Fiasco (26 page)

The difference in the conjectures was tremendous. Nakamura espoused the cosmic hypothesis. The level of Quintan technology bespoke the existence of a fully developed astronomy for many years. Zeta and its planets were traveling through an inter-arm expansion of the galactic spiral and in some five thousand years would come perilously close to Hades. It was not possible to determine the critical passage exactly, because of the insoluble problem of the mutual interaction of many masses. But any
non
catastrophic passage past the collapsar had low probability. Thus the threatened civilization was attempting to save itself. Various projects had been undertaken. For example, resettling on the Moon, turning it into a navigable planet, and moving to the system of Eta Harpyiae—which was a mere four light-years away and, more to the point, was heading in the opposite direction from the collapsar. During the initial phase of the implementation of this project, the resources of energy and knowledge might turn out to be insufficient. It is also possible that one part of the civilization—one bloc of nations—was in favor of the project, while another opposed it. It was well known that experts in different fields rarely reached full agreement in the face of a particularly complex and difficult problem.

Another project might be emigration, or astronautical flight. This idea would precipitate a crisis: the population of Quinta would surely number in the billions, and there would not be shipyards enough to build a fleet able to carry out an Exodus of everyone from the planetary cradle. To use a terrestrial analogy, the individual countries would differ considerably in industrial potential. Those in the vanguard would build a space fleet for themselves and at the same time abandon the lunar operations. Perhaps the ones who labored in the shipyards, believing that the rescue vessels were not destined for them, resorted to acts of sabotage. Perhaps this gave rise to repression, rioting, anarchy, and a radio war of propaganda. And so this project, too, would be halted in its preliminary stage, and the multitude of satellites wandering the system would constitute its aborted remains. Although Nakamura's assessment of the situation was extremely hypothetical, it was not without value. Therefore—he urged—it was necessary to establish communication with Quinta quickly. Sidereal engineering, shown to its inhabitants, might save them.

Polassar, acquainted with the Japanese's idea, felt that the facts had been twisted and stretched to support the thesis of planetary emigration.

Sidereal engineering did not manifest itself like a bolt from the blue. The power tapped from the asthenospheric installation on the Moon was three orders of magnitude removed from the power that made possible gravitology and its industrial application. Moreover, there was nothing to indicate that the Quintans would consider the Eta system hospitable to them. In a few million years, Eta would be entering the stage of the final consumption of its hydrogen, thereby becoming a red giant. And, finally, Nakamura had shuffled the data concerning the motion of the entire Harpy and of Hades—within the interval of gravitational indeterminacy—to make the critical passage of Zeta through the vicinity of the collapsar probable in as little as fifty centuries. If one took into account the perturbations caused by the spiral arm of the galaxy, the passage would be delayed to more than twenty thousand years. The knowledge that things would be awful in 250 centuries could cause panic only in demented beings. A science in its infancy, such as Earth's in the nineteenth century, might consider progress to be near its end. A more mature science, while not knowing the discoveries of the future, would know that these would increase at an exponential rate and that in the next couple of years considerably more knowledge would be obtained than had been gained in the previous millennia. Even though we did not know what was taking place on Quinta, we should establish contact with the planet. It was risky, yes, but necessary.

Kirsting believed that "anything was possible." An advanced technology did not rule out religious faiths. The pyramids of the Egyptians and of the Aztecs revealed their purpose to visitors from other worlds no more than did Gothic cathedrals. What was discovered on the Moon might be the work of some religion. Sun worship—of an artificial sun. An altar of nuclear plasma. An idol. A symbol of power or mastery over matter. But you could also have schisms, apostasies, heresies, crusades—crusades not by sword but by radio. Electromagnetic offensives to "convert the heathen"—or the heathen's informational-sacred machines.
(Deus
EST
in machina.)

