Whatever they were expecting, it wasn’t a dance.
When it began to move again, Joanna nearly panicked. Oh my god, I was wrong, I was wrong, we have to stop it now. She opened her mouth, on the verge of calling everyone to battle, when the Web took a graceful twist to the left.
The artifact swirled in a circle, kicking up the nebula, whipping it into a dense froth. The tentacles swayed and spun with rhythmic fluidity, while the Seed swooped in circles, like the weighted end of a pendulum, around the gasses, pulling them and pushing them. The motion was mysteriously stirring.
Mesmerized, Joanna waited along with the rest of her spellbound crew.
She listened to her gut. There was no reason to think the movements weren’t threatening, but she sensed the convoy was safe.
She let the Web do as it pleased.
Other officers and cabinet members hailed her over the comms, pleading for her to take action.
“What are you waiting for?” they cried.
Joanna couldn’t say. But whatever it was balanced on the precipice of her mind, hovering over a deep, dark chasm. She felt like a heretic sailor journeying to the edge of the world in ancient times, before mankind knew the Earth was round. Here there be monsters, her crew seemed to shout.
She’d been screamed at, she’d been cursed, now she was being bargained with and denounced at the same time. But she intended to see, to understand what truly lay at the fringe of understanding. If it was as terrible as modern legend said, she’d let the mob tear her to pieces—a fate her father would have approved of.
But that won’t be enough, a tickle of doubt hissed at the back of her brain. It sounded like her father. If the world really is flat, it won’t just be your ship that goes over the side. Are you sure you’re not letting your desire for hope get in the way? Are you sure you’re not trying to subvert the truth—that life is pointless and dire, and that all anyone will ever find at the end of a great struggle is tragedy?
No, she shoved doubt aside. I refuse to live in that universe.
Then prepare to damn us all.
So she did.
Joanna let the Web continue its dance for months. The protests, pleas, and late-night poundings on her door finally let up, subsiding only because nothing new had happened. She hadn’t even called a cabinet meeting in that time, purely because she wanted tempers to dissipate and panic to subside.
In a different situation, she might have feared a mutiny. But no one wanted her responsibility. If they were going to fail, they were content to blame her. That was why no one had attempted a genetic reevaluation back when the first and second (and so on) admirals had failed, and why no one else had ever offered to step into the position.
The cabinet members were mellow when she finally gathered them all together. They’d exhausted their adrenaline reserves and couldn’t bring themselves anywhere near a frenzy.
“Can we at least send shuttles?” asked the exasperated captain of the Slicer. “Sitting here, doing nothing, it’s . . .”
“Cowardly,” said Anatoly helpfully.
“I think interference can only cause problems,” Joanna said.
“I didn’t say we should interfere, just observe. Do . . . something. It would appease the rest of the crew. Otherwise, Anatoly is correct, it makes us look afraid.”
“We are afraid.”
“Sure, but being afraid and appearing afraid are two different things. One causes chaos.”
She scratched her chin. “We can send a probe.”
“And have it short out like all the others? Nothing’s ever been able to probe the Seed. Even our long-range scans have told us little. Fluid vats for course corrections, that’s all they’ve found. No, we need to send a team.”
“It’s too dangerous. I don’t want to risk anyone.”
They all looked at her as though she’d just said she was betrothed to I.C.C.
“You’re risking everyone by not firing,” said Anatoly, his protest tripping out over his tongue.
“The convoy has devoted century after century to that thing, and we want to blow it out of existence,” she said without elaboration.
“This is ridiculous,” declared the captain of Aesop. “I demand a vote—on a manned observation mission. If you won’t let us fire—an apt course of action for a military mission—then let us return to our original functions as scientists and engineers. We can’t just sit here.”
She didn’t like the idea. What if I.C.C. was wrong and it wasn’t just an oblivious machine acting automatically? But she couldn’t think of a solid argument that would convince them not to go. “Fine. Make your scientific selections for the crew, and we’ll launch a shuttle tomorrow.”
That appeased them . . . but they never got the chance to see the appointment through.
