Venturi Read online

  ‘No worries,’ Trilopharus flourished a hand and wings of light flowed and coalesced all around them. ‘We can take you back, or on, anytime.’ A note of benign concern. ‘But we didn’t break anything, did we? People seemed upset before.’

  ‘It was… disconcerting,’ Alex admitted. ‘We didn’t know what had happened. We know where we are now, but may I ask – what is this world? What’s its name?’

  Trilopharus looked, as far as could be determined when it was so hard to see details of their face in that dazzle of light, surprised.

  ‘I don’t think it has one,’ they said and after a barely perceptible pause. ‘No.’ Then, in a helpful tone, ‘It is one of yours, though – a Cartash world.’

  Alex felt a thrill run right through him and heard the same reaction around the command deck in the caught breaths and wondering murmurs. Cartash...

  Shion had told them that the Cartash had been the first of the infected species, as plague had leapt from world to world, to make the decision to create a genome that would survive them.

  It had not been a decision made without heart-searching. In order to give their offspring genome the ability to survive, the essential, high-functioning immune system, they would have to accept the side effects which came with it; a greatly increased metabolism, a very much shorter life span, cognitive reduction and an aggressive fight/flight physiology. Many species had chosen to die out entirely rather than to create such distorted and disturbing children. But to the Cartash life – any life – was the only possible answer to their own impending death. And something of themselves, they had believed, would live on. That world – their world – was now known as Chartsey, capital of the League.

  And here, all the way out here, was a world which had belonged to them. The same thought was passing through the minds of just about everyone who heard that. The Library.

  There was a legend, part of Chartsey’s own oral history, a story so old that it pre-dated even the classical era of Cartasay. The story was told that there had been a great civilisation way back in the dawn of time, facing a disaster which they knew would tear them down to Dark Age barbarity. So they had made a library far away, to keep safe all their knowledge, all the things that they held precious. Only the secret of where the library was had been lost.

  Shion had told them that was founded in fact, as her people had historical records. In their records, though, there had been guardians to care for the library. When they knew that their world was doomed they had not been able to bear the grief of being the last of their kind. So they had gone home and died and nobody knew now where the library had been.

  The Fourth had passed that information on both to the Diplomatic and Exploration Corps. The Lost Library of Cartasay is real. Nothing had come of it, though.

  ‘Is this,’ Alex asked, making an effort to keep his voice steady, ‘The Lost Library of Cartasay, Trilopharus?’

  ‘No idea.’ Trilopharus sounded bewildered. ‘Have you lost a library?’

  Ah. Tempting as it was to try to explain, Alex recognised an exodiplomacy Wall when he ran into one.

  ‘Never mind,’ he said and it had never been harder to utter the exodiplomacy rescue. ‘It isn’t…’

  ‘Hah!’ Trilopharus evidently recognised the standard step-back when communication risked being stuck in a morass of incomprehension. ‘Well, it is yours,’ they explained, ‘We thought it would be a good encounter zone. Safe for you.’

  Enlightenment. Nobody spoke, but the gratified looks and exchanges of little nods showed people’s satisfaction with that. Now things made sense. As overwhelming as it was for them, knocking them out and transporting them half a million light years to drop their ship onto a planet had been nothing more than the Chethari moving them into a safe encounter zone. Where, perhaps, the comms were better for them, since Trilopharus was now appearing in a form visible to them all. ‘I hope that’s all right?’ Trilopharus enquired.

  Alex demonstrated why he was the most successful exodiplomat in the League with a big, happy grin.

  ‘That,’ he said, ‘is excellent, thank you.’ But then, mindful of his ambassadorial responsibilities, ‘I have the great honour to convey…’

  He got no further. Trilopharus interrupted again.

  ‘Now you sound like a diplomat,’ they observed and it was evidently not a compliment. ‘You must be tired.’ A benevolent smile. ‘Rest, eat, sleep,’ Trilopharus told him. ‘Call me when you’re ready tomorrow.’

