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By the time Radmer and Leia reached the dining hall, the discussion was already in progress. The group spilled over two long tables and included a lot of the people Leia had met dancing, and whose names she had found off the org chart. She quietly queried ship-mind about who the other people were, and learned they were heads of most of the departments. She asked ship-mind if she was supposed to be at this meeting, and saw that there was a list of people who had to attend, and then basically anyone else who was interested could attend. She couldn't tell from that if other people recognized this as a stay-away, or if they just had the sense not to show their faces around this high-powered a crowd of people.
Leia concentrated on eating her breakfast, and only peripherally paid attention to the various conversations going on around her. This wasn't a meeting where one-person-talked-at-a-time. It was more like a bunch of break-out sessions that fluidly switched people. She tried to find out if there was an agenda, or a packet of material that one was supposed to have read to prepare for this thing. If there was, she either wasn't allowed access or hadn't figured out how to get it. It was possible this was a glorified meeting-in-the-hallway to thrash out how things were going with the first team on Upper Andal.
Some time in the last couple hours, the first team had shuttled over to Upper Andal. Their goal was to liaise with Andal's authorities and get as much information out of them as possible about the recent security modifications made to the station in the wake of the first couple of epidemics. This was part of the original plan upon arriving at Andal; it was the first step in the modified plan. Upper Andal security had been extremely helpful, and a lot of information was coming back from the security audit. There was a lot of discussion about how to prioritize and schedule the issues that were showing up. Leia knew from past personal experience that security audits inevitably found a variety of problems, ranging from informal practices such as waving friends around metal detectors to always-locked doors which didn't securely latch when you went through them, poor security around passwords, badges and other access procedures and identity documentation – the list was usually lengthy and most of it would go unaddressed after the audit, which contributed to no one taking security audits very seriously unless something happened that got splashed all over the 24 hour news networks, the blogosphere or, the dreaded and career-ending evening news.
This security audit was no exception, and the reaction of the breakfast club was exactly what Leia would have expected: ho hum, now can we please send our people in and get some real work done? The response was equally predictable: what intelligence led us to expect a threat to us. At this point, Leia wanted to crawl under the table, but her name didn't even come up. The political team instead went into an insanely detailed assessment of the theories so far about how those plagues, er, epidemics got started on Andal (the planet) and why the security modifications did not stop the third one. The assessment included a huge list of candidates for The Bad Guys, and Leia gathered, probably incorrectly, that no one was a standout probability. That was why the original planned operation on Andal had been so substantial. They needed to cast a very wide net, because early intel had been totally inconclusive. Once they started thinking in terms of This is a Trap for Us, as unlikely as that theory might initially seem (but still no mention of Leia), two standout candidates presented themselves and follow-up intel placed representatives of those groups on or near Andal for no good reason in about the right time-frame. The working theory was that those two groups were working together to help an Accident happen that would make trouble for Hazard. The political team had brought in people from a completely unrelated organization whose expertise was less helping-people-in-trouble, but rather seemed to be more along the lines of Leia's career. Those people had proceeded to dig into Hazard's records of recent operations and found substantial evidence that some of Hazard's less successful efforts recently were not due to bad luck or individual incompetence but were instead sabotage. Not in the sense that there were people on Hazard trying to break things, but rather that the Bad Guys were arriving at other disasters around the same time Hazard did, and working at cross-purposes, partly to the victims, but mostly to Hazard's efforts. The new guys argued that Andal was qualitatively different: the Bad Guys realized that piggy-backing on a disaster wasn't giving them enough opportunity to really mess with Hazard's extremely competent crew, so instead, they were manufacturing their own disaster out of whole cloth, on their on terms.
That made some sense, thought Leia, but who the hell would want to pick on Hazard? The whole situation had smelled to high heaven when she read the dossiers on Hazard, but she couldn't figure out what anyone's job title was around here. Making sense of the large political issues of the day for people who lived for centuries, traveled in excess of the speed of light and made phone calls and took on new passengers while doing so was way beyond her. But as near as she could tell, picking on Hazard was like taking pot shots at the Red Cross/Red Crescent/Red Crystal. It's not like it never happened, but it wasn't usually intentional.
