Marque of Caine

by Charles E Gannon

  Only when Caine was perfectly still and focusing carefully did he detect a very thin wire, perhaps three millimeters wide, running down from the bottom of the sphere into the emptiness beneath. Although its core was round, the wire was veined by four ridges arrayed around its circumference like the points of a compass rose. Despite the active camouflage that concealed the rest of the wire, the peak of each ridge shone like polished chrome, so fine that Riordan couldn’t really fix his eyes on the edge itself. It was just a hair-thin line of brightness.

  Riordan stood. So, the strap had not been severed by the main wire, but one of those four edges, each of which might only be a few molecules thick. Which was pretty impressive but didn’t bring him any closer to learning what held the sphere aloft.

  Caine studied it closely but to no avail. There were no visible emitters, and the sphere did not move when Riordan pushed it. Had he missed something underneath, surprised and distracted by the almost monomolecular edges he had discovered there? He lowered himself again, saw nothing new, but then realized that if the wire ran all the way down the channel, he and Anansi should have encountered it during their climb. By getting sawed in two.

  It took a full minute of careful examination to solve that mystery. The cable terminated in a perpendicular junction with another, identical cable just above the rim of the hole. Which Caine had fortunately avoided by mere centimeters when he had clambered up.

  Riordan stood, tried to see the floating sphere with fresh eyes. What if it isn’t floating at all? What if it is simply—?

  Riordan aimed his scope at the nine o’clock point of the hole’s rim, magnification set to maximum. Sure enough, almost completely invisible, a wire emerged from the midpoint of that surface and disappeared into the center of the facing side of the sphere. It took some effort to work around to vantage points that allowed him to examine the three o’clock and twelve o’clock positions of the rim, but again, he discovered similar wires.

  Which meant that the sphere was simply being held in place by four incredibly strong and almost invisible wires.

  Riordan shook his head, laughed, and as he did, the headset provided by Oduosslun crackled. As soon as he had it on, her voice asked, “Shall I tell you the true tragedy of this dead miracle?”

  “Please do.”

  “No one else remembers that this construct is here. And no one knows who built it.”

  “Do you?”

  “It is almost certainly Dornaani. A Golden Age homage to the wonders of the Times Before.”

  “So were the Elders actually able to control gravity?”

  Oduosslun appeared in the side monocle “I doubt we will ever know. At this epochal remove, it is often impossible to establish the provenance of the few fragmentary accounts we possess. So one cannot reliably distinguish between exaggeration, misperception, and invention.”

  “You said this structure is ‘almost certainly’ Dornaani. Why are you uncertain?”

  “Because the real miracle of this object—the wire—is something we Dornaani no longer know how to make. It, like the rest of the ruins around you, is yet another reminder of how far we have fallen.”

  Riordan looked out across the hills, saw hints of other forgotten objects: a series of broken stelae, some inscribed with glowing sigils, some dark. Still further, he spied the mist-cloaked phantom of a needle-shaped tower, three ghostly spheres floating in a stack directly above its point, eternally frozen in the instant preceding their impalement.

  Caine nodded. “I think I understand now why both the Collective and the Custodians are so insistent”—more like manic—“about preventing the spread of advanced technology.”

  Oduosslun raised a single emphatic and approving finger. “Yes. Because we are living examples of how socially destructive it is to routinely employ devices that you cannot build, or even imitate, yourself. That is how we Dornaani went from being rag pickers to night watchmen. We forsook becoming soldiers or explorers because we settled for being caretakers of prior races’ legacies and younger races’ futures.”

  She paused. “But, after all, that is nonsense. We could have been explorers and soldiers, both. But we chose not to be.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, despite all of our bitterness and resentment, this truth persists: it is not our nature. It is yours. Now, descend and study the sides of the channel near the base of this edifice.”

  “What will I find there?”

  “The final miracle. And the way to reach me.”

