Coalescent

by Stephen Baxter

  She wailed, "It's the Wall. What are we doing here? Aren't we going to a villa, or a town?"

  "No," said Aetius grimly. "This is where we will live now, here at the Wall. It won't be so bad—"

  "This is a place for dirty, stinking soldiers. Not for me!"

  "You'll just have to make the best of it," he growled warningly.

  Carta hugged her. "Don't worry, Regina. We'll be fine here, you'll see."

  Regina sniffed. "We won't be here forever, will we?"

  Carta looked at Aetius. "Why, I—"

  Regina asked, "Just until things get back to normal?"

  Aetius looked away.

  Carta said, "Yes. Until things get back to normal."

  Regina looked about more brightly. "Where's my mother?" None of the adults would reply. "My mother isn't here, is she?"

  Aetius sighed. "Now, Regina—"

  "You promised me."

  His mouth opened and closed. "Well, that's jolly unfair. I promised no such thing."

  "Liar. Liar."

  Carta tried to subdue her. "Oh, Regina—"

  "She doesn't want me. She's sent me away."

  "It's not like that," Aetius said. "She loves you — she will always love you. Look — she asked me to give you this." From a fold of his tunic he produced the precious silver dragon brooch.

  She dashed it from his hand; it fell to the coarse grass, where it gleamed. She turned on Cartumandua. "And don't you dare pick it up, Carta! I never want to see it again."

  Cartumandua flinched from the command in her voice.

  And that was when the tears came, in a sudden flood, sudden as a rainstorm. Aetius folded her in his arms, and she felt Carta's small hand on her shoulder. She wept for her mother and herself, as the carriage clattered its way the last few paces toward the Wall.

  Chapter 6

  I took Vivian's advice and set off in search of my sister.

  I booked some overdue leave. I had no trouble getting it through my line manager, or even through the Nazi killer robots who ran Human Resources. But I saw the way their gazes slid away from me as I handed over the forms and explained my vague plans. My days at Hyf were numbered. To hell with it.

  I drove north, listening to news radio all the way. Along with the sports and the useless traffic bulletins, the main topic of the day was undoubtedly the Kuiper Anomaly. Absorbed with my own affairs, I just hadn't noticed the way this thing had continued to mushroom in the public consciousness.

  Reaching Manchester at around ten that evening, I drove to the city center, to the hotel I'd stayed in before. I actually parked the car. But I didn't get out. I remembered what Vivian had said: reconnect. I shouldn't be here.

  I turned the car around and drove out to the suburbs. I canceled my hotel reservation with my cell phone.

  There was a real estate agent's sign outside my father's house. I hesitated to disturb Peter, but when I knocked on his door he was awake — I heard the hum of PC cooling fans; perhaps he was working — and he was happy enough to give me a key. I let myself into Dad's house. Inside it was warm and clean, but of course it was stripped of furniture; somehow I hadn't been able to imagine it this way. There were pale patches on the wallpaper where furniture had stood for years. Empty or not it still managed to smell musty.

  To my chagrin I finished up knocking on Peter's door again. I borrowed a sleeping bag, pillow, and flask of tea. I spent the night on the thick carpet of my old bedroom. Lulled by the sound of distant trains passing in the night, immersed in a familiar ambience, I slept as well as I had in years.

  • • •

  In the morning, around eight, Peter showed up. It was a bright, fresh morning, the sky a deep blue. He brought soap, towels, a glass of orange juice, and an invitation to come over for breakfast. I accepted, but I promised myself I'd get to the shops and stock up as soon as I'd eaten.

  Set on the other side of the road, Peter's house was a mirror image of my father's, the staircase and rooms eerily transposed from left to right. I went in there with some trepidation: this was the domain of Peter the solitary weirdo, after all. Well, it was plainly decorated, so far as I could see, with bland pastel paint hiding old wallpaper. The furniture looked a little old, and certainly wasn't modish, but it wasn't shabby. There were bookcases everywhere, even in the hall. The books seemed neatly ordered, but not obsessively so.

