Existence (14 page)

DR. SPEARPATH:
We do not make that assumption!

PROFESSOR NOOZONE:
But oh my, your search strategy implies it, Hannah! Aiming big, stooshy telescope arrays toward one target at a time, analyzing the radio spectrum from that candidate solar system, then doin’ the
ten-toe turbo
as you stroll on to the next one.…

DR. SPEARPATH:
Sometimes we take in whole globular clusters. We frequently return to the galactic center. There are also timing-pattern scenarios, having to do with the light cone of certain events, like novas, that turn our attention certain ways. We have an eclectic program.

PROFESSOR NOOZONE:
That be most-surely laudable. Still, your approach clings to an assumption—that benevolent aliens make great-profligate beacons that blare inna cosmos
continuously,
day after day, year after year,
ray-ray
just for neo-races like us, using SETI programs like yours.

But Hannah, that ignores so-many possibles. Like suppose de cosmos be more dangerous than you think. Maybe ET stays quiet because
him knows something we don’t
!

DR. SPEARPATH:
(sighs) More paranoia.

PROFESSOR NOOZONE:
No way, Doctor, me I’m just thorough. But dere be a bigger plaint, based on
hard-nose economics.

MARCIA KHATAMI:
Economics, Professor? You mean, as in money?

DR. SPEARPATH:
Alien capitalists? Investment bankers? This gets better and better. How unimaginative to assume that an advanced civilization will manage itself just like us.

MARCIA KHATAMI:
(chuckles) Now, Doctor, no one can accuse Profnoo of being—
unimaginative
. We’ll come back and discuss how economics might affect advanced aliens after this break.

13.

METASTABLE

If only I could be more than one person.

It was a frequent wish. As life kept getting busier, Hamish delegated as much as he could, but things kept piling up. The more successful he became, the more beleaguered he felt.

Standing on a balcony overlooking the lanai of his Clearwater compound, gazing past palm trees, mansions, and surf-ruins toward the sparkling Gulf of Mexico, he could hear the musical jangle of calls coming in, answered by two secretaries, three assistants, and far too many soft-aissistors to count.

To hell with being “influential” and saving the world! Wasn’t I happier when it was just me and the old qwerty keyboard? And my characters. Just give me an arrogant villain and some Big Technological Mistake. A gutsy heroine. A mouthy hero. I’d be set for months.

All right, I also liked doing movies. Before Hollywood collapsed.

Only now? There is the Cause. Important, of course. But with trillionaires joining their great power behind it, can’t the movement do without me for a week? Let me get some writing done?

Clutching the wrought iron balustrade, he recognized one of those phone melodies—a call he couldn’t refuse. After the first ring, it started vibrating a flesh-colored plug in his ear.

He refused to tap a tooth and answer. Somebody downstairs should pick up. Take a message.

But no one did. Well trained, his staff knew that tune was for him alone. Still, he kept his gaze on the horizon, where several rows of once-expensive villas used to line the old beachfront, now jutting skeletally from the roiling tide. In the distance, he heard the day and night rumble as Conservation Corps crews extended a network of shoreline dikes and dunes. Keeping Florida a state, and not paradise lost.

A new Flood is coming.…

After a third ring—damned technology—the synthetic voice of Wriggles spoke up.

“It is Tenskwatawa. We are behooved.”

Hamish relented, giving the slightest nod of permission. A faint click followed …

… and he winced as sudden, rhythmic, thumping sounds assaulted one eardrum. Dampers kicked in, filtering the cadence down to a bearable level. It was a four-four tempo, heavy on the front beat.

“Brookeman! You there? Damn it, how come you’re not wearing specs?”

Hamish grew tired of explaining why he only used aiware when necessary. You’d think a leader of the Renunciation Movement would understand.

“Where are you calling from, Prophet?”

“Puget Sound. A Quinalt potlatch ceremony. They hand-carve their own canoes and spears, stage a big sea hunt where they stab a robot orca, then come back and feast on vat-grown whale meat. Vat-grown! Bunch of tree-hugging fairies.

