Authors: Sheri S. Tepper
She had come quite far, she had seen quite enough, but her ship was not scheduled to return for two days. She had been passing the time playing cards, a complicated kind of solitaire that took her mind off her recurrent feelings of amorphous and aimless sadness. Or maybe anger. Or maybe sheer peevishness. She had no explanation for these emotions, which seemed to rise like smoke whenever she was unoccupied, but she knew from long experience they would be less intrusive if she was distracted.
Additional distraction presented itself in the form of a small shuttle that plunged from the zenith and settled onto the mown area to emit a stooped and stuttering Flagian, a trader from his dress, who came tottering unerringly toward her. Questioner rose and awaited him, the cards scattered on the equipment box that served her as a table. He was an aged and floppy-fleshed fellow, one of those whose forefathers had survived the Flagian Miscalculation by virtue of being several systems removed at the time it occurred.
“Questioner?” he asked, with a certain diffidence, peering shortsightedly through the tinted glasses that protected his pink eyes. “I am Ybor Transit.”
“We have met before,” she said. “You sold me that information about the indigenous dancers on Newholme.”
“Aha,” he murmured. “You do remember. I have been searching for you because I have something else you may find interesting. Is it true you are a collector of information on non-mankind races?”
“More or less,” she said coolly.
“I have in my possession an actual sensory recording of a Quaggian event.” He paused, adding, in a hushed and mysterious voice, “A ritual event.”
“Wouldn’t it be unintelligible to me?” she asked in the uninterested tone she reserved for traders, politicians, and members of her politically appointed entourage. “The Quaggi do not talk with us at all.”
“May I sit down, Ma’am? Thank you kindly.” He lowered himself onto one of the smaller equipment cases. “The Quaggi do talk to traders, Ma’am. There are certain botanical substances which they require, and they are sufficiently interested in obtaining these to answer a few questions now and again. As a matter of fact, the BIT, that’s the Brotherhood of Interstellar Trade, Ma’am, has circulated a list of questions so that each trader calling upon the Quaggi can ask one or more of them. Thus we fill in our knowledge in an orderly fashion.”
“Remarkable,” said the Questioner, seating herself across from him. “I had no idea you were so well organized.”
“We aren’t, in many manners.” The old Flagian gave her a gap-toothed grin. He went on, “We are curious, however, and there’s no denying that the more one knows about a client, the better it is for trade.”
“Are the Quaggi bisexual, as we’ve been told?”
“They say so.”
“Why have we never seen a female?”
“They say members of their opposite sex are mindless and incompetent, useful only for breeding and therefore confined to planetary life. We’ve never seen any, so I assume we haven’t found the planet where they’re kept, yet. We have learned this much through the use of translator devices.”
“Is there a translator built into the thing you’re trying to sell me?”
“In this case, it doesn’t matter,” muttered the Flagian, fingering a scar that cast a fuchsia shadow across the rose-pink expanse of his furrowed forehead. “This is an allemissions record that needs no language. In expert opinion it dates some million standard years ago.”
“Ah, now. Come, come.”
“Madam, I guarantee your satisfaction.” He fretted through several pockets, plucking and sorting. “Here, my location code. Here, my bonding agency. Here, my registered genetic identity. I will refund if you are not fascinated.”
Questioner found herself liking him. “You’ve seen the Quaggi?”
He nodded his head, jowls flapping. “I have, yes. They look like large piles of rock with huge compound eyes and some manipulating palps in front. They sit in monumental circles on carefully leveled plains on otherwise lifeless planets. They barely move as they commune, who knows with whom or what. In payment for the botanicals we offer, they extrude small chips of gold, platinum, or other precious metals. Other than that, they do nothing. Some of their circles are millennia, perhaps even aeons old….”
The trader stared aloft and shrugged, both face and gesture conveying his awe at the inscrutability of the universe. “When I was last there, I witnessed an outsider Quaggi come before one of these circles. It offered a recording, similar to the one I’m offering you. The recording was passed around the circle, after which the newcomer tore off its wings and antennae and joined the circle. The record was thrown aside, as on a trash heap. When I stopped by the trash heap, I found this one unbroken recording.”
