Cosmonaut Keep (29 page)

"I
love
Jadey," I said. "Christ, I
miss
her."

"I got no problem with that," she said. "And I don't think you have."

Our mouths docked before I could answer.

"Christ, man, you were supposed to get some sleep," Avakian said. "What the fuck you been doing, steaming dope all night?"

"Something like that," I mumbled. I rubbed my bleary eyelids and slid on my spex. "Hard to sleep after all this."

"Yes, isn't it just!" he agreed, as one by one the rest of the team clocked in.

We ran a match on the lists of available and required materials. It took awhile -- the trees of acceptable substitutions were multi-branched, intertwined, close to a combinatorial explosion, challenging even for the AIs.

"Chug-chug-chug," Avakian muttered.

The display flared into green.

"Yee-hah!"

"Okay, now for the Leontiev matrices ... "

A program capable of running the economy of a minor socialist republic or a major multinational corporation clunked through its iterations and punched out the complete production plan. We hung there for a moment, just looking at it. For that moment it seemed accomplishment enough. If I'd done this back home I'd have taken the team out for Chinese.

"That's it," said Mikhail Telesnikov, the cosmonaut. His phantom presence radiated impatience. "Let's run the sim."

The simulated production run uncovered enough glitches to keep us busy for hours, tweaking and rerunning it. Eventually the VR models of the fabricators did their spidery work, and spun out the disc.

It floated in the center of our dataspace, a silvery lens that focused all our attention. Doubly unreal, a simulation which we could not in our hearts believe; an original too cheapened by endless fake reproductions and false reports to produce the effect it must have had on its first viewers, or the intent of its craftsman.

"Numinous Geometries,"
I thought, mentally christening the device. Telesnikov switched to a full-immersion avatar and stood in front of it, looking back at our -- to him -- invisible viewpoints.

"Well, come on," he said. "It's only a
ship."

Avakian, silent for once, flipped us all in and we walked up just as Telesnikov reached up and touched the shining rounded edge of the thing. I had a flash of recollection of a Festival preacher in Princes Street Gardens going on about some biblical widget -- the arc of the covenant, I think it was called -- that could strike you dead if you touched it.

But all that happened was that from the seamless structure a tripod of legs extended, a hatch opened, and stairladder of child-sized steps unfolded. Telesnikov boldly ascended, then Avakian; I cheated my way to the front and followed. The others, not quite so quick off the mark, made do by switching back to non-immersive viewpoints and tabbing straight through the hull.

Inside, the craft was almost familiar -- at first disappointingly so, then uncannily. A smooth central casing over the engine formed the back of a circular bench, facing the viewscreen which likewise ran all around the craft. Beneath the viewscreen was a sloping shelf, one section of which consisted of an incomprehensible display of unreadable instruments and a panel in which the shapes of two small, long hands were recessed, as though someone with three fingers and one long thumb had pressed their palms into the material before it had set.

I'd seen very similar arrangements in documents and accounts in the decades' worth of rubbish I had scanned from Dreamland. Just about everyone who'd ever claimed to have been taken inside a UFO, or to have reverse-engineered one from crashed specimens had come up with something like this.

"Devil take this," said Telesnikov. "They're laughing at us."

"Maybe they aren't too clear on the concept of
fingers,"
said Avakian.

"No, that is not what I mean. This is ridiculous! This is copied from some shoddy piece of USAF disinformation."

His words set off an agitated babble from our colleagues, swirling around the cockpit like invisible but angry bees. Telesnikov and I seemed to be the only persons present who had more than the vaguest notion of the details of the UFO mythos. The others inclined to Avakian's more charitable interpretation, that it was a simple error in the aliens' grasp of human anatomy, a suggestion which those with the longest experience of interfacing with them seemed to find a lot more believable than I did.

"They think and see on a different scale from ours," Louis Sembat insisted. "There are gaps in their knowledge, blind spots. Imagine us conversing with bacteria! How could we know that certain cilia were significant?"

