by Dave Smeds
With such a lens, we could resolve planets on stars in the Andromeda galaxy. We could see continents and other major features on almost any planet within our spiral arm of the Milky Way, unless stars or dust or other matter stood directly in the way. And we could make out buildings and streets of cities on planets around stars many dozens of lightyears from us. We wouldn’t actually be able to see living creatures, because the images would have to be built up over multiple sessions — snapshots taken at the same time of day (time of day on the alien planet, not ours) over and over until details fully resolve — and anything moving around would not succeed in making an impression.
Hearing Drexler describe this was fascinating. It was also unnerving once I considered some of the possibilities. Right now, if there is a civilization on a planet circling Gamma Leporis A, the locale of “A Raven on My Shoulder,” if they have an interferometric lens of that magnitude, they could be viewing a picture of my home of twenty-seven years ago, a rental tract house on the other side of Santa Rosa from the neighborhood in which I now dwell. Alien eyes could be gazing right now upon the light reflected off the swing set my toddler daughter would go out to on many an afternoon so that I could push her. They wouldn’t see me. They wouldn’t see her. But they would see the swing set, the lawn, the apple tree. I thought of that backyard as our private domain.
Glass houses, my ass. We’re living in a glass universe.
A RAVEN ON MY SHOULDER
“We lasted three months until our first murder. That’s not a bad record when you think about it.”
Neil Moran glanced at the speaker, Dimitri Vlahakos, Inspector General for the Gamma Leporis A-III colony. Neil had been acquainted with Dimitri for more than a century. The man’s intense, olive-skinned face dwelled in more than one memory of university days, back when Athens seemed to Neil incredibly far from home. The sangfroid rang false. Dimitri was a man of exuberant Mediterranean gestures and passionate declarations. He was not the sort to shrug and look for the silver lining.
Who was he trying to convince?
Sometimes Neil wanted to reach inside his own skull, peel away brain tissue until he found the implants the Thwaa had left there, and yank them out.
An impossible fantasy. The implants had no nexus. Traces of them inhabited every dendrite and axon in his nervous system, as much a part of his body as, say, potassium ions or oxygen or collagen. All he could do was wish.
Neil gazed out the transport window at the planet. The Neil Moran he had been on Earth was gone. He had no choice but to be the Neil Moran of Gamma Leporis A-III — or Bjornssen, as he supposed he should begin referring to it. If he tried to deny it, reactions like that of Dimitri would remind him of all that had changed.
Observing that his Pollyannaish assessment had fizzled, Dimitri swept his hand across the view of sere peaks, eroded gullies, and slopes dotted with chaparral and scree. “Picturesque, don’t you agree? Like your Southwest, where you were born, yes?”
Neil accepted the change of subject. “I don’t remember much of that first-hand. The Plague hit when I was only eight. But you’re right; it’s beautiful. Doesn’t quite fit the name. Bjornssen.” From twenty-seven lightyears away, the Hershel Telescopic Array had shown a world marked by wind-whipped peninsulas and glacier-flattened islands, much like the homeland of the Danish astronomer who processed the initial interferometric scans. Here in the middle latitudes of the main continent, that geography was not in evidence. The vista offered a solidity and permanence that peat bogs could not aspire to. Neil decided he really needed to get out and about more. He had lingered too long aboard the ark.
The transport crossed above a ridge of crumbled, weathered rock, revealing an oblong valley some fifty kilometers in length. Their course straightened into a gently descending glide toward a mass of ruins.
Dimitri pointed at the vestiges of walls and bridges. “This was quite a city when the Eridanin were here. The region used to get more rain. Signs indicate it may have been a government center of some sort.”
“Hence the archaeological interest,” Neil said.
“Well, yes, but there’s another reason why we started digging here so quickly. Examine, please, the horizon.”
Neil scanned to the left and to the right, finding sudden meaning in the configuration of the ridge. “We’re in a caldera.”
“Earth has at least two bigger than this that I recall,” Dimitri continued. “Long Valley in California and Lake Toba on Sumatra. But this is — how do you say it? A whopper?”
