InterstellarNet 03 Enigma

by Edward M. Lerner

  “Only by totalitarian rule could the Xool enforce a worldwide ban on AI and genetic engineering, on robotics and nanotech. Only an all-powerful government, after mastering interstellar travel, could withhold from its people even the resource wealth of their own solar system. Only through constant, intrusive surveillance and by wielding absolute control over everyone and everything could a government impoverished by those decisions expropriate the vast resources to explore the galaxy, to build and staff a defensive fleet just in case, and to shape our worlds. And like the Chinese turning away from the world, that means dictatorship.”

  So much for brief. “What Joshua means,” Carl netted, “is we need only to convince Wue.”

  And with that thought, another penny dropped. Since Ene’s earliest admissions, Carl had struggled to wrap his head around shoehorning this epic, incredible undertaking into twenty years subjective. Even to try? That was, well, crazy.

  But demanding that everything happen within the lifetime of a dictator? That made sense to him. So, in that context, did hostage-taking. So did permitting only one gender off-world, lest expeditionary teams abandon the dictator’s project and set up shop for and by themselves on some fallow world.

  The second asteroid strike—on some distant part of the world, evidently, but revealed by the scurrying arrival of aides—seemed to agitate, but not accelerate the Xool deliberations.

  Carl strutted to their end of the room. “The longer you wait, the worse things will get.”

  “Enough! Wue said. (Did she direct her pique at Carl or at her own squabbling advisers? Perhaps both.) “Suppose ten years pass outside. A hundred years. We will absorb whatever damage we must from your indiscriminate bombardment. You are few and we are many, and in that time we will construct an indomitable fleet. Then—if you have not already destroyed yourselves—we will obliterate you.”

  “Here’s the thing,” Carl said. “The lesson of b’tok: victory favors those with the time to amass resources. By your choice, time is on our side. While you spend a day building a fleet, we’ll have spent a thousand days, or a hundred thousand, or a million, improving ours. And even today, because of our computers, our warships and weapons are superior.

  “Meanwhile, our engineers and scientists are examining the slow-time personnel capsules and the starships we seized on the moon overhead. Will enlightenment come after ten years? A hundred? A thousand? Who can say? But I know they will master your technology, no matter how much you’ve hobbled our past development. They will find a way to release our worlds from slow time—and for you, it will have been in the blink of an eye.”

  “And then they’ll hunt you down here,” the Foremost growled from across the room.

  Carl continued, “And if all that should fail? You will still lose. As we speak, robots are manufacturing robots and battle drones. Those will build more, and they yet more.” In factories the Xool would never find, even if they emerged to look. Throughout the years Glithwah had plotted the clan’s escape from Ariel, Carl had little suspected, much less succeeded in locating, her robot factory. “If you hope ever to exit slow time …”

  Wue and advisers caucused again. Whatever suggestion one might offer, whatever objection another might raise, Wue seemed quick to interrupt.

  “Impatience,” Joshua netted. “The prelude to decision.”

  Wue emerged from her cluster of advisers and aides. She said, “This is the choice you would give those who nurtured you. Death by bombardment? Or suicide by one of the self-destructive plagues your kind has always unleashed?”

  “Disaster is certain,” Carl said, “in only one of those scenarios. Choose wisely.”

  Wue slumped. “You cannot imagine the horrors my people have encountered across the galaxy. This choice is no choice.”

  Corinne cleared her throat. “Except that, Chief Administrator, matters don’t need to end badly.”

  THE ELMAN SOLUTION

  CHAPTER 59

  Great Seclusion: the isolation from the rest of the Solar System, behind impenetrable force fields, of Earth, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, and several other settled worlds. Gravitational influences imply these worlds continue to exist. If so, Earth may have all but ceased spinning; outside its barrier, Earth’s magnetic field has dropped to one percent of its former value. Conditions inside are otherwise unknown. That the barriers reflect virtually all incident solar energy bodes ill for the continuation of life on the worlds rendered inaccessible.

  Observers have detected no change to the force fields since their onset, without warning, in 2186.

