by Jerry
Mikey’s recent foray into Tantric Buddhism, complete with relentlessly inappropriate utterances, had vanished now the Bugs were living up to our expectations. They had become the sole focus of his attention.
He got so bad that one day I woke to find him leaning over me. As soon as I opened my eyes he started talking at me, drowning me in details about their eugenics programme.
I shoved him away and went for a walk. With full armour and scorch fields I left an incendiary path through the sparse shrub. We were under the strongest directive to remain undetected but there were no Bugs this far out so who gave a shit? The small intense sun hung high over the flat ground, making it look even flatter. The mudball was a quiet place with no really large bodies of water to give it interesting weather.
All worlds smell different though no human has ever given it a try directly, the effects of airborne alien microorganisms being too complicated to contemplate even for the AIs. But we could get the AIs to simulate it from their analyses of atmospheric gases and biomass emissions. This planet had an acrid herby bitterness which would have taken a lot of getting used to. Mikey and I had never bothered. We’d gotten used to our own emissions.
After the Bugs had reached the Glyphics stage we’d got the Orbiter to fire off a capsule, one of only three we had for communications with home. The peasized memory, safely enclosed in several hundred tonnes of engine, would take almost half a year to accelerate up to half light-speed. At that point it would have enough energy for the Push. An instant later the memory would be back in the Solar System, broadcasting all our findings before it continued off into deep space.
I knew only too well that the “instant” took a subjective eternity. It was as though you still had your umbilicus which you were sucked through until it inverted and you were shat out the other side. When you got to the mid-point, just before the inversion, you experienced a bleakness and an emptiness that cut through the heaviest narcotic. Nobody knew why. I was comforted by the thought that the next Push would be my last.
The limits of interstellar communication meant that it would take at least a year and a half before our colleagues arrived. The expense would be immeasurable but they’d come, of that there was no doubt.
Our application of Neivson’s Progression indicated that the Bugs with their compressed developmental timescale would soon be centuries ahead of mankind. We hoped they’d learn to understand the Glyphics, perhaps even defuse them.
A filmy rainbow plane undulated through the air across my path. I stopped quickly before my leading scorch field touched it. Set on its task of mindless pollination, the plane settled over the single unspiked section of a plant to my right. Its bright colours ameliorated the cold blues of the seed heads. I magnified vision enough to see the tiny indentations on its wings where insects had nibbled at it while it fed from the seedheads. If it was lucky it would live long enough to breed before its gossamer wing was too tattered for flight. Struggle and death. Look closely enough beneath the beauty and they were always there.
Humankind had first discovered the Glyphics in bacteria in the 1980s but hadn’t recognized them for what they were. It wasn’t until the beginning of the millennium, and the completion of that meticulous mapping and functional cross-correlation which was the Human Genome Project, that the same codon sequences, camouflaged by occasional sections of randomness, were found in man himself.
While the Push was being developed and AIs sent out to explore our nearest stellar neighbours, the bioscientists continued to puzzle over the Glyphics. Viral tools were perfected for manipulating DNA in vivo and when man tentatively began to alter his own makeup, they were applied to the Glyphics.
The effects were inevitably disastrous. A massive wash of enzymes caused almost instant hypermetabolism, with each cell and organ getting energy from its own breakdown. The rogues were always as destructive as they could be in the brief time allowed them. Even in humans, in the few experiments that had been attempted.
Of course it’d never gone as spectacularly wrong as with the Bugs, but then few ecologies were that fragile. The Bugs had only survived as long as they had because it was ingrained into them not to damage their habitat. Even their wars were fought in carefully demarcated zones.
Gingerly skirting the rainbow plane I trudged on. Looking back, I could follow my smouldering meanders back to the holographic hillock which hid the sleek arrowhead shape of the Lander. A string of projectors to the west camouflaged the five-klick long tracks the landing gear had gouged in the soft ground. We’d come down a thousand klicks from the caldera, relying on a multitude of carefully disguised remotes for our studies. We’d move in closer if we felt the time was right. I looked at the charred crisscrosses Mikey and I had made on our constitutionals and laughed. Our paranoia had definitely slipped.
I wandered on and worried some more.
The Glyphics had given man pause for thought and it’d taken years before human in vivo bioengineering really caught on. Mikey’s skin-patterning was a typical example though I feared that by the time we got back to Earth less superficial changes might have come into vogue. Providing the restructuring viruses could be tailored to keep well away from the Glyphics virtually any changes were possible if supplemented, like Mikey’s, by special diets. But any attempts at neural enhancement activated the Glyphics.
Meanwhile our interstellar probes had found life to be common amongst the stars. Water-based life was de rigeur and so it was found to be confined to temperate zones around well-behaved single suns. None of it was both sentient and civilized, as our few manned expeditions had shown. Where species had achieved things like space travel and bioengineering they had become extinct, leaving only bone and fossilized skin for our remotes to sample for their DNA.
And DNA was everywhere. And inside it were always the Glyphics.
