The Chara Talisman

by Alastair Mayer

  “I did.” Jackie Roberts appeared from the office adjacent to Ducayne’s.

  “I didn’t know you were here,” said Carson.

  “I wanted to be able to keep an eye on Sophie while she’s undergoing repairs. Ducayne offered me quarters but this works.”

  “The offer’s still open, Captain Roberts. It would be a lot more comfortable than that office or your ship while people are working on it.”

  “Let me guess,” said Carson, turning to Ducayne. “These quarters are down in the same complex as the briefing rooms?” He remembered Jackie’s aversion to enclosed, underground spaces.

  “Of course.”

  “Then Jackie’s probably happier where she is. Unless,” he turned back to Jackie, “you want something on campus? We’ve usually got dorm rooms available for visitors.”

  “No, thanks. I really do prefer to keep an eye on my ship.”

  Carson nodded in understanding. “So what do you have?”

  Jackie looked over at Ducayne, who said: “Briefing room.”

  Carson sighed, then nodded. “Very well.” Together they went back down the stairs to the hangar floor and across to the small office which served as the secret elevator to the lower levels. As they skirted the Sophie, Carson cast an appraising eye over the work. Much of the hull had been removed, and he saw that the warp pod they’d spent days carefully moving into position for the trip back from Chara had already been removed. It sat on an equipment cradle toward the rear of the hangar.

  “Your repair team has been busy,” Carson said to Ducayne.

  “Not just repair,” said Roberts, “they’re making a few modifications too.”

  Ducayne nodded. “A bit more range, and a few other tweaks. We want you to have more of an edge if you get jumped again. You got lucky with Hopkins and Maynard.”

  “Jackie’s flying skills helped with Hopkins.”

  “Thanks, Hannibal, but Ducayne’s right. We were lucky.”

  While they’d been talking, they’d entered the small office and the elevator had started down.

  “Briefing Room Two” Ducayne said as they cleared the security post. The familiar briefing room was already occupied by a lone man. Carson recognized him as one of the two in his original briefing with Ducayne.

  “Mr. Brown, wasn’t it?” he asked extending a hand, “Or was that Mr. Black?”

  The man smiled and accepted the handshake. “To tell you the truth I don’t recall. Call me—” he cast a quick glance towards Ducayne, who returned the glance but with neither a nod or a shake of his head that Carson could see “—Jones.”

  “Very well.” Carson and the others seated themselves at the conference table. “So,” he said, looking at Jackie and Ducayne, “what have you got.”

  Jackie glanced at Ducayne, who nodded. “Locations,” she said, “at least some.” She touched a pad on the table and the main briefing screen lit up. It showed eight talismans, all in the shape of a supercircle, all showing signs of wear, all with the line and stone decoration of the Chara talisman. All different.

  Carson let out a low whistle. “Eight!”

  “That’s right, your database search has turned up two more. We have three in hand,” Jackie touched a key which highlighted three of the talismans, “with one more on the way.” A fourth talisman image was highlighted.

  “Fantastic! What locations?”

  “This one,” she singled out an image and filled the screen with it, “doesn’t seem to point anywhere, at least not so far.”

  “It looks different from the others somehow, the pattern feels different.”

  “Good call. That’s the one that wasn’t responsive to probes, and might be a fake.”

  “I want to take a close look at it.”

  “You will,” said Ducayne. “We want you to go over all of them in detail as we get hold of them. See if you can spot fakes or anything else unusual. We’ll do a full set of scans and take samples of—”

  “Not before I examine them! The samples, I mean.”

  “No, of course not. Jones here has been giving us good advice on that.” Jones nodded agreement.

  “All right. What about other locations?”

  “We have tentative locations for three that we only have images of, to be confirmed when we get our hands on them. At least one of those is much further out than we’ve explored. Two aren’t clear enough to be sure of the gem colors, too much dirt on the artifacts, and our guesses haven’t come up with matches yet.” Jackie flipped up another image, show two talismans. “These two correspond, as best we can tell, to known locations in T-space.”