  Barriers appeared around all affected worlds at essentially the same time. In the years following, with allowances for light-speed delays, astronomers determined that the home world (at a minimum) of every InterstellarNet member species has become similarly mirrored and that the phenomenon struck everywhere at once.

  Whether the Great Seclusion is a natural phenomenon or was brought about by party or parties (and technologies) unknown remained a matter of conjecture until the approach to the Solar System, in 2246, of the starship Amends ….

  —Internetopedia (Belt Edition)

  • • • •

  “See you on the other side.”

  Her brave words had not ceased to echo in Corinne’s thoughts, any more than had the unfortunate sensation of backing into a coffin, when the shimmering field closed her in—and disappeared.

  Hell, she had barely had time to blink.

  “Now this is the way to travel,” Joshua declared from an enclosure beside hers. “Not even one second subjective time.”

  As she contemplated that, Carl and Ene moved from their slow-time boxes to the pilot and copilot seats on Amends’s compact bridge. They busied themselves with the Xool ship’s instruments.

  “Where are we?” she asked.

  “About eight billions klicks from the Sun.” Carl turned, grinning. “The radio chatter is unmistakable. Moons of Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, countless asteroids and Kuiper Belt objects. There’s still a civilization here.”

  “Then I should get to work,” Corinne said.

  Carl said. “This far out, I doubt anyone has spotted us. You can take your time.”

  Fifty-one years ago—eighty-one years, as far as her soon-to-be audience was concerned—she had scooped every media outlet in the Solar System by revealing a United Planets secret: the imminent arrival of a Hunter starship. Now she approached aboard an alien starship, to recount an epic tale eons in the making. By comparison, the incursion of the Hunters had been a trivial item of gossip. Maybe she could take her time before broadcasting; she didn’t want to. She couldn’t bear to. “Whenever the gear is ready.”

  Ene gestured at his console to indicate the camera, then vacated his seat. “You can transmit now.”

  Corinne sat. She squared her shoulders and took a deep breath. At Carl’s nod of encouragement, she began. “This is Corinne Elman, reporting live from the Oort Cloud, aboard the Xool starship Amends. People of the Solar System, it is our mission to release the trapped worlds from their isolation ….”

  • • • •

  Another day, Joyce Matthews told herself wearily. Another go at convincing the authorities, and anyone who might influence the authorities, and anyone with money, of the urgent need to dig for answers at the buried Xool base. Alas, all that the establishment could see—all that anyone ever saw—was a collapsed lava tube, kilometers from nowhere, deep in the foothills of Montes Carpatus. In the eighth month of the emergency, few people would hear out, much less entertain diverting scarce resources to investigate, some crone’s wild conspiracy theories.

  Before tilting yet again at windmills, she would complete her other, likely more productive, daily routine: four shuffling circuits of the grassy central glade of the Tycho City Arboretum. The park had always been crowded, visitors drawn to the great dome and the view overhead as much as for these lovely woods.

  But no longer.

  Avoidance. Joyce got that. Sky without Sun or Earth or stars
only rubbed a person’s face in the horror of their plight. And so, as so many days since the … whatever, she had the park almost to herself.

  Completing a lap, winded, her knees aching and her implant exhorting her to rest, she ground to a halt. Settling onto a park bench, peering upward, she wondered yet again what the citizens of Earth, studying their sky, saw—if anything. Perhaps they were also cut off. Perhaps they, too struggled, severed without warning from the resources and markets of other worlds. Perhaps they—

  A fiery spark arced across the sky. A ship! But from where? And how?

  Joyce linked to the traffic-control channel. The woman seemed almost familiar, like someone who looked like someone Joyce had once known. But that was not quite right, either. Maybe the woman resembled someone Joyce had once seen on the 3-V. She tried, and failed, to match a name to the voice and face.

  “… Starship Amends,” the woman was saying, “People of the Moon, it is our mission to release the trapped worlds from their isolation ….”

  And in the background, standing behind the almost recognized woman? Looking gaunt, looking decades older than Joyce remembered—

  Wasn’t that man, somehow, Joshua?

