Mat Cairns, outward bound from Rawliston on Croatan to Kyohvic on Mingulay, mooches about among a few hundred other milling passengers. There’s not much to do. The ship is just a more or less airtight box with an interstellar drive, inadequate seating, and a few refreshment stalls. There isn’t even a window. After the lightspeed jump, Matt has become so bored that he finds himself reading the orientation leaflet for newbie passengers. It’s available in various languages and in a variety of formats, including one entirely in pictures. The one he selects has a little boxed note at the foot in tiny print:
Literate, largely prescientific (suitable for sailors, traders, shamans, etc. Not recommended for clergy of desert monotheisms.)
Long ago, he had written the first draft of it himself. His private title for it was: ‘GREETINGS, IGNORANT SAVAGES’:
Welcome to the Bright Star Cultures
This may be your first journey in a starship navigated by human beings. Please take a few moments to read this document, which should help you to understand your journey, and your destination. It explains how we on the English-speaking planets of Croatan and Mingulay explain the worlds in which we live. Your own explanation may well differ from the one given here. We respect your opinion as much as you respect ours.
When you look up at the sky at night, you see a broad, bright band of stars overhead, which is sometimes called the Milky Way or the Foamy Wake. What you are looking at is the edge of an immense disk of stars—a galaxy. There are many galaxies in the universe, the nearest of which you may know as the Little Cloud or That Fuzzy Dot There.
The Foamy Wake galaxy contains a hundred thousand thousand thousand stars. The stars are suns like the one you know, but very far away. The worlds on which we live travel around these suns. (See “Copernican Hypothesis, Evidence in Favor of.”) They are so far away that the distances between them are measured in light-years. This refers to the distance that light travels in one year. Light travels three hundred thousand thousand thousand strides in one heartbeat. We are at present traveling at the speed of light between two stars—when we arrive, very soon, the sun will be different from the one which shone above us when we left. There is no need to be alarmed by this.
We live in a very small region of the galaxy, which we call the Second Sphere. It is a spherical volume of space that contains several hundred stars. Many of them are the suns of worlds like the one on which you were born. The Second Sphere is about two hundred light-years across. We call it the Second Sphere because it is not the place where human beings first came from. Human beings came from a world which we call Earth, a hundred thousand light-years away, on the other side of the Foamy Wake. So do all the other people, animals, and plants that you will find on the worlds of the Second Sphere. (See “Evolution, Theory of.”) When you go from one world to another, you may find that the animals and plants are different from those on your own world. There is no need to be alarmed by this. In your pack you will find a separate leaflet that will tell you which animals and plants at your destination are dangerous.
As well as human beings and the kinds of people who resemble human beings—the tall hairy people and the small hairy people—there are two other kinds of people in the Second Sphere. These are the small grey people, whom we call the saurs, and the very large people with tentacles, whom we call the krakens. You may know the saurs mainly as the pilots of the small round aircraft we see in our skies, and the krakens as the navigators of the great starships that you have seen in the sky or on the sea. The trade routes followed by their starships are what define the limits of the Second Sphere, at about one hundred light-years in all directions from Nova Babylonia, its oldest human civilization, though not its oldest settlement. The krakens and the saurs have lived in the Second Sphere for much longer than human beings.
You will have been told that there are much greater minds in the spaces between the worlds—the minds that some people call the gods, and others call the powers above. This is true. The gods live in very small worlds, like the ones which we sometimes see in the sky as comets. There are many, many such gods around all the suns that we know about, including the sun of Earth. The gods are minds whose bodies are made up from many very small animals that can endure severe cold and heat. They are similar in some ways to the many small animals which we cannot see but which exist all around us. There is no need to be alarmed by this. (See “Disease, Germ Theory of” elsewhere in this information pack. If you already understand this, see “Extremophile Nanobacteria” and “Emergent Phenomena.”)
There is much we do not understand about the gods. One thing we do know is that for a very long time they have arranged for saurs who live near Earth to transport people, animals, and plants to the worlds of the Second Sphere. These have always arrived in starships with saurs from the Solar System on board, and have been met by saurs from the Second Sphere, who in turn transported them to the nearest world. This is how the worlds of the Second Sphere came to be populated. The saurs, of course, came from Earth a very long time ago.
