“I have coffee,” he said, gesturing back toward his still-empty mug, but she wasn’t listening to him. She walked to the door of their flat and stepped out as if she were going somewhere. Peros laughed once, not in mirth but confusion, and looked at the teacup. It was perfectly full with deep brown tea, aromatic steam curling up from its surface. She hadn’t had a sip of it. He took a mouthful. It didn’t taste strange. The day tasted strange around it.
Even so, it was almost an hour before he thought to check Nadima’s public social profile and see that, after two centuries and with no other warning, he had been divorced.
#
The Carrath stones themselves vary in size, but maintain a common ratio of 1 to 1.7 to 4. The channels carved in them show markings consistent with a drill, and flakes of steel suggest that this carving was done with something not dissimilar from our own technology. Some people have posited that the stonemakers are a separate branch of humanity, somehow displaced from Earth before the diaspora, and following a parallel track of technological development. It is an intriguing thought, but unfalsifiable. Florid speculation follows the stones, and I have had some flights of fancy myself. It’s a hazard of the occupation.
Whether the stones were created in situ or brought to the sites in which we found them is another mystery. The first stone, discovered on Carrath-3, gave the stones their name, but analysis shows that it was not the oldest of the artifacts. It was only the first we happened upon. If the stonemakers were present in these disparate systems, why do we find no other artifacts or structures in common among these sites? If the patterns or their field effects have an origin outside the systems, how did they arrive there if not by slipdrive? And why does the stone appear to be local to the systems? What carved them, and where did the carvers go?
We have only the artifacts themselves to guide us. Which brings me to the central problem of my research, and with all research into them.
Context.
#
The Forger into Darkness was a rated ship with room on board for seventy people, a small warehouse for their supplies, the slipdrive chamber and housing, and an interior design of cream, pale blue, and an orange that should have been hideous, but somehow managed to seem cheerful. The ship sat in its gate high above the atmosphere, waiting for the last of its passengers to arrive.
Peros paced the pilot’s quarters. By regulation, he could have been downgraded to a single now that he was unaccompanied by a spouse or spouses, but Nadima had left with so little time before the departure that the change would have been more trouble than it was worth. Instead, the other sink in the bathroom went unused. The other half of the bed stood witness by its emptiness. The other closet held nothing but the place where her dresses and gowns, tunics and trousers and undergarments would have been.
Sitting on the desk was the homunculus of Mohommed, their first son. The boy himself—a man almost a hundred and seventy years old, but still in Peros’s mind a boy—was on a habitable moon of Ergregos-7. They were a hundred lightyears apart, but the slip made it as if his son were in the room.
“Did she speak to you?”
“Yes,” Mohommed said.
“Were you able to talk sense into her?”
The homunculus lifted its hands in a gesture Peros recognized. Nadima had made it when she was exasperated, and little Mohommed had learned it and kept it in the patterns of his brain for the fifteen decades since he had left their home to start his own life. The boy likely didn’t know the motion wasn’t his own or where he’d learned it.
“She seems happy,” Mohommed said.
Peros didn’t curse, but his growl made if feel as if he had. “Is she with another man?”
The homunculus leaned forward. “She is on a walking tour of Kellar Complex on Rasia-3 with Fatima Delgado and Abby Haal. I don’t think she has some secret lover, Papa.”
“Then why?” Peros snapped.
The homunculus shrugged. When Mohommed spoke, his voice was weary. “I haven’t lived with her in a century and a half. You woke up beside her every day. You know her better than I do.”
An alert chimed. Peros was expected at the captain’s table for dinner with the VIPs for the expedition. The image of Nadima’s empty chair beside him intruded into his mind, a wave of black dread flowing behind it.
“I have to go,” he said. “Keep at her. Find out what you can.”
“Papa, this isn’t going to help.”
“I just want to understand.”
“Well, you sound angry.”
“I am angry. I can be angry and understand. I can do both.”
“If you say so. Be well.”
The homunculus went still and lost Mohommed’s shape and features. Peros let himself curse, now that he was alone, and threw himself into his dress uniform with a banked violence. The man who looked back out at him from the mirror looked young and fierce. Not at all like a man with a wound in his heart. It didn’t look like him at all.
The table was round with room for a full dozen settings. The centerpiece was a kinetic sculpture of wirework and thin membrane that remade itself in iridescent dragonfly-wing patterns every few seconds. The captain, a hard-faced woman from Gellia-3, was one he had worked with before and liked well enough. She didn’t ask after Nadima, so he assumed she knew. The chair that would have been his wife’s if he still had one was occupied by a pleasant, slightly horse-faced woman.
“New regen?” she said as she passed the olive oil.
It took Peros a moment to understand what she’d said, as lost as he was in himself. His smile was, he hoped, polite.
“Yes. Just before I came here.”
“The first few weeks after a regen, I feel like I’m eighteen again. Terribly distracting. Mine’s three years in, and I still feel like I’m getting used to it some days.” She held out her hand. “Yva Brooks. I’m research lead.”
“Peros Williamson. Pilot,” he said. He meant to shake her hand, but she didn’t move when his fingers clasped hers, so they only sat there, hand in motionless hand, until she let him go.
