Wasteland of flint ittotss-1

by Thomas Harlan

Magdalena's ears flattened back, and her eyes narrowed to pale, golden slits. "Ya-ha, hunt-sister, they would indeed. Well, I know a little about the main array and a little about these dragonflies — the transponder has only a short range, but if we knew exactly where to look, we could open a direct comm channel to Russovsky's aircraft."

  "If we knew where to look. Big planet down there." Gretchen felt disgruntled. "Can we search the surface visually? Slave some kind of camera to the comp and tell it to look for the outline of a Midge in flight?"

  "Hrmph. Perhaps." Magdalena scrunched up her nose. "I'll see if we can do that."

  "Good." Gretchen got up and pulled on a pair of mittens from her pocket. "How's Isoroku coming with the heaters?"

  "Is it still cold?" Maggie's tongue poked out between her teeth, then coughed merrily at the human's disgusted expression. Her breath frosted in the air. "You should have a nice thick fur coat, like me."

  "Fine," Gretchen grumbled. "I'll go play with my toys, then. You just find our missing scientist."

  Hadeishi grinned, though he was entirely comfortable in his shipsuit, sitting on the climate-controlled bridge of a modern warship. Anderssen- tzin hasn't lost her sense of humor yet. Still… He remembered being constantly cold more than once himself. And wet. He tapped open a channel to his wayward engineer.

  "Hai?" The old bull's voice was aggrieved and distant. Metallic clanking and spitting sounds nearly drowned out his voice. "Yes, Captain?"

  "What's your environmental situation?" Hadeishi didn't bother to hide his amusement.

  "Cold and dark," Isoroku grunted. "We have power, but most of the heaters and lights are still down because we have no power conduit in place."

  "Do you need more help?"

  There was a short silence. Then the engineer ventured to ask: "Is the quarantine lifted, Hadeishi-san?"

  "No," Hadeishi replied, sighing in disgust. Regulations required another week of isolation for the Palenque, and then a week's medical review for any returning crew. Any engineer's mate he sent across to the civilian ship would be lost to him for two weeks, and he was already shorthanded with Isoroku gone. "No, it's not been lifted. How about supplies? Do we have conduit we can spare ourselves?"

  "Yes." Now Isoroku's voice changed and became wary. "We're pulling spares out of cargo storage here — most of the expedition supplies still in storage survived the attack because they were sealed in cargo pods — there should be enough to serve."

  Hadeishi understood the engineer's decision. No fleet officer is going to spend his hard-won supplies on a civilian ship. And I shouldn't ask myself.

  "Carry on, then." Hadeishi tapped the channel closed. "Bah."

  The number of reports in his message queue had not shrunk. Two more had popped in while he was malingering. "Enough, to work. Duty. Honor. Empire."

  Somehow, when Gretchen reached the number three airlock, Gunso Fitzsimmons was there already, looking bulky in a military field jacket, gloves and a pathetic fur hat. She looked at the musty, moth-eaten chapeau on his head and refrained — by dint of biting her tongue — from making any comment. "Sergeant."

  "Ma'am." Fitz nodded genially. "Come down to take a look at your prize?"

  "Yes." She scowled at him, then squatted down in front of a portable display pane she had salvaged from the lab ring. Since most of the ship was still dead, she could steal cycles from main comp for her analysis. Ignoring the Marine, who had maneuvered around to watch her work, she plugged her handheld into the panel, then loaded the suite of xenoarch software she'd been using on Mars and Ugarit. The pad and the panel beeped in synchrony, then a set of v-panes expanded, showing her feeds from the sensors in the airlock and the security cameras.

  "Careful," Fitzsimmons breathed, radiating nervousness like a dark cloud.

  Gretchen glared at him out of the corner of her eye. He was clutching the fail-safe for the lock ejection mechanism in both hands. "You should be careful," she snapped. "Nothing's happened…and if the lock won't hold back whatever comes out, you're not going to have time to push the button. An atomic or antimatter weapon will just vaporize us where we stand."

  The sergeant gave her an equally fierce look. "I don't like the prospect of being disintegrated, or dissolved, or anything which involves the end of my personal self-awareness. So I'll just keep hold of this, okay?"

