THE WRONG SHAPE TO FLY
Adam Oyebanji
Few questions in science fiction have been asked and answered more times and by more authors than “Are we alone in the universe?” or “Is there other intelligent life among the stars?” Many of the stories that fill the subgenre of tales about ancient aliens, ruins on other worlds, long dead progenitor races offer a grim answer to those questions: Yes, but you just missed them on the way out. Yet in a way, finding those ruins or remnants are almost as miraculous as first contact, perhaps not the answer you wanted, but an answer all the same.
This story from Adam Oyebanji explores some of the biggest things that need to occur for that miracle to happen at all. The dozens of things that can wipe out life before it can spread from the planet that spawned it. The matter of perfect timing across the vast distance of space. Recognizing something as result of an alien intelligence at all, and not just a bit of space junk or cosmic coincidence. The tragedy of had things gone just slightly differently, you might have found a civilization rather than a tomb . . . and the reflection that you just as easily could have never known they’d existed at all.
***
Perhaps it had been birthed from the nightmares of a child. A profusion of spindly, asymmetric limbs, sprouting in every direction from a gold-sheathed, polyhedral torso. A vast, blind eye protruded from its front.
There was no mouth.
“What is it?” asked Cho Abi Sorocaba, broker of planets.
His host, Ree Aba Jen, tried hard to hide her amusement, and failed.
“An embarrassment, my lord. Hiding in plain sight for many years.”
“It doesn’t look like an embarrassment, mistress. It looks . . . intriguing.”
The object of the planet broker’s attention was surrounded by a small army of construction bots. Or, more accurately, de-construction bots. The sculpture, trapped inside a transparent dodecahedron like an arthropod in amber, was being removed from a plinth. A truck waited nearby to take it away, engine idling under the soft light of the local sun, the name of which Cho always struggled to remember. He was a broker of planets after all, not stars.
The object was like nothing Cho had ever seen. Its ungainly dimensions were far from auspicious. The transparent casing, while no doubt necessary to protect the sculpture from the ravages of weather, also served to conform the installation’s shape to the harmonious requirements of Maidagan. Dodecahedrons were always propitious. Combined with the elegant shape and size of the plinth, the overall presentation amounted to a powerful token of good fortune.
The bots broke the connection between dodecahedron and plinth. There was a sharp hiss of collapsing vacuum. Or perhaps it was the sound of escaping luck. Unable to stop himself, Cho made the sign of the Protector, cursing himself for his superstition. He turned away, hiding the gesture from his escort, and strode purposefully toward the gilded commercial headquarters that was his destination. He didn’t have to look back to know that the object was being swung smoothly onto the bed of the truck, or that the truck would be extending the necessary arms and straps to secure it in place.
“How can a work of art be such an embarrassment as to be removed from the grounds?”
Ree chuckled.
“Because it’s not merely a work of art, my lord. At least, that is not what it was sold as. My Lady Morota and the board paid several million jigu for an archeological artifact. An abstract representation of the Drekkar Supreme Deity.”
Cho’s response was an incredulous guffaw.
“Any fool can see that this is nothing like a Drekkar deity—or anything Drekkar, for that matter.”
“Hence the embarrassment, my lord.” Ree ushered him into the building.
It was unfortunate for Cho that his business that day required him to meet Morota face to face. He spent far too much energy fighting the urge to ask her—in front of a number of functionaries—how she could have been so foolish in her acquisition of ancient artifacts. In the end, he brokered the sale of three planets to Naiyami Corporation for rather less than he had hoped.
“Come,” Morota said, clearly pleased with the day’s business, “join me for a drink on the ledge. You too, Ree.”
“Yes, my lady.”
“And less of the ‘my lady,’ Ree. We are done with work for the day.”
“Yes, my lady.” Ree grinned. Morota made a sound of mock exasperation.
The ledge was a broad terrace that ran along the outside of the building. Cho knew better than to look over the edge. It was a long way down and there was no railing. He knew that if he stared too long, the urge to jump would become irresistible.
