
Strangers

(1)

Seen from far away, very far away, and seen by someone used to
organic forms, and atmosphere, and wind, it might have looked
like a seed-pod, a sphere of gossamer, or a pleasingly symmetrical
burr, carried by the wind, or disturbed by the passing of an
animal.  It was, in fact, roughly eight hundred miles across
its approximate diameter, and only in some places were there
spines, or girders, or elongations reaching outward, like the
hooks on a burr that let it cling to the hair on the leg of
a passing deer.

The bubble-dome they sat in was far out toward the tip of one
such long girder, reaching thirty or fifty miles out from the
chaotic center mass, connected to other girders and hooks and
tubes and spines only occasionally, by cables or wires or transit
tubes.  Outward, away from the center where the silent and
enigmatic engines scrabbled over the texture of the vacuum
energy of the universe with a billion tiny energy legs, pulling
the entire seed-pod, the vast delicate chaotic burr, through
the void, the view was mostly open, only a few dozen or hundred
structures relatively far off between their dome and the stars.
Inward, when they chose to uncover the dome in the inward
direction, was a somewhat more obstructed view of a gnarled
and detailed landscape, burrscape, of structures and lights and
lines, unmarked roundnesses of domes, areas utterly dark and
areas slightly less dark spelling out shapes of parks, and
industrial zones, entire cities spread out below, in the sense
that inward toward the core was "below" (and, as far as the
mostly-artificial gravity was concerned, it usually was).

The bubble dome was nothing unusual, or nothing unusually
unusual on this haphazard and multifarous world, or ship,
or ambiguous star-faring construct.  It sat at the end of one
transit tube, conveniently accessed by magnetically suspended
and propelled tube-cars, as well as the other popuar forms
of transport favored by the inhabitants, including personal
magnetic suspension, jetting about on the outside of the world
(mostly atmosphere-free here, mostly bitingly cold) on
streams of hydrogen or water-stream, and of course conveniently
accessed by the means of simply sort of being there, the
method favored by the showier of the more transcendant
cultural groups in residence.

One of the latter had suddenly just sort of been there shortly
before our story opens, a thin and gangly figure, dressed or
swathed in black, reclining in a way that exuded all manner
of laziness, and adequacy, and perhaps (although it was
entirely likely to be a projection by the others) a gentle
condescension, an amused contempt for those that had had to
exploit and bow to mundane physical laws, arriving only as the
result of time and chemical and electromagnetic and quantum
interactions carefully controlled within metal chambers, rather
than simmply thinking "well, I would like to be at the Clinging
Dome now, sitting in one of the empty seats, looking out at
the stars", and having it become true, because that is how the
universe works.

There were five gathered in the Clinging Dome (which was, more or
less, what they all called it, in their various manners of speaking
or writing or symbolizing), looking out through the clear part
of the dome (transparent when open to the wavelenghts best seen
by all likely species and cultural groups, opaque to anything
harmful short of military intervention), as the ship slowly
(although very very quickly) approached the star and the planet
that Guidance had apparently decided, for reasons entirely their
own, as usual, to direct the ship to next.

We have mentioned already the early-transcend, who had arrived
simply by altering the set of true sentences in the universe (which,
he would be quick to point out, is exactly how each of the others
had arrived, just less efficiently).  He was male, apparently, at
the moment.  He was dressed in black, unless that was his skin.
He had two arms, two legs, one head, thin and elongated upward,
with two widely-spaced eyes that burned with a disconcerting black
fire, and the lower part of the face obscured by his clothing.
Unless that was part of his body too; difficuly to tell with
Transcends.

The other four, here at the beginning of our story, were easier
and harder to describe, as they sat and perched and reclined,
looking out at the slowly approaching yellow star and blue-white
planet that, it was generally agreed, were probably some sort of
destination.

The transcend had no fixed name, referring to itself seldom except
through obscure but ultimately gratifying metaphors and puns.
The two Frlepti, a mated pair, husband and wife if you will, perched
on a horizontal cylinder placed for the convenience of Frlept,
their claws dug casually into the cellmetal, long necks sometimes
intertwining intoxicatedly while the rest of the group discussions
went on.  (Or, as we will note, did not go on.)

The slatesh (a phoneme decided on by the audio-inclined species
that made up a slim majority of the species in play; the slatesh
themselves conversed through complex color-changes on their
mostly smooth and homogenous skins) lay relatively lax and
thinned out on an observation couch, constantly forming and
re-absorbing various designs on its moist and many-colored surface.
It seemed to be enjoying itself, and taking an active part in the
conversation, which was being conducted mostly wth sound for
mostly traditional reasons, through cunning slatesh-designed
devices that mapped sound patterns to color and visual ones.

And the fifth, a leonine biped with mottled orange skin, had
various belts and pouches and squares of fabric draped around
herself, by way of complex and perhaps haphazard clothing.  She
was a Greater Klite, the Lesser Klite being another, less robust
and shyer, species from the same planet.  The two did not,
historically, get along, and the Lesser Klite (being, as we have
said, the shyer group) tended to keep to themselves on the vast
black world, or ship, clustering around a neighborhood of only
a few hundred cubic miles on the other side of the rough sphere,
closer to the center.

What do five beings of four different species, different races,
from four different worlds (assuming that the transcend was in fact
from a world, and from a different world than any of the others)
talk about, sitting under a bubble, looking out at the endless
night, and a yellow star and a blue-white world gradually gradually
approaching?

What, for what matter, do the inhabitants of a blue-white world
around a yellow sun talk about, in their thousands or millions
or billions, when they notice that a vast something, something
mostly noticable as patterns of radio waves and the occulusion of
stars, is approaching out of the night?  Especially when nothing
even vaguely similar has ever been noticed approaching before.

"We almost had it worked out, you know?"

"Worked out?"

"Worked out.  Figured out.  You know.  We almost had the world
working, had our shit together."

"We did?"

"We did!  And then the aliens decide to show up."

"If they're aliens."

"What else could they be, but aliens?"

"It could be a strange kind of comet.  Or a dead star.  Or it
could be something we don't have a name for yet."

"Comets don't broadcast radio signals."

"They might."

"Radio signals including passages from Shakespeare?  Old soap
commercials?  40's music?"

"Could be reflections."

"Even the long one about 'Hello Earth' and 'we come in peace,
more or less'?  More or fucking less..."

"Sure, could be reflections from some weird old science fiction radio
show that no one remembers."

"Heh."

"If it is aliens, they must be insane."

"Yeah, lunatic aliens.  Or just so far beyond us we can't undestand
them.  But they'll kill us, one way or another.  Even if they're friendly.
And just when we almost had it worked out."

"You worry too much."

"Like there's anything else to do?"

There were many things to do, thousands or millions or billions of things,
both on the blue-white planet and the scattering of structures around it,
and in the numberless habitats, houses, hives and hovels throughout the
structure of the ship, or world, that approached.  And all of them were
being done, once or twice, or a million times.

The various inhabitants of the burr, the seed-pod, had the advantage here,
living in a system that had approached worlds (and stranger things than
worlds) many times before, over a span of time enormous in any relevant
reference frame.  Most of the present inhabitants had not been alive at
the last planetary approach, but some had, and many records existed, and
stories, and cultural practices, and longer and shorter instructional
songs sung by the young as they danced in circles around the fire, their
small voices reciting rhymes about meteor-swarms, and the timidity of
the planet-bound, and the best ways to divert nuclear missles approaching
at half the speed of light.

On the other hand, like most other things on the burr, the records and
stories and cultural practices, and even the songs of the children, had
warped and twisted over the generations, combining and recombining and
restructuring themselves and each other in the long years (minutes, seconds,
centuries) between the stars; and even (or especially) the longest-lived
inhabitants, who remembered (or claimed to remember, or denied remembering
in ways designed to suggest exactly the opposite to the hearer) one or
a hundred previous approaches, could not be relied upon for accurate
recollections, or for entirely pertinent advice.

Some of the inhabitants of the burr would have preferred that it not
approach this yellow sun and blue-white planet at all, but remain safely
and serenely (or comparatively serenely) out in the depths, where the
environment is unchanging and unsurprising except at the atomic and
subatomic level, and where the structure of space is flat.  Similarly,
many inhabitants of the blue-white planet (quite understandably, this
being their first time in record or memory, and large new things being
always a good reason to worry) would have rather that the burr, the
alien spaceship, the attacking battlestation, the enormous thing
from outer space, had stayed out there, beyond detection, and not
swung gradually but at enormous speed in toward the sun, where it
might be about to collide with and destroy the planet, or unleash
chemical or atomic destruction, or the wrath of an angry deity, or
strange and deadly new diseases.

But on the whole, considering everything, the general feeling was more
one of interest than fear.  More of excitement than despair.  And in
practical terms, the opinions that mattered, those of the generally
secretive and well-fortified Navigators that lived in the center of the
burr and exercised control, to the extent that anyone did, over its
course, those opinions were almost completely in consensus that it had
been awhile, and there was this planet here, and it seemed likely that
their current course had been set all those centuries ago with this
particular system in mind, so why not, really?

"There are sentients down there?"

"You've heard the various interceptions, the semantic patterning?"

"Yes.  Not likely to be natural phenomena?  Non-sentient?  Waterfalls
or something?"

"No, not likely at all."

"Hm, well."

"Quite a few of them, it seems."

"Millions?"

"A few billion.  Five or seven."

"That's a few!"

"It is."

The speakers here being the Greater Klite (providing the answers) and the
slatesh (asking the questions, through the patterns of color on its surface,
and the translation services of its devices).  The Frlepti, being in a
particular stage of their lifecycle, limited their discourse primarily to
noun phrases, only some of which were in any obvious way relevant to the
topic at hand.  And the transcend, at the moment, sat with its eyes on
the starfield (as did the rest of them), saying nothing, but producing soft
mournful music that made the other four feel that it was telling a story
of some sort, and that they were missing the details, but getting the
gist.

"There are contingency plans, right?  Documents?  Stuff they wrote
down in advance?"

"Well, yeah."

"Do we have nukes?  Do we nuke it, like if it was an asteroid on
collision course?"

"It might be an asteriod, for all we know.  Well, a really strange
one."

"So whatever.  Do we have nukes?  Who programs the rockets?"

"There aren't exactly any rockets."

"What do you mean?"

"Well.  There are contingency plans.  A few of them, even.  Like
two or three that I know of, and --"

"That you know of?  How could there be ones that you don't know of?
You're NASA!"

"I'm NASA, but I'm not Defense.  Defense doesn't tell me everything."

"They must have nukes?"

"They do.  But not rockets, so much."

"What about asteroids on collision course?  Wasn't there a whole
big thing about that?  About deciding what to do?"

"There was."

"So what did we decide?  I remember it was in the news and all,
that it was under control, that there was a plan."

"There were studies."

"So what was the plan?  Nukes?"

"It was important to do the studies, to reassure people.  And we did
them, and they came to conclusions.  And people felt better."

"So what were the conclusions."

"They were very long.  We didn't really talk about them much."

"So...?"

"The conclusion was that a smallish asteroid on a collision course
would be okay.  And a big one, there really wasn't much to do."

"Wasn't much to do?  What?"

"That's why we didn't talk about it much."

"Blowing it up, changing its course so it missed, all that?"

"None of it feasible, it turned out.  Except with bodies so small
that you didn't really need to."

"So we can't... blow this thing up?"

"It's not an asteroid.  It's, it's something else, like a very big
spaceship... thing."

"We don't know that for sure."

"But it is.  And they probably wouldn't really like it if we tried
to blow them up."

The speakers there being, naturally, down on the surface of the pretty
blue-white (with some green and brown) planet.  Not the very organized
and official discussions of the Object, but one of the discussions
between the people who actually did the decision making about the
largest and most dangerous of the piles of matter that the inhabitants
of the planet had put together (and taken apart, and put together
again) over the decades, the centuries, of spinning around the
buttery yellow sun.

Imagine how many stories there are, how many stories there must be,
on a planet the size of this planet, where people have been breeding
and caring for their children and making themselves ever healthier
living places for a few thousand years.  How many stories there are,
there must be, on (in) a rough sphere of spines and bubbles and tunnels
and tubes and cities, with a volume of something like half a million
cubic miles, with an unknown (but vast) number of inhabitants, of an
unknown (but vast) number of species, races, philosophies.

When they are small, the children (or at least the children of the
Greater and Lesser Klite, and the slatesh, and some thousands other
of the more straightforward extended families) are taught about the
nature of the universe, and the ship (or the world, or the construct),
and the movement through the endless night.  Energy, they are taught,
is essentially limitless, because those onboard have always known
how to cheat, how to capture energy that (as this Greater Klite's
child-teacher had put it) "if we hadn't taken it, it would have
gone to waste in keeping itself from coming into being in the first
place".  Matter, on the other hand, is mostly finite; the amount
that they capture from the near-perfect interstellar vacuum almost
exactly balanced by the amount that is knocked off, or gassed out,
or lost to attrition, or thrown out by lovers in the always strictly
forbidden but always popular ceremony of finding the aftest of aft
points accessible to one's culture, and standing arm in arm (or leg
in leg, tongue in tongue, polyp in polyp) and tossing something
of symbolic value out into the trailing void, to symbolize the
parts of their lives that are now over because they have met, or
their gratitude to the universe and desire to repay it in some
small measure, or their refusal to submit to the authority that
forbids them from doing so because of the danger of matter loss
over the long dark millenia.

So, matter being finite or more than finite, much of the politics
and society of the burr, the seed-pod, have to do with the uses
to which the matter will be put, the way the matter will be
distributed between and within each of the various quasi-stable
groupings of entities.  The entities themselves require matter,
are made of matter, with only a few exceptions.  And they require
matter for their amusements, their projects, their doings in the
long slide between the stars and down the well of time.  So, in
particular, as the ship, the burr, the world approached this new
destination, much of the politics and cultural acumen in the more
comprehensible parts of its societies turned themselves to questions
of just how the matter onboard should best be used to study and
observe and prepare for whatever was about to happen, as they
entered, gradually but at high speed, the general area of the
planet.  Consensus was slow and partial at best.

"We have here a nearly-complete picture of twelve distinct
but interacting cultural megaplexes operating on the surface
of the planet."

"A picture derived from entirely unfounded and non-circular,
open-ended and unreliable, ill-formed pseudo-analysis of a
non-cogent cage within the spectrum of electromagnetic
fluctuations noted on a non-circular and arythmic set of
the almost entirely metallic receptors occupying areas that
are not time-synchronized."

The speakers here being on the burr, the seed-pod, but not of
the five in our bubble.  They serve only to illustrate, very
briefly, that even entities nominally speaking the same
language can almost completely fail to communicate, even
(or especially) when the issue is, in theory, very important
to both of them.

Within the bubble, the transcend's music swelled for a long monent
into an especially evocative shape, occupying all of the
conversational space between the five of them.  The Greater
Klite closed her eyes and felt the music in her like sweet
nectar, like a deep vibration, like joy and sorrow.  She thought,
with some part of her mind, about the spaces between the
stars, about the difference between the transcend and the rest
of them (whatever that might be), and the difference between
herself and the rest of the universe.  At which point the
frlepti began speaking, to each other or themselves or as a
sort of accompaniment to the music, or something else
entirely.

"Motion", one of the frlepti said, "motion, matter, cold."

Those who had had their eyes (or eye analogs) closed at the
transcend's music opened them and looked at the two, secure
on their perch, necks twining avidly around each other and
graceful beaks moving just perceptibly.

"Circular motion, frequency, hands", they said, one or both
of them, and the other four (or three of the other four; who
can tell with a transcend) listened and watched and tried to
decide which of them was speaking, or if both where, in unison
or in tandem, or taking turns.

"Futile measurement, pretense, distortion, intentional
misdirection.  Iron, hydrogen, lead.  Wide avenues.
Involuntary transport."

The frlepti's voices rose and fell, sometimes smoother
sometimes harsher, now louder now quieter, conveying as much,
to the extent that they conveyed anything, with tone and
texture as with the particular words.  This account might,
or might not, be more valuable if it could convey the
subtlties of the frlepti's tone and timbre as well as the
words they uttered, there in the bubble under the endless
surrounding darkness.

"How can you not be afraid?"

"I suppose I am.  But, it's just so big.  Too big to be just
afraid of."

"What does that mean?"

"Well, it's like, it sweeps away so much.  It makes so many
things that you'd normally worry about, be afraid of, not matter
so much anymore."

"I don't think so."

"How can it not?"

"We still have to eat, we still have to pay the bills."

"But so much else is all up in the air!  Does it make sense to
save money, if money might not mean anything tomorrow?  Why do
any science, if they might give us all the science we can stand
next week?  Why hold onto a job, if all jobs might be swept
away next month?"

"And that doesn't terrify you?"

"Of course it does, or I guess it does, but it's also so utterly
exciting.  This is, it's like nothing every was before.  It
changes everything."

"And you like that."

That from the planet, somewhere in a green valley, mostly tree-lined
for the moment, mostly full of busy prosperous people for the moment,
who looked up at the sky more than they used to, and had stranger
dreams.

"What do you lot know about this crowded planet?", the Greater
Klite asked the dark transcend when his music had fallen to a low
golden hum, and his eyes had come down from the stars and were
playing over the others in the bubble, the tabletops, the vases
and the art.

The transcend smiled, moving his (her, its, their) face in a way
that was somehow a smile to all four of the others.  "What do we
ever know?", it asked.  "There are the semantic patterns we have
all seen, that they have made down there.  They are complex, they
are interesting.  There are billions of sentient entities.  There
is a whole world, made of matter, and they are using the vast bulk
of it only to generate gravity.  It is a miracle."

Which was, the Greater Klite thought to herself, one of the simplest
and most straightforward things she had ever heard a transcend say.
She wondered, not for the first time in recent hours, whether this
was indeed a transcend at all, or just someone from one of the
more playful cultures, playing dress-up with some obscure technology.
If that was not, indeed, what the transcends in general were; no
telling, really.  No consensus.

The burr, the seed-pod, the roughly spherical world or ship, sped
inward toward the warm yellow sun, leaving far behind the ring of
dust and ice and worldlets that had passed below some time back
(and from which various interesting quasi-semantic signals had
also been detected, almost but not quite prompting a few cultures
to launch out sub-burrs of their own, to drop down into the vast
ring cloud and touch and palpate and explore and find out; but
the Navigators were headed for the blue-white planet, and no one
quite wanted to go anywhere else for now; maybe later).  Passing
the outer ring it had been going at a significant fraction of
lightspeed, and now it was decellerating furiously, the tendrils
and claws and grapples in the core biting more sharply into the fabric
of space, the compensators mounted all along the rough surface of the
sphere throwing out their fields of unreality in ways that made the
hair stand up on the back of the Greater Klite's neck, but which
(she knew) also kept her alive, shielding her from the false
gravity that would have casually crushed anything soft and
organic in an instant without them.

"We can't even be sure how fast it's going, or where it is."

"Why not?"

"With things like planets and asteroids, we assume certain things.
We know that they aren't under power, that they don't change shape
or shininess, that tomorrow they're going to be about like they
are today.  This thing..."

His voice trailed off, and his eyes looked at the display without
seeing it, or anything else in particular.

"The most likely model has it doing insane and impossible things.
It passed the Oort cloud going nearly at light speed.  Now it's
somehow decellerating so fast that it'll be stationary right
about Earth orbit."

"Whoa."

"Yeah, seems unlikely that that's just a coincidence."


(2)

The five still sit, and perch, and exist, in the Clinging Dome,
out on the long spine, with the outward-facing half of the
surface transparent, looking out at the night, and the approach
of change.  Food, or at least sustenance in various forms, has
been brought, or at least has appeared.  The song of the transcend
continues, now louder and now softer, now sorrowful and now hopeful,
merging somehow into his voice when he speaks.

"Shall we exchange stories, while we wait?" he says, eventually.
This is the first time it has occurred to the Greater Klite that
they are waiting for something.  They will not be done with their
frantic decelleration for some time, some dozen of the her normal
sleeping cycles, and she does not intend to spend all that time here,
with these four.  Although, really, why not?

"What kind of stories?" the slatesh asks, through the patterns of
color on its skin and the interpretation of its attendant devices.
"Children's stories, or stories of war, or love, or alchemy?"

The transcend's face moves again, behind its dark covering, and
its eyes again seem to smile.

"I would suggest," he said (it said, they said), "stories that our
various cultures tell about other times that we have approached
planets, or things like planets, backward in the fullness and the
darkness of time.  I think most cultures on the Construct, and all
of the cultures represented here," and his dark eyes looked around,
from one to one, and his music had in it the sound of water on
stones, "have such stories.  They would be appropriate here, and
they would help to pass the time."

The slatesh turned on its couch, thickening up parts of itself so
that it almost had a shape, and its patterns gathered themselves
together at the end nearer the transcend, farther from the dome
and the endles night.

"We have a story," it said, "of one planet, very long ago, that
heard the messages that we radiated out from the Construct, in all
of their contradiction and confusion, and replied enthusiastically
and in kind, with garlands of color and light reaching out from
the surface to embrace us, and harmonious patterns welcoming us
on the expanses of its oceans.  They understood us there, the
story says, even though they were on a planet, with its huge
natural gravity, its abundant matter, its youth."

The body of the slatesh pulsed and flowed slowly as it talked,
as the devices floating above it and watching its coloration
with tiny cameras talked for it.

"In the longest version of the story that I have heard, we went
down to the planet, and there we found planetary versions of ourselves,
colonies of Fresht and slatesh, Greater and Lesser Klite," and here
the Greater Klite growled, very softly, out of racial habit, and all
the others in the dome politely failed to notice, "frlepti and Sundogs,
a whole coil of the Deep Thinkers, and cities of the Bicuspid and
the Tricorn, all living and prospering somehow in the same gravity
well."

"The populations mixed, the story says, marrying and cloning and
mothering, the planetary and the Guided, in happy congress for a
very long time.  And for some forgotten reason the Construct was
fully populated again, and the Navigators pointed it outward,
and it left.  They left.  We left."

"We call the world, planet of the story, Home; and we say, when we
tell the story, that everyone here now is a child of both here and
home, and that someday we may return."

The transcend nodded.  The Greater Klite ran the fingers of her
broad paw-like hand through the hair that encircled her face, and
considered.  The Frlepti on their perch were quiet, looking somehow
heavy, lethargic.

"We have a story like that, or like that in some ways," the Greater
Klite said, after an interval in which only the transcend's
music moved in the stillness of the dome.

"This story says that long, long ago there were many Home Worlds,
huddled around a star-cluster somewhere toward the heart of the
galaxy, at least one world for every race of us.  And that for
time beyond counting the world, this ship, the Construct, moved
from world to world, freely exchanging goods, and people, tribes,
nations and traditions with each Home World, going from port to
port at will, or the whim of the Navigators, or the timetables
of vast shoals of slilcon fish that swam between the stars there."

"Fish," one or both of the Frlepti echoed, "fish, fish, fish,"
in a deep quiet tone, mingling with the music of the transcend,
which played comfort shot through with uncertainty, or with
novelty.

"At the end of the story, it says that we arrived at one of the
Home Worlds to find it deserted, or depopulated, or destroyed,
depending on which story you listen to, and that all of the other
Home Worlds were found to be in the same condition, and out of
fear or despair or sorrow, or perhaps even in pursuit of the
destroyer of the worlds, or in search of our lost families and
nations, the Navigators turned us out into the darkness, and then
over the millenia we forgot, except in children's songs and in
the deepest of the Deep Thinkers.  And so now we wander as though
wandering made sense in itself, but someday we may remember, or
be reminded, or come upon the destroyers of the Home Worlds, or
the survivors," and her voice trailed off, and the transcend's
music swelled, and she ran her fingers more insistently through
the tangles of her hair.

"That is a common story-form among the races," said the transcend,
a nearly invisible sphere of light dancing around its head and its
face, "where we of the construct belong at our origin, or for some
time, to a planet or planets, where we are at home, and that we
head out into the endless dark for reasons that are tragic, or
noble, or forgotten in the depths of time."

"Fish," said the Frlepti again, "fish, sorrow, rejoicing."

The transcend nodded.  "The Tricuspid tells of a time when the
Construct was nearly empty, having been built or spawned between
the stars, and then sent from world to world over centuries,
picking up a tribe here, a city there, a few families somewhere
else, until it grew by slow accretion and was full, and only
then headed out into the rich void of the galaxy.  I think it is
the same story.  But we have been telling stories of leaving
planets, not arriving at them."

"Egg, butter, pie," said the Frlepti, and this needs some
explanation.

The Frlepti are viviparous, but not so long ago they were oviparous,
and their species memory links eggs to children, and prosperity, and
peace, as well as to vulnerability to predation and nightmares from
their earliest history.  "Butter", as a word for churned and air-beaten
blocks of lipid-analogues used in the preparation of food, is a relative
newcomer to Frlepti vocabulary, whereas "Pie" is an old and basic
word.  So "Egg, butter, pie" to the Frlepti might bring to mind
childhood, modernity, and stability, or vulnerability, change, and
tradition.  Whereas to the Greater Klite, egg, butter, and pie are
all basic simple foods; her reaction to those words was primarily
one of appetite and satisfaction, roughly as it would have been to
many of the inhabitants of the blue-white world a few days away.

The slatesh had only a theoretical knowledge of any of the three
words, and in fact turned part of its attention to consulting its
data-space for their denotations and connotations, and spent the
duration of the rest of the Frlepti's speech (which we are about
to get to) with that part of its attetion wandering the dataspace,
absorbing discussions of the quasi-religious food-preparation habits
of various of the species on the Construct.

"Egg, butter, pie," said the Frlepti again.  The first utterance had
been in a deep mature voice, reassuringly large.  The second was in
a lighter and higher voice, but still confident and fully formed.
The Frlepti said it again, "Egg, butter, pie", in the reedy voice of
a child of its own species, which made the Greater Klite (and, dare
we say it, the transcend) think of their own native young, and after
appropriate translation by its sensitive devices even brought to the
mind of the slatesh newly-budded young flowing through beams of
multi-colored light, with fragrant dust hanging in the air.

"Egg, butter, pie," the Frlepti said again, and this time the voice
was sharp, insinuating, and also threatening, hateful, constricted.
And they said it again, and again, "Egg, butter, pie; egg, butter, pie",
in the voice of the child, only this time frightened and upset; the
deep resonant voice, commanding that something stop; the light high
voice, pleading or screaming or sorrowing.

In all of their minds, as the Frlepti repeated "Egg" and "butter"
and "pie", some hateful force stole a child from its parents, threw
the smaller parent (the mother, the egg-layer) aside, and rushed
away, pursued by the larger parent (the father, the egg guardian,
the ram), and in the tone and velocity of "Egg" and "butter" and
"pie" the Frlepti held its listeners wrapt, except for that piece
of the slatesh that was wandering the dataspace, following a story
of theft, and fear, of confrontation and battle, of eventual victory,
and exhaustion, justice, and the return of the child, and ultimately
normalcy, with the three voices repeating as they started, a confident
and content "Egg, butter, pie" with only a hint of remembered pain.
And the constricted hateful voice no longer speaking at all.

The transcend bowed its elongated head, and moved its hands in
graceful arcs.  "Thank you for your story, my friend," it said.
"Do you think your story of theft and recovery is in the same
story as the story of the vanished or destroyed Home Worlds?
Do your people talk about our journeys through the great void
as a search for the purloined child?"

"Egg. Butter, pie," said the Frlepti, "Precision.  Correspondance."

The Greater Klite was startled by the apparent relevance of
the last two words.  Almost as theough they were intended to
answer the transcend's question.

On the surface of the planet stories were being told as well.
Stories of invaders from space, and stories of angels from Heaven.
Old stories about men dropping from the clouds, and much newer
stories about photon drives and giant robots.  And, as ever,
stories for the children at bed time, about rabbits and farmers
and children who are lost and then found again, who run away
and learn a lesson, and who befriend the lonely and weak, the
ugly and alien.

"I'm scared."

"Why are you scared, little feet?"

"Because of the space ship.  I'm afraid it might hurt us."

"Don't worry, little.  The army will keep it from hurting us.  Our army,
and everyone else's army, all keeping the world safe from anything
the space ship might want to do wrong.  It's a great chance for the
world to all work together, and we'll all be safe."

"I'm still scared."

"That's okay, little feet; it's okay to be scared."

Every telescope that could be pointed in the direction of the burr,
the seed-pod, the Construct, now was.  It was clearly very black in
the main frequencies, its albedo unnaturally low.  It was either changing
shape and size very rapidly, or reducing speek very rapidly, or both.
It was occluding more stars all the time.  And occupying more thoughts.

In the various launching bays and storage gantries of the huge rough
sphere, other systems were being readied, other response craft, everything
that the ship might have no desire at all to use, but that might prove
necessary, if these were anything like the last ones.


(3)

"A bit more data now, sir."

"Good or bad?"

"Ambiguous.  I'll let you judge, sir, if you don't mind."

The click of a mouse, the hum of a projector.

"Here, sir, is the projected track of the object.  These lines show
the envelope of the velocity vector as it decelerates in-system."

"Very nice.  And what does that mean?"

"Well, sir, you'll notice, if we rotate the view to see the whole
thing, that at no point does the velocity vector itself come very
close to the Earth, the Moon, or the Sun."

"You mean, the ship isn't going to come to Earth after all."

"No, sir.  That is, yes.  If it continues as it's going, it will go
into a relatively distant orbit around the Earth.  But the velocity
vectors..."

"You need to tell me what that means."

"Ah.  Let me see..."

"Something I can tell the press, and tell the people.  Something
reassuring, if you can."

"I see!  Yes, it's quite reassuring, in a way.  It means that they
are intentionally driving their ship so that it is never heading
directly at the Earth, or the Moon, or the Sun.  And also, for that
matter, so that, well, if something were to come loose from the ship,
or be thrown..."

"Thrown?  Or fired?"

"Well, if something was fired with enough force, or with its own
propulsion system, of course...  It's more of an assurance that they
aren't going to hit us, or use their enormous velocity vector itself to
slam anything into..."

