April #11 a new snippet

Irwin appeared in their video exactly like the official North American release showed him, except he had on a heavy neck collar attached to a waist chain and another long heavy chain hanging to ankle shackles. A separate long chain connected wrist to wrist. There were two black clad figures standing behind him pointing sub-machine guns at his head. He recited the same message exactly as before. When he naturally paused a little in his recital one of the figures nudged him with a muzzle.

At the end of the official video somebody off camera called: “Cut!”

The black clad figures lowered their guns and swept black balaclavas up and off of their faces revealing the President of the USNA and the Secretary of State.
The Secretary smiled and reached in his pocket. “Good boy!” he said, and tossed a treat. Irwin stretched a little to catch it in his mouth and looked stupidly happy.”

“It’s ridiculous,” April said, shaking her head.

“Good, that’s exactly what we were aiming for,” Chen assured her. “The thing was documentary length by news standards, but it made them look ridiculous, not us. If we claimed their video was fake that would be easy to ignore but we just demonstrated how easily it could be faked. That has much more power than the unsupported claim.”

“What?” Chen asked at the flash of consternation that showed on April’s face.

“It just occurred to me. Somebody down there will believe our video with the added officials just like they did North America’s video.”

“Well sure. I could have put them in clown suits and somebody would believe it.

A free short – too small to publish

Liars

“The first thing you have to remember is that Earthmen lie.”

“I’m sure we have very skilled negotiators who can deflect and limit their responses with the best of them,” Planetary Administrator Oolapon hissed.

The hiss had no emotional content. That was just the nature of their language.

Explorer Aeelotip shook his head so violently his crest flopped around. A negative gesture the Ooowapie shared with Humans, though it had more meaning than just a negative.

“Not a deflection or failure to reveal full details. They lie.”

“One may mislead a subordinate and put them forward to negotiate in ignorance. It’s a terrible thing to do but not unknown in our history,” Oolapon said.

“You are willfully refusing to hear or believe,” Aeelotip said. This was a horrible accusation and the fact he could say it at all was near a criminal indictment of his boss.

“Earthmen will look you in the eye and knowingly affirm a total lie with full knowledge of what they are doing. Not only will they do so to deceive, but they will do so fully aware you have just watched them do the very act they deny. They can shoot someone dead in front of you and say, ‘I didn’t do that,’ with a straight face and no shame while standing there holding the smoking gun.”

“Then they are all crazy,” Oolapon decided.

“Every – last – one, as far as I can tell,” Aeelotip agreed.

Oolapon went through a series of color changes that indicated increasing levels of stress. Since they took significant energy and produced toxic waste in his blood stream it didn’t take long before he felt really ill.

“I… I… ” Oolapon rushed over to the balcony rail and threw up violently.

Aeelotip sipped his liquor and ignored his boss’ distress, which was in itself a terrible antisocial act. He’d found some of his social obligations a little silly since dealing with this new race. In fact, he had grown distressingly pragmatic and insensitive.

Oolapon came back to the table and rinsed his mouth out with the strong liquor. Maybe he was made of sterner stuff than Aeelotip expected if he thought he’d keep it down now. He did not rebuke his subordinate as lacking in empathy either.

“I’m at a loss to imagine how it is possible to have any dealings with them,” Oolapon said. “How long did it take you to figure this out?”

“We found a small recently established colony of theirs. It took us three days, I’m ashamed to say. If only we’d found the home-world it would have been apparent before we ever landed or hailed them. That would have saved us a great deal of time. In fact, if we’d found their home-world I’d have tried to slip away and never let them know we exist.”
He looked distressed himself if not nearly as much as his superior.

“But then if we had found their home-world we’d probably all be dead. That might be for the better since they still wouldn’t have any idea what we look like or have elements of our language. They’d still be able to guess which quadrant of the heavens we came from, but they still don’t know our home-world or its distance, thank the gods.”
Oolapon ignored the superstitious reference, assuming it was sarcasm in an educated star captain.

“Why dead? That’s an extraordinary claim all by itself.”

“They have separate political factions holding different land-masses, sometimes holding segments of the same continent with arbitrary boundaries. If you encroach on their space suddenly and appear a threat you can be vaporized before you realize you alarmed them.”

Oolapon looked at Aeelotip like he was daft. “They not only lie but they fight?”

