by Stan Ruecker
“You’re thinking about your alien thing, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. I’ve been thinking about it. How far do you think it’s spread?”
“Who knows? You’re the guy’s been watching it. As far as I know, nobody else even believes in it.”
“It’s there all right. I’d bet you anything it is. I know it is. I’ve watched it.”
“Okay,” Steve said, “you don’t have to convince me. So why don’t you isolate the places you’ve found it, and take it out?”
“I’d have to cut the connections. People wouldn’t actually be thrilled, would they?”
“Just send a message ahead of time. Tell them you need whatever it is for like routine maintenance or something. Nobody cares. Then you cut it out, clean it up, and put it back.”
“And what about the major gateways? As far as I know, it’s still confined itself to Mid-South. But it’s got to hit those gates any day now.”
“As soon as somebody moves a batch through one of them, would be my guess.”
“So what’ve we got scheduled?”
“There’s a backup run out of accounting in a couple of days. They put an image up on Top-West. From there I don’t know. If I were you, I’d see if you couldn’t close the gate for a day or two.”
“No way,” Kevin said. “Unless we were maybe doing something on the computer that runs it.”
“How about a software upgrade? But we’d have to really do one.”
“Who would know? We put the same gate back on it. Or actually, we just turn it off and say it’s getting an upgrade.”
“Or we could just be defragging the drives or something. You know, the usual hocus pocus.”
“Who normally does maintenance on the Mid-South to Top-West gate? We’ll have to let them in on the secret.”
“I do,” Steve answered, and grinned. “And it’s going to cost you a case of beer.”
Descent into methane world
The clouds were even more spectacular from up close. They swirled around each other like neopolitan ice cream with floodlights inside it.
“Look at that,” Ray said. “Is that some kind of lightning out there?”
“Sort of,” Lucy said. “It sure is colourful, though, isn’t it?”
Lucy had put up a large video display on the bulkhead of Ray’s cabin.
“Are we in any danger?” Ray asked, as the entire room lit up for a second with a vivid green.
“Not particularly,” Lucy said. “I’m shielded against quite a bit.”
“I don’t suppose you’d like to give me the details?” Ray said.
“I could look them up, I guess,” Lucy admitted. “But I don’t know if we could figure out what the textbooks said.”
“Never mind,” Ray answered. “How much further to the surface?”
“Another half hour, assuming there is a surface,” Lucy answered.
“Assuming there is a surface?”
“There isn’t always. Sometimes there’s sort of a thickening of the muck, but nothing you would consider an actual surface. We should know before we get there, though.”
A trail of lightning marked out a complicated geometric pattern in red.
“How the heck does that work?” Ray asked.
“Must be some kind of contacts at the vertices,” Lucy conjectured. “Lightning always attracts to the closest point.”
“So there’s something solid there.”
“Or just a different configuration of electrical charge.”
Ray reached down to the floor and picked up Cinnamon’s ball.
“Here you go,” he whispered, and tossed it out into the corridor. Cinnamon crashed around the corner in pursuit.
“I’m surprised we can see at all,” he told Lucy. “I thought the clouds would be solid.”
“Not usually,” Lucy said. “They look pretty thick from outside the atmosphere, but there’s lots of local variation once you get inside. Earth’s a bit the same way, if you get a really cloudy day. But there’s a difference there, too, since the clouds are mostly water vapour. Here you’ve got a variety of gasses making up the clouds, so you get their interactions going too.”
A large, dark patch suddenly obscured everything.
“What was that?” Ray asked, shaken.
“I’m not sure,” Lucy said. “Maybe it was one of the natives.”
“Could you tell where it was going?”
“It was past terminal velocity, I can tell you that much,” Lucy said.
“So it’s leaving the planet.”
“Yeah.”
Ray paused for a minute, watching the rolling of a fuchsia cloud. Cinnamon got a second of his attention with the ball, and he took it out of her mouth to throw again.
“When you said ‘one of the natives,’ you meant one of their ships, right?”
“Not necessarily. Some people get pretty big. It depends on the gravity. In this environment I’d expect they might be big and flat.”
“If it was a ship,” Ray said, “it would probably be made out of metal, wouldn’t it?”
“Usually it would,” Lucy admitted, “but I’ve seen ships made out of a few other things, too.”
“Ceramics,” Ray suggested. “Plastics.”
“Some of them aren’t all that solid,” Lucy said. “Magnetic fields. Localized gravitational envelopes.”
Cinnamon came back in and stopped coyly just out of reach.
“Cool,” Ray said.
“And the people themselves might have a high metal content. They do breathe methane, remember?”
“Metal content,” Ray said. “But it was moving pretty fast for a person.”
“True.”
Ray made a sudden grab, got the ball away.
“Did it have a high metal content?” he asked.
“No.”
Ray threw the ball again.
