The Journal of Alan Ledford

Lane 697, Day 253

"Dr. Fallon turned himself in?"

Jenny had set herself up quite the cozy habitat in the guest quarters. I'd offered to flood the cargo bay again at the next station we stopped at, but she insisted that'd be too conspicuous and besides, she liked her powered suit. Interesting things, she claimed, always seemed to happen when she was wearing it. Her species wasn't big on luck but after her revealing this I'd come to nicknaming it her good-luck charm. This was met either by a good-humored humming or irate humming, depending on her mood at the time. She'd also been kind enough to upload all the research data she had to my computer. Not wanting that to fall into the wrong hands, the first thing I did was to disable the backup service I'd subscribed to. This pained me deeply, as I'd pre-paid for another several months.

The data itself would more than make up for it, though. I had restrained myself thus far; I needed to pay attention to concealing my backtrail and evading further close calls. The mission ship had clearly been able to tell which of the fake images my countermeasures had generated was actually me, but its sensors hadn't been swift enough to detect when I'd switched places with the probe. Based on that, I was hoping that they hadn't been able to scan my ship long enough to determine whose, exactly, it was. Merchant carriers look an awful lot alike and while mine has quite a bit of modification, it's the sort of modification I don't especially want noticed and so have gone through certain efforts to keep hidden. In order to trace the ship back to me, they'd have to find the manufacturer, give him enough information about my ship to have him know where he sold it, find the person who bought it from him, then repeat the operation until they finally got far enough down the line to discover who'd sold it to me. They'd probably recognize me again if they saw me, but they'd be unable to give anyone else a comprehensive enough profile to alert much of anyone. Without a better scan, it'd be limited to their own systems.

At least, this was what I was hoping.

I'd spent the meantime between then and now talking to Jenny about what I knew was going on. Her, I told everything, and I felt somewhat guilty that I was telling her what I couldn't tell Katie. Jenny, though, had what we like to refer as "Need to know". So I started with the event which precipitated everything - Dr. Fallon's surrender.

"I knew it weighed heavily on him, what we did. He shouldn't blame himself, but I know that's beyond our control. It was in the quest for knowledge. My people believe that such a quest always has a redeeming factor."

I knew that already. She'd mentioned that a number of times.

"Sorry, I like finding stuff out. And that Resonator... it's like nothing I'd ever seen before. I know we were supposed to destroy everything we had on it, but I couldn't. I've been spending the last several decades trying to figure it out. Without the real thing to go over, I couldn't really do much, but still. I know you Alan, you get things stuck in your head just as bad as I do. Well, with our people its somewhat of an obsession. Not just technical knowledge in general, but anything to do with the Predecessor races. And hell, the Ulix were involved, so that meant-"

She stopped talking, having clearly said more than she meant to. I started considering how I could subtly dial the translator back down a few levels to find out what she was thinking.

"No need, I'll tell you."

I hadn't said a word to her, but some aspect of my stance or attitude gave it away. Here I was with the most expensive and advanced translator species on my level of development could provide, and it didn't even come close to giving me the sort of cues that Jenny seemed able to pick up with no effort whatsoever. Either her translator rig was some sort of Last Great Race technology that they weren't sharing, or she just knew me too well.

"Our people have a great respect for the Ulix. The Ulix are the oldest species known to still exist. Others either go extinct or vanish. Not to mention that they've got ties to the Predecessor races that they don't talk about. To be allowed a glance at such a technology... well it's the goal of our people to one day be able to create such a thing, and here they are, allowing us to do just that."

I didn't pick up on it at first, but by the point she'd paused talking I'd noticed. I briefly thought of trying not to mention it, but then gave that up. Our positions seemed reversed with my translator this way; her deeper thoughts were blocked to me, but she seemed quite able to read what I was thinking. It'd be spooky if it weren't the exact sort of behavior I'd come to expect out of her a long time ago. Instead I asked her directly. Why was she referring to the Ulix in the present tense?

Jenny was suddenly silent. I don't mean that she wasn't saying anything on a level that translated, she wasn't saying anything on a level that was audible at all. That was spooky; it'd been strange when her cohorts had done it back on the planet, but here it was even more disquieting. It was as though she'd gone completely; even when they're not talking to anyone specifically they're always making some sort of noise. They make the humming of the lower levels of their thought even in their sleep. My translator, ever helpful, indicated that such a pause reflects an inner struggle even deeper than it was capable of interpreting.

"You must understand." She said finally, her voice even. "The Last Great Race owes the Ulix a debt. Our entire species owes this debt. Thousands of years ago, we nearly made a horrible mistake which would have utterly destroyed your species and thousands like it. The Ulix saw that this was to occurr, and stopped it.

