Authors: Joel Shepherd
“And then humans came,” said Sandy, seeing how the timelines matched up. “Humans took Pantala, and this is like a . . . a special place to you. A holy site, does that translate? The place where Talee survived, the only place. The origin of this phase of Talee life, and your salvation.”
“It translates,” Dara conceded.
Sandy recalled the statue of the Talee hand that Kiet had shown her on VR, on her first visit to Pantala. Two thousand years old, he'd said. Had it been made by organic Talee, before the Catastrophe? Or by synthetics, just after? A commemoration of disaster . . . or a celebration of survival?
“And we've been recording Talee contact since before Pantala,” she continued, “ships out in the deep, watching us . . . but you never thought they'd come here and expand so fast. And there's so many of us, compared to you . . . I know you won't give us numbers, but I don't care how advanced you areâsynthetic reproduction takes a lot of time and energy, you could have been spending something like ten percent of your total economy just on making new synthetics. While all organics do is fuck, then wait.”
They reached the ground, shady trees over green grass, and a path leading
between buildings to a road. “I cannot give you numbers, you're right. But humanity has more than thirty billion. I can tell you we're a lot fewer than that.”
“Or you were,” Sandy pressed. “Until you brought organics back, once you realised it was the only way to catch up with humanity. And they started breeding, and you used all kinds of reproductive tech to boost it quickly . . . and what, they're in the hundreds of millions already?”
“And rebuilding cities,” Dara agreed. “Cities that have not been occupied in millennia. With it comes wealth and industry. Only with organics can the Talee race hope to match the scale of humanity.”
“Explains why you've been so cautious with humans all these years,” said Jane. “Say, you ever come across an old human story called
The Wizard of Oz
?” Dara shook his head. Sandy stared at Jane in astonishment. “There's a guy in that, he pretends to be this great and powerful wizard who can do all these amazing things, but it turns out he's just a little old guy using tricks to make himself look scary. And here are the Talee, scaring our Fleet Captains with their fancy ships and manoeuvers, being all mysterious and creepy. But it turns out it's just a facade, hiding the fact that you're only a shadow of your former selves.”
They emerged onto a main street. It was entirely pedestrian, having no need for large vehicles in such a confined settlement. The surrounding buildings made an irregular podium, surrounding them on all sides like some fancy Tanushan pedestrian shopping mall. Greenery overhung, growing on trellises, and windows of establishments, perhaps eateries. Signs, in fascinating script . . . Sandy flash-froze several images from her vision and fed it direct to storage memory, she'd have to get the writing analysed. And she wondered just how many languages they had . . . or had
once
had, doubtless most of them had died in the Catastrophe, with their speakers.
Waiting for them, to one side, was a group of Talee. Just like that, no great fanfare of interspecies contact, but just like being invited into someone's home, led down the hall, and suddenly there was the family, in their living room, waiting to greet their guests. One of them walked forward, in green and brown clothes that looked more functional, perhaps like a uniform, with obvious pockets. Sandy had only seen dead Talee, and that only recently, yet it struck her once more just how unconfronting those alien features were. A
larger lower jaw and thrusting forward, almost like a snout . . . that, with the ear flaps at the top-rear of the longer skull, gave a vaguely dog-like impression. But that impression stopped with the eyes, which were bigger than human eyes, and expressive.
This one was armed, a rifle on his (her?) shoulder, and of a similar size to Sandy and Jane. Dara smiled and gestured to him. “Commander Kresnov, this is Taluq. Taluq, Kresnov-aqaruk-alung.” And something else in a flowing tongue that seemed without punctuation, like a whole series of vowels and consonants stumbling over each other.
Taluq made a gesture and replied in the same, then extended a hand to Sandy. Four fingers and a thumb, but elongated, like that statue she'd seen. It seemed a very self-conscious gesture, and Sandy guessed it was not a native one. Talee saw themselves as the advanced species, she realised. Perhaps the superior one. She and Jane were lower, and simpler, perhaps to be condescended to with gestures from that simpler culture.
