by Alex Deva
“…for us. Yes, Erbardh. In any case. Your allotted quota has been set at one hundred hours.“
“Each?“
“No, together. It is a shame your delegation includes only two individuals. May I suggest that one of you uses your quota to meet the ambassadors, while the other stays here with me to work through the trade list and determine what you might have to trade that is of interest to us. Unless, of course, you finish all your business within the free quota, in which case the loss shall be ours. The telesentience transceivers and the entire complex are very expensive, and we cannot be expected to be offering this for service for free.“
— Who’s “we“? asked Jessica Lawry in their heads.
“Are you affiliated with the Eight or with the Buil…?“ began Mark.
“No. Our civilisation is neutral. We trade in technological services and do not ally ourselves with anybody.“
— OK, that’s great. Mark, you’re on diplomatic duty. Zi, you stay with Rrapi and let’s work that list. Maybe we’re lucky and we have something they really need so we can buy some extra time, then you can join Mark.
“How is the quota measured?“ asked Mark.
“Only time spent interacting with an ambassador counts. The time you spend moving around is free, but if you just loiter without using the quota I am afraid we shall have to terminate your connection. The resources you are using must generate revenue, and we have already invested in you by answering your call.“
“How many species have been here before us?“
“Seventy-seven million, thirteen thousand, one hundred and ninety-four, on this station alone,“ came the instant answer at the same speed. “And two more have arrived after you. Other duty officers are attending to their delegations as we speak. Do you have many more questions? The effects of my medication seem to be wearing off. I do not want to take too much if I can help it.“
“We understand entirely,“ said Mark, trusting his unseen backers to fill in the blanks for him later. “My colleague will investigate trade opportunities with you. Meanwhile, I am ready to begin visiting with the ambassadors. Do I also get a lis…?“
“You do not need one. As I have explained, everything here, including the ambassadors and their offices, are being represented on your telesentience circuit in a form suitable to your senses. You can simply walk around and pick an office. A short description including species, affiliations and specific details can be found near every entrance, in clear English. You will be able to book time if they happen to be engaged or unavailable; again, you are only charged for the time you actually spend with them. Some ambassadors have greater lifespeed coefficients than you; others, smaller. It is up to you to choose. Are you ready?“
“Y…“
In a flash, Mark found himself on the floor of the great hall. A wave of thick nausea washed over him.
“…es,“ he finished, and retched.
XV.
“It is that time again, fletcher Keai.“
“Hello, Control. Time for what?“
“Time to save me from the wrath of the Council, who wish to have news not only on your progress manning your Blank, but also on the abnormalities you have been investigating for almost a thousand years now.“
The alien stretched his human body and walked to a large table in the middle of his underground laboratory. A gentle yellow light coming from all the walls bathed the room, barely causing any shadows. In a human gesture, he sat down on a chair and stretched his legs. He’d constrained himself to human form for a long time now; lately, he’d hardly even assumed his normal shape anymore. That kind of adaptation and environmental immersion was to be expected of all good fletchers, although they all cheated when they had to, of course.
Building an underground lab on a foreign planet wasn’t, however, permitted under the rules; in fact, it was quite explicitly forbidden. But Keai felt that his discovery would be worth the risk, both in terms of contaminating the civilisation that he was mining, and in terms of punishment at the hands of the Council.
“I have news,“ he announced.
“Do tell,“ said the voice in his head. “What have you been doing?“
“First, I moved my laboratory from the Kogainon mountains. It was too remote and there weren’t enough of the locals around. I needed to be somewhere where I could both mine and work, and the mountains were too far away.“
“Leaving aside for the moment the fact that you built a laboratory in the first place, where did you relocate it?“
“Underneath a former military installation, which is now in ruins. Not far from one of the larger settlements of the area, where I mined my Cub Tamer.“
The voice considered.
“Short of dismantling it — which I remind you that you promised to do, the moment you’re done — I suppose this somehow qualifies as good news. What else?“
“I moved the alien refuge, too.“
“You what?! The what?!“
“The bubble. It was used as a refuge by the locals. And I am convinced by now that it was of alien origin.“
“Fletcher, everything around you is of alien origin.“
“I mean alien to both us and them, Control.“
Again, the voice considered.
“How did you move it? Were you able to gain access to it?“
“No, and that is precisely why I moved it. And it wasn’t even that hard. I simply dug a big hole next to my laboratory, then dug out an equivalent portion of earth including the bubble, and then switched places. I brought the bubble here, and replaced it with the displaced earth from this hole. It took me all of two hours.“
“Aren’t geological modifications covered in one of our definitely do not do rules?“
“Not at such microlevels, I am sure.“
The voice sighed.
“Sadly, I am not. Please tell me that, having created ideal conditions for both mining and scientific investigation, you have succeeded in making progress on both.“
The alien gestured, and a myriad of glowing symbols appeared floating in the air around his hand. He picked one and touched it; the symbols disappeared, and a scrolling list took their place. He used another hand gesture to fast-forward the list, then stopped it.
