Spring 2007 (21 page)

Gregor shrugs. “Humans are time-binding animals,” he
explains. “So are all the other tool-using sentient species we have been able
to characterize; it appears to be the one common factor, they like to
understand their past as a guide to their future. We have sources that
have…think of a game of Chinese whispers? The belief that is most widely held
is that the disk was made by the agencies we see at work restructuring the
galaxy, to house their, ah, experiments in ontology. To view their own deep
past, before they became whatever they are, and to decide whether the path
through which they emerged was inevitable or a low probability outcome. The
reverse face of the Drake equation, if you like.”

Sagan shivers. “Are you telling me we’re just …
memories? Echoes from the past, reconstituted and replayed some unimaginable
time in the future? That this entire monstrous joke of a cosmological
experiment is just a sideshow?”

“Yes, Dr. Sagan,” Gregor says soothingly. “After all,
the disk is not so large compared to an entire galaxy, don’t you think? And I
would not say the sideshow is unimportant. Do you ever think about your own
childhood? And wonder whether the you that sits here in front of me today was
the inevitable product of your upbringing? Or could you have become someone
completely different–an airline pilot, for example, or a banker?
Alternatively, could
someone else
have become
you?
What set of circumstances
combine to produce an astronomer and exobiologist? Why should a God not harbour
the same curiosity?”

“So you’re saying it’s introspection, with a purpose.
The galactic civilization wants to see its own birth.”

“The galactic hive mind,” Gregor soothes, amused at how
easy it is to deal with Sagan. “Remember, information is key. Why should
human-level intelligences be the highest level?” All the while he continues to
breathe oxytocin and other peptide neurotransmitters across the table towards
Sagan. “Don’t let such speculations ruin your meal,” he adds, phrasing it as an
observation rather than an implicit command.

Sagan nods and returns to using his utensils. “That’s
very thought-provoking,” he says, as he gratefully raises the first mouthful to
his lips. “If this is based on hard intelligence it…well, I’m worried. Even if
it’s inference, I have to do some thinking about this. I hadn’t really been
thinking along these lines.”

“I’m sure if there’s an alien menace we’ll defeat it,”
Gregor assures him as he masticates and swallows the neurotoxin-laced meatball
in tomato sauce. And just for the moment, he is content to relax in the luxury
of truth: “Just leave everything to me and I’ll see that your concerns are
communicated to the right people. Then we’ll do something about your dish and
everything will work out for the best.”

Chapter Fourteen:
Poor
prognosis

Maddy visits John regularly in hospital. At first it’s a
combination of natural compassion and edgy guilt; John is pretty much alone on
this continent of lies, being both socially and occupationally isolated, and
Maddy can convince herself that she’s helping him feel in touch, motivating him
to recover. Later on it’s a necessity of work–she’s keeping the lab
going, even feeding the squirming white horror in the earth-filled glass jar,
in John’s absence–and partly boredom. It’s not as if Bob’s at home much.
His work assignments frequently take him to new construction sites up and down
the coast. When he is home they frequently argue into the small hours, picking
at the scabs on their relationship with the sullen pinch-faced resentment of a
couple fifty years gone in despair at the wrongness of their shared direction.
So she escapes by visiting John and tells herself that she’s doing it to keep
his spirits up as he learns to use his prostheses.

“You shouldn’t blame yourself,” he tells her one
afternoon when he notices her staring. “If you hadn’t been around I’d be dead.
Neither of us was to know.”

“Well.” Maddy winces as he sits up, then raises the
tongs to his face to nudge the grippers apart before reaching for the
water-glass. “That won’t–” She changes direction in mid
sentence–“make it easier to cope.”

“We’re all going to have to cope,” he says gnomically,
before relaxing back against the stack of pillows. He’s a lot better now than
he was when he first arrived, delirious with his hand swollen and blackening,
but the after-effects of the mock termite venom have weakened him in other
ways. “I want to know why those things don’t live closer to the coast. I mean,
if they did we’d never have bothered with the place. After the first landing,
that is.” He frowns. “If you can ask at the crown surveyor’s office if there
are any relevant records, that would help.”

