Lord of All Things

by Andreas Eschbach

  As time went by, Charlotte began to feel cold. The bridge was well heated, but anyone would start to shiver when all there was to do was sit and stare out the window at the unending, gray, storm-tossed monotony of the Arctic day. The snow had stopped, but the wind picked up, lashing the icy waves higher. But there was nothing else to do. Time passed, and the waiting frayed her nerves. The ships cruised up and down in front of the island, and the cameras filmed everything that was going on through their powerful telephoto lenses—meaning nothing at all, ever since Hiroshi had walked through that gate. Everything was being filmed; anyone who watched the footage later would be unspeakably bored.

  The tension was palpable as they waited. The officers on the bridge spoke in hushed tones, sipping coffee, turning dials, tapping away at keyboards, bent over maps, but they were all waiting for something to happen. They were like cats lying in wait, ready to spring and pounce upon any movement from the hole. But what movement might there be? Did anybody seriously expect aliens to come out of the gate? Perhaps with Hiroshi in tow? Would they be hostile, dragging him along as a prisoner, or friendly now that all the initial misunderstandings had been cleared up? “Take us to your president,” they would say, and then a whole new set of misunderstandings and diplomatic standoffs would ensue.

  Charlotte passed her hand through her hair for the hundredth time. She was only doing it so that she had something to do, so that she wouldn’t just sit at the abandoned conference table turning slowly to stone. She watched the American admiral, with his gold-encrusted cap and the colorful tags on his dress jacket; he was at the other end of the bridge, speaking into a chunky cell phone. His staff officers were standing all around him, trying to shield him from view; clearly, the Russians weren’t supposed to listen in on whatever he was telling the president.

  No, Charlotte told herself, the aliens were gone. They’d flown off. They were on their way out of the solar system. If indeed there had ever been any alien life-forms at all. Perhaps it had only ever been a robot mission, nano-robots with some unknown task to perform. And given how long ago their masters must have sent them, they may well have died out entirely in the meantime.

  Hiroshi had sent two updates from inside the installation. He was walking through endless halls, he told them, that looked like huge industrial facilities. There was nobody in sight, not a sign of life anywhere. Nothing was moving. Had the photos he had been sending them arrived, he asked? That had caused something of a stir, since in fact not a single photo had reached them. Charlotte had learned from a Russian officer that Hiroshi’s radio was a special military model with boosted transmission and an encrypted channel. And the built-in camera was supposed to be able to send every picture instantaneously at the push of a button. But the last call had come over a very bad connection, full of gaps and distortion. Most importantly, it had been a worryingly long time ago.

  Unexpectedly, the others arrived. Unable to endure the uncertainty down in the sick bay, they had pleaded until they were finally allowed to go up to the bridge. Charlotte tried to explain to them who Hiroshi was and what he had said about the nano-robots on the island, but she couldn’t really fill in the important details and was met with impatient glances. Then she pricked up her ears as she overheard a scrap of talk. The Russians were doubtful they could really triumph. What if Hiroshi didn’t report in again soon? What if he didn’t come back at all? He could be dead by now, gone without a trace, taken apart for his constituent elements like the soldiers of the landing party. Nobody even thought of Leon van Hoorn anymore. After all, there was no video footage of his death. These days anything that wasn’t captured on video might just as well not have happened.

  “I don’t like it,” Admiral Ulyakov growled ever more often. As he grumbled away, he glared at his officers with a look that made them flinch as though they felt personally responsible for the situation.

  “What to do?” she heard from the American group. “How long can we wait?”

  It wasn’t hard to read their thoughts: even a civilian must have damn well realized they were jumpy as a cat on a hot tin roof back here. If he couldn’t get a signal inside the installation, then the fool should retrace his steps to make a report, give them some sign of life, or at the very least let them know how long it might be until he could next make radio contact. If he kept quiet like this, then it could only mean he had been taken prisoner, or that he was dead—or he was such a dumb cluck he deserved everything that happened to him, and more, if they were forced to act. It was just that nobody knew what they could do. Otherwise, they were hardly likely to have waited this long. And now they were no further than they had been before.

