Existence (66 page)

That was where Dr. Betsby turned next, when he finished his interior scan, stepping onto the platform. Slawek followed, though the sheer drop-off made him nervous. Betsby bent over in front of one of the men, who stared vacantly with a thin trail of drool hanging from a corner of his mouth.

“Jonathan?” Betsby snapped his fingers. The fellow’s bare shoulders bore bioluminescent tattoos—
pixie-skin
displays that throbbed with ever-changing patterns, like an octopus or cuttlefish.

But Jonathan didn’t answer. Not while his specs flashed brainwave-tuned images, guiding him to a plateau that used to be achievable only after years of prayer and training … or with illegal substances. Buddhists and transcendentalists called this “cheating” and old-time narcotics cartels pushed to make dazing illegal, as they lost market share to programs like
Cogito
or
LightLord
.

“Leave him be,” said a fellow with reddish hair and muttonchop sideburns. His high-of-choice was simpler, a bubble-bottle of frothy Motor City Lager. “Jonathan don’t react well to interruptions.”

“All the more reason to intervene, Henry James Lee,” Betsby said, leaning closer to the dazer. “Jonathan Cain! You know the rules. No meditation during daylight hours. How long since you took care of bodily needs? What you’re doing is both irresponsible and dangerous.”

The doctor reached for Jonathan’s pair of Mesh spectacles, moving to break the trance.

“I tole you to leave off him, you gaijin-lovin’, egghead bastard!” The second man snarled, moving closer …

… and now, suddenly, Slawek caught a glint in Henry James Lee’s other hand, the one not holding a beer bottle. His specs zoomed—

“Knife!” Slawek started forward and things happened fast. As he dived between Jonathan and the doc, aiming to throw a block against the blade, he brushed Jonathan’s knee—and the dazer suddenly yelled. Spasming, arms, and legs lashed out. One foot struck Slawek’s thigh hard, slamming him into Betsby, who windmilled, struggling for balance.

“Doc!”

Slawek shouted, spinning and reaching for Betsby. He managed to catch a sleeve as the physician teetered. No help was coming from Henry James Lee, but if Slawek could just manage to hold on to the strip of fabric …

… only then Jonathan let out another thrashing, reflex kick, catching Slawek behind the knee, toppling him farther.

The physician teetered, feet scrambling at the brink, as Betsby’s weight hauled Slawek after him. In seconds, the doctor’s expression shifted from panic to realization. With sudden strength that surprised Slawek, he tore the boy’s hand off his sleeve and gave it a hard shove
,
throwing Slawek back just enough to halt on his knees, wavering right at the ledge. Even so, his momentum carried forward … more … more …

Now
Henry James Lee acted—a strong, callused hand clamped Slawek’s collar, yanking him back.

“Let go!” he screamed, swatting at the hand. Heart pounding, clenching the plywood with white-hard strength that made the boards crack, Slawek prayed rapidly, both in the virtual world and this one, as he made himself lean over again, to look down toward seating section 116.

It’s not so high. A person who landed right could get off with a broken leg—

Flowing tears might have blurred the full impact of what lay down there. But the specs detected impaired vision and compensated, magnifying, clarifying, till he sobbed and closed both eyelids tightly shut.

TORALYZER

Normally, I don’t follow leaks from a blind otter.

Off the record is bad enough. But when an OTR demands that I not even
look
for a trackspoor … well … it smacks of a disinfobot, or even reffer stuff. Please.

But we’ve done pretty well, following hints from Birdwoman303. Take the way she cued our super-posse smart-mob onto a dozen big-time international fugitives—much to the annoyance of the feds and inter-feds, who spent futile years searching in vain for those bad guys! Breaking that wind won us super-high cred ratings and put
me
in the running for this year’s Nosie Award! Not bad, for a reporter who is still confined to a gel-cocoon, who must interact with the world via Mesh surrogates and this crazy possai. But back to the topic at hand.

