The Ghosts of Heaven

  Searches were based on many concepts, the most common being that if an exo-species was trying to discover our existence, they would do just what we would do; namely broadcast a radio wave that could not be generated naturally. The idea: to broadcast something with meaning, something that displays a universal truth, such as the value of π, or a rising sequence denoting the atomic numbers of the halogens, or the universal sequence that creates itself from itself, the Fibonacci sequence—1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 … Computers were set in vast arrays to listen to the universe, hunting out such regular patterns as these and many more, but still, the result was total silence.

  Bowman sleeps. In his dreams he sees himself spiralling through space, alone, without a space ship—just his body floating free and flying fast across the galaxy. He has enough self-awareness in his dream to tell himself that he does not believe in the supernatural. The truth is maybe a little different now, and Bowman’s mind starts to send him immense and disturbing images of the universe. What really lies out here? All man’s efforts with space travel to date have seen ships footle around the Solar System; like the mission Bowman took to Jupiter and back. Compared with his forty years of flying, that was a stroll in the backyard. And the backyard is safe; there are no monsters there. But what about now? What lies waiting to be found in the very farthest darkest depths of the heavens? Do the normalities of space and time even hold good across the universe? What if they don’t?

  Bowman’s dreams tear at him as if he’s on a torture rack, opening his mind, pulling his brain apart, exposing everything he is to everything in the universe, and he begins to feel the presence of another intelligence, which he is approaching, rapidly. There are voices, though he cannot understand their words, only feel them. There are spirits all around him, and finally he knows for certain that the universe is not empty.

  There are ghosts up there—the ghosts of Heaven—and they are calling to him, urging him to come and understand, and be damned.

  So Bowman dreams as he sleeps, but this time he does not sleep for ten years.

  He sleeps for just four, and then, the alert system, which he believes is totally unreliable, kicks into action and starts his waking cycle six years ahead of schedule.

  It does this because it has registered the number one item on the priority list of emergency reasons to wake a sentinel. It has detected an ultra-low-frequency broadcast at around 1.618 Hz.

  It has detected intelligent life.

  55

  Bowman knows immediately that something is unusual. As he pulls his suit on, he sees the clock on his sleeve is flashing a priority alert code at him, and he knows exactly what it means: ETI. The signal denoting extraterrestrial intelligence has been detected.

  He staggers toward Base Four and climbs into his chair at the Terminal, half his mind on this incredible event, half on something that was in his dreams as he woke, and that even now is slipping away.

  “Yes,” he says. Then, “Let’s see you.”

  He pulls up the report of the signal, and cannot find fault with the ship’s analysis of the situation.

  At first sight, the broadcast might seem unremarkable. It is just a carrier wave, with no information in it; what is remarkable is simply the frequency of the wave; at an ultra-low level, just 1.618 Hz.

  This level, 1.618, is in fact an approximation of the frequency that the ship has found. To be sure, Bowman focuses in on the wave and has it rescanned. To ten decimal places it reads 1.6180339887, and then he stares at the screen as a chill slides its way up his neck.

  Bowman knows all about this number. Any scientist does. The number is known as phi, and along with π it is the single best known and most important irrational number that the universe created. It is a number also known as the golden mean or golden ratio. It has been known for thousands of years, and what it denotes is the state of perfection. It appears in the natural world, in mathematics, in architecture, in the ideal proportions of the human figure or the most beautiful face, even in such mundane places as the performance of financial markets. In short, it underpins the universe itself. The number itself is a ratio. It describes the ratio of two lengths, where the ratio of the shorter length to the longer one is the same as that of the ratio of the longer one to the total of both lengths. Put like that it sounds meaningless, dull, pointless, and confusing, and yet here, there, out in the world, in the universe, this ratio is not only the one which we humans find most pleasing, it is the one which in some way the universe itself seems to find most pleasing.

  For a radio wave to be broadcast at that frequency is the clearest possible indication that the source of the wave is an intelligence similar to, or greater than, our own. Billions of dollars, millions of computer hours have been spent on searching for such a thing, and now the Song has ventured into space and stumbled across one all by itself.

  Bowman stares at the screen, because he, the man who moves forward, the man who does not hesitate, the man who always knows how to act, no longer knows what to do.

  According to those mighty powers who created the Song and the other Toroid Class ships, the mission to New Earth, constellation Lyca, can be diverted for one reason and one reason only, and that reason has just popped up on the console screens, flashing in pale green, calmly, waiting for Bowman to acknowledge its existence. So now, there is just one question that rises above all others.

  Should they alter the mission? More to the point, should he alone decide the fate of the five hundred and three people on board, and alter the trajectory of the Song toward the source of the wave?

