by Ian Stewart
"So does the [BLEEP] universe, Dunsmoore! How long since the last major paradigm shift in phys —" But Harris's microphone was off, and the producer had moved smoothly on to the next item, leaving Sir Charles Dunsmoore the undisputed victor
The critics had hailed it as a triumph for rational scientific debate, almost as well argued as the latest fascinating ideas about how Nostradamus had prophesied the coming of the comet and whether alien reflexology would be similar to our own. . .
... It was galling to have spent five trillion dollars, traveled for two years to the largest planet in the solar system, and worked your ass off for the best part of a year, only to find out that Clementine and Harris had been right all along.
Uhlirach-Bengtsen's scowl was almost ingrained nowadays. Despite obsessive contingency planning, they were fast approaching the stage when all the plans had been torn up and they had to start making it up as they went along. Seat-of-the-pants politics ... he hated it.
The flurry of reports from Europa Base had made an effective smokescreen for a while—so effective that even the political leadership had been fooled—but the smoke was rapidly dispersing as a lot of increasingly worried people homed in on the weak point: the comet was still on course, and the expedition had made no progress toward contacting the aliens. You didn't have to be a genius to see that a hundred technical reports on anomalies in Jupiter's radio spectrum didn't amount to a hill of beans.
Now some idiot in Baghdad had put up a five-hundred-foot-high Doomsday Clock, counting down the days to Ground Zero . . . just what everyone needed. The goddamned media were showing it every evening before the main newscasts, and it was all over the X.
A gigantic rethink was under way. According to the latest eyes-onlys, Skylarks techs were hastily reprograming the probes to start looking at the rest of Jupiter's moons—even the small ones. Maybe one of the orbiting rock piles was really an alien love nest.
He hated improvising. He hated the state of his office. Documents were piled everywhere. Whoever had predicted that computers would eliminate paperwork had been about as much on target as the caveman who'd argued that fire was dangerous and would never catch on. The Xnet was so insecure that anything sensitive was prepared on isolated computers and printed out on paper. It was just as quick to scan printed output back in again, anyway, if need be—and paper lasted longer than magnetic film and was easier to store, as well as being more secure.
The problem was not to generate information. It was to decide which information, if any, was meaningful. The engineers could quantify information, but meaning was a quality, beyond the reaches of current information theory. He picked up a report at random: Absence of Response to Reflected Light Stimuli in Alien Artifacts, by a team of—god, it had to be at least thirty of them, all at something called the Macnamara Institute for Applied Xenotechnology Studies. He glanced through the abstract. As far as he could penetrate through the jargon, the researchers had established that wheelers could respond to light signals— something that was obvious from the debacle with the laser pointer at Prudence Odingos investigation. A dozen teams had been trying to decode the wheelers' optical "language," without success. Apparently this lot had discovered that if you bounced the laser beams off an ordinary glass mirror, then the wheelers didn't respond at all . . . but if you used a mirror whose surface was optically flat polished platinum, they did.
What the hell was that supposed to tell him about how to make contact?
Angry, he ripped the report in half and tossed it in the bin. Bloody academics', just can't keep their eyes on the hall! Then he changed his mind and retrieved the torn cover from the bin. He would see if he could get their funding diverted to somebody doing something better-targeted.
Sir Charles normally kept himself aloof from the daily routine at Europa Base, but as the weeks stretched into months he found it harder and harder to delegate all of the work to his subordinates. He was beginning to wonder whether they were missing something obvious. He was all too aware whose head would roll if they were, but that wouldn't actually matter, would it? If the task force didn't crack the problem, there would be no Egyptological Federation for him to preside over.
To his surprise, he found that he didn't much care about that kind of thing anymore—even if his team did succeed in stopping the comet.
He was beginning to wonder what he did care about.
