“That’s you, isn’t it? You are the human Ambassador to the Stellar Group.”
“I am the Ambassador. That is quite true.” Dougal MacDougal stood up straighter, but at the same time he seemed to Flammarion to have mysteriously shrunk a few inches. “However, this will be an exception to the usual rules for Assembly. Although I will be permitted to be present — as an observer — the Stellar Group insists that a different human be present as a participant. They inform us, very specifically, that Chan Dalton — you — have to be that human.”
“Do they indeed.” Dalton sat up higher in his raised chair and became very much a top advisor to the Duke of Bosny: cold and thoughtful, with an unreadable look in his eye. “The Stellar Group wants me to leave the Gallimaufries and travel out to Ceres. Very interesting. But pardon me, Ambassador, if I say I find that hard to believe. On the other hand, I can very easily believe that there are acquaintances of mine — I won’t go so far as to call them enemies — who for a variety of reasons might want me away from Earth for a while.”
MacDougal’s face reddened. “I know nothing of such things, or such people. I am telling you only that the members of the Stellar Group demand your presence. And they have hinted that this might have some bearing on the present quarantine of humanity.”
“Fine. So tell me this: Why do they want me, and only me? What do they want me for ?”
“Well …” Dougal MacDougal stood woodenly to attention.
Looking up at that tall figure, Kubo Flammarion felt his first moment of sympathy for the man. There was a good reason why the Ambassador had not taken Flammarion into his confidence concerning the reason for bringing Chan Dalton to Ceres.
The Ambassador didn’t know the reason, any more than Flammarion himself did. The need for Chan Dalton, and Chan Dalton alone, was apparently a mystery to every human.
2: AN INVITATION FROM THE STELLAR GROUP
With the Link return to Ceres closing in an hour, Kubo Flammarion had time for only a few private minutes with Chan Dalton before he had to guide Dougal MacDougal back to the surface.
“You could fight it, you know.” Kubo gestured around him. “I mean, with all this going for you and the Duke to help you, you could say no and I bet we’d never get you out of here. Why did you say yes?”
In the hours since they arrived at the Duke of Bosny’s court in the depths of the Gallimaufries — that’s what it felt like, a court, even if it wasn’t called that — Kubo had been mightily impressed. The way Dalton gave orders, casually; the way everyone nodded and scurried off to obey; the way they all cringed and kowtowed and groveled ; no one on Ceres, or anywhere away from Earth, had so much power and control.
The change, he suspected, was not in the inhabitants of the Gallimaufries. It was in Chan Dalton. Kubo remembered Chan as an innocent and compliant youth. Now he was a cool, calculating adult, whose battered face said he had seen everything and did only what he wanted to.
“I don’t know why you agreed,” Kubo went on, when Chan stared at him silently. “I mean, the aliens …”
“You don’t like them, do you?”
“Forget the `like’ bit. They give me the willies. Especially the Angels. I mean, they’re not just aliens. They’re not even animals . Why did you agree to meet with ’em?”
Dalton, Flammarion was pleased to see, did not go into the old “I do it for the good of humanity” speech. He had an odd little frown on his scarred face, of mixed puzzlement and annoyance.
“Fair question, Captain,” he said. “I don’t think I have a choice, but that’s not an acceptable answer. Or I could say it’s curiosity, and it’s certainly partly that. This will be the first Stellar Group Assembly with full human participation since the quarantine. It must mean the aliens want something from us. But what? Will they really end the quarantine if we help them? I’m as keen as the next person to find the answer. If I’m honest, though, there’s a bigger and a worse reason: vanity. The aliens don’t just want to meet with humans. They want to meet with me , Chan Dalton. I used to be nothing. How can a man resist that?”
Flammarion shivered. “I’ll tell you one man who’d have no trouble resisting. Those creepy Angels, and the Tinkers aren’t much better, crawling all over everything.” He turned his head. Dougal MacDougal was calling from outside the chamber. “Got to go.”
“Expect me tomorrow, Captain. I need tonight to wrap a few things up down here.”
