The Engines of God

by Jack McDevitt

  “Make an Oz? Are you serious? We can’t make an Oz.” He wondered how much she’d had to drink during the night. “Have you been to bed at all?” he asked accusingly.

  “Forget bed,” she said. “The numbers work.”

  Carson put on coffee. “Slow down. What numbers? And where’s the right place?”

  She picked up a remote, and put a star chart on his display. She drew a line along the edge of the Void, and parallel lines through Beta Pac, Quraqua, and Nok. “We always knew we had the eight-thousand-year cycles. But we didn’t see any other pattern. Maybe because it was staring us in the face.

  “We think we know of two events on Nok, and two on Quraqua. And we may have seen evidence of at least one here.”

  “Okay,” said Carson. “Where does that leave us?”

  “If there really is an eight-thousand-year cycle, and we know there was an event here somewhere around 5000 B.C., then there must have been an earlier event somewhere around 13,000 B.C. Right? And at 21,000 B.C.” She posted the numbers in a window:

  Event

  Beta Pac

  Quraqua

  Nok

  1

  21,000 BC

  2

  13,000 BC

  3

  5,000 BC

  “If we stay with the eight-thousand-year cycle,” she said, “and we push it backward in time, then there would have been an event on Quraqua at about 17,000 B.C. Yes?”

  Event

  Beta Pac

  Quraqua

  Nok

  1

  21,000 BC

  17,000 BC

  2

  13,000 BC

  9,000 BC

  3

  5,000 BC

  1,000 BC

  “Okay.”

  “Good. We’re sure of the second and third Quraqua events. In both cases, they start four thousand years later. What does that suggest?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  “Frank, the same kind of thing happens on Nok.”

  “In what way?”

  She filled in the last column, rounding the numbers off.

  Event

  Beta Pac

  Quraqua

  Nok

  1

  21,000 BC

  17,000 BC

  16,000 BC

  2

  13,000 BC

  9,000 BC

  8,000 BC

  3

  5,000 BC

  1,000 BC

  0

  “This time,” Carson said, “there’s always a thousand-year difference. I see the pattern, but I don’t see the point.”

  “It’s a wave, Frank. Whatever this thing is, it’s coming in from the Void. It travels one light-year every seventy-four years. The first one we know about, the A wave, arrived here, at Beta Pac, somewhere around 21,000 B.C.”

  “I’ll be damned,” he said.

  “Four thousand years later, it hits Quraqua. Then, a thousand or so after that, it shows up at Nok.”

  Carson thought it over. It sounded like pure imagination. But the numbers worked. “What could it be?”

  “The Dawn Treader,” she said.

  “What?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Remember the Quraquat prayer?” She put it on the screen:

  In the streets of Hau-kai, we wait.

  Night comes, winter descends,

  The lights of the world grow cold.

  And, in this three-hundredth year

  From the ascendancy of Bilat,

  He will come who treads the dawn,

  Tramples the sun beneath his feet,

  And judges the souls of men.

  He will stride across the rooftops,

  And he will fire the engines of God.

  “Whatever it is,” she said, “it’s connected somehow with the Oz structures.”

  The room felt cold. “Could they be talismans?” Carson asked. But the prospect of an advanced race resorting to attempts to invoke the supernatural was disquieting.

  “Or targets,” said Hutch. “Ritual sacrifices? Symbolic offerings to the gods?” She swung around to face him. “Look, if any of this is right, the wave that went through Nok during A.D. 400 has traveled about thirty-five light years since.” She drew another parallel line to mark its location. “There’s a star system located along this track. I think we should go take a look.”

  Carson called Truscott early. “I need a favor,” he said. “I’d like to borrow some equipment.”

  She was in her quarters. “What do you need, Frank?”

  “A heavy-duty particle beam projector. Biggest you have. You do have one on board, right?”

  “Yes, we have several.” She looked perplexed. “You’re not going excavating down there?”

