Year's Best Scifi 8 Part 21

"No, much better than that: we're going to visit them. Cut the delay cycle down to realtime. We came here to build a ship and recruit a crew, even if we have to cannibalize the whole of Jupiter system to pay for the exercise."

The cat yawns, then fixes him with a thousand-yard stare. "This stupid girl wants to bring her conscience along to a meeting with something so smart it might as well be a G.o.d," it says, "and you're it.

There's a slot open for the post of ship's theologian. I don't suppose I can convince you to turn the offer down?"

I Saw the Light

TERRY BISSON.

Terry Bisson [www.terrybisson.com] lives in Oakland, California these days. He continues towrite fantasy and science fiction, full of detail and fascination with how things work, with deadpan humor, wit, and stylish precision. He has been publishing in the genre since the late 1970s. Of his SF novels, Voyage to the Red Planet (1990) is perhaps both the most heroic and the funniest chronicle of the first voyage to Mars in all science fiction. His latest novel is The Pickup Artist (2001), which somehow combines the traditions of Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. In the 1990s, Bisson began to write short stories. One of his first was "Bears Discover Fire," which won the Hugo and Nebula Awards, among others. His stories are collected in Bears Discover Fire (1993) and in In the Upper Room and Other Likely Stories (2000).

"I Saw the Light" appeared electronically at SciFiction; this is its first appearance in print. It is cla.s.sic Bisson, an object of contemplation as well as a fine SF story in the tradition of Arthur C.

Clarke's "The Sentinal." Astronauts discover on the Moon evidence that humanity was uplifted by alien visitors in the distant past. This is SF as the literature of ideas, especially unsettling ideas.

How much free will do we have, anyway? This is a story about an astronaut and her dog.

I saw the light. So did you. Everybody did.

Remember where you were the first time you saw it? Of course you do. I was living in Arizona, Tucson, more or less retired. I was throwing sticks. They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks, but who would want to? There aren't any new tricks, just the old tried and true. "Good boy, Sam," I would say, and he would say "woof," and there we would go again. I used to amuse myself thinking it was Sam who was teaching me to throw, but I don't think that anymore. It was night, and desert nights are bright, even with a quarter moon. Sam stopped, halfway back to me, dropped his stick and began to howl. He was looking up, over my head. I turned and looked up toward the moon, and you know the rest. There it was, blinking in threes: dot dot dot, twice a minute. On the Moon, where no one had been in thirty years.

Twenty nine, eight months, and four days, exactly; I knew, because I had been the last to leave, the one who locked the door behind me.

Sam's a big yellow mutt; his first name is Play it Again, so I always call him by his last. He was a parting gift from my third ex, who was himself a parting gift from my second. Lunar subcrust engineers shouldn't marry: our peculiar talents take us to too many faraway places. Or to one, anyway.

"Come on boy," I said, and we headed back into the minimally furnished condo I call home, leaving the stick behind-even though sticks are not all that easy to find in Arizona, or for that matter on the Moon.

The light on the Moon was front page news the next morning-dot dot dot-and by the third day it was estimated that all but a tiny fraction of Earth's six point four billion had seen it. UNASA confirmed that the light was not from Marco Polo Station (I could have told them that) but from a spot almost a hundred kilometers away, on the broad, dark plain of the Sinus Medii: the exact center of the Moon as seen from Earth.

I figured there would have to be an investigation, so I made a few calls. I was not really hopeful, but you never knew. I still had a few friends in the Agency. I was hoping that, if nothing else, this light would get us back to the Moon. It wasn't only or even primarily for myself that I was hoping; it was for humanity, all of us, past and future. It seemed a shame to learn to soar off the planet and then quit.

Okay, so it's not soaring: it's more like a push-up, grunting and heaving, but you know what I mean.

First Contact: strange lights on the Moon: may we have your attention, please. The tabs speculated, the pundits punded, and UNASA prepared the first international expedition since the abandonment of Marco Polo in 20-. I had made, as I mentioned, a few calls, but I hadn't really expected anything. A sixty-one-year-old woman does not exactly fit the profile for s.p.a.ce flight and lunar exploration. So Imagine, as they say, My Surprise, when the phone rang. It was Berenson, my Russian-English boss from the old days. I knew him immediately by his accent even though it had been twenty-nine years eight months and seven days. "Bee!?" (Which is what we called him.) "I requested you as number two for the tech team. Logistically this is a cake walk and age is not a problem, if you're still in shape. There will be five altogether, three SETI and two tech."

"How soon?" I asked, trying to hide my excitement.

"Start packing."

I hung up and screamed, or howled, or whatever. Sam came running. "I'm going back to the Moon!"

