I waited for some grisly end at the taloned hands of the unknown. It did not come. The winds played night music in Enigma’s tubes, spires, and galleries. Three hours into the fifteen-hour night I decided that I would try to sleep. The combination of mesh stretcher and environment suit was more comfortable than it sounds, and in spite of my forebodings, I eventually slept.
At the very least I had expected dreams of terrifying wonders, nightmare visions full of things incomprehensible yet horrific. I had expected to wake screaming. Instead, I awoke after a long and pleasant sleep, an hour before dawn. I had not been eaten. The gas giants Mega and Giga had risen, and steady among the moving stars was the dot of light that was the Turing. Glancing about with the starlight enhancement goggles, I quickly reassured myself that nothing had been disturbed. The intrusion monitor reported nothing either. No nocturnal visitors had called past to inspect me, molest me, or even have a taste.
Then I saw it, on the surface of a neighboring spire. It was a circle that was just slightly darker than the background oxide in the enhanced starlight. I brought my equipment to bear on it at once. It was a shallow pit, but that was as much as I could make out at distance.
After hearing of my discovery Andrean began the return trip just as fast as the impellers would move the Cumulus, and was hovering above me just two hours after dawn. First we gently detached the ancient robotic arm from the spire and winched it into the lander, then Merek and Andrean attached another platform to the neighboring spire. The scans and tests on the little pit went on until after the planet’s noon. When no more could be learned, we were all winched back into the Cumulus.
Some hours of frantic analysis followed. I examined the arm, while the others worked on scanning and interpreting the flaw in Enigma’s otherwise perfect surface. I discovered a dozen hermetically sealed pipes, and from these I extracted air samples and spores. There was also some script etched into the metal structure.
“The pit is apparently an ancient weapons strike,” Merek announced at a meeting late in the afternoon. “Some type of high-energy beam was fired from near where we found the arm.”
“Kerris Rat?” asked Andrean.
“I agree with Merek Hound.”
“Risc Hound?”
“We are left with the question of why the shot was fired,” he said, stating the absolutely obvious.
“I disagree,” I interjected.
Andrean Wolf and the three Hounds turned to me.
“Explain,” said Andrean.
“We should be asking why the probe was there, grasping the spire.”
“Well, do you have the answer?” asked Elsk Hound.
I projected several images of the spire in the area where the arm had been attached.
“See here, this oval is where I rubbed some oxide away for analysis. Now look at this, a circle of very slightly paler material, two feet farther down. This circle is why the ancient aliens were docked at the spire.”
That ended the meeting almost instantly. Within minutes we had adjourned down to the spire, but it took the rest of the afternoon to deduce what the pale patch might be. The material was a good mimic of Enigma’s surface, but it was not original. Before long we had made another discovery. There was a structure sealed beneath the circle. It was a type of data lattice. The pit below all this seemed to have been a strike from an interstellar meteorite.
Something had repaired the damage and had embedded a time capsule in the packing material. The robotic arm was 5.7 million years old, but the repair job had been done fourteen million years ago. The impact was another three million years older. A molecular scanner was left attached to the spire, reading the data arrays of what seemed to be the time capsule. I returned to examining the mechanical arm.
Late that night our meeting was reconvened.
“The arm’s chambers contain non-local air,” I reported. “Composition: 18 percent oxygen, 11 percent argon, 69 percent nitrogen, and 2 percent carbon dioxide and trace gases. To me the technology looks to be roughly parallel to that of Earth’s, but highly refined.”
“I don’t follow. It should be either inferior or ahead of us,” snapped Elsk Hound, who seemed to resent me for also being female.
“They seemed to take longer to do what humans did, and to refine everything to a greater degree, but overall, they were ahead of us. The linear motors rely on energy exchange parameters that are not possible, according to the websites where I learned physics, yet I actually got them to work.”
“So their technology is superior but comprehensible,” said Andrean.
“Yes.”
“And they were examining the time capsule left by the earlier visitors?”
“Almost certainly.”
“Very good. Continue your work. Merek Hound, what have you learned from the lattice capsule?”
“The information is in a quantum five-state convention and is structurally different from the script found on the robotic arm. We are definitely dealing with two species and cultures. So far I have identified a representation of this solar system in the data, and I am using that as a key to open up the remaining files.”
“Elsk Hound, you are working on a tissue sample, you said?”
“Yes, Andrean Wolf.”
“Explain.”
“I am running a gestation simulation from a few skin cells that Kerris Rat found in the robotic arm.”
“I thought it would have been assembled under sterile conditions,” said Andrean.
“Probably, but I think someone did field repairs to it, and in circumstances that were not quite clean-room standard. So far the unrefined DNA-analogue has provided an adult image that looks like this.”
The holo-projector conjured something in the middle of the table that combined the very worst features of a cat and a dragon. Elsk made the projection glare at me and growl. I tumbled from my seat and was backing away across the floor before I managed to fight down my fears. The Hounds were very amused. Andrean just looked slightly annoyed, as if distracted from the serious business of worrying.
