Existence (54 page)

It’s a crystal skull. One of those weird relics that people get all mystical about, in films even sillier than mine. Though most proved to be modern hoaxes.

Of course, “most” was not the same as “all.” Archaeologists did admit that a few seemed genuinely ancient, but still just works of art—natural chunks of quartz that had been laboriously chiseled and rubbed by artisans in olden times—showing no sign of mystical properties. Yet, some of the strange skullptures had never been put under public, high-tech scrutiny, allowing fervid tales to keep swirling.

I recall, one of them was kept in Switzerland, in private hands.

He never cared enough to learn more than that. Ancient occult artifacts were never a propelling topic for Hamish. Not as much as dangerous scientific innovations and Things Man Was Never Meant to Know. Nevertheless, there had always been something alluring about the works of authors and sceneasts like Joanne Sawyer and Ari Stone-Bear, who spun tales of mystery and wonder around arcane objects from the enigmatic past.

Someone—Tenskwatawa—reached out to touch the translucent cranium—pushing with a fingertip. Turning it till the rictus grin and sunken eye sockets almost faced Hamish, glowing with an expression of fey amusement …

… when a sudden shaft of brilliance gleamed, spearing him right through the contaict lens with a shrapnel-clutter of overlapping images—

—a
planet
of dark continents and narrows seas, conveyed in murky tans and grainy grays, except for a single, wavy band that flickered with detailed color, from azure seashore to snowcapped, purple peaks—

—a jumbled, jigsaw
cityscape
that stirred together a tangle of mud huts, skyscrapers, stilt houses, and gleaming domes, topped by thatched roofs—

—a crumpled mosaic of
faces,
jaggedly combining beaks and jaws and fluted stalks that, while twisted together unnaturally, seemed to snort and cry out with some kind of delirious urgency.

The impression lasted only a couple of seconds. Then it was gone. Benumbed with shock, Hamish sought refuge in logic. In scientific speculation.

That jumble of degraded images … mixed and overlapping chaotically … they could be remnants of holographic memory. Unlike the Havana Artifact, this one offers just a few surviving fragments, retained after the thing was damaged.

Perhaps by the primitive artists who used powders and stones to grind and polish it into a shape worthy of veneration, never knowing how much harm they were doing … or else even earlier, when the crystal came crashing to Earth.

Broken and ruined, unable to communicate clearly, perhaps it could only offer brief snatches of ambiguous confusion and dreamlike images. Enough to terrify our primitive ancestors with thoughts of death. Maybe inspiring other tribes to make their own crystal skulls, in vain efforts to duplicate its power. No wonder oligarchs like Rupert thought this too disturbing to share with the easily alarmed masses.

Hamish turned his attention to Glaucus-Worthington. To the unhappy look on the man’s face.

But didn’t Rupert just say something? That this showy display started only last night? Perhaps the skull never wakened—but for rare flickers—till a few hours ago.

Only … why now?

Hamish had no trouble coming up with a most likely hypothesis.

Oh my.

TORALYZER

This is Tor—“Zep-girl”—Povlov, reporting to you from my new beat. Web-Eighteen, level Z12. The hippest, heppest hot-hit-hat … or not-this-
that
 … in the Mesh. And, yes, I come before you as a purely-pearly virtue-virtual, wearing the nimbus halo of a holy-hollow holo. Hello? You expected, like, veri-real shots of the Heroine of Washing-tin? My current-realtime phys-visage?

Granny would say,
as if!
That cadaver-shell is just container-support. I live here now, in the Over-World. Pat this avatar on the back, I feel it. If I ever let one of you horny fans talk me into a back room privirtcy (or pervertcy), the sustainer pod’ll convey it. Nothing wrong with the old Tor’s hormonal system!

(Sure … like THAT’s going to happen! Still, you can keep offering.)

So yes, there’s still plenty of “me” left. And one thing I promise—I’ll never let my presence here run on aitopilot.

