Spring 2007 (18 page)

Misha looks over his shoulder at the map: it’s drawn in
pencil, and there’s an awful lot of white space on it, but what they’ve
surveyed so far is disturbingly familiar in outline–familiar enough to
have given them all a number of sleepless nights even before they came ashore.
Someone has scribbled a dragon coiling in a particularly empty corner of the
void.

“How large is the site?” asks Yuri.

“Don’t know, sir.” Major Suvurov grumps audibly, as if
the lack of concrete intelligence on the alien ruins is a personal affront. “We
haven’t found the end of it yet. But it matches what we know already.”

“The aerial survey–” Mikhail coughs, delicately.
“If you’d let me have another flight I could tell you more, General. I believe
it may be possible to define the city limits narrowly, but the trees make it
hard to tell.”

“I’d give you the flight if only I had the aviation
fuel,” Gagarin explains patiently. “A chopper can burn its own weight in fuel
in a day of surveying, and we have to haul everything out here from Archangel.
In fact, when we go home we’re leaving most of our flight-ready aircraft
behind, just so that on the next trip out we can carry more fuel.”

“I understand.” Mikhail doesn’t look happy. “As Oleg
Ivanovitch says, we don’t know how far it reaches. But I think when you see the
ruins you’ll understand why we need to come back here. Nobody’s found anything
like this before.”

“Old Capitalist Man.” Misha smiles thinly. “I suppose.”

“Presumably.” Borisovitch shrugs. “Whatever, we need to
bring archaeologists. And a mass spectroscope for carbon dating. And other
stuff.” His face wrinkles unhappily. “They were here back when we would still
have been living in caves!”

“Except we weren’t,” Gagarin says under his breath.
Misha pretends not to notice.

By the time they leave the tent, the marines have got
the Korolev’s two BRDMs ashore. The big balloon-tired armored cars sit on the
beach like monstrous amphibians freshly emerged from some primeval sea. Gagarin
and Gorodin sit in the back of the second vehicle with the academician and the
film crew: the lead BRDM carries their spetsnaz escort team. They maintain a
dignified silence as the convoy rumbles and squeaks across the beach, up the
gently sloping hillside, and then down towards the valley with the ruins.

The armored cars stop and doors open. Everyone is
relieved by the faint breeze that cracks the oven-heat of the interior. Gagarin
walks over to the nearest ruin–remnants of a wall, waist-high–and
stands, hands on hips, looking across the wasteland.

“Concrete,” says Borisovitch, holding up a lump of
crumbled not-stone from the foot of the wall for Yuri to see.

“Indeed.” Gagarin nods. “Any idea what this was?”

“Not yet.” The camera crew is already filming, heading
down a broad boulevard between rows of crumbling foundations. “Only the
concrete has survived, and it’s mostly turned to limestone. This is old.”

“Hmm.” The First Cosmonaut walks round the stump of wall
and steps down to the foundation layer behind it, looking around with interest.
“Interior column here, four walls–they’re worn down, aren’t they? This
stuff that looks like a red stain. Rebar? Found any intact ones?”

“Again, not yet sir,” says Borisovitch. “We haven’t
looked everywhere yet, but …”

“Indeed.” Gagarin scratches his chin idly. “Am I
imagining it or are the walls all lower on that side?” He points north, deeper
into the sprawling maze of overgrown rubble.

“You’re right sir. No theory for it, though.”

“You don’t say.” Gagarin walks north from the five-sided
building’s ruin, looks around. “This was a road?”

“Once, sir. It was nine meters wide–there seems to
have been derelict ground between the houses, if that’s what they were, and the
road itself. “

“Nine meters, you say.” Gorodin and the academician
hurry to follow him as he strikes off, up the road. “Interesting stonework
here, don’t you think, Misha?”

“Yessir. Interesting stonework.”

Gagarin stops abruptly and kneels. “Why is it cracked like
this? Hey, there’s sand down there. And, um. Glass? Looks like it’s melted. Ah,
trinitite.”

“Sir?”

Borisovitch leans forward. “That’s odd.”

