Einstein's Bridge

by Cramer, John

  George looked thoughtful and nodded.

  “There’s also another aspect of my bug-disaster novels,” Alice said. “Some of the themes I’ve used in my novels are real problems, like the overuse of chemical fertilizers and pesticides and their effect on the environment. I’ve fictionalized the problems and exaggerated their effects, but the problems are nonetheless real. My bent for investigative reporting has been put to good use in developing that part of my books. And I think it’s had an impact. My paperbacks are read by far more people than any fancy hardcover work of investigative non-fiction would have been.

  “That’s what I like to think people get from my books. They learn about real problems, and they learn how to deal with change in their lives in a better and more effective ways. I’m not ashamed of what I write. I’m proud of it, and I’m delighted that people are willing to pay for it.”

  George looked closely at her. Then he kissed her. “That’s wonderful,” he whispered.

  Alice looked up from her lapstation, then saved the file she had been working on. This had been a long and trying 24 hours. Between eating, sleeping, and lovemaking, Alice had continued to work on her manuscript and now had a nearly completed first draft. She hadn’t slept much, and she felt tense and strung out.

  Roger had retreated to a big chair in the corner, using his lapstation to go over the Snark data stream and to read one textbook holo-ROM after another. He read at an amazing pace, turning a page every few seconds.

  At last George’s alarm watch beeped. “Showtime!” he announced. Alice followed the two men outside to the beach, feeling a rising excitement.

  The bright summer day was cooled by a breeze from the ocean. Alice squinted into the light, after the dimness of the cottage. There was a sharp salt smell in the air, and sea gulls wheeled overhead. The tide was coming in, the gray-green waves lapping progressively higher on the beach. She could see children playing in the surf far down the beach, but no one was close by.

  George led them to approximately the spot from which he had waded out into the surf and thrown the Egg, and they looked out to sea. In the far distance Alice could see an oil tanker moving past at a stately pace, probably heading for a refinery in Baytown or Texas City. They waited.

  She thought she was the first to notice the disturbance in the water. There was a small turbulence almost directly in front of them, about 40 meters out in the water. Then a blonde head broke the surface, moving in their direction.

  Alice couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing. The Botticelli-perfect young female face smiled at her, streaming water from nostrils and mouth but not seemingly bothered by this. White shoulders appeared.

  George and Roger stood frozen, watching. A wave broke over the child’s head, but she came on unperturbed. The water line was down to the chest now. Her form was subtly female, but there were no breasts, only small pink nipples. The golden blond hair reached to her waist. A flat belly appeared, complete with a small belly button. Then the crotch, with a labial cleft but no sign of pubic hair. Definitely female. Finally her thighs and legs. Emerging from the water was a young prepubescent human female who looked perhaps 10 years old.

  The child waded toward them through the water and stopped on the beach. She paused to study them with arrestingly blue eyes, and without a word took Alice by one hand and George by the other. Alice could feel a subtle electricity in the child’s damp grip. They walked away from the ocean. Clearing her throat and ejecting some water, the child said distinctly in a low voice, “I am in need of shelter to provide temperature stability. Can we use the structure before us?”

  CHAPTER 6.5

  Guinea Pig Stampede

  ALICE got the child into the house and into a warm shower as quickly as possible. There was probably no question of catching a cold, but she decided not to take chances. She had shown the child how to wash away the salt water, how to shampoo and condition her hair, how to dry it with the hair dryer. She was amazed that she had anything to teach the alien. She had given the child her robe to wear and combed her long blonde hair. Finally they emerged from the bathroom.

  Roger and George were waiting quietly on the couch They appeared to be somewhat dazed by what had happened. Alice and the child joined them. The child took the arm chair next to Roger and moved about experimentally in it, apparently exploring her first sensations of sitting. Alice sat in the chair opposite.

  “What shall we call you?” George began. “Tunnel Maker?”

  The child smiled. It was like the sun coming out. “In a sense Tunnel Maker was my father. I was him, but I am him no longer, although we are in communication. Since I am now separate from him, it would be appropriate for me to have a new name. I have studied your mythology. Perhaps you could call me ‘Iris’ after the female messenger of your Greek gods. Would that be acceptable?”

  “Yes,” said Alice, remembering that Iris was also the goddess of the rainbow, the bridge between Olympus and Earth.

  “Of course,” said Roger, “but may I ask why are you a child and a female? Is Tunnel Maker also a young female?”

  Iris laughed, a pleasant tinkling sound. “The concept of male and female is no longer appropriate for the Makers and has not been for over a thousand years, since we learned to READ and WRITE. The age of Tunnel Maker is half a gross of orbits, about 72 of your years. He is not particularly old, but neither is he young. You should understand that I could have emerged from your ocean in any form I chose: a goddess, a monster, a bird, a giant, a dragon. I could even, with minor modifications to accommodate the local environment, have emerged in the form of the real Tunnel Maker. However, if I had, all of you would have run screaming from the beach. I chose to be a young human female in order to be as non-threatening to your race as possible. You find humans most familiar, children less threatening than adults, and females less threatening than males.”

