Cosmonaut Keep (24 page)

"Perhaps," Camila suggested, "some of the scientists transmitted it independently?"

Driver held up and swirled his hands. "It's possible, sure. Nothing to stop somebody setting up a pirate rig somewhere. But there's no way they could have hacked the ESA planning-system, or my desk, come to that."

"Not even with that alien code-cracking math you got?" I hazarded.

"Uh-huh," he said. "The math came from here, all right, but the resources for applying it are way beyond anything anyone here has, or has access to. They had to grow honest-to-god
forests
of new tech to generate the computing capacity on Earth. Besides, we aren't relying just on encryption. Basic security measures -- " Driver shrugged. "You should know."

I nodded. "Okay. You know Alan Armstrong?"

"Nope."

"Heard of him," Lemieux said.

"Check him out any time," I said. "Call him up, if you like. No need to go into details. Just ask him if he thinks what I've brought is gen."

Driver's fingernail worried at his earhole. "All right," he said. "Let's see what you've got."

"Are you the right person to evaluate it?" Camila asked.

"No, but Paul here is. And if any of it really came from here, I can find it in my audit trail."

"That'll take awhile," I said. "We're exhausted, we need some proper food and sleep and a wash."

Driver glowered. "And we don't? We're
all
exhausted here." He slid his fingertips across his closed eyelids. "Oh, the hell with it.

You're right. Whatever it is, it can wait another few hours. Okay, Paul, you take them out and I'll catch some kip right here."

Lemieux unfolded himself from his corner of the ceiling, drifted past us and opened the door. "Come on. Let me show you some hospitality."

Chicken, mashed potatoes, runner beans, all stuck to the paper plate with a glutinous gravy; and a squeezable plastic bulb of orange juice. It was the best meal I could remember having. When I'd eaten enough to start thinking again I slowed down and looked around. The servery was a narrow room with one long aluminum table at which the diners could approximate sitting by hooking their knees around the railing half a meter down from each edge of the table. A slow queue shunted past the hatch at the far end of the room. The illusion of being in a normal gravity field must have been important to the room's designers and users -- nobody left the table by floating over it, though it wouldn't have inconvenienced anyone.

People ate fast, and talked, and kept their spex on and often shaded. Hardly anyone wore new-tech goggles. At any given time there'd be about twenty people around the table.

"How many people are there on the station?" I asked.

Lemieux looked up from a sticky apple-pie-and-treacle dessert. "Twenty-one with cosmonaut training, including ten science or technical officers -- that's me -- the five security staff and three military liaison officers -- two of whom are currently in the brig, guarded by the third -- plus fifteen civilian administrators and two hundred and seventy-two scientists and technicians."

"That's
a lot,"
said Camila.

"There's a lot to do," Lemieux said. "As you should know, if you've looked at the science data we've already released."

Camila shook her head. "Seen some stuff on the news, that's all."

"Nor me," I admitted. "I've been too busy running."

"Well," said Lemieux. "We have been in contact for over five years. There is much work. The scientists" -- he waved a hand at the oblivious company -- "are totally obsessed with it, now that they have freedom to investigate and share and publicize. It was very difficult when it was a big secret."

"Difficult to keep secret," I said, "with that many people here, and I suppose hundreds more on the ground, knowing it."

Camila and Lemieux both laughed.

"Your friend here is laughing," said Lemieux. "She is right. Big secrets can be kept for a long time by many people, and the bigger the secret, the easier it is. As your Area 51 showed, and the Manhattan Project, and our Operation Liberation."

"What are the aliens like?" I asked, smiling to show I recognized how stupid a question it was.

Lemieux leaned forward, elbows on the table, letting his fork float from one hand to the other, catching and releasing it precisely with finger and thumb.