“What is?” asks Misha, but before he gets a reply both
Gagarin and the researcher are up again and off towards another building.

“Look. The north wall.” Gagarin’s found another chunk of
wall, this one a worn stump that’s more than a meter high: he looks unhappy.

“Sir? Are you alright?” Misha stares at him. Then he
notices the academician is also silent, and looking deeply perturbed. “What’s
wrong?”

Gagarin extends a finger, points at the wall. “You can
just see him if you look close enough. How long would it take to fade, Mikhail?
How many years have we missed them by?”

The academician licks his lips: “At least two thousand
years, sir. Concrete cures over time, but it takes a very long time indeed to
turn all the way to limestone. and then there’s the weathering process to take
account of. But the surface erosion…yes, that could fix the image from the flash.
Perhaps. I’d need to ask a few colleagues back home.”

“What’s wrong?” the political officer repeats, puzzled.

The first cosmonaut grins humorlessly. “Better get your
Geiger counter, Misha, and see if the ruins are still hot. Looks like we’re not
the only people on the disk with a geopolitical problem…”

Chapter Ten:
Been Here
Before

Brundle has finally taken the time to pull Gregor aside
and explain what’s going on; Gregor is not amused.

“Sorry you walked into it cold,” says Brundle. “But I
figured it would be best for you to see for yourself.” He speaks with a
Midwestern twang, and a flatness of affect that his colleagues sometimes
mistake for signs of an underlying psychopathology.

“See what, in particular?” Gregor asks sharply. “What,
in particular?” Gregor tends to repeat himself, changing only the intonation,
when he’s disturbed. He’s human enough to recognize it as a bad habit but still
finds it difficult to suppress the reflex.

Brundle pauses on the footpath, looks around to make
sure there’s nobody within earshot. The Mall is nearly empty today, and only a
humid breeze stirs the waters on the pool. “Tell me what you think.”

Gregor thinks for a moment, then summons up his full
command of the local language: it’s good practice. “The boys in the big house
are asking for a CAB. It means someone’s pulled his head out of his ass for
long enough to realize they’ve got worse things to worry about than being
shafted by the Soviets. Something’s happened to make them realize they need a
policy for dealing with the abductors. This is against doctrine, we need to do
something about it fast before they start asking the right questions.
Something’s shaken them up, something secret, some HUMINT source from the wrong
side of the curtain, perhaps. Could it be that man Gordievsky? But they haven’t
quite figured out what being here means. Sagan–does his presence mean
what I think it does?”

“Yes,” Brundle says tersely.

“Oh dear.” A reflex trips and Gregor takes off his
spectacles and polishes them nervously on his tie before replacing them. “Is it
just him, or does it go further?” He leaves the rest of the sentence unspoken
by convention–
is it just him you think we’ll have to silence?

“Further.” Brundle tends to talk out of the side of his
mouth when he’s agitated, and from his current expression Gregor figures he’s
really upset. “Sagan and his friends at Cornell have been using the Arecibo
dish to listen to the neighbors. This wasn’t anticipated. Now they’re asking
for permission to beam a signal at the nearest of the other disks. Straight up,
more or less; ‘talk to us.’ Unfortunately Sagan is well-known, which is why he
caught the attention of our nominal superiors. Meanwhile, the Soviets have
found something that scared them. CIA didn’t hear about it through the usual assets–they
contacted the State Department via the embassy, they’re that scared.” Brundle
pauses a moment. “Sagan and his buddies don’t know about that, of course.”

“Why has nobody shot them already?” Gregor asks coldly.

Brundle shrugs. “We pulled the plug on their funding
just in time. If we shot them as well someone might notice. Everything could go
nonlinear while we were trying to cover it up. You know the problem; this is a
semi-open society, inadequately controlled. A bunch of astronomers get together
on their own initiative–academic conference, whatever–and decide to
spend a couple of thousand bucks of research grant money from NIST to establish
communications with the nearest disk. How are we supposed to police that kind
of thing?”

