“Why would they go through all the trouble to build a web around a star, then not finish it?” Matheson asked.
“That, sir, might be the most important question in convoy history.”
“How did the meeting go?” Sailuk asked when he entered their quarters, her round cheeks extraplumped by a welcoming smile.
“Fine,” he said with a shrug, then kissed her. “We still have no idea what it is. Any exciting medical emergencies today?”
She was still in her seafoam work jumper, which meant she’d stayed late aboard Hippocrates. “Thankfully, no. We did have a pregnancy scare, though, and had a panicked conference with Morgan and Eden via I.C.C. We were afraid the hormone injections in the food had failed. One pregnancy in the fleet would mean the entire convoy is at risk of naturally procreating. It was a false alarm, though. A small tumor, not a baby. She’ll be fine.”
She winked at him and it triggered a flashback. He remembered the first time he’d seen that wink. It was in a photograph of her and Mahler that the late captain had kept in his ready-room. Straifer had desired her from that first glimpse onward.
After returning her wink he quickly looked away, swallowing a knot of guilt.
Sailuk was older than Straifer, but younger than Mahler. Hers was a sort of in-between generation compared to leadership-slated genes.
Sailuk and Mahler’s children were already grown and in their own quarters. Now that she was remarried, and Straifer had yet to raise any clones, the workers in charge of birthing were debating on whether or not to assign them any children. He hoped they’d assign them at least one.
More faces flashed before his inner eye. The faces of all those he’d helped to discontinue. He thought of all the children who would never be born because of his recommendation.
People who would never know of the convoy’s discovery.
He thought of the seed-like structure, its looming figure above the long table.
In his mind it tilted toward him, aiming its pointed top end accusingly at his heart.
Nauseated, he hurried to the bathroom.
“Are you all right?” Sailuk called after him.
Straifer splashed cool water on his face from the sink and left the faucet running. “Fine, just . . . just stressed.”
“Do you need me to get you anything?”
Confirmation that your husband didn’t know about us—I mean me. That he didn’t know how much I wished to trade places with him. That his suicide was one of the best things to happen in my life.
Another crest of nausea washed over him. No, that’s not right, not what I mean, I didn’t . . . “A few minutes alone,” he said lamely.
I wanted his life, but I never wanted him dead.
Wishing doesn’t make things so. He couldn’t blame himself for Mahler’s suicide, he knew, though that did nothing to alleviate his sudden illness.
He reemerged half an hour later, still unwell but no longer in danger of losing his lunch. “I’m going to spend some time in my ready-room. There’s too much going on in my head, some work’ll straighten me out.”
“Okay.” The laugh lines around her mouth scrunched with concern.
He kissed her forehead, ran his fingers through her short black hair—more salt-and-pepper than black these days, he supposed—then left their quarters.
The room sat right off the bridge, small but comfortable. When he arrived he instructed I.C.C. to dim the lights and play Reggie the First’s proposition speech again. A picture of himself and Sailuk adorned his desk in the exact spot in which the picture of her and Mahler had sat. He swiped up the frame and shoved it in a drawer.
He rewatched the presentation five times before dozing off at his desk.
In his dreams he saw the Seed—skimmed along its surface in an impossible naked space flight. It blotted out the stars and the convoy and everything else. It told him things, things he couldn’t remember when he awoke.
“Captain?”
Straifer shook himself. “What? Yes?” The entire bridge crew was staring at him.
Commander Rodriguez wrinkled his brow. “I asked if you’d like to see the latest probe report. This one shut down before it reached the Seed as well.”
Straifer’d been . . . elsewhere. Thinking about the last dream he’d had. The Seed’s voice had been Mahler’s voice this time. That was new. He’d dreamt of the Seed every night since that first, but never had it used Mahler’s voice to torment him.
“Did it get any new intel? Or was this attempt as useless as the last?”
Several small drones had been sent in succession to investigate the large device, but the missions failed. Each probe self-terminated its information feed before arriving at its destination, but then returned to the research ship, Holwarda, with full functionality.
The only information they could retrieve were whatever pictures they could capture in visible light. Nothing else could penetrate whatever anti-information defenses the Seed possessed.
That seemed to go along with the “dampener” theory . . . but it didn’t explain why they hadn’t received any SD packets. Those were beyond the influence of anything in normal space, and they were sure they would have detected interference—if not the cause or the source there of—if the Seed had generated any subdimensional hindrances.
The rest of the devices had been deemed dormant. They sat still and silent within the thick wires that formed the Web. It was only the Seed that teased them with bits of activity.
“The probe’s approach was from the inside of the Web, rather than outside. The report says there are new photos, but they’re not attached,” said Rodriguez.
“Well, let’s get them. I.C.C?”
“The head of Observations has declined to release them. The pictures were not entered into my system.”
“Why not?” Straifer tapped the arm of his chair impatiently. The air suddenly smelled stale.
“He did not include any notes of explanation.”
Straifer longed for the days of implant communication. The system had been dismantled and all implants surgically removed after the revolt—improved security at the cost of efficient communications. Just one more legacy to haunt me. “Patch me through to Carl—in my ready-room.”
