Analog SFF, January-February 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Right."

  "An obvious question and the answer is yes, with the assistance of our translator doohickey."

  "Have you tried setting your translator to speak very slowly?"

  "Certainly. And we have essayed communication in written form. Assuming our guest digs this particular language—and why provide language instruction otherwise?—it hasn't responded to us. Nor has it eaten, although we've offered it a variety of dehydrated substances. Thus we suspect some mental or emotional defect, perhaps stress induced, which may also account for its remarkably torpid movements."

  Following an old and bad habit, I tried to gnaw on a knuckle but tasted smartsuit instead. “I'm going to have to, um, chew on all this for a while. Could you take me to my cabin now? I'd like to see those movies you found on my first patient's ship."

  "Groovy. Walk this way."

  * * * *

  The décor in my room was a bit loud. Literally. The Traders had arranged a fancy virtual Earth environment with all the comforts of home—if your home is set on the edge of a precipice with a view of a giant waterfall on one side and a forest on the other. All it needs for perfect corniness, I thought, is a unicorn and a rainbow. Then I looked more closely and by gum, found a rainbow lurking in the mist ahead. It was the waterfall, of course, that was so noisy.

  But it felt like heaven when I stepped inside and the weight of a world seemed to drop off my shoulders. At first, Earth gravity felt trivial, as though I might float to the cloud-spattered ceiling. The room had been adjusted for human occupancy, or at least Inuit occupancy since it was no warmer than the rest of the station. Deal showed me how to summon a bed, which I wouldn't need thanks to my faithful couch. Likewise a chair, likewise unnecessary. And he explained how to access the “pantry” and a bathroom, which I definitely needed. This last required stepping off the precipice onto apparently empty air, and I was grateful that Best-offer demonstrated because otherwise I might've stalled until my bladder ruptured.

  From inside, the open entrance to my stateroom was a rectangular phantom, visible through the virtuality, but I couldn't see an inkling of the actual walls. I was even more impressed by the bathroom when I excused myself to honor my kidneys. This room, too, had no door, but since I couldn't see the Traders waiting ten feet away, I told myself the environmental illusion gave me privacy. Everything from toilet to shower had been cloned from some four-star hotel. I opened a wrapped mini-bar of soap to wash my hands, stared into the mirror above the sink, and wasn't pleased with the face looking back, the tight lips and tighter jaw, the sunken eyes, that little bulge between the eyebrows.

  Snap diagnosis: this subject feels an overwhelming sense of futility.

  I didn't need a mirror to gather that. Even before I'd learned that NASA had so badly misunderstood what the Tsf expected me to do, I'd known this mission was absurd. How could I even begin to evaluate extraterrestrial problems? Despite all my training and experience, I barely understand my fellow humans.

  To be honest with myself, I'd accepted this assignment out of curiosity and pride. I'd wanted to be the first on my block to see the parent ship and to visit with aliens on their station. I'd been attracted to the adventure despite my fears, and the publicity wouldn't hurt my business. But now that I was here and both the challenge and possible rewards were vastly more extensive than I'd thought, that face looking back at me was bad news. So what if I only had a microscopic chance for success? With my current outlook, I had no chance at all. Accurate diagnosis requires open-minded, clear-eyed observation on the part of the diagnostician, and constantly telling myself the job was impossible narrowed my perception and created a self-fulfilling assessment. If I wasn't going to pack up and go home, I needed a change of attitude.

  I took a breath in and slowly exhaled, visualizing my certainty of failure dissipating in the frigid air. I repeated the procedure ten times. Mining just one useful insight about any of my patients would make me a winner. Suspend judgment and look, I told myself. For once, I listened. Returning to the party, it felt as though my personal magnetic poles had flipped.

