Jack Mcdevitt - Engines of god

by David Geary

  "Welcome aboard the Perth, Dr. Allegri." She gave the name just enough of a twist to suggest that the formality was amusing.

  Maggie was next. "I've seen you somewhere. Maggie—"

  "—Tufu."

  "You're the cryptologist."

  "Exoohiloloeist."

  "Same thing." Truscott's eyes narrowed. "You were the reason they stayed too long."

  To Hutch, it seemed as if everyone stopped breathing. But the statement was delivered as if it were a simple, obvious fact rather than a judgment.

  "Yes," said Maggie. "That's probably true."

  Truscott took a seat, not at the head of the table, which they had unconsciously left empty, but between George and Janet. "Things don't always work out as we'd like," she said. And, looking across at Hutch: "And you are the pilot."

  "I am."

  "I know you, too. Hutchins, I believe."

  "Yes. You have a good memory, Dr. Truscott."

  "My job is largely political." She peered into Hutch's eyes. "What happened to your ship? To the Wink?"

  "We jumped in at the wrong place." She glanced at Carson. Do we want to tell her any more?

  "How do you mean?"

  Carson encouraged her. "There's an object out there that registers no mass," she said. "We showed up in front of it."

  Truscott nodded. "That would be one of the telescopes."

  "One?" asked Maggie.

  "Oh, yes. There are eight in all, we believe, although we've only located five so far. It's an array." If she had said she'd encountered a flight of wild turkeys, Hutch could not have been more surprised. It had never occurred to her that the monster was anything other than unique.

  "Where are the others?" asked Hutch.

  The light shadowed and softened Truscott's features. She must have been breathtaking when young. "All in the same orbit." A steward entered with a tray heaped with sandwiches, wine, and fruit drinks. "A remarkable engineering project. Certainly well beyond our capabilities. Wouldn't you agree, Frank?"

  "Yes," said Carson. "Have you seen one up close?"

  "No. You were our first priority."

  "Thank you for that. They must be very thin." Carson let his curiosity show. "I wonder how they hold together?"

  She regarded him with interest. "Tell me, Frank, how did you know something like this was here?"

  "An accident," he said. "We're on a routine survey."

  Truscott's eves glazed. Of course. "If vou like. Do vou want to see the object you hit?"

  "Yes, we would. Very much."

  "I'll give the word to the captain. The Perth was about to leave for home when we heard your distress call. We came this way with every intention of continuing that journey after we ensured your safety. But the damage you've sustained can't be repaired out here." She swung her attention to Hutch. "Do you concur?"

  "Yes," said Hutch.

  Truscott smiled at her, as if they shared a secret. "When is the Academy vessel due?"

  "About three days."

  "You understand we cannot wait. I intend to examine the artifact, and then we will proceed home. Ah, you don't approve."

  And leave the Monument-Makers to others? Damn real.

  "We need to talk," said Carson.

  "I'll be happy to listen."

  "Frank—" Hutch used a warning tone. If there were dis­coveries of a technical nature to be made at Beta Pac, they did not want to allow Kosmik any claim to them.

  Carson's hesitation was evident. The room fell silent for several beats. Then he said "We have reason to believe there are ruins in this system. We would like very much to be put down near them." Hutch smiled to herself. He was making it up as he went along.

  "What is the nature of the ruins?"

  "We don't really know yet, Melanie. Relatively primi­tive."

  "Of course."

  "Can you take time to do that?" asked Carson. "Give us a pod and some supplies, and we'll wait for the Ashley Tee on our own."

  She shook her head. "I won't risk your lives." She seemed to be watching Hutch closely, gauging her reaction.

  Carson sat back in his chair and tried not to look uneasy. "Let me reassure you that we would not be at risk. The Ashley Tee will be here within a few days. At most. You could land us and be gone within twenty-four hours. And we'd be fine."

  Truscott's tone softened. "Travel delays are expensive. I don't see how we could manage an extra dav. In any case, mv

  passengers are anxious to get home." She tented her fingers, and appeared to dismiss the idea. "I am neither inclined, nor at liberty, to leave you."

