Akon's brows furrowed slightly. Somehow he'd never thought about it in those terms.
The Confessor shook his head. "There are reasons beyond my profession why I must not lead. I am too old."
Too old?
Akon put the thought on hold, and looked back at the Lady 3rd. She had said that all the crew were incapacitated, except her and her two sisters who took charge. And she had asked the Confessor if he held true command.
"Are you," Akon asked, "the equivalent of a Confessor for your own kind?"
"Almost certainly not," replied the Lady 3rd, and -
"Almost certainly not," the Confessor said, almost in the same breath.
There was an eerie kind of unison about it.
"I am kiritsugu," said the Lady 3rd. "In the early days of my species there were those who refrained from happiness in order to achieve perfect skill in helping others, using untranslatable 3 to suppress their emotions and acting only on their abstract knowledge of goals. These were forcibly returned to normality by massive untranslatable 4. But I descend from their thought-lineage and in emergency invoke the shadow of their untranslatable 5."
"I am a Confessor," said the Ship's Confessor, "the descendant of those in humanity's past who most highly valued truth, who sought systematic methods for finding truth. But Bayes's Theorem will not be different from one place to another; the laws in their purely mathematical form will be the same, just as any sufficiently advanced species will discover the same periodic table of elements."
"And being universals," said the Lady 3rd, "they bear no distinguishing evidence of their origin. So you should understand, Lord Akon, that a kiritsugu's purpose is not like that of a Confessor, even if we exploit the same laws."
"But we are similar enough to each other," the Confessor concluded, "to see each other as distorted mirror images. Heretics, you might say. She is the ultimate sin forbidden to a Confessor - the exercise of command."
"As you are flawed on my own terms," the Lady 3rd concluded, "one who refuses to help."
Everyone else at the Conference table was staring at the alien holo, and at the Confessor, in something approaching outright horror.
The Lady 3rd shifted her gaze back to Akon. Though it was only a movement of the eyes, there was
something of a definite force about the motion, as if the translator was indicating that it stood for something much stronger. Her voice was given a demanding, compelling quality: "What alternatives did your kind generate for dealing with the Babyeaters? Enumerate them to me."
Wipe out their species, keep them in prison forever on suicide watch, ignore them and let the children suffer.
Akon hesitated. An odd premonition of warning prickled at him. Why does she need this information?
"If you do not give me the information," the Lady 3rd said, "I will take into account the fact that you do not wish me to know it."
The proverb went through his mind, The most important part of any secret is the fact that the secret exists.
"All right," Akon said. "We found unacceptable the alternative of leaving the Babyeaters be. We found unacceptable the alternative of exterminating them. We wish to respect their choices and their nature as a species, but their children, who do not share that choice, are unwilling victims; this is unacceptable to us. We desire to keep the children alive but we do not know what to do with them
once they become adult and start wanting to eat their own babies. Those were all the alternatives we had gotten as far as generating, at the very moment your ship arrived."
"That is all?" demanded the Lady 3rd. "That is the sum of all your thought? Is this one of the circumstances under which your species sends signals that differ against internal belief, such as 'joking'
or 'politeness'?"
"No," said Akon. "I mean, yes. Yes, that's as far as we got. No, we're not joking."
"You should understand," the Confessor said, "that this crew, also, experienced a certain distress, interfering with our normal function, on comprehending the Babyeaters. We are still experiencing it."
And you acted to restore order, thought Akon, though not the same way as a kiritsugu...
"I see," the Lady 3rd said.
She fell silent. There were long seconds during which she sat motionless.
Then, "Why have you not yet disabled the Babyeater ship? Your craft possesses the capability of doing so, and you must realize that your purpose now opposes theirs."
"Because," Akon said, "they did not disable our ship."
The Lady 3rd nodded. "You are symmetrists, then."
Again the silence.
Then the holo blurred, and in that blur appeared the words:
Cultural Translator version 3.
The blur resolved itself back into that pale woman; almost the same as before, except that the serenity of her came through with more force.
The Lady 3rd drew herself erect, and took on a look of ritual, as though she were about to recite a composed poem.
"I now speak," the Lady 3rd, "on behalf of my species, to yours."
A chill ran down Akon's spine. This is too much, this is all too large for me -
"Humankind!" the Lady 3rd said, as though addressing someone by name. "Humankind, you prefer the absence of pain to its presence. When my own kind attained to technology, we eliminated the causes of suffering among ourselves. Bodily pain, embarrassment, and romantic conflicts are no longer
permitted to exist. Humankind, you prefer the presence of pleasure to its absence. We have devoted ourselves to the intensity of pleasure, of sex and childbirth and untranslatable 2. Humankind, you prefer truth to lies. By our nature we do not communicate statements disbelieved, as you do with
humor, modesty, and fiction; we have even learned to refrain from withholding information, though we possess that capability. Humankind, you prefer peace to violence. Our society is without crime and without war. Through symmetric sharing and untranslatable 4, we share our joys and are pleasured together. Our name for ourselves is not expressible in your language. But to you, humankind, we now name ourselves after the highest values we share: we are the Maximum Fun-Fun Ultra Super Happy
People."
There were muffled choking sounds from the human Conference table.
"Um," Akon said intelligently. "Um... good for you?"
"Humankind! Humankind, you did not likewise repair yourselves when you attained to technology.
We are still unsure if it is somehow a mistake, if you did not think it through, or if your will is truly so different from ours. For whatever reason, you currently permit the existence of suffering which our species has eliminated. Bodily pain, embarrassment, and romantic troubles are still known among
you. Your existence, therefore, is shared by us as pain. Will you, humankind, by your symmetry,
remedy this?"
An electric current of shock and alarm ran through the Conference. The Lord Pilot glanced
significantly at the Ship's Engineer, and the Engineer just as significantly shook his head. There was nothing they could do against the alien vessel; and their own shields would scarcely help, if they were attacked.
Akon drew in a ragged breath. He was suddenly distracted, almost to the point of his brain melting, by a sense of futures twisting around these moments: the fate of star systems, the destiny of all humanity being warped and twisted and shaped.