Gateways (9 page)

Wer stared as several of the narrow, winking rays seemed to propel tiny dots in front of them. One of these zoomed straight toward his point of view, growing into a wide, reflective surface that loomed toward those watching.

“Photon sail!” Anna diagnosed. “A variant on the Nakamura design. Propelled by a laser at point of origin.”

Wer grunted, amazed by her quickness—and that he actually grasped some of her meaning! The space windjammer hurtled past his viewpoint, which swiveled around to give chase—and he briefly glimpsed a tiny,
smooth shape, dragged behind the giant sail, brilliantly radiant in the home star’s propelling beam . . .

. . . which then dimmed. The diaphanous sail contracted, folding and collapsing into a small container at one end of a little egg, whose former brightness now faded, until it could only be made out as a seed-shaped ripple, hurtling at speeds Wer couldn’t begin to contemplate.

“Neat trick with the sail,” Patri commented. “Tuck it away, when it’s not needed for propulsion or energy collection, so it won’t snag interstellar particles. With bi-memory materials, it could expand or contract with very little effort. I bet they use it later to slow down.”

Wer now grasped how the worldstone must have come across the incredible gulf between stars—a method sure to provoke feelings of kinship from this colony of wealthy yachting enthusiasts. At the same time, he wondered. What would ancient peoples, in China or India, have made of these images?

In fact, could anyone guarantee that modern humanity was much more advanced now? In ways that mattered most?

Meanwhile, Scholar Yang’s narration continued.

Slow time passed while the galaxy turned,
A new star loomed—its light, a cushion.

The pellet turned around and redeployed its sail, which now took a gentler, braking push from a brightening light source ahead.
The sun,
Wer realized. It had to be.

“Knew it!” the islander exulted. “Of course there’s no laser at this end. Just sunlight alone won’t be enough.”

As the star ahead grew from a pinpoint into a tiny, visible disk, a
new object
abruptly loomed in front of the worldstone—a great, banded sphere, replete with tier after tier of whirling, multicolored storms.

Chosen beforehand—a giant ball waited,
Ready to catch . . . pull . . . assist . . .

Yang Shenxiu’s translation stumbled as, even with computer aissistance, he could only offer guesses. Well, after all, the Indus and archaic Chinese peoples knew very little about astronomy, planetary navigation, and all that.

“A gravity swing past Jupiter,” Anna murmured in apparent admiration. “Like threading a microscopic needle across centuries and light-years. They had to time it perfectly.”

The mighty gas planet swerved by unnervingly fast, and the pellet, with its sail still billowed open, now plunged slightly
away
from the sun, then plunged toward it again, from a different angle.

Patri interjected. “But it would still have loads of excess velocity. This needle would have been chosen to offer
multiple
swings past other planets, as well as Jupiter and the sun, again and again.”

His appraisal was borne out, as the broiling solar sphere darted by, making Wer’s eyes water. Just after nearest passage, the sail furled back into its container . . . and soon a smaller ball swung past, so close that Wer felt he was passing
through
the topmost of its churning, yellow clouds, while a brief, glowing aura surrounded the image.

“Atmospheric braking through the atmosphere of Venus. Dang! They’d need orbital figures down to ten decimals, in order to plan this from so far away, so long in advance.”

Then, another sudden veer and gyre past Jupiter . . .

“Yes, though it could make small, real time adjustments, in between encounters, by tacking with the sail,” Anna replied. “Still they wouldn’t arrange it in such detail without a destination in mind.” She made her own rapid finger movements. “They had to know about Earth already. From instruments, like our LifeSeeker Telescope . . . only far more advanced. They’d know it had an oxygen atmosphere, life, nonequilibrium methane, possibly chlorophyll. Even so—”

Without shifting his transfixed gaze, Wer had to shake his head. There was no way that ancient peoples could have made anything of this, even if
Courier
showed them all the same images and told them all about these worlds, named after their gods—or the other way around. Wer’s head seemed to spin, nauseated, as the whirling, planetary dance went through several further encounters—more dizzying, gut-wrenching pirouettes—until the sense of pell-mell speed finally diminished. The pace grew sedate—if no less urgent.

