18

Doctor Enoch Briden was already drifting off to sleep when he felt it: the pulse had gone off again. He could feel it tugging at his mind, just for a moment, as if trying to unknot something, and then came a brief, sharp pain that put him wide awake. Interesting, he thought. The pain at the end, that was new, different from the last time. Something was changing, developing.

He got out of bed and checked the time: three days since the last pulse, minus an hour or so. That made the fifth time. He pulled up the log and saw as he suspected, no regular pattern, no sense that they were coming in a particular order. Though they were, he noticed, coming closer together now, as if the object that was emitting them was, so to speak, feeling its way around. Looking for something.

The technician on duty still hadn’t called. Briden knew not everybody was as sensitive to the pulse as he was—it was fortuitous that he was heading up the project—and even those who were sensitive to it didn’t respond always in the same way. Some became nauseous or bled at the nose, some became agitated and violent. A few, a very few, didn’t seem to notice it at all, and perhaps the current technician on duty was one of those. If he didn’t call within the next sixty seconds, Briden would make a note of his name and have him reassigned to a job more appropriate to his level of awareness. Janitorial duties, for instance. No, there was no room for error: the project was crucial. It might, in fact, change the course of humanity. There was no room for mistakes.

Forty seconds. The technician still hadn’t called and so Briden turned on his vid and called him. It took the man eight tones to answer, and when he did his eyes were red rimmed and his hair was ruffled, as if he had been asleep.

“Anything to report?” asked Briden.

“No, sir,” the technician said, his eyes drifting to one side to look at his stats panel. “Yes, sir, I mean,” he said. “A pulse just came in.”

“Sleeping on the job?” asked Briden.

“No, sir,” said the technician, without batting an eye. Incompetent and a liar, too, thought Briden.

“Give me your name,” said Briden, and when the technician gave it he wrote it down. “When does your next shift end?” he asked.

“In about an hour,” said the technician.

“Return to your quarters,” said Briden. “You’ve done enough damage for one night.”

The technician looked confused for a moment and then nodded, switched the vid off.

*   *   *

Do I have to do everything? wondered Briden as he got dressed. Am I the only one who understands how important this is? He left his quarters and made his way down the hall, deeper into the heart of the complex. He had been there since the beginning, ever since they’d first started constructing the Red Marker. At first, they’d been told that it was a two-year tour, but then they’d been informed that the project was important enough that they’d have to remain on it, out of contact with the outside world, until further notice. One of the others, a man with a family named Pete, had complained about that, and then had kept complaining, and then, when that didn’t work had started to try to sabotage the project. Result: he had been accused of treason, quickly tried, and then exiled from the research facility and remanded to the penal colony a few miles distant. Even then, Pete hadn’t understood, had continued to complain and beg to be released, had begun, too, to reveal to the other prisoners the secrets of the research facility. So they had held another court, secret this time, and a few hours later Pete was found dead on his cot. Briden didn’t particularly relish what had happened to the man, but then again he didn’t object to it, either. He should, at very least have known better.

Besides, this was a sacred calling. Any scientist worth their salt would kill to have the chance that they had here.

It still made his skin tingle to see it. Each time it was just as amazing as the first time.

He reached the first set of doors, slid his card through, and entered the code. The door slid back. The technician, he was pleased to see, was gone, though he had left a mess at the console—wadded up food wrappers, a single glove, a crumpled manifest. He swept it all into the incinerator chute without a second glance, then went to the glass window.

There it was, just on the other side. Clear proof that humans were not alone, that humans were not the only form of intelligent life that had existed in the universe. Clear proof that Unitology was the only true religion, and that Michael Altman had been a true prophet.

It was perhaps twenty meters tall. It was a blackish red, cut in variegated stripes, and gave off at times an unearthly glow, the indecipherable symbols on its body burning with a curious light. Two slanting columns joined at the base then twisted upward, around one another. He and his team had constructed the Marker using the Black Marker research from Earth. It was more “grown” than constructed, really, as a fractal heuristic crystal lattice. It was almost like a brain. On activating it, they could hardly keep up with cataloguing the unexpected properties it exhibited, not limited to just these sudden pulses. It seemed to him to possess some intelligence, seemed to be trying to communicate with them. With him: Briden. The others sometimes scoffed at him when he suggested this, but somehow he was sure of it: he could feel its pulse prodding at his mind, trying to find something that would respond to it. What was it looking for within him? How could he help it to find it?

He opened the second set of doors and entered the chamber. Slowly, he moved toward the Marker, taking a moment first to take it all in. The floor of the chamber was bare exposed rock, rapidly cut so that they could begin. The prison colony site had been chosen because the military had realized that the life-sentence prisoners might prove perfect experimental fodder for the Marker experiments to come. They had started, though, by using some of them to build up the scientific compound where the Red Marker would be constructed. Of course, those prisoners had had to be killed to preserve the secret, but they were doomed anyway, it didn’t matter much. And with the way things were in the galaxy, there would always be new political prisoners to fill the colony and to be used if and when they were needed.

