Cosmic Powers

by John Joseph Adams

  So did the rest of the crew. Sasmita was positively buoyant.

  “I don’t know about the coffee-fuel-explosive machine, but these things . . .”—and she reached back to finger one edge of the rug that had chosen her—“could generate income several times the cost of the voyage.”

  “Doesn’t seem to be doing any harm,” Cooper observed guardedly.

  Bannerjee nodded. “Quite the contrary. I don’t know how these things are doing this, but I am glad that they are.” He flexed his right hand. “My arthritis is gone too.” He started toward another ovoid. “This is a room full of marvels.”

  “The marvels will have to wait.” Much as he wanted to see what was in the next ovoid, and the next, and the one after that, Oldman knew it was incumbent on him to keep the others focused. “We can come back here. We still need to find out if we’re on a ship or some other kind of apparatus, and hopefully where it may have originated.”

  They argued with him but not vociferously. The commander was right, as he usually was. But all were careful to note the location of the room on their own instrumentation.

  Chosen at random, another corridor led to a chamber that, as Cooper put it, looked like it was badly in need of a haircut. The same dim, sourceless light revealed an endless field of tightly packed-together four-meter-high jet-black strands. There did not appear to be a path through them to the other side of the chamber. Unlike previous rooms, this one boasted a domed ceiling of softly pulsing, fluctuating colors. When Oldman put out a hand to touch the nearest of the black strands, each of which was exactly the same diameter as its neighbor, it flexed and moaned. He drew his fingers back sharply.

  That would have been the end of it, save for the ever-audacious Sasmita. Crouching, she lightly gripped a strand and ran her hand slowly up the thick black filament. The higher her hand rose, the higher in pitch the moan the strand generated. Other filaments nearby began moaning in concert.

  “Too weird.” Cooper started retreating the way they had come. “I don’t know what this room’s function is and I’m not sure I care to know, but I do know that I’m not going to try and push my way across it. Let’s go back.” Not even Sasmita argued with her recommendation.

  Once more in the chamber of the ovoids, they selected another corridor and started down it. Glancing at his chronometer readout, Oldman figured that they could check out another chamber or two before they would have to stop for food and sleep. He would post a rotating watch. Just because nothing inimical had manifested itself did not mean that nothing ever would. As there was no precedent for their exploratory trek, he would have to make one up as they went along.

  On the second day, they found a chamber filled with globs of floating golden oil that were in constant motion, another whose scalloped walls heaved disconcertingly like a giant bellows, and another in which a cluster of thousands of fist-sized devices constantly formed and re-formed machines that flared to life for a few moments before collapsing beneath the significance of their own exertions.

  Then they found the chamber whose contents intimidated Oldman and put a damper even on Sasmita’s nonstop stream of jokes and sarcasm.

  Looming above them, tapering at one end but not to a point as it penetrated the far wall, the massive structure was wrapped in bands and tubes of dark metal interwoven with glistening bolts of metallic glass. A somber Bannerjee scanned the intimidating mass.

  “More strange alloys. A lot of beryllium.” His gaze rose from his scanner. “It looks like a gun,” he said softly.

  “A really big gun,” added Sasmita, without the slightest suggestion of humor.

  They walked around it, a walk that took some time. There might have been places for several individuals to sit within the device, or they might simply have been odd-shaped depressions. Oldman didn’t wish to experiment by trying one out. The technology on display was far more multifaceted than anything they had encountered in any of the other chambers, and far more threatening in appearance. He struggled to be positive.

  “It might not be a weapon. Based on what we’ve encountered and interacted with here so far, its purpose might be something else entirely. Something we can’t even imagine.”

  “Yeah,” Cooper muttered. “Like blowing up entire worlds.”

  “A civilized species wouldn’t go around blowing up habitable worlds.” Bannerjee spoke with the confidence of necessity. “They’re not that common.”