"They're the ones who introduced the translator technology we needed to understand you. I've read through your central libraries, Alan, and they have it that your species or some other one like it invented the ability to communicate with us, but they've got it wrong. It was the Ulix, and we communicated with you first. Our people were xenophobic nearly beyond rehabilitation, and even then we were a race of terrible power. They gave us the ability to understand you, to make you seem as one of us. We're still xenophobic, though you wouldn't know it. You're one of us, you see. The translators they gave us prevented us from destroying you all, and we owe them big."

I could certainly see why they'd revere such a race, though I hadn't known how close they were to killing us all.

"We still have the weapon that would have done it, on our planet. It serves as a reminder to us of how close we came to becoming beasts."

The weapon? There was only one?

"Of course. Seems wasteful to make more than one if that's all we needed."

I found myself very glad that the Ulix had indeed intervened. I also thought that the title "The Last Great Race" was more apt than I'd been giving them credit for.

"You don't quite understand yet. We owe them a species-debt, and so I cannot tell you. But it is always in my thoughts."

The way she said that and indicated my translator was a not-very-subtle hint. I carefully dialed it up all the way.

"(1) Good, you're paying attention. (2) I'm not supposed to reveal this to someone who's not one of us (3) Alan is one of us. (4) The Ulix are our fathers (5) The Ulix are fathers to all (6) our world is missing them (7) we used to know much more (8) nnnnnnnnnn (9) nmmnmmnnmmnmmnmmnn (10) ........ (11) ...... (12) The Ulix Are Still Among Us"

After this there was just the humming and silence of the eighth and lower levels. I tuned the translator back to the way it was. I still wasn't overly convinced that her belief in the continued existance of the Ulix wasn't due to the hero-worship that her species apparently was engaged in. But no, that'd been on the twelth level of her thought, the deepest level that our translators were capable of interpreting. It was deliberately kept there and I suspected that if I were to tune back down there now, I wouldn't find it. It was her species' secret. The Ulix were still around, somehow. I was inclined to tell her what I'd seen when I'd been there, how every trace of them had simply vanished. Then I remembered the dream. The way that the seemingly self-originating order had resonated in my mind, the way that I'd found myself almost obsessively trying to get the team back together since then, it wasn't normal for me. Hell, I'd even tried to recruit Salient Steve, and I hated him. I hadn't remembered the Ulix being so... forceful back when I'd worked with them, but I suppose if they were still around they'd gone through a whole lot of effort to make it appear as though they weren't, so they might be desperate to get the job done.

What the hell was the damn Resonator, that they'd go through such lengths?

All of that passed through my mind in a few seconds, during which Jenny was nearly silent. I composed myself and said a simple thank-you, and her cheerful demeanor returned immediately. If anything, she was even more energetic than before. I hadn't realized how much of a weight this information had been on her. Perhaps it was more the effort of keeping it from anyone. Until recently, I'd thought of the Last Great Race as being open books. They didn't conceal anything from anyone; even if they'd wanted to, they were utterly incapable of it. Of course, the fact that they seemed perfectly able to communicate amongst each other on deeper levels and keep their species' secrets safe there somewhat destroyed this notion. While they were usually afforded respect by the other sentient beings, they weren't thought of as a Great Race in the way that the Ulix or the Predecessors themselves had been. I was beginning to see how much of an underestimation that was.

"So, tell me the rest. How did you get caught up in this mess?"

We werent' going to get to Reil station anytime soon, so I figured I had plenty of time to tell the story. I could have just handed her a copy of this journal, but it's much better to actually talk to friends, especially those you hadn't seen for a long time. This was the first real chance we'd had to talk, as there hadn't been a lot of time for it while we were running from the law.

She got quiet when I got to the part of the story involving Katie. I wondered why until it occurred to me that Katie and I had a history which, while it didn't go as far back as Archetype, did have a great deal more time spent in each other's company. When we'd worked together before, I'd typically have the translator tuned to only the higher-level speech, as it was easier that way, but every now and then I'd tune it down to three just to get a clearer picture of what she was thinking. She respected me, I discovered. On very, very rare occasions, perhaps twice in all the time we'd spent, there was a hint of perhaps something more.

Don't get me wrong, I like Jenny too, but in a professional sort of way. It wouldn't work out. I couldn't manage a relationship with a member of my own species, let alone one which breathed an entirely different atmosphere.

I changed the subject to Salient Steve, and that got her to speak up. He was too loud, too commanding. That's a trait of the way his species' mannerisms are translated, but in his case it was genuine. He'd been brought on by the higher-ups who thought we needed a professional managing the project. They were right, granted, but Steve was not who they needed. I ended up working through the story backwards, as she kept asking questions about what happened immediately before. At least, I thought to myself, I had plenty of time to share the story.