Then a different-colored dot appeared, just ahead.

Once again, the storytelling image zoomed in upon the box at the front of the pellet. A little hatch opening, the sail reemerging.

At long last, the goal lay in sight,
Now to approach gently, and find a perch,
To focus, study, and appraise,
Then to sleep again and wait.
Wait until a time of claiming,
When allures are certain. Ready . . .

Only, this time, something went wrong, as the sail came out of its box—and one corner dimpled inward, crossing its own lines and causing a tangle.

“Uh-oh, that can’t be good,” Patri Menelaua commented. “How’d that happen?

Wer blinked in surprise and felt his guts clench as the sail rapidly collapsed, its slender cables knotted and spoiled. While this happened, Patri’s commentary continued.

“It must have intended to fine-tune its approach to Earth, by gradually tacking on sunlight till entering a high, safe orbit, Perhaps at a Lagrange point. Then spend some time—centuries—evaluating the situation. Maybe use the sail as a telescope mirror, to make detailed observations from a secure distance. Then wait.”

“Wait . . . for what?” Anna was doubtful. “For the planet to produce space travelers? But, the temporal coincidence is incredible! To launch this thing timed so it arrived only a few thousand years before we made it into space? How could they have known?”

Wer marveled that these skilled people could grasp so much, so quickly. Even allowing for all of their fancy tools and aids, it was a privilege to be in such company.

“Incredible, but implicit! Anyway, how do we know the solar system isn’t filled with these stone-things, arriving all across the last billion years? We never surveyed the asteroid belt for objects this small. And that astronaut snagged one that drifted in—”

“It’s still an appalling coincidence,” Anna snapped. “There has to be—”

“Comrades, please,” Professor Yang Shenxiu urged, raising his eyes briefly from his own workstation. “Evidently, something went wrong at the last minute. Let us observe.”

Wer found that he could barely breathe from tension, watching a drama that had unfolded millennia ago. He felt sympathy for the worldstone. To have traveled so far, and come so close to success, only for it all to unravel . . .

Failure! Luck evades us,
While the ball-Earth reaches out,
To clutch me to her bosom.

Wer glanced at Yang Shenxiu, who was once again far away in time and space, his eyes glittering with soft laser reflections cast by his helper apparatus.
Of course, the alien entity’s vocabulary must have come from its encounters with early humans, in long-ago, more colorful days.

Will Earth embrace me?
Will I end in a fiery pyre?
Or will she fling me outward,
To tumble, forever—
—in cold and empty space?

Unable to maneuver, even a little, the pellet let go of its uselessly clotted sail as the planet loomed close, swinging by, once . . . twice . . . three times . . . and several more . . . From Patri’s commentary, it seemed that some kind of safety margin was eroding with each orbital passage. Doom drew closer.

Then it came—the final plunge.

So, it will be fire.

Plummeting amid heat and pain,
Destined for extinction . . .

Starting with deceptive softness, the flames of atmospheric entry soon crackled around the image, accompanied by a roar that seemed almost wrathful. Wer realized, with a sharp intake of breath, that it would be just like the
Cheng He
expedition. He felt an agonized pang, as any Chinese person would . . .

. . . until new characters floated upward, to jitter and bump alongside the image-story, painted in brush strokes of tentative hope.

Then, once again,
Fate changed its mind.

The grand voyage might have ended then, in waters covering three-quarters of the globe, an epic journey climaxing in burial, under some muddy bottom. Or, impacting almost anywhere on land, to crush, shatter, and explode.

Instead, as they watched the egg-artifact ride a shallow trail of flame—shedding speed and scattering clouds—there loomed ahead a snow-covered mountainside! It struck the pinnacle along one flank, sending white spumes jetting skyward. Then another angled blow, and another . . . till the ovoid finally tumbled to rest, smoldering, on the fringes of a highland glacier.

