The Scavenger Door

by Suzanne Palmer

  “Then forty.”

  “Does that cover the cost of tetanus nanomeds?” Isla asked.

  “Forty. We’ll take it,” Fergus said quickly, though it was a sum not at all within the range of commendable. He glared at Isla, who held up both hands in a gesture of helplessness.

  Santo slumped. “Lemme see your catalog number,” he said, “and follow me out back.”

  Walking with a slight limp, he led Fergus and Isla through a doorway behind the counter as Ignatio continued eir happy exploration of the store front. The back wasn’t much different, though it was more organized. Shelf after shelf lined the walls with an indescribable assortment of unrelated things, which were also piled on tables and stacked in the corners: books, trinket boxes, folk art, dishware, bottles, brightly colored ballerinas and pony toys, tools, metal knickknacks, and even a lone, pristine red brick set atop a faded, wooden chess board.

  There was also a console screen sitting in the one clear space on an old desk, and beside it, taking up most of the back wall of the cramped office, was a state-of-the-art autofab unit, its build arms poised, idle, around the empty fab platform like dozens of silver praying mantis arms waiting for their next hot date.

  “Now, that is nice,” Isla said. “What do you use it for?”

  Good question. With that kind of heavy tech at hand, Fergus could not fathom why Santo traded in barely viable junk.

  “Catalog number?” Santo asked. Fergus thumbed his handpad on and showed the message to the man.

  “Right, the tea set,” Santo said. He moved a set of brass bookends and a miniature carved masthead out of the way. Behind where they’d sat were a teapot and eight cups and saucers, pristine white porcelain with an intertwined, gold vine pattern.

  “There you go,” Santo said. “You got a box or something to carry it all in?”

  “No?” Fergus said, and stared at the tea set. “I’m not really looking for a tea set, as much as—”

  Santo groaned. “You don’t know anything, do you?”

  “Not really, no,” Fergus said.

  Santo sat in the desk chair, leaning slightly to favor his left side. “You know about the librarians, at least?”

  “A little,” Fergus answered cautiously.

  “Information is never lost.” Santo snorted, then tapped one of the modules on his shoulder. “Hemiparesis, from birth. Information doesn’t always get from my brain to one side of my body without help. This here”—he pointed at the tea set—“is your help, information waiting to be found again. I don’t know what it is, or who you are, or anything except that a Cataloger sent you here to get this. I’m assuming from your nonhuman friend out there that you probably came a very long way. So, you might want to find a box.”

  “You don’t have any boxes?”

  “Another twenty,” Santo said.

  The teacups were thin and delicate. “And something to wrap them in?”

  “Twenty-five, then.”

  “Vergus!” Ignatio yelled from out in the front room. “I found a samovar!”

  “Call it an even hundred, total?” Fergus asked hopefully, and Santo reached under the desk, pulled out a box, and handed it over.

  Watching Fergus and Isla try to wrap the cups in soft paper was apparently more than the man’s patience and appreciation for competence could endure, because after the first hapless saucer that Fergus tucked in the box fell immediately back out of its wrap, Santo took the cup out of his hand and shooed him back. Using his assisted arm to hold it, he deftly swaddled it in a perfect cocoon of paper. Isla tried to copy him, only to have the next cup also plucked out of her hand with a grunt.

  “I’m sorry for bothering you,” Fergus said.

  “And we’re sorry about your partner,” Isla added.

  Santo quickly got the rest of the saucers and cups settled, then began on the teapot itself. “It’s okay,” he said at last. “I could quit, you know, if I really wanted to.”

  He finished wrapping up the teapot lid and nestled it atop the rest of the things in the box, then brought it out to the front of the store and set it down on the counter out there. “Be careful with it. The road down is bumpy as hell.”

  “We noticed,” Fergus said. He handed over a credit chit just as Ignatio warbled something unintelligible deep in the store, and Isla cracked up laughing. Bracing himself, he turned, and Ignatio had found and put on a Beefeater bearskin hat. “Oh, please, no,” he said.

