A moment later the bubble began to move. It did not accelerate sharply, but once in motion neither did it ever seem to slow down. Other than the occasional appearance of an overhead light, the tunnel down which they were speeding was pitch-black. Within the bubble it was not completely dark, however. Portions of Sarah’s golden limbs emitted a pale purple efflorescence of their own.
So absorbed was Ingrid in her own thoughts that she did not notice when they hit the midpoint of their journey. There must have been a midpoint because that was when the remarkable vehicle began to slow. She estimated that they had spent the same amount of time decelerating as they had in speeding up. When it finally stopped moving, the bubble came to a halt opposite a portal exactly like the one through which they had entered.
“How far do you think we’ve come?” she asked her companion as she exited the transportation device. “Or did we just go in a big circle?”
Whispr’s expression was grim. Plainly he was preparing himself for the worst. “Can’t say. Tunnel was too dark, no landmarks, impossible to estimate direction or speed. More than a kilometer, less than a hundred, maybe. I think there near the end we were traveling on a downward grade. But I’m just guessing.” His smile was crooked. “I expect it’s all guessing from here on out.”
In the course of the short walk that followed, Ingrid noted other Melds who were recognizably human, but only one or two possible Naturals. Their familiar shapes helped to mitigate the shock of encountering one being after another who made Johan and Sarah look positively normal.
There was the giant who was forced to walk hunched over. Nearly all white, he (for unsupportable reasons she thought of it as a he) managed the feat only because a dozen or more short legs ran the length of his upper torso from where the hips began to where the long, backward dragging arms protruded. The head—she turned away from moonlike eyes and piercing azure pupils that floated freely from one side of the iris to the other.
The giant was the largest of the creatures they passed, but far from the most exotic. A pair of perambulating, big-eyed seashells came toward them. They flanked a very ordinary-looking Natural woman. Workpad in hand, brown hair tied behind her in a bun, she reminded Ingrid of hospital staff she often encountered while having lunch in one of her home tower’s restaurants. Striving to catch her attention, Ingrid gazed fixedly in the other woman’s direction. When the Natural walked right on past without acknowledging the stare, Ingrid considered calling out. Ultimately she decided to hold her peace. She and Whispr were still prisoners, still considered intruders and trespassers. Untimely vocal outbursts might not be the best way to ingratiate themselves with their escorts.
There was an individual who looked like an emaciated horse crossed with an industrial robot, several walking crystals with rotating faces, and a whole platoon of creatures that might have been meter-tall upright millipedes save for their bright rainbow colors and the dozens of tiny gloves they wore on their multitude of hands. If these were merely Melds, as Whispr stubbornly continued to insist, then they represented manipulations of the human body far beyond anything she had ever heard of, read of, or dreamed of. So extreme was the eclectic panoply of shapes and sizes that they passed in the passageway that they looked to be the product of magic and not science, as if they had been maniped at the hands of a djinn instead of those of a biosurge.
She was looking back at still another biological impossibility when they turned a corner. As her attention shifted forward once again she found herself smacked by a sudden dollop of vertigo. Whispr had to grab and steady her to keep her from falling. For once she welcomed the contact.
Someone had punched a hole in the world in front of them and filled it with sublime.
IN AN IMMENSITY OF darkness floated a black ovoid bleeding chrome. Only its vitreous sheen, reminiscent of polished onyx, enabled her to distinguish it from the surrounding blackness. That, and the ripples of sinuous silver that occasionally materialized from deep within the gigantic object to flow from right to left before being reabsorbed into the specular body from which they had initially emerged. No railing, no barrier separated her and her companions from stepping into gaping infinity.
As she recovered her equilibrium and her brain struggled to make sense of what she was seeing, she picked out in the downward distance some sort of ramp or avenue. Suspended in the dark, it pierced the side of the ovoid like a hypodermic, drawing out not cells but tiny figures. Her pounding heart seemed to have risen into the vicinity of her throat. She grew aware that Sarah was speaking.