“I feel,” Morota said, after drinks had arrived, “that you have been distracted all day. Any particular reason?” There was a twinkle in the chair’s eye. Cho realized, with a sudden and crushing certainty, that he’d been played.
“The artifact,” he confessed. “The one that was being removed from the grounds this morning. I couldn’t understand how it could ever have been mistaken for a Drekkar.”
“I thought that might be it.” Morota didn’t insult his intelligence by trying to hide her satisfaction. “You should have been an antiquarian rather than a broker of planets. It is, I feel, your true passion—as I have told you many times.”
Cho smiled ruefully.
“Perhaps. But it does not pay the bills.”
Morota laughed at that. But she, too, turned rueful.
“An appalling mistake, truly. I have already had to apologize to our people on behalf of the board. The profits of their labor should not have been wasted in such a fashion. The local media have not been kind.”
“But how? I know I only saw the object briefly on my way in. . . .”
“But for long enough,” Ree chuckled.
“But for long enough,” Cho agreed, smiling. “Long enough to see that it was constructed from a number of ductile alloys. It is primitive to be sure—and intriguing. But not so primitive as to be Drekkar. Ten thousand years ago, when their own sun killed them, they had only recently learned to work iron. Ductile alloys—apart from bronze—were well beyond their abilities.”
“You noticed its proportions?” Ree asked. “Of the object alone, I mean, rather than the final installation?”
“Horrifying. But oddly compelling. You can’t stop looking at it. Its irregularity, its unbalanced nature, its . . . aggressiveness.” He hesitated before adding, “It was like looking at the heart of a demon.”
“Exactly. The thing is, though, there are apparently many objects on Drekkar that share similar proportions. Two, two chartered archaeologists certified that the ratios were so matched to other renditions of the Drekkar Supreme Deity as to be beyond coincidence.”
“But the technology, mistress. How could the archaeologists have failed to notice such a thing?”
“Oh, they noticed,” Morota intervened. “Not that it stopped them.” She stared morosely at her empty drink; signaled the service bot for another.
“Drekkar is, as you know, a desert world, and, even now, only partially explored,” Ree said. “There are subcultures and nations that still await to be discovered. The archaeologists—”
“Charlatans, more like.”
“—belonged to a school of thought that argues Drekkar was turned to desert by artificial forces, rather than a brightening sun.”
“We’ve seen that elsewhere,” Cho agreed. “Runaway heating caused by industrial pollution. On Xakas Sei, for example. But there’s usually some massive chemical footprint: generally in the form of ridiculous amounts of carbon dioxide, either still in the atmosphere, or trapped in the fossil record somehow. There’s none of that on Drekkar.”
“This school of thought asserted that we’ll find the footprint eventually, that the brightening of the Drekkar sun alone cannot account for the scale of the damage, and that there must be, somewhere on the planet, a Drekkar civilization far more advanced than any yet discovered. This object, they said, was proof of that.” Ree allowed herself a wry smile. “Scholarly papers were written. Obscure academic arguments ensued.”
“So, what changed your mind? Why remove a certified, one of a kind Drekkar artifact from the campus?”
“Drekkar scholars, by definition, I suppose, are skilled in the analysis of extremely primitive artifacts, in iron and bronze and stone. Their arguments revolve around shape, and proportion, the Drekkar historical record, and the planetology of Drekkar itself. But then someone had the bright idea of bringing in archeologists specializing in the Bren C cultures.”
“Bren C? Why? They have no connection to the Drekkar, either in time or space. They were in their heyday before the Drekkar people even evolved. They were around, what, a million-and-a-half years ago? And their sun didn’t kill them, as I recall. They did that to themselves. A devastating nuclear war.”
