by Mike Resnick
Frank came in smiling, which was encouraging. Alex pointed at the bar.
“Like a shot? I assume you’ll stay for a bite.”
“Can we skip lunch? I have to get my report ready for the council. There’s a special summary for you.” He tossed a folder onto the desk. “I’ll have a quick one though. Whisky. I know you always have something decent, and the good news is that we can enjoy it on the patio.”
“That is good, although I think I’d like to sit well behind the screen.”
They went out with their glasses and sat amongst the flowers. The clean-up had been so thorough that only one or two scars and chips were visible to the expert eye. Alex privately thought that he would leave them as a cautionary reminder.
“Well?”
“We certainly know how, and now have a pretty good idea of who, but we have no idea yet as to why, except that the motive seems to have been burglary.”
“Go on.”
“A study of the residential complex’s security recordings has shown that several attempts were made to break into this apartment over the last couple of weeks while you and Chivers were out. All efforts, and some were pretty damn clever, to subvert the intelligences of the complex were unsuccessful.” Frank looked smug. “Our security’s bloody good, actually.
“The assassination attempt was a last, desperate throw. The gun, triggered by the Gardenia, was supposed to take out both you and Chivers, leaving the way clear for a quick in-and-out burglary. Your survival buggered that up. We’ve managed to recover some organic clues amongst the wreckage of the gun, and it doesn’t look as if the perpetrators are local. We’re pretty sure that none of our competitors or even friends were behind the attack and your suspicions about the Lomonosov are definitely out, so keep them to yourself; we need their trade. We’re not sure yet, but the closest technological and biological match we’ve found suggests New Eden, a group of colonies run by one of the religious groups, ‘The Promised Ones’, I think. Problem is that if it is them, I can’t see why. We barely give each other the time of day. Any more scotch?”
“Yes, I need another myself.”
A lot of things were bobbing around in Alex’s mind as he went back to the bar.
So far he hadn’t mentioned to anyone his growing suspicion that the three boxes sitting in the laboratory were connected to recent events; first, because he didn’t know they were and second, the ‘eyes only’ notice.
If they were relevant he would get a bollocking from Frank for not telling him immediately and, if not, what the hell? He’d better go to the laboratory – and without Jim.
In the quiet of the lab he hefted the first box from the top of the stack and onto the bench, checking its description in the log book. It read: ‘caution, metallic molybdenum alloy samples’.
Amazing. One of the sources of the wealth of the Albion group had been trade in molybdenum for the helium 3/deuterium propulsion units of colonies, interstellar probes, his own prospecting units and many others. But it was the last thing he expected from the Oort cloud – and it was metallic. Impossible. He didn’t read any more, took the standard precaution of putting on a mask and gloves in case there was powder, and opened the lid. He could check the details of its origin in a minute.
It wasn’t just metallic, it was components. He put some out on the bench. The eight pieces in the box were all about the same size, around 30-40cms. Some clean, some twisted, some stained and marked. He half-recognised what some of them might be without being able to place them exactly. He checked the composition in the log book. It was indeed a molybdenum alloy – and an alloy of no composition that he knew.
He checked the origin. This was part of a large quantity of pieces of similar material, some up to tens of meters in size, that the probe had dug out of an agglomeration of mostly methane ice on one of the rare small planetoids on the inner edge of the Oort cloud. It was hundreds of millions of years old.
Blood pumping in his head, he put the pieces on the bench back, re-stacked the boxes, returned the log to the safe, went out of the lab which he mechanically locked and hurried back to the lounge and bar. Frank would be getting curious.
Jim would clearly know something was wrong but would be too polite to ask.
“Is everything all right?” Frank asked from the patio.
“Yes, fine. Just needed a piss.” Alex poured himself a truly stiff one and defied the gods by downing it in one. His hand still shook as he carefully put down the glass.
He was the first human ever to touch an alien starship.
