Space (21 page)

But this was the most alien thing of all to the Gaijin.

MALENFANT, WHAT IS IT THAT MAKES A SENTIENT BEING SACRIFICE THE POSSIBILITY OF A TRILLION YEARS OF CONSCIOUSNESS FOR AN IDEA?

"Hell, I can't tell you that."

BUT YOU DID THE SAME WHEN YOU CAME THROUGH THE SOL GATEWAY. YOU COULD NOT KNOW WHAT LAY ON THE OTHER SIDE. YOU MUST HAVE EXPECTED TO DIE.

"What is this, Anthropology 101? Is this so important to you?"

The answer startled him.

MALENFANT, IT MAY BE THE MOST IMPORTANT THING OF ALL.

The planet was folding over, dwindling into a watery blue dot, achingly familiar. But it was the scene of a huge crime, a biocide on a scale he could barely comprehend -- and one committed so impossibly long ago.

"So strange," he murmured. "Earth, the Solar System, contains nothing like this."

The Gaijin would not reply to that, and he felt a deep, abiding unease.

But the Solar System was primordial. You could see that was true.

Wasn't it?

Carole Lerner drifted out of the air lock.

She was tethered by a series of metal clips to a guideline, along which she pulled herself hand over hand. The line connected her ship to a moonlet. The line seemed flimsy and fragile, strung as it was between spaceship and moonlet, two objects that floated, resting on no support, in empty three-dimensional space.

But it was a space dominated by an immense, dazzling sphere, for Carole Lerner was in orbit around planet Venus.

Before Carole had come here -- the first human to visit Venus, Earth's twin planet -- nobody even knew Venus had a moon. Her mother had spent a life studying Venus, and never knew about the moon, probably never even dreamed of being here, like
this.

With no sensation of motion, floating in space, she and her ship swept around the planet, moving into its shadow so that it narrowed to a fine-drawn crescent. Close to the terminator, the blurred sweep that divided day from night, she saw shadowy forms: alternating bands of faint light and dark, hazy arcs. And near the equator there seemed to be yellowish spots, a little darker than the background. But these details were nothing to do with any ground features. All of these wisps and ghosts were artifacts of the strange, complex structure of Venus's great cloud decks -- or perhaps they were manufactured by her imagination, as she sought to peer through that thick blanket of air.

Now, at the apex of her looping trajectory, she moved deep into the shadow of the planet, and the crescent narrowed further, becoming a brilliant line drawn against the darkness. As the Sun touched the cloud decks there was a brief, startling moment of sunset, and layers in the clouds showed as overlaid, smoothly curving sheets, fading from white down to yellow-orange. And then a faint, ghostly ring lit up all around the planet: sunlight refracted through the dense air.

As her eyes adjusted to the darkness she saw the stars coming out one by one, framing that ringed circle of black. But one star, as if a rogue, moved balefully across the equator of that black disc, glowing orange-yellow. It was a Gaijin flower-ship, one of the small fleet that had followed her all the way here from the Moon.

"The cloud tops of Venus," Nemoto whispered, her voice turned to a dry autumn-leaf rustle by the low-quality radio link. "I envy you, Carole."

Carole grunted. "Another triumph for man in space." She waited the long minutes as her words, encoded into laser light, crossed the inner Solar System to Earth's Moon.

"You are facetious," Nemoto eventually replied. "It is not appropriate. You know, I grew up close to a railway line, a great transport artery. I lay in my parents' small apartment and I could hear the horns of the night freight trains. My parents were city dwellers; their lives had been static, unchanging. But the night trains reminded me every night that there were vehicles that could take me far away, to mountains, forest, or sea.

"The Gaijin frighten me. But when I see their great ships sailing across the night, I am stirred by a ghost of the wanderlust I enjoyed, or suffered, as a girl. I envy you your adventure, child..."

Incredible, Carole thought. I've traveled a hundred million kilometers with barely a word from that wizened old relic, and
now
she wants to open up her soul.

She twisted in space and looked back at her ship.

