The Scavenger Door

by Suzanne Palmer

  None of the sheep seemed to have an opinion on this, though several butted him with their heads, probably hoping more carrots would fall from his pockets. What stash he had remaining was for luring them down off the hills in the morning.

  He took out and unrolled the pop-shelter, a flat mat barely larger than a sleeping bag, and activated it. With a pop, it sprang up into a rounded tent, sending the nearer sheep crowding back behind the others. Five minutes later, they forgot it had surprised them and milled around him again.

  Fergus sat at the edge of his tent and took an instameal out of his pack. Pulling the tab and twisting it side to side, he watched it heat itself up with more anticipation than the food itself should normally warrant. Then he ate, watching the stars slowly appear overhead as the flock drifted and settled around him. Now, that, he thought, picking out constellations one by one that he’d memorized as a child hiding out in the fields, that looks like home to me.

  He was tired enough that he barely remembered crawling into the pop-shelter and spreading out his bedroll. Under the covers, he closed his eyes, imagining summer crickets that were months away yet, and listened instead to the stamping and occasional snorts of the sheep outside. He could feel, if he concentrated, the tiny power cell in his handpad and in Duff’s tracker, the electrics inside the pop-shelter, and a half-dozen other things in his pack. Somewhere deep inside him, there was a resonating hum, like a new sense, seductive and untrustworthy, useful and deadly. He wondered how long it would be before he gave in to it fully, and for the hundredth time in any given day if he should tell Gavin and Isla.

  And if he did, tell them what? I was kidnapped by aliens and they rewired some of my insides?

  If they rejected him, he could go back to his old life and be done with Earth. He had never before had the least doubt that’s what he wanted, but now . . .

  Damned bloody complications, he thought. If he pretended the faint chorus of power around him was his missing crickets, maybe they would lull him to sleep—

  Fergus sat up and groped for his boots and his goggles in the dark.

  The wind had picked up and the temperature dropped, and when he unsealed the pop-shelter, he almost changed his mind and crawled back into his sleeping bag. But he could feel it, something just barely registering on his senses, like a sound pitched so low, he couldn’t be sure he’d heard anything at all.

  It took him ten minutes of standing in the bone-chilling air to decide it might actually be real. He pulled the goggles down over his eyes and fumbled at the manual controls, too used to using them patched through his exosuit instead. He’d left that behind in Gavin’s apartment, because he hadn’t imagined needing a space suit to rescue sheep.

  As soon as he remembered how to turn on the night vision, the hills lit up in glorious, greenish relief around him. He pushed gently through the wall of sheep around his tent and headed uphill.

  The progress was slow, not so much for fear of slipping but because he kept losing his bead on where the feeling was coming from and had to stop and close his eyes and focus to find it again.

  Ozzie followed at a distance, and the rest of the flock slowly diffused out into the intervening distance between her and the tent, as if to maintain a lifeline back.

  It wasn’t as far as he’d feared, but it took him nearly twenty minutes of rooting through the snow around an outcropping to find—with his fingertips, naturally—something sharp half-buried in the frozen ground beneath.

  After cursing and sucking at his bleeding finger, he grabbed a small, pointed rock, knelt down, and used that to hack the offending bit of debris free. It was another shard, much like the one he’d absently stuck in his pocket, and not the source of the faint call.

  Sighing, he bent down until his face was nearly touching the thin snow cover, and peered around among the rocks. Something else, under an overhang and also partially buried, briefly shone.

  He reached in and was glad to find it wasn’t stuck, because there was no way he was going to get his digging rock in there to work it free. Pulling it out, he saw it was another bit of broken something, irregularly shaped but larger—about half the size of a deck of cards. Its edges were rough and oddly textured in a way he couldn’t make out even with his goggles. An inset curve along one surface shone brightly with the starlight above. There were traces of a design etched into the alloy around it, either not language or not a language he’d ever seen, and in his hand he could feel, more surely now, the dim hum of diffuse, disorganized power. He wondered what it had been a part of and how it was still live, but there wasn’t enough to make even wild guesses as to the shape of the whole.

