Masterpieces

by Orson Scott Card

  “But they may be there.”

  “There is no abundance of them. There is no progression, Lord Desan. That is the key thing. There is nothing beyond these substances, these materials. This was not a star-faring civilization. They launched their slow, unmanned probes, with their cameras, their robot eyes—not for us. We always knew that. We were the recipients of flotsam. Mere wreckage on the beach.”

  “It was purposeful!” Desan hissed, trembling, surrounded by them all, a lone credent among the quiet heresy in this room. “Dr. Gothon, your unique position—is a position of trust, of profound trust; I beg you to consider the effect you have—”

  “Do you threaten me, Lord Desan? Are you here for that, to silence me?”

  Desan looked desperately about him, at the sudden hush in the room. The minute tickings of probes and picks had stopped. Eyes stared. “Please.” He looked back. “I came here to gather data; I expected a simple meeting, a few staff meetings—to consider things at leisure—”

  “I have distressed you. You wonder how it would be if the lords-magistrate fell at odds with me. I am aware of myself as an institution, Lord Desan. I remember Desan Das. I remember launch, the original five ships. I have waked to all but one of your incarnations. Not to mention the numerous incarnations of the lords-magistrate.”

  “You cannot discount them! Even you—Let me plead with you, Dr. Gothon, be patient with us.”

  “You do not need to teach me patience, Desan-Five.”

  He shivered convulsively. Even when Gothon smiled that gentle, disarming smile. “You have to give me facts, doctor, not mystical communing with the landscape. The lords-magistrate accept that this is the world of origin. I assure you they never would have devoted so much time to creating a base here if that were not the case.”

  “Come, lord, those power systems on the probe, so long dead—What was it truly for, but to probe something very close at hand? Even orthodoxy admits that. And what is close at hand but their own solar system? Come, I’ve seen the original artifact and the original tablet. Touched it with my hands. This was a primitive venture, designed to cross their own solar system—which they had not the capability to do.”

  Desan blinked. “But the purpose—”

  “Ah. The purpose.”

  “You say that you stand in a landscape and you think in their mind. Well, doctor, use this skill you claim. What did the Ancients intend? Why did they send it out with a message?”

  The old eyes flickered, deep and calm and pained. “An oracular message, Lord Desan. A message into the dark of their own future, unaimed, unfocused. Without answer. Without hope of answer. We know its voyage time. Eight million years. They spoke to the universe at large. This probe went out, and they fell silent shortly afterward—the depth of this dry lake of dust, Lord Desan, is eight and a quarter million years.”

  “I will not believe that.”

  “Eight and a quarter million years ago, Lord Desan. Calamity fell on them, calamity global and complete within a century, perhaps within a decade of the launch of that probe. Perhaps calamity fell from the skies; but demonstrably it was atomics and their own doing. They were at that precarious stage. And the destruction in the great centers is catastrophic and of one level. Destruction centered in places of heavy population. Trace elements. That is what those statistics say. Atomics, Lord Desan.”

  “I cannot accept this!”

  “Tell me, space-farer—do you understand the workings of weather? What those meteor strikes could do, the dust raised by atomics could do with equal efficiency. Never mind the radiation that alone would have killed millions—never mind the destruction of centers of government: We speak of global calamity, the dimming of the sun in dust, the living oceans and lakes choking in dying photosynthetes in a sunless winter, killing the food chain from the bottom up—”

  “You have no proof!”

  “The universality, the ruin of the population-centers. Arguably, they had the capacity to prevent meteor-impact. That may be a matter of debate. But beyond a doubt in my own mind, simultaneous destruction of the population centers indicates atomics. The statistics, the pots and the dry numbers, Lord Desan, doom us to that answer. The question is answered. There were no descendants, there was no escape from the world. They destroyed themselves before that meteor hit them.”

  Desan rested his mouth against his joined hands. Stared helplessly at the doctor. “A lie. Is that what you’re saying? We pursued a lie?”

  “Is it their fault that we needed them so much?”

  Desan pushed himself to his feet and stood there by mortal effort. Gothon sat staring up at him with those terrible dark eyes.

