Alien Artifacts

by Seanan McGuire

  They were the same creatures as the pilot she had found—or whatever that room was for—but smaller, and not quite right. Lyssa approached one: its head bulge was uneven, tentacles shrivelled. And another, with tentacles far out of proportion to the tiny head. Images flashed through her mind of the horror stories of cloning attempts, aborted mutant fetuses in jars, miscarried children.

  But that wasn’t it. She brushed her hand against the glass, and felt not a twisted glut of power, but desperation and despair, a clutch of need to fix this, to make it right, to save them. Lyssa recoiled, and the feeling ebbed, but didn’t vanish entirely. It hadn’t come from her. She swallowed the sick swoop at the thought, and looked closer at the creatures, each of them.

  No mouths. No kind of ear-orifice she could see. Just bulbs and tentacles; she couldn’t even see how they’d take nourishment.

  There were no controls anywhere, not a single button or slider or dial. Even the depressions in the floor, in the previous room, with the harnesses—not a single switch.

  If they didn’t speak, how did they communicate? Chameleonic colors, maybe, but if they didn’t use buttons or controls, then what was left? Some kind of telepathy?

  That would explain the emotion surge.

  Jazz and Ori’s argument reached a crescendo over whether aliens would invent guns or art. From the sound of it, she wasn’t the only one being influenced. If those two could push back out into space with the death of their pilot and fix a catastrophic hull breach with barely a mention, they weren’t the type to easily lose their cool.

  There was another creature in a depression on a wall, curled up on itself. Lyssa approached it, brushed the stiff skin with her glove. Nothing.

  She sank herself against the spongy depression to look closer, and panic spiralled through her spine, clawing at her lungs and driving up through her skull like it would burst out. It was the creature’s desperation. Lyssa breathed evenly, pressed against the ship, counting the seconds in and out, trying to let the feelings wash over her, trying to read them.

  Fear of loss, and grief—actual loss. It had been trying to save something, stop something. Guilt and shame that it could not, failure. Images of the stunted aliens in the jars stuttered through her mind with a fierce love, and a pain that was almost a keening. The creature’s desperation raced onward, climbing against the guilt, and Lyssa was back in the New Washington rec complex, tugging Jem from the rubble and searching for a pulse...

  She pushed off from the wall, gasping and blinking back tears that threatened to smother her eyes. Spacers didn’t cry. In microgravity, tears would blind.

  Jazz and Ori’s voices shot back in through her earpiece.

  “It’s an invasion, and it’s happening now, you can’t ignore that,” Jazz shouted. “I will not be responsible for any more death.”

  “And if you’re wrong? I don’t know how to deal with that kind of destruction, Jazz. Nobody does.”

  Lyssa clicked on her mic, and tried to steady her breath. “This is not about the aliens, guys.”

  The other two stopped short.

  “Lyssa, stay out of this. And stay off the comm.”

  “This isn’t a trading base. And it’s not an invasion, it was a colony.”

  “How do—get the hell back to the ship!” Jazz exploded.

  “I’m a member of your crew, Jazz, not a child.”

  “You’re injured!”

  “Look around you: this is a lab, not a ship, not a base. They’re equipped for microgravity, they probably wouldn’t even want a planet. They were survivors, just trying to keep themselves alive.”

  Old-school philosophy reared up in her head. Fermi’s Great Filter. They’d been trying to save not just the colony, she sensed, but the species. And they’d failed. What does that say about us?

  “You find some ship’s log somewhere, lay it all out for you?” Jazz’s sarcasm could have warped metal.

  “Of sorts. Will you just look at the place? Actually look.” Lyssa took a breath, forced the irritation out of her voice. “No controls, no interfaces. The creatures have no mouths or orifices. The ship links directly with their minds.”

  “Spacedust—wait, what do you mean, no orifices?” Jazz’s voice rose an octave. “What did you find?”

