He remembered buying his backpack, goosedown sleeping bag and boots in a Mexico City shop. Remembered the short flight into the high desert. Remembered walking.
And sensed something behind his memories…
Of standing in a high place, looking down on a flat checkerboard of things, of categories and coordinate systems and forms.
He had watched himself. Seen a bird sheltering in a mesquite plant. Watched the first layer: Bird. Wings. A burnished brown. Phylum-order-class-genus-species.
Watched the second layer: Flight. Motion. Momentum. Analysis.
And saw at last that there was an essence in the way he filtered the world. That beyond the filter lay an ocean. A desert.
That the filter was what it meant to be human.
There was something more, something larger. He snatched at it but it…it brushed by him. He dimly saw the fabric of something… and then it was gone.
Nigel blinked. He lay on a shelf of worn rock, his body rubbed and warmed by the goosedown bag. The hill beside him glowed soft and golden; the horizon brimmed with light.
What had he learned? he thought. Factually, nothing. There were glimpsed aspects, nuances, but nothing concrete. The being had come. It provided some cushion for him during those dark hours in Mexico City (had he really fluxed the window? thought of jumping?). And the being had gone, seeped away in the night.
Nigel frowned, stretched, relaxed. His calves ached from walking. His stomach rumbled with hunger. He reached over to his backpack and fished out a dried fruit bar. His saliva wetted a bite and the flavor of strawberry filled his mouth.
What was it? After all he’d been through, Nigel still knew nothing about the alien that was useful. No facts, no data. One does not ask questions of a ghost.
He chewed, watching the filling sky.
Alexandria, Shirley—all behind him now. Ironic, how close you could be to someone, how much he’d thought he loved Shirley. Now, after all she’d done, there was only a dull, sour memory.
And questions. Had he really loved Shirley, or was that another illusion? The only person he had ever been sure of was Alexandria. And she was gone. Through the Snark he had known some faint trace of her, for a while. Perhaps some fraction of her remained in the Snark, some shadow.
He blew his nose on a handkerchief. The cloth came away with a smattering of blood; the night air had dried out his nasal passages.
Nigel smiled. Was the blood a sign of life? Or of death? Everywhere was ambiguity.
And yet…he wanted answers. He needed to know. Of his old world only one fragment remained: the Snark. There he must go. NASA and Evers would be stepping-stones outward and there would be others, other people who could help. There would be some resistance to him at NASA, he knew, particularly after the business about signaling the Snark first. Nigel Walmsley, the mad astronaut. But he would get through that.
He rubbed his eyes, smoothing the fretwork of crow’s feet. What he needed, after these two days with the being-behind-the-eyes, was people. The simple touch of his own kind. And he needed help to deal with NASA. But most of all, people.
PART FOUR
2035
ONE
Mr. Ichino paused at the entrance to the Pit. The calm murmur of technicians conversing mingled with the ding and chatter of typewriter inputs. The Pit was dark, its air stale. Hooded consoles spread dappled pools of light where men sat monitoring, checking, editing the river of information that flowed from this room, into the dancing rhythms of electrons and then out, riding electromagnetic wings to the Snark.
He noted a wall clock; twenty minutes until the meeting. Mr. Ichino sighed, willing himself to relax and not think of what lay ahead. He clasped his hands behind him in an habitual gesture and walked slowly into the Pit, letting his eyes accustom themselves to the gloom. He paused at his personal console, froze a scrap of the transmission and read:
In the service of the Emperor he found life, and fought the barbarians, and beat them into submission. When the Emperor so commanded, he fought strange and evil fairy creatures, and these he conquered. Dragons he slew, and giants. He was willing to do battle with all enemies of the land, mortal or animal or creatures from another world. And he was always the victor.
He recognized the passage from the Japanese legend of Kintaro, even in this westernized form. The Snark had asked Mr. Ichino several days before for more of the ancient literature of the East, and he had brought in all the texts and translations he could find in his collection. They were now being transmitted when time allowed. Mr. Ichino wondered idly if this passage had been selected especially by a programmer, since it contained reference to “creatures from another world.” Such an action would be lamentably typical; most of the men here understood nothing of what the Snark wished to know.
