responsibility. But a ship run that way didn't work well under ordinary circumstances, and there was no reason to think that things would change under extraordinary circumstances. He was an
Administrator; he had to accept all the advice, integrate it, and decide. Experiment had shown that no organizational structure of non-Administrators could match what he was trained to do, and motivated to do; anything that worked was simply absorbed into the Administrative weighting of advice.
Sole decision. Sole responsibility if he got it wrong. Absolute power and absolute accountability, and never forget the second half, my lord, or you'll be fired the moment you get home. Screw up
indefensibly, my lord, and all your hundred and twenty years of accumulated salary in escrow, producing that lovely steady income, will vanish before you draw another breath.
Oh - and this time the whole human species will pay for it, too.
"I can't speak for all humankind," said the Lord Administrator. "I can decide, but others may decide differently. Do you understand?"
The Lady 3rd made a light gesture, as if it were of no consequence. "Are you an exceptional case of a human decision-maker?"
Akon tilted his head. "Not... particularly..."
"Then your decision is strongly indicative of what other human decisionmakers will decide," she said.
"I find it hard to imagine that the options exactly balance in your decision mechanism, whatever your inability to admit your own preferences."
Akon slowly nodded. "Then..."
He drew a breath.
Surely, any species that reached the stars would understand the Prisoner's Dilemma. If you couldn't cooperate, you'd just destroy your own stars. A very easy thing to do, as it had turned out. By that standard, humanity might be something of an impostor next to the Babyeaters and the Superhappies.
Humanity had kept it a secret from itself. The other two races - just managed not to do the stupid thing. You wouldn't meet anyone out among the stars, otherwise.
The Superhappies had done their very best to press C. Cooperated as fairly as they could.
Humanity could only do the same.
"For myself, I am inclined to accept your offer."
He didn't look around to see how anyone had reacted to that.
"There may be other things," Akon added, "that humanity would like to ask of your kind, when our representatives meet. Your technology is advanced beyond ours."
The Lady 3rd smiled. "We will, of course, be quite positively inclined toward any such requests. As I believe our first message to you said - 'we love you and we want you to be super happy'. Your joy will be shared by us, and we will be pleasured together."
Akon couldn't bring himself to smile. "Is that all?"
"This Babyeater ship," said the Lady 3rd, "the one that did not fire on you, even though they saw you first. Are you therefore allied with them?"
"What?" Akon said without thinking. "No -"
" My lord! " shouted the Ship's Confessor. Too late.
"My lord," the Lady Sensory said, her voice breaking, "the Superhappy ship has fired on the Babyeater vessel and destroyed it."
Akon stared at the Lady 3rd in horror.
"I'm sorry," the Lady 3rd Kiritsugu said. "But our negotiations with them failed, as predicted. Our own ship owed them nothing and promised them nothing. This will make it considerably easier to
sweep through their starline network when we return. Their children would be the ones to suffer from any delay. You understand, my lord?"
"Yes," Akon said, his voice trembling. "I understand, my lady kiritsugu." He wanted to protest, to scream out. But the war was only beginning, and this - would admittedly save -
"Will you warn them?" the Lady 3rd asked.
"No," Akon said. It was the truth.
"Transforming the Babyeaters will take precedence over transforming your own species. We estimate the Babyeater operation may take several weeks of your time to conclude. We hope you do not mind
waiting. That is all," the Lady 3rd said.
And the holo faded.
"The Superhappy ship is moving out," the Lady Sensory said. She was crying, silently, as she steadily performed her duty of reporting. "They're heading back toward their starline origin."
"All right," Akon said. "Take us home. We need to report on the negotiations -"
There was an inarticulate scream, like that throat was trying to burst the walls of the Conference chamber, as the Lord Pilot burst out of his chair, burst all restraints he had placed on himself, and lunged forward.
But standing behind his target, unnoticed, the Ship's Confessor had produced from his sleeve the tiny stunner - the weapon which he alone on the ship was authorized to use, if he made a determination of outright mental breakdown. With a sudden motion, the Confessor's arm swept out...
1. ...and anesthetized the Lord Pilot [Ch. 6, Last Tears]
2. ...and anesthetized the Lord Akon [Ch. 7, Sacrificial Fire]
(6/8) Normal Ending: Last Tears
Today was the day.
The streets of ancient Earth were crowded to overbursting with people looking up at the sky, faces crowded up against windows. Waiting for their sorrows to end.
Akon was looking down at their faces, from the balcony of a room in a well-guarded hotel. There were many who wished to initiate violence against him, which was understandable. Fear showed on most of the faces in the crowd, rage in some; a very few were smiling, and Akon suspected they might have
simply given up on holding themselves together. Akon wondered what his own face looked like, right now.
The streets were less crowded than they might have been, only a few weeks earlier.
No one had told the Superhappies about that part. They'd sent an ambassadorial ship "in case you have any urgent requests we can help with", arriving hard on the heels of the Impossible. That ship had not been given any of the encryption keys to the human Net, nor allowed to land. It had made the
Superhappies extremely suspicious, and the ambassadorial ship had disgorged a horde of tiny daughters to observe the rest of the human starline network -
But if the Superhappies knew, they would have tried to stop it. Somehow.
That was a price that no one was willing to include into the bargain, no matter what. There had to be that - alternative.
A quarter of the Impossible Possible World's crew had committed suicide, when the pact and its price became known. Others, Akon thought, had waited only to be with their families. The percentage on Earth... would probably be larger. The government, what was left of it, had refused to publish
statistics. All you saw was the bodies being carried out of the apartments - in plain, unmarked boxes, in case the Superhappy ship was using optical surveillance.
Akon swallowed. The fear was already drying his own throat, the fear of changing, of becoming
something else that wasn't quite him. He understood the urge to end that fear, at any price. And yet at the same time, he didn't, couldn't understand the suicides. Was being dead a smaller change? To die was not to leave the world, not to escape somewhere else; it was the simultaneous change of every piece of yourself into nothing.
Many parents had made that choice for their children. The government had tried to stop it. The Superhappies weren't going to like it, when they found out. And it wasn't right, when the children themselves wouldn't be so afraid of a world without pain. It wasn't as if the parents and children were going somewhere together. The government had done its best, issued orders, threatened confiscations -