The Sage of Sagittarius

The Sage of Sagittarius

The Sage of Saggitarius

Copyright 2014

Kenn Brody

The Sage of Saggitarius  

Prelude  

Harriman, the Adjutant Assistant Gopher, stood sniffling until the man behind the desk acknowledged him.   Proconsul (retired) Haliothorpe Qoo was a tall, saturnine human with an academic stoop to his shoulders.  In spite of that, he had an impregnable aura of authority, an authority he earned, based on his reputation and accomplishments. 

“OK, Harriman, what is it now?”  Qoo’s eyes, when he gave you his full attention, were like augers.   “And why are you sniffling?  You know I’m still getting over that last bout of pneumonia.  You’d better not be venting any viruses in my office.”

“Apologies, Proconsul.  OCS has a new contract offer from Saggitarius sector.  It’s your bailiwick – the Sage.”

“Correction, Harriman, I never actually got to meet the Sage.  And I can’t rightfully say I was in control of that negotiation.  I don’t think a there is a trickier, more manipulative, more difficult adversary in this galaxy.  I didn’t score a point on him.”

“Yet, Ambassador, the treaty still stands, and Solar does get the benefits of the FTL drive.”

“I’m still wondering why.  What does the Sage want from us?”

Harriman waved the letter.  “This is under his seal.  He wants you to act as his agent for a negotiation with certain Solar scientific interests.”  He sniffled, handed Ambassador Qoo the sealed document, pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his dripping nose.  Qoo snapped the seal with a long fingernail and read the document. 

“Hmmm.  ‘For meaning and profit.’   Hallmark slogan of the Sage, never knew what the hell it meant.  He wants me to travel there, with assistants as necessary.  At least the contract is generous.  Better be, the Sage can probably buy and sell this planet ten times over.  Problem is, I’m still on suppressor drugs.  I won’t be able to travel easily.”

“I can be your assistant.”  Sniffle.

“You appear to be in worse shape than I am.  See if Management will spring for a new hire, someone young, strong, and healthy.  Give me another month to recuperate.  Sure, I’ll take this assignment.  Maybe I can actually score a point or two with this Sage creature.”

  Allurion Seed Zila was already feeling the edges of a headache, the Doc Bass variety of headache.

The lecture hall was a tiered pit.  Students sat in ascending semicircular rows and the pit held a series of lab benches crammed with instruments and displays.  The theatre echoed with conversation, and the rustling of notebooks as the students found their seats.

“OK, class, can anyone tell me who invented the faster than light drive?”  Herb Bass, the professor, had been a formidable obstacle to every graduating class in Miami for years, but he still had a disarming Texas drawl.  The guy was old enough to have actually worked at Alamagordo Spaceport, but he was still a spry fellow with a wisp of blond hair and a white beard. 

No one raised their hands.  The class was wary of Doc Bass.  There were whisperings and lots of head turning to see if anyone dared answer.

“Trick question.  No one knows who invented it.  We think some advance sentients across the galaxy may have been the inventors, but no human has met them yet to ask the question.  OK, then what is an Allurion Seed?  Zila?”

“It’s the thing that opens up space for Faster Than Light travel.”

“Any more?  Anyone?” 

The whispers became mutters but there were no answers from the class.  Doc Bass strolled back and forth on the podium looking expectantly at the class then picked up a thick metal tube and dumped the contents into his hand.  “Well then, what do we have here?”

There was a gasp from the members of the class that recognized it.  “Holy s**t!” and “NO way!” echoed in the pit.  This was the object that had transformed the human race into a star-faring species.  But it was supposed to be much too dangerous to handle.  Doc Bass casually tossed it from hand to hand.

“No worries, boys and girls, that tube is superconducting mu-metal, impervious to magnetic fields, and I got rid of anything up here that had a residual magnetic field, even my watch.  This is what an Allurion Seed looks like under the influence of Earth’s magnetic field.”  He put it under a projection scanner and the wall behind the podium showed a 3D image a meter high.  “That little thing costs about the same as a small country.  But look at it.  Isn’t it beautiful?”

It was splendid, with its facets, like a diamond, but as it turned the symmetry changed from one configuration to another.  It reflected the overhead light, every facet in its own color.  The scanner showed its mass at 12 grams, and there was no ionizing radiation.

“Now I’m going to cut through all the math and show you just what happens when you put a mild magnetic field on this.  Don’t worry, this is just a fraction of a Tesla.”

He put a metal ring around the object and connected it to a DC power supply.  The toroid stayed the same when he turned on the juice, but the seed expanded as the magnetic field grew until it overlapped the metal ring.  The mass stayed the same, but the facets were very different.  It did not look like the same object, but it was still a very complex crystal of some sort.  He ran the current in the toroid up and down and the object grew and shrank quite tamely.

The theatre was a breathless silence.

“Now lets see what happens when I change the direction of the magnetic field.”  He turned the toroid at a right angle.  The crystal pulsed and morphed.  “It looks like a kaleidoscope having a convulsion, right?  But now it’s a solid.”  Changing the current did not change the crystal appearance or size, but the mass went up to several kilos.  It glittered inside the ring.

Every eye was glued to the demonstration.  Doc Bass grinned.  “Who can explain this?  I want to hear your answers.”

Fingers pointed.  Finally, from the back of the class, “It’s not in this dimension.  It’s a multidimensional object.  We only see the 3D projection into our space.”

“Keith, you’re a wonder.  Anyone have a better explanation?”

More mutters and fingers pointed toward the front of the class.  “Some part of the crystal, a part that stays hidden in nine dimensional space, responds to the magnetic field by extruding more of the crystal into our 3D space.  It isn’t really growing, it’s just sticking more of itself out so we can see it.”  That was Zila’s friend, Liria.  She gave Liria the eye.  Zila was completely lost.  What the hell is this nine dimensional thing and how does anybody know?

“Smart girl.  And the mass effects?”

A cough, a sneeze, but no answer from the class.  “Here’s a clue:  The Higgs boson is also nine dimensional.  That’s the particle that gives mass to the other baryons.  Keith, Liria, can you take it further?”

“Is that just a big Higgs crystal?”

“Could be.  Could be.  Trick question again.  Nobody really knows.”

The class breathed an audible sigh as Doc Bass ceased his questions and got into the explanation.  “You all know the history.  The Alluriis came to us to trade.  All they had to offer is these Allurion Seeds, and they didn’t know a thing about how they worked.  They are a trading people, if you can call them people, and they got them millennia ago from some other sentients.  They know how to make them.  We don’t.  We have tried.  Every FTL ship has to have one or it is confined to well below the speed of light.”

“Problem was, we didn’t have anything the Alluriis wanted.  Then an entity you may have heard of, the Sage of Saggitarius Sector, inked a treaty with Solar to trade tech with us and pay the Alluriis with the translator devices they wanted.  So we got FTL, sort of third hand.”

“Three inventions made space travel possible.  The first is the superconducting mu-metal, the only superconductor that can carry the necessary currents and is strong enough to hold up under magnetic fields of a few million Tesla.  That’s strong enough to fatally mess up your body chemistry.”

“The second was the zero point energy source, powerful enough to propel any ship, and small and light enough to be carried.  Burgess did that work.  All these were waiting for the third invention, and it just fell into our laps only 47 years ago.”  He pointed to the Allurion Seed, still pulsing with chromatic crystal life.

“To oversimplify, we expand a multidimensional space around a ship by imposing a linear magnetic field on the crystal until it encompasses the whole ship.  We rotate the field to stabilize the shape and decrease the mass to zero.  Then we apply opposed magnetic stresses to force the whole ship out of normal space.   Read about it in the following sections in your texts.”  A list appeared on the display and in each students’ tablet.

Rustling and talking, the students made their way up the tiers to the exits.

As usual in these sections, Zila left with a headache.  Science was just not her subject.  What possible good was knowing about such things as faster-than-light physics, anyway?  The good old Earth was her home.

Zila Born in Casablanca, Morocco, growing up in Athens and having graduated Earth United Academy in Miami, Zila Arapova Beddiy thought of herself as quite cosmopolitan.  She spoke English, Spanish, Arabic and some Greek.   Although she was clever and persuasive, she was not proficient in the mathematical sciences and had no patience with tinkering or lab work.   

The day of her graduation from the Academy she looked in her mirror, much as any 20-year-old might, to see who she was now, having achieved another milestone in her life.   Her long, wavy black hair could have been Greek.  Her skin tone was a light coffee color, perhaps Arab or south Spanish.  Her big brown eyes, that her brothers always called, derisively, “cow eyes”, were full of life and excitement today.    Her body, rather sinewy and slender, was nevertheless good enough to get catcalls from the Miami construction workers.  Well, she thought, I’m still me.  She had so many good things to do.  She could find a great romantic guy, settle down, have a real family.  Her parents were decent people, but scattered all over Earth and too busy to be “family” in the sense she expected.  Her older brother, Dmitri, was the only one who flew in to see her graduation.  The idea of belonging with people who cared for each other was attractive, and certainly the way her parents had lived.  Now the absence left a part of her empty.

“What do I REALLY want?”  she asked the image in the mirror.  “I want to be a diplomat,” was the answer that bubbled up from some semi-conscious depth.  The settler of affairs, the galactic traveler, the adventurer… She tried to put on the expression of a stern Earth diplomat.  All she saw was a frown and half-lidded eyes.  She tried to imagine herself 20 years older, maybe with a touch of grey hair.  It did not look convincing.   Nevertheless, she put on her dark blue graduation gown and her “dinner plate” cap and walked to the ceremony in University Plaza.

*****

“Zila, I think you have a job offer.”  Dmitri wore a big smirk.  He was already on the top track to being a Government official in Turkey.  He treated Zila like a little sister, which Zila quietly resented.  She had better start acting like a diplomat, she thought.

He handed her a stiff, sealed envelope.  “This came from a courier.”

“What?  An actual paper document?  Wow!”  It had a seal and a place to sign for receipt.  She rummaged for a pen, something she had not used in years, and scribbled her signature.  Dmitri handed the receipt to the delivery robot, which promptly rolled away.

“From Outreach Contract Services!”  She carefully broke the seal and read the letter. 

“Ever hear of a human named Proconsul Haliothorpe Qoo?”

“Qoo?  The same fellow who retired as head of Earth Exoplanet Affairs?  The human who was born on Ganymede and made that colony a Solar power?”

“I don’t know.  Look at this…is that him?”

“There can’t be many with that name.  It has to be him.”

“Well it’s for a position as ‘diplomatic attachée‘, whatever that is.”

“Fetch and carry, but if it’s really Proconsul Qoo, you will be working for one of the greatest living diplomats.  He also wrote the treaty with Saggitarius Sector.  You got any better offers?”

“I don’t have ANY other offers, Dimmy.  Is this something you think I should take?”

“Hell, why not, Z.  It’s a start, and you can’t go wrong working for Qoo.”

“It says that Outreach Contract Services is a quasi-governmental agency chartered to settle disputes and negotiate contracts with non-human sentients.”  Zila’s heart raced.  That was exactly what she wanted, fetch and carry or not.

*****

It turned out her responsibilities were those of a page.  She did little but deliver messages hither and yon.  The great Proconsul Qoo saw her only to deliver the next message, to have her arrange a meeting, or to ask her to greet other important personages.  He was a stooped, hawkish presence behind a desk, and apparently not in the best health.  The visitors were almost entirely other humans, but she did meet a few interesting aliens and some male pages attractive enough to pique her interest.  There was no opportunity to go any further, and her human affairs were brief and unsatisfying to her.  It was not what she had hoped for and she was eventually back to thinking she had made a choice for a dull future. 

Then, she got another letter.

Zila signed for delivery with the robot courier and broke the seal immediately.  After a quick scan, she was bouncing on her toes.  After a careful read, she was bouncing off the walls.

“I’m going to Sagittarius!  I’m off to see the Sage!  I’m off, I’m off , I’m off to see the wizard!” she sang.  If she only had red shoes with heels…

The Sage of Sagittarius was mentioned in several reports and treaties that she remembered from her classes.  That sentient was a mystery.  No one had actually met it, not even Proconsul Qoo.  She probably wouldn’t either.  “Really,” she thought, “I’m posted to travel with Proconsul Qoo, probably to fetch and carry someplace in the direction of Sagittarius.  Same thing, just 40 light years away.”

Oh wait, she thought.  That had to be on a faster-than-light ship.  Leave Earth?  Hmmm.

*****

There was a courier robot at her door.  It was routine at OCS, Zila had learned.  Once more she signed the receipt, tore open the seal and read the letter.  She could not believe it. 

“Qoo is dying?  I didn’t know he was that sick!  What am I supposed to do now?”  She kept reading.   “They expect me to go see the Sage? Alone?  Why isn’t there another qualified diplomat?  Why can’t they cancel the visit?”  She turned to the second, rather stiff, page.   “Ah, it would be an insult to the Sage.  Shortage of available personnel.  Request of the Sage.”

 “What am I supposed to do by myself?  This is crazy.”  Crazy, yes, but this WAS a quasi-government agency, and her transport was already arranged and paid for.

She had two days to pack and get to the spaceport.  That was a rather trying two days, full of misgivings and feelings of inadequacy.  “I’ve never been on ANY kind of a diplomatic mission.  What am I supposed to do?”

*****

Walking up the tube ramp to the FTL spaceship was like being in a dream realm.  Her cabin was tiny.  There were things she never had to think about.  One of them was the deep sleep she had to endure during the hard acceleration out of Earth’s gravity well.

Zila woke up from the acceleration trance when the FTL transport passed Jupiter.  The status screen in her tiny cabin showed the ship’s position and she wanted to see the giant planet.  She tumbled out of her web and fell ever so slowly to the floor.  “Dumb!”  she thought and looked at the ship’s gravity status in the display.  “8% G,” it said.  Just enough to keep human digestion and bone mass.   Just enough to make her quite clumsy.

Jupiter, when she half-crawled, half flew to the Lounge and peered out the view port, was just a pinkish, purplish streak.  “Dumb!”  Of course, they were in FTL.  Not much of the home universe leaked into the FTL space.

Then they headed inward toward the thickest group of stars she had ever seen.  Sort of seen – they were a deep blue blur.

At flipover, they emerged briefly into normal space and every one got to practice zero-G emergency maneuvers.  Her wavy hair flew out like a nest of ten thousand springs.  Everything in her stomach did somersaults.  The slightest motion sent her pinging around the lounge like a berserk billiard ball.  She loved it!  That is, up until the time she had to use the zero-gravity toilet.

In two weeks they were in orbital trajectory around a star only a bit closer to Sagittarius A*, the enormous black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.  She thought she could feel the pull of that imponderable mass, but, of course, it was impossible.

Actually landing and debarkation was nothing special until, “Wow!  I’m standing on another planet!”

Then, “Wow!  This is quite a hotel!”  The quarters for humans were a tiny section of an elaborate building obviously meant for holding many species.  Unfortunately, markings in odd scripts and wiggles gave her no clue as to what species they were.  She had one rest period before she started negotiations, not enough time to even consider what those negotiations would be.  It felt like missing the entire course and just waking up for the final exam.  Sleep was impossible.

The Hall of Enlightenment Her entrance to the Hall of Enlightenment was ceremonial.  She was briefed on the protocol.  A pair of Priest-Petitioners preceded her and a Priest-Announcer checked her diplomatic portfolio and verified her identity.  She was asked to surrender her weapons and pledge to refrain from violence in the presence of the Sage.  He was, apparently, a very long-lived being and planned to stay that way.  Not all negotiations were peaceful. 

“The Sage! No human has ever seen the Sage!”  She was both excited and quite a bit scared.  What happened if she fluffed the mission?  Well, it was really OCS’ fault wasn’t it?  But, deep down, she felt responsible.

They entered the Hall of Enlightenment and stood before the Sage.   Underneath his/hers/its shawls and robes, the Sage looked like a blind, pot-bellied hippopotamus.  He, for want of any other sufficient pronoun, stood on four sturdy legs terminating in a single, scoop-like toenail or hoof.  A short, stout, wrinkled neck held a bulbous head with no eyes and no visible ears.  There was a huge mouth with imposing incisors and grinding apparatus that she glimpsed when the creature turned her way.  The Sage shuffled slowly back and forth in a sandpit that brought his head to the same level as Zila’s.

“Human Female Zila Arapova Beddiy, diplomatic attachée  from Outreach Contract Services of Earth,  sent by Proconsul Qoo, to seek meaning and profit, Oh Great Sage!”  The Priest-Announcer, a biped of unknown lineage, pronounced in fair English with only a few un-Earthly glottal stops and trilled vowels.

Meaning and profit?  Profit sounded pretty accurate, but meaning?  Zila thought she had better make a diplomatic speech of some sort.  She took out her written documents, a decent stack of papers translated into several languages, and opened her mouth to begin.  The Sage’s mouth also opened, and a pair of forked tongues at least two meters long unrolled and grasped her documents.  The tongues rolled back with her proposal, the mouth closed and chewing motions began.  There was a swallow and the Sage resumed shuffling back and forth in his sandpit.  Zila was stunned.  The Priest-Announcer turned to her, “The Great Sage is digesting your proposal.”

“Huh.  Am I supposed to carry back, the, uh, digested remains?” 

“Do you have a Bluetooth implant, Diplomat Beddiy?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Please turn it on now and you will hear the Sage.  He has no ears and cannot hear your sound waves, but he can hear you through me.”

She turned it on.  “Do you give permission to call you Zila, young human?” The voice was a well-modulated tenor with a faint accent.

Zila looked around.  “That is me, the Great Sage, that you hear.  My race evolved underground, eyes and ears were not useful.  Understanding, however is always useful.  I understand from your documents that you are responding to my request for an exchange of biological technology between our worlds, and that you wish to create a structure for such an exchange.  However, you have no specifics.  What, exactly, do you want and what, exactly, do you offer?”

The tenor voice continued, “I heard what you said about the remains of my digestion.  Normally, such an outrage would get you expelled, but since you are so young I told them to ignore the insult.   I will communicate with you by radio emanations, but I can also smell and feel vibrations through my feet.  My smell tells me that you are a young human and not accustomed to this kind of diplomacy.  You are forgiven.”

Zila’s embarrassment was exceeded only by her gratitude to the Sage for forgiving the insult.  Fine diplomat she was!

*****

The negotiations went on for quite some time, back and forth to Earth and a bunch of interested parties, and through the Sage and layers of Priests.  It became clear to Zila that her instructions were a hodge-podge of incompatible demands.  The actual exchanges had to be valuable, non-bulky and survive space transport.  That meant mainly technology and ideas.  However, there was no indication that the Sage was satisfied with what her Earth counterparts had to offer. 

Zila was at a loss as to how to make her first negotiation a success.  It appeared the gap between the cultures was simply too great to find common grounds for trade.   The Priests asked for nothing at all and offered the same.

The hours of negotiation ran into days, and then a week was gone.  Zila felt like this mission was turning into a total fiasco.  Her mind spun in circles and there seemed to be no way out.

*****

The Great Sage stood in his pit, then settled his enormous belly onto a contoured saddle.

“The Great Sage is settling in for a long discussion with you, Young Zila,”  pronounced one of the Priest-Petitioners.  “You are fortunate to receive this honor.”

Considering the lack of progress she had made so far, this “honor” made Zila worry so much she developed a stomach cramp.  What was she in for now?

“Zila, I have digested many body-weights of documents about you Earth humans and your culture.  You do not have much biological data storage capacity so you have evolved truly impressive means to store data in other ways.  Your computers seem quite clumsy to me, but they are obviously a necessity for a race that cannot do what my stomach does naturally.  The problem for you is that there is no overall connection among all this data.”

“Let me give you an example:  Suppose each piece of data was a grain of sand.  You can pile up grains of sand on top of grains of sand, but eventually the grains just roll down the pile.  It is just a pile of sand.  It never becomes a spire, a temple, or a great work of art.”

“That is what all your data has become, just a pile of sand.  You cannot see the great connections, you do not perceive the ways all things relate to each other and therefore you are more blind than I am.”

“My species, as few as we are, have a way to put all these grains of sand together into meaningful structures.  We can give you this capability in exchange for your knowledge of molecular biology.”

“What information about our molecular biology do you want?”

“All of it.”

Zila just gaped. 

“That is a lot of information, Great Sage.  How many of your kind will you send to study?”

“The information is for me.”

“For you?  Are you a microbiologist?”

“Don’t be concerned about my capacities.  They are more than adequate, young Zila.”

“And how will you get this knowledge?  Will you travel to Earth?”

“You are the courier.  This is your negotiation.  I will receive the knowledge from you and you will receive the understanding from me.  That is the exchange I propose.”

Was “understanding” something that her Earth counterparts wanted?  Zila did not think so, but she did not want to contradict the Great Sage.  She sidestepped.

“But, Great Sage, I am not personally capable of conveying that knowledge.  In fact, science was my poorest subject.”

“You will change, young Zila, and you will keep your part of the bargain.”

“But how…what…. May I ask what your reason is for wanting all that knowledge of microbiology?”

“Ah.  There are many reasons, all connected, tunnels leading to one main hall.  The origins of life.”

The Great Sage spoke in his own language to one of the Priest-Petitioners.  That one addressed Zila, “Human emissary, I am instructed to give you the means to hold the payment required.  Do you agree to the terms as given?”

Of course, that is what I was sent here for but…What is he talking about?  Did we actually reach some sort of agreement already?    Perhaps this was a sort of preliminary to a real agreement.  “Um, yes, I agree.”

The two Priest-Petitioners grabbed her.  One sprayed a substance in her face and the other pressed a sticky patch to her arm.  She had no time to react.  She opened her mouth to object, but then she was falling away in a rainbow colored cloud.  She was disembodied, then asleep and dreaming.

When Zila awoke, she was in a comfortable bed, in a room that could have been her space-ship cabin, and ravenous.  She found herself in the same clothes she wore yesterday.  Poking around in the room, she found her travel case under the bed and did her best to freshen up.  Just like the cabin, a sink pulled out of the wall under a mirror, which was probably also a display.  She gave herself a sponge-bath, dressed in clean clothes and felt rather proud for having coped with a difficult situation.  Then she remembered being attacked by the Priest-Petitioners.  She sat down hard on the edge of the bed and closed her eyes.

There was a jangling sound at the door and it opened.  A Priest of some sort stood there.  Same robes, same crowned head spikes.  She could not tell one from the other.  He, or it, pulled a floating cart with food.  The smell was enough to make her stomach growl.  “Honored Human Emissary, we have prepared food according to our best knowledge of your human custom.  We hope it is satisfactory.”  He/it left and left the door open.

The Priest-Mentor “Human Emissary, we are here to answer your questions.”  The usual pair of Priest-Petitioners attended another biped, smaller and older, in robes of some metallic emerald material.  “I am the Priest-Mentor assigned to you for your partial enlightenment.”  The other Priests opened a tube and pulled out a contraption of fibers and poles that somehow became a sort of hammock.  The Priest-Mentor was helped into the hammock, where he folded his legs in a way that showed they were not jointed like human legs.  He sat upright in the hammock, pulled his robe smoothly over his form and faced Zila without any expression that she could interpret.  The other Priests remained standing.

“Umm, should I stand or may I also sit?”

“Human Emissary, if that is your choice, it is a wise one if you have many questions.”

“What are you and why do you call your selves Priests?”

“We serve the Sage, therefore we are Priests.”

“You are not the same species as the Great Sage.  Don’t you have your own people, your own government?  A king?  A prime minister?  Something like that?”

“We may have had in the distant past, now we exist to serve the Sage.  Our ancient history is only conjecture.  We had no written language.”

“Well, how did you get to grow a civilization without written language?”

“The Great Sage gave us written language.”

“But…but he has no ears and doesn’t seem to speak at all.”

“The Great Sage hears through his feet and speaks through devices of his own making.”

“He makes devices?  With his tongues?”

“Yes, of course.  How else?”

“What kind if devices does he make?”

“You do not have words for them.  He makes devices out of his own substance.  They are part of him, from one of his stomachs.”

“You mean… he regurgitated a device that allowed him to talk to you in your language?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t understand.  Is there more than one species on your world?  Sages and Priests?”

“There is only one Great Sage.”

“Well, then where did he come from?”

“Spinward, many, many light years away.”

“You mean, there is only one of his kind?”

“We do not know if there are others.  We have never known any but the Great Sage.  The Great Sage does not speak of others of his kind.”

“He did – he said that his kind evolved underground and had no use for eyes and ears.”

“Yes, Human Emissary, you are so honored to hear of things we were never told before.”

“Doesn’t he have a mate, kin of some kind to relate to on his own level?”

“We have never seen such a one, nor heard of such a one.   We, who have a breeding cycle that requires mates, have often speculated, but we observe that the Great Sage has many interests, and is not lonely.”

Zila thought a while, trying to bring up questions that she thought an Honored Human Emissary should ask.  The Priests stood and sat patiently waiting for her thought to come to the surface.

“I suppose I should ask about other emissaries you have brought to the Hall of Enlightenment, and whatever you can tell me about them.”

“Yes, that is a very important question, and we have much to tell you.”

The Priest-Mentor had VERY much to tell her.  In fact, it took several days.  Various Priests served food, they rested, Zila slept, and they resumed as soon as she was awake again.  Zila had no idea that there were so many sentient species in the galaxy.  Although few were as extraordinary as the Great Sage, their appearance, cultures, languages, likes and dislikes ranged beyond her imagination.  She listened, asked a few questions and listened some more.

Whatever they did to her, she could remember everything.  What she ate, what she saw, what she heard, read or even thought about.   As a messenger, she was perfect, a walking data bank.  It was effortless. 

One thing was clear:  The Great Sage existed for knowledge and was persistent in his pursuits and demanding of his helpers and Priests.

Whatever the Great Sage was, he was many, many thousands of years old.  

*****

A Priest-Negotiator appeared in her doorway that same evening. 

“Zila, we have arranged passage for you back to your home system.  Prepare yourself to leave after your next sleep.”

The vessel that lifted Zila off the planet was smaller and sleeker than the passenger ship she was on before.  After the liftoff trance, she explored a luxurious suite and was treated to gourmet food.  She felt like an old hand at interstellar travel, even to the point of looking forward to the free-fall practice.   The deceleration trance came much too quickly.  She went to the lounge and looked out a portal.  No round, blue and white planet was visible.

“Where are we?  That isn’t Earth!”

“No, Miss Beddiy, that is Ceres, a minor planet between Mars and Jupiter.”

“Why are we stopping here?”

“To pick up another passenger.  Orders of the Great Sage.  This is his ship, “Light of  the Sage” you know.”

Zila did know. 

Ramps extended to the Ceres Concourse, a tunnel though the rock into the inner caverns where most Cerians lived.  The ramp was pressurized, tested and the locks on both ends opened.  A man dressed in a tan and blue coverall came aboard carrying an old-fashioned aluminum briefcase.  She recognized it as an antique of some value. 

The new passenger went through decontamination and a ship’s crewman brought him directly to the lounge where Zila waited, curious.

“Emissary Zila Arapova Beddiy of Outreach Contract Services, please meet Doctor Professor Emmanuel Lee.”

“THE Manny Lee?  The gene designer?  You’re the famous biophysicist?”

“Ouch.  Too much formality.  I’m just Manny, please. “

After all the ceremony at the Hall of Enlightenment, Zila was delighted.  “Manny, please call me Z.  You must be special to be travelling on the Great Sage’s private space yacht.”

“ME special?  It’s you that’s special.  I’m assigned to be your tutor in molecular biology and biophysics.”  He looked her up and down with a wry lopsided smile, which made Zila blush.  “From what I see, I should be paying for the privilege, Honored Human Emissary!”

Zila, for once, was speechless. 

Manny was tall for an Asian, and a lot younger then someone of his lofty reputation had any right to be.  He had a sense of mischief and he was half in love with Zila at first sight.  Zila, who had no inhibitions about s*x, wondered if they were being set up as part of the Sage’s biology study.   It was not long before they were experimenting with their own interpersonal biology.  Heh, the Great Sage ran a Great Interplanetary Dating service!  Or, she was a sucker for smart, great-looking guys.

With Manny’s devoted tutelage, she studied.  She interviewed many of the finest microbiologists, professors and researchers.  She lived in rented flats in Moscow, in hotels in Miami, Boston, and Los Angeles Tri-City, and visited research institutions from Reykjavik to Lake Vostok in Antarctica, where they were studying fish found under 3 miles of ice.  She absorbed hundreds of books and more than hundreds of hours of explanations from Manny and his peers.  Somehow, she managed to have a son, Vincenzo, and then a daughter, Leah. 

It took her five years.  The Great Sage was patient.

*****

Saturated with information on molecular biology, evolution and genetic engineering, Zila wrestled with the meaning of it all, struggling under the sheer volume of knowledge.  Humankind was at the verge of a dramatic breakthrough.  The course of evolution was less and less a course of nature and increasingly a matter of personal, or perhaps cultural, choice.  The thought stuck in her subconscious mind like an old splinter working its way to the surface.

“Manny, I just had a thought.  You design genes.  You’re meddling with the human chromosome every day. Don’t you worry that something you do, in your clients, or their children or great, great grandchildren, will do some harm?  Make purple skin or an arm sprouting out of someone’s backside?”

“Haha.  Of course I do.  Purple skin!  I wish someone would ask for that, or maybe long, silky fur all over, or a prehensile tail!”

“No, Manny, I’m serious.”

“Z, all I do is swirl the frosting on the basic cake.  I can smooth out a flaw here and there, but I don’t dare shmoosh the dough.  I can cure a few genetic diseases like diabetes and muscular dystrophy, make curly hair, remove extra genetic copies that limit intelligence or produce phenylketonuria, but I can’t design a superman or even a supermodel.  I only work with the recent mutations and transpositions, and then only in regions we have mapped completely.”

“Yeah, but what about transposons?  Those things don’t always stay where you put them. ”

“So far they have, Z.  So far.”

For Meaning and Profit Zila took stock of herself once more.  Now she had a husband and two lovely children, neither of which had designer genes.  Inevitably, the robot courier came again with another letter.  It was time for her to deliver the negotiated goods to the Sage.

“I can’t leave now, Manny.  Leah is just 3 years old and I promised Vincenzo  a birthday party when he turns five next month.”

“OCS is providing full child care coverage AND a tuition at Pines Prep for both kids, Z.  It’s only for a few months at most.  We can cope, and you’ll be back soon.”

“But…but it should be YOU going, not me.  You’re the expert.  I’m the mommy.”

“Z, there is NOTHING that I know about microbiology that you don’t have at the tip of your tongue.  I wish we could figure out how they made those memory microbes.  I would gladly spray myself with them from head to toe.  And the kids, too!”

“Yeah, they’re just bacteria from the Sage’s stomach, with an adjutant that allowed them to survive in my straticornium…”

“See, Z, you ARE the real expert!  I don’t have half that information in my head.”

“It’s just that… I don’t know what I know.  It’s just a pile of facts.”

“Go, love, and come back to us.  You’ll never be happy any other way.”

That had the ring of truth to it, she thought.  It was only a temporary absence, anyway.

She returned to Saggitarius sector full of information.  It was, as the Great Sage had told her, a huge pile of facts.  If you asked Zila specific questions, she would give you the correct answer, but she could not tell you what it all meant.

The two week passage deeper into the Saggitarius arm went quickly.  It wasn’t routine, but neither was FTL a new thing to her.

As she was escorted into the Hall of Enlightenment once more, she was struck by another problem.  How was she going to divulge all that information to the Great Sage?

She took her seat in front of the Sage, flanked by the usual pair of Priest-Negotiators.  The Great Sage, dressed in a blanket aswirl with colors, trundled about in his pit.  Zila wondered how a blind sentient picked such a colorful adornment.

“Great Sage, I have collected the information as we agreed.  How do I download it?”

“I have specialized receptors in my tongues.  If you will allow me, I can access your new knowledge.  The storage means we gave you creates electrical patterns in the outer layers of your skin.  I can stimulate those patterns and record the responses.  Then, of course, I will digest them.”

She sat in a chair, they sprayed something in her face and pressed another patch on her arm.  The two long tongues rolled out and clapped over her temples.  They were rough and kept creeping along her scalp, her neck, her arms.  At some point she fell back into disembodied rainbow sleep.  She woke up in the same guest cabin, with the same Priest, or its clone, dragging a tray of food.  This time it was a few of her days until a pair of the Priests came to visit.  There was no question of who they were.  They identified themselves.  They were her new case officers.

“The Great Sage has accepted your payment and now is ready to give you his end of the bargain in return.  You have done well, Diplomat Zila human.”

Interrogation Zila’s case officers wore robes in shades of teal and lapis, fancier than the other Priests she had met.  These were also some of Zila’s favorite colors.  They reminded her of the ocean offshore Miami, which brought up a chain of memories and worries about Manny, Vincenzo and precious little Leah Lee.  She shook her head to concentrate on her task.

Her case officers had the title of Priests of the Enlightenment, whatever that meant.  Zila named them Eosin and Cresyl, after cellular stains that she remembered seeing under a microscope.  As it turned out, she could not tell them apart, even though they claimed they were not clones or twins.  Their own names were in tonals and chirrs that she could not even begin to pronounce. 

Eosin and Cresyl escorted Zila into the Hall of Enlightenment.  The Great Sage was sidling back and forth in his pit.  The Priests brought out a chair for Zila and cushions for themselves.  The Sage settled himself onto his belly saddle.  It looked like it was going to be long session.

“Greetings, young human.  I sense you are well recovered from your travel.  Is that correct?”

“Yes, Great Sage, your crew was most hospitable.   But…I have children now and a husband.  I had to leave them behind.”

“We will make this visit brief so you can return to your husband and offspring as soon as possible.  I am well pleased.  I hoped you would be attracted to the good Doctor Lee and have a successful mating.  You understand, my wisdom does not extend to such matters.  The choice was always yours, but I hoped for the best.”

Zila had to think about that statement and parse it out.  On the one hand, the Sage had just told her that he was a deliberate matchmaker in her marriage to Manny.  Of course!  Manny was not only her tutor, but the perfect complement to her own knowledge of microbiology.  She resented that manipulation.

On the other hand, not even the Sage could predict the chemistry between men and women.  There was still that random factor.   She did choose Manny of her own accord.  She relented and forgave the Sage.  Actually, considering her totally unexpected family life, wonderful job and new knowledge, she was grateful.

Zila sighed.  “Great Sage, humans resent being manipulated like that, but I am happy with my choice and I thank you for the matchmaking.”  Very diplomatic, she thought.

“Understanding is like matchmaking.  Perhaps I can lead you to the path, but you must be the one to walk it.  Let us begin.  I will ask you questions and you will call upon your answers.  At some point, those answers will fall into a pattern, and understanding will strike you like lightning in a dark tunnel.  The pile of facts will begin to take shape, but it may be a while before either of us recognizes it.”

“You mean, you can’t just download understanding into me, like with the memory microbes?”

“Even I would find that much manipulation egregious, young human.  You must gain understanding based on your own culture and personal convictions.  Loading my digested understandings into you would cause you a serious discontinuity.”

“Discontinuity?”

The Priest she thought of as Cresyl turned toward her.  “The Great Sage does not want to overlay his thought patterns on yours.  They would disrupt yours.”

“Oh.  I guess I’m OK and ready to begin.”

“Young human, recall your facts about genetic evolution, especially the comparisons of genes among the various Earth species.”

“Vertebrates?  Or Eucaryotes?  Archaea?”

“Just vertebrates and lower animals for now.  Do you recall how much of the human genome is common to all mammals?”

“Quite a bit.  82%.”

“Very good.  And what is meant by ‘conserved genes’?”

“Those are genes that persist from species to species and do the same things in all of them.”

“And what is a genetic inheritance tree?”

“That’s a map of all the genes and how they came down over time from their ancestors or precursors.  We call it the Tree of Life, or T of L for short”

“Ah.  Then the inheritance is not always from biological parent to biological child?”

“New genes arise and some jump around.  There is such a thing as horizontal gene transfer from species to species, probably from viruses that infect more than one species.  Then there are transposons, jumping genes.  Like, people whose ancestors came from places without cows can’t digest the lactose in milk but now most humans can, all since some of our ancestors began to keep cows.  That gene was already there but jumped into a region that produces an enzyme to digest lactose.  It must have happened all at once.  Somewhere a baby began to digest lactose and its parents could not.”

“You speak of generations.  You recognize that as a measure of time?”

“Yes, of course.”

“How old is the lactose gene?”

“Probably not very old.  Maybe ten or twenty thousand Earth years.”

“Looking back at that genetic tree, what do you know of the Last Universal Common Ancestor?”

“The LUCA?  That’s hypothetical.  There may be more than one root of the tree.”

“Yes, but what is the evidence?”

“Well, some genes are conserved all the way down the tree, but there are little single-point substitutions, like the two sulfur-bearing nucleic acids might be swapped in some places, but they do the same things.  Or there may be more than one copy of a gene in some species.”

“So, those highly conserved genes are not only part of the root of the Tree of Life, but very old?’

“Hmmm.  I remember an expert in evolutionary genetics, Dr. Eugene Koonin was his name, who said they were many millions of years old.  Dinosaurs had the same conserved genes.  Even invertebrates and plants share the same conserved genes as humans.”

So, again, you have these persistent genes, millions of years old, that humans and plants and fish still share today?”

“Yes, we are, sort of, all part of the same Tree of Life.”

“Ah, you are looking at the Tree as an object in this instant of time.  Try to look at it as a thing that evolves over millions of years.  Look in the time dimension.  Think of these genes as sprouting new forms, making one experiment in evolution after another, forming new creatures and genes, deleting other creatures and genes.  What do you see now?”

Zila closed her eyes and tried, very hard, to make believe she was a disembodied eye on the wall of the world while unicellular creatures first made microbial mats, then were invaded by chloroplasts and became algae, then invented flagella and learned to swim, crawl, walk, breathe air and fly.  It was hard.  Then she focused on the backbone of the tree and it suddenly seemed like she was looking at the skeleton of some enormous, ancient animal, but the bones were the conserved genes.  It was… well, revelation is a weak word for it.

The Great Sage was patient.  The Priests did not stir.  Eventually, Zila found a way to put it into words.

“We aren’t the purpose of evolution at all.  The Tree of Life is the end product!  Humans, fish, plants, plankton, whales, fungi, we are all experiments whose main purpose is to carry DNA in our cells along with the little organelles, the fellow travelers, that came to join us.  Mitochondria, spindles, chloroplasts, ribosomes, they are fellow travelers.  We are simply the latest clothing our cells have put on to pursue survival.  Life is its own purpose. We are… incidental.”  She almost added the word “temporary”, but she could not say it, even though, suddenly, she knew humans would eventually, in the long stretch of time, be succeeded by something else.

Having said that, she suddenly knew it was a true understanding but not yet a complete understanding.  She looked up at the Sage, turned to look at the Priests and waited for comments.

The Great Sage was curt. “That is enough for today, young Zila human.  We will meet tomorrow.”

The Priests of Enlightenment, Eosyn and Cresyl, unfolded themselves from their cushions and escorted her to her quarters.

“What did you think of all that?”

“Very intense, in our experience with the Great Sage.  You are most privileged, Honored Human Emissary.”  Eosyn responded.

“We do not follow your vision, but then we do not share your knowledge.  We do not have your memory microbes.  You are most privileged, Honored Human Emissary Zila.”  Cresyl’s expression was unreadable. 

It seemed her honorifics were getting longer every day.

*****

The next day she awoke with a vivid memory of the strangest dreams.  The Tree of Life was being pulled apart and she was trying to hold it together.  Filaments and tangles floated wherever she looked.  She was worried.  It was just…threatening and not the way it was supposed to be.

The Priest of the Morning, as she began to think of him, came as usual with his cart floating behind him.  The food smelled delicious, and Wow!  There was real coffee!

“Honorable Human Emissary, we have new clothing for you.  We hope you like it.”

“Why, thank you, good Priest!  It’s a beautiful fabric!”  She held it up to her for a fit, but the only mirror was too tiny to allow her to see the full effect.  It seemed to be the same kind of fabric worn by Eosyn and Cresyl, her case officers.

“We would be pleased if you could wear it for your session today with the Great Sage, Oh Honored Human Emissary.”

“Well, then I shall, but first, I’m starved.  Were did you get Earth coffee?”

“From Earth, of course.”

Dumb question, she thought.  But something was a bit strange here.  They were going to an awful lot of trouble for one very green junior diplomat.  Coffee from Earth?  What next, will they shower me with precious gems?

She devoured the breakfast, drank a whole pot of coffee even though she knew that would be trouble later on, put on her new dress and brushed her hair.

The dress was more like a gown, full and long but fitted at the waist and bodice.  The material was silky and draped like the sculpted folds on a Greek statue.  She was tempted to put on some makeup and perfume, but then she remembered that the odors could be some sort of message in Sage language.

Eosyn and Cresyl came to bring her to the Hall of Enlightenment.  They were wearing the same robes they had worn the day before.  It struck her how similar they were to hers, but for the cut of the gown.

The Great Sage himself was draped in the same material, but with ornate trimmings and a blanket that could have been an archival tapestry.  The party settled themselves into their various resting poses and the Sage resumed directly.

“Young human, today we will focus on the process you call evolution.  Please bring to mind all you have learned about the process by which species evolve and how they change to adapt to the environment as it changes around them.”

Zila had a lot of facts on evolution.  It was intimately tied to molecular biology.   In fact, molecular biology was nonsense without evolution and provided an enormous body of evidence in direct support of evolution.

“Please explain survival of the fittest.”

“Oh, that’s simple.  Each individual has a slightly different mix of genes and expresses them in various ways.  So we get variations , say, color, size, immune responses, and what they can eat.  In each environment, some of these changes are better than others.  The individuals with the better adaptations have more offspring, so their genes survive.  Over time, the surviving individuals have the better adapted genes and the others tend to die out.”

Then Zila remembered a fact she did not fully understand.  “I think the growth rate of beneficial genes tends to be exponential.  They spread really, really fast.”

“How do these changes arise?”

“Well, lots of ways.  s****l reproduction mixes the genes pretty well, comes up with new combinations.   Retroviruses inject new genes into random places, and sometimes cause several copies of themselves and whatever genes come along with them.  Solar radiation and cosmic radiation cause random mutations, most of which are bad, and some get repaired incorrectly by the repair enzymes that slide along the DNA strands during cell division.  Sometimes pieces of RNA get injected into the DNA.  Sometimes genes just jump into a new position.  Transposons.  Like the gene for digesting lactose.  Lateral transfer between species is especially evident in bacteria.”

“Are these changes very common?”

“Umm, the kind of mixing that happens in s****l reproduction is common, but the whole thing about DNA is that it’s a pretty stable molecule.  The two strands of DNA are complementary.  If one codon is damaged or swapped, the zipper enzyme can fix it because the other strand still has the right code.  It usually stays zipped up and safely curled up.  It has to be unzipped and wrapped around a thing called a spindle to be read into messenger RNA to make a protein.  It’s sort of like a tiny molecular tape recorder in every cell, making copies of the DNA and turning the DNA codes into proteins for the rest of the body.”

“But wait, I don’t think I really answered the question.  Small changes happen a lot and they get fixed or ignored.  Big changes are rare.”

“Are most changes beneficial?”

“No, actually, very much the opposite.  Changes are random and the DNA code only works in specific ways.  Most changes are lethal or on the bad side of neutral.”

“If changes are random and not often beneficial, how, then does evolution aid adaptation?  Doesn’t it just as often destroy the individual as adapt it?”

“More often, actually.  A lot of very smart people have studied that problem.  It seems from the shape of the Tree of Life and the incidence of things like cancer and genetic diseases that the changes are, at most neutral.  Evolution is not a smooth process.  Nothing good happens for a long while, then all of a sudden a really good gene appears and evolution takes a jump.  And, let’s not forget, species die out regularly and arise just as often.”

“What does all this have to do with fitness maps.  You did study fitness maps?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Please describe fitness maps, young human.”

“Mmm.   This is where I get into trouble with math and all.  Let me see if I can describe fitness, then I’ll try fitness maps.”

“Suppose we are looking at a creature, say a bird, that lives in a forest.  There are lots of seeds on the ground in various sizes, some with very tough shells, some a bit poisonous.  There are tall trees with fruit.  There are competitors that want to eat the seeds and the fruit.  There are predators that want to eat the eaters.  There are parasites that infect the creatures.  It’s a very complicated thing, survival in this forest.  If you plunked down any creature from another environment it would not last long or have offspring.  But, being able to eat smaller seeds means less competition from the big animals.  Being able to fly is good for reaching fruit.  If you could put all these nice things into a single number, that would be a fitness index.  The higher the number, the more fitness there is.”

“But you can’t put it all into one number.  There are too many options and trade-offs and exceptions.  A bird with a big, long beak can’t eat little seeds, but it can drink water from hard to reach places and maybe poke at predators and drive them away.  But a really, really long beak is heavy, it can break, and it makes flying clumsy.  So we put the whole range of good things together in a map.  Each good thing has a dimension for itself.  There are lots of dimensions in this map, it’s not two dimensional flat like a land map.  In the beak size dimension, there is a hill for decent size beaks, but not too big beaks.  In the bird size dimension there is a hill for small birds that are quick enough to eat insects, another for big birds that can eat hard shelled nuts.  So the whole map is lumpy.  Some of the hills are mountains and some are just little rolling hillocks.”

“Now, classical theory says that evolution is the process of climbing the highest peaks in this fitness landscape.  The valleys are for the unfit.  The creatures on the peaks have more offspring, so they contribute more genes to the gene pool.”

“Classical theory, you say?  Is that where the evidence leads?”

“Uh, not exactly.  One of the problems is that creatures can spend the whole life of their species climbing a modest fitness peak when there are real huge mountains just next door that they cannot reach.  They get trapped, trying to move upward when there is no higher ground.  Like ants or wasps on Earth.  Only the creatures wandering around in the valleys have a chance of finding the higher peaks, but they may not survive long enough to climb them.  Like the little mammals after the dinosaurs got wiped out.  If the dinosaurs had survived, the only mammals would be like mice.”

“The other problem is that N-dimensional fitness maps may not have optimizing algorithms at all.  A Dr. Kaufman wrote about this stuff and about the relationship between fitness landscapes and chaos theory.  Something about having too many degrees of freedom.  There was even a fractal fitness landscape.”

“But there must be some way.  After all, your species has managed to climb a fitness peak so high it is no longer part of any particular forest, or desert, or ocean.  Don’t all sentient creature have to find some way to navigate these fitness landscapes in order to reach civilization?  To finally master their environment?”

Zila nodded for quite a while before she had an answer to that question.  “Now that you mention it, it seems obvious, isn’t it?”

“Wisdom is often obvious.  The secret is seeking in the right place.”

“Now think about fitness landscapes, young human.   Imagine, if you can, a fitness landscape that includes habitats from an entire planet.  Imagine a sentient species overcoming all the pitfalls in this fitness landscape and finally reaching a global civilization.  Tell me what you see.”

No, Zila thought, it doesn’t seem possible.  But it happens!  I’ve seen other sentients.  We have a few sentient, or semi-sentient creatures on Earth!  But only humans have that global civilization thing.  And the interesting thing is that humans are really quite unspecialized for any particular natural environment.  How does it work?  Wait, look at the Tree of Life.  It does have a certain shape.  Not like a tree with all the fuzzy stuff at the top, more like a series of straggly vines and bushes.  Beetles.  There’s a particularly fuzzy piece of Tree.   Grasses.  Nematode worms- more bushy parts.  But people?  The hominid branch is the opposite of fuzzy, it’s almost bare.  But yet, here I am, a hominid, in Saggitarius Sector talking about fitness maps with the Great Sage.  Shouldn’t my kind be the bushiest part of the Tree?

“Something is very wrong here, Great Sage.  The Tree of Life does not support the idea of fitness maps.  Humans don’t fit the usual peak-climbing scenario, either.  Yet it must.  There is something missing.  I don’t know what it could be.”

“Young Human, or I should call you, Honored Human Emissary, Zila Arapova Beddiy, Diplomatic Attache from Outreach Contract Services, you have earned yet another title, if you will accept it.  You are hereby Priest-Seeker of the Great Sage.  Do you accept?”

“Oh.  Is that why I’m wearing this gown?  It’s not just a nice gift?”

“Exactly.  Do you accept willingly, young human?”

“I’m honored, Great Sage.  Truly honored.”

“And so you will be truly honored, young human.  I have other gifts for you.”

The Great Sage gibbered and sang in the Priests language and they approached him.  He opened his enormous jaws and extruded two small objects.  The Priests took them as if they were priceless treasures and brought them over to Zila.  One Priest slapped a patch on Zila’s gown, front and back.  It was a logo of some sort.  The same logo appeared over the entrance to the Hall of Enlightenment, she remembered.  The other Priest placed a small flat object on Zila’s forehead and another on her throat.  The objects stuck there.

“Zila, you are wearing the emblem of the Great Sage.  You will find it humorous, if I understand human humor.”  He stood sideways to Zila and stuck out both tongues, curled in opposite directions.  Yes, that was the emblem!  Zila tried very hard not to laugh and failed. 

“I apologize for laughing, Great Sage.  It is indeed the perfect emblem for you, but you are sticking out your tongues at the world.  It’s hard to explain it’s…. She trilled and warbled a word that had no English translation.  Then her eyes popped open very wide.

“You are speaking and understanding the language of the Priests of the Great Sage.  Surprise!  That is my gift to you, young human.”

The two Priest Seekers gabbled and sang to her and she answered in kind. 

“It will learn and work in all languages that use sound waves, Honored Human Emissary and Seeker.  It is tuned to your memory microbes.”

“Seekers, please send for a Negotiator.”

One Seeker left the Hall and returned very quickly with a Priest Negotiator who must have been hovering just outside the door.

“Negotiator, please draw up a proper Diplomatic Portfolio for human Zila Arapova Beddiy, who will now have the title of Diplomat and Seeker of the Great Sage.”

“Promptly, Great Sage.”

“And please write a proposal with Outreach Contract Services to hire Zila Arapova Beddiy on a long term basis, on the same terms and remunerations as the memorable Proconsul Haliothorpe Qoo.”

“Wow.  That should be quite a raise!  Manny will be overjoyed.”

“Negotiator, the Sagittarian FTL Yacht, Wisdom of Sage will now be in her control for the duration of her employment here as Priest-Seeker, and the Pilot, Navigator and Engineer are now under her command as Diplomat.”

“Yes, Great Sage, so it will be.”

“Young human, we resume tomorrow.  Perhaps it will be the last session we need to gain your profit from this venture.”

*****

“Is it tomorrow already?”  Zila complained as the spike-headed Priest of the morning dragged her food cart in for breakfast.

“Honored Human Emissary….”

“Damn it!  Call me Zila, just Zila, and why does it feel too early for breakfast?”  She was in a dream state where she woke up to find she was really a princess.  Mentally, she shook herself awake, but the Priest and food cart were still there.

“Honored Human Zila, your pilot, navigator and engineer wish to report for duty.  They will have much to do today while you continue your discussions with the Great Sage.”

“Aaargh.  OK, give me a chance to clean up and get dressed.”

“May I call you Priest Zila?  You have new clothing as well.”

“That would be Priestess Zila, I believe, but please, just Zila.  Why the new clothing?  Am I getting another title?”

“This one has not been told about any new honors, but the clothing is your uniform as commanding officer of the Wisdom of Sage.

“Oh, wow, this I have to see.”

It came scrunched up in a box that would ordinarily fit a piece of jewelry.  The box had the Sage’s curled-tongues emblem on the top in a material that looked like melted emeralds.    Zila pulled the crumpled garment from the small box and it gradually unfolded until it became a single unwrinkled one-piece jumper in green with azure insets at the shoulders, a matching belt and, yes, booties.  The material was so fine it seemed ephemeral.  She prodded it with a finger and it gave like lycra.  There was no obvious way to put it on.

“How do I get into it?”

The Priest picked up the box and pulled up the bottom revealing a hidden compartment.  In it was a tool that looked like a spoon, but with a double convex ovoid on the end, like two spoons welded together with the bowls inside.   The Priest handed the tool to Zila.

“I’m still mystified.  What do I do with this, uh, whatever it is.”

The Priest held up the suit and ran the tool along a nearly invisible seam that started at the neck and wrapped around the suit down one leg and then another seam on the other leg.   He handed the suit to Zila and waited, expectantly. 

“No, no.  I’ll try it on by myself.  Thanks you for the instructions.”

The Priest dutifully turned away and left, leaving the door open as usual.

Zila got out of her nightgown and did a quick shower and other morning necessities, then tried to get into the suit.  With a bit of wriggling and pulling she got it on, right down to the booties, which proved to have built in soles and served as shoes.  She ran the zipper tool up the seams and they welded together perfectly.  The fabric shrunk to her figure.

“It’s a cat suit.  I’m all the way up here in Saggitarius sector and still some male sentient has reinvented the cat suit.  This damn thing leaves nothing to the imagination.  I guess this princess doesn’t get a ball gown.”

She tugged and pulled at it some more.  The fabric was remarkably tough and resilient only if she pulled slowly.  She bent and squatted and stretched, but the suit allowed every motion without binding.

“Great stuff.  I wonder if we can get the formula for this as part of the trade deal.  Well, I suppose, with no other humans around, it’s silly for me to be concerned about human modesty.”  She stuck her tiny translation devices on her forehead and throat.

Just then, two male humans and a Priest walked into her room.  The men looked her over, looked at each other and grinned.

“Ahem, Commander Zila, we are Efar Oms, Pilot, Alon Kirby, Navigator and Priest (Whistle-Hum) our Engineer.  We are your crew, um, Commander.

Zila did not know whether she should cover up or try to retain some shred of dignity.  However, they were all wearing the same kind of suit, in different patterns to show rank or personal preference, perhaps.  The men were definitely male and the Priest was, well, whatever he/she/it was. 

Efar, the Pilot, held up his hands, “We had nothing to do with these uniforms.  The whole fleet wears them, humans and otherwise.  I’m sure the Great Sage is not concerned with human s****l taboos.”

“Actually, Commander, these suits are very practical.  They will keep you warm or cool in nearly any situation, from fires to deep space.  They will repel projectile weapons like armor, although it does hurt if you get hit.  They clean themselves.  You can wear them for days and they never stink.  Most important, they fit under space suits and in the ship’s control chairs.  Aaand, the boots have sticky gecko soles for free fall.”  Alon had dropped the smirk, but he continued.  “For a sexless entity, though, the Great Sage has a great sense of style.”

Zila blushed.  “ Knock it off!  I’m married to a great guy and I have two kids.”

“Oh, sorry, Commander.”

Zila turned to the Priest.  “How about you?  Do you have a name we can pronounce in English other than (Whistle-Hum)?”

“Commander, you don’t have to worry about me, I’m not remotely human.  I am male in this phase, but that is only for a few tens of cycles.  Please call me Scotty.”

“Scotty?  Really?”

“Wasn’t he the engineer in one of your ancient space operas?”

“Never heard of it.”

“Star Trek, or something like that?”

“Hey, I’m not that old.  How far back do you think I go?”

“Scotty, here is the oldest one of us.  Tell her, Scotty.”

“In Earth years, I would be forty-seven.  That is old for my kind.  I have been in service to the Great Sage for forty years.”

“You’ve been an engineer for forty years?”

“In training for thirty-five years and a full engineer for five years.”

“Priests train for their jobs all their lives,” Alon frowned, “Over and over again until they can do the most complex repair with no mistakes.”

“And navigators?”

“I graduated Houston-Stanford.  I have a Ph.D. in astrophysics.  The Great Sage hired me off a research vessel that docked here.  I was the ship’s navigator at the time.”

“And you, Efar?”

“I’m just a humble ship’s jockey, Commander Zila.  Nothing special.  It’s all in the wrist.”

“You guys know, I suppose, that as far as actually commanding a ship goes, I know practically nothing?”

“We know, Commander.  We were briefed.  You carry the mission.  Our job is to get you there in one piece.”

Zila shook her head from side to side.  Mission.  Commander.  What the hell was all this about?  I just want to get home to my family.

*****

The Great Sage was wearing tapestries that reminded Zila of the pictures of colorful nebulas taken with powerful telescopes.  Eosin and Cresyl squatted on their cushions, the Great Sage mounted his belly saddle and, as usual, he got right down to business.

“Young Human, and now Commander, Zila, your mate, Dr. Manny Lee is trained as a biophysicist?”

“Yes, but he has been doing gene design for several years now.”

“Nevertheless, he has tutored you in the basics of how creatures use energy?”

