The kid put up his deflector screens and said, “Einstein.”
Silence then. When no one laughed, he stood straighter and drifted closer.
“What makes this thing so interesting?”
“It’s a fact,” Einstein said.
“I don’t understand,” Kath Two said. “It’s a fact that it’s interesting or—” but then she stopped, because she had figured it out. An apostrophe belonged before that word. He meant that it was an artifact. A surviving object from the pre-Zero world.
“I would go see that,” Ty allowed.
THEY UNDERSTOOD EINSTEIN A LITTLE BETTER THE NEXT DAY when Kath Two flew all of them over the mountains in a glider and they saw just how difficult it must have been for foot travelers like him to have reached the site of the artifact. It raised the question of how he had ever found it in the first place. “Blind luck after getting hopelessly lost in a whiteout” seemed the most likely answer, but perhaps his people had combed the inland slopes of these mountains in a systematic way.
They were traveling in the same type of glider they had used on the leg from the Cayambe socket to Magdalena. Because it had no engines, it could fly through the Ashwall without mechanical damage, and because it traveled more slowly than a jet, they didn’t have to worry quite so much about Kath Two’s windshield getting fogged by abrasion from microscopic bits of rock. They did have to be somewhat concerned about the fact that she could not see where she was going as they flew through the densest part of the cloud. But she knew the altitudes of the nearby peaks and stayed well above them. Once the view had cleared a little bit, she was able to take advantage of the ash, which worked in the air somewhat like a drop of ink in swirling water, making currents and vortices obvious.
Einstein seemed exotic to the Seven in that he had been born on the surface and had never left it. This was his first journey in an aircraft of any kind. Seeing the mountains from above demanded some mental adjustments, which he made quickly. And in any case he knew the latitude and longitude of the artifact. After they had passed over the crest of the mountains and gotten into clear air, he directed Kath Two toward a high valley slung between the coastal range and a subsidiary crest beyond. Its upper reaches were devoid of life, but farther down the slope, tundra and low scrub were beginning to take hold. That these had been seeded from space was obvious from their regular spacing. Robot pods had fallen out of the sky in precise geometric formations and slammed into the ground in a hexagonal array before breaking open to spill their seed on the ground. Some wag in the bureaucratic bowels of TerReForm had dubbed these things ONANs: Orbital Neo-Agricultural Nacelles. As the years went by and the ecosystem spread out from the ONANs, the hexagonal pattern disappeared into the natural chaos of life. But in a place like this where plants grew slowly it would still be visible centuries from now.
Kath Two made a few passes up and down the length of the valley and identified a stretch of smooth seasonal riverbed, paved with frozen ash-paste, where she thought she could land and take off. The glider’s energy storage devices had been charged up the night before and were still at 100 percent. So she made another long orbit to bleed off velocity and then landed while traveling in an uphill direction. She made a gentle touch first, just to verify that the riverbed was in fact frozen solid, then set the glider down decisively. The wingtips dragged at the very end and there was some concern that one of them might strike a protruding rock, but she was able to avoid this and bring the craft to a full stop without damage. Beled and Bard climbed out first, and jogged in opposite directions to the two wingtips. After picking these up off the ground they were able to rotate the glider by walking clockwise in a large circle. Kath Two told them when to stop.
Ty got out and opened a cargo hatch on the side, releasing a couple of siwis that began moving across the ground in their distinctive elbowing style of locomotion, as well as a couple of buckies that began rolling about seeking high ground from which to establish observation posts and communications links. Their main objective now was to get the glider tied down so it wouldn’t blow away in a stray gale. The siwis were essentially earth sciences robots, good at digging and tunneling. In a few minutes’ time, with a bit of guidance from Doc, they were able to plant anchors in some sturdy-looking boulders flanking the riverbed. Ty and Bard ran ropes from those to the ends of the glider’s wings and made it fast while Beled stalked restlessly around the perimeter. Kath Two and Ariane deployed the grabb that Doc used to get about in places like this. It served the same function as a wheelchair, only with legs, so that it could pick its way along terrain where even able-bodied humans would have difficulty making headway. Meanwhile Memmie got him bundled up and ready. Einstein watched it all and asked only a few hundred questions, most of which were cheerfully answered by Doc himself. Einstein would have seen much of this sort of technology on videos in the RIZ, but this was his first direct experience of it.
