Asimov's SF, December 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  An even more convoluted series of transactions got her a strong, flexible steel cable brought aboard as snack food by one of the high-gravity types. By this time she was known as the go-to girl for unobtanium. Species whose systems of communication were too foreign would bring in intermediaries to explain their wants. Sidi neglected her diplomatic duties. Cat started maintaining a database for her.

  All she needed now was a pulley. Well, she did have a fancy engineering degree from MIT, didn't she? Compared to the technology they were surrounded by, a pulley was like banging two rocks together. Pulleys simple and compound, fixed and movable—she might be weak on grand unified theories, but this was the sort of elementary stuff she'd gone over a hundred times as a grader for freshman classes. Easy.

  Except that it wasn't so easy. She didn't have a spool or a grooved wheel. No axles or bearings, no ratchets, no hooks or clips or eye-bolts—not even a paperclip or a roll of sticky tape. Archimedes, she was certain, would have been an abject failure if he'd had to work aboard a starship.

  No. Merde, that was those little blue pills encouraging her to make excuses. Archimedes would have done something halfway competent. If she corrected for the effect of the happy-zap drug, things were much worse: she was failing at this plan, just as she'd failed at everything else aboard the Bus, and now that she'd failed, she could spend the rest of her life in solitary confinement contemplating her failure. Was that assessment more objectively reasonable? How would she know, with the pills skewing her judgment? It was intolerable. She ran into the bathroom, got out what was left of her forty-day supply of the pills, and dumped them in the toilet.

  She was pounding on the mirror when a comm came in. She made an effort to compose herself. “Cat, can you take it?”

  “It's Mopsy, and Snow says it's not about a trade.”

  “Mopsy? All right, put it on.” She grabbed a wad of toilet paper and came out of the bathroom.

  A three-dimensional Mopsy and a flat Snow White sprang up in the comm portal.

  “Mopsy, I'm ... surprised to hear from you.”

  Snow made an operatic gesture with her arms. “Sidibe Traore, has it been long enough? / Will you please reconsider your cruel rebuff ?”

  “I—what?” She tried to be unobtrusive about wiping her nose.

  “Putting out that vision statement / really took me in parfaitement.”

  “Um, that actually doesn't rhyme. The ‘n’ and the ‘t’ are silent, and the accent is supposed to be on the last syllable. Why are you speaking in poetry?”

  “The books were mostly in verse.” Snow looked anxious. “Is prose better for this? I wasn't sure.”

  “I think it depends on what ‘this’ is.”

  Snow wrung her hands. “When you disdained even to take a share of the kill, I—”

  “Wait, what kill?”

  “The mammoth.” Now Snow was the one holding back tears.

  “Oh.” The cartoon mammoth they'd brought down? Some kind of cultural misunderstanding—did Mopsy see her as the dominant one now? “You smell good,” she said experimentally.

  The tentacles drooped, and Snow clasped her hands and lowered her head. Bingo, Ay est! But now she did feel a little cruel. She felt a contrite impulse to offer Snow the wad of toilet paper.

  “It's all right, Mopsy. Pecking order isn't quite as important to our species as it is to yours. Would you like to resume cultural exchanges?”

  “You don't need to keep up the pretense. I understand now.”

  “You do?”

  “Once I read If I Ran the Zoo, I understood that your species’ carefully cultivated image as a pushover was a ruse.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes. Your true self-image shows through clearly in your children's literature: the cages, the urge to conquer. Then when I went back over the vision statement that Cat put out, I saw it for the honey-tongued propaganda that it really was.”

  “Of course. You're more sophisticated than that.”

  The tentacles undroopified a little, and Snow hazarded a little smile. “But this covert commercial network you've been building, it's masterful.”

  “Why ... thank you.”

  “I assume that your true object is nothing less than—” Snow's eyebrows ascended.

  “Ah, you guessed—”

  “Complete galactic domination—” Snow stamped her feet and squealed “—I knew it!”

  Mopsy must think Sidi was a lot smarter than she really was. Even to dominate this cohort would be a goal as absurd as teaching an army of cats to march and salute.

