It. Most pilots who said that word, in that sentence, would be referring to a landmark, to a destination, to a place. But that’s not what Lukas means. “It,” in this case, is an entity. My last partner and I called it a “he.” But after Lukas’s first trip, he insisted that the word was too familiar—that humanizing something so unfathomable would lead to bad decisions.
Hence, it.
Not that it doesn’t have a name. It does—it calls itself “Envoy.” More than most, I’ve had that name burned into my mind since childhood. The human race knew Envoy for more than thirty years before it came up with a name, before we knew what to call it. And even today, generations into the Envoy program, it’s a name which begs certain questions. Questions like: “Envoy from where?” And my personal favorite: “Envoy sent on whose behalf?” One of those answers alone could clinch my memoir as a bestseller, after the redactor-monkeys go through it with their little black markers.
“Twenty klicks to the site, I’m guessing?” Lukas asks.
“Yeah. If Envoy’s at the site.”
“C’mon, Sang, it’s been a century and a half. When has it ever not been where it said it would be?”
Point taken. “All right, going in for a deep-snow landing,” I say for the benefit of each of our passengers. “Little bump—nothing our shocks can’t handle. Then we’ll put down our treads and approach by ground, as per Envoy’s instructions.”
I make contact with the permafrost with a gentle rumble, and to my left I see Lukas’s quadcopter do the same. The hydraulics beneath me set to work, extending the four snow treads out from our chassis with a light hum, one that I find surprisingly peaceful against the endless roar of the storm outside. We feel ourselves rise.
“You ready back there, Ambassador?” I shout, turning my head.
Odon sits harnessed and crash-helmeted against the wall. His gift for Envoy is fastened to the chair on his opposite side: a large collection of paper encyclopedias printed in Malagasy, wrapped in a heavy red nylon carrying strap. Fitting enough for Madagascar’s first visit with a being from another world, I suppose.
The man looks through me for a moment, rubbing his right wrist with the other hand and glancing about the cabin as if seeing it for the first time. After a moment he comes to himself with a cough, meets my eyes and gives me a slight nod.
His reaction doesn’t surprise me—some nerves are to be expected while preparing to meet Envoy for the first time. But I’ve learned that bringing that up with our passengers only makes it worse, so instead I give him a thumbs-up and turn around, switching on the comm.
“How about you, Jarosława?”
Through the feed on my dash to Lukas’s quadcopter, I see the Polish ambassador pull up her chin and nod smoothly to the camera opposite her, hands clasped in her lap. She says something that I can’t pick out through the ambient noise around us.
“No need to worry, you two,” Lukas says. “Pietra lived for more than sixty years after first contact with Envoy, and I have this on good authority: Never once did a member of her party experience an alien birthing while having lunch. Or, say, spontaneously sprout any new limbs?”
To her credit, Jarosława remains stone-faced. She has the right look for a diplomat, I think—a balance that she could only have cultivated deliberately. Cooperative, but austere, as if she’s holding something back, something which might come out if she thinks she’s being given the runaround. She hasn’t even tried to mask her age, and why should she? Every line on her face warns of her experience.
I glance back to my cargo. The Madagascan ambassador seems close to losing his lunch.
“I don’t think they watch old movies, Luk,” I say over the comm. He mutters something about “Damn Philistines” and cuts off the line.
“Look,” I say, turning it back on. “Point is, you’ll be back home in two weeks with a story to tell. You’ll run the talk-show circuit, retire to some government position that really only asks you to show up every once in a while—”
“Imagine never paying for a meal again,” interrupts Lukas.
“—and you’ll join the eighty or so people living who’ve had bona fide extraterrestrial contact. Every day on Earth, another novel experience becomes a tired pastime. But how many people can say that they’ve met Envoy?”
Lukas shakes his head. “You literally just said it—eighty or so.”
“It was a rhetorical question.”
“Well, the next time you ask a ‘rhetorical question,’ don’t give the answer literally five seconds befo—”
Lukas’s voice drops out as I shut off the comm.
