Communion of Dreams, page 9
Gates frowned, said nothing.
“OK, let’s leave it like that for now.” Jon looked around the room. “I’d like to get together tomorrow morning, say, ten o’clock?”
As they left, Jon kept an eye on them. Gates left quickly, obviously upset. Ng and Bailey wandered off together, talking intently. Navarr waited.
He said, “I figured you’d want me to stick around.”
“So, how long have you known?”
“About the girl? Found out just before you called this meeting.”
Jon looked at the man. “So, what else did your people tell you?”
Navarr considered. “Not much. I’m too far down the chain of command. They did say that they have a couple of experts working on it. Whether they’ll tell me their conclusions, I can’t say. You?”
“Nothing else. I’ll call Magurshak, see what else is up.” Jon leaned back on the bench. “So, you think there is anything to worry about?”
“No. Like I said, the girl herself can’t really be considered a threat. But I’m not too sure that everyone on the team agrees.”
“You mean Gates.”
“Yes.” He paused, “I find it interesting that you decided to tell everyone.”
“I figured that it was better to get it out in the open. I don’t like the notion of keeping secrets. I want my people to be playing with all the relevant information.”
Navarr smiled slightly. “So, you think that this is relevant?”
Jon sighed. “I’m not sure. It might be. We’re dealing with a lot of unknowns here . . . better to keep everyone informed, so if there are any connections that can be drawn, we have the greatest chance to do so.”
“Playing the odds.”
“Right.”
* * *
Jon found Gates in her quarters. He was sure she would want some privacy, but he had to talk with her. He rapped on the sliding door.
“Go away.”
“Sorry, Jackie, but I need to talk with you.”
“Not now.”
“Yes, now.”
He waited a moment, and just as he was about to speak again, he heard the door latch click. The door slid open.
“Look, I just wanted to see what’s up.”
“Nothing’s up, OK?”
“You had a pretty strong reaction to the news about Ling.”
She looked at him. “Yeah, and so will most of the human race.”
“Fair enough. I won’t argue that clones are a good idea. But I expect you to be able to set aside that emotional response and deal with Ling.”
“Why? Why do I have to have anything to do with her? It was a crazy idea to bring her along on this trip, anyway.”
“You’re right, it was crazy. And it may yet prove to have been a bad idea. But Gish was certain that she should be along.” He paused, looked at her. “I would appreciate your support. Just accept the fact that she’s here, and try to get along with her when you have to.”
Gates frowned. “All right. I’ll do what I can.”
“Thanks.”
* * *
Jon next went to see Gish and Chu Ling. He found them, along with Klee, relaxing in their cluster of rooms, walls slid back to create a common space. One of Navarr’s marines stood guard at the head of the hallway.
Ling looked up when he turned the corner into the hall. She was standing, playing with the holo projector. She smiled, eyes bright, and pointed, “See! I find dragon.”
Jon peered into the hologram. Indeed, in the middle of a large room, splendidly decorated with gold and jewels, was a black dragon, resting on a pile of cushions, reading. It lifted its head, and Jon was startled to see that it had Seth’s face, stylized, but still recognizable. “Congratulations. Now do you get to keep the dragon’s gold and jewels?”
She looked at him as if he were nuts. “No keep gold. Now have cha and dragon tell Ling story!”
Gish laughed. “The difference between Chinese and Western traditions, Jon. Dragons were considered fonts of wisdom and learning. To encounter a dragon meant the opportunity for enlightenment, not theft.”
“Ah, well then, enjoy your chat with the dragon.” He sat next to Gish on the other side of the room. “Everything going OK here?”
Gish glanced down the hall at the woman standing guard. “Seems to be fine. Commander Navarr stopped by after the meeting, and said he would have female troopers here at first. He thought that might be easier for Ling to accept without feeling threatened.”
“Makes sense.”
“Though I can’t say that she’s given the guard even the slightest attention, so I’m not sure that it would really matter. Uniforms don’t seem to bother her at all.”
“Well, who knows what the facility where she was kept was like. May not have had any sort of uniformed guards or anything.”
Klee looked at the girl, but spoke to Jon. “Think we’ll have any problems with her and the others?”
“No. The only ones who’ll know are the members of our team, since they’re the only ones that she’ll have any substantial contact with.”
Gish just watched the girl, said nothing.
Jon studied the scientist for a few moments. “I was thinking about resuming our discussions about the artifact tomorrow. When we left off yesterday, you said that you had an idea that you wanted to work through.”
“Yes, but I’m not quite ready to discuss it yet. Would it hurt to wait an extra day?”
“No, I suppose not.”
“That might be best. I’ve had some thoughts, but I need to work through them more completely.”
“OK. Johan, how about you?”
“I still consider that the object is most likely some kind of probe. The fact that it made itself visible now is significant, I think. Beyond that, I guess I am of the opinion that we need more information.”
“Fair enough. In that case, gentlemen, I wish you a good evening.” He got up to leave, glanced at Ling. She was watching him intently. “Goodnight, Chu Ling.”
