by Larry Niven
“Eric,” she called, “I’ve found a cave.”
No answer.
She clambered backward to stand by the shattered hole she and the Skidder had made in the ice curtain. “Eric?”
“Here.”
“Good. I found a cave. I’m going to explore. I don’t think we have good com, so expect to hear from me in about an hour.”
Kimber belted tools around her waist and turned her headlamp on before heading toward the back of the cave. The light bobbed up and down as she walked, making it hard to focus clearly on what was ahead of her. The cave wall appeared to be unnaturally smooth and to turn right near the back. She traced the wall with a gloved index finger for balance in the choppy light, and found herself passing through a natural doorway. She stood still, flicking on her handheld light to augment the headlamp. Her breathing stopped, and then started again jerkily. As the light traveled around the small room, she stopped it multiple times to highlight crude drawings on the walls. Finally, she rested the light on a figure huddled in the far back.
The frozen bones were large. Whatever wore them in life was more than twice as tall as Kimber, and it sure as hell wasn’t a Thray. The hollow bones reminded her of birds; the joints suggested the artist Escher. They differed greatly from Earthly designs. There was an elongated spine—twelve-centimeter-long vertebrae, oddly interlocked—and long bones that could have supported wings. She found scraps of leftover flesh frozen in strange shapes on the bones, like a mummified Andes sacrifice. How could the Thray have missed this in their survey? It couldn’t be the only accessible example of the species.
This might be just a cave-nesting bird, she thought. Thray would explore caves; the artist might have been a bored Thray surveyor.
Bored, during a thirty-hour survey? She didn’t believe it. Still…aliens…
She looked for more.
The angular drawings had been hacked and gouged into the ice. She found the tools: four flint fist-axes repeatedly dulled and flaked sharp again. The tools would have been too small for Althared’s hand. Would have hurt him, too. But the birdman’s fist was its foot: powerful, with toes become short fingers. She held the frozen bones near a fist-ax and saw a plausible grip.
She took pictures. She set up a light for a central piece as big as all the rest. The rest had been just practice, she thought. A maze…or an abstract…but the shape teased her mind. Suddenly she saw it, a bird in flight, a match for the bones she’d found.
She stepped outside and beamed the pictures up to Eric. Then she returned to carefully add some tissue samples and artifacts to her backpack. She’d see what he’d have to say about this.
It was late. Safer to camp by the cave than to head back. She sent her coordinates at Star Surveyor II, then set up her tent under a ribbon of starlight between the canyon walls. As she rolled off to sleep, questions nagged at her. What if the Thray hadn’t missed this? What if they knew about it and mapped it as tundra on purpose? Why hide it at all?
As the brilliance of the stars faded in the pale morning light, her suspicions of the previous night felt like unnecessary ghosts. Of course she’d find things the Thray had missed. She’d given them less than thirty hours to survey this region.
The unprotected surface of Trine was a cold place to sleep. Kimber packed up hurriedly and drove as quickly as she could safely navigate back to the Thray base. Two Thray looked up from the mouth of the cavern they’d been digging. Neither was Althared, so they couldn’t talk, but one helped her lift bags into Eagle.
At Star Surveyor II she crawled through the hatch (flying, not falling) and called out, “Eric! Help unload.”
He came, flight deck to lower deck, kicking once at the wall. He’d grown skilled in free fall. “I come, O my Captain!” He eeled past her without stopping.
She didn’t like his tone. She didn’t like her own either: too commanding. Then again, she wasn’t particularly happy with him. “Eric, why haven’t I gotten any compiled results back? It’s been like sending stuff up into a black hole.”
He wiggled out of the hatch, pulling a padded stow bag behind him. The massive bag must have massed as much as he did. He set it coasting, then got behind it and pushed it toward the lab.
Kimber followed him with another bag. He helped her stow it. When he finally spoke his tone was reasonable. “I haven’t got anything intelligent to say yet. I’ve been looking for cross-reference material in the Link libraries. Besides, what you sent last night changes everything.”
