Cradle (15 page)

‘Aren’t you going to make a move?’ Dale replied, pointing at the chess board.

‘No, I’m not,’ Carol said, showing just a trace of anger. ‘And I may not ever. Any
reasonable player would have accepted the draw that I offered you last weekend and
gone on to more important things. Your damn ego just can’t deal with the idea that
one game out of five I can battle you to a tie.’

‘People have been known to make mistakes in the endgame,’ Dale answered, avoiding
altogether the emotional content in her remark. ‘But I know you’re tired. I’ll meet
you at the airport and take you to breakfast.’

‘Okay. Good night.’ Carol hung up the videophone a little brusquely and packed all
the photographs in her briefcase. As soon as she had left the marina, she had taken
her camera and film straight to the darkroom at the
Key West Independent
, where she had spent an hour developing and studying the prints. The results were
intriguing, particularly a couple of the blowups. In one of them she could clearly
see four separate tracks converging to a spot just under the fissure. In another photo
the bodies of the three whales were caught in a pose that looked as if they were in
the middle of a deep conversation.

Carol walked through the spacious lobby in the Marriott Hotel. The piano bar was almost
deserted. The lithe black pianist was playing an old Carpenters song, ‘Goodbye to
Love’. A handsome man in his late thirties or early forties was kissing a flashy young
blonde in a nook off to the right. Carol bridled.
The bimbo must be all of twenty-three, she said to herself, probably his secretary
or something equally important
.

As she wound her way down the long corridor toward her room, Carol thought about her
conversation with Dale. He had told her that the Navy had small robot vehicles, some
of them derived from original MOI designs, that could easily have made the tracks.
So it was virtually certain that the Russians had similar vehicles. He had dismissed
the whales’ behaviour as irrelevant but had thought that her failure to find out if
anything else was under the overhang had been a serious mistake.
Of course
, Carol had realized when he had said it,
I should have spent another minute looking. Nuts. I hope I didn’t blow it
. In her mind’s eye she had then carefully revisited the entire scenario at the overhang
to see if there were any clues that something else may have been hidden there.

The biggest surprise in the discussion with Dale had come when Carol, in passing,
had praised the way the new alarm algorithm had worked. Dale suddenly had become very
interested. ‘So the alert code definitely read 101?’ he had said.

‘Yes,’ she had answered, ‘that’s why I wasn’t that astonished when we found the object.’

‘No way,’ he had said emphatically. ‘The trident could not have caused the alert code.
Even if it was at the edge of the field of view of the telescope, and that seems unlikely
given how far you followed the trench, it’s too small to trigger the foreign object
alarm. And how could it have been seen under the overhang anyway?’ Dale had paused
for a few seconds. ‘You didn’t look at any of the infrared images in realtime, did
you? Well, we can process them tomorrow and see if we can figure out what triggered
the alarm.’

Carol felt strangely defeated as she opened the door to her motel room.
It’s just fatigue
, she said to herself, not wanting to admit that her conversation with Dale had made
her feel inadequate. She put her briefcase on a chair and walked wearily to the bathroom
to wash her face. Two minutes later she was asleep on the bed in her underclothes.
Her slacks, blouse, shoes, and socks were all stacked together in the corner.

She is a little girl again in her dream, wearing the blue-and-yellow striped dress
that her parents gave her for her seventh birthday. Carol is walking around with her
father in the Northridge Mall on a busy Saturday morning. They pass a large candy
store. She lets go of his hand and runs into the store and stares through the glass
case at all the chocolates. Carol points at some milk chocolate turtles when the big
big man behind the display case asks her what she wants.

In the dream Carol cannot reach the counter and doesn’t have any money. ‘Where is
your mother, little girl?’ the candy store man asks. Carol shakes her head and the
man repeats the question. She stands on her tiptoes and tells the man in a confidential
whisper that her mother drinks too much, but that her father always buys her candy.

The man smiles but he still won’t give her the chocolates. ‘And where is your father,
little girl?’ the candy store man now asks. In the case Carol can see the reflection
of a kindly, smiling man standing behind her, framed between two piles of chocolates.
She wheels around, expecting to see her father. But the man behind her is not her
father. This man’s face is grotesque, disfigured. Frightened, she turns back around
to the chocolates. The man in the store is now taking the candy away. It is closing
time. Carol starts to cry.

‘Where is your father, little girl…? Where is your father?’ The little girl in the
dream is sobbing. She is surrounded by big people, all of them asking questions. She
puts her hands over her ears.

‘He’s gone,’ Carol finally shouts. ‘He’s gone. He left us and went away and now I’m
all alone.’

Against the deep black background of scattered stars, the filaments of the Milky Way
Galaxy seem like thin wisps of light added by a master artist. Here, at the far edge
of the Outer Shell, near the beginning of what the Colonists call the Gap, there is
no suggestion of the teeming activity of the Colony, some twenty-four light millicycles
away. An awesome, unbroken quiet is the background for the breathtaking beauty of
a black sky studded with twinkling stars.

Suddenly out of the void comes a small interstellar messenger robot. It seeks and
finally finds a dark spherical satellite about three miles in diameter that is easily
overlooked in the great panorama of the celestial sky. Time passes. A close-up reveals
activity on the satellite. Soft artificial lights now illuminate portions of the surface.
Automated vehicles are working on the periphery of the object, apparently changing
its shape. External structures are dismantled and taken off to a temporary storage
area in the distance. At length the original satellite disappears altogether and what
is left are two long parallel rails of metal alloy, built in sections of about two
hundred yards apiece from the spare parts of the now vanished satellite. Each rail
is ten yards across and separated from its matched partner by about a hundred yards.

