Consider our own blighted history. How much misery might we have avoided had some benevolent outsider stepped in, say, to prevent the collapse of the Hellenic states? To offer some agricultural advice? To prevent the rise to power of Caligula? To suggest that maybe the Crusades weren’t a good idea, and to show us how to throw some light into the Dark Ages? We might have neglected to create the Inquisition, or missed a few wars. Or neglected to keep slavery with us into the present day.
The standard argument is that a culture must find its own way. That it cannot survive an encounter with a technologically superior civilization. Even when the superior civilization wishes only to assist. That the weaker society becomes too easily dependent.
The cultures pointed to as examples of this principle are inevitably tribal. They are primitive societies, who, despite the claims made for their conquerors, are usually imposed on by well-meaning advocates of one kind or another, or are driven off by force. One thinks, for example, of the Native Americans. Or the various peoples of Micronesia.
However one may choose to interpret terrestrial experience, it is clear to all that the Goompahs are an advanced race. It is true that their technology is at about the level of imperial Rome, but it is a gross error to equate civilization with technology. They are, for the most part, peaceful. They have writing, they have the arts, they appear to have an ethical code which, at the very least, equals our own. A case can be made that the only area in which we excel is in the production of electrical power.
There is in fact no reason to believe that a direct intervention on behalf of the Goompahs would not be of immense benefit to them. Especially now, when they face a lethal danger of which they are not even aware. To stand by, and permit the massive destruction of these entities in the name of a misbegotten and wrongheaded policy, would be damnable.
The Council has the means to act. Let it do so. If it continues to dither, the North American Union should take it upon itself to do something while there is yet time.
— The New York Times
Wednesday, April 23, 2234
chapter 16
On board the Hawksbill, in hyperflight.
Saturday, April 26.
JULIE, MARGE, AND Whitlock had become friends. The women called him Whit, and they talked endlessly about omegas and cosmology, elephants and physicists, Goompahs and God. The days raced by, and Julie began to realize she had never been on a more enjoyable journey. It was almost as though her entire life had been spent preparing for this epochal flight.
Whit consistently delivered odd perspectives. He argued that the best form of government was an aristocracy, that a republic was safest, and that a democracy was most interesting. Mobs are unpredictable, he said. You just never know about them. He pointed out that during the Golden Age, the worst neighbor in the Hellespont had been Athens. On the major knee-bending religious faiths, he wondered whether a God subtle enough to have invented quantum mechanics would really be interested in having people deliver rote prayers and swing incense pots in His direction.
Marge had been reserved at first, had seemed always buried with work. But gradually she’d loosened up. Now the three of them plotted how to save the Goompahs, and make sure that the Academy was funded afterward so that it could learn to deal decisively with the omegas.
Julie wanted to see an expedition put together to track the things to their source. There’d been plans for years to do just that. The old Project Scythe, for one. And then Redlight. And finally, in its early stages, Weatherman. But it was expensive, the target was thought to be near the core, thirty thousand light-years away, and the resources were simply not there.
“We’ll only get one chance to beat these things,” Whit said, referring to the omegas. “The time spans are so great that people get used to having them around. Like hurricanes or earthquakes. And eventually we’ll try to learn to live with them. So if we don’t succeed on the first attempt, the window will close and it won’t get done.”
“But why does it have to be us?” Julie asked. “Why not somebody six centuries from now?”
“Because we’re the ones who lived through the shock of discovery. For everybody else, it’ll be old stuff. Which means people will still be sitting in London and Peoria complaining about why the government didn’t do something when the cloud shows up to shut them down.”
Although he lived in a society of renewable marriages and, in many places, multiple spouses, Whit was a romantic. At least, that was the impression Julie had gotten after reading Love and Black Holes, his best-known collection of commentaries on the human condition. True love came along only once in a lifetime, Whit maintained. Lose her, or him, and it was over. Everything after that was a rerun. Julie assumed that Whit, who wasn’t married, had suffered just such a loss and never recovered. She was careful not to ask about it, but she wondered who it had been, and what had happened. And, eventually, if the woman had any idea what she’d let get away.
Whitlock was tall, with a lined face, one of those faces that had been lived in. He had white hair, and exuded dignity. The rejuvenation treatments had come along too late to do him much good, but he didn’t seem to mind. He told her he’d lived the life he wanted and had no regrets. (That was clearly a falsehood, but a brave one.) He was on board because Hutch liked him and liked his work. There’d been a battle about his coming, apparently. Whit wasn’t a serious scientist, in the view of many, and consequently was not on the same level as others who would have liked the last seat on the mission. Julie had heard that Hutchins had taken some heat for giving it to him.
He asked Julie whether a lightbender would be made available to him when they got to Lookout because he wanted to go down to the surface and actually see the Goompahs. He was even working with some of the people on the al-Jahani, trying to familiarize himself with their language, but he confessed he wasn’t having much luck picking it up. “Too old,” he said.
