Spring 2007 (15 page)

“Murray Fox, from Langley.”

“Hi,” says Gregor, wondering just what kind of insane
political critical mass Stone is trying to assemble: Langley and Brundle’s
parent outfit aren’t even on speaking terms, to say the least.

“And another civilian specialist, Dr. Sagan.” Greg nods
at the doctor, a thin guy with sparkling brown eyes and hippyish long hair.
“Greg’s got something to tell us in person,” says Brundle. “Something very
interesting he picked up in London. No sources please, Greg.”

“No sources,” Gregor echoes. He pulls out a chair and
sits down. Now he’s here he supposes he’ll just have to play the role Brundle
assigned to him in the confidential briefing he read on the long flight home.
“We have word from an unimpeachable HUMINT resource that the Russians
have–” he coughs into his fist. “Excuse me.” He glances at Brundle. “Okay
to talk about COLLECTION RUBY?”

“They’re all cleared,” Brundle says dryly. “That’s why
it says ‘joint committee’ on the letterhead.”

“I see. My invitation was somewhat terse.” Gregor
stifles a sigh that seems to say,
all I get is a most urgent recall; how am
I meant to know what’s going on and who knows what?
“So why are we here?”

“Think of it as another collective analysis board,” says
Fox, the man from the CIA. He doesn’t look enthused.

“We’re here to find out what’s going on, with the
benefit of some intelligence resources from the other side of the curtain.”

Doctor Sagan, who has been listening silently with his
head cocked to one side like a very intelligent blackbird, raises an eyebrow.

“Yes?” asks Brundle.

“I, uh, would you mind explaining that to me? I haven’t
been on one of these committees before.”

No indeed,
thinks Gregor. It’s a miracle
Sagan ever passed his political vetting: he’s too friendly by far with some of
those Russian astronomer guys who are clearly under the thumb of the KGB’s
First Department. And he’s expressed doubts–muted, of course–about
the thrust of current foreign policy, which is a serious no-no under the McNamara
administration.

“A CAB is a joint committee feeding into the Central
Office of Information’s external bureaux on behalf of a blue-ribbon panel of
experts assembled from the intelligence community,” Gregor recites in a bored
tone of voice. “Stripped of the bullshit, we’re a board of wise men who’re
meant to rise above narrow bureaucratic lines of engagement and prepare a
report for the Office of Technology Assessment to pass on to the Director of
Central Intelligence. It’s not meant to reflect the agenda of any one
department, but to be a Delphi board synergizing our lateralities. Set up after
the Cuban fiasco to make sure that we never again get backed into that kind of
corner by accidental group-think. One of the rules of the CAB process is that it
has to include at least one dissident: unlike the commies we know we’re not
perfect.” Gregor glances pointedly at Fox, who has the good sense to stay
silent.

“Oh, I see,” Sagan says hesitantly. With more force: “so
that’s why I’m here? Is that the only reason you’ve dragged me away from
Cornell?”

“Of course not, Doctor,” oozes Brundle, casting Gregor a
dirty look. The East German defector, Wolff, maintains a smug silence:
I are
above all this.
“We’re here to come up with policy recommendations for
dealing with the bigger picture. The
much
bigger picture.”

“The Builders,” says Fox. “We’re here to determine what
our options look like if and when they show up, and to make recommendations
about the appropriate course of action. Your background in, uh, SETI
recommended you.”

Sagan looks at him in disbelief. “I’d have thought that
was obvious,” he says.

“Eh?”

“We won’t have any choice,” the young professor explains
with a wry smile. “Does a termite mound negotiate with a nuclear superpower?”

Brundle leans forward. “That’s rather a radical
position, isn’t it? Surely there’ll be some room for maneuver? We know this is
an artificial construct, but presumably the builders are still living people.
Even if they’ve got green skin and six eyes.”

“Oh. My. God.” Sagan leans forward, his face in his
hands. After a moment Gregor realizes that he’s laughing.

