“Enough Establishment rhetoric,” Maggs said.
Valk turned to stare at him—at least, Maggs assumed that was what he was doing. Faceless bastard.
“Why attack Niraya, though? If they had what they needed out here on Aruna, why send that lander to kill the farmers?”
“If this is new technology the polys have created,” Zhang pointed out, “maybe they sent it here to test it.”
Proserpina threw her hands up and shouted, “Enough! If you can stop hypothesizing for a second, I have more to say. You dragged me all the way out here; the least you can do is actually hear me out.”
“Sure,” Lanoe told her. The others nodded. Maggs gave her one of the warmer smiles in his stock.
“Thank you,” she said. She bent over the controls of the display and brought up some new images. Tomographic cross sections and millimeter-wave deep scans of the machinery they’d found in the factory.
“Everywhere we went in the crater, I could figure out what this stuff did pretty easily. Nothing here was designed to be pretty, or user-friendly, or anything like that. It’s basic machinery, designed to work and nothing else. That made it easy for me to see exactly what everything did, and how it was done. Except there were a couple of places where I looked at a machine and it was just…wrong.”
“Wrong how?” Zhang asked.
“I don’t want to get technical here, but there are some basic principles of engineering, some really bedrock stuff, that don’t appear anywhere in the crater. No wheels, for instance.”
“What do you mean?” Lanoe asked her.
“I mean nothing in this crater has wheels. It all has legs instead. Here.” She adjusted the display. “You see this line, this was a main route from the pit mine to the nearest smelter. All the ore they dug up had to be carried along this line. It’s a road, a good, flat, gently graded road that makes perfect sense. But there are no trucks on that road, no trains. Every piece of ore was carried from pit to smelter by a worker with a bunch of legs. That makes no sense. It shows up in the factory, too. There’s no assembly line in there, because that would mean conveyor belts, and a conveyor belt is just a fancy application of the wheel.”
“I don’t understand,” Zhang said.
“Whoever designed this facility,” Proserpina told them, “didn’t want to use wheels. Or didn’t know how.”
The pilots stared at each other, and it was clear to Maggs they weren’t getting it.
He’d already twigged to where this was going, though.
And he quietly, if secretly, approved.
“The funny thing is, there are rotary elements all over the place. Centrifuges, pulleys, lots of things. But no wheels at all. Just legs.”
Lanoe nodded. “That does seem strange,” he said.
Proserpina sighed. “Look. If this is the polys…there had to be some human involved, somewhere. The machines build the machines all the way down, fine, but there had to be a prime mover, a human engineer who designed the first machine. And I guarantee that engineer would know about wheels. This only makes sense if that first engineer had no idea what a wheel was, like maybe they grew up in space or they evolved on an ocean planet or a gas giant with no surface—”
“You’re saying the machines weren’t designed by a poly engineer,” Zhang said, very carefully.
“I’m saying they weren’t designed by a human engineer,” Proserpina replied. Clearly she knew she was fighting an uphill battle. Her stance changed, her shoulders coming forward, her head back. As if to fend off a blow.
She let them all stand—or recline, in Maggs’s case—there in silence while the import of her words sank in.
“It’s time,” she said, eventually, “to talk very seriously about aliens.”
It was cold in the dome at the base of the Retreat. The air didn’t move but it sucked the heat right out of him. The flagstones were hard on his knees where he knelt on the floor.
Thom had never prayed. His father had thought religion was for the feeble-minded, and Thom had grown up thinking only the things of the material world mattered. He didn’t pray now, either, but instead he turned his thoughts toward Lanoe, so far away.
I’ve let you down. You risked so much to save me, he thought. You shouldn’t have. You should have let me die in Geryon. Rather than just delaying the inevitable.
Warm hands on his shoulders. A soft voice in his ear calling his name. He lifted his head and looked behind him and Roan was there. He could see in her face that she was worried for him, that she could see how much he hurt.
She knelt down beside him. “The first elders, the pioneers who were the first people to live on Niraya, all lived inside this dome,” she said, as if she were a tour guide filling him in on local folklore. He didn’t mind. It was a break from being stuck with his own dark thoughts. “There was no breathable air outside at all. They lived in here with some animals and a lot of plants. They studied and meditated and worked tirelessly. They died in here.”
“They were that desperate to get away from the rest of humanity?” he asked.
“They believed,” she said. “They believed that this planet could mean something. Look up.”
The dome itself was made of steel girders framing hundreds of triangular panels, each a meter or so on a side. “That used to be glass up there,” Roan said. The panels between the supports had been plastered over long since. Each section had been painted, though each one, it seemed, in a different style or color palette. A few of them were blank. “Every time an aspirant becomes an elder,” Roan said, her voice hushed with reverence, “they paint one of those.”
Thom studied the panels, though there were so many and they were all so different none of them really stood out. He saw one that showed a figure in an old-fashioned baggy space suit standing at the rim of a canyon. Another was a pattern of concentric circles, each densely figured with the shapes of tiny human embryos. Some were just swatches of color, deep rich blues or simple, pure yellows.
