Stargods

by Ian Douglas

  He’d learned a lot since his first interview with these beings, the one that had tragically ended with his Marine guards reducing two of their prisoners to lifeless cinders. He’d learned that the Nungiirtok referred to themselves as the Collective, the same as the Sh’daar polity to which they belonged. The Sh’daar, it was known, variously called themselves a collective or an associative. The terms were used loosely and were subject to irritating vagaries of translation. Perhaps it was reasonable that the Nungiirtok referred to themselves the same way. They’d been part of the Sh’daar Collective for a very long time.

  He’d learned that the Russians had, indeed, offered the twenty-five stranded Nungiirtok on Osiris a deal, a chance to be repatriated. The Nungie leader, an individual called Mavtok Chah, had certainly not trusted the humans, but the offer was simply too good to ignore. The humans might be deceiving them, probably were deceiving them, but the Nungiirtok party’s first responsibility was to get themselves off of that miserable planet. There’d been discussion about taking the ship they were on away from the Russians and flying it home, but that plan had proven unrealistic. There were several thousand humans on board, far too many for twenty-five warriors. Besides, the human controls and navigational systems were completely unknown to the Tok.

  And so they had waited, watching.

  They’d been confused by the American attack. Among the Tok, individuals might fight, often did fight, but nations? The Tok still did not understand that concept, and only distantly grasped the idea that the Americans and the Russians might be enemies, a single species divided by . . . what? Political necessity? War involved attacking other species, species pointed out by the Tok Iad.

  Mavtok Chah sat before Gray now, watching him steadily with those almost comically large, stalked eyes. The Tok were far too dangerous to release into the general population of the ship, but Gray wished there were some way of winning the massive being’s trust. There was so much more that might be learned.

  “Do you understand the concept of ‘alliance’?” Gray asked, his words translated through software shared by the human and the Tok.

  “I believe so,” Mavtok replied. “Tok and the Tok Iad have what I believe you mean by an alliance.”

  “Alliance suggests the two parties are equals. Are you the equals of the Tok Lords?”

  The being flinched. Good, Gray thought. Maybe I’m actually getting through that tough hide.

  “The Tok are Masters.”

  “Indeed. And you do everything they tell you?”

  “Of course.”

  “You don’t discuss their orders? You simply do what they demand?”

  “One does not challenge the Tok Iad.”

  “Then you are not equals. And you are not allies.”

  “Allies . . . fight on the same side against a common enemy.”

  Very good, Gray thought. He’s using the vocabulary we fed him. “Exactly. The Nungiirtok were allies with the Sh’daar Collective, right?”

  “We were.” The being had been hunched over in its cell, but now it straightened. Pride? Gray wished he could understand the play of emotions within the Tok’s mind.

  “But did you agree to fight on the side of the Sh’daar? Or was it the Tok Lords who made that agreement?”

  “The Tok Iad make all agreements with . . . outsiders.”

  “So the Tok are slaves.”

  Mavtok threw itself toward the transparency, its hinged lower jaw snapping out and slamming against the acrylic with a thud. Somehow, Gray managed to stay in his chair.

  The Marines behind them brought their weapons up, and Truitt jumped to his feet. “My God!”

  “I don’t think he can get through, Doctor,” Gray said with a casualness he did not feel. “The transparency has been reinforced.”

  “Yes, but did you test it?”

  “This is the test, Doctor. He didn’t break through, did he?”

  Truitt resumed his seat, a bit reluctantly, Gray thought. “Where are you going with this line of questioning?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “I don’t think provoking it will help us at all.”

  Gray didn’t reply, but studied the Tok through narrowed eyes. “Mavtok Chah. You seem distressed when I suggest that the Tok are slaves. Can you explain how you are not?”

  Several untranslatable sounds came through the link. “One does not explain the Tok. We give them life. They give us . . .”

  “Yes? What do you get in return for life?”

  “Death.”

