David Brin - Earth

He paused.

“The answer, of course, is that the universe isn’t impartial at all. The singularity arrived when we’re here because we’re here.”

Silence stretched. Alex shook his head. “I don’t blame you for missing the point. I, too, was trapped by my modern, Western-masochistic conceit. I assumed only humans were clever or vicious enough to destroy on such a scale. It took a reminder from the past to show me what a stupid presumption that is, after all.

“Oh, I can give you the date and point of entry now. I can even tell you something about the thing’s makers. But don’t ask me how to take vengeance on them, Pedro. I suspect that’s far beyond our capabilities at present.”

Some of the others looked at each other in confusion. But Teresa felt queasy. She fought the effects, breathing deeply. No physical crisis could affect her as this series of abstract revelations had.

“Somebody wants to destroy us,” she surmised. “It’s… a weapon .”

“Oh yes,” Alex said, turning to meet her eyes. “It is that, Captain Tikhana. A slow but omnipotent weapon. And the coincidence of timing is easily enough explained. The thing arrived only a decade or two after the first human experiments with radio.

“Actually, the idea’s rather old in science fiction, a horror tale of paranoia that’s chillingly logical when you work it out. Somebody out there got into space ahead of us and doesn’t want company. So it — or they — fashioned an efficient way to eliminate the threat.”

“Threat?” Manella shook his head. “What threat? Hertz and Marconi make a few dots and dashes, and that’s a threat to beings who can make a thing like this?” He pointed to one of the flat screens, where Alex’s latest depiction of the cosmic knot writhed and wriggled in malefic, intricate splendor.

“Oh yes, certainly those dots and dashes represented a threat. Given that some lot out there doesn’t want competition, it would make sense to eliminate potential rivals like us as early and simply as possible, before we develop into something harder to deal with.”

He gestured upward, as if the rocky ceiling were invisible and the sky were all around them. “Consider the constraints such paranoid creatures have to work under, poor things. It may have taken years for our first signals to propagate to their nearest listening post. At that point they must fabricate a smart bomb to seek and destroy the source.

“But recall how difficult it is to send anything through interstellar space. If you want to dispatch it anywhere near the speed of light, it had better be small! My guess is they sent a miniature cavitron generator, one just barely adequate to make the smallest, lightest singularity that could do the job.

“Of course, if you start with a small singularity it’ll require quite some time absorbing mass inside the target planet before it can really take off. In this case, about a hundred and thirty years. But that should be adequate, usually.”

“It almost wasn’t, in our case,” Teresa said, bitterly. “If we’d invested more in space, we’d have had colonists on Mars by now. Maybe the beginnings of cities on asteroids or the moon. We could have evacuated some of the life arks…”

“Oh, you’re right,” Alex agreed. “My guess is we’re unusually bright, as neophyte races go. Probably most others experience longer intervals between discovering radio and inventing spaceflight. After all, the Chinese almost did something with electricity a couple of times, Babylon and the Romans.”

Pedro Manella looked down at his hands. “Smart, but not smart enough. So even if we eliminate this horrible thing the nightmare may not be over?”

Alex shrugged. “I suppose not. We and our descendants, should we live to have any, are at best in for a rough time ahead. As a Yank might put it—” and his voice dropped to a drawl ” — the galaxy we’re livin’ in appears t’be a mighty tough neighborhood.”

Manella’s face reddened. “You’re taking this awfully well to be joking about it, Lustig. Has the news driven you over the edge? Or are you saving up for yet another surprise? Maybe another deus ex machina to pull out of your hat, like last time?”

Teresa suddenly realized that was, indeed, what she was holding her breath for! He’s done it before… turned despair around with fresh hope. Maybe this time, too ?

Seeing Alex smile, she felt a surge. But then he shook his head and simply said, “No. I have no new tricks.”

“Then why are you grinning like an idiot, Lustig!” Manella roared.

Alex stood up. And though he continued smiling, his hands clenched to a slow beat. “Don’t you understand? Can’t you see what this means?” He turned left and right, staring at each person in turn, getting back only blank looks.

In frustration, he shouted. “It means we’re not guilty . We haven’t destroyed ourselves and our world!”

He pressed both hands on the table, leaning forward intensely. “You all saw what shape I was in, before. I was destroyed by this. Oh, sure, we might succeed in ejecting Beta — I give it a one in four chance now, the best odds yet.

“But what would be the point? If we produce the sort of men who’d drop something like that into the world, and not even care enough to go looking for it again? Would we deserve to go on?

“You all kept telling me, ‘Don’t take it so personally, Alex.’ You said, ‘It’s not your fault, Alex. Your singularity was harmless, not an all-devouring monster like Beta. You’re our champion against this thing!’ ”

“Champion?” His laughter was acrid. “Couldn’t any of you see how that really made me feel?”

Every other person stared. The physicist’s reserve had cracked, and underneath now lay exposed someone more human than the Alex Lustig that Teresa had seen before this. A man, she realized, who had stepped deeper into the borderlands of endurance than most ever dream of.

“I had to identify with the makers of that thing!” He went on. “So long as I knew them to be my fellow humans, I had to take responsibility. Couldn’t any of you see that?”

He had started out grinning, but now Alex shivered. June Morgan started to rise, but then suppressed the move. Teresa understood and agreed. She, too, felt an urge to do something for him, and knew the only way to help was to listen till he stopped.

Listen humbly, for she knew with sudden conviction that he was right.

“I…” Alex had to inhale to catch his breath. “I’m smiling , Pedro, because I was ashamed to be human, and now I’m not anymore. Mere death can’t take that from me now. Nothing can.

“Isn’t… isn’t that enough for anyone to smile about?”

It was George Hutton who reached him first — who drew his shaking friend into his massive arms. Then, all at once, the rest of them were there as well. And none of their former jealousies or conflicts seemed to matter anymore. They embraced each other and for a time shared the horror of their newly known danger… along with the solace of their restored hope.

Space was the fabric of its existence .

A skein of superdense yarn — knitted and purled in ten dimensions — it was unravelable. A deep well — sunk into a microscopic point — it was unfathomable. Blacker than blackness, it emitted nothing, yet the tortured space around it blazed hotter than the cores of suns .

It had been born within a machine, one that had traveled far to reach this modest basin, pressed into the rippling universe-sheet by a lesser star. On arrival, the apparatus set to work crafting the assassin’s tight weave out of pure nothingness. Then, in its final death throes, the factory slowed its progeny onto a gentle circular path, skating among the star’s retinue of tiny planets.