Analog SFF, July-August 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “So let's not get our hopes up before we know what we have,” January said. “How many prehuman discoveries have been nothing more than empty chambers or the shells of buildings?”

  “There was an entire city on Megranome,” Maggie recalled. “And, near as we could figger, it was formed as a single structure, with no seams or joints. We used to go over there when I was a kid and play in the ruins, pertending the prehumans was still there, hidin’ ‘round the next corner.” She laughed, then turned suddenly, as if startled, and her gaze swept the open desert. “Wonder where they all went to. The prehumans, I mean.”

  January shrugged. “Who cares? No matter.”

  “We usta call ‘em ‘the folk of sand and iron.’ Nobody knew why. Makes our reason fer stoppin’ here a little weird, don't ya think?”

  “Stuff and nonsense,” said January. “They were gone long before humans went to space.”

  O'Toole had finished his circuit of the pit and had returned to where they stood. “Don't ye believe it, cap'n,” he said. “They tell stories. On Die-Bold, on Friesing's World, ‘specially on Old ‘Saken. Hell, half the Old Planets have stories o’ th’ prehumans.”

  Maggie B. nodded vigorously. “Some of them old legends are so old they been forgot.”

  January snorted. “Myths, you mean. Legends, fables. I've heard them. If any two of them describe the same creatures—if any two stories even fit together logically—they'd be the first two. We don't know when the prehumans were around, or for how long. We don't know if they ruled this quarter of the galaxy or only roamed through it. There's probably a tall tale to cover every possibility. People can't tolerate the inexplicable. So they tell a story or sing a song. All we've ever found were their artifacts. No human ever saw them in life.”

  “They mayn't been even life as we know it,” said Maggie B. “Mebbe, they was fluorine life or silicon life or somethin’ we ain't never figgered on.”

  “Silicon, eh?” said O'Toole. “Now, I'm not after hearin’ that one. Hey, maybe they nivver disappeared. Maybe, they just crumbled into sand and...” He waved his arm over the surrounding desert, “...and maybe that's all what's left o’ th’ fookin’ lot uv ‘em.” The quickening wind stirred the sand, lifting and tumbling granules as if they were dancing.

  “And maybe,” said Tirasi from the pit, “you can jump down here, Slug, and help me dig the bloody thing out!”

  Tirasi always managed to slip under O'Toole's skin, not least of all by abbreviating the man's nickname. Physically opposite, they were much alike in spirit, and so repelled each other, as a man spying himself in a fun-house mirror might step backward in alarm. From time to time, they debated whether “Slugger” or “Fighting Bill” was the weightier epithet, with the question still undetermined. Slugger was a bull; Fighting Bill a terrier. The pilot leapt into the pit with the system tech, and they both dug and brushed the sand off the artifact using their hands.

  January shook his head. “And Mgurk has the shovel, and he's not about. Maggie, you dig some more around that thing. See how big it is and—maybe—you'll find that ore body while you're at it.” This last was intended sarcastically, to remind them why they were beached on this forsaken world in the first place. The artifact wasn't going anywhere and, if they didn't complete the repairs, New Angeles wasn't, either.

  Maggie moved the backhoe a little farther off and began to probe for the edge of the artifact. Her digger came down too hard into the sand and struck a still-buried portion of it. It rang like a great bass bell, a little muffled, but loud enough that the two men in the pit clapped their hands to their ears. January, who had been searching for some sign of Mgurk's dull red skinsuit, noticed the sand vibrate into ridges and waves half a league away.

  About where the mass detector had located the “ore-body's” closest approach to the surface.

  January had a sudden vision of the artifact as a buried city, like the one aboveground on Maggie's home world, all of one piece, honeycombing the entire planet, and that Tirasi and O'Toole would grub about it forever, brushing the sand from it, inch by inch.

  “We ought to go look for Johnny,” he began uneasily, and then stopped with his words in his throat, for three dull clangs reverberated from within the buried shell. Tirasi and O'Toole started and scrambled back from it. Maggie made the sign of the wheel across her body and muttered, “The Bood preserve us!” After a few moments, the clangs were repeated. “Ye turned it on somehow,” O'Toole told the system tech.

