Saturn Run

41.

Rested and equipped, but not fed—they were uncertain about the availability of alien restrooms and although some facilities were built into the EVA suits, nobody enjoyed using them—the exploratory team assembled in the air lock of the storage and shuttle bay. The bay could be pressurized for shuttle maintenance and other on-site activities, but normally it was left open to space.

The seven-person party, led by George Barnes, a marine captain, suited up. The short-range shuttles, designed to carry up to twelve people and convey a substantial amount of cargo, were boxy skeletal affairs, similar in size and shape to double-decker omnibuses, so, naturally, that’s what they got called.

Barnes was soft-spoken and meticulous. Sandy had always been a bit suspicious of marines during the Tri-Border fight, as they seemed willing to trade casualties for easy movement. That is, they used lighter weapons than Sandy thought reasonable. Faced with a Guapo hardpoint, they’d tend to do recon with a live patrol, then attack with backpacked munitions. The army would check it with drones of various kinds, both fliers and crawlers, and once the extent of the hardpoint was determined, the army had no qualms about calling in the air force with thousand-kilo bunker-busters, or toasting the place with a fuel-air heater.

On the other hand, good marine officers were just plain good officers, and Barnes was affable enough. Along with Sandy, Barnes taught a couple of popular physical-fitness courses.

As Barnes hand-checked the readouts on all seven suits, he took a call from Fang-Castro. “Captain Barnes, your party will be enhanced by one extra member. She’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”

“Yes, ma’am. Who is it?”

“One guess.”

Fiorella showed up two minutes later, still pissed. “I imagine you set Fang-Castro straight,” Sandy joked on a private channel.

Fiorella bared her teeth.

Sandy said, “Seriously, did you pee before you left? You have a bladder the size of a thimble.”

“Yes. I peed. Now shut the fuck up.”

“Keep your teeth off your lip—you won’t be able—”

“Shut up.”

“I gotta tell you one more thing, before you tell me to shut up again.”

“Tell me.”

“I brought the mini-Red with a Post-it pad. You can stick it to the bus rail and focus it on your face as we go out, and talk to it on a side channel. When we get back, we can intercut your commentary with the documentary photos.”

“Sandy… but wait. You knew I was coming?”

“No, but I’ve been exposed to your powers of persuasion,” Sandy said. “I suspected I might be seeing you.”

“Sometimes I think you’re brighter than I give you credit for,” Fiorella said. Pregnant pause. “But only sometimes.”

The Nixon’s buses weren’t pressurized. The upper deck was equipped with seats and harnesses and umbilical connectors for space suits that provided life support, power, and communications. The suits were comfortable; they’d been designed to be lived in for up to thirty-six hours. They’d support a human being for longer than that, but things would start to get ripe. Food, water, waste elimination, air recirculation, were provided for. A built-in sponge bath, not so much.

The suits even offered entertainment: the heads-up virtual screen could show movies, vids, reading material, even games, whatever the wearer had uploaded into the suit databanks, or had transmitted to it. None of the team had bothered uploading data for this trip; boredom seemed unlikely to come up inside Saturn’s rings, with the vast delicately colored expanse of Saturn itself hanging to one side and aliens awaiting them.

Beneath the seats, the life-support system sat on top of an open framework equipped with grapples, maneuvering actuators, and tie-downs. The front of the bus was equipped with manipulator arms, like the claws on a lobster. At the rear end of the bus were the rockets. The bus “cruised” at a maximum ten kilometers a minute, a snail’s pace by the standards of space travel, but entirely sufficient for the bus’s normal operating range of a thousand kilometers.

The first trip to the alien constellation’s primary would be an easy half-hour run, and over that distance, fancy orbital mechanics didn’t come into play: Gorey could fly it by the seat of his pants.

The five-kilometer primary was impossible to miss if you knew where to look; it was dim and dark, but it was twice the size of the full moon. When they were loaded, strapped in, checked one last time by Barnes, Fang-Castro gave them the go-ahead.

Barnes said, “Mr. Gorey. You’ve got the wheel.”

