Heaven's Fall (14 page)

“I understand his concern for the . . . safety of Earth,” Rachel said, feeling as though Melani Remilla could do with a reminder. “But we are six people, one of them a teenager. You’ve already performed medical examinations; we aren’t carrying a plague from space. In fact, given where we’ve lived for the past two decades, we are more likely to catch some terrestrial bug.

“So think of us as free human beings you welcomed to your lovely nation . . . to your planet . . . who have certain tasks they wish to accomplish, and a limited time in which to accomplish them.”

“I’m sure Kaushal can be persuaded to accommodate you,” Remilla said, “with one exception.” Rachel had a good idea what the exception was, but she forced Remilla to state it. “He will never allow you to go to the U.S.”

“I didn’t realize it was up to him.” She smiled, though she wasn’t feeling the humor of the moment. “In fact, I thought it was up to you and ISRO, or possibly this Mr. Kateel and the local government.”

“ISRO won’t stand in your way, but Kateel wishes he and the local government had never heard of you, so he is likely to support the Indian Air Force, which in this case is Kaushal.”

“Why does he care?”

“He thinks you might start a war. Given that Aggregate-controlled U.S. warships came close enough to our coast to shoot at you, I must confess that he has a point.”

Rachel smiled. Kaushal was actually quite correct. Well, as her father used to say . . . it’s better to know who your enemy is as early as possible. “In that case,” Rachel said, “please tell Wing Commander Kaushal that we are grateful for his hospitality and that we have no expectation that he will help us travel to the U.S.”

“Which means that you will depend on others?”

“At this moment,” Rachel said, and she was quite truthful, “I don’t know who that would be.”

Both women had asked their questions and now seemed lost with each other. “Your daughter,” Remilla finally said. “Is she enjoying the Beta unit?”

“Very much,” Rachel said. “If she hasn’t said thank you, she will.”

Yahvi’s obvious fascination with the Beta actually surprised Rachel—her daughter had zero experience with recorded music, and damned little with music of any kind beyond unaccompanied singing. The number of instruments among the HBs was three: a guitar, a flute, and a harmonica. There were a few guitar players in the population, and several who had self-taught over twenty years. But overall, musical instruments were as high on the 3-D printer priority list as fashion accessories, which was to say not very.

But music was music, and you didn’t need training to be attracted to shiny toys, Rachel realized.
Especially when you were miserable.

Finally leaving Remilla, she went off to find Yahvi, Pav, and the others.

First met as a creature, too-tall Frankenstein

You died for the third or tenth or a hundredth time

Yet in my wanderings I hear you feel you

Surrounding me

LINES CARVED ON FACTORY HABITAT WALL BY DALE SCOTT,
2015–2018

As he approached the Temple with Harley and Sasha, Dale said, “Do the lights ever go out?” He gestured toward the “ceiling” a thousand meters up, where snakelike “glowworms” provided daytime illumination for half the day, powering down to half-light at “sunset” and “dawn,” and even lower levels for ten hours of human “night.” “Ever have any droughts?” Rain inside the human habitat was benign, short, sweet, nocturnal. It reminded Dale of the old song from
Camelot
about rain falling only after sundown. Like that song, Keanu’s systems frequently created a morning fog for plants and crops. It always dissipated by “full morning.”

“Why do you ask?” Harley said.

“Why do you care?” Sasha snapped.

He chose to answer Sasha. “I’ve been in the other habitats and seen that there are hiccups in their daily weather.”

“Like a system rebooting?” Harley said.

“God, Harley,” Sasha said, “you don’t have to discuss these things with him!”

The rebuke was enough to stop Harley from answering . . . and just enough to confirm what Dale had suspected, that Sasha Blaine was still his enemy, and that all might not be paradise in Keanu.

The flatness of the terrain made it difficult for Dale to see much more. There were new buildings, of course, all small, no more than two stories, and largely clustered at the opposite end of the habitat, beyond the Temple structure, which still dominated the “skyline.” It seemed that a gate of sorts had been built in the entrance at the far side . . . with some kind of tram or train line extending from it and running toward one cluster of buildings. But all of that was still too far away.

