“The real reason we came was to get a sense of whether DPSAR had run a complete investigation.”
“If you’re asking, Alex, whether they came here to question us, the answer is yes. They did. I wasn’t here at the time, nor was anyone else who’s currently here. But I know one of the coordinators who present when the investigation was conducted. So you’ll understand I was, in effect, also present. And yes, they wanted to know whether we had any vehicles in the area at the time, whether it was possible we could have had someone out there and not known about it? Did we understand that we should not take their questions in an offensive manner, but did we have any ? I think that was the term they used. It would of course be impossible for us to have pirates running around and not know of it.”
Gabe got into it at that point: “Roka, please understand that our ability to communicate is fairly clumsy compared to yours. DPSAR didn’t have many options on the table. Either some nonhuman power had taken the station, or there’d been an equipment breakdown of some kind. The station was supposed to be impermeable. There could be no equipment failure without adequate warning.”
“That’s what they claimed,” said Roka. “But even the highest-tech equipment is not perfect. And why couldn’t there have been pirates?”
“We haven’t completely eliminated that possibility. Let’s get that off the table, though. I have a question for you.”
“I am at your service.”
“If an attack had been committed by an Ashiyyurean, would it have been possible for him, or her, to hide it from everyone else?”
Those large dark eyes fastened on Gabe. “Yes,” he said. “Provided the individual never returned to live with the rest of us.”
“How about if he was unstable? Would it be possible then?”
“For him to hide what he’d done? No. For one thing, we have very few persons who become deranged. One of the reasons for that is that everyone around them learns very early what is happening, and we are consequently able to intervene.”
“I suspect that’s one of the things the investigators wanted to know.”
“I’m sure that’s correct. More significantly we cannot hide who we are. We literally live inside each other’s minds.”
“Roka,” said Alex, “the most likely possibility seems to be aliens. We’ve both had interstellar flight for thousands of years. The only high-tech aliens we’ve encountered have been each other. Am I correct?”
“That is correct, Alex.”
“Nevertheless, there are millions of worlds out there that neither of us has visited.”
Roka nodded. “That’s certainly true.”
“You have any theories,” asked Gabe, “why intelligent life is so rare?”
He took a moment to consider the issue. “It seems obvious enough. Give a creature intelligence and it begins to acquire knowledge. The knowledge leads to advanced technology and probably a tendency to use their developments in a way that exhausts their planetary home. It almost happened with us, and we know you also came close. We’ve seen a substantial number of dead civilizations over the years. As a rule, they have little staying power. The basic key to their eventual collapse has been the development of the printing press. Knowledge spreads too quickly among a species not yet equipped to handle it. Once that happens, we have seen no one who survived more than a few centuries. Other than yourselves.”
“That doesn’t seem to have happened with you either,” said Gabe. “The Ashiyyur had aircraft and electricity before we were even thinking about building pyramids. You were slow getting to the stars, but there’s no record of your people threatening their own world.”
“I think we were fortunate.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“We communicate through direct mental contact. It probably results in a higher level of empathy than most other intelligent life-forms. Lust for power, for example, is rare. Possibly nonexistent. Because one cannot hide it. And we all recognize that it is linked to stupidity. It would serve only to draw the contempt of our associates. Consequently, we are not going to attack each other.
“For the same reason, negligence that leads to planetary destruction through runaway population growth or corrosion of natural resources cannot hide itself. We were much slower to develop advanced technology than other species because we weren’t fighting wars and consequently had less use for it. By the time we learned to manipulate atomic power, we were well beyond the point where anyone would have thought of converting it into a weapon. And please don’t be offended.”
“It makes me wonder,” said Gabe, “how managed to survive.”
“It was close,” Alex said. “Vasili Arkhipov saved us from a nuclear war.”
“Oh yes.” Gabe smiled. “The was one of the first interstellars.”
“What did it do?” asked Roka.
“Not the starship,” said Gabe. “The man.”
Roka nodded, inviting him to explain.
“Several years after we’d invented atomic weapons, there was a standoff between two major powers. They were quarreling over an island. One was shipping weapons to the island while the other sent a fleet of warships to establish an embargo. The incoming freighters were accompanied by three submarines with nuclear missiles. If I remember this correctly, the three submarines each had a captain and there was a senior officer in overall command. In order to use the nukes, all four had to agree. Arkhipov was the guy who said no.”
“It’s fortunate,” said Roka, “one of them was intelligent. I hadn’t heard that story before. You were lucky.”
“It makes me wonder,” I said, “how we managed to get into a shooting war with your people?”
The Mute paused. “I think the problem was that both sides were sitting in interstellars with no knowledge of each other. Probably, had we been close enough for the telepathy to work, we would have realized you were only acting out of fear, that neither side constituted a willful threat to the other. It won’t happen again.”
“There’s not much question you’re right,” said Alex. “The whole thing was probably just a massive communication breakdown.”
We’d learned a few weeks earlier that Kormin Broder, who’d been one of our clients for almost ten years, had passed away. Kormin was a collector of antiques that had a connection with famous writers. He also owned three hardcover classics that had been signed by the writers: Gasper Mendez’s history of the Ashiyyurean War, ; Timothy Zhin-Po’s ; and Wally Candles’s poetry collection .
Kormin’s family had asked us to convert the antiques into cash. Alex put everything up for auction. The best offers for the books all came from the same source, the Collectors’ Library, which was located in Salazar, forty minutes away on the Melony River. I was present but out of sight when Alex closed the deal with the library’s owner, Chad Barker. After they disconnected he asked me to take care of the shipment. “Best,” he said, “is to take them out to him personally. We don’t want to risk any of those books getting lost.” It had happened once before.
That was good by me. I’d never met Barker but I’d seen him twice during negotiations. It was odd; somehow he’d become one of my favorite guys. He seemed intelligent, friendly, blond, good-looking. If there are any other qualities that matter, he possessed them too.
A half hour later I was on my way. I picked up the Melony and followed it directly to Salazar, where I descended into a parking area that served the library and several other small businesses on the north side of the city.