He counted to ten, heard nothing. Then, just to be sure, he counted to ten again. He added a third ten.
Still nothing. And his frustration finally reached a boil. He picked up the Zeiss, fully prepared to test its alternate use as a hammer. How long would it last when he slammed it against the marker—?
“Zack, this is Houston, Jasmine Trieu back at you. Do you copy?”
“Houston . . . Zack Stewart here. It’s great to hear your voice, Jasmine!”
The lag might be only seven or eight seconds, but it felt much longer. Then he heard: “We’ve got a lot to catch up on, Zack. Can you talk?”
Zack looked up at the impervious Temple door. “Houston, I’ve got nothing but time.”
This interview is over.
MOST FREQUENTLY USED PHRASE BY MEGAN STEWART INTERVIEW SUBJECTS
Megan Doyle Stewart was not at all sure she approved of her newly reborn state. Yes, she’d been given a second chance at life, but why? What for? She had gone almost directly from car crash in Florida to the Beehive on Keanu.
Yes, something of “Megan Stewart” had existed for those two years in between . . . bodiless, blind, deaf, a state that would have terrified the living Megan, taking her buried-alive fear to a horrific extreme.
Yet she hadn’t felt fear. Instead she had . . . well, soared, flown, skipped from memory to memory. She had become unstuck in time and space, recalling and reliving her first kiss with Sean Peerali and meeting Zack at that party in Berkeley and late nights editing and dragging her tricycle across Main Street. . . .
But whereas dreams were mixed-up, twisted replays of a day’s activities, these moments seemed real, a record of what she had seen and heard and felt at the time.
She had even experienced “memories” from different points of view . . . other people in those same scenes. And in at least one instance—that she could recall now; it might have been a dozen or a hundred—she lived a moment from some other person’s life altogether.
The more she thought about it, the more fascinating it was . . . right up to the inevitable instant when she realized that unless her luck changed radically, and soon, she was going to be right back in that . . . postlife environment, a matrix of memories, a file in some cloud computing system.
In any case, since reawakening, she had not had much time to dwell on the larger eschatological issues, being more concerned with adjusting to the environment, with functioning as an organic being again . . . and with the pain and joy of reconnection with Zack and Rachel.
Who were now, apparently, lost to her again.
No one had told her about the detonation atop Vesuvius Vent. She had actually felt it, as a noise combined with a flash combined with a sickening tremor.
Thankfully, it had lasted only a second or two. All of her senses had actually shut down, like filters on a camera turned to the Sun.
Still, it felt as though she had been thrown off the top of a building, only to be grabbed the instant she cleared the ledge, but not before seeing the twenty-story fall that awaited her.
She had been able to tell Zack that she knew, that the event was bad news. Or was it bad? It was . . . important. That was what the message from the Architects said.
It was like one of her early news reports, before marrying Zack, covering the collapse of a good chunk of the Antarctic ice shelf.
In some ways, it was bad . . . it was expected to raise global ocean levels by several feet, enough to ruin some coastal cities . . . but not instantly, not so quickly that people couldn’t move out of harm’s way.
And given that she was far inland in Colorado at the time, not of immediate concern to her.
Still . . . it was a Significant Event.
As soon as she had told Zack, however, something had happened to her . . . she had felt herself growing extremely fatigued, almost faint.
She knew that one of the Sentries had grabbed her; she had seen the creature approaching in her peripheral vision but had been powerless to run, scream, or do anything, in fact, but shut down.
(Which made her wonder just what other “improvements” the Architects had made in her resurrected body.)
She awoke in a heap inside the Temple—and alone. Camilla wasn’t with her.
She was in a large room that was so big, shadowy, and empty that it gave her the creeps. It was like being in a monster’s cave. The Evil Ogre’s castle.
With no door or windows.
The floor looked like wood in that it had a grain or cellulose-style pattern. But it was too hard to be wood. There was a trail of some kind that led from Megan’s resting place toward a wall, some kind of nasty spooge that had the apparent texture of a snail trail. Megan had not been able to force herself to touch it.
The ceiling was out of reach; it looked to be the same material, minus the patterning, but with squiggly shapes that let in light.
The walls looked like the exterior of the Temple, varicolored and oddly shaped bricks that, when touched, seemed about to crumble . . . but didn’t. Megan could compare it to something from Zack’s world: the thermal-protection tiles of the old space shuttle. Those silicate cubes were incredibly light and felt like plastic foam . . . yet were such perfect insulators that you could bake one to a thousand degrees in an oven, then pick it up with your bare fingers.
Maybe the Temple needed to be insulated. Megan remembered being jogged several times during her “ride,” prior to being rolled onto this floor. And although the floor felt solid—like the sort of marble you found in Houston mansions—Megan’s bare feet detected a low-frequency vibration, like the drone of a power line.
The room wasn’t empty, either. It was stuffed with furniture. It would have been too much to ask, she guessed, for anything as simple as a table or chair. There were solid, symmetrical platforms at varying heights, but none lower than her eye level. Other objects were spherical, cylindrical, or, to use a word Rachel had loved, blobular.
