The Lure

18 Visions of God

Petrie heard the footsteps hurrying behind him in the broad corridor. Freya. She caught him by the arm and sat him firmly down on the velvet sofa. ‘Don’t be so secretive, Tom. What are you up to?’

He shook his head. ‘It’s too embarrassing to say.’

‘Tell me anyway.’

‘Look, it’s too silly, Freya. Let’s just say I’m off on some eccentric tangent and leave it at that.’

She nipped his thigh viciously. Petrie, taken by surprise, yelped.

‘Tom!’

Petrie hesitated, then: ‘Okay, okay. Look at the position. There’s no way for others to confirm this signal — it’s a one-off. Hanning’s right, credibility is an issue. And if we make a wrong identification we’ll lose it.’

Freya nodded impatiently. ‘But we’re all agreed on that.’

‘Charlie’s fixated on the F star. The timing’s right, like he says.’

‘But Tom, it lies outside the two-sigma error circle. There’s only one chance in twenty that he’s right.’

‘You know that and I know that, Freya, but Charlie’s an idiot and he’s going to blow it.’

‘So, what is this silly idea?’

Petrie hesitated again. Freya looked threatening, and he said, ‘I might be able to disprove his timing argument. Suppose they’ve been probing us for centuries. Say they’ve been firing at us routinely, maybe even for thousands of years, to see if we’ve reached a level where we can understand and reply with our sticks and stones, like radio or lasers.’

Freya nodded.

‘In that case there might be evidence in historical records.’

Another encouraging nod.

In a burst of bravado he added, ‘Maybe even pre-history or mythology. Lights in the sky, things like that.’

Freya pursed her lips. ‘That is embarrassing. It’s unprofessional, like looking for flying saucers or something.’

Petrie flushed.

She grinned. ‘But brilliant. History should have a record of glowing patterns in water, maybe even in heavy clouds. I’ll join you.’

In the theological library, Freya made straight for the computer terminal and fired it up. Petrie started with an illuminated Bible on a lectern, its pages laboriously written in calligraphic script in some past century. Its preface began with an enormous letter, made up of little fantasy animals with a swastika-like cross in the middle. He could just recognise it as an uncial D, and barely make out the ornate lettering: Dominus Deus noster Jesus Christus …

He blew out his cheeks. This was going to take years. More prowling the shelves revealed more Bibles, all in Latin. His hopes rose with an illustrated book on Mirabili. Perusal showed that the book described miracles indeed, if two-headed babies, statues weeping blood and winged basilisks could be believed.

He clattered up the spiral staircase. After some minutes, tucked in a corner, he found a shelf of modest-sized Bibles, in assorted vulgar tongues including English. He guessed this was the modern collection, grudgingly acknowledging the existence of the last three centuries or so. He pulled out a St James edition; its leather binding, he thought, was less than a century old, but the font and the feel of the pages told of something printed maybe three hundred years ago. It had a musty smell and he playfully wondered if the plague bacillus could survive for three hundred years.

Apart from the one at Heathrow chapel, Petrie hadn’t looked at a Bible since his school days and had no more than the vaguest memory of the contents. He was dismayed to find that there were a thousand pages. He clattered down the staircase, sat himself at a table, and started on them systematically, speed-reading.

Two hours later, bleary-eyed and head spinning, he was practically through the Bible, and was beginning to think his memory had played tricks, when he came across the first nugget.

‘What are you getting at, Tom?’

‘Don’t you see? The prophet is describing celestial visions, weird things in the sky. Okay, it’s overlaid with imagery but he sees them “in the spirit”. What does it mean, in the spirit? He repeats it all the way through the Book of Revelation. Was he in some sort of trance? An altered state of consciousness?’

‘High on Ecstasy?’ Freya suggested.

Petrie ignored the interruption. ‘And look at what he’s raving about. Bright things, shiny things, glittering things like emeralds. What does he mean, a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald?’ Petrie was still flicking through the pages. ‘Here’s another one. Listen to this:

And he carried me away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and shewed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God. Having the glory of God: and her light was like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal.

Revelation 21:10–11

‘More shiny precious stones, more “in the spirit”. This guy’s describing Shtyrkov’s syndrome. Temporal lobe damage. The signal makes you mad.’

Freya made a sceptical face. ‘That is a monstrous speculation.’ Her voice deepened by an octave at the word ‘monstrous’.

