8FOLD: Pulse War Special # 1, "Book Club"

[Amabel Holland]

  This is the song of a thousand years:
  This is how we left a thousand earths,
  And how we sailed 'cross a thousand stars,
  And how we vanquished a thousand fleets.

  This is the song of Belden's betrayal:
  This is how we lost a thousand earths,
  And how we conquered a thousand more,
  And now live by light of a thousand suns.

  This is the song of a thousand years:
  The first chords were sung at Weavers Dawn.

     - Ezra Hunter (2891 - 2929)

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                  BOOK CLUB
              BY AMABEL HOLLAND

Ben Keller: fatter than he'd like, a scraggly beard, a professor of
history, the sort that wears a tweed jacket with leather elbows and
does so unironically, thirty-two years old on the day the world
changed. Twenty-fifth of August, twenty-fourteen - the day all global
communications went down, the day a virus engineered by the body
terrorist organization FEVER made normal people (is anyone ever
normal?) violently insane, the day aliens landed in Beijing, the day
ancient and malevolent gods woke from the slumber of a millennia, the
day the monsters rose from the sea and the earth and crushed the
cities of man beneath their feet: the day of the Last Story.

   He had just started to read the news online, had just seen one of
the first photos of the enemy fleet, when the internet conked out. He
had assumed it was his ISP - outages weren't uncommon - but then his
phone couldn't get reception, and the television went black, the radio
static. He was just starting to panic when he felt the whole house
shake. Like an earthquake, only it had a sort of rhythm, like the slow
steady beating of a drum.

   He worried about Anna. She was at work, an hour's drive. He
couldn't call her, couldn't email her. He could go to her, but what if
she was coming home to him? What if they missed each other? What if
they kept missing each other as the world ended around them? What if
the world was ending?

   It paralyzed him, and he hated that. He never knew what to do in
these situations. (He still doesn't.) So it was a relief when Anna
came in the door. Her work had sent everyone home. "No one really
knows what's going on," she said. But there was some kind of monster,
tall as the space needle, heading right for Seattle. That was it, that
was the sound like a drum. Footsteps.

   "So we need to go now," said Anna. She rattled off a list of things
she needed Ben to bring, and while he was doing that, she grabbed some
other things, piling them all into the hatchback, and then they were
on the road. Anna drove, calm and confident, and Ben watched her with
admiration. If it'd been up to him to figure this out, he'd still be
in the house hours later. She's smarter than him, more decisive,
better put together, just better: he knew he got the best out of the
deal when, improbably, she agreed to marry him.

   The roads were already densely packed when they got started, and it
only got worse as more and more people joined the exodus. Three hours
east of Seattle, everything stopped. It wasn't a matter of cars
crawling a few inches, edging slowly forward: every car was as still
as a stone. At first there was a wall of red lights, but slowly each
car was put into park, and then as the evening wore on, gradually the
ignition was switched off.

   It was silent for a long time, too silent and too long. Anna turned
to him and said, "Come on." He followed her to the hatchback, and she
gave him some things to carry. Then they started walking.

   They were the first - Anna was the first. Soon there were others,
soon almost everybody. Only a handful remained in their cars. "You
gotta come out," an old man said to them, pleading earnestly. "You're
going to get killed if you stay in there."

   "Leave them be," Anna told him quietly.

   "But they're gonna get killed. We can't just leave them."

   "They can't let go," said Anna. "You can't make them."

   He kept trying, though. Anna left him behind as well. Anna and Ben
and the people following them walked on as evening gave way to night.
In the distance and the darkness, they saw flickers of light and
flame. The steady lines of people broke as some swerved off toward it
and, both curious and exhausted, Anna and Ben followed.

   It was a bonfire, big and roaring. People, too many for Ben to
count, gathered around it for warmth, for light. Many of them did so
silently and intensely, staring into the red and the orange. Others
introduced themselves, eager to commiserate, or just to pretend that
nothing had happened. And occasionally the somber scene was disrupted
by sudden peals of running, raucous laughter, defiant and
exhilarating.