He knew better than to ask questions about the weapons. Kath Two, Ty, Beled, and Bard all had katapults of different descriptions. They did not arm themselves like soldiers going into war, but more in the precautionary style of Survey personnel venturing into places where large predators or even bad Indigens might be prowling around. Kath Two carried the same type of small katapult that she’d been packing on her recently concluded Survey mission: a sidearm that would use electromagnetic propulsion to hurl one particular kind of ambot toward a large, warm target. Steering itself toward the big infrared blob, the ambot would land on it, like a space probe touching down on an asteroid, and crawl around looking for ways to make it miserable. Any large animal with more than two or three of these things on its body would have other things on its mind than eating Kath Two. Tyuratam Lake had a somewhat older, heavier, and more battered version of a similar weapon. It had two magazines, one of which was exactly the same as Kath Two’s. The other presumably housed ambots of a different type, maybe for use against humans. Beled was slung with a considerably bigger two-handed katapult, whose long flexible magazine was draped about him like a bandolier. It was overkill, but it was what he had, and the weight didn’t bother him. Langobard, in a style traditional among Red Neoanders, simply had a menagerie of different ambots—perhaps a dozen all told—crawling around on his body, and a katapult strapped to the underside of his forearm, like a splint. When he told it to begin firing, which he would do by means of a control in the palm of his hand, the ambots would get word of it over their network and begin trying to find their way to his elbow so that they could insinuate themselves into the katapult’s projection mechanism. It seemed a bit indirect, but it had the advantage that when the ambots had nothing else to do they could patrol Bard’s body looking for foreign ambots that had been projected at him by the enemy, and join battle with them.
All of which, while fascinating to Einstein, and indeed to anyone who stopped to think about it, was so routine to the Seven that no one made any mention of it. The behavior of the ambots infesting Bard was somewhat novel and distracting at first to those who’d had little exposure to Red ways, but as they began their trudge down the valley it became clear that the ambots were all executing a program that cashed out in a few repetitive, stereotypical behaviors such as perching on his shoulders or running rings around his midsection. Sometimes a few would make a bid to form a train, but there weren’t really enough of them.
During spare moments in the trip from Cradle, Beled and Bard and Ty had sat down together in private rooms, opened up the equipment cases, and made efforts to get the different ambots accustomed to each other, so that the Blue-programmed ones that most of them were using wouldn’t identify Bard’s more Reddish ammunition as innately hostile, and vice versa. So far it seemed to be working. When the shape of the valley funneled them all together, as when squeezing through a passage between boulders, Bard’s ambots seemed to catch the scent of the ones reposing in Beled’s snaky bandolier, and would crawl around to that side of Bard’s anatomy and aim their sensors in that direction, but it did not seem
as though hostilities were about to break out. Since any one communications system was likely to be jammed or hacked by the opposition, your more highly developed ambots communicated with one another in a number of different ways, including sound. Ultrasound was preferred, but all frequencies were used, and so it was occasionally possible to hear Bard’s botmo spewing noise as it tried to evaluate, or possibly just to confuse, the Blue botmo all around it. Sometimes it was a hiss and sometimes it was a mathematical tune played too fast for the human ear to process it. In any case, nothing—at least, nothing audible to humans—came back from Beled’s, Ty’s, or Kath Two’s arsenals. Broadly speaking, Blue armaments makers were biased toward the “lots of dumb ambots” philosophy while Red ones went the other way.