  • • • •

  With hands clasped, eyes closed in concentration, head canted, Richard Lewis Agnelli took everything in.

  Had Corinne ever contemplated meeting the legendary director of the UPIA, she would not have pictured it like this. Not at the summons of the chief spook himself, or in his private office. Not in the company of old friends. Not as an intel source herself. Least of all, not too distracted to focus.

  Because her mind raced and her guts tied themselves in knots, knowing where she must go next. To the home she scarcely remembered. To Denise, whom she could never forget. To Denise, whom she had given up hope of ever seeing again, to whom, over the years, she had professed her love and regrets in untold thousands of undeliverable messages. To Denise, who—until that very morning, when Amends had taken down Earth’s slow-time barrier—must have believed Corinne dead.

  Carl spoke. Joshua/Tacitus spoke. Agnelli mused about how much Ene might yet reveal if his UP bosses weren’t sticklers for ambassadorial prerogatives. Carl spoke some more. Corinne, when prompted, maybe contributed a little.

  “Interesting.” Agnelli’s eyes opened. “You’re carried off by the Snakes aboard a hijacked starship. You fake its destruction, only to return a few months later, aboard another starship, with an unknown type of alien—and those aren’t even the exotic elements of the tale.”

  “I suppose not,” Carl said.

  “Right,” Agnelli said. “So: the relative positions of the planets indicate sixty years and a bit have passed. The few surviving agents in the Belt, with whom I’d lost contact, insist sixty years have passed. But you know what convinces me I’ve been in a time warp? You, Carl. In the not quite eight months since you last sat in this office, you’ve become older than Methuselah. And still I only believe you’re you, DNA match and resemblance notwithstanding, because you have a cosmic ultra implant.”

  Corinne managed a smile. “Could have been worse. We skipped the last thirty years.”

  “And where did you all leave Discovery, or Invincible, whatever you want to call it, not to mention 20 thousand thieving Snakes?”

  “Through whose help we’ve liberated 35 billion people in this solar system alone,” Joshua commented.

  “And whom I couldn’t have stopped from keeping the ship,” Carl said.

  “Had you wished to,” Agnelli said. “I doubt you did.”

  “Short answer, sir?” Carl said. “I don’t know where Timoq took Invincible and most of the clan. I can’t tell what I don’t know.”

  “Because this Timoq, their new Foremost, figures the UP might hold a grudge.”

  Carl shrugged. “Do you blame him? As you say, for you it’s been only months.”

  As it had been only months for Denise. How would she react to someone become so ancient? Someone she surely believed lost in the feigned destruction of Discovery? Someone once mourned and perhaps moved past?

  There was a soft tapping at the door. “Come in,” Agnelli called. A steward entered, pushing a cart; he set out coffee service and left.

  “Most of the clan, you said.” Agnelli sipped coffee, considering. “The rest went off in Xool starships, just as you returned here, to liberate other InterstellarNet worlds?”

  “Most, anyway,” Carl said, “expecting to report back that the hidden slow-time generators could be turned off. Should they report otherwise, the few Hunters who stayed behind in the Epsilon Indi system will let the rocks keep falling.”

  “And that brings me to the big question,” Agnelli said. “Your Xool friends expected us to self-destruct. Hell, they created us just so they could watch, then they locked us away so the watching would be safe. The Matthews conundrum, and all that. Then, eons and eons later, changing their minds, they taught you how to let everyone out. I have to ask. Why?”

  “You mean apart from the ever bigger rocks that were raining down upon their heads?” Carl said.

  “And apart from the robotic hordes we had begun to build?” Tacitus added.

  “Because the Matthews conundrum, it turns out, has an Elman solution,” Joshua said, turning toward Corinne.

  “Well, Ms. Elman?” Agnelli prompted.

  “A plague, Wue called us,” Corinne began. “No, it’s what she called our technologies. Nanotech, AI, gengineering. Plagues that had eradicated entire civilizations. Plagues to be feared, to be contained at any cost—before some rogue Xool scientist, working in secrecy, unleashed the apocalypse. Plagues scary beyond self-inflicted poverty, beyond hiding from time itself. Plagues that, given the lesson of their galactic explorations, ought to terrify us, too.

