“You try lifting the bleeding thing, you think you’re so strong!” That challenge, issued to O’Toole by Bill Tirasi, drew January’s attention. His four crewmen stood before the first pedestal, upon which a single jet-black egg the size of a clenched fist balanced precariously.
The egg seemed made of glass, but glass so deep that light could not make it to the center, for it appeared much thicker than its size would warrant. Myriad pinpricks gleamed within. Perhaps light had tried to penetrate the blackness, had given up, and scattered into its component photons.
O’Toole was not given to such fancies. Smirking over Tirasi’s failure, he laid hold of it and lifted. His muscles bulged, his eyes stood out. But it did not move. He grunted, gripped it in both hands, and still it would not budge.
Yet the balance was so delicate, it ought at least to roll.
It did not. Pushing and pulling had no more effect than lifting. Tirasi scoffed. “Heavier’n it looks, eh, mate?” O’Toole’s glower deepened. “Sure, it must be bolted to the fookin’ stand.”
“I’d bet your whole year’s share of profits,” Terasi said, “that thing’s made of neutronium. Compressed matter…” He sighed. “Imagine the profit potential in that! A bloke could get stinking rich once he learned the secret.”
“Then he’d have to spend his life here,” January said, and the others started, for they hadn’t seen him enter. “There’s not a ship on the Periphery that could lift a neutronium egg.”
“That egg, big-big,” said Mgurk.
“Nah,” O’Toole mocked him. “That egg, small-small.”
“That egg, full of galaxies,” Mgurk answered. “Yes, yes.”
“Oh, right,” said O’Toole. But Tirasi scowled and, because he was an instrument tech and carried on his person a wide and wonderful assortment of instruments, pulled out a magnifier and studied the egg with it. “Bloody hell,” he said after a few moments. “Those light spots are made of millions of smaller lights.” He upped the magnification. “They must be the size of molecules, arranged all in swirls and clusters to look like galaxies. You got good eyes, Johnny.”
Maggie B. borrowed the magnifier from him and studied the egg. “That’s right purty. Those prehumans must’ve had eyes as good as Johnny here to enjoy something so hard t’see.”
“If they had eyes,” said Tirasi. “Maybe they had other senses to appreciate it.”
Maggie B. scratched her head. “So, this here place was what, a museum, an art gallery?”
Behind vault doors thick enough to defy all creation? January did not think this a gallery, though it might have been a vault to safeguard priceless treasures. The proudest possessions of the prehuman empire? Assuming the prehumans had had empires, or possessions, or pride. Four treasures only, and one too heavy to take away. Yet the building seemed to extend far out into the sea of sand, and might penetrate deeper into the world. Treasures beyond number might lie elsewhere in the complex.
And they could spend a lifetime searching for them.
January turned to the pedestal beside him and studied what at first seemed to be a pale red brick sitting on end, about a forearm high and just over a hand-grasp around. Of the many things which on this world might be rare, January did not think to number sandstone. Unlike the Midnight Egg—they had named the first treasure already—this was nothing more than a geometric slab whose proportions were, to human eyes, the least bit off. Yet, what made one combination of height, length, and breadth pleasing, and another unsatisfactory? The prehumans may have apprehended matters from another perspective, and esteemed this the most beautiful object in the room.
He rubbed the side of the stone and was surprised that despite its rough appearance, it was smooth, and cool to the touch.
“Maybe,” said O’Toole, “if we can’t lift the fookin’ thing, we can chip off a wee slice, something small enough to take. Even a chip could make us all rich.”
“Hey,” said Mgurk. “You-fella, no break him. No diamonds, those.” And the Terran put his left hand in front of his face and wagged it side to side three times quickly, a gesture that the crew had learned to read as vigorous defiance.
O’Toole balled a fist. “You gonna stop me, Johnny? You and what Management Company?”
“Johnny,” said Maggie B. “If them ain’t diamonds, what are they?” O’Toole rolled his eyes. As if a Terran would know!