  “How do we know?” she shot back. The delight, even amusement, they had experienced in the course of their previous discoveries within the artifact now vanished in the face of this enormous implied threat. “We don’t know anything about what a sentience longer-lived than ours might think, or want, or believe.” Her gaze rose upward, tracking the long, tapering, ominous-looking apparatus. “What if this isn’t the only one on this artifact? What if it is a gun and there are more?” Her eyes met Oldman’s as she voiced what everyone was now thinking. “What—if this is a warship?”

  He swallowed tightly. “Whatever it is, except for the activation of automated entry and internal illumination, the artifact itself has been thoroughly quiescent.”

  “How can we be sure of that?” Bannerjee said quietly. “While we’re studying and learning about its contents, maybe it’s studying and learning about us.”

  Oldman chose to ignore a question he couldn’t answer. “We’ll finish up today’s twelve hours, sleep again, and start back. Maybe we’ll find some answers.”

  They didn’t find any answers. But they did find the crew.

  They were in the last chamber they had time to explore. Had Oldman opted for an earlier start back, they would have missed them. But they had time to visit one more room. What they found stopped them cold.

  In the center of the weakly lit chamber loomed a bulky, softly glowing cylinder. Dozens of conduits filled with light lines, intermittent cables that were half-solid and half composed of pure, tightly focused light, and strands of solid material fanned out from its base like colorful tentacles. At the tip of each tentacle was a teardrop-shaped pod: the bottom half opaque, the top half transparent. Within each pod was an alien.

  They were neither ugly nor attractive as much as they were bizarre. Gazing at the nearest, Oldman could not decide if the lower half of the three-meter-long being was reflective attire of some kind or part of the creature’s body. The upper portion was more straightforward. Five flexible limbs indicating a decidedly non-symmetrical body design lay flat against the creature’s rounded, rubbery-looking flanks. There was no neck. The body tapered slightly before expanding into a smooth, triangular skull marked by several dark depressions that might be ears. Several larger ones might be eyes, Bannerjee opined, though there was no suggestion of lids, irises, corneas, or anything resembling a human eye. The function of a trio of odd appendages that protruded from the crest of the triangle could not be ascertained.

  “Our first contact with a true higher intelligence,” Cooper whispered, “and they’re all asleep.”

  “For now.” Sasmita was studying the lower half of the pod. “What if we wake one of them up?”

  “Are you insane?” Cooper gaped at her, wide-eyed. “Why the hell would we want to do that?”

  “Because,” her colleague persisted, “it’s first contact. Forget the money to be made from exploiting what we’ve already discovered.” She gave the rug that covered her back a meaningful tug. “As first contactees, we’d be famous beyond imagining. Rich and famous.” Her sarcasm returned. “Tell me that possibility doesn’t appeal to you.”

  “Of course it’s appealing,” Oldman replied, his attention still riveted on the alien. “If not for the gun.”

  Sasmita pleaded. “We don’t know it’s a gun. For all we know, it might be a device for manufacturing and distributing alien candy!”

  Bannerjee was shaking his head slowly. “It didn’t have the look of a candy machine.”

  “How the hell do you know what an alien candy-manufacturing device might look like? We don’t k
now anything!”

  “That’s exactly right.” Oldman nodded in sober agreement. “We don’t know anything. The big question is: do we keep it that way?” He eyed each of them in turn. “We’re not contact specialists. We’re geologists. We should head straight home, report what we’ve seen, and let the experts take over. Money or no money.”

  “That’s a phrase that’ll never pass my lips.” Sasmita was in full combative mode now. “What if this relic moves, automatically or otherwise, before an expedition of exploration can return? Chances of encountering it again would likely be nil. No, I’m at least going to take a few things with me. This make-you-feel-good rug, for sure.”