  “What will you do, lord-navigator? Silence me? The old woman’s grown difficult at last: wake my clone after, tell it—what the lords-magistrate select for it to be told?” Gothon waved a hand about the room, indicating the staff, the dozen sets of living eyes among the dead. “Bothogi too, those of us who have clones—But what of the rest of the staff? How much will it take to silence all of us?”

  Desan stared about him, trembling. “Dr. Gothon—” He leaned his hands on the table to look at Gothon. “You mistake me. You utterly mistake me—The lords-magistrate may have the station, but I have the ships, I, I and my staff. I propose no such thing. I’ve come home—” The unaccustomed word caught in his throat; he considered it, weighed it, accepted it, at least in the emotional sense. “—home, Dr. Gothon, after a hundred years of search, to discover this argument and this dissension.”

  “Charges of heresy—”

  “They dare not make them against you.” A bitter laugh welled up. “Against you they have no argument and you well know it, Dr. Gothon.”

  “Against their violence, lord-navigator, I have no defense.”

  “But she has,” said Dr. Bothogi.

  Desan turned, flicked a glance from the hardness in Bothogi’s green eyes to the even harder substance of the stone in Bothogi’s hand. He flung himself about again, hands on the table, abandoning the defense of his back. “Dr. Gothon! I appeal to you! I am your friend!”

  “For myself,” said Dr. Gothon, “I would make no defense at all. But, as you say—they have no argument against me. So it must be a general catastrophe—the lords-magistrate have to silence everyone, don’t they? Nothing can be left on this base. Perhaps they’ve quietly dislodged an asteroid or two and put them on course. In the guise of mining, perhaps they will silence this poor old world forever—myself and the rest of the relics. Lost relics and the distant dead are always safer to venerate, aren’t they?”

  “That’s absurd!”

  “Or perhaps they’ve become more hasty now that your ships are here and their judgment is in question. They have atomics within their capability, lord-navigator. They can disable your shuttle with beam-fire. They can simply welcome you to the list of casualties—a charge of heresy. A thing taken out of context, who knows? After all—all lords are immediately duplicatable, the captains accustomed to obey the lords-magistrate—what few of them are awake—am I not right? If an institution like myself can be threatened—where is the fifth lord-navigator in their plans? And of a sudden those plans will be moving in haste.”

  Desan blinked. “Dr. Gothon—I assure you—”

  “If you are my friend, lord-navigator, I hope for your survival. The robots are theirs, do you understand? Their powerpacks are sufficient for transmission of information to the base AIs; and from the communications center it goes to satellites; and from satellites to the station and the lords-magistrate. This room is safe from their monitoring. We have seen to that. They cannot hear you.”

  “I cannot believe these charges, I cannot accept it—”

  “Is murder so new?”

  “Then come with me! Come with me to the shuttle, we’ll confront them—”

  “The transportation to the port is theirs. It would not permit. The transport AI would resist. The planes have AI components. And we might never reach the airfield.”

  �
�My luggage. Dr. Gothon, my luggage—my com unit!” And Desan’s heart sank, remembering the service-robots. “They have it.”

  Gothon smiled, a small, amused smile. “O space-farer. So many scientists clustered here, and could we not improvise so simple a thing? We have a receiver-transmitter. Here. In this room. We broke one. We broke another. They’re on the registry as broken. What’s another bit of rubbish—on this poor planet? We meant to contact the ships, to call you, lord-navigator, when you came back. But you saved us the trouble. You came down to us like a thunderbolt. Like the birds you never saw, my spaceborn lord, swooping down on prey. The conferences, the haste you must have inspired up there on the station—if the lords-magistrate planned what I most suspect! I congratulate you. But knowing we have a transmitter—with your shuttle sitting on this world vulnerable as this building—what will you do, lord-navigator, since they control the satellite relay?”

  Desan sank down on his chair. Stared at Gothon. “You never meant to kill me. All this—you schemed to enlist me.”

  “I entertained that hope, yes. I knew your predecessors. I also know your personal reputation—a man who burns his years one after the other as if there were no end of them. Unlike his predecessors. What are you, lord-navigator? Zealot? A man with an obsession? Where do you stand in this?”

