F&SF 2011-11-01 - Nov_Dec

by F

  "Move, everyone!" Bolorma's voice now came from the headphones inside Erden's helmet. Pashupa secured a couple of lines and then dropped through the hole in the floor. Haar went next.

  "Your turn," said Bolorma, prodding Erden in the back. Erden made herself take a step toward the hole, and then another. She clipped onto the line, then stood at the edge. Through the ragged opening she could see the stars wheeling past.

  "Go!" Bolorma prodded her again, and this time Erden gave a whoop and jumped.

  THE SHUKAPASH star system had no habitable worlds, no resources worth exploiting. But orbiting five A.U. out from the dim red dwarf star was an Object. It was a rounded shape twenty kilometers long, four kilometers wide, and just under three kilometers thick, bent slightly along its long axis.

  Beneath a layer of meteoric dust, the Object was made of a metallic-looking blue substance harder than any drill, impervious to any chemical agent, and apparently a perfect superconductor of heat. Even the most powerful lasers couldn't affect it. A millionth of a gram of antimatter just rested lightly on the surface, and when the antimatter was detonated with a puff of gas, the flash left no mark. The surface was smooth except for a half-meter hole at one end, a rounded triangular depression with five smaller holes in it.

  Its physical characteristics were puzzling. Surface gravity suggested a mass of only a few trillion tons, as if the Object was just another asteroid. Attempts to move or rotate the Object had a very different result: gigatons of force produced no measurable acceleration at all. Either the Object had some way of anchoring itself to empty space, or its mass was planetary in scale and its creators somehow negated most of its gravity field.

  Its age was uncertain. The star Shukapash was nine billion years old, but there was no sign of any technological civilization in the system that might have built it.

  The first to discover the Object were the chlorine-breathing Shupi. They measured its basic characteristics, tried and failed to get inside, and began the process of mapping every square millimeter of its surface.

  Two millennia later a ship full of aquatic Disiuq arrived. They waged a brutal campaign to gain control of the Object and the archives of the Shupi...and then spent another thirty centuries poking at it, comparing measurements over time to see if there were any changes, and analyzing the dust clinging to its surface. The Disiuq constructed the first habitats among the ring of rubble orbiting close to the star, and sent expeditions into the outskirts of the system to collect ice and volatiles.

  Humans showed up next, and formed an alliance with the Shupi to dethrone the Disiuq. It was Humans who began searching the rest of the Shukapash system for other artifacts, which paid off with the discovery of a second Object: a meter-long rod of titanium-molybdenum alloy lying on the surface of an asteroid, estimated to be about half a billion years old. For two thousand years Humans and Shupi argued about whether Object Two was made by the same civilization that produced the first, and searched for more. When Object Two disappeared under mysterious circumstances, the search for others only intensified. Scholars began to discuss the possibility of a third Object that fit into the hole on the big one.

  Shortly after the Humans arrived, the first agents of the Machine Civilizations turned up. They made no attempt to take control of the Object or meddle in local affairs, and warned the godlike intellects ruling other interstellar civilizations that attempts to annex Shukapash would not be allowed. In exchange for a guarantee that sufficiently sapient machines enjoy full legal rights, they agreed to a ban on implant devices that could take over the minds of biologicals without consent.

  The Arekh were the most recent arrivals, only eight centuries in the system. They heard about the Object through the galactic grapevine and were fascinated. Arekh moved into Human-built habitats and constructed a few of their own, and soon were heavily over-represented among the legions of researchers studying the Object.

  An Arekh explorer found the first monitor platform orbiting in the darkness at the edge of the system. Nearly every habitat had a view of the flash. More cautious surveys located five others. Four of the platforms ignored all communication, but two of them grudgingly admitted that they were representatives of nearby civilizations, and would neither confirm nor deny the presence of planetary-scale weapons.

  Time passed. Scientists continued to study the Object. Some committed suicide out of frustration; more pragmatic ones had themselves put in stasis until it could be opened. About once a generation a starship arrived bearing cargoes of magic from the Godminds, but never anything that could disturb the Object's slumber. Laser and maser messages came more frequently, but only expatriates and obsessives cared much about events elsewhere in the Galaxy.

