by Alex Deva
It sat behind a thin transparent strip whose purpose Mark could not guess, because it was only two palms tall and floated at shoulder-height. Over and under it there were no other barriers. He could’ve reached out and touched the Pinguid, had he been so improbably inclined.
“But I didn’t even tell you what we want yet,“ he said. This had not been the first ambassador who had started negotiations without bothering to find out what it was negotiating for.
“I am sure we have something you need,“ said the great worm eventually, slowly and deliberately.
It’s doing it on purpose just to piss me off, thought the Brit.
“We need strategic support against the Squares,“ he said, and waited about thirty seconds, already guessing the answer.
He could watch, at length, as the Pinguid’s attitude slowly changed. It drew back, wrinkled and changed into a dark shade of red. Suddenly, the spaces over and under the lonely transparent barrier were closed by two supplemental barriers, which, however, failed to fully suppress the stench, which took another aroma, just as insufferable.
“No,“ said the ambassador. “Leave.“
“But we have wood. We actually do have wood. How much wood do you need?“
“Five trillion,“ said the alien after another forty seconds.
“Five trillion what?“
Another forty seconds came and went.
“Five trillion whatever. The answer is no.“
Mark sighed, turned around and exited the room.
What an asshole, he heard Jessica Lawry. Well, congratulations, that was your hundredth alien.
Outside the Pinguid’s office, or cubicle or whatever it was, the passageway continued endlessly in both directions. It was one of the bigger arteries of the station, that Mark had found wandering more or less randomly in search of a helpful species. He’d had no luck; the moment he mentioned the Squares, everybody backed off.
He’d met all kinds of alien ambassadors. Some were quick, some were slow; some were vaguely humanoid, others so strange he didn’t even know where to look when he was talking to them. Likewise in the main hall, there was a constant flow of different aliens moving in both directions, or in and out of the ambassadorial meeting places.
He sat down on the floor, not because he felt physically tired, but because he needed to gather his thoughts. He inspected the surface. It was a greenish light grey, the same as the walls and the ceiling. It was squeaky clean, and so smooth it felt almost like touching water. He looked up, where countless beings were moving around on what, to him, was a ceiling. He inhaled and exhaled a few times, trying to convince himself it was all real, even though reality, in that place, was more subjective than ever.
— How are you holding up? It’s been over thirteen hours, she asked.
He decided he could talk out loud. Nobody was paying any attention to him in particular. As he stretched his legs forward, some multi-legged being carefully stepped over them eight or ten times. He looked after it with interest.
“I’m good,“ he said. “A part of me says I should be hungry, but I’m really not. Either you’re dampening those particular sensations, or you’ve just fed me through one of those tubes.“
— Your vitals are great, she said. I meant more psychologically. We’ve just had our third shift of diplomats here on duty. Honestly none of them seem terribly disappointed that their services aren’t needed. This is turning into a diplomatic nightmare.
“And how are you holding up? It’s been thirteen hours for you too, and last time we saw each other, there were no tubes sticking out of your mouth.“
— I ate while you were with that blue starfish about an hour ago, she said. Even had time to go to the bathroom.
“That guy was a slow one,“ remembered Mark. “What did we offer him? Or her. It.“
— Acetone and music.
“Right. I mean, how would we even deliver on acetone? Music we could send, but acetone is a physical product.“
— We wondered about that too. I suppose they had a lot of time to wait for it. Certainly talked like they had lots of time.
He smiled a little and watched his hands. He knew they weren’t his actual hands; they were alien reproductions which travelled from who knows where all the way to Doi, and from there to Geneva, where they were sent directly to his optic nerve via laser. He wiggled his fingers, and knew that his actual fingers were in a vat of purple stuff, where some other lasers had intercepted the nerve impulses, sent them over to Doi who relayed them who knows where for some “telesentience transceiver“ to convert them into simulated movements of simulated hands, which were then converted into the appropriate visual stimuli and sent back from who knows where to Doi, and then to Geneva, and then…
A tripodal alien tripped on his stretched legs and nearly fell. “‘scuse me,“ it said, and went on hurriedly.
“That wasn’t my hundredth alien,“ he said. “The hundredth alien embassy, maybe. You didn’t count Rrapi. And remember those Hwyl? There must’ve been at least fifty of them.“
— Seventy-three, she said. We froze a frame on the recording and counted them. Unbelievable how fast they moved through that room. It must’ve felt like in a bee hive.
Mark remembered the swarm-based life form which had clustered into a tight ball the moment he’d mentioned the Squares. No luck there, either; everywhere he mentioned the Squares, doors were shut in his face.
“Hey Zi,“ he called, looking at his hands again.
— Hey there, answered the Albanian almost immediately. How’s it going?
“Not really that great,“ he answered. “We might be going over the free quota. How’s that list?“
— Hell, I don’t know. The guys are working on it. They’re also helping me negotiate with Rrapi, who’s a pretty decent person, if you ask me, as far as aliens go. Fast as bad news, but really willing to help.