“Very few humans, Naturals or Melds, have seen the ship. But you needed to be convinced. We want you to be convinced because we require the assistance of human doctors. Naturals such as yourself are especially valued.”
She hardly heard the escort. Staggered by the sight before her, still fighting to maintain her balance, she realized now that the industrial fabrication site she and Whispr had discovered after crawling through one of Nerens’s climate control ducts was not Morgan Ouspel’s Big Picture. This was the Big Picture. “It’s real, and it moves,” Ouspel had told them. And the Painters of the Big Picture, those who made it move, were …
Alien. Not of this world.
And Het Kruger had called her an intruder.
Having seen far more of the extreme than his companion, Whispr was better equipped to maintain his mental stability. Concentrating on the prosaic helped.
“How can you get something this big on and off the surface of the planet without being detected coming or going?” He nodded into the abyss. Sounds muted by distance drifted up to them. “You’re gonna tell me you’ve got some kind of cloaking device or something, right?”
“No,” Johan corrected him. “The ship does not move from space into this place. Instead, we shift the very small bit of space that contains the ship. Your simple detection devices do not detect the movement of space. You do not yet possess the math necessary to comprehend the relevant field equations.”
“That’s all right,” Whispr murmured. “I don’t feel deprived. So it is an invasion.”
“Not in the sense you are thinking of it,” Sarah told him. “An agricultural metaphor would be more apt. We are turning the soil and watering the first seedlings.”
The slender Meld’s tone darkened. Regarding himself as dead already he saw no point in holding back. If nothing else he could at least express his outrage and thereby gain some final, if not lasting, satisfaction.
“What the hell are you monsters ‘watering’?”
Ingrid flinched. Calling their escorts “monsters” was unlikely to help their situation. Johan appeared to take no umbrage, however.
“We are watering those shoots that are having difficulty thriving among your kind. Logic. Reason. Common sense. The realization that the cosmos is vast and sentience rare.” Weaving slowly back and forth atop its neck, the great compound eye tilted in the humans’ direction. “We do not seek conquest. That is an ancient and self-defeating attitude. We wish only to establish a permanent friendship. New friends are forever welcome.”
Whispr was not appeased. “Funny kind of handshake you have.”
“Your kind is not ready to receive it in full. Your world is seething with frustration, confusion, uncertainty. You need help. If it was offered openly, you would refuse it. As a species you are close to suicidal. This pains us to an extent you cannot imagine. We cannot stand by and watch you consume yourselves. To do so would be morally indefensible.”
The jumble of golden spikes that was Sarah tiptoed closer. Ingrid held her ground. Though still distrustful she discovered that, unexpectedly, she was no longer afraid. While the aliens’ intent was still unknown, their tone and manner was anything but threatening. Some of Sarah’s earlier words came back to her.
“You said you require the assistance of human doctors. What for?”
Once more the male voice emerged from beneath the eye. “To install the implants, of course.”
“Aha!” Whispr’s shout was ac
cusing. “If that doesn’t signal a hostile invasion I don’t know what does!” He whirled on Ingrid. “They’re taking control of our youth. You told me yourself that the implants have only been found in teens.”
“We are taking control of no one,” Sarah explained. “Of what use is a friend devoid of free will?”
Ingrid was torn between Whispr’s indignation and the alien’s protest. “If not control, then what is the purpose of the implants?”
An analog of a sigh issued from the center of the intertwined gold spires. “Human couriers transport them around the world to those physicians who have engaged with us.”
“Traitors to the species,” Whispr growled. “The old man Cricket and I riffled in Savannah: he was a courier. Or a co-opted doctor. Or both.”
Ingrid was nodding vigorously. “Remember Morgan Ouspel’s reaction when we showed him the thread? He called it a ‘distributor.’ ” She looked back at the alien Sarah. “It was full of your implants.”
