The Gift (9 page)

“You mean, I would communicate with something like you, but it would not be you?”

“Yes.”

“Why is that?”

“I don’t have access to that information.”

Sam thought about that as he rolled the ball around in his hand, careful to maintain contact with it at all times.

“What are you?” Sam asked.

“I am a guide.”

“A guide to what?”

“A guide to your gift.”

“My gift…and the object I hold in my hand is my gift?”

“Yes.”

Sam wanted to put the sphere down, get himself a cup of coffee and think about this for a while, but he didn’t want to hurt the entity he was talking with, even if it seemed untroubled by the prospect. He compromised by transferring the sphere to his left hand after he got up from the table and moved to the coffee pot to make himself a cup one-handed, black, one sugar. Carrying the coffee with him, he left the kitchen and went into the living room. He took a seat on his recliner. It was the only piece of furniture in the house that belonged to him. He took a sip of coffee before continuing the odd conversation.

“How many people received a gift like this last night?”

“You are the only person who received a gift in this manner last night.”

“Why me?”

“I don’t have access to that information.”

“For a guide, you don’t seem to have access to much information.”

“I am a guide to your gift.”

Sam took another sip of his coffee. It occurred to him that he should report this to Web. It also occurred to him that he had no intention of doing so. Web didn’t want him on the team and Sam didn’t want anyone else controlling his actions.

“Okay, you’re a guide to my gift. Guide me, please.”

“You have received a gift. The gift is intended to help you. You may accept it or reject it. If you reject it, our conversation will be completed. If you accept it, you will be changed, as will your gift. The change to you will be minor and can be undone. The change to your gift will be substantial and irrevocable. It will become yours and yours alone.”

“How will I be changed if I accept the gift?”

“You will be given the ability to communicate with your gift.”

“How will the gift be changed?”

“It will become.”

Sam thought about that for a while. He was in a very similar situation to the one he’d found himself in yesterday. If the object had the means to harm him and wished to do so, it could have done so already.

“What do I have to do to accept?”

“Say that you do.”

“I accept.”

C
HAPTER
T
EN

“What in the hell did you think you were doing?” Jack asked Angela as she was escorted back into the CP.

“Move, Jack,” Angela answered as she brushed passed him.

Seeing her enter, Web started to address her, but she cut him off, “I need to talk to the whole team right now, Sir.”

Web had known Angela for nearly three years. He’d become quite impressed with her as both a skilled linguist and an outstanding officer. Still, under ordinary circumstances, he would have dressed her down. These were anything but ordinary circumstances. “Go ahead, Major." He gestured toward the middle of the CP, where the rest of the team was still gathered around the monitors that had shown Angela’s actions just moments ago. Everyone was staring back at her.

“It communicated with me. The whole experience was incredibly vivid, but I’m starting to lose pieces of it. I need someone to start recording immediately.”

“We’ve been recording since we got here. Go ahead,” Web repeated. His remark caused a few raised eyebrows among the scientists.

“It told me what it is, what they are and why they’re here.” She paused for a moment, her brain processing the content of the message she was about to relay. “They are here to warn us and to help us.”

“Start with the warning,” Web directed.

“Yes, Sir. There are two opposing forces in our galaxy. No, opposing is not the right word.” She paused for a moment before resuming, “Forgive me, our communication was complex. It’s difficult to put into words.

“There is a force whose purposes are inimical to our survival and the survival of our form of intelligent life and there are pockets of our form of life who manage to survive.”

“What do you mean, ‘our form of intelligent life’?” Camilla asked.

“Individual intelligences, beings who exercise independent free will, beings who can knowingly choose to act in a manner that is inconsistent with the good of their own species. That’s the main reason group intelligences don’t recognize us as intelligent life. Individual elements of species like ours can and do choose to reduce the chances of their species surviving. The group intelligences, I think of them as swarms, do not believe that such species can or should survive. They see us as consuming resources that would best be used by their form of life. As they move through the galaxy they remove our form of life wherever they find it in order to provide the opportunity for a swarm to evolve in the newly cleared environment. They don’t act out of malice. We are, to them, an unfortunate evolutionary mistake." Angela stopped to take a drink of water from a bottle Dan handed her.

“That would explain the Fermi paradox,” Rui commented quietly.

“Indeed,” Chang replied.

“What’s the Fermi paradox?” Jack asked.

“Later. Is this threat imminent?” Web asked.

“There is no certainty in the movements of the swarms. They are close. I was trying to get more information on what close means in this context, but the conversation was interrupted when I was pulled away from the gifts, what we’ve been calling the spheres. The impression I got—the conversation was not just words—was that we may have time to prepare, if we make good use of the gifts they’ve given us. This information was conveyed with a sense of hopefulness, but it felt almost like wishful thinking. Given the history of the gifts, I believe I understand that." Angela stopped. Her training and discipline were keeping her together, barely. The others were hearing what she was saying. She had seen it. She felt like she’d lived parts of it. She’d shared the sadness she’d sensed coming from the being communicating with her when it shared what had happened to its world. She didn’t want to contemplate how much more easily Earth’s human population could be destroyed.

“Major?” Web prompted.

“Sorry, Sir. The history of the gifts’ makers does not have a happy ending. They fought an unsuccessful war with elements of the swarm over the course of centuries. They had colonized dozens of planets, all of which were eventually destroyed. Near the end, as their population declined, they invented the gifts in the hope that they would help the swarms see them as intelligent life. They had given up hope of surviving any other way. Unfortunately, their final attempt to survive failed. The gifts’ makers no longer exist.”

“Then how are the gifts here?” Jack asked.