  “Hardly seems fair, does it?”

  “If a Tok Iad were here, it would explain in full.”

  “Would it talk to me? An alien?”

  The Tok hesitated. “No.”

  “Then you’ll have to explain for them.”

  “I . . . cannot.”

  “Can you agree with me that the Tok are slaves of the Tok Iad, and not partners?”

  “No!”

  At least the creature hadn’t attacked the transparency that time.

  “Are you trying to get it to agree with you?” Truitt asked, using a private channel. The prisoner could not hear them.

  “Of course.”

  “Why?”

  “I would like these Nungies to become our allies. Right now, I think the only ones they trust are themselves. And the Tok Lords, of course.”

  Truitt nodded. “The problem is that you’re up against cultural cognition.”

  “Explain?”

  “Very basic psychology, Admiral. We see it in ourselves all the time. Any time you have an opinion, a belief, it gets filtered through all of the emotional baggage we’re carrying, right? In particular, it goes through our cultural baggage, the belief set that helps us identify with our own group, our tribe. Our chances for survival go up if our group identifies us, by our baggage, as part of them. That’s why, once someone makes up his mind about something, all of the logic, all of the rationality, all of the scientific proof in the world won’t make a bit of difference if it goes against his cultural mindset.”

  Gray thought about the bewildering kaleidoscope of distinct political, religious, and cultural beliefs back on Earth and thought he saw what Truitt meant. You could argue yourself blue in the face against an Ancient Alienist or an anti-singularist or, hell, a flat-Earther, but the harder you argued, the more the other guy would dig in his heels and refuse to reconsider those beliefs. Those beliefs, even the most bizarre, were shared by groups, and changing your mind meant alienation from the people with whom you identified.

  “So what’s the answer, Doctor?” Gray asked.

  “You soften your opponent up a bit first. Like this.” Truitt stood up and approached the transparency. “I’m sorry my friend here upset you, Mavtok,” he transmitted over the open channel. “He doesn’t understand. I can tell you must feel enormous pride at being a part of the Tok and Tok Iad union. You’re a part of a productive and vital civilization, one that’s been around for . . . I don’t know how long, but millions of years, maybe. That is amazing. I hope you can share some of the details of how your culture managed that.”

  “I did not know any of you understood this,” Mavtok said.

  “Oh, some of us do. And we admire you for what you’ve done.”

  “Flattery, Doctor?” Gray asked on the private channel.

  “Affirmation, Admiral. Some important experiments from a few centuries ago showed that if you get the subject to feel good about himself, you greatly increase the chance of getting him to accept your argument.”

  “You’re getting him to feel good about himself?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes. We don’t understand their psychology well enough to be certain this will work, but it’s certainly worth a try. You weren’t getting anywhere with your tactics.”

  “Whatever works, Doctor.”

  For almost another half an hour, Truitt chatted with the alien, getting it to talk about itself, about what it had done, about the accomplishments of its civilization. Much of wha
t it talked about was all but unintelligible to the humans. What, for instance, was the cultural significance of ascending to Toktok Moda, or of the mass genocide of a species that refused to fight?

  Once, during a break in the conversation, Gray laughed. “You know, I never thought I’d be playing good-cop bad-cop with a Nungie.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A technique in law enforcement from, oh, a few centuries back. Back before we could simply download a suspect’s in-head hardware. A suspect would be interrogated by two officers. One would be the tough guy, yelling, pounding the table, threatening the suspect. The other would bring coffee, talk nice, be a pal, as they used to say.”

  “Ah, yes. This is much the same thing, actually. If the suspect forms an emotional bond with the ‘good cop,’ he might be willing to talk. In this case, we want to see if we can get our prisoner to see our side of things, to see reason.”

  Later still, Truitt moved the ongoing conversation back around to the relationship between the Tok and the Tok Lords. “So . . . help me to understand, Mavtok,” he said. “You Tok voluntarily offer your bodies to the lords, yes?”

