by Ian McDonald
The press conference opened. Harrison Muthika spoke first.
‘I would like to thank you all for coming this evening. I regret the short notice, but once again, the aliens have taken us by surprise. As you are no doubt aware, at seventeen-oh-eight local time the emergent marine object known as Foa Mulaku emitted a phenomenally powerful radio signal.’
There were wry chuckles and someone heckled, ‘Speak up, we can’t hear you!’
Harrison Muthika smiled. ‘This signal spanned the electromagnetic spectrum between the centimetre and metre bands and lasted for two hours, three minutes and twenty seconds. The power of the signal has been estimated at one hundred and fifty megawatts.’
Murmurs. ‘How was the power generated?’ a voice with a French accent shouted. Harrison Muthika held up his hand.
‘Please. There will be an opportunity for questions at the end. This enormous burst of radio energy swamped broadcasting in the East African, Indian Ocean and Southeast Asian areas: all communications in those frequencies were silenced. The disruption to cellular networks alone has cost at least twelve billion dollars in disrupted business, not to mention feedback damage to data storage systems. Television and navigation systems went down, contact was lost with several thousand ship and aircraft, as well as the failure of air-traffic control throughout the region. It is only by the grace of God that a major air disaster was averted, though we do not yet have a complete picture: outlying sections of the East Pacific net are only now coming back on line.
‘You may be interested to know that the anonymous NASA wit behind the names “BDO” and “Tolkien” has christened this event “The Scream”.’
‘It’s Carl Sagan, isn’t it?’ an American-accented voice shouted.
‘I can’t confirm that, and I must once again ask you to keep your questions for the end. The transmission has been analysed and has been shown to consist of one hundred and eighty-seven signals, each carrying a data-transfer code at a rate of one and a quarter megabytes per second.’
Gaby did sums on her PDU. The average whodunit could fit on a floppy disc, about one and a quarter megabytes. One hundred and eighty whodunits per second, times one hundred and twenty-three minutes times sixty seconds, that’s seven three eight oh seconds equals one million three hundred and eight thousand and sixty plus an extra five hundred and sixty-one for those last three seconds and that’s an entire library of Murders in the Ballroom and Bodies in the Library.
‘We were only able to capture the last one hour and five minutes of the transmission,’ Harrison Muthika continued. ‘Neural network analysis is still coming through - the code is unlike anything we have yet encountered - but we think we have enough of a recognizable pattern to be able to extrapolate.’ A liquid crystal overhead projector threw an image on to the dance floor video screen. The swoop through the arrayed molecules would not have looked out of place in the psychotropic dance videos that usually played there. Gaby recognized the intertwined spiral staircases at once. Dance to your own DNA. ‘This is not, of course, what would have been received, it’s an approximation by our analysts. The transmitted information consisted of a three-dimension matrix of data, expressed in terms of the atomic specifications of its components.’ Molecules coiled behind Harrison Muthika like serpents mating in a baobob, the tree where man was born. ‘The DNA model is only a small part of the transmission. The remainder is fragmentary, but if we are correct, it is of enormous significance. It seems to be a complete map of the human genome.’
Hands shot up. Harrison Muthika sat down and looked to Mariko Uchida. The UNECTAsie woman took the floor.
‘You’ve probably guessed that the target of the transmission was the Hyperion Object, or BDO as we like to call it. Why the genetic code was transmitted to Saturn space is something we’ll probably only find out when the BDO gets here. However, an hour after the end of the Scream, our Miyama orbital telescope took this CCD image of the Hyperion Object.’
It looked like any grainy, blurry charge-coupled device photograph to Gaby. The universe as seen through serial-killer’s night-vision goggles. An ellipse of grey on darker grey, pierced by the burnt-out crucifixes of over-exposed stars.
