Usurper of the Sun (2 page)
“I must be hallucinating. I see this gigantic tower…”
As crazy as the idea of a gigantic tower on Mercury was, it looked real. Through the telescope, she clearly saw a tower rising from the surface of Mercury. It was unlike anything discussed in astronomy club. Second contact passed. Mercury was swimming inside the boundary of the sun’s outer rim. There was a long, thin object stretching out from the silhouette of the planet, trailing behind it, looking like a piece of yarn being spun, flailing up from the surface, connecting to the edge of the sun.
Aki rubbed her eyes one at a time so she could keep watching before her turn was over. The object stuck up from near Mercury’s equator, extending outward an unfathomable distance three times the diameter of the planet, where the tower gradually faded from view. Aki asked her partner to look to make sure it was not just in her mind.
“What in the world?” he said, voice cracking.
That was all she needed. It was not illusory. Something bizarre, bigger than anyone could ever build, was protruding from the surface of Mercury. She was not sure whom to tell. She was not even sure she should tell anybody at all.
MERCURY GROWS AN IMPOSSIBLE ANTENNA
INCONCEIVABLE STRUCTURE DISCOVERED ON MERCURY
AT FIRST, MOST
scoffed at the reports. Sensational headlines made their way around the globe and phones at observatories rang off the hook, but the landmark discovery was dismissed as conspiracy theories and hype for the first few days. Then, the general public’s apathy toward space vanished. Astronomy turned into the latest craze. So many people visited observatories and planetariums that there were waiting lists and lines around the block.
Aki had been elected president of her astronomy club in a special midterm election. Before her discovery, she had been called a bright underachiever, still seeking internal drive and motivation for learning. Now, she had found it in astronomy. As the first witness of the Mercurial event—and a media-friendly one as a poised and well-spoken female student—she was bombarded with questions from reporters, classmates, and teachers. Aki had to stay on top of the issues because people asked her opinions day and night. She even carried a laminated sketch drawn from memory, diagrams, and graphs in order to describe what she had witnessed and what the strange phenomenon meant to the world.
“It was built by aliens?” a podcaster had asked.
“No one knows for sure yet,” Aki answered. She felt it was her job to present the facts and not get swayed by the media speculation.
“Do you think aliens are taking over Earth sometime within the next few weeks?” she was asked in an online chat.
“We are not even sure that the object was built by intelligent life. We need to make more detailed observations and not go willy-nilly with spacey ideas,” she had responded. She regretted the phrasing when a small-town paper ran the headline
EXPERT SAYS DO NOT GO WILLY-NILLY WITH SPACEY IDEAS!
but she got over it. The experience was a lesson to be more careful in choosing how she expressed the concepts she was studying.
“If you could see it with just the little telescope on the roof, wouldn’t it be awesome to look at it again with an even bigger telescope?” an interviewer who giggled behind her hand after each question had asked on an hour-long talk show special devoted exclusively to Aki.
Aki explained that it was not possible, saying that, “Transits of Mercury, when we can watch Mercury pass between the earth and the sun, are somewhat rare, though more common than those of Venus. Otherwise, Mercury is always too near the sun to be seen well with even the best telescopes in the world—except for just before sunrise or just after sunset. Even viewed along the horizon, the angle distorts observations because of fluctuations in the atmosphere. State-of-the-art equipment, like active optics, cancels out some of the distortion, but my astronomy club would only get what, at best, could be called a rough approximation of the appendage’s shape. With slightly better equipment, we would also get peeks at Mercury during the day when it was high in the sky, but the sun is bright enough that it is hard to see with enough detail because of the severity of the contrast.”
It got to where classmates who had never listened to a word Aki Shiraishi said would revere her as a newly famous authority on astronomy. Before her discovery, Aki was shy and unpopular. Now, she had to turn kids down when they invited her to go shopping or attend concerts because she was too busy giving interviews and reading scientific journals.
She spoke at a science convention and mentioned that her astronomy club wanted better digital video cameras; donations poured in and the new equipment was delivered by the end of the week. Becoming a voice in the astronomy revolution and the theories people were calling “cultural exobiology” made her even more committed to her studies. Students and teachers from all over the world asked every kind of question, putting her on the spot. She had to become a reliable expert. Her knowledge started with Mercury’s physical properties but quickly moved to more obscure topics like Mercury’s orbital resonance and tidal force. Eventually, she gave lectures on the history of humankind’s belief in life on other planets and related how people got half their ideas about aliens from books and TV—but that even U.S. president Jimmy Carter had claimed to have seen a UFO. While some of her public appearances were less formal than others, she was committed to understanding the cutting-edge quantitative research and presenting it objectively.