She took the hand and applied a little pressure. Return pressure came back, slowly building, felt even through the armoured glove's feedback. She smiled in recognitionâit was synth-alloy myomer, combat strength.
“Combat synthetics,” she said. “You're all combat models.”
Dara translated to Taluq. Taluq nodded and said something back. “All of us, yes,” Dara translated back. “When you live constantly expecting to be stepped on, it makes sense to have a hard shell.”
Sandy smiled. Talee didn't seem to smile with the mouth, but the eyes narrowed a little, in a way that appeared to indicate humour. And the strangest thing about having a conversation with an actual alien instead of just their human-synthetic representatives was that it didn't even feel particularly strange.
Taluq said something else. “That's an interesting set of network barriers you have,” Dara translated once more. “Very familiar.”
Irony, Sandy thought. Or whatever the Talee called it. “Borrowed it off some friends of yours,” Sandy replied. “Jumped our technology forwards fifty years at least. More, once we reverse-engineer more of the uplink and augment hardware that went with it. And your friend Cai helped us as well, for defence.”
Taluq made an odd gesture of the head. “Cai thought he would discover the truth about himself, helping humans. Everyone is searching for origins. Us. You. Them.”
“Only you're not our originators,” said Jane. “
They
are. The organics. Your organics.”
Taluq made a face. “They're idiots. The species needs them to grow economic strength, we need industry. And instead they panic over their mental condition and insist we synthetics give them a hand in dealing with humanity. They kill each other, you know. We never do. They impose a death penalty for technologies . . .” Dara paused, searching for the right word.
“Aiwallawai,” said Sandy. Dara looked surprised. “Cai told us. Technologies causing the mental condition. Forbidden technologies.”
Dara nodded and said something to Taluq, who cocked his head and looked . . . intrigued. Sandy thought. “And then think, in an act of great genius,” Dara continued, “to continue that penalty over to humans. Only they don't tell us first. Your friend Takewashi was warned by one of their servant-synthetics, not one of ours, like Cai or Dara. Cai and Dara think for themselves, but our organics' servant-synthetics do not, and pray that you do not discover how this technology is done, to make high-thinking synthetics act like robots.” Sandy refrained from glancing at Jane. “We kill them where we find them, but the organics make more.
“If Takewashi had only told
us
of this threat, instead of assuming we were a part of its delivery, we could have taken steps to stop it. Poor Takewashi, he spent his life studying Talee work, yet understood Talee so little. And now your own world has been attacked, and your lives threatenedâan act of war upon humanity. Utter madness. We apologise, on behalf of our race. We wish you to know that we do not hold you any ill will for fighting them here. Perhaps you will teach them the lesson that we cannot. But if we are to stop this from spreading further, we must work together, synthetic and synthetic. Your species and ours, together for a common cause. This is the reason I have invited you to join us today.”
Halfway through Dara's translation, Taluq raised a finger, the other hand raised to the side of his head. An incoming uplink signal, then. Taluq gazed into empty space for a moment with those big, familiar eyes, then looked at Sandy.
“The organics have relaunched their attack,” Dara translated when he spoke again. “It was a short-jump, as your Fleet appears to have anticipated. They are inbound now, we have perhaps half an hour until contact at present velocities. We must hurry.”
Taluq led them into a nearby doorway, and they took seats at a long wooden bench in what looked like a restaurant. There were woven mats for wall decoration, and indoor plants, and various bottles of things behind the counter, and smells coming from the kitchen that Sandy had never smelt before . . . and she forced down a wave of frustration that she had no time to explore these fascinating distractions. She sat in the middle of a bench, and Jane, to her surprise, sat farther up the end, allowing several Talee to sit between. A quick glance at Jane's eyes beneath the rim of her cap suggested implacable caution. Jane was not about to fall for emotional appeals for cross-species sisterhood, and Jane smelled trouble, or at least the possibility of trouble. Spreading themselves created possible offensive angles and less defensive vulnerability. She wondered if Talee synthetics had the tactical aptitude to notice, unlike their organic counterparts.
