Existence

by David Brin

  I hope none of you are such fools. Just one person in a hundred manages to make the transition as well as I have—swooping about the datalanes, veering from hunch to correlation to corroboration. Links that used to require a laborious eyeblink or tooth-click now happen by sheer will … or whim … quickly submerging to the level of reflex.…

  All right, I just made it sound attractive, didn’t I? Well, don’t go there, any of you. It still hurts! And there are puzzling itches, in the way data often seems to stroke my skin and tingle up the spine. None of the docs can explain. Then there’s the creepy sensation that someone’s calling my name. Not this moniker I use in the news biz. Not what my mother called me, but some kind of secret name, like in stories about magic spells and such.

  Okay, it’s clearly a lingering wash of escapism/slash/self-pity … and so let’s push that aside with the balm of work! Smart-mob time. Like a swarm of T cells, let’s swoop onto something in the news!

  What? You want to make the space Artifact our topic? All of you? Isn’t everybody else on the planet obsessing …

  No, you’re right. Most of the reporting is stodgy. The insights stale. I share the group hunch. We can do better.

  41.

  THE OLD WAY

  Peng Xiang Bin tried hard to follow the conversation—partly out of fascination. But also because he felt desperate to please.

  If I prove useful to them—more than a mere on-off switch for the worldstone—it could mean my life. I might even get to see Mei Ling and Xiao En again.

  That goal wasn’t coming easy. The others kept talking way over his head. Nor could he blame them. After all, who was he? What was he, but another piece of driftwood-trash, washed up on a beach, who happened to pick up a pretty rock? Should he demand they explain everything? Dui niu tanqin … it would be like playing a lute to a cow.

  Except they needed his ongoing service as communicator-ambassador to the entity within that rock—and he seemed to be performing that task well enough. At least according to Dr. Nguyen, who was always friendly to Bin.

  The tech-search experts—Anna Arroyo and Paul Menelaua—clearly were dubious about this ill-educated Huangpu shoresteader with his weathered skin and rough diction, who kept taking up valuable time with foolish questions. Those two would be happier, he knew, if the honor of direct contact with the Courier entity were taken over by someone else.

  Only, can the role be passed along at all? If I died, would it transfer to another? Surely they had mulled that tempting thought.

  Or do I have some special trait—something that goes beyond being the first man in decades to lay eyes on the worldstone? Without me, might there be a long search before they found another? That possibility was one he must foster. At some point it might keep him breathing.

  Anyway, I do not have to prove myself their equal, Bin reminded himself. My role is like the first performer in a Chinese opera, who does not have to sing especially well. Just dance around a little and help warm up the audience. Be useful, not the star.

  “Clearly, this mechanism in our possession was dispatched across interstellar space by different people, with different motives, than those who sent the Havana Artifact,” commented Yang Shenxiu, the scholar from New Beijing, who rested one hand on the worldstone without causing more than a ripple under its cloudy surface—giving Bin a moment of satisfaction. It reacts a lot more actively to my touch!

  With his other hand, Yang motioned toward a large placard-image screen for comparison. In lustrous threevee, it showed the alien object under study in Maryland, America, surrounded by researchers from around the world—a bustle of activity watched by billions and supervised by Gerald Livingstone, the astronaut who discovered and collected that “herald egg” from orbit.

  To most of the world, that is the sole one in existence. Only a few suspect that such things have been encountered before, across the centuries. And even fewer have certain knowledge of another active stone, held in secret, here in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean.

  Bin contemplated the three-dimensional image of his counterpart, a clever and educated man, a scientist and space traveler and probably the world’s most famous person right now. In other words, different from poor little Peng Xiang Bin in every conceivable way. Except that he looks as tired and worried as I feel.

  Watching Livingstone, Bin felt a connection, as if with another chosen one. The keeper-guardian of a frightening oracle from space. Even if they found themselves on opposite sides of an ancient struggle.

