Part Praesep Dand
Teniec/Safni/Iskurahi
- 1.3E10

 Making Textual Contributions to the Teklanmeh

        For those people who enjoy writing and who wish to make a textual contribution to the Teklanmeh, we ask that you follow these few simple guidelines:

        First, you need only list your own name; that of your State, World of origin, and any position you may hold in an Iskurahi Division; the year in which you are presenting your submission in the predominant date system of your world; then the title of your document. These should be placed at the head of your document in the relative positions you see in this one.

        Your document can be of any length, written in any language, and presented in any format you wish. The Teklanmeh, with its expert system capabilities, will then translate it into the language, document format, and date system any person who subsequently accesses it may be accustomed to. The Teklanmeh will also hyperword the document so that a reader will be able to expand individual words or paragraphs, including title information, by indicating them either verbally or tactilely. Hyperwording can also include links to other Teklanmeh documents of any type. To allow easy browsing, the Teklanmeh will also abstract longer documents so that they will seldom exceed 2000 words in length. In such cases a reader's Otinda will immediately present him with fuller length options. Where an Otinda cannot translate a word from the language of the author to that of the reader, it will insert the nearest transliteration instead. This will be highlighted if presented visually, or accompanied by a chime or other such aural indicator if enunciated verbally. The transliterated word will nevertheless be a hyperword so that the reader can research its meaning in the normal way either immediately or at some later time.

        Graphics of any type, static or dynamic, may be included in a document. Should the reader require the document to be read to him aurally, his Otinda will advise him of the presence of these graphics, their type, and the insertion points in the text where they occur. He can then have them presented on that or any other Otinda of his choosing. The author may specify these insertion points if he wishes, otherwise the Teklanmeh will insert them according to its own judgment.

        The Teklanmeh attaches two numbers to each document accepted for publication. The first number simply increments each time the document is accessed by persons other than its author. This allows readers the opportunity to access only the most frequently accessed documents on a particular topic if they so wish. The second number records the approval rating in percentage terms previous readers have assigned to the document; new readers can insert their own if they wish either verbally or tactilely in the box provided. As a form of peer review, only specialists in particular fields of study and accredited as such by the Iskurahi, can register their approval of documents written solely for other such specialists to read.

        The Teklanmeh will at its discretion edit any non specialist document to ensure readability by as large a potential audience as possible. The more objectively factual your document is, the more likely the reader will be able to reproduce in his mind what was in your mind at the time of writing. For this reason colloquialisms are best avoided since accurate translations may not be possible and may lead to misunderstanding or even inadvertent offense. Should the Teklanmeh make any emendations to your document, it will present it to you again to allow a final submission to be jointly arrived at. Since the storage capacity of the Teklanmeh can be considered to be infinite, it is only likely to reject those documents that fall gravely short of its minimum standards of publishability.

        This indefinite storage capacity also means no document need be erased once it is published. The Teklanmeh may however erase a document if another person can demonstrate that it is significantly inaccurate in whole or in part. Should the author or any other person wish to make emendations to a document after its publication, including its total erasure, he or she must first seek the permission of the Teklanmeh. The Teklanmeh may recommended that any large emendations be recorded in a separate document which can then be cross-referenced via hyperwording to the original.

        Like much of the technology provided by the Eonmern, the Teklanmeh carries the risk of inducing addictive behavior. It can detect its own overuse or misuse in this respect however, and will if necessary notify the Lalleldil Division, who will then determine if some form of intervention is necessary. Behavioral training to reduce the risk of this eventuality occurring is therefore recommended for any young or otherwise susceptible people who are allowed access to it.
 

Illalia Ontamurdi Das
Fertitriu/Iskurahi
+ 2049

Jarra - A Brief Modern History

        What is the `normal' development of a scientific culture? One might say, as with all other such definitions involving the notion of normalcy, that it is `what the majority of those who observe it describe as being normal'. A world's scientific culture would either have to be seriously lacking in at least one major technology to be described as `abnormal', or it develops all the `normal' ones in an unconventional order. As an instance of the former, some cultures fail to develop a means of storing electrical energy in a light, compact container comparable to our Lotsus. This can hamper them in many ways, since it means that many of their devices, from vehicular transport to simple home appliances, have to be powered by means that can be inefficient, inconvenient, or even dangerous. Such power sources can involve wind or solar energy, which seldom produce enough power, or internal combustion engines run from combustible gasses like hydrogen or methane, or flammable hydrocarbon liquids such as kerosene and petroleum. The liquids at least offer some portability, though the engines these fuel need well ventilated environments which may, if there are sufficiently high numbers of them, then become polluted. The major price such cultures have to pay is that the development of robots is severely impeded, since these utterly depend on compact but capacious power supplies. This in turn discourages the faster development of comparators upon which artificial consciousness depends, which can mean such `retarded' cultures Contact much later than their more `normal' counterparts.

        As an instance of a case where a scientific culture develops `out of normal order', one need look no further than the world of Jarra, which the Iskurahi is at this time of writing,  just about to Contact. Indeed one could almost go so far as to describe it as a `classic' example. On most worlds cybernetics is usually discovered in a scientific context, most often in the early days of its communications or computer sciences. On Jarra it was discovered in an anthropological context during its early industrial evolution. A young woman, Gigon Trez Sompt, from the equatorial country of Talda, extracted its basic principles by wandering round her world studying its primitive societies. When she returned home, she showed how the complex manner in which the members of their communities interacted with each other maintained the structure of that community, which in turn governed the nature of those interactions, and so on. But most importantly, she showed most convincing how the very same feedback loops still operated virtually intact under all the social trappings of her own `advanced' society. Not a popular revelation at all as you can imagine since it made people wonder if they weren't machines. But nobody could find fault with what she said then any more than anybody probably could today.

        They weren't to know it, but from that point on their machines began their inexorable march towards becoming people. For it didn't take long for Jarran genius to realize that the basic principles of cybernetics could be applied to science, technology, economics, in fact virtually anything. That period came to be known as the `Quiet Explosion'. Yet though it produced some amazing science and technology, they didn't catch on to everything. For instance, when it came to machines that operate in a purely mechanical way, Jarra had no real advantage over anybody else. They only created their first fission bomb five years ago, so they are only now learning how to handle a Balance of Terror situation. The whole planet is also awash with fossil fuels, which may have delayed their Lotsu-equivalents. Nothing moves here without it. Their computer technology is relatively crude, yet their comparators, so vital to the development of artificial consciousness, are brilliant. And that's why of course we are about to Contact them.

