Rolling Thunder (18 page)

Well, let Admiral Autrey explain it:

“These frequencies are used by the United States Navy and others with large submarine fleets,” the admiral told us. “Most radio waves won’t penetrate very much water or soil. When the subs are running deep, there is no way to contact them except by ELF.”

Admiral James Autrey was a thin man with an upper-class British accent and a twinkle in his blue eyes. He was tall for an Earthie, which he had to be since he was at least sixty. I was maybe two inches shorter than him.

Me and the others who made up the guest party at Taliesen Base had been shown into his office immediately upon arrival. Others in our party included Wu Zheng Han, a Martian senator, and his daughter Mei-Ling, better known as “Monet.” There was Yahya Al-Wakil, a manufacturing millionaire, and his son—known as Dekko—from Ceres City, and Mandela Baruti, the ambassador from the Southern African Confederation.

Most of all there was the host of a popular talk show and his five-person crew and entourage, there to tape a show about the nonclassified aspects of the only ETL project that the public was likely to have any interest in. (Mars has its own Extraterrestrial Life, of course, but no one but exobiologists was very interested in the interstitial lichenous organisms and anaerobes that represent the last survivors of the glory days of Mars, over a billion years ago.) Europan “life” was big, mysterious, and awesome to look at … and still debatable, as scientists tried to come up with a definition of life that would include both Terran biota and these massive crystals.

“The problems of ELF,” Admiral Autrey went on, “are twofold. First, it takes a great deal of power and a very large antenna to send a detectable signal. The U.S. Navy built one such antenna in the state of Michigan that was thirty miles long. It ate vast amounts of power, but it would transmit around the world, and deep into the oceans.

“The bigger problem is bandwidth. With ELF, it’s almost nonexistent. We’re used to transmission rates of trillions of bits per second. An ELF system takes several minutes to send
one
character. Extremely inefficient.”

I had been surprised when I realized that the admiral himself was not only going to welcome us to his base, but actually give us the orientation lecture. Of course, we were all Important People in one way or another … insert modest cough here … but it seemed out of character. Most admirals are too self-important for stuff like that.

I had a private moment with Admiral Autrey later—a little too private—and he admitted he did it because he was bored. “Base takes care of itself, mostly,” he said. “My job’s mostly paperwork and riding herd on a lot of boffins with big egos. Way out of my field, frankly.” At this point I gently eased his hand off my butt. Again. All hands was our Admiral Autrey, something I’d suspected during his initial talk when he’d consistently made eye contact mostly with me and the senator’s daughter, who was in her early twenties and almost as pretty as me.

Actually, it was only fleeting eye contact, as a large part of his lecture was delivered directly to our breasts. And actually again, she might have been a
tad
prettier than me. But I didn’t hold it against her after she looked at me, made a face, rolled her eyes, and made a jack-off motion with her fist. Amen, sister!

“So the rate is slow,” the admiral went on, “but information can be transferred. And after our computers had been monitoring the ELF waves for about five years, they informed us that patterns were emerging.”

“Doesn’t prove anything,” said the talk-show host. Oh, very well, I’ll name him. It was Cosmo Wills, known to his admirers as simply “Cosmo,” and to the rest of us as “that loudmouthed asshole.” I considered him an irresponsible rabble-rouser—Earth-born but somehow a Martian citizen (everybody assumes money changed hands), whose political hobbyhorses all center around the Martian Republic being dissolved and becoming a part of the Greater Earth Coalition, that great jabbering society that exists mainly to pry the secret of the bubble drive out of its Martian conservators. He wants us to become just another province of Earth.

For the last three years there’s been an annual referendum to revoke Cosmo’s citizenship, but he’s always squeaked by in spite of the votes of me and all my family. (Unfortunately, our votes count no more than anybody else’s. Grandma Kelly really ought to do something about that.) (Just kidding.) As the constitution currently exists—but keep checking back, it could change!—it takes a two-thirds vote to kick someone off the planet.

Free speech? Sure, we have it. You’re free to criticize our way of life all you want to … from someplace else.

