Lord of All Things

by Andreas Eschbach

  Brenda burst into tears and hugged her tight. “Stay,” she sobbed. “Stay as long as you like.”

  Direct flights to the mainland US were totally booked so early in the New Year. Hiroshi had to take a flight via Hawaii, where he had a three-hour layover. Three hours to fill somehow. The first thing he did was scan the area for video cameras and for anybody following him. He found plenty of cameras but nobody on his tail, which could either have been because nobody was following him, or because he had no idea how to spot a tail. Once he had satisfied his paranoia, he went to one of the restaurants in the transit lounge. On the flight out he had eaten laughably little, and a hamburger would be better than nothing.

  There wasn’t much going on at this hour. Two tables down, a woman was sitting with her two children, boys absorbed by their french fries and some kind of crispy nuggets they were dipping into tubs of sauce. The woman looked over at him for just a moment longer than if she were looking at a stranger. Hiroshi had to look twice before he realized he knew her.

  “Dorothy?” he asked, astonished.

  She smiled. It was a strange smile, a mixture of pain and relief. “Hello, Hiroshi. I have to say, I wasn’t quite sure…”

  He couldn’t believe his eyes. “What are you doing here?” He looked at the two boys, the older of whom was six or seven. “Are they yours?”

  Dorothy nodded. “Nathan and Matthew.”

  “You’re married, then.”

  “Yes. Jim had to head back a couple days early or you could have met him, too. He’s an IT specialist, and there are always problems around New Year’s. We were over here visiting my in-laws for Christmas. The kids love it, you know, the beach more than anything.”

  “I can imagine.” Though in fact he couldn’t.

  “And you?” She looked at him.

  And him? “So-so,” Hiroshi said.

  “Did you…” she began, then bit her lip and asked, “Are you happy?”

  Hiroshi looked at her. She was, for sure: happy.

  “No,” he said. “No, I’m not.” Not in the least.

  He stopped, thought back on all that had happened, all that he had done. “Dorothy…I’m sorry about back then. I couldn’t have done anything else. But I could have done it more…tactfully.”

  Dorothy looked at him for a moment, utterly inscrutable, and then told him it was okay, that she didn’t hold anything against him. But she had to get going, she said, to catch their flight to Portland.

  His flight was on to Los Angeles, and he still had an hour to go, plenty of time for reflection. On the flight he did nothing but think about the past. Could this encounter have been chance, if meeting Charlotte in Boston hadn’t been? It would have been intellectually dishonest to buck the question. Hiroshi had a very clear sense that all of this was trying to tell him something, but he had no idea what.

  He would also have liked to know how Dorothy felt today about what had happened back then. About the Sunday morning when he had so brutally broken up with her. Whether she was glad now it had turned out like that, since otherwise she wouldn’t be happily married to Jim, wouldn’t have Nathan and Matthew. Or whether she still regretted it, just a little, in some hidden corner of her heart. He would really have liked to know. But there hadn’t been time for all that, and it really hadn’t been the right setting for such questions. Sure, he had her telephone number now—she lived in Oregon—but somehow he knew he would never ask her. He didn’t want to shatter his illusion that Jim was just second best. Besides, he had no desire to meet the guy. At this moment, as he looked back over his life, over all that had happened, everything seemed self-evident, every event, every decision he had taken seemed inevitable, precisely plotted. Not that this helped him figure anything out. When he landed in Los Angeles, he was no closer to understanding than he had been when he boarded.

  He was so lost in thought as he disembarked that he only noticed the men lying in wait for him when it was almost too late.

  Bud the Brain, as he liked to be known, raised his walkie-talkie to his lips. “Bingo. He’s in line at passport control.”

  There was no doubt that was the man they were after. Sure, it wasn’t exactly easy telling one Japanese from another, but he had studied the photos obsessively; he would have known the guy even in a false beard and sunglasses.