“Did you find anything yet?“
— VR games.
“What. Really?“
— Yeah. Apparently VR entertainment is at a premium on some world called Barmecide. Rrapi can sell our stuff there and make a small fortune.
“How much can we afford to give them?“
— There’s about fifty copyright lawyers in Geneva who are scratching their heads trying to figure that out. In theory quite a lot, but I hear it’s kinda hard getting hold of game developers with the necessary security clearance. Anyway, we might even look to trade directly with the Barmecidians; bring it up if you run into their ambassador. I wonder what they look like. Rrapi said they have stereo vision like us.
“And what would that buy us from him?“
— We haven’t gotten that far yet, but I mentioned a couple thousand hours and Rrapi didn’t seem fazed.
Mark smiled. “You’re doing a great job up there.“
— You too, man, you too. I really hope you find someone willing to help. Otherwise there won’t be any point selling VR games to either Rrapi or the Barmecidians.
XVII.
One and a half million kilometres from Earth, two small, very shiny cubes floated exactly thirty-eight centimetres apart.
They were made of a gold-platinum alloy and were precisely forty-six centimetres on a side. Each one of them was encased in a larger chamber which it was not touching, and the two chambers were kept in place by a laser device so precise it dealt with errors smaller than the smallest atom in the Universe. The entire ensemble was further encased in a stubby, roughly octagonal vehicle, painted in gold, with a solar panel on top (or on the bottom, depending on one’s choice of ups and downs).
The two cubes fell and fell on their Lissajous orbit, unperturbed by any forces for hundreds of years, and the spacecraft around them fell along with them.
Once, centuries before, that spacecraft had had the capability to detect if one of the two cubes moved as little as the width of a tiny bacterium, and then — applying pico-Newton forces — it would realign itself so the cubes remained untouched. Now, however, the s
pacecraft was dead. But so expertly had it been built, and so stringent had its technical requirements been, and so far had those requirements been exceeded, that the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (code named LISA Pathfinder) was still not touching the two free-falling cubes inside its enclosure.
LISA shared the L1 Lagrangian point between Earth and the Sun with a number of other dead spacecraft, in one of the most expensive cemeteries ever made by humankind. LISA itself had cost no less than four hundred million dollars at the time it was sent up in space, tasked with detecting incredibly minute ripples in the fabric of space-time, otherwise known as gravitational waves. About the same money had been spent to make a film about a disoriented pirate named Sparrow, which had produced a more tangible return on investment than the LISA Pathfinder mission, while being arguably somewhat easier and faster to complete.
Three hundred years later, opinion was no longer divided on which of them had benefited humankind more, mainly because nobody remembered either of them.
Almost nobody.
LISA, together with all the other dead spacecraft around it, was being carefully observed from the great-great-grandson of the Vega rocket that had launched it in orbit: an American space cruiser.
The USS Henderson, a huge cylinder five times as long as LISA’s original rocket and three times as thick, was manoeuvring to stay between Earth and Sun, burning vast amounts of propellant in the process. The cruiser, whose intended military applications absolutely covered spying from incredibly large distances, had on board the most powerful space-based refractor telescope that humankind had ever built.
It was a long tube that spanned almost the entire inside length of the cruiser, and with its one metre diameter it took up so much volume that the ship’s crew only had room for one third of a normal complement. Its exquisite lenses and quantum computers compensated for the optical aberrations from which such telescopes usually suffer, so that it could produce accurate, high-resolution images at great distances.
The specially trained skeleton crew had been urgently reassigned on a very strange mission: to scan the surface of the Sun and chart its apparent magnitude, until further orders.
Of course, the apparent magnitude of the Sun was -27, as everybody who had to do with telescopes already knew. And of course, there were those dark spots, and some bits of the Sun that shone brighter than others. This could easily be observed from Earth with equipment usually sold on the toys shelves of supermarkets. So, why…?
But, since the United States Space Command was not in the habit of explaining its orders, the crew was reduced to monitoring the navigation computers as they worked together with the optical computers to point the telescope towards various bits of the Sun in an automated search pattern. On a nearby computer screen, new data points constantly popped up on the magnitude charts, as soon as an observation was completed.
For the hundredth time, LISA Pathfinder crossed the narrow cone in front of the telescope. And then it disappeared.
It did not disappear because the telescope shifted to another location. It disappeared because the whole screen went black, as a multitude of tiny blinds toggled, blocking the light from the Sun.
The specially trained crew frowned, then quickly checked the diagnostic data, which showed that both navigation and optics were functioning properly and pointing at the only star in the neighbourhood. Then, they quickly assigned tasks: two crew members pulled out the video recording to watch it again in slow-motion, while the other three programmed the computers to zoom out the huge telescope.
What the first two military scientists saw was that very odd squares, each smaller than LISA and positioned closely next to each other, had rotated on an axis so as to present their surface, whereas they had probably been flying so that only their impossibly thin edges had been visible from their direction.