  Hutch decided to try her luck. "Dr. Truscott," she said. "This might be a major find. You have a chance to make a contribution."

  She looked curiously at Hutch. "Would I, really?"

  "Like the old days. You haven't given all that up, have you?"

  Truscott registered surprise, and her eyes stayed on Hutch for a long moment. "No, young lady, I haven't." She got up, went to the door, and opened it. "Let's see what the telescope looks like. Then maybe we can talk some more." She rose. "We'll see. Please help yourselves to the food." And she left the way she had come.

  Hutch climbed out of her clothes, showered, and collapsed on the bed without bothering to dress. Gravity felt good. She was asleep within minutes.

  She was still asleep several hours later when someone knocked.

  "Just a minute," she said. Her robe was still packed in her luggage. She grabbed a pair of slacks, pulled on a blouse, and opened the door. Melanie Truscott stood in the passageway.

  "Hello," said Hutch.

  "Hello, Ms. Hutchins." Truscott's voice was level. "I hope you're comfortable."

  "Yes, thank you." Hutch made way. "Won't you come in?" She used the remote to clear the bed out of the room, and turned on a table lamp. The apartment still looked moderately untidy, but the director didn't seem to notice.

  She smiled, and found a seat. "I've been talking with Dr. Carson. You had a close call."

  "Yes," she said. "We were lucky to come out of it."

  Truscott's hair was swept back, her brows neatly arrowed. She spoke, and moved, with graceful economy. "You were lucky. There's no question about that. But you did pretty well," she said.

  Hutch thought she'd performed poorly. Moving into the shuttle, and transferring the snow, had both been good ideas. But she'd been slow coming up with them. "Thanks," she said.

  Truscott shrugged. "I'd fly with you any time." She looked quite placid, a neighbor who had strolled in for a friendly visit. "I came by because I thought you and I should talk."

  "Really? Why?"

  "Clear the air." Her tone changed. "You sent over the foamball."

  It wasn't a question. And the directness of the statement took Hutch unaware. "Foamball?" She met the older woman's eyes. Oddly, she saw no rancor in them. She would not ordi­narily have hesitated to own up, take this woman on. But there was the question of Academy liability. Furthermore, Truscott seemed likable, and her manner suggested that Hutch's deed was ill-mannered. Rude. Perhaps even irresponsible. "That's true," she said. "But I'll deny it if you quote me. How did you know?"

  The smile came again. "Obvious. No one else had the opportunity. And I'm a decent judge of character."

  Hutch shrugged. "You deserved it. You were playing hardball."

  "I know." She looked pleased. "I assume you'll be happy to know that no permanent damage was done. You gave me some bad moments. Made me look silly. But after a while, my people noticed that I stayed. That I got as many off as I could. I think they compared me to some of the other management types they've known. I gather I came away looking pretty good. Anyway, I wanted to say hello to you properly, and let you know there are no hard feelings."

  Hutch thought of Richard clinging to the end of his life­line while the wave took him. "Easy for you to forgive," she said.

  Truscott nodded. "I know. And I'm sorry. But you knew it was coming. Why the hell didn't you get him out?"

  "Don'
t you think I would if I could have?"

  Hutch stared angrily at the older woman, and Truscott said quietly, "There's some brandy in the cabinet beside the monitor. Will you have a drink with me?"

  Hutch hesitated.

  "If you refuse, I understand. And I would be very sorry." She got the bottle, and filled two glasses. "If it helps, Cor­porate feels the same way you do. They're blaming me for Wald's death. I'm to be fed to the court of public opinion."

  Hutch didn't care much for brandy. "I'm not sure whose

  fault it was," she said, reaching for a glass. "At this point, it hardly matters."

  Truscott looked somber. "Nobody wanted it to happen."

  "Of course not." She couldn't quite keep the sting out of her voice. "We're all well-meaning."

  The director nodded. "To Richard Wald," she said.

  They drank, and Truscott refilled their glasses.

  "So what happens now? With you and Kosmik?"

  "Board of inquiry. They'll find culpability on my part if I let it go that far."

