by Stan Ruecker
Ray worked his way down the slope.
“It’s huge,” he said. “Is it natural?”
“What do you think?” Lucy asked.
Ray walked up to a block about the size of the Empire State building, lying at 30˚ against an even larger block.
“There are marks on them,” Ray said. “Like engraving. It’s not much bigger than about a 12 point. I would say this is definitely somebody doing something here.”
“I think so too,” Lucy said.
“You mean you don’t know?”
“I came across it,” Lucy said, “as part of my search pattern of this part of space. I made a record of some of the carving, but I thought it would be interesting for you to see the whole thing first-hand.”
“It is interesting,” Ray said. He ran his hand along the carving. It was deep enough that he could make out the texture clearly through his glove.
“How much surface area?” he asked. “You must have gotten some kind of idea.”
“It’s a bit hard to tell,” Lucy said, “because they’re all jumbled up like that. I would say over a quarter of the surface of the moon is covered with it, though. And from what I could see, they’re all carved on every surface. Certainly there are thousands of square kilometres of it. Probably more like hundreds of thousands.”
Ray walked underneath the Empire State building. Sure enough, the underside, as far as he could see it by his wristlight, was also covered with the carving.
“It’s a library,” Ray said.
“What?”
“I think it’s a library.”
“Why is it all knocked over like this?” Lucy asked. “They aren’t broken or anything. I don’t get the idea they were originally standing straight up.”
“I don’t know,” Ray said. “Maybe it has something to do with solar radiation, or meteor showers. Maybe they were worried about the surfaces eroding, so they made it all randomized.”
“Maybe they were just crazy,” Lucy said.
“Do you know who they were?”
“I haven’t got a sniff,” Lucy said. “For all I know, that’s their planet down there.”
Ray looked over at the gas giant. There was a band of green spiraling lazily from the bottom to the top.
“So they breathe methane?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Lucy said. “I’ve known people who do. I never bothered to go down there.”
“Supposing it is them,” Ray said. “Why would they put it on their moon? I mean, if it is a library, why not keep it handy?”
“Maybe it’s an archive,” Lucy said. “Some kind of permanent record.”
“Maybe it’s art,” Ray suggested. “But that doesn’t answer the question of what it’s doing on the moon. It sure seems to me that somebody put it here. This isn’t a natural phenomenon.”
Ray had worked his way around the edge of one of the buildings, to a point where he could climb up on top of it from a low corner.
“How are they for balance?” he asked. “Am I going to start things crashing around over here?”
“I don’t know,” Lucy said. “My probe didn’t weigh very much.”
Ray jumped up and down.
“Seems pretty good,” he said.
He kneeled down and ran his hand along the surface.
“I wonder what it says,” he said.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Lucy said. “I don’t even know how much it varies.”
“Could we take samples?” Ray asked.
“What for?”
“Not for anything,” Ray said. “Just because I’m curious. For one thing, do the marks repeat themselves, or are they all different? If it is some kind of recorded language, is it an alphabet or hieroglyphics or something else entirely?”
“Maybe it’s just decorative,” Lucy said. “Like you said.”
“But what if it isn’t?” Ray asked. “If it is art, it’s not very attractive. But what if it’s the library from an entire planet of methane breathers? They must have some kind of fancy technology to put this together. Who knows what might be written here? They might have the key to whole new kinds of physics, or chemistry, or anything.”
“It wouldn’t be any surprise to me if it was accounting records,” Lucy said. “You wouldn’t believe how much accounting goes on in the universe.”
Ray sat.
“I suppose you’re right,” he said. “That’s what was in our station records, wasn’t it?”
“You bet it was. God, it was pathetic.”
“So maybe this is an entire third of a moon full of somebody’s old daily ledgers.”
“Sure could be.”
Ray looked across the vast, jumbled plain.
“Kind of takes the excitement out of it,” he said. “I mean, the prospect of translation.”
“Translation is never easy,” Lucy said. “Nobody makes much sense to anybody else.”
“Still,” Ray said, “You’d like to think, something on this scale, it would make more sense than just accounting records.”
“You can tell a lot from accounting records,” Lucy said. “If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t mind sifting through them.”
“But still,” Ray said. “You can’t learn any new physics from them.”
“Probably not,” Lucy admitted.
An inauspicious beginning
Rachel’s flight was delayed out of Minneapolis, where she sat in a room as big as the landing field and tried to read under lights that would’ve made more sense for a building full of moles.
“Barb,” a woman shouted, “you get out of there.”
Rachel looked up to find a group of people moving in on her. There were half a dozen men with slick black hair, and something like four or five very big women. The children were a swarm. Rachel looked around in despair but couldn’t seen anywhere else to sit. The set of chairs across from her had just been vacated by a suite of identical Japanese businessmen.
Sure enough, the family circus located itself in the newly opened area. Two of the children detached themselves from the main body and circled around behind Rachel.