  “Why don’t I just throw that in?” Santo said. “Recommend me to all your other weird alien friends?”

  “You have T-shirts?” Fergus asked. “Like, for your store?”

  “No,” Santo said. “Who in their right mind would want one of those?”

  “Right,” Fergus said. “Thanks for the hat and the help.”

  With his hands full, he nearly had to resort to kicking Ignatio to get em to leave the store without picking up anything else.

  He settled the box with the tea set in the back of the podcar with Ignatio’s samovar and rusty lizard, then watched as Ignatio tried to contort emself enough to get in without having to take eir hat off. “Bet he can’t,” Isla said.

  “Not taking that bet,” he said.

  Ignatio made a half-dozen increasingly inventive attempts before giving up, though ey immediately put it back on as soon as ey were settled in.

  Fergus got in beside Isla without saying a word, woke the car, and turned back down the road toward the autoway.

  “I sense you are glum,” Ignatio said after a bit. “Glum glum glum. It is a good word, the sound and meaning match together, but it is for a not-good thing. Glum. It sounds like a pudding that makes you go poop too much, yes?”

  Fergus sighed, and navigated around a patchwork of potholes and cracks in the road.

  “Would you like to wear my hat?” Ignatio asked after a few minutes.

  “No, thanks,” Fergus answered.

  “Maybe you should,” Isla said. “You do look glum.”

  “This is why I prefer to work alone, you know.”

  “Ah, of course, you are too tall to wear my hat,” Ignatio said. “Is that what is making you glum?”

  “What?”

  “Being too tall.”

  “I’m my own right size,” he snapped. “It’s that I was hoping for answers, and instead we’ve got a tea set. If this is supposed to be a helpful clue, I can’t figure out how.”

  Ignatio blinked all four eyes at him. “Vergus!” ey said. “It is obvious! The tea set is the information.”

  Fergus missed the chance to dodge a large hole, and the podcar hit it hard enough that he whacked his head against the ceiling. “Too tall,” Ignatio muttered proudly.

  “Remember the fancy fab unit in back?” Isla asked. “The data must be encoded directly in the matrix of fabbed objects, preserving and hiding the data in plain sight.”

  “Oh,” Fergus said. He felt like an idiot for not thinking of that. “Makes you wonder what other secrets are in all the junk in that store. If I had a spare year and a good-enough scanner—”

  “You do not have a year,” Ignatio said. “Whiro, on the other legs, has a very good-enough scanner.”

  “Then back to orbit we go,” Isla said. “I hope Santo didn’t give us the wrong tea set, after all this.”

  They reached the autoway, and the podcar took over. Fergus leaned back in his seat and watched as the world flattened out, the sparse grass and red rock passing at a blur as the blue sky surrounding them remained still, endless, eternal. It was hard to believe, from there, how thin a shell of air that sky was, how delicate a balance everything contained within it depended on. Isla was gazing out the window again, and he wondered if they were thinking the same thing, about impermanence and impossibilities, all the many things that could and would go wrong.

  Ignatio spoke up again, breaking the s
pell.

  “So, you do not like my hat?” ey asked, eir voice filled with deep sorrow.

  Chapter 7

  “I have had a conversation I do not understand,” Ignatio said, walking into the kitchenette where Fergus was busy reheating the second to last of the half-dozen fajitas he’d bought in Santa Fe before returning to Whiro. Ey sat down in one of the chairs at the table. “Is this a thing you experience?”

  “All the time,” Fergus said, using his fingers to shove molten toppings back into the wrap before stuffing as much of it into his mouth as he could. Chewing, he gestured that Ignatio should continue.

  “Whiro is decoding and collating the data embedded in the tea set,” Ignatio said. “It tells me that it is sharing the data with the rest of its ‘party,’ as it has, and these were its words, ‘completed all their current quests.’ How does a ship have a party? And how do we know that the other party guests will not break our need for security?”

  Fergus laughed. “I don’t think you need to worry,” he said. “Actually, they could be very helpful.”

