“I’m sorry.”
“It may be hazardous for you to risk competition now that you’re implicated.”
I let the words sink in, then shook my head. “It’s too late,” I said. “I’ve already given them my word that I’ll be there.”
Risa stirred. “Too pigheaded to back down?”
“No,” I said. “But on the other hand, I do have a reputation to uphold.”
AS the premiere approached we learned what we could of the creature. It was happier in vacuum than air, although the latter did not seem to harm it provided it was kept cold. Maybe that had something to do with its silicon biochemistry. Silicon had never seemed like a likely rival to carbon as a basis for life, largely because silicon’s higher valency denied its compounds the same long-term stability. But under extreme cold, silicon biochemistry might have the edge, or at least be an equally probable pathway for evolution. And with silicon came the possibility of exploiting light itself as an energy source, with no clumsy intermediate molecular machinery like the rhodopsin molecule in the human retina.
But the creature lived in darkness.
I couldn’t resolve this paradox. It needed light to energize itself-a flash of intense blue light, shading into the UV-and yet it hadn’t evolved an organ as simple as the eye. The eye, I knew, had been invented at least 40 times during the evolution of life on Earth. Nature came up with the eye whenever there was the slightest use for it.
It got stranger.
There was something I called the secondary response-also triggered by exposure to light. Normally, shown a flash every 70-odd seconds, the animal would execute a few seemingly purposeful movements, each burst of locomotion coordinated with the previous one, implying that the creature kept some record of what it had been doing previously. But if we allowed it to settle into a stable pattern of movement bursts, the creature began to show richer behavior. The probability of eliciting the secondary response rose to a maximum midway through the gap between normal bursts, roughly half a minute after the last, before smoothly diminishing. But at its peak, the creature was hypersensitized to any kind of ambient light at all, even if it was well below the threshold energy of the normal flash. If no light appeared during the time of hypersensitivity, nothing happened; the creature simply waited out the remaining half a minute until the next scheduled flash. But if even a few hundred photons fell on its carapace, it would always do the same thing; thrashing its limbs violently for a few seconds, evidently drawing on some final reserve of energy that it saved for just this response.
I didn’t have a clue why.
And I wasn’t going to get one, either-at least not by studying the creature. One day we’d set it up in the autodoc analysis chamber as usual, and we’d locked it into the burst cycle, working in complete darkness apart from the regular pulses of light every minute and ten seconds. But we forgot to lash the animal down properly. A status light flashed on the autodoc console, signifying some routine health-monitoring function. It wasn’t bright at all, but it happened just when the creature was hypersensitized. It thrashed its limbs wildly, making a noise like a box of chopsticks.
And hurled itself from the chamber, falling to the floor.
Even though it was dark, I saw something of its shattering, as it cleaved into a million pieces. It sparkled as it died.
“Oops,” Risa said.
THE premiere soon arrived. Games took place all over the system, but the real epicenter was Tycho. The lunar crater had been domed, pressurized, and infused with a luminous mass of habitats and biomes, all dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure through game. I’d visited the place dozens of times, of course-but even then, I’d experienced only a tiny fraction of what it had to offer. Now all I wanted to do was get in and out-and if Stroboscopic was the last game I ever played there, I didn’t mind.
“Something’s bothering you, Noz,” Risa said, as we took a monorail over the Icehammer zone. “Ever since you came back from Valdez ’s funeral.”
“I spoke to Zubek.”
“Him?” She laughed. “You’ve got more talent in your dick.”
“He suggested I should consider giving this one a miss.”
“He’s just trying to rile you. Means you still scare him.” Then she leaned toward the window of our private cabin. “There. The Arena.”
It was a matt-black geodesic ball about half a kilometer wide, carbuncled by ancillary buildings. Searchlights scissored the air above it, neon letters spelling out the name of the game, running around the ball’s circumference.
Stroboscopic.
Thirty years ago the eponymous CEO of Icehammer Games had been a top-class player in his own right-until neutral feedback incinerated most of his higher motor functions. Now Icehammer’s frame was cradled within a powered exoskeleton, stenciled with luminous Chinese dragons. He greeted myself, the players, and assorted hangers-on as we assembled in an atrium adjoining the Arena. After a short preliminary speech a huge screen was unveiled behind him. He stood aside and let the presentation roll.
A drab, wrinkled planet hove into view on the screen, lightly sprinkled with craters; one ice cap poking into view.
“PSR-J2034+454A,” Icehammer said. “The decidedly unpoetic name for a planet nearly 500 light-years from here. Utterly airless and barely larger than our moon, it shouldn’t really be there at all. Less than ten million years ago its sun reached the end of its nuclear-burning life cycle and went supernova.” He clapped his hands together in emphasis; some trick of acoustics magnifying the clap concussively. “Apart from a few comets, nothing else remains. The planet moves in total darkness, even starlight attenuated by the nebula of dust that embeds the system. Even the star it once drew life from has become a corpse.”
The star rose above one limb of the planet: a searing point of light, pulsing on and off like a beacon.
“A pulsar,” Icehammer said. “A 15-kilometer ball of nuclear matter, sending out an intense beam of light as it rotates, four flashes a second; each no more than 13 hundredths of a second long. The pulsar has a wobble in its rotational axis, however, which means that the beam only crosses our line of sight once every 72 seconds, and then only for a few seconds at a time.” Then he showed us how the pulsar beam swept across the surface of the planet, dousing it in intense, flickering light for a few instants, outlining every nuance of the planet’s topography in eye-wrenching violet. Followed by utter darkness on the face of the world, for another 72 seconds.
“Now the really astonishing thing,” Icehammer said, “is that something evolved to live on the planet, although only on the one face, which it always turns to the star. A whole order of creatures, in fact, their biology tuned to exploit that regular flash of light. Now we believe that life on Earth originated in self-replicating structures in pyritic minerals, or certain kinds of clay. Eventually, this mineralogic life formed the scaffolding for the first form of carbon-based life, which-being more efficient and flexible-quickly usurped its predecessor. But perhaps that genetic takeover never happened here, stymied by the cold and the vacuum and the radiative effects of the star.” Now he showed us holoimages of the creatures themselves, rendered in the style of watercolors from a naturalist’s fieldbook, annotated in handwritten Latin. Dozens of forms-including several radically different bodyplans and modes of locomotion-but everything was hardshelled and a clear cousin to the animal we’d examined on the yacht. Some of the more obvious predators looked incredibly fearsome. “They do all their living in bursts lasting a dozen seconds, punctuated by nearly a minute of total inactivity. Evidently some selection mechanism determined that a concentrated burst of activity is more useful than long, drawn-out mobility.”