Last and First Contacts (Imaginings) Page 15

  I said angrily, ‘You’ve got no manners, Ulf.’

  ‘Oh, come on. I heard it all. Are you falling in love with Juliet, granddad? She isn’t really a girl, you know. Talk about a doomed romance! What do you want to do, save her or fuck her? We could fix you up an interface. Unless your little old pizzle is too worn out –’

  ‘Enough. This is Zuba.’ Her voice in my phones was deep and peremptory. I was impressed the Captain was listening in, but her command was built on an attention to detail. ‘You scientist types are nothing but trouble. Thoring, you need to learn some respect. You’re on fatigues at the end of your shift.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Thoring said. But Zuba couldn’t see his face, and he winked at me, insolent.

  ‘In the meantime we’ve got more work to do than time left to do it in. Get on with it.’

  We all murmured acquiescence.

  Thoring slapped Bisset on the back again. ‘It’s only a bit of a laugh, Ramone.’

  Bisset just looked down on him from his greater height. ‘It’s okay.’

  Ulf walked off towards the tractor that his buddies from Stockholm were loading up with their laser towers and sensor stations.

  Bisset turned to me. ‘Just tell me one more thing. What do you believe she’s thinking, right now? Juliet. One word.’

  I glanced at the summary analysis on my monitor. Some agitation showed there. ‘One word? …’ I have always regretted the word I chose to use, as I believe it was the trigger for what followed. ‘Fear. Actually, Ramone, I think she’s afraid.’

  Bisset stared long and hard at Juliet, under her cognitive cap, surrounded by joshing young animists. Then he turned away and followed Ulf Thoring.

  The next day was our last on CG-IV – indeed, it was the day of the impact.

  ‘Knilans, Zuba. You’d better get down here.’

  I was confused. ‘Where?’

  ‘The lake.’

  We’d already packed up at the lake. I was in the biolab, labelling samples and sorting out my records. There was less than twelve hours left before the Hammer was due to fall. I hadn’t expected ever to set foot on the planet again. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Bisset. He has a problem.’

  ‘Ramone? I haven’t seen him today. And he’s not my responsibility. He’s in Ulf’s team.’

  ‘Ulf is the problem. Look, I know you’ve talked to Bisset. We need to get this fixed. Zuba out.’

  I suited up, hurried out of the ship, and requisitioned a tractor that was in the process of being disassembled for flight.

  It was another pretty morning at Dreamers’ Lake. But the Hammer’s huge crater-pocked face was reflected in the waters; even as I watched it seemed to slide across the sky like a cloud. I felt a subtle quake as the gravity fields of two planets meshed.

  A second tractor was drawn up roughly on the pebbled beach. Two figures stood by the water; my suit’s heads-up identified them as Captain Zuba and Ulf Thoring. Thoring was standing awkwardly, as if he’d been injured.

  And a third figure stood in the lake itself, the water lapping around his waist. He was close to the big mound we’d labelled Juliet. My heads-up alerted me, but I knew who he was.

  ‘He has a weapon,’ Zuba said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s a laser gun from the IGWI kit,’ said Thoring. His voice was strangled. He was holding his side, and his forehead was bruised and bleeding, as if it had been thrown against his faceplate.

  ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘He beat me up. Bisset.’

  ‘You deserved it, you little prick,’ Zuba murmured. ‘Knilans. Fix this so we can get out of here.’

  I stepped towards the water. I noticed that many of the mounds looked damaged – scarred, stitched by straight-line wounds. ‘Ramone? Are you okay?’

  He didn’t reply.

  I racked my brains for some way to get through to him. ‘Umm – “Tis not hard, I think, for men so old as we to keep the peace.”’

  I thought I saw him relax, subtly. ‘Shakespeare.’

  ‘Talk to me, Ramone.’

  ‘Ask him.’ He gestured with the laser at Thoring.

  Hastily, sketchily, Ulf told me what had happened.

