Jack Mcdeviit - Deepsix (v1)

by Emily

  "If it gets serious, we'll do that."

  "I think it is serious. How about going to one of the other sites?"

  "Where do you suggest?"

  "Any of the cities."

  "Which one's accessible?"

  He paused. "Well, what do you mean by accessible?"

  "That we don't have to cut through ten or twenty meters of ice to get to it."

  "I don't know anywhere you can walk in the front door. But even if you have to do some digging, they'll be safer."

  "But probably not after the couple of days we'll need to get into one of them." Everyone else in the cabin had become intensely interested. "We won't take any chances, Marcel. Okay? If things start to go downhill, we'll clear out."

  When she signed off, Chiang leaned toward her. "I was at the University of Tokyo for a few years," he said. "Lamps used to swing all the time. It really doesn't have to amount to something." He wore a cheerful short-sleeved blue team jersey stenciled Miami Hurricanes. "We'll be okay," he said.

  They talked the problem over. How important was the tower and its contents? Hutch knew that a professional archeologist would have told them it was priceless. But she confessed there was really no way to know.

  In the end they compromised. They'd spend one more day there. Then find someplace safer to work.

  A wind kicked up. The sky was full of stars and the snowscape sparkled.

  Chiang found it difficult to sleep, knowing Kellie was so close. Just the seat in front of him. But he hadn't realized she was awake until he heard her moving. He leaned forward and touched her elbow. "You okay?" he asked.

  She angled her seat so she could see him. Her eyes were dark and lovely. Her hair fell down around her collar, and he ached to take it, take her, in his arms. "The quake's not good," she said, looking toward the tower. "That thing could come down on our heads."

  "Sorry you came?"

  "Wouldn't have missed it." Her eyes came back to him. "On the other hand . . ." She took a deep breath and he tried not to stare at her breasts. And whatever she was going to say was left unfinished.

  VII

  Women were intended by their Maker to be cheerleaders. One has only to examine their anatomy and their disposition to recognize that melancholy fact. So long as they, and we, keep this rockbound truth firmly in mind, the sexes will perform their joint functions with admirable proficiency.

  —Gregory MacAllister, "Night Thoughts," Notes from Babylon

  Wendy was still two hours away from the object, but they were close enough to have good visuals, which were displayed in various aspects across a bank of screens in project control. The area was crowded with Beekman's people, clustered in front of the monitors and hunched over consoles.

  The object had turned out to be an assembly of fifteen individual shafts, connected by bands set at regular intervals of about eighty kilometers. Eight shafts were on the perimeter, six in an inner ring, and one in the center. They were of identical dimensions, each with a diameter of about three-quarters of a meter, each long enough to stretch from New York to Seattle. There was considerable space between them, so Marcel could see through the assembly, could detect stars on the far side.

  A rocky asteroid was attached to one end, webbed in by a net. The overall effect, Marcel thought, was of a lollipop with a stick that projected into the next county.

  The end opposite the asteroid just stopped. A few lines trailed out of it, like dangling cables. Marcel noticed that the fifteen cylinders were cut off cleanly, suggesting the object had not broken away from some larger structure, but rather had been released.

  "Impossible thing," said Beekman, who was delighted with the find. "Far too much mass for so narrow a body."

  "Is it really that big a deal?" asked Marcel. "I mean, it's in space. It doesn't weigh anything."

  "Doesn't matter. It still has mass. A lot of it along the length of the assembly."

  Marcel was studying the configuration: The asteroid was up, the lower end of the assembly was pointed directly at Deepsix.

  Beekman followed his eyes. "At least its position is about what we'd expect."

  "Stable orbit?"

  "Oh, yes. It could have been there for thousands of years. Except—"

  "What?"

  He delivered a puzzled grunt. "It just shouldn't hold together. I'll be interested in seeing what the thing's made of."

  John Drummond, a young mathematician from Oxford, looked up from a screen."Impossibilium," he said.

