Across the Sea of Suns Page 15

Fuckin’ spiders

  ELEVEN

  The rock wall of Ted’s office was cold to the touch. It had a low thermal conductivity, but the mass of stone and iron still allowed the chill beyond to seep into Lancer. Years of human occupation had not warmed the hollowed spaces.

  Nigel sat in a low chair, leaning against the wall. Ted finished his work at the flatscreen, checking the functioning equipment left on the Isis surface. Bob Millard sat in silence on the other side of the room from Nigel. He looked up as Ted dropped his stylus on the desk.

  “Well, Nigel,” Ted began, “your idea didn’t work.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Perhaps?” Bob parodied the English accent. “Ah’ll say perhaps, yeah. Daffler dead, his rig all melted down—”

  “They became excited,” Nigel said slowly. “They each tried to send their answering signal. It seemed to be a compressed code.”

  “Ah wondah what Daffler thaught.”

  “I doubt he had time to think anything,” Nigel said.

  Ted leaned forward over his desk. “The fact remains that they attacked him. Killed him.”

  “They had expected a response to come from above, from Earth. When they realized Daffler was nearby, they tried to see him. Point is, to see by radar, you have to send. So hundreds of them tried to make him out, and the sum of them—A bad business,” he finished lamely.

  “Mebee,” Bob whispered.

  Nigel turned to him. “That’s the way it was.”

  “Yeah? Then why didn’t you tell us beforehand? Huh? You were so all-fired hot on this plan, makin’ contact, why didn’t you figure—”

  “Bloody hell, I hadn’t counted on everything. Especially on your mob running wild, cutting the EMs down like animals—”

  “Wait.” Ted held up a palm. “You’re both getting carried away. I’ll admit the men on the ground got out of line.”

  “Cut up sixteen a the bastards, scattered the rest— I’d say we saved your neck, Nigel.”

  “My robot, perhaps. I was servo’d.”

  “Well, some of us weren’t. The men figgered—”

  “Okay, okay,” Ted said mildly. “My point is that our communication attempt failed.”

  Nigel raised his eyebrows. “Not at all.”

  “What do you mean?” Ted asked.

  “The answering signal. We have that.”

  “So what?” Ted said. “Nigel, I don’t think you understand the, ah, animosity this incident has stirred up. Daffler had a lot of friends. You—”

  “I know. Coming on top of the losses before, this is—But look, let me work with the Exo-comm team. I suspect we can find some way of decoding it. Then—”

  “Okay, okay. Do what you want. But you’re barred from surface work,” Ted said severely. “Understand?”

  “Right,” Nigel said. “So long as you don’t get notions about going back for another gamble with those satellites,” He couldn’t resist grinding it in. “Just promise me that.”

  Bob grimaced and said nothing.

  The long strings of code were impacted, layered, complex, and yet keyed to a syntax which made the task barely possible; the EMs had done the difficult work of rendering their constructions into something resembling human language forms. The patterns emerged like distant signal lamps seen through an all-consuming cottony fog.

  The mathematicians could not be sure where the narrative began or ended, so the pictures and symbols that came simply remained in a static way, the interrelations suggesting but not drawing lines of cause and effect.

  One picture showed a single perfectly flat and motionless steel-colored sheet from which distant sticks and black stone arches leaped, marking perspective with their angular geometry of intersection, fixed and rigid. Something like a road came from the left and without perceptible slant slipped abruptly beneath the gray-and-blue surface, like a flat thin blade sliding obliquely into smooth flesh, guided by a delicate hand.

  Nigel watched the picture build on the flatscreen and then, as more of the code came through, he felt the implied motion of the water, the sustained layers beneath in which brown currents carried wriggling, fishlike swarms. The bland and unhurried surface bore in spots a frothy green scum, sign of methane-rich outgassings, but otherwise screened the secret speed of the layer a meter down, streaming out from the distant shoreline and carrying the fat, triple-finned glowlife which hugged together in swarms for protection in the rust-rich waters. A sense of swimming, of the soft and sapphire-tinged swarms beneath, came to Nigel as the picture moved, and he caught a quiet warm feeling of contentment in this structure, in this serene plane as ideal as any Euclid ever dreamed, which stretched to the horizon and teemed with delicate ripplings of information about the foodlife which was being borne outward on the tidestream below.