"So it's a peaceful gesture, you're saying?"

"It can certainly be seen that way.  There are other, much more
energy-efficient, courses they could have come in on, where their
vector would have swept the Earth."

"Their vector..."

"That is, they would, for some amount of time, have been heading right
for us."

"But as it is, they aren't going to?"

"That's right, sir."

"That's very good!"

"Yes, sir."

"You seem a bit uncertain."

"Well, sir, there is still the danger, as you point out, that something
could be fired from the object, under propulsion.  So merely keeping
their vector off of us is not a terribly strong message of peace.  And
there aren't many other plausible explanations for their course..."

"And?"

"Well, sir, given the rather... chaotic nature of the communications that
we've received from the object..."

"A lot of damned gibberish."

"Yes, sir.  Especially in light of that, and the size of the object,
which suggests a potentially large number of inhabitants..."

"I'm not following you."

"Well, it's been suggested in the lab that their course isn't so much
intended to reassure us that they aren't going to slam anything into us,
so much as it's intended to, um..."

"Yes?"

"To make sure that no one on the object itself does so."

"Ah."

"Yes, sir."

"So maybe the pilots are friendly, but they don't trust their own
passengers to be?"

"Well put, sir."

"Mm.  I don't think I'll mention that theory to the press."

"Probably a good idea, sir."

As the burr, continuing its rampant deceleration, approached the yellow
sun and the blue-white planet (or the planet and the sun approached the
burr; it's all the same), the obliqueness of their approach became
increasingly apparent, as all of the interesting objects visible to the
various vision systems of the inhabitants, the passengers, began to
swing off to the sides, and directly ahead was always the endless night.
Various of the approach-stories of the various species and races on the
burr included this, as did some of the children's songs.

"My people's defense systems will be online," said the Greater Klite, looking
ahead at the darkness, looking slightly to the side at the blue-white
planet and its startlingly large pale satellite.

"Beginning," said one of the Frlepti.  The other perched silently, its
long neck stretched out over its mate's back, eyes closed, apparently
asleep.  "Beginning.  Preparation.  Solitude."

"Solitude?" asked the Greater Klite, but then shook her head, chiding
herself for questioning the other, for expecting comprehensibility from
it at this stage in its life cycle.

The transcend chuckled, the warm brown sound mixing into the flow
of its music, and spreading out among them in the dome.

"Defense is a good thing," he said.  "Shall we tell more stories?  Stories
about other approaches, about the need for defense, or the lack thereof?
Stories about readiness, or surprises?"

"We have many of those stories," the slatesh signalled, drawing itself
up this time in a pair of soft cylindrical stalks, supported on the
observation couch by a wide U-shaped base that undulated as the colors
of communication moved over it.  "We have two entire Writings devoted
to such stories.  The Wanderings, one is called, and The Long Nebula,
the other.  They are stories of heroism, and curiosity, and finding
and losing and finding again."

"One story describes an approach to a nameless world, ringed by silent
dark satellites of twisted metal, with shallow seas in which great
empty cities sat and decayed, with fish swimming through their
windows, and the centuries gnawing holes in their walls."

"The story says that only a few went down to the surface of the world,
to explore and examine and salvage.  And that despite the ship's best
quarantining and decontamination, and despite the impossibility of
an alien world's diseases being able to feed on our foreign proteins,
those who had been to the surface brought illness and death back with
them, and every life on the ship was in danger, and every life was
saved only by ejecting fully one-tenth of the ship's spines and tubes,
consigning millions to death in the endless night."

The transcend's music had grown sweet and mournful as the slatesh,
the machines of the slatesh, spoke, and when it finished the dome
was quiet for awhile, but for the mingling strands of that music,
like the quiet sorrow of loss, and the endless emptiness of the
night.

"We have a few stories," said the Greater Klite softly, after a time,
"which are puzzling stories, because in them the ship is destroyed,
or dismantled, the the stories don't speak of it being rebuilt, or
recreated."

"Fiction perhaps," suggested the transcend, "cautionary tales of
things that did not in fact happen, that have not happened but might
someday."

The Greater Klite nodded, the tangles of hair surrounding her face
moving stiffly.  "Perhaps," she agreed, "although it would be odd
fiction, in which the world comes to an end."

"Might it be that these stories of your people, in which the world is
destroyed or disbanded, are stories of other worlds, other world-ships,
like this one but not this one?" suggested the slatesh,  "Ones which
existed in the past, but were destroyed or disbanded, and their stories
scattered to the winds to ooze and undulate their way here, to us in
this dome, and to your people?"

"There are no other world-ships," said the Greater Klite, with a growl
in her voice (and who knows how skilled and subtle the slatesh's
translation machines were in picking up that growl, and translating
it into the shadings of color-pattern that would carry to their
slatesh the same nuances of certainty and suppressed outrage that
the leonine speaker felt, hard and cold like a cinder inside her, in
that part of herself that is not questioned, that is kept in the
darkness for its own sake, and for the sake of the sanity of the
whole, or the stability of the whole, or at least out of a fear of
change and loss).

A wave of tan, with rounded edges, flowed over the surface of the
slatesh where it lounged in its couch, and the hovering unobtrusive
machines made a gentle and ambigious sound.  The transcend's face,
or what was probably its face, changed again, and its music changed
somehow in color or tone, and the Greater Klite felt, this time to her
annoyance, that the lean black figure was amused, amused with all of
them, amused with her.  The Frlepti on their perch just perched, necks
entwined, saying nothing.  Which annoyed her as well.

"Are there no others?" asked the transcend, voice abstracted and
musing, as if not addressing so much anyone in the dome, but perhaps
the dome itself and the infinite night beyond, or perhaps only itself
and its own imaginings.  "None now, none in the past, none here or
elsewhere?  Only this one."

"Yes," she replied, fighting to keep the snarl out of her voice.
"That this is the only world-ship, that there have been and are not
any others, is a self-evident truth.  We are an experiment, a singular
creation, a unique point in the universe.  You know this, you are of
the Transcended.  My people were taught this, countless generations
ago, early in our history, by one of your own kind."

"Really?", the transcend sounded politely curious, the question more
a conversational move than an expression of any doubt; a light skip
over the surface of the discussion.

"Well," she said, feeling suddenly very alone here, under the stars,
with none of her people around her, only the blob of slatesh on the
couch, the twined birds on their perch, the creature in black that might
be a transcend, or the puppet or toy of a transcend, or just a
mountebank with some quantum trick in his sleeve, "we believe that
it was a transcend.  In older times, we thought of it as a god.  But
that was before.  Now, having met you of the Transcended," and here
the elongated head and darkly burning eyes nodded at her words, as
if in acknowledgement, "we recognize in our stories of it, and its
interactions with my people, the work, the mark, of you and yours."

"That was a long time ago," replied the transcend, his music rising and
falling slowly about itself, in long lovely waves of breathy melody.
"But I trust the stories, that you believe to be about my kind," and
there was some sort of mockery in his, in its, words here, at "my
kind", and the Greater Klite wondered if it was mocking her people,
or her, or perhaps itself, "in those stories there is nothing that
reflects too badly on me, on us."

The Greater Klite's smile was brittle for a moment, but then relaxed.
I am a rational being, she told herself; the transcend, wise and
augmented and gone somewhat Beyond as he might be, was not one of
her own people, had not grown up with their truth, would not realize
how tender was the wound that his words were exploring.  Or if he did
realize it, and it was some kind of test of her, or her culture, or her
people, she would be most likely to pass it by being calm, and not
expecting the other four in the dome to realize what these things
meant to a Greater Klite.

"Would you like to tell us one of these stories, told to your people
by this ancient transcend, to educate us, and to pass the time during
the Approach?"

She closed her eyes, and shook her broad head from side to side.
"No," she said, "no, I would rather not."

The transcend bowed his own head again, this time in polite
acknowledgement of her reply, and concession to her wishes.
And for an instant she felt rage flow through her, and the hairs
on her back, and the backs of her blunt hands, the fronts of her
thighs, and around her face, all stood out, electrified.


(4)

It was not clear that The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs
was in fact the appropriate international body to deal with or to plan
or co-ordinate humanity's response to the appearance of the Object in
the Solar System, and its rapid (impossibly rapid) approach to the Earth.
In fact, as its Director reflected to herself on one particular morning,
it was outstandingly obvious that the Office was almost completely
unprepared for any event not directly involving legal decisions, or
committee meetings, or the publication of white papers and position
statements on the peaceful uses of space.

The only thing that could be said on UNOOSA's behalf here was that,
although it was essentially unprepared, it was still more prepared than
anyone else on the planet.  Except of course for the various militaries,
and even they were surprisingly befuddled by the situation, and prepared
only to the extent that they had plans for blowing things up, and also
well thought out arguments that blowing things up was probably a very
bad idea at this particular point.

"The trouble is that it's just such science fiction."  The technology
liaison attached to the United States mission to the UN sipped his tea,
looking up beyond the awning of the cafe where they sat in a chilly
and somewhat pigeon-flecked New York plaza, up into the cloudy sky.

People were, she had noticed, spending lots of time looking at the sky
these days.

"Shouldn't that have made us more prepared, not less?" the UNOOSA
Director suggested to her lunch companion.

"Woulda, shoulda, coulda," the blond man replied, putting down his
tea with just the slightest rattle of cup on saucer.  "Fact is that
if you propose working on something that the people in the room read
in a book when they were teenagers, and that book had a robot on the
cover, holding an unconscious girl in a bikini, they're going to laugh,
and they aren't going to fund you."

She looked up, away from him, off to the side at her own patch of
cloudy urban sky.

"It's just too big," she said, realizing only afterward that she'd
said it aloud, and that she'd said it in a sort of awed whisper.

"Eight hundred to a thousand miles in diameter, if you mean the
Object," the other replied.  Knowing full well, she thought, that
she hadn't meant its diameter.

"Don't you feel it?" she asked, looking back down, across the table
at him.  Catching his eyes for just a moment before he looked away.

"I feel grateful that civilization's survived so far," he said.
"It could have been so much worse than the rioting that we've had."

She raised an eyebrow.  "Without an economy, if the Object doesn't
do something very quickly, we'll see much worse."

This was out of both of their fields, really.  Out of almost anyone's
field, although the few pundits and professors who could convincingly,
or even unconvincingly, call themselves experts on alien contact, or
the psychology of humanity during external crises, or xenobiologists,
were in great demand in all the media.  When the media was functioning.

What would you do, if the world were going to change entirely, in
unknown and unprecedented ways, in a few days, or a couple of weeks?
Would you go in to work as usual?  Would you invest money in the bank?
Would you buy a car, or a house, or propose marriage?

The world's economy had essentially ground to a halt soon after the
general nature of the Object (huge, artificial, headed this way) was
confirmed.  Or not so much ground to a halt as stuttered, or fluttered,
or dissipated.  Some people still came to work, some of the cafes were
still open, although at random, with unpredictable hours and variable
menus.  Banks were closed, financial activity was sporadic and mostly
nonexistent.

There had been riots, were still riots, here and there, for no
particular reason, almost as though people realized that in this
situation some rioting was expected, and were looking for excuses,
heat waves, girlfriends, possible alien sightings, to start one up.
But their hearts weren't really in it, and none of them lasted too
long or took too many lives.  The aliens were coming; why bother to
trash the place?  Why bother to even up that old grudge, when the
aliens might some and even it up for you?

She had been one of the first to know.  The American President, in
fact, had called her himself, just after speaking to the Secretary
General.  She had been utterly at a loss what to say, how to respond.
She still felt herself flushing at the memory, although the President
had been flustered himself, not really expecting any particular answer
from her, having some to realize by that time that none of the people
he had assumed would be ready with plans and answers in this situation
actually had any.

NASA had, it turned out, seven separate plans and white papers for
dealing with alien contact, having in common only that they all stopped
short of actual concrete advice about what to do in this particular
situation, with an alien Object bearing down on the Earth (or, as
the lab boys had reassured him and he has reassured the people,
coming in toward the Earth, but carefully and politely not bearing
down, on Earth or Moon or Sun, as a clear gesture of peace and good
intent).  if only the radio transmissions had been a bit subtler,
a bit less obviously insane.

"What do you think the Object will do?" the technology man asked her.
It was probably the most common question on the planet that day,
that week, and they had discussed it already, more than once.  Since
there was absolutely no way of telling, the conversation never made
much progress.  But since it was the most important question ever,
the conversation equally always turned back to it.

She just shook her head.

"I should get back to the Pier," she said, not moving from her seat.
On an old pier in Manhattan, reaching out into the river where the
water today was dark green and thick looking, those of her staff that
decided to show up, and those of the contractors that decided to show
up, were assembling a somewhat makeshift collection of quarantine and
decontamination units.  Exactly what use they would be she was, as
with everything else, uncertain, but she could certainly imagine situations
in which they might come in handy, might save the world.  And that
was about the best anyone could do in the circumstances.

A few thousands of miles away (and closing), two lithe and graceful
beings slipped out of a fragrant and gently steaming pool, to lie on
cool smooth slabs as the water ran off of their nude bodies, and a
dozen quasi-sentient servitors hovered smoothly about on gravity-treads
to attend to their comfort.

"I hear that there is an Approach going on," said the larger one, the
deeper-voiced one, the one that we might as well call Male, although
the analogy is tenuous at best.

The other (the smaller, lither, higher-voiced one, the Female) laughed,
her laugh a lilt of music (similar to the transcend's music, in the
Clinging Dome thirty degrees around the burr, and many miles futher
from the center, but also very different), and shook her hair (long
and fine, silver and glistening in the pearly light from the ceiling
above) so that drops of scented water sprayed delicately into the air.

"You hear that there is an Approach," she said, as if this was the
silliest of jokes, and she tossed a palm-cup full of water in the
general direction of the male.  "You are itching to get out there and
explore, take a softie or even an actual ship, and go and see this
huge dirt-ball and its permanent sun.  You'd jump in an instant if
the doors were to be opened early, or if there was a hint that they
might."

"Well of course I would, wouldn't you?  The first Approach in nearly
a thousand years.  Say what you like about yourself, but I was barely
sentient then, and I haven't remembered a thing about it.  It was
a dull Approach by all acounts, anyway.  And now, this!"  He sat up
and stretched his arms (of which there were two) above his head (of
which there was one, topped with a thick nest of tendrils very unlike
the fine hair of the other).  He put his legs out in front of him
(again, two) and ran his hands idly over the calves (or what would
have been the calves had he been human, which of course he was not).

"I'm going to take Dauntless out in the first wave," he added, doing
his best to sound casual.

"You are?" she asked, her voice still clear but higher, even higher,
in pitch, with surprise and delight.  Her ears, which were large and
pointed at the tops, swept backward along her skill.  "And how did you
arrange that?  Who have you been bribing?"

He smiled and reach out behind him, and a quick servitor slid a glass
into his hand.  He raised it to his lips and sipped with obvious
pleasure.  "You know I have my connections."

"You won't be shot out of the sky by the enforcement cannons?"

He laughed.  "I of a certainty will not.  And I will stay safely
among the wave, not going near the field of the Bicuspid, nor
antagonizing the Few, nor encroaching on the Klite of the first,
second, or third kind."

He paused, and looked less uproariously and more quietly up at the
center of their shared space, up at the air above the fragrant pool,
and the mist there formed and colored until it was an image of
the blue-white world they were (obliquely) approaching, with its
caps of white and its large bulky continents of green and brown.

"This will be such an Approach," he said, voice deep and calm,
"such an Approach.  Just imagine them all down there, with
language, and with devices, with games and decorations, with
war and hatred, song and dance..."

She was smiling at him still, but with a hint of bitterness in
the smile, the subtlest touch of mockery, a dash of contempt,
a pinch of envy.

"All of the things that we lack here, that is?"

He pursed his lips and shook his head, still looking at the
floating world enveloped in the mist.  "You know what I mean.
All that complexity, all those arbitrary decisions accumulated
over millions of years, those accidents and mysteries, and all
untasted, pristine."

"Untasted by you."

He nodded.

"Yes.  Untasted by me."  And he turned his head to look at her,
and their gazes caught and held, and they stayed that way for a
very long moment, eyes locked, neither willing to relent.


(5)

They had put on vacsuits, of the four very different kinds that the
five of them needed, and told the Clinging Dome to open to the vacuum.
Before it opened, it naturally tied down or absorbed all the accessories,
the comforts, the features of its living space, and arranged to retain
most of the air; matter is finite, even if one can cheat on the energy.
They had stepped out and walked along the spine to which the Clinging
Dome clung, to a point where the ambient gravity of the spine dropped
away to zero, and floated luxuriously upward.

So now they were suspended in the endless night, albeit a part of the
night ringed close around by warmth and organization, by light and
life and structures, and one carried along with the seed-pod, the
ship, by the same intertia-spreaders that kept the ship's wild
deceleration from throwing them off into the void, or crushing them
against a wall.

The transcend floated limply, the furthest from the spine of the five
of them, arms and legs loose and boneless as a rag-doll, the black
folds of his clothing outlining the underlying shape in a way that
the Greater Klite found inexpressibly (both in the sense of "quite",
and in the sense of "unable to be expressed") disturbing.  She herself
was slightly curled, holding herself slightly tense, muscles stiffening
and relaxing in waves, keeping herself ready to move, to react to the
unexpected things that can happen in the darkness, in zero gravity.
Her people had been spacefaring for a very long time.

The slatesh, its vacuum-cover a mostly-transparent film with scattered
nodes of dark shiny metal, and faint patterns like swirling oil that
did not noticable confuse the hovering translation machines, floated
near the transcend (although still at a respectful distance) as a
near-perfect sphere of shifting colors and patterns.  The nodes would
glow now and then, one or two, as the tiny motors in them scrabbled
at the fabric of space to keep their charge oriented and positioned
where it desired to be.  (No reaction jets here; squirting precious
matter into the void merely for propulsion would have been considered
an obscenity in the vast majority of cultures on the burr.)

And finally the Frlepti pair, sharing a single vacuum suit that was
almost a tiny room, coiled and uncoiled their necks, moved their
stubby vestigal wings in atavistic flying gestures, and seemed to
be either delighted to be swimming, floating, hanging, in the
vastness of space among the spines and tines and tubes of the
ship, or if not delighted then agitated, upset, halfway to frantic.

"Box," the Frlepti said, in near-unison, "Food.  Distance.  Root.
Root root root.  Sibling.  Adhesion."  Above them, beyond them,
past the few, or few dozen, structures and platforms and stairways,
tubes, spines and runways that intervened, hung the blue-white world,
its face bright from the yellow sun that hung now behind the ship
as it continued to scream into the system, decelerating and steering
the cautious course between that sun and that moon and that planet.

"Root root root," replied the Greater Klite, meaning nothing and not
sure why she had said it, except that it seemed polite to respond.

The Frlepti straightened their necks in something that the Greater
Klite might have mistaken for surprise, or at least attention, when
they were all (or at least four of them) taken by a larger surprise,
as a burr-wide announcement flowed over the ship and down the spine
and around them, into their various sensing devices and wireless
antennas, and into their ears and eyes and other sensoria.

"The first wave already?" the slatesh said.   "Somehow I thought
it would be when we were closer to orbit, not still rushing in."

"Root," said the Frlepti, taking their nominative utterances in
turns now, one then the other.  "Sibling, tooth, radius.  Exterior
angle.  Explanation.  Hand."

"Not long now," said the transcend, and the Greater Klite thought
she heard satisfaction in his voice, or smugness, or even some kind
of anticipation.  But no surprise.

"Twenty-two hundred," signaled the slatesh.  "More than a gathering!
A whole discussion, even, a consensus or a coinage!"

"And we should be very well placed to see it," the transcend added,
gesturing with one limp flexible arm at the complexity of the ship
around them, spread out about them.  Down there, they all knew, at
the outer edge of the central sprawl of more or less compact habitats
and spheres, enclosed cities and vast silicon matrices for the Deep
Thinkers, at least two thousand sally-ports, launch bridges, setting
out points of a hundred or a thousand different kinds were being
prepared to lift or push or crawl themselves away from the burr,
to take charge of their own potential and kinetic energies as
they passed outside the burr's vast compensation fields, and
hurtle toward the blue-white planet, or its moon, or whatever else
those aboard or in charge might want to sniff at.

The communication that they had all received had announced that in
a certain modest span of time the ship's usual defenses against threats
internal and external would be modified, to allow a large fleet of
craft of any and every kind to leave the containment and compensation
fields, and begin the next stages of the Approach to this new system.
The ship, all half million cubic miles of it, was humming with a
vast and inchoate energy, with busyness.  Or at least so it felt
to the Greater Klite, slowly revolving in place in her vacsuit just
outside the skin of the ship, in that little pocket of protected
and surrounded night.

"I don't understand why we do it this way," she said, to the transcend
and to everyone and no one.  "A hundred twenty-twos of vessels suddenly
detaching from the core and acelerating toward their world; it must,
both from what we know about them and just from biological inevitability,
make their fur stand hotly."

"What else might we do?" the transcend asked, mildly, and again the
Greater Klite thought perhaps mockingly, perhaps because this was a
conversation that they had all had before, as a theoetical question
around the dinner pit before the Approach began, and many times since.
But it was never really resolved.

"We could warn them, let them know what is happening."

"But we do," this from the slatesh, whose body was slowly oscillating
between sphere and ovoid as the color signals flowed over its body.
"The slatesh have sent message welcoming them to the commity of
body, the Tricuspid has sent them offers for tons of their unused
matter, to be pumped up to the ship, and suggested dire consequences
if the request is not taken seriously, the Frlepti --"

"Fire," said the Frlepti in unison, "square.  Seat.  Leg.  Wheel."

"Yes," resumed the slatesh, "exactly: the Frlepti have transmitted a
large number of noun phrases using a variable-frequency electromagnetic
signal whose modulation is so complex that the planet people are
unlikely to realize that there is a signal, and even more unlikely to
be able to receive, decode, and understand it.  The messages that
they are getting are entirely representative of the First Wave, and
should prepare them nicely for what is to come."

The Greater Klite just shrugged, and took a long draw on the mild
psychedelic that her vacsuit provided through a tube near her mouth.
Soon the First Wave would take off, and that would be a sight to see.
The drug was just beginning to have an effect, and she was staring at
the connections forming (though they had always been there) between
every visible object, when the transcend turned and looked down the
curve of the ship, and following his (its) gaze she (and at least
the slatsh, and possibly the Frlepti) saw the first few, the quickest
accelerating or the most ambitious, of the Wave sliding out from behind
the dark and complex curve and, glinting in the light of the sun with
a mad complexity, slide with quickly gathering speed in the direction
of the blue-white planet.


(6)

She was in that same New York plaza cafe, although alone this time,
when her pager went off.  She checked her messages, gasped, dialed a
number, and was immediately in contact with someone who, judging from
their tone of voice over the phone, was at least as uncertain and
frightened as she was.

"It could be a battle fleet, although it's not moving in a very
organized way like a battle fleet would."

"Like a human battle fleet would.  We know nothing about these...
these.  Maybe for them there is an organization that we just don't
see.  Or maybe it's as obvious to them that one goes into battle
randomly scattered and placed as it's obvious to us that that's a
bad idea.  Who knows?"  And she felt herself choking back a sob.

"Who knows if we'll be alive tomorrow," is what she wanted to
say "or even one hour from now.  Shit it sounds like there are
alot of them."

She tried to stand, failed, took a few deep breaths, and the next
time she tried she succeeded.  Succeeded well enough to make her
way at a brisk pace across the plaza, down the stairs to the subway,
and up two stops for the UNOOSA New York office, where she strode or
fell into the mostly-deserted office and spent ten minutes lying
on her couch, staring at nothing.

The invasion had, apparently, begun.

Out in the endless night, between the vast seed-pod and the brilliant
blue-white ball of the Earth, Dauntless rode the gravity surf in
toward the planet, down its pathetic gravity well, surrounded on all
sides by other First Wavers in craft as varied as one could imagine,
communictaing (or at least communicating with him) somewhat rarely,
but firing off decorative shells and quantum fire-effects in all
directions as they went.  There were a few complex encounters, a few
more or less destructive or even fatal dances as various grudges and
legal battles and complexly conflicting codes of behavior played
themselves out in these new and not recently precedented conditions,
but on the whole things seemed to be doing quite well.

"What other resources do you have to draw on?"

The man in the dark coat moved around her office, not pacing, not
exactly, but full of an efficient energy, perhaps an energy that
needed to be kept stirred, not allowed to rest and settle.

"Not much, not much at all, as I've told you.  UNOOSA was, is, just
an Office, and a small one.  You have our reports --"

"We have them, we've read them.  They aren't bad.  At least someone
else was thinking about the problem."

"Someone else?  Look, you still haven't really told me who you are,
who you represent."  Except for the single glance he'd given her of
the rather ambiguous, but convincingly hologrammed, Federal id card
in its leather case from his pocket.

"Doesn't matter," he said, going to the window and looking out, "not
right now.  Let's say Defense, that will do.  We have been thinking
about this problem also, about what might happen if the aliens came.
Thinking about it in our spare time, maybe, but at least thinking."

He was silent for a moment, and almost still, looking out the window
at the mostly deserted street, the abandoned car on the sidewalk, and
she thought his lips twisted.

"And unlike the rest of the world we're still reporting for work.  How
is your office doing?"

She grimaced.  "Not well.  A couple people were coming in every day
for awhile.  Someone else was here earlier today.  She called me
when the notice came in from the observatory, about the fleet."  Or
the invasion, or the visitors, or whatever they were.  "But I guess
she left."

He nodded.  "But you're here.  That says something."

She nodded back, grateful, dubious, wondering who he was exactly,
probably FBI or NSA or something more secret than that, the military
wing of NASA, the Men In Black.  "Seemed like someone ought to be
here.  If any part of the UN should be standing when the aliens come..."

Her voice trailed off.  She looked up at him, but he was moving around
the small office again, looking at things, eyes scanning the walls and
the surfaces.  Not like a caged tiger, not quite.

"What are we going to do?"  Her voice surprised her with its smallness,
its note of pleading.  She hadn't really meant to speak again at all,
until he did.  But he didn't seem to mind how she'd said it.  He just
nodded again.

"Yes, that's it exactly.  What are we going to do?  And does it matter
what we do?  They are obviously far beyond us in technology.  What
matters is their intent.  What can we do to influence their intent?
Should we show strength?  Or show maturity and good will?  Or demonstrate
our own intelligence and advancement?  Or should we appear warlike
and insane, to drive them off?"

"We can at least eliminate that last one," she said, her voice in
control again.

Now his mouth did twist.  "That would be nice.  But someone's launched
missles at them already."

"Oh my God."

"Yeah.  And no we don't know just who it was; they lifted from somewhere
in Central Asia, we think."

"And, and what, I mean..."

"Nothing.  We lost track of them right around the time it was obvious
that they were headed at the leading edge of the incoming objects."

"The invasion fleet."

"The incoming --," and here he broke off because his cellphone was
buzzing again, and he huddled in the far corner of her office, and
listened to the voice in his earpiece, and gave quiet monosyllables
back.  Then he turned toward her again, and she spoke before she
could think.

"So, what --"

He cut her off with a shake of his head.  "Nothing.  Some minor
skirmish on the leading edge, apparently."

"Skirmish?"

He shrugged.  "Interactions.  We don't know.  Some of the objects may
have been accelerating, others may have moved to intercept them."

"Accelerating toward Earth?  Hostile."

He just shrugged again, and squared his shoulders, as if coming to a
decision.

"Come back with me; you're doing no good here, and you're willing to
work, and you know the subject."  And then, before she could speak,
"You can access the records here, the files, remotely?  It's on the
Web?"

She nodded, started to speak, stopped, picked up her bag and her
jacket, and stood, looking at him.

He smiled, a wan tired half-smile, but a smile nonetheless, and
gestured for her to proceed him out of the room.  Out in the hall,
she locked the office door, and then followed as he strode, with
surprising energy, out of the building and into the street.

The First Wave came on, two or three thousand (depending on just how
and what one counted) ships, vessels, objects, under power or ballistic,
bright and dark, small and large, following the magnetic field of the
planet, or the local para-gravity gradient, or the whims of the pilots.
Eighty or ninety (depending) peeled off from the rest and headed for
the Moon.  A handful began accelerating too fast, too aggresively,
and were summarily prevented from doing so by other elements of the
Wave, enforcer drones sprinkled among them by the always-conservative
Navigators, or one or another band of Peace Enforcers, or just someone
in a snippy mood.  All of them running ultimately on stolen energy,
either directly or via batteries or mass-drivers or charge condensors,
energy stolen from the endless dance of virtual particles, parting
and joining back into nothingness too quickly to even exist, except
when it happened too close to one of these clever anomalies in the
universal wave function, one of these oddly self-reproducing pockets
of local entropy reversal, the oddity that was intelligent life.

The Director of UNOOSA leaned on the railing, looking down into the
operations space, the two curving banks of displays, most with an
earnest young person attending to it, the two big common screens
set up above with their streaks of light, enigmatic multicolored
dots, superimposed on an image of the Earth, a red oval that was the
Object, and the mass of lines and dots and diamonds that was the
Invasion Fleet (as she had tried in vain to stop calling it to
herself).  They were somewhere under Manhattan, at the bottom of
a hidden elevator shaft reached by a secret stairway in a
nondescript building, the traversal of which had shattered many
of her beliefs about the accuracy of spy movies.

"As they approach, they are also separating somewhat, and we are
able to get much better resolution on them. Approximately ten percent
of the incoming objects are of the same simple type, high-albedo --"

"Shiny?"

"Shiny, or bright.  High-albedo objects roughly forty meters in
their longest dimension..."

"A hundred and thirty feet," she murmurred to herself.

"...with no other discernable features."  The young man, somewhat pale
and round, but with a startlingly deep voice, was addressing them,
really addressing her dark companion she thought, but willing to
respond, a bit, to her questions and interruptions.  "The other
ninety percent of the objects are highly varied, with very little
pattern.  The smallest objects seem to be concentrated on the
near edge --"

"The speedboats, the sportscars."