  “Who is they?”

  “I’m not sure I’m supposed to tell anyone,” Fergus said. “You could ask Whiro, though I suspect you’d spoil the fun of it, and I’m still not sure it would make sense to you.”

  “You are not worried?” Ignatio asked.

  “Not about this,” Fergus said, and took another gigantic mouthful of fajita.

  Isla entered, yawning, hair disheveled from a nap. “What in bloody hell are ye eating, Ferg?” she asked. “That smells brilliant.”

  “Fajita,” he said, putting a hand in front of his mouth as he spoke.

  “That what took ye so long in Santa Fe when ye went to turn the podcar in? Are there more?”

  He shook his head. When he finished chewing, he took a big sip of water—his eyes were watering from the hot sauce, and it was glorious—and leaned back in his chair in satisfaction. “Whiro, you got anything out of our tea set yet?” he asked.

  “Yes. The catastrophic fragmentation of the original object as it emerged from jump space into normal space took place on March 11th, Earth year 2456, at 4:48 a.m. GMT, approximately 600,000 kilometers from Earth,” Whiro said. “There were one hundred and twenty-seven atmospheric entry points detected by the orbital garbage monitors beginning three minutes and fifty-two seconds after the detection of that event.”

  “There are thousands of such entries every second, because humanity crapped up space for centuries before the ESS Belgium tragedy,” Fergus said. “How do we know these are ours?”

  “These entries had specific markers that indicated they hadn’t burnt up in the atmosphere despite their size, which got them flagged,” Whiro said. “Some of the trajectory data is strange; the monitors just assumed they had faulty data, shrugged, and moved on, but the entries remained in the official logs until they were removed by an unknown entity on December 3rd of the year 2459.”

  “One hundred twenty-seven,” Isla said. “That’s a lot. And none of these tracked bits of debris landed in the ocean?”

  “Forty-one fell over open ocean,” Whiro answered. “Eighteen fell near coastlines or islands where the estimated target area overlaps both land and sea.”

  “If some of the pieces sank, then this is impossible and we’re doomed,” Fergus said.

  “The more pieces we find and separate, the more time there is for still looking, yes? It is only impossible if we name it so without trying,” Ignatio said. “Also, not all pieces will be important ones.”

  “There is a subset of information I am extracting now that is redacted search activity reports, which continue well after the date when the first data was erased,” Whiro said. “There will likely be meaningful patterns to uncover. It will take at least a few days to fully prepare and examine.”

  “Okay, fine,” Fergus said. “Think of it as a new quest. In the meantime, I’m going to Australia. Whiro, can you get us an atmospheric insertion window and landing time for the shuttle?”

  “In anticipation of your impatience, I have already received our descent ticket from EarthPort for Port Hedland,” Whiro replied. “May I ask what name you will be visiting under, for the datawork?”

  “Oh. Hmmmm,” Fergus said. He didn’t have too many aliases left he hadn’t overused, and of those, only one would be plausibly visiting Earth. “Use Murdoch Maxwell.”

  “The helium salesman?”

  “Yes,” Fergus said.

  “And for Ms. Ferguson?”

  Isla was sitting at the table with her arms crossed, probably still peeved about the fajitas. “Do I get a pretend name, too?” she asked.

  “You shouldn’t need too deep a cover,” Fergus said. “Whiro, run my protocols for a basic ID package for Ella Blakey, employee of Maxwell’s?”

  “That is now in-progress. Your landing window is in five and a half hours,” Whiro answered. “I have also secured short-term parking for my shuttle in a private ground facility attached to the port, named Vinnie’s. Will this be going on Shipyard accounts?”

  “No,” Ignatio said. “Please use my own account only.”

  “So done. I have also located the establishment of the name Dingo Hole. It is in the town of New Augustus,” Whiro said.

  “How far is it from the nearest debris site?” Fergus asked.

  “That is a more variable answer than you likely expect,” Whiro said. “It is a mobiletown. Currently it is located approximately eighty-seven kilometers southwest of Burringurrah, but it appears to be on the move.”