“Excuse me.” Gregor glances round. It’s the German
defector, Wolff, or whatever he’s called. “Herr Professor, would you care to
explain what you find so funny?”

After a moment Sagan leans back, looks at the ceiling,
and sighs. “Imagine a single, a forty-five RPM record with a centre hole
punched out. The inner hole is half an astronomical unit–forty-six
million miles–in radius. The outer edge is of unknown radius, but
probably about two and a half AUs–two hundred and forty five million
miles. The disk’s thickness is unknown–seismic waves are reflected off a
mirror-like rigid layer eight hundred miles down–but we can estimate it
at eight thousand miles, if its density averages out at the same as Earth’s.
Surface gravity is the same as our original planet, and since we’ve been
transplanted here and survived we have learned that it’s a remarkably
hospitable environment for our kind of life; only on the large scale does it
seem different.”

The astronomer sits up. “Do any of you gentlemen have
any idea just how preposterously powerful whoever built this structure is?”

“How do you mean, preposterously powerful?” asks
Brundle, looking more interested than annoyed.

“A colleague of mine, Dan Alderson, did the first
analysis. I think you might have done better to pull him in, frankly. Anyway,
let me itemise: item number one is escape velocity.” Sagan holds up a bony finger.
“Gravity on a disk does not diminish in accordance with the inverse square law,
the way it does on a spherical object like the planet we came from. We have
roughly earthlike gravity, but to escape, or to reach orbit, takes tremendously
more speed. Roughly two hundred times more, in fact. Rockets that from Earth
could reach the moon just fall out of the sky after running out of fuel. Next
item:” another finger. “The area and mass of the disk. If it’s double-sided it
has a surface area equal to billions and billions of Earths. We’re stuck in the
middle of an ocean full of alien continents, but we have no guarantee that this
hospitable environment is anything other than a tiny oasis in a world of
strangeness.”

The astronomer pauses to pour himself a glass of water,
then glances round the table. “To put it in perspective, gentlemen, this world
is so big that, if one in every hundred stars had an earth-like planet, this
single structure could support the population of our
entire home galaxy.
As for the mass–this structure is as massive as fifty thousand suns. It
is, quite bluntly, impossible: as-yet unknown physical forces must be at work
to keep it from rapidly collapsing in on itself and creating a black hole. The
repulsive force, whatever it is, is strong enough to hold the weight of fifty
thousand suns: think about that for a moment, gentlemen.”

At that point Sagan looks around and notices the blank
stares. He chuckles ruefully.

“What I mean to say is, this structure is not permitted
by the laws of physics as we understand them. Because it clearly does exist, we
can draw some conclusions, starting with the fact that our understanding of
physics is incomplete. Well, that isn’t news: we know we don’t have a unified
theory of everything. Einstein spent thirty years looking for one, and didn’t
come up with it.

But, secondly.” He looks tired for a moment, aged beyond
his years. “We used to think that any extraterrestrial beings we might
communicate with would be fundamentally comprehensible: folks like us, albeit
with better technology. I think that’s the frame of mind you’re still working
in. Back in sixty-one we had a brainstorming session at a conference, trying to
work out just how big an engineering project a spacefaring civilization might
come up with. Freeman Dyson, from Princeton, came up with about the biggest
thing any of us could imagine: something that required us to imagine
dismantling Jupiter and turning it into habitable real estate.

“This disk is about a hundred million times bigger than
Dyson’s sphere. And that’s before we take into account the time factor.”

“Time?” Echoes Fox from Langley, sounding confused.

