by Moulton, CD
They went back to Two, explained what they had done (at Z's insistence. He wouldn't let go of the idea there was a hidden intelligence in the beacons) and changed its programming a bit. Even Thing said it felt excitement in the machine when it was told it would have a permanent crew in about sixty hours. There would be Feach medical technicians, Ternz electronic experts and as many as twenty more races at one time aboard. They were first bringing the raw materials for food and atmosphere or whatever and it would be to the individual station to compartmentalize things for the various beings as well as to find something that would be optimal for many to socialize at one time in the same place. It was designed for that.
When the medical ship arrived and docked and the trader ship was three hours out and the University ship five hours out Maita, Z and Thing said their good fortunes and left.
Two knew it mustn't ever let it be known Maita was the ship and not an individual organic being, but Two was also a machine and could be depended on.
What Maita and Thing failed to recognize was that, as T6 was accidentally intelligent so was Station Two, though to a much more primitive degree. It was designed to be a beacon station and couldn't be content unless it was operating as such. It would now be as close to happy as it could be. Maita would enhance its intelligence in the future, bringing it into the select group of citizens of the Maitan Empire as an independent being.
*Well? Shall we begin our spiral search?*
[ Yes. We can search like we did hundreds of years ago. Show the possibilities on the holovid and we'll select one, look it over and move on. ]
"I thought we were going to see if we could pass the null-E band."
*You're on! Do we agree we go out and around to prove we can, then return? No farther until Tab is with us?*
[ Are you really going to do it, Maita? ]
*I've been studying your math. It intrigues me.*
The trip outward and back was completely dull to Z. He simply lazed around the ship with nothing to do until Maita called him and Thing to the pilot's dome.
*We can do it. It's a matter of a reversal in the drift factor there on a direct ratio to the gravitic mass of the galaxy. Now that I know we can do it and it's not even difficult I don't really care if we ever do – except to see if a different galaxy operates under different physical laws. We don't have to go through that crap about null-E space. We learned that. Two days or less at midpoint.*
[ Ten minutes. Do it in TTH one. That's done so we can get back to our little exploration. ]
*We are standing off of Two a few million kilometers. Here are our possibilities.*
The holovid screen lit with stars strewn around with symbols beside them as to distance and type.
[ That one? ]
"Looks good to me!"
*It has radio, I think. We'll have to get closer.*
They were soon above the only likely lifebearing planet in the system. The radio was coming from a gas giant and was caused by the same effect many of them showed when they were big enough to supply much core heat to the atmosphere. The huge storms caused enormous eddy currents of ionized gases. A swirling ion storm, in short. A swirling ion storm is like any charged coil. It emits radio and magnetic waves.
They recorded the system, then Maita put another star chart on the screen.
"That one?"
[ Looks good to me! ]
*We go!*
The excitement was back!
Efete Stagnation
They approached the star system from "north" of the star so they could view the planets and take readings. There were eleven planets and the star was a bit hot, but the fourth and fifth worlds were in the "life zone" for that type of primary.
[ Spectroscopic analysis shows chlorophyll so we have highly developed plants at a minimum. The carbon cycles seem advanced. ]
*There's carbon dioxide and a great enough percentage of free oxygen to indicate a very large plant coverage and animal balance on both the worlds. The outer one is cooling somewhat while number four is in a very good range. Both planets should be comfortable. There should be ample life here and quite advanced.*
"So let's go in for a closer look. Orbit and send floaters down if there isn't evidence of a more developed civilization."
Maita had, as usual, already sent the floaters so they waited several hours for the sensors' return. Z and Thing played a few fast games of three dimensional chess, which Thing almost always won. It used to win in four to six moves, but Z was improved enough that the average was twelve moves now. One game went to twenty seven moves. Z won on rare occasions by playing without logic.
Maita finally announced the floaters were back and that information was going on the holovid screen.
[ I'll be damned! ]
"Probably. What's up?"
*Number five. Highly developed civilization.*
"Without cities? No trains or planes or ships? No clouds of pollution? No dying seas? And you call them developed? Come on!"
[ It seems that way sometimes. I wonder why there are so few of them? How do they control the population? ]
"Where are they? It all looks like virgin territory to me. It's really a pretty place though. Everything seems fairly well in order."
[ I would tend to say a bit too much order. Where do they get the energy, Maita? ]
*They use core thermal generation for energy and have great amounts of it in use, all underground. Those hills in the scanner are apparently dwellings. Food's grown in underground areas, I would say. That leaves the surface undisturbed. The floater scan detected two separate craft that seem much like the skimmers we use on the vacation worlds, floating on a cushion of air downdrafted through spinning vanes. They have a kind of power sphere that's quite effective. Science is advanced.*
[ Advanced enough to where these may be remnants of that once mighty empire? I would be inclined to believe they are very much aware of extra-planetary life so we can land here. There's certainly no danger from contact to these! ]
"Let's do. Have you checked with Library about this sort of lifestyle?"
