Deepsix

by Jack McDevitt

  The man himself turned around in his seat and studied them momentarily with those sad eyes. “How long,” he asked, “did you folks plan on being here?”

  “Not long,” said MacAllister. “An hour or so.”

  The snow was already piling up on the windscreen.

  “Okay. I have a few things to take care of. Make sure you activate your e-suit before you go out, and we want you to keep it on the entire time you’re here. You can breathe the local air if necessary, but the mix isn’t quite right.

  “The captain also directed me to ask you both to be careful. There’ve been wild animal sightings.”

  “We know that,” said MacAllister.

  “Good. There’s a great deal of paperwork involved if we lose either of you.” He said it without a trace of irony.

  “Thank you,” said Casey.

  They went through the airlock and climbed down out of the spacecraft into the storm. “To do the interview correctly,” MacAllister said, “we’re going to want to wait until it subsides.” Ordinarily, heavy weather provided great atmosphere for interviews. But in this case the tower was the star of the show, and people needed to be able to see it. “Wetheral, how long before this blizzard lets up?”

  The pilot appeared in the hatch. “I don’t know, sir. We don’t have a weather report.”

  “Seems as if it might be a good idea to get one.”

  “Won’t be one for this area,” he said seriously. He looked around, shook his head, and came down the ladder.

  The archeologists’ lander was dead ahead. It was smaller than the Star’s vehicle, and sleeker. More businesslike.

  A woman materialized out of the driving snow. She wore a blue-and-white jumpsuit and he knew from the way she walked it was Hutchins. She was trim, built like a boy, and came up almost to his shoulders. Her black hair was cut short, and she looked unfriendly. But he shrugged it away in his usual forgiving manner, recognizing anger as a natural trait exhibited by females who didn’t get their way.

  “You’re the mission commander, I take it?” he asked, extending his hand.

  She shook it perfunctorily. “I’m Hutchins,” she said.

  He introduced Casey and Wetheral.

  “Why don’t we talk inside?” Hutchins turned on her heel and marched off.

  Delightful.

  They clumped through the snow. MacAllister studied the tower while he tried to get used to the e-suit. He should have been cold, but wasn’t. His feet, clad in leisure shoes, sank into the drifts. But they stayed warm.

  The tower loomed up through the storm. At home, it would have been no more than a pile of rock. Here, amidst all this desolation, it was magnificent. But the Philistines had punched a hole in the wall. “Pity you chose to do that,” he told Hutchins.

  “It made egress considerably easier.”

  “I quite understand.” He did, of course. And yet this tower had obviously stood a long time. It should have been possible to show it a bit more respect. “I don’t suppose we have any idea how old it is?”

  “Not yet,” she said. “We don’t have an onboard facility for dating. It’ll take a while.”

  The storm caused him to speak more loudly than necessary. He was having a hard time getting used to the radio. Hutchins asked him to lower his voice. He did and focused on trying to keep it down. “And there’s nothing else?” he asked. “No other ruins?”

  “There are some scattered around the planet. And there’s a city buried down there.” She pointed at the ground.

  “Really?” He tried to imagine it, a town with houses and parks and probably a jail under the ice. “Incredible,” he said.

  “Watch your head.” She led him through the entrance they had made. He ducked and followed her into a low-roofed chamber with a table on which were piled some cups and darts. He had to stay bent over.

  “Tight fit,” he said. The small-gauge stairways caught his eye. “The inhabitants were, what,—elves?”

  “Apparently about that size.”

  “What have you learned about them so far?” He wandered over to the table and reached for one of the cups, but she asked him, if he would, to avoid handling them. “Forgive me,” he said. “So what can you tell me about them?”

  “We know they favored blowguns.”

  He smiled back at her. “Primitives.”

