The eternity artifact, p.27
The Eternity Artifact, page 27
Once shuttle two was on the ground, and the locks were open, with unloading proceeding, I went to the links. Danann Base, this is Sherpa Tigress, reporting energy emanations approximately two hundred twenty kays from you at two eight seven, local north.
Say again, Sherpa Tigress.
Repressed a snort of exasperation and repeated my report, adding, Interrogative any local observations in that area.
We have your report, Sherpa Tigress. Wait one.
Someone should have known. If they didn’t know… Didn’t want to think about that.
“We’re off-loaded, sir. Ready for passengers up, if we have any.”
“Thanks, chief. I’ll check.” Shuttle two was only configured at present for two passengers. Usually there weren’t any because shuttle two runs were later in the day—unless Henjsen or one of the long-timers wanted to go up and then catch shuttle one when it returned the next day—if it was on a day when a run was scheduled.
Danann Base, Sherpa Tigress, unloading complete, interrogative return cargo or passengers.
Tigress, understand three crates for return. They should be there now.
“Chief… they say there are three crates.”
“There’s a slider coming. I’ll let you know when they’re on board and secured.”
Danann Base, slider with crates in view. Interrogative emanations.
Sherpa Tigress, Danann Base, emanations at two eight seven are from multiteam project.
Interrogative second emissions.
Wait one.
A long silence followed. Finally, another “voice” came through the links. Recognized Henjsen. The second set is from the lake heating up. There’s something there that recognizes fusactors. We haven’t located or determined what it is or what the mechanism might be.
What’s the lake project? Looking for that mechanism?
Another silence.
Finally, Henjsen spoke again. I suppose it won’t matter. Cleon’s sent a report. Some of your cargo has samples for analysis. We’ve found traces of another landing, not one of ours.
Another landing? Had the CWs or the Middle Kingdom been here already? Interrogative informing the operations officer.
The laugh over the link came as rueful. Operations knows. We haven’t dated it yet, but it’s anything but recent. Cleon thinks it’s over a million years.
The aliens came back?
We don’t think so. We had a team looking into the towers there. Some of the doors had been battered open, a long time back. Preliminary measurements show that some of the ice on the lake there melted and refuze. We’ve found traces of materials in the ice, and a few scraps of metal and polymers… a few small items. We ‘ll know more after the analysis of your cargo. I’d appreciate your keeping that to you and Operations until we know more.
Will do.
Someone—something—had landed on Danann in the past, maybe millions of years ago.
To do that, they’d needed technology like ours. Where had they come from? Where had they gone?
“Sir, we’re loading the crates now.”
“Thanks, chief.”
I’d keep my mouth shut—except to Morgan—but I didn’t see how news like that wouldn’t spread through the Magellan like air pouring from a holed needle.
55 BARNA
I’d spent another three days on Danann and returned the day after Henjsen’s team discovered the traces of the aliens—the second aliens. I got more images, including a few of one of the doors that the second aliens had forced and a ramp cut or melted into the ice— wider and shallower than our ramps, but not much different otherwise. I had a few more ideas to go with the images. I still hadn’t found the elusive “something” that I knew was down there. What I had seen fueled ideas for another round of work.
One of the pieces I tried was another interpretation— of what that ancient past might have been. From Fernard and Marsalis and some of the others, I’d picked up what they had learned about Danann. So I’d shown the sky as a deep blue, because they’d said that the atmosphere had been thicker, and a sun that tended slightly to the orange. The setting was two towers above one of the canal boulevards, set just at sunrise, with the sun halfway out of the water of the canal, and nothing around. One of the tower doors was half-open, with the hint of a shadowed figure.
I stood back, looking at it and wondering if I should have made the indistinct shadow taller and not quite so dark.
“You probably can’t show that one as purely representative or historical.” Elysen carried a mug of tea as she slipped into my work space.
“No… but it might be easier to sell.”
“I suppose it might. It’s a touch less alien,” Elysen eased herself into the good chair, slowly. “You’re good enough that you don’t have to be blatantly commercial, Chendor.”
“Tell that to Aeryana.”
“You make her sound so greedy. You couldn’t love her as you do if she were.”
“She’s not. She is more practical than I’ve been.” I set down the lightbrush. “She’s seen what happens when an artist suddenly becomes unpopular. Her cousin lost everything, then jumped off the Palisades.”
“I imagine he was trying to find a commercial niche. You don’t need that. Paint your best, and success will find you.” She smiled. “It already has. You both find that hard to accept, don’t you?”
“Probably.” I didn’t want to talk about it. There wasn’t anything I could do about it on the Magellan. “What do you think about the other aliens? The ones that landed only a million years ago.”
“The visitors? That’s what I prefer to call them.” Sitting in my sole good chair, Elysen sipped tea from her mug, while I paced across my work space, avoiding canvases and matrices.
I paused to study her. There were deeper circles under her eyes, with hints of redness in them. She was thinner, and she’d shuffled slightly when she’d come in.
“I’m not a fowl to be studied, Chendor.” Her voice was gently acerbic.
“You’re not well, are you?”
