Outward Borne (46 page)

For me, the experience had an
importance beyond the ILUC. The impact of the ObLaDa data, even
that tiny sliver of it, was impressive, and it gave me some ideas
on how the mass of knowledge that I had might be used to advantage.
That was something Grandfather had been tasked with doing, but he
did not know how to do it. Other consequences were not as
favorable, however. It was not long before the tigers came creeping
about. They, and there were several, now knew that undisclosed
ObLaDa data still existed. They did not try to obtain it through
the legal process, for the ownership of Voyager material was
muddled, and it would involve years in the courts to sort it out.
They took a more direct approach, or at least a more devious
one.

There had always been a loose
watch on the Voyager community. That activity suddenly intensified.
DePat, JiLo, Millie and I were openly followed. I had been careful
to keep my work on the Voyager Mission confidential, even Millie
did not really know what I was doing, but now it was obvious, and I
was the weak link. Jaspar Hudink was a fellow history graduate
student, one year before me, I believe. I knew him rather well. I
think he gambled rather heavily, as he always talked of his
winnings. In reality, he had often lost and was seriously in debt.
Not advisable on our meager earnings. Someone under the guise of a
collection thug, threatened poor Jaspar, and pressured him to pay
off his debts or, since that was not in his always-unlucky cards,
to spy on me.

He planted a record-only camera in
my office. It did not transmit so the scanning equipment JiLo
installed did not detect it. I do not know how long it was in
place, but Jaspar was able to get some screen images of ObLaDa data
files. They mounted some small-scale robberies of computer
equipment and other valuables from University offices, as a
diversion the police said, and then stole my laptop and backup
memory. My computer was very secure and highly encrypted; even so,
they could see that I had very little data stored in memory. They
could not have known how I sourced the files, but they kept trying.
My apartment was broken into several times over the next few
months.

The attention made Millie very
anxious, they may even have tried to hire her to spy on me. I do
not know, but it became too much for her. She could not cope, and
we stopped seeing each other. That was hard. I liked her. She was
the first girl that I really cared about. The bastards.
Surveillance continued to be heavy for a long time, and it was
often public and confrontational. JiLo thought that I was at risk,
even though I did not know where the data was kept, and if they
hauled me away, it would be a big set back, to say nothing of the
personal inconvenience. I became nervous and paranoid during that
time, it was difficult to deal with, but we carried on for another
two years.

I eventually completed a rough
multimedia assemblage of the People’s abduction and life, and
something of the ebb and flow of ObLaDa politics that had taken
place during the voyage. I decided to spend a week with DePat and
show him the work, get his opinion. I am so glad that I did. It may
seem strange, but ever since the day DePat told me about the
Voyager memory cube, he seems to have declined. He weakened slowly
and steadily and withdrew into himself. As he looked at the
publication, I could see the old spark in his eyes. He was
satisfied, I think, I hope, that his life’s mission would be
complete and the Peoples’ story told. He died a month later, the
last of the Voyagers.

I will not talk of his funeral,
and all of the ceremonies that followed. They were all public
rituals. I believe he was a great man who was given a difficult and
important task under unique and challenging conditions. He was the
sole possessor of a treasure beyond value, and needed to learn on
his own how to use it to benefit mankind. He also knew that if he
let his knowledge fall into the hands some local power, it would
probably be exploited to prolong the nation-state struggles that
had done so much lasting harm.

On our last evening together,
DePat told me that he never intended to wait so long, or to keep
the ObLaDa knowledge so late into his life. The ones he had chosen
along the way were compromised or proved incapable, he said, or the
times were impossible. I believe he was referring to his
imprisonment and the death of Grandmother. I was his last
chance.

He expressed one wish that I was
unable to honor, however. DePat believed that the ObLaDas data
should always be maintained and controlled from within the Voyager
community, but the scope of the information proved to be too great
and too complex for me to manage, or for anyone then within that
small body of people. I needed to make it known, or perhaps as the
ObLaDas had done, to make it a worldwide community
project.

Chapter 24 Knowledge is
Power

I made a deal. It was necessary to
distribute the ObLaDa data on a wide scale, but that would never be
possible if various governments and industry interests were trying
to steal it. I offered, promised, to provide access to the
technical data in return for government protection and funding. The
first step was the release of the Voyager’s story. We let it be
known that there would be a completely new work on the Outward
Voyager mission. In spite of the announcement, and our disclosure
of some original images, many people speculated that it would be
little more than a rehash of old information and that nothing new
could be coming out after so many years. Somehow, one short clip of
the Frits ice-skating was leaked, and it captured the public
imagination. Interest soared. There was some speculation that these
were ObLaDas, but most decided that was not likely, they were too
cute. The collected Voyager information was a large and rather
complicated multimedia assembly and was received with a substantial
demand. It all went well, although it proved difficult to
distribute such large files to so many.

There was some criticism of my
work. Some thought it an unwieldy and overly technical
conglomeration, but, ironically, many people were drawn in by the
intimate details of the Voyager’s and the aliens’ lives. There was
a fascination, I believe, because these were the lives of real
individuals, true facts, and not just engaging fiction. There was a
lot about ObLaDa technology, fabrication techniques, and their
collection and use of interstellar matter, but very little
information about the planet ObLa itself. Virtually everything was
new, or present in much greater detail than had been
known.

There was much left to do, and I
made a mistake doing it. I established a center to analyze and
publish some of the remaining ObLaDa information, and I relied on
the government for protection. We were going to markedly expand the
original data set on planets and alien species by including some of
the information that came from ObLa itself. It was a big and
exciting project.