“What do you want for it?”
He named a figure. She laughed and named another. When they agreed, he handed over a peculiarly shaped and stoppered flask that contained, so far as she could tell, several large handfuls of coarse gray gravel.
“And what is this?”
“The recording. The Quaggi applicant brings this container, the members of the circle in turn swallow the crystals and excrete them back into the container. Evidently they read it internally. However, you can pour the stuff into a hopper, and read the same thing the Quaggi do.”
“What hopper?”
“The hopper of an EQUASER, an Electronic Quaggi Sensory Reconstructor, made by the Korm as part of a communications system for their ships.”
“Aha!” She grinned at him, all her teeth showing. “How remarkable. And I suppose you just happen to have at least one such device for sale!”
“Only because it is useless to me without the recording….”
“Useless, but, one presumes, not valueless?”
“Oh, no, Ma’am.” He echoed her grin with a gummy one of his own. “Not at all valueless.” He saw the annoyance on her face and took a deep breath. “Questioner, I would rather have you as a friend than an enemy. The BIT has always felt so. You have paid us well for the reports we bring you, those little things we see that local governments won’t tell you.”
“That’s true,” she murmured. “The BIT finds the truth of many things that governments deny.”
“So, I make an offer. You tell me a few things about yourself, I give you the Korm device for nothing.”
“You traders have a list of questions about me, too?”
“It isn’t a long list,” he said apologetically. “It would take you little time to respond perhaps to one or two little queries.”
She grinned, suddenly diverted. “Ask away.”
“We want to know … what are you like? How would you describe your personality?”
She stared at him. It was the last question she would have expected and one of the few for which she had no ready answer. “Let me see,” she said at last. “I suppose I am task driven. My stimulus comes from duty. I am singleminded, stubborn, terrier-like in my approach to whatever job is before me. Human people who work with me say that I am a stern taskmaster, and this is true, though I do have a sense of humor. Haraldson said no entities could do this job unless they had a sense of the ridiculous, and I am frequently amused, even at myself. While I have the senses needed for enjoyment, it is difficult for me to enjoy because I can not forget the amount of work that is awaiting me, and there never seems to be enough time to do it all.”
“Too strong a conscience!” he opined. “Perhaps a little wine would help? Or a euphoric capsule?”
“They can affect me, of course, but I distrust them. I am too likely, afterward, to judge myself harshly. I was designed to be a judge, and I do not withhold judgment from myself.” She paused a moment, then murmured, “Least of all from myself.”
“Is it fair to say you are relentless, unforgiving, capable of very stern action?”
She said, “It is fair, yes. I can do good only by doing my job relentlessly. If my judgments could be escaped or modified, the edicts would become mere suggestions rather than what they were intended to be: a framework by which mankind can turn himself into something better than he is.”
He frowned, forehead deeply furrowed. “Tell me, truly, when you make these terrible judgments, or at any other time, do you feel anything?”
She was taken aback. Still, they had a bargain. It was incumbent upon her to answer as honestly as possible. “When I make a judgment, I always feel I am doing right,” she replied. “If I do not feel it is right, I cannot do it.
“At other times, however, I have other kinds of feelings and I do not know why, or how, or from what source the feelings come. When I am intent upon my work, I am largely unaware of existing as an entity separate from the task. When there is a pause in my duties, however, sometimes I feel sadness or fear or longing for things I have never had, or cannot define. Sometimes I know things, and I cannot find the source of knowing anywhere in my files or my perception systems. I have thought, perhaps, that these feelings come from the human brains that were incorporated into me, but I cannot tell for sure.”
“Ah,” murmured the trader. “What brains were they?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I wasn’t informed.”
“Would you like to know?”
She felt the mental equivalent of a gasp, a brief cessation of sense, a network-wide shock. “The HoTA designs and systems for the Questioners are top secret. I incorporate certain technical achievements which have a likelihood of misuse, and COW believes them better kept under lock and key.”