On broken terrain, Doc on his grabb made better time than anyone, with the possible exception of Einstein, who was a gifted scrambler. The two of them would surge ahead and then Beled would put on a loping burst and catch up, obeying some kind of instinct to take point. Langobard seemed more inclined to hang back and act as a rear guard, which meant he spent more time in the company of the slower Ariane. Sometimes he simply picked her up and carried her over rough patches. The valley had been flat higher up, but they had to negotiate a steeper transition down to the altitude where vegetation had been seeded by the ONANs. It then became easier going, though they had to find open trails among the dense low shrubs that had taken root in the ashy soil. Their feet and their noses told them that the ground had been preseeded with some kind of microorganism that had presumably been designed to convert volcanic ash—which tended to have toxic stuff like sulfur in it—to a more wholesome kind of soil.
Einstein had played his cards close to his chest until they had deplaned. Since then, he had been providing Doc, and anyone else close enough to eavesdrop, with his own kind of speculative backstory for the thing they were going to visit.
“You’ll see when we get there,” he said more than once, perhaps betraying some uncertainty as to the correctness of his theory—a word he knew but pronounced to rhyme with “story.”
The phrase “I looked it up” was in frequent use by Einstein. He had no idea who Doc was, and just saw him as a very old man who was willing to answer questions. To answer them, but also to ask them in a way that was challenging without being brusque.
“They had these wheeled vehicles—”
“Cars?”
“No, the big box-shaped ones.”
“Trucks, or lorries,” Doc said.
“My theory is that this ’fact used to be one of those.”
“But a minute ago,” Doc observed, in the mildest possible tone of complaint, “you were saying it got hurled over the mountains by a tsunami.”
“Yeah.”
“That would imply that it had been bobbing around somewhere in the ocean.”
“That’s my theory.”
“Would it not have sunk to the bottom? The boxes were not airtight. Sooner or later it would have filled up with water.”
“The inside of what used to be the box is all coated with black residue,” Einstein offered, also pronouncing that word incorrectly.
“What conclusion do you draw from that?”
“I looked it up, and these trucks were used to carry all kinds of goods. Not just heavy stuff but bags of potato chips, athletic shoes, toys. My theory is that this was one of those. It was near the waterfront when it got hit by one of the earliest tsunamis, a small one that dragged it out into the ocean. And it didn’t sink, see, because—”
“Because it was full of bags of potato chips or something,” Doc said.
“Right, and it didn’t burn, at least not right away, because it was in the water. But then later it got caught up in a really big tsunami, like the one that created Antimer, which heaved it right up over the mountains and slammed it down . . . right over there. We should almost be able to see it.”
“Whereupon its contents burned, leaving the black residue,” Doc said, gently emphasizing the pronunciation.
“Yeah, and the paint burned off and the tires and all of the other stuff that wasn’t steel.”
“Would it not then have rusted away, during five thousand years?”
“I looked it up,” Einstein said. “The place was very dry. And this truck was probably buried. Yeah, it rusted some. But it was preserved until the Cloudy Century.”
Einstein must have looked that up too; the Cloudy Century was roughly 4300–4400, after the oceans had been reinstated but while everything was still quite hot.
“Then, after rivers began flowing again, erosion exposed it. And yeah, the exposed parts are rusted all right. Some parts are of a different metal though.”
“Aluminum,” Doc said.
But Einstein’s discourse was trailing off as he kept looking at the device that was supposed to tell them their latitude and longitude. He was giving every appearance of being lost.
Finally he made a decisive move about fifty meters down-valley, penetrating a bank of tall shrubs. The others followed him. Visibility was poor and so they heard his reaction before seeing the ’fact. “What the—?!”
“What is it?” Ty demanded.
“Someone dug it up!” Einstein exclaimed.