  The blank disk that squatted overhead, unmoving, was dull red softened by an atmospheric blue, where molecules of water scattered the light. This was Isis, at a seashore unlike any men had found, a beach sliding into a calm sea. When the thick slow viscid ridge of chocolate water formed at the bottom edge of the picture, Nigel knew he was seeing in some nonlinear way the world of the EMs as it had once been, and so the slow appearance of a spindly leg which rose and, plunged again into the stream did not surprise him. Arms worked into view, throwing nets. The lines tightened, surging up with a bulging load, and a mass of the softly glowing things appeared, fat and ready. So this was the EM heaven, Nigel thought. The contemplative serenity of this place could not be an error of translation. They had shown this because it was some vaulted memory, some touchstone image.

  There were others like it. Some were unmistakably art works, and some suggested the passage of vast stretches of time. The astronomers knew that Isis was locked in tidal resonance with the outer gas giant planet, and the ceaseless churn in each world’s wind and water tugged Isis outward, closer to the massive, beckoning Jovian-class planet. Keeping careful track of the night sky shown in some of the decoded pictures, they found the apparent diameter of the gas giant and thus the date.

  The pictures covered the span of hundreds of thousands of years. And then the images and symbols became mixed, and strange curled ships appeared—schematics, designs, clearly things the aliens had built themselves, to fly in vacuum. Spaceships. Then, abruptly, a picture of a gray-green Isis, and about it a swirling cloud of points like hot crackling cinders, which swelled into asteroids, all systematically descending on the eternal sunward-facing disc.

  The long arcs down then blended into a moving view of a flat lake. Plants: saw-edged long stems, electric blue, which grew taller as Nigel watched and then began whipping back, parting as the picture moved forward in the familiar trawl for the swarming sea life below the water, so that sharp spikes thrust at the view like limber knives which cut—it seemed he could feel the shooting pains, the following bleeding moistness—and hampered the harvesting.

  And here the mathematicians failed to make coherent the symbols and pictures hammering like hailstones at them, and simply gave them in the order they came: Of an era called the Flux Time, and of a relentless fire-consumed night when the skies were streaked with orange, and of curled profiles that leaped upward into that same night, aimed to destroy or deflect, amid rolling, hammering waves of sound like perpetual cannon-fire off over the flashing horizon. There were hot winds that rushed through black air. And then tangled angular images. And then silence.

  He knows he is worn down to a nub of persistence, his muscles cramped from the computer interface booths, and his judgment says to leave Ted Landon’s office and rest, calculate, decide how best to report what has come out of the decoding. But in the same moment he knows he cannot do that, the moment must come to a point now, and so, sitting in a calculatedly casual way, nearly lounging, he tells it:

  Something came out of interstellar space and perturbed the orbits of the asteroids near Isis. They came down as a slight oddity at first, and then with increasing mass and numbers, and the hammering went on for years. It blasted t
he surface, destroyed the strange cities of the EMs, threw dust and steam into the Isis air until the wan radiance of Ra was cut to nothing better than Moonlight on Earth. Without photosynthesis the food chains collapsed, destroying the life the EMs knew. They had lived as wading foragers, eating of the food that flowed continually through the rich seashore flatlands. Free of agriculture, they had nonetheless developed a mild technology, and even ships able to reach orbit. They had conducted a short, futile, and puny defense against the in-falling rock. In the end the entire subsolar point of Isis was hammered and blasted into a jumbled plain of fresh volcanoes, where the slumbering magma of Isis broke through as the crust itself fractured under the pounding, conjuring up deep tectonic thrashings that forever denied to life the moist birthing point at the warmest spot on the planet, and instead made the Eye.