  “And knowing all that, I asked myself: why aren’t I scared?”

  “Here’s what I decided. For thirty years, we lived in one small, overcrowded habitat. We brought with us not one, not two, but maybe every technology dreaded by the Xool. Artificial intelligences, both human and Hunter. Minds linked with implanted Hunter biochips. Competing biospheres enhanced with Wolf gengineering. Centaur nanotech and Boater robotics.” She patted Joshua on the arm. “Not least of all, an Augmented.

  “Did life aboard Invincible always go smoothly? Hardly! Biospheres skirmished field by field, farm deck by farm deck. We had gray-goo incidents, and software gone awry, and wild robots. But the undeniable fact was … we kept it together. Hunter programs would stymie a human program gone rogue. Crops of both kinds evolved and adapted and evolved again. Nanites tamed genetically modified organisms become too successful and, the once, a berserker robot.”

  “Meaning?” Agnelli prompted.

  “Meaning,” said Tacitus, “that the Xool, unknowingly and unintentionally, did more than breed test strains of plague. Perhaps any one of these technologies is fatal. But together? The synergistic interaction of—”

  “Meaning,” Corinne interrupted firmly, “that while any one of these technologies might become a plague, another tech might offer the cure. And that because no one can suppress technology forever, the only hope for the Xool is to emerge from their self-imposed quarantine and become part of a community.

  “As long as they fear plagues, InterstellarNet offers their only chance to get vaccinated.”

  “And the Xool bought that?” Agnelli asked. “They were terrified of the technologies lurking nearby.”

  “Convinced?” Corinne shook her head. “I wouldn’t put it that way. I’d say, rather, we left the Xool without any choice.”

  “And I’d say,” Tacitus said, “that having opened a Pandora’s box, all that was left to them was Hope.”

  • • • •

  Amid the bustle and din of the Basel Spaceport main concourse, the friends stood silent. Parting after so very long together, what could one say?

  Corinne could barely interpret the staticky announcement, “This is the final boarding call for Tycho City.” Ne
tted, the words would have been crystal clear—but to net would mean switching on her implant, and to do that would mean knowing each time Denise tried to reach out. Or, worse, that Denise wasn’t trying.

  Good news or bad, Corinne intended to hear it in person.

  “That’s our flight,” Carl said unnecessarily.

  They hugged, then Carl stepped aside, and she and Joshua hugged. She blinked and blinked, holding back the tears, before asking herself: why bother?

  At the yawning doorway to the boarding tube through which Joshua had disappeared, Carl paused. “Remember the Elman solution,” he called out. “We’re all in this together.”

  And then Carl, too, was gone.

  We’re all in this together. Squaring her shoulders, hoping Carl was right, Corinne strode down the concourse to catch her own flight home.

  Afterword

  The InterstellarNet saga began, with InterstellarNet: Origins, in musings about the viability and technical underpinnings of a multi-species society loosely bound by radio communications. The community’s alien members had to live nearby (astronomically speaking), because even a one-way radio transmission to the closest solar system takes more than four years.

  For story purposes, at the least, such (relative) proximity is a manageable problem. SF authors have considerable leeway in how we build universes. It’s one of the perks of the job. We can posit high-tech alien neighbors.

  What about meeting face (or whatever) to face?

  For as long as mainstream physics continues to insist that light sets the universal speed limit, travel even among neighboring star systems will be daunting—but doable. And so, in InterstellarNet: New Order, I exploited the proximity of InterstellarNet’s members to step up the inter-species conflicts with the beginnings of (slower than light) travel among community members.

  That made two novels in which I had conveniently ignored the Bandersnatch in the room.1 Oh, I’m not alone in doing so. Plenty of science fiction conveniently assumes alien civilizations in close proximity to one another and in control of nearly identical (read: competitive) levels of science and technology. Even with an FTL warp drive, I suspect the Star Trek franchise would crumble absent such handy competitors close at, well, hand.