The Engines of God

by Jack McDevitt

  Communication with Ashley was becoming difficult. After twenty-four hours, the ship had traveled approximately fifteen million kilometers. At that distance, laserburst signals required almost two minutes to make a round trip. Conversations became slow and frustrating, and the two groups began to feel their isolation from each other.

  The ground team slept through the night-phase. But all three were up early, anxious to get started. They treated themselves to a substantial breakfast, and went back to the eastern plateau.

  They hoped to finish the wall they’d started the previous day, and fashion the corner. Hutch liked doing comers. They were a break from the routine.

  Because much of the work was done from the air, Angela was usually alone in the cockpit. There, she watched the visuals coming in from Ashley, pictures of the oncoming object. Of the cloud, tiny and purple and utterly impossible.

  Sometimes she had to draw back, remind herself where she was, remember to keep her mind on the mission, on the people who were hanging out the cargo door. But My God, this was a magnificent time.

  The only downside was that she was not on board Ashley.

  On the other end, Drafts was by turns ecstatic and depressed. The sensors still gave them only superficial readings. “What I’d like to do,” he told Angela, “is put our money where our mouth is and lay Ashley right in front of it. Let it run over us, and see what happens.” That got her attention, even though she didn’t believe he meant it. But she stabbed the Transmit key anyhow and told him to forget anything like that, that she would have his career if he even so much as raised the suggestion again. But he added, long before her threats could have reached him, “Of course I won’t. I don’t think the probes will do much good, but we’ll try to insert one.”

  Later, when they were back on the ground, Carson came forward for lunch. Hutch remained in back because the cockpit was too crowded for all three. He was munching on a sandwich, and Angela was planning the next day’s flight, when, between mouthfuls, he said, “What’s that?”

  He was looking at the overhead display.

  The object had developed fingers.

  And despite all her training, the intellectual habits of a lifetime, the unshakable conviction that the universe is ultimately rational and knowable, Angela suffered an uneasy twinge. “Don’t know,” she said, almost angry, as if it were somehow Carson’s doing.

  Extensions. Not really fingers, but protrusions. Prominences.

  “Seven,” said Angela. “I count seven.”

  “One of them’s dividing,” said Carson.

  They grew long and narrow. Hutch thought they looked like the fingers of the wizard in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

  “Have we got measurements?” asked Carson.

  Angela checked the status board. “The longest is twenty thousand kilometers, plus or minus six percent. We don’t have a reading yet on the expansion rate.”

  “They’re contrails,” said Hutch.

  Yes. They were. Angela felt relieved, and then foolish, as if she had not known all along it would be something prosaic. “Yes,” she said.

  The contrails began to lose their definition. They drifted apart, overlapped, bled together. The illusion dissipated. It might have been a wispy comet with a multitude of tails. Or an airship that had exploded.

  Got to be enormous disruptions to throw all that off. “I think it’s coming apart,” Angela said.

  The chime sounded, and Drafts’s image blinked on. “Take a look at the target,” he said.

  Carson held up a hand. “We see it.” Drafts did not react, of course. His image was delayed by several minutes.

  Angela was caught up in a swirl of emotions. “Lovely,” she said. Nothing in her life, which had been reasonably full, had prepared her for what she was feeling now. Unable to restrain herself, she let go a cheer, and jabbed a fist skyward. “Good stuff,” she said. “But what is that thing?”

  It looked as if it were unraveling.

  Long smoky comets rolled glacially away from the object.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Drafts’s voice again.

  The process continued, almost too slowly for the eye to follow. Bursts of conversation passed between the pod and the ship. Drafts thought the object was disintegrating, dissolving as it should have done earlier amid the fierce tides of the gravitational fields.

  “But why now?” demanded Angela. “Why not yesterday? Why not last week? It’s not as if local gravity has changed in any significant way.”

  “The other one got through,” said Hutch. “Why would this one explode?”

  “I don’t think it’s really exploding,” Angela said without taking her eyes from the screen. “It’s hard to see clearly, but I think all that’s happening is that some of the outer cloud cover is peeling off.”

  “What would cause that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “This thing doesn’t seem to obey physical law.”

  She took to replaying the entire sequence at fast forward. The object opened slowly and gracefully, a blood-red flower with blooming petals offering itself to the sun.

  The ground team continued with their efforts at block carving. They wielded the 1600 and shaped and molded the ice, and took pleasure in their growing skills. And they watched the numbers coming in on the dragon.

  Toward the end of the day’s operations, Angela called Carson’s attention to the screens. But Carson was riding the saddle. “Neither of us is in a position to look right now,” he said. “What is it?”

  The object might have been a comet whose head had exploded. “It’s turning,” she said. “I’ll be damned. It’s changing course. That’s what all the earlier activity was about. It’s been pitching material off into space.”

  “Isn’t that impossible?” Hutch asked. “I mean, natural objects don’t throw turns, do they?”

  “Not without help.” Outside, the land looked empty and cold and inhuman. Soaked in ruby light, where anything could happen.

  “Where is it going?” Carson asked.

