Cosmonaut Keep (41 page)

Jon Letonmyaki, a Finnish cosmonaut: "Perhaps I could ask what it is we -- or indeed Colin or Paul -- have done that is illegal? We are acknowledged to have prevented a very dangerous move by the militarists. We have released some information to the public domain, but the General Secretary -- the former General Secretary -- had already called for international collaboration. Colin resigned from the FSB and, I presume, from the Party in a rather demonstrative manner, but that is not a crime! So what have we done?"

Driver raised his hand. "May I?"

Sembat nodded.

"Okay," said Driver, clambering to his feet. "Let me tell you what I've done, and what you've done. I deliberately transmitted the news about the alien contact and the crypto-war plans to the Americans. That was conscious and deliberate treason, which I took care to conceal from my friend Paul Lemieux. He's only up for trying to exploit it politically. As for the rest of you, you've all collaborated in releasing mathematical tools that have made most existing forms of encryption useless, and destabilized most of the governments of the world. That may not get you jailed, but you can bet it'll get you off this kind of work -- or any potentially security-sensitive work -- for the rest of your goddamn lives. If the E.U. authorities regain control of this station, your careers are over."

There was no rush to speak next. Most people here, I guessed, had figured this out already, but at some level they'd still clung to the kind of hopes so naively expressed by Letonmyaki -- and, less naively, by Angel Pestaña. A lot of them seemed to acquire a sudden interest in the realistic rendering of crushed Coke cans and hardened chewing-gum on the steps, or the haze and cypresses in the middle distance.

Telesnikov, whose card I'd long since marked as Driver's man within the cosmonaut cadre, stood up and strode to the front.

"Enough of this!" he said. "We are not helpless, we do not have to sit and wait for the marines. We can elect a committee to represent us in negotiation with ESA and if possible this new EC. We can appeal to the world public, preferably along the lines that Jon Letonmyaki suggested: do our best to sound innocent and reasonable. And while we are doing that, we can prepare for the worst.

"We have the most advanced aerospace vehicle in the world, just awaiting completion. We know that it works, and we have only the beginnings of an idea of its capabilities. Avakian has told me he believes it can reach Earth in a matter of hours. There is much we can do with a machine like that!

"We also have the space-drive, which we can construct in perhaps ten days. It is just possible that we can complete it before the marines arrive. And if we do ... "

He paused, and looked around, daring us.

" ... we can use it, and when they arrive we will be somewhere else!"

This time, so many people wanted to speak that Avakian could barely fend the rush.

The Bengali astrophysicist Roxanne Khan had the strongest objection, after most of the obvious what-ifs had been argued into the ground. If the thing didn't work, we were no worse off. It was unlikely to blow up, or otherwise destroy us, unless the alien intelligences had some very warped motives indeed; and if they did, we were safer dead than at the mercy of murderous or suicidal gods. "The problem, as I see it, is one of navigation," Khan said. "Mikhail speaks of making a small, controlled, jump of a few light-minutes -- a proof of concept which would indeed be quite sufficient to give us the whip hand in negotiation. But we already know that the information we are given is sometimes ambiguous, difficult to interpret. What if we make a mistake? Let us leave to one side morbid thoughts of ending our jump inside a sun. What if we find ourselves halfway across the galaxy? Or halfway across the universe?"

Telesnikov had an answer for that. I suspected he'd been thinking about this for some time.

"There are about three hundred of us, about equally divided between the sexes. That is not a bad number to begin a colony."

"Using what?" somebody shouted, through a clamor of more ribald comments. "Cometary resources?"

"Mine the gods," said Avakian, as though under his breath, but so that everyone heard, and most laughed.

"Not all the small bodies in the Solar System are ... inhabited," Telesnikov went on, unperturbed. "We have no reason to think this is exceptional. So in principle, yes. We could."

That didn't exactly end the discussion, but somehow it took the edge off it. From what I picked up afterward, most of us were glad to have something to do other than wait to be arrested, and the knowledge that if negotiations failed we had an outside chance of escape.