Still, he was amazed at the changes just in the Temple. Formerly, and for years after their arrival, it had been a big, barnlike place with upper floors that resembled a college chemistry lab.

Someone with a sense of design had smoothed out the rough exterior, landscaped the approach, and performed a major renovation on the first-floor atrium—even planting flowers. It now reminded Dale of the lobby of a big-city bank, right down to a reception desk. The walls were white and gray, the furnishings black and chrome. The only feature that reminded Dale of the old atrium was the ramp that led to the upper floors.

Even that had been “improved” by the addition of a conference table in one corner, with more chairs, not just for the table but for spectators.

Harley and Sasha led Dale to that corner. The other humans in the Temple “lobby” turned to stare. Well, Dale thought, they didn’t see many strangers.

Waiting for Dale in the conference corner was Jaidev Mahabala. The ISRO engineer, master of manufacturing, had not changed in a decade, to Dale’s eyes. He was still small, dangerously slim, permanently nervous.

And of all the HBs who were not Dale Scott fans, Sasha Blaine included, Jaidev was number one.

“Let’s get this over with,” Sasha said.

“Where’s Makali?” Dale said. “And Zhao? I would have thought they’d be part of any council.”

“Zhao is a valued member of the council,” Sasha said.

“But not so valued that he can’t show up?” Dale said. “Or is it me? Never mind . . . Makali is a friend. Was a friend.” The Australian-born exobiologist, brilliant and dogged, and attractive as well, had been part of the pioneering Keanu trek team. She and Dale had quarreled then but had seemed to be growing closer in the year afterward.

Makali was just the kind of person to do her own exploring, too. Maybe—

“She’s busy at the moment,” Harley said, as if that explained anything.

It was clear to Dale that Harley and Sasha were both waiting for him to lay his data cards on the table.

A transparent curtain emerged from both walls, enclosing them in a conference space. “What’s this for?” Dale said.

“The Temple is our city hall,” Harley said. “This room is the city council chamber. Even if we have to have private conversations, anyone who wants can sit out there and see us.”

“So generous.”

Never known for his patience, Jaidev gestured toward the table. “Sit.” Without waiting, he took the chair at the head. “Why are you back?”

Jaidev was several decades younger, yet he made Dale feel like a student reciting for an aged, ill-tempered professor. Just for a moment, Jaidev’s attitude made Dale so angry that he almost stormed out. But, no, that was twenty-years-in-the-past Dale. “As I told Harley and Sasha,” he said, trying to keep calm, “I have learned that the Reivers are on Earth, as we suspected.

“They control something like forty percent of the planet, including all the best manufacturing and high-tech facilities outside China, primarily in the United States.

“Here’s the worst of it: They are hard at work on some large project that will be bad for organic life, which is no surprise, given that everything the little bastards do is bad for organic life . . . but this might also be fatal for Earth as a planet.

“More to the immediate point, they know where Rachel and the others are. They will never allow them to visit the U.S. They tried to kill them once; they’ll try to do it again.”

Jaidev closed his eyes and drummed his fingers. That wasn’t the extent of his twitchiness—he also tapped a foot. “And how do you know these matters?”

With a great deal of pride—no other human had managed to reach such a lofty level of communion with Keanu—he told them.

Beginning almost two decades ago, four habitats had turned out to be off-limits to Dale. Human, Sentry, Skyphoi, and the blasted one.

Reachable, however was a fifth . . . the Factory habitat, a genuine cityscape that filled a volume larger than any two of the others.

It was here that Dale spent ten years wandering, exploring, probing, and in some cases, defacing . . . entirely alone. The Factory was a fascinating place if you craved solitude and the company of exotic ten-thousand-year-old machines doing God knows what for who knows what reason.

But he believed that he had learned some of the Factory’s secrets, and one of the most important was accessing its amazing data intercept and retrieval systems.

