The Ghosts of Heaven (28 page)

He wonders about the sentinels, starts trying to plan what voice log he could leave that would help him flush out the culprit. Is there some logical game he can play, perhaps using something that only the murderer would know? Can he set some kind of trap to be tripped over the course of the next ten years, while he sleeps?

It worries him. Better to play dumb. If he arouses the suspicions of the killer, he might never wake up again.

Then he's thinking about the woman again. Allandra.

He shuts his eyes and all he can see is the spiral between her shoulder blades. He can almost taste her skin, imagines he can lick the ink out of her tattoo.

His eyes snap open, and he begins to cruise through the ship's copy of the Earthnet. Everything that was recorded publicly across the entire world was archived onto the ship's network the day before the mission began. It is the encyclopaedia of everything ever known since the Internet was created.

Performing an entirely random image search floods the screens in front of him with beautiful images, and he asks himself yet again why it is that the spiral is so beautiful. What is it about this shape that sets it apart? What does it mean?

This time, he doesn't even stop to criticize himself for asking why a shape has to have a meaning. Of course it has a
meaning
, he thinks. Of course it does. Nothing is without meaning. The ancients knew that. People like Jung and Da Vinci.

He stops to browse on images that delight him particularly and he finds a series of sites with many artists he's never heard of—men from long ago who put spirals in their art—a man called William Blake created a piece called
Jacob's Ladder
. An even stranger piece by Hieronymus Bosch: the
Ascent of the Blessed
. The troubled night sky of Van Gogh. The crisp peculiarity of Escher. The fluid dusk of Rembrandt. He comes closer to his own time:
The Spiral Jetty
of Smithson, and
Final Words
by Rijndael.

The images go on and on, and he devours them, just as they devour him. He finds even older images of the spiral, carved triple spirals on some sort of Celtic tomb, spirals on an island he's never heard of, home to a religious order known as druids. And then older, and even older images—vast spiral lines carved into the deserts of South America, rocks in Australia, caves in France, caves in Borneo. No matter how far back he searches, the spiral is there, waiting patiently to be found, to be understood.

That's it
, he thinks. It needs to be
understood
. And once again, he doesn't even notice that he is asking himself to understand an inanimate shape, an abstract design, and it is only when suddenly he feels a terrible pain in his shoulders that he realizes that he's been hunched over the console for a very long time without moving.

The analysis of the alert systems finished running hours before. A light winks at him from the screen, but he hasn't seen it. There is a beeping sound, and with shock he sees that there are just five minutes left on his waking cycle.

He throws himself from Terminal Base Four and runs toward his pod, but is forced to slow to a walk as breath abandons him once again. Staggering, he hauls his clothes from his body and tumbles into the pod, fitting his tubes with fumbling hands even as the lid starts to descend on him.

As he goes under this time, he is not worried about being murdered in his sleep. He is worried that he will never understand the spiral, that is what seems most important to him.

If it were not important, he thinks, why would it be there? At every level of existence. He is tumbling through space in a spiral fashion, and even the galaxy itself, which the
Song
is crossing one tiny corner of over the next hundred or so years, is a spiral. Spiral rotation of galaxies is what causes stars, planets to form. He knows that. And whatever level of life he thinks about, the spiral is there—from the hurricane eye of Jupiter, to the motion of the Earth, to the prints on his fingers, to the DNA inside him, even down to the spiral trails of particles flashing through a bubble chamber.

As long ago as the twentieth century, it was understood that radiation itself propagates through space not in straight lines, but spirally, something that accounted for the discovery that the speed of light is not constant, as once thought. Supporting this notion, it was soon found that light in some way
magnetizes
matter so that while some barely perceptible particles spiral
away
from a light source, others, such as chlorophyll, gyrate toward it.

The spiral is there, underneath it all.

Bowman is gone again. Gone into the sleep so close to death, slowing his aging down to almost nothing, so that his body is living in slow motion.

His mind, however, is not, and he knows his dreams will be wilder than ever.

He has always moved forward, always searching, always wanting, without knowing what it is that he wants. Ever since he was a boy, that's the way he's been, and finally, he feels he might be getting close to understanding what it is that he wants. Even in Sentinel Sleep, he knows his unconscious mind will keep working on the problem. Maybe, when he wakes, he will have the solution presented to him like a neatly wrapped birthday present.

*   *   *

As the lid closes, a figure in dark gray appears as if from nowhere, and stands beside the pod, briefly, before moving on to what it has come to do.

 

34

For many years, the search for habitable planets was accompanied by a related search: the search for exo-intelligence; the signs of intelligent life other than that on Earth. Any species developed enough to have discovered radio waves ought to be making enough noise to be heard, eventually, across the other side of the galaxy. The Drake Equation was used to estimate the number of habitable planets in the galaxy, though the answers varied wildly as no one could ever agree on the value of the many components in the equation. By any measure, however, it seemed reasonable to assume that the galaxy should be full of noise—radio waves broadcast by our cousins scattered around the distant planets—and yet there was nothing. Total silence seemed to reign in the universe, aside from the one small ball of rock we know as our home planet. Somehow, the origin of intelligent life on Earth seemed to be a one-off event; the only such case, and given the vast size of the galaxy, this felt wrong. In fact, it seemed
impossible
that this was the case, and yet it seemed to be true. The conclusion: we are alone.

Searches were based on many concepts, the most common being that if an exo-species was trying to discover our existence, they would do just what we would do; namely broadcast a radio wave that could not be generated naturally. The idea: to broadcast something with meaning, something that displays a universal truth, such as the value of π, or a rising sequence denoting the atomic numbers of the halogens, or the universal sequence that creates itself from itself, the Fibonacci sequence—1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 … Computers were set in vast arrays to listen to the universe, hunting out such regular patterns as these and many more, but still, the result was total silence.