  Marcel, fascinated, watched the image. It was so long they couldn't put the entire thing on a single screen without shrinking the assembly to invisibility. One of the technicians put it up across a bank of five monitors, the lollipop head on the far left, and the long thin line of the supporting pole stretching all the way over to the far right-hand screen. "So it's not a ship of any kind, right?" he asked.

  "Oh, no," said Beekman. "It's certainly not a ship." He shook his head emphatically. "No way it could be a ship."

  "So what is it? A dock?" asked Marcel. "Maybe a refueling station?" They homed in on one of the braces. It appeared to be a simple block of metal, two meters thick, supporting all fifteen shafts in their positions. "Where do you think it came from?"

  Beekman shook his head. "Deepsix. Where else could it have come from?"

  "But there's no indication they ever had technology remotely like this."

  "We really haven't seen anything yet, Marcel. The technology may be under the ice. Kellie's tower might be very old. Thousands of years. We didn't look very advanced a few centuries ago either."

  Marcel couldn't bring himself to believe that all evidence of a high-tech civilization could just disappear.

  Beekman sighed. "The evidence is right outside, Marcel." He tried to rub away a headache. "We don't have any answers yet. Let's just be patient." He looked at the screens and then glanced at Drummond. An exchange of some sort took place between them.

  "It's probably a counterweight," Drummond said. He was about average size and generally uncoordinated, a thin young man with prematurely receding hair. He seemed to have had trouble adjusting to low gravity. But he'd come to Wendy with a reputation for genius.

  "Counterweight?" said Marcel. "Counterweight for what?"

  "A skyhook." Beekman glanced at Drummond, who nodded agreement. "There's not much else it could have been."

  "You mean an elevator from the ground to L.E.O.?"

  "Not Earth orbit, obviously. But yes, I'd say that's exactly what it was."

  Marcel saw several smiles. "I was under the impression there was no point putting up a skyhook. I mean, we've got spike technology. We can float vehicles into orbit. Why go to all the trouble—" He stopped. "Oh."

  "Sure," said Beekman. "Whoever built this thing doesn't have the spike. They've got some other stuff, though, that we don't. We could never make one of these. Not one that would hold together."

  "Okay," said Marcel. "What you're telling me, if I understand this correctly, is that this is the part of the skyhook that sticks out into space and balances the section that reaches to the ground, right?"

  "Yes."

  "That brings up a question."

  "Yes, it does," said Beekman. "Where's the rest of the skyhook?" He shrugged. "Remove the counterweight, and everything else falls down."

  "Wouldn't we have seen it if that had happened?"

  "I'd think so."

  "Maybe they cut it loose near the bottom of the elevator. If that happened—"

  "Most of it would get yanked out into space and drift off."

  "So there could be another piece of this thing out here somewhere."

  "Could be. Yes."

  "But what we're saying is that it was put up and then taken down?"

  "Or fell down."

  They retired into the project director's office, and Beekman waved him to a chair. A large globe of Deepsix stood in one corner.

  "It's crazy," said Marcel. "You can't hide a skyhook. Up or down."

  "Mayb
e the pieces that collapsed are under the glaciers," Beekman said. "We really can't see much of the surface." He zeroed in on the equator and began to turn the globe. "Although it would have to be along here somewhere. Along the equator where we can see the ground."

  They called up pictures of Maleiva HI and began looking. For the most part, the equator crossed open ocean. It touched a few islands in the Coraggio east of Transitoria, rounded the globe without any land in sight, passed through Northern Tempus, leaped the Misty Sea, and returned to Transitoria a couple hundred kilometers south of Burbage Point. The tower.

  "Here," said Beekman, indicating the archipelago, "or here." The Transitorian west coast.

  "Why?" asked Marcel.

  "Big mountains in both places. You want the highest base you can get. So you put it on top of a mountain."

  "But a structure like that would be big."

  "Oh, yes."

  "So where is it?" Marcel looked at both sites, the archipelago, where several enormous mountains stood atop islands that appeared to be volcanic. And the coastal range, which featured a chain of giants with cloud-covered peaks.