  An unfamiliar Tsf, not-introduced to me as Great-bargain, was waiting with my usual playmates in the main room, but he left after passing me a little coppery disk. Best-offer silently demonstrated how to use the thing, which proved to be a combo image projector and data-storage unit with virtual user interface. The menu presented a long list written in a Tsf script composed of Braille-like dots. Each item, Deal assured me, represented a video retrieved from my first patient's starship. I selected one haphazardly, and the menu screen displayed five tiger-lizards engaged in assembling something mechanical and intricate while a snarly voice apparently provided commentary. None of these engineers jumped around, howled, or performed a semi-vanishing act. Something really did seem wrong with my patient.

  I had a question but Deal beat me to the punch: “Have you assembled a theory as to how your initial patient renders herself insubstantial?"

  "Not really. But I have the impression she has to make herself more substantial before she can ... thin out."

  "An obvious observation, but at least you are following our line of thought on the subject. I doubt you will arrive at the correct destination. Now we will abandon you to your futile research. The pantry is stocked with human foods, both solid and liquid."

  "I appreciate your hospitality.” No sense in returning the rudeness.

  "Courtesy is the parent to trade. Call out if you require anything."

  "Thanks. I will."

  My guides departed and I tried to think.

  Two things we'd learned about Traders: they took verbal contracts very seriously, and they believed in the principle of mutual benefit. While they'd haggle and leave their customers responsible for understanding the details of any transaction, they weren't deceitful and never tried to cheat or gain unfair advantage. So it seemed at least theoretically possible for me to earn something incredible for the human race. All I needed was a miracle. I'd no idea what the Earth authorities had actually requested for my services, but surely, artificial gravity was worth far more. Did anyone back home even know that the Tsf would trade in knowledge? Was it possible the reason we'd learned so little about them and this station was simply that we hadn't offered to trade anything for detailed information?

  I shook my head and turned my attention to the little disk in my hand. Impressive technology. Yes, an ordinary DM can appear to produce similar effects, but that's an illusion. The glow around the finger, the touchscreen, the responding voice if initiated, all are subjective. It's not my field, but I know how it's done:

  After a customer provides blood samples, the “router-rooter,” a tiny piezoelectric capsule wrapped in a gene-modified stem-cell matrix, is surgically implanted near the customer's spine and attached to several multifidus muscles and the crura, which allows the capsule to be powered by simply breathing. Stem-cell filaments grow, seek out the spinal cord, and merge with it. That part is permanent without risky surgery. Then, the system operates by wirelessly networking the person's nervous system with an external CPU; in my case, a fist-sized CPU buried in my couch. The result: an interactive computer that's essentially a controlled-hallucination generator. And if several people have DMs and desire it, they can share hallucinations.

  This disk was powered by God knows what, worked God knows how, and any seeing being could make popcorn and watch the movies it projected. I shook my head. No sense in getting bogged down in minor mysteries when bigger ones were more important. I didn't have any popcorn, but I sat down and loaded a video anyway.

  * * * *

  Four documentaries later—or soap operas for all I knew—I stood and paced around the room, or rather around the couch since I still wasn't comfortable stepping onto apparently empty air. I'd seen enough punk tigers to make up for a lifetime of having seen none. Thin ones, chubby ones, exceptionally muscular ones who probably spent hours in gyms pumping something heavier than iron. Maybe thorium.

  Perhap
s from too extensive a stay in microgravity, my patient appeared scrawny compared to most of the brutes I'd seen, but not uniquely so. And yet, and yet ... something was different about her, and I couldn't figure out what.

  Sure, her peers didn't jet around like punctured balloons, but that wasn't it. I expected their behavior to be different than hers. While the Tsf had placed her in environmental isolation for her own good, she might not see it that way; simply being imprisoned could affect any being's psychology. And speaking of stress-induced quirks, I'd been traumatized by the big squeeze earlier and hated the idea of leaving this haven, but damn it, I needed to observe my patient again and compare....

  I grinned because, having confirmed I was an idiot, it seemed better to be the grinning kind. Why leave my cozy cliffside retreat when I could study her right here? I called my DM into touchscreen format and played back that first encounter with patient one. Good recording: clear and seamlessly tiled although the subject had been shot from the low angle of the lenses set into my couch. When she jumped high enough, her head popped out of frame. The videos I'd watched earlier hadn't showed any tiger-lizards from so close up.