  “Or you did,” Tirasi answered. He began to brush furiously at the sand that covered the thing, clearing a space. Then, shading his eyes with his hands, he pressed his face to the translucent surface. “I can see inside, a little. There are shapes, shadows. Irregular, ugly. Can't quite make them ... Aah!” He scrambled back in alarm. “One of ‘em moved! It's them! This is where they all went to! Holy Alfven help me!” He began to clamber out of the pit, but O'Toole grabbed his arm. “You were right about the ‘ugly,'” he said, pointing.

  And there, with his face pressed to the inner surface of the shell, was Johnny Mgurk and the shovel with which he had been beating the walls.

  * * * *

  The entrance was in the cleft, of course, obscured by the shadows in a fault in the southern face—a darker opening in the darkness.

  New Angeles had come back over the horizon by then, and January informed Micmac Anne what had happened, cautioning her not to tell Hogan and Malone lest, transfixed by visions of easy wealth, they abandon ship and drop planetside in the lighter.

  January thought at least one of his crew should stand guard outside the entrance. In case. In case of what, he couldn't say, which did nothing to win their assent. The others thought he wanted to cut them out of a share in the treasure, which by now had in their minds achieved Midas-like proportions. All was decided when Mgurk appeared in the entry and said, in his execrable Terran argot, “Hey, alla come-come, you. Jildy, sahbs. Dekker alla cargo, here. We rich, us.” And so they all hurried after him.

  January was the last to enter, and the clambering footsteps of the others had faded before he reached the point where the cave became a tunnel with a flattened footpath. He passed an enormous white stripe on the wall, three man-lengths high and a double-arm's-length wide. January had barely registered the peculiar dimensions when it struck him that it was the edge of a sliding door nestled into a slot in the rock. Yes, there was the matching slot on the other side of the passage. Pulled out, the door would seal off the entrance. January was impressed. That was one thick door.

  And made of marshmallow.

  No, not marshmallow, he decided, pressing it experimentally, but some highly resilient material. He pushed, it yielded. He released, and it sprang back. Elastic deformation. He pushed as hard as he could, and his arm sank into the door up to his elbow. It would submit to a chisel or a drill bit in exactly the same way, he decided. A jiu-jitsu material, strong because it yielded.

  As soon as he relaxed, the material snapped back, ejecting his arm with all the stored energy with which he had pushed and nearly dislocating his shoulder. Jiu-jitsu material, indeed, he thought, rubbing his shoulder. Best not try chisels, drills, lasers, or explosives. It would absorb all the energy, and then give it back. His curiosity ran high; but not that high.

  Whatever had required such a barrier must be of inestimable value. He rubbed his hands in anticipation of the wealth waiting below.

  Yet, one thing troubled his mind. A door so thick had been meant to bar entry against the most determined explorer. He could not imagine that little Johnny Mgurk had simply rolled it aside. Perhaps the lock had failed over the eons and the system had been designed to fail-open.

  But why design a “fail open” mode into an impassable barrier?

  As he continued deeper inside, the rough rock walls smoothed out into an off-white ceramic. Faint veins of pale yellow ran through it, though whether decorative or functional, he couldn't say. Here artistically sinuous, there fiercely rectangular, they could be eit
her, or both. But if decorative, he thought, prehuman eyes had been attuned to finer color contrasts than humans.

  Or they'd had lousy interior decorators.

  The passage wound down a spiral ramp and some freak of geometry cut off the sounds of the crew's voices, leaving a radio silence within which a persistent static hiss rose and fell irregularly, like a snake trying to speak. The dry air, the constant, sandy wind ... The planet must be an enormous ball of static electricity.

  He came at last to the chamber that the backhoe had uncovered. Through the translucent ceiling drifted the light of the pale sun. It was an oval room of gray sea-green accented with undulating curves of slightly darker shade. The walls seemed to swirl about in unending stillness. Had the effect been meant for beauty, January wondered, or just to make people dizzy? But if prehuman technology was unknowable, their aesthetics were unfathomable.

