CHAPTER 10

It was lucky that they’d never been able to sell all of Pasco’s junk. Ubu and Maria headed for the cargo bay, unstrapped a package, dissolved away its tempafoam shell. Inside were the fastlearn cartridges that had given him and Maria the ability to write before their hands could quite coordinate their grip upon a pencil. Maria took the cartridges to computer central, jacked them in, and cracked open the contents, liberating the actual text of the language instruction from the software-to-wetware shell that actually read its contents into the human mind. Ubu found more cartridges— mathematics, spacetime geometry, singularity physics—and took a seat at another terminal.

The intruder in the meantime looped away from Maria the Fair on a long aphelion, swung back, burned again to put itself into a less elongated orbit. By the time the stranger settled into its new orbit, Runaway was ready.

Maria lifted Maxim onto her lap as Ubu moved to the comm board. “I hope they use radio,” she said. “It’s gonna be hard getting their attention if we have to use semaphore flags or something.” She gave a laugh. “We wouldn’t even know how many flags to wave. They might have eight hands apiece.”

“Radio makes sense.”

“Who says they gotta make sense? Besides,” reasonably, “light makes as much sense as radio. Maybe they modulate a laser—”

Ubu looked at her. “We’ll deal with it if it happens,” he said.

She grinned at him. “Relax. Okay?” Ubu turned back to his board.

“I hope to hell they use high-energy communications, whatever kind. Otherwise the radiation from the planet’s gonna fuck up our reception.” He turned back to the boards and locked transmission and reception antennae onto the intruder. He prepared the transmitter to fire a series of standard greetings on a wide range of transmission bands, then made the receivers ready to pick up any return signal at all.

Ubu gazed hungrily at the dark silhouette of the intruder ship, the fluorescence gone now that its torch had shut down. Ubu’s nerves hummed. There was a knot in his stomach. He suppressed a tremor as he ordered the transmitter to begin.

The signal raced away. Ubu licked his lips, waited. Maxim’s purr was suddenly very loud.

Ubu’s heart leaped as an answer came back very quickly at 1427.4 megahertz. He looked at the board and saw a response time of less than three seconds between the intruder’s reception of the message and its reply. “They use microwave!” he laughed, and then his joy faded. The response time was so fast that the other ship had to be automated. But no: the response consisted of several lines of gibberish followed by a repeat of Ubu’s initial message.

He looked up at Maria. “We’re talking to each other.”

Maria jumped from her chair with a cry that sounded in Ubu’s mind like burnished silver. Maxim thrashed in her arms in surprised annoyance. Maria danced to Ubu’s station, bent over his shoulder. Her hair brushed his shoulder. He laughed. “Better go slow,” he said, and began his language lessons, right there on the megahertz band.

MORE. After twelve minutes of slow transmission the single word began to glow on the communications screens. Ubu gave the intruder what it wanted.

The intruder started out fast and got faster, its comprehension span ranging between thirty and fifty times the speed of the average human child. Anxiety gnawed at Ubu. What if the aliens were so smart they wouldn’t need anything the humans could give them? But, he thought, if they were so smart, how come they needed all those correction burns to wander into the right orbit?

CONTINUE.

Fast as the intruders were, it took them weeks to absorb what Ubu could send them. The intruder never asked questions, just transmitted short requests for more information.

PLEASE CONTINUE, RUNWAY. Which proved they were absorbing at least some of it.

Maria and Ubu took six-hour shifts on the communications decks, watching the transmissions blaze out, the curt replies come back in answer.

THANK YOU, RUNAWAY.

At least they were polite.

Beautiful Maria pointed out that they should be careful in transmitting technical knowledge. The aliens ought to pay for that if they wanted it. Runaway tried to limit its transmissions to abstract areas of knowledge—mainly math and language—and kept its practical applications to themselves.

Still, Maria was worried. Just the vocabulary they were transmitting would give the intruders a very good idea of human capabilities.

BRILLIANT SHIP REQUESTS YOU PRAY CONTINUE, RUNAWAY.

When the message came, Maria called Ubu out of the rack. “Maybe the ship really is automated,” she said.

“Why’s it so big?”

“Maybe the whole ship’s a big AI. Maybe that’s why they’re processing things so quickly.”

“Jesus Rice.”

“Maybe that’s why they call themselves the brilliant ship. Because they’re so smart.”

Ubu gave up on sleep. From time to time he dozed at the communications board. There was nothing to watch—the information pulsing out, the brief replies coming back—but he wanted to be ready in case something happened.

