by Scott Mackay
A holo-image of Joe Calaminci—still up in the Gerard Kuiper—appeared in the upper right corner of Cody’s visor.
“I just got word from Vesta City,” said Joe. “They’re giving us the go-ahead in spite of the lichen. They’ve had a mycologist look at our readouts, and he agrees with us. It’s innocuous.”
“Do they have any idea how it got here?”
“They’re working on it.”
“Do they suggest an alien origin?” asked Cody.
“Not when it shares kinship with an earth mushroom, no. Have you found much more of it?”
“It’s all over the place. On anything with a carbonaceous base. Plus there’s this moss. It glows blue in the dark. We’ve tested it and it’s innocuous as well.”
Cody looked around at the little bits of moss hanging like the wispy strands of an old man’s beard here and there, patches of it everywhere, lighting up the dark city as if with dim blue stars. He should have alerted Vesta City about the moss too, but he wanted to get on with things; he had been satisfied with their own tests and didn’t want to get tied up in further bureaucratic delay.
“Vesta City wants to know if you’ve found any corpses yet,” said Joe. “They particularly want to know about orphan corpses.”
“We saw five skeletons laid out next to a garbage disposal unit. The bones were all mixed up. It was hard to tell whether they were orphan or human.”
“They’re sending a security ship,” Joe told him, sounding miffed.
“What for?” asked Cody.
“The Conrad Wilson,” said Joe. “Kevin Axworthy is commander. I think the crew is forty.”
“Why’s that name sound familiar?” asked Cody.
“Heard of Artemis Axworthy?”
“Sure.”
“Kevin is his youngest son.”
“Which means Kevin must be at least in his fifties.”
“I would think so,” said Joe.
“What are his orders?” asked Cody. “I hope he’s not going to take over. This is our project. We know the infrastructure. The last thing we need is a bunch of defense engineers coming in here and trying to revamp the place.”
Joe nodded in commiseration. “They’re coming for our safety,” he said. “At least that’s what Vesta City says. They’ll be here in two weeks.”
“Anything else?” asked Cody.
“They’re bringing heavy equipment,” said Joe. “They’re interested in those outside structures. They want me to confirm with you the depth of the cavelike opening.”
“Sixty meters.”
“And you ran up against a titanium alloy?”
“Five meters thick. We haven’t the equipment to get through it. We’re here for a survey, not to investigate unknown structures on the surface with titanium alloy walls five meters thick.”
Cody could only speculate about the structures, but their implication made him nervous. He glanced around at his crew, dim figures in the peripheral glow coming from their guidelights. To forge structures of such great size and strength in absolute secrecy impressed him. What he found frustrating as a builder and a Public Works engineer—what made him keep turning the structures over in his mind—was that he couldn’t figure out what they were used for. His professional acumen was stumped. He could usually look at any tool, structure, or utility, no matter how foreign in design, and know immediately what it was used for. He kicked a piece of rubble—evidence of the fighting here thirty years ago—and watched it roll heavily across the road. He hadn’t the slightest clue what the structures were used for. And he knew that he was going to lose sleep over it.
CHAPTER 2
They set up operations in Laws of Motion Square. Cody dimly remembered a visit to Newton thirty-four years ago, when he’d been five years old, taken here by his father to tour a number of Ceresian boarding schools for the purpose of possible enrollment. He had been amazed by the tall buildings; how the Weather Board had been constantly changing the color of the sky; how all the construction materials had been in funhouse hues, designed to please children. He gazed at the building across the street, a bank building, checkered in meter-sized tiles of white, blue, red, and green, looking like a Piet Mondrian painting. He looked at the maglev station on the corner, a building zapped with diamond-shaped panes of copper-tinted glass, and diamond-shaped tiles of pink, yellow, and purple acrylic, looking like something a harlequin might wear. He looked up at the sky. The sky was now black. Back then the sky had been purple, red, pink, blue, green, and gold. Sometimes with clouds. Sometimes with moons and planets. Sometimes with whales, elephants, and lions.
