by Greg Bear
“Eminently,” Rotterjack said.
“I’m curious as to why Mr. Hicks is here,” Forbes said. “I admire Trevor’s work enormously, but…” He didn’t finish his thought. Arthur looked at Hicks, and realized he genuinely liked and trusted the man. He could understand the President’s choice. But that would cut no ice with McClennan and Rotterjack, who clearly wanted Hicks away from the center.
“He’s here because he’s as conversant on these subjects as anybody in the world,” Crockerman said. “Even though we do not see eye to eye.”
Rotterjack ineffectively masked his surprise, sitting up in his chair and then awkwardly leaning his elbow on the arm. Arthur watched him closely. They thought Hicks might be behind the President’s attitude.
“I’m glad Trevor’s here,” Arthur said abruptly. “I welcome his insights.”
“Fine with me,” Forbes said, smiling broadly.
PERSPECTIVE
The New York Daily News, October 12, 1996: Sources in the State Department, on condition that they not be named, have confirmed that there is a connection between the disappearance and alleged government captivity of four people and the secret visit by President Crockerman to Death Valley earlier this week. Other informed sources have confirmed that both of these incidents are connected with the Australian extraterrestrials. In a related story, the Reverend Kyle McCabey of Edinburgh, Scotland, founder of the Satanic Invader’s League, claims that his new religious sect now numbers its followers at a hundred thousand throughout the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic. The Satanic Invader’s League believes that the Australian extraterrestrials are representatives of Satan sent to the Earth to, in the Reverend’s words, “soften us up for Satan’s conquest.”
October 13
On the Hollywood Freeway, neck and back stiff from the early morning flight into LAX, Arthur Gordon grimly steered the rental Lincoln, listening to a babble about national lottery results on the radio.
His mind was far away, and visions of the river outside his Oregon home kept intruding into his planning. Smooth, clear green water, steady and unaware, working its natural way, eroding banks. How did each particle of dirt stripped from its place feel about the process? How did the gazelle, caught in the slash of a lion’s paws, feel about becoming a simple dinner, all its existence reduced to a week or so of sustenance for another creature? “Waste,” he said. “Goddamn waste.” Yet he wasn’t sure what he meant, or what all his thoughts were pointing to.
Cat’s paws. Playing with the prey.
Suddenly, Arthur missed Francine and Marty terribly. He had spoken with them briefly from Washington before leaving; he had told them very little, not even where he was or where he was going.
Did a gazelle, caught in the meshing gears of a lion’s paws, worry about doe and fawn?
Harry’s home was a spacious split-level “stick-built” ranch house from the early 1960s, wandering over much of a eucalyptus-covered quarter-acre lot in Tarzana. He had purchased the home in 1975, before his marriage to Ithaca; it had seemed hollow then, with only one occupant, and was still a place of vast white walls and rug-dotted linoleum floors, a little chilly and severe for Arthur’s taste.
Ithaca beyond any doubt ruled the roost. Tall, with dark red hair and features more suited to a Shakespearean actress than a Tarzana homemaker, her quiet presence balanced the broad rooms. Harry had once told Arthur, “Wherever she is, there’s enough, and never too much.” Arthur had known exactly what he meant.
She opened the door at Arthur’s knock, smiled warmly, and extended her hand. Arthur took the fingers and kissed them solemnly. “Milady,” he said ceremoniously. “Is the good doctor in?”
“Hello, Arthur. Good to see you. He’s in and being insufferable.”
“His treatments?”
“No. Something else, having to do with you, I presume.” Ithaca would never inquire. “Can I get you coffee? It’s been cold this winter. Today is especially dreary.”
“Yes, please. The office?”
“Sanctum sanctorum. How’s Francine? Marty?”
“They’re fine.” He stuck his hands in his pockets, obviously anxious to join Harry. Ithaca nodded.
“I’ll bring the coffee into the office. Go.”
