The first thing Rakesh saw upon opening his tent was Parantham, seated in a chair, in human form. Her detailed appearance was not the same as that which he’d assigned to her back in the node, but her identity signal ensured instant recognition. As he stepped out of the tent he tensed his forearm; his body believed it was real flesh. A moment’s further introspection told him that he was not modifying his perceptions in any way. As far as he could tell he was simply seeing her as she was.
Parantham said, “Welcome to the bulge.” She was even speaking in his own native tongue.
“Thanks.”
She must have noticed his puzzlement, because she explained, “I thought it would make things simpler for our hosts if they only had to deal with one phenotype and one language.” She gestured at the instruments around them, which Rakesh had barely begun to take in. “Lots of hand-and-eye-driven interfaces, so it looks as if I made the right choice.”
Rakesh told his tent to fold itself. They were in a large cabin, inside some kind of space habitat; a window looked out on to a densely packed field of stars, slowly turning, suggesting a centrifugal origin for the gravity he felt. They’d requested exactly the same destination address as Lahl, but her metabolic and ergonomic needs would have been very different, so their hosts must have undertaken some extensive reconstruction. Rakesh had no idea what the Aloof would have done if Parantham had asked to be embodied as a blind limbless blob: maybe piped all the data straight into their minds, which would have been useful. Then again, maybe their hosts would have split them up, requiring them to take turns to examine the meteor with different instruments tailored to their different bodies.
The meteor itself was prominently displayed in the middle of the cabin, encased in a transparent enclosure, protected from contamination. As Rakesh walked over to it Parantham joined him. The object that had brought them all these thousands of light years was a dark gray slab of basalt about four meters across, its surface pitted with small impact craters.
He said, “What do the Aloof think we can do with this, that they can’t do themselves?”
“Give a damn?” Parantham suggested.
“They cared enough to summon us here.”
“That wasn’t difficult,” she said. “Though it might not be a question of effort; it might be a matter of what they see as appropriate. They might believe that they have no right to mess with this themselves, but we’re entitled to know about it, and make of it what we will.” She smiled. “Though maybe that only applies to you, as molecular next-of-kin.”
They left the cabin and circumnavigated the habitat, a spinning ring some two hundred meters across. The main corridor led them to a kitchen, storerooms, a bathroom, two bedrooms, an exercise room, and a workshop. It was both gratifying and slightly chilling to see how well the Aloof understood the human phenotype’s needs. The fixtures all had a generic quality, rather than the look of something made by humans for humans, but many cultures within the Amalgam would not have done a better job. Rakesh had swallowed a library before they’d left Massa, so it was a moot point as to whether his hosts had read his mind as the source of all this, or had studied other unencrypted human travelers on their way through the bulge, but they certainly hadn’t shaped this place from his own memories; there was nothing specific to the culture of Shab-e-Noor, and they hadn’t covered the walls with portraits of his family or lovers. They really couldn’t win, though, because such tact itself invited its own creepy sense of invasiveness: they’d peered inside him deeply enough to understand how wrong that would have been.
If Rakesh felt naked, he had nobody but himself to blame. He’d known from the moment Lahl had offered him the key exactly how vulnerable he’d be, and he’d poured scorn on his friends’ concerns. These were the terms, this was the deal; it was too late to have second thoughts. In principle, the possibilities for abuse were endless: the Aloof could be systematically torturing a billion helpless Rakesh-clones at this very moment. When he’d mentioned this primal fear to Parantham back on Massa, she’d pointed out that, while she’d regret the Aloof making anyone suffer, they could easily construct
Back in the meteor room, they set to work. Rakesh had never had reason to be much of a materials scientist or ejecta expert before, and as he invoked the aid of the library the knowledge that flowed into him brought a thrill of discovery, a sense of new vistas opening up before him, that stretched far beyond his immediate needs. Imbibing a massive bolus of pre-digested information was not his usual means of educating himself—he much preferred the slow process of building incrementally on his own prior knowledge, testing and interpreting every assertion before accepting it—but there was no denying the rush of suddenly having thousands of new facts and insights jostling in his skull.
The equipment the Aloof had given them could probe the meteor’s surface down to an atomic level; elicit and analyze emissions across the spectrum from gamma rays to microwaves; tomograph it in a thousand different ways; strike it, tap it, pound it, tickle it, and listen to the harmonics as it rang like a bell. Its gross chemical composition and its rarest impurities, its crystalline microstructure and the subtlest deformations thereof, were there for the asking. This rock, Rakesh thought, was as naked to them as they were to the Aloof.
He and Parantham collaborated efficiently, discussing the best strategies for the investigation, speaking a dense specialist lingo that would have been foreign to them both just minutes before. The primary interface to all of the instruments was a touch-screen console, but mercifully they weren’t limited to reading the screen and tapping menus; the Aloof had tailored the interface to their detailed embodiments rather than a generic notion of the ancestral human phenotype, and the console could exchange data with the infrared ports in their fingertips.
Tomography alone was enough to locate the dead microbes, but it was necessary to send nanomachines crawling through the crevices to extract reliable DNA sequences. A dose of paleogenetic expertise from the library left Rakesh with no doubt that Lahl had been correct: these were not the corpses of any micro-organism, from any epoch, from any of the known DNA worlds. Their ancestors had probably been blasted off one of those planets billions of years before, on an entirely different piece of rock; that earlier meteor must have fallen to the ground somewhere in the bulge, and seeded a whole new biosphere. A billion or so years later this lump of basalt had been flung into the sky; with better luck it might have contributed to the DNA panspermia itself, but it was a dead seed now. At least, no pristine world could have revived these desiccated, shocked, radiation-fried microbes, though perhaps if they’d achieved the unlikely fate of landing on a planet already awash with DNA-based life, the right species of distant cousin might have scavenged a few of these corpses’ gene fragments and tried them out for new ideas.
“The question now,” said Parantham, “is how do we find the parent world?”
The DNA sequences were enough to assign probabilities to the meteor’s “grandparent world”: the planet out in the disk whose ejecta had seeded the world from which this rock had been blasted. Even those probabilities were not sharp, though; there were seven candidates that were almost equally likely. Given the chaotic dynamics of the bulge, this did not do much to narrow the search.
If the DNA couldn’t help them, what of the rock itself? Three billion years before, lava flowing to the surface of the parent world had cooled into crystals of olivine, a magnesium-iron silicate, and augite, in which calcium, aluminum and titanium were also present. Subtle deformations in the structure of these crystals offered a partial history of the temperatures and pressures experienced by the rock since then.
The sudden heat and shock of the impact that had thrown the rock into space had left distinctive chemical fingerprints as well as physical dislocations. Over time, in the cool of the interstellar vacuum, some of the substances forged during the rock’s fiery ejection had slowly decayed, hinting at a date for the event: fifty million years before. At the same time, the high-energy cosmic rays that flooded through the bulge from a myriad of sources had corroded the meteor’s surface, left chemical deposits of their own, scoured tracks deep inside the rock, and created trace amounts of new isotopes. As Lahl had claimed back in the node, both lines of evidence converged on the same date: the rock had apparently drifted through the bulge, unprotected by any atmosphere or planetary magnetic field, for about fifty million years.
The same console that allowed them to control the analytic instruments provided access to a star map. When
