25: Two Years Later

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Things move pretty fast when you have essentially unlimited labour and resources to get them done. The Lightsong Travel Agency was up before I knew it.

Word of our existence was spreading to every aljik nest we could contact. Very, very slowly. Aljik nests don’t communicate with each other a whole lot, but the great thing about a space station is that it stays in one place, so you only need to spread the word somewhere once.

The less great thing about our space station was the particular place it was; right on the edge of Tatik’s territory. Meaning we were sandwiched between two aljik empires, which wasn’t a particularly accessible place to be for ahlda from pretty much anywhere else; they still had to cross a lot of space to reach us. Once we had Lightsong Station as good as we could get it, we’d need to expand into other locations, create a proper network of travel stations.

That shouldn’t be too hard; we could negotiate for territory on the edge of the other empires and simply copy the design of Lightsong Station. What was going to be hard was staffing more than one station. Some species were better at inter-species communication than others, but we hadn’t found anyone as good at it as humans yet. I was on the lookout.

And how, you might be asking me, are you finding time to go looking for other aliens if you’re busy running this travel agency?

Easy. They come to us.

Our primary purpose is helping to migrate ahlda, and despite our suboptimal location, we’re getting some of them through already; jittery, bright-winged aljik who can’t seem to hold a thought in their heads for longer than three minutes. But other species also like moving around and, critically, have found a lot of utility in negotiating with other species. Half of my job these days is acting as a go-between for random groups of aliens. There’s a planet with a new species of nutritious, potentially farmable fungus that the aljik are interested in, and some drakes want to colonise said planet; can the aljik take them there and provide materials, and the drakes will provide their expertise in studying the fungus and its cultivation conditions? Some race of weird moth people have a strange wing disease that the blood of an ancient dread behemoth might be able to cure, can I facilitate the trade? Et cetera.

So yeah, trading our services for materials and potential territory rights aren’t a problem. New staff that I can trust to do my job in a new location? Much harder. Breaking up our little family would be out of the question.

Kate, of course, is having the time of her life. She burst into my office one day while I was definitely getting work done and not trying to figure out a new alien computer game I’d just traded in exchange for settling an argument between a moth person and some kind of walking plant thing, and dumped some vials on my desk.

“It’s DNA!” she exclaimed.

“Good?” It was always DNA.

“Eight species tested. Seven have DNA.” (Okay, so it was always DNA when it wasn’t Glath.) She grinned, her eyes unsettlingly bright, almost feverish. “They don’t all use the same amino acids as us, is the thing, but the ones I’ve studied do use amino acids that aren’t toxic to us. I don’t know what acids the others use, I don’t exactly have the equipment or base knowledge here to find that out, let alone the materials because so much of this relies on having enzymes that I just don’t have and that have to be super specific to the creature or proteins you’re studying so it’s… my point it, it’s absurd that we haven’t poisoned ourselves and died yet, isn’t it? But there’s unbelievable chemical uniformity between the species I’ve looked at. But not enough chemical uniformity to suspect a single origin of life. So why does it keep arising in such similar ways? Is this the only way to do it, the only chemical system that can evolve? Does it have to be DNA and RNA? Does it have to be this specific narrow band of biochemistry?”

“… Maybe?”

“Exactly! Maybe!” She grinned triumphantly. “Or maybe not!”

“Biologists are fucking weird,” I said.

“So you’ve said. Derek is back, by the way.”

“Already?” I leapt out of my seat. I hadn’t heard the docking notification. It always worried me when he went to the planet below or launched back up to the station; even after all this time, it seemed like such a horribly unsafe thing to do. We’d had no launch disasters and we’d all done way less safe things in the past, but still.

We had artificial gravity inside the station, thankfully, so I was able to speed walk down the hall, into the elevator, off to the docking bay. Derek was still there, flanked by a couple of tahl whose positions as guards were more ceremonial than anything, talking to Keith and Glath. I threw my arms around him and, after a couple of second, he returned the hug. (It always takes Derek a little while to remember human body language. I’m not sure exactly how the translator chip works, but non-aljik body language just doesn’t seem to stick any more.)

“How’s the planet?” I asked.

“Same as always,” he said. “The new Queen’s started building the fourth nest down there and it seems to be going well. Queen Ima’s daughters have hatched.”

“Princesses? How many?”

“Two.”

“I suppose we’ll be dragged in to hosting them up here when they’re grown, won’t we. Get them used to space,help them find planets to settle on.”

“Most likely.”

“Which is ridiculous. It’s a big planet down there. Plenty of space to build new nests.”

He twitched an arm in the aljik version of a shrug. “They’re really firm on the whole genetic diversity thing. No Queen down there can have a daughter, mother or sister make another nest down there until they have at least two hundred and fifty nests from unrelated Queens. They’re really worried about filling the planet with just a few families and even with the travel agency right above them able to funnel ahlda…”

“Everyone’s being super extra careful about the genetically different ahlda access thing, yeah, I get it. But the planet would be safe and easier to build nests on the more nests there are down there. If they capped it to like, five per family, there’d be plenty of space.”