“Look, do you see that one? It’s always been one of my favorites,” she told him. He followed her finger to see where she was pointing. The panel was barely touched, its plaster unpainted except that in the middle of the space, in simple lettering, was written the legend IT WILL BE GREEN.
“You’re going to paint one of those, someday,” he told her.
But she shook off his assumption. “Not every aspirant makes it to elderhood. It’s a hard road and it’s not for everybody.” She looked more wistful than disheartened by the prospect. “I’ve been studying to be a planetary engineer,” she told him. “I’ve learned all about how you can change a planet, change its chemistry at the most basic levels, to make it more livable. How you can drop comets on a planet to give it more water, and what plants are best for generating oxygen. I always knew, though, that no matter how hard I worked or how much of my life I gave to it, I wouldn’t live to see Niraya turn green. The elder who painted that panel,” she said, “knew the same thing. But he or she kept working. They kept working because they believed in the future.”
He reached over and took her hand. She stared down at it for a moment, and he saw her mouth fall, saw her shoulders slump. He thought maybe she was going to pull away. He was—attracted to her. Maybe that was the wrong word for it. He was drawn to her. She was his only friend on this planet, the only person who’d shown him any sympathy. Of course he was going to develop feelings for her.
That didn’t mean she would feel the same way, though. It didn’t mean she would feel anything. He loosened his fingers, in case she wanted to pull her hand back. She didn’t, though. She just left her hand in his, let it be.
He drew so much comfort from the touch, so much peace. He almost didn’t want to break the spell and end that moment. He had to tell her something, though. Truth was important to her. Honesty. He had to tell her what he’d discovered.
“Elder McRae thinks Lanoe will fail,” Thom said.
Roan nodded. “I heard the two of you talking. I know you dis
agree with her, though.”
Thom wasn’t sure if that was true, anymore, but he said nothing.
“Can I show you something?” she asked.
“Aliens,” Lanoe said.
Maggs considered himself a bit of an expert of reading people. He had made quite the study of the way a person’s tone of voice could give them away, even when they said the most mundane of things.
In this case, he determined that Lanoe a) had dismissed the idea before as not worth thinking about; b) was now still very uncomfortable with the idea; and c) very much wanted someone else to scoff at the idea and tell him it was nonsense. From which one could draw the inescapable conclusion that he d) was starting to believe it.
Normally Maggs would have been happy to squash the idea. It was after all preposterous—when the smoke cleared, it would be revealed that this was all some new black project run by the polys, that there was a perfectly logical solution without the need for resorting to fairy tales and the supernatural.
Just then, however, Lanoe believing in little gray men served his purpose.
So he stayed quiet.
After all, there were others more than willing to speak.
“I’ve spent my whole life thinking we were alone in the universe,” Zhang said. “I don’t know—”
“Just because we haven’t met any aliens before doesn’t mean there aren’t any,” Valk pointed out. “We’ve settled less than a hundred planets, right? How many planets are there in the galaxy? Billions? We could easily have just missed finding them before a dozen times.”
“I get that,” Zhang replied. “Sure. It’s a big galaxy. But if there are aliens, whole space-faring cultures of them out there—maybe we wouldn’t have met them in person by now, but surely we would have heard something. Some radio signal, some video broadcast of a situation comedy starring a guy with four eyes and two heads. Some chatter between their ships…anything.”
“Maybe we just don’t communicate the same way they do,” Valk pointed out. “Look at this bunch. We’ve been trying to contact them by radio ever since the first lander put down on Niraya, and nothing. Not a word from them. Maybe we’ve just been trying the wrong way—maybe they communicate by telepathy instead of talking. Or maybe they communicate with smells, or radioactivity, or—”
“Stop, both of you,” Proserpina said. “Just listen to me for a second. Let’s say they are aliens. What does that mean?”
“It would mean we have no idea how to fight them,” Maggs put in. “And let’s be honest, that’s exactly what we’ve seen so far. Valk nearly got killed using the wrong ammunition against them. Lanoe and Zhang thought they were fighting antivehicle guns that turned out to be smelters. All of our training is in how to fight other humans.”
“We’ve done all right so far,” Lanoe said. “Valk took out that interceptor. We smashed this place just fine.”
Maggs shrugged. Best not to overplay his hand.
“You wanted me to build you some guns,” Proserpina said. “Rail guns. Auster—M. Maggs, I mean—showed me the schematics. Do you know if those will even work against alien ships?”
“No,” Lanoe admitted. “Though it seems likely. This bunch don’t have the wheel, you said. They don’t seem to have vector fields, either. You said their technology was all cheap and disposable. I’m guessing that doesn’t line up with being immune to rail-gun shot.” He looked around at his pilots. “Aliens. Sure. We’ll run with that thought for now, until it gets proved wrong. That just means we need to keep our eyes and our brains open. We need to learn some new tactics. M. Derrow, I want to hear your thinking about that.”
“Me?” Proserpina asked. “I don’t know anything about fighting.”
“You’ve got a better idea than any of us what the enemy’s made of,” Lanoe told her. “If there’s a weakness there, something we can exploit…anything, I want to hear about it.”
She sat down for a while to think. The others kept silent, as if they didn’t want to disturb her mental processes.