Querying ship-mind about the two organizations mentioned turned up an unbelievable amount of information. She picked one arbitrarily and started flipping through screens as fast as she could skim. About five minutes in, Radmer jarred her elbow, making her look up and around and try to figure out if someone had said anything to her. He pointed at her food, which she had completely forgotten. She took a bite and dived back into the screen. The name of the group translated as Ubiquitous Humanity, which sounded like it might be the human equivalent of a white supremacist organization, but turned out to be something else entirely.
Leia had loved Elizabeth Moon's Familias Regnant novels, so the idea that humanity with the option to live centuries might not all agree this was a good thing was not new to her. It also made sense that the people who declined longevity would not be competing on an even field, but would not necessarily be completely useless and ineffectual, either. The math on reproduction was crystal clear, since it was the same for humanity on Earth as childhood mortality dropped and infectious diseases were brought under control through access to clean water and food, and protection from disease-transferring insects. If you live longer, even if you have children at a slower rate, you probably still reproduce at a much higher rate, leading to the intergalactic equivalent of sprawl.
While Leia would have expected some conflict between people who wanted to limit the resulting population explosion, and people who wanted to breed like bunnies, that turned out not to be precisely the point of contention. There was a lot of agreement on limiting births, and the conflicts there tended to be relatively cordial, or at least they stayed at an intellectual level. No, the heated arguments and the resort to violence tended to revolve around the death rate. There was a significant contingent of humanity, including Ubiquitous Humanity, who thought disasters were a good way to limit the spread of humanity. They weren't looking to get rid of medical technology, or on-planet trauma services. They were interested in preventing Hazard and the like from helping colonies that had gotten past what they could handle on their own. There were a lot of intellectual arguments about evolution involved, but the bottom line was that new colonies were bad, and whenever they have trouble they should be allowed to fail.
Okay, Leia could see these guys sabotaging Hazard and not having any trouble killing off people on Andal to that end.
Leia backed up to look at the other group, whose name had two translations, which usually meant there was a language ambiguity, like a homonym or pun, but in this case, the group had a dual name: Fitting Into the Universe and Universal Friends. That sounded like they ought to be Greenpeace writ large (or maybe the Quakers), but again, expectations were misleading. This was a much smaller group which had demonstrated access to as many resources in ships, technology, etc. as Hazard, but had very limited access to human resources. There was a massive dossier on why that might be the case. The executive summary on it said it was a human front for one or more alien races that competed with humans for planets to colonize.
Radmer jarred her elbow again, and after surfacing for a glance around and checking to see if anyone had said anything to her, she ate a couple bites mechanically and dived back into the screen.
The Friends had issues with Ubiquitous Humanity that Leia was all too familiar with: radicals who thought the activist moderates were delusional, naïve, and unwilling to take the hard steps necessary to reach the goal. But the Friends needed people, and would work with Ubiquitous Humanity since, unpleasant though their philosophy might seem, it was at least a lot more palatable to the general run of intergalactic humanity than what the Friends were peddling.
The epidemics were a classic Friends' technique, so classic this was the major reason the political team had called in some heavyweights who were more used to dealing with terrorists. But the Friends' weren't usually so good at covering their tracks and furthermore, they tended to leave a calling card, which had been conspicuously absent on these epidemics. The failure-to-germinate crop problems were also totally new not just for the Friends' (if, indeed, they were involved) but for anyone.
The Friends' goals were breathtakingly large in scope. They wanted to stop new colonization entirely. They wanted to reduce the population of humanity. They didn't just want to flatten the growth to zero; they wanted to shrink the total, and they were happy to help on the death rate side. Leia thought about the Australians attempts to reduce the population of rabbits by introducing rabbit viruses. She had not recalled it working very well for them; the Friends' weren't doing that well either.