  “Where?”

  “You’re not going to like it.”

  “Just tell me, damn it.”

  “Okay, this one here,” she gestured, “seems to indicate Delta Pavonis.”

  Carson turned to look sharply at her. “That’s where I found the first fragment. We know there were spacefarers there, but there’s no sign of a pyramid, not like what we found on Chara.”

  “But you did find a pyramid, didn’t you Dr. Carson?” Jones’ sudden question surprised Carson.

  “Well, yes, but it was just a burial chamber. I suppose we can go back and look again, do a full surface scan. Anything could be hidden in that jungle.” It didn’t feel right to Carson though. The jungle in that section of Verdigris was recent. Prior to the changing ocean currents causing a climate shift a few hundred years ago, it had been desert. Stone was unlikely to last 15,000 years covered in jungle growth; the material the Chara pyramid had been made of might, but even that had shown signs of wear and deterioration. That pyramid had also been big enough to poke up above even the Veridgran jungle.

  “Or it might be elsewhere on the planet, even under a glacier. That planet has gone through some climate shifts lately.”

  “Yes, that’s probably what wiped out the natives,” Carson agreed. “But what about the second talisman, where does that point? Jackie?”

  “Sol.”

  Carson wasn’t sure he heard her correctly. “Say again?”

  “Sol. It points to Sol. Earth’s sun.”

  “I know where Sol is! There’s no way there’s anything connected with spacefarers on Earth.”

  “Are you sure about that? Pyramids, rumors of ancient astronauts—”

  “Nothing old enough to fit the chronology. The oldest Egyptian pyramids are nothing like what we found on Chara.”

  “Something that’s been overlooked? Maybe still buried, or sunken, or under the ice?” asked Jones.

  “Heck, maybe something buried on the Moon,” put in Ducayne.

  Carson just glared at Ducayne.

  “All right. We can’t rule out an unproven negative. But I wouldn’t know where to begin looking on Earth, nor am I sure I’d want to.”

  “Egypt? That’s hardly radioactive at all anymore.”

  “That doesn’t worry me. I’ve visited the pyramids. They have been so thoroughly explored, probed, investigated, neutrino-graphed, and probably dowsed that there can’t be anything significant there we haven’t found yet. No. What else do you have?”

  “Several tentatives, since we don’t have the actual talismans to confirm them yet.”

  “What about commonalities?” Carson asked. “Are these all the same size, same age, what? Or have you looked at that yet?”

  Brown sat up. “From the information we have, these are all the same size to a couple of millimeters. The two genuine talismans we have, and your Chara talisman, match to within a tenth millimeter, and that difference may be due to wear. As far as age—”

  “Oh my gosh!” Roberts’ sudden interruption caught everyone’s attention.

  “What is it?”

  “Maybe nothing. Wait one.” Roberts fingers hammered on the keypad as she retrieved data. “Ducayne, how do I access Sophie from here, or tie into an astrophysical database?”

  Ducayne rose and stepped over to her console. He pressed his thumb against a scanpad for a moment then tapped several ke
ys. “Okay, you have a link to Sophie. You know her systems, that’ll be faster. Does this have something to do with the patterns?”

  “Yes.” Roberts logged in to Sophie’s computers and kept working the console.

  Carson was mystified. “What’s going on, Jackie?”

  Jackie looked up at the wall screen and flipped an image on it, the array of all eight talismans. “We have all these stellar locations represented in 2.5-D coordinates.”

  “Except for the bogus ones, yes.” Carson felt he knew where she was going this, but couldn’t quite pin it down. Something about the coordinates.

  “Right.” She dropped those from the display. “But the thing about a 2.5-D display, just like a simple 2-D representation, is that it assumes a point of view.”

  “You said we didn’t know the point of view, that’s why we needed the third dimension.”

  “To match the first one, yes, or any given one without any other context. But now they give each other context.”