“Like it is their favorite sport or hobby,” Aeelotip assured him. “They pour uncountable treasure into weapons and the people to man and maintain them.”

“So each of these factions is sealed off and hostile to the others?” Oolapon deduced. “How does one ever attain the resources to get off the planet, much less get star travel?”

“Oh, they find hostility and territorial paranoia no barrier to trading with each other. In fact, selling weapons to their lesser territories seems to be one of the major industries of their world. If anything, it has driven them to develop the technology to leave their planet’s surface before some other state or nation as they call them, beat them to it, and physically attain a superior military position over them.
“They have all this information readily available in the public data-net. It’s positively obscene. I have a copy of the data fraction this colony world held in its public net. We are still deciphering the language, but the images tell the story well enough. It took the entire memory we expected to last for a ten-year voyage to download it. It took all the first day and a half to do that. I asked why it was so large and their administrator laughed and said it wasn’t a hundredth part of the data held on the home-world. It is filled with useless personal correspondence about daily life and repetitious images of domestic animals.”

He paused and looked at Oolapn, gauging if he’d believe him.

“They keep carnivores as what the call ‘pets’. They are companion animals to amuse them but with fang and claw. Some big enough to pull them down and devour an occasional fool. Some are kept to guarantee their territorial obsession while the owner is absent.”

“Why would they care if somebody used their space in their absence?” Oolapan asked.

“They would carry their private possessions away with nobody there to prevent it.”

Oolapan looked at his glass. Aeelotip thought he might be regretting putting anything on his stomach again. Indeed, he half expected him to head to the rail again. Instead, he downed the rest of it in a gulp and poured another.

“They have copies of our technology,” Aeelotip revealed. “I let some of my officers mingle with their officials and of course there were lesser personnel about to serve both sides. They tricked our people into trade and outright theft to obtain personal communicators. When that came to light, I complained. They were amused by how naïve we were. It was shortly after that I realized what danger we were in and did an emergency recall to the ship and departed on a deceptive vector. None of the communicators should have navigational data, and the equipment itself, I’m sorry to say, seems inferior to theirs.”

“Assuming we both have volumes of exploration that are just now touching, how can we avoid them? It seems impossible to retreat from the sky. Surely, on your voyage back you have given this some thought. Did you come up with anything?” Oolapan asked.

“I have. I concluded it is impossible to deal morally with an entity that has no concept of truth or morality. One must meet it head-on with the same raw self-interest if it is impossible to destroy it. I don’t think we have any chance of doing that. We must withhold every fact from them that might be used against them and be willing to deceive them at the same level and skill they would use against us,” Aeelotip concluded. Even though he was inured to the idea for some month his color flickered and he could feel his gorge rise.

“But how?” Oolapn wailed. “I feel sick just to imagine someone else doing it. If I try to imagine doing so myself I’m sure I’ll be back at the rail. I might have to throw myself off bodily to get relief this time. In all our worlds we may have a few score criminally insane who can utter a falsehood without flashing a rainbow and making themselves sick. Are we to empty the insane asylums to recruit ambassadors to these monsters?”

Aeelotip had his crest stiffen a little and got some healthy color back. “There you go. I’m so happy you came to the same conclusion without my help. They will, of course, be difficult to manage. Perhaps some of the less stricken can be a buffer between those who deal with the Earthmen face to face and the sane. It may take two or three layers of insane between normal people and our interface to the Humans. The hard part will be enforcing no contact between Earthmen and the sane. They will feel slighted and resist it. My deepest fear is I am able to contemplate doing this after only a few months thinking on it as we returned. I’ve adjusted. I’m not entirely sure it isn’t contagious.”

A snippet of April 11

In Northern California, Eileen was still in her first year with her new husband Victor Foy. He was a local and older than her. She was a refugee from Southern California, displaced by the bombardment of Vandenberg that Jeff mentioned to his business associates. April carried out a strike on the base a couple of years previously to make them stop shooting at Jeff. She really hadn’t used excessive force. The damage was far out of line with the level of her response. There was some splatter from the primary weapon into the adjoining counties, but she really hadn’t targeted civilian areas.