Not that this was provable or even probable. The symbols of a faith, like the creations of any ideology, did not betray their meaning to a stranger from another land. But physics did not obviate metaphysics. Trying to find a commonality of intention in the peoples of different terrestrial cultures and epochs, one knew, at least, that material welfare was nowhere considered to be the all in all, the answer to existence. Such a belief would be the exception. Technology did not have to part company with the Holy. It always possessed a goal beyond itself. And when the Holy disappeared, something had to fill that vacancy in the culture. Kirsting took the marriage of engineering and religion to such mystical heights that Steergard had difficulty listening to the man. And contact? He, too, of course, was in favor of contact.

The pilots had no opinion. The imaginative expansion of mysteries into more or less nonhuman directions did not lie within their character. Rotmont was willing to discuss the technical aspects of communication, but the first consideration was how to protect the ship from the swarms of Quintan satellites. He thought that Quinta might already have been visited by another civilization, and that that episode had ended so badly that the lesson was not forgotten. The Quintans were fencing themselves off against invasion. They had manufactured a technology of universal distrust. It was necessary to assure them of our peaceful intentions, to send them "gifts of greeting" and await their reaction.

El Salam and Gerbert were of the same opinion.

Steergard followed his own counsel. "Gifts of greeting" could be destroyed before they landed; the fate of the five patrol probes near the Moon indicated as much. So he shot a large orbiter toward the Sun, a remote-control ambassador that would present its "credentials" to the Quintans. The Ambassador beamed its message by laser signals that could penetrate the noise envelope of the planet, in a redundant code that instructed the receivers how to enter into communication with it. It sent this program several hundred times, in a loop. The answer was silence.

For three weeks, the content of the message was changed in every conceivable way—with no response of any kind. The transmitting power was increased, the laser needle swept over the entire surface of the planet, in the infrared, in the ultraviolet, modulated in various ways. The planet did not reply.

The Ambassador took this opportunity to accumulate visual details of Quinta, which it relayed to the
Hermes.
On the continents were agglomerations the size of large terrestrial metropolises. Nothing, however, lit them at night. These structures, the shape of flattened stars with tangled runways, gave semimetallic reflections. From the runways went straight lines, like arteries of transportation, except that nothing moved on them. The sharper the images obtained by the Ambassador (which to some extent was functioning also as a spy), the more evident it became that the suppositions brought from Earth were false. The lines were neither roads nor conduits, yet the land between them often imitated forests. These so-called wooded areas were created by a multitude of regular blocks with branching projections. Their albedo was almost zero: they absorbed more than 99 percent of the incident sunlight. Thus they seemed to be photoreceptors.

Could Quinta therefore have also absorbed the "credentials," its receiving stations treating them as energy-food and not as information? The Ambassador, invisible until now against the background of the solar disk, gave everything it had. In the infrared it broadcast its "overture," exceeding a hundred times the Sun's radiation in that band. Common sense said that such intense light would damage the wave absorbers; that, therefore, maintenance crews of some kind would investigate the damage and its cause; and that, sooner or later, higher-ranking specialists would recognize the signal nature of the beam. But, again, days passed and nothing changed.

The pictures taken of the dayside and nightside of the planet added to the mysteries. Nothing illuminated the darkness when the sun went down. Both large continents, raised from the ocean, with steep, snow-capped mountain chains, shone at night only with the ghostly glow of polar lights. And these lights, turning the cloudless, arctic ice into phantom-green gold, did not wander randomly but were moved, as if by an invisible, giant hand, in the opposite direction to Quinta's rotation. Neither on the inland seas of both extensive continents nor in the ocean were any vessels sighted. There was also no activity at the intersections of the straight lines that cut effortlessly through forested plains and high ridges of rock. The lines could not serve as transportation. In the ocean of the southern hemisphere, extinct volcanoes of seemingly uninhabited archipelagoes were like innumerable beads scattered across the water. The only landmass of that hemisphere, at the pole itself, lay beneath an enormous glacier. From the dull silver of its perpetual snow jutted solitary needles of rock, eight-thousand-ton pinnacles locked in ice. In the equatorial belt, beneath the arch of the frozen ring, tropical storms raged day and night, and their lightning discharges were intensified—in splashing, violet reflections—by the surface of the supraatmospheric ice like a rapidly moving mirror.