Aki wished there were more pictures of Mercury, but there was only one good set. The outer planets always got more attention, with tons of photos and other data collected by the Voyager probes, but Mercury only had the ones from
Mariner 10
’s three flybys in the mid-1970s. There were over four thousand photos, but Aki came to the gradual conclusion that
Mariner 10
might have overlooked something extremely important.
The diameter of Mercury is about a third of Earth’s. At first glance it looks like the moon but has fewer dark spots.
Mariner 10
had taken pictures of almost half the surface, but there was no hint of the tower. Nor had anything unusual been observed in 2003 during the previous transit of Mercury. Thinking about it one night falling asleep and again the next morning while brushing her teeth, it worried Aki that some unknown entity could build such an enormous structure in less than four years.
One month after the phenomenon was discovered, NASA decided to resort to using one of its space telescopes to take a closer look. Although under normal circumstances NASA would never dream of pointing such a costly piece of equipment anywhere near the sun, this case merited an exception. NASA took over the telescope’s time slots, which were normally booked solid months in advance, and after careful preparations, began to collect images of Mercury.
When the photos were released to the public, the world lapsed into speculation again. Aki stuck to peer-reviewed sources and used the best-resolution images available. The strange and gigantic tower looked like Old Faithful, even though the tower dwarfed the famous geyser by six orders of magnitude. Near the surface, a thick rod jutted up before fading into a cloud of countless, blurry particles that got fainter and fainter, eventually dissolving into space.
Since Mercury’s magnetic field is 1 percent as strong as Earth’s, Aki was certain that all seismic activity on the planet had long ago ended. Some experts were clinging to the idea that dirt or dust was being shaken up into space because a similar phenomenon occurs on Io, but most admitted that the tower could not possibly be a naturally occurring phenomenon.
A few days later, newer pictures showed that the surface of Mercury was being covered with ridges and furrows. The flowing material at the root of the tower had lifted and formed a solid line along Mercury’s equator, with branches and veins stemming from the equator like tributaries. A giant red seaweed covered the planet, surging in every direction, obscuring the craters and the mountains. Under the highest magnification, Mercury looked like a monstrous bloodshot eye with pulsing capillary vessels, with areas of land that glowed with grayish red mud, reminiscent of the swampy agar fields of Japan.
Aki kept talking about the facts, but inside her head she knew that the fountain, or tower, or antenna was only the beginning. The equatorial structure, which had kept growing until its line was seventy-five kilometers thick, was somehow feeding and powering the tower construction. With no atmosphere on Mercury, payloads were easy to launch into space. Aki presumed that the constantly flowing material was launched by a series of mass drivers—electromagnetic catapults that launch payloads. As much as it was an impressive engineering feat, a different question remained for her:
why is any of this happening?
The material being ejected from Mercury trailed along its elliptical orbit. The laws of orbital dynamics said that the material would flow away from Mercury toward the sun and eventually come to rest between the two.
SURFACE MINING TAKING PLACE ON MERCURY!
HEADLINES ABOUT MERCURY
were in the most recent daily newspapers. No one could keep track of all the blogs. The images produced by the space telescope resolved to the square kilometer—not enough detail to show any vehicles, machinery, or even the residences of hypothetical alien engineers. Psychics and abductees made claims of mind-melding or being probed by the supposed Mercurians, but their stories were inconsistent, even lunatic. Aki had no choice but to hear the rumors. That side of the discussion meant little to her investigations.
Most of the experts came to the conclusion that the work was not being done by native inhabitants of Mercury. Even for the most respected scientists, it was considered unlikely that intelligent life from beyond the solar system was behind the mysterious activity, but to Aki Shiraishi, the conclusion that aliens were involved was the only rational explanation.
Was Mercury a good choice for aliens? It had a wealth of metallic minerals and, naturally, a plethora of solar energy for the harnessing. Because it was also close to the sun’s gravity, Mercury had a high concentration of heavier elements, including an iron core just beneath its crust. With solar radiation on Mercury seven times the level on Earth, there was a more-than-sufficient power source for excavation and building.
With the possibility of an extrasolar life-form only a hundred million kilometers away, humanity’s great institutions had to make a show of doing something proactive. The United Nations created rules for interstellar diplomacy based on the Post-Detection Protocol that had been adopted by the International Academy of Astronautics in 1989. PDP was devised by researchers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project and gave important instructions about what to do when extraterrestrial contact appeared imminent: