“How long,” I asked him, “was it since the skull of the Vaughn's Tiger was last examined? Before we saw it the other day.”
He called me back several hours later.
“The first part of the search didn't take long,” he said, “but I had to go through some very old records for the rest. That part of the vault hasn't been opened since the electronic locks were installed. That's more than a hundred years. And according to the written records, the box itself hasn't been opened since the first time — when the material was sent here from Australia in 1908.”
The last answer.
I recoiled. I felt like a man coming out of a dim cave, and, as he approached the daylight and the exit, placing his groping, overeager hand on a snake.
I recoiled, but I forced myself to approach it again, to face at last what that last answer was. And at last I knew why the Angel's Pencil had sent its message. My vague intuition had been right: There had been a simple explanation, before us all the time.
CHAPTER 6
Our predatory animal origin represents for mankind its last best hope… the apes were armed killers…
– Robert Ardrey, African Genesis
Alfred O'Brien dumped me in an autodoc. In a 'doc, not at a 'doc. Big-league treatment. They even had a human doc look at me.
I think now that he had guessed some time before what my final report would be and had been waiting for it.
No one could have replicated exactly and in three dimensions the shape of a skull of which no complete drawings existed and which had been locked away before any of us was born.
I went on a holiday. ARM moved me up the waiting list for a permit to hike and camp in the Great Slave Lake Park and dive at Truk Lagoon. I visited Easter Island and the Taj Mahal.
After the Taj Mahal I spent a little more time in India. I left the tourist routes and headed north, not exactly hiding, but not calling attention to myself.
Near the high jungle where Assam meets Tibet there was a new restricted area. Part of the park, a valley, needed special maintenance work, I was told. As I left, I saw some of the machinery going in. It was heavy digging machinery, and it was heading for what I knew from a fragment of map I had seen was the site of an ancient landslide.
I do not know if ARM will want me again. A year and half has passed and I have heard nothing official.
Unofficially, I have kept a few contacts.
ARM moves slowly and obliquely as a rule. I do not know when, or if, they will use the plans of the alien's bomb-missiles and laser-cannon that the Angel's Pencil sent us to begin tooling up factories. And there was a description of a gravity-motor.
Perhaps they will move too slowly. If so, I am unlikely to know before the end.
Did the crew of the Angel's Pencil think to search for a call-beacon in the wreckage of the enemy warship? Did they neutralize it? Too late to ask them now.
I have been warned not to leave Earth, and under no circumstances to contact anyone connected with either the Belt or the media.
Have I been duped? Suppose the whole thing was as we first suspected an enormously elaborate setup, perhaps not to make a bear market in some space industries but to create a bull market in a new military industry? Despite the fact we found no trace of any money movements and despite the fact no warlike race or culture could ever achieve civilization and science, let alone handle the energy processes space travel requires?
But I have learned more about that now, and it cuts the last ground away: The axiom that a warlike race cannot progress to the point of space travel is a pious fiction, a lie made into a self-evident proposition, never tested. But before I handed in my last report, I searched those old military records one more time, following the trail whose whole length only I had come to know. Our Space Age was born in war.
I think it is too late to re-bottle the genie now. Already, I know, there is increased use by ARM personnel of keys to ancient military history records. There is a new special history course and batches of selected ARM personnel are being put through it. My Military Historians are, I think, involved. Anyway, they have disappeared and I am sure they are not tending machinery on Mars.
For the rest, Anton Brillov is involved, and that means Buford Early. A new base has been set up on the moon. It is not another resort for budget-class tourists. I think that in the power struggle going on inside ARM Buford Early's masters are winning.
There have been, I have learned, unexpected postings. And I have noticed some of the sort of people posted. While waiting for my permits I called about a dozen of my acquaintances, ostensibly for company on my holiday.
In fact, I was most interested in the whereabouts of two among the dozen: specialists in x-ray lasers. Both had suddenly relocated and I could not trace them. Some of ARM's house-schizies, my near colleagues, have disappeared, too.
And there have been unscheduled meetings with the Belt leadership. I have heard rumors of a new spaceship design team being put together. I can guess some things about the new spaceship they will be designing. It will be well equipped with signaling devices to assist in contact, devices using large amounts of energy. But to design a new type of ship and to build it are different propositions.
I have noticed changes in our games and entertainment. 'Graceful Willow' has disappeared from the newscasts. A new game, 'Highest Hand', has an emphasis on winning. There are no more dances.
If those behind Early win, I think I will have a role in what is to come. Otherwise, I imagine, someone will be calling on me soon and I will be taken in to a memory-wipe. There is no point in running, ARM can find me anywhere on Earth, and if I somehow got into space, what would I be running to there?
Arthur Guthlac has been seconded to special duties, along with several others who were at the edge of forbidden studies. But he has kept his museum title of Assistant to the Chief of the General Staff. Early's joke?
Messages have been beamed out to his sister's ship after all, ordering it to turn back. No one has said why. Those messages will reach it in about seven years' time, and what has happened has happened already.
I pity Arthur Guthlac and try not to imagine what he feels, but part of me wonders if he may have found the purpose in life that always eluded him.
