Writers of the Future, Volume 28 (22 page)

Jared paused, gathering his thoughts. He hadn’t expected to have to explain this to anyone so soon, at least not until he was back on Earth being debriefed by Alliance Liaison. “It’s not anyone in the Remote Observation team, I’m pretty sure of that now. I think someone with access to core station systems has installed some agent software to act for them. Every time one of the RO birds was taken over there’d be a spike in processor activity associated with core comms.”

“Do you have details of when these events happened
?
” Benning said. “We could trace all logins, match them up with shift activity and personnel logs, get some idea who had the opportunity to do this.”

“How quickly can you get on it
?
” Anderson said.

“Let me get my section heads in here and we can start now.”

Benning made the call, as did the other chiefs to their teams, prompting an influx of new faces, all initially ignorant of events, all displaying the same shock when told of the situation. They got to work fast, a team of over fifteen by now, pulling up logs of computer access and processor activity, tracing back through the control systems of the hijacked satellites, the station processor nodes that could have been set to control them and finally the individuals most likely to have had the right kind of access at the right kind of time.

Jared looked round at the number of people working the problem, and the results they were getting. Sal was right, he thought—he had been just groping around for two weeks, sacrificing progress to maintain cover. But in many ways, this new situation brought concerns of its own. Kaluza Station housed almost a thousand people, all working on the preparations for contact, and as the number of people aware of the breach and working to pin it down grew, the probability that the culprit would be tipped off could only increase.

Then Jared heard someone call out “Got him!” He looked over to the far corner of the room where a group of system profilers were leaning over a display. One of them was pointing to a trace of computer access data.

Anderson moved over quickly, Jared and the rest of the room not far behind. Then they saw the name of the person the system had identified as the culprit.

“Not him,” Anderson said. “Not Temple.”

“It’s Temple,” Sal said.

Rory Temple, grandson of the man who had made first contact with the Alliance, and who had reportedly done whatever it had taken to convince them that humanity was worthy of joining.

Anderson sat everyone down. “How sure are you
?
” he said to the profilers who had pulled up Temple’s name.

“Ninety percent,” one of them said.

“You realize how big a deal this is, if we’re wrong,” Anderson said. “This guy’s connections make him a very important man. He could have pulled strings to get a job anywhere in interplanetary policy, but he chose this place.”

“Why here
?
” Jared said. It couldn’t help but sound suspicious, that their new number one suspect had gone to such lengths to be posted here, with status and pay grade a fraction of what he could command elsewhere.

“He studies languages. He did a lot work on the Sephora languages when we first encountered them, stuff we’d never have figured out without him. Even if he didn’t call in favors to get the exolinguistics job, he’d be a pretty good candidate.”

“And now he’s using his place here to screw the mission by breaking cover ahead of the contact date
?
” Sal said. “Why
?
”

“I have a pretty good idea,” Benning said. “He wants the glory. His grandfather was the first to meet the Sprites, the first to introduce humanity to the Alliance, the one to save our necks. Now, Rory Temple wants to bring in the Caronoi, single-handed, and get his name in the books, too.”

There were murmurs of agreement around the room; it sounded plausible.

“I’m not going to haul him in and throw accusations at him if there’s any chance he’s innocent,” Anderson said. “We can’t take that kind of trouble, not at this stage.”

Jared could see the position Anderson was in and had a lot of sympathy for the guy; he was the station commander, nominally the sole voice of authority, but he’d just been trumped on his own station twice in succession, first by Jared’s Alliance Liaison status, now by Rory Temple’s connections and the ramifications of pointing the finger. Jared realized he had to make the move.

“Let me talk to him,” he said.

“No,” Anderson said, thin-lipped. “He’s one of my staff. I work out how we deal with him.”

“Commander, we’re not sure it is him yet. Look, I’ve been trained in covert interrogation, I can talk to him under some pretext and know whether he’s lying. I have enhancements fitted that let me spot pupil dilation, skin flush, posture changes—I’m like a walking lie detector. It’s part of my job. I can tell you if it’s him.”