  It was puzzling but not so fascinating that it kept him from yawning hard enough to pop his jaw. Ozzie bleated at him from a dozen meters below, where the ground had become too steep for her to tag after him.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m coming,” he told her as he dumped the new piece into his pocket with the others. “Past my bedtime, too.”

  This time, when he was settled back into his sleeping bag, he found, with gratitude, that he had no more energy left for either fret or philosophy.

  * * *

  —

  Morning brought with it a few centimeters of fresh, light snow, the air filled with tiny, errant flakes that seemed ambivalent about what direction to drift in. As Duff had said, there was poor signal up there, and with snow blowing around, he didn’t think a flare would be seen, so he packed his things and started down the hill. He was gratified to find that, a few shakes of the carrot can and some judicious bribery later, Ozzie and her flock followed.

  Follow, of course, was a loose term at best. They meandered around him, stopped and started, wanting to graze as the morning sun cleared away the thin layer of new snow and the long-suffering grass reappeared.

  As a kid, he’d spent a lot of time roaming the hills with his uncle’s flock, which he’d had more patience for than Gavin, and which gave him an excuse to be out and away from home for long stretches at a time. He had learned a fair bit about how sheep moved—or, more often, didn’t—and patiently herded the stragglers and outliers back into the main flock before getting them all moving again.

  Late morning, more than halfway down the hill back to Duff’s farm, he stopped to heat himself up another instameal and check his handpad connection to SolNet. The signal wasn’t much better than it had been up in the hills, so he stowed it away again. He wondered if Isla had passed all her exams, but beyond that, what did he really need to know about from the outside world? Nothing.

  Gavin had been right to get him out for a few days, and now he mentally kicked himself for not figuring that out on his own. She’s done just fine without you for nineteen years, he told himself. All you did was distract her while she needed to study.

  It wasn’t so much that he felt guilty for not having known about her all these years as simply that he had no idea what he should do next. There were things you could plan for, or plan around, and then there was family.

  By midafternoon, he could see an old electric farm truck trundling through the lower fields toward him. There was only so far it could go before the terrain would become too steep, but even so, it would save him at least an hour of walking, more if the sheep wandered again; he was almost out of carrots, and it seemed a rotten trick to rattle a stone around in the can when he couldn’t make good on the unspoken promise.

  When he reached the bottom of the hill, the sheep were already absorbing the truck and the man standing beside it in their midst. “Mr. Ferguson?” the man asked.

  “That’s me,” Fergus said.

  “Duff sent me. Ah’m Boyd, his nephew,” the man said. “An’ if he tauld ye ah left th’ gate open, ’at was a lie. It was him.”

  Fergus shrugged. “I needed the walk anyhow,” he said. “Want me to help you get them in the truck?”

  “I’ll pit them in. If ye cood keep them frae gettin�
� out again, Ah’d be grateful,” Boyd said. He lowered the back gate of the truck and unfolded a long ramp. “Come haur, Ozz, ye bad lass,” he said, and with a grunt half-guided, half-shoved her up the ramp into the truck. As soon as he turned away to the rest of the flock, Ozzie headed back for the ramp, but Fergus distracted her with the last of his carrots until enough of the others had been loaded in to make her escape impossible. And with her staying put, the others seemed less inclined to try to make a break for it themselves.

  “That’s done,” Boyd said as the last ewe cleared the ramp and he brought the gate up. “Gie ye a ride back doon?”

  “Thanks, yes,” Fergus said.

  “Whit did Duff say he’d pay ye?”

  “Uh. I don’t think we actually talked about it,” Fergus admitted.

  Duff snorted. “Yoo’re nae smart, ur ye? Lucky if ye don’t gie paid with a handshake.”

  “As I said, I needed the walk. He might’ve said something to Gavin about it; I don’t know.”

  “Ye’re Gavin’s cousin, then? Heard ye waur back. Folks said ye went tae the moon?”

