A Sword Into Darkness (44 page)

Nathan’s jaw dropped.  “That is a complete mis-representation of what happened out there.”

Edwards shrugged.  “It is what it is.  Now, sir, please give your authorization for our XO and ambassadorial liaison to proceed with his damn job.”

Nathan fumed, but—with a final glance at the Deltan waiting at the hatchway—nodded curtly to Wright after a few moments.  Wright nodded back and then pushed off from the crew to close half the distance to the alien.  He stopped his flight with a quick grasp at one of the overhead’s handholds and then re-oriented himself to a more dignified standing position.

He inclined his head respectfully to the alien and smiled.  “Hello.  I am Lieutenant Commander Christopher Wright of the United States Aerospace Navy, and Executive Officer of the
USS Sword of Liberty
.  In the interests of peace, and in order to settle the conflict that has arisen between our two species, I am authorized to communicate with you on behalf of the people of Earth.”

He paused.  The alien did nothing but stand there.  “Do you understand me?  Is there another language you are more familiar with?”  He turned his head to look back at Edwards.  “COB, can we get the linguistic program running on the computer here in the mess?”

Before Edwards could respond, the Deltan moved.  It held forth a device in one tentacle, which scintillated in a rainbow of colors.  Between it and the XO, a flat image appeared in mid-air.  Wright turned back to look at the image and the alien, giving both his full attention.

He smiled.  The images were a series of clips, replayed snippets of television programs caught up by the Deltans from the Earth’s distant broadcasts, and now shown back to them as a form of communication, though none of them knew what the message might be.

City skylines and architecture were mixed in with sculptures, paintings, and plays.  Soundless visions of singers, concerts, and comedians were cut in between biographies of famous artists and writers at work.  Trailers from movies and news clips of ballet and opera openings were shown now and again.  It went on for several minutes, widely varying and never repeating.  It was possible the Deltans had hours upon hours of stored clips.

Wright nodded and laughed slightly.  “This is art!  Is that what this is all about?  Have you seen our art and culture and that’s why you’re coming?  What is so important about our works, that you would make such a long journey?  Why haven’t you simply contacted us and asked for some sort of exchange?  Why the attacks and the hostility?  Please make me understand what it is you want from us.”

The alien’s head analog tilted slightly, regarding the XO.  The images vanished and it lowered the device in its tentacle.  Another tentacle rose up, carrying a different instrument.

A silvered beam of suspended nanomachines lanced out from it, slicing into Wright at the abdomen.  Nathan cried out in shock, along with a number of the crew, Kris included, who shrieked.  They were all drowned out, though, by the screams of mindless agony from the XO himself.

The beam scanned up and down his body, spreading the nanomachines all over him.  The particles flowed around his body like a silvered mist, flaying him apart microscopic layer by microscopic layer, fast enough to watch him vanish, but too slowly to be merciful.  His vacuum suit and skin vanished, and then the flesh beneath, but not one drop of blood was cast off, converted instead into ashen dust and silvered particles.

After too long a time, the screams cut off and they could only watch as their XO was rendered and skeletonized.  The crew had surged back and lined the opposite bulkhead, some crying, some comforting, and all afraid of what sort of hell they had fallen into.  Nathan, Kris, and David Edwards alone stood apart, the pair of them holding their Captain in place from his instinctual attempt to go to his murdered compatriot’s aid.

The beam stopped and the alien brought the device down.  The cloud of nanoparticles kept up their work, though, and soon the XO’s bones started showing holes, thinned out, and vanished into dust.  Of Wright, there was nothing then but a dense, swirling cloud of particulates.

After a moment, purposeful motion could be seen within the cloud.  Similar to a time-reversed strip of film showing a decaying body growing backwards toward life, gray and silver dust coalesced, building up a body from the bones outward.  Flesh, skin, hair and features appeared, laid down layer by layer, like a line-by-line printout of a human being, differentiated by what had been there before only by coloring.  A body was made up of reds and whites, and a dozen other subtle hues between them, but this pallet had only gray and silver.

