Jack Mcdevitt - Engines of god

by David Geary

  But it too was damaged. Charred. Cratered.

  "I've seen the other one," said Angela. "Why would they make something like this?"

  "That's what we hope to find out," said Carson.

  That evening, Monday, April 18, 2203, at slightly before 1100 hours, they rolled out of lunar orbit.

  Two nights later, Carson ceremonially stored his wheel-chair. And Janet added another piece of speculation. She first mentioned it to Hutch. "I was thinking," she said, "about the phrase in that Quraquat prayer—"

  " 'The engines of God'? "

  "Yes. The engines of God—"

  "What of it?"

  "We might not be far off. // there's an A wave, the one that touched Beta Pac in 21,000 b.c.: if it kept going, it would have reached Earth."

  Hutch nodded. "Before the rise of civilization, right? Before anybody was there to record it."

  "Not exactly. It would have passed through the solar sys­tem somewhere around 5000 B.C."

  Hutch waited. The date meant nothing to her.

  Janet shrugged. "It fits the most recent estimates for Sodom and Gomorrah."

  ARCHIVE

  (Transmitted via Laserbuoy)

  TO: NCA GARY KNAPP ATT: DAVID EMORY

  FROM: FRANK CARSON, BETA PAC MISSION

  NCA ASHLEY TEE

  SUBJECT: OPERATIONAL MOVEMENT DAVID. SORRY TO LEAVE BEFORE YOU GET HERE, BUT BUSINESS PRESSES. WE MAY BE ABLE TO FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENED AT ORIKON. NEXT STOP IS LCO4418. JOIN US THERE IF YOU CAN. CARSON.

  27.

  On board NCA Ashley Tee, en route to LCO4418. Wednes­day, April 27; 1930 hours.

  "I can't believe," said Drafts, frowning at his pair of deuces, "we're really doing this."

  "Doing what?" asked Angela, looking up from a book.

  "Chasing a dragon," said Hutch. She wasn't holding any­thing either.

  "It's worth the trip," said Angela. "I don't believe a word of it. But I've been wrong before." She literally radiated vitality. Hutch had no trouble imagining her flying into a volcano.

  "By me," said Drafts. He had been winning, and was in an ebullient mood. "The problem I have," he said, "is that I can't imagine what this thing might look like. I mean, are we expecting hordes of destructive nanomachines belched into the galaxy from somewhere in the Void every eight thousand years?" He placed his cards face down on the table. "Or fleets filled with psychopaths?"

  "Maybe," said Janet, "it's not from the Void, but some­thing out of the center of the galaxy." She was trying not to look pleased with her cards. "I'll open," she said. She pushed a coin into the pot. "It would come from the same direction."

  Drafts glanced at Carson. "Forty-four eighteen's already been looked at. If there had been anything going on out there, we'd know about it."

  "Maybe not," said Angela. "If this thing exists, it might not be easy to find unless you know what you're looking for."

  "Well," said Drafts, still talking to Carson, "I don't want to offend anybody, but I doubt this dragon is likely to stand up to the light of day."

  "Ah, Terry, will you never learn?" Angela delivered a sigh they could have heard in the shuttle bay. "You're right. But it's the wrongheaded types who make the big finds."

  Carson smiled at her appreciatively.

  Drafts shrugged. "Okay," he said.

  Hutch folded, and watched Janet scare everyone out of the pot. Carson picked up the cards and began to shuffle. "The Monument-Maker as Death," he said. "Could they have built something that got away from them?"

  Hutch tried to wave it away. "Why don't we wait until we get there? Meantime, we can't do anything except guess."

  Angela was sitting with her feet doubled under her. She was reading Matama, the hundred-year-old Japanese tragedy. "If there is a wave," she said without looking up, "it would have to be pretty deep, on an order of a couple of light-years, for us to have a reasonable chance to locate it. What kind of mechanism could be that big?"

  "If it exists," said Janet, "it stretches from Quraqua to Nok. That's a hundred light-years. At a minimum." She looked toward Carson. "That would have to be an effect beyond anybody's capability to manufacture."

