Stranger Suns

by George Zebrowski

  Rassmussen sighed. “It'll be a long time before we understand what we've seen here.”

  “Perhaps not,” Malachi said. “If we can grasp even one small detail, then our understanding may grow explosively. All this may be no more than a century or two beyond us. Remember, even simple principles look like magic when you don't understand the application.”

  Rassmussen laughed. “There's nothing simple behind these doorways!” His tall, gray-haired figure seemed frail in the antiseptic light of the chamber.

  “But who were they?” Lena asked. “They seem to belong to another line of intelligent bipeds. To think they were advanced when we were still primitives.”

  “We're not all that backward,” Malachi said. “Each of us can imagine how the lock and doors might work.”

  The older man shook his head sadly. “Imagine is the word. We couldn't build one of these doors, yet it was probably only work for one of their tradesmen, who might have installed it without knowing the theory behind it. The principle behind these doors could solve the world's material problems in one stroke.”

  “Listen!” Lena said.

  The floor trembled, then shook, pitching Juan into the pile of bones.

  4. TRAPPED

  A crazed choreographer was trying to shake the skeletons on the floor into a jittery dance. Juan stood up, but fell back into the trembling bones. A skull seemed to grimace at him as it rolled away.

  “Stay down!” Malachi shouted.

  The shaking stopped, as if someone had thrown a switch. Juan got to his knees. Lena offered him her hand. “Thanks,” he said as he took it and pulled himself up. Malachi helped Magnus to his feet.

  “Let's get out of here while we can,” Lena said.

  They lined up at the door. Juan waited as they went through the glow, then slipped after them into the passage. They hurried up the passageway. The floor trembled, and there was a distant rumbling. Juan realized that they might not cover the two kilometers to the lock in time to get out.

  “Hurry!” he shouted, quickening his pace to take the lead.

  “Should we drop our packs?” Lena asked.

  “Not yet,” he called back.

  They force-marched in silence for the next twenty minutes. Juan glanced back at his companions and saw that each was keeping up, despite the extra weight.

  Finally, they reached the drop tube. Juan slowed down and slipped out of his pack as they went past. He was gasping and sweating heavily. Zero-g had taken a lot of his strength. Malachi came up at his side and tried to help him along.

  “I can do it,” Juan said, pulling away.

  The trembling started again as they reached the lock. Juan triggered the inner door. They hurried inside and collapsed on the floor.

  “Everyone all right?” Juan asked after a few minutes.

  “Yes,” Lena replied, catching her breath.

  Rassmussen nodded as he lay on his side. Malachi got to his feet and confronted the spot where the outer door had appeared. It glowed red and revealed a wall of ice.

  “It might not be very thick,” Malachi said. He stepped forward and pushed with both hands, with no result. “Did we have a digging tool in our packs?” he asked as he backed away and the door glowed shut.

  “I'll go,” Rassmussen said, moving toward the inner door. It glowed open and he hurried down the spiral.

  “I expect,” Malachi said, “that Titus will assume we're still in here.”

  Juan sat up and looked at Lena. She seemed nervous but in control of herself as she gazed back at him.

  The inner door glowed after a few minutes and Rassmussen came in. “We're in luck. A collapsible spade in each pack.”

  Malachi took one, snapped open the handle, and faced the outer lock again. It glowed open and he struck the ice. “Useless,” he said after two more tries. “Too hard for these implements.” The exit glowed shut as he backed away.

  “We'll wait,” Juan said.

  Rassmussen dropped the other spades. “It could be a few hours, or a week.”

  Juan nodded. “We have supplies for that long. Summet's equipped to reach us.”

  Malachi said, “True, but what if this place has slipped, and this exit can't be found?”

  “What else can we do?” Juan answered, getting up.

  Rassmussen cleared his throat and said, “I suggest we use the time we have here to explore a few of the chambers along the passage.”

  “Good idea,” Malachi replied.

