© Copyright 2006 by silli_artie@hotmail.com
This work may not be reposted or redistributed without the prior
express written permission of the author.
A work of fiction, meant for adults. Read something else if you are
not an adult, or are offended by stories with sexual content. Then
again, if all you’re looking for is in-out, in-out, in-out, you
should probably read something else. I welcome constructive comments.
Enjoy.
“Engineer, are your adjustments complete?” Tarah’s voice called in my head. I could hear and sense her unease. She wanted to be far, far away from here!
Before I could answer, Kay, our client, replied, “We are validating. Please be patient.”
I signaled my thanks to Kay.
I stood on the hull of our Ship, amongst the bracing which secured Kay’s large instrument pod to our hull.
As I stood there naked, I looked out on a stellar system undergoing violent change. The central star was about to collapse, then bloom, and we were here to watch, record, and learn.
My rear legs were on Ship, the next pair on the bracing, mids holding tools, and fines folded up, my delicate work done for now.
For now, I could watch. I watched with my eyes, different pairs adjusted for different wavelengths, vision augmented by sensor data from Kay’s instruments and the probes we’d launched through the system over the past few days.
“What do you feel, Man?” Kay asked over our private channel.
Even though the form I wore was closer to arachnid, eight limbs and eight eyes, there was still Man inside.
“I feel wonder,” I told Kay. “I feel anticipation. The physicist interprets models, compares measured to predicted, predicts forward... Other parts try to comprehend. And I feel sadness.”
“About?” Kay asked. “About four?”
I had the feelings of tears still, even though I don’t have the physiological mechanism anymore. My fines twitched instead. “Yes, for the life on the fourth planet, intelligent life that will never know the stars, except in the moment that will be their last.”
“It is the Way,” Kay reminded me.
“Yes, it is the Way, I know that -- parts of me know that. Yet other parts still mourn their passing, the passing of any potential. Playing children run across the grass and one steps on an ant mound. Are they remiss for not mourning the ants’ passing? No, of course not. Yet we can look on the Way, and we can wonder, we can mourn the sentient life on four, we can ask ‘what if?’ for them.”
“Mmm,” pondered Kay from her environmental chamber in our forward hold. “I’m going to buy out your contract yet...”
I laughed through my link to Kay, saying, “Ook, ook, ook,” the way I do when I want to remind her I’m aware of my primitive nature and status. I sent her the image of an organ grinder and monkey, a monkey with a caricature of my human face, hopping on the end of my chain, hopping to the music, an uneven dirge.
Kay took my image and changed it -- a buxom woman holding the chain of a monkey with my face and infeasibly large genitals. The woman moved the monkey, stroking him erect and sliding him home, holding his head to her breasts as she smiled and sighed in contentment, encouraging his thrusting with her other hand.
I laughed through my link to Kay, my fines twitching in a more animated fashion. “You’re amused by monkey chatter, the primitive baying at the moon,” changing the subject.
“You give us a perspective we haven’t had in quite a while, my friend.”
“I hope I can provide you such entertainment for a long, long, time, my friend,” I replied as her vision faded.
Had it only been nine, no, ten months Earth-time since I’d left?
Awakening; First Days (Daze)
I awoke in a fog, a haze, a cloud of pleasure, being rhythmically squeezed, someone whispering to me, unable to wake up fully. The only thing I could do was enjoy, and that I did!
Moving in a haze for a while, days? Not fully aware, awake, yet moving, with help. Moving, familiar yet strange -- strange place, strange sensations, too many legs? Practicing, moving to the side, legs crossing, learning new patterns, like a dance, the dance of life.
That was it -- patterns, patterning they called it. When I woke up more, the haze pulled away, I had the patterns I needed for basic living. I had languages, knowledge of Ship, and rudimentary understanding of her systems. But those patterns need to be integrated through use.
The first time I saw myself in a reflective surface -- I’d seen Nikki and Tarah, but the shock, realizing I was looking at me! Eek! Swat me with a shoe, I’m a fucking spider!
Better make that a big shoe... I saw myself and jumped, startling myself even more. I “laughed” and my fines shook -- I’d jumped to the side, really quickly, and partially up a wall. Amazing how many things had mapped from monkey to spider!
I was a spider, a male spider living with two females... Well, an entomologist might not call us spiders. Not sure what most people would call us after they stopped screaming -- around seventy kilos, eight limbs (nicely differentiated for function: four mains, two mids, two fines), eight eyes (also differentiated for function, wavelength range, sensitivity, focal distance and magnification), large brains... Exquisite pleasure receptors...
So much time those first few days/weeks spent in bliss with my mates.
That and plain old hard work.
The drones were some help; we had three, one for each of us. They’d positioned the drive and reconnected it. In doing that, they’d run checks on cabling and interconnects, and found additional errors made in the initial hasty repairs, and corrected those. Ship’s higher order functions were still offline, so she couldn’t help with her own diagnosis and repairs as Tarah and Nikki hoped and expected.
Hell, as I hoped and expected -- and a lot of the time those two were scarcely more helpful than the drones!
Kay explained it to me later, but that’s jumping ahead too much...
I got my sightseeing tour of the stellar system, an afternoon basically. But traveling at 0.95C, with the accompanying relativistic time dilation, you can cover a lot of distance in a subjective afternoon. It was enough time to visit Earth’s moon, hovering over the Apollo landing sites, the hope that is Europa, the tragic wastelands of Mars, and the grandeur of Saturn and Jupiter.
Oh, we did more visiting of Earth, but that was by remote. We carried out a very thorough ransacking of the arts, sciences, cuisine, you name it. Identified and sampled products that we hoped had sales potential. Wouldn’t have guessed that spiders like beer.
My job as Engineer -- checking out the reinstalled drive. I had visions of what an eight-ball a meter in diameter exploding into a zillion crystalline shards, each shard sixty or more millimeters long, the destruction and havoc that would wreak on an enclosed space.
Yet the drive chamber was pristine, the new eight-ball mounted in position before the even more impressive thruster assembly.
I have to remind myself; they aren’t people (monkeys). They don’t think like I do; some times I don’t know how they think, or if...
Once in exasperation, retelling parts of this to Kay, I remarked that they had the curiosity of a box of rocks! Kay thought I was being harsh. I agreed, and doubled my estimate -- they had the curiosity of two boxes of rocks! Kay laughed, and after a while I laughed with her.