From the dossier on the Friends' propaganda, she went down a rabbit-hole: an explanation of how humanity got into space that was bizarre. She'd been wondering about this one, whether it would turn out to be parallel evolution, or cosmic spores or Earth as a failed colony, or Earth developing a space-faring civilization, then losing its civilization and being forgotten by its daughter-colonies or some other implausible cliché of science fiction. But no, humanity made it to the stars as a group the same way she had as an individual: picked up by aliens involuntarily. There wasn't a lot of information about when this started, but it wasn't just the car-crash guys kidnapping humans. Another named species was responsible, and there was a lot of information on those aliens that Leia carefully avoided getting sucked into. Those aliens did some tinkering with the humans they picked up, and as she skimmed, Leia surmised that meant they didn't pick up Homo sapiens but some earlier Homo or maybe what she would think of as Australopithecus except all those classes were a long time ago and she didn't have any reference material with her and she suspected there'd been more recent developments in the field anyway. The longevity stuff had not come from those aliens; that happened later.
The Friends' propaganda described humanity's presence in space as an unpleasant invasive species that needed to be beaten back and possibly stamped out if at at all possible. Leia thought about kudzu and sympathized.
Was this story about humans in space like black-helicopters? Or was this for real? She queried ship-mind; ship-mind confirmed this was the accepted history of humans in space and offered her a frightening array of supporting information.
Holy shit. She started asking about fossil records and competing theories of the origin of humans. When she failed at that, she dug down in search of what planet humans were originally picked up from. Of course, in classic bad science fiction style, unknown, and the source of endless speculation, some explicitly fictional, some less so, some intended to be entertaining, some less so. If that many people had been looking for Earth to find the home of the species, the odds of them finding Earth to find her home had to be, well, very, very long odds.
What had she been trying to figure out when she was distracted by that discovery? She looked up from her screen, saw her breakfast, and finished it off quickly. Radmer had gotten up and gone across the room to talk to someone else. She could hardly blame him for that; she'd been essentially absent for about an hour. She cleared her dishes and got a refill on her beverage. Then she tried to backtrack through her research. History of humans in space. The unlovable Universal Friends. People who would attack the inter-galactic equivalent of Red Cross.
Why now? And why had no one on Hazard anticipated they might be subject to a trap or attack, yet so able to put together a plausible set of suspects and a plan to ferret out the culprits when it was suggested? It had seemed obvious to Leia, and as soon as outsiders with Leia's kind of training were contacted, they found a ton of reason to be suspicious. This should have been happening for a while or someone on Hazard should have noticed weird stuff happening that would indicate they should be thinking this way.
Leia shook her head. Not necessarily. She'd run into the same kind of denial often enough. Oh, we're too small and unimportant. These threats aren't serious. Up to and including, surely that car bomb was intended for someone else, right? Reporters, academics, charitable organizations and activists were among the worst at pretending the bad shit wouldn't happen to them, and Hazard partook of all of the above. And it wasn't just starting now; it had been going on for a while. It had just reached a point where it was impossible to ignore any more.
The question she ought to be asking was why were these people so damn reasonable once someone pointed out the risk. That was the truly unusual aspect to this situation. Leia poked around on her screen half-heartedly, trying to find a summary of what had just happened around her over the last hour while she was busy ignoring everyone and everything, including her breakfast, while she caught up on background the rest of the crew already knew. She found a précis assembled from highlights chosen partly by ship-mind and partly by members of each department. Like minutes, it included a list of decisions reached and who had what action items and when they were due. Further deployments were still on hold until the security team on Upper Andal tracked down a short list of serious issues from the security audit. Timeframes were given on when each of them were expected to be resolved. The earliest one given was a little after lunch and the longest timeframe was days away. The next meeting like this one was scheduled to occur at lunch.
Leia took another look around the dining hall. It was starting to clear out. She queried ship-mind about Amable, to find out if she could talk to her this morning. She got an immediate reply, left a message to Radmer explaining where she was going, and followed the directions ship-mind gave her to Amable's room.
Leia was more nervous than she thought she would be walking into Amable's office, and would have fled to the safety of a screen somewhere neutral if she hadn't called ahead and knew that Amable was expecting her and would probably come looking for her if she failed to show up. This went a long ways towards explaining why Radmer had insisted on going to see Amable with her the day before, holding her hand the entire time. Yes, it had been comforting; it had also ensured compliance.