Avakian brought the discussion to an unceremonious halt by dumping us all back to an abstract workspace where we faced each other around a table.

"Enough already," he said. "Whatever the reasons for this glitch, we know our friends are perfectly capable of providing us with a suitable interface because they've already done it once. It's just a matter of getting into the restricted view and letting them know our requirements."

From the comments and laughs that greeted this I gathered it wasn't likely to be as straightforward as he made it sound.

"We could also have a crack," he continued, unperturbed, "at hacking out some kind of control interface ourselves. We've got some way to understanding the physics of the thing; the controls shouldn't be beyond us. Meanwhile we bash ahead with building it and running the project analysis and so on for device number two -- the space-drive."

"Hang on," I said, "if we're looking at a different outcome, even if it's just the controls and the displays, the changes could be feedback to anywhere along the production pathway."

Avakian looked at me. "Yes," he said. "They could indeed. But that's the sort of thing you and your AI menagerie are supposed to be good at finding out."

"Oh, thanks," I said sarcastically. "I thought I might have time on my hands over the next few days."

"Don't worry," he said. "I'll help you, and we can call on a lot of other help." He waved a hand at the others around the table. "If we can't, I seriously doubt if anyone else can, except -- Hey!"

He theatrically smote his forehead.

"And
we're in touch with the only other place that could maybe do better, on the practical side. Your Mr. Armstrong's engineers in Nevada. Make this a
real
Nevada project, huh? I guess that means we'll have to get non-Comrade Hernandez in on the team. Maybe you could persuade her."

His horrible laugh was echoed by enough sniggers for me to realize that in a place without privacy, some news traveled fast.

At the end of the evening shift Driver called me to his office. I saved-to-date and arrived to find Lemieux, Camila, and Avakian with him. We still seemed to be the self-appointed project committee.

"Not bad work today," said Driver. He'd been scanning reports skimmed off by our VR activities. "I seem to remember you saying something yesterday about
hands,
Armen. Why didn't you raise it as a problem?"

Avakian shrugged. "I had only a suspicion, from a few obscure diagrams that might not have been definitive. Besides, I wanted to see what would eventually come out the other side rather than get bogged down in arguments first."

"Fair enough, I suppose," Driver allowed. "Still -- anything else like this turns up, and you let me know absolutely clearly, okay?"

"Now that you mention it," Avakian said, "there doesn't seem to be any control interface
at all
for 'the engine.' The big engine. The space-drive."

"Hmm." Driver's eyes almost lidded over. "That could be a problem. We should add that to the list of things we want the aliens to clarify. If we can; or they can."

"What's this problem with getting answers from the aliens?" Camila asked. "I thought you guys had got a lot."

"Yeah, we have," said Avakian. "Trouble is, it's mostly high-level stuff: mathematics, quantum computing algorithms, and so on. Not so much on the concrete, as we'd see it. Nothing on Earth or Solar System history, though we have asked."

"There were some things that Man was not meant to know," I said.

"Not so much that," Driver said. "My own impression from outside the science circus here is that there are some things that Man was bloody well meant to find out for himself."

He reclined in silence for a moment. "Speaking of which ... When you think it necessary, Armen, I think the people to make the first inquiries should be you and Matt."

"Me?" I said. "But I've no experience -- "

"Experience with the interface is valuable," Lemieux said. "But it is not necessarily of value in formulating queries, and in understanding answers. You at least know what kind of answer would be useful. And it is something you should become familiar with anyway. You are very good at cross-platform integration, and this is perhaps the ultimate in that."

"I can't wait," I said.

I suspected that they just wanted me to do it because they feared exposing themselves more than necessary to the seductive, addictive effect of the alien interface, and they didn't entirely trust the scientists who already had done so to come back with anything meaningful.

We dealt with some of the more mundane details of tomorrow's team deployment and then prepared to leave.

