Last and First Contacts (Imaginings) Read online

  Simon said, ‘It’s the logical next step, in marketing terms. Like putting massive computing power in the hands of the public. That would have seemed inconceivable, in 1950. And the secondary results will be as unimaginable as the internet once was. Do you think it’s immoral? Unnatural?’

  Father Nolan grinned. ‘If I were what I look like, perhaps I’d think that.’

  ‘What are you, then?’

  ‘I’m the end-product of your company’s business plans. Yours and a thousand others. It was only a few decades after your birthday-card goldfish that things took off. Remarkable. Only a few decades, to topple a regime of life that lasted two billion years.’

  ‘And things were different after that.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Darwinian evolution was slo-ow. For all the fancy critters that were thrown up, there was hardly a change in the basic biochemical machinery across two billion years.

  ‘Now there are no non-interbreeding species. Indeed, no individuals. The Darwinian interlude is over, and we are back to gene sharing, the way it used to be.

  ‘And everything has changed. Global climate change became trivial, for instance. With the fetters off, the biosphere adapted to the new conditions, optimising its metabolic and reproductive efficiency as it went.

  ‘And then,’ he said, ‘off into space.’

  These words, simply spoken, implied a marvellous future.

  ‘Who is my mother?’

  ‘We are in a lacuna,’ Father Nolan said.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A gap. A hole. In the totality of a living world. Sorry if that sounds a bit pompous. Your mother is a part of the totality, but cut away, you see. Living out a life as a human once lived it.’

  ‘Why? Is she being punished?’

  ‘No.’ He laughed. ‘On the contrary. She wanted to do this. It’s hard to express. We are a multipolar consciousness. She is part of the rest of us – do you see? She was an expression of a global desire.’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘Not to forget.’ He stood up. Grave, patient, he had the manner of a priest, despite his hairy nose, his stained shirt. ‘I think you’re ready.’ He led Simon to the window, and pulled back the curtain.

  Green stars.

  The garden was gone.

  The rest of the house was gone. The close, the park, Sheffield – Earth was gone, irrelevant. Mother had, incredibly, been right in her intuition. It had all been placed there as a stage set for her own life. But now her life had dwindled to the four walls of this room, and the rest of it could be discarded, for she would never need it again.

  Just green stars. Simon pressed his ear to the window. He heard a reverberation, like an immense bell.

  ‘Earth life turning the Galaxy green. Our thoughts span light years. But we don’t want to forget how it was to be human.’ Father Nolan smiled. ‘It’s a paradox. We have in fact lost so much. As you said – the strange tragedy of being mortal in an unending universe. There’s no more poetry. No more epitaphs. No more stories. Just a solemn calm.’

  ‘Mother wanted to experience it. Human life.’

  ‘On behalf of the rest of us, yes.’

  ‘And what are you, Father?’

  Father Nolan shrugged. ‘Everything else.’ He let the curtain drop, hiding the green stars.

  The electric light was dimming.

  Father Nolan sat down beside Mother and held her hand. ‘Only a few more minutes. Then it will be done.’

  Simon sat on the other side of the bed. ‘What about me?’

  ‘You’re only here for her.’

  ‘But I’m conscious!’

  ‘Well, of course you are. She chose you, you know. You always thought she didn’t love you, didn’t you? But she chose you to be beside her, at the end, when all the others, Peter, Mary, even her own father, have all gone. Isn’t that enough?’

  ‘Do I have a soul, Father?’

  ‘I’m not qualified to say.’

  Mother turned her head towards him, he thought. But her eyes were closed.

  ‘Help me,’ Simon whispered.

  Father Nolan looked at him. Then he closed his eyes and bowed his head. ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.’

  ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.’

  The glow of the single bulb faded slowly, to black.

  Dreamers’ Lake

  On the shore of Dreamers’ Lake we worked through the night. We had no choice; this pretty world was due to end in two more days. By the time dawn broke we had labelled all the lakes’ stromatolites, and had decided on three candidates, Charlie, Hotel and Juliet, for cognitive mapping. I was tentatively confident that Juliet was the most promising, but I was so dog-tired I didn’t trust my judgment any more.