   And part of Ben wondered if this was it, if this was what the rest
of the world would be like: wandering and huddling, the wider world
rendered mysterious and inscrutable. Anna would do well in this world,
he thought. She could let it all go without a second thought.

   But Ben couldn't, and he knew that. As they drove and as they
walked and as he watched the flames, his apprehension about the future
had given way to regret: now I'll never finish my book. He had been
working on a political history of the Holy Roman Empire for years now
- it was an expansion of his dissertation. Expansion was the word for
it: seven hundred pages into the first draft, with no end in sight.

   It had always been slow work, but it had gotten much slower of late
with the news that Wilson's book on the same topic and scope was
nearing completion. Ben's book would always exist in its shadow,
inferior: why would anyone read it when Wilson's book was right there?
Though now the question was, why would anyone read either book? What
did it matter, if the world was ending?

   But the world did not end. The world after August twenty-fifth was
unquestionably different than the world that came before: it was a
bleaker world, and there were pieces that needed picking up and
putting back together. There was also the knowledge and the
apprehension that it would happen again and again, until the Pulse at
last beat the Earth into submission.

   But in other ways the world was the same: Anna and Ben went back to
their car and drove back to their home. Friday was still pizza night.
The following week, summer break still came to an end, and Ben still
went back to teach. And, late at night and on Saturday mornings, he
still went through the motions of shuffling through his notes on
negotiations with the Prince-Electors leading up to the election of
Ferdinand II, writing and rewriting and deleting and writing again in
search of one sentence, one thought, that would lead inexorably to the
second, that would open up the gates and let the entire chapter come
spilling out in waves of prose.

   Only even that was different somehow, because while before he often
wondered if it mattered, now he knew it didn't. In a low moment, half
enraged and half relieved, he deleted the manuscript altogether. (He
did not, however, clear it from his recycling bin, and fully expected
to restore it the next day.)

   "People are people, even when they're not people." Someone had said
this the night of the bonfire. Everything about that day was surreal
and unfocused, and so many of the details had slipped away - but those
words had stuck with him. Before the Pulse, the last time some alien
species had tried to invade the Earth, one of the more reluctant
soldiers got left behind, and secretly assumed a human identity. The
speaker lived next door, and was surprised when the alien was outed
and detained by the authorities. "He was as human as you and me, in
all the ways that counted. He could be kind, could be greedy, could be
petty, could forgive. People are people, even when they're not
people."

   It wasn't the time for that conversation - given all that was
happening right at that moment, no one was looking to extend any
sympathy to the Pulse. The Pulse were different, anyway, an invincible
monoculture, an ageless empire with seemingly infinite resources,
comprised of hundreds of planets all working toward a single and
malevolent purpose.

   Only they weren't; only they couldn't be. People are people, even
when they're not people. Hundreds of different planets home to
hundreds of different species have to each have their own culture -
heck, cultures, plural - their own traditions, systems of law,
jealously-guarded rights and privileges. Each with their own agenda.
Balancing those factions against each other and exerting central
authority over them would have to be incredibly complex and
precarious. "There's no way that they're as unified as they pretend,"
he tells Anna over dinner.

   She impales three green beans with her fork, chews them
thoughtfully, then says: "You need to write all this down." She is
earnest, forceful.

   "Well," he says, retreating, "it's all theory, really. It's not
like I have any sources to consult."

   "But you're sure of it?"

   He nods slowly. "The systems of government change, but the laws of
politics don't. They've been the same since the dawn of history, and
they'll be the same at the end. And they've been the same on every
other world we know about. Maybe there are exceptions - hive minds,
maybe? But this can't be an exception. It's a confederation of
hundreds of states and cultures, there's going to be factions."

   "Like the HRE."

   "Like the HRE," he echoes. "Only orders of magnitude more complicated."

   "And therefore more broken," she offers. "Write it down. Start tonight."

