by Greg Bear
The black curtain drew aside. Beyond another thick pane of glass framed in stainless steel, they saw a small, dimly lighted, almost empty square room, watery green in color. In the middle of the room was a low platform draped with what appeared to be blankets. A plastic beaker of clear water sat in one corner. In the right-hand corner nearest their window was a meter-tall transparent cylinder, open at the top. Arthur took all this in before focusing on what lay under the blankets on the low table.
The Guest moved, raised a forward limb—clearly a kind of arm, with a three-fingered hand, each finger divided in two above the middle joint—and then sat up slowly, the blanket falling free of its wedge-shaped head. The long "nose" of its head pointed at them and the golden brown eyes emerged from the blunt end, withdrew, emerged. Arthur, mouth dry, tried to see the being as a whole, but for the moment could only concentrate on whether the eyes were lidded, or actually withdrew within "pools" of pale gray-green flesh.
"Can we speak to it?" Harry asked Hall over his shoulder.
"There's two-way communication with the room." Harry sat in a seat near the window. "Hello. Can you hear us?"
"Yes," the Guest said. Its voice was sibilant and weak but clearly understandable. It lowered itself to the floor and stood uncertainly beside the low table. Its lower limbs—legs—were jointed in reverse, yet not like a dog's or horse's hind legs, where the "knee" is the analog of a human wrist. The Guest's articulation was quite original, each joint actually reversed, with the limb's lower half dropping smoothly, gracefully, to split into three thick extensions, the tip of each extension splayed into two broad "toes." The legs made up much of its height, its rhinoceros-hide "trunk" occupying only about half a meter of its full meter and a half. The end of the long head, thrust forward on a thick, short neck, dropped a few centimeters below the juncture of legs and trunk. The arms rose from each side of the trunk like the folded manipulators of a mantis.
Harry scowled and shook his head, temporarily unable to speak. He waved a hand in front of his mouth, glancing at Arthur, and coughed.
"We don't know quite what to say to you," Arthur finally managed. "We've been waiting a long time for someone to visit the Earth from space."
"Yes." The Guest's head swung back and forth, the jewel-bright, moist, sherry-colored eyes fully revealed. "I wish I could bring better words on such an important occasion."
"What . . .ah, what words do you bring?" Harry asked.
"Are you related?" the Guest asked in turn.
"I'm sorry—related?"
"There is a question about my communication?"
"We are not of the same family—not siblings, brother or father and son or . . . whatever," Arthur said.
"You have a social relationship."
"He's my boss," Harry said, pointing to Arthur. "My hierarchical superior. We're friends, also."
"And you are not the same individuals in different form as the individuals behind you?"
"No," Harry said.
"Your forms are steady."
"Yes."
"Then ..." The Guest made a sharp, high-pitched whistling noise, and the long crest above the level of the shoulders appeared to inflate slightly. Arthur could not see a mouth or nose near the eyes, and surmised such openings might be on the head below the neck and facing the chest, in the area corresponding—if such correspondences were at all useful—to a long "chin." "I will relate my bad news to you, as well. Are you placed highly in your group, your society?"
"Not the highest, but yes, we are highly placed," Harry said.
"The news I bring is not happy. It may be unhappy for all of you. This I have not spoken before in detail." Again the whistling noise. The head lifted and Arthur spotted slitlike openings on the underside. "If you have the ability to leave, you will wish to do so soon. A disease has entered your system of planets. There is little time left for your world."
Harry pulled his chair a few inches forward, and the Guest, with an awkward sidling motion, came closer to the thick glass. Then it sat on the floor, leaving only its upper arms and long head visible. The three eyes pointed steadily at Harry, as if wishing to establish some unbreakable and facile rapport, or as if commiserating . . .
"Our world is doomed?" Harry asked, somehow avoiding all melodrama, giving the last word a perfectly straightforward and unstrained emphasis.
"Unless I sadly misknow your abilities, yes. This is bad news."
"It does seem so," Harry said. "What is the cause of this disease? Are you part of an army of conquest?"
