Zhi pursed his lips. ‘And why don’t you get to your point, Mother? About how you think Pioneer 14 is a bad idea. No – since I’m involved, it must be an immature idea.’

  ‘Am I that obvious?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Well, I am afraid the argument is obvious too,’ Yan said softly. ‘That’s the reason I’m here. The Chinese party, in fact. You, my son, your team, and those who have backed you, may be making a terrible mistake.’

  And Tash sat back, surprised.

  Zhi walked back and forth, the same few steps, a little stiffly. ‘There was me thinking you might have come over to support me.’

  ‘I am not alone in my scepticism. Most of my colleagues too. China hasn’t yet formalised its position about the Jones mission, but—’

  ‘Well, Mother, my colleagues would say otherwise. And much of American public opinion. President Cox believes in us, though she hasn’t told me so to my face.’

  Marlowe seemed reluctant to speak. ‘I feel as if I’m an umpire here, of a fight I don’t want to see happen. But, and I’m in a position to know this, Zhi, nobody much outside America – the two Americas – is too enthusiastic. I suspect a majority think we should do nothing at all right now. Nothing precipitate. Nothing that might, umm, anger Galaxias yet. Not until we know we need to risk doing that, and know what the consequences might be.’ She glanced at Yan. ‘Also – and this probably isn’t the place to air it – everybody knows the Chinese are also up to something, on the Moon and beyond. I know you’ve shown us stuff – you brought Mel to the Moon! But you are fending us off with scraps. It would help if some of the final goal could be made public—’

  ‘We are not in a position to do say more,’ Yan said.

  Mel, Tash, Marlowe shared glances. The same Chinese line, still.

  ‘The philosophical principles we can discuss at this conference, but—’

  Zhi snorted. ‘Philosophy! What use is that?’

  Marlowe spread her hands. ‘Well, Zhi, since we are dealing with an unprecedented phenomenon – a phenomenon that we barely have a handle on, barely a shred of evidence, but which sprawls across multiple scientific and epistemological categories – I’d say we have nothing much but philosophy to guide us. As we try to use the known to make at least some sense of the unknown.’

  Zhi said, ‘Well, what we know for sure is that Galaxias seems to have responded to the Pioneer 10 breakout by making existential threats, if only implicitly. And damaging our world significantly. Do you know how many deaths have already been caused, post-Blink? Galaxias intends to bottle us up, it seems. As Serena Jones says, what we need to do is to break out, to find out if it really is blockading us, and to show it we won’t put up with—’

  ‘No,’ his mother said patiently. ‘Or, rather, that is one interpretation. That is, bottling us up. Another interpretation is that Galaxias is trying to educate us. Clumsily perhaps, but—’

  That word seemed to make Zhi explode.

  ‘Educate? Where’s the proof of that? And educate us into doing what?’

  Marlowe sighed. ‘If you let her speak she might tell you.’

  Zhi glared around the room. Tash thought she had never seen him so impatient.

  But, at length, with another clunky, whirring movement, he finally sat down. ‘Oh, very well.’

  Yan spread her hands on the table.

  ‘Good. Look – as for any Chinese position. We don’t have a solution to announce. Not yet. Not even a plan as cockamamie as the Pioneer project.’

  ‘Good word,’ Jane said with relish, and she noted it down in her phone. ‘Cockamamie. Is it Chinese? Or is it swearing?’

  Mel hushed her.

  ‘But we do think – we theorise – that we know something about the nature of Galaxias. And where it came from, how it came to be. Why it is here, I mean the background motivation. Call it philosophy or deduction, a hypothesis built on a slim foundation of fact—’

  For a moment Zhi looked as if he might reach for her hand, but pulled back. ‘Mother, I think you could drop the scientific caution, just once.’

  Yan frowned and thought about that. ‘Actually I am not sure I can. We believe, you see, that the scientific assumptions hidden behind your plan to challenge Galaxias are mistaken. Because you are mistaken about its nature.’

  ‘How?’ Marlowe snapped. ‘Get to the point.’

  Wu Yan, considering her words, held her hands in a praying position before her lips.