It was a complex collection of parts -- a cylinder, bulging tanks, a cone, a giant umbrella shape, a rocky shield -- all fixed to an open, loose framework of struts made from lunar aluminum. The shield was made of blown lunar rock: gray, imposing, now heavily scorched and ablated. The shield had protected her on arrival at Venus, when her craft had dived straight into the upper atmosphere, giving up its interplanetary velocity to air friction. The big central cylinder was her hab module, the cramped box within which she had endured the long flight out here. The hab trailed a rocket engine unit -- gleaming pipes and tanks surrounding a gaping, charred nozzle -- and big soft-walled tanks of hydrogen and oxygen, the fuel that would bring her out of Venusian orbit and back home to Earth's Moon. A wide, filmy umbrella was positioned on long struts before the complex of components. The umbrella, glistening with jewel-like photovoltaic cells, served as sunshade, solar energy collector, and long-range antenna.

Stuck to the side of the hab module was her lander: a small, squat, silvery cone with a fat, heavy heat shield. The lander was the size and shape of an old Apollo command module. This tiny, complex craft would carry her down through Venus's clouds to the hidden surface, keep her alive for a few days, and then -- after extracting much of its fuel from Venus's atmosphere -- bring her back to orbit once more.

The craft looked clunky, crude, and compared to the grace of Gaijin technology very obviously human. But after such a long journey in its womblike interior, Carole felt an illogical fondness for the ship. After all, the trip hadn't been easy for it either. The thick meteorite-shield blankets swathed over its surface were yellowed and pocked by tiny impact scars. The paintwork had been yellowed by sunlight and blistered by the burns of reaction-control thrusters. The big umbrella had failed to open properly -- one strut had snapped in unfurling -- causing the ship to undergo ingenious maneuvers to keep in its limited shade.

Fondness, yes. Before she left the Moon, Carole had failed to name her ship. She'd thought it sentimental, a habit from a past to which she didn't belong. She regretted it now.

"...No wonder we missed the moon," Nemoto was saying. "It's small, very light, and following an orbit that's even wider and more elliptical than yours, Carole. Retrograde, too. And it's loosely bound; energetically it's close to escaping from Venus altogether--"

She turned to face the moonlet. It swam in darkness. It was a rough sphere, just a hundred meters across, its dark and dusty surface pocked by a smattering of craters.

Carole knew she wasn't in control of this mission, even nominally. But she was the one who was
here,
looping extravagantly around Venus. "Are you sure this is necessary, Nemoto? I came here for Venus, not for
this."

But Nemoto, of course, had not yet heard her question. "...A captured asteroid, perhaps? That would explain the orbit. But its shape appears too regular. And the cratering is limited. How old? Less than a billion years, more than five hundred million. And there is an anomaly with the density. Therefore... Ah. But what is
necessity?
You have a fat reserve of fuel, Carole, even now -- more than enough to bring you home. And we are here not for pure science, but to investigate anomalies.
Look
at this thing, Carole. This object is too small, too symmetrical to be natural. And its density is so low it must be hollow.

"Carole, this is an artifact. And it has been here, orbiting Venus, for hundreds of millions of years.
That
is its significance."

She held her hands out before the approaching moonlet.

There was no discernible gravity. It was not like jumping down to the surface of a world, but more like drifting toward a dark, dusty wall.

When her gloves impacted, a thin layer of dust compressed under her fingertips. The gentle pressure was sufficient to slow her, and then she found a layer of hard rock beneath. Grains billowed up around her hands, sparkling. Some of them clung to her gloves, immediately streaking their silvery cleanliness, and some drifted away, unrestrained by this odd moonlet's tenuous gravity.

It was an oddly moving moment. I've come a hundred million kilometers, she thought. All that emptiness. And now I've arrived. I'm
touching
this lump of debris. Perhaps all travelers feel like this, she mused.

Time to get to work, Carole.

She took a piton from her belt. She had hastily improvised it from framing bolts on the ship. With a geology hammer intended for Venus, she pounded at the spike. Then she clipped a tether line to the piton.