He had turned out to be a dear. He did not assume a superior attitude, as she’d expected when she first saw his name on the manifest. He was already taking notes, not on what was happening on the Hawksbill, but on his own reaction to learning that an intelligent species was at risk. At Julie’s request, he’d shown her some of his work, and had even gotten into the habit of asking for her comments. She doubted he really needed her editorial input, but it was a nice gesture, and she had quickly learned he wanted her to tell him what she really thought. “Doesn’t do any good to have you just pat me on the head and say the work is great,” he’d said. “I need to know how you really react, whether it makes sense. If I’m going to make a fool of myself, I’d prefer to keep the fact in the ship’s company rather than spread it around the world.”
He had a habit of referring to humans as smart monkeys. They were basically decent, he told her one evening in the common room when they were talking about the long bloodbath that human history had been. “But their great deficiency is that they’re too easily programmed. Get them when they’re reasonably young, say five or six, and you can make them believe almost anything. Not only that, but once it’s done, the majority of them will fight to the death to maintain the illusion. That’s why you get Nazis, racists, homophobes, fanatics of all types.”
Marge Conway’s assignment was to assume the cloud would arrive over the isthmus precisely on schedule, and to find a way to hide the cities. She would do so by generating rain clouds. If a blizzard had concealed a city on Moonlight, there was no reason to think storm clouds wouldn’t have the same effect on Lookout.
If the mission to shoo the cloud away succeeded, her job would become unnecessary. Marge was one of those rare persons who was primarily concerned with overall success, and didn’t much care who got the credit. In this case, though, she couldn’t conceal that she longed to see her manufactured clouds in action.
Marge admitted that she’d gotten the appointment not because she was particularly well thought of in her field, but because of her connection with Hutchins. She’d worked on a number o
f projects for the Academy, but had never before been on a superluminal. She didn’t even like aircraft. “The ride up to the station,” she told Julie, “was the scariest experience of my life.” Julie wasn’t sure whether to believe her or not because the woman didn’t look as if anything could scare her.
“We have one major advantage,” Marge commented. “Nobody expects us to get the job done.”
“Hutch does,” said Julie.
Marge didn’t think so. “Hutch puts on a good show. She knows that Moonlight might have been an anomaly. She’s seen the clouds in action, and I doubt she thinks anything can turn them aside.”
“Then why are we being sent out?”
“You want the truth?” said Whit.
“Please.”
“Because the politicians want to be able to say they made a serious effort. If we don’t try this, and a lot of Goompahs die, which they almost certainly will, the public’s going to be looking for whose fault it is.”
Whit’s statement cast a pall over things because he was usually so optimistic.
Marge asked him why he thought the decoy wouldn’t work.
“Because somebody else tried it. We don’t really know who, although we suspect it was the Monument-Makers. Somebody tried to save Quraqua at one time by building a simulated, and very square, city on its moon. At Nok, they put four cube-shaped satellites, each about two kilometers wide, in orbit. Both places got hit anyhow.”
“Sounds definitive to me,” said Marge.
“Maybe they waited too long,” said Julie.
“How do you mean?” asked Whit.
“At both places, the decoys were too close to the targets. By the time the cloud picked them up, it would already have been locked on its objectives. Lots of cities on both worlds.”
Whit considered it. “You may be right,” he said. “But we’ll be showing up at the last minute, too. It’s not as if we’re getting there with a year to spare.”
Dead and buried, she thought. He must have seen her disappointment because he smiled. “But don’t give up, Julie. There’s a decent chance the rain makers will work.”
WHIT WANTED TO look at the cloud-making equipment, so in the morning Julie took them down to the cargo bay, which required everyone to get into an e-suit because it was in vacuum.
The bay itself looked like a large warehouse. Marge and Whit had not been off A Deck, which was the only area of the ship maintaining life support. It had therefore been easy for them to forget how big the Hawksbill was until they stood gazing from prow to stern, down the length of an enclosure filled with four landers, an AV3 heavy-duty hauler, and an antique helicopter. The rainmakers were attached to the hull. Julie took them into the airlock and opened up so they could see them. They resembled large coils.
“They’re actually chimneys,” Marge said. “When they’re deployed, they’ll be three kilometers long. Each of them.”
“That’s pretty big.”
“As big as we could make them.”
Avery Whitlock’s Notebooks
One of the unfortunate side effects of organized religion is that it seeks to persuade us that we are inherently evil. Damaged goods.
I’ve watched volunteers work with kids injured in accidents; I’ve seen sons and daughters give over their time to taking care of elderly parents. There are a thousand stories out there about people who have given their lives for their children, for their friends, and sometimes for total strangers. We go down to the beach to try to push a stranded whale back into the ocean.
Now we are trying to help an intelligent species that cannot help itself. Whether we will pull it off, no one knows. But of one thing I am certain: If we ever start to believe those who think God made a race of deformed children, then that is what we will become.
And who then would help the Goompahs?
chapter 17
On board the Heffernan, near Iota Pictoris, 120 light-years from Earth.
Monday, April 28.