It’s regarding
alien artifacts
that Birdwoman303 was most helpful. Remember how we fast-correlated those underground quakes, and told the world that each individual seismo-pop was the cry of some desperate, buried crystal? We also helped gather data from varied amsci orgs, verifying that all those
space-glitters
—in the asteroid belt and the L-points—were
also
come-and-get-me cries from lonely emissary stones.

Sure, the ensuing seek-and-grab missions will take years. Still, a discovery made by
amateurs
will trigger relaunching of the world’s space programs. Congrats!

But those are old hats, no longer hot or hip. Three weeks in the past—almost a paleo-month! And though guvs and privs are sifting the whole Earth for remnants, most of the dug-up crystals are too worn-down, fragged, or broken to be holo-lucid. Twenty days after the Big Revelation in Washington, we still don’t have a credible second source. A different gypsy ball to either verify the Artifact aliens or dispute their dour diagnosis …

… that we’re all doomed—species, civilization, and planet—because
everybody dies.
Except those individual beings who manage to get themselves downloaded into message bottles, that is. The ultimate individualism. A level of solipsism that makes Ayn Rand seem like a Shaker.

But we’re not going there. Not today. Not with the whole world already chewing over that ominous sales pitch. It is SO boring to think about what everybody else is thinking about, yes?

No, what we’ve been working on, in this smart-militia of Millisecond MenW, is a different question:
What if there are other, relatively intact space globes, already held secretly, perhaps in private hands?

Some of our subgroups have been tracing legends, rumors, and murky tales. Others accosted museums or picketed outside reclusive aristo-collections, demanding access to probe precious specimens with rays and beams.

Only, aren’t
those
activities also kind of obvious, pursued by agencies and hordes far better equipped than we are? Our forte is uncovering the
un
-obvious! So I suggest a different approach. Instead of looking for hidden artifacts,
let’s look for those who are doing the looking.

Or rather, those who started looking suspiciously early!

I’m talking about the period right after Gerald Livingstone snatched his infamous Object out of orbit. Those first few days, when just the slimmest rumors started spreading, without images or data to back them up. Shouldn’t the Mesh archives reveal
who was more excited and eager than anyone reasonably ought to be,
at that early stage?

Who was out there first, searching for translucent, oblong globes about half a meter in length? There was no reason to expect to find such crystal objects already on Earth, let alone to conduct a quest so detailed and specific. And yet—following some hints from our mysterious otter friend—I’ve already spotted several seeker-worms and -ferrets that were dispatched during those early days, desperately seeking.

Somebody … perhaps as many as a dozen groups … apparently knew what to go looking for. Knowledge that they still aren’t sharing, when we all need most …

Ah, the consensus twinkle.

It’s agreed, then? We have a new goal. A fresh scent.

Call out the hounds.

49.

DOUR STORYTELLERS

For Peng Xiang Bin, these were tense hours.

Everyone in the little study team seemed on edge. So was the world, since ten billion people finally heard the whole story told by those alien entities in Washington. Their cheery sales pitch, inviting some number of individual humans to
join them
on an extended interstellar cruise. Not in person, of course—not as organic beings—but as software copies, cast forth across the interstellar immensity aboard millions of tiny vessels, made of crystal and thought.

Naturally (those alien figures added), the full resources of industrial civilization would have to be brought to bear, and soon, if galactic lifeboats were to be made in sufficient quantity, and in time. Because humanity probably had very little left.

Time, that is.

That other part of their message—revealed almost as an afterthought—was what slammed the world, provoking waves of rioting and suicides, all across the globe.

“And yet, I wonder,” mused the Pulupauan research assistant, Paul Menelaua. “Is their warning really such a bad thing?”

“What do you mean, Paul?” asked the elderly scholar from Beijing, Yang Shenxiu.

“I mean that it has focused everybody’s attention on lots of problems that people were shrugging aside, or taking only half seriously, till now. Perhaps the warning will have net positive effects, rousing humanity to crisis mode. To take our responsibilities seriously! Girding us with determination to at last to grow up. To bear down and concentrate on solving—”

Anna Arroyo interrupted, snorting with clear disdain.

