Emprise (9 page)

Aikens had been to Geneva twice before, in happier times. In between earning his master’s in physics in the mid-sixties and beginning the three-year pursuit of his doctorate, Aikens had taken six months off to tour Western Europe with a Eurailpass and a comely undergraduate American exchange student. Later, he had visited the CERN accelerators located there to talk to the discoverer of the W particle. He remembered Jeanne fondly and Geneva’s unique character clearly: the red- and green-tiled roofs of the old city on the west bank of the Rhône, the close-packed medieval dwellings, the strange seiches of the shimmering lake.

As the turbocopter passed over the Jura Mountains and began to descend, the city was suddenly there, spread out ahead of him. Scanning for familiar landmarks, he spotted the towers of the Cathedral of St. Pierre rising from the highest point of the old city, and in the hazy distance the towering massif of Mont Blanc, highest of the Alps. But the famous Fountain Jet d’Eau in the harbor was missing. Aikens wondered if the hundred-metre plume’s pumps had been turned off temporarily or permanently.

The turbocopter growled its way low across the city in the general direction of the Palace of Nations. The Palace was distinguished by having been home to two unsuccessful attempts at a planetary confederacy—first the League of Nations, and later, after it was expelled from New York by President Novak, the United Nations.

Skirting the complex, the turbocopter landed at a helipad a kilometre further on. When the cabin door was opened from outside, Aikens clambered down, squinting in the bright sunlight. A slender dark-haired man with a pencil-thin mustache and a black briefcase was walking briskly toward him.

“Dr. Aikens?” called the man. “My name is Kurt Weddell. William asked me to meet you—please come with me. I have a car over there,” he said, gesturing outside the fence. “Your luggage will be taken to the hotel.”

“I wasn’t given time to pack a bag,” Aikens said. “Look, what’s going on? Why am I here?”

Weddell took Aikens by the arm and steered him firmly toward the gate. “Let’s get on the road, and I’ll try to get you caught up.”

Aikens allowed himself to be whisked into the back seat of a black diplomatic limousine. As the car pulled away from the terminal, Weddell fished in his briefcase and pulled out two papers.

“This is your pardon, ordered and signed by the King and duly executed by the Lord Chancellor,” he said, handing the first sheet to Aikens. “Your co-workers should have received theirs two hours ago—you’ll get a chance to talk to them this evening and confirm that.”

Aikens held the parchment gingerly, as if expecting it to vanish in his hands or suddenly burst into flame. Weddell took no notice of Aikens’s state, pausing only to take a breath.

“This is your contract, which establishes you as the King’s Special Staff Assistant for Science, retroactive to September 5. You don’t have to sign it now, you can take time to read it—in fact, you don’t have to sign it at all, but we’ll still honor our side of it. Your back pay from September 5 to today will be paid to you on your return to London and from that day on, you can walk out when you want with no restrictions and no recriminations. The others will be offered contracts which will place them under you, to be assigned as you think best.”

“Why the change?”

Weddell snapped the briefcase latch. “When the King learned how Air Admiral Chance was dealing with you, he was bloody furious and had the poor man sacked. Hardly his fault, really, he’s not equipped to deal with this sort of novelty. That’s why those papers. As for why you’re here, your bombshell of yesterday accounts for that. You’ve put a whole different complexion on this conference.”

“What conference?” Aikens asked. But as Weddell was speaking, the limousine had passed through the security checkpoint at the Palace of Nations and cruised up the main drive to the entrance. As the car stopped, Weddell bounced out onto the sidewalk and looked back at Aikens impatiently.

“Coming?” he demanded, and started up the steps. The driver opened Aikens’s door, and he hurried to catch up.

“I thought the U.N. was moribund,” Aikens said, slightly breathless as they hastened along a corridor.

“Quite. You’ll remember that the United States and Soviet Union cut off financial support for the U.N. after the fission blanket was released. A lot of member nations followed their lead. The General Assembly hasn’t met in six years. This is a special conference—an extraordinary one, as you well know. We’ve got thirty-two nations and the three biggest collectives represented.”

