Existence (80 page)

Lacey kept a dour thought to herself.

That might be a good thing. With Rupert and Tenskwatawa setting up their “Wisdom Council,” pulling all strings to get it put in charge here. If they succeed … and ai models say they will … then all alien objects could be locked up and space missions canceled. “For public safety.” That’ll leave just fragments, tucked away from their clutches.

Lacey no longer received briefings from the clade of trillionaires and her spy at the Glaucus-Worthington household hadn’t reported in days. This must be it—her long expected demotion from the oligarchy. Lacey had few regrets. Still, it wasn’t enjoyable joining ten billion commoners.

She took solace in a grim thought. Any war on science can go both ways.

Do they dare to trust their boffin hirelings—any of whom might suddenly declare loyalty to the Fifth and Ninth and Tenth estates? Sure, current odds favor their aristocratic putsch. But things could go badly for them, if their inner plottings leak. Or if some new factor eases public panic, replacing it with confidence. Or fascination.

“Have any pieces responded to your probes?” asked a simtech expert from Xian.

“They
all
respond to an extent. Here’s a complete archive of reactions, so far.” The fair-headed Hawaiian anthropologist waved in midair, as if his hand held something. Lacey flipped down her ai-shades, saw a shimmering virt-cube, and click-forwarded a copy to her chief analyst.

“So, we’re learning stuff, even if broken crystals can’t talk?”

“Indeed, Madam Donaldson-Sander. A few petabytes of holo-images, mostly degraded or lacking context. Partial starscapes. Incomplete globes. And blurry creatures—walkers, fliers, sea creatures. Some that seem robotic.

“Have you traced lineages?” asked a representative of the Mormon League.

“We’re pretty sure we’ve deciphered
eleven
families of message probes, each bearing distinct sets of alien figures. Plus some overlaps.”

“Overlaps?”

“Species that appear in more than one lineage.”

“Appear in more than … but that would mean some races out there made several kinds of lifeboat probes! I thought these jealous things locked their hosts into duplicating just one virus-meme. But clearly a few organics…” Lacey swallowed, surprised at how an abstraction affected her. “A few host species kept some control over their own destiny, at the end.”

“Still, there’s nothing here to contradict the original Artifact’s story.”

Flannery motioned toward a lonely object across the room, that bulged under a heavy black cloth. All downloading had been suspended by the new Wisdom Council. Just a breather, they vowed, to let the world calm down. Sure.

Lacey thanked Dr. Flannery and others crowded in with questions. She had a few minutes till her analysts could report back, summarizing what was learned from broken relics, dug out of mud and rock all over the planet. She expected no miracles, no game-changing alternatives from such pathetic remnants.

The world overflowed with liars and self-deluders. Knowing this, Lacey had aimed her dreams skyward, hoping for enlightened minds.
But it seems deceit is nature’s coin. Among humans, animals, or across the cosmos. Unless you’re held accountable by opponents who know your tricks. And you’ll retaliate, shining light on theirs.

Competition—the engine of evolution—got a bad rap in primitive tribes, because it was almost never fair. Till rivalry was finally harnessed to let
no one
evade criticism. The Big Deal was supposed to ensure this. But Lacey and Jason always knew the odds—and human nature—were stacked.
Feudalism runs in our blood. It erupted in almost every human culture, and probably across the galaxy. Wherever beings clawed up Darwin’s ladder.

Now the clade was making its move. With limitless resources, bureaucracies captured, legislators blackmailed, and a mass reactionary movement stirred near boiling, they’d ride a wave of crisis-driven fear, fueled by the Artifact’s tale. The old lesson?
In dangerous times—trust your lords.

Some still hoped to fix all this with competition. Thousands worked around the clock on space missions robust enough to run a gauntlet of million-year-old lasers. If her money might help, Lacey would give! Only now she felt certain: those new launches would fail too.

Rupert and the others think they have it all sewn up. The old plan. Only now with a new goal.