MANY THANKS, RUNAWAY. SHINING ASSEMBLY REQUESTS CONTINUANCE.

“Shining assembly,” Maria said. “Look at that. It is a machine.”

“We’ll see.”

How do you figure the angles on a machine? Ubu wondered. How does a machine sign a contract?

Finally there was nothing left, nothing but the technical knowledge they wanted to keep for themselves. “They know a damn sight more about us than we know about them,” Ubu said. “Now that we can talk, I want to see them up close.”

Maria shrugged. “Let’s ask them.”

Ubu felt his mouth go dry. Fear flickered in his belly. He couldn’t put it off any more.

A memory of Pasco reached up from his mind, his father eating a huge piece of crumb cake while he hunched over the computer, working on a new project, some kind of big four-dimensional economic model that was going to give him a handle on Consolidation, another project he never finished. Ubu wished he had Pasco for this, Pasco’s genius and imagination. This was exactly the sort of thing that might have brought Pasco alive again, out of his spiral into death.

Ubu reached for the headset mic, then lowered his hand. Communication with the intruder had, so far, been entirely in terms of written language. If they got a voice transmission they wouldn’t know how to interpret it.

If contact continued, Ubu realized, it was going to get tedious to type everything or use the dictation software.

No choice, though. His fingers tapped keys. RUNAWAY REQUESTS SHIP RENDEZVOUS AND FACE-TO-FACE INTERVIEW BETWEEN OUR REPRESENTATIVES.

The answer was as swift as it had always been, with no more than a second between the reception of Runaway’s message and the transmission of the intruder’s reply.

RADIANT CLAN AGREES WHOLEHEARTEDLY TO MEETING, RUNAWAY.

A shiver ran through Ubu.

“Let’s do it,” he said.

“Clan,” said Maria. “Maybe they’re not machines, after all.”

Runaway seemed more maneuverable than the intruder, so Ubu volunteered to match the other’s orbit. Runaway made a pair of burns that put the ship within a half kilometer of the intruder.

Maria and Ubu watched as details of the intruder’s design became visible on the vid. The intruder’s ovoid, symmetric hull was studded with antennae and receptor dishes, and marked by artifacts of commerce: cargo cranes and movers, big hatches meant for bulky objects, smaller rider ships, some of which were winged for descent into atmosphere. There was a kind of symmetry to it all, a similar style and sense of proportion that seemed to mark the entire alien design from the largest feature to the smallest. It was the big singularity grapplers that seemed out of place— they looked as if they’d been tacked on. Runaway’s grapplers were tacked on as well, but didn’t alter the look of the human ship. Runaway’s entire battered design made it look as if it were assembled out of spare parts.

“Maybe they’re desperate,” said Ubu. “Maybe they bought some grapplers and ran out here for the same reason we did.”

“I hope so.” Maria squinted at the display. “What’s it made of?”

“Something dark.”

“Why dark?”

“Be crazy.”

“Yeah. Crazy. Guess I’ll find out.”

Ubu pushed back from the comm board and stood. “I gotta make an adaptation to my vac suit before I can talk to these people.” He looked at her. “Watch the boards. I’ll let you know when I’m done.”

“Right.” She grinned at him as she tracked her chair to the comm board. He bent to kiss her. Her taste ran like wildfire through his mind, triggering associations, memories, a storm of desire that burst without warning. Maria looked at him, wide dark eyes startled.

“Ubu,” she said.

Ubu realized to his astonishment that the rules had changed. Life didn’t equal despair any more.

He kissed her again, tasted the possibilities. He was falling in love with hope.

Beautiful Maria monitored the boards while Ubu took his four-armed vac suit to the weightless workshop aft of the centrifuge. He had to work out a fast way of communicating face-to-face, otherwise it would prove more efficient to continue chattering on the radio.

*

The suit had a maneuvering unit attached, power jacks, a chest analyzer that would provide readings on atmosphere content and pressure.

From storage Ubu took a portable computer keyboard, one of those with the wide steel keys intended for use outside a ship, when the programmer’s fingers would be sheathed in clumsy gloves. He strapped the deck to his vac suit’s chest, ran a dictation program into it, jacked in a lead from the helmet mic. He removed one of the two helmet lamps and attached a holo projector to the empty bracket. He leaned over the mic and spoke a few lines, saw a print version of his words parade in bright golden letters over the helmet. He grinned.

That was the easy part.