  “Rumors do get around,” Snow continued, seeming to mistake Sidi's nonplused reaction for reticence. “When the day comes, and we link up with the GalCiv, obviously some of us have to end up at the top of the food chain.”

  Sidi hoped that was only a metaphor. “Of course you wouldn't want to let anyone else in on our little secret.”

  “No, never!” Snow waved a finger no, and Mopsy imitated her, a little overenthusiastically, with a tentacle. “But is there some way that my people could be...”

  “Included? Why yes, I think so. Ah, tell me, Mopsy, how much weight can those limbs of yours lift?”

  * * * *

  Sidi finished her preparations for the flight of the kite-bucket, already regretting her impulsive decision to dump the pills, and dreading what it would be like to come off of the drug the next day. She woke expecting a Richter-nine headache, black storm clouds, delirium tremens, and demons with pitchforks.

  Nothing.

  She formed a suspicion that the pills had been a placebo. So what did that say about her? Had they determined through psychological screening that she was some kind of natural-born hair-shirt hermit? “Oh, send Traore, she won't mind. Went on three dates in four years at MIT. She won't mind a life sentence to solitary confinement. Give her a placebo to make her happy.” Well, to hell with them, those UN witch-doctors had all been dead of old age for weeks anyway. She wasn't doing this for them, she was doing it because she wasn't a chickenshit, and that was reason enough for her. She felt surprisingly happy, in a hopeless, bitter, world-hating sort of way. She got dressed, and found herself humming an old Malian pop song her mother had liked.

  Le dimanche a Bamako, c'est le jour de mariage.

  Sunday in Bamako is wedding day.

  The comm burbled. “Yes.”

  The Gump appeared. “My principal has agreed to the experiment.”

  * * * *

  “How's that, Pool?” Sidi, Cat, and Gump lay side by side on their backs, watching the upside-down bucket dangling lazily over their heads at the end of the cable.

  There was a pause. She watched the ripples playing across the quicksilver and suddenly realized that she felt seasick. Ouf. She'd never thrown up in a pressure suit, and didn't want this to be her first time. Was it the low gravity? Surely she wasn't that much of a tenderfoot in space. She swallowed uncomfortably.

  Cat relayed a message from Pool. “He says it's good.” Another pause. “More.”

  “Mopsy, play out another ten centimeters, okay?”

  “Ten centimeters,” Snow White's voice confirmed over the suit's comm from down below in the airlock.

  A snake-wiggle climbed lazily up the heavy cable, then suddenly accelerated as it entered the fast-time zone. The bucket pitched back and forth as fast as the buzz of a fly's wing, and Pool sloshed to and fro much faster than he should have been able to without spattering himself over the brim.

  “Ask him how that is,” she told Cat.

  “He says that's good,” Cat translated, this time without any noticeable pause. So this was it: godlike manipulation of time and space. Now she just needed to get fitted for a toga. “He says that the derivative of x squared is two x,” Cat continued. “I think he's trying to confirm that we have two-way communication.”

  “Okay, tell him that the integral of x is a half x squared.”

  The cable seemed tighter now. The quicksilver in the bucket rippled, and another wave
of nausea swept over her.

  “He says you forgot the constant of integration,” Cat said.

  “Oh—” She found out what it was like to vomit in a pressure suit, and it was every bit as unpleasant as she'd been told.

  “Sidi?” Cat asked. “Gump wants to know if something's wrong. (He seems a lot less haughty now, maybe Pool took him down a notch.) Please don't be angry, he says. Pool was right about the constant of integration, you know. I think he just doesn't understand about human standards of tact and diplomacy.”

  “No, no, I'm just having a physical problem, a minor physical problem. It's all right, everything's okay.” She closed her eyes and turned the helmet's air blower on full blast. “Uh, tell him I'm honored that his civilization chose to send me that communique, and I'm confident that we'll have a very productive session today.”

  “I'll try to translate that.”

  Sidi tried experimentally to get some of the mess off of her face by shaking her head, and found that it was a serious mistake. Her brain felt like it was rattling around inside her skull in the low gravity.