“Thanks.” He always felt like complimenting Ithaca on her appearance, which was, as usual, wonderful — but she did not take kindly to compliments. How she looked and dressed was as natural to her as breathing. He smiled awkwardly and headed down the hall to the office.
Harry sat in an overstuffed chair, fire crackling brightly in the grate. His office had originally been the master bedroom, and after his marriage, he had kept it there. There were three large bedrooms with fireplaces in the house, enough to go around. Stacks of books rose beside his chair, some of them huge, old, and well thumbed. An Olympia typewriter hung keyboard down over the fireplace like a hunting trophy, while from its return key dangled three carbon-encrusted test tubes looped together by a red ribbon. The story behind this had to do with Harry’s doctoral thesis and was seldom told when Harry was sober.
In Harry’s lap rested a copy of Brin and Kuiper’s book on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. McClennan and Rotterjack had kept copies of the same book on their office desks. Arthur also noticed Hicks’s novel on the corner of a roll-around table, almost crowded off by stacks of infodisks.
“Finally, by God,” Harry said. “I’ve been stuck here getting over nausea and waiting for the word. What’s the word?”
“I’m to go to Australia with most of the task force. I’m leaving in three days, with a couple of hours stopover in Tahiti. We should just be able to put out a short report.”
“The newshounds are on our trail,” Harry said, raising his thick eyebrows.
“The President thinks we should release the story within a month. Rotterjack and the others aren’t enthusiastic.”
“And you?”
“Newshounds,” Arthur concurred, shrugging. “We may not have much choice soon.”
“They’ll have to release those folks at Vandenberg. Can’t hold them forever. They’re physically clean and healthy.”
Arthur closed the office door. “The Guest?”
Harry’s face worked. “Bogus,” he said. “I think it’s as much a robot as the Australian shmoos.”
“What does Phan think?”
“He’s good, but this has stretched him. He thinks it’s a product of a biologically advanced civilization, kind of a future citizen, sterile and largely artificial, but still bona fide an individual.”
“Why do you disagree?”
“It was never meant to process wastes. Planned obsolescence. The Guest poisoned itself and broke down. There was no evidence of any way to void the wastes through any sort of external dialysis. No anus, no urinary tract. No valves, no exit points. No lungs. It breathed through its skin. Not very efficient for a creature its size. And no sweat glands. Unconvincing as hell. But — I’m not so convinced that I’m going to stand up and shout howdy before all the President’s men. After all, that just complicates things, doesn’t it?”
Arthur nodded. “You’ve read Colonel Rogers’s report and seen his pictures?”
Harry held up a new infodisk, the security plastic sticker Day-Glo orange on its label. “An Air Force car brought it by yesterday. Impressive.”
“Frightening.”
“I thought you’d be spooked,” Harry said. “We think alike, don’t we?”
“We always have, within limits,” Arthur said.
“Okay, I say the biology’s a ringer. What about the rock?”
“Warren’s brought in his report on the externals. He says it appears authentic, right down to mineral samples.
However, he agrees with Edward Shaw about the suspicious lack of weathering. Abante can’t make heads or tails of the interior. He says it looks like a set from a science fiction movie — pretty but nonspecific. And no sign of any other Guests.”
“So what do we conclude?”
Arthur pulled a folding stool from behind the door, opened it, and squatted. “I think we see the outlines of our draft, don’t you?”
Harry nodded. “We’re being played with,” he said.
Arthur held up an extended thumb.
“Now, why would they want to play with us?” Harry asked.
“To draw us out and discover our capabilities?” Arthur ventured.
“Are they afraid we can beat them if they aren’t careful?”
“That might be an explanation,” Arthur said.
“Lord. They must be thousands of years ahead of us.”
“Not necessarily.”
“How could it be otherwise?” Harry asked, his voice rising an octave.
“Captain Cook,” Arthur offered. “The Hawaiians thought he was some sort of god. Two hundred years later, they drive cars just like the rest of us…and watch TV.”
“They were subjugated,” Harry said. “They didn’t have a chance, not against cannon.”
“They killed Cook, didn’t they?”
