Barrens, page 3
“Why?” Malé said. She was a long way ahead. “There are plenty of barren mineral-rich rocky worlds in inhabited systems. Why not choose one of those.”
“Fame and glory. Do you know how hard it is to detect interstellar planets?”
“Um, I’m guessing ‘very’?”
“There is the Devoid Project,” Cassidy said.
“I don’t know of it,” Garrison said. “What is it? Does it mean I can’t lodge a claim?”
“Devoid Project,” Denella said, “is twenty probes, each with stutter warp drive. They go one light day, send out signal. Big signal. Radar. Wait for twenty-four hours to receive reflection. Log details and jump one more light day. Keep doing that for ten years. Come home.”
“Right,” Cassidy said. “So they’re gathering all this data, but it’s only in a tube one light day in diameter. Huge distance if you, you know, thought about walking it, but astronomically, it’s next to nothing.”
“There’s that word again,” Garrison said.
“There is also project to send one year probes,” Denella said. “Stay in same place for a year. Better coverage, longer wait.”
“Shorter wait,” Garrison said. “Even my math can do that one.”
“Sure,” Cassidy said. “Thing is that the one day probes are cheaper by several factors. Remember that thing about the strength of a signal decreasing by the cube of its distance.”
“Right.”
Lila came around the front of the lander, following Malé. There were more lights ahead now. From Malé’s suit. Weaker than the lander’s lights, but still showing up something.
A structure, for sure.
Curved, like the stems of giant flowers. Five or six stems. At least five meters tall. With more structure above them. Cross members.
And at the base, where the stems grew from the surface, something was moving.
Chapter Ten
Lila stopped, staring at the movement among the stems poking up from the planet’s frozen surface. Her own breathing was loud in her ears. Amplified by the helmet. She could smell her own body. Not hot, but enough that it felt clammy.
“Did you see that?” Garrison said. “I thought I saw something. Did anyone else see it?”
“I saw,” Denella said, at the same moment as Cassidy said, “Yep. Sure did.”
“I missed it,” Jacques said. “Description please?”
“It was like a soap bubble,” Malé said. “Swelling up through the center. From below.”
“Transparent?”
“Just the shape. Hard enough to tell what anything is in this light, without telling if I could see through it or not. Looks like it’s fixed, though. I mean, solidified. At least, it’s not moving anymore.”
Lila focused on it. Was it something that was alive? Something that responded to their presence? How could anything live out here?
Well, she was the person to ask. In her profession, she’d learned to put aside preconceived notions of what constituted life.
From self-assembling metal-based micro cells, to plants that walked to animals that photosynthesized.
Those, though, all required the light and heat from a nearby star. Nothing like that here.
“How far from it are we?” she said.
“It’s about fifty meters off,” Denella said. “I know it’s hard to tell. The light isn’t what we’re used to.”
“No atmospheric haze,” Denella said. “Everything looks the same distance away.”
“What you can actually see,” Cassidy said. “Glad the lander has great lights.”
“It’s an access point,” Garrison said.
“You sound confident,” Jacques said.
They were all walking now. Lila’s visor display showed her the distances, automatically ranging off the structure.
“Perhaps it is a plant,” Lila said. “Alive.”
“Interesting,” Malé said. “But you would know.”
“Not that I know. More like speculation. There’s no precedent for something like this.”
“We’re the first interstellar planet discovery.” Cassidy said. “That just puts everything up in the air. Or out on the table.”
“There is no air,” Denella said. “Is funny.”
“Glad someone sees humor in the situation,” Garrison said.
“Focus,” Malé said. “We’re at the sharp end of this now.”
She was closer than any of them.
“Thanks, Malé,” Jacques said.
Malé stopped. Stood staring at the structure. Maybe ten meters from it.
A minute later, Lila came up beside her, along with Jacques and Denella. Garrison and Cassidy were a few meters behind.
“Turn on your suit lights, Lila.”
“Um.”
“Menu on the right,” Malé said. “Focus on the ‘externals’ icon, then blink. Focus on the ‘lights’ icon that comes up and—”
“Blink again. Yes. I remember now.” She’d been trained in all this. Hadn’t seemed especially relevant at the time.
Her lights came on, adding to the lumens shining out from the other suits and the ship..
The structure was metallic. A slight gold sheen to it. Each of the stems was about fifty centimeters in diameter, possibly tapering toward the top. A good five meters above.
“Our suits can take measurements of all this, can’t they?” Lila said.
“They’re doing so,” Cassidy said. “It’s pretty hard-wired into them. Can’t help themselves.”
“So we can build a full image of this. To scale.”
“Of course. Why?”
“To help understand what this is? A wreck? A plant?” Lila stepped closer. There were markings on the stems. Like carved indentations. Patterns? She looked for repetition or any kind of regularity. It seemed random.
Were they illustrations, or text? Suggesting intelligence.