But still -- they don’t ask, follow up, prod, pry -- for glub’s sake ask why, why, why? Visions of a spider waiting patiently, passively in her web for a tasty morsel to wander by, contrasted with a monkey actively poking a stick into a nest of ants, slurping a few off the stick, and yes, having the occasional ant bite it in the ass... Our (monkey) curiosity does get us into trouble -- look where it’s gotten me!
One of the cornerstones of their technology is matter replication. They can record and replicate matter of virtually any complexity. They’ve had these systems for millenia... Oh, the systems have limitations -- they can’t create life. Other systems move consciousness, the flame if you please, from one candle to another, one form to another, but they can’t create life. What are the drones, if not life? Simulations, animated by Ship. Seem to be pretty lifelike to me, but what the hell do I know; I’m a monkey from a backwater system.
Okay, they have this fundamental technology. It’s as much a building block as the ability to fashion and interconnect submicron MOS transistors is to early twenty-first century Earth technology, except millenia older.
Nikki and Tarah had done a remarkable job building workarounds for the axis drivers using (primitive) Earth technology, but I didn’t really trust the things they’d built. Once on Ship, with my new knowledge, it should be easy, right? I’d had Ship replicate other assemblies, subassemblies, and tools for me. Ship, replicate three more axis drivers, please.
No.
What? Replicate three more axis drivers, please.
No.
I was flabbergasted! Ship wouldn’t do it! Nikki and Tarah explained to me that’s why they set down on Earth, took human form, worked with our (primitive) technology, the path that had led me to them, because Ship wouldn’t replicate more drivers.
Okay, but why won’t ship replicate the drivers?
It took me a while, but I concluded that they had never asked Ship that question! They’d asked Ship to supply them with replicated drivers, Ship said no, so they went to plan B.
Amazing!
I asked Ship -- why won’t you replicate the drivers?
Okay, I was dealing with damaged systems, but I managed to tease out the answer: it was an ethical restriction! The drivers were part of the FTL drive, and that was considered too advanced to risk falling into the hands of such a primitive society! It took a while, but I was able to explore the limits of the issue, and work through it -- we were no longer near that society, and I had developed similar technology, so the risks and the ethical issues no longer existed, right? Don’t know if it was logic that succeeded, or systems damage that made the difference.
But I got my three (replicated) drivers!
I grabbed one with each mid and took another with a main and lurched off to install them, not saying another word (fair or foul) to my mates. Unbelievable!
That led me to ask far more questions, following up with more questions, like building Pareto charts with unwilling engineers, having to tease out each little piece of information...
How long had it taken them to clean up the drive chamber? Not long at all.
Huh? Didn’t like that answer.
Back up and ask again. Was there much damage in the drive chamber caused by the explosion of the drive sphere?
No.
Try and remain calm... Remember, our shells can withstand full vacuum, so pounding on Nikki, even with a tool, won’t do any good, assuming she stood still, which she just might do... She might think it was some weird kind of monkey foreplay... Hell, it might be some weird kind of spider foreplay, for all I knew!
Follow-up question. What damage was there in the drive chamber?
They explained; essentially all the damage was from failing systems, but not from the sphere failing.
Okay, you had crew die from sphere shards -- where were they when that happened?
Oh, they were in forward cabins.
!!! Please indicate where they were on a diagram of Ship.
Nikki did, indicating cabins thirty meters forward and thirty off to the side from where the drive sphere was located.
How did you know they were killed by drive sphere shards?
That’s what she pulled out of their bodies, she told me, drive sphere shards. There are still shards in those cabins.
Please show me! I still hadn’t visited every cubic centimeter of Ship.
Nikki took me, offering that since we’d gotten our scheduled work for the period completed, we could go snuggle; since Tarah had me last cycle, Nikki had me for this one.
I stroked her the way she liked and told her we’d get the chance, but I was trying to understand what had happened.
She showed me the cabin, and it was a shambles, still. It looked as if an arc of shrapnel had cut through the place.
Yes, that’s exactly what it looked like -- an arc of shrapnel! Shards of the sphere were embedded in the surfaces of the cabin, and its furnishings.
But...
I asked Nikki to describe the area when it was first entered. Did they have imaging of it?
Ship probably did, but they couldn’t access that information, she told me.
Nikki had been the first to enter. She and Tarah had been snuggling in Tarah’s quarters (nesting area) further forward. Two crew and their two drones had been in this cabin, and the other crew member and his drone had been in the similar cabin on the other side of Ship. When she came in, the drone was incoherent, and...
I interrupted and asked, was the drone injured?
Nikki told me two crew and one drone were dead, torn apart by drive sphere shards, just like the two in the other cabin, but one drone was uninjured, physically at least. Mentally, the damage was not recoverable. Luckily they were able to activate more drones, although Ship was only partially able to animate them.
I’d been fumbling with my mids and fines, removing shards from furnishings, and examining how they were embedded in the walls and ceiling. The force of impact wasn’t uniform, but how it wasn’t uniform didn’t make sense to me.
No imagination, and no curiosity -- Nikki was floating there, hanging on by her mains.
In this chaos, three died and one lived. I started to ask a question, but paused and rephrased. Where was the live drone when you entered, and where were the others?
The live drone was in that corner, and the others were scattered along there. She pointed with her mids (it’s impolite to point with a main).
Okay, let’s go look at the other cabin, I suggested.
She took me there, never asking that all-important monkey question: why?
Symmetrical layout, symmetrical damage!
Whee! We’re getting puzzle pieces here! The same funky pattern of destruction!
Can we go snuggle now, Nikki wanted to know?
Yes, we can go snuggle now, I told her, exasperated. We can snuggle, and I can think...
That’s why spiders make such good crews for cargo ships. As long as things are running smoothly, and that’s what spiders want and like, they snuggle together in nesting pairs, and they can (and do) stay that way for days, weeks on end.