  Oldman demurred. “No souvenirs. No matter how harmless they seem. Maybe the rugs are as benign as they appear. But maybe they’re dangerous, or the ozone generator is dangerous, and the gun-edifice is the benevolent component of this ship. I do think we can call it a ship now. As to its purpose, its true function, none of us can say. It might be a storage vessel, parked here until it needs recalling. It might be an uncomplicated transport in sleep mode. It might have a main function we can’t descry.” His attention fell on Bannerjee. “And yes, it might be a warship. One constructed and placed here for defense, against what we also cannot imagine. Or for offense, should the opportunity present itself.”

  It was silent for a long moment until Sasmita spoke again. “I still say we should wake up one of the crew and ask it.”

  Oldman smiled thinly. “If only it were that simple. Assuming we can find a way to rouse one of the aliens, what’s to ensure that we don’t simultaneously awaken all the others? We can’t begin to imagine their response. They might be grateful. They might prove hostile. They might be utterly indifferent to our presence.”

  “We’ll never know if we don’t ask,” she replied impatiently.

  “And we’re not going to ask, even if we knew how.” He turned. “Back to the ship. Now. Touch nothing, take nothing.”

  Sasmita rushed to block his path. “Will, you can’t do this! It’s the discovery of the millennium, of the age! If it’s not here when a follow-up team comes looking for it and all we take back with us are recordings, we’ll be vilified!”

  “Not necessarily,” Bannerjee argued. “Many will agree with the commander’s point of view. Quite likely even the majority.”

  She whirled on him. “You don’t care? You’re willing to forgo this, all this, and return to the life of a paid flunky, scanning stratigraphy and boiling pebbles to see if they’re worth anything?”

  Bannerjee drew himself up. “I am content with my flunkiness, thank you, and more than willing to give up one very possible consequence.” His own gaze narrowed as he glared back at her. “That of being one of the quartet that revealed the existence of humankind to an advanced and hostile alien species.”

  “But we don’t know,” she insisted. “And if this artifact shifts its location after we leave, we’ll never know! The promise, the prospects, can’t simply be ignored in favor of . . .” Whirling, she threw herself at the nearby pod, hands outstretched, reaching for a pair of grooves that ran along one side. Mere physical contact might be enough, but the grooves were the nearest thing to a visible control and . . .

  Oldman didn’t have time enough to yell “Stop her!” before Cooper made a flying tackle. Before Sasmita could break free, the two men had joined Cooper in restraining the smallest member of the crew. That didn’t keep Sasmita from continuing to struggle as they wrestled her out of the chamber and back up the nearest corridor. As they did so, her rug fluttered and twisted, clearly upset that it was unable to calm her.

  The rugs left them near the entrance to the chamber of the ozone-generating bubbles, dropping away one by one to flutter back in the direction of the ovoid room. When Oldman’s detached from his shoulders, he experienced a moment of nausea whose aftereffects lingered. Then he realized what he was feeling was not a consequence of the rug’s departure but his normal state of being. The pang of regret at having to leave the benevolent rug behind was greatly multiplied by the realization that he likely would never experience such a feeling of general physical well-being ever again. He forced himself to march on, helping to control the still-objecting Sasmita.

  Once back on the ship, she settled down, but she wouldn’t speak to any of them, wouldn’t even ladle epithets on Cooper, her favorite target. Sasmita slumped, and pouted, and finally gave in, returning to her station as soon as they made the jump. That programmed distortion of the cosmos added a thump of finality to Oldman’s decision. They were on their way home.

  Had he made the right choice? The uncertainty troubled him all the way through the jump. He knew it would haunt him for the rest of his life. What if Sasmita’s concerns were correct and the alien vessel moved before qualified explorers could return to deal with it? And if it was still there, what would be their own decisions? Surely, they would weigh on them no less than they had on him. Would establishing contact with the aliens result in a flood of miraculous shared technology and social development . . . or the initiation of hostilities possibly ending in one species’ extinction?

  Waking the aliens might propagate paradise.

  Waking the aliens might result in war.

  He did not know about the aliens, could not begin to imagine their thought processes, but he knew that for a human, at least, the hardest thing to do was to confront a question and fear never being able to learn the answer.