“Are you suggesting some sort of resistance movement?” Harry asked.
“We’re getting way ahead of ourselves.”
“Damn right. Let’s stick to basics.” Harry folded the book on his lap. “You’re wondering about my health.”
Arthur nodded. “Can you travel?”
“Not far, not soon. Yesterday they pumped me full of magic bullets. Bullets to restructure my immune system, to strengthen my bone marrow…Thousands of little tame retroviruses doing their thing. I feel like hell most of the time. Still, I’ve got what’s left of my hair. We’re not doing radiation or heavy chemicals yet.”
“Can you work? Travel around California?”
“Anywhere you want me, within a two-hour emergency hop to UCLA Medical Center. I’m a wreck, Arthur. You shouldn’t have chosen me. I shouldn’t have agreed.”
“You’re still thinking clearly, aren’t you?” Arthur asked.
“Yes.”
“Then you’re useful. Necessary.”
Harry looked down at the folded book in his lap. “Ithaca’s not taking this well.”
“She seems cheerful.”
“She’s a good actress. At night, in her sleep, her face…she cries.” Harry’s own eyes were moist at the thought, and he seemed much younger, almost a boy, glancing up at Arthur. “Christ. I’m glad I’m the one who might die. If things were the other way around, and she was going through this, I’d be in worse shape than I am now.”
“You’re not going to die,” Arthur said sternly. “We’re almost into the twenty-first century. Leukemia isn’t the killer it used to be.”
“Not for children, Arthur. But for me…”He raised his hands.
“You leave us, and I’m going to be pretty damn inconsolable.” Completely against his will, he felt his own eyes grow damp. “Remember that.”
Harry said nothing for a moment. “The Forge of God,” he finally commented, shaking his head. “If that ever gets into the papers…”
“One nightmare at a time,” Arthur said. Harry called Ithaca to prepare a guest bedroom for Arthur. As she did that, Arthur placed a collect call to Oregon, the first he had had a chance to make in two days.
His conversation with Francine was brief. There was nothing he could tell her, except that he was well. She was polite enough, and knew him well enough, not to mention the news reports.
The call was not enough. When it was over, Arthur missed his family more than ever.
24
October 20, Australia (October 19, USA)
A newsreel preceded the feature film on the Qantas flight to Melbourne, projected over the heads of passengers onto a tiny screen. Arthur looked up from his disk reader and open ring binder. Beside him, an elderly gentleman in a gray herringbone wool suit dozed lightly.
A computer-animated graphic of Australia Associated Press News Network filled the screen, backed by a jaunty jazz score. The rather plain, rugged middle-aged face of AAPN anchor Rachel Vance smiled across the darkened seats and inattentive heads. “Good day. Our lead story today is, of course, still the Centralian extraterrestrials. Yet another conference was held yesterday between Australian scientists and the robots, familiarly known as Shmoos, after comic artist Al Capp’s remarkably generous characters, which they resemble in shape. While the information exchanged in the conference has not been released, a government spokesman acknowledged that scientists are still discussing theoretical physics and astronomy, and have not yet begun discussions on biology.”
The spokesman appeared, a familiar face already. Arthur half listened. He had heard it all by now. “We have received no information about the density of living things in the galaxy; that is, we still do not know how many planets are inhabited, or what types of creatures inhabit them…”
His picture faded to a shot of the three Shmoos in motion down a dirt path to conference trailers set up in fields of dry spinifex grass near the huge false rock. The robots’ floating propulsion was still eerie, deeply disturbing. In that motion could be signs of an immensely advanced technology…or of some sort of visual trick, a show for the primitive natives.
Vance returned, her smile warmly fixed in stone. “The Washington Post and The New York Times reported today that the remnant of an old volcano near Death Valley, California, has been closed off to the public. The Post makes a connection between this closing and the disappearance of three men and a woman, all allegedly held by military authorities in California.”
