Last and First Contacts (collection)

Dreamers’ Lake

On the shore of Dreamers’ Lake we worked through the night. We had no choice; this pretty world was due to end in two more days. By the time dawn broke we had labelled all the lakes’ stromatolites, and had decided on three candidates, Charlie, Hotel and Juliet, for cognitive mapping. I was tentatively confident that Juliet was the most promising, but I was so dog-tired I didn’t trust my judgment any more.

So I was grateful when Citizen Associate Bisset brought us animists a tray of coffee.

‘Thanks.’ I took a cup, fixed its spigot to my facemask, and gulped it down, welcoming the caffeine fix. Bisset stood beside me on the pebble-strewn beach of that lake of fizzing, acidic water.

GC-174-IV was an infant world, its young sun a lamp hanging over jagged hills. The methane-green sky reflected in the lake’s sluggish ripples, and glistened on the pillow-like stromatolites. The scene was unearthly, beautiful – and I was grateful that the dawn light hid the swarming dangers of the sky, especially the rogue worldlet called the Hammer.

In the foreground my animist cubs were playing soccer, their shouts the only sound on this silent world. I longed to join in, but they didn’t want little old ladies like me.

‘“Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops…”’ Bisset was a lot taller than I was, and under his wide visor his face, turned to the sun, was a mask of wrinkles.

‘That’s a cute line,’ I said.

‘Shakespeare. Of course we’re two hundred light years from England.’

‘But there are hills, a lake, a sky here. Things have a way of converging.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I remember the first robot landing on Titan, Saturn’s moon. The first images from the surface of the Moon had looked like a pebble beach. Then the Vikings on Mars, and the Soviet probes on Venus – more pebbles, more beaches. And even on Titan, where they use water ice for rock—’

‘Pebbles.’

‘Yes.’

I eyed him curiously. Evidently he was older than he looked. We hadn’t spoken, but the Pegasus carried over fifty people, and was roomy enough for twice that number. ‘I’m Susan Knilans. Senior animist on this mission.’

He shook my gloved hand. ‘Professor Knilans, I’ve read about your work.’

‘Susan, please. And you are?’

‘Ramone Bisset.’

‘Ramone?’

He smiled. ‘My father named me after his favourite band. I used to be a software engineer, before the software learned to write itself. Now I’m a Citizen Associate. I’m working on the IGWI with Ulf Thoring.’

It took me a minute to decode the acronym. IGWI: the Inflationary Gravity Wave Interferometry experiment, the establishment of a vast interstellar network of gravity-wave detectors designed to map the echoes of the universe’s very first cataclysmic instants. ‘Interesting project.’

‘It sure is. Not that I understand much of it, either the science or the equipment.’

‘How do you get on with those IGWI guys?’

He shrugged. ‘I’m just the dogsbody.’

‘Don’t knock it. Umm, do you mind my asking how old you are?’

‘A hundred and thirty, to the nearest decade. Born in the 1980s.’ That explained his height; many of his generation, fed on ludicrously protein-rich diets, had grown tall. His accent was British, I thought, but softened by time.

‘Well,’ I admitted, ‘I’m half your age. So what are you doing here?’

‘You mean beside the lake, or on GC-IV?’

‘Start with the lake.’

‘I’m just curious. You’re here to map minds, aren’t you? Minds in those mounds.’

‘That’s the idea.’

‘I haven’t started my day yet. I thought I may as well be useful. You can never go wrong with a tray of coffees.’

‘So what about the deeper question? Why volunteer for GC-IV?’

‘Ah. Why are any of us here?’

‘To do our jobs.’ Captain Zuba joined us. She was a tough, heavily-built New Zealander, aged about fifty. She took one of Bisset’s coffees. ‘And to earn our pay.’

‘Yes, Captain,’ Bisset said respectfully. ‘But why not just sit at home? All humans are restless. Why?’ He pointed to the patient stromatolites. ‘They don’t look restless.’

‘No,’ Zuba said, ‘but it’s a shame they aren’t, because in two days’ time, when the Hammer falls, they’re going to be toast. And speaking of which, the clock is ticking.’ She handed back the coffee cup, already drained, and stalked away, competent, efficient, a tick-box list on legs.

Bisset hesitated. ‘You know – to explore the universe in starships – it’s like something from the kind of science fiction that was out of date even before I was born.’

