Deepsix

by Jack McDevitt

  She turned the cutter on the stone side of the building, activated the beam, scorched the rock, and brought the weapon level again.

  The creature stopped.

  Chiang stepped out beside her.

  It stood for several moments, uncertain.

  Hutch took a step forward.

  It began to back away.

  “It’s no dummy,” said Chiang.

  It angled off behind the lander, and it kept the vehicle between itself and the tower while it retreated back into the patch of woods from which it had come.

  It was a short day, of course, less than ten hours from dawn to dusk. Nobody was hungry when the sun went down, and, other than Nightingale, they wanted to stay with the job. Hutch brought them out of the tower anyhow.

  It had grown dark when they logged in their most recent finds. These consisted mostly of vases and utensils and a few tiny hunting knives. There was also an armchair and a pack that seemed to be full of fabric.

  They took the pack out to the lander cabin and secured everything else in the cargo bay. Then they called it a day and climbed inside.

  Hutch opened the bag and took out a small faded blue cloak. It was ribbed, with a ring and chain at the top to fasten the collar. In its own time, it might have been a deep purple. Now it was too washed-out to be sure. The cloth was brittle, and a small piece of it broke off in her hands. She passed the garment to Kellie, who bagged it.

  Next was a shirt.

  And a robe.

  Both were cut down the sides, presumably to accommodate limbs, but what those limbs might have looked like, or even how many there might have been, was impossible to know.

  They found leggings.

  And a pair of boots.

  The boots were disproportionately wide. “Duckfeet,” said Kellie.

  Many of the garments sported decorations, sunbursts and diamond-shapes, representations apparently of flowers and trees, and various arcane symbols.

  They were delighted. Even Nightingale seemed to loosen up and find occasional reason to smile. They inventoried and packed everything, including the bag itself.

  “Not a bad day’s work,” said Toni, with a satisfied smirk.

  Hutch agreed. First day down, they’d done pretty well.

  The lander had a washroom about the size of a closet. It wasn’t convenient, but it would be adequate to their needs.

  One by one, they retreated into its cozy confines to wash up and change clothes. There was a fair amount of grumbling during the process, especially from Chiang and Kellie, neither of whom could move easily inside it. Both eventually gave up and got dressed in the rear of the cabin.

  Hutch broke out the reddimeals. They had a choice among pork, chicken, fish cakes, hamburger steak, sauerbraten. The meals came with salads and snacks.

  She produced two candles, lit them, and killed the lights. Then she set out five glasses and a bottle of Avignon Blue. She uncorked it and filled the glasses. “To us,” she said.

  They drank the second round to the owner of the bag who’d been thoughtful enough to leave it behind for them.

  When they’d finished and were sitting quietly in the candlelight, Hutch congratulated them for what they’d accomplished. “It’ll be a short night,” she said. “Dawn comes early here. But we can sleep a bit late if we need to.

  “Tomorrow, I want to change the emphasis of the search. The Academy will like what we’ve gotten so far. But time’s limited. What we really need is to find something that’ll shed some light on who these people were. On their history.”

  “How do we do that?” asked Toni.

  “Look for engravings. Something with pictures on it. Writing. Symbols. Pictographs.

  “We probably won’t find much in the way of documents on paper, or paperlike materials. We have the scrolls that somebody might be able to do something with, but what we really want is stuff that’s clearly legible. Check pottery for symbols or pictures. Anything like that, we—” A queasy sensation blossomed in her stomach, something she couldn’t quite get hold of. The candles flickered.

  “What was that?” asked Toni.

  They looked at one another.

  Tremor.

  She switched to Marcel’s private channel. “I think,” she told him, “we just experienced a minor quake.”

  “Everybody okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah. It wasn’t much. But it’s not a good sign.”

  “We have sensors on the ground. I’ll check them, see what they say.”

  “You were right,” Marcel told her a few minutes later. “It was a 2.1.”

  “How strong is that?”

  “Barely perceptible.”

  “Scares birds,” she said.

