Ian McDonald - River of Gods

Lisa Durnau ratchets the vernier up until the graphic display says X1000. The grainy blur expands into a dazzle of black and white, flickering furiously, throwing off patterns like flames hundreds of times a second. The resolution is maddeningly short of clarity but Lisa knows what she would find at the base of it if she could go all the way in; a grid of simple black and white squares, changing from one to the other.

“Cellular automata,” whispers Lisa Durnau, suspended above the fractal swirls of patterns and waves and demons like Michelangelo in the Sistine, inverted. Life, as Thomas Lull would know it.

Lisa Durnau has lived most of her life in the flickering black and white world of cellular automata. Her Grandpa Mac—geneful of Scots-Irish contrariness—had been the one to first awaken her to the complexities that lay in a simple pattern of counters across an Othello board. A few basic rules for colour conversion based on the numbers of adjacent black and white tokens and she had baroque filigree patterns awaken and grow across her board.

On-line she discovered entire bestiaries of black-on-white forms that crawled, swam, swooped, swarmed, over her flatscreen in eerie mimicry of living creatures. Downstairs in his study lined with theological volumes, Pastor David G. Durnau constructed sermons proving the earth was eight thousand years old and that the Grand Canyon was carved by waters from the Flood.

In her final High School year, while girlfriends deserted her for Abercrombie, Fitch and skaterboyz, she concealed her social gawkiness behind glitterball walls of three-dimensional cellular automata. Her end-of-year project relating the delicate forms in her computer to the baroque glass shells of microscopic diatoms had boggled even her math teacher. It got her the university course she wanted. So she was a nerd. But she could run fast.

By her second year she was running ten kay a day and probing beneath the surface dazzle of her black-and-white virtual world to the bass-line funk of the rules. Simple programmes giving rise to complex behaviour was the core of the Wolfram/Friedkin conjecture. She had no doubt the universe communicated with itself but she needed to know what it was in the fabric of space-time and energy that called the counterpoint. She wanted to eavesdrop on the Chinese whisper of God. The search spun her off the chequerboard of Artificial Life into airy, dragon-haunted realms: cosmology, topology, M-theory and its heir, M-Star theory. She held universes of thought in either hand, brought them together, and watched them arc and burn.

Life. The game.

“We’ve got a few theories,” Sam Rainey says. Thirty-six hours of drugged sleep later, Lisa Durnau is back on ISS. She, Sam, and G-woman Daley form a neat, polite trefoil up in the free-gee, an unconscious recapitulation of the steel symbol pointing the way to the heart of Darnley 285. “Remember when you dropped your name badge.”

“It’s a perfect recording medium,” Lisa says. “Anything it interacts with physically is digitised to pure information.” Her name is now part of it. She isn’t sure how she feels about that. “So, it takes stuff in; has it ever given anything out? Any kind of transmission or signal?”

She catches a transmission or signal between Sam and Daley. Daley says, “I will address that momentarily, but first Sam will brief you on the historical perspective.”

Sam says, “She says historical; it’s actually archaeological. In fact even that’s not close. It’s the cosmological perspective. We’ve done isotope tests.”

“I know palaeontology, you won’t blind me with science.”

“Our table of U238 decay products gives it an age of seven billion years.”

Lisa Durnau’s a clergy child who doesn’t like to take the Lord’s name in vane but she says a simple, reverent, “Jesus.” Alterre’s aeons that pass like an evening gone have given here a feel for Deep Time. But the decay of radioactive isotopes opens on the deepest time of all, an abyss of past and future. Darnley 285 is older than the solar system. Suddenly Lisa Durnau is very aware that she is a mere chew of gristle and nerve rattling round inside a coffee can in the middle of nothing.

“What is it,” Lisa Durnau says carefully, “that you wanted me to know this before?”

Daley Suarez-Martin and Sam Rainey look at each other and Lisa Durnau realises that these are the people her country must rely on in its first meeting with the alien. Not super-heroes, not super-scientists, not super-managers. Not super-anything. Workaday scientists and civil servants. Working through, making it up as they go along. The ultimate human resource: the ability to improvise.

“We’ve been videoing the surface of the Tabernacle more or less since day one,” Sam Rainey says. “It took us some time to realise we had to run the camera at fifteen thousand frames per second to isolate the patterns. We’re having them analysed.”

“Trying to pick out the rules behind the automaton.”

“I don’t think I’m betraying any secrets, but we don’t have the capacity in this country.”

This country, thinks Lisa Durnau, orbiting at the L-5 stable point. Screwed by your own Hamilton Act. She says, “You need high-level pattern-recognition aeais; what, 2.8, higher?”

“There are a couple of decrypting and pattern-recognition specialists out there,” Daley Suarez-Martin says. “Regrettably, they aren’t in the most politically stable of locations.”

“So you don’t need me to try and find your Rosetta Stone. What do you need me for?”

“On occasions we have received an incontrovertible, recognisable pattern.”

“How many occasions?”

“Three, on three successive frames. The date was July third, this year. This is the first.”

Daley floats a big thirty by twenty glossy through the ait to Lisa Durnau. Etched in the grey on grey is a woman’s face. The cellular automaton’s resolution is high enough to show her slight, puzzled frown, her mouth slightly open, even the hint of her teeth. She is young, pretty, racially indeterminate and the scuttling blacks and whites, frozen in time, have caught a tired frown.

“Do you know who she is?” she asks.

“As you can imagine, determining that is a primary priority,” Daley says. “We’ve already interrogated FBI, CIA, IRS, Social Security, and passport databases. No matches.”

“She doesn’t have to be American,” Lisa Durnau says.

Daley seems genuinely surprised by that. She skims the next glossy to Lisa face down. Lisa Durnau turns over the sheet of paper and reaches instinctively for something not falling to cling to. But everything falls here, all together, all the time.

He’s changed his glasses, trimmed the beard to a rim of stubble; he’s grown out his hair and lost a pile of weight, but the little grey cells have captured the sardonic, self-conscious, get-that-camera-away-from-me look. Thomas Lull.

“Oh my good God,” she breathes.

“Before you say anything, please look at this last image.”

Daley Suarez-Martin sets the final photograph floating, framed in space.

Her. It is her face, drawn in silver but clear enough to make out the love spot on her cheek, the laugh-lines around the eyes, a shorter, sportier haircut, the open-mouthed, eyes-wide, muscle-straining expression she cannot quite read: Fear? Anger? Horror? Ecstasy? It is impossible and unbelievable and mad; it is mad beyond madness, and it is her. Lisa Leonie Durnau.

“No,” Lisa says slowly. “You’re making this up, it’s the drugs, isn’t it? I’m still on the shuttle. This is out of my head, isn’t it? Come on, tell me.”

“Lisa, can I assure you that you are not suffering from any post-flight delusions. I’m not showing you fakes or mock-ups. Why should I? Why bring you all the way up here to show you fake photographs?”