“Good luck. I don’t expect I’ll see you again before the Assembly.”
* * *
When the Assembly convened in the Ceres Star Chamber, Kubo Flammarion wanted to be as far away as possible. A quick Link to the Dry Tortugas, maybe, out at the remote edge of the solar system and as distant from Sol as humans were allowed to go under the quarantine; that felt just about right.
So why, two days later, was he sitting here on Ceres, hidden away where he could see and hear whatever happened during the Stellar Group Assembly? Why had he cajoled and coaxed Milly, who handled the monitors that recorded for posterity every element of the meeting, into letting him sit next to her in the control booth?
Chan Dalton had put his finger on it: the same reason the monkey put his hand in the jar, the same reason the cat sniffed the high-voltage wire. It was curiosity, stupid curiosity. What did the aliens want? But now, with the Assembly just minutes away, Flammarion decided that he didn’t much care. He could feel his insides curdling within him — even though he was a hundred meters from the Star Chamber, even though the aliens themselves would be no more than three-dimensional images, linked in from their homeworlds lightyears away.
“Milly,” he whispered. “I don’t feel so good …”
Milly Grant turned to give him the glare of a woman handling an important task. “I told you, if you want to be in here you have to keep quiet.” She gestured to the blank monitors. “I’ve got work to do.”
“I’m sorry. I was just wondering how long we have before it starts. I was thinking maybe I might go to the bathroom and—”
“It’s starting now, you wasted imbecile. Are you blind as well as ignorant? Use your eyes!”
And now he could see it. The monitors provided a clear view of one hemisphere of the Star Chamber’s central atrium. The front of the room was empty, except for Chan Dalton slumped black-clad and scowling in an easy chair. Dougal MacDougal sat far off to the rear, on the observers’ bench. Now three oval patterns of light were flickering into existence close to Dalton. The lights gradually solidified to become three-dimensional images of the Stellar Group Ambassadors.
On the far left hung a shrouded, pulsing mass of dark purple. As the image steadied, the shape became the swarming aggregate of a Tinker Composite, imaging in from Mercantor in the Fomalhaut system. The Tinkers had clustered to form a symmetrical ovoid with appendages of roughly human proportions. Next to the Tinker Composite, still showing the margin of rainbow fringes that marked signal transients, hovered the lanky tubular assembly of a Pipe-Rilla. It was linking in from its home planet around Eta Cassiopeiae, a mere eighteen lightyears away. And far off to the right, beyond a vacant spot in the Assembly (but fifty-plus lightyears away in real space, halfway across the domain of the Stellar Group) loomed the dark green bulk of an Angel.
That was the one that made Flammarion shiver in his boots and wish he was somewhere else, as it acknowledged its arrival with a wave of the blue-green fronds at its top end. An Angel wasn’t an animal, it wasn’t a vegetable; it wasn’t anything that Flammarion could relate to. It was some weird symbiotic life-form, discovered a century and a half earlier when the expanding wave-front of human exploration reached the star Capella and the planets around it. The visible part of the Angel was the Chassel-Rose, slow-moving, mindless, and wholly vegetable. Shielded within the bulbous central section lived the sentient crystalline Singer, relying upon the Chassel-Rose for habitat, movement, and communication with the external world. The Angels, depending on the situation, were either very stupid or super-smart in way
s that humans could hardly comprehend.
MATTIN LINK NETWORK COMPLETE, said the voice of the computer at Milly Grant’s side. THE CONFERENCE MAY NOW PROCEED.
“Present,” the Pipe-Rilla said. It was a fourteen-foot nightmare rearing high on its stick-thin legs. The forelimbs clutched the tubular trunk, and the long antennas were waving.
“Present.” The whistling voice of the Tinker Composite appeared from deep within it, accompanied by a flutter of purple wings of its thumb-sized components.
“Present,” said Chan Dalton. “Ambassador MacDougal is also in the Star Chamber with me.”
“As an observer,” the Angel added firmly, “not as a participant. There can be only one participant from each member of the Stellar Group. Is that understood? Too many cooks spoil the broth .”