  * * *

  Juan paused before the chamber he had chosen. At his right, near the bend of the passageway, the small figure of Malachi slipped into the wall. Magnus and Lena had selected chambers farther down.

  Juan triggered the red glow and stepped into darkness.

  As his eyes adjusted, a scattering of blue lights appeared overhead, casting a hazy light throughout the chamber. A dozen casketlike objects formed a rectangle on the floor in front of him. He went to the left corner box and touched the opaque surface. There was no sign of a lid.

  He stepped into the center of the rectangle and looked around. The gloom made him shiver, despite his parka. A surprise party, he thought. At any moment the casket lids would fly open and well-wishers would rise to toast his health.

  As he gazed at the strange shapes, he realized that he couldn't even begin to guess what they were. He wondered again if the builders had perished. Surely they would have shown themselves by now if they still existed. Disease was too simple an explanation for their absence; their knowledge seemed to preclude such an end. Suicide? The skeletons might belong to individuals of another species, who had wandered in and died. But why were their bones piled up?

  The place irritated him, because he knew that he would never be able to set it aside and go back to his own work. What they had seen would change human life forever, if the technology were understood and mastered. The world he had known would come to an end.

  “Hello!” he shouted, and listened to his echo. “Who are you? Are you still here?”

  He smiled at his own childishness. Enigmas, like deities, never responded to entreaties.

  * * *

  Lena tensed as she passed through the glowing door. What if it froze up around her? She hurried through—

  —into a bare room filled with white light.

  The walls curved like lenses, waiting to magnify fearful depths. The chamber's stillness seemed to hold a distant whisper.

  She sat down on the smooth, glassy floor, wondering if she was in some asylum. The room seemed to tease her, and she remembered a young girl's first fascination with the sciences. Exhausting wearisome whys had driven her life. Norway's midnight sun had been one of the first childhood mysteries to fall—a simple matter of tilting the world. That sun, hanging over snow-capped mountains, remained for her the image of clear thought. However glacierlike its application to human life, the patient accumulation of knowledge could save a world.

  Her mother had been a more difficult mystery. A brooding woman, she had abandoned her husband and returned to her own country with her infant daughter. All that Lena knew of her father was that he had remained in the Balkans and had become something of a political figure during the 1990s, the so-called “era of new understanding.” He had never been part of her life, apparently content to forget his daughter.

  As she grew up, Lena had feared that she might be to blame for her parents' estrangement. The suspicion tormented her, until she confronted her mother. Her father had married another woman, she had been told. “My leaving him had nothing to do with you,” her mother had insisted. “It would have happened anyway. At least I had you. I'm grateful that he gave me a child.”

  So that mystery had been solved—but another had replaced it: How could love become indifference? Few scientific answers were as various and unsatisfying as the answers to that question. A succession of new loves gave one the illusion of youth, for a time. Clearly, the physical limits of the body, especially its short lifespan, were no match for the mind, who
se imagination soared, demanding what the body could not give. She had resolved to help break the forces of decay, and calm some of the outrage at existence that wounded the human heart. Her hopes had not been fulfilled. Humanity lived with little concern for individuals, unconsciously content with the illusory immortality of the species. Here and there, privileged individuals grasped at longer life. Their power and money supported the knowledge seekers.

  I'm a fifth-rate magician, she told herself as she looked around the room. It was difficult to guess its size. She stood up and gazed into the variable curves of the lenslike walls. They seemed to grow in complexity, suggesting biological infrastructures. Sparks shot behind the surfaces, as if a school of silvery fish were navigating inner twists.

  She moved forward and the chamber seemed to expand. She stopped and listened, imagining that she was expected to speak, and that she would be carried into the spaces between the stars.

  She turned her head and saw a great blue eye staring at her from inside a facet. The eye blinked. She stepped back and it grew smaller, and she saw that the face to which it belonged was her own.

