Existence

As for we poor pilgrims who were left standing or crouching or kneeling there, in shock and wonder? The initial, awestruck silence gave way to moans and cries, fervent shahadas declaring the greatness of God and his prophet.

  Only thereafter, by many minutes, amid layerings of both terror and joy, did I hear a rising babble of voices as we turned to one another, each declaring and comparing her brief visual experience to that of others.

  I heard the word “demons!” uttered with tones of dread.

  Several voices, tinged in marvel mixed with worry, spoke of “djinn!”

  Many, mindful of current events, murmured about “those aliens”—the beings who were coming awake within their own strange sky-stone in America.

  But far more frequent, and soon overriding all else, there arose a single interpretation of what several hundred women saw in that brief, holy glow.

  Angels.

  42.

  A PURPOSE

  Hacker felt better after a shower and a meal. He even grabbed a little shut-eye, sleeping with the joymaker in his hand, so that its vibe-mode alarm would wake him after a couple of hours. When he roused, his vision seemed much sharper and his hands no longer felt as if they were covered by oven mitts.

  A good thing, since there followed several hours’ work in the underwater center’s main laboratory, sitting at a lab bench, modifying the cable from his helmet that had tapped the sonic implant in his jaw—the same circuit he had used aboard the ill-fated rocket—converting it to link up with the archaic multiphone.

  Dad would be proud of me. And Mom, too. I may be self-indulgent and overbearing. But no decadent hypocrite-brat! I understand the tech I use. And my people know that I can sling a soldering iron!

  Through an open door, he glanced back at the pool, where members of the Tribe had taken up a game of water polo, calling fouls and shouting at each other as they batted a ball from one goal to the next, keeping score with raucous sonar clicks. One more behavior he figured you would not find among their wild cousins.

  Hacker wondered about the “uplift” changes he had seen. Did they carry through from one generation to the next? Could this new genome spread among natural dolphins? And if so, might the project have already succeeded beyond its founders’ dreams? Or its detractors’ worst nightmare?

  What if the work resumed, finishing what got started here? Would it enrich our lives to—let’s say—argue philosophy with a dolphin intellectual? Or to collaborate with a smart chimp, at work or at play? If other species speak and start creating new things, will they be treated as equals—as co-members of our civilization—or as the next discriminated class?

  Hacker recalled some classics of literature, by H. G. Wells and Pierre Boulle and Cordwainer Smith, that portrayed this concept, but always in terms of slavery. In every case—and in all the clichéd movies—author and director showed cruel human masters getting their just desserts. A simple morality tale that always struck him as being less about hubris, and more about the penalty for being a bad parent.

  But, what if “uplift” were done with the best of intentions, without any hint of oppression or cruelty, propelled by curiosity, diversity and even compassion? Wouldn’t there still be awful mistakes and unforeseen consequences? Some critics were probably right. For humans to attempt such a thing would be like an orphaned and abused teen trying to foster a feral child.

  Are we good enough? Wise enough? Do we deserve such power?

  It wasn’t the sort of question Hacker used to ask himself, even as recently as a month ago. In fact, he felt changed by his experience at sea.

  At the same time, he realized—just asking the question was part of the answer.

  Maybe it’ll work both ways. They say you only grow while helping others.

  His father would have called that “romantic nonsense.” But Lacey wouldn’t, he felt pretty sure. Suddenly he wanted to talk to her, more than anything in the world.

  READY.

  That word flashed across the little screen, and he felt relief. Not only did some undersea cable still connect the habitat to the World Mesh, but the joymaker’s repeated pulses had managed to summon a soft-reconnection. All he would have to do is vocally ask for a connection to his mother. If his voiceprint had changed too much to handle the payment problem, well, then she could unleash some aissistant to take care of that detail from her end.

  Yet, at the last moment, Hacker revised his priorities again.

  I’ll call Lacey soon. She’s probably worried sick. But a few minutes won’t make much difference.

  First, there are other urgent matters.