  “Gump doesn't think Pool understands,” Cat said.

  “Well, he understands that we've got two-way communication, right? And he knows about the communique, right? So how about confirming that I received the communique.”

  “Well, Gump doesn't think Pool really understood the diplomatic aspects of the communique. His species didn't actually write that, apparently.”

  “They didn't?”

  “Er, no. Gump says the pools suggested the physics thing, but fitting it into the framework of a human-style diplomatic note—they couldn't have come up with that. All of that was ghostwritten for them by another species, from what Gump has heard.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  “Now Pool says every integer has a unique prime factorization.”

  “We're not here to trade math trivia. Euh, don't translate that, but ... we're never going to get anywhere at this rate. Have Gump ask him if he thinks he'd be okay with another ten centimeters of altitude.”

  “He says that's fine.”

  This time she was careful not to watch the cable or the bucket. Her stomach felt as tight as the head of a drum. It couldn't just be the gravity, because she'd been up here twice before and felt fine. Miserably, she decided that the pills hadn't been placebos after all.

  “Wow, he's much faster now,” Cat said. “We can't really translate in real time. He's spewed out a bunch of math, five hundred pages worth, with his personalized annotations of the passages he thinks might be hard for someone of your ... that might be hard for you.”

  “Good, thank him for initiating the cultural exchange—”

  “He won't understand that.”

  “Okay, well ... all right, access the library, and feed him the complete works of J.S. Bach, and ... and Shakespeare"—that would give the supercilious puddle something to chew on, no matter how fast its brain was now.

  The response was almost instantaneous. “He says the sound structures are mostly a trivial corollary of mathematical principles already discovered by his species, and some of them aren't even self-consistent. The Shakespeare plays ... he thinks there was a transmission error, because he did an intensive statistical analysis, and he couldn't detect any information patterns.”

  * * * *

  As a diplomatic effort, the first flight of the kite-bucket had been a disappointment, but “give me a place to stand, and I will move the world.” The trial flight established the fundamental engineering principle involved. Soon afterward, she got her first hint that it would turn everything on the bus upside-down. A comm came in from the chlorine-breathing ameboid. The portal showed not just the ameboid but a grid of a half-dozen other generic avatars as well. One of them waved its stick-figure finger at Sidi.

  “Do you intend to be completely merciless about exploiting this monopoly?” it demanded.

  Monopoly?

  “Excuse me, but I'm a little confused,” Sidi said. She shot a glance at Cat, who shrugged. “Why are there so many avatars at once?”

  The stick man turned and mimed communication with the one next to it, which then passed the message down the chain. While the chain continued, the first one replied directly to Sidi. “It will take a moment for the translation, but I can give you a general answer. The chlorine-breather feels that it has been taken advantage of. When you originally spoke to it to negotiate for the bucket, the translation was rough, but it thought it understood well enough to carry out what seemed to be an innocuous trade. Now that we realize the full dimensions of your plan, we need more accurate and nuanced communication, and we've only been able to achieve that by constructing a sequence of AIs to minimize the size of the leaps from one conceptual framework to the next.”

  The message reached the ameboid, which gestured wildly with its cotton-socked pseudopods, its cilia sproinging out as if someone had given it an electric shock. Sidi took advantage of the delay for return translation to look up the species of the passengers whose AIs formed the chain. She stifled a chuckle when she saw that Bonsai was one of them.

  “First it says essentially what I just told you,” the final stickman said. “Then it asks you to show mercy for its delicate condition.”

  “Condition?”

  “It's ripening for fission.” The blob did look a little narrower around the waist than it had before. “It's been trying to suppress the urge—that can be terribly uncomfortable, I hear—but it doesn't think it will be able to hold out until after we make the transition into the GalCiv. It doesn't want its two daughter-selves to graduate while they're still in a postmitotic stupor. They'd need at least three or four weeks postpartum to get back up to a normal mental level.”