  When it came to decisions of cosmic import, he knew, to questions of war and peace, deciding not to know was the toughest decision of all.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALAN DEAN FOSTER is the best-selling author of more than a hundred and twenty novels, and is perhaps most famous for his Commonwealth series, which began in 1971 with the novel The Tar-Aiym Krang. His most recent series is the transhumanism trilogy The Tipping Point. Foster’s work has been translated into more than fifty languages and has won awards in Spain and Russia in addition to the US. He is also well known for his film novelizations, the most recent of which is Star Trek Into Darkness. He is currently at work on several new novels and film projects.

  GOLDEN RING

  KARL SCHROEDER

  “Do you think this is beautiful?” Eos asked the doll. She held it up, in case it was able to see the valley boiling under her gaze. “Nitrogen freezes to that cream color when it’s mixed with carbon monoxide.” The doll hung limply from her hand, but its shape helped her imagine someone was with her—some human. “You can smell the CO when it all boils off—and the methane, of course.” She gave the doll a brittle smile. “Oh, look!” Down in the valley, an ice tower was collapsing under hot laser light—the first light to bathe this world in centuries.

  Eos had found the doll in a subsiding neighborhood of frozen townhouses, part of a city drowned in freezing air ages before and now flooded with liquid nitrogen and oxygen as the world thawed. The doll was the first person-shaped thing that this avatar had ever touched. It might also be the last humanlike thing she came across during this body’s brief existence, so Eos hadn’t been able to let it go.

  She spoke with nonhuman objects all the time, of course. If she lifted her face to the tricolored laser light baking this planet, she could even talk to her self—the real Eos, who lived eight billion kilometers away. But when she did, all she had to report was I’ve found no one alive. I am still alone.

  Behind her, the crowns of a petrified forest were starting to peek through the melting air. Its trees still bore crimson leaves hard and sharp as razors. Eos had plucked one to show the doll and asked it if it remembered when these leaves were green. She’d stuttered to a stop then, crouching to curl around the little thing for hours. Had she actually been human, she would have sobbed; as it was, she radiated the words “I’m sorry” on all frequencies. But there was no one to hear.

  Now she raised the doll again and smiled. “See? Lights!” They were just tiny pinpricks at the far end of the valley, but hope surged in her at the sight.r />
  The people of Sagitta had been able to bury their dead for a while after Eos turned away from them, but in the end, they’d simply retreated from the failing daylight, first to huddle around nuclear fires in the remnants of their cities, then under domes, then underground. As the years of darkness became decades, interstellar cold wrapped its coils around even these fortresses, and eventually, everyone had died. Yet there were lights. Eos started to pick her way down the treacherous slope.

  She slipped at one point, tumbling head over knees through a tilted boulder field, going airborne for a hundred meters before landing akimbo among shards of glass-hard water ice. After a minute, she picked herself up and looked around. She spotted the lights and began to run toward them. She didn’t even realize she had dropped the doll.

  “It’s me!” she cried, in radio and microwave and visible frequencies. “I’m back! Please, talk to me!” She’d returned and brought her light with her, but the horizon was a smog of volatile chemicals. It might take years before the atmosphere was fully restored. And the ecosystem? The millions of plants, animals, large and small? “I’ll bring them all back,” she shouted as she paced over grass hard as needles. “Even if it takes ten thousand years.”

  The lights resolved slowly into cheerful points of blue-white, studded in a regular pattern around a vast metal door in the side of a mountain.

  Eos picked up the pace, running past geysers of reborn air to stand at last under the looming slope of the great gate. The thing was fifty meters high, made of bronze and other alloys that could corrode no further than they already had. There was a little postern door built into it, so she went to that. Her avatar was human-sized and human-shaped, and the door accepted the shape of her hand in an inset panel. She pushed.

  The portal jerked as if startled out of a deep sleep. Sheets of ice fell twirling, dissolving into snow before they hit her. The postern door rattled itself back a centimeter, then grated, haltingly, to one side.