64

“I knew you were coming,” said Harmon. “I just knew.” He was, Altman noted, sweating profusely. His responses were disconnected, his voice zigzagging back and forth between being affectless and flat and a panic-stricken roar. He was clearly not in his right mind.

“Actually, I called you and told you I was coming,” said Altman.

“No!” Harmon said, his voice rising. “You didn’t tell me! I knew!”

“Calm down,” said Altman. “How do you know I’m the one?”

“You’re the only one who has come,” said Harmon, speaking with a calm simplicity. “It has to be you because you’re the only one. Everyone else is dead.”

Altman slowly nodded. He might be able to play Harmon’s belief in the Marker to his advantage, he realized. He wanted Harmon to believe whatever he had to believe to allow Altman to do what he needed to do.

“I came here,” said Harmon. “This is the first place that I came and then, when I saw that they couldn’t come near me, I understood why. The Marker wanted me here. I used to mistrust the Marker, but I was wrong. The Marker is protecting me. The Marker loves me.”

“And me,” said Altman.

“And you,” Harmon agreed. He reached out and took Altman’s arm. His hand was feverish, burning hot. “Do you believe?” he asked.

Altman shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “Why not.”

“And have you understood my message?” he asked. He looked at Altman expectantly, clearly waiting.

“Message received,” Altman finally said.

Harmon smiled.

“I asked you to gather some information,” said Altman. “Do you have it?”

Harmon gestured to a holoscreen.

There was a series of holofiles, some of which Altman had seen and some that he had not. There were vid images of the interior of the first bathyscaphe, taken after the bathyscaphe had been brought up. He had seen bits of it before, first in the intercepted vid from Hennesey and then later, from the outside, through the window. As the camera taking the images scanned slowly, he recognized the scrawlings in blood as symbols from the Marker. But, he also realized, they were not in the same order or sequence as they appeared on the Marker. What he’d seen before as a symptom of madness now actually struck him as rudimentary calculations and seemed to contain a glimmer of sense.

In addition, there were analyses of the Marker ’s structure and density, hundreds of dissections of its transmissions, speculations, unproven theories. There was information about the different genetic codes that Showalter and Guthe had read into the signal and the Marker. There were, in the end, more files than he could read—even more files than he could skim. Thousands and thousands of pages and images and hours and hours of vids. What was important and what wasn’t? What was he going to do? How was he to start?

Harmon was crouched on the deck beside his chair, staring at the Marker. “Have you ever seen anything like it?” asked Harmon.

“No,” said Altman.

“It’s good,” said Harmon. “It loves us, I can tell. I touched it and when I touched it, I felt its love.”

“You felt something?” said Altman.

“I felt its love!” insisted Harmon, shouting now, apoplectic. “It loves us! Touch it and you’ll see!”

Altman shook his head. “Touch it! Touch it!” Harmon was still screaming. And so Altman, not knowing how else to calm him, stood up, walked across the chamber, and did.

It was not love he felt, but something different, something that was not a feeling at all. At first it was as if he was experiencing all the hallucinations he had had at once, as if he was experiencing all the experiences any of the others had had, all laid over one another. Most of it interfered with itself, created a kind of blinding static that blotted itself out, but beyond that, and in spite of it, he could see something he hadn’t seen before. He could see that the hallucinations were not a function of the Marker but of something else that stood in opposition to it, of something that was ingrained in his own brain. The hallucinations had been trying to protect them, but they had failed: the process had begun. Now all he could do was try to satisfy the Marker enough that the process would stop but not do enough to lead to full-fledged Convergence.

And then, suddenly, something cleared and he could see past the hallucinations to glimpse the Marker itself. It was as if it were changing the structure of his brain, reworking connections, rewiring circuits, to make him understand. Suddenly he felt he could see the structure of the Marker from the inside, and in a way that gave him a complex appreciation of it. It filled his head and set it aflame, and then it poured out through the cracks in his skull and took him with it.

When he came conscious, Harmon was over him, stroking his head, a beatific smile on his face.

“You see?” he said when he noticed that Altman’s eyes were open. “You see?”

Altman pushed him away and stood, stalking quickly over to the monitor. He began to type frantically, sketching a structure out as well. His hands were moving faster than his brain, working on different bits and pieces of it all at once, flipping from holofile to holofile and back again. He was, he realized with a shock, recording the basic rudiments for a blueprint of a new Marker. It was sloppy and skew. There were a lot of unanswered questions, a lot of mysteries to be sorted out, but that was definitely what he was doing.

“What is it?” Harmon was asking from behind him. “What’s going on?”

“I’ve figured it out,” Altman answered. “I thought I’d figured it out before, but I was still struggling to understand what it meant. Now I know.”

He worked awhile longer; how long he couldn’t say. His head was spinning, his fingers aching. When he had finished, he turned to Harmon.

“I need your help,” he said.

“What is it?”

“I need you to help me translate what I have here, best as you can, and feed the signal back to the Marker.”

At first Harmon just stared and then he slowly sat down, took a closer look. He went through it, slowly. Suddenly he glanced up at Altman, the first coherent look he’d given since Altman had entered.

“This is the Marker,” he said, awe in his voice. “You understood it, just as she asked you to do.”

Altman nodded.

“You want me to transmit to the Marker the image of itself?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Altman.

“Marker be praised,” said Harmon. And then he added, “Altman be praised.”

It made his skin crawl to hear Harmon say his name like that, but he bit his tongue, said nothing. What he had done was far from complete, would require years and years more work, but hopefully it would be enough right now to stop the process of Convergence.

It took a few hours more, and a few attempts to transmit in different ways, before something connected. The Marker sent out a short, intense burst of energy, and then, as suddenly as it had begun broadcasting, it fell silent.

“What’s wrong with it?” asked Harmon.

“It’s resting,” said Altman. “We’ve done what it wanted us to do. We’ve saved the world.”