Dark rills, with a shine from one edge. Almost as if they’d been scored with the tip of a sharp implement.
Or simply puckers from however they’d been made. Manufactured, or simply grown.
Not enough to work with.
She took another step. Just a meter away now. Were those designs intentional? She reached her hand up.
“Lila,” both Garrison and Jacques said together.
“It’s all right.”
Her glove touched the closest stem.
Light exploded around her.
Chapter Eleven
The light faded rapidly. Lila slowly opened her eyes, which she hadn’t even realized she’d shut. Automatic against the flare. She’d still been able to see the light.
Everything around her was hazy. There was a humming in her head. The visual displays were gone. Nothing showed from the helmet’s display. Maybe that was just from general dizziness.
“Jacques?” she said. “Garrison?”
No response.
She tried turning around, looking for them, but found she couldn’t move. Something holding her. She was seated. Reclining, almost lying on something.
She was cold, but still wearing the suit.
“You relax,” a voice said. A twang to it, almost as if it was several people speaking at once.
“Hello?” Lila said. She was still in the suit, but no longer on the surface. What had Garrison said about it being an access point? That bubble that had come up.
All of it had been so hard to see.
What was that voice? Was it even coming through the suit’s comms?
“Who’s there?” she said.
Nothing.
Lila took some deep breaths. She leaned again, against whatever was restraining her, and found she could now move.
“You relax,” the voices said again.
Lila looked around.
Her vision was clearing. Above her was a black and gray lattice work, like fabric made from very thick fibers.
They seemed to move.
Perhaps that was just her brain. Perhaps she was concussed.
“My name is Lila Sansom,” she said. “I am forty-seven years old. I grew up in Dubbo, New South Wales, Australia.”
Well, she seemed to be lucid, though still with hints of dizziness.
“You relax,” the twangy voice said again.
Quiet for a moment.
Lila took a breath and sat forward. The latticework continued down, curving from ceiling into walls, ending at a flat polished floor. The space was maybe five meters high, only about three meters across. Kind of claustrophobic.
“I am relaxed,” she said. She was on a kind of shaped plinth that looked like it was made from obsidian, glassy and black. The top was molded to her shape, like a hospital bed with the knee section raised, and it moved with her.
It wasn’t that hard, though, despite its appearance.
Silence came at her.
What was this room? How had she gotten here?
Too many questions.
But clear that they’d brought her here. Whoever they were. The owners of the voices.
Aliens trapped on a wanderer. Far from anywhere. Too far.
“Do you want our ship?” Lila said. “How many of you are there?”
It was supposition, an intellectual leap. A structure, something that had brought the Elegia Fortune out of warp, movement, a light blazing light and opening her eyes here.
“What do you want?” she said.
Where was the light coming from? There didn’t seem to be any sources, just a general light warming and filling the space.
“You relax.”
“Well, thanks. This is getting us a long way.”
She walked toward the walls. Wall. A circle around her. A dome.
Not the bubble though. The dimensions were different.
How had she gotten here? The transportation had been instantaneous.
A bright light.
Nothing more.
“What does that even mean?” she said. “‘You relax’? How can I possibly relax when I don’t even know where I am? When I don’t know who you are?”
No response.
“This is very frightening,” she said. “A moment ago I was with my colleagues. Now, I’m here.”
Nothing.
She reached the wall. It continued to move. Like worms writhing over each other. Lila stretched up with her right hand. When the glove’s fingertips reached the side, it didn’t feel at all like a lattice, didn’t feel like it was moving.
More like it was slick and smooth. As if the writhing lattice was hidden behind a transparent layer of something. An illusion.
She ran the glove’s palm across the face.
“There’s no exit,” she said. “Am I a prisoner now?”
A sound from behind. Coming through the suit.
She turned. She was in atmosphere. How had she not noticed that? Was it breathable? Why was it not frozen solid?
An opening, black, in the wall across from her, beyond the plinth.
“You walk,” the voices said.
Chapter Twelve
Through the opening from the lattice dome lay a short corridor, followed by a stairway that was slightly too large. Each step close to a meter across, and forty centimeters above the next.
As if the users were giants. Two and a half meters tall.
The steps curved to the right, as if they were following a helical path into the planet’s core.
But they didn’t, of course. Less than a quarter turn on, she came to another space that was much more obvious in its function.
Pipes. Tanks. Industrial looking things. Black in places, brassy and tarnished in others. Some parts that might have been seals that were slightly corroded. It was big, hard to determine the magnitude of it. Big though. Stadium-sized. Perhaps even big enough to just about fit the whole of Elegia Fortune inside.
There were catwalks and railings. She was on one, leading from the end of curved stairway.
Underground.
The light was again diffuse, save for a single point burning over another opening.
“Down the rabbit hole, huh?” Lila said.
