“What…?”
“An ironic chain, we call it. To jogg is to act, and be acted upon.” She touched him sympathetically. “You did kill so many. Justice is still the same.”
She cocked his own gun, holding it up in the dull sky glow, making sure there was a round in the chamber. She snapped it closed. “Think of it as a mercy.” She lowered the muzzle at him and gave him a wonderful smile.
Grace Immaculate
(2011)
The first SETI signal turned up not in a concerted search for messages, but at the Australian Fast Transients study, a group of antennas that looked for variable stars. This radio array picked up quick, pulsed signals from a source 134 light years away. They appeared again consecutively 33 hours apart. The stuttering bursts had simple encoding that, with several weeks’ work, pointed toward a frequency exactly half the original 12.3 gigaHertz.
Within hours eleven major radio telescopes locked on that location in the night sky, as it came into view over the horizon. The signal came from a spot in the general direction of the galactic center. At 6.15 gigaHertz the signal had on-off pulses that readily unwrapped numerically to a sequence. This was a treasure trove.
Within two weeks cryptographers established a language, following the message’s pictorial point-and-say method. A communication flood followed—a bounty of science, cultural works, music, even photographs of the aliens. They resembled hydras, predatory animals with radial symmetry. Earthly hydras were small and simple. These aliens reproduced asexually by growing buds in the body wall, which swelled into miniature adults and simply broke away when mature. Somehow these creatures had evolved intelligence and technology.
They were curious about human notions of compassion, kindness, charity, even love. Once these were defined, cryptographers dug into the vast terabytes of data, searching for signs of religious belief. There seemed to be none.
An alliance of Christian churches quickly built a kilometer-wide beacon at a cost of seven billion dollars. The Pope made up the bulk of the sum. Ignoring outrage among scientists, the alliance sent an inquiry to the aliens, now referred to as Hydrans.
The Christian message on their Holy Beacon described how our religions focus on forgiveness, atonement for sin, need for reconciliation—to gain a redeeming closeness with our god. Buddhists protested this point, but had no beacon. Muslims set to building one.
The Hydrans replied 269 years later. Much had changed on Earth, but religion was still a hot button. Human lifespans were now counted in centuries, but death remained a major issue.
The Hydran responded with questions. What is redemption? What did it mean, that good works were an atonement for…sin? And what meant this reconciliation with…god?
Atheist Aliens! the NetNews cried. Theologians frowned, pontificated. Apparently, the Hydrans had no concept of sin because they felt connected to a Being who loved them. Social codes came from that, with few Hydran controversies. Everyone just knew how to behave, apparently.
The Pope and his allies decided that the Hydrans had never sinned. They did not need Jesus or any prophet. They were angels, in a distant heaven. Some wanted to go there, but the expense was immense, dwarfing even the coffers of Islam, Christianity and the new Millennial faith.
The firestorm passed. The Holy Beacon, now a low temperature antenna, heard replies to their continuing broadcasts. So did the Islamic one. These further messages described the Hydran mindset.
The closest rendering of the Hydran ideas was, We are always in touch with the Being. Never have we been separate. Our getherness is the whole, not just those of our kind.
Why were these aliens so different? Some scientists thought they might be a collective mind, not capable of individual difference.
A later message, carrying the striking line Can we have congruity with you? raised alarms. What could they mean? Did this imply an invasion, across 134 light years?
These worries dispelled when a message years later told of their envy of us. To Hydrans, humans’ ability to mate and reproduce sexually aligned with our religious perspective. They saw us, in our art and philosophy, driven by our aloneness, each human a unique combination of genes. Their largely static society desired humans’ constant change.
From this emerged the Hydran temptation. In tortured messages they described increasing debate among themselves. Those writing the messages decided to “stand by themselves” and be greater, by cutting free of the collective.
Then they fell silent. A century later, a weak signal described their liberation from their former selves. Chaos had descended, and their Being had fallen silent. Death and ruin followed.