The Quantum Eye had taken weeks to mull Lacey’s question, applying its mysterious polycryo-substrate to sift countless what-if parallel realities. The oracle’s answer:

YOU MAY SOON BE TYPICAL

The obvious meaning?
Humanity is no different.
Its fate like every other race. Rupert, Helena, the Bogolomovs, the Wu Changs … they’d get similar readings from the Riyadh Seer. And—terrified by its import—they would choose a new ambition, beyond mere oligarchy. After that quantum prophecy, her peers would view this planet as an ocean liner, hurtling toward unavoidable icebergs.

Like aristocrats aboard
Titanic,
they were thinking about life boats.

Once they consolidate power, all science will refocus on alien technologies. Artifact schematics will become prototypes, then orbital factories. My former peers—now masters of Earth—will picture their decisions arising from logic, necessity, and their sovereign will. But they’ll be dancing to a tune that echoes far back across spacetime.

Ben Flannery lit up crystal fragments, revealing shredded constellations or partial globes, simulated beings and broken symbol-cascades that never fully cohered. Everyone seemed riveted. So, perhaps Lacey was the only one to notice when a quartet of figures emerged through a door at the chamber’s far end.

Gerald Livingstone, Akana Hideoshi, and two other members of the original Contact Team—the Russian and the Chinese-Canadian woman—strode past the other table, the one with a single bulging object in its center, covered by thick cloth. Each wore a one-piece flight suit and carried a travel duffel, slung over a shoulder.

The astronaut barely glanced at the shrouded Artifact that he once lassoed from space, as he led the small party to a side exit that had been sealed for months.

Now, the portal gave way as Livingstone planted a shoulder and pushed. For a long moment the four just stood, bathed in bright Maryland sunshine, inhaling a planetary breeze for the first time in months.

Lacey stepped near the second table, fingering a fringe of the black cloth. Thinking hard.

Even though the sound was expected, she jumped when the door slammed shut behind her with a bang.

LOYALTY TEST

This may be the last session of alien interviews for us to examine for a while. Now that the Contact Center is virtually shut down, all interactions with the Havana Artifact must now go through that new council thing. Despite all the whistleblower spills, linking it to a cabal of gnomes and trogs.

With riots and counter-riots raging, aren’t there enough upsetting rumors going around?

—That the Artifact has already been destroyed, and the one shown to the press yesterday by the WC is a fake.

—That it’s a fake all right, to cover up the fact that the original was STOLEN! Swiped by members of the old Contact Team who haven’t been seen since.

—That it was a fake all along. (Yeah, that one is back.)

—That the explosion yesterday at Canaveral was rigged to draw eyes from another launch at the same time, far out to sea.

—That cryonic suspensions of living people—fleeing our raucous time—have gone up so fast that even the Seasteads can’t keep up. And liquid nitrogen futures are skyrocketing.

—That the crisis might spark a reconvening of the Estates Generale, a conclave to reconsider the Big Deal.

And so on and on. So many puzzles … and where the heck is Tor Povlov, when we need her?

Never mind. Here and now, I want to dial back to our main interest, the Artifact aliens, or artilens. That last interview before shutdown. We started discussing it yesterday.

You’ll recall most people were fascinated by the beetlelike being who called himself “Martianus Capella,” after an ancient Roman who saw the fall of civilization looming and tried saving some of it. Our Earthly Martianus Capella strove to collect what he considered the highest accomplishments of his culture, the
Seven Liberal Arts,
and his collection—in weird poesical format—seemed a candle to many, during the Dark Ages. That story inspired Isaac Asimov, by the way, to write his famed
Foundation
sci-fi series.

The
alien
Capella’s struggles to retain many treasures of his people and planet, then safeguarding them against erasure, struck many of us as noble and moving. So moving that I missed something equally important.

It came during the interview with M’m por’lock—that reddish furred otterlike being. When he was asked by Emily Tang (before she disappeared) about the Artifact’s central narrative. The story told by Oldest Member and most of the others. That all organic races die.