Bowman sleeps. In his dreams he sees himself spiralling through space, alone, without a space ship—just his body floating free and flying fast across the galaxy. He has enough self-awareness in his dream to tell himself that he does not believe in the supernatural. The truth is maybe a little different now, and Bowman's mind starts to send him immense and disturbing images of the universe. What really lies out here? All man's efforts with space travel to date have seen ships footle around the Solar System; like the mission Bowman took to Jupiter and back. Compared with his forty years of flying, that was a stroll in the backyard. And the backyard is safe; there are no monsters there. But what about now? What lies waiting to be found in the very farthest darkest depths of the heavens? Do the normalities of space and time even hold good across the universe? What if they don't?

Bowman's dreams tear at him as if he's on a torture rack, opening his mind, pulling his brain apart, exposing everything
he is
to everything in the universe, and he begins to feel the presence of another intelligence, which he is approaching, rapidly. There are voices, though he cannot understand their words, only feel them. There are spirits all around him, and finally he knows for certain that the universe is not empty.

There are ghosts up there—the ghosts of Heaven—and they are calling to him, urging him to come and understand, and be damned.

So Bowman dreams as he sleeps, but this time he does not sleep for ten years.

He sleeps for just four, and then, the alert system, which he believes is totally unreliable, kicks into action and starts his waking cycle six years ahead of schedule.

It does this because it has registered the number one item on the priority list of emergency reasons to wake a sentinel. It has detected an ultra-low-frequency broadcast at around 1.618 Hz.

It has detected intelligent life.

 

55

Bowman knows immediately that something is unusual. As he pulls his suit on, he sees the clock on his sleeve is flashing a priority alert code at him, and he knows exactly what it means: ETI. The signal denoting extraterrestrial intelligence has been detected.

He staggers toward Base Four and climbs into his chair at the Terminal, half his mind on this incredible event, half on something that was in his dreams as he woke, and that even now is slipping away.

“Yes,” he says. Then, “Let's see you.”

He pulls up the report of the signal, and cannot find fault with the ship's analysis of the situation.

At first sight, the broadcast might seem unremarkable. It is just a carrier wave, with no information in it; what is remarkable is simply the frequency of the wave; at an ultra-low level, just 1.618 Hz.

This level, 1.618, is in fact an approximation of the frequency that the ship has found. To be sure, Bowman focuses in on the wave and has it rescanned. To ten decimal places it reads 1.6180339887, and then he stares at the screen as a chill slides its way up his neck.

Bowman knows all about this number. Any scientist does. The number is known as phi, and along with π it is the single best known and most important irrational number that the universe created. It is a number also known as the golden mean or golden ratio. It has been known for thousands of years, and what it denotes is the state of perfection. It appears in the natural world, in mathematics, in architecture, in the ideal proportions of the human figure or the most beautiful face, even in such mundane places as the performance of financial markets. In short, it underpins the universe itself. The number itself is a ratio. It describes the ratio of two lengths, where the ratio of the shorter length to the longer one is the same as that of the ratio of the longer one to the total of both lengths. Put like that it sounds meaningless, dull, pointless, and confusing, and yet here, there, out in the world, in the universe, this ratio is not only the one which we humans find most pleasing, it is the one which in some way the universe
itself
seems to find most pleasing.

For a radio wave to be broadcast at that frequency is the clearest possible indication that the source of the wave is an intelligence similar to, or greater than, our own. Billions of dollars, millions of computer hours have been spent on searching for such a thing, and now the
Song
has ventured into space and stumbled across one all by itself.

Bowman stares at the screen, because he, the man who moves forward, the man who does not hesitate, the man who always knows how to act, no longer knows what to do.

According to those mighty powers who created the
Song
and the other Toroid Class ships, the mission to New Earth, constellation Lyca, can be diverted for one reason and one reason only, and that reason has just popped up on the console screens, flashing in pale green, calmly, waiting for Bowman to acknowledge its existence. So now, there is just one question that rises above all others.

Should they alter the mission? More to the point, should
he
alone decide the fate of the five hundred and three people on board, and alter the trajectory of the
Song
toward the source of the wave?

It is a decision he does not want to take by himself. He finds himself wanting to consult others—the other sentinels. Theoretically, he could ask them. It would take ten years to get all their replies, but somehow he feels that the decision ought to be unanimous; they should all agree on this. The trace of the radio wave will still be there in ten years. The ship has logged the source now; diverting is such a long and awkward process that ten years either way is not ultimately going to make much difference. The key thing is to make the right choice, and there is so little information on which to base the decision.

The ship has woken only him; despite the potential magnitude of the finding, it cannot afford to wake all ten sentinels on a potentially false alarm. Doing so would only waste the waking life of the sentinels. Instead, the ship has woken the next sentinel due to come on duty, and so it is up to Bowman to verify the signal. But in exceptional circumstances, he can, if he decides it is absolutely necessary, wake his nine colleagues …

Should he instigate a vote?

As soon as that thought is in him; he feels odd. He has had, what is, for him, an uncommon reaction. He sees that he is regretting something. He curses his luck that the broadcast came about when he was the next sentinel up for duty …

Then he stops himself.

He
wasn't
the next. The ship should have woken Sentinel Ten. It has only been something under four years since he was awake last; why has it woken
him
instead?

Suddenly, problems seem to be mounting hard on each other; thinking about the sentinels, and why he was woken when he still had six years to sleep, he notices what he did not notice before.