It made Madeleine realize that the military here were looking two ways: protecting mankind from its alien visitors, and vice versa.
She stood on heat-soaked concrete and looked up at the sky. Even now, in the brightness of a Mediterranean day, she could see the ghostly shapes of flower-ships, their scoops hundreds of kilometres wide, cruising above the skies of Earth. At that moment, the idea that humans could contain the Gaijin, engage them in dialogue, control this situation, seemed laughable.
They had to put on paper coveralls and overboots and hats, and they were walked through an airlock. The Gaijin hostel worked to about the cleanliness standard of an operating theatre, Madeleine was told.
Inside the big boxy buildings, it was like a church, of a peculiarly stripped-down, minimalist kind: there was a quiet calm, subdued light, and people in uniform padded quietly to and fro in an atmosphere of reverence.
In fact, Madeleine found, that church analogy was apt. For the Gaijin had asked to meet the Pope.
‘And other religious leaders, of course,’ said Dorothy Chaum, as she shook Madeleine’s hand. ‘Strange, isn’t it? We always imagined the aliens would make straight for the Carl Sagan SETI-scientist types, and immediately start “curing” us of religion and other diseases of our primitive minds. But it isn’t working out that way at all. They seem to have more questions than answers …’
Chaum turned out to be an American, a Catholic priest who had been assigned by the Vatican to the case of the Gaijin from their first detection. She was a stocky, sensible-looking woman who might have been fifty, her hair frizzed with a modest grey. Madeleine was shocked to find out she was over one hundred years old. Evidently the Vatican could buy its people the best life-extending treatments.
They walked towards big curtained-off bays. The separating curtain was a nearly translucent sheet stretched across the building, from ceiling to floor, wall to wall.
And there – beyond the curtain, bathed in light – was a Gaijin.
Machinery, not life: that was her first impression. She recognized the famous dodecahedral core. It was reinforced at its edges – presumably to counter Earth’s gravity – and it was resting, incongruously, on a crude Y-frame trailer. A variety of instruments, cameras and other sensors, protruded from the dodecahedron’s skin, and the skin itself was covered with fine bristly wires. Three big robot arms stuck out of that torso, each articulated in two or three places. Two of the arms were resting on the ground, but the third was waving around in the air, fine manipulators at the terminus working.
She looked in vain for symmetry.
Humans had evolved to recognize symmetry in living things – left-to-right, anyhow, because of gravity. Living things were symmetrical; non-living things weren’t – a basic human prejudice hard-wired in from the days when it paid to be able to pick out the predator lurking against a confusing background. In its movements this Gaijin had the appearance of life, but it was angular, almost clumsy-looking – and defiantly not symmetrical. It didn’t fit.
Human researchers were lined up with their noses pressed against the curtain. A huge bank of cameras and other apparatus was trained on the Gaijin’s every move. She knew a continuous image of the Gaijin was being sent out to the net, twenty-four hours a day. There were bars which showed nothing but Gaijin images on huge wall-covering softscreens, all day and all night.
The Gaijin was reading a book, turning its pages with cold efficiency. Good grief, Madeleine thought, disturbed.
‘The Gaijin are deep space machines,’ said Brind. ‘Or life forms, whatever. But they’re hardy; they can survive in our atmosphere and gravity. There are three of them, here in this facility: the only three on the surface of the planet. We’ve no way of knowing how many are up there in orbit, or further out, of course …’
Dorothy Chaum said to her, ‘We think we’re used to machinery. But it’s eerie, isn’t it?’
‘If it’s a machine,’ Madeleine said, ‘it was made by no human. And it’s operated by none of us. Eerie. Yes, you’re right.’ She found herself shuddering, oddly, as that crude mechanical limb clanked. She’d lived her life with machinery, but this Gaijin was spooking her, on some primitive level.
Dorothy Chaum murmured, ‘We speak to them in Latin, you know.’ She grinned, dimpling, looking younger. ‘It’s the most logical human language we could find; the Gaijin have trouble with all the irregular structures and idioms of modern languages like English. We have software translation suites to back us up. But of course it’s a boon to me. I always knew those long hours of study in the seminary would pay off.’
‘What do you talk about?’
‘A lot of things,’ Brind said. ‘They ask more questions than they volunteer answers. Mostly, we figure out a lot from clues gleaned from inadvertent slips.’
‘Oh, I doubt that anything about the Gaijin is inadvertent,’ Chaum said. ‘Certainly their speech is not like ours. It is dull, dry, factual, highly structured, utterly unmemorable. There seems to be no rhythm, no poetry – no sense of story. Simply a dull list of facts and queries and dry logic. Like the listing of a computer program.’
‘That’s because they are machines,’ Paulis growled. ‘They aren’t conscious, like we are.’
Chaum smiled gently. ‘I wish I felt so sure. The Gaijin are clearly intelligent. But are they conscious? We know of examples of intelligence without consciousness, right here on Earth: social insects like ant colonies, the termites. And you could argue there can be consciousness without much intelligence, as in a mouse. But is advanced intelligence possible without consciousness of some sort?’
‘Jesus,’ said Paulis with disgust. ‘You gave these clanking tin men a whole island, they’ve been down here for five whole years, and you can’t even answer questions like that?’
Chaum stared at him. ‘If I could be sure you are conscious, if I even knew for sure what it meant, I’d concede your point.’
‘Conscious or not they are different from us,’ Brind said. ‘For example, the Gaijin can turn their brains off.’
That startled Madeleine.
‘It’s true,’ Chaum said. ‘When they are at repose, as far as we can tell, they are deactivated. Madeleine, if you had an off-switch on the side of your head – even if you could be sure it would be turned back on again – would you use it?’
Madeleine hesitated. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I don’t see how I could tell if I was still me, when I rebooted.’
Chaum sighed. ‘But that doesn’t seem to trouble the Gaijin. Indeed, the Gaijin seem to be rather baffled by our big brains. Madeleine, your mind is constantly working. Your brain doesn’t rest, even in sleep; it consumes the energy of a light bulb – a big drain on your body’s resources – all the time; that’s why we’ve had to eat meat all the way back to Homo Erectus.’
Madeleine protested, ‘But without our brains we wouldn’t be us.’
‘Sure,’ said Chaum. ‘But to be us, to the Gaijin, seems to be something of a luxury.’
‘Ms