The bus unlatched from the ship, Gorey gave it a tiny boost to the left, pointed it slightly inboard of their alien objective, and opened the engines. The bus’s quarter-gee acceleration brought them to their cruising velocity in barely over a minute; it felt oppressively heavy to people who’d been living in a tenth of a gee for half a year.

Hannegan, the physicist, said, “My God, when we get home, it’s gonna hurt, the gravity is.”

“That’s why you’ve got to keep coming to the PE classes,” Barnes said. “If you don’t, going home won’t just hurt, it’ll kill you.”

Sandy kept his high-resolution cameras running all the way in, with the recordings retransmitted to the Nixon as they were made. Gorey stopped the bus ten kilometers out. Fang-Castro asked, “Anything?”

“Not that I see,” Barnes answered.

They’d agreed that purely passive reconnaissance was the safest course. No laser altimeters or radar-mapping, nothing beamed at the alien structure, nothing that could be interpreted as hostile or invasive. They thought they’d been invited… but what if they were wrong?

The bus trip had been timed so that they’d arrive shortly before the primary’s rotation brought the rainbow target in line with the Nixon. The scientists had wanted the bus to loop around the primary, so that they’d have a minutely detailed record of its entire surface, but Fang-Castro had vetoed the idea. The bus would never be out of sight of the Nixon, not on the first trip.

Barnes: “Here comes the target.”

As the alien sphere turned, the rainbow target slowly appeared, brightening and sparkling but now something new happened. A hundred meters off to one side of the rainbow, a new, smaller bull’s-eye target began to glow, in repeating concentric rings of yellow, green, and blue that shrank toward the center and disappeared.

Barnes: “John, is that a landing port?”

Clover said, “Can’t see what else it could be.”

Barnes said, “Admiral, unless you object, I’m going to have Elroy take us in. Otherwise, we’ll be waiting another four hours before you’re line-of-sight with us.”

“I concur,” Fang-Castro said.

“Elroy…”

Gorey took them in. As they closed, a port began to open in the middle of the smaller rainbow target, and a massive shelf pushed out.

“One damn fine mousetrap,” Clover laughed.

“Not helping, John,” Barnes snapped.

Sandy glanced at Fiorella, who was smiling into the mini-Red she’d stuck to the rail of the bus, talking a kilometer a minute.

Barnes: “That shelf could take the bus. Do we land it? Or do we leave the bus hanging? If we land it, it’ll rotate out of sight.”

There was a long silence, then Fang-Castro said, “We now agree here that you should land the bus. Then, if you’re asked to leave, or pushed out, you’ll have something to leave with—you won’t be hanging on the wrong side of the primary without a ride.”

Barnes: “Take it in, Elroy.”

The bus landed on the primary without incident and extruded the Post-its to hold it to the surface. As soon as the bus was secure, the crew began unplugging from the bus and to go on full internal suit support.

Barnes worked through the agreed-upon procedure: “Everyone stay together. Check your tethers. I don’t want anyone flying free. Nobody touch anything without my approval. Nobody armed except Emwiller, and make sure your weapon is safed, Sally. No other external equipment except for Sandy’s camera gear. Ready?”

They were ready.

“Then let’s go.”

They floated just above the regolith of the primary. As soon as they moved away from the bus, maneuvering with their suit thrusters, a line of glowing dots appeared on the regolith leading toward the rainbow target. The dots flowed toward the open port.

“Interesting,” said Hannegan, the physicist. “The surface doesn’t change, it’s like the light is moving through it. I’m guessing some kind of cellular automata or nanobots, they’re what’s making the lights. Nice. The ultimate programmable signage. You getting this, Sandy?”

“I am now.” Sandy was pointing his camera at the surface, cranked up to maximum magnification. In his viewfinder, he could see the surface was packed with speckles that brightened and darkened in a coordinated way. They reminded him of the chromatophores he’d seen on the skins of squids and octopi.

The crew floated through the open port into a white, cube-shaped chamber, large enough for a small orchestra. The door that was open to space was behind them, but there was a closed door in front of them. A green pad the size of a dinner plate was next to the closed door.

Barnes looked at Clover. “What do you think?”

“What does green mean, on traffic signals almost everywhere on Earth?”

Barnes shrugged, reached forward, and punched the button.

