Coalescent

by Stephen Baxter

  I frowned. "Harm them? Harm them how? You think he's sitting in there with a revolver?"

  Rosa said heavily, "Remember San Jose."

  "Look, Rosa, I don't know why he's got himself stuck in a hole in the rock. But I can't see what harm he can do you in there. I mean, all you have to do is wait a few hours, or days even, and you'll starve him out. In fact you might have to if you want him to get through that gap."

  "This isn't funny, George."

  "Isn't it?" I felt a little light-headed.

  "Talk to him. You say he's your friend. Fine. Find out what he's doing here, what he wants, what he intends. And then find a way to resolve this situation. Because if you don't, I will."

  I tried to read her. "Will you call the police?... You won't, will you? Or the FBI, or Interpol. You don't want to bring them here into the Crypt, despite the danger you perceive. What are you planning, Rosa?"

  She said evenly, "I'm responsible for the safety of the Crypt. As is every member of the Order. I will do whatever it takes, at whatever cost, to ensure that safety. I suggest you make sure it doesn't come to that." In the gloom her face was hard, set — almost fanatical — I thought she had never looked less like me, or my parents.

  I nodded, chilled. "I believe you."

  I approached Peter's wall again.

  "Don't listen to her," he said. "Don't let her whisper in your ear."

  "Or overwhelm me with chimp pant-hoots or pheromones?..."

  "George, just get out of here."

  "Why?"

  "It doesn't concern you. Just get away—"

  "Of course it concerns me. That's my sister, standing over there. But that's not why I'm staying, Peter."

  "Then why?"

  "For you, you arsehole."

  He laughed, sardonic. "I didn't see you once in twenty years."

  "But you were a good friend to my dad. Even if I didn't know about it until too late."

  Silence for a while. When he spoke again, his tone was softer. "Okay, then. Do what you like. Arsehole yourself."

  "Yes... Peter, we need to talk."

  "About—"

  "About San Jose."

  He hesitated. "So you know about that."

  "Interpol send their best. Peter, what happened over there?"

  He sighed noisily. "You really want to know?"

  "Tell me."

  "I warn you now we will have to discuss black holes. Because that's what they were trying to build in that lab."

  Even now, more spooky stuff. "Oh, for God's sake..."

  The drones, unaware of the odd grammar of our relationship, stirred, baffled, nervous.

  Peter began to describe "geometric optics." "A black hole is a space-time flaw, a hole out of which nothing can escape, not even light. Black holes suck in light through having ultrapowerful gravity fields..."

  Black holes in nature are formed by massive collapsed stars, or by aggregates of matter at the centers of galaxies like ours — or they may have been formed in the extreme pressures of the Big Bang, the most tremendous crucible of all. It used to be thought that black holes, even microscopic ones, would be so massive and would require such immense densities that to make or manipulate them was forever beyond human reach.

  But that wisdom, said George, had turned out to be false. "Light is the fastest thing in the universe — as far as we know — which is why it takes the massive gravity of a black hole to capture it. But if light were to move more slowly, then a more feeble trap might do the job."

  Tense, with the gazes of the drones boring into me, I took the bait. "Fine. How can you slow down light?"

  "Anytime light passes through a medium it is slowed from its vacuum speed. Even in water it is slowed by about a quarter — still bloody fast, but that's enough to give you refraction effects."

  Memories of O-level physics swam into my mind. "Like the way a stick in a stream will seem bent—"

  "Yes. But in the lab you can do a lot better. Pass light through a vapor of certain types of atom and you're down to a few feet per second. And if you use a Bose-Einstein condensate—"

  "A what?"

  He hesitated. "Supercold matter. All the atoms line up, quantum-mechanically... It doesn't matter. The point is, light can be slowed to below walking pace. I saw the trials in that lab in San Jose. It's really quite remarkable."

  "And then you can make your black hole."