  “Admiral!” one of the sailors watching at the screen suddenly called out.

  Ulyakov jutted his jaw forward. “Speak!”

  “K-104 reports that the…uh, the pipelines on the seabed are changing.” He listened to the voice over his headphones. “They seem to be going away.”

  “As I recall, all of our submarines are equipped with cameras,” the admiral growled. “Is K-104 perhaps different?”

  “One moment—I’m getting a visual.” He pressed a button, and an underwater shot appeared on several of the screens. It showed one of the long metal structures running out from the island, gleaming in the circle of a floodlight—and dwindling away.

  Ulyakov stood in front of a screen, leaning forward as he watched what was going on, his hands folded behind his back, quite motionless. “Good,” he said finally. “That’s the first good news since I got here.”

  “He did it.” Whitecomb smacked his fist into the palm of his hand. “The goddamned son of a bitch got those things under control.”

  Another observer raised his head. “Movement on the island itself. Something happening on the fortress walls.”

  There was a collective gasp. Even the ship seemed to give a start, though it was only the impact of a particularly heavy wave breaking across it at that moment.

  “Where are the cameras?” barked Ulyakov, the only one who hadn’t grabbed onto a handhold.

  The pictures on the screens changed as the cameras zoomed closer in on those areas where movement was visible. The battlements up on the wall that had been coldly gleaming edges of sharp metal now became visibly softer and rounder and seemed to be surrounded by mist. The huge ribs of steel that girded the mountain fortress, which before had shone like newly polished steel, seemed to flow and collapse in upon themselves…and then simply blew away.

  “Fuck!” Rear Admiral Whitecomb yelled. “The thing’s dissolving!”

  Which was exactly what it was doing. The fortifications fell to dust and blew away in the wind. And the whole process was happening faster and faster. Soon they could see the bare rocks once more. The outline of the gate was hardly recognizable as such. The two huge quays running out into the sea, which the nanites had created from the two warships and their crew, dissolved into the water and colored it red as blood.

  Ulyakov ordered a helicopter into the air and told it to circle the island and shoot footage from above. It all showed the same picture: dust on the wind where mighty walls had stood, pale gray or reddish-pink plumes of dust blowing away in the storm. The launch pit that had run miles down into the earth had been replaced by a deep, dark hole in the rock, collapsed into rubble. The downward wind from the rotor left marks up on the plateau as though an enormous broom were sweeping through sawdust. The whole process lasted less than half an hour. Afterward, all that had seemed so invincibly strong had vanished, and Saradkov looked like the surface of Mars.

  “There’s somebody there!”

  One of the cameras pointed to the spot where the gate had stood and where now there was only a gaping, dark hole in the mountainside like the toothless mouth of an aged giant. A human figure could be seen, staggering and stumbling, with only shapeless rags on his body. It was Hiroshi. In his hand he held part of a keyboard, evidently all that was left
of his computer. As the camera zoomed in closer, they could see he was shivering with cold. The clothes he had left on his body were barely enough to keep him clad and were certainly not enough to protect him from the Arctic cold. Hiroshi staggered into the open air—just in time, for the rock face collapsed behind him as the corridors and galleries that the nanites had burrowed into the cliffs fell in upon themselves.

  He hadn’t expected anything like that. He would have liked to stop and catch his breath, but it was still dangerous by the rock face and the caves. He had to go onward, into the ice-cold wind and the storm. He looked down at his hands. His fingers were frozen blue, clenched unmoving around the miserable remnants of the laptop. At last, he stood still and waved in the direction of the ships. Surely they had to be watching?

  There. Behind him. A helicopter appeared over the mountain ridge and came down to land. Hiroshi stumbled toward it. A man jumped out as the machine touched down and came running toward him, then put an arm around him. Then, at last, a door that shut out the wind. A blanket to wrap around him. He couldn’t stop shivering, but now it was only a matter of time.

