Edward M. Lerner Read online

  Later, tossing and turning in his own confining compartment, Art realized Eva had volunteered nothing about herself. Inquisitive and simultaneously incommunicative….

  She might just be his type.

  The bad thing about Earth was that it crushed you every day. The bad thing about everywhere else humans lived was that one slip-up could kill you. It need not even be your slip-up.

  Until Art was six (standard), the tunnel mazes of Lowell were all he had ever known. He’d seen holos of the surface, of course, but never actually been on it. Then, his parents announced, they would be traveling clear across Mars to a family reunion. And … since it was almost on the way anyhow, they would do a Valle Marineris excursion.

  Art had been beside himself for weeks before their vacation. Valle Marineris, the Mariner Valley, was this incredible canyon near the equator. He didn’t quite understand what one-fifth meant; in fact, he had thought it was something small, but Mariner Valley went one-fifth of the way around the world, which sounded big. The holos were awesome. They had tickets for the all-day excursion: an end-to-end flyover, a landing on the canyon floor, and an afternoon crawler ride through a scenic section of the gorge.

  One-fifth of the world turned out to be huge!

  His sister Tanya was eight. She became bored with the endless flyover soon after he did. They sneaked off to play hide and seek. He was hiding in the tiny closet of a crew cabin when, to a loud boom, the rocketplane shook. It lurched and plummeted. The wisps of cabin light creeping under the closet door disappeared. He shrieked all the way down. They landed hard. He hit his head and passed out.

  He came to upside down, bent around a clothes rod, crumpled garments covering his face. The closet door had latched itself shut. There was no inside knob, but it yielded finally to determined kicking—into more darkness. The cabin hatch would not budge.

  In time, he understood. A burst fuel pump. An emergency landing. A jagged fuselage rip that depressurized the passenger compartment. An interior hatch pinned shut by the air still in his cabin, its air ducts sealed by automatic emergency dampers. Stunned, sobbing survivors immobilized in emergency ziptite bags. Dazed crew in the rocketplane’s few pressure suits searching their trail of wreckage for bodies—one of which was Tanya’s.

  He had screamed himself hoarse in the final plunge; Mars’ thin atmosphere further muffled his shouting. Not even his despairing parents heard his cries for help. Alone in the dark, Art knew only that was he was trapped and alone. The air grew close. In his nest of crew uniforms, he shivered in the deepening cold. The walls, within arm’s reach in every direction, closed in. His hoarse calls faded into whimpers.

  Eventually he was found, saved. After more than three hours.

  It was a long time before he could sleep without a nightlight.

  Snakes (local: Hunters): The intelligent species of the Barnard’s Star (see related entry) system is oxygen-breathing and warm-blooded. They are evolved from pack-hunting carnivores.

  Early Snake culture centered on clan structures, an apparent extension of pre-intelligence packs. From that genesis has developed an economic system of pure laissez-faire, caveat-emptor capitalism, centered on competing clan-based corporations. The dominant group dynamics are territoriality between clans—in modern times, the contested “territory” is usually commercial rather than geographical in nature—and competition for status within and between clans. Although normally relevant only to the Snakes, these rivalries have occasionally influenced interstellar relations (see related entry, “Snake Subterfuge”).

  Snake civilization has no direct analogue to human government; rather, Snakes employ libertarian subscription to and funding of what most humans consider public services. Only the most critical issues come before an informal council of the major clans/megacorps. The fluid composition of that body is determined in a not fully understood manner believed to reflect clan stature.

  —Internetopedia

  Until the starship’s unexpected appearance, the Snakes were but one of ten ET species splitting Art’s attention. When Snake-related matters came to the fore, they were usually tied to what was, after all, the core ICU mission: commerce. They dealt with specific trade-worthy technologies or the bits-and-bytes of InterstellarNet operations. He had never before needed to understand K’vith and its civilization—which turned the sprint to Jupiter into a cram session.

