Boneflower
By Ray Aldridge
Art by Cortney Skinner
/“Aboriginal Science Fiction”, January-February 1988/
Jolo Barram’s battered prospecting vessel sat cooling at the edge of the deserted colony. Aboard were Jolo, his young wife, Sinda, and the body of their only child, Talm, poisoned by a synthesizer malfunction.
Sinda was silent, exhausted by her grief. Her long black hair hung in tangles about her white face.
He remembered her last words. “The ship,” she had said. “This stinking shambling ancient idiot of a ship. How could it have been so stupid?” Her meaning had been plain —your ship, old man.
Yes, he thought, the ship is old and the ship is stupid. Like me.
*** *** ***
The empty huts huddled close to the silver seed-ship that had brought the colonists here, so long ago. The dead colony was another entry in Jolo Barram’s long list of failures — only living colonies brought the finder’s bounty from SeedCorp. But Barram descended from his ship, as much to escape Sinda’s anger as to satisfy his curiosity.
He wandered through the village. The huts seemed orderly, the scraps of existence neatly arranged. The only remains he found were of animals — a mummified dog in one locked hut, goat bones in the high-walled pens.
At the foot of the hill, where a few dusty-purple trees spread grotesque branches, he found the little cemetery. The dry soil grew no flowers, but colored pebbles decorated the graves, spelled out pathetic epitaphs. “Marlis Twohsa, beloved husband of Lefasha and Dialle, B. 2, D. 25,” he read. And, “Here lies Yolea Dawn Serpinna, taken to the angels too soon.”
He counted a meager two dozen burials. Where were the others? The mystery distracted him from his grief.
*** *** ***
The seedship opened to Barram without difficulties. Inside, the red glow of emergency lamps lit stasis racks still crowded with viable embryo flasks.
Barram checked the ship’s wombs. Green telltales twinkled on all but one; there Barram found the last motherdroid.
When he swung back the endplate, a gagging stench billowed forth. A mechanical voice spoke from the damp darkness.
“Danger,” it said. “Danger. Danger.”
“What danger?” Barram asked.
The droid craned its rust-spotted head up at him. Its photoreceptors were filmed with a brown slime. “Hiding. Yes, that is correct.” It tried to withdraw down the throat of the womb.
“What are you hiding from?”
The droid surged up, and a reeking wave of disintegrated womb lining slopped out. “Happiness. Serenity. Contentment,” it said. It ducked down again and its body shook in a brief spasm.
Energy arced, a stink of burning rose from the womb, and the droid’s abused mechanism failed for the last time.
*** *** ***
In the morning, he swung the crawler out of the hold. As he loaded the last of his gear, he looked up to see Sinda, watching from the lock, blank-faced.
Finally he raised his hand in tentative farewell.
*** *** ***
Beyond the last dead field, the track rose into the badlands. This was an arid world, where scars lasted long. He had no trouble following the old ruts.
Presently he moved between the crumbling banks of a narrow canyon. In the growing heat the shade was welcome.
He became drowsy. The fragile powdery scents of the desert filled his nostrils, and the miles drifted behind him. He almost missed the place where the track climbed an ancient breakdown.
Barram wrenched the controls and the crawler churned up the soft slope and over the top in a choking spray of dust. When he rubbed the dust from his eyes, he saw the Goner artifact below, like the rib cage of some vast, precise beast, half-sunk in a faceted tarpit.
The terrace was a heptangle a hundred meters across, supported three meters above the sand by a pedestal. In the center of the terrace a dozen richly carved arches rose to a height of ten meters, connected by a backbone of lintel stones.
Under the arches, something bright glistened.
He parked. After the ear-filling grind of the treads, the silence pressed against him.
He began to walk the perimeter. Within fifty meters he came upon the disintegrating remnants of two carts. The bones of oxen lay where they’d been left tied to a stake.
A hundred paces farther was a cleft in the terrace, glowing with a pale upward-flowing rainbow. Barram squatted, tossed pebbles into the streaming color. They fell to the ground and were kicked away gently by a repellor field. He looked closer at some of the bits that lay there.
Here was a shattered crystal eye, here the remains of a steel finger, and there a shard of circuit flake. He sorted through the remains until he was satisfied that the missing motherdroids were here, pounded to fine scrap.
When he eventually stepped into the field, invisible fingers plucked him up and served him out onto the surface of the terrace.
He waited, his shoulders hunched together. The strum of the repellor field shivered through the soles of his boots, as it went about its business of pushing dust off the edge of the artifact. A hot breeze puffed into the cirque, playing over the arches, drawing a soft, complex moan from the carvings. His shoulder-cam scanned back and forth, brushing his ear, and he jumped.
As he approached, the carvings caught his eye. The almost-human faces were contorted with grief, the almost-human bodies were twisted in lamentation.
Under the arches was a deep rectangular pool, filled with glittering fluid. A sharp, sweet smell rose from the fluid, bitter almonds and decay, and Barram was careful to stay away from the edge.
Halfway down the length of the pool, Barram looked up. The carvings were changing. Teeth bared in horror were now obscured by softening lips; eyes once wide in grief were half-closed in descending pain. With each arch, the carvings shifted, approaching serenity.
He reached the last arch, looked down, and saw the bones, blue in the depths of the pool. Human bones, from the fragile bones of infants to the long bones of mature humans, all together at the bottom.
The colonists.
Barram backed away. He lost his balance and fell hard. The breath left him and everything else receded as he struggled for air. In that instant of helplessness, he was horribly conscious of his own brittle old bones.
*** *** ***
Barram came down out of the badlands at dusk.
In the morning, after a night’s rest, they would lift away from this dead world, two rich seedseekers. Like every other known Goner artifact, this one would prove to be inexplicable, indestructible, priceless. The Goners, a humanoid spacefaring race, had been so long extinct that only a few dozen obdurate monuments survived in all the Human Cluster, and these would (so the scholars speculated) last until the end of the universe. Certainly no human technology had ever affected or injured a Goner artifact, or interfered with its mysterious function. Each artifact was unique, united only in its adamant resistance to rational analysis. Barram would sell this one’s coordinates to the highest bidder, and the bids would be very high indeed.
Barram could imagine other children, and a home where they might grow up in safety. Barram was aging — he rebelled at the word old — but there was a century or two left to him. And Sinda was young.
He found her by the medmech, keeping vigil over the boy’s body.
“Sinda,” he said, full of bittersweet triumph. “Sinda, I found a Goner site.”
Her eyes widened. “What’s it like?”
He described the artifact.
“And the colonists?” she finally asked.
“Dead, all dead. Though I don’t know the mechanism. We’ll leave that to the experts.”