Safir was small and slim, but he looked strong. He had a thick head of black curling hair and a dapper, very anachronistic mustache. He and the enormous blond Gruber made a comic contrast.
“So how does it look?” Capelo asked. “What’s the first step when we get down there?”
Gruber handed him a flimsy. “The shuttle brings us to just beyond this side of the mountains—here, see?—and the shuttle becomes base camp. Then we go right in. This time I have such good sonar maps that we know exactly where to go. Not like last time, but then I didn’t know I would need such maps. We go in here, through these tunnels, to—”
“We can’t land in that little upland valley you told us about? The one right above the artifact?”
“No, the shuttle is too big. But the digger is hovercrafted, and after we land, Karim will fly it up and over to the valley, with the other heavy equipment. The rest of us walk. What’s the matter, Tom, do you not like caves?”
“I’m going to be underground a long time when I’m dead. I don’t want to start now.”
Gruber laughed. “Don’t worry, these are easy tunnels, big enough to walk upright, mostly dry. And after the nanos finish their smoothing, it will be like walking through the ship, only with more interest on the walls. The site is very complex, you know. Quite a history. There was underwater volcanic activity originally, then the impact of the artifact striking, then tectonic plate subduction and more hot-spot stress … marvelous! The result is different kinds of caves, some chimneys, lava tunnels … and wait till you see the vug!”
“The vug,” Capelo said. He didn’t want to admit that he didn’t know what a vug was.
“I will not tell you in advance. It is amazing! You will want to bring your children in to see it.”
“Yes,” Capelo said. “Which reminds me—where’s Marbet?”
“She is not going down yet,” Gruber said.
“Why not? I thought she was native liaison. What if natives show up?”
“They will not,” Gruber said. His joviality had abruptly faded. “We will set up an electronic perimeter.”
“Because to them we’re ‘unreal,’” Capelo said. The natives didn’t interest him, but of course he knew the situation. Part of Gruber’s theory—the crackpot part—concerned finding one specific native. A woman, Only or Anly or something like that, who had been Gruber’s main contact on the last trip. Gruber believed that this alien might have had her brain somehow affected at the moment that the first artifact, the one that Syree Johnson had been towing toward the space tunnel, blew itself up.
Capelo considered this idea actively silly. If the two artifacts had indeed been linked in an entanglement of unknown type, that was fascinating. It was also explorable: through the radiation increase on the outer planets, through direct experimentation with the buried artifact itself. An undocumented and subjective “brain event” two E-years ago in an alien brain, on the other hand, was not documentable or explorable, especially not mathematically. It was not science.
“Ms. Grant, she comes maybe in shuttle journey number two,” Safir said, the first time he’d spoken. The words were spaced and heavily accented. Capelo’s respect for him rose. The Solar Alliance Defense Council had wanted this tech badly enough to teach him, an enlisted man, drug-augmented English. Safir must be exceptional.
The first trip down included Capelo, Singh, Albemarle, Safir, Kaufman, ship’s doctor, Gruber, and essential specialists with huge amounts of equipment. The digger alone took up over half the shuttle space, crowding everybody. Support crew would come later, including Jane and the children.
Capelo looked back at the ship as the shuttle left it. He didn’t like leaving Amanda and Sudie behind for even a few hours. No matter what the “psychologists” had said after Karen’s death.
“You’re overcompensating, Dr. Capelo. Not letting your children out of your sight cannot make up to them for the death of their mother.”
“They’re not going to lose two parents. Where I go, they go.”
“Even into danger?”
“Their mother was killed in an act of war while doing a peaceful job on a peaceful planet. You tell me where there’s no danger.”
“You’re not making sense, Dr. Capelo.”
“I’m making perfect sense, based on empirical experience. You, on the other hand, are talking squishy psychological cant.”
“I know an irrational position when I see one.”
“Mirrors must drive you crazy.”
The shuttle landed on a flat plain beside the Neury Mountains. Capelo, no geologist, was surprised at how abruptly the plain turned into hills and the hills into low mountains. No snowcaps. Also no villages, although he had clearly seen settlements from the air. In turn, the shuttle must have been seen, a great bright hunk of metal screaming through an atmosphere devoid even of prop planes. Well, that was somebody else’s headache. Capelo himself didn’t expect to so much as glimpse a native.
As soon as the sensor readings had been taken, the tech crew was out setting up the electronic perimeter. They worked under the capable, dour direction of Security Chief Captain Thekla Heller, who appeared to have done this a thousand times. Perhaps she had.
Capelo stood to one side of the bustle, trying to clear his mind. Gruber and Safir unloaded the digger, checking equipment and safeties. When they were done, Safir would lift the craft over the mountains and set it down in what Gruber had described as a “small upland valley, directly above the buried artifact.” Then the others, crew and scientists, would go in through Gruber’s “easy tunnels, big enough to walk upright, mostly dry.”
Capelo hoped Gruber knew what he was talking about.
* * *
Lyle Kaufman trudged through tunnel after tunnel behind the scientists. He had had to go planetside with the first team; there’d really been no choice. But he’d hated to leave Marbet Grant and the Faller in their secret quarters aboard the Alan B. Shepard. Watching them was too fascinating.