“Well,” she said, finally, “there’s the fact that all we’ve seen is drones.”
“Go on,” Lanoe said.
“Like I said earlier. You can’t just let drones do their own thinking. They’re not smart enough to know when they’ve got something wrong. Say—just as an example—say you have a drone and its job is to clean a certain stretch of hallway. It’s very good at it, it gets every little speck of dust, disinfects all the doorknobs, picks up any trash. But it’s only as good as the person who programmed it. If that person made a mistake, or just left something out, the drone will eventually screw up. It’ll clean the floor so hard it wears a hole through it. Or it’ll pick up what it thinks is trash but is actually somebody’s pet dog.”
Zhang, at least, laughed at the thought.
“Because, see, it doesn’t know any better. The programmer didn’t tell it that a dog isn’t trash. Or that the purpose of a floor is to not have holes in it. So when the drone does something unexpected like that, the programmer has to come in and fix the program. Refine the instructions. The drones here on Aruna achieved something amazing, all on their own—they built a factory to make more drones. That’s great programming. But if there was a zero somewhere in that programming that should have been a one, somebody conscious and self-aware will need to come fix it.”
“An alien,” Valk said. “One of the aliens needs to be close by to make sure the drones stay on-task.”
Proserpina nodded. “It makes sense to send drones in to do your fighting for you, I mean, we all know how that goes wrong, but from one perspective it makes a lot of sense. You don’t have to endanger yourself. You don’t have to feel guilty if some of your drones get destroyed. You’d need to be close by, though, just in case.”
“So what’s your suggestion?”
She waved her hands in the air. “Look, I’m no fighter, I said that. But I think I understand that programmer, a little. I understand that they chose to send drones instead of doing their fighting themselves. So my suggestion is that you find the programmer. You find them and threaten them and I bet they would surrender on the spot. They’re willing to throw away countless drones, but not themselves.”
Lanoe nodded. “Sure. And I bet I know where they are.”
“The carrier,” Zhang said. “That really big ship we saw in the space telescope imagery. That’s why it hangs back, at the rear of the fleet. And why it’s different from all the other ships.”
“That’s where I’d want to be, if I was soft and squishy and all my troops were robots,” Valk said.
“A wonderful analysis, Proserpina. Of course,” Maggs said, “we’d have to find a way to get to that carrier. Through all the line ships and fighter escorts and whatnot. With just four of us.”
“I never said it would be easy,” Lanoe replied.
Roan signed out a ground car and drove them to the far edge of the town, to where a long ramp led up through a lava tube and through the wall of the crater. It was dark inside the tube, the car’s lights illuminating the road ahead of them only a little ways. In the gloom she and Thom glanced at each other. Neither of them said anything.
They emerged into dazzling sunlight on a plateau just below the crater’s rim. He could see for kilometers in every direction—he saw the labyrinth of twisty canyons that covered most of Niraya’s surface, and realized he’d never been out there before, out where the air was too thin to breathe and people were few and far between. Strange to think that there was an entire planet beyond the little town. A whole world.
Roads headed off in various directions—to the mining concern in its other crater, kilometers away. Toward farms in distant, deep canyons. A narrow track, barely a path smoothed through the rock, led north, and it was this way Roan took.
The path headed down into canyons, walls of rock soaring up over them. It was all slickrock, solid stone carved by wind, except for the occasional tiny patch of dusty yellow plant life. Nothing stirred among the fallen scree of boul
ders and broken rocks—there were no animals out here at all.
Occasionally the walls of the canyon would come together in a dramatic arch that made the sun flicker as they sped by underneath. Roan pointed out her window once and he saw a place where the rock had weathered down to a cluster of hexagonal columns, shiny and smooth as glass, like the pipes of a church organ. Mostly Thom was only aware of the silence, of the incredible hushed feeling of Niraya, as if the entire planet were holding its breath. The ground car’s engine made almost no sound at all, and the air was too thin for any more than a puff of wind. If Roan hadn’t been sitting next to him, bouncing around in her seat as the big balloon tires took the rough terrain, Thom might have panicked, alone as he was in that desolate place. As it was he just felt like the two of them were the last two people in the universe.
The canyon floor started to rise through a series of long switchbacks. The walls on either side receded and they came up onto another flat stretch of land, a scratched-up plain of rock and sunlight. Roan drove another kilometer or so until Thom saw a long, low mesa climb over the horizon.
She switched off the engine and coasted to a stop. He couldn’t see why she’d chosen this particular place to end their journey, but he didn’t protest. She reached across him and opened a compartment in the dashboard. Taking out two respirator masks, she put one over her face, then showed him how to do the same. “We’re walking from here,” she said.
The ground car’s cabin had been pressurized. When they stepped down onto the naked rock, the air pressure was so low that Thom felt his skin tighten as his pores closed, a natural response to the lack of air. The respirator sprayed water across his nostrils so they wouldn’t dry out and crack.
“Be careful where you step,” she told him. Then she set off at a quick pace, walking toward the mesa. Thom followed after her, watching her weave around a patch of ground that was slightly bluer than the rest. Ahead the rock was speckled with bright yellow and deep black.
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