Firefall

by Peter Watts

  "Jargonaut's fine. I'm not proud."

  "Don't you just always know just exactly what to say." She cocked her head at me. "So, your name. What's it mean?"

  Relaxed. That was it. I felt relaxed.

  "I don't know. It's just a name."

  "Well, it's not good enough. If we're gonna to be swapping spit for any length of time you've gotta get a name that means something."

  And we were, I realized. Chelsea had decided while I wasn't looking. I could have stopped her right there, told her what a bad idea this was, apologized for any misunderstanding. But then there'd be wounded looks and hurt feelings and guilt because after all, if I wasn't interested why the hell had I even shown up?

  She seemed nice. I didn't want to hurt her.

  Just for a while, I told myself. It'll be an experience.

  "I think I'll call you Cygnus," Chelsea said.

  "The swan?" I said. A bit precious, but it could have been worse.

  She shook her head. "Black hole. Cygnus X-1."

  I furrowed my brow at her, but I knew exactly what she meant: a dark, dense object that sucks up the light and destroys everything in its path.

  "Thanks a whole fucking lot. Why?"

  "I'm not sure. Something dark about you." She shrugged, and gave me a great toothy grin. "But it's not unattractive. And let me give you a tweak or two, I bet you'd grow right out of it."

  Pag admitted afterward, a bit sheepishly, that maybe I should have read that as a warning sign. Live and learn.

  OUR SCOUT FELL towards orbit, watching Ben. We fell days behind, watching the scout. And that was all we did: sit in Theseus' belly while the system streamed telemetry to our inlays. Essential, irreplaceable, mission-critical—we might as well have been ballast during that first approach.

  We passed Ben's Rayleigh limit. Theseus squinted at a meager emission spectrum and saw a rogue halo element from Canis Major—a dismembered remnant of some long-lost galaxy that had drifted into ours and ended up as road kill, uncounted billions of years ago. We were closing on something from outside the Milky Way.

  The probe arced down and in, drew close enough for false-color enhance. Ben's surface brightened to a seething parfait of high-contrast bands against a diamond-hard starscape. Something twinkled there, faint sparkles on endless overcast.

  "Lightning?" James wondered.

  Szpindel shook his head. "Meteorites. Must be a lot of rock in the neighborhood."

  "Wrong color," Sarasti said. He was not physically among us—he was back in his tent, hardlined into the Captain—but ConSensus put him anywhere on board he wanted to be.

  Morphometrics scrolled across my inlays: mass, diameter, mean density. Ben's day lasted seven hours twelve minutes. Diffuse but massive accretion belt circling the equator, more torus than ring, extending almost a half-million kilometers from the cloud-tops: the pulverized corpses of moons perhaps, ground down to leftovers.

  "Meteorites." Szpindel grinned. "Told ya."

  He seemed to be right; increasing proximity smeared many of those pinpoint sparkles into bright ephemeral hyphens, scratching the atmosphere. Closer to the poles, cloud bands flickered with dim, intermittent flashes of electricity.

  Weak radio emission peaks at 31 and 400m. Outer atmosphere heavy with methane and ammonia; lithium, water, carbon monoxide in abundance. Ammonia hydrogen sulfide, alkali halide mixing locally in those torn swirling clouds. Neutral alkalis in the upper layers. By now even Theseus could pick those things out from a distance, but our scout was close enough to see filigree. It no longer saw a disk. It gazed down at a dark convex wall in seething layers of red and brown, saw faint stains of anthracene and pyrene.

  One of a myriad meteorite contrails scorched Ben's face directly ahead; for a moment I thought I could even see the tiny dark speck at its core, but sudden static scratched the feed. Bates cursed softly. The image blurred, then steadied as the probe pitched its voice higher up the spectrum. Unable to make itself heard above the longwave din, now it spoke down a laser.