Dale knew that in their first years on Keanu, Jaidev and Sanjay and that bunch had made several trips to the surface to erect communications dishes that they’d fabricated with Keanu’s nanotech goo—Substance K. But, given the other priorities—food, habitation, immense numbers of other needed items—there had been little time for them to pursue what was seen as a hobby.

And Keanu’s trajectory away from Earth, and soon the Sun, made signal intercepts difficult; the NEO was literally flying at right angles “south” from the solar ecliptic plane. While many terrestrial signals propagated in an expanding sphere, others—usually the most interesting—had been confined to fiber-optic networks or transmitted in tightly directed beams. There were also signals that were too weak to be detected at any distance.

At least by the equipment humans would possess in 2019, and especially the equipment that could be knocked together by ill-equipped refugees of that era.

Keanu’s systems were a hundred times better. “You won’t believe what Keanu itself has been able to pick up.”

“Oh, try me,” Sasha Blaine said. “The Architects were able to pick up morphogenetic signals and human souls. I wouldn’t think that episodes of
The Simpsons
would be a real stretch for them.”

Dale turned to her. “I don’t claim to have mastered the search engine, but I have learned this:
Anything
that was transmitted anywhere near Earth in the past twenty-four years, ever since Keanu entered the solar system, is here somewhere, stored and theoretically retrievable. I’m not just talking television and radio, but ham radio signals and telephone calls. Billions of telephone calls. Internet posts that went wireless. Obviously, I could only access a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of any of it, and I can only read or understand a tiny bit of that.

“Another thing: Terrestrial encryption means nothing to the Architects and their software.

“It just boggled my mind when I realized what it was doing. It still does, because, FYI, Keanu is still recording.”

Jaidev spoke. “You still haven’t told us how and where you learned about Rachel’s landing and these threats.”

“Landing news is everywhere outside India, nonofficial but public transmissions. You could see and hear those if your old antenna were working.

“The threats? That’s more subterranean, various blogs and other links. But convincing. A source I trust.”

Harley looked at Sasha Blaine, who looked away, through the curtain.

Then Harley looked at Jaidev, who stood up. “Deal with this.”

And the Bangalore engineer-leader walked out.

“What does that mean?” Dale said. “That’s it?”

“Sorry, Dale,” Harley said. “You’re not going anywhere for a while.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You’re a . . . security risk.”

“Be serious.” Dale knew Harley well enough to know that Harley was serious, and felt stupid about it.

“You’ve stepped in something.”

“I’m guessing you’re not going to tell me what.”

“Nope.”

“You’re not even interested in what information I have?”

“Oh, we’re interested. We want you where you can be questioned.”

Dale wanted to laugh. “What are you going to do . . . clap me in irons?”

Harley said nothing but looked past Dale toward Sasha, and the curtain.

Which had parted, revealing three serious-looking young people, one woman and two men, who were there to take Dale Scott into custody.

THE LATEST:

Word from various places in India confirms arrival of the Keanu folks, including a Sentry! (Can’t wait to hear the explanation for that.)

One of the crew is badly injured and reportedly not likely to survive.

All are temporarily sequestered at an air base north of Bangalore, near the site of their landing.

Crowds are being kept at bay, but the whole operation leaks like an old boat—good for us, but potentially bad for the Keanu folks. Not only are they fat targets for the Aggs, but anyone on the Indian subcontinent who has a religious gripe with them, and this appears to be a good number.

Well, we warned them to stay away, right? Anyone remember that?

But, since they’re here . . .

COLIN EDGELY TO THE KETTERING GROUP,
APRIL 13, 2040

The first night was awful. Partly it was the weight of the hours, the isolation, the creepy interior of the hospital, the presence of guards . . . combined with Rachel’s motherly iciness.

Mostly, though, it was the food. Everything Yahvi had eaten in her life had been produced in the Keanu human habitat, either grown from existing stock the HBs had discovered—some of it not remotely terrestrial—or from prototypes engineered by the proteus after considerable trial and error. And while there were spices and curries suited to the tastes of the Bangalore majority, none of it prepared Yahvi for the variety of exotic dishes she was now supposed to consume.