*There were any number of theoretical worlds that.... I can crossreference the coordinates. If I translate the coordinates of this star into the math of the beacon and figure drift backward for some quarter million years I get.... Shall we go to Library? We can come back, land and know more about their far past than they do.*
"This may make a projection station we can work directly from Library. Move the coordinates for various worlds ahead in time to the present, check the worlds and see what's changed."
[ I vote to go to Library, too. There's a lot of the data we can check there in person we couldn't study through the fastcom links. We have to learn what questions to ask. ]
They were on library four hours later. Thing rode Z's shoulder into the enormous underground building where they greeted the robots who maintained the place in perfect repair, went to the automatic selector desk and checked the listings for the symbols Maita supplied. Thing's floater hovered overhead so it could talk and so that Maita could know everything happening and could converse itself. There were nine ships from various empire worlds on the pad complex Maita used. Library was popular.
[ Mmm. D twenty four. That's down the fourth isle and back a few cases before the first cross-aisle on the right. ]
They found the symbol for D24. Z moved to stand on the symbol set into the floor and said, "Maitan, please."
They had programmed Maitan et al into the computers several years ago so they could read and hear the histories in a language they could understand. While the scene played through Maita recorded the native language and the full history of the world directly from the computers.
The way Library worked in this building was that these seeming mirrors were holovid screens, each representing a world that was inhabited at the time Library was built. The races in the present Maitan Empire were added, but the closing of Library when the Kropfth Empire abandoned it until Maita and the crew reopened it left a lap
se of a full quarter million years in the interim. When anyone stood on the inlaid symbol in front of a screen and spoke a one-word order for language, a lifelike being from that world was shown, introduced beings of any other types from the world and spoke the general history of the world. Z had been recorded as representative of Earth, Thing was representative of Menta. Each world now had a "mirror" and symbol.
The screen showed a world very different from the one they had seen a few hours ago so Maita checked the listing.
*The fifth planet was uninhabited by a native race when this was recorded. These people are from the fourth. I think maybe they will prove to be the ones there now. There was a colony.*
A rather strange-looking mammalian being along with a female and small child were slowly turning in the screen. They stopped to look out at Z and Thing – or very slightly to their right.
"I am called Khahrth, and this is my mate, Lueth, and my young son, Hehrth," the figure said. "We are from the world Flincheen, fifth planet outward from the star Echienne. We have a colony on the fourth planet, Glisp.
"I am mammalian and am of slightly less than half my lifespan in age. My mate is slightly younger than am I, which is customary in our society. It is customary for a pairing to have one child, though twins, triplets and quadruplets sometimes result from the pairing. This custom is relatively new and came about because we overpopulated our world, which leads to many problems, though I am informed this is by no means an unusual situation.
"The government on Flincheen is headed by a single individual elected by the elites every ten years. The Seconds and Thirds do not own land, therefore do not vote. The Seconds are generally shopkeepers and farmers, running the estates of the elites. The Thirds are of low intelligence and are generally servants or do menial tasks for the government. It is the responsibility of the government to see no one is without sufficient food, shelter and medical attention.
"The specialties of the Flincheen in the empire is as military officers of the highest quality and as general administrators. We also supply some numbers of police from the Seconds and maintenance personnel from the Thirds.
"Flincheen produces all of our own foodstuffs and, now that we have the colony, all of our own ores for industry. That industry remains insystem here. We export people, not merchandise.
"My mate will exhibit some art forms and will sing and play the klarmench for you."
Z waved for the machine to fast-forward after a few seconds of a tinny sounding instrument until it was past the art exhibition phase.
"We enjoy watching various physical contests and train many of the Thirds, the better physical specimens, for those manner of entertainments. A particularly expert Third can rise above his birth station and his children become Seconds, infusing new and stronger genes into the higher classes.
"Our architecture is..."
Z stepped back and the screen shut off.
*It seems more was said by what wasn't said than was said by what was said.*
[ You sound like Z. I take it we now know what kind of culture they had back then. They were slavers, which seems to have been accepted by the empire. It used the Thirds, who were the slaves. Flincheen's contribution to the empire was to produce slaves for them. No wonder the thing died! It's inherent in the system. It can't survive cultural crisis. Sociomath shows clearly that such a system holds only until the decadence of the elite classes have rendered them helpless in cases of societal stress, then the slaves will take over and recycle the same system, the society will fail and regress. They will outgrow that form and evolve. ]
"I suppose we're going to find exactly how far slavery can be taken when we land on Glisp. I think we're going to be very outraged about a thing or two there!"
*Surely, they outgrew that kind of government hundreds of centuries ago! As Thing said, such a system can't be viable longterm!*
[ Only if they made machines to be the slaves. I know what Z's saying. A good deal about that society is pretty clear now. I doubt the empire condoned slavery, but it probably didn't try too hard to regulate such things in its member worlds. Perhaps that's why the empire is no more. It allows corruptions that erode the ability to retain a dynamic. ]
"Let's go back to see. I won't mind being wrong one little bit! This could be very interesting and I hope they really have made machines to be their slaves."