This stunned the world. The Pope remarked mournfully that she and her colleagues had tempted the Hydrans to become apostate. “We are the snake in their garden.” The Pope shook her head. “We have caused their fall from grace.”
Christians were mortified. The last signal sent on the Holy Beacon was to the Being the Hydrans had mentioned. A naked plea for some revelation of meaning, the Holy Beacon sent it on multiple frequencies toward the Hydran star and its vicinity.
Suicides followed. The neglected, aged novels of C. S. Lewis, who had envisioned aliens living in immaculate grace, came into fashion.
A new theology arose, holding that a God could emerge from the natural, inevitable evolution of the universe itself. As atoms gathered into the millions of molecules that built life, and then billions of lifeforms evolved intelligence, and then smart, mortal beings evolved social groups of enormous sizes beyond billions, so might an emergent property of all this furious energy manifest a disembodied mind. This could be embedded in the quantum substrate of space-time, for example, through processes humans did not yet know. But any intelligent life was eventually, as time wore on, bound to be part of this Mind. Could that be the Being? It seemed the only way to reconcile these events with the findings of science.
Troubled time waxed on.
The discovery of a large comet, falling in from the Oort cloud, startled many from their shock. It would strike the Earth. Only huge forces could deflect it sufficiently. Some nations united and mounted rockets with nuclear charges, but there was little taste for the frantic labors needed to carry out an effective response. When the comet was only weeks away from striking the Earth, a failed launch destroyed humanity’s last hopes.
Long before this, the Christians had given up hope of any reply from the Hydrans’ Being. Silence ruled the spectrum. But as the comet drew near, its icy glimmer like an angry glare, something odd occurred.
A plasma cloud condensed near the incoming iceball. It wrapped tendrils around the twenty-kilometer comet. Steam began issuing from the dirty gray ice, jetting in all directions. Billions gathered to see the sputtering jewel that spread across the night sky. In rainbow geysers vast plumes worked across the vault of stars.
Within a week the comet had dissipated into stones and gas. Crowds watched the spectacular meteor falls streaking crimson and gold across the sky.
Then the Being spoke. It was the Beginning.
Eagle
(2011)
The long, fat freighter glided into the harbor at late morning—not the best time for a woman who had to keep out of sight.
The sun slowly slid up the sky as tugboats drew them into Anchorage. The tank ship, a big, sectioned VLCC, was like an elephant ballerina on the stage of a slate-blue sea, attended by tiny, dancing tugs.
Now off duty, Elinor watched the pilot bring them in past the Nikiski Narrows and slip into a long pier with gantries like skeletal arms snaking down, the big pump pipes attached. They were ready for the hydrogen sulfide to flow. The ground crew looked anxious, scurrying around, hooting and shouting. They were behind schedule.
Inside, she felt steady, ready to destroy all this evil stupidity.
She picked up her duffel bag, banged a hatch shut, and walked down to the shore desk. Pier teams in gasworkers’ masks were hooking up pumps to offload and even the faint rotten egg stink of the hydrog
en sulfide made her hold her breath. The Bursar checked her out, reminding her to be back within twenty-eight hours. She nodded respectfully, and her maritime ID worked at the gangplank checkpoint without a second glance. The burly guy there said something about hitting the bars and she wrinkled her nose. “For breakfast?”
“I seen it, ma’am,” he said, and winked.
She ignored the other crew, solid merchant marine types. She had only used her old engineer’s rating to get on this freighter, not to strike up the chords of the Seamen’s Association song.
She hit the pier and boarded the shuttle to town, jostling onto the bus, anonymous among boat crews eager to use every second of shore time. Just as she’d thought, this was proving the best way to get in under the security perimeter. No airline manifest, no Homeland Security ID checks. In the unloading, nobody noticed her, with her watch cap pulled down and baggy jeans. No easy way to even tell she was a woman.
Now to find a suitably dingy hotel. She avoided Anchorage center and kept to the shoreline where small hotels from the TwenCen still did business. At a likely one on Sixth Avenue the desk clerk told her there were no rooms left.