She looked at him for a moment before responding, but he was unable to determine what she saw. Finally she responded simply, “Goodnight.”
* * *
In that cool, soft moment of consciousness just before he was fully awake, the dream image of the ants crawling on his arm came back to Jon. He held it there, allowed it to play through. What was it that Ng said? Something about alien motivation, dreams and passions.
He opened his eyes to the dim glow of a night-light. As he sat up on the edge of his bunk, he realized just how much he identified with those ants from his dream. He and the others were just scrambling about almost blindly, looking at only those things right before them.
The indicator flashed in a corner of his field of vision. He had messages waiting. He lightly touched the control pad on the back of his hand. Routine communication from the Seth dup on Earth with status reports. Posts from Magurshak and Owen Roberts about the status of the other team, now en route. And the daily report from Susan Jakobs on Titan Prime.
Starting at the top, Jon went through his messages. Seth was managing the office efficiently, reported that he was accumulating the requested information on unusual dreams, and that there was more than he expected. Bradsen’s team had left Earth orbit on time, with some last-minute personnel changes being the only minor hitch.
Susan Jakobs looked a little more tired than she had the day before. “Sidwell has stopped talking to me, just started to ignore my messages. I’d hoped that he would put his micros at our disposal. But he hasn’t answered me about that or anything else for the last day or so. My people tell me that they rarely see him, though occasionally he goes into the temporary dome and just sits staring at the artifact.
“The Hawking trials are continuing without interruption. Soukup has the AG drive working smoothly. If you want him here for examination of the artifact, I suggest that you contact him before he leaves for a solo trial on the ship.
“That’s all for now. I’ll report in tomorrow, as scheduled.”
Jon didn’t like the idea of Soukup just hanging around Titan Prime, waiting for them to arrive, but he needed him. He keyed the recorder. “Soukup. Thompson here. Don’t know if you’ve heard, but we’ve discovered something on Titan that we may need your help with. Check in with Jakobs for details. We won’t be there for another five days. But do me a favor, and don’t run off with the Hawking for a long trial, eh?”
* * *
He was reading Innocents Abroad when the message came in. The low flash of the indicator came on in his lower-left field of vision. With a touch he saw that it was from Soukup.
Gregor Soukup was not a small man. He was built like a bear, with a barrel chest and massive limbs, hands broad with stubby little fingers. Bearded. The corners of his mouth and eyes scrunched up as he said “Hello Jonathan, my old friend.
“Your message got my interest. I have spoken with Susan. I will stay here on Titan Prime and wait for your arrival. You, me, and Gish . . . we will have a drink together, and figure out this mystery, yes? See you in a few days. Gregor out.”
The man was a bit of a lunatic. But he was a brilliant engineer who had an almost intuitive understanding of the Apparent Gravity phenomenon, and was the first to propose that it could be adapted for use as a propulsion system. He figured out a way to trick an AG field into thinking that it was in a stable inertial reference by projecting it in front of a ship, and thereby essentially have the ship — and generator — continuously ‘fall’ into the field. The Hawking was the first ship equipped with the new reactionless drive system.
Now, the Hawking was about ready to go on a deep-run solo trial. And had Jon not asked him to stay behind, he was certain that Soukup would have gone.
* * *
Jon studied the faces for a moment. Everyone looked ready to begin. “When we left the discussion last time, Gish had suggested that the artifact might be responsible for the existence of tholin gel on Titan. That the artifact might be creating the gel as part of a pre-colonization effort to make the moon more habitable for another species. I believe that he has more to say on that topic this morning. Robert?”
Gish ran a hand through his hair, glanced quickly around the room. “It’s not xenoforming Titan. Can’t be.”
Gates asked, an edge to her voice. “Why the hell not?”
“Bailey gave me the clue. Last time we talked he asked ‘Where are they?’, meaning the aliens that built the artifact.”
Bailey nodded, said, “Yeah, but I was talking about the idea of them mining gel from Titan.”
“Yes, but the question still applies. If they were coming to settle Titan, they’d be here already.”
“I don’t follow,” said Bailey.
“Neither do I,” said Jon. “Why can’t they have just sent the artifact to prepare the way?”
“Well, it is possible, but I think extremely unlikely. Think of it like this: if the aliens required a lot of gel for colonization, they’d have sent a lot more than this one machine. No one else has come across one of these things. If they didn’t need a lot of gel, if the amount that was already created was sufficient, then they’d be there already.”
“Well, what if we’re just at the right time, between when the conditions are right for colonization and when they actually arrive?” asked Jon.
Gish shook his head. “Statistically, unlikely. Such a window would have to be very small . . . you’d either spend most of the time preparing the planet for colonization, or colonizing it. The time period between the two would be very small, relative to the time of either preparation or settlement.”
Navarr agreed. “He’s right. From a strategic point of view, you wouldn’t want to just leave a prepared territory unoccupied. You’d move in and take advantage of the work you had put into preparing it in the first place, before someone else moved in.”