  Paul Menelaua answered Yang Shenxiu by describing a long list of physical differences in excruciating detail—the Havana Artifact was larger, longer, and more knobby at one end, for example. And, clearly, less damaged. Well, it never had to suffer the indignities of fiery passage through Earth’s atmosphere, or pummeling impact with a mountain glacier, or centuries of being poked at by curious or reverential or terrified tribal humans … not to mention a couple of thousand years buried in a debris pit, then decades soaking in polluted waters underneath a drowned mansion. Bin found himself reacting defensively on behalf of “his” worldstone.

  I’d like to see Livingstone’s famous Havana Artifact come through all that, and still be capable of telling vague, mysterious stories.

  Of course, that was the chief trait both ovoids had in common.

  “… so, yes, there are evident physical differences. Still, anyone can tell at a glance that they use the same underlying technologies. Capacious and possibly unlimited holographic memory storage. Surface sonic transduction at the wider end … but with most communications handled visually, both in pictorial representation and through symbol manipulation. Some surface tactile sensitivity. And, of course an utter absence of moving parts.”

  “Yes, there are those commonalities,” Anna Arroyo put in. “Still, the Havana Artifact projects across a wider spectrum than this one—and it portrays a whole community of simulated alien species, while ours depicts only one.”

  Dr. Nguyen nodded, his elegantly decorated braids rattling. “It would be a good guess to imagine that one species or civilization sent out waves of these things, and the technology was copied by others—”

  “Who proceeded to cast forth modified stones of their own, incorporating representatives of all the diverse members of their growing civilization,” concluded Anna. “Until one of those races decided to break the tradition, by offering a dissenting point of view.”

  Bin took advantage of this turn in the conversation—away from technical matters and back to the general story their own worldstone had been telling.

  “Isn’t … is it not … clear who came second? Courier warns us not to pay attention to liars. It seems … I mean, is it not clear that he refers to the creatures who dwell within the Havana Artifact?”

  Of course they were amused by his stumbling attempts to speak a higher grade of Beijing dialect, with classier grammar and less Huangpu accent or slang. But he also knew there were many types of amusement. And, while Anna and Paul might feel the contemptuous variety, it was the indulgent smile of Dr. Nguyen that mattered. He seemed approving of Bin’s earnest efforts.

  “Yes, Xiang Bin. We can assume—for now—that our worldstone is speaking of the Havana Artifact—or things like it—when it warns against enemies and liars. The question is—what should we do about this?”

  “Warn everyone!” suggested Yang Shenxiu. “You’ve seen how the other worldstone has thrown the entire planet into a tizzy, with that story told by the emissary creatures who reside within. Although it remains frustratingly unspecific, their tale is one of profound and disarmingly blithe optimism, confidently assuring us that humanity is welcome to join a benign interstellar community. In this era of nihilism and despair, people across every continent are rushing to believe and put their trust in the aliens!”

  “And is that necessarily such a bad thing?” asked Anna.

  “It could be, if it is based upon some kind of lie!” Paul interjected. He and Anna faced each other, with intensity f
illing their expressions, till an outside voice broke into their confrontation.

  “What about others?”

  Menelaua glared at Bin for interrupting, his look so fierce that Bin shrank back and had to be coaxed into resuming. “Please continue, son,” Dr. Nguyen urged. “What others are you talking about?”

  Bin swallowed.

  “Other … stones.”

  Nguyen regarded him with a blank, cautious stare.

  “Pray explain, Xiang Bin. What other stones do you mean?”

  “Well, honored sir…” He gathered his courage, speaking slowly, carefully. “When I first arrived here, you … graciously let me view that report … the private report describing legends about sacred gem-globes or rocks that … were said to show fantastic things. Some of the stories are well known—crystal balls and dragon stones. Other tales were passed down for generations within families or secret societies. You yourself said that there is one such secret fable that’s supposed to go back nine thousand years, right? It’s … it is interesting to compare those sagas to the truth we see before us … and yet…”

  He paused, uncertain he should continue.