‘I’ll enhance the image,’ Mariko Uchida said. It was still a light grey shape against a dark background to Gaby, but was there something about the edges? ‘Here are the images the Miyama telescope took over the subsequent five hours.’ The picture parade was like a sequence of pages torn from a badly drawn cartoon flicker book. ‘The object keeps the same face to the sun; we assume that the systems of organization there require energy to operate. I’d call them “life”, except that they’re existing in pretty hard vacuum. Note the curvature of the rim.’ The laser pointer jumped from frame to frame as the AV computer flashed up all the images in array. The edge of the disc was folding upward, like flat clay on a potter’s wheel being drawn into a wide, shallow bowl. ‘The increase in curvature is very slight, less than one per cent, but when you consider the size of the object and that this happened over a period of five hours with the BDO about sixty-five light minutes away, you can begin to imagine the scale of the forces at work here.’
She loves them, Gaby thought, these mighty forces. That smile is not part of the architecture now. She loves being dominated by the powers in the sky. She is getting soft and wet on that platform thinking about forces beyond imagining. Whoever is with her will get it good in bed tonight.
‘The changes must have started the moment the first signal of the Scream was received from Foa Mulaku. We’ve had our own extrapolations done of what the BDO might look like when it arrives in earth space.’ A sequence showed a creakily animated BDO pucker up around its rim into a conic parabola and stretch. The animation ran twice. The first time the BDO stretched into a great cosmic egg. The second time it rolled into a cylinder five hundred kilometres long, one hundred and fifty across its flats. ‘The probabilities for the second, cylindrical form are higher; fifty-eight per cent against thirty-nine per cent for the ovoid. The other percentages are covered by wild speculations from perfect cubes to space-faring Cadillacs to old men with long white beards. The cylinder model rates higher because it is a well-established format for a deep space habitat. Given that the axial rotation will increase as the BDO pulls in on itself, like an ice-skater speeding up her spin by drawing in her arms, we estimate that the internal rotational gravity will maximize to point six of a gee, which seems consistent with an internal planet-like environment. This may just be human chauvinism however; the Chaga-makers have yet to show any anthropomorphic tendencies; there is no reason why they should need to create a biosphere inside the BDO. However, the content of the Foa Mulaku transmission is significant in this context.’
‘You think the BDO is being converted into a self-contained Earth-like environment as a kind of alien embassy?’ Gaby interrupted. She heard murmuring. She heard whispers and sniggers.
‘I do,’ the Japanese woman said. ‘I believe the Hyperion Object as we see it is a universal form that has been employed many times before by the Chaga-makers in their migrations and contacts with extra-terrestrial environments. There is no evidence that humanity is a particular end-point on their journey: they may well have left the mechanisms that turned Iapetus black and produced both the biological packages and the BDO many thousand or even millions of years ago and moved on to other star systems. It is quite possible that the system was programmed to wait until intelligence was highly developed enough to stimulate it, which we have done with our probes to the outer planets.’
Peter Werther had said it knows us of old, Gaby thought. Perhaps that is why it transmitted the DNA code and the map of the human genome; to let whatever is out there know that there is still life on Planet Three, and how much the smart apes have changed since last we met.
R.M. Srivapanda was on his feet now. He waved down the raised hands with his one good hand.
‘Please, ladies and gentlemen, questions later. There is more.’ He waited for quiet. ‘For t
he one hundred and nine hours prior to emergence, the Maldives Ridge Object has been emitting a series of high volume, long-time base, low-amplitude sounds. We have been recording these on hydrophones; phase-shifted and compressed, this is what they sound like.’
The night club sound system was very good. It played the recording without any hiss or distortion or growl of overload. It must be great to dance to, Gaby thought. The sound started as a high-pitched musical twittering that plummeted in a deafening howl of bass notes that made Gaby think of Portuguese fado singers and Islamic muezzins. The song concluded on a rising note that ascended into the ultrasonic through frequencies that made buzzing ears ache. Gaby remembered the old National Geographic floppy disc of whale song she had played non-stop on her bedroom sound system in her teenage Green phase. Dad had finally threatened to buy dolphin-unfriendly tuna unless she stopped. Whale song. It will talk to them but not to us.
