Stone Gods (26 page)

We were in the dish of a disused radio telescope.

I scrambled out, short of breath, grabbing a frayed rope hooked from the rim to the base of the receiver antenna. The white surface of the dish was breaking up in places, but it was polar-blinding, and impossible to feel the distance or the scale. The parabola and the whiteness distorted my spatial sense, and I pulled myself a little way further up the sloping side and sat down.

Wind. Silence.

I felt as though as I was in the cup of some giant creature, long extinct. Or a creature that had moved glacier-slow over the land and at last come to a stop here, and slowly fallen asleep, in a deep trance of millennia, waiting to wake again, for the sun, for some other star, to stir it from unknown dreams.

* * *

What were the signals this creature had received, and were they gone now, fainter and fainter, fading like a voice losing strength?

Are we alone in the Universe? And if we are, was it always so? Will it always be so? Does longing, flung out, some day find another voice?

I think all my life I've been calling you, across time. Steadily sending the signal, sure that, one day, you will hear.

The wind skimmed the edge of the bowl like a man's thumb on a hollow drum. The sound was eerie, unworldly, as much like a cry as a note.

It was beginning to get dark, and the stars, light years away, were spread over the dish like a cloth to cover it.

I thought I might stay there for ever. Why not? I was slightly hypnotized, like an Alpine climber, part altitude, part snow-blindness.

I was losing my clear boundaries. All I had to do was pull myself up on the rope to the rim and step off into the star-stretched universe.

Then I would be free.

It was movement that startled me out of the slide-state into dream. Not movement I could see, movement I could feel, under me, powerful and hardly perceptible. I held on to the rope to get my balance.

'The dish is tipping,' said Spike.

'It can't be — it's disused. There's no motor, no driver, no control.'

I had altitude sickness, and some inner-ear problem — that was what it was. I moved to start the climb back down the ladder, and then I realized that it was true: the dish was tipping.

Now it seemed as though the inside of the dish was scooped like some gigantic prehistoric flower, with a stamen the size of a tree, and I was whatever insect was resting inside but I couldn't fly to keep my balance. All I could do was to hold on.

The dish was not just tipping, it was turning. I could hear the great rusted wheels grinding round the clogged-up rails. It was dark now, and we were stark and white in the darkness, like an earthbound moon.

By watching the angle of the antenna I could see that we had tipped as much as forty-five degrees. Then the dish halted.

'There's a signal,' said Spike.

'From what? A satellite? A star? Another radio telescope?'

'I don't know,' said Spike. 'It's not a code I recognize. I can't decipher it. Take me on to the receiver.'

'I can't do that.'

'Yes, you can. There is an inspection ladder. It won't be hard to climb it now it isn't vertical. I want to be closer.'

So I did. I slung her over me in the dark, and climbed up on to the receiver itself, hanging out like a gangman on a crane, balanced over the fearful white drop and, after that, certain death. Here I am, back against the wind and the night, holding Spike's head in front of me like an offering, but I don't know to what god.

'It's repeating,' said Spike. 'The same message, repeating.'

'What do you think it is?'

'Wherever it's coming from, it's been set like an echo. It might be a test from some other astro station.'

'Does it match this?' I said. I got out the notebook and showed Spike some of the unintelligible (to me) code.

'Yes,' she said. 'It's not all there, but yes, it appears to be the same thing.'

'Then it's been repeating since at least 1960.'

'It may only repeat at intervals.'

'Can you analyse it from the Mainframe?'

'If I had a connection, which I don't.'

'We should go down.'

'Billie, I think it is something very strange, very old, and at the same time in front of us.'

'What do you mean, in front of us?'

'I think that whoever or whatever is sending or has sent this signal is able to reach us in a way that is in advance of anything we are yet capable of.'

'You think it's from the future?'

'No, I don't, and that is what is strange. I think it is from the past.'

We began our descent. My fingers were numb and my body was shivering. I had only a vest and a short fold-up waterproof jacket. The night was cold now. We reached the second gantry, and I saw that the swinging cabin, still perfectly upright, in spite of our angle, must have been designed for observation when the dish tilted. Now, at least, we had reached a solid frame to climb down.

On the ground I ran to warm myself up, and got clear of the range of the telescope so that I could look back on it. It was still now, aimed at whatever strong and invisible call it had recognized.

We moved off, away, back up the hill, and looking down, I saw it's silent white shape, mysterious, moonlit, keeping a message from an unknown mind, like a creature who keeps a secret it cannot tell.

PARTY! Lighting rig running off an oil generator. Oil drums circled at two-metre intervals round the perimeter of the Playa, each one burning with inferno fire, drums so hot they were glowing red. Different drums, hand-beaten hard, fit to burst, the drummers swaying in time in the heat and beat of the fires.

Goat in boots, girls in leather, boys half stripped, children naked, running screaming under a cool-down fountain made of a punctured hose on pressure-wash.

A pig roasting on a spit of split applewood. Two women grilling sliced aubergines and courgettes. Potatoes pierced on a length of metal rod and put to cook in the ash of a pot-fire, its cauldron steaming above with lentils, tomatoes, lamb.

The pink Cadillac with a trailer on the back working the Playa as a mobile bar, trailer piled with beers on ice.

A bright blue tent that said 'FORTUNES' on the front, and there was the gypsy I had seen earlier, spreading her cards and placing her crystal ball.

Blackjack, poker, a stand of 1960s one-armed bandits, pirate themed, get three galleons and WIN WIN WIN.

Six dodgem cars on a raised dais, electric rods sparking the wires. Three cars red, three cars yellow, Toy Town steering-wheels and massive bumpers, Madonna playing over the double speakers.

