"Space" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baxter Stephen)

Chapter 8 Ambassadors

Madeleine Meacher barely got out of N’Djamena alive.

Nigerian and Cameroon troops were pushing into the airstrip just as the Sänger’s undercarriage trolley jets kicked in. She heard the distant crackle of automatic fire, saw vehicles converging on the runway. Somewhere behind her was a clatter, distant and small; it sounded as if a stray round had hit the Sänger.

Then the space plane threw itself down the runway, pressing her back into her seat, its leap forward sudden, gazellelike. The Sänger tipped up on its trolley, and the big RB545 engines kicked in, burning liquid hydrogen. The plane rose almost vertically. The gunfire rattle faded immediately.

She shot into cloud and was through in a second, emerging into bright, clear sunshine.

She glanced down: The land was already lost, remote, a curving dome of dull desert-brown, punctuated with the sprawling gray of urban development. Fighters — probably Nigerian, or maybe Israeli — were little points of silver light in the huge sky around her, with contrails looping through the air. They couldn’t get close to Madeleine unless she was seriously unlucky.

She lit up the scramjets and was kicked in the back, hard, and the fighters disappeared.

The sky faded down to a deep purple. The turbulence smoothed out as she went supersonic. At thirty thousand meters, still climbing, she pushed the RB545 throttle to maximum thrust. Her acceleration was a Mach a minute; on this suborbital hop to Senegal she’d reach Mach 15 before falling back to Earth.

She was already so high she could see stars. Soon the reaction-control thrusters would kick in, and she’d be flying like a spacecraft.

It was the nearest she’d ever get to space, anyhow.

For the first time since arriving in Chad with her cargo of light artillery shells, she had time to relax. The Sänger was showing no evidence of harm from the gunfire.

The Sänger was a good, solid German design, built by Messerschmitt-Boelkow-Blohm. It was designed to operate in war zones, but Madeleine was not; safe now in her high-tech cocoon, she gave way to the tension for a couple of minutes.

While she was still shaking, the Sänger logged into the nets and downloaded her mail. Life went on.

That was when she found the message from Sally Brind.

Brind didn’t tell Madeleine who she represented, or what she wanted. Madeleine was to meet her at Kennedy Space Center. Just like that; she was given no choice.

Over the years Madeleine had received a lot of blunt messages like this. They were usually either from lucrative would-be employers, or some variant of cop or taxman. Either way it was wise to turn up.

She acknowledged the message and instructed her data miners to find out who Brind was.

She pressed a switch, and the RB545s shut down with a bang. As the acceleration cut out she was thrust forward against the straps. Now she had gone ballistic, like a hurled stone. Coasting over the roof of her trajectory in near silence, she lost all sensation of speed, of motion.

And, at her highest point, she saw a distant glimmer of light, complex and serene: it was a Gaijin flower-ship, complacently orbiting Earth.

When she got back to the States, Madeleine flew out to Orlando. To get to KSC she drove north along U.S. 3, the length of Merritt Island. There used to be security gates; now there was nothing but a rusting fence, with a new smart-concrete road surface cut right through it.

She parked at the Vehicle Assembly Building. It was early morning. The place was deserted. Sand drifted across the empty parking lot, gathering in miniature dunes.

She walked out to the old press stand, a wooden frame like a baseball bleacher. She sat down, looking east. The Sun was in her eyes, and already hot; she could feel it draw her face tight as a drum. To the right, stretching off to the south, there were rocket gantries. In the mist they were two-dimensional, colorless. Most of them were disused, part-dismantled, museum pieces. The sense of desolation, abandonment, was heavy in the air.

Sally Brind had turned out to work for Bootstrap, the rump of the corporation that had sent a spacecraft to the Gaijin base in the asteroid belt three decades earlier.

Madeleine was not especially interested in the Gaijin. She had been born a few years after their arrival in the Solar System; they were just a part of her life, and not a very exciting part. But she knew that four decades after the first detection of the Gaijin — and a full nineteen years after they had first come sailing in from the belt, apparently prompted by Reid Malenfant’s quixotic journey — the Gaijin had established something resembling a system of trade with humanity.