  She fell for two seconds before the line went taut and she jerked to a stop. Erden was hanging beneath the outer hull of a spinning habitat. Below and around her was empty vacuum dotted with the distant stars. Above her the habitat was just a vast black shape filling half the sky, with the hole in Satozh's kitchen floor shining in the middle of it.

  Bolorma followed her out. She tugged a bulky object out of her own bag, touched a control, and let it drop away past Erden into empty space. Erden turned her head to watch as the decoy balloons inflated, falling away from the habitat with an emergency beacon flashing. With any luck the cops would waste time chasing them instead of tracking Bolorma's crew.

  "You okay?" Bolorma asked her.

  "I'm fine," said Erden. She felt great. She turned on her headlamp and made sure her suit status was all green. Then she pulled herself along the line to where Pashupa had attached it to the hull. Once there, she could cling to the surface with the pads on her gloves and knees. Her perceptions rotated: she was crawling along a huge curving roof with the stars above her—except that down was up, and her body wanted to fly away into the dark sky.

  Halfway to the edge the sun came up. The dark hull she was clinging to suddenly changed to pure white, and now Erden could see her comrades again. She risked a look to sunward. Her lenses stepped the sun's image down to a pale reddish disk with dark spots, but that wasn't what Erden was looking for.

  There: just a degree or so away from the sun in the sky was Object One— the Object. Even from a thousand kilometers away it was a big dark oval spangled with the lights of towns on its surface. She cranked up the magnification as far as her lenses would go, but of course there was no way to resolve the tiny depression on one end of the Object, an irregular rounded triangle shape with five holes, exactly the shape of the thing in Erden's bag. Up ahead Pashupa reached the side of the habitat and climbed out of sight.

  They clamped on next to an emergency lock while Pashupa disabled the alarm. "Okay," said Bolorma, "I'll go in first. Wait for my signal. The word is 'happy.' If I don't call in two minutes, assume I'm caught and go to the fourth plan. Haar's in charge then."

  She went inside and the airlock door closed behind her. Erden watched the countdown on her lenses. With thirty seconds left, Bolorma's voice sounded in her earphones. "I'm happy. Come on in."

  They cycled in, tucked the weapons into anonymous zipper bags, and switched their suits back to ordinary coveralls. Then the four of them strolled calmly to the nearest lift up to the hub.

  "We've got it!" Erden crowed once the lift started moving. "And now—"

  "And now we keep quiet!" said Bolorma. "There's at least four factions that would cheerfully kill us to get this thing, not to mention the cops. And if the Godminds hear about it, who knows what they'll do?"

  "The Godminds are too far away," said Erden. "The closest one is ten light-years."

  "That's what you think," said Bolorma. "They've all got monitors watching the Object, autonomous and smarter than you are. Weapons, too. Relativistic killers, antimatter, gray goo, serious stuff. As soon as anyone finds out we've got the key—"

  "Could be junk," said Haar.

  "I am glad of one thing," said Erden. "There's no little slot or anything shaped like the second Object. I don't want to go throu
gh this again."

  "Oh no," said Bolorma. "We're not going to go plug this into the end of the Object to find out what it does. We're not going anywhere near it. This is a business operation. All we're going to do is get in touch with some people who can negotiate with the Reconstituted Temple and the Institute and maybe the Life Support Authority, and get us paid a lot of money for it."

  "How much?" said Haar.

  "The discount will be steep, because it's so hot and high-profile. But even an eighth or a sixteenth of incalculable wealth is still pretty good."

  "At the very least I want to scan it," said Erden. "Map it down to the picometer, try to work out what it's made of, check its mass and density, everything."

  "You can try," said Bolorma. "But they've been analyzing Object One for what? Ten thousand years? Maybe more, and they've got a whole library full of nothing to show for it."

  "Who keeps it?" asked Haar.

  "This Object? Erden," said Bolorma.