I said.

"Woof!" he said, jowls flopping; as always, happier for me than for himself.

Our trip was put together with a minimum of publicity and fanfare. We were due at Novy Mir in less than a week. I wasn't to tell anyone where I was going. Of course, I had already told Sam.

"I'm leaving you here with Willoughby," I said. "I'll be back soon. Three, four weeks max.

Meanwhile, you be good, hear?"

"Where are you going, exactly?" My next door neighbor, Willoughby, is a retired FBI agent, a type that both hates and loves secrets, depending on who is keeping them, and why.

"An old lover," I said, with a wink. It was one of my better moments.

Zero G felt perfectly normal; you don't forget how to fly, just as you don't forget how to walk. I felt ten years younger immediately. It was great to be back in the Big Empty, even if it meant a night or two on Novy Mir, the sprawling, smelly s.p.a.ce station in Clarke orbit.

Bee was the first one I saw when I entered the day room we had been a.s.signed. He was with Yoshi, his old number two.

"I thought I was number two!" I complained.

"You are," Bee replied with a laugh. "Yoshi is number one." Turned out he was leading SETI. His partners were a scowling Chinese biologist named Chang, and a smiling Indian linguist named Erin Vishnu whose mother had gotten pregnant during Julia Roberts'Academy Awards acceptance speech. I didn't learn this until later, of course; at first the "sadies" (as Yoshi and I called them) were very reserved.

It was a two-day trip from high Earth orbit to the Moon. Bee and I caught up on old times (he had saved my life twice, which cements a friendship) while Yoshi flew the ship and studied the manuals, which she already knew by heart. So did I. I had helped her and Bee run the pumps, extracting environmentals from buried comet ice, for almost six years at Polo.

The SETI team, the sadies, were the scientific payload. The heart of the matter, as it were. They had been established to deal directly, discreetly, and creatively with any First Contact situation, answerable to no government-not even UNASA.

"No one really thought it would ever happen," Bee told me. "So we have complete autonomy; for two weeks anyway."

We were just preparing for lunar capture when I got the call from Willoughby-my next door neighbor, remember? It was Sam. He was desolate, disconsolate, wouldn't eat; he just howled-at the moon, of course, as if he knew where I was headed.

"How the h.e.l.l did you get through to me here?" I asked. I needn't have. Those FBI guys never let go of their connections. I could hear Sam in the background, whining.

Willoughby held the phone, and I said, "Hang in there, boy, I'll be home soon."

"Woof," was his answer; he was nothing if not unconvinced.

The light source was about a hundred kliks from Marco Polo, and we crossed over the old station on our recon orbit. I got all teary-eyed, seeing our domes and tunnels, still intact here where the weather runs in billion year cycles; every scratch and scuff in the lunar dust just as we had left it, twenty-nine years eight months and eighteen days before.

Then we saw the light itself as we pa.s.sed over Sinus Medii. It was coming from a perfect jet blackpyramid, ten meters on a side, too small to show up in amateur photos but plenty large enough to have been studied from Novy Mir.

"There haven't been any pictures of this!" I said. "Not even on the internet." Bee just smiled and I realized then that his SETI team had powers that belied their modest size and relative obscurity.

The pyramid was pure black, the only pure thing on the Moon, which is all shades of gray.

It was still throwing light, dot dot dot, a new sequence every twenty-seven seconds.

We set down next to the pyramid in a cloud of slow-settling dust. If we had hoped to be greeted by the aliens when the dust cleared (and we had; hopes are less restricted than expectations), we were duly disappointed.

The pyramid was silent and still, as black as a rip in the Universe. It was still (we confirmed from Novy Mir) transmitting its dot dot dot twice a minute, but the light was, for some reason, invisible from our position beside it.

Still teary-eyed, I felt like a dancer; light on my feet, without the creaking that comes with age and miles. I realized that it was not the moon I had missed all these years, but the one-sixth gravity, and of course my youth.

SETI had arranged for a two week stay, so I immediately sunk a probe and hit pay dirt (or ice). The sadies went to work, photographing the pyramid from all sides, while Yoshi and I unfolded the dome and adjusted the environmentals to break down the oxygen and hydrogen (for fuel) extracted from the cometary trash imbedded under the lunar crust.

By Day Two (sticklers for tradition, we ran on Houston time) we had the ship for a dorm, and the attached geodesic as a day room and observation dome, complete with fast-plants and a hot tub which also heated the dome and ship. By Day Three I knew I should have been bored. Shouldn't something have happened by now?

"What would you have us do?" Bee asked. "Knock?"

