Neptune Crossing

by Jeffrey A. Carver

  *

  The information swirled by like a churning white-water rapids, and it seemed that all he could do was sample here and there, and file for future analysis. But that was difficult; perhaps he would be better off just jumping in and riding downstream with the flow . . .

  It was millions of years ago, just as human science had surmised, that an orphaned body later to be named Triton had fallen into the gravitational influence of the solar system. Charlie and his translator were aboard, though the quarx was in stasis-sleep, and would remain that way for millennia yet to come, until awakened by the translator. But the translator never slept. It probed ceaselessly, monitoring the inner solar system and the evolution of sentient life on the third planet, unmistakably marked by first gradual—then abrupt—transformations of its biosphere. When there were visible events to be observed, the translator recorded them, from volcanoes to atomic explosions to the migrations of small vessels out of the atmosphere. It studied events of all kinds, whether apparently significant or not, and in its own methodical way, drew conclusions about the events it had studied.

  Much of what Charlie knew, he had learned directly from the translator. Since his awakening, he had viewed years of reruns of Earth television, all recorded by the translator in that window of time when TV signals had been broadcast into space, before laser and opfiber transmission had mostly ended the free show. He owed much of his knowledge of human culture to such broadcasts.

  He’d also gleaned hints of what it was he was doing here, what purpose he intended to serve. Bandicut could only register astonishment: how could the quarx not know his own mission? But it was not his first, far from it, and he had yet to fully understand a mission prior to undertaking it.

  The other thing that astonished Bandicut, as he caught all of this in a great swirling stream, was that the quarx really didn’t know how the translator performed many of the feats in which the quarx himself was a participant. Surely, if he’d been alive in the translator for millions of years, didn’t he have to know how it worked? No no no, whispered a quarxly voice, almost lost in the undercurrent. I’m not the master of that science. The quarx knew how to use the translator, but it was not actually his machine, not a quarxly machine at all.

  But where . . . how . . . had Charlie come to be in such a time and place . . . ?

  —shift—

  The images changed like a whirlpool yawning. There were glimpses of dozens of worlds, dozens of hosts in quarxly lives past . . . it was like a flickering of holocards . . . and then the image settled, and filled with the sounds and impressions of other beings, alien beings, living on this very moon. The beings who had left the metal deposits? Their footsteps echoed around the translator, their voices and activities an incomprehensible murmur. For an instant Bandicut thought, with a flash of alarm, that they were here on Triton now—

  —and then he realized that this scene was far, far in the past, long before Triton had ever come to the solar system. It was the moon as it had been, not just in the past, but so deep in the past that primitive life had scarcely yet evolved on Earth. This was Triton eons ago, in another star system, another reality.

  It was Triton at war.

  In frightening silence, he watched as long plumes of light splashed languidly across the ruined landscape of a nearby planetary body, the mother world. He was aware that the light beams came from the surface of Triton, and they were no mining lasers. They were weapons, terrible weapons, and they were raining devastation upon their homeworld. The plumes of destruction flowed and surged over the planet’s surface like tides, and the civilization beneath them crumbled, melted, evaporated.

  Nor was the conflict confined to the planet’s surface: battle raged in space, as well—between the planet and its moon, and on the surface of the moon. Spaceships tumbled past one another, lancing each other into debris. Streams of fire swept over the surface of the moon, boiling away its atmosphere and reducing miracles of technology to molten slag. The footsteps were gone now; it all happened in silence. But he imagined that he could hear the screams of dying beings echoing across the emptiness of space.

  There was no escape, none at all—except down into the buried, shielded translator, the place from which the quarx had first emerged in his failed, futile effort to prevent this tragedy from happening. Though damaged and unable to escape, the translator could probably survive the dark and the cold to come, if it could just survive this last terrible onslaught of violence. The quarx was now slipping downward through the deep darkness of ice, into the machine that might bear him through eons, and perhaps an eternity, of silent exile. He felt, but only distantly, the final tremendous explosions that vaporized the last living beings on the surface and hurled the moon out of orbit, out of its star system, and into the somber and lonely silence of interstellar space. With those explosions had come the final, bitter end to this war, and to the last of those who had fought it.

