The eternity artifact, p.14
The Eternity Artifact, page 14
“Were you trying to piss her off, Jiendra?” asked Lerrys.
“Me?”
“You.” He unfastened his restraints, stretched as he stood. “This is the biggest expedition in human history. Tepper’s only Morgan’s number two. Morgan’s probably got orders to keep everything quiet until we’re close to our destination.”
“No one could follow us through a Gate.”
“Unless they’re on board. I’m sure there are some agents in the crew or the scientists.”
“You sound like a spy type yourself, looking everywhere.”
“I’m not. You’re not. Braun’s not, and I doubt if any of the senior officers are. Beyond that, anyone can be compromised, and the stakes are higher than you seem to understand.”
“So there are aliens, or there were. So what?”
“So… after more than five millennia of thinking we’re the pinnacle of intelligent life in the Galaxy, if not in the universe, we’re about to bring back proof we’re not. If Morgan is right, these departed aliens may have known far more than we’ve discovered. What’s a technology like that worth? What would the Sunnis or the Covenanters give to have that? Or to keep the Comity from getting it? What about Old Earth and the League? Or the Middle Kingdom or the Chrysanthemum Worlds? Go ahead, tell me I’m full of crap, Jiendra.”
Didn’t say a word. If I did, I’d regret it. Who the hell was Lerrys to lecture me? Sure, we might find tech stuff like that out where we were headed. But who said we’d understand it or could even use it?
After he left, I looked at the screen again. Mostly saw blackness. Not much in the way of individual stars. Figured what looked like nebulae and stars were distant galaxies. Few enough of those. Meant that there was dust of some sort out there. Wasn’t anything anywhere near, and we weren’t any more than a third of the way to Danann.
Lerrys might be right. Damned if I wanted to tell him.
27 GOODMAN/BOND
“Duty stations for Gate translation!” The announcement blared everywhere.
Chief Stuval looked at me. “To your station, Bond. You can finish the inventory after translation.” He frowned. “Even on a new ship, there’s always something missing. You’d think that they do it on purpose.”
I laughed. It was expected. “Maybe they do.”
“No. They just don’t know any better. Ground-huggers never do. They don’t understand ships or space or translations. They never have. You got to wonder how many ships have been lost over the years because some numbers numbnuts wanted to save a few credits.”
“There are always people like that.”
“You’re right, but when you’ve made as made translations as I have… you have to wonder.” Stuval shook his head, then gestured toward the aft bay. “Better get strapped in.”
Another minute and I settled into the restraint couch in the aft bay of the armory.
“Five minutes to translation. All personnel in secure stations. All personnel…”
I checked the restraints again. I didn’t need to. Nothing ever happened during translation except null grav and disorientation. I sat there and thought how people had different reactions to Gate translations. Yet… why should a translation be different for every person? Everyone on a ship went through the same process and ended up in the same place. Did the translation affect different people’s brains in different ways?
I almost laughed. Everything impacted people in different ways. Even looking at the stars affected them differently. How could anyone look at the vast order of the universe and not accept that there was a Creator? Yet some people denied it, as if chaos could ever create order, as if, in a galaxy where there was no intelligent life except mankind, that was an accident. But were we still in our Galaxy? Or did God limit intelligence to one species in each galaxy? If He did, where had the aliens come from?
With that thought, I had to consider my mission, again. I would have liked to send a message with the locator I had yet to construct. I needed to let the colonel and CIS know that the Sunnis were also trying to obtain whatever alien technology D.S.S. might find. There were two problems with that. First, I didn’t know how to modify the locator enough to send a text or verbal message. Second, the colonel had emphasized that I wasn’t to start on the locator until we were actually at our destination. Over the time since I’d been aboard the Magellan, I’d scoped out where most of the parts I’d need would be, but I’d have to cannibalize part of a working torp for the rest of it—in a way that couldn’t be detected or traced to me.
“Stand by for Gate translation. Stand by for Gate translation.”
I’d made enough Gate translations in my time, but not nearly so many as a midlevel D.S.S. tech would have. I still got nervous. Going through artificial hawkings seemed to violate something about the Lord’s universe. I couldn’t have said what, but to me it did.
When we went through the Gate, white turned black, and black was white. It took forever, yet it was over before I could think about it. After full grav returned, my stomach was still protesting the null grav during translation. I swallowed hard and forced things back where they belonged.
I waited several moments to let my guts settle.
“Translation is complete. Dismissed from stations to normal duties…”
I unfastened the restraints. I had an inventory to complete, and I was looking forward to it, because it gave me a far better sense of where everything was, and what would be easily missed, and what would not.
28 CHANG
After the first Gate translation, things quieted down. Farscreens didn’t show that much, except the faint and distant galaxies. We spent three days moving at high sublight to get to the second Gate. Before I’d become a pilot, I’d always wondered why Gates couldn’t be reprogrammed to send ships to different places. That was before I understood the stress relationships between atrousans and gravitons. You try to use a Gate for more than one destination, and pretty soon you don’t have a Gate. You put two Gates too close together, and pretty soon you don’t have either one. That was what happened to some of the military Gates in the Dirty War and why Gates are spaced far apart outside inhabited systems.