“Time.” Sagan smiles in a vaguely disconnected way.
“We’re nowhere near our original galactic neighborhood and whoever moved us
here, they didn’t bend the laws of physics far enough to violate the speed
limit. It takes light about 160,000 years to cross the distance between where
we used to live, and our new stellar neighborhood, the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.
Which we have fixed, incidentally, by measuring the distance to known Cepheid
variables, once we were able to take into account the measurable red shift of
infalling light and the fact that some of them were changing frequency slowly
and seem to have changed rather a lot. Our best estimate is eight hundred
thousand years, plus or minus two hundred thousand. That’s about four times as
long as our species has existed, gentlemen. We’re fossils, an archaeology
experiment or something. Our relevance to our abductors is not as equals, but
as subjects in some kind of vast experiment. And what the purpose of the
experiment is, I can’t tell you. I’ve got some guesses, but…”

Sagan shrugs, then lapses into silence. Gregor catches
Brundle’s eye and Brundle shakes his head, very slightly.
Don’t spill the beans
.
Gregor nods. Sagan may realize he’s in a room with a CIA spook and an East
German defector, but he doesn’t need to know about the Alienation Service yet.

“Well that’s as may be,” says Fox, dropping words like
stones into the hollow silence at the table. “But it begs the question, what
are we going to tell the DCI?”

“I suggest,” says Gregor, “that we start by reviewing
COLLECTION RUBY.” He nods at Sagan. “Then, maybe when we’re all up to speed on
that,
we’ll have a better idea of whether there’s anything useful we can tell the
DCI.

Chapter Five:
Cannon-Fodder

Madeleine and Robert Holbright are among the last of the
immigrants to disembark on the new world. As she glances back at the brilliant
white side of the liner, the horizon seems to roll around her head, settling
into a strange new stasis that feels unnatural after almost six months at sea.

New Iowa isn’t flat and it isn’t new: rampart cliffs
loom to either side of the unnaturally deep harbor (gouged out of bedrock
courtesy of General Atomics). A cog-driven funicular railway hauls Maddy and
Robert and their four shipping trunks up the thousand-foot climb to the plateau
and the port city of Fort Eisenhower–and then to the arrival and
orientation camp.

Maddy is quiet and withdrawn, but Bob, oblivious,
natters constantly about opportunities and jobs and grabbing a plot of land to
build a house on. “It’s the new world,” he says at one point: “why aren’t you
excited?”

“The new world,” Maddy echoes, biting back the urge to
say something cutting. She looks out the window as the train climbs the
cliff-face and brings them into sight of the city. City is the wrong word: it
implies solidity, permanence. Fort Eisenhower is less than five years old, a
leukaemic gash inflicted on the landscape by the Corps of Engineers. The
tallest building is the governor’s mansion, at three stories. Architecturally
the town is all Wild West meets the Radar Age, raw pine houses contrasting with
big grey concrete boxes full of seaward-pointing Patriot missiles to deter the
inevitable encroachment of the communist hordes. “It’s so
flat.”

“The nearest hills are two hundred miles away, past the
coastal plain–didn’t you read the map?”

She ignores his little dig as the train squeals and
clanks up the side of the cliff. It wheezes asthmatically to a stop besides a
wooden platform, and expires in a belch of saturated steam. An hour later
they’re weary and sweated-up in the lobby of an unprepossessing barrack-hall
made of plywood. There’s a large hall and a row of tables and a bunch of bored-looking
colonial service types, and people are walking from one position to another
with bundles of papers, answering questions in low voices and receiving
official stamps. The would-be colonists mill around like disturbed livestock
among the piles of luggage at the back of the room. Maddy and Robert queue
uneasy in the damp afternoon heat, overhearing snippets of conversation.
“Country of origin? Educational qualifications? Yes, but what was your last
job?” Religion and race–almost a quarter of the people in the hall are
refugees from India or Pakistan or somewhere lost to the mysterious east
forever–seem to obsess the officials. “Robert?” she whispers.

“It’ll be alright,” he says with false certainty. Taking
after his dad already, trying to pretend he’s the solid family man. Her
sidelong glance at him steals any residual confidence. Then it’s their turn.

“Names, passports, country of origin?” The guy with the
moustache is brusque and bored, irritated by the heat.

Robert smiles at him. “Robert and Madeleine Holbright,
from Canada?” He offers their passports.

“Uh-huh.” The official gives the documents a very
American going-over. “What schooling have you done? What was your last job?”