The Phantom in the Deep (Rook's Song) (13 page)

“
Yeah, well, my tactics are somewhat different than that of the entire human resistance, aren’t they?”

“They are,” the Leader allows.
  “But only marginally.”

“
You monsters struck so fast—and, by the way, you did a damn good job, so kudos to you—that we didn’t have time to really work out your weaknesses.  And by the time we did, we were too late to do anything about it.”  Rook shrugs, as if it is nothing.  “Too little, too late, is all.  But now I know more.”

“Yes, more.  These weaknesses you spoke of.  Might I ask what you think they are?”

“You have no guile.”

“Guile is a weakness.  It tore apart your politicians and world leaders.  It brought about endless deceptions that were counterproductive to creating a unified front.  Had you had that, you would have been a far more powerful civilization, and
your warring capabilities would have been far more formidable when you set out for the stars.”

“But then, we wouldn’t’ve been human, would we?”

“That assertion is correct,” the Leader says simply, “you would not have been human.  You were following your genetic programming.  Your
nature
, as it were.  A flawed nature, which is why you failed so fantastically.”

Rook smiles, and the Leader mimics.  His first instinct is to punch the smile right off the alien’s face, but then he considers something.  He feeds the forged MRE package back into the mini-fabricator, and starts playing with other dials and buttons.  “Let me ask you something else.  Why did you just ask me what I think your weaknesses are?  Are you curious?  Are you just buying time or genuinely interested?”

“A bit of both,” the Leader admits.

“Huh,” says Rook, mulling something over for a moment.  “
Because that makes me wonder, if you’re buying time, doesn’t that mean you understand
something
about deception?”

“Of course, no life can form completely without an understanding of it.  Life wouldn’t survive, e
specially intelligent life.  It is as natural to survival as curiosity.”  The alien adjusts himself amid its bonds, settles himself.  “However, there is a time and place for deception, but it is a pollutant in all calculations.  Whenever deception is added to a calculation, it causes unnecessary disharmony.  It is what your researchers used to call ‘tricking the data.’  It isn’t useful, it is only harmful.  Tricking the data doesn’t reveal the truth of the matter.  The problem your species had was that it was too used to adding these deceptions into important decision-making moments.  A people used to the language of deception are gullible.  Gullible thinkers elect deceptive leaders, and deceptive leaders produce terrible results.  Make no mistake, your species achieved space travel
despite
your many deceptions, not
because
of them.”

Rook feels his hands shaking.  He looks down at them, takes a breath to control the volcanic rage, and tries to continue the interrogation. 
“And you don’t…you don’t think that said
something
about our greatness?  Yes, our politicians were liars.  Yes, many of our people were divided along religious lines and social lines and racial lines.  But we made it this far!  That’s not worthy of enough respect to be left alone, to be allowed to live and carry on?”

“Greatness and respect were never a concern.  Indeed, we
do
respect the many qualities of mankind.  Mostly we are interested in how far your species made it into the stars, despite its many flaws—it is a statistical anomaly.  However, as anomalous and intriguing as it was, it could not be allowed to spread across the galaxy, consuming resources that were more fit for us.”

“More ‘fit’ for you?” Rook chuckles incredulously.  “How so?”

“Because your species could not carry on,” the Leader says.  “You were an intelligent species, but far too gregarious.  You were consuming the resources that our race would eventually need, once we inevitably expanded to those regions.  We expand slowly, at a measured pace, but we are quick to annihilate those we see as future problems.  In human parlance, we ‘head the problem off at the pass.’  Another human axiom: ‘The best time to fix the roof is when the sun is shining, not when it’s raining.’  The sun was shining for our species, and we needed to protect ourselves from the rainstorm of Man while you were still at a controllable number.  Our Calculators estimated how long it would take you to overpopulate various worlds, take the resources, and of course, how long it would be before your leadership faltered, as it invariably does.”

“So
you saw us as termites just starting to climb up the side of the big galactic house, and so you sent in the exterminators.”

The Leader tilts his head to one s
ide again.  “That is actually an imaginative, and appropriate, analogy.”

“What if we had been as smart as you guys?” Rook asks.  “What if, I dunno, you had come upon us and we were expanding slowly, like you guys, measuring our resources with our
own kind of Calculators?  What would you have done?”  The Cereb doesn’t move.  It blinks once, twice, and doesn’t blink again.  Rook smiles as realization dawns on him.  “You never considered that, did you?  You actually never imagined it.”

“That is true,” the Leader says, with no signs of shame.  “It has never occurred to me, because it has never been a concern.”

“Well, try to envision it now.”

The Leader goes quiet for some time. 
This isn’t easy for him to do.  It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it simply never occurs to most in his species to think this way.  It isn’t pertinent information, these “what if” scenarios.  It is like trying to ask a member of one religion to suddenly convert to another religion instantaneously.  It’s not that that person is incapable of such thought, it’s just that it’s an unusual and untrained (and
alien
) method of thinking.  It’s
alien
.  The mind automatically rejects it, because it is programmed with various cognitive biases, most of which are there to confirm a person’s previously held beliefs.  Evolutionary processes placed them there, guaranteeing that, for the most part, a creature accepts the reality which it is given so that it can get on with its life, never questioning
too
much.

It has made of the Cerebs the ultimate pragmatists.

The Leader genuinely attempts to do what Rook has asked of him, tries to imagine what might have happened if the Cerebs had found Man as similar to themselves, and finds that, like trying to hold onto a large, slippery fish, the thought wriggles free and is gone.  With the bothersome slippery fish out of the boat, the boat is back in proper order, sailing in the safety of calm and familiar waters.