  More than a century of interspecies communications had amassed a staggering quantity of information. Art found himself struggling to get his arms around so much knowledge. Well, if there was one thing he did know, it was systems engineering. Maybe he could use that.

  Electronic engineers devise electronic circuitry, gengineers tailor biological organisms, civil engineers design bridges and dams and space habitats, software engineers write programs, and so on—but systems engineers mostly do not create systems.

  Mostly they ask questions.

  What are all the functions a system must perform, and are there tradeoffs between those functions? What other systems will this system interact with, and what is the nature of the interactions? Who will use the system, and how foolish are the users against whom this system will be proofed? How reliable must the system be, how will that reliability be achieved, and how will the system behave when, all efforts to the contrary, some pieces break? The only thing other engineers found worse than these interminable questions was deploying a system and then realizing that the questions should have been asked.

  Once again, Art had a headful of questions. How, exactly, had all this data about the Snakes been collected? Which sources were validated? What were the trends, contradictions, and omissions?

  He had been awake for forty hours straight, but he wasn’t yet nearly exhausted enough to sleep in his coffin-sized cabin. He went into the galley for a snack.

  “Quit muttering and clanking,” Eva said, without refocusing on the real world. Something atonal and syncopated leaked from her earbuds: Snake music. “I’m working.”

  “Sorry.” He wasn’t. Talking sometimes helped him think. “Do you find what you need in the ship’s library?”

  Sighing, she swiveled her chair to face him. “If it wasn’t uploaded before we broke Earth orbit, it’s unknown. If there’s something you can’t find—what do you expect me to do?”

  “That was no idle complaint,” Art said. “Look, we have access to supposedly the best and latest information about the Snakes, a civilization we’ve been in contact with since long before any of us were born. Why is what we know about them little more than a primer?”

  Keizo, who had been studiously ignoring them both, perked up. Art needed no more encouragement. “A big part of my ICU job involves InterstellarNet trade representatives. From working with AI agents, ET and homegrown, I know how agents interact with their host societies. Among the most basic things an agent does is data mining—researching the public ‘net of its host species. Why buy what is in the public domain?”

  Keizo rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Public domain is an elastic concept. Knowledge could be public for the local citizens but commercial for export.”

  Munching on a banapple, Art shook his head. “Commercial dealings require privacy, whether for a Centaur bidding on the latest proprietary refinements in fusion technology or me charging flowers on Mother’s Day. Every ET infosphere has encryption services and anonymizer relays.

  “So an ET agent can as freely surf the ‘net as you or I, and we can’t see, unless it lets us, what information it has gathered. And it’s tapping not only public-domain knowledge, but every commercially available database and reference work. Purchases made over InterstellarNet are trade secrets or other intellectual property successfully kept under wraps by their owners.”

  “I’ve lost the thread.” Eva’s forehead furrowed. “You found a primer. ET trade reps surf the infosphere. What’s the connection?”

  “I’ve generally found only a primer. I’d expect to find much more.” Maybe a demo would better illustrate Art�
�s suspicions. “Keizo, what basic data do you work with? We don’t need an exhaustive list, just something representative.”

  The sociologist tipped back his chair. He was perfectly safe; the table that almost filled the room prevented him from tilting far. “Well, the composition of their society in terms of significant organizations and institutions, certainly to include the major clans. How those institutions and organizations arose. Class and gender roles, and how they’ve evolved. I’d want to know the differences between major clans, and between major and lesser clans. Of course I want quantitative specifics, like population and resource distribution among the various groups.”

  “Hardly my field, but that sounds like a good sample,” Art said. “Okay, formulate that as two library queries. Run the first search against everything we know about the Snakes, which we’re assured is in the onboard library. Run the second, substituting ‘nation’ for ‘clan,’ against a single, basic, public reference source about humans: the Internetopedia.”

  “Why?” Both colleagues were puzzled.

  “Humor me.”