"It looks like moondust," she reported to distant Nemoto. She scooped up a dust sample and passed it through a portable lab unit for a quick analysis. Then she held the lab over the bare, exposed rock and let its glinting laser beam vaporize a small patch, to see if the colors of the resulting rock mist might betray its nature.

Then, spike by spike, she began to lay a line from her anchor point, working across the folds and ridges of this battered, tightly curved miniature landscape, toward the pole of the moonlet. There, Nemoto said she had detected what appeared to be a dimple, a crater too deep for its width: it was an anomaly, here on this anomalous moon.

Nemoto, reacting to her first observations and images, began to whisper in her ear, a remote insect. "Lunar regolith, yes. And that rock is very much like lunar highlands material: basically plagioclase feldspar, a calcium-aluminum silicate. Carole, this appears to be a bubble of lunar-type rock -- a piece of a larger body, a true Venusian moon, perhaps? -- presumably dug out, melted, shaped, thrown into orbit... But why? And why such a wide, looping trajectory?..."

She kept talking, speculating, theorizing. Carole tuned her out. After all, in a few more minutes, she would
know.

She had reached the dimple. It was a crater perhaps two meters across -- but whereas most of the craters here, gouged out by impacts, were neat, shallow saucers, this one was much deeper than its width -- four, five meters perhaps.

Almost cylindrical.

She found her heart hammering as she clambered into this pit of ancient darkness; a superstitious fear engulfed her.

With brisk motions, she fixed a small radio relay box to the lip of the dimple. Then she stretched a thin layer of gas-trapping translucent plastic over the dimple. Of course by doing this she was walling herself up inside this hole in the ground. It was illogical, but she made sure she could punch out through that plastic sheet before she finished fixing it in place.

She saw something move in the sky above. She gasped and stumbled, throwing up a spray of dust.

A flower-ship cruised by, its electromagnetic petals folded, jewel-like Gaijin patrolling its ropy flanks.

She scowled up. "I want company," she said. "But you don't count."

She turned away and let herself drift down to the bottom of the pit.

She landed feetfirst. The floor of the pit felt solid, a layer of rock. But the dust was thicker here, presumably trapped by the pit. When she looked up she saw a circle of stars framed by black, occluded by a little spectral distortion from the plastic.

Nothing happened. If she'd expected this "door" to open on contact, she was disappointed.

But Nemoto wasn't surprised. "This artifact -- if that's what it is -- may predate the first mammals, Carole. You wouldn't expect complex equipment to keep functioning so long, would you? But there must be a backup mechanism. And I'll wager
that
is still working."

So Carole got to her hands and knees, trying to keep from pushing herself away from the ground, and she scrabbled in the dirt, her gloved hands soon filthy.

She found a dent.

It was maybe half a meter across. There was a bar across the middle of it. The bar was held away from the lower surface, and was fixed by a kind of hinge mechanism at one end.

Once more her heart hammered, and she felt a pulse in her forehead. Up to now, there had been nothing that could have
proven,
unambiguously, Nemoto's assertion that the moonlet was an artifact. But there was surely no imaginable natural process by which a moon could
grow
a lever, complete with hinge.

She wrapped both hands around the lever and pulled.

Nothing happened. The lever felt immovable, as if it was welded tight to the rocky moon -- as, of course, it might be, after all this time.

She braced herself with a piton hammered into the "door," and pushed. Nothing. She twisted the lever clockwise, without success.

Then she twisted it counterclockwise.

The lever turned smoothly. She felt the click of buried, heavy machinery -- bolts withdrawing, perhaps. The floor fell away beneath her.

Quickly she let go of the lever. She was left floating, surrounded by dust, suspended over a pit of darkness. Some kind of vapor sparkled out around her.

Making sure her pitons were secure, she slid past walls of rock and through the open door.

Nemoto's recruitment pitch had been simple. "The flight will make you rich," she'd promised.

Carole had been skeptical. After all, she was only going as far as Venus, a walk around the block compared to the light-years-long journeys undergone by the handful of interstellar travellers who had followed Reid Malenfant through the great Saddle Point gateways -- even if, twenty years after the departure of Madeleine Meacher, the first, none of them had yet returned.