“Galaxies,” the deckhand answered. “Whole universe in a ball. Story, they tell ut in Corner of Abyalon, when me a kid. King Stonewall, he want alla-alla galaxies, jildy. So his bhisti science-wallahs press universe small-small. But Stonewall fear touch ut. An he smash ut, universe ends.” Mgurk pointed to O’Toole. “You chip, you break sky. Big trouble.” And he arced his arm over his head.
“Aaah! Those old stories ain’t worth shit.” O’Toole was unimpressed by tales of an imaginary prehuman “king.” But he stepped away from the pedestal.
January raised his eyebrows. “A whole universe compressed into a ball that small? No wonder it’s so heavy.”
Tirasi snorted. “Rot! It’s too damned light to be a whole universe. I don’t know what stories they tell in the Terran Quarter on Abyalon, Johnny, but that just doesn’t make sense.”
Mgurk shrugged. “Pukka tale. Here ball; just like tell story.”
Maggie B. pursed her lips. “How can the universe be inside a ball inside the universe? That’s like finding New Angeles inside a cargo hold of New Angeles! It ain’t…” She hesitated, searching for a term to express the ain’t-ness of it. “It ain’t topological!”
O’Toole made a disgusted sound. “I thought we come down here to get rich, not stand around discussin’ kiddie stories and fookin’ philosophy. C’mon, Bill, there’s three more things to check out here.”
Tirasi took one more look at the Midnight Egg, captured an image of it, and folded his magnifier. “If we can’t take it with us, it doesn’t matter what it is.” He announced this as if excuses were needed, and followed the pilot to the next pedestal. Mgurk said something about foxes and grapes that January did not catch.
January was about to follow the others when he noticed that the sandstone block beside him seemed now twisted into a half spiral. Curious, he took it off the pedestal—it proved lightweight and comfortable to hold—and tried untwisting it; but it was “rock solid” and had no give to it. And yet, imperceptibly, the thing had altered its shape, like a dancer turning his upper body while leaving his feet planted.
Whatever, it wasn’t moving now. He increased the sensitivity of the skinsuit’s perceptors, but could detect no movement in the thing. January took some comfort that the stone was not actually squirming in his hand.
The next artifact was what they finally called the Slipstone. It seemed to be a chunk of blue coral, irregularly shaped into tendrils and cavities, and about the size of a man’s head. Like the Midnight Egg, the Slipstone seemed to go on forever: each tendril, each cavity, when magnified, resolved into further tendrils and cavities. “Fractal,” was how Maggie B. described it and, since she was the ship’s astrogator and Electric Avenue was a fractal network, they accepted her word for it.
They could not pick it up, either.
It proved immovable, not because of its weight, but because it was frictionless. They could get no grip on it, not with hands, not with tongs, not even by first covering it with the sandy grit that they had tracked with them into the chamber. How could something so irregular be so slippery?
“It doesn’t make bleeding sense,” Tirasi complained. “If it’s frictionless, how does it stay put on the pedestal?”
Maggie B. shrugged. “Same way that other pedestal could support an entire universe.”
A joke, thought January as he watched their hapless efforts with a growing sense of his own frustration. (Had they forgotten there was also a ship to repair?) The Slipstone was a joke like the Midnight Egg was a joke. One was very small, but very big. The other was very rough, but very smooth. Was this place the repository for prehum
an practical jokes? A collection of alien whoopee cushions and joy buzzers?
Even the door was a paradox. Soft and yielding, but impenetrable.
Neither Maggie B. nor Johnny could recall a prehuman legend involving anything like the Slipstone; and the others came from worlds where such fables were never told, or at least never mentioned. “Oh-for-two,” Tirasi grumbled, finally conceding defeat in his effort to grasp the Slipstone. “What’s the point of finding a bleeding treasure trove if”—he waited out a burst of static on the radios—“if you can’t pick any of it up?”
His answer was a sudden howl of pain from O’Toole, who was dancing away from the third object, holding his right hand. “Sunnuvabitch!” he cried. “Sunnuvabitch, sunnuvabitch, sunnuvabitch!”
“Heard you the first time.” Tirasi laughed, reaching for the golden object, cupped on a pedestal of pure white. “But we’ve known that about you for…Bloody son of a bloody bitch!”
