The Engines of God

by Jack McDevitt

  They talked about the Monument-Makers, and about the discontinuities. And eventually they began to talk about the things that really mattered to them. Hutch learned that the woman in Carson’s photo had run off with a securities dealer, that Maggie was morbidly afraid of death, that Janet had trouble attracting reasonable men. “I don’t know why,” she confessed, and Hutch suspected it was true. Most men she had known would have felt threatened by Janet Allegri, would never have felt comfortable in her presence.

  George, she decided, wanted to excel so that a young woman who had walked off years ago would regret her choice.

  And Hutch? She wasn’t sure what she gave away. She was careful not to mention Cal, and she didn’t talk about Richard. But Janet told her years later that she had first come to understand Hutch when she described her fear and humiliation while Janet took on the strider. “I promised myself I would never stand by again,” Janet quoted her as saying. And she added, herself: “I liked that.”

  As for the mission, one series of questions was central: if these were, indeed, the Monument-Makers, would they remember their visit to the solar system? Would they remember their own great days?

  “Oz,” said George, when asked to produce a question for the aliens. “I want to know why they built Oz.”

  The evening gatherings quickly took on a ceremonial aspect. They toasted one another and the commissioner and Beta Pac. Mission symbols and patches, worn on Academy blue, became de rigueur. Whatever reserve was left drained away, and they relaxed in each other’s company. They joked, and laughed, and required everyone to produce entertainments. There were magic tricks and monologues and sing-alongs. Maggie, reluctant at first to join in, demonstrated an ability to impersonate the voices and mannerisms of everyone on board. She’d captured Carson’s military demeanor and George’s back-country accent; she caught Hutch’s trick of tilting her head when puzzled, and Janet’s slightly voluptuous stance.

  They staged a dance (ties for gentlemen, skirts for ladies), and they began running an improvisational comedy, Great Excavations, in which a group of misfits at a mythical dig took turns trying to fleece and bed one another.

  Hutch enjoyed the fun and games, which always seemed to work well within the closed belly of a starship where human companionship counted for so much. Night after night, they talked into the early hours, and Hutch felt the bonds among them strengthening.

  Near the end of the third week, Maggie took her aside. “I wanted you to know,” she said, “that I’m sorry about Richard.”

  “Thank you,” Hutch responded, surprised.

  “I didn’t know you were so close, or I would have said something earlier. I think I was a little stupid.”

  “It’s okay.” Hutch felt a wave of regret. Not sure why.

  Maggie looked uncertain. “I know a lot of people think Henry is getting a bad deal. They think I’m responsible for what happened.” Her dark eyes found Hutch, and held her. “I think they’re right.” Her voice caught. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “We did the right thing. Richard knew that. That’s why he was there. But I wish it could have turned out differently.”

  Hutch nodded. Maggie hesitated, opened her arms, and they embraced. Maggie’s cheek was warm and wet.

  Hutch lived by her rule; she maintained a cautious demeanor toward George. She had been delighted at his inclusion in the mission, but she also recognized that his presence necessarily created a difficult situation. His eyes lingered on her through the long evenings, darting quickly away when she looked back. They brightened when she spoke to him, became animated when she asked his opinion about the topic of the hour. His voice softened noticeably in her presence, and his breathing downshifted.

  She would have liked to talk frankly with George, explain why she was not responding. She did not, after all, want to discourage him. But she could say nothing until he provided the opportunity by making an overt move.

  When it came, she blew it.

  They had fallen into the habit of pronouncing each session formally closed with a midnight toast, and marking off another day on the mission calendar which Carson had constructed and placed on a bulkhead in the lounge. (The ever-present four-master loomed above the five weeks and two days allotted for the outbound flight. On the twenty-sixth evening, George had seemed especially vulnerable. He had seated himself across from her, where he could demonstrate monumental unconcern. But color went to his cheeks early in the session, and stayed there.

  When the group broke up, he approached her. “Hutch,” he said in his most serious manner, “can we walk?”

