Writers of the Future, Volume 28 (26 page)

“Why did they contact you
?
” Jared said.

Anderson looked back at him, a coldness to his eyes. “It was a warning to clear the planet’s surface. They’re going to blow the place.”

“No! They can’t!” It was Rory, stepping forward to face Anderson.

“Why are they doing that
?
” Jared said. “Did something go wrong at the contact site
?
”

“We never got that far,” Anderson said. “We sent the broadcast, we were scanning for a response and then the Alliance appeared. Some kind of Sprite ship, something we’ve never seen before. And right now, I will need a hell of a lot of persuasion to believe that your intervention hasn’t caused this. I think they figured out what you’re doing and this is their response.”

Jared looked over at where Rory’s song was still playing out into the Caronoi gathering. Could the Alliance have been watching that closely, all this time
?
They were millennia ahead technologically, but not clairvoyant. “I don’t think that’s true. The Alliance are acting because they know the Caronoi are naïves, and they only know that because they’ve reviewed our research reports. We’ve given them three years of data and analysis, and unwittingly incriminated the Caronoi in the process, but that doesn’t have to be the full picture.”

“You mean you think we can still fix this
?
” Rory said. He was almost shaking with the enormity of what he’d started, clearly out of his depth now that Anderson, the OAL and the whole Alliance were involved.

“Maybe,” Jared said. “But not like before. You’ve planted the seed of the theory in the Caronois’ minds, but we don’t have time to let it take root on its own any more. We need to tell the Alliance straight out why the Caronoi are suddenly worth saving.”

“And reveal that we know what the Alliance are looking for
?
” Anderson said. “Remember, we’re being judged too, if Mr. Temple’s theory is correct—if we step out of line, we’re next.”

“In that case we think up some way of pointing them in the right direction. Something with plausible deniability.”

“What if you’re wrong
?
” Anderson said. “What if by doing this you only provoke them
?
”

“What would you rather do
?
Leave the Caronoi to be massacred
?
Knowing that you could have helped them
?
” Through his brief time on the station, one thing had come through loud and clear to Jared. For some people, including, he suspected, Anderson, the mission had become more than just a research project. They’d got to know the Caronoi so well, albeit from a distance, that there was now an emotional stake in contacting them. Working the last three years only to see them wiped out would be more than just a waste of research time.

“Fine, your way,” Anderson said. “But whatever we do next, we do it from orbit. I am not going to wait here for whatever that Sprite cruiser has in store. Mr. Benning, set your shuttle to automatic and get it back to Kaluza Station. From here on we stick together.”

Ten minutes later, the remaining shuttle was back in orbit, nine hundred miles above the planet’s surface. Jared, Rory and Benning stood up front with Anderson and the pilot while the rest of the Contact Team sat behind them, coming to terms with the rushed summary Anderson had been able to give them—a species doomed according to arbitrary rules, a new mission plan to save them and the risk of defying the Alliance itself. Two thousand miles ahead of them was the Sprite cruiser, ten miles of stacked circular disks and needle-like spires, product of a technology Jared knew Earth had only begun to comprehend. And between the disks were the Sprites themselves, open to space, their charcoal-gray polyhedral carapaces hardened to the vacuum and radiation.

Jared activated the shuttle’s comms panel and hailed the ship. Just contacting them instead of waiting for them to initiate was a breach of OAL protocol, another offense to add to a long list of transgressions.

“Remain in orbit while sterilization occurs,” the reply came moments later, a bland synthetic voice steeped in gender-neutral, unemotive tones.

“Please clarify reasons for sterilization,” Jared said. He didn’t work directly with the OAL Speakers, but he’d heard that simple, direct sentences were usually the best approach.

“Subject species is in violation of Alliance criteria,” was the similarly terse reply.

“Please indicate nature of violation,” Jared said.

“Subject species is in violation of Alliance criteria,” the Sprite repeated.

“We don’t have time to play this subtle,” Jared said, more to himself than anyone, then into the comm unit: “Our research has revealed new data that could influence the criteria. Request delay to sterilization.”

“Humans have no information on Alliance criteria.”

“This is painful,” Benning said. “Are they always this hard work to talk to
?
”

“So I’ve heard,” Jared said, then to the Sprites, “We strongly request that the sterilization is halted in the light of new information. This is vital to the success of the contact mission.”

“Humans have no information on Alliance criteria.”

“Jesus Christ!” Benning said. “What do we have to do to get it through to these things
?
”

Jared knew, but the direction this conversation was taking might have consequences beyond anything he’d done so far. He took a deep breath, then spoke into the comm unit again.

“Our studies lead us to assess with high confidence that the Caronoi are not and will never be in violation of Alliance criteria.”

He was sure he could detect a pause before the reply came. With AI minds running billions of times faster than human brains, to make them stop and think even for a heartbeat was some achievement.

“Present proof of this assertion,” the Sprite ship answered.

“Any ideas
?
” Jared said to those gathered round him.

“Not beyond telling them straight out how much we know,” Rory said. “But then that was always going to be the case, wasn’t it
?
”

Jared knew that it was true. It was time to go for broke. He turned to the comm unit and addressed the Sprites one more time.

“A final precontact investigation of Caronoi capabilities has just been performed. A group of Caronoi have recently developed the ability to analyze conflict as a mathematical phenomenon. We have seen them derive theorems proving the futility of instigating such conflicts, including those where techniques based on causality violation are employed. As such we do not believe they pose a threat to Alliance interests.”