“We only have two more weeks here.”
“I know,” he said.
“I need to compare what I sent so far with the new data. There might be clues we missed in the early analysis. I feel like I’ve been in a sanitized zone all along, and picked up only lies.”
“We have the Link libraries. I’ve been learning how to access them. Kimber, doesn’t it bother you? They know. They all know the answers to all of these questions, everything we want to learn. We’re still guessing.”
“Eric, what is this? I’ve never seen you quit.”
“Who said anything about quitting? I’m just not interested in dying. Let’s see what you brought, Captain.”
Dying? Kimber laid out samples and photographs for his review, backed against the Velcro display wall. “Any ideas?”
Eric shook his head.
“Come on,” she chided. “You scored A’s in xenobiology. What is this thing? Is it something we know about?”
“I’ve never seen it. Is it a tool user?”
“Yes. Cave drawings…friezes, really. Rocks to carve them. This bit of skin, I thought it might not be his skin, but this came off its skull, so it is. We’ll compare the genetic coding. See if it wore clothing.”
“Did you tell Althared about it?”
“No. I want to learn more. But I also don’t want to insult Althared. I just want to know more and then tell him.”
“I think it’s gone beyond insult, Kimber. You think you were in a sanitized zone? With this in it? They had a sanitized zone all ready for you, out on a frozen ocean! You wouldn’t have that. Don’t tell Althared anything.”
“Eric,” she said carefully, “when I talk to Althared, you’re never in front of the camera. Am I wrong?”
“I didn’t think you’d noticed. I can’t look at an…at some kinds of handicapped people either.”
“He’s ugly?”
“Hideous.”
“Are all aliens ugly?”
“Oh, no. Pillbugs are wonderful. This thing, look at that wingspan. Birds are beautiful.”
“Buzzards aren’t.”
“Have you seen buzzards fly? Damn right they’re beautiful. Are you accusing me of making villains out of the Thray? By reflex?”
“I think it’s worth looking at.”
“How could the Thray not know about these creatures?” Eric swept his hand above the neat piles laid out on the Velcro. “And if they knew, why hide them? A world freezes. All life dies above the one-celled level. By and by the Thray come along. It’s tragic, but what’s the problem?”
“Eric, what is the problem?”
“The problem is that you and I might keep looking. Might find something more. I think we both win if we live through this survey.”
Paranoia.
Kimber started punching up biological species records looking for matches with large birdlike species. Even if it was sentient, it didn’t have to be a starfarer. Maybe it had never been cataloged. She didn’t find anything that looked right in the databases, and that increased the odds that it evolved here.
“Kimber,” Eric said, “while you were gone I found a reference that indicates the Thray may have been here about a thousand years ago. That was before this thing died.”
“That’s not possible, the first survey was less than a hundred years ago,” she said.
“Remember, the Thray prepared our briefings. I went looking in other libraries until I found an archived reference. They didn’t call it Trine, and it wasn’t ice,
but the coordinates fit.”
“Why hide it?”
“Carbon dioxide. Maybe Trine froze recently.” He looked at her stony expression. “The poles are too warm. The CO2 isn’t freezing out. If the continents haven’t been covered for more than a thousand years, then that’s when limestone formation stopped—”
“Then the Thray froze the planet? Damn it, Eric! You’re accusing a whole species of premeditated genocide! If we’re wrong, if we accuse the Thray of a crime this big and we’re wrong, we’d be lucky to be teacher’s assistants in some backwater for the rest of our lives, and not in prison, or extradited to some Thray cavern to face their judgment! Of which we know nothing.” She hadn’t planned to say any of that. She hadn’t quite known it was in her head.
Eric asked, “Did you ever wonder, Kimber, why they chose you? Your psych profile was the most compliant of all of us, at least with authority figures. I know, I looked it up when I lost the job to you.”
“And if we’re right, if they even guess at what we’re thinking, they’ll swat us like two flies,” Kimber said. “But they have not done anything threatening. Althared is always friendly. He’s given in on several points.”
