Salvation

“When the original Space Age was underway back in the 1950s and ’60s, part of the ideological struggle was the hypothesis surrounding first contact. The Soviet Union postulated that any civilization advanced enough to travel between the stars would logically be socialist, and would therefore choose to deal only with Moscow. The battle for ideological supremacy would be over, the world would undergo conversion to enlightenment, and the age of capitalism would be at an end.”

  “Aliens are all communists? Bunch of bull. The Olyix are savvy traders.”

  “Maybe. But today, instead of the Soviet Union, we have the Utopial culture.” I glanced over at Eldlund and Jessika, still chatting happily with Loi. “Who will explain, at great and boring length, how their post-scarcity equality is not socialism, but a technology-driven evolution of egalitarian humanist society.”

  “Jeez, you mean Callum’s here to confirm starfaring aliens will all be—”

  “Good little Utopials? Yes. Beware, my son, the end days of capitalism are nigh.”

  “He’ll swing contact their way?”

  “Utopial society is very benign and nurturing. The thinking goes that aliens will instinctively favor that.”

  “Benign, my ass. Tranquil verging on stagnant, more like.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Oh, come on, you work for Connexion, for fuck’s sake. The Universal market economy worlds and habitats are goddamn dynamic. The Olyix don’t do much business with Utopials.”

  “The Olyix are a single arkship colony who care only about continuing their voyage to the end of the universe, where they will meet their God at the End of Time. Anything else is secondary to that doctrine, so by necessity they adapt to local conditions. In the Sol system, trade with Earth and the habitats is the method by which they can acquire the energy to build up their supply of antimatter and continue that voyage. Therefore, they trade. The argument being, had they arrived at Delta Pavonis instead, they would now be following Utopial doctrine in their contact with Akitha.”

  “Doesn’t that kind of blow the shit out of the pan-galactic Utopial theory, that every species will embrace post-scarcity benevolence?”

  “In the case of the Olyix, yes. Which is why Callum is hoping for a more favorable outcome this time.”

  “So what’s the deal with Yuri, then?”

  I leaned in a little closer, lowering my voice. “I didn’t say this, but Yuri is a xenophobic son of a bitch. He’s got a real bug up his ass about the Olyix.”

  “Why?”

  “He doesn’t like Kcells, apparently.”

  “That’s crazy. They’ve turned out to be a medical miracle. Goddamn cheap one, too. Everybody wins.”

  I shrugged. “It’s just the way he is.” I smiled and sat back to watch if that particular seed of doubt would grow into anything I could use on my mission.

  * * *

  —

  Outside the Trail Rover, Nkya’s landscape was turning darker. The long screes of sandy regolith we traversed were now as black as volcanic dust. And maybe that’s what the stuff actually was; I’m no geologist.

  Callum appeared midmorning and gave the coffee machine a thorough workout. He and Yuri gave each other a curt nod. Their war wasn’t yet over and probably never would be, but the truce was holding.

  Alik went and sat next to Yuri. For a moment they both looked out of the window as we passed the scarlet strobe of a beacon post. The intrusive light caught their faces, shading them both a strange bloodred, its time-lapse flashes pulling the shadows out of hooded eyes like dramatic tears.

  “So if after considered analysis we declare the alien ship hostile, what happens?” Alik asked. “Are we carrying a nuclear capability?”

  “Our security drones can handle a high level of aggression,” Yuri told him. “If the spaceship becomes actively belligerent, they will contain it while we retreat.”

  “Retreat in what?”

  Yuri frowned, as if he’d misheard. “In this, of course.”

  “Jeez, you call this a getaway car?”

  “The alien ship is isolated. It doesn’t pose a threat to anything except the immediate vicinity. If that happens, we can return in a more forceful mode.”

  “Unless it wipes us out. Then the guys sent to find us get taken out, and the guys who get sent in after that…What’s the cutoff? Team twenty?”

  “There is no link with solnet. However, the satellites are keeping watch. If the mission’s G8Turing spots any trouble, then the appropriate protocols will be followed.”

  “Great,” Alik grunted. “And we’re still racing away at walking pace.”

