Analog Science Fiction and Fact 01/01/11

by Dell Magazines

  “Either way, Mike, the important thing is never to think your life is finished. Look forward to that next day, that next hour, that next breath. Don’t worry about those images other people might see when they look at you.”

  Mike shifted in his chair, trying to find a more comfortable position. “The real problem,” he said, “is trying not to see them myself.”

  (EDITOR’S NOTE: Mike Christopher has appeared previously in “No Traveller Returns” [May 2008] and “Some Distant Shore” [September 2007], and Leo Bakri in “Unbound” [September 2004] and “The Human Equations” [November 2002].)

  Copyright © 2010 Dave Creek

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  Novelettes

  Enigma

  By Sean McMullen

  Enigma hung beneath us like a mighty display screen in space, alive with colors, yet showing no picture that we could understand. There were no seas, mountains, or polar caps; neither were there clouds or forests. There was, however, a city. The entire planetary surface was a vast, empty, incomprehensible city. It was a city that could not be lived in, our robotic probes had told us that. All its surfaces were curves, arches, light wells, and tunnels. There were no roads or walkways, the mighty halls had no f loors that could be walked on, the towers were hollow, and there were no rooms, offices, balconies, windows, or steps. Because the material of the city absorbed radio-frequency signals, our probes had been lost when they went deeper than one mile into the caverns and tunnels.

  The actual planet was a mass of contradictions too. Its atmosphere contained oxygen, the Hawking telescope told us that within hours of the original discovery. The presence of oxygen seemed a guarantee of life. Pure oxygen reacts with most elements, so it cannot last long without plants to renew it. Because of that, there was never any doubt that Enigma harbored life. Then came the unthinkable discovery. Spectrometers found that Enigma’s atmosphere had no water or carbon dioxide, which are also part of the life cycle as we understand it. An atmosphere of oxygen, but no life! This was beyond comprehension.

  There was no radio noise, yet edge-of-resolution interferometry showed a surface texture like vast expanses of buildings. Buildings and pure oxygen indicated a highly advanced civilization, one that had progressed beyond electronics and had outgrown industrial pollution. Obviously we had merely misunderstood alien life processes. That gave the Earth hope. Enigma’s people would show us how to manage our world, they would have all the answers we needed. Now we had arrived there, but the mysteries kept piling up and we had not a single answer.

  Andrean was slightly wolf, and was commander of the lander Cumulus. Five of us would share a space no bigger than a small apartment until we died, but that was no problem. We would not live long.

  I was a woman who was somewhat rat. The other three had traces of terrier in their DNA. An alpha wolf, an ultraloyal pack, and an outsider—me. Someone’s computer model had once concluded that it was the near-perfect exploration team.

  “Too soon, our turn,” Andrean said as we waited for the launch window.

  There was a certain quality of gloom in his voice. It told me that he did not like taking chances, and that was reassuring.

  “You don’t sound happy,” I prompted.

  “Clever Kerris Rat. This star’s planetary system has no precedent. That worries me.”

  “Why? Nine other systems have two gas giants and a single rocky planet.”

  We had been engineered to disagree without actually coming to blows because that was the current theory of team dynamics. We were also just a little repelled by each other sexually, which simplified interpersonal relations.

  “For anyone frightened of meteor impact, Enigma is really configured to last,” Andrean replied.

  “Configured? Who could configure an entire system?”

  “Who indeed, but the evidence suggests it. Here the gas giants have no moons or rings, and there are no asteroids, comets, or even meteors. Dust is at the levels of interstellar space. Enigma’s orbit even leaves it untouched when the star eventually swells into a red giant.”

  I knew all of that, but it did not worry me. Wolf paranoia is different from rat paranoia because rats live their lives in danger. Rats have dwelt in the shadows of a more advanced species ever since humans evolved, but wolves live separately, in wilderness.

  All six thousand planetary systems examined by the Hawking Telescope had detectable Oort clouds. Enigma’s system was the sole exception. The star’s galactic orbit took it nowhere near any other star’s Oort cloud for a hundred million years, and possibly longer.