“Shut down all their radio telescopes. At gunpoint, if
necessary, but I figure a power cut or a congressional committee would be just
as effective as leverage.”

“Perhaps, but we don’t have the Soviets’ resources to
work with. Anyway, that’s why I dragged Sagan in for the CAB. It’s a Potemkin
village, you understand, to convince everybody he contacted that something is
being done, but we’re going to have to figure out how to shut him up.”

“Sagan is the leader of the ‘talk-to-us, alien gods’
crowd, I take it.”

“Yes.”

“Well.” Gregor considers his next words carefully.
“Assuming he’s still clean and uncontaminated, we can turn him or we can ice
him. If we’re going to turn him we need to do it convincingly–full
Tellerization–and we’ll need to come up with a convincing rationale. Use
him to evangelize the astronomical community into shutting up or haring off in
the wrong direction. Like Heisenberg and the Nazi nuclear weapons program.” He
snaps his fingers. “Why don’t we tell him the truth? At least, something close
enough to it to confuse the issue completely?”

“Because he’s a member of the Federation of American
Scientists and he won’t believe anything we tell him without independent
confirmation,” Brundle mutters through one side of his mouth. “That’s the
trouble with using a government agency as our cover story.”

They walk in silence for a minute. “I think it would be
very dangerous to underestimate him,” says Gregor. “He could be a real asset to
us, but uncontrolled he’s very dangerous. If we can’t silence him we may have
to resort to physical violence. And with the number of colonies they’ve already
seeded, we can’t be sure of getting them all.”

“Itemize the state of their understanding,” Brundle says
abruptly. “I want a reality check. I’ll tell you what’s new after you run down
the checklist.”

“Okay.” Gregor thinks for a minute. “Let us see. What
everyone knows is that between zero three fifteen and twelve seconds and
thirteen seconds Zulu time, on October second, sixty two, all the clocks
stopped, the satellites went away, the star map changed, nineteen airliners and
forty six ships in transit ended up in terminal trouble, and they found
themselves transferred from a globe in the Milky Way galaxy to a disk which we
figure is somewhere in the lesser Magellanic cloud. Meanwhile the Milky Way
galaxy–we assume that’s what it is–has changed visibly. Lots of
metal-depleted stars, signs of macroscopic cosmic engineering, that sort of
thing. The public explanation is that the visitors froze time, skinned the
earth, and plated it over the disk. Luckily they’re still bickering over
whether the explanation is Minsky’s copying, uh, hypothesis, or that guy
Moravec with his digital simulation theory.”

“Indeed.” Brundle kicks at a paving stone idly. “Now.
What is your forward analysis?”

“Well, sooner or later they’re going to turn dangerous.
They have the historic predisposition towards teleological errors, to belief in
a giant omnipotent creator and a purpose to their existence. If they start
speculating about the intentions of a transcendent intelligence, it’s likely
they’ll eventually ask whether their presence here is symptomatic of God’s
desire to probe the circumstances of its own birth. After all, we have evidence
of how many technological species on the disk, ten million, twelve? Replicated
many times, in some cases. They might put it together with their concept of
manifest destiny and conclude that they are, in fact, doomed to give birth to
God. Which is an entirely undesirable conclusion for them to reach from our point
of view. Teleologists being bad neighbors, so to speak.”

“Yes indeed,” Brundle says thoughtfully, then titters
quietly to himself for a moment.

“This isn’t the first time they’ve avoided throwing
around H-bombs in bulk. That’s unusual for primate civilizations. If they keep
doing it, they could be dangerous.”

“Dangerous is relative,” says Brundle. He titters again.
Things move inside his mouth.

“Don’t
do
that!” Gregor snaps. He glances round
instinctively, but nothing happens.

“You’re jumpy.” Brundle frowns. “Stop worrying so much.
We don’t have much longer here.”

“Are we being ordered to move? Or to prepare a
sterilization strike?”

“Not yet.” Brundle shrugs. “We have further research to
continue with before a decision is reached. The Soviets have made a discovery.
Their crewed exploration program. The
Korolev
lucked out.”