Fairground, bacchanal, dream.

I never knew there could be so many different kinds of smoke.

As Spike and I entered the Playa, Chic X, in Doc Martens and leather bikinis, tuning up on the back of a decoupled low-loader, smashed into what was left of the airspace with a no-volume control cover of 'Metal Guru'.

Nebraska, on bass, swished her guitar round her back to bend and blow kisses at Spike, before leaning against the rubber model of a
Tyrannosaurus rex
to pout her lines about a silver-studded sabre-toothed dream.

A line of dancers, drunk and noisy, tried to jive me into their rhythm.
Metal guru — it is you?
I didn't want to dance but I was caught up, trying to keep my balance, trying to hold on to Spike. I shoved her into my backpack.

Somewhere near the FORTUNES tent, the line broke and I cut free, and sat down on a plank making a rough seat across two rounds of sliced tree-trunk. I took Spike out of the bag. She was flushed and cross.

'I'm only doing this to protect you,' I said.

'That's what all control freaks say.'

'You've never met a control freak — you don't even know the words "control freak".'

'N ebraska told me that her father was a very controlling man a control freak. That is why she left home.'

'Spike, forget teenage politics.'

'Didn't she look great? It would be worth having a body to look like that.'

'Spike, we are not in San Francisco. Concentrate! How are we going to get out of this mess?'

'I don't know.'

'You don't know? You're being designed to deal with planet sized problems and you don't know how we're going to get home?'

'I am objective. That is my job.'

An old man had come out of the riot in the Playa and was sitting down next to us. He smiled. 'You were at the telescope,' he said. 'I was watching you.'

'What is that place?' I asked. 'What is it for? Is it military?'

The old man shook his head. 'A War casualty, but not military. It's the Lovell Telescope, don't you know?'

1957 - the Lovell Telescope. Driven by an analogue computer, designed to read the language of stars. In its early days it decoded the Cold War, tracking the Soviets' first Sputnik. A radio telescope, famous for fifty years, then gently pastured-out as bigger, better telescopes, one with a dish a kilometre square, became the future.

'When they moved it from Jodrell Bank, it had been intended as part of a space museum, quite a good idea that included a replica of its first success, Sputnik 1, and a full-scale model of Sputnik 2, the rocket that sent the dog Laika into space. Remember Laika? No, you were too young, I suppose. Poor dog. I still have a photograph of her.' He fumbled in his jacket for his wallet, and took out a creased black-and-white photo of a creased-faced black and-white dog. 'She would have gone to the ends of the earth for her master. Instead she went into space.'

He smiled sadly, his faded blue eyes back in another time.

'I started work at Jodrell Bank in I957,' he said. 'I was twenty two, just finishing my degree at Manchester University, and all I wanted to think about was stars. I loved them — the mathematics of them, the vast distances of them. I was very happy spending my life listening to them. via the telescope. When I retired in 2000, after my wife died, I was rather bored, rather gloomy, you understand, and so when eventually I was contacted by the new space museum asking if I would be interested in advising on how the early analogue computers worked, and perhaps being part of the team, I jumped at the chance. We were going to rebuild an analogue computer to drive the telescope. I came down here for a week, in an advisory capacity, and then war broke out. It was just like when I was a boy, seven years old, and we were evacuated out of Manchester. Imagine living through all that again. Who would have thought it? At any rate, I'm fortunate that I did live through it. Funny thing is, I couldn't get home for such a long time and then I never did go home. Can't manage the jetons. Started with pounds, shillings and pence, survived decimalization, but jetons — how do they work? So here I am. The nuns look after me. And to me, to tell the truth, there's home.' He pointed at the night sky.

'It was you then,' I said. 'You nearly killed us. We were in the dish.'

'It isn't safe,' he said mildly. 'Not been maintained for years.'

'Why did you drive it when we were in it?'

He looked blank. 'I saw you wandering round the hut. I was walking my dog. I carried on. I'm pretty slow, these days, you understand. It would have taken me half the night to get down the hill.'

'The dish moved!' I said. 'It was picking up a signal.'

He smiled and shook his head. 'You shouldn't have climbed up there, but I expect the motion of the wind made you feel that the dish was moving.'

'The dish tilted forty-five degrees and turned in an arc of a hundred and eighty degrees,' said Spike.

The old man saw her for the first time. 'Good Lord,' he said to me. 'I thought that was your party outfit —like a gorilla suit, you know.'

'This is the Robo
sapiens
,' I said.

'The one we saw on the television last night?'

'There is only one.'

And then I had to explain everything, and Spike had to explain everything, and at last I gave the old man his notebook back, and Spike and he went through the code.

'I was the first person to pick it up,' he said, 'and there was absolutely no interest because the signal was bouncing off the moon and can only have been sent from somewhere very close to the moon — in fact, the earth. It was assumed to be something Soviet but of no importance and, at any rate, we were unable to decode it. It uses no current configurations.'

'This happened in I960?'

'Yes. The telescope was very new in those days, and we used to try random directions, partly to eavesdrop on the Soviets — this was the Cold War you recall — and partly to look for Little Green Men.' He laughed. 'Never found any — green or red.'

'But the signal '

'Yes, the signal You understand, you can't receive a signal unless you have the equipment, and not until that equipment is pointing in the right direction. I suppose that in 1960 we were pointing the right way by chance. Then I didn't pick up the signal again until just after the Moon Landing in I969, and to my knowledge it was never picked up again until, you say, tonight.' He shook his head. 'But it isn't possible. The telescope can't drive itself, and it's out of commission.'