“That globe makes gravity, Kirk, but in reverse. It pushes. And it’s adjustable. This one is set for one g because that’s desirable for the human phenotype. And they’ve finessed it so that it’s variable to compensate for Earth’s one g. It goes from zero on the floor to two g’s on the ceiling, canceling out Earth’s gravity. The result is Earth normal gravity for the entire interior.”
“Seems complicated.”
“It is, but the nanotechnology that built this place works naturally in a globular orientation, rather than flat or rectilinear.”
Whatever.
We were in among the odd shapes that littered the place. Close up they showed more detail, but were still bizarre looking. Turner didn’t say a word about any of them. He kept up his dissertation on gravity control, economy of design, and insights into alien intelligence, complete with footnotes. None of it got through the haze I was in. Until we came to a coffin shaped thing with a woman’s figure (Stella’s) reversed out of clear, Jell-O-like stuff.
“This is where she was born. Can you imagine it? Complete initial expression of final gene cascades for a mature genotype. That means it went fast—really fast. They are decades ahead of us in human genetic engineering.” He said this in such an awed tone, he obviously expected me to be impressed too.
But I was clueless. I was still struggling with the most basic parts of what Turner was saying. And I couldn’t seem to face it head on. I’ve embraced the alien, I thought. I’ve been in alien flesh, I said to myself, with a stupid grin (which confused my gut reactions all to hell).
Turner was no help, cutting off my questions and answering what he thought I was asking.
“But, how…?”
“It’s beautiful. Elegant, really. Information! Electromagnetic radiation is exactly the same for matter as it is for mirror matter. So they sent a probe here. The Anti-Christ. It took almost two thousand years to get here. Can you imagine a civilization taking on a project of that duration, and seeing it through? Well, when it finally got here it beamed all this information into the sand—etching billions of bits of data into the atomic vibration patterns of iron atoms, the way we etch microcircuits into silicon wafers. Only their method is holographic. Anyway, they used the information to create this place, and Stella, in normal matter. And there you have it: an alien from a mirror matter world exploring the Universe of regular matter and never any matter/mirror matter contact. Just incredible.”
Turner couldn’t see my confusion, so I tried again. “But Stella…?”
“There was a lot of controversy eighty some years ago about transmitting the human genome into space. Crazy idea, but the SETI people insisted it would be an olive branch to the stars. Well, seems they were right. Stella’s people got every bit of that two year long transmission. They created Stella’s DNA matrix, beamed it to their probe which beamed it here. This place acted on that information, growing Stella, like a stereo lithograph in this nutrient gel.”
“Why?”
“To make contact with us easier, I imagine. So as not to cause panic. She could blend in with us, become one of us, determine her best course of action, and choose her contacts.”
First Contact! The holy grail, in sci-fi and in real life. By now it was already something for the history books, even though no one else knew it yet. I wondered when, precisely, history would say that it had occurred. At The Trough, when Turner held the door open for Stella? In my bed?
I shuddered.
“ ‘Contacts’? That would be you, then, wouldn’t it?”
No emotion. Just clinical agreement. “That’s right, Kirk.”
I got pissed. He could call himself her “contact” all he wanted. But he was really just stealing my girl.
“It’s all so easy for you educated guys, isn’t it?” But he took that wrong too.
“Not true, Kirk. No. You had the insights. Your data was almost nonexistent. A wrong-handed handshake. That was it. And yet you had that flash of intuition. There aren’t a lot of people with that power working in the sciences these days. The genius of a Feynman, for example, is like a lightning strike in the dark. People like me devote whole careers to the details, endlessly analyzing small parts of the landscape revealed by such rare bolts from the blue. We need more people like you to stand back and see the picture… the big picture.”
“And you end up with Stella.”
Concern in his voice, now. “Oh no. You’ve got that all wrong. She has no feelings for me. It’s you she loves. I suppose it’s first love. For you too?”
I loved an ET. An ET loved me. How weird could things get?
“First love? Uh… yeah. I guess.” Of course, there had been that girl in high school. But that had been all onesided. I never told her. Never touched her.
Turner and I moved on until what had been our starting point was almost directly overhead. I kept picturing the underground city of the Krell. I needed the voice of Walter Pidgeon to spoon-feed me explanations full of wonder. Turner’s half-assed lecture was no help.
We got to a part of the “floor” that was “roofed” over to give the illusion of human rooms with ceilings. Turner explained that this section of the “ge-ode” was set up to be more normal for a human, and I could relate to that. I felt a whole lot better with a ceiling over my head. We even passed a normal looking kitchen. Well, I guess Stella had to eat.
We walked to a room where we heard and saw Stella pleading with an old man. The old man was standing in what looked like the beam from a weak spotlight shining straight down on him from the ceiling.
Turner got quiet as we stepped just inside the archway between the hallway and the room. He moved closer to me and began to talk quietly into my ear, explaining things, as only he could. “He’s just a holographic projection. Phenomenal bandwidth, considering their communication link. Stella tells me it’s a primitive adaptation of systems on her planet.”
Now that Turner told me, I could see that it was true. There was a slight shimmer to the old fellow, and if I focused my eyes past him I could see little bright spots of reflected light from across the room. But this beat three-deevision all to hell. If this was a primitive version, the full-blown version must be something. Daddy McFarland was just about as opaque as the real thing.
Stella and her dad were all intense and earnest. Turner started providing audio subtitles of the conversation for my benefit. The whole thing felt like a hospital visit to a dying man, or a wake.
“Father…” Stella said.
Turner whispered, “Not really her father. He’s their first successful DNA recreation of a human. He was kept on the project as a sort of mission communicator so Stella would have a human face to look at and relate to. But don’t be fooled. Her memories came over with the DNA data. There’s a whole other life she remembers.”
“…You should have told me…”
“The supernova poses a real danger to the home planet. The light reached them years ago, but he didn’t tell her. The most dangerous particles will hit in 2,000 years, or so. Matter particles. They’ll polish the home planet’s surface just as smooth as Niven’s Cannonball.”