“I take it it’s not entirely dormant?”
“Not any more. Fresh magma is accumulating. The last eruption was pre-Eridanin — at least thirty thousand years ago — but there is a possibility the whole plug will explode within the decade.”
“Won’t volcanic activity that potent affect the weather?”
“Nothing we can’t deal with. Some cool summers. Some hazy sunsets. We’ll be fine as long as we don’t found any permanent settlements nearby. The dig can be evacuated with a few hours’ notice.”
The transport touched down and the pilot released the locks on the passenger compartment. Neil and Dimitri stepped onto a landing field of packed earth. No tarmac or concrete. Neil deliberately noted this. The charter called for Terran presence on this world to remain as tentative as possible until the Thwaa granted permission to colonize fully. What he observed here today, the Thwaa would witness as well. It didn’t hurt to be sure humanity received credit for the small ways in which it abided by its promises.
He might have no choice about being a Thwaa tool, but at least he was free to maintain his loyalty to his own culture.
A lean, bony individual in khaki work clothes approached, offering his hand. “Ivan Vereshchagin. I am the director of the team here,” he said in English so precise as to be overly formal.
“This is Neil Moran, the, ah, the Thwaa consul.” Dimitri winced at the hesitation he inserted into the introduction.
Vereshchagin’s youth was as perfectly sustained as that of anyone under the age of two hundred fifty, but he exuded a dour studiousness that implied he was older than either of his visitors. His unkempt aspect reminded Neil of a university professor caught in the waning of middle age. His handshake remained firm, but he failed to hide the eyelid flicker of unease that others suppressed when first meeting Neil. He stared as if expecting Neil to sprout Thwaalike cilia.
“Pleased to meet you,” Neil said.
Vereshchagin nodded. Neil waited for him to say something more — “Welcome,” perhaps — but the archaeologist managed only to look constipated.
“I hope you managed to get some sleep,” Dimitri added as the lull grew awkward.
“A little,” Vereshchagin replied.
“I didn’t leave here last night until the wee hours,” Dimitri explained to Neil. “If I’d known I had to return today to bring you, I would have saved some of the on-site investigation for this morning.”
Always the caution, carefully veiled in ingratiating language. Dimitri wanted the Thwaa to know that he hadn’t deliberately kept them out of the loop. Neil believed him. Dimitri could not have known the Thwaa wanted to send their native observer until Neil had received the directive and so informed the governor. That summons had not come until the news of the murder, leaked by one of the diggers, raced across the net just before midnight.
“I won’t require more than a few hours,” Neil assured Vereshchagin. “I just need to check on a handful of the basic aspects of the case first-hand.”
“Very well,” the director replied. “With what would you like to start?”
“I’ll want to see the body.”
Vereshchagin cleared his throat. “This way.” Rubbing his neck and turning slowly, he guided them with a weary tread. They entered the ruins, traversing a somber camp to a tent set apart from the others. Two men stood guard, encased in the gray uniforms of the colonial police. At Dimitri’s nod, they moved aside.
Vereshchagin held up the tent flap,
eyes averted. Dimitri stayed back, ostensibly to ask his men if anyone else had come by during their vigil. Neil was left to enter alone.
The remains of a copper-skinned Asian male lay supine inside a stasis coffin, hands atop his abdomen as if arrayed by an undertaker, though he looked anything but peaceful. Until the body could be brought to the forensics lab at the capital, no cosmetic adjustments had been made. No one had replaced the dead man’s torn, dirtied, blood-splattered work fatigues. No one had wiped the brains off his face. Gore encrusted the shovel they had placed beside him.
Neil calculated the degree of force required to lodge the blade of the tool so deeply into the skull with one blow. The image of violence it engendered made him grimace. He backed out of the tent and turned away, and was grateful to hear the canvas drop out of Vereshchagin’s fingers.
“You can put it in the transport now if you wish,” Neil said. “I’ll talk to the coroner after he’s done his job, back in Landfall.”
