Lord of All Things (49 page)

“Radio signal has ceased,” announced another officer. “No further activity.”

Now the island could be seen on all screens, at different resolutions. In some inexplicable way it really did seem as though it had frozen into stillness. Only then did Charlotte realize that up until that moment there had been constant rippling movement all across the massive steel walls—movement she had subconsciously dismissed as being nothing more than reflected light. But now she could see nothing of the sort.

Whitecomb turned to Hiroshi. “Congratulations, Mr. Kato,” he said. “It looks like you managed to turn the things off.”

Hiroshi snapped his laptop shut. “It that case, could a helicopter take me over to the island?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“To the island,” Hiroshi replied patiently. “From this point on I need to be in direct contact with the nanites.”

Whitecomb spluttered. “Don’t you think you’re getting a little ahead of yourself? At the moment we have no idea whether this will last, and—”

“It won’t last, not indefinitely.” Hiroshi unplugged the multiband device and wound up the cable. “We have no time to lose.”

“You did see the videos? What happened to the men in the landing parties?”

“I saw.” Hiroshi put the multiband on top of his laptop. “I’ll need a warm parka, something like that.”

The rear admiral gasped for air. “A parka! You have strong nerves, I’ll give you that.”

Ulyakov listened to all this through his interpreter and nodded gruffly. “Good. Minimum crew for the helicopter. And they will not land him on the island. Lower him with the winch.”

They brought Hiroshi a thick, naval-issue parka with the emblem of the Northern Fleet, pants, and boots to match, and a backpack, where he could stow his laptop and multiband. Hiroshi accepted everything stony-faced. Outside, the helicopter’s blades were already spinning. The snow continued to flurry against the windowpanes. It was an extraordinary moment. The officers didn’t seem to know whether they should be bidding Hiroshi a solemn farewell or sending him on his way with cheers. Above all, they seemed unhappy that a civilian had taken the job upon himself.

“Good luck,” Whitecomb said at last with a forced smile. Somebody opened the door. The ice-cold north wind gusted in.

Hiroshi approached Charlotte, his bundle on his back. “Wish me luck,” he said.

“
Ki o tsukete
—Take care,” she said.

A shadow flitted across his face. “I don’t know what made it stop,” he told her quietly in Japanese. “It wasn’t me. But for heaven’s sake, don’t tell anybody that!”

Then he followed a sailor out to the helicopter. The door closed behind him with a dull clang.

8

As the helicopter battled its way through the blizzard, Hiroshi only had eyes for the island. He still couldn’t believe that right here in front of him was what he had been dreaming about for years—for his whole lifetime—and in such an unlikely place. Maybe the others only saw steel walls, fortifications, a colossal fortress in the solitude of the polar sea, but he saw the underlying nanite complexes, trillions upon trillions of them, so many that language hardly had any words for the numbers involved, yet all of them integrated, all organized, all awaiting their commands. He saw an infinite number of miniaturized versions of the robots he had built on Paliuk, of that simplest possible machine, and he saw the forms and structures that had until that moment only ever swarmed across his computer screens. There was no other way to see them: either with the mind’s eye, or not at all. Nanites were so small that the human eye could not detect them without the help of technology. They would only ever remain pictures on a screen. Yet here they were. They existed. The fact that he couldn’t see them meant nothing. Bacteria and viruses were also invisible to the naked eye, yet they existed—albeit on a scale many times larger than nanites.

And down there in the sea, growing ever larger, was the proof of the nano-robots’ power: by building themselves anew using the atoms they found all around, they could multiply their number indefinitely, almost infinitely. And since, despite their numbers, they stayed strictly organized, marching in lockstep as it were, working hand in hand to follow a clear plan, one gigantic program, they could build structures on any scale at all: from tiny replicas of themselves right up to such colossal creations as this island. Twelve square miles of rock now clad in shimmering steel. But this was nothing. There were no limits for nanites. They could rebuild a whole planet if they were programmed to, and there was practically nothing anyone could do about it.

Nano-robots did nothing but place atoms next to each other one by one, but that was enough to perform miracles. Fundamentally, the whole history of technology boiled down to this one aspect: how effectively one atom could be placed next to another. It had all begun with flint hand axes, bashing stone against stone until splinters flaked away—splinters made up of so many atoms that early man had no words to begin to describe the numbers involved. Then mankind began to dig for metals, which was nothing more than looking for atoms of particular elements, chosen for their special qualities. Next we learned to organize these atoms—and we called it smelting. Most recently came the highly developed industrial techniques of modern times—for instance, polishing slices of silicon to unprecedented purity, etching them with certain wavelengths of light and then subjecting them to chemical treatment to create computer processors of almost unimaginable capacity.