"Why not?" I said, returning his smile. I was in no hurry; I was just glad to have a reason to be here, back home, on the Moon. It felt-right. Even Yoshi, an olympic complainer, was not complaining, though her narrow face was not exactly wreathed in smiles. "What about ground control?" she asked.

"Aren't they pushing you?"

"There isn't any ground control," Bee said. "Or haven't you noticed?" The SETI mandate was a blank slate, designed to remove First Contact, if it ever came to pa.s.s, from the constraints of diplomacy and politics. The pace of events was their call.

By Day Four Yoshi and I had nothing to do except watch the sadies in their clumsy white suits measure and photograph and a.n.a.lyze the pyramid. I kept my doubts to myself, reluctant to interfere, but Yoshi was never one to recognize such restraints. "Aren't you guys disappointed?" she asked at the end of the day.

"Not yet. It feels right to go slow," Bee replied. He was sitting with us in the hot tub, soaking off the chill that comes with EVAs, even in a suit. "Can't you feel it?"

Feel what? We both looked at him, puzzled.

"The familiarity. I feel it; we all feel it. A feeling that we are in the right place, doing the right thing."

"I thought it was just me," I said. "Being back here."

"We all feel it," said Chang, who was sitting on the floor in his long johns, tapping on a laptop. "We are here to record and evaluate everything. Feelings included. Right, Vish?"

"Right."

"You've got another week," said Yoshi.

"Knock and you shall enter," I said.

"Hmmmm," said Bee.

And knock he did. The next day, at the end of their routine explorations, he reached up with a heavy gloved mitt and rapped three times on the side of the pyramid.

Yoshi and I were watching from the dome. "I knocked," Bee said to me, as he was unsuiting just inside the airlock (we entered and exited through the ship). Instead of answering, I pulled all three of the sadies into the dome, and pointed across the little plain of dust toward the pyramid.

"d.a.m.n," said Chang. He all but smiled. Vishnu looked amazed. Bee, delighted. There it was: A handprint, in bright yellow, against the darker-than-midnight black, halfway up the pyramid.

The next "morning" the print was still there, and the sadies were suited up early. Yoshi and I watched them jumping clumsily around, stirring up the dust, fitting their stiff gloves against the handprint, waiting for something to happen. Hoping for something to happen.

Nothing did.

Later in the hot tub we were all silent. Outside the dome, we could see the print, bright yellow in the Moon's cruel gray. We felt gloomy and hopeful at the same time. Familiarity had been replaced by a kind of desperate eagerness.

"It wants something," said Bee.

"Maybe it wants a touch," I said.

"A touch?" Chang was scornful.

I ignored him and addressed myself to Bee. "You know, not a glove."

"It's high vac out there," Vishnu reminded me. "We can't exactly take off our gloves."

"But of course we can!" Bee said, slapping the water like a boy. I grinned and gave him five. There were the peels.

Peels are emergency spray-on suits to be used in case of sudden decompression. Coupled with a "paper" helmet, a peel will give you anywhere from two to twenty minutes to find an airlock or an emergency vehicle-or say your prayers.

I was in fact the only one present who had actually used a peel, after a sudden rockslide collapsed Polo's ag dome. Thanks to the peel I had survived the twelve minutes it took Bee to get to me with a Rover. I could still feel the cold of those long twelve minutes in my bones.

The next "day" (Six) they tried it. Yoshi and I watched from the dome as Bee in his peel and the sadies in their white suits approached the pyramid, Bee in the lead. He was hurrying, of course; there's no other way to moonwalk in a peel. I could feel how cold he was.

They all stopped and stood in a line, right in front of the print. With his left hand Bee grabbed Chang's mitt, and Chang grabbed Vishnu's. Then Bee placed his right hand high on the side of the pyramid, directly over the print.

And it happened.

Something-a lens, a door?-opened in the side of the pyramid, and they stepped through: one, two, three: Bee, Chang, Vishnu. It closed behind them and they were gone.

"Holy s.h.i.t," said Yoshi.

"Knock and you shall enter," I said. It was another of my better moments.

Yoshi and I watched the pyramid, wordlessly. Was there air in there? How could Bee survive? After twenty minutes Yoshi began to suit up for a rescue EVA. I was the only one watching two minutes later (twenty-one point four minutes from entry, timed on the sadies' fixed video camera) when the lens opened and the three emerged, stumbling, Bee in the lead. Yoshi opened the airlock for them and they staggered in, Bee falling into my arms. While Yoshi helped the other sadies un-suit, I ripped off his paper helmet and pulled him into the hot tub, which would dissolve his peel. He was shivering and grinning.