The door behind them closed and a light winked on Sandy’s camera: “George, I just lost the link back to the Nixon.”

Barnes tried calling the Nixon. There was no response. “The interior must be EM-blocked. Why am I not surprised? Okay, people, we are really on our own now. You follow my orders. You do what I tell you, when I tell you to do it. You do not take the initiative, not if you ever want to come back here again. We take everything slowly.”

Gas began venting into the chamber. When it hit one atmosphere, according to their suit gauges, the inner door opened. They moved forward, and somebody muttered, “Standard air lock…”

When they’d all entered the second chamber, the door behind them closed. The room was larger than the first, but not much, possibly ten meters long and eight wide, also a featureless white with diffuse lighting. The only item in the room was a stand-alone console toward the back of the room. A meter and a half high, it would’ve been impossible to miss even if the room had been as cluttered as a secondhand junk store: it glowed with flickering bands of rainbow colors and looked disturbingly similar to an antique jukebox.

Words appeared in the air above the console that read: “You can remove your helmets. The air is sterile and breathable to Earth standards and is maintained at 21 degrees Celsius.” In a few seconds, the words changed to Chinese ideograms, followed by Arabic and Russian, then a half-dozen other languages, before it cycled back to English. Barnes looked over at Emwiller and said, “Sal, I’m cracking my helmet. If I collapse, get everyone out of here, pronto. Shoot out the air lock if you have to.”

“Wait, wait, wait…” said Stuyvesant. “What if there are biologics in here?”

“That’d be another unnecessary mousetrap,” Clover said.

“They could be unintentional—”

“We haven’t seen anything unintentional so far…. I believe the air will be safe.”

“I’m going to unseal,” Barnes said. “Sally, stand by.”

They all watched as he unclipped the faceplate on his helmet and took a deep breath. And held it. And let it out and took another. He took a few more breaths and licked his lips, tasting the air, and finally nodded. He pushed the faceplate closed again, resealed it, and said, “The air seems to be okay, but I want everybody to stay sealed. When we get back, I’ll go into isolation to check for biologics. Let’s go to Post-its.”

They all reached down and threw switches on the legs of their EVA suits. When upward pressure was placed on a boot, a pressure switch would cut the electrical charge and the boot would peel away from the floor with about the same resistance as Earth gravity.

As they all stuck to the floor, or deck, or whatever it was, new words appeared over the polychrome console. “Please say something to me.”

“Speakers and mikes, now,” Barnes said, and they all went to external speakers and microphones.

The phrase repeated in the same other dozen languages they’d seen in the first message.

Barnes said, “Hello. We’re from Earth. Uh, the third planet in this system.”

Colors shifted across the sides of the alien console making it look even more like a jukebox, and then it spoke: “American English. I can speak in American English. Now, what questions do you have?”

Barnes asked, “Who are you?”

The jukebox said, “I am not a ‘who’ but a ‘what.’ I am a low-grade artificial intelligence tasked with answering questions. I am programmed to understand thirteen human languages, five of them based on the probability of being the first-contact languages. In order, the probability for first contact was American English, Chinese, Russian, Arabic, and Portuguese. I am not a fully intelligent AI. I chain rhetorical logic via a statistical grammar. Though it may sound as though I’m being conversational, in fact I am always responding directly or indirectly to questions. My data storage has the answers to 71,236,340 explicit or implicit questions. I can synthesize new answers from those I am preprogrammed with, but at times you will ask questions for which I have no answer, to which I will reply, ‘I don’t know.’”

Barnes asked, “Can we set up camera equipment to record this conversation?”

“Yes. I will wait.”

Barnes nodded at Sandy, who’d had the mini-Red under his arm, recording first contact as clandestinely as he could. Now he broke three more cameras out of his carrying case and began setting them up in the bare room.

Clover asked the jukebox, “Are there any other species here now?”

The AI said, “No, you are the only species here at this time.”

Clover: “When are you expecting others to arrive?”

“I don’t know. That is not an omission from my database. There is no predefined schedule for arrival. Previous intervals between arrivals have ranged from two years to three hundred and ninety-six years.”

