"Don't bother looking. JPL is sitting on the results."
I heard the unhappiness in his voice. "That bad?"
"It's not entirely bad news. At least not until recently. The replicators did everything Wun hoped they would. Amazing things, Tyler. I mean absolutely amazing. I wish I could show you the maps we generated. Big navigable software maps. Almost two hundred thousand stars, in a halo of space hundreds of light-years in diameter. We know more about stellar and planetary evolution now than an astronomer of E.D.'s generation could have imagined."
"But nothing about the Spin?"
"I didn't say that."
"So what did you learn?"
"For one thing, we're not alone. In that volume of space we've found three optically blank planets roughly the size of the Earth, in orbits that are habitable by terrestrial standards or would have been in the past. The nearest is circling the star Ursa Majoris 47. The farthest—"
"I don't need the details."
"If we look at the age of the stars involved and make some plausible assumptions, the Hypotheticals appear to emanate from somewhere in the direction of the galactic core. There are other indicators, too. The replicators found a couple of white dwarf stars—burned-out stars, essentially, but stars that would have looked like the sun a few billion years ago—with rocky planets in orbits that should never have outlasted the solar expansion."
"Spin survivors?"
"Maybe."
"Are these living planets, Jase?"
"We have no real way of knowing. But they don't have Spin membranes to protect them, and their current stellar environment is absolutely hostile by our standards."
"Meaning what?"
"I don't know. Nobody knows. We thought we'd be able to make more meaningful comparisons as the replicator network expanded. What we created with the replicators is really a neural network on an unimaginably large scale. They talk to themselves the way neurons talk to themselves, except they do it across centuries and light-years. It's absolutely, stunningly beautiful, what they do. A network larger than anything humanity has ever built. Gathering information, culling it, storing it, feeding it back to us—"
"So what went wrong?"
He sounded as if it hurt him to say it. "Maybe age. Everything ages, even highly protected genetic codes. They might be evolving beyond our instructions. Or—"
"Yeah, but what happened, Jase?"
"The data are diminishing. We're getting fragmentary, contradictory information from the replicators that are farthest from Earth. That could mean a lot of things. If they're dying, it might reflect some emerging flaw in the design code. But some of the long-established relay nodes are starting to shut down, too."
"Something's targeting them?"
"That's too hasty an assumption. Here's another idea. When we launched these things into the Oort Cloud we created a simple interstellar ecology—ice, dust, and artificial life. But what if we weren't the first? What if the interstellar ecology isn't simple?"
"You mean there might be other kinds of replicators out there?"
"Could be. If so, they'd be competing for resources. Maybe even using each other for resources. We thought we were sending our devices into a sterile void. But there might be competitor species, there might even be predator species."
"Jason… you think something's eating them?"
"It's possible," he said.
* * * * *
The flicker came back in June and clocked nearly forty-eight hours before it dissipated.
In August, fifty-six hours of flicker plus intermittent telecom problems.
When it started again in late September no one was surprised. I spent most of the first evening with the blinds closed, ignoring the sky, watching a movie I'd downloaded a week before. An old movie, pre-Spin. Watching it not for the plot but for the faces, the faces of people the way they used to look, people who hadn't spent their lives afraid of the future. People who, every once in a while, talked about the moon and the stars without irony or nostalgia.
Then the phone rang.
Not my personal phone, and not the encrypting phone Jase had sent me. I recognized the three-tone ring instantly even though I hadn't heard it for years. It was audible but faint— faint because I'd left the phone in the pocket of a jacket that was hanging in the hallway closet.
It rang twice more before I fumbled it out and said, "Hello?"
Expecting a wrong number. Wanting Diane's voice. Wanting it and dreading it.
But it was a man's voice on the other end. Simon, I recognized belatedly.
He said, "Tyler? Tyler Dupree? Is that you?"
I had taken enough emergency calls to recognize the anxiety in his voice. I said, "It's me, Simon. What's wrong?"
"I shouldn't be talking to you. But I don't know who else to call. I don't know any local doctors. And she's so sick. She's just so sick, Tyler! I don't think she's getting better. I think she needs—"
And then the flicker cut us off and there was nothing but noise on the line.
4X109 A. D.
Behind Diane came En and two dozen of his cousins and an equal number of strangers, all bound for the new world. Jala herded them inside, then slid shut the corrugated steel door of the warehouse. The light dimmed. Diane put her arm around me and I walked her to a relatively clean space under one of the high halide lamps. Ibu Ina unrolled an empty jute bag for her to lie on.
"The noise," Ina said.
Diane closed her eyes as soon as she was horizontal, awake but obviously exhausted. I unbuttoned her blouse and began, gently, to peel it away from the wound.
I said, "My medical case—"
"Yes, of course." Ina summoned En and sent him up the warehouse stairs to bring both bags, mine and hers "The noise—"
Diane winced when I began to pull the matted cloth from the caked blood of the wound, but I didn't want to medicate her until I'd seen the extent of the injury. "What noise?"
"Exactly!" Ina said. "The docks should be noisy this time of the morning. But it's quiet. There is no noise."
I raised my head. She was right. No noise, except the nervous talk of the Minang villagers and a distant drumming that was the sound of rain on the high metal roof.
But this wasn't the time to worry about it. "Go ask Jala," I said. "Find out what's happening."
Then I turned back to Diane.
* * * * *
"It's superficial," Diane said. She took a deep breath. Her eyes were clenched shut against the pain. "At least I think it's superficial."
"It looks like a bullet wound."
"Yes. The Reformasi found Jala's safe house in Padang. Fortunately we were just leaving. Uh!"
She was right. The wound itself was superficial, though it would need suturing. The bullet had passed through fatty tissue just above the hipbone. But the impact had bruised her badly where the skin wasn't torn and I worried that the bruising might be deep, that the concussion might have torn something inside her. But there had been no blood in her urine, she said, and her blood pressure and pulse were at reasonable numbers under the circumstances.
"I want to give you something for the pain, and we need to stitch this up."
"Stitch it if you have to, but I don't want any drugs. We have to get out of here."
"You don't want me suturing you without an anesthetic."
"Something local, then."
"This isn't a hospital. I don't have anything local."
"Then just sew it, Tyler. I can deal with the pain."
Yes, but could I? I looked at my hands. Clean—there was running water in the warehouse washroom, and Ina had helped me wrestle into latex gloves before I attended Diane. Clean and skilled. But not steady.
I had never been squeamish about my work. Even as a med student, even doing dissections, I'd always been able to switch off the loop of sympathy that makes us feel another's pain as if it were our own. To pretend that the torn artery demanding my attention was unconnected with a living human being. To pretend and for the necessary few minutes to really believe it.