Blue Remembered Earth

on our own Earth, even with the best materials currently at our disposal, do you imagine they’d last more than a few millennia without upkeep?’

‘Maybe it’s not even that old.’

‘I very much doubt that it was built within the span of human history. Given the age of the galaxy, the ages of the other stars and planets . . . that would be an almighty coincidence, wouldn’t it? That someone made this thing, and we just happened to evolve a civilisation and the means to detect it a cosmic eye-blink later?’

‘You think it’s a lot older.’

‘Yes, but not hundreds of millions of years, either. Crucible has plate tectonics, like our own Earth. Land masses move around on her surface. We trace their interlocking coastlines and deduce where they once fitted together, like Africa and the Americas. No structure that large could endure plate movement without being deformed or destroyed. Mandala’s geometric symmetry is as perfect as we can measure with our current methods. It can’t be much older than tens of millions of years. Which, I admit, is still a cosmic eye-blink.’

Geoffrey felt as if he’d stepped off a mental cliff and was still falling. Wisely or not, he rejected any notion that Arethusa might be lying. This was real – or at least she believed it to be so. Ocular had found something of epochal significance, one of the two or three most important discoveries in the history of the human species, and he was in on it from almost the outset. Stupendous and world-shattering, Arethusa had called it. That, he was forced to admit, was no exaggeration.

This knowledge changed everything. Sooner or later the world would know, and from that moment on . . . every thought, every action, every desire and ambition would be indelibly coloured by this discovery. How could it be otherwise? There was another intelligence out there, close enough to touch. And even if they were now gone, then the mere existence of their handiwork was wonder enough to fundamentally change humanity’s view of the universe.

Well, perhaps. The world had absorbed the dizzying lessons of modern science easily enough, hadn’t it? Reality was a trick of cognition, an illusion woven by the brain. Beneath the apparently solid skin of the world lay a fizzing unreality of quantum mechanics, playing out on a warped and surreal Salvador Dali landscape. Ghost worlds peeled away from the present with every decision. The universe itself would one day simmer down to absolute entropic stasis, the absolute and literal end of time itself. No action, no memory of an action, no trace of a memory, could endure for ever. Every human deed, from the smallest kindness to the grandest artistic achievement, was ultimately pointless.

But it wasn’t as if people went around thinking about that when they had lovers to meet, menus to choose from, birthdays to remember. The humdrum concerns of normal life trumped the miraculous every time. Eunice’s death had been a seven-day wonder, and the same would be true of the Ocular discovery when it went public. Maybe a seven-month or seven-year wonder, Geoffrey thought charitably. But sooner or later it would be business as usual. Economies would rise and fall. Celebrities would come and go. There would be political scandals, even the occasional murder. And the knowledge that humanity was not alone in the universe would be as relevant to most as the knowledge that protons were built of quarks.

But still . . . That didn’t mean it wasn’t momentous, that it wasn’t an awesome privilege to be one of the first to know.

Quite why Arethusa felt he deserved that privilege, or what he was expected to do for her in return, were entirely separate mysteries.

‘Forgive my scepticism, but . . .’ he ventured. ‘Are you absolutely certain that it can’t be a naturally occurring phenomenon? I mean, think of anthills . . . beehives. They have structure, organisation, that might imply conscious intent. Even geological or chemical processes can create the illusion of design.’

‘It’s good that you have doubts, but I don’t think you’ve considered all the options yet. This is an order of magnitude – no, make that two or three orders of magnitude more complex than anything nature is capable of. That’s a planet like Earth, Geoffrey. Its weather and surface chemistry obey predictable rules. There’s only one conclusion, which is that Mandala was made. It’s artificial, and it was designed to be seen. The people . . . the beings . . . that did this – they’d have known exactly how visible they were. They’d have known that instruments like Ocular would be capable of viewing them from dozens of light-years away. And still they did this, knowing full well that another civilisation would be able to detect their handiwork. It was deliberate. It was made to be seen.’

‘Like a calling card,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Or, perhaps, an invitation to keep away. A territorial marker. Maybe a helpful warning sign, like a radiation or biohazard symbol. I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about this image for months and I still haven’t got any further with it. Ocular will continue monitoring Crucible, and the signal-to-noise will improve . . . but there’s a limit to what we can find out from here. We’ll have to get closer.’

‘You mean go there?’

‘If it takes a thousand years, that’s within our scope. Don’t look so surprised, Geoffrey – I credited you with more imagination than that.’

He shivered, for it was uncomfortably like being spoken to by his grandmother.

‘It takes months just to get to Jupiter.’

‘But the Green Efflorescence already demands of us that we achieve the means to cross interstellar space. We are already on that path. If Crucible is the spur that brings that goal closer, so be it.’

‘You said this discovery was made late last year.’

‘That’s correct.’

‘That’s also around the time my grandmother died.’

‘And you’re wondering if the . . . shock of it was what pushed her over the edge?’

Geoffrey doubted there was much in the universe capable of shocking his grandmother. ‘Or something,’ he allowed.

‘She was surprised, as you’d expect. Brim-full of questions. Probing, insightful questions. Sharp until the end, your grandmother. But once she’d absorbed the news, once she’d asked me enough to satisfy her curiosity, it was almost as if she decided to put the whole business out of her mind, as if it really wasn’t that important, just something we’d been talking about to pass the time. As if the discovery of intelligence elsewhere in the universe was no more consequential than, say, the news that a mutual acquaintance of ours was dying of some very rare