They had provided some technological advances: robotics, vacuum industries, a few nanotech tricks like their asteroid mining blankets — enough to revolutionize a dozen industries and make a hundred fortunes. They had also flown human scientists on exploratory missions to other planets: Mars, Mercury, even the moons of Jupiter. Not Venus, though, oddly, despite repeated requests. And the Gaijin had started to provide a significant proportion of Earth’s resources from space: raw materials from the asteroids, including precious metals, and even energy, beamed down as microwaves from great collectors in the sky.

Humans — or rather, the governments and corporations who dealt with the Gaijin — had to “pay” for all this with resources common on Earth but scarce elsewhere, notably heavy metals and some complex organics. The Gaijin had also been allowed to land on Earth and had been offered cultural contact. The Gaijin had, strangely, shown interest in some human ideas, and a succession of writers, philosophers, theologians, and even a few discreditable science fiction authors had been summoned to converse with the alien “ambassadors.”

The government authorities, and the corporations who were profiting, seemed to regard the whole arrangement as a good deal. With the removal of the great dirt-making industries from the surface of the Earth — power, mining — there was a good chance that eco recovery could, belatedly, become a serious proposition.

Not everybody agreed. All those shut-down mines and decommissioned power plants were creating economic and environmental refugees. And there were plenty of literal refugees too — for instance, all the poor souls who had been moved out of the great swathes of equatorial land that had been given over to the microwave receiving stations.

Thus the Gaijin upheaval had, predictably, caused poverty, even famine and war.

It was thanks to that last that Madeleine made her living, of course. But everybody had to survive.

“I wonder if you know what you’re looking at, here.” The voice had come from behind her.

A woman sat in the stand, in the row behind Madeleine. Her bony wrists stuck out of an environment-screening biocomp bodysuit. She must have been sixty. There was a man with her, at least as old, short, dark, and heavyset.

“You’re Brind.”

“And you’re Madeleine Meacher. So we meet. This is Frank Paulis. He’s the head of Bootstrap.”

“I remember your name.”

He grinned, his eyes hard.

“What am I doing here, Brind?”

For answer, Brind pointed east, to the tree line beyond the Banana River. “I used to work for NASA. Back when there was a NASA. Over there used to be the site of the two great launch complexes: Thirty-nine-B to the left, Thirty-nine-A to the right. Thirty-nine-A was the old Apollo gantry. Later they adapted it for the shuttle.” The sunlight blasted into her face, making it look flat, younger. “Well, the pads are gone now, pulled down for scrap. The base of Thirty-nine-A is still there, if you want to see it. There’s a sign the pad rats stuck there for the last launch: Go, Discovery! Kind of faded now, of course.”

“What do you want?”

“Do you know what a burster is?”

Madeleine frowned. “No kind of weapon I’ve ever heard of.”

“It’s not a weapon, Meacher. It’s a star.”

Madeleine was, briefly, electrified.

“Look, Meacher, we have a proposal for you.”

“What makes you think I’ll be interested?”

Brind’s voice was gravelly and full of menace. “I know a great deal about you.”

“How come?”

“If you must know, through the tax bureau. You have operated your—” She waved a hand dismissively. “ — enterprises in over a dozen countries over the years. But you’ve paid tax on barely ten percent of the income we can trace.”

“Never broken a law.”

Brind eyed Madeleine as if she had said something utterly naive. “The law is a weapon of government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.”

Madeleine tried to figure out Brind. Her biocomposite suit looked efficient, not expensive. Brind was a wage slave, not an entrepreneur. “You’re from the government?” she guessed.

Brind’s face hardened. “When I was young, we used to call what you do gunrunning. Although I don’t suppose that’s how you think of it yourself.”

The remark caught Madeleine off guard. “No,” she said. “I’m a pilot. All I ever wanted to do is fly; this is the best job I could get. In a different universe, I’d be—”

“An astronaut,” Frank Paulis said.

The foolish, archaic word got to Madeleine. Here, of all places.

“We know about you, you see,” Sally Brind said, almost regretfully. “All about you.”

“There are no astronauts anymore.”

“That isn’t true, Meacher,” Paulis said. “Come with us. Let us show you what we’re planning.”

Brind and Paulis took her out to Launch Complex 41, the old USASF Titan pad at the northern end of ICBM Row. Here, Brind’s people had refurbished an antique Soviet-era Proton launcher.

The booster was a slim black cylinder, fifty-three meters tall. Six flaring strap-on boosters clustered around the first stage, and Madeleine could pick out the smaller stages above. A passenger capsule and hab module would be fixed to the top, shrouded by a cone of metal.

