Star Song and Other Stories

by Timothy Zahn

  There was no Good Samaritans listing.

  Nor was there an Altruists listing. Nor were there listings for benefactor, philanthropist, hero, or patriot. Or for good example, salt of the earth, angel, or saint.

  There was nothing.

  He thought about it for a long time. Then, with only a slight hesitation, he picked up the phone. Alison answered on the fourth ring. "Hello?"

  "It's me," Radley told her. "Listen." He took a careful breath. "I know the difference now. You know—the difference between true and truth?"

  "Yes?" she said, her voice wary.

  "Yeah. True is a group of facts—any facts, in any combination. Truth is all the facts. Both sides of the story. The bad and the good."

  She seemed to digest that. "Yes, I think you're right. So what does that mean?"

  He bit at his lip. She'd been right, he could admit now; he had enjoyed the knowledge and power the Book had given him. "So," he said, "I was wondering if you'd like to come up. It's... well, you know, it's kind of a chilly night."

  The Book burned with an eerie blue flame, and its non-plastic bag burned green.

  Together, they were quite spectacular.

  The Broccoli Factor

  "So," Tom Banning said, his voice muffled by the coffee cup hovering just below mustache level. "How's life in the hot lane?"

  "Don't ask," Billy Hayes sighed, spooning the last few chunks of ice from his water glass into his own mug. The Institute's cafeteria invariably served their coffee at a temperature which, in his opinion, was just short of the melting point of lead. "The last confinement scheme officially went down the gutter this morning, and we're right back on square one."

  Banning slurped some coffee and shook his head. "Remember the good old days when fusion power was going to be just around the corner?"

  "Yeah," Hayes retorted. "That was maybe twenty years before artificial intelligence was going to be just around the corner."

  Banning grimaced. "Talk about job security."

  Hayes nodded, and for a minute they sat silently, each contemplating in his own way the perversity of the Universe. "So what's the trouble this time?"

  Banning asked at last.

  "Oh, the usual," Hayes shrugged. "We can get the plasma hot enough, but we can't figure out how to keep it confined long enough in the center of the vacuum chamber. Every time we reconfigure the fields to eliminate one instability—Blooie!—another one crops up, drives the plasma out to the wall, and that's that."

  "Computer design doesn't help?"

  "Not so far. I don't suppose you've got JUNIOR to the point of understanding plasma physics yet?"

  "Don't rub it in," Banning growled.

  "Sorry," Hayes apologized. "Still stuck at the two-year-old intelligence level, eh?"

  Banning glared down into his coffee. "We got him to the level of a six-month-old exactly eight months after the breakthrough. Six months later he was a year old.

  It took just two more months to get him where he is now... and we haven't gotten him to budge since." Hayes nodded. He'd heard the litany a hundred times in the past four years—just as Banning had spent endless lunch breaks listening to his litany. Just a couple of broken old men, he thought sourly. Flat up against the wall of the Universe, without an exit sign in sight. "At least you don't have to worry about funding," he offered.

  "Not from congressional committees, no," Banning agreed darkly. "But on the other hand, you don't have the entire Japanese computer industry breathing down your neck."

  Hayes sighed. "A pity you can't at least get him to the three-year-old level.

  My grandson just turned three, and he loves to tinker with mechanical toys. Give a

  three-year-old AI the magnetohydrodynamic equations and it might just come up with something."

  "Be thankful JUNIOR's not still at the six month level," Banning said dryly.

  "He'd take your equations and chew them to a pulp."

  "Gum them to a pulp, you mean," Hayes corrected him. "Six-month-olds don't have any teeth."

  "Just like sixty-year-olds," Banning said, snorting a chuckle as he readjusted his upper plate. "You suppose the secret of the Universe is that life is round?"

  " 'Pi are round; cornbread are square,' " Hayes said, quoting the hairy old joke from his youth. It was one of the chestnuts he brought out periodically to try on ever-younger sets of new Institute employees, who were generally unanimous in failing to see any humor in it. "And on that note, I guess lunch is over," he added.