“True, my lord. But, given that they wiped themselves out with fusion bombs, they had technology. The sort of technology that was more than familiar with ductile alloys. They had machines, the remnants of which survive to this day, even if we have no idea what many of them were for. Bren C archaeologists spend a lot of time with machinery. If this artifact was as advanced as its proponents claimed, someone had the bright idea that it might not be a deity at all, but a machine. And who better to investigate a machine than a Bren C archaeologist?”
“And these Bren C specialists somehow settled the argument?”
“And then some,” Morota said. “They reanalyzed all the original scans. Apparently, it took them less than a day to deduce that the artifact had never been anywhere near Drekkar.”
“Really?”
“Really. The object’s ‘torso,’ the gold-sheathed polyhedron in the middle of all those arms and legs, isn’t solid. There are a number of devices inside. Some of which are little more than pellets of uranium two-three-eight.”
“Odd.”
“It gets odder. The pellets are uranium two-three-eight now, but they also contain trace amounts of plutonium two-three-nine. Everyone—everyone—agrees that the pellets must once have been pure plutonium, but they’ve decayed into uranium over a period of about a thousand years.”
“So, too young to be Drekkar?”
“Precisely. About nine thousand years too young.”
“And did these new archaeologists hazard a guess as to what this thing is?”
Morota smiled into her drink.
“They don’t know. But one of the team thought it might be a spacecraft, or the remains of one.”
Had Cho been drinking at the time he would have choked.
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“A tiny, ill-balanced collection of appendages with no room for passengers or cargo, no fuel tanks, no A-Grav engines, no soliton generator, with the aerodynamics of a . . . a rock, is a spacecraft?”
“In fairness,” Ree jumped in, “the archaeologist said it was the best he could offer. The Bren C cultures made copious use of something called rockets. Giant tubes of explosives. The explosive force is channeled out of one end and the resultant thrust pushes the object high into the atmosphere—even to the edge of space if it’s big enough.”
“And these . . . rockets, really worked?”
“Apparently. In any event, our ‘Drekkar deity’ has a number of devices that look like tiny rockets. The problem is, they’re so tiny that they’re useless. And, as you’ve pointed out, the object is the wrong shape to fly, anyway. In the end, the new team came up blank as to what it is. But they are very certain as to what it is not. Our certifying archaeologists had no answer to the radioactive decay problem. The Drekkar civilization is ten thousand years old, and this object is barely a thousand. They were forced to concede their error. The certificate was withdrawn, and my lady Morota had to consume large quantities of humble pie.”
“Charlatans,” Morota muttered again. “If they’d just thought about what was inside the object, this would never have happened. But they were so wedded to their advanced Drekkar subculture theory, they ignored what was right in front of them.”
“And that,” said Cho, smiling, “is archaeology in a nutshell: wild guesses, based mostly on personal prejudice, mutate into equally wild theories. Theories into which the guessers have poured so many hopes and dreams that they will not let them go until the evidence against becomes overwhelming. At which point the academy moves on to a slightly less wild theory, which gives way in turn to something even less wild until, after many, many years, and many, many shattered egos, something close to the truth is finally arrived at.”
“Well, I wish these people’s personal growth had not come at the expense of my company’s balance sheet,” Morota grumbled.
It was at this point that an idea, an idea as persistent as it was ridiculous, lodged itself in Cho’s head. He was careful to keep his face devoid of anything beyond an expression of mild curiosity.
“What will become of the object?” he asked.
“Don’t know,” Morota said. “Don’t care, either.”
“It’s being taken to a storage vault in Chosungdal City,” Ree offered. “It’s where we keep the items in our collection that aren’t on display or loan.”
“And it still has its title papers, I presume?”
“Yes, my lord. Although, obviously, the Drekkar claim is no longer valid.”
“In that case, let me make you an offer for it.”
And so, for considerably less than the price paid by Naiyami Corporation, Cho Abi Sorocaba, broker of planets, acquired an ill-proportioned object of no known purpose, and no known provenance, on the basis of an idea that was, he had to admit, about as unlikely as an iron-age civilization manufacturing plutonium.
