Final Inquiries Read online

  "Are humans really frightened of us?" Brox asked, almost seeming surprised. "I suppose I knew that, intellectually, but it never really struck me as an emotional fact. We're frightened of you, of course--and also, I might add, very angry and annoyed."

  "Annoyed? Why?"

  "That isn't obvious? We arrived out in galactic society, or whatever you want to call it, just a few twelves of years before you did. We look back on that brief period as a lost golden age of promise. We weren't just one of two Younger Races. We were the Young Race among all the Elder Races, the only Young Race. Special. The first New Race of sentient starfaring beings to emerge in many thousands of years. In fact, it had been so long since a new sentient species was located that most of the Elder Races had assumed that the process of emergence was completed. We were unique, and of interest.

  "Some of them took to calling us the Last Race. Their studies proved that 'the wave of evolutionary fervor'--that was their favorite phrase--that had produced all the sentient races had reached its end. We were the last dot on the graph, the last to appear. We were to be cherished, prized, protected.

  "And then humans emerged, and the novelty was gone. Suddenly all their theories were wrong--and Elder Race scientists don't like to be proven wrong any more than Kendari scientists--or human ones, for that matter.

  "Somehow or another, they seemed to take it out on your people, and mine, almost as if we had evolved, developed spaceflight, then star travel for no other reason than to make them look foolish.

  "Since you appeared they have to explain away everything they got wrong. Some of them have decided you humans are merely the last aberration, the Last Race. Some have taken to assuming that there are any number of other Younger Races out there, bound to appear at any minute. But that position requires that they admit their mistake.

  "So mostly the Elders have dealt with the problem by simply declaring that all Younger Races--humans, Kendari, and whoever else might suddenly pop up--are utterly insignificant. We are all so weak, so small, so behind in our technology that we simply do not matter. It doesn't matter if their theories are wrong, because the subjects of their theories aren't worth bothering about."

  "That goes along with what our xenologists have concluded regarding the Elder Races in general," said Jamie. "The Elders figure that they know so much, and can do so much, have such superb science and technology and so forth, that anything they don't know or can't do is at the edges, unimportant."

  Jamie had never really thought about the human-Kendari rivalry from the Kendari point of view. The human emergence into interstellar space must have upended any number of plans and hopes and expectations. It was just as irrational for the Kendari to resent the humans as it was for the Elders to resent both Younger Races for the crime of spoiling their nice neat theories.

  There was a series of clanks and thuds, and Jamie sat up a little straighter. "Is our command sphere going to take another little ride?" he asked.

  "I believe so," said Brox. "We are still traveling at something very close to light-speed, and will of course have to decelerate in order to match the orbit of Tifinda. Greveltra will want us as far from the propulsion system this time as he did the last time. Should we perhaps awaken Senior Special Agent Wolfson?"

  "Huh? What?" Hannah came awake at the sound of her name. "Are we there yet?" she asked. "What's going on?"

  The command sphere lurched forward before anyone could answer. They looked overhead to watch the sphere climb the vertical shaft system. "Brox says we're getting ready to slow down," Jamie half shouted, trying to make sure he was heard over the bangs and clatters of their transit.

  "Thanks for the tip," Hannah said. "I never would have figured that out on my own."

  The sphere crashed and banged through the various hatches and back up into the navigation-dome position.

  The view overhead was utterly different. There was a muddled blob of reddened stars at the zenith, unnaturally crowded together, with only a sprinkling of smeared, distorted, off-color stars to fill up the sky between the horizon and the near zenith. It took Jamie a moment to figure it out. The Eminent Concordance had turned around, pointing her aft end toward the direction of travel in order to decelerate. The ship was flying backwards, and Jamie was looking back the way they had come. The view of the stars was redshifted when looking behind.

  He barely had time to understand the spectacle before it disappeared. Suddenly the sky began to change, the stars spreading out from the center of the view, expanding out of their smeared distortion and color shifts, back toward the calm and familiar stars--but in a new pattern, the constellations of Center's sky completely gone. They had slowed down from near light-speed in a matter of seconds. A human-built ship--or most Elder Race ships--would have required days or weeks.

  Almost before the stars had regained their normal appearance, the Eminent Concordance pivoted around to a new heading.

  At least the sight of the stars wheeling around in the sky was comprehensible. They might not have seen this sky before, but they had seen other skies do more or less the same thing. What they were not ready for was the sight of the planet Tifinda coming into view. The Vixa home world was a famously gaudy sight, and Jamie had seen endless images of it displayed in and on books, posters, video-walls, and so on. But none of those versions measured up to the real thing.

  They were close, startlingly close to the planet. Jamie had assumed the paranoically safety-minded Greveltra would have vectored the massive ship into a high and distant parking orbit, just to keep that impossibly powerful propulsion system well away from populated areas. Instead, they were close enough to see the structure of the Stationary Ring on the daylight side of the planet, and the running lights of the Ring on Tifinda's nightside. They were directly over one of Tifinda's poles--Jamie had no way of telling north or south--and therefore looking straight down at the planet, with the day-and nightsides visible. The nightside of black and deep blues, set with the glowing lights of cities, made a striking contrast with the blue-white-brown-and-green world of dayside. The gleaming silver-bright Ring hung round the planet like a gleaming diadem inset with glittering jewels.