  "Whatever." Gretchen turned away to hide her hands — which were trembling ever so slightly — from the Marine. "Let's see what we can see."

  Inside the airlock, the passive sensors had been recording for almost a day and her volume analysis software had built a fine-grained map of the outside of the cylinder, the slab of limestone and every nook and cranny of the pitted surface. From this, the soft had extracted a map of the inner structure of the stone fragment and the cylinder. In both cases, large sections of the display were blank or an all-too-familiar fuzzy gray. "Not enough data to see inside, not yet."

  Gretchen opened a log and started talking into her throat mike. Her awareness of Fitzsimmons faded away, replaced by a smaller, more tightly defined universe of stone surfaces and densities. "Previous sample — as shown in Clarkson's logs — activated when exposed to high-density sub-x-ray scan. Previous sample did not activate when subjected to microwave analysis. I am starting, therefore, with low-power ultrasonic and will advance slowly to microwave."

  She tapped a series of quick commands and held her breath. There was no explosion, no ominous hum, only a flickering on the sensor command relays and then a new v-pane appeared, showing an echo-scan image building. After a few moments, the first scan completed.

  "The sandstone is unremarkable," Gretchen said, resuming her narrative. "Though the embedded shell is really quite beautiful. A number of smaller cephalopods and annelids are also recognizable in the matrix. The cylinder does not express the same characteristics as the previous sample. This low-power survey is unable to penetrate the metallic casing, but there are markings incised into the surface of the device. I am going to enter the airlock, move the sensors manually, and then run another set of low-power scans."

  Fitzsimmons coughed in alarm, but Gretchen didn't even hear him.

  "I hope to build a more complete image by interpolating the scan results and taking, oh, four complete sets from different vantage points in the airlock. Luckily, the heavy shielding of the lock itself is blocking out a great deal of outside interference. In fact…" She paused, thinking. "…as we are in orbit, a gravitometric analysis may reveal a great deal about the object."

  Gretchen stopped, stood up, stretched and noticed the Marine watching her, arms crossed, with a distracted expression on his face. "Are you all right?"

  "What? Yes ma'am, I'm fine. Need a hand moving the sensors?"

  "Sure." Her lips pursed. "Should we suit up to work in the lock?"

  "Yeah." Fitz nodded. "A pain, but better than finding yourself outside without a jacket."

  An hour later, Gretchen was sitting again, cross-legged, watching a second set of images build on her display. Fitzsimmons had given in to complete boredom and was sleeping with his head on a wadded-up blanket behind her. A small heater had appeared from somewhere and was baking Gretchen's righthand side, though her left was still very cold.

  She dragged a fingertip, rotating the interpolated image of the cylinder.

  "A densely-packed inscription covers the surface of the object. Each character is very small and quite complex. My IdeoStat says the least complicated ideogram is formed by seven strokes, the most complicated by nineteen. There is a noticeable distribution, though the average tends toward the complex, rather than the simple." She rubbed her eyes, feeling a peculiar, too-familiar twitching prick behind her left eye. "Adamski would argue this indicates a glyph-based language, like old Nбhuatl or pre-Kanji Japanese — one without a phonetic alphabet. I can't make any kind of judgment yet, not without even the faintest idea of the creator race's vocal apparatus or lack thereof. I would say, however, the information density on the object surface is very
high. There are thousands of distinct ideograms, thousands…"

  In the display, the mapping software unwound the surface image of the cylinder into a long luminous strip covered with thousands of tiny characters. The dizzying arrangement of glyphs filled Gretchen with an odd disquiet. They seemed to dance and twist across the v-pane and she was uncomfortably aware of a sensation the characters were shifting places as she watched, rearranging themselves into an almost recognizable pattern. She blinked and rubbed her eyes.

  "The density of the exterior…" she continued, looking away from the IdeoStat display. As a result, she did not see the system monitor showing the translator drawing a gradually increasing rate of comp cycles. "…is far exceeded by the possible content of the interior. Unlike Clarkson's sample, this one is entirely filled with a dense membrane structure. If my hypotheses about the first device are correct, then this one contains an enormous amount of information, coded on the fine surfaces of the membranes."