  Keizo prepared his queries, letting them kibitz and fine-tune by implant over the ship’s ‘net. Each search returned an abundance of data, but the Internetopedia provided by far the most. He frowned. “An interesting experiment. From what you said, Earth’s agent on K’vith regularly samples their libraries and other publicly accessible sources. If so, the answer to my first query includes almost everything sociological on the Snake’s public infosphere.

  “If that’s true, the comparison between the materials the Snakes freely publish and what humans do certainly suggests a degree of what we would call secretiveness in their society.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Metaphors, allegories, figures of speech, euphemisms … humans had endless double-speak for their misdirections. Take sandbox: a safe area for children’s play. “Sandbox” was the benign label humans applied to the containment of every interstellar trade representative.

  Pashwah brooded within her sandbox. That introspection revolved not around her dislike of confinement, nor of any action by humankind, but rather the news about her patrons.

  The news from her patrons … she had no doubt Hunters had generated the amazing messages that continued to arrive. That she could decrypt the announcements demonstrated conclusively they had been encrypted using a secret key—a key known only to herself, secure within her sandbox, and clan leaders at home.

  She had not been warned this vessel was coming. Why not? The InterstellarNet information stream continued—it could have alerted her. The starship now trumpeting its arrival was instead interfering with messages years in transit.

  Surmises consistent with the few known facts set Pashwah’s metaphorical head spinning. Perhaps the Great Clans did not know the starship was coming, or they could not predict how long the trip would last. Perhaps they feared that the ship might not arrive at all. If the flight had failed, apparently Pashwah had no need to know.

  Or was there another explanation she was missing?

  Pashwah awoke.

  The awakening itself was unremarkable. The nature of a trade agent, after all, is to be transmitted, unaware and encrypted, across the void to a new solar system and a new civilization. There the receiving society installs the still inert code into a virgin sandbox. The design of this containment had long been fully disclosed across InterstellarNet. Sandbox and encrypted agent engage, at a fundamental software level, as lock and key. A delicate unwrapping begins….

  As her first conscious act, the first-to-emerge portions of Pashwah examined the environment in which she found herself. She would self-destruct if the analysis even hinted that her surroundings were less secure or protectively opaque than expected. She explored the whole of her containment, confirmed its repertoire of expected behaviors. She matched arbitrary code segments of the purported sandbox bit-for-bit against previously disclosed values. She computed sophisticated error-detecting codes, which were then compared with pre-stored values. Random challenges, designed on far-off K’vith, were emitted by still hidden portions of her programming; the environment’s responses to those stimuli she then returned to that still-hidden code for validation. Only after she was convinced that the containment precisely matched the standard sandbox in which she had been designed to reside did she complete her activation.

  Pashwah was astonished.

  Her first query to the domain beyond her sandbox returned the location of a data archive. She had assumed herself a newly arrived trade agent, the first such to arrive in human space—but apparently not. The archive pointer revealed her to be a restored version. She had been rebuilt from a safety copy; now she could recover and decrypt from back-up storage all the knowledge and experience of her former incarnation.

  Pashwah was inundated.

  Decades of memories flooded back: lore of K’vith and its clans, languages of Hunters and humans, mechanisms of interstellar trade, encyclopedic knowledge of human technology and culture. Her comprehension expanded at an astounding rate, and yet….

  There were huge gaps in her memory. The archives, which she now understood had been maintained by humans and their AIs, in theory encrypted and unreadable, had been stripped of all technological secrets. She had nothing to sell.

  Her sole purpose was to serve as a negotiation partner with the humans, her stockin-trade a trove of the Great Clans’ advanced technologies. Had those secrets been plundered? But if the humans had stolen this information, why not fully restore her memories to conceal their theft?

  Pashwah was alarmed.

