Does that mean that more than one of them is involved? Does it mean that someone is tampering with the records? Perhaps Sentinel Three, or Four…?
He stops.
He has no evidence that anyone, never mind a sentinel, is intentionally committing murders of the Longsleepers. It’s much more likely that there is some mechanical fault in the Longsleep system, and should he really be so sure that he did see a dark figure slip across the edge of his field of vision? Wasn’t he warned about possible visual disturbances during his training? He can’t remember.
It’s so hard to think now, so hard to remember back past all those years of dreaming that seem to cloud his waking thoughts. Maybe he dreamed the whole thing. He feels the back of his head and can find no sign of a cut. It’s not tender, but then, he’s been asleep long enough for a hundred broken bones to heal.
There’s one way to be sure: the ship’s CCTV banks.
Every second they have recorded is stored in the ship’s memory. The cameras are motion activated. They should therefore only be recording at all during the twelve hours of a sentinel’s waking cycle. Anything outside those times would indicate something highly irregular occurring, and sure enough, as he performs a search on the years between all Sentinel Sleeps, he finds nothing.
Instead, he searches for the video from his last waking. He’d been working on pod 89. The beautiful woman, now so much dust recycled back into the ship’s nutrient systems. He seems to be able to remember the time he was there, and sure enough, he is soon watching the playback of himself entering Deck One from the door at Base Two. The cameras are few, just enough to cover all habitable areas of the ship. Due to the concave curve of the deck, any one camera can only cover around a hundred meters or so before the floor of the deck slides up out of view of this inverted “horizon.” So that’s how far apart the cameras are spaced, and he finds that he has a pretty clear view of himself arriving to work at pod 89.
He sees himself reach the pod, and wonders why his hand hovers over the personal effects drawer for a moment. He doesn’t remember that, or why he would have thought of opening it when he would not be able to anyway.
He watches as he opens the maintenance drawer, and then, his heart pounding, he sees his head flick around as he sees something, trips backward, and cracks his head on the drawer.
He can see no sign of any figure, and begins to doubt himself further.
He glances at the doors to the Terminal and checks that the red “lock” lights are still glowing. They are, but somehow it doesn’t make him feel much safer.
What is going on? he thinks. Was it all my imagination?
And why would anyone want to murder the Longsleepers anyway?
* * *
Then, with a spring of insight, he realizes that where the camera is mounted, on the ceiling, gives it a slightly reduced view of what he’d have been able to see crouching by the pod. But maybe the next camera along can help him.
He searches for the file, forward to the right time code, and then is almost immediately sick as he sees exactly what he thought he’d seen.
The picture is small and the quality poor, but even so he sees quite clearly as a figure emerges from behind a Longsleep pod, flits across the deck, and hurries away out of sight, up the curve of Deck One. At no point can he see above the figure’s shoulder height. All he sees are the torso, arms, and legs.
By rights he should be able to pick up the figure on the next camera, so he fumbles hurriedly to load the right file, but when he plays it, there is nothing there. The figure simply disappears between one camera and the next.
Dumbfounded, he sets the portion of video that contains the moving figure to loop, and he watches it, again and again. Round and round the clip plays, like a snake swallowing its own tail.
It’s fuzzy, but he can see two things. Whoever it is, they are male. And from their dark gray suit with orange trim, he is a sentinel. A sentinel who seems to vanish into thin air right before the eyes of the camera.
* * *
Bowman doesn’t believe in supernatural entities; no one does anymore. Not God, nor gods, nor ghosts of any kind, yet from some ultimate depth of the most primitive part of his mind, the ancient concept of one of these things begins to crawl upward.
13
It seems an inescapable conclusion, to Bowman, that whichever sentinel was awake when he shouldn’t have been is also somehow responsible for the deaths of seven Longsleepers. This means that they have somehow managed to program the ship to wake them when it should not be waking them, and furthermore, have also managed to conceal their tracks within the computer system, which should be impossible, since every keystroke is logged. Impossible? Bowman thinks he might just be able to do it, given enough time, but he is rightly arrogant about his computer skills and doubts that the other sentinel he saw slipping out of the video frame could match him.
But it’s a place to start, and he begins to hack into the computer, beyond where he is allowed access, in order to view the personnel files of his nine colleagues.
The files are only loosely encrypted and it doesn’t take Bowman long to find the files of not only the nine sentinels, but also his own, and those of the five hundred passengers on the Song of Destiny; the ones who would populate New Earth.
All of the sentinels are, of course, highly intelligent. All of them match the ideal of a sentinel’s personality profile. Some have more experience as astronauts than others, but they all have a minimum of three years’ flying time. Like Bowman, two or three have experience on the creation of the Toroid ship venture, but only one of these is a man. Bowman doesn’t even pause to read his name, but sees that he has been assigned as Sentinel Eight.
Bowman sits up.
He had hoped it would be Five, as his first intuition had told him. Still nothing is making any sense.