“Of course not,” said the admiral. “Patterns exist in nature independent of life. Crystals themselves are patterns.”

“But what about the stuff moving around in them?” Cosmo wanted to know. “Surely that debate was ended long ago.”

“A popular misconception,” the admiral replied, putting the contemptuous spin on the word “popular” that the British can do so much better than anyone else. Cosmo didn’t have much of a reputation for accuracy. “Things can be seen to move in the mountains. They move in patterns that, so far, have defied our attempts to assign meaning to them. Rivers move, as do glaciers. Ocean currents move in interesting patterns, but so far as we know, they are not alive.”

“So you’re saying you don’t think they’re alive?”

“I said nothing of the sort. I myself am convinced they are alive, in some way we don’t yet understand. But there are cogent arguments on the other side. As you might imagine, it is the subject of a lively debate around here. Remember, not long ago the huge majority of astrophysicists subscribed to the Big Bang theory of cosmic origins. Recent discoveries concerning dark energy have cast some doubt on that scenario.”

“Some people still believe the Earth is flat, too,” Cosmo sneered.

“Many of them in your audience, I shouldn’t wonder, Mr. Wills,” the admiral said, which was one of the reasons I only moved his hand off my ass later instead of slapping him. I liked him, horndog though he was. Besides, I don’t expect men to always be able to resist my endearing young charms.

“Actually, now that I think back,” I piped up, “last time I was there it looked pretty flat to me.” I knew that “Mr. Wills” business had riled the little idiot. He wants everyone to call him by his brand name, Cosmo. It’s copyrighted.

“Maybe you should go back and research it, Cosmo,” said Monet, the senator’s daughter. “It might take years. Decades, even.”

This dig went right over his head. I gave the girl a thumbs-up.

“What I’m interested in is a lot more serious,” Cosmo said, seriously. Seriousness is also a trademark of his; he seems to have no sense of humor.

“You’re speaking of the statistical anomalies,” Admiral Autrey said.

“If that’s what you want to call death, disability, and destruction, yes I am,” Cosmo said. Even I had to admit he had a point.

YOU APPROACH TALIESEN
on the ground because spaceships fall out of the sky if they try to fly there. Not all of them, of course, but we’ve been using flying buses on Mars and other planets for a long time now, and they’re very safe.

Not around Taliesen. At first you attribute the accident rate to random chance. No connection could be found, no common failing that had caused the first four bus crashes, years ago. In each case it was the failure of a small, rather insignificant part, often a piece of electronics or programming, that led to a chain of failures that resulted in catastrophe. It all seemed so reasonable. The engineers shook their heads and chalked it up to sheer bad luck. Flights continued to Taliesen because the freckles were the most fascinating objects in the solar system, and everybody knew that whoever figured them out would be in the history books forever.

Then another three buses crashed. Finally, the engineers listened to what the actuaries had been telling them all along, one of the basic principles of life, though you won’t find it in any science book.

Once is bad luck.

Twice is coincidence.

Three times is enemy action.

Seven times … well, nobody knew
what
was going on, but it was clear that
something
was out of the ordinary. All flights were grounded for a radius of one hundred miles, and that interdiction remains in force to this day. There were no more crashes …

… but a high percentage of buses coming and going broke down on the ground. The closer you got to the crystal mountains, the more malfunctions of all kinds happened. Often it was a part that seldom, if ever, had failed before. Computer programs developed glitches. Okay, computer programs
always
develop glitches, it’s in their nature, but these were too frequent and too odd to be just chance mishaps. Enemy action? Nobody knew. Nobody knows to this day. But you have to act as if it is.

There was something else about the place, something much more disturbing. Machines were not the only things that broke down in Taliesen. People did, too.

Of the first team to actually go to one of the big crystal mountains, many years ago now, one suffered a stroke two days after arrival, and another had a heart attack the day after returning to Forward Base. Of the seven people in the first primitive exploratory mission, which lasted thirty days, five were dead within the year, all from “natural causes.” The trouble was, most of them were too damn young to die of what killed them, and none had shown any warning signs, nor did they have any family history. They just dropped dead.