  Peter wore a gray sweat suit of soft fabric, and thick mountaineer's socks — no shoes or slippers.

  We consumed Alpen and coffee in the kitchen. I told him I'd seen him on TV, and we talked about the media frenzy over Kuiper. Peter said it was all to do with positive feedback.

  "It's like that Mars story a few years back. You know, where they found fossil bacteria in a meteorite—"

  "Thought they found."

  "And Clinton zipped himself up long enough to pronounce that NASA had discovered life on Mars. Suddenly it was everywhere. The story itself became the story." It was the nature of the world's modern media, he told me. "The days when news was controlled by a few outlets, the big networks, are long gone. Now you have CNN, Sky, Internet news sites: thousands of sources of news at local, national, and international level. And they all watch each other. A story sparks into life somewhere. The other outlets watch the story and the reaction to it, and pick up on it..." He was overfamiliar with this stuff, and tended to talk too rapidly, using specialist jargon, words like mediasphere. He showed me an editorial he'd clipped from the Guardian decrying the bubble of hysteria over Kuiper. "There's even news about news, which itself becomes part of the story. It usually finishes with a spasm of self-loathing. 'What This Hysteria Says About Our Society.' Pathological, really. But it shows the kind of world we live in now. We're all densely interconnected, like it or not, and this kind of feedback loop happens all the time."

  Densely interconnected. For some reason that phrase appealed to me. "But the fuss about Kuiper has been good for you," I said.

  "Oh, yes," he said. "It's been good for me."

  Cradling our second mugs of coffee, Peter led me into his living room. Beyond a big double-glazed picture window, a garden glowed green in the soft light of the autumn morning. The room obviously served as an office. In addition to a music stack and wide-screen TV with various recorders and set-top boxes, there was a large table given over to computer technology: a big powerful-looking desktop, a laptop, various handhelds, a scanner, a joystick, and other bits of gear I couldn't recognize. The desktop was booted up. There were books and stacks of printouts on the desk and on the floor.

  All this looked like the environment of a freelancer working at home. But there was no sense of style, and a certain lack of ornamentation and decoration — no photographs, for instance — a lack of personality.

  The only exception was in the little alcove over the fireplace. In my home my parents used to keep silly souvenirs in there — tiny wooden clogs from Amsterdam, a little Eiffel Tower, other family knickknacks. Peter had set up a little row of die-cast model toys. Intrigued, I asked, "May I?" Peter shrugged. I reached up and brought down a fat green aircraft. It was a Thunderbird Two, heavy and metallic-cold. I turned it upside, trying to see a manufacturer's date. Something rattled in its pod. On the edges of the wings and along the base the paintwork was chipped and worn away.

  "It's a Dinky original. Nineteen sixty-seven," Peter said.

  I cradled it in my hands like a baby bird. "I never had one of these. My parents got me a plastic snap-together substitute."

  "Without a detachable pod? I sympathize."

  "They didn't understand. This must be worth something."

  He took it back and restored it to its place. "No. Not without the original box, and it's hardly in mint condition."

  "Much loved, though."

  "Oh, yes."

  I stepped toward the big gear-laden table. I could smell Johnson's Pledge, I realized, and it struck me that the Thunderbird toy had been free of dust. Up on the desktop screen was what looked like a prototype Web
page. It was complex, crowded, and partly animated; it showed stanzas of music that cycled rapidly, along with a kind of binary code I didn't recognize. Peter stood awkwardly beside the table, big hands wrapped around his coffee cup.

  "This is your work? — Peter, I hate to admit it, but I don't know a damn thing about what you do now you're retired from the cops."

  He shrugged. "After the funeral you had other things on your mind." There was a note in his voice, a subtext. I'm used to it. "But you got interested when you saw me on TV. Well, that's okay. I make a living from Web design, mostly corporate sites, and game design."

  "Games?"

  "Web-based, multiuser. I was always good at computer games. It's something to do with a facility for spotting patterns in patchy and disparate information, I think. It made me a good copper, too. That and being out of control."