There was also the strangely comforting consideration that at worst we might die, but we would not
die out.

"I'm ready," I said.

My breath was loud in the helmet. Ten meters away from the faceplate, in a direction I refused to think of as "down," was the surface of the asteroid -- the nightside, at the moment, its clinkery detail faintly visible in the dim light from my suit. In every other direction were the stars, sharper than frost. I couldn't think of them as a destination. The Copernican hypothesis seemed absurd. These scattered points of light could not be suns.

"Turn the light off," Armen said.

In front of me now, nothing but black.

"Pull very gently on the ropes, and stop when you see it."

The paired ropes, one for each hand, were stretched between two tall masts a hundred meters apart. I'd moved along them about forty-five meters, sliding the clip of my tether under one hand. I tugged myself farther, peering into the black. Beneath me -- in front of me -- I saw the alien apparatus. It glowed just enough to be visible. It looked like a bush, or a bush robot, just big enough to fall into.

"Now," said Armen, "just pull the ropes toward you and let go, and let yourself drift into it. Don't worry about missing it, you won't, and remember you're still attached to the ropes. Turn the radio off."

I did, then tugged as gently as possible, and let go, and sank forward between the ropes. In the seconds it took to traverse those few meters, the apparatus looked ever more crystalline and fragile, as though I were about to crash very slowly into a snowflake chandelier.

When Avakian had shown us what he called "the big picture" of the asteroid's interior, I'd assumed we were seeing a direct view of it, of something that was relayed to us in a vastly diminished, user-friendly form through the interface. Actually, what we'd seen was recordings from previous encounters such as the one I was about to have. The interface aside, there was no ongoing direct view of the interior. The interface was fed by a fiber-optic cable as thick as my arm extending from the bush down the side of the asteroid to the station, but for the real live action we had to use this other interface, constructed -- or grown -- by the aliens themselves. For what reasons, the gods only knew; and for once that flip phrase was a literal truth.

The apparatus didn't shatter as I collided with it. Some of its branches moved and parted, others gathered, to mesh at their tips into shapes like huge petals. It absorbed my momentum and held me. One of the flat shapes covered my faceplate. For a second of complete darkness I felt, quite irrationally, as though that covering would suffocate me. Then I found I could still see the coordinate readouts on the faceplate, printed on the upper left corner in faint red digits. That display, and an input jack on the helmet, and the orientation controls under my splayed fingers, were the only interactions with the apparatus which the aliens had deigned to allow.

There was a small increase of light, or perhaps my eyes adapted. I saw obsidian walls passing on either side, then faster and faster the viewpoint rushed me down endless branching corridors, each one slightly wider than the last. The red numbers on the readout flickered. It occurred to me that I might be seeing the branches of the crystal bush, from inside. The sensation of movement was inescapable. I closed my eyes, and found that I still saw the black corridors down which I helplessly hurtled. By means I could only guess at, this scene was being played directly on my retinae. Only the readout vanished from my sight. When I opened my eyes I saw it again, the numbers a red blur.

Down one final straight, smooth shaft I went, and was sent flying out of it into the asteroid's interior space. Beauty flooded my brain. If closing my eyes could have stopped me seeing it, I would have grudged a blink.

This time I didn't have the chill splash of Avakian's laughter to save me. It took all my mental strength to turn my attention to the three long numbers of the coordinate display, and to press my fingers against the apparatus to take control of my virtual flight. And once I had, the temptation to use it to play, to swoop and soar, was almost irresistible, but not quite. I moved until the numbers matched the coordinates we'd been given, and found my viewpoint hovering inches above an intricate, floral, fractal pattern like a bank of moss.

My viewpoint was being provided by an icy chip wafted by molecular gusts, transmitting information back to the apparatus and thence to the input jack. So it was supposed. My face plunged into that minute and perfect garden, and some plant in front of me was ripped out by the roots. The sense of damage done filled my eyes with tears as fast as the structure repaired itself. I blinked, and the view vanished. The apparatus pushed me away with as much force as my arrival had delivered to it. As I drifted backward, it was all I could to grab the ropes.

