Analog Science Fiction and Fact 01/01/11

by Dell Magazines

  “Anyone, can you hear me? This is Kerris Rat, over!”

  Silence. Minutes passed. I continued to transmit. Suddenly I got a response.

  “Kerris, can you hear me, over!”

  It was Leonne, with a very weak signal.

  “Leonne Sapiens, I receive you. What happened? Over.”

  “An ascent rocket rigged with power packs and scrap metal. It was meant to be a sample delivery. When we saw that it was coming at us full velocity, we managed to turn the starship so that it impacted on the Earthlink module. That dispersed the blast, but killed Earthlink. Over.”

  “Who sent the rocket? Over.”

  “The Cumulus. Over.”

  “The Cumulus fired the rocket? Over.”

  “Confirmed, confirmed, and both landers have since self-destructed. We managed to rig comms, but only you are responding. Over.”

  It took little effort to work out what had happened. Andrean had spent days struggling with Enigma’s influence. Like me, he had failed. Unlike me, he had despaired. He had not been able to destroy the Turing, but he had broken the link. As far as Earth was concerned, we were dead. Seventeen years in the future, our echo clones would be revived. My last memory of Enigma would be of looking up at the night sky, blissfully unaware of any problem.

  “Kerris Rat, are you still there? Over.”

  “Leonne Sapiens, this is Kerris. Over.”

  “Becter Lattice has got the sensors working again. Thermal wavelengths show that the wreckage of both landers has vanished into the funnels of the city. There is one anomaly left. It looks like a liaison parasail, traveling at about one hundred miles per hour and heading straight for you. Over.”

  It had to be Andrean. He would be coming to save me from Enigma, the same way he saved everyone on the Cumulus and Nimbus.

  “Leonne Sapiens, I have a bad feeling about this. Over.”

  “Have you any mobility? Over.”

  “I can flee at the same speed as the incoming parasail. Over.”

  “Kerris Rat, you are cleared to flee or fight, according to your judgment. Over.”

  Flee or fight. That was what Andrean would expect. There was a third option, however.

  “Leonne Sapiens, stand by. Don’t be alarmed when you lose my signal. Over.”

  After engaging the impeller and advancing it to full power, I stepped off the parasail.

  I fell into the blackness of the funnel. It was about a hundred feet before I hit the steep slope and plunged down into its absolute darkness. After the first minute I turned on my helmet light, but it showed little. The deep, soothing, musical chords and flourishes from the city’s airways were continually with me as I descended.

  My personal doppler radar unit gave my speed relative to the oxide-slick surface, and from this I could calculate distances. At three miles I entered a vast cavern that seemed to act like the soundbox of a guitar for all the tunnels that fed into it. On the roof were drawings and script, glowing down as a different texture in the oxide layer. Landers and aliens were depicted, and I even recognized some of the surface features visible from my base. The graffiti of other visitors, I decided as I slid into the next tunnel. Obviously there were no damage control inhibitors down here. Minutes later I entered another graffiti gallery, then another. Were all visitors meant to leave some similar testament, I wondered, or was it optional?

  I scanned and recorded what I could as I plunged onward. In a few minutes I had learned more about the alien races of our galaxy than in the rest of human history put together. Gallery after gallery flashed by, all covered with imagery and script from earlier visitors. I passed the five-mile point. So far I had dropped only two miles vertically, but now the inclination of the tunnels began to flatten out, and with this my speed slowed too. There were dozens more galleries decorated and inscribed by earlier visitors, but traces of the alien machine’s descent continued to be visible as well. More than once the thought that I might have made a terrible mistake by jumping passed through my mind, but rats survive by taking chances. Clever chances.

  After ninety-one miles of travel and at seven miles depth I finally slid out into what resembled a vast indoor sports stadium. The floor was ankle deep in powdery dust that flowed like black mercury. Shapes were visible, some towering, others mere scraps. One dark shape about the size of an old-style automobile was all ridges, scales, spikes, and mechanical arms.

  It had the right dimensions for whatever had fallen into the funnel that I had entered, and it was stylistically identical to the mechanical arm.

  For once the archeological evidence was absolutely beyond doubt. Five shots from a plasma weapon had hit the craft, all of them passing through the pilot—who was now just a skeleton in an environment suit. Both of the mechanical arms were attached and undamaged. Scattered about that vast chamber I soon found fragments of another, identical craft, one that had apparently exploded. In the very remote past the aliens had moved beyond rational discussion of Enigma. It was the second craft that had left its arm on the surface.

  Words are not adequate to describe how it felt to be working in that place. The only light came from my helmet, but sounds were all around me, echoing down for miles through Enigma’s warren of caverns and galleries. As I had suspected, solid jetsam found its way down here, but the chamber was also built for the dust of eons to settle out.

  Even though rats are bold, we are not fools. A cluster of spiky violet crystals about the size of a basketball floated enticingly just above the dust. I was about to reach out to it when I had second thoughts. I tossed a scrap of metal at it instead. The metal vanished. No bang, no flash of light, it just ceased to be. Not far away was a sphere of nothingness. Not a single gleam or highlight was visible, it was just a depression in the liquid dust. I skirted it carefully. My foot discovered a badly corroded device that resembled an assault rifle built for a squirrel.

