InterstellarNet- Enigma

by Edward M. Lerner

  True enough: the waiting Xool might have stepped from the lunar-base vids. The aliens were bipedal yet medusoid—and headless, their eyes and ears on telescoping stalks that protruded from the shoulders. Chest-high, many-pocketed utility belts, the only clothing they wore, carried patches that might mean anything, but that made Carl muse about insignia of rank. Tools or instruments (or weapons?) dangled from belt loops.

  Stalk extensions aside, the aliens varied little in height from one another or from Carl. They differed more with respect to iris color, in swirls of yellow and green, in irregularities of their waist-level fringe bands, in stockiness, and, most of all, in the mottled gray-on-gray patterns of their leathery skin.

  Four Xool had met Carl and several more were visible, standing at consoles, in the next room, but the extent of the facility—and the many ships hangared outside—suggested many more aliens somewhere nearby. Deeper within the complex, he supposed.

  “Translate for me,” Carl netted to Joshua, glad he didn’t have to rely on the scraps of Basque his implant could manage. “Begin with this: I come from the planet called Earth.”

  A portable speaker hung from a clip at the waist of Carl’s pressure suit; in Joshua’s voice, the speaker said … something.

  To Carl’s right a Xool responded, its voice also originating from waist level. A mouth must lie behind that band of fleshy fringes. This Xool’s eyes were predominantly jade green, the insignia on its belt a square of royal blue.

  “That likewise was in Basque,” Joshua netted. “He, she, or it said, ‘Understood. We are familiar with Earth and humans.’ ”

  “He,” Carl decided. “As a pronoun of convenience, until we learn otherwise.”

  “Fine, he. As an unrelated observation: Ir don’t know the extent to which their skin markings vary. Mottling patterns might repeat among them as often as hair colors recur among humans. That said, Tacitus believes ‘he’ could be someone we’ve seen in the lunar vids.”

  Carl had inferred as much from getting his answer in Basque. He netted, “Tell them that others traveling with me are Hunters, native to the Barnard’s Star system.” Joshua, via the wireless speaker, translated that, too.

  “If you speak English, that would be more convenient,” Blue Square said in English, speaking with a curious, sibilant lilt. “And by the way, our air is safe for humans. For Hunters as well, although they would find it flat from the lack of sulfur compounds.”

  Pressure-suit readouts had indicated as much. Before removing his helmet, its transceiver left switched on, Carl netted, “No more speaking through the loudspeaker. Let them believe software in my helmet handled the Basque translations. They may not realize I have a connection to the outside.”

  “Understood,” Joshua netted. “But ask: why not Basque?”

  Carl passed along the question.

  “We found it effective,” Blue Square said, “to recruit our servants from among orphans in an isolated, oppressed subculture. More recent servants favor the old language out of respect.”

  Respect? As Carl remembered the lunar vids, the attitude of agents was reverential. That made Basque a liturgical language. Did the aliens encourage that worship?

  Blue Square continued, “If any of our human servants survive. Your arrival here might suggest otherwise.”

  “Some are gone,” Carl admitted. “They have the disconcerting habit of blowing themselves to pieces rather than talk.” Or of falling silent because tons of rock had fallen on their head. After all these years, Helena’s death still haunted him.

  “Enough trivialities,” Blue Square said. “You should not be here.”

  “So we have heard. ‘Humans aren’t meant to wander.’ Why is that?”

  “A moment.” Blue Square and his colleagues launched into a lengthy exchange.

  Their clipped intonations, sometimes guttural, sometimes sibilant, could mean anything. They went on (and on), for far longer than any moment.

  In the artificial gravity, gear and pressure suit grew heavy. Carl wished someone would invite him to sit, but no one did. Maybe the ottoman-like things weren’t seats. Maybe Xool didn’t sit. He set his helmet on the floor and continued to wait. As the hiatus dragged on, Carl updated Motar for relay to Koban and Timoq. Mostly that involved uploading snippets of aural and optical recordings from his implant, annotated with his impressions.

  As the Xool kept talking among themselves, Carl, with an inward sigh, chose an ottoman and sat.

