sympathetic. She took in Akon's appearance at a glance, and her eyes widened in alarm. "My lord, you're hurting!"
"Just tired, milady," Akon said. He cleared his throat. "Our ship's decision-making usually relies on markets and our markets are behaving erratically. I'm sorry to inflict that on you as shared pain, and I'll try to get this over with quickly. Anyway -"
Out of the corner of his eye, Akon saw the Ship's Engineer re-enter the room; the Engineer looked as if he had something to say, but froze when he saw the holo.
There was no time for that now.
"Anyway," Akon said, "we've worked out that the key decisions depend heavily on your level of technology. What do you think you can actually do with us or the Babyeaters?"
The Lady 3rd sighed. "I really should get your independent component before giving you ours - you should at least think of it first - but I suppose we're out of luck on that. How about if I just tell you what we're currently planning?"
Akon nodded. "That would be much appreciated, milady." Some of his muscles that had been tense, started to relax. Cultural Translator version 16 was a lot easier on his brain. Distantly, he wondered if some transformed avatar of himself was making skillful love to the Lady 3rd -
"All right," the Lady 3rd said. "We consider that the obvious starting point upon which to build further negotiations, is to combine and compromise the utility functions of the three species until we mutually satisfice, providing compensation for all changes demanded. The Babyeaters must compromise their
values to eat their children at a stage where they are not sentient - we might accomplish this most effectively by changing the lifecycle of the children themselves. We can even give the unsentient children an instinct to flee and scream, and generate simple spoken objections, but prevent their brain from developing self-awareness until after the hunt."
Akon straightened. That actually sounded - quite compassionate - sort of -
"Our own two species," the Lady 3rd said, "which desire this change of the Babyeaters, will compensate them by adopting Babyeater values, making our own civilization of greater utility in their sight: we will both change to spawn additional infants, and eat most of them at almost the last stage before they become sentient."
The Conference room was frozen. No one moved. Even their faces didn't change expression.
Akon's mind suddenly flashed back to those writhing, interpenetrating, visually painful blobs he had seen before.
A cultural translator could change the image, but not the reality.
"It is nonetheless probable," continued the Lady 3rd, "that the Babyeaters will not accept this change as it stands; it will be necessary to impose these changes by force. As for you, humankind, we hope you will be more reasonable. But both your species, and the Babyeaters, must relinquish bodily pain,
embarrassment, and romantic troubles. In exchange, we will change our own values in the direction of yours. We are willing to change to desire pleasure obtained in more complex ways, so long as the total amount of our pleasure does not significantly decrease. We will learn to create art you find pleasing.
We will acquire a sense of humor, though we will not lie. From the perspective of humankind and the Babyeaters, our civilization will obtain much utility in your sight, which it did not previously possess.
This is the compensation we offer you. We furthermore request that you accept from us the gift of untranslatable 2, which we believe will enhance, on its own terms, the value that you name 'love'. This will also enable our kinds to have sex using mechanical aids, which we greatly desire. At the end of this procedure, all three species will satisfice each other's values and possess great common ground, upon which we may create a civilization together."
Akon slowly nodded. It was all quite unbelievably civilized. It might even be the categorically best general procedure when worlds collided.
The Lady 3rd brightened. "A nod - is that assent, humankind?"
"It's acknowledgment," Akon said. "We'll have to think about this."
"I understand," the Lady 3rd said. "Please think as swiftly as you can. Babyeater children are dying in horrible agony as you think."
"I understand," Akon said in return, and gestured to cut the transmission.
The holo blinked out.
There was a long, terrible silence.
"No."
The Lord Pilot said it. Cold, flat, absolute.
There was another silence.
"My lord," the Xenopsychologist said, very softly, as though afraid the messenger would be torn apart and dismembered, "I do not think they were offering us that option."
"Actually," Akon said, "The Superhappies offered us more than we were going to offer the Babyeaters .
We weren't exactly thinking about how to compensate them." It was strange, Akon noticed, his voice was very calm, maybe even deadly calm. "The Superhappies really are a very fair-minded people.
You get the impression they would have proposed exactly the same solution whether or not they
happened to hold the upper hand. We might have just enforced our own will on the Babyeaters and told the Superhappies to take a hike. If we'd held the upper hand. But we don't. And that's that, I guess."
" No!" shouted the Lord Pilot. "That's not -"
Akon looked at him, still with that deadly calm.
The Lord Pilot was breathing deeply, not as if quieting himself, but as if preparing for battle on some ancient savanna plain that no longer existed. "They want to turn us into something inhuman. It - it cannot - we cannot - we must not allow -"
"Either give us a better option or shut up," the Lord Programmer said flatly. "The Superhappies are smarter than us, have a technological advantage, think faster, and probably reproduce faster. We have no hope of holding them off militarily. If our ships flee, the Superhappies will simply follow in faster ships. There's no way to shut a starline once opened, and no way to conceal the fact that it is open -"
"Um," the Ship's Engineer said.
Every eye turned to him.
"Um," the Ship's Engineer said. "My Lord Administrator, I must report to you in private."
The Ship's Confessor shook his head. "You could have handled that better, Engineer."
Akon nodded to himself. It was true. The Ship's Engineer had already betrayed the fact that a secret existed. Under the circumstances, easy to deduce that it had come from the Babyeater data. That was eighty percent of the secret right there. And if it was relevant to starline physics, that was half of the remainder.
"Engineer," Akon said, "since you have already revealed that a secret exists, I suggest you tell the full Command Conference. We need to stay in sync with each other. Two minds are not a committee.
We'll worry later about keeping the secret classified."
The Ship's Engineer hesitated. "Um, my lord, I suggest that I report to you first, before you decide -"
"There's no time," Akon said. He pointed to where the holo had been.
"Yes," the Master of Fandom said, "we can always slit our own throats afterward, if the secret is that awful." The Master of Fandom gave a small laugh -
- then stopped, at the look on the Engineer's face.
"At your will, my lord," the Engineer said.
He drew a deep breath. "I asked the Lord Programmer to compare any identifiable equations and constants in the Babyeater's scientific archive, to the analogous scientific data of humanity. Most of the identified analogues were equal, of course. In some places we have more precise values, as befits our, um, superior technological level. But one anomaly did turn up: the Babyeater figure for Alderson's Coupling Constant was ten orders of magnitude larger than our own."