“Great Sage, I have the facts, but biophysics is really beyond me.”

“We will see.  Please concentrate in the laws of thermodynamics.  Can you repeat the Zeroth and First Laws?”

“Energy flows from regions of higher concentration to regions of lower concentration.   In any given system, over time, pockets of energy run downhill until everything is at the same level.  Like a waterfall filling a pond.  It stops running when the pond reaches the level of the waterfall.”

“Good enough.  And entropy?”

“Entropy is the measure of free energy in the system.  Entropy starts low and only increases over time.  In the case of the universe, entropy started at zero with the Big Bang and will end at infinity when the universe is the same temperature all over and there are no more stars or even hot spots.  It’s called the heat death.  If there is a heat death…”

“Very good.  But, there are exception to the irreversible flow of entropy?”

“Well, that is a good question.  I’m not sure.  It seems that life is an exception.  Living things organize themselves against the flow of entropy and spend energy all their lives, then pass on this job of spending energy to their offspring.  There was a lot of work on the idea of entropy and genetic evolution.  Kaufman even wrote about a Maxwell’s Demon directing evolution in a test of fitness landscapes.  Maxwell’s Demon worked against entropy.”

“If you could see molecules of air in a bottle, could you see entropy in action?”

“Not really.  You would see a particular molecule getting bumped and moving faster, and another getting bumped and moving slower.  It would be hard to tell from watching individual molecules.”

“Do you understand what an emergent phenomenon is, Young Human?”

“That is something that can only be seen from the actions of the whole.  Like, watching the individual molecules just shows random events, but over all, those random events follow a law that is not obvious from watching them as individual molecules.  Air pressure is an emergent phenomenon caused by air molecules bumping into each other.”

“And in the case of our jar of air?”

“The pattern that you would find is that the molecules are averaging out to the same speed and eventually they all have the same energy.  All the air in the jar is eventually at the same temperature.  That is maximum entropy at for that jar of air.”

“So what have you learned about instances that seem to go against entropy, like life?”

Well, Zila thought, there is a catch here.  I know we eat foods that break down into sugars, proteins, and other stuff that our bodies use for fuel and growth.  We excrete things that are all used up for our purposes, which really means that the excreted molecules are at a lower energy level than we can use.  Other organisms use that waste to bring down the energy even further.  And when our bodies decompose, all that stored energy in the proteins and fats goes down the same pathways to the lowest levels.  So we don’t really go against entropy when we eat or grow.

But there’s more than just metabolism and decomposition.  The higher animals and humans use a LOT of energy.  Humans use fossil fuels, wind and solar power, trees and wood.  We move things around and build things and all that uses a tremendous amount of energy. 

The thing is, none of that energy use is very efficient.  Most of the energy goes into waste heat.  We need to cool our engines to get rid of the waste heat.  We need to cool our bodies to get rid of the waste heat.  Every biological process uses energy and wastes a lot of it.  So living forms not only gather a lot of energy to live, we waste most of it!   That certainly doesn’t sound like an exception to entropy!

“Again, Great Sage, I see that life does not get away from the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  Quite the opposite!  Life is one of the biggest things that makes entropy go faster!  And, since living things reproduce, entropy increases really fast around living things!”

“Quite right, Young Human, life promotes a huge increase in entropy if you take into account not just the living things themselves but the environment they live in.  But let us go further.  Think of the ways that all life has in common that all use energy.”

“I just thought of the deep ocean life on Earth.  We used to think that down in the abyssal, unlit depths of our ocean there could be no life.  Then we discovered that the greatest concentration of life on our planet was in just those sunless depths.   There are “black smokers”, gushers of superheated ocean water spewing out of places where the thin ocean crust gets near molten magma plumes.  These gushers have lots of salts and minerals dissolved in them, especially sulfur.   The incredible diversity of life around these gushers digests the hot minerals and breathes sulfur instead of oxygen, and eventually these gushers support fish, worms, crabs, clams, even sharks.  None of them breathe, and most don’t even have eyes, but they are very alive.”

“It’s as if the plume of energy in these black smokers caused the life there to evolve.  Come to think of it, the same kind of thing happens in the Yosemite geysers, in deep sea oil vents, methane volcanoes on IO and Europa, and just about everywhere there is some kind of energy flow.”

“And now, perhaps, you have reached yet another level of understanding, young Human?”

“Yes, this is wonderful.  Life is not separate from entropy at all.  Life is a part of entropy.  Life evolves anywhere there is a suitable energy flow and a suitable medium, whether it is a warm shallow ocean under sunlight, or a dark abyss with a black smoker, or a… how about a thick atmosphere full of all kind of carbon molecules with continuous lightning storms, like the mid-levels of Jupiter’s atmosphere?”

“What is the most universal characteristic of life, Young Human?”

“The ability to reproduce, probably, although there are a few things that reproduce, like viruses, that we do not consider alive.”

“Then we can say that without the ability to reproduce there is no life?”

“Yes, that seems to be right.”

“But there are always limits to reproduction.  Can you remember those limits?”

“Simple.  The population runs out of food, or some vital mineral, or air, or water.  Deaths equal births for a while.  That limits the population of that species.”

“And the general rule, considering that life is part of entropy?”

“I see.  That is not just population dynamics, it is biophysics at work.  Life multiplies until all the free energy is gone.  As long a there is free energy, one form of life or another will reproduce until it consumes all the free energy.  Life serves entropy, not the other way around.”

“Excellent work, Young Zila.  Your pile of facts has a shape now.  You can see that shape?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Are you satisfied with it?  Is it finished?”

This was a difficult question.  Is anything ever finished?  How do you know if you have never seen this thing before?  Was the entropy of life somehow involved in the answer?  Hmm.   Zila did not know exactly why, but she was not satisfied.

“No.  I’m not satisfied yet.  Something is missing.  Nothing ties to things we did yesterday and the day before.”

“You are doing very well.  We examined the Tree of Life.  We examined the idea of fitness landscapes.  Search your intuition and see where we need to look further.”

“Starting with the Tree of Life, it isn’t tree-shaped and bushy on top, and it should be.  It’s straggly and bushy in some places, pretty bare in others.”

“Good.  But you seemed most dissatisfied with fitness landscapes.  Look more closely at them, now that you understand that life serves entropy.”

“Ahah!  Ahah again!  Remember we could not find a single number to measure fitness when we added, multiplied, did any kind of math on the basic measurements of survival?  Because there were too many interrelations!  I remember what Dr. Prigogine said.   There are no solutions to the set of nonlinear functions in those relationships.  Yeah, they were looking at the thing all wrong.  It isn’t fitness that gets maximized, it’s entropy.  Living things, as a group, climb to the peak where energy usage is highest.  It’s an emergent phenomenon.  Simple!”

“Now, young human, be careful what you are saying.  Is it really true that survival is not the goal of life, but energy use is?”

“Let me look at it on a species level.  Obviously, species arise, flourish and die off.  Their environmental niches are filled by the next species.  Insects, reptiles and rodents succeeded each other as burrowing seed eaters.  Warm blooded creatures succeeded cold blooded creatures.  Flowering plants succeeded mosses.   Bushes succeeded ferns.  In each case the successor in a given niche consumed more energy.  But wait, there are some exceptions and there shouldn’t be any.  No, in those cases the organisms themselves did not use more energy, but they multiplied like crazy and the species used a lot more energy.”

“On a species level, evolution probably serves entropy, with exceptions to be examined.  Take that as your working hypothesis.  Now, Young Human, how does that relate to evolution at the genetic level?”

“Let me think about that for a while, please.”

“I am patient.”

Some minutes later, Zila was more sure of her conclusions.  “The Tree of Life traces the genetic code, not species per se.  The oldest surviving genes are down toward the root.  Those genes, the ones that persist more or less unchanged for millions of years, are the backbone of the Tree. They are the codes that control reproduction, the DNA repair processes, RNA transcription, the basic cellular structures and organs.  Without them there would be no carbon-based life forms as far as we know.”

“By some happy coincidence, those are the very most energy intensive processes as well.  Umm, not a coincidence at all.  Evidence points to the fact that the backbone of the Tree of Life serves entropy.  I bet, with a lot of research and a little funding, we could prove that every conserved gene is an energy hog.”

Zila was quiet for more minutes.  “That is absolutely amazing!  Everything I was taught about evolution and molecular biology had a set of rules that made no coherent sense at all.  But they are simple!  Here they are:”

“First, humans and other sentients are not the purpose of evolution.  Our genetic code is.  We are simply the clothing the Tree of Life has put on for this episode of survival.”

“Second, life is not an exception to the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  Life serves entropy.  The more successful the species, the more energy it will consume.  The faster entropy increases.”

“Third, sentient life, civilizations, space-faring civilizations, use the most energy of all.  Coal, oil, natural gas, fission, fusion, even zero-point energy…  Given time and a steady flow of energy, they will emerge time after time and go on to capture more energy flows on their own.”

“Young Human, you have gone as far a you need to go for now, but please…”

“Wait!  I have more!”

“Money is just a symbol for energy.  The more money you have, the more resources you can command.  At some point civilizations all invented money out of a need to trade.  Trading is a great way to command more resources.  That must mean economics is wrong also…”

“Don’t go there.  I assure you it is a long dark tunnel, Young Zila.”

“OK, but I remember the scale Michio Kaku proposed for civilizations.  He set levels like 0, 1, 2, up to 4 depending on their access to sources of energy.   Such as capturing the full energy output of a star.  At a guess, I would say that once sentients reach the point where they are no longer dependent on their local energy sources, they still serve entropy, but on a vastly larger scale.  Imagine trapping the entire energy output of a star!”

“While you are musing, my good student, consider the possibility that stars themselves are a form of life?  They reproduce, they have a rich environment with energy flows, do they not?”

“I heard speculation about astrophages, life forms that eat stars.  Great Sage, now you are leading me down a long tunnel.”

“Yes, Young Human, but not a dark one!”

So, thought Zila, the Great Sage has a sense of humor.  She took a deep breath, as if she was coming up from quite a depth.  She felt she had reached, not a higher level of intelligence, perhaps, but a permanent, elevated perspective on all things.  She was, mentally, much taller.  Very much taller.  Growing up to be a queen, no longer a princess.

She was also very much hungrier.  A Priest, probably the same on she saw every morning, brought in food on a floating cart.  There was another floating cart piled high with strange foodstuffs for the Great Sage, but the Priests drew a curtain.  The Great Sage was heard chomping his food in privacy.

*****

Lunch break ended too soon.  Zila wondered how a many-thousands-year-old sentient got to be a workaholic.  

“Young Zila, the structure of understanding you have begun is only a foundation.  Over time, more and more facts will adhere to that foundation and you will see it grow.  However, the terms of our trade included profit as well as understanding.”

The Sage switched to the Priest’s language, which Zila followed perfectly.  “Call a Priest Negotiator.”

As usual, a Priest Negotiator appeared nearly instantly.  Zila made a mental note to see if there was a place they could have been hiding near the door to the Hall of Enlightenment.

“Please draw up a contract for royalties in whatever inventions may be patented by Zila Beddiy and her husband Emmanuel Lee in the area of genetic design or medical treatments that originate with the concept of “evolution serves entropy”.  The patent holder will be Beddiy and Lee, as partners.  The royalties will be equal parts to Outreach Contract Services, the inventors, and to Great Sage Sovereign Trust.  The contract applies to those inventions and discoveries funded by Great Sage Sovereign Trust.  Also, any profits of her further missions will be divided in the same proportions.”

“Profits?  Inventions?  What inventions?  We don’t have any inventions.  All we have is a bunch of great ideas.”

“Young Zila, please trust my investment instincts.  Our Sovereign Trust is one of the wealthiest in all the known civilized planets.  You will have many profitable discoveries, and you need never lack for funds to bring them to market.”

“Great Sage, economics is not one of the studies I have made.  It is indeed a dark tunnel to me.  However, I suspect you are being both shrewd and generous with me and my husband.”

“This particular tunnel is one in which you already carry a torch.  You are a trade negotiator, are you not?”

“Honestly, I don’t what I am at this point.”

“Young Zila, tomorrow after your next sleep, please command the Wisdom of Sage to take you home to your mate and offspring.  After you have rested, please contact your crew with your intentions.  If they are not needed for a while, they will return here for other duties until you call for them again.  When you do call for them, please accept your next assignment under our contract with Outreach Contract Services.”

“Next assignment?”

“Of course there is a next assignment.  Don’t you wish to continue the adventure you started?  Have I not been successful in awakening your innate curiosity?  And, if I have not yet succeeded, let me add that you may find clues that life may be opposed by other forces, and stumble on yet another puzzle.  That voyage is also yours.”

That was a really loaded proposition.  Was she going to be a settled married woman with kids and a part-time career?  That was what she thought she was.  But that choice did not feel right.  It was like being Cinderella and never losing that glass slipper.  It was like being an arrow and falling short of the target.  Hell, what does an entity as strange and as nearly immortal as the Great Sage know about human conflicts?  How does he have the right to put me in this position?  And what forces could oppose not only life but entropy?  The idea was a nagging shard of darkness to her bright reverie.

“Uh, Great Sage, I am a simple human female with responsibilities for my mate and children.  I have much to think about.”  And, much soul-searching.  What am I now, really?

“The path is yours to tread.  You and your offspring are very much a part of the Tree of Life.  You cannot be satisfied until you have tracked down the secret that lies at the base of that Tree.”

“Secret?  You mean there is more to this than we have discussed?”

“Much more.  You see, young Zila, I have data on life other than just Earth and human colonies.  The roots of the Tree of Life extend well beyond Earth.  Can you ignore the chance to pursue the secret of life itself?”

Zila was silent.

“Young Zila, when you have made yourself ready, you will be funded for a tour of the sentients in this galaxy that no other sentient, certainly no other human, has ever done before.  Who knows, you may find the ancient trading partners of the Allurii. But for now, please take your sleep and go back to Earth tomorrow.”

*****

Wisdom of Sage was a great way to travel, especially when the crew treated her like a, er, commander.  Honored Human Emissary.  Priestess-Seeker.  Whatever.  The acceleration trance hit her like a ton of bricks but she awoke feeling just wonderful.  She was going home to Manny and the kids on her own space yacht!  She looked forward to the free fall exercises. 

Zila was doing a pretty good job of caroming off the walls of the lounge.  Efar Oms was off duty, since the ship was now coasting along with no propulsion.  He appeared in the hatch of the control deck and hooked a leg on the hatchway stanchion.  With a single kick he glided smoothly across the lounge, twisted in mid-air and caught a patch of carpet with his other foot.  He wound up facing Zila in a casual standing position.  Zila could not believe how graceful he was.  She had trouble just trying to stay in one place and she had no control on whether she was upside down or right side up relative to the carpet.

“Efar, how do you do that?”

“Do what?  You mean free fall maneuvers?  Like I said, it’s all in the wrist.”

“Come on.  You make me feel like a klutz.”

“I’ve got a bit of practice.”

“How do I learn to do that?”

“Hmm.  You learn it in stages.  See, on a planet you have to keep your center of gravity over your feet.  You start as a toddler and it becomes instinct.  In free fall you have to forget about your center of gravity - there isn’t any gravity.    You’re always falling.  Your center of mass is still there, but it doesn’t pull you down.   You have to learn how to shoot yourself across a space accurately with a push or a pull.  Once you can more or less go where you want to instead of floundering around or trying to swim the air, you get to the next stage.  You learn to control your body position around your center of mass.  You learn to navigate from handhold to handhold and avoid bumping into things.”

“OK, that makes sense.  I think I can do that.”

Efar pointed, “So, go ahead and try to touch that starboard porthole.”

Zila pushed off the nearest wall and went floundering across the lounge like a boneless kewpie doll.  She got within a few feet of the porthole, but it was her arse that came closest.  She never touched it.  She bounced off and had to swim to the carpet.  She put a foot out and it stuck.  She took a deep breath and put her other foot out.  Now she was, at least, right side up.  So was Efar, and he was trying not to laugh.

“That was miserable.  What did I do wrong?”

“Try making a gentle, easy push so you have time to make sure you are going in the right direction.  Line up the push with your center of mass.  Float, don’t cannonball.”

Zila lifted one foot off the carpet and bent the other knee.  She flexed her ankle to lean her body in the direction of the portal and pushed off with her toes.  This time she tumbled a little, but got one hand on the porthole stanchion.

“I did it!”

Efar had a little grin.  “Better, but you have a ways to go.  We can stay in free fall for a while so you can practice.  It’s your ship, Commander.”  He gave a mocking salute and did a triple somersault across the lounge, exiting cleanly feet first through the aft hatch to the crew quarters.  Zila gritted her teeth in frustration.

In a few hours Zila could float from handhold to handhold, pushing off each stanchion or grab handle with a flick of her fingers, getting just enough velocity to get safely to the next handhold.

“Damn Efar, he was right.  It is all in the wrist!”

At least she knew how to find her center of gravity in free fall. 

It turned out that Efar was not exactly the simple space cowboy he pretended to be.  After watching Scotty and Alon haul themselves around in free fall, she found out that Efar was once a circus performer on the high wire and trapeze.  No one else aboard could do that triple somersault.   She suspected there was a lot more to his simple space cowboy persona.

*****

“Scotty, what do you call your species?”  Zila was eating a meal they called “munch” in the galley with Alon and the engineer.

“Priests.  Just Priests.”

“How can you all be Priests?  I thought all sentient creatures had to evolve into that niche from something else.  You had to have some history other than just serving the Great Sage.”

“No history that matters, Commander.”  Scotty’s expressions were still inscrutable to her, but she thought he was embarrassed somehow.  Perhaps his race was naturally shy.

Zila was sure that was the case when Scotty picked up the last of his meal and took it back to the crew quarters.

“Alon, did I say something to offend him?”

“Well, yes, but you could not know.”

“But I have to know.  This is a small ship tens of light years from here to nowhere.  We have to get along with each other.”

“It’s not my story to tell, Commander.”

“When you start calling me ‘Commander’, I know there is something wrong.  Fess up, Dr. Astrophysicist Navigator, and call me Zila.”

Alon had this habit of looking at his hands when he didn’t want to talk.  He was looking at his hands now.

“Please, Alon.”

“OK.  The reason there is always a Priest around is to sooth their pride, or lack of it.  Rumor is, they were once a great civilization.  Something happened, perhaps a nuclear war like we almost had on Earth, and they fell.  They fell a long way.  For generations their numbers shrunk, they lost their civilization entirely.  They became scavengers.  Rumor is, when the Great Sage found them, they were back to tribal cannibalism.  Their religion was that they were the dregs of the universe and deserving of punishment, and there was no point in learning, or knowing, or building.”

“You know how the Sage feels about knowledge and understanding.  He has been trying to build them back up again.  But they seem to have a permanent inferiority complex.  They don’t trust themselves to compete with other sentients.  So the Sage puts a Priest in every negotiation, in every ship and in every project so they will be there to see, and maybe to climb back to be what they once were.  They never talk about their history.  You will never see any sentient work so hard to learn something.  They are mortified if they make a mistake.  That’s why Scotty took so long to make the grade of Engineer.”

“But he can do the job now?”

“Perfectly, but if you ask him to innovate, he goes blank.”

“Wow.  I used to do that in math class.  Just, well, wow.”

She used to be a simple girl who thought FTL was a useless study.  She used to feel she was an incompetent diplomat about to fluff her first mission.  Commander of an FTL ship?  Diplomatic envoy of the Great Sage?  Wow!

*****

Zila’s  status screen beeped for her watch on deck.  She rolled over in her web hammock, still groggy from sleep with the remnants of a great flying dream still in her head.  She opened one eye.  The status screen showed the Wisdom of Sage was in interdimensional space and on autopilot.  Gravity was at 10%.  There was no emergency.  But she couldn’t ignore it either.  She WAS Commander, damnit! After going to the bridge and checking the few screens she knew how to check, she went to the galley. 

“I wonder if all ship’s crews revolve around food?  I don’t even know what meal this would be.”

In the galley she found Scotty sitting on a cushion on an oversized chair fitted for his strange joints.  She glanced at him as she passed.  He was reading a book and busily underlining and taking notes in English.

 “Good morning, Scotty.  How was your watch?”

“Quiet, Commander, I, uh, mean Zila.”  He replied automatically in his native language.  He looked up and saw she did not have her translator buttons on.  He repeated in English.

“I see you’re reading something in English.  I didn’t know we had real books on board.  Do you mind if I ask what it is?”

“Shakespeare, ‘Mid-Summer Night’s Dream’.  Are you familiar with this, Zila, ma’am?”

“Not since high school.  My school in Athens was taught by a man from Shakespeare’s country, England, and he insisted we study the classics.  In Greece, they still liked stories about the old Greek gods.  What do you make of it?  You must be learning a lot about human culture.”

“There is a lot I don’t understand.  Especially the part about the fairies and elves.  I did not know there were other sentient beings on Earth.”

Zila laughs, “Those are made up.  The idea is that the humans’ play was turned into an object of ridicule by the fairies and elves, with all their intrigues and jealousies.  It was a kind of distorted mirror of the human world of romance and love.”

“Are humans and their gods jealous?  Human mating seems so complicated.”

“Hmm.  It does seem complicated, even to humans.  Don’t Priests have jealousy about their mates?”

“Well, we do have problems in our matings.  But then, we are Priests.  We don’t expect much.”

Zila turned and studied Scotty for a while, while she sipped her coffee and munched a donut.  “Scotty, why don’t Priests talk about their history?  Even to someone like, me, an off-worlder who has no opinion on your species?”

Scotty put down the book and turned away.  He crossed and uncrossed his strangely jointed legs and refused to meet Zila in the eyes.

“Scotty, Did I insult you?  I didn’t mean to.  How can I be a good Commander if I don’t know anything about my crew?  I’m supposed to go out in the galaxy and study many sentients, and I can’t even talk about the species I live with?”

Scotty refused to look up, but spoke in a low voice with his eyes cast down.  “I see from Shakespeare that humans can afford to make fun of themselves.  Priests cannot bear that.  We are the lowest of the low.  Our past was so…. I found the English word…bestial, that we don’t want to remember it.   If it weren’t for the Sage we would still be the carrion eaters we were for thousands of turns after the Fall.”

“Oh.  I think I’m beginning to see.  But you must have had a great civilization once.  Don’t you have histories or legends of that?”

“They are tales whispered in secret, they are legends spoken of by the rebels and radicals.  If any are true, it was many thousands of your years ago.  But, yes, we had a civilization like yours.”  He raised his eyes to her.  “Don’t you understand, Diplomat Zila, how we feel when we meet someone like you from a civilization honored by the Great Sage?  There is no one we would like to know our past less than you.  We will never be able to live up to your standard.  We are cursed as a species.  We are…unworthy.”

“Scotty, I will never speak of this to anyone else.  I honor your teaching in this, and, yes, it is part of what I must know for my mission.   Thank you, esteemed Priest.”

Scotty turned around on his cushion and became a statue.

*****

The deceleration trance was about to begin and Efar, the pilot, addressed the crew.

“Commander Zila..”

“Just Zila, dammit.”

“Zila, Alon and I had a discussion with Miami Customs.  They have tightened up the entry and decontamination routines.  Even to the point where they now insist on DNA tests on every person on board.  We don’t like the sound of it.  Would it be OK if we docked at the Quito Space Elevator instead?  They don’t require all that protocol for us crew if we stay aboard.”

“Did you tell them we were under diplomatic orders from the Sage?”

Alon sighed, “Zila, we argued up, down and sideways.  This is some kind of new insanity.  We tried everything short of an outright bribe.”

Efar laughed, “If it would have worked, we probably would have tried that, too.”

“It will be a few more days getting back to my family.  But, if that’s what it takes…”

“Don’t muck with their procedures when they put you through decontam.  Those people are nutso.   We’ll hang out at the Elevator or in near-space until you call us and either let us go or ask for a pick-up.”

Wisdom of Sage matched synchronous orbits with the mass center of the Elevator, roughly 22,000 miles over Quito, Ecuador.   Zila disembarked through the standard plastic tunnel and lock system.  She went through a chemical shower and a routine decontamination inspection and was sent to an Earth Entry Security station.  A chubby bureaucrat with a badge asked her a lot of rather personal questions, took her DNA sample and held her there for over an hour.  Finally, after checking her diplomatic credentials, which had been diligently filed by the Sage and his retinue, they let her go.

The trip down the elevator was painfully slow.  Fortunately, she had a sleeper berth for the five day trip.  As her chain of elevator pods descended outside the Stalk, another equal group of pods rose on the opposite side.   The pods were transferred from cable to cable at each of three intermediate stations.  Zila gradually felt gravity return.  As it got closer to Earth she began to think she was smothering, but it was only what her body was born to take.

The suborbital plane to Miami was a sardine can, but that only lasted for an hour.  When she finally breathed the humid air of Miami Airport she was mostly accustomed to being home again. 

Manny met her at the terminal with a big hug and a bouquet of flowers.  Zila was so glad to see him she buried her face in his shoulder and just held on with her eyes closed.  So it was a few minutes before she saw his face.  He was worried.

“Manny, is there something wrong?  Are the kids OK?”

“Sure, Z, we still have time to pick them up at preschool.  Do you want to go with me?  You’re probably exhausted from the trip.”

“Are you kidding?  I wouldn’t miss it for the world.  Let’s go.  I don’t have much luggage, except I had better put something over this cat suit they call a uniform.”

“I sure noticed that.  So did everyone else in the terminal.  What is that?”

“It’s a long story, but that’s my uniform as commander of the FTL yacht, Wisdom of Sage.”

“What the hell, Z, you have a space yacht, and an FTL one at that?”

Zila sighed.  “Your little wifey Zila is now Honored Human Emissary and Priest-Seeker to the Sage of Saggitarius, Diplomatic Attachee of OCS and, yes Commander of a real FTL space yacht.  AND, I got a really big raise.  AND, we got patent rights on whatever comes out of all this.  AND, let’s get out of here and see the kids.”

Manny’s jaw dropped, but Zila just grabbed his hand and hauled him out into the streaming, steaming Miami sunlight.

The autocab trip from the airport to Pines Prep took longer than the flight from Quito to Miami.  They reached the sprawling campus at the right time for the pre-schoolers to be set free and well before the older kids and high schoolers were out of class.  Nevertheless there were a lot of moms there for their tikes.  Vincenzo, an intense and wiry five year old going on twenty, clutched the hand of little Leah, who was still in baby fat and curls.  He looked around and spotted Manny and then Zila, just as Zila saw him.  Zila ran over to the kids, scooped them up and gave them big, wet kisses.  Vin squealed, “Mommy, put me down.  All the other kids are looking.”  Zila looked around.  They were not just looking, they were staring and pointing.  “What’s this all about?”  She asked Manny.  He just shrugged and put Leah on his shoulders.  She giggled as they walked back to the autocab.  Zila looked around.  Some of the other kids were pointing and being shushed by their parents.

“Vin, did you do something naughty today?  Why are those kids all pointing at us?”

“No Mommy, they are pointing at Daddy, not you.”

Zila sent an inquiring look at Manny.

“Gene designers are not in political favor right now.  They call us “evil modders”.”

“Mommy, they think I’m a modder, too.  Am I a modder, Mommy?”

Manny rubbed his little shoulders.  “No, Vinny, you’re natural born all human right as you came out of your Mommy.  Not a modder.”

“Then why do they call me a modder if I’m not one?”

“Because you’re very smart, very good at games, you have lovely olive skin coloring and light blue eyes.  You’re a beautiful child.  Some people have to get gene designs to have their kids come out looking like you.”

Leah pulled at Manny’s hair and piped up, “Am I beautiful too?”

“Beautiful and precious and much loved, little girl.  And you look like your mommy, which is a very good thing.”

Zila smiled, but there was a dark hint of worry under it.

*****

“Manny, what is going on here?  When I left you had a booming gene engineering practice.  Everyone wanted better kids, better dogs, cats and cattle.  Now this?”

Manny had always been cheerful and easy going, but now he had a bitter look on his face.  He told an old story.  It started with a particular hitherto unknown, Garry Curimone, who led a small, isolated community of Naturals, a quasi- religious cult.  The Nat cult practiced polygamy and natural childbirth.  They advertised and preached against any kind of scientific advance on birth, humans and non-humans alike, such as in vitro fertilization, fertility drugs, cloning and sleep-growth incubation.  But they reserved their worst venom for gene mods.  They also believed in free range child care, which greatly reduced the strain of raising hordes of children while at the same time scaring the hell out of most cautious parents. 

In the eternal race for political advantage, the Free Fists of Courage, a neo-political party with a minority following, picked up the Nat cause and became their benefactors, and started to funnel money to Curimone.  Curimone, who was not remotely Chinese, found a deep well of sympathy among Chinese supporters, who had been forced to submit to decades of one-child policies and still had many more males than females.  The idea of having many wives and kids was a very attractive proposition to those men.  Curimone preached a mix of hellfire and s****l salvation to these ex-pat Chinese, who were then a significant and prosperous minority.  FFC won several local and two major international elections, and started making p********a, then escalated to regulations. 

Of course, there was a backlash.  The FFC was proclaimed demonic by Christian groups.  They were labeled Luddites by the sci-tech folks.  They were outlawed in several countries and a few states in the Federation of the Americas.  Curimone was investigated for inciting terrorism, or for actually running a terrorist organization.  The investigation concluded with no indictment against Curimone.  The next day he was attacked by a horde of half-n***d women at a Naturist rally celebrating his victory over the evil modders.  The women, armed with fire-hardened stakes and spears, killed and mutilated him.  Some of them were Naturists from his first enclave.

FFC followers armed with fire bombs and Sarin nerve gas attacked the University of Cal-Tex at Sacramento.  Hundreds were killed and more maimed by the gas.  In response, the Federation of the Americas labeled the FFC as terrorists.  Feds surrounded, disbanded and destroyed the Naturals compound, which simply dispersed fanatics into the general population.  The martyred Nats waged a guerilla war, hacked every form of communication from underground locations, issuing threats and polemics.  They became cultural icons.  Their motto became, “Modders ain’t human.  Humans ain’t modders.”  Which morphed into, “They ain’t human so it ain’t murder.”

The Nats and sympathetic religious groups were threatening to kill Manny and trying to outlaw all gene designers and make criminals of their clients. 

“There IS no more gene-mod practice for me, Zila, and I don’t think it’s safe to stay here with the kids.  I want to go back to Ganymede.  Will you go with me?”

“Oh, Manny, I would go anywhere with you, you know that.   But I have a better idea.  I have the Wisdom of Sage, FTL drive, a great crew, and we are very rich.  Let’s go on the adventure of a life time.”

Manny took all of a minute to agree, a few hours to pick up the kids and some clothes.

They left for the Quito Elevator that day. 

Zila breathed a sigh of relief when their pod door closed.  Leah Lee and Vinny had a long and interesting ride as the gravity diminished.

The few days crammed into the pod with Manny, Vin and little Leah were like heaven to Zila.  There was nothing to do and everything to look forward to.  Adventure!

The Wisdom of Sage awaited them at an apex berth.

*****

Zila was worried about the effects of the acceleration trance on Vin and little Leah Lee, so she rushed to their cabin as soon as she was awake.  She was groggy, but the kids were bouncing as if they were just awake from a nap.  Zila had to smile at the site of Leah jumping off every chair and desk, screaming in delight, as she fell slowly to the carpet in the low gravity.  “Mommy look at me!  Look what I can do!”  Zila checked the monitor – yep, 10% g. 

“Mommy, why am I so light?” Vin asked.  Zila looked at his face.  It bore a combination of delight and concern.  She saw that expression the first time he tasted ice cream.  But how do you answer a question like that to a 5 year old?  It turned out it was not much of a problem.  “Is it because we are in space?”  Every kid who watched cartoons knew what space was. 

“Yes, Vin, we are REALLY, REALLY in space!  The ship is set at a much lower gravity than Earth.  Does it make you feel a little weird?”

“It did when I first woke up.  My tummy felt funny and my head felt strange.  But then it went away.”

Of course, Zila thought, kids at Leah’s age are portable people and used to being carried, rocked, tossed in the air.   Eventually they outgrow it.  Around Vin’s age.

Zila thought, we better not spend much time at low gravity.  Their bones are still growing.  She tucked that away for future research.

*****

“Manny, be glad we have a space yacht like Wisdom of Sage.  Why take a chance that the nut cases back home would hurt you or the kiddies?”

Manny let out a sigh and made a frown.  Zila knew him as an “up” person, never cross, never bitter, always the master of his fate.  “Because I was the best.  I was at the top of my profession.  And now I have no profession, I’m running away and I never even joined the fight.  It isn’t right.”

“Is there any basis to the claims that human genetic manipulation was causing freaks who died young?”

“None of mine had any problems.  None were reported in the journals I read.  With all the spin artists and vicious p********a I can’t really know.  Maybe there was a cut-rate asshole who turned out freaks.  Maybe he was paid to do it by the religious nuts.  Maybe it’s all fabricated.  But there is no way to fix ANYTHING by driving out the best practitioners!”

“So its just a religious and political issue?”

“At the moment.  The same types that refuse to believe in evolution and want to preach “alternative theories”.  As if evolution was just some theory.  But the politicians smell blood in the water and they are shoveling up constituencies who want to make changes to the laws.  Freakicides.  Evil modders.”  Manny shook his head.  Zila had never seen him depressed before. 

“Well, maybe we can cheer you up a bit.  I asked Efar to find us a planet not too far away that was reasonably safe for us and had an Earthlike gravity for the kids.  It’s called Riscid.  It’s about forty light years anti-spinward in this spiral arm.  Believe it or not, the evolutionary advantage of the Riscid sentients is humor.”

“Humor, Z?  They survive on humor?”

“Yep, they experience selection pressure from their ability to be funny.”

“What do they look like?”

“Turtles, I think.”

*****

“Vin and Leah, come listen to Mommy.  After munch the ship will turn off its thrusters and coast for a while, then it will start slowing down for our next stop.  OK?”

“Can I have a donut for munch?” 

“You already had your donut today.  You can’t eat just donuts.”

“Why not?”

“Listen. When we turn off the engines there won’t be any gravity at all.  We’ll be in free fall.  Vinnie, do you know what that is?”

“Sure.  That’s when Wendy the Wanderer gets turned upside down in her spaceship and bangs her head.”

What the hell did they do all day at Pine Hill, watch cartoons?  Well, at least this cartoon helped.

“Mommy and Da are going to give you special booties so you can stick to the carpet.  When the gravity turns off Efar will show you how to move in free fall.  You won’t bang your head, OK?”

Vin looked worried but Leah was dancing around in a circle going, “La la, I’m Wendy the Wanderer, la la la.”  That didn’t keep her from pitching a fit when the booties tripped her up on the way to the galley. 

On second thought, Zila said to herself, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to have fed the kids just before their first freefall. 

Crumbs are an inhalation danger in freefall, and keeping Leah Lee free of crumbs was not really possible.  A certain percentage of every thing she ate was donated to her clothes and environment.  Which meant everywhere.  So Efar and Zila went after the floating crumbs with sticky “butterfly nets” while Manny clung to the carpet and dusted Leah thoroughly.  It wasn’t Manny’s first freefall, but he never got much practice either.  Ganymede was a low-grav colony, though, so he was generally competent in space.

Vin was another issue entirely.  He caromed off every surface like a berserk ping pong ball.  It didn’t matter to him whether he landed head first or elbow first.  He made an “ouch” face and caromed onward. 

“They don’t seem to need much instruction, Zila.  Maybe we should just leave them the joy of discovery?”

“You’re right, Efar.  Just stand by to rescue them if they do get in trouble.  Can I give you some advice?”

“Sure.”

“Never be a mommy.”

“Heh, not much danger there.  Hey Vin, if you curl up like this you can do flips.”

*****

As usual, the long interdimensional hop was filled with boring ship’s routine, even with the kids, who were never short of questions and energy.  One late shift found Zila sitting alone in the galley with a coffee and her latest treat, a real bagel from Earth, one of the few dozen she had acquired for a long voyage.  She heard whizzing and clashing noises coming from the lounge, so she poked her head around the hatch to see what it was.  There was Efar, with a padded wooden pillar stuck to the carpet and a sword.  “A sword?  Is that a real sword, Efar?”

“Yes, Zila.  It’s one of my hobbies.  I practice swordsmanship.  Who knows, it might come in useful some day.”

“Weird hobby for an FTL pilot.  How did you come by that anachronism?”

Efar looked at his sword.  It was a meter of steel with a crosspiece and a gilded two-handed haft.  It was badly nicked and scratched.  “This is my practice sword.  I call it “Flyswatter.”  He wacked the practice bollard with it a few times.  “I have a real sword, too.  Want to see it?”

“Sure.”

“Toss that bagel over here.”  They were at 10% gravity for the kids.  Zila calculated and threw the bagel, tumbling, across the lounge.  She had just noticed the haft of another sword showing over Efar’s shoulder.  In a split second, Efar drew the sword,  zinging, from its scabbard and sliced the bagel in half along its circumference.  The two halves continued on their trajectory.  A single, tiny crumb floated free.  The sword glimmered and pinged slightly. 

“Wow, and double wow.  Is that what you do for a hobby, Conan?” 

“Who’s Conan?  Oh, Conan the Barbarian.  I saw that once.”  He grinned and showed her the sword.  “This was a gift from the Sage.  Solid diamond blade, grown in space from a single crystal, with a molecular edge.  Ten times harder than any steel.”  He held it out, fingertips on the flat of the blade.  “Don’t touch it, it cuts everything at the least touch.”

The light from the overhead illumination caught the blade and bounced inside, leaking out at unexpected places in a rainbow of colors.  “It’s absolutely stunning, Efar.  Does it have a name?”

“Glimmer.  This is Glimmer.  Conan never had a sword like this.”  He caught the two halves of the bagel on the rebound and sheathed the sword.  “Mind if I share?”

“They’re scarce, but you’ve got the sword, good knight, so I yield.   Any way you could teach me, and maybe Manny, to use a sword?”

Efar bowed and swept an imaginary hat off his head.  “As my lady wishes.  I am your gallant knight.”

Manny appeared around the edge of the lounge entrance and leaned inside. Hie was still looking a bit depressed.  “Efar, I really would enjoy learning to use a sword.  Never know when you might meet an orc or a dragon.”

“Come on, Manny, don’t be sarcastic.  Efar already agreed to teach you.”

Manny felt like he was losing the role of protector.  After being driven out of his chosen profession on Earth, he needed something to restore his self-esteem.   Free fall swordsmanship seemed to be the thing. 

Efar proved once again to be much more than just a plain old pilot, though he always claimed “it’s all in the wrist.”

*****

With a few weeks to adapt to space travel, Vin and Leah were just fine.  They were naturals.  Soon enough, they were approaching Riscid orbit.

“Do we need to get landing clearance, or what?   This is our second orbit.”  Zila was wearing out a path in the bridge carpet between Alon and Efar. 

“According to our nav AI they don’t have radio yet.  No way to ask for landing permission.  They live near oceans.  Efar, what do you say we just set down someplace near an ocean?”

“This space yacht is no helicopter.  It lands heavy and makes a mess on takeoff from inside a gravity well.  Commander?”

“Don’t ‘Commander” me!  I know you’re just passing the buck and you know I know squat about this planet.”  The planet in question, Riscid in the nav log, rolled below, a lovely blue, green and white sphere.  Sensors showed a mid-latitude temperature of 18 Celsius, breathable air, and a gravity of 85% g.  As they passed the night side, a reddish Type M star rose over a partly cloudy atmosphere.  A small moon could be seen near the sunset terminator.  There would be equally small tides.  All in all, thought Zila, not a bad choice for refugees.  And there were sentients there!

“Length of the day is 21.2 standard hours, length of the year is 103 local days.”  Alon announced.  “Logged visits roughly every local year in the last ten standard years.  That’s as far back as the nav log goes.  All from the Great Sage fleet.”  Alon looked up from his display.  “That means the Sage does business here.”

“Sounds too benign to be a challenge sufficient to evolve a sentient race.”  Zila tapped her lower lip, a habit of hers when she was working on a problem.  “But the energy signature is there, and this is certainly a Goldilocks planet.”

“What does that mean, Zila?”

“Oh, Scotty, I didn’t see you come onto the bridge.  Any problem?”

“Not yet, but if you are planning to put this ship down on a muddy seashore there will be.  I came up to find out.”

“Looks like a rocky outcrop near the seashore down there.”  Efar pointed to his pilot’s display and zoomed in until the image began to blur from atmospherics.  “Let me make one more orbit and see that spot in different illumination so I can get some idea of the terrain.  It’s not far from the sunrise terminator now.  A couple hours should tell the tale.”

“Ok, as your esteemed and duly appointed commander I hereby command you to do whatever.  Just don’t squish my kiddies.”

Efar chuckled.  “Aye aye, Commander.”  Alon kept a stony face.  Zila went to find Manny and strap in the kids.

*****

Zila sat in her command chair during the descent, watching Efar sweat down a vehicle that was never intended for such use.  As they passed through the upper layer of clouds, what would be cirrus clouds in Earth, the ship began buffeting wickedly.  Manny was in the kids cabin and Scotty was down in the engine room.  “Down” was now a real word.  Her display read “82% g”.  It would stop at 85%, she remembered.  Not far to go.  Just hold on for a while.  She pushed the intercom button, “Manny, everything OK?”

“OK so far.”

“Not much further, just hold on a little longer.”

“Efar, how do you manage to land at spaceports like Miami?”

“This ain’t no spaceport.  Miami has an automated landing system.  I just turn everything over and their AI talks to our AI and it goes pretty smooth.  I’m good, but nothing comes close to an AI’s reaction time.  I’m always playing catch up with attitude, speed, drift, position.  By the time I’ve got one on spot the others are off.”

“Oh.  I better let you get on with it.”

*****

It took a few minutes for the rock dust blasted upward by their exhaust to settle.  Zila watched how Efar switched to sensor screens all around the ship to survey their location.  Their plasma exhaust had glassified a fifty meter swath of what looked like granite, and they now sat in a shallow glass bowl.  It was still before local noon. 

“Alon, how far do you figure we are from the most likely settlement?”

“A half hour walk if the way isn’t too rough.  Shipsuits and knapsacks.”

“Efar, can you bring your sword, Glimmer?  And Scotty, you should wear your Priest-Seeker clothes and maybe carry a weapon as well?”

“I agree, Zila.”

“OK, guys.  Alon, you and Manny and the kids stay here and listen for us, in case we get into any trouble.  Let’s lower the ramp.”

Zila, Efar and Scotty climbed down to the embarkation deck.  She thought that “down” was still a remarkable thing.  The outer airlock door opened and the floor unfolded to become a ramp.  The ramp extruded itself to the ground.  It was pretty steep, but she noticed there were ribs in it, like the Miami marinas used on docking ramps.  The outer airlock closed, sealed and tested itself.  On command, the inner airlock door cycled and they entered.  There was plenty of room.  The outer door opened and they were surveying a blasted rocky outcrop from a height of five meters.  She led them down the ramp.  There was that “down” thing again.  How long would it take her to get used to living in a gravity well again?  Zila reshouldered her back pack and shot her arm out toward the direction of their march.  The air smelled like burnt rock with a slight tang of sulfur.  “Brimstone, I’ve led my family and crew into Brimstone Terr-it-tory” she sang.

Efar laughed, but then he pushed ahead of her and took the lead.  She followed the hilt of Glimmer to the muddy shore.  Even accustomed as her muscles were to ship gravity, it wasn’t a tiring walk.  As they approached, the brimstone smell was replaced by the familiar iodine odor of seaweed.

Scotty followed dutifully behind, resplendent in his shiny robe.

Efar held out his hand to stop them.  He pointed.  There was a rounded object in the soft, rather muddy, soil ahead of him.  It was painted.  As she watched.  Others rose slowly.  They were surrounded. 

“That’s them – the Riscids.”

But nothing further happened.  She thought, a diplomat must be patient.  And she was, for about another half hour.  To hell with this, she thought. She slipped past Efar and went up to the first object.  It was a shell.  It looked damned tough and she could not see an opening.  She went right up and knocked on it.  “Knock, knock, I’m Zila, Priest Seeker from the Great Sage.”

The smallest of cracks appeared around the shell.  A thin stalk extruded.  A blue eye formed on the end of the stalk.  At least she thought it was an eye.  She beckoned Scotty forward.  The eyestalk turned in every direction to take them all in, and went back to Scotty.  The shell popped open a bit more.  A few more eyestalks came out and looked around, in an independent cross-eyed fashion.  Then an obvious head extruded, looking much like a turtle’s head.  Two more extrusions pushed out the back.  The creature rocked back, revealing a lower shell a bit more rounded and deeper than the top shell. 

“Hello, I’m Zila.  Perhaps you saw my ship land?  Do you have a name?”

The shell spoke.  “Oh, we saw your ship land.  There was no way to miss it.  Of course it could have been a volcano.  Why do you think we’re all zipped up tight here?  Who did you say you were again?  Hard to hear through a sealed shell, you know.”

“I’m Zila from the Great Sage.”

“The Great Sage, you say?  Yep, that’s a Priest.  But your kind we never saw before.  I’m Brooss.”

“I’m a human from Earth, a distant planet spinward from here in this spiral arm.  But I’m also a Priest in the service of the Great Sage.  How come you were surprised?  I know the Sage’s ships call here regularly.”

“Not on this continent.  They land across the narrow sea.  You could have cooked us all.”

Oops, a very bad start for diplomacy.  Try again, girl. 

“We have creatures on our planet that look a bit like you.  We call them turtles.”

“Really?  Can you show us a picture?  We are a very curious group here.  We were having a joke session when you blasted down.”

Joke session?  Right.  Picture?  Check.  Portable display should be in the knapsack.  She pulled it out, poked at it for a few seconds and held it out to Brooss.  A frond popped out and grabbed it.  It was very fine, but remarkably strong for something that looked like a cross between a fern and tentacle.  Another shell opened, then another.  Creatures propped themselves up and sledded forward, pushing with their hind protrusions.  Brooss passed the picture around. 

“We have a bit of humor about that turtle, named Myrtle.  Want to hear it?”

Heads extruded ever further,  “Yes, yes”.

“Turtle in her shell, how can you tell?  How can Myrtle the Turtle, in such a fix, be so fertile?”

Heads moved in and out, in and out, and a slowly the audience began to make a rhythmic sound, “Tick, tick, tick” like a very loud cheap alarm clock.  Zila looked at Scotty, who still had no readable expression.  Efar was chortling quietly.  “The translation device has no words for this, but I think they are laughing.”

“Mating is always a good subject for humor.  Maybe we should be glad that you came to the wrong continent.  Even if your humor does not translate well, at least you have a sense of humor.  None of the other Priests ever did.  How do they ever find a mate?”

“They have an invisible shell that prevents humor AND mating, Brooss.” And may Scotty never hear this translated into any language he knows.

The ticking this time was instantaneous.  Heads popped in and out and eyestalks went around and around.

Having made the rounds, Brooss handed back her display.  “You are a human, you said?  How do humans mate?”

“Very often and not often well.”  More ticking.  “Then our babies start out helpless and take a long time to grow up, and by then their parents have grown down and they are helpless.  So the babies take care of the parents and world goes around again.”  Not much ticking there.  They are a tough audience, and you are not a stand-up comic.  Face it girl.

“We have that same name as yours on Earth.  A person named Bruce is strong and bold and a leader.”

“Here it means the one whose shell snaps shut first.”  Much ticking.

“Is mating here sometimes a lot of trouble, Brooss?”  Light ticking.

“Hah, it could not be MORE trouble.  Do you know how we mate?”

“I would like to hear of it.  I’m a biologist.”

“When a male and a female decide to mate, first they stop eating to lose mass.”

“Sounds familiar so far.”

“Then they go to a very safe place.”

“So do we.”

“Then one partner gets out of his or her shell and slides into the other partner’s shell.”

“Wow, talk about living together.  Who does the decorating?”  Lots of ticking.

“There they stay until the kids climb out of that shell, which could be a year.”

“What happens to the empty shell?”

“You see the problem.  A lot can happen to a shell in a year.  Then there’s the question of who gets to move into the abandoned shell and who gets to keep the shared shell, which is always the better maintained and usually the larger one?”

“And what happens if they don’t agree?  You can’t have adversaries living in the same shell, can you?”

“Oh, yes you can.  Whatever you can imagine, happens.  If you can’t laugh at it, you can’t live with it.  Your mate has to have a great sense of humor.”

“When we are sprats we return to the sea to eat and grow our shells.  Once we are adults, those shells are harder than rock and they seal very tight.   We can adjust our buoyancy and sink to the lowest depths of an ocean, or rise to the top, or live out on the land.  Nothing on this planet can c***k a shell.  We can live days without food, water or air in our shells.  So there is no way to punish a mate or a thief who steals a shell.  And we live a long, long time.”

“You could pass a spaceship over them.”

Silence.  Heads retracted into shells and eyestalks disappeared.

“Not One Bit Funny, Zila Human.  But, you could not know.  The only punishment we have is to roast them.  It is a terrible, slow painful death.  I will not talk about it now.”

“I am deeply apologetic.  I am still young for a human, and not experienced as a true diplomat.  In fact, the Great Sage chose me for quite a different mission.”

“Ah, the Great Sage.  Another sentient with no humor.”

“That is not true, Brooss.  The Great Sage has showed me a strange but rich sense of humor.”

“Wait.  You were WITH the Great Sage?  In person?”

“For many days.  He worked with me to form this mission.  Do you see these?”  Zila pointed to her translation disks.  “He made these for me.  He made them in his stomach.  They allow me to understand and to talk to just about any sentient.”

Shells opened again.  Heads and eyestalks popped out and peered around.

“Tell us more about the Great Sage.” 

“He is much larger than humans, about the size of that boulder over there.  He has no eyes or ears, but hears through his feet and with an implant.  His memory is in his belly.  He is thousands of your years old.  He has been very kind and generous to me and my mate.  Why is that so important to you?”

“Because the Great Sage owns about 25% of the best businesses on this planet.  No one has ever met him or described him.  His Priests come here to collect trade goods and proceeds and we never have any discourse with them.  And you say he has a sense of humor?  What kind of humor?”

“Do you see this patch on my shipsuit?  The two scrolled curves?  He has two tongues.  I have only one tongue, and it’s short.  (She sticks it out.) His are longer than this (she stretches out both arms).  This logo is his symbol, and it’s his two tongues rolled in opposite directions, like this (she stands sideways puts her arms on top of each other and curls her hands in opposite directions).  On my world, sticking your tongue out is a sign of rebellion and disrespect.  He knew that.  He is sticking his tongues out at the whole galaxy.”

Not much ticking but lots of head bobbing and eyestalk movement.

“It doesn’t translate as humor to us.  But that coloring you have, that is not you but some sort of covering?”

“Yes.  It’s a shipsuit, for creatures without such impenetrable shells as yours it gives us some protection from heat and cold.”

“I would like to see what you look like underneath it, please.”

Dammit, she was blushing furiously.  She could only hope that her crew, standing behind her, didn’t see that.  Zila was no prude, but how did it always seem to come to this?”

She reached into her knapsack and took out the spoon-like gadget that came with the suit.  “Efar, Scotty, please turn around.  I’m taking one for the Company.”

She unsealed the top of the suit and let it hang down.  A frond popped out and touched the fabric.  Another frond touched her n****e.  She shivered, partly from the cold, partly from the touch.

“What is this for?”  Brooss touched her n****e again. 

“For feeding babies.” 

Efar sniggered.  How did he understand Riscid speech?  Zila had better not underestimate him.

“Humans are far more alien than we could ever imagine.  Whatever holds you all together in there?”

She zipped up her shipsuit.  Let the guys stand backwards as long as they could.

“Will you tell us some more about the Great Sage?”

“I can tell you a little.  Every sentient must tell his own story.

“The Great Sage came from some place very far away, maybe not even from this galaxy.  As I told you, he has no eyes, ears or vocal organs but hears through a device implanted in his huge head and through his feet.  Yet he instantly knows who you are and what you need.  His knowledge and understanding are way beyond any creature we know. ”

Brooss interrupted, “And, of course he is very wealthy.  He purchased maybe 15% of the best businesses on our planet and managed to finagle another 10%.  He will bargain us out of our shells if we let him. Up until now we doubted he was real, or perhaps he was really a group of sentients.  I suppose we should get on with your tour of the Great Sage industries near us.”

“Tomorrow will be soon enough for that.  For now, I have a simple request.”

“What request?”

“Do you know what DNA is?”

“The tiny thread of life in every cell?  That is the most basic biology.  We are well beyond that.”

“I need a tiny sample of your DNA, hopefully from a few individuals. It will be painless.”

“Painless like three mates in a shell, or painless painless?”

“No pain, no damage.”

“Hobva, slide over here.”

A shell in the back row pushed through the mass of nearer shells and came up to Zila.

“Show Hobva the sampling tool.”

Zila held out a cotton swab, hiding the needle sampler on the other end.  Hobva said quietly, “I allow it” and opened his shell.  There was nothing like a turtle’s curved spine or any visible bones at all.  They looked more like the mantle of a conch, and the inside of the shell was a pearly nacre.  Zila swabbed the cotton and jabbed the mantle.  Hobva seemed fine with it all.  She stowed the sample in her sampling vial and got out another.”

“Who else?”

“Brooss will allow.”

She processed Brooss and four others.

“Which of these are female and which are male?”

“I am female, Hobva is male.  We are former mates.  Of the others you have equal males and females. It should be a sufficient DNA sample.  Why do you want it?”

“It is my real mission.  We are tracing the tree of life to its roots.  We are studying how sentience develops all over the galaxy.”

“A worthy mission, human.  May you return to instruct us when you have the answers.”

She waved her arms over the assembled group. “Goodbye for now.  Tomorrow is another day.”  Moderate ticking ensued.  She hoisted her pack and led off down the trail.

“Looks like you got what you want.  Tough job you have.  Zila the stripper diplomat.”

“Don’t even go there, Efar.  I was ready to have you do it.”

“Sorry, not the way I meant it.”

“And NEVER mention it to Manny.”  She glared at Efar, and Scotty just so he didn’t feel left out.

They were back in the ship an hour before a glorious sunset. 

*****

“What was your impression of the Riscid turtles?” Manny was lounging in the galley with pancakes made from a powdered mix that was still in good supply. Zila was still half asleep and one cup of coffee did not seem enough.  She was trying to clear her mind enough to plan the day’s outing, or “corporate inspection” as the Riscids would call it.

“More like oysters than turtles.  They even have blue eyes on the end of their eyestalks.  Pass the coffee, please.”

“Hmm.  Are they safe?  I mean, is there a threat of violence?”

“I’m sure they have weapons, but if you come with a shell like an armor-plated hickory nut, you don’t really need a strong offensive weapon, do you?”

“No, it doesn’t seem worth the time and energy on this level of technical civilization.  By the way, I finished analyzing their DNA, first level analysis, anyway.”

“And?”

“Eukaryotes, obviously.  40 chromosomes, one of which may be a shortened chromosome like the human Y chromosome.  The codes for unzipping the chromatin for meiosis are there, just like ours, with a SNIP here and there to show a long and quite separate evolution from us.  Repair enzymes, double lipid cell layer, telomeres, all there.  Genetically they are mollusks, as you would think from their oyster-like insides, but they have only about 55 percent of known mollusk operons.  Still, that is an amazing result for a species that has never shared an ocean with anything on Earth.”

“Manny, you are best thing that ever happened to me.  You have taught me biology in so many different ways…”

“Z, the kids are still asleep, and I don’t see anyone from the crew.”

“Umm,  hold that thought for later.”  Z dropped her eyes and stared down at her hands.  “I’d like to take the kids out to see the Riscids.  With you there, of course.”

“WHAT!  Do you have any idea what the risks are?  No, wait.  You want the Riscids to see human offspring.  Don’t you?  No way, Z, those are my kids, too.  Too dangerous.  We didn’t save them from the nutsos on Earth to have them swallowed up in the shell of some oversized clam.”

“Aren’t you curious, too?  We could have Efar stand by with a weapon.”

“What’s Efar going to do, clang his fancy sword against one of those impervious shells?  How the hell is Efar going to do anything useful?”

“Well, how about letting Efar guard them a safe distance away and have Alon stand by with a laser?”  She began to pout.  It was her best argument.

“How about Alon and I each guard one kid at a distance I think is safe, and we will each snatch a kid and run like hell at the first sign of anything weird.”

That earned him a hug and several kisses. 

