David Brin - Existence

“I understand. You have cause for bitterness. But do not judge too quickly. We don’t know what role it will play. But one thing is certain. Your husband will be safer if he and the stone can be drawn out of shadows. Into the light.”

Mei Ling pondered this for long seconds.

“Can that be done?”

The other woman’s smile was rueful, apologetic.

“I don’t know the details. They are searching for him by sifting the daita-sphere. A myriad corners and dimensions of the Great Mesh. The tides and currents and drifting aromas. Many things that are deeply hidden, encrypted and buried behind bulwarks of firewall isolation-these nevertheless leave spoors that can be detected, if only by the studious absence of mention.”

Mei Ling blinked silently, wondering how this foreigner-born in New Guinea, raised on Fiji, and educated in Europe-became so articulate in Chinese. Better than me, she observed.

“These are the sort of not-there traces that the Blessed Throwbackssometimes can detect, invisible to the rest of us.”

“But not to me!” inserted Hijo, who had laid Xiao En on a plush rug, and was playing a game of peekaboo, to the baby’s delight.

“No. Not to you,” Agurne responded, indulgently.

“In fact, I can tell that Mei Ling’s children will be special,” the Neanderthal boy added. “Even though I don’t know why. Nobody can know the future. But some things just leap out. They’re obvious.”

Hijo’s faulty use of the plural almost made her protest. I have only one child. But Mei Ling shook her head. This was no time for petty distraction. She turned back to the mother.

“How can I help? What can I tell you?”

Agurne Arrixaka Bidarte leaned gently toward Mei Ling.

“Everything. Anything you can remember. We already have many clues.

“Why don’t you just start at the beginning?”

The gullet of the sea serpaint isn’t as gross or disgusting as he expected. The walls are soft and he has only to crawl back a short distance to find a space shaped to fit a recumbent person.

While twisting into the seat, Bin hears the jaw of the mechanical beast close with a thump. There follows backward movement, undulating, shaking, like a worm wriggling out of a hole. By some tech-wizardry, the small space around him begins emptying of water. Soon, a hiss of air.

Bin spits out the mouthpiece-a gasp of shuddering relief. The breather had gone foul. He gratefully rubs his eyes.

A patch of wall near his head is transparent-a window! How considerate. Really. It makes him feel ever-so-slightly less a prisoner-or a meal. Pressing his face, he peers outside. The palace ruins are a jumble, collapsed further by the fighting, now lit by slanting moonlight.

While the robot backs up, Bin spots his former attic shelter. Briefly, before the machine can accelerate forward, he glimpses the opening-and perhaps a shadowy silhouette. At least, he thinks so.

Enough to hope.

“They aren’t just battling it out with lasers anymore,” Gennady reported. “Now, many of the space attacks appear to involve kinetic energy weapons.”

“You mean pellet guns?” Akana asked. “Wouldn’t those be slower? Harder to aim, with all those asteroids jumbling about, on different orbits? And your target might get a chance to duck.”

“How does a lump of crystal duck?” asked Emily Tang.

“Evidently,” replied Haihong Ming, “there are things out there with more… physical capability… than mere lumps of passive crystal.”

That had been obvious for a while. Still it felt like a milestone for someone to say aloud what everyone was thinking. We’re in new territory, Gerald realized.

“Exactly! So…” Akana blinked. “Oh, I see. If you fire a high-velocity pellet and it takes a while to intersect the orbit of its target, that gives you time to take cover or get out of the way, before anyone will notice and retaliate. Can’t do that with a laser.”

“Depends on whether anyone’s using radar…” Gennady started to quibble, then shook his head and let it go.

“But why fight at all?” asked Dr. Tshombe. “What is this all about?”

“You mean other than scaring the bejeesus out of several billion Earthlings?” Emily asked, with a crack in her voice.

Or putting the kibosh on all those stupid claims of a hoax, Gerald pondered with some bitter satisfaction. One casualty had been the credibility of Hamish Brookeman and his backers. Well, sic transit gloria .

Ben Flannery, their Hawaiian anthropologist, gestured toward the object Gerald recovered from space-what seemed ages ago-now covered by a thick black cloth. The recording technicians had been sent away and all light cut off. The commission members had come to realize it was still necessary to teach the Artifact a lesson, now and then.

“We already knew there were factions. Machines that are related to our Artifact-part of the same interstellar lineage-may have worried, when other types started flashing for attention. Then came news reports from Earth, about space expeditions preparing to go fetch more varieties, for comparison. That was the last straw. Those cousins of our Artifact stepped in at that point, acting forcefully to remove the competition.

“And that brought retaliation. A truce that may have lasted eons came to a sudden end.”

“In order to achieve what?” Emily asked.

“To claim the most valuable commodity in the solar system-human attention.”

Gerald felt sympathy for Ben, a man of peace, reluctantly dragged into analysis of deadly war. One that apparently spanned millions of years, without a single living participant. But that didn’t make it any less violent.

Akana had gone quiet for a while, as her tru-vus went opaque. Her teeth were clicking like mad, and among her subvocal grunts Gerald thought he heard one that signaled “Yes, sir,” repeated several times.

Uh-oh, he thought.

“You know, there is an alternative theory,” Gennady mused, oblivious to Akana’s distraction. “We already decided these crystal artifacts are a lot like viruses. Well, in that case, consider a biological analogy. One explanation for the machines that are shooting at these space viruses may be some kind of immune-”

Akana’s specs abruptly cleared and she sat up, with the petite but commanding erect posture of a woman who had recently been promoted to the rank of major general in the United States Aerospace Force. Her bearing brought silence better than any spoken order.

“That was the White House. All plans for another sample-recovery mission have been put on hold. Nobody feels prepared to send a crew, or even robots, into that mess out there. And I’m told that similar orders have been issued by Great China.”

She paused while Haihong Ming checked with his government. In seconds, he nodded.

“That is so. But there appears to be more. Will you all kindly give me a moment?” Then it was his turn to disappear behind interspectacles that went totally opaque.

Gerald and the others looked at each other. Way back in olden times, it used to take weeks or months for an envoy to consult with his government, back home. Now, a couple of minutes seemed to stretch forever as Haihong Ming grunted in apparent surprise… then seeming protest… and finally evident submission.

At last, he flipped back his eye hoods decisively and took a few seconds to scan those seated around the table, before resuming.

“It would seem we now have sufficient reason for a complete pooling of resources and information.”

“Um, I thought that was what we were doing already,” Gennady commented. But Gerald shook his head. “I think our esteemed colleague from the Reborn Central Kingdom has something specific in mind. Something that he was forced-until now-to conceal.”