The planet we call Croatan was settled in this way more than seven hundred years ago, in the Seasonally Adjusted Year of Our Lord (SAYOL) 1600 (see “Calendar, Croatan”) by people from North America. Its daughter colony, Mingulay, was established two hundred and fifty years later by the followers of a heretical prophetess (see “Taine, Joanna”).
Almost three hundred years ago, in SAYOL 2051, a starship from Earth arrived near Mingulay. It was a starship built by human beings, and it was called the Bright Star. It was left to travel in the sky around Mingulay when the several hundred people on board were met by saurs and taken to the main city of Mingulay, Kyohvic, where they settled. They were different in three important ways from other people who had arrived from Earth.
First, they had traveled into the space outside their world by themselves. These Cosmonauts, as they were called, had encountered a god in one of the very small worlds we have mentioned earlier, and it had communicated with them. It gave them copies of instructions on how to build the engines which enable us to travel at the speed of light, and the other engines to fly in the air like the saurs do. Unfortunately, it had not told them how to navigate, and when they used the engine they found themselves in the Second Sphere, with no idea of how they had got there or where it was. Their descendants, over several generations, had to work out how to navigate for themselves, and succeeded about ninety years ago. The Cosmonaut families went on to build ships such as the one you are now traveling in. The Bright Star also contained much new knowledge, discovered on Earth, which we are still learning. That is why we call ourselves the Bright Star Cultures.
This brings us to the second important way in which the Cosmonauts differ from most human beings. Many of them had taken medicines that enabled them to live for many hundreds of years, just like the saurs do. Unfortunately, neither they nor the saurs understood how this had happened, and we are still trying to find out. Many of the original Cosmonauts from the Bright Star are still alive today, and some of them are trying to help. They would be very happy if everyone could live as long as they do.
Thirdly, the Cosmonauts were the last people to arrive here from Earth. As of this date (SAYOL 2338) we know of no other arrivals from outside the Second Sphere. It is very possible that people on Earth, or the saurs near Earth, have come into conflict with another star-traveling species, which we call the aliens. It is possible that Earth has been destroyed. There is no need to be alarmed by this. If you have, now or in the future, any knowledge of creatures resembling furry spiders and about the size of a large dog, please inform the nearest militia officer or starship crew member as soon as possible.
And now, a word about the militia. We in the Bright Star Cultures believe that, in general, people should be free to do whatever is compatible with the freedom of others. Here and below, “person,” “people,” and “human” refer to members of all intelligent species. Some religious, sexual, and other practices of which you disapprove may be permitted by law. Some of your own practices, which you believe to be righteous, may be prohibited by law. For your comfort and safety, it is important that you do not make mistakes in this area. Please study the following carefully:
Permitted practices of which you may disapprove:
All forms of sexual relations between people over the age of puberty.
All forms of attire (other than uniforms worn for purposes of deception) or lack of attire in all public places except places of worship or public ceremony.
All modes of address to people of any rank. All modes of worship not involving prohibited practices.
All forms of artistic expression, including descriptions and depictions (but not commission or incitement) of prohibited practices.
Self-medication, including for ennui.
Suicide.
Reading books in public.
Writing in the margins of books.
Abortion.
Keeping and carrying weapons.
Prohibited practices (with or without consent) of which you may approve:
Human sacrifice.
Entertainments of lethal combat.
Sexual relations with people below the age of puberty.
Sexual relations with beasts.
Slavery.
Inflation.
Infanticide.
Piracy.
Cattle-raiding.
Dueling.
Nonmedical surgery on people below the age of puberty, including but not limited to: scarification, infibulation, circumcision.
Animal sacrifice grossly incompatible with the codes of kosher and halal.
Interference with public or private practices not on the list of prohibited practices.
Public exhortation of prohibited practices or heinous crimes, except in the public reading of scriptures revealed before the date of the passage of this law (SAYOL 2226) or in the performance of traditional rites.
Unauthorized possession of nuclear-explosive devices.
Theomancy.
Heinous Crimes:
Murder.
Rape.
Kidnapping.
Trafficking in slaves.
Torture.
Poisoning.
Maiming.
Nonmedical vaginal or anal penetration of a person below the age of puberty.
Prevention by force or fraud of any accepted passenger or crew member from embarking or disembarking from a starship.
Causing a nuclear explosion within a habitable atmosphere.
Theicide.
