Existence

by David Brin

  Hamish expected Om to speak up. This seemed compatible with his earlier comments. But the artilen said nothing.

  “If only we could look,” Lacey said at last, after a sullen pause. She clearly referred to their blocked view homeward, where even a clear glance might reveal whether the Big Laser was still in use, even if it were aiming its great power at other targets. Without the box in the way, they might also pick up noise from Earth’s radio networks and industry. That, too, could tell them a lot.

  Courier of Caution broadened Lacey’s longing into something more general.

  “That has always been my own desire. To look and see, before doing anything else. It is why I urged support for your grand telescopes, Lacey—and other space-born efforts—to find out what has happened to other worlds. Whether any of them survived the disease, while still maintaining a vigorous, scientific culture.”

  One of Courier’s most endearing traits had always been this penchant for unquenchable hopefulness, despite a frozen facial expression that resembled purse-lipped doubt. Even when giant mirrors gathered images of his home system, detecting no sign of civilization—no audible communications mesh, no atmospheric traces to suggest ongoing industry—Courier remained upbeat, explaining.

  “It only shows that we became more efficient. That is exactly what a mature people must do, over time, in order to both have a mighty culture and use up few resources. It is what you humans have been doing, increasingly, for three generations! Earth was loudest in the radio spectrum back during the 1980s. It became a quieter planet while exploding with talk and ideas, carried over fiber and tight beams. My people have only taken this process further, by thousands of years!

  “Need I also add that the galaxy is proved to be a dangerous place? I’ll wager that wise survivor races—like mine—grow cautious about leaking much. No sense in shouting! There are more subtle ways to reach out and explore. To find allies and fight back against an unfriendly cosmos.

  “Nevertheless, I have every expectation that the next set of instruments will reveal them, my people, still vibrant and rambunctious. Still resisting the enemy with every strength.”

  Hamish recalled how Courier used to say all this before every major new telescope came online. And when that one detected nothing at Turbulence system? Courier simply turned to help design the next.

  One of those experiments involved propelling a few dozen early crystal probes, not toward faraway stars but a modest distance, into the gap between Uranus and Neptune. A unique zone, seven astronomical units wide, where theory suggested they might pick up focused gravitational waves, of all things. As Hamish recalled, that project delivered good science and helped humanity test its own early designs for crystal craft. But the probes found no trace of intelligent modulations in the gravitation noise. No spoor of high civilization, from any of sixty different directions.

  Behind him, his fellow passengers—the ones who were serious, unlike the dilettantes playing god-games below—argued on, chewing over every possible explanation for their abandonment, from bad news to horrendous. Hamish, meanwhile, found himself staring not into the void, but at the great brown wall. The giant box that lay in contact with the aft end of their crystal vessel, blocking any view of home.

  What if we were in a simulation? A test? And not in space at all? Isn’t that “box” exactly the sort of thing that the experimenters would set up, like a one-way mirror, to let them observe us up close? And to keep us from measuring things like the Earth or sun too closely?

  Hamish gave in to an impulse and stuck out his tongue toward the great brown wall, at any spectators who might lurk there.

  But no. He shrugged that idea aside. Not because it was stupid or illogical … it seemed as likely as anything others were discussing. No, Hamish dropped the idea because of something else. Something he had spent his whole life nurturing.

  Intuition. Not always right. Often dead wrong. But always interesting. A trait that once got Hamish invited to join the Autie League! Because it was deemed a “savant-level talent.”

  Right now, he was having a powerfully strange feeling, not unlike déjà vu, only in reverse.

  A sense that something ought to be obvious.

  Something to try.

  Right now.

  “Say!” he asked aloud, turning to interrupt whoever was talking. “Has anyone actually tried to open that thing?”