  "I just can't see that the evidence amounts to anything," said Drafts. "Look, these people, whoever they were, had a passion for leaving their signature everywhere they've been. They liked monuments. The Oz-structures and the cube moons were early efforts. They were getting their sea legs. No hidden meanings; just practice."

  "Come on, Terry," said Carson.

  "Why not? Why does there have to be some deep-seated significance? Maybe they're just what most other monuments are: somebody's idea of high art. And the eight-thousand-year cycle is hardly established as fact. Half of it's pure guess-work, and I bet the rest of it is going to turn out to be wishful thinking."

  Carson and Janet looked at Hutch. Hell, she thought, I made no guarantees. But she felt forced to defend her specu­lations. "The dating wasn't mine," she said. "It was done by Henry Jacobi and David Emory and the data technicians on the Perth. I just put it together. If the numbers are a coinci­dence, they're a coincidence. But it's not wishful thinking. I have no interest in meeting a dragon out here."

  The tension broke, and they all laughed.

  If a cosmic hand were to move the red giant LCO4418 to the center of the solar system, Mercury and Venus would sink beneath its tides, and Earth would swim through its upper atmosphere. The surface simmered serenely at less than 2200 degrees Kelvin. It was an ancient star, far older than Sol. Its blood-colored light spilled across its family of worlds.

  Terrestrial planets orbited at either end of the system, sepa­rated by four gas giants. The survey team which had vis­ited the system ten years earlier had concluded that there had probably once been other planets, closer to the central luminary, but they had been absorbed as the sun expanded. LCO4418 was now thought to be close to the end of this phase of its cycle. Over the next several million years, it would recede.

  Carson watched recordings of its image on the screens. Prominences did not erupt from its interior, nor did sunspots mar its placid surface. It had entered the final stage of its existence, and death would come quickly now. By cosmic standards.

  For all that, it would still be here, and still look much the same, when the human race had long since met whatever fate awaited it. Or had evolved into something else.

  The flight was somber. The festive mood and the enthu­siasm of the days on the Winckelmann had gone. The crew and the passengers spent most of their time together. No one drifted off alone. But there were long silences and uncom­fortable glances and things left unspoken. It was perhaps not entirely coincidental that on the evening before their arrival at LCO4418, the conversation had centered on how funerals might be improved to aid future archeologists.

  Late in the afternoon of May 7, they jumped back into real space, well south of the planetary plain.

  On those occasions when Carson was honest with himself, he knew that he did not expect to find anything. He did not really believe in the wave. It was an intriguing concept, but this was not a phenomenon that he could credit. So he stood on Ashley's bridge, and surveyed the vast wastes, and wondered, not for the first time, why he was here.

  The three surviving members of the original team found they could no longer hide their feelings from each other, and Carson was not surprised when Hutch, who had come up behind him, moved right into his mood. "Sometimes," she said, "you just have to take your chance, and let go."

  They started by performing a system-wide survey for arti­ficial objects. It showed negative, which did not mean there might not be something present, but only that any such object would be at considerable range, or quite small, or hidden behind a natural body.

  In spite of themselves—they agreed, when pressed, that they were chasing ghosts—they were disappointed.

  Angela pored over the records of the original mission to 4418. "A fairly typical system," she told Hutch. "What do we do now?"

  The red gi
ant dominated the viewscreens. "Verticals and perpendiculars," she said. "We are going to make some right angles."

  Carson had been looking for a good construction site. He explained his strategy in detail, and Angela produced topo­graphical maps from the survey. They decided to use an oversized moon orbiting the second planet: 4418-IID. Delta.

  Drafts put it on the display. In the dim glow of the sun, it was an exotic worldlet, silver and gold by candlelight. Clouds drifted above orange snowfields and nitrogen seas, methane swamps and crooked mountain chains. It lay in the shadow of the big planet's wispy rings.

  The atmosphere read out as hydrogen, methane, nitrogen, with substantial amounts of ethane, hydrogen cyanide, ethyl-ene. Distance from the central world was 650,000 kilometers. Period of revolution: 13 days. Diameter: 5300 kilometers. Surface temperature: -165°C, at the equator. Surface gravity: .37. Orbital period: 11.14 days. Age: estimated 4.7 billion years, with an error factor of ten percent. The system was twelve A.U.s from the sun.