  Rear Admiral Denis J. Whitecomb was waiting for him on the helicopter landing deck, surrounded by his staff officers. Some of them, who looked like experienced bruisers, were staring at him with a cool, determined look in their eyes.

  “Welcome back, Mr. Kato,” said the rear admiral, standing there in his splendid US Navy uniform. “I am afraid there are a great many things you still have to explain to us.”

  ISLAND IN THE STARS

  1

  JOINT INVESTIGATION COMMITTEE

  SARADKOV ISLAND EVENT

  CHAIR: SENATOR RICHARD COFFEY (US)

  DEPUTY CHAIR: MINISTER ANATOLY MIKHAILOV (RUSSIA)

  DOCUMENT STATUS: CONFIDENTIAL

  EXTRACT FROM THE WITNESS TESTIMONY OF MORLEY MANN (US)

  Chair: Can you tell us in one or two sentences what you believe happened on Saradkov?

  Witness: An extraterrestrial probe had been frozen in the ice sheet on the island for thousands of years. It was freed when climate change caused some of the ice to melt, and then it became active.

  Chair: And did you do anything to influence subsequent events—that is, after the probe became active—in any way?

  Witness: No.

  JOINT INVESTIGATION COMMITTEE

  SARADKOV ISLAND EVENT

  CHAIR: SENATOR RICHARD COFFEY (US)

  DEPUTY CHAIR: MINISTER ANATOLY MIKHAILOV (RUSSIA)

  DOCUMENT STATUS: CONFIDENTIAL

  EXTRACT FROM THE WITNESS TESTIMONY OF CHARLOTTE MALROUX (FRANCE)

  Chair: What is your relationship to Mr. Kato?

  Witness: We’re friends. We’ve known one another since we were ten years old. That was when we first met, and then later we met up occasionally after that.

  (…)

  Deputy chair: What were your motives for joining the expedition to Saradkov? You’re a paleoanthropologist. What’s a paleoanthropologist doing on an Arctic island?

  Witness: I was there as interpreter. None of the others speak any Russian.

  (…)

  Chair: When it came to how we could stop the unsettling events on Saradkov Island, what gave you the idea of calling on Mr. Kato of all people?

  Witness: I knew what he was working on, and I had the feeling he was more likely than anyone else to know what we could do against this probe.

  Deputy chair: I’d like to have a little more detail here. What was he working on? As far as I understand it, his work had nothing to do with contacting a possible alien intelligence, did it?

  Witness: No, he was working on robots.

  Deputy chair: I’m having trouble seeing the connection.

  Witness: These were special robots. Large numbers of very small robots designed to work together in various configurations. About this big.

  (The witness indicates the size of the palm of her hand.)

  About six years ago Mr. Kato gave me a demonstration of these robots in action. It was most impressive, even if in the end they didn’t actually work as he had intended. When I visited Mr. Kato shortly before my departure to Saradkov, he showed me computer simulations of even smaller robots that he’d been working on in the meantime. Robots that are designed to be built from single atoms.

  Chair: Did he show you any actual examples of such robots?

  Witness: No. As I have said, he only showed me computer simulations. He told me there were fundamental technological barriers to actually building them.

  Chair: What was the nature of these technological barriers?

  Witness: As far as I understand, it’s not actually possible to arrange the atoms in the way we would need to.

  (…)

  Deputy chair: Inasmuch as I understand these things, nanotech constructs are by definition so small that they cannot be seen by the naked eye. There you were on a remote Arctic island, beset by all kinds of weird phenomena—what in the world gave you the idea that you were dealing with nano-robots?

  Witness: The way they moved.

  (Witness gives a long pause. She is emotionally distraught.)

  The blades that impaled Leon…Mr. van Hoorn…I saw a pattern on them, a kind of movement, a very characteristic way of moving, flowing, like a wave…

  (Pause.)

  I don’t know now. But whatever it was, it made me think of Hiroshi’s…of Mr. Kato’s robotics experiment when I saw them moving like that. For a moment I even thought his robots might have achieved autonomy and somehow reached the island. I wasn’t thinking of nanites. Mr. Whitecomb was the first one to mention that.