He hurried away. Once inside, he locked the door for privacy.
“Dr. Windstorm speaking.”
“Carl? What’s with the half-assed report?”
“Excuse me? Who is this?”
“Captain Straifer. Why is the latest report from the probe missions incomplete?”
“It hasn’t been fully compiled yet. I assure you, my next presentation—”
“Bull,” Straifer called. “All of the raw data from each mission has always been immediately available via I.C.C., until now.”
A long pause followed. He suspected Carl was choosing his words carefully. “I didn’t want to alarm anyone.”
“What does that mean?”
“The probe found something unexpected.”
“Unexpected . . . ?”
“Meet me in my lab ASAP.”
“This thing is hovering in front of the Seed? Looks like a wire hair ball or a metal nest . . .” Straifer scrunched his nose and glanced away from the projection. Something in Carl’s lab smelled rancid. When was the last time he’d summoned a cleaning bot? “Yes,” he said to himself, turning back to the image and poking at it as though he could feel the strange protrusions. “Have you seen the nests the purple finches make on Eden? With the twigs dangling down and the cup shape in the middle? Even has the same kind of whorl—”
“It’s a ship,” Carl said frankly.
“A ship? You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“Then you should have alerted the board immediately.”
“As I said, I didn’t want to—”
“Alarm anyone.”
Carl scratched his nose, then crossed his arms tightly over his chest—an ironclad defensive position if Straifer had ever seen one.
“You,” said Straifer, catching on. He put his hands in his pockets. “You didn’t alert the board because you were alarmed.”
“Look.” Carl repositioned his glasses with a shaky hand. “I wanted to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. We see one alien construct and we start seeing aliens everywhere. I thought maybe—maybe—it was a captured asteroid and I wasn’t seeing what I thought I was seeing.”
At least you aren’t having telepathic conversations with the Seed in your sleep.
Inside, Straifer empathized. On the outside, he did his job. “You don’t think that an alien vessel poses a security threat? Maybe they are blocking our transmissions somehow. Was there any activity?”
“All we have are these pictures, Captain. I don’t have any more information than you do. The only thing I can say for sure is that it is in a steady, matched orbit with the Seed. I cannot identify any active propulsion. But if we could hold off, get more pictures—”
“Which is what we’ll try to do. But our policy is one hundred percent open information. Anything that has to do with the overall mission is supposed to be shared with all personnel. We are not some hush-hush military group that carries a few ‘key’ people. Everyone is key. Everyone needs to be fully informed, whether you think it’s pertinent, practical, real, or not.”
Hypocrite.
“Add these photos to the official report,” he finished. “And be ready to present this and whatever else the probes discovered to the board in three hours.”
“Yes, sir.”
Oh my god, Straifer thought. They’re here.
But their presence wasn’t nearly as baffling as their silence.
“The gap does not appear to be purposeful,” said Carl, gesturing once more at a holographic diagram. “The ends of the tethers are frayed, and several machines appear to have been the victims of collisions, with sections torn away. The destruction is limited to the edges of the gap. The remainder of the Web—as we’re officially calling it—appears unbreached, but there is evidence of midspace impacts on the husk-like outer shells of the devices. None is more pockmarked than the Seed. It seems to have battled many a wandering space rock and emerged undaunted.”
Straifer scratched his Adam’s apple. Apparently Dr. Windstorm was going to give his presentation as previously planned, and wanted to save the best for last. The Captain wished he’d get to the pressing part.
“The Web, as far as we can tell, is not functional. The devices aren’t doing anything, according to the probes. They’re either dormant, never went online—”
“Or were never meant to perform a function at all,” Pavon added helpfully.
Not one to take interruptions lightly, Carl spoke right over the lieutenant. “So, if it is a Dyson Sphere—which I think we can agree is the prevailing theory—we can’t tap into it and hope to get useable energy. I know some of us on Holwarda were hoping the convoy could somehow access its power.”
He paused, shuffling his notes. Straifer’s grip on his armrests turned white-knuckled.
“I have a feeling,” Carl said, “that the other civilizations that traveled here had hoped for the same thing.”
Everyone collectively perked. Captain Straifer leaned forward, expecting an image of the nest-like ship to manifest above the table. Instead, four examples of the “node” devices shimmered into being.
“We’ve identified no less than four distinct styles of construction. We expected to find a subtle change in each meridian slice of the net, as the technology progressed through the builders’ society, however what we actually discovered were major leaps in design, though the technology appears to be no more efficient or evolved than it is around the large parent object we’ve dubbed the Seed. This leads us to believe that four separate civilizations took up the project. Each after the first is assumed to have stumbled upon the star, found it inactive, then located instructions or reverse engineered the devices to continue construction.
“We won’t know if these assumptions are correct until the samples team can tell us if the trace elements in the machines are different in each design, and until the engineers get their hands on the guts of the mechanisms—yes, that is my recommendation, that we proceed by actually infiltrating the devices.”