Tell you what. Help boost my ratings, and MediaCorp may spring for a more palp-able holvatar. Even one of those android-mobiles, I can send to chase down real-layer stories. Meanwhile, though, there’s plenty to occupy us here, in the Val-hall-levels, where citizen/amateur heroes like you can hunt iniquities, skewering lies with lances of transparency and light! Like we did, together, back on the old
Spirit of Chula Vista.

So let’s get started.

*   *   *

What? Many of you want to hear about me, first? What it’s like to live this way?

Each year, hundreds of catastrophically injured people become gel-encased refugees, like me, who experience life through remote sensors, rather than organic eyes and flesh. Though the Mesh is home, we’re not “uploaded” cybernetic beings. Cams and sensors still feed old-fashioned nerve channels of a very wetbrain.

For some it’s a painful, limited life, that only fools would envy. Still, tens of thousands of normal, undamaged homosaps climb into hook-in tanks and risk body-atrophy, trying to follow us “pioneers” down the path of the living holvatar.

I hope none of you are such fools. Just one person in a hundred manages to make the transition as well as I have—swooping about the datalanes, veering from hunch to correlation to corroboration. Links that used to require a laborious eyeblink or tooth-click now happen by sheer will … or whim … quickly submerging to the level of reflex.…

All right, I just made it sound attractive, didn’t I? Well, don’t go there, any of you. It still hurts! And there are puzzling
itches,
in the way data often seems to stroke my skin and tingle up the spine. None of the docs can explain. Then there’s the creepy sensation that someone’s
calling my name
. Not this moniker I use in the news biz. Not what my mother called me, but some kind of
secret name,
like in stories about magic spells and such.

Okay, it’s clearly a lingering wash of escapism/slash/self-pity … and so let’s push that aside with the balm of work!
Smart-mob time.
Like a swarm of T cells, let’s swoop onto something in the news!

What? You want to make the space Artifact our topic? All of you? Isn’t everybody else on the planet obsessing …

No, you’re right. Most of the reporting is stodgy. The insights stale. I share the group hunch. We can do better.

41.

THE OLD WAY

Peng Xiang Bin tried hard to follow the conversation—partly out of fascination. But also because he felt desperate to please.

If I prove useful to them—more than a mere on-off switch for the worldstone—it could mean my life. I might even get to see Mei Ling and Xiao En again.

That goal wasn’t coming easy. The others kept talking way over his head. Nor could he blame them. After all, who was he?
What
was he, but another piece of driftwood-trash, washed up on a beach, who happened to pick up a pretty rock? Should he demand they explain everything?
Dui niu tanqin …
it would be like playing a lute to a cow.

Except they needed his ongoing service as communicator-ambassador to the entity within that rock—and he seemed to be performing that task well enough. At least according to Dr. Nguyen, who was always friendly to Bin.

The tech-search experts—Anna Arroyo and Paul Menelaua—clearly were dubious about this ill-educated Huangpu shoresteader with his weathered skin and rough diction, who kept taking up valuable time with foolish questions. Those two would be happier, he knew, if the honor of direct contact with the Courier entity were taken over by someone else.

Only,
can
the role be passed along at all? If I died, would it transfer to another?
Surely they had mulled that tempting thought.

Or do I have some special trait—something that goes beyond being the first man in decades to lay eyes on the worldstone? Without me, might there be a long search before they found another?
That possibility was one he must foster. At some point it might keep him breathing.

Anyway, I do not have to prove myself their equal,
Bin reminded himself.
My role is like the first performer in a Chinese opera, who does not have to sing especially well. Just dance around a little and help warm up the audience. Be useful, not the star.

“Clearly, this mechanism in our possession was dispatched across interstellar space by different people, with different motives, than those who sent the Havana Artifact,” commented Yang Shenxiu, the scholar from New Beijing, who rested one hand on the worldstone without causing more than a ripple under its cloudy surface—giving Bin a moment of satisfaction.
It reacts a lot more actively to my touch!

With his other hand, Yang motioned toward a large placard-image screen for comparison. In lustrous threevee, it showed the alien object under study in Maryland, America, surrounded by researchers from around the world—a bustle of activity watched by billions and supervised by Gerald Livingstone, the astronaut who discovered and collected that “herald egg” from orbit.