  “Don’t know. We won’t be able to tell until it completes the maneuver. But it has turned inside Ashley’s projected course. Toward us, actually.” She tried to keep the sense of melodrama out of her voice, but it was difficult not to scream the words.

  “You sure?” That was Hutch.

  “I’m sure that it’s turning in our general direction.”

  Nobody said anything for a long time.

  Hutch’s face appeared on one of the screens. That was good. They needed to be able to see each other now.

  “Son of a bitch,” said Hutch. “Is it possible the thing knows we’re here?”

  “What the hell,” said Carson, “is that thing?”

  “That’s the question,” said Angela, “we keep asking, isn’t it?”

  “You’d better let Ashley know,” said Hutch.

  “I’ve got a call in.”

  They stared at one another for a long moment. “Maybe we ought to think about getting out of here,” said Hutch.

  Carson put a hand on her shoulder but said nothing.

  Angela had the same thought. But they needed to avoid jumping to conclusions. Celestial bodies do not chase people. “I don’t know whether you two are aware of it,” she said, “but we’ve got the daddy of all anomalies here. We are all going down in the history books.”

  “Just so we don’t all go down,” said Hutch.

  “Angela.” It was Drafts, looking confused. “I don’t know where it’s going, but it sure as hell isn’t going to the same place we are. It’s swinging inside us, and we can’t brake quickly enough to adjust to its new course. Whatever that turns out to be. We’ll have to loop around and try again. This is going to become a marathon. We’ll need several extra days now to make a rendezvous. Can’t really be specific until the thing settles down.” He shook his head. “This can’t be happening. I’ll get back to you as soon as we know what’s going on.”

  Angela was a study in frustration. “Tha
t can’t be right,” she said. “They had just enough time to get out to it before. Now he thinks he can take a couple of days to turn around, and catch up to it?”

  “He just hasn’t thought it out yet,” said Carson.

  “Maybe. But he might know something we don’t.”

  “If he did, wouldn’t he mention it?”

  “Sure. Unless he assumed we all had the same information.”

  “Ask him.”

  “Maybe there’s no need.” Angela looked at the numbers again and started her subroutines. Meantime, she noted that her power cells had dropped inside safety margins. “That’s it, kids,” she said. “Saddle up. We’re going home.”

  Nobody talked much on the way back, but once they got inside the shelter she told them what Drafts had known: “It’s decelerating. It’s thrown on the brakes.”

  “That’s why it’s coming apart,” said Hutch.

  “Yes, I would say so. Despite appearances, it’s apparently pretty tightly wrapped, considering what it’s able to do. But this maneuver is a bit much even for the mechanism that holds it together.”

  Carson asked the question that might have been on everyone’s mind: “Is it a natural object?”

  “Of course it is,” said Angela. But she was speaking from common sense, not from knowledge.

  “How can it change directions?” asked Hutch. “And what sort of braking mechanism could it have?”

  “Maybe there’s something out there exerting force on it,” Angela said. “A superdense object, possibly.”

  “You think that’s what’s happening?” asked Carson. He had thrown off his jacket, and was making for the coffee pot.

  “No.” There would have been other effects, advance indications, orbital irregularities. There was none of that. “No,” she said. “I have no explanation. But that doesn’t mean we need to bring in malevolent agencies.”

  “Who said malevolent?” asked Hutch.

  They exchanged looks, and Angela let the question hang. “It’s reacting to something. Has to be. Magnetic fields, maybe. Maybe there’s been a solar burp of some kind. Hard to tell, sitting down here.” She shrugged. “We’ll just have to wait and see.”

  “Angela,” said Hutch, “Is this thing like a cloud? Chemically?”

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s constructed of the same kind of stuff as the big clouds that stars condense from: particles of iron, carbon, silicates. Hydrogen. Formaldehyde. And there’s probably a large chunk of iron or rock inside.”

  Hutch tasted her coffee. It was spiced with cinnamon. “There were concentrations of formaldehyde,” she said, “in the soil around Oz.”

  “I didn’t know that,” said Angela. “Is that true?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  She looked out at the sun, which was still high in the southwest. It was only marginally closer to the horizon than it had been when they arrived.

  “So how does it brake?” asked Hutch again.

  Angela thought about it. “One way would be what we’ve seen: to hurl material outward. Like a rocket. Another way would be to manipulate gravity fields.”

  “Is that possible?” asked Carson.

  “Not for us. But if anti-gravity is possible, and the evidence suggests it is, then yes, it could be done.” Angela fell silent for a few moments. “Listen: let’s cut to reality here. Just the existence of this thing implies wholesale manipulation of gravity, of tidal forces, and of damned near every other kind of force I can think of. It’s almost as if the thing exists in a dimensional vacuum, where nothing from the outside touches it.”

  “Almost?”

  “Yes. Almost. Look: there are two clouds. Let’s assume both were traveling at the same velocity when they entered the planetary system. They should have broken up, but they didn’t. The one on the far side of the sun is moving more slowly than this one. That’s as it should be, because it’s contending with solar drag, while our baby here is getting pulled along as it moves toward the sun. So there is some effect. But don’t ask me to explain it.”

