by Eric Flint
"Me? Go into space?" She flashed back to her childhood, staring at the moon and wondering what it was like. All the TV shows she'd seen, including some of the ones A.J. was so fond of. A dream that had been diverted when she found her first fossil in a nearby park.
"You're kidding. I'm too old."
"You had your fortieth birthday just a few months ago, Dr. Sutter. Popular mythology about daring young men and women aside, the fact is that forty is just about the right age for an astronaut. John Glenn was forty-one years old when he made his orbital flight; Yuri Gagarin, only a bit younger when he made his. Thirty-seven, as I recall. And Neil Armstrong was just two weeks short of his thirty-ninth birthday when he was the first man to set foot on the moon."
A smile came to Deiderichs' stern face that made him abruptly seem more human. "You certainly don't appear old, if you'll pardon me saying so. Had I not known otherwise, I would have thought you to be a woman in her mid-thirties. Furthermore, Doctor, we did a quick check of your medical records which are publicly available and you seem to be already in excellent condition. People who know you confirm that impression. 'Strong and stubborn as a mule' was the way Mr. Baker put it, as I recall." The smiled widened a bit. "I should add in fairness to Mr. Baker that he spent considerably more words assuring me that you didn't look like a mule."
Helen couldn't help but laugh. "Well, I hope so! Him? Comparing anyone else to a mule? He should talk!"
His face serious again, Deiderichs continued: "In short, unless a thorough and careful examination shows some hidden problems, there is no physical reason you cannot go into space. Unless you have some mental disability we don't know about. Perhaps claustrophobia?"
"What?" Helen shook her head, somewhat absent-mindedly. "No. Nor agoraphobia, either. Space?"
"Space indeed!" A.J.'s voice shouted from behind her. He'd just entered from the other side. "What's gonna be up, Doc, is you. Several million miles up. And me! And Jackie, and Joe!"
It was finally starting to penetrate, and for a moment Helen Sutter felt something that she hadn't since she was seven years old. Coming down the stairs on Christmas morning to see a vast expanse of wonders laid out before her and realizing that they really, truly, were all there for her.
But, no, it was something she hadn't felt even then, it was something most people only have in their imaginations. Helen's exhilaration didn't stem from childhood fancies of being an astronaut. Those had long ago faded away. It stemmed from her life as an adult. All those long hard years of work and study, now come to as triumphant a conclusion as anyone could wish for.
Bemmie really had come down from the skies sixty-five million years before and fought for his life beneath the crackling skies of a bolide impact. His people had watched the solar system from a great base built inside a twenty-mile-wide asteroid. And she herself would step foot inside the first alien structure ever discovered by mankind!
"Well," she said finally, her voice sounding almost conversationally inane in her own ears. "Where do I sign up?"
PART IV: BLUEPRINTS
Design, n: an outline, sketch, or plan, as of the
form and structure of a work of art, an edifice, or a
machine to be executed or constructed;
the combination of details or features of a picture,
building, etc.; a plan or project.
Chapter 21
"That's his missing hand."
"Yep. Though calling something with eighteen branches a 'hand' seems pretty weird to me."
"He'd say the same about a clumsy paw with only five branchings, I'm sure."
"Well, which one of us is sixty-five million years freeze-dried, and which one of us is sitting here still using his hands? Ha! Don't have an answer for that one, do you?"
"You're such a wiseguy, A.J." Helen studied the 3-D model, derived from multiple spectra of imaging combined. "I wasn't half-bad in my modeling."
"Taking into account water loss, damage, all the other good stuff, some of your reconstructions were damn near perfect. You couldn't get all the internals, but the externals are good. The colors would be more earthy, though."
"How can you get colors out of this? I'm not even sure if the external skin or whatever it is has just dehydrated or gone through a hell of a lot more changes in the time it's been here."
"Guesses, but pretty good ones. We have some idea of the chemical processes that go on in vacuum now, and I can run simulations. If I take the chemical constituents I can derive from my various sensors and run a simulation of what it would've looked like before sixty-five million years of space exposure, I get something with a sort of warm brown tint. Like good leather."
"Interesting. Still, with all the variables, I'd say it's more like a wild-assed guess."
"Give me half-assed, and you have a deal."
Helen snorted. "No one gets half my ass."
A.J. should have made another comment at that point, but he was silent instead. Giving him a sideways glance, Helen saw a rather dramatic blush just starting to recede.
Well, now, that's cute. I guess a wiseass answer occurred to him that took him in a direction he wasn't ready to go.