“Do you have any idea what that calls for? Uncovering and solving
thousands
of different traps and pitfalls, from a long list of perils that ultimately struck down every other intelligent race out there? Every last one! You’ve seen the telecasts. Those Havana Artifact creatures insist there’s no way to accomplish that.”

“Yes, but is that even logical? I mean, each of their home species was still alive, when it launched its wave of—” Paul stopped, shaking his head. They all recalled what had happened to the homeworld of the helicopter aliens, even as those beings were busy, launching their own bottle-probes. Everyone on Earth knew
that
was no happy ending, with the Havana Artifact barely launched in time to escape a nuclear holocaust.

In the weeks since that scene was televised, radio and optical telescopes had been swiveled to aim at that source planet. So far, they were picking up nothing, not even the static noise that might come from moderate industry … though new-model sensors and space-borne instruments were being designed and hurriedly built, to peer even closer.

“Surviving as a technological civilization is like crossing a vast minefield,” Anna continued. “Too many mistakes and pitfalls lie in wait—bad tradeoffs or ineludible paths of self-destruction. They say it’s rare, at best, for any advanced culture to last for more than a thousand years. Barely long enough to learn how to make more of
these
”—she gestured at the worldstone—“and hurl out more copies of the chain letter!”

Well,
Bin thought,
even a thousand years would be nice. We humans have only had high tech for a century or so, and we seem to have already made a mess of it.

Anna shook her head, sounding resigned and detached. “If it’s all hopeless, then maybe we should take them up on their offer. Let them teach us how to build millions of crystalline escape pods, each carrying one of us to go voyaging, in comfort, across the stars.”

After a long stretch of shyness, Bin now dared to speak.

“Courier of Caution—the emissary in
our
worldstone—claims that the aliens in Washington are
liars.
”

“Exactly!” Paul snapped, while tugging at his animatronic crucifix. He had lately grown more willing to treat Bin as a member of the team, even acknowledging his presence with a terse nod, now and then. “They may
not
be telling the truth. Perhaps they are using this story to
push
us toward despair and self-destruction—the very scenario that our own envoy warns against.”

Yang Shenxiu agreed, switching from the colloquial Chinese they had all been using to English.

“This is bigger than any of us. We should bring these terrifying stones together. Let them debate each other, before the world!”

All eyes turned to Dr. Nguyen, the Annamese ceramics mogul, who had been pensive and nearly silent for several days. Now he rested both elbows on the teak tabletop and bridged his fingers, blowing a silent whistle through pursed lips, till finally shaking his head.

“I am answerable to a consortium,” he said at last, returning the conversation to impeccable Mandarin, with only a hint of his childhood Mekong accent. “My instructions were to start by getting this stone’s story and determining if there were any differences from the Havana Artifact. That we have accomplished.

“Alas, the second imperative priority was made luminously clear—to
seek advantageous technologies,
at almost any cost. Either through interrogation or through dissection. Also, using such methods to determine if there are troves of information the thing is holding back.”

With grim, tight lips, Paul Menelaua nodded. Meanwhile, Bin and the others stared, in various degrees of shock.

“The word ‘advantageous’
…,
” Anna protested, “it assumes we can learn something that the researchers in Washington aren’t discovering—technologies that would give our consortium an edge.

“But we’ve already seen that these objects are similar. Moreover, the entire
premise
of the story being told by the creature-simulations inside the Havana Artifact … their whole narrative … revolves around a promise that they will
give
humanity every capability
to make more of these stones.
It’s the reason they crossed so many light-years! What motive would they have, to hold anything back? Surely that means we’d gain nothing from tearing apart—”

“Not necessarily,” Paul dissented. “If Courier is right, they may have a hidden agenda. In which case they’ll hold back plenty. Sure, they’re teaching humanity how to make crystalline copies. But really, what are they offering? These stone emissaries don’t seem to be all that far in advance of our present capabilities. Now that we’ve seen their ai and simulation technologies at work, we could probably duplicate everything—except those super-propulsion lasers—without any help, in thirty years. Or less.