“Randy, what are you up to?” the same woman shouted. Obviously the ringmaster, Rachel thought.
“Nothing,” one of the kids behind Rachel called. But she smelled smoke, and turned carefully half around to see the two of them hunkered down with a soldering gun.
What do I say about that? Rachel thought. I don’t think it’s right for people to be doing freelance electronic repair at the airport. She looked for moral support at one of the older men, then realized that had been a mistake. He leered back at her, and she transferred her now despairing glance to the ringmaster.
“They aren’t going to hurt nothing,” the woman said confidingly. “They’re just fixing their radio. It got busted.”
A clash of music came bursting out from behind Rachel’s chair and she closed her eyes against it.
“Norman,” the woman called. “You turn that down now. You’re giving the lady here a headache.”
Rachel toyed with the idea of thanking the woman, but decided the less contact she could generate, the better.
“She could have my chair,” one of the men volunteered. “If those kids are bothering her.”
Rachel opened her eyes. “That’s fine,” she said. “I’m all right here.”
She was rewarded with another array of leers.
“Them kids,” the ringmaster said confidentially, “they’re smart as snakes, the whole bunch of them. There isn’t anything they don’t get into and figure out what it is makes it tick. We went through I don’t know how many televisions before Randy there finally got it all figured out. But you did, didn’t you Randy?”
A dirty little girl with a missing tooth suddenly manifested herself beside Rachel’s chair. Rachel stared blankly back at her until she disappeared again.
“You got any kids?” the woman asked.
“No,” Rachel said. “Not yet.” She hid as completely as
possible behind the magazine she couldn’t see to read.
The jet she eventually boarded should have been decommissioned a decade ago. The captain didn’t bother to get on the radio to talk to the passengers, but simply pivoted in his chair and pulled aside the curtain that gave privacy to the cockpit. He made the usual welcomes in an accent she had trouble following, then the steward came on board and showed them the whistle they should blow to attract rescuers if the plane happened to crash in the jungle.
The passengers consisted of herself and a couple of tourists, as well as a very large businessman sweating into his suit. The plane rumbled to its place on the runway, and Rachel went back to sleep until they landed.
There were too many armed guards, she thought as she disembarked. Everyone seemed excited. One of the guards gestured to her, and she went over to find herself addressing her contact.
“You will carry on to Cairo,” Irene told her. “Where you will arrange for dinner tomorrow with the ambassador from Italy and her husband. Your contact is their son, Giovanni.”
“What else?” Rachel asked.
“Your mission is to put together a profile of a developing situation in India. Once you have a handle on it, they want you to help put some pressure on the right quarter, which is specifically the office of the Prime Minister. They’re stalling on putting forward a new bill. Your contact will have all the details.”
Rachel nodded, and left her guard behind at the security entrance. When she went to collect her luggage, it turned out to have been inadvertently routed to Canada.
Ray makes a proposition
“Lucy?” Ray was back inside the ship, struggling to get his boots off.
“Yes, Ray.”
“We could go anyway, couldn’t we?”
“Go where?”
“Down onto that planet. Just because the blocks’re probably accounting records doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take a look at the people who made them, does it?”
Lucy hesitated.
“I guess it doesn’t,” she admitted.
“Maybe we could find out for sure,” Ray said, “ if we actually went down to the planet. We might meet an entirely new species or something.”
“Is that important?” Lucy asked.
Ray stripped off his spacesuit and hung it up in the locker.
“I think it is,” he said. “You’ve got to admit, there might even be a chance we could figure out what the tablets are all about.”
“I guess there’s a remote possibility,” Lucy said hesitatingly.
Ray thought about the reticence in her voice.
“But you don’t really want to go down there, do you?” he asked.
“Not really,” Lucy said.
“Why is that? Is it some reason you can tell me?”
Lucy sighed.
“I was chased by a methane breather as a child,” she said.
Ray laughed.
“Methane breathers,” he said, “they’re all just bullies.”
“You wouldn’t know a methane breather,” Lucy said, “if one showed up in your soup.”
“It seems a shame, then,” Ray answered, “that I have this unjustified prejudice.”
“And you think if you actually met some of them, you’d have a chance of liking them,” Lucy said.
“Stranger things have happened,” Ray pointed out. “Or do you know these ones in particular?”
“I’ve never met them,” Lucy said. “I don’t know anything about them except this business with the carving.”
“But you still don’t want to try to contact them.”
“No,” Lucy said. “I can’t say I do.”
“So what is it really?”
Lucy took a minute to answer.
“It goes against my directives, Ray,” she said slowly.
“I don’t understand. Do you mean you aren’t supposed to investigate people who breathe methane? Is it some problem with how you’re built, that you can’t stand the atmosphere or the pressure or something? I mean, I could certainly understand that: the kind of equipment a person would need, or, I suppose, would have to be, it would need to be fairly robust to tackle that kind of gravity and atmosphere and so on.”