Anyone convicted of a heinous crime may be sentenced to death by public stoning. There is no need to be alarmed by this. The maximum sentence is seldom applied, and when it is, it is usually commuted to death by firing squad.
Have a safe journey, and enjoy your stay.
And whee! Back in Kyohvic—“Misty Harbor,” as the helpful stab-in-the-dark translation says in squiggly italics on the sky-port sign, dittoed below in the barred neon of chi-chi Ogham—Matt Cairns shoulders his duffel bag and heads through the concourse for the shuttle train to town. Foam earpieces tab his throat. The contract brokers will already be yammering after him, but he’s not ready yet to come online. He needs a break and doubts his skills are obsolete, for all that his want of trying is everywhere evident in shimmering monitors and remote eyes and the infrared flicker of robot scuttlebutt. In the sixty rack-renting days of his contract on Croatan, this place has jumped forward eight years, and seen more change than in the previous sixteen: Matt knows the pattern, he can clock the curve, he’s lived through this shit before; they’re running up the steepening slope to the lip of Singularity like there’s no tomorrow, and if the gods have their eye on the ball as usual, there won’t be. Cue cannon ball: Somewhere out there in the long orbits, a shot is being lined up in the godgames of Newtonian pool. Or the spidery aliens will irrupt into the system, and Darwinian dice will roll.
Outside the low, flat-roofed concourse, he pauses to inhale the autumn late-afternoon wind off the sea, its salt tang muffled by the faint freshwater scent of the fog in the sound, and the sharper notes of acetone and alcohol derivatives. The skyport’s on a plateau above the town, its traffic everything from buzzing microlites and zippy little skiffs through new lifting-body aerodynes to the great clunky contraptions of human-built starships like the one he’s just stepped off. The town has spread up the valleys like a lichen, sprouted towers like sporula—tall, thin hundred-meter spikes of gene-hacked cellulose offshoot. The factory fringe is a fast merge of that sort of biotech or wet nano stuff with the rougher, more rugged carapaces of steel and aluminum, concrete and glass. It reminds him of the Edinburgh he left, centuries ago in his life, millennia ago in real time. The harbor’s busier than ever, the tall masts bearing computer-optimized wind panels rather than sails, the steamships wispy and clean rather than smoky.
Out beyond the surface vessels, a Nova Babylonian starship—a quarter-mile of iron zeppelin, its hull running with rainbow colors—is poised above the water as though impossibly halted in the last few meters of a long fall. On the headland that shelters one side of the harbor like a shielding arm, the Cosmonauts’ keep still stands, its prehuman megalithic proportions as unyielding to the eye as ever.
The crowd of merchants and migrants and refugees scurries off the starship funnels, thickening, to the station entrance and packs the carriages. Matt straphangs through the electric down-slope glide, his knees’ grip holding the big duffel upright. His reflexes haven’t quite adjusted to the fractional difference in the gravity, but he’s used to this transition; hell, he’s done free fall often enough, he’s bounded across the rusty desert of Raphael in a clumsy pressure suit, he’s earned his honorary title of Cosmonaut. Others, the first-timers, are thin-lipped and whey-faced, lurching with each sway of the train. The cheap housing slides past the windows, then the University’s crag-built complex, sprawling and soaring like everything else here, then the older, richer streets of the town center and shorefront.
Matt detrains at the esplanade terminus and hesitates. He has never quite gotten used to being feted by his descendants. The Cairns are now the richest of the Cosmonaut clans, thanks to their monopoly of interstellar navigation that they’re exploiting as blatantly as the old merchants ever did their long-cut deal with the krakens. He has nowhere to sleep for the night, nobody apart from the brokers expecting him home, and the merchants off the Nova Babylonian ship will be at the castle, probably being entertained royally. A good party to gatecrash. On the other hand . . .
Nah. He’s not up for it. He needs to find his feet first. The terminus is new since eight years ago, a cavernous glass shed full of hurrying people—the three major hominid species, and saurs—and cluttered with concession stands: coffee, flowers, snacks, drugs. Announcements are murmured from cunningly focused speakers, and displayed in midair holograms that don’t quite work. The female gigant at the coffee stall has had all her hair dyed blonde and curled. Matt tries not to laugh at the thought of this car-wash-scale coiffure, smiles politely and takes his cup—thin plastic, but insulating—to a round enamel table.