  He was about to call his manager and broker—before they had a chance to declare him dead and start liquidating his commercial empire. But then Hacker stopped. Even that was doing stuff in the wrong order.

  He looked back up the hall, where splashes could be seen, rising from the pool, and an occasional leaping gray form. The Tribe. The friends who had saved his life.

  Hacker paused a second or two longer. Then he keyed the private access code for his attorney, hoping to get through, despite the lack of phone-ident.

  After a lengthy ring, Gloria Harrigan answered, but at first she sounded brusque, distracted.

  “Who the hell is this and could you call back later? The whole world is watching TV right now.”

  He blinked in surprise at her non sequitur. The whole world was what? He rapped his jaw, in case the implant had malfunctioned. Concentrating, Hacker spoke aloud. Even though he could not hear air-carried sounds, he could feel his larynx buzz and his mouth shaped sounds.

  “Gloria—”

  “Anyway, this hi-pri line is set aside for the search and rescue. So if it doesn’t have to do with—”

  “Gloria…” He spoke carefully, as if trying to recall a disused skill. “You can call off the search.… It’s me … Hacker Sander.”

  There was a long pause. Then a shriek that carried up his mandible to resonate his skull.

  “Hacker? Is that really you?”

  He only got in two more words, before the shouting recommenced and would not stop for a while. Gloria kept punctuating joyful yells—calling others to gather around—with outright sobs. “This is goddam more important than any fucking aliens!” she hollered.

  It had a strange effect on Hacker, almost making him feel remiss, embarrassed over having caused such emotion and inconvenience. Another novel sensation. I didn’t know anybody liked me that much, he mused.

  At the same time, he also wondered.

  Aliens?

  Carrying the phone back to the dome’s atrium, he arrived in time to witness the water polo game conclude in a frothy finale. Dolphins pirouetted and squawked, either celebrating or protesting the score … as Gloria finally calmed enough to confirm that … yes … they now had his location pinned down … and help was on the way. About an hour … no, make that forty minutes, she revised in a hurried update, as a tourist minisub offered to divert from a nearby beach resort for a reasonable fee.

  “That’s fine…,” Hacker said, though with a strange flurry of mixed feelings. “During that time, though … right after you phone my mother with the news … there’s something … I want you to do for me.”

  He then gave Gloria the World Mesh codes for Project Uplift, and asked her to find out everything about it, including the current disposition of assets and technology—and how to contact the experts whose work had been interrupted here.

  When Gloria asked him why, he started to reply.

  “I think … I’ve got a new…”

  Hacker stopped there, having almost said the word hobby. But suddenly he realized—he had never felt quite this way about anything before. Not even the exhilaration of playboy rocketry.

  For the first time he burned with real ambition. Something that seemed worth fighting for.

  In the pool, several members of the Tribe were now busy winding their precious net around the torso of the biggest male, preparing to go foraging again. Hacker overheard them gossipi
ng as they worked, and chuckled when he understood one of their crude jokes. A good natured jibe at his expense.

  Well, a sense of humor is a good start. Our civilization could use more of that.

  “I think—” he resumed telling his lawyer.

  “I think I know what I want to do with my life.”

  TORALYZER

  Hello? Is anyone there? I’m counting a handful—just half a mega or so. Well, four hundred and thirty thousand participants will have to suffice. You are the types who would rather do than passively stare at feed from the Artifact Conference! We posse members sniff the edges. So let’s follow some scents.

  Hey, despite talk of aliens, the regular news cycle goes on, with ever-rising tensions about water, energy, food ’n’ phosphorus, or rising seas … or else more squabbles between guild and civitas and manse. Let’s have a capsule update from my favorite summarizer, Walter:

  * Syr-Isra-Pal has threatened to ramp up coolwar if Turkey keeps sequestering snowmelt in the Great Anatolia Reservoir. Downstream neighbors blame this for worsening the Near Eastern Drought, plus an upsurge in quake activity across the Levant.

