"Moving downward, gravity tugs at me," the remote viewer murmured. His voice was drowsy. I saw his shoulders spasm, as if he were falling forward and had caught himself.
"Wake up, there, colonel," the voice said, without reproach. "You're drifting."
"He's sliding into Phase Two. That was hypnic myoclonia," the nurse commented. "Jactitation."
"Haven't slept since yesterday," Meagle muttered. He shook himself. "Okay. Got it. I'm in."
The screens, trying to emulate whatever it was the psychic was "seeing/feeling," bloomed with a burst of visual noise. Were those things sketchy blocks of cells, like the hexagonal innards of a bee hive? They shrank, jittered, smoothed into a kind of curvy passageway. The image was being enhanced by the computer's analysis, drawing on an archive of Meagle's private symbols.
"Analytical overlay," the operator said in a tone of admonition.
"I don't—No, this's what I'm actually perceiving. My God, Charley, the place is so fucking old. Millions of years. Tens of millions."
"Give me some Stage Three."
"Weirdly beautiful, man. But alien. Not insects, I'm pretty sure." The overlapping images loped along, as if from a camera mounted on a cartoon's shoulder. Is this how the blind imagines seeing? Meagle had been sightless from birth, the dossier had informed me. But maybe that shouldn't be surprising; the blind repurpose the cortical and precortical tissues specialized by evolution for visual capture and registration—the large dedicated occipital lobe, the striate V1 cortex, all the way up the V hierarchy to middle temporal MT, pathways carrying neural trains from the retina to the brain, interpreting, pruning as they flashed their specialized code. Yada yada. His sensitive, trained brain had nabbed that spare capacity, retained its function, modified its input channels. The Marvel That Is Your Brain! I overheard my own mocking subliminal commentary and wondered why I was so anxious, suddenly. A kind of curdling in the causal webs . . . I felt more and more uncomfortable, as if I badly needed to take a dump. Maybe I did. Meagle had fallen silent. Dropping off to sleep again? No, the constructed image was sliding past us in the hologram, slurring and breaking up in detail, but it was a corridor he walked along, in his spirit walk or whatever you call it.
Something sitting in a large padded chair. Christ!
"Christ!" Meagle cried, loudly. Small indicator lights went from placid green to blipping yellow on one display. A histogram surfed briefly into the red. The nurse was clicking keys, fast and unrattled.
"Bingo, Colonel," said the operator, triumph shaking his professional sangfroid.
My etiological sense scrambled. I lurched up, leaned forward, ready to puke. Meagle was doing the same, cable tangled at his neck, contacts pulling from his cropped scalp. In the great chair shown on the screen, as the imaginary viewpoint swung about, the interpretative computer sketched a seated person with a snout and deep-set hooded eyes, clawed hands gripping banked controls on the arm rests.
The image skittered and jittered, revised itself as the causal whirlpool screeched around me. But no, this wasn't the dragon I was looking for. It was, it wasn't. The machine image spoke directly to me through Meagle and memory. That dead person, that ancient thing in its ancient warship, it was . . . was . . . Impossible. Delusion and grief. Something else. I knew the beloved face beyond denial, of course, like a clumsy pencil drawing on the screen that tore my heart out. Human. Face burned down in places to the bone, gaze suffering, mouth mute, determined even in death. In his stained UN uniform, with Korean Imperium lieutenant flashes at the collar.
"Oh, lord god," I moaned, and did barf, then, like a puling schoolboy drunk.
From the corner of my leaking eyes, in the window feed from his RV cell, I saw Meagle turn convulsively. He seemed to stare right at me, through the camera, into the display, with his blue, blind eyes.
The main hologram image, too, looked steadfastly back at me—sketched from the Naval remote viewer's words and speaking hands, his brain rhythms, the archived set of his stereotypical ideograms—looked at me from a grave five years dug in the soil.
Song-Dam. My son. My poor boy. My lost hero child.
I started to cry, wiping at my bitter mouth, and couldn't stop.