  They watched an ice volcano erupt in the southern hemi­sphere. Snow was falling over one of the oceans, and a nearby coastline was whipped by heavy rain. "The rainstorm might be two-hundred proof," said Angela. "There's a lot of ethanol down there, and the temperature's about right." She grinned. "I wouldn't be surprised to find gasoline lakes."

  Carson found what he was looking for in the south, about 20 degrees below the equator: a vast plain cluttered with

  plateaus. "Here." He tapped the screen. "Here's where we want to set up."

  With Hutch's help, Drafts disconnected three of the ship's external cameras. The Ashley Tee was consequently left with blind spots, but they could get by. They jury-rigged a mount for the laser, and tripods for the cameras.

  "Tell me about the communications," Carson asked as they rounded the gas giant early in the afternoon of their third day. They would go into orbit around Delta at breakfast time.

  Hutch set up one of the cameras for his inspection, opened the tripod (which they would anchor into the ice), and attached a sensor cluster. "We put the cameras on the ground, around the target. We'll launch two comsats. If the cameras see something, they'll transmit pictures to the comsats, which will send a hyperlight alarm to Point Zebra. The satellites are enclosed in convex casings. No right angles."

  "What triggers the cameras?"

  "A sudden and substantial increase in electrical activity, or in temperature beyond that normally encountered. Each cam­era has its own sensor system, and will operate independently. If something does happen, we should be able to get pictures."

  "How about ordinary electrical storms? Won't they set it off?"

  "Angela says lightning will be infrequent here, and quoted pretty good odds against normal phenomena triggering the sensors. If they do," she shrugged, "too bad. Somebody will come out for no reason."

  "Somebody will come outT' This wasn't exactly the kind of alarm system Carson had in mind. "Won't they be able to tell when they get the pictures at the Point?"

  "They won't get any pictures. The pictures are stored in the satellites. All that'll happen is an alarm will go off."

  "Why not send the pictures?"

  "Can't. Hyperspace communication requires a lot of power. We just can't generate enough for complex transmissions unless we plan to hang around ourselves and use Ashley's power plant. So we do the next best thing: we send a beep."

  Fine, Carson thought. Every time there was an electrical storm, they would have to dispatch a ship. "I can't say I care much for this arrangement," he grumbled. "How safe will the cameras be if an event occurs?"

  "Hard to say, since we really don't know what the event is. They have to be close to the target area, within a few hundred meters, for the short-range sensors to work. If we back it up farther, and go long-range, they'll pick up too much stray activity, and then we will get a series of false alarms."

  "Okay."

  "One other thing. If the kind of action we're looking for develops, there'll be a lot of electricity in the atmosphere, and the transmissions will get scrambled. In that case, the satellites will not get the pictures."

  "So package in a delayed broadcast, too."

  "I've done that. We will also record everything at ground level. Redundant copies everywhere. So if anything survives, we'll have a record." She was proud of her work, and had expected Carson to notice. But he still seemed preoccupied. "I've tried to shield the equipment as best I can," she con­tinued.

  "Okay," he said. "Good."

  "You'll want to send someone out in a couple of years to replace this stuff. It's not designed for this kind of mission, so it won't last much beyond that."

  "I know," he said. They both understood that such a backup flight would be unlikely.

  They pinpointed a target area on a broad, snow-covered plain between a mountain range and a swamp filled with nitrogen and hydrocarbon sludge. The plateaus that had drawn Carson's attention were scattered across an otherwise flat landscape. It looked like a piece of the American West, cov­ered with ice, and bathed in the pale red light of the dis­tant sun.

  They settled on a group of four mesas which lay within an area approximately sixty kilometers on a side. Each was already roughly rectangular. (The group had been chosen primarily for that reason.) The smallest comprised an area of about six square kilometers, the largest about a hundred. Carson would have given much to find four mesas at the corners of a square, but nature had not provided, not on this world, nor on any other in the system. He was as close as he could get.

