Writers of the Future, Volume 28 (24 page)

Jared got up and opened a terminal, linking up to the internal feed of recent news and discoveries. There was a group page belonging to the decoding team, a kind of repository of quick look reports on all Caronoi communications that the technical and cultural research teams could browse, and call up the full recordings if they wanted. He scanned through the reports for the last eight weeks, the approximate duration of the breach. Northern hemisphere songs were showing an increased proportion of fictional material, one report said, their own stories and legends playing a big role in a way that wasn’t true for other regions. Then there was a reference to one of the Continent A settlements, playing with new ideas for collecting water in dry seasons, encouraging the growth of plants that collected moisture under their leaves. Then there was a tribe on the west coast of continent B, the readout showed, who had started making rapid advances in the mathematical analysis of competitions and strategies for winning them.

Jared stopped, wondering why that last part had stood out. He checked the date on the posting—just one week ago. Then he looked back in the archive of postings, searching for anything on the same or related subjects. There was nothing. He stopped, thinking back to his conversation with Rory Temple, running through everything he’d seen and heard, justifying to himself just why this might be significant.

Then he called the number given for the decoding group and got through to one of their researchers.

“Hi, I’ve just seen the summary for signal 2/DK/2462,” he said, once he’d identified himself. His heart was pounding with the realization trying to be born in his mind, and it was hard to keep his voice level. “That reference to their mathematics and analysis of competitive behavior—have you ever seen that come up in any other songs or communications
?
”

“No, there’s no sign of it here,” the woman said when she’d checked her records.

“Nothing before a week ago
?
”

“No.”

Jared thought back to that chat with Rory, three full weeks ago, concentrating not on Rory himself but on what he’d tried to hide on his screen, that window that had looked like “Game Theater,” but which the recording in Jared’s implants now showed to be something altogether different.

“How about other ways of phrasing it, like ‘tactical strategies,’ or ‘competitive analysis,’ or—ah—‘Game Theory’
?
”

She checked again. “Nothing,” she said.

“What about other tribes or other regions
?
”

“It’s spread to a few other tribes since then, but the signal you saw seems to be the origin. Beyond that, it’s as if it came out of nowhere.”

Jared was out of the door and running to Benning’s office before he’d even had time to break off the call. Benning was sitting at his desk, halfway through reading the dailies that his staff had put out.

“I know who it was,” Jared said. “It was Rory Temple all along.”

“How do you know
?
”

Jared told him everything, up to and including how Rory had information on his Caronoi analysis system three weeks ago that didn’t show up in Caronoi communications until two weeks later.

“You think this is what he’s sending
?
” Benning said. “Why this
?
Why is he giving them math lessons
?
”

“You want answers to that, I say we go and ask him. Where is he now
?
”

Benning still didn’t seem convinced, but he called up Rory’s details to see the last access point he’d swiped through. The record showed him being on a maintenance deck toward the sunward side of the station. It was far from his usual place of work.

“What in the hell is he doing there
?
” Benning said.

They went to the area indicated in the records, up at the narrow end of the spindle-shaped station, not running but still moving with urgency. The area they ended up in was right under the array of antennas and dishes that were clustered on the sun-facing point of the station. There they slowed, moving quietly, knowing even before they located him that whatever Rory was doing, he wouldn’t want to be found.

The deck was like a circular corridor matching the sixty-foot diameter of this narrowest part of the station, and they found Rory in an alcove on the outer side, kneeling down with his back to them. The alcove contained ducting and cables running floor to ceiling, presumably leading to one of the antenna arrays on the outer hull, and Rory had plugged a portable omni into one of the monitoring units and was uploading something to the transmitter.

“Rory, whatever you’re doing, stop,” Jared said.

He jumped half out of his skin, almost falling over in his haste to get up and turn around. His eyes darted between Jared and Benning, then he backed against the wall, deflated, as he realized he couldn’t get out.

“You mustn’t stop it,” he said. “There’s too much at stake.”

“What are you doing
?
” Benning said, heading over to the omni. He was about to unplug it when Rory ran over, pushing him away, then stepped back with his hands up.

“Sorry—you can’t do that. Please, you’ve got to listen.”

Jared’s detectors, tuned for their usual role of spotting untruths, were now screaming one thing at him—Rory was sincere, and was doing what he was doing for a reason he believed in so strongly, he didn’t care what happened to him as long as he could continue. This wasn’t someone out to steal glory.

“Benning, wait a minute,” Jared said. “Rory, tell me what’s going on here. I promise, I’m listening.”

“It’s the Caronoi,” he said. “I’ve got to get a message to them.”

“We know. You’ve already sent them several. But why
?
What have you been telling them
?
”

“How not to get themselves exterminated, that’s what.”

“What the hell do you mean
?
” Benning said.

“It’s the Alliance and the judgment they pass on new races. My grandfather knew. Don’t you realize
?
He knew what almost happened to us and why. And guess what
?
Those poor bastards down on Caron-c are heading for the same fate.”

“So you tipped them off
?
”

“Yes, but not in the way you think. I tapped into their songs, the ones they share between continents, and added the elements of the knowledge they’ll need to survive.”

“What—Game Theory
?
” Jared said.

Rory blanched, his eyes widening. “How do you know about that
?
”

“It’s started turning up in their songs. The intercepts are showing it.”

“And now that they know we’re here, all preparations for contact have been wasted,” Benning said.

“No, it’s not like that,” Rory said. “I hid the information in their songs. They don’t know it’s from outside. If they ever try to trace it back, then it will look like it came out of nowhere, but right now every tribe thinks it must be one of the other tribes that started it.”