[ It's likely. They have all the energy they could want and you don't have to feed machines and you don't have to house and medicate machines. Simple economics would tend to dictate going to a machine-society base. Just think! A very few people and thousands of machines! This will be linear psychology study gone to the limit! My sociomath formulae will certainly be advanced tremendously I'm sure. ]
*I still don't see how you figure it. I don't disagree, either. The society certainly doesn't exhibit any particular drive if it isn't even in space. That's withdrawal to the extreme. They certainly have the science and resources to head their own empire. I agree they have lost any semblance of a societal dynamic.*
"We're figuring dynamics from the organic standpoint, Maita. That character who made the recording was hedonistic, proud and steeped in the things a society can produce that have no real worth. He already thought of his fellow beings as being less than himself, was willing to supply those of his own race to other cultures for slave labor or worse.... You can bet the 'physical contests' were brutal and deadly. That was his entertainment. The set of the minds of that kind of being will be so deeply ingrained now that nothing could possibly change it. They simply will be unable to see any viewpoint but their own."
[ Remember the Kroon, Maita? The religious thing? The total inability of some of those people to see truth no matter how obvious? Remember how blind a person can be who simply refuses to see or hear a thing he doesn't want to see or hear? Add constant strong lifelong conditioning along those same lines and you have what these will have become. They won't see anything they don't want to see. Nothing exists if their religion says it doesn't and they are now their own religion. ]
"Khomeini Baptists."
*What was that reference, Z?*
"I just now thought of something that was happening in my own neighborhood when I was abducted from Earth. There was a state in another part of the world from the USA that was ruled by a turkey named Khomeini. He ran the state strictly along the lines of his religion. To the last letter. Anything else was unthinkable. As you can guess, the state was constantly at war with everyone else in the world. 'Death to the infidels' and all that crap.
"There was a religion called the Baptists at the same time. They were in the US. A group of them broke away and started a movement to infiltrate the government of the US. They wanted to take over and to run the country along the lines of their own religion as they perceived it. The Baptist Bible was to be the law because God said it was to be that way. Other people would argue that to try to run a state along such strict lines was ridiculous. We even had a constitution that guaranteed it wouldn't happen BECAUSE the framers of the document knew such a thing couldn't work.
"These people argued that it would work, it had simply never been tried.
"There was a movement called the Calvinist Movement that was partially like that. They couldn't even see the atrocities of that partial form of what they wanted. We argued that not only had such a thing been tried, there was exactly the same sort of thing happening at the time. They could read about the results of the religious control in every newspaper or watch it on TV. It was Iran and Khomeini.
"They absolutely refused to see it. They were as blind and unthinking as Khomeini. We called them Khomeini Baptists."
[ Did you ramble on and on like that about it? No wonder they wouldn't hear! Wheee! ]
Z threw Thing into the air and it caught the floater with a tentacle, then swung back around to wrap its tentacles around his shoulders and neck. They wrestled a bit until they were aboard Maita, then went to the pilot's chair to sleep. They awoke later, had a good meal, used the
showers and sanitary and prepared to go aground on Glisp. Maita chose an area where they could be sure they would do no damage.
Several of the skimmer craft came to wait patiently so Z and Thing went out to one. There was no one inside.
"Machine slaves. I'm glad of that!"
There was a spate of language coming from a speaker on the skimmer, but Z shrugged.
[ It's altogether possible there are no longer any Flincheens alive. Only the machines. Maita, you have a sort of language from Beacon Two. Maybe these machines can converse in it? ]
*Digitals. I'll try the introductory sequence code Two used with me.*
They waited while the machines chattered at one another for a few minutes.
*Go in any of the skimmers. There's a translator device. You'll be talking with Porth, an organic being. He'll use the probe on the floater and I'll give you the language and such. I'll leave all the information on the crystal so you'll have both societal and personal perspectives. From what was said you were right about them. I'll allow you to draw your own conclusions and to act as you see fit.*
Z and Thing got into a skimmer and were whisked away. The tug floater was hovering a meter above them. They arrived at a small hollow into the side of a hill where the skimmer stopped and sat on the ground so they climbed out, Thing onto it’s personal floater from Z's shoulder.
A door opened and a being much like the one in the holovid on Library waved them inside. They went into a luxurious room where Porth reclined on a couch. Thing placed the probe helmet, they waited and the floater left to return shortly with the crystal for Z's socket.
"I see," Z said in Maitan after inserting the chip. "Thing, I know Maita is sending directly to you. You're an amusing little creature – maybe a Fourth class. You might make a good pet if you aren't too messy. I'm either Third or Fourth class myself. How do we handle it?"
