Chapter 2
II
The street was full of temptations.
Azad had followed Grant out onto the front porch, but no further. The front porch with its overhanging roof, with its vine-laced columns shielding it from the street below, the front porch which was not inside but, comfortably, still not quite outside. Azad had stepped out onto the porch and then stopped, nodded, looked at Grant expectantly. Neither had said anything.
The front porch was connected to the street only via a short winding block of stairs, and those stairs were the real threshold. When Grant had set foot on the sidewalk, his stomach had lurched: no ceiling or roof above, just the blank sky. The night air was neither cold nor warm, but it was different. He had stolen a glance back up at the house, and in doing so lost his balance, stumbled backwards into the minivan parked by the curb. Above, an empty porch, front door already closed, Azad already inside.
Grant was in the middle of the road, headed south. He had started out on the sidewalk, but the lamps were too harsh on his eyes as he passed between them, and in this tranquil world there were no longer such things as moving cars. This also helped him avoid temptation.
Every cross-street, for instance, was a temptation. How strange, how excessive it seemed that each street still existed, here, sitting dark and inert, without an audience. Along this cozy, winding residential road, most of the cross-streets were narrow and stubby, and Grant knew they were just lined with more houses, like this one. But the outside had wakened a fierce restlessness within him. In a house. For four years. An able-bodied man, barely over thirty, formerly athletic (and somewhat vain about it), housebound.
Here in the middle of the road, if he kept his neck rigid and gaze straight ahead, he could make the cross-streets lose their reality. Mere abstractions in his peripheral vision. And no curbs to step over—the curbs, he had felt, were taunting him. You could turn here, they were saying, but you won’t, will you? Because you’re a good little pet.
Grant gritted his teeth. He thought he would have learned by now not to let Azad bait him. To play the game on Azad’s whimsical terms was already to have lost it. This compulsive symbol-making and thematizing of things—Grant a desert mouse, Mooncrash a desirous godling with a retinue of malevolent owls, a fucking walk down the fucking street a psychodrama on themes of freedom and duty—at most one of the two could afford such indulgences, Grant thought. Sometimes a curb is just a curb.
Face forward, Grant. One foot after the next, now. You are walking, Grant said to himself, just walking, feet hitting pavement, joints working to balance and rebalance load—all physics and no fantasy. No hidden depths, no brilliance required.
The house he was looking for was near the end of this homey little stretch, and as Grant neared it, cresting a slight hill, the view before him opened up suddenly. His eyes took a moment to process the new vista, and when they had, he laughed aloud: he was marveling at the majesty, the frontier-like wild openness, of a four-way stop.
It was, in his defense, the largest and most brightly lit physical space he had seen in at least three years. The red traffic lights were still blinking on and off, pointlessly—they must have been blinking here the whole time, with no one around to bear witness—and the color was a shock to him, a whole third thing that was neither the pale light of the moon nor the orange light of the sodium streetlights. And he knew that if he continued on past his destination, towards the intersection, he would encounter a far more massive space to the left, the parking lot of the supermarket.
Grant had been here quite a few times since the start of the Mooncrash, but only in the early days, before he and Azad had exhausted the non-perishable, non-revolting food on the supermarket shelves and had switched to sole reliance on the house refrigerator which, as in a fairy tale, would refill itself every time it was emptied. It had been Grant’s duty, back then, to march to the supermarket and return bearing bags full of cans and packaged snacks. His upper body strength far exceeded that of willowy Azad, and it felt deeply wrong for them both to leave the house at the same time.
He was not sure, he realized, when he had last thought about the supermarket. It must have been a very long time ago indeed, for the Mooncrash had its ways of constricting and pacifying the mind, filling his thoughts ever more with the geometry of the house, with visions of dim light against shadow, hand feeling along familiar wall in search of edge—and nothing else. He’d been so afraid of boredom, for a time, early on; afraid he would go mad. But instead he had sunk willingly into the house, let its stasis envelop him, become a harmonious part of its system. The furniture did not get bored, nor did the drapes, or the carpets, so why should he? And whatever part of his restless animal soul this phenomenon could not tranquilize, Azad’s incandescent mind could at least keep busy with distractions.
It really was (pace Azad, pace fucking Azad as always) like hibernation.
But if Grant’s mind was slow and cold now, its cogs mostly gathering dust, the memories of the supermarket were heating it up. Long-dormant assemblages creaked into motion, and the gear train of which the supermarket formed a part was now turning in lockstep. Thus, Grant would later think, it wasn’t a lapse or failure on his part that he began to remember. Memories trigger other memories: that is simply the way a mind works, a good ordinary well-oiled mind. A human mind. He couldn’t stop himself from being human, after all, not on his own. Which was why he needed the Mooncrash.