Eric silently pointed at her photographs of the flyer’s bones.
Damn him anyway. She turned her searches to planetary magnetism and technology. The silence settled again.
Kimber worked through the night while Eric slept. In the morning she packed for four days down. Her eyes were swollen from staring at search screens and her whole body was tired. All her muscles knotted up when she slept in free fall.
Eric bounced down from the flight deck. “Kimber, I think you should stay here for a few extra days.”
Kimber sighed. The fears that drove her from sleep the previous night floated near the surface. She was truly scared now: scared of what she had found, and of what she had not found yet. Scared that she was seeing ghosts where there were none. The safest thing to do was to finish the survey. Act normal. They were already behind schedule. And Star Surveyor II was a fragile egg with no more protection than the distant Institute could offer.
Eric said, “Look, I think the Thray were here before the planet froze. They’re hiding that much anyway. I had to dig for days to find a reference, and there’s none in the survey prep documents. They’re pulling a fast one.”
“If they wanted to run a scam, why pick you?” she asked reasonably.
“I’m the top student. They had to pick me, or someone would ask why not. But why you?”
She could feel herself blushing. “We were lovers. Mated. To an alien it must be clear we get along.”
“That’s an interesting take,” he said slowly. “I hadn’t thought of it. The Thray could have got that off our e-mail, right?”
“That would be…” Illegal, of course; but they’d had a bitter flame war on-line, too, and then three years of silence. “More likely they looked at our psych testing,” she said. “They might misinterpret what they found.”
“They might have got it right,” he said.
“Oh, God. You’re a xenophobe, aren’t you? And you try to give me orders, and then I do whatever you tell me not to. They put me in charge. If you tell me it’s No Go on the Thray project, I’ll do the opposite.”
Eric had that verbal minefield look. Cautiously he said, “An alien might think we’re that simplistic.”
“Eric, I’m scared,” she admitted. “But I can’t do anything obviously different. If they are dangerous, and they think we know it, we’re in a lot of trouble. We’d best play stupid.”
He looked at her appraisingly for what felt like forever. “Kimber, are we thinking the same thing? This world froze fast, and recently. Worlds this near to Earthlike are scarce. If a world evolves anything intelligent, the Overlords protect it. Terraforming…it rolls in your mouth, it’s such an easy word, but…shaping a planet. The closer we look, the harder it gets. What if you started with a world that was already inhabited? It would be so much easier.”
“They’re burrowers. It must be easy for a burrower to hate birds,” Kimber said.
“What if the Thray found this place and made it cold?”
“Froze a whole world?”
He flared, “Well, they plan to warm one!”
“I guess so. How?”
“I think they blocked the sun. Changed the insolation—the amount of the sun’s warmth that gets through to the surface.”
“Same question.”
“Don’t laugh yet. They’d need a mirror bigger than whole planets. When Althared was talking about warming Trine, he said…what? Sunlight from a hundred thousand klicks around Trine? That’s ten to the sixteenth square meters. Three hundred thousand trillion. A mirror bigger than whole planets. Now laugh.”
Kimber didn’t feel like laughing.
“Right. That part’s plausible because they already need the mirror for the warming phase!”
“A mirror that big, would it be hard to hide?”
“Hah! I’m still working on that.”
“But it’s only engineering. We picked a killer and now we’re working on the locked room. Eric, why haven’t they swatted us?”
“Plausibility. Got to make it look like an accident.”
“Or maybe a murder-suicide. What if you could roll it up?”
“Or fold it? Make the mirror a few atoms thick, you could fold it into something the size of a…city? Aw, Kimber. Have you ever tried to refold a map?”
“Say it’s gone. They destroyed it, dropped it into the sun. How can we prove anything? There’d be no trace of what they did on the surface, barring the ice itself.”
He said nothing.
“Eric, how do you make coffee? Show me.”