Amable was, as before, hospitable and welcoming, which felt a little pointless since once again, Leia was arriving immediately after having eaten a meal.
"What can I help you with," Amable asked, once they were both settled with a beverage, because humans from every culture need something to do with their hands when having a difficult conversation and this culture had wiped out the usual things to fiddle with like pens, files and cigarettes.
"I have some questions that I would like to ask a person, and you were very helpful with that yesterday, so I thought I'd waste some more of your time."
"Not really a waste. Go ahead."
"I don't quite know how to say this. I don't own anything, so I don't need a place to put anything, but I still would like to know where I would put something if I had something. Although there's no reason to believe I ever will."
Amable blinked. "I'm sorry. Here. She pulled up a screen and split it to display one direction for Leia, and one for herself. Amable entered a few queries that Leia could easily follow along with, which was nice, because that showed Leia a bunch of things that could be done via ship-mind that she hadn't known about. At the end, Amable assigned Leia a space that Leia suspected would turn out to be a closet or locker. "When new people start as crew, or when guests arrive, as opposed to involuntary guests such as you, they are assigned some amount of space. I've given you what we would give a guest for now; when you finish the application and you are regular crew, we'll put you through the regular intake process and you'll get more space of your own, probably a room."
Amable entered some more queries, and looked surprised at the empty results she was getting back. "You have not saved any information for yourself?"
"No, that was going to be my next question."
"I'm amazed you can function. You must have a very good memory. Here," Amable showed her how she could save various kinds of data: pictures, text, links into information within the ship-mind, the data required by the food and clothing stations, etc. At the same time, she showed Leia how to set meta-information on what she stored: whether she wanted anyone to be able to access it, a list of people, just herself. Amable drew an analogy with the way locks work, causing Leia to muse that she was on a ship full of people who thought about security like computer geeks.
"Next question?" prompted Amable.
"This one might get me into trouble, since where I come from, there are a lot of taboos associated with this topic. Can you explain Hazard's social rules are around sex?"
Amable opened her mouth to answer, then closed it again and thought for a moment. "Maybe you could tell me first what you're used to, and I'll try to help you see where that's going to have an unexpected result."
Oh brother. Between generational and regional differences, what the rules supposedly were vs what they seemed to be in practice and individual variation, Leia was hard pressed to come up with any kind of answer. Which was aggravated by the fact that people tended to either talk about the topic way too much or not at all, giving her precious few models for a short, pithy summary.
"I apologize for that suggestion," said Amable after a long pause. "You did just mention you have a lot of taboos on this topic. Probably that includes talking about it? Is it very difficult to ask this question?"
"Yes." Maybe she should explain there were personal reasons she had trouble talking about it? Could Amable possibly want to hear her entire dating history now? Please, God, no.
"Hazard has some simple rules that apply to everyone, regardless of what the rules are from their background. These rules are designed to ensure that we can all continue to work together. If someone refuses you, whether verbally or otherwise, you are expected to stop and give them a lot of space. There are cultures with ritualized courtships that require people to say no at various points in the process. If you want to engage in one of those courtships, you can't do it on Hazard. We're happy to grant leave for people who need it for those purposes. If you see anyone violating this rule, you are expected to intervene, yourself if necessary, but more typically by reporting the incident to us." Amable paused. "That's why Dulak has been watching you and Radmer. You aren't saying no verbally, but because we don't have a baseline for your non-verbals and you aren't saying much of anything, we've been staying very alert. That must be extra special fun for you."
Was Amable making a joke? Sure sounded like a joke. Leia laughed hesitantly. Amable smiled back. Okay, definitely a joke.
"What do you want?" Amable asked.
Leia had no answer for that.
"What do you want from Radmer?" Amable prodded.
Wasn't anything her own business, Leia wondered? God, these people were pushy. They made office gossips look shy and retiring.
"Do you want him to go away?" Amable asked forcefully.
"No!" Definitely not.
"That's clear. Are you happy with what he is doing? With you?"
And I'm supposed to answer that how? The sex is awesome and maybe one of these days he'll go down on me and I'm so looking forward to that? But if it never happens, that's okay too because the rest of it is just amazing? Come on. Amable didn't really want to hear that, did she?