‘It has been known for some time that whales use cold currents as waveguides along which song-cycles can be directed over several thousand miles. The Maldive Ridge Object seems to be using the mid-ocean drift to the same effect. Tracking of tagged blue whales in the Indian ocean basin has revealed a strange pattern.’ He nodded to the technician behind the mixing desk. A map of the ocean basin appeared on the screen, marked with red arrows with tails of varying lengths. The arrowheads were slowly converging on the blue star of Foa Mulaku. ‘The map only shows the Indian Ocean population, but we have evidence of migrations among Balaenoptera musculus pods in the south Atlantic and Pacific. Fragments of Foa Mulaku sound have been appearing in recordings of blue whale songs as far as Hawaii: the pods are communicating it to each other along the cold current channels. At current estimates, eighty per cent of the world blue whale population will have moved into the Carlsberg Ridge/Mid-Indian Basin region within three months, and the object is still calling.’
‘Yes, but what is it saying?’ Paul Mulrooney called out. ‘And why is it saying it to them and not to us?’
R.M. Srivapanda shook his head and pursed his lips.
‘At least Greenpeace will have something to do,’ Paul Mulrooney said. ‘All those whale burgers to protect.’ The comment did not get as big a laugh as planned.
‘Very well. That is all we have to say.’ R.M. Srivapanda looked at his colleagues. They nodded. ‘So, are there any questions?’
Three hundred voices clamoured at once.
~ * ~
32
She saw the light of the fire and walked toward it along the beach. Crabs scuttled around her feet, always that sufficient second quick enough to avoid destruction. The moon and tide were high. The ocean ran far up the soft coral sand. She climbed over the trunks of slumped palms.
There were four of them sitting around the fire on tube steel and canvas beach chairs up close to the tree line. Marshmallows toasted on sticks over the driftwood embers. One was a dripping blob of blazing goo. Cool-boxes held the full bottles; the empties lay careened in the soft sand. Three of the people wore white T-shirts with Foa Mulaku Sun’n’ Surf Club printed on the front. The fourth had a picture of a masturbating nun.
‘Gaby!’ Shepard surged to his feet. He looked a little drunk. ‘Press conference over?’
‘Reception said you would be down here,’ she said coolly. ‘I was expecting to see you back there.’ She would be angry with him later when there were no witnesses- She rubbed the palm of her hand against his chin stubble. Purr.
‘Come. Sit. Have a beer. Sorry we’re out of chairs.’ He introduced the white T-shirts: Depak Ray, Director of UNECTAsie’s Kavieng base on New Ireland; Mariella Costas from UNECTAmerique headquarters in Quito; Dave Mortensen from UCLA Riverside’s nanotechnology unit. ‘We’re blue-skying. What if-ing. Probing the outer limits. Entering the twilight zone. Opening the X-files.’
‘So, what have you found out in the Twilight Zone?’ Gaby asked.
‘That maybe the stars are not our destination,’ Depak Ray said. ‘Human intelligence evolved as a response to a set of environmental challenges which are specific to the environmental niche we inhabit. Those whales out there swimming toward Foa Mulaku are a different solution to a different set of environmental problems. The Chaga-makers are an interstellar civilization because wherever they come from, their niche demanded that they develop space-faring. We, with our ape’s hands and ape’s eyes and our ape’s brains and our ape’s obsessions with individuality and sex, are not evolved to make that jump. If the Chaga-makers were ever individual intelligences like us, they are not now; if we ever match their achievements, neither will we be.’
‘The Chaga-makers are the Chagas?’ Dave Mortensen said.
‘Our research at Kavieng seems to support that,’ Depak Ray said. ‘For the Eastern Pacific entities - we are trying to have the word “symb” adopted as the official term, “Chaga” is too specific to Africa - we have found that all the many thousands of seemingly different species are genetically linked to each other. They are all - to borrow a term from physics - isotopes of each other. The symbs are essentially one species with many dependant variants.’
‘Isogenes?’ Dave Mortensen suggested. ‘Like dogs: cocker spaniels, greyhounds, beagles, borzois.’