The helmet had a heads-up display that projected data on the interior of the faceplate—life-support and power information, suit systems and comm unit status, any readouts from attached equipment. Ubu ran the microwave receiver on the helmet through the comp, then reprogrammed the heads-up unit to display any received information. He took a spare suit comm unit from the rack, jacked it into a computer deck, and aimed the antenna at the helmet receiver. He tapped a message, fired it at the helmet.

Nothing.

It took him two more tries before the jury-rigged system worked properly. Then he tested the vidcam unit in the helmet— he wanted to record this— and drifted his suit to the dorsal lock, entered the centrifuge, and dropped to the first level. Maria sat before the comm board. She looked over her shoulder and smiled.

“I’m ready,” he said.

LUSTRE SHIP WILL ILLUMINATE THE APPROPRIATE AIRLOCK. OUR AMBASSADOR WILL AWAIT YOU.

The illumination was blinding, the lock outlined by a series of multicolored strobes so bright that Ubu had to dial up the polarization of his helmet. The other ship was taking no chances that Ubu might miss the appropriate hatch.

The outside hatch was open, about two meters by three. Relief eased through Ubu at the realization that it was human-sized. He rotated, fired attitudinal jets, drifted into the lock, and raised a pair of arms to stop his motion against the far hatch. His own shadow, hard-edged in the light of the strobes, flickered in bursts of bright color against the interior hatch. Ubu triggered his transmitter.

“I have arrived in the airlock.” His fingers tapped the broad steel keys. He could see the gold glow of hologram letters above his head.

The door behind him slid smoothly shut. Phosphors, images of the strobes, burned in Ubu’s vision, then faded. He dialed down his polarized visor and turned on the video camera. Get some pictures, he thought, of this historical moment.

Fluorescent strips on the walls glowed with bluish light. There was another blue light source, a circular plate that Ubu assumed operated the lock. The corners of the lock were rounded, not angular, Ubu looked at the smooth dark grey surface of the walls, brushed gloved fingers against it, tried to work out what it was made of. It didn’t seem to be metal. Possibly it was plastic.

In time he became aware of a world outside his vac suit, that there was now an atmosphere in the lock that transmitted the muted hiss of air coming in, and then, more distantly, a complex drumming sound, a long weighty chain of rhythm.

A wedge of bright blue light spilled into the lock. There was a metallic whirring noise that made Ubu’s heart leap. The drumming sound was much louder. The interior hatch had begun to slide open.

Something waited beyond the hatch, outlined in the light. Ubu’s pulse beat louder than the clattering door, the sound of the ship’s throbbing drums.

It was, at first glance, reassuringly humanoid. About two meters tall, with two long arms and two legs, dark brown in color, a head where a human’s would be. It was bent over a football-sized object that it cradled in its arms.

Letters rose crimson on Ubu’s heads-up display. GREETINGS, they said. Apparently the other was holding a transmitter. CLAN LUSTRE BIDS YOU WELCOME.

Ubu’s blood ran cold as his eyes adjusted to the brightness and details of the stranger became visible.

The hands and feet were alike in each having three digits and a pair of opposable thumbs. The legs were just a little thicker than the arms. There was not even the hint of a neck. The head was squared-off, almost a cube, eerily equipped with a pair of very human-looking eyes at the upper corners, dark pupils set in white eyeballs that each peered out of a wrinkled vertical slit. As the creature bent over its transmitter, Ubu could see a slight concavity on top of the head.

Drums boomed on, hardly muffled by Ubu’s suit. Random noise, possibly, but Ubu thought not— there was a pattern in there somewhere, even if he couldn’t quite understand it

The creature was pointing at the transmitter with a stylus. His movements were slow, careful. At each touch of the stylus a letter jumped onto Ubu’s display.

I, THIS-INDIVIDUAL, AM VOLITIONAL TWELVE.

This-individual’s mouth was a flattened oval and apparently had no teeth. Something flickered in and out, as if with respiration— Ubu thought at first this was a tongue, then realized there were two of them, a ribbonlike, branchlike construction at the comer of each mouth.

I ABASE MYSELF AT MY CLUMSINESS WITH THIS DEVICE. I AM NOT YET FAMILIAR WITH ITS OPERATION.

The creature—Volitional Twelve—looked up at Ubu. Its pupils were very wide. The branchlike structures flickered in and out of its mouth. There were little bits of purple phosphorescence at the end of each branch.

My turn, Ubu thought. His lips were dry. The steel keys rattled as he tapped them.