  Sidi finally understood. They'd heard rumors that she'd helped Pool to visit the accelerated-time zone, but they didn't know any of the details of how it worked. “It wants to buy some time?”

  “Buy?” The stick figure turned and started the translation before Sidi could explain that it was only a figure of speech.

  * * * *

  The ameboid got a jury-rigged birthing nest, but its delegation was only the first. Everyone aboard the Bus was feeling the pressure of time as the end of the voyage approached. Sidi stopped taking incoming comm messages, and she posted Mopsy outside her door to keep from being bothered at all hours. She'd heard once that the hardest part of building an observatory was laying the road up to the mountaintop, and something similar seemed to apply here. The first big scramble was to round up a crew of volunteers who had pressure suits (or who, like Pool, could live in vacuum without them), and get them, along with a big cargo net full of cannibalized construction materials, up into the fast zone. A crow's nest sprouted in the exotic vacuum, seeming to observers down on the deck like one of those time-lapse photos of a flower blooming.

  Once Sidi finally found a good straw boss (Mopsy scared everyone too much), she moved upstairs herself, and once again had time to sleep and eat occasionally. The original mast and crow's nest had by now metastasized into a Daliesque favela.

  Sidi's office was at the top, in the fastest space they could push into before construction materials started misbehaving in mysterious ways. She learned not to turn her head too quickly to keep from insulting her inner ear with pseudo-Coriolis forces. The room, made from a food container one of the big hot-Jupiter types had brought aboard, was small and cold, and when it was quiet (which wasn't often) you could hear the air hissing out through the badly assembled vacuum seals.

  Her desk was a door-panel resting unevenly on two crates. She peered down over its edge at an alligator-pancake who was prone to hysterics. “I don't think it really meant to step on you,” she told it.

  OF COURSE I DIDN'T. The centaur-anemone stamped half a dozen of its hooves. The vibration made the leaking seals hiss louder. IT WAS AN ACCIDENT, said the word-balloon that popped up over its head (for Sidi had found that personified avatars made conflict resolution more difficult). I DIDN'T SEE HIM TH
ERE ON THE FLOOR OF THE AIRLOCK.

  MY PLANET IS NOT WITHOUT MILITARY RESOURCES, the pancake shot back heatedly, its word-balloon rearing up higher than the centaur's and whacking at it.

  “Please, please, this doesn't need to be an interstellar incident, does it?” Sidi said. “Monsieur crepe-croc, perhaps you could start manifesting a red flag above yourself, to make yourself more ... ah ... visible in high-traffic public spaces? Now I'm afraid I have another appointment. If you two could adjourn this discussion to the anteroom, I think we already have on hand the ingredients for a successful settlement. Could I suggest a cultural and scientific exchange? I understand that the crocs have a very ancient and fascinating type of dance suite that takes a full lunar month to perform.”

  She ushered them out as forcefully as she could without stubbing her toe on the croc. The clock showed four minutes until her next appointment. She put her head down on her arms the way the nuns had made them do when she was a little girl, so long ago and far away in Bamako. She had a hammock stashed in one of the crates, and if she strung it up taut and high, almost to the ceiling, the four minutes could become a fifteen- or twenty-minute nap. It wasn't too hard to sleep through the occasional static discharges from the monopoles and strangelets whizzing by just above the ceiling—she'd gotten used to them like a Chicagoan with a bedroom window facing the “L.” She really ought to prepare more for this next meeting, but she was feeling so very, very tired.

  She remembered the day she'd thrown the happy pills in the toilet, and how she'd thought of herself as being condemned to life in solitary confinement. A little solitude would be heavenly right now. Oh, the croc was basically a good sort, just a little hotheaded. But why couldn't any of them deal with their problems without coming to her?

  She was sure that the pills would have long since run out, although she had only a vague idea of how much time had passed since that day on her biological clock. Four or five months? It was endlessly confusing, the way everybody's time ran at different rates.

  Complete galactic domination. At the time she'd had to grit her teeth to keep from laughing at how silly it was. How could Mopsy's rumor of a suspicion of an absurdity have become so real, and such a heavy weight to bear?