  ‘Reflect on this. There are those, including the Americans, who think – who behave as if Galaxias is a conquering force. I have heard the words used often. It has blockaded Earth, as if to force us into submission. As besieging armies, like the Mongols in medieval China, once starved cities into surrender.’

  ‘Before butchering the population,’ Zhi murmured.

  ‘But Galaxias is not a Mongol horde. Save for the Blink, it has not touched us. One action, granted a pretty destructive one, but one action alone, and now it waits for us to draw our conclusions.

  ‘And we believe, you see, that this is a reflection of its nature. Galaxias is not a conqueror. It is not even expansive, as we are.

  ‘Expansive.’ Jane looked that up on her phone.

  ‘But it may have cause to fear cultures that are expansive. Perhaps from encounters in the past. It may see us as potentially threatening.’

  Tash felt vaguely baffled by all this. What would Fred Bowles do, if he were here? Ask tough questions. Questions he probably couldn’t ask in public, or in any session likely to be recorded.

  She said, ‘OK. You people keep saying Galaxias commands the power of a Galaxy. Well, then – if it thinks us a threat, why not just wipe us out, without any warning at all? Could it do that?’

  ‘Indubitably,’ Marlowe murmured. It could destroy the whole Earth. ‘With only a fraction of the energy it took to move the Sun.’

  ‘It may have its own code of ethics,’ Yan said now. ‘Well, it must. Perhaps it is averse to taking life indiscriminately . . .’

  And Tash remembered Marlowe’s bleak comparison with the ‘ethics’ of wiping out a harmful virus.

  ‘Ethics?’ Zhi shook his head. ‘Tell that to my lost fiancé, his family. Mother, tell that to those thousands who have died since Blink Day, in the volcanism, the storms. I grant that it has not simply destroyed us—’

  Marlowe said now, ‘But even that could be seen as an ethical act. Depending on the ethical system.

  ‘No – let me finish.

  ‘My own instinct is that Galaxias seeks gestures that seem – small. To it, anyhow. Comparatively speaking. It doesn’t build a huge beacon on the Moon; it builds a – a water pistol. It doesn’t destroy us; it evidently warns us. It is conservative. So perhaps its goal is not to preserve life as such but energy. Mass. It preserves the potential for life, for longevity. On cosmic scales, anyhow. If that’s the case, you see, it would be rational, even ethical, to contain expansive, destructive species like us. Who grow so fast we just burn up our resources, on a planetary scale for now, maybe on an interstellar scale in the future – at least, until our expansion wave hits the speed of light and we finally crash and burn. That’s “the light cage”. There are plenty of mathematical models predicting just that. Maybe it seeks to contain us, as opposed to destroying us, before we wreck a few hundred star systems and crash anyhow.’

  Tash nodded. ‘OK. I could buy that. But why move a star? Why not just the Earth – even the Moon?’

  ‘Or just stop the Earth rotating, like Yahweh?’ Marlowe grinned.

  Tash and Mel exchanged unhappy glances, and Tash remembered the slogan worn by those cultist types at New Diaspora.

  Mel said, ‘Charlie, I think everybody would be happier if you stopped kicking Yahweh.’

  Marlowe shook her head. ‘I recall what we said before. Those are K-II stunts. Stellar-scale energies. Galaxias wanted to prove to us, conclusively, that it is K-III. Galactic scale. If not greater. And so it makes a K-III gesture. You can take some crumbs of consolation. It hasn’t destroyed us yet. And if we don’t alarm it perhaps it will continue to leave us alone. And, within those parameters, we may be safe.’

  Zhi snorted. ‘Safe? That seems a reach. How can you know that?’

  ‘I don’t know it. But we have evidence, of a sort. Negative evidence, evidence of absence. Remember the Fermi Paradox? If life arose on Earth, how come it hasn’t arisen everywhere? How come other species haven’t built starships – or at least sent radio messages we can hear? There’s been time for civilisations to rise and fall across the Galaxy, over and over. Why don’t we see them?’ She glanced around, looking them each in the eye. ‘Because Galaxias stopped them, that’s why.