  And they were gone.

  Three

  They didn’t rest, of course. They went into analytical mode, with teams assigned to work on all the different aspects of the situation.

  Silvie, emerging from the aquadeck now that things had calmed down somewhat, moved happily from team to team, contributing a little here and there but mostly just soaking up the buzz humans got from such adventure and discovery. Her best contribution, undoubtedly, was when she wandered through the lab where the biodiversity team was attempting to figure out what was going on.

  They had worked out, by then, from the sedimentary record, that this biosphere certainly hadn’t been created ten thousand years ago. It had been evolving for at least six hundred thousand years.

  ‘They are all descended from a common ancestor,’ one of the research team was arguing, quite heatedly, as many of the others seemed inclined to the view that they couldn’t make definitive statements like that until they had physical samples.

  This was the Second’s lab, primarily, though open for shipboard projects to use too. It was, as with every facility aboard the Venturi, impressive. The Second Irregulars themselves – the Fleet’s semi-civilian R&D Division – had put major funding into it and so had several universities. The result was a lab which had the very best equipment which could be packed into the space available. The Second had resisted pressure to turn the lab into a suite by compartmentalising nanotech, biosciences and physics into separate rooms, too. One of the reasons the Fourth’s lab worked so well was that it brought together people from many different disciplines, sharing a communal space.

  ‘Inga’s right,’ Silvie said, sitting down with them at the datatable where a team of four biologists, a nanotech engineer and five members of the Fourth were arguing over the results of bio-scans. ‘That’s your direct line.’ She ran a finger along the evolutionary tree which Inga had constructed, showing her idea of how various branches had evolved as plant life expanded into new habitats. ‘And this,’ she tapped a finger on the file of the plant Inga had identified as the oldest, ‘is your common ancestor.’

  It wasn’t impressive. It was a small, hand-sized plant with a rosette of rubbery leaves.

  ‘And these…’ Silvie enlarged the screen on which the fungi data was still in something of a mess, since the team hadn’t got to it yet. A few deft sweeps and the data resolved into an evolutionary tree – no, two evolutionary trees. ‘Fungi 1,’ Silvie pointed out, ‘essential symbiont, exchanging nutrients for sugars. Fungi 2, essential detritus disposal.’ She regarded the trio with interest. ‘Looks like an experiment to me,’ she observed and as everyone stared at her, grinned. ‘What would happen,’ she asked, ‘if you seeded a planet with nothing more than a plant and the two essential fungi to feed it and break down dead plants into soil? We’re doing habitat experiments on Serenity, putting things together in isolation habitats and watching how it works itself out. This looks the same. And it would be interesting to see, don’t you think, how a biosphere would evolve where plants had no fauna driving their evolution, no need to develop don’t-eat-me things like toxins or thorns, no need to put energy into flowers.’ She smiled. ‘We’re looking,’ she said, ‘at what happens when plants have nothing to compete with but themselves. Obvious, really. They get big. And as the habitats get squeezed, they adapt to expand.’

  She left them to think – and argue – about that and that was in fact the preliminary theory that the biology team brought to the debriefing, later that day.

  ‘We believ
e it may have been a terraforming experiment.’ Inga said, putting up the report which the team had eventually agreed upon as all that they could say, for now and that speculative. She spoke for a few minutes, outlining their reasons for that as-yet tentative conclusion and Alex thanked her.

  ‘Good work,’ he commended. He could see Silvie’s name on the list of contributors, but did not single her out. He just moved briskly on, calling up the next team leader to give their report.

  This was the comms-tech analysis team. They didn’t actually have any tech to analyse but they did have the effects of tech, which they had speculated about and also come to some tentative conclusions.

  The first thing they had to report was that, while Trilopharus had appeared visible to the rest of them since their arrival here, they were still not showing up on cameras or any of their internal sensors. There was less, now, even, than there had been in the previous encounters, where the ship had at least registered a build-up of electrostatic charge, which had discharged itself with a crack and flash at the figure’s departure.