  The Ring encircled Tifinda precisely at the altitude of the planet's spin-stationary orbit, the point where the orbital velocity exactly matched the planet's rate of rotation. The engineering effort must have been immense, and hideously complex and expensive, but the result was simple: The Ring, as seen from the surface, was utterly motionless.

  It was linked to the surface by the Six Columns, spaced equally around the planetary equator. The columns themselves were far too slender to be visible even at as close a range as this one, but it was easy to tell where they were. Gigantic, glittering domed-over space habitats were embedded in the Ring over each column, and huge, gleaming counterweights, metallic spheres the size of small asteroids, rode on extensions of the columns, several thousand kilometers farther out from the planet itself.

  "Sort of makes the Grand Elevator at Metran look like nothing at all, doesn't it?" Jamie asked.

  "It sure does," Hannah agreed. "And Metran's Elevator impressed the hell out of us not so long ago. I read up on elevators after that one, and of course, there was a lot of material about Tifinda. The overall structure is beyond huge. According to most calculations, the interior living spaces of the Stationary Ring, plus the Column Cities, plus all the other structures hanging off the Ring add up to a total habitable area substantially larger than what there is on the planet's surface."

  "That's not just grandiose," said Jamie. "That's borderline insane. Why the devil could they possibly need that much space? Is their population that big? I thought the Elders sneered at us lowly humans for breeding to excess."

  "They do, and they are right," said Brox. "You do breed too quickly. But that is beside the point. My information is that, even at the most generous definition of what constitutes a sentient Vixan, the total planetary population, including the Ring and Columns, is substantially below a billion."
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br />   "So why build that monstrosity?"

  "A human I have had some dealings with called it 'keeping up with the Joneses,' if I am translating the English phrase properly into Lesser Trade. Competition through the acquisition and creation of status markers. Once one clan had an elevator, all the clans that could possibly manage had to have one too. But there was a practical strategic side to it as well. Once one elevator was in place, the clan that controlled it gained improved access to space, and the other clans needed to follow suit in order to match that capability. When the Ring was proposed, all the clans cooperated with the project to demonstrate their wealth, to keep parity with the other clans' capabilities, and show how unafraid and unintimidated they were."

  "'We are strong enough that we have nothing to fear from connecting our column to yours,'" suggested Hannah.

  "Precisely. All this was endless thousands of years ago, of course. The irony is, of course, that living in a Column City or a Ring segment is vastly different from living on the planet's surface. As a result, the communities on the Column Cities and the various sections of the Stationary Ring evolved long ago into essentially independent clans that form and split alliances with their ancestor clans and the rivals of those clans whenever they see fit--and the Column City Clans control the column elevators, and, therefore, most access to space. In terms of enhancing the security and space access of the clans that were the original builders, the whole project was massively counterproductive."

  Brox looked thoughtfully out at the incredible structure. "Mind you, I am quoting the analysis of my own people--though it coincides closely with what your researchers have to say as well."

  Jamie caught Hannah's eye. This close to where they were going, Brox was allowing himself to let a few details slip. There were humans on the planet--humans who spent time observing and studying the Vixan culture, humans with whom the Kendari were in contact.

  "Arms-race theory," said Hannah. "Not all that far off from keeping up with the Joneses, really. The Red Queen, running as fast as she can to stay in one place."

  "The Red What?" Brox asked.

  "Hmm? Oh! An Earth legend. Not important. The point is that in an arms race, you expend a great deal of effort without gaining any advantage--but you must expend the effort or risk falling behind. All sides compete for advantage with such intensity that every achievement is canceled out or countered by the opposition before it can do any good. No clan benefited from the race."

  "Except in this case, it was of benefit to all the clans as a whole," said Jamie. "Now the planet has six space elevators, six orbital cities, and the Ring itself. Those are pretty significant assets."

  "The first elevator was a significant asset, and possibly the second--and perhaps even the third if you consider it as a backup system. But six is just a massive waste of resources," said Brox. "And that's not me opinionating. That's our embassy's economic staff doing some very thorough analysis. But the same analysts pointed out that we don't place the same values on things as species like the Vixa."

  "'We' meaning Kendari?"

  Brox looked a bit surprised. "No, actually, now that you ask, I realize what I meant by 'we' was individualist species, like yours and mine, as opposed to collectivist species, like the Vixa."

  "You're not saying the Vixa don't have the concept of the individual," Hannah objected.

  "No, of course not," said Brox. He gestured toward the SubPilot. "Obviously they do. Greveltra has a name, a status, a title. But the group is far more important. If I asked you who you were, you might say, 'I am Hannah Wolfson, Senior Special Agent of the BSI,' and leave it at that, and not even bother to say you were human, as that would be assumed. Greveltra would say 'I am of the Vixa, of the planet Tifinda, Founder's Pillar Clanline, of the rank SubPilot,' and might not even mention his name, thinking it unimportant.