“Our capsule isn’t much more sophisticated than an Apollo,” Brind said. “It only has to get you to orbit and keep you alive for a couple of hours, until the Gaijin come to pick you up.”

“Me?”

“Would you like to see your hab module? It’s being prepared in the old Orbiter Processing Facility…”

“Get to the point,” Madeleine said. “Where are you planning to send me? And what exactly is a burster?”

“A type of neutron star. A very interesting type. The Gaijin are sending a ship there. They’ve invited us — that is, the UN — to send a representative. An observer. It’s the first time they’ve offered this, to carry an observer beyond the Solar System. We think it’s important to respond. We can send our own science platform; we’ll train you up to use it. We can even establish our own Saddle Point gateway in the neutron star system. It’s all part of a wider trade and cultural deal, which—”

“So you represent the UN?”

“Not exactly.”

“We need somebody with the qualifications and experience to handle a journey like this,” Paulis said. “You’re about the right age, under forty. You’ve no dependents that we can trace.” He sighed. “A hundred years ago, we’d have sent John Glenn. Today, the best fit is the likes of you. You’ll be well paid.” He eyed Madeleine. “Believe me, very well paid.”

Madeleine thought it over, trying to figure the angles. “That Proton is sixty years old, the design even older. You don’t have much of a budget, do you?”

Paulis shrugged. “My pockets aren’t as deep as they used to be.”

Brind prickled. “What does the budget matter? For Christ’s sake, Meacher, don’t you have any wonder in your soul? I’m offering you, here, the chance to travel to the stars. My God — if I had your qualifications, I’d jump at the chance.”

“And you aren’t truly the first,” Paulis said. “Reid Malenfant—”

“ — is lost. Anyhow it’s not exactly being an astronaut,” Madeleine said sourly. “Is it? Being live cargo on a Gaijin flower-ship doesn’t count.”

“Actually a lot of people agree with you,” Paulis said. “That’s why we’ve struggled to assemble the funding. No one is interested in human spaceflight in these circumstances. Most people are happy just to wait for the Gaijin to parachute down more interstellar goodies from the sky…”

“Why don’t you just send along an automated instrument pallet? Why send a human at all?”

“No.” Brind shook her head firmly. “We’re deliberately designing for a human operator.”

“Why?”

“Because we want a human there. A human like you, God help us. We think it’s important to try to meet them on equal terms.”

Madeleine laughed. “Equal terms? We limp into orbit, and rendezvous with a giant alien ramjet capable of flying to the outer Solar System?”

“Symbolism, Meacher,” Paulis said darkly. “Symbols are everything.”

“How do you know the Gaijin respond to symbols?”

“Maybe they don’t. But people do. And it’s people I’m interested in. Frankly, Meacher, we’re seeking advantage. Not everybody thinks we should become so completely reliant on the Gaijin. You’ll have a lot of discretion out there. We need someone with… acumen. There may be opportunities.”

“What kind of opportunities?”

“To get humanity out from under the yoke of the Gaijin,” Paulis said. For the first time there was a trace of anger in his voice, passion.

Madeleine began to understand.

There were various shadowy groups who weren’t happy with the deals the various governments and corporations had been striking with the Gaijin. This trading relationship was not between two equals. And besides, the Gaijin must be following their own undeclared goals. What about the stuff they were keeping back? What would happen when the human economy was utterly dependent on the trickle of good stuff from the sky? And suppose the Gaijin suddenly decided to turn off the faucets — or, worse, decided to start dropping rocks?

Beyond that, the broader situation continued to evolve, year on year. More and more of the neighboring stars were lighting up with radio and other signals, out to a distance of some thirty light-years. It was evident that a ferocious wave of emigration was coming humanity’s way, scouring along the Orion-Cygnus Spiral Arm. Presumably those colonists were propagating via Saddle Point gateways, and they were finding their target systems empty — or undeveloped, like the Solar System. And as soon as they arrived they started to build, and broadcast.

Humans knew precisely nothing about those other new arrivals, at Sirius and Epsilon Eridani and Procyon and Tau Ceti and Altair. Maybe humans were lucky it was the Gaijin who found them first, the first to intervene in the course of human history. Or maybe not. Either way, facing this volatile and fast-changing future, it seemed unwise — to some people — to rely entirely on the goodwill of the first new arrivals to show up. Evidently those groups were now trying, quietly, to do something about it.