  “You said that your race had learned to READ and WRITE,” Alice said. “Those words occurred occasionally in our conversations with Tunnel Maker, but he was evasive in explaining what they meant. It is clear, however, that they mean more in your world than simply learning symbolic language skills.”

  Iris nodded. “One of the reasons I have come into your world is to teach you three, as representatives of your race, to READ and WRITE. These are skills that we learned through contact with another race, the Baltrons, who reside in another Bubble. In a way, Alice, it does involve learning some symbolic language skills. But the language is the genetic code, and one must READ and WRITE in the media you call DNA and RNA.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Roger. “Surely DNA genetic coding is not a universal language that extends from one bubble universe to another, from one species to another that evolved separately. Surely the genetic patterns of your race have nothing to do with ours.”

  “There is more similarity than you might think,” said Iris, “but you are partially correct. Your language of English differs greatly from Russian or Sanskrit, yet knowing one language makes it is easier to learn another. For carbon-based life forms the proteins are much the same from one evolved species to another, and therefore the DNA that controls protein synthesis is also very similar. There is less variation in the separate carbon-based genetic codes than in human languages. The coding details may differ, but the basic underlying principles for carbon-based life forms are always the same, from species to species, from Bubble to Bubble. We have found no violations of this principle.”

  “But, in a sense we are already READING and WRITING,” said George. “Our molecular biologists over the past decade have extracted the coding of the human genome. It now resides in a huge computer database and is being intensively used to develop drugs and to combat genetic diseases. We can also do genetic modifications, using synthesized retroviruses. Isn’t that what you are talking about?”

  Iris smiled again. “We too were doing such things
before we contacted the Baltrons. The difference is, we now can READ and WRITE in a natural way, within ourselves. Each Individual can do it. We do not require machines to assist us. In fact WRITING has become our way of making machines, and we use READING and WRITING to control and communicate with them.” She held out her hand to Roger. “I would like to READ you now,” she said.

  She took Roger’s hand. He sat passively, gazing at the silent child. His face had been looking more and more haggard with each passing day. Alice wondered how long it would be before he had another seizure, how much longer he might live.

  Finally Iris spoke. “You have a very high level of intelligence for your race, and you are particularly adept at abstract thinking, perhaps less so at focusing on concrete objectives. Your vermiform appendix is subject to infection, and perhaps it has already been removed. The dynamic range of your vision is peaked toward focusing on nearby objects. I presume that is why you suspend artificial lenses before your eyes.”

  Alice smiled. The child sounded like a fortune teller.

  “Your mother had blue eyes,” Iris continued, “but yours are brown. Your father became bald, starting at the crown of his head and progressing. You will begin to do the same in a few years. You have a tendency toward cancer of the colon. You ...” Her eyes widened. “Your life is severely threatened by a series of seizures, and you will die soon. I did not READ that from your DNA, but from some messenger RNA that I came across almost by accident. Were you aware of this, Roger?”

  He nodded. “I took an experimental drug, a neuroprotein that increases intelligence. The seizures are an irreversible side effect.”

  She looked closely at him. “I believe I should correct that condition immediately. Do you agree?”

  Roger swallowed hard, then managed to say “Yes!”

  Iris placed her index finger in his mouth and seemed to be concentrating and breathing hard. “There, it is done,” she said. “You will have no more seizures.”

  Alice felt a wave of relief. Her concern about Roger’s condition had been like a weight, dragging down her usually optimistic outlook.

  “I corrected the neuro-stability problem,” Iris said, “and also increased the natural supply of the neuroprotein you wanted. Your neural processes will henceforth function at the level you wanted, but without the side effect. Is it usual for your race to accept such risks for such a purpose?”

  “Roger is rather special and unusual in that regard,” said George. “How were you able to do that?”

  “It is the product of what you would call genetic engineering,” said Iris. “My body, this body, had special chemical receptors and manipulators in the hands that can isolate and read DNA and RNA very rapidly. My brain has a special pattern recognition section devoted to decoding the information received and reconstructing what the implications of that coding are for the organism from which it comes. You might call it on-line genetic modeling. That is what we call READING. It feels quite natural to me. It’s really no more difficult than the pattern recognition done by your vision centers. It is only pattern recognition applied in a different domain.”

  “And WRITING?” asked Alice.

  “It’s the reverse process. If you understand how an organism works, you can see how to change it for the better or to accomplish some particular purpose. The manipulators in my hands can produce DNA, RNA, or retroviruses that can alter the genetics of an individual or produce a new organism or nanomachine with the desired characteristics. It’s a little harder that READING and takes more training and concentration, but it works the same way.

  “I should add that there is a strong compulsion that comes inextricably with these abilities. When you use these skills, you will always feel compelled to do good for the target organism involved, never harm. That’s quite inconvenient on some occasions, but it is for the best.” She smiled.