“Mr. Cairns?”
He starts, almost splashing the coffee, and sets it down with both hands around it and glares into the smile of the young woman swinging into the seat opposite, slinging down a bag. She has a camera behind her ear like a pen, and a mike on a parallel spoke against her cheek. Her hair, eyelids, and lips are a sort of frosted gold. Behind all that she actually looks quite good. She’s wearing black leather trousers and a black T-shirt with a broad rectangular panel of multicolored abstract tapestry on the front.
“Susan Harkness,” she says, sticking out a hand which Matt clasps as briefly as politeness permits.
“I don’t do interviews.”
“I’m not a journalist,” she says, fussing momentarily with the recording gear at the side of her head. “Well, I am, but I’m here on family business.”
(He detects the increment of the local accent’s change since he’s been away: fah-armlie.)
“You’re family?”
“Daughter of Elizabeth Harkness and Gregor Cairns.”
“Ah.” Matt relaxes and relents, smiling. “So I’m your ancestor.”
“Yes,” she says, looking at him with the unabashed curiosity of a human child seeing its first gigant. “It’s hard to believe.”
“In a good light, you can see the scars,” Matt says.
“You’ve had cosmetic surgery?” She sounds disappointed. (Suhdge’ry.)
“Just two-hundred-fifty-odd years of shaving cuts.” He shrugs. “And fights, of course.”
“Of course.” She tips her head sideways a little and smiles. Matt realizes she’s putting up a good show; she’s intensely nervous about him, or about something.
“So,” he says, over the rim of the cup, “what family business? And how did you find me?”
She waves a hand. “Oh, I knew you had to pass through here. Mam—” She winces at herself—“Elizabeth and Gregor sent me.”
Matt doesn’t have to ask how she recognized him. Hanging in the castle is his ancient portrait in oils. There’ve been more recent photos, too, since he came out of hiding. Decades old, but not out of date.
“How are they?”
“They’re well. They’re just recently back from an expedition.”
“Space?”
“No, sea. That Beagle tour they’ve been threatening as long as I can remember.”
“Longer than that,” says Matt. “Well, I’m glad they finally made it.”
“They had to cut it short and come home in a hurry.”
“Why?”
Her eyes widen. “Haven’t you seen the papers?”
He shakes his head, thinking, Don’t tell me they’ve reinvented war while I’ve been away . . .
Susan runs her thumbnail across the top of her bag. It opens in a way he can’t quite see and she pulls out a bundle of news-flyers, hours old and already tattered. Matt spreads them out to see that they’re all downmarket—their money pages cover the lottery rather than the stock exchange—and their front sides all have articles and headlines and photos of odd phenomena: a flattened whorl in a wheatfield, a waterspout, the face of a worried-looking man in dungarees, and something that might have been a thrown ashtray. There’s a sketch of two grim-faced men in the Puritan-style suits affected by scoffers, the clergy of the local irreligion, captioned: “Sinister visitors—Heresiarchy denies knowledge.”
“This rubbish?” Matt says.
“It’s true,” says Susan. She leans forward, voice dropping. “That’s what Elizabeth and Gregor found out. The aliens are here. We’re being invaded.”
Matt sighs, clasps his hands at the back of his head and tilts back the flimsy chair. He’s been expecting this for decades, ever since the expedition to the gods, but it still pisses him off. Through the glass roof he can see a couple of silvery lens-shaped skiffs scooting overhead. A couple of tables away, two small grey-skinned figures with large bald heads and big black eyes are canoodling over a shared bloodshake. The blonde person who’d served him at the stall has just shuffled through a spilled sticky drink and is leaving forty-centimeter-long footprints. There’s a good chance that several of the commuters striding past had an ancestor on the Mary fucking Celeste. Three hours ago by his body clock, he was four light-years away. And it was early morning. He’s a hundred thousand light-years from Earth and he’s hundreds of years old and he feels every meter and minute of it.
“Aliens,” he says, looking up again. “Unidentified flying objects. Crop circles. Men in black. This is too fucking much.”
He swings forward, his gaze still focused on the middle distance, and he has a sudden hallucination that he can see right through Susan’s T-shirt to a glowing green hologram of her naked torso. He blinks as the chair settles, and it’s gone, there’s just that pattern of colorful stitchery. He looks away and back, covertly, then meets her eyes. She’s smiling.