        But like all new concepts with practical applications anywhere, cybernetics can be a double-edged sword, and that has certainly proven to be the case on Jarra. The intense relationship that can so rapidly build up between Capitalism and Cybernetics on any world soon enabled a few of Jarra's richer capitalist countries to grow bigger than the others at a rate far beyond their social and political maturity to cope with. These then began to dominate their neighbors in a highly fascistic way, with that of the already wealthy and very large country of Ri Anarada becoming leader of the pack. And it dominated with a version of fascism a lot tougher and more insidious than it becomes on most worlds. It didn't just try to crush all before it with an enormous military machine. Here you have to use the Jarran concept of a machine. Ri Anarada softened up its victims first by infiltrating their economic systems like a virus taking over a cell. This then added their resources to their own. Before long it would have those of two entire continents behind it.

        In those circumstances the only defense a target country can develop is an economic one: ruthlessly centralize the control of the economy in the name of extreme civil emergency. Unfortunately, the first countries to try that quickly found they had no way of preventing their government officials from being corrupted by Ri Anaradan infiltrators. Except, that is, for a small country called Shappen. It had been taken over by a tiny political party who had seen right from the start the dehumanizing effect the Quiet Explosion was having on the people in the `Capitalist Hegemony'. They wanted to preserve the old values of Home, Family, Nation, indeed it was their words for them from which they derived the name we know them by: `Tinik'. But they also knew they would have to use the new cybernetic techniques to develop ways of achieving that and resisting the corruption. They didn't just became propagandists who turned ideals into slogans like most Socialists do, they lived them as well, traditionally always very difficult for socialists to manage for some reason. But from all accounts they really were excellent people, and their population looked up to them. This made it easier to set up their carefully designed cybernetic sets of checks and balances that made infiltration by outsiders nearly impossible. And that of course didn't only extend to its civil service, but right throughout the country's sources of production and distribution as well. Then, as commonly happens with socialist societies, its people.

        One might say that, in order to survive, they had to become paranoid.

        But of course it wasn't only the Ri Anaradan infiltration the Tinik had to think about. The threat of their conventional military juggernaut had grown in response as well. The Tinik knew if they wanted to maintain their values in their own country, they would have to extend them to as many other countries as they could to enable them to build their own military machine in response. They too were now in a race for territory. So with time so short, they had to resort to infiltrational techniques only slightly different from those of the Ri Anaradans. Many countries offered little resistance, it was either takeover by Ri Anarada or takeover by the Tinik, and they just happened to prefer the Tinik.

        Planet-wide war was virtually inevitable, and indeed it broke out just ten years after the Quiet Explosion began. Ri Anarada made a pre-emptive attack on the Tinik thinking their ability to oppose them was minimal. Military technology was still not particularly advanced at that time; machine-guns, battle cruisers and tanks had come into existence, propellor-driven aircraft were all that flew. Although Ri Anarada had a lot more hardware, they couldn't trust anybody but their own men to do the actual fighting. The Tinik could put up millions more men and, with their kind of propaganda, infuse them with a lot more incentive. All that resulted was a very bloody Balance of War for nearly three years until both sides finally negotiated an `Agree to Differ' kind of truce. The two blocs have managed to maintain it in the fifty years since, but at a very stiff price. The Ri Anaradans have become like the machines they are so brilliant at producing, the Tinik have become subverted by their own propaganda into jingoistic bloody-mindedness.

        Our Contact negotiations will therefore need to be very sensitively conducted. The Tinik may see us as representing a Ri Anaradan ideological victory, the Ri Anaradans as a Tinikan one. After all, we don't have an economic system at all, so we could be seen to be a socialist paradise. On the other hand, the Torsyne universe is the ultimate product of what was probably the greatest and most extraordinary capitalist system ever to exist.

        Also, as you can imagine, the military hardware on both sides has improved considerably if still unevenly since that `Great War', as it has since become known. A single example is all that is needed here. Although their fighter planes are little more than simple turbojets barely able to make the speed of sound, the Ri Anaradans are as good at surgery as they are at artificial intelligence. If one of their citizens has an accident which turns them into a paraplegic, they have another option besides euthanasia if they have the requisite skills. They can have their brain literally transplanted into a plane that has been modified to allow them to control it with their brain impulses direct. Even without the special inbuilt endorphin reward system, the experience apparently induces the ultimate in euphoria.

        One interesting feature of Jarra's cybernetic precociousness is not that, like most worlds, it evolved two superpowers, but that it did so with such vengeance. This may well reinforce the popular belief in the Teklanmeh that virtually all worlds that have evolved a science-based culture will gravitate towards a political dichotomy anyway, no matter what the prevailing political ideologies might be, socialist, capitalist, fascist, racist, whatever. This is something we in the Iskurahi have consistently observed throughout our own long history. The most unstable political systems are where you have three or more roughly equal parties. Why? One of the favorite theories in the Teklanmeh is that it basically boils down to the equally ancient notion that: `if you are not for us you're against us'. It doesn't matter what size a population might be, a few tens, or tens of trillions like the ancient Hysadder, all its factions will eventually form alliances and shuffle themselves down through a form of `For Us - Against Us' sieve to just two superfactions.

        And Jarra has certainly provided a classic example of such forces in operation.

        These forces of course also affect the people that, in the end, make up those `superfactions'. Jarran newsmedia provide a good example here. As you would expect, while both promote `the free expression of information and ideas', Tinikan media is hamstrung by ideology, the Ri Anaradan's by the commercial need to provide profitable entertainment. The only choice the people have in the end is which form of oppression they prefer. This produces a higher level of fanaticism than you see on most pre-Contact worlds, which in turn encourages all manner of behaviors, from intense loyalties to crimes of the most devious and highly-organised kind. 