Some were solid colors, though none Megan would have allowed in her home. Others had stripes or patterns. The surface of one particular cubelike object was different every time Megan looked at it.
And several of the objects transmitted the same hum that could be felt in the floor. It reminded Megan of mission control, with all its computers and screens . . . but it looked like a catalog photo for home decorators from Mars.
Oh yeah, there were no sanitary facilities . . . and of more immediate concern, no food or water.
She wondered about Camilla. She knew the girl had been taken . . . even if she was in an apparently benign environment like this, she must be terrified.
Thinking of Camilla reminded Megan of Rachel, and Zack. And the utter futility of her circumstances. She had heard the phrase better off dead most of her life . . . for the first time, she believed there might be something to it.
She leaned against one of the flat-surfaced objects and slid to the floor. Barefoot, largely naked, except for the surprisingly durable underlayer of the second skin, she could literally feel the vibrations of the wind against the Temple walls.
Which made her wonder just how durable this imposing-looking structure really was. How durable could it be? It had “grown up” in the past two days!
Then she felt something different . . . not a gentle wavelike motion that seemed to be caused by the storm outside. This was a deeper, more powerful vibration. A tremor.
It was coming closer, too. And more frequent.
One entire wall of the room slid open, revealing a dark chamber beyond. She heard more thumps, scrapes, and an awful chittering sound.
In spite of the darkness in the chamber, Megan could see the shadow of something huge and multi-armed.
Megan got to her feet. She knew there was no point in running—
—But she tried.
For Steverino. See attached, which turned everyone’s heads inside out. Where did you get such freaky freaks? Nathan says it has to be Keanu- originated, but he would. Where are you? Will we ever find out what you’re doi
ng with this stuff?
E-MAIL FROM RESEARCHER [email protected] TO STEVEN MATULKA,
WITH EXTREMELY LARGE AUDIO FILE
Before Harley opened the door to the Home Team, he heard what sounded like Britain’s House of Commons in full roar. Then Blaine said, “We need you.”
The immediate image did nothing to cheer him; the tableau reminded Harley of a bar fight paused in midpunch. Wade Williams and his little friend Glenn Creel were, in fact, nose-to-nose with Lily Valdez and some other person Harley couldn’t place.
The heated argument Harley had heard through the door simply stopped. All parties looked at him like guilty schoolchildren when the teacher got back early. “Do you people realize we’re about to try the craziest maneuver in the history of spaceflight?” Harley said.
“We do,” Sasha Blaine said, indicating the big screen behind the potential pugilists. Destiny was now so close to Keanu that the NEO landscape filled the screen.
“Then please tell me what the hell is going on?”
Blaine smiled and blushed. “We think we’ve cracked the Architects’ code.”
“What do you mean?”
Wade Williams geared up for a sound bite. “It turns out those markers were transmitting and receiving information—”
“No, Wade, that’s imprecise,” Lily Valdez said. “We managed to isolate what we think are two reciprocal functions.”
Williams looked at Creel for his usual support. “Isn’t that what I just said?”
“Not quite,” Sasha Blaine said. She turned to Harley. “All we’ve done is isolate what appears to be packets of information flowing to and from the markers. The Bangalore team was able to record a burst of both when Zack and Taj made their first approach. Logic and precedent suggest that the message could contain warnings or instructions about entering the Keanu interior—”
“Probably asking us to remove shoes and headgear,” Creel said, largely for his own amusement.
“Truly, we know nothing!” Valdez was quite adamant.
“O ye of little imagination,” Williams said, unwilling to concede the point. “We recorded the burst, and can reproduce it. That, young lady, is communication. If we ran across a Martian who took one of our messages and fed it back, we’d think we were on to something.”
“We aren’t the Architects,” Harley snapped. “How the hell does this work?”
Blaine said, “It’s just a weird frequency—”
“—Not entirely unlike Brahma’s terahertz radio,” Williams said.
“Fine,” Harley said, growing exasperated. “You’re ready to simply feed their own signals back to them on command?”
Blaine polled the room visually. “Yes,” she said.
“Any other thoughts on what would happen? Ranging on a scale of one to ten, one being nothing and ten being Keanu blows up?”
Valdez answered quickly: “Two, some kind of response, likely automated. We have to operate on the assumption that the Architects are at least as advanced as we are, and to return to Wade’s Martian scenario, we would respond if our signal returned in a nonreflective manner.”
“Good,” Harley said, not knowing what value this would be. “If we decide to try it—”
“—Oh, you’ll be trying it,” Williams said.
But this time Harley wasn’t ready to yield the floor. “There’s a larger issue on the table.” He told them the center was being evacuated, that only a limited crew would remain in mission control. “As far as NASA is concerned, you are putting your lives in danger by staying. And you are, in fact, free to leave now.”
The Home Team room remained silent.
“What, and fight all that traffic?” Wade Williams had said. Several of the others laughed.
“Do you all feel this way?”
Lily Valdez said, “We may not play nicely all the time, Mr. Drake, but we’re bright enough to know the situation. We’re needed here.”