  Lyssa pushed all the air out of her lungs, suddenly exhausted by the prospect of convincing them. “Alright, I don’t know you that well, but have you been listening to yourselves? Your arguments, your thoughts? Everything is much more intense over here, everything is the end of the world. You’ve found an abandoned structure and you’re convinced it’s the end of times. Is that what you’d usually expect from each other?”

  Jazz’s harsh breathing caught.

  “That’s not you; the ship is tapping in, trying to communicate. It’s using your guilt over Tye’s death as a kind of translation. An approximation.” The implications yawned in her mind. She had no energy left to be delicate. “Your fear that the grief will overwhelm you if you open that door, the fear that you’ll snap with any more death... they felt that, these creatures, as they were dying. It’s trying to tell us what happened.”

  Jazz all but snarled. “You don’t know a fu—”

  “I get it, I do. In pilot training, I lost my partner. We had a day’s leave, and I wanted to go to the rec complex, because it was so retro, and I dragged Jem along. The same day of the New Washington Suicide Bombs.” Lyssa pushed her hand against her belly through the suit to comfort the familiar ache. “I made it out. Jem didn’t. She was right next to me. There was no warning, no reason I earned survival and she didn’t, it just happened.”

  Jazz was silent. Lyssa continued.

  “It took me years to figure out how to get over—no—get to the place where death just happens. To stop trying to justify or punish or hide or control. To get out of my own way.”

  Jazz cleared his throat. “I’m sorry about your friend,” he said gruffly. “But I don’t see how it’s relevant.”

  Lyssa sighed. “The ship is trying to communicate the loss of its entire species. It doesn’t know English. Hell, it probably doesn’t know language as we think of it, but it’s trying to tell us what happened the only way it can. Something about the way you lost Tye is—”

  “Radiation,” Ori blurted, her voice raw. Lyssa caught her breath in surprise. Ori, actually speaking to her?

  “We hit a micrometeorite leaving Earth orbit,” Ori said, as if the words drew blood. “Not bad, but enough that we needed to stop and repair. But there were solar flare reports.”

  “We didn’t know about the sol—” Jazz interrupted.

  “We did. But we had deadlines and a full load and it was Tye. Tye could pull a planet out of a black hole if he wanted. He said he’d be done by the time the flare hit.”

  “I should have stopped him.”

  “You didn’t know. And he didn’t say. We didn’t even realize until we heard him choking over the comm,” Ori’s voice shook, then fell silent.

  “By the time we pulled him in, he was bleeding from everywhere,” Jazz whispered. “Blood floating around in bubbles on his ears and eyes and nose. He couldn’t breathe past it. He was drowning in it.”

  “The radiation tore him apart from the inside,” Ori finished softly. “He died in our grasp.”

  “And you towed his body to Schiaparelli and drove back out again the next day,” Lyssa said.

  Jazz took a sharp breath. “I told you—”

  “It wasn’t your fault, Jazz,” Lyssa cut him off.

  “I should have been with him.”

  “You couldn’t have stopped it,” Lyssa said. “That’s the point, the ship’s point.” She took a breath. “You need to stop assuming the worst. Trying to control it. Both of you. You can’t protect yourself from pain by controlling the world, or shutting yourself off from it.” A new strength colored her voice, filling her from the outside in. “Because life ends. That’s a fact—just look around. They were trying to save themselves. They failed.”r />
  She floated back toward the first room, the strength flowing down her spine. “Life ends, and we need to tell people. So we stop taking our own species for granted. So we get out of the way of humanity surviving.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? Our ship is crippled,” Jazz said.

  “And as soon as we tell anyone there will be war,” Ori added. “They’ll be too paranoid to listen, there’ll be nothing but lies.”

  Lyssa eased into a harness, wrapping the strange cords around her body. It was a little long, but she managed to twist them tight enough to hold her in the spongy depression. The strength blossomed out from her core as she nestled herself in. Well, you wanted something bigger than shuttles.

  “We still have engines,” she said. “Power is power, we can convert it somehow. I have a hunch we’ll figure it out. They were trying to start a colony; they’ll have had a transmitter somewhere, and a powerful one. One that could call home, wherever that was.”