The lack of any sign of civilizational bustle, of port cities, for example, at the mouths of great rivers; the convex metal shields in mountain valleys which hid the valley bottoms with armor that was distinguishable from the natural rock only spectrochemically; the absence of air traffic, given the discovery of about a hundred smooth concrete airfields enclosed by low buildings—all this led irresistibly to the conclusion that century-long warfare had forced the Quintans underground, and that it was there that they lived, relying on the metallic vision of radioelectronics to observe the skies and outer space. The measurement of temperature gradients revealed thermal spots on the surfaces of Norstralia and Heparia, interconnected by branchings deep in the ground, as if they were cave cities. But a careful analysis of their radiation seemed to prove that idea false. Each of the wide-ranging spots, at a diameter of forty miles, manifested a strange gradient of expelled heat: the center was the hottest, but the source of its radiation lay beneath the lithosphere at the border of the mantle. Could the Quintans be drawing energy from the molten interior of their globe?

Enormous areas, geometrically regular, at first taken for cultivated land, were in reality collections of millions of conical balls, like ceramic mushrooms planted for dozens of kilometers. Transceiver radar antennas, the physicists at last decided.

The planet was wreathed in clouds, storms, cyclones, as if intentionally dead and waiting-hiding behind an incessantly transmitted sign that requested some countersign. Observations made under the heading of archeology—to discover traces of a historical past, such as ruins of cities, or things corresponding to the cultural architecture of Earth, like temples, pyramids, ancient seats of government—yielded nothing definite. If war had destroyed these totally, or if human eyes were unable to discern them for their sheer alienness, the sole bridge cast across that alienness remained technological activity. So they looked for the devices—gigantic, surely—that had been used to hurl the ocean waters into space. The arrangement of such artillery could be calculated using criteria that were universally applicable, since determined by physics. Given the direction of the rotation of the ice ring, its circumequatorial path, it was possible to deduce the localization of the planetary water-throwers. But again the searchers were stymied: the installations must have been erected where dry land met ocean—in the very region over which now sped the frozen ring, whose constant friction against the rarefied atmosphere covered the critical places with storm and downpour. Thus even the attempt to recreate the methods employed by the engineers of Quinta a century ago to shoot the seas into the void met with failure.

The detailed photographs filled the archives of the ship but had no more value, really, than blotches on the page of a Rorschach test. The meaningless contours of the star-shaped structures on the continents suggested to the human eye as many terrestrial things as the shapes a man might see—but in fact only imagine—when confronted with copious spatterings of ink. DEUS's helplessness in the face of these thousands of pictures made them realize that within the machine, too—though it was supposed to be absolutely objective in the processing of information—lay the stubborn inheritance of anthropocentrism. Instead of learning something about an alien intelligence, Nakamura remarked, they had learned how close the bonds of mental kinship were between man and his computer. The nearness of the alien civilization—practically within arm's reach—became a separating distance that mocked their attempts to get to the heart of it. They struggled, with the growing feeling that a malicious trap had been laid for the expedition, as if Someone (but who?) wished to offer them a challenge full of hope, only to reveal—at the end of the road, at the destination—its impossibility. Those who were troubled by this thought kept it to themselves, so as not to infect their comrades with defeatism.

After seven hundred hours of this fruitless diplomatic emission, Steergard decided to send to Quinta the first lander, named
Gabriel.
The Ambassador announced the
Gabriel's
arrival forty-eight hours before takeoff, informing the Quintans that the probe was not equipped with any kind of weapon and would touch down on the large northern continent Heparia, a hundred miles from a certain star-shaped group of buildings, in a barren—hence uninhabited—area, as an unmanned emissary, with which the Heparians would be able to communicate in machine language. Although the planet did not respond to this announcement, either, they sent the
Gabriel
out of orbit, in the aposelenium. It was a two-stage rocket with a microcomputer that had, besides the standard programs of contact, the ability to revise and alter them to fit unforeseen circumstances. Polassar supplied the
Gabriel
with the best of the small terajoule engines that they had on board, so that it could cover the four hundred thousand kilometers to the planet in about twenty minutes, at a speed up to six hundred kilometers a second. It would slow down only above the ionosphere.