“Never mind. Have you made any progress on the Basque Chimera?”

“Both mother and child have gone underground. And pretty effectively. I figure they got help from elements in the First Estate.”

“I suspected as much. It’s not as if they could hide in plain sight. So. I’ll put some pressure on the trillies. It’s time for them to stop playing both sides and choose. One thing about aristos, they have an instinct for self-preservation.”

“True enough, sir.”

“So, what about that thing with Senator Strong? It’d be great if he can be salvaged. He’s been an asset.”

“I’ve been home one day,” Hamish answered. “I did hire a team of ex-FBI guys to gather prelims through discreet channels. Tap government files and such. Investigate the fellow who claims to have poisoned the senator. Forty-eight hours to gather background, before I take an overall look.”

“One of your trademark
Big Picture
brainstorms? Wish I could watch you do that some time.”

Hamish bit back a sullen response. It used to be flattering when important men asked him to consult and offer a wide perspective—pointing out things they missed. Now, the fun was gone. Especially since Carolyn pointed out something that should have been obvious.

“A hundred years from now, Hammi, what will be left of you?” she asked on the day they parted, ending all the anger and shouting with a note of regret. “Do you expect gratitude for all this conspiring with world-movers? Or to go down in history? Pick any of your novels. A book will still be around—read and enjoyed by millions—after that other crap has long faded. Long after your body is dust.”

Of course she was right. Yet, Hamish knew how the Prophet would answer. Without the Cause, there might not
be
any humanity, a century from now, to read novels or do anything else.

Still, thinking of Carolyn, he knew—she had also been talking about their marriage. That, too, was important. It should have been treated as something to last.

Tenskwatawa’s voice continued in his ear.
“But that’s not why I’m calling. Can you get linked right away? There’s news coming in. And I already have my plate full. Got to attend a conference with some aristocracy in Switzerland. One of the big
newblesse
clans may finally get onboard and join the movement.”

“That’s great news.”

“Yeah, well, we need those rich bastards, so I can’t turn away, even when something more urgent turns up.”

Hamish felt pleasure turn to worry. “Something more urgent than getting support from some First Estate trillionaires?”

“I’m afraid so.”
Tenskwatawa paused.
“One of our people, Carlos Ventana, just managed to slide a blip to us, past NASA security. He reports that something big is up.”

“Ventana,” Hamish mused. The name was familiar. A rich Latin. Used to own the entire phone company in Brazil or someplace, till they broke his monopoly as part of the Big Deal. Then he moved into fertilizer.

“Did you say NASA? Are they still in business?”

“He’s playing tourist right now on the space station.”

“You mean the old research station. Not the High Hilton or Zheng Ho-tel?” Hamish shook his head, wondering why a bazillionaire would spend good money to go drift in filth for a month.

“That’s right. Wanted an authentic experience, I guess. Anyway, it’s pure luck—or destiny—that we had a friend aboard when it happened.”

“It? What happened?” Hamish barely quashed his irritation.

“The astronauts grabbed or recovered something out there. It’s got them all lathered up.”

“But what could they possibly have found that—”

“Details are sketchy. But it may be a second-order disturber. Perhaps even first-order.”

Hamish himself had come up with the “disturber” nomenclature a decade ago to classify innovations or new technologies that could threaten humanity’s fragile stability. Leaders of the Movement embraced his terminology, but Hamish always had trouble remembering the exact definitions. Of course, with specs on, he might have asked Wriggles for help.

“First order…,” he mulled.

“Oh, Jesus walks in the Andes. Do I have to spell it out, man? Government spacemen haul something in from the deep dark beyond … and it starts talking to them! Apparently, they’re deciphering a series of communications protocols, even as we speak!”

“Talking? You mean…”

“Maybe not real conversation. But enough to send folks running down the halls of the White House and Blue House and Yellow House, looking all sweaty. Even worse, too many pros in the pencil pushers’ guild know about it already—damned civil servants—for us to exert pressure and get a presidential clamp put on. News is gonna get out this time, Hamish.”