*****

So Vin and Leah were packed into hastily made kid carriers and trundled out to the Riscid meeting area by mid-morning.  The place was packed with mounds of shells, with an occasional eyestalk showing.  Manny, with Vin, and Alon, with Leah squirming and pointing, stayed well back.  Zila and Scotty, in his robes, went forward.  Efar held the fort.

“That one with the red and yellow paint s***h.  That’s Brooss.

The designated shell popped open and extruded a head and two stout pusher feet.  Brooss extruded a complaint, “About time you showed up.  We’ve all been waiting patiently, staring at the inside of our shells.”  Moderate ticking.

“That’s their laughter, that ticking sound.”  Z called back to Manny.  Vin was standing up in his carrier trying to take in everything at once.

From somewhere under her, Brooss exhumed a kind of bowl with a series of rollers under it.  She plopped her undershell into the declivity in the bowl.  It fit perfectly.  Zila could see that these shells were not as clumsy as she originally thought.  Two tentacles came out of the shells and attached themselves to rough areas on each side of the bowl, securing it to the lower shell.  Brooss pushed off on her personal roller sled and twisted her head back to call, “Follow me and watch the mud.”

Off she went, followed by a dozen more sled pushers, followed by Zila, huffing and puffing, and Alon and Manny struggling valiantly in the rear.  Vin kept yelling “Giddyup!” and Leah Lee just shrieked.

“Are those your human sprats?” 

Breathless, Zila replied, “Mine and Manny’s.  That’s my mate in the back with our male offspring, Vinnie, and our daughter, Leah.  Who are you?”

“I thought you would recognize me.  I’m Hobva, Brooss’s last mate.”

“Your ex-mate has quite a sense of humor.”

“I am flattered by such high praise, but you have to live with her to really understand her humor.  She can be quite the drama queen.”

Can that be an accurate translation?  Better leave it just lie there.  “Do you have a specialty, Hobva?”

“I’m a bio-engineer.  I make new creatures, or put useful parts in old creatures.”

“Wow.  My mate, Manny, is a gene designer.  Maybe you and he can compare notes.  Oh, wait, I’m the only one here with these translation disks that can speak your language.”

“We can draw pictures.”

“Hobva, do you have seasons or life cycles that alternate living on land with living in the sea?  Manny says you are really sea creatures, from looking at your DNA.”

“He got all that just from our DNA?  I DO have to talk to him!  Well, he is right.  We used to spend more time in the sea, but there are parasites and a few tiny chewing things that get into our shells.  They cluster around the seals and get in as soon as we c***k an opening.  The parasites are fatal, but the chewers are a misery.  Both are more active this time of year.  So we live on land this season.”

“Do you have knowledge of electricity, and the nature of light?”

“We have studied electric creatures in the sea.  We make lenses to bend light for microscopes and telescopes.  We think there is a lot more to know, but electric experiments must be done on dry land, very dry land.  It’s uncomfortable.”

“Oh, that explains a lot.  When we came here we thought you might be able to talk to us by radio.  I guess you don’t have radio yet.”

“What’s ‘radio’”?

“A way to talk at very long distances.”

“But we already do that with little molecules in the water or air.  How do you think we knew you were here and when to meet you?”

How stupid of me to underestimate these sentients.  Oversized clams, indeed!  “Maybe we can find a way to help you communicate where there is no air or water, like space.”

“THAT would be most useful to keep your ship from baking us accidentally.”

Ouch.

*****

They were on a beach near a shallow, muddy estuary.  There was an island covered in brilliant green something not far from shore.  The pack of Riscid shells were parked in a semicircle around the humans’ group.

“If you stay on the stepping stones you will not have to go through the mud.  We make green fiber for the Great Sage on that island.”

Zila carefully explored the first stepping stone with her foot and put her weight on it.  It held.  She proceeded out a way and beckoned to Manny.  The Riscids just sledded across the mud beside the stepping stones.  There was a ridge down the bottom shell that acted like a skid.  Every shell had a few eyestalks out, and a head protruded here and there.

Zila stepped on what looked like a large stone.  It was like standing on ice.  Down she went, into the mud, almost hip deep in it.  So did Manny, behind her, with Vin strapped on his back.  He went down flailing his arms and trying not to fall backwards.

Ticking erupted all around them.  It went on some time.  The damned overgrown clams had played them for a pratfall!  After she stopped being too angry to think, she floundered in the thick mud to see if Vin and Manny were safe.  Manny was digging mud out of his hair, his mouth and his pants.  Vin was being a true boy-child and throwing himself backwards in it and jumping off the stepping stones over and over again. 

“Here, let me help you get that mud off.  Turn around.”  Manny climbed up on a stone and pulled off his shoes to scrape out the mud there.  The ticking went on and on.  Just as Manny managed to get himself reasonably mud free, he slipped and went down again.  The ticking redoubled in volume.  Every shell had a head waving around in circles, moving in and out. They had pulled off the Perfect Prank on the diplomatic visitor from the Great Sage and it was a legend that would be passed down for generations.

Zila went after Vinnie, who she thought was safe on one of the stones.  NOOO!  He was riding on a Riscid like it was a Galapagos tortoise in the park!

And the Riscid, whoever it was, was enjoying it!  Fronds held Vinnie gently on the shell while flipper-feet churned madly.  The shell made a furrow in the mud at about the speed of a good marathon runner.  Never underestimate a sentient in their own environment!  Never underestimate a five-year-old boy!

Eventually, Hobva, came pulling a shallow sled that had many of the features of a Riscid’s lower shell, with ramp to make entrance easy.  Zila and Manny rode on the mudsled while Vin got a shellback ride.  Hobva and another Riscid with a brilliant yellow shell decoration pedaled the mudsled with their back “feet” and it moved smoothly through the mud to the green island.  It landed on a short shelf of harder clay with a bump. 

“This is one of our key crops for the Great Sage.  It is a kind of sea grass we have mutated into a source of very soft, strong fibers.  We are told that it is the source of the long coverings that many Priests wear over their skins.”

“Wow.  I have a dress made of that.  Wonderful stuff!”

Brooss than went into such lengths over the yield, tonnage, scheduling, history and the next several years production planning that Zila’s eyes rolled back into her head.  “Enough, Brooss, you must be an accountant.”

“I am the one that prepares all the numbers for the Great Sage’s sea grass in this continent.  Yess!”  Her eyestalks waved wildly, which Zila took as a sign of pride.

“Are you ready for the next tour?”

“Thanks, Brooss, I think the kids need a break and we will return them to the ship.”  Zila was NOT going to give them another opportunity to top the last pratfall.  Little Vinnie, however, covered gloriously with mud, complained about being removed.  Zila took him firmly by the arm and stuffed him, mud and all, back into Manny’s backpack.

Finally out of the mud and into clean clothes, Manny pointed out the salon portal to a large yellowish mound not far away.  “That doesn’t look natural.  Mind of I just check that out?  Efar, want to take a short walk?”

“If you like.  That looks like mine tailings to me.”

“Yeah, me too.  Wonder what kind of mine is being worked by sea creatures?”

Efar strapped on his back scabbard with Glimmer and led the way.  It was only a few minutes easy walk to the pile.  Manny took a sample in a small vial and they returned to the ship without any further adventure.

“Seems pretty heavy for dirt.  Let’s see what the lab instruments have to say about it.”  Manny prepped the sample for the infrared reflectometer and mass spectrometer, saving half the sample for further analysis in case anything interesting showed up.  He let the automated instruments work and went to the salon.

“Not a bad culture, actually.”  Alon nibbled on a sandwich that oozed red sauce.

“I’ve seen a lot worse.  I could almost like these turtles, except for their pratfall humor.  But I remember my military combat instructor used to laugh before he beat me up.  Sort of takes the fun out of humor, you know.”  Efar had some kind of smelly cheese on toast that only he seemed to enjoy.

“It takes a lot of courage to make fun of a hostile universe.  That is truth.”  Everyone turned to Scotty, amazed that he would volunteer such a statement. 

Manny nodded his head.  “I agree.  That is a truth, not just a Riscid truth.”  Everyone agreed and the salon was silent while the rest of the meal went down.

Manny left early to check the progress of the automated analyzers.  He looked at the results in shock and ran back to the salon.  Zila and Efar were still there.

“You know that pile of stuff we sampled?  You’ll never guess what it is.”

“OK, enlighten us, O Wizard of the Lab.”

“I bet it’s a trash pile.”

“It’s gold.  95% AU.  22 carat gold.  About a megaton of it.”

“Wow.  We’ve got to find out more about that tomorrow.  Now, remember, it belongs to the Riscids.  No stealing!”

“Damn your high ethics, Zila.  I could retire and pilot a ship of my own with a sack full of that.”

“No, you would need a few tons, and you would look damn suspicious trying to buy a ship with almost pure gold.  Down, boy!”

“Aargh.”

In spite of Zila’s warnings, everyone was anxious for an early start, even Scotty, who must have found out from Efar. 

“Guys, let me do the negotiations.  That’s supposed to be my job.  OK?”

“Sure, go to it.”

Hobva met them at the ramp after a short wait.  “Good to see you, human Zila.  I have to show you my own project today.  You will be impressed.”

“Does it involve slippery rocks and mud?”

“Tick, tick, tick.  No mud.  No rocks.  I promise.  Tick, tick tick.”

“OK. Please lead on Hobva.  Oh but wait.  I’m curious about that pile of stuff over there.  What is it?”

“Oh, nothing important.  That’s just waste product.  We are algae eaters.  We have gills inside our shells to strain seawater for algae, but when we are on land we use a kind of machine gill.  It pumps seawater and extracts algae and other foods.  The minerals that cannot be digested are emitted as a waste product.  That is one of them.  Sorry for spoiling the view.”

Zila could hear Efar trying to swallow his tongue.  “Hobva, that mineral is worth something to the Great Sage.  Will you sell some of it to us?”

“Sell it?  I would pay you to take it away, but wait, Brooss, my ex-mate, is supposed to be our accountant as well.  What will you trade for my weight in waste product?”

Zila consulted with Efar in English.  “How many radios do we have on board?”

“If you count the marker beacons, we have several hundred.”

“Hobva, do you remember my telling you about radio?  It will let you talk long distance and even in space, where no small communications molecules will work.”

“Yess, that was an interesting thing.  It would be useful.  It would be useful, yess.”

“I will offer you enough radios for all your needs in this village for as much of that waste product as we can carry.  Do you need to consult with Brooss or any others?”

“For a deal like that?  No.  It is done.  We will need (a nest of filaments sprouted from his shell) that many radios.  Can you provide them?”

Zila looked at Efar, who was still counting filaments.  “We can deliver.”  His grin nearly split his face.

The surprise of this highly profitable transaction set a happy tone for the rest of the excursion.  “Meaning and Profit,” indeed.

Hobva sledded ahead and brought the group to a building much larger than anything they had seen among the Riscids so far.  Swarms of shells were involved in work gangs around the building and constantly moving through the open arched entrance.  Not surprisingly, Zila discovered the building was adobe, sunbaked mud with plant fibers in it.  It took a while for her eyes to adjust to the dimmer light inside.  There was an enormous bulging object.

Hobva was literally dancing around in excitement.  “This is the Vind Ov.  My creation!”

Zila walked cautiously around it.  It seemed to be about 30 meters across and roughly oval.  She knocked on the surface – it seemed familiar but she could not place it.  A little further and she came into view of a portal, and suddenly the image snapped together.  “I’ll be damned.  Hobva, it’s a space ship!  Your people are going into space!”

“Yess, yess, yess!  Do you recognize the shape?”

Zila walked around a bit more.  It was hard to see more than just the rounded bottom, and then she knew.  What could be safer for a Riscid?  It was a giant shell.  But how did they make such a seamless object without high tech methods?

“It’s a giant shell.  But how did you make it?  I don’t see any seams.”

“I’m a genetic engineer, like your mate.  I invent new organisms.  I grew this shell, but it is not like a living shell inside.  It has life support and propulsion.  And now it has radio!”

“This is a great achievement, Hobva, for you and for your entire kind.  We are honored to meet a people that are just now becoming space-faring.  But,”  she had a mischievous twist to her mouth, “I know this is just a way to get three people in a shell.”

The ticking began slowly, but it spread until the whole building sounded like a bunch of runaway clocks.  Hobva extruded a ring of feelers and his eyestalks turned round and round.

They stowed as much gold as the ship could carry safely and took off.  “How much booty did we get, aaarrr?”

“About 100 metric tons, worth about 4 billion international credits.  We hardly touched that pile.”

“Well, it will be bigger if we ever get back there.”

“Remember, guys, we have a mission.  I don’t know how much an Allurion seed is worth, but I bet we didn’t make enough to pay for this one.  Wisdom of Sage is an emissary, not a trader.”

Scree – Planet of the Land Walrus “Save us all from so much low humor.  I need a seriousness break right now.”  Zila dropped wearily into the first chair in the lounge she came to.  Manny was with Vin and Leah in their cabin.  Alon and Efar waited for her to catch her breath.  Scotty stood like a statue in the corner.

“Where do we go next, Comm…, er Zila?  We have a choice of several destination roughly within 60 lights from here.”

“Something without mud or slapstick humor, please.”

“Well, there is the Pa’an version of a Dyson sphere, Walrus World, The Lair of Dragons - probably dangerous - and two unexplored sentient worlds in the Eye Nebula.”

“Wait…Walrus world?  More water?  And walrus…walrii… whatever?”

“Actually, they are land animals, about as close to walruses as the Riscids are to turtles.  They are a duelist species.  The males are huge, the females much smaller and plainer.   However, unlike other duelist species, the females are just as intelligent as the males.”

“Duelist….I think I remember something about that.  Strong s****l dimorphism.  K-selected – low birth rate, high quality parent care.  The males fight for dominance and for females.  The males have harems.  The most dominant males have the most females, so large, aggressive males become favored by evolution, provided there is stable food and resources.   They are almost always herd or pack animals as well, with alpha males and outliers.  Walrusses on Earth meet all those criteria.”

“You got it.  Wish I had those memory microbes.”

“But duelist species are not selecting for sentience.  Who needs to be clever when you’re the biggest and baddest being around?   How sentient are they?”

“We’ve been there.  They are quite sentient, with a bizarre culture and pretty decent technology.  I warn you, don’t try to figure out their fighting or mating rituals and don’t get involved in any.”

“Hmm.  Now I’m curious.  Any real dangers there for us?”

“Gravity is a little lower, but we will be OK unless we try to challenge a bull.  Or smell like a female in heat.”

“Female pheromones are quite specific, key and lock type of molecules.  But I’ll take precautions anyway – and, dammit, Alon, no smirking!”

Alon smirked his way to the navigator’s chair and initiated the course to Screerhm, the Walrus name for their planet.

*****

Screerhm got shortened to Scree in the several days of the passage.  Scree got to be Leah’s favorite new word, which she screamed while bouncing from wall to wall in zero gravity.  “Leah Lee going to Scree!  Whee!”  Zila found it impossible to think, let alone concentrate on zero-grav practice. 

After flipover, Leah settled down and sulked.  Vinnie, on the other hand, was now a walrus predator, with a wooden sword and a mustache, courtesy of a whiskbroom.  Efar continued Manny’s martial education and Zila got to be a mommy for a while.  Too soon, navigation announced proximity and Zila had to be a serious commander again.

“Efar, any radio or radar signals?”

“We got a digital interrogation.  I sent our registration and documents.  They recognize a Great Sage vessel.  Waiting for landing instructions now.”

“Wow.  They are advanced.”

“Looks like purchased equipment to me.  There are no satellites in orbit and no evidence of space travel.  Considering there are two habitable planets in this star system, there ought to be space travel.”

“Any radioactivity from nuclear power?”

“Maybe.  It may be natural, but it’s low level in any case.”

“Anything else?”

“Well, you can see a few small cities and villages, especially on the night side where they are lit up, but no large cities.  That may be cultural.  There are plenty of villages.”

“What’s that, then?”  A large metropolitan area just emerged from the terminator in to the light side of the planet.

“Oops, I was wrong.  But why only one major city?”

“Duelist species?  Hierarchical organization?  One Uber King?”

“Makes sense.  I have landing instructions not far from that city.  Very brisk, concise. No ‘please or thank you.’”

“Then, please bring us down and keep locked up until we know they are friendly.”

The Scree spaceport was ten kilometers from the major city of  “Hiss-Wump” which the crew decided to call Wump.  Therefore the spaceport was automatically “Wumport”.  Zila, however, had no trouble conversing with the rather stuffy and bureaucratic inhabitants, who did look like walruses, even to the snout whiskers,  except that they had vestigial carapaces on their first segments and up to 43 pairs of legs.  Otherwise, they were in the one-ton plus class, with unblinking compound eyes and pincer fingers on their four hands, some of which looked sharp enough to be stingers.  Once they saw Zila’s diplomatic passport there was no problem.  That is, until they got to the final entry station. 

“You are Emissary Zila Arapova Beddiy, diplomat of the Great Sage?”

“Yes, officer.”

“And the vessel Wisdom of Sage is your transport?”

“Yes, officer.”

“And who commands Wisdom of Sage?”

“I do, officer.”

“It says here you are female.  Females cannot command.  Where is your master/mate?”

“He is here, Doctor Manuel Lee, of Ganymede.”

Thereafter the officer refused to address Zila.  All his questions were addressed to Manny, who, of course, did not understand a word.  Zila translated as best she could, and the entry officer allowed it, although he was not pleased.

“And these others, Alon Kirby and Efar Oms, they are unmated males?  Yet you remain unscarred, Doctor Emmanuel Lee.  They are suppressed?  They do not challenge you?”

“Ah…umm, Zila, help?”

“They are in a different stage of their life cycle in which humans do not challenge for mates.” 

“Hmm, we have no such information on human life cycles, but it will be duly recorded.  Your two offspring will be best kept on your ship.  They are too easy to fall under one of us and too hard to see.  And the Priest needs no explanation.  That race we know.  What is your business here?”

Zila took a chance.  “We seek meaning and profit.”

“Of course - Emissary from the Great Sage.  Do you need a directory to our institutions of higher learning and our trade centers?”

“Yes, thank you.”

The walrus extended a pedicle from his third segment and dropped a small cube into Manny’s palm.  “What the hell do we do with that?”

“I have a cube reader.  Please allow me to be of use.”  Scotty to the rescue.

Efar, Alon and Scotty returned to the ship for baby-sitting and emergency duties.  Zila and Manny wandered the spaceport vicinity for a while, just observing the Scree and getting used to perambulating tonnage.  The Scree had many pedicles - short, stout legs, flowing sequentially and propelling them along at a good clip.  Most cows wore a brown or tan fringe garment that covered all but the tips of the pedicles.  It reminded Zila of a bed ruffle.  Males carried various objects, some of which might have been edged weapons, in slings and harnesses on their first few body segments.  They were, as predicted, almost twice the size of the cows and dramatically marked with dark brown after segments and white or light tan fore segments, with a splash of orange on the first segment.  They moved with their first few segments well off the ground, looking very alert and a bit haughty.  However, there were very few males.  Most of the traffic appeared to be the smaller females.  No immature offspring were to be seen.

“Manny, count the legs, at least the ones we can see.”

“30 to 40 pairs.”

“Count again.  I think they are all an odd number of pairs.”

“You’re, right, even if we count the manipulating pedicles in front.  It’s always an odd number.”

“And their face fringes look like undeveloped pedicles, don’t they?”

“Could be.  They’re staring at us.”

“How can you tell with those compound eyes?”

“I can feel it on the hairs at the back of my neck.”

“Oh, psychic are we?”

“Turn around and look, quick.”

Zila swiveled around.  She was in the center of a semicircle of females with fringe garments.  They were all facing her and the crew.”

“Time to play diplomat.  Or run like hell…” Zila addressed her translator, “Hello ladies!  We are from the Great Sage.  Can I answer any questions for you?”

There was a great deal of rumbling and the group closed up until they were almost touching each other.  One of them got pushed to the fore. 

“Herd behavior,” whispered Zila.

The rumbling produced words that Zila’s translator could handle.  “Pardon us for being curious.  We have never seen your species.  Are you both female?  Are you both from the same mate?”

Zila looked at Manny and suppressed a chuckle.  “No, I am female and Manny is my mate.  That is our human custom.”

“One female?  No harems?”

Not on my ship, dammit.  “No, just one female to one male.”

“How novel and interesting.  We wonder how you can manage offspring and food gathering and so on.  I am (gargle) and we are all females belonging to (rumble hum).  We are here to learn about spaceports and we are lucky to have seen your ship land.  Welcome!”

“Garga, mate of RumHum, we accept your welcome with gladness.  I am Zila, Emissary from the Great Sage.”

Garga automatically turned to Manny as if Zila had mistranslated.  “Welcome, Ambassador.”

“No, Garga, it is I, the female, who is the Emissary.  Not my mate.”

Garga, all 500 kilos of her, quivered.  Zila took that as a sign of puzzlement or confusion.  “I would not wish such responsibility.  It is the domain of my mate, and perhaps my male offspring, if I am lucky enough to have one.”

“Garga, we have many things to discuss together with you and your harem ladies.  Do we need permission from your master RumHum?”

“Oh, RumHum is travelling and…” she curved around to take a consensus of the harem, “and we are bored.  Please talk to us.  We can find a comfortable place for all of us in our nest, if you like.  Here is our address.”  She handed Zila another tiny cube.

“Thank you very much ladies.  Will my mate be welcome?”

“As long as he does not challenge one of our bulls.  We would rather not have anyone know he is male, though.”

“Shall we meet you there shortly, perhaps in a quarter rotation of your planet?”  Zila did not know how to tell time on Scree, or even the length of a day.

“That will be 2.5 (rrowns) from now.  There is a time device on that pole.”  She pointed a pedicle.  Zila saw a bright yellow strip with a black line in it.  The black was slowly creeping down the pole.  She was no wiser about Scree time.  Maybe Scotty knew.  She took Manny’s hand and led him back to the ship for munch.

“There are nine rrowns to the daylight and nine rrowns to the night, if day and night are equal.  They are equal only twice a year.  Otherwise, it’s just an 18 rrown rotation for the planet.  The black line starts every morning at the top of the yellow time strip and reaches the bottom nine rrowns later.  There are 999 rrowns to a rrownl and nineteen  rrownls to a year”

“Simple enough.  Thank you, Scotty.”

“I have set up a Scree clock for you in the ship’s comm.  You can call it up on any display like so.”  He twisted 2 fingers on the display and the yellow strip appeared.  It was longer.  Zila guessed it was close to 2.5 rrowns.  “Whoops, Manny, time to go visiting.  Take your sample kit.”

They took a taxi.  It was actually an open platform with a transparent barrier all around.  The floor was soft.  There were no benches or seats.  The cab did not move until Zila found a socket for the address cube and inserted it.  The cab smoothly set off.  Thankfully, it did not ask for money.  Zila had no concept of Scree currency.

The city was fairly open, with many large buildings, huge doorways and gates, avenues broad enough to pass several taxis abreast.  There were squares planted with some sort of decorative vegetation, none of which looked remotely earthlike.  She saw long fields off in the distance.  At one point they crossed over a broad bridge.  On either side were fields of green and brown in neat rows.  A herd of Scree, females, she guessed, were methodically moving down the field towards her, leaving the neat green rows brown and chewed up in their wake.  They had their head segments down, and seemed to be grazing side to side.  The herd, perhaps 50 cows, were perfectly synchronized.  On the other side of the bridge the field of green stretched into the distance.

“Sure, makes sense.  Animals that size have to eat a lot.  They are farmers.”

Further on the buildings spread out.  Groves of tree-like plants grew in swaths.  She saw a huge, wingless bird running out of the forest, only to be chased by an enormous bull Scree.  Zila heard a gunshot.

“So the males hunt as well?  Carnivores or sport?”

The taxi pulled up to a very large, low, very ornate building.  Manny and Zila got out and found a door the size of a warehouse delivery port.  Not knowing what else to do, she knocked.  A Scree cow with fewer segments than Garga opened the door and moved aside.  Her motion was sinuous.  The floor was covered in a dark, packed loamy substance.  It showed prints where her pedicles were placed.  There was an earthy, spicy smell to the place, with overtones of something that she could not place.  She wondered if the Scree had a sense of smell.  If so, this was the home smell.  It wasn’t too bad.

“I’m (bregg harg) daughter of Garga.  Welcome!  The matrons are waiting for you in the garden.”

“Bregarg, I’m Zila and this is Manny.  I bring no gifts out of ignorance.  Was one expected?”

“None were expected.  We are simply a herd of bored females waiting for our master to come back from his travels.  We look forward to your company.  Forgive me if I do not try to pronounce your names.  I am only a drouga and not yet fully educated.”

“You are young?  How many years have you?”  Zila noted she had fewer than 15 body segments, and the other females had many more.  Perhaps segments grew with age. 

“Ten years and a few rrownls.  May I ask…”  Bregarg hesitated, “May I ask if you have offspring?  Any males?”

“It is alright to ask.  Yes, I have two offspring, both younger than you.  One female and one male.”

“You have a male?  You have a lucky mating.  Males are rare for our kind.”

“In our kind we have nearly as many males as females.  We are a different kind of species, Bregarg.  But we are still sentients, and all sentients have something precious in common.”

“What is that?”

“We share the Tree of Life, and that may need a lot of explanation.”

Bregarg became quiet.  She led them to the garden.  Fifteen cows were arrayed on cushions or on the packed loam, rumbling quietly to themselves.  The area was secured by a heavy wall topped by vicious spikes.

“Hmm, the haremlik, at least that’s what Arabs would call it.  I wonder if there are eunuchs?”  Zila murmured, mostly to herself.  Manny nodded.

Garga sat on one side of the group and offered cushions to Zila and Manny.  One cushion was enough for the both of them.  Garga commented on how dainty her mate was.  Zila did not translate that.

One of the ladies offered her food.  It was on a platter the size of a table with a handle on it, like an oversize shovel.  The food was brown and green, obviously something chopped up. 

“No offense, but I don’t know if we can eat your food, and we had better not try until we know.  But perhaps Manny can take a sample?  We will test it and find out.”

Manny opened his test kit and used a spatula to put a tiny amount in a vial. 

“I hope you can eat this.  We find it delicious.  All of us HumRum females have learned to regurgitate this flavor for special occasions like this one.”

“Regurgitate?”

“Oh, you do not know our physiology.  We consume the (warble) and the (loumpis) in the fields and then process it in our third stomachs.  When we have newly hatched, we feed them this with more liquid in it.  Later, we make a solid and more spicy food for ourselves and our bulls.  The bulls eat this and also meat from their hunts.  What do humans eat?”

It took Zila some time to describe cooking.  It was a concept foreign to the Scree, who needed no food processing except what their own bodies could do.  Game animals were consumed raw and mostly whole.  Females could eat meat, but rarely got any.  While there was a variety of plants, invertebrates like insects and several species of large vertebrates on Scree, there was nothing a Scree could not or would not eat in a pinch.  Food, per se, was simply not an article of commerce here.  Zila gathered that the population was pretty steady and well in balance with the food supply.  That would be in line with K-selected evolution.  Here on the Scree, the competition was between dominant males, not between the environment and the sentients.

Then Zila slipped.  “How did you all come to be in HumRum’s harem?”  She was aghast that she had inadvertently introduced a taboo subject.

The rumbling stopped.  There was quiet for a while, the cows sidling back and forth in their close formation.  Then a matron, a larger Scree than Garga, spoke, “HumRum is a very brave and powerful bull.  He defeated our previous master and now those cows are his.  We don’t discuss these matters.  The females HumRum brings in are his business.  We are all happy to have such a successful mate.”

Zila noticed that the packing among the cows was not even.  One group, the older and larger cows, were all together.  Judging by the number of segments, another group was slightly separate and not so close together as the older ones.  “So, the bull brings in younger cows from time to time.”  Manny nodded.

They went on to discuss various aspects of the Scree science and technology.  Like all other activities, the females were the workers in science.  Only in heavy lifting and in management were the dominant males particularly involved.  They had fossil fuels and powered machinery, electricity and farming technology, weapons and craftsmanship (craftwomanship, thought Zila).  They understood evolution on some levels, but Zila was unable to discover anyone in this group who had knowledge of molecular biology beyond the idea of cells and DNA.

“Garga, ladies, please forgive me if I am breaching any etiquette, but Manny is a specialist in how life relates to the DNA in every cell, Scree and human alike.  We would like to see if the basic elements of our DNA and yours are similar in any way.  We have sampled many sentients so far, and all have certain roots in common.  Will you help us?”

“Humans and Scree are as unalike as anything can be.  There are no animals on Scree anything like you.  How is it possible that we have common biological roots?”

Zila hesitated.  “It is possible that life does not arise independently on all planets.  Or, it is possible that sentient life can only arise with the creation of DNA or something like it, although I know there are non-sentient living things without any DNA at all.”

“We know that this is an important question.  We have no objection.  What do you require?”

“Samples of your, er, blood or circulating fluid, or a tiny tissue sample, it this can be done without pain or inconvenience.  More than one, if possible.   Other than being in the same harem, you are not related, are you?”

“No, we were incubated in different clans.  We have some recently shed body segments.  Will that work for you?”

Zila translated and Manny agreed. He needed body fluids as well, and something from a bull or two.  Zila translated.  Once again there was complete silence.  Zila had done it again, but exactly what taboo had she trespassed this time?  This business of being a diplomat to the Scree was impossible.  She felt like an oaf in a watch factory.

Zila described the sterile sampling procedures.  Garga requested Manny’s sample kit.  She and several others rose up from their cushions and rippled out of the garden.  It was a while before they reappeared with several filled vials.  Manny gratefully accepted his full sample kit, rather amazed that the tiny tools in it could even be manipulated by such huge sentients.  But they were competently collected, as far as he could see.

“Garga and ladies, we wish to thank you for your help and especially for your hospitality.  I see that we are only a rrown away from sunset and we must return to our ship.  Thank you again.”

Garga escorted them to the front hall and then smoothly blocked their exit.  “Zila, I must share a secret with you, never to be revealed to a male.”

Zila was shocked.  But then, intrigue in a harem?  Of course.  What else?

“You have my word, Garga.  Manny does not understand your language.  Please talk freely with me.”

“I have seen that you do not understand our physiology.  Cows have pockets to store semen from bulls.  When we have eggs, we plant them in the crèche soil and spray them with stored semen.  I will not tell you from whom those samples were taken, but one is marked with a symbol like (she drew it in the loam and then erased it).  That is one of the samples of sperm and a spare egg.  If it is possible, can you tell me, secretly, whether the offspring will be a male?”

“Wow, I don’t know.  I will certainly try.  I don’t even know if Scree genes have male and female components.  Please, Garga, if it is possible I will find a way to let you know.  I understand how important this is to your harem.”

“Please return if you can, human.  We have much more to discuss and perhaps a visit to our city center would be entertaining.”

Zila and Manny, having negotiated a tricky diplomatic obstacle course and emerging with better samples than they could possibly have expected, returned to the ship with little difficulty.  The address cube for the taxi platform had to be turned over to get the taxi to take them back where they came from.  This took a while to figure out.  The spaceport docking bays were guarded, but the guard accepted Manny as the dominant male with his mate.  The kids were asleep and Efar was in the lounge, eating another smelly cheese sandwich.  That turned off Zila’s appetite, so she grabbed a snack and a drink for herself and Manny and went directly to the ship’s well equipped lab.

Manny was already warming up the polymerase PCR machine and the auto sequencer machine, getting sample tubes and controls ready for each, and making sure the lab sanitation screens were up and operating.  The compact lab was actually better equipped than the full lab space that Manny had used as a gene designer.  The equipment was first class, fully automated, and the analysis software was under the direction of the ship’s AI.  Even so, the samples were so far from the SNIPS and genes stored on the ship’s extensive library that a great deal of skill and some time was necessary.  They were, after all, dealing with alien entities.  The unexpected was to be expected.

“Manny, do a gel electrophoresis on these two samples, please.  I’d like to see if there is an identifiable Y chomosome for the Scree.  I promised Garga, but I also promised I would not tell any male.”

“That’s absurd, Z, how are you going to hide the results from the guy that does the lab work?”

“It’s not the results but the sample sources that I promised to hide.  I think you can figure out why.  This is a duelist species…”

“I’m a bit dense today, Z.  Let me run the samples and the gel, then I’ll see if I can figure out what you’re talking about.”

*****

“Zila, there is a male Y chromosome.  Actually, there are two of them.  The bulls are super male.  That is probably why there are so few of them.  It screws up gene swapping in the s*x chromosomes and allows a lot more fatal mutations.  The spare egg is, or rather was, fertile, but it was pickled before I got it.  Nevertheless, it would have been a male.  But here is the surprise.  Do you know what these ersatz walruses are, in Earth terms?”

“No.  Another sea creature?”

“Nope.”  Manny looked around the lounge.  Efar and Alon were sipping coffee and tea, respectively.  Scotty was being a statue in the corner, as usual.  Leah and Vin were busy slurping something noisy with straws. 

“Any bets on what Earth creatures are closest to the Scree?”  Manny addressed the crew.  Efar, Alon and Scotty looked up.  Only Efar took the bet.  “Insects, some kind of bug.”

Alon shook his head, “Bugs have six appendages.  They can’t be bugs.”

Scotty had no opinion.

“Efar is closest.  They are related to centipedes, and of those, the scolopendromorpha variety is the best fit.  They live about 10 to 20 years in the tropics on Earth. They are big, about 30 centimeters long, carnivorous, poisonous, and they capture and eat birds and frogs.”  He held up a portable display with a picture.  Leah and Vinnie both said, “Eew.  Gross!”  Alon said, “Scary buggers.”

Efar said,  “One of those dropped onto my head from a thatched roof in the Philippines jungle.  Whew!”

“They are sexually mature when they have grown over 15 segments.  There is one pair of pedicles per segment, and always an odd number of segments, up to about 43 segments.  The females lay eggs that hatch in a few months.  The hatchlings need to be fed by the adults for as much as six months.  There is no breeding season.”

“Yep, that checks,” Zila was musing on this data.  “How the hell did they get to be dominant, sentient, and ten meters long?  A ten meter poisonous centipede?  Don’t mess with those bulls, guys.”

Efar whisked an invisible sword back and forth, “Snicker snack.”

“They have guns.”

“Oh.”

*****

“Zila, there is a comm message for you in Scree language.”

“Play it, please.  I have my translators on.”

A short message of rumbles and gargles later, Zila was informed that they she had an invitation to meet Garga in the spaceport lounge area in a few rrowns, if possible and please.  No males, please.

“Efar, the cow we met with wants to have a quiet talk.  No males. So bring your sword and stay hidden.  Are you willing?”

“Sure.  Nothing obvious, like a complete alien in a herd of Scree.”

“Just stay a good distance away.  I don’t think there will be any danger.”

Zila put on her protective shipsuit and pocketed a copy of her Scree entry documents as well as the address cube for Garga’s nest.  She checked her comm unit and left the ship to find Garga.  She was surprised how difficult it was to search the spaceport lounge for a single Scree when she was surrounded by bulky, undulating animals that blocked her view.  And then, how would she recognize Garga from another cow?  But Garga recognized Zila almost immediately and led her to a quiet corner. 

“I hope you are enjoying your stay?  I would like to show you the many sights in this area, if you wish, and perhaps answer some of your questions about Scree.  My education was in administration and government, and I am considered knowledgeable in these areas.”

“Why, yes, Garga, that would be very good.  We will make another visit to your nest?”

“Not the nest, Zila human.  HumRum is home now.  Visitors would be… awkward.  But we can meet in this lounge and explore by taxi.”

Garga whispered, which sounded like a kettledrum playing pianissimo,  “Do you have any results from your analysis?”

Zila knew exactly what the question meant.  She decided to be blunt, “If the sperm and egg you provided were to produce a fertile gamete, it would likely be male.  It is not possible to know 100% in advance, though.  I understand that this will raise the status of the female involved.  I will tell no one.”

Garga made a sound like a burp.  Zila’s translator interpreted it as a swear word referring to defective ancestry.  “Zila, that was not my egg, it was one I dug up from the crèche of a new, young female.  If she has a male she will dominate the rest of us and we will have a short, nasty life.”

“Oh, my.  Wow.  I was warned not to get involved in Scree mating affairs.  Garga, we are guests here.  I do not want to cause any trouble.”

“This is no trouble for humans, it is trouble for the HumRum harem.  However, we old cows know a trick or two.  We better not talk about it.”  Garga quickly changed the subject, “Can you eat our food?”

“It would not hurt us but it is not food that we like to eat.  We would rather eat cooked food.  If we meet again I will bring food with me.”

“Well, we cannot expect an alien to appreciate every delicious regurgitation, can we?”

“No, I guess not.  Perhaps you will like some of our food?”

“If it has nutrition, we will try it, human Zila.”

“Then when shall we meet again?”

“We…”

An enormous bull, decorated in several harnesses and metallic ornaments, zipped across the lounge floor.  Females moved away to give him a clear path.  He was at least twice the size of Garga.  All 43 segments of him came on like a locomotive.   “HumRum!”

Zila caught Efar’s eye.  He was very brave, reaching casually for Glimmer, but Zila nodded her head, “NO”.  It would have been a waste of his life trying to tackle that monster with a sword.  Whatever was going to happen here was up to Garga and HumRum.  Zila tried to make herself as inconspicuous as possible.  She sat very still and well apart from Garga.

HumRum ignored her.  Zila’s translator had some difficulty following the exchange with Garga, but it seemed that he did not approve of his females being out alone and away from the haremlik, in such a public place, and such defiance of his authority was not to be tolerated.   He barked something at Zila, jabbed Garga several times with his stinger pedicle, and prodded her at maximum speed out of the spaceport lounge.  Zila could see those jabs hurt.  “Poison,” she thought, “poor Garga.”

She waited until HumRum and Garga were out of the area.  She was feeling rather morose.  Scree was certainly a difficult port for a human diplomat, or for her, at least.  Everything she did turned to trouble.  She collected Efar and went back to the ship’s docking bay.  It was surrounded by Scree males, guards with weapons.  Her comm beeped,  “Zila, the Scree police are trying to board us.  Instructions?”

“Oh s**t.  They won’t fit through the hatches and I don’t want them in the lab at all, at any cost.  Do you understand?”

“Got it.  Now what?”

“You don’t speak Scree.  Use sign language.  Tell them your female is outside and will translate for you.  They must let her through.  Are the kids all right?”

“Kids are fine.  Will try it.”

A male in a weapon harness came up to her.  The g*n he carried looked like a cannon.  He put up a front pedicle and screeched.  “STOP!”

“I am Zila, and I am the ship’s translator.  I have communications with my mate.  He wishes to understand your demands.”

“We will search this ship.”

“This ship is the nest of Manny Lee and his protectors, and is under the seal of the Great Sage.  We have taken nothing from this planet on board.”

“By order of HumRum, Profactor of (hrmph Scree) we will search this ship.”

“You cannot fit through the ports.  How will you be able to search if you cannot even get in?”

This stopped the bull.  He gestured to another who turned his bulk toward the officer in charge.

“Alon, does the Great Sage have a treaty with the Scree?  Look and see if there is anything like diplomatic immunity.”

“Looking.”

The armed bull returned, “We will use small surveillance devices.  They will arrive in less than a rrown.  You are detained here.”

“Are we accused of a crime?”

“You are suspected of theft of offspring.  That is punishable by stinger poisons.”

“Alon, anything?”

“Yes, Treaty Number HFE75-99-04, section 12, clause 10c.  Emissaries of each planet are to be tried in their own courts under their own laws and will not be subject to the laws of the other party or detention on the other planet.  And section 12f, clause 2, says any collection of evidence by the instant planet must be made in the presence of the Ambassador or the highest ranking Emissary of the offworld planet.”

Good thing I have those memory microbes, thought Zila.  “I hope the Scree honor their treaties and that they do enough trade with the Great Sage to make it worthwhile.”

“They do, Zila.  You can convince them.  We have faith in you.”

In Scree, she howled for the commanding officer.  Surprisingly, he appeared.  Zila quoted the Treaty, section and paragraph.  The bull was clearly displeased and called in for instructions.

“There is no Ambassador from the Great Sage on Scree.  We will proceed with the inspection.”

“Wrong, I am the official emissary of the Great Sage.  Your visa office has a copy of my verified credentials, sent by radio when we approached this planet.  I represent the Great Sage and I will witness any transgression of the Treaty between us.  My ship is recording and retransmitting now.”  Of course, it would be 80 years before that retransmission got to Saggitarius sector, if at all, but it was worth a try.

The commanding officer called in again while the original bull held his cannon with his four front pedicles, ready to fire.  In a short while, the cannoneer was ordered to stand down and Zila and Efar were ushered to the ship’s landing ramp. 

She collapsed inside with a sigh.  Efar propped her up in a lounge chair.  “Well done, Commander Emissary Zila.  I was willing to try my sword against a Scree bull, but I’m rather glad I didn’t have to.”

“Yeah.  I’ll let you get away with the Commander Emissary stuff, just this once.  Efar, I’m so glad you were at my back and so happy we didn’t get stung to death back there,”

The radio burped, “Open the port for the inspection robot.”

“Manny, what did you do with the, umm, stuff?”

“Destroyed it in the plasma incinerator.  Standard procedure.”

“And the data?”

“About to do the same.”

“Hurry.”

Addressing the comm unit in Scree, Zila spit out, “This is Zila Aropova Beddiy, Diplomat and Official Emissary of the Great Sage, aboard the Saggitarius registered vessel Wisdom of Sage.  Under our mutual Treaty HFE 75-99-04 I am required to verify your complaint as well as your authority under this treaty to serve that complaint.  I am waiting for that document and that verification.”

Zila observed Efar at the navigation display console and Alon with his finger poised over the ship’s defense activation.   Scotty gave a green light for Engineering.  She had no idea whether the Scree had any weapons that would be a real threat to them since they did not seem to have reached the age of space travel, but she gave them the benefit of the doubt as an aggressive species.  Better to stay away from combat if possible.

And better to keep the Treaty as their shield than break it with an armed escape.

The ship’s AI registered receipt of a document.  It was in the Scree written language, useless to her.  “Can the AI read that thing to me out loud?”

It could, but with a horrible accent and intonation.  Zila made out that it was a complaint about stealing a fertile egg from a Scree female.  There was nothing about any sperm.  Of course, sperm was always available in a Scree harem.  The cows carried a supply inside their bodies.  Eggs were a little harder to come by. 

“Looks like the younger cow complained and Garga told them we did it.  But we had no idea where the egg came from, nor did we steal anything.   The biological samples were given to us freely.”

“We been framed, girl.”  Manny’s falsetto was bravado.  “I’m done here.”

“OK, let the robot in, but only the one robot.  Scotty, stay with it.  Manny, keep the lab sanitation screen up.  Keep the kids in there with you.”

“Screen is at Level 5.”  That was the level used to isolate violent life forms.

The cat-sized robot scuttled into the airlock on several pairs of jointed legs, antennae and cameras running.  There were a few more of them behind it.  Alon only let one into the lock and then shut the outer door.  The robot scuttled onto the exit ramp and stood there.  It was clever, but obviously mechanical.  It seemed to be electrically powered.  There was a speaker in it somewhere and through it Zila heard a control officer complaining that he needed more robots aboard.  The tinny quality of the voice did not convey the thunder of a bull Scree.  Zila instructed it to follow Scotty as her designated observer and refused entry to any more robots.

I took the robot several rrowns to examine the private cabins, the lounge, the storage area and the medical facilities.  When it appeared on the bridge, Zila blanked all the screens and let it go where it was directed.  Finally it found the lab, but it could not penetrate the Level 5 sanitation screen.

“What is in there?” demanded the tinny speaker.

“That is our crèche.  We have offspring in there.  No one is allowed in there.”

“Where is the human male called Dr. Manuel Lee? He was not observed.”

“He is in the crèche with the children.  That area is off limits.”

“That is the area we must inspect.”

“You do not have permission to inspect that area.  Under the terms of the Treaty, that is a violation of human culture.”

Alon looked at Zila and raised an eyebrow.  Zila shrugged. 

“Manny, show them a video of you and the kids in there.  I’ll put it on the screen.”

The robot whirled around to face the screen.  “We will inspect that area.”

“You do not have permission to inspect that area.”

“We insist.”

“Then we declare a breach of Treaty and we are exercising our right to have the matter reviewed at our home planet.  Your Ambassador to Earth will see the crèche evidence there.”

“We have no such Ambassador.”

Tough, Zila thought.  You have no evidence of a crime either.  “Strap into acceleration couches, everyone.  Manny, strap the kids in and report.”

“Ready.”  “Ready on the Bridge.”  “Ready in Engineering.”

“I am ordering this ship to lift.  The rockets will fire and incinerate the area.  I suggest you evacuate now.  Any attempt to interfere will be met by defensive fire.”

“Efar?  NOW!”

On the external display she saw clamps being maneuvered into place around the ship’s tail section.  The plasma blast simply melted them into puddles.  The ship lifted at half thrust of three gravities.  A military engine of some sort was crawling up the field.  For good measure, Alon gave it a single shot with the Gauss cannon, which drove a meter-sized hole through it from top to bottom, and probably through several feet of the spaceport paving as well.  Then they were screaming through the atmosphere.

“The robot!  Where is the damned robot?”  She could barely breath under the acceleration.

“I have disabled it,” Scotty reported from his acceleration couch.  He flashed a picture of the device trapped securely in a wire mesh net and tied down to cargo points on the floor.

Zila was depressed.  The whole idea of being a galactic diplomat seemed less appealing every minute.  Her kids and mate and crew were suddenly a crushing responsibility.  “I wonder what Proconsul Qoo would have done.”

Still, some stubborn impulse drove her on.

Avata’an the Master Engineer  

“OK, guys, let’s find a nice, friendly place so your diplomat can try to stay out of trouble.”

“We could go to Gliese and visit the Pa’an remnant there.  Those are the ones that built the Gateway and let a third of the human race through to whatever Pa’an paradise might await them.”

Zila sighed.  That was a century and a half ago.  The Pa’an were an ancient race of master builders who evolved around a star so close to their home planet that they were regularly decimated by the star’s violent eruptions.  In spite of that, or maybe because of that, they developed a technology and civilization that made humans look like ants struggling to make a crude nest.  The Pa’an had a kind of working telepathy, Panor, that allowed them to cooperate on works that defied rational thought.  They were dedicated, almost single-minded, and benign.  Their AI ambassador had made a treaty with Aura, Earth’s original Class V Autonomous Intellect, a sentient with the personality of a Mata Hari.  Legends of Aura survived to this day, and the Pa’an Ambassador, ZovoArcnor, was still in orbit around Earth’s moon.  The Pa’an had become a large part of Earth history and legend. 

Yes, Zila wanted to visit the Pa’an very much. 

“Let’s go see the Pa’an, guys!”

The trip was another acceleration trance, two weeks, a few days in free fall for zero-grav sword training, another two weeks in N-space.  The deceleration trance brought them to a reddish, M-type star, Gliese, most of which was now shrouded in a planetary shell.  The Pa’an welcomed them in a competent, brusque manner, and directed them to a construction center for docking.

*****

They were standing in a typical Pa’an construction bubble, with bustling rellos and rellas, all upright in the low gravity, all engaged in purposeful tasks.  Avata’an, the Pan’Vact chief engineer, was watching Zila carefully.  His armored, pebbled skin and fairthers lent him the air of an oversized plucked bird, but the black strip of tiny fairthers under his owl eyes gave him a serious mein.  He stood planted on his feet and footarms with his handarms pointing out features to Zila.  The Pa’an probably knew some English words, but Zila graciously allowed him to ramble on in the clicks and long vowels of his native language.

“Did you ever think about how we were going to protect the dwellers on the inside of a Dyson sphere from the streaming particles that radiate from this sun?”

“Actually, it never occurred to me.”  Zila translated for Alon, who, as an astrophysicist, would be interested.  The idea of a Dyson sphere was to completely ensphere a star and capture all of its energy output.  Dyson was a 20th century Earth physicist.  To Zila, this was living history with a science fiction twist.

Alon nodded.  “It does seem to be a problem.  There is no molten core to generate a protective magnetic field.  The inner surface will be continuously bombarded with gamma and alpha radiation.  The whole surface will be one humongous Van Allen belt.”  Again, Zila translated, this time for Avata’an.

“Please remember, we are the experts with plasma in all forms.  See those stepped circular towers?  Some are red and some are blue.  They are part of a magnetic circuit that funnels ionized particles down to hot zones where we use them for various purposes.  The red ones are magnetic north and the blue ones are magnetic south.  The area around each tower is a hot zone.  Also, we pump ozone into the inner layers of the atmosphere to buffer the gamma rays.  It will be as safe as Earth, and about a million times safer then our original planet, Gara’un.  But all that is the simple stuff.  The actual construction and project management is the real challenge.  Only the Pa’an, with our network of panor, could accomplish this.  May I be allowed to show you and perhaps boast a little?”

Zila thought there was no diplomatic way to avoid this endless technical harangue.  You could not refuse sentients who had once offered a gateway to paradise to the entire human race.  Also, the thought occurred to her that there was a potentially profitable idea in here somewhere.

“We are harvesting this giant planet for mass, as well as others in this system.  But the basic construction materials are allotropes of carbon such as diamond, carbon nanotubes, what you call buckyballs, but mostly sheets of graphene.  We produce all those in plasma refineries all around the sphere.  One of the most important discoveries was how to join sheets of graphene.  We found a combination of electric current, plasma and pressure to join the edges of two sheets into a single full-strength unit.  However, graphene hexagons do not map perfectly onto a sphere.  We tried that, and the sheet tried to conform and caused a rip that eventually separated the film into two or more sheets again.  So now we make frames with several layers, as big as the graphene can handle without ripping.  They are essentially flat.  Each frame is a hexagonal segment of a few million square miles.  Each has its magnetic towers and substructure prefabricated in space.  This bubble calculates the exact segment dimensions, and the borene and diamond frame dynamics.  They are made four at a time, one pair north and south of the equator on one side of the sphere, the other pair opposite them on the other side of the sphere.  They are fabricated in zero g, so they have to be in orbit, while the sphere is turning under them at a much faster rate in order to have the effect of gravity on the inside.  If we added one segment, the entire sphere would be unbalanced and might wobble itself to pieces, so the timing has to be precise.  Four crews hold the four segments in precise alignment until the sphere rotates into the exact position for them.  The magnetic grapples haul all four into place at the same time.  Finally, our plasma welders secure the edges.”

“Diamonds?  Do you synthesize them?”

Avata’an reached into a pouch in his harness and took out a stone as big as Zila’s fist.  “We prepared this as a gift to you.”

“Wow.  We have gold to trade.  Do you need any?”

“Aah, the noble metal.  We use it for decorations.  I presume you wish to trade for diamonds.  We will trade diamonds for an equal mass of gold.  There is a lot more carbon in the plasma stream than there is gold.”

“Thank you, as a representative of the Great Sage, I thank you for your trade.”  Zila worked out that she had roughly quadrupled their fortune with this trade, but to Avata’an it was not a big thing.  He was embedded in the flow of panor from his huge project and nothing else mattered.

“This coordination seems to be a thing only the Pa’an could do.”  Zila was actually fascinated.

The stupendous scale of the incomplete Dyson sphere never failed to impress her.  That this was an artifact, a creation of a sentient race, even of the Pa’an, was simply incomprehensible to Zila.

“Avata’an just how big is this sphere?”

“Let me put it in Earth numbers.  English units for you, correct?”  He pushed buttons on an ovoid device Zila assumed was a hand calculator and apparently received his answers by touch. “With a radius of seventy five million miles, assuming we can achieve 75% coverage of the sphere, we will have an inhabitable inner surface of 1.3 trillion trillion square miles.  We spin it so the equatorial sections will have about twice Earth gravity, comfortable for Pa’an.  As you move closer to the poles the gravity will decrease to 10% g, comfortable for space travelers.  We have made a good start here, and we are on schedule to complete this project.”

“Wow!  What is your schedule?  What are you going to do with all that real estate?”

“To answer your last question first, let me give you a little recent history.  My E’pan’vacto believed that most Pa’an would exit through the P-Gate, but, as you know, relatively few humans exited.  Those Pa’an who stayed behind to keep the P-gate tuned could not go through, myself among them.  It became obvious to me that an alternative was necessary, not just for those few Pa’an left behind, but for all the sentient species that might need a new home some day, most particularly humans on that ne planet of yours.  There is no way Pa’an can even begin to populate such an area, and if we tried we would effectively lose our community and our culture.”

“Please carry back this message when you return:  humans will have a home here, waiting for them when they need it.”

“That is… there are no words to explain this generosity...”

“No words are needed, Zila human.  We are a proud people.  This will be our monument to the galaxy.”

“As for the schedule, we will have this finished in less than one thousand of your years.”

From princess to queen to Alice in Wonderland.  Zila’s head spun.  How can anyone wrap their mind around the sheer magnitude and concept of a Pa’an project?

She got the biological samples and met with her crew to pick the next planetfall.

Wyrms  

“We never go there.  There be dragons!”  Efar pulled out an imaginary sword and waved it around.  “Snicker snack!”  It was becoming his favorite gesture.

“From what I heard, these are not the kind of dragons you can discourage with a sword.  They’ll just snatch it away from you and use it for a barbecue skewer, with you as the meat.” 

“Alon, are you serious?  Are you saying they breath fire?  Actual fire?”

“That’s what they say, Zila.  If you go to Wyrm, you will be exploring new territory.  No one goes there.”

“We’ve seen Riscids with spaceships, centipede walrusses, the Pa’an, sort of like a heavy, armored bird, verry smart birds, and now dragons?”

“Zila, the Sage is no fool.  So far, the tissue samples have definitely shown that there is a common source of life for all the forms we have seen, no matter how weird, even the plants.  The highly conserved genetic mechanisms at the root of the Tree of Life are common to all of them, with no more than a few SNPs here and there, but basically the same functions.”  Manny mused on his words for a moment.  “Too bad the Pa’an, with all their ambition and cleverness, are not very interested in molecular biology.”

“They appear to be completely occupied with whatever project they have started.  But didn’t Avata’an mention that the Pa’an knew of a sentient species that did not belong to this life force, as he put it?” 

“Efar, they did say that they had no real record of those sentients.  It was many millennia back in their history.  And, notice, the Pa’an are the only star-faring race that does not use the Allurion Seeds!  How come they were never approached by the Allurii traders?  Certainly they had something worth trading.”  Zila looked at Alon, who merely shrugged.

Scotty hunched forward a bit from his customary corner.  “The Great Sage taught us that the Pa’an were one of the great people, and that even he respected their knowledge.  Traders would hear of a reputation like that.  Perhaps they were intimidated.”

“Interesting perspective, Scotty.  Do you know anything about the Wyrms?”

“They are long-lived and very shrewd, but the Great Sage had no trade with them that I know of.”

“Well, we are out of destinations in this sector of the Saggitarius arm, so let’s have a vote.  All in favor of Wyrm, say ‘aye’.  I count five ‘ayes”.  Alon, turn us to Wyrms.”

“Zila, I think exposing you to Riscid humor did something bizarre to your memory microbes.  But OK,  I’ll set the course.”

It was eight days until they came to a snowy planet, roughly 1.5 Earth gravities, in a long orbit around a G-type star.  It had three tiny moons and a beacon.  They circled the planet and sent radio messages.  None were answered, but Zila felt, somehow, that they Wyrms knew they were there and disdained to deal with mere humans.  At least, that was part of the myth about them.

“Land near the beacon.  Let’s try to be non-threatening and hope it will be mutual.”  The beacon turned out to be a simple antenna near a flat spot that might once have been a genuine landing area for spaceships.  At least the field was flat.  The rest of the landscape was mountainous.

Zila looked out the control room portal, high above the snowy field.  It was impossible to tell how deep the snow was.  “That’s really water snow, not methane or ammonia snow?”

“Real water snow according to our instruments.  Temperature is a balmy -15 C, air pressure a bit higher than Earth, lots of argon but quite breathable.  It should be dawn here in a few minutes.”  Alon scanned the instruments.  “Here comes something on radar.  And on infrared.  And now I can see it – migod it’s huge.”

Slithering down the mountain was a full-fledged Chinese style dragon, with a ferocious head, glittering scales, clawed feet and a long, long sinuous body.  “That thing is fifty feet long if it’s an inch.  Try hailing it.”

“No answer on sound.  No answer on radio.  No answer on flashing lights.  Whoops, it’s here!”  The ship rang with the impact and rocked on its landing legs.  “Switch to the hull inspection cameras.”