  “Go on,” urged the rich man—representing an association of many other rich men and women, across Asia.

  “Yet … what I don’t understand is why that report, all by itself, would have made people so eager … spending so much money and effort … to actually look for such a thing! I mean, why would any modern people—sophisticated men like you, Dr. Nguyen—believe such stories, any more than yarns about demons?” Bin shook his head, repressing the fact that he had always believed in spirits, at least a little. So did lots of people.

  “I figure the former owner of our worldstone—”

  “Lee Fang Lu.” Yang Shenxiu interjected a name that Bin had never known, till now. The fellow who used to own that pre-deluge mansion, with a clandestine basement chamber where Bin found a treasure trove of odd specimens. He nodded gratefully.

  “Lee Fang Lu might have been arrested, tortured, and killed over rumors—”

  “That he possessed something like this.” Dr. Nguyen nodded and his beads clattered softly. “Pray continue.”

  “Then there’s the way you and your … competitors … pounced on me, after I put out just a hint about offering to sell a glowing white egg. Clearly, when the Havana Artifact was announced, there were already powerful groups out there, who knew the … the…”

  He groped for the right words. And abruptly a new, unfamiliar Chinese language character appeared in the ai-patch that had been inserted within his lower right field of vision. Plus a row of tone-accented Pinyin Roman letters, for pronunciation. The ai-patch had been doing that more often as it grew more familiar with Bin—anticipating and assisting what he was trying to say.

  “… the range-of-plausible-potentialities …,” he carefully enunciated, while moving his finger over his palm to mimic-draw the complex characters—a common thing to do, when a word was obscure. He saw the others smile a little. They were used to this sort of thing.

  “I just find it hard to believe that powerful people would go to so much trouble … to search frantically for such a thing, even after learning about the Havana Artifact … unless they thought there was a real possibility of success. Unless they had strong reason to believe those legends were more than just legends.”

  He looked at Dr. Nguyen, surprised by his own boldness.

  “I bet there was a lot left out of that report, sir. Is it possible that some groups already have worldstones? Now, in the modern era?”

  Menelaua shook his head and snarled. “Ridiculous.”

  “And why is that, Paul?” Anna Arroyo answered. “It’d take care of that temporal coincidence, at least a bit. Maybe these things have been crisscrossing our region of space for a long time, like messages in bottles. While most settled into far orbits, waiting for Earth to produce space-faring folk, others might have landed—accidentally, like this one. Or on purpose in some way. Most would shatter or get buried at sea. But just like a plant that sends out thousands of seeds, you need only one to take root.…”

  Yang Shenxiu protested. “If there were so many, would not geologists or gem-seekers or collectors or plowing farmers have seen, by now, some of the fallen ones? Even if they were split or burned, they would stand out!”

  Anna shrugged. “We have no idea how these things decay, if broken. Maybe they decompose quickly into a form that resembles typical rock crystal. Or they might dissolve into sand or dust, or even vapor.

  “Anyway, suppose a few were found, from time to time, and recognized as something special. We all know how rare and precious things used to be treated, in almost every past culture. They were presented, as gifts, to kings and priests, who then hoarded them in dark places! Maybe bringing them out from time to time, for use in mystery rites, to impress the rubes. But then always tucking them away again … till the city was sacked and the hiding place lost forever. Or the items were buried with the king, which amounts to the same thing. Either way, the truth would dissolve into legends—of which there are plenty!”

  She turned to Bin. “Isn’t that exactly what happened when Lee Fang Lu got his hands on the worldstone? Caught up in that old way of thinking, he clutched the secret—the most special thing in his life—and took it with him to the grave.”