Heat, quenched by cold, melted a shallow impression, much like a nest. Whereupon, soon after arriving in a gaudy blaze, the pellet from space seemed to fade—barely visible—into the icy surface. Wer had to blink away tears.

Wow,
he thought, releasing tension. That was much better than any of the telenet dramas that Ling used to make him watch.

Meanwhile, archaic-looking ideograms continued to flow across the worldstone, next to the story-image. Yang Shenxiu was silent, as distracted and transfixed as any of them. So Wer glanced at some modern Chinese characters that formed in the corner of his right eye. A rougher, less poetical translation, offered by his own aissistant.

This was not the normal mission.
Nor any planned-for program.

For once, none of the smart people said a thing, joining Wer in silence as the picture narrative flowed on. Spot-sampled snapshots seemed to leap across countless seasons, innumerable years. The glacier underwent a time-sped series of transition flickers, at first growing and flowing down a starkly lifeless valley, carrying the stone along, sometimes burying it in white layers. Then (Wer guessed) more centuries passed as the ice river gradually thinned and receded, until the retreating whiteness departed completely, leaving the alien envoy-probe stranded, passive and helpless, upon a stony moraine.

But the makers left allowance,
For eventualities unexpected.

Appearing to give chase, grasses climbed the mountain, just behind the retiring ice wall. Soon, tendrils of forest followed, amid rippling, seasonal waves of wildflowers. Then, time seemed to put on the brakes, slowing down even more. Single trees stayed in place, the sun’s transit decelerated, unnervingly, from a stop-action blur to the torpid movement of a shadow, on a single day.

Wer swayed in reaction, as if some vehicle he was riding had screeched to a halt. A bubble of bile rose in his throat. Still, he was unable to stop watching, or even blink . . .

. . . as two of the shadows moved closer, converging upon a pair of
legs
—clad in leather breeches and cross-laced moccasins—that entered the field of view in short, careful steps.

Then, a human hand, stained with soot. Soon joined by its partner—fingernails grimy with caked mud and ocher. Reaching down to touch.

Wer tried hard to follow the conversation—partly out of fascination, but also because he felt desperate to please.

If I prove useful to them—more than a mere on-off switch for the worldstone—it could mean my life. It might even mean getting to see Ling and Xie Xie again.

That goal wasn’t going to come easy, though. The others kept talking way over his head. Nor could he blame them. After all, who was he?
What
was he, but another piece of driftwood-trash, washed up on a beach, who happened to pick up a pretty rock? Should he demand they explain everything?
Dui niu tanqin . . .
it would be like playing a lute to a cow.

Except, of course, they needed his ongoing service as communicator/ambassador to the entity
within
that rock—and he seemed to be performing that task well enough. At least according to Dr. Nguyen, who always seemed friendly to Wer.

Still, the tech-search experts—Anna Arroyo and Patri Menelaua—clearly felt dubious about this ill-educated Huangpu shoresteader with weathered skin and rough diction, who kept taking up valuable time with foolish questions. Those two would be happier, he knew, if the honor of direct contact with the
Courier
entity were taken over by somebody else.

Only,
can
the role be passed along at all? If I died, would it transfer to another?
Surely, they had mulled that tempting thought.

Or do I have some special trait—something that goes beyond being the first man in a decade or two, to lay eyes on the worldstone? Without me, might there be a long search, before they found another?
That possibility, he knew, was the one he must foster. At some point, it might keep him breathing.

“Clearly, this mechanism in our possession was dispatched across interstellar space by different people, with different motives, than those who sent the Havana Artifact,” commented Yang Shenxiu, the scholar from New Beijing, who rested one hand on the worldstone, without causing more than a ripple under its cloudy surface—giving Wer a touch of satisfaction.
It reacts a lot more actively to my touch!

With his other hand, Yang motioned toward a large placard-image screen for comparison. In vivid three-vee, it showed the alien object under
study in Virginia, America, surrounded by researchers from around the world—a bustle of activity watched by billions of people and supervised by Gerald Livingstone, the astronaut who had discovered and collected that “herald egg” from orbit.