Existence

  “I’m afraid so.” Tenskwatawa paused. “One of our people, Carlos Ventana, just managed to slide a blip to us, past NASA security. He reports that something big is up.”

  “Ventana,” Hamish mused. The name was familiar. A rich Latin. Used to own the entire phone company in Brazil or someplace, till they broke his monopoly as part of the Big Deal. Then he moved into fertilizer.

  “Did you say NASA? Are they still in business?”

  “He’s playing tourist right now on the space station.”

  “You mean the old research station. Not the High Hilton or Zheng Ho-tel?” Hamish shook his head, wondering why a bazillionaire would spend good money to go drift in filth for a month.

  “That’s right. Wanted an authentic experience, I guess. Anyway, it’s pure luck—or destiny—that we had a friend aboard when it happened.”

  “It? What happened?” Hamish barely quashed his irritation.

  “The astronauts grabbed or recovered something out there. It’s got them all lathered up.”

  “But what could they possibly have found that—”

  “Details are sketchy. But it may be a second-order disturber. Perhaps even first-order.”

  Hamish himself had come up with the “disturber” nomenclature a decade ago to classify innovations or new technologies that could threaten humanity’s fragile stability. Leaders of the Movement embraced his terminology, but Hamish always had trouble remembering the exact definitions. Of course, with specs on, he might have asked Wriggles for help.

  “First order…,” he mulled.

  “Oh, Jesus walks in the Andes. Do I have to spell it out, man? Government spacemen haul something in from the deep dark beyond … and it starts talking to them! Apparently, they’re deciphering a series of communications protocols, even as we speak!”

  “Talking? You mean…”

  “Maybe not real conversation. But enough to send folks running down the halls of the White House and Blue House and Yellow House, looking all sweaty. Even worse, too many pros in the pencil pushers’ guild know about it already—damned civil servants—for us to exert pressure and get a presidential clamp put on. News is gonna get out this time, Hamish.”

  “From … space…” He blinked several times. “Either it’s a provocation—or a hoax—maybe some Chinese—”

  “We should be so lucky!”

  Hamish forged on.

  “—or else, it is the real thing. Something alien. Oh man.”

  Now it was Tenskwatawa who paused, letting the background beat of drums fill a pause between them. Bridging regular gaps of time, like the pounding of a heart.

  “Oh man is right,” the Prophet finally murmured.

  “This may be nothing. Or perhaps we can strike another deal with the pencil pushers. Distract the public and keep the lid on, once again.

  “Still, it has terrible potential. We could be in real trouble, my friend. All of us. All of humankind.”

  ENTROPY

  What of destruction by devastating war? Shall we admit that our species passed one test, by not plunging into an orgy of atomic destruction?

  Millions still live who recall the Soviet-American standoff—the Cold War—when tens of thousands of hydrogen bombs were kept poised in submarines, bombers, and silos. Half a dozen men at any time, some of them certifiably unstable, held the hair trigger to unleash nuclear mega-death. Any of a dozen crises might have ended civilization, or even mammalian life on Earth.

  One sage who helped build the first atom bomb put it pungently. “When has man, bloody down to his soul, invented a new weapon and foresworn using it?” Cynics thought it hopeless, given a basic human reflex for rage and convulsive war.

  But it didn’t happen. Not even Awfulday or the Pack-It-Ind affair set off the unthinkable. Were we scared back from that brink, sobered to our senses by the warning image of a mushroom cloud? Chastened and thus saved by an engine of death?

  Might the cynics have been altogether wrong? There was never any proof that vicious conflict is woven into human DNA. Yes, it was pervasive during the long, dark era of tribes and kings, from Babylon and Egypt to Mongolia, Tahiti, and Peru. Between 1000 C.E. and 1945, the longest period of uninterrupted peace in Europe was a fifty-one-year stretch between the Battle of Waterloo and the Austro-Prussian War. That tranquil period came amid the industrial revolution, as millions moved from farm to city. Was it harder, for a while, to find soldiers? Or did people feel too busy to fight?