  The lander detached from the Turing with a slight lurch and began its long, long fall to the outer atmosphere.

  “Okay, the system has been swept clean,” I said. “So what? We humans have done that with threatening asteroids in our own system.”

  “Enigma’s system has been swept clean out to a distance of two light-years, Kerris Rat. Think about it. Pi times a radius of two lightyears cubed is over twenty-five cubic lightyears. What sort of power can do that? Just getting the Turing to Enigma pushed Earth’s orbital fabricators to the edge of capacity for three decades.”

  “You seem to be driving at something.”

  “I have fears, Kerris Rat. After going to so much effort to save Enigma from impact damage, don’t you think the builders might have left defenses to protect it from aliens like us? Landing the Cumulus on Enigma might be like a fly landing on the Mona Lisa.”

  Andrean had a gift for unsettling imagery. I shivered.

  “Our probes were not destroyed,” I said, as hopeful as a rat slinking past a sleeping cat on a cushion. “Besides, a curator would not squash a fly against a valuable artwork.”

  “Only if it behaves.”

  “So we must behave.”

  “Behave? Relative to what rules?”

  In a sense we were safe, because the expedition had been planned as a type of suicide mission. The Turing would reach Enigma, but without enough fuel to return to Earth. The Cumulus and Nimbus would descend to the surface, but could not return to orbit. When our work was done we would all suicide, but that was fine. Echo technology would bring us home.

  We were attached to our echoes by streams of brain telemetry carrying our memories, sensations, and experiences. Our echoes lived in suspension tanks. To return to Earth, all that we had to do was die. Our clones would be revived once the telemetry ceased, and those clones would be us.

  So were I to die, my clone would be revived, and I would be my clone. I would wake with some alarming memories of dying, but I would be alive. Were my signal to be lost, I would be considered dead, and my clone would also be revived. If all signals from the Turing ceased, Earth would assume a catastrophe and revive all of our clones at once. As a strategy it had its flaws, but it was still easier than returning our physical selves to Earth.

  There had been years of legal wrangling about both our status and even the morality of constructing our echoes, yet when the time came for the Turing to leave, we originals were aboard. This was largely because the whole idea of being “human” was slipping away. Cyberlibs were campaigning for android-human marriage, lattice-heads had more RAM than synapses, and the poochers were having themselves genetically morphed to have recreational sex with their pets. Throw a stone into a crowd on Earth and your chances of hitting a template human were not good and getting worse.

  Thoughts of being blotted out by some gargantuan fly swatter were with me as the Cumulus entered the outer atmosphere of Enigma. In preparation for this moment Risc Hound had piloted dozens of descents to the surfaces of Venus, Mars, Titan, and of course, Earth. Compared to all that, Enigma’s atmosphere presented him with no real challenges. After tracing a line of fire through the cloudless oxygen, the Cumulus slowed to subsonic speeds by twelve thousand feet, deployed its huge parasail, then inflated it with hydrogen. Three hours after entering the atmosphere, we were hanging a hundred feet above the spires, fu
nnels, tubes, towers, and galleries of the city.

  Although we were all wearing environment suits, these did not stop the sounds of the surface from reaching our ears and resonating through our bodies. The probes dropped by the Turing had already transmitted the symphony produced by the gentle winds of Enigma blowing through the city, but probes’ microphones did not give anything like the full effect of being down there. All the rat heritage in me shrieked for caution, yet I was just a little allured. Every tunnel, air vent, and light well, every functionless yet exquisite tube and hollow tower in the structure of Enigma’s city contributed to the sounds that caressed us.

  “The music must be a lure,” said Merek Hound, the security officer.

  His voice was relaxed yet halting, as if he were fighting his better judgment.

  My body was shivering with the chords reverberating through it, yet I did not seem to be quite as entranced as the others. Apparently a few rat genes made a subtle but effective difference.

  “Lure or not, we cannot return to orbit,” said Andrean.

  “Our probes found no evidence of life or power sources,” said Elsk Hound.