  “No,” Carson said. “Nothing like that. In fact, we’re leaving the system.”

  She registered surprise. “I can arrange it. What else?”

  “A pod. Something big enough to use as a command post.”

  “Okay,” she said. “We can do that, too. You’ll have to sign for this stuff.”

  “Thanks. I owe you, Melanie.”

  “I agree. Now, how about telling me what this is all about?”

  He could see no reason for secrecy. “Sure,” he said. “How about breakfast?”

  The Ashley Tee was essentially a group of four cylinders revolving around a central axis. It bristled with sensing and communication devices. Hutch had already talked to them before they made the transfer. “We’ve got a celebrity,” she said, with a smile.

  The celebrity was its pilot, the near-legendary Angela Morgan.

  Angela was tall and trim with silver hair and gray eyes. Hutch had never met her, but she knew about her. Angela had performed many of the pioneer flights during the early days, had pushed the limits of mag technology, and had been the driving force behind many of the safety features now incorporated in FTL deployment.

  Her partner was Terry Drafts, a young African physicist not half her age. He was soft-spoken, introspective, intense. He made no secret of his view that riding with Angela was equivalent to getting his ticket punched for greater things.

  “If you’ve really got something, Carson,” Angela said, “we’d be happy to help. Wouldn’t we, Terry? But don’t waste our time, okay?”

  Since all starships maintain onboard clocks in correlation with Greenwich, the new passengers suffered no temporal dislocation. It was mid-morning on all the vessels of the various fleets when Angela showed her new passengers to their quarters.

  She joined them for lunch, and listened while they talked about their experiences in the system. Eventually, she asked pointedly whether they were certain this was the home world of the Monument-Makers. (They were.) How had the team members been lost? (No one got into graphic details, but they told her enough to elicit both her disapproval and her respect.)

  “I see why they wanted me to put the ship at your disposal,” she said. “We can stay here. We can take you to Point Zebra. Or we can go all the way back to Earth. Your call.” The Point was the staging site for local survey vessels.

  “Angela,” said Carson, “what we’d like is to take a look at one of the moons in this system. Then we’re going to do some serious traveling.”

  Angela trained the ship’s telescopes on the harbor city. It looked serene: white ruins embedded in soft green hills, thick forest spilling into the sea. The broken bridge that led nowhere.

  They spent two days at the Oz-like artifact. They marveled anew at its perpendicularity. It was, announced Drafts, the mecca of right angles. And, unlike the construct on Quraqua’s moon, this one had no exception, no round tower.

  But it too was damaged. Charred. Cratered.

  “I’ve seen the other one,” said Angela. “Why would they make something like this?”

  “That’s what we hope to find out,” said Carson.

  That evening, Monday, April 18, 2203, at slightly before 1100 hours, they rolled out of lunar orbit.

  Two nights
later, Carson ceremonially stored his wheel-chair. And Janet added another piece of speculation. She first mentioned it to Hutch. “I was thinking,” she said, “about the phrase in that Quraquat prayer—”

  “‘The engines of God’?”

  “Yes. The engines of God—”

  “What of it?”

  “We might not be far off. If there’s an A wave, the one that touched Beta Pac in 21,000 B.C.: if it kept going, it would have reached Earth.”

  Hutch nodded. “Before the rise of civilization, right? Before anybody was there to record it.”

  “Not exactly. It would have passed through the solar system somewhere around 5000 B.C.”

  Hutch waited. The date meant nothing to her.

  Janet shrugged. “It fits the most recent estimates for Sodom and Gomorrah.”

  ARCHIVE

  (Transmitted via Laserbuoy)

  TO:

  NCA GARY KNAPP

  ATT: DAVID EMORY

  FROM:

  FRANK CARSON, BETA PAC MISSION

  NCA ASHLEY TEE

  SUBJECT:

  OPERATIONAL MOVEMENT

  DAVID. SORRY TO LEAVE BEFORE YOU GET HERE, BUT BUSINESS PRESSES. WE MAY BE ABLE TO FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENED AT ORIKON. NEXT STOP IS LCO4418. JOIN US THERE IF YOU CAN.