Anderson sat back, thinking it through. “Sal, what do you think
?
”

“If Spegel is wrong, then it’s he and Alliance Liaison that look bad, not us.”

“Remember, it’s not just the embarrassment we’re trying to avoid.”

“We run a higher risk by doing nothing.”

“Okay,” Anderson said. “Do it.”

J
ared’s duties while under cover had never taken him to the Cultural Assessments section. He made his way there with growing apprehension, knowing how much hung on what he was about to attempt. He stopped at one of the research rooms to ask directions and was pointed toward the teaching facility where Rory taught Caronoi languages to the Contact Teams. When Jared got there the door was open, and Rory was inside addressing a class of twelve contactees. They sat there, lean and clean-cut in their red jumpsuits like pilots at a preflight briefing, hanging on every word, knowing that success or failure lay in doing the job right and assimilating every bit of information they were given.

Jared hovered outside. No one seemed to have noticed him, so he listened in while Rory took them through the finer details of something called “cross-grammeme resonance.” The class was in its final five minutes, so he waited for them to finish, then went in as Rory was closing down the displays.

“Rory Temple
?
” Jared strolled in as if there on some errand, but already he had his implants fired up to record and analyze everything.

“Yeah, that’s right.” Rory was a young guy, younger than Jared with curly black hair and a wide welcoming smile.

“I’m Jared, hi. Look—do you have a minute
?
I want to ask you something about the stuff you’re working on.”

“Sure. My office is just down the hall.” Rory started gathering disks and printouts together, clearing the room for whoever would be teaching here next.

Jared hesitated—Rory’s office might be the worst place to go; people were always harder to read on home ground. But then this classroom was probably familiar territory in itself, and anyway people were already arriving for the next lesson. He let Rory lead him out and down the hall to the cubicle where he worked.

“So, what do you want to know
?
” Rory said once they’d arrived.

Why you’ve jeopardized this mission, this station and the safety of the human race, Jared didn’t say. “I run the remote observation birds that pick up all RF communications, but resourcing is getting to be an issue and we might need to prioritize our collects. I was wondering whether there are any particular locations or times of day that give you the best material.”

“To an extent, yes, but it depends what you’re looking for. The southern continents seem to be first with all technical advancements. Certainly, their songs were the first to contain explanations for electromagnetism and atomic theory, plus most of the other milestones we’ve gauged our own development by. But it was a northern song that first showed something resembling General Relativity, so take your pick. And if it’s their culture you’re into, how they communicate and govern themselves, you can take songs from pretty much anywhere.”

Rory had an image on his wall, taken by a low orbital satellite back when they still dared get that close, showing one of the song sharing rituals in progress. Jared had seen others like it in his brief time on the station, but this one was particularly clear, a gently sloping meadow of dark green vegetation with a group of over two hundred Caronoi clustered together, their quadruped bodies packed so close as to be clambering over each other as the song was sung again and again, being added to, refined and memorized with every repetition. The songs were at the heart of Caronoi culture, a kind of common knowledge base evolving over time, copied from generation to generation and place to place as the Caronois’ understanding of the world increased. It had even been suggested that the hours-long ritual took them into some kind of shared world space, a place existing only in their minds but where theories and hypotheses about the world could be formed, developed and rationalized until finally, when they were done, they would go back to living in lean-to shelters, eating grass and leaves off the ground, while the milestones of physics, chemistry and biology fell to their relentless accumulation of knowledge.

“And is it just the songs that you get
?
Or other stuff too
?
” Jared said.

“Has no one told you this
?
” Rory said. “Wow, they do keep you guys green, don’t they
?
Okay, in terms of what you pick up, the majority of it is song lore, but there are plenty of other site-to-site communications too, more mundane stuff like arranging journeys or warning of bad weather.”