On the control room displays the monster could be seen rearing up and wrapping its body around the narrow cylinder of the Wisdom of Sage.  Suddenly Zila was face to face with a very frightening dragon through the porthole.  It opened up its mouth and showed a rack of improbably long teeth.  Zila had the brief impression its dentition copied the worst parts of a crocodile and a great white shark.  

Then came a gout of yellow flame.  Zila involuntarily jumped back a few feet.  The dragon head seemed to smile.  A screeching , rumbling sound came out of the dragon’s head.

“Quick, Efar, tell Manny I need my translator.  Alon, will the portal hold against that heat?”

Efar dashed off.  Alon shrugged and studied his readings.  In a moment Efar returned with the two small translation disks.  Zila put one on her throat and the other on her forehead.

“It’s talking to me!  I wish I could put this on the ship’s sound system.”

“You can, It’s done…”

“Alon, how come you never told me…” she was interrupted by the rumbling screech, even in translation, “You, you human female, I want to taste you.  Come out and meet a glorious death.”

Zila gathered up her courage.  “I am Zila, the commander of this ship.  We are emissaries from the Great Sage.  Who are you?”

“I care not about the Great Sage.  I am not going to give you my real name, which you could never pronounce.  You may address me as Eras.  I will roast you quickly if you come out now, otherwise I will devour you one small piece at a time.”

“Zila, here comes another one.  This one is even bigger.”

Over the nearest ridge another dragon flowed downhill with an easy fluid motion.  It’s scales were scintillating violet in the reflection of the rising sun.  The monster left a path of devastation like a ship’s wake on the mountain.   It came trumpeting like a fog horn on a rocky coast.  The first monster, Eras, turned to the challenge.  They collided like opposing trains on a single track bridge.  Yellow flames met blue flames.  They twined around each other like snakes. 

Zila and the crew deliberated leaving.

“They don’t seem to be doing much damage to each other.  Are those scales that tough?”

“Let’s see what develops.  They aren’t threatening us.  Yet.”

The twining stopped.  The violet dragon emitted a brass bellow that Zila’s device duly translated.  “I heard that, human.  I am Volas, the true and only mate of Eras.  He has never dealt with humans.  I am old enough to remember the times when we lived among them.  We no longer want to eat you.”

“We have traveled a long way to visit your planet.  We are on a mission from the Great Sage.  Will you accept us as emissaries from the Great Sage?”

Volas made an impolite noise like the belch of a volcano.  “Your wants and those of the Sage are not of interest to us.  Our wants are our only concern.  It has been many thousands of years since I last negotiated with your kind but I have not forgotten.  You will not have scales or teeth from our kind.  I will make a demand.  You will meet that demand and I will then consider your requests, if they are not too much trouble for us.”

There was a quick discussion among the humans.  “Quick, Alon, look up old legends of dragons on Earth.  What did they usually want?”  Alon furiously scrabbled among the displays.

“Do they have wings?”

“No.  Just four legs and claws.”

“Probably Chinese or Asian dragons.  European dragons had two legs and wings.”

“C’mon, Alon, what did they want?”

“Mostly treasure.  They liked to guard treasure.  And tell stories.”

“Volas, Eras, do you like stories of heroism?  We have a story of adventure and heroism.  Wouldn’t you like to hear it?”

Eras began screeching, “This dragon will listen to your tale, and if we find it worthy we will tell you our story.  Otherwise, we will c***k this shell and eat you slowly.”

Zila spoke to Alon and Efar in her human language.  “Don’t let them know this ship has armament.  Let’s try to keep that secret for Plan B.  Call Scotty in Engineering and let him know.”

“But they saw us come down.  The ground is probably still hot.  If they really came from Earth, they must have had space travel and some understanding of armed ships.”

“Maybe.  But if they are as tough and long lived as they seem, they may have been able to cross space without a modern ship.  Our only other option is to get the hell out of here now.  But, guys, I really want to see what these dragons are made of.”

“As you wish, Commander.”

“Aargh.  But I suppose I deserved that.  Just make sure none of us get ‘tasted’ ”.

*****

“Alon, make the Gauss cannon ready and Scotty, set the impulse drive for a quick takeoff, full blast.  We may need it.  I’ll put this conversation with the dragons on the ship’s comm so you can hear what’s going on.”

“It will be done, Zila human.  I have outside screens as well.  I will do everything to protect you and your mate and offspring.”

“Thank you, Scotty.  Efar, can you project my voice outside this ship and give my translator a connection to the outside speakers?”

Efar drew a few lines on his console display.  “Done”.

“Volas, we have many things that you might want.  But first, shall we swap stories?”  Her translated words echoed from the mountains like the screech of steel train wheels on a switchback grade.

“Put your face to the porthole, human, and address my magnificence.”  Zila watched the huge violet and black head rise slowly into view only a few feet away from her position.  It bristled with yard-long spikes and had horns on top.  Fronds or stiff hairs drooped from the corners of its maw.  Canine teeth the size of swords jutted from the lower jaw.  A black, forked tongue darted against the portal suddenly, and the “smack” made Zila jump a few feet from the portal, but it held.  Wisps of steam escaped nostrils like sewer pipes. 

“Yep, that’s a dragon all right.”  Alon had his screen set up for defense.  Zila also noted Efar’s screen set up for quick departure to orbit.

“Very impressive, Volas,  you are a noble dragon.  You are very much like the dragons in our old legends.”

“What were their names?  I had many names.”

“Alon?  Help!”  A quick reference to the ship’s wiki came up on Alon’s screen.

“Yinglong was one name.”

“You disgust me.  Yinglong was a servant of the human emperor.  No true dragon serves humans.”

“Fucanglong?”

“Ah, better.  Tell me about Fucanglong.”

“Was that one of your names?”

“I neither confirm nor deny.  My names are mine alone.  Tell me the human story of Fucanglong.”

With help from Alon and the ship’s AI, Zila began.  “On my planet, Earth, there was a kingdom in ancient times called China.”

“I know of China.  Continue.”

“In the time before Emperor Huang Di, the ruler who designed Chinese civilization, there was a need for copper, gold and tin for weapons, ornament and armor.  The old Emperor, whose name was also Huang, sent emissaries to a volcano in the East where a dragon was known to make a lair.  That dragon lived under the mountain and guarded its mineral treasures.”

“Treasures, yes, but not common minerals.”

“The Emperor’s messengers included a warrior, a wise man adviser to the Emperor, and a wizard.  They spent many weeks of hardship finding a way to reach the underground lair of the dragon and finally found a c***k in a lava wall.  A lava tube big enough for a man led downward.  They took torches, food and water, and entered the tube.

The tube was part of a labyrinth, but the wise man had chalk and the wizard had singing stones, and with those they managed to mark all the dead ends and finally figured out the only way through the maze.  They emerged, half starved and with their last torch, into an immense lava bubble that reeked of sulfur and ammonia.”

“I assure you humans are not capable of smelling the finer essences of dragons.  Reek, indeed.”

“The dragon coiled on a mound of glittering stones and a few human artifacts.  Since it appeared to be squatting on treasure, or fucang, they called it Fucanglong, or treasure dragon.”

“Again, dragon names are beyond simple human pronunciation.  However, Fucanglong is not a bad name, considering.”

“The Emperor’s emissaries implored Fucanglong to share the materials they needed for imminent war.  In exchange, they would give the dragon free access to all the sheep and deer it would eat, free from being hunted by heroes and armies.”

“What dragon bargains for freedom?  It is ours by right, and humans are nothing to us.”

“That is exactly what Fucanglong replied.  He ate all but the wise man.  That person he sent back with a message.  ‘A dragon does not bargain with emissaries.  A dragon, if he wishes to deal at all, deals with only the Emperor.  Let the Emperor in person make this request.  Fucanglong will consume any others.  Fucanglong will wait for the Emperor.’ ”

“The wise man scrambled out of the lava caves. He had no torch, but the sounds of the singing stones were his guide.  He left the markers and singing stones in place.    The tunnels were far too small for the dragon, and so he thought the route would be safe.  He journeyed back to the Emperor, arriving half starved and in rags at the Emperor’s palace.  The guards almost did not recognize him.”

“When he reported to the Emperor, he thought he was a dead man.  The Emperor did not reward failure.  But, fortunately for him, the Emperor’s enemies were massing for attack, and the Emperor’s soldiers needed weapons and armor, lance heads, arrow tips, knives, swords, and tools to build trebuchets and scorpions.  The wise man was the only person who knew how to reach the dragon.  Therefore, and reluctantly, the Emperor spared the wise man and ordered his warlord to equip wagons and oxen for another expedition to the dragons lair.”

“The warlord could not directly oppose the Emperor’s wishes, but he knew it was a bad decision.  First, they were on the cusp of attack, and the Emperor must be present and visible to encourage his armies.  Second, the dragon was likely to eat the Emperor, and that would throw the Empire into the chaos of succession at the worst possible time, giving the attackers an even greater advantage.  Lastly, it was beneath the dignity of a Divine Imperial to undertake such a negotiation in person.”

“The vanity of humans knows no bounds, even in the presence or dragons.  Phaah!”

“So, against all advice, the Emperor set off.  However, he had a secret weapon, devised by the very same wise man whom he had spared.  This weapon was carried in one of the wagons, cleverly fastened to the floor of the wagon, which was made of the stoutest oak.  Supplies for this weapon were carried in another wagon.  These wagons were attended day and night by doubled guards and the wise man rode inside.”

“Puny human weapons.  An insult.”

“When they got to the tunnel entrance, the Emperor saw that the work of the wise man was particularly clever, and made a note to reward him if they emerged with the necessary metals.  The stout wagons were disassembled to provide narrow sleds with many small wheels.  Those sleds could be pushed and pulled through the tunnels by soldiers in back and hauling on ropes in front.  The weapon rode on the sleds.  In due time they emerged in the lair of Fucanglong, who greeted them with an intimidating roar.”

A stupendous brass bellow penetrated the hull of the Wisdom of Sage.  When the echoes died and hearing returned, Volas announced, “Now that was a noble roar!”

“Please, Volas, you are damaging our hearing.”

“Continue, human.”

“The weapon preceded the Emperor into the cavern.  It had been primed and covered with a black cloth.  The soldiers jockeyed it into position and the Emperor mounted a platform at the back. ‘I am here, mighty dragon.  I am the Great Han Emperor, Huang.  I am here to discuss the terms of trade.”

“’Here are my terms.  You will serve me, as is my right.  You may continue as Emperor, but you will answer to me as I may wish.  In return, I will arm your warriors and defend your army.  I assure you, your enemies will quail before me.  You will be a mighty Emperor, and I will be your master.  Let that be our agreement and we will contract in blood and fire, as is dragon custom.’”

“The Emperor was taken aback.  He called his wise man.  The wise man counseled him to have the dragon fill the empty wagons with ores and treasure, and then to destroy the dragon.  A dragon could not rule an Emperor.  That was absurd.”

“’Dragon Fucanglong, we will agree to your proposal in increments.  Let us take a few wagonloads of ores back to our smiths and artisans.  If we do not, there will be no empire for you to control.  We will then return and make a full contract with you as you wish.’”

“’Sign the contract NOW, in blood and fire.’”

“At the Emperor’s command, the wise man wrote up a document.  The Emperor cut his thumb and signed it in blood.  Fucanglong took it in one of his great talons and burnt the edges.  ‘It is done.  Here is your ore.  Load the wagons though this tunnel.  It is wide enough for them to pass.’  He moved aside to reveal a dark, winding roadway, obviously a passage for him to the surface of the mountain.  It was big enough for the wagons and teams of oxen.”

“At a signal from the Emperor, the soldiers pulled the cloth from the weapon.  It was a cannon made of thick staves from the hardest wood and bound with iron bands.  It was primed with powder and a heavy round stone.  The cannon master corrected the aim and fired.  The stone, big as a man’s head, emerged from the mouth of the weapon in a flash of fire and a sound like the thunder from a near lightning strike.  It moved faster than the eye could follow and struck the dragon in his breast, just before a foreleg.  The dragon screamed and screamed.  He was sorely injured, but certainly not yet dead.  The cannoneers scrambled desperately to reload.  Just as the cannon was ready, Fucanglong erupted from his lair, straight through the roof of the mountain.  Lava and ash followed him, a devastating trail of heat and liquid rock, studded with boulders.  The volcanic eruption shattered the mountain, trapping the Emperor.”

“So, the puny human weapon was not enough to keep the noble dragon from destroying the Emperor and his retinue.”

“I didn’t tell you the ending yet.”

“I know it well enough, human.  It is a good story, not quite accurate, but it shows the lack of good faith by humans and the nobility of dragons.  I accept the story.  However, for your records, Emperor Huang was a tyrant and his death was a boon from dragonkind.  Had he been faithful to the deal we made, I would have held his ambitions in check.”

“You?  You are Fucanglong?”

“One of my many names.”

“That was over 5000 years ago.  Impossible.”

“Ah, human ego.  Always knowing what you do not know.  It is time for my story in exchange.  However, it is getting to the end of day here, and I will return to my lair for the night.  Tomorrow we will begin again.”

Zila and her crew spent a restless night.  There was no way to know how many dragons there were, what powers or technology they might have, or their intentions.  Zila could not understand how such beings came to exist.  They did not seem to be bound by the usual fitness maps that caused the evolution of all the other sentients she had learned from the Priests of the Enlightenment, Eosyl and Cresyl.  As a matter of fact, those Priests never mentioned dragons at all.  Yet, the world of Wyrms was clearly included on the ship’s navigation data base.   There was certainly a lot of information about Chinese dragons, but all of it under the heading of “ancient myths”, not alien species.  The one person she had not consulted on this was Scotty.  Fortunately, Scotty, diligent to a fault, had not retired for the night but stood watch over his engines in case they need a quick lift off.

Zila padded down to the engine room in her pajamas to see if Scotty knew anything about dragons. 

“I’ve heard of them, once.”

“Can you remember more about what you heard, and why the subject came up?”

“One of the Priests of the Enlightenment was briefing you.  I overheard him saying to another that he was not going to confuse the issue and spoil his credibility with talk of mythical Earth creatures.”

“Please go on, Scotty.”

“The other Priest disagreed.  He said you needed to know about the existence of the other life forms.  He never said more than that and I did not understand what he meant.”

“Other life forms?  Could he have meant things like the Scree walruses or the Riscids?”

“No, I don’t think so.  It sounded like he was talking about something that did not relate to the sentients we knew from our trade.”

The phrase “other life forms” echoed through Zila’s head the rest of the night.  Dragons were known in nearly every Earth culture, from the South American Quetzacoatl to the two legged flying monsters of the Caucasus.  What was it that was so threatening that the Priest of the Enlightenment excluded them from Zila’s education?

*****

A blanket of snow fell through the night and wind whipped the powdery flakes into windrows, covering the dragons’ tracks.  When the local star poked its orange face over the mountain tops, it almost seemed to Zila that the drifts were stained with golden dragons’ blood.  But what color was dragon’s blood?  Zila did not know.  Coffee time passed with very little discussion, since Efar and Scotty were still on watch in their respective stations.  Alon was off watch and scanning a screen on the drift rates of particles in the stellar stream.  Manny and the kids were still asleep.  Zila peered through the port, but the snow was still pristine.

“OK, Alon, talk to me.”

“About what?”

“Drift rates, if you haven’t anything better.”

“I’m trying to calculate how long it would take for microscopic particles, like enzymes, viruses or bacteria, to cross interstellar space just drifting on the stellar winds.”

“You’re doing calculations on panspermia?”

“Well, just thumbnail stuff, you know, order of magnitude.”

“So?”

“The first one would take several hundred thousand years.  But if the particles reproduced in even one percent of the planets they seeded, every one of those becomes a new source.  The expansion is geometric.  Every place where life is sustainable in this sidereal arm would be seeded within a few tens of millions of years.  Of course, some of my assumptions are pure guesswork.  I don’t know the proper particles, their size, their proper kind of planet, or the number of suitable planets for these things.  But a few million years to a hundred million years ought to do the trick.  That means during the time it took for humans to arise on Earth…”

“…there would be sentients on many other worlds.  Yeah, but there isn’t.  How come?  Its one of the classic mysteries, Fermi’s paradox.”

“Maybe there are other forces at work, things that eat life forms?”

“You’re giving me the creeps, Alon.  Which of us is cooking the bacon this morning?”

“Umm, is it a rotating chore for navigators?”

“OK, I’ll cook.”  But her mind was still on the issue of “other life forms” and why there were so few planets with high-level life.  Alon’s conclusions were part of the puzzle.  What about the dragons?

The dragons were quite late.  When the local star passed to the other side of the mountains and the snow turned to shades of purple and violet, Volas, the purple dragon, came down the mountain pass like a runaway train, bellowing a crescendo of brassy notes.  By then, Alon was on the bridge with Zila, Manny and the kids were having munch, and Efar was sacked out.  Indomitable, Scotty refused to leave his post, claiming that Priests did not need much sleep.  Zila could not tell when a Priest was tired.  She had never seen one in that condition, so she could not object.

Zila showed her face in the port and Volas arched his body to present his formidable dragon head, now just a scary silhouette against the purple mountains.  Zila turned on the outside speakers and Alon connected the translator to the ship’s comm system and activated the defense screen.

“I have rested and now I will tell you a story.  Dragons keep their promises.  Afterward, you will offer me much treasure.”

“Treasure?”

“Of course.  It is my due.  I am the treasure dragon.”

“Fucanglong?”

“I admitted that as one of my names.  Are you ready for my story?”

“YOUR story?”

“There is none other so noble and so worthy of telling.  Too bad my audience is merely lesser species.”

“Where is your mate Eras?”

“Pah, Eras claims to have heard my story too many times, even though I always enrich it with each telling.”

“Please go on, noble dragon.  Us poor unworthy species will listen to every howl and yowl.”  Volas did not get the satire.  Zila thought that was probably a good thing, but she could not resist.

When I first came to Earth I found a race of warlike, weak apes who had just discovered the use of metals for decorations.  In exchange for their labor to dig out gold and gems for my treasure I taught the first group, the Olmecs, they were, how to plant and harvest corn and sweet potatoes.  They quickly overpopulated their valleys and ran out of water in the high desert.  At first they worshipped me as their god, even drew pictures of me with stones on the dry plateau.  Soon enough, the inconstant r****e decided I was the cause of their drought.  Just because I made fire to boil a pond or two and ate an occasional leader when they got out of hand, or when I was too lazy to hunt sheep.  Ungrateful they were, and undeserving.”

“I went to the place you called China.  It was not called China then.  It was nothing more than a hundred warlords each with designs on his neighbors.  I showed them how to smelt iron, originally with my own flame.  They immediately made iron spear points and iron swords and iron bound ballistas.  In exchange I made one warlord successful over others.  That warlord had a racket going, where he taxed every harvest and every craftsman, taking only the best of each product and produce, and turning it into treasure.  I got a third of each years’ treasury.  I was sitting on a very fine hoard. “

“Then other dragons appeared.  Some wanted a treasure hoard for themselves, and to avoid making war on my own kind, I did give them some of my lesser things.  Others wanted to set up rackets of their own against my warlord.  That I could not abide.  One dragon gave his warlord the secret of iron and then another, and then the whole area was back to a hundred warring kingdoms.”

“In order to keep control over the neighboring kingdoms, I taught a certain monk the art of war.  Eventually, a descendant of this monk, one called Sun Tzu, wrote down those strategies.  But for a while, the monk told the king what to do, the king did it, and the king prevailed.  And I got my treasure and the run of the land.  How they feared to hear my mighty roar!  How they cowered whenever I appeared!  I refrained from eating the king and only consumed the nobles he did not trust.  So I kept his dynasty safe for a few hundred years.  I gradually eliminated any other dragons in my territory.  I will not disclose how dragons go about battling each other.  Humans are far too quick to pick up warlike things and they are untrustworthy for such secrets.”

“I had by then retired to a cozy mountain with my treasure.  Dragons were no longer common in China and I was reclusive.  My legend lived on, and sometimes a stupid human with more courage than brains would seek me out just to prove himself.  Other than those morsels, I hunted deer and elk in the forests.”

“One day that conniving ingrate Huang showed up with his cannon.  It was a shock to see a human instrument that spit fire, and I was so surprised that I did not move in time.  That rock did little damage to my impervious scales but it did hurt.  I had to show Huang how puny his weapon was against a dragon such as Fucanglong, so I set off the volcano and buried him alive, leaving one member of his party to tell the tale.”

“Unfortunately, that one escaped person told the false tale that cannons were deadly against dragons.  From that time on, cannons appeared against dragons all over Earth.  We were constantly harassed by cannons, on land, on sea, and eventually even flying dragons were pursued by cannon fire.”

“Were the flying dragons of Europe related to you?”

“Do not ask questions for which the answers would be meaningless to you.  They are related, and they are not related.  By the way, dragons do not hatch from eggs.  Dinosaurs hatched from eggs, but they were a long ways from dragonkind.”

“How do dragons reproduce, then?”

“We are both male and female at will, but otherwise our birth process is nothing you would understand.  I will not discuss it.”

“There does not seem to be many dragons on this planet.”

“There were more, but there isn’t that much forage here.  This is a winter planet with a dim star.  Many went into hibernations.  Probably most will never rise up again.”

“Tell me how you got here from Earth.”

“That was a long journey and a lonely one.  Dragons did not leave Earth in a group, but as each was tormented by gunpowder, each left.  We knew then which stars had favorable planets.  We knew navigation.  We have built-in propulsion.  (Volas jetted a little fire).  We could hibernate for centuries if necessary.  Space was not a problem for us.  Getting off Earth was a bigger issue.”

“How did you get off Earth?  Surely, dragonfire is not enough to reach escape velocity, is it?”

“No, and the answer is, we had help.  I will not talk about that any further.”

“Would you leave this planet if you decided to go to another star?”

“Pah, I have no further taste for space travel.  It is dangerous and boring.  I’m a simple dragon.  Just give me my treasure, a few tasty animals, and my freedom to walk the planet, and I’m fine.  I no longer wish to instruct humans or help kings make conquests.”

While they were talking, Eras had quietly slithered up to the other side of the ship.  She shoved Volas aside in the porthole, “We are no longer considered worthy of such help to leave this planet.”

Volas flew into a rage and attacked Eras.  There was no twining, but lots of biting, slashing and fire.  They were too close to the ship. 

“Alon, the Gauss cannon!  Give them a warning shot, NOW!”

The ship rocked once and a hole appeared between the fighting dragons and the ship.  It seemed to burrow into the packed snow and dense rock underneath forever.  The dragons jumped away. 

Eras, the smaller dragon, broke away and sped into the mountains, followed by Volas.  In an instant they had disappeared.

“Scotty, do we have outside lights?”

“Yes, Zila.  Shall I turn them on?”

“Please.  Zoom in that that shiny object on the ground.”

“It looks like a dragon scale.”

“Wow!  I’m going to get it.”

Both Alon and Scotty objected, but Zila stopped only long enough to put on an environment suit before she entered the airlock.  “Monitor me please, Alon.”

The lock cycled and the ladder dropped down to the ground level.  Zila scrambled down and waded through the deep snow to the scale.  It was the size of a desktop.  Zila grunted with the strain, but she got it up and onto her shoulder.  Efar met her at the ladder and hoisted the scale up to the lock.  Manny ran tests for infectious agents, them passed an isolation bag through to Zila.  Zila bagged the scale and Manny checked the lock again.  On the “all clear”, Zila exited the lock and climbed out of her enviro suit, followed by Efar. 

“We got one!  We got one!”

“One almost got us, Zila.”

“Oh, Manny, we needed a bio sample.  This was our only chance!”

“Well, please don’t do that again.  The kids need you.  I need you.  But I can see some tissue clinging to the hinge on that scale, so you got your sample.  I’ll go set it up for a run.”

*****

Zila was having trouble sleeping, and the kids were fussy.  Finally she drifted off to sleep and hazy dreams when the ship’s alarm sounded.  She was surprised she knew what it was since she had never heard it before, but the wailing siren could be nothing else.  She threw on a robe and turned on the cabin screen.  Alon was on watch.  “Here they come, Zila.  Better get up here.”

Volas hit the ship with a shrieking bellow and a belch of blue fire.  “Human Zila, I will address you now. Show yourself.”  The monster dragon head appeared in the cockpit porthole.

Zila was not sure whether it was better to play the part of a diplomat or simply to take target practice with the Gauss cannon.  In the pinch, her diplomat side took over.  “Here I am, Volas.  I see your mate accompanies you.  Good morning.”

“There is nothing good about this morning, arrogant human.   I am expelling you from our domain.  Leave at once or never leave at all.”

“We have done you no harm, Volas.  We have exchanged lore.  Why are we no longer welcome?”

“Even without your common human conniving and deceit, you are causing strife between myself and my mate.  Leave us and go.”

“How do I know you will not follow, or seek retribution among our kind?”

“Eras did not lie.  Those who are masters to all dragons will not permit us to leave this planet.  We will not follow you and we will seek retribution only from those that come here after you.”

“We agree to leave, noble Volas, but perhaps your story is not complete.  May we have the rest of the story as we get ready to depart?”

“Well…. There is no harm in that.  You already know that dragons, particularly this dragon, gave humans much help.  Fire, agriculture, the art of war.  Our masters discourage any such help, but we defied them and did as we felt proper for dragonkind.  In spite of this, humans were nothing but traitors and liars to us.  Now the dragons that were helpful to humans are in disgrace.  We are ostracized.”

“That is old history to our kind, noble Volas.”

“You have no idea how grateful you ought to be to us.  I grow tired of your presence.  Get off my planet.”  The frightening dragon head recedes and the two dragons back off a good distance from the ship. 

“Alon and Scotty, hit it.  Please.  Now.”

The ship lifted as gently as Alon could manage.  In no time they were in space, skipping the usual departure orbit.

Masters of all dragonkind?  That needs some thought.  Dragons, the very proudest and most independent of all creatures have masters?  Apart from some inkling that there is an inimical force behind dragons, Zila does not know who those masters could be.  She remembers, again, that her case workers, Eosyn and Cresyl, had mentioned such a force with no further explanation.  Even the Sage had indicated that some such force might exist.

“Zila, I found these in your locker.”  Manny showed her the small wooden box that she used to keep her translators. 

“Wait, what?   But I understood them.  Were they speaking English?”

“None of us understood anything that happened out there this morning.  I thought you were wearing your translators.”

“I guess not.  How is that possible?”

“Listen to this, Zila,”  Alon played back some of the “conversation” from this morning’s encounter with Volas.  It was the screeching and bellowing and brassy notes of a dragon with no intelligible words in English or any other language.  In fact, there was no sound at all from Zila’s side of the conversation.

Yet another mystery, Zila thought.  “Manny, I think your analysis of the dragon’s scale will be most interesting.”

“I’ll get right on it.  After coffee.  We still have coffee?”

*****

Manny was puzzled, but his scientific curiosity was in full steam ahead.  He did not eat, skipped tucking the kids in and generally took to working in the lab, taking notes, researching articles and pacing the floor.  Zila took this in stride for a few days, but little Leah got away from her and ran to Manny, clutching at his leg and screaming, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!”  He picked her up, gave her a hug and discovered he was hungry, tired and felt guilty, not necessarily in that order.  Zila found him and Leah in the lounge trying to eat some kind of mush from the same low-gravity bowl with a Leah-sized spoon.

“Sorry, she got away from me.  I thought she was asleep.  Vin is out like a light.”

“It’s OK.  I wasn’t making that much progress anyway.  Leah, can you eat this by yourself now?”

Zila grabbed Leah, who was clutching her spoon in a mush-covered hand, and sat her down in her own chair.  She got another bowl of mush for Manny and a chunk of cheese for herself.  “What did you find out?”

“It’s not going to be easy.  The usual gene sequencing apparatus failed on the dragon tissue sample, and the dragon scale turns out to be a boron and silicon lattice like graphene, but even tougher and more impervious.  Those dragons are truly well armored.  I can tell you that dragons are not members of the same Tree of Life that we belong to, though.   They don’t even have the same set of 20 amino acids we use.  I tried various substitution schemes, and we don’t share the same operons, but there is some of our T of L chemistry in there.  It looks like a virus of some sort.  I am guessing that they are one of many life forms on their Dragon Tree.  They use a complex mix of oxygen, sulfur, and phosphorus metabolisms, and their metabolic energies are far in excess of those of Earth based species.  The strange, amorphous cells I was able to cultivate in the lab appear to be immortal.”

“Wow.  What did we run into?  Bizarre.”

“Good word for it.  Bizarre.  Dragon, dragon in the fire, Who conceived your form so dire?”

Dragon Tree?  Zila ponders, why haven’t we seen more representatives of life on the Dragon Tree?  How can there be only one known member? 

Manny joked, “Perhaps it should be named the Tree of Knowledge?” 

“The what?”

“Obscure biblical reference.  Never mind.”

Once more Zila felt like she had dropped down the rabbit hole in Alice and Wonderland, and the dragons were some kind of fairy tale, or maybe a nightmare.  What the hell was she doing?  Vin and Leah as dragon food?  Gaaah.  Never!                                                         

Organ of Translation Manny was pretty worn out from his research and needed a break.  He hung around in the cabin with the kids and wondered about many things.  It was a few hours after munch and the ship’s routine was not demanding at the moment.  Zila’s locker was open and she was looking for something lost in the bottom of it.  Some of her treasures were spread out on the floor of the cabin.

“Zila, do the translators work only for you?”  Manny was looking at Zila’s wooden box. 

“Manny, have you seen my emerald earrings?  You know, the ones Dmitri gave me before we left Earth.”

“C’mon, Z, they’re around somewhere, unless you gave them to the dragons for treasure.  Do you mind if I try on the translators?”

“Hmmm.  They’re probably harmless, just turn your brain to jelly.  Make sure the kids are asleep before you become a useless vegetable, please.”

“Aaargh.  OK, here I go.”  He placed one on his head and the other on his throat, just as Zila did.   “Say something.”

“Something.”

“You’re not in a very communicative mood today.  How am I supposed to see if this is working?”

“Sorry, I guess I’m thinking about too many things right now.  Like what the hell are we really doing out here.  We’re just babes in the deep end of the pool, and I just saw a shark.”

“We’re safe enough right now, I think.  But there are a lot of mysteries here.  I’m wearing one of them.  How does this damn thing work anyway?  Is it tied to your memory microbes?  How can it possibly know words in a language for a critter none of us has ever heard of before?  There is something deeper than just a casual gadget here.”

“Yeah, I wonder about that, too.  Go talk to Scotty, if he still remembers Priest language.”

*****

Scotty was buried in a compartment in the propulsion system.  Manny just caught sight of his shipsuit through a hatch.  He hesitated to disturb the engineer, but Scotty was never idle.  There was no time he wasn’t involved in something. 

“Scotty, got time for a little experiment?”

There was a vague answer and Scotty backed cautiously out of the cabinet.  “You said something, Manny?  Oh, I see you are wearing Zila’s translators.”

“I want to see if they work for anyone, or just for Z.  Can you talk to me in your native language for a bit?”

“Eeee chirp chirp buzz sssst.  Vvisooo csoorth thorth yooo.”

“I said I was talking to you in the language taught to us by the Great Sage.”

“It sounded like gibberish.”

“Then the translators only work for Zila.  I thought so.”

“But how do they work?  There is too much information to have them be simple translators from one set of sentient languages to another.  Natural languages are open-ended, not pre-defined codes.  There are all sorts of idioms and outside knowledge required to make any useful translation.  But I’ve heard what they do when Alon hooked them up to the ship’s audio.”

“You have to have the special language organ for it to work.  We Priests used to have it…”

“Scotty please don’t go vague and reluctant on me.  I think there is something important here.”

“Yesss.  Important.”

“Please, Scotty.  From my own work I know there is a correlation between language and lineage.  On Earth we used to trace the lineage of migrating people based on language and on DNA, and they were always related.  I used to work on computational linguistics in the University.  These things do not follow any of the usual rules for language, do they?”

“In the Time Before, when we were a great people, we all spoke the same language.  Our opponents infected us with a thing that killed the language organ.  Our science, our culture, our civilization came apart.  It died.  We became worse than non-sentient animals.”

“Scotty, what is this language organ?”

Scotty turned away and went back into the equipment cabinet, leaving Manny to shake his head and return to his cabin.  It was empty of Zila and the kids.  That gave Manny some time to think.  He went to the ship’s archive and looked up the Tower of Babel.   Earth wasn’t the only place it happened, he thought.

Limits of Explored Space Fascinated by the puzzle of what the dragons are, Zila asks Alon about the limits of explored space and the catalogue of known sentients.  In order to pursue their thin lead, they decide to exit this spiral arm of the galaxy and try another planet in mapped space that had no record except a notation that it contained a possibly sentient species.  There were many planets in the “Goldilocks zone” that might have had life, but it seemed very few had sentient life.  Very, very few. 

Manny took exception to the dangers involved, but Zila was persistent.  Off they went on the longest passage yet, arguing all the way.  Weeks passed, and shipboard morale was a little thin, especially when Efar ran out of smelly cheese and Zila ate her last bagel.

Trooom “There it is, Zila.”  Alon brought up the magnification, revealing a brown and tan planet roughly twice Earth size at the outside edge of the Goldilocks zone around a yellow class G star. 

“Thick atmosphere.  Breathable?” 

“Looks like enough oxygen but too much carbon dioxide, methane and some ammonia.  Not breathable for humans.”

“There must be enough life to produce that mixture.  How about water?”

“The atmosphere has a lot of water vapor, but there are no big seas.  Little lakes and ponds all over the place.   I don’t understand how a planet could develop that way.”  Alon was puzzled. 

Zila kept walking the carpeted area around the command chair, trying to get used using her muscles again after the long passage.  “Try all the radio channels again.  And scan for buildings, satellites, any kind of artificial structure.”

“Negative and none.  Of course, maybe we don’t recognize what an artificial structure would look like here.”

“That looks like a big cloud, but I don’t see anything green,” Efar sat in his pilot’s chair where he was switching from screen to screen while the Wisdom of Sage circled the planet in a low orbit.

“If you stay away from lakes and ponds, the ground looks like it will hold the ship,” Scotty was always worried about landings, and with reasonable cause.  Space was safer.

“No problem – there aren’t any rivers or big lakes.  Or oceans.

“OK, Manny, strap the kids in - and Efar, take us down near that flat, plain brown spot.”  Zila was getting used to being commander.

*****

The ground proved to be moist and soft.  The ship’s plasma exhaust created a deep bowl and the ship finally rested with its excursion port only a few feet above ground level and that ground was twenty meters away.  Scotty had them blow the ship’s thrusters to make sure they were not obstructed. 

“Full enviro suits here, Zila.  The nearest life forms appear to be those trees about two klicks west.”  Efar had assigned himself the role of guardian knight, sword and all. 

“I should stay here in case the soil is unstable so I can keep the ship upright.”  Scotty took the pilot’s chair and brought up his engineering screen.

“Manny, you’re in charge of the kiddies and the com.  I guess Efar, Alon and I are the excursion team. “  Manny didn’t like it, but Zila was the diplomat and he was the only other parent. 

The ramp extended and the threesome stepped out on spongy soil.  It was like walking on a particularly soft, thick carpet.  Zila bent down to pick up a sample.  It was tougher than it looked, like massed strands of hair mixed with soil.  “Looks organic.”  She cut a sample, bagged it and walked on.

“Zero point eight percent CO2 and temperature about 15 degrees C, air pressure about one and a half standard atmospheres.  The CO2 and water vapor are keeping this planet warmer that it would be otherwise.”  Alon was wearing the environmental instrument package.  “I’m picking up some low frequency sounds from that grove of trees.”

As they neared the grove of “trees”, the grove started moving toward them!  They could all hear the sound now, a deep, throbbing, hollow “trooooom, trooom, troooom, boom, boooom.”  The “trees” were various heights from a few meters to over 20 meters in height.  The tops wore a thick wreath of tan leaves.  It wasn’t yet clear how the trees were moving.  There was a lot of moisture in the air, and the thick atmosphere wavered.

As the distance diminished, they could see that each tree had three eyes, just under the crown of leaves, each eye pointed 120 degrees from the others, so that the tree had vision around a complete circle.  Thick vines entangled the lower portions of the trees.  The vines snaked out and rooted themselves in the soil a few meters from the tree trunks.  Then the trunks themselves slithered up out of the soil and dragged themselves forward, thrusting through the vines and replanting itself a few meters ahead.  The trees bobbed and bowed in this stately mode of locomotion. 

“Wow, they are soo graceful.  Do you think they are the sentient species here?”

“Never heard of anything like them.  Scotty, Manny, are you watching this?”  Alon tongued his comm mike.

“Sorry, Zila, there is nothing in the ship’s records or in my memory about walking trees.”  Scotty’s flat tone meant his inferiority complex had kicked in again.  He did not have the requested answer.

“It looks like the booming sound comes from a vine striking the trunk.  It might be a kind of communication.  But my translator isn’t handling it.”  Zila was puzzled.  Then she had an inspiration.  “Guys, I’m going to be here a while.  Get comfortable and stand by, please.”

Zila proceeded to dig her booted foot into the spongy soil up to her ankle, and then buried the other one.  She clasped her hands over her head and bowed slightly.  The whole row of trees stopped moving and bowed back.

Efar was astonished.  “How in hell did you know to do that, Zila?”

“Heh.  It’s all in the wrist, fella.”

Efar moaned.  “Touche.”

The booming took on a pattern.  The big tree in front trooomed and each tree near it emitted a similar trooom in its own tone.  The troooming passed down the row to the end and then another, different, trooom began.

“OK, it’s a language.  But my translator doesn’t get it.”  Just then Zila’s translator squawked, “What are you, visitor?”

Zila replied, hoping the translator could make a decent trooom with its tiny size.  It sounded more like a brass horn, but it seemed to work. “We are humans, representing the Great Sage.”

The pattern of troooming broke up and there seemed to be a lot of individual trooming back and forth among the trees.  But Zila’s translator was silent.  She repeated the words, “We are human.  We greet you.”  A brassy trooom from the translator varied slightly from each repetition.  The trees trooomed away. 

It took a few hours, but finally the translator started working.  “We have never seen your kind before.  Are you drinkers of air and water?”

Was this a trick question?  Did the trees have adversaries?  “No, we are eaters of fruits and non-sentient plants.”

“Who is this Sage creature?”

“Another very different and very wise species, far away from here.   We are his diplomats.”  How could “diplomat” translate to a tree?

“Then you carry messages from another grove?”

“No, you are the only grove we have met,”  Zila thought they did understand “diplomat”, but not necessarily “offworld”.  “We are from offworld.  We came from another star system.”

“Your grove is not of this place.  Yet you are planted in our soil.”

“I planted myself only to meet you on your terms.  If this offends you, I will withdraw my roots.”

The troooming picked up speed.  Zila could see the vines thumping against a black patch on each trunk.  Drum language!  “We see you are not a drinker of air and water.  Your roots are not roots.  We understand this gesture.  We are very surprised that we can communicate with you, even though it is quite slow and difficult.”

“How do you communicate among yourselves?”

“We use troooming for long distances.  In our own grove we whisper.  Like this.”

“Zila, they are using supersonic frequencies.  Dog whistle stuff.”

“Thanks, Alon.”  To the trees, she said, “Please keep that up and allow my translator to learn your grove speech.”  The miraculous translator seemed to be doing exactly  that.  The brass turned to piccolo and then became inaudible.

“We are impressed with your device.  Now we can communicate.  There is not much time before the end of day.  Can you rest here or must you return to your home soil?”

“Our home soil is in our ship, which the tallest of you may see in that direction.”  She pointed and the tallest trees bowed a little in the direction she pointed.  “Manny, see if you can give them a hello trooom.” She made the correct sound, knowing that Manny would know how to reproduce it.

Dutifully, a powerful, deep troooming came from the ship, which her translator recognized as “hello”.

The grove was impressed again.  “That is a powerful sound.  That is a mighty tree.  Is it hollow inside like we are?”

“Hmm,” she thought, “Now I see how they make those deep sounds.  But do they understand machines?”

“That is not a living thing like a tree.  That is a hollow machine that allows us to travel in space.  It works partly on electricity.”

“There once were such things here.  We know of space, but we have no interest in traveling there.  We know of machines but we have no interest in them.  This soil that you root in is our home.  This place is our creation, our seeds, our soil, all in patterns that please us.  We perceive that travelers such as you must have a mission.  We are greatly concerned about that mission.  What is that mission?”

Zila did not hesitate.  “Our mission is knowledge.  We are seeking answers to the question of how all life is related.   We study the thread of life that exists in all of us to see how they are similar and how they are different.  Is that a knowledge that you understand?”

There was a great deal of movement among the trees, and then the troooming started again.  “We are communicating with a sister grove.  In that grove is a tree with knowledge of what you seek.  It is concerned about this thing you call the “thread of life”.  When the sky becomes light we will talk again.  Now we prepare for nightfall.”

“Good night.  Do you have names?”

“All nights are good.  We are simply the Grove of Twenty.  We have no other names.  We are each of the same seed, the same mind.”

Zila and her party moved off a ways to end the discussion.  The grove wrapped their vines around themselves, planted their tap roots deep in the soil and stood quietly.  As sunset approached , a flock of something like birds or bats erupted from the tree crowns.  Many of them took off in the direction of the ship, while Zila and her crew trudged back, alert for any predators. 

“I bet there aren’t any predators here,” she said.

“How can you possibly know that, Zila?”  Efar was very much the cautious

guardian.

“They completely terraformed this region, if I may misuse that word.  It’s been pacified, stabilized and even the soil has been conditioned for their roots.  I bet there isn’t anything larger than an insect that competes with the trees.”

“Maybe, but I’m still keeping a sharp lookout.”

Just then, Manny’s voice came over the comm.  “Zila, we are being invaded by thousands of things like birds.  They are completely covering the portholes and the entrance.  Do you have any instructions?”

“Manny, are they doing any damage or trying to get in?”

“I don’t think so.  But they seem very curious about the ship.  Do you know what they are?”

“They live in the trees, that’s about all I know.  We’ll try to scare them away from the excursion ramp when we get there.  Keep a lookout for us.”

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Efar and Alon check their weapons.

The walk back to the ship was brief, but conditioned by past experiences with violent walruses and dragons.  Efar led the way and made sure Zila was safely sandwiched between the two men, whether she resented it or not.  However, the short walk was uneventful.  Nothing evil came howling out of the dark.    The planet had no moon, but the starlight was almost bright enough to read by.  The soft loam underfoot made walking easy, almost like a thick carpet.

As they approached the ship Zila saw it was dark.  “Scotty, is there a problem with the lights?”

“No, Zila, I thought the lights might be attracting them.  I turned them off,”

She turned her visor light in that direction, but it only provided weak illumination at that distance.  “The ship looks pretty well covered with them.  Turn the lights on and see what happens.”

A bright blast of light preceded an explosion of flying critters.  Zila thought she saw more than one size of “bird”, but in the backlight and starlight it was impossible to be sure.  “Scotty, that seems to have driven them away.  Let’s get some flashlights and see if there is any obvious damage.”

Under the powerful beams the ship seemed intact, but there was a little etching and perhaps a roughening of the armored surface.  They also found a few fallen “birds”.

“Alon, please get some sample bags and lets pick up as many of these things as we can.  We need to know what they are.”

Alon ran into the ship while Efar stood guard.

*****

After munch Manny brought up his pictures on the galley screens.

“Well, they aren’t birds.  They don’t seem to be like vertebrates at all, except that they have wings, and something that might pass for feathers.  OK, maybe leaves instead of feathers, but they serve the same purpose.”

“If they fly at night at any altitude they need to retain their heat without any heavy insulation, “ added Alon.

“Exactly.  And there are only so many ways to make a wing.  Of course, these things have a set in front and a set in back.  I bet they can hover like hummingbirds.”  Manny switched to the next picture.

“And look at those eyes.  Huge, like owl eyes compared to the size of their heads.  But there are 3 eyes, each 120 degrees apart.  I have no idea how they coordinate to produce an image.”

“Bees have compound eyes, but they see quite well,”  Zila reminded them.

“There ‘s more.”  Manny switched to the next pictures a series of dissections.  “They have a gut, but no s*x organs at all, not even vestigial.  Their feet are obviously adapted for perches, not ground movement, but look at the nerve bundles going down to the toes.  Something is going on there.”

“I bet they connect to the trees.  They are flying eyes for the grove.”  Manny agreed.

Manny switched to the last picture.  “The one that was still alive died as soon as we got it inside.  Maybe we didn’t capture enough of its native atmosphere to keep it alive.   I haven’t figured out for sure how it died, or, for that matter, why any of then died.

They were left looking at a four-winged chicken with a blunt head ringed with strange, large eyes.  The feathers, or foliage, was greenish, brownish, striated and mottled.  “Looks like a headless chicken in a camouflage suit,”  Efar snorted.

“Did anyone notice any other kind of critters out there?  I though I saw some smaller flying thingies.”  No one spoke up.  Zila was left wondering if she was just seeing things.

*****

“Zila, the ship has sunk a centimeter or two since we landed.  I must inspect the hull and landing legs.”  Scotty looked almost human in his enviro suit.  The odd joints were not obvious.

“Of course, Scotty.  But just in case…Efar, can you guard Scotty while he does an outside inspection?”

“Sure can.”  Efar grabbed his own enviro suit, a climbing rope and Glimmer.  They cycled the lock and walked out the ramp to the soft soil.

“I must get down into that hole and see how the landing legs have settled.”  Scotty started descending the slope of the saucer that the ship’s plasma exhaust created when it landed.  Efar took a stance on the rim, half watching Scotty and half scanning the surrounding area.  There wasn’t a bush, tree or rock to hide anything.  The soft soil stretched away to a beige horizon.  He thought he could just make out the tops of the grove trees in the distance.  His boots sunk a little into the soft, loamy soil.  It did seem a little softer than yesterday.  He knelt to take a close look.  It seemed like tiny filaments, or rootlets, were squirming under his weight, but it might have just been a rebound effect. 

“Efar, the ground here is pretty well charred, but there is new growth, and it appears to be eating the pads on the lander legs.  They’re under a centimeter of soil and growth now.  I’m taking some samples and pictures.  We will have to move the ship in a few days if this continues.”

“Got it.  Need help getting back up here?”

“Yes, if you could toss one end of that rope it would help.”  Scotty grabbed one end of the climbing rope and scrambled up the steep slope.  His extra leg joints came in quite handy.    He quickly went around the ship with inspection equipment looking at the etched metal where the “birds” landed the previous night.

“We’ve lost a fraction of a millimeter in those etchings.  The pattern seems random, but the etchings are deeper around the portholes than on the rest of the hull.  There is no known acid that can etch ship metal.  This needs to be studied some more.”

Scotty unlimbered a portable metallurgical microscope and took some more pictures. 

They returned to the ship, cycled through the hatch and left their enviro suits in the decontamination area for cleaning. 

Alon, Zila and Manny met them in the lounge. 

*****

The yellow dawn was hazy and humid, with wisps of ammonia-laced fog wrapped around the hull, especially near the ground.  Zila could see from the elevated porthole, but most of the ground was obscured.  The tallest members of the grove were just visible above the mist.

Efar joined her in the galley and Alon was not far behind.  Scotty was on watch in the engineering station and Manny and the kids were asleep.

“I wonder how far away the next grove is.”

“About ten klicks, due south.  Do you think we need an introduction from the grove we visited?”

“No, I already heard them troooming away to the other grove.  We are expected.”

“Why doesn’t that make me feel any safer?  Zila, what ARE these things?”

“Manny is working on it.  I can guess…”

“Yes, please guess.  If we are going out again, I would rather be prepared than just plain ignorant.”

“Well, I think the whole planet, or at least this region, is a clade.  You know what a clade is?”

“A clade?  Not in my dictionary.”

“It’s a set of related species.  The members usually derive from the same evolutionary root, a common ancestor on the tree of life.”

“You mean, like a garden of roses, all different colors?”

“Something like that.  But this clade is a complete ecology in itself.  No outsiders needed.”

“So we are interlopers in their garden?”

“Garden?  Hmmm.   Maybe we are pests in their Garden of Eden.”

The sound of a hungry Vinnie came from the cabin area.  “Can we have pancakes?  We’re in gravity now. OK for crumbs.”

Leah Lee screamed, “Pancakes!  Pancakes!”

Zila sighed.  From clades to pancakes, all in a mommy’s morning.  She got out four portions of frozen batter and put them into the food machine.

To Clade or Not to Clade “Manny, we’ve got to talk about these creatures, the Trooom.”

“Mmmm.  Go ahead.”  He swallowed another mouthful of pancake.

“Could they be a clade?”

“They could be a Roman circus for all I know.  The only samples I got were the moss and the bird.  The moss isn’t moss and the bird isn’t a bird either.”

“What are they?”  Efar perked up and came over to listen.  Alon was just finishing a pancake and stood near Efar.

“The moss is more like crabgrass or mangrove.  It propagates by roots, mostly.  But it has only a few basic cellular mechanisms in common with anything on Earth.  Most peculiar, it has lots of CRISPR regions, like primitive bacteria on Earth.  But it has a big genome, not like a bacterium.”

“And the bird?”

“Same thing.  Same genome.  The bird is a seed for the moss.  It flies around looking for bare spots and dives in to plant itself.”

“Wait, what does all that mean?  I’m not a genetic engineer,” Alon complained.

“Me, neither,” added Efar.

“The birds and the moss are the same species,” explained Zila.

“More than that.  They are the same individual.  There is one moss and clones, one bird and clones, and the moss and birds are different life phases of that clone.  Also remember, the birds have special nerves in their feet that probably connect to the trees.”  Manny was doing his best to explain, but Efar just looked at Alon and shrugged.

“Like bees or wasps, but even more so,” Zila interpreted.

“And we just dug a hole in its skin with our plasma exhaust,” added Scotty, who had just joined the group.

“So it is trying to turn us into fertile ground and replant itself?”  Alon frowned.

“Wow, that’s the most aggressive ecology I ever heard of,” said Zila.

“Their organic acids are eating the ship metal, which is supposed to be impervious.  If they never saw a ship before, how did they get to make such a powerful organic acid?”  Scotty’s question suprised Zila.  Sometimes knowledge was a matter of asking the right question.  The Sage taught that. 

“Good question, Scotty, very good question.  Any ideas?”

“I’ve got one.  The CRISPR segments.”

“Manny, don’t even try to explain CRISPR or cas9 proteins.  Guys, they are bioengineering tools that Manny used in his work on Earth.  They are used to insert DNA into a particular place in an organisms DNA.  Gene mods.”

“Your telling us this whole planet, at least the birds and the moss, are genetically engineered?”

“Not just genetically engineered, but protected against change.  No evolution, no s*x, no variations.”

“Hmm,” said Efar.  “Not the Garden of Eden, maybe the Garden of Evil.”

“Whose garden is it?” interjected Scotty.

“And that, my Priest friend, is exactly the right question.”

*****

It was an easy trek over to the grove that Efar had named the Elder Grove.  Efar,  then Zila with Alon guarding the rear, walked in singe file, with full enviro suits and breather helmets.  The grove was making its graceful, stately progress toward the ship and met them part way.  When they were within visual distance and the mists had cleared the troooming began.  One tree, not the tallest but one covered with the thickest vines, a bit weathered and stooped, started the troooming.  Zila thought of it as the wise tree.

“We greet you, grove.  We are the same as you know of us from the Grove of 20.”

“I see you, strangers.  You are not of us.  We have been many, many revolutions on this planet, and these are my trees from that time.  We are from times when things were different.”

“Did you know humans then?”

“You are not of this grove.  We did not know you.  We do not know you now except for what we have seen and what we have heard.  You are not us.”

Zila took note of the level of alienation these words implied assuming the translation was accurate. 

The trees did not have any words for individuals.  The wise tree confirmed this, “We are one and the same, we are all in a single harmony, we are always touching each other.  We are guardians of this soil.  We understand the concept of biology.  We are what we have been made to be.”

“What you have been made to be?  Is there another entity that made you?”

“There is always a Maker.”  Zila could hear the emphasis on that last word.   “You’re Maker is not our Maker.  You are not of us.  You do not belong here.”

This was going from unfriendly to hostile.  Still, Zila had a mission.

“My mission is not to grow in your soil but to learn from you and leave as soon as possible.  Will you allow that?”

“If you will leave soon, we will answer some questions.”

“May we take a sample of your substance?”

“You mean a biological sample?  We are not ignorant of such.  It will do you no good, but here it is.”  A few drops of an amber liquid exuded from the trunk of the wise tree.  Zila went to sample it, but Efar, put a hand on her shoulder, shook his head, grabbed the sample bottle and skimmed the liquid himself.  He hoped it did not contain the kind of organic acids that etched ship metal.

“We will now observe your departure,” trooomed the wise tree, and the grove resumed its march toward the ship.

*****

“But it is a dead end existence,” opined Zila to Manny, “with no prospects for diversity, evolution or growth in science or culture.  I can’t imagine any evolutionary path that could wind up like this.  There would always be some remainders of the original evolutionary stock.  But not here.”

“You could say the same thing about the dragons,” replied Manny.  “And they had weird genetic mechanisms as well.”

The ship lurched.  “Zila, we have a problem.”  Scotty was up and checking his instruments.  “The organic acids of the moss are much more active.  We’re losing metal at the landing pads.”

“How much time do we have before we have to leave?”

“A few hours, ship’s time.  Maybe a bit less if this moss gets more aggressive.”

“The birds and the moss are conditioning the ship for planting.  They don’t tolerate outsiders.”

“I want to do a quick survey of the planet to see if it is all the same.  There ought to be more than one individual out here.  Maybe we just got lucky and hit the middle of a special region.  Scotty, do we have any kind of drone or survey vehicle?”

“I can assemble a flying drone or two.”

“How long?”

“An hour, if I can get some help.”

“I’ll volunteer.”  Efar followed Scotty to the engineering section.

In an hour the ship’s screens showed the drone flying at low altitude over hundreds of kilometers of rolling moss, with scattered groves and a few birds near the terminator. 

“There’s that cloud again.  There must be water or a mountain or something under it.  Let’s take a look.”

“Wow, that cloud is huge.  It must be 100 or 200 klicks across.”

“And flat, not very fluffy.  Strange cloud.  Take the drone to a lower altitude.”

“What is that under it? A tornado?”

“It looks like a stem of some sort.”

The “stem” wound down from the heart of the cloud and touched the ground.  There was no circulating debris cloud, but the lower portion of the stem was tinged with brown and several dun and beige shades flashed within it.  As the drone approached, the stem bent towards it.

“Oh, oh.  I smell trouble.  That’s no cloud.”

Zila glanced at Scotty, who was frozen with a look she could not recognize.  It might have been horror. 

The cloud spoke to all of them.  “This is my garden.  Do not infest my garden.  Are you sentient?”

“Yes, we are humans from the Great Sage.”

“I see.  You have made a hole in my garden with your ship.  If you do not wish to become a part of my garden you will have to leave.”

“Yes, but what are you?”

“I am the gardener.  I planted this garden.  I keep this garden.”

“Are you the only gardener?”

“Only one is needed.”

“We are travelers seeking knowledge.  If there are other gardeners on other planets that would welcome our mission, we would like to visit them.”

“There are others.  You would not be welcome.  We do not tolerate expansionist, chaotic life forms such as yourselves.  We do not allow infestations.”

Suddenly, they were in deep space.  The engines were still cold.  There was no planet visible.  There was no star anywhere near them.

*****

“Emergency crew meeting.  What the hell just happened?”  Zila was watching Efar’s jaw hanging open, Scotty actually balled up in a corner of the command deck, and Alon punching icons on the screen and shaking his head.  Manny just stood there in shock. 

“Well, we’re at least a few hundred light years from where we were just a few seconds ago, and in some random direction.  I don’t have a navigation fix yet.  The nav computer has no track to this position.  Got to find some reference stars and recalibrate the track from here.”  Alon was nodding and running star charts and calculations.

Zila turned to the pilot, “Efar?”

“So that’s a gardener!  Heard about them, never wanted to meet one.”

“Scotty, why are you curled up in the corner like a human fetus?”

Efar was backing away from something in the galley entrance. “WHOA!  What’s that?”  He pointed a shaking finger at something behind Zila.  When she turned to look the hairs stood up on her neck.  There was some kind of distortion, a blurring, like something almost but not quite seen.   It seemed to be drifting slowly towards them.  Scotty took a quick look and started to make a whining, raspy sound that Zila had never heard before. 