“Who made you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where are your makers?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you know?”

“When they left, they didn’t tell me who they were or where they were going.”

“When did they leave?”

“One thousand seven hundred and fifty-three Earth years ago.”

Hannegan: “How old is this facility? The aliens… uh, the beings who recently left, they weren’t your makers?”

“This depot is 21,682 Earth years old, and I don’t know if the species that recently departed were my makers, because I don’t know who my makers were.”

Stuyvesant: “Can you tell us what the other species look like?”

“No. There may be some visual recording facilities on this depot, but I do not have access to them.”

Stuyvesant: “Do you provide this service to species other than humans? Do you speak languages not derived from Earth?”

“Yes.”

Barnes: “How can you run this depot with so little critical information?”

“I do not run this depot. It is separately automated. I am here to answer questions.”

Hannegan muttered, “Not very helpfully, so far.”

Clover wagged a finger at him: “Are you programmed to deny us information about your technology?”

“No. Ninety percent of my information is about technology. I contain complete descriptions, operation details, status reports, maintenance records, documentation, and instructional and design manuals for this station, and for its satellites.”

Barnes: “Tell us all about the depot.”

“That would not be a good idea.”

“Why?”

“I would not know what you would want to know. I would start with the first facts in my memory and proceed through the databases in an orderly manner. Done orally, it would take seventeen Earth years. Do you have sufficient time?”

Clover: “Don’t you have more efficient ways to transmit information than talking?”

“Of course, but I do not know which ones of them, if any, are usable by you. Technology changes very rapidly. In comparison, language changes extremely slowly. I doubt you are equipped with I/O protocols from even a century ago. But English, as spoken several centuries ago, would still be comprehensible to you today. If you have communications specialists I can talk to, we can probably find a mutually agreeable protocol.”

Clover: “And you are willing to transfer that data to us?”

“Yes.”

Barnes held up a hand to slow him down, then looked at the jukebox:

“You say you can’t tell us about your makers or other species. Is that because you are prohibited from sharing that information, or because it’s not in your databases?”

“Your question is not entirely correct. I do have some limited information about my makers and other species, but you have not asked the correct questions to elicit that response. As to your other point, I am not prohibited from answering any questions for which I have information. Everything I know or can synthesize is accessible to anyone who asks me questions.”

Clover jumped in: “What would be the correct questions that would elicit your programmed response about your makers and the other species?”

“The correct questions would be: First: ‘Are your makers afraid of us?’ The correct answer would be, ‘Not at this time.’ Second: ‘Should we be afraid of them?’ The correct answer would be, ‘Not at this time.’ Third: ‘Should we consider them hostile to our species?’ The correct answer would be, ‘No.’”

Emwiller looked at Barnes: “Sir, should we be trusting these answers?”

Barnes shrugged: “I don’t know.”

Clover asked the jukebox, “Is there some way we can determine if you’re telling the truth or not?”

“Not that I am aware of, but I have not been programmed to lie. I am not an advanced AI. I cannot construct elaborate fabrications. If I were to mix false information with the true, it is likely the questioner would eventually find a discrepancy or contradiction in my answers. Lying would also interfere with my function, which is to provide instructional information on how to best make use of this depot and to ensure that visitors do not harm the depot or themselves unintentionally.”

Clover turned to Barnes: “What we have here is the ‘all Cretans are liars’ problem. Its responses make sense, but this could be a very elaborate fabrication. I’d say that either this machine is pretty much as it seems, or it’s much more sophisticated than we can imagine, a very high-level AI, well beyond our systems, masquerading as a low one. I think we have to assume the former until proven otherwise, because there’s not much we can do if it isn’t true.”

Hannegan said, “But if it feeds us incorrect information on physics, we’ll find that out pretty quickly. I personally don’t care if it’s lying about what the various species are like, if it could deliver, say, a thirtieth-century Physics Handbook.”

Stuyvesant: “That’s a little parochial, Bob.”

Hannegan: “Yeah, well, what if he could deliver a thirtieth-century Biochemistry Handbook?”

“That would be helpful,” Stuyvesant admitted.

Barnes said, “Our jukebox raised another concern. New question: Why do we have to worry about harming ourselves or the depot?”