"Conquest . . . Uncertain. Army?"
"Organized group of soldiers, fighters, destroyers and occupiers, invaders."
The Guest was silent and still for a few minutes. It might have been a statue but for the almost invisible throbbing of its upper crest. "I am a parasite, a happen-by voyager."
"Explain that, please."
"I am a flea, not a soldier or a builder. My world is dead and eaten. I travel here within a child of a machine that eats worlds."
"You've come on a spaceship?"
"Not my own. Not ours." The emphasis there was striking.
"Whose, then?" Harry pursued.
"Its forebears made by very distant people. It controls itself. It eats and reproduces."
Arthur trembled with confusion and fear and a deep anger he could not explain. "I don't understand," he said, blocking Harry's next words.
"It is a traveler that destroys and makes the stars safe for its builders. It gathers information, learns, and then eats worlds and makes new younger forms of itself. Is this clear?"
"Yes, but why are you here?" Arthur almost shouted.
"Shh," Harry said, holding up one hand. "It just said that. It's hitched a ride. It's a flea."
"You didn't build the rock, the spaceship or whatever it is, in the desert? That's not your vehicle?" Colonel Hall asked. Obviously, they had heard none of this before. Young Lieutenant Sanborn was visibly shaken.
"Not our vehicle," the Guest affirmed. "It is powerful enough not to fear our presence. We cannot hurt it. We sacrifice ..." Again it whistled. "We survive only to warn of the death our kind has met."
"Where are the pilots, the soldiers?" Harry asked.
"The machine does not live as we do," the Guest said.
"It's a robot, automatic?"
"It is a machine."
Harry pushed his chair back and rubbed his face vigorously with both hands. The Guest appeared to observe this closely, but otherwise did not change position.
"We have a couple of names for that kind of machine," Arthur said, facing Colonel Hall. "It sounds like a von Neumann device. Self-replicating, without outside instructions. Frank Drinkwater thinks the lack of such machines proves there is no intelligent life besides our own in the galaxy."
"Playing devil's advocate, no doubt," Harry said, still massaging the bridge of his nose. "What scientist would want to prove intelligence was unique?"
Colonel Hall regarded the Guest with an expression of mild pain. "It's saying we should be on war alert?"
"It's saying ..." Harry began angrily, and then controlled his tone, "it's saying we haven't got the chance of an ice cube in hell. Art, you read more science fiction than Ì do. Who was that fellow—"
"Saberhagen. Fred Saberhagen. He called them 'Berserkers.'"
"I am not being spoken with," the Guest said. "Have you become aware of the results of this information?"
"I think so," Arthur replied. They had not asked a perfectly obvious question. Perhaps they didn't want to know. He appraised the Guest in the silence that fell over them. "How long do we have?"
"I do not know. Perhaps less than an orbit."
Harry winced. Colonel Hall simply gaped.
"How long ago did your—did the ship land?" Arthur continued.
The Guest made a small hissing sound and turned away. "I do not know” it replied. "We have not been aware."
Arthur did not hesitate to ask the next question. "Did the ship stop by a planet
in our solar system? Did it destroy a moon?"
"I don't know."
A short, powerfully built Asiatic man with close-trimmed black hair, dark pockmarked skin, and broad cheekbones entered the room. Arthur slapped his hands on his knees and glared at him.
"I beg your pardon, gentlemen," he said.
Sanborn cleared his throat. "This is Colonel Tuan Anh Phan." He introduced Arthur and Harry.
Phan greeted each with a reserved nod. "I've just been informed that the Australians are releasing news photos and motion pictures. I believe this is important. Their visitors are not like our own."
PERSPECTIVE
InfoMet Political News Forum,
October 6, 1996,
Frank Topp, commentator:
President Crockerman's rating in the World-News public opinion polls has been a rocksteady 60 to 65 percent approval since June, with no signs of change as Election Day approaches. Political pundits in Washington doubt that anything can derail the President's easy victory in November, not even the hundred-billion-dollar trade imbalance between the Eastern Pacific Rim nations and Uncle Sam ... or the enigmatic situation in Australia. I, for one, am not even wearing campaign buttons. It's going to be a dull election.