  So I was grateful when Citizen Associate Bisset brought us animists a tray of coffee.

  ‘Thanks.’ I took a cup, fixed its spigot to my facemask, and gulped it down, welcoming the caffeine fix. Bisset stood beside me on the pebble-strewn beach of that lake of fizzing, acidic water.

  GC-174-IV was an infant world, its young sun a lamp hanging over jagged hills. The methane-green sky reflected in the lake’s sluggish ripples, and glistened on the pillow-like stromatolites. The scene was unearthly, beautiful – and I was grateful that the dawn light hid the swarming dangers of the sky, especially the rogue worldlet called the Hammer.

  In the foreground my animist cubs were playing soccer, their shouts the only sound on this silent world. I longed to join in, but they didn’t want little old ladies like me.

  ‘“Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops…”’ Bisset was a lot taller than I was, and under his wide visor his face, turned to the sun, was a mask of wrinkles.

  ‘That’s a cute line,’ I said.

  ‘Shakespeare. Of course we’re two hundred light years from England.’

  ‘But there are hills, a lake, a sky here. Things have a way of converging.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I remember the first robot landing on Titan, Saturn’s moon. The first images from the surface of the Moon had looked like a pebble beach. Then the Vikings on Mars, and the Soviet probes on Venus – more pebbles, more beaches. And even on Titan, where they use water ice for rock –’

  ‘Pebbles.’

  ‘Yes.’

  I eyed him curiously. Evidently he was older than he looked. We hadn’t spoken, but the Pegasus carried over fifty people, and was roomy enough for twice that number. ‘I’m Susan Knilans. Senior animist on this mission.’

  He shook my gloved hand. ‘Professor Knilans, I’ve read about your work.’

  ‘Susan, please. And you are?’

  ‘Ramone Bisset.’

  ‘Ramone?’

  He smiled. ‘My father named me after his favourite band. I used to be a software engineer, before the software learned to write itself. Now I’m a Citizen Associate. I’m working on the IGWI with Ulf Thoring.’

  It took me a minute to decode the acronym. IGWI: the Inflationary Gravity Wave Interferometry experiment, the establishment of a vast interstellar network of gravity-wave detectors designed to map the echoes of the universe’s very first cataclysmic instants. ‘Interesting project.’

  ‘It sure is. Not that I understand much of it, either the science or the equipment.’

  ‘How do you get on with those IGWI guys?’

  He shrugged. ‘I’m just the dogsbody.’

  ‘Don’t knock it. Umm, do you mind my asking how old you are?’

  ‘A hundred and thirty, to the nearest decade. Born in the 1980s.’ That explained his height; many of his generation, fed on ludicrously protein-rich diets, had grown tall. His accent was British, I thought, but softened by time.

  ‘Well,’ I admitted, ‘I’m half your age. So what are you doing here?’

  ‘You mean beside the lake, or on GC-IV?’

  ‘Start with the lake.’

  ‘I’m just curious. You’re here to map minds, aren’t y
ou? Minds in those mounds.’

  ‘That’s the idea.’

  ‘I haven’t started my day yet. I thought I may as well be useful. You can never go wrong with a tray of coffees.’

  ‘So what about the deeper question? Why volunteer for GC-IV?’

  ‘Ah. Why are any of us here?’

  ‘To do our jobs.’ Captain Zuba joined us. She was a tough, heavily-built New Zealander, aged about fifty. She took one of Bisset’s coffees. ‘And to earn our pay.’

  ‘Yes, Captain,’ Bisset said respectfully. ‘But why not just sit at home? All humans are restless. Why?’ He pointed to the patient stromatolites. ‘They don’t look restless.’

  ‘No,’ Zuba said, ‘but it’s a shame they aren’t, because in two days’ time, when the Hammer falls, they’re going to be toast. And speaking of which, the clock is ticking.’ She handed back the coffee cup, already drained, and stalked away, competent, efficient, a tick-box list on legs.