Cho hated the cold. Unluckily for him, Braym’s southern hemisphere was in deep midwinter by the time his ship, Abstract Existence, nestled into a berth on the outskirts of Gaiyo, the planet’s largest city. Not that that was saying much. Braym, lying on the edge of trafficked space, and close to the daunting voids of the Rimward Reach, was something of a backwater. If its owners ever approached him with a view to selling, there would have to be some very hard conversations about its value.
Unless, of course, he turned out to be right.
Leaving the crew to do whatever it was the crew did in the aftermath of a landing, Cho hurried into town, mildly worried that he would be late for his appointment, but rather more concerned that he would freeze to death before he got there.
“Come in, my lord, come in.”
Seo Aba Mai welcomed him across the threshold herself. She personally removed his snow-crusted cloak and handed it off to a subordinate before escorting him across the showroom to her office.
“You took a ground car, my lord?”
“I did. I didn’t much fancy flying in this weather.”
“A wise choice, I’m sure.”
Seo’s office was almost as large as her showroom. Like the showroom, it was full of carefully curated antiquities and objets d’art. For an out-of-the-way place like Braym, it was an impressive collection. Cho took time to compliment the antiquarian on her taste.
“Coming from you, my lord, those are words to treasure.”
A warm beverage, delivered by a person, not a bot, materialized at Cho’s side. He accepted it gratefully, taking up Seo’s invitation to perch on a luxuriously upholstered bench. He didn’t recognize the material. Local, presumably.
“And now, my lord, how may we be of service?” Seo didn’t bother to hide her puzzlement. “What brings a collector of your stature to my humble premises? I cannot imagine what we have to offer, that you would journey so far to visit us.”
“I have other business to accomplish here, mistress. But now that I am planetside, I thought it would be remiss of me not to visit.” Cho’s eyes flitted around the room, alighting on one of the shelves. “I have a number of first era steles from the Moan subculture of Sadako Prime. But they are large and, if I may say so, vulgar. Fine as outdoor decoration, but no more than that. I am looking for something of similar provenance, but smaller. More personal, if you understand my meaning. They are harder to find than you might think. So many antiquarians want to sell only the big, flashy pieces.”
Seo followed his gaze and smiled.
“You have a good eye, my lord. I personally feel that, of all the many civilizations we have come across, those of Sadako Prime were the most artistic. Who knows what they might have achieved had they not succumbed to disease.” She rose from her stool and removed the subject of their discussions from its shelf. “This is a late first era statuette of the Moan god-king, Tallamok the Second. It’s fully provenanced with the title documents in order. Hard to believe it’s almost half a million years old. Would you like to examine it more closely?”
“Later, perhaps. I shall most certainly want to purchase it. Assuming suitable terms, of course.”
“Of course, my lord.”
“But while I am here and enjoying your hospitality, I wonder if we might discuss another matter?”
“Anything you wish to discuss, my lord, would be an honor.”
Cho wriggled his fingers, causing a 3-D image to materialize in the center of the room. There was a sharp breath of recognition from his host.
“Several years ago, now, you sold this object to a representative of Naiyami Corporation: an abstract representation of the Drekkar civilization’s Supreme Deity.”
“I did indeed, my lord. Though, as I’m sure you’re aware, it now seems unlikely that this piece was from Drekkar at all. But it was certified as such by highly respected experts in the field, and we sold it to Naiyami on that basis. There was no intention to mislead.”
“Of course not, mistress. I know that the archaeologists in question had a good faith, if misguided, basis for their findings. That is not why I’m here.”
“No, my lord?”
“No. I’m more interested in the provenance annotation on the documents of title.” Highlighted script flowed in curling ribbons around the object’s holographic image. “It says here that you acquired it from one Ryo Abi Ahn, who had acquired it as, ah, scrap on Otai Station.”
“Yes, my lord. His papers were in order, and that is the provenance described.”