  * Rumors suggest several reffer cabals have agreed on a joint, renewed assault on the “decadent institutions of an obsolete, so-called Enlightenment.” Most such tales are generated by peevish ai-bots, unleashed years ago by long-dead nihilists. But ever since the failed D.C. zeppelin attack, security anticipators are taking them all seriously, kicking their prefrontals into overdrive.

  * A recent spate of small-scale earth tremors, all over the world, has accompanied strange reports of underground or underwater detonations, all reaching a crescendo in the last few hours. Though some fret nervously about terr or reff attacks, a new correlo-study shows that few events are near human habitations. Most seem to be happening far out to sea.

  * And the top-linked thread: many reports in the last few hours of glimmering lights, bursting from chunks of formerly quiescent stone. The most notorious episode took place half a day ago at Islam’s holiest shrine. Others include a piece of Chinese imperial jewelry in the Taipei Museum and a paving stone in Hyderabad. Now, scientific instruments laid out to watch scintillations on the Antarctic Plateau, report at least twenty faint, localized glimmers, deep within the ice sheet, implying there might be hundreds more beyond sensor range.

  Thank you, Walter. Well? Which of those stories set you all a-quiver with excitement? We want something that regular media is likely to screw up! That’ll benefit from half a million baying bloodhounds.

  What’s that? Okay, I expected this. Several throngs of you are intrigued by those stones that started lighting up, around the world. The obvious guess—it’s more-than-coincidentally tied to the Havana Artifact? Well, sure, great topic … though I see several hundred teams, agencies and citizen-posses already pouncing on it. Seems pretty obvious, if creepy.

  How about this alternative some of you suggested? What if that recent flurry of micro-quakes is somehow related? They’ve been at the lower end of detection range and almost hidden by normal temblor background. So far, it’s all been largely dismissed as “normal fluctuations.” But does anyone else see something strange about the data?

  Yep, that’s a good prelimalysis, Amsci Genovese. The energy profile really does stand out. Most of the extra quakes seem to occur in a narrow range of power release. Down around a sixtieth of a Richter. Far too narrow to be natural.

  And yes, Insight-filled Hmong Science Collective, I see your point—how most of these events have the sonic shape of explosive detonations, and not natural fault slips! Will someone please probe security channels, in case the protector caste thinks these are terr or reff attacks? And why no damage reports? You’ll lead that effort, Anne Dobson of Cape Town?

  Come to think of it, let’s start mapping events versus geology, terrain, political instability, hydro-cycles.…

  Come on, people and people-helpers. Feedme here! Tear yourselves away from the TV and do what you are good at.

  Bugging the universe with curiosity.

  43.

  SORRY I ASKED

  Among all the added complications, who needed a rising wave of copycat hoaxes? People “discovering” ancient messenger-rocks of their own.

  Some of the posted vids and palps showed blatant fakes—little more than chunks of glass, crudely lit from below, or pixeltrated with off-the-shelf image-altering programs—easy to spot. Others were the work of ingenious, high-tech pranksters, featuring impressive “aliens” who uttered mysterious warnings from their crystal homes … sometimes laying the groundwork for terrible punch lines, endlessly shaggy stories, or groaner puns. Others played it straight, claiming to be real star-emissaries offering deep (if always clichéd) wisdom … attracting storms of crit from smart posses yelling “fake!” And equal crowds of fervent believers.

  A festival-like sense of momentum built, as vids of homemade Artifacts flooded the Mesh. And it’s possible that one or two may be real, Gerald thought. But someone else will have to check-and-vet them.

  The Contact Commission had its hands full with the oblong, rounded cylinder that he brought home from orbit. It sat before him now, drinking in a bright diet of photon energy. The resident aliens had asked for a recess behind shrouded mists. Some time to get organized. And Akana Hideoshi’s team was happy to comply. People, too, needed food and rest. So did the tense observers who watched from the advisers’ gallery, just beyond the tall glass wall.