  ‘Because the Galaxy is big enough for only one K-III. That’s the definition of what K-III is. And if it is suppressing everybody else from becoming K-I or K-II, as it seems to have stopped us – and if it were to spare us – maybe we will actually be protected, in a sense, in the future. If we can live with Galaxias, we don’t need to think about provoking other threats.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Wu Yan said slowly. ‘And isn’t it a corollary that, for fear of provoking Galaxias, we must learn to live together peacefully?’

  Zhi grunted. ‘Maybe. Or maybe it doesn’t matter whether or not we fight each other. We’ll still be in a prison with only one gaoler. You may have trouble selling that as good news. If we can’t expand, economically, physically—’

  Yan said, ‘But we humans have not always been so expansive as in recent centuries – indeed, once we were not so at all. Look – once our deepest ancestors were animals, among a suite of animals, wandering around the planet, looking for food. Oh, we emerged from Africa several times over, and walked out across Eurasia, all the way to the Americas, Australia . . . The economists say we diffused. Like a gas, filling a space. It’s thought that just before farming was developed we were doubling our numbers every few thousand years. But—’

  ‘But then we did develop farming,’ Marlowe said. ‘And the consequences included booms and crashes, starvation and gluttony, war and peace – peasants and empires. And, ultimately, the light cage. That’s the growth paradox, right there. Any culture that expands into interstellar space at anything like our own historic rates is bound to hit the lightspeed limit, to crash and burn in a few centuries or millennia. Taking out a chunk of the universe’s usable resources in the process.’

  Zhi got up and walked again, exoskeleton creaking. ‘I love you all dearly, but, just like my mother, you spend too long getting to the point.’

  ‘No,’ Mel said, ‘I think I know what you’re getting at. You don’t have to expand at breakneck speed. The slower you go, the further you can go. And if Galaxias has gone really, really slowly, so it didn’t crash into lightspeed before it had covered the whole Galaxy—’ She peered into her phone, manipulated dancing images in the air above it. ‘Say a hundred times a hundred times slower – no, slower than that – you’d grow so slowly that . . . You could cross the Galaxy well within lightspeed.’ She sat back.

  Yan smiled. ‘You are paralleling our own thinking. Chinese thinking.’

  Tash said, ‘So, if I get this right, Galaxias didn’t expand. It didn’t conquer. It diffused. Too slowly to fall into any light cage trap of its own.’

  ‘And moved quietly,’ Yan said. ‘Touched the stars lightly. So lightly we don’t see any evidence of – modification. Building. Crossed the Galaxy, still a single culture.’ She nodded at Marlowe. ‘Indeed, some of us believe it is a single being, perhaps, a galactic mind with thoughts carried at the crawl of lightspeed. And, just as Galaxias failed to fall into any light cage, so, we think, it must stop others falling into the same trap. Otherwise we would see them: the Dyson spheres, the antimatter rockets, the interstellar wars, visible across light years.’

  Jane was wide-eyed. ‘What a pity.’

  Zhi grinned. ‘You said it, kid. And so it decided to teleport our Sun out to the Kuiper Belt? Somewhat drastic response to Pioneer 10. Just one ship! Just one frail little probe!’

  Yan said sadly, ‘Probably every light cage catastrophe would have started with just one frail little probe.’

  Zhi stood again, walked stiffly around the table. ‘Mother – even if you’re right – this is about more than science. The decisions we make now might shape the whole future of humanity, for ever. And for all your lectures about the dangers of light cages and the like, do you really believe it will be healthy for humans just to – to sit here on Earth – with every independent choice shaped by the fear of Galaxias and its retaliation, for ever? At least now, right now, we can do something. In a few generations, if our space technology withers, or even our willingness to push back – is stagnation not a danger too?’

  ‘Of course it is.’ She hesitated. ‘But there is a greater danger of doing something – foolhardy. Precipitate. Obvious, even. We must do more than – than not attack Galaxias. We must show it we have learned the lesson it gave us. It must believe we will never threaten catastrophic expansion.’

  Zhi looked as if he wanted to argue some more.

  But Tash held up her hand. ‘Hang on, Zhi. I’ve been around Fred Bowles and his like long enough to be able to recognise what your mother said as a politician’s answer.’

  Yan smiled. ‘I am flattered. I think.’