“That is how they are transported,” Sarah admitted. “On the thread they exist as a stabilized dichotomy: field circuitry imprint in one part, foiled metal in the other. It is only when they are combined that a functional implant results.”
Ingrid recalled her and Whispr’s several attempts to divine what was on the thread by probing it with various readers. No wonder all had proven futile.
“When the particular distributor of which you speak disappeared on your continent, steps were taken to ensure that it did not come to the attention of one of your tribal governments or your wide-ranging media. We were only peripherally involved in these prophylactic steps. That is one reason why initial attempts to recover it on a local basis were clumsy and awkward. Such recovery procedures are the responsibility of our human associates, a portion of whom operate within the organization you commonly call SICK, Inc.”
“More traitors.” Whispr could barely restrain himself. “Their ‘clumsiness’ got an old mudbud of mine deaded.”
“You haven’t told us what the implants do,” Ingrid reminded their escorts.
Sarah continued. “The implants are tiny—you would say transmitters.”
Ingrid remembered the signal-boosting experiment they had performed on the thread in the shop of the tech Meld Nokhot, in underground Orangemund. “What do they transmit?”
“Endocrinal suggestions,” Johan told her. “Neurological correctives. Very slight adjustments to the dispersion of endorphins and other substances. Your kind still exists in a state of evolutionary stasis that prizes self-preservation over cooperation. This hinders both the survival and maturation of your species. Confined as it is now to a single habitable system, the cosmos could wipe out your entire population in a single stroke. An exceptional series of solar flares, comet strikes, a high-energy particle storm from a nearby supernova—this has happened before, to others. To survive potential catastrophe on a cosmic instead of a local scale you will need the help of—everyone else.”
“But you are not socially or culturally prepared for such intervention,” Sarah informed them. “That comes only when the individual members of a species recognize that the survival and well-being of all supersedes and takes precedence over the survival instincts of the one.”
Whispr turned bitter. “Some of whom you don’t mind killing if they threaten to interfere with your galactic good Samaritans.”
“That cannot be denied,” she replied calmly. “We regret the need to employ such means. But your people cannot be made aware of our presence until such time as they have matured sufficiently to accept it for what it is: an intervention for the benefit of the entire species.” The odd twang in her voice hardened slightly. “The methods employed to preserve the secrecy required for the continued proper functioning of this facility are your own. We did not import them.”
“What do these ‘correctives’ and ‘suggestions’ you’re talking about actually do?” Ingrid continued to be fascinated both by the alien speakers and their explanations.
Subsidiary orbs as well as the big compound eye turned to her. “In summary and taken together they serve to mute the destructive priorities that favor individual self-preservation over that of the species as a whole. The neurological signals are most effective when applied to the mature but not yet fully fossilized cortical structure of humans of a certain age. Given the very limited number of your colleagues who have agreed to cooperate in achieving these ends and who have been trained in the implantation procedure, it was decided to concentrate on those of your young who have suffered poor or inaccurate meldings.
“Eventually the changes necessary to ensure humankind’s survival will have been inculcated in enough of your youth so that inducing neurological adjustments by means of the implants will no longer be necessary. It will take some time. But time we have, and we have learned to be patient. We cannot suddenly fix all that is wrong with your present social order. For an indeterminate amount of time, more of you will perish at your own hands than should be necessary. But we can, slowly, fine-tune your future for the betterment of your kind. And one day, when you face a global catastrophe, or when the time is simply right, we will reveal ourselves.” All his eyes looked at Whispr. “Then will occur a collective mental handshake that will encompass every sentient being on this world.”
Ingrid remembered the potentially deadly intertribal clash that had been broken up in Cape Town by a band of singing, unarmed youths. She struggled to recall the words of the young lemur Meld who had tried to pickpocket her purse. What was it he had said when he had abruptly scurried off to help put a damper on the looming conflict?
“The old ways must go passing by. Tribal feuds must be stopped. Not only here but everywhere. Is for betterment of human species I go.”
And when Ingrid had wondered aloud why he had chosen to risk his own welfare on behalf of people he did not even know …?