  And the answer was right in front of me, I knew it, but couldn't see it.

  "Dr. Morganson?” The voice seemed to come from nowhere, but it sounded deep and raspy.

  "Best-offer?"

  "Got it in one. What's happenin'? Your life-signs are wigging out a bit."

  Seemed odd not to hear any clicks beforehand. And I felt uneasy about being so closely monitored. “I'm fine, just getting slightly frustrated."

  "Stay cool. But there's been a change in your second patient. I could flip video your way, but would you care to check it out live?"

  "When's the next gravity surge?"

  "We'll wait until you complete your examination before applying therapeutic force. We observed how bummed out you got last time."

  "Thanks, but won't that hurt your health?"

  "Our health will keep. If you can dig it, Deal-of-a-lifetime will meet you in the Arcade of Healing. Even-steven and Trader-joe shall join you ASAP. They're non-shrinking doctors."

  Even Steven? Trader Joe? Had the Tsf selected such names simply to make me comfortable? If so, it wasn't working. “Okay. I'm leaving right now."

  * * * *

  Best-offer was right about patient two; the simian had certainly changed. He'd lost perhaps a third of his hair, and where his mottled skin was exposed, it resembled freshly plucked poultry. Diseased poultry. He'd stopped the incessant hand twitching; his lowest two eyes, the only ones open, looked as if they'd been whitewashed; and the way he sat slumped on his tripod legs practically screamed of despair through the body-language barrier.

  "How long has he been like this?” I asked Deal.

  "I am unsure of the precise time interval, but ahoy! Here come the medicos."

  The “medicos” were both currently female—green-tinged cilia—and they streaked down the hallway, arriving in seconds. Even without prompting I might've guessed these were doctors. No white coats or tongue depressors, but they had that harried, behind-schedule look. Each toted an arsenal of small but complex-looking devices. Diagnostic, I assumed.

  "Trader-joe,” Deal asked the newcomer slightly in front, “when did this patient suffer a state-change?"

  Trader-joe also carried a translator, so I got his answer in stereo. “In human time, nine minutes and eight-thirteenth seconds from when you finished asking me the question."

  Huh. The Tsf all seemed to have built-in chronographs and a savant's ability to instantly convert their time units into ours. For some reason, that notion struck me as highly relevant, and for an instant, I wobbled on the threshold of remembering exactly where I'd seen hand movements similar to the ones my patient had stopped making. The second medic, Even-steven, addressed me before I could fix the memory.

  "We waited to learn if the aberration would resolve itself before subjecting this subject to the potential trauma of direct evaluation."

  "So you'll examine him now?"

  "Only with your permission, Doctor. He is your patient. If you wish us to proceed and to accompany us, you must don your vacuum suit. His atmosphere contains enough chlorine to discomfort a human to death."

  "I think we should act immediately, so please go ahead without me."

  Both doctors moved to lean against the subtle barrier separating the patient's space from ours, and they seemed to slowly melt through and into the room. The three-legged simian didn't react, even when Trader-joe and Even-steven unfolded their machines and began attaching clamps and probes to and in him. Unipolar depression or possibly bipolar disorder, I thought, then reminded myself to distrust my instincts. But damn it, it looked like some form of depression.

  "Cheese it,” Best-offer said, barely clicking. “The cops."

  I didn't get the cheese reference but the “cops” became obvious when two more Tsf joined us in the corridor. These two were the largest Traders I'd seen. They moved nearly in unison and neither was introduced to me, not even off-handedly. They halted behind Deal and lurked there, watching everything with presumably steely sensory organs.

  "Why the company?” I whispered to Best-offer, but Deal answered.

  "My whimsical associate misstated the role of the individuals who have joined us. These are Masters of Propriety here strictly to make sure our doctors follow established protocol in what is clearly a medical emergency. Should this subject kick the bucket, we might find it desirable to have evidence of our good faith attempts to preserve him."