  The quarx drifted off into a timeless, dreamless stasis-sleep. His final thoughts were darkened with grief. Where he was bound now, he had no idea. But he knew it could take longer than the lifetime of his own race to reach his next destination. And while he slept, the translator repaired itself. Would he ever see another quarx? All he really knew for certain was that his life had changed forever, yet again.

  Bandicut’s whisper was a part of the blurred datastream. My God, is this your memory? Did you really live through this? Were those your people who died?

  Not my people, no. For a time, yes, but not anymore . . . that time was past . . .

  —shift—

  The battle images spun swirling away, the whirlpool of memory displaced by new images of Triton in orbit around the cold, cerulean planet Neptune. The heat of its capture had melted most of the moon, causing all the stone and metal in its crust to sink to the core; but some of that energy had been harnessed by the translator, and it, with some of the metal remnants of the alien civilization, had erupted back upward to the surface in a great convective flow as Triton cooled.

  With awakening, for the quarx, there was a sense that certain memories were faded or perhaps had been lost, that some very important work had gone unfinished, that some failure had to be rectified, some wrong atoned for, some need fulfilled. There was a reverberating memory that this was how it always felt to awaken.

  The quarx felt a deep loneliness and longing, but also a sudden new urgency. Here was a new place and time, a new solar system, a new race called “humanity” that had come into being while he had slept. And humanity had found its way to Triton, and would soon discover the translator. Who were they, these humans—and were they dangerous? Would one of them make a suitable host and companion? Were they dangerous? Why had the translator waited so long to wake him? It had served him well, and protected him—but it was not life to be trapped in that machine forever. How he longed to be free of its bonds—to grow, to taste again the reality of life with another!

  But it was not to be easy; there was something that had to be done here—a matter of life and death, not just for him, but for the beings of this solar system. He did not know yet what it was, but he knew that that was why he had been awakened, and he knew that it would be risky and costly, because it always was. He had much to learn, and quickly.

  With the help of the translator, he listened to humanity and came to know their languages and some of their ways. He watched their entertainment and studied their history through what he could capture of their datanet. He struggled to get to know a race that sometimes made him shudder with fear.

  Fear . . . ?

  They were a dangerous species, humanity. Of course, most sentient species were; and with that thought came another shudder.

  Do you fear all sentient species? whispered Bandicut.

  Watch the datastream, you’re missing too much, was the whispered answer.

  The quarx still had much to learn, even as he paid particular attention to a survey pilot named Bandicut who was stumbling along
in a rare but promising condition known as silence-fugue, toward a potential meeting. The translator hinted that time was probably growing short, and this person seemed the most promising of an uncertain lot . . .

  ——

  The datastream changed, and most of it diverted away, while a single, bright connection remained.

  /Are you saying that you deliberately—/

  >>  I didn’t say that. >>

  /—drew me in—?/

  >>  I didn’t say that, exactly. >>

  /But you knew a lot about me already, and you sure as hell opened the ground under my feet!/

  >>  Well . . . yes . . . >>

  /So you knew I was coming?/

  >>  I sensed . . . yes . . . when I am in the translator, it enables me a certain degree of . . . what you would probably call telepathic scanning. It is nothing like the intimate contact that we have now. It is more like a . . . radar sweep. >>

  /Radar sweep? And are you still doing this? Are you probing the other people here?/

  >>  I can’t, not outside of the translator. Except in a limited way, when you physically touch someone, or something. >>

  Bandicut remembered Napoleon. /Like the robot, you mean?/

  >>  Yes. >>

  Bandicut was silent for a time, trying to absorb all that the quarx had told him. /Charlie,/ he said finally, /are you trying to say that you spend your life traveling around the galaxy trying to bail civilizations out of trouble? Because that’s what it sounds like . . ./

  >>  Well, yes—I mean, no! Not always whole civilizations . . . >>

  Bandicut blinked. /Good God, but you mean it’s true? Is that what you do? It sounds like . . . I mean, don’t you . . . have a life of your own to live?/ He swallowed, and realized that a shadow of grief seemed to have come across Charlie with his words. /I’m sorry, look, I didn’t mean . . . if I said something . . ./

  The quarx spoke, but as though from a great distance.