Again, enemy action? If so … of what kind? There was absolutely nothing happening around the mountains—nothing we could detect, anyway—that could account for it. No sizzling death beams, no elevated radiation levels, no theremin music and invisible Id Monster snarling and gnashing its teeth.

Nobody was about to give up exploring the Taliesen area just because of an elevated risk of death or injury. It was just too important. So what do you do? You look at the charts and minimize the risk.

Distance equaled better odds, so longer-term personnel were quartered at Taliesen Base, five miles from the nearest mountain. People could stay there for several years with only minimal increased hazard, or so the number-crunchers said.

Cryoaquanauts were at the NEMO Base, only two miles away. Stays there were limited to six months, with a three-month rotation out. NEMOs are well-known to be nuts, and would have stayed indefinitely, but such were the regs.

Last was Forward Base, one mile from the mountain, where no one was allowed to stay longer than two weeks. You planned your experiment at Clarke Centre, you hastened to Forward, did your work, and got out.

Sometimes a closer approach was authorized, but you’d better have a damn good explanation of why it was necessary, and you’d better be able to do it in twenty-four hours.

So, next question … what are
you
doing in Taliesen, Podkayne?

Well, a couple of reasons. I did the math (actually, I asked a computer to do it; wouldn’t you?) and found that my itinerary increased my risk of death by about 0.00001 percent. It was already a bit dangerous just coming to Jupiter, and living on Europa. And come on, I’m nineteen and healthy as a bran muffin.

Then there’s the fact that I wanted to go because I
could.
Simple as that. (You say you went to Europa and all you got was that lousy T-shirt?) The most interesting thing on the planet, maybe in the solar system, is Taliesen, and not many people are allowed out there. I knew the only reason I was approved for the junket was because I was the granddaughter of a former president of Mars and the niece of an admiral. Well, so be it. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.

Anyway, I had my gonads in cold storage. What’s the worst that could happen?

WE STARTED OUR
tour by backtracking from Taliesen Main Base to the ELF antenna, apparently the Eighth Wonder of Europa, in the opinion of the station tech who showed us around his lonely outpost… except the whole fifty-mile array was under the ice. We did get to see some very educational films about its construction, though.

He played us some tapes of one of the songs, speeded up about a million times, that had come from the largest Big Rock Candy Mountain, officially designated TECP-45. For Taliesen-Europa Crystalline Prominence #45.

“This is the last year of recording,” he said, and the room filled with music. Each note was the same length, lasted about a second, and was in a lower register. Of course it could have been much higher and much faster, since this was a virtual sound, but the authority of the deep notes reverberated more dramatically. It lasted about a minute and a half. Our silence lasted not quite that long.

“That’s it?” Monet, the senator’s daughter, asked. “A year’s worth?”

“That’s it,” our nursemaid confirmed.

“Well, when you get a little more, call us and we’ll talk contract,” Monet said.

“Could I hear it again?” I asked. The others were already wandering ahead. The tech showed me how to call up the recordings of all the TECPs, of which there were over five hundred. There were sixty-five in Taliesen, the most interesting region, and the most vocal. I downloaded them all and caught up with the group.

IN THE BUS
on the way back to Taliesen Main Base I started working my way through them. Each was about four hundred notes, nonrepeating, but sometimes seeming to work variations on a theme. Each tone was discrete, there was no sliding up and down a tone scale. I queried the download and found that each note was held for 85.2 hours (3.551181041 Earth days, if you want it exactly), then the rock would stop singing for a few minutes and begin again on another note. There was no tremolo, no vibrato, no variation of any kind that anyone could find. I guess it was the equivalent of one Europan bit, or maybe byte. To no one’s great surprise, 85.2 hours was the length of the Europan day and orbital period, which meant it also had a resonance with Io and Ganymede. This was truly music of the spheres, on a vast scale.

I tried listening to some of the other mountains. At first they just seemed like more variations on the same theme, but before long I began to discern a distinct voice for each TECP.