  The IGWI team had completed their station on the surface of GC-IV. This is simple in principle, just a network of nodes connected by laser light; perturbations of the laser echoes can be used to detect the passage of gravity waves. The ancient waves the IGWI boys seek are stretched, attenuated and overlaid, and it is taking an interferometer, a super-telescope made up of many stations across interstellar distances, to map them.

  Their work done, the IGWI boys dismantled their gear. But on a whim, probably motivated by Ulf’s overhearing my conversation with Bisset, they stopped by Dreamers’ Lake, unpacked their lasers, and enjoyed a little target practice.

  Bisset said, ‘These are minds, Ulf. You burst them like balloons.’

  Thoring sounded aggrieved. ‘But it was only a bit of a laugh. For God’s sake –’ He gestured at the sky. ‘In twelve hours none of this will survive anyhow.’

  I turned back to Bisset. ‘You punished him, Ramone. You made your point. So what are you doing out there?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about what we said. Juliet.’

  I felt a deep knot of dread gather in my stomach. For the first time I began to get the feeling that this might all be my fault. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You showed me the signal of her mind. She is afraid. She knows, Susan.’

  ‘How can she?’

  ‘The Hammer is the size of Mars. Perhaps the mounds can sense the tides. It’s at least possible, isn’t it? Even I can feel the quakes. Juliet faces extermination, yet she has never known death: what a terrible thing.’

  ‘Okay. Even supposing that’s true, what are you going to do? Put her out of her misery? Finish the job Ulf and his thugs started?’

  ‘You don’t understand.’ He sounded offended. ‘I’ve known death. I lost my wife, my daughter. I’ve had to live with that.’ I knew little about his past. ‘Maybe if I can teach Juliet what I’ve learned, it will help her, and her kin, accept what is to come.’

  Then I saw it. ‘Shit. You’re going to kill yourself, aren’t you?’

  ‘Knilans, Zuba. This is a secure line; Bisset can’t hear us. I don’t think this has anything to do with the mounds. It’s all about the bullying and the bullshit from the IGWI boys. Bisset wants to make a statement – to rise above them on his own terms.’

  ‘Nice theory,’ I replied. ‘But I can’t use it. I think I have to deal with him in his own framework. Unless you have a better idea, Captain.’

  Zuba hesitated for one second. ‘You know him better than I do. You scientist types are nothing but trouble. Get this resolved.’

  I cut back to the open comms, and struggled to make Bisset understand. ‘Ramone – it can’t work. There’s no interface between the two of you. Not even a cognitive net. If you die now, she will never know.’

  ‘But nobody even knew that mounds like this could be sentient before the discoveries on Mars. You say she won’t know. Are you sure?’

  I was lost.

  Zuba took over. ‘Citizen Associate, it’s at least a fair bet Knilans is right. This mound will understand nothing. If you slit open your suit – have you ever seen a suffocation? – it will take longer to die than you might think. And in all those long seconds the seed of doubt will grow in your mind: I have thrown my life away for nothing.’

  I could see Bisset’s uncertainty. ‘Then I’ll just stand here until my air runs out.’

  ‘That’s your privilege,’ Zuba said mildly. ‘And it will be my privilege to stand here with you.’

  Bisset seemed genuinely puzzled. ‘Why?’

  ‘Call it my own brand of xenoethics.’ She turned to Ulf Thoring. ‘Have you told the Citizen Associate about the results of the IGWI programme?’

  ‘No.’ Ulf said defensively. ‘They’re not published. And besides –’

&
nbsp; ‘Tell him now.’

  Structure, Ulf told him, has been detected in the signals from the beginning of time. No, not just structure – life, its unmistakeable signature, with traces of mind susceptible to standard animistic deconvolution. Even in those very first instants, as cosmic energies raged, life flourished, blossomed, died, and was aware. The study of this primordial life is the whole purpose of the IGWI programme – though, as nothing has yet been published, it is still a matter of gossip on academic sites.

  This stunning discovery has led to a revision of our theories of life’s origin. Perhaps the essence of life was born in those first instants. Or perhaps, some speculate, it was injected into our infant universe, from – somewhere else.