  • • • •

  Squirming with boredom in his couch on Excalibur’s tiny bridge, Joshua netted, “This is like watching paint dry.”

  “I’ll have to take your word as to the simile,” Tacitus came back, “but I’ll go along with waiting here being a waste of our time. I’d like to see—but you already know.”

  How could I not? Joshua thought to himself. Aloud, he said, “Motar?”

  The Hunter turned.

  Joshua gestured around the cramped, overcrowded room. “Would you mind us going to our cabin?”

  “That’s fine. I’ll net you when something happens.”

  “Excellent. Ir will be examining that curious central peak outside.” He/they stood to take leave of the bridge.

  “What?” Motar said. “You can’t go outside.”

  “And why not? You can reach mir as easily on the surface as aboard this ship, as Ir can as easily net from there with Carl.”

  “You are needed here on Excalibur.”

  “No, Ir am needed on comm. Ir will remain on comm.”

  “And if the Xool should—”

  “Should what?” Joshua interrupted. “What reason is there to suppose we’re safe anywhere on this world?”

  To which sally Motar had no immediate answer.

  The acting captain would simply order any of the Hunter crew to remain—and they would jump to. But Joshua? He/they weren’t crew exactly, and he/they—more so, the idea of Augmentation—still intimidated the hell out of many Hunters. Certainly, it intimidated this one.

  “So Ir will be in touch,” Joshua concluded, headed for the pressure-suit lockers.

  “You’ll take along a guard,” Motar said. Insisted. Asserted himself.

  “That’s unnecessary,” Joshua said. “To do what? Shoot the hidden telescope Ir expect to find?”

  “You will take an escort, or not go at all,” Motar growled.

  “Fine,” Joshua said. He had intended from the start to bring a tech, but that had to seem like Motar’s idea. “Hrak Votan, perhaps. She can at least make herself useful.”

  “Fine,” Motar said, having established his authority. “You’ll remain in touch throughout.”

  “Of course.” And as the alien chatter, still unintelligible, droned on from the Xool base, Joshua took leave of the bridge.

  • • • •

  After almost twenty minutes, Carl cleared his throat. “Why don’t we start over? My name is Carl Rowland, and you may call me Carl. I am an agent”—at least, he chose to see himself that way—“of the United Planets Intelligence Agency. I also represent the Foremost of Hunter clan Arblen Ems.”

  Blue Square said, “Just a moment more, Carl.”

  As the cryptic sidebar continued, Joshua netted, “Do these guys imagine you’re not recording? With enough speech samples and interleaved English for context, correlation will give us a start at translation.”

  The Xool might not perceive the risk. Language translation with primitive computers like those found in the Xool lunar base would take geologic time. Of course the Xool executed plans that stretched across geologic time, a perspective that rendered them more alien than their tentacles or the lack of heads.

  “They don’t care if we know what they’re saying,” Tacitus offered. “To judge from whatever they’ve wrapped around Xool World, we’re as backward in physics and engineering as they are with computers.”

  That was Carl’s theory, too. The Xool figured they could squash uninvited guests like bugs. They were probably right.

/>   The rasping, hissing consultation finally ended amid much bobbing of eye stalks. Did the mannerism denote agreement? Disdain? Laughter?

  Blue Square edged a few centimeters closer. “I am Iroa Ene Leiahoma, leader of the Xool assigned to the human solar system. Consider me our spokesperson. You may call me Ene.”

  “Ene, I am pleased to meet you.” Pleased was the politic term, Carl thought, if also an exaggeration. Negotiation called for tact. “We’re here for a purpose.”

  “Your intentions are immaterial,” Ene said, “just as your presence in this solar system is unacceptable. For your own safety, you will leave at once.”

  I don’t think so, Carl thought. Not without answers. “Ene, your people have intervened in countless lives. We don’t understand why. What do you expect of us?”

  The four Xool once again compared notes. Ene said, “Only that you fulfill your destiny.”

  “And what is that destiny?” Carl asked.

  “If we knew,” Ene said, “we need not to have undertaken so much.”

