And he was right. With its pleasant stone buildings, its blue sky and sea, its wheeling gulls, Last Resort looked more like a fishing village or holiday retreat than a penal settlement. Even the warders checking off their names on clipboards were informally dressed and could almost have been tour guides or couriers. For this wasn’t so much a place of punishment as a place of quarantine, a place where inveterate offenders could be sent indefinitely when they showed no sign of changing their ways, not for purposes of vengeance but to prevent them causing further distress.
“Not such a bad place if you like doing sweet nothing,” grunted Shoe, turning to one side to spit.
“Greetings everyone,” called out a tall white-haired man. “My name is Humility—Humility Joyousness Fortunas—and I’m the governor of Last Resort. It may sound an odd thing for a prison governor to say, but I sincerely hope that your time here will be interesting, pleasurable, and rewarding.”
No one had ever escaped from Last Resort, for it was on an island surrounded by hundreds of kilometers of open ocean, one of the remotest places on the planet. But (as the governor now made clear) the regime there was far from harsh. They’d find their accommodation plain but comfortable, he explained. They were free to roam, and they’d have plentiful opportunities to work at trades, or to study, or to engage in sport and the creative arts. There was even a unique opportunity to take part in the excavation of an archaeological site.
Not all the prisoners were grateful or impressed.
“Who wants to make pots?” growled Pennyworth. “Who wants to dig up bloody old stones?”
He and Shoe had lived their whole lives in the seamy underbelly of a city where you could walk for a whole day and still not come to its edge. All their notions of what was exciting and fun were formed from that experience. They’d lived for the whiff of violence, the heady joy of getting one over on some foolish sap, the sound of gunfire, the thrill of the chase, dodging and diving through crowds and honking traffic. But here the cry of seagulls was the loudest sound, and you could see the island’s only hill at the end of its single empty street.
“I’ll die of boredom,” Shoe gloomily repeated.
“I wouldn’t have bothered to lay down my gun if I’d known this was coming,” said Pennyworth. “I’d have kept on shooting till they put a bullet through my head.”
A few days later, the two thieves were riding in a bus along a bumpy coastal track, carefully avoiding looking out at the great blue ocean glinting with sunlight, for fear they might find themselves enjoying it.
“So what is this dump we’re going to anyway?” Pennyworth asked one of the other prisoners, a large toothless black man who was sitting across the aisle from them.
The black man shrugged.
“A settlement from the Old Empire or some shit like that.”
“What, and we have to dig it up?”
“Yeah, but the guy in charge is really soft. You don’t have to do much.”
Pennyworth snorted.
“Why do they want to dig it up anyway?”
“Find out what it was for,” the black man said. “Or some shit. No one knows apparently.”
“Or gives a crap,” said Pennyworth.
The black man laughed.
“Yeah,” Shoe said, “but you never know what we might find, do you? It’s amazing what people pay for that old shit.”
He’d once been involved in a scam involving some fake Old Empire artifacts, and he knew. It was why he’d suggested to Pennyworth that they choose this work over, say, potting, or working on the colony’s single farm.
They came to a picturesque ruin on a slope above a rocky shore, some three kilometers from the main colony, with diminutive trees clinging picturesquely to its crumbled stonework.
As they alighted from the bus, the young officer in charge came rushing to greet them with his hand outstretched.
“Gestas? Dismas? Welcome to the Place of Wells, my friends! My name is Gravitas but most people just call me Officer Graves. Well, I am always down a hole in the ground!”
The two thieves declined to smile.
“I think you’ll really enjoy this work,” Graves continued undaunted. “I know the site doesn’t look much at first but it’s one of those places you really fall in love with, once you get a feel for it.”
He believed that archeology was the key to human wisdom, and was determined that it should be the delight and consolation of everyone.
“What once stood here looks to have been a square building with a flat roof. A large building in terms of length and breadth but only a single story high. You see the walls here? And here? The top of the roof was paved to make a flat terrace—you can see a few bits of it left round the edges—and the terrace was completely enclosed with a colonnade. There’s just that one single complete arch still left over there, look. Almost the whole roof has collapsed into the rooms below, as you can see, and what we’re doing now is removing the remains of it to see what lies beneath. It’s very exciting because we really have no idea.”
Not much excitement was evident, however, in the faces of Prisoner Gestas and Prisoner Dismas. Officer Graves gave a small sigh. “One note of caution,” he went on. “We really don’t know what function this place used to serve, but we do know they had some mighty advanced technology back in those days, and played with materials and forces that we no longer understand. Wear these radiation counters at all times, and if they ever start to bleep, or if you come across anything that seems in any way odd, do please report back to me before going on. It’s for your own safety. I really don’t want anyone to come to any harm here.”
Shoe and Pennyworth shrugged and spat and grudgingly shoved the proffered counters onto their belts, and Graves led them to a part of the site where a shaft of some kind had been filled up with rubble. Some four meters of this debris had already been lifted away. Now Graves led them down into the shady hollow and, under his direction, the two thieves reluctantly began removing more loose stones and putting them in large bins for removal later by crane.