  Right. If Traders ever located his species, they wouldn't want to alienate, so to speak, a potential trading partner. So no experimental neck-tourniquets. But the “cops” reminded me of just how deadly the Tsf could be.

  Two years ago, a year after the Traders had put this station into circumlunar orbit and opened up Trading Posts near Beijing, Delhi, and Manhattan, there'd been an incident unreported in any human news media. I'd only found out about it myself two weeks ago. Some crime syndicate had tried to rob the Manhattan Trading Post, which was understandable considering all those exotic treasures just sitting there on all those shelves. This Post, like the others, was only open an hour at a time, three times a day. During those hours, its environment was adjusted for human comfort. At all other times, the environment was set to duplicate conditions on the Tsf's high-gravity home world. Which, from what I now knew, implied that it was more practical to increase gravity on a planet than on a space station.

  The heist was perfectly organized, executed, and timed, and the eight hooded men who rushed into the open-for-business Post carried the most reliable and powerful automatic weaponry any mob could afford.

  Until that moment, the Traders had seemed harmless, self-effacing, friendly, and unarmed. It hadn't occurred to many humans that ambulatory beings who'd evolved in high-gravity would not only be strong and tough, they'd also have reaction-times like oiled lightning. Maintaining balance under multiple gees, even with multiple legs, requires super-quick reactions because everything falls fast. And if you want to avoid a predator, or catch prey, or even catch a ball...

  To make a long and gory story just gory, the three Tsf present in the Post moved like rockets and tore the eight men to bloody paste, bones and all. I watched the Trader recording of the event, which they released to the US Justice Department, who hot-potatoed it to the FBI, evidently with instructions to bury it deep and only decant it for intimidating psychiatrists. I'm fairly sure one of the Tsf got hit with a bullet or two, but it didn't even slow her down.

  Yes, the Traders could've simply disarmed the bad guys, captured them, and turned them over to our police; and it says something about Tsf psychology that when presented with a clear threat, they obliterated it. Another point of interest was the method the Tsf used to clean up the mess: they released a cloud of blue gas. When it dissipated, the Post was spotless and only the carnage was gone.

  I needed a distraction. “Why do you think,” I asked Deal, “
your medical tests will be meaningful on a life form so unfamiliar?"

  "The data now being collected can be compared to the data we gathered immediately after we rescued this individual. We expect to find significance, but aren't counting on it."

  "I—good Lord! Countingonit. That's the key!"

  For a few seconds, Deal kept as still as the security personnel behind us. Then he clicked, “I fear our translator has failed. I failed to grasp the import of your last few statements."

  "My fault. I'm just—I think I know what my patient was doing with his hands before.” I had to fight off a childhood tendency to stutter. “Do you know what an abacus is?"

  "Only if you refer to the counting frame referred to as a suanpan in China, a soroban in Japan, a—"

  His condescension no longer bothered me. “That's the thing."

  "What about it?"

  "Years ago, I visited a school in Tokyo where students were trained to perform all sorts of arithmetic calculations on, um, sorobans and do them in seconds."

  "I still await enlightenment."

  "Not for long. When the students got really proficient, their teachers took their sorobans away. After all those years of intensive practice, the students could visualize the beads perfectly, and I watched a roomful of kids multiplying four digit numbers, fast and accurately, on imaginary abacuses."

  "That what you talkin’ ‘bout.” The voice sounded worried. “You believe your patient was employing a similar technique. A curious notion, but what problem would require three separate counting frames?"

  I nodded, relieved that Deal hadn't stomped on the idea. “You told me you'd only found his landing craft, so I'm guessing he was somehow keeping track of his main spaceship and trying to give you the coordinates. It would take three, right? Finally he gave up."

  Deal stiffened and I thought he was going to clam up on me again. “An improbable theory although it conforms to all known facts. But even given the numbers, how could we determine the zero point to which the coordinates relate?"