  * * *

  Malachi stood in an orange room. Hundreds of containerlike objects crowded the large floor. The far wall was bare, but the one at his right was covered with shelves. Hundreds of small square boxes sat on them.

  He was annoyed; it all seemed to be just beyond his understanding. He went over to a large rectangular container and tried to lift what seemed to be the lid, but could not move it.

  They knew I was coming, he thought, so they sealed the covers.

  * * *

  Magnus stared at the wall of square cubbyholes. It seemed to defy him to guess its purpose. He almost laughed as he turned away.

  The rest of the blue room was empty, except for six tablelike protuberances in the center, set low enough to sit around. He pictured a corkscrew of chambers stuck in the ice, with everything in them made to be deliberately puzzling or meaningless; access to each chamber was through an elegant dissolving doorway, designed to boast; or so it seemed to an envious savage.

  Irritated as much by his own reaction as by the contents of the room, he turned and approached the exit. It glowed obediently. He went forward—

  —and gasped as a vise closed around him.

  He could see into the passage. His heart raced. He tried to move, but the door held him.

  * * *

  “Help!” a voice shouted as Juan slipped out into the passage. He looked to his right, saw Magnus's hand clawing the air, and rushed to him.

  The older man's face gazed out from the substance of the doorway, his right hand straining to push through. “Don't touch me—it might be dangerous.” The door seemed plastic, ready to flow. The embedded face was a mask; only the quick movement of the eyes showed its fear.

  Lena and Malachi came around the turn. “Over here!” Juan shouted. They ran up the passage.

  “Oh, no!” Lena said.

  “Is it cutting into you?” Malachi asked.

  Magnus blinked. “No, but it's tight.”

  Juan imagined food and water being brought to him as the world's finest minds studied the jammed portal. He would discuss his plight with them as nurses bathed his face and brushed his teeth after meals. Endless rescuers would aspire to pull the new Merlin from the stone.

  “Juan,” Lena said softly, “he can't last long with so much of his body enclosed.”

  Magnus tried to smile. “So the technology isn't as perfect as it looks. . . old, malfunctioning.” He formed his words with difficulty.

  “Are you in pain?” Lena asked.

  He moved his hand. “Can't feel it.”

  Juan tried to think.

  “You may not be able to free me,” Magnus said.

  “We'll get you out,” Lena said.

  The floor trembled, as if offering a comment. Juan took a deep breath. He stepped forward and began to touch the portal.

  “No!” Magnus shouted.

  The surface was strange, hard and slightly warm. It glowed suddenly, and Magnus stumbled into his arms.

  “I suspected it would trigger,” Juan said, holding him up. Magnus was sweating heavily in his parka, but smiled.

  “Can you stand?” Juan asked as Lena massaged his limp right hand.

  He nodded, breathing more evenly. “Unfortunately, we're cut off from that room.”

  “So the door sticks a bit,” Juan said, letting him go. “What's in there?”

  “I'm not sure.”

  “We had no trouble with the ones we tried,” Malachi said.

  “Look!” Lena shouted. The portal was glowing.

  “Maybe we're triggering it,” Juan said.

  They stepped back. It darkened, reddened again, then faded to normal.

  Magnus smiled and rubbed the back of his neck. “It's as if it were resetting itself.”

  Juan stepped forward. The opening glowed, then died as he moved back.

  “It may never happen again,” Magnus said.

  “Why did it happen?” Lena asked.

  “A quantum accident of some kind, perhaps,” Magnus said.

  The floor trembled, then shook. They threw out their arms for balance. It stopped suddenly.

  “We must get back,” Lena said. “They may have dug through by now.”

  The floor trembled again as they went up the passage.

  5. ICELOCK

  The ice pitched and the floodlights flickered. Summet lay flat at the rim of the pit as the dome pushed up. Men were strewn below, crying out and rolling to avoid the cracks. One power digger was on its side, pinning two figures.

  “Get some lines down here!” he shouted as he got up.

