by Neal Asher
‘Is that what you think?’
‘It’s one possibility. Other possibilities include mass murder and mass suicide. It’s weird, it’s an anomaly, and it just is.’
A lump of ice falls from the ceiling and bounces off the screen of the crawler. I nearly fill my pants.
‘You’ve got a lot of seismic activity out there,’ says Linser over the com.
‘No shit,’ I reply.
Just at that moment a big one hits and the crawler slides a couple of yards to one side. I steer back central and note a huge crack dividing the icy ceiling and exposing rock a couple of metres above. Something occurs to me then, and I wonder if I will get a reply that will again make me feel stupid.
‘Hey, Linser.’
‘Yes.’
‘They’ve been here for three quarters of a million years, I make that about a thousand conjunctions. How come I haven’t seen any old damage in these tunnels? That’s a thousand earthquakes.’
Again there is that long pause and I await Linser’s slapdown. It does not come.
‘That is an interesting question, Mr Gregory. There is no damage in the area where you are and that area is an unstable one. You must remember though that we only recently acquired the low-energy scanners and that area is the only unstable area we have mapped so far.’
‘Yeah. Wouldn’t it have been an idea to have mapped some of the other unstable areas before the conjunction?’
‘For what purpose?’ he asks.
‘To find out if there’s any old damage there.’
‘I’m sure such information would be of interest to a planetary geologist, but we are here for the archaeology,’ he says.
He either doesn’t get it or is trying to give me the brush-off.
‘If there’s no damage there that will be because the damage has been repaired. Oh, by the way, you got any other crawlers in this area?’
‘To answer your question: no we do not have any other crawlers in that area.’
‘Then it looks like I’ve found Duren … Tell me, Linser, have you found any evidence, other than the tunnels and the sarcophagi, of their technology?’
‘No, we have not.’
‘Funny that,’ I say, and get out of the crawler.
Duren is inside a large chamber that contains three sarcophagi. He has strung up lights all around and as I walk in through the round door he has his back to me. He is using a cutter to slice open a sarcophagus. There seems nothing scientific about what he is doing. It looks like vandalism. I speak to him over private com.
‘Duren,’ I say.
He turns and holds the business end of the cutting unit in my direction. The disruption field only has a range of a couple of centimetres. I have no intention of getting within that range.
‘You … what are you doing out here?’ he asks.
It strikes me that he does not sound particularly irrational.
‘I’ve come to see what you are trying to prove,’ I say.
Duren stares at me for a long moment then abruptly turns back to cutting open the sarcophagus. I move round to a position where I can better see what he is doing.
‘You know, it was this place being frozen that led us astray,’ he says. ‘First you think of cryostasis and expect the bodies to be perfect. We found decayed bodies in thick frozen brine and thought it was cryostasis gone wrong. When we found no sign of their technology we then assumed this was some kind of burial.’
‘What is the truth?’ I ask.
He throws back the piece of sarcophagus he has cut away and it crashes to the floor.
‘The truth? The truth is that—’
Oh isn’t melodrama crap. When he is just about to fill me in on ‘the truth’ the biggest fucking earthquake hits. I am on a floor split by a crack a half a metre wide. A haze of broken ice fills the air and huge chunks fall from the ceiling. I hear Duren yelling over the com but cannot make out what he was saying. Something heavy bounces off the helmet of my suit and I realize that I might not actually get out of this alive. I bury my head under my arms and wish I had enough belief in something to pray to it. When the quake is over, some eight minutes later, Duren grabs my arm and hauls me to my feet.
‘We’ll do better in the crawlers,’ he says.
We are in the crawlers when the next quake hits, and the one after that. My crawler ends up on its side with one tread smashed and the ice all around. I don’t get out of it until Duren comes and raps on the screen.
‘Is that it?’ I ask, as I climb out the only door I can get through.
Duren shrugs. ‘Might be a few more aftershocks, but that’s the worst of it I think,’ he says.
I study my surroundings. The tunnel is wrecked: the floor is a metre deep in shattered ice, and rock is exposed in many places. I follow Duren into the chamber.
‘I didn’t need to do it,’ he says, and points.
The sarcophagus next to the one he had cut open has a huge dent in it where a boulder has fallen from the ceiling. There is also a split where the dent is deepest.
‘They’re not particularly strong and yet we’ve never found a broken one, just as we’ve never found a tunnel as badly damaged as that one,’ he says, gesturing towards the tunnel.
‘And what does that mean?’ I ask, not sure I want to know the answer.
‘This is a cold worldand here we make things out of frozen water. It never occurred to us that those who lived here would do the same. Frozen, salty water filled with all kinds of impurities. We should have looked closer at those impurities,’ he says.
‘You’re not exactly making yourself clear,’ I say.
He gestures all around us at the shattered ice.
‘Here is their technology. Here is the world in which they lived and will live when they have the energy.’
‘What energy?’ I ask.
‘Geothermal,’ he replies, as if it is obvious.
I only start to get it when the ice melts.
In some way the energy is distributed through the ice very evenly. One minute we are surrounded by shattered ice, the next minute we are up to our waists in water that has an almost glutinous consistency.