Huygens is not part of the Imperium, of course, being a research agora, like Herschel, the other settlement on Titan, but it is a fiscal affiliate of Korea, as well as of Zimbabwe, the Brazilian Superstate, Camp Barsoom (on, you guessed it, Mars), and a handful of other polises on the Moon and Ganymede. So while the writ of Mr. Kim, my sponsor, did not run on Titan, precisely, his paternal hand was heavily in the weighing scales. The Warlord had developed a fondness for the Intelligent Dinosaur paradigm when he studied paleontology as a young student in Antarctica, where all the equivocal evidence was located prior to the Enigma's excavation, and he carried that interest through into maturity and, some said, senility. He would be pleased as punch.
Dr. Caetani, surprise, surprise, was not. Everyone by now had studied the remote viewing session, and more than once. My participation and role could be determined only by inference, since no recorders had been trained on the observation room. But the recording of Meagle's results showed plainly the results: the alien or saurian and, moments later, the harrowing superimposed image of my late son. For Caetani, I'm sure, my distress, my involvement, was just a piece of hammy theatrics, a shameful way to spray my mark onto an historic event.
"This afternoon, we know nothing more than we did a week ago," he stated bluntly. "I'm candidly dismayed at the gullibility of some of my colleagues here."
"The saurian—" began Jendayi Shumba. He cut her off instantly.
"—the image was no more veridical than the, the disturbed imposition into the colonel's entangled state of Sensei Park's tragic fixation on his son's death. Nobody doubts that Mr. Park is a functioning poltergeist, capable of casting images and interfering with complex electronic systems. It's why he's here—over my objections—and isn't the point." He took a deep breath, his features flushed behind that pretentious beard. "Our visitor's martyred son is certainly not aboard that Jurassic artifact, and surely nobody thinks he is. Neither, by the same token, is the dinosaur space captain that Mr. Park's well-prepped imagination also dreamed up and shoveled into the ideospace."
"With all due respect, you're out of your depth, Tony." This one I hadn't met before, an industrial psychiatrist named Lionel Berger. "Back off, will you? Remote viewing is no exact science, nor even an accomplished art—and I mean no disrespect to Colonel Meagle in pointing this out. We don't know how it works, except that quantum field nonlocality is engaged and implemented by an act of deliberation. Its famous vulnerability is that other minds can become trapped into the entanglement and add their own measures of information . . . but whether that aggregate data is veridical, symbolic, mythological or sheer phantasy, we can't tell just by simple inspection. Dismissing this evidence by flinging about words like 'psychic' and 'poltergeist' is argument by slur. I'm prepared to wait for more evidence before I decide so confidently what's inside that vessel."
Caetani, the surly fellow, actually said, "Bah!" I'd never heard anyone actually say that before. Others spoke, in their turn; Meagle sat at the back, his blind eyes closed, sunk into a sort of exhausted torpor. I'd have liked to go to him, sit beside him in respectful and sorrowing silence. Instead, as requested, I also remained silent, half-listening to the academese, the scholasticism, the stochasticism, the loop theories of cognitive restructuration.
I had seen my dead son.
I had seen the saurian sit in his great chair, or hers.
If cause is a pool of chaos and order blended by intention and brute event, I am (and nobody, as yet, has managed to explain why it is so) a small stick of dynamite exploding up random fishy critters to the shore. Brrrr . . . That's a macabre, self-lacerating image. It had been my boy Song who perished in mindless explosions, and not by my hand. But hadn't I sent him into fatal danger? Into ultimate harm's way? Of course I had. Not by urging or forbidding, in so m
any words, but in my reckless skepticism, my louche lack of patriotism. Which had fetched us up where? Him, smashed like a detonated fish in a pool he could not escape, did not wish to escape. Me, bereft, alone, my bond to my nation long ago broken and betrayed. I grunted aloud, hoisted myself into a less uncomfortable position on a seat too small, as usual, for my girth.
"Sam? You wanted to say something?"