But Petrie’s eyes were shining with enthusiasm. ‘No, it fits perfectly. The writer’s an astral prophet. He has a cast of thousands, the Beast rising over the sea, the Dragon, the throne in the sky, the plague of celestial locusts, falling stars, centaurs, the abyss, the temple in the sky…’

‘Tom…’

‘The seventh seal marks the return of seven comets, trumpet-shaped. The four horsemen of the apocalypse are comets, streaming their manes across the sky. Don’t you see? He’s describing the sky and things that have taken place in the sky. And if that’s right, Freya, if they’re all celestial phenomena, then they include a glowing sky, complete with the temporal lobe stuff. You must see that!’

‘No, Tom, I don’t see it, not even remotely. In fact, I’m beginning to wonder if you’ve had a touch of the magnetic fields yourself.’

Petrie blinked in frustration. ‘They’ve been sending us signals at least since the time of pastoral societies. They’ve been probing us for at least two thousand years.’

‘Ruling out Charlie’s F star?’

‘Yes. But more than that, anyone watching the Earth would know there was no technological civilisation capable of understanding the message. Sending sub-nuclear particle messages to sheep-farming societies is not the behaviour of an intelligence.’

‘What, then?’ Freya’s brow was furrowed.

‘A probe. An automated probe. Something set up to run by itself. Something waiting for a response, maybe for thousands of years.’

‘You keep talking about probes, probing us.’

‘Charlie and you are both wrong. It’s not the M51 galaxy and it’s not the F star. I think it’s empty space. Only the space isn’t empty — it has a machine, something orbiting the Sun. Something that fires off bursts at us from time to time. It has to be close because it knows our geography and our rotation and all the rest. But it’ll stay dormant until we send it a reply.’

Freya frowned. ‘Tom, if that’s right, it needn’t be thirty million light years away or even three light years away. Its distance could be anything.’ She stood up, and paced up and down in thought. Then: ‘There’s another clue. Whichever of the two directions it came from, it’s well away from the ecliptic.’

‘Meaning?’

‘It’s not orbiting in the plane of the planets, or the asteroids, or the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt. It could be out in the Oort cloud.’

‘The what?’

‘A cloud of comets orbiting the Sun far beyond the planets, where the Sun’s gravity is very weak. The comets just barely hang on to the solar system. You could have something the size of the Moon out there and you’d never detect it.’

‘What’s the travel time of a signal from the Oort cloud?’

‘A few months. A few weeks from the inner cloud.’

‘Do you see what that means, Freya?’

Freya was tight-lipped. ‘Of course. The galactic club isn’t something for our distant descendants. We could be members by this summer.’

‘An automated probe. An automated probe.’ Petrie began to pace up and down, his head bowed.

Freya, struck by a sudden thought, cupped her hands over her mouth. ‘There’s more.’

Petrie stopped.

She paused to gather her thoughts. Then, ‘Okay. If there’s a probe targeting us then it’s somewhere in the solar system otherwise it would just zip by. But if it’s too close it wouldn’t last. If you injected something into an orbit between the planets, the chances are it would be thrown around chaotically by the gravitational fields of Jupiter and Saturn and end up falling into the Sun or being thrown out of the solar system altogether.’

‘How long would that take?’

‘It depends on the orbit, but you’d be okay for typically a few millennia to a few hundred millennia. There are stable zones inside the asteroid belt but they’re crowded and anything in them eventually gets hit by something moving at kilometres per second. If the signallers have put a robot probe well clear of the ecliptic plane — well away from the planets — they’ve been planning for longevity.’

Petrie’s mouth opened and shut with astonishment. ‘But you’re talking millions of years.’

‘It looks like it. We’re so used to thinking in short time spans, I suppose because our civilisation is only a few thousand years old.’

To Freya, Petrie’s round spectacles were making him look like a surprised owl. ‘I’m beginning to understand this. In fact…’ his voice trailed off.

‘Well?’

‘No, it can’t be.’

‘Do you want another nip?’

Petrie shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Freya, you just wouldn’t grasp it.’

Freya gaped. ‘You conceited…’

‘No, no. It just needs a lot more thought. I can hardly take it in myself.’

‘Tom, come down to earth. Ancient texts can be interpreted in a hundred ways. We need something more concrete.’

An hour later, Freya looked up from the terminal screen. Petrie was still at the table, reading the Bible and scribbling rapidly. There was an excited sparkle in her eyes. ‘I think I’ve struck gold.’