Dr. Alien, page 4
“An obvious observation, but at least you are following our line of thought on the subject. I doubt you will arrive at the correct destination. Now we will abandon you to your futile research. The pantry is stocked with human foods, both solid and liquid.”
“I appreciate your hospitality.” No sense in returning the rudeness.
“Courtesy is the parent to trade. Call out if you require anything.”
“Thanks. I’ll do that.”
My guides departed, and I tried to think.
Two things we’d learned about Traders: they took verbal contracts very seriously, and they believed in the principle of mutual benefit. While they’d haggle and leave their customers responsible for understanding the details of any transaction, they weren’t deceitful and never tried to cheat or gain unfair advantage. So it seemed at least theoretically possible for me to earn something incredible for the human race. All I needed was a miracle. I’d no idea what the Earth authorities had actually requested for my services, but surely, artificial gravity was worth far more. Did anyone back home know that the Tsf would trade in knowledge? Was it possible the reason we’d learned so little about them and this station was simply that we hadn’t offered to trade anything for detailed information?
I shook my head and considered the little disk in my hand. Impressive technology. Yes, my implanted DM can appear to produce similar effects, but that’s an illusion. The glow around my finger, the touchscreen if initiated, and the responding voice, all are subjective. It’s not my field, but I know how it’s done:
After a customer provides blood samples, the “router-rooter,” a tiny piezoelectric capsule wrapped in a gene-modified stem-cell matrix, is surgically implanted near the customer’s spine and attached to several multifidus muscles and the crura, which allows the capsule to be powered by simply breathing. Stem-cell filaments grow, seek out the spinal cord, and merge with it. That part is permanent barring risky surgery. Then, the system operates by wirelessly networking the person’s nervous system with an external CPU; in my case, the fist-sized CPU buried in my couch. The result: an interactive computer that’s essentially a controlled-hallucination generator. And if several people have such DMs and desire it, they can share hallucinations.
This disk was powered by God knows what, worked God knows how, and any seeing being could make popcorn and watch the movies it projected. I shook my head. No sense in getting bogged down in minor mysteries when bigger ones were more important. I didn’t have any popcorn, but I sat down and loaded a video anyway.
Four documentaries later—or soap operas for all I knew—I stood and paced around the room, or rather around the couch since I still wasn’t comfortable stepping onto apparently empty air. I’d seen enough punk tigers to make up for a lifetime of having seen none. Thin ones, chubby ones, exceptionally muscular ones who probably spent hours in gyms pumping something heavier than iron. Maybe lead. Or thorium.
Perhaps from too extensive a stay in microgravity, my patient appeared scrawny compared to most of the brutes I’d seen, but not uniquely so. And yet, and yet … something was different about her, and I couldn’t figure out what.
Sure, her peers didn’t jet around like punctured balloons, but that wasn’t it. No surprise that she behaved differently from them. While the Tsf had placed her in environmental isolation for her own good, she might not see it that way; simply being imprisoned could affect any being’s psychology. And speaking of stress-induced quirks, I’d been traumatized by the big squeeze earlier and hated the idea of leaving this haven, but damn it, I needed to observe my patient again and compare …
I grinned because having confirmed I was an idiot, it seemed better to be the grinning kind. Why leave my cozy cliff-side retreat when I could study her right here? I called my Data Manager into virtual screen format and played back that first encounter with patient one. Perfect recording: clear and seamlessly tiled despite the subject moving around so much, and that it had been shot from the fixed low angle of the lenses set into my couch. But when she jumped high enough, her head popped out of frame. The videos I’d watched earlier hadn’t showed any tiger-lizards from so close-up.
And the answer was right in front of me, I knew it but couldn’t see it.
“Doctor alien?” The voice seemed to come from nowhere, but it sounded deep and raspy.
“Best-offer?”
“Got it in one. What’s happenin’? Your life signs are wigging out a bit.”