Not that there had been anything much to see. Marbet had spent most of her time watching the alien, who had watched back. Except when the Faller was being force-fed, there had been very little to observe. Occasionally Marbet repeated her prime-signaling, both on erasable tablet and with raised fingers. She also played music, sang to herself, danced a bit. The Faller had not responded to any of it, as far as Kaufman could see.
What had Marbet seen? He hadn’t wanted to interrupt her to ask.
Most recently Marbet had called for a full-length mirror to be brought to the cell anteroom. She spent time making faces in front of it. Duplicating the minute facial and body changes that she had registered and he had not, Kaufman guessed. He had become accustomed to the sight of her nude body, but he knew he wasn’t nearly as unconscious of it as she was. She was working. He was infatuated.
The infatuation would pass. It always did, with every new woman. It was merely a matter of not letting it interfere with his work.
The tunnels, lit by Gruber’s powertorches, were not a hard climb. Everyone wore s-suits, including helmets, since parts of the mountains had intense radiation and other parts, according to Gruber, almost none. Some of the radiation was natural, some was caused by the buried artifact. Periodically Kaufman’s suit informed him that he was in a dangerous area of x number of rads. He ignored it. The suit was safe.
“We are almost there,” Gruber said encouragingly, after the long line of humans had slogged through a jagged, twisting tunnel filled thigh-high with brown water. Snake-like things swam through the water, many of them looking deformed. “That was the worst. From here, smooth going! And by tomorrow, the nanos will make this all so different, you won’t recognize it.”
One of the crewmen somewhere behind Kaufman gave a short derisive laugh.
However, the geologist told the truth; a few minutes later they emerged, one by one and ducking low, into the upland valley. It was small, no larger than a sports field, surrounded by looming rocks with overhangs, tunnel openings, and
shallow alcoves. A stream babbled through the middle of the valley before it disappeared underground. Flowering plants dotted the undergrowth, some of them beautiful colors. Kaufman found himself wondering if Marbet would like them.
Put Marbet out of mind.
The digger had already arrived. Hal Albemarle began directing the set-up of sensing equipment all over the valley. Crew checked the huge digger. Gruber and Safir, both strapped about with climbing equipment, unrolled a flimsy in front of Kaufman and stabbed a finger at it.
“Here, Colonel, is the chimney I went down last time. It gives direct access to the artifact, and it is the only direct access. Karim and I will go to make sure nothing has changed in two years. It is not an easy descent, so the rest of you wait here.”
“I’m going, too,” Capelo said.
Gruber said, “You should not, Tom. I have done much spelunking, and Karim is the best in SADA. It is too dangerous for an amateur.”
“You don’t understand,” Capelo said, with what Kaufman recognized as willed patience. “I have to see the artifact before you disturb it. It may not be the same afterward, or behave the same. I need baseline comparisons. The measurements we’re taking up here aren’t enough. Besides, for all you know, the second you move the thing one millimeter, it may vaporize. It may be designed to only function when buried under a quarter mile of dirt and rock.”
“It has undoubtedly been moved before,” Gruber said dryly. “After all, it has been there for perhaps three million years. Quake activity is what set off the destabilizing of atoms that has produced all the radioactivity in the first place.”
“But quake activity in situ, packed into rock and dirt,” Capelo said. “I’m going down with you.”
“You don’t know how,” Gruber said flatly.
“I’m a quick study.”
“It is not only mental, like mathematics,” Gruber said. “It is physical experience.”
Kaufman intervened. “Dieter, I’m afraid Tom is right. He has to examine the artifact before you move it, or move anything else.”
Gruber was capable of yielding without resentment. “All right, ja, if you must you must. Get suited. Karim, Dr. Capelo goes with us.” He said the last sentence slowly and clearly. Safir nodded, unperturbed. Kaufman wondered if anything perturbed him. The little spelunker seemed to have no nerves.
The three of them moved off. Kaufman watched the shouting, swearing techs unload digging equipment, then looked for Hal Albemarle.
“We have all the baseline measurements we can take from here,” Albemarle said. “Sonar, radar, neutrino flow, everything matches what Gruber got two years ago on his handheld. Actually, it’s amazing he got as much as he did. As far as we can tell, during the last two E-years nothing has disturbed whatever’s down there.”
“Gruber said the radiation field was strange,” Kaufman said. “Like a flattened doughnut.”
“Yes, a torus. Look.”
Albemarle did something to his equipment, and a three-dimensional holodisplay floated above it. It showed a doughnut made of dots, thickly clustered in some places and thinly in others.
“Look, there’s a dead ‘eye,’” Albemarle said, “like in a hurricane. No radiation there, or only what might occur from natural pressure and decay. Then, around the ‘eye,’ this toroidal field of radiation surrounding the artifact. That’s not natural. And it doesn’t match what Syree Johnson told us about the other artifact, the one that exploded and killed her.”
“In what way doesn’t it match?” Kaufman asked. He knew the answer; he had studied all this data intensely before the expedition even left Mars. But Albemarle needed to shine, away from Capelo’s withering glare. Kaufman would let him do it.