  The scholar, Yang Shenxiu mused. “In fact, this could explain Hindu legends of Siva Linga stones. Moreover, it is said that both the First Emperor Chin and Genghis Khan were laid to rest with treasures that included—”

  Dr. Nguyen lifted his hand for attention, cutting the discussion short. He had been standing quite still, apparently staring into space—or else, at scenes that only he could see, conveyed on the inner surface of his specs. Now, the black-haired mogul spoke in a low voice that Bin took to contain equal parts surprise and resignation.

  “It seems that events have caught up with our ruminations. My sources tell me that reports are trickling in…”

  He took off his specs and looked at Bin, directly.

  “It appears, my young comrade Xiang Bin, that you may have been right, after all.”

  SCANALYZER

  Call me Hagar.

  I communicate to you all today via encrypted channels for my own protection, although this (*) pseudonymous reputation code should attest that I am a reliable person and fair witness, having taken courses in Visual Skepticism and Objective Veracity at the Women’s University of Abu Dhabi. Of course, I see no conflict between that and being a good Muslim.

  Which brings me to my account. For, early this very morning, I stood at the holy place in Mecca, filled with gratitude for the dispensation of the Second Caliph, who has wisely, generously and against some entrenched resistance, granted women pilgrims greater equality in seeking to fulfill our obligation of Haj.

  This blessing is all the more welcome, now that I live the life of an outcast, much in keeping with my adopted name. (No doubt, some will connect this pseudonym to a certain fugitive, not pursued by any nation or law, but chased by great powers, nonetheless. Like the original Hagar, I am not without protectors, blessings be upon them. Moreover, I shall be long gone by the time this time-delayed posting lands, like a heavy stone, to ripple the dark waters of the InterMesh.)

  Of course, there are by now other reports or rumors, attesting to what happened some hours ago, just before dawn, at the Holy Kaaba. But I will offer my own testament, nonetheless.

  I had only begun my third of seven tawaf circuits, around the inner courtyard of the Grand Mosque, praying as Hagar once did, for relief and sustenance amid my exile, when a hot desert wind burst upon us from the east, driven over the roofs of bir Zamzam, as if by the soon-to-rise sun. This zephyr ruffled the kiswa black-cloth coverings that both honor and protect the shrine that now stands on the spot where Adam was the first person ever to pile one stone upon another, and thus began the era of Man the Builder. The same site where Abraham and Ishmael, son of that earlier Hagar, repaired the f
oundation and sanctified the site to forever honor Allah.

  So strong was the gust that it drove many pilgrims to their knees, or else forced them to crouch down, exposing to those of us who were circling much farther away a wondrous sight: a clear view of that eastern corner of the Kaaba, where the Prophet Muhammad himself—blessings be upon him—placed the fabled Black Stone into the wall with his own hands.

  The very same Black Stone that fell in order to show Adam and Eve where first to sacrifice and prostrate themselves before the Holy Name.

  To unbelievers, or to modernists who think that the Word can be reinterpreted by mere men, the obvious explanation is that the Black Stone must have been a meteorite that startled and bedazzled primitives, during an era when tribes made fetishes of so-called sacred rocks all over this rugged peninsula. Moreover, many devout Muslim scholars avow that it can be nothing more than just a rock—one worthy of respect, for having once been kissed by the Prophet, but nothing more.

  Only then, how do such people explain well-attributed testimony that the Stone is said to have once been pure and dazzling white? Only to have turned reddish black because of all the sins it has absorbed over the sad centuries?

  And how will skeptics explain away the miracle that I witnessed, with my very own eyes? When that blessed Stone began to shine with a glow all its own! Emanating from within, pushing forth against the predawn twilight?

  Whereupon, for a brief span, rays seemed to flash toward the pilgrims, some of them unaware, having already abased themselves facedown upon the ground. But many others braved the sight, and so rocked-back, stumbling, or threw up their arms, or held their heads in amazement and awe.

  It lasted only the interval of a few heartbeats. Then, the momentary brilliance passed. The Stone faded again, almost to black. Except I witnessed that several small patches continued to glow softly within, especially under the gentle warming of the rising sun.