The Trail of the Creator, The Trial of Creation
Paul Di Filippo
Aboard the Final Theophany I had assembled a small but efficient crew consisting of the meanest, deadliest, orneriest, smartest and most embittered set of intergalactic killers I could dredge up during ten years of cruising all the lanes of civilized space and quite a few of the more savage precincts. Out of sheer self-indulgence, I had given them all human names familiar to me so I wouldn’t have to be bothered with trying to recall or pronounce their original exotic monikers. After all, I was Captain and footing all the bills.
Maxwell Silverhammer stood three meters tall in his bare green scaled feet and carried, as if it were a toothpick, a giant mallet whose head was fashioned of purest quark matter from the heart of a neutron star. The portion of his face not taken up by black fangs was filled by one enormous bloodshot eye.
Jagello appeared at first to be merely a sessile nest of whiplike, besuckered tentacles surrounding a sharp parrot beak of a mouth. But then he would reveal enormous snapping chelae that could propel him at lightning speed and which were capable of snipping a man in half.
Drumgoole manifested as a grey-complexioned wispy wraith with a mummy’s face, all parchment skin and kite-stick bones, flimsy as a clothes rack. But when he enfolded his victim and began irresistibly tightening, all impressions of fragility vanished.
Corinthia, barely one meter tall, hailed from a heavy planet and resembled a troll or gnome from Terran legend, down to a complexion full of warts and scars, and a nose like a small cucumber. I had seen her stop a fusillade of shredder flechettes with her formidable chest, leaving her laminate armour like Swiss cheese but her bruised skin intact.
Myself, I go by the name of Moortgat, and although technically human – whatever that means these days—my kind is divergent from the baseline. I’m the result of inbreeding for survival on a deathworld where every element of the ecosphere was lethal to the human species. My skin exudes toxins, my eyelids are impenetrable, a braid of three of my hairs can serve as a garrotte, and my farts are explosive when voluntarily primed. Not a pinup boy.
Seeing this ugly, fantastical assemblage of beings – and I included myself of course – some ancient, pre-spacefaring Terran might have thought that we represented a good assortment of aliens from around the multifarious galaxy, a panorama of the myriad heterogeneous miracles produced by the ingenious Darwinian chemistry and physics of our different worlds.
But of course, nowadays everyone knew better.
‘Aliens’ did not exist. Nowhere in the galaxy could be found a sophont with an utterly exclusive genome.
Every sentient creature in the universe, no matter how oddball their physiognomy, was genetically related.
We were all one species, sharing up to ninety-nine percent of our genes, all of which used the universal DNA substrate. Same amino acids, same method of translation into proteins, all the same cellular processes right down the line.
Had any of us four males on board the Final Theophany wished to do so, and had it been physically possible in any particular mating to connect genitals, we could have inseminated Corinthia and produced a viable foetus. (Believe me, this was not a fantasy that any of us harboured.) Even without a carnal connection, such a thing could have been easily done artificially with nothing more elaborate than a syringe.
Just like Terran canines, which ranged from half a kilo in weight to well over one hundred kilos, a
nd exhibited a huge range of appearances, the intelligent population of the galaxy hid cellular uniformity beneath their varying facades. We were a universe of mutts. Admittedly, the analogy was inexact, the situation more bizarre than with dogs, given the anatomical gap between, say, someone like Jagello and the rest of us bipeds. But even if scientists still had their questions about certain aspects of how we remained interfertile despite such large variations (they often rang in embryological morphic resonance), the basic fact was scientifically incontrovertible.
Every single sophont across a hundred billion star systems was related. Or so we surmised, based on an incomplete expansion across about one-third of that realm.
Of course, such a finding immediately raised the question of how such consanguinity came to be. Ours was the first interstellar age. No previous FTL empires had ever existed. The archaeological records had been plumbed on a half million inhabited worlds without producing one shred of evidence for any widespread civilization of forerunners. So the scenario where an empire of homogenous beings decayed and, over a few million years, sent its isolated populations down a variety of evolutionary paths proved untenable.