  “So you can figure out a point of view?” Carson had it now. His heart thudded in his chest. The logical origin of that point of view would be—

  “A direction of view. But put several of these together—if they’re all sketched as viewed from the same place—and the directions of view will intersect. Perhaps at the—”

  “At the Spacefarer’s home system,” Carson cut her off.

  “As of 15,000 years ago, yes. I’m working that out now.”

  “Carson, you’re not suggesting we just go drop in on them, are you?” Ducayne asked. “That’s not just a can of worms, that’s a whole barrel, or a tanker.”

  “How could we not go? If they’re hostile they could have done us any time since the last ice age.”

  “Maybe they’re only hostile to other spacefarers. Or maybe approaching their system will make them hostile. It’d sure make us nervous.”

  “Got it!” Roberts called out. “Near the edge of explored T-space, assuming 15,000 years. Looking for a current match . . . and we have it. Or rather, them.”

  “Them?”

  “I don’t know how precise those diagrams are, I’m allowing for a few parsecs of fudge.”

  “How many stars in that fudge?”

  “A dozen, but mostly red dwarfs or variable stars we can eliminate.”

  “On the other hand they might have picked an unlikely star as the origin just because we’d be likely to ignore it,” pointed out Ducayne.

  “What are the likeliest stars?” said Carson.

  “The nearest to the center of the probable position is an orange-red dwarf, HD 40307. It’s a bit over twelve parsecs from here. It does have planets, at least three big ones in tight orbits. Not habitable, but there may be others, or habitable moons.”

  “Huh, that’d be unusual. What else?”

  “There are a couple of G-type stars, slight smaller than Sol, about four parsecs each from there—”

  “That’s a big ball of fudge,” objected Carson. “It’s going to take up about a third of T-space.”

  “Do you want to hear this or not?”

  “Go ahead. G-type stars.”

  “One is Alpha Mensae, ten parsecs. I don’t seem to have any data on it. The other is Zeta Reticuli, at just under twelve parsecs. That’s actually a double star but the pair are distant, over a light-month apart. Both stars are G-type.”

  “Excuse me, did you say Zeta Reticuli?” Jones, whom Carson had thought had dozed off, sat up and leaned forward. “That reminds me of something.” He sat back and closed his eyes.

  “What?” Carson and Roberts said simultaneously.

  “Shush, give him a moment,” Ducayne said.

  Jones opened his eyes again and leaned forward. “Yes, Zeta Reticuli. About 160 years ago—1961, I think it was—a couple named Betty and Barney Hill claimed to have encountered a UFO, although the details didn’t come out until later, under hypnosis. Bizarre details, all but the UFO cultists discounted it, but they claimed to have been taken aboard a spacecraft.”

  “This sounds familiar,” Carson said. He’d dug through scores of old UFO contact stories looking for hints of the real spacefarers, but there was little consistent between them. “Wasn’t there something about a map?”

  “I was getting to that. Betty Hill reported that she saw some kind of 3-D star map on the ship, and when prompted she drew a rough approximation of it. It had what she called ‘trade routes’ on it. Some years later the main stars were identified as Zeta Reticuli, or perhaps the map was drawn from the viewpoint of Zeta Reticuli, the reports don’t all agree.”

  “Well,” said Roberts, “if she was drawing it from memory of a 3-D map, the viewpoint would be from wherever her head happened to be relative to that display. Zeta Reticuli would be just a coincidence. That’s if there’s anything to the story at all.”

  “You don’t think there is?” asked Carson.

  “If there were trade routes, that implies a lot of traffic that would have been running through known T-space as recently as a hundred and sixty years ago. We’ve been out here nearly fifty of those, I think we’d have noticed some evidence of that by now.”

  “But we are finding evidence,” Carson said.

  “Not that recent.”

  “The wreckage in the Epsilon Eridani system?” Ducayne put in. “The pyramid you saw?”

  “Okay, perhaps,” Roberts said, although she still looked doubtful. “But why are they being so damned sneaky about it? If they were here first, why run and hide the moment we get star travel?”