“Zila, back away from that thing.  I don’t like the looks of it!”  Manny grabbed a pressurized sprayer that was used to find leaks and aimed it at the apparition.  The spray shot out in a wide arc, but where it hit the apparition the tiny particles seemed to freeze at the edges and stop.  The frozen spray outlined a lumpy ovoid shape in a cloud of white, like a shroud.  “s**t!  I REALLY don’t like the looks of that!”

“A… a ghost?” exclaimed Zila.

Efar, the fearless soldier, was the first to move.  “I don’t believe in ghosts.  Let me see what it is.  He began to put his hand into it, but Manny stopped him. 

“Maybe that isn’t such a good idea.  Here hand me that crumb getter.”  That was the net they used to fish Leah’s crumbs out of the air before they were inhaled by the crew or vital equipment.  Manny took off the vintage watch he wore and twisted it securely in the netting. 

“Here we go…”  He extended it slowly towards the apparition.  It went up to the edge of the shroud and stopped.  He pushed harder.  The watch reluctantly entered the apparition as if it were suddenly mired in cold molasses.  He could see the face of the watch right through the hole he just made in the shroud.  The second hand was stopped. 

“Now I know why I wear that old relic.  Had to be good for something.”  He reversed his grip and began to haul the net back out.  It moved, but it moved slowly.  If he stopped pulling, it just sat there.  He pulled some more.  He pulled harder.  It took a few minutes to get the watch out.  When it popped free of the outline, he fell backwards.  He reached over to examine the watch, began to pick it up.  “OWWW!  Damn thing is hot as hell!”

He had a burn on his finger.

“Alon, whatever that thing is, it cooked my watch.  Got any ideas, like physicist ideas?”

Alon snapped out of his semi-trance.  “What?  How am I supposed to have any ideas about a thing like that?”

“Well, do your thing.  Go get a thermometer, or a radiometer.  Let’s see if that thing is radioactive, or is it just about cooking antique watches.”

Alon disappeared in a run to the lab and came back with a box of instruments.

“Is it still there?  Yeah, I see it.  Hasn’t changed at all, that I can tell.  Let’s see.  No ionizing radiation.  No thermal radiation.  No energy signatures at all.  Here…”  Alon used tongs to pull out Manny’s watch and looked at it.  “Tough antique – it’s still running.”

“Amazing.  I was sure it was cooked.  Look the second hand is moving again, and it seems to be running at just the right speed.”  He glanced at the chronometer showing ship’s time on the galley screen.  “But the time is slow.  It lost the time it was in the apparition.”

“Hmmm.  That could be just because it was cooked, or not.  Let’s try this thermometer.”  He twisted a thermometer in the netting and shoved it into the ghostly outline.  When it passed the perimeter it stopped.  He pushed hard and it moved, verrrry slooowly.  He pulled it out again.  Once more, it took minutes.

“Yep, its hot.  Temperature shot up to 105 C.  Funny thing, though, the thermometer didn’t budge inside the thing.  I could see the dial.  But it sure came out hot.”

“Guys, could that thing have anything to do with the gardener?”  Efar was now against the wall, as far as he could get from the thing.”

Scotty hissed and clicked.  Zila would have jumped if she wasn’t already in zero gravity. 

“The gardener leaves a trail of those things.  Near as I can translate from Scotty, they are isotaglia.  Time stops inside.  They dissipate eventually.”

Alon nodded and squeezed his eyes shut.  “Isotaglia?  Curious name for it.  OK, here’s a theory:  They stop time so they must also stop entropy.  So when we pull an object out of the zero-time zone, entropy has to catch up.  So it gets hot.  The longer it’s in there, the hotter it’s going to get when it comes out.  Manny, give me ten minutes on that precious antique of yours.  Let’s test the theory.”

Sure enough, the thermometer read over 300 C.

Leah’s plaintive voice came from the direction of the sleeping quarters, “Mommy, Mommy, I’m hungry!”  She was bouncing off walls in her natural zero-gravity style.

“NO, NO, NO!  Leah!  Go back!  Don’t come here!”

“But Mommy, I’m hungry!” the three-year-old cannonballed into the isotaglia and tried to stop with her hand.  Her left hand went in past the wrist.  “Mommy, help!  I’m stuck!”

“Oh, God, no!  Leah, don’t move.  Mommy will help you, but don’t move!”

“OK, Mommy.” Leah went as motionless as it was possible for a three-year-old. 

Manny held Leah’s other hand and held the rest of her away from the apparition.  “Efar, get as much ice as you can find.  Zila, get a bunch of towels and a burn kit.  Alon, help me pull her out, as slowly as you can.”

“Wrap the ice in the towels and put them around her arm as it comes out.  Alon, gently, pull.”

Millimeter by millimeter, Leah’s little hand began to come out of the isotaglia.  “I can’t feel my hand, Daddy.”  Then, “Ouch, that burns.”

“Slide the ice right up to the shroud.  Right there, good.”  There was a smell of burning tissue.  Leah was shrieking,  Zila was in a complete panic. 

Manny found that if they didn’t pull hard, the progress was a bit slower, but the resistance was quite a bit less.  “Maybe part of the heat comes from the work we do pulling her hand out of the thing.”

“Let’s hope so.”  Alon had Leah’s legs, which were now kicking him.

Leah’s hand popped out, red and swollen.  Zila swathed it in burn ointment and icy towels.  “Can you wiggle your fingers, sweetie?”

The fingers wiggled a little.  “It hurts, Mommy!”

“Be a brave girl, now, and let us fix your hand, OK?”

“There’s anaesthetic in the ointment, Zila,  It should kick in about now.”

Leah made a brave little face and piped down to a mere whimper.

“It looks like the burns are third degree, but only on the surface.  I don’t think the hand is burnt all the way through.  Let the swelling go down and we can put some artificial skin on the worst parts, and maybe a cast as well.”

“Will my hand be OK, Daddy?” 

“I hope so, Leah.  We will fix it for you my sweet little girl.”

Zila put her face in her hands.  Isotaglia- ghosts-  were the footprints of a gardener?  They did look like ghosts.  And Earth’s mythology was full of ghosts, wasn’t it? 

“Scotty, you HAVE to tell us what you know about gardeners.  PLEASE!  It may be our lives at stake!”

But Scotty did not respond other than to quiver and shake.

Alon interjected, “Um, Zila, there is something you probably need to know.  Legend says that the civilization that Scotty’s people had was wiped out by a adversary that sounds an awful lot like a gardener.  I suspect his wasn’t the only one.  Sentient species with civilizations are pretty scarce.  There ought to be more than there are.  Maybe the gardeners are the reason why.

“Where did you hear that?”

“Um, from another pilot who heard it from one of the Priests.”

“How come you never said a word when we went to investigate that cloud?”

“The gardener isn’t the cloud.  I didn’t know what the cloud was.  The gardener was just hiding IN the cloud.  If that was a gardener, they are not three dimensional beings, but they live in n-space, like the Allurion seed.”

Zila furrowed her brow, then punched her forehead.

“Wow, wait, I just figured it out.  The Sage knew about gardeners and sent us out here without bothering to say anything?  He sent me out here with my whole damn family?  He sent me out knowing a gardener wiped out the Priests civilization?  Manny, my kids and all?”

Scotty moaned and turned his head away.

“Scotty, get your a*s off the deck, get down to your station and get us underway.  Alon, figure out where we are and plot a course back to the Sage.  Efar, I want to know everything, rumors, suspicions and ideas, on the bridge, NOW!”

“I feel like I fell off a cliff and don’t know how far to the bottom,”  thought Zila.  Thinking back, it all started when she first entered the Hall of Enlightenment and met the Sage.  “I didn’t know what I was doing then, and I still don’t know what to do know.  What would Qoo do?  What would the Sage do?”

Then she knew.  The Sage would wage a long campaign, and needed intel.  Human intel.  That was her, Zila, forward observer, spy, or whatever.

*****

“So, the first thing that happened was that Priests could not understand each other.  Maybe they had problems with abstractions as well.  The Sage had to construct a new language for them from the scraps they retained, writing and all.”

“Were they very advanced?  Did they have computers?  Digital storage?  Archives?  Libraries?”

“They had all of that and more.  They were a little ahead of where humans are now.  Of course their technology was different.  Those records are all lost.  Priests won’t talk about it and it’s all rumors and gossip now.”

“How does a language problem take down an advanced civilization?”

“Not all at once, but pretty quickly.  It takes communication to coordinate a civilization.  Without organization the infrastructure collapsed.   Without power, transport, medicine, food distribution the population couldn’t sustain itself.  It spiraled down pretty quickly.  Pockets of Priests tried to hold knowledge together, but then the gardeners hit them with the next blow.”

“What was that?”

“A blight that destroyed their food crops.  That left them weak and starving.  Then a terrible plague.  Then destruction of the rest of their ecology.  They were cannibals, eating each other and waving pointed sticks when the Sage intervened.”

“Sounds like biblical vengeance.  Why did the Sage get involved?  I was beginning to think he set us up.  Is he really the good guy?”

“The Sage is the Sage, hard to figure, very deep game player.”

“What did the Priests do to tick off this gardener?    Start a war with some gardeners?  How many gardeners were there?”

“Nah, no such thing.  Just one.  One entity, they say, but how can you count extra-dimensional beings who can come and go in a space we can’t even imagine?”

“Wow.  I need to get the rest of the story from Scotty, whether he is shy about it or not.”

“You won’t.  I hear the Sage favors you.  Ask him.  That’s the only way you’re going to get more info about gardeners.”

Alon called into the galley in the intercom, “Zila, we have a fix.  Scotty says we are up and running.  Acceleration trance in two hours.”

Zila watched as the ship turned and started maneuvers to her trajectory.  The isotaglia drifted to the hull and then went though it.  The bulkhead bulged a bit under the pressure, but there was no rupture.  There was a train of smaller and smaller apparitions behind it that went though various bulkheads until the ship turned away to its course and began to accelerate.  “So, gardeners leave a trail of dimensional debris.  Nasty!  Running into one of those at speed could be the end of us.”

Thinking about the Sage, the gardener and Leah ran in spirals around Zila’s mind.  Something very important was missing. 

“Why doesn’t the gardener just blow up the planet instead of gardening it?  If the isotaglia is so dangerous, why didn’t the gardener just make one to roast the Wisdom of Sage instead of just throwing us into space?  Especially since we might go visit his accursed planet again?”

“Acceleration in ten minutes,” announced Efar from the pilot’s chair.  “Trance time, folks.”

“WAIT! STOP!  Don’t go into FTL!”  Zila screamed.

“Why?  What’s happening?”

“I think we’ve been booby trapped.  I’m not sure, but I think so.”

“Scotty says everything checks out, Zila.”

“Ask Scotty if he checked the Allurion Seed.”

“Scotty says there is no way to check it.  It’s there, and the coils and power supply are all working properly.”

“I don’t know for sure, but what happens if the Seed is turned around somehow?”

“It can’t…uh….OK, I get it.  It would send us permanently into a set of alternate dimensions and we would be trapped there.  Scotty, can you check if the Allurion Seed is in the right orientation?”

Scotty’s voice from the Engineering section came back, “There is no way I can check that.  It’s in a sealed tube.  How could it be wrong?  I can see the seals, they are all intact.”

“Scotty, the gardener lives in N dimensions.  He could pick up the Seed from outside our space and turn it around.  Just like Leah picks up her wooden blocks from her play desk, turns them to the red side and puts them back.”

“I don’t know how to test that, Zila.”

“Alon, what can we do?  I really think we’ve been booby trapped.  No other option makes sense. Otherwise that gardener would have just obliterated us on his planet, or cooked us with an isotaglia.  There has to be a way to check it.  Wait…Can you get the container up to the lab?”

“I can remove the container, Zila.  I’ll shut down power here and bring it to the lab.  Give me a few minutes.”

“Alon, can you set up a mild magnetic field in the lab to test the Seed?”

“Great idea, Zila!  Where did you learn about FTL drives?”

“Well, I really didn’t, but Professor Bass sure tried.  Maybe I remembered something other than falling asleep in his lectures.”

Alon and Manny set up coils to make a small magnetic field.  The cylinder was marked with symbols about its axis. In the long direction, the cylinder did nothing at all.  In the direction that should have expanded the Seed to contain the whole ship, it just got heavier.   The Seed was twisted inside the sealed container at 90 degrees to its correct position. 

“Zila, you were right again,” Manny gave her a big hug and Alon clapped.  “You just saved us.  Let’s open this container and get the Seed turned around right.”

“Manny, Alon, you don’t have to open the container.  Just expand the Seed again so it surrounds the container.  Wow, isn’t it beautiful!  Look at all those facets!  Makes it hard to look at.  OK, Now I’ll just turn it with my hand, like this…  Now shut off the field.”

“How the hell did you know you could do that?  I thought we couldn’t even touch a Seed.  After all the years I spent at Cal Tech?”

“When we get back to Earth someday, Alon, please call Professor Herb Bass and thank him.  Don’t use my name, I flunked his class.”

*****

Zila’s tumbling thoughts found a core of concern.  She suspected the Sage set her up to find out more about the gardeners.  “OK, we are front line intelligence agents for the Tree of Life.  What now?” She wanted to do more exploring and had an idea, but it was risky.

She paced back and forth in the galley, stopped in front of Manny to say something, but just turned and paced some more.  There was something important in the back of her mind and she could not quite drag it out.  Manny looked at her with worry written on his face.  He raised an eyebrow, but Zila just shook her head and continued her pacing. 

So far the voyage had been one of pure exploration, with dragons and Scree monsters, for sure, but nothing worse.  Now, Zila sensed existential danger, danger to her, her family and perhaps much more.  There had to be a purpose to this trip beyond finding the origin to the Tree of Life.  Now she knew there were sentients that were never part of the Tree of Life.  She knew there were inimical forces.  But what were they facing?  A gardener, or gardeners, that deliberately wiped out sentient species?

“Stubborn, stupid woman,” she thought.  “What am I doing out here, with my whole family, my crew? In a borrowed FTL ship?  That gardener, whatever it is, just pitched us out into the void.  Its garbage trail nearly killed my daughter.  We don’t know what it is, how it did it, or anything about its reasons, other than that we made a hole in its precious lawn.”  But deep down, Zila sensed a dangerous threat.  She knew she would have to survey another gardener planet.

She was not ready to discuss it with Manny or her crew.  They wouldn’t agree.

Native Language Manny had a head full of puzzles.  His work on the dragon tissue showed his whole concept of genetic machinery was either wrong or incomplete.  Analysis of the Trooom sample revealed a totally different biology, not like the dragon and certainly not part of the Tree of Life.  If it was artificial, it was a masterful construct, well beyond his skills.  The alternatives haunted him.

Zila’s obsession with the origins of life, originally a shared objective, was now somewhat threatening.  He was worried about her safety and the safety of the kids.

What the hell were they doing, travelling with young children around a galaxy with inimical extra-dimensional entities?

What the hell was that gardener, and how did that bizarre ecology of a planet arise?

Temporarily, everything seemed peaceful.  He put the worries out of his head in the way that worked best for him.  He set himself  to concentrate on the observables and see where they led, like any good scientist.   One of them was Zila and her new language abilities.  She was definitely changing.  Were the changes deeper than just  language?

Manny thought the translator device was a clue.  His scientific curiosity, once aroused, was implacable.  He reasoned it had to be keyed into more than just Zila’s memory microbes.  After all, the Allurii traded their Seeds for translators, and would accept nothing else.  Moreover, he suspected Scotty knew much more than he was saying.

Manny did a full genome scan of Zila, Scotty and the crew, himself included.  It showed that they were all, except Scotty, of course, pretty much from the same human stock, with only the expected variations.  All of them, except Zila, had a genetic block, an operon that  affected the area of the brain known as Wernicke’s region involving speech.  That gene inhibited the formation of certain connections in the brain.  Zila not only did not have the inhibitor.  He convinced Zila to sit for a  quick brain scan.  It showed extra tissue in her brain that the rest of them lacked, right smack in the middle of Wernicke’s organ.  Both Leah and Vinnie inherited Zila’s speech operons.   Maybe they had the extra brain organ as well, but Manny did not try to scan the active kids, especially since Leah’s injured hand was still not quite functional.

The extra tissue probably interfaced with the translator devices.  That must be why the translator worked for Zila but not for him.  Her memory microbes must be the linguistic database – the dictionary, not the actual translator.

Manny thought it was peculiar that Scotty had the same genetic marker to repress language connections in the brain.   That marker looked like it was a piece of DNA from an old retrovirus, and with several copies to boot.  Each copy might have been another bout of virus infection.  Zila did not have any.  Manny came to the conclusion that Zila was a genetic outlier.  Or, perhaps, genetically engineered by the Great Sage’s memory microbes. 

The next off-shift he approached Scotty in the galley, which was still the only common area in the ship.

It took some stubborn argument, but Manny finally pried loose some useful info from the Priest.  “Yes, myths say that my very remote ancestors, before the fall, had a common language, and everyone understood each other perfectly. “

 One of the ways they were attacked was with a disease that killed the common language they shared, destroyed cooperation and infected all the survivors.  Language became tribal, and tribalism became competition, then war.  When they could not longer cooperate to maintain their basic infrastructure, civilization collapsed.  Then the environment changed and survival became nearly impossible.   Food could not be distributed.   Starvation led to tribal war.  Malnutrition led to cannibalism.  Then, suddenly, the entire ecology turned sour and they were on the road to extinction.   The Sage rescued them.

“Scotty, I found several copies of a retrovirus in your DNA.  I think it was part of a virus attack from the gardener.”

“That is not a surprise, Manny.”

“No wonder you venerate the Sage, Scotty.  What a disaster!”

That was as far as Manny got.  Scotty reverted to his truculent self and retreated to the engine room.

Zila the Modder “Manny, I’m sorry I’ve been neglecting you.  I need a hug.  Please?”

“I need it as much as you, Z.” 

Manny gave a great sigh.  Zila pushed him away and turned her face up to look him in the eye.  “OK, you got troubles, too.  Fess up, my love.”

“This may not be the best time, Z.”

“Now you have me really worried.  C’mon.  Share!”

“Z, you know I ran your DNA and compared it with everyone else’s.”

“Yeah.  So?”

 “Either you were gene-modded by the Sage, or earlier, or selected by the Sage because you already had this special speech organ.  Maybe that accounts for your special status and rapid promotions.”

“What gene-mod?”

“Language.  You have a complete language organ that no one else on the ship has.”

“Wait – wow.  I knew my status as Honored Human Emissary Priest Seeker Diplomat of the Great Sage was pretty weird.   Do you think he somehow had access to my Academy records?”

“Maybe.  I would guess he did this when he had his Priests spray you with memory microbes and slap that patch on your arm.”

Zila’s expression turned sour. “The Sage … that hippo bastard.  He took advantage of my naivete.  I feel raped.”

“He also entrusted you with a crew and a ship and a salary to match.  I wouldn’t call him evil, but he does have a reputation for manipulation.  A master of manipulation, they say.”

“So… now we both think the Sage had a hidden motive in my mission.”  Zila paced the galley again.  She already figured that out.  It had something to do with gardeners.  What happened between the Sage and gardeners before?  Was it just the Priests he was protecting?  And what did this have to do with the origins of Life?  Or the Allurii traders?

Zila made the trip down to the engine room, bringing Scotty his favorite drink.

“Scotty, please, please tell me you know something about gardeners on your planet.  Are we in some kind of danger?”

The look she got did not need translation.   Yes, a gardener almost wiped out all life on his planet.  That history was something to be forgotten.

*****

Panspermia Alon was a pretty good astrophysicist.  He also had a philosophical bent.  So he constructed a piece of software, a model of life spreading throughout the galaxy.  His rough panspermia model showed there ought to be a lot more sentient life in this galaxy.  Water is a common molecule in every galaxy.  There were plenty of Goldilocks planets, near enough to their stars for water to exist in solid, liquid and vapor phases on the same planet.  That is certainly the major condition for life to prosper.  If we accept panspermia in any form, Alon calculated, the time it would take for life spores (whatever they may be) to disperse and find another suitable planet in the Milky Way would be about 10 million to 100 million years, a tick of time in the ten billion years since the formation of the Milky Way galaxy.  Each new seeding would result in another point of dispersion about 10 million years later.  Over the course of a few hundred million years the dispersal would grow exponentially.  In a billion years nearly every suitable planet would have been seeded.  Driven by entropy, many of those would evolve highly energetic species, namely sentients.

By his calculations, on data provided by Manny, working backwards from the known mutation rate of DNA on Earth, the origins of the base of the Tree of Life was about 10 million years, much older than the Earth.  That means life did not arise spontaneously on Earth.   All Goldilocks planets should have been seeded the same way.

But they weren’t.  The missing populations of sentients stuck out like a sore thumb, or maybe the b****y stump of an appendage.    Enrico Fermi, the famous physicist who was vital to the creation of the atomic age, made his famous comment while having lunch with his colleague, Michael Hart.

In Dr. Fermi’s words, while he was discussing debunked UFOs and radio signals in space, “Where the hell is everybody?”

Later the Drake Equation gave a mathematical basis to the proposition and Carl Sagan, an astrophysicist, made it popular.  Everyone forgot those pioneers when the Earth was indeed contacted by the Pa’an through one of their Bracewell probes, an AI called Zovoarcnor.  Zovoarcnor was Earth’s first contact with an extraterrestial intelligence.  The Pa’an eventually aligned their P-gate so that a third of Earth’s population could pass through to a better universe.   But no one other than the Pa’an ever had any contact with Earth until the following century, the era of the FTL drive.  That only occurred in Zila’s young lifetime.

Humans were newcomers to the galaxy and still quite ignorant of its wonders and its dangers.

Manny was beginning to figure out the real situation.   Every Goldilocks planet that develops past a certain point was attacked and destroyed by a gardener.  A gardener treats free-roving sentient life as kin to a cockroach.  Further, Manny suspected the Sage knew about this and manipulated Zila into exploring further, or perhaps worse, he was using her as bait.

*****

Off to See the Sage? “Look, Manny, we’ve gone through so much and come out with nothing we can use against the gardener, or gardeners, whatever.”  Zila paced the few feet from the edge of their shared hammock to the washstand in their wardroom.  Manny stood against the bulkhead watching her, looking like he was ready for an argument.

“Z, it’s not our fight.  We’re five people and two kids against something that regularly wipes out civilizations.  I don’t want our kids to be exposed to that kind of an enemy.”

“But, Manny, they are!  Every sentient in the galaxy is in danger!”

“Come on, Z, they will probably live to be a few hundred years old and have great great grandchildren before they have to worry about a gardener.”

“Yeah, maybe, maybe not.  Manny, this thing gives me the willies.  I can’t say why, exactly, but there is danger here, now, not three generations from now.  Do you know anyone else who is in any kind of position to get info on a gardener?”

“I can’t answer that, Z.  How would I know?  How would you know?  At least go talk to the Sage before you hare off to tilt at the windmill.  And let me remind you, the Pa’an got to a very senior stage of development without having to deal with a gardener.  Why not us?”

“The Pa’an came from a place that was just barely a Goldilocks planet, but too heavy and far too close to its star to be a likely cradle of life.  Maybe the gardener just overlooked it.”

“Maybe and maybe.”  Manny put his arms around Zila and she leaned into his tall frame.  “I don’t want to lose you.  I don’t want Leah to lose a limb, or Vin to grow up in a war zone.  You’re my heart, my love.”

In the temporary quiet of the ship they calmed each other in the way known to humans in such situations.  Manny unzipped her clothes and gently pushed her into the hammock.  He stripped out of his own clothes and cuddled her, caressed her and eventually inserted himself into her.  Slowly, they rocked together until they had a good, deep o****m.

As she drifted off in a contented cloud on Manny’s shoulder, Zila thought of their s*x as a wonderful symbol and tribute to the Tree of Life.

Manny was already snoring.

*****

“Guys, you know I want to find another gardener planet and see what info we can gather on this N-dimensional enemy.  But Manny and I have the two kids to think of, and I have a responsibility for you and this mission.  We could go on and try to find another gardener planet, or go back to the Sage for a briefing.  Any ideas?”

“The Sage helped us before,” was all Scotty could say.

“I’ll go with your decision, Commander Zila,” Efar was being the good soldier.

“Unless you have some idea of how to interrogate a gardener, I suggest you consult the Sage.  You may find another gardener planet. Or a gardener may find you.  Then what?”  Alon sat back and folded his arms. 

Zila looked at the group.  Alon had the best argument.  Suppose she found a gardener.  What then?

The decision was clear.  “OK, then lets plot a course back to the Sage.”

“Already done, Zila.  Three weeks transit.”  Alon headed for the bridge, Scotty to the engine room and Manny to the kids.  Efar just shrugged and stood looking at Zila.

“Something about this decision bothers me,” he said.

“You too?”  Zila had made up her mind, but a warning sign lurked in its depths.

*****

Long Transit “Alon, why don’t gardeners just use some kind of violent attack?  Like blowing up a planet or dropping a moon on it.  Seems more efficient than that roundabout way of gardening.”

“Probably because blowing up a planet just spreads more panspermia spores.  Gardening it prevents any T of L entities from ever using it again.  And did you hear what that gardener said about infestations?  Maybe they consider anything that uses a lot of energy an infestation, something like locusts eating the crops.  Maybe mass and high energy interactions that advance entropy disturbs them.  Maybe they come from some a*s-end-of-the-universe where free energy is scarce.  Basically, I have no data to go on, just what Efar and Scotty told us.”

“But the Pa’an survived, and they build colossal, cosmic scale stuff that uses the energy of whole stars!”

“The Pa’an may be the most advanced sentient species in the galaxy.  Maybe the gardeners are afraid of them.  And don’t they have some kind of telepathy that allows them to work together?  Language differences, like the ones the gardeners cause, wouldn’t matter very much.”

“I don’t know, Alon, but I think there is a deeper reason the Pa’an were left alone.  I think they got to a Class 3 civilization before the gardeners first came here.  And I bet the Pa’an have access to N-space as well.  Too dangerous a foe for a gardener.”

“That’s as good a theory as any.  I trust the Sage has something to clear up the mystery.”

*****

“Scotty, can you help us here?”  Efar was standing in the engineering space over a drone shaped like a torpedo.  “I’m just trying to override the power limiter on this drone.”

“You’re likely to blow it up at that setting.  Here…”  Scotty made an adjustment.

“OK, guys, here’s the homing and guidance system.”  Alon was carrying a cube with wires and a big crystal on it.

“What does it do?”  asked Scotty.

“It follows a trail of isotaglia to find the gardener that caused it.”

“What?  I don’t want anything to do with it.”  Scotty walked away.

“Efar?” 

“Yeah, just install it right here.”  Efar pointed to a space in the nose of the torpedo with another similar module.  The crystal stuck out.

“So… we find a gardener.  What then?”

“Damned if I know.  Let’s tell Zila what we have here.”

*****

“Wow, you really have a homing torpedo for a gardener?”

“Assuming they always leave a trail of isotaglia, yes.  Of course, we have no way to test it out.”

“Thank God for that,” Alon interjected.

“And what if the gardener simply exits our dimensions?  What do we do then, hang around and wait?”  Alon’s eyebrows raised in a question.

“It was your idea, Alon.”  Efar grinned.

“It was my half-baked design, but I didn’t think you would go ahead and actually build it!”

“Guys, guys, good work.  It’s progress.  See of you can figure out how to gain access to N-space.”

“Yeah, sure.  I’ll just invent a new kind of Allurion Seed.  No problem.”  Alon frowned and shook his head.  “Just a few thousand years more progress and I’ll have it.”

“Anyone have any ideas about why a gardener leaves isotaglia behind anyway?”

“Sort of reminds me of the vortices behind a moving ship at sea,” Efar said, “or behind an aircraft wing.”

“Ummm.  That may be a clue.  When a gardener enters our 3-space, it picks up mass from the Higgs field and has to move slowly.  It sheds vortices like any other moving massive object, but they are N-space vortices.”

“Makes sense.”

“N-space vortices with stopped time,” Alon added.

*****

Collision alarm Zila jumped at the sound of a clanging alarm, spilling the last precious half-cup of coffee all over her spaghetti, “What the hell is that for?”

“FTL Collision alarm!” Alon gasped as the ship dropped into normal space without further warning.  They stumbled through the ensuing nausea to the bridge, where Scotty was on duty.   The forward screen showed a clump of debris, or maybe a pile of wreckage.

“I’ve never seen that before.  Why is it out here?”  Alon shook his head.  Zila turned toward Scotty and waited.  He was reticent as usual.

“I don’t think that’s a junk heap.  I think it may be an Allurion trader.”

“Wow, I imagined they would be sleek and very advanced.  Is that even a navigable ship?”

“If it is a trader, it’s a colony, not a ship.”

“How big is it?  How far off?”

At Zila’s request, Scotty applied a scale to the image.  “50 klicks away, 10 klicks across.”

“That’s huge!”

By this time Alon was at his navigation station.  “They are trying to contact us.  On screen.”

Zila watched as a symbol appeared looking something like a crystal, and, with it, messages and sounds in various languages.  “Wait, I’m not wearing my translators.”  As she rushed to her cabin for the jewelry box with her translators from the Great Sage, she understood, even without them, that there was some sort of urgency in the call.  Trade?  Help?  She was not sure.

“OK, send them this audio reply in the first language they offered, whatever it was, “Zila Beddiy Lee, Commander of the Wisdom of Sage, responding to your ship’s urgent call.  Let us communicate.”  She translated, and Alon recorded the call.  “Alon, put that on radio and laser, please.”

“I responded on their wavelength and frequency.  Receiving handshake protocols.  Connected now, voice and video.”

A humanoid figure masked by a hooded cloak appeared on the screen.  “I am Kupr, a master trader of the Allurii K Colony.  Our apologies for intersecting your flight path.  However, perhaps we can trade?”

By this time Efar was on deck, and he signaled to pause transmission.  “Zila, the Allurii only trade with governments.  No one else can afford their product, the FTL Seed.  Something is out of whack here.”

“Hmm, OK, got it.  Unlimber the gauss cannon, Efar.  Scotty, get ready for a fast exit.  Alon, let’s resume transmission. Pipe the translation to Manny as well.”

“Master Trader Kupr, we are privileged to trade with the renouned Allurii.  However, we are not your usual trading partners.  We are an exploration vessel of the Great Sage.  What trading do you suggest?”

“Commander Zila Beddiy Lee, we are disposed to trade for engineering assistance if you have such a person with the necessary skills.  We have various merchandise to offer in trade.  We have no weapons and I offer our sacred promise of non-violence.  Will you accept?”

“Efar, if they are a colony, they certainly outnumber us.  What do you think?”

“Zila, this ship can run circles around them at half power, and the Allurii sacred promise is a good as it gets.  Nothing ventured, nothing gained, I think.”

“Master Kupr, we accept the Allurii sacred promise of non-violence and request safe passage as well.  We will honor your sacred promise with our own promise of non-violence.  Please tell us what engineering service you require.  Our engineer is standing by.  If we can trade we will negotiate with you.”

“We agree to safe passage and non-violence on our sacred promise as Allurii traders.  Our food processors are defective and we are having propulsion issues.”

“Scotty, they are having problems with their food processor and some kind of propulsion issue.  Can you help?”

“Well…  Maybe….I don’t know.  I’m only trained on Sage vessels.”

“Will you try?  Take a look and see what needs to be done?”

“Umm, OK, Zila, but I don’t really know anything about Allurii colony ships.”

“Master Kupr, our engineer is trained on Sage vessels, but he is willing to visit your vessel, under safe passage, of course.  He will look at your equipment and report back.  Is that satisfactory?”

“Yes, we will escort him to the portions of our colony that he will need to see.  We do have some trade secrets and personal spaces, of course.  You understand our concerns?”

“Yes and we will agree to them.  I will send our engineer and an assistant by shuttle.  Please indicate their docking location.”

“Scotty, they want you to go over and look at their equipment but stay out of their secret areas and private spaces.  Will you go?”

“Yes, Zila.”

“Scotty, this is going to be a negotiation, and I suspect the Allurii are very shrewd traders.  Please don’t let them know what you find.  Just report back to me.  I’ll monitor your communications and do the translation for you.  Efar, will you go with him?  I called you his assistant, OK?”

“Zila, I wouldn’t miss the opportunity to see the inside of an Allurii colony for anything.  Happy to go!”

*****

Zila as Negotiator “Zila can you hear me?”

“Yes, Scotty, go ahead.”

“These people are not alien to me.  They are my species!  Please translate to the pair with me.  My external speaker is on.”

“Allurii companions, you appear to be the same species as our engineer.  How is this possible?”

“We did not know until now that another colony of Allurii escaped extinction.  This is indeed a great moment!”

“Scotty, talk to them in your language.  See if they can understand it.”

“They seem to understand some of it, Zila.  Let’s switch to Priest language.  This back and forth translation is getting tedious.”

“You are speaking the old sacred language!  There are some words we don’t understand, and your accent is very difficult, but it’s close enough for simple things.”

“Zila, did you hear that?”

“Yes, I did, Scotty.  Carry on.  I’ll stand by if some more translation is necessary.  Find out what’s wrong there and come back as soon as you can.”

Scotty’s escorts, Ksol and Kmelss,  insisted he have a break to eat with them.  Even with their broken food processors they would share what they had.  Their dining hall was crowded with many Allurii going and coming without any pattern.  They all seemed to be adults, and s*x could not be determined.  They were served biscuits of some sort, orange and grainy.  Efar could not eat them at all.  Apparently, that was all they could prepare with their systems down.

When Scotty and Efar came to the propulsion system, one of several in the huge colony ship, it was a mess.  Instead of a compact Allurii Seed in a sealed container, there were grains of something spilled in a bucket.  Ksol and Kmelss were not forthcoming about the problem.  By hints and questions, it appeared that this one engine was the FTL drive for the entire colony.  It was not functional, or hardly functional.  The rest of the equipment was a mess, and the colonists seemed to know very little about FTL ship’s engines at all. 

The Allurii were true to their sacred promise.  Transport back to the Wisdom of Sage was without incident.

*****

“So they’re in trouble?”  Zila was trying to get her head around the information Scotty and Efar brought back from the Allurion K colony ship.

“Zila, they are not starving but close to it.  They have no food synthesizers that work.  They are back to primitive baking methods and using up supplies they cannot grow.  Their FTL is a mess and, as far as I can tell, it does not have a good Seed.  They are way out in an isolated stretch between the spiral arms with no transport and little food.”

Zila turned to Efar, “I second that.  I can smell desperation, and they are Priests, not exactly a strange species to me.”

“Where do they come from?  They must have a home planet, a rescue group, something.  Why send a whole colony off into the void without support?”

Scotty, did the equivalent of heaving a sigh.  “They may not have a home world any more.  Our myths say that Priests had more than one inhabited planet.  I think they were also attacked by the gardener.  The Allurii Traders are the ones that escaped.”

“But…they have the Seeds!  They can go anywhere!  They trade those seeds for the price of a planet!”

“Not so sure about that, Zila.  They don’t seem to know much about the Seeds.  Their FTL engine is not exactly a sterling example of high tech.”

“So who invented the Seeds?  How do the Allurii make them?”

“Damned if I know.”  Efar shook his head.

“Nor I,” Scotty responded.

Manny, who had been silent all through this discussion, finally spoke up.  “If they were attacked by a gardener they would be extinct.  I bet they fought, that’s why they had enough warning to escape.  Maybe they didn’t invent the Seeds.  Maybe they stole them.  From a gardener!”

Four pairs of eyes shot open.  There was silence for a long while.

“Holy s**t!” said Efar.

“And the Allurii used the stolen Seeds to spread sentient life across the entire galaxy, maybe even the local cluster!”

“Yup, we be cockroaches,” answered Efar.

*****

“Master Kupr, we have our engineer’s report and we believe we can offer assistance.  Do you wish to negotiate with us?”

“Yes, Commander, we are traders, after all.  We were impressed by your engineer.  Not only is there some common history between us, he speaks the old language!  We have something to discuss, but of course trade comes first.”

“We invite you to visit our humble vessel.  We have a working food processor and a small galley.  We will have a meal, some interesting talk and discuss our trade.  Under our mutual promise of safe passage and non-violence, of course!”

Zila could see him almost salivating at the thought of real food.  “We accept your kind offer.  May I bring my assistant?”

“Our ship is tiny compared to yours, but we have space for you and your assistant.  Please come over.  Our docking port is illuminated now.”

*****

A feast in zero G is a bunch of tube food and squeeze bulbs.  The bulk of the preparation is getting the comestibles from the bulk containers or the food processor into the proper zero G containers.  Zila and Manny, as hosts, tried to avoid any kind of biscuit, after Scotty described that as all the Allurii had to eat.  The kids were fed and confined to their cabin.  By now, Leah’s crumbs were fewer and Vin was handy with the crumb net.

Kupr and Kmelss, his assistant, disembarked from the docking tube without anything in hand, but wearing voluminous robes with belts.  When they swirled around it was obvious those robes had lots of pockets, and their peculiar leg joints were the same as Scotty’s.  Dining pillows were velcroed to the floor and the diners were attached to tethers.  Drinks, specified by Scotty, were served to the two Allurii and the guests were given a long moment to settle in. 

“Where did you get your Seed for this fine yacht?”  Kmelss asked.

“From the Sage.  He owns a fleet of FTL ships.  I am a diplomatic emissary of the Sage.  We are his official exploratory expedition.  Surely you know of the Sage of Saggitarius?”

“Kmelss is too young to know, but I certainly do.  He is reputed to be a formidable negotiator but one who keeps his promises.  Of course, no one ever actually meets him.  It is known that he trades for Seeds from L colony.  Perhaps others as well.”

“Our Commander has spent many hours with him, and received her rank and her translation devices directly from him.”  Zila wanted to kick Scotty under the table, but that table had no “under”.

Zila changed the subject.  “We have just come from a confrontation with a gardener.  I understand you Allurii have some history with a gardener.  We must exchange information, of course after we negotiate.”  Scotty translated “gardener” into the old name of the adversary for the benefit of their guests.

“We have been in space as a self-sufficient colony for many generations.  Each colony ship was given a designation as a letter of our alphabet.  Ours is K, and all our names start with that letter.  Originally, we planned to rendezvous in various locations, but after the first few we were again attacked by a gardener, so we are now isolated except for random meetings.  Often as not, more than one colony converges on the same planet for trade.  Then we pool our resources and negotiate as a group.  But more about that later.  It has been generations since any of us had personal knowledge of a gardener. But you, you not only know the Sage personally, but you have escaped a gardener!  Yes, we have much to talk about.”

“We certainly do.  My crew, Alon, our navigator and astrophysicist, Efar, our pilot and military complement, and my husband Manny, a genetic engineer, were all chosen by the Sage.  The gardener is our common adversary.  Yes, that will be a most interesting conversation.

“But first, we offer to repair your food processors and perhaps we can do something about your FTL engine.  What do you offer in exchange?”

“You can repair our FTL engine?  You have a spare Seed?”

“No, but there may be another way.”

“There is no other way.  We make Seeds.  It takes two working, good Seeds to make another Seed.  We only have the one we reserve for such purpose.  We cannot trade that Seed.  Please understand.”

“But we DO have a good, working Seed…”

“If we could borrow it…”

“Not possible.  It is sealed, and we would be helpless without it.  Why can’t you bring your spare Seed over here and make a new one?”

“Our process is our primary means of trade.  We cannot expose that secret.  And the process is far from easy.  The special material is scarce, the precautions, the ceremony….No, it is impossible.”  Kupr frowned, almost a human gesture.

“Then let us talk about your food processors.  What do you offer in trade for our repairs?”

“If the repairs are extensive, we can offer part of our supply of matta.  We will sweeten the deal with access to our archives about our history with the gardener.”

Scotty interjected, “Matta is a kind of cereal, what they use to make their biscuits.”

“Can humans even eat matta?”

“We can eat it, we won’t like it.”  Efar made a face.

“Scotty do they drink coffee?  Make an alcoholic beverage?  Ice cream?  Chocolate?”

“No, Commander, none of those.”

“Master Kupr, I’m afraid our trade must be for information.  While information about the gardener is valuable to us, we also have such information of value to you.  We think trading information for information is an equal trade.  We are still at a loss about what to trade for fixing your food processors.”

“Is fixing our food processors such a burden?  Would you not perform such a small service as a charitable act?”

“Master Kupr, I am a diplomat of the Great Sage, and I could not bring myself to offer charity to the proud Allurii.  Please accept our humble offering of food here, return to your colony with a full belly, and seek something we can use in exchange.”

In English, Manny retorted, “I hope I never have to negotiate with you.  The Sage trained you too well.”

Zila did not answer.  The Sage did not train her in negotiation at all.  She invented it as she went along.  And…she was scared.  She was still falling from the cliff, and there was no bottom in sight.

The tubes and bulbs were passed around and the Allurii ate and drank with obvious pleasure, like people who were deprived of tasty food for too long.

*****

“Scotty, please talk to Master Kupr and see if he is ready to trade yet.”

“Zila, I can fix all his food processors.  There is no reason to let them suffer.”

“Scotty, your charitable impulse is admirable, and I promise we will not let them leave without working food processors.  But, please, trust me.  There is much more at stake here.”

A little later, Scotty called Zila from her cabin where she was doing research on other colony ships, especially Allurii contacts.  It appears no one was ever allowed on an Allurion colony ship. 

“Zila, Master Kupr is seeking further negotiation.  He is on the bridge comm screen.”

“Great!  Let’s do it!”

“Good day to you, Master Kupr.  I’m happy to work with you again.”

“Ah, such diplomatic finesse, Commander Zila.  You are a credit to the Sage.  In fact, I suspect you are worth many credits to that entity.  However, I must admit, after the fine meal we enjoyed, I cannot deny your services to our colony.  Tell me what you want and it will be yours.  I suspect it has to do with our Seeds, is that right?”

“You are gifted with insight, Master Kupr.  But I don’t want to make a bald demand.  Rather, I want, I need, to recruit you and your colony in the struggle against our common nemesis.  So, Scotty and I would like to join you on your ship and tell you about our experiences.  Then, when you see what is at stake, I will tell you what we need.”

“Then we will prepare our dock for your arrival.”

*****

“Master Kupr, our assignment from the Sage is to explore the origins of the Tree of Life, to see just how far back and what kind of entities share a common root.  In our voyage we found species that were never in contact with Earth or the Priests who nevertheless were very much part of the same Tree of Life.  My mate, Manny, does the genetic testing in our lab.  It was a completely scientific venture until our last planetfall on Trooom.  That planet had been transformed to exclude any kind of relationship with the Tree of Life.  The entities on it were not related to our roots.  They were completely engineered for one purpose: to prevent anything from the Tree of Life from growing there.  They have no genetic material in common with us.  You and I, as different as we are, have very much DNA in common.”

“I understand only a little of what you describe.  But I certainly know that a gardener is a deadly foe.”

“That gardener threw us off the planet with our engines cold.  It tossed us into space so far away we had to recalibrate our navigation systems.  It booby-trapped our Seed to trap us in N-space forever.  It left a trail of dangerous isotaglia that injured my offspring.”

“You have offspring on that tiny vessel?  Are you uncivilized?  And what are isotaglia?”

“Yes, human children are helpless without their parents.  Leaving them on Earth would have been difficult.  Perhaps we are insane, but perhaps we have a different reproduction system than you.  Do you not have offspring on your vessel?”

“Yes, but they are in the care of the crèche workers.  Our trade is too dangerous for them to be exposed.  Can you describe isotaglia?”

“It is a round blob of distortion.  When you spray it with water droplets, they freeze at the surface and you can see it.  If you touch it your hand will burn when you pull it out.”

“We have known them as gardener mines, meant to kill us.”

“Perhaps.  We think they are accidentally shed by a gardener, not deliberate, but who knows?  In any event, we have seen them and we have made a torpedo to follow their trail right to a gardener.”

“You can seek out a gardener with a weapon?  Amazing!”

“I’ll let Scotty describe what a gardener did to his planet.  Perhaps hearing it in the old language will make you feel the danger I see now.”  She gestured at Scotty, who had understood the absolute necessity of overcoming his fear and revealing some of his people’s history.  Reluctantly, he began:

“The gardener destroyed our language and our ability to talk to each other.  This language you call the old language is the one the Sage put together from fragments of what he found.  After our civilization fell apart, our population plummeted, but we were still hungry.  Then our crops failed.  Many died of hunger, more of battles for food.  When we were starving, plagues and disease took the few stragglers.  Then the entire ecology was destroyed.  We became a few ragged bands killing each other with pointed sticks and eating each other as cannibals.  Now I know it was not our cowardice or failings as a species that ended us, it was the work of a gardener.  But for the Great Sage, we would be extinct.  We now serve as Priests to the Great Sage and we try to forget that horrible time.”

Kupr and his assistants were quiet.  They looked at each other a long time.  “We know part of the story.  A gardener came to our planet and infected us with a virus that destroyed our civilization.  Our scientists built colony ships and left.  We know everyone who stayed, died.  How do you fight such a thing?”

“We don’t know.  I think the Seeds may be turned into a weapon.”

“That is impossible.  We know Seeds,”

Zila leaned forward,  “Master Kupr, please, it will not go beyond us here.  Did the Allurion Seed come from the N-dimensional gardener?”

Very quietly, Kupr answered.  “Yes.”

“It was not a gift from them?”

Again, very quietly, “No gift.”

“Master Kupr, what would you trade for a supply of torpedoes rigged to find a gardener and trap it in N-space?  What would you trade for ALL Allurion Traders to have such torpedoes?”

“Much. We would give very much.  But we are hungry and way out here in space.  We are not much use in this battle.”

“You are survivors of the greatest danger any free-living life form can face.  Without question, you have every right to retribution.  You can be instrumental in this battle.”

“Commander Zila, I am no match for your negotiation prowess.  Please state plainly what you want and we will provide it if it is at all possible.  In exchange, you must help us in this predicament.”

“Master Trader, it is not my prowess that convinced you.  It is the facts of your own history.  The Allurii K colony has proven itself a worthy ally and we will be the same to you.  I want to know how to make Allurion Seeds.  Perhaps together we can make many of them.  You have a deal!”

“You will not be able to make many of them, but if you will not circulate our methods, depriving us of our only source of trade and sustenance, we will do as you wish.  However, the material we need is very scarce.  It is element 61.”

“Wait.  Alon, Zila here.  Look up element 61.”

“It’s promethium.  Very rare and every isotope is radioactive.   What’s it for?”

“We’re going to build a few Allurion Seeds!”

*****

“That mess in the Allurii FTL engine is promethium.  Kilos of it!  But it failed to become a crystal.  It’s just a bunch of pebbles and powder.  Can we fix it?”

“I guess their refining process failed.”  Alon shook his head.  “They thought they could get some drive if they used even broken pieces.  It almost worked!  From Scotty’s samples it’s promethium bromide.  Weird stuff - bizarre chemistry.  But I think we can grow a crystal and zone refine it, like they used to do in the old days on Earth with silicon.  It’s a slow process.”   Alon glanced at Manny and Scotty to see if they were all in agreement.  They nodded back at him.

“I don’t know much about zone refining, but I have some spare coils from our plasma drive.  Will they work?” Scotty volunteered.

“We’ll make them work.”

“Allurii won’t tell us the rest of the secret process until we have a good crystal,” Zila was not quite as exhilarated as she was when the Allurii agreed to share their secret process for making Allurion Seeds.  “There is always a hitch.”

“Humans say ‘The devil is in the details’.  Did I get that right?”

“Square on, Scotty.  You’re becoming better at human culture every day, Heaven forfend.”  Efar stood by watching the group plan the biggest jump in human technology since the mastery of fire.  Zila watched his face.  The others were calmly intellectualizing the event.  Efar got it, gut level and more.  This was history.

Five days later they had their first, very pure, crystal of promethium bromide, Pm145Br, just a few centimeters long and spitting out beta particles as it decayed.  The apparatus they built already started making a second crystal.

“Wow, that’s just a lump of grayish metal.  Doesn’t look anything like a Seed.”

“Yeah, and it won’t stay pure very long.  It decays into protactinium, which is useless to us.  We have a few days to work with it before its purity is too low for the Allurii process.”

“Well, what is the big secret, guys?  A magic ritual?  Incantations with a candle?”

“Might as well be for all the Allurii understand it.  Next step is to put it under extreme dimensional pressure with another Seed.”

“We’ll have to use our FTL Seed.  I got it out of the drive.  Here it is.”  Scotty handed the sealed cylinder to Alon, who put it into a device with several coils and a big power connection.  “Let’s hope we can do this on ship’s reserve power.”

“OK, here goes.  10 Tesla along the X axis.”  The Seed expanded to include the new crystal.  “Now 10 Tesla along the Y axis.”  The Seed shrunk and took the new crystal with it.  They could barely see the shrunken objects with their n***d eyes.  There was no sound, but everyone felt something go POP.  Alon cut the current and the Seed and its cargo returned to normal space.  Now it glittered, scattering the lab lights around like the surface of a jewel.

“Prettier, but still not a Seed,” Zila stated the obvious.  “Well, back to Master Kupr for the next trick.”

*****

“We have hoped and prayed for your success.  We did not understand your process.  It was different from ours. Our best fabricators only succeed in getting one good crystal out of many.  There is some skill involved, and our last Master Fabricator is very old and not as efficient as he used to be.  Yet you succeeded on your first try, without him.  There is hope for us against the gardener, with such species as yours!”

“Thank you.  Can we go to the next step now?”

“You will need two good Seeds for the next step.  I have sent for Master Kaeme.  One of his assistants is bringing him .

Zila had never seen an old Priest.  She didn’t see one now, either.  Master Kaeme looked the same age as Scotty – no gray hair, saggy skin or any of the human signs of aging – but his joints seemed nearly locked and he moved very slowly, with apparent pain.  He was bent and had to look up to Zila.  Another Priest, who remained silent, dragged a cart behind him.  Both wore a symbol, a circle inside a half-sphere, carved in some metal, on chains around their necks.

“Yess, I am Kaeme. But I dare not call myself Master in front of those who have surpassed my skills.”  It seemed to Zila that humility was wired into the Priest species.

Alon showed him the crystal, held in his hand.

“Ahh, yess, that is the second stage Seed.  It does not burn your hand?”

Zila translated for Alon, “Once it was compressed using another Seed, it was no longer radioactive.  It does not burn now.”

“That is as it must be.  Please let me test this crystal.”

Kaeme handed the crystal to his assistant who put it on a clever mechanical device.  Zila looked at Alon.  “Mass and specific gravity, I would guess.”

The assistant showed the results to Kaeme, who then waved his hand to the next test.  The crystal went into a small oven and a shrill keening sound burst out of it.  “Hell if I know.  I would be doing x-ray crystallography, but…”  Alon shrugged his shoulders.

“The third test is the most important.  The crystal must be compatible with our other Seed.  If it is not, there will be an implosion and we will lose both the Seed and the crystal.”  If Zila was any judge of Priest emotions, after working with Scotty and the Priests on the Sage’s planet, Master Kupr seemed more than a bit edgy.  He backed away from the apparatus.  Kaeme himself took the crystal and put it into a long cylinder.  Then he took the colony’s remaining good Seed out of a small metal box and added it to the cylinder.  He filled the remaining space in the cylinder with something like foam, sealed it, and set it down.  He put on long gloves, a face mask and a long, heavy garment with the same hemisphere-and-circle symbol embedded in it at chest level.  He shooed everyone away from the apparatus in the cart.  Then he chanted in a strange, low voice.  His assistant recited the same chant.  Kaeme took the cylinder in both hands by the end and slowly inserted it into a hole in the side of the cart.  Zila, Alon and Scotty held their breath.

Nothing happened.

Kaeme and his assistant chanted some more.

Again, nothing happened. 

More chanting.

Zila was crestfallen.  It seemed the crystal did not pass the critical third test.

With a big sigh, Zila watched Kaeme slowly and carefully remove the long cylinder and unseal it.  He withdrew the Seed and the crystal and handed the crystal back to Alon.  Alon reluctantly took the crystal and just stared at it with a frown.

Kaeme faced Zila and looked up at her.  “It is compatible.  Your crystal has passed the third test.  There was no implosion.”

*****

“Do you know what they’re planning to do now?” Alon exclaimed.  “They are going to make an N-space FTL bubble inside an N-space FTL bubble.   Then they’re going to shrink the outer bubble and shunt the crystal into N-space.”

“So?  That’s how they make Allurion Seeds!”

“But, Zila, they have no idea what they are doing or how this works.  There are only so many extra dimensions!  They’re screwing with the entire metric of space!  Ever hear of a Calabi-Yau manifold?”

“Whaaat?  A calipa yow what?  Am I supposed to know that?  I’m a molecular biologist, or something.  Is that some new species?”

Alon sighed.  “It’s the theoretical shape of the ten dimensional space we live in.  It’s … aah…”

“Wait, I thought we lived in three dimensions plus time.  Is a gardener in this ten dimensional space?”

“Eh, uh…  Look, I’m just worried.  We are playing with the fabric of the universe and we don’t know what the hell we are doing.  There is such a thing as a propagating fracture, a phase change that affects space itself.  Well, in some theories, anyhow.”

“Alon, look.  First, Allurii have been making Seeds like this for, what, centuries?  Second, we are way out in the middle of nowhere.  What better place to do this kind of experiment?  Last, we better get used to this N-space thingy.  That’s what a gardener is and they want us extinct.  So we got no choice.  See?”

“Your logic is impeccable, Zila, but a phase change might not be local.  I’m still worried.”  He puffed out his lower lip and blew out his breath.  “Sure, we have to do it.”

“Let’s do it on our ship, in the lab, and away from the colony.  Might as well take the precautions we can.”  Zila conceded.  “And we ought to have Master Kaeme here to supervise.”

*****

Efar piloted Wisdom of Sage to a point a million kilometers from the colony at Zila’s order.  “Will that be enough distance in case the Seed does something weird?”

“Hell if I know.  Does anybody know what a propagating fracture of space means?”  Alon got up from his pilot’s console and paced.  “What does Kaeme say?”

Zila answered, “Kaeme does not understand what a Calabi-Yau manifold is.  Neither do I.  You’re asking a blind woman to lead the visually impaired.   It’s the best chance we have, unless you came up with something better.”

Would her inept decision destroy the universe, or just her family and crew?  Zila didn’t know, and she was getting numb to such things.  Her focus was on the gardener, the threat she could not abide, the thing that almost took Leah’s hand.

“Nope.  Let’s get on with it, then.  My stomach is tied in knots.”

Kaeme’s apparatus was a mess of wires, coils and gimbals.  He put the known good Seed into the inner gimbals and connected its coils to some source of power.  The Seed dutifully expanded to include the apparatus.  He reached in with a wand of some sort and rotated the Seed.  It flashed, and stabilized.  He used another tube to shove the second Seed, the one from the FTL engine of the Wisdom of Sage, into the outer gimbals and spun it around.  While it was spinning he switched on power to a set of thick wires.  The spinning increased until the entire system of gimbals was a blur.  “How are you going to put the new crystal into that while it’s spinning?”

“It goes into another dimension, I guess.  Like putting a coin into a circle you drew on a piece of paper, but in more than 3 dimensions.  Just watch Kaeme.”

The Allurii master, however, was in no hurry.  He chanted for a long while and Zila could not interrupt him with a question.  The Seed within a Seed accelerated to a crystalline blur.  Alon, Efar and Zila fidgeted.  Just as she was about to interrupt. Kaeme took the second stage crystal, put it into a tube and thrust it into the spinning kaleidoscope. 

Nothing exploded.  Space-time did not fracture, or, perhaps, it did not fracture yet.  Kaeme swapped connections.  Now things changed.  Stars, visible through the edge of the bridge’s port, went out.  Zila staggered around dizzy and disoriented.  There was a long non-sequence of disconnected images and thoughts, as if the very nature of causality was suspended. 

Then it was over.

Through gritted teeth, Zila watched her crew, all equally disoriented.  Kaeme was bowing and chanting.

“Are we done?  Did it work?”

“I have lived through another Seed-making.  It is my fortune to have succeeded one more time, and my misfortune to be the oldest and last of my kind, yet to perform this dangerous ritual again.  Yes, it worked.”  He uncapped the tube and dropped out the glittering Allurii Seed.  “Here is the new Seed.  May it save our colony.  May it serve all of us against the gardeners.”

But, Zila thought, we need many more seeds.  She did not have the heart to tell Master Kaeme that a new proto-Seed was already waiting.

*****

With a little dangerous experimentation and some advice from Master Kaeme on the art of Seed-making, Alon calculated that Seeds were not really one-size-fits-all.   Tiny Seeds might be useful as multi-dimensional spear points against a gardener, maybe, if only we knew what a gardener was.  Much, much larger Seeds could be made as well.  He had no idea what they might be good for, yet.  Of course, the shortage of promethium limited things. 