“William’s going to tell them about the Senders.”

“Yes. Here, this way,” Weddell said, striding between a pair of guards and through a set of double doors. In the well-lit center of the room was a rectangle made of a dozen tables. Near one corner sat King William, his youth accentuated by the gray-haired poker-faced appearance of the well-dressed men and women who occupied the remainder of the tables. Most were looking at the graph on the projection screen on the east wall, and gave at least the appearance of listening to the speaker who was addressing them in French from the podium.

Surrounding the conference area were several U-shaped tiers of chairs, occupied by a more-relaxed appearing collection of minor officials and diplomatic aides. Weddell ushered Aikens to a seat near the back of the British section and sat down beside him.

“What’s he talking about?” Aikens asked.

“World GNP. There’s an earcup hanging from the side of your chair if you want a translation,” Weddell answered in a loud whisper. “He’s part of the team presenting our state-of-the-world assessment.”

“That promises to be gloomy.”

“We want it to be. That’s part of the strategy. Not that having plans means things go that way.”

“Why? What’s happened?”

“Well, first of all, look at who’s not here. Virtually no one from the Americas, and only two of the new Soviet Republics. And we lost two days and a fair amount of goodwill on a big credentials fight.”

“Over what? Isn’t everybody here by invitation?”

“Sure—but the invitations were pitched to the top levels of government, not the bureaucracy. Most of those participating sent high-level ministers, like Tai Chen from China—she’s the Chair of the People’s Political Consultative Conference, which as near as we can figure is just two levels down from the Premier. And we’ve got eight heads of state, including Rashuri from India. But Egypt and several others sent what wouldn’t even rank as a junior cabinet minister back home. The Asians refused to sit with them—wanted them excluded, or they’d go home.

“We need them, so we were forced to compromise—cabinet-rank or above at the main table, others in the gallery as observers. That satisfied Tai Chen, but half the delegations we demoted walked out, and the others aren’t in quite the frame of mind we want.”

“Nothing’s been said about the message?”

“Not until tomorrow. William intends to handle that himself. Look, I’ve got some things to attend to. William will probably want to see you when they recess, but I know he wants you to be prepared to answer questions from the delegates tomorrow. Do you need any help preparing, any materials or such?”

“No,” said Aikens.

“Then I’ll pass the word that you’ve arrived and have someone bring you a copy of the briefing book. We have a floor at the Hotel Intercontinental, and there’s a room set aside for you. Any of the lads wearing blue badges can get an escort for you when you want to head over.”

The background rustling and conversation was suddenly louder, and Weddell looked up. “Montpelier does good homework, but he has no pizzazz. You’ll want to stay for the next one, though. Lord Kittinanny is up next—he’s got a slide show on hunger and child mortality that ought to heat things up a bit.”

Aikens was preparing for bed at the end of what had been an alternately uplifting and enervating day when the knock came at his hotel door. He padded to the door in slippers and robe, both thoughtfully included in the full wardrobe somehow assembled for him while he sat in on the opening sessions.

As he had thought, it was William.

“Might I come in for a moment, Doctor?”

“Of course,” Aikens said, stepping aside.

“Weddell insisted I get some sleep, even though he’ll probably work through the night,” said the King, perching on the edge of the already turned-down bed. “But I wanted to see you first. Are you ready for tomorrow?”

“If I understand what tomorrow is to be,” Aikens said. “If I can use your own analogy, today you told them what shape the house is in. Tomorrow you’ll tell them why it has to be cleaned up.”

The King nodded. “And you will tell them why it has to be done now,” he said, and paused. “Does your new discovery tell you what world they come from?”

Aikens shook his head. “Not even what star it orbits. If it orbits one.”

“What do you mean?”

“That perhaps they were literally searching, not just listening. That perhaps they’re not coming directly from their home star, but diverting from some other mission that already placed them nearby,” said Aikens. “Their world could be a ship that has been traveling through space for thousands of years.”

King William pursed his lips. “I would avoid raising that possibility. They will need to latch onto something concrete, even if it turns out to be wrong. Can you offer them something to focus on?”

