“Second World War, for starters. Think on it. You’re stuck in the blitz in London, and some strange dude offers you a way out. The chance for you and a few others to start a new life on a new world. The only price is that you can’t ever come back. You know you’d take that offer. We’ve got close to twenty terraformed planets now, every one of which cost us the biggest financial and political effort our species has ever known. If we’d spent half that much fixing Earth, we’d have us a genuine paradise. But no, getting a second chance is the greatest human dream and delusion we have. It even outranks religion.”
“Benign aliens intervening to save us?” Yuri sneered. “What’s that, second on the wish list?”
Alik spread his hands wide. “Then why are humans on board?”
“We don’t have nearly enough information yet to confirm the intent.”
“Hell, man, I know that. I’m offering up possibilities, that’s all. Thinking wide. That’s why we’re all here, aren’t we? Everything is up for consideration.”
“So which do you think it is?” Kandara challenged. “You put up a good case for them being benign. Are they saving worthy people from Earth’s brutality, or are they hostile imperialists, capturing specimens for the all-time rectal probing record in their laboratory?”
Alik gave her a quick salute. “I’m prepared for it to be the hostile, but intellectually I’m kinda thinking it’s unlikely.”
“Why?” Yuri said, his voice sharpening.
“Every reason given. You don’t cross interstellar space for conquest. You do it for politics and wanderlust, like we have; and you do it for science, like we also have. But most interesting motive of all: as art. Because you can.”
“You are a fool if you think that. You are assigning human behavioral traits to aliens—the worst form of anthropomorphism and intellectual dishonesty. They have taken these people, most likely against their will. Whoever they are, they’re not our friends.”
“You’ve prejudged, then?”
“My judgment comes from the—admittedly small—amount of information we’ve uncovered so far. It is what we don’t know that bothers me even more. The potential for conflict here is enormous. Aliens can affect us in the most subtle ways. Our encounters with them show that we are always changed.”
“Them?” Eldlund queried. “How many do you think we’ve encountered? As far as I’m aware, this is only the second.”
“It is,” Yuri said. “But look at what the Olyix have done to us.”
“They brought knowledge.”
“No, they didn’t; a few clever chunks of biotechnology, that’s all. Not real knowledge, no revelations. They’re the greatest example of passive-aggressive we’ve ever known. But what else do you expect from a bunch of religious fanatics?”
I’d heard this speech many times. It was one of the reasons I’d urged my boss to come on the expedition in person. My hope was that he’d open up to his peers in a way he never would to me and provide some kind of insight into his xenophobia. As Callum was to Emilja, so Yuri was to Ainsley—and a more paranoid sonofabitch you cannot find.
Kandara regarded Yuri with some surprise. “I don’t see the aggressive side of them. They seem more full-on passive to me.”
“That’s all part of the act. They adapt to circumstances. I don’t blame them; it’s an excellent survival trait, which is exactly what you need if you’re on a voyage to the end of time. Even the Olyix don’t know what they’re going to encounter next, so they have to be ready for anything.”
“Are you saying we’re not seeing the real them?”
“No, quite the opposite. They see us, and adapt themselves to the systems we live by. That is the real them, even though for us it’s looking into a mirror.”
“You, the Sol system, turned them into traders,” Callum said.
“Of course we did,” Yuri said. “They came, they looked around, they saw what they had to do to get the energy they needed to rebuild their antimatter fuel supply—and they did it. No hesitation, no regrets. And to hell with the consequences.”
“And there are consequences to them trading Kcells with us?” Eldlund asked in surprise. “I don’t see how. Kcell treatments have saved the lives of millions of people in the Universal star systems. People who are too poor to afford stem cell printing and cloned organs. That’s the only outrage here.”
“I’m not saying Kcells have been bad for us,” Yuri said. “But the nature of the Olyix, this adaptability, is detrimental when they encounter a species with politics as complex as ours. They lack discrimination. Because they are driven so relentlessly to achieve their own goal, it doesn’t matter to them how they achieve it. They need our money to buy our electricity, so they will adopt our own methodology to obtain it. Any methodology we have, they see an opportunity. Anything else is probably a sin to them.”
“You object to them because they’ve become capitalists?” Eldlund exclaimed.
“No,” Callum taunted. “It’s because they’re better capitalists.”