Someone finally notices
Kevin was hurrying down his usual shortcut corridor, knocking a few minutes off his travel time from the cafeteria by cutting through an area that wasn’t really for public traffic, when his boss’s boss suddenly appeared out of a doorway in front of him. At first Kevin thought it would be just another “Hi, how are you?” in the hallway, but the man actually looked right at him.
“Fliegel,” he said. “You’re the programmer Fliegel, right?”
“Yes, sir,” Kevin answered, trying desperately to remember the man’s name. It was important to know who your boss’s boss was. “We met at the Christmas party,” he said to cover his confusion.
“Of course we did,” the man said. “I remember. I was talking to Karen, just the other day, a normal productivity review, you know, and she mentioned you were working on a pet project.”
Kevin gulped, and tried to think fast.
“Yeah,” he admitted, “I sort of am.”
Delacroix, he thought. Maybe Delacroix. Or was it Lawrence? Then he realized he was still being stared at, that there was some agenda going on that he didn’t know.
“It isn’t on company time,” he said, hurriedly covering himself.
“Oh no,” Delacroix said, or maybe it was Lawrence. “Karen didn’t say anything like that. In fact she was quite impressed with the way you’ve been working. Lots of late nights, she said. She gave me the idea you were quite a good worker.”
“Thank you,” he said. “That was nice of her.”
“But about this project. What exactly is it that you’re working on?”
Kevin stammered a couple of times, then finally got started.
“It’s kind of hard to say,” he said. “I think it has something to do with that ship that was here.”
“Ship.”
“You know—the alien probe.”
Jeez, Kevin thought. What do these guys do for a living, anyway?
“You mean the anomaly,” the man said.
“Anomaly?”
“There was an electromagnetic anomaly,” the man explained, sounding patient with a fool. “It prod
uced a ghost on the monitoring system that some people mistook for a strange spaceship. But it was just a glitch. It’s been fixed.”
Kevin bit at his lower lip.
“Okay,” he said. “Whatever. But at about the same time there was that anomaly, something started to act funny with the computer system.”
“Funny?” the guy asked.
“It’s hard to explain,” Kevin said. “But it’s something that I think is hiding itself. Not just in the working code, but right down to the data, the drive tables, everything. It doesn’t seem to differentiate between primary and secondary storage, either.”
“That’s fine,” McArthy said. Kevin suddenly grinned to himself. McArthy. Of course it was McArthy. Not too bright. He’d heard him trying to hit on somebody at the Christmas party, talking like a tech to make an impression. Only he’d gotten it all wrong, and the woman was only filling in as a graphics artist. She was actually a senior programmer analyst with a background in board design.
“It isn’t a problem, though,” Kevin started to say, “I’ve already isolated all the equipment it was on, and I’ve gone through each system and—”
But McArthy had already slipped back into his office.
“—cleaned it out,” Kevin said. “It wasn’t easy,” he added, but nobody was listening.
Kevin resumed his quick walk home for another bout with the virus. You’ve really got to wonder, Kevin thought. With guys like him running the place.
The planet with no centre
It took them several hours to get deep enough into the atmosphere to realize it was all atmosphere.
“Ray,” Lucy said, “we’re going to just go right through this and come out on the other side.”
“You mean there’s no planet here?”
“Not exactly. There is sort of a thickening going on, but it isn’t anything you could call solid.”
“How do you evolve higher life forms without a planet?”
“I don’t see why a planet has anything to do with it. It seems to me there’s plenty of life everywhere. I’ve certainly seen a lot of it.”
“How do the proteins get started?”
“Oh, you know. Swimming around in water, stuck in mud, floating in smog. Proteins are always happy to get started, Ray.”
“Then where are all the people?”
“They must move around. Whatever it was that flew past us on the way down is probably a clue.”
“But we didn’t track where it was headed.”
“Not through these clouds we didn’t. I wouldn’t know left from right in here if it weren’t that the gravity gets stronger as you move inward.”
“Did you get to see enough of it to know its trajectory?”
“I guess so. I saw it for several seconds through the clouds, and it seemed to be moving in a fairly predictable line.”
“Can you show me?”
Lucy put it up on a video display, overlaying the course the object had followed onto a globe of the methane world.
“Now can you give me the movement of that moon we were on?”
Lucy overlaid the trajectory of the moon. Sure enough, the two lines intersected.
“It’s just a guess,” Ray said, “but I’d say whatever it was is headed up onto that moon.”
“Interesting.”
“Maybe we’re on the wrong track. If everyone who lives on this planet is really just flying around in the soup, maybe we would have done better to wait and see if anybody came out and visited the moon.”
“Assuming they go there regularly.”
“Something left those blocks behind.”
“So you think we should go back?”
“Couldn’t hurt,” Ray said. “Unless you can think of some other way of getting someone’s attention.”
“Not off hand. We aren’t going to get very far with radio waves. Not in this goop.”
“X-rays?”
“They aren’t very safe.” I’d hate to annoy anybody.”
“Safe?” Ray said. “In here?”