“And is it easy to translate
?
”

“It wasn’t at first, but we managed to crack it a year or so ago,” Rory said. “Their languages are fascinating, their way of communicating so unlike our own. Have you ever seen their speech decoded
?
Seen how it works
?
”

“No,” Jared said. “I just collect their transmissions. It’s all noise as far as I can tell.”

Rory smiled. “I guess to them, hearing us speak would be just noise. It’s not like hearing another language from your own planet where you can tell
something
is being said, even if you’re not sure what.”

Jared put on a quizzical look, mainly a way of keeping Rory talking, but mixed with genuine interest as to what he’d managed to uncover.

“Okay, here’s how it works,” Rory said. He leaned over the keypad, then hit a key to bring the screen back to life.

There was something else on there when it powered up, something Jared couldn’t see clearly but which made Rory close the window in a hurry, cursing under his breath. “Game Thread” or “Game Theater” was all Jared had been able to read.

“Didn’t realize that was on there,” Rory said, laughing nervously. For Jared though it would be yet another problem—Rory couldn’t have been the only crew member playing games when they should be working, but being caught out for that minor misdemeanor could well mask the signs of the major one.

Rory opened up the program he did want and brought up an audio file. When he set it playing, it sounded like dolphin sounds, but mixed with a low-level buzzing drone.

“Okay, not much to take from that, is there
?
” he said. “But watch this.” Then he brought it up visually, a graphical trace of amplitude and frequency matching the peaks and lulls of the sound itself. He zoomed in, down to the level of hundredths of a second, and the trace began to resolve itself into discrete spikes of noise.

“Each one of those is a click,” Rory said. “In isolation they don’t mean much—it’s the spacing that counts. Look here.” He pointed out a sequence of four clicks, three equally spaced with the fourth farther off to the right. “This is the west coast dialect of continent B, so that means ‘home.’” He then pointed out other sequences, some of up to ten clicks, with meanings as varied as “down” and “water” and “closed.” Then he zoomed out, the screen becoming a forest of spikes, and hit a couple of keys that caused another four to be highlighted, much wider apart this time.

“‘Home’ again,” Jared said.

“That’s right, but covering a tenth of a second, not just a few hundredths. And each of those clicks already forms part of other short-span words. In fact, in any sequence of clicks you can find whole new levels of meaning by pulling back and looking for patterns at larger and larger scales. And their languages actually use that phenomenon, to add grammatical nuances, parallel threads of meaning, evidence and context running alongside every statement—do you know they find it almost impossible to lie
?
Their brains must be wired up to process layers of meaning and truth like this. To them, our way of just putting one word after another would be almost incomprehensible. They can’t form a coherent meaning
without
layering it on.”

Rory seemed to enjoy explaining all this stuff, Jared thought. Certainly enough to make it plausible that he’d chosen this posting out of sheer academic interest, and nothing more. Jared had once felt the same about his old job, doing covert analysis of other Alliance races’ technology—highly secretive, extremely fruitful and fascinating to an extent that he’d have done it as a hobby if someone else was paying his bills. Then one day he just hit burnout and couldn’t do it anymore.

“And did you figure all this out yourself
?
”

“Most of it. It was me who discovered the songs. I even invented the name ‘Caronoi’—we’d been calling them ‘Carons’ for too long.”

“So this whole contact effort is your baby
?
”

“Yeah, I guess you could say so.”

He thinks it’s his own pet project, Jared thought. He’s got a lot to be proud of with what he’s done so far, but Benning was right—he wants one better. He wants the glory like his grandfather. Time to put him on the defensive.

“So what’s the point of any of this
?
Why are you even bothering if we can’t even get our heads around it
?
”

Rory answered straight, not rising to the bait. “The Contact Team will be using translation packs, and one of my jobs is to program them. But even using them needs a degree of training, almost as much as learning the rudiments of an unfamiliar Earth language. You can’t just talk into the translator and hope that something coherent will come out, much less expect to understand what it gives back to you when they reply. It just doesn’t work that way.”