The Spawning (59 page)

Today is the day you've dreamed and fantasized about.

Can't you let out a cheer? A little one even?

But he couldn't. Because there was something damnably wrong about all this and he felt that right to his core. He did not doubt that the signal was extraterrestrial. He just saw trouble with it, like it was not the greatest news in the history of the race but the worst thing imaginable. He did not like it. Did not like the idea that there was some advanced civilization apparently based off of Callisto that had been monitoring us all these years and now decided to say howdy, how ya'll doing on that blue world out there?

There was something disturbing about this.

He had the craziest and most irrational feeling that a new chapter had been opened and by virtue of its revelations, there could never, ever be any going back to the old one. This would blot it out entirely.

A hand clapped his shoulder and he saw Frank Clark standing there. Good old Frank. How many bottles had they killed discussing ETI and life on other worlds, divergent streams of evolution and technological and social development? Good God.

“The intensity is increasing,” Clark said, toying with his scraggly gray beard as he did whenever he was nervous or on the verge of big things. “But I don't suppose that cheers you up any, does it, old hoss?”

Sadler tried to smile, but it just wouldn't come. “I don't know what the hell is wrong with me, Frank. I should be jumping for joy, but–”

“But you've got a bad feeling?”

“Yeah.”

Clark nodded. “You're not alone, my friend. Look at this old face? Does it look happy? Does it look overjoyed? Well, it's not. I have the same feeling as you have.” He laughed. “I feel like Oppenheimer . . . like we've just exploded the bomb.”

“Maybe we're getting too old.”

Clark looked around. “It's not just us, Carl. This whole thing has the young and the old by the collective balls. Lookit this place, will you? It's goddamn swarming. We were a handful yesterday and now we've got visiting scientists and diplomats. All the types that laughed at us last week. And what's worse is that this place is crawling with
spooks.
We got the NSA and the DIA and probably the CIA here, too. They claim they've only sent their best and brightest cryptographers, but I got an ugly feeling that our old girl, Little Miss SETI, is about to be absorbed by a larger entity with a lot of abbreviations in its title.”

Sadler didn't like that part of it, either, but what could you do?

This whole thing had become political as well as scientific now and the military-industrial-intelligence machine had to get its particularly dirty, worn fingers in said pie.

SETI had picked up the microwave signals first.

They were the best equipped to do so. It was called the Omni-Directional Sky Survey Project. Its aim had been to canvas the sky in not just a wide-range of radio frequencies, but also throughout the optical spectrum. So SETI grabbed it first with the ATA, but it wasn't long before their optical observatories at Harvard, Berkeley, and Columbus were in on the act. Pretty soon, Arecibo was in on it followed by the VLA radiotelescope system—Very Large Array—and dozens of others from England to Australia to the far reaches of the former Soviet Union. And the signals kept coming and getting stronger and stronger.

And everyone wanted to know what they were saying.

Thing was, they didn't seem to be saying a thing. What they had were high-frequency pulses, regular and directed, in the electromagnetic spectrum and they seemed to be shielded and encrypted. All the cryptographic muscle of the United States and its numerous allies were unable to break the code, if code it indeed was. The best they'd been able to do was digitally represent the signals in prime numbers. But these were terribly random and did not seem to repeat at any identifiable interlude.

So was it a message . . . or was it something else entirely?

Clark sighed. “I got a bad feeling in my gut, Carl, and so do you and you know what? I think they do, too.
All
of them.”

Sadler was interested now.

“Everyone is nervous as hell, Carl. They're ready to have kittens. They laugh and they joke and they hoot and holler . . . but none of it touches their eyes. Their eyes are scared. I mean, they're
scared.
All the festive bullshit and ass-slapping and congratulating are fictions.
Fictions.
I can see it in their eyes. They're acting all happy-go-lucky because they know it's how they're
supposed
to act. They're playing the part. All of them. But inside?”

“Inside their guts are twisted up?”

“You got it. They feel like they're waiting for the phone to ring, you know? Waiting for the doctor to call and tell them whether that mass on their brains is benign or malignant.” He swallowed a couple times like he had no spit in his mouth. “And you want my opinion, old buddy? It's going to be
malignant.”

“Least it's not just me,” Sadler said.

But he did not feel better. He could not get past the sense that this was not only going to change human culture, but warp it into something intrinsically diabolic. And there was no more common sense behind that anymore then there was about an astrophysicist with a Ph.D. from Cornell turning down one big-money radioastronomy position after another so he could follow his gut sense and hunt for bug-eyed monsters in outer space. He had done it because he felt that there was intelligence out there. No, he
knew
it. Just as he knew that there was something incalculably pestilent in these signals, something parasitic that would suck the blood out of the race drop by awful drop.

Clark cleared his throat. “Lucy . . . Lucy asked me to invite you and Karen for dinner Friday, Carl. She's making one of those terrible French seafood concoctions from her Juliet Child book. I told her I'd ask you, but if I were you I'd decline. She made me some kind of soup the other night and it tasted like rancid crayfish in salty, tepid water. Christ, it was unholy. Feel free to decline.”

“We'll be there.”

But the disturbing thing was that he didn't think they would be. That things like dinner parties and backyard barbecues were about to become things of the past, relics of a way of life that no longer existed. Because by Friday, the world was going to be a much different place and there wasn't a goddamn thing that he or anyone else in that massive room of cutting-edge technology could do about it.