Vereshchagin and Dimitri glanced at each other, as if considering whose duty it was to handle this unpleasant detail. A moment later Dimitri signalled to the guards.
“Where can I interview the witnesses?” Neil asked.
“I’ll show you,” Vereshchagin replied.
As Neil put distance between himself and the gruesome evidence, he cultivated his queasiness into a seed of anger. The death had been a waste. The dig worker had been about thirty years old, not counting hibernation. He’d had ninety percent of his life expectancy left.
If the Thwaa took an interest in his emotional reaction, as usual they gave no indication. All he could really sense was that the transmitter was active, giving his overlords whatever information it was they absorbed from him. Nevertheless it was important to Neil to insert as much genuine, human feeling as he could muster. Not for the first time, he wished the Thwaa had chosen someone less reserved than he as their liaison.
Their destination proved to be outside the encampment. They struck out toward the mud flat upon which their aircraft perched. A lake had once filled the center of the valley, its shoreline demarcating the western and southern boundaries of the Eridanin city. Neil could make out a saline remnant of that body of water some two kilometers away. In the immediate foreground was a large pre-fab shed, evidently the only true building erected since the archaeologists had arrived.
“We didn’t want to put structures over possible excavation areas,” Vereshchagin volunteered. “The lakebed was the obvious choice — the Eridanin never used boats and never built under water.”
The shed turned out to be the storage facility for the artifacts the team had decided were worthy of longterm study off-site. Vereshchagin led them past tables and shelving units arrayed with relics, some already painstakingly cleaned and tagged, others crated and sealed for shipment, but most lying in a raw state. Half the surfaces in the room remained empty, attesting to the recent establishment of the dig.
They ended their journey in a small corner room. A table equipped with an interface waited there, surrounded by four chairs. “My office,” explained the director. “Forgive the spartan conditions. I seldom use it. After fifteen decades in a hibernation tank I prefer to spend as much time as possible outdoors.”
“I understand,” Neil replied. Which wasn’t to say he shared the urge, though he had spent the same interval in coldsleep while the ark inched its way across interstellar space. He meant he perceived why an archaeologist could not resist being part of the race to discover, somewhere within the ruined city or elsewhere on the planet, just how and why the Eridanin had lost their claim to this world.
“Who would you like to question first?”
“The murderer.” Neil fed a data lozenge into the interface and called up a screen full of names, faces, and pertinent information about the case. “Barry Radner, is it?”
“Yes. Radner.” Vereshchagin’s posture slumped. Perhaps he had hoped Neil might start with other, less volatile figures. Indeed, had Neil been a normal investigator, he would have questioned the killer last, after gathering the data that would allow him to poke holes in whatever excuses the man tried to concoct to excuse his crime. But Dimitri had already seen to that phase the day before, working his way through all five eyewitnesses, several peripheral figures, and then to Radner himself. The Thwaa had not sent Neil to comb every flea of evidence; all they wanted was to confirm the gist of the events for themselves, through him.
“Is there a problem?” Neil asked.
“No. I can have him here in two minutes. He’s right down there.” Vereshchagin pointed out the small window, which looked out over the lakebed.
“I desired to have him kept where no one had any cause to wander near,” Dimitri added. He stepped to the window, signalled, and moved aside so Neil could see.
Looking down, Neil spotted what appeared to be a septic tank in the early stages of construction. The pair of men guarding the pit — more of Dimitri’s colonial police — lowered a ladder. Up came a muscular, red-haired man broadcasting defiance. His escorts marched him up the low bluff atop which the shed perched. Not long after the party slipped out of Neil’s field of view a knock shook the office door.
As soon as the group had entered, the guards handcuffed Radner to his chair and took up stations by the door. The accused man spared the inspector general and the chief archaeologist the briefest of glances. He regarded Neil unflinchingly.
“What? More questions?”
“A few,” Neil replied.
“Shouldn’t my lawyer be here by now?”
“Ordinarily. If it helps, I can confirm that you’ll have legal counsel well before the arraignment, and I won’t ask any questions you haven’t already been asked by Inspector Vlahakos yesterday.”
