Weissenbaum's Eye - Stetten

Weissenbaum's Eye - Stetten - Chapter 38

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Without delay, Don Andrews ran up to the observation porch, and turned on the telescope. Now that he knew what he was looking for, it did not take him long to find it.

For hours afterwards he sat, leaning back in the comfortable chair, gazing up at the glass of the telescope. He must have fallen asleep, for he awoke with a start.

The bright flames of the ferry's engines turned almost overhead, outside the window. Without the relay beacons, there had been no advance notice of the ferry's return.

As soon as the ferry had landed, Don Andrews summoned everyone up to the porch. Sand and Tarni got there first. Don Andrews was somber at the news of Mara's death, for he truly had respected her, and furthermore was counting on Benjamin Holly's continued benevolence.

"She was a brave woman," he said. "I wish that I had known her better."

Sand nodded, his head remaining bowed.

Don Andrews motioned for Sand and Tarni to be seated, and continued. "Mara would have wanted us to carry on. I have something to show you." He stepped up to the controls of the telescope.

Judy had arrived. She was standing in the back, waiting to make her announcement, waiting for Don Andrews to praise her accomplishment. Then she noticed the numbers on the telescope's controls, and asked, "The Lagrange point?"

"The what?" Sand inquired, looking up.

"The Lagrange point," Don Andrews explained, pointing to the glass of the telescope, "a quarter of a million miles above our heads, is a spot where something can maintain a stationary orbit with respect to the Moon and the Earth. The perfect place to hide something, forever behind the Moon. We are looking there, for something so thin that it is practically transparent. Unless the telescope is focused just right," he switched the gain to maximum, and canceled out the background stars, "we would never know that it was there. And we must assume it is very big, more than a thousand miles across."

Like a delicate sun, like a gigantic jellyfish, a pulsing sphere materialized on the glass of the telescope. The rhythms of its lights reminded Sand of the spheres in the cathedral, the semi-randomness of music or a foreign language. As if sensing that it was being watched, the patterns on the giant globe changed subtly. At least it seemed so to Sand.

"What is it?" he breathed.

Judy spoke in a wavering tone. "If you had seem my program you would know. It is the Culminate. A single integrated circuit, on the surface of a sphere, twelve hundred miles across, just like the one we plan to build..."

Don Andrews followed on her thoughts, "...and it accounts for the strangeness of the couches in Backdoor, the unexplained interaction, the magical inspiration..."

"The music," Tarni whispered.

Don Andrews waved his hand. "How else could Judy have come up with its exact design? The Culminate has reached out to our couches, from where it hangs in space, and showed Judy how to build another one just like itself."

"How long has it been there?" asked Sand.

"A long time," Don Andrews responded with strange certainty. "Since before life started on the Earth."

Sand's eyes were wide. "Then it must have come from another planet."

Don Andrews nodded. "To bring life to the Earth. And it has waited all this time, to see what happened here."

"And how long have you known?" Tarni quietly demanded.

"I suspected before we built Backdoor. I even wondered if the Lagrange point could be its hiding place. And I looked but never saw it, because it was transparent. It will be easy to build one now."

"But if it already exists," asked Tarni, "Why build another one?"

"We have no choice," Don Andrews replied. "It is our purpose."

It was then they realized Judy was gone. Don Andrews cursed, and jumped down through the trap door to chase after her. Tarni was not far behind. Sand also tried to follow, but he was stopped by a force, like a shove against his chest.

The Culminate.

Looking up at its pulsing form on the telescope, Sand was held immobile, his senses dominated from a distance, his will forgotten. This was no simulation, from which he could have freed himself, but more like a trance. A giant face up in the sky seemed to have turned towards him.

From that point on, he did not decide anything. Sounds and images streamed through him, as he stood, eyes uplifted to the telescope, locked within his own nerve and muscle by an input that he could not block.

The people of the Earth were all just plants. Slow growing things that turned to see the light, in pots upon a shelf by a window. Outside, somebody walked, up through the trees along a mountain path, and Sand seemed to go along, climbing the rocky slope up to the summit. Fog lapped at the peak, forming an island above the trees. There was nowhere left to go.

What now? Might there not be a taller mountain hidden somewhere in the fog? Completion finds reprieve in reproduction. Down into the misty valleys from which they had come, down to where each Culminate must sow its seed into some rich primordial soup, far away on some new virgin planet, it would start again the random wanderings of evolution.

Even in his captured state, Sand recognized the history of life on Earth, of life on countless other planets in the universe where some lone Culminate had gone, planting one speck of stardust coated with the complex molecules of life. From these evolved the beings whose hands eventually produced another Culminate, a different Culminate. These hands on Earth were human. The ovaries right now were in Backdoor, in the cathedral, hatching little spheres, forerunners of the one that would climb up on its own summit and become another Culminate.

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