I have done what I could. If there is any future history now, no doubt historians will look at the chance the whole thing turned on. Colonel Vaughn shot well. He bought us five hundred years.
They are capable of mistakes. They are capable of wishful thinking. Skragga-Chmee's creatures did not come. We had to go to them.
The main purpose of my holiday was to say good-bye to what has been, to what we always took for granted. I visited places of Earth I had known in a longish life that has, I suddenly realize, almost too late, had its share of good times. Scenes of beauty, peace, tranquility or thronging human life. Scenes from the last days of the Golden Age.
What will these same scenes show in a few years?
War factories worked around the clock by forced labor? Glowing bomb craters? Or the hunting territories of Earth's felinoid conquerors?
Time is running out.
What shape is space? Space will put on
The shape of any cat…
I look up at night and know what is coming. ARM may or may not move in time. Perhaps the felinoids have too great a technological edge over us anyway. They have been in space a long time. Perhaps it is too late for us to rearm, and perhaps as a species we have deprived ourselves of the capacity to fight.
Sir Bors, Lady Helen! If you and yours had been arrested three days earlier, how different an ending your story might have had! But I cannot say whether a better ending or a worse one.
One thing I know is that the program and everything I have worked for is in ruins.
Perhaps that is why I feel so happy.
A DARKER GEOMETRY
Mark O. Martin and Gregory Benford
Part I
The Veldt between the Stars
CHAPTER ONE
> Deep space is vast and cold, stretching endlessly. Eternal, unforgiving night.
Look first to the tiny bubbles of light and heat that nourish the warmlife bustle of carbon-carbon bonds, challenging the ever-patient cold and dark. Not too close to these stellar fires, yet not too distant, exist the small set of orbits which can support chemical disequilibria: warmlife.
There spin the myriad water worlds, brimming with living things, spheres all green and blue and white, basking in oblivious torpor. The warmlife worlds swing confidently around their parent suns, ripe with energies and youth, wellsprings awaiting the patient appetite of entropy.
Such thin slices of space-time are but tiny candles in an enormous darkened ballroom.
Look now to what is not, to the overwhelming depths between the stars; a darker geometry, the vast majority of all space and time. Strange minds dwell in that apparent emptiness, far from the hectic heat of the sunward spaces.
The Deep has its own beauty — stark, subtle, and old beyond measure. A flickering cold glow of plasma discharges; the diamond glitter of distant starlight on time-stained ices; a thin fog breath of supercooled helium, whirling in intricate, coded motion: These are the wonders of the Deep, far from any sun.
Here dwell the Outsiders.
They have ranged within the Deep for eons, thinking their cold thoughts while on still colder errands, as the barred spiral galaxy turned upon its axis dozens of times.
What the Outsiders — cryogenic, helium-based traders — have witnessed in their vast span of time remains a mystery to the myriad warmlife races. Outsider logic is cold, their designs as shadowy as the spaces between the stars; their minds are totally alien to the bustling carbon-children of thermonuclear heat and light.
Outsiders watched while warmlife first evolved on world after world, beginning nine billions of years ago. They remained aloof as the first warmlife sentients developed space travel, reaching out with clumsy arrogance to nearby stars in the name of exploration and empire. Now and then, some Outsiders helped such upstart and brash races, for cold, strange reasons of their own.
Other times, and for other reasons, the Outsiders dispassionately weeded.
They journeyed throughout the galaxy, sailing the Deep, watching and thinking, as warmlife flitted from sun to sun, insignificant motes moving within the Outsiders' vast realm.
The Outsiders observed impassively as the influence of the telepathic Thrintun spread from warmlife world to warmlife world, eventually enslaving a galaxy with their Power. They had nothing to fear: Outsider minds are organized as complex interactive eddies of superconductive liquids. No telepathic neurological command geared to warmlife-evolved biochemistry could influence them.
Over a billion years ago, the Tnuctipun Revolt ended in Suicide Night: horror beyond imagining. The defeated Thrintun used their artificially amplified Power to blanket the breadth and depth of the galaxy, commanding the death of all life possessing the slightest trace of sentience.
All sentient warmlife, that is.
For Outsiders, the sudden end of countless tiny minds was but a passing cool event in the slow tick of time. Such minds had not existed in the galaxy's dim beginnings, then suddenly burst into being, and finally vanished into the original frigid silence. It was information to the Outsiders, rather than calamity. They saw no reason to intervene in warmlife affairs.
The small bubbles of light and warmth around so many stars remained silent after that. No more tiny ships or minds traveled the Deep in real or hyperspace. The stars slumbered on.
And still the Outsiders lived their long, cold lives. On the devastated warmlife worlds, enough time passed for the mindless hand of natural selection to make the former food yeasts of the Thrintun evolve again toward complexity, and eventually, intelligence.
Once more, warmlife races learned to journey from star to star, for fleeting mayfly reasons. Eventually, their frantic movements impinged again upon the Outsider realm, sometimes disrupting patterns set in place for half a billion years. The Outsiders dealt with the intrusion in many ways: brushing the interlopers aside, diverting their short-lived attentions, or simply ignoring the disturbance.
