Although the Kiatti have their share of sculptors, engineers, and mercenaries, they are perhaps best known as traders. Kiatti vessels are welcome in many places, for they bring delightfully disruptive theories of government, fossilized musical instruments, and fine surgical tools; they bring cold-eyed guns that whisper of sleep impending and sugared atrocities. If you can describe it, so they say, there is a Kiatti who is willing to sell it to you.
In the ordinary course of things, the Kiatti accept barter for payment. They claim that it is a language that even the universe understands. Their sages spend a great deal of time to attempting to justify the profit motive in view of conservation laws. Most of them converge comfortably on the position that profit is the civilized response to entropy. The traders themselves vary, as you might expect, in the rapacity of their bargains. But then, as they often say, value is contextual.
The Kiatti do have a currency of sorts. It is their stardrives, and all aliens’ stardrives are rated in comparison with their own. The Kiatti produce a number of them, which encompass a logarithmic scale of utility.
When the Kiatti determine that it is necessary to pay or be paid in this currency, they will spend months—sometimes years—refitting their vessels as necessary. Thus every trader is also an engineer. The drives’ designers made some attempt to make the drives modular, but this was a haphazard enterprise at best.
One Kiatti visionary wrote of commerce between universes, which would require the greatest stardrive of all. The Kiatti do not see any reason they can’t bargain with the universe itself, and are slowly accumulating their wealth toward the time when they can trade their smaller coins for one that will take them to this new goal. They rarely speak of this with outsiders, but most of them are confident that no one else will be able to outbid them.
One small civilization claims to have invented a stardrive that kills everyone who uses it. One moment the ship is here, with everyone alive and well, or as well as they ever were; the next moment, it is there, and carries only corpses. The records, transmitted over great expanses against the microwave hiss, are persuasive. Observers in differently equipped ships have sometimes accompanied these suicide vessels, and they corroborate the reports.
Most of their neighbors are mystified by their fixation with this morbid discovery. It would be one thing, they say, if these people were set upon finding a way to fix this terrible flaw, but that does not appear to be the case. A small but reliable number of them volunteers to test each new iteration of the deathdrive, and they are rarely under any illusions about their fate. For that matter, some of the neighbors, out of pity or curiosity, have offered this people some of their own old but reliable technology, asking only a token sum to allow them to preserve their pride, but they always decline politely. After all, they possess safe stardrive technology of their own; the barrier is not knowledge.
Occasionally, volunteers from other peoples come to test it themselves, on the premise that there has to exist some species that won’t be affected by the stardrive’s peculiar radiance. (The drive’s murderousness does not appear to have any lasting effect on the ship’s structure.) So far, the claim has stood. One imagines it will stand as long as there are people to test it.
Then there are the civilizations that invent keener and more nimble stardrives solely to further their wars, but that’s an old story and you already know how it ends.
A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel copyright © 2011 Yoon Ha Lee
Art copyright © John Harris 2011
tor.com, August 10th, 2011 - online version