“I am honored by your hospitality, Volitional Twelve,” he said. At the appearance of the holo letters over Ubu’s head, Twelve’s eyes bulged from the comers of its head and focused intently on the bright display. “I am Ubu Roy, bossrider of the human ship Runaway. I hope that we—” Volitional Twelve startled him by making quick jerky movements with its hands and feet. Ubu stared, then staggered on. “— that Clan Lustre and I— and Runaway—” Ubu halted and caught his breath, wondered what sense, if any, the translation program was making of this. Volitional Twelve continued twitching. “I hope we will have a long and continuing friendship,” Ubu said.

Volitional Twelve bent busily over its transmitter. CLAN LUSTRO, spelling badly in his agitation, IOS HONORED BEYONDD ALL MAGNIFICENCE BY THE PRESENCE OF BOSSRIDER UBU’S ROY’S PERSON.

Ubu licked sweat from his upper lip. What the fuck could he say now? Volitional Twelve continued its painfully slow typing.

Ubu’s heart gave a lurch as he realized that Volitional Twelve wasn’t holding the stylus with his fingers, or at any rate with the fingers Ubu had noticed till now. Volitional Twelve’s large, stubby digits each had a delicate, smaller finger curled inside, each nesting in a slot like a blade in a clasp knife. Intended, Ubu concluded, for delicate work.

The tapping continued. A chill ran up Ubu’s spine as he watched the little fingers move.

THIS UNWORTHY AMBASSADOR IS UNPREPARED FOR SUCH AN HONOR AS THIS. DOES BOSSRIDER UBU WISH ME, THIS-INDIVIDUAL, TO RETIRE FOR FURTHER INSTRUCTION?

Ubu looked at it hopelessly. “Let’s get to know each other first,” he said.

Volitional Twelve began twitching again. I PLEAD THAT YOU MAY FOLLOW ME, it typed.

“Lead on,“ Ubu said.

Volitional Twelve pirouetted and reached out to touch the airlock door, pushed off, and moved out of sight. Ubu followed.

The corridor was oval. One end was blocked near the lock, and there was another dead end about fifteen or twenty meters farther along. Long blue phosphorescent strips were set at apparent random along its length. The walls were the same dark grey color as the ship’s exterior. Drums boomed and rattled in the air. There were none of Volitional Twelve’s kind in sight.

Ubu looked at his chestpack analyzer. Air pressure 1.87 millibars. Nitrogen 69 percent. Oxygen 26.333 percent. Carbon dioxide less than .1 percent. Insignificant amounts of argon and helium. Ubu could breathe it if he had to.

Methane 3 percent. Ozone .5 percent. Long-chain proteins and complex organics—the analyzer wasn’t sensitive enough to report more than that—almost 1 percent. At this Ubu looked up in surprise, and his heart staggered at the sight of Volitional Twelve returning his gaze even though Twelve’s back was turned.

Ubu took a deep breath, tried to settle his nerves. Volitional Twelve, he saw, had another pair of eyes set in the rear corners of its head. It could give itself binocular vision forward, aft, left, or right, or probably any combination. Useful, Ubu thought, for a weightless three-dimensional environment. He moved on.

Portals were set in the walls every five or ten feet, cross-corridors. Each of them had a thin, opaque scrim drawn across it—doors, Ubu thought, until the drumming sound grew louder as he passed one of the screens and he saw it vibrate with each beat. The membranes—some of them anyway—were drumheads or amplifiers.

Ubu noticed four darker spots on Volitional Twelve’s back, arranged in a vaguely trapezoid pattern. Scales? Ubu wondered. Calluses?

Volitional Twelve checked its movement and touched one of the door screens. The membrane withdrew to the door’s rim with galvanic speed, and Volitional Twelve cast itself through it with a push of its arms. Ubu followed.

The room was cube-shaped, about twenty feet in diameter, with rounded-off corners. Fluorescent strips were strewn over its surface. There was no furniture, no equipment, nothing to attract the eye. Ubu wondered if the chamber had always been like this or whether it had been carefully stripped of all it contained. Volitional Twelve spun slowly to face Ubu, the structures in its mouth fluttering rapidly.

Ubu saw four dark trapezoidal spots on Volitional Twelve’s chest, the same as had been present on its back. They looked like calluses of some sort, patches of rougher skin. It bent to its transmitter again.

I TREMBLE IN AWE AT YOUR PRESENCE, BOSSRIDER.

Ubu looked at Twelve. “At ease,” he said.