But all of this was nothing compared with the possibilities that opened up at the zenith of technological development once it became possible to manipulate individual atoms, to pick them up and place them exactly where they were needed; this was the most advanced technology imaginable. The difference between a lump of coal and a diamond was simply a matter of the arrangement of their respective carbon atoms. Nothing more. And what was so special about a diamond? It was a mere toy compared with the materials nanotechnology alone could create.

Hiroshi also couldn’t believe that he had just climbed aboard a helicopter that was carrying him to the heart of the most technologically advanced artifact mankind had ever seen. He had spent years working out the fundamental principles of this technology. He had developed a few concepts—but only a few—he believed must be universally applicable. He was a mere beginner compared with the mind that had created this shimmering silver colossus in front of him. A greenhorn. The bizarre structure reared up against a sky of heavy, gray clouds, and the lead-gray waves beat against it.

Nor did he understand why the nanites had ceased their activity. What had he done? All he had been trying to do was take a closer look at what the military had decided were jamming signals. He had wondered what might happen if he treated them as command signals instead and tried to make contact with the central control units that way. That was all. He had put a couple of his pattern-recognition programs to work on them. While the software did its job, he had just sat there thinking banal thoughts about how the Russian and American computer hotshots might decompile his binary code once all this was over. How his pattern-recognition algorithms would find their way into all kinds of software, thanks to the industrial-espionage guys. And how Jens would give him that lecture about patents and squandered profits when he heard about it
.
All true. In any case, he had identified a couple of patterns that seemed to make sense, and then he had broadcast a complementary sequence of signals just as an experiment. It had been nothing special, and certainly nothing he expected to provoke any reaction from the nanite machinery—perhaps an answering radio signal, but certainly no more than that. And then—standstill. Absolutely astonishing. Absolutely inexplicable.

The island reared up before them, gigantic: a dizzyingly oversized redoubt with shimmering battlements and impregnable fortifications. The sight took his breath away. That, and the knowledge he had no idea what he would actually do now that he was here. He had no plan, nowhere to start, nothing but a computer with a radio transmitter attached. The only thing he knew with absolute certainty was he had to set foot on this island even if it cost him his life. He would never be able to forgive himself if he didn’t.

The copilot unclipped his belt and came back to where Hiroshi sat, gesturing that he should do the same. Then he helped him into a kind of padded noose that ran around his back below the arms. At the front, on his chest, was a thick hook into which the soldier clipped the winch cable. Then he shoved the door open with a clang. Snow flurried in. The man shouted something that was lost in the noise of the engines—Hiroshi couldn’t even tell whether it was in Russian or English. Not that it made any difference, since he knew what it meant. It was time to entrust himself to the winch. One last check to see that everything was properly in place, that the backpack with the computer was sitting above the noose so that there was no chance of it getting damaged. One last nod, and then he stepped out into empty space.

The air snatched furiously at him as soon as he had dropped a few yards. The searing cold dispelled any feeling that this was all a dream. It was no dream. He was hanging from a thundering helicopter by a vibrating steel cable while the soldiers winched him downward just as fast as they could. Soon he would be the loneliest man on Earth. Nobody would come to save him if anything happened. The footage the agents had showed him in California played out again before his mind’s eye. It had included images of men screaming in pain as they died an almost unimaginable death, killed by the very ground beneath their feet. They had literally melted away as billions of nanites took their living cells apart into their constituent atoms of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, carrying away the calcium from their bones atom by atom to use elsewhere in nanotech devices.

Hiroshi looked down. The ground was fast approaching. It looked like flawless, freshly polished steel. His feet touched the surface. Nothing happened. He looked closer and saw snowflakes lying intact here and there on the steel, not even melting. He began to breathe again. He quickly took off the backpack and slipped out of harness. He waved upward. The cable with the empty noose whizzed away, and even before it had reached the winch the helicopter had turned and was roaring back to the ship.

He stood there. What now? Hiroshi lifted the backpack to his shoulders and looked up at the gigantic gate. It was standing open, which looked like an invitation. Well, he wasn’t going to stay out here. Now that he had made it this far, he wanted to go as deep as possible into the heart of the machine. If for no other reason than that it could only be warmer in there. He marched off, trudging up the shallow slope toward the narrow, dark gap. It was perhaps fifty meters high and five meters across. The closer he came to the gate, the more vividly he recalled the legends about the Bon festival back home and the Japanese legends of the dead. If there really was an entrance to the underworld somewhere, it could only look like this huge gate. He felt somehow uplifted. Even though he had no idea what he would do in there or what he might achieve. Probably nothing.