“From … space…” He blinked several times. “Either it’s a provocation—or a hoax—maybe some Chinese—”

“We should be so lucky!”

Hamish forged on.

“—or else, it is the real thing. Something alien. Oh man.”

Now it was Tenskwatawa who paused, letting the background beat of drums fill a pause between them. Bridging regular gaps of time, like the pounding of a heart.

“Oh man is right,”
the Prophet finally murmured.

“This may be nothing. Or perhaps we can strike another deal with the pencil pushers. Distract the public and keep the lid on, once again.

“Still, it has terrible potential. We could be in real trouble, my friend. All of us. All of humankind.”

ENTROPY

What of destruction by devastating war? Shall we admit that our species passed one test, by
not
plunging into an orgy of atomic destruction?

Millions still live who recall the Soviet-American standoff—the Cold War—when tens of thousands of hydrogen bombs were kept poised in submarines, bombers, and silos. Half a dozen men at any time, some of them certifiably unstable, held the hair trigger to unleash nuclear mega-death. Any of a dozen crises might have ended civilization, or even mammalian life on Earth.

One sage who helped build the first atom bomb put it pungently.
“When has man, bloody down to his soul, invented a new weapon and foresworn using it?”
Cynics thought it hopeless, given a basic human reflex for rage and convulsive war.

But it didn’t happen. Not even Awfulday or the Pack-It-Ind affair set off the unthinkable. Were we scared back from that brink, sobered to our senses by the warning image of a mushroom cloud? Chastened and thus saved by an engine of death?

Might the cynics have been altogether wrong? There was never any proof that vicious conflict is woven into human DNA. Yes, it was pervasive during the long, dark era of tribes and kings, from Babylon and Egypt to Mongolia, Tahiti, and Peru. Between 1000 C.E. and 1945, the longest period of uninterrupted peace in Europe was a fifty-one-year stretch between the Battle of Waterloo and the Austro-Prussian War. That tranquil period came amid the industrial revolution, as millions moved from farm to city. Was it harder, for a while, to find soldiers? Or did people feel too busy to fight?

Oh, sure, industry
then
made war more terrible than ever. No longer a matter of macho glory, it became a death-orgy, desired only by monsters, and fought grimly, by decent men, in order to defeat those monsters.

Then, Europe’s serenity resumed. Descendants of Viking raiders, centurions and Huns transmuted into pacifists. Except for a few brush fires, ethnic ructions, and terror hits, that once-ferocious continent knew peace for a century, becoming the core of a peaceful and growing EU.

One theory holds that democracies seldom war against each other. Nations ruled by aristocracies were more impulsive, spendthrift, and violent. But however you credit this change—to prosperity or education, to growing worldwide contacts or the American Pax—it shattered the notion that war burns, unquenchable and ineradicable in the human character.

The good news? Violent self-destruction isn’t programmed in. Whether or not we tumble into planet-burning war isn’t foreordained. It is a wide-open matter of choice.

The bad news is exactly the same.

It’s a matter of choice.

—Pandora’s Cornucopia

14.

TREASURE

Night had fallen some time ago and now his torch batteries were failing. That, plus sheer exhaustion, forced Peng Xiang Bin, at last, to give up salvaging anything more from the hidden cache that he had found underneath a sunken mansion. Anyway, with the compressed air bottle depleted, his chest now burned from repeated free dives through that narrow opening, made on lung power alone, snatching whatever he could—whatever sparkle caught his eye down there.

You will die if you keep this up,
he finally told himself.
And someone else will get the treasure.
That thought made it firm.

Still, even without any more trips inside, there was work to do. Yanking some decayed boards off the sea floor, Bin dropped them to cover the new entrance that he’d found, gaping underneath the house foundation. And then one final dive through dark shallows to kick sand over it all. Finally, he rested for a while with one arm draped over his makeshift raft, under the dim glow of a quarter moon.

Do not the sages counsel that a wise man must spread ambition, like honey across a bun? Only a greedy fool tries to swallow all of his good fortune in a single bite.