“Not with any certainty.”

“I want you to be able to project certainty. You don’t need to actually feel it,” he said, smiling.

Aikens hesitated. “Mu Cassiopeia. It’s 26 light-years away, and a long-lived star of the same spectral class as the sun, though less luminous. I would give it a 60 percent chance of being the source.”

“If I can still cipher, they would have been listening to our broadcasts of 1958 when that message we received was sent,” King William mused. “Why, do you suppose, they chose that time to come?”

Aikens smiled. “I’ve thought about that, too. It may mean nothing, but there’s a tempting coincidence. That was the dawn of the First Space Age, ushered in by our late unlamented superpowers. Perhaps we went up a notch in the Senders’ estimation for that.”

“I like that thought. A good one on which to end the day,” King William said, rising. “Do you know, I feel as though tomorrow is a cusp day for our species. I only wish I knew down which slope we’ll roll.” He yawned. “But such babblings are a symptom of a lack of sleep, aren’t they, Doctor? I’ll take my goodnight.”

He moved toward the door, and as he did Aikens went to the bureau where some papers lay.

“Wait,” Aikens said. He held out the contract, folded in quarters, at arm’s length.

King William took it and turned to the last page. He looked up and met Aikens’s gaze with a small smile. “Thank you,” he said. “And welcome to the team.”

As the last of the delegations seated itself, William looked down at his notes a final time, then pushed them aside.

“I trust that even the most cynical of you found a good deal to regret yesterday. This is a much-changed world, and many of you know it even better than I. We have endured a winnowing—the earth now bears barely three souls where once there were five. In some ways that has made us hard and self-centered.

“There has been less for all, and our first thought of late has been protecting what remains rather than reclaiming what was lost. We climbed high and fell. It made us fearful of climbing again.

“I trust that even the most cynical among you are touched at some level by the gap between what we are and what we could be. We are the world’s leaders, and we have not led. Instead we have squabbled and fought and scratched and threatened. We are responsible for the state of the world. We are responsible, and we should be embarrassed, every one of us.

“If we are not embarrassed, it is because we believe we have hidden our guilt from the eyes of those who might judge us. With jingoistic ideology and outright lies, we have hidden from ourselves what we’ve done and what we’ve failed to do. We have hidden it from our God by denying Him. Through clever indoctrination, we have hoped to hide it from our children, who have reason to and the right to expect better from us.

“But the time is coming on us when we will no longer be able to hide the hovels and the worm-ridden bodies of our people and the coal-choked atmosphere. We will not be able to pretend that the poor chose to be poor or that God loves a soldier. We will have to face up to what we are, and if it were today I wonder if we would survive the shame.

“From what quarter will our accounting come? I will let those who will judge tell you.”

Exactly on cue, the room’s loudspeakers crackled and then loudly sang the eerie modulations of the Senders’ message. When it ended, three and a half minutes later, a cadre of aides distributed thick hardboard binders to the delegates: the two-hundred-page briefing book which contained a more formal version of the explanation Aikens had given the King during his first audience.

From his seat at the conference table, two places to William’s right, Aikens studied the delegates’ faces. He saw a measure of open suspicion, many unreadable expressions, and a number of furrowed brows. Things had taken a turn that apparently none had expected. They would listen, Aikens thought, for a while longer.

Having paused to make his own quick assessment, King William went on: “What you have just heard is a radio message beamed to Earth from a world more than 150 trillion miles away in the direction of the constellation the ancient Greeks called Cassiopeia. It was not a recording. The signal was and is now being received by a satellite dish in the courtyard of the International Labor Office.”

“
Menteur
,” said a French delegate in a whisper that was meant to be heard. “Liar.”

“You are invited to examine the installation and question the technicians. But even more, you are invited to tarn your own antennas skyward and listen. In the briefing book you now hold, we have shared freely how it can be heard. The signal is intended for all of Earth’s people, respecting no national boundaries. We do not own it. No one can. It simply fell to us to discover it.