“I did both, at the same time,“ he began again. “I sent out watchers who, in time, learned more about locals that the locals know about themselves. I wanted to find out how they function, why they do the things they do, where they get their thoughts from. My computers learned enough to be able to predict human actions with excellent accuracy, and they can map any human individual on a multidimensional evaluation matrix based on millions of criteria.“
“You have been thorough. That is good. You are finally doing the job of a fletcher.“
“It was never otherwise, Control.“
“I assume this level of meticulousness means you are mining for your Shipmaster.“
“Indeed. Humans become unusually corrupt at early stages in their lives. And there are generational shifts that I must, and I do, account for. For example, did you consider that by moving the bubble I might have robbed them of their shelter?“
The voice stopped and considered, as it was asked. “No,“ it answered, frankly.
“In fact, I did not,“ said the alien. “The humans had nearly lost their ability to access it, so it had become useless to them anyway. At some point, a couple of hundred years since we last spoke, someone tried to access the bubble and simply couldn’t. She was reduced to walking around the trees helplessly, exactly like myself. Then, a few years later, someone else failed again. In time, they began to lose confidence, and gradually stopped counting it amongst the facts of life. By the time I took it from them, nobody even knew it was there anymore, let alone used it.“
“An aspect which eluded you, in equal measure.“
“Yes. I can detect it, measure it — I can even see it if I dig it out a little. But I cannot enter it.“
“How do you know that nobody else can?“<
br />
“My measurements have gotten better and better with time. With a lot of trial and error, I began being able to corroborate my data with what happened when someone who could, actually did enter it.“
“Did that not involve waiting until the locals needed it in order to save themselves from trouble?“
The alien did not answer.
The voice from another planet sighed. “I see. You took care of that. You sent more nomads and barbarians to plunder that place, only so that you could take your measurements.“
Keai shrugged. “I did what I had to do.“
“By now, fletcher, I am convinced that whoever invented the rule we never interfere would give anything to have you thrown into the darkest and loneliest hole in a million galaxies.“
“I don’t care, Control. This is too important. Time manipulation at rest is more important than mining.“
“As your luck has it, the Council does agree that it is at least as important as mining. Very well. So by causing the death of many locals, you now have a way to detect those special few who can interact with alien technology.“
“I have more than that.“
“Do continue.“
“In addition to asking myself how, I started asking why. Why does this alien refuge exist? Why would an alien species so advanced simply leave this bubble for the locals to use? How did it end up here? I tried to find answers to all these questions. I thought the bubble had originally been part of a greater ensemble, but I could find no evidence of that. No remnants of an alien starship, no signs of anything else out of the ordinary. Which was when I started using my newly calibrated watchers to look around.“
“And?“
“And I found more. Artefacts which to me are completely invisible or intangible, but which registered in the same way that the bubble does. Some were inside solid rock, some were under bodies of water, none was as exposed as the bubble. Here,“ he said, indicating a corner of the table which appeared completely empty, “I fished this one from a river.“
“I am watching through your human eyes, fletcher. I see nothing but the wooden surface of your desk and I assume that that is not what you want to show me.“
“Indeed it is not. And I cannot see it either, not with my human eyes, and not with my normal eyes. And neither could you, if you were here in person. But look.“
He made another gesture, and the myriad of glowing symbols reappeared around him. He touched a few, and they stopped glowing; when he touched a last one, all the glowing ones vanished. With one hand still raised among the floating glyphs, he moved the other around the space above the table. The symbols instantly changed their shape and colour.
“Interesting,“ said the voice, thoughtfully. “Admittedly I am not as knowledgeable about your newly invented mathematical apparatus as you are, but there are scientists here who can make more sense of that data.“
And then, after a pause:
“They will make more sense of that data, will they not, fletcher Keai?“
The alien smiled. “I’m not cheating, Control. Our scientists will, as the humans say, fall on their butts when they see this.“
“I sincerely hope they do, for both our sakes. It might be worth assigning them butts and placing them under positive gravity for that purpose alone.“
“It’s good to see your human form came with a suitable sense of humour, Control.“
“Yes, I don’t know what I’ll do without it once your Blank is manned and my mission is over.“
“Hope that your next fletcher will mine another civilisation with humour.“
“So what do you suppose it is that you fished out of a river?“
“Ask me how I fished it out.“
“An even better question. If you cannot feel it, how did you grab it?“
“With great difficulty. I assembled a small scale version of the matter transporter on my Blank, but it saw through it as well. So I started fine-tuning its core parameters until it began to have, for lack of a better word, grip. At the peak of my best efforts, I managed to grab about a billionth of the volume occupied by the artefact, for nearly a picosecond.“
“And yet you eventually and obviously succeeded.“
“In point of fact, Control, I did not.“
There was confused silence.