GUARENS ME, SEDISTI LASSOS
7
Hicks, bleary-eyed, clothing rumpled, sat on the straight-backed hotel desk chair and scanned the contents of the file he had marked "Hurrah." "Hurrah" contained the choicest bits of information from twenty-two hours and perhaps three hundred dollars' worth of accessing specialist bulletin boards around the world. He did not care about costs. He was still high.
Australia did indeed have an artifact in their Great Victoria Desert, something apparently disguised to resemble a huge chunk of red granite. The Australian government had kept the find secret for about thirty days, until leaks through investigating military and scientific agencies threatened to scoop them on the greatest story of all time. This much and more—speculation, rumors—had been repeated again and again on all the networks he had accessed. While the government had not released full details, they were expected to do so any day.
The Regulus bulletin board was used solely by radio astronomers belonging to the 21cm Club, of which he was an honorary member. After searching through the general and special interest messages, in a small area headlined "Irresponsible Murmurs," Hicks had found a cryptic and unsigned note: "Ham fanatic, right? Say no more about identity. Picked up unscrambled transmission to AF1"— that, Hicks decided, must be Air Force One, the President's plane—"concerning 'our own bogey in the Furnace.' The Man's heading west to Vandenberg. Could this be . . . ?"
Hicks frowned again, reading that. He knew several shuttle pilots currently flying out of Vandenberg. Dare he call them up and ask if anything untoward had been happening? Dare he mention "our own bogey in the Furnace"?
A knock interrupted his reverie. He was heading for the door when it opened and a young Asian woman in lime-green blouse and slacks backed in. "Housekeeping," she announced, seeing him. "Okay?"
Hicks looked over his room abstractedly, relieved that he had chosen to wear a robe. He often worked in the buff, paunch, gray chest hairs, and all—the habit of a bachelor of long standing. "Please, not yet."
"Soon?" she asked, smiling.
"Soon. An hour."
She shut the door behind her. Hicks paced back and forth from curtained window to bathroom door, chin in hand, face as clear and guileless as an infant's. "I cannot think straight," he muttered. Turning on the television and selecting a twenty-four-hour news station, he sat on the corner of the bed.
For a moment, he thought he had tuned to a movie channel by mistake. Three shiny silver objects, shaped like long-necked gourds, hovered above arid sandy ground. Nearby squatted a large van topped by an array of electronic sensing equipment. The van gave the objects scale; each was as tall as a man. Hicks reached over to turn up the volume, joining a male announcer in midsentence:
"—from four days ago, shows the three mechanical remote devices which the Australian government claims emerged from a disguised spacecraft. The government says these devices have communicated with their scientists."
The video of the silvery gourds and van was replaced by a typical press conference scene, with a slender, thirtyish man in a brown suit standing behind a clear plastic podium, reading a prepared statement: "We have communicated with these objects, and we can now affirm that they are not living creatures, but robots, representing the builders of the spacecraft—it is now confirmed to be a spacecraft—buried within the rock. While the actual communications are still being analyzed and will not be released immediately, the substance of the information supplied was positive, that is, not threatening or alarming in any fashion."
"Jesus bloody Christ," Hicks said.
The image of the hovering gourds returned. "They're flying," Hicks said. "What's holding them up? Come on, you bastards. Do your job and say what the bloody hell's going on."
"Commentary from world leaders, including the Pope, after these messages—"
Hicks flung his arms out and swore, kicked the cabinet holding the television, and punched the set off. He could spend another three hundred dollars chasing rumors across all the networks and bulletin boards in the world, or—
Or he could stop being a novelist wallah and start being a journalist again by finding the news behind the news. Certainly not in Australia. The Great Victoria Desert, by now, had representatives of the media three-deep, trying to interview every grain of sand.