*

Twelve led the outsider to his room in a haze of terror. Panic flooded him at the horrifying realization that Ubu was the bossrider himself, Runaway’s governing entity. He had expected to deal with only a volitional, or volitional-equivalent. The holy presence of an actual intelligence, a full-blown entity whose mind encompassed all history and knowledge, might well overwhelm him. Twelve knew he might be inadequate to deal with the situation, might well be ordered to dissolution either by Ubu or Beloved if he proved unsatisfactory.

Even Beloved, he suspected, might not have anticipated this. An alien intelligence on Beloved’s ship! The oily flavor of the stranger, or his suit, came faintly to Twelve’s palps. Beneath his fear he felt a rising anger, the urge to hurl himself at the intruding intelligence and destroy it.

Beloved’s beat throbbed through him, allowed him to collect his wits. He calmed himself. Beloved had given him this task. He would do his best. And if defense were needed, a company of swiftly grown warriors waited just beyond the thick screens that had isolated him from the rest of the ship’s company.

The stranger was looking about from inside his protective shell. His lips moved. As he read the words projected over the human’s head, Twelve could vaguely hear sounds muffled by the shell.

“I am curious as to the composition of your vessel,“ the human said.

The display was a useful knowledge, Twelve thought as he read the bright letters. He would have to acquire this on behalf of Beloved.

Twelve assumed a stiff, prideful stance as he stabbed at his transmitter with his stylus. IT IS COMPOSED OF THE FINEST EXUDATE. He saw the words scroll in reverse across the interior of Ubu’s transparent faceplate. The human’s answer came back.

“Exudate? I do not entirely understand.“

A tremor rolled through Twelve’s mind. Could an actual intelligence, a bossrider, not understand these things? The thought was frightening. Could Ubu be mad? Through his agitation Twelve endeavored to frame his answer simply.

IT IS MADE OF RESIN EXUDED BY NONVOLITIONALS.

The human took a moment to frame his reply. “I believe I understand. Humans build ship hulls primarily out of alloyed metal, though resinous compounds are used elsewhere in construction.“

Relief edged cautiously into Twelve’s mind. The bossrider was familiar with alternate means of building ships: that did not necessarily make him a lunatic. No doubt, Twelve thought warmly, Beloved also understood how to build metal ships, and chose to use exudate because it was more efficient.

One of the nonvolitionals on the walls leaped for the intruder. Ubu flinched and raised a hand. The nonvolitional fastened itself to his arm. Ubu peered at it.

“What is this?”

A NONVOLITIONAL ORGANISM. ITS FUNCTION IS TO GROOM THE WALLS AND INHABITANTS OF OUR SHIP. IF IT FINDS FOOD IT WILL MAKE A SOUND TO ALERT THE OTHERS TO THE SOURCE OF NOURISHMENT.

“It is harmless?”

YES. IF YOU DO NOT WISH ITS PRESENCE, YOU MAY REMOVE IT AND THROW IT TO ONE OF THE WALLS.

The human reached for the glistening creature and gingerly removed it from his arm. The nonvolitional coiled to try to clean his fingers, but Ubu flicked it away. It tumbled across the room and struck a wall, adhering. There was a moment of silence.

“I was also curious,” Ubu said, “about the drumming sound.”

Another odd question. Perhaps the bossrider had other means of communicating with his servants. IT IS AN EXPRESSION OF OUR BELOVED, Twelve replied. A WAY SHE COMMUNICATES HER INTENTIONS TO WE-HER-SERVANTS.

“I see.”

Twelve made no reply to this self-evident statement. The human’s constant use of the first person, all this “I,” was growing irritating. Twelve had difficulty using the word himself, even though the human’s language allowed little else. It was almost as if they possessed a disgusting defiance in their solitude, their unregenerate apartness.

“I gather from the appearance of your vessel,” the bossrider said, “that your ship’s function is the discovery and capture of singularities.”

Twelve assumed a dignified posture. OUR BELOVED HAS CHOSEN THIS TASK FOR US. BUT IT IS ONLY ONE OF MANY. CLAN LUSTRE, he lied, IS A GIANT APPARATUS WHOSE TRADE ROUTES ARE NUMBERLESS AND WHOSE MEMORY SPANS THE LENGTH OF ALL TIME.

The human absorbed the information as it crossed his display. “You represent a trading company?” he said. “As it happens, so does Runaway.”

Triumph danced through Twelve’s mind. Beloved’s divine purpose would be fulfilled, and he would be her instrument!

PERHAPS, he transmitted, THIS MIGHT BE OF BENEFIT.