Eclipse

by K. A. Bedford

  The old man raised his eyebrows. “All the more reason, then, we have to find a way to communicate with these fellows. Learn their secrets.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  “Though just how we might manage that…” He trailed off, chuckling at the enormity of the task. Where to even start? The creatures had no discernible head, though they did have a series of long, thick, muscular extensions resembling whips projecting from one end of their bodies, which, unlike the rest of their surface, were not segmented. In the creatures’ dormant state, with several specimens curled around each other in a kind of spiral, the whip-like appendages were used, apparently, for holding the clump of creatures together.

  “May I ask a further question, sir?” I asked, thinking about all this now.

  Grantleigh looked bemused at my formality. “You may,” he intoned.

  “You want to communicate with the creatures, sir. But how are we going to keep them alive, let alone wake them to the point where we can begin to learn how to talk to them?”

  Grantleigh managed a weak laugh. “That’s a very good question, son. How indeed?”

  Seven

  Rudyard ordered the ship’s boat, its personnel and its cargo quarantined outside the ship for a week while Eclipse biologists studied us for contamination. It was a long week. In theory, nothing could penetrate the active diamond-fiber fabric of our environment suits. They were designed to ­generate nanophages to hunt down and kill foreign ­microbes, or at least to isolate them for later study. And even in the unlikely event of the suit sustaining a tear or cut, it would fix itself; the process looked like millions of microscopic spiders building webs of glistening strands in a big hurry. But Rudyard was taking no chances.

  During this week of isolation, Rudyard and the ship’s psychology staff debriefed us about our experience with the alien vessel. I suffered through maddening hours of testing and conceptual simulations of the sort where no given choice is necessarily right or wrong, but reveals volumes about your state of mind. In these tests I was often returned to the time I spent crawling around the reticula of the other ship, reliving the hallucinations and memory-flashes, only sometimes a voice would appear in my head to ask in a bland voice, “Why did you take this turn here?” and “Why did you think of this event at this moment?”

  And some of the time, during these long and annoying sessions, I found myself thinking about Sorcha, wanting to tell her about something I saw during the mission, or something funny Grantleigh said, or even, maybe, tell her a little about just how shit-scared I was in that black muck. It didn’t seem like something you could talk to the docs about without them looking at you funny. I knew their type from the Academy. Sorcha, on the other hand, I thought, I could talk to her. And that made the docs ask what I found so amusing.

  And hardest of all, “How do you feel about the creatures you found?” The psychologists refused, as ever, to discuss the results of these tests.

  I noticed that Ferguson, Grantleigh, and Blackmore were in worse shape at the end of the isolation week than I was. Where I was simply bored and anxious to get back to my helm training, the three senior officers were having screaming matches interspersed with long, tense periods consisting of pointedly ignoring each other, or staring at each other in frosty silence before one or all would stalk off, leaving a churning wake of malice. Grantleigh and Blackmore argued about who owned their data, and who owned which conclusions. Ferguson pointed out that all research data and conclusions belonged first of all to the Service, and second of all to the Home System Community government. Besides which, everything was subject to official secrets sanctions.

  The scientists kept fighting, Ferguson kept trying to maintain order. And probably trying to deal with his own encounter with what Grantleigh had called the “Great Other.” One time, during an argument that I thought would come to blows, Ferguson screamed at them, “At this rate I’m thinking I might just chuck the bloody specimens overboard and to hell with all of you jumped-up bastards!” Which reignited the fight.

  This tension was hard to avoid; the three of them ­radiated their anger like failed stars. Blackmore spent most of her time in the cargo hold, going over data she regarded as her own. Ferguson spent as much of his time as he could up front in the command deck, talking to Rudyard in the cloud. Grantleigh spent his time, when the three weren’t warring, floating before the creatures’ isolation tank, watching the thick black opacity of the buffer medium behind the armored plastic wall. He was getting sonar, radar, infrared and other sensor feeds coming straight into his headware; he could essentially see the creatures in the tank. They had taken to clumping, apparently for the heat. Sometimes they moved their whip things, trailing them slowly around in the jelly, touching, stroking each other’s bodies in particular locations. They remained relatively inactive. I didn’t know what to make of them. Grantleigh asked me one day, as he floated there watching them, “Perhaps, Mr. Dunne, those whips are analogous to sense organs, what do you think?”

