Lord of All Things (57 page)

“He’s coming,” Bud the Brain announced.

But Kato must have noticed something. Whatever it was, he went neither left nor right but instead ducked lightning-fast under a
N
O
E
NTRY
tape and scuttled off upstairs to a part of the airport Bud hadn’t scouted out.

Shit. This wasn’t going to be so boring after all.

“Brain to all. He smelled a rat. He’s gone up the stairs behind immigration. Anybody know what’s up there?”

A crackling sound. Someone spoke, giggling. “Nothing. There’s nothing up there.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? There has to be something. There are stairs leading up.”

It was Sergei. Until just a couple of weeks ago, Sergei had worked here as a pickpocket, and he knew this airport better than the architect who built it. “Customs and Border Protection are supposed to have their offices there when they clear out of Terminal One. October, maybe. Till then there’s nothing up there but empty rooms and locked doors.”

“Where can he get out?”

“Nowhere,” Sergei giggled again. “Dead end. Our friend has run right into a trap.”

So it was going to be boring after all. “Okay, let’s go get him. Yellow Group to me, Blue Group covers.”

He waited on the stairs with his free hand in his pocket near his gun in case the guy came back and wanted a fight. That would cause a bit of a stir, but it would be better than letting the guy get away. Coldwell would straighten it all out if need be. But it didn’t come to that. The four men in Yellow Group were there quick as greased lightning. Bud lifted the
N
O
E
NTRY
tape. He was wearing airport overalls and had an ID clipped to his breast, so no one paid any attention. And up they went.

The corridor was empty. Most of the doors were still in plastic wrap, with even the locks sealed shut. They were locked and loaded when they came around the first corner. Another empty corridor.

Sergei grinned. “Nothing doing,” he said. “Corridor stops around that next corner.”

Bud grinned, too. He cleared his throat and called out, “Mr. Kato? We know that you’re there. We don’t want to have to do anything to you. We just want to bring you to meet someone who really needs to talk to you.”

No answer. He signaled to Sergei, who checked his gun and then peered around the corner. He turned around. “You sure he came up here?”

Shit
, thought Bud the Brain when he looked as well. The rest of the corridor was empty. The hallway ended in a wall of ivory-tinted construction slats, and there was no sign of anyone.

“Shit!” Bud shouted. “Come on, get back, go go go. He must have gone through one of the doors.”

“How do you figure he did that?” Sergei was beginning to get on his nerves. “Those are deadbolts. Good ones. Customs and Border, you get me? Nothing but the best for those guys.”

“He’s got to be somewhere.”

“You really sure he even came up here?”

“Are you looking for a smack across the chops?”

They raced back to the staircase and then worked their way down all the doors. There was one with a security seal missing, and they broke it open. Nothing there but a huge open space that ran the whole length of the corridor. Still a building site; the dividing walls hadn’t even been installed yet. There was no other exit, and no footprints. It was as though Kato had vanished into thin air. All at once Bud the Brain understood why Coldwell had warned him, “Expect the guy to have a few tricks up his sleeve.”

This must have been the kind of thing he meant.

Hiroshi stood motionless behind the wall. He had only just managed to let it down in time, with the help of his Wand and the nanites. He held his breath and listened. He heard them come nearer, talking in animated voices, and then leave again. Right after that he heard a crash; obviously, they had broken open one of the doors he had passed, expecting to find him behind it. He looked down and, peering at the display on his Wand, scrolled noiselessly through the stored command sequences. There was only limited space in the memory. He had moved the tunnel-building program back onto his laptop when he had been working on the hunter complex. Bad mistake. Luckily, the garage-building program was still there. And luckily it had managed to build a very strangely shaped garage—no roof, a garage door that was only four inches across and faced the wall of the corridor, out of sight, and the slatted walls reaching from floor to ceiling.

That had been close. Way too close.

However, he now knew he had been too unsure of himself back in Hawaii when he was worried he couldn’t spot a tail; he’d been able to see these guys in time. The question was whether they would be so conspicuous next time. Probably not. There was no question of whether there would be a next time. There would be, without a doubt.

It eventually fell quiet. Hiroshi nevertheless waited another two hours, which was torture in the narrow confines of his hiding place. Once the air became unbreathable, he triggered the program that ordered the nanites to return every atom they had moved right back where it came from. Within minutes the wall was gone without a trace.

The corridor was deserted; no one was waiting for him. When he was ducking back under the tape at the bottom of the stairs, a guard showed up and barked at him, asking what he wanted. Couldn’t he see there was no civilian access here?

