For the first time in the course of the conversation Siobhan felt faintly disturbed. After all, she’d had, independently, vague thoughts along these lines. “You’re saying this is no accident.”
“I’m saying the sunstorm is intentional. I’m saying we are the target.” Bisesa left the word hanging in the air.
Siobhan turned away from the intensity of her gaze. “But this is all just philosophy. You have no actual proof.”
Bisesa said firmly, “But I believe that if you look for proof you will find it. That’s what I’m asking you to do. You’re close to the scientists who are studying the sunstorm. You could make it happen. It could be vital.”
“Vital?”
“For the future of humankind. Because if we don’t understand what we’re dealing with, how can we beat it?”
Siobhan studied this intent woman. There was something odd about her—something of another world, perhaps, another place. But she had an intelligent soldier’s clarity and conviction. She could be wrong in what she says, Siobhan thought. But I don’t think she’s mad.
On a whim she dug into her jacket pocket and dug out a scrap of material. “Let me show you what we’re actually working on right now, the problems I’m wrestling with. Have you ever heard of smartskin? …”
This was a prototype sample of the material that would some day, if all went well, be stretched over the gaunt lunar-glass framework of the shield. It was a glass-fiber spiderweb, complex and full of components, detailed on scales as small as the eye could see. “It contains superconducting wires to transmit power and to serve as comms links. Diamond fibers, too small to see, for structural strength. Sensors, force multipliers, computer chips, even a couple of tiny rocket motors. There, can you see?” The scrap, the size of a pocket handkerchief, weighed almost nothing; the little rocket motors were like pinheads.
“Wow,” Bisesa said. “I thought it was just a big dumb mirror.”
Siobhan shook her head ruefully. “That would be too easy, wouldn’t it? The whole shield won’t have to be smart fabric, but maybe one percent of it will. It’s like a huge cooperative organism.”
Bisesa touched the material reverently. “So what’s the problem?”
“The manufacture of the smartskin. The trouble is, it has to be nanotechnological …”
Nanotechnologies were still in their infancy. But nanotech, a process that built atom by atom, was the only way to manufacture a material like this, with a complexity that went down below the molecular.
Bisesa smiled. “Can I tell my daughter about this? She’s a modern sort of kid. Nanotech fairy tales are her favorite sort.”
Siobhan sighed. “That’s the trouble. In a story you throw in a handful of magic dust, and nano will build you anything—right? Well, nano will build almost anything, but it needs something to build with, and energy to do it. Nano is more like biology, in some ways. Like a plant, a nano application draws energy and materials from its environment, and uses them to fuel its metabolism, and build itself up.”
“Instead of leaves and trunks, space shields.”
“Yes. In nature metabolic processes are slow. I once saw a bamboo shoot growing at naked-eye speeds: nano is directed, and faster than that. But not much faster.”
Bisesa stroked the bit of smartskin. “So this stuff grows slowly.”
“Too slowly. There aren’t enough factories on the planet for us to churn out the quantity of smartskin we need. We’re stuck.”
“Then ask for help.”
Siobhan was puzzled. “Help?”
“You know, people always think on a big scale—what can the government do for me, how can I gear up industry to churn out what I want? But I learned, working for the UN, that the way the world really works is through ordinary people helping each other, and helping themselves.”
“What are you suggesting?”
Bisesa cautiously picked up the smartskin. “You say this stuff grows like a plant. Well, could I grow it?”
“What?”
“I’m serious. If I put it in my window box, and fed and watered it, and kept it in the sun—”
Siobhan opened her mouth, and closed it. “I don’t know. An open plant pot wouldn’t do, I’m sure of that. But maybe some reasonably uncomplicated kit would work. And maybe the design could be adapted to draw on local nutrients—”
“What does that mean?”
“From the soil. Or even household waste.”
“How would you get it started?”
Siobhan thought. “You’d need some kind of seed, I guess. Enough to encode the construction data, and to bootstrap the macro-scale growth.”
“But if my neighbor grew one, she could pass on seeds to me. And I could pass them on from my, umm, ‘plant’ to the next person.”
“And then you’d need some kind of collection system to bring the finished smartskin to some central point … But wait,” Siobhan said, thinking fast. “The total area of the shield is around a hundred thousand billion square meters. One percent of that, and a global population of ten billion—why, every man, woman, and child on Earth would have to produce, oh, say a blanket ten or twenty meters on a side. Everybody.”
Bisesa grinned. “Surely less than that if the factories do their job. And it isn’t so much. We’ve still got three years. You’d be surprised what Boy Scouts and Girl Guides can produce when they’ve a mind to do it.”
Siobhan shook her head. “This needs thinking through. But if it’s possible I’ll owe you a debt of gratitude.”
Bisesa seemed embarrassed. “It’s an obvious idea. If I hadn’t come up with it, you would have yourself—or somebody else.”
“Maybe.” She smiled. “I ought to introduce you to my daughter.” Saving the world is so 1990s disaster movie! Nobody believes in heroes anymore, Mum … This way, everybody would be a hero, she supposed. Maybe it would catch even Perdita’s imagination.
Bisesa asked, “Why did you show me this stuff?”
Siobhan sighed. “Because this is real. This is engineering. This is what we’re building, right now. I thought if you saw this—”
“It might puncture my fantasies,” Bisesa said.
“Something like that, maybe.”
“Just because something is big, indeed superhuman, doesn’t make it any less real,” Bisesa said evenly. “Or any less relevant. And anyhow, as I’ve said, you don’t have to believe me. Just look for proof.”
Siobhan stood up. “I really ought to get back to my meeting.” But she hesitated, intrigued despite herself. “You know, I’m open-minded enough to accept the existence of extraterrestrial aliens as a possibility. But what you’re describing makes no psychological sense. Why would these hypothetical Firstborn try to destroy us? And even if it were so, why would they give you these hints and glimpses? Why would they warn any of us—and why you? …”
But even as she spoke, Siobhan thought of a possible answer to her objection.
Because there are factions among these Firstborn. Because they are no more united and uniform of view than humanity is—why should a more advanced intelligence be homogeneous? And because there are some of them, at least, who believe that what is being done is wrong. A faction of them, working through this woman, Bisesa, are trying to warn us.
This woman could be crazy, Siobhan thought. Even after meeting her, she was ninety percent sure that was true. But her story did make a certain sense. And what if she was right? What if an investigation did turn up evidence to back her claims? What then?