Space (19 page)

It was stunning to watch.

She felt a surge of excitement. The data she would take back on this would keep the scientists busy for decades. Maybe, she thought, this is how the double-domes feel, at some moment of discovery.

Or an intervening god.

...Then, suddenly, the growth failed.

It started first at the extremes; the lichen colonies began shriveling back to their heart lands. And then the color of the patterns, in a variety of wavelengths, began to fade, and the neat hexagonal structure became chaotic.

The meaning was obvious. Death was spreading over the star.

"Frank. What's happening?"

"I expected this," the interface metaphor said.

"You did?"

"Some of my projections predicted it, with varying probability. Meacher, the lichen can't survive without their fusion cycle. Our intervention from orbit was somewhat crude. Kind of anthropocentric. Maybe the needs of the little creatures down there are not as simple as we imagined. What if the fusion cycle is
necessary
to their growth and existence, in some way we don't understand?"

The fusion cycle had delivered layers of complex molecules to the surface. Maybe the crystalline soil down there needed its fusion summer, to wipe it clean and invigorate it, regularly. After all, extinction events on Earth led to increased biodiversity in the communities that derived from their survivors.

And Madeleine had destroyed all that. Guilt stabbed at her stomach.

"Don't take it hard, Madeleine," Paulis said.

"Bullshit," she said. "I'm a meddler."

"Your impulse was honorable. It was worth a try." He gave her a virtual smile.
"I
understand why you did it. Even if the real Frank won't... I think we're heading for home, Meacher. We'll be at the Lagrange point gateway in a couple of minutes. Prepare yourself."

"Thanks." Thank God. Get me out of here.

A couple of minutes, and eighteen years into the future...

"And, you know," Paulis said, "maybe there are deeper questions we haven't asked here."
That
didn't sound like Frank Paulis, but one of his more reflective companions. A little touch of Dorothy Chaum, perhaps. "The Gaijin could have brought you -- the first human passenger, after Malenfant -- anywhere. Why
here?
Why did they choose to show you this? Nothing the Gaijin do is without meaning. They have layers of purpose."

She thought of that grisly, slow dismantling in Kefallinia, and shuddered.

"Perhaps we are here because
this is the truth,"
the Paulis composite said. "The truth about the universe."

"This?
This dismal cycle of disaster? Helpless life forms crushed back into the slime, over and over?"

"On some symbolic level, perhaps, this is the truth for us all."

"I don't understand, Frank."

"Maybe it's better that you don't."

The truth? No, she thought. Maybe for these wretched creatures, here on this bizarre star relic. Not for us; not for humans, the Solar System. Even if this is the cosmos's cruel logic, why do we have to submit to it? Maybe we ought to find a way to fix it.

Maybe Reid Malenfant would know the answer to such questions by now -- wherever he was, if he was still alive. She wondered if it would ever be possible to find him.

But none of that mattered now, for electric blue light enveloped her, like fusion summer.

And, far from home, here was Malenfant, all alone save for a sky full of Gaijin, orbiting a planet that might have been Earth, circling a star that might have been the Sun.

He peered down at the planet, using the telescopic features of his softscreen, for long hours. It might have been Earth, yes: a little heavier, a little warmer, but nevertheless compellingly familiar, with a jigsaw arrangement of gray-brown continents and blue oceans and streaky white clouds and even ice caps, all of it shining unbearably brightly. Was that textured greenery really forest? Did those equatorial plains breed some analogy of grass? And were those sweeping shadows great herds of herbivores, the buffalo or reindeer of this exotic place?

But, try as he might, he found no sign of intelligent life: no city geometries, no glowing artificial light, not even the thread of smoke or the sprinkling of firelight.

This wasn't a true copy of Earth. Of course not, how could it be? He knew there was no Africa here, no America, no Australia; these strange alien continents had followed their own long tectonic waltz. But those oceans really were made of liquid water -- predominantly anyhow -- and the air was mainly a nitrogen-oxygen mix, a bit thicker than Earth's.

