138: QUESTIONS

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We get back to our dome and desuit, and Captain Klees starts pacing back and forth, agitated. I also want to pace, but two people pacing seems weird, so I sit at the table all tense instead.

“We’ve been through a lot of weird bullshit,” Captain Klees says, “so I’m probably overreacting. I’m probably just being [unknown word]. So tell me, everyone. Something weird is going on here, right?”

“Oh, yeah,” Tinera says. “It’s just a mountain of red flags out there. Are we sure we’re not in danger?”

“Nah,” Tal says. “If there was any chance they were going to kill us, they wouldn’t have let us call the ship. They would’ve done it out at the drop pod and claimed it was some failure in the landing.” Ke shoots us all a joking grin. “I bet it’s aliens. This planet belongs to the Spider Queen and the colony has a peace treaty with the Spider People and our presence has put the treaty at risk.”

We all stare at kem. Ke just grins wider.

“Anyway,” the Friend says.“Everything makes sense, but it does seem like they’re hiding something. Then again, it might just be treating us carefully, as unwanted invaders. This Friend doesn’t know.”

Everyone looks at me, for some reason. Oh, right – I’m the sociologist, which apparently translates into Expert On weird Hylaran Mystery Bullshit. “I’m not sure,” I say. “Things feel… strange, but… different cultures do different things. Different assumes… assumptions… and different politeness. Miscommunication is common. Maybe, they are polite by Hylaran standards, we do not understand. Maybe to them, we have many red flags. Maybe, things that seem strange have simple explanation. Maybe we are too tense after so many problems.”

“You don’t sound convinced,” Tal says.

I shrug. “Many things are wrong in small ways. Maybe good explanation, maybe not.”

“Like this viral treatment they’re taking,” the Friend says. “Why not delay our landing until they were done? It’s such an unnecessary risk to the colony.”

“You think it might be fake?” Captain Klees asks. “An excuse to keep us from trying to wander around on our own?”

It shakes its head. “No need. Quarantining us until the pathology tests all come back clear is perfectly reasonable on its own. There would be no need to invent another short-term reason. It’s certainly real, but why handle it like this?”

“And there is the soap,” I say.

“Soap?”

“Soap. They seem to have a reasonable supply of it, and it is hand-cut, probably hand-made. It is possible that they’ve stopped limiting because Courageous has more, but still. They gave us a lot. Soap is made with oil. Oil is grown in plants, animals, algae. But they had…” I try to recall the Texan word for ‘famine’, and fail… “a lot of death, from hunger, Max says. They are okay now, Max says. So they have enough now. But this much? To make so much soap?”

“So there’s some disease in the biotanks or whatever,” Tinera shrugs. “It wipes out everything, they don’t have food stockpiled, people die before they can get things up and running again. Now they have a lower population and fully running tanks so they have enough left over to make soap.”

“After death from hunger? Any left over should make food stockpile. Anyway, if algae recover that fast, should recover fast enough to save people. Is possible, but…” I shrug again. “Many small things here that are possible, but unusual. We are missing something important.”

“You think the population drop was from something else,” Captain Klees says.

“Possibly.” I think of how we’ve been treated so far, about how it suggests a high level of social control in this settlement. I really shouldn’t be making sweeping generalisations from such a tiny pool of evidence, that’s how you get wrong-headed theories that steer the science off-course for decades, but… “Might possibly be controlled hunger. Hard to know. Not enough information.”

“What do you mean, controlled?” Tinera asks.

“Groups here, I think. Disagreeing on what to do about us, maybe disagreeing on other things for a long time.”

“Factions,” the Friend says.

I nod and try to remember the word. “Factions. In history, very often, mass deaths from hunger – ”

“‘Famine’ is the word you want,” Captain Klees says.

“ – famine, is not unavoidable. It happens because different factions have different power. One group takes everything from another group, second group starves while first has plenty. Maybe, something happened in this settlement, three quarters on one side, one quarter on the other. Maybe not. But it does explain some of the tensions, And the odd supplies.”

“They wouldn’t do that to each other, all the way out here, surely,” the Friend says. “There’s no other humans for light years. It’s too much of a risk to the settlement to let each other die.”

“Possibly. Possibly not. Smaller groups of humans have done it. Smaller groups who know that if they die, their people are gone and the land is only for foreign people. Is there any difference? It would be unusual, yes – it is usually done between groups, different people who live different lives or in different places, and they have not been here long enough for too many big differences.”

“Unless they’re genetic,” Tal cuts in.

“What do you mean?”

“The Hylarans don’t look much like us. This is obviously a colony built with engineered embryos, which is totally illegal but who the fuck would care out here. What if our missing people weren’t engineered like this? Maybe they were, like, the kids of the initial colonists or something, and these engineered people were made as a fast labour force or something, like in a story. That’d be a pretty simple way to divide two groups of people, wouldn’t it? Some disaster occurs, or some revolution or something maybe, after they realise the Courageous isn’t coming. Their oppressors die off, and then we show up out of nowhere wearing their faces.”