M’m por’lock agreed with Om’s account … though with some body language that has stirred argument across the Mesh. Some suggest signs of reluctance, perhaps even coercion! Others chide that it’s foolish—interpreting alien quivers and crouches in human terms.

Only then, M’m por’lock continued.

“There is a legend,”
he said.
“That one day will come a species who achieves the impossible. Beings who notice and wisely evade all traps and pitfalls, yet do so while moving forward. A race that soberly studies the art of survival, the craft of maturity, and the science of compassion.

“It is said this will be a new dawn. That long-awaited civilization will set forth to rescue all promising new races, teaching them the skills to make it and survive. And they will lift up those who tumbled earlier.

“They will light a path for all.”

With eagerness, Emily Tang asked M’m por’lock to elaborate. Only then the Oldest Member appeared, reminding them that time was up.

“Of course … it is only a legend,” finished the red alien, with Om standing alongside. “A tale for children or those in denial. Not for realists who can see. There is only one escape.”

61.

IT’S A BUOY

Ascent.

The ai inside his right eyeball wrote that ideogram, explaining the new path of the mechanical sea serpent that had swallowed Bin and the worldstone.

Sure enough, it felt as if the robot snake were now aimed upward, throbbing hard with swishing strokes of its long tail. Peering through the tiny window, Bin watched an extinct volcano pass by—its eroded peak now crowned by a coral reef that shimmered with sunlit surf. Was this the secret base of whatever group had sent the machine after him?

After the
worldstone,
that is? At best, Bin would be a helper, a tour guide, hoping for reward. Not death.

But this was no secluded outpost. Instead of entering the lagoon via a clear channel that Bin spied through the shoals, he felt the machine twist and undulate away, following one shoulder of the mountain toward a ridge of shallows, some distance from the main atoll.

It began slowing down.

During one of the snake’s looping movements, Bin caught sight of something ahead … a metal
chain
leading from an anchoring point on the mountain slope, tethering something that bobbed at the surface. A wave-energy generator? Was the robot only stopping here to replenish its batteries?

The thought that this might only be a brief stop, along a much longer journey, seemed to fill Bin’s body with sudden aches and his mind with new-formed terror of confinement. The tiny space was now even smaller and more stagnant. He flexed, involuntarily pushing with hands and feet against the close, padded space, breathing hard.

Peng Xiang Bin.

Focus.

It is a weather and communications buoy.

The words, floating boldly, briefly, in his lower right field of view, both chided and calmed him. Bin even had the presence of mind not to subvocalize his relief. No doubt this was a rendezvous point. The serpent would use the buoy to summon another vehicle. A seaplane, perhaps. Bin had been on a similar journey before. Well, somewhat similar.

And yet, after Nguyen’s penguin went to all that effort, covering our tracks while guiding me to sunken Pulupau, the Chinese Special Forces still found us. Found the worldstone. Did they have a spy on Newer Newport? Or did one of their satellites pick up some special color of light, reflected by the stone when it soaked in the sun?

Perhaps he would never know. Just as he might never learn the fate of Dr. Nguyen. Or Mei Ling and their child.

Anyway, it seems that someone else followed the Chinese assault team, taking advantage of the chaos to gain an upper hand and win the prize. Who?

Will my new masters even bother to tell me, when I’m fully in their power?

Through the little window he saw growing brightness, approaching daylight. The front end of the snake-bot broached amid spume and noise. Bin abruptly had to shade his eyes against a sunshine dazzle off the ocean’s rippling surface. Even with help from the ai-patch, it took a minute of blinking adjustment before he could make out what bobbed nearby—a floating cluster of gray and green cylinders, with arrays of instruments and antennae on top.

Wriggling gingerly, carefully, the serpaint moved closer to curl its body around the buoy and grasp it firmly. Then Bin saw its mouth open and a tendril emerge.

It will tap in

to communicate

with its faction.

The floating characters took on an edgy quality, drawn with strokes of urgency.

You must please act urgently.

This won’t be easy.

Blink twice if willing.