He glanced around at his crew. Peter Wooster inventoried pressure-suit oxygen tanks. Wolf Steiger mounted an electrical box on one of the bank’s multicolored tiles. Huy Hai adjusted the temperature controls on the portable water tank. Cody was glad to see they were getting on with their work despite the unexpected discoveries.
A holo-image of Jerry Rudnick appeared on Cody’s visor, optically transmitted for focus directly into his retina by a laser. Jerry’s face looked as if it floated two meters in front of Cody.
“We’ve found one,” said Jerry. “He’s been mummified.”
“Human?”
“No. Orphan. A male.”
Cody called up a local map to his visor using his wrist input and pinpointed Jerry’s location. “You’re on Subtraction Avenue?”
“Two blocks away.”
“Are you going to need help bringing him here?” asked Cody.
“No,” said Jerry. “I’ve got Wit with me. And Russ is here too. Has Deirdre checked in? I saw her heading up Spectrum Street.”
Cody felt his lips stiffen. He knew Deirdre occasionally ignored safety protocols, but also knew there wasn’t much he could do about it. “Let her go,” he said. “She’s never been here before. She’s going to find the structures interesting.”
A few minutes later Witold and Russ appeared in Laws of Motion Square bearing a mummified orphan corpse on a stretcher. Jerry walked along beside them, looking as if he might collapse under his extra gee-load any minute. Cody stared at the corpse, fascinated by it, this genetically altered human being, now dead, preserved by the dry airless cold, an orphan who had lived here thirty years ago, in a different time, and who had most likely lost his life during the bitter struggle of the Ceresian Civil Action. A historical snapshot on a stretcher.
“You’re really getting along with the lights,” said Jerry, looking around.
“Ben was born to wire,” said Cody. He motioned toward the supply yard. “Let’s put him over here on this cable spool.”
Wit and Russ lifted the corpse onto the cable spool.
As with all orphans—Cody had seen only pictures—this one looked to all intents and purposes human. Genetic engineering had been minimal, only enough to enhance his bones into a more adaptive posture for microgravity. The orphan’s arms were longer than human arms, while his legs were shorter. He wore green satin pants and a Schrödinger University T-shirt. He was barefoot, with those odd orphan feet, like monkey feet, only human-looking, with an extra phalange in each toe. The orphan would have been young, no more than eighteen, but, because of the extreme cold and zero humidity, had been freeze-dried, looked wizened, like an old man.
Cody shook his head. “I never agreed with the way they handled that,” he said. “They should have negotiated. Look at him. He’s just a kid.”
Cody stared at the orphan’s face, wondering what it was like to grow up without a mother or father, to be incubated in a test tube, to have your code genetically altered by someone else’s design. To climb, to swing, to jump. To instinctively pack with your own kind. To repudiate the people who made you. To renounce humanity. To rob. To rape. To kill …
“Okay,” he said to Jerry. “Perform an autopsy and send the results to Vesta City. I’m sure they’ll be interested in what you find.” Vesta City, habituated to a posture of vigilance, would always be interested in looking at dead enemies. “Then give him
a proper burial.”
The airlocks. Sixty-eight of them citywide. Eighteen leading to installations on the surface. Another eighteen used as access points to electrical, water, oxygen, and heating mains. The remaining thirty-two strung along various transportation routes at the city limits. All of them with backup airlocks, and backup airlocks for the backup airlocks. One-hundred-and-ninety-eight separate units in all. All of them closed, when, by rights, they should have been found wide open, the way the evacuation authorities had left them thirty years ago. Who had closed them?
Cody shook his head as he gazed at the surprising finding once more on his visor’s GK link, a link that downloaded data into the visual hookups of his visor. After the Ceresians had evacuated the asteroid; after the Ceresian Defense Force had launched multiple bioextermination warheads; after they had opened all the airlocks—after anybody and everybody who had been left behind should have been dead, fried to a cinder from the inside out by microwave radiation—somebody had gone around and closed all the doors. A lot of doors to close in this once-thriving city of five million inhabitants.