The creature was apparently capable of rearing nine feet tall, and had four fingers and two opposable thumbs. The brain was structurally unlike that of a human, but of a similar capacity by volume.
“Our first look at an intelligent alien,” said Elsk.
“Its fangs mark it as a predator,” said Merek.
“I’d say its ancestors had been stalking their prey in supermarkets for centuries by the time they found Enigma,” was my opinion.
“I can’t believe this thing’s species was civilized,” said Risc.
“I can,” I said. “Two thumbs, retractable talons, and all the digits are finely formed and gracile. It was a tool maker, just as we are.”
“But the skull is long and narrow. It should be optimized and hemispherical, like ours.”
“You’re thinking like a human, Risc Hound. Birds’ brains are nothing like ours, yet crows score about as well as chimps as tool makers and users.”
Andrean now reluctantly declared that Enigma was free of hazards, so the Nimbus was sent down from orbit to help with the research. Its crew was also one of chimeras, but the composition was a little different. Silzan Hawk commanded three Hounds, and Rel Fox was the science vector. We sent the first samples up to the Turing on a small sample ascent rocket, and included some of the oxide from Enigma’s surface.
Over the days that followed a scanning survey for surface texture anomalies located dozens, then hundreds of repair sites. Most were damage from interstellar meteorites, and a third contained time capsules that we could scan. The rest seemed to have been repaired for the sake of keeping Enigma looking complete and pristine.
Back on the Turing, Becter and his people analyzed our findings, drew no sensible conclusions, then sent us in search of yet more data. From equator to poles, Enigma was covered in buildings. The style was not uniform, but the individual structures blended into each other seamlessly and each style framed the next without clashing. B
ackscatter-radiation sounding indicated that the material of the city was some type of silicon ceramic, highly resistant to corrosion yet slightly rubbery. Its composition varied slightly from place to place, causing the differences in surface color.
All planets shrink slowly and Enigma was no exception, but the city was designed so that no part would fracture within the estimated remaining age of the Universe. There was no rain or sand on the wind, so there was no weathering of the surface. The ceramic did react with oxygen, but only to form a thin, protective layer against further corrosion. We discovered that trace oxides in the air seemed to disrupt microbial structures at the molecular level. It was a self-sterilizing planet; even bacteria could not colonize Enigma.
The oxidation was also a dry lubricant. Everything dropped onto Enigma’s surface slid down until it reached one of the many yawning funnels and was lost to sight. This was garbage disposal on a planetary scale; the builders had really thought of everything to keep it perfect.
All of this was fascinating, but it told us nothing!
Our practical, usable discoveries were made from the mechanical arm and the time capsules dotted about on the surface. That made sense. Give a hunter from a Stone-Age tribe the choice between a good titanium alloy knife and an orbital battle platform, and he will take the knife every time. What is comprehensible is always preferable. The technology of the other alien visitors was on a par with our own, in a time period between roughly decades and millennia. On the other hand, those who had built Enigma were well beyond description, imagination, and comprehension.
Using the data files from one of the time capsules, Becter built a simulation of a planetary system that had been explored by the visitors. Included were images of what were probably ruins, shattered crystals from some type of nanotech community intelligence. They came from a water world sheathed in ice and orbiting a gas giant. The system had no star, it was just a gas giant and its moons, adrift in interstellar space. Tidal effects provided heat to maintain a layer of liquid water on two of the moons. The intelligences resided in relays arranged in crystal lattices, and these were interfaced in larger or smaller clusters depending on what sort of processing was required for a problem. They were almost unimaginably alien, but at least comprehensible. Enigma’s builders were not. Enigma had been only the second system where the visitors’ race had discovered ruins . . . if Enigma could be described as ruins.
“Andrean Wolf, I want you to look at some images,” I said. “First, the fourteen-million-year-old repair to the meteorite strike.”
“I know it well, Kerris Rat.”
“Next, the little crater left by the shot fired 5.7 million years ago.”
“No, this is one of the repaired craters.”
“I’m afraid it is the right one.”
“But it has been repaired.”
“Correct. Between today and the day we arrived, it has been repaired. I checked the activity logs. Nobody has entered the work as a job. I revisited the site. The material used for the job was aceramic used for lightweight repairs in our field maintenance kits, and it was colored to blend in with the spire.”
“Who would have done this, Kerris Rat?”
“One of us.”
“But why?”
“Because Enigma has ways of maintaining itself, Andrean Wolf.”
While the Hounds surveyed Enigma, I mapped, scanned, disassembled, refurbished, and powered up the robotic arm. Reverse engineering the thing turned out to be relatively straightforward, as the alien processors were based on layered crystal neural electronics. The power buffers for the linear motors were drained but viable, and electricity is always electricity. After some blind experimentation I charged it up, then developed some methods of control and slowly worked out the interfaces for the nodal processors.
“They were deliberately kept simple, presumably to make repairs in the field more easy,” I explained to Andrean. “Allow me to demonstrate.”
As he watched, I powered up the cameras in the fingertips. Very slowly, I used my laboratory computer system to point the unit at Andrean. An image of his face appeared as a hologram above the bench.