  "Yeah," Banning agreed with a sigh. "Back to uselessly banging our heads."

  "Six-month-olds do that a lot, too," Hayes said. "Mostly when they're crawling under coffee tables."

  "Haven't programmed a coffee table into JUNIOR's environment," Banning said as they headed for the cafeteria door. "Maybe I ought to try it."

  "Yeah—it'd be interesting to hear what a computer sounds like when it cries.

  Well, happy hunting."

  Four hours later Banning's private line rang. "Hello?"

  "It's Billy," Hayes identified himself. "Listen, you said earlier that JUNIOR's environment can be programmed. "Can JUNIOR himself be programmed, too?"

  "Sure," Banning said, frowning. "You can dump any peripheral stuff into him—"

  "Without affecting his intelligence?"

  "Such as it is, sure."

  "Can you lend him to me? Say, for six hours?"

  "Take all the time you want," Banning sniffed. "Adopt him, for all I care.

  I'm thinking of quitting and joining a monastery, anyway."

  "Yeah, well, don't invest in rosary beads just yet," Hayes told him. "Your idiot savant computer may just be good for something, after all." The red glow on the monitor faded, and Banning shook his head in wonderment.

  "I'll be damned. You did it. You really and truly did it."

  "We sure did," Hayes nodded. "Me and JUNIOR."

  "I'll be damned," Banning repeated, reverently. "After all these years. Real, genuine fusion."

  "It's the fluctuating confinement fields that broke the deadlock," Banning told him, tapping the printout still snaking its way out of the printer. "JUNIOR

  has to alter them every ten microseconds or so to keep the plasma confined, but that appears to be well within his capabilities."

  "Capabilities, yes. Sophistication, no." Banning fixed him with a puzzled and slightly ominous look. "Come on, Billy; I came to see your triumph, like you asked, and I agree you're a genius. So now level with me—because if you got JUNIOR past the two-year-old level last month and didn't tell me about it then, I swear I'm going to strangle you."

  Hayes shook his head. "No such luck, I'm afraid. JUNIOR's no further along than he was when you loaned him to me."

  "Then kindly explain that," Banning demanded, waving at the fusion test chamber.

  "JUNIOR can't possibly have the intelligence or expertise that demonstration showed."

  "Ah—but you underestimate two-year-olds," Hayes waggled a warning finger at him.

  "All I had to do was find the proper age-specific behavior pattern and figure out how to adapt it."

  Banning blinked. "You've lost me."

  "Oh, come on, Tom, you've seen it yourself. What does a kid JUNIOR's age do when you make him eat something he doesn't like? He pushes it around with his teeth and the tip of his tongue, trying like the devil to swallow it without letting any of it touch the sides of his mouth."

  Banning's eyes went wide. "Are you saying...?"

  "That's right," Hayes nodded. "I tied JUNIOR into the test chamber... and then programmed him to hate the taste of plasma."

  Banning looked at the printout. "When the Nobel committee phones you," he said,

  "I want dibs on half the prize money."

  "You got it."

  The Art of War

  You know how it ended, of course. Or at least you know the official version of how it ended, which isn't quite the same. I imagine all the parties involved would have preferred to completely
bury that first incident; I know for my part that I was instructed in no uncertain terms to keep quiet about what I knew.

  But you can't completely hush up a debacle that cost sixty-three men their lives.

  Especially not when one of them was a Supreme Convocant of the United Ethnos of Humanity.

  So you know more or less how it ended. It's time you learned how it began.

  It began with my eighteenth birthday, and my parents' desire to do something really special for my nineteenth year. The Year of YouthJourneying, we called it on New Ararat: a brief interval between the end of Institute and the beginning of life as adults. Most of my friends were going the traditional routes: taking career-sample apprenticeships, joining volunteer groups, doing YouthJourney tours around New Ararat, or—for the more adventuresome—signing aboard starfreighters to travel the whole sector.