I wasn’t too sure what ‘science fiction’ was, and didn’t really want to know. On impulse I said, ‘Why don’t you come visit again tomorrow? I’ll give you the guided tour. You don’t even need to bring the drinks.’

He nodded like a gentleman. ‘I’d appreciate that.’ And he walked away, tray in gloved hand, boots crunching over the beach.

The day on GC-174-IV was near enough to twenty hours long (was; now it’s different, changed by the Hammer Blow). I worked through that day, and was dog tired by the end of GC-IV’s short afternoon. As half the complement of the Pegasus wended back to the airlocks the other shift was suiting up to go out; Zuba ensured we made the most of the time we had left.

That evening, before I turned in, I looked for Bisset.

The Pegasus is a tuna can. It sits on four stubby legs, just five metres across, and is only a couple of storeys high, externally. But inside it’s the size of a small hotel. A ship that’s bigger inside than out – another gift of the quantum foam technology that so suddenly opened up the stars. Anyhow, the Pegasus is roomy enough for all fifty of its crew to have a private cabin, but not big enough to hide.

I found Bisset in the lounge with Ulf Thoring and the rest of the IGWI crew. The guys were playing some variant of poker and drinking beer; I could see the pharmacy’s stock of sober-up nano-pills would be called on that night. Bisset sipped his beer and played a few hands, but you could see from the body language what was going on with those smart-ass college boys.

The Citizen-Associate programme of the International Xenographic Agency is aimed squarely at people like Ramone Bisset: his active life extended by decades by the new longevity treatments, his curiosity still bright, his skills long outmoded. Such is the capacity of a quantum-foam-drive starship that there is room for guys like Ramone, whatever they can contribute. It helps the sponsoring nations justify the IXA’s cost to their taxpayers: anybody can be an explorer, so the slogan goes. But the Associates aren’t necessarily given much respect.

I’m not in the habit of taking on lame ducks, and I suspected Bisset could look after himself. But I didn’t like to see a thoughtful man treated that way. I don’t blame the IGWI guys, however. All male, none older than thirty-five, all from a university at Stockholm, Ulf and his guys were a tightly bonded bunch, and too young to be empathetic.

I was glad when, at the start of my next work shift the following morning, Bisset showed up at Dreamers’ Lake.

My cubs were already at work, wading knee-deep in the scummy pond, attaching floating sensor pods to the cognitive net we’d placed over Juliet. I was standing on the comparative comfort of the beach, before a monitoring station on which the first signals were beginning to be processed.

Bisset raised his head to the brightening sky. ‘Nice morning.’

I murmured, ‘Perhaps. That makes me uneasy.’ I pointed upwards.

That was the Hammer, a worldlet the size of Mars, visible in the bright sky, clearly larger since the end of my last shift.

‘Ah,’ Bisset said. ‘You do get the feeling that it might fall at any moment and smash all of this.’

‘But not today. So, the guided tour. You understand what these mounds are? They occurred on primitive Earth – still do, in places where it’s too salty for the predators, like snails. They are layers of bacterial mats …’ A mat of blue-green algae will form on the scummy surface of a shallow pond. The mat traps mud, and then another layer forms on top of the first, and so on. With time the mound builds up, and specialised bacterial types inhabit the different layers, until you have a complex, interdependent, miniature ecology. ‘We’ve found bacterial mats everywhere we’ve looked—’

‘Beginning on Mars,’ Bisset said.

‘Well, that’s true. And everywhere there is standing liquid, water or perhaps hydrocarbons, you get mounds.’

‘Stromatolites.’

The pedant in me objected, although I use the word myself. ‘Strictly speaking, stromatolites are terrestrial forms of blue-green algae. These bacteria are photosynthetic but they’re not algae. You can see they are purplish, not green. They don’t use chlorophyll; their chemistry kit is adapted to the spectrum of their sun. So these mounds are like stromatolites, but—’

‘“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”’

‘More Shakespeare?’

‘Sorry. It’s a bad habit.’

‘The mound bugs here are related to us, of course, although we’ve yet to classify them.’

It would have been a major shock if GC-IV’s bugs hadn’t been a distant relation of our own, their carbon-water chemistry dictated by a kind of skewed DNA. One of the triumphs of the IXA’s exobiology programme has been to establish that all the carbon-water life forms we have found are related, apparently descended from an ancestor that came blowing in from outside the Galaxy altogether. Subsequent ‘generations’ had spread by panspermia processes from star to star. But that origin theory is controversial; the family tree of galactic life is still incomplete. Some even believe that the ultimate origin isn’t carbon-water at all, but lies in a deeper substrate of reality.