“You can’t do it, can you?” Rook marvels.

The Leader remains silent for a moment, then admits bluntly, “I cannot.”  There is no shame in his admission.  There is also no reason for him to hold the information back.  By the Leader’s reckoning, there is absolutely no way that the human could ever use this information to his benefit.  There were no chinks in the armor to exploit here, the Cerebrals had stood by their philosophy for thousands of generations, and so far their results had proven them right.

“You can’t even imagine what it might’ve been like,” Rook says, “because it
didn’t happen
that way.”

The Leader doesn’t move.  He’s waiting for the next relevant statement or question.

Rook, for his part, is lost in his own bit of thought.  He realizes that, just as the alien can’t wrap his mind around human psychology, neither can he wrap his mind around the alien’s.  A gulf exists here that can probably never be crossed.  The Leader can’t understand how humans could have come so far as a spacefaring race without possessing the flawless logic of Cerebs, and Rook can’t understand how Cerebs can understand the rudiments of deception and self-preservation without having a psychology or society similar to Man.

“I feel sorry for you,” Rook says suddenly.  He realizes it as he’s saying it.
  “What’s it like, not being able to see things the way they aren’t?  It must be terrible.  You live only in the certainty, and never flatter the maybe.”

“
I feel sorry for you, also,” says the Leader.

Rook snorts.  “
You?  Feel empathy?  Please.”

“I feel despondency
over unrealized potential,” the alien clarifies.  “Humanity had much potential, most of it actualized.  It is unfortunate to see such folly, and the collapse it caused.”

“Why so unfortunate?”

“Because, like humans, we also hope to find we are not alone in the universe.”

Rook wanted to pull his hair out at the madness of this statement.  “But you
did
find out you weren’t alone!”

“Wrong. 
We are alone.”

“What about humanity?”

“Humans do not count.”

“
How do we not count?!
” Rook screams, rising to his feet.

“Long did you exist on Earth with termites, but did you ever stop asking the question, ‘Are we alone in the universe?’  Of course not.  That’s because the termite does not count.”
 

Rook stares down at him, speechles
s.

The Leader shifts
uncomfortably in his compristeel bonds.

When Rook finally finds his voice
again, he says, “Termites don’t speak.  They don’t have music or love or language.  They don’t have a
culture
!  They don’t have—”

“All of these are items
that
you
use to qualify true sentience,” the Leader says, eyes pulsing now with a vague green light.  “I wonder at it, because dolphins also had a language, and even a sophisticated understanding of tones, which you might define as ‘song,’ and they were closer to sentience than termites.  But if they were to spread across the galaxy, consuming resources and living beyond their means, we would have classified them as lesser-sentient, as well, and dealt with them the same.  Certainly human language was more sophisticated than dolphin language, and your culture more colorful than chimpanzees, and your songwriting more intricate than birds or whales, but in the end, you were no less threatening to the integrity of the ‘galactic house,’ as you put it, than mold.”

Rook takes a step towards his prisoner
, staring down at him with supreme enmity.  His breathing has become erratic.  He reaches to his side, draws his sidearm, levels it at the Leader’s head.  “Can mold outthink you?” he asks.  “Can mold switch the air vents off, then back on, and increase the oxidizers and hydrocarbon gas levels until the air is combustible?  Can mold keep a dialogue going with its enemy until an ally sneaks up behind him?”

The Leader nods.  “It was a fair ploy.  Executed with
a degree of intelligence and imagination, to be sure.  But more of our people have died from disease last month than ever died from a human trap.  Your traps were never any greater than the traps set by the Venus Flytrap, or the dams built by beavers to gather fish.  All life has a level of intelligence—that’s what makes it
life
—but the great failure of humanity, and the proof that it is not truly self-aware, is its inability to set deception aside and work together as a cohesive unit towards a definable and reachable goal.”

“We
were
working towards it!” Rook fumes.  “Until we were interrupted by it!  We made every sacrifice we could in order to reach peace with ourselves and—”

“And there is another problem
with your race, of course.  Sacrifice.  Wave after wave of your soldiers were sent on suicide missions, against odds that, did they have the minds for it, they would have known were impossible to overcome.  Rather than fleeing, most of you stood and fought.  Such needless sacrifice, when you might have eked out an existence on the run.  You attempted War, and when that did not work, you attempted stealth, deception, and sabotage, hence the Sidewinders.”

Rook shakes his head.  “Well, maybe like you, we couldn’t
imagine
living on the run for the rest of our existence.”

“Another flaw, then.”

Rook stands there, looking down at him, mouth slightly agape and his tongue sliding over his top lip.  Lost in thought for a moment, he almost never came back.  “You say you don’t understand sacrifice,” he says finally.  “But you’re a soldier yourself.  Surely you know something about sacrifice for the sake of your people.”

“It is not sacrifice what we
do as operatives. 
Efficiency
is key to us, and we make sure that nothing stands in the way of it.”  He looks right proud when he says this next.  “For instance, my people will not stop and search for me or my team, not until they find you.  They may gather the dead as they go, but we are a single-minded people, and we will not allow ourselves to become distracted from our goal.  To waste even a scrap of our soldiers or pilots on search and rescue before we have acquired our target would be wasteful.  Eradication is the goal, and our Conductor has set his eyes on you.”

The purpose of the comment
is clear.  It is a reminder from the Leader to Rook that his people are relentless, that they will never stop hunting him. 
As if I need a reminder
.