But Madeleine’s first priority was the integrity of her own skin.

“How far is it, to this burster?”

“Eighteen light-years.”

Madeleine knew the relativistic implications. She would come back stranded in a future thirty-six years remote. “I won’t do it.”

“It’s that or the Gulf,” Brind said evenly.

The Gulf. Shit. After twenty years of escalating warfare over the last oil reserves the Gulf was like the surface of Io: glassy nuke craters punctuated by oil wells that would burn for decades. Even with biocomp armor, her life expectancy would be down to a few months.

She turned and lifted her face to the Florida Sun. It looked like she didn’t have a choice.

But, she suspected, she was kind of glad about that. Something inside her began to stir at the thought of this improbable journey.

And crossing the Galaxy with the Gaijin might be marginally safer than flying Sängers into N’Djamena, anyhow.

Paulis seemed to sense she was wavering. “Spend some time,” he said. “We’ll introduce you to our people. And—”

“And you’ll tell me how you’re going to make me rich.”

“Exactly.” He grinned. He had very even, capped teeth.

She was flown to Kefallinia, the Ionian island that the Gaijin had been granted as a base on planet Earth. From the air the island looked as if it had been painted on the blue skin of the sea, a ragged splash of blue-gray land everywhere indented with bays and inlets, like a fractal demonstration. Off the coast she spotted naval ships, gray slabs of metal, principally a U.S. Navy battle group.

On the ground the Sun was high, the air hot and still and very bright, like congealed light, and the rocks tumbled from a spine of mountains down to the tideless sea.

People had lived here, it was thought, for six thousand years. Not anymore, of course: not the natives anyhow. When the UN deal with the Gaijin had been done, the Kefallinians were evacuated by the Greek government, most to sites in mainland Greece, others abroad. Those who came to America had been vocal. They regarded themselves as refugees, their land stolen, their culture destroyed by this alien invasion. Rightly so, Madeleine thought.

But the Kefallinians weren’t the only dispossessed on planet Earth, and their plight, though newsworthy, wasn’t attention-grabbing for long.

At the tiny airport she saw her first piece of close-up genuine Gaijin technology: a surface-to-orbit shuttle, a squat cone of some shimmering metallic substance. It looked too fragile to withstand the rigors of atmospheric entry. And yet there it was, large as life, sitting right next to the Lear jets and antiquated island hoppers.

From the airport she was whisked to the central UN facility, close to the old capital of Argostoli. The facility was just a series of hastily prefabricated buildings and bunkers linked by walkways and tunnels. The central building, containing the Gaijin themselves, was a crude aluminum box.

Surrounding the Gaijin shelter there were chapels and temples and mosques, embassies from various governments and inter-governmental bodies, a science park, representatives of most of the world’s major corporations. All of these groups, she supposed, were here trying to get a piece of the action, one way or another.

The senior U.S. government official here, she learned, was called the planetary protection officer. The PPO post had been devised in the 1990s to coordinate quarantine measures to handle samples of Mars rock returned to Earth, and suchlike. With the arrival of the Gaijin, the joke post had become somewhat more significant.

The military presence was heavy, dug in all over the complex. There were round-the-clock patrols by foot soldiers and armored vehicles. Copters hovered overhead continually, filling the languid air with their crude rattle, and fighter planes soared over the blue dome of the sky, flight after flight of them.

To some extent this show of military power, as if the Gaijin were being contained here by human mil technology, was a sop for public opinion. Look: we are dealing with these guys as equals. We are in control. We have not surrendered… Madeleine had even heard senior military officers describing the Gaijin as “bogeys” and “tin men,” and seeking approval to continue their war-gaming of hypothetical Gaijin assaults. But she’d seen enough warfare herself to believe that there was no way humans could prevail in an all-out conflict with the Gaijin. The hoary tactic of dropping space rocks on the major cities would probably suffice for them to win. So the smarter military minds must know that mankind had no choice but to accommodate.

But there was a splash of darkness on the concrete, close to the Gaijin facility: apparently a remnant of a near-successful protest assault on the Gaijin, an incident never widely publicized. Happily the Gaijin had shown none of the likely human reaction to such an incident, no desire to retaliate. It made Madeleine realize that the military here were looking two ways: protecting mankind from its alien visitors, and vice versa.