‘Here they come,’ says Duren while I wonder if I am going to drown on this insane world. It takes me a moment to digest what he has said. I turn to the door and see one of the aliens standing there up to its crotch in the water. Standing, it looks like an insectile man with a horse’s skull for a head. I have never been this scared.
‘What … what’s happening?’ I ask.
‘The repair teams are about their work,’ he says.
‘I thought you said they were dead,’ I say, and though wondering why I am whispering, am unable to stop myself.
‘I never said such a thing. I may have misled you, but I never said they were dead.’
I feel like hitting him, but I don’t dare move. A second alien comes in through the entrance. Both almond-shaped heads turn towards us. I know that if they come at us I will almost certainly shit my pants.
‘But they were decayed,’ I say.
‘It takes energy to prevent decay. Decay is one form of entropy. With little energy to spare you don’t squander it. If you have the technology you reverse entropy when you do have the energy … You know, it’s easier to store information than to store bodies.’
The two aliens finish studying us then abruptly wade to the sarcophagi. One of them picks up the piece of metal that Duren had cut away and pushes it back into place.
‘You’re still not making yourself clear,’ I say.
Duren turns his head towards me and I can see his expression. He looks as frightened as I feel, though it doesn’t come over in his oh so correct voice.
‘If I wanted to preserve you over a long period of time I would record your thought patterns to crystal and keep a spit of your genetic material to regrow your body. That’s all I’d need.’
The aliens step back and trail their strange appendages in the glutinous water. That water rises up in a glistenin
g wave over the sarcophagi. Through it I can see the damage spontaneously repairing.
Duren goes on, ‘I don’t know how they did it. Their technology is in the water, mostly. I think there is something here of both burial and preservation. They don’t need entire bodies for resurrection. Maybe they’ve kept them so they can repair them from the DNA template, maybe that would use less energy.’
‘If it’s in the water, what are the sarcophagi for?’ I ask.
‘The technology is in the water; self-repairing, regenerating. What they are, their minds and perhaps the DNA templates, are in the sarcophagi. We spent too much time studying the contents of the containers when we should have been studying everything but the contents of the containers.’
The water recedes from the sarcophagi and they are both whole and undamaged. It then proceeds to crawl up the walls and across the ceiling. The two aliens turn and observe us, or so it seems. They have no eyes.
‘What now?’ I ask Duren.
‘I have no idea,’ the scientist replies.
I see that the water on the floor, on the walls, and on the ceiling is dividing into liquid bricks – reforming to how it was before the earthquake. I point this out to Duren.
‘Just enough geothermal energy from the quakes to repair the damage they made. Neat,’ he says.
One of the aliens squats and places its appendage in the water again. A snake of water, like a rivulet in reverse, traverses Duren’s body. It seems to be probing all round his coldsuit. When it tries to get into his mask he slaps at it and it drops away, suddenly only water again. The aliens tilt their heads then abruptly stride to the entrance through ankle-deep water holding the shape of bricks. We follow. We follow them out into the tunnel and there see that the treads have melted away on both of the crawlers. We follow them through the water to a point where the water is suddenly ice again – a neat line round the circumference of the tunnel. We watch them climb back into their own sarcophagi – the water still liquid inside – and seal themselves in.
‘They didn’t do anything,’ I say.
‘They wanted to,’ said Duren, ‘but they probably didn’t have the energy to spare.’
As we walk back to the crawlers I ask him what will happen now that this is known.
‘The project won’t be shut down by accountants. We’ll get funding from Earth Central itself. Maybe, sometime, we’ll resurrect them all,’ he says.
‘It would be nice to see,’ I say, after we have made a call for help from the transmitter of my crawler. And I wonder if we will see it, because, of course, the warming of our coldsuits has damaged them, and they are already starting to malfunction. Perhaps you, who are experiencing this documentary, will see.
5
ALIEN ARCHAEOLOGY
The sifting machine had been working nonstop for twenty years. The technique, first introduced by the xeno-archaeologist Alexion Smith and frowned on by others in his profession as being too blunt an instrument, was being used here by a private concern. An Atheter artefact had been discovered on this desert planetoid: a species of plant that used a deep extended root system to mop up platinum grains from the green sands, which it accumulated in its seeds to drop on the surface. Comparative analysis of the plant’s genome – a short trihelical strand – proved it was a product of Atheter technology. The planet had been deep-scanned for other artefacts, then the whole project abandoned when nothing else major was found. The owners of the machine came here afterwards in the hope of picking up something the previous searchers had missed. They managed to scrape up a few minor finds, but reading between the lines of their most recent public reports, Jael knew they were concealing something and, breaking into the private reports from the man on the ground here, learned of a second big find.
Perched on a boulder, she stepped down the magnification of her eyes to human normal so that now all she could see was the machine’s dust plume from the flat green plain. The Kobashi rested in the boulder’s shade behind her. The planetary base was some ten kilometres away and occupied by a sandapt called Rho. He had detected the U-space signature of her ship’s arrival and sent a terse query as to her reason for being here. She expressed her curiosity about what he was doing, to which he had replied that this was no tourist spot before shutting down communication. Obviously he was the kind who relished solitude, which was why he suited this assignment and was perfect for Jael’s purposes. She could have taken her ship directly to his base, but had brought it in low below the base’s horizon to land it. She was going to surprise the sandapt, and rather suspected he wouldn’t consider it a pleasant surprise.