Ah. Hmm. I very much hope that whatever’s going on, it isn’t that.

“Surely they would’ve told us that,” the Friend says.

“They’re not telling us anything!” Tinera points out.

“There are absolutely tensions within this society,” Captain Klees says. “Big ones. And famine or not, the other side of said tensions isn’t dead. Whatever’s going on, I think Max and Hive are on the same side of it, and that side’s winning since it got to pick both liaisons. That scuffle probably explains the long radio silence. Hive might even be telling the truth about radio equipment failure; there could have been sabotage of the tower.”

“Doctor Kim’s a lot less happy about our presence here,” Tinera says. “Might be on the other side.”

“Hard to be sure without knowing what the division is,” Captain Klees says. “It might be bigger than just us. We might’ve misread why we’re a problem. Whoever Max was trying to keep us away from on the tour, though, is probably not a friend.”

“Probably not their friend,” I point out. “We don’t know enough to know what other side thinks of us for sure. We’re mostly guessing. But I think… it might be about aliens.”

“How so?”

“No plants on the surface. Not even potted plants in living domes. Everything is underground, but almost first thing that Hive asks us is about pollinators. You notice that? Did not ask over radio to ship, only in person. Captain says we can ask ship, Hive says no, don’t worry about it.”

“Yeah, I was wondering about that,” Captain Klees says. “It’s a fairly innocuous question. It wouldn’t have been difficult to find out.”

“Did you see how they reacted to Xanthe sending down seeds good for this air?”

“Yeah. That was also odd.”

“Did not say ‘no’. But were very… tense. Very clear, cannot plant them without locals deciding. I think, okay, we know they don’t want us to take over and tell them what to do. Normal thing to say if Hive thinks Xanthe is trying to tell them what to do. But with plants, with pollinators, knowing there is some kind of faction argument, I think… what Hive wants and what Hive can say over radio to the ship is different, possibly.”

“The broadcast to the ship is probably monitored by everyone,” Captain Klees agrees. “I’d be monitoring it if I was a local here. You think the lack of plants up here is deliberate and political. You think they’re arguing about whether to terraform the surface.”

I nod. “And us showing up with all the plants and animals tips that argument. Hive wants to but is not allowed to ask, perhaps. When we asked about aliens they said it is complicated, and nothing else. I think this is the argument, the same old argument – should we disturb the ecosystem by supplanting our own life on it?”

“If that’s what’s at issue,” Tinera scowls, “then why not just say up-front?”

“Possibly they want to find out where we stand on the issue first.”

“Did anyone else notice the metal?” Tinera asks. “I grew up off Earth and let me tell you, the use of metal here? Makes no sense. It’s hard to get a proper look at anything, but I think a lot of it’s titanium. Can we assume that the trapdoor under the radio tower is connected to the hillside entrance? Maybe; it’d have to be at least that big if their farms and power production and manufacturing are down there. They have a fucking rail launcher that they say is for ‘climate control’? What the fuck does that mean?”

“A Hypati launcher,” Tal corrects her. “a rail launcher would have to be a lot bigger to – ”

“Whatever! The point is, there’s a lot of metal being used here, so why are they living in tents that aren’t even airtight? If the canvas integrity isn’t good enough any more, move underground! If the rocks are toxic, line the walls with metal! And also. If the whole point of this was to send a lighter, faster ship ahead of ours and wait for our supplies, why do they have so much metal? They couldn’t have dragged this much metal with them from Earth, it doesn’t make sense, meaning they’re mining it here, but do you know how fiddly titanium is to refine? There’s not a whole bunch of pure titanium lying around in nature, especially not on a planet that has oxygen. If they’re mining titanium, they’re almost certainly mining it as an alloy with metals that are easier to work with. It’s something that makes sense to ship over for assembly here – we’ve got plenty of titanium on the Courageous – but that means that either they wasted a ridiculous amount of mass lugging unnecessary metal with them when their entire mission was to be as fast as possible, or they found it here and went to the trouble of refining it instead of working with easier metals for the same result. And there’s no way they brought the parts for that launcher. We don’t carry the parts for that launcher. They manufactured those here, probably out of titanium and something magnetic like iron, but I haven’t had a look at the thing, I might be wrong. For some reason, even though they don’t seem to have a space program. In fifty years! That’s a ridiculously small stretch of time to set up the level of industry required for this with no outside support! They probably brought a lot of robotics and soforth for mining, but we have those on Luna too and it’s still a surprisingly slow and laborious process. I haven’t seen any open quarries, or any external equipment for shaft mining, although it’s entirely possible that their mining operations are simply set up away from the colony over some hill we haven’t seen over. They must have left Earth very shortly after us, so they’re unlikely to have any new miracle manufacturing process invented after we left unless they invented it here themselves which, on this timeframe with a limited population and limited resources? Very unlikely. It’s possible, it’s all just… such a strange set or priorities. Especially the part where they live out here wearing out their pumps keeping these domes oxygenated instead of just moving underground.”