  “Yeah. I suppose.”

  “I thought we weren’t supposed to feel anything until the last day or so.”

  “I don’t think I ever said that, Hutch. But I did warn you that the tower area is not stable. You’re sitting right on top of a fissure. The experts up here are telling me that it’s not a good place to be with Morgan coming.”

  “Morgan’s still pretty far.”

  “Not far enough. It’s massive. Think Jupiter.”

  “All right. We’ll be careful.”

  “Maybe you should leave. Get out of Dodge.”

  “If it gets serious, we’ll do that.”

  “I think it is serious. How about going to one of the other sites?”

  “Where do you suggest?”

  “Any of the cities.”

  “Which one’s accessible?”

  He paused. “Well, what do you mean by accessible?”

  “That we don’t have to cut through ten or twenty meters of ice to get to it.”

  “I don’t know anywhere you can walk in the front door. But even if you have to do some digging, they’ll be safer.”

  “But probably not after the couple of days we’ll need to get into one of them.” Everyone else in the cabin had become intensely interested. “We won’t take any chances, Marcel. Okay? If things start to go downhill, we’ll clear out.”

  When she signed off, Chiang leaned toward her. “I was at the University of Tokyo for a few years,” he said. “Lamps used to swing all the time. It really doesn’t have to amount to something.” He wore a cheerful short-sleeved blue team jersey stenciled Miami Hurricanes. “We’ll be okay,” he said.

  They talked the problem over. How important was the tower and its contents? Hutch knew that a professional archeologist would have told them it was priceless. But she confessed there was really no way to know.

  In the end they compromised. They’d spend one more day there. Then find someplace safer to work.

  A wind kicked up. The sky was full of stars and the snowscape sparkled.

  Chiang found it difficult to sleep, knowing Kellie was so close. Just the seat in front of him. But he hadn’t realized she was awake until he heard her moving. He leaned forward and touched her elbow. “You okay?” he asked.

  She angled her seat so she could see him. Her eyes were dark and lovely. Her hair fell down around her collar, and he ached to take it, take her, in his arms. “The quake’s not good,” she said, looking toward the tower. “That thing could come down on our heads.”

  “Sorry you came?”

  “Wouldn’t have missed it.” Her eyes came back to him. “On the other hand…” She took a deep breath and he tried not to stare at her breasts. And whatever she was going to say was left unfinished.

  VII

  Women were intended by their Maker to be cheerleaders. One has only to examine their anatomy and their disposition to recognize that melancholy fact. So long as they, and we, keep this rockbound truth firmly in mind, the sexes will perform their joint functions with admirable proficiency.

  —GREGORY MACALLISTER, “Night Thoughts,” Notes from Babylon

  Wendy was still two hours away from the object, but they were close enough to have good visuals, which were displayed in various aspects across a bank of screens in proj
ect control. The area was crowded with Beekman’s people, clustered in front of the monitors and hunched over consoles.

  The object had turned out to be an assembly of fifteen individual shafts, connected by bands set at regular intervals of about eighty kilometers. Eight shafts were on the perimeter, six in an inner ring, and one in the center. They were of identical dimensions, each with a diameter of about three-quarters of a meter, each long enough to stretch from New York to Seattle. There was considerable space between them, so Marcel could see through the assembly, could detect stars on the far side.

  A rocky asteroid was attached to one end, webbed in by a net. The overall effect, Marcel thought, was of a lollipop with a stick that projected into the next county.

  The end opposite the asteroid just stopped. A few lines trailed out of it, like dangling cables. Marcel noticed that the fifteen cylinders were cut off cleanly, suggesting the object had not broken away from some larger structure, but rather had been released.

  “Impossible thing,” said Beekman, who was delighted with the find. “Far too much mass for so narrow a body.”

  “Is it really that big a deal?” asked Marcel. “I mean, it’s in space. It doesn’t weigh anything.”

  “Doesn’t matter. It still has mass. A lot of it along the length of the assembly.”

  Marcel was studying the configuration: The asteroid was up, the lower end of the assembly was pointed directly at Deepsix.