  "I don't know." Beekman held out his hands.

  "Tell me," said Marcel. "If you had a skyhook, and something happened to it, so it collapsed, which way would it fall?"

  The project director smiled. "Down."

  "No. I'm serious. Would it fall toward the west?"

  "There'd be a tendency in that direction. But the kind of structure we're talking about, thousands of kilometers of elevator shaft and God knows what else. Mostly it would just come down." Someone was knocking. Beekman kept talking while he opened the door and invited Drummond inside. "If it were here, in Transitoria, the base could be hidden on one of these peaks under the clouds. But that still doesn't explain where the wreckage got to. It should be scattered across the landscape."

  Marcel looked at Drummond. "Maybe not," Drummond said.

  "Suppose you wanted to take it down. With minimum damage to the terrain below. What do you do?"

  "I have no idea, John," Beekman said. "But I'd think we would want to separate the shaft at a point where the longest possible section would get hauled up by the counterweight. What's left—"

  "Falls west—"

  "—into the ocean." Beekman drummed his fingers on the table-top. "It's possible. If you've got a hell of a good engineer. But why would someone deliberately take it down? I mean, that thing's got to be an architectural nightmare to put up in the first place."

  "Maybe they developed the spike and didn't need it anymore. Maybe it was becoming a hazard. I'd think one of those things would need a lot of maintenance."

  "Well." Beekman shrugged. "There are a number of mountains in that range. We'll have an orbiter in the area in a bit. Why don't we run some scans and see what we can see."

  MEMO FOR THE CAPTAIN

  11726 1427 hours From Bill

  The cruise ship Evening Star transited from hyperspace four minutes ago. It has set course for Maleiva III and will arrive in orbit in approximately two hours.

  People boarding cruise liners usually did so via standard GTOs, Ground-to-Orbit vehicles that employed the spike for lift and standard chemical thrusters for velocity. The Star's onboard lander was a luxury vehicle, seldom used, maintained primarily to accommodate VIPs who had commercial or political reasons for shunning the more public modes of transportation.

  It resembled a large penguin. It had a black-and-white hull with retractable white wings. The nose was blunt, almost boxy, with Evening Star emblazoned in black script below the TransGalactic Starswirl. The interior was leather and brass. It had a small autobar and a pullout worktable so that riders could shuffle papers or relax as they wished.

  After making arrangements to send the shuttle down, Nicholson had become concerned that some of his other passengers would learn about the flight and demand places on board. He had consequently impressed on MacAllister that he was to say nothing to anyone. The news that he wished to take another journalist along had been unsettling, but Nicholson had been caught by then, committed, and wanted to do nothing to upset his illustrious guest.

  This was not the first time the old editor had discovered the advantage of his reputation for volcanic outbursts against those who, for whatever reason, had incurred his wrath. Consequently he and Casey remained, aside from the pilot, the only persons aboard.

  The pilot's name was Cole Wetheral. He was a taciturn man who would have made a successful funeral director. He had morose eyes and a long nose and long pale fingers that fluttered across the controls as if they were an organ keyboard. He gave preflight instructions and information in a stentorian tone: "Please be seated." "You will wish to check the status board above your seat before attempting to move around the cabin." "We want you to enjoy your excursion; please feel free to ask if there is anything you need." He informed them also that it would be early morning local time when they arrived.

  Casey looked dazzled, and MacAllister wondered whether it was a condition brought on by the chance to visit a world a few days before it was to end, or by his own presence. He waited until she was inside, then climbed in and sat down beside her.

  "Have you ever been down on another world before, Mr. MacAllister?" she asked.

  He hadn't. Had never seen a point to it. He perceived himself as the end product of three billion years of evolution, specifically designed for the Earth, and that was where he was inclined to stay. "I expect," he told her, "that this will be the only visit I ever make to alien soil."

  She had, as it turned out. She'd been to Pinnacle and Quraqua, and to Quraqua's airless moon, with its enigmatic city on the plain. Doing features, she explained.