“I thought I might find the restroom up there,” Hiroshi replied.

“Up ahead on the left,” the man snarled, waving his hand vaguely. “Just follow the symbols.”

Hiroshi thanked him and then vanished into the crowd. He would have to make a decision.

6

Hiroshi sat in the car and watched the quiet suburban street and the house of Rodney and Allison Alvarez. He had been their guest so many times, and he was about to visit the house for the last time.

They were both home. He had seen them arrive, seen them use the garage as though it were the most natural thing in the world and had stood there forever. He liked that.

He glanced over at the newspaper on the seat next to him. “Are Sharks Now Extinct?”
read one of the front-page headlines. He didn’t like that.

Nobody had made the connection yet, but it was only a matter of time. Hiroshi had read in an article about Minamata disease that sharks were especially prone to accumulating methyl mercury; some of them had so much stored in their body that only five grams of their flesh contained more than the safe daily dose for humans. No wonder they had been the principal victims of his collector nanites.

He sighed and got out of the car. Every step was an effort.

They were surprised to see him, and genuinely happy. Allison feigned outrage. “All I made is spaghetti! If you’d told us you were coming—”

“Spaghetti’s great,” Hiroshi said to calm her down.

“And what you did with the garage…and the news about the alien probe…Rod told me everything, but to be honest I wouldn’t have believed a word if it hadn’t been for the garage standing there all of a sudden…A garage! Of all things! I have a million questions for you, just so you know.”

Hiroshi had to smile. “Do I have to answer all of them here in the front hall?”

“No, of course not. Oh, I’m not being much of a host. Come right on in, come on. Wait, I’ll get another plate and some flatware…Rod, can you look after the wine?”

Then they were sitting at the table, and by some miracle there was enough spaghetti for three. “I always cook twice what we need and make the rest into noodle salad for work,” Allison explained. “As for the tomato sauce, well, you can stretch that out with something from the can.”

“It tastes great,” Hiroshi assured her.

“Enjoy your meal,” she said, pointing her fork at him. “Because afterward you’re going to have to tell us every last detail about the extraterrestrials, about their probe, the works. Listen, I want to persuade you to let us make it all public. I mean, if we can show solid proof that the aliens launched a probe that landed on Earth thousands of years ago, it would be the sensation of the century. And who has more right to make the announcement that we do at SETI? It’s right there in the name—searching for extraterrestrial intelligence is what we do. Okay, so you made Rodney promise not to say a word, but why? I mean…you’re really going to have to explain yourself.”

“That’s why I came,” Hiroshi said.

“Let the man finish his meal, Ally,” Rodney said. “Hey, did you buy new dishes?”

Allison was caught off guard and looked mistrustfully at her husband. “Don’t try to change the subject. When have I ever bought new dishes without asking you first…oh.” She looked down at her plate. “That’s really weird. I just used our ordinary…look at it shine; it’s kind of golden. Is that from the light in here?” She lifted it up. “Hey, this is really heavy!”

“It’s gold,” Hiroshi said. It was time they knew.

Rodney frowned. “Is this another of your tricks?”

“What kind of trick?” Allison put in.

Hiroshi nodded. “As I sit here there are billions of nanites swarming all around me. They’re in my body, in the air around me, in the floor under my feet. On my way over they were gathering atoms of gold from all around, building up a stockpile, bringing them along. Then when I sat down at your table they began to bring these gold atoms in here along a microscopically thin tube that’s running through the ground beneath your house and up one of the table legs. There were also nanites at work in the tabletop itself, gradually taking away all the atoms from the porcelain of your plates and replacing them with gold atoms. I told them to work from the inside out so we wouldn’t see the gold shine until it was all ready. Which is why you now have three plates of solid gold.”

The two of them stared at him open-mouthed.

“Just my way of saying thank you for the meal,” Hiroshi said mildly, and thought,
Just saying good-bye. This is the last time we’ll see each other.

Allison blinked, looked down at her plate, and admitted in a flat voice, “I don’t even know what porcelain’s made of.” It was a strangely inappropriate reaction that proved how deeply surprised she was.

“Kaolin, feldspar, and quartz,” Hiroshi said. “Whole lot of silicon and oxygen, a little bit of sodium and aluminum.”

“And how did the…nanites know not to turn the spaghetti to gold as well?”

“Spaghetti’s made of starch. Polysaccharides. They’re as different as night and day.”

Allison put her face in her hands and took a deep breath. “Oh my God!” she said as she lowered her hands. “Plates that turn to pure gold as I eat off them! This is so crazy, I don’t even know what to say.”

Rodney looked Hiroshi up and down. “And how did you tell them to do all this? I don’t see your Wizard’s Wand.”

“I no longer need my Wand. The nanites are now directly linked to my brain. They read my thoughts, so to speak.”

“Linked to your brain?” Rodney was round-eyed with wonder. “You cannot seriously mean that?”

“I do, Rodney. I discovered a function that built me a neural interface—”

“Are you trying to tell me that alien technology is compatible with the human neuronal structure?” A gleam appeared in Rodney’s eyes. He was not far from getting angry.

Hiroshi carefully put down his flatware. He knew this was an evening unlike any other. “There’s an explanation,” he said. “But you’re not going to like it.”

“Spit it out. And let me worry about whether I like it or not.”

“The probe wasn’t what we thought. In fact, it’s something else entirely.”

And he told them.

One week later astronomers performing routine observations of the night sky noticed a bright object in the constellation of Pisces that was moving unusually fast. It didn’t take them long to establish it was headed on a course directly for Earth. They pointed the Hubble Space Telescope toward it and got pictures of a long, thin object at least twelve miles long and at least three miles across. It was huge. If this object collided with Earth, it would mean the end of all life.

The heads of state of all the space-capable nations consulted with one another. More-or-less-detailed plans that had been drawn up for deep-impact scenarios were hastily recovered from desk drawers, where they had been gathering dust. It turned out that most of them were hopelessly out of date. Despite their best efforts to keep the matter secret, there was no clamping down entirely. Rumors began circulating on the Internet of a meteorite on a collision course with Earth. Government spokesmen declined to comment on the rumors. Meanwhile, the military were calculating the range on their nuclear missiles, and surprising alliances formed between formerly hostile powers. Satellites and radar antennae all turned toward the object as it approached.

What they discovered sent a shiver down the spines of all who heard it.

The computer simulations clearly showed that the object was not going to collide with Earth. It was
slowing down
…

7

Today was the day. Though his computer reminded him of that fact, there was no need. He wouldn’t have forgotten.

Jens Rasmussen went to his office safe, opened it, and took out the padded envelope Hiroshi Kato had pressed into his hands the last time they saw each other. He had named a day and said, “If I don’t get in touch by then, open this.”

He did so. Inside were a sheet of paper and a rewritable CD. He read the letter, choked for breath, then read it through again. “If everything has worked as I planned, then a very large object will have been moving toward Earth for the last several days,” he read in Hiroshi’s neat, elegant handwriting. “Maybe this has not become public knowledge yet, but there could be rumors; they’re true. I have recorded a short lecture on the accompanying CD that explains the whole story. Please send the file to the press, and put it on the Internet
.
”

What was this all about? Rasmussen took the CD from its jewel case, slotted it into his computer drive, and started the video. Hiroshi Kato appeared on the screen. He was sitting in the chair by the window of his meditation room, the garden visible behind him through the window. He wasn’t smiling. He held a neat little stack of index cards in his hands that presumably held the notes for what he was going to say, though he never looked at them once.

“Most of you will remember the mysterious rocket launch in the north of the Canadian province of Saskatchewan,” he began. “I did that. I built the launch site, I sent the rocket on its way, and then I dismantled the site, which regrettably caused considerable damage to that region. What most of you don’t know is that there was already one such mysterious launch, from a Russian island. At the time it was officially designated a test launch, and it dropped out of the headlines quite quickly. In the next few minutes I will tell you what actually happened and how that relates to the object currently approaching Earth.”

He told the whole story of what had happened on Saradkov Island, about the probe that had landed on Earth thousands of years ago and been frozen in the eternal ice ever since, and about what had happened when it became active. He explained how he had saved some of the nanites to research on his own. He sketched out his own studies in self-replicator theory, and how this had helped him to unriddle how these nanites worked.

“The megastructure currently approaching Earth is a space station, a habitat for at least a million people. It was built by the nanites I sent out to the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars. It’s an area where the remains of a former planet orbit the sun. These asteroids are a rich resource for mining all kinds of materials, which is what the nanites duly did, following my orders. First they replicated until there were enough of them—meaning trillions upon trillions of them, so many that we barely have the words to express such numbers. We have to rely on powers of ten. Next, they set out to build the space station out there in the twilight of the asteroid belt in interplanetary space. Once they were done, the nanites withdrew and gave the station its launch command, which fired the rockets to set it off toward Earth. By my calculations it will take up a stable orbit around Earth within a few weeks, ready for the moment when we decide to settle it.

“I would like to be able to say I built this space station, but that’s not actually the case. Rather, the control unit of every nano-complex contains an information-storage function that we might best imagine as equivalent to the DNA within our cells. Our DNA contains something like a history of all human evolution, with genes that—to simplify somewhat—could help us grow limbs and organs that we no longer need, and these genes are switched off. Similarly, these information-storage functions contain the blueprints for objects that were not part of the task the nanites were launched into space to fulfill. There are millions of these blueprints. They’re hard to understand, and it will take decades even to find out what each one of these programs can build. And even once we know that, we will still know very little about what these objects are and what they are capable of.

“I’m saying all this to tell you that the blueprint for the space station was supplied by the creators of the nanites. However, they didn’t include the instructions. Meaning that anyone who goes near it should do so with all due care and attention. According to my simulations, there should be no danger; there seem to be no weapons aboard or anything like that. But whoever boards the space station is in the same situation as a medieval human trying to make sense of a jumbo jet. We cannot expect to understand all that we see.

“You will ask why I did this. For a very simple reason: I wanted to point the way. The space station is large enough to be seen in the night sky from anywhere in the world, and it is built with technology far, far more advanced than our own. I invite all space-faring nations to send their expeditions to this station and to discover all of its workings. Humanity has the chance to learn an immense amount from such research.

“And that’s just the beginning. Once we have learned how to use them, the nanites could change—and improve—our lives in ways we can barely imagine today. The possibilities offered by manipulating matter at the atomic level are limitless. There will never again be any shortage either of energy or of raw materials. We will be able to recycle everything we no longer need, one hundred percent. Nobody will ever have to go hungry again; nobody will ever have to do unpleasant work. We can make a paradise on Earth—and it won’t even take any effort on our part.”

He stopped and seemed to have finished, then remembered something. “Ah yes, another thing: there won’t be just this one space station. The nanites in the asteroid belt are already at work on the next habitat, and they’re still self-replicating. In a few years’ time, there will be enough habitats available for all of us to move off-world if we so desire.”

The video ended there.

Rasmussen shut his eyes for a moment. So that had been the secret. That’s what he had been hiding all this time. He had always had the feeling Hiroshi hadn’t been telling him everything, but now…now all the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. Now it all made sense. But that wasn’t what had made him choke for breath when he read the letter. Rather, it had been the closing lines.

Jens—if you’re reading this, then chances are we’ll never see one another again. I’d like you to know that I’m very grateful for everything you’ve done for me, and I have always considered you my friend. The business side of things was just a game we played together.

All the best,

Hiroshi

They didn’t let him fasten his own seat belt—not on a space shuttle. Bill Adamson watched the man in the Roscosmos overalls check and double-check the straps and wondered once more how things could have gotten this far.

That conversation in the director’s office. How long ago had that been? Just a few days before, it seemed to him. Weeks. Months. In any event, Roberta Jacobs had not been alone; there had been a great many men in there as well when he finally entered the room, summoned from his own office by her secretary’s almost-hysterical phone calls. Old men. Men who looked exactly as important as they were. One of them could have been Sidney Poitier’s twin brother, in uniform, with yard upon yard of service ribbons across his chest.

“Space colonization is your field now,” the director said after a few words of introduction that he missed entirely, he was so surprised.

My field is robots!
But he hadn’t said so. Instead, he had simply asked, “And what does that mean in concrete terms?”

Whereupon the Sidney Poitier clone had looked at him impatiently and said, “Means you’re flying.”

Rhonda had almost flipped out when he told her. “You’re no astronaut, Bill! They can’t ask you to do that!”

“Doc says I’m fit enough.”

“They want you to fly off to an alien spaceship?”

“Someone’s got to do it,” Adamson had said, managing somehow to hide the fact that on the inside he was cheering. Hallelujah! Kato, that arrogant kid, had certainly never dreamed of this twist.
Serves him right for being too darned snooty to join the Robot 21 project
. And now he was helping Bill Adamson take the ride of his life.

On the flight over to Baikonur, it had gradually dawned on him he would be aboard one of the brand-new shuttles, and then he had suddenly had misgivings after all. He had asked someone whether there had even been any test flights.

“Of course,” they told him.

“How many?”

“One.”

Because they had to be built fast, it had been one of those harebrained international-cooperation projects, and he could only hope they hadn’t made any dumbass conversion mistakes between inches and metric. The space shuttle was strapped to a gigantic Russian carrier rocket that the Russian copilot, a shaggy blond guy called Boris, would steer during the climb. Then Jackson, the pilot, would fly the shuttle itself.