They found themselves standing around the rim of a pit perhaps half a dozen meters in diameter, and the same in depth. Marks in the soil made it obvious that this had been excavated with shovels, and vague footprints proved they had been wielded by humans and not robots. At the deepest part of the excavation, the gray soil had been stained red with rust. But the bottom of the pit was otherwise vacant; whatever had been rusting there was entirely gone. Only a few scraps of hard black plastic, and fragments of steel that had been altogether converted into rust, proved that Einstein hadn’t been lying to them all along.
Ty let himself down carefully into the hole, prodded in the wet, rusty mush with his toe, then reached into it and pulled something out. After shaking off lashings of mud, he underhanded it out of the pit to Beled, who picked it out of the air. It was a bent black cylinder.
“The day is not lost,” Ty announced. “All of us will get to handle an actual ’fact. That, my friends, is a five-thousand-year-old radiator hose.”
A few emotions were competing for the mental energies of the Seven: utter confusion about who had dug this hole, and why. Empathy for the deeply embarrassed Einstein, who had promised them an entire truck. Disappointment that the only things left of it were a rust stain and a radiator hose. A mild sense of alarm at the idea that inexplicable persons with shovels were somewhere about. Swamping all of these, however, like a tsunami cresting over the mountains, was the awareness that they were in the presence of a real artifact from before Zero. As they had established on the flight up here, Doc had seen such things three times in his life, not counting museum exhibits. None of the others had ever seen one at all.
And so they all stood there in silence for several minutes, passing it from hand to hand, thinking about it: the factory where it had been manufactured, the engineers who had designed it, the workers who had assembled the vehicle, the driver who had piloted it around, and the day that the Hard Rain had begun. As it turned out, imagining the fate of seven billion people was far less emotionally affecting than imagining the fate of one.
Beled, after handling the ’fact for a minute and gazing at it inscrutably, handed it off to Kath Two. He withdrew from the edge of the pit and began circling it restlessly. After a minute he called out to the others, but not in a voice of alarm.
About ten meters away, at a break in the slope that afforded a bit of a view down the valley, a sort of totem had been erected: a length of aluminum tubing, white with oxidation, projecting vertically out of the ground to a height about equal to that of a person. At its top, lashed on with a few scraps of copper wire, a circular object: a steel hoop mostly obscured by marred and pitted black stuff, a crossbar through its middle with loose wires dangling from orifices.
“Steering wheel,” Ty said. “The pla
stic coating burned but the steel rim held it together.”
“Who put it here?” Ariane asked. She was the last to arrive, and had to insinuate herself among taller members of the Seven in order to get a clear view. As a result she nearly tripped over a long, low mound of disturbed earth. The steering wheel totem had been erected at one end of it.
“Whoever buried the driver,” Ty answered.
Doc looked at Einstein. “Were you aware of the existence of human remains?”
Einstein held his hands up. “You have to understand, the truck came down like a dart. Nose first.”
“Naturally,” Doc said. “All the weight was in the engine block. The box, as we have established, was filled with something light.”
“The only part that was sticking out was maybe this much of the bumper, and some of the box.” Einstein was holding his hands about a meter apart. “The place where the human was—”
“The cab,” Ty said.
“—was deep underground. You have to understand, all this digging—”
“Came as a complete surprise to you. Yes, we understand that,” Doc said.
“When were you last here?” Langobard asked.
“Two years ago,” Einstein said. “But you have to understand: if someone from my RIZ had gone up here with shovels and dug up a whole truck, I’d have heard about it.”
“Where’s the incentive?” Ariane asked.
Everyone looked at her.
“As it was—in situ—the truck was priceless. Legally or not, tourists would have paid any amount of money to come and view it. To dig it up makes sense—so that tourists could get a full view of it. But—”
“But instead it has been completely dismantled,” Doc said, “and everything of value taken away.”
“Of value?! I don’t understand what you mean by that word,” Ariane said.
“The Diggers were after the engine block,” Doc said, as if this would answer her question—which it by no means did. But after a few moments she had a thought.
Seveneves Page 76