He had been head of security at the facility, he remembered, hazily. The facility was still an impossible dream to him at this point, since his mind had only begun to warm up. He grasped it primarily by loose analogy with the house—for it was something like a house, but much larger and brighter, and full of quick nervous people.
There had been a great change at the facility. Many of the quick nervous people had left, and been replaced with even quicker and much more nervous people. Grant got a spectacular raise at the cost of signing away his rights to communicate with the world outside, for the new people had brought secrets with them. This had been acceptable to Grant, for he was a solitary man, single and childless, who killed his time with beer and video games, primarily those that simulated covert military operations with masturbatory levels of accuracy. His co-op buddies expressed no interest in his job transition, although they heartily approved of his new, cushy condo. He bought a ping-pong table. Such were the changes brought to Grant’s life by mankind’s first contact with an intelligence beyond its own.
He had been a simpler man, then. How strange and irritating to think that Azad had changed him in that way, had given him culture. He had not intended to become cultured, but he did fear boredom in the early days, and to escape it he was willing even to submit to Azad’s impromptu lectures. One night, when the topic was closer than usual to his turf, he realized that on said topic Azad was full of shit, and told him so in as many words. Azad’s face had lit up with a devious smile, and Grant realized that his resistance was the resistance of a bug against a spider’s web. He was caught, now, and the great debate began, and the house was rarely quiet. Grant even began to read, then, squinting in the moonlight, combing the house’s paltry book collection for factual ammunition.
Those had been good times.
The earlier Grant, head of security at the facility (his mind was warming up and he could see it in his mind now, even the colors), had been informed about the new people and their task. It was important that the head of security understand the parameters of the situation, the kinds of risks that might most likely emerge. He memorized flowcharts of scenarios and ran drills covering each one. He did not understand all of the details, because even the team did not understand all of the details, and the team was full of Ph.Ds while Grant (barely) had a Bachelor’s in Communications. But he knew the outline.
Some sort of structure had been sighted in the texture of the physical universe. The team talked a lot about something called “spinor anomalies.” Attempts were made to explain the spinor anomalies to the earlier Grant. They had something to do with space and time and, oddly, with mirrors. He had understood none of this, but had had no trouble understanding the bottom line, which was that when the people with Ph.Ds looked at the spinor anomalies they saw aliens.
More precisely, the ones with physics Ph.Ds said the spinor anomalies were like nothing they had ever seen, and then people with biology Ph.Ds got involved because they were a bit less surprised. At first the people with physics Ph.Ds yelled a lot at the people with biology Ph.Ds and this struck Grant as annoying and childish. But pretty soon they started getting along, and getting along with the people with all sorts of different Ph.Ds, because they had realized they were seeing something that was beyond all of their capacities. The words “intelligence” and “communication” were frequently used to explain how the thing was new and different.
After the early tensions had subsided, Grant found himself liking the new team. This surprised him, because they were eggheads. They were pragmatic, though, which he liked. And they quickly stopped talking down to him. There was a general sense that everyone was working on the edge of their capacity, no one coasting on smarts or expertise. On Friday evenings the team would drink beer together, and Grant joined them, and did not feel out of place.
There was one member of the team Grant did not like so much: the linguist. He gathered that he was not alone in this feeling. Some of the team—it emerged on certain Friday evenings—was dissatisfied with the linguist who had been chosen: he was a polyglot and an accomplished translator, yes, but a literary translator, one tasked with making the source text sing in the target language, not with bringing the source language across in all its alien awkwardness. He had been brought on, they carped, on the basis of star power rather than real suitability for the task. A new heavyweight in the field of Persian literature, winner of the PEN Translation Prize at the ripe old age of 26 for his iconoclastic prose rendition of the Shahnameh (in full), credited with knocking Dick Davis out of his secure position as top dog in the Persian/English world, and oh he’s cute too . . . is this man, so at home in human cultures, prepared to tell us (in English approximation) what the aliens are saying? Can’t we just send his pretty face off to some talk show where it belongs and bring in some sort of fittingly drab Chomskian technician?
That was why a few of the team members did not like the translator. Grant just didn’t like the translator because he was a pretentious ass who thought he was better than everyone because he could say confusing things.
But if the translator was ill-suited to the project, he certainly did not realize it. He seemed fascinated by the creatures who were speaking through the spinor anomalies, and of the team he was most willing to speculate, sometimes wildly, about their nature and psychology. He spoke of them in obscure poeticisms which he would deliver to whoever would listen, or, if necessary, to no one, as he paced around one of the stone-walled, bunker-like rooms in the heart of the facility. The team warmed to him somehow, although Grant didn’t. Perhaps, in retrospect, Grant had had a grudging respect for his enthusiasm: like everyone else, he was burning all of himself he could, although this looked quite different on the surface than it did for anyone else.