Harley could have kissed her. Clearly he was getting softhearted. Well, if he was softhearted enough to allow Rachel Stewart to ride out the upcoming impact with him, he was in no position to try to dissuade these people from remaining . . . especially not when he needed them. “Fine. In the time we have left, why don’t you tell me what those dang things are saying?”
He never learned. As he was turning to Sasha Blaine’s Slate, the speaker relaying real-time air-to-ground communications with the astronauts on Keanu went live.
Capcom Jasmine Trieu was talking to Zack Stewart.
No matter what you’ve heard . . . Z lives!
POSTER JSC GUY AT NEOMISSION.COM
“We’re only with you for a few minutes. Comm is through Destiny.”
Zack found he was blinking back tears. Steady, he ordered himself. Be strong. Look forward. Look at the task. Don’t think about where you are and what you’re losing. “What happened?”
Trieu gave him the short version, ending with news that Destiny had survived the blast, though Venture and Brahma had not. That Tea and the others were on the surface awaiting a long-shot rescue. (Trieu didn’t phrase it that way, but Zack made that determination.) “And what is your status?”
So he gave mission control his short version. “Bottom line, I’m stymied.”
“Wait one,” the capcom said. The persistent and by now infuriating lag made that statement unnecessary.
Then Harley Drake came on the line. “Yo, Zack . . . I’m patched in. Rachel is with me, by the way.”
“Say hello for me.”
“She’s listening. But since time is short, we want to get you this idea: Home Team thinks the markers are not only antennae of some sort, scooping up data . . . but might also serve as locks for the doors.”
“I kinda figured that out for myself. The locked part, anyway.”
More lag time. Zack realized he was hungry and out of breath. Neither one was a good sign.
“We’re going to feed you a signal that we want you to play into the nearest marker. Our hope is it will start the unlocking process.”
For the first time in days, Zack got furious. “When did we start making decisions based on hope?”
Now the lag stretched. Zack was immediately sorry—the whole mission plan had vanished soon after the landing on Keanu. He was in a bad way, risking his life on an alien environment . . . but at least he had the advantage of making his own decisions and living with the direct consequences.
The team in mission control felt just as responsible but operated in the dark. It was certain to drive them crazy. “Hey, guys, belay that last remark,” he said.
Naturally Harley talked over him. “—Ignoring that, because I know you’d want it that way. We all want the same thing, Zack, which, right now, is for you to get through that door. So stand by for this signal. We will play it, you will hear it just as you’re hearing my voice . . . ideally the marker will pick it up.”
“What does it say?” He owed himself that much information.
“It won’t be open sesame, it will repeat what the original markers transmitted . . . with one significant change.”
“I hope that change doesn’t say, ‘Shoot this guy.’”
He waited. Then he heard Harley say, “Well, my friend, that’s a chance you’ll just have to take. It will take about a minute to boot this up. In the meantime, let’s talk about step two. You get out of the Temple and return to the surface.”
Zack noted that Harley didn’t mention with Megan. Or what the plan would be if the unlock signal failed. “Tell me straight, Harls: Do I really have a chance to make it to Destiny?”
Zack waited, knowing that no matter what Harley said, Zack’s fate was controlled by the state of his EVA suit, still lying at the former campsite. Would it still hold pressure? Did he have enough oxygen in his tanks to get back to the surface?
“We don’t have to worry about launch windows. Once we set Destiny down, we only need to get the crew off the surface. Obviously time is everyone’s enemy here. Tea could drive the rover back to the floor
of the vent and pick you up.”
Zack knew immediately that that wouldn’t happen. “Come on, Harls. An EVA by Tea and rover is going to take hours and put four lives further at risk.” Optimistic projects were nice, but what he needed now was cold-eyed realism. “Have you talked to her about this?”
More lag. Then, “Not yet.”
Zack wondered about that—he was afraid Tea was actually able to hear this conversation. But, since he was using a Brahma channel routed in some cockamamie way to Houston, maybe not.
“Okay, we’re ready. The next voice you hear won’t be a voice . . . we may go LOS right after this, but we will be listening and hoping. Hang in there, buddy.”
Zack waited. Keanu itself was still vibrating . . . it reminded Zack of some gigantic beast shuddering in a troubled sleep.
Then the tones began. The sound was a mash-up, what might result from a mixture of whale song, old Internet dial-up, and clicks. It was eerie enough to make Zack feel more uncomfortable—quite a trick, given his circumstances.
He could only wait. And wonder what he would do if it failed. Give up? Try the damaged EVA suit? Say good-bye to any chance of seeing Megan or the others again?
He realized that at least three minutes had passed. No further word from Harley . . . no apparent unlocking signal.
“Hey, Harls . . . Zack transmitting in the clear for Rachel. If you’re wondering why your father is doing what he’s doing . . . it’s because I’ve spent my life trying to find answers to big questions, like, ‘What are those lights in the night sky?’ It was why I became an astronomer and why I wanted to be an astronaut.
“So here I am, one of the first humans ever to see and experience life beyond Earth. I can’t just walk away from it. The worst thing would be to try to come home now, and die on the way.
“And I really can’t leave your mom.
“Just so you know, if the tones don’t work . . . I’m going to break a window. If I can find a window.”
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