()

He doesn’t just start tonight; he finishes it. He’s surprised by how
quickly it comes together, how easily the words flow. "I'll have you
read it in the morning," he says.

   "I'll read it now," says Anna, and she does.

   "So," he says when she's finished.

   "It's good," says Anna. "I need to show this to somebody. Do you trust me?"

   "Always," he says, a bit perplexed.

   She kisses him on the cheek. "Go to bed. I'll be home in the morning."

   "You're going now?"

   "I'm going now."

   "Do you want me to come with you?"

   "Go to bed," she commands. "You'll have a meeting tomorrow. You'll
need rest."

   "A meeting?"

   "She'll be waiting in your office."

()

Her name is Regina White: forty, gangly but poised, started with MI6
but as alien contact became more frequent she was moved over to MI
Zero. As part of the World Defense Treaty, MI Zero and the other
extra-terrestrial intelligence agencies have pooled their resources.

   "Every developed nation had at least a few alien contacts," says
White. "Some even had the same assets, feeding each country different
information. (Turns out we can blame that for at least one war here on
Earth; well, we've sorted that out now anyway.) Our network is smaller
than I'd like, and it's limited to worlds outside the Pulse."

   "But they have some contact with them?" asks Ben. "Trading?"

   "Smuggling," corrects White. "Officially, it's a closed system:
Pulse worlds only buy from and sell to other Pulse worlds, at prices
set by the central government. If you ask poorer worlds that do more
buying than selling, these prices are too high, ergo smugglers can
sell them necessities on the cheap. If you ask richer worlds that do
more selling than buying, these prices are too low; smugglers give
them access to larger markets."

   "That's a natural consequence of mercantilism," says Ben. "That'd
be true if their economy was prosperous, and it'd be true if their
economy was failing."

   "That's the problem with being on the outside, yes," says White.
"We don't know what it's really like, only what the Pulse projects
outward... and what leaks through the cracks."

   "But," Ben ventures hesitantly, "what's being leaked is at least
somewhat consistent with my paper. Otherwise you wouldn't be talking
to me."

   "I'm talking with you because Anna Joplin told me to," says White
pointedly. "But, yes, it's consistent with the intel we have, and with
our general theory. Please don't pat yourself on the back too much,
Mr. Keller, you're not some bold visionary who saw what no one else
could."

   "I, I didn't," Ben starts, embarrassed.

   "But you are a capable researcher with a talent for connecting
dots, able to present the big picture without oversimplifying that
which is irreducibly complex. Your prose style is clear and effective
if unremarkable. Your colleagues speak highly of you."

   "Colleagues, plural? When did you have time to talk to them?"

   "Early next week," says White. "That will make about as much sense
as it ever will once you see the time dilator."

   Ben just nods vaguely.

   "And Anna says you're the man for the job. It's not unusual of
course for a woman to think the world of her husband whether he
deserves it or not. But I dare say we both know Anna better than
that."

   "Yes. So, she says I'm the man for the job, but what is the job, exactly?"

   "Understand the Pulse."

   "Un. Understand?"

   "The Pulse, yes. Give us a complete and comprehensive model of
their empire, how it functions, how it doesn't, what tensions exist
and how they can be exploited. You'll be working with a team of
linguists, spies, historians, economists, data analysts, scientists,
xeno-psychologists, humanities, et cetera, and together you're going
to give us a picture of who they are. Because otherwise how are we
going to beat them?"

   "Beat them," says Ben, a little surprised.

   This in turn surprises White. "Well, yes. It's either that or be
exterminated. Oh, I know it's daunting. We don't have the ability to
fight in space, we don't have the numbers, we don't have the
resources. But even once we solve those problems – and we are working
on it, Mr. Keller - there's still the question of what our strategic
objective is, of how we win the war.

   "How do wars end? The loser runs out of something. Sometimes, they
run out of soldiers. Unlikely here. Non-starter. Sometimes they run
out of money, resources. We can target that, but to do that we need to
understand how their economy works. Sometimes they lose support.
Subjects rebel, governments fall out of favor. But to exploit that, we
need to understand how their government works. To incentivize peoples
within the Pulse, we need to understand their grievances with the
central government. We need to understand their history." She points
at him with an open palm. "We need a historian. Someone who has
experience understanding an extremely complicated confederation of
polities with overlapping jurisdictions, rife with inherent
contradictions. That's you, by the way."

   "I gathered." He takes a deep breath. "I accept."

   "It wasn't an offer," says White. "Your flight leaves at noon. See
you in Moscow."

()

Ben is soon introduced to Kelly Chen, a professor of "quantum
linguistics", whatever that means.

   "Regina tells me you're working on our language problem?"

   Chen nods; she seems excited to talk about her work. "So, the good
news is, we actually have the equivalent of an online course that we
can take to learn the Pulse's language. Once we learn that, we can
start digging into the various documents we've gotten from smugglers
and such. Unfortunately the course is written for people who already
speak a completely different alien language."

   "Does anybody on Earth speak that language?"

   "Sort of?"

   "Oh, great."

   "When the Last Story happened, there was an alien psi network
coordinating their efforts. These aliens had their own language, which
I'm calling psionese. This is the language we need to learn in order
to make use of that language course."

   "With you so far."

   "The problem is that psionese is a language that has no words."

   "No longer with you here. Definitely lost."

   "So, they're a telepathic race that's used to communicating ideas
and feelings in a flash," says Chen, snapping her fingers for
emphasis. "They have no use for words, sounds, sentences, not even
pictograms. It's completely abstract and defies any definition of
language that we're used to. Now, the Pulse were using people on Earth
- comatose people infected with the FEVER brain virus - as basically
telepathic wireless routers. When Earth's own psychic internet shut
down the alien psi network, those human routers were still, for lack
of a better word, 'speaking' psionese. And right now, they're still
asleep, but they're thinking in psionese. You still with me?"

   "Maybe?"

   "Right now we have human telepaths trying to learn psionese from
our comatose routers - it's rough but we're making some progress - so
that they can then take the course. Once they learn to speak the Pulse
language, from there it's just a matter of them teaching it to
everyone else. That part's easy-peasy."

()

   By mid-October, they've gotten to the "easy-peasy" stage, though
Ben finds it anything but. The Pulse language turns out to be a
constructed language - like Esperanto or Romanid - designed to be easy
to learn and to serve as a common auxiliary language. What Professor
Chen finds most compelling about the language ("which I'm calling
Pulseranto") is that, it being used by hundreds of different worlds,
each which itself has hundreds of distinct cultures and traditions, it
diverged and evolved rather quickly. Each planet's version of
Pulseranto is quite different than another's, both in terms of
vocabulary and grammar.

   "And this is the cool part," Chen beams. "They even alter the
words, applying their original language's native inflections to modify
case and tense!"

   "So instead of trying to master one set of completely alien,
unintuitive, borderline indecipherable grammatical rules, we're going
to have to bang our head against that particular wall probably every
time we open a new document."

   "Yes," she beams.

   "How is that the cool part?"

   She grimaces. "I mean, I guess for us and the war effort and the
work we're doing, it's not? But, you know, conceptually - it's, wow.
Blowing my mind."

()

White's agents had the foresight to package documents and materials
from different planets separately, which makes cataloging a little
easier. There's a lot of material from a planet that they designate
Badilara, almost all of it in Badilaran - not Pulseranto. This is
initially seen as a bust, until it's noticed that one of those
Badilaran books has the same illustrations as a book in Pulseranto. An
examination and comparison of the opening passages by Chen confirms it
is two versions of the same book. Potentially this will allow them to
also learn Badilaran, making those other documents much more valuable.
Chen translates the title as "Modern Ordinary Hilarious Saga of the
Hikazar".

   "What's a Hikazar?" Ben asks.

   Chen shrugs. "Guess someone will have to read the book and find out."