She stood on heat-soaked concrete and looked up at thesky. Even now, in the brightness of a Mediterranean day, she could see the ghostly shapes of flower-ships, their scoops hundreds of kilometers wide, cruising above the skies of Earth. At that moment, the idea that humans could contain the Gaijin, engage them in dialogue, control this situation, seemed laughable.

They had to put on paper coveralls and overboots and hats, and they were walked through an air lock. The Gaijin hostel worked to about the cleanliness standard of an operating theater, Madeleine was told.

Inside the big boxy buildings it was like a church, of a peculiarly stripped-down, minimalist kind: quiet calm, subdued light, and people in uniform padding quietly to and fro in an atmosphere of reverence.

In fact, Madeleine found, that church analogy was apt. For the Gaijin had asked to meet the Pope.

“And other religious leaders, of course,” Dorothy Chaum said as she shook Madeleine’s hand. “Strange, isn’t it? We always imagined the aliens would make straight for the Carl Sagan SETI-scientist types, and immediately start ‘curing’ us of religion and other diseases of our primitive minds. But it isn’t working out that way at all. They seem to have more questions than answers…”

Chaum turned out to be an American, a Catholic priest who had been assigned by the Vatican to the case of the Gaijin from their first detection. She was a stocky, sensible-looking woman who might have been fifty, her hair frizzed with a modest gray. Madeleine was shocked to find out she was over one hundred years old. Evidently the Vatican could buy its people the best life-extending treatments.

They walked toward big curtained-off bays. The separating curtain was a nearly translucent sheet stretched across the building, from ceiling to floor, wall to wall.

And there — beyond the curtain, bathed in light — was a Gaijin.

Machinery, not life: that was her first impression. She recognized the famous dodecahedral core. It was reinforced at its edges — presumably to counter Earth’s gravity — and it was resting, incongruously, on a crude Y-frame trailer. A variety of instruments — cameras and other sensors — protruded from the dodecahedron’s skin, and the skin itself was covered with fine, bristly wires. Three big robot arms stuck out of that torso, each articulated in two or three places. Two of the arms were resting on the ground, but the third was waving around in the air, fine manipulators at the terminus working.

She looked in vain for symmetry.

Humans had evolved to recognize symmetry in living things — left to right, anyhow — because of gravity. Living things were symmetrical; non-living things weren’t — a basic human prejudice hardwired in from the days when it paid to be able to pick out the predator lurking against a confusing background. In its movements this Gaijin had the appearance of life, but it was angular, almost clumsy looking — and defiantly not symmetrical. It didn’t fit.

Human researchers were lined up with their noses pressed against the curtain. A huge bank of cameras and other apparatus was trained on the Gaijin’s every move. She knew a continuous image of the Gaijin was being sent out to the net, twenty-four hours a day. There were bars that showed nothing but Gaijin images on huge wall-covering softscreens, all day and all night.

The Gaijin was reading a book, turning its pages with cold efficiency. Good grief, Madeleine thought, disturbed.

“The Gaijin are deep-space machines,” Brind said. “Or life-forms, whatever. But they’re hardy; they can survive in our atmosphere and gravity. There are three of them, here in this facility: the only three on the surface of the planet. We’ve no way of knowing how many are up there in orbit, or further out, of course…”

“We think we’re used to machinery,” Dorothy Chaum said to her. “But it’s eerie, isn’t it?”

“If it’s a machine,” Madeleine said, “it was made by no human. And it’s operated by none of us. Eerie. Yes, you’re right.” She found herself shuddering, oddly, as that crude mechanical limb clanked. She’d lived her life with machinery, but this Gaijin was spooking her, on some primitive level. “We speak to them in Latin, you know,” Dorothy Chaum murmured. She grinned, dimpling, looking younger. “It’s the most logical human language we could find; the Gaijin have trouble with all the irregular structures and idioms of modern languages like English. We have software translation suites to back us up. But of course it’s a boon to me. I always knew those long hours of study in the seminary would pay off.”

“What do you talk about?”

“A lot of things,” Brind said. “They ask more questions than they volunteer answers. Mostly, we figure out a lot from clues gleaned from inadvertent slips.”

“Oh, I doubt that anything about the Gaijin is inadvertent,” Chaum said. “Certainly their speech is not like ours. It is dull, dry, factual, highly structured, utterly unmemorable. There seems to be no rhythm, no poetry — no sense of story. Simply a dull list of facts and queries and dry logic. Like the listing of a computer program.”