Kay says we’re organized more or less the same, including spiders and primates, with three-section brains. Well, in primates, it’s brain stem, midbrain, and cerebral cortex (more or less -- I’m a physicist, not a comparative neurologist). With “us” spiders, the really basic, primitive brain is physically separate from the midbrain and higher functions; each brain has its own support systems, cross-connected for added reliability. And during those long snuggly periods, the primitive brain takes the majority of the body into effective hibernation, with the midbrain and higher centers running on their own support system, at reduced levels. You can come back up to speed in a few clicks, which amounts to about half an hour Earth (monkey) time. Whoever’s currently on watch stays at a more active level, though, body pretty dormant but able to switch to full activity in a few seconds, a typical spider trick.
That’s another aspect that makes us (spiders) good crew on ships. We can take raw vacuum for reasonable periods (the big problems are thermal -- we’re more or less endotherms, without a major internal source of body heat), can tolerate temperatures from -40C to +90C. Zero G to fifteen G, no big difference. We can also tolerate a wide range of atmospheric pressures and compositions.
Ah, but what spiders don’t tolerate well? Passengers. Passengers tend to be individuals, and individuals introduce variability and unpredictability. Spiders would much, much rather carry cargo. Cargo doesn’t talk back, fight back, complain it’s too hot/cold/dry/wet whatever. Passengers? Not happy. Dull, boring, cargo? Very happy.
Robust, not very demanding, intelligent enough to have developed interstellar travel on their own, works well with other races, dependable... A good, solid, reputation.
And with the curiosity of a box of rocks! Oh, Kay and I argued the point; you need some minimal curiosity of the world around you, I posit, to evolve. I mean, without wondering why things fall, you’re never going to ask the questions to get the answers that lead you to the questions ... and eventually the understanding that lets you get your asses (or functional equivalents) off that damn rock, right?
And Kay laughed at me! She actually laughed! I ranted on, about needing to have some minimal amount of curiosity, I mean, to wonder what’s snatching and eating your kin, because if you don’t, you’re likely to be next on the menu! And she laughed, and agreed with me, telling me I’d summed up a very old argument in very few words... Others asked the same questions about the spiders -- just how had they managed to get their asses off that rock?
Aboard Ship, Nikki and I settled in to snuggle, bellies together, our mains around each other, suspended in our nest. That primitive part takes over, rocking slowly and rhythmically, flooding us with pleasure. I sensed Nikki blissing out. I focused, retaining awareness, opening links to Ship to explore what I’d learned.
It seemed to me I had a lot of facilities available, even though I was continually told major portions of Ship were damaged and unavailable.
Okay, parts of the mystery so far: Drive sphere went kablooie. But no pieces were in the drive chamber! There were pieces in other cabins. Picture, please! I worked with a three dimensional image of Ship. Could I get an image of those cabins? Yes, I could. Could I get images of those cabins at the time the drive failed? Pause... Not available. Why? Systems damaged and not responding. Okay, can you identify shards of the drive sphere in the images from those cabins? Yes. Please plot those on the image.
Okay, arcs, in those cabins.
Ooh! Scan images of Ship along these arcs for similar shard damage and display!
Systems damaged and not responding responding responding responding...
Okay, cancel and display what you can.
Enough areas supplied imaging data to let me draw a picture, and form an initial hypothesis.
Well, a wild-assed guess... The drive sphere went kablooie, but not in place. For some reason, the bits and pieces went out in this ring of destruction...
Wait a bit -- that uninjured drone, and the undamaged spots...
I had no idea why, but it looked as if no damage occurred closer than what, 28 meters from the sphere? The ring of destruction started about there, fanning out through Ship...
Oho! Hypothesis and something to test! Ship is wide and thin! If the arc continues, there should be spots on the hull showing damage. I extended the arcs along top and bottom. I asked Ship if we could get images of the outside of the hull. Systems damaged and not responding. Okay, cancel, I’ll do it tomorrow. I colored and extended the projected path, starting with a ring, a circular ring of debris, expanding along this path...
Nikki stepped up the action, opening our genital slits, stimulating us to full coupling -- I didn’t have much coherent time left; I asked Ship to scan any of the colored areas it could for shards or shard damage and record.
Then I gave myself to my mate, and to bliss.
The next “morning” after a passionate wake-up with Nikki, I announced I was going out on the hull.
Tarah wanted to know why. I told her I was looking for damage to the hull. Fine, don’t stay out too long. Didn’t ask why, and I didn’t volunteer.
We were orbiting Saturn at the time. Being outside, seeing with my own eyes, was incredible! And being able to link into Ship, have her image electromagnetic field contours, and see the forces braiding the rings... But I had a job to do, a mystery to solve.
It didn’t take me half a click to check the two regions on the top of the ship, and then a quick trip through to the bottom, and yup, two more damaged areas.
The view was spectacular; I could stay outside for a few more clicks before heat loss started bothering me, and longer if I had Ship throw up catchfields around me. But that wouldn’t solve my problem. Damn monkey curiosity...
Don’t know how, or why, but I’ve got a good idea of what... For some reason, when the sphere went, it went in an expanding pattern. Some parts of that expanding pattern were inside Ship, and some were outside.
Oh fuck, you idiot! What other systems did those shards hit! Of course! Going back to Tarah’s cabin, I had Ship give me drawings of the volumes impacted (good choice of phrase) by probable shard intrusion.
And intersecting that arc, plain as could be -- the primary neural tube, and the secondary neural tubes spaced off on either side of the primary.
“How can we inspect the cables in these areas?” I asked Ship and Tarah pretty much at the same time. Both replied that we could send probes. Do it, now!
What had I found, Tarah wanted to know.
I expected to find damaged cables. How could we repair them, I asked?
Tarah didn’t know, and called for Nikki.
I felt like frowning, but I left the parts that could frown with my monkey shell... From my overview I knew Ship used fiber optic cables to transfer information. I also knew, and felt, that they weren’t my Earth-knowledge fiber optics. Like the difference between Edison’s first electric light and a twenty-first century deep UV laser diode: both devices convert electricity to light, but there the similarity ends, and as to fabrication, or theoretical underpinnings? Worlds apart! Or the difference between Tesla’s initial AC power distribution, and waveguides. Nah, I had the feeling I could sit down with Maxwell and he’d understand waveguides -- it was his math, after all, even if we used newer, different notation.
Nikki arrived. Through careful interrogation I learned that if fibers were damaged, we had repair equipment. Had I found damaged fibers?
I expected to!