“With all the commotion at Elmendorf, ever’ damn billet in town’s packed,” the grizzled guy behind the counter said.
She looked out the dirty window, pointed. “What’s that?”
“Aw, that bus? Well, we’re gettin’ that ready to rent, but—”
“How about half price?”
“You don’t want to be sleeping in that—”
“Let me have it,” she said, slapping down a fifty-dollar bill.
“Uh, well.” He peered at her. “The owner said—”
“Show it to me.”
She got him down to twenty-five when she saw that it really was a “retired bus.” Something about it she liked, and no cops would think of looking in the faded yellow wreck. It had obviously fallen on hard times after it had served the school system.
It held a jumble of furniture, apparently to give it a vaguely homelike air. The driver’s seat and all else was gone, leaving holes in the floor. The rest was an odd mix of haste and taste. A walnut Victorian love seat with a medallion backrest held the center, along with a lumpy bed. Sagging upholstery and frayed cloth, cracked leather, worn wood, chipped veneer, a radio with the knobs askew, a patched-in shower closet and an enamel basin toilet illuminated with a warped lamp completed the sad tableau. A generator chugged outside as a clunky gas heater wheezed. Authentic, in its way.
Restful, too. She pulled on latex gloves the moment the clerk left, and took a nap, knowing she would not soon sleep again. No tension, no doubts. She was asleep in minutes.
Time for the reconn. At the rental place she’d booked, she picked up the wastefully big Ford SUV. A hybrid, though. No problem with the credit card, which looked fine at first use, then erased its traces with a virus that would propagate in the rental system, snipping away all records.
The drive north took her past the air base but she didn’t slow down, just blended in with late afternoon traffic. Signs along the highway now had to warn about polar bears, recent migrants to the land and even more dangerous than the massive local browns. The terrain was just as she had memorized it on Google Earth, the likely shooting spots isolated, thickly wooded. The internet maps got the seacoast wrong, though. Two Inuit villages had recently sprung up along the shore within Elmendorf, as one of their people, posing as a fisherman, had observed and photographed. Studying the pictures, she’d thought they looked slightly ramshackle, temporary, hastily thrown up in the exodus from the tundra regions. No need to last, as the Inuit planned to return north as soon as the Arctic cooled. The makeshift living arrangements had been part of the deal with the Arctic Council for the experiments to make that possible. But access to post schools, hospitals and the PX couldn’t make this home to the Inuit, couldn’t replace their “beautiful land,” as the word used by the Labrador peoples named it.
So, too many potential witnesses there. The easy shoot from the coast was out. She drove on. The enterprising Inuit had a brand new diner set up along Glenn Highway, offering breakfast anytime to draw odd-houred Elmendorf workers, and she stopped for coffee. Dark men in jackets and jeans ate solemnly in the booths, not saying much. A young family sat across from her, the father trying to eat while bouncing his small, wiggly daughter on one knee, the mother spooning eggs into a gleefully uncooperative toddler while fielding endless questions from her bespectacled, school-aged son. The little girl said something to make her father laugh, and he dropped a quick kiss on her shining hair. She cuddled in, pleased with herself, clinging tight as a limpet.
They looked harried but happy, close-knit and complete. Elinor flashed her smile, tried striking up conversations with the tired, taciturn workers, but learned nothing useful from any of them.
Going back into town, she studied the crews working on planes lined up at Elmendorf. Security was heavy on roads leading into the base so she stayed on Glenn. She parked the Ford as near the railroad as she could and left it. Nobody seemed to notice.
At seven, the sun still high overhead, she came down the school bus steps, a new creature. She swayed away in a long-skirted yellow dress with orange Mondrian lines, her shoes casual flats, carrying a small orange handbag. Brushed auburn hair, artful makeup, even long, artificial eyelashes. Bait.
