"OK, boys. This is just to get you acquainted. Take all the time you want to look around. This'll seem like a bore before you know it."
Somehow, for him, maybe for him alone, that preplanned aphorism turned out to be a lie. He was embarked on a first flight into the unknown, a recognizable sort of adventure. He wanted to look for the exit from this infinite room, not the one that led to his old world, no, but the door to the next world, which would be even grander than this, and even more wonderful.
They were on the surface of Aello now, standing before the Artifact that had called them here, staring silently at it, andthey had fully implemented the thermal retention feature of their worksuits, so no further erosion was taking place. Neon dust about five hundred centimeters thick hid everything except for the grotesque fin, a dark and foreshortened triangle that towered upward above their heads. It was featureless, looking almost naturalistic.
Finally their desire for touristic gawking was fulfilled, and they began to wonder, to speculate. Krzakwa was the first to speak. "Well, this is it, I guess. Time to find out what this thing is made of. Brendan?"
Sealock unhooked a tunable em-wave modulator from his belt and played a tight cone of infrared radiation over the ground in front of him. A great swath of neon simply disappeared, followed by the water nodules that it had contained. They were momentarily surrounded by the haze of a swiftly dissipating cloud of gas, then what was left was a perfectly flat, smooth area, more blue than gray, about the size of a boxing ring.
Kneeling on the surface, he muttered, "I guess a little neutron activation analysis won't hurt anything. . .
." He changed the setting on his suit scanners and exchanged the em-device for a smaller collimated particle beamer. He fired an invisible ray and read its reflection. "Um ..." What the fuck? "This is ridiculous. It's ... it looks like . . . carbon, platinum, and iridium." Using the em-wave device, he did a quick gamma-ray scan. "In a dense, octahedral array . . ." He hung the tools back on his belt and turned to stare at the others, feeling somewhat foolish.
"Bubbleplastic?" Jana's whisper was incredulous, a perfect overlay.
"That seems a little unreasonable," said Krzakwa.
"Yep." Sealock rubbed a gloved hand uselessly over the front of his helmet. "The latticework is smaller, and there's something peculiar about it, but there's no doubt about the readings. There must be something more to this than meets the eye." He grinned to himself, humorlessly. "Not to mention the instrumentation . . ."
Ariane turned up her suit optics and looked hard. "No seams, connectors, doors, or even bumps. No real detailabove the crystalline level, except for the slight variations in color. No way in from this end." The Selenite grunted as he snapped together the fittings of a heavy beam-welder that he'd stripped from one of the remote work units. He took careful aim at nothing in particular, set the charge coupling regulator, and fired. The bright beam reached out and touched the surface but stopped and disappeared there like a broken rod.
"No change in blackbody constant," said Hu.
The beam shut down and, in the dimness, it became apparent that the intense radiation had not even marked the stuff. It hadn't even gotten warm. "Hell," said Krzakwa. "Be nice to find out how they're getting around the basic laws of thermodynamics.''
Ariane nodded. Her speculations were getting ever more grandiose. It was best to take things as they came.
Brendan turned to face Jana. "One thing left to do," he said. The woman nodded and began pulling components from her own belt, assembling them into a device atop a small collapsible tripod. The thing was a partial gravimetric flume gauge, a wave-system detector that could map out anomalies in the local mass-density background. Though useless to asterologists, it was a handy device for prospectors and could tell them a great deal about what lay beneath their feet. All energy fields have patterns, and those patterns contain information. Chains of causation can be unraveled by anyone with sufficient data processing capability. . . .
"I guess we might as well give it a try, huh?"
Hu signaled agreement by unreeling a waveguide from her suit and plugging it into the detector. Sealock joined her and they switched it on.
The Einstein winds blow like a delicate breeze, moving shells of time restrained only by the calming influence of quantum mechanics. Sequencing events are self-ordained and all things come off a steadily unraveling skein. Lachesis. Visualize a rock in a flowing river. Now, hide the rock with an occultation disk. Inspect the turbulence that you can see downstream. Estimate the difficulty in deducing the size and shape of the rock from the wake it leaves in its lee. Q*T*D. Quantum Transformational Dynamics comes along and makes many things possible.
"Jesus!" That from Sealock.
"Yes," said Hu. "I see the infrastructure is too complex for our little 'net element. It seems to be a wingless lifting body something like ten kilometers long. A lot of mass here, disguised by the size of the empty internal cavity. That's why it wasn't apparent from the preliminary system scans. Though I suspected ..."
"What did you suspect?" asked Ariane.
"I suspected that some previously derived theories might have to be revised. That is all a scientist can do, in the end."
"Yeah," said Krzakwa. "We could use some theories now." Ariane shrugged. "Some kind of landing craft? But what kind of atmosphere would you fly something this size in?"
"Jupiter maybe. The sun's chromosphere?" said Tem. "How about Iris'?"
"So? What next? It seems like we're stymied already," said Jana. Sealock looked up into the black circle of sky at the entry to the hole. "We've got a fair number of choices," he said. "We can play with it; we can fuck around looking for some kind of door, scrape the ice off bit by bit while we indulge in the happy explorer game, but ..." Hu turned and looked at him, a cold suspicion forming inside her. "But . . . what?"
"Lots of things. Hell. Let's pull it right out of the ice. Why do you think we brought the ion drill?" There was a silence, and they all heard her gasp, "No!" She took a step forward, almost menacing.
"You stupid bastard! Aello will tell us what we want to know about where this thing came from and when. If you give me a chance to—"
"Maybe so," he said, "but time is not something we have in an abundant supply. Let's get out of here." Jana seemed to have frozen, contained by her visions and at the same time holding them all in.... Visions of fiery destruction.
Polarisdrifted in a slow, elliptical orbit around Aello. Inside the crowded CM the four scientist-engineers sat arguing Krzakwa floated above his couch leafing through a hypothetical sheaf of options, a finger representing each one. "Look why don't we put it to a vote?" Jana Li Hu shook her head emphatically. "No," she said, "this is too important to be decided that way." There was a look of desperation on her face. "I don't think you people understand the magnitude of what you're suggesting. If you try to pull something that size out of the ice, you're going to chew up an entire quadrant . . . you'll ruin the whole moon!" She looked at their faces separately, seeking some form of recognition. "Don't you realize you'll be destroying something that's as important to the physical sciences as these putative 'aliens' are to biology?"