        What hope for Jarra then in the face of Contact with a culture that to them will seem alien in the extreme, in spite of our being of the same human appearance? The one factor they have in their favor is that religion has never played a significant role in Jarran history, that is one challenge we do not have to face. Both superpowers were founded on the principles of objective rationality which, in spite of outward appearances, there is still much evidence for today. My overal impression therefore - hope, if you must - is that the situation is not intractable and that, with extreme care, the Tinik and Ri Anarada can both be brought, albeit separately, to a successful Contact.
 
 

         "This has to be the silliest, stupidest, most grotesque - horror - I've ever been dragged into in my entire life..!" 

        Quincey's struggle to get the words out only made her even more furious as yet another urn flew out of her hands and bounced off the wall in front of her.

        "Come on, Quince," Barkworth tried to comfort her  "At least we didn't finish up in there, " he pointed to the furnace rooms.

        She smiled at him very thinly indeed.

        "Here, pass me that crate of empty reds, will you?" Polson asked Barkworth in a voice trained to reassure. "A lot of these guys are coming through in the wrong colors just now."

        After Barkworth did so, Polson hurriedly filled the input rack of the contents-exchange machine with as many of the skittle-like red-banded urns as it would hold. He had already filled the other input rack with the blue-banded urns that had in the rush of things had been incorrectly filled with the wrong contents.

       "Zla..!" Barkworth heard Polson say both directly and through his Hilashel.

        Polson pressed the switch that would discretely correct the mistakes of the hard-pressed staff in the furnace rooms. A few seconds later the red-banded urns went shuffling down the output racks like the little soldiers they had once been, correctly colored, correctly filled, correctly documented.

        And the thought passed through Barkworth's mind for the umpteenth time that Earth could so easily have finished up like this...
 
 

        It hadn't seemed possible that characters like Polson Polsion could exist in this Paradise of Freeze-Dried Souls when Barkworth first met him all those decades ago. He hailed from the World of Palalacilemena (with all those syllables in that name, Barkworth had had to hear it several times before it finally stuck in his mind). Polson was the first Conversationalist Barkworth had met, and he was so profoundly impressed with the man's character that he had allowed him to draw him into that way of life. Being so young he had naturally considered becoming a Body rather than a Mind, but he knew his body wasn't really up to it, so Mind it would have to be. Besides, he had no particular yen to live hard and die fast before it all caught up with him.

        Polson had gently shown him that there was more to Conversation than merely extending one's education and developing the basic intellectual skills needed to `join battle' with other Conversationalists. You also had to develop the diplomatic skills that would enable you to coax a Conversation from virtually anybody. "That can be far more rewarding," Polson had said, and the words had remained with Barkworth over those many years since he had last seen him, "because you can draw upon a far wider experience of life. It also reduces the risk of going stale, as you would if you talked exclusively to other Conversationalists."

        Those words had again leapt back into Barkworth's mind as he ran into Polson again in that bizarre undersea-cave restaurant on Tilosola just three days ago. The chances of meeting somebody anew if you hadn't kept in touch via the Teklanmeh were all but nil, you had to be very lucky indeed. Now in his mid sixties, Polson's appearance was essentially unchanged except that twenty years had made him even more comfortable with it, if that was possible. His eyes were still a non-judgementorial pale blue, his hair that curly wire-like tonsure, only a little grayer now, that seems to go as universally with a florid build as a constant state of perspiration. He was dressed in an overall-like garment in what looked like a fine cream linen, but so elegantly cut as to belie what could so easily have been an unkempt appearance.

        Nor had his manner changed. Cheerful, even boisterous, on the surface, there was a proficiency and exactitude underlying it that made it clear there was no fuzzy thinking in that fuzzy frame.

        Twenty-odd years on, Barkworth had grown to resemble him in many ways. He was somewhat thinner though, and his hair was long and straight; parted to the left it hung almost to his collar. And while he too was dressed in white, his trousers were plain cotton and his upper garment a light cable-knit jersey. His shoes were also brown leather rather than the white molded linen Polson's resembled.

        It was almost as if Polson began to re-test his Conversational abilities there and then, perhaps to see `what he had wrought'. Straight away he got him into a discussion on the virtues of the 3D's in the Teklanmeh, immediately taking the opposite view to Barkworth's, which had been that writing enabled people to communicate subtle concepts that could not be expressed in any other way.

        "Math, art, human relationships," Barkworth had claimed. "Surely there's no other way you can cover the detail so concisely, yet so completely."

        "It can all be found in pure 3D's too, if you know where to look," Polson had laughed. "I've met a good many writers, and they're all mastos, the lot of them. I wouldn't trust their point of view on the art of breaking wind."

        "And none of the 3D composers are I suppose?" Barkworth had countered. "In any case, no new art completely supplants earlier ones. Just as most worlds retain a few of the species of the primitive life it began with, there's always a niche for old art forms. We still have traveling orators roaming through Paradise, and they preceded writers on virtually all worlds."

        Polson laughed out loud. "And to think I could have spent the rest of my life as a Conversationalist. But now I've got a real job - and if you keep in touch I might just be able to help get you one too. It's not uncommon for Conversationalists - "

        At that point Quincey returned from `powdering myself somewhere' as she usually put it. From the look on his face Barkworth wondered if Polson would have made his offer if she had returned just a few seconds earlier. He was clearly assuming that if two people looked different from each other, then they must be from different worlds. And he obviously felt uneasy about people from different worlds `getting too close', which Barkworth found surprising.

        But then, to be fair, Quincey didn't look too Earthlike, or even Brazilian. Very tall and impossibly thin, she was covered head to foot in freckles that made her look as if she was somehow covered in rust. Her light hazel eyes and thin, almost mousy hair tied in a bun at the nape of her neck matched those freckles exactly, and that only emphasized their color contrast against her milk-coffee skin. It was perhaps unfortunate that she had also chosen on that day to wear a long belted dress covered in little blue and yellow daisies. On her they just looked like more freckles, and multicolored ones at that.

        Barkworth could really say to himself with a fair degree of honesty when he first met her that he really had been attracted to her mind rather than anything else, and certainly not her instantly off-putting manner. But then female Conversationalists were rare items in a Paradise of Instant Gratification, and he knew immediately, during that six-way Conversation on the world of Almwik, that she was better at it than he could ever be, in spite of her confrontational style. Much of that Conversation had, oddly enough, been about the probability of running into somebody from one's own World on another, and she had torn a strip off him when he reflexively blurted out that she `couldn't have been' from Earth.

        "New Zealand?" she had snarled at him when he told her where he was from. "And just what kind of dim little star does that World orbit round?"

        The following morning they had met again by chance at the almshouse Nessik. For some reason he would never know, he impulsively asked her if she would like to come on to the next World with him. Much to his surprise she agreed - providing he was willing to let the Nessik select a World for them at random. And immediately after they stepped into the very pretty but rather chilly mountain-lake setting on Roalda, she began to make her ruthlessly frank attitudes towards sex absolutely clear to him. In that antiseptic environment that seemed almost funny. It occurred to him that she may have done it to put him off her in some way. Perhaps that was just as well, he could hardly tell her that she had little to worry about in that respect.

        In the end it hadn't really mattered. Although she had clearly not had the benefit of having a diplomatically inclined mentor as Barkworth had (which seemed surprising considering that, as he later learned, she was from one of the leading families in arch-conservative Brazil; he couldn't tell though whether she had rebelled or been expelled) they finished up wandering Paradise together. At first it had been little more than a mutual tolerance (she certainly could be that `pain in the sphincters' that one group of Conversationalists had described her as, safely out of her hearing). They just never got round to parting company. But, when they found Eve, they had to stay together since her life depended on it.

        Not that they really minded by then.

        Polson's suddenly coming through on that half-forgotten promise three days ago couldn't have happened at a better time. They were ready to leave the marine world of Samsunda that had so unexpectedly turned out to be a bit boring, and were beginning to wonder where to go next. Polson's current assignment of Jarra had looked particularly interesting from the Teklanmeh's texts and 3Ds, and, as Polson had pointed out himself, the chance of visiting a preContact World was always one to be grabbed with both hands.

        Quincey wasn't quite so keen however. She had written off Polson as an `oleaginous smoothy, just like you can be at times', much to Barkworth's surprise. But then he really shouldn't have been, Quincey was good at killing two birds with one stone. She had no notion that it required more intelligence to make people feel good about themselves than it did to put them down, that it could make all the difference between their being forthcoming and clamming up. But what could he do? She was clearly too far gone to be coachable, besides, he had to admit to himself he rather liked her the way she was. He had come across a reference to the `good-cop bad-cop routine' in an old time Earth 1980's TV crime thriller he had once tried to watch, and he suspected that they made a good Conversational team for much the same awful reasons.
 
 

        The country of Talda in which Polson had established his Contact Embassy was one of Jarra's smallest. It sat astride an equatorial isthmus that joined a small tropical continent to a much larger southerly one as if it were a speech balloon. It also joined the world's two superpowers, The Tinik; and Ri Anarada, as a neutral territory where both sides could make unofficial contact and, hopefully, official progress. Talda was therefore the obvious place to carry out the vital Contact negotiations which would, all going well, bring Jarra into the Iskurahi fold. Such negotiations apparently required a sizable staff of advisors and other functionaries; they more than filled the huge residency assigned to them. It would therefore be no problem for Polson to accommodate Quincey and Barkworth as his `temporary personal assistants' once they had been vetted by the Diursuel. "If you don't like it or start feeling restless, there's no need to stay longer than a day or two", Polson had insisted. "Fascinating place, you really can't go wrong..."
 
 

        Still as stoutly cheerful as ever, Polson had led them off straight after their arrival to a hurried snack in a sidewalk cafe Barkworth would never forget; purplish meats and vegetables as pungent in appearance as of odor hung from hooks all round its steamy hole-in-the-wall kitchen. The walk around the city while Polson acquainted them with the current political situation and got to know Quincey a little better had been just as memorable. Although Barkworth had found the stiff heat from the nearly-overhead sun and the humidity of the atmosphere a little hard to cope with, Quincey had been thoroughly in her element. Tempere reminded her so much of Old Bahia in her native Brazil. Even the people looked much the same as they made their almost stylishly torpid way between the tall narrow buildings that sported elaborate moldering facades, or just sat contemplatively behind shuttered windows giving out onto heavily baroque-like balconies. All was front with little more than brick or - here too - corrugated iron behind. The smell though was strangely clean, like a mixture of iodine and rain evaporating from hot streets.
 

        As soon as they returned to the residency and passed through its ornately molded doors however, they were jumped from behind. They were then frog-marched without explanation back onto the street, then up a ramp onto the back of a covered truck that Barkworth had earlier noticed parked outside the door.

        "Something's obviously gone wrong," Polson said under his breath in what Barkworth suspected would be the understatement of the year.

        The cold stare way Quincey levelled at him spoke volumes.

        The truck ground for some distance along the narrow winding streets, then slowed to a near standstill to get itself round a particularly sharp corner and down into what Barkworth suspected from the echoes was a large underground garage. It stopped, then backed slowly until it contacted something solid. The rear ramp was dropped down flat onto a deck and the trio were marched directly into a brilliantly lit cubical room. With the only concession to modesty being the fact that two female guards were called in, they were made to strip, then put on what resembled very thin pajamas of such a horrible fluorescent pink Barkworth doubted if anybody would be seen dead trying to escape in them.

        But what really made Barkworth really feel uneasy was that their clothes were all thrown into the one box. For the first time he wondered if they were going to get out of this alive, and he began to shiver.

        After another brief inspection, they were then marched through a side door up a stairway, along a short bare passage, and into a room similar to the one they had just left. This however was occupied by a man wearing a very military-looking uniform sitting behind a very large painted metal table. Yet his facial expression did not match the uniform, in fact he looked to Barkworth as if he had just received the most monumentally silly order he had ever heard in his life. His manner quickly became almost conversational as he explained who he was, but it didn't really help to allay a certain numbness Barkworth now also began to feel. It was all he could do to carefully follow Polson's lead and answer the Officer Responsible's questions civilly and correctly. Nor, miraculously, did Quincey lose her temper, she just carefully repeated Polson's statement that they would leave Jarra as soon as they were asked.

        "We want to show you while you are here what we think of people who allowed themselves to be taken over by machines," the Officer replied just as formally.

        While this was obviously the Reply he had been ordered to make, Barkworth suspected the `while you are here' was purely his own.. It wasn't much, but it was a glimmer of hope that made him shiver a little less.

        "Have you eaten recently?" the Officer asked them then, looking a little more relaxed now that the part of the interview ordained from on high was over.

        "Thank you, yes we have," Polson replied.

        "Well. good day to you then," the Officer looked up at them briefly in apparent dismissal. He then barked a quick command to the guards.

        They were marched out through another door to their left into the long hall of what Barkworth suspected was a school. Spaced out along the crudely neon-tube-lit yellow brickwork were glass cases containing memorabilia of children who had apparently gone on from that school to Do Well In Life; photos, mementos, paintings they had made, what looked like carefully inscribed scrolls listing their achievements. The paintings frankly looked to Barkworth as if the children had all been somewhat emotionally disturbed, but then he remembered from the 3Ds that the flora and flora in many regions of Jarra, to say nothing of the architecture, was pretty weird and might well have looked something like that through the eyes of a perfectly normal Jarran child.

        These obvious role models were made complete in a way Barkworth found vaguely macabre. Mounted on top of the cases on ornately carved plaster pedestals were cherubic waxy likeness of these alumni's heads as they must have looked in those far off, sunshine filled schooldays before they grew up to become scientists, politicians, economists, and in one case, a particularly brutal-looking wart-encrusted Military Commander.

        The chill Barkworth felt when he looked at this was only reinforced when he happened to glance through a glass doorway into what appeared to be the school's dining room. It was filled with what he suspected was the entire Contact Team in Talda, all wearing those absurd pink pajamas, and trying to eat from chairs and tables many times too small for them. It might have looked funny had the circumstances been different, but these were clearly deeply experienced people who were totally shocked at their total failure, and that left a pit in Barkworth's stomach.  

        The trio were then marched out through a pair of solid-looking double doors that formed the end of the passage into what looked like a military vehicle of some sort.
 
 

        And so they had found themselves incarcerated in this, a noisy, creaky mobile crematorium that every hour or so raised itself a few meters off the ground and moved along the midnight battle lines making sure the right remains went into the right urns going to the right places with the right papers - papers which looked to Barkworth like a cross between Old Earth's greetings telegrams and company dividend assessments. Perhaps this was why the Tinik was so fanatically considerate about returning the enemy's war dead to them. He wondered if their enemy did the same to them.

        Their little narrow room was, by accident or design, pure lavender discreteness itself. An alcove, with an air extractor fan placed in its ceiling, was set into the wall in front of them. The urns entered the alcove from the left on a conveyor belt through two rows of black plastic bead curtains that made it impossible to see into the furnace room beyond. The `task', such as it was, was to take and hold each urn up to either of the two machines mounted on the wall each side of the alcove. The machine would automatically read the many and various symbols embossed into the small metal dog tag molded into its stopper, then print out a little yellow form, concertina-folding it ready for insertion into the small ring molded vertically into the urn's neck. This had to be done with the destination in large Urdu-like print on the outside, making it look rather grotesquely like a little flashy yellow bow tie. As each paper issued from the machine a buzzer would sound and a light come on - green for one machine, yellow for the other - above one of the destination pigeonholes that formed the entire back wall of the room. The butterfly door of the pigeonhole would automatically open, then close again only after the correct urn had been inserted into it. While Quincey and Barkworth prepared the urns for filing, Polson put them in their pigeonholes and looked after all the other minor tasks. If their imprisonment was to be prolonged though, they would doubtless swap duties in turns.

        They had all tried peering through a pigeonhole while its door was open into the room beyond, but without success, they merely backed onto more black bead curtains. At one stage though Barkworth thought he saw a hand with many-ringed fingers take up an urn which he had just inserted.

        Barkworth was not a complete stranger to work, but it had never occurred to him that it could be so boring. He also began to wonder when - and where - their next meal would be coming from.

        The grisly thoughts that then began to flow into Barkworth's mind were quickly dispelled however when the crematorium moved to a new site on the battlefield and the rush began. Suddenly there seemed no way of keeping up with the furnaces, the backed-up urns spilt helplessly against the alcove's side wall. Whole phalanxes of them had also surged through in the wrong colors, the angry buzzing from the documentation machines had at times been almost continuous. Up until then a single crate had been enough to store these and Polson only needed brief breaks from his filing duties to put them through the contents exchange machine. But before too long even Polson couldn't keep up and there were several such crates. He just had to set them aside until the rush was over.
 

        Now at last the rush had wound down and Polson had just put the last urn through. Another slack period was coming up and they could all relax. Indeed, when the Senior Factor had been with them to show them how to perform their tasks, slack periods was what the job looked as if it would mostly consist of. Perhaps it was just as well she left before the rush, her attitude to them and the Iskurahi had been very much harsher than the Officer Responsible's. "The Tinik has made its decision, and as far as you're concerned it's irrevocable", she had said, looking at them very coldly indeed.

        They were just upturning a few empty crates to sit on when the door suddenly banged open, and they were confronted by a stack of full crates moving towards them on a hand trolley. Pushing it was a black negroid youth who was barely able to see over the top. He didn't look at them as he placed the stack by the contents exchange machine, gathered up all the empty crates that weren't being anxiously sat on into another, then wheeled this out without so much as a backward glance.

        "All ready for next time," Barkworth observed as the youth closed the door behind him.

        Quincey gratefully set her crate down by the porthole that would allow them a twenty centimeter ration of daylight when the sun came up.

        "I thought war was supposed to be banned on all Worlds anyway," she looked at Polson as if what had happened had been his personal policy failure.

        "Not newly Contacted ones, no," Polson said to her. "They must feel absolutely free to make whatever decision they want to, even if it means destroying themselves in the process as one out of ten do."

        "So you can let a world kill itself in order to preserve its freedom of choice?" Quincey said acidly.

        "We have to, the Iskurahi insist on it" Polson said, glancing at Barkworth with what Barkworth recognized was his `where did you find this one?' look "We think that's because, if we were to interfere with their decision-making processes in any way, the Iskurahi would in effect be invading a world, not negotiating with it. And the Torsyne apparently don't want that. So, if a world doesn't wish to join us, or some part of it doesn't wish to, that wish has to be respected."