“Then why bother?”
“I am the Thwaa consul,” Neil explained. “Our patrons have asked me to look into your case personally.”
A puff of astonishment jostled Radner’s head backward. Neil half-expected a retort, but none came. Even a man such as this could be disquieted to find himself the specific target of Thwaa scrutiny. Radner turned to Dimitri, who nodded.
“I hope you understand that lack of cooperation today is simply not an option,” Dimitri told the prisoner.
Radner shrugged.
“All right, then,” Neil said. “Let’s run through the events of early yesterday morning. You and several members of your team were excavating a building. You got into an argument with a co-worker by the name of Farid Bilyang. It escalated. You struck him in the head with a shovel. Is that correct?”
He grunted. Neil took it as a yes.
“Why did you argue?”
Radner continued to stare, but now his eyes glinted. “He fucked my wife.”
Neil checked the interface. “That would be Christine Radner, age 29, whom you married eighteen months prior to ark launch.”
“They met when the archaeological contingent was finalized,” Vereshchagin interjected.
Neil waved the director silent. “Mr. Radner?”
“Yes. That’s my wife.” He spoke without affection.
“Did you actually witness Mr. Bilyang and your spouse having intercourse?”
“She wouldn’t admit it, but I saw him with his arm around her. Eric Denard joked with me about all the murmurs coming from my tent. He said it assuming it was me in there with Christine, but I was unloading supplies off a transport that afternoon. Pretty soon everyone was talking about that.” Radner’s anger continued to radiate, but beneath it came an undertone of betrayal and humiliation.
Neil glanced at Vereshchagin, whose downcast eyes lent credence to the description of the social dynamics.
Turning back to Radner, Neil asked, “Would you say then that you not only had cause to believe they were having relations, but you felt that the affair was being conducted indiscreetly?”
“Yes.”
“And during the argument, those circumstances became too much to endure?”
Radner’s lips
quivered violently. “A man like him had no right. It wasn’t . . .” He swallowed. “I couldn’t let it go on.”
Neil gauged Radner’s reaction, and realized the interview need not be prolonged. He had only the final question: “Are you sorry you did it?”
“I’m sorry it had to be done.”
Neil nodded. “I see. Thank you. That will be all.” Dimitri gestured to the guards, who uncuffed Radner. The prisoner strode away chin up, eyes gazing straight ahead, apparently unfazed by the tall musclemen at his elbows.
“I am sure in another day or two, he will realize what a ghastly mistake he made, and wish he could undo it,” Vereshchagin said into the silence.
“He may have regrets, but I fear they will not be the right ones,” Dimitri said, beating Neil to the response. He brushed off his suit lapels, as if finding contamination there.
“Tell me something,” Neil asked Vereshchagin. “Had you heard the rumors about the affair?”
The director paled. “I had suspicions.”
Neil gestured at the background data still on the interface screen. “You let an Australian be taunted with knowledge that an Indonesian was humping his wife?” Radner was too young to have been caught in the Perth massacre, but he would have grown up among the resentful survivors.
“Everyone on our team had been getting along profoundly well since we arrived on-planet. I was lulled into a sense of security. I believed the matter would sort itself out.” His expression could only be labelled wretched. “What would you have done?”
Neil leaned back, losing the sharp tone. “Never mind. I wasn’t asking for official reasons,” he lied. “I’m sure you’ll come out of this better prepared should anything like this develop in future.”
Vereshchagin did not seem consoled. Small wonder. Even if he believed that Neil — and thus the Thwaa — had taken no note of him, Dimitri’s report to the governor would call into question the Russian’s appointment to lead the archaeological project. Neil vaguely recalled the man’s credentials from the background check he had conducted for ark candidacy, in the sweet days before Neil had been elevated from the governor’s security assessor to an unlooked-for role as Thwaa consul. Vereshchagin was quite distinguished in his specialty, but his dearth of administrative skills had now shown itself to be a handicap. He might never be granted responsibilities of such magnitude again.