  It is a decision he does not want to take by himself. He finds himself wanting to consult others—the other sentinels. Theoretically, he could ask them. It would take ten years to get all their replies, but somehow he feels that the decision ought to be unanimous; they should all agree on this. The trace of the radio wave will still be there in ten years. The ship has logged the source now; diverting is such a long and awkward process that ten years either way is not ultimately going to make much difference. The key thing is to make the right choice, and there is so little information on which to base the decision.

  The ship has woken only him; despite the potential magnitude of the finding, it cannot afford to wake all ten sentinels on a potentially false alarm. Doing so would only waste the waking life of the sentinels. Instead, the ship has woken the next sentinel due to come on duty, and so it is up to Bowman to verify the signal. But in exceptional circumstances, he can, if he decides it is absolutely necessary, wake his nine colleagues …

  Should he instigate a vote?

  As soon as that thought is in him; he feels odd. He has had, what is, for him, an uncommon reaction. He sees that he is regretting something. He curses his luck that the broadcast came about when he was the next sentinel up for duty …

  Then he stops himself.

  He wasn’t the next. The ship should have woken Sentinel Ten. It has only been something under four years since he was awake last; why has it woken him instead?

  Suddenly, problems seem to be mounting hard on each other; thinking about the sentinels, and why he was woken when he still had six years to sleep, he notices what he did not notice before.

  He was so busy with the priority alert about the ETI signal that he has not seen the status alert about the Longsleepers.

  Another screen is flashing a pale green alert at him; with a series of red lights glowing on the schematic of the ring of the Song.

  Eight more pods have gone offline. Eight more people are dead.

  He is dumbfounded. Adrift, he feels a powerful sense of terror rising inside him, not terror of the murderer who is aboard the ship with him, but the terror of not knowing what to do. It is something he has rarely experienced, and when he has, it has come close to paralyzing him with fear.

  Trying to think of something to do, to kid himself that he is in control of the situation, he decides to read the reports of Sentinels Seven, Eight, and Nine, who have all been on duty since he last woke.


  Again, they have left only written reports, and something about their tone troubles him. They sound concerned, they have performed what duties and investigations they can, but when he goes to check on the computer what those investigations were, he finds that nothing has been done that the ship itself could not have done.

  Uneasy, he finds some of the words in the reports are bothering him. It’s so hard to be sure, because he finds remembering anything at the moment is very hard, but he seems to find them very familiar. He hunts back to the previous reports from Sentinels Seven, Eight and Nine, and then he knows what it is that worries him. They use the same phrases. They repeat themselves. They use different combinations of key phrases, but the phrases are there nonetheless. Of course, people repeat themselves, but they do so in a loose way, not a perfect one.

  He forgets everything else. For the time being, he wants to know something, because an awful idea has just crept into his head and he cannot focus on anything else until he has that idea disproven. At least, he very much hopes it will be disproven.

  He knows that the entire mission files are on the ship. Most of them are open access to a sentinel. Some are classified, such as the personnel files that he hacked before. And then there are a series of files that are only to be actioned upon arrival at New Earth. These are files that contain information about landing procedures, sequences, settlement plans, security measures, and so on. He knows these are important because he has glimpsed them, hidden behind firewalls that it would take him years to crack, unless he happened to have the right access codes.

  He digs down into the network until he’s faced with the screen demanding the sixteen-digit access code to the mission files.

  He stares at the screen and, as he does so, he remembers something else about the number phi—the number being broadcast through space. Phi also underpins something else, one of the most beautiful of shapes: a special kind of spiral known as the Golden or Fibonacci Spiral, one found again, and again and again in nature; in the shells of sea creatures, in the heads of sunflowers, in the branching of plants.

  Bowman leans forward and, holding his breath, he types, without even thinking why he knows he has the correct code.

  1 6 1 8 0 3 3 9 8 8 7 4 9 8 9 4

  The screen turns green for an instant, and a whole new user interface that he has never seen before opens up before him.

  And that’s when it all unravels. The whole thing: the mission, the sentinels, and his place among them.

  89

  Bowman is wrong about one thing.

  He had feared that he was the only sentinel. That what appeared to be the other sentinels was in fact just the ship, generated by the computer, to mimic the actions of his colleagues. He knows that Sentinel Sleep was unbelievably costly to introduce into the mission; maybe they only had the cash for one per ship. Maybe he is the only sentinel aboard the Song, that’s what he’s thinking.

  But he’s wrong. There are indeed nine other living sentinels on the ship. It’s just that he’s the only one who’s been woken so far. In all of this last forty years, he is the only one, and now he knows why.

  They lied about the distance to New Earth. It is not in the constellation of Lyca at all, but much farther away—around ten times farther, to put a number to it.

  They have lied about the aging process too. Bowman is aging much faster than he was led to believe. If he had looked more closely at his face during any of his waking cycles, he would have seen lines appearing around his eyes, more gray hairs than his actual years ought to have given him.

  As he reads on, Bowman learns the bald truth of his situation.