  Oh, sure, industry then made war more terrible than ever. No longer a matter of macho glory, it became a death-orgy, desired only by monsters, and fought grimly, by decent men, in order to defeat those monsters.

  Then, Europe’s serenity resumed. Descendants of Viking raiders, centurions and Huns transmuted into pacifists. Except for a few brush fires, ethnic ructions, and terror hits, that once-ferocious continent knew peace for a century, becoming the core of a peaceful and growing EU.

  One theory holds that democracies seldom war against each other. Nations ruled by aristocracies were more impulsive, spendthrift, and violent. But however you credit this change—to prosperity or education, to growing worldwide contacts or the American Pax—it shattered the notion that war burns, unquenchable and ineradicable in the human character.

  The good news? Violent self-destruction isn’t programmed in. Whether or not we tumble into planet-burning war isn’t foreordained. It is a wide-open matter of choice.

  The bad news is exactly the same.

  It’s a matter of choice.

  —Pandora’s Cornucopia

  14.

  TREASURE

  Night had fallen some time ago and now his torch batteries were failing. That, plus sheer exhaustion, forced Peng Xiang Bin, at last, to give up salvaging anything more from the hidden cache that he had found underneath a sunken mansion. Anyway, with the compressed air bottle depleted, his chest now burned from repeated free dives through that narrow opening, made on lung power alone, snatching whatever he could—whatever sparkle caught his eye down there.

  You will die if you keep this up, he finally told himself. And someone else will get the treasure. That thought made it firm.

  Still, even without any more trips inside, there was work to do. Yanking some decayed boards off the sea floor, Bin dropped them to cover the new entrance that he’d found, gaping underneath the house foundation. And then one final dive through dark shallows to kick sand over it all. Finally, he rested for a while with one arm draped over his makeshift raft, under the dim glow of a quarter moon.

  Do not the sages counsel that a wise man must spread ambition, like honey across a bun? Only a greedy fool tries to swallow all of his good fortune in a single bite.

  Oh, but wasn’t it a tempting treasure trove? Carefully cloaked by the one-time owner of this former beachfront mansion, who took the secret of a concealed basement with him—perhaps out of spite—all the way to the execution-disassembly room.

  If they had transplanted any of his brain, as well as the eyes and skin and organs, then someone might have remembered the hidden room before this.

  As it is, I am lucky that the rich man went to his death angry, never telling anybody what the rising sea would bury.

  Bin finally turned toward home, fighting an ebb tide that kept trying to haul him seaward into busy shipping lanes. It was a grueling journey, squatting on the overloaded block of polystyrene while propelling his paddle in an exhausting figure eight pattern … till his trembling fingers fumbled, losing their grip and dropping the makeshift oar! Night swallowed it, but there was no use searching, or cursing his fate. Bin couldn’t rig another paddle. So, with a soft sigh, he slipped back into the greasy Huangpu and commenced dragging the raft behind him with a rope around his waist.

  Several times—obsessively—he stopped to check the sacks of salvage, counting them and securing their ties.

  It is fortunate that basement also proved a place to deposit my earlier load of garbage—all those pipes and chipped tiles—tucking t
hem away from sight. Or I’d have to haul them, too.

  The setting of the moon only made things harder, plunging the estuary into near blackness, except for a sprinkling of stars. And the glitter of Shanghai East, of course, a raucous galaxy of wealth, shimmering and flashing beyond the nearby seawall. And a soft glow of luminescence in the tide itself—a glimmer that proved especially valuable when Bin’s winding journey took him by some neighboring shoresteads, looming out of the night like dark, medieval castles. He kept his splashing minimal, hurrying past slumping walls and spidery tent poles with barely a sound.

  This time Mei Ling will be impressed with what I found.

  That hope propelled Bin till, at last, his own stead was next, its familiar tilt occulting a lopsided band of stars. In fact, so eager was he to get home that he let his guard down … and almost swam into disaster.

  Even a little moonlight would have alerted him to the jellyfish swarm, a cloud of drifting, pulsating umbrella shapes that surged through the bay—just an offshoot of a vast colony that infested the East China Sea, growing bigger every year, annihilating age-old fishing grounds. Driven by the tide, one throbbing mass of filmy bodies and dangling stingers flowed directly in his path.