  Arranged irregularly about the room, eleven pedestals emerged seamlessly from the floor. All but one were faerie-thin, and all but four were empty. In a separate chamber, entered as through the languid petals of a fleshy white lotus, a twelfth pedestal, also empty, swept in a graceful exponential arc from the floor. Amidst this peculiar corn-field his crew darted with great exclamation.

  At the farther end of the room, but offset from the tip of the oval, another white, spongy door sat half-open. Through this opening, January could make out a long, dim corridor receding into the blackness.

  “You try lifting the bleeding thing, you think you're so strong!” That challenge, issued to O'Toole by Bill Tirasi, drew January's attention. His four crewmen stood before the first pedestal, upon which a single, jet-black egg the size of a clenched fist balanced precariously.

  It seemed made of glass, but glass so deep that light could not make it to the center, for it appeared much thicker than its size would warrant. Myriad pinpricks gleamed within. Perhaps light had tried to penetrate the blackness, had given up, and scattered into its component photons.

  O'Toole was not given to such fancies. Smirking over Tirasi's failure, he laid hold of it and lifted. His muscles bulged, his eyes stood out. But it did not move. He grunted, gripped it in both hands and still it would not budge.

  Yet the balance was so delicate, it ought at least to roll.

  It did not. Pushing and pulling had no more effect than lifting. Tirasi scoffed. “Heavier'n it looks, eh, mate?” O'Toole's glower deepened. “Sure, it must be bolted to the fookin’ stand.”

  “I'd bet your whole year's share of profits,” Terasi said, “that thing's made of neutronium. Compressed matter...” He sighed. “Imagine the profit potential in that! A bloke could get stinking rich once he learned the secret.”

  “Then he'd have to spend his life here,” January said, and the others started, for they hadn't seen him enter. “There's not a ship on the Periphery that could lift a neutronium egg.”

  “That egg, big-big,” said Mgurk.

  “Nah,” O'Toole mocked him. “'That egg, small-small.'”

  “That egg, full of galaxies,” Mgurk answered. “Yes, yes.”

  “Oh, right,” said O'Toole. But Tirasi scowled and, because he was an instrument tech and carried on his person a wide and wonderful assortment of instruments, pulled out a magnifier and studied the egg with it. “Bloody hell,” he said after a few moments. “Those light spots are made of millions of smaller lights.” He upped the magnification. “They must be the size of molecules, arranged all in swirls and clusters to look like galaxies. You got good eyes, Johnny.”

  Maggie B. borrowed the magnifier from him and studied the egg. “That's right purty. Those prehumans must've had eyes as good as Johnny here to enjoy something so hard t'see.”

  “If they had eyes,” said Tirasi. “Maybe they had other senses to appreciate it.”

  Maggie B. scratched her head. “So, this here place was what, a museum, an art gallery?”

  Behind vault doors thick enough to defy all creation? January did not think this a gallery, though it might have been a vault to safeguard priceless treasures. The proudest possessions of the prehuman empire? Assuming the prehumans had had empires, or possessions, or pride. Four treasures only, and one too heavy to take away. Yet the building seemed to extend far out into the sea of sand, and might penetrate deeper into the world. Treasures beyond number might lie elsewhere in the complex.

  And they could spend a lifetime searching for them.

  January turned to the pedestal beside him and studied what at first seemed to be a pale red brick sitting on end, about a forearm high and just over a hand-grasp around. Of the many things which on this world might be rare, January did not think to number sandstone. Unlike the Midnight Egg—they had named the first treasure already—this was nothing more than a geometric slab whose proportions were, to human eyes, the least bit off. Yet, what made one combination of height, length, and breadth pleasing, and another unsatisfactory? The prehumans may have apprehended matters from another perspective, and esteemed this the most beautiful object in the room.

  He rubbed the side of the stone and was surprised that, despite its rough appearance, it was smooth, and cool to the touch.

  “Maybe,” said O'Toole, “if we can't lift the fookin’ thing, we can chip off a wee slice, something small enough to take. Even a chip could make us all rich.”

  “Hey,” said Mgurk. “You-fella, no break him. No diamonds, those.” And the Terran put his left hand in front of his face and wagged it side to side three times quickly, a gesture that the crew had learned to read as vigorous defiance.