“Something's happening, Carl.”

And something was.

The natives were getting restless. Real restless. Everyone had gathered in little groups before the banks of computers that the cryptographers used, which were hooked up to the NSA and DIA's massive cryptological networks.

“Maybe . . . maybe they've decrypted the message,” Clark said.

One of the crypt techs grabbing a cup of coffee overheard him and shook her head. “For something to be decrypted it must be
en
crypted. And I'm not sure this is encrypted at all. I don't think this is a message. Unless, well, unless it's meant to be subliminal somehow.”

“What's going on?” Sadler asked her.

She did not look at him, did not take her eyes off the overhead screen that digitally encoded the electromagnetic pulses, turned them into oscillating waves that everyone could see. “It may just be a stream of energy directed at us.”

Sadler felt a chill run up his spine. “To what end?”

She just shrugged and he knew it was pointless to grill her. She would not speculate or hypothesize wildly. It was not in her makeup. She was NSA and the cryptology techs of the National Security Agency knew how to keep their mouths shut.

“Look,” she said. “Do you see it? The wavelengths are changing. They're erratic, but intensifying. It's very . . . curious.”

And Sadler figured it was that, all right.

Something was about to happen and he could almost feel it building in the air of the institute like static electricity. Growing, powering up, potential energy about to go kinetic. And everyone seemed to be aware of it. They were not speaking. They were not doing anything but staring at the screen, transfixed by those jumping digitalized displays.

One of the techs turned up the audio so that everyone could hear what the radiotelescopes were hearing. Earlier it had been sort of a rumbling, mindless static like that you heard coming from a radio that could not lock onto a channel. But this was different. It, too, had changed. Not meaningless static now, but a rising and falling far-off drone as heard through a windstorm. And something else, a sound almost like respiration just beneath it. As if something out there was breathing and they were hearing the signature of that across the deadness of almost 400,000,000 miles of space.

The droning was getting louder now.

It was something insistent.

Something that would not be denied. Something that had been broadcast not to be deciphered or even understood really, but simply
listened
to.

Sadler felt a headache begin to build in the back of his skull.

He wanted to say:
Turn that noise off . . . do you hear? Turn it off before . . . it's . . . too . . . late . . .

But he said nothing.

He just listened and felt something inside him give with a dull popping sound. All he could hear was that transmission. Nothing else, nothing else.

He did not like it, but he listened.

He did not seem to have a choice.

It was almost a living, organic sound like having your ear pressed up against a birth sac and listening to something waking up in there, hearing the subtle beat of a heart. It was like that. The sound of potential, of awareness, of activity. He was imagining Callisto out there in that blank womb of space around Jupiter, held in stasis by the planet's intense gravitational field like a metal filling trapped by the pull of a gigantic magnet. He was seeing that ancient moon in his mind . . . cratered and dark and crumbling like a prehistoric barrow pit . . . and hearing the hissing of its transmission as it grew louder and louder and made his thoughts scurry and fall over one another, crowd for room in his head as the droning and breathing rose up and dominated everything.

He was likening that noise to the sound a haunted house might make in the dead of night . . . or maybe what you would hear if you put a skull up against your ear like a conch shell. A hollow droning of nothingness just barely concealing the echoes of the distant past, the ghosts and crawling memories of antiquity that were beginning to stir, to awaken, oozing from the walls like malignant shadows.

“Carl . . .” Clark said, but got no farther than that.

Sadler tried to speak, but it was like he was trapped inside his own head, hiding in some creaking house as that droning wind rose higher and higher. He could do nothing but feel the drumming throb of that headache. He seemed beyond the reach of his somatic nervous system; incapable of voluntary action.

And not just him, but everyone in that room.

They stood around like statues, wide-eyed and tense, but absolutely motionless. Their lips did not speak and their eyes did not blink. Many had odd little tics in the corners of their mouths. And more than a few were sweating and drooling.

The droning noise and that weird susurration of breathing were so very loud now that you could not have screamed above them. It owned everyone in that room and it would not let them go.

Sadler managed one last lucid thought before his mind was overwhelmed:
Dear God, it's no message . . . it's a signal sent to dominate and master, to break us down and own us . . .

He was right.

The signals had been beamed from the megalithic structure that had recently risen through the frozen crust of Callisto just as it had been programmed to do upon first contact countless eons before. It generated the signals, amplified them, then directed them across space with great intensity to that warm, blue world called Earth. And here those electromagnetic pulses found their receivers in hundreds of megaliths across the globe. The pulses were gathered, refined, not dampened, but stepped-up and purified and reflected into a white noise that unlocked ancient directives and drives implanted in the human brain.

It may have sounded like a mindless droning or a hissing respiration.

But it was much more than that.

It was the final siren call of the race and the end times were at hand.

Tim Curran lives in Michigan and is the author of the novels
Skin Medicine, Hive, Dead Sea, Resurrection, The Devil Next Door,
and
Biohazard,
as well as the novella
The Corpse King.
His short stories have appeared in such magazines as
City Slab, Flesh & Blood, Book of Dark Wisdom,
and
Inhuman,
and anthologies such as
Shivers IV, High Seas Cthulhu,
and
Sick Things.
Find him on the web at:
www.corpseking.com
.