  “A wired-in Hippocratic Oath,” said Roger, who now looked more relaxed.

  “And you’re going to teach us to do these things?” asked George. “Why?”

  “There are two reasons,” said Iris. “First, READING and WRITING are gifts of contact that we received from the Baltrons and that we are obligated to pass on. When your race has received these gifts, you will incur the same obligation.”

  “We are the first race in our universe, our Bubble, that you have contacted?” asked George. “That seems strange. Surely there are other intelligent species here, and many of them must be doing something equivalent to high energy physics.”

  “There are no others that we have detected,” said Iris. “Intelligent life is extremely rare. We know of no other intelligent species within our own Bubble, for example, and our exploration probes have been investigating other star systems for many dozen gross of orbits, thousands of your years.”

  “How can that be?” Roger asked. “Surely life is not so rare.”

  “Primitive life is common, but intelligence is rare,” said Iris. “The process you call evolution usually moves forward only slowly and spasmodically. Even the achievement of multi-cellular life takes a long time. Species evolve to fill the available ecological niches and then stabilize. It requires a dramatic climate change or some disaster to disrupt that stability and restart the evolutionary process. Your scientists have described this pattern as ‘punctuated equilibrium’.”

  “Disasters drive evolution?” Roger asked.

  “In part,” said Iris. “Your solar system contains a giant planet, Jupiter, and a belt of asteroids in the next inner orbit where a planet might have formed. In that asteroid belt are certain empty zones where the orbits become completely chaotic from the influence of Jupiter.”

  “Ah yes, the Kirkwood zones,” said Roger. “Asteroids there would have orbit periods that are integer ratios to the orbit period of Jupiter like 3:1 or 5:2.”

  “This structure in your solar system is like a weapon that about every 20 million years sends a large asteroid to collide with your planet. This produces a sequence of disasters that have driven forward the evolution of life on your planet. The solar system of our world has much the same arrangement.”

  “Like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago,” said Alice.

  “But surely,” said George, “there must be other star systems where similar structures exist, and where the evolutionary process is driven even faster.”

  “Yes,” said Iris, “but there is an optimum rate. If the disasters, the ‘punctuations’, occur too often, there is not enough time for recovery from the previous disaster. If they occur too slowly, the organisms are too firmly embedded in their ecological niches and cannot readily adapt to the changed conditions. In your world and ours the rate of disasters from asteroid collisions is near the optimum, and intelligence has evolved. In most star systems in most universes the conditions are wrong, and this does not happen.”

  Alice had been trying to take notes, and she was becoming impatient. “I’m getting confused,” she interrupted. “Let me try to summarize what you’ve said so far. Your race uses wormholes to contact other intelligent species, which are rare. You had two reasons for coming to our world to teach us to READ and WRITE the genetic code. First, you are obligated to pass on this skill. I’ve been waiting to hear the second reason, but you haven’t mentioned it yet. Or did I miss it?”

  “No, I hadn’t come to it yet,” said Iris. “I must teach you READING and WRITING so that your species can defend itself. The ultra-high energy collisions that you have recently been producing are generating signals that echo throughout the Cosmos. They attracted our attention and resulted in our contact, but they are also likely to attract the attention of a less benevolent species, the Hive. The Hive is the only example of which we are aware of a social insect species, similar to your ants, bees, and termites, that has achieved intelligence. Their intelligence is collective, each drone, worker, soldier, and queen united t
hrough electromagnetic links as components of an overall Hive Mind.

  “Your world is presently in great danger from this species. With your Superconducting Super Collider in operation, it is only a matter of time until you attract the notice of the Hive. You have at most a few years, perhaps much less time to prepare yourselves. They may already have noticed your signals. Even now they may be preparing their response.”

  “I don’t understand,” said George. “You’re suggesting this Hive might attack the Earth? This sound like something out of H. G. Wells.”

  “The Hive was unknown to us until the last four gross of orbits, excuse me, until about six hundred years ago. Their form of contact is to establish a Bridge, then use coherent light beamed through the Bridge to manipulate atoms and construct nanomachines in the contacted universe. The Hive nanomachines then reprocess any matter they find into Hive components: workers, soldiers, and flyers. After a short while, perhaps three of your days, when they have reached the critical number of components they produce a Hive queen. At that point the new Hive Mind becomes conscious.

  “Their species has in the past few centuries been attempting to reproduce and spread in this way by colonizing other universes. They have had some successes. They attempted their trick with our world, but one Individual READ the initial contact nanomachines and ‘improved’ them so that they became benevolent. He saved our species.

  “We destroyed their Bridge-making apparatus, but they built more. We have formed an alliance of intelligent species that has resolved to stop the spread of the Hive. We want to prevent it from infesting your world. Some of your race, at least, must learn to READ and WRITE as soon as possible. Then, if and when the Hive arrives, you will be able to deal with them.”