  “You want to call the aliens here?”

  Lyssa sighed. “They’re long gone, remember? This was their last ditch effort. But we can’t be the only two species in the universe, and I suspect this thing has a hell of a range.” She wriggled in her suit, the spongy material of the depression gently grasping her body. “You’re right about the paranoia, and the lies. It’s what we do, how we hold ourselves back.

  “But the ship is telepathic. So we’re going to tell the solar system. Mars, Earth, Io, the outposts, everyone at once, right to their core. We’ll tell them what really happened here, the truth in their bones. We’re going to tell them what’s at stake, and what they’re going to do next.”

  Lyssa took a breath. “And then we’re going to call the aliens here.”

  TITAN DESCANSO

  James Van Pelt

  If you’re not famous, you think famous people experience a different sort of life from you, that they don’t shop at convenience stores or they don’t get haircuts. You don’t think about them spending time driving their cars. But they do. Even if they were an astronaut, even if they’d been to Titan, they still might have a dead brother. They still might have their little traditions, same as you.

  The roadside memorial came up on my right: a wooden cross wreathed with decayed flowers next to a barbed wire fence. A weatherworn cardboard sheet with a photograph taped to it leaned against the cross. I pulled the car onto the shoulder, as far from the traffic as I could get, but a semitrailer rocked me as it blasted by. Highway 50 is straight here. Grand Junction to the north-west, Delta to the south-east. Colorado residents sometimes call this stretch the “stinking desert,” but it’s semi-arid at worst. Dry grass and scrubby brush that drops down to the Gunnison River about a mile from here on one side, and the same, maybe a little drier land, that rises toward the mesa on the other. Beautiful country at sunset or sunrise when shadows cut across, making what is green a dark and mellow shade and highlighting the rolling landscape, but at noon, when the sun blasts down, it’s flat and dusty, a lot like our old home in Santa Fe. You would think an accident would be impossible here. A truck veering off the road would hit nothing more substantial than a three-wired fence or scrub oak as dry and insubstantial as toothpicks for hundreds of yards, yet this is where Gabriel rolled his truck. State Patrol said he probably fell asleep, dropped a wheel off the shoulder, then over-corrected. They found the truck fifty yards from the highway on its top. Gabriel landed another twenty yards beyond that.

  I pulled the cardboard off the cross. The picture showed the two of us camping eleven years ago. Gabriel sat on our cooler, a beer in one hand and a frying pan in the other. I stood behind him, holding a fishing pole and looking glum. Nothing bit that morning. We had pancakes again. It was my last vacation before the Titan lift-off.

  The staple gun stuck the new cardboard with the same picture to the cross. I’d laminated it to last longer.

  Gabriel knew I’d walked on Titan. He sent a congratulatory message. I sent a thank you back. At the speed of light, he waited three hours for my reply. No real personality in the messages, of course. He couldn’t very well say, “How the fuck is it?” in an e-mail that everyone in the world might read, but that would be more like him. We’d save the rudeness for when I got back, when we could buy each other beers and remember when we played astronaut in the back yard.

  Mamá called roadside memorials descansos. It comes from an old New Mexico funeral custom where the coffin was carried from the church to the camposanto, the cemetery. When the pallbearers needed rest, they put the coffin down. The stopping was the descanso, a resting place before the body reached the final destination. Mourners might leave flowers at the spot, sometimes with a little wooden cross among them. Like a descanso, roadside memorials commemorate the body’s rest before reaching the cemetery.

  It was an unremarkable piece of land. The state had hauled away the wreck long ago, and a rancher had repaired the barb wire. Saturn would have been visible that night. I checked. Clear sky, dry, desert air, no city lights. Gabriel might have looked in my direction that night, before he crashed. Now, I smelled sage and the distant river. The sand, brownish red and fine grained, slipped from my fingers.