  Nigel pauses and feels the eyes of the others on him in the spaced silence that fills the office. He has been talking swiftly and with fragile momentum, not sure of all the connections but wanting to get it out so the others can work on it, test the fleeting images which have come to him, the greased pig, in the light of this they can test and refine and perhaps even disprove what he thinks he has glimpsed.

  Ted says Seems funny I don’t and a geologist rushes in with You know that would match the dating on the cratering we found, it was planetwide we do know that and from Nigel’s left comes Now that you mention it the age of the satellite surface was about the same and softer, farther back in the crowded, sweaty office Christ at that scale of time you can’t deduce causality that’s absurd and Nikka beside him says suddenly, defiantly Would you mind giving him a chance to complete his but he waves her into silence, it’s true that events of a million years or more ago are dim notions now, fitful spectral dreams.

  So he goes on, and in his mind’s eye sees the quiet calm lives of the stilt-legged creatures who swayed and stepped among breakers and tide rushes; seeking the floating ambient glowlife that fed them, that made possible time around fires at the shore, and from that brought into being some culture very distant from the hunter-based and forward-tilting human imperatives. By the Flux Time they knew much about themselves, had mastered the coiled code of DNA and molecular cookery. They survived the hammering from above and saw their world wither away, felt the animals and plants dying in the wan and unforgiving twilight of a dust-shrouded world, and sensed the coming into being of a new ecology built on the withered husk of the old. So their scraps of genetic knowledge were hammered into instruments for change, solutions titrated, molecules wrenched and reordered, and from themselves they made a new kind of self.

  I dunno, sounds improbable to me, doing a lot of genetic tinkering on yourself and Look the vulcanism was increasing, no way they could carry on without the oxygen-rich air they’d had and All that sulfur pouring outta the volcanoes, might as well as the room grows warmer, the scent rises salty and strong But that’s plain impossible, writing into your own genetic code things like those transistor nerves and the capacitor storage you just can’t do that kind of and softer Yeah who says? with That’s old Muriel for ya, anything she doesn’t know howta do is a law of nature like God’s speed limit and Nigel sags into his chair, feeling the muscles in his back spasm from the hours of stiff sitting, should have bloody lounges those computer jockeys, math buffs never learned how to live, tangled up in their numbers It was the only way out maybe the other exo-logic types murmuring amongst themselves for they have run their own multifactorial analysis of the EM squirted codes At least thass an explanation for the lack of other electricity-storing life-forms in the biosphere and Nigel can see the math division does not quite agree with his explanation, but he shrugs, knowing that this initial smattering of impressions will not converge until more work is done but still the implications It would imply if I’m not mistaken Dr. London that the nominal superconducting “rooms” Bob’s group found are in fact artifacts of a million-year-old technology and frankly survival of any superconductor, even two-dimensional, I find incredible over that period of slowly the sweep of it seeps into them and at first they balk, unable to accept I mean how could they cling to just one high-tech bit like superconducting sheets and let everything else go jess go and have not felt yet the humbling sense of what it meant so long ago to change deliberately your own substance to go on living, to harness electrodynamic forces when the chemical pyramid of life failed and could not be revived, because the Eye was always there, the ancestral skies were now smothered with dust and wherever some remnant of technology fought the rust an arcing orange lance would hammer away until they were all dead, the machines broken, snapped, and finally rusted by the altered ecology of sulfur grains and wind-sculpted gnarled plants But why make it so complete doesn’t fit I’d say and the room dissolves into discussion, Nigel feeling the points emerge slowly as indeed they did with him Well radio was the only way to see in that windblown crap he presses Nikka’s hand, for it was she who saw the final dark connection Sure and I guess the only hope of communicating over interstellar distances crying bleak and hungry across the abyss My God all that just so they could survive a rickety bagful of working meat, pipes and pouches grown thick and waxy, soaked with juices, walking on jointed sticks as they peacefully waded through the cool shallows, life still hanging on, pulsing, flexing, bubbling, combusting, and doomed even with their slowed metabolism to lose their last charge and decompose into rustrun soils You know I’ve been thinking, using radio in a life-form that way it would be natural, so to speak, not a product of technology and Nigel, seeing they have made the last turn toward home, puts in a few phrases wearily Maybe that’s the point the Watchers a gathering fever of perception runs through them, a prickly closeness as each sees a fragment of it Sure wouldn’t regard it as technology at all, just a quirk of the life-form, some odd aspect of evolution and no Watcher could suspect that even the electromagnetic spectrum, refined over aeons, could give to a life-form pleasure, nature’s sign of approval, Well Occam’s razor alone would say the Watchers must’ve been the cause and now the Watchers skating endlessly across a murky ruin of a world I dunno seems like a string of ignoring small hints of life giving rise to technology again Still when you think about it hoarding energies over the aeons Damn getting stuffy in here Nigel you need to get out, rest, let no Makes you wonder if maybe we shouldn’t pull our servo’d vehicles out, or disperse ’em so’s they don’t attract attention no, he shrugs off her concern again Yeah ’at Watcher gets the idea we’re down there an’ a serious civilization or somethin ’we’re and Ted says calmly, to bring it all under control, that of course the teams will have to look into these ideas, there will be another meeting tomorrow at 1100 hours and he expects reports from each division and Nigel let me the room is thick and heavy with their sweat and concentration Don’t try to stand up but he does and finds the compacted mass of details in his mind does not allow him to move his feet properly, they will not catch his weight as it wishes to rush at the floor in this mild centrifugal gravity Damn he curses himself for being so negligent of his body but still there were no clear signs or did he miss them Hey what’s he crashes down, snapping a wrist and almost welcoming the stabbing pain which follows.

