“Refueling stations,” Jansen suggested.
“What?”
“I’ve been thinking, too. I’ve been wondering what they want from us. This place is a closed system. It has water and air, but in the thousands of years between stars it can’t get more of them. No matter how well it recycles its resources, it’s eventually going to run out. I think it came to Earth to get more water, that’s all.”
Hawkins grunted. The sound startled Rao—she’d almost forgotten he was there. “If that’s what they want, they could have asked nicely,” he said. “They could have—”
He stopped talking so suddenly Rao worried he might have fallen off the raft, even though she hadn’t heard a splash. But no, he was struggling to get to his feet. He stared forward into the murk, his suit lights spearing out ahead of him.
“What?” Jansen asked. “What is it?”
“I saw something,” Hawkins said.
“What? What did you see?”
He didn’t have an answer for her. It had been just a flicker of reflected light, a shape he’d half glimpsed. It could have been his own light shining back at him from the wet surface of an ice floe, or—
There. He found it again. It wasn’t an ice floe.
It looked like a yellowish-gray mass, like a cluster of dirty soap bubbles. It was rising from the water, swelling up out of the dark. The shiny forms grew dull as they expanded, as if they were drying out. Solidifying, maybe. They formed a mound that just crested the surface of the water. He tried to keep the light steady on the bubbles—and as he watched, more of them formed, inflating on top of the heap. Growing higher.
As they got closer he could see a network of the rootlike tendrils, very thin ones, climbing across the surfaces of the dry bubbles. Latching on to them, maybe supporting them. The mass was growing, fast.
He waved back at Rao, and she got the point. She pushed sideways, against their previous course. Trying to get some distance from the mass of… globules? Eggs? He had no idea what they were, what they could even be.
Hawkins had no strong desire to find out. He waved one way, then the other, directing Rao. He didn’t want to get anywhere near the mass. Soon they were past it, and it receded back into the shadows. He took one last look back and caught the mass in his suit lights, twenty meters behind them. It was still growing.
“Some kind of machine?” Jansen asked. “Nanotechnology, maybe? I’ve never seen anything like that.”
“No. No, it was alive—alive on some level. So fast…,” Rao whispered.
“What?” Hawkins demanded.
The astrobiologist shook herself as if she’d been in a trance. “The things here grow so fast—their metabolism must be incredible. I saw it with the tendrils that—that killed Stevens. They don’t move, they grow. And they grow at an incredible rate. I guess it makes sense.”
“What are you talking about?”
Rao stared out over the black water. What she saw out there he couldn’t imagine. “I think—the reason we didn’t see any aliens here, when we arrived. I think they were hibernating. Jansen, you said this was a closed system, and you’re right. If you were going to travel between stars, and take thousands of years to do it, there’s no way you could carry enough food or air. You would have to find a way to slow down your body systems. Your metabolism. You would down-regulate your breathing, your pulse, until your heart only needed to beat once a year, until you could survive on just a little puff of air…”
“But you said the metabolism of those bubbles, and the tendrils, was super fast,” Jansen pointed out.
“Right. Because now, as 2I gets close to its destination, everything changes. There’s work to get done. They need to speed up again. You see the same pattern in nature, in places where it doesn’t rain for near on a century, say. Brine shrimp, or water bears.”
“Tardigrades?” Hawkins asked.
He’d expected her to be impressed that he knew what a water bear was, but she gave no indication she’d even heard him. “There are animals that dig down into the mud when a drought comes, they bury themselves in soil as hard as rock, then climb back out for the rainy season—fish that get frozen in ice all winter, then they’re alive and fine when they thaw out. It’s the same. They slow themselves down, down to near nothing, then when conditions get better—when it rains, or gets warm again—they come to life with this amazing stock of stored energy. Because they know the good times can’t last.”
“The changes we’ve seen in here have been happening faster and faster,” Hawkins agreed. He didn’t like that at all. “You think it’s done now? Or are things going to keep changing?”
