Orb (38 page)

I proceeded on to depths where sunlight never penetrated, yet uninterrupted darkness seldom prevailed. Here brightly illuminated Orbs sallied back and forth in seemingly random zigzag patterns; others approached from out of the gloom, appearing like giant beacons, spreading a soft light wherever they went; they drifted aimlessly by, only to fade, silently, into the darkness.

Orbs did not reside in this region for very long, preferring, perhaps requiring, sunlight. For this reason I watched with heightened interest as several shifted their luminance to blue and drifted toward a faint glow emanating from below. I followed, plummeting down into a realm well beyond the deepest of Earth’s Ocean.

There I came upon the most unusual sight: Hundreds of Orbs amassed into a huge, slowly rotating, tightly compacted sphere. From this fiercely glowing conglomeration Orbs were propelling themselves outward and back, their completed course of travel describing acute ellipses, their brilliant light reaching out to further confound the distant blackness. This pastime was, in and of itself, quite intriguing, but it was made more so when it dawned on me that the entirety of the spectacle was radiating the identical shade of blue as the planet’s sun!

It was then, Bruce, that I saw them—growing from the jagged terrain below. Silent sentinels bathed in pale blue light. Your spires. I can tell you nothing more about them, for they were mostly obscured in the distant darkness. I hope this meager information will be of some assistance in your effort to solve their mystery.

Until this point, my entire being had been consumed by the fascinating behavior of individual Orbs, with scant attention devoted to that of the OceanOrb. As I rose toward the surface, I tried shifting my perspective.

Beyond our present understanding of the structure of matter there is an interface where oblivion meets totality, a region where the elemental becomes sublime. It is here (a word I hesitate to use for it connotes
place
) that every Orb is able to instantly communicate with any of ten or ten million fellow creatures. I know almost nothing of what was conveyed within this dominion, not because anything was deliberately shielded from me—that would require subterfuge—but rather the medium and content were of a nature I could not yet fully fathom. I was, however, able to sense (and we have all seen) that every Orb in existence celebrates the arrival of a new member born out of the OceanOrb. I will add this: When one Orb is born, another somewhere,
anywhere
on the planet, disbands, reassimilating of its own accord, and this, too, is celebrated.

In trying to comprehend, I asked myself how an entity can be so vast yet be so intimately connected; so unimaginably old and yet, through the birth of individual Orbs, constantly renewed and replenished; exist as one, yet comprise a multitude. The startling answer, obvious when pondered from a different perspective, was that these seeming contradictions were not contradictions at all. No, they were better viewed as corollaries, each in some way explaining itself and the others.

Still, my understanding of the OceanOrb seemed lacking, bereft of emotion, despite the fact that I was, in some inscrutable way, permeating that which I wanted to better comprehend. Funny-strange, I reflected, that I was encountering a similar difficulty in understanding an entity for which I was even more intimately connected, namely myself.

I considered all that transpired on this expedition. I thought of my crewmates and what I managed to learn from each of you. Then I remembered your words, Paul.

I reflected on what was, and will always be, simple.

As brilliantly simple as Angie, for whom the Orb evidently had a great affinity.

I battled against my parochial, preconceived notions. And, in partly winning the fight, I came at last to accept that you can never understand the universal ocean flowing within and without us; and in doing so I began to perceive the world from the OceanOrb’s original, revelatory perspective, as it should be perceived. As a joyous exaltation.

And there it was, before me all the time!

The sky!

I saw
all
the broad and wonderful sky as the timeless sun simultaneously rose and fell, lightness and darkness, one star and a million!

I felt the constancy of the atmosphere’s warm embrace imbued with feathery tracings of wind, wild and calm.

I heard the quietude as ascending moisture returned in blustery squalls of descending rain.

And then, in my greatest triumph, I divined your presence, Kelly, as you sought my island of solitude, searching … searching only for me … my love….

And I desired to return home.

To you.

To an abused Earth that has always and will forever represent the only real sanctuary we have.

