And the Lion Said Shibboleth Read online

  And the Lion said Shibboleth

  A Short Story

  R.P.L. Johnson

  Copyright © 2020 R.P.L.Johnson

  All rights reserved

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Cover design by: www.MatthewDobrich.com

  And the Lion said Shibboleth

  By

  R.P.L. Johnson

  “How can you steal from a species that has no concept of possessions?” I asked. The music in the bar was overpowering, but I was sure I’d heard her correctly.

  My sister leaned over and slapped me on the shoulder. It had been nearly ten years since I had seen another child of the High Frontier and over twelve since I had seen a sister, although I had never met this one.

  “See! I told you he’d get it,” she said addressing the rest of the table. “It’s hardly even a crime. Maybe we should just shuttle over and ask for it.”

  “Great idea,” I said. “The Chirikti will either ignore you completely or they’ll swarm you and use your remains for reaction mass. But I guess being spat out the back of a Chirikti starship one ion at a time is one way of seeing the galaxy.”

  There was an uncomfortable shuffling around the table. It seemed my sister had made a big point of the Chirikti’s totally alien nature, including their absence of attachment to personal possessions, but she had neglected to mention the rest of the package. If it came to a fight, a Chirikti mapped onto the human behaviour spectrum somewhere between selfless bravery and mindless savagery.

  Mina had come to the meeting with two companions: Reason Jefferson Jura, a post-op neuter tank who must have massed close to a quarter of a ton and her pilot, Albright Smith.

  The back of Smith’s head was distended above the nape of his neck in an encephalitic bulge that probably housed some wet-wired neural upgrade. By the way I could feel his stare boring through to the back of my skull I was guessing falcon, definitely a raptor of some kind anyway.

  My sister seemed unfazed. “That,” she said, "-is where you come in.”

  The call had come out of the black, but how could I refuse a meeting with a sibling? We were so widely scattered these days, it was rare to even read about another child of the High Frontier let alone meet one.

  Despite our similar genetic stamp we had shown a remarkable capacity for diversity. Perhaps our father had been a little too exact in his imitation. As well as his dark good looks, charisma and expansive if somewhat bookish intelligence, he had also gifted us with his distrust of authority and his insufferable self-confidence. Combine that with the way we were fragmented after the incident and raised in separate foster groups and you had a pretty good recipe for a Diaspora.

  Mina had found me at Lansky’s Folly. The station was a waypoint on the shipping routes of a dozen civilisations. It saw more different species in a month than any Terran embassy saw in a local year and there was always work for xeno-linguists like myself. However, it could be a disorientating place to get around. The transient and ever-shifting population also gave it a fluid social structure and some interesting politics. It was not an easy place to call home.

  Mina leaned back in her chair and gestured to the bar for another round of drinks as if she owned the place. I knew that the bar didn’t have table service, but the drinks came anyway.

  The bar we had agreed to meet in was on the 3.9 radian spoke, about 1.1g down. This particular spoke formed the border between the oxygen breathers and the quarter-rim that housed the nitrogen-phosphorous crowd and the bar’s patrons were an eclectic mix.

  The bar’s motto, “Space is the hole into which we all fall,” was projected above the bar in languages from Terran to Trux to Gilbrashi as well as the stultifyingly logical, mathematically based Galactic Standard (cosmos ≡ -ve delta-z communal locus ). There was no need for it to be displayed in Chirikti. For one, the language had no written component, other than the pin-yin we xeno-linguists applied to it and also the Chirikti themselves were far too alien to ever do anything as normal as spend a night in a bar.

  “You know, you’re a difficult man to find,” Mina said. “What kind of a name is Morgan Tenetto anyway?”

  “It attracts less attention that John Turnbull Junior,” I replied.

  Smith, the wet-wired pilot, let out a low whistle. Even the tank sat up a little straighter, the seat creaked under its weight.

  “You’re a John?” Mina said. “I should have guessed: new hair, new chin. What’s the going rate for mentoplasty these days?”

  “Affordable, on a xeno-linguist’s salary. Less so on a surviving dependants’ pension,” I said, self-consciously rubbing fingers along grafted bone.

  Even after twenty years, the name John Turnbull was enough to raise eyebrows. I guess that the children of infamous parents get a lot of unwanted attention, but it was worse for the children of the High Frontier.

  Our father, John Turnbull, or Prester John to use the title he had affected, was the last leader of the generation ship High Frontier. Even his critics admitted that he was a charismatic leader and a very effective administrator and by the age of thirty-four he had become the head of the administrative council.

  It had taken him another fifteen years to turn the Frontier into his own private dictatorship and two more decades before his personality cult reached the height of its powers. By then John Turnbull was an old man, but his vital energy and infectious charisma had never waned. He assumed the title Prester, from the legend of the mythical Christian king of the Orient, and became the Frontier’s spiritual leader, its father-protector.

  His rule was total, every action an example, every utterance a proclamation. And when he ordered that the U.T. tanks be brought online early and a generation of cloned children be quickened from his DNA, that order was carried out to the letter.