  Chair: Rear Admiral Whitecomb.

  Witness: Yes. Some experts back in Washington had gotten the idea.

  Chair: Can you describe more closely the movement on the blade?

  Witness: It was a kind of moving shimmer, flowing along the blade. That’s how it looked at least. And when I saw Hiroshi’s robots moving six years ago, that’s exactly what they looked like. A shimmering, like something flowing along. Like a pail full of little silver balls being tipped out, but they weren’t balls, more like disks. And they didn’t roll; they moved one another along or crept…

  (Pause.)

  You have to have seen it for yourself. Once you’ve seen it, you recognize it. Then the pattern on the blade…

  (Pause.)

  It was rather like when you dabble your hand in a basin full of water and see ripples. Then next time you see the ocean, you know the waves are basically the same thing. Water, movement. The same way, the shimmer on the blade made me think of Hiroshi’s robots.

  (…)

  Deputy chair: I must return to my question. What gave you the idea to tell the admirals about Mr. Kato?

  Witness: The thought just struck me. That’s all. If you like, I took a wild guess. To be honest, I was even exaggerating a bit when I told them about Mr. Kato on the boat. I just didn’t want anybody using atom bombs.

  Charlotte could have wept with relief when she got to Moscow and saw her mother waiting at the airport. Somehow that meant it was really over. She hugged her mother, so happy to see her that she had to fight back the tears. At that moment she would have gladly married any cousin her mother put in front of her—though luckily her mother hadn’t thought of that.

  “You and your mad adventures,” was all she said.

  “Yes,” Charlotte confessed. “That was the maddest of them all.”

  “I hope you learned something.”

  “I did. I really did.”

  Charlotte felt bad about leaving the others in the lurch. There had been a long tug-of-war between the superpowers over the inquiry: the American government had wanted to hold it in Washington, the Russians in St. Petersburg. At last, they had agreed on Iceland, neutral territory. When the witnesses were called to make their statemen
ts in Reykjavík, in a hotel that had been sealed off from the world at enormous expense, the media had gotten wind of it and started rumors about negotiations for a new disarmament treaty.

  Though public interest had dropped off, the inquiry still rumbled on. In the end, giving one statement after another and then one more, with no end in sight, had gotten to be too much for Charlotte. She had shamelessly invoked her status as a diplomat’s daughter to make her escape. She had signed everything they put in front of her before she left—she agreed to keep everything she had seen secret, not to seek payment for damages or any other reparations, and to a dozen other conditions—and then she had gotten on the next plane out.

  So here she was. Home—or not. In fact, it took her only a few days to realize it was dreadful. Her mother seemed cooler and more distant than ever—prickly, even—only concerned with etiquette and the look of things, and quite determined to show no feelings at all. Her father took flight in noncommittal pleasantries and supposedly vital engagements. When he was home at all, he exuded shallow good cheer and batted away every attempt at serious conversation. All he had to say about Charlotte’s experience in the Arctic was that the speaker of the Russian parliament had inquired after her health. With every passing day, she sank deeper into lethargy. More than ever before she understood why she had always felt the urge to escape, even as a little girl. But where should she go? She had lost all hope she would be able to find elsewhere what she had spent so long looking for.

  She finally made the effort to call Brenda’s mother, who assured her all was well with her apartment in Boston and gave her Brenda’s new telephone number in Buenos Aires. She also told her the move to Argentina had gone well and that even Jason really liked it.

  Brenda squealed with joy when she picked up the phone. “We love it,” she hollered when Charlotte asked how they liked their new life. “We have this huge house with palm trees all up the driveway and a crazy overgrown garden.…The faculty at the university are just wonderful.…Jason spends his whole day moping around, of course, morning till night. I have no idea whether he understands anything at school. I caved in the end and bought him one of those computers they play on, a gamestation or whatever they’re called, but I’m insisting he only ever gets the games in Spanish. Maybe that will help.”