"Before we go -- "

Lemieux, up in his corner perch, drew something on a physical notepad, tore off a sheet and let it flutter in the air among us. I caught a glimpse: It was an oval, with a single horizontal line a little above the sharp end, and two tilted ellipses on its small axis; the iconic, ironic ideograph of the mythic Gray alien.

"I hardly dare say it," he said. "But as a solution to the problem of how they know our languages, and of the strange design of the craft's controls -- I wonder, Camila: Is there anything you might know, even a rumor about ... the old rumors?"

But Camila was already laughing, giggling an explanation to the still-baffled Avakian. She reached out and grabbed the sketch and balled it up and stuffed it in Driver's trashbag.

She shook her head. "Sorry to disappoint you, guys, but I've been through all that; I've spoken to people who'd know if anyone would. The only Dreamland the little Gray folk have ever been to or come from is the one in our heads."

She smiled around at us. "Come on," she said. For a moment she looked puzzled, as though startled by a sudden thought, then she shook her head even more firmly.

"Nah."

15

____________

The Space Shore

This place was smaller than Kyohvic, but it felt like a city -- or how she imagined, from what she had heard and read, that a city felt. Kyohvic, for all its half a million inhabitants, its university and houses of philosophy, its ships and trade, had "small town" written in its genes. New Lisbon might have but a tenth the population of her hometown, but the people were so much more diverse. It was on the shore, not just of the sea, but of space: Other worlds were in the air, in the smells, in the surprises around every corner; in the attitude that everybody knew everything, but didn't know everybody.

She walked briskly but carefully down a sloping cobbled street, if you could call something three meters wide a street. Gregor walked beside her, having firmly rejected Salasso's argument that it would be more effective for them to search separately. It felt strange to be alone with him. She hadn't realized the extent to which she'd become used to Salasso's presence when they were together. Not that it had ever bothered her. Any inhibition she felt had been entirely her own doing. But still.

Buildings rose to three or four stories on either side, black and narrow as dominoes, and as dependent on each other's support. Overhead, a cable car fizzed and sparked, laboring up the incline at just the right height to barely avoid knocking a tall hat off a man on horseback. (Municipal regulation, she'd been told.) A gaggle of small blue-and-red-mottled dinosaurs which shared the size, shape, gait, and probable fate of geese, slithered and skittered past them, honking in protest at their casual herding by a ragged little girl with a big stick. The street was so steep that Elizabeth could see the ocean when she looked straight ahead. Which was not advisable, because of the dinosaurs, because the cobbles were uneven, and because out there on the sea squatted the starship.

Yes, it was the de Tenebre ship. Everybody knew that. She had cherished a faint hope that it wasn't. Gregor had said very little about the prospect of perhaps seeing Lydia again; she had rather expected him to prattle on about it, but he seemed to be focusing his attention and excitement on the possibility of tracking down some of the old crew. Which was, she supposed, all to the good.

Salasso had scribbled a list of thirteen waterfront dives ("for a start"), and drawn an elegant and precise street map of the relevant district.

"You got all this from your old teacher?"

Salasso had looked at Gregor as if he were being stupid.

"Of course not," he'd said. "This is my own deduction, from what I know of this place. I have been here before, and it doesn't change much."

Salasso himself had set out to prowl the saur hangouts, from the skiff pilots' bars to the more refined haunts of entrepreneurs in the butchery business. Listening for rumors, he'd explained; he was reluctant to actually ask around, and advised them, too, to be cautious, and to dress rough. And to remember that they were marine biologists, here to scout out possible lines of research, maybe hire a boat to watch kraken, something like that. Near enough the truth.

"You know," Elizabeth said, as the small dinosaurs waddled off down a side alley, "our cover story might turn out to be the only thing we get out of this trip. It's actually a
good idea.
This is a far better place to study the kraken than out of Mingulay."

"You don't hold out much hope of nabbing one of the old buggers, then?"

"We don't even know what they
look
like!"