  We don’t know for sure that he gave the order to space the thousands of frozen embryos stored to populate the new world. There is no record of who ordered the pogroms against his political opponents and the slaughter of the innocents. But we do know that the greenhouses of the Frontier were fertilized with blood and bone as well as recycled nitrates and that when it eventually reached its destination there were no children aboard ship that were not Prester John’s.

  It was technology that undid him in the end. FTL drives were invented while the High Frontier was still drifting between Sol and Xuxa. By the time Prester John arrived he found a thriving colony already there and celebrating its centenary. He killed himself just hours before the shuttle arrived to take him into custody.

  His lieutenants were tried of course, but the population of Xuxa was never quite sure what to do with the hundreds of children that Prester John had sired. We were treated as victims of his Messianic hubris, but always in the knowledge that we were also identical copies of him. He was an iconoclast and a tyrant: a mass-murderer as callous and calculating as he was charismatic. And everything that he was, is in us.

  I was a John, one of that first generation, sharing even the mad king’s name. That’s bound to make people look at you sideways.

  “What is it you want to steal?” I asked. The Chirikti don’t have anything worth taking. Their technology is mostly impossible to operate unless you’re planning on growing half a dozen pedipalps and simulating their pheromone keys. They’re not particularly advanced anyway. Maybe some of their field theory is ahead of ours but
in many other ways they’re quite backward. They wouldn’t even be a star-faring species if they weren’t so bloody tough and long-lived.”

  “Does this mean you’re in?” Mina asked.

  “No it does not.”

  She looked at me for about half a second. One of the problems of talking to a sibling is that you know what they’re going to say before they say it. Not that we’re psychic or any of that crap you see on the 3-D-ramas, just that we are so alike that we tend to follow the same conversational cues. Even so, I confess that I didn’t see her angle until she explained it to me.

  “Those Chirikti, they’re about as alien a civilisation as you can get and still have some kind of a meaningful dialogue with. I don’t think there’s a species in the galaxy that really understands them. And they don’t understand us. We can communicate, sure, but they don’t really get us. They go through the motions and do whatever the Chirikti equivalent is of nodding and smiling politely and then they leave.”

  “So?” I asked.

  “So... the point is they go through the diplomatic motions, no matter how strange our customs appear to them. And when we give them a gift-”

  “They know enough to accept it and avoid causing offence,” I said.

  “Exactly!” She leaned closer, conspiratorial although I had seen her tip the bar-man for a shielded booth. “Twenty three days ago a Chirikti vespiary ship stopped by Terra long enough to renew the non-combatant treaty. By way of sealing the deal we gave them a chunk of mineral from the neutral planetoid where first contact was made fifty years ago.”

  “AB Pictoris,” I said.

  “AB fucking Pictoris, exactly. A planetoid of almost pure carbon. We gave these bugs a diamond the size of bar-fridge and they’re so fucking dumb they probably tossed it in the trash before they broke orbit.”

  “And that’s what you want to steal?”

  “It’s not as if they care. It won’t be guarded. It will probably just be sitting in a storage locker.”

  “Chirikti don’t have storage lockers,” I said.

  “The hold, then.”

  “They don’t have a hold either.” These guys really were in trouble. “A Chirikti starship is just a big porous rock like a chunk of soapstone. They don’t form it, or hollow it out: they just fit sensors, drives and weapons and then it’s good to go. A typical vespiary will have between sixty and eighty thousand individuals inside and they permeate the whole damn thing, crawling through the voids in the rock.

  “They don’t have a bridge, or a hold or a mess. Apart from the drive which has to line up with the centre of mass, there is nothing in a vespiary ship that we would call architecture or geography.”

  “It’s all one super-organism, a hive mind, I get it.”

  “It’s better to think of the Chirikti as a species that has selected cooperation over specialisation. They’re all individuals, but identical. In a vespiary the use that each area gets put to depends upon the relative concentration of individuals in that space. You get a dense enough concentration of individuals who are thinking about navigation and that’s your bridge. You get a group who just happen to be near a malfunction when it occurs and that’s your engineering team. Nothing is fixed, there is no hierarchy. It’s like looking at a human brain and asking which neuron is in charge, except the neurons are all constantly crawling through the skull in response to the shifting concentrations of pheromone signals around them. It’s practically impossible to predict.”

  As soon as those words came out of my mouth I knew she had me. Mina smiled.

  “Practically impossible, you say?”

  ◆◆◆

  “Where’s the hatch?” Smith asked from the cockpit.

  “There is no hatch,” I replied. “Just find a hole you think will be big enough and take us in.”

  “Plenty of candidates.. The rock looks like a bloody sponge. You want fore or aft?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. I was used to this: humans found it very hard to come to grips with the Chirikti’s lack of specialisation.

  Whatever avian neurons Smith had grafted onto his brain did their job. He brought us down a long fault that extended a hundred yards into the vespiary, easing the shuttle into a three-dimensional powered spiral and set us down as gently as a mother hen settling onto a clutch of eggs.