  "Can you stop it?"

  "I can make a public apology. Take the blame. I don't mind doing that. It happened on my watch, and I can't really evade responsibility. Did I tell you I was directed to see that no one was hurt?"

  "No—" Hutch felt a new surge of resentment.

  "It's true. I thought I'd arranged things pretty well. But I blundered."

  "How?"

  "Doesn't matter."

  "What will happen to you?"

  "They'll get my resignation, I'll drop out of sight for six months, and then I'll start a new career. I'll be fine. I have friends."

  Hutch was silent for a long time. Finally she said, "Losing him was such a waste."

  "I know. I've been reading his books." She sighed. "Hutch, you have a job with me any time you want it."

  They drank to that. They drank to Perth, and to Alpha.

  Then, amused, Truscott proposed a toast to Norman Caseway. "God bless him," she said. "We couldn't have got here without him. And you'd still be waiting for the Ashley Tee."

  "How do you mean?"

  "The Perth brought out the people who are going to implement phase two of Project Hope. It also brought the directive for me to go back and face the music. Caseway did not send my recall on ahead. Instead, he arranged to have it handed to me by the ship's captain. An insult. But, as a result they had to wait around a few days while I finished with loose ends. If that hadn't happened, the Perth would have been on its way home when your SOS came through.

  There would have been no ship to send after you."

  Hutch drained her glass, refilled it, and refilled Truscott's. "One more," she said. Hutch did not have a lot of tolerance for alcohol. It didn't take much to loosen her inhibitions, and she knew she should not propose this new toast. But she couldn't help herself.

  "To whom?" asked Truscott.

  "Not a whom, Melanie. You don't object if I call you Melanie? Good. Not a whom, Melanie. A what. I give you, the foamball."

  Hutch raised her glass.

  Truscott's aristocratic features darkened. She looked hard at Hutch, and the cloud lifted. "What the hell," she said. "Why not?"

  It was clearly a bowl. Carson's team gathered in an observation lounge during the approach, where they had access to a wide-screen display and communication with the ship's operations center. Harvey Sill joined them, announcing that he had been assigned to assist. "Don't hesitate to ask for anything you need," he said, with marked lack of enthusiasm.

  Perth moved in on the open side of the object. It broadened, and mutated into an inverted world, a world whose land­scape sank, and whose horizons rose. They glided below the rim, and their perspective shifted again: the surface flattened, became a blue-black plain, stretching to infinity. The horizon rose, and the lower sky went black. They passed beneath an enormous arch, one of a network tied in to strong points across the face of the object. "This is the only one of the telescopes," Sill said, "that's still transmitting."

  "Have you tried to translate the signal?" asked Carson.

  "We don't really have the means to attempt it. But we can tell you that they were aimed at the Lesser Magellanic."

  There was a young male crewman with them, wearing earphones. He reported precise physical specifications as they came in—diameter, angle of curvature, declination. "And thin," he said. "It's very thin."

  "How thin?" asked Carson.

  "At the rim, they're saying a little under six-tenths of a centimeter."

  "That's still thick enough to have ripped us up," said Hutch. "How did we get through?"

  "There's an antenna at dead center," said the crewman. "And it looks as if that's where the transmitter is." He listened to his earphones and nodded. "Operations reports it is rotating around its axis. They say one complete rotation in seventeen days, eleven hours, twenty minutes."

  "What holds it together?" asked Maggie. "It seems too fragile."

  "It's not metal or plastic. We're getting odd readings: potassium, sodium, calcium. Heavy concentrations of calcium at the center construct."

  "Do we have a picture of it yet?" asked Sill. "The center?"

  "Coming up now." The crewman glanced at the screens.

  The bulkhead opposite the window changed colors, went dark, and revealed a cluster of black globes, a group of small dish antennas, a few domes. "The signal source," said the crewman.

  Carson glanced at Sill. "We'd like to get a good look at it," he said.

  "We'll take you in close."

  "Is there a way we can date this thing?" asked Hutch.

  "Maybe if we had a sample," said Janet.