  “You were aware of the risk before we started.”

  “Risk, yeah. Your paranoia, not so much.”

  “We have to guarantee the safety of our entire species. That is no small obligation.”

  “Come on. If you can travel between stars, you aren’t doing it for the glory of the empire. There’s no such thing.”

  “Our own history and rationale cannot be used as a template for analyzing the motives of an extraterrestrial species,” Yuri said levelly. “The alien ship was probably on some kind of scout mission—an exploration and assessment maybe, the equivalent of this very assessment mission. Whatever the exact classification, they stole humans to examine them. Already that puts them into an antagonistic classification.”

  “Do we know they were stolen?” Alik challenged. “Hell, they could have been fleeing some catastrophe or war, and the aliens were doing these people a favor. We’re eighty-nine light-years from Earth, right? So if this ship was flying below light speed, it could have left Earth at anytime in the last five hundred years. There was some pretty bad shit going on then; not our finest era.”

  “Fleeing what?”

  “Second World War, for starters. Think on it. You’re stuck in the blitz in London, and some strange dude offers you a way out. The chance for you and a few others to start a new life on a new world. The only price is that you can’t ever come back. You know you’d take that offer. We’ve got close to twenty terraformed planets now, every one of which cost us the biggest financial and political effort our species has ever known. If we’d spent half that much fixing Earth, we’d have us a genuine paradise. But no, getting a second chance is the greatest human dream and delusion we have. It even outranks religion.”

  “Benign aliens intervening to save us?” Yuri sneered. “What’s that, second on the wish list?”

  Alik spread his hands wide. “Then why are humans on board?”

  “We don’t have nearly enough information yet to confirm the intent.”

  “Hell, man, I know that. I’m offering up possibilities, that’s all. Thinking wide. That’s why we’re all here, aren’t we? Everything is up for consideration.”

  “So which do you think it is?” Kandara challenged. “You put up a good case for them being benign. Are they saving worthy people from Earth’s brutality, or are they hostile imperialists, capturing specimens for the all-time rectal probing record in their laboratory?”

  Alik gave her a quick salute. “I’m prepared for it to be the hostile, but intellectually I’m kinda thinking it’s unlikely.”

  “Why?” Yuri said, his voice sharpening.

  “Every reason given. You don’t cross interstellar space for conquest. You do it for politics and wanderlust, like we have; and you do it for science, like we also have. But most interesting motive of all: as art. Because you can.”

  “You are a fool if you think that. You are assigning human behavioral traits to aliens—the worst form of anthropomorphism and intellectual dishonesty. They have taken these people, most likely against their will. Whoever they are, they’re not our friends.”

  “You’ve prejudged, then?”

  “My judgment comes from the—admittedly small—amount of information we’ve uncovered so far. It is what we don
’t know that bothers me even more. The potential for conflict here is enormous. Aliens can affect us in the most subtle ways. Our encounters with them show that we are always changed.”

  “Them?” Eldlund queried. “How many do you think we’ve encountered? As far as I’m aware, this is only the second.”

  “It is,” Yuri said. “But look at what the Olyix have done to us.”

  “They brought knowledge.”

  “No, they didn’t; a few clever chunks of biotechnology, that’s all. Not real knowledge, no revelations. They’re the greatest example of passive-aggressive we’ve ever known. But what else do you expect from a bunch of religious fanatics?”

  I’d heard this speech many times. It was one of the reasons I’d urged my boss to come on the expedition in person. My hope was that he’d open up to his peers in a way he never would to me and provide some kind of insight into his xenophobia. As Callum was to Emilja, so Yuri was to Ainsley—and a more paranoid sonofabitch you cannot find.

  Kandara regarded Yuri with some surprise. “I don’t see the aggressive side of them. They seem more full-on passive to me.”

  “That’s all part of the act. They adapt to circumstances. I don’t blame them; it’s an excellent survival trait, which is exactly what you need if you’re on a voyage to the end of time. Even the Olyix don’t know what they’re going to encounter next, so they have to be ready for anything.”

  “Are you saying we’re not seeing the real them?”