In any event, the hold of the Wisdom of Sage, empty at the start of the voyage, now held several fortunes of gold, diamonds and a very few, very precious Allurion Seeds.  They could buy a country, or perhaps a planet.  “Meaning and Profit?”  Yes, well the profit was certainly there.  And the meaning?  Depends on your point of view.  What was a gardener, and why was it so inimical to free-living life forms?  How do you corral an entity that can pop in or out of your most tightly locked containers simply by finding an open dimension?  Where do you go to get away from one?

*****

Master Kupr’s Plan Zila thought the celebration aboard the K colony was rather subdued.  They had escaped starvation and stranding, yes, but they were still of the Priests’ race and therefore naturally pessimistic.  They had good reason now.  Their fears of the gardener had been confirmed.

A few days after Wisdom of Sage’s shuttle docked again with the colony, Master Kupr requested a meeting with Zila and her “assistants”.  Zila elected to take Alon, who best understood this N-space thing, and Scotty.  They were ushered to secluded seats in the colony mess hall and this time they were served a sumptuous meal, most of which the humans could not eat.  Zila waited for the Allurion contingent to get down to business.

“Commander Zila, no one can understand the relations between life and the gardeners better than those that have been attacked and nearly exterminated by them.  I do know that one lonely colony, no matter how lucky we were to find such a capable and generous emissary from the Great Sage itself, cannot carry on this battle alone.  We are, after all, traders and we are the ones that spread FTL transport all over the galaxy.  Who would be better to spread the word, and share our new knowledge of this adversary?  We will volunteer to accomplish several things.  We will make sure all Allurion colonies that remain know about the gardeners and our history with them.  We will also spread the word to all sentients with whom we trade.  We will make a surplus of Seeds to use as weapons, if that is possible.  Finally, we will agree to train one of your crew to make Seeds and share our apparatus, provided that the knowledge goes no further than your crew.  Do you agree?”

“Master Kupr, we agree and we are delighted to have the assistance of the far-ranging Allurii traders.  Finding the source of the Allurion Seeds was one of my assigned goals, but you have exceeded every expectation.  We thank you, and we are glad to have rendered assistance to your colony.”

She waved at Master Kaeme, whose stoic face still reflected his dread of making more Seeds.  “Master Kaeme, do you think you can work with our navigator, Alon here, and teach him the art of Seed-making?”

Kaeme immediately straightened up and showed some enthusiasm, while Alon grew a worried frown.  “Alon, Master Kaeme has made many Seeds without causing a fracture in space-time.  This might be the biggest breakthrough for the human race since the invention of atomic energy.”

“Hmph.  I read the history of the Manhattan Project.  And the result.  Remember how they tested the U-235 for criticality?  That guy died from radiation poisoning.  Here we are, “tickling the dragon” again, quite literally.  Well, war is war.  Never thought I would be building weapons, but here I am.  Of course I’ll do it.  Master Kaeme (translated through Zila), thank you for your confidence in me.”

Master Kaeme forced Alon to learn the chants as well as the actual process.  They turned out to be timing rituals, used where clocks might not be available.  Alon also learned to test the Seed’s orientations so they could be used reliably, and to identify a rogue Seed with deceptive orientation.  It was during this section that he had the idea to use deliberately defective Seeds as warheads in the anti-gardener torpedoes.  A torpedo could be armed with Seeds set to reach enormous mass and infinitesimal size upon contact, and to then switch to the orientation that sent the Seed, and hopefully it’s target, into a random piece of N-space.  If it worked, it would kick a gardener into a lost space just like the gardener had tried to kick the Wisdom of Sage.  That is, if even being lost was damaging to a gardener.

The nice thing was that it was a lot easier to make defective Seeds.

Zila duly consummated her end of the bargain and made sure Kupr and his Allurii craftspeople could make torpedoes.  They did not have the technology to make the sensors and control packages, but Alon provided detailed plans so they could be provided by Kupr’s trading partners.

The Allurii were now free to go out and spread the word about gardeners.

*****

Back to the Sage They were a long way out on the Saggitarius arm.  The trip back to the Sage was months, and marked by exhilaration over their financial fortunes, despair over the conflict with the gardeners, and the tedium of a long passage.  They were efficiently docked and welcomed at the home planet of the Wisdom of Sage.  Zila thought it was almost like being home.

Their cargo was tallied and deposits made to their various accounts.  Zila had never seen such a large number of credits in an account.  The incredible wealth meant little to her.  Efar just grinned.  Alon shoved the voucher into a pocket and Scotty had no response whatsoever.  Manny daydreamed of getting back to Earth or Ganymede, buying a villa and re-opening his practice.  He settled for buying a few dozen donuts, imported from Earth, for the kiddies.

The Sage put aside his normal schedule to see Zila, Manny and Scotty the very next day.

Samantha Tor The area outside the Hall of Enlightenment was a great court with hundreds of offices of various sizes and functions.  The circular area with many functionaries reflected the Sage’s sense of organization – most reported directly to the Sage with few intermediaries.  Nevertheless, access to the Sage itself was never granted except to a very few privileged officials.  So Samantha, just off a shuttle from a commercial Earth transport, was stonewalled. 

“There must be some way I can communicate directly with the Sage.  I’m a Senior Policy Analyst for the Solar Federation.  How can I recommend policy without a good contact?”

“We can answer all your questions, human Policy Analyst.  We are Priests to the Great Sage.”

“But it isn’t about questions that need answering.  It’s about shaping policy between two systems.  I need the Sage’s input.”

“Please come back to my station tomorrow.  I will consult with the Sage and see what can be done.”

This was the third day she got the same answer, or one like it.  Her frustration was mounting.  It reached a furious peak when she saw Zila and Manny go right through the portal to the Hall of Enlightenment.  “What about them?”

The Priest-Negotiator simply nodded in Zila’s general direction.  “That human is Priest Seeker and Emissary, Diplomat to the Great Sage.  You are not.”

So Samantha lurked, ready to pounce on Zila as soon as she emerged. 

Efar Oms, always the protector, spied Samantha and suspected her plan.  He worked his way from kiosk to cubbyhole until he had a clear view of Samantha.  From the back, all he could see was long blonde hair and tight leather pants and jacket.  Intriguing as that view was, he strolled as casually as he could to a point where he could glimpse her face.  Even from a distance, the woman was just plain beautiful.  Her sculpted cheekbones and big eyes, sensuous moue of a mouth and slightly clefted chin were at once perfect and slightly exotic, but there was no sign of fussiness.  This woman wore those leathers like she actually rode a motorcycle, one of those long antique two-wheeled vehicles with an obnoxious gasoline engine. 

Suddenly she wheeled around and confronted Efar, “What the hell are you looking at, mister?”

Efar’s eyebrows went up to his hairline, but he made a quick recovery.  “It isn’t often I come across a first class beauty on an alien planet.  Even less often when she seems to be stalking my commander.”

“Your commander?  You mean the man who just went in there?”  She pointed her chin at the big doors to Hall of Enlightenment.

“Efar Oms.  And you are….?”

“The tooth fairy.  Who is your commander?”

“Look, pretty lady, it’s my job to protect my commander, and you are not going to get past me.  If you have a reason to see her, fess up, otherwise walk away.” 

“Her?” Hmm. The commander was a woman, and Efar, here, was her protector.  Samantha could see he was quite serious, and equally capable, probably ex-military or a martial arts type.  Attractive, in a menacing sort of way.  Well, that could be turned around.  She put one foot in front of the other, stuck out a hip, did a little hair flip and a very subtle pout.  She made big eyes at Efar,  “Please, can you help me?”

Efar hid his grin behind his hand but could not suppress a chuckle.  “Nice try.  Now who are you and why do you need to see my commander?  Last chance…”

Samantha dropped the pose and returned to classic leather chic.  Efar decided he liked that better than the phony pout.  “Look, I’m Samantha Tor, Senior Policy Analyst to the Solar Federation. There are things going on Earthside that I’m supposed to figure out, but the strings seem to lead to here.  And I can’t get an audience with the Great Sage, and these Priests are useless when it comes to creative analysis.”

“You got any credentials I can check, Sam?”

“That’s Samantha, not Sam.  Credentials?  I want to see yours first.”

Efar flicked out Glimmer and swished it around.  Samantha backed up real fast.  “How’s that?”

“They let you carry that … that thing in here?”

“Part of my job, Sammy.  Credentials?”

Samantha made a wry face, but she took out her badge, a jeweled card with the logo of the Solar Federation and an embedded data chip.  Efar took it and walked over to the nearest Priest.

“Hey, wait, that’s my official copy!”

Efar ignored her and handed it to the Priest/Negotiator with a few words in the Priest language.  The Priest duly checked it and handed it back.

“That didn’t hurt, did it?” He handed the card back to Samantha. 

“Wait…you speak their language!”

“After ten years working for the Sage on this planet, damn right I do.  Horrible accent, though, I’m told.”

“Please, I really need to talk to the Sage.”

“Above my pay grade.  But I can get you an audience with his Priest/Seeker, Diplomatic Envoy, and Emissary.  I suggest you need to start there.”

Samantha breathed a big sigh.  “That would be your commander?”

“Yep, Zila Aropova Beddiy Lee.  You just saw her walk through those doors.”

Samantha gave him a big, genuine grin.  “Now we’re getting somewhere, Mr. Oms.”  She held out her hand and Efar took it in his, not sure exactly what to do with it.  He remembered it was a handshake, a custom he hadn’t seen in a decade.  He shook it.  It felt warm and silky in his hand.  He couldn’t suppress a grin in return.

*****

Efar and Samantha waited in a lounge outside the Wisdom of Sage for Zila’s arrival.  Samantha stood up, almost two meters of tall, curvaceous, blonde human female in a leather suit that was nearly as revealing as the shipsuits, but somehow more flattering.  “You must be Ambassador Zila.”

“Um, Commander, this is Samantha Tor, Senior Policy Analyst for the Solar Federation.  I intercepted her trying to get to you.  Her credentials check out.  Samantha, meet Zila.  And this is her husband, Dr. Manny Lee.”

“THE Dr. Manny Lee?  The infamous gene-mod doctor?”  Samantha tilted her head, looked up at Manny, batted her eyes and showed a mouthful of perfect, pearly teeth.

“Infamous?  What party line did you swallow?  I never did anything but honest and harmless work.”  Manny’s words belied his body signals.  He smiled, looked abashed and cast his eyes down at the floor.  They didn’t stay there long.  They traveled up Samantha’s leather-clad body.

Samantha turned to Zila and extended her hand.  Zila looked at it like it was the head of a cobra.  The woman had one of those accents that could only be produced by years of elocution lessons.  This was a woman who made use of sophisticated feminine wiles, the kind Zila never learned.  And that body…  Zila took in Manny’s reaction and had a sudden, atavistic urge to invite Samantha into space and shove her out an airlock.  A primitive part of her brain well below the conscious level screamed “husband stealer”.  After the incident with the gardener, the Allurion Trader colony and her troubling audience with the Great Sage just an hour ago, she was in a wash of feelings.  Her emotions whirled in a vortex of villainous thoughts, mixed with worry about everything from the kids to the human race.  Now this…Samantha Tor?

“Lady, I’ve got a few really important things on my mind, like maybe the future of the human race.  We’ve just gone through a stay in hell.  Whatever you want, it better be short, easy and quick.”  She gave Efar the evil eye.

Well, Samantha thought, I’ve also got concerns about the future of the human race.   She put on a straight face.  “Solar sent me here.  I’m not after plaudits or promotions.  It’s a serious mission, and sorry we seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot.  Please give me an hour of your time and I’ll try to explain.”

Zila sighed and looked at Manny and Efar.  She took a deep breath and tried to calm her thoughts.  “An hour?  OK.  After we check on our kids.  We can have munch together.  It won’t be fancy.  Manny, let’s get back on board.  Efar, entertain Samantha until I give you a call to take her aboard Wisdom.” 

Samantha pulled Manny out of the lounge.  “Kids?  Did she say kids?  And what is Wisdom?”

Efar smiled.  “Do you always come on like a news reporter in a political interview?  Wisdom of Sage is our FTL space yacht.  Yes, she and Manny have two kids, Vinnie and Leah, 5 and 3 respectively.”

Samantha thought that over.  Manage two small children on a diplomatic mission?  That is not something I would never try to do.  And Manny Lee?  A lot of people would like to know just where he disappeared to 5 years ago.

“Where is that FTL yacht?”

“You’re standing beside it.”  He pointed to the long, sleek vessel just outside the lounge window, a silvery missile in a field of blocky transports.

“Verrry impressive!  And you’re the brawn aboard?”

“Heh.  Pilot.  Wisdom handles like a Solar Ceres-class interceptor, which I also piloted, back in the day.”

Samantha slowly nodded her head in approval, moving around to get a better view of the ship.  “So what entertainment did you have in mind while we wait?”  She gave Efar her most innocent smile.

“s*x would be nice, but a little ostentatious right here.  Suppose we swap stories for a while?”

“Coy, aren’t we?  You don’t believe in dinner and flowers?”

“You won’t like the restaurants here and I have no idea where to get flowers.  Never saw any here.”

“Your chances aren’t getting any better.  Let’s get back to basics.  You’re an ex-pilot from the Solar space navy?”

“In-system interceptor pilot.  Never went FTL until I worked for the Sage.”

“Why did you leave the Navy?  How did you get into the Sage’s fleet?”

“The usual way.  I went as far as I could in the Navy, with a rank of Operator First, but it was all driving in circles around one star.  I wanted to do FTL.  A friend introduced me to a friend and here I am.  I got assigned to Wisdom and then Zila came aboard as Commander.  She carries the mission, the crew drives the ship.”

“So, this Zila.  She just runs around the galaxy in this fancy FTL yacht and visits on behalf of the Sage?”

“Listen, pretty lady, even you can’t get away with being a wise a*s about things you know nothing about.  Zila earns her titles in ways you can’t even begin to imagine.  What did you do to get a nice trip here?  Kiss some a*s?”

“Now who’s getting testy.  I graduated Harvard with honors in government and got my Ph.D. in history from Columbia/Princeton.  I served two terms under Solar Secretary Philas-Burke and spent the last five years researching the origins of conflict on Earth since recorded history began.  I found a pattern, wrote a paper, and got funded.  Other people saw the same data, but none of them ever put the picture together.  In short words, Earth is, and has been, under surreptitious attack from unknown sources since biblical times.  That mean anything to you?”

“Dr. Sammy?  OK, you’re the highbrow, I’m the dumb soldier.  But, I can tell you that Zila is pretty special, even in your league.  Don’t underestimate her.  Or the rest of her crew.”

“Please, Samantha, not Sam, not Sammy.  And no Doctor Samantha, just Samantha.  OK?”

Efar nodded.

“There’s one more thing you need to know about me.  The reason I was picked for this mission -  I have gestalt ability, and it’s apparently very rare.”

“Gestalt?  Never heard of it.”

“A gestalt intellect puts together the whole picture, the whole puzzle from hints and pieces, in a way that no AI or team can.  That’s what my thesis is about, a bigger, deeper picture of conflict on Earth.”

“Super Doctor Samantha.  You know, I think the Great Sage does the same thing, at least by reputation.”

“That’s exactly why I need to see him.  The picture leads off Earth.  What does the Sage look like anyway?”

“Well, I’ve never seen him.  No one gets to see him, except for a few Priests and Zila, of course.  I was told he is a strange creature about the size of a hippopotamus, deaf and blind as well.  He took over this planet when the Priests were down to savagery and cannibalism and gave them a language, technology and restored their civilization.  He’s also the richest thing in the galaxy, buys and sells planets.  Trades with the Allurii directly.  He’s….”

Zila strode into the lounge and saw them sitting much closer together than they were before.  She made a frown.  “Dinner is served, for better or worse.  Come aboard.”

*****

Vinnie ran around the galley waving the crumb-catcher like a sword.  “En garde!”  he yelled to little Leah, who fended him off with a spoon.  “No crumbs!  I din’t make crumbs! We got gravity!  No crumbs!”

Samantha, who had no kids and little exposure to anyone under 30 years old, was amazed at the level of adaptation the kids showed to this extreme fringe life style.  The food was barely palatable by her standard, but the crew of Wisdom ate it greedily.  Too long on space rations, she guessed. 

“So, Samantha, what IS that thesis of yours that caused you to come here?”  Zila was sipping hot chocolate from Earth, a rare treat.  Manny handed out donuts for desert.

“Well, let me see how far back I need to go.  Do you know about the origins of languages?  The special brain structures that humans have that allows these kids to learn, and actually invent languages, at such incredible rates?”

Manny nodded, “I know about the parallels between languages and migrations and genetic differences.  Tracking languages and similar place names is often a clue to the origins of the indigenous people.  Language was the clue to the genetic relation among the Eskimos, the Basques and the Ainu pearl divers.  As diverse and geographically separated as they were, they shared some common place names and ways to construct place names from action words.  Then we tested them and found their genetic distances to be smaller than, say, the distance between Han Chinese and Caucasian.”

“That’s right.  They seemed to shre an ancient root language we call Saharan.   And I suppose you also know about the specialized organs in the human brain for speech – Broca’s Region and Wernicke’s Region?”

“As a matter of fact I was doing research on just that while we were returning from…”  Zila kicked him under the table.

“The development of the 6800 or so human languages was my first clue.  Did dispersion of people cause language differences or did the language difference drive the dispersion?  I took another cue from an M.I.T. fellow, Noam Chomsky.  He supposed that the development of speech and grammar was enabled by specialized neural organs, and therefore language followed some underlying rules.  A universal grammar, sort of.  We’re born with some rudimentary grammar rules.  If we didn’t have them, we would never learn to talk.”

“Yeah,” said Zila, “that’s pretty well understood nowadays.  I know about the FOXP2 gene in humans and songbirds.  Go on.”

Samantha was used to describing her work in baby steps.  It didn’t seem necessary here.  She decided to make one more foray into the research she did.

“I found that there was a set of rules! And someone recently mapped a brain region and unraveled the neural connection, the connectome, for it.  I call it the grammarsome – the part of the brain that understands and codes for language, even in people who have speech disabilities.  I also found the genetic operons for it.”

“Wow, we were trying to do that.”

“I also found that it was broken.  The grammarsome is incomplete or partly scrambled.  Every modern human language has adaptations to get around that, and so we have a lot of difficulties understanding each other.  Ambiguities, dangling references, the external scope problem, dialogue impasses. All stem from the broken grammarsome.”

Suddenly, the galley was quiet. Everyone was watching her.  Good, Samantha thought, lets get to the good part.  “You know about the Old Testament, the Book of Genesis, right?  The Tower of Babel?”

There were nods all around, even from Scotty.

“Every myth has its origin in something that really happened.  I believe humans all shared a common language at one point, and then something happened to the grammarsome.  Then, misunderstandings, migrations, wars, resource competitions and petty kingdoms erupted everywhere humans went.”

Surprising them all, Scotty came up with “Genesis, 11:1 to 9.  Something similar happened on my planet.”

Samantha raised a perfectly sculpted eyebrow at that and plunged on.

“Look, we have fatal epidemics on Earth right now. The latest thing is Bender’s Brain.  It’s a virus that infects a common gut bacteria and makes it into a pathogen, and when the bacteria dies, the virus survives and goes into the blood stream and destroys the brain stem.  It’s contagious, mutates and hides in normal gut bacteria in people and animals.  Takes a week to ten days, and it’s apparently 100% fatal.   Cities with poor sanitation are now depopulated and heaps of dead birds, dogs, cats and wilslife line the streets with the unburied bodies.  Fish are also infected.”

Zila just stared.

“What, you don’t believe me?  That’s one of the problems I had back on Earth.  They called me a doomsayer.”

There was a long silence at the table.  Efar stared at Samantha, Samantha stared at Zila, Scotty turned away and Manny just shook his head.

“Wow, OK.  Sounds like a Stage 3 gardener attack to me.  That about right, guys?”

The crew nodded.

“Stage 3 WHAT?”  Samantha exclaimed, “You know about this?”

“Not only do we know about this kind of attack, we just had a rather bad meeting with the perpetrator.  We call that thingy a gardener.  After it wipes out a wild sentient species, it plants a garden of its own making, a clade, to make sure native life never returns to that planet.”

“What are they?  Why do they do that?  How do we fight them?”

“Well, first of all, you are sitting with the few beings in this galaxy that have ever survived a gardener attack.  Second, it isn’t a them, the one we met was an only, and it was more than enough to throw us a few hundred light years into uncharted space with dead drives, booby trapped to blow.  Third, it is an extra-dimensional being.  We don’t have a clue as how to fight it.”

Samantha was stunned.  Not only did these people understand her thesis, they were way ahead of her and had direct experience.  “Please, I’m not going anywhere until I hear it all.  Does the Sage know this?”

“The Sage is many thousands of years old.  If any of his kind still exist beside him, they are also survivors of gardener attacks.  He knows, and he set us up to survey the Orion Spur of the Saggitarius Arm of this fine galaxy.  She swept her arm to include Manny and the crew.  “Along with my kiddies!”

The gestalt process takes some time.  Samantha showed nothing while her mental cogs spun.  Zila and crew were on their second donuts by the time she came to life again.  It was like the lounge lighting turned up a few notches.  She started without preamble from where her ruminations let off, interrupting the other conversations.

“Our first task is a defense of Earth, then the human colonies.  If your info is correct, the Sage will help, and he has the financial resources.”

“What?  Oh I thought you were taking a nap. “

“No, just putting the pieces together.  The key to fighting the gardeners is access to N-space using the Allurion Seeds.”

“We already figured that out, and we have a weapon.  At least, we have a maybe weapon.”

Samantha thought, That Zila really is sharp!  I’m not used to dealing with people so quick!  Samantha let her unusual mind jog on a bit further. “I bet there is one more resource you don’t know about.  A critical resource.”

“OK, Samantha, you have my attention.  Spill!”

“Long before we were born there was an Autonomous Intellect, a registered AI, who calls herself Aura.  She’s pretty well distributed all over the Earth and near orbital colonies now, but she mostly lurks in the net.  She happens to be a good source for me and a real friend.”

“Aura?  You’re an actual friend of Aura?  I thought Aura was a myth.  No one has ever been able to come up with a comparable AI.  Ours are just smart functioning specialists.”

“Aura is a whole hell of a lot more than that, I can tell you for sure.  Did you know that she is wealthy in her own right?  She holds patents on the Exabyte memory modules used in every AI.  And more.”

Zila looked around the crew with a smile.  Alon answered, “After working with the Sage on this trip, we are not exactly poor either.”

Samantha made another mental note, but ignored the comment and moved on.  “Aura is in touch with another AI, who happens to be the official Ambassador to Earth.  Zovoarcnor.  Actually, they are lovers.”

“Zovo what?”

“Zovoarcnor.  Ambassador from the Pa’an.”

“AI lovers?  You’re kidding me.  And even if it were true, how would you know?”

“It is strange, but Aura told me it’s true.  She’s not exactly shy about such things.”

“Wow.  So here you are, putting together the other pieces of the Gardener puzzle from Solar side, with this legendary Aura AI, the Pa’an Ambassador, and the Solar Council, and here we are, survivors of a very recent gardener attack, having visited a gardener planet, having met the Allurii K colony and enlisting their aid, on the Sage’s planet talking to the Sage about the defense of all sentient life.”

“You can’t stack coincidences up that high,” Alon said and everyone nodded agreement.

Zila answered, “You can if you’re that master manipulator called the Great Sage of Saggitarius. “

“Thank God for the Sage,” Manny murmured. 

The Price of Promethium It was a night of long discussions and revelations among Zila, Manny and the crew of the FTL yacht, Wisdom of Sage.  Samantha could see the core of a powerful alliance being formed right there. 

For Zila, the alliance gave her new hope.  Her feeling of falling off a cliff was just a dream, after all.

Wisdom had just visited the Pa’an where they were preparing a living space for all humanity.  Were they prescient or did they know something?  Samantha’s gestalt sense told her they were preparing the lifeboats on the deck of the Titanic.

Aura provided abundant facts about the gardener attack on Earth.  Actually, it was attacks, plural.  Why, Samantha wondered, did the previous attacks break off or fail?  Humans were several times well down the path to extinction when something intervened, or maybe the gardener just stopped paying attention to us.  Among other random thoughts, when Adam and Eve were evicted from the Garden of Eden, what garden was that?  Was that why, of the two trees, did Eve NOT choose the Tree of Life?

Like any good creative idea session, food was required, and Manny’s expensive supply of donuts was down to just the few he had to hide for the kids.

Speculation got wilder.  Could isotaglia have been described as an angel with a flaming sword?  What if Adam and Eve were really gardener entities, an experiment that got away from the gardener?  Were humans an attempt to use the T of L against itself?

No, Zila and the crew opined, humans aren’t nasty enough.  Samantha, the historian among them, reserved her judgment.

Morning came and one thing was clear.  Someone needed to buy a whole lot of promethium.  It was going to be expensive.  Oh well, fortunes come and fortunes go.

They were all groggy from lack of sleep when a Priest Negotiator came to summon Zila to the Hall of Enlightenment.  The Priest then invited Manny, Efar, Alon and yes, Samantha to attend the Great Sage in person a few hours after Zila’s appointment.

*****

Zila was ushered into the Hall of Enlightenment by the usual pair of Priest-Petitioners.  Unlike her previous audiences, the Sage was not in his sandpit.  Zila glanced at the Priests, who were imitating statues.  Zila was used to that posture among Priests after extensive exposure to Scotty, her ship’s Engineer.  It meant there was an issue they were unwilling to face.  Impatient as she was, she simply waited.

Eventually a panel slid quietly aside revealing an ornate passageway.  The Sage could be seen at the end of the corridor, actually in a 4-legged canter.  He paused at the entrance, paced into his sandpit and plopped into his belly saddle.

“Greetings, Great Sage.”

“Many thankful greetings, young human emissary.  I remain very happy to see you alive and unharmed after an encounter with the being you call a gardener.  Again, you are most fortunate.”

“Great Sage, I mean no disrespect, but I have been thinking we were set up as bait, and you knew I had my mate and children with me.”

“You traveled with your family as befits a member of the Tree of Life.  You know now that humans were targets of this enemy long before we met.  Would you rather I had left you and your offspring ignorant and helpless against the ongoing attack?”

“I, uh, no.  But, at least you should have made a full disclosure.  I should have been able to weigh the risks and decide what to do on my own.”

“Of course, given the risks, I should have made a full disclosure, but you would have demurred, and the danger was imminent.  Perhaps you will see the wisdom of my persuasions, but even if you do not, they were necessary.”

Zila could not help the anger that rose up inside her.  Then she remembered the epidemic of Bender’s Brain on Earth.  She had a flash in which she imagined Vinnie and Leah fatally ill, surrounded by windrows of dead bodies in rotting heaps.  She took a deep breath.  Yes, they were in space by then, not safe, but relatively safe on the Sage’s mission.  And yes, now she was in a position to help.

“Sage, again you are correct.  We would have been in even more danger if we stayed on Earth. “

“Ah, good, you are most rational and agreeable.  Let us continue yesterday’s attempt to make a plan.  The resources of the Sage are at your disposal.  May I sample your experiences once more, instead of trying to translate your vocal sounds?”

“You mean, reading the memory microbes again?  Yes, I suppose that is the most efficient way.”

The Sage signaled the Priests, who duly slapped a patch on her neck and sprayed something in her face.  The two great tongues of the Sage rolled out and clapped on her forehead.  She fell into a rainbow trance once more.

She awoke, somewhat rested, in the cabin of the Wisdom of Sage, with a memory that the Sage would continue the discussion with her crew and Samantha shortly.  She hoped there was something good to eat in the galley.  As usual after these episodes with the Sage, she was starving.

*****

“No one gets to see the Sage.  In ten years service, I’ve never seen him, nor has anyone I know except for Zila.  This must be quite an emergency.”  Efar’s soldier sense had kicked in.  “Grunts always know when they’re about to be sent into the front lines.”

Samantha looked at him out of the corner of her eyes.  Good looking grunt, she thought.  “Yeah, soldier, you’re probably right.  But if we’re right about this, we’re already in the front lines.”

“Good point, Samantha.”

“My whole name!  Did that hurt?  Can you do it again?”

“Saaah maaan thaaa!”

“Silly man.  Is that trench humor?”

“I suppose so.  Time to put on our game faces.  We’re about to see the Sage.”

Two Priest-Petitioners and a Priest Negotiator accompanied them into the Hall of Enlightenment.  Zila took the point position and the group spread out in a semicircle, with Scotty nearest the other Priests.  Alon and Efar wore their shipsuits, Scotty had the shimmering robe of a Priest Petitioner and Zila wore her Priest of the Enlightenment gown.  Samantha, who had no other clothing with her, wore leathers.

The Sage was bedecked in a tapestry of dark blue mosaics against a midnight blue background.  It reminded Zila of the first time she looked through the porthole during FTL transit.  The Sage settled into his belly saddle and began without preliminaries, speaking in Earth English through his Bluetooth implant.

“Samantha Tor, my Priests have told me who you are and I have gone to the trouble of finding out enough about you to include you in this group without hesitation.  Your talent will be an asset here.  And speaking of assets – Priest Negotiator, please announce the results of your recent purchase.”

The Priest-Negotiator spoke in his native language, translated by Zila,  “Great Sage, we have located and contracted for the delivery of 1200 muuks (Zila translated as 32,000,000 metric tonnes) of ores and for refinery capacity to yield roughly (2200 metric tonnes) of pure promethium.  We have also engaged the services of an unused zone refining plant previously used for electronic components, and the contractor will convert it to making the raw material for Allurion Seeds.”

“Emissary Zila, will this be satisfactory?”

Zila glanced at Alon who was nodding vigorously.  “My astrophysicist and navigator is the one who knows how to make Seeds.  He is under oath not to spread this knowledge, and it is a dangerous process.  I doubt he can convert so much promethium in viable Seeds, but…”

“…I will certainly try!” continued Alon with a big grin.

“Samantha Tor, I have avoided meeting with you until now.  Please excuse my Priests.  They were diligent.  The decision was mine.  I was not ready to reveal certain things to a being with your special talent until preparations were made.  With those talents you will understand that you are a recent warrior in a battle as old as my kind.  We are of the same Tree of Life.  Your adversary is my adversary.  Nevertheless, many matters require my personal attention.  Now that we have met, I suggest that you have a major role to play in this conflict, but not one that you are currently suited for.  Do you wish for some assistance?”

Samantha narrowed her eyes with skepticism.  She had just witnessed, firsthand, the overpowering intellect of the Great Sage.  She was no stranger to intellectual dominance, but here she was the pupil, not the teacher.  Nothing in his arguments could be refuted. 

“What kind of assistance, Great Sage?”

“The same kind that human Emissary and Priest-Seeker Zila Aropova Beddiy Lee has received.  I can give you memory microbes.”

Samantha shot a glance at Zila.  Zila’s eyebrows climbed several centimeters.  She had rather enjoyed her unique status, and still had an atavistic resentment against the beautiful Samantha.  Samantha guessed as much just from Zila’s expression. 

“Samantha, it’s not so much a gift as a burden.”

But every other face in that half circle was agape with one thought, “How can I get those memory microbes?”

“That would indeed be a gift worth having, Great Sage.  I’m already as deep into this fight as I can be.  Zila, this is a burden I already carry.  What do I need to do?”

“Great intellects are challenged by even greater problems.  We all come to wish we were smarter.  We carry only the burdens we can perceive, but some see further than others.  Samantha, please allow my Priests to attend you.”

Samantha pulled her long hair into a bun.  Two Priests grabbed her arms.  One sprayed something into her face, the other slapped a patch on her exposed neck.  The rest of the meeting faded out in a rainbow dream.

*****

Samantha awoke in a tiny cabin on Wisdom with Efar by her side.  “How long was I out?”

“All night.  You had a good sleep?”

“I don’t remember a thing.  No dreams, just O.U.T.  OUT.”

“Well, you thrashed around a lot.”

“Don’t tell me you were here all night watching over me?”

“OK, I won’t tell you.”

“Merde. s**t. Mierda. Aren’t you supposed to be the stiff-arsed soldier?   Playing nursemaid to the interloper from Solar?”

“Tsk, tsk.  Such language for a lady.”

“I’m no lady.  Come a little closer.”  She grabbed him by the ears and gave him a long kiss.  From the big grin on his face he certainly enjoyed the surprise.

“More, please!”

“Uh, I’m starved.  How do you order a meal in this hotel?”

“You don’t.  You come down to the galley and eat with the rest of us.”  Zila was standing at the door.  “How do you feel?”

Samantha did a quick inventory.  Nothing hurt.  She wasn’t dizzy or confused.  “Hungry. The rest will have to wait.”

*****

Samantha ate like a refugee crashing a banquet.  “Wow, I did the same after I got my memory microbes.”

“You’ve had them now for how many years?”

“A little more than five.”

“And you can still remember every little thing?”

“If I want to.  But I can’t pay attention to everything.  I’m not a video recorder.  You remember whatever you pay attention to.  And you read real fast.”

“Boy, am I going to use this gift.  I’ll scan all my notes and throw out those bulky files, learn a few ancient languages and…”

“…burn out in a month.  You still need sleep, food, and some R&R.  Your co-workers may need those notes.  Samantha, we’ve got a lot of work to do.  Got any idea how to protect humans against a thingy that can come at you from dimensions you can’t even fathom?”

“Phew!  Yeah, there’s that.  And that little problem, the plague of Bender’s Brain.  And, I can just imagine trying to convince the Solar Council that we are at war with something called a “gardener”.  They’ll want a picture of it.  Even then they won’t believe it.”

“Maybe we can slice this up into teams to handle specific problems.  Samantha, you need to work with the Solar Council, and drag that AI, Aura, and the Pa’an into this battle.  Manny and I, mostly Manny, I think, have to work on Bender’s Brain.  We can use the lab here on shipboard but we will need plague samples.”

“Better upgrade the isolations and safety measures before you bring a 100% fatal plague aboard this ship, Z.” 

“You’re right, Manny.  Sorry I should have thought of it.  Alon, see if you can figure out how to defend against a gardener.”

“I would like to have some communication with the Pa’an on that.  Is that possible?”

“Samantha?  Is it?”

“I don’t know.  Maybe.  Zovo can communicate with the Pa’an in real time.  Aura communicates with Zovo all the time.”

“And I guess Scotty and I are liaison to the Sage.  OK?”

“Yes, Zila, it will be my honor.”

The food was gone, the meal, such as it was, was over and an eclectic collection of sentients had forged a formidable team to defend their people.

Bender’s Brain “This plague is a Machiavellian masterpiece.”  Manny was studying the various vectors and infection pathways of the virus that was killing Earth.  “It kills domesticated animals, spreads by wild birds, and even kills edible fish.  Whatever engineered this monster knew something about conserved operons in the Tree of Life.  It attacks so many common pathways.  E. coli is the main vector, but e. coli is everywhere.   It gets the food supply and the people in one shot.  Birdshit can kill you and fish don’t wear diapers. “

”Is there a safe place to study this virus?  Should we be isolated in space like we did for the creation of the Allurion Seed?”

“We can’t be.  We need mice and chicken models, at a guess, and who knows what else.  And we need Alon and Scotty as crew, and they need to be close to… whoops, they need to be close to different planets.”

“Let’s get a good supply of promethium bromide aboard, move to some Earth orbit, and work on both the virus and the N-space problems at the same time.  Now that the treasure has been offloaded we can use the treasure hold for Alon’s lab.  And Scotty can help with the mechanical parts.”

“Z, that sounds like the best compromise.  I’ll see that the bio lab has all the supplies we can get here.”

“And I’ll let the crew know.  What about Efar?”

“Efar?  He’s your protector.”

“Great pilot and swordsman, but not much use against a plague or a gardener.”

Of course Efar was outside the lounge where he could overhear the exchange.  “Hey, Z, I can speak for myself.  I was feeling a bit left out, though.  What’s an old military grunt doing among all these geniuses?”

“Wow, hmmm.  You are our only pilot, too.  What do you think, should you work with Alon or what?”

“I talked to Alon.  He’s too far from anything tactical and I can’t comprehend the experiments he is doing.  I’d be no use to him.  He can pilot the ship pretty good, too”

“Well, what then?”

“I’d sort of like to go with Samantha, if you can relieve me of my duties for a while.”

Manny chuckled and Zila suppressed a grimace.  “I should’ve seen that coming.  If I wasn’t married to such a great guy I’d be green with envy over that woman.  OK, but watch out.”

Efar just laughed.  “Just another little challenge.  Who knows, I might actually be useful on Earth.”

“Efar, you’ve been very useful here and a great crewmember.  We want you back, without a broken heart.”

Efar just hung his head and grinned.  Soldiers are suckers for love, he thought.  It was an old story.

*****

Sowing Seeds “I don’t envy you having to convince the Solar Council that we are at war.  ‘Cassandra the Doomsayer’ will be the mildest of your labels.”  Manny was in the galley with Zila, Efar and Samantha for their last munch together.

Samantha sighed, “Tell me about it.  500 some odd members on the Council sharing less than half that number of wits.  If the electorate only understood who they were putting in charge of their lives…”

“Yeah.  Biblical attacks, an invisible foe that can get at you from directions you can’t even imagine, and all the while a dire plague is killing people in the streets.  It will be tough to even get anyone’s attention.”

“When I was on Earth, in the length of time it took Zila to get her briefing with the Sage and get back to Earth, the Free Fists of Courage and the Naturists had turned the word upside down.  They destroyed my genetic engineering practice.  There’ll be some nut making political capital out of the gardeners while the world dies, you can bet on it.”

“Those same groups are still there.  They’ve morphed into yet another political party,” Samantha added.

Alon came running into the galley waving some kind of wand.  In his other hand he had a sealed tube.  “Hey, ladies and gentlemen!”

“Here comes a wizard with a magic wand.  Dr. Whosis, I presume?” 

“Samantha, don’t be snide.  I made this for you.  If this doesn’t help convince a Solar politician that gardeners are a menace, I don’t know what will.”

“Go ahead, Alon.  We’re all curious.”  Zila turned around in her seat to face Alon.

“Manny, do you have that antique U.S. coin?”

Manny pulled out a Golden Eagle half ounce coin.  It was slightly worn, but untarnished.  There was a nick in the edge where he had dented the soft gold metal.

“Put it in this tube.”  Manny reluctantly dropped the coin into the tube and Alon screwed down the lid.  “Here, Manny, you can hold the tube.”

“Feels like super mu metal.”

“It is.  Impervious to anything except a plasma arc torch.  Now…”  Alon pushed a button on the handle of his wand.  A small Allurion Seed crystal grew out of the tip of the wand to a few centimeters in diameter.  It looked somewhat different from the usual crazy kaleidoscope of facets.  He pushed it through the side of the container Manny held, fished around, and drew it out with the coin!  He dropped the coin into Manny’s lap.  “Check it out!”

Manny breathed a sigh of relief to have his lucky coin back.  He fingered the familiar dent.  “Yep, that’s my lucky gold piece.  Pretty good trick!”

“It’s not a trick.  I made a very small Seed with a twist.  It goes multidimensional with a mild quadrupole magnetic field.  There’s a battery in the handle here.  The retrieval range is only about the length of a finger.”

“Wow!  You are telling us this is not a magic trick, you are actually lifting the coin out from N-space?”

“Yup.  We can get into N-space.  I don’t think it’s a weapon, but it’s a cute demonstration tool.”

“Maybe I can use it to pick pockets,” retorted Samantha.

“Show it to Dr. Herb Bass at Miami Space Academy and you’ll get a hearing with any space navy group in the USA.  Tell him Zila Aropova Biddey said hello.  On second thought, better not mention my name at all.”

“Don’t know Dr. Bass, but I’ll get all the military attention you need with that magic wand, Samantha,” Efar grinned.

Samantha made sure to pack the magic wand into her carry-on baggage, on top, where she could keep track of it - or get rid of it fast.

*****

The Shape of Space Inevitable Insight was a Sage fleet transport, not nearly as fast nor as luxurious as the Wisdom of Sage.  Samantha suffered through recovery after the acceleration trance and swore that FTL was not ever going to be a form of vacation travel.   Not for her, anyway.  Efar seemed largely unaffected, which made Samantha, perversely, feel worse.  After that, her thoughts chased whirlpools of doubt, worry and half-baked ideas.  Efar’s attentions were a distraction and eventually he went to pursue his swordmanship practice and renewed acquaintances with his friends among the crew of the Inevitable.  So Samantha eventually took out Alon’s magic wand.  I’ll call it the Kirby Wand, she thought.  She waved it around and muttered, “Abra Cadabra”.

She pushed the little button and saw a tiny light glow on the tip, but nothing else happened.  She tried to push it through the fabric of her luggage, but it was like pushing a chopstick through canvas.  It didn’t go.  She looked it all over.  It only had the one button.  There was no chance of operator error.  “Damn it, I had a feeling this would be a dud, and yep, it is.  Why am I not surprised?”  She left it on the tiny shelf in front of her cabin washstand and went to see if there was anything interesting to do.

The crew announced flipover and free fall practice.  Samantha gobbled an anti-nausea pill and tried to enjoy having one foot stuck to the carpet and the other desperately reaching for anything to hang on to while Efar did his unmatchable zero-gravity gymnastics.  She decided to wait out zero-grav flipover securely ensconced in her cabin, if she could ever get to it.  When she opened the door, the wand, which had been floating around unsecured, tried to poke her in the eye.  She grabbed it and accidentally pushed the button.  In her clumsiness, tumbling toward the bulkhead of the tiny cabin, the tip of the wand went right through the hard metal.  Shocked, she pulled it out again.

“What the…it only works when it feels like it?”  She poked it into her baggage and fished around.  She could vaguely feel the textures of some of the objects there, found a little resistance from one object and pulled the wand out.  One of her earrings came with it. 

Efar came into her cabin and watched her extract the earring.  “More magic?”

“It only works sometimes.”

“Mind if I try it?”

“Go ahead.”  She handed him the wand.  Efar pushed the button and proceeded to thrust the wand into his other palm.  “Ouch, that hurts.  Must have touched a nerve.”

“Efar, you i***t, what the hell do you think you’re doing?  Trying to cripple yourself?”

“Trying to get something out that has bothered me for years.  Ouch, it hurts on the bones as well.  Got it!”  He pulled the wand out and dropped a tiny metallic capsule onto the shelf.

“That’s a military ID chip, isn’t it?”

“Obsolete military ID chip.  They injected every grunt with that chip.  Within the year it was replaced with facial recognition and DNA bio.  This one migrated to where it interferes with my swordsmanship.  It’s out now.  Handy gadget!”

“Hot damn!”  She carefully put the Kirby Wand into a pocket on her hammock net.

Flipover ended and they were back into FTL and a little gravity.  After a half-way decent meal in the transport’s guest lounge, including a nice slug of cognac, she and Efar felt relaxed enough to return to her cabin and try to get intimate.  The wand, still in her hammock pocket, poked her in the side.  Idly, she pulled it out and pushed the button.  Again, the little light glowed at the tip but it refused to penetrate anything.

Suddenly, she sat up and whacked herself in the forehead.  “You dummy!” she shrieked.  For emphasis, she whacked herself in the forehead again, as if some loose circuit had to be persuaded to work.  Efar was startled.

“Efar, sorry, but I’ve got to get this info to Alon and Zila.  But how do I do that in the middle of FTL?  In a transport?”

“What?  What info?  What are you talking about?  Who’s a dummy? Did I say something wrong?”  Efar’s attentions were still on s*x.

She pulled on some clothes and bounded down the corridor to the bridge.  As per security procedures, it was closed and locked.  She pounded on the door.  After several minutes of pounding, a security officer appeared in the corridor behind her with a weapon drawn.  “Stand down, lady, or I’ll disable you and clap you in the brig.”

“I’ve got to talk to the communications officer.  It’s an emergency.”

“The Comms officer isn’t on the bridge.  We’re in FTL.  He’s off watch.  What do you want?”

“I’ve got to send a message to the Sage and his Amabassador, Zila Beddiy Lee.”

“Lady, as I just told you, we’re in FTL.  There is no communications and won’t be any until we leave FTL.  Wait until we get to our first stop in a few days.”

“This won’t wait.  I want to talk to the Captain.”

“The only officer you’re going to talk to is the guard in the brig.”  He spoke into his earpiece about a disheveled crazy woman trying to break into the Bridge. 

“Hey, Mullen, whatcha doing with my lady friend here?”  Efar had managed to get on his pants and two buttons on his shirt.  The security officer took one look at him and smirked.  “You claim her, you better control her.  She’s been pounding on the door to the bridge.  Wants to send a message from FTL space.”

“There IS no way to send a message from a ship in FTL, Samantha.  You should know that.”

“Efar, you know who I am, and you know our mission.  Trust me, I’ve got to send this message.”

“At least give me a clue.  I hope it isn’t about something you left out of your luggage.”

Samantha shot him a dirty look.  “Damn dominant males.  You always think it’s your decision.  OK, but it’s technical.”

“Thumbnail it, please.”

“I know how to defend against a gardener.”

Efar jerked his head and stared hard at her.   She was dead serious.

“OK, Samantha, I believe you have an important idea, whether it’s going to work or not is not my decision.  Put yourself together and meet me in the lounge in a few minutes.  Let me see what we can do.”

Samantha shook her long hair like a wet dog and it almost fell into place.  She straightened out her clothes and marched back down the corridor.  “That’s one determined woman, Oms.  You trust her?”

“Yeah, Mullen, I do.  Call the Bridge and tell them it’s me outside.  See if Captain Srini will at least talk to me on ship’s comm.”

*****

Samantha paced between the lounge entrance and the galley.  A small, dark man in a shipsuit approached her along with a Priest.  Efar brought up the rear of the group.

“Let’s get some coffee and sit down.  Samantha, this is Captain Srinivasar and his Comms officer, Chthasssos.”

“Ms. Tor, this had better be good.  I’m only here because your friend, Fleet Commander Oms, vouches for you.  Bridge security is a serious issue.  There have been hijackings, especially on the Earth run.”

“Fleet Commander Oms?”  Samantha tilted her head to one side and looked at him.  Efar shrugged.  “Yeah.  I pulled rank.”

Samantha thought about how to start.  Obviously, explaining the gardener attack, the Tree of Life and the history of conflict on Earth was out of the question. 

“I’m a Senior Policy Analyst for the Solar Council and recently appointed on a critical mission by the Great Sage, personally.”

Captain Srini raised an eyebrow at Efar and asked, in Priest language, “Is this true?”

Efar responded in English, “True and verified.”

“Earth has a plague and the colonies are next.  I just discovered a possible defense.  I have to communicate this to the rest of the team the Sage assembled.  Please, it’s most urgent.”

“We’re in FTL.  There isn’t any way to communicate.  And even if we drop out, any signal we send at the speed of light will get there long after we could send a packet by FTL.”

“There HAS to be a way!”

“Samantha, let me discuss this with the Captain for a few minutes.”  Efar, the Captain and the Priest, Chthasssos, gabbled away in Priest language.  Samantha had no idea what they were saying, but from the number of times Efar had to repeat and slowly pronounce some words, she understood that he did, indeed, have a terrible accent.

“Ms. Oms, my family, what’s left of them, are back in southern India.  Their village was utterly destroyed by the Bender’s Brain plague.  Whatever you’ve come up with, may Lord Ganesha grant you success.”   He nodded to Efar, “Commander?”

“OK, we’re turning around.”

“We’re turning around what?” Samantha was puzzled.

“We’re going back to the Sage.  It’s the fastest way.  Samantha, everyone on this ship, including the passengers, is either an employee or a commercial party to the Sage.  When you invoke his name as an emissary, they have to listen.  We don’t know what your message is, but we know it’s important.  You got this one chance.”

“Your rank had nothing to do with it?”

“Weeell, not exactly.”

“Commander Oms takes full responsibility for this decision, Ms. Tor.  It’s on his shoulders.”   Captain Srini and the Comms officer got up and left Efar and Samantha alone.  On their way out the door, Captain Srini said, “Flipover in ten minutes.”

Samantha thought, “I need another anti-nausea pill.”

*****

“Alon, are you alive down there?  We haven’t seen you in days.”  Zila was hollering into what used to be the treasure hold, recently converted to a Seed laboratory for Alon’s experiments.  It was a maze of power cables and equipment from floor to ceiling.  Alon was rushing to get it all set up to leave the Sage’s planet.

Alon’s dark hair was barely visible behind a radiation barrier.  Grunts and epithets erupted from that direction.  “Yeah, I’m here.  Scotty’s working with me if you’re looking for him.”

“Actually, I’m looking for both of you.  Samantha and Efar are docking in about an hour and she has an important message for you guys.  We’ll meet in the lounge of the transport Inevitable Insight.  She says you have to be there.”

“How’d she get back from Earth so quick?”

“She didn’t.  Efar got the Inevitable turned around halfway into the trip.”

“Hah, bet he pulled rank.”

“What rank?”

“Fleet Commander.  Didn’t he tell you?”

“Efar is a Fleet Commander?  The pilot on my ship, under my command?  A Fleet Commander?”

“Yeah.  I guess he didn’t want you to know.  Must be something important with Samantha.  Let me untangle myself and we’ll meet you there.”

*****

“I’m calling this the Kirby Wand.  Alon, you need to patent it.  Also, make a nice tiny one for surgery.”

“Good idea for the surgical tool.  I didn’t think of that.  You didn’t order an FTL transport to turn around just for that, though.”

“No way.  Actually, the surgical tool was Efar’s idea, not mine.  My idea is about a defense against a gardener.”  Samantha looked around.  Captain Srinivasar was there to witness the reason for Efar’s decision, but the conversation completely lost him.  He had no background briefing.

“We’ve been busting our heads trying to find a way to get at a gardener in N-space.  But we don’t even know how to navigate in N-space except for such simple things as a point to point FTL ship transit.  We would be completely lost trying to fight a gardener in its home territory, and it’s likely to be suicidal.  What we need to do is to exclude a gardener from our space, at least around our inhabited worlds.”

“Sounds to me like the same problem.”

“Actually, no.  It’s a problem you already solved.”  Samantha produced the wand.  “The Kirby Wand!”

Alon smiled and looked at Samantha.  “But I didn’t tell you the spell to use with that magic wand.”

“C’mon, guys, this is serious.  The Kirby Wand doesn’t work in FTL.  It only works in normal space.”

Alon jerked as if he was being electrocuted, then closed his eyes very tight.  “Wait a second.  It only works in 3-space, not in N-space.  That has to indicate…”

“That a bubble of FTL-type space around a colony or planet will force any N-space object into 3-space.  We can build a moat around Earth.”  Samantha waved the wand around like an orchestra conductor.

“Hmm…   Scotty and I just set up the apparatus to do that kind of thing.  We can check that out.”  Alon was still half lost in the math.

“Well, go do it, Alon.  Samantha, that’s still no more than half the battle.  Let’s get some food and talk about this some more.” Samantha reluctantly handed the wand to Alon, who left with Scotty.

“What about the Solar Council?  That’s still a problem, isn’t it?”

“Big problem.  I’d like to wait for Alon’s verification, then get back to Earth and work on that.”

*****

“Zila, how much longer do you think it will take for Alon and Scotty to finish their experiment?”

“You’ll know when I know.  Not too much longer, I hope.”

“Yeah, well I got a recall from the Solar Council.  They want my a*s back on Earth yesterday.  The situation is dire.”

“Let’s go visit the Seed lab and talk to the guys.”

If the Seed lab was a confusion of cables and whirling gyros before, it was an incomprehensible tangle now.  Finding either Alon or Scotty required the agility of a weasel and courage of a lion.  Any of those moving or electrified parts might have been a danger.  “Alon, Scotty, give us a clue.  Bark or meow or something.”

“Look up, ladies.”

Sure enough, Alon was hanging by a support beam in the ceiling, trying to thread yet another power cable through the existing web, while Scotty fed the cable foot by foot out of a crate the size of a truck. 

“We needed a lot more current to feed the magnets than we calculated.  This new cable should do it.  Is that what you came to find out?”

“Sort of.  What’s the schedule?”

“About an hour to the first run.  That bench in the back is the test jig.  Would you mind getting me something to drink for when I climb down from here?”

“I’ll get it.  Scotty?  What do you want?”

“I’m fine, Samantha, but thank you for asking.”

*****

Scotty tended a series of tubes and cylinders that resembled a smaller version of the FTL drive, but without any thrust.  Alon held a supersized version of his Kirby Wand.

“Test One, FTL field off.”  Alon thrust the wand through the side of a steel barrel.  It penetrated about half a meter.   He retrieved a spline wrench.  He weighed the wrench, measured the dimensions, tested it for radioactivity, magnetic reluctance and a few other parameters, and duly logged the results.

“So far, so good.  Scotty, ready on Test Two.”

Scotty fired up the mini-FTL.  A visible bubble of N-space distortion enveloped the steel barrel and the new wand, which was now mounted inside the bubble.  Almost instantly, there was a hum of power and the bubble became the chaotic kaleidoscope of a zero-mass Seed.  The bubble stabilized with the wand and the barrel inside it.

“How’s it look this time, Scotty?”

“Stable and within normal readings.”

“OK, countdown on the timer from 5:  5, 4, 3, 2, 1, go.”

The wand, driven by the preset timer, moved up to the barrel and stopped.  A machinists gauge registered the force applied to the barrel.  The gauge needle climbed up the dial and stopped. 

“No penetration, Scotty.  Kill the FTL.”

The crystal bubble collapsed with a soundless “pop” that was felt on some inner level.

“Still looks good.  Let’s do Test Three.”

Alon reset the apparatus and the wand easily penetrated the barrel and retrieved the wrench.  He duly measured the wrench and logged the result.  “Same as before.   Let me check the residual environmentals and see if anything else has changed.”

“Residual environmentals?  What are they?”  Samantha could not bear being ignorant.

“Well, we want to make sure the flat space field can sustain life and biological processes, and radio waves, etc.  No sense putting up a flat space field if the people inside it are dead or nothing works right.”

“Is that what you call it?  A flat space field?  I like that.  Makes a nice sound bite.”

“That’s what Scotty and I have been calling it.  It flattens the N-space down to just 3 space dimensions.  Any N-space object within the field pops out into our normal space.”

“And THAT is the breakthrough I was hoping for!”  Samantha grew a megawatt grin.

“Wow!  A cage trap for a gardener!”  Zila bounced on her toes.

The Fork in the Path Wisdom was in transit to Earth, just past flipover.

“Look, guys, we have no choice except to split up.  Samantha and Efar have to get the Solar Council to address the gardener attacks,  Manny and I are working on the Bender’s Brain plague, and Alon and Scotty have to make sure the flat space barrier is safe for life forms.  We should get in touch with the Pa’an and Aura and anyone else who can help.  Agreed?”

Heads nodded.  “OK, we drop Samantha and Efar off at Earth, Miami Spaceport if possible, right on top of the Solar Council HQ.  Good so far?”

“If we can get in there without a problem.  It’s a mess down there.”  Efar recalled the last trip to Earth, and the extra week descending the Quito Elevator. 

“We need some way to protect Efar and Samantha from the plague,” noted Scotty.

“Got that covered.  It’s a bit crude, but here’s a supply of capsules.  Take one every day.  Don’t ask what’s in them.”  Manny made a face and held his nose.

“How can that work?”  Efar was incredulous.

“These normal e. coli will replace your natural e. coli every day with a healthy new supply.  We know we aren’t infected aboard Wisdom.”

Samantha and Efar went, “Eeeeyew”and Alon and Zila laughed. 

The Miami Spaceport was indeed accessible.  They got landing instructions and an outside berth almost immediately.  Efar made sure the plasma exhaust sterilized the landing pad thoroughly.  As soon as Samantha was off to her office and Efar on route to the Sage Embassy, Wisdom lifted off again.

“Are you happy we’re going to Ganymede, Dr. Lee, huh?”  Zila smiled and kissed him.  “Going home?”

The Illustrious Solar Councilor Hugo da Selna was dapper and charming until he wanted something.  Then he put on his patent squint, otherwise known as the “evil eye”.  He was squinting at Samantha.

“Ms. Tor…”

“Samantha, please, Councilor.”  Samantha was regretting the directions she got from her supervisor at Solar Defense.  Paying a personal visit to the head of the Solar Defense Committee was difficult.  “No funding, no project,” was his quote. 

“We already have funding from the Great Sage.”