  ‘Okay,’ Zuba said. ‘Here’s what I take from all of that, in my simple way. Everywhere we have travelled we have found life and mind. But it is not like us. It exists on utterly different scales from us – hugely more extensive in space, and in time.’

  She was right. At best multicelled forms like us are an episode in the long dream of bacterial life. Away from Earth, we’ve found a few fossils; that’s all.

  Zuba said, ‘There are similarities in the cognitive maps of your pet stromatolite, Bisset, and the antique minds from the inflationary period. Similarities. But we are different; we are nothing but transient structures that soon dissolve back into the mush. You’re right, Citizen Associate; only we humans know death. And in a universe that teems with life, we humans are still alone, in a way Juliet has never been alone. That is why I will wait for you, Citizen Associate, until that damn moon hammers me into the ground like a tent peg. Because all we humans have is each other.’

  You have to admit she was impressive.

  Bisset thought it over. ‘I should get out of this pond.’

  ‘Good idea,’ I said fervently.

  Bisset glanced once more at Juliet. She was unharmed, save for a slight scarring from our cognitive net. He dropped the laser, which sank out of sight into the water, and began to wade towards us. ‘Tell me one more thing, Captain.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘So we humans work for each other. But why are we here? We spoke about this, Susan. Why explore, why go on and on?’

  Zuba said, ‘We don’t know what we might find. We humans are lost now, but not forever. There’s a place for us.’

  Bisset laughed softly. ‘Like the movie song.’

  ‘What movie?’ I wondered.

  ‘What is a movie?’ Ulf Thoring asked.

  Zuba glanced up. The Hammer was an inverted landscape sliding over the dreaming stromatolites. ‘You might want to hurry it along.’

  Bisset splashed to the edge of the water, and we hurried forward to help him.

  The Long Road

  Hara took days to walk the long road, from the hunters’ camps in the hills to the sandstone huts of the fisher folk by the marshy shore. But the road ran straight, its surface hard, the walking good. This directness pleased Hara, as she walked alone through the autumnal sunlight. She was fifteen years old.

  Her father scolded her for these excursions. But Hara would be able to trade cattle leather for bream and mussels, and enough cockle shells for an anklet or two.

  Besides, her father’s misgivings were to do with the road itself. People muttered darkly that it must have been built by vanished giants. But Hara had a practical turn of mind. A straight line was simply the most obvious way from hills to coast. And generations of patient walkers like herself had surely flattened the ground with their feet, without the help of giants: Britain was already an old country.

  The wind rustled dying leaves. She could smell the ice that still lay not far to the north. She hoped to reach the coast before nightfall, and, perhaps, and to find a certain boy of the fisher-folk clan. Smiling, warm deep inside, she hurried on, her feet padding softly on the road’s grassy surface.

  Under the unusually hot sun of this northern summer’s day, Marcus Plautius, stripped to the waist, worked with his men on the road.

  Marcus didn’t have to do this. A centurion from north Italy, he had won his seniority the hard way. But road-making pleased him: the surveying with plumb lines and beacons, the grades of stone and gravel laid in sequence, the design that ensured good foundations, a decent walking surface, and reliable drainage. Maybe it was because of all the destruction he had seen that he found road-building so satisfying.

  But a soldier understood that the roads were the Emperors’ supreme instrument of control. Just here they happened to be following the course of an old rutted track, but Roman roads ran straight whatever was in their way, their cold geometry freezing barbarian minds. And where roads ran, towns and prosperity flourished, and citizens paid their taxes – and Marcus’s salary.

  So Marcus worked with a will, immersed in songs from Spain and Persia and Africa, and the road stretched true from horizon to horizon.

  Seth sat in the musty dark of his toll gate lodge, chewing on tobacco. He had had an argument with his son.

  Like his father, Seth was a turnpike gatekeeper. This was a profitable road, the obvious route to carry your cotton goods straight from city to port. And thanks to the tolls those who used the turnpike paid for its upkeep, so the old road was restored to its best condition since the Romans.

  But now the railway had come, its culverts and embankments following the road’s own direct route. The turnpike traffic had reduced to a trickle, and the tolls dried up with it. Today Seth’s son Thomas had vowed that he would never become gatekeeper but would go work on the railway.