So that’s how he beat the lie test, Jared thought. He was telling the truth when he said actual contact was still to come. “But why Game Theory
?
How is that meant to save them
?
”

Rory paused, as if collecting his thoughts on a subject he never expected to have to explain. “The Alliance destroys races that it thinks might be a threat to it. It’s no coincidence that contact always occurs just when a race discovers g-wave tech and starts to control gravity. It’s the point of no return when a race can begin to spread to the stars and exert an influence over what it finds there. But there’s another discovery just beyond gravity control, something even more profound. The way my grandfather described it, it’s like a way of violating causality, a limited form of time travel where you can make effect happen before cause, and it brings massive power—enough to make you think you could defeat the whole Alliance. But you’d be wrong. That’s where Game Theory comes in—in single-play cooperate-or-betray games, defectors always win. It’s like the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It’s been known for years. If you play time after time and keep score, it’s the strategy that determines the winner. But if you can loop back within the game, and time is no longer sequential, it’s always the instigator who loses. It’s like a fundamental principle, and the Alliance have a name for races who haven’t figured it out—they call them ‘naïves.’ And whenever a naïve race discovers what causality violation can buy them, they always end up using it, no matter how cooperative they might have seemed to begin with. They end up losing—non-sequential Game Theory ensures it—but they do untold damage in the process. That’s why the Alliance does this; that’s why contact is made and judgment is applied—any race liable to make trouble can’t just be contained or left to its own devices. It’s make or break.”

Jared had more questions than he could count—how could the Alliance be so sure that all naïve races would cause trouble
?
Why not just tell each new race why it was pointless
?
And why not contain them rather than wipe them out altogether
?
But right now, a more immediate question had to be answered.

“If the Caronoi are already lined up for this, why were we given the job of bringing them in
?
What’s our part in all this
?
”

“To start with, one of our jobs was to find out whether they are naïves or not, even though we didn’t know we were doing it. Check the things the Alliance want us to report on, like the Caronois’ technical and mathematical development—Game Theory is in there, it’s just not obvious. But this is the thing—we’re being tested too. Our Alliance membership is hanging by a thread and always has been. The people who think we’re still being judged, they’re right. And this is the test we’ve been given, to see how we react when the race we’re reaching out to is themselves targeted for elimination.”

So now they knew the criterion for destruction, Jared thought. There had been countless theories over the last sixty years as to why mankind was nearly eliminated, most of them immediately discounted. It wasn’t because humans were a militarized race, the favorite theory in the early years—for instance, Sephoran starships packed a firepower that would dwarf the whole world’s nuclear arsenal. It wasn’t because humanity had damaged their world’s ecology, or wiped out whole species—at least one Alliance race didn’t even inhabit their home world anymore thanks to the effects of their industrial advancement. Instead, it was this, some obscure bit of mathematics that could relegate a race to extinction just by its absence from their textbooks.

Jared had felt frustration before at mankind’s lowly position among races that held power of life and death and had deigned to keep humanity ignorant too. Now this revelation made him angry.

“Is that it
?
That’s why we nearly died
?
”

Rory just nodded.

“But if you knew this from your grandfather, why didn’t you say anything
?
We could have known what we were getting into from the start.”

“At our stage of membership, just knowing the criteria for destruction is enough to ensure destruction. The Alliance want to see us demonstrate truthfully that we’re worthy of joining, not just see us showing them what they want to see. It’s the same for the Caronoi—I
had
to hide the knowledge in their songs, make it look like they worked it out themselves.”

“The bastards. The bastard alien freaks, making us jump through hoops in games we’re not even allowed to know the rules to.” Jared worked for the same organization that employed the Speakers, those humans trusted with managing the direct contact with Earth’s sponsor race, the Sprites, so by all rights he should have been all in favor of Alliance membership. But he’d joined up on the rebound from his old job, and whereas there he’d been using Earth’s membership for Earth’s benefit, now he wasn’t really sure whose interests he was serving. And all through his time there he’d had a suspicion that there was something deeply wrong with the position humanity had been put in, the continued life-or-death judgment, just by making themselves known to other races.

“That’s why the Alliance are here,” he said. “They’re here to put the extermination order into practice.”

“They’re here
?
” Rory said.

“Yes.” Jared told him about the g-wave intercepts, the now unmistakable signs of Sprite ships hanging back in the outer system.

“That’s them,” Rory said. “My grandfather talked about special ships they use, some kind of elimination unit, with planet-busting weapons.”

“But aren’t the Caronoi safe now
?
You’ve put the knowledge into their songs.”

“Not enough though, I never got past the basics. I even had to teach them what conflict
is
, the idea is so alien to them. Then I lost contact.”

“That was us,” Jared said. “We cut the feeds to the satellites. But are the Caronoi really going to be wiped out
?
How can a race turn bad if they have to have the very concept of conflict explained to them
?
”

“I don’t know; all I have is what my grandfather was told—the Alliance think that races like that are the most dangerous of all.”

“So what options do we have
?
”

“Options
?
” Benning said. “We came here to arrest this guy; now you’re asking him about options
?
”

It was true, Jared thought. But now that he knew the truth, he couldn’t do anything else. “Yes. We can’t just do nothing and let an innocent race be exterminated.”

“We need to get this message to Anderson,” Benning said, still unsure about whether they were doing the right thing.

“We may not have time,” Jared said. “The Contact Team shuttle is in radio silence, all the way in. Even their receivers are off. Rory, if we can arrange for you to use the station’s transmitters, can you get the rest of the information into the Caronoi songs in time
?
”