by Paul McAuley
The interview didn’t endear Darryl to Leah Bright and her supporters. There were anonymous threats, and an attempt at swatting. Someone spray-painted ALIEN LOVER across the window of Darryl’s store. A small group gathered outside his home and banged saucepans and blew whistles and chanted insults until he came out with his 12 gauge and fired a double load of bird shot into the air. He was arrested for that, but Van Diaz, whose patience was being sorely tried by the protestors’ antics, released him without charge a couple of hours later.
Leah denounced the threats and vandalism, but also accused Darryl of being in Universal Communications’ pocket. And some of us accused her of being in the pay of outside parties who had a financial interest in sabotaging Universal Communications’ plans. The whole town was divided. You couldn’t not have an opinion, for or against. Meanwhile, heavy trucks brought in the prefabricated parts for the radio telescopes, big white parabolic reflectors set on skeletal support structures that allowed them to point at any part of the sky, assembled in a twenty-by-ten grid. Construction took six months, and all the while Leah Bright and her crew of protestors camped outside. They held up traffic, locked themselves to construction machinery, tied banners and balloons to the mesh security fences, leafleted traffic and people in town, sat around campfires in the cold desert evenings, and sang old songs from Earth.
Most were out-of-towners, and most were young. They had not volunteered to come up and out to First Foot after winning a shuttle ticket in the UN lottery or buying a ticket on one of the repurposed Ghajar ships. They had been born here. It was not a wonder, for them, to be living on another planet. As far as they were concerned, First Foot was home and Earth the alien planet. A hundred years ago, they would have been protesting about the Vietnam War and the Man. Now they were campaigning against the colonial attitudes of off-world companies, and the alliance between scientists and big business that was exploiting Elder Culture artifacts they believed to be theirs by right of birth.
Some of us sympathized with them. A large part of our town’s income derived from the City of the Dead and the artifact business, and we’d chosen to live there because it was remote from central government and gave us the space to express our lives as we saw fit. So although we had businesses to run and families to feed, many of us visited the camp, donating food and water, sitting and talking with the kids, and participating in sing-alongs, an attempt to encircle the camp with a chain of people holding hands, and an attempt to levitate the radio telescopes as a demonstration of human will triumphing over science (some swore it actually happened). Elmer Peters, the Unitarian minister, held a nondenominational service at the camp every Sunday. Ram Narayan supplied daily meals of vegetable curry and bread; the New Mexico couple from the yoga retreat brought macrobiotic food and said that the camp had a beautiful air of spirituality; Jeff James sold pot he grew in his hydroponic greenhouse. Sally Backlund was often to be seen interviewing someone, an external microphone clad in a furry windshield attached to her iPhone like a dead hive rat soldier. She was writing a series of stories about individual protestors and uploading her interviews to SoundCloud. Craig and Jody Mudgett brought their kids as part of their homeschooling. And other kids visited, of course, because of the excitement and transgression. It was the biggest thing to have happened in our town since that unfortunate breakout. A carnival. A freak show.
Leah was there from beginning to end, holding daily séances to consult her Byzantine priest, chairing interminable camp meetings, giving interviews to TV and net journalists from Port of Plenty, and leading every protest action. She said that the presence of the camp was a shield between the black energy of the radio telescopes and the fragile noosphere of the City of the Dead. She was arrested twice, but although Joel Jumonville wanted to keep her ass in jail until things cooled off, she was quickly released both times, thanks to supporters who paid her fines and a sympathetic lawyer from Port of Plenty who was doing pro bono work for the protesters. She was dogged, determined, and, most of us agreed, very happy.
She’d broken up with Troy Wagner soon after she’d begun her campaign. He sourly confided to the bartender at Don’s Joint that it wasn’t so much that she’d found a cause, but a cause had found her. She had become the lightning rod for the discontent of well-to-do kids who joined protests because it was the hip thing to do, or because they were rebelling against their parents. He felt badly treated by his former lover—Joel had investigated him over the leak about the planning application, and although nothing implicated him, bad blood remained—and we weren’t surprised when, two months later, he took a job with the UN in Port of Plenty.
By then, construction was nearing an end. The garden of radio telescopes sat behind a double wire fence topped with razor wire, bowls turned to the sky like giant albino sunflowers. There were ranks of solar panels to provide power, a short string of flat-roofed, single-story prefabs where security guards and technicians would live and work. Q-phone circuits linked it directly and instantaneously to a facility in Paris, France, and to the headquarters of Universal Communications’ parent company at Terminus.
Several of us were invited to the facility’s inauguration, including Joel Jumonville, Sally Backlund, and Darryl Hancock. As was Leah Bright, in what was either a spirit of reconciliation or a sneaky PR move. She formally burned the invitation in front of a crowd of her supporters and a couple of reporters (Sally and a stringer from NBC First Foot) and announced that there would be an intervention, but refused to divulge any details.
“It will be nonviolent but potent,” she said, adding that testing of the equipment had already caused significant agitation amongst eidolons and other potencies in the City of the Dead.