  And still it stuttered. Keeping it aligned across a million fluctuating kilometers should have posed no problem at all; our respective trajectories were known parabolas, our relative positions infinitely predictable at any time t. But the meteorite's contrail jumped and skittered on the feed, as if the beam were being repeatedly, infinitesimally knocked out of alignment. Incandescent gas blurred its details; I doubted that even a rock-steady image would have offered any sharp edges for a human eye to hold on to. Still. There was something wrong about it somehow, something about the tiny black dot at the core of that fading brightness. Something that some primitive part of my mind refused to accept as natural—

  The image lurched again, and flashed to black, and didn't return.

  "Probe's fried," Bates reported. "Spike there at the end. Like it hit a Parker Spiral, but with a really tight wind."

  I didn't need to call up subtitles. It was obvious in the set of her face, the sudden creases between her eyebrows: she was talking about a magnetic field.

  "It's—" she began, and stopped as a number popped up in ConSensus: 11.2 Tesla.

  "Holy shit," Szpindel whispered. "Is that right?"

  Sarasti clicked from the back of his throat and the back of the ship. A moment later he served up an instant replay, those last few seconds of telemetry zoomed and smoothed and contrast-enhanced from visible light down to deep infrared. There was that same dark shard cauled in flame, there was the contrail burning in its wake. Now it dimmed as the object skipped off the denser atmosphere beneath and regained altitude. Within moments the heat trace had faded entirely. The thing that had burned at its center rose back into space, a fading ember. A great conic scoop at its front end gaped like a mouth. Stubby fins disfigured an ovoid abdomen.

  Ben lurched and went out all over again.

  "Meteorites," Bates said dryly.

  The thing had left me with no sense of scale. It could have been an insect or an asteroid. "How big?" I whispered, a split-second before the answer appeared on my inlays:

  Four hundred meters along the major axis.

  Ben was safely distant in our sights once more, a dark dim disk centered in Theseus's forward viewfinder. But I remembered the close-up: a twinkling orb of black-hearted fires; a face gashed and pockmarked, endlessly wounded, endlessly healing.

  There'd been thousands of the things.

  Theseus shivered along her length. It was just a pulse of decelerating thrust; but for that one moment, I imagined I knew how she felt.

  ***

  We headed in and hedged our bets.

  Theseus weaned herself with a ninety-eight-second burn, edged us into some vast arc that might, with a little effort, turn into an orbit—or into a quick discreet flyby if the neighborhood turned out to be a little too rough. The Icarus stream fell invisibly to port, its unswerving energy lost to space-time. Our city-sized, molecule-thick parasol wound down and packed itself away until the next time the ship got thirsty. Antimatter stockpiles began dropping immediately; this time we were alive to watch it happen. The dip was infinitesimal, but there was something disquieting about the sudden appearance of that minus sign on the display.

  We could have retained the apron strings, left a buoy behind in the telematter stream to bounce energy down the well after us. Susan James wondered why we hadn't.

  "Too risky," Sarasti said, without elaboration.

  Szpindel leaned in James' direction. "Why give 'em something else to shoot at, eh?"

  We sent more probes ahead, though, spat them out hard and fast and too fuel-constrained for anything but flyby and self-destruct. They couldn't take their eyes off the machines swinging around Big Ben. Theseus stared her own unblinking stare, more distant though more acute. But if those high divers even knew we were out there, they ignored us completely. We tracked them across the closing distance, watched them swoop and loop though a million parabolas at a million angles. We never saw them collide—not with each other, not with the cauldron of ro
ck tumbling around Ben's equator. Every perigee dipped briefly into atmosphere; there they burned, and slowed, and accelerated back into space, their anterior scoops glowing with residual heat.

  Bates grabbed a ConSensus image, drew highlights and a conclusion around the front end: "Scramjet."

  We tracked nearly four hundred thousand in less than two days. That appeared to be most of them; new sightings leveled off afterwards, the cumulative curve flattening towards some theoretical asymptote. Most of the orbits were close and fast, but Sarasti projected a frequency distribution extending almost back to Pluto. We might stay out here for years, and still catch the occasional new shovelnose returning from its extended foray into the void.

  "The faster ones are pulling over fifty gees on the hairpin turn," Szpindel pointed out. "Meat couldn't handle that. I say they're unmanned."