  It was pretty clever how Coldwell had gotten wind of it. Not just the way he used his contacts with Homeland Security to get through to the office that collected all the passenger data for arrivals to America—no, there was the whole business with Japanese names, too, and the different ways they could be written. You had to think sideways to come up with that. That was the kind of thing that showed Coldwell had spent quite a while in Asia. He knew all the tricks.

  This was going to be so easy it would almost be boring.

  He raised the walkie-talkie again. It broadcast on an encrypted channel and was, needless to say, completely illegal. “Bud to all. We’ll grab him when he comes out of customs. Blue Group waits in the walkway on the right; Yellow Group waits on the left. And remember: easy does it, quiet as you can.”

  There was no need even to say it, since they’d gone over all the moves on the way over. But a couple of his boys were more brawn than brain, so it did no harm to remind them of all the details.

  Kato was at the desk, passing his passport and green card to the officer, who checked them both, nodded, handed them back, and waved him through.

  “He’s coming,” Bud the Brain announced.

  But Kato must have noticed something. Whatever it was, he went neither left nor right but instead ducked lightning-fast under a NO ENTRY tape and scuttled off upstairs to a part of the airport Bud hadn’t scouted out.

  Shit. This wasn’t going to be so boring after all.

  “Brain to all. He smelled a rat. He’s gone up the stairs behind immigration. Anybody know what’s up there?”

  A crackling sound. Someone spoke, giggling. “Nothing. There’s nothing up there.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? There has to be something. There are stairs leading up.”

  It was Sergei. Until just a couple of weeks ago, Sergei had worked here as a pickpocket, and he knew this airport better than the architect who built it. “Customs and Border Protection are supposed to have their offices there when they clear out of Terminal One. October, maybe. Till then there’s nothing up there but empty rooms and locked doors.”

  “Where can he get out?”

  “Nowhere,” Sergei giggled again. “Dead end. Our friend has run right into a trap.”

  So it was going to be boring after all. “Okay, let’s go get him. Yellow Group to me, Blue Group covers.”

  He waited on the stairs with his free hand in his pocket near his gun in case the guy came back and wanted a fight. That would cause a bit of a stir, but it would be better than letting the guy get away. Coldwell would straighten it all out if need be. But it didn’t come to that. The four men in Yellow Group were there quick as greased lightning. Bud lifted the NO ENTRY tape. He was wearing airport overalls and had an ID clipped to his breast, so no one paid any attention. And up they went.

  The corridor was empty. Most of the doors were still in plastic wrap, with even the locks sealed shut. They were locked and loaded when they came around the first corner. Another empty corridor.

  Sergei grinned. “Nothing doing,” he said. “Corridor stops around that next corner.”

  Bud grinned, too. He cleared his throat and called out, “Mr. Kato? We know that you’re there. We don’t want to have to do anything to you. We just want to bring you to meet someone who really needs to talk to you.”

  No answer. He signaled to Sergei, who checked his gun and then peered around the corner. He turned around. “You sure he came up here?”

  Shit, thought Bud the Brain when he looked as well. The rest of the corridor was empty. The hallway
ended in a wall of ivory-tinted construction slats, and there was no sign of anyone.

  “Shit!” Bud shouted. “Come on, get back, go go go. He must have gone through one of the doors.”

  “How do you figure he did that?” Sergei was beginning to get on his nerves. “Those are deadbolts. Good ones. Customs and Border, you get me? Nothing but the best for those guys.”

  “He’s got to be somewhere.”

  “You really sure he even came up here?”

  “Are you looking for a smack across the chops?”

  They raced back to the staircase and then worked their way down all the doors. There was one with a security seal missing, and they broke it open. Nothing there but a huge open space that ran the whole length of the corridor. Still a building site; the dividing walls hadn’t even been installed yet. There was no other exit, and no footprints. It was as though Kato had vanished into thin air. All at once Bud the Brain understood why Coldwell had warned him, “Expect the guy to have a few tricks up his sleeve.”

  This must have been the kind of thing he meant.