“That’s because they are machines,” Paulis growled. “They aren’t conscious, like we are.”

Chaum smiled gently. “I wish I felt so sure. The Gaijin are clearly intelligent. But are they conscious? We know of examples of intelligence without consciousness, right here on Earth: social insects like ant colonies, the termites. And you could argue there can be consciousness without much intelligence, as in a mouse. But is advanced intelligence possible without consciousness of some sort?”

“Jesus,” Paulis said with disgust. “You gave these clanking tin men a whole island, they’ve been down here for five whole years, and you can’t even answer questions like that?”

Chaum stared at him. “If I could be sure you are conscious, if I even knew for sure what it meant, I’d concede your point.”

“Conscious or not, they are different from us,” Brind said. “For example, the Gaijin can turn their brains off.”

That startled Madeleine.

“It’s true,” Chaum said. “When they are at repose, as far as we can tell, they are deactivated. Madeleine, if you had an off switch on the side of your head — even if you could be sure it would be turned back on again — would you use it?”

Madeleine hesitated. “I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t see how I could tell if I was still me, when I rebooted.”

Chaum sighed. “But that doesn’t seem to trouble the Gaijin. Indeed, the Gaijin seem to be rather baffled by our big brains. Madeleine, your mind is constantly working. Your brain doesn’t rest, even in sleep; it consumes the energy of a light bulb — a big drain on your body’s resources — all the time; that’s why we’ve had to eat meat all the way back to Homo Erectus.”

“But without our brains we wouldn’t be us,” Madeleine protested.

“Sure,” Chaum said. “But to be us, to the Gaijin, seems to be something of a luxury.”

“Ms. Chaum, what do you want from them?”

Frank Paulis laughed out loud. “She wants to know if there was a Gaijin Jesus. Right?”

Chaum smiled without resentment. “The Gaijin do seem fascinated by our religions.”

Madeleine was intrigued. “And do they have religion?”

“It’s impossible to tell. They don’t give away a great deal.”

“That’s no surprise,” Paulis said sourly.

“They are very analytical,” Chaum said. “They seem to regard our kind of thinking as pathological. We spread ideas to each other — right or wrong, useful or harmful — like an unpleasant mental disease.”

Brind nodded. “This is the old idea of the meme.”

“Yes,” Chaum said. “A very cynical view of human culture.”

“And,” Paulis asked dryly, “have your good Catholic memes crossed the species barrier to the Gaijin?”

“Not as far as I can tell,” Dorothy Chaum said. “They think in an orderly way. They build up their knowledge bit by bit, testing each new element — much as our scientists are trained to do. Perhaps their minds are too organized to allow our memes to flourish. Or perhaps they have their own memes, powerful enough to beat off our feeble intruder notions. Frankly, I’m not sure what the Gaijin make of our answers to the great questions of existence. What seems to interest them is that we have answers at all. I suspect they don’t…”

“You sound disappointed with what you’ve found here,” Madeleine said.

“Perhaps I am,” Chaum said slowly. “As a child I used to dream of meeting the aliens: Who could guess what scientific and philosophical insights they might bring? Well, these Gaijin do appear to be a life-form millions of years old, at least. But, culturally and scientifically, they are really little evolved over us.”

Madeleine felt herself warming to this earnest, thoughtful woman. “Perhaps we’ll find the really smart ones out there among the stars. Maybe they are on their way now.”

Chaum smiled. “I certainly envy you your chance to go see for yourself. But even if we did find such marvelous beings, the result may be crushing for us.”

“How so?”

“God shows His purposes through us, and our progress,” she said. “At least, this is one strand of Christian thinking. But what, then, if our spiritual development is far behind that of the aliens? Somewhere else He may have reached a splendor to which we can add nothing.”

“And we wouldn’t matter anymore.”

“Not to God. And, perhaps, not to ourselves.”

They turned away from the disappointing aliens and walked out into the flat light of Kefallinian noon.

Later, Frank Paulis took Madeleine to one side.

“Enough bullshit,” he said. “Let’s you and me talk business. You’re fast-forwarding through thirty-six years. If you’re smart, you’ll take advantage of that fact.”

“How?”

“Compound interest,” he said.

Madeleine laughed. After her encounter with such strangeness, Paulis’s blunt commercial calculation seemed ludicrous. “You aren’t serious.”