He could picture the members of Council back in Vesta City scratching their heads in mystification over the whole thing. The closed airlocks, in conjunction with the citywide bulwarks, now pressurized a tenuous atmosphere of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide—the stuff the lichen breathed out—with a barometric reading of eight millibars, as thick as the atmosphere on Mars.
He closed down his data-link. They had one last airlock to check. But they had to get there first. Cody, Ben, and Peter adjusted the gauge of the rover wheels to fit around the Fermi Maglev’s central rail so the tires wouldn’t rub against the metal. Cody keyed in a command and the chassis rose, creating distance between the rover and the rail so the chassis wouldn’t scrape. Now the wheels could ride comfortably in the concrete bed on either side of the rail. He looked around at Ben and Peter and smiled. They were just three guys tinkering with their vehicle.
“I think we’re ready,” he said.
“Then let’s go,” said Peter.
They drove in the track-bed over the central rail, Peter at the wheel. They rumbled eastward—the Fermi Maglev line was the most direct route to the final airlock they had to check. The rover headlights pierced the gloom. After about ten kilometers, Peter slowed the vehicle. Ben stood up and peered ahead. The final airlock, decorated with a mosaic of children playing catch with an enlarged atomic model of hydrogen, rose twenty-five meters to the pressure wall overhead. Like all the others, this airlock had been closed. But unlike the others, this one had been damaged. Whoever had closed it had repaired it.
A compound of unknown origin had been puttied over the central seal.
Peter, in charge of materials management, stopped the rover ten meters from the airlock. The three men got out. Peter went to the back of the rover and retrieved a portable materials analyzer. The three approached the airlock.
Cody selected his visor’s infrared, looked at the airlock, detected no discernible decline in temperature in and around the airlock, and concluded it was airtight.
“Are you getting the infrared reading?” he asked Ben.
“No leak,” said Ben. “We could have popped Newton the minute we got here.”
“I’m getting sick of wearing a pressure suit,” agreed Cody.
“Look at this compound,” said Peter. “It looks like ice.”
Peter pressed the retrieval port against the compound and waited for a reading.
“Mainly carbon and nitrogen in polymer-type chains, with a few heavier molecules I can’t identify,” said Peter. “We’re really going to save on sealant. Maybe we’ll have enough for Equilibrium.”
Equilibrium was Ceres’s second-largest city, next on their list.
“Unless all the airlocks have been closed and repaired in Equilibrium as well,” said Cody.
“Look at this,” said Peter. “The stuff has a melting point of minus 25 Celsius.”
“Who would make sealant with a melting point that low?” asked Ben. “What would be the point? Nothing can live at minus 25 Celsius.”
Cody thought about it. “Nothing human at least,” he said.
He again wondered about the structures on the surface, whether they were, in fact, alien, or whether the orphans—humans of a sort—had been responsible for them. Certainly the possibility of alien design had to be considered. The notion was so momentous he felt ill-equipped to deal with it. He was a carpenter by trade. The larger ramifications of first contact would have to be dealt with by people who had made a study of such things.
“We’re going to have to put some of our own sealant on that before we pop the place,” said Peter. “If we pop the place and release the biotherms, that stuff’s going to melt.”
“Then let’s get to it,” said Cody.
Cody went to the back of the rover and lifted a thermal laser. He keyed in for a diffuse beam, walked to the airlock, lifted the tool, and pulled the lever. The sealant immediately began to bubble and steam, sublimating directly from solid to a gas heavier than the ambient atmosphere, filling the track-bed of the Fermi Maglev line with dim blue mist.
“You think there’s anybody still here?” asked Ben.
“Not in Newton I don’t,” said Cody. “The place is a giant tomb.”
“Joe’s going ultrasonic up in the ship?” asked Ben.
“I gave him orders to go to a depth of 60 meters.”
“Good.”
“I really don’t think there’s anyone here but us, Ben. Whoever built those structures on the surface … well … I think they must be gone by now. The Kuiper would have detected any life-forms from orbit.”