The jukebox said, “This depot has technologies and artifacts from many different species. No visitor could be familiar with them all. Some of these devices are dangerous if misused, the same way a milling laser is dangerous if misused.”

Clover nodded: strange technology, strange tools.

The jukebox: “Also, there are containment modules that should not be accessed without proper instruction, as they currently hold a total of eight hundred and forty-nine tonnes of antimatter.”

“Holy shit,” Hannegan said. “Uh, where did all this antimatter come from?”

“It’s manufactured here.”

Before anyone could say anything, Barnes barked, “All right, everybody, speakers off, intersuit comm channel 7, full encryption, wait for my lead.”

When everybody had gone to encryption, he said, “This is exactly why our mission was top priority for the U.S. We need to secure this, or make sure that nobody else gets their hands on it. That is a buttload lot of antimatter. Bob, thoughts?”

The physicist had been looking off in a distracted way and tapping the fingers of one hand together. “Yeah, I’m doing a little mental arithmetic here. If the Wurlitzer is telling the truth, that’s on the order of a teratonne explosive equivalent. Call it a million of those H-bombs the superpowers used to stockpile. Which immediately has me wondering, first, where is it? And second, how are they making it? Related to that, where are they getting the power to make it?”

Barnes said, “Numbers one and two are what most concern me. Plus, there’s a number four: Will the answer-bot tell us how to make it?”

“Let’s go back to the jukebox.” They turned back to the answer-bot. “Excuse us, we need to discuss the information you imparted.”

“My programming informs me that is very common with first arrivals and I am not programmed to take offense in any way. Do you have any other questions at this time?”

Hannegan cleared his throat: “Uh, you said this depot stored over eight hundred tonnes of antimatter. Where? And how?”

The jukebox said, “The constellation of small moonlets you see associated with this depot are the containment modules for the antimatter. The material is in the form of iron-58, which is electromagnetically isolated from the walls of the modules.”

Hannegan raised his eyebrows: “Anti-iron? We can barely manage anti-helium. How do you make this and where do you get the power? For us, manufacturing that quantity of antimatter would require roughly a year’s worth of solar output.”

There was a perceptible pause as the answer-bot considered its answer. Then:

“I can’t give you an accurate answer to your first question unless your engineers can establish a high-bandwidth I/O path. Very inaccurately and roughly, the transformation reaction makes use of a supersymmetric resonance to convert protons to antiprotons. An analogous lepton pathway produces positrons. Assembling those into neutrons and higher-order nuclei is a straightforward exploitation of a subset of localized D brane excitations to chain up isotopic ladders of least resistance—”

Hannegan said, “Okay, stop. I get it. We’ll wait for the interface.”

“As for your second question, this depot taps the rotational energy of Saturn for power. The reaction pathway is approximately twenty percent efficient. Consequently this depot can produce something in excess of one billion tonnes of antimatter before Saturn’s rotational period will be significantly altered.”

Hannegan glanced at Barnes, then asked, “Can you provide engineering designs and instructional manuals for the antimatter production and containment facilities?”

This time there was no hesitation in the response. “That information is exportable to all species.”

Barnes said, “I think that’s enough for this session. We should return to our ship now. Are we allowed to return at any time?”

“Yes, at any time.”

“We will bring engineers to discuss a high-bandwidth I/O pathway. May they come at any time?”

“Yes, at any time.”

Sandy cut in. “Speaking of which, can you establish a link so that I’ll be able to transmit directly to our ship from here?”

“EM-blocking is an initial precaution. The security system will establish a communications link for you before your next visit.”

Fiorella, who’d kept her mouth shut, jumped in: “George, please: give me one minute. Or two minutes. No more than two minutes. Three at the outside.”

Barnes grinned and said, “Two minutes, Cassie.”

Fiorella moved up to the jukebox with Sandy switching between cameras to provide a range of views. She asked the machine, “Do you have a name?”

“I have understood that you call me jukebox.”

“That’s because you look like an antique music machine from Earth, called a Wurlitzer. Could we name you Wurly?”

“Yes.”

Barnes groaned, Clover laughed, and Fiorella asked, “Wurly, do you have any historical records? Of events in other systems?”

