Ian Watson - The Embedding

MISSION CONTROL “Telemetry reads your distance as two miles, Leapfrog. Relative velocity now nine—now eight point five.”

T PLUS 3 DAYS 15 HOURS 28 MINUTES

SHERMAN “Landing probes making contact—now. We’re down.”

TSERBATSKY “It’s metal—a great metal sphere. The horizon is a perfect circle round us. The surface slightly pitted—a texture like sandpaper. But no big dents or cracks. I can see great circle lines running to the horizon. It’s put together like an orange.”

DALTON “Smooth parking, Paulus—like in your own driveway. I guess it’s a free ride home from here.”

MISSION CONTROL “Not all the way home, boys. For God’s sake get them persuaded into a high parking orbit. The Soviets will announce an inflatable comsat to coincide with their arrival. That thing will be like a new star in the sky.”

TSERBATSKY “And supposing it wishes to land, Gentlemen?”

DALTON “That thing, landing? It would break apart! What does it sit down on?”

TSERBATSKY “HOW about water?”

MISSION CONTROL “That’s true, Tserbatsky. If they plan on landing that thing, we’ll have to scrap the Nevada Desert plan.”

TSERBATSKY “The American lakes are too public. Canada is no use in winter. How about the Aral Sea in Kazakhstan?”

DALTON “Aussieland might be better. One of those lakes in the Outback?”

TSERBATSKY “They’re seasonal lakes. Empty at the moment. And too shallow anyway.”

MISSION CONTROL “Don’t you boys worry yourselves about the politics of it, we’ll work that one out down here. You concentrate on that Globe.”

T PLUS 3 DAYS 16 HOURS OO MINUTES

MISSION CONTROL “Boys, we’ve reached a compromise on the landing zone—if that thing’s going to land. The obvious place is the Pacific. Will you copy the co-ordinates? It’s a lagoon in the Marshall Islands, southeast of Eniwetok. North seven degrees fifty-two minutes. East one-sixty-eight degrees twenty minutes. Of course, the Globe is unlikely to land—most likely it carries a scout ship on board. In which case Nevada is the prime choice.”

TSERBATSKY “I request verbal confirmation of the Mar-shall Islands decision from Dr Stepanov.”

MISSION CONTROL “Fair enough.”

DIMITRI A STEPANOV (USSR CO-ORDINATOR, HOUSTON; TRANSLATED FROM RUSSIAN)

“I confirm the Pacific location, Petr Simonovich. But try to keep that thing in the sky. The Nevada Desert for any scout-ship.”

DALTON “There’s a hole opening up in the skin about a hundred metres off.”

SHERMAN “A cylinder shape is rising out of it. It’s about ten metres high by thirty across. Maybe it’s an airlock?”

TSERBATSKY “A broad opening appearing in the cylinder side.”

MISSION CONTROL “Leapfrog? The landing plan they were broadcasting has stopped. We’re receiving a new diagram now. It shows you on the outside of the Globe—with a dotted line moving from you to the inside of it. They want you to go inside. Better get suited up, Sherman and Tserbatsky. Dalton will watch the store.”

T PLUS 3 DAYS 16 HOURS 50 MINUTES

DALTON “They’re getting close to the airlock now. You okay, Paulus?”

SHERMAN “We’re fine. You read us, Houston?”

MISSION CONTROL “Fine—good visuals.”

SHERMAN “The inside of the cylinder is empty. There’s a large round chamber. Some sort of sensors and controls at the rear. We’re stepping inside together.”

DALTON “Two great steps for mankind? Hey Houston! The door’s closing! That thing’s shutting on them.”

TSERBATSKY “Doors are designed to close, my friend. We’re—” (LOSS OF SIGNAL)

DALTON “The door’s tight shut now. The cylinder is retracting back into the skin. Can you hear me, Paulus? Paulus! Houston, the contact’s been lost. Can you still hear me, Houston?”

MISSION CONTROL “We hear you loud and clear, Leap-frog.”

DALTON “Something’s blanketing their transmissions then.”

