A Grey Moon Over China (51 page)

“What’s Lowhead doing with power masers?”

“Oh. ‘Allerton’s Folly.’ He bought them from Singh’s people way back, in exchange for embryos or something. They were supposed to be for orbiting collectors, but the collectors never got built. As far as I know, they’ve never been used for anything. The Boar River Press calls them ‘Allerton’s erections.’ ”

Dorczak looked around at that moment to see Becker and Allerton standing in the doorway. “Hello, Bart.”

Allerton twisted the ring on his little finger for a minute, then ignored her. “All right, the transcripts are on the way. The techs and the equipment are here, if you people want to get started.”

T
he alien was alive.

We had welders tack the cattle cage down to the flooring to keep it from slipping, then we slid a truck jack in under that section of the flooring and tipped it up. When it reached a steep enough angle the creature snapped to the uphill side and with a clean
snick
latched onto a bar with a hand. It was an incredibly sudden, precise movement. The creature didn’t move again, so we let the flooring back down.

A magnetic resonance scan of the creature showed densities that were too high to be organic, and an infrared scan showed that all of its heat was concentrated at one end of the trunk. The rest of it was at ambient temperature, except for the joints it had used during its movement—which were a fraction of a degree higher—and an area under the bulge on its back that was warm all of the time. It also turned out that the creature was emitting an infrared sensing frequency of its own, from the porous area around the bulge.

Efforts to talk to it were fruitless. It was Penderson who finally remembered his own comment about radio communications.

“It may be talking this whole time, on some frequency we can’t hear,” he said.

“I don’t think it even thinks we’re something that bears talking to,” I said.

“I didn’t say it was talking to us.”

We looked at each other.

“Is that why it got left behind, do you suppose?”

So we had the technicians go up on top of the room’s drop ceiling and lay out antennas, then start scanning the entire spectrum for signals coming from inside the room. There was none.

“Maybe it doesn’t have anything to say at the moment,” said Penderson. “Maybe we’ll have to give it something.”

So the technicians rigged up a forklift with a canister of liquid nitrogen strapped to one end and a burning space heater at the other, knowing it would leave a powerful infrared signature. A young woman then came roaring into the storeroom riding on top of it, smashing her way down a row of shelves and past the cage, then back out the other door.

A comm tech burst through the door moments later.

“Got—”

“Quiet!”

Penderson herded everyone out of the room and into the hangar, where the vans full of communications equipment stood.

“I take it you got something?” he said.

“Yes, sir. A powerful squirt, way up in the EHF band. Extremely High Frequency. Real clear. Super-compressed, though, so I’ve got no idea what was in it.”

“Jesus, no one uses EHF. Serenitas probe wasn’t even
listening
on EHF.”

“Hot
damn!”
A head poked out of the van. “Someone answered. And not only that, but we’ve got traces of that same frequency all over the system, now that we’re looking for it.”

“Son of a bitch,” said Penderson. “Time to find out if they know English.”

We asked the vans’ clocks to set themselves to our watches exactly, then while the technicians began recording, Penderson and I went in and began taking detailed photographs of the alien. While we were there we talked about cameras and lighting, and about the creature’s skin and its lack of orifices. The techs recorded no further transmissions during that time.

But at two minutes and six seconds past the hour, I wondered out loud to Penderson whether the aliens knew that they’d put the base’s long-range weapons program permanently out of commission. And while the creature stood perfectly motionless in front of us, the techs recorded another transmission.

B
ut I was under the impression they didn’t pay any attention to humans at all,” said Dorczak.

“My guess,” I said, “is that they pay enough attention to assess our function at any particular moment, but that they don’t attach any special significance to us beyond that. Our significance is whatever obstacle we represent at the time, no more nor less than the significance of any other object. And the truth is that tactically we
aren’t
any more significant than most of the MI or other hardware around us. They certainly don’t see us the way we see human enemies. When we fight humans we hate them or resent them or envy them—we seek them out and it’s our
goal
to eliminate them.”

“In other words,” said Penderson, “it’s personal.”

“Exactly. It’s personal.”

“That’s very frightening,” said Becker. “To mean so little to one’s enemy. To be killed by someone who doesn’t really care whether he kills you or not.”

“It’s worse than that. It’s being killed by something that doesn’t even consider you alive in the first place, who doesn’t see you as any different from the tow motor you’re sitting on. Which, in an absolute sense, we’re not.”

“I’m surprised they know English.”

“Not really,” said Penderson. “Spoken English in analog form is all over the system on the radio waves. A creature that can handle a hundred gigahertz transmission can certainly sort that out, and if they’ve been observing events in the system at all, they can cross-correlate with events for the words’ meanings.”

“Could they learn to speak it, do you think?”

“Again, with something that can process as fast as these transmissions indicate they can process, it wouldn’t be a matter of learning a new skill, the way it is for us. Once they’ve got English on file, they’d simply reverse the algorithm and spit it back out. The problem is, though, whether they
think
enough like us that anything they say is comprehensible.”

“Well,” said Allerton. “The main thing is that he’s communicating. Which is good, because I have questions I expect answers to. And some propositions I’d like to put to it.”

Penderson looked tired at the thought, and rubbed a hand across his leathery face. “What makes you think
it
wants to talk to
you,
Allerton?”