  "Out of control?"

  He grinned, self-deprecating. "You knew me, George. I was never much in control of anything about my life. I was always awkward socially — I could never figure out what was going on, stuff other people seemed able to read without thinking about it." He was right about that. In later years, we, his friends, even speculated he might be mildly autistic. He said, "You see, I'm used to being in situations where I don't know the rules, and yet making my way forward anyhow. Decoding a chaotic landscape."

  "So is this one of your games?"

  "It's a personal project."

  I pointed at the screen. "I see music, but I don't recognize it. Some kind of encryption system?"

  "Sort of, but that's not the purpose." He seemed briefly embarrassed, but he faced me, determined. "It's a SETI site."

  "SETI?"

  "Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence."

  "Oh, right."

  He talked quickly. "We've spent forty years now listening for radio whispers from the sky. But that's twentieth-century thinking. If you were an ETI, and you wanted to learn something about the Earth, what would you study? What better than the Internet? It's by far the largest, most organized information source on the planet."

  I said carefully, "You imagine aliens are logging on?"

  "Well, why not? You'd learn a lot more about humankind than by sticking a probe up the rectum of a farmer from Kansas." He seemed to sense what I was thinking. He grimaced. "Let's just say I've been intrigued by the possibility of extraterrestrial life on Earth since the first showing of Fireball XL-Five. Haven't you?"

  "I suppose so. But you've stayed interested. You've become — um, an expert on this stuff."

  "As much as anybody is. I'm plugged into the right networks, I suppose. My name is known. Which is how I got on the TV."

  "And your site is designed to catch their attention?" I peered at it. "It looks a little busy."

  "Well, I doubt an ETI is going to be interested in snazzy Web page design. The site is information-rich, though — you're looking at the works of Chopin, here, rendered in compressed binary — and encoded in forms that ought to make it easy for the ETIs to pick up. Bait, you see. And if the ETIs do find my site — look, this is a long shot, but it's cheap to set up and maintain... and the payoff would be of incalculable value. Isn't it worth trying? I'm not alone in this," he said, a bit defensively. "There's a network of researchers, mostly in the States..."

  He told me something of a bizarre-sounding online community of like minds. "We call ourselves the Slan(t)." He had to write that down for me. "Slan is an old science fiction reference — made up to date, you see... It sums up how we see ourselves. The Slan(t)ers are a new kind of community, a bunch of outsiders, the fringe united by new technology."

  "I bet there are a lot of Californians."

  He grinned. "As it happens, yeah. It was set up long before I joined." He said there was no hierarchy to Slan(t); it was all "bottom-up." "It's a self-organizing community. The hardest thing to model online is social interaction — the kind of unconscious feedback we humans give each other face to face, feedback that moderates behavior. So we devised a system where we would moderate each other's contributions to the clickstream. If you are uncivil, or just plain uninteresting, your scores go down, and everybody sees."

  "A bit like eBay."

  "Like that, yes."

  "Plenty of scope for bullying."

  "But that's antisocial, too, and there are always plenty of people who would mark the bully down accordingly. It works. It is homeostatic — actually another example of feedback. But this time it's negative feedback that tends to make a system stable, rather than drive it out of control." He talked on, describing the Slan(t)ers' projects.

  I felt awkward. This was the kind of conversation we'd had as kids at school, or later as booze-fueled students: excitable, complex, full of ideas, the more outlandish the better. Peter had always been good at that, because he'd learned to be. Whereas other fat kids, it's said, get a break from bullying by being funny, Peter's defense was to have wilder ideas than anybody else. But now it wasn't the same. We weren't kids anymore.

  And there was something else I couldn't quite read in the way he spoke, this big, clumsy man with folded hands and his habit of adjusting invisible spectacles, talking earnestly. I had the impression of shadows, ranked behind him in the electronic dark, as if Peter was just a front for a whole network of densely interconnected, like-minded obsessives, all working for ends I didn't understand.

  Anyhow Slan(t) sounded like one giant computer game to me. "Interesting."