I centered my will on the invisible path that was laid out before me and found myself inside the Orb with Angie beside me.

Before I opened my eyes (I could just as easily say before I closed my eyes), one last image flashed in and out of view, an image not easily rectified with all the rest: The glint from the faceted sides of a slowly rotating cube. Of all the wonders I saw, this is the only one I cannot faithfully attest to.

Diverting my attention was another, more tangible, wonder: Kelly peering down into the Orb, then stepping forward to hold me while it moved away.

You have been patient with me….

“CONGRATULATIONS AND WELL done,” said Paul, voicing the predominant opinion of my crewmates.

“Back on Earth there’ll be doubters,” Diana cautioned, expressing the subordinate sentiment. With help from Thompson and Paul, she had interrogated me like a world-class prosecuting attorney, but I was only a little worse for wear.

“What do you believe?” I responded, realizing that if my encounter lacked credibility with my crewmates, then I’d have zero chance of convincing the billions on Earth.

“What I believe won’t matter. A shitload of scientists, no,
everyone
will be asking, ‘Did you make contact with the Orb or with yourself?’ By your own account, you fell asleep. You must admit that most of what followed has more than passing semblance to a dream, a string of illusory images concocted by someone with a hyperactive imagination.”

(Symmetry, I thought to myself, if I again found myself accused, tried and found guilty by the scientific community and the public.)

“Admit? I insist that it does, but I shall disavow none of it. Not on a world where having a
hypo
active imagination has been our failing.”

“Which is one of the principal reasons I believe you, every farfetched, consciousness-altering, reality-bending, mind-boggling word.”

“Did you get all that?” Thompson asked, pointing to my recorder.

“Every hyphenation,” I said.

“She’s right, though,” Thompson said. “Those inclined to believe you may choose to focus on the unusually intimate nature of your contact. They will conclude that you lacked the capacity to evaluate exactly where your identity ended and the Orbs’ began. You will be accused of being unable to draw a distinction between the two.”

“Another example of the observer affecting the observed?” I said, once again finding something Thompson said worth paraphrasing.

“Take one more step,” replied Thompson. “The observer, to some degree, becomes the observed.”

“If so, isn’t that the best evidence of contact? Of course I was altered by the Orb. How could I not be, when every projection of our self alters us in some way? If I plunge my arm in a pool of cold water, my arm becomes cold and a host of physiological changes occur. It is still my arm when, in turn, it slightly warms the water. Well, I plunged my mind into the Orb. We took
something
from each other. Joy, I found—easily identified in Angie, and then found in me.”

“Was that sharing enough to undo the damage Melhaus inflicted with his negative emotions?” Diana asked.

“Interestingly enough, that was never necessary: The entity perceived threats from the laser and from
Ixodes
but not the underlying motivation. To the Orb, emotions other than pure joy cannot be separated out because they lose meaning. Don’t you see the irony? If anything, it was I
,
inside the Orb
,
who imparted causative emotions like hubris, anger, guilt, and pride to our actions, not Larry, individually, or us, collectively. How best to explain? To the Orb, everything is connected and, difficult as this is to accept, unjudged. Threats are perceived when something holds itself completely apart from, or is the antithesis to, that connectivity.”

“A connectivity to which you became a small part,” Diana commented.

“Small, yes, but far from trivial. I never felt completely…”

“What?” Diana said, cajoling. “Alone?”

“Yes. Alone.”

“Because of your connection to the Orb?” Thompson asked.

“In part,” I said, my voice much lower than I intended. “But not all.”

“If not all, what then?” Paul prompted, even though he didn’t need to ask; having recently heard my verbal report, he had a pretty damned good idea of my response.

“Kelly was with me. I felt her. I felt Angie. Behind them, each of you. Behind each of you, everyone and everything….” Looking around the table, I saw everybody smiling. All except Melhaus, fast asleep in the blue warmth of the late day sun. Reciprocating the group smile, I said, “Perhaps I did find out more about myself than about the Orb.”

“As I said before,” Paul remarked, “congratulations.”

