Bennu was doing what he usually did when he was doing nothing - that is, when he was in a bus station waiting to travel from one unsuccessful search to one probably as futile. He was reading a book, like usual a paperback, he had selected from the station racks.
In this case, since the wait was even scheduled to be a few hours, he had slowed the usual Adult reading rate down to something more nearly like that of the Earth people he was among. Not finding anything on any of his first choices of topics, he had worked his way down his preferences until he was forced to settle for a fat one on "UFOs". It came complete with a breathless title - "Strangers Among Us - The True Story!" and plenty of pictures, most of them fake.
As he read, he Smiled a few times, and even chuckled twice. Eldebran had had a Mature society for thousands of years, and they had made Contact with - or been Contacted by - some dozens of other starfaring races. None of them had used, or heard of anybody else using "flying saucers". The whole idea was silly. For that matter, so was using rocket power to travel between the stars.
Not that it couldn't be done, mind you. Hibernation techniques and/or the relativity effects of near light-speed travel kept the crews from aging. And, what with the stars populated by intelligent races being ten or more lightunits apart out here in the relative barrenness of a spiral arm of the galaxy, near lightspeed travel was essential if you wanted to accomplish much, anyway. Mature or not, people had a limit to their patience, and who wanted to spend most of one's life just to make a trip to and from reasonably near neighbors! Besides, long travel times at non-relativistic speeds meant that the ship's equipment was expected to operate for much too long without experiencing a serious breakdown.
On the other hand, rapid travel had its dangers, too. There were simply too many energy fields, plasma clouds, and bits of stray matter between the average pair of stars! At near lightspeed, it didn't take much of a collision to cause fatal damage, and the survival rate of the early space explorers had been dishearteningly low.
No, there was a better way - planar travel. It involved using the "planes" of Hyperspace. He didn't understand the mathematics behind it - after all, he was a Healer, not a Scientist - but when the hyperplanes aligned, you could use the alignment to travel "along" a plane from one point to another at near-instantaneous speeds.
The obvious disadvantage was that you had to wait for the planes to align. Through long study, the Local races had managed to chart the slow shifts of the major planes, allowing quite accurate predictions of when two points would connect, or, much more likely, when a useful entry (or exit) point was reachable by a short rocket flight. And that wait could be a long time, indeed! But, with the need for rockets on spaceships, they had to be approximately the traditional shape - nose at one end, exhaust at the other, and why Earthmen had imagined such an unlikely shape as a "saucer" was another, if quite minor, one of Earth's Secrets.
Communications was another matter. Various minor but rapid variations in the planar alignments meant that, using the right equipment, one could send a message thousands or millions of times over the course of a few days (clearly not a very practical way to send anything more substantial than data!) and expect to have all of it received and replied to. There were specific frequencies and transmit/ listening sequences to use, and he presumed that such equipment was located in both of their hibernation sites, though, as with so much else, that part of his memory was missing ...
He had reached the picture section of the book. Meteor, hoax, hoax, aircraft - there was a loud PLOP! as the paperback fell from a stunned Bennu's hands. A clerk's voice rang out in annoyance: "If you're going to treat them that way, at least have the courtesy to pay for them first!"
Bennu grabbed the paperback, shoved money at the clerk, and used the wait for his change to attempt to slow his racing heart. He failed, and actually had to call upon some of the training Children underwent to control himself. Still shaken, he flipped back to the page. Could it actually show what his memory said it did?
It did. THAT was, beyond a doubt, a Capezzi probeship! The Capezzi! Or, as they were known by all of the other Local races, The Adolescents. Very little was known about them, but what was, was usually unlike that of any other known race. They were non-aggressive, and not apt to be exploitive of others, so they had the right to as much privacy as they wanted.
Which was fortunate, because, while almost totally lacking in psionic powers, they were also almost immune to telepathic probing - though the few times such communications had been established, their minds didn't seem to be much different than those of other races. Perhaps it was only such similar minds that could establish mental linkages. Who knew?
Most of the other facts included the location of their home planet (calculated from the particular planes they used combined with the time they had used them), persistent rumors that they had managed to develop, if not immortality, at least an indefinitely extended lifespan (that one had a reasonable amount of evidence behind it ...), and, again, probably in compensation for their lack of psi, a unique ability to "sense" hyperplanar alignments.
And, as one would expect from their designation, an agenda different from all others. The designation was literal. Apparently far more stable than other races, they had negotiated the difficult transition from Childhood successfully, eliminating prejudices, hatred, and most irrational behavior without learning to control their subconscious. All offers from other races to assist them in transition to full Maturity were politely declined - apparently, they preferrred to remain as they were.
Well, that was their right, and perhaps they were correct. Normally, it would have just been thought of as a probably inevitable peculiarity in racial development, given the number of intelligent races out there, but there were a few complications. Along with the lack of psi powers went the lack of Empathy. Combine that with an extreme curiosity about Immature races, and trouble sometimes erupted.
The Capezzi used their planar sense to attempt to contact Immature races whenever they could. Lacking Empathy, they viewed the disruption and panic their barging in on unsuspecting Immatures sometimes caused with amused toleration. Granted, they truly were sorry when the occasional planetwide tragedy happened - but it was at least as much for the loss of a rare opportunity to study Immatures as for the disaster. (The Capezzi, with considerable justification, claimed it would almost certainly have happened to such a Childish race soon enough even without Contact .) Still, such situations were extremely distasteful to the Mature races.
The usual method of handling predicted Contacts was to send a small fleet of unmanned probeships of their own - by rocket, if, as usual, there was no suitable planar alignment - to determine what the Immature race looked like, then to select a Mature race who matched the target one physically. That race would, if possible (lack of a suitable planar alignments didn't ALWAYS make it so) send a Contact team to prepare the Immatures for their impending encounter. Since that alignment might not occur for hundreds, or even a thousand or more years, before the expected Capezzi appearance, it was desirable for the team to be present when the Capezzi showed up, and, in any case, it was likely to take decades to prepare the Immatures, the Team normally had to be placed into hibernation, to be Awakened in the decades before contact with the Capezzi - just as he and Mira had been!
Bennu shook his head in amazement. So THAT was their Mission! While, until he found Mira and checked the timer on her sleep chamber, he couldn't know the expected arrival date (which could, after all, still be hundreds of years in the future), at least he knew that they could try to prepare Earthmen for what awaited them. Their Mission could still fail - Earthmen could ignore their warnings - but at least he knew that they had a chance of success.
He tore out the page showing the probeship, carefully put it into the safest part of his backpack, and waited for the bus with increased eagerness. One problem solved, one to go - and even if he were captured, his Mission still might succeed! But finding Mira would be a much more pleasant way to attempt it ...
As the bus pulled away, he had to chuckle. The vagaries of the shifts of the hyperplanes resulted in the Eldebranis having to send their team over a thousand sun-cycles earlier than the predicted date of the Capezzi arrival. OK, that happened. But, because a probe took so much less time than a Survey and Construction Team did, the Capezzi could take advantage of a short alignment and send their probeship only a few decades ago. Recently enough so that Bennu could spot a photograph of it in a book. Hmm. That sounded like the work of The Light again.
Copyright July 29, 2000 Three Cheeks Productions (Richard Kaplan)