The tragic interview came four
years after the Voyager history was published. It was a sit-down,
informal setting, and I was asked if any more revelations were to
come. Unfortunately, I said too much. “As you may know, the Outward
Voyager visited a number of planets and succeeded in capturing
eleven intelligent alien beings, including us humans. We are now
delving into the information the Outward Voyager received from the
planet ObLa. They had been in radio contact with several additional
civilizations, and had acquired information on more planets and
alien life forms.” Foolishly, I told her that there was an
excellent team of scientists working on the project so that it
should not take long to complete our analysis. “Unless we continue
to find new stores of data, which has been our problem up to now,
if you want to call it that.”

The team worked out of a
single-story building on the old Lucas Ranch, near Marinwood. It
had very good computer networking and security facilities, but the
area was unpopulated and the building was rather secluded. It was
not hard for the raid to succeed. It was a criminal organization of
some type that did the job. Drug money funded, of course. I was at
home, preparing for a trip to Austria. Several others were working
late as they often did in midweek. It was winter, and dark by six.
As many as ten operatives came up through the creek bed and hid in
the scrub manzanita, waiting. They had already knocked out the two
guards and rigged the locks. When it was time, they ran into the
building and grabbed my people. They utilized some type of
fast-acting drug to knock them unconscious. Winnie Wysoki sent an
emergency signal, but it did not help. They took all of our
computer equipment and searched the building, even ripping out
walls, to find any hidden servers. Three helicopters landed during
the break-in, they were all gone within twenty minutes,
disappearing into the coastal hills and valleys.

The primary ObLaDa data was never
in that building. We had it networked in from a secure server, so
the thieves did not get much of what they were after. I do not know
if they wanted to exploit the knowledge for themselves or just sell
it, but I received a call to deliver more data in return for the
four hostages’ lives. I guess that was their backup plan. It was
three weeks of hell. The FBI took over the case from the beginning,
and was very tight with its investigation. The Bureau knew that we
had access to the memory files and that none of us were willing to
have our people hurt over a set of data. It had been our plan to
make the ObLaDa data, including the material that had been stolen,
universally accessible in due time. We proposed to move up the
release date and render the thieves’ stolen data worthless, but we
were not allowed to do so.

Things got tense after they
released Winnie Wysoki. She had not been hurt directly, but she was
in bad shape, half starved, and disoriented from being kept in a
dark secluded room for thirteen days. I suppose the kidnapers
thought Winnie’s condition would reinforce their threats against
us, but they did not need to do that. None of us had any desire to
keep this situation going, but it was out of our control. The FBI
was able to get enough information from Winnie to locate the
hideout, and they convinced themselves they could break in and
release the hostages without them being hurt.

They staged something akin to a
military invasion of that little building. Six people died
including Lick Umdohar. It was a completely unnecessary waste of
life. I hope that was the last time they ever do such a thing. Ego
trips and war games, quests for glory, whatever, it was personal
self-aggrandizement rather than reasoned law enforcement, and I
hope the Agency has been thorough and efficient in clearing their
ranks of such people. Even so, they never disclosed what happened
to the organization behind the kidnapping, or even who they were.
Payoffs pay off again. Those events remain a sadness to me that I
will never set aside.

A great deal of ObLaDa
information, much more than has been disclosed, was still
unpublished. It included historical data about ObLa before they
went into space, and much of the information that ObLa had received
from other planets. It was unknown to people on Earth, although
some of it could not be released until the future was more settled.
But it was all taking too long for my teams to sort it out. After
the kidnapping and all that followed, I had a better understanding
of the very technical material that remained unstudied and the
limitations of the small team that had been trying to master it. It
became clear to me that another approach was needed, something more
organized and on a larger scale. WE needed an organization that
would provide a structure around the release and management of the
ObLaDas’ gift. This idea turned into a series of International
Institutes that were created and dedicated to the study of the
Voyager’s memory. Private, independent, non-profit, with academic
credibility, they would seek to gain the maximum advantage from
whatever remained in the ObLaDa data files.

To be honest, the idea for the
Institutes was never so pragmatic. I confess that there was a bit
of revisionist autobiography in that story. The necessity for
creating the Institutes fell from the realization that my staff
could make sense of only a superficial slice of this massive work.
Others in the Voyager family that would follow might do better, but
likely not enough. The depth of my deficiency, almost
mismanagement, was made clear by the UC Berkeley Mathematics
Department. They have a way of doing that to history
majors.

The ObLaDas learned a great deal
from, and about, other civilizations, particularly those that had
achieved some level of technical competence. From the start had a
concern about those civilizations that failed or declined after
reaching so high a level. They spent a concerted effort to
understand the course of events that transpired on those planets.
One tool they developed was a mathematical model for the
progression of events from emergence to demise. It used some type
of algorithm that I could not follow. At first, I dismissed it all
as a lot of hand waving, but it stuck uneasily in my mind. The
ObLaDas seemed to have placed great stock in the approach and its
conclusions. One rainy fall day, I arranged a lunch with a few of
the mathematics faculty. I showed them how the ObLaDas had modeled
civilizations. They immediately became very excited about the
system, as it was something that they had not envisioned, a great
advance, not unlike Newton’s invention of the calculus, they said.
They claimed the best economic models were like a slice, only a
cross-section of the broad scope that would be accessible using the
ObLaDa model.