Why wasn’t she more worried? Maybe this was where the explanations lay. Where were the others?
She came to a stop. Bent her head forward and sipped from the refreshment tube. The liquid was slightly pulpy and tasty. A milky blackberry flavor.
“Where are the others?” she said.
“You walk.”
The tone of the voices was kind of pleasant. Almost like a choir that was so well practiced that they could even speak two words at the same time.
She didn’t move.
“You walk.”
What was she going to do? No contact with the others. Surely this was the opportunity to study something. Scary, but not terrifying.
Likely she would start getting more worried when her air began to run out. The suit packed enough for six hours.
But the suit had no readouts. Clearly she was still breathing, but it was unnerving have no data.
“My suit is broken,” she said. “I don’t feel safe. Did you do that?”
“You walk.”
Great. That was hardly progress.
So she headed on, following the catwalk. There were symbols in the fatter top railings. Similar to those on the stems above. Quite beautiful.
Something scampered along one, not far ahead. It looked like a big insect. A scarab, no, a rhinoceros beetle. Eight-legged, maybe some wheels on some of the feet. It was moving faster than she could run.
“What’s that?” she said.
Got no response. Hadn’t really expected one.
The insect—robot?—vanished over the side. Briefly reappeared on an upright before disappeared below the catwalk.
Lila looked over, found herself staring into an abyss.
Had to take a breath.
“All right,” she said. “Walking.”
She continued on, through the next opening and found a room that looked like it had been hollowed out by a giant auger. White. Circular. Indeterminate light source. Scrapes along the walls, with deep, plunging trenches curving around. Helixes again. Was that some DNA metaphor, or just the way they thought and built? Or just a coincidence?
The floor was curved down, like a bowl. Ten meters across at least. Some vapor hung, as if this was some meadow on a frosty morning just as the sun rose.
There was something lying near the center. Out of place. Mechanical.
Bipedal.
“You’ve got a robot? An android.”
“You talk,” the voices said.
The robot sat up.
Chapter Thirteen
The robot got to its feet slowly, uncertainly. Like a marionette with seized joints and bad strings and a poor operator.
The robot had a tall transparent dome for a head, with lenses and other sensors tucked safely within. The body and limbs were very open, like a skeleton of piping, with exposed cables and pulleys in place of muscles. Three fingers on each hand, three parts to each foot, like a wide-splayed tripod. Stable.
“You want me to talk?” Lila said.
This was probably all automated, then. Some old installation from whenever the planet had been ejected from its star.
Shouldn’t someone aboard Elegia Fortune have been able to calculate where it had come from? Figure out how long ago disaster had struck. Run the planet’s trajectory backward and compared it to other gravity fields it would have passed by.
Not an easy thing probably. Too many variables.
Besides, there was probably nothing left of its system anyway.
And how could the automatons still be operating hundreds of thousands of years after that? Even that length of time felt conservative.
The robot stood in front of her. Shakily. As if it was standing on an uneven surface and trying very hard for balance. Easy to imagine the whines of its servos and the squeaks of its joints as it moved.
“What do you want me to say?”
The robot’s head moved side to side. Its lenses adjusted, perhaps focusing on her.
“What can I say? We had a problem with our ship. There was a signal from here, we came to take a look. Now I’m here.”
“You talk.”
“Who are you?”
Nothing.
“My name is Lila Sansom. I’m a passenger from Elegia Fortune, the ship we came from. It’s nearby, I guess in a wide orbit now. We were on our way to Ursus 319. Big trip and we should have been going right on by you. Faster than light. Warp drive technology that I don’t understand. I’m pretty sure, though, that we shouldn’t have simply dropped out of warp right here.”
The robot continued shaking in front of her.
“Can’t be coincidence, right?” Lila said.
No response.
She took a step toward the robot.
It responded, stepping back. Holding up its hands at her.
“Where are the others?” she said. “You brought me down here, but where are they? Are they safe?”
“You walk.”
“Walking and talking, right? That’s what you want. Except for when you wanted me to relax?”
The robot turned, on shaky feet and walked to the side of the augered room. The robot’s hand reached out and touched a part of the wall about a half a meter above the floor. The point grew transparent, widening from the point of touch. Spreading out horizontally.
There was something inside.
Moving.
Kind of murky in there, like cloudy water, the thing inside like a big fish. Some tuna or something like that. Bluish. Close to the side.
“What are you showing me?”
“Me,” the voices said.
“Oh.”
Chapter Fourteen
Lila tried to crouch in front of the transparent part of the wall, but her suit was too stiff. She managed to kneel and look closer.
The thing in the wall was moving, but not much. She wasn’t even sure if the movement was simply an illusion. The wall was rough, so there was refraction. The movement was subtle.
There were lemon yellows and eggplant purples in there. Lines of gold that might have been arteries. Projections that might have been limbs. There were floaters in the liquid that might have sloughed skin.