  * * *

  Riordan didn’t find the final miracle with his eyes, but his fingertips. A perfectly round three-meter section of the western side of the channel looked exactly like the rest, but had a faintly different texture: smoother, glasslike. At first, it didn’t react, but when Caine laid his palms flat against it for several seconds, the surface retracted slightly.

  A small hole appeared in its center and widened until the entire outline had become an aperture. Riordan leaned forward, inspecting its edges. Perhaps it was an iris-valve comprised of so many and such fine leaves that the mechanism could not be detected by the naked eye. But it worked, and looked, like magic. He stepped through the portal into the space beyond: a three-meter wide tube, bored into the monument’s faux rock.

  The instant Riordan’s foot crossed the threshold, a light appeared: a neon blue ring that outlined the perimeter of the far end of the tube. Riordan approached it warily, wondered if this was how a wild animal felt when approaching a human device, unable to discern if it was a trap, something useful, or simply an unfathomable object.

  The glowing blue circle was neither mounted on or emanating from the wall. It seemed to be separate: a ring of pure light that was snugged up against the black rock, close as a coat of paint. Riordan leaned forward to examine it…and smelled the ocean.

  Caine jerked back. The ocean? Here? But upon leaning forward again, he detected the same scent, as faint and fleeting as the olfactory equivalent of a ghost. Hell, was it even there, or was it just his imagination?

  Riordan leaned closer to the ring. The odor became stronger, persistent.

  Riordan took the severed strap out of his pants pocket, spooled it into a tight disk, and carefully advanced it toward the blue light.

  Just before it should have touched that bright, narrow ring, the coiled strap was pushed away, like the matching poles of opposed magnets. Except this push moved the strap toward the black surface inside the ring.

  The part of the coil that touched the rock. Riordan advanced the strap farther: the blackness continued to swallow it.

  Caine flinched back, irrationally fearful that he might lean too far forward, lose his balance, and fall into…

  …into what? A void? A hole in the fabric of time and space? A different reality?

  At the same moment that Riordan realized that the strap was still intact, he also discovered that his armpits were every bit as wet as they had been after the crocodactyl attack. But instead of heat surging along his brow, he felt a wave of cold moving out from his gut.

  This was not a confrontation with a familiar enemy; this was an encounter with the unknown. He cleared his throat. “Oduosslun, I think I’ve found that last miracle.”

  No reply.

  Which meant the journey, the test, was not over. Riordan stared at the lightless hole framed by the bright ring. To get to Elena, he had dodged assassins, fought wild animals, endured the gibes and contempt of diffident Dornaani, and damn near been killed by the octobot that was now his servant. But this? To walk into the unknown? It was the oldest, most primal fear of humankind, inculcated by eons of brutal lessons which, titrated down into their purest form, became age’s invariable advice to youth: beware the things and places you do not know. Because out there, beyond the flickering ring of the tribal fire, on the unlit streets of concrete cities, in the unending depths of space—there lay an unquantifiable, unbounded potential for death.

  Riordan breathed deep. All of that was true. But it was also
true that, out in the same darkness, lay the unseen opportunity, the untouched wonder, the undiscovered country. And although venturing there meant courting risk, or even annihilation, it was the only way that humanity had ever moved forward, beyond huddling—unwashed and fearful—in cold caves. And in that moment, Caine reheard Oduosslun’s pronouncement upon the difference between the nature—and thus, the fate—of their respective races. “We could have been explorers and soldiers, but…that is not our nature. It is yours.”

  Before he had time to reflect any further, Caine took a long step forward.

  * * *

  Riordan blinked against sudden sunlight. He smelled brine, heard surf, squinted into the glare. A few meters beyond and below his vantage point, dark blue breakers rolled in, flattening into sheets of foam that spent themselves upon a long stretch of beach.

  At his feet, a widening skirt of the structure’s black pseudo-rock sloped down sharply and disappeared beneath the sand. Riordan glanced behind: the ring of blue light was still there, but surrounded by sand. Swathes of dune grass waved behind it. Christ, is this a…a gate to another world?