"...whereas the farther objects, although we have less resolution
on them, are statistically larger, and apparently more complex."

On one of those farther objects, even as he spoke, the party was really
heating up.  It was a large and lumbering ship, not really a ship so much
as a platform, or a large (very large) room, with walls and ceiling
rendered transparent in many places, and nearly three hundred Lith-quill,
small spindly upright quadrupeds, were leaping on and over each other
(in what the people in the buried monitoring center under Manhattan
might have called a dance, and not been terribly far wrong), pressing
their faces against the walls to look out at the planet and its moon,
imbibing heavily of a thick milky liquid from large circular vats
scattered throughout the space, and becoming seriously intoxicatd.
On another, a dozen Hammaner spirit guides, each with his own large
compartment with a view out at the planet, sat in contemplation,
preparing themselves for mutually-beneficial interaction with other
minds.  And several transcend ships, or objects, floated between and
among them, resembling nothing so much as solid chips of carbon,
dark and shiny in the endless night, and as far as could be told
without any internal compartments or machinery of any kind.

"So we've shot at them, but the missles just sort of went away, and
they've fought with each other, maybe to prevent some of them from
attacking us, and they're still blanketing the airwaves with this
utter nonsense..."

"Not all of it is nonsense by any means."

"But taken as a whole."

"Quite true.  Here."  And the dark man that had led her here plugged
something into a nearby socket, pushed some buttons on a keyboard, and
a voice, oddly-accented and somehow grating on the ears, began to speak.

"Greetings, people of Earth," the voice said, in something of a monotone
but really, she thought with some part of her mind, not badly done at all
considering, "we come with peaceful impact and intent and arrival.  We
are to be trusted.  You are to be trusted.  Our interchanges will be
beneficial.  Our dealings will be mutually helpful.  Be of good cheer.
Do not trust all of those who we are.  To be mutually beneficial, be
wary of what might happen."

"Good advice."

"Shh."

"We acknowledge," the voice went on, "that this message is self-defeating.
This is proper.  Do not trust this message.  Trust, but verify.  Our
interchanges will be mutually beneficial.  We will explain.  Welcome our
arrival!  We welcome our intent and arrival!"

"Ah ha.  I wonder which of our TV programs they've been studying to get
that out of them.  Trust but verify, eh?"

"That is only one of the thousands of transmissions that they've sent."

"Do any of them have video?"

The pale young man grimaced.  They were sitting now, the three of them,
the UNOOSA Director, the dark energetic man, the pale young man, on
comfortable curved chairs around a coffee table in a surprisingly plush
niche off of the viewing chamber above the operations room with its
glowing screens.

"Some of them do," he said, "but you don't want to see them.  None of
them have made much sense so far.  Some are... disturbing."

"Are they insane, on the ship?"

The dark man shook his head dismissively.  "You know that's not a
question.  Insanity isn't well-defined here at all."

"Insane, as in unhealthy, irrational.  We have a study on that, on the
relevance of concepts like sanity and health to alien lifeforms.  I imagine
you've read it," she sighed, "I imagine you're one of the six people in
the world that have."

"We have," both men nodded, "or at least skimmed it.  Things have been busy.
It's not bad.  It would have been a good introduction to some actual
thinking about the problem.  The kind of thinking we would have done,
if we'd known this was happening."

She felt, suddenly, the pressure of the air in the room, the stuffy
warmth of the underground, the whirr of the circulating fans, vague
electrical smells from the operations room outside.  Her skin crawled.

"Why are we just sitting here," she ask, her voice almost a moan.

The pale man gave her a wary glance, stood, and went out.  She heard his
footsteps on the stairs leading downward from the viewing level.

"I know what you mean," the dark man said, leaning forward, his elbows
on his knees.  "We've analyzed our options.  We are doing all that we can,
and it's next to nothing."

"We were gathering quarantine units, making plans for an ET visit..."

"That would have been fine, if they had radioed ahead, offered to negotiate
a visitation protocol.  But there are approximately twenty-two hundred
objects on their way to Earth.  They are communicating in volume, and
it's nonsense."  His eyes darted around the room.  Finally he looked up
at her.  "So this is what we can do.  Hold ourselves ready."

"Or we could go home, wait there, wait for them to kill us, or liberate us,
or make us Gods."  She felt good for actually having said it.

He nodded.  "We could.  Many of us have.  I don't think that we will."

She opened her mouth, closed it again, stood, and went out to look at
the screens.


(7)

Floating free above the Clinging Dome, the Greater Klite watched the First
Wave approach the blue-white planet.  The Wave, visible at first as
individual corruscating points, gradually shrank to a diffuse cloud of
light and motion, moving across the deep black toward the planet, as the
burr itself moved closer on its own glancing course, all the lights in
visible space moving slowly and gracefully, a stately dance against the
background of the black and the unmoving stars.

"The first Approach for a thousand years," the slatesh signalled through
the near-field communication network that invisibly surrounded them.
"An addition to the commity of body."

"It could be that they don't want to be added," the Greater Klite
replied, seeing for a moment the bright cloud of the First Wave as
a virus about to penetrate a cell, and then as a motile gamete bearing
down in its target ovum.

"Desire is not a factor," said the slatesh, "desire and preference are
not involved in the commity of body; it logically precedes them."

"Head," added the Frlepti, both their heads pointed out at the planet,
their necks relatively straight, only swaying slightly from side to side
in the microgravity, "Signal.  Duality.  Team.  Visit."

"That almost made sense, again," the Greater Klite remarked, in the
general direction of the transcend, who had been floating silent and limp,
perhaps contemplative, perhaps having moved his consciousness to some
other part of the universe as the transcend were said to do.  "Do the
Frlepti's nouns carry meaning, to each other, or are they intended to
carry meaning to us?"

"What is intent?" the transcend replied, uselessly.  "The Frlepti spent
a good bit of energy, but no matter, on conveying a large number of
noun-phrases, complexly encoded toward the planet.  Did they intend
some result?  How would we tell?"

The Greater Klite shook her head, the circle of mane moving stiffly in
the transparent film of her vacuum garment and the insignificant pull of
the ambient microgravity.  "Do they understand us when we speak?"

"They do," the transcend and the slatesh replied almost in unisonl, both
knowing more about the Frlepti than she did, their races being more likely
to pay attention to what the Greater Klite, in careless moments, still
tended to refer to as "prey species."

The Frlepti twined their necks together and ruffled their stubby wings
in what she hoped was not amusement.  In the high distance, the first
leading edge elements of the First Wave entered the first traces of
the planet's atmosphere, and most of them reduced their speed for
entry.  In Dauntless, the lithe and graceful male, his body cradled
and cleaned and caressed by the internal servitors of the slim and
powerful craft, pulled his lips back from his teeth in a grin, and
pushed the ship forward, just gradually enough not to risk retaliation
or correction from any other element of the Wave that was likely to
be paying attention.

On the planet below, in the underground room in Manhattan, the UNOOSA
Director is standing at the bottom of the stairs that connect the
operation floor to the observation level, watching the tense back of
the dark man, who is speaking into his earpiece.  They have made
contact, finally, with three other observation points that are
still operating, through parts of the telephone system that are
also still operating.  The fleet, it seems, has reached atmosphere.

"The center of mass of the group is decelerating.  Still no reaction
signatures."  He speaks in clipped tones into the phone, and exchanges
quick words with the earnest young people in remarkably clean shirts
who sit in the chairs.

"No reaction signatures?" she asks, in a low tone, of the pale man,
who is now standing at the back of the operations floor, a clipboard
in his hand, just looking up at the two large screens where the lights
move.  "So they're using... anti-gravity?"

"Or something," he says.  The greens and blues from the screens color
his face.  She looks at the screens herself, and sees a scattering of
reds.  "Some of them aren't slowing down."

The pale man nods grimly.  Some of the ships, the Objects in the Group,
have cut into the atmosphere at full speed.  They may just have better
heat-shielding than the others, or different tastes in atmospheric
entry style.  Or they may be weapons, missiles, large rocks lobbed
at the Earth any reason or no reason, aimed at cities, or aimed at
nothing.

"That's odd," the pale man is moving forward, conferring with one of
the operators at her small screen.  The dark man is speaking into his
phone.  On the large screen, all but a few of the red dots seem to have
vanished.

"Not just us," the dark man says, "the other stations are reporting the
same.  Most of the fast incoming --"

"Looks like it was the rocks," says one of the earnest young persons.

"Was it?" says the pale man, something like relief in his voice.

"Most of the fastest incoming objects, including the ones we had
identified as possible inert-mass weapons," that is, she said to
herself, really big rocks, "have vanished from tracking.  We
don't know what they were, or what has happened to them."

"Those were our ships," said a voice, with some slightly proud
emphasis on the "our", "and they have reached their destinations."

Everyone in the operations pit looked around.  The dark man
sprang up the stairs to the observation level.  But there was
no one there.  No one to have produced the voice.

"I know," the dark man said, looking down at the rest of them,
"that that was not anyone playing a joke."

He thought for a moment, and no one moved, or spoke.

"It seems we may have had our first close encounter."

Over the next few hours, the First Wave of ships, constructs, vehicles,
visitors, from the great dark seed-pod rained down on the Earth like a
mad blizzard.  The black ships, solid with no interior spaces, like
great flakes of shiny black coal, that belonged to the transcendi
entered the atmosphere and vanished, dissipating instantly into a
fog of parts that sliced or floated down through the atmosphere.
Dauntless, with the lithe male creature in it feeling himself merged
entirely with the ship, cut through the atmosphere (oxygen and nitrogen,
some carbon dioxide, a typical quadruped world), fast enough that the
outer shell glowed red with the heat, and he felt a great rushing through
his veins, seized by gravity and scoured by air, rushing toward and over
the vast bulk of silent functionless mass below, shouting to himself,
and to the female back on the burr who watched him through an experience
link, shouting loudly in exhilaration.

The ships that had peeled off and headed for the Moon reached it, some
vanishing around behind the satellite and others settling down to the
surface.  In two places odd patterns, structures, like lichen or oddly
shaped buildings, began spreading over the surface, and people looking
through telescopes frowned.

The ships, platforms, party-rooms, of the Lith-quill drifted down slowly
thorugh the atmosphere, mostly over the oceans, although two took up
positions more or less over central Manhattan, three over Paris, and
one over Tokyo.  On board, the parties continued, and from those that
were over oceans long tubes extruded down to touch the waves, and
Lith-quill and some inhabitants of compatible ally species, in various
states of intoxication, slid and rolled and were carried up and down
the tubes, to touch the roiling water and feel the air, and roll around
in the robust matter-born gravity.  The first Approach in almost a
thousand years, and they weren't about to miss the opportunity.

Outside a converted farmhouse in suburban Nebraska, a young man stands
in the night, looking up at the clear sky, where a few enigmatic lights
signify the enigmatic things that they have heard, inside, on the
sporadically-appearing news programs.  They have missed the riots here,
and the violence, but not the general breakdown of things working; they
are very careful with their food, locally-grown and otherwise.  But
just now he is not thinking about food.

"Come for me!" he shouts with his mind into the sky, and then, careless
that they might hear him inside and what they might think, he shouts
it with his voice: "Come for me!  Here I am!"

He feels it, his desire, his desparate knowledge that they have come,
and he belongs up there with them, that if only he can get through to
them, can only be noticed.  He gathers his resolution within himself
and pushes it upward, picturing to himself a bolt of power, a shaft
of intense meaning, every atom of his deep desire soaring up and
out to find some receptive sense organ.  "Here I am!  Come for me!
I need to go with you!"

The ship seems to appear out of nowhere.  Suddenly, in the darkness
above him, it is just there.  Maybe a hundred, a hundred and fifty
feet long, shiny in the darkness, unmarked.  Still, floating, held
up by nothing, as the news says the alien craft are; no rockets, just
silent motion, wherever and however they want to go.

And then, the voice.

"Where do you need to go?" it asked.  It is mellow, melodious, not
male or female, not human or robotic.  He's not sure if it's a sound
or just a voice in his mind, but he knows the answer.

"To space!  To the Object, the mothership that you came from.  I
belong there!"

"You are certain?"

This stops him for an instant.  His heart is pounding, he is balanced
on the edge of something, the border between reality and dream.  Is he
certain?  For just an instant, he is canny.

"Yes!  To space, to the mothership, alive and unharmed, with food and
water and air, but please please take me with you."

"Very good", the voice says.  And there is a rush as of wind, and he is
gone, and the ship is gone, and the land is quiet under the sky.


(8)

The Director of UNOOSA woke up, for no obvious reason, feeling stiff
and tired, her eyes crusty, her throat needing to be cleared, her clothes
twisted and binding around her.  She felt, that is, less like the Director
of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs and more like Lina
Magee, which she had been after all for considerably longer, and in a
much wider variety of situations.  The smell of food brought her out
of the niche off of the observation stage, where she'd apparently been
sleeping on the couch, out and down among the screens and earnest young
persons, where bags of fast-food breakfast and steaming coffee were
scenting the air.  She was glad to see what some of the vital institutions
of humanity were still functioning.

"Just in time," the dark man said, looking just as dark but less neat,
more rumpled, as Lina knew she did herself.  "We've heard from the
White House, and I expect you have some new messages from the SecGen."

Her memory of the night before, when her superiors had gotten around to
thinking of her, and made contact, was fuzzy.  They had not been pleased
that she had gone off to a United States installation.  But they had
been pleased that she was in a well-equipped monitoring post, able to
confirm or disconfirm some of the wild rumors that had been reaching
them from the various national and NGO bodies looking at the sky.

When she had started reporting, through her phone, what they were
seeing there with respect to the invasion fleet, that is the group
of incoming objects, that is the extraterrestrial visitors, she
thought the pale man had whispered in concern to the dark one, some
worry about protocol, about state secrets and levels of clearance.
But the dark man had either reassured him or overridden him, because
sometime after that she was connectingn his technical people to the
SecGen's technical people, and sometime after that the UN's own
observational net, such as it still was, was connected to the growing
net that the dark man was constructing between this place and some
other similar ones.  She had drifted off, after a long time lying
on the couch trying not to think of aliens, wondering what the earnest
young persons in front of the screens in an underground monitoring
post in India would wear to work.

She checked her messages.  There were many of them, full of news
and messages and rumors that contradicted each other or supported
each other or made no sense in themselves.  But the last one informed
her that she was provisionally attached to the UN liaison office to
NATO, and through it to this very underground chamber and whatever
budding or long-hidden organization it belonged to.

"So now what?" she asked, putting down an empty coffee mug and archiving
all of her messages.

"Now," said the dark man, "we go to MIT.  They have aliens there."

The Greater Klite had propelled herself, hours before, back down the
spine to an area of significant gravity, and caught a transport tube
to the habitation zone, popular with scholars and artists and writers
of predator species, where she commonly slept.  It was noisy and full
of light, full of creatures of all races and species and cultures rushing
around, even more than usual, because of the Approach, the departure of
the First Wave, and the preparations for the Second, which given the
very successful and non-disastrous results of the First (so far, anyway,
she reflected to herself), looked to be an order of magnitude larger
and more boisterous.  She had wrapped a mask around her eyes and ears,
wrapped herself in layers of furs and blankets, and slept.

Now she was back, in the Clinging Dome, with the transcend (or at
least a similar-looking being), the slatesh, and the pair of Frlepti,
all of whom seemed to her entirely too cheerful, too full of energy
and silly ideas, too full of excited idle chatter.  The dome was closed
to the vacuum but open to light, and the five sat, and stood, and
twined, and reclined, and ate and drank and breathed and absorbed
various things associated with waking up in their respective cultures.

"It is an utterly lovely world!  Have you seen the experiences?  The
waves on the vast water areas?  The motion of the atmosphere over the
vast flat or crumpled land areas?  The constructs of the natives,
shining in the filtered light of their sun?  It is a delight!"

The slatesh had been waxing enthusiastic for some time.  The Greater
Klite growled softly and politely deep in her throat.  She had watched
an experience an hour before, a covey of silly Lith-quill diving down
from their garlanded platform over hostile-looking waves, coming back
up with shiny squirmy live things that looked like the just might be
edible.  It had made her hungry.

"I wonder what that is," the transcend said lazily, gesturing at a
nondescript black object that occluded some stars and the tip of a
light-column some ways out along the spine.

"Debris," said the Frlepti, "Celebration.  Velocity.  Connivance.
Ridicule."

"Um, yes, well," said the Greater Klite.  "Debris I would certainly
imagine."

The transcend did that thing again that reminded her of smiling.
"Look at the heat signature."

"Oh, it's a live something."

"Is it in distress?"

"It isn't signalling on the communication array."

"It doesn't have a locator ID, how can it be a live something?"

"Perhaps something escaped from somewhere."

"Is it floating?"

"It is tethered, I think..."

The slatesh put an end to speculation by having the dome extend a field
and pull the drifting oddly-warm thing over and in.  It was indeed
tethered to the ship, with a long band of some adhesive something, but
it was sufficiently long to allow the bulbous end to be brought inside
the dome.

"Ah," said the transcend.

"Ah?"

Now inside the dome, with a fog of the ship's microservitors surrounding
it until its needs could be determined and attended to, the something
writhed oddly, an ovoid and ill-defined moving shape, until the surface
of it tore and peeled back, revealing a somehow familiar-looking biped,
or upright quadruped, somewhat dampish and making rather loud noises.

"And what is this?" the slatesh said with considerable enthusiasm.  The
Greater Klite's query to her information link confirmed that it was nothing
known to live on the burr, and that it was almost certainly, as she had
somehow known from the moment the transcend had said it was alive, a
being from the blue-white planet below.  They all adjusted their
translators accordingly.

"Enthusiastic amazement!" the dampish biped said, in an almost painfully
loud voice, "Enthusiastic amazement, they really did it!  I'm here!"


(9)

The aliens at MIT were short but stocky, massively heavy from the sound
that their stubby feet made on the floors, of a dusty-looking grey color,
and had disturbingly mobile noses.  They were mostly-upright quadrupeds,
standing on their feet, or their hind feet, most of the time, but resting
on all fours much of the time.  And their command of English was both
very good and maddeningly uneven.  There were apparently about a dozen of
them known to be on the MIT campus.  A month earlier she would have been
incredulous that the exact number and whereabouts of a party of aliens
visiting MIT could be uncertain; now it felt entirely natural.

Of the dozen, three of them were in this room, now.

"Yes, yes, our ships have as you have saw none of the reaction drives."
Their voices were deep and somehow (what was the word she was looking
for?) avuncular.  "The reaction drives are being wonderfully wasteful
of the matter!  And for us the matter is the finite resource."  Here
the voice stopped for a moment, and the nose, the proboscus, waved in
what looked like it might have been intended as an expansive gesture,
but to her at least came out almost irresistably comical.  "But for you
the matter is so much!  The planet is so astounding to us!  So understood
astounding!"  And the squat heavy grey shape made an odd wiggling motion
that suddenly closed a relay in Lina's brain.

"My God," she whispered to the dark man, who was standing with her a little
apart from the speaking alien and the excited and somewhat flustered covey
of scientists, "It's Babar.  That's what I've been thinking of since I saw
them.  Babar and Cornelius."

The dark man said nothing, but she thought she saw his shoulders move in
what might have been well-supressed laughter.

The scientists, a few professors, a handful of privileged students, one
or two people that she thought were probably press who had snuck in under
some pretense, were gamely trying to draw technical, or cultural, or really
any information at all from their vaguely elephantine guests, who were for
their part more interested in getting the humans to talk (they seemed to
have a great interest in the organizational structure of the people who
had build the building that they were standing in, something that no one
in the room knew anything about), and in taking apart and (often) putting
back together various of the devices on the tables in the room, using a
rather unsettling combination of the stubby fingers on their hands (their
forfeet) and pale retractable protrusions that extended out of their noses
(or, she thought now, their trunks).

"So your ships do not use reaction drives.  How do they function?  What is
their propulsion system?  How do they go?"  The tall grey-haired man who
had become the scientists' principle spokesman had taken to wording each
question in three or four different ways, including at least one very
simple (if innacurate) one, in hopes of getting his message across more
clearly.  The alien who had spoken last had begun caressing the pressure
regulator on a Dewar flask of liquid oxygen, but one of the others spoke
up, probably in reply.

"In the motivators of the ships," it, he or she, said, "there are the turbines,
it is, that activate with the clothes of space-time, and cause the ships to
be having velocity, it is.  And all is made standing through the fields-ray
of the ships.  It is."

She was amused at some level to notice that every human in the room, herself
included, winced in just about the same way.

The spokesman for the humans perched on the edge of a lab stool; its metal
feet grated for a moment against the concrete floor, and then caught.  She
thought if it had been one of the heavy aliens, it might have crashed to
the floor.  The humans had tried to politely herd their guests to a quiet
conference room, with recording devices and without so many shiny distractions,
but the aliens had wandered here instead, and seemed quite content.

It occurred to the Director of the UNOOSA, standing next to someone whose
name she somehow didn't know yet, in a room at MIT, watching a random
collection of humans trying to talk productively to a small and apparently
random collection of Barbar-like aliens, that it was all shockingly
informal.  They had had plans, or they had had papers about plans, whole
scholarly journals, or at least special issues of scholarly journals,
about first contact with aliens, about how to organize ourselves to
understand and impress aliens.  But those journal issues had always had
that bit of tongue in cheek, and the authors of those papers had always
gone off and done something else next, and the officials tasked with
actually drawing up official plans had always somehow had something with
a higher priority to do.

And anyway none of the papers, or none of those that she could remember,
had covered the possibility that the aliens might already speak English,
might come to Earth suddenly and in their thousands, might move around
taking things apart in a laboratory rather than sitting down and doing
their part to contribute to inter-species understanding.

It seemed rude of them, at the very least.

After skimming Dauntless over the land at supersonic speeds, sending
loud sonic booms in his wake as he compressed the air more quickly
than it could get out of the way, the lithe male being spun the little
ship in a tight circle, flipped it gracefully on end, and slammed it
decisively into the dry earth, a reasonable distance from a town of
low-tech structures that he had passed over an hour previously.  By
the time the sun set (going out of site behind the bulk of the planet
as the planet turned on its axis), he was firmly established in the
largest of the buildings, laughing expansively and throwing his arms
wide to welcome in the villagers who entered, heads bowed, hands shaking,
conveying in for his pleasure the best of their food, and the shapliest
of their young women.

His mind reached out to theirs, and he felt with a great delight
their excitement, their awe, and their fear.

In the Clinging Dome, the Greater Klite frowned at the damp alien,
hoping it would calm down soon, and not die.  So far, since being
released from its wrappings, it had not ceased its loud noises, and
now fluids of various unattractive kinds were leaking from parts of
its face.  She wondered if it had been damaged in some subtle way
when it was brought, however it was brought, here from below.

Much of the sound that it was making was apparently untranslatable,
but the damp alien (which was slowly drying out, except for the fluids
on its face) was apparently in a state of great excitement, was highly
gratified to be outside the atmosphere of its planet, and was deeply
grateful to whoever had brought it here, and to them, and to every being
in any way associated with the great ship, which the alien constantly
referred to as its parent.  The Greater Klite, being mostly a literal
minded creature, found this confusing at best.

Finally the sounds got quieter, and the transcend managed to get the
thing's attention.

"You are welcome among us," he said formally, and the Greater Klite
was afraid from the contorting of its face that it might become
agitated again.  But it put its legs under its rather scrawny body,
sitting on the floor in a more stable position, and looked up at
them, and spoke.

"Gratitude," it said, through the communication-field translator,
"extreme gratitude, gratitude."  Its natural voice was not unpleasant,
if a bit shrill.  "Am I speaking to the inhabitants of the great
parent vehicle?"

The slatesh, which had been lying in passive observation until now,
drew itself up into a curved plane, rising above the flatness of
its couch.  The planet-alien started back at the motion, and its
body shivered alarmingly for a moment, but then it stabilized again.

"You are speaking to five of the inhabitants, at any rate," the
slatesh said, through the colors and patterns of its surface, the
translation servitors hovering over it, and the communication
field's translators.

"Question," the alien said, "question, for your pleasure.  Are you
the beings who have caused me to be in this place?  There was in the
past a small vehicle, in a place that is mine..."

"No," replied the transcend, after the shrill voice had tailed off
to silence, and the planet-creature had just sat there silently for
a time, looking from one to the other of them as though it had
finished, and expected or hoped for an answer.  "It was not us
that brought you here.  What sort of vehicle was it?  Did you see
those aboard it?  Did you communicate with them?"

The alien reached about itself with its five-fingered hands, which
seemed to shake considerably, and pulled itself up to what must have
been a more comfortable position on one of the seats of the Dome.
It bobbed its head oddly and then, in the oddly-phrased language
that was the best the translators could do given the limited expertise
that the ship as a whole had in this dialect of the planet's speech,
told its story.  How it had stood in the gravity at the surface of
the planet, and shouted upward with voice and mind and spleen, and
had its call answered by a featureless shiny ship that had negotiated
and confirmed and then swept it up.  And that it remembered little or
nothing between then and the moment that the wrappings opened and it
tumbled damply onto the floor of the Dome.

A general feeling of nodding went around the others, although only
the Greater Klite and the transcend actually nodded their heads.
The transcend, reflecting what they all (probably even the Frlepti)
were thinking, said, "ah, an Izwit.  Yes, they do that."


(10)

Like essentially every other system on the planet, the news services
were in turmoil.  Like everywhere else, a significant number of people
who would normally have appeared at predictable times and places,
and behaved in predictable ways, or usefully unpredictable ways,
and generally furthered the interests of the organization in ways
appropriate to their particular roles, assigned or unassigned, would
decide on any given day that the world was coming to an end anyway,
or that paradise was about to arrive anyway, or even that the turmoil
was a good excuse to take a week or a day off, and simply not show up.
Others would stop what they were doing in the midst of things, and
go off and do something else instead.  More than a few had simply
vanished.

But on the other hand, there was more for the news services to do,
and what there was to do was more important, perhaps, than anything
that they had ever had to do before.  And people, at least some
people, were intensely eager to know, to get both the individual
scraps of fascinating news, and to get some overall account, some
explanation, some sensible narrative that put it all together.

That latter, the news services had not been able to provide.

Word came, in what news outlets and communication channels were
working at least sporadically, that in rural areas of India and
China towns had been taken over by golden muscular men from the
stars, striding like gods, like Gods, setting themselves up as
overlords, commanding the best houses, the best food in quantity,
the most beautiful women, also in quantity, and shaking the air
with their bellows and their howling laughter.

And this was to a great degree accurate.  The fact that these golden
men each resembled very closely all of the others, and that in place
of hair they each had a ridge of fleshy tendrils across the crowns
of their heads, did not figure in these stories prominently, if it
was mentioned at all.

Outside that first village, near where Dauntless had put down and
where it still sat slowly sinking into the earth, a light silver
ship, glinting and somehow nearly invisible in the sunlight, came
down out of the sky, quickly and accurately, without excess motion,
and settled into place, like a leaf touching down on dew-spotted
grass.  A door appeared in the side, and the female creature,
her body wrapped in silk and light, stepped out and looked around
herself, her long hair waving about her.  She smiled at the
shape of Dauntless so firmly embedded in the ground, and raising
her head as though smelling something on the wind, she strode
toward the buildings, where sounds of reverie and weeping could
be heard.

"Is it that you have what kind of hierarchical organization, in
the universe?" the planet-alien asked, still appearing somewhat
agitated, at least compared to the ones the Greater Klite had
seen on the video signals the Deep Thinkers had intercepted and
decoded on the way toward Approach.  But at least it was speaking
rationally.  Or more or less rationally.

"Do you mean on the ship?  What kind of hierarchical organizations
we have on the ship?" This from the slatesh, who seemed the most
interested in speaking to the creature, and also the least
patient with its confusion and odd wordings.  "We have many,
very many, different organizations, some hierarchical, and some
not.  A wider variety than your planet, it seems, in the overall
commity."

The planet-alien (she looked up the name that they called themselves,
in the incomplete lexicon that her people had put together from
their own and purchased sources of analysis of the decoded transmissions,
and what they had gotten in addition since Approach: "Humans"), the
Human stood up on its back feet, and then sat again.  "I mean,
out in the universe, between the many planets of the universe,"
it seemed to be speaking more slowly, and it had shut its eyes,
"what is it that is tying the planets to one another, as a
hierarchical organization?  Is there?"

"Ah," said the slatesh, "no, there is no hierarchical organization
between the planets of different stars.  It takes so long to travel
from one star to the next, or to communicate between them, that no
real organization has emerged."

"That we know of," added the Greater Klite, partly just to annoy
the slatesh, who was always far too sure of itself on matters like
this for her taste, and partly because she felt sorry for the
bedraggled creature, and wanted to tell it the truth.  She had
decided that while it was not a prey species, it was not particularly
predatory either, and her data links confirmed this: an upright
quadruped omnivore.  One of the more common classes of civilized
species in the collective experience of the Greater Klite and
those with whom they had shared.

The Human bobbed its head, rather comically.  "And. In addition.
Movement through the universe. Is it very rapid?  Is it rapid in
a way that is more rapid than the movement of light?  With the
ship?  Here?"  And it waved its somewhat overlong arms around at
the dome, the spine, by extension all the cubic miles of the seed-pod.

"Is it asking about faster-than-light travel, do you think?" the
slatesh asked, speaking in the direction of the transcend, who seemed
at that point to have mostly lost interest.

"Yes!" said the Human, "travel faster than light!  This here is
doing that?"

"No," the slatesh said again, and the Human seemed to wilt slightly.
"The speed of light is an absolute limit.  It is not possible to
travel faster than light."

"As far as we know," the Greater Klite added again, and this time
she thought the shape and patterns that the slatesh assumed where
sharp with annoyance.

"It is impossible," the slatesh, or really the slatesh's devices,
said, "It is contrary to the laws of physics."

The Greater Klite decided it would be impolite to say anything
further in that direction; the slatesh were, as a culture, quite
stiff-minded about some things.  About many things, in fact.

"It's ridiculous," the dark man said, tossing another cream
colored file folder onto the desk untidily covered with them.