T PLUS 4 DAYS 06 HOURS 35 MINUTES

DALTON “Houston! That cylinder’s on the move again. It’s coming up… The door’s opening… There they are in the doorway. Paulus? Tserbatsky? Do you read me?” SHERMAN “Yes Mike, we read you. But we’re tired.”

TSERBATSKY “Houston?”

MISSION CONTROL “Houston to Leapfrog. Sherman, Tserbatsky. Welcome back. What happened?”

SHERMAN “I guess you could say that the ball’s in their court now…”

TSERBATSKY “Paulus—have you no sense of destiny! Intelligent beings have crossed the deeps of space to communicate with us. They open the door to the Universe. Let us never wittingly let it shut!”

DALTON “Great speech, Ivan, but what the hell do they look like?”

TSERBATSKY “Oh that. Appearances. They’re bipeds—two arms and two legs like ourselves—only they’re much taller than us, about three metres tall. They’ve got skinny frames, with powdery grey skins. No body hair visible on them. They have this broad single nostril in the middle of their faces—a vast flat saddle nose like you see in hereditary syphilis. And their eyes—these are set further round the sides of the head than ours. They must see through a hundred and eighty to two hundred degrees—the eyes bulge like the eyes of Pekinese dogs. Their ears look like crinkly grey paper bags—and are continually inflating and deflating. I could see small cartiliginous teeth in their mouths and the mouth itself was a bright orange colour, except for the tongue which was long and dark and red—and very supple, like a butterfly’s tongue.”

SHERMAN “They analysed our air and fitted out a sort of reception room for us made out of glass—for us to take our helmets off inside of. We gave them the language videotapes and microfilm. They put them through some machine—decontamination I guess—and huddled round them. They had the language tapes on a screen within ten minutes. Two of them scanning fast and listening, ignoring us. Another of them brought a communication screen we could write on.”

TSERBATSKY “They treated us in a brisk brotherly way. As fellow intelligences. They were very busy. We were the tourists. They talked with a very wide range of sounds. Going up very high-pitched sometimes. I heard the top C that shatters Opera House chandeliers. And a dull low bass at other times. With a very fast shuttling between the two extremes.”

SHERMAN “We negotiated with two of them by way of this blackboard screen. We drew with our fingers and images appeared. It’s agreed they’re going into parking orbit. They’ll send a small vehicle down to the Nevada site. We asked for and got a transpolar orbit on the twenty west, one-sixty east longitude. The only land that passes over is Siberia, Antarctica, Reykjavik in Iceland, and a few bits and pieces in the Pacific. Okay?”

TSERBATSKY “Imagine, Gentlemen, we have met our brothers from the stars. And we are going to hide them away where no one sees! I am still filled with the wonder of it!”

STEPANOV (SPEAKING RUSSIAN, A PROVERB WHICH CAN LOOSELY BE TRANSLATED AS)

“Brothers is, as brothers does, Petr Simonovich!”

SHERMAN “I’m goddam tired. We’re coming aboard to sleep now.”

MISSION CONTROL “One thing more, Leapfrog. Did you find out why they’ve come?”

SHERMAN “Nope. Apart from the orbital and landing data, it was all one big language lesson to me. All taken up with checking out the speech tapes we brought. We didn’t get down to personalities or purposes.”

MISSION CONTROL “Don’t worry, Paulus—I guess they got their priorities straight. How do we communicate with them if not by words?”

After he’d read the transcriptions, Sole stared at the bright red cover of the xeroxed sheets, which had been flown in direct from Houston to Fort Meade, the autofax system apparently being distrusted for the conveyance of sensitive material of this order. Tax Freaks’ had been operating in the States for at least a year now, making it their sometimes profitable, sometimes anarchistic hobby to extract autofaxed documents from the coded signals in the public telephone system, even when scramblers were in use. There had already been one major scandal in the past twelve months, about nuclear waste disposal procedures, traceable to this particular source—amateur guerrilla technology. There were tales of industrial espionage from the pharmaceuticals industry, and rumours of phoney government memos being slipped into the system, somewhere between the State Department and the Pentagon. The personal courier had emerged from the world of autofax technology, unscathed and even with a new importance.