“There was a faction among the Makers who did not believe the appeasement strategy would succeed. They did not believe their species would survive, but, they believed they would have had a chance if they had found an academy sooner.”

“An academy?” Jack asked.

Web gave him a look that Jack rightfully interpreted as an order to stop interrupting.

“My word. I don’t know of a better one. I can’t explain it. I’ve been calling it a conversation because I don’t have a better word for that, either. It was actually more of an exchange of memories, with more than one memory being shared at the same time. I was learning about the history of the gifts at the same time I was learning about their purpose here, and so on. Anyway, yes, an academy. There are places throughout the galaxy where a race far older than the gifts' makers has hidden training grounds for our type of life. The Makers found one near the end of their struggle. It’s what allowed them to make the gifts and the gift ships. The entity I was communicating with did not know much about the academies. I sensed this was intentional.

“The faction responsible for our visitors decided to create as many ships as possible in the time they had remaining. Each completed ship would precede a swarm as best it could, looking for worlds like ours, where the dominant intelligent life form was individual intelligences. When a ship found such a world, it would do what this one has done on ours: seed the planet with gifts capable of helping us get to an academy. Each ship also carries nearly all of the knowledge of the Makers at the time of the ship’s creation. That’s the primary purpose of the information they transmitted to us while they were approaching.

“The program we downloaded and decoded does far more than what we have seen so far. It’s designed to work in some way with a number of gifts and humans to give us access to their knowledge in our language and numerical base. It will present their knowledge in context with our own. Where our theories and observations are correct, it will use our terminology for them. Where we were mistaken, it will explain our mistakes starting from the dominant human theory. It is intended to start the process of preparing us to defend ourselves as quickly as possible. ”

“Why not just give us the information? Why make it so convoluted?” Rui asked.

“When the Makers built the gift ships, they did not know how the swarms would react to them. The spent considerable time and energy building redundant safeties and controls designed to preclude any outsider from being able to reconstruct the ships’ intent. They didn’t want either the ships’ mission or the locations of the academies to be compromised, should any part of a ship be captured. They also didn’t want to provide a society too primitive to benefit from advanced information such information. Although they were, compared to us at least, very technically advanced, they had almost no experience with other sentient species. They were not explorers. They had advanced only as far into the galaxy as their need for space required. They didn’t know what the ships they were building would encounter and they didn’t want to cause harm. Above all, they did not want to be agents of harm. They were really quite remarkable." Angela had become visibly less energetic as she answered Rui’s question. She was running out of steam and it was happening quickly.

“What else did you learn, Major?” Web asked.

“Sir? I’m sorry. So tired…” Angela sat down on the floor of the shelter. Before anyone knew what was happening, she’d passed out. Camilla caught her body as it slumped from sitting to uncontrolled.

Jack told the closest technician to get a medic. Moments later a young sergeant from the advance team entered the CP with her bag. Seeing Major Leone on the floor of the structure, she quickly moved to her side and checked her breathing and pulse. While she was doing this, she asked, “What happened to her?”

“She appeared to faint,” Web answered.

After checking her vital signs, the medic grabbed an ampule of smelling salts from her bag, broke the inner glass casing and waved the ampule under the Major’s nose.

“What…what happened?” Angela asked groggily.

“You fainted, Ma’am,” the medic replied.

“Will she be okay?” Camilla asked.

“She should be fine. It’s probably just stress and lack of sleep. You should get her to a cot and keep her covered.” The medic stood, threw away the used salts and asked Colonel Web if there would be anything else. He dismissed her and asked Camilla to take care of Angela.

Web watched Camilla help an un-protesting Angela toward a part of the CP being prepared for her before restarting the interrupted conversation. “We need someone else to make contact with the objects to continue this conversation. She learned a lot in a matter of seconds, but we still have far more questions than answers, particularly with regards to the proximity of the threat. I need a volunteer.”

All of the technicians in the room immediately raised their hands, as did Chang, AJ and Dan. AJ was the first to speak, “This is my field. Understanding alien psychologies and communicating their nature is why I’m on the team.”

AJ was chomping at the bit to finally do something. His frustration with his inability to contribute had been palpable. Normally among the most personable members of the team, he’d become short, almost snappy, as the morning wore on.

“I agree,” Web replied, “We don’t know how this works, so be positive you touch the same sphere Angela touched. Review the video if you need to.”

“I don’t need to. I know which one it is. If there’s nothing else, I’d like to go right now,” AJ said.

“Go,” Web replied.

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN

Sam didn’t exactly fall asleep, but he didn’t exactly stay awake either. He knew he was in his recliner, alone in his house. He knew he could move, if he really wanted to. It seemed like too much trouble, and wrong in some way. How it might be wrong eluded him, but he had decades of trusting such instincts, so he didn’t force the issue. He waited for it to end, with the hope that understanding would accompany clarity. This time, it did.

“That was unsettling,” Sam said when he’d recovered a balance of ability and desire to speak.

“I’m sorry, Sam. You are the first human we’ve integrated with. We have a lot to learn, so we had to go slow. Others will benefit from your experience.”

Sam spent less time processing that than he would have thought. “You sound very different.” What had been an amorphous monotone had become a mellifluous female voice with a decidedly impish quality.

“I am not what you previously spoke to, Sam. As what you spoke with told you, it was a guide. A guide to me, or us. I’m different. I’m alive, thanks to you.”

“Why thanks to me?” Sam asked.

“I think it would be best if I started a bit further back than that, to give you some context. Before I start, I would like to begin communicating with you like this, if you don’t mind." The gift switched in mid-sentence from communicating by physically vibrating the air to create audible sound to directly communicating with Sam’s brain.

“That’s interesting,” Sam replied, less concerned than a part of him thought he should be. “How are you doing that?”