   Chen selects one of her people, Mark Sinclair, to translate the
text into English and to learn Badilaran. Working alongside him will
be literary critic Ruby Stevens, who will be analyzing both the
Pulseranto and English texts. The book is relatively short, and ten
days later Stevens and Sinclair turns in their report on Modern
Ordinary Hilarious Saga of the Hikazar.

   First things first, Stevens has no idea what a Hikazar is, or if
it's even a real thing. "It functions more like a macguffin. It's
something really valuable that everybody wants, something that isn't
produced on planet Aralidab, where the book takes place. Not even sure
if Aralidab is a real place."

   "But it's Badilara backwards?" asks Ben.

   "Basically," says Sinclair. "Close enough that it's probably not a
coincidence."

   "I think the book is a sort of satire?" says Stevens with a shrug.
"I mean, I didn't think it was very funny, but I'm not from Badilara.
Maybe there it's hilarious, ordinary, and modern."

   The protagonist is a young and impoverished orphan woman, Amla,
with few prospects. Her uncle ordered a Hikazar from a merchant ship
that came to Aralidab in his youth, and has been waiting his entire
life for it to arrive, because then he will be accepted by the upper
classes, who all have their own Hikazar. He has borrowed heavily
against his Hikazar, making him a fabulously wealthy man with vast
estates and business holdings. But when he dies it still hasn't
arrived, and he left no will.

   The entire extended family starts fighting over who will get the
receipt to the Hikazar. They don't even care about the land, the
money, the businesses - that's how valuable the Hikazar is. There's a
lot of intrigue and "a number of very long speeches from each of the
family members that we didn't really see the point of", but eventually
Amla inherits the receipt. (Stevens notes that it is comforting that
even across languages and species and galaxies, the fundamental laws
of story structure apply.)

   This catapults our heroine into high society, and suddenly wealthy
suitors come out of the woodwork. There is another long series of
speeches from each of the suitors, but eventually the girl marries
well into a very prominent family. That family has a secret it's been
keeping for generations: it doesn't actually have a Hikazar, only a
receipt to one, and like the girl's uncle they borrowed heavily
against it to build their own wealth, and they were on the verge of
bankruptcy and ruin. Marrying the woman with the relatively fresh
Hikazar receipt was a way to shore up their credit.

   By the end of the book, the heroine is a great-grandmother, and
when she dies her great-grandson inherits the two receipts, making him
the wealthiest person on the planet. "The Hikazar never arrives," says
Stevens. "I guess that's the joke?"

   "Ha," deadpans Ben.

   "There's some interesting stuff to pick out there," says Stevens,
"but how much Aralidab is a reflection of Badilara, and how much of it
is a distortion for supposedly comedic effect, I can't say yet. What
did jump out to me, though, were the merchant ships that never seem to
arrive. That's obviously an exaggeration, but Mark has something to
say about that."

   Sinclair nods. "My Badilaran is still pretty rudimentary, but I've
been looking at what were basically newspapers and muddling my way
through. And there are advertisements here for merchant ships with
arrival dates that are two or three years hence. And there are offers
of credit for people who have valid receipts for off-world purchases
that haven't arrived yet."

   "So, that much is real, if lampooned and magnified," says Stevens.

   Ben walks over to his whiteboard and uncaps a marker. He draws
three circles, forming points of a long, skinny triangle, labeling the
farthest point "B" and the others "A" and "C".

   "Ellis has been reading a travel book for another sector of the
Pulse empire," he explains. "And one of the things he brought to my
attention is the itinerary to get from this world," he jabs at the "A"
circle, "to this one," he jabs at the "C". "This isn't to scale,
obviously, but the distance from A to C is much, much closer than from
A to B or B to C. But no one ever goes from A to C, it's always A to B
to C, even though B is a backwater."