The “probes” were miniature versions of ourselves, or the drones, thirty centimeters in size or so. Those you could almost whack with a shoe...
Ship reported that the first probe had been delayed -- shard damage in the ductwork! Plot and display, please!
The pattern was playing out, all too well.
“Oh my...” Nikki said, looking at the image.
“Oh shit,” Tarah said, or the functional equivalent, as another image appeared.
We were looking at a section of the secondary neural tube, and a swath a meter or so long was riddled with shards. We had severed fibers, fibers with shard stuck in them, a real mess.
I zoomed out to the schematic view of the ship, and indicated the area implicated by symmetry. “Should find the same damage over there. Can the drones work on this kind of repair, or do we have to do it?”
Nikki wasn’t sure. Ship usually did this kind of thing by itself, but...
Yeah, yeah, systems damaged and not responding; I know...
A click or so later and we had a better idea of the mess we were in, with imaging from all three sets of drones.
Didn’t know what caused it, but my best model was that the sphere was in a different space (brane?) when it failed. Given the shard distribution, I could model (well, with Ship’s help) the difference in motion between the expanding sphere of shards and the remainder of Ship. The shards transitioned back into the same space (brane?) as the rest of Ship, displaced in spacetime. That accounted for the damage pattern, the one drone surviving, for so much.
And when the shards transitioned back, they ripped things to shit. Important things, like crew and portions of our primary and secondary neural tubes.
“What do we do now, Engineer?” Tarah asked.
Where to start? Apply the triage rules, start where you stand, where the drones are? Oh, these are diagnostic drones, not repair drones. We have to replicate repair drones.
Okay, how long will that take, how many can we get, and will Ship run them, or do we need to?
It took Nikki a while to get answers. The good answer was that we could get as many repair drones as we wanted. The bad news was that we would need to guide them, which effectively limited how many we could run.
Okay, two repair drones each. How long does it take a drone to repair a cable?
Depending on the damage, it amounted to half a minute per spot. If the cable was nicked, half a minute. If the damage was more severe, such as severed, half a minute per end plus time to extrude the new fiber.
Still sounded like a pair for each of us -- start the replication, please.
Tarah wanted to know where we wanted to start.
Good damn question... If a repair drone identified a broken end, could Ship trace and identify the other end for us?
When Nikki didn’t answer, I queried Ship directly, and got a multitude of answers, which amounted to, it depends. Either Ship could, or it couldn’t, and we wouldn’t be able to tell until we tried a particular fiber.
I guesstimated eight to ten thousand damaged fibers. Ballpark, hundred and eighty to two hundred clicks, three and a half days. Not too bad.
Hmmm -- idea! Where do Ships’ diagnostic and repair circuits run? Can we identify those? I queried Ship. Yes, we could! First priority is to fix systems that will help us fix systems!
“We start here,” I told my mates, coloring areas on the display. I assigned each of them sections in the secondary neural tubes, and I took the main neural tube. “Go through those areas, repair nicks first, and then circuits involved in diagnosis and repair.”
Nikki showed me how to run the drones. It was fun, at least for a while, shifting my vision to the drone, picking out a fiber, and having it do the repair. I could start one going, check on the other, start it going, bounce back to the first one, and so on.
Damn delicate work, though -- some shards were easy to remove. Others, though, disturbing them severed fibers. I worried we’d sever something important, and be in worse shape than when we started.
I guess we were lucky; we didn’t screw anything up.
One time I checked on Tarah, though, and she was waiting, not doing anything. Both her repair drones were working on severed fibers. Both were holding one end of a fiber, waiting for Ship to identify the other end. Waiting, and waiting, and waiting!
I explained to her that if Ship couldn’t identify the other end in a few seconds, it probably wasn’t going to do it ever, so mark that one and move on! Please!
I gave the same explanation to Nikki -- only one of her drones was waiting! Box of rocks!
We worked. The task was varied enough that I didn’t lose focus.
It happened -- I don’t know who did it, but Ship shivered, and the lighting changed. Both my drones paused. One was moving to a new spot, the other was finishing a splice. The one I’d directed to a new spot scampered in the other direction! The one doing the splice finished its work and scampered away as well!
I checked with my mates; their drones were doing the same! All the drones were clearing out of the damaged area!
“What?” I started to ask...
Still looking through the “eyes” of one of the drones, the neural tube filled with an orange glow, which pulsed and flickered. Flickering -- I looked closer. The shard chunks were disappearing!
I queried Ship.
I received a wealth of information -- we’d gotten enough of the diagnostic and repair functions operating for Ship to take over!
I was very, very relieved! Until I learned that the field Ship was using to remove the shards was a standard medical diagnostic/repair tool. Why hadn’t she? ... Nikki hadn’t thought of using it for that. And I hadn’t known enough to ask, or that such a tool existed. Oh well.
And we’d worked nonstop for about 40 clicks, almost a day! That separation of brains came in handy -- while I concentrated on the drones, the old brain took care of housekeeping. But now it was time to rest! Tarah grabbed me, and after a while, we rested...
Mysteries
We woke to a different Ship. More remotes than I’d ever seen were bustling about, the lighting was different, sounds were different, the air was different. When I linked in as Engineer, I was greeted with a wealth of information, and the feeling Ship was happy I was here! We reviewed systems. FTL drive was operational but needed recalibration. Life support, sensors, effectors, defensive systems, limited offensive systems, all coming back to operational status. Some components had been damaged beyond repair.
I don’t know how it happened. I was running through lists with Ship, things that needed work, repair, upgrading. Guess that’s it; she decided I needed repair and upgrading! The sensory impression of Ship around me disappeared, and I received the first part of an upgraded education in fifteen clicks or so. My background in physics and math certainly helped; it wasn’t a cram-down experience, more like a lightning-speed Socratic method, building and educating me through some very interesting advances in physics, mathematics, and engineering.
When my lesson was over, I had a much better appreciation for Ship and those who designed her -- a very robust and pragmatic design!
