“The underwater environment that the creature came from was, above all, an acoustic environment. Play it.”
“How would we do that, exactly?” Garza asked.
“We know the alien heard, and understood, whale song. It listened, and communicated, digitally, via the Baobab. It stands to reason it would also have listened in to the numerous communications of ours that were transmitted undersea—ship to DSV, DSV to DSV—over the UQC.”
Glinn thought for a moment. “But UQC is an acoustic, analog technology.”
“Yes,” Garza said. “And that would give the entity access to both analog and digital methods of communication. Not that this would help it any.”
“The alien brain could only communicate digitally,” Wong said. “But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t trying to send an analog signal. Prothero walked me through the technology once. It wouldn’t know how to use an audio codec, of course—but there’s no reason it couldn’t have sent an uncompressed bitstream of audio data.” She looked around. “What else would take up such a large volume, if not communication?”
“Sounds far-fetched,” said Garza.
“It probably is,” Wong said. “All you need to prove me wrong is to run it through a D-A converter.”
Glinn had been listening silently to this most recent exchange. Now he walked over to a phone on the nearby wall, picked it up. “Hello? Get me the audio lab.” A pause. “Who is this—Smythefield? It’s Eli Glinn, in the auditorium. Bring me up a digital-to-analog converter and a set of powered speakers. Yes, right away.”
Hanging up the phone, he opened one of the doors of smoked plate glass behind him, revealing a bank of rack-mounted computers. He pulled out a keyboard, turned on one of the computers, typed in a series of commands, then unspooled a TOSLINK optical cable, used for transmitting digital stereo, from the bank of equipment.
“I’ve transferred the alien download into this CPU’s memory,” he said.
Gideon noted that Garza shifted in his seat; scoffed. Clearly, he believed this was a waste of time. At least he refrained from saying so.
One of the doors in the rear of the auditorium opened and two men in lab coats walked down the aisle, carrying several pieces of equipment. Gideon, an audiophile himself, recognized them as an expensive Grace Design DAC stereo monitor controller, along with a high-end set of Dynaudio powered speakers. They placed the equipment on the table, plugged it into receptacles in the base of the platform, and then, at a nod from Glinn, left the room. Glinn inserted the TOSLINK cable into the back of the Grace, then used a pair of balanced XLR cables to connect the powered speakers to the controller. He turned the speakers on, raised the volume controls on their rear panels, adjusted the gain and the signal routing on the controller, then stepped over to the computer keyboard.
“Initiating playback,” he said.
At first, nothing happened. And then a long, low, gentle sound came out, rapidly joined by others, and still others, in a mounting chorus. The strangest feeling Gideon had ever experienced in his life began to wash over him. It was as though he was in his chair, here in this auditorium in the EES building in New York City—and yet he was also everywhere and nowhere in the world, simultaneously. It sounded as if he were listening to, experiencing, the most beautiful music imaginable. And yet it was not music. It was something more than music: a form of communication so deep, so profound, so wondrous, as to be utterly beyond description. It was, he thought, as if he were hearing the singing of God. At the same time, he felt a vast psychological weight being lifted from his shoulders. The pain and sorrow that he bore, new and old, that had accumulated every day of his life like a second skin—the loss of his parents, the death of Alex, his own medical death sentence—all of it was gone, gone entirely, replaced by a kind of quiet, transcendent joy. As he sat there, transfixed, he felt the hinges of his mind begin to loosen. He became aware of the singularly unique sensation of being on the cusp of understanding the real meaning of life; as if incredible insights into the very purpose of the universe were about to be laid bare, something beyond language, beyond human understanding; but in order to receive this revelation he felt his own individuality, his own sense of self, evaporating into the cosmos…
And then, suddenly, the music stopped.
Gideon, gasping, came back to himself. On the platform, Glinn, staggering slightly as if from a physical blow, had shut down the audio system.
“I don’t think…” Glinn began, and then stopped to take a few deep breaths and steady himself. “I don’t think the world is ready for this.”
But even though Glinn had stopped the playback, the indescribable joy, the release, that it offered to Gideon did not dissipate—at least, not entirely.
“It’s a gift,” he heard McFarlane say, his voice strange. “It’s the alien consciousness giving us a gift as a way of saying thank you—for liberating it from its prison.”
“A gift,” Gideon repeated. And, looking over at McFarlane, he noticed that the bitter, brooding expression that seemed permanently stamped into the meteorite hunter’s face—as deeply as an image embossed into a coin—had eased. It was as if he, too, had just shed the existential darkness that had followed him around, like a shadow, for much of his life.
Their eyes met. Slowly, McFarlane smiled.
Gideon returned the smile. Then, as he settled back in his seat, his eyes traveled upward toward the skylights—and the pure light that streamed through them, enveloping him in golden warmth, felt like a caress from creation itself.
A Note to Our Readers
More years ago than we’d care to admit, we wrote a thriller titled The Ice Limit. It was about an expedition to the desolate wastes at the frozen tip of South America, with the goal of recovering the world’s largest meteorite.
The expedition did not go quite as planned. It was a dark story and the ending was rather grim and enigmatic. We believed at the time that no further explanation was required. As with the famous Twilight Zone episode, “To Serve Man,” there appeared to be only one possible outcome after the final page was turned.
However, we began to get letters and emails asking exactly what did happen after that final page. And demanding a sequel to the novel.
We thought such requests would die down over time. They did not. We continued to receive them until they totaled in the many thousands. Even today, at virtually every book signing we do, somebody asks us when we are finally going to write a sequel to The Ice Limit.
Eli Glinn was a character we first introduced in The Ice Limit, and he continued to appear in several of the books that followed. In the mysterious way that fictional characters sometimes take on lives of their own, Glinn too began to insist that we tell the rest of the story—he even worked behind the scenes, as it were, to make it happen. Glinn roped in Gideon Crew, our newer series character, in his obsession with the “meteorite.” That was when we realized our readers were right: the story and characters demanded a sequel. Once we understood that, we knew the time had come to set sail once again.
We did, however, take pains to ensure that this new book was not just a story for fans of The Ice Limit or Gideon Crew, but rather a stand-alone novel that anyone could enjoy, whether or not they had read any of our earlier fiction. We hope that, in retrospect now, you agree, and that you have enjoyed your fictional journey—whether for the first or the second time—to the Screaming Sixties of the South Atlantic…and beyond the Ice Limit.