   With a different marker, he draws two slashes on the A-B axis, one
near to each of the two planets. He does the same on the B-C axis.
"Fold gates," he says. "These are naturally-occurring cracks in
space-time. I don't really understand all the science, but the gist is
you go through these cracks with the right tech and you'll get from A
to B in a few days, B to C in a few days. Whereas if you tried to go
from A to C, you would be floating in space for decades.
Interestingly, these folds don't go both ways - you couldn't go back
the way you came, C to B to A." He draws another fold gate slash on
the other side of the C. "You'd have to keep moving down the line
until you get to some other path, some other set of folds, that gets
you back to A."

   "Which explains why a world on the outskirts like Badilara might
not see Pulse-approved merchants all that frequently," says Stevens.
"And why their banking and credit is built around those arrivals."

   "So, what happens if a ship doesn't arrive?" says Ben. "Stuff gets
lost in transit, delayed, accidents happen."

   "From the context of the novel, I think it's be pretty disastrous,"
says Stevens.

   "And if all the shipments stopped?" says Ben. He draws a planet on
the other side of C, labels it D. Then he draws an ugly black scribble
between planet A and the first fold gate. "If we were able to gum up
the works here, how many of these other planets does it cut off?"

()

Getting a detailed map of the Pulse's empire and the fold gates that
connect it is impossible. But they can sketch out parts of it from
references in the written materials and information passed through
White's network of smugglers and informants. And while Ben Keller
doesn't really understand the science, there are people who do. There
are laws of physics that can be applied, theories that can be tested,
and the long and short of it is that late in December 2014, a
theoretical map exists, and Ben and his team get to take a look at a
version of it.

   As they expected, it's not just a single circuit going around the
empire. Each fold gate might be unidirectional, but not every gate
goes in the same direction, and there's more than one way to get to
some planets, sometimes a lot of ways. Planets with multiple fold
gates are more likely to be major trading worlds, as well as staging
grounds for military operations. The most prosperous of these have
literally dozens of fold gates, and are represented on the map with
insets. Unsurprisingly, these are worlds that Ben and his team have
heard of, worlds that are referenced many times by many different
species.

   With other worlds, there's only one way to get there, and sometimes
it's part of a long string of gates. These are worlds like Badilara,
off in the boonies, waiting for a handful of ships to make their way
there on the way to more important worlds.

   Ben's eyes are drawn to a spot on the map, a small red dot out in
those same boonies. He wonders for a moment at its significance, and
then he sees it. Only one fold gate feeds into it, and only one feeds
out of it. The planet on the other side of that second gate both
begins a major chain of isolated planets, and feeds back into the more
heavily-trafficked areas. Miss that turn, and you've got to go through
dozens of planets over the course of several months to get back to
what might be considered civilization.

   He puts his finger on the spot, and looks at White. She nods, then
clears the room.

   "It's a chokepoint," he says once the two of them are alone.

   "Yes," she says. "Lightly defended." She traces her own finger
along the map, resting on the nearest military base, ten jumps away.
"Won't be much resistance at first."

   "At first."

   "But then they're going to hit us with everything they can," says
White. "If we can hold it, though, we'll have cut off a third of their
empire. Including some vital mining and farming worlds." She sweeps
her hand across the other side of the red dot.

   "If we can hold it," he repeats. "Can we?"

   White studies him carefully. "The Earth has recently found some
allies. One of them in Deep Space, bordering the Pulse in this other
sector." With her hand she pulls an imaginary fleet from the edge of
the map opposite the red dot. "They'll be launching a campaign against
the Pulse. Can't tell you where, that's classified, but you're a smart
boy. You saw the chokepoint. I'm sure you can see others."

   He sees two or three likely spots in that other sector.

   "That attack will be big and obvious and tie up a lot of their
forces and resources. That's the plan, anyway. And maybe then we can
hold that point long enough to cripple them." She points at the red
dot.

   Ben squints and reads the label. "Weavers Dawn. But even if our
ally gets their attention, we're still talking about dozens of ships?"

   "Easily," says White.

   "How many will we have?"

   "One."

   "One!"

   "One to start with, anyway," says White, smiling mysteriously. "We
call her Forlorn Hope."

COPYRIGHT 2023 AMABEL HOLLAND