I have to say, though I had fuck-all idea what was going on, I really liked his writing. I got a bit into it and realized that it was actualy the last book of a series and then stopped until I could pick up the others. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find.īut you'd give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them.I've got one, Behemoth: Seppuku. You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. And you send a synthesist-an informational topologist with half his mind gone-as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called "vampire," recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed, and a fainter hope that she'll do any good if she is needed. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees X-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices that he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores.
So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet? Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Two months of silence while a world holds its breath.
Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown. Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash.
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