“As a child I was enthralled. Of course, I thought about the possibility of other worlds circling those distant suns. Inhabited worlds, perhaps. Planets perhaps with civilizations like our own, but more primitive or more advanced. Childish fantasies, but even a scientist may entertain such ideas.
“As an adult I discovered that a career in modern astronomy was more prosaic than I expected. My post-graduate project was a study of the propagative layer, the radiosphere, using high-frequency interferometry. My work met with resistance. It was hard to get cooperation or research time on the larger dish antennae. The details don’t matter—a tenured colleague from another university became aware of my work and introduced me to the Correspondence Society.” Amélie smiled ruefully. “Much was explained.”
“You believed what they told you? About the radiosphere being alive?”
“They offered me the evidence and allowed me to draw my own conclusion. Don’t you believe it?”
“I’m not a scientist. I guess you could say Ethan convinced me. His conviction convinced me.”
“Life,” Amélie said, “not of this world, and almost near enough to touch. At first it was only a surmise, but the evidence is now conclusive. Thanks in part to the work of your husband. The small seeds embedded in ancient ice cores. Think of that, a sort of gentle snow of alien life, very diffuse, sifting down from the sky, accumulating over centuries. And not dead, but still in some sense living. We are enclosed in an organism, which facilitates our communication and moves us, as a species, in a certain direction.”
Herds us, Ethan had once said, the way certain ants herd aphids.
“It’s a marvelous, a terrifying, an utterly unpalatable truth.” Amélie waved a hand at the sky—well, the ceiling—and came within an inch of knocking her drink to the floor. “For some years now we have consoled ourselves with the idea that the relationship between ourselves and this entity is symbiotic. Do you know that word? Mutually beneficial. It preserves and enhances the peace of the world, and in return… ah, what it takes in return is a matter of some debate. But Mr. Beck is more pessimistic. He suspects the relationship is purely parasitical. What the hypercolony wants, it will eventually take. Its intervention in our affairs is entirely selfish. If it wants us to be unwarlike, it’s so we won’t develop the weapons we might use to defend ourselves.”
“You think that’s true?”
“I don’t know. The evidence is controversial. But consider the implication, if what Mr. Beck believes is true. There is a form of life that is distributed throughout galactic space, and it depends for its survival on the exploitation of civilizations like our own. What does that mean?”
“I suppose… well, that civilizations like ours must be relatively common.”
“Yes, perhaps. At least common enough to have played a role in the evolution of this entity. This parasitical entity. This successful parasitical entity. The parasite is here, all around us—” Amélie leaned close enough that Nerissa could smell the alcohol on her breath. “But where are its previous victims? Where are these other civilizations like our own? Why haven’t they warned us against it? Why aren’t they here to help us?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it isn’t practical, or maybe they don’t care…”
“Or maybe the predator, having devoured its victim, leaves only a corpse behind.”
The bar was aggressively air-conditioned. Nerissa shivered.
Amélie nodded. “You understand, I think. And this is what has destroyed the plea sure I once took in looking through the telescope. All those wonderful possibilities. But now when I see the stars I think, death. Killing. Nature, red in the tooth…”
“Red,” Nerissa corrected her, “in tooth and claw.” Amélie was quoting Tennyson, whether she knew it or not. A passage about “man,” that Victorian abstraction, Who trusted God was love indeed / And love Creation’s final law—/ Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw / With ravine, shriek’d against his creed…
“‘In tooth and claw.’ Exactly.”
“And you blame Beck for changing the way you look at the sky?”
“Blame Beck? No, not for that.” Amélie smiled bitterly. “No. I blame Mr. Beck for propositioning me very crudely when we were alone in his room, and then belittling my work because I refused his advances. But that’s the kind of man he is.” She stood up suddenly, her chair teetering behind her. “I think Mr. Beck is as deluded as the rest of us. He simply cherishes a more militant delusion. Watch out for your husband, Nerissa. I mean to say, be careful of him. Protect him. Because he seems terribly impressed with Mr. Beck’s ideas. And I think Mr. Beck’s ideas are frankly dangerous.”
Nerissa saw Werner Beck once more that weekend, at a group dinner at the end of the conference. All technical discussion was banned for the duration of the meal. It was meant to be a social evening, though Nerissa was the only woman at the table: Amélie Fourier had booked an early flight to Louis Blériot Airport in Paris.
Conversation was shallow and often awkward. Maybe it hadn’t been a good idea to ban discussion of the single subject these people had in common. What was left? Books, films, politics, trivia. Nerissa said little and allowed her attention to drift, but she was impressed by Beck’s obvious domination of the event. The Correspondence Society was supposedly nonhierarchical and Beck held no official position, but it was Beck who called for menus, Beck who refereed minor disagreements, Beck who had organized the dinner in the first place.
And it was Beck who declared it over as soon as the dessert dishes had been cleared away. He held his hand out to Nerissa as she left with Ethan. “Plea sure meeting you, Mrs. Iverson.” His handshake was firm and his smile radiated a perfect confidence. She managed a smile in return, perhaps not very persuasively.
Later, in their room, she told Ethan what Amélie had said about Beck.
Ethan frowned. “It must be some kind of misunderstanding.”
“Amélie seemed clear on what happened.”
“Her work on microwave echoing was pretty thin gruel. Beck was a little dismissive of it in discussion, but I don’t think he said anything unfair. It was Beck who delivered the bombshell at this conference. He managed to detect signaling mechanisms in chondritic cells in culture.”
“And that’s important?”
“Like pulling down a piece of the sky and putting it under a microscope. If we understand how these cells communicate, it should be possible to monitor that communication or even interfere with it. I mean, if we choose to.”
“And the fact that he propositioned her?”
“Well, did he? He may have said something callous, which she amplified out of, you know, professional jealousy—”
“So she was lying?”
“Come on, Ris! Not necessarily lying, but…” He shrugged impatiently. “And no real harm was done. I don’t know why we’re even discussing this. She produced some trivial work, it got the attention it deserved, and she resented it. Maybe Beck didn’t conduct himself like a perfect gentleman, but even if that’s the case, does it really matter?”
At least take it into consideration, Nerissa thought. Don’t dismiss it out of loyalty to Beck. Don’t make excuses for him just because his research is impressive. But she didn’t say any of those things, only frowned and turned away.