‘And,’ Bisset said, ‘there is mind. There, in those mounds.’

‘Oh, yes. Ramone, even though we have only found microbes – no multi-celled life forms like ourselves – there is mind everywhere we look.’ Everywhere there is a network to be built, messages to be passed, complexity to be explored, you’ll find a mind. Again Mars was the prototype, with the billion-year thoughts of its microbial mats locked in that little world’s permafrost layers. ‘You can see we labelled the mounds with marker dye. For the cognitive mapping we looked for the best specimen – the most intricate structure, the least damaged. We picked her.’ I pointed to the larger mound, over which the sensor net had been laid.

‘“Her”?’

A bit sheepishly I said, ‘Anthropomorphising is a bad habit of animists. We call her Juliet. We labelled the mounds – see, that’s Alpha, that’s Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo—’

‘And Juliet. Oh, it’s the old NATO phonetic alphabet, isn’t it? My father was a copper on the streets of London, and they used the alphabet for their call signs. He was Sierra Oscar One Nine…’

I admit I switched off. Why are old peoples’ anecdotes always so damn dull? It doesn’t seem adaptive, evolutionarily speaking.

‘And you can trace her thoughts,’ he said now. ‘Juliet’s. That’s a question of detecting biochemical impulses, right?’

‘We have an analytic technique called animistic deconvolution. It’s possible to break the characteristic signals of a mind into its component parts. You’d be surprised by the commonalities we find.’

He surprised me with his next question. ‘Does she understand death?’

‘Why, I don’t know. Ramone, these minds are not like ours. She doesn’t need to know death. As long as the pond survives Juliet will always be renewed, by one bacterial layer over another. She’s effectively immortal.’

‘Except that tomorrow all this will be destroyed. The mounds, the lake—’

I watched his face. This wasn’t the first young system I had visited; I had come across such reactions as Bisset’s before. ‘This stellar system is unfinished. Just a swarm of worldlets. Collisions are the order of the day, Ramone. In fact it’s the way planets are built.’

‘A rough sculpting.’

‘Indeed. GC-IV is around a hundred million years old – that is, since the last collision big enough to melt the surface. A scummy crust formed in a few million years, comets delivered ocean water, life drifted in from space. Continents, oceans, lakes, air – it all comes together in an eyeblink of geological time. In between catastrophes, you see, there is time for life. But GC-IV hasn’t finished being built yet. It happened to Earth.’

‘But in a few days, everything alive now will be gone.’ He craned his head, looking up at the sky. ‘Is it possible Juliet knows the Hammer is coming?’

‘I don’t see how.’

‘Do you think we should warn her?’

‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘Even if we could, we shouldn’t try.’ Xenoethics is a new and uncertain field. As for me, I trained as a doctor. I don’t believe in intervening if there’s a risk you can do more harm than good. ‘We can’t lift off a whole biosphere – we couldn’t even save Juliet; she’s too fragile. All we can do is take a few samples, make a record of what was here. Wouldn’t it be cruel to interfere?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said simply.

He was interrupted by a slap on the back. It was Ulf Thoring, his team leader. ‘I wondered where you got to, granddad. I patched your comms frequency into the crew and we’ve been having a bit of a laugh.’ He was Icelandic. His accent was strong, his English slightly off-key.

I said angrily, ‘You’ve got no manners, Ulf.’

‘Oh, come on. I heard it all. Are you falling in love with Juliet, granddad? She isn’t really a girl, you know. Talk about a doomed romance! What do you want to do, save her or fuck her? We could fix you up an interface. Unless your little old pizzle is too worn out—’

‘Enough. This is Zuba.’ Her voice in my phones was deep and peremptory. I was impressed the Captain was listening in, but her command was built on an attention to detail. ‘You scientist types are nothing but trouble. Thoring, you need to learn some respect. You’re on fatigues at the end of your shift.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Thoring said. But Zuba couldn’t see his face, and he winked at me, insolent.

‘In the meantime we’ve got more work to do than time left to do it in. Get on with it.’

We all murmured acquiescence.

Thoring slapped Bisset on the back again. ‘It’s only a bit of a laugh, Ramone.’