  I assumed he was still talking to me because nobody else was. “Possibly, sir. I don’t know. Have you got any dirty plates or cups there?”

  I noticed, too, that there was a faint smell in this area, the smell of that jelly material, which was technically impossible. We had phages going all the time, sweeping up anything that didn’t belong. And the containment tank was electron-leakproof, with various fancy backups.

  I remembered Ferguson asking earlier in the week, “And you’re sure nothing can get out of there?” and Blackmore saying, “The only way out of that tank is quantum tunneling.” She looked smug, saying this. Ferguson reminded her that he would record this assurance of hers in the mission log for future reference. Quantum tunneling? I knew the chances of particles from inside the tank quantum tunneling out into the bay were astronomically remote, but still non-zero.

  “Do you smell that, sir?” I asked, sniffing with great care.

  “Dunne?”

  “Do you smell something in the air?”

  He squinted, staring into middle distance. “Ship — run a foreign particle scan in this area, excluding the isolation tank.” The ship’s boat reported finding nothing abnormal in the entire defined space.

  Grantleigh said, “I think we’re all going a little space-happy, son.” He looked even more tired now. None of us was sleeping well. Those arguments were getting everyone uptight.

  He was probably right. I couldn’t smell anything strange now, either. I pushed myself a little closer to the isolation tank; it was immense, three meters on a side, like a cubic chunk cut out of space. There was something intimidating about it, even a little scary. I could see why Grantleigh spent so much time here, communing with it. Even without the feeds pouring information into my head, I found simply being there compelling, as if at any moment something would happen, something important. It was hard to say if these creatures were as intelligent as we were; we wouldn’t know that for a long time. Whoever had made the creatures’ ship and launched it, on the other hand, was certainly at least at our level, if the technical sophistication of the mass-conversion drive system was any guide.

  Why had these creatures been launched into the void like this? Each of the chambers containing the creatures was physically sealed off from the reticula winding through the vessel. None of the chambers showed any sign of food storage, or waste disposal systems. There was no obvious bridge or command center from which a crew could guide the ship and we found none of the creatures outside the chambers. An automated ship sent off and forgotten? Colonists or exiles? The Holy Chosen or the Despised? The lack of anything we recognized as artwork or writing perplexed us. Besides the vessel itself, all we had were the glass spheres.

  Blackmore speculated that these things might be some kind of communication/information machines, but until we established some kind of contact, there was no way to tell. The layout of the pits and grooves on th
e surface of the spheres seemed to match up with the dimensions of the creatures’ grabbers, but there were other features we didn’t recognize. Inside the spheres we saw what looked like a central core surrounded by complex structures linked by fine tubes, and a suggestion of what looked like photonic circuitry. There were also small bodies or structures near the surface whose function we couldn’t guess. Looked at one way, the spheres looked like sophisticated technology, but from other angles they looked like nothing so much as large spherical cells.

  One of Blackmore’s projects during our week of quarantine was the detailed examination of one such sphere. She threw every sensing, measuring, and scanning resource we had at it, looking for information she couldn’t see with her own enhanced eyes. Blackmore didn’t share her data with Grantleigh, or anyone else. I didn’t even bother asking her about it. To her I was just a dumb kid with no place on the mission. She hadn’t told me this in so many words, but it was obvious from her monosyllabic answers to the questions I was allowed to ask her: “Can I get you something to eat, Dr. Blackmore?” or “Are you finished with that tray, Dr. Blackmore?”