  Her pulse fluttered. “Of course.”

  They descended into the lower reaches of the ship. The configuration had changed for this mission. She was still carrying three rings, but they were smaller. The vast cargo areas had been removed; the living quarters were reduced. There was still ample space to store artifacts, should the need arise, but Hutch no longer felt she was walking into an aircraft hangar. This Wink would present a considerably smaller target to scanners.

  “Hutch,” he said almost timidly, “you’re one of the loveliest women I’ve ever seen.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “When we get back, I’d like to have an evening with you. Just us.”

  Yes. “We can do that.”

  He was very near, not quite touching her, his breath warm and uneven. She steered them toward a viewport. Outside, the mist of the interdimensional world drifted slowly past. They might have been in an old house on the edge of a moor.

  “It’s like you,” he said, watching the fog. “You can’t see into it, you can’t quite get hold of it, and it keeps moving.”

  She laughed. They both did. And she made the first move. It was subtle enough, and would not have been noticeable to a bystander: she leaned in his direction, a mere centimeter or so. A signal passed between them, and she sensed his body make its own decision.

  “Hutch—”

  He reached out, tentatively, and touched her hair. His lips were very close.

  Hutch felt her tides begin to run. Fingertips touched. Flanks brushed. His eyes held her. His hands curled around her shoulders, and her cheek touched his. It was warm. She was up on her toes, lips parted, open, waiting.

  The moment expanded. Her breathing, her heartbeat, melted to his. Breasts, protected only by the flimsy material of her work uniform, touched him. He bent to her, met her mouth with his own, not pressing her. She accepted him, let him explore the thrust of her lips. Her heart hammered, and she lost her breath. When finally he broke away, she caught the nape of his neck, softly, firmly, and drew him back.

  She had one final moment of clarity, of reluctance, and then folded herself against him, inviting him, becoming part of him. She had to get up on her toes to reach him, but she loved it. His fingers brushed her right breast, lingered, drew away.

  She’d been on flights which featured people padding between rooms in the middle of the night. She didn’t want any part of that. “Come with me,” she said.

  He moved silently behind her.

  “Only tonight,” she said.

  His hand settled on her shoulder, touched her throat. And then he stopped. “Hutch,” he said, “do you really want to do this?”

  Yes, you fool.

  She led him into the shuttle bay. The Alpha lay in its cradle, shadowy, silent, potent. The cockpit windows glittered in the uncertain light. (They had replaced the damaged tread, bent by the tsunami.)

  He swung her easily off the floor, strode across the deck, and paused at the shuttle cargo door. He jabbed at the release mechanism, but nothing happened.

  She did it for him; there was a maintenance seal that had to be removed.

  He ducked inside with her, found a blanket, and spread it out.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” he said as he bent to her again. “Because I don’t want to spoil anything. I love you, Hutch.”

  She kissed his cheek. Drew his head down. “Be careful what you say. I migh
t hold you to it.”

  “Now and forever,” he said. The response was sufficiently artificial that she almost laughed. But he added, solemnly, “I mean it, Hutch.”

  What waited at Beta Pac? Maybe they were being invited to join the Galactic League. Or to receive a history and detailed atlas of the Milky Way, with its civilizations and its points of interest and its rest stops. Carson sprawled comfortably in his chair, feet propped up. “How do you suppose an individual in such a culture would define fulfillment?” he asked. “What would they want out of their lives?”

  “Same as us,” said Janet.

  George sipped dark wine. “What would that be?” he asked.

  “Power,” she said. “And love.”

  “It’s impossible to know,” said Carson. “That’s why they’re alien.”

  Hutch sat with a book open on her lap. “But we are able to understand alien mythologies, at least the ones we’ve encountered so far. Which means we are motivated by the same drives.” She thought once again about the footprints across the ridge on Iapetus. “I would guess they’d live, as we do, for achievement. To do something. And to want others to know what they’ve done. That’s the whole point of the Monuments.”