Bisset just looked down on him from his greater height. ‘It’s okay.’

Ulf walked off towards the tractor that his buddies from Stockholm were loading up with their laser towers and sensor stations.

Bisset turned to me. ‘Just tell me one more thing. What do you believe she’s thinking, right now? Juliet. One word.’

I glanced at the summary analysis on my monitor. Some agitation showed there. ‘One word? …’ I have always regretted the word I chose to use, as I believe it was the trigger for what followed. ‘Fear. Actually, Ramone, I think she’s afraid.’

Bisset stared long and hard at Juliet, under her cognitive cap, surrounded by joshing young animists. Then he turned away and followed Ulf Thoring.

The next day was our last on CG-IV – indeed, it was the day of the impact.

‘Knilans, Zuba. You’d better get down here.’

I was confused. ‘Where?’

‘The lake.’

We’d already packed up at the lake. I was in the biolab, labelling samples and sorting out my records. There was less than twelve hours left before the Hammer was due to fall. I hadn’t expected ever to set foot on the planet again. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Bisset. He has a problem.’

‘Ramone? I haven’t seen him today. And he’s not my responsibility. He’s in Ulf’s team.’

‘Ulf is the problem. Look, I know you’ve talked to Bisset. We need to get this fixed. Zuba out.’

I suited up, hurried out of the ship, and requisitioned a tractor that was in the process of being disassembled for flight.

It was another pretty morning at Dreamers’ Lake. But the Hammer’s huge crater-pocked face was reflected in the waters; even as I watched it seemed to slide across the sky like a cloud. I felt a subtle quake as the gravity fields of two planets meshed.

A second tractor was drawn up roughly on the pebbled beach. Two figures stood by the water; my suit’s heads-up identified them as Captain Zuba and Ulf Thoring. Thoring was standing awkwardly, as if he’d been injured.

And a third figure stood in the lake itself, the water lapping around his waist. He was close to the big mound we’d labelled Juliet. My heads-up alerted me, but I knew who he was.

‘He has a weapon,’ Zuba said.

‘What?’

‘It’s a laser gun from the IGWI kit,’ said Thoring. His voice was strangled. He was holding his side, and his forehead was bruised and bleeding, as if it had been thrown against his faceplate.

‘What happened to you?’

‘He beat me up. Bisset.’

‘You deserved it, you little prick,’ Zuba murmured. ‘Knilans. Fix this so we can get out of here.’

I stepped towards the water. I noticed that many of the mounds looked damaged – scarred, stitched by straight-line wounds. ‘Ramone? Are you okay?’

He didn’t reply.

I racked my brains for some way to get through to him. ‘Umm – “Tis not hard, I think, for men so old as we to keep the peace.”’

I thought I saw him relax, subtly. ‘Shakespeare.’

‘Talk to me, Ramone.’

‘Ask him.’ He gestured with the laser at Thoring.

Hastily, sketchily, Ulf told me what had happened.

The IGWI team had completed their station on the surface of GC-IV. This is simple in principle, just a network of nodes connected by laser light; perturbations of the laser echoes can be used to detect the passage of gravity waves. The ancient waves the IGWI boys seek are stretched, attenuated and overlaid, and it is taking an interferometer, a super-telescope made up of many stations across interstellar distances, to map them.

Their work done, the IGWI boys dismantled their gear. But on a whim, probably motivated by Ulf’s overhearing my conversation with Bisset, they stopped by Dreamers’ Lake, unpacked their lasers, and enjoyed a little target practice.

Bisset said, ‘These are minds, Ulf. You burst them like balloons.’

Thoring sounded aggrieved. ‘But it was only a bit of a laugh. For God’s sake—’ He gestured at the sky. ‘In twelve hours none of this will survive anyhow.’

I turned back to Bisset. ‘You punished him, Ramone. You made your point. So what are you doing out there?’

‘I’ve been thinking about what we said. Juliet.’

I felt a deep knot of dread gather in my stomach. For the first time I began to get the feeling that this might all be my fault. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You showed me the signal of her mind. She is afraid. She knows, Susan.’

‘How can she?’

‘The Hammer is the size of Mars. Perhaps the mounds can sense the tides. It’s at least possible, isn’t it? Even I can feel the quakes. Juliet faces extermination, yet she has never known death: what a terrible thing.’