  The three senior officers spent most of that week either fighting or giving each other the silent treatment, as I said, but there was something else going on. Watching them yell and scream at each other with Ferguson abusing them in his gutter manner and the scientists shooting back at him and at each other with their terribly witty diatribes, their too-smart verbal thrusts and parries, I had the feeling that there was more to all this than was apparent. The main issue, on the surface, was the ownership of data and ideas. There was talk about media contracts — until Ferguson stepped in and reminded them, again, about official ­secrets. But the noise and viciousness of the fighting seemed too intense for such an issue. The close confines of the boat’s public areas weren’t helping matters, either. We’d been in each other’s armpits for weeks now, engaged in difficult, filthy, exhausting work. With little opportunity for the exercise needed to maintain muscle and bone in zero-g, we were forced to rely on nanobots racing around our ­bodies rebuilding tissue as fast as we lost it. It wasn’t a good solution, nothing is as effective as doing the ­exercise and maintaining the diet, but it was all we could manage. Cleanliness and hygiene were difficult to maintain, too. As hard as the bots worked to remove flakes of skin and bits of hair, there was still the uncomfortable reality of smelling each other’s bodily odors.

  Yet there still seemed something more serious underlying the huge fights they had. I knew that credit for ­scientific findings and discoveries was a life-and-death ­issue among professional scientists. Having your name on the paper announcing a major new discovery was critically important, not only for keeping your job, and meeting strict publication quotas, but also to make sure that when the big prizes, such as the Nobel, were handed out, you got to stand on that stage in New Copenhagen, and be part of scientific history.

  But I didn’t think this was all that Grantleigh and Blackmore were fighting about. I think there was something much bigger at work, the idea that we had reached a watershed moment in human history: we had found a border in what we had thought a borderless universe. Before this singular moment it had been possible to lay out general big-picture forecasts of how human expansion across interstellar space might proceed. From now on, however, nobody could say how things might go. To me, this was exciting and scary. I didn’t know what to expect, but I was cautiously looking forward to seeing what came next. Grantleigh, Blackmore and Ferguson, on the other hand apparently could not begin to comprehend the significance of all this. Or perhaps they could comprehend it all too well, but couldn’t make the next mental leap, to enlarge their picture of life in the galaxy to include more than the only child that was us. I think this is what Grantleigh was trying to find between the lines of all the data he was taking in from the isolation tank, and what Blackmore was trying to find in her study of the spheres: the key to understanding a completely new world, a world with edges, with other modes of intelligence.

  I wrote to Sorcha the last night of our quarantine, and I went over this idea. She wrote back an hour later, ­saying, in part:

  “I think you have a point there, James. We are going through a classically Kuhnian paradigm ­crisis right now, one limited to the crew of Eclipse. Once we get back to human space, I imagine word of what we found out here in the dark will escape somehow, and the official secrets regs be damned. By the time some clever member of the crew shunts a bundle of information through a variety of anonymous mail routers, with some suitably cool crypto wrapped around it, I can’t see how the Service could prevent the memes spreading, even by backtracking through all those mail systems to find out who started the wave.

  “And I think it will be a wave, like a tsunami, hardly noticeable while out in the deep water, ­racing along at hundreds of kilometers per hour, a slight bump amid the general surface clutter, but once it hits shallow water, it will get much, much bigger. This tsunami will swamp all of human space. If there’s trouble brewing on dozens of worlds and orbitals now in the wake of all the speculation about Kestrel, this will tip everyone over the edge, don’t you think? Imagine being at ground zero when all this goes off! Imagine being the Service trying to stop it! Probably they’ll try to put out a counter-meme to confuse people, bury the original story with more information, and yet more information after that. I wonder what they’ll do with actual witnesses, though…”

  Strapped into my vertical bunk that night, reading all this as it fed straight into my mind, I felt myself growing very warm, flushing with embarrassment — and a private happiness that Sorcha was sending me these amazing letters. I’d never received letters like these before, so ­vibrant and full of life. It was a little intoxicating. The other ­officers were all less than a meter away; I was close enough to feel their collective heat, smell their breath, hear their ­stomachs gurgle and grumble. And right there in my head Sorcha’s voice gleefully chatting about the vast chaos to come when the information tsunami hit, followed by greater waves of misinformation, all washing through the entire sweep of human space, occupying the minds of billions of people. The main trouble, I figured, was that Sorcha was just the kind of person who would start the wave, given the right motivation.

