“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.
Chapter 9
Fusion Summer
Brind drew up contracts. Madeleine tidied up her affairs; preparing for a gap of thirty-six years, at minimum, had a feeling of finality. She said good-bye to her tearful mother, rented out her apartment, sold her car. She took the salary up front and invested it as best she could, with Paulis’s help.
She decided to give her little capsule a call sign: Friendship-7.
And, before she knew it, before she felt remotely ready for this little relativistic death, it was launch day.
Friendship-7 ’s protective shroud cracked open. The blue light of Earth flooded the cabin. Madeleine could see fragments of ice, shaken free of the hull of the booster; they glittered around the craft like snow. And she could see the skin of Earth, spread out beneath her like a glowing carpet, as bright as a tropical sky. On the antique Proton, it had been one mother of a ride. But here she was — at last — in orbit, and her spirits soared. To hell with the Gaijin, to hell with Brind and Paulis. Whatever else happened from here on in, they couldn’t take this memory away from her.
She traveled through a single orbit of the Earth. There were clouds piled thickly around the equator. The continents on the night side were outlined by chains of city lights.
She could see the big eco-repair initiatives, even from here, from orbit. Reforestation projects were swathes of virulent green on the continents of the northern hemisphere. The southern continents were filled with hot brown desert, their coasts lined gray with urban encrustation. Patches of gray in the seas, bordering the land, marked the sites of disastrous attempts to pump carbon dioxide into the deep oceans. Over Antarctica, laser arrays glowed red, laboring to destroy tropospheric chlorofluorocarbons. The Gulf was just a sooty smudge, drowning in petrochemical smog. And so on.
From here she could see the disturbing truth: that space was doing Earth no damn good at all. Even though this was a time of off-world colonies and trade with interstellar travelers, most of mankind’s efforts were directed toward fixing up a limited, broken-down ecology, or were dissipated on closed-economy problems: battles over diminishing resources in the oceans, on the fringes of the expanding deserts.
She wondered, uneasily, what she would find when she returned home, thirty-six years from now.
Madeleine would live in the old shuttle Spacelab — a tiny reusable space station, seventy years old and flown in orbit twice — dug out of storage at KSC, gutted and refurbished. At the front was her small pressurized hab compartment, and there were two pallets at the rear fitted with a bunch of instruments that would be deployed at the neutron star: coronagraphs, spectroheliographs, spectrographic telescopes.
Brind gave her a powerful processor to enable her to communicate, to some extent, with her Gaijin hosts. It was a bioprocessor, a little cubical unit. The biopro was high technology, and it was the one place they had spent some serious amounts of Paulis’s money. And it was human technology, not Gaijin. Madeleine was fascinated. She spent a long time going over the biopro’s specs. It was based on ampiphiles, long molecules with watery heads and greasy tails, that swam about in layers called Langmuir-Blodgett films. The active molecules used weak interactions — hydrogen bonding, van der Waals forces and hydrophobic recognition — to assemble themselves into a three-dimensional structure, supramolecular arrays thousands of molecules long.