Charles Gannon - Raising Caine

“Yes. But there was another reason for our insistence upon that method of acculturation, one we could not initially reveal.”

Caine felt a cool chill on his back, a sensation he’d come to associate with those moments in first contact when, invariably, a crucial and often dangerous new wrinkle insinuates itself into the budding relationship. “And what is this reason?”

“We wanted to watch you.”

“Well, that only stands to reason. You wouldn’t want to allow just any bunch of—”

“You misperceive, Caine Riordan. We wanted to watch you . I mean the singular pronoun.”

Caine stopped. “Oh.” Then: “Why?”

“Because our contact with your people is not just motivated by our desire to open normal diplomatic relations. We have another crucial objective, and we needed to be certain — beyond any doubt — that when the time came to reveal it, that we could do so to an individual who had demonstrated powerful affinity with our species, without the benefit of any of our pheromones or spores. When we learned of your travels on Delta Pavonis Three, it raised our interest and hopes. When I met you briefly at Sigma Draconis, it confirmed much, not only because of the easy amity of our discourse, but because of the mark you bear. It meant that you had been touched by, and Affined to, a lost branch of our family tree, a fallen branch. But now, also a crucial branch. This was the other reason we were eager to mount this mission so quickly; not only did we fear the machinations of the Ktor—”

Well, you certainly called that correctly .

“—we also realized that, with you, we had a fleeting opportunity to reveal our needs to the liaison we sought. And we were aware that it might be years, or longer, before so promising a candidate as yourself arose again.” Yiithrii’ah’aash seemed to become distracted. “Besides, time is short. Which is quite ironic: our current urgency arises not from the events of this moment, but from those of past, and largely forgotten, epochs.”

Riordan held up a pausing hand. “Forgotten by you, perhaps. But for us, that past is a blank. So if you want my help, you’ll have to explain how events from those lost epochs are creating urgent problems now.”

“I took the liberty of disturbing your rest, Caine Riordan, so that I might unfold that paradox,” Yiithrii’ah’aash answered. “Because until you know its origins, you cannot fully comprehend why we wish you to be our liaison. Nor can you fully understand why we exhorted your legation to meet us.” He paused. “Or rather, to save us.”

Wait: to save them? Damn, what’s that about? “You have my full attention, Yiithrii’ah’aash.”

The Slaasriithi ambassador sat very straight. Riordan had the impression that he was preparing to strive for absolute precision and clarity in what he said, that he was possessed by a terrible need to impart this information correctly . “Long ago, my species lost something: the ability to defend itself against aggressors who were too large or fast or bold for us to ameliorate, and then constrain, with our various strategies of inducement.

“However, as your own people have begun to conjecture given the age of the ruins you found on Delta Pavonis Three, our people were in the stars before we lost that ability. Our races — yours and mine, certainly — were transplanted, much as we transplant biota to different worlds to achieve different ends. We have no concrete knowledge of that earlier epoch, or of what those ends were, but we conjecture that we were, in your vernacular, the preferred terraformers of that time.”

Caine discovered he was squinting. “And what was humanity’s function?”

“We can make even fewer conjectures about that, and those we have must wait for a later conversation. But be assured that it was not simply to be blood-drenched killers such as the Ktor. What evidence we do have suggests that the Ktor were a later aberration. You might call them the flawed result of a weapons development program.”

Yiithrii’ah’aash’s neck seemed to sag. “Sadly, what you uncovered on Delta Pavonis Three suggests that the Ktor were used to eliminate the enemies of one side in the great conflagration which ended that distant arc of history. Specifically, we believe that the human ruins you discovered belonged to the Ktor, who had been sent to exterminate us. And almost did so. Indeed, given the devolved subtaxon you encountered, the Ktor so damaged our population that it was unable to remain fully polytaxic; it regressed to a much earlier, simpler state. That is why you observed no discrete taxae there.

“I see you are eager to ask questions about this war, what caused it, what followed. It is in the nature of the way you narrativize the past to ask such questions. I must disappoint you. I have no such information. I doubt any of my species do. But this much is manifestly evident: the Ktor did not exterminate all Slaasriithi, everywhere.” He gestured around him at the high ceilings of the Third Silver Tower. “I do not know when we devised the defense spores that almost killed you, Caine Riordan. It might have been during that war. It might have been later, as a means of making our remaining planets too difficult and costly to invade. But the spores do date from those days.

“Our historical record, such as it is, commences well after that war ended. We found ourselves alone in a silent universe. Never overly concerned with machinery, we did not find our loss of technological acumen terribly distressing. Rather, we pursued our efforts to build harmony between our polytaxon and the biota with which we shared the biosphere of what we call our homeworld. In time, of course, we reexpanded to other systems — by slower-than-light craft, at first — and often discovered worlds which still had vestiges of our earlier bioforming. There was much work, and much purpose, and we throve, although the pace of our ‘thriving’ is very different from humanity’s.

“Well before the Dornaani recontacted us, we had progressed to the point where our synergistic balances had become so refined, so stable, that there were no longer any new regions to explore quickly, no crises that needed swift address, no species that required prompt suppression. In short, we had achieved the harmony we had sought. All the notes in the symphony of our many biospheres were in tune and consonant with the leitmotif we had heard and now, had created.”

Riordan rested his chin in his hand. “Why do I suspect that there is a problem in this paradise?”

Yiithrii’ah’aash’s voice was rueful but also gently agreeable. “Because you are the liaison, Caine Riordan; because you see the stories of other beings not from the outside, but from the inside. We have many words for this trait and its subtle shadings and variations. In your language, the closest term is ‘empathy,’ but that only touches the surface of a far more complicated matrix of phenomena. But to return to the problem in this paradise:

“Because conflicts, crises, and exploration had become uncommon, my species found itself confronted with a problem it had never faced: the existence of a taxon which had outlived its function. We called the members of this taxon the indagatorae, which comes closest to your term ‘explorers.’ That taxon had descended from our earliest days; they were our scouts, guards, trail-blazers. They were unique among us in that they sought challenge and uncertainty, conditions that the other taxae wished to avoid. They preferred rootless solitude or small groups over fixed communities. Furthermore, for the indagatorae to have optimal chances of survival and success, they required a trait that was also unique to their taxae: a pronounced self-preservation instinct that prompted them to be more innovative and more decisive than any other taxon when faced with a crisis.”