“This Ryo, whoever he is, is a bit of mystery. He claims to be a spacefarer of some kind, but he appears on none of the registries either now, or at the time of this sale. And how did this person, someone who almost certainly has no background in antiquities, come to know that he had a, quote-unquote, ‘Drekkar’ artifact on his hands? And, even if he did, how did he come to you?”
Seo favored him with a whimsical smile.
“As for your latter question, my lord, the answer is reasonably straightforward. Although it may not count for much elsewhere, my establishment is the most prestigious antiquities dealership in the whole world. It would not have taken much by way of inquiry to have learned of my existence.”
She paused for a moment, blowing the heat from her beverage before drinking.
“Master Ryo, if memory serves, was an engineer on some sort of freighter. I don’t remember the name of it, but if he came from Otai Station as the papers say, then it would be one of the independents. Most ships that run as far out as Otai are. The profit margins are too small for the corporations to take much interest. That’s why you won’t find him on any of the usual registries. I have no doubt, though, that you will find him in Otai Station’s database. He retired there after the sale. Stations generally keep detailed records of who’s been breathing their air.”
“And was this indie engineer an expert on the Drekkar civilization?”
“Protector, no,” Seo chuckled. “Although everyone knows something about the Drekkar. They are the only sentient beings we have ever come across who existed at the same time as us. And they lived practically next door, astronomically speaking. They were far more advanced than we were at the time, working with metals while our own ancestors were struggling to fashion hand axes from stone, but we shared the same sky. It’s easy to imagine our ships meeting in orbit somewhere had the universe treated them more kindly.”
Cho nodded. Trafficked space was a lonely, friendless void, scattered with the remains of long-dead cultures. That it had once been shared with the Drekkar, that they had come so tantalizingly close to becoming a sibling civilization, someone to share the galaxy with, held a powerful hold on the imagination.
And made their artifacts the most valuable in existence.
“If Master Ryo had no great expertise in the Drekkar, what made him think he had one of their artifacts when he came to you?”
“I don’t think he did, not really. I think he believed it to be something else altogether, although he was too circumspect to say so out loud. But the trade guild on Otai Station had identified it as a salvaged Drekkar artifact, so when Master Ryo brought it to me, I had it appraised by two of our local academics who, somewhat to my surprise, concurred.”
“I take it then, that you did not believe it to be Drekkar either?”
“Not at first. Braym is a long way from Drekkar, and Otai Station is even farther. It made no sense for a genuine Drekkar artifact to be all the way out here. And while I’m no expert on the Drekkar, it struck me as too advanced an object for them. But the academics insisted, and I suddenly found myself holding a genuine Drekkar relic. I couldn’t afford the item myself, of course, it was far too valuable, but I brokered the sale.”
“To Naiyami Corporation?”
“Exactly, although there was quite a lot of competition for it, as you can imagine. The first artifact from a previously undiscovered—and advanced—Drekkar culture. We were quite famous for a while.”
Cho chuckled at that. His beverage finished, he rose from his seat.
“You have been more than helpful, mistress. I appreciate you taking the time.”
“The pleasure was all mine, my lord.”
Cho wandered toward the Moan statuette, turning it over in his hands. It was heavy with history, the scrollwork beautifully detailed, with the classic, blurred toolmarks that marked it out as being genuinely first era.
“This is a very fine piece, mistress. Very fine.”
He paid her considerably more than it was worth.
The view was spectacular.
Otai Station circled a moon of the same name. The moon was a marbled blue and white that took its appearance, not from the aqua seas and swirling clouds of a habitable planet, but the rare rock formations that spoke to the mineral wealth lying just beneath the surface. Apart from the mining complexes dotted around Otai’s airless craters, nothing lived down there.
Stunning though Otai was, it was by no means the only thing worth looking at through the restaurant’s vast windows. The moon and its many sisters circled a massive, multicolored gas giant that, in turn, hewed close to its parent star, an orange monster that flared and spat its fury at the universe in gouts of irradiated flame. Otai Station rotated at a leisurely pace so that, in the course of one meal, a diner could take in Otai, its planet, its star, its sister moons, and deep space before starting the whole cycle once again.