Flammarion grunted and said to Milly, “Still at it! Don’t you hate it when they do that?”
The Angels had an annoying habit of using human cliches and proverbs at every opportunity. No one was sure if it was the symbiotes’ sense of humor, or some perverse notion of species politeness.
In any case, Chan Dalton was used to it. He nodded. “We understand. I will be the only human participant.”
“Then all are present,” the Angel said. “We can proceed.”
There was a silence, long enough for Flammarion to wonder if Milly had lost sound from the monitors. Finally the Pipe-Rilla writhed its limbs, produced a preliminary buzzing sound, and said, “Twenty of your years ago, the members of the Stellar Group were obliged to take an action that we much regretted. Humans, a known intelligent species, were denied access to all Link entry points except those close to your own sun. This quarantine was not imposed lightly, or for no good reason. It was done following more than thirty incidents in which ships with human crews undertook acts of piracy and aggression. Acts of trickery. Of treachery. Of violence .”
On the final word, the voice of the Pipe-Rilla rose in pitch, while surface components rose from the Tinker Composite and flew in an agitated fashion around it.
The Pipe-Rilla’s narrow thorax leaned forward. “Chan Dalton, we do not accuse you, personally, of such things. Your actions when you worked with our colleagues, so long ago on Travancore, showed you to be a simple, honorable being.”
Flammarion glanced at Milly. “Twenty years ago, maybe. Look at him now.”
Chan was nodding at the Pipe-Rilla. His weary and battered face wore an expression of cynical amusement. “Nice of you to say kind things like that.”
The Pipe-Rilla went on, “However, a species must take responsibility for the actions of all of its members. When humans showed no inclination to deal with the problem, we — Pipe-Rillas, Tinkers, and Angels — were obliged to act for you. We closed the interstellar Link system to human access.”
“Yeah. We noticed.”
Sarcasm was lost on the Pipe-Rilla. She continued, “Of course, the Link closure was never intended to be permanent. We would continue to observe, and look for beneficial change in human behavior.”
“And you’ve seen it?” Chan’s face now showed genuine surprise.
“Regrettably, no. Such a modification has not, so far, occurred. However, a new factor has recently entered the picture. It could lead to the end of the quarantine. What do you know about the region of space known as the Geyser Swirl?”
“Not a thing. Never heard of it.”
Dougal MacDougal sat upright on the observers’ bench. “If I may say—”
“You may not.” The Angel’s deep voice cut him off. “Remain silent, or leave.”
The Pipe-Rilla went on, uncertainly, “The Geyser Swirl is an ultradense gas cloud and associated embedded stars that lie on the Perimeter of the Angel section of the Stellar Group. Until recently, it was believed to be uninhabitable, unremarkable, and of no special interest. However, one year ago we discovered evidence of a Link entry point within the Swirl. This was surprising, and most puzzling. The Link is certainly not of our creation, nor is it under our control. Neither is it a Link of natural origin, which would have been discovered during the first survey of the Swirl.
“Our curiosity at such an anomaly was aroused. It has been our experience that the most valuable discoveries are often associated with the strangest events. We dispatched an exploration team of Tinkers and a Pipe-Rilla to the Swirl using the new Link, and we had no thought of danger. Why should we, since Link access has always been perfectly safe? When the team failed to return on schedule, we thought there had perhaps been an equipment failure. We sent a second team, this time with an Angel as captain and crew.”
“And it didn’t come back?” Chan Dalton had lost his slouch.
“That is correct. How did you know that? It did not return. Neither expedition has returned. A single equipment failure is unlikely but possible. Two such, in immediate succession, represent a vanishingly small p-probability.” The Pipe-Rilla was beginning to stammer. “B-but what other options are there?”
“Something — or somebody — in the Geyser Swirl doesn’t like company. They’re knocking off your expeditions as fast as they arrive.”
“That is our f-fear. B-but how do we d-determine if that is true?”
“Easy enough. You send a third team. If it doesn’t come back, you’ll know for sure.”
“Regarding a third team—” began Dougal MacDougal, but he was drowned out by the Pipe-Rilla, screaming a reply.