A large chunk of sealant fell away from the airlock like a piece of ice sloughing off a glacier into the sea.
“Unless whatever sabotaged the microsatellites sabotaged our own detection equipment as well,” said Ben.
“I just don’t see it,” said Cody. “This place is dead. Maybe there might have been some survivors, and maybe they were able to huddle together somehow for a few years after the evacuation, and maybe build those structures, for whatever reason, but I think they’ve all died out since then.” Cody shrugged as the last bit of sealant gasified under the diffuse beam of his thermal laser. “I think we’re alone.”
Back in Laws of Motion Square, where the crew now had the pressurized dorm and office up and running, they received from Joe Calaminci an interesting ultrasonic image of the surface of Ceres. This was essentially an X-ray 60 meters deep. What Cody saw was a disk, measuring 70 meters across, its shape concave according to the computer’s extrapolations, dipping a full five meters to the center. Material analysis indicated a composition of bonded silicate—in other words, glass. This huge disk of concave glass was situated in County Hypotenuse, a remote part of the asteroid 250 kilometers away from Newton. Like the other structures, the glass disk hadn’t been there at the time of the evacuation.
“Do you realize the kind of kiln they’d need to bond a piece of glass that size?” said Deirdre. “And the heat such a kiln would produce? At least 1,500 degrees Celsius. I don’t know how Vesta could have missed it.”
“Any speculation as to what the thing is?” he asked her.
She raised her eyebrows. “A photocell?” she said. “To collect solar energy?”
“Why would it be 60 meters underground with no microwave converter in sight if it were a photocell?” asked Ben.
“I think it’s a telescope,” Jerry Rudnick said quietly, steepling his fingers. “Any time you have a concave disk of glass that large you can be certain it’s used for light-gathering purposes. What you’ve got here is a 70-meter refractor.”
“GK 1,” said Cody, addressing the computer, “access historical infrastructure blueprints for current coordinates.”
The computer showed historical infrastructure blueprints for these given square kilometers of County Hypotenuse in a smaller window off to one side. Nothing. No infrastructure at all. Cert
ainly no telescope. Cratered terrain. No sign of human habitation or economic activity. Cody half thought the old infrastructure blueprint shot might be in error. Ceres was famous for its telescopes, known for its great strides in deep-space optics. A giant telescope in County Hypotenuse would be typical of them. As far as Cody could recall, the Ceresian Astronomical Association had six observatories around the asteroid. But did it have any so big?
“So who built it?” asked Ben. “And why did they put it all the way out in County Hypotenuse?”
Cody shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. Again, it was a mystery that he found galling to his professional pride. He was intensely curious about the structure as a builder and an engineer, but as a project manager he knew he couldn’t devote any of his resources to finding out what it was. “Let Kevin Axworthy worry about it when he gets here in the Conrad Wilson.” He thought of his schedule, tried to act like a project manager. “We should have popped the oxygen yesterday. We should have released the biotherms. We’re a day behind. Transmit all this stuff to Vesta City. Let them worry about it.”
The next day he was up a ladder stringing lights on Subtraction Avenue. Ben was helping him. The temporary lights were powered by a generator for the twofold purpose of making their survey easier and lighting the way for the cleanup crews when they arrived six weeks from now.
“Deirdre took me down to the lake,” said Ben. “I’ve never seen ice so hard. And the boats they have down there! Shaped like swans. Hippopotamuses. Blue whales … just like a carnival.”
“Frozen right into the ice?”
“Yes. We walked out to this island, and they have a gazebo and a bandstand in the park. That’s different for me. The civic designers on Flora prefer neon and metal.”
“Vesta’s not much better,” he said. “I notice you’re spending some time with Deirdre.” He put his screwdriver in his tool belt. “Could I have a bit more cable?”
Ben handed Cody more cable.
“That’s okay, isn’t it, me spending more time with her?” said Ben.
“Why shouldn’t it be?”