To take his mind off such confidence-sapping questions, he wandered unannounced into the main Ops Center. As far as he could tell, everyone was performing their alotted tasks as competently and energetically as could be expected under the trying circumstances. Even though the radio monitors had been on the case now for well over a year—before arrival and after— they still seemed to be watching attentively as the computers scanned ten thousand frequencies each second, searching ceaselessly for signs of a structured signal.
Having wandered round the plastic-covered dome and observed what everyone was doing, putting all their nerves on edge and otherwise achieving nothing. Sir Charles Dunsmoore settled into an inflatable chair in front of a small flatfilm screen and tried to pretend that he was somewhere else. It didn't work, but the operatives appreciated the gesture. The Old Man was mellowing. That was really weird—most people in his position would be going quietly off their trolley. Sir Charles was a cool one, and no mistake.
It was a day like any other. Lots of activity, no results. Lots of analysis, no signals.
Jupiter wasn't helping. When it came to the radio spectrum, Jupiter was the most active planet in the solar system—apart, perhaps, from Earth. The difference was that Jupiter's activity was natural, a relic of its failure to become a star, whereas Earth's was mostly human in origin. Earth emitted noise on every wavelength, which on close analysis resolved itself into chat shows, game shows, news, pornography, and sports. Jupiter emitted noise on every wavelength, which on close analysis resolved itself into . . . noise. If the aliens were using radio to communicate, they were speaking in the language of dice and casinos. There was no structure, no short-range correlation, no semantic content. Earth's scientists were learning a great deal about the physics of Jupiter's mesosphere, its flimsy near-invisible rings, and the plasma torus that linked it to lo . . . but nothing at all about aliens. The only sign of life that they had yet found was half a diatom shell. Freddy Sunesson had discovered it on a rock she'd been slicing up for examination under her electron microscope. It was exactly like a terrestrial diatom—no doubt because that's where it had come from. Sunesson swore blind there'd been no chance of contamination, but nobody believed her. Someone had brought it with them on their clothes or in their baggage. He certainly wasn't going to tell the people of Earth about that.
Sir Charles decided to amuse himself by playing with the spectrum analyzers and attractor reconstruction suites on his local node. He extracted some beautiful segments of 1/f noise, and publishable evidence for Brownian chaos in the statistics of the Zeeman effect for calcium ions in Jupiter's polar magnetic field, but no alien equivalent of The U-Foes.
He called for a squeezer of cold coffee and a tube of croissant paste. Europan cuisine was healthy and filling—provided you could bring yourself to stuff it down.
I could he sunning myself in the Virgin islands attended by distinctly unvirgin islanders, he thought. Or sipping champagne in a hot-air balloon circling the peak of Nanga Parhat. Or watching twenty-jive-over limited cricket on the quicksport channel with a tube of beer at my elbow . . . Instead, I had to be too successful, and now I'm buried up to my armpits in the maddest, most desperate project ever attempted by the human race, and to date the most unsuccessf —
He became aware of a growing hubbub in the Ops Center. People were pointing at their screens and shouting at one another.
He scanned his own screen, trying to work out what had captured their attention. He didn't want to make himself look like a fool by asking.
No good. He didn't have the training.
He pushed with his feet and floated off the seat,
extending his legs at the last moment so that his velcro socks met the complementary carpet. Swaying where he stood, making quiet ripping sounds at every step, he crossed the aisle to the nearest desk. "Okay, Bethan, you know this stuff a lot better than I do. Have we finally found something important?"
"Probably not, Sir Charles." The operative was a laconic young woman from the Argentine Pampas. "One of the external sensors seems to be malfing, but the diagnostics are in conflict."
Ah. Now he knew what to look for. He scrolled a couple of windows, spotted the appropriate icon, expanded it. "Mmm. Or—if I read this correctly, which you can help me with—the routines say nothing's wrong with the sensor. Yes?"
I didn't realize the Old Man was that sharp. "That's right. We're getting impossible readings, but the tests say there's no malf."
Charles found his mind wandering back to his pyrrhic victory in the W talk show . . . Expect the unexpected. "Bethan— just indulge me for a moment, let me ask a silly question. Just suppose, despite all arguments to the contrary, that there is no malfunction. What would the sensors be telling us?"
