Charles Sheffield: Divergence

She smiled to herself. Pity it didn’t work for me. Death doesn’t excite me, it scares me. I enjoyed myself, but I didn’t even come close. Never mind. There’ll be other chances.

At last she opened her eyes. They had not bothered to turn off the projection unit. Gargantua hung above her head, perceptibly bigger. She could see the markings on the swollen face, and the planet had turned a quarter of a revolution since the last time she had looked at it. The huge and permanent atmospheric vortex known as the Eye of Gargantua sat in the center of the disk. It was staring straight at her: orange-red, hypnotic, baleful.

Darya found herself unable to breathe.

So there’ll be other chances, will there? the Eye’s expression said. Don’t count on it. I know something about death, too.

E. Crimson Tally: Permanent record for transfer upon return to Persephone.

Today I reached my initial destination, the planet Opal of the Dobelle system. Today I also drew a major and disturbing conclusion concerning my mission.

It is this: The decision made by Senior Technician Sue Xantippe Harbeson Ando was an appropriate one, although not for the reasons she gave me. For it turns out that the slow, inefficient method of information transfer via human channels yields information that I would never have received by direct access to the data banks. This is true for a simple reason: some important information is not in the data banks.

The central data banks of the Fourth Alliance are incomplete! Who could have foreseen that? Worse still, I now have reason to believe that they are sometimes in error , so much so that I can no longer rely on them.

I would now like to present the evidence that supports these conclusions.

Item one: My journey to Opal required that I pass through four transition points of the Bose Network. This I knew before departure. The data banks had also indicated that each Bose Transition Point serves as a nexus for the transportation of different species; thus members of the Cecropia Federation and the Zardalu Communion might be encountered there, as well as humans of the Fourth Alliance and the Phemus Circle.

This information proved accurate. At the third transition point, 290 light-years from Sol, in a region already verging on the Phemus Circle zone and adjoining both Fourth Alliance and Cecropia Federation territories, I saw and recognized Cecropians, Lo’tfians, Varnians, Hymenopts, and Ditrons.

The data banks make the relationship between these species very clear. Lo’tfians and Ditrons serve as slave species to Cecropians. Hymenopts and Varnians are sometimes free beings, but are usually slave to humans living in the territories of the Zardalu Communion. (Slave to the land-cephalopod Zardalu also, should any still exist; but none has been encountered since the Great Rising, in pre-Expansion times.)

The data banks also make it clear that, despite the independence of the Cecropian and Zardalu clades, all these species recognize the superiority of humans of the Fourth Alliance. They defer to them, acknowledging the higher nature of human intellect and achievements, and regarding Earth and surrounding Alliance territories as the cultural and scientific center of the spiral arm.

That is not the case! I, a Fourth Alliance human in outward appearance, received no preferential treatment whatsoever. In fact, quite the opposite. In the great terminus of Bose Access Node 145, I emerged to find an overcrowded transit point. To reach my required departure zone it was necessary for me to pass close to a group of other travelers, Cecropians, Zardalu humans, and Hymenopts prominent among them. My request for prompt passage was ignored. More than that, a Cecropian pushed me out of the way as though I did not exist!

When I remonstrated to another human traveler, he said, “Your first trip, is it? You’re going to run into a lot of things that aren’t in the travel guides. Or they’re going to run into you, like that Cecropian.” He laughed. “As far as she’s concerned, you don’t exist, you see. Humans are missing the right pheromones for Cecropians to detect, so they consider we’re hardly there. And anyway, since they’re an older civilization than humans, they kind of look down on us. Don’t ever hope for politeness from a Cecropian. She knows you’re an upstart little monkey. And get out of the way if she pushes; she’s a lot bigger than you.”

I do not believe that I could have received such information, except directly from a human source. It is totally inconsistent with the perspective offered by the central data base.

Item two: The Fourth Alliance central data bank indicates that Alliance science is superior to that of the other clades, and that Alliance technology is even more so.

I am forced to dispute that notion.

The first three Bose Transition Points that I passed through after leaving Sol-space were constructed and operated by Fourth Alliance humans. The fourth one, as I learned upon my arrival, was built and is maintained by the Cecropia Federation. With time to spare before my shuttle ship to Dobelle, I studied this transition point in some detail. It is obvious that the facility is technologically at least the equal of the Fourth Alliance nodes; operationally it is far better designed. Moreover, it is cleaner, safer, and less noisy.

The data bank is again misleading, for a reason I cannot conjecture. Alliance technology is not universally superior, and in at least some instances is inferior. But direct observation was necessary to draw that conclusion.

Item three: The data base indicates that humanity reached the stars employing carefully constructed and logical theories of the nature of the physical world. The laws of physics, mathematics, and logic underpin all human activities, says the data base, no matter how diverse the application.

I believe those facts may be accurate, as they relate to human history . But they seem irrelevant to current human actions on Opal. Indeed, from recent conversations I deduce that they apply little anywhere in the Phemus Circle. Either humans here are deranged, or they operate with a subtlety of logic beyond anything to be found in the files of the central data base.

These disturbing conclusions are drawn from my own direct observations, supplemented by discussion with natives concerning the recent traumatic events known as Summertide, as follows:

The dangers of Summertide were enormous. Death and destruction were planetwide and appalling. A logical race would have concluded that Opal is not a world suitable for human occupation and would have begun birth-limitation procedures in preparation for relocation to some new planetary environment. Such action would be consistent with the profiles of a logical humanity, as described in the central data banks.

And what did the people of Opal do, once Summertide was over? They embarked on a reproductive orgy, one guaranteed to raise the population in a few years’ time and thereby make it far more difficult to evacuate the planet. They justify this by professing — and perhaps, in truth, feeling — a powerful affection for the very place that recently killed so many of their friends and families.

And to “celebrate” their own survival, they have been inhaling and ingesting large quantities of addictive drugs and powerful carcinogens, thereby substantially shortening their already diminished life expectancies. Suspecting that for some reason the natives might be misleading me, as a newcomer, about the effects of these substances, I ingested a small amount myself on an experimental basis. My metabolism was seriously impaired for several hours.

Those ill effects were not, I should add, a consequence of my different background and origins. Indeed, I find that a similar impairment is common among the natives. And far from being puzzled by their own contralogical activities, they actually proclaim them to one another — unashamedly, and often in boastful terms.