Stephen Baxter - Coalescent

Peter wore a gray sweat suit of soft fabric, and thick mountaineer’s socks — no shoes or slippers.

We consumed Alpen and coffee in the kitchen. I told him I’d seen him on TV, and we talked about the media frenzy over Kuiper. Peter said it was all to do with positive feedback.

“It’s like that Mars story a few years back. You know, where they found fossil bacteria in a meteorite—”

“Thought they found.”

“And Clinton zipped himself up long enough to pronounce that NASA had discovered life on Mars. Suddenly it was everywhere. The story itself became the story.” It was the nature of the world’s modern media, he told me. “The days when news was controlled by a few outlets, the big networks, are long gone. Now you have CNN, Sky, Internet news sites: thousands of sources of news at local, national, and international level. And they all watch each other. A story sparks into life somewhere. The other outlets watch the story and the reaction to it, and pick up on it …” He was overfamiliar with this stuff, and tended to talk too rapidly, using specialist jargon, words like mediasphere . He showed me an editorial he’d clipped from the Guardian decrying the bubble of hysteria over Kuiper. “There’s even news about news, which itself becomes part of the story. It usually finishes with a spasm of self-loathing. ‘What This Hysteria Says About Our Society.’ Pathological, really. But it shows the kind of world we live in now. We’re all densely interconnected, like it or not, and this kind of feedback loop happens all the time.”

Densely interconnected. For some reason that phrase appealed to me. “But the fuss about Kuiper has been good for you,” I said.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “It’s been good for me.”

Cradling our second mugs of coffee, Peter led me into his living room. Beyond a big double-glazed picture window, a garden glowed green in the soft light of the autumn morning. The room obviously served as an office. In addition to a music stack and wide-screen TV with various recorders and set-top boxes, there was a large table given over to computer technology: a big powerful-looking desktop, a laptop, various handhelds, a scanner, a joystick, and other bits of gear I couldn’t recognize. The desktop was booted up. There were books and stacks of printouts on the desk and on the floor.

All this looked like the environment of a freelancer working at home. But there was no sense of style, and a certain lack of ornamentation and decoration — no photographs, for instance — a lack of personality.

The only exception was in the little alcove over the fireplace. In my home my parents used to keep silly souvenirs in there — tiny wooden clogs from Amsterdam, a little Eiffel Tower, other family knickknacks. Peter had set up a little row of die-cast model toys. Intrigued, I asked, “May I?” Peter shrugged. I reached up and brought down a fat green aircraft. It was a Thunderbird Two, heavy and metallic-cold. I turned it upside, trying to see a manufacturer’s date. Something rattled in its pod. On the edges of the wings and along the base the paintwork was chipped and worn away.

“It’s a Dinky original. Nineteen sixty-seven,” Peter said.

I cradled it in my hands like a baby bird. “I never had one of these. My parents got me a plastic snap- together substitute.”

“Without a detachable pod? I sympathize.”

“They didn’t understand. This must be worth something.”

He took it back and restored it to its place. “No. Not without the original box, and it’s hardly in mint condition.”

“Much loved, though.”

“Oh, yes.”

I stepped toward the big gear-laden table. I could smell Johnson’s Pledge, I realized, and it struck me that the Thunderbird toy had been free of dust. Up on the desktop screen was what looked like a prototype Web page. It was complex, crowded, and partly animated; it showed stanzas of music that cycled rapidly, along with a kind of binary code I didn’t recognize. Peter stood awkwardly beside the table, big hands wrapped around his coffee cup.

“This is your work? — Peter, I hate to admit it, but I don’t know a damn thing about what you do now you’re retired from the cops.”

He shrugged. “After the funeral you had other things on your mind.” There was a note in his voice, a subtext. I’m used to it. “But you got interested when you saw me on TV. Well, that’s okay. I make a living from Web design, mostly corporate sites, and game design.”

“Games?”

“Web-based, multiuser. I was always good at computer games. It’s something to do with a facility for spotting patterns in patchy and disparate information, I think. It made me a good copper, too. That and being out of control.”

“Out of control?”

He grinned, self-deprecating. “You knew me, George. I was never much in control of anything about my life. I was always awkward socially — I could never figure out what was going on, stuff other people seemed able to read without thinking about it.” He was right about that. In later years, we, his friends, even speculated he might be mildly autistic. He said, “You see, I’m used to being in situations where I don’t know the rules, and yet making my way forward anyhow. Decoding a chaotic landscape.”

“So is this one of your games?”

“It’s a personal project.”

I pointed at the screen. “I see music, but I don’t recognize it. Some kind of encryption system?”

“Sort of, but that’s not the purpose.” He seemed briefly embarrassed, but he faced me, determined. “It’s a SETI site.”

“SETI?”

“Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.”

“Oh, right.”

He talked quickly. “We’ve spent forty years now listening for radio whispers from the sky. But that’s twentieth-century thinking. If you were an ETI, and you wanted to learn something about the Earth, what would you study? What better than the Internet? It’s by far the largest, most organized information source on the planet.”

I said carefully, “You imagine aliens are logging on?”

“Well, why not? You’d learn a lot more about humankind than by sticking a probe up the rectum of a farmer from Kansas.” He seemed to sense what I was thinking. He grimaced. “Let’s just say I’ve been intrigued by the possibility of extraterrestrial life on Earth since the first showing of Fireball XL-Five . Haven’t you?”

“I suppose so. But you’ve stayed interested. You’ve become — um, an expert on this stuff.”

“As much as anybody is. I’m plugged into the right networks, I suppose. My name is known. Which is how I got on the TV.”

“And your site is designed to catch their attention?” I peered at it. “It looks a little busy.”

“Well, I doubt an ETI is going to be interested in snazzy Web page design. The site is information-rich, though — you’re looking at the works of Chopin, here, rendered in compressed binary — and encoded in forms that ought to make it easy for the ETIs to pick up. Bait, you see. And if the ETIs do find my site -

look, this is a long shot, but it’s cheap to set up and maintain … and the payoff would be of incalculable value. Isn’t it worth trying? I’m not alone in this,” he said, a bit defensively. “There’s a network of researchers, mostly in the States …”

He told me something of a bizarre-sounding online community of like minds. “We call ourselves the Slan(t).” He had to write that down for me. “ Slan is an old science fiction reference — made up to date, you see … It sums up how we see ourselves. The Slan(t)ers are a new kind of community, a bunch of outsiders, the fringe united by new technology.”

“I bet there are a lot of Californians.”