The problem was that all of Southern California was a hodgepodge of obsolete and barely adequate infrastructure waiting to do a chain-reaction collapse if any important piece was damaged. Southern California was depopulated and reverting to desert in a month of the strike. People who built luxury seaside mansions on the Baja after the Mexican annexation fled or died. The northern part of the state and parts of eastern Oregon were more like the tribal areas of Pakistan now than part of the United States of North America. The new seat of North American governance, Vancouver, looked dangerously close to being cut off from the rest of its populated areas when you looked at an honest map.

The Texas Republic in the South and East was keeping the USNA too busy to do anything about the autonomous areas. Nevada wasn’t exactly lawless, but it was a lot emptier than before The Day. Many businesses were closed, including all the casinos, and services limited. You might get mail if you could get to your post office, but forget delivery or seeing state services like the highway patrol. There was no city water in Las Vegas, and when the power went down in outlying areas, nobody was fixing it now.

Eileen walked from near LA to her father-in-law’s home after The Day, with a stop to winter over halfway. She quickly became eager to leave there, chaffing under their thumb, and picked Victor Foy over younger men for his substance. She’d left her family early when things had come to a head and walked to Vic’s late the previous fall.

“When we go to the Fall Festival I want you to talk to Mr. O’Neil and arrange for him to get me a prescription flown in from Nevada,” Eileen said. She was standing close in front of Vic, her hands on his shoulders. He was sitting on his favorite kitchen chair, which put her eyes just a little higher than his. He’d been reading but sat the book aside when she wanted to talk.

“Feeling poorly?” Victor asked, but he knew better.

“Feeling entirely too good, and you also have that look on your face that says you are tired of being patient and understanding about feeling half married. I’ve grown enough this year that there’s no arguing a pregnancy would be too risky for me. Well, no more than all the other women here in the autonomous zone who don’t have modern medicine like before The Day. But I still have the same goals. I not only want to go to space, but want to take you with me. I’d be pleased to have children with you – later – out there. If we have to get passage for three or four, my guess is it will never happen.”

“We can try,” Vic said, “My understanding is the doc in Nevada will issue a new prescription against an old pill bottle. I’m not sure he’d send a new prescription for a seventeen-year-old girl he’s never met or had as his patient before.”

“Do you know what the legal age is to marry in Nevada?” Eileen asked.

“Eighteen, without parental consent,” Vic said. “Why? What are you thinking?”

“I could fly to Nevada and return his next trip. I’m easily within his weight limit to take passengers. Both of us are near it. If it’s still business as usual enough to have a pharmacy and get a prescription written there has to a doctor and maybe even a clinic or hospital. If there is any way we could pay for it,” Eileen worried. “Is there any way we can convert some of our nuggets or gold dust secretly?”

“No need. If there are drug stores and aviation gas in Nevada they must be doing business normally in dollars,” Vic said. “I have a credit card that hasn’t expired yet. It had no balance and was set up to auto-pay from my bank account. If Chase Bank is still in business in Nevada it should still be active even though it hasn’t been used lately.

“If that doesn’t work, I always kept some cash on hand. I should have enough in twenty and fifty dollar bills to pay for your flight and pills. I always worried the teller system might go down and I wouldn’t be able to get to my money. I just never figured everything would go down so hard that very few people would take cash for anything. I was thinking in terms of a couple of weeks or a month. If there is a branch open I may even get some more cash.”

“Like you kept a few extra rounds of ammunition?” Eileen teased.

“I’ve got somewhere around fifteen thousand dollars in a bank bag in my safe. What I am more concerned about is things may be too normal in Nevada. They may not accept you are an emancipated minor and a married woman and try to declare you at risk and put you in foster care if they have that sort of thing still functioning.”

“I could lie and tell them I’m eighteen,” Eileen said. “That wouldn’t bother me.”

Vic shook his head no, looking unhappy. “You might be in national databases even if your old California records are lost. Sworn statements from our locals that our marriage is notorious and recognized by the community might mean more. Especial from the pilot if he’s well regarded there. We need to discuss it with either O’Neil or his pilot buddy. If they need to make inquiries at the other end we’ll have a couple of weeks until he can report back what it’s possible to do there.”

When Eileen made a face, Vic shrugged. “Thank you, but we’ve waited this long. A couple more weeks won’t kill me.”

Eileen put her arms around his neck and leaned forward nose to nose and forehead to forehead. “Do not assume my concern was for your patience.”