  Thinking, she chewed slowly on her thumb. "I think this one is a book, or perhaps an entire library. Yet, as with most glyph-based languages, we may never decipher the contents, not without an intersecting language to point us toward a translation." She began to feel ill, as if the promise of the cylinder were burning a hole in her stomach. The tiny fragments left by the First Sun civilization inspired awe and lust in equal measure. A clear window into the distant past might be sitting only meters away.

  "What a loss," she murmured. "I want to read this! Well, as long as it's not legal documents. Lort! It's probably property records, or warehouse inventories or recipes."

  Green Hummingbird was in near darkness, lying on a narrow bed in his quarters. Pale green and blue lights played across his angular face. A swing-out display hung above him, showing feeds from the cameras on the Palenque and Cornuelle. Most of them were muted and dialed down to thumb-sized squares. One mirrored the contents of Anderssen's work panel. In the main v-pane, a cylinder engraved with thousands of tiny glyphs rotated slowly. Two more v-panes showed her working, blond hair slowly becoming a tangled mass, and the object itself, resting in a steel cradle in the airlock. The tlamatinime watched and listened, eyes unfocused, thoughts distant.

  As the scan image of the writing on the cylinder unfolded in the feed, Hummingbird stirred to life, attention sharpening. One hand, gnarled and scarred, brushed across the display, keying a series of preset searches. The panel chirped pleasantly, then began processing. Immediately, the video feeds flickered to a stop and the entire device dimmed noticeably.

  In the small, crowded office beside his private cabin, Hadeishi cursed as his display slowed to a crawl, then snapped back to its normal responsiveness. A stiff finger jabbed a comm channel open. "Sho-sa Kosho, are we under attack?"

  "No, Captain," came a quiet, level reply. "By ship's clock Hummingbird-tzin was using twenty percent main comp capacity for six seconds."

  Hadeishi suppressed a curse, then curiosity washed away his anger. "What is he doing with that level of capacity?"

  "I do not know, Hadeishi-san, and would not venture to guess." Kosho's voice was very demure.

  "Understood." Hadeishi cut the channel, forcing speculation from his mind. There were logistics and supply usage reports to review and sign. Twenty percent? Is he modeling planetary weather or something?

  Hummingbird scowled, lean old face twisting into a tight mask. Bits and pieces of the glyphs incised into the cylinder were coming back a match with examples from his archive. He thought briefly of using the blue pyramid, but discarded the notion. I urge caution on others, he thought with a trace of humor, so should I practice it myself.

  What did match was troubling. Some of the more complicated signs were very like a series of temple carvings observed by a deep-range probe in a dead system beyond New Malta. Others suggested the contents of tablets secured by a Mirror agent from the marketplaces of Ik-hu-huillane. Both sets of documents were restricted to the highest levels of the Mirror — Hummingbird did not even possess translations of them, only symbol-match heuristics — and a series of winking red-and-white banded glyphs appeared alongside the comparison results.

  "You say they're dangerous," he muttered at the panel. "But how?"

  He began to feel uneasy, watching the Anderssen woman work with her probes and sensors, slowly revealing more and more layers hidden inside the cylinder. The arrangements of the membranes inside the structure did seem to contain more data — a vast amount, far more than even the writing etched on the outer surface.

  "Are they access instructions?" he wondered aloud, wishing the upper levels of the Mirror had seen fit to provide him with more information about dead Gulatith and whichever race had chipped the Ik-hu-huillane tablets from interstellar ice. "Could she decipher them, given time? Or is the device too old — broken by the wear of so many millennia… She has the inclination, I see." Hummingbird was glad Anderssen had such limited software.

  On his v-pane, the woman was cursing at her slow panel and tapping commands at a furious rate. Hummingbird shook his head slowly — curiosity was a powerful drug — one whose effects he had felt himself and he wondered if the soldier was right. We could throw the cylinders into the sun. There they might be destroyed, or at least lost for another million years.

  "But then," he said to the dark room, "we would not know, would we? And we are curious monkeys…even I am pricked by curiosity."