Yet she had almost been crippled. That still bugged me. I had a much better appreciation now of how the quantum oscillator I’d invented back on Earth worked, and how close... Nah, not close at all. What would have happened if Earth science had gone right from the point-contact diode to the field-effect transistor, bypassing thermionic (vacuum tube) devices entirely? While it’s true that semiconductor devices play major roles in Earth technology, there’s a lot of crossover from thermionic technologies; you need both. The ubiquitous microwave oven is an advanced thermionic device. Hell, vacuum deposition used in semiconductor fabrication is an offshoot of vacuum thermionic technology. So while my oscillator in one sense represented a leap of three or four steps closer to FTL drives, there are still a hell of a lot of intermediate innovations, both theoretical and practical, needed.
And how lucky Nikki and Tarah were -- ten years earlier, and Earth technology wouldn’t have been able to do what they needed.
But back to what happened to Ship. That sphere didn’t just go kablooie because it felt like it. It most definitely had to be provoked. So, what happened?
I started looking through records of the event. They were incomplete, as systems had been damaged.
I also learned about my predecessor. He wasn’t a spider by birth, either. Looked more like an otter, a five and a half foot tall otter. I also interpreted his posture and the look on his face to mean he was a pragmatic, practical, and wiseass individual. Ship certainly liked him. Looked like the kind of guy I’d drink beer with.
I thought I knew the sequence of events; Nikki and Tarah thought they did: (1) drive fails, killing crew and drones (2) they drop out of warp, (3) they limp to Earth.
It took me three days of poking, thinking, modeling to figure it out. We had enough in terms of partial records to show what happened.
It hadn’t been an accident; it had been an attack. Our crew died in an act of piracy, and my predecessor Engineer saved the ship.
Pardon the shorthand, but essentially a bunch of nasties figured out how to generate a singularity in the higher-order branes this particular FTL drive system uses. A ship using that particular drive system wanders by, trips over the singularity, and drops back into normal space, where the pirates are waiting to pounce.
I’m convinced the box-of-rocks principle applies in this instance as well. It’s well known that spiders are fond of this particular drive system. And spiders have a reputation, well, for not responding/adapting with lightning speed to new situations.
But our Engineer wasn’t a spider. And, he was alert at the time, not off in a blissful haze.
So when Ship was ripped out of FTL and dropped into this trap, he figured it out, and quick. The normal defensive systems were screwed up (engineering shorthand -- they were temporarily destabilized, and while they would restabilize and come up, it would take too long to matter). My predecessor figured out in a flash that the hypercube of ships surrounding them (we have scans) were generating the singularity which yanked Ship out of warp (a higher-order folded adaptive brane).
He deliberately (and quickly) rigged the driver to send a huge overload pulse through the drive sphere. With the magnification the drive presents (think of it as leverage if you wish), this blew out the singularity generators and ripped up local branes, so Ship was thrown back into a higher-order (FTL) brane.
What he didn’t predict, unfortunately, was that when the singularity generators croaked, a significant amount of energy was ... well, think of it as a standing wave problem. All of a sudden the standing wave ratio on your transmission line goes to shit, and all the energy you’re pumping out gets reflected back into your face. He blew out the singularity generators and threw Ship back into an FTL brane, but when the singularity generators blew, the reflected energy made the sphere go kablooie, and Ship dropped out of FTL for good, but quite a few lightyears from the baddies, even though it was in a random direction. And not all of Ship transitioned at once -- that’s what caused the shard dispersal.
He saved Ship, but it cost him his hide. My fallen brother, I salute you!
I was able to deduce the nature of the singularity from our records and studying the mathematics of the drive. I came up with a few probable ways to generate that singularity, and a number of simple yet nasty changes to the drive system that would allow us to blow past similar singularities, and I do mean blow past -- part of the singularity generators would be suddenly flipped into a different brane, and in a way that avoided the reflected power problem, dissipating all of it in the singularity generators. Let’s just say I wouldn’t want to be near those singularity generators when it happened.
Ship liked the changes, and implemented them.
So much for mathematics, physics and deductive reasoning...
Back in the so-called real world, Tarah was dealing with a problem of a different nature.
She (we) had been contracted to haul cargo from point A to point B on an agreed schedule. Now we’re showing up a few years late. Someone is pissed, as they wanted their goodies at point B quite a while ago.
Well, that’s what insurance is for. Tarah was dealing with her insurance carrier, who wasn’t much impressed that we’d been delayed by what Tarah thought amounted to a flat tire or a thrown connecting rod. A rare engine failure, but a failure nonetheless.
Oh, while we got the FTL drive working again, it was only partially working. A subsystem had been damaged beyond repair, which limited us. It was like my old VW beetle back on Earth -- the engine was fine, but the ball joints in the front end were shot. Try to exceed about 60 miles per hour, and the front end wobbled like a son of a bitch. So it was with our drive; we could go faster than light, just not as fast as we would like.
But as Tarah was negotiating with insurance carriers and such, I popped up and told her, no, it wasn’t a flat tire, it was an attempt at piracy, and here’s the proof.
Well! That’s a different story! All of a sudden the insurance carrier was very interested! And when I was able to finger where and when, and the scans we had demonstrated pretty conclusively to those in the know just who was responsible... Let’s just say the party involved had a reputation, but had been good at covering their tracks. Until now.
And there was the other part. I’d figured out the singularity, the how part, a few ways of creating it, and a few ways of blowing past it. I’d invented some new, interesting stuff. Stuff with a market -- everyone using this drive system or its many variations would be interested in my defensive changes. Hell, their insurance carriers would insist!
Which leads us to the next phase of the tale. A damaged ship wanders into port. It turns out they are the first survivors of a bunch of pirates who have been causing trouble for quite some time. Not only do they have solid records of the pirate attack, they’ve deduced how it happened, and come up with a way to keep it from happening again. Spiders did this? Well-earned reputation as boxes of rocks, remember. Deduction? Quick action? Innovation? Well, it was their monkey, a monkey, picked up from a backwater world! Spiders? And a monkey?
That’s how we met Kay.
Kay is a member of another very, very old spacefaring race. I’ll call Kay “she,” as that’s a convenient approximation. Someone, somewhere, on hearing parts of our story, decided someone (someone else) should interview me personally, to among other things, make sure I was where I was of my own free will; abducting primitives is frowned upon. They also wanted to suss out this monkey from the backwater system -- did he really do this stuff? Nobody believed for a moment that a spider had come up with something so innovative, but where did this monkey come from?