The treads finish lowering, and after confirming my readiness with Lukas, we’re off with a mild jolt. For nearly an hour we ride on in silence, our treads clawing voraciously through the snow, our shocks eating every impact.
Slowly, a blur begins to impose itself over the perpetual whorl of the ice, growing stronger and more defined against the grain outside. If I didn’t know better, I’d assume it’s a small mountain, or a geodesic dome, or—
VERY GOOD, APPROACH
“Whoa, you hear that?” says Lukas, relishing our passengers’ discomfort. “He’s ready for us!”
The first member of Homo sapiens to meet Envoy, more than a century before I was born, was a self-styled “amateur polar enthusiast” named Pietra. If you ever think you might be forgetting her story, don’t worry—I understand they’re working on yet another cinematic retelling.
When Pietra heard Envoy’s voice in her mind—at the time no human language, to be sure, but language nonetheless—she decided that the entity must be some sort of telepath. How else to explain the way that its speech seems to fill your very skull? The explorer returned with every conceivable monitoring instrument to see how it was done, but Envoy forbade the use of them all, including still photography. Even after the worldwide Envoy program began, theories abounded for years, un … a pilot tried detaching from her harness and jumping, and the voice cut off until she hit ground.
Bone conduction. Directed sound waves beamed right to your inner ear via your skull via the vehicle itself. Skeptics worldwide breathed a sigh of relief, while New Age cranks stood firm and held on to their crankery.
“Well, there it is.” Lukas reads the coordinates on the dash. “The right lat and long on the dime. Drink it in, people.”
The blizzard is thinning. I untint the windows, carefully controlling for the glare of the facing sun so that Odon can see through without being blinded. In his surprise the man tries to stand, forgetting his harness and sprawling back into his seat. Over the radio, I hear Jarosława exclaim in very surprised Polish.
“I’ve heard about it,” says Odon, eyes wide and fixed on the view through the front window. “But to actually see it …”
Envoy is magnificent.
I’ve seen Envoy eight times before, and each feels like the first. Its form is dynamic, versatile. Seeing its yearly change is like looking through some protracted zoetrope, one which reveals only one frame a year. On our previous visit, Envoy stood in the snowless tundra, a lusterless teal-colored dome planted unceremoniously within the rainbow of micro flora coloring the ground about it. But this year its form is squat, extended.
And it shines. Envoy is no longer the dim smooth blue it’s been every time I’ve seen it, but a glossy, smaller orb which seems to reflect nearly all light. It’s so brilliant that its color can’t be seen, even with the windshield correcting for the glare.
“I was a Messenger as a kid, believe it or not,” I say over the comm, already aware that this isn’t the right time for this. “You know—Messengers of Envoy? Believing that it’s here to prepare us for the End of Days and all that? My parents converted when I was a toddler. Drove the grandparents nuts. Mom lost her job at the Department of Defense—used to joke that rooting for the end of all earthly war had been a conflict of interest.”
I chuckle. Neither of the ambassadors say anything. Nor does Lukas. I concentrate on my navigation, feeling my cheeks flush.
“ETA at this speed,” I say neutrally, “about … six-and-a-half minutes until we reach the Eye.”
As we get closer, the colors coming in through the windshield become more and more distorted, darken like a bruise. There can only be one reason for this: the ship’s glare correction is working overtime. But why?
Lukas is way ahead of me. Through the camera I see his cockpit flood with light as he switches off the live image processing. Jarosława cries out and throws a hand up over her eyes.
“A substructure!” Lukas says with a fist to the dash that makes the Polish ambassador flinch. He turns, suddenly aware of his passenger, and apologizes, re-enabling and adjusting the glare. Then, more reserved: “Sang, do you see a substructure around Envoy? It’s been … how many years?”
Now that I know what to look for, it’s plain: The space around Envoy’s bulb is shining as well, far brighter than the snow.