  “To what—” His voice came hoarse and strange. “To what are you trying to convert me, Dr. Gothon?”

  “To our rescue from the lords-magistrate. To the rescue of truth.”

  “Truth!” Desan waved a desperate gesture. “I don’t believe you, I cannot believe you, and you tell me about plots as fantastical as your research and try to involve me in your politics. I’m trying to find the trail the Ancients took—one clue, one artifact to direct us—”

  “A new tablet?”

  “You make light of me. Anything. Any indication where they went. And they did go, doctor. You will not convince me with your statistics. The unforeseen and the unpredicted aren’t in your statistics.”

  “So you’ll go on looking—for what you’ll never find. You’ll serve the lords-magistrate. They’ll surely cooperate with you. They’ll approve your search and leave this world . . . after the great catastrophe. After the catastrophe that obliterates us and all the records. An asteroid. Who but the robots chart their course? Who knows how close it is at this moment?”

  “People would know a murder! They could never hide it!”

  “I tell you, Lord Desan, you stand in a place and you look around you and you say—what would be natural to this place? In this cratered, devastated world, in this chaotic, debris-ridden solar system—could not an input error by an asteroid miner be more credible an accident than atomics? I tell you when your shuttle descended, we thought you might be acting for the lords-magistrate. That you might have a weapon in your baggage that their robots would deliberately fail to detect. But I believe you, lord-navigator. You’re as trapped as we. With only the transmitter and a satellite relay system they control. What will you do? Persuade the lords-magistrate that you support them? Persuade them to support you on this further voyage—in return for your backing them? Perhaps they’ll listen to you and let you leave.”

  “But they will,” Desan said. He drew in a deep breath and looked from Gothon to the others and back again. “My shuttle is my own. My robotics, Dr. Gothon. From my ship and linked to it. And what I need is that transmitter. Appeal to me for protection if you think it so urgent. Trust me. Or trust nothing and we will all wait here and see what truth is.”

  Gothon reached into a pocket, held up an odd metal object. Smiled. Her eyes crinkled round the edges. “An old-fashioned thing, lord-navigator. We say key nowadays and mean something quite different, but I’m a relic myself, remember. Baffles hell out of the robots. Bothogi. Link up that antenna and unlock the closet and let’s see what the lord-navigator and his shuttle can do.”

  “DID IT HEAR you?” Bothogi asked, a boy’s honest worry on his unlined face. He still had the rock, as if he had forgotten it. Or feared robots. Or intended to use it if he detected treachery. “Is it moving?”

  “I assure you it’s moving,” Desan said, and shut the transmitter down. He drew a great breath, shut his eyes and saw the shuttle lift, a silver wedge spreading wings for home. Deadly if attacked. They will not attack it, they must not attack it, they will query us when they know the shuttle is launched and we will discover yet that this is all a ridiculous error of understanding. And looking at nowhere: “Relays have gone; nothing stops it and its defenses are considerable. The lords-navigator have not been fools, citizens: We probe worlds with our shuttles, and we plan to get them back.” He turned and faced Gothon and the other staff. “The message is out. And because I am a prudent man—are there suits enough for your staff? I advise we get to them. In the case of an accident.”

  “The alarm,” said Gothon at once. “Neoth, sound the alarm.” And as a senior staffer moved: “The dome pressure alert,” Gothon said. “That will confound the robots. All personnel to pressure suits; all robots to seek damage. I agree about the suits. Get them.”

  The alarm went, a staccato shriek from overhead. Desan glanced instinctively at an uncommunicative white ceiling—

  —darkness, darkness above, where the shuttle reached the thin blue edge of space. The station now knew that things had gone greatly amiss. It should inquire, there should be inquiry immediate to the planet—

  Staffers had unlocked a second closet. They pulled out suits, not the expected one or two for emergency exit from this pressure-sealable room; but a tightly jammed lot of them. The lab seemed a mine of defenses, a stealthily equipped stronghold that smelled of conspiracy all over the base, throughout the staff—everyone in on it—

  He blinked at the offering of a suit, ears assailed by the siren. He looked into the eyes of Bothogi who had handed it to him. There would be no call, no inquiry from the lords-magistrate. He began to know that, in the earnest, clear-eyed way these people behaved—not lunatics, not schemers. Truth. They had told their truth as they believed it, as the whole base believed it. And the lords-magistrate named it heresy.