Mr. Ichino tapped his front teeth with a finger, thinking. The square, stylized yellow tape squatted against the green of the tube, a totally unfit medium for the delicate thread of a fairy tale. He wondered how it would be read—was read, by now—by a thing of copper and germanium, circling Venus. All this—the quiet intensity of the Pit, the compressed minutes he had lived through for months now, the unbalanced feel of what he was doing— seemed parts of a jumbled puzzle. If he could have but a few days to sort it out, to fathom what being could see so quickly to the core of his personal experience, and extract it—
He moved on. A technician nodded, an engineer saluted silently. Word would spread that the Old Man was in the Pit for his daily visit; the men would be a trifle more alert.
Mr. Ichino came to a large graphics tank and studied the intricate work being done inside it by the computer. He recognized the print at once: Nude in the Sunlight, Renoir, painted 1875 or 1876; Mr. Ichino had selected the painting only two days before.
Light, filtered to a blue-green, cast streaks across the breasts and arms of the naked girl, strangely altering the illuminating red glow of the skin that was Renoir’s unmistakable signature. The girl gazed pensively downward, caught as she grasped at some ill-defined cloth. Mr. Ichino looked at her for a long moment, savoring the ambiguity of her expression with a wistful romanticism he knew as an old friend; he had been a bachelor all his life.
And what would the Snark make of it? Mr. Ichino did not venture to guess. It had responded well to Luncheon of the Boating Party and asked for more; perhaps it mis-took them for a sort of photograph, despite his explanation of the uses men made of painting.
He shook his head as he watched the computer carefully breaking the picture down into tiny squares of color. The Snark spoke very little; many of Mr. Ichino’s ideas about it were deductions. Still, there was something about the pattern of requests the Snark made—
“Anything you would like to see especially, sir?” a technician said at his elbow.
“No, no, everything seems to be going well,” Mr. Ichino said softly, startled out of his contemplation. He waved the man away.
Other consoles flickered as the men in the Pit transmitted data to the Snark. At the moment they were working their way through a fresh edition of an encyclopedia, he recalled. Simply radioing the material would have been simple, but the men he supervised were charged with editing each line that found its way into code. The President had accepted the recommendation of the Executive Committee that no detailed scientific or technical information be given the Snark—the Pit was quickly built to ensure it.
Most of the consoles were operating with Mr. Ichino’s own Code 4, a specially designed vocabulary and matrix of symbols that afforded high information density in each transmission to the Snark. The Executive Committee had searched Mr. Ichino out in the days following first contact, desperately trying to find a cryptologist who had enough experience with high flux signaling. Code 4 had been relatively simple to lay out, since it drew upon the codes Mr. Ichino had already developed for scrambled transmissions to Hipparchus Base on the moon. It was a simple, flexible code that seemed fairly secure from the Russians and Chinese and whoever else was listening in, but of course it had limited range. It soon became inadequate for the questions the Snark asked; past that point, only photographs and a wider vocabulary would suffice.
Because security was tight, many of the encoders and technicians were not told about the Snark; they thought they were working on something related to Hipparchus Base. So it fell to Mr. Ichino to speak to the Snark. Another cryptologist, John Williams, was brought in to ease the strain. Mr. Ichino had little contact with him, since he managed the other half of their round-the-clock schedule. The Snark never slept.
But Williams would be at the meeting, Mr. Ichino reminded himself. He stopped amid the comforting buzz of the Pit and made a quick survey of the remaining consoles. Images flickered there: a three-masted schooner in outline; stiff figures modeling sixteenth-century clothes; clouds layered over a boiling ocean. A river of information, shoveled at the Snark, to correlate as it liked.
He turned and made his way down a line of swivel chairs to the doorway, where he was passed by a guard. As he emerged into a bright corridor, he reached involuntarily for the lump in his jacket pocket and brought it out: a rubbing stone. He kneaded it with his right hand, feeling the smooth cool textures and focusing on them, calming himself by lifelong habit.
He walked. Mr. Ichino felt out of place in these garish crisp corridors, transfixed by the plastiform walls, the thin partitions, clatter of typewriters, distant whisper of air conditioning. He should be in a university by now, he thought, spending patient hours in a cloister far back in shadowed library stacks, peering into nuances of information theory. He was aging; the higher he rose, the more abrasive the men he dealt with, the more subtle their methods of combat. He was not made for this game.