"Frustrating," she agreed, her feet up on one corner of the
desk, looking down at him and then looking up at the ceiling
again.

"There are thousands of aliens on Earth."

"A couple thousand.  And many of them haven't landed; they're
having mock-dogfights in the atmosphere, or spending their days
in drunken partying in those bizarre cities over the oceans."

"And there are at least five thousand conversations, going on
at any particular second, going on at this second, between
someone on Earth and some alien..."

"Or someone claiming to be an alien."

"...in a dozen, three dozen different languages.  And yet
they tell us nothing, they answer no questions."

She laughed, a bit exhausted, a bit hysterical perhaps.
"Or they tell us much too much, and answer entirely too
many questions."

The dark man made a sound somewhere between a snort and a
growl.

"What's your name, anyway?" she asked.

"What?"

"You name.  What is it?"

"Luca.  Luca Maris.  Nice to meet you."


(11)

The six of them, the transcend wrapped in black, the Greater
Klite striding along as Greater Klites do, trying not to leave
the others behind, the slatesh in the characteristic eye-straining
rush and roll of an amorph, the Frlepti skittering in erratic
saccades on their thin backward-jointed legs, and last, always
last, the Human, alternately hiding behind the others or going
off into distraction, depending on whatever was passing the other
way, or whatever the group passed by, on their long (and, to the
Greater Klite, supremely frustrating) walk down the transit tube.

The Human seemed especially fascinated by the slatesh, although
it was clearly both fascinated and frightened by essentially
everything that it saw.  With practice it and the translation
network were becoming better at communicating its wants and
its questions, its random statements, to the others, and it was
apparently beginning to understand more of their replies.

"The two most common body-forms on the ship," said the transcend,
in a bored tone that the Greater Klite doubted was being
accurately conveyed to the Human, "are the upright quadruped,
as I am, and you are, and our friend the Greater Klite is, and
the amorph, as our friend the slatesh.  The true biped, as
our Frlepti here," nodding at the feathered pair, who were
at that moment racing each other back and forth across their
line of progress, pecking playfully at each other's necks as
their paths intersected, "are somewhat rarer."  Due, the
Greater Klite noted silently, to being so obviously prey,
and therefore not often surviving long enough to acheive
intelligence.

A group of five Izwit entered the tube from a side-branch,
and (apparently upon seeing the Human) raced toward the six
on their silvery locomotion scooters, but at a subtle gesture
from the transcend wheeled and vanished back the way they
had come.  But not before the Human saw them, and started.

"Those!  Those there, they are..."

"Yes," said the slatesh's hovering machines, "Izwit.  Those
are the species of the one that brought you to this part of
the commity.  They do that."

"What do you mean by they do that?" the Human asked, now having,
occasionally, presence of mind enough to utter two connected
statements in a row.

"They perturb.  They find value in the entropy of the body,
in various circumstances," said the slatesh, using its
characteristically frustrating idiom.  "To balance this,
in the commity of body, they operate under various rules and
restrictions.  That is why they were so careful to question
you, before bringing you here.  To establish the forms."

"The holders of legitimate violence, they would have been
taking action if the Izwit had not asked the questions and,"
the Human paused, apparently to think.  An encouraging sign,
the Greater Klite thought, stopping herself to sniff after
a notable scent in the air.  "And established the forms?"
it concluded.

"We will have to discuss," said the transcend, "your notion
of the holding of legitimate violence.  The ways of the ship
and the ways of planets are most likely quite different."

The Human's face contorted at this, probably a token of some
sort of emotion.  The group walked on.  The Greater Klite
reflected, again, that it would have been far easier to
take the nearest translocator rather than walking down this
obscure tube to a car station.  But one does not in general
argue with a trascend for very long.

The lithe female slipped through an opening in the coarse
planetary fabrics that hung around the sides of the room, and
stood behind the large grimy divan where the male, nude and
glistening with sweat, lay supine.  Two attendants were just
leading a sobbing girl from the room, supporting her on
unsteady legs.

"You are filth," she said fondly, her voice soft and melodic.

He craned his neck to look up at her, and leered, and reached
out a large hand toward her.  She swayed gracefully just out
of reach.

"Perhaps later, when you've been cleaned."

"Gah, you..."

"I should think in any case you would have had quite enough
for now, reducing the local girls to tears."

"Tears of joy, I assure you."  Like her, he spoke in the
formal cadances of archaic Russian, a language that no native
of the planet understood for hundreds of miles in any
direction, and none had spoken outside of overly romantic
novels for hundreds of years.  His voice was as melodious
as hers, but of course much deeper, more solid, heavier.

She lowered herself gingerly to the divan, as far from his
reach as she could be.  He made a casual lunge for her, and
settled back in his place when she equally casually swatted
him away.

"I gather the conquest goes well," she said.

"Ah, it does, it does.  I spread for miles in all directions,
my people bask in the glow of my favor, their women dream
of being called to me, their larders are emptied of their
finest goods to honor me.  I have the finest silks --"

Here the female tossed her head and laughed, her hair flowing
like water, her laughter sparkling in the air like diamond.

"Alright, yes," he went on, waving a hand lazily beside his
face, "the finest cloth that my simple people can produce,
which is all I can ask as their God and King.  They provide
what they can.  It is all that they have.  It is sumptuous
to them, so it is sumptuous to me."

Her laughter continued dancing in the air.  In the smaller
rooms outside, his attendants looked at each other, wondering.

"And you," he said, perhaps to stem that flow of lovely
mirth, of cruel and graceful hilarity, "how go your own
endeavors, your projects?  Are your eyes and ears prospering?"

"They are," she replied, still a lilt of that jewel laughter
in her voice, "my long dark servants.  Their ships have
dispersed in the atmosphere, they walk the streets at night,
invisible among the people.  On the Ship above us one of
them walks even now down a long transit tube, with one of
the humans --"

"One of the humans is on the Ship?  Your doing?"

She smiled, filling the room with light.  "The Izwit brought
him.  Nothing whatever to do with me."  But her lips quirked
as she said it, and seeing that his lips quirked as well, and
after a few seconds of silence they both broke into laughter,
the high lilt of hers blending with the low chortling rumble
of his, into a stream of music that made those kneeling in the
outer chambers dizzy, and filled the heads of the musicians in
the square outside, so that they had off dreams for months, and
later composed new songs that shaped the music of their people
for generations.

He recovered himself first, and shook his head at her in
approval or wonder or reproach.  "It is not only the people of
the planet to whom you are a deity, my lady," and he reached
out for her again.  This time she suffered him to caress her
hip and her belly with one strong paw, stopping him with a
slap only as his hand strayed upward.

"So they have," he said, in a tone that said he knew the answer
already to what he was asking, but wanted to hear her confirmation,
wanted to bask with her in the knowing of it, "nothing whatever
with which to threaten us, no riddles --"

"Beyond the riddle that we have come down for."

He nodded in acknowledgement and went on, "no hidden weapons
or secret pockets of transcendi of their own, nothing to
disrupt or disturb us?"

"Nothing," she said, her voice melifluous, "nothing, nothing,
nothing, nothing."

Lina Magee sat on the United Nations side of the hall.  Luca Maris,
she was pretty sure, was over on the national side, in the
US section.  That was the largest section by far, given that
this was a US installation, and nearly as many of the speakers
US as UN.  It was somewhat worrying, althougn not as worrying
as the utter lack of Chinese representation.  But she was too
tired to worry about it.  She was, as she reflected most of the
people in the hall appeared to be, too tired most of the time to
worry about much of anything, beyond the plain fact of the invasion
of Earth, the likely end of human civilization, and related matters.

"As of an hour ago, we have confirmed presence and location of three
thousand seven hundred and forty-seven aliens within Earth's
atmosphere," the minor general on the stage said, pointing with
a blue laser-pointer at the PowerPoint slide being projected onto
the large businesslike screen.  "Of these, two thousand and sixteen
are on one of the twelve large platforms suspended over deep ocean.
Of the remaining one thousand seven hundred and thirty-one, two hundred
and eleven are in contact with one or more of the governments
and quasi-governmental organizations represented in this room," and
he nodded sideways, out at the more or less fidgety, more or less
overheated and annoyed, more or less exhausted representatives of
the governments and quasi-governmental organizations (Lina felt
herself trying to bristle at the UN being so described, but being
to tired to actually do so), "and another ninety-six are in contact
with one or more other governments, not represented here."

He turned to the next slide.

"The remaining one thousand four hundred and twenty-four aliens --"

"Extraterrestrials," a voice somewhere in the back of the audience
muttered, loudly enough to be heard.  But they have been over that
issue hours ago.  The general restarted his sentence but did not
otherwise acknowledge the speaker.

"The remaining one thousand four hundred and twenty-four aliens
have been located in a wide variety of areas, falling into four
general categories," the next slide contained four boxes, each
containing a number of noun phrases, and with lines connecting each
box to each of the other three boxes, for no apparent reason,
"aliens in urban land areas, aliens in non-urban land areas,
aliens on the water or oceans, and aliens more than one kilometer
above local ground level."

"Excuse me," said someone from the UN side (Lina was too tired to
look and see if it was anyone she knew; the voice didn't sound
familiar), "how are you counting the single humanoid extraterrestrial
that has set itself up as a god, in over a dozen places at once,
in rural towns in south Asia?  And the cloud of... something that
currently infests the Eiffel Tower, and forms into a different
number of possibly-separate forms every few minutes?  Is that one
of your one thousand four hudred and twenty-four aliens, or is
it six, or ten, or..."

The general on the stage waved his hand and nodded, and simultaneously
flipped through his presentation to the backup section.  "As you can
see here, the methodology that we have adopted to count," and at that
moment his beeper went off, a raucous tone that meant a do-not-disturb
being overridden.  Serval other beepers and telephones in the room
went off at roughly the same time, and most of the rest of them
sounded within the next minute or two.

Approaching the end of the long transit-tube, and the car station
that was (finally, the Greater Klite muttered to herself), the six
stopped abruptly in their course (including the upright quadruped Human,
who stopped suddenly to avoid running into or tripping over or stepping
on the slatesh), as did most of the other beings visible to them,
as a wave of sound and signal flowed through the common communication
matrix.

"The Second Wave already," commented the transcend, "things must be
going well."

"For someone," said the Greater Klite dryly.

The Human looked from one to the other, for the moment uncomprehending.


(12)

Sitting on the brick wall, watching a dozen ring-tailed aliens leaping
into the air in some sort of dance, or chant, or religious ritual, and
half a dozen human children (or what were probably human children) running
and scampering and laughing with and around them, she reflected that when
things are normal, one feels and thinks and behaves normally.  When there
are small changes or crises, one feels excitement or fear, one focuses or
loses focus, one behaves a bit better or worse.  In large crises or real
emergencies, adrenalin flows, the heart pounds, tunnel-vision sets in,
one can if necessary lift ten times as much weight as usual, think a
dozen times faster.

But when things change completely, when a crisis is so large that it
utterly overwhelms one's ability to cope with it, alone or with one's
fellows, there is a point when one just gives up.  And once one has given
up, things seem almost normal again.

She unwrapped the second half of her tuna sandwich, and took a big
satisfying bite.

Luca came around the corner, only ten minutes late, carrying a briefcase,
walking with the same odd combination of spring and fear in his step, a
kind of alert skittishness, that she had noticed in others on the street,
and for that matter in herself.  He sat beside her, opened his briefcase,
and took out a cylinder of yogurt and a roll.

"Wouldn't have figured you for the yogurt type."

"Doctor's orders," he said, "good for the digestion."

They ate in silence for a minute, watching the spinning furry aliens and the
laughing children.  An adult came from one of the doors of the building across
the street and shouted and gestured toward the group, perhaps calling one
particular child.  Eventually she stopped, having had no response from the
aliens, the children, or anyone else, went back inside, and closed the door.
Lina felt a shudder run through her, for no particular reason.

"The voice that we heard, that first day, in the operations room," she said,
because it had come to her mind just then.

"Collective hallucination," he said, unconvincing and unconvinced, "stress."

"But we all heard it say the same thing."

"We think that we did, now.  But that could be just because we all talked
to each other about it, firmed up consensus on a false memory."

"You believe that?"

"No.  Do you believe this?"  And he gestured around at the aliens in the
plaza, the automobile-sized alien craft (or perhaps they were the aliens
themselves) chasing each other around among the buildings, the large
silent alien vessel sliding majestically over the city a thousand feet up,
the world as a whole.

She nodded.

"The really frustrating thing," he said, "is that of all the... creatures --"

"Aliens," she said.

He waved a hand.  "Of all the creatures, aliens, beings that have come down
out of that," gesturing at the sky, "that damned thing, not a single one
has had the grace to just sit down, and talk rationally --"

Here she groaned.

He went on, more forcefully, "Yes, rationally!  I don't buy the story that
there are different kinds of rationality for us and for them, or for every
planet, or every thinking species.  That's bullshit.  Rationality is
rationality, or it should be.  Clarity is clarity.  Irrationality isn't
a survival trait."

She just shrugged.

"Or at least," he said, more quietly again, "there should be, of all the
damn ragtag species up there, down here, at least one that has a sense of
reason something like ours."

An ovoid, shiny and featureless, roughly forty meters long, swooped out of
the sky and hovered over them for a moment, and then vanished again.

Why go to work when they say that there's an alien in the next town giving
away gold bars?  Or if gold is worthless, there's a space ship a few more
miles away where you can get as much food as you can carry, really good food,
for free, or where you can listen at the door and hear the most amazing
secrets, or where someone's giving away little boxes that produce all the
electricity you could want, forever, because an alien told him how to make
them.

Or, if all the changes have frightened you, why go outside at all, when you
can stay indoors, keep the TV turned to one of the stations that's just showing
old movies, take the food that your friends bring by and use the water and
power that's still coming into your house, and don't worry too much about
who's paying for it, or why there are no commercials on the TV.  Stay in,
where it's safe.

"Yes yes," the bluish alien said, its eight feet of skinny height folded up
disturbingly on the visitor's chair in the Pastor's study, "I am seeing.
This planet, it was made by a large human."

"Almost," said the Pastor, patiently.  Whatever the Church ultimately
decided on the question of whether the aliens, the visitors, had souls,
and whether those souls were in need of salvation, he had decided himself
not to wait and risk missing an opportunity.  And even if they did not
themselves have souls, they might in their wanderings transmit some
piece of the Gospel to some other place, where there we souls to receive
the happy news.  "Not only this planet, but the entire Universe, was
created by God.  God is not a large human; God is the Deity.  God is
not like anything else.  God is Holy."

The alien (the visitor, the Pastor corrected himself inwardly for the
dozenth time) rocked in the chair in a way that the Pastor hoped
represented assent, or at least thought.  The dusky cinammon smell
of the visitor's body filled his head, and he thought his eyes might
be starting to water.  Perhaps he should invite the other outside again,
into the garden.

"Yes yes," the other said again, "so this sun and planets system, it
was made by a very large not-human, a very large being with power."

"Not only this planet, or this sun and planets system, or even this
whole galaxy, but the entire Universe, everything that there is, was
made by God."

More rocking, more of the cinammon scent.  He wondered if the smell could
be part of the alien's native means of communication, it seemed to come
and go so frequently and suddenly.

"Yes no," the other said, "if God is making everything that is being,
then is God making God?"

It might, the Pastor reflected, be a long evening.

The transcend had brought them, via the long walk through the transit
tube, a long fast run by car, and then a series of autoramps, to a
point high above one of the central hubs of the Terce, a voluntary
subject race of the Deep Thinkers, who ran a more or less stable and
more or less ancient set of high-diversity commerce and interchange
domains that dotted the interior and exterior parts of the seed-pod,
the burr, the ship, indiscriminantly.  From here, sitting in a
comfortable viewing chamber not entirely unlike the interior of
the Clinging Dome, it was possible to look down at several hundred
meters of interior space, where persons of dozens of species and
subspecies carried on business, performed ritiuals, exchanged stories,
cheated each other, engaged in stridency battles, evaluated each
other's potential for replication, and otherwise carried on the
routine business of the seed-pod.  Gravity here was mostly in the
same direction, toward the point on the great spherical hub more
or less directly opposite their position, and the ceiling above them
was either open to space or well instrumented to appear to be.

The Human was displaying behaviors that the Greater Klite had
decided were indicative of pleasure.  It was also communicating
better with every handful of minutes; and as its communication became
clearer, she found interacting with it to be increasingly frustrating.

"There are so many different kinds," it said, its eyes moving constantly
over the scene below, "so many different kinds in one place, all at
peace."  The Greater Klite considered just what it must be that the
Human considered "peace".

"How many are there?" it asked, turning to the transcend.

"How many individuals, or how many species, or races, or cultures?"
the transcend asked.

The Human frowned at whatever translation had come to its small
hairless ears from the communication matrix.  It twitched slightly
to activate the retranslation and replay functions (to which, she
had to admit, it had caught on quite quickly, if with considerable
noise, when they were pointed out to it), listened again, and
moved its head from side to side in an unreadable gesture.

"First," it said, "how many individuals are there?  On this?"

The Greater Klite considered the question absurd, and the slatesh
had been sufficiently offended by the first form of the question
that it had withdrawn into a rough spheroid, and its surface
patterns indicated distracted introspection.

"Cluster," said one of the Frlepti.  "Atmosphere," said the other.
The Human turned toward the bipeds, and then back to the transcend.

"The number of individuals on the ship is not generally known,"
the transcend said passively.  "Estimates range from eight hundred
million to slightly over one billion.  There are many ways to count
individuals, and in some species and cultures the process is far
from well defined."

The Human appeard to consider this for a time, sucking from the
water-bulb that it had brought with it.  The Greater Klite winced,
from the Human's point of view, at the thought of ingesting something in
an environment nso foreign to it.  But the creature had little choice,
of course, given the circumstances.

"How many planets of origin are there, among those on the ship?" it
asked.

"That is not generally known either," replied the transcend (and the
Greater Klite thought that the slatesh's shape humped slightly, and
its surface rippled in irritation, despite it's nominal state of
inattention), "as many of the species and cultures aboard do not
have firm knowledge of their origin or origins.  But two hundred
is a fair estimate."

"Two hundred planets," the Human repeated stupidly.  "And how many
different species?"

"Roughly the same number."

The Human moved its head in what the Greater Klite's eyepiece said
indicated agreement or acknowledgement.

"And how many ships like this one are there, travelling the path of
brightness?"

The Greater Klite's skin bristled at that question, and she tried
hard not to growl.  The transcend's face contorted slightly with what
might have been amusement.  "That is a culturally sensitive question,
but we know of no others."

"No others," the human repeated, and then grew quiet, apparently absorbed
in the complex and colorful scene below, the ever-shifting patterns and
the flow of bodies and goods from here to there, the flapping of the
High Mesa Grey, the flitting of the Izwit on their scooters.

"Am I the only Human here?" it asked after a time, its voice quieter
and smaller.  The translator did not indicate whether it meant here
in the observation area, here in the domain of the Terce, here in the
seed-pod ship, here in the area of the planet, or just what.  But the
transcend gave it the benefit of the doubt.

"You are the only Human presently on the ship, as far as is known."

The Greater Klite expected the Human next to ask when and how it could
return to the planet and its clan or caste or creche or whatever it was
that Humans had, but it said nothing, only looking down at the motion
below, and occasionally up at the endless dark, and the stars.


(13)

In some places on Earth, the sea was blanketed by the platforms of the
Lith-quill, and the servitor drones that circled constantly, intercepting
the more intoxicated individuals on their terminal velocity descents toward
the water and delivering them to safety.  Various tall structures, including
the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Big Ben Tower in London, were for reasons
unknown surrounded by dizzily spinning and constantly changing clouds of
what appeared to be infinitely light and infinitely mobile particles,
shaped something like tiny caltrops, that formed and re-formed into shapes
that were sometimes pleasing and sometimes disturbing.

In the streets in all major cities, groups, troupes, clans, families,
clusters, clutches, teams of aliens of a maddening variety of sizes and
shapes walked, hovered, flew, rolled, rode, or indescribably squelched
along, like wildly extrapolated foreign tourists.  When they entered an
area they effectively split any nearby human groups into two, with one
set fleeing as far as possible from them at their coming, for fear of
infection or ingestion, and the other set flocking toward the visitors,
with cameras or goods or just consuming curiosity, hoping sometimes for
casual bars of gold, or universal revelations, offhand gifts of incredible
new technologies, in-passing beatification.

Energy had ceased to be a problem in any urban area on Earth, as the aliens
presented Mayors or beggars or policemen or infants with not only the
magic boxes that produced heat and electricity from nothing, but also
the plans for making them.  This wave of subtle but profound novelty
rolled at varying speeds out into the suburbs and the countryside, and
what was left of the economy of the Earth and its nations writhed again
in an agony of uncertainty and change.

A dozen Izwit orbs flew over the ten largest cities in Africa, dropping
leaflets describing how to construct various devices whose purposes were
not entirely clear.  What was left of the authorities attempted to gain
some control over them, many were quickly hidden, secreted, taken out of
the country, sold on the black market that was still functioning (much
as it always had, really).  Most of them were not used, the instructions
not finding their way to anyone willing and able to carry them out, but
some were.  A few days later a thousand square miles of land, north of
Pretoria, vanished under a perfectly circular, and apparently completely
impenetrable, hemisphere of shiny blackness.

Lina Magee and Luca Maris had taken for themselves a small coffee shop
and the rooms directly above it, in central Washington D.C., conveniently
close to the government buildings and certain buildings in Virginia.
The former owners had left, and left behind a note to the effect that
anyone who wanted anything was welcome to it.  Luca had found out about
the situation through contacts in what was left of the police force.

"Have you decided yet?" Lina asked him one morning, on their way to
the Smithsonian building where they would be working that day.

"Decided?"

"You remember," she said with a half-smile, "decided whether we're headed
for Utopia, or Hell."

He grinned, something he had been doing more often recently.  "I have
definitely not decided, and I'm even coming to suspect that they may be
the same thing."

That day they were working with a team from the Smithsonian and Georgetown
University, who had managed to assemble a solid core group of people who
seemed unlikely to drift away, and who had a set of skills that seemed
relevant to, as Luca put it, "the task of figuring out what the hell is
going on".

They had a good piece of the building to themselves.  The electricity
was of course functioning, coming as it did from a set of alien boxes
appropriately hooked to the building's circuitry.  The water was acceptable,
if a bit turbid, that day; enough people with skills or inclinations had
drifted back to the maintenance of the water system that it was at
least running.  ("Gives a guy a good feeling to keep something running,"
Lina had heard a sweaty hard-hatted man say that morning, as they went
into the building.  He was speaking to another man, a colleague, also in
a hard-hat, as they lowered themselves into an open manhole, toolbelts
around their waists.)

"Significant developments this morning," that day's team-leader said,
his back to them, writing on a whiteboard, "from the overnight radio,
include further rapid spread of both the meat fruit plants and the
itchy-arrow plants across the southern United States."  Lina had tasted
the fruit of the meatfruit plants, once a few plausible-sounding laboratories
had confirmed the claims of the aliens that had started them out, that
they were safe and apparently nutritious.  The taste was strange and
aromatic, but she thought she might get used to it.  Even come to like
it.

"The number of visitors on Earth continues to be roughly in equillibrium,
holding rather steady at roughly four hundred thousand, with a turnover
rate of something like ten thousand per day.  There are still sporadic
reports of humans being taken up by the aliens, but none have been
plausibly confirmed."  Later in the day one of the team members would
deliver this same report, smoothed out if necessary, to a bank of
television cameras, on what had taken place of the professional newscasts.
Ratings, if there had been any ratings, would have been slightly better
than before the invasion, or the Arrival as it was being called in
popular culture.

"A number of Heffel," that being, they had discovered, the name of the
elephantine (Babaresque, Lina still thought) species that had come first
to MIT, "have been buying up land in Manhattan and Tokyo --"

"Buying up land?"

"Yes, in the most straightforward way, offering gold or currency or
technology in exchange for the deeds to the properties."

"Do we know that they have the same concept of ownership that we do, in
these cases?  Do we have some idea how closely their expectations match
ours?"

Whether or not the question was rhetorical, no one attempted to answer.

This was turning out to be one of the largest challenges in dealing with
those of the aliens that had both the interest and ability to interact
with humans on a linguistic level: although they had some kind of amazingly
sophisticated translation devices, the expectations that the aliens had
around various words and concepts were different in complex and sometimes
crippling ways than the expectations of the humans involved.

"The unpleasantnesses in Mexico, and around the Black Dome in southern
Africa, seem to have abated, at least for the moment."

"Unpleasantness" being the operative synonym for "riot" in that room at
that time.  Riots and similar social uprisings had been surprisingly rare,
given the very alien nature of the aliens, and the human tendency to shoot
anything that is too different, and failing that to become enraged about
the inability to shoot, and to set fire to parts of the surroundings as
a sort of replacement.

One popular explanation for this was the "Harmony Ray" that had been
mentioned prominently in some of the mostly-incomprehensible radio
transmissions that had preceded the Arrival (and mostly ceased since).
Although the ransmissions had not said so (nor had it said anything
else decodable), the assumption (or conclusion) among certain sectors of
the bruised and dazed and delighted Earth population was that the seed-pod
ship, or the ovoids of the Izwit, or the wildly variable forms of the ships
that had carried the First and Second and Third and subsequent Waves of
visitors to the Earth, were equipped with rays of an unknown type, which
caused humans' minds to operate along friendly and harmonious lines, rather
than killing or rioting or blowing things up.  Opinions on the desirability
of this situation were mixed, from "damn well about time" to "are we going
to let these lunatic aliens control our minds?".  Ways of avoiding alien
mind control were not immediately obvious, although the number of people
on the streets wearing metal of one kind or another on their heads,
generally artfully concealed behind hats, had sharply increased.

"The situation in the dominated areas in rural south-Asia seems to be
stable.  There are no reports of newly dominated towns, and the flow
of refugees out of the areas is at roughly the same level as the flow
into them, as far as anyone has been able to measure."  Lina shuddered
again, at the pictures she had seen from the area, at how impossibly
attractive, even in a grainy far-zoomed closeup, the lithe golden-skinned
man had looked, caught standing in the doorway to a converted government
building, now hung with garishly bright cloths of a thousand colors,
piles of fruit and meat and televisions around the door at his feet,
half a dozen attendants bowing before him.  He was slightly too large,
slightly too perfect, to be human, and the plump tendrils on the top
of his elegant skull should have been revolting, but she felt somewhere
in herself a perfect understanding of why so many people, male and female,
had made their way to the sporadically-maintained checkpoints around
the dominated area, and slipped past the occasional guards.

"Do we know anything more about the dominator?" Line thought that this
was an unfortunate name, but it had stuck.

"No," the team leader replied after a moment looking through the papers
he held, turning to type on the laptop open on the table beside him.
"No new simultaneous sightings, but we still have the previous six,
verifying that he can be in two places at once, or that there are
multiple dominators.  No image or other evidence suggests any detectable
differences between the dominators of the various towns.  And we have
had no success in questioning any other visitors on the subject."

More typing.

"Hm, wait.  Here's a new blog entry," and he switched on the projector,
overlaying his scrawls on the whiteboard with the front page of the
DomWatch weblog.  "Just in, looks significant.  We can read it
together?"  He looked up at the room, tentative, not used to being
in any position of leadership.  The rest were already reading.

"A Rogue Heffel on the Dom, from DomWatch Angela.

"I was able to approach a solitary Heffel in McKinley Park.  He was
behind some trees in a corner of the park, and no one else had seen
him.  He was apparently in a deep viewing mode, maybe 3 or 4, sitting
on the ground with a good view of the rest of the park.  I sat
beside him without speaking, per protocol.  His proboscis became more
mobile, and he slowly came out to a 1 or 2 and seemed to look at me.
I chose not to get out any audio recorder, my phone was in my back
pocket and I did not want to move that much.  So I do not have a
transcription to post.  But I engaged him in conversation slowly.
His replies were very clear and almost in plain English.

"He said that he had been on Earth since the Second Wave, and that
he was very pleased with his visit.  He told me that he does not know
why the mother ship came to the solar system, just as the other Heffel
and most of the other aliens have said.  This is the usual story and
I have no reason to believe it particularly in this case.  He said
he does not know how the mothership's space drive works, or how the
energy boxes work, in these areas he was even less willing to make
statements than the average Heffel speaking to media.

"But when I raised the subject of how he has been spending his time
on Earth, and his opinion of humans, he became more voluble.  His
proboscis was very active, as if in Heffel analysis mode, but he
did not rise or look for artifacts to examine.  This may be some
new mode of conceptual or verbal analysis that we have not identified
before."

Lina winced to herself at this point on the page.  Amateur net groups
like DomWatch had constructed elaborate theories about the aliens,
with complex terminology about their behaviors, implausible guesses
about the structure of their thoughts, and self-important systems of
all kinds.  Dozens of them, all incompatible and mostly so laced
with multisyllabic jargon and driven by a desire to sound scientific
as to be essentially useless.

"In his statements that followed, he used the word 'sorrow' several
times.  He said that he has 'been being in sorrow', and that he
'has for you on the planet here sorrow'.  I have looked through the
web lexicon on the Heffel, and not found a single prior instance
of the word 'sorrow'.  This strengthens my belief that this one
individual was in a new state, or is in a position in his Heffel
society that we haven't seen before.

"He replies when I asked him about his 'sorrow' or the causes of
it were less understandable.  He said that he was 'in sorrow for
the long time of the planet' and 'in sorrow from the planet and
you the people and your joy.'  I have also been unable to find
previous uses of the word 'joy' by a Heffel.

"I was afraid that he might end the conversation at any time, so
rather than following up on the 'sorrow' and 'joy' subjects I
brought up the subject of the Dom, using the phrase 'the golden
person in our towns who makes himself central' which has had
some success before.  When I did so, the Heffel's proboscis moved
in a series of circles, of type C I would say, for some seconds
before he spoke.  I will not speculate on the meaning of that
gesture, leaving it for the analysts.

