Worlds Enough and Time (33 page)

O’Hara said it was overreactive xenophobia and counseled moderation. The things hadn’t actually killed anybody, though they’d had the chance; probably many chances. Before exterminating them, it would be smart to capture a few and observe what they do under controlled conditions.

Age 57.31 [23 Galileo 431]—Raleigh let me go ahead with the idea of capturing one or two of the floating spiders (or brain-eaters, as some people are calling them) so long as I could muster enough volunteers to build a cage and go capture them.

Finding the volunteers was no problem. I’m not the only one who feels uneasy about a campaign of slaughtering the dominant form of life in the region. Charlee rounded up eleven people from Engineering and I got fourteen from Policy. We built the cage in four afternoons, basically a geodesic dome of thick reeds, the whole thing covered with tough plastic. A fan pulled cool air through hollow reeds in the top; a pair of cameras with night vision would keep our captive under surveillance.

Now the big problem is finding a captive to capture. The first day the sweep team went out, they killed thirty-four of them, using robot drones to home in on helium ponds. The second day they killed nine; the third day they killed two. Maybe the creatures are rare. It seems more likely to me that they’re able to communicate with one another, and smart enough to clear out. Jungle primates on Earth would probably do that. Even birds.

Raleigh’s letting us use the fast floater for one day, three days from now, so we can try a couple of hundred kilometers north of here. The drones show a concentration of them up there. Meanwhile, we’ll keep practicing our capture technique, throwing a weighted net and then pulling the trailing cords together fast. It works fine on a soccer ball.

Age 57.32 (27 Galileo 431)—It was almost too easy. There were two of them floating together on a helium pond only five kilometers away. They had somehow eluded the killing patrols, but didn’t detect us sneaking up behind them. We got both on one sweep of the net; they didn’t resist after an initial startled reaction. They didn’t eject all their ballast water in an attempt to fly away, which was the usual response. Maybe they understood the net’s function and saw that the tactic wouldn’t work.

The dome was in a cleared field well away from Lakeside. Its floor was weeds and water; we’d borrowed a watering trough from the goat ranch and sunk it level with the ground. Dan’s enthusiasm for the project was limited, but he helped us rig a pipe from a helium tank with a valve so we could bubble the gas up through the “pond” whenever we wanted.

We put the creatures in the cage and freed them from the net, then hastily retreated. Both of them did the same thing, one after the other: drain out just enough ballast water to rise slowly, then at the top of the dome, spin around once, and then let out just enough helium to slowly descend. Then they both spread out as flat as they could and, over the course of an hour, turned bluish-green. It was as if they had seen that they weren’t going anywhere, so might as well photosynthesize.

It was a transformation nobody had documented before, but the only times we had seen the creatures at rest were when they were floating on the helium ponds, presumably ready to flee at any sign of danger. Perhaps they were slower, or not mobile at all, while absorbing sunshine for energy.

Maybe this was their normal state. If so, they had to be a lot more common than we thought. Certainly they would be hard to spot from orbit; indeed, you could probably walk right by one and miss it, if it was resting on a bed of grass.

Samples taken hour by hour did show that photosynthesis was going on. By nightfall their jail had the most oxygen-rich atmosphere on the planet.

We left Katia Paz in charge overnight. She’s going to let the helium bubble for an hour or so; see whether they move over to it. See how they respond to light, and so forth.

I have an odd feeling about the creatures. This has all been too easy.

PRIME

It is difficult to relate directly the events of that night and the changes they precipitated. O’Hara and I have gone over them time and again, she under deep hypnosis, myself working in parallel with machine intelligences more large, deep, subtle, and quick than I.

Even if you were a machine and I was telling you this story directly, you would only see a set of outlines of it—outlines not in the organization sense, but outlines as silhouettes, simulacra of truth. In the total sum of those simulacra, you would know what I know.

Telling the story to soft humans, it is not so much that
words
fail. In fact, words are appropriate quanta because of their multiplicity of meanings, their radiational and reflective powers: when I say “heat” to you, free of context, the small word carries associations of anger, thirst, passion, pain, drowsiness, as well as whatever host of personal connections the word releases from your own experience, your own ideolect. (To me, until some other context is indicated, “Heat” is a kind of energy transferred from regions of higher temperature to those of lower temperature.) It is not words that fail but rather the structures that we, machine as well as flesh, are constrained to put them into: structures defined and delimited by human consciousness.

Because something other than that is at work here.

Allow me to relate the incidents of that night and morning as if these were O’Hara’s words; in fact, they are the distillation of millions of words and trillions of associated somatic measurements.

Dan’s snoring woke me up in the middle of the night and I weighed the comfort of the warm blanket against the discomfort of holding back and decided to go pee. I put on a robe against the slight chill, breeze off the lake, but left the hat and knife on their pegs. The walkway to the toilet was covered now.

The thing was waiting in the rafters outside the toilet. It let me go inside and relieve myself. When I stepped back out, it fell and enveloped me.

There was a sharp pain on the top of my head, like being stuck by a pin. I tried to scream but couldn’t draw a breath; the membrane was fast against my mouth and nose.

It spoke to me:
Don’t cry out. I will let you breathe, but you must be quiet
. The order was clear and specific, though it was not in English, not in words. I nodded, and a hole opened in front of my mouth. When I had taken a couple of breaths without calling for help, the membrane that clasped me from head to knees slowly relaxed its grip.