  As if she had been reading his mind, Oduosslun’s voice was in his headset. “There is no danger. Walk around, if that interests you. Or return. The portal is not temporary. It is permanent.”

  Riordan frowned. “How is your signal getting through to me?”

  Her reply was almost mischievous. “I called it a miracle, did I not?”

  Riordan sat on the black fan-shaped ramp. It was too steep to descend on foot, so he slid down. As he did, he noticed that not only was the sky a cloudless cobalt blue, but the star was the same blinding yellow-white of Earth’s sun. So, he was definitely not on Aozhoodn, where the sky had hints of aquamarine and a more proximal yellow-orange sun. And yet Oduosslun’s signal was coming through what she had called “the portal.” Or getting to him some other way.

  Caine rose to his feet, dusting sand—real, honest-to-god sand—off his duty suit. White, cigar-shaped aquaforms leaped among the swells beyond the breakers, their body-length fins flaring as they did. He walked down to the edge of the surf, felt the water roll over and soak into his boots, squinted against the fine spray that coated his cheeks, his lips. The instinct to lick it away was almost too fast for his learned reflex: never let anything from an exoplanet environment into your GI tract until exobiologists have approved it.

  Except…the spray that had landed on his lips didn’t quite match the brine in the atmosphere. The ocean’s odor was exactly what he had expected: the faint sulfur funk, backed by smaller hints of iodine and a fresh-fish tang. But the miniscule misting on his lips, and particularly the smaller amount that leaked through to a few tastebuds, was nothing more than saline.

  Riordan smiled and glanced at the horizon, appreciating it one more time. “Okay, Oduosslun,” he said at last, “you can turn off the simulation.”

  The environment faded away. Riordan was in a small chamber, lying on a foamy surface that was inclined at forty-five degrees, and snugged just to one side of a round entry. This room was the other side of the black-surfaced “portal” that he had passed through. “So tell me, why do you consider this parlor trick a miracle?”

  “The simulation is not the miracle, human.”

  Riordan reflected, discovered his oversight, smiled again. “No, of course not. It’s the transition that’s the miracle, the fact that I believed I had walked through some kind of telelocating portal. How did you do it?”

  Oduosslun’s tone had reverted to its default: dismissive. “Firstly, the illusion was no more my handiwork than the monument in which it is housed. But to answer your query…” Deeper in the small chamber, a hologram shimmered into existence: it was Riordan himself, leaning toward the black portal, the coiled strap halfway through the bright blue ring. But from this perspective, the entirety of the strap was visible.

  Riordan’s smile widened as he remembered the entry into Alnduul’s hidden facility on Rooaioo’q. “So, the side of the ‘portal’ I was facing is lined with your light absorption materials.”

  “So you are already familiar with that technology? Interesting. However, this is a far more powerful version than the limited versions we build today.”

  “Another product of your Golden Age?”

  “Yes. And by the time you passed through and entered this room, your mind was linked to virtuality.”

  “That fast? And without physical contact?”

  “Physical contact is unnecessary if the virtuality equipment is sufficiently sophisticated and the brain and mental patterns of the subject are fully mapped beforehand.”

  Riordan glanced at the tube from which he’d entered. “And you were able to do that while I was dawdling on the threshold.”

  “Yes. There are thousands of the remote mapping sensors embedded in the entry tube’s walls, and its shape is optimal shape for such scans. However, keeping the subject immersed requires that they lie down without being aware of doing so. If they were to remain standing, they would ultimately become aware of muscle fatigue or the need to actively maintain balance.”

  Riordan glanced at the inclined surface upon which he had been resting. “That’s why you put in the black stone ramp leading to the beach. By sliding down to the beach, I voluntarily initiated the process of putting myself into that resting position within the sim.” Riordan rose and exited the virtuality chamber. “Still, I don’t believe this is the final miracle.”

  “No?” Oduosslun sounded simultaneously irritated and…hopeful?