He showed her, carefully. It took fifteen minutes. Neither referred to anything outside their ship. Kimber was hours late at Trine Base; she didn’t mention that either.
They went up to the flight deck and sipped coffee from squeezebulbs. By and by Eric said, “Give me a sanity check here: they didn’t destroy the mirror. They need it for the warming phase.”
“You’re sane.”
“Permission to run an errand?”
“Where?”
“I want to look in the L1 point. I’ll be back in a few days.” He saw her go blank and said, “The first Lagrange point, between Trine and the star. It’s around a million klicks inward from the planet. It’s an equilibrium point. Whatever you put in a Lagrange point, it stays if you don’t nudge it. Metastable equilibrium. We’ve been thinking about a big, big mirror, but what if they used a lot of little ones? We’d—”
“They’ll see the ship move! What do we tell them?”
Eric glared at her. “I think we’re running out of time.”
“But what do we tell them?”
She waited while he thought it through.
“I wouldn’t say anything,” he said. “If they’ve left something—doesn’t have to be a mirror—any bit of evidence anywhere around Trine, then as soon as I start searching…they don’t have to know what I think I’m after. Why bother to tell them a lie? They only have to decide if I live to talk. My best chance is, I can’t deliver the verdict. Only you can talk.”
“And I’ll be down there.”
“A hostage!”
She blinked back tears and turned away from Eric so he wouldn’t see. She told herself she was tired and stressed, but it was more than that. They were in a box. If they played nice, they’d be let loose. And they’d be liars.
Or Eric was crazy, and so was Kimber.
She turned to him. “Eric. I want to dazzle them with footwork.”
They talked it through. At one point Eric said, “Skis? You are nuts! The ice on this planet has been settling for hundreds of years. It’s a sedimentary rock, not the snow you’re used to.”
And again, “This isn’t pretend danger. It’s real. If you really got killed by accident, then there’s only me to worry about, and I’m mute!”
“No,” she
said. “Thray can’t take cold. They don’t like snow. They might not like any kind of surface conditions. Althared will think I’m committing suicide when I’m only out cross-country skiing. And we’ll have one more thing going for us.”
She explained. He listened. He said, “I can sure use the distraction. Next question. Why are you late going down?”
“Maybe we kissed and made up and indulged in”—she glanced at the computer’s clock—“three hours of mating practices. Or maybe we fought about this, this snow trek.”
He didn’t leer; his lips didn’t even twitch. He said, “Okay. Any way it breaks, they’ll be watching you. If Althared asks, I wanted an unblocked view of the sun…and a chance to get away from you, because we had a fight. Good call, Kimber.”
“Is there a touch of that?”
“Not bloody funny. It’s plausible. Make your call.”
Althared wiggled his head rapidly, then settled on a left profile. He waited.
Kimber said, “I expect to complete my exploration in two weeks.”
“Acceptable.”
“Please access your map.”
“Pause. Done.”
Kimber’s map was already displayed. She zoomed on Integra Continent. At her direction the Thray had set their base near the midcontinent, a mile below the peaks. Kimber popped up a green dot where a trailing end of Integra curled into a bay.
“I want to drop here. Over the next ten days I’ll make my way back to Trine Base. That gives me four days leeway, to get lost or to take a closer look at anything I find. I want you to arrange to drop a Skidder for me and take the Eagle back to Trine Base to wait.”
Althared turned his left eye full on her, then the right, then left again. “Kimber, have you lost your sanity?”
She glared off-screen, and Eric grinned back. She exploded, “Do you all think like that? If I start and end at the Base, I have to loop. This way I can go twice as far! Thus far I’ve only seen the midcontinent. Now I’ll go through terrain none of us has explored.”
“You take a fearful risk for no clear profit.”
“You built the skidders. Aren’t they safe? A skidder does fifty on the flat, but call it twenty; that’s plenty of leeway. I can drive for ten hours a day. If I lose ground, I’ll drop back to sea level. In ten days I’ll cover two thousand miles and be back at Base.”