  "Kindly give us your explanation of why she should be the one to have custody of it," said Pashupa.

  "Two reasons," said Bolorma, patting Erden gently on the shoulder. "If we don't let her have it, she'll bug us endlessly, and she's the weakest. We can be sure she won't betray us."

  The lift reached the hub and they joined the crowd of travelers heading for the docking area. Bolorma had spent a heartbreaking sum to get a private bay, but that saved them from passing through the checkpoints to the commercial shuttles.

  The chartered ship was pretty bare-bones—an eight-meter habitat bubble perched atop an ion drive, with photovoltaic wings and a little backup fusion powerplant. Life support was strictly consumable; it could go anywhere in the cluster of habitats around the Object but couldn't sustain living crew for a longer trip. The ship's brain was limited-sentience, well below the legal threshold. It was registered under the name Jewel-Bright Hero, which made Bolorma snort every time she said it.

  Everything had been ready for departure when they left it, so Bolorma and Pashupa ran through the launch checklist in five minutes and the Jewel-Bright Hero eased out of the bay and began boosting at a modest acceleration toward Object One. It was just over an hour since they had knocked on Satozh's door.

  ERDEN HAD ARRIVED at the park in Harmony Habitat early and secured a good spot for her cart, right near the playground where young Humans and Arekh shouted and chased each other through a three-dimensional maze of ladders, slides, and bridges. All it took to start a game was for one child to start running. The pursuit instinct would kick in, and off they all went.

  She was selling masks. The cheapest were simple stick-ons that flashed colors or patterns. Anyone could print them out at home—but at the park they weren't at home, and the kids wanted a mask now, not later.

  The expensive ones were handmade out of real feathers and leaves. Adults bought those as wall decorations or gifts. In order to eat and cover her rent Erden had to sell forty of the cheap masks a day. If she sold one of the handmade masks she could quit early and even buy some real fish.

  Two hours until the park closed and she had sold only sixteen masks. At this rate she'd have nothing but tea for dinner.

  A woman approached, dressed in conservative business robes, no child in tow. Probably no sale, but Erden couldn't be choosy. "Masks! Masks for sale! Every day is a party when you're wearing a mask! Which mask do you like best, madam?"

  "That one," she said, stabbing a finger at the most elaborate mask on Erden's cart. It was made of real rooster feathers, gingko leaves, and appashp scales, a wonderful swirl of gold and brown that would cover Erden's expenses for two or three days.

  Erden lifted it reverently out of its protective case and held it for the woman to inspect, but the other just aimed her ring at the cash reader and paid in full. "Lock up your cart. I want to talk with you."

  "Me?"

  "If you are Altan-Ochir Erden, yes."

  "That's me. Who are you?"

  "Call me Bolorma. I want to hire an archaeologist. Are you coming?"

  Erden locked the cover on the cart and followed Bolorma along the path to the lake. They bought salad rolls—with real shrimp!—and oranges, and took their meals along the curving bridge to the little wooded island in the center of the lake. When she had satisfied herself that there were no lurkers in the shrubbery, Bolorma sat on the bench and patted the spot next to her. "Now. You are an archaeologist, correct?"

  "Yes—at least, I completed my training at the Institute, but I left before my final certification."

  "Left or flunked?"

  "I chose to leave," said Erden a little sharply. "I could tell I wasn't going to fit in."

  "Why?"

  Erden munched on her salad roll for a minute before answering. "I wanted to do archaeology. Real archaeology. I want to study the Object. That's not what they do at the Institute any more. There are more people studying the cultural influence of the Object, or the history of the history of Object studies! There's one team— one! —actually monitoring it, paid for by the Life Support Authority. Everybody else stays inside Institute Rock worrying about Institute politics and the latest intellectual fads."

  "I looked up some of your work," said Bolorma. "You were studying the legend of the third Object."

  "I had to phrase it that way to get approval. I don't think it's a legend at all." She looked Bolorma straight in the eye as she said that, her chin tipped up a little as if ready for a fight.