  Hamish realized, with a bit of chagrin, that the person he cut off was Emily. She had been saying something guilt-ridden, about how the presence of new “alien” people on Earth might contribute to overall human wisdom in the long run, but the greater variety could prove frightening and destabilizing in the short term. She worried that her “Cure” might have killed the patient. An interesting notion—

  —though Hamish never deemed any topic more valuable than his current question.

  “What did you say?” Lacey Donaldson asked him. “Open what?”

  Hamish gestured in the direction everyone called “aft” … which also pointed back toward the sun and everything they all used to know. A view blocked by a giant container.

  “That thing. The box. The mysterious crate. Have … you … tried … to open it?”

  Courier of Caution stared at Hamish with its ribbon-eye, pursing its diamond-shaped, four-lipped mouth.

  “We have set up instruments, Hamish. Tried to probe the box with light and other rays. We even managed to wish-create a weak laser and got return reflections.…”

  Hamish shook his head. “Look, we’re supposed to have access to the stuff inside, sooner or later, right? So … shouldn’t there be an instruction manual? Aren’t we supposed to be able to use whatever it is?”

  The humans turned and looked at each other.

  “I suppose that’s logical.”

  “We had extensive pre-briefings, but no one mentioned it.”

  “Because we were recorded from our originals some years before they settled on a final probe design. This box-thing’s an add-on.”

  “So? He’s right. Even if it was all meant to be used at the destination, there have to be instructions!”

  “But where? We scanned the surface of the box and found no message.”

  “Embedded in the crystal, surrounding us? Like every other bit and byte carried aboard this solid state—”

  “You mean like us? We’re just as much bits ’n’ bytes—”

  A screech and series of sharp squawks made Hamish turn, to see that newcomers had arrived, bringing all of the team that had been staffing the “control room” at the forward end. Birdwoman and M’m por’lock and several others stepped off a traveling disc-conveyance. So who’s at the helm? Hamish wondered as his tru-vus translated the autie’s wing-flaps and chirps:

  The answer is simple. We must have known the method once and forgot it.

  “Forgot!” The Oldest Member expressed disdain with undulating puffs of his trunk-like breathing tubes. “I can assure you that I have forgotten nothing.”

  “Well … maybe you were loaded that way,” Lacey commented. “But some of us could have had important bits buried. Unconscious. Like a—” she paused, searching for the right phrase.

  “Like a posthypnotic suggestion?” offered Emily, rising with enthusiasm. “All it might take is a certain word or thought to trigger recollection. Giving us access to a more information. Like a command. Maybe something coded—”

  Her eyes widened, at the same moment that Hamish saw several other people rock back. Including Lacey and Professor Noozone. Whatever it was … he experienced it too.

  “Now that’s odd. Does anyone else feel suddenly compelled to say the word—”

  “… key…”

  “—key?”

  “Key!”

  “Yea. I-mon feel it, too, obeah-strong.” The black Jamaican science-showman seemed aggrieved at the very idea. Almost through gritted teeth, and glaring at Hamish, he added, “Key.”

  Four individuals, all of them human, approached each other near t
he edge of the glassy plain, while the others watched. Emily, Hamish, Profnoo, and Lacey exchanged looks, back and forth.

  “So … now what?” Lacey asked. “Are we supposed to conjure up a key to unlock the box? Something capable of survival near the lattice surface, penetrating through the wall—and vacuum—and then the container? How? Shall we hold hands and wish it into being?”

  I ain’t holding hands with Noozone, Hamish grumbled inside.

  “Well,” Emily suggested, “if we four concentrate, maybe it will manifest, by force of will.”

  They tried for a while. Hamish closed his eyes, envisioning what a “key” might look like. Something to unlock a heavy, massive cabinet. A virtual object tough enough not to unravel when it was brought “up-and-large” near an unbridgeable barrier made of crystal and time. All he could come up with was the mental image of an old fashioned skeleton key with a cylindrical shank and a single flat, rectangular tooth.