“This station should think more about tourism,” Cho said, taking a bite of his meal. “I can’t think of another place like it in the whole of trafficked space.”
Ryo Abi Ahn smiled in polite appreciation.
“Perhaps, my lord. But the journey is long, and I suspect the cuisine is not up to your lordship’s usual standards.”
“Who can think about food with a view like this?”
“Perhaps one who has not eaten in a while.”
Cho had to laugh at that.
“If you have no love of the cuisine, and no great attachment to the view, why retire here?”
“It’s my home. I was born here. My friends and family all live here. And there is, as you can see, no other place quite like it. It never occurred to me to live anywhere else. And after the sale of the artifact, I had the funds to settle down, so I did.”
“I noticed from the title documents that you acquired this Drekkar artifact as scrap. How did you come across it?”
The engineer-as-was chuckled.
“I didn’t ‘come across it,’ my lord. Well, not exactly. I knew it was scrap, and I knew where it was, so I went looking for it.”
“You went looking for a Drekkar artifact? Out here?”
“You sound surprised.” Ryo looked faintly amused.
“We’re a long way from Drekkar.”
“And yet it was certified as Drekkar. By two highly respected archaeologists.”
“Of course. The documentation is entirely in order.” Cho picked politely at his food. “And yet, I can’t help wondering. Do you think it’s a Drekkar piece?”
“Do you?”
Cho hid a small smile. Mistress Seo had been correct in her assessment. The retired spacer was nothing if not circumspect.
“I do not,” he admitted. “In fact, I know it’s not.” News of the artifact’s decertification did not appear to have made it to Otai Station, so Cho filled him in on the details. “You don’t look surprised,” he concluded, looking at Ryo. “Or even disappointed.”
“I’m not, my lord. I never thought that thing was Drekkar. Never. Neither would you in my position.”
Cho found himself leaning forward on his stool.
“Do you understand how a soliton generator works?” Ryo asked.
“Only in the vaguest sense.” Cho felt like he was back in science class. “On a planet, a soliton is a standing, solitary wave in a closed body of water, like a lake, generated by some kind of resonance. They can be quite destructive when they reach shore, I understand. Up here, at the cost of a great deal of energy, you can create the same effect with space-time. You create a soliton of space-time around a ship, and let it go. The soliton folds space-time as it moves, carrying the ship with it. Because you’re folding space-time as you go, you effectively travel at many times the speed of light, even though, safe inside the soliton, you’re not really moving at all. Depending on the amount of energy put into the original generation, the soliton will carry you a very great distance before it fades away. At which point, you hope to be close enough to your destination for the A-Grav engines to carry you the rest of the way.” Cho grimaced a little. “I’m always slightly relieved when my ship’s captain tells me we’ve gone sub-light within range of a port beacon.”
Cho expected that his small confession of weakness would elicit a smile or some other sign of amusement. It did nothing of the sort. Ryo simply nodded.
“Then you understand,” he said. “Solitons require an enormous amount of energy. For that reason, we use massive in-system launchers to send ships on their way. In trafficked space, at least, shipborne generators are strictly for emergencies. And that’s fine: until the launch teams screw something up.”
“But the safeguards . . .”
“Don’t always work. Ships have been lost that way.”
Cho stared at the engineer in something approaching horror. Ryo shrugged.
“It’s a fact of life. The port authorities will tell you that ships are lost in space for all sorts of reasons. A hull breach, gravitic implosion, unfavorable Maidagan. Maybe even the will of the Protector. But spacers know better. I know better.”
The engineer pushed the remains of his meal away from him, as if suddenly nauseated.
“Back in the day, I was an engineer on an indie freighter, the Nothing In Excess. We were making a run from Braym to Otai Station. Easy enough to do. We’d done it dozens of times. No one gave it a second thought. We broke orbit from Braym, traveled to the edge of the system, and waited in line at Lishi Station for our launch window. Off we went without incident. Or so we thought. The trip was taking far too long, and that soliton just kept going and going and going.”