  "Meat's reinforceable," Sarasti said.

  "If it's got that much scaffolding you might as well stop splitting hairs and call it a machine anyway."

  Surface morphometrics were absolutely uniform. Four hundred thousand divers, every one identical. If there was an alpha male calling the shots among the herd, it couldn't be distinguished on sight.

  One night—as such things were measured on board— I followed a soft squeal of tortured electronics up to the observation blister. Szpindel floated there, watching the skimmers. He'd closed the clamshells, blocked off the stars and built a little analytical nest in their place. Graphs and windows spilled across the inside of the dome as though the virtual space in Szpindel's head was insufficient to contain them. Tactical graphics lit him from all sides, turned his body into a bright patchwork of flickering tattoos.

  The Illustrated Man. "Mind if I come in?" I asked.

  He grunted: Yeah, but not enough to push it.

  Inside the dome, the sound of heavy rainfall hissed and spat behind the screeching that had led me here. "What is that?"

  "Ben's magnetosphere." He didn't look back. "Nice, eh?"

  Synthesists don't have opinions on the job; it keeps observer effects to a minimum. This time I permitted myself a small breach. "The static's nice. I could do without the screeching."

  "Are you kidding? That's the music of the spheres, commissar. It's beautiful. Like old jazz."

  "I never got the hang of that either."

  He shrugged and squelched the upper register, left the rain pattering around us. His jiggling eyes fixed on some arcane graphic. "Want a scoop for your notes?"

  "Sure."

  "There you go." Light reflected off his feedback glove, iridescing like the wing of a dragonfly as he pointed: an absorption spectrum, a looped time-series. Bright peaks surged and subsided, surged and subsided across a fifteen-second timeframe.

  Subtitles only gave me wavelengths and Angstroms. "What is it?"

  "Diver farts. Those bastards are dumping complex organics into the atmosphere."

  "How complex?"

  "Hard to tell, so far. Faint traces, and they dissipate like that. But sugars and aminos at least. Maybe proteins. Maybe more."

  "Maybe life? Microbes?" An alien terraforming project...

  "Depends on how you define life, eh?" Szpindel said. "Not even Deinococcus would last long down there. But it's a big atmosphere. They better not be in any hurry if they're reworking the whole thing by direct inoculation."

  If they were, the job would go a lot faster with self-replicating inoculates. "Sounds like life to me."

  "Sounds like agricultural aerosols, is what it sounds like. Those fuckers are turning the whole damn gas ball into a rice paddy bigger than Jupiter." He gave me a scary grin. "Something's got a beeeg appetite, hmm? You gotta wonder if we aren't gonna be a teeny bit outnumbered."

  ***

  Szpindel's findings were front and center at our next get-together.

  The vampire summed it up for us, visual aids dancing on the table: "Von Neumann self-replicating r-selector. Seed washes up and sprouts skimmers, skimmers harvest raw materials from the accretion belt. Some perturbations in those orbits; belt's still unsettled."

  "Haven't seen any of the herd giving birth," Szpindel remarked. "Any sign of a factory?"

  Sarasti shook his head. "Discarded, maybe. Decompiled. Or the herd stops breeding at optimal N."

  "These are only the bulldozers," Bates pointed out. "There'll be tenants."

  "A lot of 'em, eh?" Szpindel added. "Outnumber us by orders of mag."

  James: "But they might not show up for centuries."

  Sarasti clicked. "Do these skimmers build Fireflies? Burns-Caulfield?"

  It was a rhetorical question. Szpindel answered anyway: "Don't see how."

  "Something else does, then. Something already local."

  Nobody spoke for a moment. James' topology shifted and shuffled in the silence; when she opened her mouth again, someone indefinably younger was on top.

  "Their habitat isn't anything like ours, if they're building a home way out here. That's hopeful."

  Michelle. The synesthete.

  "Proteins." Sarasti's eyes were unreadable behind the visor. Comparable biochemistries. They might eat us.

  "Whoever these beings are, they don't even live in sunlight. No territorial overlap, no resource overlap, no basis for conflict. There's no reason we shouldn't get along just fine."