  "You can blow your slow-moving light around — even make it move backward. Photons, thrown around like paper planes in a Texas twister. To make a black hole you set up a vortex in your medium — a whirlpool. You just pull out the plug. And if the vortex walls are moving faster than your light stream, the light gets sucked into the center and can't escape, and you have your black hole."

  "That's what these Californians were doing?"

  "They were getting there," Peter said. "They hit practical problems. The condensate is a quantum structure, and it doesn't respond well to being spun around... But all this was fixable, in principle."

  "Why would anybody want to do this?"

  "That's obvious. Quantum gravity," he said.

  "Of course," I said. I actually had to keep from laughing. I was talking to a crack in the wall, watched by ten differently evolved hive-mind drones and my own long-lost sister. "You know, on any other day this conversation would seem bizarre."

  "Pay attention, double-oh seven," he said wearily.

  Quantum gravity, it seems, is the Next Big Thing in physics. The two great theories of twentieth-century physics were quantum mechanics, which describes the very small, like atomic structures, and general relativity, which describes the very large, like the universe itself. They are both successful, but they don't fit together.

  "The universe today is kind of separated out," said Peter. "Large and small don't interact too much — which is why quantum mechanics and relativity work so well. You don't find many places in nature where they overlap, where you can study quantum gravity effects, the predictions of a unified theory. But the Black Hole Kit would be a tabletop gravity field. The San Jose people hoped, for instance, to explore whether space-time itself is quantized, broken into little packets, as light is, as matter is."

  I said heavily, "What I don't understand is why all this should cost anybody her life. How do you justify it, Peter? Omelettes and eggs?"

  "You know I don't think like that, George."

  "Then tell me why that lab was destroyed."

  "You already know."

  "Tell me anyhow."

  "Because of the future. Humankind's future. And because of the war in Heaven."

  All this was so like our bullshit sessions in the park by the Forum. I could imagine his earnest face as he spoke, that big jaw, the small mouth, the beads of sweat on his brow, the half-closed eyes. But Rosa was watching me, skeptical, drawing her own conclusions, no doubt, about Peter's sanity. She twirled her finger. Hurry it up.

  He reminded me of what he had told me, of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial life, and attempts to signal to it.

  "Most of it was absurd," he whispered. "Quixotic. Like the plaques stuck on the side of Pioneer space probes. They will fail through sheer statistics, because the chance of any sentient being picking up such objects is minuscule. We are surrounded by that tremendous unintentional ripple of radio noise, spreading out everywhere at lightspeed — nothing we can do about that now... But then, most perniciously, some signaling has been intentional, and designed to succeed. Such as using the big antenna at Arecibo to throw digital signals at the nearest stars..."

  "Pernicious?"

  "George, where was the debate? Were you consulted? Did you vote to have your whereabouts blasted to the universe? What right had these people to act on your behalf?"

  "I can't say it keeps me awake at night."

  "It does me," he said hoarsely. "We know there is something out there waiting for us. The Kuiper Anomaly — long faded from the news — is still out there, orbiting silently. My seismic signals, the dark matte
r craft that decelerated and veered inside the Earth: more evidence. Signaling is dangerous. It must be. That is why the sky is so quiet. Whoever is out there has learned to keep quiet — or has been forced to be."

  "Peter, I don't see what this has to do with the destruction of the black hole lab."

  He sighed again. "George, there are some SETI proponents who say that our feeble attempts to signal so far are futile. Plaques on clunky spacecraft, radio signals — all of this is laughably primitive technology. Jungle drums. It won't attract the attention of anybody advanced enough to matter."

  "Right. And the kind of technology they will use—"

  "Well, we don't know, but we can speculate. For instance, about technologies based on quantum gravity. Or even the manipulation of space-time itself. If you could do that there is no limit to what you could achieve. Warp drive — faster than light. Antigravity. The control of inertia—"

  I began to see where this was going. "The San Jose Black Hole Kit would be a manipulation of space-time."

  "That toy black hole would have stood out like a single campfire shining in the middle of a darkened landscape."

  "You think the San Jose people were trying to signal to aliens?"