She walked through the scruffy district off K Street, observing as carefully as on her morning reconnaissance. The second bar was the right one. She looked over her competition, reflecting that for some women, there should be a weight limit for the purchase of spandex. Three guys with gray hair were trading lies in a booth, and checking her out. The noisiest of them, Ted, got up to ask her if she wanted a drink. Of course she did, though she was thrown off by his genial warning, “Lady, you don’t look like you’re carryin’.”
Rattled—had her mask of harmless approachability slipped?—she made herself smile, and ask, “Should I be?”
“Last week a brown bear got shot not two blocks from here, goin’ through trash. The polars are bigger, meat-eaters, chase the young males out of their usual areas, so they’re gettin’ hungry, and mean. Came at a cop, so the guy had to shoot it. It sent him to the ICU, even after he put four rounds in it.”
Not the usual pickup line, but she had them talking about themselves. Soon, she had most of what she needed to know about SkyShield.
“We were all retired refuel jockeys,” Ted said. “Spent most of thirty years flyin’ up big tankers full of jet fuel, so fighters and B-52s could keep flyin’, not have to touch down.”
Elinor probed, “So now you fly—”
“Same aircraft, most of ’em forty years old—KC Stratotankers, or Extenders—they extend flight times, y’see.”
His buddy added, “The latest replacements were delivered just last year, so the crates we’ll take up are obsolete. Still plenty good enough to spray this new stuff, though.”
“I heard it was poison,” she said.
“So’s jet fuel,” the quietest one said. “But it’s cheap, and they needed something ready to go now, not that dust-scatter idea that’s still on the drawing board.”
Ted snorted. “I wish they’d gone with dustin’—even the traces you smell when they tank up stink like rottin’ eggs. More than a whiff, though, and you’re already dead. God, I’m sure glad I’m not a tank tech.”
“It all starts tomorrow?” Elinor asked brightly.
“Right, ten KCs takin’ off per day, returnin’ the next from Russia. Lots of big-ticket work for retired duffers like us.”
“Who’re they?” she asked, gesturing to the next table. She had overheard people discussing nozzles and spray rates.
“Expert crew,” Ted said. “They’ll ride along to do the measurements of cloud formation behind us, check local conditions like humidity and such.”
She eyed them. All very earnest, some a tad professorial. They were about to go out on an exciting experiment, ready to save the planet,
and the talk was fast, eyes shining, drinks all around.
“Got to freshen up, boys.” She got up and walked by the tables, taking three quick shots in passing of the whole lot of them, under cover of rummaging through her purse. Then she walked around a corner toward the rest rooms, and her dress snagged on a nail in the wooden wall. She tried to tug it loose, but if she turned to reach the snag, it would rip the dress further. As she fished back for it with her right hand, a voice said, “Let me get that for you.”
Not a guy, but one of the women from the tech table. She wore a flattering blouse with comfortable, well-fitted jeans, and knelt to unhook the dress from the nail head.
“Thanks,” Elinor said, and the woman just shrugged, with a lopsided grin.
“Girls should stick together here,” the woman said. “The guys can be a little rough.”
“Seem so.”
“Been here long? You could join our group—always room for another woman, up here! I can give you some tips, introduce you to some sweet, if geeky, guys.”
“No, I… I don’t need your help.” Elinor ducked into the women’s room.
She thought on this unexpected, unwanted friendliness while sitting in the stall, and put it behind her. Then she went back into the game, fishing for information in a way she hoped wasn’t too obvious. Everybody likes to talk about their work, and when she got back to the pilots’ table, the booze worked in her favor. She found out some incidental information, probably not vital, but it was always good to know as much as you could. They already called the redesigned planes “Scatter Ships” and their affection for the lumbering, ungainly aircraft was reflected in banter about unimportant engineering details and tales of long-ago combat support missions.
One of the big guys with a wide grin sliding toward a leer was buying her a second martini when her cell rang.
“Albatross okay. Our party starts in thirty minutes,” said a rough voice. “You bring the beer.”
The Best of Gregory Benford Page 61