        "So what do you think happened here?" Barkworth asked him, hoping to defuse another probable outburst from Quincey. "It looks like only a part of Jarra's now saying no - the Tinik."

        "From what the ones we've met have said to us, that would certainly seem to be so," Polson grinned at him wryly. "I guess they somehow just changed their minds, decided they wanted Freedom instead of being `run by machines' as that Officer Responsible put it. And how can we deny it? The Iskurahi is 99% run by humanity, but that other 1% is just too much for some."

        "Surely they must have given you some hint of that at the beginning?" Quincey glared at him.

        "Well, no," Polson looked back at her. "Look, Contact can create more uncertainty to a world than just about any other event in its History. For a start, very few worlds have any experience of negotiating with political entities outside themselves. Obviously. So when the Iskurahi asks a world if it wishes to join up, there is usually no actual `it' to ask. For the first time in its existence that world is faced with a set of decisions which should really be made collectively, as a world, but politically it's just not set up that way. If things go wrong, it's on its own. What outside help can you give it to reorganize itself if too many of its individual countries perceive `outside' to be the biggest threat in the first place? And the Iskurahi cannot insist that all a world's political entities must agree before it can join as a whole, one or two would invariably hold out and no worlds would come in at all. So the Iskurahi has to ask each of them separately, meaning that only a part of a World ever really joins the Iskurahi at first, and sometimes it can take a very long time for the rest of it to follow suit."

        "So those countries that don't join up are in effect Closed Out until they do - if they do?" Barkworth asked him. "They just continue on with their old political and economic systems. Dig holes and fill them in again."

        "That's about it," Polson said, giving him an `you've obviously learned something, boy' look. "As you no doubt saw from the Teklanmeh before you joined me here, the Tinik have a pretty uncompromising ideology. They insist that the state must look after the people on behalf of the people. The Ri Anaradans on the other hand insist that people must be free to exercise their own judgment; market forces are the ultimate wisdom and losers can elect voluntary euthanasia. A classic superpower divide. But we didn't anticipate any real problems here. Whatever else they might be, both superpowers are very pragmatic, more than ready to face facts, so it really looked like they were going to come to agreements with us, albeit separate ones. But now it seems the Tinik have now decided for the whole of Jarra, not just for themselves, and the Balance of Power has gone awry. Whether it was something we inadvertently said or did we can't really say."

        "What kind of weapons does this planet have?" Quincey breathed. "Is your notion of freedom going to get us all fried?"

        "Fusion bombs only," Polson replied, clearly deciding there was no point in trying to be nice about it. "Though they're bad enough, especially the primitive, dirty ones both sides have. Lot's of long-lived radioactive fallout."

        "And the means to deliver them?"

        "Yes."

        "And you can't or won't stop them? For their sakes let alone ours?" she looked round the room with a mixture of fear and disgust.

        "That's right. If missiles get launched they won't be stopped, The Torsyne forbid us to. Have done since their Advent. Though if one comes our way it'll be stopped since the Adjoahsno's always on standby during a Contact," Polson said to her.  "They'll pick us up soon."

        "How reassuring - for us," she put on her best scathing smile. 

         "Even I have to ask why you think the Torsyne have that policy?" Barkworth said to him. "Surely the fact that missiles have been fired would surely be enough to demonstrate freedom of choice to a world . So why does it have to live with the outcome - or rather, die rather horribly of it? You described the Tinik as having an `uncompromising ideology'. Isn't the Torsyne ideology a whole lot worse?"

        "Couldn't have put that better myself, Barkworth," Quincey said

        When Quincey said something like that to him it was usually in a fit of sarcasm. But when he looked at her, it seemed she had really meant it.

        "Do you two have any children?" Polson asked them simply.

        Barkworth looked at Quincey, but she was clearly as puzzled as he was.

        "No we haven't," Barkworth replied. "Guess we're just not that kind of couple."

         Indeed not. When he had once carefully broached the subject with Quincey, her response had been graphic: "I don't want to be a talking hormone-driven female bloody ape..!" she had screamed at him. "I've got better things to do with my brain than get laid, give birth, and join the legion of mindless mums..."

        "Well, let me put it this way," Polson then said. " If you had, sooner or later you would find yourself saying: `if you do this, then these will be the consequences'. That can of course can mean rewards as well as penalties, but if you don't follow through on them - "

        " - I see," Quincey laughed sarcastically. "If you give your little boy a great big fission bomb and tell him not to chuck it at other little kidies, but he does and a big chunk of the planet vanishes in a big flash, then you're saying they deserve to be punished because Daddy said No. I would have thought the Torsyne were a little more advanced in its child-rearing practices than that."

        Barkworth winced, carefully avoiding looking at Polson. Of course he knew that Polson would see that, which would only make matters worse.

        "As I just said, that's not Iskurahi policy, it's one of the few imposed upon us from above. All we can hope to do is try to prevent the disaster from happening.When we negotiate Contact with a world, we usually show them how negotiations proceeded on other worlds like their own. And we have countless millions of such examples to select from. They include the good things that can happen as well as the bad, from the burying of ancient differences to curing their uncurable diseases. But the Dead Worlds, the ones that didn't make it, do help prevent them getting the impression it's all stage-managed and that behind the scenes there is a big stick - "

        " - But there is a big stick, isn't there?" Quincey insisted. "If an individual country refuses to join up, but does those things which you - or the Torsyne - forbid it to do like build Nessiks, interstellar spacecraft, or any form of artificial consciousness, you move in fairly smartly, don't you?."

        "I can't deny that. The price of freedom is that it shouldn't interfere with anyone else's as far as possible. So if a world attempts to interfere with what apparently are the Torsyne's, then yes, the Cahoctor will act. It's not ideal, but it's the best we can do."

        "And just what does `act' entail? Stromlos? Or is there a secret 'Division' of the Iskurahi nobody knows about that performs `covert operations', or whatever the terminology is."