Now it was Tirasi nursing his hand and dancing a little. Mgurk cocked his head. “Hey, that piece one Budmash Lotah.”
Maggie B. pursed her lips. “I wouldn’t touch that, Cap’n, was I you.”
January bent close to study the artifact. It was shaped like a discus bisecting an oblate sphere. “Saturnoid” was how he would describe it. Many gas giants were saturnoid, some with quite spectacular rings. January wondered if this was a compressed gas giant. At least it won’t be as heavy as the Midnight Egg…
The surface had a cool metallic look, whether actually metal or not, and was smooth and shiny and golden. It seemed to glow from within, and waves of yellow and red and orange passed through it. “Those look like flames,” January said. “Was it hot?” he asked the two men, but another static discharge covered his words. “Did it burn you?” he asked when he could.
O’Toole had calmed down somewhat. “Like a million needles sticking my hand.” Tirasi pulled a pyrometer from his scrip with his left hand and gave it to Maggie B., who examined the object’s surface.
“Ambient temperature,” the astrogator announced.
That made the object rather more cold than hot. “It looks like it’s burning up inside,” January mused aloud. But fire was a chemical reaction. It could not have continued for eon upon eon without consuming eons of material. Of course, maybe this pot is all that’s left. There were chemical reactions that oscillated between different colors, and the appearance of roiling flames might be a consequence of such a reaction. But could such oscillations remain undamped over so long a time as these objects must have sat here?
They called this one the Budmash Lotah, which Johnny explained meant an evil-doing brass pot in the Terran patois.
January gave up. He could not grasp the nature of these objects. There was nothing in his experience from which he might analogize. Each was beautiful in some manner, but the only other thing they had in common was that they could not be moved.
That’s why all the other pedestals are empty, he suddenly realized. Whatever else was once here could be removed, and so they had been. (But when? And by whom?) Leaving, what? A display of…immovable objects? Earth, water, fire…
He wondered where the irresistible force was. “Hey,” cried Mgurk, “come-come, look-see.” The Terran was standing by one of the empty pedestals and passing his hand slowly through the air above it.
“Now what?” Tirasi complained. He and O’Toole joined the Terran.
Maggie B. turned to the captain, who had not moved. “What is it?” she asked.
January waited out a growl of static. “Something’s missing.”
“Holy Alfven!” said Tirasi, and O’Toole turned to the captain. “It’s a fookin’ ghost.”
“You have to look at just the right angle,” Tirasi explained when the captain and Maggie had joined them. “Johnny, stand away. The light has to be…There, do you see it?”
January nodded slowly. He could make out the billowing of yellowed clouds against a ruddy background, as if a slice of orange sky many leagues deep had been captured and set on a pedestal. “It’s a whole-gram,” he guessed.
“Yah?” said Tirasi as he viewed his gauge in disgust. “A projected image with mass?” He showed January the readout. “And with a temperature and”—passing his hand through the image—“with a texture. Cool, smooth, and I can feel that it’s hollow.”
“You can feel it,” Maggie B. said, “but you can’t pick ’er up.” Tirasi nodded. “Like grabbing smoke.”
“Why am I not fookin’ surprised,” said O’Toole. He was answered by another outbreak of static.
The second chamber was right beside the pedestal and January idly felt one of the soft, spongy leaves that ringed the entry. It seemed made of the same material as the door of the vault.
At that point, Tirasi and O’Toole noticed their captain’s possession of the sandstone block. “Well, now,” said O’Toole with a glower. “And are ye cutting us out on the only bit of loot we can actually walk off with?”
January, surprised, looked at the sandstone block in his grip. It had fit his hand so comfortably that he had quite forgotten he was holding it. The stone was thicker at the ends now, and curved in a slight arc—and he had not felt even the smallest movement.
It was an exceptional piece, he realized. An exception not only to the beauty of the other items, but also to their immobility. A cuckoo in the nest. And why wasn’t it taken when the rest of this vault was plundered?