  Later analysis would show that the dust was partly from interstellar micrometeorites falling over hundreds of millions of years and partly oxides from the surface. Enigma’s surface bound with water and carbon dioxide, removing the products of our respiration from the atmosphere, to drift down to these dust traps. Enigma passively maintained itself to perfection.

  With the caution of a rat scouting an unfamiliar kitchen I circled the intact vehicle. The vital parts were coated in a smooth material that looked like chrome but felt like plastic. It apparently did not react with oxygen, and so was in pristine condition. I then realized something even more fundamental. The engine was no more than a force-field balance. My backscatter scanner told me that it was like the Turing’s antimatter resonance converter—except that there was no antimatter. From the mechanical arm I had learned how to find and release the access plates in dragoncat devices. I now methodically removed the vehicle’s plates in order to trace the damage from the retaliation shots. Before long I accepted that repairs were way beyond me, and turned my attention to the other artifacts in the chamber. To my surprise I found that most were intact.

  Andrean was traveling slowly as he entered the chamber. I had suspected that he might try to follow me once he caught up with my empty parasail, and so had set up a short-range radar sensor to give myself a few minutes of warning. I hid behind some wreckage in case he arrived shooting. My visor’s infrared display showed him as a shape crouched warily amid the swirling dust and alien machines.

  “Andrean Wolf, I hoped you would visit,” I said in the darkness.

  “Kerris Rat?” he asked, seeing what was visible of me as an infrared glow, just as I saw him.

  “The original Kerris, accept no echo. They lead very sheltered lives in those suspension tanks.”

  “No heroics please, my beacon mortar is armed,” he said. “One move and I shoot.”

  “I am marooned down here until I starve. Why should I care?”

  “You are not moving. This tells me that you do care.”

  “Then I invite you to put my ghost to rest,” I said, hoping there was no tremor in
my voice.

  Andrean considered this option, allowed some moments of silence to pass to see if my nerve would crack, then realized that a lengthening silence meant loss of face for him.

  “We are both ghosts, so we have all the time in the world,” he said, still wary.

  Now I had the advantage. There is nothing that a guru, prophet, messiah, or alpha wolf wants more than followers. Even one will do. Andrean would be regarding me as a challenge.

  “Who else is still alive?” I asked.

  “The Hounds have sacrificed themselves.”

  “How very dog.”

  “Eagle and Fox were not as willing, but they too are dead.”

  “You failed to destroy the Turing.”

  “We broke Earthlink. That was enough. My echo will awake in seventeen years and explain.”

  Andrean switched his helmet light on and shone it at my face across the distance separating us. Coming across to me, he satisfied himself that I was not armed. Only now did he glance over the detritus in the chamber.

  “So even an eternal city has junkyards. Is that why you came down here? To examine junk?”

  “Of course. Junkyards are the lifeblood of archeology.”

  “I suppose you will try to tell me you have discovered Enigma’s secret.”

  “Work it out for yourself.”

  “Perhaps I will. We have plenty of time.”

  “Until the food runs out and my portable recycler degrades.”

  Killing me would mean he was left alone down here. For someone intending to suicide, that should not have mattered, but perhaps he hoped to lure those in the Turing down to help.

  He sat down on a device with rather Gothic-looking outlines that seemed to serve no purpose at all. His helmet light panned across a mixture of wreckage and ancient, intact equipment amid the swirl of black, liquid dust.

  “Enigma was set up specifically to be found and visited by civilizations that have just obtained the capability of interstellar travel,” he began.

  “Very good, but why?” I asked.

  “The visitors learn the lesson, then take it home. Their races then go on to the destiny that Enigma has decreed. That message is on the winds, in the colors of the spires, towers, and buildings, within vibrations and tremors in the surface, and in many other effects that are probably too subtle to notice.”

  The rat had the wolf in a dialogue, but for how long?

  “That’s all?” I asked.

  “Enigma is the ultimate evangelist. Races come and go, but Enigma is eternal. It is a message given form. It travels through space, indestructible, forever ready to spread its message. It has sunk its hooks into my mind, but it has not yet seduced my will away.”

  “Or mine.”

  “True. We are chimeras. Perhaps Enigma’s builders did not expect chimeras. That was pure luck. That allowed me to save Earth.”

  “Then why come down here to kill me?”

  “Because I do not know my enemy. Your recycler can keep you alive for a few days longer. In that time Enigma might grant you the power to . . . perhaps to teleport to Earth by a mere act of will. No, best to end it all here.”

  “One out of three.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Enigma has been attracting visitors like us for hundreds of millions of years—true. Enigma has a message—false. Enigma seeks to influence us—false.”

  “Of course Enigma influences us. Why else would we do the repairs to its buildings?”

  “So that we can be heard.”

  “There is nobody to hear us.”

  “Ah, but there will be, millions of years in the future. Reading the lattice databanks in the repair sites and visiting these chambers and the graffiti galleries is better than visiting the home worlds of the earlier visitors. They all arrived within a few centuries of their industrial revolutions. Their inscriptions, time capsules, and discarded equipment are still comprehensible to us.”