  He could feel magic gather at his fingertips. Something was happening in front of him. He opened his eyes …

  … and saw a mess. His version of a “key”—muddled and half formed—was jumbled with another one that resembled a modern biomet-tag, of the kind that people on Earth might use to remotely identify themselves. Both of those swirled with someone else’s notion of a “key” … a maze of numbers, dots, and computer-readable smudges.

  One of the onlookers guffawed at the resulting mishmash. Hamish couldn’t blame him.

  “This is silly,” Profnoo said. And Hamish noticed that the man had altered his appearance. Now he resembled a real professor—tweed jacket, turtleneck shirt, and milder dreadlocks. Even spectacles. His affected accent was nearly gone.

  “I doubt anything that we manifest will do the job.”

  “If we discuss it first…,” Lacy suggested. “Maybe reach a consensus on a single metaphor, we four might then—”

  Hamish shook his head, hating to agree with Profnoo.

  “Wanna know what I think? I would bet my next cash advance and media options that we don’t have anything else to do, right now. Our job is done. We four had only to remember, all of us at the same time, and say the word together, for it to—”

  Birdwoman shrieked!

  Hamish swiveled to see her hopping and using both iridescent wing-arms to point downward, over the edge of the plate. Next to her, M’m por’lock crouched on all fours, thrashing a beaverlike tale and hissing.

  “I think you had all better look at this!”

  Hamish and the others bent or knelt to peer into the depths. And there they saw, far below, refracted by multiple foldings of fractal scale, something that appeared to be rising fast, drawing near with tremendous momentum. A patch of light. A glow. A spot of brilliance that seemed too intense to be merely virtual.

  Probably, it would be visible even from outside the probe itself, if anyone happened to be looking.

  It must have started in the very most depths, Hamish thought. And it’s been rising ever since we all said the key word. Key … word. Of all the stupid codes! I would never have stooped to using that in a novel.

  Staring, unable to move, Hamish watched as the glow brightened, swerved … then plunged straight at the aft-most end of the ship, casting sharp light even past the crystal barrier, to briefly pulse a complex rhythm against the great, brown container-box …

  … which then

  quietly

  opened.

  95.

  REFLECTIONS

  Cracks and seams propagated across the great brown surface of the aft cargo container as it started unfolding.

  “Come on!” Lacey shouted. “Let’s get up top for a better view.”

  She stepped off the glassy plate and started grow-walking skyward, becoming a giant, striding ever-higher and turning translucent as she climbed. Others quickly followed, leaving Hamish—assisted by the Oldest Member—hurrying to catch up, struggling to master that queer trick of envisioning changes in both position and scale, pushing upward against increasing weight and resistance.

  Glancing back, he saw the flat plain where they had been meeting, along with all the instruments and tools that their minds had built, now looking like tiny toys and already starting to dissolve.

  “Focus ahead of you, Hamish my friend,” Om insisted. “Think up and out. Think big.”

  The others had pulled ahead. Their ankles were gigantic as Hamish fought to keep up. But he had always been a quick study, and soon had the knack, forging ahead and expanding his own scale to match that of Emily, then the otter-alien, then Singh and the Birdwoman—whose personal augmentations were starting to soften, molting her glorious feathers, leaving a much more human-mundane appearance. Professor Noozone, however, was still up ahead. Still huge. Striving hard into a headwind, maintaining his lead.

  The mists shredded and parted as stars came out, stark and bright beyond the great ceiling-barrier.

  Om was right. This seems a bit easier, accompanied by others.

  But the group had not come up here for stars. They gathered where the aft-end curvature of the rounded cylinder was most pronounced, giving them their best view of the cargo box. Its deployment had already progressed.

  Rather than just unfolding, the brown sides of the box unraveled, supplying meter after meter of ropy strands. Five of these cables connected to five different blocky objects that now tumbled out of the container, until each of them trailed behind the crystal ship, as if dragged by its own tow-line.

  “There!” Emily pointed. “I see it. The sun!”