  “Well, crap,” Fergus said. He’d heard about mobiletowns—had even borrowed books on them as a kid, whenever the book bus came through their hills—but those had all been in Pacifica, and his interest had been as a way he could escape and never be found. The idea of an entire town being able to roll itself out of the path of fires and floods and other disasters still seemed fantastical. Maybe not so much, though. “Fires?” he asked.

  “There is one to the east, some distance away, that does not likely constitute a threat,” Whiro said. “However, New Augustus is also an eco town; they move periodically both to limit their impact on the environment at any one particular site but also to perform certain ecological remediation and scientific survey work as they move. I examined the records and New Augustus tends to move on average forty-six kilometers each time, with a median move of thirty-nine.”

  “And how far has it gone this time?”

  “Seven kilometers. Moving a town while leaving a minimal footprint as you go is a slow process,” Whiro said. “I project that they will only have moved another kilometer and a half between now and when you land.”

  “May I ask a question?” Isla asked.

  “Of course,” Fergus said.

  “Why do we need to go to the town? Shouldn’t we just go directly to the site?”

  Fergus leaned back in his seat and tilted his head against the head rest. “You’re right,” he said at last. “I’m so used to going in seeking information, needing to understand the layout of the area in terms of entry and escape, and scoping out my adversaries. But maybe none of that applies this time.”

  “It was an excellent observation, Ms. Ferguson,” Whiro said.

  “Thanks, Whiro,” Isla said.

  “I also mention, as an aside, that Mr. Ferguson was incorrect in a statement earlier; there is one more fajita remaining in the refrigerated keeper,” Whiro said. “I am sure it was an accidental oversight.”

  Isla smiled. “Thanks!” She got up, found the wrapped fajita carefully tucked back behind some of Ignatio’s more unfathomable food items, and slung it into the cooker. Fergus hung his head; he was absolutely stuffed after eating five of them in a row, but when was he going to get fresh fajitas again? A few weeks back on Earth and already he was getting spoiled.

  “I must have miscounted,” he said, by way of feeble exc
use. He stood up, rolled his shoulders, and stretched. “Maybe I’m getting old. I’m going to go lie down for a bit and think about my approach more thoroughly; let me know when it’s time for me to get in the queue to descend.”

  “I will, Mr. Ferguson,” Whiro said. “And you are welcome for my assistance with facts, any time.”

  * * *

  —

  A little bit of research turned up a supply company with global delivery that produced a variety of kits for vacationers, and their Experienced Outback Hiker package had nearly everything he could want in it. After consulting with Isla about her feelings on hiking—she ran off immediately to pack, so he took that as a positive—Fergus arranged for delivery of two kits to the private hangar Whiro had already contracted with for shuttle space.

  Getting to the mountain was a separate challenge. It was over 800 kilometers in a straight line, and what roads there were, were distinctly not. Either mostly not roads or mostly not straight, Fergus amended.

  He was still mulling over a multitude of poor options when Whiro announced they were nearing the front of the descent queue, and seconds later, his handpad pinged to let him know his hiking kit had been delivered. The receipt came with a pop-up ad that he was just about to flick away in annoyance when he paused, fingers hovering over his screen. It was for a drone-based pod service for the “casual hiker,” and although not cheap, among the many places all over Western Australia it would happily deliver him, one was about eight kilometers from the edges of the debris site on a trailhead for Burringurrah itself. The price, even if tripled, would still beat the hell out of walking. Fergus booked one to pick them up at the private shuttleport and, feeling rather pleased with that turn of luck, got up to go prep the shuttle and collided with Ignatio coming back in at a run on three legs, holding eir bear hat in the other two.

  “Vergus!” Ignatio shouted. “I have made something for you!” Ey rummaged through eir fur and pulled out a tiny pin, and placed it carefully in Fergus’s hand.

  Isla arrived at the bay with a small backpack, and ey handed another pin to her.