A Grey Moon Over China (50 page)

“Let it go, Bart. I’m sorry I yelled at you. Let’s go see your alien.”

He gave me a long, thoughtful look, then his eyes flickered away at some private thought and he turned away.

“Fine, fine,” he said. He rubbed his hands together. “Carolyn? We’re over here. This way.”

The built-out area in back was poorly lit. It stank of wet ashes and was covered with burn marks on the walls and ceiling. Allerton led us through a maze of empty offices and storerooms to a room against the hangar’s exterior wall, with a conference table in it.

The exterior wall was made from gravel poured into some kind of hard limestone and clay mixture, and had a single window cut into it for air. Bright bars of sunlight seeped around the edges of the iron shutters, and the shutters rattled and clanked sporadically from the gusts of wind.

Allerton threw his jacket onto the table and poured water into metal cups. Dorczak watched him thoughtfully, pursing her lips as she took a cup.

“All right,” said Allerton, “if you’re ready. The animal got itself trapped in a secure storage area down at the end of the build-out, and the troops managed to drop a cattle cage over it. They left the rest of the room the way it was, so you’ll have to excuse the mess.”

The narrow corridor outside the conference room widened at the end, where two armed soldiers guarded a pair of steel loading doors. They saluted and swung open the doors. “Watch your step, Gentlemen, Ma’am.”

The storeroom stood on raised high-traction flooring. More steel, I
noticed. So Lowhead was manufacturing carbon steel, while elsewhere we still settled for iron.

We clanked our way back through aisles of high shelving, some of it leaning drunkenly and burned, and after a minute the vertical bars of the cattle cage appeared. It was up against the outside wall, where another window let in thin shafts of light as the shutters rattled nervously.

The alien stood rigid in the center of the cage. It had dark grey, leathery skin, almost black, which tapered smoothly into four legs that ended with hard hooves. It was the size and color of a timber wolf, but the ends of its trunk were smoothly rounded, with no crease or orifice whatsoever. Its back swelled up a few centimeters in the center, and the skin along the sides of the swelling was slightly darker and porous. At the base of the swelling on each side, at the transition from flank to back, sturdy arms were folded tightly against its body. They had a single hinge and ended in bifurcated hands lined with the same gripping material as the hooves.

I looked at the creature only for a moment, then turned and pushed my way back past the others, ignoring their questions and shaking off Pender-son’s hand.

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” he said as they followed me back into the conference room. “You act like it’s your everyday farm animal or something.”

I leaned against the wall, feeling the hot air from the window on the back of my neck.

“No, Harry, it’s an alien all right. But it’s not an animal. It’s an artifact.”

C
arolyn Dorczak poured herself another cup of water and watched me as she drank it. Allerton paced, while Harry Penderson leaned down with his hands on the table and blew out his breath. Colonel Becker eased himself into a chair.

“A robot, you mean?” said Becker. “I’m being killed by robots, here? How—”

“Do you mean to tell me,” interrupted Allerton, spinning to face me, “that the real people are still out there
watching
us while we make asses out of ourselves with some kind of goddamned
robot?”

“No,” I said to Becker, “not a robot. An artifact.”

“Come on, Torres,” said Penderson, “Spit it out. What do you mean, ‘artifact?’ ”

“Artifacts have a conscious design.”

“You mean a fucking
robot!”
said Allerton. “What is going
on
here?”

“Listen, Bart,” I said. “Let’s say our planet gets covered in water. So, we modify our genetic code a little to give us gills—now we’re a little bit artifact, a little bit consciously designed. And then maybe we have a hard time coding the DNA for flippers, so we just alter ourselves to give birth to offspring with no limbs at all, and we attach manufactured ones. You with me? Then maybe after a thousand years we aren’t bothering with the messy part at all, but we just build new, improved offspring out of wires and bar stock. Did we cross a line there, somewhere, between animal and machine? I don’t know. The only distinction I’m concerned with here is that, whether we’re talking about a genetically self-modified species or an object like this table, we’re talking about a conscious design.”

“Ed,” said Dorczak “you only looked at the thing for a second. How do you know?”

“Because,” I said, pulling out a chair, “I’m an engineer. And if I were to
design an animal, that’s exactly how I’d do it.” Across from me, Allerton was still agitated, starting to sweat. “It also happens to be a design that wouldn’t, under any circumstances, evolve through natural selection.”

“Oh come
on,”
said Allerton, starting to pace again. “If that’s all you’ve got, I don’t for a minute believe we’re not dealing with the honchos themselves, here. Anyway, everyone knows natural selection produces the best possible individuals. The
winners,
for Christ’s sake.” Winners like him, he meant. “That’s its whole
point.”

“That is not remotely its point, Mr. Allerton. The point of natural selection is to bind the greatest possible amount of energy into replicating forms.”

“Jesus
Christ,
you two.” Penderson had been pulling out a chair for Dorczak, but now he stopped. “We need to find out damn fast if this thing is ticking or not, so let’s
sit
on it.”

“Now, now,” said Becker, “let’s not be hasty.” He peered pleasantly over his glasses at Allerton.

“And the unfortunate way natural selection does it,” I said, finally sitting down, “always produces a dog shape.”

“Not snakes?” said Becker, gazing pointedly at Allerton.

