“Maybe—or maybe you just misunderstood what was being said, or the translators garbled their intent.”
“Perhaps. But how do you explain their suicide systems?”
Downing frowned. “Technical intelligence and prisoner interviews both agree that the suicide cysts of the Arat Kur do seem to be nonstandard equipment. But the Trojan bug wiped out any data that might have shed light on whether those suicide systems were part of a concerted plan or a harebrained option spearheaded by a cabal of superstitious and senile extremists, as the senior surviving Arat Kur claim.”
“Of course they’d fabricate a story like that. They’d want to make their mass-seppuku look like an aberration, not their standard operating procedure.”
“So you believe that they really did know about humanity long before?”
“Yes, particularly given some of the comments I overheard.”
“It’s an interesting theory, but it does have one rather large flaw, don’t you think?”
“Which is?”
Downing couldn’t help smiling. “Well, it’s all predicated on the idea that the great ‘destroyers’ of their race came from Earth. But we weren’t exactly flying about the cosmos, squashing mammalian beetles twenty thousand or even ten thousand years ago, were we? If I recall my history, I think the ancient Egyptians or Chinese were still striving mightily to perfect basic crop irrigation, rather than building interstellar invasion forces.”
Caine didn’t smile. “Remind me: how old are the human ruins I found on DeePeeThree?”
Downing stopped smiling. “Twenty thousand years. Give or take.”
“No matter how much you give or take, they weren’t made by, or for, any humans who called Earth ‘home.’ Couldn’t be, for the historical reasons that you’ve provided. Yet there the ruins sit, created and extant in the same general epoch in which the cognoscenti of the Arat Kur insist that humans were destroying their civilization.”
“And that’s why the natives on DeePeeThree knew humans on sight,” he said slowly.
“Hell, they were even able to point out the insignificant yellow speck that is our home star in their night sky.” Caine carefully swung his feet down to the floor. “Look, life since the Parthenon Dialogs has been more like an opera than reality. In the course of a single year, we experience first contact, jockey for political equality with other races, are invaded, fight free, and now stand panting on the threshold of our future among the stars. But what we’ve overlooked is that no matter how much it may feel like it, this is not the beginning of the story. The story—whatever that is—began thousands of years ago. This only seems like the beginning to us because it is where we enter—or maybe reenter—the tale.”
Downing felt his frown deepening. “Fair enough. So let’s say some humans who did not live on Earth attacked the Arat Kur ten or twenty millennia ago. And so they have a sore spot for us. How does that change how we deal with them, here and now?”
“Firstly, we’re dealing with a species which has conceived of us as ‘the enemy’ for longer than we’ve had writing. We’re not a military opponent. We’re their iconic bogey-men. That might complicate negotiations a bit.
“But secondly, the bigger multimillennia context should prompt us to ask this: what other ancient agendas, animosities, initiatives might be in play here? To us, it is all terrifyingly and wondrously new. But to the Dornaani, the Ktor, the Slaasriithi, and maybe the Arat Kur? And maybe even the natives of DeePeeThree? Richard, we have fallen into the common trap of seeing ourselves at the center of the universe: all that goes on around us somehow has us as its subject and raison d’etre. But in reality, all the events, all the plans, all the acts we interpret as intentionally malign—or benign—to us may, in fact, have almost nothing to do with our species. Or, in the case of the Arat Kur, have nothing to do with us as we are now.”
Downing imagined Nolan’s ghost grinning at him over Caine’s shoulder. “What do you mean, ‘as we are now’?”
“I mean, as Earth-born humans who, after five thousand years of relatively intact and complete history, are the brand-spanking-new entrants into the cosmos. But others in that cosmos might recollect some other batch of humans that was grabbed off Earth, bred for purposes both noble and nefarious. Some of whom may have been on Delta Pavonis Three, and some of whom may have done to the Arat Kur exactly what the Arat Kur say they did.”
“And, of course, the Dornaani must know the whole story.”
“Or a whole hell of a lot of it. And that could be crucial as we try to jump-start the negotiations with the Arat Kur. Because since Alnduul is here with us, that means there’s someone in the room who does know the bigger story. From their own admission, the Dornaani have been Custodians for about seven thousand years, and it’s a surety their histories stretch back well before then. That means that they must have a damn good idea of what was going on in this stellar cluster ten thousand years ago.”
“Well, since we’ve got Alnduul on board, it will be easy enough to put questions to him.”
“As if one ever gets straight answers out of the Dornaani. Which reminds me. When the Dornaani made their first contact with you, were they just as enigmatic as they’ve been since then?”
Downing scoffed. “It was blasted freakish. A message coming out of nowhere, tight-beamed at an IRIS-DoD satellite.”
“Richard, don’t play coy with me. It had to have been a lot stranger than that, given the package they left waiting for you in deep space.”
Oh damn. He’s figured it out…
Caine nodded. “Because they had to smuggle you the device that you put into my arm on Mars, after those two Russians attempted to ‘assassinate’ me. Which was pure theater, all so you could get me into surgery and slip that Dornaani device into my arm. Tell me, was it Alnduul himself who came to our system, bearing strange gifts?”
Richard looked down. No use concealing it now. “No. I don’t know if any of them even came within an AU of any of our planets. We simply received a signal directing us to deep space coordinates. We retrieved the device and a few instructions for its implantation and for subsequent communications with them. We learned what the implant did, and set up the eventual rendezvous for the delegation to be transported to the Convocation.”
“And the device itself—implausibly perfect for your purposes, wasn’t it? Almost like they knew what you needed to make Case Timber Pony work. A secret plan that they should have been completely unaware of.”
So, you’ve wondered too? “It was as if we had ordered it from a catalog. Case Timber Pony would have been an uncertain—and damned messy—business without it.”
“Yes, but Case Timber Pony was just one, penultimate ploy in a long string of traps and tricks. If they knew how to provide what you needed for Case Timber Pony, then they had to be aware of the other plans, as well.”
Downing nodded. “They were. They never mentioned the different plans, but it was as if they had tapped into Nolan’s strategic stream-of-consciousness. If it hadn’t been for their implication that they knew what he had wanted, I would not have approved of the implantation or their other offers to help us protect ourselves in the event that the Convocation went as badly as it did. But try as I might, I’ve not been able to get Alnduul to tell me how they found out about—”