“Not sure. Must try,” he had replied. She understood now. It made sense now. Three bad melds he had undergone, the young Meld had told her and Whispr. Three times under the biosurge’s instruments, and still he was not right. Which meant there had been three opportunities for a human doctor to install one of the clandestine “corrective” alien implants. Apparently it took only one such quantum entangled bit of intervention to turn a street thief into an effective mob suppressor.
Was it so bad, then, what the aliens were doing? she thought. Helping the human species to mature? To focus on cooperation in place of conflict? If Sarah and Johan were to be believed, every young person who had been implanted still retained full control of their faculties, still functioned with free will. That wasn’t mind control. The fact that the youthful lemur Meld was still practicing riffling when they had encountered him was proof enough of that. But when the greater good was at stake, when two mobs threatened to engage one another in an orgy of typically human essentially senseless violence, alien “suggestions” kicked in via the transplants to mitigate the aggression.
Realization hit home like a kick in the head. She and Whispr had been rescued from the twisted attentions of Napun Molé, had been brought to this place and shown irrefutable evidence of the alien’s existence and presence, for one reason and one reason only. To help safely install the increasing number of implants in meld-damaged young humans the aliens needed human doctors.
They needed her.
“I—I understand what you want from me now.” She turned away from the black void and the gargantuan craft behind her. “You’ve explained yourselves clearly and you make a good case. But I—I just don’t know.…”
“It is a great deal to grasp and comprehend at one time.” For the first time, Sarah was openly sympathetic. “When one knows only the insularity that comes from living on a single world and is ignorant of all else, the scale of things on a cosmic basis can be overwhelming.”
“Don’t do it, doc—Ingrid!” Whispr was slower on the uptake than his more educated companion—but not dead slow. “This could all be nothing but a quick-ass cover story for
a real invasion! We don’t have any real proof of anything they’re saying.” He lowered his voice. “The fox is explaining how to fix the henhouse.”
Turning to him in a daze, she mustered a response. “Whispr, look at all this. The implant technology, the MSMH metallurgy, this facility and this—ship. Even the little underground shuttle that brought us here. All of it examples of technology that are beyond our dreams. Don’t you think if they just wanted to ‘conquer’ us they could do so easily? But what would be the point?”
“You do understand.” Johan was plainly pleased. “Planets, astronomical bodies, natural resources—in the galaxy these are as common as dust. Habitable worlds are plentiful. Far more have been discovered than could ever be settled. What is rare, what is precious, what cannot be synthesized, is sentience. That is to be preserved, to be nurtured, to be helped to flourish like the rare flower it is.” He paused, the huge multilensed central eye inclined in her direction. “Humankind is one of those rare flowers.”
“Yeah, right!” Whispr protested. He was stalking back and forth now, waving his long scarecrow arms for emphasis. “Just like each of your kind is a ‘rare flower,’ huh? How many of you are there, anyway?” He nodded sharply at the attentive collection of spires, then at the assemblage of eyes. “How many ‘helpful’ species?”
“We do not know for certain,” Sarah told him quietly. “Not anymore.”
Her reply caused a suddenly bemused Whispr to halt. “What do you mean you don’t ‘know for certain’?”
“There was a time when we did,” Johan explained. “After a while it was no longer considered important. Save for a few scattered historians the relevant parties ceased to care. We have all become as one.”
“Ah.” A self-satisfied Whispr looked at Ingrid as if to say “I told you so.” “I knew it. There always has to be a boss.” He smirked at the two aliens. “There always has to be someone on the top, someone in charge. Someone who’s more interested in themselves than in some poofy pie-in-the-sky ‘greater good.’ Which race is it?” He stared intently at Sarah. “The spine collectives?” His attention shifted to the watching Johan. “Those who can keep an ‘eye’ on everybody and everything else? Or is it the mammal-bug giant we had to dodge in the corridor, or some species we haven’t met yet?”