Kay was amazed and amused at my story, that I’d developed on my own a technology that was a cornerstone of interstellar travel. It was a technological development that was many hundreds of years out of the usual path, but on the other hand (or similar body part), the Universe is a big place, and the unusual happens all the time. What’s incredibly weird to one is another’s breakfast cereal. To a certain extent, I was a creature lifted from a primitive world, but I was also a physicist, and one who had shown a great deal of innovation and ingenuity both on Earth, and in the repairs to Ship I’d made to get us this far.
Kay not only vouched for me, but helped secure the equivalent of patent protection for what I’d done to Ship, and much, much better business deals for my inventions.
That made me a monkey with not only a reputation, but a growing bank account.
Kay has become a good friend. She’s explained a lot to me. Tarah and Nikki’s race is known for being superb journeyman spacers. They get the job done, without flair or flash. They like things neat, tidy, organized, and running smooth. And when things are neat, tidy, organized, and running smooth, they spend their time screwing.
Yup, that’s Tarah and Nikki. Smooth out the bumps and back to the nest.
Oh, to finish up on our cargo; delivered a bit late, remember? Because of the piracy attempt, we’re not liable for damages or late delivery. I was able to demonstrate, mathematically, that my predecessor Engineer could not have known at the time that the load he was feeding all that power into (the trap generators) would suddenly turn from adsorptive to reflective -- Kay got others to vouch for that; I’d invented the math needed for that analysis, so there was no negligence on my predecessor’s part. So our insurance carrier was happy with us.
But the customer doesn’t want to pay for the goods, as they’re too bloody late, and now out of date. We’re stuck with the cargo, a load of widgets that do things. I looked at the widgets. Interesting. I looked at the current model on the market. Yup, some bells and whistles ours don’t have. I did one of those damn monkey things, figuring out how to spiffy up our lot. Even got patent protection on my improvements, thanks to Kay’s connections. We went back to the original buyer. You want these things? They told us to piss off, do what you want with them. They even told us to piss off in a legally binding form! Gee, thanks! We had our broker approach one of the original buyer’s customers, and gave them one of our improved units to try. Want some more? Yes, please! We turned a nice profit, undercutting the price of the current units. That got a lot of press -- that monkey masquerading as a spider pulling a fast one.
Damn monkeys... Monkeys (primates) are troublemakers. They’re curious, sticking their whatevers into the strangest of places, and for no good reason other than because they can. Primate races are great sources of innovation, if they mature past the self-destructive stage.
But primates are also adaptable. Kay told me about watching a bunch of spiders on an avian world. The spiders had a very difficult time adapting. Yet primates adapt well, and have fun besides. Typical pattern -- flying is fun, right? How does an advanced, highly sentient avian land? Well, if they’re the equivalent of a teenager, they stoop, dive, and flare out at the last moment. Put a monkey in avian form, and that’s what they do as well, whooping and hollering for joy as they do it. Spiders? Carefully controlled flight, soft landings -- great-grandma landings. Dull, boring, box of rocks! Tarah and Nikki had done well picking a primate world, and had been very, very lucky to have screwed up enough to have found me.
*
Talking to Kay, learning from her, is how we got the job we’re on, floating out a few clicks light-time from a star that’s about to go kawhoompf! Kay’s race may be spacefaring, but they’re not what you’d call builders. They do things differently. They have to.
Most primates seeing Kay would ... well, most of them would run away screaming, but what else is new... Kay resembles a banana slug, except that she weighs in at about 100 kilos, and is a very pretty shade of pale blue, with markings in darker blues and purples. When she needs eyes, she extrudes the number and type needed. She’s fairly young for her race, about two hundred Earth years old, so she hasn’t decided on a specialization quite yet. She seems to be heading for a specialization in generalization. She’s a superb physicist and mathematician, a linguist and xenopologist, artist, teacher, lawyer, you name it. When the problem of me came up, she was at the top of everyone’s list to send to investigate.
She’s also a con artist, raconteur, gambler, liar, and a seducer of innocents. That’s another reason she was sent to investigate -- sent far away to investigate. Still haven’t figured out what she did, but it was enough to earn her an invitation to leave for a while.
She told me the best way to bring me up to speed on really current physics and math was for me to shift to her species form for a while so she could use specialized techniques to transfer knowledge.
Hah. Stupid monkey hadn’t heard that one before...
She moved me into a form that was the Adonis of slugdom. She may have educated me, but it was more intimate and varied an education than I’d signed up for!
And she was gentle, and intense, and funny, and passionate, and caring, and I’ll do it again with her if she’ll have me. She says after we finish this job, I should spend a few months with her really learning in depth.
Some times I think the only reason she picked us for this job was to stay close to me.
One of her side interests, as an astrophysicist, is stellar evolution. Someone had spotted a stellar system about to go kawhoompf. Kay had been waiting for such an event to test out some new models, and since we didn’t have any current contracts, hired us (and Ship) to transport her and her equipment to the target system for the study.
Not Tarah’s first choice, but the money was good. Spiders like things dull-and-boring. Deliberately going to a stellar system that’s about to go kawhoompf and wipe out a number of its orbiting planets, one of which was inhabited, is not the kind of thing that spiders like to do, that’s for sure. But, the money was good, very good, there wasn’t much business otherwise, and it kept me onboard for a while longer. I already had a number of side deals going with Kay.
I like to think I’m a good judge of personality. In spite of the fact that she’s a con artist, raconteur, gambler, liar, and seducer of innocents, she’s also very talented and fun to be with. And, we get along together. She’s introduced me to a number of interesting opportunities. Oh she takes her cut, but she’s in it for the long term. The better I do, the better she does. I hired an independent to look over things, and it (organic-AI composite, well respected, reasonably priced) agreed. It also told me Kay was a master con artist from a race of con artists, and getting sent off the way she had was quite an accomplishment.
One of the things we do is talk. She likes to get my perspective on things. The universe is a big place, and one being’s incredibly weird is another’s breakfast cereal. But the view of an outsider such as myself is somewhat of a novelty. And Kay knows markets for novelty. I guess the spider form adds to it as well. Novelty is expected from monkeys, but from spiders?
Let’s take an old debate, nature versus nurture. Add an interesting wrinkle -- what happens when you move a monkey mind (spirit? soul?) into a spider body? What controls? In what situations?