  The pilot closed the hatches. Interior lights came on. He spent about a minute hunched over his control board, then reached up and threw a couple of switches on an overhead panel. "We are depressur-izing the bay," he said. "We'll be ready to depart in just a couple of minutes."

  The vehicle rose slightly.

  "I appreciate your doing this," Casey told him.

  He smiled benevolently. MacAllister liked doing things for people. And there was nothing quite so gratifying as the appreciation of a young person to whom he was lending the luster of his name. "To be honest, Casey," he said, "I'm glad you asked. Without your initiative, I'd have spent most of the next week in The Navigator."

  The lander's motors whined and began to pulse steadily.

  She smiled. MacAllister had made a career of attacking women in print, as he had attacked college professors, preachers, farmers, left-wing editorial writers, and assorted other do-gooders and champions of the downtrodden. Women, he'd argued, were possessed of an impossible anatomy, top-heavy and off-balance. They could not walk without jiggling and rolling, and consequently it was quite impossible for men of sense to take even the brightest of them seriously.

  Many women perceived him as that most dangerous kind of character: an articulate and persuasive demagogue. He knew that, but accepted it as the price he had to pay for saying the things that everyone else knew to be true, but which they denied, even to themselves. To a degree, his literary reputation protected him from the rage that surely would have fallen on the head of a lesser man. It demonstrated to him the intellectual bankruptcy of both sexes. Here, after all, was this sweet young thing, beaming and smiling at him, hoping to improve her career through his auspices, and quite willing to overlook a substantial series of ill-tempered remarks on his side, should he choose to make them, simply because they would provide excellent copy. "There is a perfectly good reason, my dear, why the downtrodden are trodden down. If they deserved better, they would have better."

  The bay doors opened.

  "We'll lose all sense of gravity after we launch," said the pilot.

  Harnesses swung down and locked them in. The interior lights blinked and went out. Then they sank back into their seats and began to move through the night. MacAllister twisted around and looked back at the great bulk of the Evening S
tar. Lights blazed fore and aft. An antenna mounted just beyond the launch pod rotated slowly.

  The power and majesty of the great liner was somehow lost when it was in dock. He'd not been all that impressed when he'd boarded her back at the Wheel. But out here the Star was in her element, afloat among strange constellations beneath a sun that wasn't quite the right color, above a world whose icy continents bore unfamiliar shapes. This view alone, he decided, was worth the side trip.

  "Did I tell you," said Casey, "I'm checked out to pilot these things?" She looked pleased with herself.

  That fact caught MacAllister's respect. Deep space seemed to be her journalistic specialty. Acquiring a pilot's skills told him she was serious. "Excellent," he said. He turned away from the view, glanced at her, then looked out again at the shimmering atmosphere below. "So how did you manage that?"

  "My father owns a yacht."

  "Ah." He recognized the family name. "Your father's Desmond Hayes."

  "Yes." She clamped her teeth together as if she'd been caught in a faux pas. And he understood: rich man's daughter trying to make it on her own.

  Desmond Hayes was the founder of Lifelong Enterprises, which had funded numerous biotech advances, and was one of the major forces behind recent life-extending breakthroughs. He was notoriously wealthy, had a taste for power, and talked often of running for political office. He was seldom seen without a beautiful young woman on his arm. A ridiculous figure, on the whole.

  "Well," MacAllister said, "it's always a good idea to have a backup pilot."

  They were over clumps of cumulus now, bright in the starlight. MacAllister heard and felt the beginnings of atmospheric resistance. He brought up the autobar menu. They were well stocked. "How about a drink, Casey?"

  "That sounds like a good idea," she said. "A mint driver would be nice, if they have one."

  He punched it in, handed it over to her, and made a hot rum for himself. "Wetheral," he said, "let's take a look at the countryside before we set down."

  It proved to be a singularly uninviting landscape, mostly just snow and ice. The narrow equatorial belt provided dense forest along its southern edge, open country to the northeast, and low rolling hills and occasional patches of trees near the tower.