Regular sorties to the storage area continue until the useful supplies of material
are depleted and the tracks extend for a distance of almost ten miles. Then activity
stops. The rails from nowhere to nowhere in space stand as mute reminders of some
major engineering activity suddenly abandoned. Or was it? From just below a prominent
binary pair, the two brightest lights in the eastern sky, a speck emerges. The speck
grows until it dominates the eastern quadrant of the sky. A dozen, no, sixteen great
interstellar cargo ships with bright, flashing red lights lead a procession of robot
vehicles into the region. The ghostly rails to nowhere are surrounded by the new arrivals.
The first cargo ship opens and eight small shuttles emerge, each one moving back down
the line toward another of the great cargo containers. The shuttles wait silently
outside the huge ships while the entourage completes its arrival.

The final vehicle to arrive is a tiny space tug pulling a long slender object that
looks like two folded Japanese fans joined together end to end. It is encased in a
transparent and protective sheath of very thin material. Eight small, darting vehicles
dance like hummingbirds along its entire length, as if they were somehow guiding it,
guarding it, and checking out its health all at the same time.

The large cargo ships shaped like ancient blimps now open and reveal their contents.
Most of them are carrying rail sections stacked in enormous piles. The small shuttles
unload the sections, leaving them stacked, and set them in groups stretching for miles
in both directions from the existing rails. When the rail sections are almost all
unloaded, four of the shuttles approach the side of one of the remaining giant cargo
ships and wait for the bay doors to swing open. From the inside of this cargo ship
come eight machines that attack each of the four shuttles in pairs, breaking them
carefully into pieces and taking the parts back into the dark of the cargo bay. A
few moments later, an elongated complex of articulated machinery emerges from this
great ship. Once released from the confines of the cargo carrier, it stretches itself
into a long bench reaching almost a mile in length. Every hundred yards or so along
the central platform of this bench, a smaller set of coordinated components form into
highly organized local groups.

This is the automated, multipurpose construction system, one of the technological
treasures of the Colonists. The entire system moves into place at the end of the tracks
and its many remote manipulators begin to pull rail sections from the various stacks.
Its sophisticated local hands and fingers deftly put the new sections in place and
attach them with atomic welds. The speed is astonishing. An entire mile of new track
is finished within minutes and the great builder moves to another group of rail section
piles. The completed tracks extend for almost a hundred miles in space.

Having finished with one task, the construction system undergoes its next metamorphosis.
Tearing itself into pieces starting from the two ends of the long bench, the monolithic
structure disappears and is reorganized into thousands of separate but similar components.
These little antlike contraptions attach themselves in groups to individual rail sections.
They measure carefully all the dimensions and check all the welds between adjacent
sections. Then, as if on cue, the rails on the four ends of the track segments begin
to bend and elevate, lifted by the antlike components. The rails twist upward, upward,
bringing the rest of the track with them. The two long parallel lines are eventually
transformed into a giant double hoop, over ten miles in radius, that looks like a
fun-fair big wheel suspended in space.

With the completion of the double hoop, the construction system again reconfigures
itself. Some of the new elements of the system pick up the long slender object shaped
like end-to-end Japanese fans. They erect it near the hoop (it is, not surprisingly,
almost the same length as the diameter of the hoops) under the careful surveillance
of its hummingbird protectors. Then the object is hoisted into place as a north-south
spoke in the double hoop structure. Some of the hummingbirds produce unseen thin cables
and anchor the spoke to the hoop structure at both ends. The rest of the tiny mechanical
speedsters create a web that winds around the centre section and connects the great
antenna with the east-west axis of the hoops.

The antenna, now connected to its supporting structure, opens slowly at both the north
and south pole positions on the hoop. Closer inspection reveals that the hummingbirds
are actually pulling the delicate individual folds apart. The folds spread out until
the entire interior of the hoops is covered with a mixture of mesh, ribbing, and amazingly
complex local arrays. The initial deployment is complete.

The communication complex next goes through an elaborate self-test while its construction
minions stand by in case any problems are encountered. The tests are successful and
the station is declared operational. Within hours the phalanx of robot emissaries
from the inhabited universe picks up all the stray metal lying around and packs it
into one of the large cargo ships. Then, as swiftly as they came, the robot vehicles
disappear into the blackness around the station, leaving the imposing hoop structure
alone as a reminder of the presence of intelligence in the universe.

Around the vast Outer Shell, whose two hundred and fifty-six sections each contain
more volume than the Colony, over one thousand similar upgrades have been made during
Cycle 446 in an attempt to extend advanced communications capabilities to new locales.
This is the last upgrade of a very difficult group in a region near the Gap. This
group was delayed several times because of an unacceptably high number of manufacturing
deficiencies at the nearest major factory over two light millicycles away. After several
attempts to diagnose and repair the problems, eventually the plant had to be closed
and virtually rebuilt from scratch. The total delay to the completion of the project
was fourteen millicycles, just about what the Council of Engineers had predicted in
their worst-case analysis that accompanied the Cycle 446 Proclamation.

As the big moment approaches, all normal activity in the heart of the Colony ceases.
In the last nanocycle, there is no business activity, no entertainment. Even the spaceports
are empty. At precisely 446.9, after two hundred millicycles of debate and discussion
by the Council of Leaders, the governmental blueprint for the next era will be delivered
and all intelligence in the Colony will be listening.

The giant transmitter is activated on schedule and the Cycle 447 Proclamation pours
out at an information rate of a hundred trillion bits of information per picocycle.
The actual data rate from the powerful source is much higher, but the information
rate is reduced to accommodate requirements for both sophisticated encoding and error
checks internal to the data. With the coding, only Colony receivers equipped with
special decryption algorithms can unscramble the message at any level. And the internal
consistency checks on each packet of data in the transmission reduce the probability
of receiving an erroneous piece of information, even at an enormous distance, to practically
zero.