Aside from killing us if we tried to tamper with our own minds, what other more subtle functions did they perform? To what intellectual frameworks and perspectives did they confine us? Did they define our rationality? They clearly acted as our intellectual blinkers. What might we be capable of without this genetic graffiti?
That the Glyphics had been implanted was now widely accepted. The DNA of species on each planet had many similarities, reflecting common ancestors, but planet to planet variations were colossal. Yet the Glyphics were always there in barely altered forms, resistant unlike the millions of other codon chains to the usual mutagenetic mechanisms of radiation and chemicals.
Neuroarchaeology had been born out of humankind’s perception of its prison. A science less than fifty years old, it commanded astronomical budgets to obtain the DNA of dead or nascent species.
Now by an incredible stroke of luck we’d found a species alive and about to overtake us in bioengineering terms at least. We would have to watch our trail-blazers carefully.
I stopped again and scanned this unpleasant world. “Why me? Why now?” I thought. “I’m too old for the terrible truths.” With a sigh, I blazed my own trail back to the Lander.
I began to wake with vague feelings of despair. Even after coming to I’d spend hours turning restlessly in my cot.
Mikey’s feelings too seemed to confuse him. His natural enthusiasm, normally boundless, had become sporadic and interspersed with silence and depression. I remembered his dedication and brilliance and how by careful meticulous study he’d discovered the caldera from his analyses of the returning memories from automated probes. Though only a postgraduate student then it had earned him the right to accompany me on this expedition, leapfrogging many more senior colleagues in the process.
He still looked healthy even though his eyes seemed to reflect some awful loss. His patterning cycle excluded the greys and blacks of winter, skipping instead straight to spring. Normal flesh tones had reappeared and were becoming stippled with bright green tracings. It didn’t seem appropriate.
“It couldn’t be more perfect,” he said to me one day during an “up” period as we chaffed through the
data checking for novel developmental indices. We were in the tiny recreation area, created by retracting the partition wall between our cabins.
“I mean they’re way too contained to be a threat to Earth and their technology’s for shit. They haven’t even colonized further than a couple of hundred klicks. We could afford real contact.”
“Maybe later. If they survive.”
“Easy. They’re tough.”
The Builders had been too, I reflected but kept it to myself. Squat and thick-skinned with lots of meat, they’d had lasers and atomics and nanotechnology. They’d chewed out vast trenches on their neighbouring planet and constructed huge generators that cracked the permafrost, making air and filling the trenches with ocean. Then they’d disappeared within 800 years, barely five of their lively generations.
“Professor Helver, Dr Marillo,” Ed interrupted gently. “I’m sorry to bother you but one of our remotes has picked up something of possible interest.”
The watchword of AIs was understatement. Mikey and I exchanged glances then we were squeezing down the narrow corridor to the Obs Room. He got there first and froze. I had to stand on tiptoes to get a look. When I saw the viewpit I stumbled back in disbelief. The sudden perception of vulnerability hit me like a rock.
The scene showed a table of rock viewed from a remote at a higher elevation. Spelled out in letters made from travel tube creatures were just two words: FREE US.
I spent the next few hours telling myself how impossible this all was. The Bugs had no electronics, no radios, no lasers. Their terrain was the organic, the microscopic. They shouldn’t have been aware of our remote, they shouldn’t have been aware of us. They shouldn’t have understood English. Anthropomorphized Bugs was something I was just too queasy to deal with.
Ed performed long-range interrogative checks on the remote’s onboard AI. He eventually came back deeply ashamed but with some answers. We listened numbly to his contrite tones.
“The Bugs up to now haven’t been subterranean creatures. In fact no burrowing creatures longer than a few millimetres exist within several hundred kilometres.”
“They dug a tunnel?”
“Correct. Depth scans were only performed during the first five months with no appreciable changes recorded. Attention levels were therefore distributed to more apparently significant studies.”
“Didn’t you detect the excavations?”
“The effect of the pulsers on the rock is minuscule. The Bugs are small, they live in a fluid medium which is highly sensitive to the planet’s random seismic activity. They’re intelligent enough to mimic it.”
“And intelligent enough to understand English?”
“Ah, now there,” said the AI very softly, “I really can’t help you.”
I was still pretty screwed up but I’d managed to do some thinking of my own. “I’d guess induction,” I refilled my glass from the plastic bottle of Scotch we’d been working our way through. “Their bodies are full of electrolytes. If they got close enough to, say, the AIs’ aerial feed they might’ve felt it.”
Relief washed across Mikey’s face. “And the AIs send back images overlaid with text. For a second there . . .”
“Yeah. It looked like they had a whole technology we didn’t know about.”
“But how could they have deciphered it?” asked Ed with some interest.
Traditionally ships’ AIs displayed themselves as whirling digital patterns on screens set above the viewpits. Some sort of focus was always better than a disembodied voice. I stared at Ed’s grimly.
“By altering situations in the caldera, by creating events and seeing how the remote’s signals back to the ship changed. In effect by prodding and poking you, Ed, like the cheap pile of junk you are.”