  The densely packed strip of symbols taunted him from the display. He could sense — even through the filters running in his panel, even with well-ordered detachment — a tantalizing meaning in the angular, alien shapes. Hummingbird felt an urge to turn the power of his display — of the Cornuelle's main comp — to their decipherment. The pyramid might contain a linguistic key. My tools might —

  "I think not," he said aloud, and tapped off the v-feed from the Palenque.

  "Delores…take a look at this." Parker dialed up the magnification on his work lenses, head cocked as he stared down the throat of shuttle number two's air intake. The heavy machinery had been — at last — removed from shuttle number one's cargo hold, the mold cleaned away and the entire assembly mounted on a diagnostic rack in the Palenque's engineering ring. The morning had been spent laboriously attaching power feeds and exhaust vents so the engine could be tested. The exploration ship did not have a proper maintenance bay, causing Parker and Isoroku to waste a great deal of time trying to get reliable diagnostic relays established between the Sunda Aerospace Yards Komodo-class shuttle and the Novoya Rossiya–built mechanicals on the Palenque.

  Eventually, the pilot had given up trying to make the Javan and Swedish equipment play nicely and had settled for a visual inspection. A multispectrum lamp was clipped to the lip of the intake.

  "What?" Delores, surly again for some reason — though she'd greeted both Parker and Isoroku with a big smile this morning when she came swinging out of the accessway — climbed up on the rack and worked her head and shoulders inside.

  "Switch to UV-band on your lenses," Parker said, gently placing his fingertip on a curving section of the intake wall. The highly polished ceramic alloy gleamed like a mirror, reflecting his face as an enormous, distorted monster. "And hi-mag, about six hundred."

  "Now I can't see anything but the surface of the composite." Delores didn't bother to keep mounting irritation out of her voice.

  "Follow my arm, then just ahead of my finger."

  Delores grunted, making a face. "You need to take a bath sometime. Your nails…" Then she whistled softly in alarm. "By the Sister — what is that?"

  "Something alive," Parker said, watching a faint discoloration shimmer like a rainbow in the hi-mag view of his work lenses. He could see regular, symmetric structures in the discoloration — not the stolid honeycomb of the ceramic, but something delicate and far, far more complicated. "Something eating the hi-temp ceramic lining and making more…more metallic lichen."

  "Oh, Sister!" Delores scrambled backward out of the intake. "It's the eaters!"
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  "No," Parker said, watching the tiny gleaming lights with a bemused expression on his narrow face. "No, it's not them…we'd be dissolved or turned inside out. This is different — this must have come from the planet. Is there any life down there?"

  "No," Delores called from across the engineering bay. "Just rocks, sand and barren mountains. Nothing green, no trees, no water. Nothing."

  The pilot wanted to scratch his nose, but couldn't, not in the close confines of the intake. On a hunch, he breathed on the discoloration, trying to focus the flow of moist gas with his lips. In the restricted universe of hi-mag, he saw the delicate tendrils wave in the wind, and the textures and colors brightened. He blinked, then squinted in disbelief. "I think they got bigger," he called excitedly to Delores.

  The crewwoman was still on the other side of the bay. She had found a welding torch and was hefting the slender wand like a bat. "Well, don't do that again, whatever it was! Come on, let's tell the engineer or Anderssen-tzin about this."

  "Hmmm…ok." Parker backed out of the intake and swung the UV lamp to mark the discoloration. Even from the vast remove of a meter, he could no longer make out the lichen. Sitting on the steps of a work ladder, he tapped open a channel.

  "Doctor Anderssen? Parker. Can you join me and Delores down in Engineering bay four? Bring your hi-mag lenses, if you've got 'em handy."

  Squeezed into the intake, with Parker, Delores, Isoroku and the ever-present Fitzsimmons crowding around outside, Gretchen stared dully at the glassy, curving surface. Now she felt too hot — the heaters were working in Engineering for some reason — and there were too many people around. "All right Parker, what am I looking at?"

  "Right where I've got the UV spot shining," the pilot said, trying to wedge in beside her. "You can't miss them, not in hi-mag."

  "I don't see anything," Gretchen said after a moment, "except some discoloration, like some kind of acid spilled on the ceramic." She turned her head, then made a face. The inside of Parker's nose was not the place to be looking with work lenses dialed high. Flipping up the goggles, she looked at him inquiringly.