A hand grabbed her shoulder.
It was dark, she realized. Without noticing she’d sailed into the shadow of the asteroid. She flipped up her gold visor, and now Malenfant loomed, a fat, ghostly snowman. There were stars all around his head. “You okay?”
She took stock. Her stomach seemed to have calmed, the thumping of her heart slowing. “Maybe moving around this damn rock is harder than I expected.”
She looked back. Cornelius came clambering along the guide ropes after her, paddling at the regolith like a clumsy fish. Despite the darkness of the asteroid’s short “night,” Cornelius wouldn’t lift his sun visor.
Malenfant grinned at Emma and made a starfish sign in front of his face, a private joke from their marriage. The poor sap has barfed in his suit.
Somehow that made Emma feel a whole lot better.
“Anyhow it’s over.”
“It is?”
Malenfant helped her to her feet. “We’re here.”
And she found herself facing the artifact.
It was just a hoop of sky blue protruding from the asteroid ground, rimmed by stars. It sat in a neat craterlike depression maybe fifty yards across.
She could see the marks of firefly pitons and tethers, the regular grooves made by scoops as the robots had dug out this anomaly from the eroded hulk of Cruithne. The fireflies had fixed a network of tethers and guide ropes around the artifact. They looked, bizarrely, like queuing ropes around some historic relic.
Malenfant, tethered to the dirt, stood before the artifact, facing it boldly. Cornelius and Michael were clambering along more tethers toward him, ghosts in the pale starlight, just outlines against a background of black dirt and wheeling stars and alien blue.
Emma approached the artifact. It was perfectly circular, as far as she could see, like a sculpture. A small arc at the base was buried in the dirt of Cruithne. There were stars all around the ring, in the night sky — but not within its hoop, she noticed now. The disc of space cut out by the hoop was black, blacker than the sky itself.
It was obviously artificial. A made thing, in a place no human had been before.
And it was glowing, here in the asteroid night. She glanced down at herself. There was blue artifact light on her, too, highlighting from the folds of her meteorite-protection oversuit.
Malenfant said, “Let’s not freak out. It’s not going to bite us. We’re not going to slacken up on our tether drill, and we’re going to watch our consumables every second of the stay here. Is that understood? Okay, then.”
Clipping themselves to the guide ropes, Emma firmly gripping Michael’s hand, the four humans moved in on the artifact.
Reid Malenfant:
Malenfant got to maybe six feet from the base of the hoop, where it slid into the regolith. The hoop towered over him. That interior looked jet black, not reflecting a single photon cast by his helmet lamp.
He glared into the disc of darkness. What are you for? Why are you here?
There was, of course, no reply.
First things first. Let’s do a little science here, Malenfant.
Sliding his tether clips along the guide ropes, he paced out the diameter of the hoop. Thirty feet, give or take. He approached the hoop itself. It was electric blue, glowing as if from within, a wafer-thin band the width of his palm. He could see no seams, no granularity.
He reached out a gloved hand, fabric encasing monkey fingers, and tried to touch the hoop.
Something invisible made his hand slide away, sideways.
No matter how hard he pushed, how he braced himself against the regolith, he could get his glove no closer than an eighth of an inch or so to the material. And always that insidious, soapy feeling of being pushed sideways.
He reported this to Cornelius, who grunted. “Run your hand up and down, along the hoop.”
Malenfant did so. “There are… ripples.”
“Tidal effects. I thought so.”
“Tidal?”
“Malenfant, that hoop may not be material.”
“If it ain’t material, what is it?”
Folded time.
That was Michael, skimming easily around the artifact, as if he’d been born in this tiny gravity.
Malenfant snapped, “What the hell does that mean?”
Cornelius said, “He’s saying this thing might be an artifact of spacetime.” He labored at the instruments the fireflies were deploying. The instruments, sleek anonymous boxes, were connected to each other and to a central data-collection point by plastic-coated cables, light pipes, and diagnostic leads. The cluster of instruments was powered by a small radiothermal isotope power generator. The cables refused to uncoil properly and lie flat. Cornelius stared at chattering data, avoiding the stern mystery of the thing itself. “I have a gravity gradiometer here. I’m picking up some strange distortions to the local gravity field that… I need to figure out some kind of gravity-stress gauge that will tell me more.” Mumbling on, he tapped at his softscreen with clumsy gloved fingers.
Malenfant understood not a damn word. He had the feeling Cornelius wouldn’t be much help here.
He walked back to the center of the hoop. That sheet of silent darkness faced him, challenging.
Abruptly the sun emerged from behind a hill to his left, as Cruithne’s fifteen-minute day rolled them all into light once more. His shadow stretched off, to his right, over the crumbled, glistening ground, shrinking as he watched.
The sunlight dimmed the eerie blue glow of the hoop. But where the light struck the hoop’s dark interior, it returned nothing: not a highlight, not a speckle of reflection.
He reached out a hand, palm up, to the dark surface.
No.
Michael was beside him. The kid reached up and grabbed Malenfant’s arm, trying to pull it back. But Michael was too light; his feet were dangling above the regolith, tethers snaking languidly around him.
Malenfant lowered him carefully.
Michael bent and rummaged in the asteroid dirt. He straightened up, hands and sleeves soiled, holding a pebble, an irregular chunk of breccia the size and shape of a walnut. He threw the stone, underarm, into the hoop.
It sailed in a straight line, virtually undisturbed by Cruithne’s feeble gravity.
Then the stone seemed to slow. It dimmed, and it seemed to Malenfant that it became reddish, as if illuminated by a light that was burning out.
The stone disappeared.
Michael was looking up at him, grinning.
Malenfant patted his helmeted head. “You’re a scientist after my own heart, kid. Hands on. Let’s go find that rock.” He started to work his way around the artifact to the far side. The ropes were awkward, and clipping and unclipping the tethers took time.
Michael stared around at the ground beneath the hoop. He was still grinning, the happiest he’d been since he had left Earth. My stone is not here.
“Dear God,” Emma said. “Just as we saw when the firefly went through.”
“Yeah. But seeing it for real is kind of spooky. I mean, where is that stone now?”
Michael found another stone, dug out of the dirt, and he threw it into the black surface. The stone slowed, turned red, winked out. This time it looked to Malenfant as if it hadflattened as it approached the surface.
“Malenfant.”
He turned. Emma was pointing.
The surface was churned up, pitted and cratered — but then, so was the surface all over the asteroid. What made this different was what lay in the craters.
Scraps of flesh. Dead squid, bodies crushed and broken, disrupted by vacuum, desiccated, life-giving fluids lost to space.