Trang (2 page)

Wouter sent his report to Beijing with mixed emotions—they
could roast him for losing a second satellite, but on the other hand, it was
intriguing, wasn’t it? He had his staff look through old satellite
trajectories, and other satellites had passed through those coordinates as
recently as four months ago without any incident. None of the telescopes picked
up anything strange there, and his staff reviewed four months of observational
data without finding anything of note. He sent the results of their research on
to Beijing, hoping that it would help guide their bean-counting minds toward
the “intriguing” and away from the “wasteful” school of thought.

But the viewfinder got back to
Wouter before Beijing did, reappearing 46 hours after it vanished. Again, its
trajectory had obviously been interrupted. The staff sent a retriever after it,
not risking communication this time. The retrieval into the satellite bay went
off without a hitch, as did the automated quarantined download of the
viewfinder’s data. Wouter and several of his staffers gathered around the one
working screen in his office to see what the satellite had seen.

The image was clear, but at the
moment of disappearance there was what looked like a jump in the star field. A
circle of light appeared and vanished at the periphery of the image, which
became distorted for a moment as the viewfinder compensated for a sudden change
in light levels.

Then, a small, white, oval object
appeared. It sped up to the viewfinder quickly, making Wouter wonder if it was
an asteroid shooting past.

But then it slowed. The object
hovered in the image, only a few meters away from the satellite.

“What’s
that?
” asked a
staffer.

Act skeptical,
thought
Wouter, suppressing a smile. “Let’s not get excited—it could be a hoax,” he
said.

It wasn’t a hoax, he knew it, and
he clasped his hands in his lap to conceal his excitement.
I’ll be able to
write my own ticket!
he thought.

The oval paced the viewfinder for a
bit, matching its trajectory. There were no markings on its surface, and no
indication of any sort of door or window. There was, however, a little dimple
in the center of the oval.

After a few moments, a tail snaked
out of it, seeming to feel its way through space toward the viewfinder.

Suddenly the station’s breach alarm
went off, making one of his staffers scream and nearly scaring Wouter out of
his seat.

He would later think it odd that he
didn’t have the same initial reaction that everyone on Earth seemed to have—he
didn’t wrongly assume his station was under alien attack. Instead, he foolishly
wondered for a moment if the alarm was coming from the soundless video. Then,
as he scrambled to seal his environmental suit, the chilling thought occurred
to him:
I’m too late.
My station’s fallen apart.

Once everyone was sealed up, he
found the frantic staffer who had set off the alarm. There had been no breach,
thank God, but the staffer had seen something on the viewfinder satellite,
something that had left him gibbering.

Wouter looked through the window at
the satellite bay, which had sealed and was now pumping out the toxic Titan
atmosphere.

He saw it then, sitting on the
outside of the satellite, nestled next to the camera aperture.

Later investigation would reveal
that that same camera had prevented Wouter’s techs from spotting it during the
retrieval. They had instructed the retriever to approach the viewfinder from
behind, so as not to damage the camera, and from that angle the camera itself
had blocked their view of the thing.

That
thing
was a large
cluster of round purple lumps, a bit like the inside of a pomegranate or a
bizarre and fatal tumor.

Wouter ordered the area sealed off
completely, sent a missive to Beijing, and ordered a decontamination of the
rest of the station before allowing his staff to unseal their suits.

Then he went back to his office and
watched the video. He saw in fast-forward what the rest of Earth would watch in
detail, over and over and over again, in the months and years to come. He saw
the other ovals and their tails as they looped around the satellite and pulled
it through space. He saw the appearance on the edge of the screen of a
structure that grew larger and larger until it swallowed up the view. He saw
the strange things—creatures? robots?—that examined and worked on the satellite
in an open bay on the structure’s side. He saw the left hand of the image
replaced by a white field, while the right half showed the ovals reattaching to
the satellite and hauling it away. He saw the ring of light marking the spot
where the ovals detached and let the satellite float away, and then the sudden
appearance of Saturn, with its familiar rings and moons.

And he saw the equally dramatic
change in the white side of the screen as the viewfinder approached the ring.
There, in the middle of an unchanging field of white, was a round, growing spot
of black.

A hole.

Chapter
2

May 27, 2118

Philippe Trang stood outside the door, frozen.

A sound had caught his attention,
riveting him to the floor.

Bzz-bzz. Bzzz-bzzz-bzzz.
Bzzz-bzz-mbzz.

It was coming from behind the door.

It’s not flies,
Philippe
thought to himself.
It can’t possibly be flies.

He could feel the panic rising all
the same. He took a moment to control himself, to suppress all emotion, and
then he pushed the button.

The door in front of him opened,
and Philippe saw the gently lined face of the evening’s host, Chen Ming, head
of the DiploCorps’ Beijing office.

Ming smiled with obvious warmth,
and Philippe instinctively smiled back with what he hoped appeared to be equal
warmth.

They greeted each other and shook
hands; then Ming held onto Philippe’s hand as he escorted him into the
apartment. The drone of conversation became punctuated by pleased exclamations.
Everyone soon stopped talking, turning their well-coiffed heads to look at
Philippe.

“The man of the hour!” announced
Ming.

Philippe smiled and bowed slightly,
realizing that he was going to be put on display immediately.
Good thing I
don’t need to go to the bathroom,
he thought.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I am
delighted to present to you Philippe Trang,” Ming continued. His voice was not
loud—he seemed far too elegant a man to raise it—but it carried throughout the
spacious room.

“As you may have heard,” Ming said
knowingly, eliciting smiles from the audience, “tomorrow Philippe will leave
Earth and travel to the Titan station. From there, he will go through the
portal and take up residence on the alien station.