“People say that this dig really isn’t very important compared with the big ones on the mainland where they are finding all those wonderful artifacts,” Graves enthused as they made a nominal pretense of working. “But we don’t know what it will throw up, do we? And we won’t know until the whole dig is done. I think you’ll find it a fascinating place. All digs are, like books of secrets waiting to be read.”
“Wow,” said lean-faced Shoe in a flat, bored, sarcastic voice.
Graves blinked and looked momentarily hurt—the thieves’ surliness was starting to wear him down—but he was a man with a determinedly positive outlook on life.
“We look up the stars today,” he said, “and we know their names and we know what they’re made of, but for all practical purposes, they might as well be lights projected onto a screen. It was different for our ancestors at the time of the Old Empire. When they looked out at the stars, they were looking into a vast cave of delights going back and back and back, a cave through which, in some way we no longer understand, they were able to move freely—just imagine it!—bringing back strange beasts and fabulous wealth and wonders that we can only dream about.”
He glanced hopefully at Shoe and Pennyworth. Both were gazing into the distance with the determinedly vacant expressions that people and animals wear when they are keeping their minds entirely blank until such time as they are needed.
“And yet,” Graves doggedly continued, “technological prowess is only part of what we lost when the Great Calamity brought down the Empire, and I would say not the greatest part. What strikes me most at these sites is the architectural grace, the calmness and at the same time the playfulness of that wonderful civilization. Again and again we find details, flourishes, ornaments, whimsical little touches, that seem to serve no purpose other than to give delight, or raise a smile, or serve as food for thought.”
He glanced again at the two thieves and finally resigned himself to the fact
that he might as well be talking to the stones.
“Anyway, it gives you a good appetite, that's for sure,” he said a little sadly, “all this digging and shifting rocks in the open air, with a nice sea breeze to keep you cool.”
Pennyworth turned to the side and spat.
“So are there any questions, lads?” asked Graves, making one last effort to force cheerfulness into his voice.
A seagull screeched. The ocean sighed.
“I’ll leave you to it then,” Graves concluded. “Have fun. Lunch will arrive back at the sorting area at twelve. Just come over and find us when you’re ready.”
Shoe and Pennyworth grunted, watched him go, and then slumped on a slab of rock and lit up cigarettes.
“A fascinating place,” Pennyworth mimicked. “A wonderful book waiting to be read.”
He put two fingers into the back of his mouth as if to make himself gag.
“What a dump,” he concluded.
“Yeah,” agreed Shoe, “what in God’s name made us pick this job?”
After half an hour of this sort of talk, boredom finally drove them to interact at least a little with their surroundings, and they chucked a few stones at each other. Then they set up a bit of ancient marble paving slab and lobbed more stones at it until it split in two. Finally, when they couldn’t think of any other games, they began picking up rubble and dumping it into Graves’ bin, settling in spite of themselves into a slow rhythm that was certainly more pleasant than doing nothing at all, though both of them would have strenuously denied it.
And then, after about half an hour of this, and to their great surprise, Pennyworth’s counter began to bleep.
“What the . . . ?”
Before Pennyworth could finish the sentence, Shoe’s counter went off as well. Both men laughed loudly.
“So are we going to go and tell that Graves guy?” asked Pennyworth when they had recovered from their hilarity.
“Are we, shit!” said Shoe. “This might be something interesting.”
Pennyworth nodded and tried to turn off his counter. Unable to find the switch immediately, he lost patience with the thing and silenced it by banging it repeatedly on a rock.
“Piece of shit,” he growled.
“You dick, Pennyworth,” said Shoe, turning off his own device. “The switch is right here on top. Where it says ON/OFF.”
“Yeah, well,” grumbled Pennyworth.
He poked the switch, found it no longer worked, and tossed the counter aside.
“Come on then,” said Shoe. “Let’s just find out what this is.”
They shifted some more stones, this time working at a speed that would have delighted Graves, and finally reached something looked like a circular lid, about a meter across, made of shining and untarnished metal.
“It’ll be locked, or rusted up underneath,” Pennyworth said glumly. “Then we’ll bloody well have to go and get help.”
“You never know,” said Shoe, tossing aside a cigarette and kneeling in front of the lid with his fingers under the edge.
Pennyworth joined him with a sigh.
“One—two—three,” Shoe said, and they both lifted.
Against their expectations the lid came away quite easily, and they found underneath it a well. Which explained why the site was called Place of Wells, of course, but that was not what was on their minds just then. The thing that struck them was what they saw inside it. For there was no water in that well, nor was there the dark echoing space you expect in a well that has dried up. There was—nothingness.
Of course the human eye doesn’t see the essence of things, but can only detect light or its absence, and you might argue that what was visible there must therefore have been amenable to description in such terms. But it didn’t seem like that to them. There was neither light nor darkness down there. There was no surface, solid or liquid, rough or smooth. There was just nothing.
“Holy crap!” intoned Pennyworth.
Shoe turned his radiation counter back on. It was bleeping away so fast that it was pretty much giving out a continuous screech. He listened to it for a moment, then laughed.
