Edward M. Lerner (2 page)

Barnard’s Star
(local: K’rath): Earth’s second closest interstellar neighbor, after Alpha Centauri. A dim red dwarf, Barnard’s Star went undiscovered despite its proximity until 1916. Its two planets somewhat resemble Mars and a ringless Saturn.

While red dwarves are inhospitable to life due to their feeble energy output, Barnard’s Star is a recognized exception. The major satellite of its sole gas-giant planet sustains not only a viable ecosystem but also intelligent life. This habitable body is called K’vith by its dominant species (see related entry, Snakes).

K’vith benefits from the confluence of three factors. First, K’vith is a moon of a planet, K’far, that orbits very near to its sun. Second, the K’vithian atmosphere provides a pronounced greenhouse effect. Third, K’far induces tremendous tidal effects; the energy coupling manifests itself through strong oceanic movements and active volcanism. Volcanic gases originated and continue to reinforce the greenhouse effect.

K’rath is at least ten billion years old, more than twice the age of Sol. K’rath—and hence its planets—are consequently poor by human standards in heavy elements. Compared to Earth, K’vith is also low on solar-energy input for the vegetative base of its food chainand high on geological stresses. K’vith’s energy—and resource-constrained biosphere is, by terrestrial norms, undiverse and underpopulated. These environmental limitations are generally thought reponsible for the comparatively slow evolution of life and civilization in the K’rath system.

—Internetopedia

“Watch out for that truck!” Art said.

Head swiveling in confusion, Eva half stumbled off, half was propelled off, her treadmill. She landed, totally without grace, on Art. They tumbled to the floor.

She’d probably been jogging on autopilot, her attention somewhere in the infosphere. The treadmill monitor’s scenic display had shown a truck approaching on an intersecting road. Had she even noticed? “That wasn’t nearly as amusing as I’d hoped.”

Climbing back to her feet, Eva gave a wry grin. “Are you okay?”

He sat on the deck, rubbing the arm newly out of its cast. “Just embarrassed. Sorry.”

She gave him a hand up. “
Don’t
do that again.”

“No chance of that.”

“I’ll be off the treadmill in another few minutes.” She gestured at the mini-gym’s other piece of gear, a stationary bike. “Or did you plan to use that?”

“On second thought, maybe I’ll do the walking course.”

“I’ll join you, if that’s okay.”

The “walking course” consisted of the narrow corridors circling the two decks on which passengers were allowed, and the ladders joining those levels. A circuit took about thirty seconds.
I’m trapped like a rat in a maze.
On those two decks, Art knew the location of every hatch, duct, ziptite stash, and alarm button.

In total silence, thirty seconds is a long time. “How does our little project affect you?” Eva finally asked.

“It makes me nervous as hell. Assuming light still defines a speed limit, this visit was many years in coming. So why didn’t the Snakes speak up until they were almost on top of us? Having announced themselves, and that their ship is damaged, why have they had so little to add?

“And if they’ve found a way to beat light speed … you would know far better than I what that implies about our comparative grasps of physics. I’m no xenophobe, but anyone in my position at the ICU can’t forget how they once exploited a superior knowledge of biocomputing.”

“Not knowing how they got here is killing me—or maybe the swill they call coffee onboard ship is doing me in.” She patted her stomach and grimaced. “
Something
is getting to me. But I meant at a personal level. Who did this tear you away from?”

The kind of question he never knew how to answer. “My job. Truth be told, my best friends are coworkers.” She gave back some of his silence as they completed the circuit of one deck and climbed down to the other. Fine. “Pre-ICU, I was married. Moving around the solar system, from project site to project site, eventually took care of that.” On one spaceship after another. In newly carved asteroid habitats. Under low domes. He’d been too busy confronting his inner demons to connect with his family.

“Children?”

“A son, nine, and a daughter, fourteen. Good kids. They and Maya live on Luna. I see more of them now than when I was married.”

Some combination of the partially completed jog and the walking circuit kicked in, and he yawned. That gave her an excuse to cut short the conversation. She said goodnight the next time they passed her cabin.

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.