“You have to understand what radiation is, Colonel. The binding energy of atomic nuclei holds the nucleus together, within an ‘energy barrier.’ But nobody can predict exactly where subatomic particles are—that’s implied in the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. You can only say where they probably are. And part of that probability field lies outside the atom. So quantum events being what they are, sometimes radiation is emitted from an atom despite the constraints of the binding energy. Are you with me so far?”
“Yes,” Kaufman said. He let Albemarle patronize him. This was elementary physics.
“One way to look at radiation is to say that a nucleus temporarily destabilized, so an alpha particle escaped. The big artifact that Syree Johnson found in orbit, the one the natives thought was a moon, sent out some sort of probability wave that destabilized atoms with more than seventy-five protons and neutrons. At least, the number was seventy-five when it was used the first time, still in orbit, and killed that shuttle pilot from radiation poisoning.”
“I see,” Kaufman said. He kept his expression one of alert interest.
“Who knows what got destabilized when the moon went off at the end, at full strength, and killed everybody aboard the Zeus. But the point is, Colonel, that in both those cases, the wave was spherical. It went out in all directions equally, from what we know. This buried thing, on the other hand, is producing a toroidal wave. It’s been unevenly destabilizing atoms and increasing the probability of their sending out an alpha particle. In a doughnut pattern.”
“And what causes that pattern of radioactivity?”
“Nothing,” Albemarle said flatly.
“Well, something is. There’s the pattern, on your display.”
“Yeah,” Albemarle said. “It’s a mystery.”
He seemed more likable away from Capelo, despite his condescension. Kaufman could see that Albemarle, too, actually cared about this mystery. Kaufman said, “So you think that the strange wave has been emitted over the millennia whenever a quake jostled the artifact underground.”
“Probably. Although maybe only on some low setting. If it had activated higher settings—presuming the thing has higher settings—the mountains would have blown like the Zeus did. Or at least become as radioactive as Nimitri.”
“But instead the explosion of the other artifact killed the Zeus, fried Nimitri, fried the next planet, and did nothing at all to World.”
“Yeah,” Albemarle said. “And that makes no sense either.” He stared at the holo doughnut.
“Thanks for the physics lesson,” Kaufman said, as devoid of irony as he could manage.
“You’re welcome,” Albemarle said graciously. “Don’t worry, you’ll understand the basics eventually.”
“Yes,” Kaufman said.
His open comlink to Gruber said, “Colonel? We are at the first chimney. We go down now.”
“Be careful, Dieter. And keep me informed of everything.”
“Ja,” Gruber said cheerfully. “Don’t worry, Lyle—we will not lose you your prize physicist. Tom, watch out there!”
“I see it,” said Capelo’s voice irritably.
Kaufman found a convenient rock, out of the way of the clamor surrounding the digger, to pay attention to Gruber’s progress reports. But he had only been sitting there a few minutes when his comlink shrilled and said, “Sir, priority two message from base camp.”
“On. Captain Heller?”
Kaufman’s formidable security chief said, “Sir, we have the perimeter up and working. But there are natives clustered at it, a whole delegation of them. One speaks English. They want to talk to ‘the head of our household.’”
“That’s impossible,” Kaufman said, stupidly. “The natives won’t talk to us. They’ve declared us unreal.”
“I don’t know anything about that, sir. But they’re here, they want to talk to ‘the head of our household,’ and the shuttle hasn’t yet brought down Dr. Sikorski, the xenobiologist.”
“All right,” Kaufman said. “I’m on my way. Tell the natives that the head of this household will arrive soon.” He could monitor Gruber’s progress from base camp.
Why did the natives want to talk? The last time they’d seen humans, Gruber had said, they were ready to kill us all.
He said to He
ller, “About half an hour, Captain. Anything else?”
“They have a lot of flowers with them.”
“What colors?”
“Sir?”
“What colors are the flowers?”
“Uh, orange and yellow, sir.”
Hospitality colors. So humans were no longer proscribed on World. No longer unreal. All that political maneuvering General Gordon had done to get an expedition authorized to a proscribed planet—all unnecessary. But what had happened in the last two E-years, almost three years on World, to change the natives’ minds? How could they decide that humans did after all possess souls, in the absence of all humans?
Kaufman hoped the answer wasn’t going to make their job here harder than it already was.
EIGHT
THE NEURY MOUNTAINS
The electronic perimeter circled the base a quarter click from the shuttle pad, now empty since the shuttle had returned to the Alan B. Shepard for its second load of personnel. A small group of aliens milled around beyond the perimeter. One lay on the ground. As soon as Lyle Kaufman saw them, he knew what had happened.
“Turn off the perimeter,” he said to Security Chief Heller.
“Sir, that isn’t—”
“Turn it off.”
“Yes, sir,” she said unhappily.
The shock from the electric field was not enough to seriously hurt a human. But these were not humans, Kaufman reminded himself. Their physiology, although based on the same DNA as humanity, was nonetheless subtly different. Plus, coming up against an invisible source of pain would be a shock in itself for people who had not yet discovered electricity. Plus, they’d been coming in peace.
“May your flowers bloom forever,” Kaufman said in English to the group as a whole.