  “Do jellyfish have destinies?” Carl asked. “They were the advanced life forms on Earth when your people became involved.”

  “True,” Ene said, “we have long been engaged in this project. It is all the more reason why you must not interfere.”

  “Project,” Carl echoed, struggling to hold level his tone of voice. “That’s what we are to you? A science project?”

  “An important project. You can be proud.”

  “If we knew the nature of the undertaking, we might be proud. Perhaps, with mutual understanding, we would agree to leave this solar system.”

  “Do you mean any of that?” Joshua netted.

  It was the first comment for quite a while from Joshua or Tacitus; Carl supposed the two had found some more productive line of inquiry. That start at translation Joshua had hinted at would come in handy.

  “No,” Carl netted back, “and hence ‘might’ and ‘perhaps.’ But it’s strategic to dangle the possibility. I’m trying to open negotiations. Because what I want—what I believe we all want—is for the meddling to end. To be left alone. To have the opportunity, from here on out, to chart our own destiny.”

  “That will require more than talk.”

  The inner door of the Xool air lock opened—and Joshua stepped through! He removed his helmet.

  Ene, his eyestalks tipped forward, studied Joshua. He said, “Dr. Matthews, I presume.”

  CHAPTER 52

  Matthews conundrum: a variation upon the discredited Fermi Paradox (see related entry). In an age before contact with interstellar neighbors, twentieth-century physicist and Nobelist Enrico Fermi asked about (then only theoretical) alien intelligences, “Where are they?” Well into the modern era, historian Joshua Matthews (see related entry) asked why the detectable alien intelligences all clustered among neighboring solar systems, thus able to establish InterstellarNet, amid a larger galactic silence.

  Apart from Matthews, no credentialed figure ascribed any significance beyond random chance to the spatial grouping of known intelligences. Matthews’s evident substance abuse and subsequent disappearance discredited him and further relegated his speculations to fringe status.

  Following the onset of the Great Seclusion (see related entry), some scholars have controversially speculated that both astronomical-scale enigmas might in some way be related.

  Few proponents of such linkage advance an explanation for either phenomenon. Joyce Matthews (see related entry), grandmother of Joshua and a onetime secretary-general of the Interstellar Commerce Union, released a data archive she attributes to a theretofore unrevealed, non-InterstellarNet, alien species named the Xool. The senior Matthews asserts Xool involvement underlies the conundrum—an hypothesis dismissed by authorities.

  Under the crisis conditions of the Great Seclusion, her efforts to raise funds to excavate a purported Xool facility have been without success.

  —Internetopedia, Lunar edition

  • • • •

  “Ir am, in part, Joshua Matthews,” Joshua said.

  Ene’s eyestalks retracted jerkily by half their length. “You are an Augmented?”

  “Ir am.”

  “We find your kind … interesting.”

  If eyestalks set to twitching were reflexive, then “interesting” would seem seriously understated. Joshua thought, and that’s one more data point to ponder.

  “Joshua,” Carl netted, “you’re not supposed to be here.”

  “Hence Ir did not ask.” Joshua followed that netted utterance with the close-up of a solar system, its worlds mere dots. In several cases, dots he found disturbingly bright. Aloud, he said, “Do you know what else is interesting, Ene? The large optical telescope”—far more powerful than any instrument Invincible carried—“hidden in a nearby crater.”

  Joshua had had to aim the telescope via manual overrides, stymied by the still-cryptic symbols on its control console. But that could change. Even as he had operated the telescope by hand, data—an event log or program trace, he supposed—had streamed from the console to a nearby storage unit. And not merely to the Xool memory device ….

  An interface cable printed aboard Excalibur, like the unit his grandmother had designed for tapping computers at the Xool lunar base, had accommodated the local gear. Thirty years later, the Xool used the same electronic connectors and signaling protocols. He needn’t have made Votan lug a 3-D printer to the observatory.

  So: he had downloaded everything. When they could spare the time, Tacitus would correlate log entries with the observations set up by hand. Meanwhile, they had left Votan onsite to begin digging through the data.