  Bisset hesitated. ‘You know – to explore the universe in starships – it’s like something from the kind of science fiction that was out of date even before I was born.’

  I wasn’t too sure what ‘science fiction’ was, and didn’t really want to know. On impulse I said, ‘Why don’t you come visit again tomorrow? I’ll give you the guided tour. You don’t even need to bring the drinks.’

  He nodded like a gentleman. ‘I’d appreciate that.’ And he walked away, tray in gloved hand, boots crunching over the beach.

  The day on GC-174-IV was near enough to twenty hours long (was; now it’s different, changed by the Hammer Blow). I worked through that day, and was dog tired by the end of GC-IV’s short afternoon. As half the complement of the Pegasus wended back to the airlocks the other shift was suiting up to go out; Zuba ensured we made the most of the time we had left.

  That evening, before I turned in, I looked for Bisset.

  The Pegasus is a tuna can. It sits on four stubby legs, just five metres across, and is only a couple of storeys high, externally. But inside it’s the size of a small hotel. A ship that’s bigger inside than out – another gift of the quantum foam technology that so suddenly opened up the stars. Anyhow, the Pegasus is roomy enough for all fifty of its crew to have a private cabin, but not big enough to hide.

  I found Bisset in the lounge with Ulf Thoring and the rest of the IGWI crew. The guys were playing some variant of poker and drinking beer; I could see the pharmacy’s stock of sober-up nano-pills would be called on that night. Bisset sipped his beer and played a few hands, but you could see from the body language what was going on with those smart-ass college boys.

  The Citizen-Associate programme of the International Xenographic Agency is aimed squarely at people like Ramone Bisset: his active life extended by decades by the new longevity treatments, his curiosity still bright, his skills long outmoded. Such is the capacity of a quantum-foam-drive starship that there is room for guys like Ramone, whatever they can contribute. It helps the sponsoring nations justify the IXA’s cost to their taxpayers: anybody can be an explorer, so the slogan goes. But the Associates aren’t necessarily given much respect.

  I’m not in the habit of taking on lame ducks, and I suspected Bisset could look after himself. But I didn’t like to see a thoughtful man treated that way. I don’t blame the IGWI guys, however. All male, none older than thirty-five, all from a university at Stockholm, Ulf and his guys were a tightly bonded bunch, and too young to be empathetic.

  I was glad when, at the start of my next work shift the following morning, Bisset showed up at Dreamers’ Lake.

  My cubs were already at work, wading knee-deep in the scummy pond, attaching floating sensor pods to the cognitive net we’d placed over Juliet. I was standing on the comparative comfort of the beach, before a monitoring station on which the first signals were beginning to be processed.

  Bisset raised his head to the brightening sky. ‘Nice morning.’

  I murmured, ‘Perhaps. That makes me uneasy.’ I pointed upwards.

  That was the Hammer, a worldlet the size of Mars, visible in the bright sky, clearly larger since the end of my last shift.

  ‘Ah,’ Bisset said. ‘You do get the feeling that it might fall at any moment and smash all of this.’

  ‘But not today. So, the guided tour. You understand what these mounds are? They occurred on primitive Earth – still do, in places where it’s too salty for the predators, like snails. They are layers of bacterial mats …’ A mat of blue-green algae will form on the scummy surface of a shallow pond. The mat traps mud, and then another layer forms on top of the first, and so on. With time the mound builds up, and specialised bacterial types inhabit the different layers, until you have a complex, interdependent, miniature ecology. ‘We’ve found bacterial mats everywhere we’ve looked –’

  ‘Beginning on Mars,’ Bisset said.

  ‘Well, that’s true. And everywhere there is standing liquid, water or perhaps hydrocarbons, you get mounds.’

  ‘Stromatolites.’

  The pedant in me objected, although I use the word myself. ‘Strictly speaking, stromatolites are terrestrial forms of blue-green algae. These bacteria are photosynthetic but they’re not algae. You can see they are purplish, not green. They don’t use chlorophyll; their chemistry kit is adapted to the spectrum of their sun. So these mounds are like stromatolites, but –’

  ‘“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”’

  ‘More Shakespeare?’