“ Y-yes. A third t-team. But that would m-mean s-s-sending s-s-s-someone t-to almost s-s-s-sure d-d-d-d-d.” The Pipe-Rilla’s speech degenerated into a series of sputtering noises. The Tinker Composite broke into a myriad small components that darted frantically around the imaging volume.
“It is difficult to speak of such things,” the Angel said slowly. “Impossible for a Pipe-Rilla or a Tinker, and possible for me only because I am able for brief periods to operate in human simulation mode. You know the prime rule of the Stellar Group: Intelligent life must be preserved. It cannot be destroyed — ever . But we suspect that it is being destroyed in the Geyser Swirl. The Swirl is dangerous .”
“Sounds like it. But you won’t be sure of that unless somebody goes there again and takes a look.”
“Yes indeed. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data . Therefore let me, quickly, attempt to say the rest of this. We concur with your suggestion. We should send a third expedition, to learn the fate of the first two and if possible rescue them. But that might mean our sending intelligent life, knowingly, to its death in the Geyser Swirl.”
“Can’t be helped. That’s what you have to do.”
“But, Chan Dalton, that is what we are unable to do.”
“Then you got problems.”
“Problems indeed. And, as we see it, only one possible solution. Humans. You do not have the same attitude toward the preservation of life — even of your own lives — as other Stellar Group members. An expedition to the Geyser Swirl, headed by a human whom we already know and trust, a human who is willing to do whatever is necessary to learn the fate of the earlier teams, and if possible bring them home …”
The Tinker Composite had vanished from the Star Chamber. Its components, mindless as individuals, had dispersed and flown out of the imaging volume. The Pipe-Rilla was still present, but it had bent forward and curled its body until the narrow head was almost on the floor.
“Let’s see if I have this right.” Chan Dalton stood up. “You want me to leave the nice, cushy job I have back on Earth and fly a team out to the Geyser Swirl in the ass end of the known universe, where chances are I’ll get knocked on the head the second I come out of the Link exit. I’m supposed to bring the other two teams back, dead or alive. Suppose I say yes — and I’m not saying that I will. What’s in it for me?”
“If you undertake this task, we, the members of the Stellar Group, are ready to lift the quarantine on humans. Naturally, it will be for a trial period, while we again evaluate human behavior. But this time we will recognize, as we are recognizing n
ow, that certain tasks cannot be performed without the assistance of humans.”
“Very nice — for humans. You haven’t said what’s in it for me , but we’ll worry about that later. So I go off to the Swirl, and when I’m there things get kind of nasty. I have to kill off a few aliens before there’s any chance of coming home. Are you saying that will be all right?”
“No!” The blue-green fronds on the Angel’s upper body were thrashing in agitation, while the recumbent Pipe-Rilla in the next imaging volume uttered a continuous spluttering moan. “You refer to the killing of other intelligent beings! Of course it is not all right! It is absolutely forbidden. Violence is never the only solution . The rules of conduct of civilized beings must not be violated.”
The Angel turned slowly, from right to left. “It appears that the other representatives are no longer able to participate in this meeting. What is your decision?”
“No decision. I have to think about it.”
“Then think about it well, Chan Dalton, and with all possible speed. We will return, one of your days from now, to learn your answer.”
The Angel became a prismatic blur of colors. The Link was closing.
And that was probably just as well. Chan Dalton happened to be looking right at the monitor as he moved toward the front of the chamber, and his muttered words came through clearly to Flammarion and Milly Grant.
“Crazy. What do they think I am, some kind of human sacrifice putting my butt on the line for nothing? I’m out of here.”
But he could not leave. Dougal MacDougal stood right in his path. “Ah, Chan Dalton.” MacDougal took him by the arm, then released him when he saw Chan’s glare. “That was most interesting, and most promising. They are ready to end the quarantine!”
“I agreed to nothing.”
“Ah, but I know you will make the right decision — for the good of humanity. However, there are one or two points that we urgently need to discuss before the Stellar Group returns tomorrow.”
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