Near the Marker and a little farther out, near the walls, were little patches of what looked like fungus or rot, sloping tendrils. They were bigger than he remembered them being, and there were more of them. He’d begun to notice them in the halls as well, spreading somehow. He’d have to set the clean-up crew onto them.

He reached out and placed his hand against the stone, but felt nothing unusual. It was, he knew, still sending a signal, just not in a way that his body or mind could perceive. The computers, though, were picking it up, recording it, trying to decipher it. He tried to keep his thoughts free and his mind open, listening inside his head for whatever the Marker was trying to say to him, willing it to talk to him. I’m ready, he told it mentally. Take me.

How long he waited like that, he didn’t know. When nothing happened, he sighed and went back through the doors and into the control room, and began to sort through the latest data.

*   *   *

It took only a few moments for him to realize that the new data was inconsistent with the earlier data. It seemed that the pulse itself had begun to change—not only during the moment of pain he had felt in the end, but earlier as well. And now that the pulse had subsided, the Marker was broadcasting on slightly different frequencies, something it had never done before. Apparently, the constructed Marker had started to reorganize itself, continuing to grow and develop even after they’d finished the process. It wasn’t something he’d expected. What did it mean?

He was poring over the data, trying to assemble things into a coherent structure, when other members of the team began to arrive. Callie Dexter was the first. She was second in command, but Briden felt she did not have proper respect for what they were doing. She was a good scientist, but for her the Marker project didn’t go beyond science. She didn’t have the proper level of either faith or awe, and thus could not be counted on.

“Here already? What’s on the docket for today?” she asked when she came in and settled in at her console, right next to him. Briden just grunted. “Anything new?” she asked.

“Lots,” said Briden. “Major pulse last night.”

A few minutes later Anna Tilton came in. She had dark brown hair, cut short so that it clung close to her face. Briden liked her better: she understood things properly. Like him, she was a Unitologist, and like him she had understood that the Black Marker had been a gift, a glorious proof of the truth of their religion, and their work here to reconstruct it was a holy cause. They were trying to decipher the mind of God. She nodded at him as she came in, settled right in.

A few moments later the room was full, a dozen or so scientists and technicians, all of them going over the data and thinking about it according to their own specialties. They exchanged a few comments here and there, asked one another for clarifications, and prepared for the day’s tests and experiments.

Callie leaned over to Briden. “It’s changing. What do you make of it?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” said Briden. “I think it’s trying to speak with us however it can, and, since we didn’t seem to be listening to how it spoke before, it’s trying out new voices.”

“You make it sound like it’s alive,” said Callie.

Briden shrugged. “It almost acts like it sometimes,” he said.

“Careful, doctor,” cautioned Callie. “Don’t lose your objectivity.”

It made him angry. Doctor Dexter can’t see what’s right in front of her own eyes, he thought. It was a mistake to have anyone on the team who wasn’t a Unitologist, but when he’d suggested to the authorities having her removed, they’d denied his request. She was a good scientist, he had to admit that, but this wasn’t just science. This was something bigger, something grander.

She was staring at him, he realized, her gaze hard. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“Of course I’m all right,” he said, and gave her a cold smile. He had to tolerate her for now. But maybe a time would come when he wouldn’t have to.

*   *   *

They worked in silence a while until Callie said, “Hmmm.”

He ignored her, kept sending his own data through the modeling system. Then she cleared her throat and said “Strange.”

“What’s strange?” he asked.

“The vector,” she said.

“Of course there’s a vector,” he said. “There’s always been a vector, several in fact. Ours broadcasts out into space.”

Dr. Dexter shook her head. “That’s just it,” she said. She scooted her chair closer to him, turning the screen so she could show him. “See here?” she said. “There’s the unidentified signal we caught the other day.”

“Keep your voice down,” said Briden in a low voice. “Not everybody in this room has our security clearance.”

Dr. Dexter smiled. “It hardly matters, Briden. With what we already know, we’re all already a huge security risk.” She reached up and traced her finger along the screen. “Now, something else is coming from here, a few dozen systems away. Looks like it could be on Kreemar, or that the signal cuts through it anyway. And here’s us.” She shadowed the other vectors, making them nearly invisible, and brightened this one. Then she scrolled it backward in time. “Watch this,” she said. “Here we are, broadcasting indiscriminately, with an occasional pulse. But the pulses are wide. And then this morning, boom. Sharper focus.”

“It’s just a different frequency,” said Briden.

“Okay,” she said. “Could be. But the other pulses were all directed up into space, off planet. This one is angled differently. Half of it is simply bouncing off the ground. The rest of it travels the planet’s surface pretty closely. It’s never done that before.”

Maybe that explained the pain at the end, thought Briden. Maybe that was what made it different. To Dr. Dexter, he said, “Why would it do that?”

She gave him a look. “You think it’s alive,” she said. “You tell me.” When he didn’t, she said, “Maybe it found what it wanted.”

Briden nodded. “And what would that be?”

Dr. Dexter shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Give me more data and maybe we’ll find out.”