“Say, boys.” Boris’s voice came over the headset. He was talking to mission control. “How about you let us get started, huh? We don’t want the Chinese getting there before us.”

In fact, the countdown had started a while back. The hatches were closed and bolted, checklists ticked off—the whole thing sounded reassuringly routine. There were eight of them onboard, four Americans and four Russians, all scrupulously fair and politically aboveboard. The whole equal-rights arrangement only wobbled a little when you remembered that there was only one woman in the crew, a Russian engineer called Ilena.

Lift-off at last. A fist slammed him back into his seat, just as he had been warned. The soft material of the couch suddenly seemed rock hard. Breathing became difficult, and all he could do was pant and rasp. And yes, everything around him was roaring, though not as loudly as he had imagined it might. It basically felt like an uncommonly long roller-coaster ride. And judging by all the shaking and rattling, the rails had built up some rust.

Then the pressure suddenly let up, and his stomach lurched into his throat. Good thing he’d hardly had anything to eat. There was a crash somewhere that sounded as though some important part had broken.

“Carrier rocket disengaged,” Boris announced.

“Taking over controls,” Jackson said.

A moment later the shuttle’s own engines roared to life. It was louder than before, but not quite so brutal. Adamson took a ragged breath. All things considered, he’d had easier rides. Hiroshi Kato could go to hell. The way he’d shot him down at that party back then. As though the project were mere child’s play, not worth taking seriously. There had been good people working on it, good minds, the best of the best. Hiroshi Kato had been an arrogant prick. And he had been right, as everyone now knew. That was the worst of it.

Finally, they were up and away and the engines could cut out. Zero gravity. He had been warned that a great many people experienced nausea and was given a good number of sick bags just in case, but he didn’t feel anything of the sort—quite the opposite: he felt euphoric. They had to stay strapped in, of course, as the flight wasn’t over yet. But he could set his ballpoint pen floating in the air in front of him, and when he nudged it gently it would rotate, dancing around its own axis. Fascinating.

He found himself thinking of the old TV footage of the space missions and what his father had told him about Apollo 11. “Back then we thought, well, anything’s possible,” his dad had said more than once, with a visionary gleam in his eye. “We thought that’s the first step into space, nothing can stop us now. I was convinced my kids would live on the moon, that my grandkids would live on Mars, that my great-grandkids would set out for distant stars.”

Adamson had always thought his father was naive. As far as he was concerned, the moon landings went hand in hand with the summer of ’68, hippies, free love, LSD, and flower power. America had thrown one huge, collective, wild party in those days; no wonder people got a little starry-eyed when they looked back. But here and now, sitting in a space shuttle on his way to an absolutely unbelievable object, he understood his father for the first time. The first step into space. Hell, yeah!

“There it is,” Jackson suddenly said.

He could see a pale fleck out the window that was too big to be a star. The space station. The habitat orbiting Earth at a height of around eight hundred miles. Their destination. The fleck rapidly grew larger until it was a blurry circle and then bigger than the pockmarked face of the moon, growing ever larger as they approached. The space station was colossal. Six miles long. By comparison, their shuttle was a fly headed for a sixteen-wheeler. Even an aircraft carrier, if they somehow managed to boost it into space, would be small next to this. Hell, even a supertanker would have been dwarfed. What they saw out there was nothing less than a city in flight.

He tried to imagine how this incomprehensibly vast object had been built atom by atom, the way Hiroshi had explained it in his video address, by quadrillions of nano-assemblers. It was unimaginable. Now anything really was possible.
But this is all stolen tech
, Adamson told himself bitterly.
All that Hiroshi Kato did was make use of an alien technology. Nothing more than that.

They flew across its face. He found himself thinking of
Star Wars
, the sequence where Luke Skywalker and the others attack the Death Star. It was all so huge, so immense, so crowded with curious clusters of equipment, antennae, and machines.

“I keep expecting Darth Vader to show up,” Ilena said to him, and the pilot laughed in agreement.

They were all thinking the same thing. He found that oddly touching. He had to blink; there was something in his eye. Well damn it—he admired Kato. He always had but had never been able to admit it to himself. Hiroshi Kato was a genius if ever he had met one, but he hadn’t seen it; he had only ever felt threatened…how idiotic. Kato had made it; he was writing history here, preparing humanity’s way toward a better, brighter future. And he, Bill Adamson, still bore a grudge because that skinny little Japanese kid had an idea that he could have had if only…well, if only he had had it.