“Yes. My records contain a generalized history of this galactic arm.”

“If you have no information about other species, how can you have a history?”

“Because the history has no specific information about other species. The species are designated by number and date of emergence and tradable items. Specific information on the species is not available through my memory banks.”

“That information must exist somewhere.”

“Yes, that is logical.”

“Do you have tradable items stored here?”

“Yes.”

“Do we have access to them?”

“Under the terms of tradable items, yes. However, you must have items to trade.”

Now Clover got back in: “How can we provide items to trade if our technology is so much lower than star-traveling species?”

“Most tradable items are not technological. One questioner referred to an antique music machine. Music machines are often tradable. There is a trade AI that will determine if your music machines are tradable, and if so, what level of trade you may access. In general, these are not valued highly, as it is very likely that other civilizations already have music machines resembling yours, and manufacturing specifications can be simply transmitted, which is vastly less costly than carrying physical goods between stellar systems. But the actual alien machines may be valued by collectors in some cultures, as visual artworks are in yours. Some musical compositions might also be tradable, for similar reasons.”

Sandy: “We gotta have a hundred and fifty instruments on board—I’ve got eight guitars down in the fab shop area, and we’ve gotta have a million songs on file, from Bach to Kid Little.”

Barnes said, “Yeah, yeah, we’ll discuss that later.”

Clover raised a finger. “Uh… Wurly… are there any classes of trade goods that we ‘primitives’ might have that would garner us more trade credit?”

“You are not considered ‘primitives,’ merely less technologically advanced.”

Clover muttered into a private comm channel, “It doesn’t get sarcasm. Probably not a high-level AI, as it says… or it’s a great faker.”

The answer-bot continued. “Physical art artifacts are valued by species with similar sensory systems and possessed of an inclination toward acquisitiveness. These are worth something. Comestibles can also be rated highly, especially those that cannot be duplicated based on the transmission of data.”

Stuyvesant jumped on that—her specialty, biology. “Oh, come on. You’re telling me different species from entirely different ecosystems can eat each other’s food?”

“Very rarely. On the infrequent occasions when the biologicals are compatible, though, those can be highly prized trade goods.”

Clover said, “Makes sense to me. How much were rich folks in Europe willing to pay for spices a few hundred years ago? Stuff we take for granted, like peppercorns. A king’s ransom. And that’s not an exaggeration.”

Stuyvesant pondered for a moment. “Hmmm, there’s the commander’s tea—you can’t transmit ‘specs’ for that. And I’ve heard rumors there’s some pretty good booze squirreled away somewhere.”

Clover winced. “I’ll work on a list.”

Barnes got back to the jukebox: “Is there any limit on the number of trades?”

“Not exactly. Trade items are evaluated by a trade computer and assigned a total numerical value between 1 and 8. You may leave the items and choose trade items with a similar total value.”

“Was that top number chosen because your makers use a mathematical system with a base eight?” Stuyvesant asked.

“I have no information about my makers.”

“Is your native mathematical system in base 8?”

“Yes, except for our mathematical computer languages. However, when speaking with you, I convert all numbers to base 10.”

Stuyvesant: “When you have new arrivals, does the station provide them with a relevant environment, as you did with us?”

“Yes, if it is within the station’s means. Not all species can be accommodated. Those that cannot be accommodated always have means to maneuver in space, so they do that.”

“Do all species require gaseous environments?”

“No. Some require hybrid gas-liquid environments.”

Clover: “Does the size of your entry air lock and entry hall suggest that other species may be quite large?”

“Yes.”

“This was supposed to be my two minutes, goddamnit,” Fiorella said. To the jukebox: “Wurly, do you have a message for the people of Earth?”

“Yes.”

“What is it?”

Wurly said, “Hello, people of Earth.”

Fiorella: “Anything more?”

“No.”

Barnes muttered, “Well, shit, that was inspiring. I’m calling an end to this… again. Everybody ready? Let’s go.”

Leaving was as simple as the arrival. From the bus, Sandy fired the contents of his camera’s memory back to the Nixon. It was gone in a few seconds; they were gone in another minute.