“Wow! Smart or what?” Mikey took a pull on his Scotch. “And they worked it all out without computers. How the hell do they expect us to help them?”
“It’s time to find out. Ed, send a message to the remote then have it sent back in case they’re only tapped into the return feed. Ask them: ‘How can we free you?’ ”
We watched the tube letters retreat then grow back. It took hours.
REMOVE THE POISON
By now we were too impatient for circumspect communication. Trying to clarify things, we described the Glyphics and asked if that was what they meant. We stopped them when they were half way through the laborious construction of a “Y.”
“What makes you think we can remove them?” we asked. By the time the answer came back a second bottle of Scotch had been finished.
YOU MADE US
“No we didn’t,” we blithely replied, “and the Glyphics are in us too.”
We never heard from them again.
I was dreaming of aching, stabbing loss when Ed’s voice woke me.
“I would advise you to hurry to the Observation Room,” he said.
Feeling sick and wishing I could vomit, I scuttled as fast as I could down the rat-run to the Obs Room. Mikey was already slumped over the central console.
“They’re dying,” he said.
It didn’t seem so at first. The caldera looked to be seething with as much activity as before. Then I saw the bodies on the floor.
Normally as the Bugs died they drifted down to where teams of bioengineered scavengers would drag them to the recycling pods. The teams weren’t coping now and the little corpses were beginning to accumulate.
That was the beginning of the end. It took only three months but seemed to go on for ever. As the long days passed we watched chilled and helpless as an entire species was extinguished.
I couldn’t understand why we both took it so personally. The anthropomorphism created by the message had been brief. Despite their intelligence they were still brutal, alien little bugs, given to cold and calculated manipulation of other species.
So why was I grieving? Sure, they hadn’t defused the Glyphics and that was a terrible disappointment but it didn’t explain the crushing despair we both felt. A despair which was somehow intriguingly familiar, yet difficult to pin down.
By the time the population had decreased by ninety percent the medical AI was starting to fuss about mission termination. Mikey’s hideous patterning couldn’t disguise his weight loss. Sleeping pills were getting less and less effective. We were drinking more and more. The stims had lost all attraction.
“Gentlemen,” Ed said one day, “if we left now it would take ten months and six days to get you to full medical facilities. At your present rate of deterioration you might only just make it. I must insist we leave immediately.”
Mikey, drawn and weary, was lying slouched in a corner. He hadn’t spoken for days. I was curled up in my inertia web. I had no idea how long I’d been there.
It was clear that the Bugs would never now recover, so there was little point in staying. We also had a good reason to return home, though it was something we only dared consider tangentially. The Bugs’ collapse had been on the Neivson Scale at a point about one hundred and twenty years ahead of mankind’s. We’d estimated the error at plus or minus one hundred and fifty years.
“OK, Ed,” I said. “Do your stuff!” It was just as well we weren’t expected to fly the thing. I had enough trouble strapping a febrile Mikey into his web for takeoff. He grasped my hand.
“Why?” he asked. “Why did they all have to die?” I gently stroked his hair but could give him no other comfort.
His question stayed with me. It wasn’t until afterwards, after the takeoff, after the docking with the main engine in orbit round the planet, after the five interminable months of acceleration and our increasing dementia, and finally the horrors of the Push itself, that I had the terrible epiphany that gave me the answer to it all.
As soon as we were back in the Solar System we started to recover. Decelerating, we picked up tight-beam radio messages. Humankind was still forging ahead, unaware as yet of its fate. Though a source of great relief I knew it wasn’t the main reason for our improving health.
I stared morbidly at my hand clutching the glass. Bony and shrivelled from the wasting, it reminded me of a bird’s claw.
“Well?” asked Mikey, his voice weak and high. The muscles in his face were too attenuated to convey much expression other than a gaunt emptiness. Somehow he’d sensed I knew something and he’d kept on at me during the brief, infrequent periods he talked at all. I didn’t want to explain. I knew once I started I’d be made to do it again and again for the rest of my life.
I took a deep breath. “I think the Bugs reached the end of their useful life.”
This was the only thing he was interested in so I used it. I deliberately waited so he had to communicate. It worked.
“Useful for who?”
I shrugged. “I couldn’t even guess.”
More silence until finally: “The ones who inserted the Glyphics?”
I nodded. “I think the Glyphics act like a fuse, or a tamper switch or a limiter. Get too clever, mess with them and your species goes down the drain.”
It took about a minute but finally he asked me to go on.
“You must have felt it when we made the Push. The same kind of coldness and emptiness as when the Bugs died.
“We were there when a whole intelligence was extinguished. No man has ever experienced that before. On Earth we live our lives right at the heart of an intelligence that is so all-pervading we’re totally unaware of it. It’s only during the Push, when for an instant we’re in interstellar space, that the ambience momentarily diminishes. That difference is enough to wither us, creatures of the bright light that we are. Try and imagine what a complete absence of that sustenance would be like, and not just for an instant but for eternity.