“The crown surveyor’s not very helpful.” That’s an
understatement. The crown surveyor is some kind of throwback; last time she
went in to his office to ask about maps of the northeast plateau he’d asked her
whether her husband approved of her running around like this. “Maybe when
you’re out of here.” She moves her chair closer to the side of the bed.

“Doctor Smythe says next week, possibly Monday or
Tuesday.” John sounds frustrated. “The pins and needles are still there.” It’s
not just his right hand, lopped off below the elbow and replaced with a crude
affair of padding and spring steel; the venom spread and some of his toes had
to be amputated. He was fitting when Maddy reached the hospital, four hours
after he was bitten. She knows she saved his life, that if he’d gone out alone
he’d almost certainly have been killed, so why does she feel so bad about it?

“You’re getting better,” Maddy insists, covering his
left hand with her own. “You’ll see.” She smiles encouragingly.

“I wish–” For a moment John looks at her; then he
shakes his head minutely and sighs. He grips her hand with his fingers. They
feel weak, and she can feel them trembling with the effort. “Leave
Johnson–” the surveyor–“to me. I need to prepare an urgent report
on the mock termites before anyone else goes poking them.”

“How much of a problem do you think they’re going to
be?”

“Deadly.” He closes his eyes for a few seconds, then
opens them again. “We’ve got to map their population distribution. And tell the
governor-general’s office. I counted twelve of them in roughly an acre, but
that was a rough sample and you can’t extrapolate from it. We also need to
learn whether they’ve got any unusual swarming behaviors–like army ants,
for example, or bees. Then we can start investigating whether any of our
insecticides work on them. If the governor wants to start spinning out
satellite towns next year, he’s going to need to know what to expect. Otherwise
people are going to get hurt.”
Or killed,
Maddy adds silently.

John is very lucky to be alive: Doctor Smythe compared
his condition to a patient he’d once seen who’d been bitten by a rattler, and
that was the result of a single bite by a small one.
If the continental
interior is full of the things, what are we going to do?
Maddy wonders.

“Have you seen any sign of her majesty feeding?” John asks,
breaking into her train of thought.

Maddy shivers. “Turtle tree leaves go down well,” she
says quietly. “And she’s given birth to two workers since we’ve had her. They
chew the leaves to mulch then regurgitate it for her.”

“Oh, really? Do they deliver straight into her
mandibles?”

Maddy squeezes her eyes tight. This is the bit she was
really hoping John wouldn’t ask her about. “No,” she says faintly.

“Really?” He sounds curious.

“I think you’d better see for yourself.” Because there’s
no way in hell that Maddy is going to tell him about the crude wooden spoons
the mock termite workers have been crafting from the turtle tree branches, or
the feeding ritual, and what they did to the bumbler fly that got into the mock
termite pen through the chicken wire screen.

He’ll just have to see for himself.

Chapter Fifteen:
Rushmore

The
Korolev
is huge for a flying machine but
pretty small in nautical terms. Yuri is mostly happy about this. He’s a fighter
jock at heart and he can’t stand Navy bullshit. Still, it’s a far cry from the
MiG-17s he qualified in. It doesn’t have a cockpit, or even a flight
deck–it has a
bridge
, like a ship, with the pilots, flight
engineers, navigators, and observers sitting in a horseshoe around the
captain’s chair. When it’s thumping across the sea barely ten meters above the
wave-tops at nearly five hundred kilometers per hour, it rattles and shakes
until the crew’s vision blurs. The big reactor-powered turbines in the tail
pods roar and the neutron detectors on the turquoise radiation bulkhead behind
them tick like demented death-watch beetles: the rest of the crew are huddled
down below in the nose, with as much shielding between them and the engine
rooms as possible. It’s a white-knuckle ride, and Yuri has difficulty resisting
the urge to curl his hands into fists because whenever he loses concentration
his gut instincts are telling him to grab the stick and pull up. The ocean is
no aviator’s friend, and skimming across this infinite gray expanse between
planet-sized land-masses forces Gagarin to confront the fact that he is not, by
instinct, a sailor.

