Beyond the Rift by Peter Watts Read Free Book Online

only got a ten -thousandth the synaptic density, that’s still—
    A hundred thousandth. The merest mist of thinking meat. Any more conservative and I’d hypothesize it right out of existence.
    Still twenty billion human brains. Twenty billion .
    I don’t know how to feel about that. This is no mere alien.
    But I’m not quite ready to believe in gods.
    I round the corner and run smack into Dix, standing like a golem in the middle of my living room. I jump about a meter straight up.
    “What the hell are you doing here?”
    He seems surprised by my reaction. “Wanted to—talk,” he says after a moment.
    “You never come into someone’s home uninvited!”
    He retreats a step, stammers: “Wanted, wanted—”
    “To talk. And you do that in public . On the bridge, or in the commons, or—for that matter, you could just comm me.”
    He hesitates. “Said you— wanted face to face. You said, cultural tradition .”
    I did, at that. But not here . This is my place, these are my private quarters . The lack of locks on these doors is a safety protocol, not an invitation to walk into my home and lie in wait , and stand there like part of the fucking furniture ...
    “Why are you even up ?” I snarl. “We’re not even supposed to come online for another two months.”
    “Asked Chimp to get me up when you did.”
    That fucking machine.
    “Why are you up?” he asks, not leaving.
    I sigh, defeated, and fall into a convenient pseudopod. “I just wanted to go over the preliminary data.” The implicit alone should be obvious.
    “Anything?”
    Evidently it isn’t. I decide to play along for a while. “Looks like we’re talking to an, an island. Almost six thousand klicks across. That’s the thinking part, anyway. The surrounding membrane’s pretty much empty. I mean, it’s all alive . It all photosynthesizes, or something like that. It eats, I guess. Not sure what.”
    “Molecular cloud,” Dix says. “Organic compounds everywhere. Plus it’s concentrating stuff inside the envelope.”
    I shrug. “Point is, there’s a size limit for the brain but it’s huge , it’s...”
    “Unlikely,” he murmurs, almost to himself.
    I turn to look at him; the pseudopod reshapes itself around me. “What do you mean?”
    “Island’s twenty-eight million square kilometers? Whole sphere’s seven quintillion. Island just happens to be between us and 428, that’s— one in fifty-billion odds.”
    “Go on.”
    He can’t. “Uh, just... just unlikely .”
    I close my eyes. “How can you be smart enough to run those numbers in your head without missing a beat, and stupid enough to miss the obvious conclusion?”
    That panicked, slaughterhouse look again. “Don’t—I’m not—”
    “It is unlikely. It’s astronomically unlikely that we just happen to be aiming at the one intelligent spot on a sphere one-and-a-half AUs across. Which means...”
    He says nothing. The perplexity in his face mocks me. I want to punch it.
    But finally, the lights flicker on: “There’s, uh, more than one island? Oh! A lot of islands!”
    This creature is part of the crew. My life will almost certainly depend on him some day. That is a very scary thought.
    I try to set it aside for the moment. “There’s probably a whole population of the things, sprinkled though the membrane like, like cysts I guess. The chimp doesn’t know how many, but we’re only picking up this one so far so they might be pretty sparse.”
    There’s a different kind of frown on his face now. “Why Chimp ?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Why call him Chimp?”
    “We call it the chimp.” Because the first step to humanising something is to give it a name.
    “Looked it up. Short for chimpanzee . Stupid animal.”
    “Actually, I think chimps were supposed to be pretty smart,” I remember.
    “Not like us. Couldn’t even talk . Chimp can talk. Way smarter than those things. That name—it’s an insult.”
    “What do you care?”
    He just looks at me.
    I spread