Rao didn’t answer him. She didn’t really need to. He knew that they hadn’t seen everything 2I had in store for them. Not yet. He was sure of it.
“You’re breathing heavy,” Jansen said. “You must be exhausted.” She was talking to Rao, not him.
“I’m fine,” the younger woman said.
“You’ve been working nonstop for over an hour. Let me take a turn,” Jansen insisted.
Hawkins sat back down, near the edge of the floe. Careful not to let his feet dangle in the water. “Everybody keep a lookout, make sure we don’t run straight into another of those bubble heaps.” There was no doubt in his mind that there would be more.
Yet the next thing he saw was completely different. A dull pale shape rising out of the dark water like a sea serpent rearing its head.
“Stop,” he said as they drew close. “Stop!”
Jansen planted the pole in the mass of tendrils under the water, slowing them to a stop almost immediately.
“Get the lamp on that,” he said, pointing forward.
The thing he’d seen was maybe four meters across where it rose from the water in a gentle curve, a pylon or a column of rough material that might have been concrete, if it resembled anything found on Earth. It stuck straight up from the water, maybe ten meters high, then leaned over to the left. If they hadn’t stopped they would have passed right underneath its curve.
The top of the column was smoking, or releasing vapor of some kind. Hawkins pointed both of his suit lights right at the surface there and saw that it was slick with some kind of foam that glittered and popped. He could even hear it hissing. A little fluid escaped the foam and dripped from the column’s ragged end.
“Is that—”
“It’s also growing,” Rao said. “Whatever it is.”
The column was getting longer, its curve continuing even as they watched. It extended out over the water, increasing its length constantly. Far faster than Hawkins liked.
He watched the column grow for a while. Then he got a funny feeling, a bad idea. “Pan the light over to the left,” he said.
Jansen twisted the boom of the lamp slowly, scanning the face of the black water. Her light caught something.
There was an identical column over there, curving to the right as if the two spars of concrete were reaching out for each other. Which he thought was exactly what they were trying to do. Just like the first one’s, the top of the second column was fuming and growing, centimeter by centimeter.
When they met, as he was sure they would, they would form an arch. An arch maybe twenty meters high and a hundred meters across.
“We can go around,” Jansen pointed out. “We can work our way around so we don’t pass beneath.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Good call.”
“I just had a weird thought,” Jansen said as they passed another of the bubble piles. “Is it possible those are the aliens?”
Hawkins laughed, but Rao’s head lifted, and she gave Jansen a serious look. “Interesting,” she said.
“Maybe—maybe the reason we haven’t been able to talk to them is that they’re just so different from us, so weird that we don’t have anything in common,” Jansen suggested.
“Those aren’t the aliens,” Hawkins said, gesturing at one of the bubble mounds. “No hands. Not even a head. How could something like that build a starshi
p?”
Rao looked as if she might have an answer. She sat up very straight, and Jansen half expected her to raise her hand. Hawkins waved at her in dismissal, though. “Don’t answer that. It was a rhetorical question.”
Jansen’s eyes narrowed. They’d brought an astrobiologist all this way, at great taxpayer expense. Now he didn’t even want to hear from her?
He had more to say, apparently. “No, we haven’t seen the aliens yet. You said they were hibernating, Rao. Now they’re waking up. We’ll see them. We’ll see them real soon, I bet.” He swallowed, hard, a sound that would have passed unnoticed if it weren’t picked up by his suit’s microphone.
Jansen gave him a very thin, very cold smile. “You’re scared,” she said.
“Damn right,” he told her.
“You’re scared that these aliens have come across light-years of space to invade the Earth and kill us all.”
He shook his head. “Don’t be stupid. How does that make any sense? An invasion that takes millennia? What would be the point? If they wanted what we’ve got, our gold or our water or something—it would take way too long to get it back to their planet. No. I’m not worried about an invasion.”