  "Oh, they didn't mean to. All they were doing was trying to build a test bed for quantum gravity, just as advertised. I'm sure of that. But they wouldn't listen to our warnings — the Slan(t)ers. They would have gone on, and on, until they lit that damn campfire..."

  And then I understood what had been done. I rubbed my eyes. "What did you use, Peter?"

  "Semtex-H," he whispered. "Not difficult to get hold of if you know how. Before the fall of communism the Czechs shipped out a thousand tons of the stuff, mostly through Libya. My police background..."

  He hadn't set the thing off, he said, but he had designed the system. It turned out to be simple. He had used electronics parts he bought from RadioShack to build a simple radar-activated sensor. It was based on dashboard detectors supposed to warn drivers of the presence of a police radar gun. If attached to a detonator, such a sensor could be used to set off a bomb, in response to a signal from a radar gun — or even from something smaller, lighter. He had learned these techniques in Northern Ireland.

  "You know, Semtex is remarkable. It's brown, like putty. You can mold it to any shape. And it's safe to handle. You can hold it over a naked flame and it won't explode, not without a detonator. So easy."

  I held my breath.

  "You see, it's all about the future," he said softly. "That's what I've come to understand. We humans find ourselves on a curve of exponential growth, doubling in numbers and capability, and doubling again. We are wolflings now, but we are growing. We will become adults, we will become strong. Billions will flow from each of us, a torrent of minds, a great host of the future. This is our predestination. The future is ours. And that is what they perceive, I think."

  "Who?"

  "Those beyond the Earth. They see our potential. Our threat. They would want to stop it now, while we are still weak, cut down the great tree while it is still a sapling."

  I tried to hold this extraordinary chain of logic in my head. "All right. I can see why you thought the San Jose lab should be stopped. But what are you doing here?"

  "The hive is just as much of a threat to the future. Don't you see that yet? It is an end point to our destiny. And we have to avoid it."

  I could see a glimmer of light in the rock cleft. He was holding something; it looked like a TV remote. "Peter, what's that?"

  "The switch," he said. "For the bomb."

  • • •

  My sister stood there in her white smock, her hands clenched in fists at her sides. I didn't need to tell Rosa her worst suspicions had turned out to be accurate.

  Her attendants, the beefy drones, whispered and fluttered, wide-eyed, clutching each other and walking about in little knots. Meanwhile Peter sat silently in his cave, a brooding demon.

  And I was stuck in the middle, trying to find a way out for everybody.

  "Peter."

  "I haven't gone anywhere," he said dryly.

  "Do you trust me?"

  "What?"

  "I've listened to your theories. I've taken your advice. I've even taken you seriously. Who else has done all that?"

  He hesitated. "All right. Yes, I trust you."

  "Then listen to me. There has to be a way out of this."

  "You're talking about negotiation? George — you said it yourself. You can't negotiate with an anthill."

  "Nevertheless we have to try," I said. "There are a lot of lives at stake."

  "Nobody will be hurt. I'm not some homicidal nut, George, for God's sake. But I will open this place up. Expose it to the world."

  "But maybe you won't even have to take the risk. Why not give it a try?" I fell silent and waited, forcing a response. Old management trick.

  At last he replied. "All right. Since it's you."

  I let out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding.

  "Rosa," he hissed now. "She is the key. The rest were born here, and are beyond hope. But Rosa might understand. She has a broader perspective, a self-awareness you're not supposed to have, here in the termite mound. You might persuade her to see what she is. But George — you'll have to get her on her own. Get her away from the others. Otherwise you'll never jolt her out of it."

  "I'll try."

  I walked up to Rosa. Her eyes narrowed as she waited for me to speak. Suddenly I had power, I realized, but it wasn't a power I wanted. "He'll talk. But you have to do things my way, Rosa." I glanced at the drones, who continued to flap ineffectually behind her. "Get rid of these people."

