Filling in the Blank

Chapter 11

Defeated by the bluntness of what she had just said, I turned up my internal clock, causing the world around me to all but freeze in place. When familiarizing me with the controls of my new body, Brian had warned me that this was a skill to be used sparingly, that the extra heat it gave off could damage my computing substrate. Right now, I didn't care. I needed some of that composure she appeared to have in such abundance. I needed time to take a deep breath and to settle a racing mind. Most of all I needed a response to what she had just said. If I didn't find some way out of this impasse in the next few minutes, our entire mission could fall apart before it had even begun – if only I could find the right words... But even at its slowed rate, time continued its ticking, the woman still awaited my reply. Taking one more moment to pull myself together, I dropped back to normal speed.

I have been told I have that teacher's bad habit of addressing adults as if they were a misbehaving junior student. I suppose it is in times of stress that such unconscious traits come to the fore. "Gwyneth," I began, "what you just said to me is hugely rash, and hardly necessary. Consider what you are passing up. All the ways our societies could help each other. How about I agree to an extended quarantine? I will refrain from contact with anyone but you. That will give us time to explore the possibilities. There must be some common ground that allows us both to go away better off."

She allowed my little speech to come to an end.

"I'm sorry. This is not a negotiation."

"Okay then. What if we agree to go peacefully? Will you provide us with a copy of your ark ship archives? Surely there is no harm to you in handing over information about our own shared past, our own home planet. I mean, surely it's as much our birthright as yours? To go away empty handed after coming all this way ..."

Again she let me talk myself out before replying. "You misunderstand. You will not be allowed to return."

The world around me vanished, replaced by the dropship cabin virtuality. Brian was standing in front of me.

"What the ..."

Brian dismissed my surprise with a wave of the hand. "I've ramped up time but even so we need to keep this quick. Things have been happening here on the island. Our minders have been up to something. I was starting to suspect a weapon of some kind, and what she just said confirmed it. Listen, you need to put a stop to this right now. Tell her about the failsafe." He went on to explain while I just gaped at him with open mouth, trying to take it all in. Then he cut the connection and I dropped back into my body.

Composing myself, I put as much authority into my mechanical voice as I could.

"I've just received a message from my colleague on the dropship. You need to stop whatever you are doing this instant. We have a failsafe mechanism. Should any harm come to us, it will detonate."

She looked sceptical. "You mean that thing you landed in. On the island?"

"No. I mean our ship in orbit." A corner of my mind picked up something in her reaction. Did she really not know about the ship? I pushed the question aside. Right now, I had other priorities. "Do you have any idea how much energy it takes to travel between stars?" I asked her. "We have enough up there for our return journey. If the containment fails it will go off like a miniature supernova, flooding your world in lethal levels of radiation. Nothing down here will survive."

The scepticism remained. "You would do that? Murder our entire population in retaliation for two ... what are you? A talking computer program?"

"I am as real as you are. But forget about that for a moment. Do you realize what you are doing? You accused me of vandalism, and yet here you are destroying any chance of peace between our worlds before we even know anything about each other."

"Earth is a long way away. It will be decades before anyone else arrives."

"You can't know that. And when they get here, knowing what happened to us, they won't come unarmed."

Her expression shifted to one of disdain. "How could they know what happened to you? You're the historian, professor. You know how it works. History is what the history books say it is. And none of ours will make any mention of you. As far as posterity is concerned, you never arrived."

"But why? When all you are doing is delaying the inevitable?"

She shrugged. "We are buying time. If that follow-up mission ever gets here, we will be ready for it."

I was about to argue back but then stopped myself. Shook my head. "Look this is all beside the point. It doesn't matter what the history books do or don't say because the evidence of our passing will be seared across the surface of your planet. Whatever you are planning to do, you need to stop it right now."

"You're bluffing."

"Am I? You want to take that risk?" For once I felt grateful for my mechanical poker face, my nervousness hidden beneath its blank façade.

She held my gaze for a moment longer, then relented. She extracted a device from the folds of her gown, turning to one side to speak into it. I couldn't make out the words but I was almost certain that the language she was using was the same one we had just been speaking. So it was true. They really did use Old English, really had preserved it unchanged for a thousand years. She turned back to me.

"It seems we have a stalemate."