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Before you go on a multiple-year trip accessible only by hyperspace relay, you download every out-of-copyright-work of art, literature or science your civilization has ever produced and stick it on your ship's computer. You do this even if you are, frankly, kind of dumb; it is just the obvious thing to do. You are not going to think of everything you need, and no matter HOW confident you are that five-dimensional math is beyond you or that you have no interest in the works of Falazon-2114, some conceivable emergency might mean that you need to repair a damaged hyperdrive or persuade a colony founded on his works that they desperately need to join the League, and when it is essentially costless to take everything, that is what you do.
This, at any rate, is common knowledge known even to the pilot of the Finite But Extremely Large Bounty, whose true name is a thirty-six digit hexadecimal string and whose usename incorporates sounds found not only not in English, but not in any language spoken by dogs, chimpanzees, mosquitoes, or any other entity that does not prefer to communicate exclusively via signal broadcast. We can call him Nau, or Fodion, or GODDAMN IT, since these are all noises he is going to make very, very soon.
Not that any emergency has hit. No, he's had a peaceful trip; no need to exercise self-control, no need to make decisions calling for twice his intelligence, just regular drop-offs of signal beacons to mark his progress and slightly less regular placement of mining replicators on the occasional unusually valuable asteroid; when the pickup ship comes in his wake, it will find the asteroids neatly sorted into their component materials, all carefully packaged and floating by the beacons for immediate delivery to the nearest orbital factory. He's been being choosier than most miners would, with his beacons, but the whole point of taking a job mining asteroids is so you can generate positive value for the world without ever having to interact with any part of it that is not best primarily understood with reference to Newtonian motion, and the longer his trip, the more he can stay in his cabin, reading books written when the League's average IQ was three standard deviations lower than it is today and even mostly following them.
And as long as no emergency hits, that's exactly what he's going to be able to keep doing. He sets his hyperdrive going and -
There is not exactly a publicized plan about for the eventuality but it doesn't look like there's a lot of qualms going around about killing them quicker than that.
If he explains, very firmly to the greens in charge of studying him, that the League of Meridiana will not accept mass murder of reds, how exactly does the internet suggest the Amentans would react to this?
(He is not doing this yet, to be clear. He is just sitting quietly and thinking and looking stuff up on the internet and letting his machines whir.)
Amenta's internet does not have a Hypothetical Situation Answers Generator but after absorbing enough of the general culture he can guess that they might just cut all their child credits instead.
... And not, say, declare war on the aliens? He's a little worried about that possibility, what with being THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF A TRAINED DIPLOMAT.
Amenta likes aliens and wants to be friends! This does not get less true when the aliens have overwhelming technological and strategic advantages!
Huh. Wow.
(The Traveler will admit that he is the sort of person who considers destroying planets in fits of rage for literally negative strategic benefit, which is one of the MANY, MANY, MANY reasons he did not consider a diplomatic job for one second.)
... Still, he has a hook for talking to these people.
He's going to send a message to Tashi Tosuk.
I know about Piki Tai's death and the reds. We have a problem.
Would you like to see the security details for your site? It's much better-protected since it didn't need to be in any specific location or have access to any particular facilities, I'm very confident you're safe.
I appreciate that, but you don't understand the nature of the problem.
The three things wrong are that you told me nothing and I started a project that got attacked by terrorists and then someone died just before we could implement immortality, that I could not plan for this even though I strongly suspect you knew it would happen because you didn't tell me that it was a risk that people working on automation might get killed by reds, and the biggest one, which is that the League of Meridiana is going to panic when they learn about reds.
They are not going to learn about them in the context of a friend of theirs being murdered.
They are going to learn about them in the context of 'so, there are these people being bullied by their government'.
They are not going to think of the situation as more complicated than that.
If you try to do anything final about the reds, they will know that, and then they will not give you spaceships, because they would react about the same way that they wish they had reacted to the Unity of Man when it appeared - quarantining it to its home planets before it could accumulate any resources, because they made the opposite mistake before and they don't want to make it again.
They will not particularly care that the reds engaged in terrorism, and insofar as they do, they will solve it by putting you and them on different planets, assuming there are any of them left.
We need to find a reasonable solution that doesn't kill the reds and doesn't make the League want to leave you trapped on Amenta forever and get everyone on board before the diplomats show up to start negotiating.
And I need your help cooperating because I don't understand Amentans and will botch everything if I try to do anything on my own but I need you to be willing to talk to me about this.
(That series of messages involved a rapidly-improvised Amentan style guide and the computer's careful assistance with phrasing, and took about half an hour of preparation work before he felt ready to say anything to anyone.)
I'm so sorry, I should have realized that it would be a particular shock when you're from a much more advanced society. I don't expect it to be much consolation but Tai did know the risks and chose to work on the project.
What sorts of solutions to the red situation would work? It's politically realistic to pension them off with no child credits, but some of our analysts think that risks more violence from them.
I understand that, but though it helps - this is still a shock. I was thinking of Amenta as safe, so if I'm somewhat - overly emotional - my apologies for that.