  But all that was detail with which Carl would lack patience and about which Ene was best kept in ignorance.

  In the shared solar-system image, Joshua set one pixel blinking. He said, “Carl, do you remember how Epsilon Indi III appeared to astronomers back home?”

  Carl nodded.

  “The image Ir sent you is home,” Joshua said.

  “You’re showing me the Solar System? Earth is become like”—Carl gestured overhead—“Xool World?”

  “Like Xool World,” Joshua agreed, and then ceded shared vocal cords to Tacitus. “Just like that. The Moon, too, and Mars. Ir saw hints that some Jovian moons are likewise altered. Being far more distant from the Sun, they are too dim to be certain. K’vith has also changed.”

  Ene said, “Across InterstellarNet, people are fulfilling their destiny.”

  His eyes narrowed, Carl said, “It’s time, Ene, for you to explain exactly what that means.”

  “It is time,” Ene countered, “to discuss the Matthews conundrum.”

  • • • •

  “Life is common throughout the galaxy,” Ene said. “Complex multicellular life is not. Intelligent life is scarcer still.”

  “Except in this neighborhood,” Joshua said.

  Ene’s fringe tendrils wriggled. (Laughter, Joshua wondered, or agitation?) “We will come to your conundrum, Dr. Matthews. Please, be patient.”

  Carl cleared his throat. “And how do the Xool know these things?”

  “We listened,” Ene said, “and heard no one. We looked, and observed no one. The implications were so disturbing that we went searching.”

  “Throughout the galaxy,” Carl said, sounding skeptical.

  “Yes,” Ene said.

  “Throughout the galaxy,” Joshua repeated. At the outset of this adventure, neither he nor Tacitus had had more than a layman’s grasp of science. After the long voyage occupied by study, they knew a great deal more about, among several topics, physics. Nothing they had learned led them to doubt Einstein. And the galaxy, with its billions of stars, was a disk-shaped structure about 100 thousand light-years in diameter. “Have your people repealed the light-speed limit?”

  “No,” Ene said.

  Joshua said, “Then this will be a story too long to stand through.” He joined Carl on one of the low ottomans.

  “Indeed.�
�� Ene added something in his own language that sent his companions gliding away, before claiming a nearby seat for himself. “If you brought refreshments, feel free to eat. We will provide water.”

  Carl leaned forward. “When does this story begin?”

  “In Earth terms, about six hundred million years ago.” Ene sank into an ottoman; his tentacle-legs deflated. “Xool biological and computer technologies lag behind recent human levels, but our physical sciences are further advanced. It was our physics that enabled everything we will discuss.

  “In brief, we have the technology to slow the passage of time. Crew on our off-world missions scarcely aged. Applying the technology on a larger scale, scarcely twenty years have elapsed on our home world.”

  “Twenty years,” Carl repeated. “In which to manage 600 million years of galaxy-spanning machinations? That sounds impossibly ambitious.”

  “It was decided,” Ene said, his tendrils fluttering, as though no further explanation were needed.

  But Joshua scarcely heard that exchange. He remembered all too well the ride he had once unwittingly taken in a Xool agent’s “cab.” For him, less than an hour had gone by; for the world, a month had passed. The disappearance that he could never explain, that no one could explain, had ruined him. The old rage boiled up—

  Only to wash away in a surge of serotonin.

  “This isn’t the time,” Tacitus told his other half.

  Aloud, Tacitus speculated, “A unified field theory?” To Carl, he explained, “The reconciliation of gravity with the other forces of nature, such as electromagnetism. A unified field theory would be an extension to Einsteinian general relativity and T’Fru gravitation. A unified theory may also underpin their technology for artificial gravity.”

  Carl nodded. “Thanks.”

  Ene said, “Just so. Humanity’s incomplete notions of relativity permit time dilation by traveling at near-light speeds and in proximity to very large masses. The more complete theory offers more elegant means to the same end.”

  The Xool dropped tantalizing hints, more metaphor than math, until Carl interrupted. “Big picture? A boundary of slowed time is what surrounds the planet. Correct?”