38
Barna
After three days on Danann, by the time I collapsed twoday night on my assigned bunk in the men’s bay, everything ached. On threeday morning, my legs were aching even before I got up and sat on the edge of the bunk. My head throbbed, and my eyes were filled with grit. I didn’t even try to look up. I might have seen the blue plastrene walls closing in on me.
“It doesn’t get any better, Chendor.” Rikard Sorens sat on the edge of his bunk. It was one away from mine. The one between had been empty the whole time I’d been on Danann.
“How long have you been down here?” I asked.
“Five days. This time.”
“How did yesterday go for you?”
“The same as every other day. We’ve found three kinds of anomalous composites, and they’ve all got elemental characteristics that suggest they were engineered on the fermionic levels. None of us can figure out, even theoretically, how they created them. One deforms. One doesn’t. The third one doesn’t deform, but passes radiation selectively. That’s what they used in the windows you found. There’s almost no difference in appearance. They all seem to have the same Mohs number. At least, their surfaces do, but the window materials change their refractive index in a passive-response mode. The material responds to radiation, but the response is skewed somehow, as if it had been engineered to fit a different spectrum…”
That still didn’t tell me much. “I’m an artist, Rikard. What does all that mean?”
“First off—it’s all impossible. The materials can’t be. Anomalous metals can’t be that stable for millions of years, let alone billions. For the universe’s sake, they’re effectively liquids, but these composites don’t seem to know it.”
He seemed more than a little upset. “What have you learned?”
“We can tell that their sun was significantly dimmer than ours. Of course, that’s assuming that the response to radiation at present reflects what it did when the materials were designed and installed…”
That meant more than he was saying, but my head hurt so much that I really couldn’t figure it out.
“… the material has a refractive index of one for each type of radiation it passes, even simultaneously. And it has a threshold. It won’t pass any form of radiation energy above a certain level. We think that it’s about twice what the ambient level of their sun was, but that’s only a guess. The physicists and the chemists are going crazy over the internals, because there aren’t any identifiable controls, at least not in the small pieces we’ve managed to cut away, and those are mostly latch fragments. The others… we’ve destroyed two lasers. The material itself is probably intelligent on a nanetic level. If we knew how to control it, I’d bet that we could make it go negative to any degree necessary. It’s the perfect window, or the perfect lens. You might even be able to use it as a telescope…”
“From a window?”
“Why not?” asked Rikard. “If you can do it. How many things do we do just because we can?”
Art was one of those things.
After Rikard left, I tried not to think too hard about what he’d said—especially about the impossibility of what the Danannians had done. I did manage a quick hot shower. It helped, but not enough because the water was limited by the recycling-reformulating equipment. If we had a bigger base on Danann and more power, we could have melted more of the ice, but anything outside the walls and shields froze immediately.
My feet still ached after breakfast, when I stood in the cramped operations area and looked down at the small screen display of the megaplex. That was what they were calling the assemblage of buildings on Danann. The structures weren’t a city, or a country, and there was no sign of anything artificial or fabricated under the ice anywhere except within the megaplex.
I wanted to find something special. Everyone did, and no one had found anything—except the towers, canals, and lakes—not a single artifact, not a single remnant of any multicelled creature.
I wasn’t after that. What I wanted was something that conveyed what the Danannians might have been. It didn’t have to be a picture, or a sculpture, or a frieze… but something.
In seeking that, thinking hadn’t done me much good. I hadn’t found anything beyond what everyone else had seen. I’d gotten some images that, because of lighting, angles, perspectives, contrasts, I might be able to turn into truly evocative art. An artist never knows, not for certain, until he tries. Those who say otherwise lie. The least talented lie to others, the most talented to themselves.
Those images would do what I’d been brought to do. They weren’t enough for me. I kept looking at the map on the screen display. Finally, I decided on a section of one of the lower oval buildings almost a kay from the first that had been opened. Because of the time constraints facing the expedition, Commander Morgan had overruled Dr. Henjsen and the archeologists and ordered more buildings opened so that other members of the team could investigate. He had ordered that nothing be disturbed until the archeological team could investigate, but so far, no one had found anything except what had been in the first structure.
With my imager and case in hand, I headed for the locker room that held my space armor. Once there, I struggled into it. Most of the other team members had already suited up and left for their sites. I tried to ignore the odors raised by too many bodies and too much equipment in too small a space.
Nuovyl was waiting for me by the inner lock. “Where to, sir?”
“Oval thirty-nine.”
“That’s the new one. We’ll need extra lights for that. If you’d wait a moment, sir.”
I nodded, holding my helmet in one hand, the imager in the other. Nuovyl was back in less than a few minutes, wearing what looked like an ancient cartridge belt over his armor, except that it held powerpaks and lights.
He checked the seals on my helmet, and I did the same for him. Then we stepped into the lock and its already-marred blue plastrene walls and dark gray floor.
“Comm check, ser Barna.”
“You’re clear. Comm check, Tech Nuovyl.”
“Clear here, sir.”
The lock cycled, and we stepped out of the lock into an arc of harsh white light. A good two hundred meters to my left was the edge of the area where the shuttle landed. It was empty. Ahead was that part of the uneven icy surface of Danann holding the dark gray plastrene path that led to the western section of the megaplex.
We walked for a good fifteen minutes before we left the area on the frozen lake where the temporary quarters had been constructed. After that, the circles of light around building entrances vanished. Lighting was another problem I’d have in depicting Danann. Without an atmosphere, light didn’t diffuse. It only illuminated what it struck, either directly or by reflection. The silvery surfaces of the buildings should have reflected well. They didn’t. So much of art was the interplay of light on surfaces, and that was minimal. I’d have to work on how to create that starkness in a way that conveyed both the effect and the alienness, but wasn’t merely an image. Just replicating the effect of light without an atmosphere would push most things into a flat characterless representation. Accurate as that might be, it wouldn’t be art.
“Has anyone found anything new?”
“Not that I’ve heard, sir.” After a pause, the tech added, “Professor Polius thinks that the aliens planoformed all of Danann.”
“They did something to it. The continental outlines are too regular. I thought everyone felt that way.”