Maybe all obligate carnivores are essentially the same. Can I eat that? Is it going to eat me? Is it a toy?
Perhaps Cheeirilaq settled on “toy.” You are offended?
“Oh no,” I said. “Just realizing that Terra would be a deadly environment for one such as yourself, due to the gravity, and feeling a pang of sympathy. Hard on the tourists, that.”
I often think that we lose many opportunities for cultural exchange because so few of the systers have homeworlds that are mutually compatible for tourism. The senso made it sound disappointed, but Cheeirilaq’s upright posture and tilted head made me think it was more wry amusement.
“Saves on a lot of colonial adventurism, though.” I took a deep breath of heavily oxygenated air. “I’ve never been to Terra myself.”
Somehow, we fell into step beside one another, proceeding in a stately way through the garden. As the Goodlaw moved, I noticed that it had been standing in a little park area, with an abstract, water-tinkling statue for contemplation, and a bench for contemplating on.
The paths were lined with specimens from many worlds, showy and colorful, arranged to show the foliage to advantage—and so that they could be lit in the most appropriate spectra. There were beds of greens and red-violets, some Terran and some not, some showing flowers or other dramatic structures. There were the black-leaved trees from Favor, with their almost shineless leaf surfaces, forming a dramatic backdrop to some intensely scarlet flowers I did not recognize.
Busy pollinators buzzed and fluttered among them, leaving me to wonder how they knew which plants were biologically compatible. Smell. Instinct. Ancestral insect knowledge.
I wondered if the methane and chlorine sections of Downthehatch had similar extravagances, or if their stationmasters had different hobbies.
We paused beside a low, puce-colored plant that had the rough architecture of a mammalian brain and seemed otherwise unprepossessing, but was nevertheless absolutely darting and swarming with bright-winged butterflies. Or butterfly analogues; I didn’t know enough to be able to tell, and couldn’t be arsed to check my senso for the data.
It was busy, anyway.
We turned again, this time back toward the aquaculture area. “And Habren? What’s their deal?”
My new friend paced alongside me on six slender legs, the two deadly looking raptorial manipulators folded against its forethorax, the more delicate ones waving gently in the air. Allow me to encrypt this conversation?
The stationmaster might, in fact, be eavesdropping on our senso. The Goodlaw, in fact, had access to law-enforcement encryption tools.
“Of course.”
It wouldn’t be suspicious at all that Goodlaw Cheeirilaq and I were talking about it over encrypted channels, of course. But the Goodlaw being the law in these parts, and the Synarche Space Guard being out of town currently, I decided to trust its judgment. There was a tickle as Cheeirilaq established a secure socket into my sphere, requesting limited permissions that I readily granted. It wouldn’t prevent a really determined eavesdropper, but it would slow them down a little.
I hoped I would meet you here, it said. I’ve been monitoring your movements, under orders from [Habren], and I noticed your pattern of visits. Since I come here fairly often myself, a chance meeting would seem unremarkable.
Speaking out loud would make the secure connection useless, so I replied silently. You don’t trust Habren.
There was the virtual equivalent of a shrug. [Habren] is no worse than many. This place is in dire need of personnel support. The Republic is involved in its management through extortion, as you have no doubt deduced, and [Habren] does not care for being beholden to pirates. However, obtaining defensive personnel is less than easy. Material resources are less of a problem, obviously, because we have excellent printing support and the local system for materials.
If [Colonel] [Habren] could manage some major coup, they might get more attention and support. That would benefit Habren and also the station, and disbenefit the pirates.
Where do all these plants come from, if resources are so scarce? I asked.
Shipped as seed, often traded with other hobbyists. The soil is manufactured. All the pollinators are local-system. The only real resource expenditure is space, and as you have noticed, the station is not crowded.
Habren’s interest is not why you sought me out, however. I felt alarm that Habren had set the Goodlaw to watch me, and confusion at the Goodlaw’s loyalties. Habren might be worse than Cheeirilaq was admitting. If there was a chance we were being monitored, it wouldn’t exactly want to call out its… well, the stationmaster wasn’t precisely its boss, but somebody in greater authority over the station than it held itself… in a recordable format. And it couldn’t entirely know my loyalties, either.
I recognize your tattoos.
Well, that shifted me from mild alarm to sirens shrieking so badly I had to tune myself down to mere alert arousal just in order to hear the rest of the conversation. I took a deep breath and held it and turned my amygdala down to about three, then let the breath out again.
You can see them? I asked, glancing down at my nanoskin-covered arm.
Ultraviolet reflectivity. A wing-settle that could be an insectoid shrug.
I was looking for information on the syster operating the factory ship, I said. Noncommittal, and something it already knew. There’s nothing in our databases, which might be nothing or might be withheld information. Habren claimed they had no information either, but they might be lying.
That’s because the species operating the factory ship is not a syster.
I actually turned to the giant bug and gaped, dumbstruck. As far as I knew, every intelligent race that the Synarche had encountered had, eventually, been induced to join it. The fact of an enormous, existing trade organization and governmental body that, in general, had overwhelmingly superior technology to any emerging race and also a complete monopoly on exploration and trade generally proved a convincing argument. Once a species developed what Terrans called the Alcubierre-White drive, or one of its variant technologies, the Synarche was waiting to greet them.
Sometimes new systers tried to start a shooting war, which generally had similar results to a kitten attacking your pants leg; when the difference in available force is so overwhelming, and you’re essentially raising a child, there’s literally no need to shoot back. Even races as belligerent as my own had come around eventually.
A few went with isolationist policies for a local generation or two, but eventually somebody started tuning into the propaganda channels and wanting all that great stuff, and within a hundred ans or so—well, the Synarche was also patient. Like a respectful suitor—unlike my friend Rohn in the bar—it had nothing to gain by hurrying things.
Earth could have learned a long time ago that securing initial and ongoing consent, rather than attempting to assert hierarchy, is key to a nonconfrontational relationship. Because we’re basically primates, we had to wait for a bunch of aliens to come teach us. We’d at least, by then, developed the tech to fix our brains so we could accept emotionally what logic should have showed us.
What can I say? We’re slow.