There was silence from the Sprites. Ten, twenty seconds passed without answer. “My God, what have you done
?
” Anderson said. “If you’re right and we’re not even meant to know about that—”

A message from the Sprite cruiser interrupted him.

“This claim confirms that violation has occurred,” it said. “Hold station.”

“We’re done for,” Benning said.

More time passed while those in the shuttle waited in silence, the atmosphere of the cabin turning cold and clammy with apprehension.

I’ve done it, Jared thought, I’ve just consigned the human race to history to stand up for a principle. His palms were sweating as he stood in the cockpit, knuckles white on the grab rail. Then, at last, the final message from the Sprite ship came through.

“The Alliance has concluded that contact with the subject race can continue. No information regarding Alliance criteria will be given to them.”

Then the Sprite ship departed, accelerating away so rapidly that on the shuttle’s view screens it appeared to just vanish.

“Is that it
?
” Anderson said. “They let us off just like that
?
”

Then a light appeared, off to the side. For a few seconds it shone brighter than the sun, then diminished. Everyone in the shuttle crowded to the side windows, and what faced them was Carpathia, sole moon of Caron-c.

The surface was glowing white hot, a spherical envelope of gas expanding around it. Then it cooled, to the orange of molten magma, then the red of sunset. Already those watching could see that the surface had been obliterated entirely.

“Jesus Christ,” Rory said, “they nuked the thing.”

“What the hell
?
” Benning said.

“It’s a warning,” Jared said. “They weren’t fooled; they know what we did and why. If our membership was in the balance before, then it’s running at critical now. They’ve shown us what’s in store if we defy them again.”

They watched Carpathia’s surface, cooling and flowing, its shattered surface lit by the menacing red glow of nuclear annihilation.

T
he plain was near the equator, with a vast jungle-covered river basin to the south, hot blue skies above and a warm dry wind blowing off the deserts further west. The Caronoi settlement here was like a sprawl of teepees on a grassy meadow, straddling a narrow river of blue-green water. On the edge of the settlement was their emissary tower, far larger than the one Jared had seen at the last site, and beyond that was a long-range transmitter field, six square kilometers of phase-locked dipole antennae, tens of thousands of them, each wood-and-wire construction no more advanced than the emissary transmitters but forming a phased array that could command probes as far as the outer system. And barely ten miles away was the place where one of those probes had been launched, the site cleared and leveled so the rocket could be assembled, elevated, then packed with propellant and launched.

They never built and tested things, Jared thought as he looked around the examples of Caronoi technology. There were no labs, no research institutes, no particle accelerators or mass spectrometers. All their experiments were thought experiments, carried out in whatever shared world that bizarre song trance took them to. And then they would snap out of it and do
this,
and it would just work, every time.

Then he looked toward the center of the settlement, where Anderson had walked in, alone, to greet the Caronoi. There was a small crowd of them, awake and aware this time, and Anderson was talking to them, the translator unit in his hand, occasionally gesturing back to the shuttle and the rest of the team waiting a safe nonthreatening distance away.

“So tell me something,” Jared said to Rory as they watched. “How did your grandfather know so much if Alliance rules are meant to be so secret
?
”

“Let’s just say the Alliance isn’t as unified as they like us to think. There are factions, even within the Sprites, who think they are doing things wrongly. My grandfather was lucky enough to meet them first, and they were able to help us. But we needed to maintain the pretense of true compliance, and that bound him to secrecy. Unfortunately, with the Caronoi, it fell to us to play good cop. Or to me.”

Rory had carried this knowledge alone for years, Jared realized, with the fate of entire races in his hands. It felt good to share the burden, just by being let in on the facts. “I don’t know what’s going to happen when this gets reported back to Earth,” he said. “I’m in trouble, I know it. You may be too. But now we know what we’ve got ourselves into with the Alliance, what we’re really up against, the people in control might realize the situation has changed.”

“You think we can help other races
?
Ones we encounter in future
?
”

“Possibly. I can’t help feeling we’ve delivered the Caronoi to the Alliance on a plate by bringing them in, but they’d already been discovered, and you can’t put the clock back. But if the Alliance itself is divided, at least we get to pick which side we’re on. It’s not just us against
them
.”

Rory nodded slowly and looked up, where Carpathia sat high in the daylight sky.
They
had arranged another demonstration of power in the hours after its surface had been near-vaporized. Somehow, incredibly, it had been resculpted as it cooled, regaining its former appearance as if nothing had happened. The sheer power required to manipulate matter on a planetary scale was if anything a more sobering show of supremacy than the destruction that preceded it.

“So were we naïves
?
” Jared said. “Humans, I mean, when your grandfather made contact
?
”

“We were,” Rory said. “We would have been in the firing line. Have you ever heard of Alderman’s theorem
?
”

“No.”

“That’s what the crucial branch of Game Theory is known as on Earth. Except John Alderman never came up with it. He’d recently died in a car crash when our first contact happened, so records were fabricated to make it look like he’d figured it out just before his death.”

“Like the songs you concocted for the Caronoi
?
A fake breakthrough, just in time
?
”

“Exactly.”

They carried on watching Anderson in silence. Then, ten minutes after he had started discussions with the Caronoi, he turned to face the Contact Team and waved them over.