The Web stopped its swirling and behaved in an all-too-familiar fashion, globing around its newly gathered ball of gas and dust.
More panic, more cries of kill the monster immediately boiled through the comms.
She only went so far as to order the weapons on standby. She still refused to shoot.
You’re weak. It’s your fault. It’s your fault she died, and now you’ll kill everyone else, too.
Shut up, she mentally screamed, locking the dark voice away, bracing her mental walls with that firm feeling she harbored—that feeling that told her the entire history of the convoy was not a tragedy.
Standing on the bridge, she held her breath, staring at the image of the Sphere that filled the screen. It was so beautiful, wrapped around the purples and blues and pinks that whirled within.
It didn’t need to gather such a thin soup to feed on—there were plenty of stars available—so what was it doing?
Suddenly another shift. A brilliant flash of light—so strong she had to shield her eyes. “I.C.C., reduce input, shift resolution,” she demanded. “I can’t tell what’s happening.”
The brightness decreased, the contrast increased.
“What in the name of—?”
The consumer of worlds, that great demon artifact which sucked up every scrap in its path, was now spewing.
Utilizing unknown forces, the Seed catapulted energy at the nebula fragment. Giant streams of matter shot toward the center of the Sphere, hot and sizzling in a plasma state.
“By the continuum, what’s happening?” asked Nakamura.
What is this? Joanna’s mind screamed. Something not destructive, she tried to reassure herself.
Only minutes passed before the Seed broke free of its legs. It tumbled away into space as the Web fused behind it, leaving no gap and shrinking the size of the Sphere.
“What should we do?” asked Captain Nakamura. “Follow the Seed?”
Joanna took a deep breath. I will not be Ahab, she told herself. “No. Watch.”
“You’re insane,” said a lieutenant, leaving his station to face her. “We’ve got our chance again. Shoot it, shoot it now. Give the order, damn it!”
“Back to your position,” she ordered calmly.
“To do what? Standby forever? Act!”
“Lieutenant,” snapped the captain. “The admiral gave you an order.”
Seething, his hands clenching and unclenching at his sides, the man did not move. “I don’t recognize her authority.”
Joanna did not waver. If the bridge crew thought her order to hold was made by a feeble will, they’d soon change their minds. “Matheson,” she said to her chief of security. “Hand me your sidearm.”
Without hesitation, he snapped open its sheath and pulled forth his deep-shock bar, a ranged weapon based on the shock batons. At its highest setting it could fry a person’s cerebral cortex in under .28 seconds. He placed the weapon firmly in her outstretched hand.
In the next instant it sat level with the lieutenant’s eyes. “You will report to the brig and wait for court martial. Or, you can refuse. In which case I’ll shoot, and Matheson can drag you away by the heels.”
A split second’s worth of d
efiance remained in the man’s eyes. For Joanna, it was a split second too long. She aimed the head of the deep-shock bar between his eyes and pulled the trigger.
The lieutenant jolted as every muscle in his body contracted. Then he slumped to the floor, unconscious.
Thanking Matheson with a nod, she returned his weapon. “Take him to a doctor. Give him a cozy bed and something warm to drink when he wakes up. Then put him in the brig.”
Matheson did as he was told, ever the stoic soldier. He threw the lieutenant over his shoulder and stalked away.
All eyes were on Joanna. The crew was stunned. No captain had ever shot an officer before. But she wasn’t a captain, she was a fleet admiral. “Look,” she said, gesturing lightly at the forward screen. Reluctantly, heads turned.
The Seed was making no attempt to flee. It hadn’t abandoned its legs, just separated from them. Acting independently of its parts, and keeping its concave face toward the Sphere, it circled the Web. Slowly at first, but with every passing second it increased its speed. It twirled faster and faster, keeping just under the speed of light, skewing their view.
What was happening within the Web’s reach became a mystery. Nothing could be seen past the Seed’s incredible display.
But somehow, Joanna knew it was something wondrous.