Tirasi nudged the pilot. “Greedy sod, ain’t he? C’mon, Slug, let’s explore the rest of this place. Might be there’s more stuff in the next room.”
January suddenly knew. Those fleshy “leaves” were not the petals of a decorative flower that ringed the entrance to the second chamber. They were segments of another of those marshmallow doors. Something had pierced the door in the center, and it had peeled outward in pie-slice sections. From the arrangement of the pieces, the door had been pierced from inside the chamber. And there was nothing inside the chamber but an empty pedestal.
“Wait!” he said, and to his surprise the others stopped and turned expectantly. January looked again at the shredded door. What had sat on that pedestal, sealed off from the other objects? The irresistible force? How long had the door resisted it? Millennia? Eons? But it had failed at last.
Where was it now? It could not have gotten off-planet, surely. No, it must still be loose somewhere on this world.
Waiting for a ship to happen by.
“You’re absolutely right, Bill,” he said. “There may be other relics somewhere in the complex, but for all we know that corridor”—he pointed toward the half-open door at the end of the room, half enticed by the dark at the end of the tunnel, half expecting something irresistible to come pouring through it—“for all we know that corridor leads nowhere but to a dead end deep inside the planet. That would fit, somehow. But we need to get off this world, now.”
O’Toole scratched his ear, cast an uneasy glance at the corridor, and said, “Sure thing, Cap’n. But I hate to leave without getting something out o’ this.”
The lack of objection surprised January. “Something’s happening,” he told them. “Have you been listening to the static on the comm channels? It’s getting stronger. There’s a storm brewing, and a big one. Look.” He wanted desperately for them to understand. “We can’t take these other things with us, but we can still cash in. Think what people would pay to come see them. They have to come through the tunnel, so we can control admission. But…” And here his voice became lower, more urgent. “We must leave now. We don’t have the supplies to stay and explore every pocket in this entire complex. We need to get a stake, so we can come back and do this proper and controlled.”
Maggie B. pursed her lips, thinking. “Who you thinking might stake us?”
January took a deep breath. “The Interstellar Cargo Company…” He hesitated, waited for the objections; then, when none were forthcoming, stammered on. “The ICC’s a damned pack of jackals, and ships like ours only get their l
eavings; but we may be able to work out a deal with them. If we’re going to do a seismic survey, map the complex, conduct a grid-by-grid search in an orderly manner, document our discoveries, we’re going to need more resources than the poor old Angel can earn in our lifetimes.”
A moment of silence passed. Then Maggie B. said, “Right, then. There’ll be time between here and the Jenjen to cook up a plan to protect our rights.”
Tirasi nodded. “An’ we’ll be able to show ’em that thing”—he indicated the now S-curved sandstone block in January’s hand—“and the videos we took of this place.”
“But if ye show ’em yer rock,” O’Toole warned him, “be fookin’ careful, or they’ll be taking it off ye. That bein’ yer honor’s very own stone.”
The display of unanimity and agreement was so unexpected that January waited a moment longer for the objections. Then Johnny Mgurk cried, “Chop and chel, sahbs. We go jildy. Hutt, hutt! Big dhik.” And the spidery little man led them up the tunnel.
January half expected to find the main door now shut, trapping them inside, but it was still rolled into its slot in the wall. The five of them tumbled out into the rocky cleft, blinking at the light, noticing that it was already dimmer.
Through the growing static on the radio, he heard Micmac Anne calling, “…swer me! Angel ca…Jan…! C…in, Amo…!”
January flipped the responder. “Tell me thrice,” he said three times. The ship’s intelligence could create a coherent sentence by splicing the fragments that got through the static.
“Amos!” said the reconstructed Anne. “There’s storm coming your way, a big one. It started over your eastern horizon, and we’ve been tracking it since…There’s lightning. Lots of lightning. Lots of big lightning. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s coming right down on you. Amos, get out of there now!”
They had already reached the excavation site. Maggie B. began to mount the backhoe, but January said, “Leave it. You heard Anne. The wind won’t be much at this pressure, but the sand can clog our breathing masks. And the lightning…”
The January Dancer Page 3