This planet was hot enough to kill an unadapted human and the air too thin and noxious for her to breathe, but she wore a hotsuit with its own air supply, and in the one-half gravity could cover the intervening distance very quickly. She leapt down the five metres to the ground, bounced in a cloud of dust, and set out in a long lope, her every stride covering three metres.
Glimmering beads of metal caught Jael’s attention before she reached the base. She halted and turned to study something like a morel fungus – its wrinkled head an open skin of cubic holes. Small seeds glimmered in those holes, and as she drew closer some of them were ejected. Tracking their path she saw that when they struck the loose dusty ground they sank out of sight. She pushed her hand into the ground and scooped up dust in which small objects glittered. She increased the sensitivity of her optic nerves and ramped up the magnification of her eyes. Each seed consisted of a teardrop of organic matter attached at its widest end to a dodecahedral crystal of platinum. Jael supposed the Atheter had used something like the sifting machine far to her left to collect the precious metal; separating it from the seeds and leaving them behind to germinate into more of these useful little plants. She pocketed the seeds – she knew people who would pay good money for them – though her aim here was to make a bigger killing than that.
She had expected Rho’s base to be the usual inflated dome with resin-bonded sand layered over it, but some other building technique had been employed here. Nestled below an escarpment that marked the edge of the dust bowl and the start of a deeply cracked plain of sun-baked clay, the building was a white-painted cone with a peaked roof. It looked something like an ancient windmill without vanes, but then there were three wind generators positioned along the top of the escarpment – their vanes wide to capture the thin air down here. Low structures spread out from either side of the building like wings, glimmering in the harsh white sun glare. Jael guessed these were greenhouses to protect growing food plants. A figure was making its way along the edge of these towing a gravsled. She squatted down and focused in.
Rho’s adaptation had given him skin of a deep reddish gold, a ridged bald head and a nose that melded into his top lip. She glimpsed his eyes, which were sky blue and without pupils. He wore no mask, his only clothing being boots, shorts and a sun visor. Jael leapt upright and broke into a run for the nearest end of the escarpment, where it was little more than a mound. Glancing back she noticed the dust trail she left and hoped he wouldn’t see it. Eventually she arrived at the foot of one of the wind generators and from her belt pouch removed a skinjector and loaded it with a selection of drugs. The escarpment here dropped ten metres in a curve from which projected rough reddish slates. She used these as stepping stones to bring her down to the level of the base then sprinted in towards the back wall. She could hear him now – he was whistling some ancient melody. A brief comparison search in the music library in her left-hand aug revealed the name: Greensleeves. She walked around the building as he approached.
‘Who the hell are you?’ he exclaimed.
She strode up to him. ‘I’ve seen your sifting machine; have you had any luck?’
He paused for a moment, then in a tired voice said, ‘Bugger off.’
But by then she was on him. Before he could react she swung the skinjector round from behind her back and pressed it against his chest, triggered it.
‘What the …!’ His h
and swung out and he caught her hard across the side of the face. She spun, her feet coming up off the ground, and fell in ridiculous slow motion in the low gravity. Error messages flashed up in her visual cortex – broken nanoconnections – but they faded quickly. Then she received a message from her body monitor telling her he had cracked her cheekbone –this before it actually began to hurt. Scrambling to her feet again she watched him rubbing his chest. Foam appeared around his lips, then slowly, like a tree, he toppled. Jael walked over to him thinking, You’re so going to regret that, sandapt. Though maybe most of that anger was at herself – for she had been warned about him.
Getting him onto the gravsled in the low gravity was surprisingly difficult. He must have weighed twice as much as a normal human. Luckily the door to the base was open and designed wide enough to allow the sled inside. After dumping him inside she explored, finding the laboratory sited on the lower floor, living quarters on the second, the U-space communicator and computer systems on the top. With a thought, she summoned the Kobashi to her present location, then returned her attention to the computer system. It was sub-AI and the usual optic interfaces were available. Finding a suitable network cable, she plugged one end into the computer and the other into the socket in her right-hand aug, then began mentally checking through Rho’s files. He was not due to send a report for another two weeks, and the next supply drop was not for three months. However, there was nothing about his most recent find, and recordings of the exchanges she had listened to had been erased. Obviously, assessing his find, he had belatedly increased security.
Jael headed back downstairs to study Rho, who was breathing raggedly on the sled. She hoped not to have overdone it with the narcotic. Outside, the whoosh of thrusters announced the arrival of the Kobashi, so she headed out.
The ship, bearing some resemblance to the thirty-yard-long abdomen and thorax of a praying mantis, settled in a cloud of hot sand in which platinum seeds glinted. Via her twinned augs she sent a signal to it and it folded down a wing section of its hull into a ramp onto which she stepped while it was still settling. At the head of the ramp the outer airlock door irised open and she ducked inside to grab up the pack she had deposited there earlier, then stepped back out and down, and returned to the base.