  Seth heard a clattering of hooves. Another traveller, another penny. Sighing, he pulled himself up from his chair.

  The road itself was aware.

  It still followed the ancient, logical route between inland city and port. But now every centimetre was saturated with chips and actuators, and nano-machines repaired every crack, while the road monitored and controlled the traffic that thundered along it.

  The road, integrated into a global transportation network, had become very smart indeed. And it understood a great deal.

  Transport drove the global economy, but things were out of balance. For a century it had been cheaper to travel than to build. So children commuted to huge regional schools, their parents to work in faraway cities. But if you factored in the cost of waste and excess heat, transport really wasn’t so cheap after all – and the days of ‘cheap’ travel must soon end anyhow. And then what?

  The road suspected that nothing like it was ever likely to be built again. But then it would sink back into the joy of purpose fulfilled, as storms of traffic broke over its long back.

  Lida, fifteen years old, took days to walk the long road, from the hunters’ camps in the hills to the huts of the fisher folk by the shore, where she would trade rabbit skin for bream and mussels.

  The road ran so straight and firm that people muttered darkly about its origins. But Lida was practical. This was simply the most obvious way from hills to coast, and generations of patient walkers like herself had surely flattened the ground. No need to imagine vanished giants.

  The wind rustled dying leaves. She could smell the ice to the north; every day it edged closer. She hurried on.

  And the road sensed the soft pad of her footsteps, and dreamed of vanished traffic.

  Last Contact

  March 15th

  Caitlin walked into the garden through the little gate from the drive. Maureen was working on the lawn.

  Just at that moment Maureen’s mobile phone pinged. She took off her gardening gloves, dug the phone out of the deep pocket of her old quilted coat and looked at the screen. ‘Another contact,’ she called to her daughter.

  Caitlin looked cold in her thin jacket; she wrapped her arms around her body. ‘Another super-civilisation discovered, off in space. We live in strange times, Mum.’

  ‘That’s the fifteenth this year. And I did my bit to help discover it. Good for me,’ Maureen said, smiling. ‘Hello, love.’ She leaned forward for a kiss on t
he cheek.

  She knew why Caitlin was here, of course. Caitlin had always hinted she would come and deliver the news about the Big Rip in person, one way or the other. Maureen guessed what that news was from her daughter’s hollow, stressed eyes. But Caitlin was looking around the garden, and Maureen decided to let her tell it all in her own time.

  She asked, ‘How’re the kids?’

  ‘Fine. At school. Bill’s at home, baking bread.’ Caitlin smiled. ‘Why do stay-at-home fathers always bake bread? But he’s starting at Webster’s next month.’

  ‘That’s the engineers in Oxford.’

  ‘That’s right. Not that it makes much difference now. We won’t run out of money before, well, before it doesn’t matter.’ Caitlin considered the garden. It was just a scrap of lawn, really, with a quite nicely stocked border, behind a cottage that was a little more than a hundred years old, in this village on the outskirts of Oxford. ‘It’s the first time I’ve seen this properly.’

  ‘Well, it’s the first bright day we’ve had. My first spring here.’ They walked around the lawn. ‘It’s not bad. It’s been let to run to seed a bit by Mrs Murdoch. Who was another lonely old widow,’ Maureen said.

  ‘You mustn’t think like that.’

  ‘Well, it’s true. This little house is fine for someone on their own, like me, or her. I suppose I’d pass it on to somebody else in the same boat, when I’m done.’

  Caitlin was silent at that, silent at the mention of the future.

  Maureen showed her patches where the lawn had dried out last summer and would need reseeding. And there was a little brass plaque fixed to the wall of the house to show the level reached by the Thames floods of two years ago. ‘The lawn is all right. I do like this time of year when you sort of wake it up from the winter. The grass needs raking and scarifying, of course. I’ll reseed bits of it, and see how it grows during the summer. I might think about getting some of it relaid. Now the weather’s so different the drainage might not be right any more.’

  ‘You’re enjoying getting back in the saddle, aren’t you, Mum?’