David Brin - Existence

Her eyes widened, at the same moment that Hamish saw several other people rock back. Including Lacey and Professor Noozone. Whatever it was… he experienced it too.

“Now that’s odd. Does anyone else feel suddenly compelled to say the word-”

“… key…”

“-key?”

“Key!”

“Yea. I-mon feel it, too, obeah-strong.” The black Jamaican science-showman seemed aggrieved at the very idea. Almost through gritted teeth, and glaring at Hamish, he added, “Key.”

Four individuals, all of them human, approached each other near the edge of the glassy plain, while the others watched. Emily, Hamish, Profnoo, and Lacey exchanged looks, back and forth.

“So… now what?” Lacey asked. “Are we supposed to conjure up a key to unlock the box? Something capable of survival near the lattice surface, penetrating through the wall-and vacuum-and then the container? How? Shall we hold hands and wish it into being?”

I ain’t holding hands with Noozone, Hamish grumbled inside.

“Well,” Emily suggested, “if we four concentrate, maybe it will manifest, by force of will.”

They tried for a while. Hamish closed his eyes, envisioning what a “key” might look like. Something to unlock a heavy, massive cabinet. A virtual object tough enough not to unravel when it was brought “up-and-large” near an unbridgeable barrier made of crystal and time. All he could come up with was the mental image of an old fashioned skeleton key with a cylindrical shank and a single flat, rectangular tooth.

He could feel magic gather at his fingertips. Something was happening in front of him. He opened his eyes…

… and saw a mess. His version of a “key”-muddled and half formed-was jumbled with another one that resembled a modern biomet-tag, of the kind that people on Earth might use to remotely identify themselves. Both of those swirled with someone else’s notion of a “key”… a maze of numbers, dots, and computer-readable smudges.

One of the onlookers guffawed at the resulting mishmash. Hamish couldn’t blame him.

“This is silly,” Profnoo said. And Hamish noticed that the man had altered his appearance. Now he resembled a real professor-tweed jacket, turtleneck shirt, and milder dreadlocks. Even spectacles. His affected accent was nearly gone.

“I doubt anything that we manifest will do the job.”

“If we discuss it first…,” Lacy suggested. “Maybe reach a consensus on a single metaphor, we four might then-”

Hamish shook his head, hating to agree with Profnoo.

“Wanna know what I think? I would bet my next cash advance and media options that we don’t have anything else to do, right now. Our job is done. We four had only to remember, all of us at the same time, and say the word together, for it to-”

Birdwoman shrieked!

Hamish swiveled to see her hopping and using both iridescent wing-arms to point downward, over the edge of the plate. Next to her, M’m por’lock crouched on all fours, thrashing a beaverlike tale and hissing.

“I think you had all better look at this!”

Hamish and the others bent or knelt to peer into the depths. And there they saw, far below, refracted by multiple foldings of fractal scale, something that appeared to be rising fast, drawing near with tremendous momentum. A patch of light. A glow. A spot of brilliance that seemed too intense to be merely virtual.

Probably, it would be visible even from outside the probe itself, if anyone happened to be looking.

It must have started in the very most depths , Hamish thought. And it’s been rising ever since we all said the key word. Key… word. Of all the stupid codes! I would never have stooped to using that in a novel.

Staring, unable to move, Hamish watched as the glow brightened, swerved… then plunged straight at the aft-most end of the ship, casting sharp light even past the crystal barrier, to briefly pulse a complex rhythm against the great, brown container-box…

… which then

quietly

opened.

Cracks and seams propagated across the great brown surface of the aft cargo container as it started unfolding.

“Come on!” Lacey shouted. “Let’s get up top for a better view.”

She stepped off the glassy plate and started grow-walking skyward, becoming a giant, striding ever-higher and turning translucent as she climbed. Others quickly followed, leaving Hamish-assisted by the Oldest Member-hurrying to catch up, struggling to master that queer trick of envisioning changes in both position and scale, pushing upward against increasing weight and resistance.

Glancing back, he saw the flat plain where they had been meeting, along with all the instruments and tools that their minds had built, now looking like tiny toys and already starting to dissolve.

“Focus ahead of you, Hamish my friend,” Om insisted. “Think up and out. Think big.”

The others had pulled ahead. Their ankles were gigantic as Hamish fought to keep up. But he had always been a quick study, and soon had the knack, forging ahead and expanding his own scale to match that of Emily, then the otter-alien, then Singh and the Birdwoman-whose personal augmentations were starting to soften, molting her glorious feathers, leaving a much more human-mundane appearance. Professor Noozone, however, was still up ahead. Still huge. Striving hard into a headwind, maintaining his lead.

The mists shredded and parted as stars came out, stark and bright beyond the great ceiling-barrier.

Om was right. This seems a bit easier, accompanied by others.

But the group had not come up here for stars. They gathered where the aft-end curvature of the rounded cylinder was most pronounced, giving them their best view of the cargo box. Its deployment had already progressed.

Rather than just unfolding, the brown sides of the box unraveled, supplying meter after meter of ropy strands. Five of these cables connected to five different blocky objects that now tumbled out of the container, until each of them trailed behind the crystal ship, as if dragged by its own tow-line.

“There!” Emily pointed. “I see it. The sun!”

Indeed, as hundreds of meters of cable spun out from the sides of the box, a great star was revealed, mightier (apparently) than all the rest. Far bigger and brighter, and closer than it should have been, at this point in their mission. And somewhere buried within its glare would be a tiny, blue-green twinkle. Homeworld.

As they watched, each of the five blocks broke in half… then divided again… with each smaller chunk separated by more rope that got increasingly slender, with every division, till five long chains trailed behind the vessel. Each of them consisted of a long strand, with small lumps knotted along its length. Through some kind of magnification or refraction, Hamish could tell that the tethers stretched back kilometers now, perhaps much more.

“Whatever it is, it doesn’t look like a weapon,” Professor Noozone pointed out, still in his tweedy, university-teacher mode, almost accent free, like when he had been just a regular associate instructor at Caltech. “Nor does it seem like a way to hasten contact with some planet-born, primitive race.”

Lacey had an observation.

“Notice how one of the strands has deployed to trail directly behind us… while the others fan out above, below, left, and right. It must use an electrostatic charge-

“And see now! How all five of them have branched? Each of them splitting into several sub chains? A total of… a hundred strands! Each terminating in a pair of thicker lumps, one after the other? I believe it has to be antenna array- a detector of some sort-meant to cover as large a volume of space behind us as possible.”