River of Gods (25 page)

Raja of shit.

"Come on, we've got a car to pick up."

Hand over hand, Lisa Durnau hauls herself up the tunnel into the
heart of the asteroid. The shaft is little wider than her body, the
vacuum suits are white and clinging, and Lisa Durnau cannot get the
thought out of her head that she is a NASA sperm swimming up a cosmic
yoni. She pulls herself up the white nylon rope after Sam Rainey's
receding gripsoles. The project director's feet come to a halt. She
pushes back against a knot on the rope and floats, halfway up a stone
vagina, a quarter of a million miles from home. A robot manipulator
arm squeezes past her on its way down from the core, outstretched and
creeping on little manipulator fingers. Lisa flinches as it brushes
past her compression suit. Japanese King Crabs are a childhood
horror; things chitinous and spindly. She used to dream of pulling
back the bed cover and finding one lying there, pincers weaving up
towards her face.

"What's the delay?"

"There's a turning hollow. From here on, you'll begin to feel
the effects of gravity. You don't want to be heading facedown."

"This Tabernacle doofus has its own gravity field?"

Sam Rainey's feet tuck up, he vanishes into the gloom between the
lume tubes. Lisa sees vague whiteness tumbling and manoeuvring, then
his face looks through its visor into hers.

"Just be careful not to get your arms trapped where you can't
use them."

Lisa Durnau gingerly draws herself up into the turning space. It's
just wide enough to fit a hunched body in a vacuum suit and, as Sam
warns, get yourself inextricably trapped. She grimaces at the rock
grating on her shoulders.

It's all been cramming and jamming and slamming since she was
excreted through the pressure lock into Darnley 285 Excavation
Headquarters. If ISS had smelled rancid, Darnley Base was that
distilled and casked for a year. Darnley was an unstable trinity of
space scientists, archaeologists, and oil rats from the Alaska north
slope. Darnley's greatest surprise was what the drill-crews
discovered when their bits punched through raw rock and the spycams
were lowered in. It was not a propulsion system, a mythical
space-drive. It was altogether other.

The suit she had been given was a tight-fitting skin, a microweave
smaller than a molecule of oxygen, flexible enough to move in the
confined spaces of Darnley's interior, yet with the strength to
maintain a human body against vacuum. Lisa had clung, still
vertiginous from the transfer from the shuttle, to a handhold in the
pressure lock as she felt the white fabric press ever-tighter against
her skin and one by one the crew upended themselves and dived down
the rabbit hole that was the entrance to the rock. Then it was her
turn to fight the claustrophobia and go down into the shaft. Clocks
were ticking. She had forty-five minutes to get in, get done with
whatever it was dwelt in the heart of Darnley 285, get out, and get
on to Captain Pilot Beth's shuttle before she made turnaround.

In the gullet of the asteroid, Lisa Durnau folds her arms across her
chest, pulls up her legs, and neatly somersaults. Pushing herself
down the rope she feels a little extra assistance pulling at her
feet. Now there is a distinct sensation of down and up and her
stomach starts to gurgle as it reverts to its natural orientation.
She glances between her feet. Sam Rainey's head fills the shaft;
around it is a halo. There's light down there.

A few hundred knots downshaft and she can kick off and glide in
hundred-metre swoops. Lisa whoops. She finds microgee more
exhilarating and liberating than bloated, nauseous free fall.

"Don't forget, you have to come back up again," Sam says.

Five more minutes down and the light is a bright silver shine. Lisa's
body says
half a gravity
and getting stronger by the metre.
Her mind rebels at the outrage of weight in absolute vacuum. Suddenly
Sam's head vanishes. She clings fingers and toes to the wall and
squints through her feet into a disk of silver light. She thinks she
sees a spider web of ropes and cables.

"Sam?"

"Climb down until you see a rope ladder. Grab a good hold of
that, you'll see me."

Feet first, in a too-tight sperm-suit, Lisa Durnau enters the central
cavity of Darnley 285. Beneath her feet is the web of cables and
ratlines strung around the roof of the cavern. Clinging to the guy
ropes, Lisa catwalks across the net towards Sam Rainey, who lies
prostrate on the netting.