“Stereogram,” she says. “Computer-generated. You just let your eyes go—”
“I know,” says Matt. “That’s the most indecent garment I’ve ever seen.”
“You haven’t seen the skirts.”
Matt stares at her face as though it too were a stereogram, and something clicks into focus. He knows she’s attractive but he isn’t attracted to her. To attribute this to the incest taboo would be absurd—intellectually, there’s nothing to it, she’s generations removed from him, and emotionally there is no way that inhibition would have had a chance to lock on—it depends on childhood imprinting of siblinghood, as far as he knows. It must be something else. He has the body and brain and appearance of a man in his early twenties, but mentally, inside, he is just too old. That must be it: Susan is too young for him. She’s sucking a strand of her frosted fair hair, and tiny fragments of her matching lipstick are clogging the tips. As though realizing what she’s doing, she flicks it away.
“Anyway,” she says, “Elizabeth and Gregor want to see you.”
“Up at the castle?”
“No. Too busy up there. For the merchants, this place is becoming a bit of a culture shock. Along the shore, at the marine biology lab.” She stands. “We can walk.” She sees his duffel, and his look. “Or take a tram.”
The laboratories are single-storey blocks with wide windows, and walls whose pebbledash and roughcast have fallen off in great flakes here and there and mostly been patched up, so that over the years they’ve acquired a mottled texture like a lichen-covered boulder. The place is old and important enough to have its own tram stop, Aquarium. Inside, there’s an atmosphere of barely controlled frenzy: knots of people in white coats arguing in low or raised voices, technicians wheeling equipment down corridors with the urgency of hospital porters in Accident and Emergency. Susan leads Matt through it all. Anyone who gives her a puzzled look or starts to ask her business is tugged back at the elbow by someone else.
At the end of a long corridor with shore-facing windows along one side, she marches into a room with rows of wide white-topped lab benches, aquaria and sinks and display cabinets around the sides, charts and diagrams papering the walls and a broad whiteboard at the far end, in front of which a woman is standing tapping a long pointer at multicolored scribbles and talking to the score of people sitting or standing around. It’s her voice Matt recognizes first, just before she recognizes him and interrupts herself.
“Matt!” She walks toward him, arms opening.
“Elizabeth, it’s good to see you. Salasso, Gregor . . . wow.”
Of his old companions, only the saur Salasso is unchanged, his small thin lips stretched in what for a human would have been a wide grin, his long arms poking far beyond the cuffs of his standard and therefore ill-fitting lab coat. Elizabeth and Gregor have aged fifteen years since Matt last saw them, fifty years ago. As usual it’s a jolt but he can hardly see it as a deterioration. Elizabeth’s broad, angular features have tightened more than they’ve sagged, and her walk has gained poise. Her hair is better styled than he remembers and still black, though not (Matt bitchily notes, as she air-kisses beside his cheek) at the roots. She’s wearing a sharp, elegant grey trouser suit that looks like, and may even be, a uniform. Gregor’s handshake is harder, his thin face looks more worn, and his swept-back hair (which, like his face, distantly echoes Matt’s own) grows grey-flecked, and from farther back on his head; his clothes are as casual as ever. Salasso’s long hands grasp Matt’s shoulders, briefly. Matt smiles down into the huge eyes, black as though all pupil, and wonders if the saur can feel the faint reflexive shudder induced, against all reason, by his friendly touch. If he does, he gives no sign, and is probably wise enough to realize it’s just a reflex, not a reflection.
Elizabeth turns back to the gaggle of scientists.
“Take five—take ten,” she says. “We’ll bring Matt up to speed and get back in ten minutes.”
They disperse, some into huddles around the room, others outside. As they depart, Matt sees a table previously obscured by their backs. There are bones on a black plastic sheet, tweezers around them like sated steel piranhas. Matt finds himself drawn toward the array like an abductee to a skiff.
“Jeez H,” he says, so close that his breath moves dust. It’s the Holy Grail, right there before his eyes: physical evidence. He’s seen pictures; by the gods, he has seen pictures, but until this moment he has never seen real hard evidence of multicellular life of extraterrestrial origin.