  ‘We don’t know whether this has to do with the ship being superlight at the time, with some factor of distance, or some other factor maybe we can’t even guess at. But Trilopharus’s comments about a transducer ‘our end’ being dodgy and the transmission erratic, that may be relevant. But without any idea what they mean by a transducer, or any clue as to the nature of the transmission, all we can really say at this point is that we have a lot of questions.’

  Silvie had one, too, slipping it in quickly as Alex gave a nod of thanks.

  ‘Why does it matter so much,’ she asked, curiously, ‘that other people can see Trilopharus too, now?’

  Alex hadn’t realised himself that it did matter to him, but as she asked that he realised that she was right, it did. He had felt a sense of great relief when he realised that everyone else could see the Chethari, too – everyone other than Davie, at least. And having realised that, it didn’t take him long to figure out why.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘It felt like a lot of pressure, being the one and only person who could see them – difficult, that, in so many ways. But for me personally, I guess, even though I knew people did believe me, there was a feeling at some level that I had an Invisible Friend.’

  A burst of laughter at that and Davie raised a hand, speaking as Alex gave him a look of assent.

  ‘I’ve recreated what I saw, myself,’ he told them and put up a short simulation on a screen. It was a cloud of brilliant fractals, flashing and flowing, with just here and there perhaps a hint of a feature, a hand, an eye, barely glimpsed. The sound which he’d created was a complex half-musical, half-technical hoot and babble, which held something of the tonal qualities of speech but yet no sound which could be interpreted as such. ‘From which,’ Davie reported matter of factly, ‘I deduce that the transmission is processed directly by the visual cortex and has no objective presence – which is why none of our cameras or scanners picked it up. It is, I believe, transmitted directly to the observers’ brain. Which implies that since only the skipper could see it until we got here, the transmission is focussed specifically to his brain and its only since the strength of that signal has increased with our arrival here that others can pick it up too.’

  Alex nodded thoughtfully. ‘That makes sense,’ he agreed, ‘Trilopharus did say that it was in the nature of a person to person call – and it’s evident that other people still aren’t seeing them with the clarity and brilliance I do.’

  That had emerged in the course of conversation since Trilopharus’s departure, as Alex had commented on how blindingly bright the Chethari was and others had remarked with some surprise that the figure was, to them, more of a ghostly presence – radiant, yes, but like a spectre seen in moonlight rather than the eye-piercing brilliance Alex experienced.

  ‘You mean its beaming directly into his brain?’ Mister LIA had been released from sickbay, having been calmed down with one of Dr Tekawa’s cups of herbal tea, and had promptly asserted his right to be present at the debriefing.

  He had no such right. The LIA had sneaked him aboard at Serenity, deploying falsified documents which had given him a Fleet ID and orders to join the ship signed by the Third Lord, Admiral Tennet. It had been quite cleverly done, that, as anyone spotting the holes in his cover would normally assume that he was working as an investigative officer for Internal Affairs. The LIA would have been mortified to realise that nobody had been fooled by that at all. Even door security at the Port Admiral’s office knew that the alleged Sub-lt Jones was an LIA spook. Alex certainly had, when he’d let him come aboard. And he’d allowed him an observer’s place, too, when even he eventually recognised that his cover was irretrievably blown.

  Mister had resolved to stay quiet throughout the briefing, which he’d been told was a condition of his being present. But there were limits and this was way beyond them. ‘An alien is beaming stuff directly into the commodore’s brain!’ he pointed out, with a frantic note, as everyone looked at him in some surprise. ‘And none of you find that in any way alarming?’

  Surprise turned into perplexity and in some cases, pity. Everyone understood that the LIA man was so far out of his depth in this situation that it was small wonder he was struggling with it. He had, so far as they could determine, no kind of exodiplomacy experience before this, or even any decent training. And he was, by the nature of his work, conditioned to always look for the worst possible interpretation of any situation.