After the second translation, the captain had announced we had another day and a half of sublight travel to the third Gate. Ship seemed quieter, subdued.
I was one of the last into the mess at the evening meal on threeday. I’d been in bay two inspecting shuttle one, checking things out, trying to get a better feel for it. Powered up the internal systems and ran through the checklists. Some say you can do that sort of thing with a simulator. You can’t. Not the same. Feel’s important.
Only table with much space and anyone I wanted to talk to held Lerrys, Morgan, and Tepper. Soon as I sat down beside Morgan, Liam Fitzhugh and Alyendra Khorana took the last two seats. Fitzhugh sat next to me, Khorana between him and Tepper.
Rather would have had Khorana next to me. Fitzhugh was always spouting something. Not exactly loud, but firm.
I turned to Morgan. “What ever happened to all that debris? The stuff that piled up against the shields? I was thinking about our return. There was enough there to strain shields if we hit it at any high-sublight velocity.”
“The captain decided to push it out of the way and leave it behind,” Morgan said. “She accelerated, pulsed the shields, and changed headings twice. It’s still somewhere around the second Gate, but shoved far enough away so that we won’t run into it coming back.”
“Debris? In space?” asked Khorana.
“The debris from the destruction of the Sunni ship…”
As Morgan explained, I looked toward the captain’s table, where some of the physical scientists had been invited, probably to explain their specialties and what they hoped to find to the Special Deputy Minister. I recognized the faces, but couldn’t put names to all of them. Ferward was there, along with Koch. He was an organic chemist.
“… while space is big, and it’s unlikely that we’d actually run back into that debris,” Morgan was finishing up, “it certainly doesn’t hurt to be cautious and shove it out of the return corridor to the Gate.”
“Such residues wouldn’t include anything explosive, would they?” asked Fitzhugh.
“There might be a torp predetonator, or something like that. There wouldn’t be anything else explosive in and of itself. It we hit a lot of mass at high sublight, it could wreak havoc on the shields, and that could be as bad as a torp.”
“My understanding was that shields were deployed in a curved array designed to divert such masses from actual physical impact with the vessel…”
“They’ll divert a few tonnes,” Morgan replied with a laugh. “They won’t divert large metallic asteroids or other ships of significant mass. Or planets or suns.”
Morgan was oversimplifying. The shields would also throw the Magellan out of the way of such large masses. Doing that would make a mess out of the insides of the ship, and anyone who wasn’t restrained. That was why all sorts of detectors were focused ahead of the Magellan. Ships still got lost. I didn’t want to hear any more about what I already knew. I turned to Fitzhugh. “You’re a historian, aren’t you?”
“After a fashion. My expertise lies in historical trends. That includes studying nodal points to determine which factors are causal and which are merely correlative, analyzing seemingly unrelated aspects of a culture’s history to ascertain whether they are part of the trendlines, symptomatic, or merely noise surrounding the signal, so to speak.”
“If… if we find something alien, do you think you’ll be able to make sense of things?”
Fitzhugh paused. “That’s a good question, Lieutenant Chang. I doubt that, if we do find remnants of an alien civilization, there will be cultural referents that will be meaningful, or even intelligible. In fact”—he laughed nervously—”I’ve pondered the rationale for my inclusion in this expedition. Not that I’d give up the opportunity willingly, you understand.”
Had to admit I liked his honesty. Wished he’d give up using the largest possible words, though. “Do you think we’ll find anything worthwhile?”
“To discover remnants of any intelligent life that is nonhuman would be of immense value, if only to disabuse the anthropic principle and those who have used humanity’s apparent uniqueness as a rationale for theistically rationalized tyranny and ignorance.”
“Surely, you don’t consider the Covenanters and the Sunnis as theistically tyrannized?” That was Tepper, sardonic smile after her words.
“No, Major Tepper, perhaps my clarity was lacking. They tyrannize their own people, and would do their best to tyrannize others, rationalizing their actions on the basis of ancient theistic beliefs that state such a deity gave humanity dominance over the universe, but only so long as men, and I use that gendered term advisedly, placed that deity above all and followed the deity’s commandments and those of the deity’s prophets.”
“I don’t think you’ll be on their list of the saved, Professor,” suggested Morgan.
“Nor would I wish to be, not under the conditions they specify for such salvation.”
Had to admit that Fitzhugh’s attitude—under all the words—was more to my liking than a lot of the civilian experts I’d heard. Not that I’d ever see him outside the mess or talk to him once the expedition was over. Still… there was something about him. Talked like a professor, but nothing else was professor-like. He was as big as a Marine, no fat, either. He moved quickly, and his eyes flicked from point to point, like a cat’s. Maybe like his mind did, too.
Didn’t think anyone else saw that, either. They just heard all the big words.
29 BARNA
I wasn’t about to ask the three shuttle pilots to sit for a portrait. Instead, I managed to sneak some imager shots of them in the officers’ mess, and once in the ship corridors. There was plenty of time to work on that composition, because the farscreens just showed dark patches with faint hazy white globs. I could only get them magnified to barely recognizable images of galaxies. I hadn’t seen much of Elysen for days, not since after the second Gate translation. She and the other astronomers and astrophysicists were already buried in some project.