“That’s what we’ve all been thinking,” says Gregor dryly as Matt straightens, still fascinated, still tracing out in his mind how the thing hangs together. Gregor and Elizabeth take about one minute to recount their encounter with the selkies and their discoveries at Lemuria Beach.
“You’re all sure?” says Matt, suddenly struck with a doubt. “You don’t think it could be just a new terrestrial phylum, I dunno, some kind of Burgess Shale survivor—”
He keeps to himself his momentary hallucinogenic vision of a pre-Cambrian civilization, which had gone off into space and returned to Earth at the end of the Cretaceous, just in time to meet the ancestors of the saurs, tweak their genes and set them off on their travels after the gods’ wrath hit Chicxulub—
“No, because that’s not all we have,” says Gregor. “It gets worse.”
And he’s pointing to an elaborately sealed vivarium on a bench over at the side. Sand and a puddle and a clump of algae. Something moving. This time, Matt has to force himself close enough to look. He finds he has mild arachnophobia, rather to his surprise. Probably picked it up in a dodgy lodging house years ago. Well, the only way to overcome a phobia is to face its stimulus and extinguish the response . . .
Considered objectively, it’s quite beautiful. Like a golden-furred tarantula, with tiny splayed hands at the ends of seven of its eight legs Tiny eight-fingered hands, each a miniature of itself, as becomes evident when it skitters up the glass and walks upside down across the underside of the clamped-down glass slab on top. Matt gropes for a hand lens, peers through it as the animal repeats the manoeuvre. The brief flickering glimpse leaves no doubt. At the end of each appendage’s eight fingers there are other tinier appendages, eight of them, and these fingers’ fingerlets are what open out to grasp the microscopic frictions of the pane.
“Holy shit,” says Matt. “A natural bush robot.”
“A what?” asks Elizabeth.
“Kind of like the fabricators off the ship,” says Matt, “but free-moving. Manipulators on the manipulators, right down to the molecular level. Early idea, never got built because the fine motor controls get hellishly complicated. But with a natural one, the lower levels could run on reflex, like digestion or something. Maybe it doesn’t go that far down, but it goes a hell of a long way.”
He looks again at the thing in the tank, and notices a much smaller specimen running around. “Please don’t tell me the top-level hands are buds . . . ”
Elizabeth, Salasso, and Gregor look at each other, and at him.
“That’s exactly what they are,” says Gregor. “We picked up a few small ones, which we thought were spiders, on Lemuria Beach. It was only after we came back that we noticed they were still alive.”
“What do they eat?”
“Anything organic,” says Salasso. “Their initial sustenance was the ether in the killing jar. Then each other. This is the survivor, and its first offspring.”
“Did I see it wrong,” asks Matt, “or does it have two mouths?”
“It has,” says Elizabeth. “One for eating, one on the opposite side of its head for breathing.”
People are coming back. This is a discussion that assimilates interruptions and swirls on. Elizabeth returns to the whiteboard. Matt moves in to perch on the edge of a table; Susan Harkness hangs back, it seems shyly until Matt notices that she is discreetly recording. Fair enough: This is history. No, it’s worse, it’s evolution . . .
Elizabeth wipes the board and begins scrawling anew. A circle, a tangent, a couple of dots.
“We’ve identified the star that the selkie pointed out,” she says “It’s on the edge of the known Second Sphere—actually just over a hundred light-years from Nova Sol—but definitely off the trade routes and about four light-years from here. So assuming we interpreted the selkie correctly, it seems a plausible enough place of immediate origin. Gregor, over to you.”
Gregor takes her place at the board. “I’ve done a first-cut analysis,” he says, waving a sheaf of papers. “Because it’s so close to us, we already have a solid body of knowledge built up from navigating around the neighborhood, which should enable us to plot a jump within weeks. If we want to go there, that is.”
“Why should we want to go there?” someone asks.
Gregor shrugs. “Scientific curiosity?”
Polite laughter.
“Okay,” Gregor goes on, “but seriously . . . it looks very much as if these octopods, or whatever we want to call them, have been here in the past few years. Which raises the question of how they got in and out undetected—we’ve had the skies pretty well covered for decades. I was with Matt here just before and after he went off on the expedition seventy-odd years ago to contact the gods near Croatan, from which most of our admittedly scrappy information about the aliens—the octopods—is derived. I’ve had a long time to think about its implications. One of them is that we are dealing here with the actual inventors of the lightspeed drive and the gravity skiff, and the species that—”
He glances at Salasso, and at the two or three other saurs in the audience, as though he’s about to mention something indelicate.