  “There. And Mars. And Pluto. And a lot of other places,” Fergus said.

  “They better than Scotland?”

  “Different than Scotland,” Fergus answered. Boyd got in the truck, and Fergus took the passenger seat. It had been a long time since he’d been in a manually operated vehicle on Earth—not since stealing Gavin’s motorcycle when he ran away from home, which started no end of adventure and trouble—and he guessed there must be exceptions for farm vehicles as long as they stayed off the roads.

  Boyd tapped his fingers to the start pad and the truck turned on. Slowly they turned around and headed back toward Duff’s farm, where the gate was waiting, still open, for its lost charges.

  “You ever mit an alien?” Boyd spoke suddenly.

  “A lot,” Fergus said. “Some are my friends.”

  “Some not?”

  “Some not,” he said. “It’s a scary, weird universe out there.”

  Boyd grunted again, and they drove the rest of the way in companionable silence. Duff had made it out to the gate by the time the truck rolled up, and he and Boyd coaxed the flock back in with an enviable ease.

  “Come intae th’ house fer some coffee while ye bide,” Duff said. “Auto-taxi should be haur suin.”

  Fergus followed Duff and Boyd inside. The farmhouse was warm, the air unmistakably scented with wood smoke. Twenty-fifth century be damned, he thought.

  “Everythin’ went withit trooble?” Duff asked, as he got two mugs down from the cupboard one at a time with his one good hand.

  “Here, let me help,” Fergus said, and poured the coffee for them both.

  “Thank ye,” Duff said, as Boyd came in, stamping his boots on the mat before closing the door and slipping off his coat. “Ye fin’ anything up in th’ hills?”

  “You said something about an accident ten years ago, before I headed up,” Fergus said.

  “Aye, something ‘at went wrong up thaur in orbit. Th’ suits still comin’ by asking abit it every noo an’ then, ye find anything, ye see anything, th’ usual pish. But there’s a reward if ye did.”

  “A reward?” Fergus chuckled. “What blew up? The King’s gold space carriage?”

  Boyd snickered, but Duff scowled at them both. “Ne’er tauld us,” Duff said at last. “Jist ’at there’s a reward fer any scraps.”

  Fergus could feel the weight of the pieces he found in his pocket, but he didn’t need the cred for them, didn’t want the hassle, and really didn’t want to talk to anyone from the government. Any government. “Nothing,” he said. “Enough snow on the ground to hide most anything up there, anyway.”

  “Mah grandfaither tauld me didnae used tae snow in April, when he was a lad,” Duff said.

  “Well, times hae changed,” Boyd said. “Auto-taxi’s jist drove up.”

  “Ah, thanks,” Fergus said. He stood up, downed the last of his coffee, and set the mug in the sink. “I’ll let you settle up with Gavin, since he made the arrangements. Good luck with your arm.”

  “Thanks,” Duff said.

  Fergus gathered up his things where he’d left them on the porch outside the door and climbed into the idling auto-taxi, trying not to yawn. He gave it coordinates, and as it headed back out onto the public roads, he leaned back in his seat and pulled the mystery shard out of his pocket. The faint murmur of energy from it was less a low, monotone hum than the sound of someone singing under their breath, barely audible. The edges with the strange texture he’d felt in the dark had a bizarre pattern of corrosion that he’d never seen before, almost acid-eaten, vaguely fractal, though the alloy that remained seemed pristine. He turned it on its side to look at the shiny insert, frowned at the piece, and tumbled it over and over slowly in his hand. He would swear, if he didn’t know it was impossible, that the piece had a different weight depending on which way he turned it.

  Fergus set it down on the seat beside him, took out his handpad, and made a 3-D scan of it. Then he opened up a message to the Shipyard and attached the image to it.

  “Hey, Theo,” he said. “Found this odd little bit of trinket on Earth, but I don’t think it’s from here. Unusual fragmenting along the edges, among other odd properties. Let me know if you’ve seen anything like it before?”