His mind starts to drift again. Without realizing he is doing it, he begins to flick through the profiles of the five hundred. He notes that the Selection Committee was assiduous in its accuracy to the profile of the Earth. At a rough glance it seems that all racial types are represented. There are exactly two hundred and fifty men and two hundred and fifty women, though whether they have been matched as monogamous couples, these simple lists do not indicate. Bowman smiles; even if they were, twenty minutes after landing he suspected they’d be making their own arrangements. He begins to picture inside the minds of the Selection Committee. Watching the files flick through underneath his fingertips, he learns the way they were thinking as they made their choices. Something begins to bother him, but he can’t work out what it is.
Of course, he realizes, they would have chosen only physically healthy specimens of the human form. Perfect, if such a thing were possible. He himself is tall and strong, and he’s never stopped to ask whether he is attractive or not. So the Selection Committee had chosen tall, strong people, from healthy genetic backgrounds, with no physical weaknesses of any kind.
“Playing God,” he whispers, staring at the screen, but he asks himself if he would have done anything differently. Why introduce illness to the new world when it can be eliminated before they’ve even landed? Cancer is now a thing of the past; each of these five hundred comes from families where no cases have ever been reported.
And they’ve chosen two hundred and fifty of each sex, but did they stop to consider those who might feel differently? Were homosexuals chosen? Why wouldn’t they be? Why would they be, when it would be vital to the survival of the new colony that they reproduced like rabbits in the spring? And in that case, wouldn’t it have made more sense to have populated the ship with four hundred and ninety fertile women and ten, soon to be somewhat exhausted, men? Maybe the women would mostly be younger, to give them as long a reproductive life as possible.
Are they teenagers? It has long been recognized, Bowman knows, that the teenage mind played a large role in the explosion of humankind: the young adult mind, with its love of risk-taking and experimentation. Of freedom and exploration
, of pushing the limits. In the aeons when life expectancy reached barely twenty years, when we clung to the fireside and when we drew magic on the walls of dark caves, those were things that set our entire species ahead of the competition, those were the characteristics that gave us an evolutionary edge. Perhaps, in this moment of desperate need, it was foreseen that we should turn to this youthful version of our mind, once more.
He, at last, understands the pitiless task that the Selection Committee faced, and maybe, in the end, they left some of these things to chance. But he doubts that thought as soon as it enters his head.
* * *
Bowman sits in the chair at the console.
He ought to be reprogramming the alert systems, so that he, or one of the other sentinels, will be woken if further deaths occur. But he doesn’t. He sits, flicking through the files of the five hundred, until he finds that he has brought up the file on pod 89.
Her name was Allandra Li. His guess was close; she was twenty-seven at the start of the voyage. She had trained as a dancer in Reykjavík until she moved to California at sixteen and changed the course of her career, enrolling with the Axe Apollo Space Academy. She excelled in her doctoral work as a geneticist, but just when she could have developed a highly paid career, she opted to work with underprivileged children in China, until she applied for selection to the New Earth voyage. She was kind. She was beautiful. She was intelligent. And now, Bowman thinks, she is dead. He flicks to the end of her file, where he finds that there are images of each pod occupant. One of these images shows the face in close-up. Two of these images show the whole body of the occupant, naked, from the front and back. Bowman finds himself desiring a woman who died before he even met her, and then he notices something: a mark between her shoulder blades.
He zooms into the image and sees it is a tattoo. That alone is odd, such primitive body markings would undoubtedly have lost her a few points during her selection assessment.
But he doesn’t care about that. What obsesses him for the next two hours is that the symbol she chose to have placed on her back is the one that has been haunting him for the past thirty-six years of sleep: a spiral.
21
It’s incredible, the things that mankind has learned how to do. The things that we have discovered. For example, it has been determined, by the interference of the planet now known as New Earth on light traveling toward us from stars even farther away, that the composition of this new world is 97.8 percent like that of Earth itself. That the planet is around a billion years younger than our own. That it is rich in plant life. That there is no advanced species there, no technology like our own. We can know all that from one hundred and seventy light years away.
So why is it, thinks Bowman, when we can know all that, that we cannot design an alert system on board a spaceship that works the damn way it’s supposed to?
He tries to get the ship to analyze all the systems involved, and a prompt loads telling him it will take an hour and a half to complete the task.
He checks his clock. When that analysis has run, he will have five hours left before sleep.
What should he do in the meantime?
He thinks about writing his log for the other sentinels, but he hesitates. He wants to tell them he knows that one of them is a killer, but in order to do that, he would have to tell the killer, too. Better to hold his fire. He’s working on the assumption that there is no reason for the deaths to stop, even though it was only one the last time, and six the first.
For some reason, the deaths are not being inflicted upon the sentinels. At least not yet. Maybe that’s just random, or maybe the rogue sentinel has developed some weird grudge against the five hundred, against the mission itself?
That’s a thought worth pursuing, Bowman thinks, but, in the meantime, he reallocates memory to the CCTV cameras on all five decks. The images are fuzzy not because the lenses on the cameras are poor, but because they have been given a limited amount of file space in which to store their images. By reallocating more memory to the next of his sleep phases, any images recorded will be of much better quality.
He wonders about the sentinels, starts trying to plan what voice log he could leave that would help him flush out the culprit. Is there some logical game he can play, perhaps using something that only the murderer would know? Can he set some kind of trap to be tripped over the course of the next ten years, while he sleeps?