So that’s where the extra mass has gone. Envoy is sitting on a flat foundation of itself, one which extends nearly a kilometer in each direction and which seems to be even with the snow. Envoy looks—I think with only a twinge of the guilt instilled by a childhood spent worshiping the thing—like an enormous fried egg.
“Not within my lifetime at least, Luk. But why now? What purpose does it serve?”
“Maybe we should knock on the door and ask.” Lukas laughs without mirth. I understand his reaction—we’re talking about a being which won’t even allow itself to be photographed, for which every depiction is an artist’s impression. Even the ship has been carefully stripped of any unnecessary tech to comply with Envoy’s requirements. So, needless to say, it doesn’t exactly answer questions about itself.
We continue on in silence for several hard-fought, squally, ice-strewn kilometers, and then … the storm stops. The air is still.
The Eye. The proverbial center of the hurricane, with Envoy right at its center. Roughly two point six eight kilometers in diameter, each and every year almost to the meter; a rare constancy for something related to Envoy.
We stop, weighing anchor by raising the treads, which causes our ships’ diamond-shaped undersides to dig into the snow, rooting us into place.
“All right.” I unfasten myself to assist Odon with his harness in the cabin. “I’m obligated by UNOOSA and the Non-Member State Cooperative to review the following before you depart: Bring your cold-weather gear and your gift only. No electronic devices of any sort are allowed off the ship. Envoy doesn’t usually ask questions, but if it does, you’ll answer anything unrelated to confidential government affairs. Bottom line: If it’s something that you’d tell a reporter or a shrink, you can tell Envoy.”
“Oh—and last but not least, kids,” says Lukas over the sound of his cockpit door opening for disembarkment, “Have fun.”
Try this on for size: Envoy doesn’t show up on satellite. It’s not blanked out or scrambled; it just doesn’t appear.
When viewed from above, the Eye looks exactly like any other bit of terrain. Several minutes ago, hundreds of people squinting over displays watched us blink out of existence, just as we entered the Eye. And now, as we don our snowshoes to escort the ambassadors to their destination, we’re literally the only four human beings on the surface of the planet who aren’t being surveilled from the skies.
“I thought it would be colder, somehow,” says Jarosława, loosening her scarf.
Lukas nods. “That’s Envoy. Or, rather, the Eye. If you walked in from outside, you’d feel the temperature climb from roughly freeze-your-face-off to only just below freezing. Oh, and no wind chill. None. The wind stops”—he snaps his fingers—“just like that.”
“Hmm.” Jarosława glances in Envoy’s direction, then lowers her gaze to her feet.
I chuckle a bit—did Lukas really miss her attempt to soothe her nerves with small talk, or just rebuff it?—but disguise it as a sniff.
We accompany Odon and Jarosława to the edge of the snow. It takes us a moment to convince them that it’s all right to walk on the still glaringly bright substructure, that expeditions decades before set foot on Envoy without incident. Then we leave them to find the rest of their way to the center on their own. After all, Envoy doesn’t like uninvited guests.
While we wait, Lukas and I convene to my quadcopter-turned-motor sled.
Lukas is the visitor here, and so he seats himself in the copilot’s chair. He pulls a little electronic pad out of his pocket, unfolds it across the dash and begins work on his usual sketch and description of Envoy. A cursory task, most years, but one he takes to with surprising energy today.
“Let’s see what we’ve got here.” I rummage through the hold box. “The usual MREs, protein cakes, letters of hero worship from the wonderful elementary school students of Antananarivo and Krakow, and …”
“And what?” he asks, erasing and redrawing part of the substructure rim.
“Hmm …” I inspect the bottle. “You’ll be mad.”
“Hand it over.”
I toss Lukas the plastic champagne bottle. He curses and flails for it, catching it between his fingers with a yelp.
“You know that looks like glass, you skeevy bastard!” he laughs.
I point at the label, which contains the words “SPARKLING” and “NON-ALCOHOLIC.”