Hiroshi turned around and looked back at the gray ships lying offshore at what the military men considered—quite mistakenly—a safe distance. He remembered the walkie-talkie they had given him. He took it out of his pocket. It was a chunky thing that looked like a first-generation cell phone, and he had to take his gloves off to switch it on.

“Kato here,” he said. “I’m going in.”

He didn’t wait for an answer. He put the device away, pulled his gloves back on, took a deep breath, and crossed the threshold.

As time went by, Charlotte began to feel cold. The bridge was well heated, but anyone would start to shiver when all there was to do was sit and stare out the window at the unending, gray, storm-tossed monotony of the Arctic day. The snow had stopped, but the wind picked up, lashing the icy waves higher. But there was nothing else to do. Time passed, and the waiting frayed her nerves. The ships cruised up and down in front of the island, and the cameras filmed everything that was going on through their powerful telephoto lenses—meaning nothing at all, ever since Hiroshi had walked through that gate. Everything was being filmed; anyone who watched the footage later would be unspeakably bored.

The tension was palpable as they waited. The officers on the bridge spoke in hushed tones, sipping coffee, turning dials, tapping away at keyboards, bent over maps, but they were all waiting for something to happen. They were like cats lying in wait, ready to spring and pounce upon any movement from the hole. But what movement might there be? Did anybody seriously expect aliens to come out of the gate? Perhaps with Hiroshi in tow? Would they be hostile, dragging him along as a prisoner, or friendly now that all the initial misunderstandings had been cleared up? “Take us to your president,” they would say, and then a whole new set of misunderstandings and diplomatic standoffs would ensue.

Charlotte passed her hand through her hair for the hundredth time. She was only doing it so that she had something to do, so that she wouldn’t just sit at the abandoned conference table turning slowly to stone. She watched the American admiral, with his gold-encrusted cap and the colorful tags on his dress jacket; he was at the other end of the bridge, speaking into a chunky cell phone. His staff officers were standing all around him, trying to shield him from view; clearly, the Russians weren’t supposed to listen in on whatever he was telling the president.

No, Charlotte told herself, the aliens were gone. They’d flown off. They were on their way out of the solar system. If indeed there had ever been any alien life-forms at all. Perhaps it had only ever been a robot mission, nano-robots with some unknown task to perform. And given how long ago their masters must have sent them, they may well have died out entirely in the meantime.

Hiroshi had sent two updates from inside the installation. He was walking through endless halls, he told them, that looked like huge industrial facilities. There was nobody in sight, not a sign of life anywhere. Nothing was moving. Had the photos he had been sending them arrived, he asked? That had caused something of a stir, since in fact not a single photo had reached them. Charlotte had learned from a Russian officer that Hiroshi’s radio was a special military model with boosted transmission and an encrypted channel. And the built-in camera was supposed to be able to send every picture instantaneously at the push of a button. But the last call had come over a very bad connection, full of gaps and distortion. Most importantly, it had been a worryingly long time ago.

Unexpectedly, the others arrived. Unable to endure the uncertainty down in the sick bay, they had pleaded until they were finally allowed to go up to the bridge. Charlotte tried to explain to them who Hiroshi was and what he had said about the nano-robots on the island, but she couldn’t really fill in the important details and was met with impatient glances. Then she pricked up her ears as she overheard a scrap of talk. The Russians were doubtful they could really triumph. What if Hiroshi didn’t report in again soon? What if he didn’t come back at all? He could be dead by now, gone without a trace, taken apart for his constituent elements like the soldiers of the landing party. Nobody even thought of Leon van Hoorn anymore. After all, there was no video footage of his death. These days anything that wasn’t captured on video might just as well not have happened.

“I don’t like it,” Admiral Ulyakov growled ever more often. As he grumbled away, he glared at his officers with a look that made them flinch as though they felt personally responsible for the situation.

“
W
hat to do?” she heard from the American group. “
H
ow long can we wait?”

It wasn’t hard to read their thoughts: even a civilian must have damn well realized they were jumpy as a cat on a hot tin roof back here. If he couldn’t get a signal inside the installation, then the fool should retrace his steps to make a report, give them some sign of life, or at the very least let them know how long it might be until he could next make radio contact. If he kept quiet like this, then it could only mean he had been taken prisoner, or that he was dead—or he was such a dumb cluck he deserved everything that happened to him, and more, if they were forced to act. It was just that nobody knew what they could do. Otherwise, they were hardly likely to have waited this long. And now they were no further than they had been before.

“Admiral!” one of the sailors watching at the screen suddenly called out.

Ulyakov jutted his jaw forward. “Speak!”

“
K-104
reports that the…uh, the pipelines on the seabed are changing.” He listened to the voice over his headphones. “They seem to be going away.”