d thought I had been figured out, but now wasn’t sure. “I’ve got work to do. Stay here and finish your meal, Friend.”

  I looked down at the green world beneath, and jumped when a hand grabbed my shoulder. I could see gray words tattooed in the skin. “Cruzie?”

  Her large brown eyes were filled with anger. “That son of a bitch has been lying to us,” she said, pointing in the direction Beck had gone. “Come with me.”

  “The gourds,” Cruzie said, pointing at a screen, and then looking at Beck. “Tell us about the gourds.”

  And Oslo grabbed my shoulder. “Watch the drone, sharp now. I want you to tell us what you see when he replies to us.”

  My contract would be clear there. I couldn’t lie. The scientists owned the contract, and now that they’d asked directly for my services, I couldn’t evade.

  Points on the package, I thought in the far back of my mind.

  I wasn’t really human, was I? Not if I found the lure of eternal riches to be so great as to consider helping the freelancers.

  “The Vesians have farms,” Cruzie said. “But so do ants: they grow fungus. The Vesians have roads, but so do animals in a forest. They just keep walking over the same spots. Old Earth roads used to follow old animal paths. The Vesians have buildings, but birds build nests, ants build colonies, bees build hives. But language, that’s so much rarer in the animal kingdom, isn’t it, Beck?”

  “Not really,” the drone said calmly. “Primitive communication exists in animals. Including bees, which dance information. Dolphins squeak and whales sing.”

  “But none of them write it down,” Cruzie grinned.

  Oslo’s squeezed my shoulder, hard. “The drone is mildly annoyed,” I said. “And more than a little surprised.”

  Cruzie tapped on a screen. The inside of one of the pyramids appeared. It was a storehouse of some sort, filled with hundreds, maybe thousands, of the gourds I’d seen earlier that the Vesian had been transporting.

  “Nonverbal creatures use scent. Just like ants on the mother planet. The Vesians use scents to mark territories their queens manage. And one of the things I started to wonder about, were these storage areas. What were they for? So I broke in, and I started breaking the gourds.”

  Beck stiffened. “He’s not happy with this line of thought,” I murmured.

  “Thought so,” Oslo said back, and nodded at Cruzie, who kept going.

  “And whenever I broke a gourd, I found them empty. Not full of liquid, as Beck told us was likely. We originally thought they were for storage. An adaptive behavior. Or a sign of intelligence. Hard to say. Until I broke them all.”

  “They could have been empty, waiting to be sealed,” Beck said tonelessly.

  I sighed. “I’m sorry, Beck. I have to do this. He’s telling the truth, Oslo. But misdirecting.”

  “I know he is,” Cruzie said. “Because the Vesians swarmed the location with fresh gourds. There were chemical scents, traces laid down in the gourds before they were sealed. The Vesians examined the broken gourds, then filled the new ones with scents. I started examining the chemical traces, and found that each gourd replaced had the same chemical sequences sprayed on and stored as the ones I broke.”

  Beck’s muscles tensed. Any human could see the stress now. I didn’t need to say anything.

  “They were like monks, copying manuscripts. Right, Beck?” Cruzie asked.

  “Yes,” Beck said.

  “And the chemical markers, it’s a language, right?” Kepler asked. I could feel the tension in her voice. It wasn’t just disappointment building, but rage.

  “It is.” Beck stood up slowly.

  “It took me days to realize it,” Cruzie said. “And that, after the weeks I’ve been out here. The Compact spotted it right away, didn’t it?”

  Beck looked over at me, then back at Cruzie. “Yes. The Compact knows.”

  “Then what the hell is it planning to do?” Kepler moved in front of Beck, lips drawn back in a snarl.

  “I’m just a drone,” Beck said. “I don’t know. But I can give you an answer in an hour.”

  For a second, everyone stood frozen. Oslo, brimming with hurt rage, staring at Beck. Kepler, moving from anger toward some sort of decision. Cruzie looked . . . triumphant. Oblivious to the real breaking developments in the air.

  And I observed.

  Like any good Friend.

  Then a loud ‘whooop whooop’ startled us all out of our poses.

  “What’s that?” Cruzie asked, looking around.

  “The Gheda are here,” Oslo, Kepler, and Beck said at the same time.

  The Path Less Traveled

  “Call the vote,” Oslo snapped.

  Cruzie swallowed. I saw micro beads of sweat on the side of her neck. “Right now?”

  “Gheda are inbound,” Kepler said, her artificial eyes dark. I imagined she had them patched into the computers, looking at information from the station’s sensors. “They’ll be decelerating and matching orbit in hours. There’s no time for debate, Cruzie.”