“—genetically uplifted the ancestors of the saurs, and culturally—at least—uplifted the kraken. We are used to thinking of these species as wise and ancient, which indeed they are, but the octopods are their ‘Elder Race.’ I don’t think we should underestimate their abilities, which may include making a lightspeed jump to a point arbitrarily close to a planetary surface; various stealth technologies, et cetera.” Expansive handwave. “We can only place the limits of their capabilities as within the laws of physics which, come to think of it, we don’t know either. So maybe the stuff we’re seeing in the more, ah, uninhibited news-flyers is not entirely out of the question.”
In the ensuing hubbub Gregor looks at Matt, rather helplessly. Matt jumps to his feet and strides to the front.
“This is all completely bizarre,” he says. He waits for the nods, then goes on. “That’s what makes it believable. I know what a planet undergoing alien intervention looks like, because I was born on one! And I can tell you, this is all horribly familiar. Most of what you read about it is rubbish, hysteria, hoaxes, but if you dig deeper you’ll find a hard core of cases that remain unexplained. Not that I’m recommending you dig deeper.”
“Why not?” Gregor asks, looking baffled. “If we could only clear out some of the clutter—”
“Waste of time,” says Matt. “You’ll get bogged down. The phenomena are elusive, that’s part of what they are, it’s definitive, it’s how I can recognize the situation.” A thought strikes him. “Just when did you and Elizabeth come back from Lemuria Beach?”
Gregor hesitates. “Couple of weeks ago,” he says.
“Let me guess,” says Matt. “You’ve been back since, right? With lots of skiffs skimming the sea, lots of people scouring the bogs and moors.”
“That’s right,” says Gregor. He shifts uncomfortably. “And, well, the fact is—”
“The selkies and the octopods are nowhere to be found?”
Everybody stares at him.
“How did you know?”
Matt grins evilly at Gregor, then swings his gaze around the room. “Like I said, it’s a feature. Believe me, folks, better minds than ours have been destroyed trying to make sense of this sort of thing. We’re dealing with the unknown, with something irreducibly strange.”
“That’s a counsel of despair,” says one of the scientists.
“No, it isn’t,” says Matt. “It’s to recognize that we can never make sense of it while part of the picture—perhaps most of it—is inaccessible. So I concur with Gregor’s suggestion—if we have the slightest reason to think we know where these things are coming from, let’s go there and invade them. Make them watch the skies for a change.”
“Were you serious about that?” Elizabeth asked. She’d found herself, not entirely to her delight, walking alongside Matt while her husband and Salasso had got into some deep conversation and her daughter walked behind them recording it. They were on their way along the esplanade from the lab to find somewhere to have dinner and catch up.
“About what?”
“Going there. Invading the aliens.”
“Oh, yeah, sure. I’d sign up for it tomorrow. Fuck, I’d go on my own.” He cast her a conniving glance. “Just lend me a ship?”
“Not a chance,” she said cheerfully. “I wouldn’t trust you with a ship even if we could spare one. Which we can’t. So that would mean going on a proper expedition, armed no doubt, on what might turn out to be an eight-year-long wild-goose chase.”
“That’s looking on the bright side,” said Matt. “We could blunder into something that would start a war with the aliens.”
“Or the war—or whatever—might start while we’re away.”
Matt grunted and shook his head. “I don’t think that’s how these things work. This probing”—he laughed, nervously she thought—“and assorted anomalous phenomena could go on for at least another century. That’s about how long I give us, at our current rate of development, before the gods decide we’re getting too big for our boots. And if they do something before that, putting a few light-years between us and it, sounds like a good start.”
“Not much help in the long run.” She shot a bleak look at Matt. “But then again, what is?”
“Oh, it’s all unutterably fucking depressing,” said Matt, not sounding depressed at all. “It’s like biological pest control—the species introduced to keep down the pest becomes a pest itself, and we’re it. Or the aliens are. Whether the gods are setting us or them up as the vermin this time around is as irrelevant to us as it is to them. If we make peace with the aliens the gods can line up something else to come out of nowhere and clobber us both.”
“It makes me wonder,” she said, “if Volkov wasn’t right after all.”