"Don't look down," Sam warns. "Yet. Come over here and
lie beside me." Lisa Durnau eases herself prone on to a sling of
webbing and looks down into the heart of the Tabernacle.

The object is a perfect sphere of silver grey. It is the size of a
small house and hangs perfectly at the centre of gravity of the
asteroid twenty metres beneath Lisa Durnau's faceplate. It gives off
a steady, dull, metallic light. As her eyes become accustomed to the
chromium glow she becomes aware of variations, ripples of chiaroscuro
on the surface. The effect is subtle but once she has the eye for it,
she can see patterns of waves clashing and merging and throwing off
new diffraction patterns, grey on grey.

"What happens if I drop something into it?" Lisa Durnau
asks.

"Everyone asks that one," says Sam Rainey in her ear.

"Well, what does happen?"

"Try it and find out."

The only safely removable object Lisa Durnau can find is one of her
nametags. She unvelcroes it from the breast of her suit, drops it
through the web. She had imagined it would flutter. It falls straight
and true through the tight vacuum inside Darnley 285. The tag is a
brief silhouette against the light, then it vanishes into the grey
shimmer like a coin into water. Ripples race away across the surface
to clash and meld and whirl off brief vortices and spirals. It fell
faster than it should, she thinks. Another thing she noticed: it did
not pass through. It was annihilated as it intersected the surface.
Taken apart.

"The gravity increases all the way down," she observes.

"At the surface it's about fifty gees. It's like a black hole.
Except . . ."

"It's not black. So. stupid obvious question here. what is it?"

She can hear Sam's intake of breath through his teeth on her suitcom.

"Well, it gives off EM in the visible spectrum, but that's the
only information we get from it. Any remote sensing scans we perform
just die. Apart from this light, in every other respect, it is a
black hole. A light black hole."

Except it isn't, Lisa Durnau realises. It does to your radar and
X-rays what it did to my name. It takes them apart and annihilates
them. But into what? Then she becomes aware of a small, beautiful
nausea in her belly. It isn't the embrace of gravity or the worm of
claustrophobia or the intellectual fear of the alien and unknown.
It's the feeling she remembers from the women's washroom in
Paddington Station: the conception of an idea. The morning sickness
of original thought.

"Can I get a closer look at it?" Lisa Durnau asks.

Sam Rainey rolls across the mesh of webbing to the technicians
huddled together in a rickety nest of old flight chairs and impact
strapping around battered instrument cases. A figure with a woman's
shoulders and the name
Daen
on an androgynous breast passes an
image amplifier to Director Sam. He hooks it over Lisa Durnau's
helmet and shows her how to thumb up the tricky little controls.
Lisa's brain reels as she zooms in and out, in and out. There's
nothing to focus on here. Then it swims into vision. The skin of the
Tabernacle fizzes with activity. Lisa remembers elementary school
lessons where you popped a slide of pond water under the video camera
and it was abuzz with microbeasts. She ratchets up the scale until
the jittering, Brownian motion resolves into pattern and action. The
silver is the newsprint grey of atoms of black and white, constantly
changing from one to the other. The surface of the Tabernacle is a
boil of patterns on fractal scales, from slow wave-trains to fleeting
formations that scuttle together and annihilate each other or merge
into larger, briefer forms that decay like trails in a bubble chamber
into exotic and unpredictable fragments.

Lisa Durnau ratchets the vernier up until the graphic display says
X1000. The grainy blur expands into a dazzle of black and white,
flickering furiously, throwing off patterns like flames hundreds of
times a second. The resolution is maddeningly short of clarity but
Lisa knows what she would find at the base of it if she could go all
the way in; a grid of simple black and white squares, changing from
one to the other.

"Cellular automata," whispers Lisa Durnau, suspended above
the fractal swirls of patterns and waves and demons like Michelangelo
in the Sistine, inverted. Life, as Thomas Lull would know it.

Lisa Durnau has lived most of her life in the flickering black and
white world of cellular automata. Her Grandpa Mac—geneful of
Scots-Irish contrariness—had been the one to first awaken her
to the complexities that lay in a simple pattern of counters across
an Othello board. A few basic rules for colour conversion based on
the numbers of adjacent black and white tokens and she had baroque
filigree patterns awaken and grow across her board.