Odd not to hear any clicks beforehand. And I felt uneasy about being so closely monitored. “I’m fine, just getting slightly frustrated.”
“Stay cool. But there’s been a change in your second patient. I could flip video your way, but would you care to check it out live?”
“Um, when’s the next gravity surge?”
“We’ll wait until you complete your examination before applying therapeutic force. We observed how bummed out you got last time.”
“Thanks, but won’t that hurt your health?”
“Our health will keep. If you can dig it, Deal-of-ten-lifetimes will meet you in the Arcade of Healing. Even-steven and Trader-joe shall join you ASAP. They’re non-shrinking doctors.”
Even-steven? Trader-joe? Had the Tsf selected such names simply to make me comfortable? If so, it wasn’t working. “Okay. I’m leaving right now.”
Best-offer was right about patient two, the simian had certainly changed. He’d lost perhaps a third of his hair, and where his mottled skin was exposed, it resembled freshly plucked poultry. Diseased poultry. He’d stopped the incessant hand twitching, his lowest two eyes, the only ones open, looked as if they’d been whitewashed, and the way he sat slumped on his tripod legs practically screamed of despair through the body-language barrier.
“How long has he been like this?” I asked Deal.
“I am unsure of the precise time interval, but ahoy! Here come the medicos.”
The “medicos” were both currently female—green-tinged cilia—and they streaked down the hallway, arriving in seconds. Even without prompting I might’ve guessed these were doctors. No white coats or tongue depressors, but they had that harried, behind-schedule vibe. Each toted an arsenal of small but complex-looking devices. Diagnostic, I assumed.
“Trader-joe,” Deal asked the newcomer slightly in front, “when did this patient suffer a state-change?”
Trader-joe also carried a translator, so I got her answer in stereo. “In human time, nine minutes and eight-thirteenth seconds from when you finished asking me the question.”
Huh. The Tsf all seemed to have built-in chronographs and a savant’s ability to instantly convert their time units into ours. For some reason, that notion struck me as highly relevant and for an instant, I wobbled on the threshold of remembering exactly where I’d seen hand movements similar to the ones my patient had stopped making. The second medic, Even-steven, addressed me before I could clarify the memory.
“We waited to learn if the aberration would resolve itself before subjecting this subject to the potential trauma of direct evaluation.”
“So you’ll examine him now?”
“Only with your permission, Doctor. He is your patient. If you wish us to proceed and to accompany us, you must don your vacuum suit. His atmosphere contains enough chlorine to discomfort a human to death.”
“I think we should act immediately, so please go ahead without me.”
Both doctors moved to lean against the subtle barrier separating the patient’s space from ours, and they seemed to slowly melt through and into the room. The three-legged simian didn’t react, even when Trader-joe and Even-steven unfolded their machines and began attaching clamps and probes to and in him. Unipolar depression or possibly bipolar disorder, I thought, then reminded myself to distrust my instincts. But damn it, it looked like some form of depression.
“Cheese it,” Best-offer said, barely clicking. “The cops.”
I didn’t get the cheese reference, but the “cops” became obvious when two more Tsf joined us in the corridor. These two were the largest Traders I’d seen. They moved nearly in unison, and neither was introduced to me, not even off-handedly. They halted behind Deal and lurked there, watching everything with presumably steely sensory organs.
“Why the company?” I whispered to Best-offer, but Deal answered.
“My whimsical associate misstated the role of the individuals who have joined us. These are Masters of Propriety here strictly to make sure our doctors follow established protocol in what is clearly a medical emergency. Should this subject kick the bucket, we would find it desirable to have evidence of our good faith attempts to preserve him.”
Right. If Traders ever located his species, they wouldn’t want to alienate, so to speak, a potential trading partner. So no experimental neck tourniquets. But the “cops” reminded me of just how deadly the Tsf could be.