  My parents outdid them all. Somehow, I still don't know how, they wangled me a

  one-year appointment as aide to Magnell Sutherlan, Convocant from New Ararat to the Supreme Convocation of the UnEthHu. My friends were all kelly green with envy; naturally, I milked it shamelessly for all it was worth.

  It didn't take long for the shine to wear off, though. Zurich was crowded and noisy, with a crime rate probably a thousand times that of our whole district back home. The Convocation Complex itself was huge, practically impossible not to get lost in, and populated by some of the most snidely condescending people I'd ever met. And Convocant Sutherlan, far from being a respected, sharp-edged lawmaker the way the newspages always portrayed him, was old, tired, and completely detached from what was going on. Just treading water, really, until this final term was over and he could go home.

  It was not exactly an atmosphere that bred enthusiasm. As a result, whenever there was travel to be done—whether secure document delivery, repre-meetings, or personal errands—I was always the first of Sutherlan's aide corps to volunteer.

  A fair percentage of those first few months were spent crisscrossing Earth in a

  suborbital or hopping between various planets of the UnEthHu in one or another of Sutherlan's official half-wings.

  And so it was that, four months into my tenure, I found myself two hundred parsecs from Earth on the Kailth world of Quibsh.

  Everyone in the UnEthHu knows where Quibsh is now, of course, but back then even most professional politicians had never heard of the place. No real surprise; Quibsh was a fairly useless border world, with an unimpressive list of resources and an outer crust that was a staggering collection of tectonic instabilities.

  The Kailth had put a couple of minor military outposts there to watch over a population of a few million hardy colonists, about half of whom resided in a single city in one of the more fertile valleys. The Kailth and UnEthHu had made contact about ten years previously, but with the Dynad's main attention focused on the ongoing Pindorshi trade disputes, we hadn't given the Kailth much more than passing notice.

  The diplomatic corps had installed a one-man consulate in the main Quibsh city, where I was supposed to pick up some research documents Convocant Sutherlan had ordered as a favor to a constituent. The pilotcomp landed the half-wing behind the consulate—it had its own drop beacon—and I presented my ID and request to the consular agent, a wrinkled man named Clave Verst who, like Sutherlan, seemed to be marking time until retirement. He got me the documents, and I was preparing to head back to the half-wing when I took a second look at the request form and noticed a hand-written note asking me to also bring back a case of Kailth mixed cooking brandies. There wasn't a single shell of the stuff to be had in the consulate, the nearest potables dealer was a kilometer away, and Verst made it abundantly clear he wasn't about to waste his own time on such a

  frivolous errand. So, armed with a fistful of detailed instructions and a stomachful of queasiness, I headed out alone.

  The spider-web maze of streets was surprisingly crowded—I thought more than once that the entire population must have decided to go out walking or driving that afternoon—but I'd bumped shoulders with other species before and it wasn't as bad as I'd been afraid it would be. For a small fraction of the pedestrians I seemed to be a minor curiosity; for the rest, I was something to be ignored completely.

  I had just turned what I hoped was the last corner when I spotted Tawni.

  She was probably the last thing I would have expected to see out there among all those lizard-skinned, bumblebee-faced Kailth. A human woman, of medium height and slender build, with an exotically cut cascade of black hair that at the moment was obscuring most of her face as she leaned into the open engine compartment of what looked like an ancient Pemberkif Scroller. The vehicle was parked beside the curb, or else had summarily died there. On all sides, completely oblivious to her plight, streams of Kailth shuffled past, breaking around her like a river around a rock.

  Protocol probably dictated that I call back to the consulate, report the situation, and then continue on with my errand while Verst handled it. But she was a human, and in trouble, and I was an aide to a UnEthHu Convocant. More importantly, I was nineteen, and what I could see of her looked pretty attractive. Working my way through the traffic, I headed over.

  I got through the last rivulet of pedestrians and stepped to her side.

  "Having some trouble?" I asked inanely.