“No. I wasn’t well before we left. They knew that, and I knew it.”
“What—”
“Extreme old age. At some point, medical science can’t do any more. You can only spur regeneration so long before the system says no, or before you get carcinogenesis so rapid and widespread that no treatment is effective. In my case, it’s just the former.”
“But… why did you come?”
“Why not? My children are dead, and I have greatgrandchildren older than you. I’d rather keep working.” She smiled and her eyes brightened. “I’ve never had such an interesting project, either.”
“Can you tell me yet?”
“Not quite. The cross-checks on the last observations—and on the mathematics—should be finished in the next few days.”
“Is it as big as you thought?”
She shrugged, then sipped her tea once more. “If the evidence all turns out the way it’s looking, it will be one of the most astounding discoveries in astronomy and astrophysics. It will also confirm the Kardashev civilization classifications. Most people will reject it. Possibly even most astronomers. It will be very controversial, to say the least.”
“You’re making it all very mysterious.” I knew better than to ask. I’d already tried more than a few times and gotten nowhere. Elysen would tell me when she was ready, and not before.
“You don’t like to let people see what you’re painting until you’re ready.”
She looked tired, and I didn’t point out that I had let her see works in progress. She and Aeryana were the only ones who had. “You never said what you thought about the visiting aliens.”
“From what Cleon has sent me, I don’t think the visitors’ technology was as advanced as ours, but it’s difficult to tell from so few scraps. One of the items left was a projectile weapon, gas-powered, from a reservoir. Of course, it wouldn’t have operated on Danann unless it had a heating element.”
“The only way they could get into the towers was to pound open the doors.”
“Some form of massive hydraulics. They’ve found traces of that, too. From the metal shavings buried in the ice, Cleon thinks that they had mechanical difficulties and finally gave up.”
“Why didn’t they use lasers?”
“I would surmise that they either did not have them or did not have them with the ability to focus sufficient energy in a fine enough cutting edge.”
“But they reached Danann.”
“They did. So did we. And we could have traveled here centuries ago. I have my doubts that we could have had much success either if we had arrived right after the development of the AG drive.”
“Why didn’t they come back, then?”
Elysen raised her eyebrows. “There was only one flurry of expeditions to Chronos. Why didn’t we go back?”
“Oh. You think it was too costly, with no hope of financial return? But surely, sometime…”
“How long do civilizations last, Chendor? We don’t know. We look at the ruins down there, and we know that something ended… at least it appears that it ended anywhere that we can reach or observe. We almost didn’t survive the early nuclear age on Old Earth, or the postdiasporan conflicts, or the Covenanter-Sunnite Conflagration. If they hadn’t called a truce when they did, most of the known galaxy would have been dragged in. Would we have had a civilization to come here—or return to Chronos?”
“But we haven’t seen a trace of the visitors’ civilization. Our Galaxy is by far the closest to Danann, and it would have been even a million years ago.”
“That’s true. And what percentage of even our Galaxy’s systems have we surveyed or visited? There are close to five thousand inhabited worlds—out of more than a hundred thousand million star systems.”
I couldn’t argue that.
“Intelligent life has to be rare,” she said quietly “We know that. Intelligence also makes cultures unstable.”
I hated to think that. “Liam Fitzhugh thinks Danannian culture was stable.”
“He may well be right. Are we to the point of matching it? In terms either of stability or technical achievement?”
Elysen didn’t say it, but I could sense what she implied. Would we ever reach that point? “Not yet.”
She looked at the latest light-matrix painting, my representation of a past that might never have been. “I wonder…”
“You wonder what?”
“If great art and stable societies are irreconcilable.”
“What about science?”
She smiled, so enigmatically that I wished I could have put the expression into oil then and there, but the half smile vanished before I could have even reached for an imager.
But that was art—trying to create a work that evoked a moment and a truth that had already come and gone—or one that had never been, but should have been.
56 CHANG
Didn’t get to the officers’ mess that much with all the shifts in the shuttle schedule. Neither did Lerrys, and usually we never got there together, except at breakfast. Morgan took some of the replenishment runs to the Alwyn, trying to give us a break and keep his hand in. Wasn’t a bad idea.
Asked him why he didn’t try the needle pilots with the shuttles. He had laughed. “They don’t feel the mass.”
I understood what he meant. Exactly.
Another fiveday came. Dragged myself to the mess for the evening meal. Saw Liam Fitzhugh coming the other way. Just looked for a moment.
He looked, gave me a sort of smile. “Might I join you for supper?”
“I could manage that. Don’t ask me to be brilliant, Professor.”
“I won’t. I would request… if you wouldn’t mind… that you refrain from calling me ‘Professor.’ When I hear the term from you…” He stopped speaking. “My verbiage is already excavating a depression from which I will not be able to extricate myself.”
“Then stop digging.” Tried not to make the words hard.
“Excellent advice.”
We sat a good three tables away from the captain’s. Didn’t even ask each other. Just seemed better that way.
Professor deSilva joined us, and so did Nalakov, obnoxious math theorist. He always stared at me, like he’d never seen a fair-skinned woman with true blond hair and slanted eyes. Except he was blunt about it. Had to stop a smile when Alyendra Khorana plopped down between Fitzhugh and Nalakov. Gave me enough separation.