At its end, the cloud was gone, its entirety now comprising a statue of Christopher Wright, nude and flawless, inexplicably standing on the deck in disregard to the absence of gravity.  As they watched, the gray and silver coloring of the body faded and gained inhuman detail.  Finally, the statue took on the cast of white marble, shot through with random veins of pink and amber.

As a piece of art, a memorial to Wright, it had worth, but not any worth that justified his murder.  Nathan no longer struggled against Kris and Edwards.  He simply glared at the statue and the alien with unmasked hatred.

That hatred shifted to shock and confusion, though, as the marble statue of Wright turned toward him fluidly and smiled.  The statue glanced back at the alien blocking the hatchway and then walked—again in contravention of microgravity—to Nathan, Kris, and Edwards.

The thing that had been their XO, and which mirrored his appearance in exacting detail, nodded to them all and spoke, its voice similar enough to Wright’s to be unsettling, but stripped of all emotion and inflection, words without conscious thought or feeling.  “Greetings.  I am prepared to communicate with you in regards to our purpose and design.  Will you speak with me?”

Nathan shuddered, listening to the thing speak, unable to reconcile its toneless copy of Wright’s voice with the passionate, disciplined man who used to own that face.  “What the hell are you?”

The statue gestured to itself, waving a hand over its body.  “The man Wright was your ambassador.  I, too, am an ambassador.  This is our emissary, capable of communication in human terms, an avatar of the beings you know as the Deltans, though that designation is incorrect in every way worth considering.”

Nathan shook his head, horrified and confused beyond all measure.  In the back of his mind, he realized that it could have just as easily been himself who was converted into this entity, a thought that both shamed him and relieved him at the same time.  He struggled to get his mind back on track.  “What do you mean, the ‘designation is incorrect’?”

“The beings en route to your planet are not from Delta Pavonis, nor any nearby star system.  Their home and their place is quite distant from any place you would know, at least in any sense that you will understand.  That star system was merely the sight of their last acquisition, a priceless treasure which you destroyed during your futile attack.”

Nathan’s eyes narrowed, and he looked back and forth between the alien and the statue of Wright through which it communicated.  “Acquisition?  Treasure?  What are you talking about?  Why are you coming to Earth?”

The avatar smiled.  It might not have any emotion in its voice, but its expression demonstrated its condescension quite well.  “Your people have openly displayed their magnificent cultural wealth for all within a hundred light-years to see, with selfless disregard for protecting its unique and singular worth.  And we have taken notice.  We are appreciative.  We adore the works of Earth and we are devoted to its safety and guardianship.  We do not seek enslavement.  No, no.  We only want to preserve and enshrine the greatness your species has wrought.

“We are your Patrons, and we bring you the galaxy, to the betterment of all.”

17:  “UNIVERSAL TRUTHS”

Date Unknown; USS Sword of Liberty (DA-1), location unknown; Mission Day ???

They
all stared agape at the aliens’ marble avatar, trying to process their thoughts and their pain, to reconcile its cold, mechanistic words with its face—the face of their own XO—which smiled at them in amused condescension.  Nathan’s mind and emotions whirled about, unable to settle on any one bit of the automaton’s announcement.  Patrons?  The cultural works of Earth?  The casual murder of Christopher Wright and his rebirth as this … thing?  Where did one start?

Dave Edwards, an eminently practical—if impudent—individual, recovered from this latest string of shocks first.  He pulled himself forward to float slightly in front of Nathan, focusing the avatar’s attention on him rather than his Captain.  The Master Chief drew his face into an expression of contempt and distaste, the same look someone might give to a particularly large roach one has found in the sink.  He shook his head and said, “Let me get this straight … we’re being invaded by art lovers?”

The marble avatar peaked an eyebrow over the blank, colorless hemispheres it had for eyes and glanced back to the alien—the Patron—holding station in the mess’s main hatch.  The alien flicked a tentacle tip and the automaton nodded and turned back to them.  “That explanation is rather simplistic, but it suffices.”

