The Draco Tavern - Larry Niven [64]
“Then you don’t have a problem with terrorists?”
“A tale out of history,” Sissy said to me. “Wesshenss Bondbreaker’s family vortex built an iron kite and ran it into a stratospheric storm. The tail he guided into a meeting of the Guidance Vortex. Half the Guidance was blown out. Wesshenss disrupted too. Would you call Wesshenss a terror maker?”
I said, “Not unless he was trying to frighten someone. Wesshenss was trying to kill the Guidance, wasn’t he?”
“Yes. I don’t understand this term, ‘terror.’ ”
“Extreme fear,” I said. “It isn’t what one can do to an enemy, it’s what one can make an enemy do to itself. If one can put an enemy country—political entity, culture, whatever—in a state of terror, the enemy may do crazy things.”
“It’s not a useful term,” one of the Chirpsithra said. The two looked identical—slender lobsters eleven feet tall—and I didn’t try to tell them apart.
Blue Bubble said, “When we fear an enemy, we fight him. Why would any entity want us to fear him?”
“Among us there is doubt as to what is a person,” Sissy said. “Attacker and defender may merge or trade packets of information. One may become the other. Your Golden Rule is mere common sense to us.”
The Boojum said nothing.
“Terrorist is not for us a useful term. You must understand,” one of the Chirpsithra said, “that no entity would achieve interstellar flight if extreme forms of vandalism were a problem. The energies involved are too great. The power in Wandering Signal would shatter most habitats. Planets, for instance.”
“What do you do about vandals?” I asked.
“Many things. Our greatest threat is from the dead universe, from kinetic energy, from impacts large or tiny. Most tool users cannot match the fury of a meteor impact or a blast of cosmic rays. We make the ship self-repairing. We blast small intersecting masses and steer around large ones. These same defenses would repel many potential enemies.”
“Design flaws,” the other Chirp said. “Things go wrong with any machine or system. We build to resist accidental damage. Thus the ship will also resist imposed damage, sabotage.”
“We don’t land the mother ship,” Chirp One said. “Wandering Signal now orbits the Earth’s Moon. Wherever entities probe the universe more deeply than you have, we still leave Wandering Signal out of easy reach.”
Chirp Two leaned toward me. “Rick, your people say ‘terrorist’ and ‘freedom fighter’ and ‘soldier,’ ‘espionage’ and ‘murder’ and ‘homicide,’ as if you must know an enemy’s motive. You deal with only one species. It must be easy to predict what people of your own kind will do. But we deal with a myriad kinds of intelligence.
“More than that, there are deviants. Few species evolve toward the conditions of interstellar travel, therefore it is deviants who board our ships. We must be very wary of our own passengers. Even ourselves, even crew may go mad.
“So, our concern is not with who might try to damage us, or why. Some of you use another term, ‘threat estimate.’ For every creature or hive or plausible grouping, there is a threat estimate. How much damage could it do to us? How shall we protect against it?”
“That sounds insanely complicated,” I said.
“Intrusive,” said the Blue Bubble. “We were probed down to our atomic structure before we were allowed to board. We entered Wandering Signal naked, and found life support inside. All are so treated. What the crew learns is useful for medical treatment, so we are told.”
“That sounds likely,” I said.
“Objection!” Blue Bubble said. “Medical repairs interfere with our ongoing evolution! What if we refuse the probes?”
“Stay home,” one