I looked around. They were gazing at me expectantly. "Oh, nothing. What can I donate that hasn't already been weighed and found wanting?" It was petty and self-regarding, and I snapped my mouth shut, but a fierce anger burst up in me anyway, so I opened it again. "I'll say one thing. And make no apologies for it. We are here," I swung one arm through an embracing arc, taking in the auditorium, the station, Titan, "because years ago, when I was still on Earth, I discerned a causal anomaly near this place. We are here because military and independent remote viewers on three worlds concurred in finding and describing the vehicle. We are here, therefore, driven by the many motives that arose from that discovery. But I insist that the principal occasion is Premier Kim's wish to test the hypotheses forwarded by the scientific entity I represent." I took a deep breath. "So far as I can see, what Colonel Meagle uncovered this morning corroborates precisely the predictions of the Intelligent Dinosaur Institute. If my presence has muddied your waters, I'm sorry—but again I remind you, if it were not for me, none of you would be here today.
"So lay the hell off, okay?"
I dug in my robe's pocket, found a Mars bar, unpeeled it, and gobbled it down.
Shortly after Song-Dam's eighth birthday—his mother long since escaped back into the whorehouse alleys she and I had both come from—I took him with me on a business trip to Palo Alto. I was the object of the business trip, my absurd gift, my poltergeist prowess with cause and effect. Several Stanford biophysics researchers had somehow picked up trash journalism stories about me as the luckiest/unluckiest man on earth. Funding was limited, but I convinced them that Song was in my sole charge and that I wasn't budging without him.
So we took an exhausting flight from Incheon International across the Pacific and through the absurd indignities of US Homeland Security (despite a graduate student being on hand at the airport to collect us, now cooling his heels in the arrival lounge with a wilting cardboard sign in two languages; I had inadvertently set off various bells and whistles, so of course we were detained pointlessly, until one of the senior professors was persuaded to drive to the airport and vouch for us), and stayed in an anonymous, ugly block of apartments that seemed to have been compiled from polyurethane pretending to be marble. We could hear the dreary TV set next door through the adjoining wall.
I took Song for a long walk so he and I could get a feel for the alien place, this America, as we stretched our weary legs. Within three blocks (trust my causal eddies for once), we found a Korean food store, established that my parents' modest residence in Nangok—back at the turn of the century when it was still a squalid slum in a hilly area of Sillim-dong, Gwanak District—was just spitting distance from the proprietors' familial stamping grounds, and found ourselves dragged happily to a nearby park by Mr. Kwon's wife and three kids to fly dragon kites in the cool afternoon breeze.
I helped Song pay out the string. Our borrowed kite was a scarlet and gold Dragon Diamond (a gift to us both, as it turned out—and thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Kwon!). Our dragon quivered on the middle air a moment, strained against his leash, then suddenly flung himself upward into the deepening blue California sky. The line went taut. Song let it go in fright, but I held tight, and a moment later he put his hands back to the winch reel beside mine. I saw the line stretched between my hand, his small resolute hands, and the high, swooping, flower-bright dragon: a luminous string.
"Daddy, look!" said my son, wild with excitement. "Our dragon is flying on a beam of photons!"
At that moment, as if Buddha had smacked me in the ear, I was enlightened.
"I think I can get in," I told the Director of Operations, a tight jawed fellow named Namgoong, almost certainly a political appointee but in secure possession of a decent scientific reputation with degrees in geology and astrobiology. Earth and sky, I thought, but hid my smile. "I think I can break the shield. The question is, do I dare?"
"Yes. Precisely. If you rupture the stationary shield, who knows what might seep out into the atmosphere." He gave me a thin-lipped smile. "Fortunately, Sensei, we shall not have to wait three years for an Environmental Impact Study. The Imperium wants this thing opened. Now. It's why you're here."
"To tell you the truth, sir, I'm more worried about what might seep in. They must have sealed it against Titan's atmosphere for good reason."
"A motive that expired millions of years ago." He rose. "I'm having a containment dome erected around the locus. There's no way we can establish blockade underneath the ice as well, but this will meet most likely challenges. Or so I'm assured."
"I'm relieved to hear it." I belatedly heaved up my bulk. "When will you want me out there?"
"You'll be advised. We have a full scale colloquium scheduled, starting at two. I'll expect you to be there, Sensei Park, and on your best behavior. No more outbursts, if you please."
"More damned chin-wagging. Science used to be an empirical exercise," I grumbled.