  ‘That wasn’t a denial. More an evasion. I think you have secrets. With respect. You may not endorse the American plan, but . . . I think the Chinese do have some scheme.’ Somehow convincing Galaxias we are harmless. Though I can’t imagine how you would do that.

  Zhi stood and glared at his mother. ‘And you won’t tell me? About any of this? Even what you are doing, personally, now?’

  Yan stayed calm. ‘My son, do you have a sprint setting on that exoskeleton of yours?’

  He frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I am attempting a joke in the English idiom. Forgive me. You always did run before you could walk.’

  There was a brief silence.

  Then Jane laughed softly.

  Charlie Marlowe said, ‘She’s got you, son. Never cross swords with your mother.’

  Zhi forced a smile, but it was an angry expression, and Tash could feel the tension. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘And tell that to the light cage cultures Galaxias has . . . mothered.’

  He walked noisily out.

  Yan seemed bewildered. ‘I hope he isn’t too upset by any of that. I – oh, dear.’

  Jane leaned over the table and took her hand. And she held that hand tightly, as Yan suddenly appeared to be fighting back sudden tears.

  Charlie Marlowe rocked back in her chair with a sigh. ‘You know, if only we could just get along . . . Imagine the progress we could make. Look at our stumbling response to the climate crisis. Wars broke out over that. Now we have an alien incursion. Can we not work together?’

  Yan took her time replying, once again. ‘Professor Marlowe, I am working with a group of very smart, highly qualified, deep-thinking people, back home. We are the world’s largest nation by far, possibly the richest and most powerful, and arguably the most politically stable. We have seen the United States fracture in my lifetime . . . What need have we of your assistance?

  ‘But we – do – not – trust – you,’ she said, emphasising the words with gentle slaps of the table.

  Marlowe said, ‘And if you do come up with some concrete plan, must we trust you to act for us?’

  ‘It is the only way . . .’ She seemed to falter.

  Tash said, ‘Even if it’s costing you your relationship with your son.’

  Jane squeezed Yan’s hand harder.

  ‘We’ll bring him back to you,’ Tash said earnestly. ‘We promise.’

  ‘We’ll find a way,’ said Mel.

  We better had for the sake of the world, Tash thought, feeling caught between sympathy, cynicism, and an awful sense of global responsibility. If mother and son could not work on this together, what hope the rest of humanity?

  Yan bowed her head.

  It was a ferociously long day.

  But even as the technical sessions ran down, it was made clear to Tash and her colleagues that attendance was expected of them at a series of ‘cultural exhibits’ set out in the main hall by various groups, displaying a variety of responses to Galaxias and the Blink: artistic, philosophical, and several religious. Mel showed Tash a party in blue PUNY YAHWEH? T-shirts.

  The one that fixated Tash especially was a choir, of a couple of dozen adults, who appeared to be dedicated to the worship of Galaxias. They sang by memory. Their tenet was that Galaxias had meant to plunge humans into the dark as a punishment, hidden from a light that sinners did not deserve. And so, they had all had their eyes surgically removed.

  26

  August 2057

  The Edinburgh conference ended without any more significant meetings between mother and son, Yan and Zhi – Yan’s handlers seemed to see to that.

  But another opportunity of sorts for a rapprochement came up a month later. For by then Wu Yan was participating in another exotic lunar-manufacturing experiment – and this time on Earth, and, to Tash’s initial surprise, in the Americas, on a plateau in Oregon called the High Lava Plains. But the American Free States’ government had responded positively to a Chinese request for resources, partly for political advantage – particularly over its rival, the rump US – and also for the chance of learning about the Chinese experiments themselves. And the AFS too saw an advantage in getting Wu Yan out there, for political leverage, for publicity through imagery featuring her own now-familiar face against an American background.

  So, Tash and Mel started to work out an itinerary to get Zhi out to Oregon.

  Officially he was to be a kind of goodwill ambassador from the American hosts of the Chinese project – one the Chinese would find hard to turn away. Unofficially, as far as Tash could see, he was being used yet again as a sort of out-in-the-open spy on his mother’s project.

  It was becoming a pattern, Tash thought. ‘It’s a long shot,’ she told a sceptical Mel, ‘but it’s cheap, and it’s worth a try.’