“Philippe will lead the very first
human diplomatic mission to an alien culture—or, more accurately, cultures,
since there are fully seven alien species living on that station. Philippe will
be the DiploCorps’ first representative ever—
humanity’s
first
representative ever—to the aliens. What he is doing is unbelievably important.
Without exaggeration, it is the most historic mission the DiploCorps has ever
undertaken.”

Philippe gamely continued smiling.
He hadn’t talked things over with Ming beforehand, so he wasn’t sure if he was
going to be expected to say a few words.

“It is also something that has
never been done before, and as a result, it has generated a great deal of
concern,” Ming continued. His tone grew greatly concerned as well, and Philippe
realized that Ming had, essentially, prepared a speech.

He stopped trying to organize his
thoughts: He wouldn’t have to say a thing. Today, he was nothing more than a
prop.

“Some of that concern is
legitimate, and some, in my opinion, is the result of an unfortunate
xenophobia. It is true, as some critics never tire of pointing out, that we’ve
been exchanging messages with the aliens for five years, but there is so much
that we don’t know—that we
can’t
know—just from exchanging video. We
need somebody
there
—someone who can actually interact with the aliens,
who can live among them and forge the kind of connections that could never be
made from the safety of Beijing or Ottawa.

“I’m not claiming we know exactly
what will happen—far from it. But while the road ahead is unmapped and full of
pitfalls, given Philippe Trang’s remarkable record in the DiploCorps, I am
confident that he will be able to navigate it.

It was his going-away party.
Perhaps fittingly, it was a generic DiploCorps affair, held far away from any
place that had any personal meaning for Philippe, and populated mainly by
people he did not know. It was held in an apartment reliably suited to the
typical needs of an upper-level DiploCorps officer, who would be required to
throw several large parties a month: The living/dining/cocktail-party room was
spacious but also featured several semi-private nooks, the better to foster
those all-important one-on-one interactions.

The décor was lush without being
vulgar—the deep red, almost burgundy walls with tan paper hangings rose up from
an impressively immaculate white carpet. The wall hangings reflected what
Philippe assumed was Ming’s own preference for traditional Chinese calligraphy,
but even they obeyed the DiploCorps aesthetic—moderate in size and muted in
color, they had been hung perfectly at a discreet distance from each other.

This was a room that, like its
owner, whispered and did not shout. The same was true of the soft music in the
background and, no doubt, of the expertly blended drinks available. Although
Philippe had never met most of the people there, they, too, looked
familiar—well-groomed, well-dressed, clearly well-off, yet not garish or
ostentatious. Tasteful, tailored, and smooth.

Philippe took a deep breath. He
knew this world well; he’d worked in it for years.

This shouldn’t be so tough,
he told himself.

They were all there to meet him, of
course. Well, not really to
meet
him—not in any genuine
getting-to-know-you kind of way. He was a prop, and they were there to shake
his hand and look at his face before he left Earth. Then they would be able to
tell their friends,
I met Philippe Trang once, the night before he left
Earth. I shook his hand and looked him right in the eye. Isn’t it a pity?

Philippe shook his head to stop
that train of thought—it would affect his smile, and he needed to smile
convincingly now because the flurry of introductions was beginning. The guests
were actually lining up, like they would at a wedding or a funeral, to receive
the handshake that was due them.

It wasn’t hard. As Philippe
expected, no one really wanted to talk to him. Some of them asked him how he
was, but luckily they didn’t want a real answer.

Like any reasonably competent
diplomat, Philippe was good with names. Still, under the circumstances, it did
seem a little pointless to have to learn dozens of new ones. Here, for example,
was the last person in the line of new acquaintances, the assistant
undersecretary of technology trade standards for the Hong Kong office of the
Commerce Division. Philippe couldn’t imagine why he would need to know her,
even if she had, as he remarked, certainly traveled a long way.

“Well, I haven’t come as far as
you
have!” burbled the assistant undersecretary.

And why not?
he wondered.
There was no one in line behind her, pushing her along. She was by herself, but
she seemed genuinely friendly and sociable—with none of the scary stalker vibe
he had occasionally gotten from people who recognized him on the street.

Plus, this was an opportunity to
ease the topic of conversation away from himself. He really, really did not
want to spend an entire evening dwelling on his own state.

“Oh, yes,” he replied. “I saw the
Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, and the Temple of Heaven—and of course the
Great Wall. It’s all been fantastic.”

Wei tilted her head. “What do you
think of Beijing itself? As a city?”

Philippe thought for a moment. “I
guess the main surprise for me has been how big the Space Authority is here—I
mean, I knew the headquarters are here, but. . . .”

“You can’t go two blocks without
seeing the logo,” agreed Wei.

Philippe nodded. “I mean, the
DiploCorps are headquartered in Ottawa, but that just means the offices are
there. You don’t see people in the street wearing DiploCorps jackets and
shirts—if those things even exist.”

Wei nodded. “Beijing is
crazy
about the Space Authority, especially these days. We’re always joking about
that in Hong Kong—they should just change the city’s name to SA and be done
with it.”

“That’s a good idea. You could
pronounce it
Sa,
” said Philippe. “You know, ‘This weekend I’m going to
Sa to, um—’”

“‘To watch the launch!’” Wei
finished.

They laughed. The Space Authority
seemed to launch something every few hours—the noise was surprisingly
penetrating despite the required muffling. Even when Philippe had gone out of
town to see the Great Wall, he had been distracted by a launch—not the noise
that time, it couldn’t travel that far, but the blazing light trail in the sky
that followed it, a reminder hanging in the heavens that his time on Earth was
limited.