Two years ago, a year after the Traders had put this station into circumlunar orbit and opened up Trading Posts near Beijing, Delhi, and Manhattan, there’d been an incident unreported in any human news media. I’d only found out about it myself two weeks ago. Some crime syndicate had tried to rob the Manhattan Trading Post, which was understandable considering all those exotic treasures just sitting there on all those shelves. This Post, like the others, was only open an hour at a time, three times a day. During those hours, its environment was adjusted for human comfort. At all other times, the environment was set to duplicate conditions on the Tsf’s high-gravity home world. Which, from what I now knew, implied that it was more practical to increase gravity on a planet than on a space station.
The heist was perfectly organized, executed, and timed, and the eight masked men who rushed into the open-for-business Post carried the most reliable and powerful automatic weaponry any mob could afford.
Until that moment, the Traders had seemed harmless, self-effacing, friendly, and unarmed. It hadn’t occurred to many humans that ambulatory beings who’d evolved in high gravity would not only be strong and tough, they’d also have reaction times like oiled lightning. Maintaining balance under multiple Gs, even with multiple legs, requires super-quick reactions because everything falls fast. And if you want to avoid a predator, or catch prey, or even catch a ball.…
To make a long and gory story just gory, the three Tsf present in the Post moved like rockets and tore the eight men to bloody paste, bones and all. I watched the Trader recording of the event, which they released to the US Justice Department who hot-potatoed it to the FBI, evidently with instructions to bury it deep and only decant it for intimidating psychiatrists. I’m fairly sure one of the Tsf got hit with a bullet or two, but it didn’t even slow her down.
Yes, the Traders could’ve simply disarmed the bad guys, captured them, and turned them over to our police, and it says something about Tsf psychology that when presented with a clear threat, they obliterated it. Another point of interest was the method the Tsf used to clean up the mess: they released a cloud of blue gas; when it dissipated, the Post was spotless and only the carnage was gone.
I needed a distraction. “Why do you think,” I asked Deal, “your medical tests will be meaningful on a life form so unfamiliar to you?”
“The data now being collected can be compared to the data we gathered immediately after we rescued this individual. We expect to find significance, but aren’t counting on it.”
“I—good Lord! Counting on it. That’s the key!”
For a few seconds, Deal kept as still as the security personnel behind us. Then he clicked, “I fear our translator has failed. I failed to grasp the import of your last few statements.”
“My fault. I’m just—I think I know what my patient was doing with his hands before.” I had to fight off a childhood tendency to stutter. “Do you know what an abacus is?”
“Only if you refer to the counting frame referred to as a suanpan in China, a soroban in Japan, a—”
His condescension no longer bothered me. “That’s the thing.”
“What about it?”
“Years ago, I visited a school in Tokyo where students were trained to perform all sorts of arithmetic calculations on, um, sorobans and do them in seconds.”
“I still await enlightenment.”
“Not for long. When the students got really proficient, their teachers took their sorobans away. After all those years of intensive practice, the students could visualize the beads perfectly, and I watched a roomful of kids multiplying four-digit numbers, fast and accurately, on imaginary abacuses.”
“That what you talkin’ ’bout.” The voice sounded worried. “You believe your patient was employing a similar technique. A curious notion, but what problem would require three separate counting frames?”
I nodded, relieved that Deal hadn’t stomped on the idea. “You told me you’d only found his landing craft, so I’m guessing he was somehow keeping track of his main spaceship and trying to give you the coordinates. It would take three, right? Finally he gave up.”
Deal stiffened, and I thought he was going to clam up on me again. “An improbable theory although it conforms to all known facts. But even given the numbers, how could we determine the zero point to which the coordinates relate?”
“I don’t know. Or maybe I do. You found him on a planet? If I were him, I’d have used the spot where you found me as the reference point. Either that or the planet’s center.”
“You foolishly assume he has unprecedented powers of spatial and temporal orientation. Please bide while I discuss this matter with my superiors.”