  ‘No – interesting,’ Buzz said, with kindly reassurance, ‘it helps us to have some idea of what’s going on. But it isn’t alarming, Mister, no.’ And as the LIA agent would have protested, Buzz went on, more firmly, ‘Extensive medical evaluation has already established that the skipper is not affected by these encounters in any way.’

  ‘Right,’ said Simon, in a tone which made it clear he didn’t expect anyone to argue with his medical expertise on this or any other matter. ‘And we will,’ he declared, with a stare at Mister which flicked into a minatory look at Alex, ‘continue to monitor that very closely.’

  Alex inclined his head, confirming his willingness to allow Simon to continue whatever tests he wanted to do to ensure that he was not being affected either physically or psychologically by the ongoing encounter with the Chethari. Mister, however, was not pacified.

  ‘But…’ he started, hardly knowing how to start pointing out to these people the self-evident lunacy of allowing an alien race to penetrate the brain of an officer who held all kinds of top secret information.

  ‘I will,’ Buzz told him, cutting off what was evidently going to be an impassioned spate of protest, ‘discuss that with you later if you wish. But if you could abide by briefing protocols for now…’

  It was a mild but effective reminder that he was here only by courtesy and that if he didn’t follow their rules he would be excluded entirely. So he gave a short nod, containing his outrage by writing several rapid, heavily underscored notes with multiple exclamation points.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Alex, dividing the acknowledgement between Buzz for defusing that and the LIA agent for complying.

  The engineering tech report came next.

  ‘We believe that the ship may have been transported within some kind of vehicle, like the encounter-bubble generated by the Gider,’ their team leader, the ship’s engineer, was still a little sensitive about the wild yelling from his department in the immediate aftermath of what they were now calling the transit event. It hadn’t actually been him yelling, since at the time he’d been fully occupied with checking that the engines weren’t going into dephase. But engineering, he knew, would take a lot of teasing over that. It was already a shipwide joke to ask any member of the engineering crew, ‘So, engines still down, are they?’

  ‘This can only be speculative, of course, but it seems the most likely scenario given what we have observed of advanced tech. Our provisional theory is that the ship was put into stasis by the same Turnaround system that o
perates at the Firewall, that we were then decelerated, enclosed in a Chethari vehicle and transported here. We believe that the oval burn-zone we’re resting on may have been caused by that bubble bringing us down to land and, we think, possibly being removed in a high energy but contained disposal. Their concern that they may have parked us upside down indicates that they have been informed and guided about the handling of our ships by the Gider.’

  This led neatly into a sociological analysis presented by Buzz.

  ‘It is apparent,’ Buzz said, ‘that the Chethari are following first-contact protocols based on the Gider’s experience with us. Trilopharus’s response to an attempt at giving a formal diplomatic greeting was particularly indicative of that – the comment You sound like a diplomat makes it apparent that they know what diplomats sound like and that they do not wish to engage with us at that formal, impersonal level. Trilopharus’s first greeting, after all, was I wish to be your friend, not, We want to open diplomatic relationships. So our advice is to set aside all formal protocol and continue to engage with Trilopharus on an informal and personal basis.’

  Alex nodded. That was, in fact, his intention. But it was useful to have Buzz’s expert opinion confirming it.

  Less immediately useful, but perhaps rather more thrilling, was the report from the team which had been assigned to look at the data from the Chambers, in the light of what Trilopharus had said about this being a Cartash world.

  ‘Could it be the Library?’ their leader was Davie, having taken on that analysis with a hands up and ‘bagsy?’ to which Alex had given an unhesitating nod. ‘Dunno,’ Davie said. ‘No way to know on the data that we have. But I recommend in the strongest possible terms that we do not, not, not attempt to access those Chambers.’

  There was an outcry from many in the seminar room who’d been so focussed on their own research that they were hearing this for the first time, but Alex was already nodding agreement.