  “There is no coercion, no.”

  “And the Masters plant their seed inside your chest cavity, where it takes root and grows.”

  “We give them life.”

  “The life-giver dies when the young organisms eat their way out.”

  “They give us death.”

  “And this is a good thing?”

  The Nungie hesitated.

  Truitt pushed ahead. “You want this to happen? How do you feel about that?”

  The Nungiirtok’s lower jaw unfolded suddenly, but he didn’t attack the transparency this time. He stood there, the hinged appendage folding and unfolding rapidly. Flaps in the hide beneath the eyestalks pulsed open and shut rapidly as it breathed.

  “Cognitive dissonance,” Truitt explained.

  “If you say so.”

  “Mavtok is actually being forced to think about some of his opinions and is finding that much of what he always took for granted just doesn’t make sense, at least in this new context. He’s finding himself trapped between new information and belief sets that have always kept him safe.”

  “Kept him safe? How?”

  “The opinions and beliefs, the religions and superstitions, that ‘cultural baggage’ I mentioned—we use all of that as a kind of protective wall. It keeps the good guys—us and people like us—safe inside, while it keeps out the scary, threatening guys—anyone with ideas different from ours, you see?”

  “You put it that way, it’s a wonder any of us can ever change our minds . . . about anything.”

  “The trick is that people who feel good about themselves are a lot more likely to be open-minded, to accept new ideas.”

  “Dr. Truitt is correct,” another voice said in Gray’s mind.

  “Hey, Konstantin. You’ve been listening in?”

  “Of course. Our prisoners may offer our best hope for resolving the war between Humankind and the Nungiirtok.”

  “I thought the war was resolved,” Gray pointed out.

  “We have negotiated a peace with the Sh’daar,” Konstantin replied, “but individual Sh’daar Collective species remain hostile. These twenty-three Nungiirtok were still at war with humans on Osiris, so far as they were concerned. After decades of warfare, most other species within the Collective do not trust us. Their views of how things work are at such direct odds with ours, true understanding may not be possible. They and we have become polarized, diametrically opposed and unthinkingly hostile.”

  Gray thought about the anti-alien xenophobe groups back on Earth and had to agree. At this point, some humans would never change their minds about friendship with other species. Hell, Earth was filled with mutually hostile and polarizing groups right now, and every one had its own pet enemy, its own ideological target. Where once nations had hated one another, now it was small and splintered social groups at one another’s throats. Earth was teetering at the brink of anarchy as never before.

  So what was the answer—flattering them all until they agreed to get along? Somehow, Gray didn’t think that it was that simple.

  “The situation on Earth is extremely dangerous,” Konstantin continued. Damn, had it been reading his mind again? “That remains a different problem. But for the Nungiirtok, we may be able to combine Dr. Truitt’s psychological approach with some technology.”

  “What technology?”

  “The Nungiirtok, like most humans, possess in-head hardware, combining memory-enhancement, virtual reality, math coprocessors, and communication. The system is quite different from human technology, but we already have an electronic bridge—our translation program. I created it with an eye to providing a kind of back door into Nungiirtok neural implant technology.”

  “That,” Gray said, “is downright scary.”

  “Scary or not, the technology will allow me to create an electronic virus, one that carries certain memes.”

  “Like you did a few years ago against the Pan-Europeans.”

  “Something like that. In that instance, the meme we spread was one of revulsion against war and an irresponsible leadership drunk with power. In this case . . .”

  “What? What are you going to do?”

  “We will let them see reality.”

  Gray’s eyebrows shifted higher. “So here we are changing Nungie culture to something we approve of. Pretty arrogant.”