In the end, the best theoreticians in the whole galaxy were left with only one reasonable hypothesis.
All the races of the universe had been seeded separately by some individual or small band of individuals, leaving no archaeological traces and employing as root stock the same malleable germplasm.
In other words, there was a Creator, and He or She or It had populated the galaxy with His or Her or Its designs. (Let’s call that bastard God Him from now on, for convenience.)
In many individuals, this scientific revelation inspired awe, reverence and bliss.
In myself and my crew, the notion of a God who had promiscuously fecundated our galaxy with a plethora of intelligent races of all body plans had instead engendered hatred, disdain and rage.
You see, each of us – Maxwell, Jagello, Drumgoole, Corinithia and yours truly, Captain Moortgat – had belonged to our own world’s One True Religion which maintained that the Creator had fashioned the dominant species of our ‘unique’ world in His Own Likeness. It was a belief born of primitive planetary isolation, and maintained precariously in the early years after First Contact. But after a few centuries of discovery and correlation, the widespread broadcast about the reality of universal miscegenation had definitely killed the concept.
This irrefutable revelation – that all the galactic races issued from the hand of the same mad demiurge who had, in addition to crafting his ‘chosen’ race, spawned equally privileged ‘monsters’ left and right – had sparked suicides and apostasies galore.
But in us five it had bred only one overwhelming urge.
To find and assassinate the irresponsibly profligate God who had made us.
For a group of five sentients who hated each other’s guts, we got along pretty well. The fact that each one of us was a living affront to the bedrock theology of the others – an affront each of us longed to bloodily erase – was subsumed in our quest to find and kill God. Of course, my appropriately heavy poison hand of discipline, employed only when necessary, also helped to maintain a surface calm.
So once we were underway along the navigable labyrinth of the Dark Matter Web that threaded the visible cosmos and provided galactic civilization with its FTL links, I had no hesitation about calling my crew out from their private cabins and assembling them in the refectory of the Final Theophany for a discussion of our plans. I expected them to behave even in those close quarters – or else.
No chair was big enough for Maxwell, so he just towered by the table’s edge. Corinthia, on the other hand, had to perch atop several pillows on her seat to see over the rim. Resting on the floor, where he left a spreading trickle of scummy brine, Jagello simply extended an eye stalk up to the common level. Drumgoole seemed to float an inch or so off his seat, wafted back and forth by the room’s gentle ventilation.
“All right, you mooks,” I said, “listen up. Now that we are away from any chance of being overheard by busybodies who might try to stop us, I can reveal our first destination. We are going to make a raid on the Syntelligence Institute on Souring Nine. Our goal is to kidnap one of their boffins, a human named Ilario Mewborn.”
Jagello’s voice sounded like a toucan crunching an entire stalk of bananas. “What for we take this man?”
“Because he’s discovered how to track God.”
If I had closed my eyes, I could have imagined Corinthia’s husky tones emanating from a sexy gal of my own planet, someone whose epidermal toxins would have blended with mine to make an aphrodisiac sweat paste. Of course, the gruesome reality of the dwarf was nowhere near as alluring.
“You signed us on with the promise that you already had a way to track the creator. What gives?”
“It’s true, I do have a stochastic projection of His path. But I just learned that Mewborn’s got something much better.”
Determined from the fossil record and biological markers, the evolutionary age of every sentient race so far discovered had been precisely calculated and arrayed in a database, then sorted. The oldest race proved to be the Thumraits, aquatics who resembled a cross between a squid, a seahorse and a clam. Their fossil record extended back five million years. The youngest race so far encountered were the Quisqueya, a bunch of plump pancake-shaped things that lived by clinging to the rock faces on their world, absorbing sunlight and licking fermenting moss. Their existence stretched back a mere three-quarters of a million years, and they had not even achieved their full sentience yet. But their sampled ‘human’ genome was unmistakeable.
