The Chara Talisman

by Alastair Mayer

  Marten looked up from the pile at Carson and, pulling a slim, round-cornered square from his pocket, said: “What is so special about this artifact anyway?”

  “Probably nothing.”

  Marten looked up at Carson. “Certainly. You just happen to show up on my doorstep asking about it at the same time two creeps—who must have landed within a day of you—burglarize my office and try to steal it. Come on, explain, what is the story?”

  “All right. It really might be nothing, but if these markings are a, well, call it a star map,” he pointed at the network of dots and lines on the face of the talisman, “then it could lead to something of potentially enormous value.”

  “You’re joking. It is a treasure map?”

  Carson grinned. “Well, no, not exactly. But it could mark the location of an information cache, or possibly an arsenal, left by the Spacefarers.”

  “Arsenal? We’ve never seen any indications of hostile activity, not with anything much more advanced than arrows and knives.”

  “Probably not. The description was ambiguous.”

  Marten looked up from the markings and stared at Carson. “Description?”

  Carson interpreted the look and nodded. “Apparently so. I haven’t seen the original.” Carson summarized what Ducayne had told him about the translation.

  Marten breathed a low whistle, looking back at the artifact. “So,” he glanced up at Carson again, “when do we leave?”

  Chapter 16: The Talisman

  Clarkeville, Taprobane

  It would take them two days to get ready for departure. Marten had to arrange to have his classes covered, and wanted to be sure Carson had laid in supplies adequate to explore . . . well, they still weren’t quite sure where they were going yet. They had given Jackie that problem.

  “Oh, it’s a supercircle,” Jackie said when they showed her the talisman.

  “What?” Carson and Marten both asked at the same time.

  “The shape.” Hadn’t they heard of supercircles or superellipses? “It’s not a square with rounded corners, see how the sides curve too? This one looks like a shape halfway between a circle and a square. Mathematically you’d graph it with an exponent of 2.5, a circle is—” She stopped, they were staring at her like she had grown a third eye. “What?”

  “I told you she was the right person for this,” Carson said to Marten. He turned to Jackie. “We hadn’t noticed anything special about the shape. Is there some significance to a super circle?”

  “Um, not as far as I know.” Jackie had studied the math but that was a long time ago; she just liked the shape. What did she remember? “It’s also called a Lamé curve, a superellipse, but this one has both axes the same, thus supercircle. We can look it up. I just think it’s an attractive shape, mathematically elegant. Oh. I guess that helps reinforce the high-tech origin.”

  “I suppose so. So, do you think you can interpret the pattern of stones, the diagram?”

  Jackie rotated the talisman, examining it from all sides. The back was plain, the only information seemed to be encoded in the diagram. “You said it was high tech. Could it be a data storage device?”

  “That’s possible, although what was left of the circuitry in the fragment I found wasn’t very complex. From what Ducayne said, the Velkaryans seem to think that the dots and lines are the key.”

  “Okay, that could be a star pattern. Perhaps the different color stones represent different spectral types of stars. How old is it?”

  “The fragment I found was fifteen thousand years,” Carson said. He turned to Marten. “Has this one been dated?”

  Marten shook his head. “Not specifically. So far what was found with it has been dated at about seventeen thousand years. That is our years, perhaps sixteen thousand Terran years. I can have the lab do a rush analysis for me if you like.”

  “How accurately do you need to know, Jackie?”

  “To allow for stellar drift, within a thousand years would be good, if these stones represent stars.” Jackie thought for a bit. What if one had gone supernova? No, there weren’t any nearby supernova remnants, this wouldn’t be anywhere in T-space if that were the case. If the stones were pulsars the age wouldn’t matter so much, but figuring out which ones they represented would be a bitch. “Okay, yeah, five hundred to a thousand years. Anything more accurate than plus or minus a hundred years is wasted.”

  “All right,” Marten said, “I will take it back to the lab.”

  “Marten, make sure they extract a sample very carefully,” Carson said. “Mine showed evidence of a circuit, we don’t want that damaged if we can possibly avoid it. Just drill out a tiny piece of the technetium, it shouldn’t take much.”

  “Hannibal, I’m not a grad student. But thanks for the reminder anyway.”

  “Before you go,” said Jackie, “let me take some scans so that I can start work on it. Maybe I can narrow it down even without the exact dating.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  “Damn it! You screw ups can’t even pull off a simple burglary, what’s wrong with you?” Hopkins paced back and forth in his cabin aboard the Hawk. Rico, not one of the two being yelled at, looked on in amusement. “Marten’s office was supposed to be a simple in and out job, no complications, and maybe he wouldn’t notice the stuff’s missing for days.”

  “But Boss—”

  “Shut up, Warshowski, I’m not finished. First you screw up a simple break in to the archeology store room—”

  “We didn’t screw that up, the talisman just wasn’t there.”

  “And you let yourself get caught in Marten’s office. If he hadn’t have seen you he might never have missed that talisman, or figured a colleague took it. But no—”

  “But boss, how were we to know he’d be back so soon? He’s usually all night at the pub, when he’s there,” the other robber, Tuco, said.