I expected Deal to go off to find these superiors, but he stood right there, clicking like a Geiger counter in plutonium. The Tsf way of speaking carried quite a distance because I couldn’t see the Traders who began clicking back in return. The interpreting device ignored all this byplay, but Deal gave me a summary in his own sweet way.
“Here is our plan: We will play back earlier recordings of this being, analyze the image of his moving hands, and deduce the bead arrangements of the counting frames he was visualizing, and the three continual sets of results.” He made it sound as though the idea was his. “Then we need only vary dimensional axes and numeration systems until his results become meaningful and consistent in relationship to a moving object. If one of the logical zero points such as galactic center proves correct, a few sets of solutions will allow us to plot his ship’s course or orbit. If this is successful, we will then retrieve his spacecraft. Personally, I very much doubt this approach will accomplish anything but waste time and energy.”
I had to admit that the Traders had evidently caught my insight and run with it farther than I could, all the way to the goal posts if everything worked out. “I have another idea. Do you have or could you build anything resembling an abacus?”
“Why?”
“I’ll have to show you.”
Deal hesitated. “The project seems unnecessary. But I have been ordered to obey your whims. Certainly we have wires and beads. Hang loose, this won’t take long.”
Deal leaped away, leaving me alone with Best-offer and two grim shadows until the medicos finished their research and squeezed back into the passageway. Without waiting for me to ask, Trader-joe began rattling off—it sounded like rattling—test results, all expressed in human measurements but too fast for me to follow. I interrupted to ask some questions but just then Deal returned, passed me an improvised abacus, and everyone who wasn’t already silent became so and watched to see what would happen.
I glanced at the toy in my hand. It had once been a Tsf translator, but the spokes had been ripped out, the frame bent rectangular and restrung with fifteen parallel wires. Each wire held fifteen hollow rings, all emerald green except for the black top two. Fast work, putting this together.
I hoped my patient would see it and realize that we’d caught on, but first I had to catch his attention; he seemed to have withdrawn a light-year into himself. So I stood in front of him and waved the impromptu abacus like a madman. Slowly, his eyes focused on it. I flipped a few beads and all his eyes popped open, colors instantly replacing what had resembled cataracts. I’d never seen such a rapid, spectacular transformation. In that instant, he jumped to his feet, all three of them, practically radiating joy and health. I could’ve sworn his hair was already growing back on his bare spots. He pointed to the abacus with three arms and Deal took it and pushed it through the isolation membrane into his hands. The simian held it so that we could see the emerald beads and hid three of them under a hand.
Deal made an especially forceful click. “Base twelve, it seems,” he said, no pleasure in the tone. “Other possibilities exist, but this may save us time. Would you care to return to your stateroom now, Doctor?”
“Oh. Sure. Guess I’ve been holding up your gravity therapy.”
“You think? But apparently the Masters have found a champion in you. Come, I will accompany you to lightness.” Deal’s legs practically dragged as we moved along, but his partner seemed to skip.
“Doctor, you da man,” Best-offer click-whispered to me.
My room hadn’t changed, but I had. “Deal-of-ten-lifetimes,” I said, standing between Deal and the doorway, a joke if he wanted to leave. “You clearly have a problem with me, and I want to know what it is.”
“I will tell you, if you insist.”
Best-offer, who’d entered behind me, hopped onto my couch without asking my permission and rode it to its usual spot. I had the feeling he found this confrontation vastly entertaining.
“Here’s me,” I said, “insisting.”
“Very well. I chose to wager against your success, which required a large amount of exchange credit to show any significant profit.”
I stared at him for a second. “Let’s see if I understand you. You made a bet that I’d fail and had to bet a pile because the local bookies were betting the same way.”
“In essence, yes.”
“I, on the other hands,” Best-offer volunteered, “wagered against the odds, risking little and earning much exchange. Deal-of-ten-lifetimes should’ve hedged his bet with a side wager.”