Jon spent a little time hunting through his database, then looked up. “That makes sense. Last century, during one of the flare-ups of ‘UFO’ activity, one of the leading physicists argued that if there were extraterrestrials capable of interstellar travel, they should be everywhere. But they’re obviously not.”
“Yet we have proof that such extraterrestrials exist,” said Gates. “And it was left, or sent, by someone who does indeed have the capability of interstellar flight.”
“Exactly,” said Gish. “But that just proves that it wasn’t sent for xenoforming Titan. To send such a device is relatively easy. We’ve sent probes toward neighboring star systems. It just takes a very long time. To send living beings to those systems is a very different matter altogether. It will take a very long time. Conventional physics means we are limited to speeds significantly slower than light. You wouldn’t send just a lone machine in advance of a colonization effort, the risk of failure would be too great.
“On the other hand, if you have a technology which is very greatly beyond ours, and you have figured out some way to cheat and travel faster than the speed of light, then you’d be able to colonize the planet as soon as it was ready.”
Everyone was quiet for a moment. Jon spoke, “So, we can rule out xenoforming as the artifact’s function.”
“Yes.”
“Then we’re back to the original question: what is it, and what does it do?”
Bailey frowned. “I’ve been thinking about that. I think it’s the wrong question. Without even knowing what it is or does, we can still learn a lot about the entities that made it. We can think of this as a message. The way the message was sent, how it was crafted, contains a great deal of information about the creators of the message.”
“OK,” said Jon, “we have the basics . . . they are technologically sophisticated . . . ”
“Which implies intelligence, curiosity, and the ability to manipulate matter,” said Bailey. “But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves again. Start with the simple, move to the complex.”
“Right. So, what else does this message tell us?”
“Something about size? The artifact is about a meter tall, does that give us some idea of relative size?” Klee looked around. “I mean, it’s not microscopic, and it’s not the size of Titan Prime. Doesn’t that tell us something?”
Bailey bit his lip. “Maybe. I think that it would be hard to draw any conclusions just based on size. I wish we had a better image of it to work from.”
For the first time Ng spoke. “I can help with that.”
“How?” asked Jon. “The reports indicate that they couldn’t get an image of the artifact, either photographic or holographic.”
Ng gave a slight smile. “We have the first mock-up as a starting point. And the initial reports, with their descriptions and what measurements they contain. I’ll talk to people who have seen the artifact, make something better. Give me a day.”
Bailey nodded. “Could be helpful.”
“I concur,” said Jon. “So, we’ll pick this up tomorrow. I’ll talk with the captain about reserving the recreation room for a couple of hours. So, before we break for the day, I want to remind you that tonight is the roll-over for deceleration. Remember to stow away loose items.”
* * *
He was standing at the top of a stone staircase, outdoors. The sun was bright, but not harsh. The stairs led down to a quiet riverside glen, filled with fruit trees. A path led from the foot of the stairs to a nearby structure. It was the church, stonework with high glass windows all along the side, the blue rose in the window at the end. Turning to see what was behind him, he saw that he stood at the start of a pedestrian bridge over a small river. Ducks swam lazily in the river along the near shore. The far shore was shrouded in a low-lying fog that seemed to hang close.
The bridge was perhaps three meters wide, and arched slowly up in front of him, so that he couldn’t see the other end. It had walls of stone about a meter high, and periodically along those walls he could see small sculpted stone vases in which grew roses. Blue roses. He went over and peered into one of the buds, a clean blue light almost like a gas flame. The petals spread, until the flower was completely open.
Turning, he started to walk toward the rise in the center of the bridge. After a few dozen paces, he was almost halfway across the bridge, but he couldn’t see the other side. The fog seemed to rise up from the surface of the river, the bridge stretched off into a muzziness of grey. Then he noticed that the roses in a nearby vase were smaller, the light somehow more distant.
Another couple dozen paces and the end of the bridge where he had begun was almost out of sight. The roses had continued to shrink in size, and the light of each receded. It had grown darker, too, the sun had begun to shrink in size, as though retreating from him. He walked on. There was still no end in sight, just the bridge continuing into a growing dimness. The sun was smaller still, and had lost enough intensity that he could look straight at it without discomfort. The roses here were so small as to be hard to make out, the blue dot of light in each flower becoming pale. And he noticed that the walkway beneath his feet now felt spongy, like it was becoming insubstantial.
Tentatively taking a few more steps, at last he felt his foot sink into the bridge, and he started falling forward.
Chapter 6
Jon reached out to find the surface of the thick, flat-black drapes which hung floor to ceiling. They seemed to suck the light in, reflecting back nothing. His hand brushed the warm soft fabric, found the edge and pushed the drapes aside, stepped into the rec room. The room was large enough to accommodate about a score of people, with deep, plush chairs and love seats arranged in a couple of arcs around the projecting platform of the holo. Circling the room was the almost invisible blackness of the drapery.
There was just one other person in the room, standing at the side of the holo platform, hands dancing over a control board only he could see. It was Ng, dressed fittingly in a jumpsuit of the same black material from which the drapes and carpet were made.
“Isn’t that stuff hot?” asked Jon, nodding toward Ng’s clothing.