Dara sat on Sandy's right, and Taluq sat opposite, as other Talee filled the benches or stood about to see. This was not first contact for
them
, Sandy knew. They'd been doing recon on humans for a very long time and were familiar with most human things. Doubtless they'd made an academic study of human culture, language, and history for several decades at least, with spies like Cai and Dara to feed them information. And dammit, she wanted to ask them what they thought, what they found interesting, wanted to invite them to Tanusha for a stroll up Ramprakash Road for dinner and a musical, and go to a football game at Subianto Stadium, and see the crowds and flash and glamour and say, “See, we humans are pretty good fun, let's be friends.” And then she looked again at Jane up the end of the bench, eyes cool and wary, and reprimanded herself to common sense and caution. Here, she was representing not just the FSA, or Callay, or synthetic humanity; she was representing her entire species. There were no friends or enemies in interplanetary relations, only strategic interests and their satisfaction or compromise.
Sandy began, pointing a finger to the ceiling. “Your organic half. Why are they here?”
Taluq looked around at his comrades as Dara translated. The look of a very intelligent person gathering his thoughts. Deciding how to play it. It immediately put Sandy into cautious mode. These Talee had been hiding under humanity's nose for roughly a century. The organic Talee had acquired their technological arrogance from somewhere, their assumption they could
just march into Callay and rough the humans up, and get what they wanted. Did they learn it here, from Taluq and friends?
“Please understand, Commander,” Dara translated when Taluq spoke, “organic Talee psychology has shown difficulty adapting to the demands of advanced neurological technology. They killed themselves twice and would be extinct today if not for us. They remain unstable today, as you've seen, and must be controlled. We suspect this is something common to organics everywhere. Observe the League and the death of the moon you call Cresta.”
“League used advanced Talee tech in their uplinks without understanding the intergenerational consequences in human brains,” Sandy said cautiously. “Federation has avoided the problem, our tech is largely indigenous.”
“So was ours, once,” said Taluq. He seemed very confident, in the low-key, calm manner of someone utterly in command of the subject. Sandy wondered what he was, exactly. Leader of this outpost? Tech-expert? Human expert? Soldier? All of the above? “It didn't stop the madness of the organics.”
“Talee psychology is not human psychology. You've got two brains. The combination of two independently processing neural cores causes complications. We don't have it.”
“You deny that synthetic humanity has psychological advantages? Social advantages? Organic humanity has a history of going mad in groups. If Talee experience can teach you anything, it is that neural-synth technology will exacerbate this tendency rather than correct it. And that synthetics are comparatively immune to it, for reasons that have more to do with design and the disconnect of that devastating emotional-feedback loop that passes for conscious reasoning in organics. In that, our best experts agree, Talee and human are alike, both the organics in their unreasonableness, and the logic of the synthetics. That is why I wanted to talk to you, in particular. And Jane, you too, to be based on Cassandra's designation.”
Sandy wasn't sure she liked where this was going. Dark possibilities emerged. Dangerous ones. But she was running out of time, as were Fleet, if Reichardt was right about his chances against a Talee strike run. She thought about it for a moment.
“I agree with you,” she said finally. “It's been an issue for us in Tanusha for some time. The FSA and CSA acquire synthetic talent, and non-synthetic
agencies fall behind. It scares them, that imbalance. I fear for the stability of our institutions if it continues.”
She risked a glance at Jane, doubting that Talee could read human expressions of body language that well. A deadpan glance, to make sure Jane understood. She got the same expression back. Jane was ready for anything.
“You will leave them behind,” said Taluq. “You know this.”
Sandy nodded. “They can't match us, especially with the new tech we just acquired from your organic friends. But I'm less convinced they'll all destroy themselves. We've had so many opportunities to do so, since the creation of atomic weapons six hundred years ago, and FTL a few centuries later. But we're still here, and until we ran into
you
,” with a pointed look, “we were doing fine. Don't mistake your problems for ours, my friend. We call you aliens for a reason.”