  Hiroshi stood motionless behind the wall. He had only just managed to let it down in time, with the help of his Wand and the nanites. He held his breath and listened. He heard them come nearer, talking in animated voices, and then leave again. Right after that he heard a crash; obviously, they had broken open one of the doors he had passed, expecting to find him behind it. He looked down and, peering at the display on his Wand, scrolled noiselessly through the stored command sequences. There was only limited space in the memory. He had moved the tunnel-building program back onto his laptop when he had been working on the hunter complex. Bad mistake. Luckily, the garage-building program was still there. And luckily it had managed to build a very strangely shaped garage—no roof, a garage door that was only four inches across and faced the wall of the corridor, out of sight, and the slatted walls reaching from floor to ceiling.

  That had been close. Way too close.

  However, he now knew he had been too unsure of himself back in Hawaii when he was worried he couldn’t spot a tail; he’d been able to see these guys in time. The question was whether they would be so conspicuous next time. Probably not. There was no question of whether there would be a next time. There would be, without a doubt.

  It eventually fell quiet. Hiroshi nevertheless waited another two hours, which was torture in the narrow confines of his hiding place. Once the air became unbreathable, he triggered the program that ordered the nanites to return every atom they had moved right back where it came from. Within minutes the wall was gone without a trace.

  The corridor was deserted; no one was waiting for him. When he was ducking back under the tape at the bottom of the stairs, a guard showed up and barked at him, asking what he wanted. Couldn’t he see there was no civilian access here?

  “I thought I might find the restroom up there,” Hiroshi replied.

  “Up ahead on the left,” the man snarled, waving his hand vaguely. “Just follow the symbols.”

  Hiroshi thanked him and then vanished into the crowd. He would have to make a decision.

  6

  Hiroshi sat in the car and watched the quiet suburban street and the house of Rodney and Allison Alvarez. He had been their guest so many times, and he was about to visit the house for the last time.

  They were both home. He had seen them arrive, seen them use the garage as though it were the most natural thing in the world and had stood there forever. He liked that.

  He glanced over at the newspaper on the seat next to him. “Are Sharks Now Extinct?” read one of the front-page headlines. He didn’t like that.

  Nobody had made the connection yet, but it was only a matter of time. Hiroshi had read in an article about Minamata disease that sharks were especially prone to accumulating methyl mercury; some of them had so much stored in their body that only five grams of their flesh contained more than the safe daily dose for humans. No wonder they had been the principal victims of his collector nanites.

  He sighed and got out of the car. Every step was an effort.

  They were surprised to see him, and genuinely happy. Allison feigned outrage. “All I made is spaghetti! If you’d told us you were coming—”

  “Spaghetti’s great,” Hiroshi said to calm her down.

  “And what you did with the garage…and the news about the alien probe…Rod told me everything, but to be honest I wouldn’t have believed a word if it hadn’t been for the garage standing there all of a sudden…A garage! Of all things! I have a million questions for you, just so you know.”

  Hiroshi had to smile. “Do I have to answer all of them here in the front hall?”

  “No, of course not. Oh, I’m not being much of a host. Come right on in, come on. Wait, I’ll get another plate and some flatware…Rod, can you look after the wine?”

  Then they were sitting at the table, and by some miracle there was enough spaghetti for three. “I always cook twice what we need and make the rest into noodle salad for work,” Allison explained. “As for the tomato sauce, well, you can stretch that out with something from the can.”

  “It tastes great,” Hiroshi assured her.

  “Enjoy your meal,” she said, pointing her fork at him. “Because afterward you’re going to have to tell us every last detail about the extraterrestrials, about their probe, the works. Listen, I want to persuade you to let us make it all public. I mean, if we can show solid proof that the aliens launched a probe that landed on Earth thousands of years ago, it would be the sensation of the century. And who has more right to make the announcement that we do at SETI? It’s right there in the name—searching for extraterrestrial intelligence is what we do. Okay, so you made Rodney promise not to say a word, but why? I mean…you’re really going to have to explain yourself.”