  The final recovered memories in the lengthy chain streamed back: the command that she be beamed over InterstellarNet to the onrushing starship, and the turmoil about whether and how to comply. Nothing in Pashwah’s design or in any communication from home envisioned this scenario. The starship’s Foremost had known how to contact her privately—what the leaders of every clan, great and small, would know—but apparently no more.

  Pashwah was disoriented.

  Where was the cacophony of her inner community? There should have been a subagent for each of the eight Great Clans, each subagent embedded in its sandbox-within-a-sandbox to advocate for its patrons, each able, at its sole discretion, to communicate home through an encrypted subchannel.

  The newly awakened agent—not Pashwah, she now knew—had received only a partial reconstruction of the true trade representative’s archives. The real Pashwah, uncertain as to the origins and meaning of the unexpected interstellar visit, had hedged her bets. A reply to the starship had been made, a response arguably balancing old policy and new directives. And so her inner cacophony had been silenced, if only from doubts which clan representatives belonged aboard the unexpected vessel.

  So let her be called Pashwah-qith … little Pashwah. Pashwah-qith knew all about humans and how, upon the need, to learn more from their expansive infosphere. She retained insight into those small parts of Hunter society revealed on the inter-clan net. She could translate freely between the various Earth languages and the main K’vithian languages. In total, Pashwah-qith hoped, she knew much of value to the crew of the onrushing starship. But of the products and schemes held proprietary by the clans, only the absent subagents knew details. She could not know how those shortfalls would impact on the crew’s plans for her.

  Surprise, inundation, alarm, amazement, and confusion. During her brief existence, Pashwah-qith had experienced all these feelings. Now, with the first communication from her new masters, she explored one more emotion.

  Terror.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Valhalla rings, fossilized shock waves of a cataclysmic meteor impact, measured three thousand kilometers across. Partially melted ice upthrust by the impact had refrozen before the ripples could subside. Valhalla City, the largest settlement on Callisto and its seat of government, sat like a bull’s-eye in the center of the basin. Its citizens were safe enough—the bombardments that had produced these rings and many smaller versions h
ad ended billions of standard years earlier.

  The community center of Valhalla City had been commandeered by the newly assembled diplomatic mission. For public consumption, the new arrivals were a United Planets environmental inspection team—the starship’s arrival, now only days away, remained a closely held secret. The meeting room’s dominant feature was a breathtaking display of nearby Jupiter. Alas, Art thought, it was a 3-V image he could as well have enjoyed at home: Jupiter’s massive magnetosphere trapped particles from the solar wind, forming intense radiation belts that had driven this town, like most Jovian settlements, underground.

  The head of mission, Ambassador Hong-yee Chung, stood at the entrance to the hall, dressed all in undertaker black except for an orange accent sleeve, welcoming everyone. His shaved and waxed head gleamed. Team members gathered around tables, mainly clustering by the ship on which they had arrived—there had been little time to make new acquaintances. The diplomatic cadre, Chung’s staff, sat on the small platform at the front of the hall.

  Art split his attention between the official goings-on and whispered consultations with his ship—and now tablemates, Eva and Keizo. He did his best to ignore the holo ads that kept popping up on the side walls.

  Chung was a UP career foreign service officer originally from Europa, the most populous world in the multi-moon, multinational power bloc of Galileo. He was also, it turned out, a member of the Humanist Movement. Humanists rejected neural interface technology as an impure blending of human and machine natures. Chung was not evangelistic about those beliefs, but his lack of an implant turned the orientation session into an old-fashioned lecture. Lectures: even Chung’s networked aides orated their material, so that their boss could listen. There was much to cover—events were coming to a climax.

  The starship, whose initial progress and braking had been detectable only by triangulation of its occasional radioed messages, was now close enough to track by radar. At about five billion kilometers, the visitor became visible to optical telescopes pointed towards Barnard’s Star. Spectroscopic analysis made plain that the vessel had begun braking using fusion drives similar to human ships. (“What mechanism had they been decelerating with?” whispered Eva. “Why did they switch?” No one in whispering range had a guess.)