  >>  It’s not . . . so bad, really. It has its own rewards, you know. >>

  /Charlie—/ He hesitated, and after a moment, the quarx drew back toward him, speaking softly.

  >>  It is true that I am on a . . . journey, John Bandicut. And that I don’t always know where I am going, or for what purpose. Or whether I will ever return to my own kind. Or even if they are— >>

  The quarx paused. /What?/ Bandicut asked. /Alive, or something?/

  >>  Yes. >>

  /Jesus . . . I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—/

  >>  It’s been a long journey, John. I’ve seen more than one civilization fall, and I’ve seen some saved, and the latter way is better. I’d like to help save yours, if I can. >>

  Bandicut was silent. They had to save the Earth, the quarx had said. And he wanted Bandicut’s help. /You want to, uh, tell me a little more about that?/ he asked at last.

  >>  I’ll try. Let’s start with a question. How much do you know about chaos? >>

  /How do you mean? Randomness, disorder, entropy?/

  >>  No, I mean the science of chaos. >>

  /Oh. Not too much. What should I know about it?/

  ——

  The explanation came in streams and waves, curling around him like breakers rolling in upon a shore . . .

  The dynamical theories of chaos were the only practical means of describing many kinds of natural events, of illuminating past and present patterns, and of predicting future patterns of similar events. Among the subjects described by chaos theory were fluid turbulence, atmospheric weather patterns, the movements of particles, of individual lives, of planetary bodies in orbit . . . and even the social forces that swirled through crisis upon crisis in the history of any civilization, including Earth’s. It was the last two of these subjects that had drawn the sharpest attention of the translator.

  It was the study of the chaotic patterns of orbital resonance in the solar system that made the translator suspect, long ago, that the Earth might one day be in trouble.

  How’s that? whispered Bandicut.

  Let the stream carry you, and just try to follow, murmured the quarx.

  The human science of chaos was far too immature, even in its second century of organized existence, to adequately analyze the appropriate data; and even the translator, with its vastly more powerful chaos-calculator, was still working furiously, refining and analyzing, drawing together vague and shadowy possibilities into a picture that soon would make clear exactly what would go wrong, and where . . . and what must be done . . .

  Charlie . . . ? I’m not . . .

  Take an example, murmured the quarx. Motions of particles in a cloud of smoke—or in the rings around a planet, a planet such as Neptune, or Saturn. All the particles followed known physical laws of motion. But the motions were too hopelessly complex, viewed from a perspective of close detail, for predictions of any individual particle’s motion to be useful. The tiniest perturbation of an orbit in one place could cause a drastic change in a particle’s path elsewhere; and every particle exerted some degree of force on every other particle, so if you were trying to predict a particle’s path with any precision, taking into account the millions of moving bodies and fluctuating conditions . . .

  It was impossible—unless you employed truly advanced chaos dynamics, such as the calculations used by the translator. And even then, working out general patterns of orbital resonance and the stability and instability of orbits was one thing, but the raw-data requirement for tracking where one individual particle might get flung out of its orbit like a bullet was truly staggering, and best represented this way:

  An image flicked into existence, showing a series of hollow, transparent, concentric tori, colored various shades of green, blue, orange, and red. Waves of distortion began rippling through the donuts, and then kinks appeared as resonant instabilities, and then the tori opened up like onion shells and twisted like bizarre Möbius strips, and shredded into four-dimensional ferns . . .

  I am not following this, not at all—

  ——

  The image vanished, and Bandicut let out a long breath. /Now, that sure was helpful./ He sensed frustration coming from the quarx.

  >>  I don’t expect you to follow the actual math, John. But I was trying to let you see the general outline of the problem, and the solution process. The translator, to put it very simply, is making n-dimensional phase-space analyses of the movements of objects in your solar system . . . >>

  /That’s putting it simply—?/ Bandicut asked, but the quarx continued without missing a beat.