  "I don't think we want to do that." Carson looked uncertain what he wanted to do. "How about scrapings? Can we do it with scrapings?"

  Janet thought about it. "Maybe."

  "It's even thinner away from the rim," said the crewman. "Scanners indicate that thickness in this area is less than two millimeters. There's a latticework of thicker material, provid­ing support. But for the most part, the object is micro-thin."

  Nobody noticed Truscott until she spoke. "Now we see why Wink survived," she said.

  She was accompanied by a narrow, uniformed man whom she introduced as Captain Morris. His eyes were the color of water, and his hair was black and cut close in a military fashion. He acknowledged their names and shook hands with an irritating air of self-importance.

  They were approaching the cluster of antennas.

  "Historic moment," Truscott said. "We are getting a look at the first piece of alien high tech. We'll try to do an analysis, see if we can figure out precisely what we're looking at. How about you, Frank? Do you have an expert along who can give us some answers?"

  Carson looked at his colleagues. He received no encour­agement. "We're a little short on experts," he said.

  Perth glided over the featureless blue-black terrain. Her lights played on the surface, producing muted yellow blurs. The ship might have been moving across a burnished mar­ble floor.

  "How does it get power?" asked Janet. "Solar?"

  "Probably," said George.

  Truscott looked at Carson. "Do you want a sample?"

  "Yes," said Maggie.

  Carson nodded. "Try not to damage anything."

  The captain showed irritation. "We'll take care of it," he said coldly. He spoke into his commlink, listened, and looked puzzled. "Melanie, we can't find the collision site."

  "Were we looking for it?" asked Carson.

  Morris nodded. "We tracked your course backward, as a navigation exercise for my junior officers. There's no hole anywhere in the impact area large enough to run a starship through. Or anywhere else for that matter."

  "Your junior officers flunked," said Carson.

  Morris responded with a superior smile. "My junior offi­cers are quite good. And we've checked the numbers. There is no error." He looked at Hutch. "You did not change course, I understand."

  "That's correct," she replied. "But we did
take some dam­age. I had to adjust for a tumble, and it's possible that when I terminated the burn the thrusters didn't shut down simulta­neously. That could have resulted in a new heading."

  Morris shook his head. "There is a hole in the impact area. But it's not big enough to accommodate a shuttle, let alone Wink."

  "That's odd," said Truscott.

  "That's all there is," said the captain.

  "Why don't we take a look?" Hutch suggested. "At the hole we did find."

  The site was plowed up, exploded outward. They floated above it, in Flickinger belts, looking down through the open space at stars on the other side.

  "It's less than seven meters across at its widest point," said the Ops officer, a young woman named Creighton.

  "Well, we certainly didn't come through here," said Hutch. "There must be another one somewhere."

  "No." Morris spoke from the bridge. "There is no other hole. We've looked everywhere."

  "There has to be," Carson insisted.

  Lights played across the damage.

  "This is strange." George was holding his hand over the hole. He pushed it through, and withdrew it. And pushed it through again. "There isn't clear passage here," he said.

  Janet, who'd been examining the membranous material of which the Bowl was constructed, directed her lamp into the hole. "He's right," she said. "There are threads or thin fabric or something in it—"

  "Filaments," said Maggie.

  ARCHIVE

  "Yes, director?"

  "Do you have anything yet on the sample?" "We've just begun." "What do you know so far?" "It's organic." "Are you certain?"

  "Yes. I can give you more details in a few hours. But it looks like a spider's web."

  Commlog, Ship's Laboratory, NCK Catherine Perth Dated April 10, 2203

  Melanie Truscott, Diary

  I have not been able to sleep tonight. We have withdrawn from the immediate neighborhood of that telescope, construct, creature—God help me, I don't even know how to think of it. Now we begin the business of trying to learn who put it there. And why.

  There is no evidence of artificially generated elec­tromagnetic radiation anywhere else in the system. Even the other telescopes are quiet. (I wonder, does that mean that their transmitting equipment has given out? Or that the telescopes are dead?)

  The third and fourth worlds are both in the biozone, but only the third has life.