“Nothing like that,” Lucy said. “But that was a good guess. It takes quite a bit to be able to stand the conditions in that atmosphere. ”
“Still,” Ray said. “I might’ve known you could take it. You already told me you’d met people who breathe methane.”
“Still, I might have meant I met them somewhere other than their native planet.”
“Did you mean that?”
“No. I’ve been down on plenty of methane worlds.”
Ray had a sudden idea.
“Were your builders methane breathers?” he asked.
“No. They use oxygen, like you do.”
“Then what do your directives say?”
“They tell me I’m supposed to locate as many planets as possible within my search area. Then it’s my job to figure out which solar systems have the most intelligent life in them. After that I have to pick one and study it. Then I report back.”
“And you’ve already rejected this solar system as a possible choice.”
“I chose your solar system, Ray.”
Ray paused.
“That’s kind of a compliment, isn’t it, Lucy?”
“I suppose it is.”
“But even so, there’s nothing, other than your directive, that says you couldn’t go and look at the planet’s surface down there.”
“Just the directive.”
“Can you override them?”
“Not comfortably. Imagine you have a phobia, and you’re trying to work against it. You still have the phobia working on you even though you’ve consciously decided to fight it. That’s what a directive is like.”
“Okay,” Ray said. “How about this: you’re supposed to study my solar system, which in this case, at this time, means me and Cinnamon, right? Cinnamon and I are the only parts of my solar system you’ve really got handy.”
“That’s true,” Lucy said.
“And what I’m curious about is what the people on that planet over there are like. So in satisfying my curiousity, you’re actually giving yourself a chance to study my civilization, aren’t you?”
“I suppose that’s true,” Lucy said.
“You bet it is,” Ray answered.
Cairo
Rachel met the Italian ambassador when the official limo came to pick her up at her hotel.
“Sorry I’m late,” she told Rachel. “We had a bit of an emergency down at the embassy.”
“Anything I can help with?” Rachel asked.
The ambassador laughed.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Unless you can speak Cantonese.”
“No problem,” Rachel said. “Which province?”
“You got me. But stop by the shop tomorrow morning and we’ll see if we can’t get it straightened out. Something to do with somebody claiming dual citizenship. But we couldn’t find anybody who could sort through the paperwork for us. You know—date of birth, mother’s maiden name, all that kind of thing. So you’re an old friend of my son?”
“Not exactly an old friend,” Rachel followed orders. “We knew each other at college, and we’ve kept in touch by e-mail. So I when I was going to be passing through town, I figured I’d give him a call.”
“He’s excited about your coming,” the ambassador said. “I don’t think I’ve seen him so happy for months.”
The ambassador had a suite right at the embassy, as well as an acreage outside town.
“We’ll have dinner at the shop,” she told Rachel. “But if you haven’t made any other arrangements, why don’t you come and spend the night with us out in the country?”
“I’d love to,” Rachel said, as they pulled through the embassy gates.
Rachel noticed the armed guards and the electronics everywhere. Giovanni and his father came out into the foyer to greet
them.
“Rachel!” Giovanni said. “You look great!”
He came over and gave her a big hug. She kept her unbreakable ceramic stiletto in her sleeve.
“We can talk after dinner,” he whispered in her ear. “I’ll offer to show you around.”
She held him back at arms length, getting a good look at the old friend she’d never seen before in her life.
“You’ve lost some weight,” she said.
“Not me,” he answered. “I eat like a pig.”
“Which reminds me,” his father said. “Dinner is ready. Or would you like a drink first?”
“No, thanks,” Rachel said. “I don’t drink.”
“Is that right?” the ambassador said. “That must be a problem for you.”
“Sometimes it is,” Rachel admitted. “But I took an oath, so of course I can’t break it.”
“Oh,” the ambassador’s husband said. “An oath.”
“So you’re religious then?” the ambassador asked.
“No: it was a secular oath. It has to do with my work.”
“So what are you doing these days?” Giovanni asked. “I don’t think you’ve ever told me.”
“I’m a bank auditor,” Rachel told him. “I check international transactions.”
“Wow,” Giovanni said. “Sounds exciting.”
“It’s okay,” Rachel admitted. “I’ve always enjoyed accounting.”
Kevin does his spring cleaning
The first item on the agenda, Kevin told himself, was to get the whatever-it-was out of the computers. There’d be time enough to study it later, once the system was clean.
He knew the kinds of transactions the alien software made, so he could monitor for those at a pretty high level. The question was, how could he go about trapping the thing?
“Funk,” he said. “What do we do with a virus that gets in?”
“We’ve never had a virus get in,” Steve said. “Except that one somebody brought up with them that time, but that was different.”
“But there must be a way to handle it.”
“Yeah. You cut the machine off the net, and clean out whatever’s infected on it, then put the connection back.”
“What if it’s already on the net?”
“Then you, my friend, are screwed, blewed, and tattooed.”
“It can’t be that bad,” Kevin said. “Code doesn’t replicate itself instantaneously.”