        "That `nobody' includes me," Polson replied. "But, surely, if there was such a Division, then knowledge of it would surely have leaked out sometime during the last ten billion years. There's no need for one in this case anyway, the Cahoctor does it itself employing a variety of techniques. Diplomacy usually works, but sometimes they have to destroy equipment. There are any number of reports in the Teklanmeh of such interventions so you can get some idea of how they do it. As I say, it's not perfect, but its the best that can be done."

        "Perhaps you, or the Torsyne, use secret agents to trigger Terminal Wars on one in ten worlds in order to provide the encouragement wavering worlds might need to Sign Up. That one in ten figure has always seemed suspiciously high to me."

        When Quincey got her teeth into Conspiracy Theory, she could be unrelenting. Unfortunately she often overdid it to the point of provoking an embarrassed humor.

        "Once again, if that is the case then I have no knowledge of it for the same reasons as before. But let's be fair, you're not the first person to suggest that, including many people in the Iskurahi when they lose friends and loved ones in a Terminal War. But then, how high is `high'? As I said before, Contact can be a shock, even for those few worlds who do try to prepare for some sort of contact with aliens. They almost invariably make the wrong preparations since there's no - "

        " - Have any Iskurahi people ever rebelled against your - or the Torsynes' `let it rip' policy?" Quincey asked him then. "I mean, resigned in protest?"

        "A few - along with those few others who resign at other aspects of Iskurahi policy they don't like. But what's the point of that? Who's going to listen to them? The Torsyne? Also, they're rather easy to replace."

        "You wouldn't consider resigning yourself then? At all those billions of horrifying deaths you must have condoned."

        "Now hang on, Quince," Barkworth thought she had now gone way too far.

        "It's all right, Barkworth," Polson gave him an `I can manage this one' look. "No, I wouldn't resign. As I've just said, what would be the point? I agree with you, the fact that missiles are launched should be just as good a way of demonstrating to a world that it does have free will. But the Torsyne unfortunately don't see it that way. So I like to think I can do some good for those worlds that don't destroy themselves and who manage to get through Contact and into Transition. Then we can move onto the next World and try to do our best for them. Get them through."

        "And I suppose if you fail, you can also tell people like us that we need Dead Worlds for Lalleldil Communities, or those ghastly Holliswalds. You're just another well oiled cog in the Torsyne disinformation campaign, aren't you?"

        This time Polson just held his palm up with fingers curled slightly outward in a gesture that Barkworth knew on Polson's Home World meant `hopeless case'. He admired his patience, he knew his own would have run out by now. But then Polson had always been a diplomat, that was why he had been so glad to have known him.

        It now also seemed that Polson had developed another side to his character Barkworth had never seen before. He clearly wasn't enjoying their ghastly predicament anymore than he or Quincey was, yet Barkworth suspected that no matter how frightening a situation Polson might find himself in, some small part of him would still look forward to being in a position where he could look back on it all and regale all and sundry with yet another spine-chilling `close escape' tale. Barkworth wondered if all Contact Team people were like that. Perhaps that was why Polson had invited he and Quincey onto Jarra. He knew it would probably come apart, and wanted to see if they had the ability to handle that kind of pressure. Barkworth wondered how many other Conversationalist he might have tried out in the past.

        "Look, Quincey," Barkworth said to her to try and cool things down, "Conspiracy theories are a bit pointless out here in Paradise since there's no way anything can be proven. Back in a preContact society at least you could get to know a few people, who knew a few people, and so on till you finally got to someone who did know. But even then that was always next to impossible, and the person at the end of the chain was often the one who spread the rumor in the first place, as a piece of real disinformation. But here it is totally impossible to get to the top, since nobody personally knows a Torsyne. Not even Polson here."

        "So you're going to give up? What about all those other questions you've wondered about? Like why is it that whole regions of Space remain un-Contacted, even though entire interplanetary empires have grown up in them? Is it just Torsyne probes getting lost, or do the Torsyne just like to remind us occasionally how useless we are on our own when left to organize our own affairs?"

        "Could be that secret agents are also sent in to foment the wars that usually erupt in those Regions," Barkworth had to laugh.

        He didn't have to look to see Quincey glaring at him, speechless.

        "Needless to say - " Polson began.

        " - Needless to say," Quincey did a fair imitation of Polson's carefully measured tones.

        "As I was going to tell you, Quincey, Barkworth is right," Polson said to her evenly. "If you have no way of proving or disproving some notion or idea, then you might as well not bother with it. You have to work - and think - within the framework of what you do know, and you know that the Torsyne really do place us under very few restraints. They don't censor the Teklanmeh so far as we can determine, and Cahoctor Law is a fairly good abstract of the judicial systems found on most preContact worlds. We really have very little reason to complain."

        "So Daddy tells me to shut up and be a good little girl," Quincey said in the bast little girl voice she could manage.

        "Daddy doesn't care what you do or say just so long as you don't break any laws while you are doing it or saying it," Polson replied simply.

        "Daddy doesn't care that millions of people on this planet could die because of what they are doing," she persisted relentlessly.

        "We don't know whether Daddy cares about that or not. But we have to obey Daddy when he tells us not to interfere and let nature take its course," Polson replied.

        "Come on, Quince," Barkworth said. "Give it away. That's the reality of it. If there's no point in thinking about it, it's best not to. Like all those other questions we'll never find answers to, like `how did Reality begin and why?'. 'Is there a God?' Doubt if even the Torsyne would know the answer to either. - Or," he grinned at Polson, "perhaps they do, they're not telling us for our own good."

        "Patronizing arseholes, the pair of you," Quincey screamed at them, balling her fists.

        "Now that's something we do know for sure," Barkworth had to laugh. "We're - "

        Suddenly the door to their little room crashed open, and in strode what in the bizarre Tinik hierarchy of Military Command must have been a Finally Utterly and Completely Responsible. Standing at his version of Attention! with hands behind his back and feet apart, he filled every cubic millimeter of space at that end of the room. With a complexion resembling that of salted pork, he wore a gray uniform of a stiff horse-hair like fiber that looked as if it had been sprayed on. On his head was a black boater with a hat band made from scrambled eggs in bronze. Around his waist he wore a wide belt of what looked like heavy white plastic on which thin vertical stripes made up of various criss-cross designs had been stitched, from that grotesque display cabinet Barkworth had seen at the school he suspected they were war decorations. The coruscated silver buckle of the belt was immense, and reminded him of those championship belts boxers back on Earth fought for even more vigorously after the last of Earth's own Military Men had faded in lockstep into the sunset of Transition.