“Ah, unleaded,” he says solemnly. “Fair enough, I suppose.” His face fills with steely concentration as he takes his glass. “All right, placebo effect—your time has come.”
A glass and change later, and we’re having the usual discussion. The one that weighs on our minds throughout each year, here or there, but which becomes impossible not to think about when we’re parked less than three klicks from Envoy.
“But see, here’s the thing,” I say, feet on the dash, kept carefully away from any controls which might actually do anything. “If you’re making the effort to enter a gravity well like Earth’s, it’s damn well not for natural resources. Why not just go window-shopping at your nearest asteroid belt for platinum, cobalt, gold, whatever? You’ll save fuel.”
Lukas studies the bubbles in his glass. “But where’s the atmosphere in that?” He meets my eyes. “Sorry.”
“You joke, but that’s exactly what I mean. In some way we can’t understand, the human race is the main draw here: Envoy’s here for us. But that brings us to the usual motives—domination, extermination, transformation, education—which don’t seem to hold when—”
“When the thing hangs around for more than a century without actually doing anything.” Lukas walks to the glove box, searching for any goodies that I might have missed. He sits back down dejectedly with only an MRE.
“Doing anything that we’ve noticed, at least.” Anything but plant itself in the snow and get presents once a year, like some ersatz reverse Santa Claus. Anything but leech off our sculpture, art, history, and culture while offering nothing in return.
There are others who feel this way, I know. Who can’t see the Envoy project as some universal coming-together of peoples, the view we’re careful to cultivate. And the project’s been around for so long that still others consider Envoy a known quantity; they’ve grown up with it, after all. They barely think of it.
Not that I’m always certain how I feel. I just know that I’m too close to the subject of Envoy, in more ways than one, not to feel something.
I sigh and turn my gaze to the windshield facing Envoy. It’s opaque, since we use less power just dimming the electrochromic glass than it takes to do point-by-point glare correction. Still, Envoy’s presence looms.
I already know the rest of this conversation. It may as well be scripted: Lukas will advance his scout/invasion theory. I’ll say then where are the other Envoys, after all this time? Lukas will concede the point
and move on to what about altruism—save us from ourselves or raise us up? Then I’ll point out that we already have the ability to destroy the planet in about a dozen different ways and Envoy hasn’t taken our toys away yet. And if it’s got any secrets for the human race’s benefit, Luk, it’s sure taking its damn time revealing them.
And so on and so on. In the end I’ll bite my tongue and change the subject, because if I go any further I might say something that could cost me my job, make me look incapable of dealing impartially with Envoy, the way that having been raised as a Messenger nearly did.
“Something the matter?” Lukas says between bites of his calorie-laden bar of reconstituted who-knows-what. He continues to sketch with his other hand.
I shake my head.
“Because it seems like something’s the matter—”
“You know what, Lukas?” I pick up his writing pad and review what he’s taken down, and I can’t hold it in anymore: “You can write the word ‘substructure’ all you want. ‘Substructure, substructure, substructure.’ Just blanket the screen with it from top to bottom. But it doesn’t mean anything.”
He blinks hard. “Sang, the world is waiting for—”
“For what? For the opportunity to say ‘for the first time in so many years, ambassadors visiting Envoy in the Antarctic have seen such-and-such,’ without being able to say anything more? Without having the tiniest inkling of what anything it does means? To publish an article which says nothing new about Envoy and takes thirty pages to do it? What’s the point, Lukas? What are we doing out here, year after year?”
Taking another bite of his MRE, Lukas chews slowly, staring up at the ceiling in thought. I know that he’ll defuse the situation if I give him a chance to speak, and I can’t have that right now. I need to get this out, whatever the consequence.
I toss the pad in his lap. “I’ve read the articles, Luk, and they’re worse than nothing. This thing’s a massive self-modifying mountain of whatever from wherever. Either we can’t comprehend its inscrutable morality, in which case we’re wasting our time, or we can, in which case we’re dealing with an extraterrestrial narcissist.”