Existence

once have glimmered a little, before they were carved into uselessness? From your buildup, I figured you fellows already had something more tangible in your hands.”

Haihong Ming shook his head.

“We almost did. An especially promising piece kept slipping through our grasp. Not once but frequently, for a generation.”

“A generation?” Akana asked, clearly puzzled. “But-”

“That is how long we suspected something remarkable-an intact emissary stone-might have come into private possession. Our searches came close to recovering it, several times.”

And if you did acquire a working space crystal, earlier than I snagged one out of orbit, Gerald wondered, would you have shared it with the world, as we did?

Haihong Ming continued. “The most recent near miss-and it causes some embarrassment to say this-came just over a day ago. Thirty hours, to be exact. Since then, we have searched hard. And other forces appear to be doing so, as well.”

“But…” Akana leaned forward, her elbows on the smooth tabletop. “How do you know this isn’t just another fetish stone, or crystal skull, or some other man-made-”

“We know,” affirmed the representative of Great China, firmly. “And I am now authorized to show you how we know.”

With a series of grunts and hand motions, Haihong Ming caused an image to appear above the table. A scroll of some sort, or flimsy document, a single page that stretched wider and then shimmered with pixelated rainbows, as if lit by some angled light source. Gerald squinted. His aiware compensated and interpreted.

A memory sheet. An older, ten-petabyte unit for digital data storage.

The filmy object floated-in synthetic 3-D-above them all, then appeared to flatten, turning and glistening in every refracted color.

“This recording came into our possession just three hours ago. It is now being flown to Beijing, but a preliminary download contains information so startling-I am ordered to share it with you.”

A small seed of blackness erupted from a corner of the memory sheet. Unfolding once… twice… several times… the darkness continued to expand through a dozen dimensions. It then unpackaged glittering, pinpoint stars that swirled and dispersed, arraying themselves across what rapidly became an ersatz, 3-D cosmos, complete with strange constellations… all of it enveloping a blue-brown world. One that clearly wasn’t Earth. Nor did Gerald recognize the globe from dozens revealed by the Havana Artifact.

“As I said, we did not recover the interstellar voyager itself,” explained Haihong Ming. “That crystal may already be sequestered in a hidden place by some nation, cabal, or gang. But a sympathetic citizen did provide us with this record containing dozens of hours of output from the Heaven Egg.”

“Heaven Egg?”

“The original artifact is Chinese national property. It is ours, to name, as we choose. And be assured, we will recover it! Meanwhile, here is a small portion of its trove. Remember, I, too, am seeing this for the first time.”

Haihong Ming motioned and a story commenced, made entirely of images.

It began as natives of the blue-brown world launched a tiny, twinkling probe, then used giant machines to send sparkling rays, push-propelling its filmy sail across the vast desert of space. Gennady and Ramesh murmured about technical differences between the method portrayed here and that described by the Havana Artifact. No one else spoke as the little envoy passed for a time through darkness… then brightened in the light of a fast-approaching sun.

Gerald’s breath caught as quick-looming Jupiter snagged and flung the little envoy… which then caromed wildly among other planets, slowing each time until, at last, a familiar globe floated into view, seizing the star-traveler into a final, flaming embrace…

… followed by a miraculous, snow-cushioned landfall. Then discovery by men in sewn leather garments… And the story had barely begun.

There were no breaks-for meals, even the toilet-nor did anyone speak. Not till a single word took shape, central and glowing, above the table top, right next to the blanket- covered bulge of the Havana Artifact. It manifested as an ancient Chinese ideogram, floating and shimmering in a calligraphic style that seemed edgy. Even angry.

Gerald’s aiware had no trouble with translation. And all at once, he understood why Haihong Ming and his superiors were in a sudden mood to share everything they knew.

LIARS.

LOYALTY TEST

You got to hand it to those boys and girls on the Contact Commission. They do come up with clever tricks to get cooperation from the Artifact. First that behavioral training they used last month. Now, by refusing to record any more of those endless schematics and tech manuals the probe offers.

Who would think to try that? Saying no to a free gift? Declining something humans passionately desire-all those advanced technologies-in order to get what’s more important.

It makes sense though. What’s the probe’s top priority? Get us moving down the road toward making more probes. Put aside whether that ultimate goal is good, bad, or neutral. The Artifact must hunger to teach us those technologies. A hunger we can exploit. Hideoshi and her team are savvy. They won’t scratch the Artifact’s itch without some kind of payment. And their demand?

More interviews with the passengers. One or two or three at a time.

This grew more urgent when we spied lasers and guns blasting across the asteroid belt! The commission demanded an explanation-and Oldest Member first expressed surprise, then indifference, and finally attributed it all to “bad machines from earlier eras.”

Adding that “You humans can protect yourselves by downloading strong tools. Let us show you how to cast powerful rays that could sweep your solar system clean!”

Hm. Tempting. Persuasive. Who turns down an offer of big guns?

And Gerald Livingstone tossed the Black Cloth, casting the artilens in darkness-till they finally accepted a deal. One hour for one hour. They get to teach us new-tech for a span, then we get some diversity-such as it is.

So we’ve gone back to interviewing Low-Swooping Fishkiller-the youngest member-proud that his race made the Artifact we now hold, and apparently unmoved that we detect no sign of industry or radio by peering at his homeworld. “Organics all die,” he answered, shrugging those weird wings.

And Squiddy… she picked the name herself, from fifty thousand submitted by school kids across Earth. Some sense of humor, for a tentacle-waving pseudo cephalopod! Her chief contribution to human culture-a fresh and convincing definition of “irony”-has the intelligentsia spinning in why didn’t we think of that circles! And it took an alien. Huh.

Still, Squiddy won’t diverge from Om’s party line. He makes a case that the Artifact may indeed be like a virus- as critics say-but a beneficial or commensal one. And he gave hundreds of examples from our medical literature. A persuasive point.

Others are harder to understand. Take the caterpillarlike being who spends its time during each interview peering out of the crystal at any nearby human, then muttering a puff of dismissive symbols that translate: “Man, what an imagination I have!”

A clear case of Noakes Disease, earning that creature the web consensus name Bennie.

“What did you expect?” commented M’m por’lock, the one who resembles a giant-reddish otter, after helping usher Bennie away. “We spend eternities floating through space, either sleeping or amusing ourselves in vast virtuality layers, deep within our crystal vessel. You can lose your way in dreamstate. Or miss your chance to taste objective reality, during each brief encounter with a living race.”

Are you like me? Do you get a sense, from M’m por’lock, of things unsaid?

More broadly-is this doing any good?