The Ghosts of Heaven by Marcus Sedgwick
III
It happened.
Straight away, the weirdness descended from the deepest ocean of the universe, and came to Edward Althing where he slept in his pristine white cell.
They’d worked all night, and for most of the time there had been little for Edward to do. Tyler chatted to him while Lensmann conducted operations, monitoring the progress of the array’s all-seeing eye across the heavens.
‘We’re looking for patterns,’ Tyler explained, though Edward knew the system from his reading on ISIS. ‘Radio waves travel across space, of course some of them hit the Earth. Most of them, almost all of them, are just random noise, like static on a dead TV, the random background noise of the universe. It’s the echo of the big bang, still hissing across the void.’
Edward saw Tyler’s eyes brighten as she spoke. He could see she loved what they were doing.
‘But every once in a while, there’s something a little different, something that isn’t random, something with a pattern. Now lots of these can be explained away quite easily. Certain stars emit radiation in regular pulses, due to their rotation, like a lighthouse light spinning round. The ISIS system is computer interpreted, and anything simple the computer dismisses. Any known star patterns, anything normal, she just ignores. But when that screen there starts up, it means ISIS has found something she can’t explain, and that’s where you come in.
‘If there’s life out there, intelligent life, it will know the best way to communicate across the vastness of space, and without the use of a common language, is through the language of mathematics. Mathematics has to be a universal constant. Two plus two has to equal four in Alpha Centauri, just as it does here. If we find someone broadcasting the digits of PI, or the Fibonacci sequence, or, and this is my personal hope, the numbers of the Golden Section, then it’s going to raise a few eyebrows.’
So Edward had watched the blank screen all night, waiting for a sequence of numbers to appear that ISIS didn’t like, and when it did, it would be up to him to explain what it was. Or wasn’t.
He’d watched the screen, but nothing had happened.
Nothing had happened, until the morning, when, with almost everyone else, he’d staggered off to bed. With the shutters drawn across his high windows, night had been restored to the daytime inside the dome, and sleep came easily.
And with it, came the voices from space. Edward knew he was asleep, which in itself was strange, but he knew he wasn’t dreaming, as suddenly he became aware of the others in the room. Not people, but…what? He could only think the word; intelligences. Other intelligences beside his own were in his room, floating about, voices without words coming at him.
Ghosts.
Ghosts of thoughts from a million light years away.
He woke, pawing at the air, throwing himself upright in the dark.
In the evening he got up, and checked in at the refectory.
Tyler and Lensmann sat around a table with some of the others from project he’d met the night before.
‘Edward!’ Tyler called. ‘Sleep well?’
Edward stroked the back of his head, trying to remember his day/night’s sleep.
‘Yes,’ he said, because he could find nothing else to say.
‘Good,’ Tyler said. ‘Have some food, then we’ll go get set up for tonight.’
They worked through the night again, and though Edward watched the blank screen, it stayed blank all night, until by the early hours of the morning, Edward began to resent its jeering silence.
He stayed up until about ten the following morning, then collapsed in his bed again.
It didn’t take long for them to come back again. The room spun and dipped with the echoes of their thoughts, and suddenly Edward was ripped apart by a memory of the fight with Juliet. He saw the tears on her face as if they were inches from his, he smelt her anger and with burning shame he remembered the precise words with which he had cursed her.
The wordless voices pressed in all around him, and began to fill his head, and again he woke sweating and pounding the dark air with weak fists.
‘Sleep well, Ed?’ Tyler asked as usual at the meal that Ed didn’t know whether to call breakfast or dinner.
He took off his glasses and wiped them on his t shirt.
‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s proving a little difficult. I…’
‘You’re jetlagged still,’ Tyler said, a note of concern in her voice. ‘It’ll pass in a day or two.’
But it didn’t.
If Edward was looking for a pattern, one came very quickly into his own life. Every night they would paw their way another inch across the roof of the universe, and every day he would retire to a dreadful sleep in his bedroom, haunted by voices that could not speak.
‘Sleep well?’
‘No,’ Edward whispered.
‘Guess you’re still jetlagged,’ Tyler said.
‘After three weeks?’ Edward stammered.
‘It can take time to adjust to the nocturnal life,’ Tyler said. ‘We all suffered, but we got there. You will too.’
That night, as Edward stared at the screen again, seeing nothing, and hating everyone and everything around him, it occurred to him to ask a question that he hadn’t asked before.
‘Tyler,’ he said quietly.
She looked up from her workstation. ‘How did that Greek guy get ill? Exactly?’
She hesitated a fraction too long, just long enough for Edward to doubt whatever it was she might say.
‘Stress,’ she said, ‘He got stressed and had to retire from the project.’
‘Stress?’ Edward said. ‘That all? Stress.’
‘Well,’ Tyler said, ‘It was quite bad, you know. Long hours at work, little contact with the outside world…I guess he just wasn’t built to take it.’
‘So what happened to him really?’ Edward said, and he knew from the way that Lensmann stopped what he was doing to see what Tyler would say, that he was right. She was lying.
‘I told you…he got stress, and…’
‘Dammit! Don’t treat me like a child! Just tell me what happened to him.’
Tyler raised a hand.
‘Whoa. Cool it, Ed.’
Lensmann spoke softly to Tyler.
‘Tell him,’ he said, ‘It’s no secret.’
Tyler paused.
‘He went crazy. Okay? But he was a nut anyway, never fitted in.’
‘He went crazy?’
‘Yeah. We found him crawling round his room one night mewing like a cat. Then he tried to attack Baxter. Ramon pulled him off. When we got any sense out of him at all, he said there were drawings on the wall of his bedroom that had told him he was a cat, and to start being one if he was going to save himself. That’s all he said. The drawings told him to do it. Of course there was nothing there… He’s in Frisco now. Funny farm.’
There was silence in the room, suddenly broken by a series of bleeps from Edward’s computer. The screen went mad, filling up in seconds with a series of ones and zeroes, scrolling down faster than Edward could read them.
‘What the hell is that?’ Tyler said.
‘Is this what it usually looks like?’ Edward said, flying to the desk.
‘There is no usually,’ Tyler said, and began reading and cross-checking the position of the array.
Lensmann went into an overdrive of silence, and pored over his keyboard for hours like a drug addict getting his load.
As suddenly as it had arisen, the screen went blank.
A moment later, a printer began to chug out the whole series in a hard copy, ten feet long.
‘Looks like you’re on,’ Tyler said, and smiled.
