Existence

Sure, it scratches our curiosity itch, a bit. Glimpsing strange arts and tasting the cultural spread can be engrossing. This gives our psych and other experts a chance to chart behaviors, cross-correlate alien attitudes and other boffin stuff. But seriously, what do they expect-to come up with an extraterrestrial lie detector? Some way to verify the stories we’re told? Or to separate the Artifact’s good offers from the sales-pitch parts? The portions that are pure, viral self-interest?

Suspicion lingers. The diversity of ninety races that we see-is it all somehow concocted? An act that’s been refined before many audiences across ten million years? A puppet show, serving that long-term goal-

– to persuade?

59.

JONAH

The artificial sea serpent took a circuitous route along the ocean floor, carrying Bin on a lengthy tour of murky canyons and muddy flats, stretching endlessly.

His passenger cell was padded, but cramped. The curved walls kept twisting, throbbing as the machine beast pushed along. Nor was the robot vehicle as garrulous or friendly as Dr. Nguyen’s penguin surrogate. Giving only terse answers, it ignored his request for a webscreen, immersion specs, or any form of ailectronic diversion.

For the most part, the apparatus kept silent.

Or as silent as a motorized python could be, while undulating secretively across a vast and mostly empty sea. Clearly, it was avoiding contact with humanity-not easily done in this day and age, even far away from shipping lanes and shorelines. Several times, Bin felt thrown to one side as the snake-sub veered and dived, taking shelter behind some mound, within a crevice, or even burying itself under a meter or so of mucky sediment, then falling eerily quiet, as if hiding from predators. On two of those occasions, Bin thought he heard the faint drone of some engine gradually rise and then fall, in both pitch and volume, before fading away at last. Then, as the serpent shook itself free of mud, their journey resumed.

Even its method of propulsion seemed designed for stealth. Most of the world’s sub-sea detection systems were tuned to listen for propellers, not wriggling giant serpents.

Of course signs of humanity lay everywhere. The ocean floor was an immense junkyard, even in desert zones where no fish or plants or any kind of resource could be seen. Shipwrecks offered occasional sights worth noting. Far more often, Bin saw mundane types of trash, like torn commercial fishing nets, resembling vast, diffuse, deadly clouds that drifted with the current, clogged with fish skeletons and empty turtle shells. Or swarms of plastic bags that drifted alongside jelly hordes in creepy mimicry. Once, he spotted a dozen huge cargo containers that must have toppled from a mighty freighter long ago, spilling what appeared to be bulky, old-fashioned computers and television panels across forty hectares.

I’m used to living amid garbage. But I always figured the open sea was better off… more pure… than the Huangpu.

Losing track of time, he dozed while the slithering robot hurried across a vast, empty plain, seeming as lifeless as the moon…

… then jerked awake, to look out through the tiny window and find himself being carried along a craggy underwater mountain range, an apparently endless series of stark ridges that speared upward, reaching almost to the glistening surface, but even more eerie, because the rippling promontories vanished into bottomless gloom, below. Clearly, the mechanical creature that had swallowed him meant to shake off any pursuers. Weaving its way through this labyrinth should help.

Feeling a bit recovered, Bin peeled open some ration bars that he found in a small compartment by his left arm. A little tap offered trickles of fresh water. There was a washcloth, which he used to dab and clean his cuts. A simple suction tube-for waste-was self-explanatory, if awkward to use. After which, the voyage became a battle against both tedium and claustrophobia-the frustration of limited movement plus abiding worry over what his future held.

No clues came from the serpent, which spoke sparingly and answered no questions, not even when Bin asked about some roiling funnels of black water that he spotted, rising from fissures in a nearby jagged ridgeline, like columns of smoke from a fierce fire.

It occurred to Bin that-perhaps-he shouldn’t be so glad that the owners of this sophisticated device included a window. In stories and teledramas, kidnappers insist on a blindfold, if they plan to let you go.

The time to worry is when they don’t seem to care. If they let you watch the route to their lair, it means they feel sure you’ll never talk.

On the other hand, who could possibly tell, by memory, one hazy sea ridge from another? That reassured him for a while… till he remembered the visual helper unit that Dr. Nguyen installed in his right eye. Bin had come to take for granted the way the tiny aissistant augmented whatever he looked at, enhancing the dim scene beyond the window. Now he realized; without it, he wouldn’t be seeing much at all!

Are they assuming that a poor man, like me, is unaugmented?

He wondered about the implant. Might it even be recording whatever he saw? In which case, was he like the kidnap victim who kept daring fate, by peeking under his blindfold?

Or am I headed for someplace that is so perfectly escape-proof that they don’t care how much I know?

Or someplace that I’d never want to escape from?

That was preferable to other possibilities.

Or am I to be altered, in ways that will make me placid?

Or do they figure that I’ll only be needed for a little while-till a replacement can be arranged, someone else qualified to speak with the worldstone? Must I try as hard to win over my next masters, as I did Anna and Paul and Dr. Nguyen?

Each scenario came accompanied by vivid fantasies. And Bin tried not to subvocalize any of them-there were modern devices that could track the impulses in a human throat and parse words you never spoke aloud.

On the other hand, why would anyone bother doing that, with a mere shoresteader trashman? Ultimately, each fantasy ended in one thought. That he might never see his family again.

But the soldier… the woman in that drowned attic room… she will get the sheet recording that Yang Shenxiu made. She will know that I cooperated. The government will protect and reward Mei Ling and Xiao En. Surely?

It was all too worrisome and perplexing. To help divert his thoughts, Bin put the worldstone on his lap and tried talking to Courier of Caution.

True, without immersion in sunlight, the entity had to preserve energy, subduing its vivid animations-the images were dim and limited to a small surface. Still, if he could learn some new things, that might prove his worth.

It wasn’t easy. Without sound induction, he was limited to tracing characters on the ovoid’s surface. Courier at first tried responding with ancient ideograms. But Bin knew few of those, so they resumed the process of updating its knowledge of written Chinese. The entity within offered pictures or pantomimed actions. Bin sketched the associated modern words-often helped by the ai-patch. Never having to repeat, it went remarkably quickly. Within half a day, they were communicating.

At last, Bin felt ready to ask a question that had been foremost in his mind. Why did Courier hate the aliens inside the Havana Artifact?

Why did he call them “liars”?

In a stream of characters, accompanied by low-resolution images, the entity explained.

Our world is farther from its sun than yours. Larger but less dense. Our gravity slighter. Our atmosphere thicker and rich with snow. It is a planet much easier to land upon than your Earth. If a solar sail is