On-line she discovered entire bestiaries of black-on-white forms that
crawled, swam, swooped, swarmed, over her flatscreen in eerie mimicry
of living creatures. Downstairs in his study lined with theological
volumes, Pastor David G. Durnau constructed sermons proving the earth
was eight thousand years old and that the Grand Canyon was carved by
waters from the Flood.

In her final High School year, while girlfriends deserted her for
Abercrombie, Fitch and skaterboyz, she concealed her social gawkiness
behind glitterball walls of three-dimensional cellular automata. Her
end-of-year project relating the delicate forms in her computer to
the baroque glass shells of microscopic diatoms had boggled even her
math teacher. It got her the university course she wanted. So she was
a nerd. But she could run fast.

By her second year she was running ten kay a day and probing beneath
the surface dazzle of her black-and-white virtual world to the
bass-line funk of the
rules.
Simple programmes giving rise to
complex behaviour was the core of the Wolfram/Friedkin conjecture.
She had no doubt the universe communicated with itself but she needed
to know what it was in the fabric of space-time and energy that
called the counterpoint. She wanted to eavesdrop on the Chinese
whisper of God. The search spun her off the chequerboard of
Artificial Life into airy, dragon-haunted realms: cosmology,
topology, M-theory and its heir, M-Star theory. She held universes of
thought in either hand, brought them together, and watched them arc
and burn.

Life. The game.

"We've got a few theories," Sam Rainey says. Thirty-six
hours of drugged sleep later, Lisa Durnau is back on ISS. She, Sam,
and G-woman Daley form a neat, polite trefoil up in the free-gee, an
unconscious recapitulation of the steel symbol pointing the way to
the heart of Darnley 285. "Remember when you dropped your name
badge."

"It's a perfect recording medium," Lisa says. "Anything
it interacts with physically is digitised to pure information."
Her name is now part of it. She isn't sure how she feels about that.
"So, it takes stuff in; has it ever given anything out? Any kind
of transmission or signal?"

She catches a transmission or signal between Sam and Daley. Daley
says, "I will address that momentarily, but first Sam will brief
you on the historical perspective."

Sam says, "She says historical; it's actually archaeological. In
fact even that's not close. It's the cosmological perspective. We've
done isotope tests."

"I know palaeontology, you won't blind me with science."

"Our table of U238 decay products gives it an age of seven
billion years."

Lisa Durnau's a clergy child who doesn't like to take the Lord's name
in vane but she says a simple, reverent, "Jesus." Alterre's
aeons that pass like an evening gone have given here a feel for Deep
Time. But the decay of radioactive isotopes opens on the deepest time
of all, an abyss of past and future. Darnley 285 is older than the
solar system. Suddenly Lisa Durnau is very aware that she is a mere
chew of gristle and nerve rattling round inside a coffee can in the
middle of nothing.

"What is it," Lisa Durnau says carefully, "that you
wanted me to know this
before?"

Daley Suarez-Martin and Sam Rainey look at each other and Lisa Durnau
realises that these are the people her country must rely on in its
first meeting with the alien. Not super-heroes, not super-scientists,
not super-managers. Not super-anything. Workaday scientists and civil
servants. Working through, making it up as they go along. The
ultimate human resource: the ability to improvise.

"We've been videoing the surface of the Tabernacle more or less
since day one," Sam Rainey says. "It took us some time to
realise we had to run the camera at fifteen thousand frames per
second to isolate the patterns. We're having them analysed."

"Trying to pick out the rules behind the automaton."

"I don't think I'm betraying any secrets, but we don't have the
capacity in this country."

This country, thinks Lisa Durnau, orbiting at the L-5 stable point.
Screwed by your own Hamilton Act. She says, "You need high-level
pattern-recognition aeais; what, 2.8, higher?"

"There are a couple of decrypting and pattern-recognition
specialists out there," Daley Suarez-Martin says. "Regrettably,
they aren't in the most politically stable of locations."

"So you don't need me to try and find your Rosetta Stone. What
do you need me for?"

"On occasions we have received an incontrovertible, recognisable
pattern."