  “As with the Pan-Europeans,” Konstantin said, “this is a case where reality, our view of reality, is a matter of survival.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  25 April, 2429

  Command Bunker

  New White House

  Washington, D.C., USNA

  1501 hours, EST

  President Walker glowered at the holographic images around him. Thirty-seven world leaders had come on-line at Walker’s request, at his demand, and their projections filled the command bunker’s main briefing area. Thirty-seven nations out of over two hundred in the world today. It was a miserable showing. Walker thought about the long campaign to create a single, one-world government, and how many times the effort had failed. Humans, it seemed, were simply too fractious, too territorial, too xenophobic to unite.

  Humankind, he thought, was paying the price now.

  “We will never surrender to these invading monsters!” the leader of South India said, and several of the other images around her agreed.

  The voice of Jamyang Kyab, the leader of Tibet, gently mocked her. “South India, of course, has the absolute right to commit national suicide,” he said. “But perhaps the rest of us should be free to make up our own minds?”

  This, Walker thought, was getting them nowhere. The second Nungiirtok rock had missed the synchorbital ring, but fallen into the Atlantic Ocean just north of the equator. At this moment, hundred-meter tsunamis were sweeping toward the African and South American coasts; in a few hours, the wave would hit the Verrazzano-Narrows Dam south of Manhattan, and it was entirely possible that the reclamation efforts there would be swept away.

  Contact had already been lost with the Republic of Cape Verde. Senegal, The Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau would be next, probably within the next ten minutes, while northern Brazil would not be far behind.

  As the argument on the conference room floor continued, Walker opened private channels with three of the leaders present: Pan-Europe, the Russian Federation, the Chinese Hegemony. He could see their faces within the open windows in his mind.

  “Gentlemen and madam,” he said. “We four have ships actually involved in the fight right now. I think it’s obvious that the decision rests with us.”

  Renee Kurtz, the current president of the Pan-European Union, nodded. “It’s as you say, Mr. President,” she said. “If we do not surrender, there will be nothing left.”

  “Perhaps the forces you have on the alien planetoids will yet prevail,” Chairman Zhao Zhanshu said. “We should give them their chanc
e.”

  “Easy for you to say, Mr. Chairman,” Kurtz replied. “You’re on the other side of the planet! You don’t have giant tsunamis rolling toward your coasts!”

  “Your coastline is vulnerable with the first impact in the Pacific Ocean,” the president of the Russian Federation said. “And that will happen when the planet rotates enough to show its face to the enemy. Some of us shall enjoy watching that!”

  Oleg Kobylkin, Walker thought, was almost completely defined by his nation’s ongoing war with China. It was far easier to reach an agreement with his Defense Minister. Walker fervently wished Vasilyev was here instead of Kobylkin.

  “Mass murderer!” Zhao snapped.

  “Tinplate dictator!” Kobylkin replied.

  “If you please, gentlemen,” Walker said, “you two can fight your petty little wars later! We have more important matters before us!”

  “We could, Mr. President,” Kurtz said, “simply recall our own fleets, our own forces. That might at least buy us some time.”

  “I never would have imagined,” Walker said, “that surrender would be such a logistical nightmare!”

  “You are looking for consensus here?” Kobylkin said. “Very well. The Russian Federation supports your decision. We currently have five naval vessels in the defensive line at Mars, and three more en route. I will give orders to withdraw them all.”

  “The Chinese Hegemony agrees in principle, Mr. President. But only in principle. We demand, however, that we be fully represented in any negotiations with the aliens.”

  “Of course, of course,” Walker replied. “That goes without saying.”

  “Nevertheless, I prefer to hear you say it.”

  “Mr. Chairman—I promise you, the Chinese Hegemony will have full representation in any negotiations with the aliens. But right now, we have to stop this bombardment!”

  “You Americans have the majority of the naval assets at Mars orbit,” Kobylkin said. “You send the necessary message. But know that you do not speak for all of Earth. Russia demands a say in future negotiations as well.”

  “Of course. Thank you, all of you—”

  “Oh, don’t thank us. If this fails . . .” Kobylkin gave them all a wolfish grin. “If it fails, I shall very much enjoy watching Beijing sink beneath the waves!”