"I have tried to memorize his answers relative to the Dom, because
I think they may represent a real breakthrough in our understanding,
both confirming some of our prior guesses, and also opening up new
avenues of possibility to be explored.  I will not comment on my
own interpretation of his statements until people have had a chance
to read this and post to the forums.

"'It is,' he said, 'it is that he makes himself central in your
places of the planet.  He makes himself central also in our places
of the ship and the ships.  He is of sorrow also, it is, but not
of the long sorrow.'

"He was then silent for some time, and the motion of his proboscis
slowed.  I was afraid he might be withdrawing from the conversation,
but then he continued.

"'He is the central, the seeing and also the hearing.  He is
being of you with the matter, it is, being of you with the matter
of your towns.  On the ship the matter is the finite cutting-off,
but here on the planet the matter is the vast.  We are all in
the joy, but he is of the central.  On the ship he is being many,
the joy and the short sorrow.  On the planet he is being in
some of your places only, being the central but not the only.
It is.  He will be contained.'"

"You can imagine how I felt when he said 'He will be contained.'
It's hard not to read this as some reassurance that the other
species on the mothership are aware of the Dom as a threat to
Earth, and that they will somehow take steps to protect us.

"The Heffel became silent again after this, and I tried to ask
further about the word 'contained', but he was not responsive.
Because 'On the ship he is being many' seemed to touch on the
number of Dom that exist on the ship, I tried asking him plainly
how many of the Dom were on Earth, one or many.

"He replied: 'No, it is.  He is not many of the he on the planet,
he is not one, it is.  He is two.  The He and She, on the planet,
in the short sorrow.  It is.'

"At this the Heffel slumped in what looked to me like the gesture
of accomplishment, and became quiet again.  I tried further
conversation, but got no responses, and eventually I saw that
he was entering deep viewing mode agian, moving quickly to an
obvious 4.  I stayed as long as I could, but there was no more
communication.

"Questions are welcome in the forums.  There was little sonic or
otherwise interference, and I could make out his voice very
distinctly.  In particular, The Heffel's reference to 'the He and
the She' was unmistakable.  Looking back I should have risked
getting out my phone and recording, but I didn't.  See you in
the forums."

Luca, sitting beside her, must have finished reading the projected
words at about the same time she did; she looked over at him to
see him looking back.  Their eyes met for just a moment, then he
leaned back, stretching.

"More evidence that their translators just don't work, if you
as me."  This was one of the many theories around the opacity
of the aliens' communication.  That they had, for instance,
hastily adapted the translators that they used between their own
languages, and that they were missing fundamental functions in
their translation of human languages.  By some accounts and
guesses the seed-pod ship had been in space for at least hundreds
of years since it last visited a planet that might have been
home to strange intelligences; how out of practice they must be
at translating new languages.

"But another reference to the woman," Lina said quietly back.

"Eh," he grunted.


(14)

"And I am the only Human on the ship?"

The creature's eyes had changed coloration, the Greater Klite
thought to herself, or perhaps the pale hairless skin around
them had.  The thing looked tired, worn, somehow smaller.  But
it never stopped moving, asking questions, wanting to look into
things.  It reminded her of a Heffel in some ways, but a thin
and feverish one.

The six of them were still together, or together again, because
being together had become the thing that they were doing, in the
casual way that that happened among residents of the burr, the vast
black seed-pod ship, who had left the primary domains of their own
species, and wandered out into the cosmopolitan interstices, under
the general and benign organization or lack thereof of the Terce
and their patron Deep Thinkers.

The transcend seemed to be there always, to define the center of
gravity of the group.  Transcends did not of course sleep, or eat
except for pleasure, or require privacy or retreat for the elimination
of wastes or the honoring of clan or ancestors.  But it did have its
periods of quiet, generally when the other five were resting or
sleeping or absent, when it would sit or recline, very still, its
eyes open and disturbingly unblinking (the Greater Klite thought),
and its music, if it was making music, would fade away to almost
nothing, just a subtle touch of color in the air.  She wondered
what it was doing in those times, some equivalent of sleep, of
the processing of memory, or if its mind was just off somewhere
else, flitting down the data circuits of the communication matrix,
embodying itself perhaps in a exterior capsule of the ship, or
even giving itself form somewhere on the blue-white planet below,
looming dark and ominous over whatever was happening down there.

The others, including the Human, had taken up residence, or a
sort of residence, in a cluster of multispecies Terce sleeping
pods not far from the great hub where they had sat that first
day, watching the Human stare down at the riot of races and
colors.  The Human seemed to sleep very much like a Greater
Klite, if somewhat louder.  (She had had to turn off the sound
into her pod once in order to sleep, blocking the music of
the transcend along with the wet rasping sounds the Human was
making.)

When the Human asked his question, the slatesh was in its pod,
in the limp semi-liquid state that was its own rough equivalent
of sleep, and the rest of them were lounging in the common area
of the cluster, interacting with shared display screens (a nice
bit of primitivity that the Human seemed more comfortable with
than shared direct projection), and watching the Human randomly
exploring the information space of the commity.

The last thing the Greater Klite had noticed it in was an only
slightly interactive drama of homecoming nand forgiveness, something
low-scale, probably written as the side-effect of some Deep Thinker
construct, but nice enough as time-candy.  The Human seemed oddly
troubled by it, or so she guessed from the muscles in its face,
and it had slumped back away from the screen when it reached one
of the endings, and asked the question in a tone of lamentation.

"No, in fact," the transcend replied, "there at now roughly forty-three
other Humans from the planet present on or in the immediate vicinity
of the ship."

The Human jerked its body at the words.  "Truth is?" it said,
loudly and suddenly, straying from the understood vocabulary
that the translation mesh had been subtly training it to.
"Eagerness to experience!  Surprise!"   Then it seemed to collect
its wits.  "I mean, that is interesting information.  Is it
possible for me to communicate with them?  To see some of them
directly together?  When did they arrive here?"

"Triangle," said one of the Frlepti, languidly.  The pair was
nearing the egg-laying stage, the Greater Klite thought, and
they had become lazy and quiet, except for the occasional
enigmatic noun.

The transcend had tilted its head forward and back, a mottion
that apparently signified assent or acknowledgement to both
the transcend and the Human.  "You may communicate with them
on the screens or your direct connection," it said, the black
fabric of its face moving slightly with the words, "or you
may see some of them in person if you prefer."

The human opened and closed its mouth, sensibly placed in the
lower half of its face, two or three times, looked at the screen
that it had been using, looked over at the Frlepti and back at
the transcend, and said, "Thank you!  I would prefer to see them
in person I believe."

And a few minutes later, joined by the slatesh riding in a small
personal roller because it had not yet firmed up enough to move
at speed itself, they were in another shorter transit tube, heading
for another car station.  The Greater Klite wished the Human would
code for the translocators like any sensible person, but for some
reason the transcend had not urged it to.  And the Human seemed to
enjoy travel by ship-car, for some reason.

In one of those rural towns, so completely and ecstatically
transformed by the coming of the Orb, and the arrival among them
of the Orb's Gift, the Gift himself lay lazily on his back,
staring up at soothing abstract patterns the ceiling was generating,
one arm around the smaller and lighter version of himself, whose
head rested on his shoulder, and whose hands played idly over
his broad body.

They rested on a warm fluid-filled membrane, in the central
hollow of a pod of smart fabric and nanomachines that occupied
every cubic inch of the space in the room, while at the same
time completely insulating them from the wooden walls, the
crude door, the dead and ugly floor and ceiling.  She had
insisted, as he'd known she would, in deploying the pod for
them before they made love, and he had put up an enormous fuss,
as she'd known he would, before he relented.

The people outside, attendants and worshippers and the curious
(the latter soon to be worshippers, and even attendants if they
were lucky) had either prostrated themselves or crawled away at
the sounds from the inside, and then at the strange quiet, at
the shaking of the building, and the strange fumes that had
poured out of it.

"How goes it, up in the ship?"

"It goes," she murmured, "it goes as it must go."

"You have more of the humans now, up there?"

"Oh, yes.  More, but so many less than wanted to go."  She
smiled to herself, and nibbled at the smooth golden skin of
his shoulder with perfect white teeth.

"They are a delicious people, aren't they?" he asked, sliding
one hand down to squeeze her flank.  She bit him harder, and
he laughed.

"They are as we expected them to be, as they had to be.  Large
and petty, fearless and afraid, noble and scurrilous.  They are
the product of history," she said, the last word a drawn-out hiss
that might have meant contempt, or hatred, or something else
entirely.

"Is there communication?"

"Besides here, you mean?" her voice a hot whisper in his ear,
"Besides here where your body and your mind penetrate theirs,
enter them and possess them, communicate with them at the deepest
level that matter can know?"  He turned and would have wrapped
his arms around her, but she laughed musically and twisted away
from him.

"There is," she said, "communication of a sort.  Understanding, not
so much.  But even that there is, a drop here, a hint there.  A
brief ray of light from mind to mind, like a door opening for an
instant and closing."  He approached her slowly, his hands moving
to touch her gently, in broad slow caress.  "They long for it,
for understanding, for touch," she whispered, her voice growing
less steady.  "They misunderstand us, they misunderstand each
other.  Between each other, between human and human, it is worse,
if anything.  Because they do it on purpose..."  The last word
again a hiss, but this time not from contempt or hatred.  He
continued to touch her body, and her breath came faster.

"So the two main threats, or at least the concrete ones, are the
black dome in Africa, and the dominated areas."  They were having
lunch in the plaza again, on a windy afternoon.  No aliens were
present, at least not obviously, but five of the children were
playing with some kind of anti-gravity device, taking turns hanging
on to it and letting the wind blow them around.

"Unless you count the destruction of the world economy," Luca
replied dryly.

"Oh, and the itchy-arrow plants," she added, ignoring his comment.
They'd been through that before.  "They still spreading fast."

He made a derisive sound.

"They could be a esrious threat to the ecosystem.  Along with
the meatfruit trees, but at least those are beneficial."

"Yeah, some alien's garden spills a seed or two, it puts an
end to world hunger and like the need to ever work.  Sort
of beneficial, in a way."

"You're a grouch."

"I'm tired."

They were both tired.  They were all tired.  Stress-related illnesses
were up everywhere on the globe that people were still managing to
keep records, with the exception of a few anomalous spots where they
were down sharply along with most or all other illnesses, and people
were beginning to notice and flock in to see what was up.

She fully expected that any day now, someone would turn up with an
alien pill, or tanning booth, or foot-lotion, that cured all known
diseases and make your teeth extra-shiny in the process.

"I am, too.  And I'm a grouch too."

He looked up and smiled, or half-smiled.  "Let's get some dessert."

They both liked pistachio ice-cream.


(15)

"Hi!"

"Hi, oh my God, welcome!"

"Good to see a human face."

"When did you come up?

"Wow, hey!"

"Really, wow!  You were the first?"

"That's what they told me any--"

"Hey, wow where are you from?"

"Was it the Izwit?"

"Yeah, yeah, me too!"

"The Izwit!  Yeah."

"How long have you been --"

"I don't really know how it happened, they don't --"

"Has anyone been up here and gone back home?  I'm starting to --"

"Have you tried the Terce food?  My God, some of it is --"

"Where've you been staying?  Do you have your own pod?  Have they let you --"

"God I could so use a long hot bath."

"Did you ask them?  I'll bet they could --"

"Isn't it incredible?"

"Beyond my wildest dreams!  Come over here, you have to meet --"

"The guy in black, is that one of the Exalted?"

"Transcend, we've been calling him.  He seems to be really just --"

"Man, they must think we're completely nuts!"

"Have they let anyone see the engines?  Mine told me that the Navigators --"

"Wait, wait, you haven't had a bath?  They made you use a shower, or --"

"You were the first?  You're kidding!  Was it those little guys, what do you --"

"The Izwit, yeah.  I was out in my back yard, looking at the sky --"

"I hear back on Earth they've like taken over India and --"

"You're kidding!"

"Man, I never want to go back; the stars for me!"


(16)

Wikipedia Reborn (tm)
The Free Encyclopedia of the Commity
Help Wikipedia Grow: _Donate Now_

Main entry: DomWatch
Domwatch Dot Com redirects here.

(It has been suggested that _DomWatch Media Catalog_ be merged into this article.)

(This article needs additional _citations_ for _verification_.  Please help
_improve this article_ by adding _reliable references_.  Unsource material may
be _challenged_ and removed, as _required_ by _Commity law_.)

(The _neutrality_ of this article is _disputed_.  Please see the discussion on the
_talk page_.)

(Some _alien invasion_ related information in this article may be _embargoed_ by
certain countries and cultural organizations.  Please see _Wikipedia: Alien Information
Embargoes_ if you are uncertain whether such an embargo applies to you.)

(Some information in this article may be _anathema_ in _the Emirate of Lagrange
Five Beta_.  Please see the criteria on _Wikipedia: L5 Beta Advisories_.)

(This article may contain or link to some information provided by the Izwit,
and therefore require special precautions. Please see _Wikipedia: Izwit Information_
for further details.)

DomWatch is a group-authored _weblog_ on the subject of the _Dominator_ entity
that arrived on _Earth_ during the _alien invasion_.

Origin

DomWatch began as a section of the _Watch the Skies_ weblog.  When Watch the
Skies was shut down, DomWatch and _Heffellog_ were spun off into their own
sites.  _Galvin Clyde_, the original moderator of the Dominator section of
Watch the Skies, salvaged much of the information to serve as the initial
seed for DomWatch.

Structure and History

DomWatch was originally just a simple group weblog, with a number of
authors, mostly former staff of Watch the Skies and their friends.
The weblog allowed comments, and the volume of the comments far exceeded
the volume of the postings themselves, often moving to topics having nothing
to do with the original post.  After two months of operation, a _forums_
system was added so that, in the words of Clyde, "we can stop endlessly
repeating the same discussions in every comment thread, and endlessly
repeat them in forum threads instead."

More authors were gradually added from the most valuable contributors to
the forums, and DomWatch gained a reputation as a source of alien-related
news and information during the first chaotic period of the invasion that
was considered among the most reliable [citation needed].

As well as the weblog and the forums, DomWatch developed an extensive
_media library_ (see _DomWatch Media Catalog_ for a catalog of its holdings),
contributed by weblog authors and forum  users.  The media library included
most of the available video and still images of the Dominator entity itself,
as well as extensive video and interviews concerning the dominated areas.

Material from the DomWatch media library was used prominently in the
_Invasion Hearings_.

Controversy

DomWatch has been the subject of a number of controversies, including
accusations that it contained extensive _Izwit_ information [citation needed],
that Galvin Clyde had illegally stolen the original material from the
owners of Watch the Skies, and that significant material in the media
library was either forged or misdescribed [citation needed].  In many
periods in its history these controversies made up the majority of
postings in the forums, since new Dominator information was only very
seldom available.

Many subjects concerning the Dominator entity (or entities) also
provide controversy in the DomWatch forums.  The question of whether
the Dominator was a single entity or multiple entities (even a whole
species) is probably the most common, with opinions held very strongly
on both sides.

When the _Female Dominator_ reports began to appear, contributors to
DomWatch quickly split into two _camps_, one supporting the authenticity
of the reports, and one strongly questioning or rejecting them.  While
later events (see _Dominator_, _Female Dominator_) put an end to most of
these threads, there are still DomWatch posters who reject the findings
of the _Hartley Commission_, and persist in bringing the subject up on
the forums and the weblog.

The DomWatch weblog was unreachable for at least five days after the
_Internet Blackout_.  Some forum contributors maintain that during this
period it was being suppressed, or even altered, by Izwit or other
interests.  But the site authors, and especially Galvin Clyde, deny
this, saying that the delay was purely a post-Blackout ISP problem.

Another popular topic of debate is how important the DomWatch media
library material in fact was in the success or otherwise of the
_Invasion Hearings_.

Status

The DomWatch site is still one of the most popular Invasion-related
weblogs [citation needed], and the forums are extremely active.
Galvin Clyde has turned over daily operation of the site to a group
of "MiniDoms", who are popular and (mostly) trusted contributors to
and moderators of the weblog and the forums.  While no figures are
publically available, posters on the forums have estimated that the
site earns on the order of one hundred thousand Euros per month
through the placement of _text advertisements_.

Related Articles

_Weblog_
_Dominator_
_Female Dominator_
_Alien Invasion_
_Heffellog_
_New Media_
_DomWatch Media Catalog_
_Commity New Media_


(17)

Night in Hong Kong is only slightly darker than day.  In some places,
it's brighter.  It's always been a chaotic place, a rich soup.  The
aliens coming have just made it a bit more that way.

Luiz Xu was looking for a place with a bit more darkness, and a few
less aliens.  A few less people too, while he was at it.  He was in
one of those moods.  The aliens had screwed up the world even worse
than people had already screwed it up.  The dirt had a funny smell to
it now, the pollution was worse every day, everyone knew it, and it
also had a funny alien smell.  Alien power-boxes had thrown half the
world out of work, including him.  And who wanted to eat meatfruit
the rest of their lives?

Turning away from a neon street, toward a block or two of alleys and
warehouses where he hoped to find some quiet and a place to sit and
drink, his eye caught a silver glint on the sidewalk.  He walked toward
it, bent down, but saw nothing that could have explained it.  Then
looking up, he saw it again, on the street this time, further in the
direction he had been going.  He walked forward, slowly, and it moved
away before him, like the reflection of the moon (there was no moon,
but there were high lights, here and there, on the looming buildings,
it could have been one of them) reflecting from a shiny line of something
on the ground.  It shone, shone beckoningly, with a silvery light,
rich like satin, like precious metal.  He followed it into the shadow.

It shone, still just ahead of him, in the alley, even though there
was on light to reflect, or there seemed not to be.  He walked more
slowly, carefully, sniffing and listening ahead for anything or anyone
that might be there, breathing and living in the dark.  He caught
an odd scent, sharp and acrid, exotic.

Around the last turn, at an intersection of three alleys between
windowless warehouses, hidden from view until the last moment by
a broken crate, a pile of cinderblocks, a shape glowed with that
same silvery light.  It was a low shape, humped and amorphous,
sitting unmoving in the dark, lit itself but casting light on nothing
else.  He could nearly see a silver trail on the ground, leading from
the shape back out the way he had come.

He reached down to touch it, the rich silver light glinting in his
eyes, filling his eyes.  The surface felt cold at first, cold and
oddly slick, almost moving out of the way under his fingers, but also
binding, slick and sticky at once.  And then his fingers felt nothing
at all.  It took Luiz Xu a long moment to realize that it was because
his fingers were gone.  And then it was far too late.

He did scream, brief and shrill, but in all the noise of the late
night city and the busy streets no one heard.  Or if they heard they
thought nothing of it.  One short scream.  Happens all the time.

"So has anyone who came up here gone back?  I asked that before,
but I missed the answer."

"Yeah, we think so."

"You think so?"

"Well, we asked, and they answered, but you know how it is --"

"Yeah, god."

"And they were saying, I think, that they couldn't really tell us the
details because of privacy concerns --"

"Privacy concerns?"

"Well, something like that, I don't know, but anyway that they
couldn't really tell us the details, but that people who had come
up here had been taken back down again, at least one, and were
back on Earth now."

"And we can go back, any time, if we want?"

"Do you want to?"

"No, God no, but it'd be nice, I don't know --"

"To know that you could."

"If you wanted to."

"Yeah, exactly.  I mean, we're all up here voluntarily --"

"Do we know that?"

"You heard of or talked to anyone who came against their will?"

"No, not exactly, I mean --"

"We all wanted to come."

"Okay, so we all wanted to come, but even if we're all here voluntarily
like I said, it'd be good to know that we can go back too --"

"That we're not prisoners."

"Yeah, that we're controlling what happens to us --"

"And they're going along."

"Yeah."

"So did they say we could go back down?"

"Well, I think --"

"Sort of."

"They didn't say No."

"But you know how they are."

"Oh, yeah."

The Director of the UNOOSA that was walked into the office in the
Smithsonian building where Luca was sitting at a laptop, drinking
coffee from a cracked mug.  She saw he was looking at images of aliens,
one of a Dominator taken from a long distance, one Izwit ovoid ship (unless
that was an Izwit itself, they still didn't know), a pair of Heffel (Babars,
she thought) apparently communicating to each other.

"Something you'll want to see," she said.

"What you got?"

She slipped the sheaf of papers out of her bag, turned the first one over
on the desk.  It showed a large florid man in an expensive suit, about to
enter the door of a building on some city street.

"Recognize him?"

"That mogul, isn't it, who's been buying up properties?  One of the New
Moguls?  Make me nervous, they do.  Taking advantage of the invasion to
get richer."

"Okay," she said, "recognize him?"

A grainier photograph, but it seemed to be the same suit, the same figure,
seem from the back, the same lower hairline, large body and slightly short
arms and legs.  Again about to go through a doorway, into what looked like
a different building.

"Same guy," he said.  And he looked uncomfortably over at the pictures on
his screen.

"And taken at almost the same time, almost a thousand miles away."

He chewed on his lower lip.  "Damn," he said, and he breathed out a long
breath, tired or resigned or perhaps afraid.

"Yeah," she said.

"There's lots of other explanations."

"Of course there are," she said, looking down at him, thinking how thin
he looked.  "Do you think --"

"No," he interrupted, "there lots of explanations, but they're wrong.
He's an alien.  Or a species of them.  Or another kind of Dominator."

"Yeah."

"Do we know anything else," he asked, "and hordes of shapely girls,
piles of fruit at his feet?"

"Nothing like that so far," she said, "we're working on it."

"God," he breathed, and turned to his laptop.  He clicked a link, waited,
frowned, clicked more, typed on the keyboard.

"Network trouble?"

"Yeah, again."  The network had been surprisingly stable, considering,
since the invasion had begun.  But it had had its glitches.

He pulled a small black cellular phone from his shirt pocket, flicked
it open, frowned again.  "Shit."

"Not getting a signal?"

"Yeah."

She went to the corner, found the landline phone and picked up the
receiver, looked at him with fear in her eyes.

"It's probably just some temporary -- thing," he said.

"Yeah," she said, "temporary."

In three places far away, the attendants crouched facing away from the
inner presence-room, and tried to ignore the sounds of ecstacy and
violence from inside.


(18)

The Greater Klite sat in the common room, the ceiling showing the
starfield as it would have looked if there were nothing between it and
the stars, as if the miles of seed-pod ship outradius from the common
room were absent, or invisible.  She was immersed in her data matrix,
resting, tapping mostly into her own people's sources, the information
space of the Greater Klite, warm and familiar, images of predator and
prey, the Great Certainties, the long sweep of the past and its stories.

In one corner the transcend sat, or lay, folded into an odd shape that
she preferred not to look at for long, apparently immersed in whatever
transcends immersed in, but its music playing nonetheless, a long
multi-voiced fugue complex with overtones and simultaneous melodies
chasing each other around the scale.  It made a surprisingly fitting
accompaniment to her movement through the Greater Klite matrix, although
it was nothing like any music that a Greater Klite had ever made, or
ever played in the home domain.

A small-band of Greater Klite had gone down to the planet in the
second wave, found a rich plain of prey species (verified non-sentient
to satisfy the Terce and their patrons), and had been continuously
streaming experiences of the hunt to those still on the ship.  She
had spent long hours with them, the thrust of the spear, the warmth
of prey-blood in the mouth.  It left her, always, feel exhiliarated
but also queasy, tapping both her ancestral nature and whatever quirk
of spirit had drawn her here to the cosmopolitan interstices early in
her life, out here to the land of transcends, the Clinging Dome, the
Frlepti (entirely different creatures now that their egg was laid),
the slatesh and the Humans.  Especially the Humans.

The records, both the ancestral ones of the Greater Klite and the
more or less consensus ones of the ship as a whole, suggested that
not only were upright quadrupeds common in the commity of body (she
snarled slightly to herself on noticing how much the slatesh
phrase had worked itself into her vocabulary, even into her
thinking), but that omnivores were as well, and upright omnivorous
quadrupeds like these Humans not the majority of species (there
was no majority, as far as the records showed, between the
various categories), but the solid plurality of sentient and
intelligent, potentially star-faring, species in the galaxy.

Which seemed unfair to the Greater Klite, especially unfair after
she had been in the planetside hunting experience stream for a
few hours, and felt very much the predator, the predatory hormones
running high and hot in her blood, the taste of meat in her mouth.
Why should vegetable-eating make a species fitter for survival
and intelligence?  Why for that matter should four roughly
equal appendages, the back two more or less recently adapted
for locomotion and the front for manipulation?  She felt the
rightness of that herself in all of her muscles, running over
the plain on her legs and throwing the spear with her arm,
using the skinning knife with her broad furred hands.  But
the stubbornly rational, fatally non-traditional, part of her
mind thought of all the other possible body-plans with roughly
the same engineering properties, and wondered why they were,
as far as was known, so much rarer in the flecks that floated in
the endless night.

The Human came into the common area and looked about itself.  It
had gotten quite good at finding its way from the flat room where
it consorted with its fellow Humans and the place where their pods
were.  It was only two transit tubes and a short trip by car, but
still.  It was a sign, she thought, that it was gaining some
understanding, seeing its new surroundings as an understandable
whole rather than a random assemblage of puzzles.

"Greetings," it said, "hello."

"Hello," the Greater Klite replied.  At the sound of the Human's
return the slatesh rolled out of its own pod, its attendant devices
hovering around it, and one of the Frlepti (now that their egg had
been laid they were not quite as inseparable) stepped out of theirs.
The transcend's music swelled and lightened (she wondered if that
meant that more of its attention was here now, or if that was just
the next movement in the piece).

"I would like to know," it said, "I have been communicating and
discoursing with the other Humans and I would like to know, we would
like to know, if it possible for us to return to Earth."  Then it
frowned.  "We are not expressing a desire to return to Earth with
this question," it said carefully, "only asking yes or not if it is
a possible thing or not."

"Of course," said the transcend before any of the others spoke,
"very many things are possible.  Very many."

Far below on the blue-white planet, a young woman in a dark green
vest with many pockets, and her hair tied untidily back behind her
head, typed on a keyboard in a room lit by bright blue-tinged lights,
and frowned.

"It's not coming back up."

"Neither of the backup units?"

"Eighty-nine came up for a minute, but now it's wedged again."

"Can you see in from the outside at all?"

"I don't have a path in from anywhere.  If MAE East is down, I don't
have direct --"  Her cellphone chirped again.

"Yeah?"

"You can't?  Why not?"

"Yeah, I got that.  What happens when you try?"

"Damn, that's what happened here, too.  Doesn't make any sense."

"Could you raise anyone at JPIX or CHIX?"

"Yeah, me too.  And they said the same thing?"

"And -- hello?  Hello?  Shit."

She clicked the phone off, then on again.  She pushed buttons, snarled,
and turned it off with a disgusted snap.

"Do you know any ham radio operators?" she asked the other woman in the
room, who was sitting backward in a metal chair, staring out the window.

"What's that?"

"You know, amateur radio.  Transmitters and receivers.  Analog.  With the
Internet and the digital phone system this badly crashed, how else are
we going to talk?"

The other woman groaned.

"I was about to say we should google some up."

"Uh-huh," the other said, "I know. I know."

In another place, a tall thin man held a radio-telephone to his ear,
muttered a few short words into it, and set it down.  He turned to the
other two in the interior of the trailer, bared his teeth in what might
have been a smile, and said "Get out the guns.  Looks like it's starting."


(19)

"The networks at the major Internet Exchange Points," said the green-vested
woman, and you could hear the capital letters in her voice, "are not working.
The network equipment seems to be fine, or at least basically fine, and it
passes all standalone tests and isolated-network tests.  But as soon as we
hook any piece of exchange traffic to it, it crashes, or freezes, or powers
down."

She was standing in front of the same whiteboard.  Half the audience was
the usual Smithsonian group, the other half some mixture of military and
networking experts who had known in one way or another of this group and
this room and come down, there being no more rational or organized means
of deciding where to go or what to do.

"Aren't there backups, redundant connections?  The Internet is supposed
to be survivable."

The woman rolled her eyes.  "That's a myth.  Buy anyway yeah, there are
redundant connections, and backups, and failover circuits, and they're
all failing as soon as they try to deal with any exchange traffic.  We
can't tell what's in the traffic, because the analyzers that we hook to
it crash also.  The voltages seem normal, it's not like we're getting
lightning bolts down the wires, but whatever the data is, it's playing
hell with the hardware."

"And you think this is alien action?"

"I have no idea what to think.  I've never seen anything like it.  The
few other people I've managed to get hold of have never seen anything like
it.  The digital phone system, which is only loosely tied to the Internet,
is having the same problem."

"What about the, um, analog, the old phone system?"

"That was, as you probably recall from all the public-service announcements
at the time, sunset two years ago.  We've tried to activate parts of it,
but without any central coordination we've only managed to talk to a few
phone hackers at random spots in the network who had the same idea.  In
a few days we might be able to reconnect bits of the continent that way,
but it'll be random bits, whatever happens to still have connectivity
and power."

"How about radio?"

"Radio is working.  There was a contingency plan, from like 1999, about
a set of frequencies to use in case other means of communication went
down, and some people seem to have remembered about it.  That's how we've
managed, when conditions are right, to relay all the way to the Internet
Exchanges in London, Tokyo, and so on, and establish that they've all
got problems just like ours.  It's crazy."

"Other people must be working on this problem also."

"Of course.  We've made contact with a few.  No doubt there are others.
But how do we find out about them?  Air travel, what was left of it, is
apparently grinding to a halt.  We hear rumors of riots starting again
in Mexico, and even Chicago, but we can't say for sure.  People with
cameras have nowhere to stream to, the data has no way to get out.  No
way," she repeated, the glazed look in her eyes intensifying, "no way
to get out."  And she looked out at the audience, and slumped slowly to
the floor.

"I can't take this," she whispered, just loudly enough for the first
couple of people coming to her aid to hear, "I just cannot fucking
take this."