‘That closely related, yes, but the variations are very much more greatly differentiated.’
‘A clade,’ Mariella Costas said. ‘Genetically related to a common ancestor.’
‘More subtle than that,’ Depak said. ‘More like a watermark in paper than a family tree.’
The beer and the tiredness were beginning to work on Gaby now. The sand looked soft enough to curl up on and throw over herself like a sheet.
‘I can’t go for this all-nurturing life-mother goddess thing,’ Dave Mortensen said. ‘These people are engineers. They can dismantle the fundamental units of the universe and build anything they damn well like out of them. The Chagas - symbs, whatever - are made things. Technology. Machines.’
‘I have a problem with such a mechanistic view of the universe,’ Mariella Costas said. Gaby could not take her eyes off her moustache. ‘In my country we believe in community; that in our coming together we become stronger than our sum as individuals. The symbs are like families, communities, clans, tribes if you will. Corporations, perhaps: they have all come together to a common purpose that could not be achieved individually, and, in a sense, they all wear the company uniform: in their genes.’
‘But if, as the name symb implies, the thing is symbiotic, then it can’t be totally self-sufficient,’ Dave Mortensen was saying now. ‘Perhaps it needs humanity to be able to move on from this star system.’
‘The Big Dumb Object seems an effective enough way to propagate the Chaga through the galaxy,’ Mariella Costas replied.
‘Perhaps there are quicker, more efficient ways,’ the American said. ‘Worm-holes, tachyons, all that spooky stuff at the edges of quantum theory.’
‘You Americans, you must always have your dreams of the frontier,’ Depak said. ‘The place beyond that draws you on. “The Stars Our Destination”: the nobility, no, the superiority, of humanity over all possible species, and of homo americanus over all other humans.’
This is what it is all about, Gaby thought. UNECTAfrique/Asie/ Amerique. It is intellectual colonialism. The white boys telling the rest of the world what to think and how to think it. All the poor and the dirty and the over-crowded and the funny-coloured. Shovel-wielding Paddies included.
‘The Chaga-makers don’t need human Big Science,’ Shepard said. ‘They’ve got plenty of their own. Do you know how they made Hyperion disappear? A quantum black hole. So JPL reckon, based or gravitational profiles just before and after the blast. Something with the mass, say, of this island, compressed into a singularity smaller than an atomic nucleus. Out in space it’s innocuous enough, maybe twinkling a bit in the high gammas as it sucks in the odd stray hydrogen molecule. Feed it with ice satellite, and in point seven five of a second it blows in a blast of very hard Hawking radiation and super-h
eated accretion disc plasma. Ninety per cent conversion of mass to energy. Makes comet Shoemaker-Levy’s megatonnage look like indoor fireworks.’
Gaby thought of Mariko Uchida of UNECTAsie’s Space Sciences Division; how excited she had got thinking about the BDO. Slam-dunking micro black holes was more than soft and hot and wet. It was hog-tied and gagged and crocodile clips on the nipples: total submission to the powers in the sky.
They were debating now about what humanity could hope to offer entities who manipulated the fundamental units of reality. All we can offer the Chaga-makers is what it is to be human. But that is enough. And I think that is what the Chaga-makers have come for.
She flicked off her shoes and went down to the sea. She needed to connect with the reality of water. She walked a little into the tide line, feeling the run and suck of sand under her soles. The surf on the reef was a tremor in the water. Are there sharks out there, under the moon? Gaby thought, come in with the high tide through the gaps in the reef, casting their moon-shadows over the soft marl floor of the lagoon? Do they sense me, am I a tickle of electricity along their lateral lines? There had been little sharks in the waters around the Watchhouse, and once she had seen from the Weather Room the silhouette of a great basker off the rocks around the harbour entrance. If they ever stop moving, they die. They need a constant passage of water over their gills or they drown. A drowned fish. Oksana’s totemic creature was the wolf. I should have a shark tattooed on the upper slope of my left breast, Gaby thought.