Controversy sparked again, however, when the Ph.Ds had synchronized their powers enough to produce something like an interpretation of a small snatch of the alien signal. The translator was then given his first real job: producing an English approximation. Not necessarily an accurate one—which was impossible anyway—but a sort of shorthand, which could be circulated in the facility and easily understood, so no one would have to parse the way the other Ph.Ds had been writing the signal, which typically looked something like:
BEGIN HANDSHAKE; WAIT FOR HANDSHAKE; PRESENT SERIES SOLUTION 3155 WITH {angles: (0.332, 2.77)}; WAIT; APPLY DYNAMICS g6(3,3,2,4,3); EMPIRICAL TRANSFORMATION 57 (loss minimal coefficients cached for this transformation); PRESENT ISOMORPHISM TO EMPIRICAL SOLUTION 5543 (loss minimal coefficients not cached for this transformation); WAIT {wait_state: 12};
and so on for hundreds or thousands of pages. The facility quickly became a paperless office at this point.
To everyone’s surprise, the linguist rose happily to the challenge. Undaunted by the forbidding, voluminous, and deathly repetitive corpus at hand, he jumped at the chance to discover two entirely new cultures and languages: that of the aliens, and that of the Ph.Ds who had written the corpus. He drilled the physics Ph.Ds relentlessly about their jargon, making fanciful analogies which were occasionally spot-on. This went on late into the night, which made Grant’s job slightly harder, and that was its only significance to him at the time. But he, with everyone else, got caught up in the general furor when the linguist at last presented his first, preliminary, partial translation.
It was long, and it was florid, and poetic, and it sounded human, which made everyone suspicious. The phrase “literary translator” emerged once again as a term of abuse. The linguist had produced a flowing luxuriant thing, as far from the technical syntax as was imaginable. It was difficult to make sense of, and the linguist pleaded that in this he was being true to the source: those hours of midnight interrogation with the hard scientists had shown him the shape of the vast ambiguities in play, and he had used every resource in the English language to ensure that precisely those ambiguities remained.
Verbose, obsessive, with no clear divisions in topic or theme, the monster he had written belabored every point again and again, and yet the points themselves remained maddeningly unclear. New topics appeared out of old ones gradually, as slight ripples in the repetitive—but never identical—sentences. This quality in itself sparked little controversy. But many of the individual lines did, especially the incantatory refrain which pervaded the document:
An abomination has formed near the center of the world.
More hours of discussion were devoted to this sentence than to the rest of the document combined. The linguist came in for harsh criticism for the dramatic wording: was he yielding to his worst tendencies at a crucial moment? Knowing nothing of how these beings live (if they do live), how can we attribute to them as culturally fraught a word as abomination? What is their concept of world? And what, in stark mathematics, might it mean to be near its center?
Grant’s mind was all too warm by now. Overheating, even. He told himself to block out these memories and walk, step by step, to the house. Just a moving animal, no thought. He pointed himself in the right direction, and began to close the distance between him and the front door he wanted, but the gears kept turning:
Much later. Negotiations had broken down. There had been negotiations and they had broken down. The team had tried touching the spinor anomalies, making their mark on them, and the spinor anomalies had changed in response. The linguist was ablaze, producing new translations overnight, and no one had time to doubt his capacities.
Some things had become very clear. Our universe, to them, was “near the center of the world.” And the abomination was us.
It was not known what they were capable of, but they seemed to understand all that we did about the physical world and also everything we had only dimly glimpsed. Thus their desires were treated with the utmost gravity. For the most part they articulated only one desire: that we stop bothering them.
“What bothers them” became a topic of intensive research. Early tests revealed that we bothered them the least when we were dead. As this did not point the way to a mutually acceptable solution, many more tests were performed.
In the linguist’s suspiciously fluid translations, everyone could recognize a growing impatience and frustration, sometimes a kind of outrage. The schedule was accelerated further.
After the shit hit the fan, and the shit hit the fan again, and the negotiations were over, and it was us against them, and the confidentiality strictures had been lifted so that the human race could be told about the likelihood of its imminent extinction—
after all that, and a few more intra-facility shit-fan collisions, Grant had found himself in a special room with the linguist, of all people. This room was a very good place to be at the time, because it might be able to save them, or transform them into something that could be saved. It contained specialized chambers set up with face masks and nutrient IVs and the ability to neutralize, as much as possible, the interaction of the matter in their bodies with the spinor anomaly field.
Grant had never known why the technology was called “Project Mooncrash.” An inside joke among the engineers, he’d figured.