  Indeed, as hundreds of meters of cable spun out from the sides of the box, a great star was revealed, mightier (apparently) than all the rest. Far bigger and brighter, and closer than it should have been, at this point in their mission. And somewhere buried within its glare would be a tiny, blue-green twinkle. Homeworld.

  As they watched, each of the five blocks broke in half … then divided again … with each smaller chunk separated by more rope that got increasingly slender, with every division, till five long chains trailed behind the vessel. Each of them consisted of a long strand, with small lumps knotted along its length. Through some kind of magnification or refraction, Hamish could tell that the tethers stretched back kilometers now, perhaps much more.

  “Whatever it is, it doesn’t look like a weapon,” Professor Noozone pointed out, still in his tweedy, university-teacher mode, almost accent free, like when he had been just a regular associate instructor at Caltech. “Nor does it seem like a way to hasten contact with some planet-born, primitive race.”

  Lacey had an observation.

  “Notice how one of the strands has deployed to trail directly behind us … while the others fan out above, below, left, and right. It must use an electrostatic charge—

  “And see now! How all five of them have branched? Each of them splitting into several sub chains? A total of … a hundred strands! Each terminating in a pair of thicker lumps, one after the other? I believe it has to be antenna array—a detector of some sort—meant to cover as large a volume of space behind us as possible.”

  Hamish was still getting used to how strange everything felt, up here near the real universe, where the slender crystal’s curved limitations could be felt by those within. No longer capacious and immense, the impression now seemed cramped, confined. His body—when he pressed closer to the barrier—felt warped. Distended and rounded. Confined.

  “Lacey you tend to view everything in terms of telescopes,” commented Jovindra Singh, with evident amusement. “It could just as likely—”

  The Sikh biophysicist stopped abruptly and they all stared as the lumps—strung out along the many strands—started to open, expanding like very broad, many-petaled flowers, each of them aiming their concave faces away from the sun.

  “Well all right,” Singh admitted. “That looks like some kind of detector array. But it’s aimed ahead of us! Aren’t we most-curious about what is going on behind us, on Earth? Whether civilization survived? Whether the big laser i
s still being used?”

  M’m por’lock commented:

  “This device was never meant for us to use in that way, checking on our point of origin. It may have been intended to look ahead, during our final approach toward the destination system. To help perfect our ideal trajectory, optimizing arrival at the target planet.”

  Courier of Caution disagreed.

  “Upon approaching the destination, our type of light-craft always turns around to enter the new solar system aft-end first, with the sail using sunlight to help decelerate. Hence, these mirrors would be aimed away—”

  Hamish interrupted.

  “Aren’t you all forgetting something? None of those flower mirrors can see a damned thing that’s in front of our ship. There’s something blocking the way!”

  He gestured toward the bow of their crystal vessel and Birdwoman squawked, now in spoken English.

  “The sail! Sail. Big light-pail!”

  It covered a whole third of the sky, warping the starscape with reflections, cutting off any view ahead.

  “But … then … if the sail is in the way…” Lacey mused, staring at the curved boundary of the gigantic, reflective surface. “What could all those smaller mirrors be looking at…”

  Her eyes widened.

  Then Lacey Donaldson let out a cry of realization and joy.

  “It’s all …

  “… we’re all part of ONE big telescope!”

  96.

  FOCUS

  The group drifted “down” to a nearby fractal layer where it was just barely possible to forge instrumentalities with their minds, yet still have a clear view outside. By concentrating together, they managed to create some image magnifiers to peer beyond the artifact-ship at the two hundred or so flower-mirrors that lay strung behind it, along five trees of branching tethers. Many of the kilometer-wide diaphanous blossoms were still unfolding.

  How did all of that fit in a one-meter box? They reminded Hamish of filmy jellyfish—swarms of which had conquered Earth’s great ocean.

  Courier of Caution presented a schematic, adding—“Of course, nothing is to scale.”