“I agree,” Nakamura said. “That should be our next course of action.”
“Of course you’d vote for that,” said an elected member of the medical staff. “I want to hear more about these other civilizations. What happened to them? Where are they? If the head of Communications here could figure out why the hell we can’t hear anything out there—”
“Don’t you have someone to go operate on, Kenji?” Lieutenant Pavon spat.
“He’s got a point. If there are others who came here and took up the work, why isn’t the Web complete?” Eden’s captain asked. The nearest people shot her sideways looks, a mixture of patronization and curiosity in each set of eyes.
“Well,” Carl pushed his thick glasses up his nose and cleared his throat, “the seemingly obvious answer is because the builders all died.” He ran his hand through the three-dimensional image and flipped through his slides to find the most impressive representation of the entire Web. “This is a tremendous undertaking.” He waved his arm around the image. “Just to get this far may have taken many trillions of—if you’ll pardon the expression—man-hours. It’s logical to conclude that such a project was never meant to be finished by those who started it, and that those who found it knew that they wouldn’t see its conclusion either. It’s been held as a scientific truth that civilizations have a finite life span. Most likely their societies collapsed before they could finish—it’s even possible their allotment of time and attention to the project led to the collapse—but this is all just speculation. The only real proof we have is the unfinished Sphere we see here.”
“So, why work on it?” Straifer blurted out. “Why all the effort if you’re not going to get anything out of it?”
“The potential. The chance for power, however slim,” Nakamura responded. “If those machines are batteries meant to store up energy from the star, they could power Earth by themselves for centuries, millennia even.” Murmurs sprang up like leaks around the room. “Energy was a problem when we left—hell, it’s a problem for the convoy—it’s probably a dire concern now. It’s worth trying to complete the Web, even if the odds are against you, I think.”
“Knowledge,” Aesop’s captain piped in.
“Pardon?” Nakamura asked.
“If you figure you’ll never finish, wouldn’t you take up the construction project purely for the knowledge of how to do it? More so than on the hope you’ll get something more tangible out of it? Isn’t that why we’re going to do it?”
The mumbling ceased immediately.
“Do what?” Straifer asked.
“Attempt to complete the construction.”
Straifer’s mouth opened limply, and the words trickled out slowly. “Who said we were going to do anything of the sort?”
The other captain chuckled. “Surely no one here thinks we were sent just to look.”
“Would it be possible for us? To close the gap, I mean?” a quiet, recently elected botanist from Morgan put forth. This was her first meeting.
Carl shrugged. “Presuming we can understand the technology used, we could—in theory—continue the work. But I can’t say how much time it would take to close the gap. It’s gigantic. We’re talking three times the distance from the Sun to the Earth just in length. It’s going to be another century for us to get this information back to Earth, and for those back home . . . who knows how much time our society has left before it collapses—provided it’s still there when we get back?”
Straifer put his fingertips to his temples. Like Nakamura had pointed out when they first emerged from SD, why hadn’t they had these in-depth discussions long ago? They’d had so much time before. They knew from a very young age that they were the generation that would finally stop. They would see and do what their anc
estors had only dreamed of.
But the only discussions they’d ever had about the future were operational: what steps they would take if they found an asteroid belt; what would happen if this was a new kind of star; when the observations team would send this craft or that craft; if the engineers would be needed; in what order the departments should be sent out; if the biologists would be physically sent in to be sure there was no contamination, or if scans would be sufficient.
The biologists had never found anything before—in the handful of times they’d surfaced from their SD in order to practice on this asteroid or that rocky planet—which made the Web’s discovery even more baffling. They hadn’t come across so much as a microbe in their journey from point A to point B.
These procedures had all been gone over dozens of times, but never had they discussed what they would do with the information gathered, besides deliver it to earthbound ears. No one imagined they would be able to apply any of the new things they learned.
How often did they think of the people who would come after them? This generation was the peak of the journey. Anyone grown on the way back was tasked with analyzing and deciphering the information gathered, and ultimately delivering the findings. But now that their offspring’s offspring would carry the most important message in human history to the leaders of their planet, there would be something to decide when the mission was over: What to do with this information?
Could they build?
Would they?
Straifer shook his head. They were getting ahead of themselves.
Carl waved his glasses like a white flag to get the room to focus again. “We’re getting off track, people. I said the seemingly obvious answer was that the builders had died. But the Web could be incomplete because they simply haven’t finished it yet.”
Yet.
Carl brought up a picture of the Seed. It was animated, revealing the subsonic pulses it emitted—presumably to keep the Web stable and rotating.
Straifer was finally able to put his finger on why the Seed made him grow cold—why it haunted him. It looked more organic than the other devices. They all shared the same musculature and joints and shiny shells, giving each one a look of insectoid-ness, but the Seed looked like a chrysalis. It was a machine, but he had trouble shrugging off the feeling that the device knew something. For real—not just in his dreams. Whenever he looked at it he received a distinct impression of awareness. Yet it did nothing but vibrate mechanically.
Noumenon Page 18