Kay pointed me at learned treatises. Pretty much without question I found them to be hyperanalytical hogwash, out to support some predetermined bias (sorry, learned conclusion).
So I’ll give you the monkey’s view. What controls? It depends. But rather than keep this discussion on a highly analytical plane, let’s contextualize it, give it feeling.
Let’s talk about snuggling. I suggested to Kay that a way to determine if a race was peaceful or not was to look at the practice of snuggling.
I thought as a monkey I understood snuggling. I know I like snuggling. My wife, Linda, gave me a wonderful education into the art and practice of snuggling. Last thing at night and first thing in the morning, we snuggled together. Afternoons, if we could get it. Some times on weekends or on holiday we would snuggle together for hours.
Then she died, and I was alone. That really taught me how important snuggling was. Oh, sex is good, and lots of sex is better, but even with sex, the best part is snuggling afterwards.
Then Dina and I fell together; she was a decade younger, fiery red hair, full lips, full bosom, oh so full, so warm, and so soft. And she was a cuddleslut, just like me.
And she introduced me to another dimension in snuggling; holding me to a nipple. She could, and did, suckle my brains to mush. I’m lucky she enjoyed it too! Attach me to a nipple, hold me close, and I was all hers. Lucky for me, the thing she wanted most was more.
But outside of that, we were different people, without the closeness Linda and I shared. So when Dina’s parents, who lived on the other side of the country, fell ill, she went back to help them. I understood; I’d gone through that with my parents. We got together once more. Then her father died, and her mother fell apart. We talked on the phone, once more after that. I couldn’t ask her to leave her mother, and she couldn’t do it. I hope she’s found someone who appreciates her.
Reborn as a spider -- new dimensions to snuggling! Tarah and Nikki taught me a lot. As a monkey, I could snuggle at night, go to sleep snuggling, and wake up snuggling, but sooner or later biology calls, and I had to get up. You have to eat, and you have to pee. But as a spider -- we could, and did, snuggle for days! And my mates, Tarah and Nikki -- they could tell when part of me was off thinking, pondering. That’s when they’d tease open our genital slits, and just like getting that nipple into my mouth, it’s all over...
Except that’s where the monkey and the spider experiences differed. As much as I like snuggling with Nikki, or Tarah, or even the drones (I’m not into the drone thing, although some are, and a few times when I was thinking hard on something, they had the drones ambush me, grab me, and snuggle me into submission), that oral dimension just isn’t there with spiders.
Let’s face it, I like tits. Part of my monkey heritage, I guess.
That leads me to that seducer Kay... Monkeys and spiders don’t have the terms, but every square centimeter of Kay’s seductive, passionate form is an erogenous zone, and it was the same with me when I was with her. And when I was with her, she fulfilled every carnal need and then some -- the holding, the squeezing, the rocking, oral, genital, the you name it, and the you don’t know how to name it, but damn it feels so good, and it just goes on and on... She seduced me, she used me, and we both loved it.
Anyway, my tentative thesis is that peaceful races snuggle as adults, and if questioned, would like to spend more time snuggling. I’ve tried it as a monkey, as a spider, and as a slug, and given the chance, I’ll try it in other forms. Maybe that’s what I’ll do when I grow up -- study xeno-snuggling.
Requiem for Four
Standing on the hull of Ship, Karl Jenkins’ Requiem sounding through me, waiting for the shockwave to propagate through the system, propagating so fast, engulfing and extinguishing Four, and the reason I was listening to the Requiem... We’d seen, tracked, measured the initial X-ray burst, and were waiting for the breakout phase, where the shockwave breaches the surface of the star, ejecting most of the stellar mass. Kay’s models said that should happen soon, very soon...
“I want to ride it,” I said to Kay on our private channel.
“What?”
“The shock wave -- you could build a small ship with a sail or a catchfield, and surf the wavefront. I want to ride it, ride on the ragged edge of all that energy...”
Kay shrieked in delight! I felt the increased power drain on Ship from Kay’s equipment. “I’m adapting... Reconfiguring, shifting probes... Damn, why didn’t you think of that yesterday!”
I watched then helped as we reconfigured four of her precious probes, moving them, waiting for signs signaling breakout, even as the stellar collapse accelerated, soon to be followed by...
Breakout started; we received data from the close-in probes, data signaled to us essentially instantaneously, data that would take many clicks to propagate to us at the speed of light. We were sitting at a safe distance. Safe, but not comfortable, at least to Tarah.
Breakout, enormous quantities of matter being pushed outward, still accelerating!
Another shriek of delight! Kay fed me data from the probes, including one of the reconfigured ones! The imaging data was shaking -- no, don’t stabilize it! That’s part of the story, the feeling, the raw energy! We rode with the little probe, feeling and watching its systems fail as it rode the incredible violence and energy of the shockwave.
One failed, and we switched to another! More chaos, what a violent ride! I felt how she was using catchfields and tried to feather them, directing... Don’t know if Kay did it, or the probe-based AI did, but the catchfields focused and feathered, and we accelerated, moving sideways along the shockwave. We were riding it! Kay shifted part of her attention to another probe, “teaching” it the same tricks, and surfing it along the shockwave into position ... to catch the impact into Four...
A side conversation, a side-bet. On the main comm channel, the one shared with Ship, Kay queried, “Captain, we have breakout. While we have contracted to remain at this orbital distance until the shockwave is two clicks away, would you be interested in negotiating to remain until ...”
“No!” interrupted Tarah. “We leave at the contracted time!”
“You wouldn’t be interested in...” started Kay.
“No!” interrupted Tarah again.
“Thank you, Captain,” Kay soothed. “We will depart as contracted.”
“Hah!” I signaled over our private channel. We’d bet on it; I’d bet that insecurity would win out over greed. Kay insisted greed would triumph. I knew Tarah better, and had almost bet that Tarah wouldn’t even listen to offers. Still, I’d won.
“You should have taken my last bet,” Kay teased.
“Didn’t want to end up pregnant if I lost,” I told her. I still had some advisors, and at least the illusion or delusion that our conversations were private. Kay’s last bet, on the issue of whether or not she’d get to the point of stating a price with Tarah, had the winner being male and the loser female for a hundred clicks of intense fun. My research suggested to me that if I lost, I’d end up pregnant, and stuck in that form for essentially six months until I gave birth.