(There, that will help explain why he's prepared to tolerate them. And it's even true - he doesn't know what would have happened if that green hadn't been so unreasonable, and gotten all his emotional energy redirected at the people lying to him. Not that he wouldn't kill the murderers himself, if they got away, but he can still see the horror of all of this, not just his own corner.)
The essential question is how we can get them contained without wiping them out, but I don't understand pollution well enough to understand how containment would have to work.
They just need to be prevented from directly touching anything we can't wash before we touch it. If they no longer provide essential services we can move them somewhere more out of the way where they have fewer opportunities to commit crimes, though my assistant's telling me it would be logistically nightmarish to sterilize them all first - not that many doctors learn to perform those surgeries - and enforcing population controls isn't easy and would get harder if they were all penned up together somewhere en masse.
Ugh. He knows where he wants to steer the Amentans, he just isn't sure how to get them there. Why couldn't someone COMPETENT have landed.
And they're prepared to do whatever terrorism they need to do to make sure they still control essential services. A difficult problem.
A few more questions, then, so I understand the situation better.
First: What do the researchers think the timeline on hyperdrive looks like? How long do we have to solve this problem?
Second: I assume you don't have any way to fix the hereditary pollution, or you already would have done it.
Third: Are there any - I don't know, red community leaders, you can talk to, who might be able to enforce a deal on their own people? I don't like the idea of letting anyone get away with this, but it's easier to get surrenders if you can talk to the enemy commanders.
Fourth: What power to coordinate on implementing any solution we find can Amenta manage? How well coordinated is the planet?
(He stops typing, looks at what he's written with distaste, edits it, sends it.)
1. They're hoping five years, but that sort of estimate is much more often too optimistic than too pessimistic.
2. That's right, all the methods that would do it would also kill the red.
3. I've called in the head of the red social work department and he says those exist but aren't particularly trustworthy.
4. Tapa's a well respected country; if we do something, and it works, and we explain why it's necessary to placate our neighbors, we can expect pretty good uptake. But we don't have the power to unilaterally enforce anything and even if we had enough of a coalition to do that we don't realistically project enough power at enough granularity to prevent every individual town from defecting.
Five years is too optimistic. Five Amentan years. He was hoping an Amentan season. Well. That will make some things easier.
I can fix hereditary pollution but I can't get the reds behind me and I don't have the budget and I have no idea how you can get the political will.
But the technology, I can do.
When you came here, you wanted to make sure I didn't bring any pollution with me. I thought you meant germs not the broader sense, and I told you - twice, you asked again, later, more anxiously - that anything that came with me had been heated in the impact to the boiling temperature of water. That my initial body had been broken and shattered when I landed, making me improvise one out of my reserves of Sarengha steel. That this is not the body I was born with; that the only thing that was left of me was my brain, which is in a near-hermetically sealed container that does not interact with my body except via transmitting electrical impulses to the chip in my head.
You said that was acceptable.
Rule of thumb: I can print four cynodes - brain-interface-computers - every ten minutes. I need designs for how to adapt it to Amentan biology; once I get a working design, I can convert about two hundred thousand Amentans a year if I have the Sarengha steel, which is less difficult to develop than cynodes. Sterilization is a side effect, but Imai* doesn't worry about that, because we can synthesize new copies of anyone's genome any time we want, and we use artificial wombs anyway. It also provides excellent life extension, since your only risk is brain damage.
Small problem: The first people we test it on, it might not work; it's only been done for humans, before. I expect the first test subjects might die.
Large problem: We would be giving terrorists immortality before we give it to old, dying people. I have no idea how to possibly spin this, other than to try to get Amentan technology to the point where it doesn't need me to print the cynodes and make enough for everyone before we get help from the League.
Only upside: It could theoretically solve both problems and I don't have any better ideas yet.
Nau is so glad they can't see what his face looks like right now.
More than three times that many Amentans are born every year; that pace can't keep up with our old and dying even if we make it understood that the reds are test subjects to make it palatable that they go first.
Then our new problem is: How do we get Amenta to the point where it can mass-produce the cynodes? Or else: How do we find a better solution?
It trades off to some extent against the hyperdrive, since both would require engineers and similar, but I'm getting the sense it might be better to have the reds' pollution all safely boxed up in bodies like yours before we go to meet them, is that right?
The price of that is that delays in meeting them are delays in them giving you all this technology we're reinventing, but yes; I don't know what they'd do, I might be worrying about nothing, but it's a risk that I would guess you don't want to take. The Unity of Man made everyone jumpy.
(Jumpy his ass, the Unity of Man kills stars for short-term military advantage. But there's 'jumpy' and there's 'desperate', and nobody wants to look desperate.)
That is unfortunate. I was hoping for a lower overlap there between cyberneticists, biologists and computer programmers on the one hand, and materials scientists and physicists on the other. But if resources are a constraint, it might be worth expanding resources first anyway, so we have more to devote to the projects.
I'm sure everyone is going as fast as they can. We've been hoping for something like this to happen for a long time.
Then why do you still have reds. The further back in your history you killed them, the better it would be for you when someone ethical caught up to you! It can't be a conscience matter, your conscience has a red-shaped hole!
And I am happy to help.
For, you know, certain limited values of 'happy'.