We were to leave the planet mid-morning the next day. Diana was assisting Paul, who was dismantling his science station and securing it onboard
Desio
. As for Thompson (and Diana, as well) the task of stowing equipment had been made easier—thanks to the efforts of Melhaus and his laser. A few instruments survived for the geologist to use, and he intended on doing so until, in his words, “the very last rays of light make work impossible, and possibly beyond that.”

We were sympathetic. The first expedition, working in adverse conditions, had come away with what they believed to be a fairly representative sampling of the planet’s surface geology. They had not, however, stumbled upon the spires. Until we were back on Earth, samples of those geological anomalies were all Thompson’s, and they presented a challenge that captivated as much as confounded him.

Within hours of arriving on Orb, he used a portable rock drill equipped with a hollow diamond bit to bore small holes into the base of the spires, extracting long, smooth, core samples. These, in turn, he sliced into several ‘thin sections’ which he examined under two different instruments: A petrologic microscope with two-thousand time resolution and a scanning microscope capable of resolutions to a fraction of a nanometer. Nothing in the visual analyses of these thin sections, or in their subsequent spectral and chemical analyses, shed any light on how the spires were formed.

This was my limited knowledge of Thompson’s work when, suppressing excitement, he appeared at my doorway and said, “Stop pretending to be Hemingway. I want you to look at a series of scanning microscope images.”

“Asimov,” I corrected, following Thompson to his cabin. “And I thought your microscopes were toast.”

“Crispy. Diana’s scanner managed to escape destruction.”

The first thing I noticed, and commented on, when entering Thompson’s cabin was that the San bow, minus two arrows, had been remounted on the bulkhead.

“They better make that standard issue for deep space missions,” I said.

The second thing I noticed was that his desk was cleared of all effects save the scanning scope and associated hardware, including a monitor upon which four colorful images, each occupying a quadrant, were displayed for viewing.

“Pretty pictures,” I commented.

“Sit,” Thompson ordered. “Try, if at all possible, to not act dumber than you are.”

“I like a challenge.”

“I want you to study the surfaces of the thin sections displayed on the monitor. What do you see?”

“There is a noticeable difference in smoothness.”

“Be specific.”

“The top two thin sections are smoother than the bottom two. Of the top two, the one on the left is slightly smoother than that on the right.” The images were unambiguous. So obvious, in fact, it was difficult to take Thompson’s needing my opinion seriously. “Does my answer please master?” I said.

“You’re sure of your response?”

“Absolutely. Is this some kind of object lesson, like the juice container? What gives?”

“‘What gives’ is, once again, turning our assumptions on their head.”

That was something Thompson would not joke about. “How so?” I asked.

“In due time. Get Diana. Don’t tell her the why or the wherefore.”

“Since I don’t know, that’ll be easy.”

I located Diana in the lab, helping Paul stow away his equipment. “You’ve been summoned to the king’s chamber,” I pronounced.

Both of us?” Paul asked.

“No. Just Diana.”

“What the hell did I do now?” she asked.

“Remarkably, nothing.” I replied. “Thompson appears excited about something.”

Diana gave Paul a quizzical look. “Thompson? Excited? Hmmm….”

When Diana and I entered Thompson’s cabin, I noticed the order of the images on the monitor had been changed. Diana, concluding that the display was the purpose of her presence, approached the monitor.

“Pretty pictures,” she said.

I looked at Thompson and shrugged. “I told her nothing.”

“What’s the resolution?” she asked, her face practically pressed against the screen.

“Point six five nanometers,” Thompson replied. “The field of view is five hundred nanometers. The scans are of thin sections made from spire core samples. What I’m interested in hearing is your opinion as to the relative smoothness of the four scans shown.”

Diana, reacting more or less as I had, stared at Thompson. “Is this some kind of trick?” Thompson shook his head. Seeing he was serious she glanced back at the monitor. “OK. The top left and bottom right thin sections have irregular surfaces. The other two are far smoother with the bottom left being the smoothest of all. Satisfied?”