Oxygen was unstable; left to itself it should soon combine with the rocks of the planet. So something had to be injecting oxygen into the atmosphere. Free oxygen was a sure sign of life -- life that couldn't be so terribly dissimilar to his own.

But that atmosphere looked deeper, mistier than Earth's; the blue of the oceans, the gray of the land, had a greenish tinge. And if he looked through the atmosphere toward the edge of the planet, he could see a pale yellow-green staining -- a sickly, uncomfortable color. The green was the mark of chlorine.

He tried to explain to his Gaijin companion, Cassiopeia, what it was that kept him staring down at this new world, long after he had exhausted the analytic possibilities of his eyeball scrutiny. "Look down there." He pointed, and he imagined interpretative software aligning his finger with the set of his eyes.

IT IS A PENINSULA.

"True..." Pendant from a greater continent, set in a blue equatorial sea and surrounded by blue-white echoes of its outline, echoes that must be some equivalent of a coral reef. "It reminds me of Florida. Which is a region of America--"

I KNOW OF FLORIDA. THIS PENINSULA IS NOT FLORIDA. Over the subjective months they'd been together, Cassiopeia's English had gotten a
lot
better, and now she spoke to him using a synthesized human voice relayed over his old shuttle EMU headset.

"But it's
like
Florida. At least, enough to make me feel..."

WHAT?

He sighed.

It had taken him forty years to get here from Alpha Centauri -- including around six months of subjective time as he had coasted between various inner systems and Saddle Point gateways. System after system, world after world. Six months as he had tried to get to know the Gaijin, and they to know him.

It seemed very important to them that they understood how he saw the universe, what motivated him. As for himself, he knew that understanding was going to be the only way humans were ever going to deal with these strangers from the sky.

But it was hard.

Cassiopeia would
never
have picked out that peninsula's chance resemblance to Florida. Even if some mapping routine had done it for her, he supposed, it would have meant nothing, save as an example of convergent processes in geology. The Gaijin sought patterns, of course -- it was hard to imagine a science that did not include elements of pattern recognition, of correlation and trend analysis -- but they were not
distracted
by them, like humans.

No doubt this was simply a product of differing evolutionary origins. The Gaijin had evolved in the stately stillness of deep space, where there was, in general, time to think things through; humans had evolved in fast-moving, crowded environments where it paid to be able to gaze into the shadows of a tree, a complex visual environment of dapples and stripes, and pick out the tiger
fast.

But the end result was that he simply could not communicate to Cassiopeia why it pleased him to pick out an analog of Florida off the shore of some unnamed continent, on a planet light-years from Earth.

Cassiopeia was still waiting for a reply.

"Never mind," he said. He opaqued the membrane and began his routine for sleep.

It didn't help that he didn't really have any idea who, or what, he was talking
to.

He had no idea how complex an individual Gaijin was. Was Cassiopeia equivalent to a car, a bacterium, a person, something more?

And the question might have no meaning, of course. Just because he communicated with a discrete entity
he
called Cassiopeia, it didn't mean there had to be anything like a corresponding person behind his projection. Maybe he was talking to a limb, or a hand, or a digit of some greater organism -- a superbeing, or some looser Internet of minds.

Still, he had found places to start. His first point of contact had been navigation.

Both he and Cassiopeia were finite, discrete creatures embedded in a wider universe. And that universe split into obvious categories -- space, stars, worlds, you, me. It had been straightforward to agree on a set of labels for Sol, Earth, and the nearby stars -- even if that wasn't the custom of the Gaijin. They thought of each star as a point on a dynamic four-dimensional map, defined not by a
name
but by its orientation compared to some local origin of coordinates. So their label for Sol was something like "Get to Alpha Centauri and hang a left for four light-years"... except that Alpha Centauri, the local center of Gaijin operations, was itself defined by an orientation compared to another, more remote origin of coordinates -- and so on, recursively back, until you reached the ultimate origin: the starting point, the home world of the Gaijin.