  Angela drifted out of the conversation while she watched the object, and the readouts. The cometary tail, which (in obedience to physical law) was leading the object, had become harder to see as the head turned toward them. Now its last vestiges virtually disappeared into the red cloudscape. After a while she turned back to them. “It’s coming here,” she said.

  They watched the image. Watched for the tail to appear on the other side. It did not.

  Their eyes touched. “Target angle stable,” she added.

  Hutch paled. “When?”

  Carson said, “This can’t be happening. We’re being chased by a cloud?”

  “If it continues to decelerate at its present rate, I would say Monday. About 0100.”

  “We’d better let Terry know,” said Carson. “Get them back here and pick us up.”

  Hutch shook her head. “I don’t think so. They’re moving away from us at a pretty good clip. My guess is that it will be noon Sunday before they can even get turned around.”

  Bedtime. Angela noticed Hutch in front of a display, her expression wistful, perhaps melancholy. She sat down with her. “We’ll do fine,” she said. “It can’t really be after us.”

  “I know,” said Hutch. “It’s an illusion.”

  The screen was filled with poetry.

  “What is it?” Angela asked.

  “Maggie’s notebooks.” Her eyes met Angela’s, but looked quickly away. “I think there was a lot about the woman that I missed.”

  Angela’s gaze intensified, but she didn’t speak.

  Hutch brought up a file. “This is from Urik at Sunset.”

  It was a group of prayers and songs celebrating the deeds of the Quraquat hero. Epic in tone, they retained a highly personal flavor. “Urik was to be experienced up close,” Maggie commented in the accompanying notes, “and not from a distance in the manner of terrestrial heroes.”

  She went on: “Show me what a people admire, and I will tell you everything about them that matters.”

  And, finally, a prayer that seemed particularly pertinent:

  My spirit glides above the waters of the world,

  Because you are with me.

  They looked east across the sky. It will come from that direction. Over there. It would come in over the coffee-colored sea. If the sun would set, which of course it won’t for several more days, they’d be able to see it now. “It’ll probably become visible during the next twelve hours,” Angela said.

  What was the old line from the Rubaiyat?

  But who was now the potter?

  And who the pot?

  The snowfields were broad and serene.

  Delta. Friday, May 20; 0900 hours.

  Hutch was not happy. “What are our options?” she asked.

  “How about clearing out now?” suggested Carson. “Get in the shuttle and go. Get away from Delta altogether.”

  Angela considered it. “I don’t think the odds would be good. The shuttle was designed for ship-to-ship operations. It was never intended for use in gravity wells. It doesn’t have much power. We can’t really get clear, and I don’t think we want to play tag with that monster. No. Listen, it’s moving pretty slowly now. I suggest we stay where we are. Go around the other side of the world and hide.”

  “I agree,” said Hutch. She depolarized the viewing panels, letting the red daylight in. “We know there were survivors on Quraqua and Nok: these things don’t kill everybody. Let’s just dig in.”

  “Listen,” said Carson, “is it really going to score a direct hit on us?”

  “Yes,” Angela said. “I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. It’ll come in about thirty degrees off the horizon, and it’ll land right in our coffee. Incidentally, its timing is perfect. If it were a little earlier, or a little later, it wouldn’t have a clear shot at us. At the mesas, I mean.”

  Carson’s stomach tightened. Its timing is perfect. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s make for the other side. Let
the moon absorb the impact. After that happens, we clear out. If we can.” His face was grim. “So now we know about Oz. It was intended to draw the goddam thing. I can’t believe it. The sons of bitches deliberately arranged to bomb the civilizations on Nok and Quraqua. They must have been psychos.”

  “Let’s talk about it later,” said Angela. “We’ve got things to do.”

  “Right,” said Carson. “Let’s start by rearranging the cameras to get the best record we can.”

  “There is something else we could try,” said Hutch. “Maybe our blocks worked better than we expected. We could blow them up. Pull the bait out of the water.”

  Angela shook her head. “I don’t think it would matter now. It’s late. That thing is coming for dinner no matter what we do.”

  The outermost moon in the system orbited the gas giant at a range of eighteen million kilometers. It was little more than a barrel-shaped rock, with barely the surface area of Washington, D.C. It was a fairly typical boulder, battered and ill-used. An observer in that moon’s northern hemisphere would, during these hours, have been looking at a fearsome sky, a blood-red sky, filled by a vast fiery river. The river knew no banks and no limits: it drove the stars before it, and even the sun was lost in the brilliance of its passage.

  30.

  Delta. Saturday, May 21; 1010 hours.

  They watched the dragon rise, a massive cloudbank, swollen and infected. Streamers and tendrils rolled toward them, over the eastern horizon.

  The cameras had optical, infrared, X-ray, and short-range sensor capabilities. They were state-of-the-art stuff, but Hutch didn’t think they were going to last long when things began to happen.

  They picked three sites, each a half-kilometer outside the general target area. Two were on high ground. They slipped the cameras into makeshift housings, and bolted the units into the ice. One was set to track the approach of the dragon, and the others to scan the target area.