Now, playing connect-the-dots with the planets of the sentient races in order of their age produced a unidirectional path for the Creator’s malignant life-spawning journey, a path which could be extended out beyond the Quisqueya into the unknown light years with a certain degree of accuracy, assuming, as we had to, that the Creator was still active some three-quarters of a million years after his last recorded abomination. My plan had been simply to follow the projection, stopping at every likely world.
I explained all this to my crew.
Maxwell rumble-lisped a response. (Large fangs did not an orator make.) “And thish Mewborn, what ish hish invention?”
“He’s discovered that the Creator’s method of travel leaves a distinct signature in the Dark Matter Web. The signature is almost eternal, but fades gradually with time. He’s plotted the traces against the archaeological record and it fits perfectly. We can use Mewborn’s gadget to home in on the Creator’s current whereabouts much faster and with more certainty than by following the stochastics. We’ll just ride His transportation gradient until we come upon His present location. Then – goodbye, God!”
Drumgoole’s hypnotic voice, one of his tools for taking prey, resembled a ghoulish whisper from another dimension.
“I will guarantee this human’s cooperation, have no fears.”
“Fine. Then we’re all in agreement. Souring Nine, here we come!”
The defences of the obscure and isolated Syntelligence Institute were laughably rudimentary. Nothing but a few robotic security guards patrolling the outside perimeter. They were brought to a juddering stop with the broadcast of a simple Universal Halting State Trojan. Confident that their lofty, pure researches held no allure for thieves or pirates, the Institute had never hardened up. A blow from Maxwell’s weighty hammer took the front door of the Institute clean off its hinges and sent it rocketing across the empty reception area.
Expecting a mob of workers and panicked screams, we got only emptiness and silence.
“Where the hell is everybody?” Corinthia demanded.
“Don’t know, don’t care,” I said. “We’re just after Mewborn’s tracking device. Let’s move before the cops show up!”
After dashing down corridors where several doors led to labs and storerooms but no offices, it finally dawned on me that the staff of the Syntelligence Institute consisted
of Ilario Mewbon alone.
We found the boffin cowering under his desk in a centrally located room. Jagello extended a claw and pulled him roughly out.
Ilario Mewborn presented as a puny baseline human, and not a particularly impressive specimen at that. Sparse strands of mouse-coloured hair failed to conceal his spotty scalp. He stood not much more than one-and-a-half times Corinthia’s height. His drably wrapped limbs approximated Drumgoole’s spidery structure. And for some reason he wore antique eyeglasses. (I learned later that he was allergic to contacts and scared of surgery or implants.)
Although not as loud or basso profundo as Maxwell, I had a respectable bellow. “Where’s the Creator tracker? Quick!”
Mewborn’s quavering voice sounded like a goat’s bleating. “Oh-over th-there…”
I walked to where he pointed. A large plastic drum was the only possible item. I pried off the top. Inside quivered a translucent gelatinous mass threaded with glowing, sparkling organelles.
“What the hell is this!”
“It – it’s the tracker. Honest, it truly is!”
Approaching sirens penetrated the building.
“Grab everything, Mewborn too, and let’s roll!”
The Final Theophany showed Souring Nine her tail faster than you could say ‘God is dead’. We were in the unpursuable depths of the Dark Matter Web while the planetary cops were still unlimbering their guns.
In the refectory the five of us crowded with a menacing expectancy around a seated Mewborn. With sweat dotting his brow, the little scientist sipped delicately at a glass of restorative electrolytes and cyana-berry juice, his composure gradually returning. Finally he looked calm enough for questioning to be effective.
“Okay, pal, what’s with the tub of pudding?”
Mewborn’s voice exhibited a certain disdain at my ignorance and pride at his own accomplishments. “That, my loud and pockmarked thief, is urschleim, my own discovery and invention. It’s taken decades, but I’ve done what everyone said was impossible. Employing every single genome of all the sentient races, I have reverse-engineered the mother plasm from which they all arose. In that barrel you behold the raw material employed by the Creator, the clay from which we were all initially fashioned.”