  This was a very rat perspective. The wolf pondered this.

  “You have my attention,” he conceded.

  “How often does a civilization achieve interstellar flight in this galaxy? On the basis of what we have found on the surface, perhaps once every five million years. Now ask how long a civilization lasts until it becomes something unrecognizable to people at our level. A thousand years? Do the math and the chances of us meeting another space-faring race are two in ten thousand, but probably less.”

  “This tells me nothing about Enigma.”

  “Oh, but it does. Visits to Enigma are the only time alien civilizations will ever have anything in common. A million years earlier, and healthcare means scratching fleas, security is trying not to get eaten, and entertainment is scoring a screw when the alpha male is not looking. A million years later, and we are totally unrecognizable. Enigma is a beautiful but puzzling piece of work, designed to draw attention to itself and attract visitors. Here we can meet the hundreds of alien races who have come and gone before us.”

  “This does not make sense,” said Andrean. “The chambers and tunnels beneath Enigma are inaccessible, unless you do a one-way slide like we did.”

  “I have reviewed the scans I did as I passed through the graffiti galleries and surveyed the tech in this chamber. Humanity appears to be the first space-faring race ever to visit Enigma without using some type of gravitational inversion. All the other visitors could fly down the tunnels using backpack units. We need parasails inflated with hydrogen, and they don’t fit.”

  Andrean said no more for quite some time, so I was fairly sure that I had made sense. Humanity yearns for diversity. For a lack of aliens they created the latticeheads, poochers, androids, and of course we chimeras. Long ago, Enigma’s builders must have known of some innate need for intelligences to meet other intelligences. They thought it so important that they left us Enigma, so that even when separated by millions of years of evolution, development, and change, we could still know the other visitors as friends and colleagues.

  “So I have destroyed humanity’s chance to use Enigma, Kerris Rat,” Andrean finally admitted. “Is that not true?”

  “In seventeen years your echo will awake on Earth and tell everyone how you destroyed the expedition and murdered us originals.”

  “I did it to save humanity.”

  “But humanity was not in danger.”

  “When we get back to the surface I will transmit a retraction.”

  “How? You destroyed Earthlink, and we are marooned down here.”

  “Then what can we do?”

  “We can leave our own message. Do you have anything to say to the next visitors, Andrean Wolf? Scratch it on the wall if you do.”

  Again he said nothing for some time. When he did speak, it was a lateral instruction, such as a rat might resort to when trapped.

  “Down here, most of the artifacts look undamaged.”

  “I think this place is meant to be a sort of archeological trade fair. Most visitors leave something.”

  “Some of them are floating above the ground. They must be gravitational inversion packs and sleds. We could use those to escape.”

  “It takes weeks to master alien equipment, if it can be done at all. We have days.”

  “The batteries I brought down as weapons will last your equipment for many weeks, Kerris Rat.”

  “But you have no supplies, and mine are almost all gone.”

  “Then I had better provide something for your recycler,” said Andrean as he raised his beacon mortar to his head and shot himself.

  As it happened, I took five weeks to master one of the artifacts that had remained functional after uncounted millions of years of dust, darkness, and pure oxygen. Using it, I was able to return to the surface, then seal my environment suit and reach the Turing and other survivors in orbit. In the years since then, we have been able to build a new Earthlink and explore some of Enigma’s caverns. There are enough caverns to last many lifetimes, so it is better than exploring the galaxy itself. All of ou
r findings have been transmitted to Earth, but will anyone listen? I have a feeling that they will heed Andrean’s warning and ignore all new transmissions from Enigma.

  I no longer care. We are leaving a chronicle of Earth’s history in a lattice databank embedded in a meteorite pit repair and a mural on the roof of a gallery deep within Enigma, along with a sample of our equipment in the chamber where Andrean killed himself. I am writing within the mural of how we were the boldest of the visitors to Enigma, using the most primitive and dangerous of technologies to cross the chasm of distance from Earth. I know I will have appreciative audiences, even when humanity has progressed beyond the comprehension of beings like us.

  After all, that is what Enigma is for.

  Copyright © 2010 Sean McMullen

  If we were to wake up some morning and find that everyone was the same race, creed, and color, we would find some other causes for prejudice by noon.

  —George Aiken

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  When a relationship changes to something new, the last traces of the old can be very persistent…

  Stephen L. Burns

  The President of the United States, clearly troubled by what he has just heard, walks around behind the emissary from the Bad Lands. He bends down, sniffs the emissary’s butt.

  When he straightens up again his expression is thoughtful, bemused. The emissary seems to be holding his breath in wide-eyed anxiety. “Sir?” he says nervously.

  The president’s smile is sudden and disarming. He claps the emissary on the shoulder. “You certainly have given me a lot to ponder. I’m going to need some time to think about this.”

  “Of course, sir. It is, um, pretty big news.”

  “Absolutely. One of my aides will escort you to a reception suite while I consider how to respond to the information and proposal you have brought me.”