  Reconvening on schedule, Gerald sat between Emily Tang and Haihong Ming, as Genady, Ben, Patrice, Akana, and other team members took their places. He saw dignitaries arrange themselves among the plush cybo-chairs that were steeply arrayed, auditorium-style, beyond the quarantine barrier. They seemed less agitated over there, now that the behavioral conditioning experiment had worked and the aliens were behaving better. Not that anyone enjoys being proved wrong. The advisers’ consensual holvatar representative—Hermes—no longer paced angrily, his broad forehead crowned with miniature lightning flashes. Now the ersatz god merely drummed the table, frowning nervously.

  At the appointed time, all room lights dimmed and those swirling clouds within the Artifact began to change. Tshombe reduced the beam intensity, so everyone could see … as mists began to part, revealing a luminous vista of bright stars.

  A veritable galaxy, presented in luscious three dimensionality, that none of the Earthling hoaxes had been able to duplicate so far. Gerald was about to shout for Ramesh to make sure the starscape was being recorded—

  —when the Rajasthani astronomer beat him to it, reacting with an uncannily speedy virt.

  These aren’t real stars. Uniform in spectra and brightness, they’re scattered about for art’s sake. It’s a metaphor.

  Dang. That part of a long list of questions would have to be delayed, till more urgent matters were settled.

  A murmur rose from the peanut gallery as, originating from dozens of distinct pinpoints, there unrolled a pattern of slender, curvy lines … that soon flattened and took the form of golden roads, tapering into the distance. These pathways branched and split, many of them leading to dead ends. But all of those that survived eventually joined together, merging one-by-one into a single highway that proceeded toward Gerald’s point of view … now shared by several billion watchers, tuning in from all across Earth.

  People still complain about the degraded image quality that’s allowed to leave quarantine. In fact, only a very few of the most paranoid—not even Emily and her Tiger holvatar—still thought it likely that these images held dangerous codings.

  Gerald leaned forward, staring directly into the Stone, instead of at the giant, magnifying screens nearby. Now, the eye began to make out figures, distant at first, striding along those golden paths. Seeming to begin at quite some distance, they all could be seen heading this way … toward the face of the Artifact that lay directly in front of Gerald. And soon, observers could tell that the Artifact beings all looked a bit different this time.

&nbs
p; The centauroid, the bat-helicopter alien, the raccoonlike creature, the blimpy-thing … they now wore garments of some luxurious fabric, wafting in simulated breezes. Even the squid-cephalopod being had draped itself in formality as it glided forward along with the others, its means of locomotion as mysterious as ever.

  Here it comes at last, Gerald thought. The formal invitation.

  Where before there had seemed to be too little room at the interface—forcing aliens to jostle one another at the curved boundary between the Artifact’s inner world and the humans outside—now the foreground somehow seemed uncrowded. All the visitor emissaries were able to share this grand procession, gathering and arranging themselves so that every one could see outward—and be seen.

  “That’s some group portrait, when they decide to get it together,” the anthropologist Ben Flannery commented. “Their earlier fractiousness showed that they tolerate diversity. Now they are displaying a wakened cooperative spirit and shared purpose. What combination of traits could be more encouraging? I’m pretty optimistic, right about now.”

  General Hideoshi made a soft shushing sound. A number of the central figures were moving their arms/tentacles/appendages in unison …

  … and letters formed, flowing toward the curved interface, arranging themselves into words that also emerged as sound from loudspeakers overhead.

  We have asked the oldest surviving member to speak for us.

  Out of the center of the crowd there emerged a being Gerald had seen before. Tall, bipedal, with a rotund-chubby figure, it had short arms that clasped each other across a stout belly. A roundish head nodded from atop its roly-poly neck. The eyes—wide but narrow-slitted, as if squinting with amusement—were in roughly the “right place” for a gestalt that seemed very close to human, and so was a thick-lipped mouth that even seemed to curve slightly upward, as if in an enigmatic smile. There was no nose—the creature apparently breathed through vents that opened and closed rhythmically, at the top of its head. Gerald’s overall impression was of a wise-looking, Buddha-like being. In fact, though he knew it was taking first impressions way too far, the fellow seemed rather … jovial.