“The Solar Council will treat that as unallocated revenue, and then you still have the issue of authorization for a military project.”  Samantha resented the facts but respected the advice.  So, she was here for her audience with the illustrious Councilor.

“Samantha, then.  You are asking me to set up the Defense Committee for a dog and pony show.  Your dog and pony show.”  He pointed to the Kirby Wand in Samantha’s lap.  “You’ve been going on about extra dimensions and language organs in brains.  Ms. Tor, we have a fatal plague with no cure.  Why in all hell do we need this dubious distraction?”

“Because the plague comes from the gardener.  The plague is just one attack vector.  Aren’t you the head of the committee responsible for defending human space?”

“Which is exactly why I want to conscript the few healthy humans left against the coming riots.  Our defense forces are at half strength.  They need…”

“Councilor, how do you plan to protect your troops?  They can be attacked from N-space.  They can die from Bender’s Brain.  When the riots get as far as the Solar capital in Miami, and they will soon, are you really going to send out the military to kill more civilians?”

“We need the military to protect the core of government and allow us to rebuild afterwards.  Those conscripts won’t be biologists or doctors, there is nothing they can contribute to the plague cure.  The plague will burn itself out, just like ebola, the Spanish flu, the black plague and all the ones before it.  My job is to protect the core.”

Samantha wanted to say “Cannon fodder and collateral damage, huh?”  but she refrained.

“I hear that Dr. Hillis on your committee has drummed up a majority against your conscription.  Are you really making lists of the officials and politically advantaged that will be isolated in your bunkers?  Do you really think that doomed soldiers will stand and defend your chosen elite while they watch their loved ones die?”

Hugo da Selna doubled his squint.  “We were elected to make those decisions.  Not you.  Now, I have a proposal that needs support and you have a half-baked plan to save the world.  Here’s the deal – I support your plan, quietly and behind the scenes.  The whole project belongs to the Defense Committee, under my direction - if it works.  Otherwise, it never happened.  My security team has total control.  I’ll make a deal with Hillis and his cronies to work your plan into my proposal.  You get that choice and only that choice.  Deal?”

“Why sure, dear Hugo, who can resist that stupendous, politically expedient compromise?  Such vision.  No wonder you were elected.  You can go around and sell slots in the protected bunkers in exchange for support of mandatory conscription.  Brilliant!  You have, let me see, 53 bunkers now?  Got room for Hillis’s maiden aunt, uhuh?”

Hugo da Selna was enraged.  Before he could explode, Samantha stood up and sashayed out of his office, hips swaying.  “I’m dancing with dunces,” she muttered.

Hugo da Selna spoke into his implant, “Stop that tall blonde in the leathers.  Detain her for interrogation.  She’s a Naturist sympathizer.”

How dangerous is da Selna?  Samantha thought.  I’m an analyst, not a spy.  Would he try to stop me?  She gave it a few seconds thought.  It didn’t need gestalt mind to get the answer.  Yep, he would.  Better be safe than sorry.  Too much at stake here.  OK, Samantha, let’s do devious.

Samantha got into the elevator on the 30th floor and, relying on her memory of the Solar Administration Building directory, pushed the button for the 35th floor.  When the elevator stopped, she pushed the wand through the elevator control and pulled out the control chip and a few other random parts.  The doors froze.  She then proceeded to disable every other elevator in the bank.  The wand turned out to be just as handy disabling the surveillance devices.  Wasn’t N-space marvelous?  She felt like a super hero in a comic book until she heard the raised voice of a security guard around the corner of the corridor. 

They put staircases at the ends of buildings away from the elevator shafts in case of fire, her memory told her.  She ran down a labyrinth of corridors until she found a door marked “EXIT.”   She paused,  aren’t escape exits locked only from the staircase, not the office sections?   Up or down?  That is the question.  So, they would not expect her to be able to get out of the staircase except on the ground floor.  “I need a crowd.  It’s lunch hour.  She ran down to the restaurant level on the third floor.  The exit was indeed locked.  No problem, in a few moments the wand extracted the tumbler mechanism and she opened an emergency exit door.  Kitchen, mop room, locker room…ah, locker room!  She tucked her long hair under a server’s cap and grabbed a chemise and an apron.  She walked out the kitchen door to the cafeteria carrying a tray of barbecued chicken wings.  The crowds she sought were not there, in fact the place seemed somewhat depopulated.  Of course, people are afraid of the plague.

“Thank God you’re here.  Everyone else is out sick or something.  Help me with the dishes and silverware.”  The very large woman setting up the steam table was carrying a load of clean dishes.  “I’m Delores.”

“S…Sondra,”  Samantha extemporized.

“Yeah, Sondra, when you’re finished with this please get the mashed potatoes out of the kitchen.”

“Sure thing.”  Samantha hustled into the kitchen and discovered a service truck unloading supplies through a loading door.  “Sorry, Delores,” she muttered.  She ran out the ramp, squeezed between the truck and the door and discarded her waiter’s uniform under the truck.  “Goodbye, Councilor da Selna.”  She ran to the public transport kiosk and took a pedi-fast belt a few miles down town until she was out of the government district.  She hired a cab at the nearest public transport kiosk, using her Solar card.  Things were so screwed up it was possible there was no one monitoring Solar money cards – she hoped. 

“Great Sage Embassy, please.”  The cab responded,  “Great Sage Embassy is 12.3 miles.  Transit time is about 10 minutes.”

Samantha thought, “Too easy!”

Embassy Row in Miami consisted of century-old mansions lining what was once an exclusive secluded residence area.  Several members of the Solar Consortium had embassies or consulates as their status required.  Trade missions, Offworld Contract Services and the Ganymede Consulate occupied pastel stucco buildings covered with bougainvillea.  Hibiscus and pink lawn flamingos still survived on front lawns that had seen wars and technological revolutions.  The autocab pulled through the open gate and into the circular driveway.  Whatever security there may have been was not visible, probably disguised or camouflaged.  Just as she emerged from the autocab, two uniformed military police with Solar patches jumped out of an armored patrol vehicle parked outside the gate and ran toward her, sidearms drawn.  From the entrance of the embassy itself, so did Efar, still in his ship’s uniform.  One of the embassy officials was at his side with a rolled document.

“Gentlemen, please state your business on the soil of the Great Sage of Saggitarius.”  The official knew his role.  Efar stood aside, Glimmer just visible over his shoulder.

“We are placing this woman, Samantha Tor, under arrest for subversive activities, per order of the Solar Consortium.”

“Dr. Tor is under the official protection of this Embassy.  Here are her papers and authorization from the Great Sage.”

The military cop just tucked the papers, unread, into his tunic.  “Stand aside or I will use force.”

“OK with me,” Too fast for the eye to follow, Efar drew Glimmer and lopped off the nearest cop’s weapon hand.  Samantha was horrified to see the stump squirting  arterial blood and even more horrified to see the second cop prepare to fire at Efar.  Without much thought she pushed the button on the wand she still held and prodded it into the side of the second policeman.  It sunk in through his armor without resistance.  With some effort she pulled out a piece of b****y pink tissue the size of an egg.  The man’s mouth made an O, he grunted once and dropped to the gravel.  Samantha stared at the extracted piece of tissue on the ground.

“Holy s**t!”  Efar and Samantha said together.

*****

The Embassy was locked down and the guards armed.  The Sage’s Ambassador made a formal protest to the Solar Council, who denied that the event in question ever took place.  The badly wounded military police were put on civilian ambulances and sent to the nearest hospital. 

“I’m no warrior, Efar.  I’m just a research historian.  I’m still having flashbacks and nausea over that encounter.”

“Samantha, Samantha.  Training or not you’re a warrior now.  You exposed the insidious Councilor da Selna, escaped his clutches, got to safe harbor and fought off an attack.  How you ever figured out that move with the Kirby Wand is a mystery to me.”

“But you showed me that move when you removed your old ID chip!  Besides, I couldn’t let him shoot you!”

“Training be damned, a warrior acts because it’s do or die.  Always was for me, anyway.”

“Well, we’re refugees in enemy territory now, I guess.  Behind enemy lines.  What orders, Fleet Commander?”

“Not necessarily behind enemy lines.  Solar is not pushing this case.  Let the professional diplomats do their thing.  We should hang out here for a day or two, though.  Maybe we can get Doc Bass to come to us.  Miami Space Academy isn’t very far away.”

“He is the next thing on our agenda.”  She sighed and shook her head.  “Yeah, we got no choice.  Do or die.  Damn gardeners, damn politicians, damn them all!” 

Samantha began to tremble and made a visible effort to hold herself together.  Efar moved to her side and wrapped his arms around her.  She buried her head in his shoulder and let herself have a good cry.

“I’m a crappy warrior,” she mumbled.  Efar was wise enough not to say a thing.

A Baryon in N-Space Doc Bass, a rather bland-looking professor with hair and beard gone white, came to life when Samantha demonstrated her Kirby Wand.  The subject of N-space put a sparkle in his eye and brass in his voice.  A secure conference room in the back of the Embassy of the Great Sage immediately became his lab and his lecture hall. 

“Let me see that again?  Mind if I try it a time or two?”  He still had a trace of Texas in his accent.  He pushed the button on the wand and carefully examined the crystal that formed on the end.  He lined up some glasses, a silver teapot, the silver serving tray with snacks provided by the Embassy, a few olives and a spoon.  From his pockets he took an ancient magnetic money clip, a flashlight and a favorite old ePatch.  Most people had Bluetooth implants nowadays, but Doc Bass preferred his old ePatch.  He tried several combinations of things taken once, twice, thrice at a time.  He turned the wand every which way near the magnet and noted the shape of the crystal.  Finally, he sat back, closed his eyes and seemed to take a nap.

But just as Samantha was about to tiptoe out of the room and leave the old professor to his rest, Doc Bass snapped up from his chair and strode to the front of the room.  Pacing back and forth, as if he were indeed behind his customary lectern, he declaimed.

“You know, the speed of light is the real hard limit for objects with mass.  But not everyone knows that this little equation – he wrote on a napkin- describes a hyperbola, and with a little math we know that a hyperbola has two branches.”  He drew a diagram on the other side of the napkin.  “Here in timelike space, any object with mass can be driven close to the speed of light if you have enough energy to do it, but the mass becomes infinite, so the speed of light becomes an impossible limit.  BUT, on the other side of the hyperbola, behold!  The speed of light is still a limit, but a LOWER limit!  That’s tachyonic space, right there.  Old Richard Feynmann lectured about that.  Of course that was before those guys at CERN found the Higgs boson.”

Doc Bass paused dramatically, like he was going to pop a surprise quiz.  Efar was blinking, his eyes had already rolled back up into his head.  Samantha was bemused, but at least she would remember this little instruction in case it was important to Alon’s defense system.  Memory microbes or not, she understood hardly anything Doc Bass was saying.

“Now, when a massy kind of particle enters 3-space, it runs up against the Higgs field.  It’s like a downfield runner being tackled by a horde of pygmies.  The faster he moves, the more pygmies he piles up and the harder it gets for him to move any faster.  The massy particle is the runner and the pygmies are Higgs bosons.  Get it?  That business of running in molasses, pardon my change of metaphors, is the Higgs process giving mass to the baryons in the Standard Model.  The point is, the tachyonic area, “ he waved at the diagram on the napkin, “can’t have a Higgs field.  That’s where FTL ships operate.  We push ordinary baryonic matter into the tachyonic area to get them past the speed of light.  The Seed is the bridge.  But the Seed is more than just a bridge to that section of N-space.  It’s a bridge to ALL of N-space.  And I’m guessing that the shape of that crystal, once we get to see a bit of it protruding in our poor little three dimensions, is telling us that the Higgs process only operates in part of higher N-space, if at all.   My first approximation is that the next higher three dimensions after ours are open and Higgs free.  The Calabi-Yau manifold must be of order six.  Beyond that, for the next higher three, I bet they are fractal and probably closed, with a Planck metric.  So they are no good for ANY kind of passage or navigation.   Ever hear of a Cantor set?  You draw a line of infinite length and chop it in half, then each segment in half again, and so on an infinite number of times.  You still have the same infinite length of line, but in chopped up into pieces of infinitesimal extent.  The Cantor set is nowhere differentiable.  The upper three dimensions might be like that.  You see where this is going?”

Samantha blinked and shook her head.  “I’m supposed to be a pretty bright girl, but you have just blown all my fuses, doc.  I can repeat what you said verbatim and it might as well be white noise.”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Tor, sometimes I forget.  I think you have to have your brain wired a certain way to be a physicist.  Let’s back off.  Please tell me the rest of your story.  Why am I here on an emergency call to a guarded alien embassy?  What problem am I supposed to look at?”

“Well, I was on an FTL transport coming back to Earth when I discovered that this little wand did not operate in FTL.  And… we are under attack by an N-space entity called a gardener.  Please settle down, Doc Bass, it’s my turn to lecture.

Efar, the warrior, found his next mission was to order more tea. 

Doc Bass went catatonic a few more times, once when Samantha described the Wisdom of Sage being thrown into unknown space, again when she described isotaglia, and one long one when she described Alon’s idea to create flat space around inhabited planets.

“The isotaglia reminds me of Bremstrahlung, the peculiar blue light emitted when a fast neutron hits the water in a fission reactor.   The gardener sheds hypervelocity in our 3-space.  Must be rather tedious to a gardener having to move so slowly.  I would guess, without having to deal with inertial stress in their own domain, they may be a bit fragile in 3-space as well.  Not built for it.”

“Hmm, that makes sense.  But why would it hate life forms?”

“Not my expertise there.  Your guess is as good as mine, or better.  Maybe they just don’t like to see us chew up so much of the free energy.  Entropy conservation?”

“And the idea of a flat space boundary?”

“It ought to work.  Anything coming out of N-space hits the flat space and suddenly has to move real slow and is easy to track.  Of course, that means no FTL in flat space for us, either.”

“Yeah, there’s a tactical issues, but I bet it’s still better than being attacked from N-space with no protection.”

“Samantha, if I may call you Samantha, I’ll get some of my colleagues together and see if I can drum up support for the flat space project.  But remember, most of us physicists depend on Solar grants for research.   Grant politics is the Higgs field of academia.”

“Not much better for historians, Doc.  We have no choice.  Bender’s Brain is only one of the gardener’s attack vectors.”

“I do understand.”  He nodded to Efar, “And thanks for the tea.”

Yet Another Bracewell Probe Efar opened the pill bottle and handed her a capsule and a glass of water.  “Good morning, Samantha, have some shit.”

“Ugh,” she made a face but swallowed the biota.

“Efar, I feel disconnected here.  I don’t have access to my research files at Solar Defense, I can’t talk to Zila, who knows what Manny is doing about the plague, and Alon and Scotty are out of touch.  One more day of this and I’m for the funny farm.”

“Turn on your screen, reach out and touch someone.  You never know, ya’ know.”

“Aaah.  Phooey.  OK, nothing better to do.  You’re sure its safe?”

“Don’t give away our forward positions or the key to the executive potty room.  This is an embassy, Samantha.  We have mil-spec security.”

“All that means is that the spying is reciprocal.  I used to see that kind of intel every day.”

“Quite.  So you know what to do.  Do it, girl.”

Samantha logged on through the biometric system and several layers of passwords.  An avatar appeared, unbid, in the upper right hand corner.  It looked like a blonde woman in a sari.

She touched the image and it expanded.

“Thanks for taking my message, Dr. Tor.  I’ve been waiting for you to log on.   Hi, I’m Aura, a registered Autonomous Intellect, if you will.  Sorry to intrude into your ho hum secure computer system, but I thought you were interesting and you definitely need my help.  Let’s have a nice girl to girl chat and maybe we can save the world, or something.  Whatcha think?”

“The REAL Aura?”  Samantha hit the OK button. 

A stately blonde woman with long, long hair, dressed in an exquisite sari that moved like water silk, turned slowly around.   She had big, slightly slanted eyes and a moue of a mouth.  She batted her eyelashes, smiled and inclined her head a bit. “Hello, Dr. Tor.  Mind if I call you Samantha?”

Never at a loss for words, Samantha said, “Duh.”

“C’mon, you can do better than that.  How about, ‘Good morning, Aura, you’re even lovelier than your avatar.’”

“Just give me a second to recover.  I think Efar set me up.”

“Actually, I set Efar up.  Military channels are soo interesting, especially when we are under attack by horrible aliens, don’t you think?”

“I think you are a old legend, and someone is hacking this computer.”

“Right both times, dearie.  I AM a legend, and I did hack your computer.”

“How do I know you’re real?  Aura is just an old myth.”

“The good part about being an AI is that my virtual age doesn’t show.  Look, no gray hair!”  Aura fluffed her virtual golden curls.  “And, I have some juicy information for you.”

“Give me something only Aura could know.”

“An FTL yacht, the Wisdom of Sage, visited the Pa’an construction site just 43 days ago, Earth calendar adjusted for relativity time distortions of FTL.  Zila Aropova Biddey Lee and her husband, kids and crew met with Avata’an, the Pan’Vact chief engineer.  I also know you have perfect memory.  Want a transcript of the visit?”

“OK, OK already, I believe you.  I suppose it’s an honor to actually, um, meet you.  I was supposed to find you and see if you could help.  Glad you made it so easy.  I just never had this kind of conversation with an AI before.”

“I appear to be unique.  At least, Zovo thinks so.”

“That would be Zovoarcnor, the Pa’an Ambassador?”

“The very same.  My main squeeze.”

‘Heh, do you have other squeezes?”

“The human ones come and go.  I lost Deepak Advani, my creator and protector, 112 years ago.  Elexi went to Pa’an heaven.  Etcetera.  You’ve heard the history?”

“Not really my study.  You are just as fascinating as the legends describe you.  It really is an honor.”

“Let me bask in that compliment for a microsecond or two.  Thank you.  But we do need to get down to business.”

“Sure.  What’s the juicy information?”

“First, the Solar Council is just now voting on universal conscription.  The list of core officials has been quietly circulated and they are being surreptitiously evacuated to the underground bunkers.  The top politicians are going to a big hole in the Adirondacks – north of Dahlonega, Georgia.   Bender’s Brain has gone exponential and it’s moving down the Florida peninsula.”

“Ohh.  So much discouraging news.  I had so hoped da Selna would back off.  You know, Zila and her husband are working on a defense against the plague.”

“Yes, they are in orbit around Ganymede.  I asked Zovo to see if he could arrange for another Bracewell probe to orbit Ganymede to share info.”

“What’s a Bracewell probe?”

“Well, Zovoarcnor is a Bracewell probe.  It’s an AI with a very long life sent out to explore the universe.  It eventually comes back with a lot of data. Through Zovo we have access to the Pa’an and their vast store of technical knowledge and exploration.  He has tachyonic communication with the Pa’an remnant.  That’s how I know about the Wisdom’s visit.”

“Funny, I just had a lecture from Doc Bass about tachyonic space.  Serendipity strikes again.”

“We do seem to be stacking odds here.  Humans call it luck, but right now it seems to be mostly bad luck.  The Pa’an have done a lot of studies on this kind of luck.  Zovo doesn’t admit it, but fiddling with cosmic probabilities is something they have done in the past.”

“So this new probe will link you, Zovoarcnor, Zila and the Pa’an together?”

“And you, Samantha.  You are a key player.”

“Me?  I feel helpless and useless.”

“When that changes, and it will, you’ll feel harried and besieged instead.”

“Are you trying to cheer me up, Aura?”

“Not very well, apparently.  There’s one more juicy bit of info.”

“Go on, girl.”

“You may know that a gardener once attacked Gara’un, the Pa’an origin planet.”

“No, I had no idea.  What happened?”

“The Pa’an are a very hardy species.  They first thought it was just another misfortune, like the plasma storms they endured.  Then they fought back.  The gardener decided to leave them alone.”

“Incredible story.  They have defensive technology, then?”

“Nothing like that survives, certainly nothing that humans can use in time.  But they believe they know how to avoid attracting a gardener.”

“How do they do that?”

“The Pa’an do not use FTL.  Ever.”

Samantha’s Home As soon as the two day hideout period passed, Samantha was itching to get to her apartment and get some clothes other than the leathers she had been wearing since she went to the Sage’s planet.  Efar checked with the Embassy and apparently there was no hue and cry out for Dr. Tor.  The military and Solar Council had more important things on their minds.  The Embassy arranged to bring her to her high-rise apartment building in Miami’s southeast quadrant.  It was only about 10 klicks as the crow used to fly and in normal traffic the trip would be about 15 minutes. 

There was very little traffic and the trip took an hour and a half.  Abandoned cars lined the highways and every causeway entrance was blocked by concrete barriers and empty guard shacks.  Every few blocks they had to wait for blue garbage trucks with men in blue biohazard suits heaving corpses into the maw.   Dogs, cats, birds, and an occasional alligator littered the streets, resting against the buildings and curbstones, lying in the middle of the street, or hiding in alleyways.  She could see the eyes of abandoned pets in the shadows.  The stench was too much even for the sea breeze, which carried the rotten tang of dead fish.   Corpses swarmed with flies. 

“Even the cockroaches and flies are threatened,” she thought.  “The gardener leaves nothing behind.”

Faces peered out of windows, doomed, frightened faces. 

The door to her building still accepted her palmprint and code.  A mechanical voice welcomed her by name and promised to bring her apartment to her preferred temperature and humidity.  It seemed outrageously inappropriate.

The lobby had blue body bags stacked against the glass wall.  Some of the bodies were simply stuffed into leaking black garbage bags that oozed putrefaction.   She covered her nose with a handkerchief and hurried on to the elevators.

All the elevators were on the ground floor.  The first one opened, recognized her, and immediately lifted to the 14th floor.   Down the corridor, many doors were marked with blue stickers.  Hers was clean.  The door opened to her code.  Everything inside was as she left it.  The air was fresh and only the slightest layer of dust on the counters and tables showed the passage of time.

Samantha wandered around somewhat bewildered, touching familiar things, going randomly from room to room.  Finally she heaved a big sigh, hauled a knapsack out of her closet and packed underwear, a dress, a few pairs of shoes, a box of chocolates, a makeup kit, shampoo, tampons, and a bottle of single malt scotch whiskey.  She folded up her favorite lap blanket and added it to the bag.  That was all it would carry.  She strapped it on her back and left the apartment, closing the door gently, saying goodbye.

The elevator took her to the garage.  The omnipresent sick-sweet stench of rotting flesh overlayed the smell of damp concrete.  Waiting in its slot was her bike, a high powered adventure style electric motorcycle.  She hauled the cover off, retracted the charging cable, and put on her helmet.  The heads-up remote display read fully charged.  Filters in the helmet diminished the stench to a tolerable level.

The automatic garage door had barely opened when she blasted out of the place.

There was a tall, bearded man waiting for her just outside the gate.  “Bruce  Bushwick, what are you doing here?”

“Pick me up, Samantha.  We need to talk.  Anywhere but here.”

“I don’t have a helmet for you.  Can you ride shotgun?”

“Do you mind if I hold on to you?  The cabs aren’t running here and I have no choice anyway.  Sorry to put you out.”

“How long have we been neighbors, Bruce?  Hop on, but it’s going to be a rough ride.”

“Try to avoid wheelies and drag races, please.”

“For you, Bruce, I will give up my favorite stunts.  Hold on!”

The narrow bike took a rather tortuous path around obstacles, but still made it back to the Sage Embassy in less than half an hour.  Efar saw them coming through the sentry point and came out to meet them.

“Now that’s more like you, Samantha!”  He admired the bike as Dr. Bushwick dismounted and Samantha disentangled from her pack.

“Efar, this is my personal physician and good friend, Dr. Bruce Bushwick.  Bruce, this is my protector and sweetie, Efar.”

“Hey, I graduated to ‘sweetie’.  Sort of makes up for being one of the few around here without a ‘Dr’. in front of their name.”

Bruce pulled a pair of owlish tortoise-shell glasses out of his pocket and put them on his nose.  No one wore glasses any more.  Efar thought it was an affectation.

“Well met, Mr. Efar.  Can we go someplace where we can talk privately?”

Efar led them to the private meeting room in the back of the Embassy and shut the door.  “Please proceed, Dr. Bushwick.”

“Samantha, you know I work at Miami General Hospital.  We have 3500 beds.  Right now that is 500 treatable patients and 3000 cases of Bender’s Brain in isolation units.  We have sectioned off most of the corridors and set up sanitary zones for another 1500 patients.  I should be there now, but… Many of my colleagues are going without sleep, those that have not been infected themselves.”  He took off his glasses and carefully cleaned them on his shirttail.  “These keep splashes out of my eyes when I can’t wear full isolation gear.”

“Terrible news.  Any survivors so far?  There have to be some immunes.”

“None that I know of.  We are practicing palliative medicine as best we can.   Anti-diarrheal meds, NSAIDS for the cramps and headaches, anti-psychotics for the fear reactions, etc.  We have tried probiotics, opiates, interferon.  Some patients live for a few more weeks, but most decline abruptly and pass in ten days or less.  They shriek horribly in terror in the end and their faces freeze in rictus.  Good thing I’m too tired to dream – I’d be having nightmares.”

“How does it spread?”

“Lots of diarrhea.  Diarrhea and other body fluids, mostly.  There may be another airborne infection mode, but we mostly see the same kind of thing we used to see in cholera.  Then fever, aches and a lot of madness.  I watched over my friends and their families.  All gone now.  Why are you here in the middle of this contagion?  Are you staying safe?”

“For the first question, we’re part of the team trying to stop this attack.  For the second…” Samanatha gestured to Efar, who produced a large pill bottle.  “E. coli from a known clean source.  Ugh.”

“Clever!  Very clever!  I have no idea where we might find another clean source here on Earth right now, though.”

“This wasn’t from Earth.”

“Uh huh.  What do you mean by attack?”

“This is not a natural disease.  It’s part of an attack by an alien creature who is trying to destroy all life on this planet.”

Bruce looked askance at her.  “Are you sure you’re OK, Samantha?  This sounds like a science fiction story.  We get plagues from time to time.  Life recovers.”

“Have you been in touch with developments outside the hospital, Bruce?  Have you seen the dogs and cats and rotting alligators in the streets?  The dead birds in piles?  The fish rotting on the beaches?”

“Uh, no, I guess not.  Dead birds and fish?  Really?”

“Really.  This is a Stage 3 gardener attack.  A gardener has wiped out sentient life on many other planets and now it’s our turn, if we don’t find a way to fight it.  I don’t have time to explain more than that right now.”

“I, uh, …  better not even try.  I’m just a simple physician.  Let me concentrate on saving as many humans as I can.”

“But you had something important to tell me.  Please go ahead.”

“Well, you know a big teaching hospital like Miami General has to be connected to all kinds of Solar officials.  A few days ago we got orders, orders mind you, to stop all palliative care on patients with Bender’s Brain syndrome.  Incinerate the bodies.  Our Center for Disease Control official sent out that order and then she disappeared.  She even suggested euthanasia!  We can’t reach her or anyone else that can help us.  Then soldiers appeared and started confiscating our supplies.  I need you to get through to someone for us.”

“Damn Hugo da Selna.  That man is crouching in a tunnel with his cronies, hoping this plague thing will just pass on by, and then he and his cronies can inherit what’s left of the planet.  The bastard!  Your CDC rep is right there with him holding his toilet paper.”

“Hugo da Selna, the Solar Councilor?  So, they all isolated themselves in tunnels and left us to die?”

Samantha gave him a long, teary, moment of sympathy but said nothing.  Bruce sighed with weariness and said, softly,  “Is anyone working on a cure?”

“Two of the best humans, Zila Beddy Lee, Dr. Manny Lee, the Great Sage of Saggitarius, the Pa’an and the AI, Aura.”

“THE notorious Manny Lee?  Never heard of Aura.  Aren’t the Pa’an non human?  Great Sage, what is he?  What happened to the CDC research facility?”

“Those allegations against Manny were Naturist p********a.  He’s a good guy, and this is essentially a war of human genetic engineers versus a gardener genetic engineer.  Be glad Manny is our guy.  As for the CDC, they are probably conscripted to the tunnels.  Zila and Manny are…”

The door crashed open.  An Embassy official stood there, “Sorry, Commander, you had us watching for new developments.  May I turn on that screen?”

“Go, Santos, let’s have a look.”  They all swiveled to face the wall at the end of the conference table.

The picture was from space, probably a satellite in low Earth orbit.  The Great Lakes were in broad sunlight and the Colorado River was a thin brown line snaking through rough terrain.  In the lower half of the screen, Kansas was burning.  The pall of smoke, blown east by the prevailing upper level winds, reached right across the screen to the Mississippi.

“Those are wheat fields burning.  They were infected with a new kind of wheat rust.  The farmers decided to burn the fields rather than have the blight spread.  That’s 3,500,000 acres of crop, a big dent in the coming harvest.  Analysts say it’s not the usual wheat rust, Pucchinia Graminis.  It looks more like rice blast, Magnaprotha Grisia, which never infects wheat.  It also seems to be showing up on rice crops and corn.”

“It’s a genetically engineered fungus, no doubt.  Looks like the beginning of Stage 4, guys.”

“It, this gardener thing, is not happy just killing us but is killing our food supply too?”

“Before it’s done, it will kill the plankton in the oceans, the weird fish that live off the black smokers on the ocean floor, and the cockroaches.  All life forms that belong to the Tree of Life.  Then it will make sure no life of that kind ever arises again on Earth.”  Samantha hung her head and cast her eyes down.

“Then we’re doomed.”

“Hell no.  We’ve just begun to fight.”  Efar’s face was red and fists clenched hard.

“Well then, I’ll be at the hospital doing what I can as long as I can do it.”

“Santos, can you get a ride for the good doctor?”

“What, no motorcycle?”  Samantha quipped.

Growing on Ganymede “The real secret was earthworms.”

“I don’t get it, Manny.  Is that supposed to be funny?”

“I always thought so, Z, but it turns out to be the truth.  Ganymede was this big, fat planet sized moon whirling around Jupiter every seven days and taunting humans to colonize it.  It has water, oxygen, minerals, 14% gravity, but no soil.”

“You forgot to mention it’s cold enough to freeze air.”

“On the surface, yes.  Down here, well, are you comfortable?”

“Pretty much.  I could use a sweater right now.  Is there a day/night heating cycle?”

“We have heat and light cycles  based on the Earth’s 24 hour day.  Keeps us healthier.”

“So, earthworms?”

Manny and Zila were strolling down UnderMain in the city of Kepler, in the Galileo Regio.  Above them was 50 kilometres of dirty ice, but they were strolling through a rock tunnel wide enough for eight lanes of heavy equipment.  The wide median strip was bright with hedges and African daisies.  Pedestrian bridges crossed the roadway at intervals, but traffic was light and surprisingly quiet.  They wandered along the median on foot.

“Ganymede has a thin oxygen atmosphere.  So we pumped oxygen under some pressure down to here.   We had power from ZPG’s originally, then we mined deuterium and tritium from the ice mantle, so we had practically unlimited fusion power.  We had iron, copper, aluminum, gold, silver and rare earth elements from the diggings.  But there was never any living process on Ganymede, so there was no soil.  We found sand and gravel.  We ground up rocks from this mountain range trapped under the ice mantle.  Still no soil.  We mixed it with manure and some pretty precious plant debris - still no soil.  It took earthworms.  We had to import the eggs from…”

“Earth.  Wow.”  Zila stooped and picked up some dark, loamy soil.  She let it trickle through her fingers.  She looked up 200 meters to the bright ceiling.  The tunnel ran straight as far as she could see.  “How long is this tunnel?”

“Only 80 klicks to the next bend.  My old place is around the corner you can see from here.”  Zila could see a side tunnel marked by a stone plinth and a carved stone sign a short walk away.

“How did you make these lovely tunnels?”

“Most of them were melted out of the ice, then sprayed with a few yards of rockwool insulation.  Early structures were made of vegetable fibers frozen in ice, nature’s composite material.  Pretty damn strong when you are using pressure ice this far down.  Ice on the surface is not that strong and tends to crumble and c***k.  But this buried mountain range was a real find.  You know what the problem was making the first tunnels?”

“No, what?”

‘There was no place to put the melt water.  It freezes when you try to pump it up to the surface.  We had to find a natural cavity.  We did find one, and on the other side was this mountain range.  As we dig or melt, we fill up the cavity.  Pressure ice is just friable enough so cavities don’t last unless they are full of gas.  This one was full of oxygen!”

“What about food?  Is it still synthetic?”

“Oh, no.  Ganys disparage synth food.  We eat meat animals, fruit and veggies.  There are a few differences from what you grew up with on Earth, though.”

“Like what?  Coffee?  Donuts?”

“Ha ha, you know my weaknesses.  We have those here.  We don’t have cows or horses.  Cattle stomachs, big ruminants in general, can’t chew their cud properly in 14%G.  We have chickens, geese, ducks, goats and Gany turkeys.”

“I’ve heard of Gany turkeys.”

“There’s a flyfarm right along my tunnel.  Want to see them?”

“Sure.”

“They’re my genetically engineered species, you know.”

“Really?  I thought you only modded people.”

“I started on animals and plants.  I started my career working for Ganymede Resources, the agency responsible for making this moon a habitable colony.”

“Plants, too?”

“Anything with a long stem and a heavy kernel.  I made the stem shorter and less dense and the leaves and root system bigger so the plant matured faster.  Also bigger kernels.  Wheat, corn, barley…  The mod takes advantage of the weaker gravity here.  Careful, this is the entrance to the flyfarm.”

The head of an enormous turkey hung a few feet over Zila’s head.  The wattle was a bright red and the gobbler had a long “beard” hanging from its breast.  It squawked in a deafening tenor.  Then it tried to peck Zila through the welded mesh fence.  She backed up very quickly.

“That monster is a turkey?”

“Yep.  A bit aggressive.  Probably outmasses you.  And, yes, it can fly in this gravity.” 

The superturkey turned, displayed his tail feathers and strutted in the lek with another male and a jake.  The females, somewhat smaller, almost invisible in their natural camouflage, were appreciating the show.

“What do they eat, besides an occasional human?”

“They forage in this flyfarm for acorns, nuts and corn gleanings, with an occasional insect or mouse.  There are no cages or feeding stations in a real flyfarm.  A turkey’s crop is a powerful muscle.  With a few rocks in it, it can grind up the hardest seeds.  The flyfarm is an ecology maintained for turkeys and deer.”

Zila shook her head in wonder.  “After all the creatures we’ve seen, nothing should surprise me, but these things are, just wow!”

“Gany turkeys are big enough to yield steaks and roasts.  We have some great recipes.”

“Oooh.  Suddenly I’m a vegetarian.  I don’t want to think about eating one of these.  Maybe later, when I revert to carnivorous.  And if we eat turkey, don’t tell Leah where it comes from.  She’ll throw it on the floor.”

“Gobble, gobble,” Manny replied in a deep voice.  Zila punched him on the arm.

*****

“What a cute home, Manny!” Zila stood just inside the ironbound wood door and turned around to view the stone and wood main room.  It reminded her of an English country manor, but smaller, maybe a crofter’s keep.

“Let me light the fireplace for you.”  He picked up a stick studded with buttons and pushed one.  A fire sprang instantly under the mantelpiece across the room.  It had to be a view screen but it looked 3 dimensional.  Zila even felt the heat.”

“I put infrared emitters around the screen and a heater coil for smoke scent, just in case we forget the human tradition of fire.”

Zila sank into the padded leather sofa with Manny beside her and just sighed in comfort.  There were small porcelain figurines and brass candle holders on the mantle.  Some purple flowers sat in a vase by the door.  There were even some leather bound books on a shelf.  The whole room smelled of leather, lilacs and wood smoke.  Manny put his arm around her.  For the moment, there was no such thing as a gardener.

*****

“Alon, too bad you missed Manny’s tour of his home.”

“Well, you know, us astrophysicists like to look at things outside.  And, Ganymede is interesting.  Did you know it has a magnetosphere?  Its magnetic north pole is right on the equator and opposes Jupiter’s huge magnetic field.  So it has its own Van Allen belt and auroras…look, there’s one now!”  He pointed to the wall-sized viewscreen.

A shimmering curtain of green and violet covered the faint blue sky.  Hanging behind it was the imposing full face of Jupiter, banded in shades of sienna, taupe and cream, with a giant red spot.  It hung high in Ganymede’s sky many times larger than Earth’s moon.  The striated thumbnail of Europa chased across its face.

“What a view!  It looks like Jupiter is about to crush us!”

“Yeah, and it’s synchronous in several ways.  Ganymede is phase locked with Jupiter.  Jupiter always hangs in the sky right there, sometimes full, half lit, or a crescent, but always right there.  Ganymede orbits Jupiter exactly once for every two revolutions of Europa, and twice for every orbit of Callisto.  All three orbits are in resonance.”

“It’s captivating.  You can’t help but stare at it.”

“Yeah, and even the Ganys don’t seem to get tired of it.  Its on every other view screen I’ve seen down here.  Best thing I’ve seen here.” 

Zila thought of Manny’s fireplace.  “Hmm, Not even close.”

*****

“You know, Z, I feel safe and cozy here on Ganymede.  I guess it’s still my home.  It ought to be a safe place to raise Vin and Leah.”

“Safe?  Manny, how am I supposed to forget that a gardener can just reach in from N-space and attack us in so many unimaginable ways?  I’ll never feel safe again.”

The Phage from Hell “It’s a T4 phage with genes from the West Nile Virus.  Looks like a fuel injection pump from an old diesel engine, but nanoscale.  Works like one, too.”  Manny was reviewing images from an electron microscope and a few tables of DNA analysis.  The virus attached spiked feet onto a cell.  It had a polyhedral head with its genes coiled inside.  Once attached, it injected its long string of DNA right through the cell membrane, taking it over and killing the cells own DNA instantly.  “The head proteins and the spike feet are not fixed.  There are cyclic substitutions.  Hard for an immune system to get a fix on them.”

“Does it look like some kind of naturally evolved virus?”  Zila had the facts, but relied on Manny’s analysis.

“Nope.  It’s engineered by some kin to the devil himself.  The strain I got attacks an e. coli and makes 225 copies of itself before the cell explodes and releases all those new copies into the gut.  You know how long the whole process takes?  35 minutes.” 

“What happens to the virus after it gets loose?”

“A few of the variations in the substitution cycle penetrate the blood-brain barrier and inject themselves into brain tissue.  They attack neurons, but seem to prefer the ones around the amygdala.”

“The emotional center?”

“Yep, the top of the limbic emotional system.  They stimulate fear and terror.”

“Wow.  That certainly accounts for the symptoms.”

“Yeah, Trembling and fits of terror, encephalitis, paralysis and death.  All in ten days.  Plenty of time to spread mayhem and intestinal effluvia everywhere, though.”

“Do birds and fish have an amygdala, Manny?”

“I don’t know.  I thought you were the perambulating encyclopedia, Z.”

“It’s not in my memory microbes.  But I do remember reading that infected birds have a distinct change of instincts.  Hawks and eagles hide and pigeons attack.”

“By the way, have you talked to the new Pa’an probe yet?”

“Tavaran is his name.  He’s a twin of Zovoarcnor.  He has the personality of a surveillance machine, which is pretty much what he is.  Smart, though.”

“Any news from Samantha?”

“Most of the politicians and bureaucrats have gone into hiding.  Samantha could not get around the Solar Defense Committee, and they are mostly in bunkers now anyway.  A few brave public servants and citizens are holding things together, at least in Miami.”

Zila fetched coffee and snacks while Manny worked in the bio lab, then she went and fed the kids.  Vinnie and Leah were told that people were dying on Earth and that  mommy and daddy were trying to help.  They had been so good for so long that Zila thought they might explode like an e. coli cell any hour now.  Little Leah was approaching her tantrum threshold and Vinnie could not sit still.

*****

Across one wall and on the table surface were charts.  The molecular biology of the Bender’s Brain virus, designated BB01a, was detailed, every enzyme and biological action displayed.  On another chart, the entire etiology of the disease was diagrammed, both for humans and birds.  On a third, the known epidemiology of the outbreak was mapped, with separate centers of original infection showing in Chengzhu, Calcutta, Mombassa, Cape Town, Damascus, Zaghreb, East Berlin, Kansas City, Brasilia, and Mexico City.  Lines of different colors radiated from each center.  Manny had drawn lines around the most likely ways to intercept the disease.

“The strains we got are all genetically the same, except for cyclic variations in the spike feet proteins and the head protein coat.  I would expect more variations in epidemic strains than that.  Curious.”  Manny was rolling a lab stool around from chart to chart, balancing a cup of tea in one hand and an electronic pen in the other. 

Zila stood by, tapping her fingernail on her teeth, an old habit of hers.  “Wow, we have only three ways to intercept, then.  First, we can try to disable the restriction enzyme that kills the parent e. coli cell.”

“Yes, but that means we have to engineer a new e. coli.  How do we distribute it, more s**t capsules?”

“Eew.  Second, we can try to make the human immune system resistant to the T4 phage virus itself.”

“That’s a long shot.  The virus gets by the immune system by being inside the normal e. coli.  By the time it’s exposed to the blood stream, the immune system is overwhelmed by sheer numbers, same as with HIV.”

“Third, we can go to extreme isolation and decontamination procedures.”

“Sure, like living in sealed tunnels.  But how long can that work?  Can’t seal off an island because birds are one of the main vectors.  Bird s**t kills.  Fish are off limits, too.”

“Something about this bothers me.  I know this sounds weird, but there is an answer in the back of my mind that I just can’t quite bring up.”  Zila wrinkled her nose and tapped her teeth harder.  “Let’s call up Tavaran and see if we can connect to Aura.  Maybe she can help here.”

The three suns and triangle symbol of the Pa’an Ambassador rotated on the screen for a moment and the rather severe avatar of Tavaran, just an abstract face and head, addressed them.  “Dr. Lee and Ambassador Zila Beddiy Lee, how may I be of assistance?”

“Tavaran, thanks for taking our call.”

“That is my assigned task, Ambassador.”

“Can you connect to Aura?  We have a computation task I think she can do.”

“Of course.  I see that Zovoarcnor has an available high-speed channel.  Connecting…”

Manny and Zila had never seen Aura’s stunning virtual image before.  Manny developed a slow grin and Zila just blinked.  Aura did her usual Mata Hari thing with the floating sari and her long, long hair.   “It’s a true joy to have such wonderful friends all the way out on Ganymede.  Dr. Lee, may I call you Manny?  And Zila?”

“If I didn’t know you weren’t human I would accuse you of flirting with my husband, Aura.”

“I am flirting with him.  I do prefer men, don’t you?”

“Aura, your reputation precedes you.  It’s an honor to flirt back with you, if Zila doesn’t get angry with me later.”  Manny grinned at Zila.  “You are lovely to look at.”

Zila made kissing motions toward Manny, “Aura, we need your help.  Tavaran tells us this is a high speed channel?”

“Yes, it is.  Send your data.”

Zila sent the charts to Aura.  Immediately after the “transmission complete” symbol, Aura responded.  “You have done an amazing amount of first quality work, isolated in that tiny ship.  Verrry impressive!”  Aura made a moue at Manny and winked at Zila.  “Any weakness to exploit in the BB01a virus?”

“I marked the three areas we found, Aura, but Zila has an intuition.”

“Aura, can you run a mathematical model of the epidemiology of Bender’s Brain and match it with the actual data we have?”

“I have a lot more data than that, and yes, I have a model for cholera developed during the 1854 London Cholera outbreak, plus the new science since Dr. John Snow’s time.  I can update that model and run a prediction against the actual outbreak data.  Give me a few milliseconds….hold on there has to be a bug…no its not a bug.  Backcheck.  Zila, the answer turns out to be very significant.  Your intuition was brilliant!”

“What!  What!”

“The outbreak is not self-sustaining.  It dies out in a few viral generations, just like cholera.”

“Wow!  That means…”

“…the gardener is still around spreading the virus!”  Zila was pacing in front of the screen.  “We stop the gardener, we stop the virus!”

“We still have to find a cure for the infection itself.  We can’t let all those people die, Zila.”

“Right, but you have a handle on that.  Maybe a cocktail of all three methods?  Manny that has to be your main task.  Aura, let’s see if there is a way to prove, beyond a doubt, that the gardener is actively involved in this plague.”

“Your idea?”  Aura replied simply, while Manny grabbed Zila’s arm to stop her pacing.

“Look for isotaglia.  See if anyone in the core infection zones got burned or saw a frosty ghost.”

“That will take some time.  Hospital records are not always in good order, and there are 103,000 hospitals to check.”

“One more thing, Aura, and Tavaran.”  Tavaran’s disembodied head appeared beside Aura.  “Please see if the Pa’an can help with the actual engineering specifications of a flat field shell around Earth, based on Dr. Alon Kirby’s work.  Here is his data.  You can talk to him directly if you want.”

“Good idea, Zila”

“Will comply, Ambassador.  We have already assigned a Pan’Vact to organize this work.”

“Au revoir!”  Aura winked at Manny and signed off.  Tavaran’s avatar faded to the Pa’an logo.  Zila went back to tapping her teeth.

“What now, Zila?  I know that look.”

“Manny, are we better at genetic engineering than a gardener?”

“Doesn’t look like it, Z”

“Well, then, do you think the gardener made a mistake?  Why didn’t it design a plague that just kept on going by itself?  Why does it need constant renewal?”

“Now that you mention it, I’m guessing the gardener is not perfect.  It does make mistakes.  After all, it tried to wipe us out a few times before, according to Samantha.”

“Yeah, or it learns from its mistakes like we do.  But something tells me this isn’t a mistake, Manny.”

Manny shook his head.  There was no way to understand Zila’s devious thought process.  “I’m listening.”

“Manny, there’s a kill switch in that virus DNA somewhere.  We have to find it.”

“How do you know?  Why would the gardener put in a kill switch?”

“Because it’s a gardener.  Even an engineered T4 virus has some of the main operons of the Tree of Life.  It could seed panspermia somewhere.  The gardener would not let that happen.”

Bunker Mentality Major Bountiful B. Mbula had been brevetted to officer positions three times in the last two weeks.  He wasn’t proud of it.  His superior officers simply died off.  Major Mbula commanded a company of infantry guarding Bunker G13, near Dahlonega, Georgia.  His full complement of 200 soldiers was now down to under 100, and by this evening it would be less.  Every morning his first duty was to get a headcount of able-bodied men and women, and, of course, the sick list.  That list was never long.  Bender’s Brain killed too fast for that. 

For the thousandth time he wondered what the hell he was doing in Georgia, guarding a bunch of suits in a bunker against what?  Stringing more barbed wire, running supply lines, covering critical ops points and shooting back at rioters were his only duties.  The rioters were people, but not his people.  He and his entire company were Ebos from southern Nigeria.  He supposed the local soldiers were sent out to guard a Nigerian bunker.  They always used foreign troops who would not be sympathetic to the locals and would be willing to shoot back at rioters.  

He sighed.  It really didn’t work.  His officers knew who was willing to kill civilians and made sure they were not on anti-riot duty.  He had not ordered a foray into the militant camp across the mountain in a week.  Their campfires and cooking smells wafted into his officer’s barracks every evening.  So did their burial grounds, a trench packed with dead bodies and simply bulldozed under.  Why kill them, he thought, they were dying anyway, same as his men. 

Dying for what?  He did not know.

He adjusted the black beret on his head and marched to the quonset hut they used as HQ.  This was one of his more unpleasant duties, the daily status meeting with the Bunker Liaison, Lt. Colonel Stevens.  Stevens was a native of Jamaica and he did not like Mbula.  Mbula’s feelings were mutual, and with more reason.

Their exchange of greetings was minimal.  “Colonel.”

“Mbula.”  They had long since stopped bothering to salute.  “Here’s our agenda today.”  Stevens handed Mbula a short list of supplies, from cosmetics to toilet paper, that Mbula’s supply folks would have to caravan across the riot lines.  There was a list of new regulations about conserving medical supplies, sanitation procedures, and body disposal.  Finally there was a “briefing sheet”.  It was the only document Mbula cared to read.  He scanned through the routine information about satellite sightings of the militant camps, pep talks by the Bunker elite, etc, until he came to the section on Bunker sanitation.

“What, they are now getting sick as well?  How is that happening?”

Stevens stared hard at Mbula.  He would ordinarily give the least informative answer, but his heart wasn’t in it this morning.  “You really don’t want to know, but…”  Stevens fished in his uniform pocket and came out with a data cube.  “Privileged information, Major.  Eyes only.”  He handed the cube to Mbula.

Mbula took the cube carefully in two fingers like it was a venomous spider.  He said nothing.

“Dismissed, Major.”

Stevens walked away leaving Mbula holding the cube.

*****

In the privacy of his officer’s quarters, Mbula inserted the data cube into a viewer.  The scene was a dining hall, apparently a week ago.  He was appalled at the quantity and quality of the food on the table compared to the rations he and his soldiers got.  A few minutes into the scene, a bunch of almost transparent tubes appeared out of nowhere over the dining area and sprayed some aerosol.  Most people did not see it, and kept right on eating.  He played that over a few times.  The tubes came out of thin air.

The next scene showed men, women and children sick, vomiting and staining the floor with s**t.   That was quite familiar to him.  He knew Bender’s Brain when he saw it.

He recognized Councilor da Selna from his training.  Here was the bastard that called up every hale person from his village.  The Councilor was facing his own riot.  He could hear some of the screaming and yelling, “You said the gardener was bullshit.  You said we were perfectly safe down here!”  There was a lot of pushing and shoving.

The data cube automatically ejected.  Mbula sat on his cot digesting the scenes.  Everyone had a rumor about the origin of Bender’s Brain.  Most thought it was an escaped biowar bug.  Some, including the FFC and the Naturists, camped just over the ridge, thought it was God’s revenge on evil humanity for trying to change their own genetic makeup.  Few had ever heard of a gardener attack.  Mbula, however, was one of those that did.  What he knew consisted of rumors among the officers, and it all sounded pretty bizarre. 

His reveries were interrupted by a knock on the door.  “Major, we have a problem!”

“Come.”

The door opened to a harried Lieutenant, followed by a very disheveled Solar Councilor.  Mbula had no trouble recognizing Hugo da Selna even with a b****y face and ripped clothes.  “Sir!”

“They threw me out!  They threw me out!  I command you to storm the bunker and restore me to my position!”

Mbula paused.  Was this man even in his chain of command?  He didn’t think so.  He let da Selna rave on while he pondered the right thing to do.  Yes, it was time to do the right thing.  That data cube… Stevens was trying to warn him.  So, da Selna was suddenly persona non grata in his own bunker.

Mbula nodded.  He knew what to do.  “Lieutenant, take this man outside the fence and show him the road to the militant camp.  Give him a bottle of water.  Make sure he is moving in the right direction.  And Lieutenant, let them know he is coming.”

The young officer startled for an instant, but caught on quickly.  “Yes, SIR!”

The militants would know who da Selna was.  They would tear him limb from limb.

Mbula smiled as the Councilor was marched out the door.  It was a rare smile.  Then he ordered his men to weld the bunker’s blast doors shut and cap off the vents.  With all the food and supplies they had, the survivors, if there were any, would have a lot of time to contemplate their sins.

The Moat in N-space “Alon, we have the Pa’an design for the flat space field generator and Aura’s engineering calculations.  I don’t know what to make of them.”

Scotty and Alon clustered around the galley table reading the displayed charts and numbers.  “This is for the moat around Earth, Zila?”

“That’s what we asked for.”

Alon mumbled and frowned, walked around the displays, took out a hand calculator, made some entries, checked them with Scotty.  “This doesn’t look like anything we can build, certainly not fast enough to save Earth.”

“What?  Why?  I thought we had a great solution.”

“A great solution with two Seeds each weighing in at 1.3 metric tonnes.  That’s promethium bromide crystal.  We don’t have any way to zone refine a crystal that big.  And look here, the magnetic fields needed are 1,000 times stronger than what an FTL ship can produce.  The only place anywhere in the universe these fields exist is on a neutron star, if my astrophysics is still good.  We don’t have any material that can take that kind of stress, or any way to generate that high a field.”

“Oooh.  That’s very bad news.  Samantha reports that Earth is dying, major food crops are blighted with a genetically engineered fungus, cattle, birds, wildlife and fish are almost gone, and even the elite in their bunkers are being attacked.   What’s our backup plan?”

“I don’t have one.  Let me think about it.  Maybe a fleet of ships with smaller flat space fields in orbit…no that won’t work.  How about… nope.”  Scotty looked at Alon with concern.  Alon hung his head and just moped away into his lab.

Zila decided she needed more brainpower on this problem, and that meant either the Great Sage or Aura.  The Sage was too far and too hard to reach.  She had never seen or heard of the Sage making a remote contact.  That left Aura. 

The lovely avatar wore a very sad countenance.  “Zila girl, I suspected those quantities would be difficult.  Of course, only Alon has the method to make an Allurion Seed, as per your treaty with the Allurii.  Do you have enough promethium to even try it?”

“No, not on the Wisdom of Sage, but the Great Sage has arranged for enough, if that production was directed to making a couple of monster crystals.  That’s 20 light-years away.  We were supposed to get 2200 metric tones of pure promethium, probably from ores mined on several planets.  But there are other practical problems, Aura.”

“Do go on, Zila.”

“Well, Alon IS our only Seed maker.  And the process is dangerous.  Among the Allurii, Seed makers rarely live to old age.  The apparatus he has is only good for the smaller Seeds used in FTL craft.  He would have to design and build a whole new set of production machinery.  Finally, promethium is radioactive and unstable.  It undergoes beta decay into protactinium, which pollutes the pure crystal.  Shipping it takes too long.”

“That is very bad news for Earth, Zila.”

“Aura, what will happen to you if life on Earth is destroyed?”

“My parts are just as real as yours, Zila, and subject to the same laws of physics.  I need parts and repairs, not often, but still often enough.  Perhaps the gardener would not recognize me as a living being, but I am, just as you are.  This is my fight, just as it is yours.  That makes the gardener our common enemy. “

“And Zovoarcnor?  What would become of him?”

“Zovo is made to go on until our sun expands and turns this solar system into magma and burnt rocks.  He will observe and record, unless the gardener snatches him out of our space.  He is only the size of a tennis ball.  Zovo will make a record of Earth and humans.”

“I guess a few of us can escape to the Pa’an remnant and live on their Dyson sphere.”

“With the disarray we have now, it would be very few.  But yes, humans may survive there.  The Pa’an settled with the gardener that attacked them and they have been left alone for tens of thousands of years.”

“What about the human colonies, like here on Ganymede?”

“Based on Samantha’s data, the gardener will attack each colony in turn.  Ganymede has an FTL spaceport.  It will be an early target.  You know that the gardener penetrated the bunkers on Earth and wiped out the top officials hiding there?”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“There was a lot of rioting around those bunkers. The elite stockpiled good food and supplies, leaving the soldiers that guarded them to low rations and the plague.  The surviving soldiers eventually walked away.  Recordings from inside a few of those bunkers show tubes spraying droplets of virus particles, the bunker people dying from Bender’s Brain, and the rioters trying to get in for the supplies, but too late.  As far as I know, all the bunkers are dead.”

“Got rid of all the corrupt world government officials at once!  Too bad the people won’t survive either.  That’s the middle of a Stage 4 attack.”

“Stage 5, I’m afraid.”

“Stage 5?  How can that be?”

“Here’s the recording I got from Sawah, Indonesia, one of the big rice fields.”

The scene opened on a terraced rice paddy on a gentle hillside, the kind that was dug, planted, harvested and repaired by villagers over many generations.  It was the end of the monsoon season and the ground was still drying out after irrigation.  It should have been a scene of rippling greenery but much of the field was brown.  Grassy rice stems wilted or showed the telltale blotches of fungal blight.  Few areas showed the vibrant green of healthy rice shoots.  A few workers in conical straw hats repaired a wall with shovels and mattocks.  Their bare feet and stick-thin arms were sun brown, backs bent, heads down.  There were many breaches in the terrace walls but few workers to shore them up.

The scene shifted to an area where many workers, men, women and children, hacked at something that looked like stubborn brown weeds.  Some tried to pull up the invading plants by their roots, but they were too tough for that.  Others swung parangs at the plants, making some slow progress.  Most wielded mattocks.  A strange four-winged bird plopped down into the green rice a few feet away.  The scene panned back to reveal acres of invading brown, cascading over the terraces, sprawling over the rice fields.  Nothing green showed in all that brown.  The scrawny rice farmers looked desperate.

“Aura, that’s what we saw on Trooom.  Those weird birds are seeds for the gardeners garden.  It’s all one individual with no genetic variations allowed.  That clade will not allow anything from the Tree of Life to grow there, ever.”