  Frantically backpedaling, Bin barely avoided plowing into the horde. Even so, he soon discovered by the light of his failing torch that he was surrounded by outliers and stragglers. In pushing away from one cluster, he inevitably drifted toward another. Unable to avoid individual jellies altogether, he kicked with flippered feet … and inevitably felt sudden flares of pain, as a stinger-tendril brushed his left ankle.

  Left no recourse, he clambered back atop the raft, praying the makeshift lashings would hold. It sank under the weight, leaving his body awash. But the tendrils couldn’t reach him. For now.

  Fumbling in the dark with his knife, Xiang Bin hacked at a torn milk jug and contrived a paddle of sorts—more of a scoop—and began a hard slog forward through the morass of poisonous creatures. Waiting for the swarm to disperse was not an option. By then, currents would take him far away. With home in plain sight, a brute force approach seemed best.

  These awful things will kill all the fish in the estuary and tangle my nets, he thought. Worst case? His family could go hungry. Maybe for weeks.

  Didn’t someone tell me you can eat these things, if you’re careful? Cooked with sesame oil? The Cantonese are said to know all the good kinds.

  It sounded yucky. They might have to try it.

  The last hundred meters were pure agony. Bin’s lungs and arms felt on fire, and his right hand somehow took another painful jelly sting, before the main opening of the ruined house gaped before him at last. Of course, he took a beating as the raft crashed half sideways, into the atrium. A couple of salvage bags split, spilling glittery treasures across the old parquet floor. No matter. The things were safe now, in easy reach.

  In fact, it took all of Bin’s remaining energy to drag just one bag upstairs, then to pick his way carefully across the slanted roof of broken tiles, and finally reach the tent-house where his woman and child waited.

  * * *

  “Stones?” Mei Ling stared at the array of objects that Xiang Bin had dropped before her. A predawn glow was spreading across the east. Still, she had to lift a lantern to peer at his little trove, shading the light and speaking in a low voice, so as not to wake the baby. Low-angled illumination made the scars on one cheek stand out, an injury she had suffered as a child, in the terrible Hunan earthquake.

  “You are all excited over a bunch of stones?”

  “They were on shelves, all neatly arranged with labels,” he explained. After treating the two stinger wounds, he began carefully applying small amounts of ointment to a sore on his left leg, one of several that had opened again, after long immersion. “Of course the tags were unreadable after all this time. But there used to be glass cabinets—”

  “They don’t look like gems. No diamonds or rubies,” she interrupted. “Yes, some of them are pretty. But we find surf-polished pebbles everywhere.”

  “You should see the ones that were on special pedestals, in the center of the room. Some of them were held in fancy boxes, made of wood and crystal. I tell you it was a collection of some sort. And it must have been valuable, for the owner to hide them all so—”

  “Boxes?” Her interest was piqued, at least a little “Did you bring any of those?”

  “A few. I left them on the raft. I was so tired. And hungry.” He sniffed pointedly toward the stewpot where Mei Ling was reheating last night’s meal, the one he had missed. Bin smelled some kind of fish that had been stir-fried with leeks, onions, and that reddish seaweed that she put into most of her dishes.

  “Get some of those boxes, please, Xiang Bin,” she insisted. “Your food will be warm by the time you return.”

  Bin would have gladly wolfed it down cold. But he sighed in resignation and gathered himself together, somehow finding the will to move quivering muscles. I am still young, but I know how it will feel to be old.

  This time, at least, the spreading gray twilight helped him to cross the roof, then slide down the ladder and stairs without tripping. His hands trembled while untying two more bags of salvage, these bulging with sharply angular objects. Dragging them up and re-traversing the roof was a pure exercise in mind-over-agony.

  Most of our ancestors had it at least this bad, he reminded himself. Till things got much better in China, for a generation …

  … then worse again. For the poor.

  Hope was a dangerous thing, of course. One heard of shoresteaders striking it rich with a great haul of salvage, now and then. But, most of the time, reality shattered promise. Perhaps, after all, it is only an amateur geologist’s private rock collection, he thought, struggling the last few meters. One man’s hobby—precious to him personally, but of little market value.