Carry me down the ladder
. The membrane parted in front of my eyes. I walked toward the ladder like a person wearing an elaborate top-heavy costume. I knew the thing was in my brain, but that didn’t bother me. I’m not sure whether it was controlling the chemistry of my brain in order to subvert panic, or it was communicating “trust me”—or I was in such a state of shock that I would do whatever I was told, no matter who or what requested it.

It felt like a kind of VR. But it was not a dream. It was happening.

I slid the ladder to the ground and carefully backed down it.
Now walk into this hole
.

I knew the hole wasn’t real. Between the road and our house there had appeared an artifact sort of like the antique “postmodern” subway entrances in Atlanta: an unornamented and well-lit plain ramp descending into the ground at a comfortable fifteen-degree angle. This was metal, though, not cement. It went about twenty meters and turned right, still descending. As I walked down, I could feel it closing up behind me.

Forming each word carefully in my mind, I asked Where are you taking me? It didn’t answer, but communicated a desire for me to be patient.

We passed through a sort of invisible wall, a soap bubble of resistance, and we were suddenly in an arctic waste. My bare feet burned and curled on the ice; my skin raised up in gooseflesh. An instant later I was warm again.

The creature slid off me with a slurping noise like a silly sex joke, taking my robe along with it, inside out over my head. It floated in front of me and dropped the sodden robe, which froze solid before it hit the ice.
Are you comfortable?

I said I was and looked around. Epsilon squatted low on the horizon, a red ball that looked too large, the sky blue-violet, cloudless, three dim stars showing. There were fantastic ice mountains with ragged razor edges like primitive chipped flint tools. A constant wind keened at the upper limit of audibility and granules of hardened snow rattled along the ice. It smelled like metal.

Behind me, the collapsed remains of a small hut. A corroded machine stood next to it; atop a five-meter pole, a thing with eccentric vanes spun madly, clicking, squeaking. On the door to the hut was a faded stencil:

U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY
WEDDELL SEA METEOROLOGICAL MONITOR #3
PLEASE REPORT DAMAGE
L. AMERICA
3924477 COLLECT

This is Earth? I asked.

Yes. I wanted someplace on Earth where you had never been, so you would know it was not taken from your memory; and a place where there were no people around to be confused by our sudden appearance
.

You can travel to Earth? Anyplace on Earth?

Many planets. Step forward
.

I took one step forward and popped through the bubble again, onto the metal ramp, and then another step into warmth and darkness. The creature was still in front of me, slightly luminescent. The darkness was silent. It smelled like we were in a forest. I asked whether this was Earth.

No, we are back home. Not far from where you live. Sit down
.

I patted the spongy moss and nothing crawled. I sat down carefully, feeling helpless, anus clenching. I asked if this were telepathy.

There is no such thing, to my knowledge. We are physically joined
. I reached up and touched a silken thread.
Don’t pull on it. That would damage you
.

I asked What’s going on? Are you going to hurt me?

Not yet
. Then there was an overwhelmingly complex montage of thoughts, indecipherable, chilling.
Sorry. There are many others listening. I will keep them from intruding
.

I said that they didn’t sound friendly.

Why should they? You represent the alien species that has invaded this planet. They are tired of your actions and angry at having to deal with the moral complexity of the problem you have caused
.

I said that we wouldn’t have killed his people—people?—if we had known them to be sentient.

Maybe you would not have. That was our decision; we assumed from first contact that some would die if we kept our nature secret. That’s not the problem
.

The problem is whether to allow you to continue existing
.

I felt the dimension of that “you.” I asked whether they would kill everybody.

On this planet and in the starship and on Earth and in orbit about the Earth, every person and every cell of preserved genetic material
.

I said that that was genocide. Why kill the people on Earth?

Genocide, pest control, it depends on your point of view. If we didn’t destroy them, they would come again in time
.

I was glad to know that there are people still alive in orbit about the Earth. I said that we thought they might have been destroyed.

More alive in orbit than on Earth or here. Whether they continue to live will be decided by us and by you
.

I asked whether I had been chosen, or was it just chance?

We interrogated three people. All three identified you as best for our purposes
.

I asked why.

It can’t be expressed exactly in ways that a human would understand. An obvious part of it is having been many places, known many people, done many things, compared to the others; giving what you would call a large database. Part of it is trust, or reliability, combined with egotism. This makes it easier for us to communicate with you
.

I also sense that the stress of our liaison is not going to motivate you to destroy yourself as happened with one of the others, and may happen with the second male. Although it cannot be pleasant for you, knowing that I am inside you
.

I said that it was very unpleasant. I supposed that it was equally unpleasant to be inside an alien’s brain.

Unspeakable. This union is normally used for times a human would call sacred
. The specific word came through, echoing.
You yourself would not employ that word
.

I said that I would not use it in a religious sense; that gods were the inventions of men, sometimes women. I tried to communicate that I was nevertheless capable of appreciating transcendence, numinism.

Let me show you something godlike. Rise and follow
.

I stood up and stepped into blinding light. Orange with ripples of yellow and red. We seemed suspended, no gravity.

You are seeing heat, not light. We are in the center of your planet Earth. If it were desirable, or necessary; I could open a passage from here to the surface. Within hours, the planet would be a dead ruin
.

I asked What could cause you to do that?

You
.

Though I personally wouldn’t have to do it
. We were suddenly back in the forest’s humid darkness.
Any of us could do it, as an expression of will, if you cause it to be necessary
.