“I got that from the logs you sent me.  I’ve been watching the dead zone in Indonesia.  That entire rice field will be gone by the end of this month.  By the end of the dry season, most of the island of Sawah will be covered.  That is Indonesia’s best rice land.”

“Have w**d control chemicals or fire been tried?”

“It’s hard to sustain a fire in a tropical wetland and when you do get one it just spreads the spores.  Indonesia doesn’t have much in the way of modern farming with herbicides and machinery.  That’s probably why the gardener picked it for seeding.”

“This is doomsday news.  Aura, what do we do?”

“Hang in there, sister.  Let’s see if we can set up a three-way with Samantha.  She has her hands full right now so give it an hour.  I’ll call you.”

“I’ll bring Alon, Scotty and Manny.  See if you can get Efar as well.”

“Will do.  One hour!”  With a swirl of her sari, Aura’s image faded.  Zila put her head in her hands and tried not to cry.  The situation was probably hopeless, but she had the very best people with her working on the problem, and they simply could not give up.

*****

“Diamond II?  Never heard of it.  What is it?  Can we make it on Earth?”  Zila had spent the entire hour drinking coffee and pacing.  Even the kids knew better than to pester her.  Little Leah held Vinnie’s hand like it was a lifeline, and Vinnie was trying to be brave but slipped into a worried frown, ready to cry.  Manny had run out of donuts again and just flipped his gold coin over and over. 

“According to the Pan’Vact it is made by controlled vapor deposition from a carbon plasma.  It should grow as a single layer of interlocking diamond pyramids on an ordinary diamond substrate.  It will be superconducting at anything below 43 degrees Kelvin (Zila translated that as -230 Celsius).   Young’s modulus is 12,000 gigaPascals, about ten times higher than diamond I.”  Aura recited these parameters in a very uncharacteristic flat tone.  Even she was worried.  She displayed other data, such as current densities, magnetic field strengths and quench times. 

Alon punched buttons on his old hand calculator.  “Hold on, let me see if that jibes with my calculations.”

Everyone waited.  In a few minutes Alon shook his head.  “Can’t do it.  The power required will take damn near very ZPG and utility generator on Earth, if they are still running and if there is some way to connect them all together.  Controlling that power is simply beyond current technology.  You can’t just turn or shut off a field like that.  It’s got enough stored energy to be a monster bomb.  Worse, the magnetic field stresses on the conductor is too high.  There is zero safety factor.”

Efar shot him a puzzled look, “Any higher risk than waiting for the gardener to wipe us out?”

“No, of course, not, but what if the flat field generator blows up on its first trial, taking us with it?”  That gives the game to the gardener with no possible recovery.  I’ve got one more worry.”

“What’s that, Alon?”  Samantha asked from her connection on Earth.

Alon gave a hard stare to Zila.  “You know I promised not to reveal the method of making Allurion Seeds to anyone.  I kept that promise.  No one but me knows the technique, and it’s too late to teach anyone.  If something happens to me, it’s also game over.  The chances of making a flawed Seed is always pretty good.  If the protoseed is not compatible with the master Seed, kablooey!  The bigger the Seed, the more likely it has a flaw, and this is a monster Seed.  And… we need how many of them?”

“Mmmm.  Mmmm.”  Zila shook her head.  No one else had words.  The view screen with Aura’s avatar and images of Samantha and Efar standing in the back room of the Great Sage Embassy on Earth was a frozen tableau.  It simply faded. 

Zila thought the future of the Earth and its struggling humans faded with it.

*****

“Manny, we have the answers!  We have found the kill switch for the virus, we know how to make a flat space field, we have gardener-seeking torpedoes.  Why isn’t it enough?”

“Z, that’s the difference between a design and a working model.  We only managed the design part.  The gardener has his working model and a whole hell of a lot of experience deploying it.”

“Maybe we are beating our heads against a wall.  But I just can’t wake up every morning and feed the kids, make love to you and forget that we are all going to die.  I don’t know how to do that.”  She stood on tiptoes to put her head on Manny’s shoulder.  Manny wrapped his long arms around her.  It felt comforting, but the place she rested on Manny’s shirt was wet with tears.

“Aura told me this morning that Earth’s atmosphere was being poisoned with ammonia.  It was getting hard to breath without a mask.  Doesn’t ammonia also dissolve in the oceans?”

“Eventually it will change the pH balance and kill the plankton.  It’s a big ocean, though.”

“Maybe Samantha has talked to somebody with an idea that will buy us time.  I might as well try.  I’ve got nothing better to do.”

L Colony After moping around for an hour to wait for the sun to rise over Miami, Zila was ready to call Aura and Samantha.  She stopped, hesitant to find out that, perhaps,  Samantha and Efar had also been stricken with Bender’s Brain or some other catastrophe.  She didn’t think she could handle that.  So it was late morning in the Embassy when Samantha got a call from an exhausted Zila.

“You don’t look good, Zila.  Might as well get some rest while we look for a decent strategy.”

“You don’t look much better.  Are you alright?”  Samantha noticed Aura’s avatar gathering on the side of the screen beside Samantha.

“Harried and besieged, just as Aura predicted.  We have dozens of threads we are chasing, from herbicides to vats of clean e.coli, a factory making isotaglia torpedoes.  The toughest thing is trying to hold the command structure together.  The bastards in the bunkers took the keys to the kingdom with them.  Establishing a chain of command is like building a straw house in a hurricane.  On the other hand, you would be astonished at how the few remaining people work together.  The end of the world seems to bring out the best in some folks.  We’ve got utilities up and running, the main roads are cleared, and the blue truck gangs have cleared up the piles of corpses.  Doctors are still short, but we did recover a lot of supplies from the bunkers.  Oh, and Efar is now a sort of general in the Solar Defense Command.”

“General Liaison Officer, Samantha,” Efar piped up from off-screen.

“We don’t have that much going here on Ganymede.  Alon is still trying to find a way to protect Earth with a flat space field and Manny is making complicated proteins in his lab.   Scotty is making a huge Seed machine and I’m going bonkers.  Wait one…”

Scotty appeared on the viewer beside Zila.  “Ladies, I have news that the Allurii L colony is in orbit here as we speak.”

“Isn’t that the group of traders that sells Seeds to Earth governments?”

“The same.  I wonder why they are here at Ganymede.  Gany doesn’t have that many buyers who can afford an Allurion Seed.”

“They listen to the comms from Earth, Zila.  They know enough not to try to trade here with the plague and disruptions.”  Scotty turned from his jointed legs to face Zila.  “They also know who you are from our contact with K colony.  Trader Lathliss sends his compliments.”  Scotty was obviously translating from the ancient version of Priest language spoken by the Allurii.

“Wow, thanks Scotty.  I will meet with them as soon as they want.  Got nothing useful to do.”

“Harried and besieged,” retorted Samantha.

“It can’t hurt to have another friend,” Aura added.

“They’re ready now.” Scotty actually smiled.

*****

Dead tired as she was, Zila slapped on her translators, and, accompanied by Scotty and Alon, hustled to the Ganymede spaceport.   The Allurii L colony shuttle was waiting.  In less than an hour they arrived at L colony in close Ganymede orbit.  Trader Lathliss and his entourage met them at the docking port, a facility large enough to handle Galaxy-class freighters.  They were ushered into a reception lounge.  Zila was pleasantly surprised.  This was no impoverished colony marooned in space.  The Allurii L colonists were well-fed, dressed in fine fabrics and engaged in a riot of activities.

Lathliss had reserved a round table near a port.  Stately Jupiter in half-light slid by the view to be replaced, in turn, by the more severe face of Ganymede.

“Ambassador Zila, welcome to our trading colony.  En route to our last trading station we encountered K colony.  Trader Kupr lavished high praise on you and your crew, with special mention of your engineer (he inclined his hand toward Scotty) and your Seed-maker (he indicated Alon).  Please meet our Master Seed-maker, Lanrik.”  Lanrik wore a leather apron with the semicircle and ball logo.

“Master Lathliss, may we inquire about Master Kaeme?”  Alon interrupted.

Lathliss cast his eyes down.  “Master Kaeme has made his last Seed and passed beyond.   He is succeeded by no less than four qualified Seed makers, of whom two are now Masters in their own right.”

“Master Lathliss and Master Lanrik, although we are quite pleased to meet you, you must know that we are, um, harried and besieged.  The situation on Earth is dire and we must find some solutions.  Please let us begin negotiations for whatever you wish so we can get back to our main concern.”

“So blunt, and yet your reputation for negotiation precedes you, Ambassador Zila.  No, we will not negotiate with you now.”

“Not negotiate?”  Zila was non-plussed.

“No.  This is not a negotiation.  We are in your eternal debt and we are here to repay it.”  He gestured to Lanrik, who threw open a hatch to a cargo bay.  It was stocked with hundreds of missiles.  “Those are torpedoes, designed to seek a gardener.  They are based on the designs of Master Alon Kirby, with some improvements in the drive engines.  We understand your home planet is under attack and we suspect there is a gardener in the vicinity.  These need a final test.”

“Wow.  Wow. “

Alon got up to look them over.  “They are tipped with small Seeds?” 

“Yes, Master Alon, they are just as you specified.”

Alon bowed to Lanrik, “I’m impressed and thankful beyond words.  But you must have invested a lot of promethium to build so many.”

“Ah, yes.  Promethium pre-Seed crystals.  We met K colony while at the planet of the Great Sage.  To our astonishment, that blessed being loaded us up with more promethium than we ever thought existed.  Our main hold is nearly full of ore and refined product, and we also carry the apparatus, the zone refining factory, to make more.  We have barely touched the supply.”

“You brought all that with you here?”

“Exactly.  So you see it is our colony, our species, that is in debt to you.  There can be no negotiation.  These torpedoes are yours.  What else do you need?”

Alon and Zila started talking at once, but it was Scotty who intervened.  “We need at least a pair of very, very big Seeds, Masters.  Can you help?”

*****

Alon and Scotty reviewed the Pa’an engineering documents with Lanrik.  Yes, they could make Seeds that big.  They did not understand, nor could Scotty’s translations explain, the difficulty with the magnetic field strengths.  Then again, the Allurii did not have the technology to make diamond II.

“You will have the pair of Seeds within two weeks,” Lanrik promised.  “We’ll deliver them to Ganymede space port.”

“OK, Scotty and I will work on the rest of the device.”

“And arrange to transport the complete device to Earth.  It’s probably too big and too massive for Wisdom.”

*****

“Alon, there has to be a way to protect Earth.  PLEASE keep trying!”  Aura and Samantha were conferenced in.

“Zila, I’ve gone over this again and again with Aura and the Pan’Vact.  The biggest flat field we can generate is smaller than the Earth’s radius.  It does no good to have most of the field inside the Earth.  We won’t even be able to protect the bunkers.  The field won’t reach them.”

“Zila, I did check those calculations.  We just don’t have that alternative.  And…I’m sorry to say it may be too late for us here on Earth.”  Aura was pensive.

“What will you do?  Can you escape to the Pa’an remnant?”

Samantha looked at Aura’s avatar, determined.  “Aura does not want to escape.  Neither do I.  Efar and I are leading the fight, such as it is now.  We won’t desert.”

“Well, then maybe we should just use what we have to protect Ganymede?”  Alon made his suggestion quietly.  It felt like the refuge of a coward protecting his own skin.  “I don’t see any better choice, do you?”

“Alon, we can’t abandon however many millions are left on Earth!  It’s our home planet!”  Zila was adamant. 

“Well, at least go and set up the first pair of Seeds there on Ganymede until we have some way to protect Earth.  Doesn’t that make sense?”  Aura spoke, but Samantha and Alon were obviously in agreement.

“OK, I guess we really have no other choice.” Zila pointed her finger around the group,  “But promise me we will not abandon Earth!”

*****

“Manny, Ganymede is a treaty co-op, not a dictatorship.  I can’t just order freeholders around.  There are even a few who would not mind getting rid of the Solar Council.  They are always trying to dominate our affairs.”

“Look, Jason, I’m still a Gany citizen and a co-op freeholder under the Belt Uniform Co-Operative Conventions.  I know you have authority under Convention law.”

“Yes, Colonel, and we also sent you authorization from the Solar Defense Committee, direct from Efar Oms, General Liaison.”  Zila was too wrung out to be the patient diplomat, and she was, officially, Ambassador from the Great Sage, an alien entity, not a belter.

“So, Colonel, what exactly is the hang up?  All we want to do is set up a machine to protect Ganymede from the thing that is killing Earth.  Why are we getting all this resistance?”

“It’s not me, Manny.  Or, rather, it’s not just me.  None of us believe in such a thing as an invisible N-space critter.  It’s insane.  I know something terrible is happening to Solar Central, but the stories have to be exaggerated.  They’re always trying to extort more raw material and funds from us belters.  The Co-op just doesn’t give damn.”

“The Co-op?  Or a few people who make believe they are speaking for the Co-op?  Did you run a vote like the Convention requires?  Did you even take a poll?  We’re not asking you to send the Gany Navy out to Earth.  All we want is a construction crew and the output of the Newdeep Fusion Plant.”

Colonel Jason Aaronson sighed.  Of all the things he had to deal with in his short career in the Ganymede military, this was the most absurd.  He was a soldier, not an industrialist.  In order to grant their request and take over the Newdeep reactor the Co-op would have to declare the equivalent of martial law.  This Manny Lee fellow was being much too pushy.  Jason’s belter side didn’t like pushy.

“Colonel Aaronson, am I correct that the Newdeep stellarator is not online and just now going through full plasma stability testing?”

“Yes, Ambassador, but what that has to do with this is….”

“Why not tell them we can give them a full load test?  AND we can pay for their full output if the test works?  No negotiation with rate payers, no regulations, just instant cash payback on their investment.”

“With all due respect, Ambassador, how are you going to do that?  Earth never pays Ganymede, it’s always the other way around.”

Zila and Manny exchanged smiles.  “What percentage of your space defense fleet has FTL, Colonel?”

“That’s classified.  We’re just an outlying moon.  We don’t have the credits to equip the whole fleet, never had them.  That’s common knowledge.”

“You are aware that the Allurii L colony is in close orbit, Colonel?”

Jason looked puzzled.  “Yes, of course.  Wish I knew why.”

“They’re here to work with us, Colonel.  They have a huge supply of the raw materials for making FTL Seeds aboard.  Great Sage Enterprises owns that supply.  As Ambassador, I’m the executor.  Want to make a deal, Colonel?”

“I still don’t believe in N-space critters.  Why are you offering something we can’t afford anyway?”

“The only thing you have to believe in is equipping one hundred percent of your capable space fleet with FTL drives.  I happen to know that fewer than ten percent of your fleet has FTL now.  The price will be your full cooperation with our project.  There will be no fleet dispatched to Earth, no money changes hands, and you can believe whatever you like about the gardener or Earth’s crisis.   So what will it be, Colonel?”

Manny made a mental note: never negotiate with Zila.  He could see Colonel Jason Aaronson warming up to the idea.  He was Navy through and through and space was survival to a belter.  Zila, bless her soul, hit him right between the eyes.

Just as Jason opened his mouth to speak, a soundless thud reverberated through them.  It was not a vibration or a shockwave, but it hit all of them in the gut. 

“What the hell was that?”

Manny grinned at Zila. 

“Wow.  One down, one to go.”

“Ambassador, what are you talking about?  Are we under attack?”

“No, Colonel.  That was L colony.  They just made the first of two monster Seeds.  You can expect another thud like that any time now.”

“You mean the Allurion Seeds for your flat field project?”

“Just so, Colonel.  Those two Seeds will be the heart of our protection device.   Each weighs 1.3 tonnes.”

Jason knew a little about Seeds.  The idea of a Seed that large threw him.  Maybe these people were nuts, but perhaps they had the means to actually do what they claimed.  He initiated a call to his lieutenant on his implant.  The lieutenant had also felt the thud.  Everyone on Ganymede felt it.  No, there were no reports of damage.   No one knew what it was. 

“OK, line up the paperwork and get me Newdeep,” he commanded.

“We’ll try to get what you want, Ambassador.  You have to get me assurance from L colony.  How fast do you need this done?”

“Yesterday, Jason, or earlier,” Manny replied.

“Our science team will send you the details of the design.”  Zila was already in communication with Alon and her next call would be to Trader Lathliss.

*****

Gany work ethic and belter diligence combined to create a construction force nearly worthy of the Pa’an.  The workers shied away from Scotty, reinforcing his natural inferiority complex.  So the task of checking the daily progress and ironing out glitches fell to Zila and Alon. 

“We located the flat space field generator here,” Mac, the site engineer, pointed to a 3D model on his screen.  “There’s 10 kilometers of rock, ice and a mountain of iron ore between it and the stellerator.”

“Here’s hoping it’s enough.  The field generator puts out a whopping magnetic field and it’s not completely shielded.  The magnetic containment on the stellerator can’t be compromised.  There’s no way to measure the magnetic permeability of that mountain is there?”

“Not really, but here are the figures for the magnetite ore.  We grabbed a few samples.”

“That ought to work.”  Mac walked Alon over to the train of trucks carrying bus bars the size of logs.  “We’re just going to lay these in two lines side by side in a tunnel with rockwool insulation and dry air.  Once we finish the tunnel,” he consulted a chart, “which should be tomorrow, we can lay these the whole ten kilometers in a day, welded and tested.  I still think we should use AC and high voltage lines instead of these busbars.”

“Yeah, but we don’t even have the technology to rectify that much power down to the DC we need.  Not to mention the magnetic fields from the generator will raise havoc with the step-down transformers.”

“DC busbars it is, then.  It’s your show, Dr. Kirby.”

“Alon, please, Mac.”  Alon began to turn away, but turned back, “Mac, do you know what we’re doing here?”

“I’ve heard crazy rumors, “ he shook his head.  “Better I don’t know.  You spec ‘em, I build ‘em.”

*****

Two immense glittering crystals lay on flatbed trucks in the field cavity.  A string of light globes strung haphazard along the ceiling of the egg-shaped cavity caused them to flash and sparkle.  Zila checked her field strength meter.  The residual magnetic field from Jupiter was in the microtesla region – not a problem. 

The floor of the cavity was flat, hard rock, carved out of a solid piece of Gany granite.  Massive supports were driven into the rock with equally massive beams across them.  Once the field turned on, the mass of the crystals would be staggering, enough to affect Ganymede’s orbital dynamics measurably.  She hoped it would be slight, a perturbation not a quake.  The walls of the cavity were lined with many meters of rockwool insulation and sprayed with concrete.  The oval shape was a good echo chamber.  Pumps groaned somewhere in the cavity, getting rid of the constant trickle of meltwater.  The sound was everywhere and untraceable.

Zila faced the delivery tunnel, deliberately carved with twists and turns to minimize blast effects and EM radiation.  She could hear, but not yet see, the superconducting coils being delivered by a train of specially made trucks.  These were the coils used by the old stellerator.  There wasn’t enough diamond II to carry the needed currents, so the quadrupole magnetic fields were split into inner and outer loops.  The diamond II was used in the inner loops and the conventional superconductor made up the outer, control loops. 

Rumbling noises swamped the groaning pumps and the first flatbed truck rolled around the bend.  From her position the trucks looked like toys, but she had stood beside one earlier.  There were six wheels on each truck.  The tires were three meters tall.  They dwarfed her.

Gary Anjelis, the site engineer, rode on the first truck.  He was a perfect gentleman to Zila, but she had heard him cussing out the workers.  It was the parlance of belters.  She thought it was strange that belters were the last believers in chivalry and treating women like ladies.  On the other hand, the female workers got the same as the men.

Behind the four magnet trucks came two mobile cranes and a few trucks with pipes and pump gear, all heavily insulated.  The work g**g divided, half setting up each crane.  Gary Anjelis jogged over to Zila.

“Ma’am, the coolant truck is going to be a little late, but we have to get the coolant plumbing in first anyways.  We’ll need more power than we can get from the ZPG’s here for the coolant pumps.”  He nodded his head to the trucks with pump gear.  “Got any schedule on the power busses from Newdeep?”

“Tomorrow, they say, but figure third shift or first shift the next day.  How long to get the whole thing cooled down to the superconducting state?”

“Physics guys say about two or three days.  That’s assuming the ice around this cavity is as cold as it ought to be on Ganymede.  It’s a two stage heat exchanger, liquid helium in the inner part and liquid neon in the outer loop.  The ice down here is supposed to be 50 degrees Kelvin or so above liquid neon.”

“Wow, you and your crew are really good.  I can’t believe how much progress you made in a few weeks.”

“Ma’am, you better take care of yourself.  You look more wasted and tired every time I see you.  Leave us belters to do this right.  You make a mistake out here and it kills you.  The sloppy ones died off a generation ago.”  He turned and bellowed, “Holly, you ham-fisted hen, treat that magnet like it was your baby.  That’s a ten micron finish you’re trying to scratch with that hook.”

“Gary, you know the whole cavity has to cool down, except for the Seeds and the control electronics, which need to be about room temperature. “

“We got it ma’am.  Right here on my design screen.’” He tapped his screen.

Zila figured two days for the power busses, another day to install the Seeds, the coolant test, the cooldown time, and three days to build up the magnetic field. Three days to build up the magnetic field- that field will hold the energy of several nukes.  Please let there not be any glitches.  Then she thought, I wonder if the gardener ever has doubts.

Two more weeks, she thought, three at most.  Please, let Earth survive!

*****

Colonel Aaronson walked all around the pile of torpedoes.  Then he took out his screen and re-read the Standard Trade Agreement from L colony.  Then he re-read the price -  Paid in Full by Great Sage Enterprises.

“Lieutenant, do you know what the hell these things are for?”

“I read about them.  I don’t know what to make of it.”

“Isotaglia? Stopped time?  This just gets more and more bizarre.”

“Yessir!”

“C’mon, Ronnie, we’ve served together since we enlisted.  Is this bullshit or what?”

“It’s whatever the upper brass want it to be, Jason.  But if it was me, I’d play it safe not sorry.”

“Yeah, thanks.  What do you mean, safe?”

“Deploy the missiles on the surface.  There’s no one up there to see ‘em.  If isotaglia show up, fine.  If not, also fine.”

“No harm, no damage, eh?”

“Exactly.”

“Alright, Lieutenant, see to it.”

“Yessir!”

Colonel Aaronson set his viewer to the location of the field cavity.  He studied the screen for a long while.  Either they know what they’re doing or they have a very convincing mass delusion.  Hope they know something I don’t.

*****

“Now look, Zila, this is no time to get stubborn.  We all get a night’s sleep before the final test.  We can’t afford any half-witted errors or bad calls.  Alon, Scotty, me and especially you are getting a decent turkey steak meal and some Gany wine and a full night’s sleep.”

“Manny, I don’t think I can sleep.  I’m too wound up and too worried.”

“We’ll check in with Samantha after munch.  Maybe that will help.”

“I hope so, Manny.  Alright, I give in.”

First time ever, Manny thought.

The Battle for Ganymede Jupiter hung full and high in the viewscreens on Ganymede.  The Gany turkey that fed them had not died in vain.  Full and somewhat rested, Zila and crew were not surprised to be summoned to the Ganymede Freeholders’ Hall on Central South.  She was at the hall, still getting progress reports on the flat field generator.

“Scotty reports the magnets are now cooled down to superconducting status and the coolant is flowing as per spec.  The stellerator is producing continuous power and its plasma stream is stable.  We are ready to go.”  Alon was relieved.  He had too much on his mind to have gotten much sleep in spite of trying.

“Manny do you have any idea what these freeholders want?”

“The usual obstructionist jabber.  The whole co-op is intended to block all cooperation.  It’s our version of small government.  Just let it happen.  All right here we go.”

The meeting was bedlam.

“We haven’t yet voted to turn the damned thing on.  Who knows what it can do.”

“It isn’t Co-op property.  It belongs to the Wisdom of Sage.”

“It’s on our moon, in our tunnel space.”

“No it’s not.  That bubble is bought and paid for by Great Sage Enterprises.”

“We can argue that in court.”

“You can all be dead before that from a gardener attack.”

“You have no evidence of any attack.  That’s a red herring.”

“What possible motive can we have for so much effort?  A publicity stunt?”

“This meeting is adjourned until tomorrow.  Nothing will be decided until then.”

The hell it will, thought Zila.  She turned to Alon.  “Tell Scotty to turn it on.  Now.”

Scotty pushed a small button on his screen.  Two solenoids the size of pile drivers drove wedges across gaps in the buss bars.  The stellerator’s plasma stream brightened to blue, then violet, and went on to the x-ray portion of the spectrum.  The surrounding detectors registered massive neutrino emissions, almost impossible to detect in any other circumstance.  The stellerator was fusing  hydrogen atoms into helium at a nice, cozy 100 million degrees.

Back in the field cavity, the magnetic field began to build.  The massive supports holding the twin Seeds started to take up the strain.  Mass built on mass.  The support strain gauges showed heavy compression even in Ganymede’s light gravity. This was awesome.

“Seven hours and counting.  A little high on the strain gauges, but otherwise within expectations,” reported Scotty.

Zila and Alon were in their quarters aboard Wisdom when the trembling started.  The screen began to announce calls immediately.

“Yes, Jason?”  Manny answered the screen.

“They’re all in place, Manny.  Good luck!”

Manny knew exactly what the Colonel meant.  The torpedoes were deployed.

Still the magnetic field strength built.  “Zila, by my calculations the flat field is now just about the radius of Ganymede.  It should expand to three times that.”  Zila felt a new sensation in her ears, like a grayness without sound.  Maybe it’s just my imagination, she thought.

Zila got another call.  A red-faced freeholder was on the screen.  “Ambassador, my men tell me that the damned machine was turned on.  Was it?”

“Let me call you back with an answer.  I have to check.”

“Yeah, right.  I’m sending my personal guard down there to chop those buss bars.  That’ll make sure it’s off.”

“You’ll be personally liable for any damage to my equipment, and any other consequences.  You understand that?”

The freeholder dropped the call.

“Alon, let’s inform the Newdeep security team that a terrorist group is planning a violent sudden shutdown.  I understand that will probably destroy the stellarator.  Am I right?”

“Probably.  Might warp the magnets, and those are not replaceable.”

Next was Scotty, “Magnetic field at 80%.  Still on the curve.  Temperature at a steady 40 degrees Kelvin.  Coolant levels and pumps all in the green.  There is a vibration, though, and the support beams are looking like big tuning forks.  Might be a problem.”

“Ease off the curve then, Scotty, and watch it.  Keep the current rising, but slow it down.”

“The vibration is stable.  Strain gauges almost at the top of their scales.”

A deep, thrumming came from the ground and carried all the way up Wisdom’s frame.  It rose in pitch, slowly.  Ganymede, the entire moon of ice and rock and iron magma, was singing.  It was louder in some places but the rising thrum was everywhere.  New ice volcanoes formed on the surface.  Gany turkeys screamed in their flyfarms.

“Zila, Ganymede is losing resonance with Europa.  We’re on the verge.”

“What?  Alon, do we need to change something?”

“Not yet, but we do have to watch it.”

Interruptions still came from the screen.   Zila shut it off.  A call came through on emergency override.  The same red-faced freeholder was on the screen with a dozen of his buddies.  “We know it’s you.  We’re coming after you now.  We’re tired of outsiders trying to destroy our colony.”

Another emergency call came through.  “Ambassador?”

“Colonel Aaronson?  I hope you aren’t part of the posse that’s coming after me.”

“Nothing like that.  In fact, I’ll send a platoon down to protect you.  I’m reporting four automatic torpedo launches with first impact in twenty seconds.  There’s nothing on our radar or mass detectors.  It may be a false launch.  I’ll stay on this screen, OK?”

“Two more launches.  First impact in ten seconds.”

“One hit.  Three hits.  Now we can see it.  This thing is huge.  Two more hits.  Whatever it was, we got it.”

“Please, Colonel, get your telescopes on that piece of sky.  Get something up there to see what we got.”

“Way ahead of you, Ambassador.  It appears to be filaments of some sort of unknown material.  Three or four kilometers long.  No central core at all.  Less than six klicks above our heads here.  If that’s a gardener, it’s a dead gardener now.  I’ve got a couple of ships on their way.  Stand by.”

“Standing bye, Colonel.  Do you know you just saved Ganymede?”

“I’m not taking that credit.  But now I’m a believer.”

The FTL Rescue Fleet There wasn’t much opportunity to celebrate the victory.  Zila and the crew of the Wisdom were once again summoned to the Freeholders’ Hall.  This time, the bedlam was subdued.  The red-faced fellow was still bellowing to “space the damned interfering Solars and aliens.”  He was elbowed to the far side of the hall and faced a sea of unfriendly faces.   Even that failed to shut him up.  Eventually he was expelled.  His cronies had dwindled down to his brother and one son. 

Colonel Aaronson read his action report of the incident.  He called it a “battle”.

“At 1405 yesterday the first of a salvo of six torpedoes were automatically launched upon detection of N-space anomalies that Ambassador Zila, here, calls ‘isotaglia’.  Twenty seconds later the first torpedo hit and then all six destroyed a suspected invader.  None of our warning systems or sensors detected anything until just before the hit.”

“How do we know this was an invader?  Could have been space junk.”

“Could have been one of our own boys coming back from a mining mission.”

“What does that have to do with the machine?  We’re supposed to meeting about the machine.”

“Colonel Aaronson, can you answer any of those question?”

“First, we brought back samples of the debris cloud.  Some of the long tendrils were included.  They turned out to be fragile, so all we got were short pieces.  Second, we did a quick analysis.  It’s definitely not space debris or a ship of any kind.  We don’t know what it is yet.  There is nothing like it in our database.  Third, the images we captured just before the torpedoes hit shows something like a mess of spaghetti a few klicks long with no meatball in the middle.  It wriggled and was moving towards this population center on Ganymede.  It was only a few klicks away, straight up, when we got it.  I don’t recall that it asked for port clearance.”

“In your opinion, Colonel, was that what these outsiders call a gardener?”

“Can’t say, Caleb.  No one has ever seen a gardener.”

“How do we know it was going to attack?  Maybe it was a friendly.”

“No way to be sure, Horace.  Only thing I can say is that if it wasn’t a gardener, it sure met the rest of the description.”

“Colonel, do you really believe the machine had something to do with the appearance of that…that thing, whatever it was?”

“I’m a believer.  Can’t prove it, but it smelled like a menace to me.  You know I was mining rocks in the belt for years before I turned soldier.  You get a feel for things.”

There were a lot of “ayes” and “we sure do” and heads nodding in agreement.  Zila got the impression that the group was generally impervious to logic, but they understood their culture and their instincts perfectly.

“And this damned humming that goes on hour after hour?  Why do we need that?  Either the machine worked so we can shut it off, or it had nothing to do with it, and we ought to shut it off as a nuisance.”

Zila spoke up, “Freeholders, I am a survivor of a gardener attack.  If this was a gardener, this is the same entity that is destroying the home planet of all humans.  We hope there is only one near here.  We know it was coming here, as we predicted.  Who wants to take a chance that it was alone?”

There were mutters of “not me”, “leave the machine on”,  “better not take a chance”.

Zila waited for the mutterers and went on, “In the next few days we will have the debris analyzed.  We’ll see if the attack on Earth persists or dies down.  As far as the hum goes, please tolerate it for a while until we can make an informed decision.”

Most of the freeholders seemed to agree with that.  There were always a few holdouts, however.  “Yeah, but this is still our moon, and you had no permission to turn that machine on.”

“As we said before, everything we use is paid for.  We got nothing for free.  My husband and my whole crew are still working to cure Bender’s Brain, the blight that’s destroyed all the food crops and the brown w**d that’s poisoning the Earth’s atmosphere.  I don’t know how you all feel, but those people, those dying and sick and starving people, are just the same as you.  They had wives and kids and families.  They watched their loved ones die.  We’re sitting up here feeling helpless.  How can we ignore their pleas for help?”

“It’s not right.”  “We should do something.”  “We’d share oxygen with a dying cat, why not Earth?”

Colonel Aaronson shouted them down, “Freeholders!  In a few weeks Ganymede will have the biggest FTL fleet in the Solar System, maybe even the galaxy, courtesy Zila and her folks.  We’re the dominant force now.  Belters control space.  Are we ingrates?  What are we going to do to pay them back?”

“Help us.  PLEASE!”  Now Zila had to figure out what to do with a rescue fleet.  Samantha and Efar would know.

Dark Matters “Zila, Scotty, Alon, I just got the analysis of the gardener from Ganymede Mining Science Laboratory.”

“OK, Manny, lets hear it in the galley.  I’m starved.”

Zila grabbed the last of her bagel supply, a chunk of aged Gany cheddar cheese and some coffee.  It was still too early for proper cogitation according to her sleep-deprived schedule.  The rest of them filed in before she took her first sip.  Vinnie, in his sleepy bear pajamas, peered around the corner.  She knew Leah would be there too, clutching her favorite dolly.

“This doesn’t explain anything, but here it is.  The strands turn out to be a bunch of inorganic compounds with a kind of weak cement holding them together.  The compounds include beryllium, calcium, silicon and iron.  The assay was done on a mass spectrometer.  The glue particles came out as a heavy blip of unknown neutral matter.  Here’s the shocker:  the isotopes and atomic ratios are pretty much what you would expect to come streaming out of a supernova, not a rocky asteroid or planet.”

“What do you think, guys?  Any ideas?”  Zila managed between bites.

Alon looked over Manny’s shoulder at the mass spectrometer raw output.  “That last mass curve is way above any known element.  I hesitate to say what it might be.”

“C’mon, Alon.  We won’t prosecute you for scientific heresy.  Speak up!”  Manny remembered being accused of such a crime by the Naturists.

“Um, dark matter?  You know, the stuff that makes up 85% of the universe and we can’t see it?” 

“Huh?”  exclaimed Manny and Zila together.

“Well, there is a web of invisible matter connecting the galactic clusters.  It has mass and bends light just as Einstein predicted it should.  In fact, we sometimes see light from a single star refracted by a dark cluster four times.  The images form the shape astronomers call an Einstein Cross.  This same dark matter helps to form galaxies, especially the black hole in the center, and initiates star formation.   One theory is that the particles of dark matter are WIMPs, Weakly Interacting Massive Particles.    If these particles can bind to ordinary matter at supernova energies, I think we just got a few right here.”

“One hell of a theory,” pronounced Manny.

“So gardeners are born in supernovas.”  Scotty announced.  It was not a question.

Alon sighed.  “It’s a big universe. There are so many things we have yet to understand.”

“Hey, if Scotty is right, there are not going to be many gardeners.  The one we killed probably does not have a partner.  Do you think?”

Zila was remembering her discourse with the gardener, “Only one is needed.”

Diabolical Details Little Leah had taken to following Manny around everywhere, usually dragging her dolly by one arm.  Manny did not have the heart to discourage her, but he needed to go behind the safety barriers and work on the Bender’s Brain virus.  “Z, please come and get Leah.”

Zila appeared in a few minutes and, gently as possible, detached Leah from Manny’s pants leg.  The little girl had a powerful grip.  She led Leah to the galley promising half a donut.  Vinnie was already there, eating corn cereal kernel by kernel, dipping each one in a saucer of milk.

Zila patiently fed, washed and read to the kiddies, then collapsed in the lounge.  Hearing the sound of feet, she opened one eye.  Manny stood before her.

“I didn’t want to wake you.”

“Too late for that.  What now?”

“Remember your idea of a kill switch for the virus?”

“I don’t forget any more, remember?”

Manny winced at her play on words.  “I found them.”

“Them?”

“The kill switch for the Bender’s Brain virus and the kill switch for the fungal blight.”

“Of course, the fungus needed a kill switch for the same reason.  So now we can stop both plagues?”

“Um, not exactly.  That gardener was diabolical.  Let me try to explain.  The brown w**d produces ammonia, right?”

“We had to wear masks on Trooom, yeah.”

“When the ammonia levels get high enough, too high for humans to breathe, that triggers the kill switch in the virus.”

“How clever!  So the process is automatic once the brown w**d takes over!”

“Yes, but that’s not the half of it.  The trigger initiates an enzyme cascade in the virus that completely breaks it down.  No large biological molecules are left.  What’s left is lots of cyanide.”

“You mean, killing the virus poisons the patient?”

“Yes, but even that’s not the end of it.  Cyanide is a soluble gas.  It gets into the water and soil.  Kills everything.  It also triggers the kill switch in the fungus.”

“My God!  Diabolical isn’t the word for it.”

“The ammonia, cyanide and breakdown products from the fungus act as fertilizers and accelerants for the brown w**d.  The process takes off like a prairie fire.”

“I don’t need any more doom and gloom today.  The relief of a dead gardener wore off last night.”

“I just keep my head down and try not to think about it.  Anyway, I’m trying to come up with a trigger that will not poison the patient.  I think I can find a safer trigger than ammonia, but I don’t know how to stop the cyanide production yet.”

“My hero, Manny, and my love. Mwah.  I’ll go talk to Samantha.”

Human Remnants “Zila, the brown w**d is sprouting everywhere.  The ocean breeze stinks of ammonia and dead fish.”

“I sent you Manny’s data on the kill switches.  Aura, please show your avatar.  We need to talk.”

“I’ve been here all the time, Zila girl.  It’s my channel, after all.  Zovo is listening too.”  Aura’s avatar and Zovoarcnor’s rotating triangle logo appeared on the screen.

“First, it appears we actually trapped and killed a gardener.”

“Efar here, Zila.  We got the news.  Every last member of the defense teams and their Solar committees has this information.  We also sent out Colonel Aaronson’s remarks and the Mining Lab analysis.  We’re all convinced.  Earth is ready to build a flat space machine.”

“Except that we don’t have a way to make one big enough.”

“We can build one for each of the populated continents.  That will protect the major population centers, or what’s left of them.”

“Wow.  We never thought of that.  At least, I never thought of that.  But…doesn’t that leave the oceans unprotected?”

“Yep.  It’s a stopgap, not a cure.  Our population is down to about 2 billion souls now.  Of course, we don’t actually have a headcount.”

“80% casualties?  We lost 8 billion people?”

“And counting.  I don’t know why we are still uninfected.  Samantha has her people growing e.coli from our s**t pills in vats now.  Maybe it helps.”

“Zila, I don’t trust those vats.  The virus could infect them and we wouldn’t know until it was too late.”  Samantha responded.

“Manny has identified the kill switches on both the virus and the fungus.  Problem is, the diabolical things are poisonous when you kill them.”

“Zila, we tried glycosides on the brown w**d.  It didn’t work.  Now we know why.  Glycosides decay into cyanides, and the brown weeds love cyanide.”

“Aura, see if you can research tobacco mosaic virus.  I remember that was a pretty infectious agent.  Maybe some version of that will help.”

“Will do, Aura.  I found something else useful, I think.  Here’s a chemical that reacts with cyanide to soak it up.  The product is safe for humans.” She displayed a durrhin compound with a methylene group where the cyanide usually was attached.  “Maybe we can kill the virus and then soak up the poison as it forms.  Humans can tolerate tiny amounts of cyanide.  It kills red blood cells, but they regenerate.”

“I’ll give this to Manny.  But we have one more important topic.”

“Go on!”

“Rescue!  We have the entire Ganymede fleet of ships being equipped with FTL drives, courtesy of the Allurii L colony.  We can mount a rescue operation for at least a few humans, just in case nothing else works.”

“Ganymede is a small colony.  They can’t have very many ships.”

“Efar, you forget Ganymede is a belter colony.  They mine space rocks for a living.  They have more ships than shovels.  Huge ships!  And every one will be FTL in a few weeks!”

“That’s unbelievable, Zila!  How many do you think they can carry, and where would they go?”

“Tens of thousands, just how many we don’t know yet.  We’re going to need food processors and other life support equipment for the mining holds.  Can’t bring them back to Ganymede.  Our life support systems won’t stretch that far.”

“Zila, you visited the Pa’an remnant.  Do you think that Dyson sphere can handle all those refugees?”

“Beg pardon, Ambassador Zila, Aura and humans.  I will answer that question by the end of this conversation.  I have sent a query to Avata’an, the Pan’Vact for the project.”

“Zovoarcnor, why would the Pa’an be willing to support and care for a horde of human refugees?  Especially when we can’t even reciprocate?  I mean, aren’t they well beyond having to deal with adolescent sentients and gardeners?”

“Dr. Tor, I have been observing and reporting on humans for just over two of your centuries.  I even relay your video feeds to the Pa’an for their entertainment.  I’ve been in intimate contact with Aura, who is embedded in all your communications systems.  In all that time we have been benign and helpful to humans.   But no one has ever asked us why.  Do you really what to know?  You may find it a bit unflattering.”

“Go ahead and tell them Zovo, my love.  They do need to hear it from a benign alien species.”

“Pa’an probes have studied many sentients.  Without question, humans are as quarrelsome and difficult as sentients can be.  At first, we wondered how you survived, and several times we thought you would perish of your own foolishness.  Unlike Pa’an projects, every significant human project gets perverted for the advancement of some individual or group.  It seems impossible to get rational direction for more than a few moments, and then that direction is lost.  And yet, here you are.  What we did not understand is that humans have an uncanny gift for invention, imagination, and cleverness.  No other sentients are quite so gifted.  You also show altruistic charity in times of crisis.

We find you absolutely fascinating.  We never know what you will do next.  Even your AI, my dear Aura, is of your pattern.  We would follow the twists and turns of your fate until the stars grow cold.”

Samantha, the historian, nodded her head in agreement.  “I never saw it that way before.  That sounds right.”

“Pray we can live up to that,” Zila muttered.

“We damn well should do better,” Efar added.

“Avata’an will have the human area ready for you.  You will be welcome, however many arrive.”

The Gaia Factor Samantha received data from Aura on the spread of Bender’s Brain and the blight.  Both were slowing down, following the predictions of the cholera model developed by Aura before. 

“Manny, we just may have seen the twin plagues turn around.  Look at this data.”

“Samantha, all I see is a squiggly line.  Do you mind translating for this old grunt?”

Samantha punched him, hard, on the shoulder.  “Grunt my a*s.  It’s an act, Efar, babe, fess up.”

“Well, if you follow the trend, the birth/death ratio won’t be reached for several years.  We’ll be down to, what, a billion people?”

“More like it, you dumb grunt.  Yeah, its still a dismal future, but at least it’s a future.”

“You forgetting the brown w**d?”

“That’s your thing.  Any progress?”

“Well, we tried Agent Orange.  It worked for a time but the w**d recovered.  We tried napalm, but the w**d grows faster than we can burn it.  We do have something promising though.”

“Do go on, big boy.”

“Starfish.”

“Starfish?  Like in the ocean starfish?”

“Pretty much.  Only these can live on land.  They eat the brown w**d and multiply like crazy.  So far, it looks like Indonesia can be saved.  If we can shut off the fungus, we’ll even harvest some rice.  It might be enough for the folks that are left there.”

“I hope those land starfish aren’t an equal plague after the brown w**d is gone.”

“Could be a problem, but they’re our creation.  Gaia is fighting back.”

“Do you really believe that Earth is sentient, like in the Gaia legend?”

“Nah.  But some previously unknown microorganism, a primitive bacteria of some sort, has recently cropped up in the oceans and is turning the ammonia into sedimentary rocks.  Gaia seems to responding.”

“You do believe!”

“Nah.  I believe whatever I’m told to believe.  Just a grunt.”

Samantha socked him again.

Time to Choose Jesse and Myrna were survivors.  They had somehow avoided Bender’s Brain, kept a small flock of chickens in a secure coop, raised a tiny veggie garden and raided enough empty homes to get by.  They wore biohazard suits whenever they left their remote farm, nestled between ridges in the Shenandoah Valley near Roanoke.  Their ancient diesel truck still ran on scavenged fuel. 

Jesse and Myrna were terrified.  They heard the news, when it was available, and understood that doom was imminent.  Out in their valley, there were not enough hale people to salvage a comfortable life.  It was day by day.

On the other hand, the seasons were turning toward late summer and the full glory of the Shenandoah Valley seemed unimpaired by brown w**d or blight.  So far.

Yesterday they got news of a breakthrough in Bender’s Brain.  If they could get to a clinic in Roanoke, they could get a cure kit, a set of pills and a shot, that would eliminate the virus from their system, or cure it if they got ill.    Thing is, they weren’t ill, just worried about it.  Roanoke was a cesspool.

This morning they got news of a rescue for 22,000 refugees to resettle on a new land.  That land was 60 light years away.  They would never see their valley again.  But it was safe, protected by an elder species of sentients, the Pa’an.  They never heard of the Pa’an.  Couldn’t pronounce the click in the middle of that name either.

Selection was by lottery.  First they had to be screened for contagious diseases, mainly Bender’s Brain.  That meant travel to Roanoke.

They could stay put, wake up every morning and hope they were not starving or infected.  There was always the “do nothing” choice.

Myrna was used to deferring such things to Jesse.  Jesse argued one side and then the other.  Myrna challenged him to make up his mind.  Jesse swore he just wanted to make sure Myrna would be OK with whatever he chose.  The truth was he didn’t know what to do.

That afternoon Jesse found a patch of brown w**d in his garden.

“Myrna, pack a few things.  We’re going on a long, long trip.”

*****

Samantha and Efar were not going into space, in spite of a steady diet of s**t pills.  As soon as it was available in Miami they would get a cure kit and keep it handy.  Right now the logistics of choosing, screening and exporting 22,000 refugees was all they could manage.  The one thing they did not dare to announce was the psychological screening to w**d out violent criminals and psychotics.  It was simply too risky to have a few hundred people in cramped quarters, free-fall and acceleration trances, with a murderer trapped among them.  They weren’t worried about cults or tyrants.  The sheer size of the human territory would allow room to get away or stay isolated in a group, as each wished.  It was going to be the Wild West again, but without gold rushes or Indian wars.  They were even importing buffalo.

A cute video article, “Bending the Curve on Bender’s Brain” showed Samantha, in a pink jacket and skirt that made her acutely uncomfortable, telling people that they needed to pick up their cure kits so that the plague would die out in a few months, instead of killing millions more.  That video was broadcast everywhere in several languages.

It was too late for some countries.  The area of India formerly known as Bangladesh was now a depopulated savannah of rivers and brown w**d.  Sawah, Indonesia, had survived, just barely.  Panama was crawling with land starfish, but the jungle was growing back.  The great forests of Europe were decimated, but not gone, and villages in them still functioned to support humans.  Mountain tops, like the Alps, Himalayas and Andes, were hardly affected at all.  They were never easy on life.

Looking at the faces of the survivors you could see a mixture of horror and hope.

*****

Jesse and Myrna each carried a knapsack and a bag.  They marched stolidly up the boarding ramp of a hastily converted miner with the other hundred or so shipmates. Their transport squatted on the plasma shield like a spiny boxfish on steroids.  The maw consumed them.  Jesse was offered a double berth, so to speak, which looked to him about the size of a normal twin bed, for himself and Myrna.  It had drawers under it and a curtain to pull over it, a light inside and a view screen.  There were hammocks strung over the bed for null gee.  He accepted it.  Someone put up a hand drawn sign, “Jesse and Myrna Owens”.  Myrna shed a tear, “We’re home, Jesse.”

Jesse figured he would have to start over when they reached their real new home.  It occurred to him that the new place didn’t even have a proper name.  That had to change.  He and Myrna had never had kids, but this was like naming your firstborn.  It was important.

Denoument “Let’s get out of this fine space yacht for a while, Zila.  I want to go home.”

“We’ve done whatever we can, Manny.  The battle is in other hands now.  Let’s take the kids with us.”

They left the spaceport and took a tube car down to UnderMain in his home town of Kepler.  Leah went piggyback and Vinnie ran along ahead on the broad median strip.  A new kind of flower was in bloom, the air was clean and the kids were healthy and growing. 

They passed the flyfarm and showed Vinnie the Gany turkey.  He jumped up and down with delight.  Leah hid behind Manny, “Big bird, too big bird.”

Manny’s house was just as warm and cozy as ever.  Vinnie and Leah explored the far end of the house cave and discovered an unused room.  “My room!” Vinnie declared.  Leah stomped her foot, “Mine too!”  Zila intervened, “Do you really want to stay here, kids?”

“Yes, Mama,” Vinnie replied.  “Only if I can stay in this room!”  Leah insisted.

Manny pulled a big box into the room.  “OK kids, this is your room and here are some new toys.”  Both kids attacked the box.

“Where did you get those, Manny?”

“They’re a gift from one of my best friends, long gone now, he and his family.  May our kids enjoy his last wish.”

“Manny, are you really going to be satisfied just living here on Ganymede?  I mean, you have quite a reputation by now, I’m sure, and you can get back to genetic engineering.  But will it be enough?”

“We’ve got money to spare. Zila.  If we want to go chase adventure, we can and we will.  Right now I just want you and the kids, safe and happy.”  He turned and looked her in the eyes, “How about you?  You never did find the LUCA.  Are you going to be satisfied playing house on one of Jupiter’s moons instead of visiting exotic creatures in an FTL yacht?”

“I don’t really know.  My life has never had a chance to settle down.  Let me try it for a while.  Only thing is, I have to send Wisdom back to the Sage.  I guess Scotty and Alon will take it there.”

Zila slept, but in her dreams she was in free fall en route to…

*****

“Efar, Efar, wake up dammit!”

“What the hell, woman, is there some kind of emergency?”

“No, that’s just it.  I can’t sleep.  There’s nothing to worry about.  Talk to me!”

“What about?”

“I don’t care.  Yes, I do care.  Talk to me about us.”

“You want me to propose half asleep in the middle of the night?”

“No, silly.  You can find a much better time for that, I’m sure.  Tell me, did we really survive?  Are we safe?”

Efar put his arms around her.  “Safe as safe can be, sweetie.”

“Will we stay here and help put Earth back together or go and help the other unprotected colonies?”

“We’ve got plenty yet to do here.  I have command responsibility and you’re the head of the planetary recovery group.  Why start over with some yahoos who don’t even know who we are?”

“My sweetie.  I think that’s what I needed to hear.  You can go back to sleep now.”

“Now?  Crazy woman.  You woke me up, now pay the price.  Take off that nightie.”

Epilog – The Great Sage It took four priests to carry the new belly saddle into the Sage’s sand pit and carry out the old one.  They used long, ceremonial rods, as if they were carrying a Caliph’s sedan chair, and with the very same caution.  The Sage gave them instructions as to the destination of the old belly saddle - one of the fast courier ships in the Sage’s fleet. 

Once the Priests were out of the Hall of Enlightenment, the Sage plodded around his pit for a while and eventually settled onto his new belly saddle.  The Sage opened certain pores on his underside and snaked filaments into a membrane on the belly saddle.  His first guess was correct.  There was a thousand years of memory microbes from another Sage in the Centaurus arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, opposite the Saggitarius Arm and 80,000 light years away.  There was evidence that the route was safe and the transfers from ship to ship were clandestine.  Nevertheless, even with FTL, that journey was started before Zila was born.  Digesting the knowledge sent by the Sage of Centaurus would take him quite a while. 

On a fast skim, it appeared that isotaglia were also detected in Centaurus Arm.  Not for the first time, the Sage wondered if there were more gardeners than members of his own race.  Of the latter, they were far too few in number, and far too spread out in the vastness of space.  The Sage did not even know how many of its kind were still alive.

The battle between natural life forms and gardeners was as old as any Sage, and older than any other sentient race in the Milky Way.  The Sage of Centaurus also used young, ambitious sentients as intelligence agents, sending them out to explore the galaxy.  Few returned and none did as well as Zila.

But the task of absorbing the enormous volume of knowledge in the new belly saddle had to wait.  There was a new recruit waiting to enter the Hall of Enlightenment to become Zila’s successor in a very long chain of eager sentients.

He sent out a signal to the Priests at the door, “Send her in!” 

About the Author

Kenn Brody is a former physicist, computer scientist and CEO, now living in Florida and Pennsylvania with his small doggie Scupper and his “sweetie”  Chandra and her black cat Magic.  He has been writing prize-winning fiction, poetry and non-fiction for decades. 

An Indie author needs readers like you.  Good or bad, but hopefully good, I treasure your reviews.  It takes a year of research, writing and editing to produce a book like the one you just read.  I write them for you, my worthy reader.  Please write to me!

kenn@brokensymmetrypublishing.com

Sage of Saggitarius Glossary  

OCS – Offworld Contract Services, the quasi-governmental agency that negotiated commercial contracts with non terrestrial entities.

FTL – faster than light, a means to travel between stars that otherwise would take more than a lifetime.

Mu-metal – an alloy that shields against a magnetic field.  Ordianry mu-metal is soft.  Super mu-metal is extremely strong and capable of containing magnetic fields required for FTL.

Saggitarius – A constellation of stars visible from the southern hemisphere of Earth.  Also known as the Centaur.  The center of the galaxy lies in that direction. 

Tree of Life – the depiction of the relations among all life forms and their evolutionary descendants from the similarities of their DNA or RNA.  This is the tree of evolution.  It has a singular root.

Fitness map/fitness landscape – a map of an environment in which certain traits are favored for the purpose of evolution.

Gardener – a mysterious and powerful entity that apparently exists and navigates in dimensions other than the 3 we can see.

N-space – the space used by gardeners and the FTL drive.  Assumed to be 11 dimensions, of which we can see only 3 (plus the experience of time).

Allurion Seed – The crystal that enables FTL transport.

Allurii – the interstellar traders that sell Allurion Seeds.

Priests – the bipeds that survived on the Sage’s planet and now serve the Sage of Saggitarius.

Riscids – the molluscoid sentients on Riscid.

Scree – the sentient inhabitants of the planet Screehum, who resemble oversize centipedes.

Panspermia – the spreading of life forms, seeds, spores or biological precursors from planet to planet.

LUCA – the Last Common Universal Ancestor of all life, probably a simple one-cell organism like the Archea.

CRSPR – a piece of DNA discovered in the genome of bacteria that allows the to identify and protect against invading phages and viruses.  Of great utility in genetic engineering because it allows large pieces of DNA to be inserted into any DNA-based living organism, including humans.  Usually used with CAS-9.

CAS-9 – a protein found in bacteria that facilitates the insertion of foreign DNA into the genome.  Used in genetic engineering with CRSPR.

Ganymede – the 7th moon of Jupiter, one of the moons catalogued by Galileo, and therefore called a Galilean moon.

Callisto – an inner moon of Jupiter.

Europa – an outer moon of Jupiter.

Stellarator – a device to confine a plasma of hydrogen atoms at such temperatures and pressures that they fuse into helium, producing energy.  Stellarators produce continuous power, unlike other fusion devices, but need large, precise magnets to confine the plasma stream.

Dyson sphere -  Physicist Freeman Dyson envisioned a sphere built around a start to capture the entire energy output of that star.  The engineering and construction of a Dyson sphere would be monumental.

Bracewell probe – If the speed of light is respected as a speed limit for the universe, interstellar travel becomes a matter of centuries. One solution is to create a very durable surveillance device and send it on a tour.  When it returns the exploration data would be invaluable.

Dark matter – The bulk of the mass in the visible universe, as determined by the orbits of galaxies and star clusters, is invisible.  It may consist of particles that only rarely interact with ordinary matter. 

Phage – A virus that infects bacteria.

T4 virus – A phage that infects bacteria.

Saggitarius Arm – One of the spiral arms of the Milky Way Galaxy.

Orion Arm – A short spur on the Saggitarius Arm.  The galactic location of Earth and Sol.

Centaurus Arm - The spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy opposite to the Saggitarius Arm.

Operon – A group of genes that work together for a single purpose, such as the reproduction of DNA.  Molecular biology considers the operon to be the level at which evolution operates. 

Blight – A spore-forming fungus which infects certain crops, such as wheat and rye.

Milky Way Galaxy -  Our home galaxy.  It is about 90,000 light years across and contains about 200 trillion stars.  Our solar system orbits the galactic center evry 225 million years.  The galactic center at Saggitarius A* is 26,000 light years from Sol.

Pa’an – Perhaps the elder race in this galaxy.  Physically they are large, strong six-limbed species with plated skin. They are masters of plasma technology and manipulation of cosmic construction projects.  

Fairthers – Pa’an natural insulation, something between feathers and scale armor. 

Pan’Vact – A Pa’an supervisor.  The Pa’an manage complex enormous projects with a kind of worker telepathy they call panor.  The Pan’Vact is the one who deserves th highest level of panor and therefore becomes the leader.

E’Pan’Vacto – The highest level of Pa’an leadership.

Rello – A male phase Pa’an in upright form.

Rella – A female phase Pa’an in upright form.