SKY STAYED WELL clear of the hedgehog. Since he’d watched the one at Alpha Pictoris explode, he’d gained a lot of respect for the damned things.
Emma was beside him, enjoying a mug of beef stew. The aroma filled the bridge. “Bill,” he said, “send the packages.”
He sensed, rather than heard, the launch. “Packages away,” said Bill.
The hedgehog was forty-four thousand kilometers in front of the cloud.
“Withdraw to five thousand kilometers.”
Bill swung the Heffernan around and retreated as directed.
“Keep the engines running.”
The AI smiled. He was on-screen, seated in his armchair. “We are ready to accelerate away, should it become necessary.” He looked off to his left. “Sky,” he said, “we are receiving a transmission from the Academy. From the DO.”
Emma smiled. “That’ll be another warning to play it safe,” she said.
“Let’s see what she has to say for herself, Bill.”
The overhead screen blinked on, first the Academy seal, a scroll and lamp framing the blue Earth of the United World, and then Hutch. She was seated on the edge of her desk.
“Emma,” she said, “Sky, I thought you’d be interested in the preliminary results we’re getting. It looks as if, when these things blow up, they’re not ordinary explosions. I can’t explain this exactly, but I suspect Emma will be able to. The energy release is sculpted. That’s the term the researchers are using. They think it’s designed for a specific purpose.
“We hope, when you’re finished out there, we’ll have a better idea what the purpose is. And we appreciate what you’ve been doing. I know it’s not the most rousing assignment in the world.”
She lifted a hand in farewell, the seal came back, and the monitor shut down. Sky looked at his wife. “Sculpted?”
“Just like the lady says,” said Emma. “Think of it as a blast in which the energy doesn’t just erupt, but instead constitutes a kind of code.”
“To do what?”
She gazed at the image of the omega, floating serenely on the auxiliary screen. “Sometimes,” she said, “to excite nanos. Get them to perform.”
THE PACKAGES ARRIVED in the vicinity of the hedgehog and opened up. Twelve sets of thrusters assembled themselves, collected their fuel tanks, and circled the hedgehog. At a signal, each located the specific site it had been designed for and used its set of magnetic clamps to attach itself. The twelve sites had been carefully chosen, because on this most uneven object, the thrusters lined up almost perfectly parallel with each other. They would function as retrorockets.
“Everything’s in place,” said Bill. “Ready to proceed.”
“Execute, Bill.”
The thrusters fired in unison. And continued to fire.
Satisfied, Sky got himself a mug of Emma’s soup.
“You do good work, darling,” she said.
“Yes, I do.” He reclaimed his seat and slowly put away the soup. Bill screened the figures on deceleration rate, the fuel supplies left in the retros, and attitude control.
There had been some concern that the magnetic clamps would set the device off, but that had happily not occurred.
They were in a dark place, in the well between stars, where no sun illuminated the sky. It wasn’t like a night sky seen from Earth. You knew you were far out in the void. There was no charm, no bright sense of distant suns and constellations. The only thing he felt was distance.
“Retro fuel running low,” said Bill. “Two minutes.”
The important thing was to shut them all down simultaneously, and not let one or more run out of fuel and cause the others to push the thing off-course.
“Bill, where will we be if we shut down with thirty seconds remaining?”
“The hedgehog will have shed 30 kph.”
“Okay. That means the cloud will overtake it when?”
“In sixty days. June 27.”
“Good. Let’s do it.”
“I DON’T LIKE these things, Em.” He
pushed himself out of the chair.
“Nor do I,” she said.
He gazed down at the navigation screen, which had set up a sixty-day calendar and clock, and begun ticking off the seconds.
“I’m going to turn in.”
She nodded. “Go ahead. I’ll be along in a minute.” She was looking at the cloud. It was dark and quiet. Peaceful. In the vast emptiness, it would not have been possible to realize it was racing through the heavens.
“What are you thinking, Em?”
“About my dad. I remember one night he told me how things changed when people found out about the omegas.”
“In what way?”
“Until then,” he said, “people always thought they were at the center of things. The universe was made for us. The only part of it that thinks. Our God was the universal God and He even paid a visit. We were in charge.
“I never really thought that way. I more or less grew up with the clouds.” She touched the screen, and the picture died. “I wish we could kill it,” she said.
LIBRARY ENTRY
The omegas are a footprint, a signal to us that something far greater than we is loose in the galaxy. Once we used our churches to demonstrate that we were kings of creation, the purpose for it all. Now we use them to hide.
— Gregory MacAllister
“The Flower Girl Always Steals the Show”
Editor-at-Large, 2220
chapter 18
On board the Jenkins.
Tuesday, May 6.
“NEVER SAW ANYTHING like it,” said Mark Stevens, the captain of the Cumberland, as he docked with the Jenkins. He was referring to the omega. “Damned thing’s got tentacles.”
That was the illusion. Jack explained how the braking maneuver tended to throw it around a good bit, tossed giant plumes forward as it slowed down. And more plumes out to port as it continued a long slow turn. “Gives me the chills,” said Stevens.
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