Beyond the Sky: Chapter 18
Unintended Consequences
The human sounded like he let out some air, another cryptic expression. Despite her emotions, Takji admired the Cepic girl’s gall. She doubted that’d be her first request, confronted by an alien creature from the stars.
“It is not that simple,” Benson replied. “You have my sympathies, but I cannot intervene in that way.”
“Why not?” Velli demanded. Takji worried for her, insolent in the face of such power.
“First, we came here to bring peace, not make war. The second will require some explanation. Follow me.” He tapped the door-button, it slid open and Takji followed the two of them into the immaculate white hallway. Another door at the end stood closed, Takji thought she saw the skin-crawling gait of another alien walking past behind a window, then Benson went right and opened another door.
Velli let out a brief shriek.
“Do not be afraid,” an alien voice spoke Mesprenian in a female tone. “My intentions are peaceful.”
Takji peered in. Another room, this one windowless save for a pane of glass at the far end which appeared to open on a tank of water, and a wooden table in front of it.
Standing beside one chair was a predatory creature. Though alien, that much was obvious: pointed ears, forward-set eyes and a snout with sharp teeth. It stood bipedal like a human, and wore a jet-black uniform over rust-brown fur. Behind her was another pane of display-glass, this one black, showing wireframe depictions of a craft shaped like a triple-sided arrowhead with two sets of notches in each fin, oriented up like a tower. The spaceship? It looked magnificent.
“This is Agent Selva of the Existential Risks Directorate,” Benson introduced the Predator.
“Existential?” Takji asked.
“It means I’m an expert in the many myriad ways a developing civilization like yours can destroy itself,” Selva replied.
“Which you’re here to stop,” Velli reiterated. “Then why can’t you free my homeland?”
“We have a rule, a protocol, against interference in civilizations like yours before we can predict the consequences.”
“But you must know what’s going on, if you’ve been watching our broadcasts and sending the Black Triangle to spy!”
“Survey,” Benson insisted.
“We do.” Selva tapped the table, whose surface revealed itself as yet another display. On it appeared pictures and videos of demolished buildings, burning vehicles, and running troops, all with the Flyer’s-eye view of an observation satellite.
“Then do something!”
“That may trigger the very catastrophe we hope to avoid.” Selva looked to Takji. “How would your nation react, if we were to retract our observation shield and reveal this three-hundred-meter ship orbiting your planet?”
Takji replied, “Not well, I imagine.” The early-warning radars could see the little re-entry cones of ballistic warheads, they’d scream a fit over an alien spacecraft—she still had trouble believing that was a real thing. Here she was, talking to aliens, while a thousand miles below, her father ate lunch.
“Still, it has to be worth trying!”
“You may be surprised.” Benson turned to the glass tank, inside which were two lumps like purple-and-blue rocks. Takji had noticed them earlier, but paid them little heed.
The ‘rocks’, it turned out, were alive. Each one’s base was an anchor or foot of some sort, to hold it to a surface, and the top lifted up like a shell. Eyes and little tendrils extended out.
Takji felt woozy. “Don’t tell me those are—”
“Intelligent beings,” replied Selva. “Their species is the Lempusians, originating from a world we call Perelandra.”
She gestured to the display panel behind her, which turned to show a planet of blue oceans and huge white clouds, alien text rolling past on the sides as if taken from the nose camera of an approaching ship.
Selva continued, “The Lempusian species is, as you may surmise, exclusively aquatic, not unlike your Deep Ones, as far as we know. Their homeworld is a single ocean, with only scattered volcanic islands as land. Can you guess what that meant for them?”
“Well, they’d have trouble talking to anyone on land.” Takji thought. “Or is this one of those worlds with only one species?”
“It is. Yours constitutes the only known exception. Imagine their civilization, something fundamental.”
It hit her. “No fire!”
“Exactly. Fire is the foundation of all industrial technology, but one cannot light a fire underwater. Without access to fire, the Lempusians could not smelt metals. Now consider how much of your society’s technology depends upon that.”
“All of it?” Takji offered. Even the Deep Ones based a lot of their works on metals washed down from surface-dwellers.
“Or very nearly so. The Lempusians weren’t completely primitive, they developed aquatic agriculture and a rich cultural history, but had little luck at material progress—their technology base had been static for several millennia before first contact.”
“Then, with the best of intentions,” Benson said, “We tried to help. It was simple enough: give them terranaut suits and teach them to build forges on land, then ever more complex devices until they too could build spaceships and travel between worlds.”
“It did not work out that way.” Selva tapped the desk, bringing up a picture of a Lempusian city, an artificial reef of bulb-like dwellings floating in clusters from ropes anchored to the seabed. Then, an explosion burst one. “We were careful to involve only peaceful cultures in our uplift project, but a warlike tribe stole equipment and set up its own smelters in secret, crafting weapons and armor. Then, they attacked.”
“The starmen hoped to improve our lives by giving us technology,” a voice whose gender Takji couldn’t quite place spoke. A Lempusian—a light on one of the round-topped beings flashed. “Instead, their efforts caused chaos which is still ongoing. I have not returned to my planet since.”
“Mendicant and Acolyte were bards and story-tellers, members of an order dedicated to traveling between settlements,” Benson said.
“Traits which made us natural candidates for assisting in first contact,” Mendicant replied. “And which bring us here now in hopes of averting a similar disaster on your world.”
“Hence our hesitance in intervening, or even showing our presence,” said Selva. “There’s many things we could give you with great potential to improve your lives. But if we did so, and came back five years later, we might find you enslaving each other with computerized surveillance, or cooking up plagues with genetic engineering, or dropping buildings from the sky with repulsors.”
Takji asked, “What if we don’t want your help?” More and more she felt a burning loyalty to her nation, perhaps soon to face the greatest crisis in all history.
“If that is the sentiment of your entire world and its people, we will leave you alone. But, as for now, we cannot stand by and watch you plunge yourselves into thermonuclear holocaust.”
Benson said, “You’re here as a preparatory step. Normally, when we find an inhabited world, we remain at a distance to observe until we’ve learned enough to initiate contact—language, culture, current events, et cetera. Before we do that, we go down and find a few residents to take up and interview, to fill any remaining gaps.”
“But this is not normal?”
“Indeed,” Selva replied. “While industrial civilizations are nearly always in precarious situations, we did not expect things to be quite this bad. Then, we detected this.”
The display screen showed a top-down image of desert land with hills, trees, and a river.
“That’s the Slee city where you encountered our shuttle,” Benson said. “The river is radioactive.”
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