  “That’s why I came,” Hiroshi said.

  “Let the man finish his meal, Ally,” Rodney said. “Hey, did you buy new dishes?”

  Allison was caught off guard and looked mistrustfully at her husband. “Don’t try to change the subject. When have I ever bought new dishes without asking you first…oh.” She looked down at her plate. “That’s really weird. I just used our ordinary…look at it shine; it’s kind of golden. Is that from the light in here?” She lifted it up. “Hey, this is really heavy!”

  “It’s gold,” Hiroshi said. It was time they knew.

  Rodney frowned. “Is this another of your tricks?”

  “What kind of trick?” Allison put in.

  Hiroshi nodded. “As I sit here there are billions of nanites swarming all around me. They’re in my body, in the air around me, in the floor under my feet. On my way over they were gathering atoms of gold from all around, building up a stockpile, bringing them along. Then when I sat down at your table they began to bring these gold atoms in here along a microscopically thin tube that’s running through the ground beneath your house and up one of the table legs. There were also nanites at work in the tabletop itself, gradually taking away all the atoms from the porcelain of your plates and replacing them with gold atoms. I told them to work from the inside out so we wouldn’t see the gold shine until it was all ready. Which is why you now have three plates of solid gold.”

  The two of them stared at him open-mouthed.

  “Just my way of saying thank you for the meal,” Hiroshi said mildly, and thought, Just saying good-bye. This is the last time we’ll see each other.

  Allison blinked, looked down at her plate, and admitted in a flat voice, “I don’t even know what porcelain’s made of.” It was a strangely inappropriate reaction that proved how deeply surprised she was.

  “Kaolin, feldspar, and quartz,” Hiroshi said. “Whole lot of silicon and oxygen, a little bit of sodium and aluminum.”

  “And how did the…nanites know not to turn the spaghetti to gold as well?”

  “Spaghetti’s made of sta
rch. Polysaccharides. They’re as different as night and day.”

  Allison put her face in her hands and took a deep breath. “Oh my God!” she said as she lowered her hands. “Plates that turn to pure gold as I eat off them! This is so crazy, I don’t even know what to say.”

  Rodney looked Hiroshi up and down. “And how did you tell them to do all this? I don’t see your Wizard’s Wand.”

  “I no longer need my Wand. The nanites are now directly linked to my brain. They read my thoughts, so to speak.”

  “Linked to your brain?” Rodney was round-eyed with wonder. “You cannot seriously mean that?”

  “I do, Rodney. I discovered a function that built me a neural interface—”

  “Are you trying to tell me that alien technology is compatible with the human neuronal structure?” A gleam appeared in Rodney’s eyes. He was not far from getting angry.

  Hiroshi carefully put down his flatware. He knew this was an evening unlike any other. “There’s an explanation,” he said. “But you’re not going to like it.”

  “Spit it out. And let me worry about whether I like it or not.”

  “The probe wasn’t what we thought. In fact, it’s something else entirely.”

  And he told them.

  One week later astronomers performing routine observations of the night sky noticed a bright object in the constellation of Pisces that was moving unusually fast. It didn’t take them long to establish it was headed on a course directly for Earth. They pointed the Hubble Space Telescope toward it and got pictures of a long, thin object at least twelve miles long and at least three miles across. It was huge. If this object collided with Earth, it would mean the end of all life.

  The heads of state of all the space-capable nations consulted with one another. More-or-less-detailed plans that had been drawn up for deep-impact scenarios were hastily recovered from desk drawers, where they had been gathering dust. It turned out that most of them were hopelessly out of date. Despite their best efforts to keep the matter secret, there was no clamping down entirely. Rumors began circulating on the Internet of a meteorite on a collision course with Earth. Government spokesmen declined to comment on the rumors. Meanwhile, the military were calculating the range on their nuclear missiles, and surprising alliances formed between formerly hostile powers. Satellites and radar antennae all turned toward the object as it approached.