It took her a few seconds to decide that it wasn't some silly test of her competence. "Um. I—I guess we'd interpret the readings as external movement." She couldn't stop there. "But Sir Charles, there's nothing out there!"
"Maybe it's a probe?"
"No, our probes are all hundreds of miles away."
"Someone doing an unauthorized moonwalk because they're bored out of their skins and need to relieve the tension?"
"Only if they're crawling on their stomachs! If there's anything moving, it's hugging the ground."
"Do we have a W camera that can see what's out there?"
"There's a mobile veecam on the far side of the base. It's being brought 'round—it'll be there in a min ..."
Her voice trailed off.
Everyone's voice trailed off. You could have heard a pin hover.
Something was banging on the main base airlock.
By a tortuous route, a copy of Pin Yi-wus self-effacing non-recommendation about the street child with the improbable skin color had made its way into the hands of Xi Ming-Kuo. Xi had been hearing rumors for weeks, but the scrap of recycled paper told him that something more than rumor was at work. The child still lives.
This left him in a dilemma. It had been impossible for the boy to survive in the anarchic jungle of the buffer zone—defenseless, naive, trapped among gangs of feral children and dangerous dogs . . .
Yet, he had.
Were the powers that arranged the universe trying to tell Xi something? Had he made a mistake? Worried, he demanded the services of his jeng-shui adviser.
Delicate Blossom was young, slim, and breathtakingly beautiful, with long dark hair and—he knew—a body that it was a crime to conceal beneath such shapeless, billowing robes. In olden times, the art oi Jeng-shui had largely concerned itself with the placement of buildings, for any fool could see that it would be a mistake to erect a house on the tail of a buried dragon, and since only one skilled in jeng-shui could tell where dragons were buried, it made good sense to hire the services of such a person. By the end of the twenty-second century the practice of jeng-shui had widened its bounds, first to the placement of furniture, then decoration and art, then the choice of bride, groom, mother-in-law, or pedigreed cat, and finally to any kind of decision in which a certain amount of guesswork was inevitable. The advantage of taking jeng-shui advice had nothing to do with whether it was good or whether you believed in it. The point was that if the decision later turned out to be wrong, there was someone else to blame. Of course, nobody in their right mind ever went back to their adviser to complain about their poor jeng-shui —because it was wise not to offend anyone who might be able to tell where dragons were buried.
So now, in an oblique manner that conveyed as little genuine information as possible, Xi asked Delicate Blossom to warn him of hidden dragons, metaphorical and real. And her reply was as well reasoned, as carefully considered, and as enigmatic as his own questions. The woman was good, there could be no doubt, and her chosen profession was a terrible waste.
"You advise me, then, to exercise extreme caution?" he asked, trying to extract another ounce of clarity from a fog of allusions and ambiguities.
"Caution should always be exercised," she intoned. "But true wisdom lies in knowing when to eschew excessive caution and take decisive action. Timidity and recklessness are equally doomed."
"Ah, yes. And—er— how should the wise man know when such a time has come?"
She smiled. "By exercising his wisdom, excellency." She leaned closer and he smelled her musky perfume. She whispered, "I believe that in your heart of hearts you have already determined the wise course of action. And I am certain that you possess the courage to heed the advice of your heart of hearts."
Xi coughed modestly. Of course. He dismissed her with the wave of a hand. The hint was obvious.
Courage.
To kill the child, even indirectly, was not and never would have been an act of courage, and that is why it had failed. But to leave the boy among the feral children, acquiring experience, a growing source of danger—not the organized street children, that was trivial, but the deep danger that Xi had sensed when first he had seen the child—that was foolhardy. To accept an unsatisfactory circumstance, merely because of vague and irrational fears about the powers that might or might not arrange the universe, was the opposite of courage. To risk the wrath of those powers (should they indeed exist, which was possible) ... to do so as a calculated gamble . . . that was courageous.