  And as I listened to her words, I found myself feeling sure that the others could hear them, too, that all this ­mischievous, provocative thought was somehow leaking out of my ears.

  I erased it immediately, feeling guilty for more reasons than one.

  Eight

  We returned from quarantine to the confines of the HMS Eclipse. The ship now felt and looked different. The fresh air was wonderful and having room to move around made me feel a little agoraphobic. I was told this was a natural feeling, the same way that when I returned to the ship and experienced gravity again, I felt heavier than I remembered, and more lethargic. The ship’s doctor prescribed us all a vigorous program of exercise and high-calcium dietary supplements, and a range of electrolyte boosters to help repair the damage the circulating nanobots hadn’t been able to remedy. We had weekly appointments scheduled with the psychologists, too, to help us deal with residual effects of what we had experienced over there. Of course, I swore to myself that I was fine, I was young and ­re­silient, that I didn’t need all this coddling; the older officers, on the other hand, were obviously in need of expert help, as I saw it. I planned not to bother going to the psychologist appointments, deciding I would be too busy getting back into the routine of helm training.

  On our fourth day back, the Contact Team met, along with Captain Rudyard, this time in person. I wondered why we weren’t meeting over the cloud, as usual; I assumed there must be some sort of ­security issue. We were stuck in a small room on Deck E, crowded around a display table and sitting on the same utilitarian chairs used in the Mess. I could see things between Grantleigh, Ferguson, and Blackmore were still tense. Blackmore sat next to me and wasn’t talking to Grantlei
gh, except in a strictly formal, all-business capacity. She kept her folder of display sheets separate from the others, and sat as far away from Grantleigh and Ferguson as possible. Ferguson, for his part, looked fed up with the whole business, and wanted only to get through it. He scowled from his end of the table, tapping his blunt ­fingers on the table-top, and hardly touched his chess pawn. Grantleigh watched the others, looking aloof, detached, and a little amused. The captain, at the head of the rectangular table, seemed as fidgety as his executive officer, but also very tired. He sat rigidly and only the sound of one of his feet tapping on the floor gave away his agitation.

  The meeting was routine, and proceeded quickly, ­despite its contentious subject matter. The scientists reported new findings, interesting data, challenged conclusions. They sounded like first-year Academy cadets in ­debating class, speaking formally and with great and crisp precision, lest their slightest word be taken the wrong way. I had seen my parents talk like this during that stage of a fight when both parties are tired of being misunderstood.

  The alien creatures and their isolation tank had been installed in a room like this one with a viewing gallery for human observers to watch and monitor the data feeds from overhead. Grantleigh informed us that we were close to working out their biochemistry, and understanding their cellular machinery, metabolism, and genome. So far the creatures conformed to known biology. Blackmore then ­explained, with pointed detail, about the effort to warm and dilute the jelly material, with the aim of establishing a warm-liquid environment; studies of the creatures’ exoskeletons and interior structures suggested they might be warm-blooded in their natural state, as counterintuitive as that seemed.

  A parallel line of study was investigating the glass sphere objects, including such measures as stripping one apart atom by atom and studying the apparent circuitry and structures visible within. Grantleigh and Blackmore differed in their interpretations of what the spheres were for, heatedly debating whether the objects were technological artifacts, some kind of inert art object, or perhaps even toys. Blackmore held that the spheres could even be naturally occurring formations from the creatures’ home world — souvenirs from home!