  TWELVE

  He lay quietly as the machines sniffed and poked at him. Nikka said, “Fatigue, mostly, they think. But your blood chem is off, too.”

  “Um,” Nigel grunted. “Imbalance in the antiaging potions, I suspect. I stayed away from the medmon, once my trick went sour.”

  “You do look tired. But you got more out of those EM messages than the specialists, so maybe it was worth … What’s it doing now?”

  “Um? Serving up pills,” The medmon pushed a tray toward him, humming.

  Nikka asked, “What’s the orange one?”

  He turned stiffly to see it. “Ah, the orange bugger.” Pharmacological peace. He lay with a feed in his nose, diagnostic discs on arms and chest, a thermometer and sampler in his anus, various leads and taps spotted over his belly. “That’s my aphrodisiac
.”

  Nikka smiled and the door peeled and Ted Landon came in. Nigel smiled wanly as the three of them went through the customary hospital-visiting remarks. Ted was nervous. To deflect him, Nigel asked about research.

  “Oh, we’re pretty much sure that idea of yours was right,” Ted said. “The EMs must’ve tinkered with their genes to come up with that semiconductor and electrical storage system.”

  “By building it into an ecology, they made it look natural? So they could get away with using radio?” Nikka asked.

  “Maybe. Something kept the Watchers from attacking them.” Ted shrugged. He still seemed distracted.

  “They found a loophole. Their radio is natural. The Watchers seem to he hunting down technology. Ergo, natural radio is safe.”

  “Could be.”

  “We’ll have to study them more to be sure,” Nikka said, “But it seems—”

  “’Fraid not,” Ted stated flatly. “We’re moving on.”

  “What!” Nigel spat out.

  “Just got a long squirt from Earth. We have a new target star. A long trip.”

  “Why?”

  “Things have changed back there. There’s something in the oceans now. New life-forms.” Ted looked at them bleakly. “Looks like somebody dumped them there. That’s why Earth wants us to push on. Find out what we can from the EMs sure, but explore other systems, too.”

  Nikka said slowly, “I don’t …”

  “Somebody’s seeded our oceans. Using starships.”

  THIRTEEN

  2077 DEEP SPACE

  For weeks now, Lancer had been filled with the steady muted roar of the boosters. The huge, ornamented stone arced out from the sullen star, away from Isis, preparing for the ramscoop drive to cut in.

  “Nigel? Nikka said I’d find you here.”

  Nigel turned to find Ted Landon entering the view chamber. “Having a last look?”

  “Um.”