Eileen Gunn: Stable Strategies and Others

The Southern Matriarch had been waiting for this day a long, long time.

Her mother, standing beside her, whistled as the ship materialized. “Look at all that iron!”

“Obviously a pre-Scarcity culture,” Mandakusala said. “Late industrial capitalism, right on the cusp of an information economy.”

“They’re primitives, then,” Ayapasara said slyly. Her mother was too old to hold a command, but she still made a cunning strategist. “And primitives are easily convinced of their own superiority.”

Mandakusala caught her thought. Without putting down the glasses, she began issuing orders: “Go aloft and take down the satellite dish. Tell Cook we need a fat roast as soon as she can heat one up. There are two crates of wine down there somewhere — find them! But first, break open that shipment of hibiscus for the Queen Governor’s coronation and distribute them among the crew. I want them to have flowers in their hair and garlands around their necks by the time we close with our target.”

Puzzled, her mother said, “Flowers in their hair? Why?”

At last she lowered her glasses. “They’re all men.”

It didn’t take long for the crew to catch on to this fact. They were young women all — rough-and-tumble adventurers, hoping for enough prize money to buy their first husbands. And they’d been at sea for weeks.

They crowded the prow, staring at the men, and calling out to them lewdly.

“That one — I want the slutty-looking boy with the long legs.”

“Sweet Goddess, I want them all!”

“Stick your tongue out, little redhead, so I can see how long it is.”

“Cease that talk!” Mandakusala snapped. “The next woman who speaks out of turn will be flayed alive!”

The crew fell silent. They knew she meant it.

“As you may be aware, the war with the North has been stalemated for the last forty years. No supplies, that’s the nub of it. The iron, the coal, the oil — all used up centuries ago! Yet here before us is exactly such a ship as our scientists have told us must someday inevitably come. One with an engine capable of carrying us to other worlds. Rich worlds. Fat and peaceful worlds. You are all warriors. You have all been blooded in the service of the Matriarch. You know how to kill — now I’m counting on you to do something a little more difficult.” They hung on her words.

“Smile and wave to the nice boys. Don’t frighten the dears. Make them think you’re proper gentlewomen, so they’ll let us on board.”

They were coming in hailing distance now. Mandakusala counted. Thirty men along the rail. Not many for such a large vessel. One of them called out something unintelligible.

“What language is that?” Mandakusala demanded. “Can anyone speak it?”

“It’s Ænglish,” someone replied. “They speak it in the Cold Isles. I helped burn a village there once.”

“Translate.”

“They ask where they are, and what we want.”

“Tell them welcome to Bermuda. Say I’d like to speak to their commander.”

The message was relayed and a figure stepped forward. A woman.

“Why is she all covered up like a man?” her mother asked.

“Perhaps her breasts are deformed. What does it matter?” Mandakusala said peevishly. This woman looked like nobody’s fool. “Tell her we request permission to come on board.”

Most of the men were leaning over the rail, their eyes bulging out as if they’d never seen women before. They hooted and waved and blew kisses with shocking immodesty. The captain stood apart with two men who must be her advisors. One was short and plump. The other had a thin black mustache. Their eyes bulged too, but there seemed a glimmer of intelligence in them as well.

A crate of wine was set before her and Mandakusala tore open the lid. She tossed a bottle upward to waiting hands. To the translator she said, “Say we wish to entertain them. We have wine for them. And food as well.”

The metal ship’s men were almost rioting. Their captain was swearing angrily at this lapse of discipline, but they paid her no mind. Her advisors looked uncertain and confused.

She had them. She could feel it.

“Throw down your ladder!” Mandakusala called. She smelled the roast coming up behind her. “Look — we bring you a feast!”

But then, inexplicably, the small round one’s eyes widened with horror. He pointed. Others turned to look. Mandakusala turned as well, but there was nothing to see. Only the roast.

But there was nothing strange about the roast. Nothing! It was a plump Northern infant boy, roasted with an apple in its mouth, one of several that had been taken in a raid on a Gulf Coast fortress.

The men were backing away from the rail.

“Grappling hooks! I want grappling hooks and line! Close with that ship!” Mandakusala cried.

But the hooks and lines had been stored below, and by the time they were out, the metal ship was coruscating with green fire. One of her crew threw a line anyway, and screamed as the power flowed down the rope to burn her black from the inside out.

Two great bolts of lightning slammed into the sky, and the ship was gone.

Mandakusala stared at the roast, lying forgotten on the deck. A flesh taboo. Could it be as simple as that? Had she lost everything — power and wealth and eternal glory — simply because these strangers were vegetarians?

Old Ayapasara hobbled up behind her, and coldly said, “Your own command. Forty warriors. And you couldn’t take a ship away from a crew of men! ”

Mandakusala closed her eyes.

Her mother was never going to let her hear the end of this.

“What did you do?” Isaac asked. “How did you know to do that? Where are we?”

“I don’t know where we are. I ordered the engine room mate to apply power to the Tesla coils, removing us from immediate danger. And I knew to do that because I could read their Captain very clearly. I watched how she held herself and when she gave commands. She wasn’t a savage, but the commander of a disciplined crew.” There was a note of respect in her voice. “Did you notice how swiftly they obeyed her?”

“Well, I — ”

But Hopper was speaking to a petty officer: “The Captain and the other officers are missing and must be presumed dead. That makes me the ranking officer. I want all hands on deck immediately. The mission is over. We need to take our bearings, find out how many of us are left, and get this extremely valuable top-secret bucket back to Philadelphia.”

“Ensign, do you have any idea where we are and what’s happening to us?” Isaac liked to remind people in positions of power of their own ignorance.

“At this point, Mr. Asimov, I’m considering this theory: that an interaction between the current in the coils and some unknown factor or factors is affecting the physical state of the ship, causing a change like a phase transition.”

Isaac saw that she was observing him shrewdly; evidently her ability to read minds was not limited to half-naked Amazons. To his excruciating embarrassment, he found himself blushing.

“Do you have any thoughts on that, Mr. Asimov? Ideas are your provenance, I’ve been told.”

“Well, Grace, I’m afraid that the physics is pretty damn difficult, if you’ll pardon my French, so — ”

“That’s Ensign Hopper to you, Mr. Asimov!”

Asimov wilted in the heat of that basilisk glare, and hastily said, “Yes, Ensign Hopper.”

He didn’t apologize, though. He might stand corrected, but he would not apologize. “I agree that what happens to the ship is like a phase transition, when matter changes from being a solid to being a liquid or a gas. Except instead of a transition between different states of matter, this is a transition between matter and time. There’s some unknown physical property involved in the way the ship interacts with space and time. It retains its solidity when the current isn’t running through it, and sublimates into gray-green gas when it is. We could be in the future or the past or even in some other universe.”