The Seed’s hyperactive dash went on for months. Who knew what might happen if they shot now? All they could do was continue to observe the Seed’s mesmerizing behavior.
When the Seed slowed once again, Joanna was in her quarters, caught firmly in a deep sleep. I.C.C. roused her, its volume levels nearly double the norm. “You have to see,” it said in the face of her drowsy eyelash batting. It turned on her monitor without asking.
Joanna’s eyes snapped shut against the screen’s glare. Coaxing them open, she forced her vision to focus through the grog of exhaustion.
The Seed sat completely still again, and hovered on the edge of the camera’s vision. The Web was gone, cannibalized by whatever processes the Seed had exerted.
What appeared to be a brown dwarf lay in its place.
Tripping over her sheets, she stumbled toward the bright image. Her palms pawed at the screen, as though she could make tactile sense of what she was seeing. “Why eat so many?” she asked, rubbing at her eyes, then at her sleep-numbed cheeks. “Just to create a dim substitute?”
“This footage is from twenty minutes ago,” I.C.C. said. “I don’t have enough information to form a hypothesis. We must continue to observe.”
Over the next weeks, the Seed began to circle again, expelling its liquids and even more gathered matter. Joanna watched, transfixed as the hours went by, her eyes glued to various feeds every waking moment. The Seed moved at near the speed of light around the dwarf, maintaining a distant orbit, making four rings of muddy liquid that instantly froze.
When its stores seemed exhausted, the Seed stopped its expulsion, and with its gravity set the rings spinning.
“I don’t understand,” she breathed one day. “Why don’t I understand? It destroyed so many systems . . . for this? Is it a failed experiment? A weak attempt at replication? What good . . . ?” she trailed off, biting her lip.
She knew her dark eyes must be wide and startled—like those of a concerned child. That’s exactly what she felt like: a child who could not comprehend a grownup’s actions.
“It pains me to admit that I don’t know what it’s doing,” she confessed to I.C.C. “It burns my insides like a gut-shot from a deep-shock bar. I could keep speculating, but there’s been far too much of that on this . . . trip.” She spat out the last word as though it had left black rot on her tongue. “We shouldn’t have interfered in the first place if we didn’t understand. That is a fatal flaw in human nature. Our curiosity is too strong, and our noses tend to find themselves in places they don’t belong.”
“Yes,” said I.C.C. in a distinctly solemn tone.
Joanna let her forehead fall against the monitor in her quarters. Its cool, smooth quality soothed the pounding in her head. “All I know is this . . . It’s creating instead of destroying. I have to take that at face value.” I don’t know how else to take it.
She recalled, then, a good moment she’d had with her father. When he’d taught her about planetary creation. It didn’t justify his years of abuse, but . . . it helped stay her hand now.
At least the wretched man’s memory was good for something.
Except, the next morning, the Seed went back to destroying.
It crashed through one ring, then another, hurling sections this way and that. The icy pieces threatened to leave orbit, but were drawn back by the well of the brown dwarf. The falling portions collided with other remainders of the rings, fracturing them into smaller and smaller scraps as the Seed continued its carefully calculated march of devastation.
Everything seemed to happen so fast. Cataclysmic cosmic events that usually took eons were happing in a relative blink.
Months later, the ring fragments were directed to coalesce by beams of energy from the Seed. The beams left behind four globes—three rocky planets and one gas giant, all encircling the brown dwarf in broad, distant orbits—each with its own large moon. Joanna thought the moons very curious.
After completing the planets, the Seed continued to circumnavigate its children, spraying each with more liquid. Water and nitrogen and methane fell to the surfaces. Oceans splayed out over the planets.
“I want us to be ready, for when it’s finished,” Joanna told the cabinet, once again aboard Eden, this time in the tropical quarter. The first flowers of the season were blooming, unfurling their petals among clusters of small new leaves on rope-like vines and stems. The air smelled of nectar, and the false-sun’s rays felt unseasonably warm. The squawking of a toucan echoed in the distance. “I want to know the exact composition of those planets, their orbits, and their rotations. In the meantime, anyone have postulations as to why the Seed is building a modest brown dwarf star system?”