She paused mentally at that point. It dawned on her that she was skirting an area that she wasn't ready to go. She been working alongside A.J. for three days, ever since she'd agreed to participate in the planned expedition to Mars. Almost every waking hour, in fact. The experience, she now realized, had just driven home the impressions she had gotten in the two years since she'd first met the man.
Don't kid yourself, woman. For whatever reasons—God only knows how and why it works—A.J. Baker really and truly turns you on.
She shook her head slightly. She was still twelve years older than he was—always would be—and she was still not ready to go there. Probably never would be.
Before she could start blushing herself—at her age!—she hurriedly went back to the subject at hand. "Are there any other rooms you can get into other than this one and the water room?"
A.J.'s tone seemed just a bit hurried, too. "A few, yeah. There's only one major room we haven't looked into yet. Its door is opened a little bit less than this one, but it was clearly jammed tight and no way we were going to lever it open. So now that we've done all the heavy work we can with the Faeries, I'll probably be trying to get one of them into that room. It might get stuck, though; it's going to be really, really tight. That's why I hadn't tried until now. And we've got a few more side corridors to go into first."
"What do you make of those things over there, that look like, oh, triangular plaques?"
A.J. studied the thirty or so glittering bronze-tinted plates that were piled in ages-old shallow drifts against the wall, probably due to Phobos' rotation. "My guess? Printouts of important data."
"Printouts? But they're metal. And they don't appear to be stamped or inscribed in any way. So why do you think they're printouts?"
"Hard to prove it right now, but on some wavelengths, just at the edge of maximum enhancement, I get hints of structure. Remember, these guys were sitting in a pretty limited environment here, so you gotta think about it. If they did prefer using hard copy, like we do, how're they going to do it? It'd be insane to bring along masses of paper, and it's not like you're going to be growing trees here. Or papyrus reeds. So you need something else.
"What would be ideal would be something sorta like an Etch-a-Sketch that doesn't go away at a shake but only at a specific signal. It'd be a physical display, but one you could use over and over again. And with a lot better resolution and control than an Etch-a-Sketch, of course."
Helen nodded. "Okay. But how would that work?"
"Remember when you first met me? My halo?"
"Yes. So?"
"Well, if you have miniature active agents like my sensor motes, only a lot smaller—real nanotech like they've been working on for years—you could make the surface of some object, like those plates, be composed of these agent-motes. They'd be networked together on the
local level and could rearrange the surface physically to conform to whatever you wanted to display. Then, when you wanted to change the surface, you'd send another code to have them move around again. Properly designed, it could be pretty energy efficient. Everyone would be able to have a few of these little babies and they'd have permanent records without physical waste. If you ever really decided that a book or whatever wasn't needed any more, you just erase it."
He pondered a moment. "The things probably would scavenge power from transmissions in the air. You might even be beaming out some signal that was harmless to you and that didn't interfere with your other devices, just in order to keep 'em powered. Of course, once the power failed, the motes shut down. And by now, they're almost certainly vacuum-welded into a single mass. Not to mention that with sixty-five megayears having gone by since then, radiation probably hasn't done 'em any good either."
Helen thought about the bronze-colored tablets having a surface mutable as water, changing and freezing on command. It was a nice image, and it did make sense the way A.J. put it. But it was awfully speculative, based just on a faint trace of microstructure.
"Do you always jump to conclusions on that little evidence?"
"Well, yeah," he said, grinning a little sheepishly. "I like having a guess at anything I run into. Besides, I have a reputation to maintain." More seriously: "But they do seem to have a lot of the symbols on the keyboards and signs, and other things that might be sketches or something. So the tablets look a lot to me like sorta triangular clipboard type things, but they're also pretty much solid."
"I think I understand you," Helen said slowly. "Unless we postulate some odd religious requirement, it's hard to imagine they were spending their time carving or casting metal symbol-plates like this. It's not like they had to write in cuneiform. So you're saying that if they used these things as you're guessing, then obviously the tablets couldn't be as simple as they look."
"Right in one, Doc. Hey, here we go, the first stereo imaging of the interior of a Bemmie."
The combination of wavelengths the Faeries could scan in had given A.J. an extensive array of methods for analyzing the interior of just about anything. Helen didn't understand how it worked, but she knew that when A.J. was dealing with an organic, mummified target, he could tailor the approach for exactly that sort of object.