  The vespiary had a slight spin to it: enough to give an apparent weight of about three quarter’s standard.

  The fault continued deeper into the ship in the direction my brain now told me was up and we set off along a steep, irregular slope.

  This part of the ship was unpopulated but that was to be expected. The vespiary always allowed space for future expansion. I took the lead with Jura, the giant neuter, following so close behind that I repeatedly had to tell it to back off. If we came across any Chirikti our posture as a group would be important. Jura had been schooled on this in the last couple of days as had the others, but either the neuter’s curiosity or its aggression kept getting the better of it.

  During my lectures on human-Chirikti psychology, Jura had joked that all human interaction came down to the decision to eat, fight or fuck whatever it was they came across. By divesting itself of the third option, Jura’s appetites for the first two had grown sharper and I disliked having its oppressive bulk so close behind me.

  Contact with aliens was difficult. Humans are social animals, hierarchical and status-obsessed: that’s an easy system to game. We’re pre-disposed to defer to authority. If you can assume that authority then you’re home and hosed. Basic monkey politics.

  But those tricks aren’t universal. Alien species don’t pick up on tone, inflection or body language. Some do not even inhabit the same sensory space as we do. There's an old story about human's first contact with the Gilbrashi. The aliens spent the whole time trying to read the infra-red signatures given off by the human ambassadors. They didn’t even know they were supposed to listen for the modulations in air pressure we call sound.

  Compared to finding your way around a Chirikti vespiary, Father’s conversion of an entire generation ship to his own personality cult was child’s play.

  Perhaps that was why I worked with aliens. I wanted something more challenging than what my father had done.

  Monkey politics again: hierarchy, status, be the best.

  The fissure narrowed and branched into a number of tunnels.

  “Are we getting close?” Albright Smith’s voice sounded anxious but that may have just been the distortion of the com link.

  “Not far now,” I said. “All we need is one Chirikti so as soon as we reach the edge of the vespiary we’ll be able to ask.”

  “How will we know when we’re there?” Mina asked.

  I smiled. She was in for a treat.

  There was light ahead: colourful cycling pulses of brilliance on an organic beat that seemed in time with my heartbeat. I found my footsteps following its rhythm.

  The tunnel opened into a huge, spherical rock bubble and I crawled out onto the inner surface of a world reversed. Above me the cavernous space, curved around to an antipodes over three hundred yards distant. The surface of the sphere was plated in reflective, prismatic panes of crystal that shimmered like the wings of butterflies. There was no obvious order to the riot of light but it had a chaotic beauty that fascinated rather than overwhelmed.

  I had the feeling of being an observer cast inside a huge glass prism, watching as the rainbow of colours was struck from white light.

  “Fuck me,” said Jura as it crawled out onto the inside of the sphere next to me.

  “I know,” I said. “Beautiful isn’t it?”

  “I meant fuck me, there are lots of them.”

  Chirikti crawled all over the inside surface of the sphere. Each was an identical oblate disc about a metre across at the widest point. Their leathery surface gave them the appearance of headless sea turtles but instead of flippers, branching limbs extended from their carapace at approximately two, four, eight and ten o’clock on
the dial of their disc-like bodies. They wore clothing of photo-reactive film that glistened like soap bubbles in the refracted light that filled the sphere.

  “Stay close,” I said as Mina and Albright Smith crawled out of the tunnel.

  I checked my shibboleth. The university had issued me with enough for a day in the vespiary. Split four ways it would only last a few hours, but that should be enough. The adhesive patch of volatile resin attached to my suit would boil away at a steady rate, surrounding me in a perfume of pheromones that identified me as a legitimate visitor. It acted like a peptide marker on a cell; without the shibboleth we would be torn apart by the vespiary’s equivalent of an immune response.

  I approached one of the Chirikti, walking slowly towards it so as not to outpace the invisible cloud of protection provided by the shibboleth. It was working on one of the vespiary’s computer nodes, routine maintenance by the look of it. Although it made no reaction as I advanced, I could see the cluster of black eyes on the front of its carapace and knew that I was in its field of vision.

  Chirikti language included body posture and limb-glyphs, a kind of semaphore with the front limbs. Fortunately they had evolved as an arboreal species so orientation was not important: I would not have to drop to all fours in order to communicate.

  I delivered the query I had prepared, something like a material requisition but phrased with a casual postural context and a structure of hormonal graphemes that I hoped would be compatible with the underlying identification markers of my shibboleth. Parallel with the query, I released a cocktail of complex, volatile hydrocarbons which basically said, “Excuse my accent, I’m new in town.” Composing this one phrase had taken several days. This was what Mina was paying me for. This, and my ability to get us out alive.

  The chemicals were released from a small dispenser in the chest-plate of my suit. I waited, holding my posture in a one-foreleg-raised salute that was strangely human while the chemicals perfumed the atmosphere around me. I tried not to shake. This was the crucial time: if the Chirikti found my query to be inconsistent with the agreed parameters of my mission (as encoded in the chemical signature of my shibboleth) then the best we could hope for was escape.