He was in a generous mood, a magnanimous mood.  Rather than kicking
the nearest attendant as he burst out of the door, as he sometimes did,
he reached down and grasped the man by the shoulders, lifted him,
effortlessly as a rag doll, pressed his fleshy juice-stained mouth to
the mouth of the quaking human in his hands, and laughed loud and long.
Then he tossed his aside, in the general direction of a pile of fruit that
had been out in the sun just a few minutes too long, and scattered a handful
of gold coins after him, from the pocket of his loose ornate robe.

The attendant scrambled to right himself and assume the proper attitude
of obeisance as the laughing golden figure strode away, and then scrambled
in the dirt for as many of the coins as he could reach before his colleagues
got up the courage and the speed to run over and compete for them.

In the opulently-furnished penthouse of the second-tallest building in
Chicago (United States of America, Earth), an other huge figure, this one
more spherical than lithe, more pale pink than golden, lolled on a
specially reinforced armchair, eating fruit and chocolate from a huge
bowl, watching scenes from the Earth and the seed-pod ship on a trio
of large screens mounted on one wall.  Periodically he would wave his
hand in the direction of an orb of light that hovered at the side of
the chair, and the scenes would change, or the eye would zoom in or out.

Eventually his corpulent hand found his chocolate bowl empty, and he
bellowed, his massive belly shaking, toward someone in the next room.

"Tanya!  More chocolates, damn you.  And show some respect this time."

A tall fair woman, in a simple and expensive black dress, came into the
room with an opened bag of chocolates, and upended it into the bowl.
She kept her eyes averted, her knees slightly bent.

"Ha, good!" the massive figure chortled, and slapped at her with one
vast meaty hand.  "Let us see what your mud-grubber media are saying
today, shall we?"  She turned toward the wall of screens, head still
down.

He waved his hand at the orb of light again, and it swirled in new
patterns.  Two of the screens immediately went dark, and the third, on
the right, showed a pattern of static that periodically half-resolved
into swirling colored boxes before dissolving again.

"What the hell is this?" he shouted, and reached his hand entirely
into the orb of light, moving his fingers to and fro.  "Why is
your planet's network broken, woman?  Does it always do this?"

The woman shook her head, a hint of a smile at the corners of her
mouth.  "Less and less all the time," she said, softly.  Her voice
had a trace of Baltic accent.  "But there have been so many
changes..."

She braced for an explosion, or a laugh, a cuffing or even a
ponderous beating from the vast hands, the immense body, but none
came.  He was looking into the screens, which now showed precise
arcs of color, rapidly flashing shapes, signs and symbols appearing
and vanishing.  And his hand continued to move in the light orb.
She looked up, and her eyes widened.  His face was different, calmer,
more rational.  His body seemed to flow and shimmer, becoming less
obscenely obese, becoming for a moment less human, less flesh, more
something strange and alien.

Then he looked up at her, his face and body flowing like water to
their old configuration, and he looked at her with the old eyes, and
he said, shouted, scolded, "Don't stand there gawking, get out of
here!  Make yourself useful!  Clean some other room, read a book,
improve your mind, stock the larders!  But I don't want to see you
for an hour at least."  And she fled the room, head down again.

Had she stayed, she would have been his body shimmer and flow more
profoundly, into something she would not have recognized, and the
images on the screens speed up insanely, and the figures of odd
creatures, human and not, small elephant-nosed men, things like
six-foot-high insects, appear and disappear, first in the screens,
and then somehow in the room itself, until the spinning and the
odd light and impossible things would have driven her from the room
even if he had not.

The lithe golden man, still in the best of moods, strode among his
admirers, his subjects, his worshippers, reaching out a muscular
arm to squeeze or caress a nearby beauty, aiming only playful kicks
at the people kneeling along his path, reaching out to take one of
the best peaches from a cart and biting deeply into it, the juice
running down his cheeks.

He stopped, suddenly and still, when the nimbus of light formed
at eye level, a meter or so in front of him.  It was spherical and
pearly, glowing with an inner light and yet somehow nearly
invisible.  His attendants and all others within site tried to
study it without appearing to look, but none were particularly
enlightened.  The golden one only stood before it, eyes forward,
as it spun (for it seemed to be spinning) before his eyes.

Later two of those present would swear that they had seen a squat
elephant-god, some avatar of Ganesh appear for an instant and seem
to be conversing with him.  Another attested to the presence of
Hotei, sitting round and humorous on cushions.  But this sort of
thing was always being reported, especially in this area, and no
one paid them much attention.

"Can you, say, put an oscilloscope on the Internet wires, and see
what data is being sent through that's messing up the hardware?
Is it some kind of virus?  Or what?"

"An analog oscilloscope is just going to show us that bits are
flowing.  I'm guessing a digital one will crash, and I'll put
dollars to Fig Newtons on that," she replied.  "The fact is
that whatever's on those lines is mixed up with the real network
traffic, and it's somehow deadly destructive to digital machinery
attached to it, and we're basically screwed."

"We are can providing you the assistance," said a voice from the
back of the room, and a dark-skinned Heffel that none of those
present could recall seeing before thumped on its short legs
down the aisle toward the dias.

Lina heard some angry mutters from a few in the audience, but also
sensed a wave of relief going through most of them.  A hideous
problem, probably caused by the aliens, and finally they were
actually going to help out.  Or lt least try to.  And at that
point she realized that it might not be such a relief after all.

"It ate him, damn it."

"Come on, now."

"I swear!  It was there in the alley, at the end of this like
trail of something on the ground, we went there together, he
could see the trail better than I could."

"Yes, you have said this."

"But you aren't listening!  You've got to come, bring the army and
guns and things!  It's some alien shit thing, and it ate him!  He
touched it, and then his hand was just suddenly gone, and his arm,
and he was screaming but then he wasn't because his mouth was gone,
just gone, just gone, just gone..."

The desk officer and someone from the back room got the hysterical
young man to a chair, where he seemed to calm down, slightly.

"There you go, there you go," said the desk officer.  "You're okay,
now you're okay."

The gangly young man in the torn T-shirt moaned loudly, without
words.  Then he took a breath, seemed to be gathering himself,
and spoke again.

"Can you send just one person, with me, to come and look?  Not to
touch it, or do anything, but see that it is truly there?"

"What's the problem, desk officer?"  The new voice came from a tall
man in a civilian trench-coat, surrounded by an aura of authority.

"This young man, sir.  He says that he and a companion encountered
some alien object --"

"It ate him!  He touched it, and he screamed, and then --"  The
boy seemed in danger of hysteria again, but the tall man's voice
was deep and calm.

"How far from here?"

"Not far, a few streets, back in an alley in the warehouses, just --"

"I'll come with you.  Show me."


(20)

They were in the MAE-East New York Operations room, not the pretty one
with the carpeting and the nice clean screens that the visitors and
investors saw, but the noisy chilly one two floors down, where you have
to squeeze between banks of terabit optical switches and optoelectronic
interconnects to get from the door to the nest in the back where the
beanbag chairs are, and the empty pizza box, and the slightly dusty
terminals and are actually physically connected to things.

"Usually this is all maintained over the network; no one comes through
here but security."

"But when the network is down.."

"Yeah.  This much of the network's never been down before."

Lina and Luca ("Luna", she found herself thinking, "Lica") crouched not
very comfortably to one side of the space; the woman in the green vest,
a blond man and another woman that had joined them on the way in, and
two Heffel (she didn't recall seeing the other one join them, it was
just there) clustered around the keyboards and displays, speaking in
some unhallowed mixture of alien pidgin and network geek speak.  They
seemed to understand each other distressingly well.

"May East?" Luca muttered, at Lina or at no one in particular, as they
crouched feeling not very useful, and wondering just why they had been
chosen (or chosen by default, as they followed and everyone else dropped
back) to come along and observe on behalf of the UN and/or Luca's agency,
whatever was left of either of them.

"MAE," Lina said, "Em Aye Eee. I looked it up.  Metropolitan Area Exchange,
it stands for."

"Aha.  The eastern one."

"Yeah."

"And the western one is... MAE West?"

Lina laughed tiredly.

"Geeks."

"Hey," called the woman in the green vest over her shoulder at them,
"we're like busy saving the world here, don't get all snooty."

"Any progress?" Luca replied, to her or to the Heffel.

"Well, we're --"

"It is the anomaly," the darker of the Heffel interrupted.  "It is
the process of a coming away from the ship of ours.  It is."

"I think it means that something from the ship is causing the network
disruption."

"Yes, the disruption.  It is.  It is the hiding concealment from our
being aware vision.  It was shoulding that we were knowing of the
anomaly earlier.  It is.  Unpleasant."

Lina noticed with some surprise that the Heffel was typing on the
keyboard itself now, no longer watching and speaking as the humans
typed.  It seemed surprisingly good at it, pressing the keys with
rather disturbing nodules that seemed to emerge from the ends of its
stubby arms.

"We will be the acquisition, the bringing.  It is, yes.  We will
be having here the device, the assistance, to be the bettering this."

"Was it intentional," Luca asked, undiplomatically, "Did some group
in your ship plant whatever it is in the network that's causing the
disruption?"

The Heffel raised its arms and its proboscis at the same time, in a
gesture that Lina had originally found comical.  As far as she could tell,
it indicated frustration, or amusement, at an inability to express a
concept.

"Was not was.  It is.  It is not."  The Heffel said, and resumed typing.

The silvery trail was still there, in fact it seemed to be brighter now,
easier to see.  He pointed it out to the tall man in the trench-coat,
who just moved his head from side to side and squinted, but said
nothing.  They moved quickly through the streets of the warehouse
district, under the security lights.

At one point, they heard a scream from ahead, quickly cut off.  The
boy stopped, shuddering, but then started off again, nearly running.

They did not talk.

It was still there, at the place where the alleys came together,
behind the broken crate.  There was nothing around it, no bodies,
no blood, but he had known there wouldn't be.

"I think it's bigger," he whispered, staring at it.  It seemed larger,
shinier, brighter.  It seemed to pulsate, to glow in the darkness, to
swell and relax rhythmically, although he could also see that it wasn't
moving.  One or two of the other silvery trails, not the one that they
had followed in, seemed to be thicker, pulsing in time to the glow of
the mound.

The tall man said something, but he didn't hear what.  He stared at the
shiny mound, thinking what it had done to Hao Guan, what it must have
felt like, shiny and slippery.  He reached out slowly for it, stepping
forward with an arm extended.

The tall man tackled him and pulled him back, restraining his arms
painfully behind him.  The sudden contact and the pain jerked his
eyes away from the silver mound, and he groaned.

"It almost had me," he said, "it almost had me."

Across the city, in the direction of one of the thicker silvery bands
leading away from the mound, a shiny tendril slid out of a sewer
grating, and touched the ankle of a woman sitting on a bench waiting
for a bus.  Her scream lasted slightly longer, and two people on the
street noticed her sudden departure.

"You're really going to stay on the mother ship when it leaves?"

"Hell, yes!  Out to the stars?"

"But doesn't it take them like forever to get to the next star?
Way sublight speeds?"

"Doesn't matter, I'll still be Out There."

"Are they even going to leave?"

"Of course they're going to leave, Earth's just like a pit stop for
them, or a rest area or something."

"A visit."

"Yeah, a visit."

"Will they take you?"

"Well, you know how they are..."

"You really want to spend the rest of your life with aliens who
can't even give a straight answer to a simple question?"

"It's just a matter of learning theirs ways and their language.
Think of it!"

"Not for me."

"So why did you come up?"

"What, did I have a choice?"

"You didn't want to?  I mean, really really want to with every ounce of
your self, so that they couldn't help but hear you and take you up?"

"Well, I =="

"God, that's how I felt."

"Me, too."

"Yeah, I did, too, we all did, but..."

"But now you want to go back down?"

"Not right now, but yeah I want to go back down sometime.  Don't want to
leave Earth forever for who knows what."

"The Big Dark, the space between the stars, with a thousand alien races to
talk to, and learn..."

"There's a thousand of them?"

"I thought it was like a couple hundred."

"Whatever, still, my God, I mean --"

"Do we know when they're leaving?  Have they said that they definitely are?"

"That Klite that I talked to --"

"Greater Klite, you always have to say 'Greater' Klite."

"Where are the Lesser Klite?"

"Maybe they ate them."

"Shhhh, it's a delicate subject with them."

"Like how many mother ships there are?"

"They have their religions, their beliefs."

"Have you talked to them about their religions?"

"Well, just a little."

"The Greater Klite said that there were around two hundred species on
the ship, depending how you counted."

"Do they believe in God?"

"There's two hundred species, they must have so many religions --"

"Or they could have got past religion, maturing into starfaring cultures
and all --"

"You think religion is something that you get past?"

"You don't?"

"Uh-oh, religion and politics."

"No fist-fights!"

"I think there are Lesser Klites, around on the other side of the ship
somewhere.  This Terce said --"

"And what about the amorphs?  Wouldn't have thought sentient amoebas
would be one of the dominant body types in the --"

"They've been a thousand years between planets, they said?"

"You'd better bring along a woman when you go off, keep the human race
going until the ship gets to the next star."

"Oh, ha ha ha."

"Seriously --"

"A lot of us are planning to go."

"So, then, you and you, going to um..."

"Oh come on."

"Marry and raise a family in interstellar space, keep up the species?"

"It's been talked about."

"Any couples up here?  I mean, any couple who came up as a couple?"

"I don't think so.  Oh, what about --"

"Yeah, they're married, aren't they?"

"Are they staying on?  Where are they?"

"I think they were going to try to figure out the library again."

"If that's a library."

"The Exalted --"

"Transcend"

"-- said that it was.  Well, implied."

"Hinted."

"Suggested."

"Yeah, as usual."

"I think you're all crazy."


(21)

The Internet Blackout lasted nearly a day, depending on when you figured
the start of it.  The Heffel, and some smaller thinner more agile aliens
that never identified themselves or spoke a word any human could understand,
eventually came from somewhere with strange small machines that seemed to
emit a cold barely-visible light, and hooked them into the circuits at the
main Internet Exchange points in MAE East, MAE West, China, Japan, London,
and at least a handful of others.  They left the keyboards and consoles
and communed with these boxes, moving their arms and probosci near them,
looking at them as though they were seeing things the humans present
could not (and presumably they were), and humphing and hrumming and now
and then speaking to one of the hovering humans, asking pointless questions
about the history of the network, the way that sound was encoded in the
digital telephone system, and the degree of encryption in use.  Most of
these questions no one present could answer definitively; in ordinary
times all of them would have been answered on the network.

"We are bringing the anomaly in the control.  It is," said one of the
Heffel eventually, standing in the front of the same room in the
Smithsonian.  "We are having the interior of the planet network,
and it is the working together."

"Do you mean you are working with each other at the different access
points?  Or that the anomaly is working with others of itself?  Or...?"

The Heffel did the Heffel shrug gesture, arms and probocis in the air.
It spoke more slowly.

"Are are working with anomaly.  It is the remorseful.  It is not the --
It did not intend to causing the disruption of planet communication."

Lina raised her eyebrows.  "It is remorseful?" someone in the front row
asked.  "What does that mean?  Some... person from your ship was
disrupting the network, and it's apologizing?"

Again the proboscis rose and fell.  "No.  The anomaly, which was in
the inside of your network, is the apologetic.  We will get it out
and restore it back into the ship, in goodness.  It is."

"So this was some... entity actually living inside the network,
and messing things up?"

"Was was not," the Heffel said, "not living, residing dwelling, not
living, it is.  Is undead.  Zombie?  Brains brains brains."

Mild consternation at this.  Lina couldn't help chuckling to herself.
What wild mistranslation of what strange alien concept had led the
Heffel to say that the Internet had been possessed by a brain-eating
zombie, that was now eager to apologize?

"Is it a software construct?  A computer program?  Like, a computer
virus of some kind?"

The Heffel were both quiet for a long moment, either not hearing,
or busy with some intricacy of ferreting out of the apologetic
not-living anomaly, or thinking how to answer.

"It is," said the darker Heffel, acting as speaker again, "It is that
it is like the computer virus, and the replicating and breeding like
the bunnies.  And but that is only the arm of it, it is not entire
the computer virus."

"The computer virus is just some part of this... entity or anomaly
that's messed up the Internet?"

"Yes.  It is."

Wonderful, thought Lina, and how many arms does whatever it is have,
and are they all equally apologetic?

The Greater Klite continued to feel no particular desire to visit
the planet herself, although she also continued to enjoy the streams
of experience from her fellows on the ground, in their hunting.  All
over the great dark seedpod-ship, the burr in the fur of the Solar
System, creatures of all kinds plugged themselves variously into
devices and fielde and potentials, and streamed into their various
sensoria sense impressions, and words, thoughts and feelings, of
their conspecifics on the planet below, as they engaged in activities
of all kinds, risking their lives (within limits), seeing the sights,
interacting with the natives (again within limits), hunting and
fighting and breeding, eating and drinking, getting drunk or otherwise
intoxicated, falling in the gravity field, splashing into enormous
bodies of water laced with rich organics, and otherwise having a
high and fine time.

She wondered that so many from the ship had wanted to go down to the
planet, to experience the bottom of the gravity well first hand, to
touch the profligate hugeness of the matter that produced it.  They
had, after all, lived and evolved and developed in the ship, between
the stars, away from immense planets, for many many generations.  The
gravity and horizon and dust of planets must be bred deeply indeed into
their DNA, if some of them were willing, eager, to go down to this
strange orb, and if so very many of them were eager to share the
experience with them.

She had tried to express this wonder to the transcend (who seemed
recently to be comparatively withdrawn, his thoughts perhaps elsewhere)
and to the slatesh, but without much success.  Both of them seemed
to feel that this was all prefectly natural and in need of no wonder
or explanation.  Certainly their genes had all eveolved on planets
(with the possible exception of some of the Deep Thinkers), so it was
inevitable that even after a thousand years, or even a few thousand,
which would be an eyeblink in evolutionary time, there was still
the soul-deep need for, desire for, the comfortable and gene-familiar
surroundings of a planet surface.  The wonder would be if they did
not feel that way, if planets were just uninteresting statistical
fluctuations in the matter-density of the galaxy.

She was lounging on a padded seat in the common area, thinking these
thoughts, when one of the Frlepti came in.  She hailed it, and was
considering putting her puzzlement before it, when it spoke.  Both
of the pair had been gradually speaking more intelligibly after the
egg was laid.  This was, indeed, the only brief interval during the
complex Frlepti lifecycle in which they carried on more or less
straightfoward, more or less rational, conversations.

"The planetary data network has been malfunctioning, did you know that?"
It wasn't clear to the Greater Klite if the Frlepti was talking to her,
or to the transcend.  Neither of them spoke, the Frlepti stood on one
long thin leg, looking from one to the other with its restless darting
eyes.  "I understand there are Heffel down there now, working to fix
it.  Did we do something?"

"Something did something.  It was defending itself as a sentient
process.  It has established communication as a sentient process.
So things are going on."

"Oh, things are going on!" the Frlepti repeated, its high birdy
voice adding extra sarcasm and scorn to the words, "I'm so glad to
hear that!  We are, it seems, allowing rodents to take up residence
in the local digital network, and possibly contaminating their
culture through straightforward aid rendered.  And this does not
seem bothersome?"

The Greater Klite found the Frlepti's argument annoying.  Very much,
she thought, a prey-species argument.  To the Greater Klite, you made
plans, you tried them out, you adapted them as necessary, you did
what worked.  The Frlepti seemed to be asking for some differrent
set of principles, and that did not make much sense.

"What must be done is being done," she snarled, "what else would
you have occur?  You must speak up if you want to make wind."  She
smiled at herself, knowing that the figure of speech was a cliche,
but loving it regardless.

"Someone should be finding out just what was done, and by whom,
and measures should be taken, penalties imposed, order maintained!"
This was typical of a Frlept in egging season, wanting all to be
steady and stable and safe, at any cost in long-term viability,
in the sensible risk and the needed chance taken.  Not that there
was, she thought, any great risk in the present activity.  The
Heffel would find whatever was wrong with the planet's networks,
function would be restored, the planet civilization would not be
wiped out by a few sensible words with an alien, and things would
be again as they ought to be.

As the Internet and the digital telephone systems came back up,
with the glowing alien devices patched into the data-flow just
in case, data began to flow in a rush that threatened to bring
it all down again, this time from sheer volume.  Having been cut
off from their collective memories and from each other for
nearly a full day, people swarmed back into the net, and
began reporting and commenting on and logging and discussing
and debating everything that they had missed, and in addition
every aspect of why they had missed it.

In various apartments high above various human cities, a pale
corpulent figure leaned back in a reinforced chair in satisfaction,
bringing up data from and about the human information networks
long enough to satisfy himself that the bits were flowing again,
then slid back to the feeds coming in from outside the atmosphere,
and pounded on the table beside him to demand more food, and
bottles of wine.

Among the first stories to get widespread attention, besides the
Blackout itself, were reports (never confirmed) of voices coming
out of the Black Dome in Africa, stories (quickly confirmed, but
without any obvious meaning) about the various Lith-Quill platforms
converging over the Southern Pacific for some enormous conference or
drinking-party or orgy during the Blackout, and accounts (difficult
to confirm or deny) out of Hong Kong, Vietnam, and Manila, where
something had, it was said, been eating people.

"Crisis averted," Luca Maris said with some satisfaction, down in
the operations room in Manhatten, now staffed with only a skeleton
crew of crisp young persons.  After the stress of the Blackout, and
the inevitable confusion as everything came back up, everyone needed
a rest.  The incident had only reinforced the sort of optimistic
fatalism that had been in the air since the Second Wave began; the
feeling that everything was changing, that it was all too much to
bear, but that, well, the lights were still on and the aliens seemed
friendly so far, and the sun was still coming up in the morning.

"Alot of people are angry, suspicious.  We may see anti-visitor
activities, even violence, on the rise for awhile."  Lina felt
unsettled somehow, even though the Blackout was apparently over,
the Anomaly that had caused it apparently purged from the network.
The Heffel (and the quicker unspeaking aliens, whose species name
the Heffel had somehow managed to avoid giving) had been helpful,
indispensible, in fixing things up, which would seem to more or less
make up for the fact that the Blackout had more or less certainly
been the aliens' collective fault in the first place.  But still
she felt unsettled, found herself pacing, as if they were still in
the center of the crisis somewhere, not on the restful far end of
it.

"They can always just turn the gain up on the Harmony Ray," Luca
said with a half-smile.  The Harmony Ray, a silly conspiracy theory
very popular in some parts of the Internet, founded on some enigmatic
and probably meaningless chatter from the first blast of radio
gibberish that had reached Earth from the mother ship, was a
running joke among the more serious (or, Lina sometimes thought,
the less open-minded) of those who watched, or tried to watch,
their visitors in a systematic way.

"What are the weblogs saying?" She managed to stop pacing and
sit down at her laptop, bringing up the browser and skipping like
a stone over parts of the web; a kind of pacing itself, only
done sitting down.

"Oh, the usual," replied Luca, "mostly obsessed with themselves,
and how awful it was to have no network for a day, and how awful
it is that it was awful, and how ironic it is that we have to use
the network to bemoan our depencency on the network, and --"

"Oh, hush," she said.  Luca, she had found, got cynical and
ironic when he let himself relax, when he was in a good mood.
Cynical and ironic in a sort of endearing way, but still.  "Did
you see this thing about voices out of the Black Dome?  It's
all over the place."

"Only because things are just coming up again, and there hasn't
been time for anyone to debunk it."

"That's what you said about the dome itself when it first showed
up."

"Yeah, and no one did debunk it, so we decided it was really there."

"And we had satellite pictures."

"Yeah, and the satelliet pictures."

"So you don't think the voices --"

"If the reports aren't debunked in a few days, maybe I'll believe
it."

"A very passive approach to investigation, Dr. Maris."

"That's Special Agent Maris to you, ma'am.  And yeah, I just sit in
the middle of my web and let the data come to me.  It's the modern
way."  He paused.  "Also, I'm tired."

She just looked over at him and smiled.

There were yellow and black striped wooden sawhorses across the dark
entrances to all four alleys, along with more modern plastic tape,
with "POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS" in bold day-glo and night-lite
lettering.  There were also words and symbols and images sprayed in
paint, elegant or crude, simple or illegibly complex, on the
sidewalks and walls around the mouths of the alleys, in a rich
mixture of English, Cantonese, Mandarin, and half a dozen other
languages, variously reinforcing, questioning, commenting on, denying,
and claiming credit for whatever horror lay within, the police barriers,
and each other.

"Can't you do more than that?  The damned thing could spread!  It
could do anything!"

"You don't realize how difficult it has been with the Internet and the
digital telephone system down.  We have called for help, and been put in
queues behind --"

"Called for help?  Can't you do anything yourself?  Shoot it, blow it up --"

"If it is an alien thing, and it seems that it must be --"

"Shit, what else could it be?"

"If it is an alien thing, we cannot act hastily.  The aliens might --"

"Are you scared of them?"

"Aren't you?"

That was not the reply he had been expecting.

In the dry plains of North America, halfway between a certain hill and
a gathering point, three men sat in a dusty vehicle with a loud
internal combustion engine with a dozen loaded rifles in the read
storage area.  The one in the driver's seat had the antenna of a
battered radiotelephone held to his head, hanging halfway out the
window of the stopped car.  The man in the passenger seat shook his
head.  The third man was asleep in the back, snoring softly.


(22)

The lithe golden male was on his divan again, naked again, with his legs
propped on golden props, and a pair of clear-skinned young women in thin
white gowns massaging his feet and calves, their eyes down.  A third
young woman, larger-breasted and with bolder eyes, fed him grapes from
a crystal bowl.  His female self perched on the edge of the divan, watching
the scene with the hint of a sneer on her perfect mouth.  The attendants,
who had been told nothing at all about her, had taken to according her a
sort of subsidiary reverence, deriving from that they showed to him, as
though she were a sister or an aunt of his.  She found this amusing.

"And why did you not notice it earlier?"  They spoke, again and still, in
archaic Russian, laced with technnical terms taken mostly from Mandarin
Chinese.  No human within hearing understood a word that passed between
them, which was just as it should be.

"Here?" he replied, laughing, "Here we are not big users of the planet's
communication network."  He put out a hand and stroked the ample flank of
the woman feeding him.  She smiled and looked into his face, nearly into
his eyes.  Brazen thing, he thought to himself.

"But you have monitors here, you are connected to the status of things."

"Oh, yes, yes.  But how careful are we with them, really?  Hardly worth
the bother."

She started to speak, but he cut her off, turning his head at an awkward
angle to look at her.

"And you, why didn't your pets, scattered all around this lovely planet,
walking the cities and floating in the winds, why did they not see it
coming before our huge friend did in his city roost?  Do they not have
their eldritch fingers on every pulse in this little world?"

"Well, yes," she said, softly, "that is exactly the thing that is in my
mind.  They did not see it coming.  And yet the Anomaly as the Heffel
have described it, and how it appears on the stream records from the
barnacles, should not have been able to, should have had no notion of,
evading our detection.  It was only a resonance, hardly self-regarding,
entirely intrinsic to the data space.  It would not even have known that
we exist."

He frowned, stretching out more fully on the divan, curling one of his
legs around the back of the corresponding attendant's neck, so she had
to turn sideways to continue her ministering to his muscles.  Sensing
his distraction, even annoyance, the third attendant stopped her offers
of grapes and began stroking his shoulders with her fingers, between a
caress and a massage.

"Well, then," he said, still looking up at the female, "so it was not
the Anomaly.  There is some flaw in your pets rounds, there is some
oversight in my monitors.  A coincidence.  Why are you mentioning this
to me?  Why are you lingering here?  Not that you are not always most
welcome, but --"

"But why do I think this might be anything in your space?  Why do I
talk to you, when I could be naked under you, or gone comfortably
away?"

He said nothing.

"I don't know," she said, "and I don't like not knowing.  I will be
back."

And she was gone.

The Greater Klite and the slatesh sat (in their own senses of the word)
in another of the observation spaces above the same vast Terce mall
that they had sat above that day in the near past, when that first
Human had found its way to them.  That first Human (she had somehow
never gotten their naming system straight, and told them apart by
their scents, their gaits) was with them as well, with two others,
a male and a female, who seemed to be part of its linguistic and
cultural group.  They were constantly talking, as pointlessly chatty
as Frlepti at hatching time, randomly feeding their conversation into
the shared translation web or not; it was not clear that they had
really understood how to control that, and it was very clear that
they had no grasp of the etiquette and protocols that would have
told them when it was proper to.

At the moment, she and the slatesh were in their own closed translation
space, and the three Humans were in theirs; so although they could
all hear each other in some sense, the Humans could not understand
the other two (the modulated growls and purrs of the Greater Klite as
far from linguistic as the colors and textures that oozed across the
surface of the slatesh), and the other two could not understand them.
Which was fine with the Greater Klite; the bizarre conceptualizations
of the Humans and their insatiable and often inappropriate curiosity
had tired her out.

"They were very agitated by the news of the difficulties in their
planet's data network," she commented to her amorphous companion,
who was resting comfortably as a three-lobed ovoid on the sofa
beside her.

"They were indeed.  Are you surprised?"

"They are still an essentially physical society."

"Oh, but they are in that delicate phase of transition!  Have you
read Mallentressor?  You should, it has brought together many
bulbs of the past experience of the commity with the solving of
new cultures and planets."

"I will look it up in the dataspace."

"You should read the original, really!" the slatesh enthused, and then
became quieter (the hovering translators became quieter, that is, as
the moving shapes slowed and softened), as it realized that it was
treading close to the edges of Greater Klite orthodoxy somewhere.  Did
Mallentressor somewhere suggest that there were other seed-pod ships
moving between the stars, or dare to repeat some of the stories and
histories that evolved possible such ships?  The slatesh could not
recall, but dropped the subject just in case; the Greater Klite's
religion was small and quirky, but where it did have rules those rules
were deeply engrained.

"You are suggesting, then, that the disruption of their data network
would have impacted their society as it would ours?"

"No, not to that degree.  To us it would be like losing atmosphere or
gravity --"

"Worse."

