‘The smell of sulphur in the air.’ Abrahams smiled sadly. ‘The aroma of Yellowstone. Wonderful sunsets. Symptoms of a world coming apart at the seams. And bad news for anybody like me, who only came here looking for a spot of quiet farming.’
Bowring looked impatient, uncomfortable. ‘I must keep stressing that this is still largely guesswork. Extrapolation. We have so little data … This is not the Datum, which is, or anyhow was before Yellowstone, saturated by survey gear of all kinds. Networks of seismometers, for instance. I myself worked at the Large Aperture Seismic Array in Montana, an exquisite instrument. And of course the climate was monitored by ships, planes, satellites, as well as weather stations with a global coverage. Here we have only our one observation platform in the Cowley, a few pinprick settlements like yours, Dr Abrahams – forgive me – and a handful of observations from the instruments we can emplace. We need gravimeters to measure the planetary morphological distortion, line-of-sight lasers to measure the distortion directly.’
Jha said, ‘I know you’re doing your best, Ken. As we all are.’
Bowring grunted, visibly unhappy. ‘At least we can do something. I myself was trained up properly, before Yellowstone. But the Datum science institutions have never recovered from the volcano. The next generation of scientists will be amateurs, if that. Then we’d have no hope of understanding something like this at all.’
‘So,’ said Abrahams, ‘we’ve talked about the what. Have you got any closer to understanding why this is happening?’
‘Well, we’re asking the question, at least. Come see …’
The silver beetle was, self-evidently, dead.
It lay on its back on a table, the gas pods removed from its green underbelly, its sections of silvery armour carefully detached and laid aside, its carapace of what looked like black ceramic sliced through and peeled back to expose a greenish, pulpy mass within.
‘I have to emphasize we didn’t kill this thing,’ Bowring said. ‘We found this corpse—’
‘Or this inert unit,’ Jha corrected him. ‘There’s no consensus yet over whether these creatures are alive or not.’
‘Very well. We found him in the big exhausted mine working you call the Gallery. Evidently inactive. We’ve no idea what happened to him, or even how long he’s been there; we’ve no idea how processes of decay work with these creatures.’
‘Or even if he’s a he,’ Jha said dryly.
‘True enough. It’s hard not to anthropomorphize. Especially when you see one standing upright, with that eerie mask-like face turned to you.’
‘You settlers call them “beetles”,’ Jha said to Abrahams. ‘I’ve heard the scientists call them “assemblers”. The marines under our Colonel Wang are calling them “bugs”.’
‘But we don’t know what they call themselves because they won’t talk to us,’ Bowring said, sounding exasperated. ‘We believe they are capable of communication, Dr Abrahams. Well, that must be true for them to be able to accomplish such complex feats of engineering as the viaducts. We believe they are individuals; they exhibit individualistic behaviour – such as the first ones discovered by the children here, who began trading rock samples for bits of beetle jewellery. You could regard that as a kind of preliminary communication, if you like. Pre-symbolic. You could even see it as a kind of play.’
‘Play?’ Abrahams mused. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’
‘Play, yes. Their assaying of this world has evidently been very extensive, and it’s hard to imagine a few random ore samples given them by uneducated kids can be of any real value. It’s a chink of hope we might somehow get through to them. And that they’re not evil. Not if they can be playful.’
‘Hmm,’ Abrahams said. ‘Even the conquistadors loved their children, Dr Bowring. Even the Nazis, probably.’
‘True enough. Anyhow that’s as far as we’ve got. We have one of the SETI crowd here who’s been trying to get them to recognize prime numbers in symbols, heaps of stones. You know the kind of thing: mathematics is supposedly the universal language. The beetles just walk away.’
Abrahams laughed. ‘I’d walk away if you started counting out prime numbers to me. How boring …’
Jha leaned over the beetle on its table, a facemask over her mouth. The dissection had progressed a lot since Jha had last seen the specimen, but in the body’s interior she made out nothing but a kind of spongy mass, undifferentiated. ‘I’m just a lowly plant biologist, but even I can see we’re lacking in internal structure here. No obvious organs, no skeleton.’
Bowring shrugged. ‘We think the ceramic shell acts as a kind of exoskeleton, to support the weight. And there is a lot of weight; that spongy stuff is very high density. We’ve run various scans – MRI, sonar. There is structure in there, but it’s a kind of network with identifiable nodes, not a collection of organs like the human. The same kind of structure extends to the head, which seems to be more a sensor pod than a brain pan.’ He glanced at Abrahams. ‘Which could be significant. The human skull has grown over our evolutionary history, but even so there’s only so much room in there – and cerebral functionality has to share space with extensive areas devoted to sight processing, for instance.’
‘Hmm,’ Abrahams said. ‘Whereas if these creatures have their brains in their stomachs, so to speak—’
‘Room to grow. And if they are potentially very smart, they’re also very capable. Take a look at this.’ Bowring picked up a tablet, which showed an image of a bug’s manipulator arm. He swiped the image to magnify a section.
Jha saw that the ‘limbs’ terminated with splits, into twig-like appendages like fingers. But the ‘fingers’ bifurcated too, into still finer manipulators.
‘It goes on down to the nano scale,’ Bowring said. ‘We think these creatures could manipulate molecules.’
Abrahams said, ‘You call it a “creature”. We return to the point. Is it a creature, though? Is it biological?’
‘As Commander Jha said, opinion is divided on that. Animal or robot? My own theory, for what it’s worth, is that this is some kind of very advanced cyborg. And a very old design, to the point where the technology and the biology have merged, seamlessly. The manipulator substructures certainly look engineered. On the other hand the basic body plan looks like a throwback to some biological origin, to me. I mean, it’s not efficient. Why not have the whole body as a kind of modular robot? That way you could split off substructures, merge whole bodies to form larger structures … Certainly the capability to engineer on a molecular scale and upward gives them enormous manipulative power. Dr Abrahams, I think a beetle could make anything from almost any ingredient, given the right elemental composition.’
‘Including a copy of itself?’
‘Yes. We know these things have – reproduced.’
‘Using locally sourced materials – beetles grown from the substance of this world. I found that out myself. This is a von Neumann replicator, then. A machine capable of reproducing.’
‘Among other capabilities, yes. And when they combine they are clearly capable of tremendous feats, like their globe-spanning viaducts.’
‘But these creatures don’t come from Earth at all,’ Abrahams said. ‘I mean, from any of the worlds of the Long Earth.’
‘Right,’ Bowring said grimly. ‘And of course our best evidence for an extraterrestrial origin—’