"Led by theory, as I'm sure you understand." He was standing at his door, and I went out, biting my lip. Nobody had the faintest starting point for a theory to explain my causal distortions, and not much to account for the photon-entangled portage functor. I could do it, I could show them a method for using it (and had), but I didn't have a theory-empowered clue how or why. I'm nobody's mutant superman, that much I do know. (Or is that just a fat man's self-doubt speaking?)
Postmodern science, as far as I can tell looking in from the outside, is drunk on the sound of its own voice. But yes, I know: look who's complaining. I recalled again that Victorian sage, that poet Tennyson. He had it right: I sometimes hold it half a sin to put in words the grief I feel; for words, like Nature, half reveal and half conceal the Soul within. But, for the unquiet heart and brain, a use in measured language lies; the sad mechanic exercise, like dull narcotics, numbing pain. I followed Dr. Namgoong along the narrow compiled corridors of Hyugens station, so like those awful domiciles on the outskirts of Palo Alto, and went to hear the sad mechanics exercise their tongues and dull their pain, and maybe mine.
The circulated air was pungent, despite the scrubbers, with the musk of excited animals crowded together. A schematic chart I'd grown familiar with, these last few months, started displaying on the auditorium wall, replacing the magnified image of Saturn's glorious tilted hat. The Fermi Paradox Solution candidates. My eye bounced off them, falling down a cliff of words and logic with no footing in reality beyond the dragon-haunted thing outside the dome:
Where are They?
Fermi 1. They are here among us, and call themselves Koreans.
That always got a satisfied titter, except from any Hungarians in the crowd.
Fermi 2. They are here, running things.
A chance for the Hungarians, and anyone else chafing under the Imperium, to get their own back with a belly laugh. No giggles here, though, I noticed.
Fermi 3. They came and left.
Bingo, I thought. They came and left flowers scattered in their wake. Strictly, though, that was Fermi 53, the only choice left. The ancient intelligent dinosaur hypothesis.
Fermi 6. We are interdicted.
Fermi 10. They are still on their way here.
The starship had blown that one, and others like it, clear out of the water. Time to trim the list, methinks.
Fermi 21. They're listening, only fools are transmitting.
Fermi 22. Dedicated killer machines destroy everything that moves, anywhere in space.
Fermi 28. The Vingean Singularity takes them . . . elsewhere.
No Singularity back near the end of the Cretaceous, I thought. Judging by the remote viewer's sketches, that s
aurian pilot was advanced, but not sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic.
Fermi 38. Earth is the optimal place for life, just by chance.
Could be. And for intelligent life, at that. Hey, look, we've seen it twice: the smart dinosaurs and Homo sap.
Fermi 48. Language is vanishingly rare.
Ha! Yeah, right. Blah blah blah. Still, maybe so. The skies are awfully silent, which is where we came in . . .
Fermi 49. Science is a rare accident.
Not as rare as I am, I thought, touching the etiological chains and vortices all around—and no scientist ever predicted me. Most of them still didn't even know about me, thanks to all those Above Top Secret restrictions. Damn it.
Namgoong cleared his throat at the podium. Voices, in clumps and then one by one, fell silent. Hey, maybe that's it. God tapped His microphone, and the cosmos shut up to listen. And they're still listening, bent and cowed by the awfulness of what they heard. But not us, we haven't heard from God yet, despite a thousand revelations claimed and proclaimed. Or if we have, there's no way to search through the babbling noise and extract the divine signal. Funny way to run a universe.
I could feel the dinosaur calling to me, even so, through the appalling cold of Titan's snows and the void of fifty or a hundred million years. And the entwined memory of my son, sacrificed for nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
"Those are the classic guesses—most of them wrong." The Director flicked his finger; the display went to blank gray. "We still have no idea why the galaxy, indeed the universe as a whole, is quiet. Why the stars are still shining, spilling out their colossal energy resources, when intelligence should be collecting it. Calculations you're all familiar with prove that a single intelligent species arising anywhere in the galaxy within the last billion years would by now have colonized all its trillion stars and associated bodies, turned the sky black with Matrioshka shells—or perhaps obliterated the stars in vast, wasteful wars."
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Four Page 34