  “No. The final miracle is that these trompe-l’oeils were made at all. The final miracle is the social phenomena that built them, that has shaped your species’ culture. You spent so much time living among and using the actual artifacts that you became obsessed with imitating them. Or, in the end, just creating the illusion of them.”

  “An acceptable insight. I wonder if humans can generalize from that insight, to appreciate the very different forces shaping you, albeit toward radically different ends.”

  Yeah, that would be great, but first, Elena. “So now—?”

  “Now we shall meet.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Back in the downport.”

  Oh fer Chrissakes…

  “You should depart immediately. You are modestly intriguing but if I am granted access to the special research equipment before you arrive, I shall not wait.”

  By the time the carrier wave hissed out of existence, Riordan had already swapped his circlet for the headset and was loading his gear back on Anansi. “Circlet, establish commlink to Olsloov.”

  “Expediting. Link established.”

  “Alnduul?”

  “We have been awaiting your contact, Caine Riordan. Have you completed Oduosslun’s tasks?”

  “I have. But now I need to meet her. Back in the downport. And the clock is ticking.”

  “That is most irritating. How may we assist?”

  “The only way to cut travel time is to keep moving. Nonstop.”

  “Through the night, without sleeping?”

  “Yes, through the night. But not without sleeping.”

  “How do you propose to direct the octobot while you sleep?”

  “I don’t. But given the quality of your remote control from orbit, I can strap myself to the cargo bed and sleep while you do the nighttime driving.”

  “It is a strange plan, Caine Riordan.” A pause. “But then again, so many of yours are. I recommend you start back at once. It will take us some time to calibrate the controls.”

  Chapter Forty-Three

  JUNE 2124

  AOZHOODN, SIGMA 2 URSA MAJORIS 2 B

  In a crowning—and perhaps intentionally malign—irony, the entry to Oduosslun’s urban residence was through a hidden passage in the traveler’s hostel where Riordan had spent his first nights on Aozhoodn.

  Ushered into a subterranean level by two proxrovs and a swarm of flying eyebots, Riordan noted stark distinctions between this
retreat and Uinzleej’s. The aesthetic was minimalist, and if there was any dust or rust, Riordan was unable to detect it. After three days of nonstop return travel, he was by far the dirtiest object in the facility.

  He was led into a sparsely furnished room as another bot arrived and offered him water and what looked and smelled like a ham sandwich. He hastily consumed both and leaned back in a comfortable human chair to wait.

  He awoke with a start when Oduosslun entered. Her long strides were incongruous for her species. “I require the genetic sample I stipulated during our first exchange,” she announced without preamble.

  Riordan checked his wristlink, discovered an hour had passed, frowned. “What about my memories from Issqliin?”

  “Those were recorded as you slept.”

  So the refreshments hasn’t been simple hospitality, after all. Hell, why did I expect any different? “In case you are unaware, humans get upset when you drug their food and drink.”

  “I am aware. I am also aware, as you are not, that had I announced my intentions, you would have been in a heightened state of anxiety and watchfulness. That interferes with the depth of sleep required for a clean and useable recording of your memories. Now, the genetic sample.”

  You arrogant bastards. Always ready to justify every violation of privacy. I have half a mind to—but no. Elena. Remember Elena.

  Another robot entered, bristling with what looked like medical implements. Riordan extended his arm silently. One of the instruments grazed across his cheek, then his arm, then stopped, poised over his thigh. Without warning, it shot a hair-thin needle down through his pant leg, retracted it just as swiftly.

  Riordan jumped. “What the hell was that?”

  “Stem cell sample from your femur.”

  “You just took a bone sample?” Riordan’s anger gave way to surprise at how little it had hurt.

  “The osteoid materials are of no interest, but stem cells offer subtle genetic data absent in other tissues. The extraction site may be tender for two days, but there is no cause for concern. The aperture in the bone has been resealed. I shall now address your queries regarding Virtua.