  She looked up, giving me my first look at a face that more than met my expectations: young and beautiful, in a dark and distinctly exotic way, though at the moment she was almost at the point of tears from the frustration of her situation. A delicate line—scar or tattoo, I couldn't tell which—arched almost invisibly from the bridge of her nose over her right eyebrow, curving around her cheekbone and past the corner of her lip to disappear into the dimple at the point of her chin. From one of the frontier Ridgeline worlds, I guessed, where humanity's races had been mixed in unusual combinations and body ornamentation could get a little bizarre.

  And where, I belatedly remembered, Anglish was not always the language of choice. For a second she just gazed up at me, her face not seeming to register my question; and I was trying to figure out a Plan B when my words suddenly seemed to click. "Yes," she said. Her accent was soft and delicate and as exotic as the rest of her. "Can you help me?"

  "I can try," I said, peering into the engine compartment. It was a Scroller, all right, though from the looks of it whoever had traded it to her had gotten the better end of the deal. I was just reaching in to check the motivor cables when, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the pedestrian stream falter and looked up to see what was going on.

  Rounding another corner, heading across the intersection, were a pair of Kailth warriors.

  I'd seen pictures of Kailth warriors at the Convocation Complex, vids secretly taken by SkyForce Intelligence at the Chompre and TyTiernian pacifications near the edges of the Kailthaermil Empire. We hadn't tangled with them yet ourselves, but there was a widespread feeling in the Complex back rooms that it was just a

  matter of time before we did. The Kailth controlled a lot of territory, with a

  fair number of non-Kailth under their control, and that almost always spelled trouble.

  Besides which—the more cynical argument went—the Pindorshi situation wouldn't last forever, and wars and conflicts were too politically useful for politicians to stay away from them for long.

  Watching the SkyForce reports in the safety of a Zurich screening room, I had hoped those cynics were wrong. Standing there in the middle of a Quibsh street, I desperately hoped they were wrong. On telephoto vids, Kailth warriors were impressive; up close and personal, they were damn near terrifying. Armored up to their headcrests in full combat suits, walking in lockstep, they were straight out of a xenophobic newspage docu-diatribe. Or straight out of hell.

  The two warriors spotted me at roughly the same time I spotted them, and in perfect unison they shifted direction toward us. Instinctively, I moved closer to the girl—some chivalric idea about sticking together, I suppose—and I threw her a
quick glance to see how she was handling this.

  And paused for a longer look. She was gazing at the warriors, but the look on her face wasn't the knee-shaking trepidation I was feeling. She was smiling, the tension lines in her face already starting to smooth out.

  It was a look of relief. Maybe even adoration.

  "You," one of the Kailth said in passable Anglish. "Human male. What are you doing?"

  My tongue tangled momentarily over my teeth. "I—she's having trouble with her Scroller," I managed. "I stopped to help."

  He held out his right hand. "Identify."

  I fumbled out my ID folder and handed it over, wondering nervously whether a UnEthHu Convocation ID would be an asset or a liability here. My eyes drifted to the lumpy black weapon strapped to his left side, not much bigger than the 5mm slugkicker pistol I used to plink targets with when I was a kid. At its highest setting, this particular sidearm could allegedly drop a two-story brick building with a single shot.

  The warrior studied the ID for what seemed like an inordinately long time.

  Then, closing it, he handed it back and turned his insectine gaze on the woman.

  "Does he bother you, Citizen-Three?" he demanded.

  "Not at all, Warrior-Citizen-One," she said, bowing her head. "It is as he said: he paused to help me."

  I stared at her, suddenly almost oblivious to the warriors. Citizen-Three?

  "Do you wish our assistance?" the warrior continued.

  The girl looked at me. "No," she said. "I will be fine. Thank you for your concern."

  The warrior threw one more long look at me. Then, in lockstep once more, the two of them passed us by and disappeared down another street.

  I looked at the girl, my stomach churning. "He called you Citizen-Three," I said. "Citizen-Three of what?"

  "Of the Kailthaermil Empire," she said, as if it was obvious. "I and my people are third-citizens." She reached up and touched the tattoo line on her face.

  "Your people," I said, dimly realizing I was starting to blither like an idiot.