Nothing new, but closer…perilously closer. Arthur leaned back in his seat and stared out of the window at the ocean and clouds passing in review tens of thousands of feet below. Immense, he thought. It seems to be all there is. Ocean and clouds. I could spend my entire life traveling and not see all of it. This did not necessarily demonstrate the size of the Earth, but it did put his life and brain in perspective.
He tried to nap. They would be in Melbourne in a few hours, and he was already exhausted.
The Rock, still unnamed, stretched for half a mile across the horizon in the early morning light, gloriously colored from the bottom up in layers of purple and red and orange. The sky overhead was a trembling dusty blue-gray, hinting at the heat to come. It was spring here, but there had been little rain. There was hardly a breath of wind. Arthur jumped down from the bulky, big-tired gray Royal Australian Army staff vehicle into red dust and stared across the golden plain at the Rock. The science advisor, David Rotterjack, stepped down behind him. Less than a dozen meters away, the first circle of razor-wire-topped hurricane fence began, curving in broad scallops through silver-gray mulga scrub and spiky spinifex.
Quentin Bent walked with a short-legged, almost eager waddle along the red dirt path to the edge of the road. Bent was in his mid-forties, heavy and florid-faced, with a forward-swept bush of gray hair, an easy smile, and sharp, pessimistic blue eyes. He extended his hand to Rotterjack first. In another Army vehicle, Bent’s assistants, Forbes and French, accompanied Charles Warren, the geologist from Kent State.
“Mr. Arthur Gordon,” Bent said, shaking Arthur’s hand. “I’ve just finished reading the draft American task force report. Your work, and Dr. Feinman’s, largely, am I correct?”
“Yes,” Arthur said. “I hope it was clear.”
“All too clear,” Bent said, lifting his chin as if smelling the air, but keeping his eyes on Arthur. “Very disturbing. Gentlemen, I’ve received a message from our Shmoos — we all call them that now, they can’t really be offended, can they? — and we’re scheduled to have a meeting with them at noon today in trailer three.” Almost breathlessly, he said, “Each day…they travel from the Rock to our conference trailer. They never leave the vicinity of the Rock. Before then, we will have breakfast in the mess trailer, and then a tour of the site, if you’re up to it. Did you get enough sleep, Dr. Gordon, Mr. Rotterjack, Dr. Warren?”
“Sufficient,” Rotterjack said, his eyes dark.
Bent flashed a smile and waddled in
to place ahead of them. “Follow me,” he said.
Arthur fell in step beside Warren, a man of middle height and build with wispy, thinning brown hair brushed across a bald spot and large eyes above a long nose. “What does it look like?” he asked.
“A lot like Ayers Rock, only smaller,” Warren answered, shaking his head. “It’s less convincing than the cinder cone in Death Valley. Frankly, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find it at Disney World.”
The breakfast went smoothly. They were introduced to several of the scientists measuring and analyzing the Rock, including the head of the materials team, Dr. Christine Carmichael. She explained that the minerals making up the Rock were all clearly earthbound — none of the surrounding “camouflage” material had arrived from space. Arthur tried to visualize the construction of the Rock, away from all human witnesses; he could not.
Other discussion was brief. Bent asked only three questions: how they planned to release the news (Rotterjack replied that at present there were no such plans), how they interpreted the Guest’s story about planet-eating spacecraft (it seemed straightforward), and whether they believed there was a connection between the Death Valley cinder cone and the Rock. Rotterjack was unwilling to commit himself. Warren did not believe he had spent enough time on the project to render a useful opinion. Arthur nodded once; there was a definite connection.
“Can’t have too many interstellar visitors in one year, eh?” Bent asked.
“It seems very unlikely,” Arthur said.
“But not impossible?” Bent pursued.
“Not beyond possibility, but difficult to conceive.”
“Still, we’re all quite ignorant about what’s out there, aren’t we?” Forbes asked, smoothing back his white-blond hair with one hand.
“There could have been a wave of machine migrations, finally reaching this vicinity,” French added. “Perhaps whole civilizations have grown up along an evolutionary timetable, and like rain precipitating out of a cloud, the time has come …”