  Beekman followed his eyes. “At least its position is about what we’d expect.”

  “Stable orbit?”

  “Oh, yes. It could have been there for thousands of years. Except—”

  “What?”

  He delivered a puzzled grunt. “It just shouldn’t hold together. I’ll be interested in seeing what the thing’s made of.”

  John Drummond, a young mathematician from Oxford, looked up from a screen. “Impossibilium,” he said.

  Marcel, fascinated, watched the image. It was so long they couldn’t put the entire thing on a single screen without shrinking the assembly to invisibility. One of the technicians put it up across a bank of five monitors, the lollipop head on the far left, and the long thin line of the supporting pole stretching all the way over to the far right-hand screen. “So it’s not a ship of any kind, right?” he asked.

  “Oh, no,” said Beekman. “It’s certainly not a ship.” He shook his head emphatically. “No way it could be a ship.”

  “So what is it? A dock?” asked Marcel. “Maybe a refueling station?” They homed in on one of the braces. It appeared to be a simple block of metal, two meters thick, supporting all fifteen shafts in their positions. “Where do you think it came from?”

  Beekman shook his head. “Deepsix. Where else could it have come from?”

  “But there’s no indication they ever had technology remotely like this.”

  “We really haven’t seen anything yet, Marcel. The technology may be under the ice. Kellie’s tower might be very old. Thousands of years. We didn’t look very advanced a few centuries ago either.”

  Marcel couldn’t bring himself to believe that all evidence of a high-tech civilization could just disappear.

  Beekman sighed. “The evidence is right outside, Marcel.” He tried to rub away a headache. “We don’t have any answers yet. Let’s just be patient.” He looked at the screens and then glanced at Drummond. An exchange of some sort took place between them.

  “It’s probably a counterweight,” Drummond said. He was about average size and generally uncoordinated, a thin young man with prematurely receding hair. He seemed to have had trouble adjusting to low gravity. But he’d come to Wendy with a reputation for genius.

  “Counterweight?” said Marcel. “Counterweight for what?”

  “A skyhook.” Beekman glanced at Drummond, who nodded agreement. “There’s not much else it could have been.”

  “You mean an elevator from the ground to L.E.O.?”

  “Not Earth orbit, obviously. But yes, I’d say that’s exactly what it was.”

  Marcel saw several smiles. “I was under the impression there was no point putting up a skyhook. I mean, we’ve got spike technology. We can float vehicles into orbit. Why go to all the trouble—” He stopped. “Oh.”

  “Sure,” said Beekman. “Whoever built this thing doesn’t have the spike. They’ve got some other stuff, though, that we don’t. We could never make one of these. Not one that would hold together.”

  “Okay,” said Marcel. “What you’re telling me, if I understand this correctly, is that this is the part of the skyhook that sticks out into space and balances the section that reaches to the ground, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “That brings up a question.”

  “Yes, it does,” said Beekman. “Where’s the rest of the skyhook?” He shrugged. “Remove the counterweight, and everything else falls down.”

  “Wouldn’t we have seen it if that had happened?”

  “I’d think so.”

  “Maybe they cut it loose near the bottom of the elevator. If that happened—”

  “Most of it would get yanked out into space and drift off.”

  “So there could be another piece of this thing out here somewhere.”

  “Could be. Yes.”

  “But what we’re saying is that it was put up and then taken down?”

  “Or fell down.”

  They retired into the project director’s office, and Beekman waved him to a chair. A large globe of Deepsix stood in one corner.

  “It’s crazy,” said Marcel. “You can’t hide a skyhook. Up or down.”

  “Maybe the pieces that collapsed are under the glaciers,” Beekman said. “We really can’t see much of the surface.” He zeroed in on the equator and began to turn the globe. “Although it would have to be along here somewhere. Along the equator where we can see the ground.”