  Hutchins’s people drifted in to meet him. They struck him as by and large a forgettable lot. The other two women were reasonably attractive. There was one young male with a trace of Asian ancestry. And he recognized the second male but couldn’t immediately place him. He was an elderly, bookish-looking individual, with a weak chin and a fussy mustache. And he was in fact staring at MacAllister with some irritation.

  Hutchins did the introductions. And the mystery went away. “Randall Nightingale,” she said.

  Ah. Nightingale. The man who fainted. The man carried relatively uninjured out of battle by a woman. MacAllister frowned and pretended to study his features. “Do I know you from somewhere?” he asked with benign dignity.

  “Yes,” said Nightingale. “Indeed you do.”

  “You’re…”

  “I was the director of the original project, Mr. MacAllister. Twenty years or so ago.”

  “So you were.” MacAllister was not without compassion, and he let Nightingale see that he felt a degree of sympathy. “I am sorry how that turned out. It must have been hard on you.”

  Hutchins must have sensed the gathering storm. She moved in close.

  MacAllister turned to his companion. “Casey, you know Randall Nightingale. A legendary figure.”

  Nightingale took an aggressive step forward, but Hutchins put an arm around his shoulder. Little woman, he thought. And a little man. But Nightingale wisely allowed himself to be restrained. “I haven’t forgotten you, MacAllister,” he said.

  MacAllister smiled politely. “There, sir, as you can see, you had the advantage of me.”

  Hutchins drew him away and turned him over to the Asian. Something passed between them, and he coaxed Nightingale out of the chamber and down the child’s staircase.

  “What was that about?” asked Casey.

  “Man didn’t like to read about himself.” MacAllister turned back to Hutchins. “I’m sorry about that,” he said. “I didn’t expect to find him here.”

  “It’s okay. Let’s just try to keep it peaceful.”

  “Madam,” he said, “you need to tell that to your own people. But I’ll certainly try to stay out of everyone’s way. Now, can I persuade you to show us around the site a bit?”

  “All right,” she said. “I guess it can’t do any harm. But there’s really not much to see.”

  “How long have you been on the ground, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “This is our second day.”

  “Do we know anything at all about the natives, the creatures, who built it? Other than the blowguns?”

  Hutchins told him what they had learned: The natives were of course preindustrial, fought organized wars, and had a form of writing. She offered to take him to the top of the tower. “Tell me what’s up there, and I’ll decide,” he said.

  She described the chamber and the levered ceiling which apparently had opened up. And she added their idea that the natives might have owned a telescope.

  “Optics?” he said. “That doesn’t seem to fit with blowguns.”

  “That’s our feeling. I hope we’ll get some answers during the course of the day.”

  MacAllister saw no point making the climb. Instead they descended into the lower chambers, and Hutchins showed him a fireplace and some chair fragments.

  Near the bottom of the tower they looked into a tunnel. “This is where we’re working now,” she said.

  The tunnel was too small to accommodate him. Even had it not been, he would have stayed out of it. “So what’s back there?” he asked.

  “It’s where we found the blowguns. It looks as if there was an armory. But what we’re really interested
in is finding writing samples and maybe some engraved pictures. Or possibly sculpture. Something that’ll tell us what they looked like. We’d like to answer your question, Mr. MacAllister.”

  “Of course.” MacAllister looked around at the blank walls. “We must have some idea of their appearance. For example, surely the staircase is designed for a bipedal creature?”

  “Surely,” she said. “We’re pretty sure they had four limbs. Walked upright. That’s about the extent of what we know.”

  “When do you expect to be able to determine the age of this place?”

  “After we get some of the pieces back to a lab. Until then everything is guesswork.”

  Wetheral was still standing by the chair fragments, trying to catch Hutchins’s attention. “Yes?” she said.

  “May I ask whether you’re finished with these?”

  “Yes,” she said. “We’ve already stowed a complete armchair in the lander.”

  “Good.” He looked pleased. “Thank you.” And while she watched, clearly surprised, he gathered the fragments, a beam, and a piece of material that might once have been drapery. And he carried everything up the staircase.