“She felt a great disturbance in the Force,” more than one of us wisecracked, but many had a sense of foreboding. We were remembering that breakout, and all the tomb raiders and explorers who had been to one degree or another driven crazy by exposure to eidolons and other manifestations of Ghostkeeper algorithms. People who had invisible friends, or believed that they were dead, rotting corpses, or had caught counting syndrome or spent half of every day scrubbing themselves down with industrial bleach in the shower because they believed that the pores in their skin were infested with alien bugs. And all of us were affected to some extent, living as we did in the penumbra of a vast alien necropolis, where alien ghosts infested alien tombs and scenes from long-lost alien lives were replayed to any sentient creature that strayed close to the tesserae that contained them. All of us were changed.
A couple of years ago, a PR company hired by Joel Jumonville to boost the tourist trade came up with a cute cartoon mascot, a fat green-skinned elf with puppy-dog eyes, a goofy grin, sparkly antennae, and a slogan: Experience Ten Thousand Years Of Alien History! But that history wasn’t cute, wasn’t amenable to Disneyfication. It was the background hum of our lives, a psychic weather acknowledged by the amulets or tattoos some of us wore to ward off bad luck and bad eidolons, jokes stolen from corny old horror movies, and the little rituals tomb raiders performed before entering a tomb. I guess you could say that our love of gossip and stories was part of our coping mechanism: a way of reassuring ourselves that we were still human. Even visiting scientists and archaeologists talked about bad spots and weird feelings. That psychic weather, those weird feelings, were what Leah and her protestors had tapped into. And it turned out that they were right, although in the end it wasn’t the radio telescopes that blew everything up. It was Leah’s attempt at sabotage.
The company and the government took her talk of an intervention seriously. There was heavy security around the radio telescope array on the day of its inauguration. Two hundred state troopers were on standby and a small army of private goons checked the IDs of VIPs, patrolled the perimeter, and flew drones above the protestors’ little encampment. According to Van Diaz, they weren’t so much worried about Leah and her friends, but that some lone crackpot might use them as cover.
“Still, none of us has any idea about their
plans,” he said. “The company tried to infiltrate the camp with a couple of undercover guys, but they were spotted and turfed out. Leah is playing everything very close. But man, really, what can she do?”
Many of us resented the intrusive security, the closure of Main Street while a convoy of press and guests rolled through, the noise of helicopter traffic that brought the VIPs, the journalists stopping us on the street or knocking at our doors or coming into our places of business, asking us for our opinions. And while we wouldn’t admit it, we were anxious that there might be an outbreak of some kind of stupid violence, or that Leah might turn out to be right, and the radio telescopes really would trigger something incomprehensible and catastrophic out in the City of the Dead. So although we tried to go about our normal business, we were secretly watching the skies. And at four p.m., when the radio telescopes were due to be switched on, most of us found excuses to hunker down at home.
But nothing happened. Despite all the rumors, Ada Morange, the billionaire who bankrolled the Omega Point Foundation, did not appear at the inauguration. Instead, a colorless executive read out a short message from her, and an astronomer who had helmed a TV series about the gift worlds and the New Frontier, brought from Earth especially for the occasion, gave a short speech before pressing the button that activated the dishes. All swung ponderously towards a spot high in the day sky, aiming towards a G2 star eleven light years away. It was the twin of Earth’s sun, but it wasn’t known if it possessed any planets, let alone one that could support life. As Darryl Hancock said, the project was in many ways a symbolic gesture, making the point that the human species wasn’t going to stop asking big questions just because the Jackaroo had happened along with their gift worlds and shuttles, and their offer to help.
The protestors built a huge bonfire that night and held a cross between a séance, a prayer meeting, and a free concert. Leah didn’t appear; she was in conversation with her Byzantine priest. We didn’t know then that her plan to disrupt the inauguration had been foiled by a failed comms link.
That link went live two days later.
The first most of us knew about it, the power went off in the town. It was just after seven in the morning. The municipal grid, solar power, generators, and LEAF batteries: everything cut out. Vehicles drifted to a halt, broadband fell over, TVs and radios and phones howled like wolves. Some people say they saw an arc of pale sun dogs in the sky; others that a host of eidolons rose up from tombs and sinkholes across the City of the Dead and formed a thickening haze that poured north, towards the radio telescope facility. Esther Aldrich, the manager of the Shop ’n Save, claimed that she saw beings like glowing balloons drift through the plate glass window, head down the liquor aisle, and vanish, leaving behind an odor like burnt plastic. Several people suffered fits. Kyra Calliste, a former tomb raider who for three years had panhandled around town, haunted by an eidolon fragment that had robbed her of her voice, suddenly stood up in the church hall where she was eating her customary breakfast with other transients and started talking about everything that had happened to her out in the City of the Dead. She hasn’t stopped talking yet. On the other hand, Monica Nielsen, eating breakfast with her husband in Denny’s, was struck blind. Hysterical blindness is the opinion of specialists who have examined her, nothing organically wrong, but she hasn’t seen a spark of light since.
