Where do all these plants come from, if resources are so scarce? I asked.
Shipped as seed, often traded with other hobbyists. The soil is manufactured. All the pollinators are local-system. The only real resource expenditure is space, and as you have noticed, the station is not crowded.
Habren’s interest is not why you sought me out, however. I felt alarm that Habren had set the Goodlaw to watch me, and confusion at the Goodlaw’s loyalties. Habren might be worse than Cheeirilaq was admitting. If there was a chance we were being monitored, it wouldn’t exactly want to call out its . . . well, the stationmaster wasn’t precisely its boss, but somebody in greater authority over the station than it held itself . . . in a recordable format. And it couldn’t entirely know my loyalties, either.
I recognize your tattoos.
Well, that shifted me from mild alarm to sirens shrieking so badly I had to tune myself down to mere alert arousal just in order to hear the rest of the conversation. I took a deep breath and held it and turned my amygdala down to about three, then let the breath out again.
You can see them? I asked, glancing down at my nanoskin-covered arm.
Ultraviolet reflectivity. A wing-settle that could be an insectoid shrug.
I was looking for information on the syster operating the factory ship, I said. Noncommittal, and something it already knew. There’s nothing in our databases, which might be nothing or might be withheld information. Habren claimed they had no information either, but they might be lying.
That’s because the species operating the factory ship is not a syster.
I actually turned to the giant bug and gaped, dumbstruck. As far as I knew, every intelligent race that the Synarche had encountered had, eventually, been induced to join it. The fact of an enormous, existing trade organization and governmental body that, in general, had overwhelmingly superior technology to any emerging race and also a complete monopoly on exploration and trade generally proved a convincing argument. Once a species developed what Terrans called the Alcubierre-White drive, or one of its variant technologies, the Synarche was waiting to greet them.
Sometimes new systers tried to start a shooting war, which generally had similar results to a kitten attacking your pants leg; when the difference in available force is so overwhelming, and you’re essentially raising a child, there’s literally no need to shoot back. Even races as belligerent as my own had come around eventually.
A few went with isolationist policies for a local generation or two, but eventually somebody started tuning into the propaganda channels and wanting all that great stuff, and within a hundred ans or so—well, the Synarche was also patient. Like a respectful suitor—unlike my friend Rohn in the bar—it had nothing to gain by hurrying things.
Earth could have learned a long time ago that securing initial and ongoing consent, rather than attempting to assert hierarchy, is key to a nonconfrontational relationship. Because we’re basically primates, we had to wait for a bunch of aliens to come teach us. We’d at least, by then, developed the tech to fix our brains so we could accept emotionally what logic should have showed us.
What can I say? We’re slow.
Not a syster? I asked. I mean, there were the Ativahikas, which weren’t exactly a syster, not really talking to the rest of us much. And not having a white space drive so much as being a white space drive. . . .
Suddenly, all the glittering particles gliding gracefully and harmlessly between the cells of my epidermis seemed to ferociously itch. I’m not a praying sentient, but at that moment, I felt such a horrible black hole of implication implode in my belly that I almost doubled over in pain. Cheeirilaq put a manipulator on my shoulder to steady me.
That’s why you recognize the tattoos, I said.
The particles are derived from the sensory organs of Ativahikas. They are not widely known; in fact, their existence is kept a secret outside of law enforcement circles. They are believed to be a form of Koregoi technology that was given to or traded for or somehow imbued into the Ativahika species in a time of great antiquity. In combination with certain innate abilities of the Ativahikas, they allow the species to—
I interrupted. —to traverse space-time as if they were living starships. And somebody is stealing these particles, by murdering Ativahikas. And I have a bit of this technology embedded in me.
I’m sorry, Cheeirilaq stridulated, reminding me that the rest of the conversation had been carried out in utter silence.
We stopped before the aquaculture observation windows.
I am glad, the Goodlaw continued, that you did not acquiesce to this anathema knowing its origin.
I’m a walking war crime.
Yes.
The dodecapod was hard at work when we paused. It had a combined head and body about a meter across. It didn’t speak to us, seeming involved in its labors, but as we paused it raised six of its twelve legs in a cheery wave, flashing ripples of electric blue and silver across its normally sedate dark red surface. Maybe it recognized us; apparently we were both around enough, and we’d been waiting for clearance to leave for more than two dia. Also, dodecapods and humans have kind of a long-term friendly relationship. I don’t remember all the details, but we found them before they invented spaceflight—spaceflight is a rough invention for aquatic species, for a number of obvious reasons, though they’re great astronauts once somebody gets them up here, and the noncompressibility of water means they’re often really good at remaining functional in erratic gs—and before the Synarche brought us in as systers, but after we’d developed crude rightminding technology.
So our species are, in the parlance of the Synarche, elder systers to one another.
Cheeirilaq and I both waved back.
Does Habren know?
Cheeirilaq’s wing coverts buzzed. That seemed more like a shrug than a yes, given what I also picked up through the senso.
Who. Who did this to me?
They are Jothari. The Synarche’s greatest tragedy. But I think it was Terran pirates who murdered their crew and stole their ship and . . . cargo. Such a wave of distaste that I could feel it through the senso, despite our incompatible neurologies.
The name meant nothing to me.
What do you mean, the Synarche’s greatest tragedy? We don’t have tragedies anymore.
Well, Cheeirilaq said, perhaps we still did, a long time ago.
And it proceeded to tell me the history of how the Synarche learned to be a patient suitor, because it turns out that making mistakes is how we grow up, whether we’re a multispecies alien utopia, or just some dude screwing up their first romance beyond believability.
This is what I learned: early on, when the Synarche was new, it was not a Synarche yet at all, but a Galactic Parliamentary Democracy—and grandiosely so named, because in those diar it consisted of five or six of the foundation systers and perhaps a dozen systems. The short version of a very long and ugly story is that by the time the Galactic Parliamentary Democracy encountered the Jothari, the Jothari were working on establishing a smaller but still thriving interstellar community of their own. They’d come of age in one of the sparser and darker arms of the Milky Way—not unlike my own species, as it happened, so I feel a certain sympathy for this—and had never seen any evidence of sentient life until a Parliamentary ship dropped out of white space over their homeworld, ascertained that they were a spacefaring species, and opened communications in as friendly a manner as possible, considering a language gap.
I mean, when you show up in orbit over somebody else’s inhabited planet, not dropping a rock on it or tossing your bow wave in their direction is, in itself, a reasonable assurance of goodwill, but not everybody understands that—and there is, I suppose, the possibility that you might want a quickly habitable planet afterward.
Anyway, the Jothari had managed to reach a couple-three of their closest neighbor systems, and had pretty good shipping and space-colonization efforts going on. Then the Galactic Parliamentary Democracy ship full of weirdos like my friend the Goodlaw showed up and opened communications. The Parliamentary crew was not met in a friendly fashion, but at least no shots were fired.
They drew back, and that was when they found out that the Jothari were navigating by harvesting Ativahikas, a species generally-accepted-as-sentient, who had a migratory path running through the core of Jothari space. The Synarche’s antecedents tried to intervene, leading to the beginnings of a war.
Through absolute blind bad luck, an antibiotic-resistant pandemic broke out among the Jothari worlds around then, and somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of their population died. They declared this an act of war on the part of the proto-Synarche, and came gunning.