  “No, quite the opposite. They see us, and adapt themselves to the systems we live by. That is the real them, even though for us it’s looking into a mirror.”

  “You, the Sol system, turned them into traders,” Callum said.

  “Of course we did,” Yuri said. “They came, they looked around, they saw what they had to do to get the energy they needed to rebuild their antimatter fuel supply—and they did it. No hesitation, no regrets. And to hell with the consequences.”

  “And there are consequences to them trading Kcells with us?” Eldlund asked in surprise. “I don’t see how. Kcell treatments have saved the lives of millions of people in the Universal star systems. People who are too poor to afford stem cell printing and cloned organs. That’s the only outrage here.”

  “I’m not saying Kcells have been bad for us,” Yuri said. “But the nature of the Olyix, this adaptability, is detrimental when they encounter a species with politics as complex as ours. They lack discrimination. Because they are driven so relentlessly to achieve their own goal, it doesn’t matter to them how they achieve it. They need our money to buy our electricity, so they will adopt our own methodology to obtain it. Any methodology we have, they see an opportunity. Anything else is probably a sin to them.”

  “You object to them because they’ve become capitalists?” Eldlund exclaimed.

  “No,” Callum taunted. “It’s because they’re better capitalists.”

  “You don’t get it,” Yuri said calmly. “They don’t have our moral filter. It doesn’t matter to them what they do to get money, nor the consequences. And there is an awful lot of money involved with supplying the Salvation of Life with energy. That’s why we have to watch them very closely.”

  “Money is always going to distort everything,” Alik said. “Nothing new in that. Greed is a constant. That just makes them more human, you ask me.”

  “You’re wrong,” Yuri said flatly. “You, with your job, should know the levels to which people will sink when there’s real money involved. And because we race to the bottom, so do the Olyix. We are the architects of their current behavior. And I’ve seen the consequences firsthand. They’re not good.”

  I watched with immense interest as Alik finally made his facial muscles contract, an expression approximating skepticism. “Such as?”

  YURI’S RACE AGAINST TIME

  LONDON, AD 2167

  The summer of 2167 was exceptionally warm, even by Europe’s new standards. In Yuri’s London office, the whining air-con was making no difference to the wretched late-August temperature. By quarter past ten on Thursday morning he wanted to open the window—not that he could; his office was on the sixty-third floor. Connexion’s extraordinary European central office rose out of the Greenwich Peninsular, a neo-Gothic helix-twist skyscraper of glass and black stone that topped out at ninety stories, like the watchtower of some fallen pagan archangel charged with guarding the city against invaders sailing up the Thames. From his office Yuri had a perfectly framed view of the huge old Dartford Bridge curving up out of the distant horizon. But that same panorama was one that poured sunlight through the glass all morning long.

  Earth had been using solarwells to supply its power since 2069, with the last coal and gas power stations shutting down in 2082. That had given the biosphere eighty-five years to reabsorb the excess carbon monoxide and dioxide produced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Climatologists kept saying that was long enough for the atmosphere to stabilize at pre–Industrial Revolution levels, the idealized norm. Unfortunately, their elegant computer predictions never matched reality, and they all agreed 2167 was a fluke spike on the obstinately shallow cooling curve. One which the neogreen movement, whose ideology trumped science, was quick to blame on unusual solar activity, created by solarwells abusing the corona.

  Yuri didn’t care why it was ridiculously hot; he just wanted the god-awful heat wave to end.

  “Executive priority call,” Boris announced. “Poi Li for you.”

  “Crap.” Yuri resisted the impulse to pull up his tie and fasten his top button. He couldn’t think of any event that would warrant a personal call from Poi Li. She’d retired nineteen years ago, then immediately become an independent security advisor to the board—much to her successor’s dismay. “Give her access.”

  “Yuri,” Poi Li said.

  “Poi, been a while.”

  “Anything of interest to report?”