Jansen laughed. “Seriously? Then what are you scared about?”
“I’m worried they come in peace,” he said.
SURFACE MAPPING
You’re scared of what?” Rao asked, laughing.
Hawkins took his time replying. When he did, his answer was so cryptic she couldn’t make any sense of it.
“Neanderthals,” he said.
Rao considered herself a patient person. She had the discipline and the inner calm necessary to carry out laboratory experiments that could take months to complete. When he didn’t say anything more for nearly a minute, though, she felt an unbearable anxiety start to build up inside her chest, and she very much wanted to scream at him and demand an explanation. Instead she merely repeated what he’d said.
“Neanderthals.”
He nodded. “Neanderthals. About forty thousand years ago, there were at least two kinds of humans on planet Earth. There were Cro-Magnons, right, our ancestors, and there were Neanderthals.”
“I might’ve heard of them,” Rao said. She had a degree in astrobiology, after all. That he thought he needed to explain Neanderthals to her made her seethe. Just a little.
“The Neanderthals had music. They painted caves and they buried their dead. They were as smart as us, and probably stronger.” Hawkins shrugged. “The Cro-Mags had flint spearheads. The Neanderthals didn’t. A couple thousand years later—no Neanderthals.”
“And now we’re the Neanderthals,” Jansen suggested.
Hawkins sighed. “We used to think the Cro-Mags hunted the Neanderthals into extinction. Now we know that isn’t true. The two groups got along, it looks like. They even intermarried. But the Neanderthals didn’t make it. You want another example? Think of Columbus landing in the New World. Look how that went for the Indians. Or when British explorers found Tasmania. You know that story? They came wanting to trade, to give the Tasmanians good technology, good metal tools and all kinds of modern stuff. You know what happened?”
Rao cleared her throat. “I do,” she said. “The Tasmanians almost died out. They suffered so much culture shock they stopped having babies.”
“What?” Jansen asked.
Rao shrugged and ducked her head. “Maybe the story is apocryphal, but that’s what I heard. They couldn’t understand these newcomers. These white people. The British wanted to modernize them, to civilize them. Make them good Christians and good royal subjects. They moved the Tasmanians off their ancestral hunting land and put them on a new island, and they were so terrified, so unready for contact with another culture—they just stopped bearing children.”
“When one culture meets another, and one of those cultures has a technological edge—they win. They win whether they come in peace or war,” Hawkins said. He wasn’t looking at either of them. He was staring off into the darkness. “That’s what I’m afraid of,” he said.
A chime sounded inside Hawkins’s helmet. “I’m getting something from the robot,” he said. He tapped at the console on his chest, and an AR window opened in front of him.
“Care to share with the rest of the class?” Jansen asked, standing up to get right in his face. Blocking his view of the new window.
He grumbled under his breath, but he tapped a few keys and the transmission was copied to both Jansen’s and Rao’s suits. Rao had been poling the raft along—now she stopped as they all studied the image floating in front of them.
It was a map of 2I’s interior. This was the first time they’d ever gotten an idea of what the drum contained. It was in black and white, and all the objects ARCS had found were fuzzy and indistinct, but it was a revelation.
“What’s the resolution on this?” Jansen asked.
Hawkins checked the metadata. “About fifty meters.” Meaning nothing smaller than that would show up on the map. ARCS had instructions to fly back and forth along the axis, building up a better picture with each round trip. So far it had only completed one scan, and that first pass was quick and dirty. Yet the low resolution didn’t mean the map was lacking in interest. ARCS must have traveled the whole length of the drum, pushing itself along the axis on a jet of compressed air. As it moved it had built up the scan slice by slice, using the lidar system that was its only sensor.
The first thing Hawkins noticed was that there were two large structures, one at either end of the spindle, both perfectly spherical. One of those had to be the airlock they’d come through. The other was much smaller, but it matched the location of the seam they’d seen at 2I’s south pole, on the exterior of the hull. “That’s definitely a second airlock, then,” Hawkins said.