“Sure. Think about it. Invest what you can of your fee. After all you won’t be touching it while you’re gone. At a conservative five percent you’re looking at a fivefold payout over your thirty-six years. If you can make ten percent that goes up to thirty-one times.”

“Really.”

“Sure. What else are you going to do with it? You’ll come back a few months older, subjectively, to find your money has grown like Topsy. And think about this. Suppose you make another journey of the same length. You could multiply up that factor of thirtyfold to nearer a thousand. You could shuttle back and forth between here and Sirius, let’s say, getting richer on every leg, just by staying alive over the centuries.”

“Yeah. If everything stays the same back home. If the bank doesn’t fail, the laws don’t change, the currency doesn’t depreciate, there’s no war or rebellion or plague, or a takeover of mankind by alien robots.”

He grinned. “That’s a long way off. A lifetime pumped by relativity is a whole new way of making money. You’d be the first, Meacher. Think about it.”

She studied him. “You really want me to take this trip, don’t you?”

His face hardened. “Hell, yes, I want you to make this trip. Or, if you can’t get your head sufficiently out of your ass, somebody. We have to find our own way forward, a way to deal with the Gaijin and those other metal-chewing cyborgs and giant interplanetary bugs and whatever else is heading our way from the Galactic core.”

“Is that really the truth, Paulis?”

“Oh, you don’t think so?”

“Maybe you’re just disappointed,” she goaded him. “A lot of people were disappointed because the Gaijin didn’t turn out to be a bunch of father figures from the sky. They didn’t immediately start beaming down high technology and wisdom and rules so we can all live together in peace, love, and understanding. The Gaijin are just there. Is that what’s really bugging you, Paulis? That infantile wish to just give up responsibility for yourself?”

He eyed her. “You really are full of shit, Meacher. Come on. You still have to see the star of this freak show.” He led her back into the facility. They reached another corner, another curtained-off Gaijin enclosure. “We call this guy Gypsy Rose Lee,” he said.

Beyond the curtain was another Gaijin. But it was in pieces. The central dodecahedron was intact, save for a few panels, but most of those beautiful articulated arms lay half disassembled on the floor. The last attached arm was steadily plucking wiry protrusions off the surface of the dodecahedron, one by one. Lenses of various sizes lay scattered over the floor, like gouged-out eyeballs.

Human researchers in white all-over isolation gear were crawling over the floor, inspecting the alien gadgetry.

“My God,” Madeleine said. “It’s taking itself apart.”

“Cultural exchange in action,” Paulis said sourly. “We gave them a human cadaver to take apart — a volunteer, incidentally. In return we get this. A Gaijin is a complicated critter; this has been going on six months already.”

A couple of the researchers — two earnest young women — overheard Paulis, and turned their way.

“But we’re learning a lot,” one of the researchers said. “The most basic question we have to answer is: Are the Gaijin alive? From the point of view of their complexity, you’d say they are; but they seem to have no mechanism for heredity, which we think is a prerequisite for any definition of a living thing—”

“Or so we thought at first. But seeing the way this thing is put together has made us think again—”

“We believed the Gaijin might be von Neumann machines, perfect replicators—”

“But it may be that perfect replication is impossible in principle. Uncertainty, chaos—”

“There will be drift in each generation. Like genetic drift. And where there is variation, there can be selection, and so evolution—”

“But we still don’t know what the units of replication are here. It may be a lower level than the individual Gaijin—”

“The subcomponents that comprise them, perhaps. Maybe the Gaijin are a kind of vehicle for replication of their components, just as you could say we humans are a vehicle to enable our genes to reproduce themselves…”

Breeding, evolving machines? Madeleine found herself shuddering.

“Do you see now?” Paulis asked. “We are dealing with the truly alien here, Madeleine. These guys might spout Latin in their synthesized voices, but they are not like us. They come from a place we can’t even imagine, and we don’t know where they are going, and we sure as hell don’t know what they are looking for here on Earth. And that’s why we have to find a way to deal with them. Go ahead. Take a good long look.”

The Gaijin plucked a delicate panel of an aluminumlike soft metal off its own hide; it came loose with a soft, sucking tear, exposing jewel-like innards. Perhaps it would keep on going until there was only that grasping robot hand left, Madeleine thought, and then the hand would take itself apart too, finger by gleaming finger, until there was nothing left that could move.