  They called up pictures of Maleiva III and began looking. For the most part, the equator crossed open ocean. It touched a few islands in the Coraggio east of Transitoria, rounded the globe without any land in sight, passed through Northern Tempus, leaped the Misty Sea, and returned to Transitoria a couple hundred kilometers south of Burbage Point. The tower.

  “Here,” said Beekman, indicating the archipelago, “or here.” The Transitorian west coast.

  “Why?” asked Marcel.

  “Big mountains in both places. You want the highest base you can get. So you put it on top of a mountain.”

  “But a structure like that would be big.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “So where is it?” Marcel looked at both sites, the archipelago, where several enormous mountains stood atop islands that appeared to be volcanic. And the coastal range, which featured a chain of giants with cloud-covered peaks.

  “I don’t know.” Beekman held out his hands.

  “Tell me,” said Marcel. “If you had a skyhook, and something happened to it, so it collapsed, which way would it fall?”

  The project director smiled. “Down.”

  “No. I’m serious. Would it fall toward the west?”

  “There’d be a tendency in that direction. But the kind of structure we’re talking about, thousands of kilometers of elevator shaft and God knows what else. Mostly it would just come down.” Someone was knocking. Beekman kept talking while he opened the door and invited Drummond inside. “If it were here, in Transitoria, the base could be hidden on one of these peaks under the clouds. But that still doesn’t explain where the wreckage got to. It should be scattered across the landscape.”

  Marcel looked at Drummond. “Maybe not,” Drummond said. “Suppose you wanted to take it down. With minimum damage to the terrain below. What do you do?”

  “I have no idea, John,” Beekman said. “But I’d think we would want to separate the shaft at a point where the longest possible section would get hauled up by the counterweight. What’s left—”

  “Falls west—”

  “—into the ocean.” Beekman drummed hi
s fingers on the table-top. “It’s possible. If you’ve got a hell of a good engineer. But why would someone deliberately take it down? I mean, that thing’s got to be an architectural nightmare to put up in the first place.”

  “Maybe they developed the spike and didn’t need it anymore. Maybe it was becoming a hazard. I’d think one of those things would need a lot of maintenance.”

  “Well.” Beekman shrugged. “There are a number of mountains in that range. We’ll have an orbiter in the area in a bit. Why don’t we run some scans and see what we can see.”

  MEMO FOR THE CAPTAIN

  11/26 1427 hours

  From Bill

  The cruise ship Evening Star transited from hyperspace four minutes ago. It has set course for Maleiva III and will arrive in orbit in approximately two hours.

  People boarding cruise liners usually did so via standard GTOs, Ground-to-Orbit vehicles that employed the spike for lift and standard chemical thrusters for velocity. The Star’s onboard lander was a luxury vehicle, seldom used, maintained primarily to accommodate VIPs who had commercial or political reasons for shunning the more public modes of transportation.

  It resembled a large penguin. It had a black-and-white hull with retractable white wings. The nose was blunt, almost boxy, with Evening Star emblazoned in black script below the TransGalactic Starswirl. The interior was leather and brass. It had a small autobar and a pullout worktable so that riders could shuffle papers or relax as they wished.

  After making arrangements to send the shuttle down, Nicholson had become concerned that some of his other passengers would learn about the flight and demand places on board. He had consequently impressed on MacAllister that he was to say nothing to anyone. The news that he wished to take another journalist along had been unsettling, but Nicholson had been caught by then, committed, and wanted to do nothing to upset his illustrious guest.

  This was not the first time the old editor had discovered the advantage of his reputation for volcanic outbursts against those who, for whatever reason, had incurred his wrath. Consequently he and Casey remained, aside from the pilot, the only persons aboard.

  The pilot’s name was Cole Wetheral. He was a taciturn man who would have made a successful funeral director. He had morose eyes and a long nose and long pale fingers that fluttered across the controls as if they were an organ keyboard. He gave preflight instructions and information in a stentorian tone: “Please be seated.” “You will wish to check the status board above your seat before attempting to move around the cabin.” “We want you to enjoy your excursion; please feel free to ask if there is anything you need.” He informed them also that it would be early morning local time when they arrived.