  “So what was your backup plan, to throw the stuff all over the hallway when they surprised you?”

  “The little weasel tripped me! Then he must have stashed the artifact, I thought it was still in the bag,” Tuco said. “But I got the papers.”

  “Yes, and we have pictures of the artifact.” Hopkins voice lowered from a shout to more normal tones. “They’re not helping us much, though. I thought that diagram was a star chart but it isn’t correlating to anything. I need to get another look at it. Where is it now?”

  “Not sure, Boss, but it’s probably locked in a vault somewhere,” Warshowski said.

  “Will he take it to the ship?” Rico asked.

  “Ship? Oh yes, the Sophie, Sophie Space Charters. What do we have on Roberts?”

  “Not much,” said Rico, crossing his arms and leaning against a bulkhead. “She used to fly for somebody else, got into a few incidents. Works her own outfit now, solo.”

  “Can we bribe her?” asked Hopkins.

  “Not likely, she’s pretty much a straight arrow, other than bending the flight regs once in a while. She has a mail permit, I think she’s worked with Carson before. No, we probably can’t, Boss.”

  “What about searching the Sophie?”

  Rico shrugged. Warshowski said “Roberts and Carson are sleeping aboard, I don’t think so.”

  “Damn it, what can you do?”

  “I may know a guy who can put a remote tap on the ship’s security system,” Warshowski said. “We’ll be able to listen in on everything, see a lot of it. If the object is in the open, we may see it.”

  Rico rolled his eyes at this. Hopkins guessed that it probably wasn’t as easy as that.

  “All right,” Hopkins said. “Get on it.”

  “Got it, boss.” Warshowski turned to leave, with Tuco following.

  “Oh, one more thing.”

  Tuco and Warshowski stopped and turned. “Yes boss?”

  “If it is still at the University, Marten is going to have to get it to the ship sometime. Keep an eye on him, pick up anything that looks interesting.” Hopkins didn’t want to lose it if it could be snatche
d easily.

  “Got it boss,” Tuco said with a grin. “I owe him one. I may take some of that action myself.”

  “Whatever, just get it done. Now get out of here!”

  “On our way boss.” Tuco and Warshowski left. Rico turned to follow.

  “No, not you Rico, stay a moment. I’ve got something else for you.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Jackie glared at her computer screen. One panel displayed an image of the talisman, another showed a star map. “This isn’t working, Carson!” she called back to him.

  Carson made his way forward to the control area. “Not getting any matches?”

  “I’m getting too many matches, but none of them make sense.” She gestured at the star map. “This looks like a great match, but it’s nearly two thousand light-years from here. It can’t be right.” That would take the Sophie four years to cover in warp.

  “Maybe they had better starships than us.”

  “Even if they could, why come all the way here? All of known T-space is only two-percent of that distance. Besides,” Jackie touched a control and several different star maps popped up, “like I said, there are too many matches. There are over a hundred billion stars just in the part of the galaxy we can see—”

  “You can’t be trying to match against all of those?”

  “Of course not, we don’t have detailed data for that many, and certainly not to correct for sixteen thousand years of drift.” Marten had called from the university with that number, older than the fragment Carson had found. “It would help if I knew the exact correlation between the stone colors and spectral type. You don’t suppose those stones have changed color as they aged, do you?”

  Carson looked stricken. “That hadn’t occurred to me. Most gemstones don’t . . . unless they’re exposed to radiation. No, the talisman was only slightly radioactive, that wouldn’t have an effect.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “No, I’m not sure. I’ll call Marten and have him check the stones. Is there anything else we might have missed? You mentioned the shape, a supercircle. Could that have any significance?”

  Jackie hadn’t thought so; it was just a pleasing shape. There was a mathematical property to it. The general equation was X-to-the-N plus Y-to-the-N equals some constant, C. If N equaled one, that would be a square, although tilted to look like a diamond. If N was two, that would graph as a circle. For a supercircle like this, N would be two-point-five. Two and a half? Was it that simple? “Carson, that’s brilliant!”

  “What did I say?”

  “Later,” Jackie said, turning back to her computers. “I need to try this. Call Marten anyway, I still need to know about the colors.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  “Okay,” Jackie began. Marten had returned to the ship and Jackie had him and Carson gathered in the eating area. She was going to explain how she had figured out the map whether they liked it or not, damn it. None of this ‘just tell us where we’re going’ crap. Although in truth the others had far too much intellectual curiosity for that, they really did want to know how she had solved it, but they also enjoyed ragging her. “The first problem was to come up with a correlation between the colors of the stones and some characteristic of stars.”

  “Spectral color, right?” asked Marten.

  “That was my first thought, but I couldn’t make it fit anything. I ignored halo stars, correlated for drift, added halo stars back in with drift, allowed for a difference in color perception of the stones versus stars. Nothing.”

  “So what did work?” asked Carson.

  “Consider. It’s awkward trying to map points in three dimensional space to a two dimensional diagram.”

  “Well yes, but if you look at the sky it’s just a two dimensional surface, or it seems to be.”

  “Ah, but we know something unique about the people who made this,” Jackie said, and grinned. She’d caught something obvious that the archeologists had missed.