  His heart beat steadily again. Things made sense again. His hands found familiar motions, putting on the suit, making the closures.

  “There’s that AI in the controller’s office,” said a senior staffer. “I have a key.”

  “What will they do?” a younger staffer asked, panic-edged. “Will the station’s weapons reach here?”

  “It’s quite distant for sudden actions,” said Desan. “Too far, for beams and missiles are slow.” His heartbeat steadied further. The suit was about him; familiar feeling; hostile worlds and weapons: more familiar ground. He smiled, not a pleasant kind of smile, a parting of lips on strong, long teeth. “And one more thing, young citizen, the ships they have are transports. Miners. Mine are hunters. I regret to say we’ve carried weapons for the last two hundred thousand years, and my crews know their business. If the lords-magistrate attack that shuttle it will be their mistake. Help Dr. Gothon.”

  “I’ve got it, quite, young lord.” Gothon made the collar closure. “I’ve been handling these things longer than—”

  Explosion thumped somewhere away. Gothon looked up. All motion stopped. And the air-rush died in the ducts.

  “The oxygen system—” Bothogi exclaimed. “O damn them—!”

  “We have,” said Desan coldly. He made no haste. Each final fitting of the suit he made with care. Suit-drill; example to the young: The lord-navigator, youngsters, demonstrates his skill. Pay attention. “And we’ve just had our answer from the lords-magistrate. We need to get to that AI and shut it down. Let’s have no panic here. Assume that my shuttle has cleared atmosphere—”

  —well above the gray clouds, the horror of the surface. Silver needle aimed at the heart of the lords-magistrate.

  Alert, alert, it would shriek, alert, alert, alert—With its transmission relying on no satellites, with its message shoved out in one high-powered bo
w-wave. Crew on the world is in danger. And, code that no lord-navigator had ever hoped to transmit, a series of numbers in syntaxical link: Treachery; the lords-magistrate are traitors; aid and rescue—Alert, alert, alert—

  —anguished scream from a world of dust; a place of skulls; the grave of the search.

  Treachery, alert, alert, alert!

  Desan was not a violent man; he had never thought of himself as violent. He was a searcher, a man with a quest.

  He knew nothing of certainty. He believed a woman a quarter of a million years old, because—because Gothon was Gothon. He cried traitor and let loose havoc all the while knowing that here might be the traitor, this gentle-eyed woman, this collector of skulls.

  O Gothon, he would ask if he dared, which of you is false? To force the lords-magistrate to strike with violence enough to damn them—Is that what you wish? Against a quarter million years of unabated life—what are my five incarnations: mere genetic congruency, without memory. I am helpless to know your perspectives.

  Have you planned this a thousand years, ten thousand?

  Do you stand in this place and think in the mind of creatures dead longer even than you have lived? Do you hold their skulls and think their thoughts?

  Was it purpose eight million years ago?

  Was it, is it—horror upon horror—a mistake on both sides?

  “Lord Desan,” said Bothogi, laying a hand on his shoulder. “Lord Desan, we have a master key. We have weapons. We’re waiting, Lord Desan.”

  Above them the holocaust.

  IT WAS ONLY a service robot. It had never known its termination. Not like the base AI, in the director’s office, which had fought them with locked doors and release of atmosphere, to the misfortune of the director—

  “Tragedy, tragedy,” said Bothogi, standing by the small dented corpse, there on the ocher sand before the buildings. Smoke rolled up from a sabotaged lifesupport plant to the right of the domes—the world’s air had rolled outward and inward and mingled with the breaching of the central dome—the AI transport’s initial act of sabotage, ramming the plastic walls. “Microorganisms let loose on this world—the fools, the arrogant fools!”