  Rosa actually quailed. I could see that the thought of being alone in a situation like this, cut off from the rest of the Order and the subtle cues of other drones, disturbed her on some deep level. But she complied. The drones went fluttering away, out of sight around the bend of the corridor.

  I snapped: "And bring Lucia here."

  She shook her head. "George, the doctors—"

  "Just do it. And her baby. Otherwise I walk away."

  We confronted each other. But, just as I had waited out Peter's response, I stared her down.

  At last she backed off. "All right." She walked a little way down the corridor, dug a cell phone out of her pocket, and made a call.

  It took a few minutes for Lucia to arrive. She was dressed in a plain smock, and she was carrying a small blanket-wrapped bundle. She was barefoot, and she walked slowly, uncertainly; I glimpsed attendants, perhaps from the chambers of the mamme-nonne, lingering around the bend of the corridor. When Lucia saw me she ran toward me. "Mr. Poole — oh, Mr. Poole—"

  "Are you all right?"

  Her face was sallow, I saw, her cheeks sunken, her eyes rheumy. Her hair was coiffed but it looked lifeless. She had lost weight; I could see her shoulder blades protrude through the smock, and her wrists and ankles were skeletal. I would never have believed she was still just fifteen. But she was smiling, and she held up her baby to me — her second baby, I reminded myself. She handled the child awkwardly, though. "They had to fetch her from the nurseries... It's the first time I've seen her since she was born. Isn't she beautiful?"

  No more than a few weeks old, the baby had a small, crumpled face, and she was sleepy; but when she opened her eyes, they were mother-of-pearl gray. The baby seemed a little agitated: strange hands, my mother would have said. I felt sad for Lucia.

  "Yes, she's beautiful."

  She rubbed her stomach. "How is Daniel?"

  "With his parents."

  "I think of him often."

  "What's wrong with your stomach?... Oh. You're pregnant again."

  She shrugged and looked away.

  I took her arm and found her a place to sit, on a bench carved out of the rock wall.

  "Rosa, how did you get her out of the American Hospital?"

  Rosa shrugged. "Do you really want the details?... The key was that she wanted to come out, despite ever
ything she says. Didn't you, child?"

  Lucia huddled over her baby, hiding her face.

  Rosa said, "I've done what you asked, George. Can I talk to him now?"

  "Go ahead."

  She turned to the rock wall and raised her voice. "I don't know why you want to do this, Peter McLachlan. What harm have we done you — or anybody? We are an ancient religious order. We dedicate ourselves to the worship of God, through Mary, the mother of His son. We were founded for benevolent reasons. We educate. We store knowledge that would otherwise be lost. In times of trouble we act as a haven for vulnerable women... You can't deny any of this."

  "Of course not," Peter said. "But you don't see yourself clearly. You can't, in fact; you're not supposed to. Rosa, even you, who were born outside, have been here too long. Your conscious purposes — the religion, your communal projects — are just by-products. No, more than that — they are glue to bind you together, dazzling concepts that distract your conscious minds. But they are not what the Order is for. They could be replaced by other goals — cruelty instead of benevolence, futility instead of useful purpose — and the Order would work just as well. The truth is the Order exists only for itself..."

  In broken phrases he sketched his beliefs. The Order was an anthill, a mole rat colony, a termite mound, he told her. It was not a human society. "Your handful of mamme-nonne, pumping out infants. Your sterile sisters—"

  Rosa frowned. "Celibacy is common in Catholic orders."

  "Not celibate. Sterile," he hissed.

  She listened to his arguments, her face working.

  "And you can't argue with the reality of Lucia," he said. "Suppose she walked into a medical office in Manchester. The doctor would think Lucia was extraordinary — and so would you, if not for the fact that you grew up here. You have all been down in this hole for a long time. Time enough for adaptation, selection — evolution, Rosa."

  Lucia looked up at me. "What's he saying? If I am not human, what am I?"

  Rosa touched her hands. "Hush, child. It's all right..." She paced around, her heels clicking softly on the rock floor. I had no real idea what was going through her mind.