“Sweet!” he exclaimed.
Others might have worried that the radiation would do them harm, but to these men danger and uncertainty felt like home.
Shoe and Pennyworth hadn’t known it, but their counters were connected to a monitor back at the sorting area that Graves checked at regular intervals. He had picked up that they had detected radiation and, running and scrambling across the ruins, he now reached the broken wall at the top of the shaft and looked down at the two of them standing there on the edge of the well, with Shoe’s counter still giving out a continuous plaintive screech.
“Hey guys,” he called out softly in what he hoped was a calm, kind voice, “you’re going to need to back off from there.”
He squatted down so that only his head was above the wall, in order to minimize his own exposure to whatever force of nature was pouring out of the well.
“Take a couple of steps back,” he called, “mind you don’t trip on the stones, and then come up here and get behind this wall with me.”
Shoe and Pennyworth looked up at him peeking fearfully down at them. Then they glanced back at each other, and laughed.
“What is this thing then?” Shoe asked him.
Graves made a further effort to control his voice.
“Not sure guys, but it looks like you may have come across some sort of spatial gateway. We’ve never come across a live one before. But never mind that for the moment, eh? Really guys, I’m not kidding. It’s a lot of radiation we’re all soaking up right now. I need you to step away from the edge and then we really ought to get away from here.”
Gateway? They had no real idea what Graves was talking about, but “gateway” sounded like a way out. Shoe looked at Pennyworth. Pennyworth nodded, and, with a defiant yell, both of them jumped into the well. The last thing they heard was Graves yelling “No! Don’t!”
After the first quarter-second or so, they didn’t experience themselves as falling. In fact they found they were already standing on smooth, solid ground. There had been no jolt of impact at all, but they were aware of a sharp change of temperature and light intensity and a feeling that they had become slightly heavier. Wherever they were, it was much cooler than the dig at the Place of Wells, and it seemed to be night time, although, once their eyes had adapted, it was certainly not pitch dark.
“Bloody hell!” said Pennyworth.
They stood under a starry sky on a wide platform perhaps a hundred meters square, paved in checkerboard style in black and white marble. A colonnade ran round the edge of it, with an urn containing an olive tree in front of every third arch. Beyond, there was a sandy desert.
The air was completely still. The silence was absolute.
Then Shoe gave a low whistle and pointed at the sky.
Shoe and Pennyworth weren’t so big on moons, for the moon back in the city had been at best a pale smudge above the brash electric lights, and there were always brighter and more vivid things clamoring for attention all around. So moons weren’t things they’d ever really paused to think about. But they did know, all the same, that there was only supposed to be one.
And here. . . . Well, it was regrettable, but it couldn’t be avoided. Here there were three of the things shining down.
Standing there side by side, their mouths gaping foolishly open, they both felt an icy shiver of almost superstitious terror. It was the animal dread of the inexplicable and the unknown. One moment on Earth, on an island in the middle of the ocean. The next moment: this.
“Oh crap,” murmured Pennyworth.
“Yeah, I know,” said Shoe.
“We’re on another planet, aren’t we?” Pennyworth whispered.
Since Shoe didn’t reply, Pennyworth answered his own question, addressing himself to the three cold moons themselves.
“We must be. Another bloody planet. What are we going to do?”
/> The moons, of course, had nothing to say on this point. Their sole contribution to the story of the two thieves was to illuminate the scene and to provide incontrovertible evidence that this was not the planet Earth. And Shoe also said nothing. He sniffed, and spat, and then began to walk across the wide platform to the colonnade.
“What are you doing, Shoe?” moaned Pennyworth.
Again Shoe declined to answer.
“Talk about out of the frying pan,” Pennyworth complained as he hurried after his silent companion.
He caught up with Shoe as he reached one of the archways. They looked out over the planet surface, turned and looked back at the artifact on which they stood, then looked out at the planet again. The checkered platform, strewn here and there with blown sand, was raised some three meters above the surrounding desert. A flight of marble stairs led down onto the surface, its lower steps half-buried in sand.
And this was a proper desert. Some deserts have cacti growing in them, or shrubs, or tufts of yellow grass, or even small trees. But there were no features at all in this one but rocks and stones, each with its overlapping set of faint moon shadows.
“We can’t cross that,” said Pennyworth
“No,” said Shoe, finally breaking his silence. “And anyway, the whole place might be like that for all we know. You can’t cross something if it hasn’t got another side.”
“We’ve had it, haven’t we?” groaned Pennyworth.
Shoe shrugged and began to walk round the edge of the colonnade, noticing, now that they were close, that all the olive trees in their urns were dead. The twigs were gray and had long since lost their bark.
Reaching the corner of the colonnade, they turned and continued along a second side of the platform, passing another flight of stairs that led down into the sand.
“Maybe we should have listened to that guy,” said Pennyworth. “What’s his name? Graves.”
“What?” said Shoe. “That drip? Nah. Never. Start doing what men like that tell you and you might as well be dead anyway.”
They turned along the third side.
Asimov's Science Fiction 01/01/11 Page 5