“I’m the President, damn it! Leader of this planet’s preeminent nation. Don’t you think that’s why it’s here? Do you think it’s a coincidence? I believe that this attack was just a negotiating ploy. That’s why I instructed Ed to come and work out the technical details, so that I could negotiate with it. And remember—this animal’s our prisoner, completely at our mercy. It has no choice but to talk to us. And who are you to say differently, in any case, an asteroid miner like you. Did asteroid mining teach you the finer points of trading in power?”

“No, Mr. President, I’m just an old journalist who knows that nobody reveals anything unless there’s something in it for him.”

W
e stood on the packed dirt outside the hangar and ate sandwiches, while the comm techs instructed their MI to perform a particular task Penderson and I had requested.

There was to be an antenna placed next to the cage, through which the MI would listen for the EHF band the aliens appeared to be using. Since it would be a long time before the priests could decode the aliens’ own compacted transmissions, the communications MI was to ignore those messages and listen instead for ordinary sound carried on the same frequency, and then broadcast the sound back through a speaker near the cage. It was
to act as an ordinary radio, in other words, tuned to the aliens’ remarkably high broadcast frequency.

The sky had lowered and blackened, and out on the rise beyond the buildings the ranchers herded their cattle toward lower ground. Heat lightning still flickered behind us in the east, and the air smelled even more strongly of dust and the coming rain than before.

Finally the device was ready and Penderson and I left the others to finish their lunches, and went in and told the alien that if it would modulate its communications frequency with human speech, it could communicate with us.

Nothing happened. We tried prompting it by asking for the hexadecimal value of pi, or for the measurement in its units of the frequency of free hydrogen, or for where it came from; but it didn’t move and the speaker made no sound, and finally we gave up and went back outside.

Sometime later we were talking about how to move the alien to the ship and had decided it would be easier to have our ship brought up to the base, when a technician stuck his head out the door to report that an experimental squawk had come over the speaker.

Penderson and I went back in and ran through our questions all over again, spicing them up with vague threats and promises, but still the alien remained silent. We gave it up again and walked out into the hangar for coffee, then met the others in the conference room. Allerton came in late, saying he’d had to make calls to his office.

“I would have been surprised,” said Penderson, “if it had been any different.”

“Why?”

“Well, think about it. Did you notice, for instance, that out in the comm van there was a screen there in the back, flashing on and off in big red letters something about ‘advise system time and status?’ ”

“Um—”

“Well, it was right there next to me, and I saw it, yet I didn’t advise it of any such thing. Even though it wanted to know.”

“Harry . . .” Dorczak’s brown eyes studied him as she stole a sip from his coffee.

“The truth is,” he said, “I couldn’t have cared less whether it got its ‘system time and status.’ Why the hell should I have?” He took back his coffee.

“Well.” Allerton smoothed back his white hair and began to pace. “I’m sure this animal realizes that it
should
care whether it answers our questions. It must know that it’s in an untenable position—”

“My
guess,”
interrupted Penderson, “from listening to Colonel Becker
here, is that personal danger isn’t even a concept to these things. There’s nothing it fears from us, and nothing it needs.”

“That’s scary,” said Becker.

“Yes,” I said, “but wait a minute, Harry. There is one thing it wants, and it is something we have control over.”

T
he technicians laid copper mesh across the entire roof of the storeroom, working quietly up under the hangar’s ceiling. Then with a series of power cells they drove the mesh’s potential down to a negative fifty thousand volts. The aliens’ signals could get neither in nor out. A switch to disable the shielding was placed just outside of the cage.

Numbers of us went near the cage a few times to make important-sounding statements, and in between, the technicians paraded intriguing and powerful-looking contraptions past it. The antennas picked up the alien’s brief squirts of attempted transmissions, and then finally the communications MI reported that, whatever was being transmitted, the exact same thing had just been transmitted twice in a row: The alien finally knew it wasn’t getting through.

Penderson and I told Allerton and the others that for the next step we would need to concentrate, and over their objections we shut them out of the storeroom and pulled chairs up to the cage. I picked up the switch that controlled the shielding.

“If you answer some questions,” I said, “I can let you talk to your friends again.”

Nothing happened.

Penderson leaned closer to me. “It may be real weak on some of those concepts, Torres. Let me try.” He worked his teeth across his lip for a minute in thought, then spoke.

“If information is provided, communications will be open.”

“Query information type,” said the alien.

The words had come from the speaker without hesitation, in a thin, sharp voice, very slightly inflected. The creature itself remained perfectly still.

“No shit,” said Penderson.

“How do we ask it where it’s from?” I said.

He stared at the cage. “Query,” he said, “your place of origin.”

“Deck ninety-one,” said the speaker, “communications not open.”

Penderson glanced at me. “That’s a big help. It had a berth on deck ninety-one. You’d better hit your switch—it expects its communications to be opened the instant it gives an answer.”

“It’s hardly told us anything, Harry—”

“Do it. It’s the interviewer’s first law, Torres: Don’t mess with the ground rules. Or they never talk to you again.”

I hit the switch for an instant and our indicator lit up to show that the alien had transmitted something, presumably the bits of information we’d been dropping near its cage earlier.

“Query,” I said, “cause of the attack against this base.”

We waited for several minutes, but nothing else came from the speaker. “It’s got no reason to answer,” said Penderson.

“It’s got the same reason as before: being allowed to transmit.”

“There’s nothing new it wants to send.”