They’re two days outbound from the new-old North
America, forty thousand kilometers closer to home and still weeks away even
though they’re cutting the corner on their parabolic exploration track. The
fatigue is getting to him as he takes his seat next to Misha–who is
visibly wilting from his twelve hour shift at the con–and straps himself
in. “Anything to report?” He asks.

“I don’t like the look of the ocean ahead,” says Misha.
He nods at the navigation station to Gagarin’s left: Shaw, the Irish ensign,
sees him and salutes.

“Permission to report, sir?” Gagarin nods. “We’re coming
up on a thermocline boundary suggestive of another radiator wall, this time
surrounding uncharted seas. Dead reckoning says we’re on course for home but we
haven’t charted this route and the surface waters are getting much cooler. Any
time now we should be spotting the radiators, and then we’re going to have to
start keeping a weather eye out.”

Gagarin sighs: exploring new uncharted oceans seemed
almost romantic at first, but now it’s a dangerous but routine task. “You have
kept the towed array at altitude?” he asks.

“Yes sir,” Misha responds. The towed array is basically
a kite-born radar, tugged along behind the
Korolev
on the end of a
kilometer of steel cable to give them some warning of obstacles ahead. “Nothing
showing–”

Right on cue, one of the radar operators raises a hand
and waves three fingers.

“–Correction, radiators ahoy, range three hundred,
bearing …okay, let’s see it.”

“Maintain course,” Gagarin announces. “Let’s throttle
back to two hundred once we clear the radiators, until we know what we’re
running into.” He leans over to his left, watching over Shaw’s shoulder.

The next hour is unpleasantly interesting. As they near
the radiator fins, the water and the air above it cool down. The denser air
helps the Korolev generate lift, which is good, but they need it, which is bad.
The sky turns gray and murky and rain falls in continuous sheets that hammer across
the armored bridge windows like machine gun fire. The ride becomes gusty as
well as bumpy, until Gagarin orders two of the nose turbines started just in
case they hit a down-draft. The big jet engines guzzle fuel and are usually
shut down in cruise flight, used only for take-off runs and extraordinary
situations. But punching through a cold front and a winter storm isn’t flying
as usual as far as Gagarin’s concerned, and the one nightmare all Ekranoplan
drivers face is running into a monster ocean wave nose-first at cruise speed.

Presently the navigators identify a path between two
radiator fins, and Gagarin authorizes it. He’s beginning to relax as the huge
monoliths loom out of the gray clouds ahead when one of the sharp-eyed pilots
shouts: “Icebergs!”

“Fucking hell.” Gagarin sits bolt upright. “Start all
boost engines! Bring up full power on both reactors! Lower flaps to nine
degrees and get us the hell out of this!” He turns to Shaw, his face gray.
“Bring the towed array aboard, now.”

“Shit.” Misha starts flipping switches on his console,
which doubles as damage control central.
“Icebergs?”

The huge ground-effect ship lurches and roars as the
third pilot starts bleeding hot exhaust gasses from the running turbines to
start the other twelve engines. They’ve probably got less than six hours’ fuel
left, and it takes fifteen minutes on all engines to get off the water, but
Gagarin’s not going to risk meeting an iceberg head-on in ground-effect. The
Ekranoplan can function as a huge, lumbering, ungainly sea-plane if it has to;
but it doesn’t have the engine power to do so on reactors alone, or to
leap-frog floating mountains of ice. And hitting an iceberg isn’t on Gagarin’s
to-do list.

The rain sluices across the roof of the bridge and now
the sky is louring and dark, the huge walls of the radiator slabs bulking in
twilight to either side. The rain is freezing, supercooled droplets that smear
the Korolev’s wings with a lethal sheen of ice. “Where are the leading edge
heaters?” Gagarin asks. “Come on!”