What the other three military scientists saw involved no programming whatsoever, once one of them had the idea of looking out the window with his own set of eyes. They discovered that the same phenomenon was happening all over the disc of the Sun. It took less than a minute for the entire star to become invisible. A large eclipse halo, with a huge square inset, took its place.
The crew fired a telemetry laser into the impossible black square, hoping to get an accurate reading of its distance. The photons never bounced back. They got no reading whatsoever. They tried radar with the same degree of success, and so they started using their brains instead.
They judged that the wall must have appeared at around L1, where LISA and its fellow dead spaceships were flying, which was a conclusion that not only made sense from an astrophysical perspective, but also happened to be true.
And then, they judged that it was about time to panic.
At about the same time, half of the world — the half that happened to be enjoying daylight at that particular time — began to panic as well.
Night fell swiftly, and brought with it chaos, and with chaos came death. More people died of heart attacks in the first few minutes than in weeks. Accidents, ranging from small to huge to catastrophic, began to happen at a despairingly high rate. Soon, people who were sleeping woke up to the news that there would be no morning. Hysteria swept over humanity like the shockwave of a bomb set off by a mad god.
And then, nature itself panicked.
The temperature across half the globe quickly dropped by an average of five degrees. Land cooled faster than water, and air over the land began to lose heat in turn. As air became cooler, relative humidity grew, and huge, grey clouds appeared almost everywhere. As the temperature gradient increased, so did the pressure differential. Winds formed, at first on coasts, then around the hills and the mountains, then along the former day-night terminator. New weather fronts were born, low-pressure areas became bullied by cold air, and caused cyclones where cyclones had no business being.
But the horrible universal night did not stay universal for long.
As the crew of the USS Henderson still reported from their quiet, climate-controlled space cruiser, a few tiny pixels of white suddenly appeared in the huge black square. They aimed their telescope towards one of them. It turned out not as a simple hole in the wall, but instead as a complex arrangement of those little tiles, which had been placed — or had placed themselves — so that a narrow beam of light, reflected, refracted, diverged, recombined and amplified, eventually tight as a laser and just as focused, shone on Earth.
Someone in possession of enough detachment, wits and historical knowledge might have likened the arrangement that created that laser beam out of sunlight to the ultra-high precision laser interferometry device which lay abandoned inside LISA Pathfinder, ingenuously built by Scottish scientists centuries before.
The particular beam of light that the Henderson was observing shone over a little town in Poland called Grójec, and followed its movement as the Earth rotated. The town normally held about twenty-thousand inhabitants, but its population had increased steadily in the previous few weeks to nearly fifty-thousand. The newcomers had set up camp on its surroundings, taking every available open space till Tarczyn to the north, Konie to the west, Chynów to the east and Zaborów to the south, and that entire area was now enjoying sunlight again. The thirty-thousand newly converted members of the Church of Eight who had come to Grójec raised their heads towards the prick of light in the sky they once called their Sun, and muttered their thanks to the Eight and their prophet.
The same scenario took place in five hundred other places on Earth’s populated continents. And the same treatment was reserved for five hundred more, as they would gradually rotate with the other side of the planet, on their way from night to what was supposed to be day.
The Eighters were both scared and delighted. This had been the first promise that any gods had ever kept, in all of human history. The first measurable prophecy, the first Great Truth on which even those who had had their doubts when the Prophet was reborn, now could base their faith. They were the first true believers in the
history of belief who were demonstrably right. Their ranks, already on the rise, suddenly thickened immensely. In the space of a few hours, tens upon tens of millions of people gave up Catholicism, Islam, Buddhism and every other religion or lack thereof, in order to sell their faith for sunlight. Like pilgrims on the most important journey of their lives, trudging on darkened roads blocked by accidents and endless queues, they flooded to the nearest Place of Light that the Prophet had promised to the faithful.
There was a man in Vatican who had hoped against hope that the threat of Nightfall would be in vain, but who had believed in it even as he was begging his Catholic God to spare His creation from it. Karel Souček watched the chaos from the window of his office, and felt the coming chill in every one of his bones. He glanced towards the black cross hanging on his wall and vainly tried to hide his thoughts from it, and from himself.
“Is it bad?“ asked Tiessler from a tab.
“Worse than you could imagine,“ he answered.
The German was in space, aboard the EASS Monnet. He, too, could observe the blackened sphere under him, and he had received the worrying reports from their — for the time being — allied American space cruiser. He saw the bundle of thin, gently moving rays which were favouring some very specific places on Earth, just as the Prophet of the Eight had said would happen. But, unlike the people down on the surface, he knew about the Squares, and he understood how helpless Earth was in the face of such an monumental threat.
“Verflucht noch mal,“ he swore, softly.
“Yes,“ answered Souček. “Damned we are indeed.“
He turned towards his desk and faced Tiessler. His eyes were glistening, and he fought to keep his voice steady.
“How’s Geneva?“
“Dark on the surface, as expected. Fortunately, our laboratory is safe underground.“