Fitzhugh poured me a quarter glass of the wine, exactly what I poured for myself. Impressed me. Also worried at me. Took even less for himself, passed the carafe to Alyendra.
“You don’t drink much?” I asked.
“I like just a little good wine. This is barely passable, but I will taste some, at times, if merely to remind myself that there is a universe of superb vintages awaiting our return. Not that I could afford most of them. Still… if one looks and is careful, there are many that are delightful and fit the budget of academics.”
Didn’t want to talk credits. “Do you think the aliens had wines?”
“They did not practice viniculture as we know it, not down upon Danann, but perhaps their chemistry was as advanced as their materials science.” He pursed his lips. “But then, they would never have discovered the joys of uncertainty, the combination of soil, of climate, and the fluctuations of solar radiation that combine to make a vintage that can be almost abysmal or truly celestial.”
“Perhaps nothing in the universe was uncertain to them,” suggested Professor deSilva.
A moment there, I thought he was serious.
Fitzhugh paused, then frowned. Finally spoke. “You meant that humorously, Tomas, even with great irony, but there is a possibility you are absolutely correct.”
“How could that be?” asked Alyendra. “There is uncertainty everywhere, even for us and our technology. The Danannians were not gods.”
“I will reply, if you will, by means of an analogy.” Fitzhugh inclined his head. “Ancient humans believed the weather to be capricious, or dictated by the whim of then-gods. Early technological humans discovered the mechanics of weather and achieved reasonably accurate predictions, Today, we are not perfect, but we are over ninety-eight percent accurate. Weather is the result of the interaction of multiple factors. A culture that could anticipate and predict such factors would operate with little uncertainty.”
“Then they could have predicted our arrival here.” Irony filled deSilva’s voice. “Could they not?”
“Quite possibly. At least, they could project the type of culture that would seek out Danann.”
At that, I had to wonder about the heating of the water under the ice. What sort of mechanism had the aliens set up? One that waited for visitors that might arrive millions or billions of years later? What else might be waiting down there? What might trigger it?
“If they could predict that, could they not also predict any other dangers to their civilization? And if they could predict all that, certainly they should still be around, shouldn’t they?”
“We only know that they are not on Danann,” Fitzhugh replied. “That does not mean that their civilization does not exist elsewhere. There are endless galaxies in the universe.”
The stewards arrived and set plates before us. Something covered in white sauce. Watched Fitzhugh motion to the steward. “Tea, please.”
“Yes, sir.”
Fitzhugh fingered the stem of the wineglass.
“I don’t suppose we’ll find the answer to that soon,” deSilva replied. “But, speaking of predictions, we’ve had one set of ships attack on the Magellan,” deSilva said, “Do you think another outside attack is likely?” Looked at Fitzhugh as he spoke.
“It’s possible.” Fitzhugh smiled politely. “In an infinite universe, the possibilities are also infinite.”
“Anything is possible, but what do you think?”
“I am not a military expert.”
Someone murmured, “You could have fooled me.”
Didn’t recognize the whisper.
“What about the other aliens?” asked Alyendra, as if to cover the comment.
“They were not on Danann recently. The team has dated their appearance at close to a million years back, give or take some tens of thousands.” Nalakov tried irony, just sounded ponderous.
“They found a gas-powered projectile weapon, with a grip, an odd grip,” deSilva said. “The similarity seems… unusual.”
Fitzhugh leaned back as the steward slipped his tea onto the table. “There are only so many possibilities for efficient use of energy.”
“I can see that with the Danannians. One can look at the megaplex and see that it is truly an alien culture. But a weapon so similar in design to something we might have used, doesn’t that suggest a similarity of evolution?”
“Their technological prowess approximated that of ours, I understand. Therefore, there should be a certain similarity.”
“Still…”
Fitzhugh turned to me. “I defer to an expert Lieutenant, space combat has been employing torps and screens for centuries. From what you have indicated, their efficiency leaves something to be desired. With the plethora of human cultures and the multiplicity of worlds, one would think that something more innovative should have arisen from the depths of human ingenuity and destructiveness, let alone among aliens. Yet it does not seem that such has occurred. Why might that be?”
Even asking a question, he sounded like a professor. Bet he knew the answer, but he knew Nalakov and DeSilva wouldn’t buy his words. Or he wanted me to support what he thought.
“Simple. Space is big. It’s also essentially a vacuum. Means that there’s no medium to conduct energy.”
DeSilva looked puzzled.
“Not explaining it as well as I should. You explode a simple bomb on a planet. There’s an atmosphere. The air carries a blast wave. That extends the force of the explosion. Doesn’t happen in space. Lasers… particle beams… they’re useless except close in. No ship can generate enough energy to hold a long beam; and then there’s the delay factor. Torps are designed to maneuver to deliver concentrated energy at the focal point. So far… nothing else does it that well. Doesn’t matter whether you’re human or alien. A gas-powered projectile thrower is the same idea. Concentrates the force in the projectile.”