“True. We know when you were made, however, and we know that the HoTA ships went here and there at that time. HoTA ships are quite easily recognizable, and the BIT keeps track of where ships go, and when. If brains were taken from persons who were dying at the time, it could not have been done in total secrecy. Linkages would have been necessary, and there are records….”
“If you could learn who … when, why, I would be prepared to reward you very well,” said Questioner, surprising herself with the sudden spate of interest she felt.
“Your regard would be reward enough.” The Flagian bowed respectfully, took his payment for the recording in Council of Worlds monetary units, repeated his compliments, and departed, staying well away from the snicking grasses and not without a backward glance. Each time he met the Questioner he was surprised that she did not seem more exotic.
The Questioner knew perfectly well what he was thinking. Most people expected something more exotic. To outward appearance, she was simply a stout woman of indeterminate age with a rather large head covered with iron gray hair worn in a bun. She was, however, a good deal more than that. She was enormously strong; she could swim, dive, fly, brachiate, crawl, or climb mountains. She could provide emergency medical assistance and do quick field repairs on a great variety of complicated equipment. She could cook, sing quite well, and compose fairly literary poetry in several languages. She supposed she could fall in love, though she had never done so. Though the senses were there, the stimulus was not.
When the trader’s shuttle took off in a fountain of flung clods and crushed grasses, she set aside all thoughts of him and settled herself into a stable position. With the flask of gravel-data, the newly acquired hopper device, and the probability of two uninterrupted days before her own ship arrived, she could look forward to a period of peace. Her so-called aides were aboard the ship, where they were no doubt plotting to kill one another. Let the idiot captain deal with them. Better there than here.
With a satisfied hum, she poured the gravel—crystals of uniform color and size—into the funnel-shaped port atop the device she had just bartered for. As instructed by the trader, she put the flask into a receptacle at the bottom of the device, moved one of the bars to the right, another to the left, and pushed a button….
And was in a darkness of space, confronting a new, young planetary system. Her viewpoint shifted erratically, as though the recording device was being moved or anchored. Abruptly, the viewpoint settled, only to be interrupted by the edge of an enormous … well, it looked rather like a membrane of some kind. A wing, perhaps. Whatever it was, it receded off one side of the view, never allowing Questioner to see what kind of creature it was part of.
She returned her attention to the sun, around which three young planets whirled in fiery rings. The recording system obviously compressed the action. Mechanical time lapse equipment, perhaps. Or, considering that the Quaggi exchanged information through these crystals, an organic system which secreted memories: information pearls, secreted over time by Quaggian oysters. In any case, the recording device was also orbiting the sun, allowing a good view of a nearby planet with eight moons, three in one orbital plane, three smaller ones, no doubt captured asteroids, with orbits at considerable angles to the other three, and two tiny orbiting rocks, close to the planet, moving very fast.
Her view could be extended in every direction. When she turned slowly to look away from the sun, she saw two gas giants and then, after careful search, the shadow arcs of several smaller, colder worlds farther out. Beyond them was a circling field of galactic flotsam and jetsam, a com-etary collection, perhaps remnants of some larger and older thing, and beyond that the darkness of space sequined by a far-off scatter of fully formed stars and galaxies.
She returned her attention to the nearest planet where thin plates of surface rock were thrust across great furnaces of the deep to be suddenly pimpled with a rash of baby volcanoes, each vent a basaltic core that hardened inside its ashen cone into a cyclopean crystalline pillar. Echoes from within the planet allowed her to perceive a spongy crust built up by recurrent layers of lava tubes superimposed on sedimentary structures. She could detect great caverns held aloft by basaltic pillars, one atop another, some created by fire, some by water, some by both together, some mere bubbles with a pillar or two, others measureless caverns with forests of columns.
Here and there chasms split through the layers, bringing light to the inner world. Those deepest down had been invaded by the abyssal oceans where scalding vents spewed black smoke while complicated molecules rocked in the steaming waters at the edge of the white hot magma, spinning in the heat, accumulating and replicating themselves, adhering, separating, drifting away on the currents of the sea.