  They planned to polish off the rough edges, and convert the mesas into perfect rectangles. To that purpose, three would

  require only minor sculpting. The fourth, the largest, would need a major effort.

  "They won't look much like Oz," said Terry.

  "Sure they will," said Janet. "When we're finished with them, they'll be all straight lines. No curves. Like the cube moons."

  "And you think it's the straight lines that matter?"

  "Yes," she said. Right angles. It always comes back to right angles. "You know what? Maybe it's just a matter of creating a design that doesn't appear in nature. We were talking about doing some crosscuts. Making it fancy. But that might not matter."

  Carson was uncomfortable that no one on board had experi­ence using the big pulser. "We might end by shooting our­selves down," he said.

  They installed the mount for the particle beam projector in the cargo area of the shuttle. Janet looked at it uncertainly and grinned at Hutch. "If the thing falls out," she said, "the show's over."

  Hutch tried to visualize the way the operation would work. They would have to fly the shuttle at times almost on its side in order to get a good target angle out the cargo door. "I hope none of us falls out," she said.

  They loaded the pod modules on board, and filled sever­al spare air tanks. There'd be no opportunity to cycle air from this environment if things went wrong. For that reason, Carson, who was now thoroughly persuaded to play it safe, brought along enough for a month.

  "Why so much?" asked Drafts.

  "Shuttle might break down," Carson said. "We could get stuck there."

  Hutch didn't like the shuttle. It was boxy, not very aero­dynamic, not good for atmospheric flying. It would be a bumpy ride. And slow. And she was not entirely confident, despite what she had told Carson, of her ability to handle it. "I hate to tell you this," she said, "but this is a shoebox with wings. You'd be better off if you could get Angela to pilot the thing. She's used to it, and she's the best there is."

  "It can't be that hard."

  "You want to bet your life on it?"

  Carson looked at her, and smiled his approval. "Thanks," he said.

  He took Hutch with him to the bridge, where Angela was examining displays of the target area. "We'd like to have you fly the shuttle," he said without preliminary. "Hutch tells me it's likely to be difficult to handle, and she says you're pretty good."

  Angela studied him for a long moment. "Is
that what you want?" she asked Hutch. She wore a light brown ship's jacket, with Ashley's logo, a sail against a circle of stars, displayed prominently on the left breast.

  "Yes. I think it would be a good idea."

  "Then I'll do it." Hutch thought she looked as if she had something on her mind. "Of course the shuttle's cramped. And four people will crowd the ground station."

  Janet leaned in. "I'm not all that excited about carving mountains. If you want, I'll help hold the fort here."

  In the morning, the shuttle slipped its moorings, parted from the Ashley Tee, and began its descent. Angela had preset a glide path that allowed a methodical entry. They slipped easily into the upper air.

  The delicate interaction between the shuttle's flux and local magnetic fields provided all the lift she needed. But as the air pressure rose, they began to bounce around. The wind thumped the panels and blew gobs of thick rain against the windows. Carson, tied into a temporary web in back, com­plained loudly.

  "It's okay," said Angela. "With this kind of vehicle, you've always got a lot of headwind. Don't worry. It's pretty tough."

  Mountain ranges and snow dunes and a coffee-colored sea rose to meet them. No human foot. Hutch thought. Ever.

  An hour later, they approached the target area, coming in over a sludge-filled river. The landscape was mottled with snowdrifts and boulders and gullies. The light was a Halloween mixture from the red sun and the watery-brown ringed giant that floated on the horizon like a Chinese balloon. Gloomy, cold, and forbidding. Not a place to build a country estate.

  Angela turned south. "Ten minutes," she said.

  The plain smoothed out. The wind came up again, and the surface disappeared beneath blowing snow. The sky was red, not sunset red, but rather like the scorched appearance

  of clouds in the aftermath of a forest fire. The first plateaus appeared.

  "They're down," said Drafts.

  He'd been watching the pictures come in. Janet had shown some concern during the shuttle descent, and was visibly relieved that the mission was on the ground. "Looks like a rainstorm to the west," she said. Orange-gray clouds rode over a mustard-colored mist. "Maybe some of that two-hundred proof."