  CARSON.

  27.

  On board NCA Ashley Tee, en route to LCO4418. Wednesday, April 27; 1930 hours.

  “I can’t believe,” said Drafts, frowning at his pair of deuces, “we’re really doing this.”

  “Doing what?” asked Angela, looking up from a book.

  “Chasing a dragon,” said Hutch. She wasn’t holding anything either.

  “It’s worth the trip,” said Angela. “I don’t believe a word of it. But I’ve been wrong before.” She literally radiated vitality. Hutch had no trouble imagining her flying into a volcano.

  “By me,” said Drafts. He had been winning, and was in an ebullient mood. “The problem I have,” he said, “is that I can’t imagine what this thing might look like. I mean, are we expecting hordes of destructive nanomachines belched into the galaxy from somewhere in the Void every eight thousand years?” He placed his cards face down on the table. “Or fleets filled with psychopaths?”

  “Maybe,” said Janet, “it’s not from the Void, but something out of the center of the galaxy.” She was trying not to look pleased with her cards. “I’ll open,” she said. She pushed a coin into the pot. “It would come from the same direction.”

  Drafts glanced at Carson. “Forty-four eighteen’s already been looked at. If there had been anything going on out there, we’d know about it.”

  “Maybe not,” said Angela. “If this thing exists, it might not be easy to find unless you know what you’re looking for.”

  “Well,” said Drafts, still talking to Carson, “I don’t want to offend anybody, but I doubt this dragon is likely to stand up to the light of day.”

  “Ah, Terry, will you never learn?” Angela delivered a sigh they could have heard in the shuttle bay. “You’re right. But it’s the wrongheaded types who make the big finds.”

  Carson smiled at her appreciatively.

  Drafts shrugged. “Okay,” he said.

  Hutch folded, and watched Janet scare everyone out of the pot. Carson picked up the cards and began to shuffle. “The Monument-Maker as Death,” he said. “Could they have built something that got away from them?”

  Hutch tried to wave it away. “Why don’t we wait until we get there? Meantime, we can’t do anything except guess.”

  Angela was sitting with her feet doubled under her. She was reading Matama, the hundred-year-old Japanese tragedy. “If there is a wave,” she said without looking up, “it would have to be pretty deep, on an order of a couple of light-years, for us to have a reasonable chance to locate it. What kind of mechanism could be that big?”

  “If it exists,” said Janet, “it stretches from Quraqua to Nok. That’s a hundred light-years. At a minimum.” She looked toward Carson. “That would have to be an effect beyond anybody’s capability to manufacture.”

  “I just can’t see that the evidence amounts to anything,” said Drafts. “Look, these people, whoever they were, had a passion for leaving their signature everywhere they’ve been. They liked monuments. The Oz-structures and the cube moons were early efforts. They were getting their sea legs. No hidden meanings; just practice.”

  “Come on, Terry,” said Carson.

  “Why not? Why does there have to be some deep-seated significance? Maybe they’re just what most other monuments are: somebody’s idea of high art. And the eight-thousand-year cycle is hardly established as fact. Half of it’s pure guess-work, and I bet the rest of it is going to turn out to be wishful thinking.”

  Carson and Janet looked at Hutch. Hell, she thought, I made no guarantees. But she felt forced to defend her speculations. “The dating wasn’t mine,” she said. “It was done by Henry Jacobi and David Emory and the data technicians on the Perth. I just put it together. If the numbers are a coincidence, they’re a coincidence. But it’s not wishful thinking. I have no interest in meeting a dragon out here.”

  The tension broke, and they all laughed.

  If a cosmic hand were to move the red giant LCO4418 to the center of the solar system, Mercury and Venus would sink beneath its tides, and Earth would swim through its upper atmosphere. The surface simmered serenely at less than 2200 degrees Kelvin. It was an ancient star, far older than Sol. Its blood-colored light spilled across its family of worlds.