        The three of them jumped from their seats to duplicate the man's stance in the way the Senior Factor had instructed.

        But the Finally Responsible just looked at them, then at their makeshift seats as evidence of their unwillingness to work.

        He slowly raised an index finger and pointed to the window behind them.

        "What do you think they've been doing out there? Masturbating?"

        And then the room, the entire structure of the crematorium, began to move, and warp, and twist, and a fractured rumbling came up though Barkworth's feet and wouldn't go away. The hair stood up on the back of his neck as a cold stream of sweat began to work it's way down his spine into the small of his back. Earthquake...?

        No.

        The Finally Responsible spun round and looked into Polson's eyes and could see the answer confirmed there.

        The War had now become Terminal, and Barkworth felt something walk over the grave of Time and Space.

        The Finally Responsible obviously knew it too. He reached slowly for the sidearm in the holster hanging from his belt, and Barkworth could just see through eyes that no longer seemed to quite work properly that it was a brutally simple revolver designed to fire brutally simple pre-Contact bullets. The General aimed it first at Polson, then to Barkworth's alarm moved it slowly over towards Quincey. Barkworth couldn't look at anything else as the man's eyes stared flaring into hers.

        But she just stood there, calm, impassive, staring back into his. And although Barkworth didn't quite know why, there was something oddly disturbing about that...

        Then suddenly the man's eyes moved and locked onto Barkworth himself. He could feel the revolver slowly begin to swing in his direction. A look of such hatred suffused the man's face. But then a look almost of pity appeared in his eyes, as if he thought Barkworth had missed something.

        And Barkworth once more found himself asking himself that dreadful question that had been in the back of his mind for years: Could a man hope to be a Man in a Paradise of Babbling Children?

        Or was that now the most innocent dream of Will of all?

        At last the room grew still, and the Finally Responsible's stare drifted beyond them all as if to some personal, private inevitability he was now seeing for the first time.

        Then he slowly reholstered his revolver. He gave the room a cursory glance once more before he snapped his heels together, spun round on them, then marched himself out through the door.

        It was all they could do to just stand there staring at it after him. They then heard muffled sounds of furious barked commands coming through the walls of the alcove and a squad of newly filled urns somehow managed to wobble nervously onto the conveyor belt.

        Then, to his abject horror, Barkworth found himself extruding the contents of his bowels into the seat of his Shocking Pink trousers. He felt huge steaming globs of crud slide down the inside of his right leg like hot greasy fingers.

        When Polson said something about `it really shouldn't be too long now', he just didn't feel like asking him whether he meant rescue or obliteration. Perhaps that was just as well, it would be wisest to carry on as if nothing had happened. Just grab urns and get them processed as quickly as he could.

        He knew it would only be a matter of time though before somebody Noticed.

        And indeed, it wasn't long.

        " - Do I detect a certain nostalgia for the Good Old Days?" Barkworth felt the heat of Polson's grin burning into his back.

        Quincey looked at him then too, sniffed delicately, and smiled a sweet knowing smile.

       "Where did you say you wanted that button sewn on?" she said in her best schoolmistressy voice.

        She and Polson then burst into laughter.

        But it was cut short by the boom of yet another massive explosion, and once more the crematorium shook. But it wasn't quite the same as before, Barkworth suspected it was conventional explosive. But that meant, he suddenly realized, that the ground battles were now coming much closer to them. His stomach began to growl complainingly when an even huger blast drowned out the reverberations of the first. His bowels strained again.

        Polson glanced towards the porthole.

        "First light," he announced. "And they've obviously started shelling again. I wouldn't know how long this chamber of horrors can field those things for, but it's certainly time we weren't here."

        Barkworth thought he could hear a clattering of what sounded like machine gun fire in the distance.

        "SECURE ALL STATIONS! SECURE ALL STATIONS! RELOCATION COMMENCES IN TWENTY-THREE SECONDS! RELOCATION COMMENCES IN TWENTY-THREE SECONDS!" the high pitched female voice shrieked through the P.A. system and into their Hilashels.

        A buzzer sounded from above the ceiling of the alcove. Then, just as they filed the last of the urns, an open-meshed folding steel curtain began to descend. The doors of the little pigeon holes behind them then closed just after their lights clicked out. Polson and Barkworth - as best he could - then gathered up all the crates and stacked them together in the corner by the contents exchange machine. Polson pressed the stack into the retaining clips on the wall that would hold it secure.

        ......PHEEEW ......CRANGG!!

        The crematorium literally bounced as the next shell hit close by. Barkworth and Polson looked at one another, then at Quincey. But she had actually gone over to the porthole and was peering out of it as if she was trying to see where it had come from, and to Barkworth that seemed a particularly odd thing to do...

        But then he realized that fear - petrifaction, now, in spite of her bravado, was a very rare experience in a Paradise of Measured Encounters. It had been known to produce some very strange effects. That might well explain that peculiar - bloodless - calm of hers when the Finally Responsible pointed his revolver at her.

        He stepped over to her as quickly as he could, put his arm around her waist, and took hold of the grab bar below the porthole with both hands. He glanced back towards Polson who nodded back at him as he reached for a similar grab bar by the contents exchange machine.

        "It's alright, Quince," Barkworth tried to reassure her. "Just try to think of it as an adventure we haven't - quite come to the end of yet." He hadn't entirely managed to keep the quaver out of his voice.

        Quincey gave him a searing `are you mad?' look.

        "ELEVEN SECONDS...!!" came the announcement as if the woman desperately hoped it would be. Then a slow growl came up through the floor as the VTOL fan-jets started up. But as their pitch rapidly built up into a high milling shriek, a fine shuddering began to pass through the huge battle scarred structure and the thought crossed Barkworth's mind that one of the turbines might have thrown a blade.

        "SIX SECONDS...! FIVE..! FOUR..! THREE..!"

        Barkworth couldn't tell whether Jarran seconds were longer than the Iskurahi standard ones or merely seemed that way...