  “The ship hopes to salvage a few pieces,” MacAllister explained. His back was beginning to hurt from all the bending. “Anything that might interest the more historically minded passengers.”

  She showed no reaction. “I can’t see that it’ll do any harm.”

  “Thank you,” said MacAllister. “And if there’s nothing we missed”—he turned to Casey—“this might be a good time to go outside and, if the weather will allow, do our interview.”

  VIII

  The results of archeological enterprise at home are predictable within a set of parameters, because we know the general course of history. Its off-world cousin is a different breed of cat altogether. Anybody who’s going to dig up furniture on Sirius II or Rigel XVII better leave his assumptions at the door.

  —GREGORY MACALLISTER, “Sites and Sounds,” The Grand Tour

  It was the first time in his adult life that Nightingale had seriously considered assaulting someone. That he had resisted the impulse, that he had not taken a swing at the smirking, self-satisfied son of a bitch, was a result not of Hutch’s restraining hand or of any reluctance over attacking somebody considerably more than twice his size. It had been rather his sense of the impropriety of violence that had shut him down.

  Nightingale had grown up with a code. One did not make a scene. One retained dignity under all circumstances. If an opponent was to be attacked, it was done with a smile and a cutting phrase. Unfortunately, he hadn’t been able to come up with the cutting phrase.

  Now, working in the tunnel with Toni and Chiang, he was embarrassed by his outburst. He had not gotten it right had not come close to getting it right. But he had, by God, confronted MacAllister, and that at least had relieved part of the burden he’d been carrying all these years.

  MacAllister had written an account of the original expedition, titled “Straight and Narrow,” as the lead editorial for Premier. It had appeared shortly after Nightingale’s return, when the investigation was still going on, and it had laid the blame for failure at his door, had charged him with mismanaging the landings, and had concluded by branding him as a helpless coward because he’d fainted after being wounded. The article in fact made light of his wounds. “Scratches,” MacAllister had remonstrated, as though he’d been there.

  It had branded him publicly and, in his view, had caused the examining board to render a verdict against him, and to shut down plans for future expeditions. We need to put Maleiva III behind us, one of the commissioner’s reps had told him after the commissioner herself had cut off all contact. Didn’t want to be seen with him.

  “Straight and Narrow” had appeared again, six years ago, in a collection of MacAllister’s memoirs. A fresh attack. And the man had pretended not to know him.

  “You okay?” asked Chiang.

  They were working to clear the chamber where they’d found the blowguns, the area they now called the armory. But he realized he had stopped in the middle of the effort and was staring off somewhere. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m fine.”

  Toni and Chiang were both watching him. They’d asked on the way down what had caused his outburst, and he’d put them off. How could he possibly tell them? But it galled him that MacAllister, glib, irresponsible, that judge of all mankind, had been within reach, and that he had been impotent. What a pathetic creature he must have appeared.

  John Drummond had made his reputation within a year of receiving his doctorate by devising the equations named for him, which had provided a major step forward in understanding galactic evolution. But he’d done nothing of note during the decade that had passed since that time. Now, at thirty-five, he was approaching the age at which he could be expected to begin tottering. Physicists and mathematicians traditionally make their mark early on. Genius is limited to the very young.

  He’d adjusted to the realities, and had been prepared to spend the balance of his career on the periphery, criticizing the results of his betters. His reputation was secure, and even if he did nothing else notable, he still had the satisfaction of knowing that, during his early twenties, he’d outpaced damned near everybody else on the planet.

  Despite that sense of his own contributions, he could not help feeling overawed in the presence of people like Beekman and al-Kabhar, who were known and respected everywhere they went. Drummond inevitably detected a note of condescension in his treatment by his peers. He suspected they perceived him as someone who, in the end, had to be regarded as a disappointment, who had not quite lived up to the promise of the early years.