‘Okay. Even supposing that’s true, what are you going to do? Put her out of her misery? Finish the job Ulf and his thugs started?’

‘You don’t understand.’ He sounded offended. ‘I’ve known death. I lost my wife, my daughter. I’ve had to live with that.’ I knew little about his past. ‘Maybe if I can teach Juliet what I’ve learned, it will help her, and her kin, accept what is to come.’

Then I saw it. ‘Shit. You’re going to kill yourself, aren’t you?’

‘Knilans, Zuba. This is a secure line; Bisset can’t hear us. I don’t think this has anything to do with the mounds. It’s all about the bullying and the bullshit from the IGWI boys. Bisset wants to make a statement – to rise above them on his own terms.’

‘Nice theory,’ I replied. ‘But I can’t use it. I think I have to deal with him in his own framework. Unless you have a better idea, Captain.’

Zuba hesitated for one second. ‘You know him better than I do. You scientist types are nothing but trouble. Get this resolved.’

I cut back to the open comms, and struggled to make Bisset understand. ‘Ramone – it can’t work. There’s no interface between the two of you. Not even a cognitive net. If you die now, she will never know.’

‘But nobody even knew that mounds like this could be sentient before the discoveries on Mars. You say she won’t know. Are you sure?’

I was lost.

Zuba took over. ‘Citizen Associate, it’s at least a fair bet Knilans is right. This mound will understand nothing. If you slit open your suit – have you ever seen a suffocation? – it will take longer to die than you might think. And in all those long seconds the seed of doubt will grow in your mind: I have thrown my life away for nothing.’

I could see Bisset’s uncertainty. ‘Then I’ll just stand here until my air runs out.’

‘That’s your privilege,’ Zuba said mildly. ‘And it will be my privilege to stand here with you.’

Bisset seemed genuinely puzzled. ‘Why?’

‘Call it my own brand of xenoethics.’ She turned to Ulf Thoring. ‘Have you told the Citizen Associate about the results of the IGWI programme?’

‘No.’ Ulf said defensively. ‘They’re not published. And besides—’

‘Tell him now.’

Structure, Ulf told him, has been detected in the signals from the beginning of time. No, not just structure – life, its unmistakeable signature, with traces of mind susceptible to standard animistic deconvolution. Even in those very first instants, as cosmic energies raged, life flourished, blossomed, died, and was aware. The study of this primordial life is the whole purpose of the IGWI programme – though, as nothing has yet been published, it is still a matter of gossip on academic sites.

This stunning discovery has led to a revision of our theories of life’s origin. Perhaps the essence of life was born in those first instants. Or perhaps, some speculate, it was injected into our infant universe, from – somewhere else.

‘Okay,’ Zuba said. ‘Here’s what I take from all of that, in my simple way. Everywhere we have travelled we have found life and mind. But it is not like us. It exists on utterly different scales from us – hugely more extensive in space, and in time.’

She was right. At best multi-celled forms like us are an episode in the long dream of bacterial life. Away from Earth, we’ve found a few fossils; that’s all.

Zuba said, ‘There are similarities in the cognitive maps of your pet stromatolite, Bisset, and the antique minds from the inflationary period. Similarities. But we are different; we are nothing but transient structures that soon dissolve back into the mush. You’re right, Citizen Associate; only we humans know death. And in a universe that teems with life, we humans are still alone, in a way Juliet has never been alone. That is why I will wait for you, Citizen Associate, until that damn moon hammers me into the ground like a tent peg. Because all we humans have is each other.’

You have to admit she was impressive.

Bisset thought it over. ‘I should get out of this pond.’

‘Good idea,’ I said fervently.

Bisset glanced once more at Juliet. She was unharmed, save for a slight scarring from our cognitive net. He dropped the laser, which sank out of sight into the water, and began to wade towards us. ‘Tell me one more thing, Captain.’

‘Yes?’

‘So we humans work for each other. But why are we here? We spoke about this, Susan. Why explore, why go on and on?’

Zuba said, ‘We don’t know what we might find. We humans are lost now, but not forever. There’s a place for us.’

Bisset laughed softly. ‘Like the movie song.’

‘What movie?’ I wondered.

‘What is a movie?’ Ulf Thoring asked.

Zuba glanced up. The Hammer was an inverted landscape sliding over the dreaming stromatolites. ‘You might want to hurry it along.’

Bisset splashed to the edge of the water, and we hurried forward to help him.