  O'Toole balled a fist. “You gonna stop me, Johnny? You and what management company?”

  “Johnny,” said Maggie B. “If them ain't diamonds, what are they?” O'Toole rolled his eyes. As if a Terran would know!

  “Galaxies,” the deckhand answered. “Whole universe in a ball. Story, they tell ut in Corner of Abyalon, when me a kid. King Stonewall, he want alla-alla galaxies, jildy. So his bhisti science-wallahs press universe small-small. But Stonewall fear touch ut. An he smash ut, universe ends.” Mgurk pointed to O'Toole. “You chip, you break sky. Big trouble.” And he arced his arm over his head.

  “Aaah! Those old stories ain't worth shit.” O'Toole was unimpressed by tales of an imaginary pre-human “king.” But he stepped away from the pedestal.

  January raised his eyebrows. “A whole universe compressed into a ball that small? No wonder it's so heavy.”

  Tirasi snorted. “Rot! It's too damned light to be a whole universe. I don't know what stories they tell in the Terran Quarter on Abyalon, Johnny, but that just doesn't make sense.”

  Mgurk shrugged. “Pukka tale. Here ball; just like tell story.”

  Maggie B. pursed her lips. “How can the universe be inside a ball inside the universe? That's like finding New Angeles inside a cargo hold of New Angeles! It ain't...” She hesitated, searching for a term to express the ain't-ness of it. “It ain't topological!”

  O'Toole made a disgusted sound. “I thought we come down here to get rich, not stand around discussin’ kiddy stories and fookin’ philosophy. C'mon, Bill, there's three more things to check out here.”

  Tirasi took one more look at the Midnight Egg, captured an image of it, and folded his magnifier. “If we can't take it with us, it doesn't matter what it is.” He announced this as if excuses were needed, and followed the pilot to the next pedestal. Mgurk said something about foxes and grapes that January did not catch.

  January was about to follow the others when he noticed that the sandstone block beside him seemed now twisted into a half-spiral. Curious, he took it off the pedestal—it proved lightweight and comfortable to hold—and tried untwisting it; but it was “rock solid” and had no give to it. And yet, imperceptibly, the thing had altered its shape, like a dancer turning his upper body while leaving his feet planted.

  Whatever, it wasn't moving now. He increased the sensitivity of the skinsuit's perceptors, but could detect no movement in the thing. January took some comfort that the stone w
as not actually squirming in his hand.

  The next artifact was what they finally called the Slipstone. It seemed to be a chunk of blue coral, irregularly shaped into tendrils and cavities, and about the size of a man's head. Like the Midnight Egg, the Slipstone seemed to go on forever: each tendril, each cavity, when magnified, resolved into further tendrils and cavities. “Fractal,” was how Maggie B. described it and, since she was the ship's astrogator and Electric Avenue was a fractal network, they accepted her word for it.

  They could not pick it up, either.

  It proved immovable, not because of its weight, but because it was frictionless. They could get no grip on it, not with hands, not with tongs, not even by first covering it with the sandy grit that they had tracked with them into the chamber. How could something so irregular be so slippery?

  “It doesn't make bleeding sense,” Tirasi complained. “If it's frictionless, how does it stay put on the pedestal?”

  Maggie B. shrugged. “Same way that other pedestal could support an entire universe.”

  A joke, thought January as he watched their hapless efforts with a growing sense of his own frustration. (Had they forgotten there was also a ship to repair?) The Slipstone was a joke like the Midnight Egg was a joke. One was very small, but very big. The other was very rough, but very smooth. Was this place the repository for prehuman practical jokes? A collection of alien whoopee cushions and joy buzzers?

  Even the door was a paradox. Soft and yielding, but impenetrable.

  Neither Maggie B. nor Johnny could recall a prehuman legend involving anything like the Slipstone; and the others came from worlds where such fables were never told, or at least never mentioned. “Oh-for-two,” Tirasi grumbled, finally conceding defeat in his effort to grasp the Slipstone. “What's the point of finding a bleeding treasure trove if—” He waited out a burst of static on the radios. “—if you can't pick any of it up?”