  “Not really. Any interesting reason you’re calling this office?” He’d been appointed head of Connexion’s small but elite Olyix Monitoring Office two years ago. At the time, Yuri hadn’t been sure whether or not it was a promotion from director of the Sol Habitat Security Office, which he’d held before, but it had been created by Ainsley himself ten years after the Olyix arkship Salvation of Life had decelerated into the solar system in 2144 and had provided Yuri with almost unlimited authority. Despite his being completely office-bound, it was interesting work, plotting the political and financial influence of the Olyix across Earth and the habitats. It also gave him personal access to some very influential people. He’d come to regard it as an essential rung on his way up to Connexion’s Security Chief, proving he had the executive skills to match his operational ability.

  “There is a matter which we would like you to investigate personally,” Poi Li said.

  “We?”

  “Ainsley and me.”

  Reflex made Yuri sit up fast. “I see.”

  “It is somewhat urgent.”

  * * *

  —

  He took the security department’s portal door into the company’s general London network; from there he could walk straight into the London metrohub inner loop. He took a radial out to the Sloane Square hub. A short walk down King’s Road, where there were a lot of silver-blue two-person cabez breezing about, and he was at the address Poi Li had sent, an elegant brick Regency-style building that contained phenomenally expensive pied-à-terres for the wealthy, overlooking a small square with tall plane trees. He counted five security guards positioned around the square, dressed like normal people, hanging casually, and wondered how many more he was missing.

  Boris gave his code to the entrance, which scanned him. The glossy black door—which looked like wood but wasn’t—opened smoothly. Two guards in expensive suits were standing in the hallway. They gestured him in.

  Yuri just had to admire the ancient l
ift with its iron grid doors and manual brass operating handle. He was the sole occupant as it rattled and groaned its way up to the fourth floor.

  Poi Li was waiting on the landing for him. She looked the same as she had when he first started working for Connexion almost a century earlier, but somehow more delicate now. The telomere treatments seemed to be gnawing away at her core, leaving only the shell of a woman.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said and led him into the penthouse apartment.

  The décor was classical: marble floors and high ceilings, gold-plated chandeliers illuminating old master oil paintings and baroque modern canvases with equal intensity. The furniture style was unremittingly Louis XVI, heavy handcrafted pieces that looked hugely uncomfortable to sit on.

  Ainsley Zangari was waiting in the lounge. Yuri was impressed. At 136, the richest man there’d ever been had clearly spent something like a medium-size country’s arms budget on genetic therapy; his anti-aging treatments went far beyond the simple telomere extensions Yuri had spent decades of his generous bonuses on. Anyone who didn’t know him would think he was a normal forty-year-old who ate sensibly and exercised properly. Even his hair had turned from silver back to a youthful brown, as if follicle hues were merely seasonal, and now spring had come once more.

  “Yuri, good to see you.” A handshake, with a strong grip, underscoring easy vigor.

  “Sir. Poi said this was urgent.”

  “Yes, let me introduce you. This is Gwendoline.” Ainsley gestured at a teenage girl sitting awkwardly on one of the antique settees.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Yuri said automatically. Boris was running facial recognition on her, but there was nothing in Connexion’s database. That didn’t bode well. Connexion had files on everyone remotely important. He told Boris to find out who owned the penthouse. Answer: a firm registered on Archimedes, a post-Jupiter-orbit habitat whose major industry was serving as a zero-tax enclave.

  “Sorry to be so much trouble,” Gwendoline said. Her voice was high and hesitant. Yuri stopped analyzing her and actually looked. She was pretty, of course, but not just in that way all teenage girls were. Gwendoline was groomed to perfection. Casually, of course, but not cheaply. Personal stylists and the right schooling had created an effortless ingénue elegance. He decided she was maybe seventeen or eighteen, with a thin face and strong jaw, giving her glass-cutter cheeks. A button nose was heavily freckled, and her long strawberry-blond hair possessed a healthy gloss that rivaled the gold ornaments glittering around the lounge. Her dress was also deceptively simple: white and scarlet cotton with a square-cut neck and a hemline high above the knee. Yuri just knew it wasn’t printed in any fabricator; this was Rome or Paris couture with an eye-watering price tag. Gwendoline was a true golden-child heartbreaker. So then: spoiled brat or wallet-busting mistress.