“I understand I was a last-moment fill-in. I hope your wife isn’t ill?”
“I wouldn’t know. She’s divorced me,” he said, and realized it was the first time he’d said the word aloud. The first time he’d confessed his new status as if it were truly done, and not merely a moment’s aberration on Nadima’s part.
“Ah, I’m very sorry,” Yva said. “Was it a long marriage?”
“Almost two centuries,” Peros said, astonished by how conversationally it came out.
“That’s an impressive run,” Yva said, and took a sip from her water glass. “I’ve never been much for long-term relationships. The alternative can get lonely, that’s true, but I’ve always found ways to cope.”
She smiled at him in a way that didn’t mean anything, unless he wanted it to. But if he wanted it to, it did. Peros’ heart was suddenly racing, and he felt a blush rising under his newly darkened skin. And rage. He was single. Nadima had left him. She had no grounds to object to his behavior, whatever it was.
“I would be grateful,” he said carefully, “for any advice you can share.”
#
Imagine for a moment that you are in a pub with a group of people who know each other well. People who have been interacting with each other for a very long time. Imagine one of them makes a reference to some event that they shared, but that you did not. Will that be comprehensible to you? Will it not? The difference is the context. If they say “Remember the night when Toby got so drunk he tried to go home with Mira?” and you know both Toby and Mira and why they would be a poor sexual match—close consanguinity, for example—you will be in a position to understand the scenario despite not having shared the experience. If you do not, you still have enough shared context of what it is to be in a pub, what it is to be drunk, and what sorts of things inspire hilarity in one’s friends after the fact to understand that the pairing was somehow inappropriate.
But wh
at if the reference were smaller? Less complete? Imagine that the night Toby asked Mira home with him, it was because he’d underestimated the power of a new drink. Call it Ambler’s Ale. Your friends might say, “Remember the night Toby drank Ambler’s?” Now you are more at a loss. Your context is less useful. You might guess that Toby overindulged, but the details beyond that, shared though they are by the group, are lost to you. Or you might think he’d disliked the drink in some way that caused him distress and the others amusement. Or that it had been someone else’s drink, picked up and consumed in error. Or any of a thousand other possibilities. Without more information, there is no way to choose one interpretation over another. Now imagine they only said “Tony and the Ambler’s.” Or just “The Ambler’s night.”
The meaning of all these references is identical to those who carry the context with them, but for the naïve listener, hope of understanding retreats quickly.
In this metaphor, the Carrath stonemakers are the friends, and the artifacts are the references to Toby’s indiscretion. And we are—or specifically I am—the new girl in the pub, trying to make sense of what’s going on around her.
My example sounds light-hearted, I know, but I chose it carefully. Because I believe the great majority of you listening to me know have had an experience like that. A moment of feeling excluded by those around you. Of knowing that there is something there that you are outside of. It is distressing—even painful—to know that there is an answer to your question, but that you cannot access it.
And because you and I share that context, I can give you a sense of the frustration of working with the Carrath stones.
#
It was strange to have a lover who was not Nadima. Sexually, he was awkward at first. Yva was forthright in what she wanted and guided him clearly to her own satisfaction. Peros was surprised to find that, outside the bedroom, he didn’t know what he wanted from her or else did not have a vocabulary to ask for it.
The journey to Ouroboros was uneventful, though the sense of displacement and disorientation that came with the slip was perhaps a bit more pronounced for Peros than usual. Touchdown on the fourth planet was on a calm day, atmospherically speaking, and crew and passengers alike walked into the local sunlight with the air of going to a new park on a picnic. The Forger into Darkness ceased for a time to be a ship and became instead a village. For the months of the expedition, it would act as base camp for the scientists, and then become a ship again, riding the slip to Bercale-3. And, Yva made gently clear, after that she and he would not know each other.
“You should stay here,” he said one evening after they had fucked and eaten dinner. “It’s not good to be alone so much.”
“I’m not alone,” she said. “My work is very good company.”
“Maybe I wasn’t talking about you.”
If she had been Nadima, she would have heard the hurt in his voice. She would have bent a little. If not enough to change her plan, at least enough to offer him some little reassurance. Yva laughed.
“You should come to the site.”
“I’m a pilot. What would I do there?”
“See it. Look. We came all this way. Seems like a shame not to take in the sights.”
“I will if you want me to.”
She laughed again and shook her head. “Oh, bunny.” Bunny was not her pet name for him. It was what she called anyone she liked but was presently annoyed by. He had come to understand her that well, at least.
The site was a series of sandstone caves at the side of a wide, green-gray sea. Yva drove a cart there with two of the other science team members and Peros. They talked about superimposed magnetostatic potentials and diagrammatic quantum analysis. He watched the local sun setting over the water, the clouds going pink and gold as the sky slid to indigo.
In the caves, a truckback reactor fed electricity through a snakepit of conduit and wires to assaying equipment and sensor arrays, work lights and climate-controlled habs. A dozen or more people worked there at any given time in rolling ten-hour shifts like they were running a ship. Peros walked through the place with his hands in his pockets. The smell of saltwater and local algae equivalents was rich and pungent.