  “Then I judge Enigma to be safe,” concluded Merek.

  This gave me no comfort. Merek was a dog chimera, and dogs can be bribed by a burglar with a slice of chicken pie. A rat would just bite his finger and run.

  “Captain Leonne, will you give an opinion, over?” Andrean asked into his mouthpiece.

  Leonne was back on the Turing, and thus likely to be impartial.

  “There may be dangers that we can’t begin to imagine,” she said slowly, “but we can see none. Dr. Becter reports that the biosensors on your body and brain echo monitors display a state of tranquility. This may have been induced by the city’s sounds. Over.”

  “So they could be a lure, over?” asked Andrean.

  “They could also be a welcome, over,” said Leonne.

  I looked out over the landscape of ludicrous, nonfunctional architecture that was producing the eternal music. There was no obvious threat, but that could mean anything.

  “I can see no threat,” said Andrean, “but who am I to decide? From now on we shall have to rely on Kerris Rat to sense any danger.”

  The caution of rats is in every cell of my body, even though I am human. The very specifically chosen rat DNA spliced into mine made me a highly effective but very cautious explorer. Uncounted millennia of sharing caves, houses, ships, and palaces with humans had taught rats to treat everything new and strange as a possible snare or trap. Unless forced to, I would not explore. Thus Andrean forced and the Hounds backed us both. There was strength in our diversity.

  One never really got used to the sounds of Enigma, but it was possible to push them into the background of one’s thoughts. I could not avoid the feeling that I was like a rat in some gallery of wonderful artworks, surrounded by beauty, yet forced by my limitations to ignore what was on the walls while hunting for garbage bins to raid.

  Across the entire surface of the planet there was just a single anomaly, and that was our first objective. A probe had identified it as wreckage, and from a technology not entirely different from our own. It was a mechanical arm, and it was grasping the top of a spire with its cluster of metal fingers. The other end trailed cables and torn metal, as if whatever it had been attached to had been ripped away. Long exposure to the pure oxygen and sunlight had not yet eaten into its structure, but there would come a time when it would crumble and vanish into the huge funnel at the base of the tower. How far would it fall, and to where? I did not want to think about that.

  We sighted Becter’s probe standing sentinel in the distance and steered for it. It was rather like a small airship trailing six tentacle manipulators, each a hundred feet long. One of those was anchoring the probe to the spire. We approached slowly, then circled several times. The spire was one of fourteen at the edge of a field of tubes shaped like immense, inverted saxophones. At a command from Becter, back on the Turing, the probe released the spire and departed to continue its survey. With the solar-powered impellers of the Cumulus holding us steady, Andrean was lowered from the belly hatch on a cable.

  “No sign of threat, over,” he reported.

  “Mind your first step, over,” said Merek.

  “There is nowhere to step, but I will be careful. Over.”

  Only inches above the spire, Andrean hesitated.

  “Commander, is there a problem, over?” asked Merek.

  “Just being cautious, over.”

  Andrean’s boot touched the spire’s tip.

  “The surface is stable, over,” he announced.

  These were not the most inspiring or auspicious words that someone could have uttered when first stepping upon an alien world. Seventeen years in the future many people on Earth would be disappointed with him, but what did that matter to a wolf? He attached himself to the spire by a loop of cable, then with exaggerated caution, descended to the mechanical arm.

  “The probe identified the arm’s material as a titanium alloy,” I reminded Andrean. “Very hard, lightweight, and almost inert. Over.”

  “I see corrosion, especially on the joints. Assessment, Kerris Rat? Over.”

  This was all leadership and protocols. Andrean was the alpha wolf, so he had to prove his credentials by being first to go down and face the unknown. I was better qualified to investigate, but I had to be second.

  “We do not know what mechanism maintains the arm’s grip on the spire,” I pointed out. “If it slips loose it will vanish into the funnel below and be lost. I suggest that you use your personal tether to secure it to the spire, then return to the Cumulus. I will then winch down to do more detailed scans and tests. Over.”

  “Suggestion good. Over.”