And this recursive web of directions and labeling was, of course, subject to constant change, as the stars slid through the sky, changing their orientations to each other.

It was a system of thinking that was logical, and obviously useful for a species who had evolved to navigate among the stars -- a lot more so than the Earthbound human habit of seeking patterns in the random lamps of the sky, patterns called constellations, that shifted because of perspective if you moved more than a couple of light-years from Earth. But it was a system that was far beyond the capacity of any human mind to absorb.

Another point of contact:
You. Me. One. Two.
In this universe, it seemed, it was impossible not to learn to count.

Malenfant's math extended -- shakily -- as far as differential calculus, the basic tool mathematicians used to model reality. It did appear that Cassiopeia thought of the world in similar terms. Of course, Cassiopeia's mathematical models were smarter than any human's. The key to such modeling was to pick out the right abstractions from a complex background: close enough to reality to give meaningful answers, not so detailed they overwhelmed the calculations. For the Gaijin, the boundaries of abstraction and simplification were
much
farther back than any human's, her models much richer.

And there were more fundamental differences. Cassiopeia seemed much smarter at
solving
the equations than Malenfant, or any human. He managed to set out for her the equations of fluid mechanics, one of his specialties at college, and she seemed to understand them qualitatively: She could immediately
see
how these equations, which in themselves merely described how scraps of flowing water interacted with each other, implied phenomena like turbulence and laminar flow, implications it had taken humans years -- using sophisticated mathematical and computational tools -- to tease out.

Could Cassiopeia look at the equations of relativity and
see
an implied universe of stars and planets and black holes? Could she look at the equations of quantum mechanics and
see
the intricate chemistry of living things?

Of course, that increased smartness must lead to a qualitative jump in understanding. A chimp didn't think about things more simply than Malenfant did; it couldn't grasp some of his concepts at all. There were clearly areas where Cassiopeia was simply working above Malenfant's wretched head.

Cassiopeia had spent time trying to teach him about a phenomenon just a little beyond his own horizon -- as chaos theory might have been to an engineer of, say, the 1950s. It was something to do with the emergence of complexity. The Gaijin seemed able to
see
how complexity, even life, naturally emerged from the simplest of beginnings: not fundamental physical laws, but something even deeper than that -- as far as he could make out, the essential mathematical logic that underlay all things. Human scientists had a glimmering of this. His own DNA somehow contained, in its few billion bases, enough information to generate a brain of three
trillion
connections...

But for the Gaijin this principle went farther. It was like being given a table of prime numbers and being able to deduce atoms and stars and people as a
necessary
consequence of the existence of the primes. And since prime numbers, of course, existed everywhere, it followed there was life and people, humans and Gaijin, everywhere there could be.

Life sprouting everywhere, like weeds in the cracks of a pavement. It was a remarkable, chilling thought.

"Take me to your home," he'd said one day.

Cassiopeia's choice of a human label for her remote home was "Zero-zero-zero-zero," the great sky map's origin of coordinates.

I AM THE SUCCESSOR OF A REPLICANT CHAIN THAT EMERGED THERE, she'd said.
She was descended from emigrants?
Not exactly, because she'd continued. I RETAIN RECORDS OF ZERO-ZERO-ZERO-ZERO. Memories? Did each Gaijin come to awareness with copies of the memories of those who bore her -- or constructed her? Were they, then,
her
memories, or a mere copy? IT IS POSSIBLE TO TRANSLATE TO ZERO-ZERO-ZERO-ZERO. THERE IS NO PURPOSE.

"I'd like to see it."

THERE ARE RECORDS THAT--

"Your records only show me your world through your eyes. If we're ever going to understand each other, you have to let me see for myself."

There was a long hesitation after that.