"That's it," said Avakian. "Do you want to have a look?"

I shook my head. "Just tell me."

"I'll show you," he said, waving from his spex to a screen stuck to the wall, and tapping his thumb.

In the hours since returning from my encounter I'd been unwilling, and possibly unable, to go into VR. Even the interface, on recollection, struck me as unbearably clunky. Avakian had assured me the effect would wear off: "It's like a drug -- burns up your endorphins, or something. You'll bounce back."

With a dull pretense of interest I watched as a diagram and sheets of data appeared on the flat screen. High-res, but to my jaded eyes it was crude, as if I could see the pixels. The engine was displayed, subtly changed. I couldn't see the difference at first. Avakian threw a laser bead on the screen.

"There," he said. "A control system, and it looks like a human-oriented interface. The data columns underneath are
settings.
We're in business, man. All we have to do now is build it."

All I could think of was the tedium of churning through the project plan yet again, tweaking it bit by bit to bring this changed result.

"Good," I said. "I'll get on with it."

"You will not," said Avakian. "We may be going to the stars, but
you
are going to sleep."

"Will that help?" The notion sounded vaguely intriguing, but irrelevant.

"Trust me," he said. "I'm a doctor."

"Did I wake you?"

Camila had climbed out of her overall.

"Yeah," I said, "you must have bumped into me. What's the time?"

"Midnight," she said.

"So I missed the meeting."

She hooked a foot through webbing and pulled me to her, wrapping her arms around me.

"You didn't miss much," she said. "The new committee's still getting the cold shoulder from ESA, not to mention the junta. The good news is, we've got the
Blasphemous
fitted out. I take it for the first proper test flight tomorrow."

"Hey, wow! That's great!"

She caught my shoulders; her own shook with restrained laughter.

"Matt, wake up properly! That was routine, we knew we were going to make it. Everybody was talking about what you did."

"What I did ... Oh!"

The memory of what I'd done came back, but it was like the memory of a dream remembered not on waking, but later in the morning, already breaking up into elusive, colorful fragments. At the same time I felt a surge of well-being. My endorphins, or whatever, were onstream again.

"The data you got back, what Armen calls the settings, Roxanne and Mikhail have checked them over and they definitely are for a short jump, just like you asked for. And you went right in among the aliens to get it!"

"Yes, I did that. I can hardly believe it now. And, oh hell -- "

I laid my forehead on her shoulder for a moment.

"What is it?"

I swallowed. "I can see why they were so keen to volunteer me to do it. If you've done it once ... you'd never want to do it again."

A shiver shook her warm body. She pushed back and looked into my eyes.

"Is it
that
horrible?"

"No! No, it's beautiful. It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."

"More beautiful than me?"

"Yes," I said, without hesitation. "It just ravishes the mind, like a packet storm overloading a buffer."

"My, what an evocative vocabulary you've got."

I had to laugh.

"But I'm forgetting it," I said. "And I want to forget it. The beauty I'm seeing now is a lot more real."

"Now you're talking," she said.

Some synergy of Camila's excitement at flying the
Blasphemous Geometries
with its new engine at last, and my endorphin overshoot, and perhaps my last shreds of memory of that garden of intelligent machines, filled us with energy and invention and affection, and kept us awake most of the night.

I didn't feel at all sleepy in the morning; indeed I felt immensely refreshed. I followed Camila to the receiving-bay where we'd first arrived, so few days and such a long time ago.

A small crew of cosmonaut techs was waiting for her. Roxanne Khan was nominally in charge as chair of the recently elected committee. Colin Driver hung about in a purely advisory capacity.

Camila dragged her g-suit from a mesh crate.

"Is that necessary?" Driver asked.

"Maybe not," said Camila, sliding into it with a neat somersault. "But just in case."

Helmet under her arm like an astronaut posing for a pre-launch photograph, she drifted toward me and parked the glass bubble in midair before giving me an unexpectedly firm hug.