“They’re worried about wars in a couple of generations’ time between sister nests when their daughters want to be able to settle on-planet. If they don’t have enough unrelated nests down there by then…”

“Yeah, yeah,” I mumbled. “When we plan to extend the space station further I’ll build on areas for the fussybritch Princesses on either side of the station so they don’t accidentally steal each others’ aljik and end up killing each other. How long are you staying?”

“Two weeks.”

“That’s not long enough! A month, at least!”

“There’s a lot of work to do with the nests. Anyway, Aunt Kate wants to come down and study them.”

“And finally learn about how pre-spaceflight aljik would’ve lived, yeah.” If Kate had heard me say that, of course, I’d be in for an hour-long lecture about how we can’t draw solid comparisons between pre-spaceflight nests and post-spaceflight nests that happen to be planetbound, about how if you dumped a bunch of humans on Mars it wouldn’t tell you anything about how cavemen lived, et cetera, even if you didn’t take into account the really obvious fact that they were in communication with our space station and getting ahlda from space, bla bla bla. But since her main interests were things like ‘what biologically attracts ahlda to nests and how do they find and choose between them’, or ‘how do the mechanisms of a Queen’s influence physically work and how common is natural aljik migration between neighbouring nests’, I think a bunch of nests next to each other on a planet will tell her a lot whether or not they also happen to be talking to space.

Which will be useful, because the more we know about how ahlda think, the better our little agency can work.

“I should be able to go down to the planet,” Keith grumbled.

“On Kate’s second trip, she can take you if it’s safe.”

“I should be able to go alone! Everyone else can go places alone.”

“Six more months,” I told him firmly. “After your next birthday, you can go places alone. Until then, you’re stuck with an escort, kiddo. Such as me, telling you that the fourth storage bay needs stocktaking.”

“Uuuugh, stocktaking!”

“If you don’t want to stocktake,” I said jokingly, “the offer’s still open to go back to – ”

“I’m not going back to Earth, Mum! You’d never smuggle me past Tatik anyway, you know she’d pitch a fit if she thought we were sending people to and from Earth. Probably panic that we’ve been lying this whole time and we’re actually raising a super big Singers In Light army to kill everyone.”

“Eh, we’ve outsmarted her before. I could get you through if you wanted to go.” But we both knew that that wouldn’t happen. The station was his home now, a world of exciting new frontiers and a space station to inherit and strange new aliens to learn to communicate with regularly. And a ketestri that sometimes hung around outside for no clear reason that Keith would definitely, totally be able to beat at at least one game any day now, if Kate would please just teach him a bit more about statistics so he could refine his strategies.

As my sons dispersed on ther own errands, Glath put a hand on my shoulder. (It did look a lot like a hand, too. At a glance, I couldn’t even tell that it was made up of tiny alien spiders.) “We need to talk, Charlie.”

I knew what this was about. I’d been expecting it for a while. “My office.”

We went to my office.

“I think I’m done,” he said.

“Done?” I asked, though I was pretty sure I knew what was coming.

“Yeah.” He raised a hand, an unbelievably humanlike hand, and flexed it in front of his ‘eyes’, watching the way the false tendons moved. “I’ve learned so much about the world. And people. And humans; or at least, as much as I can out here. It’s time for me to go home.”

“We’ll all be sorry to see you go,” I said.

“I know.”

“You don’t sound too happy about it, either.”

“I’m not! I mean, I am. Every day, the urge grows stronger. I want to finish my job, I want to bring home the information that I was designed to bring home; I know my work is complete. But I want to see how this place turns out, too! I put so much work into building this, and to leave without seeing how it all goes…” He shook his head. “That’s a trap, of course, because there aren’t endings; I’ve been holding on this long to see how this place turns out, but there’s always more turning out for a place to do. And I can’t be here forever; I have a job to do, and I want to do it. But I can’t be in two places at once.”

I was struck with a sudden old memory, one I generally tried not to think about. Cowering in a dark tunnel under the roots while a collection of old parts of aljik exoskeletons shambled towards me, piloted by a fragment of an ambassador colony.

“Can’t you?” I asked.

“What?”

“I mean, you’ve lost parts of yourself before. And I know you did actually lose a lot then, stuff you’ll never get back. But… you’re a lot of spiders. You can be more spiders. Is it possible to make two copies of all of your memories and soforth, and send half of you, with one copy, away?”

“I… don’t know.”

“Is there any rule against trying?”

“Well, no. There’s nobody who could stop me trying. But it… can’t be possible. Or other ambassador colonies would’ve done it.”

