Her name was Lori. Her English had the flat Man accent of most Centrans. (All of us vets spoke English, which had been the default language during the Forever War, for people born centuries and continents–or even planets–apart. Some of us only spoke it at get-togethers like this, and the strain showed.)
She was small and slender and had an interesting tattoo that peeked out from under her singlet, a snake with an apple in its mouth. “There’s not much to report that hasn’t been in the news,” she said. “A number of Taurans landed and stayed for one day of meetings, evidently some sort of delegation. But they never appeared in public.”
“Good thing,” Max Weston said. “I don’t care if I never see one of those bastards again.”
“Don’t come to Centrus, then. I see one or two a day, in their bubbles.”
“That’s gutsy,” he admitted. “Sooner or later somebody’ll take a shot at them.”
“That may be their purpose,” I said. “Decoys, sacrificial lambs. Find out who has the weapons and the anger.”
“Could well be,” Lori said. “They don’t seem to do much but walk around.”
“Tourists,” Mohammed Morabitu said. “Even Taurans might be tourists.”
“Three are permanent,” Cat said. “A friend of mine installed a heat pump in their apartment in the Office for Interplanetary Communications.”
“Anyhow,” Lori said, “these Taurans came in for a day, were put on a blacked-out floater from the Law Building, spent four hours there, and returned to the shuttle and left. A couple of cargo handlers saw them; otherwise they could have been in and out without being noticed by humans.”
“I wonder why bother with secrecy,” I said. “There’ve been delegations before.”
“I don’t know. And the shortness of the visit was odd, as well as the number four. Why should a group mind send more than one representative?”
“Redundancy,” Charlie said. “Max might have run into them and killed three with his bare hands.”
As far as we could tell, the Tauran “group mind” was no more mysterious than Man’s. No telepathy or anything; individuals regularly uploaded and downloaded experiences into a common memory. If an individual dies before tapping into the Memory Tree, new information is lost.
It did seem uncanny, since they were all physically twins. But we could do the same thing, if we were willing to have holes drilled into our skulls and plugs installed. Thanks, no. I have enough on my mind.
“Otherwise,” Lori continued, “not much is happening in Centrus. The force field bunch got voted down again, so we’ll be shoveling snow another year.”
Some of us laughed at that–with only ten thousand people, Centrus wasn’t big enough to warrant the energy expenditure to maintain a winter-long force field. But it was the planetary capital, and some citizens wanted the field as a status symbol as much as a convenience. Having the only spaceport, and alien visitors, didn’t make them special enough.
To my knowledge, no Taurans had ever been here to Paxton. It might be unsafe; with our large vet population, a lot of people were like Max, unforgiving. I didn’t bear them any animus myself. The Forever War had been a colossal misunderstanding, and perhaps we were more at fault than they.
They were still ugly and smelled weird and had killed a lot of my friends. But it wasn’t Taurans who had sentenced us to life imprisonment on this iceberg. That was Man’s idea. And Man might be a few billion twins, but they were still biologically human.
A lot of what went on in these meetings was just a more splenetic version of complaints that had already been sent through channels. The power grid was unreliable and had to be fixed before deep winter, or people would die, and the only response from Centrus was a schedule of municipal engineering priorities, where we kept getting shoved back in favor of towns that were closer to the capital. (We were the farthest away–a sort of Alaska or Siberia, to use examples that would be meaningless to almost everyone.)
Of course, the main reason for these secret meetings was that Centrus did not really reflect our concerns or serve our needs. The government was human, elected representatives whose numbers were based on population and profession. But in actual administration, Man had oversight that amounted to veto power.