A faint memory of some obligation suddenly flared into consciousness. He had had an appointment this morning. "Damn." That single word, said almost happily, adequately expressed his slight irritation at having forgotten the local television interview. He should have been at the studio five hours ago. It hardly seemed to matter. He was on to something.
The "Furnace" . . . Where in hell would that be? Somewhere near Vandenberg, apparently. He had visited Vandenberg seven times in his career, twice covering important combined civilian-military shuttle launches to polar orbit. Hicks pulled out his pocket compact disk player from a suitcase and hooked it into the computer. He indexed the World Atlas sector on his reference disk and searched through the F's in the gazetteer. "Furnace, furnace, furnace—"
He quickly found several Furnaces, the first in Argyll County, Scotland. There was also Furnace, Kentucky, and Furnace L ("What is L, lake?") in County Mayo, Ireland. Furnace, Massachusetts . . . And Furnace Creek, California. He entered the map number and coordinates. In less than two seconds, he had a detailed color map of an area a hundred kilometers square. A flashing icon in the lower left-hand corner indicated a comparative satellite photograph was available. His eye searched the map until an arrow appeared, flashing next to a tiny dot.
"Furnace Creek," he said, smiling. "On the edge of Death Valley proper, not far from Nevada actually . . ." But not very close to Vandenberg—across the state from it, in fact. He switched disks and keyed in a request for Automobile Club of Southern California information. The computer found a year-old listing. "1995L Brief: Furnace Creek Inn. 67 units. Golf, riding. Long-established, picturesque location overlooking Death Valley. Three stars."
Hicks thought for a moment, very much aware that the facts were not coming together perfectly. Operating solely on instinct, he picked up the phone, punched a button for an outside line, and requested the area code for Furnace Creek. It was the same as San Diego's although it was hundreds of miles north-northeast. Shaking his head, he called information and asked for the number of Furnace Creek Inn. A mechanical voice informed him, and he jotted it down, whistling.
The phone rang three times. A sleepy-voiced, young-sounding girl answered. Hicks checked his watch again, for the fourth time in ten minutes. For the first time, he actually paid attention to the dials. One-fifteen P.M. He hadn't slept all night. "Reservations, please."
"That's me," the girl said.
"I'd like to book a room for tomorrow."
> "I'm sorry, sir, we can't do that. We're completely full."
"Can I make a reservation for your dining room, then?"
"The inn is closed for the next few days, sir."
"Big traveling party?" Hicks asked, his smile broadening. "Special reservations?"
"I can't tell you that, sir."
"Why not?"
"I'm not allowed to give out that information now."
Hicks could almost see the girl biting her lip. "Thank you." He hung up and fell back on the bed, suddenly exhausted.
Who else would have tracked this down?
"Can't sleep," he resolved, sitting up again. He called room service and asked for coffee and a substantial breakfast—ham, eggs, whatever they had. The clerk offered a three-egg concoction with ham and bell peppers mixed in—a Denver omelet, as if pigs and peppers might be special to that city. He agreed, held down the button, and called the downstairs travel agency listed in the hotel directory.
The agent, an efficient-sounding woman, informed him that there was a private airstrip near Furnace Creek, but the closest he could fly in commercially would be Las Vegas.
"I'll take a seat on the next flight out," he said. She gave him the flight number and departure time—about an hour from now, cutting it close—and the gate number at Lindbergh Field, and asked if he would need a rental car.
"Yes, indeed. Unless I can fly directly in."
"No, sir. Only small airfields out that way, no commuter flight service. The drive between Vegas and Furnace Creek will take about two or three hours," she said, adding, "if you're like everybody else who drives on the desert."
"Madmen all, eh?" he asked.
"Madwomen, too," the agent said briskly.
"Mad, all mad," Hicks said. "I'd like a hotel room for* the night, as well. Quiet. No gambling." It would be late afternoon by the time he arrived in Las Vegas, and he would not be able to make it to Death Valley before dark. Best to get a good night's sleep, he thought, and start out in the morning.
"Let me confirm your reservations, sir. I'll need your credit card number. You're a guest at the Inter-Continental?"