  I descended to the scrap of wreckage with a field analysis kit and utility platform. With the platform attached to the spire, I had a firm and safe footing. I began my tests.

  “I can confirm the probe’s analysis: The arm’s age is 5.7 million years, over,” I reported presently.

  “Humans could still interbreed with chimps when it was new,” said Andrean. “How is the structural integrity? Over.”

  “Surprisingly good. I suggest on-site analysis, then winch it into the Cumulus for detailed work. I will need to work into the night for what I have to do. Over.”

  “Suggestion good. Over.”

  Andrean now decided to survey the immediate area from the Cumulus and promised to return the following day. I was left to study the artefact alone.

  At first I took microsamples from the arm. Scraps of metal tubing, wires, cables, fibers, and even corrosion went into my snap-top phials. An ultrasonic scan gave me a good idea of its internal structure. Each joint had its own linear motor, each digit on the hand had a tiny camera above the fingertip, and there were eleven control processors. There were four fingers and two thumbs, each cushioned by layers of carbon lattice. Very hard at the molecular level, yet soft to the touch.

  I ran my gloved hand along the surface of the spire. It was covered in fine oxide, and was as slick to the touch as wet ice. I rubbed off a sample of the oxide, then returned my attention to the arm. Somehow I felt strangely guilty.

  All around me the city played its music, oblivious to the fact that it now had an audience. The motion of the wind through the buildings of Enigma played a strangely tranquilizing symphony that was not music, yet not random either. Chords boomed, lingered, then faded, trills rippled out in the distance, and sometimes a background like the drones of bagpipes resonated until the winds shifted again.

  The sky was deep blue, due to the way oxygen polarizes sunlight. Heat shimmers made the light reflected from the varied oxides on distant buildings dance and sparkle. The colors and patterns of the buildings seemed to teeter on the edge of making sense, but they never quite did so for me. I was intrigued, but not captivated. Rats are not easily impressed.

  The site was forty degrees south of Enigma’s equator, and I had been left there
six hours before sunset. The plan was that I should overnight there, alone. Should anything nocturnal live on Enigma, I might be the first to see it. Or be eaten. Still, death held no terrors for me because I had an echo, on Earth, seventeen light-years away.

  I extended the platform until I had two meters of space to lie down on for the night. The wind regime changed at sunset, and I discovered that the spires produced their own music. They resonated, combining individual notes into chords, yet they were not entirely pleasing to the ear. I soon realized that the ancient robotic arm plus my utility platform were acting as dampers on my base spire, spoiling its contribution to the overall effect. I was the fly on the Mona Lisa, and that gave me a little spasm of dread. Still, the robotic arm had clung there undisturbed for nearly six million years, so perhaps my fears were groundless.

  Sunset was a very strange inversion of what I was used to on Earth. The buildings lit up, sparkled, glowed, flashed, morphed color, and sang their symphonies, but the sky merely faded from blue into starlit black, with a band of gold along the horizon. Beyond dusk, the darkness on Enigma was more profound than was possible anywhere on Earth. Amid the stars was the Turing, a point of light on the celestial equator, never moving.

  Rat caution counseled me against turning on any lights. Countless caverns gaped open on the surface. What might emerge from them? We had detected no power sources below, yet Enigma had power available. Solar radiation drove the wind regimes, and the winds generated sounds, vibrations and who could guess what else? Tidal forces from the star’s gravity flexed the planet and might well have driven engines by compression and expansion. Sunlight falling on the surface was reflected as colors and patterns, but could also be accumulated as electrical energy. Power was definitely available for defenses.

  I switched my goggles to starlight enhancement and looked around. Immediately I saw scrape marks in the mouth of the funnel below me. This was an important discovery. Enigma was designed to be viewed at its best by day, but at night one could see occasional evidence of wear. Something the size of an old-style automobile had fallen into the funnel nearly six million years ago. Time and oxidization had blurred the scrape marks, but in starlight the scoring stood out. Something had clung to the spire until the arm had ripped away, then it had fallen into the funnel.