  Still, after collapsing on the floor of their tent-home for a second time, he found enough curiosity and strength to lift his head, as Mei Ling’s nimble fingers worked at the tie ropes. Upending one bag, she spilled out a pile of stony objects, along with a couple of the boxes he had mentioned, made of finely carved wood, featuring windows with beveled edges that glittered too beautifully to be made of simple glass.

  For the first time, he saw a bit of fire in her eyes. Or interest, at least. One by one, she lifted each piece, turning it in the lamplight … then moved to push aside a curtain, letting in sharply horizontal rays of light, as the sun poked its leading edge above the East China Sea. The baby roused then, rocking from side to side and whimpering while Bin spooned some stew from the reheating pot into a bowl.

  “Open this,” Mei Ling insisted, forcing him to choose between the bowl and the largest box, that she thrust toward him. With a sigh, he put aside his meal and accepted the heavy thing, which was about the size and weight of his own head … maybe a bit longer. Bin started to pry at the corroded clasp, while Mei Ling picked up little Xiao En, to nurse the infant.

  “It might be better to wait a bit and clean the box,” he commented. “Rather than breaking it just to look inside. The container, itself, may be worth—”

  Abruptly, the wood split along a grainy seam with a splintering crack. Murky water spilled across his lap, followed by a bulky object, so smooth and slippery that it almost squirted out of his grasp.

  “What is it, husband?” Mei Ling asked. “Another stone?”

  Bin turned it over in his hands. The thing was heavy and hard, with a greenish tint, like pale jade. Though that could just be slime that clung to its surface even after wiping with a rag. A piece of real jade this big could bring a handsome price, especially already shaped into a pleasant contour—that of an elongated egg. So he kept rubbing and lifted it toward the horizontal shaft of sunbeams, in order to get a better look.

  No, it isn’t jade, after all.

  But disappointment slowly turned into wonder, as sunlight, striking the glossy surface seemed to sink into the glossy ovoid. Its surface darkened,
as if it were drinking the beam greedily.

  Mei Ling murmured in amazement … and then gasped as the stone changed color before their eyes …

  … and then began to glow on its own.

  SCANALYZER

  MARCIA KHATAMI: We’re back. Before the break, we heard Professor Noozone—our favorite science-dazzler and gadfly—question some of the assumptions behind Project Golden Ear, the world’s greatest SETI program, headed by our other guest, Dr. Hannah Spearpath. Professor, you asserted, in your colorful rasta-way, that economics will play a crucial role in the decisions made even by advanced alien cultures. Wouldn’t superbeings be beyond such things as money?

  PROFESSOR NOOZONE: Look true, them may come in many types! Some may be like supersocialist hive-dwellers, or solipsistic self-worshipping Ayndroids, or shi-shi foo-foo babylon-capitalists, or mistik-obeah wizards … or even hyper-elightened rastabeings, living inna smoke ring of sacred, loving yum-aromas. Diversity is grand, an’ who tell dere isms an’ skisms?

  DR. SPEARPATH: What? Look, I knew you as an undergrad at Tulane. You spoke plain English before picking up this faux-Jamaican patois! So just spit it out, will you? Are you saying that every alien culture will have money?

  PROFESSOR NOOZONE: Whatever system a superculture uses to govern itself, some things are dictated by simple physics. A pure beacon that continuously screams “hello!” in all directions, whole-heap, for centuries inna de morrows is just mind boggling—an’ surely more annoying to the neighbors than a tone-deaf steel drum band! Especially since dere be more efficient ways by far.

  MARCIA KHATAMI: More efficient?

  PROFESSOR NOOZONE: Long time back at the turn of the century, three white coolboys—Benford, Benford, and Benford—showed that any civilization wanting to transmit First Contact messages will do so periodically, not continuously. Dem use narrow, practical beams an’ shine briefly upon likely abodes of young-uplifting civilization, then move on to the next, spot-calling each one in turn, before returning to the start again, in a regular cycle. Sight? Seen?