"They are
like
the microorganisms that produce the calcareous mats which build up to stromatolites," he said. "Except that what they build are not stacks of stone, but something between a larger organism and a computer, to put it crudely. To put it delicately, they build quasi-organic mechanisms of incredible beauty and diversity. The basic unit, the builder, is something
like
an extremophile nanobacterium. Obviously these are not the seats of consciousness, any more than our neurones are. Collectively, though, they build something greater than themselves." He smiled, and added: "As our clever English comrade Haldane mistakenly said of the ants, they are 'the smallest communists.' "

Camila made a snorting noise. "Communism sounds just fine for
germs,"
she said witheringly.

"You would not think it so funny when you see what they have achieved. They are not a collective mind as a whole -- there are more separate minds in this asteroid than there would be in, let us say, a human Galactic Empire, if such a thing could be."

"And you're in communication with them?" I asked, anxious to avoid any political argument.

Lemieux's eyes narrowed and his lips thinned, as though in momentary pain. "We are," he said. "It is a theoretical scandal, but it is the case."

"What's the scandal?" I asked. "That you can ... translate? Or that they can?"

"It is worse," said Lemieux. He scratched his head. "There was no need. They know our languages."

"Like, they learned them from television?" Camila asked.

"Impossible,"
said Lemieux. It sounded more definite like that, in French. "It is simply not theoretically possible for a genuine alien to learn a language from television broadcasts. A language cannot be learned without the ... interaction."

I had scant respect for linguistic theory, particularly when delivered in a French accent.

"Can you be sure of that?" I asked. "Perhaps, I don't know, something in their code-cracking, something we don't understand yet, some mathematical underlying structure, Chomskyan deep grammar -- "

Lemieux caught the fork at both ends and began to bend it.

"That is conceivable," he said. "Barely. We may be all wrong about the theory. That is not the scandal. The scandal is that they understand languages that not only have never been televised or transmitted, but that have had no living speakers since before the invention of writing.
That
is the scandal."

The fork snapped.

We've washed ourselves with wet sponges in cylindrical stalls through which air flows and water flies. We've dried in the same stalls, with hot air. We've been given much-laundered underwear and stiff, fresh blue fatigues and soft plastic boots. Lemieux has left us together in a cubbyhole behind a clipped-on curtain, with a shrugged apology that it's the best he can do. The walls of the little space are hung, like many walls in this place, with loose webbing. We look at each other and laugh. I have three days' worth of stubble and our faces are flushed and puffy with blood that's no longer pulled toward our feet. We hook elbows and ankles through appropriate holes in the webbing and fall asleep against the upper and lower partitions, facing each other a half-meter apart.

I dream. Lemieux's words and worries combine with scraps of pictures I've glimpsed of the interior spaces of the asteroid, the alien city or computer or garden, fractal and crystalline and florally organic. I'm falling on it from a great height, like in an airliner descending on a lighted city, like a parachutist's view of onrushing grass, and every dandelion is a clock. Inside it, tiny green men the size of ants are watching television, laughing in thin high voices, and scribbling notes to each other in cuneiform and Linear B.

I fall onto something and wake to realize I've drifted and been snagged by the webbing. Camila's snoring, openmouthed, a few inches in front of my face. I shrug back into the webbing and sleep again.

And fall again, but this time more gently, onto a bed. Jadey's face, troubled, as in the last shot I saw of her, looms above me. Then she smiles, like she did the last time she was in this position, and our faces and lips meet.

Sometime after that I hear a voice telling me to wake up, and I feel -- for a few dozy seconds -- happy and comfortable, before I wake to find that Camila and I have worked our limbs out of the webbing and are now huddled and cuddled like frightened monkeys, and that I have a quite obvious erection pressing against her.

She disengages and smiles at me in a friendly,
We're all adults here
kind of way, and rattles the curtain back and pushes herself out. Bending over awkwardly, I follow.

Back in Driver's office we all took the places we'd had before. He didn't look more than marginally refreshed.

"Right," he said. "You ready to show me what you've brought?"

It was easier to walk Driver and Lemieux through the material than it had been with the Americans. The tech was compatible, the protocols familiar to both of them -- the ESA-specific ones more familiar, indeed, to them than to me. They tabbed about in it, finding links and paths I'd missed, taking it all in quickly, with rapid-fire, cryptic remarks to each other. Camila hung out on the edge of our shared dataspace, not commenting apart from the occasional murmur of "Holy shit!"