  “I don’t know. It might be that they’re observing us until they decide on a course of action—”

  “For fifty years?”

  “More like thirty since we really got started. Another possibility is that something else spooked them, and the timing is coincidental.” Ducayne paused and rubbed his chin. “Although I hate coincidences. My worst nightmare is that we have somehow stirred up something else, something we don’t know about yet, that spooked them. I don’t want to meet anything that scares someone who has had star travel for fifteen thousand years.”

  “If they have had star travel for that long,” Carson muttered.

  “What?” said Ducayne, darting a look at him. “What do you mean?”

  Carson shook his head. “Nothing. Flying pyramids, pyramidal technology museums . . . who else would it be? It just doesn’t quite meet the level of scientific proof.”

  “And I thought I was the professional paranoid here,” said Ducayne.

  “Wouldn’t we know about it by now if we'd stirred up something?” Roberts asked.

  “Would we? I don’t know. I can imagine scenarios where we wouldn’t, and those scare the crap out of me. I’ll tell you, a good imagination is both a blessing and a curse for a security agent.”

  There was a moment of silence as Carson and the others considered the possible implications of Ducayne’s suggestion. Carson broke it. “Be that as it may, the only way we’re going to find out what the situation is, is to go out there and look. But hasn’t anyone been out that way before? It’s not that far.”

  “Alpha Mensae is over nine parsecs from here, Zeta Reticuli more than eleven,” Roberts pointed out. “That’s far enough.”

  “Chara is almost nine parsecs away. It has a colony on it.”

  “Point taken,” Roberts said, nodding her head. “Ducayne, I’m sure you have the most complete records on this sort of thing.”

  “We’d better.”

  “Can we get a rundown of all flight plans filed to anywhere in this area, settlement efforts, that sort of thing?”

  “Certainly.” Ducayne turned to Jones. “Can you take care of that? Filter out the details of any classified trips, but leave their dates and destinations. Also flag any ships that went out and were never heard from again. There’ll be a lot of noise in that data but we might find something odd.”

  “Yes sir, no problem.”

  “Okay. Now, Carson and Roberts. No haring off on your own on this one.
We have no idea what’s out there, and the Velkaryans are still around.”

  “But Maynard blew up with his ship.”

  “He was important but not the whole organization. From what we can tell it’s been shaken up, but is still operating. They don’t know for sure, but they suspect you had something to do with it, Carson.”

  “I suppose they want revenge?”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me. I’ve got some people on it, but watch yourself.”

  “Roberts, I want you to continue to refine the probable location from the talisman diagrams and any other information we come up with. Jones and Carson, is that Betty Hill map available anywhere? The original or a photograph of it, not someone else’s reinterpretation.”

  Carson thought about it. He certainly hadn’t come across it in his research, but he hadn’t been looking for it. He looked at Jones and raised an eyebrow. “The Blue Book files?”

  Jones shrugged. “That would be the logical place to look, given the timing of the incident, but who knows what happened to the original records. Some of the documentation went to the US National Archives, but original records might not have.”

  “What’s Blue Book?” asked Roberts.

  “A project to investigate UFOs,” Carson said, “undertaken by the United States Air Force from circa 1950 to 1970. The Hill encounter would have been right in the middle of that.”

  “Huh. What was their conclusion?”

  “About what you’d expect. Not a threat to national security, so not worth worrying about, and not extraterrestrial vehicles.”

  “The point is that tracking down records from 150 years ago might not be easy.” Jones turned towards Roberts, he’d know that Carson already knew all this. “Paper records might well still exist but a lot of computer data from that era, including indexes saying where records like that were physically stored, has been lost due both EMP effects during the war and just general bit rot. Backup systems were much more ad hoc in those days, not everything was preserved.”

  “So the paper records might be in a file drawer somewhere, but nobody knows which drawer or where, or even if it still exists.”

  “That’s the most likely situation, yes. We could get lucky, but that’s not the way to bet.”

  “We’re still going to try looking for it,” Ducayne insisted.