  "That means you think it's real."

  "I do. I think it exists, I think someone has it, and I think it's the key to opening up the Object."

  "In your paper you quoted Araaa as saying that's all just wishful thinking. People are frustrated with the Object and wish for a magic key to open it."

  "Absolutely," said Erden. "I want to see what's inside. I've wanted it ever since I touched the bare surface of the Object when I was six years old. I banged it with my fist, in fact. But the third Object isn't a delusion. There's that hole at the leading end, and I've traced speculation about a key back to before the Disiuq invasion."

  "Pretty thin," said Bolorma casually. "And it seems like more crackpots than real scholars are interested in finding another Object."

  "I've been called worse," said Erden, slipping the orange into her pocket as she stood up. "I don't care how crazy it sounds. If there's a way into the Object, the whole Institute should be looking for it, instead of leaving it to crazy old icecatchers and bottom-feeders."

  "Don't go," said Bolorma. "It just happens that I want to look for the third Object, and I've got enough money to hire an archaeologist who thinks it's worth finding."

  "I'm in," said Erden.

  "Don't you want to haggle over terms? I'll pay you ten times whatever you made last year selling masks, plus I'll cover all your expenses. Room, board, unlimited travel, unlimited archive time—and I'm going to start you on a physical training program."

  "What for?"

  "Because when you find me the third Object, we're going to steal it."

  They didn't want to attract attention, so Bolorma did a nice fuel-conserving burn at a thousandth of a gee, which meant the travel time from Glorious Hand habitat to the cities on Object One was just over five hours. Erden went down to the lower deck with all the scanning equipment she could find on board to make measurements of their prize. Haar ate half the food supply and curled up in a sleepsack. Pashupa and Bolorma stayed on the flight deck with the hull transparent, watching the Object grow larger ahead until turnover.

  "Tell me what you think will happen." Pashupa asked without any preamble, just after they began the slow braking burn.

  "I think we're going to make a lot of money."

  "Actually, I meant after that part."

  "Once we collect I'm going to disappear. I'm going to buy a new identity and a nice house, hire a staff of masseurs, trained sexual partners, and gourmet chefs, and spend my time trying out every vice there is. And then I'm going to start combining them."

  Pash
upa was silent for a while. "Tell me what you think the buyer will do with it while you are being absurdly self-indulgent."

  "A temple will put it up in some big sanctuary and pray at it, I guess. The Institute will want to map it and poke at it and do science stuff. If the LSA get hold of it they'll probably stick it in some super-secure vault and try to forget about it, like whoever got Object Two. Why do you care?"

  "It occurs to me that someone might wish to put it in the hole on Object One to see what happens."

  "Probably nothing. The whole thing's old and dead."

  "And yet you cannot know that for certain."

  "Do I look like the Chief Scientist? No, I don't know what would happen. Nobody does."

  "Tell me what you think is inside."

  "Stop asking questions! Are you one of those people who thinks it's God's cocoon or something?"

  "If it opens, everything will change. People will fight to control it, destroy it, or close it up again. We cannot tell what the Godminds will do."

  "Yeah, it'll piss in everyone's soup, so what?"

  "I should like you to tell me what all our money will be worth if the system is plunged into chaos and war."

  Bolorma unstrapped and went over to the ladder to the lower deck. She looked down at where Erden was working and Haar was curled up asleep. It looked like Erden was having a ball with Object Three. Her apparatus was kludged together out of the scanners she and Pashupa had used, plus a few odds and ends scavenged on board.

  Bolorma closed the hatch and came back to hold on next to Pashupa's pilot couch. "Okay, it sounds like you're working up to suggesting something. Let's hear it—but remember, I've already sunk a lot of time and money into this operation. I need a return on my investment."

  "I understand your position. Perhaps I should have mentioned this sooner, but I hold the position of Devotee in the Restored Original Temple. Therefore I would like very much for us to sell it to them rather than some other party. I can guarantee that the Temple will pay very well for it, and keep it safe to prevent any social disruption that might interfere with your sex and food project."