“Would I do that to you?” Kay asked with seeming innocence.
“You have in the past and you would again,” I told her.
She changed the subject, switching us back to the probe, riding the shockwave. “Wheee!”
We rode the probes, interacting with them, feathering the catchfields, moving along the edge, the incredible release of energy interfering with our signals.
And we rode one probe straight into Four, cheating a bit, using higher-order fields to stabilize things through the turbulence of the shockwave meeting the atmosphere, following a somewhat smoothed trajectory into the planet’s surface.
We witnessed the death of Four from the other probes, watched as the last fury of a star extinguished the sentience, the promise, of one of her children.
I know it’s the Way. Still, for the exhilaration of the ride we’d taken, I felt the loss.
Libera me, Domine, de morte aeterna
in die illa tremenda, quando coeli
movendi sunt et terra, dum veneris
judicare saeculum per ignem.
Requiem aeternam dona eis.
We moved Ship early, moved out to a sixteenth light year to make Tarah happier. By the time the shockwave reached the sixth planet, about 240 clicks after breakthrough, it did little more than disturb the magnetic field.
We left orbit after the shockwave passed six and the remaining probes rejoined us. During the week-long journey to our next port, Kay and I worked on data analysis. We also worked on a presentation of the shockwave-riding data. I sketched out what I wanted. Kay agreed, and we worked and refined.
It would have been nice to have some slightly different shots, especially of four, but we stuck to scientific rigor -- the data shows what the data shows, and we weren’t going to mess with it. Clean, accurate representation of data without distortion.
Of course the added soundtrack, for those who could hear it, was something else. We mixed in sensor data, adapting the scream and roar of the dying star, with Verdi and Jenkins. Yes, the audience may be limited, but we didn’t care.
The pace, the sound builds and builds, the roar of the star mixing with Dies Irae, building to impact -- and complete silence as we cut to the other probes showing the death of four.
We showed it to Tarah and Nikki. What did I expect? They’re spiders. Interesting is what they said. They were being polite.
Damn Kay, that’s when she knew she had me! That’s the other thing monkeys have that spiders don’t -- that emotional core. And it’s something else I share with Kay. The first time I showed her my rough cut, everything building to a climax, the little compartment we were in shaking from the sound, and then -- silence. When it ended, I could hear and feel the emotion. “They did not die in vain,” is what she told me. Damn, I needed a hug then.
When we got back to “civilization,” Kay brought in professionals to clean the thing up. We threw the first one out -- he was a pompous ass with no soul. The second one, of avian stock, got it -- she cried at the end. Damn but I wanted to be out of this spider shell so I could hug and be hugged by someone/something with heart, with feelings!
And in retrospect, Kay knew that, too.
Dog and Pony?
We sent out review copies of our technical presentations. Kay and I were of the opinion that we’d done some damn good science, and she was insistent that I get credit for what I’d added to the mix. As she said, I added a different perspective, and a different analytical slant.
Reviewers agreed, and we were invited to a conference (for oxygen breathers) to present our stuff. We happened to have a Ship nearby, and even managed to find some cargo which needed quick delivery.
Tarah wasn’t quite happy with my split responsibilities, which included Engineer, mate, and much, much farther down the list, Kay’s partner in this expedition.
Damn Kay, it’s clear to me now that she was surreptitiously throwing fuel on the fire, helping increase friction.
But we arrived at our destination; the conference was being held on an orbiting resort. Tarah went off in an irritated huff to take care of the cargo. Nikki sulked. Kay and I bailed.
I’ve done conferences and presentations before, dealing with colleagues who speak different languages, who have different customs. But this was the first time I attended a conference where colleagues had different number of arms/legs/eyes!
Kay left the presentations to me. My reception was a little weird at first, and I didn’t quite understand why. A colleague clued me in over beer.
Kay and her kind don’t have hands as such. They can extrude pods/peds for locomotion, but fine manipulation is pretty much out of the question. But fine (and not-so-fine) manipulation is required for so much of the climb to the stars, from agriculture through mining and refining metals, to more advanced stuff.
Kay’s race evolved another approach. They evolved the ability to control other creatures that had the manipulation skills, but not the brains. Call it limited telepathy and telekinesis. Call it mind control. Worked well enough for them to evolve, and get off that damn rock.
So when a spider shows up, doing things like talking math and physics, sitting around drinking beer and swapping shaggy zanth stories, other folks tend to come to the conclusion that Kay is acting as the ventriloquist, and I’m her dummy. The box-of-rocks effect once more!
It took a while to shake that one, and starting out, I was pretty much doing it one person at a time. Then word started to get around that I was the monkey (that monkey) wearing a spider body.
The kicker, though, was when I reacted to a beautifully stacked female of the mammalian persuasion, and suggested to her that I really wished I could switch forms and join her for some serious snuggling... But she gave me her contact info, and an invitation for later, to “discuss” my work further.
There was one lout who went on and on (in front of a crowd) about how nothing I could possibly do would convince him that I’d actually done any of this work, and on and on how spiders were so stupid, Kay’s race were all con artists and thieves...
When he stopped for a moment, I calmly remarked to those around me that I was surprised and disappointed that in such a supposedly advanced society, someone with such obvious and serious psychological problems was allowed to wander about untreated...
Someone departed to hoots and howls of laughter. I didn’t have to buy my own beer for the rest of the evening.
We showed the Requiem for the first time in a large conference space after the day’s sessions were concluded. A hundred or so attended. It was the first time I’d seen the finished product projected on a really large volume, and with sound filling a large space.
Kay told me the reception was far better than she’d expected. I didn’t care -- it was my tribute to the sentience that had lived on that planet.
Another after-sessions gathering, drinking beer and talking with colleagues of the otter persuasion, of course they didn’t know the gent who had been my predecessor engineer. It would be like having someone come up and ask me if I knew Julius Caesar -- he was from my planet, after all. I was ranting about my detective work aboard Ship, trying to get information out of a box of rocks, working things out...
And it struck me. “I need to get out of this stinking shell!” The novelty of being a spider had definitely worn off.
End of Part 2
rev 2008/01/03
On to Part 3
Time of Arrival 2
By silli_artie@hotmail.com
http://www.asstr-mirror.org/files/Authors/artie/www