The slatesh pulsed in agreement, "Yes, quite likely worse, which is why
so much of our matter is devoted to the maintenance and redundancy of the
matrix.  But it would be, it was, bad for the Humans all the same.  They
were isolated, not to the degree that we would be, but isolated still.
Think how tightly the scope of their vision of shared commity would have
been limited!  Talking only to those they could see, validating themselves
and their ideas only with the selves and ideas in the immediate geographic
neighborhood.  And remember that they live essentially in two dimensions!
They crawl and flow on the surface of their world, within the skin only,
not going inward to a significant degree at all."

"The nest of them here seemed more excited by the news than angry, or
pained.  They were themselves cut off from their planet-network."

"And," the slatesh laughed, stripes of humor translated into sounds of
amusement that caused even the uncomprehending Humans' heads to turn
for a moment, "they had just discovered that they could access their
network at all!  And our transcendi did not allow them to realize that
the planetary network itself was troubled until the trouble was past.
They were of the opinion that it was only their access to it that had
been lost."

"Ah," the Greater Klite growled, "perhaps that explains it.  But even
now, they seem more excited than pained or vengeful."

"Excitement seems to be their nature.  I think the Izwit have chosen
this nest for its excitability."

"It would be like them."

Lina was still disturbed.  The more she read the post-Blackout weblogs
and news, the more disturbed, the more unsettled, she felt.  The Blackout
had increased the worldwide sense of chaos.  Harmony Ray or not, there
had been incidents, attempts of violence against aliens, or at least
reports of attempts of violence.  Graphic, but almost certainly false,
descriptions of aliens captured, tortured, killed, dissected, were
everywhere.  And on the other side, reports, supposedly first-hand, or
second or third, of aliens taking humans captive, of torture and sexual
abuse, of alien things reaching up from the sewers and devouring people
alive, had multiplied wildly.  The story of the voices from the black
dome had been convincingly debunked, the names in the reports traced
back to people who denied having ever said any such thing, or not traced
back at all because people with those names did not exist.  Violent
attempts to break through the dome, on the other hand, were well documented
to be increasing, and threats against the Izwit and any and all other
aliens if the dome was not removed were as well.  (The aliens, for their
part, had responded to questions about the dome with silence, or the
usual gibberish, or more or less direct statements that the dome was
not their doing, not their problem, and wasn't really such a bad thing,
and was in any case only temporary, or did not actually exist.)

Following links through the web, skimming and diving, reading and
summarizing, she felt a hard core of horror, a bad taste in her throat
that had not been there before.  And she was getting a headache.

Stories of aliens captured and dissected by humans were uniformly
unconvincing.  In the very few cases where an alien had verifiably
been in distress or danger, the situation had always ended calmly
and often mysteriously, with the alien and/or the threat vanishing
from the field due to the convenient arrival of some alien craft,
or in some cases due to know visible cause at all.

Many of the stories of alien attacks on humans were the same way;
obviously false rumors, unsubstantiated stories, deliberate frauds.
But a set of stories, coming out now in the first hours after the
end of the Blackout, felt more substantial, more like things that
her intuition told her she ought to believe.  And these stories were
not pretty.

In coastal towns in Viet Nam, on the island of Hong Kong, in the
city of Manila, people were vanishing.  Vanishing suddenly,
sometimes vanishing in plain sight.  Associated with these
vanishings were glowing silver trails, pulsating silver mounds,
hypnotic ensorcellment, screams cut off as living bodies vanished
from the hand up.  Or barely-sighted silvery tendrils coming out
of storm sewer grates.  And although some of the stories and postings
were of the same lunatic attention-seeking style as the ones about
alien satanist rituals with human virgins, others were not.

Frowning, she made a phone call.  It took her four or five attempts
to get through the still-uncertain network, but eventually she did.

In the alleys of Hong Kong, the first armed and armored troops had
already begun gathering at certain points, and the first of the
amateur videos of them were just being uploaded and streamed out
to the world.  In the data matrix surrounding certain penthouse
apartments in the cities of the blue-white planet, subtle and
watchful processes executed, carefully preventing those streams
from appearing on certain screens.


(23)

Tanya Mercedes stood at the window of her room in the penthouse
suite, looking out over the city, at the park and the river beyond.
Sailboats moved on the lake in the park, human sailboats and oddly
graceful alien boats, or things like boats, on which a mixed lot
of round and gangly aliens, and round and gangly humans, lay and
walked and, she imagined, attempted to communicate.  With the network
back up, she had been watching as she always did the feeds from the
various Visitor-related weblogs and camera crews ("visitor" being the
polite work for the aliens, used by those keeping up a positive
attitude, a smile of welcome, attempting to deal with the chaos of
change with optimism, or at least the face of it).

Tanya had been fascinated with the Visitors herself, had thrilled at
the Arrival, the First Wave, and even the Second Wave.  Had thrilled
perhaps a bit too obviously, a bit too openly.  Or, she thought to
herself, listening as she always did for a summons or a crash or a
bellow from the next room, maybe just obviously and openly enough.

Her cellphone chirred.  She felt, as people all over the world felt
now when their cellphones chirred or rang or buzzed or played grunge
metal or the "Sound of Music" theme, a little extra stirring of
happiness, of knowing that the world was again working correctly,
at least in this one small sense, that something had been broken,
but then fixed again.

"So are you comeing out with us, or what?"

"You know it's not my usual --"

"Are you busy?"

"No, but I --"

"Did you ask him, your mysterious celebrity boss, did you even ask
him?"

"Well, no --"

"Oh c'mon it's Charlene's birthday fa fuck's sake an' you haven't
seen her forever.  You too good for us now, up there doin' whatever
god knows?"

Tanya smiled to herself.

"Okay, okay, I'll ask him.  Give me ten minutes, okay?"

She was not used to, was not comfortable, asking her employer for a
half-day off, or for anything else.  She was not comfortable in his
presence at all, in fact, but that discomfort, the pressure of his
closeness on her mind and her senses, was a different kind of discomfort.
But now she had set herself a challenge.  She stepped out into the
room.

"Yes, yes?  What is it?"  He was lounging, as he usually did, a
round mass of flesh, naked but for the cloth that he wore loosely
around his hips, dark hair curling on his pale chest and down the
curve of his stomach.  She tried not to breathe deeply, knowing that
part of it was his scent, musky and heady and overwhelming.

"I would like to take the rest of the day off," she said, restraining
her urge to say "Sir" because he hated it, speaking plainly and
straightforwardly, saying only exactly what she meant, "to see an
old friend that is in town for the day.  If it would not be an
inconvenience for you."

He snorted.  "If it would not be an inconvenience for me not to have
you here, then I would fire you!  Not be an inconvenience, she says.
Of course it would be, it will be, because you are going to go.  You
would be distracted and insufferable for the rest of the day otherwise.
Go, go!  Be ten minutes early tomorrow."

"Thank you, sir," she said, a bit shocked at herself, as she quickly
left the room.  He snorted again behind her, in amusement she thought,
although it was always hard to tell.

"So tell Charlene all about your fancy celebrity boss!"

"Oh god yes, tell me everything!  Marcia's been tormenting me with all
of your secrets."

"You know I can't tell you very much.  He's -- He is a celebrity, in
a way, and I can't say very much about him at all.  Marcia is just a
tease!"

"Tanya is just hopeless!  First her aliens, now this mysterious job
off an a swanky apartment somewhere."

"Oh, I know!  She's working for an alien!  Aren't you, hon?  Maybe
one of those hunky ones from like India or wherever."

Tanya laughed, she hoped convincingly.

"Oh, but baby you don't want to be working for aliens this week."

"Why not?  They fixed the Blackout for us."

"Haven't you been reading the nets, honey?  Some of them aliens out in
Viet Nam and all have started eating people!"

"Eating people?  You don't say."

"I'm not fooling with you, Tanya!  Haven't you seen it?  It's been all
over."

"No, I haven't."

"Well, I don't know where you've been."

"Maybe all busy with her celebrity, I bet."

"Here, look."  Marcia turned her wide-screen phone around to Tanya, open
to a page of one of the more respectable newslogs.

Tanya frowned.  It was alien news, it was frightening, it seemed almost
credible.  She scanned her own phone and feeds for just that kind of thing
every morning, when she first arrived at work, because he always asked her
what she had seen.  And she had not seen this.

"Is this new?" she asked, but she looked at the page's date herself, and
the dates on the related links.  The story had been out for at least two
days.  "That's funny, I don't know how I could have missed it."

"Creepy, isn't it?"

"Gives me the shivers."

"I never liked the aliens.  Tanya was always the one who was alien this and
alien that.  Surprised they didn't take her up to their space ship, never
see her again."

"They don't really take people up."

"They do, they do!  Didn't you read --"

Tanya's attention moved off of the two entirely.  She got out her own phone,
and found the same page Marcia had showed her.  It was not good.  It was
definitely not good.

She made her excuses early, enduring boisterous chiding from Marcia, said
goodbye to Charlene until next time she was in town, and went across town,
back up the elevator to the penthouse, back to her employer's rooms.

"What the hell are you doing back?  Didn't I tell you you could have the
rest of the day?  Go away!"

"I thought you should see this," she said, in a voice quiet and serious
enough that his bluster quieted, and he seemed to actually pay attention,
his frighteningly intelligent eyes focusing on her.

"On what?"

She opened her phone, and dialed back to the page that Marcia had taken
her to, with the confluence of stories from Viet Nam, Hong Kong, Manila.

But the page was blank.

Lina nearly stoppd herself from saying it, but she did, the last thing
she said before hanging up.

"And Fred, one more thing..."

"Yeah?"

"Take it to them on a printout, will you, not just a screen?"

"Hardcopy."

"Yeah."

"Okay, Lina, just 'cause it's you."

"Thanks."

He thought she was being paranoid, and then he thought that she ought to be
paranoid, and that he himself wasn't being nearly paranoid enough these days,
having reacted (like everyone else really) to the utterly strange by becoming
used to it, by insisting that it was routine.

He found the pages she had pointed him at, printed them out on the old and
rather noisy color printer, which was for a miracle not out of papre or toner,
and carried them down the long hall, to where the Heffel were, once again
chatting frustratingly with graduate students and taking things apart.

"Excuse me," he said, "but I've been asked to show you this, and see if you
were aware of it."

One of the blocky aliens stopped what it was doing and came over, and took the
papers from his hand with the disturbing little worm-like tendrils at the end
of its arm.  It turned the paper around a few times, as if not quite understanding
how to use such an inert bit of matter, and then got it right way up and looked
at it for some seconds.

Then it made a deep hrumming sound somewhere in its heavy body, and the other
Heffel in the room stopped whatever they were doing, and gathered around it.
There was some more deep sounds, some gestures of arm and proboscis.  And then
the Heffel were gone, and the papers with them.

On the great seed-pod ship, a feeling of unease drifted through the data
matrix.  Or at least so it felt to the Greater Klite.  The slatesh and
the Frlepti seemed content, attempting to converse with the occasional
Human that came by, playing elaborate board games, and bickering over the
probable length of the ship's stay in this system, and how long it would
be until the next Arrival.  The transcend seemed quieter than usual, his
music perhaps more subdued, his intervals of inward-seeming silence longer.
And the feeling she got from the matrix was not the general amusement and
satisfaction she would have expected at the stories of the anomaly in the
planet people's communication networks.  It felt more like the middle of a
crisis than the end of a trivial incident.  And it bothered her that she
didn't know why.

"Is all well on the planet," she asked the transcend, "Are things under
control, going as planned, is the hunt in order?"  That last being a very
Greater Klite phrase, either hearkening back to the youth of the species,
when they had truly been hunters, or appealing to a false nostalgia for
a time that the race had in fact forgotten but loved to tease itself with
dreams of, depending on just who you asked.

The transcend's music swelled and widened slightly, and it turned its head,
still as always half-wrapped in black, and looked at her.  "All is well,"
it said, "to the extent that that can ever be true.  Depending on whose
viewpoint one speaks from, all is well, or all is as bad as usual, or
notably better, or notably worse."  The Greater Klite let a growl escape
her throat, and the transcend went on, "But from the viewpoint of the
ship and its societies as a whole, and from your viewpoint and even
mine, things are under control, and going as planned, as much as they
ever are."

Which was not, the Greater Klite said to herself, the most satisfactory
possible answer.

She paced to the other end of the common room, and then turned to ask
the transcend another question.  But it was gone.


(24)

As Lina and Luca worked it out later, all three of the warnings must
have come at about the same time: Fred Hammil's presenting the printouts
to the Heffel at M.I.T., Tanya Mercedes showing the blank screen that
should not have been blank to her employer in Chicago, and the female
Dominator (to the extent that that name meant anything) running up
against whatever stifled her own initial deeper investigation into
the internet Anomaly and why it had not been detected earlier by the
ears and eyes and generaly enhanced senses of the ship.

The first and third strands converged when the lithe golden woman
came striding, apparently out of nowhere, into the lounge off of the
operations room under Manhattan where Lina and Luca were engaged in
what was starting to be (but would never have a chance to be) a heated
debate about just how satisfactory the resolution of the Blackout had
been.

Lina hated her at once, and Luca was, obviously, fascinated.  She
was tall and slender, with perfect skin and an exquisite figure.
Her face was of a vaguely Oriental or South Asian cast (Lina chided
herself for not being able to identify the racial background better
than that, and then chided herself for chiding herself, since this
as clearly an alien, and from no particular part of Earth at all),
her eyes strong and clear, her motions vibrant.  Her voice, when
she spoke, was musical enough that even Lina was distracted for a
moment from her words by the sheer pleasure of the sounds that they
came wrapped in.

"It was you who had the stories out of Viet Name and Hong Kong
brought to the attention of the Heffel?" she asked, and it was
clear she knew the answer.  "And you," to Luca this time, "are
the agent in charge of this station?"  Neither of them replied,
Luca too stunned by her presence to be alarmed or even surprised by
what she knew.

"Good, we will need this," and she strode out again, so clearly
intending them to follow that they had no choice.

She walked to one of the consoles.  Luca followed close behind,
intending to explain the controls and the systems to her, to be
at once apologetic for the primitive technology and quietly proud
of its sophistication.  But she only gestured, and not only did
that console and all the other consoles in the room come to life,
but a brilliantly glowing overlay, a hologram in red, pink, and
green wires, emerged from her hands and forehead and covered all
of the controls, as well as her own body, and Lina and Luca.  The
big screens lit up, and the two humans both put their hands to
their scalps, which felt suddenly as though swarms of gentle but
persistent ants were exploring them.

The male Dominator stepped from nowhere and stood beside her.
Without looking at each other they clasped hands, and more phantom
wires, blue and orange this time, sped out to join the network
growing in the room.

The female said something, in what sounded to Lina like an unfamiliar
dialect of Russian or Ukranian.  The male replied, in what was probably
the same language, sounding either sardonic or chastened.  And then,
as Lina and Luca watched, and the crawling on their scalps lessened
or grew familiar, the two began to change.

Their bodies lengthened and thinned, lost color, lost limb
definition, seemed to become somehow insubstantial, as though
made partly of light themselves.  On what were still barely heads,
there were still barely faces, but they were less than, or perhaps
more than, human faces.

"What's happening to you?" Luca blurted, words pulled from him
involuntarily.

"These are our true forms," the female (or it was probably the
female; the voice seemed oddly nondirectional, and the two bodies
were becoming more and more similar), "did you really think the
ship contained a species with the form of idealized humans?"

On the screens, rapid-fire views of the Earth from space,
combining sattelite visuals with data overlays in bright
primary colors, flicked dizzyingly by.  Lina put her hand to
her head again, wincing at a sudden sharp increase in the activity
of the nonexistent ants crawling in her hair.

"What are you doing to --," Lina began, but was cut off.

"We're busy," one or both of the now-silvery forms hovering in
the console-space among the holographic overlays said, "talk to
the hand."

Lina was too perplexed by that answer to respond at once, and
then felt her heart thud painfully at the touch of a bony hand
on her shoulder.  She spun (and beside her Luca spun also,
having cought a motion out of the corner if his eye).

"They mean me," the apparition said, a bony black-wrapped mummy
with half its face veiled in ebony gauze.  "Come and sit."

They went up the stairs to the observation deck.  For a
moment it seemed it was going to lead them into the small lounge,
out of sight of the screens and the consoles and the hovering
silver forms.  Then it looked at them, seemed to wilt slightly,
perhaps in resignation, and they all perched on the stools by
the railing, looking down.  The network of glowing wires, or
holographic data paths, or elaborate decorations, or whatever
they were, had stretched and elaborated itself up to cover them,
and now all three were wearing glowing circular crowns of light,
like neon circuit diagrams or subway maps.  And Lina's scalp
still itched.

"Who are you?  Who are they?  What's happening?  What is this,"
and she gestured, waving her hand through the intangible lines
that stretched and shifted as she moved, "doing to us?"

"I am of the transcendi," the black figure replied, its voice dry
as a salt flat, "we have no personal names.  Those are two of my
superiors.  It seems likely your world is under assault by a
biophage replicant of some kind.  The ad hoc data matrix around us
is tapping into our, and particularly into your, knowledge of
the world, to aid my superiors in their investigation of the
situation."

"You understand our language well enough to --"

"Of course."

"Then why haven't you been speaking to us this clearly all along?"

Luca shuddered as the black mummy's deeply sunked eyes looking
into his.  "And destroy your civilization?"

The Greater Klite fumed to herself, and paced the common area another
dozen times.  Infuriatingly ironic, she said to herself for the fifth
time, that they had just been talking about how wonderfully redundant
and robust their lovely communication matrix was, and now here they
were in replicant lockdown, virtually deaf and blind, knowing nothing
beyond what the flat badly-translated text streams scrollingn across
the wall screens could tell them.

"I hate this," she growled.

"You said that in the past," replied the slatesh; even its hovering
machines, cut off as they were from the wider web, were suffering a
certain degradation of their subtler abilities.

"And I expect I'll say it in the future."

The slatesh has configured itself as a broad base with a slender stem
or stalk rising up from in, trifurcating at the end into a set of
finger-eyestalk combinations with which it was using one of the
mechanical keyboards that had emerged from under the wall screens
when the lockdown alarms had gone off.

"This is merely identical to the drills of practice," the slatesh said.

"The drills were boring, an expected and finite nuisance.  This,"
she pointed out unnecessarily, "is real.  Who knows what kind of
replicant we might have picked up from the planet people?"

"With high probability not the planet beings as the source of the
replicator of the lockdown.  With high probability some entity from
the world-ship which has employed as substrate the data matrix of
the commity of body of the planet beings on planet," the slatech's
machines replied annoyingly.

"Something from the ship, attacking us from the planet?"

"Attacking or not attacking, being a replicator and being the
replicator or replicators of the lockdown."

The Greater Klite just snarled, and crouched to type awkwardly on her
own keyboard.


(25)

"But you're talking to us now; is that going to destroy civilization?"

"Unlikely.  You are only two people; whatever information I might give
you will be lost in the fog.  You will be two more pages in the
confusing and self-contradictory stories of people who have had
clear and informative conversations with aliens."

Lina nodded.  They had been tracking those stories, along with the
others.  The college professor in Peru that had had an Izwit houseguest
for a week, and been given basic instruction in how to interpret and
exploit the diagrams that other Izwit had been peppering the world
with.  The woman in Nairobi who had exchanged cosmologies and theologies
with a trio of skinny blue aliens that had spoken nspoke perfect urban
Swahili, and who was writing a book on a new religion combining her own
African Pentacostalism with the "divine world insights" she had received
from her visitors.  And so on and so on, for the usual bruising and
baffling thick sheaf of papers.  Odd to think of herself as just another
paper in that folder.

Luca cursed and slapped his forehead.

"Apologies," the mummy's dry voice whispered, "my superiors have been
forced by the situation to make use of rather slapdash measures.  Be
assured that uncomfortable as it may be at times, there will be no
permanent damage."

The screens below them had stabilized, more or less, on a set of views
of the Earth, a half-hemisphere at a time, overlaid with geographical
(but not, Lina thought, political) boundaries, and color-coded overlays
of various degrees of incomprehensibility.  Splashes of purple covered
the main island of Hong King, as well as parts of Viet Nam and Cambodia,
Manilla and its surburbs, the full length of Japan, and all of the
islands of Hawai'i.

"Are those where, something, is, eating people?" she asked hestitantly.

"The most obvious of the purple areas correspond to the highest
probability of such incidents, yes, based partly on first and second
hand reports that we have been able to obtain, but based mostly on
missing or apparently falsified sensor data from those areas."

"Falsified?"

"Apparently.  With significant probability."

"So whatever is -- eating people is also interfering with, whatever
it is that you have, watching us?"

The displays below became more complex, with areas of orange and blue
overlaying nand swirling around the purple, expanding and contracting.
One screen displayed a cartoon rendering of some sort of spacecraft,
with a set of doors open and stylized dots or sparks spilling out.

"That seems to be the case."

"Seems to?"

"Explaining to you exactly why we believe that to be the case, and
exactly what the various probabilities are, would take more time and
equipment than we have available."

Lina sighed, and resolve to leave the verbal sparring to Luca.  And
immediately on making that resolution she had a thought, and broke it.

"Can we trust what you are telling us, Mr. Transcendant?"

"You cannot.  You should take nothing that I say at face value."

"Why is that?"

There was a silence.  From the space below, Line felt rather than heard
a thrumming in the air, waves of compression or force, corresponding to
pulsations in the orange and blue areas on the screens.

"I am not," the creature said through the veil over its mouth, "of your
culture.  You have no reason to think that I am conditioned to automatic
truth-telling as many members of your culture are.  My words could be
intended to manipulate rather than to communicate useful information to
fellow culture members."

Flecks of green appeared here and there on the screens, on the maps
of the infected areas, and where the green appeared the orange and
blue faded, and the green spread, and the purple seemed to recede in
on itself.  Unless she was imagining it.

"And are you manipulating us, or telling the truth?" Luca asked, looking
at the screens rather than at the thin black alien sitting with them.

"In most of what I say, I am doing both."

"Manipulating us with the truth?"

"Yes.  I speak the truth, or some version of the truth, or at least
I avoid falsehood, because that is counted a virtue in my culture as
well, although you have no reason to think that."

"Isn't speaking the truth a basic habit, a rule that any culture has to
have in order to function at all?"  That had been in one of the better
reports someone had done for UNOOSA, back when it was all fun and
theoretical.  "But that applies only within groups, not between."

"Yes," the creature, the transcend, replied.

"And you manipulate us?"

"I manipulate you inevitably.  When I communicate with you, I must
choose from a very large set of possible communication styles, tones,
orders, contents.  And for any one that I might choose, I have a
reasonably good idea of how you will react to it, as opposed to any
other one I might choose."

Another long silence.  The screen continued to change, the air
continued to thrum.

"Are we winning?" she asked.

"That is not presently clear."

"How many people has it eaten?"

"We do not know."

"Do you have a guess?"

"The number is with high probability between one hundred and ten
thousand."

Luca cursed under his breath.  "People are fucking dying out there."

"For the moment, that appears to be the case."

During replicant lockdown, the communication matrix ran only a set
of carefully vetted, mostly comprehensible, programs.  These programs
were, in theory, robust against corruption or co-optation by any
and all replicants.  They were also very bad at certain things,
particularly things requiring understanding, and most particularly
including translation.  Sick of the half-nonsense conversations
with the slatesh, the Frlepti, and especially with the Humans
(their transcend having vanished at about the same time the
lockdown went into effect), the Greater Klite was finally forced
to take desparate measures.  She called her family.

"The stray returns!"

"Hello, Mother.  Hello, Third Brother."

"How goes the hunt in the barren hills?"

"You know we are in lockdown."

"Yes, we know we are in lockdown!  How could we not know?  The
servitors are all stupid, and we've had to break out the keypads.
Is it a drill?  They say it is not a drill."

"It is not a drill, Mother."

"Is it something that the planet herbivores have done?"

"They are omnivores."

"I don't --"

"And no I don't believe it is anything the Humans have done.  It
seems likely that something from the ship has made its way to the
planet, and is gathering matter there, and perhaps changing."

"Will you come back home, child, when the lockdown is over?  You
would be safer here."

"I don't think so, Mother.  I don't think so."


(26)

The atmosphere on the Lith-quill platforms, now gathered into one
large chaotic group of structures at different heights, loosely
connected or not connected by portable transit tubes, occasionally
drifting or mischievously bumping into each other, was subdued.
Which is to say that there were quite spots in the party, groups
of sober individuals here and there, places where the dumbing-down
of communication and service had brought things to a halt, or where
the ancestral dread of rogue replicators had managed to put a damper
on the festivities, for a moment or two.

"Desire of the going superatmospheric and return of home."

"Desire of impossibility.  Pointlessness."

"Displeasure with desire thwarted.  Lack of intoxicants.  An
oversufficiency of subatmospheric time.  Fatigue centered upon
this specified gravity-well."

"Offer of further intoxicants.  The prospect of additionally
thrilling at the abandoning of the self to the control of natural
mass-born gravity.  The sudden shock of impact with water.  High
concentrations of dissolved organic compounds."

"Waste.  Futility.  Oversufficiency of matter leading to ennui.
The threat of replicants.  Overcaution on the part of the esteemed
navigators."

The yellow sun was just touching the flat horizon of the planet.
On an adjacent platform someone set off a long burst of atmospheric
fireworks, lighting the platforms and the surface of the sea for miles
in all directions, in garish purples, reds, oranges, and a variety
of ultraviolets.

"Color!  Light!  The pressure of novelty on the senses!  Speed and
recklessness!  Noise!"

From another direction came a screech of metal as a quintet of
celebrants riding gravity scooters managed to fool their guidance
systems, made sluggish and stupid by lockdown, into a complex five-way
collision, involving damage to two of the scooters, nearly involving
pain to one of the celebrants (who would have a story to tell at
parties for centuries), and leading to a most satisfactory amount of
noise and vibration.

Tanya Mercedes lay on her bed, looking out at the city, intensely
aware of being trapped.  She was getting hungry.  She wondered idly
how long she could hold out until hunger drove her to open her door,
and try to make her way to the kitchen, or even out of the penthouse
altogether.  As whatever it was had pushed her bodily from the main
room and slammed her door closed behind her, she had had it impressed
upon her (in exactly what way she could not have said) that she should
under no circumstances open that door until her employer opened it
from the other side.

Leaking around the edges of that thought had come a nightmare image
of a thick roiling cloud of something, something nearly invisible and
utterly inimical, surrounding the top of the building, hanging in the
air, warping reality, and at the same time hungering.  Hungering for
something that she knew she should not think about.

And since then, as she lay in her bed trying to be as small as
possible while still being able to see out the window, while the
sounds (more frightening when they faded to a sinister quiet as
when they swelled to nearly comprehensible grunting and cursing)
came through the door, she was assailed every few minutes with another
image of equal terror, of yawning abysses behind the facade of
reality, of her employer grown enormous beyond his routine vastness,
big as a house, pouring with sweat and vital fluids, engaged in
heated battle with something indescribable, that hungered (again
that hunger) and that held him back with smothering fog and choking
smoke from something beyond that he fought, that he needed, to
reach.

And down in the city below her, there may have been a few more lights
out than usual, but otherwise things looked terribly, terribly normal.

"What's happening?  Have they merged?"  Luca's voice was as tense as
Lina felt.  This could not be lasting this long.

There had been a surge through the vortex around them, a pulling and
curving and elaborating in the glowing lines that linked them all, and
the two humans had cried out in unison as the crawlings on their scalps
had for an instant become burnings and tuggings and pain.

Now in front of the consoles where there had been two perfect human
forms, and then two silvery alien shapes, there was a single imperfectly
defined region of space where light bent and curled and refracted; not
so much a shape as a phenomenon.

"We have established a secure link back to the main object in orbit
around your planet.  The two in the space below us have dissolved some
of the distinctions between themselves, for greater efficiency."

"Are we winning yet?"

"Winning and losing apply only approximately here.  It may be more
helpful to think of this as firefighting, or even pottery, rather
than warfare."

"Pottery?" the two asked, again in unison, and in sharp appalled
voices.

"Think of the potter's hands shaping a piece, a wobble developing in
the clay, and the hands urging it carefully back into place as the
wheel spins."

"Very poetic."

"Are we getting the wobble under control, then?  Are we going to
get a pot, or a ahhhh --," they both winced again at a wave of
heat ran through the wires and through their heads and instantly
subsided, "-- or a blob of broken clay?"

"This is not a situation that I have very reliable models for --"

Luca snorted.

"-- but to the extent that I can predict, it seems probable that
we will have, as you say, a pot."

"I certainly hope so."

"Certain other resources are being brought to bear, now that we have
a secure connection to the ship.""

The Greater Klite looked up as the transcend walked quickly into the
common area, its black wrappings flapping in a way that made her
smile.  Maybe in lockdown the transcendi actually had to walk, and
couldn't just change from being here to being there in a smug
semantic sort of way.

"Are the humans together?" he asked, and she was surprised by how
perfect the translation seemed to be until she noticed he was
actually speaking High Klite.

"I believe so.  From what I can tell," and she gestured with some
contempt at the lockdown-stupid screen and keyboard, "they are
all huddled in their usual area, eating and drinking and making
endless human noises."

"Good," the transcend replied, sitting in his place in the center of
the common area, and with a gesture bringing up a set of controls
that the Greater Klite would have sworn would be inoperative in
lockdown.  "Bring them here, please."

"Why?" she asked, "Are they useful for something?"

The transcend's voice almost seemed to contain a smile, and she
became aware of its music slowly swelling.  "Yes," he replied,
"Yes, it seems likely that they will be."


(27)

It was as different from being in the alien mothership as that had
been from sitting in his apartment in Paris, looking out at the
dingy street and being bored.  If the Izwit had plucked him off of
the roof that night and taken him to an entirely different place,
then the Exalted One, the Transcend, had now plucked him out of
places entirely.

He sped, in a way impossible to describe but utterly natural to
experience, through a space with so many dimensions that the word
"dimension" was really not a good fit.  Instead of up and down and
left and right and near and far, he soared toward yearning, cut
across purple, did a barrel-roll on the axes of disagreement and
forgery.  And around him, in directions like faith and fear and
ferocity, flew the other members of the rescue team.