  The wall panels were open, and the internal lights played off the fog. There was always a sense of something just beyond the limits of vision. Hutch remembered an old story that pilots who had gone outside during transdimensional flight occasionally heard voices.

  George kept their bargain and stayed at a distance. She was pleased that he understood the need for discretion, and that he refrained from demonstrating the possessiveness which was so often the immediate downside of a sexual encounter. There was no second event. Both had been around long enough to recognize the damage that pairing up does to a small team on an extended mission. So they strove for the same pleasant amiability with each other that they displayed toward each of their colleagues. In Hutch’s case, at least, it required no small effort.

  Unlike her personal life, Wink glided placidly through the veils. It never trembled, never quivered, never accelerated. No inner systems quickened, and of course it received no messages from outside.

  Hutch enjoyed doing simmies with this crew. She portrayed a series of love interests attached to cynical antiheroes, like Margo Colby in Blue Light and Lisa in Casablanca. George charmed her as Antoine in the one, and Carson was appropriately vulnerable as Rick in the other. (It showed her a side of his personality that she had not anticipated. And she was moved almost to tears when George/Antoine left her behind and rode to his death near Moscow.)

  Carson had a taste for open-air historical spectaculars. He looked dashing, if a little beefy, as Antony at Actium, astride a white charger, the sun glittering against his horsehair helmet. Maggie was, they agreed, sensational as Cleopatra.

  When it was her turn to choose, Maggie inevitably went for the MacIver Thomson cliffhangers, in which she excelled as the quintessential damsel in distress. (It struck Hutch as odd that their most intellectual member would opt for thrillers.) And, by God, she was good: she screamed her way through Now the Dawn, hunted by the members of a bloodthirsty cult; fled the maniacal clown Napoleon through the deserted amusement park in Laugh by Night; and fought off Brother Thaddeus, the murderous monk, in Things That Are Caesar’s, while her would-be rescuer, the globe-trotting adventurer Jack Hancock (George), tried to recover from a vicious whack on the head and an attack in the rook tower by a pair of eagles.

  Janet specialized in women gone wrong. She portrayed Lady Macbeth with such pleasure and malevolence that Janet herself, seated beside Hutch, was chilled. (Watching acquaintances in the classic roles added an extra dimension to the experience, provided they were good. It all depended on the energy level and passion that one could provide to the mix.) Janet was also the scheming Mary Parker in Roads to Rome, and Katherine in Bovalinda. “You have a taste for power,” Carson remarked while she was seizing control of a metals consortium and simultaneously plotting to murder an uncooperative husband.

  “Yeah.” Her face glowed. “Damn right.”

  Hutch discovered something about herself during the evening they watched Things That Are Caesar’s. There is an all-out, no-holds-barred love scene in a rock pool within an abandoned monastery. And it was with an uncomfortable stirring in her breast that Hutch saw George, her George, close in on Maggie for a long aquatic grapple. It wasn’t really George, of course, any more than it was really Maggie. It wasn’t even their bodies: the subjects had supplied only fully clothed images and personality ranges; the computer had generated the rest. But Hutch felt a rising heat all the same, and she could not avoid a sidewise glance at Maggie, who was enjoying herself. As was George, sitting with a silly smirk.

  Beta Pacifica was somewhat smaller than Sol, and slightly cooler. The radio source was located fifteen AUs from the star. “We should materialize within fifty thousand kilometers of the target,” said Hutch as they began waiting for Navigation to signal that a jump was imminent.

  “We won’t hit it, will we?” asked Janet.

  “Chances are thin.” Hutch grinned. “Fifty thousand kilometers is a lot of space. There’s a better chance that both Hazeltines will fail.”

  “That’s not necessarily reassuring,” said Janet. “You’re assuming it’s a station. What if the source is on a planet?”

  “There’s no appreciable probability of that,” said Carson. “Anyhow, the mass detectors would pick up any significant gravity well and cancel the jump. Right?” He looked toward Hutch.