  ‘Sorry. It’s a bad habit.’

  ‘The mound bugs here are related to us, of course, although we’ve yet to classify them.’

  It would have been a major shock if GC-IV’s bugs hadn’t been a distant relation of our own, their carbon-water chemistry dictated by a kind of skewed DNA. One of the triumphs of the IXA’s exobiology programme has been to establish that all the carbon-water life forms we have found are related, apparently descended from an ancestor that came blowing in from outside the Galaxy altogether. Subsequent ‘generations’ had spread by panspermia processes from star to star. But that origin theory is controversial; the family tree of galactic life is still incomplete. Some even believe that the ultimate origin isn’t carbon-water at all, but lies in a deeper substrate of reality.

  ‘And,’ Bisset said, ‘there is mind. There, in those mounds.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Ramone, even though we have only found microbes – no multicelled life forms like ourselves – there is mind everywhere we look.’ Everywhere there is a network to be built, messages to be passed, complexity to be explored, you’ll find a mind. Again Mars was the prototype, with the billion-year thoughts of its microbial mats locked in that little world’s permafrost layers. ‘You can see we labelled the mounds with marker dye. For the cognitive mapping we looked for the best specimen – the most intricate structure, the least damaged. We picked her.’ I pointed to the larger mound, over which the sensor net had been laid.

  ‘“Her”?’

  A bit sheepishly I said, ‘Anthropomorphising is a bad habit of animists. We call her Juliet. We labelled the mounds – see, that’s Alpha, that’s Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo –’

  ‘And Juliet. Oh, it’s the old NATO phonetic alphabet, isn’t it? My father was a copper on the streets of London, and they used the alphabet for their call signs. He was Sierra Oscar One Nine…’

  I admit I switched off. Why are old peoples’ anecdotes always so damn dull? It doesn’t seem adaptive, evolutionarily speaking.

  ‘And you can trace her thoughts,’ he said now. ‘Juliet’s. That’s a question of detecting biochemical impulses, right?’

  ‘We have an analytic technique called animistic deconvolution. It’s possible to break the characteristic signals of a mind into its component parts. You’d be surprised by the commonalities we find.’

  He surprised me with his next question. ‘Does she understand death?’

  ‘Why, I don’t know. Ramone, these minds are not like ours. She doesn’t nee
d to know death. As long as the pond survives Juliet will always be renewed, by one bacterial layer over another. She’s effectively immortal.’

  ‘Except that tomorrow all this will be destroyed. The mounds, the lake –’

  I watched his face. This wasn’t the first young system I had visited; I had come across such reactions as Bisset’s before. ‘This stellar system is unfinished. Just a swarm of worldlets. Collisions are the order of the day, Ramone. In fact it’s the way planets are built.’

  ‘A rough sculpting.’

  ‘Indeed. GC-IV is around a hundred million years old – that is, since the last collision big enough to melt the surface. A scummy crust formed in a few million years, comets delivered ocean water, life drifted in from space. Continents, oceans, lakes, air – it all comes together in an eyeblink of geological time. In between catastrophes, you see, there is time for life. But GC-IV hasn’t finished being built yet. It happened to Earth.’

  ‘But in a few days, everything alive now will be gone.’ He craned his head, looking up at the sky. ‘Is it possible Juliet knows the Hammer is coming?’

  ‘I don’t see how.’

  ‘Do you think we should warn her?’

  ‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘Even if we could, we shouldn’t try.’ Xenoethics is a new and uncertain field. As for me, I trained as a doctor. I don’t believe in intervening if there’s a risk you can do more harm than good. ‘We can’t lift off a whole biosphere – we couldn’t even save Juliet; she’s too fragile. All we can do is take a few samples, make a record of what was here. Wouldn’t it be cruel to interfere?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said simply.

  He was interrupted by a slap on the back. It was Ulf Thoring, his team leader. ‘I wondered where you got to, granddad. I patched your comms frequency into the crew and we’ve been having a bit of a laugh.’ He was Icelandic. His accent was strong, his English slightly off-key.