“And this is all being done by the alien artifact?”
“Yes. Note how the six cameras allow a three-dimensional representation. Now observe the high degree of motor control.”
With the speed of a striking snake I lunged the robotic hand at Andrean’s wrist and seized it firmly. He yelped and pulled away, beating at the mechanical fingers. I released him.
“Observe also how durable the technology is, even after millions of years in sunlight and oxygen,” I pointed out.
“Yes, I had noticed,” he said, rubbing his wrist and scowling. “Kerris Rat, I have been thinking about the images you showed me nine days ago. The repairs to the little crater.”
“Yes, yes. Do you know who did it yet?”
“All hounds deny it, as does the crew of the Nimbus. I went back over the work schedules. Look here.” He projected collection schedules onto the screen. “It had been my intention to collect samples of the many hundreds of variations of oxide that gave Enigma its patina of colors.”
“I don’t see anything unusual.”
“Look again. Really concentrate.”
I made a real effort this time, aware that he was driving at something.
“There are three hundred requests,” he said presently. “How many samples have been collected?”
“I . . . I see . . . one acknowledgment. It’s . . . early in the program.”
“Look again. How many Enigma days?”
“Three, five, two, seven . . . and the only sample taken was by me on the day we arrived!”
“Now you see it,” he concluded. “The requests are assigned to Merek, Risc, and even yourself. It gets better. I scheduled you to take samples of the underlying material of several sites in the city. How many have you drilled out?”
“None,” I managed, after some concentration.
“Yes indeed, none. Kerris Rat, Enigma is protecting itself. It has messages in the windsongs, subsonics and visual patterns. The city seems to have a way of compelling visitors like us to do no damage and to help with its upkeep.”
“But I feel no urge to rush out and repair things.”
“Were you to find some damage, I think you would have a change of heart.”
“This . . . ought to feel alarming,” I conceded.
“Once again, Enigma at work. Becter asked for some laser ionization sampling to be done fifteen days ago. Not only did you forget about it, but he did too. I remembered. Strength in diversity.”
“Becter forgot? Becter is in orbit. How could he be influenced?”
“From orbit he can see Enigma’s surface. Even viewed from space, the changing light on the surface seemed to generate subliminal effects on some brains. It’s . . . taking control of us, no matter where we are.”
“So Enigma was designed to inf luence us, but how?” I wondered, “We were blobs of jelly in some Pre-Cambrian sea when it was built.”
“All true, Kerris Rat.”
“How?”
“I do not know, but we are definitely changing. All of our experiences are being streamed back to Earth. That means our echoes are changing too. The—the infection may already be back on Earth with our echoes.”
“How can we know that?”
“We cannot know, that is all that I cling to. We are doomed, Kerris Rat, but there may still be time to save Earth.”
“Garbage, Andrean Wolf. I have a . . . a feel for Enigma. It does not threaten me.”
“I have a feel for Enigma as well, and all that I feel is menace.”
“Wolves are outsiders, they do not have empathy as rats do. Nobody is better qualified to cope with a more advanced species than someone with a few rat attitudes.”
“Then teach me, Kerris Rat. Teach me before it is too late.”
I submitted a proposal to return to where we found the mechanical arm. Andrean signed off on my
proposal, but was distracted and remote, like a terminally ill patient who was focused on the approach of death. I took a scout parasail, which was just a seat frame, an impeller, and some controls hanging beneath an airfoil filled with hydrogen. I had a supply cache that would last a week, and the seat could be extended into a sleeping bunk.
Anchoring the parasail presented me with a dilemma. Were I to attach a tether to one of the spires, it would act as a damper when it vibrated in the wind. Use the electric impeller to hold my position, and there would be a low hum to interfere with the sounds from Enigma. Positioning myself above the spires, I turned off the impeller and prepared to measure how fast I would drift with the wind. To my astonishment, I did not drift at all. Many hundreds of millions of years ago, something had anticipated that a visitor might try to hover at that place, and had designed the buildings to produce a wind anchor.
Sitting on the platform, I exposed myself to Enigma’s sounds while monitoring my brain activity and hormone levels. I found definite anomalies, but could not understand them. Enigma’s builders had never seen a human, yet they could control me. I was aware of the control, perhaps because I was a chimera. No template human had descended to Enigma. What would happen if Leonne was exposed to what I was experiencing? I stayed at that position for three days.
It is said that the most effective raids take place in the small hours of the morning. I had developed a habit of waking an hour or two before dawn and looking up at the stars while listening to Enigma and feeling its deeper sounds reverberating through my body. Something f lashed for a moment at the celestial equator, exactly where the Turing was positioned. Immediately I sat up and checked my Earthlink, whose alarm had started beeping. The downward poll signal was dead. This meant that the upward link, with my brain telemetry, was going nowhere.
I keyed the manual link at once. There was no response. I turned the imager to the sky and boosted the resolution all the way. The Turing was still there, but amid a twinkling cloud of fragments. At this distance I could not tell what had been damaged. I kept transmitting, but was returned only hiss. The Cumulus and Nimbus relied on the Turing to communicate with each other, and with me.
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