“You’ll have to explain.“
“Of course. Forgive me. I do not mean to make you feel inadequate; I am myself rather poorly prepared to deal with this thing, even after a thousand years of research. What happened, Control, was that I managed to fish out a part of the artefact. Not a volumetric fraction, but a part of it in another sense of the word, which my equations can explain, but human language can’t.“
“In other words, you broke it.“
“In a sense, yes. But watch this.“
The alien waved and ordered a three-dimensional video feed to appear floating in front of him. It showed a river bank; clear, shallow water flowing over stones and mud and the occasional fish.
“Is this where you found it?“
“Yes. This is live imagery. Look, I’m bringing the watcher down.“
The image changed as the camera lowered itself near the water surface. A little mechanical arm protruded into the field of view, and grabbed a small pebble from the ground. Then, the robot lifted itself and moved to a position just a few steps over the flowing stream.
“Watch closely and make sure you record this.“
The watcher dropped the pebble.
A wet pebble appeared instantly on the alien’s table. It bounced once, then bounced again and it finally came to rest on one side.
The alien watched it, transfixed.
“It learned from my matter transporter, Control. Or at least that’s what I assume it did. It learned its purpose and, using some method to manipulate time, it made it work a billion times faster.“
“But that’s… impossible. Our matter transports already work at near light speed. A billion times faster than light speed is equally impossible as two times.“
“You have the recording and can measure yourself. I am perfectly willing to redo the experiment as many times as our scientists need, until they’re convinced or I’m buried in pebbles, whichever comes first.“
“Of course, the impossibility only applies to what we consider to be the normal acceleration of the time flow.“
“Very perceptive. The pebble suddenly becomes possible if we allow for time travel.“
The voice said nothing, but when it did, there was excitement in it.
“You said this artefact appeared to learn from our matter transport?“
“Yes.“
“What would it then learn from our starship propulsors?“
The alien smiled.
“One would assume it would learn how to make our starships faster than light with no relativistic effects.“
“Assume? You don’t know?“
“I can’t just build a pocket starship propulsor out of dismantled watchers, Control. They’re a little more complicated than matter transports.“
“Well, where’s your Blank now?“
“On its way. It’ll be here in a few days.“
“And then you will be in a position to conduct the experiment.“
“And more. I plan to recruit my Shipmaster as well.“
This time, Control’s excitement reached a level distinctly reserved to very happy humans and small puppies.
“Fletcher, that is the best news you could have given me, and I am truly grateful. Please tell me about your Shipmaster.“
“A very special human, Control. Of course, such is required of a Shipmaster, but this one is extra special.“
“In what way?“
“The alien technology reacts to this particular individual, as it did to the people of old. I’ve had the opportunity to measure it many times. The bubble reacted every time she was around.“
“She?“
“Yes. My Blank will have a Shipmistress. A pure, perfect lit
tle human girl with a pure, perfect mind and a pure, perfect soul, who can interact with time manipulating alien technology in what I hope to be our first faster-than-light starship.“
“If you succeed, fletcher, the Council will bow before you and nothing will ever be the same again.“
“I know, Control. I know.“
The alien smiled, waved, and the floating lights faded away. He checked the overground surroundings of his laboratory, and found them suitably deserted at the moment. Grabbing a hooded mantle and a large clay flask, he left his laboratory and exited to the surface via a secret passage that immediately closed after him.
The former Roman road was now missing nearly all of its stones, stolen to build houses and barns, together with most of the bricks that used to make up the old Roman fort named Apulum. Looking hunched and tired, the alien slowly dragged his sandals through the dusty road, and it was not long until he started meeting people. They greeted him respectfully and he answered in kind, sometimes raising his right hand in two straight, perpendicular gestures.
“Et cum spiritu tuo,“ he would then say.
Soon he arrived in front of a tiny hut, little more than a hole in the ground with a roof made of straws and branches. He hunched even more and entered.
“I brought clean water,“ he announced.
Doina’s happy face lifted towards him.
“Thank you, uncle. Dominus vobiscum.“
“Et cum spiritu tuo,“ he replied, giving her the flask with a smile. She took it gratefully, drank a few swallows then returned it, still half-full.
“Mother always told me to never drink all of someone’s water,“ she said.
“That she did,“ he said.
“Will you tell me more about her?“ she asked, drawing closer to him.
And so the alien began to tell her stories of her parents, dead in a nomadic raid that he had just happened to have arranged.
XVI.
“Wood,“ said the great worm.
Or, at least, it looked like a great worm. Who knew what it looked like in reality; Rrapi had said that the ambassadors’ avatars were adapted “to fit human senses.“ At the moment, Mark really wished that his human senses did not include smell. The representative of the Pinguids looked like the half-ton version of something you’d stick on your fishing hook hoping to never see it again, fish or no fish, and it smelled, well, as a half-ton worm.