Yva took his hand, pulling him toward the central chamber. “Come on. Big show is this way.” He pretended to be reluctant, but in truth his curiosity was piqued.
The stone was as tall as a man, striped gray and white with tiny flecks of red unlike the sandstone walls around it. The surface was covered in complex lines that reminded him equally of wiring diagrams and calligraphy. The lines glowed, and though they were silent, he had the sense of hearing someone speaking too softly to make out the words. Yva stood before it, her hand in his. Her eyes had hunger and excitement in them, and for a moment she reminded him of a cat he and Nadima had kept in the common house on Molos, the way the little beast would stare at a mouse hole.
“This is impressive,” he said, knowing the words were too small.
“It is,” Yva said, and then the shared moment was over.
He stayed for an hour, watching and staying out of the way. When he told Yva he was going back to the ship, she answered with a grunt, not looking up from the screens. As he rode back to the ship, the stars had come out. The galactic disk glowed, its contours slightly different as they were on every world. Peros felt a thickness in his throat and chest and wondered if he might be growing ill or having some allergic reaction to the local air.
When he got back to the ship, he took a long shower which did not relax him, drank a glass of wine that the ship generated, and put in a connection request to Nadima, expecting it to go unanswered as his previous attempts had done. This time, however, the homunculus shifted and changed. Between one moment and the next, it developed long white hair with just a bit of yellow to it as if it had once been blonde, though it had not. Her face, tiny now to fit the homunculus’s thumb-sized skull, was pale, deeply lined, and serene. She wore a dress of purple tapestry, wrapped around her shoulders, and a necklace of silver set with huge turquoise stones. Nadima had still not gone for regeneration, and the annoyance he felt at that was like hearing the name of an old friend he had almost forgotten.
She didn’t speak, and—caught between What were you thinking to do this to us? and I have taken a new lover and I miss you—he didn’t either. The homunculus tilted her head. The tiny smile seemed amused by him.
“I didn’t think you would answer,” he said.
“I almost didn’t. But you keep trying, and I thought maybe if I did this once, it would help you be free.”
“I don’t want to be free. What were you thinking, Nadi? Why are you doing this?”
She shook her head. “I had my time with you. It was good, when it was good. It was less good when it was bad. And then I was finished.”
“Oh, please. Marriage isn’t a meal. You don’t take your fill and then push your plate away. You and I are two parts of the same thing. We belong together.”
“We did,” she agreed. “But the woman you’re thinking of doesn’t exist anymore. She hasn’t for years, really. There’s only me now, and I don’t fit the same way that she did.”
He leaned over his desk, towering over the homunculus, scowling at it. “This is ridiculous. You’re not talking sense. You are going to come home when I am finished with this contract. You and I are going to counseling or something. We’ll work this out.”
Her sigh was soft and gentle, and it made him realize that wherever she was, she was not being towered over. For her, there was a homunculus that looked like him, only tiny, on her own desk. It made him feel small here as well.
“You can call back if you like,” she said. “I don’t believe I will answer, but I didn’t think I would answer this time either. Maybe I’ll surprise us both.”
Her image dissolved as he snapped “I’m seeing another woman.” He didn’t think she’d heard him. When he tried the connection again, it failed. He sat alone for a time, growing more aware of the depths to which he
had just humiliated himself. He didn’t weep, but he permitted himself to feel the sadness that had been his silent companion since the day she’d left.
Later, he made a cup of smoky tea, and set it across the table from him, watching the steam rise from it as if it might tell him something.
#
A mystery that cannot be solved and one that simply hasn’t been solved yet are difficult, if not impossible, to tell apart. We have learned a great deal from the Carrath stones, and this new one has yielded another dataset that may hold the key to deciphering all of them. Or it may not. If not, the next one—assuming there is another one found—may. Or there may be no key. The secret of the stones and their creation may require contextual knowledge we don’t have and never will.
It is possible that I have spent decades of my life on a problem I lack the ability to resolve. Even if I remain dedicated to this study—and I expect I will—I may die with a deep knowledge of trivia about the Carrath stones and no insight into the issues that brought me here. Or, maybe next time it will all line up, we will find the thing that puts all the unknowns into a formula, and I will be able to write an equation that lays bare the mysteries. Maybe I already have the information, but haven’t developed the wisdom yet to see the critical connection.
For me, for now, the Carrath stones and the alien civilization that fashioned them are a paradox. They remind me that, as we explore and travel this vast, glorious, tragic universe, we are not alone.
And also that we are.
The Wreck of the Tartarus
By Lee Murray
October 2033
Strapped in her seat, Captain Kennedy R. Jones clutched the console as the submarine rolled on the Atlantic seabed. Seaman McNaught wasn’t so lucky; flung across the control room, his skull smashed against the interior wall. The young man’s face registered an instant of surprise before it slackened and collapsed. Then Kennedy lost sight of him, the submarine still toppling, rocks and debris from the volcano battering the Tartarus’s graphene laminate exterior. The sub groaned, and Kennedy caught a whiff of burning rubber—electrical circuits—tasted blood, fear.
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