“Good to know we’ve got two ways out of here,” Jansen told him.
He had no comment on that. He kept his face carefully neutral. There were things she didn’t need to know. Yet.
Luckily she didn’t study his face too closely—she was too busy looking at the map. Hawkins imagined she was noticing the same thing he had. They’d expected to find that the drum was mostly empty, its floor flooded with water, and the map largely flat apart from the occasional arch or bubble pile. That wasn’t the case at all. There were dozens, maybe as many as a hundred objects larger than fifty meters across scattered around the inside of the drum. One of those would be the structure that was their destination, but there was a vast profusion of other shapes—towers and spines, some looking similar to the superstructures on the hull. Enormous domes that must be kilometers across—they looked like hills in the map. There were several complicated, spiky shapes that the robot hadn’t been able to draw with any precision.
“Jesus,” Hawkins said. “The place is crammed full of structures. Those could be entire alien cities. And still we could have rafted our way from one end of the drum to the other and missed all of them.”
“In the dark,” Jansen said. “Sure.”
Hawkins noticed something about the map—it was time-stamped. He queried the robot, and it sent back a series of partial images, the individual slices it had made on its journey. “Here,” he said, “look at this.” He linked the images together in a slideshow, then scrolled through them to create a time-lapse image. “Those domes,” he said. “The big domes. Do you see it?”
Rao glanced at Jansen as if looking for permission to speak first. “They’re getting bigger. All of these structures are. They’re new, and they’re growing. But the domes are swelling incredibly fast.”
“And here,” Hawkins pointed out. “The water level is dropping. Slowly, but you can just make it out.”
“I see it,” Jansen said.
None of them bothered putting forth hypotheses about what that meant. It was just a fact. If the progression continued, the water would recede to a point where they would have to get off the floe and walk. They would have to walk over the thick mat of tendrils that covered the floor of
the lake.
Hawkins didn’t exactly relish the prospect.
Their progress slowed to a crawl. They could no longer travel in a straight line toward the structure. Instead they had to make wide diversions around new masses, new… things that emerged from the water with increasing regularity.
None of what she saw made any sense to Jansen. It only made her afraid.
There were plenty more of the bubble mounds, and more than a few of the arches, definitely—they started seeing pairs of arches, or three of them arranged in a row, and always Hawkins refused to sail under them. The arches were getting bigger, too, like everything else. Some of the curved columns were twenty or even thirty meters across where they met the water, now, and still they fumed and smoked.
There were other things in their way now, as well. Dim shapes that emerged from the darkness like fog thickening into solid forms, shapes defined only by their lights, shapes draped with shadows. They had to make a long detour around what looked like a crater, or maybe a well, nearly half a kilometer across. It looked as if it were made of sandbags, or a flexible sort of bricks that didn’t so much fit together in regular patterns as they might have oozed into place, deforming around each other. The lip of the crater was just slightly higher than the level of the water around it, and as they drew close they could see inside. Liquid inside the crater—maybe water, but it looked more viscid and sluggish—swirled and churned as if agitated from below. A greasy scum accumulated on its surface, chopped up by the bubbling water, but it never quite dispersed. Tendrils crept over the wall of the crater and dipped into the turbulent liquid.
They had a bad scare when one tendril moved under their raft. Rao scuttled backward like a crab from the edge of the floe, scooting on her elbows as she tried to get closer to its center of gravity. Jansen lifted the TBL thinking she could use it like a spear, that she could stab the snakelike appendage, but it ignored them completely. It was too preoccupied with getting to that soupy cauldron. Once it had climbed the wall and stuck its end down into the liquid, it anchored itself it to the rim with tiny, spiky appendages and stopped moving. Jansen pushed them away from the crater and back into the dark.
The Last Astronaut Page 22