  "On the other hand," Szpindel said, "Technology implies belligerence."

  Michelle snorted softly. "According to a coterie of theoretical historians who've never actually met an alien, yes. Maybe now we get to prove them wrong." And in the next instant she was just gone, her affect scattered like leaves in a dust-devil, and Susan James was back in her place saying:

  "Why don't we just ask them?"

  "Ask?" Bates said.

  "There are four hundred thousand machines out there. How do we know they can't talk?"

  "We'd have heard.," Szpindel said. "They're drones."

  "Can't hurt to ping them, just to make sure."

  "There's no reason they should talk even if they are smart. Language and intelligence aren't all that strongly correlated even on Ear—"

  James rolled her eyes. "Why not try, at least? It's what we're here for. It's what I'm here for. Just send a bloody signal."

  After a moment Bates picked up the ball. "Bad game theory, Suze."

  "Game theory." She made it sound like a curse.

  "Tit-for-tat's the best strategy. They pinged us, we pinged back. Ball's in their court now; we send another signal, we may give away too much."

  "I know the rules, Amanda. They say if the other party never takes the initiative again, we ignore each other for the rest of the mission because game theory says you don't want to look needy."

  "The rule only applies when you're going up against an unknown player, " the Major explained. "We'll have more options the more we learn."

  James sighed. "It's just—you all seem to be going into this assuming they'll be hostile. As if a simple hailing signal is going to bring them down on us."

  Bates shrugged. "It only makes sense to be cautious. I may be a jarhead but I'm not eager to piss off anything that hops between stars and terraforms superJovians for a living. I don't have to remind anyone here that Theseus is no warship."

  She'd said anyone; she'd meant Sarasti. And Sarasti, focused on his own horizon, didn't answer. Not out loud, at least; but his surfaces spoke in a different tongue entirely.

  Not yet, they said.

  ***

  Bates was right, by the way. Theseus was officially tricked out for exploration, not combat. No doubt our masters would have preferred to load her up with nukes and particle cannons as well as her scientific payload, but not even a telemattered fuel stream can change the laws of inertia. A weaponized prototype would have taken longer to build; a more massive one, laden with heavy artillery, would take longer to accelerate. Time, our masters had decided, was of greater essence than armament. In a pinch our fabrication facilities could build most anything we needed, given time. It might take a whi
le to build a particle-beam cannon from scratch, and we might have to scavenge a local asteroid for the raw material, but we could do it. Assuming our enemies would be willing to wait, in the interests of fair play.

  But what were the odds that even our best weapons would prove effective against the intelligence that had pulled off the Firefall? If the unknown was hostile, we were probably doomed no matter what we did. The Unknown was technologically advanced—and there were some who claimed that that made them hostile by definition. Technology Implies Belligerence, they said.

  I suppose I should explain that, now that it's completely irrelevant. You've probably forgotten after all this time.

  Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with gentle intelligence—spiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened than we, a great galactic siblinghood into whose ranks we would someday ascend. Surely, said the Optimists, space travel implies enlightenment, for it requires the control of great destructive energies. Any race which can't rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf.

  Across from the Optimists sat the Pessimists, who genuflected before graven images of Saint Fermi and a host of lesser lightweights. The Pessimists envisioned a lonely universe full of dead rocks and prokaryotic slime. The odds are just too low, they insisted. Too many rogues, too much radiation, too much eccentricity in too many orbits. It is a surpassing miracle that even one Earth exists; to hope for many is to abandon reason and embrace religious mania. After all, the universe is fourteen billion years old: if the galaxy were alive with intelligence, wouldn't it be here by now?

  Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didn't have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials— but if there are any, they said, they're not just going to be smart. They're going to be mean.

  It might seem almost too obvious a conclusion. What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots? But the subject wasn't merely Human history, or the unfair advantage that tools gave to any given side; the oppressed snatch up advanced weaponry as readily as the oppressor, given half a chance. No, the real issue was how those tools got there in the first place. The real issue was what tools are for.