  >>  . . . including those at the outer periphery, not just in the Kuiper Belt, but in what you call the Oort Cloud . . . >>

  /Kuiper Belt? Oort Cloud? There’s nothing but empty space there, and a few zillion comets./

  >>  Precisely. Plus some dark planets which you haven’t discovered yet. Your science is not yet tracking the large-scale movements of those bodies, or their gravitational effects on each other. Nevertheless, the translator is mapping the resonant attractor patterns that emerge over time, in an effort to mark the probable locations of future events. And now it needs the specific transient identifiers to locate— >>

  /Would you explain this in English, please?/

  >>  I’m trying, I really am. It’s a question in one sense of identifying the largest-scale meta-attractions, and then using that as a focusing device to scale down to— >>

  /Fucking A, Charlie, if you can’t explain it, can you just cut to the conclusion?/

  >>  I . . . yes, if you wish. The conclusion is that something’s very likely to hit the Earth, something big, and I’m not sure yet what it is, and I need your help to find out. >>

  Bandicut remained silent and puzzled for a little while. /Oh. That’s more or less what you said in the first place, isn’t it? But listen, then . . . why insist upon secrecy?/

  There was a sigh, before the quarx answered.


  >>  That’s another part of the chaos analysis: the sociopolitical attractors. The translator says that time is too short, and if we go public, we’ll set up turbulences that may delay our acting until it’s too late. >>

  Bandicut frowned. Before he could think of a reply, the quarx whispered one more thing.

  >>  I’m putting a pretty heavy burden on you, I know. But there’s one more thing here that you ought to know, too. >>

  /Which is—?/

  >>  Uh—well, you see . . . there’s a good possibility that I might not live long enough to see this to its proper—oh, hell’s bells! NOW what’s happening—? >>

  He was interrupted by a hash of static.

   Chapter 6 

  Neurolink

  /WHAT? CHARLIE!/

  ——

        >

         >>

     >>>

       >>>>

           >>>>>——>>>>

      >>

  He couldn’t hear the quarx over the static. There was some sort of jostling going on, but he couldn’t tell if it was within the data-connection, or on the outside.

  The static faded, but there was still some sort of scratchy interference, like a malfunctioning neurolink junction, or an audio speaker distorting a human voice. For a moment, he felt a rush of panic. Was this going to be another devastating breakdown, only without the neuro? It had seemed safe enough . . . but now the data-connection was disintegrating, and all of Charlie’s explanatory images had turned to snow. The interference persisted a moment longer, before

  >>

       >>>>

               >>>>>——>>>>

           >>>

     >>

  >

  was followed by a stunning silence. The silence was broken only by the jangling of his nerves and the slow return of his external senses.

  /Charlie? Are you still there?/

  The quarx stirred.

  /// I’m here, but so is someone else!

  Open your eyes, John!

  Open your eyes! ///

  What the hell was Charlie talking about? Was someone else trying to get access to his thoughts? Suddenly he realized that the quarx was speaking literally. His eyelids flicked open, and in the gloom of his bunk, he saw the privacy-curtain dimpling inward with rhythmic beats. Someone was whacking on it from the outside. He heard a muffled voice. “Bandie! You in there? Hey, Bandie!”

  /// Who is it? ///

  Bandicut groaned. /I think I know. I’d better answer./

  /// Don’t tell them about me! ///

  /Gimme a break, will you?/ He opened the curtain a few inches and peered out into the glare of the room light. “What d’ya want, Krackey?” he grunted.

  His roommate, Gordon Kracking, was pacing back and forth in front of their stacked bunks, waving his arms in obvious distress. Bandicut sighed. Krackey was arguably one of the brightest individuals in the entire Triton operation—and also one of the most ungainly, with angular bones and an owlish haircut; and whenever he was really worked up about something, all of that mental power somehow transformed him into a sight that reminded Bandicut of a crippled duck trying to fly.

  /// Who is this? ///

  the quarx asked.

  /My friend,/ Bandicut sighed. /Don’t mind him, he’s a bit of a goak./

  /// Goak—? ///

  “Bandie!” Kracking cried. “I knew you were in there!”