“Maybe the famine was a lie,” I say.

“What do you mean?”

“Mining and making metal things… it can be done much faster for more risk, right? More pain? Like on Luna.”

Tinera nods. “If you don’t care about health and safety and have a big enough work force, you can get much more done much faster. You think that’s what happened to the missing people? Killed in some mining or manufacturing accident, and the Hylarans don’t want to tell us?”

“They know we are carrying convicts. They probably know most of you were sent out as convicts. They probably think we would not like such news. And that is possibly why the surface tents, open air, open water – not practical, social. Class division.”

“Living confined to pressure vessels underground is the fate of miners,” Captain Klees says thoughtfully. “Higher class people live in the open air. You think?”

I shrug. “Not enough information to know. But people have done sillier things to be upper class. Is possible. Also explains the soap – if there was no famine, no problem with food. Now they do have extra.” And if working with machines is something the drudges do, maybe that’s why the people up here seem to make things with their hands? Although that doesn’t really need explanation. Making something with one’s hands is something that humans just do.

Well, if they did lose their mining and manufacturing force in some kind of horrible accident, they’d better not be thinking of replacing them with our colonists. That simply isn’t going to happen. If Tinera’s theory is right, then they must have replaced the dead with some of their own – the whole reason I suspected a population drop was that there was too much living space for too few people in the domes. But then, I was also operating on the assumption that the full population they’d quoted us, just under four hundred, was living in the domes – so if Tinera’s right, then either there are very few people up here and the population decrease was much larger than we thought, or –

“Can we trust that they were honest about their population count?” I ask. “If they have many of miners and manufacturers elsewhere, it would explain making so much metal while the people around here seem to have lots of time to hang around and sew trinkets.”

Captain Klees shakes his head. “They wouldn’t lie about population numbers. They’d have to tell the truth later, when our colonists start integrating. A little white lie about how people died, maybe, but a lie like that… no. But I don’t think there’s a bunch of hidden miners off anywhere, dead or alive, and I don’t think they’d lie to us about why so many people died if it was something so simple as an industrial accident. Tinera’s right; they are using an awful lot of metal in what looks like a lot of unnecessarily wasteful construction for people living in tents on an alien planet. There’s something off no matter how you juggle the numbers of who’s doing what work. And it doesn’t explain the weirdness around the pollinators and seeds being dropped.”

“The terraforming controversy doesn’t conflict with this in any way,” Tinera points out. “They can both be true.”

“Okay, I have a theory that explains everything,” Tal says. “Hear me out. What if it’s aliens?”

“Tal,” Captain Klees says with extreme patience, “if the Hylarans have a treaty with the Alien Spider Queen, they absolutely would have told us about that as soon as we started talking, if only so we wouldn’t fuck it up.”

“Not if she’s dead.”

“… What?”

“I know there’s not gonna be living sentient aliens here, obviously. You’re right, they would’ve mentioned that first thing. But. What if there’s no living aliens at all? Aspen said that the only reasonable explanation for why there’s oxygen down here is if there was life here – what if there was, once? And there was still oxygen left when their ship got here. What if they found a dead planet, as in a deceased planet, a planet with refined metals and stuff left over by the previous occupants that they want to study and use, but also things it might not be safe to be near all the time. Maybe that’s what’s underground, and why they live up here instead, if there’s stuff down there that might be dangerous. Maybe that’s where their metal comes from. Maybe whatever is up here that killed off the alien life won’t let plants grow, and trying is an ongoing social battle and that’s why they’re so weird about the seeds and pollinators and stuff. Maybe that’s what got into their own farms and caused the famine, even. Maybe it’s something powerful and dangerous that they don’t just want to put into the hands of the two thousand strangers who showed up to live in their home. And that Hypati launcher – they almost definitely don’t have a space program or they would’ve had monitoring abilities and radio protocols and stuff when we called. That thing is probably to send stuff to other parts of the planet. Finding more ruins, maybe?”

“That’s… a stretch,” Captain Klees says uncertainly.

“Cap. In how many scenarios can you mention aliens to the locals and get the answer ‘it’s complicated’?”

“Tal, that’s the stupidest theory I’ve ever heard,” Tinera says, resting her forehead in her good hand. “I hate that it’s the most cohesive explanation we have.”

“I’m telling you,” Tal grins. “Aliens.”

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