We backed out and looked at each other, blinking.

"Hmm," said Driver. He looked at Lemieux, eyebrows raised.

"Interesting," said Lemieux.

Driver fiddled with the datadisk then slotted it in his desk. "Let me run that past the audit trail."

He put his goggles back on and sucked at a smokeless. Lemieux relaxed into a meditative posture; we fidgeted.

"Shit," said Driver. He peeled off the goggles and flicked his filter into the net bag. "Shit." He looked at Lemieux, then at us.

"It's there," he said. "All spelled out. No way could I have missed it, not back then. Last year, hell, Paul, you remember. We double-checked everything. You and me."

"I didn't double-check the disinfo," said Lemieux. "Obviously."

"Yeah," said Driver, in a dangerously calm voice. "But I'd have known about any disinfo, because anything that wasn't totally innocuous, bland, censored shit about low-temperature chemistry and so forth,
I fucking made up myself.
Not from the whole cloth, sure, but you can bet I read every bloody line of the real stuff that went into it. And I did
not
send disinfo to ESA! You'd have seen it, mate."

"That," said Lemieux, "is not in question."

The two men looked at each other; some unspoken understanding was reaffirmed.

"Okay," said Driver. "So what
is
in question?"

"Who, and how," said Lemieux. "Which of the civilians managed to hack this datastream, and how did they do it?"

"I don't believe it for a minute," said Driver. "They don't have the skills, and they don't have the balls." He considered this for a moment. "More to the point," he added, "they don't have the motivation. I mean, anyone who'd found this would have been all too keen to tell us. And why send it to ESA, if they weren't loyal? Why not send it to the other side -- they knew about the controlled datastream going to the West, and it would have been easier, if anything, to slip it in that."

He closed his eyes and scratched his eyebrows. "Or maybe not. Maybe I do need more sleep."

"You do, Colin," said Lemieux, with an odd, affectionate, personal note I hadn't heard in his voice before. "But you are right. It makes no sense."

"What about your CIA spy?" Camila asked.

Driver dismissed this with a wave of his hand.

"That was all bullshit. Sorry." He looked at us fiercely. "I've apologized to Sukhanov about the slander. It was necessary."

Aha!
I thought. "So the CIA must have -- "

He glared at me, glanced at Camila. "Leave it."

"All right," I said. "You're all making one assumption, which is that someone on this station hacked the datastream and downloaded the 'flying saucer' stuff to ESA."

"Well, no," said Driver. "I've just found the
evidence
that someone -- " He blinked, then gave me a sick-looking smile. "Nah! Come on."

"What's so unlikely about it?"

"About
what!"
asked Camila, sounding exasperated.

Enough dramatics,
I thought, and said flatly: "The datastream was hacked by the aliens."

Everybody tried to reply at once. Driver banged the desk.

"Paul? What do you think?"

"It's possible. That is to say, it is not theoretically impossible and it is not simply improbable, like the scientists' doing it would be. So, yes, we should consider it."

Driver sat silent for a moment.

"Hell," he said. "If they've done it, it's something that has never happened before." He scratched his cheek. "Intervention."

The word hung in the air like the pieces of Lemieux's broken fork.

"Like all the information they've been feeding you
isn't?"
Camila asked.

"I don't think the scientists would call it 'feeding,' " Driver said. "The aliens are pretty selective about what questions they'll answer."

"Oh? And what
do
you call giving the E.U. a massive military intelligence advantage?"

"They didn't necessarily know that," Driver protested. He looked at Paul Lemieux, as though for support. "There's no evidence the aliens even understand the politics of Earth, let alone take sides in it. Nor is there any evidence that our presence is being dealt with at any kind of high level in the alien ... community. For all we know, we may be in contact with nothing more than their equivalent of the
Encyclopedia Britannica
-- and the children's version, at that."