  "My point is that a collectivist species places very different values on things. Status of the group is important, but not individual status. A human or Kendari might want a large house or an important-sounding title to demonstrate his or her own wealth or value. A Vixan wouldn't bother much with that--but would want to work with others to build the biggest, grandest city or spacecraft or whatever to demonstrate the power and wealth of the group.

  "You and I would see a huge, gleaming, near-empty Column City as a waste of resources that could have gone to improving the well-being of individuals. Greveltra would regard that same empty city as a worthy investment in staking out the territory of the Clanline, and in denying those resources to the competition. Those goals are not alien to your people or mine, of course--but the Vixa emphasize the group to such an extent, and downplay the individual so much, as to be quite jarring to Kendari--and humans. And many other species, for that matter."

  Jamie glanced back at Greveltra. Had the SubPilot even heard Brox? Would he even care what a mere non-Vixan said or thought? But if Greveltra was a relatively low-ranking Vixan who could safely regard mere Younger Race types as beneath his interest--how did he square that with the frantic urgency of the effort he himself was expending to get those same Younger Race types to where they were going? Didn't the importance of their mission--whatever it was--confer any sort of status to them?

  "Now at programmed and authorized station-keeping point," Greveltra announced. "Preparing for separation of vehicles."

  "This is where everything starts to happen very quickly," said Brox.

  Before Jamie or Hannah could ask what he meant, Jamie felt an odd, shivering vibration course through his body, a sensation he recognized as a new acceleration-compensation field powering up. He suddenly understood what Greveltra had meant by vehicle separation.

  Just then, the world--or at least the command sphere--began to turn upside down. Their view of Tifinda rolled away, to be replaced with a view down the shaft they had ridden before. Three lines of running lights came on, and Jamie could see some sort of mechanical motion far down the shaft. It looked as if something was retracting into the side wall. He realized it was the portal tube that had transferred them sideways between this vertical shaft and the one that they had been in originally.

  With the way clear, he could see that the shaft they were in was a straight drop that went a lot farther down than he had realized.

  There came a bang and a thud--but no sense of vibration or motion--and they were sliding down to the base of the shaft. The command sphere had rotated through a hundred and eighty degrees. They were looking straight up toward where down had been moments before--and they were moving toward it at an alarming rate of speed.

  "I do not understand the process completely, but in essence the shaft we are traveling in right now will serve as a form of linear accelerator, using the interference patterns between the sphere's acceleration compensator and that of the propulsion module to throw us forward at great speed. The command sphere is inverted to maximize the desired interference reaction."

  "Like a bullet out of a gun," said Jamie as the sphere hurtled to the end of the shaft. "First they have to load us into the chamber." They stopped with a boom and a thud. There was still not the slightest physical sensation of the command sphere moving at all, a stillness that was completely at odds with the sounds of big machine parts banging along and the sight of their craft being bashed and shuttled around.

  "Activating launch sequence," said Greveltra in his bland, flat, expressionless voice.

  There was a blinding flash of light and suddenly the shaft was filled with a storm of lightning bolts that flared around the sphere, engulfing it without touching it. The walls of the shaft flashed past in a blur, and, in less than a heartbeat, the sphere was flung into clear space.

  They were looking upward and backwards along their line of flight at the massive spherical bulk of the Eminent Concordance--or at least the ninety-nine-point-ninety-five percent of her that was her massive propulsion module.

  The sheets of lightning blazed up out of the launching shaft, seemingly unwilling to release the command sphere, th
eir crackling fires dancing and reflecting on the polished golden surface of the great ship.

  Greveltra swung the command sphere about, pointing it along its direction of travel, straight at the planet itself, directly overhead.

  They were moving fast enough that Tifinda was growing visibly larger moment by moment. Jamie made a rough guess at their distance from the planet and realized they had to be moving at something like a hundred thousand kilometers an hour, straight at the planet. If Greveltra suddenly keeled over and the command sphere flew on as it was and impacted the surface at their present speed, at minimum the energy release would be comparable to a large nuclear weapon. He decided a few prayers for the health of their pilot and the continued proper functioning of their ship might be in order.

  Jamie felt a few muscles straining and decided he had gotten tired of craning his neck to look directly overhead. He sat down on the deck, pulled off his gear vest, bunched it into a lumpy makeshift pillow the same way Hannah had, and lay down flat, his head on the vest. He could be astonished and overawed just as handily while flat on his back.

  Hannah glanced down at him, saw what he had done, and lay down next to him, her head on her own vest. For a bizarre moment, Jamie was irresistibly reminded of camping trips in the mountains, lying back, looking up at the sky, and sharing the teenage equivalent of deep thoughts with his camping buddy. "What do you want to be when you grow up?" he half muttered, more to himself than to Hannah.

  "Huh? What?"

  Jamie chuckled and shook his head. "Nothing. Never mind."

  "Glad you can find something to laugh about," Hannah said. "Do you have any idea how fast we must be going?"

  "Yes," said Jamie. "But I don't see any point in discussing it." He glanced over at Brox, who had sat himself down and was calming watching the incoming planet. Jamie decided the Kendari was out of earshot and spoke to Hannah in low tones. "Do you have any useful guesses about what we're going to find down there?"