When the lion-woman (the Klite he told himself, and always say
"Greater Klite", not just "Klite", for reasons that he hadn't
gotten around to finding out) had come to the big round room
overlooking the giant alien mall (and how he yearned to go
down into that mall, mingle with the species and races and exotic
beings down there, even as he realized the wisdom of the delay,
of what must be a period of acclimation), and called them all
back to the sleeping area, he had been a bit worried.  The aliens
hadn't really given orders, especially not to all of them at once,
but that seemed to be what this was.  The translation machines
(or matrix, or network, or web) had been working poorly for the
last few hours for some reason, but there was no mistaking the
lion woman's growled "come".

And then the Transcend had greeted them, sitting in his nest of
brightly-glowing holograms or whatever those were, explained some
of the situation to them in words that were not only perfectly
spoken and accented, but that somehow burned themselves directly
into the mind, so their truth and urgency was obvious as nothing
had been obvious before.  And once they had all agreed, and they
had all agreed, without dissent, the glowing wires extended
themselves from the nest in which the black-clad being sat, forming
rings and crowns around their heads, and the world had dissolved.

The team turned as a whole, feeling for the dozenth or hundredth
time that tug, that call, that feeling of familiarity, angling
down a vector three parts reluctance and one part the smell of
burning leaves on a chilly morning, curled gracefully around some
felt obstacle, and burst through the skin of the space into another
chamber of closeness, a smaller and lower-dimensional place like
the others they had seen since the crowns sank into their heads.

And, like all those other times, there was someone here.

"Hello."

"Who, who are you?"

There were no voices here, but meaning flowed easily through the
fabric of reality, and arrived in the mind as language.

"We are from Earth, by way of the alien mother ship, and we have
come to free you."  They had found that it was better to put the difficult
part on the table immediately, rather than have it come out later, and
risk appearing to have kept something hidden.

"You are... aliens?"  The voice, or the thought, came with some
disappointment, or hope against hope.

"No, we are humans, just like you.  We have been sent to get you out
of here, to take you back."

"I'm not dead?  It... when I touched it it was smooth and sticky.
And then my fingers were gone, and it hurt, and I --"  The thought
was the thought of a scream, the memory of terror.

"Yes, it did and it was.  But you are not dead, you are here.  And we
are here to send you back."

"Please," the voice, like many of the others, despaired of understanding,
and wanted only that things be normal again, back to Earth, out of this
darkess with too many dimensions, back to sanity.

"Reach out," the team said in unison, "reach out and touch,"  And they
extended the glowing matrix as far as they could, close enough to be
an easy reach for the trapped voice, but far enough that it would be
the voice's own decision whether to take it or now.

"Yes," said the voice, and reached out in the darkness.

And at a bus stop on the main island of Hong Kong, a silvery tendril
extended up out of a storm drain, and a woman appeared, head to toe,
sitting on the bench, her mouth open, her body tensed.  As her eyes
reached clarity she looked about herself, closed her mouth, and
looked about her.

In the operations room, now lying on the floor of the observation
level, with cushions from the lounge under their heads, Lina and
Luca slipped in and out of consciousness, or slipped between the
consciousness of reality, the hum and buzz and flickering colors from
the screens and the black-wrapped face of the transcend looking
down at them, and the inner illusion of flying through that impossible
omni-dimensional place where space was meaning, and lost souls
tugged at them with their desire, to be found and contacted and
offered the chance of freedom.

"You must describe to me what is happening," said the transcend, each
time Lina came back to consciousness.  And she would try, speaking of
the flying and the axes, of the pockets of darkness where the prisoners
were trapped.  And then she would be sucked in again.  Beside her, she
sometimes heard Luca's voice, answering the same question.

"Who are they," she asked once in return, "who are they that we are
flying with, that are doing all the work when all we can do is hang
on, hang on and observe?"   Her own voice came to her as a distant
whisper, but the transcend had no trouble understanding her.  Had
never had any trouble, understanding.

"The minds you are experiencing are the minds of those humans who
are resident on the ship, in orbit around Earth.  Because they are
on the ship, closer to our main sources of organization, they are able
to take a more active part in the meaning-space."

"They are like this, also?"  That was Luca, gesturing with his eyes at
the wires of light circling and penetrating his skuill, at his body lying
limp and supine on the ground."

"They are, roughly, like this," replied the transcend.  "We are drawing
upon all of the, available assets."

She heard Luca groan a feeble curse, then she slipped, and felt him slip,
back into headlong flight, along the axis of solidity, swooping in the
direction of amber.

"We're still on target, sir.  That many MOABs in one place will take
out whatever the hell they have in there."

This is not, she thought to herself for the hundredth time, the kind of
decision that a major general ought to be making.  She happened to be in
command of a small fleet of airlifters that happened to include an
impressive number of very large bombs, all of which happened to be quite
near one of the hotspots of inimical extraterrestrial activity (ironically
abbreviated INEXAC) that had become evident after the end of the Blackout.
Their signals and human intelligence from the area was still in disarry,
and the satellite intelligence was disturbing.  There was no sign of
ordinary human activity in what had been a medium-sized Vietnamese city;
there was, on the other hand, obvious and unmistakable sign of alien
activity, in the form of surges and crests and billows of a smoky
silvery something moving through what had been the streets of the city.

Would blowing it all to hell help?  Or scatter infected pieces of whatever
it was far and wide?  Into the atmosphere, to be inhaled by every creature
on Earth?  Or would it, simply and bravely, destroy whatever it was?

"Sir?"

Over the last half-hour, the patterns on the satellite and surveillance
images had changed, the silvery something bunching up and settling,
perhaps even shrinking.  An orange nimbus now covered much of the
ground, and sometimes a long strand of orange seemed to flash into
being, linking the ground to something far far above.

"I think we may be out of our league here, Watterby.  Hold them in
position for now.  Do nothing else."

"A wise decision, Major General," said the spindly black-garbed something
that had suddenly come to be standing across the room, leaning comfortably
against the wall.

The Greater Klite was worried.  She said as much to the slatesh, seeing
no reason to keep it to herself, and anticipating that enough of her
meaning might make it through the inferior translation web to make
it worthwhile.

"Are we sure this isn't hurting them?  And how can this technology be
safe during lockdown?  My fur bristles like fire."

Neatly arranged on the floor of the common area, resting comfortably
on cushions provided by the Terce and Armingers that moved among them
adjusting their food and water tubes, heads linked together by the
eye-searingly bright lines of direct data-matrix pipes, lay fifty-one
Humans.  They were quiet and immobile for the most part.  Now and then
one of them would groan, or grunt, move an arm or jerk a leg, or utter
some phrase of nonsense.  Then an Arminger would surge over and extend
a manipule to stroke the Human's forehead soothingly, or give it more
water, or restrain its limb until the twitch subsided.

It was all quite surreal.

"It is being as within the body of commity," the slatesh's idiot
translation machines replied, "it is as a small frame of them as
being not harmful of them."

The Frlepti and, disturbingly, the transcend had not been seen for some
time, since the latter had spread the pipes over the heads of the Humans,
and called the Terce and Armingers and their equipment from somewhere.

"That's all very well," she replied, "if our models of their bodies are
really all that good.  But what about this technology?  Direct matrix
pipes during lockdown?  That must be very high-semantic!  How do we know
they are not compromised."

"Are not being of the knowledge deep," said the slatesh, "are in the
commity of the ascending, are being of the solution, the center of
visualization of the repair of the replication.  Being in safety."

The Greater Klite snarled.  "Very comforting, I'm sure."

At a place where four alleys came together in urban Hong Kong, another
burst of silvery fog congealed into human form.  The man slumped to the
ground, moaning, to be helped quickly to his feet by the others, only
slightly steadier on their feet, only slightly longer back in the world.


(28)

The team is flying through the matrix dreamlike, not thinking so much as
being, part of the flow, part of the flight; following tug after tug by
instinct now, touching life after life, presenting the lifeline and feeling
it being accepted, constant punctuations of success in the long narrative
of motion.

Sometimes they feel, sliding up and down the innumerable axes, the sound
(or something like sound, or something entirely unlike sound) of conflict,
implosion, or settling, like great areas of tension releasing and flattening
out, far away from them.  They are vaguely aware of being guided, in their
flight through everything, not only by the tugs of the trapped minds but
also by an external whisper, by something that steers them away from areas
of danger, that keeps them in the channels of safety.  And all of this is
just as it should be.

Here is a tug that is singularly strong, utterly compelling.  It warps
the meaning-space around them, bends their course strongly toward it.
And yet it has a different texture than those other tugs; it is strong
and generous, not strong with despair.  It is welcoming rather than
pleading.  But it is there in the flow, the whisper from outside has
not warned them away from it, and in dreamily speeding through this
infinitude of being, it is obviously the way to go.

"Hello?  Hello?"

They have broken through this time, in and under the infinite-dimensional
space of meaning, into something that feels more like a mansion than a
bubble.  And perhaps more like a world than either.

"Hello?"

"Hello!  Welcome!  Where are you?"

Not the usual question, but...

"We are from Earth, by way of the alien mother ship, and we have come to
free you."

Is that laughter?  They can see nothing in the darkness.

"And what have you come to free us from, Earth friends by way of the
alien maternal ship?"

"To free you from this space, to bring you back to Earth, to where
you were before you came here."

More laughter.  A voice, more than one voice.  Many voices.

"We have found you, generous visitors!  Why do you sit there, in the
corner of the wall?  Join us!"

And a veil lifts, and the team finds that it is a wiry naked male human,
half-crouched in the corner of a large hall, and gathered around them,
around him, are a dozen large laughing persons, in thick red robes and
white furs, and someone is holding another robe out to him.  And they
realize that he is cold.

"This is strange," Luca says.

"They can see, now, where they are," Lina says.

"It is a large bright hall."

"Is it cold."

"The Hall of the Mountain King," says Luca.

The transcend does not seem pleased.

"General Tanaka, we're getting people."

"People?"

"The satellite's picked up people in the INEXAC area, on the west side,
heading outbound."

"Do you know about this?"

She turned to the thin black-wrapped alien, like some insectoid mummy,
that had so far answered her questions only enigmatically, and seemed
content as long as her unit was not going to drop its bombs.

"It is to be expected.  The individuals are being separated from the
replicant's structure.  This is what we intended."

"What you intended.  You're fighting it?"

"We are modifying it.  There is no need for metaphors of hostility here."

"Are these the people that it -- ate?"

"With high probability, yes."

"How many will you be able to save?"

"With significant probability, all of them."

"All?"

"We will see."

"No need to blow the place to hell, then, just now."

"I would concur."

"Could we have blown it, dropped the MOABs and eliminated the place,
if you'd wanted to stop us?"

"You did not drop the devices."

"I still could."

"That is true.  Will you?"

The major general snorted.

"No.  No, I guess we won't."

The team is sitting in a thickly upholstered chair by a roaring fire,
drinking a hot beverage tasting of honey and apples.  They are, he is,
confused, befuddled, still half in the dream-state of flying through
infinite-dimensional semantic spaces, only half present in this small
muscular body wrapped in this thick velvet robe, feeling the liquid
flowing down its throat, breathing the hot steam and dry air, feeling
the heat of the fire on its, on his, face.

"We don't understand."

"Neither do we, neither do we.  You have not joined us in the usual
way."

"What is the usual way?"

"There is a stream, that bursts from the ground as a spring, high on the
side of a mountain that we call Arrival.  Beside that spring there is a
stone bowl, where a little rainwater collects, and sometimes spray from
the spring.  On the longest day of the year, the Summer Solstice, we go
to that spring, and in that bowl there is sometimes a person, sometimes
two, who have come here to join us from the outside.

"But you were crouching naked in the corner of our great hall."

"We are inside an alien entity, a replicator.  It eats people, takes them
into itself against their will.  We have been sent inside to find those
people and rescue them."

Laughter again, booming and bold.

"That is marvelous!  The earliest legends of these Snow Lands say this,
that the first ancestors were taken into the belly of a great silver beast,
and fought, and won, and somehow made there in the belly of that beast a
land that is the Snow Lands, where we now live and prosper."

The team was silent, sitting and drinking, looking around at the hall,
the heads of great beasts mounted on the walls, the rich tapestries
covering the worked stone, the thick carpets.

"What do we do now?"

"What do they do now?" Lina whispered from the floor.  The transcend
was gesturing with its hands, bony fingers running purposefully through
the glowing wires that surrounded them.

"It would be best," he said, through the black veil that covered his
mouth, "if they got back to work."

The team was learning a simple line-dance when the whispering from the
outside began to grow louder.  They, he, looked around, but no one else
seemed to hear it.  Dinner was just beginning, a many-course affair at a
long table of thick hardwood, when it suddenly became so loud that it
overwhelmed everything else in the room, consciousness spun, and once again
the team was flying free in the space of meanings, aimed halfway between
hope and hunger, feeling for the tugs of the lost, with only a dim memory
of the touch of velvet and the taste of honey.

In Hong Kong, Viet Nam, Manilla, in Japan and California and Seattle, the
silvery mounds and orbs and tendrils bubbled and burst, sending out puffs
of silver smoke that rsolved themselves into people; people in various
states of terror, confusion, wonder, or exhaustion.  In the common area
on board the great seed-pod ship, the Terce and the Armingers changed
shifts, the Armingers replaced by a mixed crew of slatesh (no one that
the slatesh already present knew, or at least would admit to knowing) and
many-limbed Stengklik, with an apparently-sober Lith-quill (for no species
is without its rebels) on nutrient-mix duty.  Lina and Luca were not so
well attended, and the transcend seemed almost annoyed at the necessity
when Luca finally whispered that they were starving (he could feel it from
Lina, somehow, through the crowns on their skulls), and the spindly alien
somehow pulled a couple of meatfruit from the air and fed them impatiently
to the supine humans.

It happened again, four more times in fact, that the team followed a
tug in the vector space of concepts, passed through a membrane, and found
themselves facing not a desparate lost soul eager for rescue and return,
but something else.  Once a man at an easel by a huge window, painting
canvas after canvas from the monumental view outside, who had no interest
in leaving, to return to Earth or otherwise.  Once a small white village
set among verdant hills, whose people flew on graceful wings and spoke
no words, but clearly let the team know that they were content as they
were.  And once a space where there was no obvious individual or act
of communication, but only a deep feeling of joy and love that they
basked in for nearly an hour before the humming form at the console
in the operation room could coax them to come out.

After the fifth time, they had learned to tell the tugs of the lost
souls from those other kinds of tugs, and to follow only the ones
relevant to the task at hand.

The sounds from the main room swelled and faded, swelled and faded.
Outside the window, the city dimmed with twilight and clouds, there
was a flash of lightning, and the window was streaked with rain.
At first she was most frightened when the sounds were quiet, because
that quiet was somehow smothered, brooding, sinister, ominous.  But
then, now, the quieter times had become longer and somehow calmer,
and as the rain fell she felt some tension lifting.  The nightmare
visions lightened and came further apart, and then she gasped as a
final one caught her up, and she saw the deadly black shadow around
the building twist and break and shred, spinning apart and merging
with the rain.

She lay on her bed a long quiet time, her eyes closed and her heart
beating more slowly.  She felt that, somehow, she was on the edge of
sleep, when heavy footsteps crossed the floor outside, and the door
of her room was opened.


(29)

When the replicant lockdown was lifted, the noise and light from the
Lith-quill platforms could be seen, heard, felt, for hundreds of
miles.  The Greater Klite wake from a doze as her feeds all lit up,
news and interpretation, communication from around the seed-pod ship,
celebrations and rumors of a thousand kinds.  "Well, Mother," she
thought to herself, "your servitors are smart again."

Out in the common area, the transcend was gone, the glowing wires
of the data pipes were gone from the heads of the Humans, and the
Terce and Amingers were back, lifting the limp forms from the
cushions and carrying them away.

"Where are you going with them?  What are you doing?"  And her feeds
reassured her that the Humans were fine, only fatigued and dehydrated
and slightly mind-burned, and they were being taken to a nearby
Terce facility to minor repair.  "Well, I hope so," she growled under
her breath.

"You don't trust the feeds of the commity?" asked the slatesh, rolling
in from its sleeping pod.

"Well risen," she replied, "it is good to understand and to be
understood again."

"It is."

"I trust the feeds as much as the next sapient," she said, showing
her teeth, "Where is our transcended friend?"

"Back out in the Clinging Dome, I believe.  Shall we join him in
the commity of body?"

"Why not?"

Lina felt as though she had slept for days, and not slept at all.
Her eyes were filmed over, with dry sand in the corners.  Her head
ached horribly, and her mouth tasted of something unspeakable.  Her
first few waking breaths (but had she been asleep, truly?) smelled of
the same thing, but then cleared, and she was smelling only sweat, and
fear, and the buzz of ozone.

"Did we win?"

It was her thought, but not her voice.  Luca was stirring on a couch
a few feet away, holding his head.  His hair was matted with sweat;
she touched her own, and found it the same.

"Well, we're alive."

"Heh, speak for yourself."

They got to their feet and staggered out onto the observation deck,
which was empty but for stools lying on their sides, and down into
the operation area.  The consoles were dark, the screens empty, the
glowing wires gone.  There was no sign of the golden man and woman,
or the blurry shiny entity that they had turned into, but as Lina
and Luca stepped tentatively into the space where they had been, a
pile of black cloth rose from the ground and formed itself into
something.

Lina nearly screamed.

"Yes," said the spindly black-wrapped alien, "yes, we won."

Tanya sat in her employer's lap, supported by his vast thighs and
leaning contentedly against the warm sweaty curve of his belly, as
he fed her grapes and slices of melon with his massive hands.  She
felt his mind surrounding hers, cradling hers, gently palpating her
soul like a doctor, checking for damage, for soreness, for breaks.

"I am fine," she whispered between sweet pieces of fruit, "I am
just fine."

Luiz Xu felt far from fine.  Between the beginning of his scream and
the end, in that dark alley behind the broken crates, was an eternity
of darkness and confusing, like a bad dream that was not fading nearly
fast enough come daylight.  Whatever had pulled him to this place had
gone, and he'd wanted nothing more than to be somewhere else, away from
the shiny silver thing, out.  But before he'd staggered from the alley,
the others began to appear, standing around the silver thing, moans,
screams dying in their throats, falling to the ground like he had.

"Damnit," someone said eventually, "doesn't anyone have a working
cellphone?"

The ambulances had started arriving not long after.

"Maybe it wasn't the aliens."

"Of course it was the aliens, stupid.  What else?"

"Could've been the government, you know, the trilaterals."

"Government's working with the aliens."

"Aliens and the communists."

"Alvin and the boys called."

"What'd they say?"

"They got into Tulsa, but everything was like back to normal again, the
phones working and the lights and the papers and stuff."

"They do us any recruiting?"

"I don't think so."

"Good for nothings."

"Never did like that boy of his."

"Damned hippie, what he is."

The nearest coffee shop to the obscure door that led into the obscure
building that hid the operation center was, for a miracle, open and
functioning.  And the coffee was good.  Lina usually took hers black,
but today she went for a double mochaccino.

"What is that?"

"Double mochaccino.  Two shots espresso, two steamed milk, foam, double
shot of chocolate."

"Gah."

"Normally gah.  Today it is heaven."

"That laptop working?"

"Give me another minute with my chocolate."

At first the weblogs had said that all the people taken, eaten, absorbed,
acquired by the INEXAC (the word caught on the instant the first of the
military documents showed up on the leak sites) had appeared again, or been
expelled, or been reconstructed or reborn.  There were a few reports of people
still missing, of course, but there is always noise, and there are always
people who go missing for reasons other than being absorbed by inimical
extraterrestrial activity.  But as they poured through the data public
and private (she had her U.N. sources, he his unspecified Yankee ones),
Lina got a very cold feeling in her stomach despite the hot coffee.

"Some of them haven't come back."

"We don't know that."

"But we think that it is likely."

"We don?"

"Don't we?" she asked, looking sideways from the screen.  His eyes were tired.

He sighed.  "We do."

They sat for awhile, not speaking, looking out the window of the shop at
the passing traffic, one or the other bending forward to tap or click, to
read or write, tag or post.

"You know what I hate?" he asked.

"What do you hate?"

"I hate how Jackson made Gimli into the comic relief.  Just because he was
short."

"Jackson's not a giant himself."

"Yeah, true.  He didn't need to work out whatever psychological issues right
there in the movie, though."

"What else is there to do?"

"There's saving the world from aliens and that."

She nodded, closed her eyes the better to taste the chocolate.  When she
opened them again, half a dozen Heffel were passing the window, their
deep huffing voices easily penetrating to where they sat, their stubby
arms and mobile noses waving in the rainy air.  Some people stopped to
stare, or take phonepix, or glare uselessly at the aliens, but most just
passed by them as though they were a clump of tourists from anywhere in
the world, a couple from Ohio or a busload from Tokyo, walking too slowly
down the sidewalk, busy even in the rain.

"Do your people have stories about this happening on Arrival?" asked the
Greater Klite.

"Oh, yes," replied the machines of the slatesh, which seemed if anything
better interpreters of the shifting colors and shapes of their charge
than they had been before, "don't yours?"

"Yes, essentially.  In main outline."

"In basic structure."

"It is quite different to be here for it."

"Most definitely it is."

"To have the juices in one's own mouth."

"So to speak."

The lithe golden figure stood with his back to Dauntless, his legs
crossed at the ankles, looking out at the countryside.  The wind
played gently with the thin cotton that barely covered his smooth
glistening skin, and if anyone human had been nearby to hear, they
would have heard a soft deep music swirling around him.

She came around the side of Dauntless, out of nowhere but not
unexpected, and leaned her shoulder against the side of the ship,
looking at him.  She put out a delicate hand, and touched his
cheek.

"Not too much of a busman's holiday, I hope?"

He smiled and turned his head to look at her.

"Not at all," he replied, in Swahili, "one always enjoys having one's
skills put to use, even here and now."

"Are you going back to the towns?"

"Of course!  My people need me."


(30)

"We have questions," Luca said to the Heffel collectively.  Collectively
because it was at the moment impossible to get the attention of any
individual one; they were busily assembling and dissasembling things
in a recently-coopted mechanical engineering lab.

"It is," one of them said, "it is that you are having the questions
that you are having the laboratory.  This the laboratory is good."

"No," said Luca, "we have questions that we want to ask of you, or
of your Ascended, or of the Dominators whose true forms we know."

"It is," said one another of the Heffel, absently, peering into a
microimager.

"No," said Luca again, "it is not.  We know very well that your
translators work better than you pretend."

The Heffel continued milling around, booming at each other, holding
up objects to each other, taking things apart and putting them
together again in subtly different shapes.  Lina sat on a lab stool,
her back to a bench, taking in the scene sardonically.  Fred
Hammil hung in the background, looking worried.

Luca stood up and walked between two of the Heffel, boldly as even
now few humans ever walked up to an alien.  The two heavy figures
stopped what they were doing and raised their probosci.  The one
in front of him looked him directly in the eye.

"And why," it boomed, softly and Lina thought ominously, "why should
we be answering any questions of you?"

Before Luca could reply, Lina found herself on her feet, arms out,
the stool clattering to the ground behind her.

"Because we deserve it, that's why!"

She stood there as Luca and all of the Heffel turned their faces to
her.  She could almost feel Fred behind her attempting to vanish into
thin air.  After a moment of silence, Luca turned back to the Heffel
before him, and said, "Yeah.  That."

"When the Dominators referred to you as 'the hand', what did they mean?"

Luca was taking the first turn asking the questions, leaning forward
where he sat at the UNOOSA conference table, with Lina beside him
and the transcend, or something that looked very much like the transcend,
sitting on the other side.  (Now that they were actually about it,
the idea of having this conference in an actual conference room
seemed to her sort of amusing and pathetic, but it was too late now
to suggest a nice picnic on the grass.)

"I am an appendage, a part, a subset, as your hand is a part of your
body."

"And the Dominators are the brain?"

"No."

"Well?"

"If we extend this metaphor, the next step might be the arm."

"Where is the brain, then?"

The other seemed quiet, perhaps thinking, perhaps somehow communicating
with its superiors, getting instructions, having its answer cleared with
the boss.

"It is a difficult question to answer.  In some sense the brain is
the commity as a whole, what you would call the mother ship and all
of those aboard."

"And in another sense?"

"In another sense there are those aboard that are called the Deep
Thinkers.  They are, perhaps, the cerebral cortex."

"And they --"

Luca stopped there, and frowned over at Lina.  She almost smiled,
his face so clearly said, what do we ask now?  It occured to her
that they really should have made a list.  Maybe they hadn't really
expected their demands to the Heffel to have any effect.

"And they were in charge, fighting the INEXAC?" she finished for
him.  As good a question as any.

"Again I suggest that your analogy to hostilities is not fitting.
It was not a fight so much as an adjustment, a correction."

"And no one died?"

"People die every day.  But you mean to ask if no one died as part
of the adjustment of the anomaly.  No, there were as far as we know
no deaths directly attributable to either the anomaly or the process
of adjustment."

"They have all returned?"

A long silence again.

"They have not all returned.  Of the roughly eleven-hundred humans
processes by the anomaly --"

"Processed," Luca muttered.

"-- seventeen have not returned to their former conditions."

"They're dead."

"Not in any useful sense of the word."

"They are alive?"

"You recall, Lina Magee, when you were our subjective links to the
human asset team, your experience of the Hall of the Mountain King,
as Luca Maris put it?  And the painter at the window, and three
other similar patterns?"

"I wouldn't call them similar, but yes."

"The seventeen who have not returned are in comparable situations,
within the adjusted substrate."

"Wait, you mean that -- silver thing -- that thing that ate the
people, still exists?"

"Of course."

"Back on your mother ship?"

"The sort of subquantum semantic substrate that we are discussing
does not have a physical location in the usual sense."

"Will it leave when your ship leaves?"

"With high probability, no."

"Will it start eating people again?"

"With very high probability, no."

"And your ship is going to leave, at some point?  You are not here
to rule the Solar System?" asked Luca.

"It is, and we are not."

"When?  When will you leave?"

"With high probability, what you think of as the mother ship, and
those who come or remain aboard, will leave the solar system not less
than six months, nor greater than three years, from today."

"Three years?"

"At most."

"Wait," said Lina, "you said those who come or remain aboard.  What
does that mean?  Are some of you staying?  Are you taking some humans
away with you?"

"We expect that a number of individuals and entities from the ship
will choose to stay in your Solar System, and that a number of
individuals from your planet will choose to go with the ship."

"Choose."

"Choose."

"You will not use force?"

"The idea is more repugnant to us than you can imagine."

"Which is a good thing, as we couldn't do much about it if you did
want to kidnap a few rural villages, say."

"Quite true."

"Oh god, this is awful," Lina said, stretching back in her chair,
away from the table and the other two, "how about we just sit
around and talk for awhile?  You, mummy in black, do you like us?"

She could have sworn the thing chuckled, with whatever was behind
that ominous black cloth.

"Yes.  Yes, I like you very much."

"And you're manipulating us by saying that."

"I am indeed."

"And also it's true."

"It is."

"What's going to happen, Mister Mummy?  What's going to happen in
a Solar System full of Izwit and Heffel and drunken Lith-Quill and
oversexed Dominators and six billion people who know that they
aren't alone in the universe anymore?"

"No one knows," the transcend replied.  "No one knows."


(31)

Between six months and three years later, Tanya sat in that enormous
lap again, drinking wine, feeding grapes and being fed melon, and
laughing.  The roof of the penthouse had rolled back, and the room
was open to the night sky, which was full of fireworks, silver
ships, and fiery golden birds.  She slapped her hand down onto
that enormous belly, and watched the waves her blow made in the
so-generous flesh.

He laughed deafeningly and raised his glass.  "Tanya Mercedes, for
the third time I ask you, before the universe and these revelers,
do you sanely and of your own free will choose to join this most
excellant company, as we ascend and depart, never to see this
planet again?"

She giggled once and then recovered herself, raising her goblet
and splashing wine everywhere.  "Yes!  For the third time I answer
you, before the universe and these revelers, that I freely and of
my own sane will choose all that stuff about ascending and departing
and not seeing Earth ever again except in like movies and stuff!"

The crowd packing the penthouse roared, but then they'd been roaring
and otherwise making noise for hours.  The Lith-quill, she thought
to herself, throw a heck of a party.

"I can't believe you're going!"

"I can't believe you're staying!"

"What, living on the mother ship longer than any other human --"

"Almost any other human!"

"-- any other human still on Earth, it'll be book deals and TV
spots for me for years."

"Ha, you think they'll be books and TV for years?"

"Okay, it'll be blog deals and holosensorium spots, ya bastard!"

"Shit, I'm gonna miss you."

"Stay on Earth!"

"You crazy?  And miss the universe?"

Lina woke up tangled in the sheets, knowing that it was Departure
Day and she had a hell of a schedule, but feeling like there was
something else she ought to know.

She turned over to see the clock and screamed, just slightly,
when she rolled into somebody.

"Hi," Luca said.

"Ah," she replied, "what are you -- oh yeah."  She'd remembered.

And in the Clinging Dome, the Greater Klite looked out at the
blue-white planet with a sense of premature nostalgia (the
slatesh have a word for that, she thought, but couldn't recall
it).  The transcend sat in his place, music swirling around him,
having arrived moments ago by virtue of having arrived moments
ago, transcend-like.  Styles apparently having changed among the
Deep Thinkers, the transcend was clad in a corruscating nimbus
of blue-white light, soft enough not to hurt the eyes, but bright
enough to look, the Greater Klite thought, utterly pretensious.

There was the subdued whoosh of a translocator, and the Frlepti,
strutting with the upright necks appropriate to their new stage
of life, came into the dome and perched on their cylinder.  And
following along behind them, flapping tiny still damp-looking
wings and doing something vaguely like flying in the Dome's
present minigravity, came what was left of their egg.

"Hello, there," the Greater Klite said to the tiny bit of prey.

"Peep," it said, keeping carefully out of reach.  "Peep, peep!"