  “What we’re about to do is something that requires debate. They’re intelligent. We’re proposing ripping that away over the next day with Kepler’s tailored virus. They’ll end up with a viral lobotomy, just smart enough we can claim their artifacts come from natural hive mind behavior. But we’ll have stolen their culture. Their minds. Their history.” Cruzie shook her head. “I know we said they’re going to lose most of that when the Gheda arrive. But if we do this, we’re worse than Gheda.”

  “Fucking hell, Cruzie!” Oslo snapped. “You’re changing your mind now?”

  “Oslo!” Cruzie held up her hands as if trying to ward off the angry words.

  “You saw our mother planet,” Oslo said. “The slums. The starvation. Gheda combat patrols. They owned everyone. If you didn’t provide value, you were nothing. You fought the Sahara campaign, you attacked Abbuj station. How the fuck can you turn your back to all that?”

  “I didn’t turn my back, I wanted a different path,” Cruzie said. “That’s why we’re here. With the money on the patents, we could change things . . . but what are we changing here if we’re not all that better than the Gheda?”

  “It’s us or the fucking ants,” Kepler said, voice suddenly level. “It’s really that simple. Where are your allegiances?”

  I bit my lip when I heard that.

  “Cruzie . . . ” I started to say.

  She held a hand up and walked over to the console, her thumb held out. “It takes a unanimous vote to unleash the virus. This was why I insisted.”

  “You’re right,” Kepler said. I flinched. I could hear the hatred in her voice. She nodded at Oslo.

  He raised his walking stick. The tiny grains inside rattled around, and then a jagged finger of energy leapt out and struck Cruzie in the small of her back.

  Cruzie jerked around, arms flopping as she danced, then dropped to the ground. Oslo pressed the stick to her head and fired it again. Blood gushed from Cruzie’s eye sockets as something inside her skull went ‘pop.’

  A wisp of smoke curled from her open mouth.

  Oslo and Kepler put thumbs to the screens. “We have a unanimous vote now.”

  But a red warning sign flashed back at them. Beck relaxed slightly, a tiny curl of a smile briefly appearing.

  Oslo raised his walking stick and pointed it at Beck. “Our communications are blocked.”

  “Yes,” Beck said. “The Compact is voting against preemptive genocide.”

  For a split second, I saw the decision to kill Beck flit across Kepler’s face. “If you kill him,” I spoke up, “the Compact will spend re
sources hunting you two down. You can’t enjoy your riches if you’re dead.”

  Kepler nodded. “You’re right.” But she looked at me, a question on her face.

  I shrugged. “If you’re all dead, I don’t have points on the package.”

  “Trigger them manually,” Oslo said. “We’ll bring the drone. We won’t leave him up here to cause more trouble. Bring him, or her, or whatever the Friend calls itself as well. Your contract, Alex, is now to watch Beck.”

  We burned our way through the green atmosphere of Ve, the lander bucking and groaning, skin cracking as it weathered the heat of our reentry fireball.

  From the tiny cramped cockpit I watched us part the clouds and spiral slowly down out of the sky as the wings unfurled from slots in the tear-drop sized vehicle’s side. They started beating a complicated figure-eight motion.

  Oslo aimed his walking stick at us when the lander touched down. “Put on your helmet, get out. Both of you.”

  We did so.

  Heavy chlorine-rich mists swirled around, disturbed by our landing. Large puffball flowers spurted acid whenever touched by a piece of stray stirred-up debris, and the black, plastic leaves all around us bobbed gently in a low breeze.

  Oslo and Kepler pulled a large pack out of the lander’s cargo area. Long pieces of tubing. They set to building a freestanding antenna, piece by piece. I watched Beck. I couldn’t see his face, but I could see his posture.

  He was about to run. Which made no sense. Run where? On this world?

  Within a few minutes Oslo and Kepler had snapped together a thirty-foot tall tower. I swallowed, and remained silent. It was a choice, a deliberate path. I broke my contract.

  Oslo snapped a clip to the top of the tower, then unrolled a length of cable. He and Kepler used it to pull the super light structure up.

  That was the moment Beck ran, as it hung halfway up to standing.

  “Shit,” Oslo cursed over the tiny speakers in our helmets, but he didn’t drop the structure. “You’ve only got a couple hours of air you moron!”

  The only response was Beck’s heavy breathing.

  When the antenna stood upright, Oslo approached me, the walking stick out. “You didn’t warn us.”