To most of the world, that is the sole one in existence. Only a few suspect that such things have been encountered before, across the centuries. And even fewer have certain knowledge of another active stone, held in secret, here in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean.

Bin contemplated the three-dimensional image of his counterpart, a clever and educated man, a scientist and space traveler and probably the world’s most famous person right now. In other words, different from poor little Peng Xiang Bin in every conceivable way.
Except that he looks as tired and worried as I feel.

Watching Livingstone, Bin felt a connection, as if with another
chosen one.
The keeper-guardian of a frightening oracle from space. Even if they found themselves on opposite sides of an ancient struggle.

Paul Menelaua answered Yang Shenxiu by describing a long list of physical differences in excruciating detail—the Havana Artifact was larger, longer, and more knobby at one end, for example. And, clearly, less damaged. Well, it never had to suffer the indignities of fiery passage through Earth’s atmosphere, or pummeling impact with a mountain glacier, or centuries of being poked at by curious or reverential or terrified tribal humans … not to mention a couple of thousand years buried in a debris pit, then decades soaking in polluted waters underneath a drowned mansion. Bin found himself reacting defensively on behalf of “his” worldstone.

I’d like to see Livingstone’s famous Havana Artifact come through all that, and still be capable of telling vague, mysterious stories.

Of course, that was the chief trait both ovoids had in common.

“… so, yes, there are evident physical differences. Still, anyone can tell at a glance that they use the same underlying technologies. Capacious and possibly unlimited holographic memory storage. Surface sonic transduction at the wider end … but with most communications handled visually, both in pictorial representation and through symbol manipulation. Some surface tactile sensitivity. And, of course an utter absence of moving parts.”

“Yes, there are those commonalities,” Anna Arroyo put in. “Still, the Havana Artifact projects across a wider spectrum than this one—and it portrays a whole community of simulated alien species, while ours depicts only one.”

Dr. Nguyen nodded, his elegantly decorated braids rattling. “It would be a good guess to imagine that one species or civilization sent out waves of these things, and the technology was copied by others—”

“Who proceeded to cast forth modified stones of their own, incorporating representatives of all the diverse members of their growing civilization,” concluded Anna. “Until one of those races decided to break the tradition, by offering a
dissenting
point of view.”

Bin took advantage of this turn in the conversation—away from technical matters and back to the general story their own worldstone had been telling.

“Isn’t … is it not … clear who came second? Courier warns us not to pay attention to
liars.
It seems … I mean, is it not clear that he refers to the creatures who dwell within the Havana Artifact?”

Of course they were amused by his stumbling attempts to speak a higher grade of Beijing dialect, with classier grammar and less Huangpu accent or slang. But he also knew there were many
types
of amusement. And, while Anna and Paul might feel the contemptuous variety, it was the indulgent smile of Dr. Nguyen that mattered. He seemed approving of Bin’s earnest efforts.

“Yes, Xiang Bin. We can assume—for now—that our worldstone is speaking of the Havana Artifact—or things like it—when it warns against
enemies and liars
. The question is—what should we do about this?”

“Warn everyone!” suggested Yang Shenxiu. “You’ve seen how the other worldstone has thrown the entire planet into a tizzy, with that story told by the
emissary
creatures who reside within. Although it remains frustratingly unspecific, their tale is one of profound and disarmingly blithe
optimism,
confidently assuring us that humanity is welcome to join a benign interstellar community. In this era of nihilism and despair, people across every continent are rushing to believe and put their trust in the aliens!”

“And is that necessarily such a bad thing?” asked Anna.

“It could be, if it is based upon some kind of lie!” Paul interjected. He and Anna faced each other, with intensity filling their expressions, till an outside voice broke into their confrontation.

“What about others?”

Menelaua glared at Bin for interrupting, his look so fierce that Bin shrank back and had to be coaxed into resuming. “Please continue, son,” Dr. Nguyen urged. “What others are you talking about?”