Anatoly, his typically smug features flat, said, “Doctor Ka’uhane—” he waved his hand briefly in the astronomer’s direction “—thinks the central object isn’t a brown dwarf—just a gas giant. In which case the planets—the smaller gas giant included—have to be called moons.”
She crossed her arms. “Your point being?” She widened her stance in a display of rigid self-assurance, but the effect was spoiled by her knocking over the metal briefcase she’d brought with her. She let the case lie in the ferns.
“We’re looking at this too simplistically,” Anatoly said. “Just like the way we approached the Web. As we saw a sphere and attributed familiar scientific hypothesis to it, we now see what appear to be common cosmic objects and are attributing typical behaviors to them. But what if they don’t adhere to Newtonian physics? Or what if they aren’t as inanimate as they seem?
“What I’m suggesting,” he said, raising his voice in spite of the cabinet’s blank stares, “is that the Seed might be creating another machine. One whose function and processes we can’t disrupt this time.”
“We have the power to destroy the Seed. You think we can’t destroy those planets as well?” Joanna asked.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I understand what you meant. If it’s a machine it’s most likely one we can’t stick our wriggling little fingers into. No cogs to place, no wires to bond. You’re saying the Web’s creators had us and other unsuspecting civilizations work on a machine that we can understand in order for it to manufacture a machine we cannot. Interesting idea, I’ll give you. But what’s the point, I ask, if we can just blow it all to smithereens anyway?”
“Perhaps it’s disguised as it is so that we’ll hesitate.” The accusation in his tone was palpable; it stuck to the roof of Joanna’s mouth like a wad of peanut butter.
“Or perhaps your alarmist behavior is just what it’s after,” said Captain Nakamura. The cabinet turned toward her with eyebrows raised. “Doctor Ka’uhane, what would happen to Ear
th should a supernova or the like occur at this proximity?”
Dr. Ka’uhane wrung her hands, and her lips opened and closed like a fish’s. She hated being put on the spot, and everyone knew it. “Well, it, uh, should the blast be angled just so, that is, well—”
“Spit it out,” demanded Aesop’s captain.
“The resulting wave of gamma radiation could rain down on the planet and terminally irradiate much of its life. It might even blow away atmosphere and meddle with their magnetic field,” she finished with an audible gulp.
“There’s not enough mass there to create a supernova,” said Anatoly, understandably skeptical.
“Oh, no?” said Joanna. Popping open the metal briefcase, she extracted several sets of ‘flex-sheets and passed them around. “It’s eaten eight main sequence stars that we know of. Who knows how many it might have lifted before the Nest got to it? Ten solar masses are plenty enough to create a type II supernova.”
Dr. Ka’uhane eagerly nodded her agreement.
“What are these?” asked Anatoly, squinting at the images cycling across one of his ‘flex-sheets.
“Images taken an hour ago—of the Seed. I know it’s hard to make out—we’re too far out to resolve the picture properly—but I’d like to draw your attention to these three dots.” She pointed just off the concave side of the Seed.
“They look like errors. A problem with the camera?” asked the captain of Morgan.
“I.C.C. would not have reported errors,” Joanna said out of the side of her mouth. “These are objects, each roughly the size of a major Earth city, expelled from cavities within the Seed. I.C.C. tells me one fell to each rocky planet, and all were lost to its sensors because they sank in the oceans.
“What Nakamura seems to be suggesting, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that the Seed or its new planets could be waiting for us to strike. Say we assault the planets and trigger those objects—the addition of our weapon’s energy could send a carefully balanced matter-containment system over the edge, triggering a nova-like event.”
“Or those objects could be for something else entirely,” said Dr. Ka’uhane with a smile. The pep in her voice made the others look at her as though she’d just proposed they run naked through the corridors: a mix of reprimand, disgust, and skeptical amusement. She was normally reticent, quiet. Perhaps Joanna wasn’t the only one holding on to a ray of hope.
Noumenon Infinity Page 47