  Terrestrial planets orbited at either end of the system, separated by four gas giants. The survey team which had visited the system ten years earlier had concluded that there had probably once been other planets, closer to the central luminary, but they had been absorbed as the sun expanded. LCO4418 was now thought to be close to the end of this phase of its cycle. Over the next several million years, it would recede.

  Carson watched recordings of its image on the screens. Prominences did not erupt from its interior, nor did sunspots mar its placid surface. It had entered the final stage of its existence, and death would come quickly now. By cosmic standards.

  For all that, it would still be here, and still look much the same, when the human race had long since met whatever fate awaited it. Or had evolved into something else.

  The flight was somber. The festive mood and the enthusiasm of the days on the Winckelmann had gone. The crew and the passengers spent most of their time together. No one drifted off alone. But there were long silences and uncomfortable glances and things left unspoken. It was perhaps not entirely coincidental that on the evening before their arrival at LCO4418, the conversation had centered on how funerals might be improved to aid future archeologists.

  Late in the afternoon of May 7, they jumped back into real space, well south of the planetary plain.

  On those occasions when Carson was honest with himself, he knew that he did not expect to find anything. He did not really believe in the wave. It was an intriguing concept, but this was not a phenomenon that he could credit. So he stood on Ashley’s bridge, and surveyed the vast wastes, and wondered, not for the first time, why he was here.

  The three surviving members of the original team found they could no longer hide their feelings from each other, and Carson was not surprised when Hutch, who had come up behind him, moved right into his mood. “Sometimes,” she said, “you just have to take your chance, and let go.”

  They started by performing a system-wide survey for artificial objects. It showed negative, which did not mean there might not be something present, but only that any such object would be at considerable range, or quite small, or hidden behind a natural body.

  In spite of themselves—they agreed, when pressed, that they were chasing ghosts—they were disappointed.

  Angela pored over the records of the original mission to 4418. “A fairly typical system,” she told Hutch. “What do we do now?”

  The red giant dominated the viewscreens. “
Verticals and perpendiculars,” she said. “We are going to make some right angles.”

  Carson had been looking for a good construction site. He explained his strategy in detail, and Angela produced topographical maps from the survey. They decided to use an oversized moon orbiting the second planet: 4418-IID. Delta.

  Drafts put it on the display. In the dim glow of the sun, it was an exotic worldlet, silver and gold by candlelight. Clouds drifted above orange snowfields and nitrogen seas, methane swamps and crooked mountain chains. It lay in the shadow of the big planet’s wispy rings.

  The atmosphere read out as hydrogen, methane, nitrogen, with substantial amounts of ethane, hydrogen cyanide, ethylene. Distance from the central world was 650,000 kilometers. Period of revolution: 13 days. Diameter: 5300 kilometers. Surface temperature: -165°C, at the equator. Surface gravity: .37. Orbital period: 11.14 days. Age: estimated 4.7 billion years, with an error factor of ten percent. The system was twelve A.U.s from the sun.

  They watched an ice volcano erupt in the southern hemisphere. Snow was falling over one of the oceans, and a nearby coastline was whipped by heavy rain. “The rainstorm might be two-hundred proof,” said Angela. “There’s a lot of ethanol down there, and the temperature’s about right.” She grinned. “I wouldn’t be surprised to find gasoline lakes.”

  Carson found what he was looking for in the south, about 20 degrees below the equator: a vast plain cluttered with plateaus. “Here.” He tapped the screen. “Here’s where we want to set up.”

  With Hutch’s help, Drafts disconnected three of the ship’s external cameras. The Ashley Tee was consequently left with blind spots, but they could get by. They jury-rigged a mount for the laser, and tripods for the cameras.

  “Tell me about the communications,” Carson asked as they rounded the gas giant early in the afternoon of their third day. They would go into orbit around Delta at breakfast time.