“Niche creature,” I said, “not a candidate for intelligence.”

“Well,
this
thing looks like a dog,” said Becker. “Yes?”

“No. That thing in there is a platform designed to carry two things: hands and a brain. Whereas on the dog-shape that natural selection produces, the only things that could turn into hands are too busy holding it up, and there’s no room on the neck for a bigger brain because of the neck muscles and the jaw muscles that break up its food. So the only way to get from there to here is to stand the thing up. That’s because there’s no way for the head to evolve up onto the back where it belongs, unless the organism already has hands—and there’s no way to get hands without standing it up to begin with. There’s certainly no way for the flanks to evolve a whole new pair of limbs out of nothing.”

Penderson stopped tapping his metal cup against his teeth for a minute. “Why can’t the head move up onto the back without hands?”

“Because then it can’t get food to its mouth. No, all of Earth’s candidates for dominance did it the same way. They stood up, and then the hands could be used to lift food and break it up. We evolved hands for the trees, then we were forced out onto the savannah where we had to stand up to see over the grasses.

“But
—now we’re this engineering nightmare: two legs when there should have been four, a brain that should have been down in the trunk, a mouth that should have been in the belly, an air intake that should have
been on the chest, sensors that should have been on the shoulders. In other words, nothing like our perfect friend in there.

“Nor would humans ever get there. The irony of natural selection is that, as soon as a species is able to intercede in its own mortality, first-order natural selection stops. Cognitive selection takes over. And that’s what we’re looking at with this alien: the evolution of artifacts.”

“Mr. Torres,” said Becker over his glasses, “I almost hate to ask this, because I think I know the answer. But you said a while ago that we could end up reproducing by constructing our own offspring. Do you mean
machines?
We could evolve into machines?”

“We could evolve what’s called external reproduction, Colonel. Is that a machine? I don’t know. Be careful about making distinctions where there aren’t any. But yes—on Earth we were several steps in that direction already.”

“But that’s terrible! We’d be gone, forever. Just . . . gone. Replaced by machines!”

“You and I would be gone. Our descendents would be there.”

“As machines, with no soul!”

“If you say so.”

“But that’s abomination!”

Penderson glanced at Becker, then stood up and put his hands on the back of Dorczak’s chair. “Back to the point, Torres. I take it you think this thing’s brain is up under the bulge, and the sensors are in behind that porous band around it. Granted that it’s consciously designed, do you think it’s manufactured? Doesn’t reproduce?”

“I don’t know, Harry. Internal reproduction, if that’s what you mean, would probably need orifices for seed and issue, and growth would need orifices for fuel and waste, and I didn’t see any. Just the same—Colonel, can you get us some instrumentation techs? Scanners to cover the whole spectrum? And I think we’re going to need comm techs, too.”

“Yes,” said Allerton. “Becker, would you take care of that?”

“Absolutely. Yes, sir, Mr. President.” Becker gave him a pudgy salute, then straightened his glasses and left.

“Harry,” I said, “I think I know why you’re asking. The next question is, if it’s manufactured to size, is it manufactured as someone else’s tool, or is it itself the mainline species?”

“Yeah. Or
part
of the mainline species. Becker said there were other variants present—maybe the identity of the mainline species exists simultaneously in several different forms.”

“Good point. Bart? Is there hardcopy somewhere of all the witnesses’ descriptions? Is that something you could get for us?”

“My pleasure, Ed.” He started out, then turned back in the doorway. “You’re not going to get started in the next few minutes? Talking to it or anything?”

“Not without your permission, Bart.”

“Oh. Okay, that’s fine, then.” The door closed behind him.

Penderson sat down again next to Dorczak, and the three of us sat in the near darkness, smelling the heat from outside the window and listening to the iron shutters bang against the concrete. Lines of hazy light burned past the shutters, etching designs onto the tabletop like cabalistic symbols.

“Well, Carolyn? What’s our old friend Bart doing out at this base with his precious defense forces?”

She gazed at her metal cup and turned it in a slow circle on the table. “Don’t overestimate my position, Ed. There’s not much I’m privy to anymore. But I don’t think it’s news that Bart’s ambitious. He gets his rocks off on competition, you know. As long as he wins.” She turned to Penderson.

“What you didn’t see in there, Harry, is that we seem to be building a weapons delivery system. Interplanetary, probably. From the funding stuff I’ve seen come across my desk, and from the ranchers’ complaints about their livestock dying, my guess is that it’s biologicals with a nuclear dispersant. Something nice and fast to help him in his grab for territory. Just exactly what the system needs.”

“How very American,” said Penderson. “Shit. So what about Becker, Carolyn? He’s got to know what’s going on.”

“Becker’s got kids he wants to see get an education.”

“So what do we do about it?”

“Hell, Harry,” she said. “You’re way ahead of me. I’m still staring at the fact that I’ve just become a serious liability to Bart Allerton.”

“Maybe not just yet,” I said. “Allerton’s first concern is to see whether he can wring any advantage out of this alien.”

She sighed. “Did you know, Ed, that nearly everyone on Lowhead thinks your drones are going to return and fight back against the aliens? That all we have to do is hold on and wait?”

“The drones are gone, Carolyn. We found their debris. So unfortunately that’s just wishful thinking. Tell me about the masers, Carolyn.”

She looked blank. “What about them?”