The Outsiders knew that this, too, would pass.
Some of the factions of the diverse Outsider society would interact with these upstart, reborn children of stellar heat. They would occasionally trade a tiny portion of data collected over billions of years for chemicals, cold-world facilities, or still more information. The coldlife beings were shrewd traders and negotiators, having lived through eons of time, and dealt with the many thousands of faces intelligence can assume.
To the Outsiders, little was new. Even less was interesting.
The Outsiders themselves seemingly remain unchanged, eternal, just as their cold realm has existed relatively unchanged since the galaxy was freshly forged in the fires of the strong nuclear force. To be sure, the great clouds of dust and simple molecules were pruned away, collapsing into suns. This left the interstellar reaches thinner, easier for the Outsiders to negotiate, for plasmas to form and self-organize. But these were slow shifts. Warmlife was a buzzing, frantic irritant.
The coldlife traders intimidate the warmlife races. Outsider ships are works of incomprehensible art, both their aesthetics and functions strange and perplexing.
Even the Outsider form is coldly beautiful; their bulblike bodies and weaving tentacles gracefully flow like a dancing cryogenic liquid. And there is something in their manner when dealing with warmlife races that suggests immense distance. Outsiders had freely roamed the galaxy while the most advanced warmlife creatures consisted of single-celled pond scum.
The warmlife races know nothing of the Outsiders beyond their form and their penchant for trading. Scholars of many races wasted entire lives pursuing questions, speculating, debating — all without adequate data, talk leading nowhere. The Outsiders never spoke of themselves.
Where and when did they evolve to intelligence — and from what less advanced form? Were they somehow exempt from the deft hand of natural selection? What did they value and what did they spurn? Did Outsiders have hopes, or worse still, fears? Did Outsiders have societies, or were they all of one vast, icy mind?
The Outsiders, as always, kept their own counsel.
But there are other minds than the Outsiders dwelling in the eternal Deep — much older and still more alien — who might understand. In the black gulf between the stars, strangeness waits.
CHAPTER TWO
Bruno Takagama looked out at the twisted starscape on the command screen, and shivered at the prickly sensation of unseen eyes on him.
He had awakened with the Dream once again that watch, stifling a shout, drenched with sweat and unspoken fear. Now the stars themselves seemed to threaten him, and perhaps with good reason. He rubbed his temples and peered more intently into the screens.
As observed from the navigation deck of the Sun-Tzu, the ghost of Einstein was squeezing the universe in the implacable fist of his ancient equations, making it seem more eerie and disturbing than Bruno would have thought possible.
The Earth vessel was traveling at just over seventy percent of light-speed, seemingly alone in the vast darkness of interstellar space. Physics had begun to compress the usually unchanging starfield forward and aft of the ship, distorting the one rock-steady constant of space travel. Relativity Doppler-shifted the stars directly in front of the Sun-Tzu into a handful of blazing blue diamonds, while Sol was reduced to a dull red gleam behind them, lost in the hellish wash of the antimatter drive.
In the back of his mind, he saw the hand from the Dream on his shoulder, brown and leathery, knuckles the size of walnuts. Alien, but still familiar. He shivered, pushing the memory away with effort.
One thing could always exorcise his demons, Bruno reflected, and keyed the ship commlink. He hoped that the captain was in the mood for a bit of banter.
“Carol, you there?” Bruno licked his lips a bit nervously, waiting for the reply. Sometimes the empt
iness around the ship wore her down as well.
There was a faint crackle over the deck speakers, static born from the relativistic impact of bits of interstellar dust against the eroding forward edge of the Sun-Tzu.
“No, I'm lying on a beach in Australia.” Her voice on the commlink was clear, immediate, though she was half a kilometer away on the other side of the iceball that was the interstellar warship.
He smiled despite himself at her flippant tone. A good sign. “You couldn't find Australia on a map.”
“Map, schmap. I saw it once through a scope out Ceres way. Big brown-and-tan dot in the Pacifist Ocean.”
“That's Pacific Ocean.” She was baiting him a little, Bruno knew. Belter impudence against Flatlander tradition.
Carol's tone remained airy, unimpressed. “Big diff, Flatlander. Looked like a dog turd, actually.”
“What would a Belter know about dogs?” he replied, amused.
“Saw one once, in a Luna zoo. Wear their hearts on their sleeves, don't they?” Pause. “Okay, okay, Mr. Precise. They wear their hearts on their forelegs. Happy?”
“Ecstatic. Anyway, we so-called Flatlanders bred dogs that way. Who wants a pet that's hard to read?”
“Explain cats, then.”
“Ummm — point conceded.” Bruno smiled again, the beaked face and sad liquid eyes of the Dream receding still further with Carol's banter. The captain of the Sun-Tzu was better therapy than all the psychists with whom Bruno had worked downside on Earth.
Her conversation was filled with typical Belter logic and twisty changes in subject. Practical, ever looking for the loophole. But then, he reminded himself, Carol had smuggled a cargo or three past the goldskin UN police back in the Belt.
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