“What makes you think they haven’t? How often do you speak to other ambassador colonies? It’s a big, big universe out there, and being near each other creates problems for you, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, it messes up our colony communication. If we run into each other, we avoid each other.” He frowned. “I think. These are things that I’m born knowing, I don’t… I know what we’re supposed to do, I have no way of knowing what happens.”

“Then it’s entirely possible that there’s a whole lot of third or fourth generation ambassador colonies out there who you simply don’t know about, and may not even know about each other.”

“I… suppose it is. I don’t know if it would work, and even if it did, I don’t know if it would solve anything – perhaps the me that stays behind would still be labouring under the overwhelming urge to go home even knowing that his information has already been recorded. Or maybe not. I guess we can’t lose anything by trying. But, Charlie, doing something like this wouldn’t be fair on you.”

“On me? Why not?”

“It might not work. I don’t have proper conscious control over the location of my various memories. I do have experience at rebuilding myself, but that only counts for so much. This’ll take a while, and I’ll probably miss a lot. You’d be left with a version of me that’s ignorant and useless and just a general burden for a while, I think, and there’s no guarantee that the me I become will be exactly the same as this me. I could turn into someone you don’t like. You might be putting up with a lot for nothing.”

“So?” I said. “A baby is supposed to be a useless burden where you can’t be sure what sort of person they’ll turn into. I’m raising two sons on this damned space station already, you think I can’t raise a third?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, we can try.”

And so that’s how things stand right now, as best I can remember. Smuggling a human back to Earth under Tatik’s watchful and paranoid eye would be really difficult, but a lot of people owe me favours by now, and I’m pretty sure that this will reach you safely. Whoever ‘you’ are.

Sorry to dump this responsibility on you, I guess. But fuck it, we can’t shoulder humanity by ourselves out here. It’s your future, too. And that’s why I’m writing this down – so that you guys understand what’s waiting for you out here. There’s a whole universe of friends and foes, and just because we’re providing a vital resource on our little space station doesn’t mean that the empires aren’t still jumpy as fuck about the Singers in Light. When you get out here, you need to be the best of humanity. You can’t be clumsy, insular, war-mongering aliens ready to respond to every slight in kind, or assume that what’s familiar is what’s best, or look at how any new situation can benefit you at the expense of others. We cannot fuck this up with the kinds of fuckups spread throughout all human history. You’ll be coming into a playing field that’s already unfairly weighted against you.

Maybe the Lightsong Agency will make it a bit less weighted against you by the time you get here. Maybe not. There’s still plenty of ways for us to fuck this up on our end.

But if you’re the one who receives this message, that’s what I need you to get out there. However you can, I don’t know what the fuck technology or politics or whatever is like down there, that’s your problem. You need to let people know what kind of universe is waiting for them, so humanity can do what it’s always done with new situations – prepared itself through stories. Train minds and souls and ethical frameworks via the Game of Lies.

Or, occasionally, through the Game of Truth. I’ve told you the start of a true story today.

Now it’s your turn to tell me the ending.

—————————————-

Hello, Earth!

You know what? I think I’ve solved the Parable of the Child.

I hope I’m doing this correctly. I generally don’t talk to people. The Void has no particular demands on the skill of my communication. But that is the difficult thing right there, isn’t it? The skill of my communication. I am thinking that this is a skill worth developing. See, after extensive observation of the growth of my garden, I have come up with a new framework that I believe resolve sthe Parable of the Child, as well as explains the allure of the games I so enjoy and my fascination with my garden. Intriguing, yes? I am investigating the properties of insight born from ignorance. Foolish, right? To have less information is to have more information? But is that in itself not the core of the Parable of the Child?

I am calling this concept “perspective”.

Sounds silly to you, I know. I mean, you clearly already have a word for this, since I just used it, so obviously you understand ‘perspective’ very well. But it is a new and fascinating concept to me. I have taken to disregarding vast amounts of information when observing certain things, and the vast differences in the conclusions this leads to is fascinating – not because they’re different, which is expected, but because the differences are not always clearly erroneous. And the similarities in conclusions drawn from different starting information is also, in itself, illuminating; a whole new level of information that I am very excited to analyse. Possibly in chunks after discarding random parts of it for ‘perspective’.

My apologies. I am rambling.

But I looked through Charlie’s story and while I am far from an expert in perspective, I do suspect that it has quite a lot of missing necessary information; things that explain certain events and behaviours that Charlie herself was not aware of. And this seems to be an excellent test of my own skills in information and perspective. So I have done my best to clarify the story by adding parts of these other perspectives that I felt were necessary. You will have to be the judge of how well I did! If they are unnecessary, no harm done; I have not altered Charlie’s parts at all, merely added alternate perspectives to create context. Discount them if you feel they add nothing.

I hope they do, though. I would like to get much better at this sort of communication.

If I get good enough, I might one day speak to Charlie.

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