  "You don't really think so," he said. "But that's okay."

  "But now," I said, "perhaps we do see the aliens, in the Kuiper Anomaly. Isn't that what you've been saying on TV?"

  "That's obviously a gross signature of something out there. Yes, it's exciting." His face was closed. "But I have a feeling that the origin of the Anomaly is going to turn out to be stranger than we think. And besides, it's not the only bit of evidence we have."

  "It isn't?"

  "Perhaps there are traces out there, if you know how to look. Traces of life, of other minds at work. But they're fragmentary, difficult for us to recognize and interpret. But I, well, as I told you I have this facility for pattern matching."

  I looked into my coffee cup, wondering how I could get out of the conversation politely.

  But he had rotated his chair until he faced the desktop, and was briskly working a mouse. Images flickered over the screen. He settled on a star field — obviously color-enhanced — the stars were yellow, crimson, blue, against a purple-black background. Around a central orange-white pinpoint were two concentric rings, like smoke rings. The inner one was quite fine, but the outer, perhaps four times its diameter, was fatter, brighter. Both the rings were off-center, and ragged, lumpy, broken.

  I searched for something to say. "It looks like a Fireball XL-Five end credit."

  Sometimes he lacked humor. "Fireball was in black and white."

  "Tell me what I'm seeing, Peter."

  "It's the center of the Galaxy," he said. "Twenty-five thousand light-years away. A reconstruction, of course, from infrared, X-ray, gamma ray, radio images, and the like; the light from the center doesn't reach us because of dust clouds. The sun is one of four hundred billion stars, stuck out in a small spiral arm — you know the Galaxy is a spiral. At the core, everything is much more crowded. And everything is big and bright. It's Texas in there." He pointed at the image. "Some of these 'stars' are actually clusters. These rings are clouds of gas and dust; the outer one is maybe a hundred light-years across."

  "And the bright object at the center—"

  "Another star cluster. Very dense. It's thought there is a black hole in there, with the mass of a million suns."

  "I don't see any aliens."

  He traced out the rings. "These rings are expanding. Hundreds of miles a second. And the less structured clouds are hot, turbulent. It's thought that the big rings are debris from massive explosions in the core. There was a giant bang about a million years ago. The most recent eruption seems to have been twenty-seven thousand year
s ago. The light took twenty-five thousand years to get here — it arrived about two thousand years ago; the Romans might have seen something... If you look wider you can see the debris of more explosions, reaching much deeper back in time, some of them still more immense."

  "Explosions?"

  "Nobody knows what causes them. Stars are simple objects, George, physically speaking. So are galaxies, even. Much simpler than bacteria, say. There really shouldn't be such mysteries. I think it's possible we're seeing intelligence there — or rather stupidity."

  I laughed, but it was a laugh of wonder at the audacity of the idea. "The Galaxy center as a war zone?"

  He didn't laugh. "Why not?"

  I felt chilled, but I had no clear idea why. "And how does Kuiper fit into this?"

  "Well, I've no idea. Not yet." He pulled up an image of his own face on CNN. "I'm hoping that if I can tap into the interest in Kuiper, I'll get resources to push some of these questions farther. For instance, there may be links between the core explosions and Earth's past."

  "Links?"

  "Possibly the explosions tie in with extinction events, for instance."

  "I thought an asteroid impact killed off the dinosaurs."

  "That was a one-off. There have been eighteen other events. You can see it in the fossil record. Eighteen that we know of..."

  I lifted my mug to my lips, but found it drained of coffee. I put the mug on the computer table and stood. "I ought to start my day."

  He looked at me doubtfully. "I've gone on too long. I'm sorry; I don't get much chance to talk; most people wouldn't listen at all... You think I'm a crank."

  "Not at all."

  "Of course you do." He stood, looming over me, and grinned. Again there was that disarming self-deprecation, and I sensed, uncomfortable again, that he really was glad to have renewed his connection with me, regardless of my reaction. "Maybe I am a crank. But that doesn't mean the questions aren't valid. Anyhow, you're the one with the abducted sister."