  “And that would be . . .?”

  “They’re spacefarers.” Jackie’s smug look seemed to imply that that should explain everything.

  “Yes, and?” Marten asked.

  “Of course!” this from Carson. “It’s a 3-D coordinate system, the colors somehow representing the third dimension.”

  “Exactly. What we sometimes call a 2.5-D display.”

  “So the supercircle—”

  “Was the clue that it was a 2.5-D display, yes.” Jackie grinned. “Of course, even then it took a bit of playing to correlate color with distance, but I finally found a match. The cool colors represent a distance above the plane, warm colors below—something like blue shift and red shift. I had to guess at the scale and I’m assuming sixteen thousand years of stellar drift. I’m assuming that drift is constant, which it surely isn’t, but it should be close enough over that time scale. There were few other things I had to tweak.” In fact she had spent long hours at the console trying things. She was ready for sleep, but wanted to explain her find first. “I finally found a match near the edge of T-space.”

  “Where?” Carson shifted to the edge of his seat. “What did you match on?”

  “You found this talisman at Zeta Tucanae, right?”

  “Yes. Don’t tell me that’s the match.”

  “No, no. Completely on the other side of T-space from there. The star Beta Canum Venaticorum, also called Chara. A G0-type star just over twenty-seven light-years from Sol, about thirty-eight light-years from here.”

  “Chara? Greek for joy.” Carson grinned. “Let’s hope we have the joy of finding what we’re looking for. So, is it inhabited? I assume there are planets.”

  “Yes, including a Terraform planet. No official permanent habitation yet, except for a lone Mennonite settlement. There may well be the odd homestead.” Interstellar travel had become so easy, and so many of the nearer stars had habitable or terraformed planets, that humans had been leaving Earth and setting up homesteads around the nearer stars for over twenty years, even on planets well off the usual trade routes. Or perhaps because those planets were well off the usual trade routes. “There are signs of ancient agricultural activity,” Jackie continued, “but nothing now.” She checked her notes. “It may have just come out of an ice age a few thousand years ago.”

  “Did it indeed? Interesting.” said Carson.

  “Oh?”

  “I have a theory about that. Well, more of a hunch.” Several of the planets that may have been visited by the Spacefarers had had recent ice ages, but Carson wasn’t sure of the significance, if any.

  “And?”

  “I’m not ready to talk about it just yet. I don’t publish hunches.”

  “No, just act on them,” muttered Jackie.

  “So, when can we leave, and how long will it take us to get there?” asked Marten.

  “Well, there’s a problem,” she said.

  Carson looked at her, concerned. “What problem?”

  “We can’t get there from here. It’s thirty-eight light-years, that’s about twice the Sophie’s range.”

  “But—”

  She held her hand up. “Relax, I’ll figure out a route. But I need to take a break first, I’m beat.” She got up from the table and moved to the galley door, where she stopped and turned back. “We’ll be ready to go in a day or two. Marten, are you coming with us?”

  “Are you joking? I wouldn’t miss this.” He got up too. “I am going to go back to campus and start making arrangements. I need to pick up the talisman, too.”

  “Okay.” With that Jackie headed towards her cabin and welcome rest.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  The next morning Carson found Jackie at the main console plotting the route.

  “Okay, Carson,” she said, “We’ve got a bit of a round about route. Sol and Alpha Centauri are each about one-fourth of the way there, but after that there’s no place at any reasonable angle or range where we can stop to refuel.”

  “Damn, do I have to find another ship, then?”

&n
bsp; “You might find a ship with a twenty-eight light-year range at Earth, but I doubt it. That’s pushing the range for anything but an antimatter ship.” That would leave out anything but a military ship. A few regulated commercial ships on scheduled runs also had antimatter reactors to power their drives, but that was to allow more cargo and passenger volume, not added range. “But there’s another possibility. Here, look.”

  Roberts displayed a star chart on the main screen. “Here we are, down here,” she indicated a point and it highlighted with a yellow circle around it. “And here’s Chara, up here.” She highlighted that one the same way. “Now, Sol is over here, and Alpha Centauri here.” She highlighted two more stars.

  Carson examined the display. “They’re both off the direct path, about what, fifteen degrees?”

  “Roughly, but that would only add about a day to the total time in warp. But look at the big gap between either of them and Chara. See?”

  “Yes, but you already said that.”

  “Right, but look around the edges of the gap. See, this way if we go by Centauri.” She highlighted a few more stars. “We can do a series of jumps, each one easily within range. All of these stars have some way or other to let us refuel.”

  “They’re all inhabited?”

  “I didn’t say that. This one,” she pointed at one, “has two gas giants, we can do a scoop refueling run on either of them, this ship is designed for it. And here,” she pointed to another star, “this has several small ice worlds. The others have settlements where we can refuel.”

  “Well, that looks do-able. How much time does it add to the trip?”

  “There’s the problem. Not counting actual time to maneuver in-system and to refuel, that’s about an extra two weeks of warp time. Add another few days for in-system time, per system. Call it a total of four to six weeks from Alpha Centauri. About the same from Sol, but on a different path.”