"Is he coercing you?" Amable asked.
"No! God. I cannot figure out what you want me to say."
"The truth would be nice. An accurate description of your feelings, for example."
"I feel like this is all happening very fast, and I have no idea what I'm allowed to ask for, and I have no idea what he's got in mind for the future, but I'm extremely happy with what has happened so far. Other than the public pressure from Dulak."
Amable laughed at that. "Dulak does what he does because he thinks it'll result in the most productivity that is compatible with peace. In your case, he took one look at Radmer pining away, checked in with you to make sure you weren't feeling unable to say no, and then put his foot on Radmer's butt and gave him a good shove. I'm surprised he didn't explain that to you."
"He did. Sort of."
Amable waited a minute, and when Leia did not continue, she added, "I may get into trouble for telling you this, but Dulak is probably also thinking that if there's someone around here you are interested in, that relationship should be encouraged to move as quickly as possible. You are very, very alone, in your situation, and the few examples we have of other people in this situation did not go well, largely because the isolation was overwhelming. You've done a lot to mitigate that by getting your language into ship-mind so quickly."
Dulak the Procurer was not an enticing thought.
"Returning to Hazard's rules, other than never, ever, ever overriding a rejection, the only other rule is the advice to ask for what you want. A lot of people don't because they worry about being rejected, and wind up being extremely unhappy for a long time when if they just asked, they'd probably get what they'd want, or they wouldn't and they'd get over it faster. Sexual interactions are going to be charged, no matter what the rules are. Did that answer your question?"
"Yes. That was helpful."
"Never hesitate to contact me with more."
"I won't."
"In the meantime, you are supposed to be working on filling out the crew intake forms. Let's spend some time doing one now." It was not a question.
The amount of personal history required by the form was breathtaking. They spent an hour walking through it, with Amable, Leia and ship-mind working together to translate the questions in the form to something Leia could understand, then making sure the translation back into Target Language made sense as well.
They eventually finished one form of what turned out to be over a dozen; Amable was willing to wait to work on the next one until some indefinite future time. But before Leia could excuse herself, Amable said, "I hear you were at this morning's meeting; what did you think?"
Leia explained, "I didn't pay much attention because I was trying to catch up on background. Which reminds me, I read about the history of humanity in space, and the lost home of Earth. On my home planet, there are other primates." When Amable looked at her blankly, she did her best to explain about apes, orangutans, bonobos and gorillas. "And there's a relatively complete and consistent fossil record of the evolution of humans going back millions of years. While I know my time conversion isn't perfect, it's not off by that much. I'm assuming I'm the same kind of human as everyone else on this ship, and not the result of parallel evolution, so that sort of implies I'm just the most recent kidnap victim from the place where everyone else came from, right?"
Amable gave her a pitying look. "That doesn't seem very likely, does it?"
"No, it really doesn't," agreed Leia immediately. "I was hoping you could explain this."
Amable blinked. "Let's see what we can find out." Amable started asking some of the queries Leia had already been through with ship-mind, then slowed down substantially. The next step involved making more of those presumably-expensive, definitely-impossible calls. Those people had a whole lot of questions that Leia had no answers for, because she wasn't an archaeologist or anthropologist or any other specialty that might know something about the subject. She could give a general explanation of carbon 14 dating, and she made a valiant effort to explain about Neanderthals and Australopithecus, but she didn't know the details of the dates at all, and furthermore, the time conversion problems made anything she did know guaranteed to be inaccurate by an order of magnitude. Nevertheless, they all seemed extremely excited, and quite unhappy to learn she had no idea where her home planet was. Not even to the galaxy.
The conversation next turned to progress on decrypting car-crash's computer system. Amable found out it had been completed, but the information was awaiting someone to go through it. No one on Hazard was available to work on it to because all the people who would be working on it were busy with the Upper Andal security audit instead. When that was discovered, Amable and some other people on board ship got to talking about turning the whole thing over to someone off-ship. Leia sneaked out while they were discussing the details of doing so.
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Copyright Rebecca Allen, 2012.
Created: July 9, 2012 Updated: July 9, 2012