  “Right,” she agreed.

  Carson brought up a star chart. “We’re back in our old stomping ground,” he said. That was approximately true: Pinnacle, Quraqua, Nok, and the Beta Pac system were all located along the rim of the Orion Arm.

  “Party time’s over,” said Janet as they closed to within a few hours of their ETA. “Time to go to work.”

  LIBRARY ENTRY

  (Scene 221 from Things That Are Caesar’s: Ann Holloway is carried by the giant monk, Brother Thaddeus, through an underground passage into a rock chamber. She is stunned, and only begins to recover consciousness as he sets her down. She is wearing an evening dress, but it has been partially ripped away, exposing a shoulder and the upper curve of one breast. Brother Thaddeus, in obedience to his vows, shows no interest. He removes his sash and uses it to tie her wrists. When he has finished, he drags her across the stone floor toward an iron ring in the wall.)

  THADDEUS

  (Starting to secure her to the ring)

  No need to pretend, little one. I know you are awake.

  ANN

  (Stirring, confused, most of the fight now out of her)

  Please don’t.

  (Looks around wildly.)

  Jack? Where are you?

  THADDEUS

  He is past helping you, child. He is past helping anyone.

  (Opens a panel in the wall, revealing a switch. Zoom on switch.)

  ANN

  (Tries to cover herself)

  Let me go. Let me go, and I’ll tell no one.

  THADDEUS

  I’m not afraid of what you can tell, Ann Holloway.

  ANN

  Then why kill me?

  THADDEUS

  (Pulls the switch. We hear the sound of running water. A stream begins to gush into the chamber from above.)

  I have no intention of killing you. It is your past that condemns you. Your long nights of illicit pleasure cry out for atonement.

  ANN

  No! It’s not true. You’re crazy.

  THADDEUS

  (Sounding genuinely sorry; water gushes over her.)

  Have courage, child. God’s cleansing waves will save you yet. It is your only path to paradise.

  ANN

  (Strains at the chain. The torn blouse falls open, revealing still more, but she is well past worrying about it. Camera in close as she struggles.)

  Jack—

  THADDEUS

  (Pauses at the entrance to t
he chamber, prepared to close the heavy stone door.)

  Pray, my dear. It will ease your passage.

  (She screams. He begins to close the door. Water pours into the chamber.)

  The peace of the Lord be with you.

  (Bows his head. Camera in close. He hears something behind him, turns. Camera looks past him, down the passageway. Jack stands silhouetted in flickering torchlight.)

  JACK

  Where is she, you madman?

  THADDEUS

  (Surprised to see him.)

  Hancock? Do you really still live?

  ANN

  (Desperate)

  Jack! I’m in here.

  THADDEUS

  You should have accepted the grace the Lord gave you, and stayed away.

  JACK

  (Advancing)

  Hang on, Ann.

  THADDEUS

  (Closes the door behind him, sealing off Ann, and blocking the passageway.)

  You cannot help her. Best prepare for your own judgment, which is very close.

  (Touches the crucifix which hangs on a thin chain about his neck.)

  The wicked are like the chaff which the wind drives away. The wicked shall not stand.

  (Moves forward. They close in combat, and Thaddeus’ greater size gives him an immediate advantage. He quickly forces Jack back, removes a cord from his robes, and loops it around Jack’s neck. Meantime, cutaway shows water rising rapidly in the chamber. Ann struggles, etc. Holding Jack temporarily helpless, Thaddeus hauls him back along the corridor until he reaches the torch. Here, there is a lever in the wall. He pulls it, and a pit opens at their feet. A few rocks drop into the dark, and it is a long time before we hear them land. He drags Jack toward the edge of the pit. Jack breaks free, and the struggle rages while the water rises around Ann.

  THADDEUS

  For you, O God, delight not in wickedness; no evil man remains with you; the arrogant may not stand in your sight.