  He had consequently become somewhat defensive. His profession had passed him by, and he suspected that his selection to join the Deepsix mission had been a political choice. He had been simply too big a name to leave off the invitation list. It would have been better, he sometimes thought, to have been a mediocrity from the start, to have been perceived as a man of limited promise, than to have raised such hopes in others and in himself, and gone on to disappoint them all.

  Like Chiang, he was also attracted to Kellie Collier, although he’d never made any sort of advance. He drank coffee with her when the opportunity permitted, spent what time with her that he could. But he feared rejection, and he detected in her manner that she would not take him seriously as a desirable male.

  He was not entirely surprised when Beekman invited him into his office to ask whether he wanted to join the team that would inspect the artifact they’d found orbiting Maleiva III. It was an offer most of his colleagues would have coveted, and his reputation may have left the project director with little choice. But Drummond wasn’t anxious to embrace the honor, because it seemed to mean he would have to leave the ship. And the idea of going outside frankly scared him.

  “That’s very good of you, Gunther.” He loved using the great man’s first name.

  “Think nothing of it. You deserve the honor.”

  “But the others—”

  “—will understand. You’ve earned this assignment, John. Congratulations.”

  Drummond was thinking about the void.

  “You do want to participate, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Of course I do. I just thought that the more senior members should have the privilege.” His heart had begun to pound. He knew spacewalking was supposed to be simple. You just wore air tanks and a belt and magnetic shoes. And comfortable clothing. They emphasized comfortable clothing. He didn’t like heights, but everything he’d read about work in the vacuum indicated that wasn’t a problem either.

  Before the offer had come, before he’d thought it out, he’d made the mistake of telling several of his colleagues how he’d like to cross to the assembly, to touch it and walk on it. He knew that if he refused the offer, no matter what reason he gave, it would get out.

  “Do you know how to use a cutter?” Beekman asked.

  “Of course.” Punch the
stud and don’t point it at your foot.

  “Okay. Good. We’ll be leaving in two hours. Meet in front of the cargo bay airlock. On C Deck.”

  “Gunther,” he said, “I’ve never worn an e-suit.”

  “Neither have I.” Beekman laughed. “I suspect we’ll be learning together.” Then, abruptly, the conversation was over. The office door opened. Beekman had picked up a pen. “Oh, by the way,” he said without looking up, “the captain says if you want to eat, you should do it now, and keep it light. Best not to have a fresh meal in your stomach when we go out.”

  Drummond closed his eyes and wondered whether he could get away with claiming to be ill.

  Marcel regretted having allowed Kellie to travel down to the surface. Had she been available, she would have accompanied the inspection team over to the assembly, and he could have held himself in reserve for an emergency. Or for a less arduous afternoon.

  He didn’t like taking Beekman’s people outside. None of them had ever before gone through an airlock in flight. There was in fact little that could go wrong. The Flickinger field was quite safe. But it still made him uncomfortable.

  At Beekman’s request, Marcel had brought Wendy to the Maleiva III end of the assembly, the section most distant from the asteroid and closest to the planet. There, they could see quite clearly that it had been detached from a larger construct. The terminal ends of the shafts had latches and connectors.

  He matched course, speed, and alignment so they maintained a constant relative position. That was crucial, not only because having the airlock within a couple of meters of the assembly was convenient, but because the sight of the two objects moving in relation to one another would almost certainly sicken his embryo spacewalkers. The only problem was that the two globes currently in the sky, Deepsix and the sun, would be in apparent motion. Enough to make you dizzy if you weren’t used to it.

  “Don’t look at them,” he advised his team. “You’ve got a bona fide alien artifact out there, unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. Concentrate on that.”

  Beekman had chosen two people, a man and a woman, to go out with him. Both were young, and both were celebrated members of his science team. The woman, Carla Stepan, had done some pioneering work in light propagation. Appropriate, Marcel thought. She was herself a luminous creature.