The image that materialized on-screen was a detailed, layered outline of structures down to a fraction of an inch in size, all done without having to touch the specimen. That was a good thing, too. It was quite possible that at least parts of the sixty-five-million-year-old Bemmie would disintegrate at a touch.
"There it is!"
The "it" Helen referred to was a large, three-lobed organ protected by the bony structure they had long since decided was effectively a skull combined with part of a rib cage—sort of a cephalothorax. The tripartite object bulged towards the front of Bemmie and extended back a considerable distance. Lines of tissue branched from it at regular intervals, and it swelled again about halfway down the body and then trailed off.
"Well, no one doubted Bemmie was smart," A.J. commented. "Still, that's a hell of a brain. Great for zombies, though. Brrraiiiiins!"
The idea of a Bemmie zombie was creepy, Helen thought, since they were actually looking at a mummified corpse. "Look at all these other organs. That must be the digestive tract. Right there at the mouth and going down—"
"How do you know that's not his respiratory system?"
Helen could tell that was just a contrarian question. But she answered anyway, tracing the complexities revealed with her eyes, trying to wring every last bit of information from the image.
"First, because the area it comes through has a number of structures that look like they were made for cutting and crushing—a mouth, just like we thought when we looked at the fossil. Second, because the structures trailing down here look an awful lot like flattened intestines. And, third, because I think these are his respiratory system."
A.J. looked at "these," which were a pair of structures extending from slitlike areas on each side of Bemmie. "Okay, yeah, I'd probably agree, at least at a first guess."
"You'd damn well better. Who's the professional reconstruction expert and who's the glorified photographer here?"
"Fine, lemme give you another daguerreotype for your collection."
Another view of Bemmie shimmered into view next to the first, this one done in different wavelengths.
"Oh, now there's some nice structure! That must be the equivalent of cartilage and connective tissue. Look how it layers along the shoehorns. Weird, it seems very heavily set, though. A lot more than I remember the limbs of the fossil being."
Helen gnawed on her lower lip for a few seconds. "I think I know what caused that. Drying out retracted the arms. I'll bet the extension and contraction tissue was pretty hydrophilic, even for living tissue."
"I dunno. Depends on the mechanism. As I recall, you've been arguing with yourself for the past couple of years on just how it managed the 'extend' part of that movement. Memory molecules, crystal structure, all that kind of thing."
He glanced back at the other view. "Getting back to the digestive and respiration systems, there's one area he was built better than us, if you're right. Bemmie never choked to death on a chicken bone. If they ate chickens. I wonder what he did eat? Was Bemmie vegetarian?"
"I severely doubt it, unless it was from personal conviction or ideology. His eating mechanism doesn't look all that much like ours at first glance, naturally. But my gut reaction—pardon the pun—looking at his, um, dentition, and the internal structure you've got here, is that Bemmie was an omnivore, like us."
"Just a guess though, right?"
"Yeah. An educated one, but still a guess. We don't have any idea what plants or their equivalent were like on his homeworld, or what other species existed besides themselves. But there are also these structures on the arms. I found some of them in our fossil Bemmie, but I couldn't be sure what they were. Looks like one of my guesses was right, however. They exist on the inside of the arms or tentacles in the front, and I'll bet the lumps of tissue under them indicate that they can be raised and lowered. Sort of like a cat's retractable claws."
"They do look kinda like claws. Or shark teeth even, or thorns."
"And where they're located indicates they were used to grab something and prevent it from moving away. And not gently, either. That looks to me like a predatory creature's design. Squid have some similar hooked structures on their tentacles. The length of the digestive system, though, is really over the top for something that's an obligate carnivore. At least here on Earth, the digestive tracts of meat eaters tend to be significantly less complex because, well, you're trying to convert meat into meat, rather than plants into meat."
"And that funnel sort of thing around the mouth. Like lips?"
"Yes, I think so. It's got more structure around it, though, from what I can tell. I'm not sure, but I think that it might not look so simple if it were still alive. Maybe not like pedipalps or other side organs, but not just a smooth funnel of tissue, either."
A.J. was studying other external features. "They didn't wear clothes, exactly, but they did have sort of harnesses and other things. I'll bet that's either jewelry or else some kind of communicator badge up there."
"Embedded in the skin? Well, I guess that tells us that they did have pretty tough skin."
"Not necessarily. After all, we get ears and other body parts pierced just for vanity. Still, at that size it probably did have pretty tough skin, like a rhino or elephant."
"Ugly things, weren't they?" Diane said from over their shoulders.