  “Get back!” Florman shouted at his right. A crack ran between them and toppled one of the huts. The dry, frigid air crackled with static electricity. Summet saw that the dome was large enough to send all the huts, copters, and machinery rolling away as it rose through the ice. He turned and followed Florman. The blue-white glare cast a strange daylight over the ice. Men moved like penguins toward the distant copters.

  Black cracks radiated from the pit. Summet resisted the urge to drop flat and wait for the trembling to stop. He covered the last hundred meters and Florman pulled him up into the open bay. As the copter lifted, Summet looked back and was appalled at the size of the dome breaking through the ice. The floodlights died as cables snapped.

  “From the curvature,” Dovzhenko said in his clipped English, “it might be more than two kilometers across fully exposed.”

  The blue glow of the dome suggested the play of vast energies. Dovzhenko leaned over and slid the door shut. Summet peered through the small window. All the copters were in the air, beams sweeping the ice for survivors.

  Summet opened the door a crack. The glowing dome had stopped rising. “Obrion's team may still be able to get out,” he said. “The entrance area is exposed now, and the curve's shallow enough for them to reach the ice.”

  “They may be dead,” Dovzhenko said, sounding as if it might be an appropriate punishment.

  “Don't underestimate them, Ivan,” Summet said. The Russian's relentless arrogance had grated on him ever since their first meeting more than a year ago. “We'll land and wait.”

  “What pushed it up?” Florman asked.

  “It seems to be doing that by itself,” Dovzhenko replied.

  Summet saw two copters touch down on the far side of the dome. They were at least two kilometers away, yet clearly visible in the strange light. Dovzhenko handed him a pair of binoculars.

  The dome's blue glow was bright in the glasses as Summet scanned the surface. There was no sign of the entrance.

  Slowly, the copter descended and touched down. Summet felt a low rumble in his guts. “Florman, tell the pilot to leave for base if the quake starts again.” As the engineer stood up and made his way forward, Summet peered through his glasses again, hoping to see Obrion's team.

  “Are they coming out?” Dovzhenko asked.


  The copter shook violently, and the pilot took it up. Summet saw the black cracks stabbing across the bright zone of ice. He shifted his glasses back to the dome.

  “Fuel is limited,” Dovzhenko said. “We must start back to Base One in fifteen minutes.”

  “It's coming up again!” Summet pulled the door open halfway.

  The dome raised the ice around it into a ragged wall. Sections began to collapse.

  “It's at least three kilometers across,” Summet said, still peering through the glasses. The dome was rotating. Ice thundered as it fell, echoing through the dark valley. The air was fall of static. The dome's blue glow brightened into silver. A shimmering field enclosed its skin as the massive globe lifted itself free. Tons of ice fell from the sphere as it hovered, then jerked upward, pulling a train of ice and snow after itself.

  He followed the sphere as it climbed the night, blotting out the stars with its glow. The roar continued from below, where the ice was collapsing into the hole. The sphere shrank to a silver point and disappeared. Summet scanned the sky until his eyes adjusted and stars reappeared in their stately march around the pole.

  “Back to base,” he said to Dovzhenko, looking back at the hole in the ice, where a luminous cloud of steam was belching up into the darkness. “Will anyone believe this?”

  “The question,” Dovzhenko replied, “is whether we could have prevented it.”

  “What do you mean?” Summet demanded, handing him his binoculars.

  “We may ask if Obrion's team was responsible for this happening.”

  “I very much doubt that.”

  “We may never know,” Dovzhenko said, “since most of the evidence is lost. But they should not have been permitted to remain in the vessel. You are responsible.”

  Summet sighed. “Okay, Ivan. Work your tricks. You can have my job—if they'll give it to you.”

  * * *

  The shaking stopped. They were all still on their feet.

  Juan looked at Lena. “Hear that?” she asked nervously, eyes wide.

  “No.”

  “High frequency. I can just pick it up.” She darted across the passage. “It's coming from this portal.”