Sometimes he felt worn down by the burdens that his position imposed on him. It would now be necessary to show courage, and not just to possess it. Killing the child had failed, but keeping him captive in one of the many dungeons that had been constructed in the cellars of his mansions— that would offend no transcendental powers. Courageous it would be, though, for always there would remain a slim chance that the child might escape.
To add to the bravery of spirit that this course of action entailed, however—and he saw at once that this would be essential, for had not the Jeng-shui maiden told him so, though not in as many words?—he himself must be present at the capture. He would break his own rules, risk being observed, and command the hunt himself.
Of course, he would do so in heavy disguise and from a position of relative safety, for as Delicate Blossom had so eloquently pointed out, wisdom recognized a distinction between braver}^ and foolhardiness . . .
Xi sat in the green light of the armored car at the edge of the buffer zone and listened to the hunt for the feral child. Through short-range encrypted radiophones he could keep track of every move made by his forces. Already a dozen children had been cornered, interrogated (as best they could be), and— naturally—killed. It was for the best, anyway, under the circumstances. Now his men had pinned down the black-skinned child's position: he was holed up in the ruins of an abandoned abattoir, allegedly surrounded by a pack of wild dogs that were obedient to his every barked command. This was surely nonsense, but it confirmed how wisely Xi had balanced courage against reckless exposure.
His ground troops moved in. Over the radio he heard a cacophony of barks and howls, surprised shouts, and spine-chilling screams . . . Perhaps the allegations possessed a semblance of truth after all. Then the rattle of automatic weaponry echoed across the ruins, coming to his ears from outside the car as well as over the phone. An eerie silence followed.
He waited, but there were no answers to his shouted demands for someone to report.
Enraged, he restrained himself from driving the vehicle into the buffer zone and crashing through the ruins. Most likely the vehicle would fall through a flimsy floor into some concealed pit. He tried several times more to raise his troops, calmed himself, and called in a reserve squadron of hardened street fighters, also armed with automatic weapons.
He realized that he had underestimated the dangers of the buffer zone: he should have sent in
more men to begin with. On the other hand, it had been excellent strategy to keep something in reserve. Wisdom, again.
His men moved in, this time very carefully indeed. What they found was a scene straight out of Hieronymus Bosch. Bloody corpses lay scattered in heaps—dogs, Xi's men, street children. Some had their throats ripped out, some had been blown to pieces.
None was black.
Then they found one of Xi's men, still half alive, buried under a pile of dead dogs, his flesh ripped into bloody tatters by teeth and claws. They sat him up, bound his worst wounds with field bandages, and barraged him with questions.
Xi Ming-Kuo heard these things over the radio, and his fear that perhaps the powers that arranged the universe were abandoning him rose once more to the forefront of his mind. Pin Yi-wu's report must have made its way into other hands, too . . . Heads would roll for this, literally, and the first would be Pins.
The black child had gone.
He was unharmed, but he had been taken by others who had arrived earlier and lain cunningly in wait. The boy was now in the hands of others—identity unknown.
Xi could guess who. It had to be the White Dragon Gang and its warlord Deng Po-zhou.
Knock.
"What the hell do we do?" asked Bethan, aghast.
Sir Charles rose to the occasion. He had been waiting for this moment all his life. He just hadn't realized it.
They had all seen the impossible image from the veecam.
"Elementary courtesy," said Sir Charles, "requires that we let our visitor in. Someone open the door, please. Yes, you!"
The person nearest the airlock controls stared at him as if frozen.
"Just do it," Sir Charles said in a voice of infinite tiredness. "Whatever happens can't be worse than carrying on with our normal routine. You saw what's out there: pussy wants in. Someone open the cat flap, okay?"
There was a strained silence as the outer airlock cycled. The hiss of inrushing air masked their hesitant breathing. Then the inner airlock door cracked open. They'd all seen the W, they all knew what to expect. The reality was still unbelievable.