“I suppose. But the atmosphere blocks a lot of radiation. You don’t have the same kind of shielding in place against high gravity and methane that you have against radiation.”
“I suppose that’s true. I never thought about it before.”
“People think you’re tough,” Lucy said, “and they think you’re universally tough. But what usually happens is that you’re tough in some ways but weak in others. Everybody has their weaknesses.”
“Is that right? What are your weaknesses, Lucy?”
“I have trouble following orders.”
Trouble in India
After dinner, Giovanni invited Rachel to take a tour around the embassy.
“We won’t get anywhere near the accounts,” he promised his mother.
Rachel took his arm. “Never mind,” she told the ambassador. “I’m off duty.”
“Where first?” she asked Giovanni.
“How about the art gallery?”
“That sounds good.”
The two of them walked down a hallway until they were out of earshot of everyone else, and Rachel turned on her electronics sniffer. It showed clean.
“So what’s happening?” Giovanni asked.
“That’s what I was here to ask you about,” she said.
“Well,” he said. “It’s tough to know where to start.”
“Start with the main problem,” she said. “And give me the details later.”
“The Prime Minister of India is going to pass a bill,” he said, “that makes it illegal to manufacture computers.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Well, sort of. There isn’t going to be any problem with standard computers, but anything that reaches over the Turing threshold is going to be stopped.”
“That’s just loopy.”
“India’s a loopy country,” Giovanni said. “Ask anybody.”
“Doesn’t he know the computer industry is 17% of his gross national product?”
“I don’t know what he knows,” Giovanni said. “But there’s more.”
“What else?”
“It has to do with a human-rights coalition. They were just another fringe group ten years ago, no more than two or three million followers. But then they got some real money together, and now they’re making noise.”
“They’re the ones this bill is supposed to appease.”
“Right.”
Giovanni headed them into a side gallery full of Monets.
“What do they really want?”
“They think there should be a guarantee of jobs. One person, one job.”
“You’re kidding. There’s some religious fanatic behind it all, right?”
“Yeah. But the important thing is, they have enough votes to start swaying elections. They have only seven elected representatives, but they pull enough punch at the grassroots level to sway policy. They were responsible for getting all the Ryoki funding pulled last May.”
“Ryoki funding?” Rachel said. “You mean like farm equipment?”
“They also make a niche line of processor chips,” Giovanni explained. “Something to do with monitoring food preparation. It was supposed to be this big installation, all geared up for a market around the Pacific Rim, but it fell through.”
“And these fanatics put the kibosh on it.”
“Yeah. Foundation for the Preservation of Humanity.”
“We could all use a little more humanity,” Rachel said.
“I don’t think they know what they’re talking about, exactly,” Giovanni said.
Rachel sighed.
“So what do we do about it?” she asked.
“That’s up to you, as far as I know. My job is just to get you accurate information.”
“How secure is your e-mail?”
“I’m superuser for the embassy.”
“That’ll do,” Rachel said. “The next thing I need is a good profile of the person who’ll replace the prime minister.”
/> “I’ll put it together by Wednesday,” Giovanni promised.
While they walked back to the dining room, Rachel noticed at what point they came back under electronic surveillance: eight meters past the largest painting. She let Giovanni do all the talking, describing the various works of art they passed on the way. There had to be something wrong with her instructions. There was no way RISK wanted her to stop computer development in India. Maybe Giovanni just had the nature of the legislation backwards. Why couldn’t people provide reliable instructions? Rachel considered her options. She could e-mail Ted Jones directly and ask for clarification, but not if she wanted any chance of getting that promotion. You didn’t get anywhere in RISK by asking stupid questions. Clearly, the thing to do was put a stick in the wheel of the religious fanatics. But it wouldn’t hurt to get some more information together first, and preferably from another source than Giovanni.
Eavesdropping on a foreign language
There were three of the methane creatures on the moon when Lucy and Ray returned to orbit. They reminded Ray of mantas, or maybe skates, only the tails were missing. They varied in size from about twenty metres across to more than fifty metres.
“Look at that,” Ray said. “They sure are big. Do you think it was one of them that went past us?”
“I think so,” Lucy said. “The chemical composition matches.”
“Do you think we can talk to them?”
“I don’t know how they talk,” Lucy admitted.
The mantas were moving slowly across the surface of one of the fallen buildings. They seemed to be following one another in a complicated pattern, switching directions and circling.
“How close can we get?” Ray asked. “Can you increase the magnification on that display?”
“Yes,” Lucy said. “I don’t want to get too much closer physically, in case we either scare them off or trigger an attack or something. But there’s no reason we can’t watch them as closely as you want.”
“Zoom right in,” Ray said. “I’ve got a hunch.”
Lucy’s display slowly moved closer.
“Look at that,” Ray said. “Can you see that?”
“What?” Lucy sounded confused.
“The surface of that building.”
“You mean the one they’re moving on?” Lucy asked. “There’s nothing on it.”
“Not in front of them there isn’t. But look behind them.”