Edwards grinned with as much malice as he could muster, which at this point was a great deal.  “Well, you’ll have to forgive me, but that’s about the stupidest damn thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life.  No one crosses light-years of space and spends decades of time to go browsing over the artifacts of another planet like some sort of interstellar garage sale.”

Nathan’s eyes widened and his brain finally engaged.  He reached out an arm and dragged Edwards behind him.  Nathan scowled at the Master Chief and spun back toward the avatar.  “Sorry about that, but I’ll admit that it sounds a little implausible to me as well.”

The avatar shrugged, its features quite expressive even though its voice remained toneless and uninflected.  “However plausible it might seem, given your preconceived notions of value and worth, is irrelevant.  I speak only the truth, and it is a truth which should make perfect sense if you only give it some thought.”

Nathan allowed himself to drift closer to the moving statue of his XO.  “My thoughts are a little jumbled here, but I’m not getting it.  We’ve imagined any number of dire motivations for you … Patrons to be coming to Earth—things like desire for our resources, or our biological diversity, or simply the desire to subjugate us as life different from your own.  Art and culture weren’t high on that list.”

The avatar smiled.  “Yes, all of those inimical motivations that your fictions have ascribed to invaders, but those invaders were always merely disguised copies of invaders in your own history.  Very few were developed with any sort of nod toward actual universal truths.”

“Universal truths?” Nathan asked.

“Yes.”  The avatar turned and walked upon the deck, as if it were under the full acceleration of gravity.  It approached a painting on the bulkhead of the mess, a likeness of the
Sword of Liberty
, engines blazing against the backdrop of a nebula.  The automaton lightly touched the canvas and then faced them again.  “What makes something valuable, Captain?”

Nathan frowned.  “I don’t know.  We value things for all sorts of reasons.  Some for their intrinsic worth, for their value as a resource in order to fabricate something we need, or something we like.  Some things are valuable because of the difficulty of obtaining them or creating them.  Some are valuable because they belong to us, for sentimental reasons, or for their worth as personal property.”

The avatar gestured with its hand for him to keep going, a gesture it had no doubt copied from the thousands of video signals it had cataloged.  “Yes, yes.  And what does each of those measures of worth have in common?  What is the universal truth that defines worth and value, no matter your culture, your species, or your planet?”

Nathan thought about his answers and what each of them shared.  He looked beseechingly toward Kris, but she only shook her head and shrugged.  He returned to the avatar and answered tentatively, “Rarity?”

The avatar smiled broadly.  “Precisely.  That which is rare or unique or is difficult to obtain, is what has value—value enough to cross light-years for.  And knowing this, how valuable are simple raw resources for any society capable of expending enough of them to reach another star system?”

Nathan nodded, excited and pleased by their interaction, in spite of the hatred and revulsion he still felt toward the aliens and this vessel through which they spoke.  “Given the technology you’ve already demonstrated and the sheer quantities of energy you’re expending to get to Earth, I’d imagine that raw resources are no big deal for you.”

“Certainly not.  Elements and minerals are of no difficulty to obtain.  With nanotechnology and other means, an asteroid can be rendered into its component elements in days, and those elements can be recombined into whatever composition we desire, with an efficiency far exceeding chemical processing.  And those molecules can then be formed into whatever we desire, with greater precision and speed than any other manufacturing method.  Material wealth holds no special distinction for us—it can be obtained in nearly unlimited quantities from any single star system, not just a populated one.  It is the same way with energy resources.  Hydrogen and helium are abundant and available wherever we travel, and that is only considering fusion as a power source.  There are other, more compact and energetic forms of power that are more difficult to obtain, but not overly difficult.

“So, if your material and energy resources themselves are not rare enough to make us travel light-years for them, why would your cultural works be?”

Nathan shook his head, straining to put himself in the alien’s mind.  He answered slowly, “If the only reason to travel to another star system is to obtain something rare and unique, something physical that can’t be obtained elsewhere, then I suppose the answer’s obvious:  while the materials aren’t truly rare, what we do with them is … because … there’s only one human race?”