  He closed the message and sent it, opting for a standard-priority jump-packet routing. From Earth to Pluto was cheap and fast enough as it was, and he didn’t figure his curiosity over some ten-year-old bit of space junk required spending triple the cred to cut an hour or two off delivery for something Theo might not get around to looking at for days anyway.

  Exhaustion weighed his things down as he hauled them from the taxi and into the train station, just in time to catch the next one down toward Glasgow. He gratefully dropped his stuff onto an empty seat, then took the one beside it next to the window. It was full night, the days still short, and he both missed and didn’t miss seeing the countryside go by as the train started to move.

  Only a few weeks before, he’d returned a stolen Van Gogh and more than a dozen other priceless artworks to their museum. Today, he’d rescued Ozzie the Ewe. Definitely one to remember, he thought, but mostly because it was the only job in a long, long time that was easily done, without complications, and didn’t involve bodily harm to himself beyond a scraped fingertip.

  He leaned back against the headrest and closed his eyes, listening to the train and feeling the vibration, feeling the energy of it like a lullaby of distant electrons, and didn’t care that he was dozing off.

  It was the sound of paper, rattling, that caught his attention, and he opened his eyes to see someone had taken the seat opposite him and was reading a newspaper.

  Paper newspapers hadn’t existed in centuries. Fergus leaned unobtrusively forward, hoping to spot the date or a telltale headline on the wall of print, when the paper snapped down and he found himself face-to-face with the other passenger.

  The man was not a stranger. Nor, despite appearances—and he wouldn’t make that same mistake again—fully human. The last time Fergus had seen him had been on the bridge of Venetia’s Sword, a starship stolen from the Shipyard on Pluto that he’d retrieved at nearly the cost of his own life. He still couldn’t pin down exactly what it was that put the Asiig agent over the top of the razor-thin edge of the uncanny valley, from his too-precise, too-uniformly-brown hair, to the way his expressions moved as if someone had reinstalled all his facial muscles backward, or as if he was running biological firmware retrofitted from a set designed for a different humanoid species.

  Needless to say, after the Asiig messed around with his own internal workings, he had hoped never to encounter him, or them, again.

  “Mr. Ferguson,” the agent said.

  Fergus’s mouth was dry, and he resisted the urge to cough, or lick his lips, or shout. �
�I didn’t catch your name last time,” he said.

  The man shrugged. “It is such an amazing coincidence to meet you here.”

  “Is it? A coincidence?”

  “Of course not,” the man said. “We are always watching. You’ve been busy.”

  “Off and on,” Fergus answered. So many of his dreams were filled with the menacing black triangles of the Asiig ships, as if they lurked in the periphery of both his waking and unwaking world. Only under the ten kilometers of the Enceladus ice sheet had he felt, maybe, free of them. “Look, what do you want? And where the hell did you find a newspaper in this day and age?”

  “Do you like it?” the agent said. “I wanted to blend, to make you feel more comfortable and at ease.”

  “Right. Are the Asiig here on Earth?” That was a terrifying thought; he no longer dared underestimate what the Asiig could or would do, or try to intuit why.

  “Just me,” the agent said. “I came to see you.”

  “Why?”

  “To bring a warning. That piece of a thing you found—it’s dangerous,” the man said.

  The fragment from the hill? How does he even know about it?

  Anger began to gain ground. “Dangerous to me? What isn’t now?” Fergus said. “I’m already a dead man, thanks to you and your masters, if anyone ever figures out what you did to me.”

  “You misunderstand,” the agent said. “Not dangerous to you specifically. Dangerous in a larger scale. To Earth. To us, even, if it had fallen into our hands instead of yours.”

  “What is it?”

  “I can’t tell you,” the man said. “But we think you woke it up. Very bad of you, even if it was utterly unintentional on your part.”

  “Then what the hell do I do with it? Destroy it?”

  “You don’t have the means. Be very careful with it, and who you trust, because like all such things, there are those who covet the fire and do not understand that it burns. And fear for the lives of everyone on this planet until you’ve returned it, and the rest of its pieces, to their proper place.”