  He will never make it to New Earth. In fact, once he has worked his shift of a hundred years or so, he will die. Only then will Sentinel Seven be activated. Bowman was designated number Six so as not to arouse any notions of being the first in a chain, as the name One might have suggested to him. When he dies, Sentinel Seven will take over for a thousand years of duties, and then Eight, and so on.

  They lied about other things, too.

  He, like everyone else, had been told there were five Toroid Class IV ships leaving for New Earth, but that too was a lie, told in order to make the members of the Song feel less isolated, less alone, because it is well known that such thoughts can seriously undermine confidence and performance in the long run.

  The Song of Destiny is alone—here will be no other voyages. It is simply too expensive.

  They lied when they said New Earth was 98.7 percent like home. He reads now that there is a 65 percent chance it is as close to Earth as they hoped. The chances are high that the planet is something less than perfect for man to colonize. Even on which to survive.

  Bowman sits at the console, staring into the nothingness with which he has just been crucified. They lied to him; they lied to everyone. He has a bitter picture in his head of the riots that took place around the launch base on Venture Day. People fighting to be allowed on board, even though they had never come close in the selection procedure. People died in that riot, and all over a lie. If only they’d known the truth, would anyone have signed up at all?

  All his life Bowman has wanted to head forward, never looking back, searching for something that always eludes him. Now he knows what it is; he has lied to himself. His whole life, he has lied. Because he does want to look back. He wants to be a boy again. He wants his father to be alive, and his mother, but they are dead forever. He wants to fall from the apple tree and land in the wet grass at the end of the sloping lawn outside the house where he grew up, and have his father come and pick him up, as they both laugh about how silly life is.

  He won’t find that. He will never get back there, back to his childhood, or anything like it. He will die, in space, aboard a ship full of the victims of a terrible lie, approximately 16 thousand trillion kilometers from home.

  He cries.

  * * *

  The hours tick away.

  His tears have ended.

  He stares at the information in front of him, wondering what else is untrue. For one thing, they must have programmed all the clocks and time codes aboard the ship to alter themselves, or future sentinels would know that the mission had been running for far longer than it ought to have been. They must have tampered with telemetry and astro-sextancy. They must have falsified so much.

  He needs time to read everything, and the first thing he decides is that if he is going to die in space, it might as well be sooner than later.

  He can break into one of the PTPs and make use of the food and other provisions there; there is enough on board each landing ship to feed 102 people for two years, and they are now fifteen people lighter than when they left Earth. He can, likewise, override the oxygen controls to allow him to breath those fifteen people’s quota of air.

  Maybe after ten years awake, he can slide back into the pod, and let it keep him alive, sort of, dreaming, forever. He could hack into it and make it do that. In fact, he could probably make it do anything, like take him to sleep only when he tells it to, not just once every ten years, automatically.

  He is God now, not the Selection Committee. He can do anything he wants.

  He hangs his head, and he cries again for a short time.

  * * *

  There is still another matter that Bowman has forgotten. It is only when he finally stands, as his sentinel pod starts to send him warning beeps that it is time to return to sleep, that he remembers it.

  Let the pod go to hell, he thinks. I’m not sleeping anymore. Not now.

  He wants, if nothing else, to know what is happening to his passengers, for that is how he has started to think of them since he met Allandra. There is the question of which of the other sentinels has been waking. And waking, he now knows, far ahead of their expected schedule. Waking and killing.

  He sits back down again, listening vaguely to the sound of his pod emitting a final series of warning beeps through the clock on the sleeve of his suit, before lapsing into silence.

 
“Maybe now I can get a little work done,” he says, and starts to punch up the video files from the last four years.

  If everything has gone according to plan, he should have better quality image files than before.

  He checks the numbers of the eight newly failed pods; he is, for some reason, disturbed to learn that one of them is right next to his own sentinel pod.

  He plays the files.

  He watches a dark gray suit appear in the field of the camera. His back is toward the lens and Bowman cannot make out the face. The sentinel kneels beside pod 269, and dials out the maintenance drawer.

  Bowman’s hand moves to his mouth as the sentinel sets up the routine to open the lid.

  A few minutes pass but Bowman does not fast-forward the video. He is transfixed, waiting to see what happens, and he wants to see every second. Finally the lid slides open, and he watches in horror as the sentinel pulls from his pocket a Lethno probe, used to test the charge of electromagnetic bolts on the PTPs, holds it against the temple of the man inside, and squeezes the switch.

  The body shudders once inside the pod, and Bowman knows that all brain function would have terminated immediately.

  The sentinel is already closing pod 269, the drawer sliding shut, and then, as the figure stands and makes ready to leave for his next killing, Bowman’s heart falls apart at the sight of the most horrifying thing of all.

  He can see the killer’s face.

  It is him.

  144

  I killed them, he thinks.

  He is horrified and scared, in equal measure.

  I killed them all. I killed Allandra.

  He thought there was a ghost on the ship with him.