  According to the mission logs, I was on an EVA in the Titan rover when he died. I wouldn’t learn about it for almost twenty-four hours. No real night sky on Saturn’s largest moon. It’s a hazy, dark, orange air during the day with the sun so far away. At night, no stars. Even Saturn, that great, ringed giant isn’t visible. I couldn’t see the Earth, of course, not that I had the luxury. Driving the rover required constant attention. Liquid methane puddles and ponds dotted the area around the habitat. They weren’t deep, but the ground became viscous at their edges and could bog the rover down. We’d used the second rover to extricate it several times. I was investigating a radar blip a couple thousand meters away, behind a low hill we called Mount Olympus.

  They built the rover’s cab like a Kansas combine: enclosed against methane rain or wind, but not air tight. The atmosphere on Titan is thicker than Earth’s by about half, so no need for a pressure suit, but we needed thermal protection. All that concerned us was keeping the heat in. The weather on the surface was almost minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit, and a light breeze whispered past the windows.

  There’s a lot to like about Titan. Sound, for example. I’d been to the moon, Mars, and Ganymede—all silent except for human and machine noise. Titan, though, had a voice. I imagine during the equinox, when the winds picked up, that it positively roared. Rain hissed as it slowly settled at a sixth of Earth gravity. Methane creeks made happy bubbly noises when they over-spilled their basins. Rocks clacked against each other when I kicked them. Occasionally there was thunder.

  Planets have a smell, too. Regolith from the moon smells like burnt gunpowder. Mars smells like sulfur. Titan reeks. We decontaminated the suits when we reentered the habitat, but the methane and ethane stench lingered. It was hard to believe that Earth’s atmosphere might have once been a rich, hydrocarbon soup like Titan’s.

  A smoggy late dusk under heavy cloud cover best described a drive at noon on Titan. I steered by headlights and found my way by the nav screen. The radar blip could be a rock situated the right way to bounce the signal, or a mineral deposit, or nothing at all. We’d investigated dozens of radar anomalies. We liked doing it. NASA scripted so much of our mission. There were science experiments to be set up, samples to be gathered, observations to be made. Responding to anomalies meant that we were human. That’s why we came instead of self-directed robot explorers.

  Rover I handled the rocky-strewn terrain easily. The hill tilted me a little, but that meant I was above the liquid, hydrocarbon muck below. Not much chance of getting stuck. Up here, the Rover crackled as it fractured the thin crust on the surface. Underneath, the soil was soft sand.

  The headlights revealed a hump in the surface that I steered to go around. The blip was close. As I approached, the lump resolved into a cairn, but not just rocks on rocks. These seemed
organized and fitted. The cairn stood stark in the Rover’s lights; a long shadow cast behind it. A breeze caught dust from under the wheels and swept it around the rocks. I climbed out, put my suited hand against the stones. The pile was nearly as tall as me, and this close, the artifice was clear. How could this be a natural formation? I walked around, dragging my hand as I went, and on the far side, a low opening appeared. On my knees, I shined my light inside. Partly buried in sand, metal objects glinted back. My breath quickened. I knew I should call it in, but I wanted to make this moment last. Two, small metal boxes and what looked like a helmet. I brushed dust from the helmet’s front. Beneath, it was a clear faceplate, too small for an adult human, and way wider than it was tall. We had not left it. Ours was the only expedition to this area on Titan.

  I had discovered the first sign of extraterrestrial life.

  Somewhere around the time I knelt in front of a cairn on Titan’s surface, within an hour or two, when I was about nine-hundred million miles from home, Gabriel rolled his truck. Time of death was hard to pin down. A guy in a jeep spotted his overturned vehicle mid-morning. By then, our news had reached Earth. I’d been broadcasting a live feed, the now iconic, grainy picture of my gloved hands pulling a strangely shaped helmet from the dark. Anyone on Earth watching knew we weren’t alone about an hour and a half after I did, after the signal flew at the speed of light across our solar system.

  By the time we returned home, the space budget had tripled. New expeditions were scheduled to all the planets. Ambitious plans to explore the asteroids were being finalized. Who left the helmet? No one believed another space-faring species lived in our solar system. They had to be extra-solar. How did they get here? Had they mastered the power of faster than light travel? If they could, we could.