Others spoke of hearing the voices of dead relatives, or a vast lonely roar like a jet plane passing low above the roofs of the town, although the sky was cloudless and empty that morning. And at the radio telescope array, the dishes began to move under a command fed through a clandestine link which a sympathetic IT worker had installed in the control system,
overriding the program that until that moment had kept them tracking the G2 star.
The technicians had not yet started their shift; by the time they responded to a q-phone call from the actual controllers, on Earth, it was too late. The dishes locked onto a new target and their dormant transmission system came online, linked to a qube in the protestors’ camp that was running algorithms extracted from several hundred tesserae. At least one of which, it turned out, had been contaminated or overwritten by code extracted from a fragment of that crashed Ghajar spaceship. The ship code took control of the telescopes, and began to send a complex powerful signal towards a distant star.
After the technicians tried and failed to regain control of the array, they shut everything down. It’s still shut down three years later, so I suppose you could say Leah Bright and her followers scored some kind of a victory. Trouble is, they also helped Universal Communications discover something new.
Leah was arrested by the UN geek police and charged with sabotage, interference with telecommunications transmissions, and a ragbag of lesser crimes. She and several of her supporters, along with the technician who had installed the clandestine link, were released on bail put up by an anonymous supporter, and all charges were eventually dropped. Partly because a trial would have been a PR disaster; partly because Universal Communications discovered that the transmission had been aimed at a red dwarf star more than twenty thousand light years away—a star with, it turned out, a single wormhole orbiting it.
An expedition was promptly dispatched, taking more than a month to make its way from wormhole to wormhole, star to star. It discovered a vast debris disc circling close to that cool, dim star, a churning mass of organic and metallic fragments twelve million miles across and just thirty feet deep, with about half the mass of the Earth’s moon. The remains of millions Ghajar ships, perhaps. Or the wreckage of some huge structure, a space metropolis or moon-sized orbital fort, ground small by innumerable collisions and time.
Five companies have purchased licenses to map and explore the debris disc, searching for artifacts and scraps that contain active algorithms. So far no one has found anything useful—or if they have, they aren’t talking about it—but one thing is clear. Radioactivity, chemical changes, and stress marks show that the debris was subjected to energies so immense they would have caused serious deformations in local space-time.
It seems, the experts say, that the Ghajar were divided against themselves. The spaceship that crashed in the City of Dead did not crash by accident, but was shot down while fleeing from an enemy; the debris disc was created by some unimaginable battle, part of a war that ended with the Ghajar’s extinction. And in their fate we may glimpse our own future, because the human race is already split into opposing factions by the influence of artifacts or technologies. By ideas not our own. By the ravings of mad alien ghosts.
The Jackaroo have said nothing at all about this theory. They will neither confirm nor deny our speculations about what happened to the Ghajar, saying only that they are “interesting.” There is a rumor that three of their gold-skinned avatars visited the radio telescope array while the geek police were making the qube safe. Van says neither he nor any of his deputies were informed about their presence, but one night in the Green Ale Inn one of the facility’s technicians said the avatars stood there for an hour, facing each other like gunfighters in some old Western, then walked off to a town car without saying a word and were driven away.
Perhaps someone will find something immensely valuable in the debris disc. Or perhaps it will drive those trying to understand it insane, or infect them with some kind of combat eidolon. But despite those risks the prospect of reward is too great to stop exploring.
Meanwhile, although the radio telescopes remain offline, Leah Bright is still camped at the gate. Like our founder, Joe Gordon, she lives in an RV. She supports herself with royalties from a self-published e-book about her campaign, by charging tourists for taking selfies with her, and by holding consultations about the Ghajar message that, she claims, passed through her. Unlike Joe, she loves to talk. She’ll talk to anyone who’ll listen. And with her garrulous eccentricity, and her obsession with the inscrutable alien dead, she has finally become one of us.
About the Author
Paul McAuley was bor
n in England on St George’s Day 1955. He has worked as a research biologist in various universities, including Oxford and UCLA, and for six years was a lecturer in botany at St Andrews University. The first short story he ever finished was accepted by the American magazine Worlds of If, but the magazine folded before publishing it and he took this as a hint to concentrate on an academic career instead. He started writing again during a period as a resident alien in Los Angeles, and is now a full time writer. His first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars, won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, and fifth, Fairyland, won the 1995 Arthur C. Clarke and John W. Campbell Awards. His other novels include Of the Fall, Eternal Light, Red Dust, Pasquale’s Angel, the three books of Confluence, Child of the River, Ancients of Days, and Shrine of Stars, The Secret of Life, Whole Wide World, and White Devils. He has also published the collections of short stories The King of the Hill, The Invisible Country and Little Machines. A Doctor Who novella, The Eye of the Tyger, was published by Telos Books in November 2003, forty years after the author was scared behind the couch by the Daleks. He lives in North London. You can sign up for email updates here.
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