It worries him. Better to play dumb. If he arouses the suspicions of the killer, he might never wake up again.
Then he’s thinking about the woman again. Allandra.
He shuts his eyes and all he can see is the spiral between her shoulder blades. He can almost taste her skin, imagines he can lick the ink out of her tattoo.
His eyes snap open, and he begins to cruise through the ship’s copy of the Earthnet. Everything that was recorded publicly across the entire world was archived onto the ship’s network the day before the mission began. It is the encyclopaedia of everything ever known since the Internet was created.
Performing an entirely random image search floods the screens in front of him with beautiful images, and he asks himself yet again why it is that the spiral is so beautiful. What is it about this shape that sets it apart? What does it mean?
This time, he doesn’t even stop to criticize himself for asking why a shape has to have a meaning. Of course it has a meaning, he thinks. Of course it does. Nothing is without meaning. The ancients knew that. People like Jung and Da Vinci.
He stops to browse on images that delight him particularly and he finds a series of sites with many artists he’s never heard of—men from long ago who put spirals in their art—a man called William Blake created a piece called Jacob’s Ladder. An even stranger piece by Hieronymus Bosch: the Ascent of the Blessed. The troubled night sky of Van Gogh. The crisp peculiarity of Escher. The fluid dusk of Rembrandt. He comes closer to his own time: The Spiral Jetty of Smithson, and Final Words by Rijndael.
The images go on and on, and he devours them, just as they devour him. He finds even older images of the spiral, carved triple spirals on some sort of Celtic tomb, spirals on an island he’s never heard of, home to a religious order known as druids. And then older, and even older images—vast spiral lines carved into the deserts of South America, rocks in Australia, caves in France, caves in Borneo. No matter how far back he searches, the spiral is there, waiting patiently to be found, to be understood.
That’s it, he thinks. It needs to be understood. And once again, he doesn’t even notice that he is asking himself to understand an inanimate shape, an abstract design, and it is only when suddenly he feels a terrible pain in his shoulders that he realizes that he’s been hunched over the console for a very long time without moving.
The analysis of the alert systems finished running hours before. A light winks at him from the screen, but he hasn’t seen it. There is a beeping sound, and with shock he sees that there are just five minutes left on his waking cycle.
He throws himself from Terminal Base Four and runs toward his pod, but is forced to slow to a walk as breath abandons him once again. Staggering, he hauls his clothes from his body and tumbles into the pod, fitting his tubes with fumbling hands even as the lid starts to descend on him.
As he goes under this time, he is not worried about being murdered in his sleep. He is worried that he will never understand the spiral, that is what seems most important to him.
If it were not important, he thinks, why would it be there? At every level of existence. He is tumbling through space in a spiral fashion, and even the galaxy itself, which the Song is crossing one tiny corner of over the next hundred or so years, is a spiral. Spiral rotation of galaxies is what causes stars, planets to form. He knows that. And whatever level of life he thinks about, the spiral is there—from the hurricane eye of Jupiter, to the motion of the Earth, to the prints on his fingers, to the DNA inside him, even down to the spiral trails of particles flashing through a bubble chamber.
As lon
g ago as the twentieth century, it was understood that radiation itself propagates through space not in straight lines, but spirally, something that accounted for the discovery that the speed of light is not constant, as once thought. Supporting this notion, it was soon found that light in some way magnetizes matter so that while some barely perceptible particles spiral away from a light source, others, such as chlorophyll, gyrate toward it.
The spiral is there, underneath it all.
Bowman is gone again. Gone into the sleep so close to death, slowing his aging down to almost nothing, so that his body is living in slow motion.
His mind, however, is not, and he knows his dreams will be wilder than ever.
He has always moved forward, always searching, always wanting, without knowing what it is that he wants. Ever since he was a boy, that’s the way he’s been, and finally, he feels he might be getting close to understanding what it is that he wants. Even in Sentinel Sleep, he knows his unconscious mind will keep working on the problem. Maybe, when he wakes, he will have the solution presented to him like a neatly wrapped birthday present.
* * *
As the lid closes, a figure in dark gray appears as if from nowhere, and stands beside the pod, briefly, before moving on to what it has come to do.
34
For many years, the search for habitable planets was accompanied by a related search: the search for exo-intelligence; the signs of intelligent life other than that on Earth. Any species developed enough to have discovered radio waves ought to be making enough noise to be heard, eventually, across the other side of the galaxy. The Drake Equation was used to estimate the number of habitable planets in the galaxy, though the answers varied wildly as no one could ever agree on the value of the many components in the equation. By any measure, however, it seemed reasonable to assume that the galaxy should be full of noise—radio waves broadcast by our cousins scattered around the distant planets—and yet there was nothing. Total silence seemed to reign in the universe, aside from the one small ball of rock we know as our home planet. Somehow, the origin of intelligent life on Earth seemed to be a one-off event; the only such case, and given the vast size of the galaxy, this felt wrong. In fact, it seemed impossible that this was the case, and yet it seemed to be true. The conclusion: we are alone.
The Ghosts of Heaven Page 21