  “Yeah, Krackey, you got me on that one. Now make a little room, will you?” Bandicut pushed the curtain open and swung his feet out over the edge of the bunk. At the same time, he sat up, banging his head on the bunk above him. “Ow!” He cursed quietly. Three months in this place and he was still banging his goddamn head on that goddamn bunk.

  Krackey greeted him like a long-lost brother. “Bandie! What happened out there, man? We were afraid you were a goner!”

  Bandicut squinted back at him from the bunk. His head was still foggy with the things Charlie had been saying, and he was trying to remember what it was they had been talking about at the very end, before the interruption. He felt as if he had awakened from a dream, and the threads of it were slipping away, even as he tried to fix them in his memory. But it was too late; they were gone. “What are you talking about?” he rasped finally.

  Krackey cocked his head, eyes blazing. He had one blue and one green eye, like a cat. “Bandie, everyone knows about it—how you fried your buggy and would be frozen stiff out there if Genghis hadn’t come along and gotten you running again. What were you doing in the laser area anyway?”

  Bandicut let out an annoyed breath. “Who said I was in the laser area?”

  “That’s what I heard,” said Krackey. “I don’t know who said it first.”

  “What else did they say—that I went into orbit? Look, I didn’t fry anything—and it wasn’t Genghis, it was Napoleon. And he didn’t fix it, he just hopped a ride back to save his lazy, robot ass the walk home.”

  Krackey was shaking his head. “Bandie, that’s not the way people are saying it. Look, man—I trust you, you know that. If you want me to set the record straight for you—”

  Bandicut sighed as he slid down from his bunk. “All right, Krackey. Yeah, I guess I can tell you. What really happened is that I met an alien out there, and was lucky to get back without being dissected alive.”

  /// What are you doing!!! ///

  Krackey looked hurt as Bandicut walked past him. “Come on, John—I’ll keep it quiet if you want me to. But what really happened? I heard Jackson was fit to be tied.”

  “I just told you.”

  /// John, you PROMISED! ///

  He ignored the quarx. “Look, Jackson should be put out of his misery, for all of our sakes. I didn’t do anything that—” He sighed. “Ah, never mind. You wouldn’t believe me anyway. No one else does.” He traipsed into the lav, with Krackey following. /Don’t worry, Charlie. You don’t think he’d actually believe me, do you?/

  “Come on, Bandie!” Krackey wailed.

  /// Will he? ///

  /Not a chance./ Peering into the sink mirror at his angular, unshaven face and his copper-green eyes, he thought, Do I look possessed? Are you in there, Charlie, in those eyes? Sighing, he shook his head and glanced back at his friend. “Krack, if you don’t want to believe me, you can read all about it on the board newsies. They won’t have it right, either—but at least it’ll be official.”

  “Bandicoot, give me a break! Why’d they demote you to mining ops? Something must have happened!” Krackey couldn’t bear mysteries like this, and he was staring at Bandicut imploringly. Suddenly his eyes widened and understanding seemed to dawn. “Bandie!” He lowered his voice. “You didn’t have one of those damn fugues, did you?”

  Bandicut nearly froze, but forced himself to bend to wash his hands and face. He dried himself and said in a low voice, through the towel, “Now, Krackey—if that’s what had happened, they’d have me in the funny room already, wouldn’t they?” He peered up at his friend and was greeted with a sober gaze. He had had a fugue, Krackey was realizing. “Look,” Bandicut said quietly, “I’d appreciate it if we could drop the subject for a while. You can just tell people that it was all blown out of proportion. Really—I had a malfie, but I fixed it, and nothing happened. Okay?”

  Krackey nodded slowly. “Okay, Bandie.” He hesitated, scratching the back of his neck. “But listen—let me know if it happens again, will you? You can’t let this keep happening. If it does, like it or not, you’re going to have to see the docs.”

  Bandicut snorted.

  “I mean it, Bandie.”

  “Yeah,” Bandicut sighed. “I will. Okay?” He waited until Krackey nodded, then he returned to zip up his bunk curtain, and he left the dorm without another word.