I just kept working on what I could. I’d created a replica of the Magellan itself, based on the closescreen images I could get and upon the material in the ship’s system, and I’d finished a portrait of Elysen that both she and I liked.
On fourday, just before lunch, she appeared at the door to my studio work space. “Could I persuade a hardworking artist to accompany me?”
“You could.” I rose. I wished I were clever with words, but I never had been. “You’ve been busy.”
“Very busy. It’s been a great amount of work for not much of a result. Not so far, at least.” She smiled. “I’ll tell you about it after I get something to eat. It won’t take long.”
“To eat?”
“To tell you.”
We walked down the passageway toward the lifts.
“How many of you are working on this?”
“Just four. Another astronomer, an astrophysicist, a physicist, and me. Cleon and I are limited in what we can add. He’s the physicist and does the calculations. I comment and ask inane questions.”
I couldn’t imagine Elysen asking inane questions.
When we reached the mess, she pointed to a table in the corner, where an older major sat with some of the scientists. I knew their faces, but not their names. “Let’s sit over there. Kaitlin Henjsen can be very interesting, even if she is a close friend of my grandniece.”
Her grandniece? I didn’t know what to say about that, or about her grandniece’s choice of friends. “Which one is she?”
“She’s the thin blonde. She’s an archeological technologist.”
“I didn’t know such a profession existed.”
“There aren’t many. She was the lead on the New Cumorah project.”
I’d never heard of New Cumorah.
“That was an archeological expedition to the New Zion system. A solar flare wiped out all life on the inner planets more than two hundred years ago. Recently, there was some question whether the flare was caused by New Zionist technology. The Sunnis had claimed it was the Will of Allah…” Elysen broke off and nodded to Henjsen. “Might we join you, Kait? This is Chendor Barna.”
“Please do. I’m pleased to meet you, Chendor. Ely has told me about the portrait you did of her. It must be marvelous. She’s a perfectionist.”
“You’re too kind.” What else could I say?
“Neither Ely nor I is kind.” Kaitlin offered an expression that was wry, not exactly a smile, but not disapproval. Her forehead wrinkled slightly, and her thick blonde eyebrows lifted. Unlike Elysen, while she was tall, she was fine-boned, with a small but squarish chin and gray eyes that could look as cold as rain-soaked stone when she was angry, I suspected.
“Perfection is hard on kindness.” I eased into the seat across from her and on Elysen’s right.
“Spoken like a true artist,” added the black-haired man to Kaitlin’s right. “I’m Reyal Torres. Paleontology.”
There was a momentary silence. I looked at Elysen. “You never finished explaining.”
“It’s something I’ve always wondered about, and since we were here…”
“Wherever ‘here’ is,” murmured Torres.
“… it seemed like a worthwhile idea. We’ve been making observations—the ones that we can with the relative velocity of the Magellan—trying to determine the gas density of the hole in the Small Wall.”
“Small Wall?” My murmur was almost inadvertent.
Elysen turned to me. “I’m sorry, Chendor. The Small Wall of Galaxies is a section of the universe. Generally, the spacing is regular, far too regular for chance, except there’s nothing that suggests it’s anything but coincidence, but there is a hole in that spacing, and we have a chance to take observations that the earlier astronomers who studied it could not do.” She smiled. “They were called the Hole-in-the-Wall gang and never had the data to reach a consensus. Since the exact center of the graviton trace line of Chronos appears to come from the hole in the Small Wall, persuading the commander that it might be relevant was not too difficult, particularly since there appear to be traces of some unusual energies involved. This could be of import, because the concentration of matter in the hole in the Wall is extraordinarily low and comes from a later date than the galaxies of the Small Wall, all of whom ate true second-generation population-two galaxies.”
I was still lost, but nodded.
“We’re not that far, not in astronomical terms, from where Chronos and Danann started, and they represent at least a high Type II civilization…”
“How did you know where they started?” asked Kaitlin abruptly.
“Once we knew that Chronos and Danann were on the opposite ends of the same course,” Elysen replied, “that wasn’t too hard. We did have to persuade Commander Morgan to surrender some navigational information. When we explained the significance to Project Deep Find, he provided it He wasn’t totally enthusiastic, and he made us sign a secrecy agreement of sorts.”
“What have you discovered?” I finally asked. “And what’s a Type II civilization?”
“A Kardashev Type II civilization is one that can harness all the energy from a single star. A Type III civilization should be able to harness all the energy from a single galaxy. Not that anyone knows how that might be done. We humans are roughly a low Type II.” She paused to take a sip of wine. “As for what we’ve discovered… nothing. That’s what’s surprising. We’d always thought that the hole in the Small Wall was just a random effect, or even a thick intergalactic dust cloud. It’s not. It’s truly a hole, and the samplings and observations we’ve taken over the last day seem to support that.”
“A hole? A hole in the universe?” That seemed unlikely, but I was only an artist. I depicted what was there, usually, not what wasn’t.