“Couldn’t you just shut it down?”
“No, my lord. That much energy? We’d have torn ourselves to pieces. We had no choice but to go wherever the soliton was taking us. It died away eventually. Dumped us in the middle of the Rimward Reach.”
“No!”
“Yes. The middle of proverbial nowhere, where the stars are far apart and unexplored. No way to get help, and no easy way to get home.”
“But you got home, clearly. Or else this whole meal is a figment of my imagination.”
Ryo rewarded him with a quick smile.
“We shed as much extraneous mass as we could and drained every last proton and anti-proton in the tanks to make a soliton. We barely made it. Our soliton faded away so far out that it took us a year—a year—to get back. And even then, it was only because Otai Station finally received our distress call and sent help. We’d never have made it on our own. As it was . . .”
The engineer stared through Cho, reliving who knew what. He brought himself back to the present with a visible effort.
“Anyway, you don’t want to know about that. You want to know about the artifact.”
Cho nodded, but he felt small and petty as he did so.
“Solitons have a habit of picking things up as they ripple through space-time. Interstellar gases, dust, the odd meteoroid, that sort of thing. Nothing you need to worry about, usually. When the soliton fades out, the navigator will check the scopes for obstructions before firing up the A-Grav. No point head-butting a rock if you can possibly avoid it, yes?”
“Of course.”
“Well, this time, we picked up something more substantial. The artifact. It must have been drifting in open space, somewhere in the Reach.”
“Which is how you knew it couldn’t possibly be Drekkar.”
“Exactly. The Drekkar were thousands of years short of interstellar travel when their civilization collapsed. There’s no way anything Drekkar could have made it all the way out there. Protector knows, there’s nothing of ours out there. It’s beyond trafficked space.”
“So, what did you think you’d found?”
Ryo lowered his voice.
“The remains of an undiscovered, dead civilization, somewhere in the Reach. An undiscovered, dead, space-going civilization.” Taking Cho’s silence for skepticism, he plunged on. “The thing is unbelievably crude, but it’s designed for space. It’s hardened against radiation and low temperatures, it had a frighteningly primitive atomic power supply, and it had little rockets to provide attitude control. A rocket is . . .”
“I know what a rocket is, Master Ryo. Enough to know that these ‘little rockets’ of yours could never have lifted it off a planet.”
“Of course not, my lord. But something else could have lifted it off a planet. An enormous artillery piece, perhaps, or a space elevator. Maybe even a huge, giant rocket. Then they could just cast it into space, allowing it to drift into the Reach. They must have been a patient people, my lord, for whatever journey it was on would have taken many thousands of years.”
“But in the name of the Protector, why?”
“Who knows? Maybe it was a religious observance, or an experiment, or a joke of some sort. What matters is that they did it, we found it, and I persuaded the captain to let me bring it in for examination.”
Cho finished the last of his meal, his face thoughtful.
“So, if you knew you were looking at the relic of a dead, space-going civilization, why didn’t you report it as such when you finally arrived here? That would have been huge news. You would have been famous. And, if you’ll forgive me for saying so, even more comfortably off than you already are.”
“We tried to. The captain added it to our manifest as an ‘ancient space-going artifact of unknown origin.’ But the authorities here thought it was a hoax—or maybe that our time in the Reach had sent us mad. Either way, they refused to process us until we either modified our manifest or waited until they could convene a panel of experts from all across the sector—which would have taken forever.”
Ryo looked bitter.
“I was all for holding out, but the crew were tired, my lord. Traumatized. They wanted to go home, see their loved ones, maybe never walk a ship deck again for as long as they lived. In the end, we changed the manifest to ‘salvage of unknown origin’ and sold it to the Port Authority as scrap. They put it in the boneyard.”
“The boneyard?”
Ryo pointed toward the vast, panoramic window.
“It’s the libration point between that moon out there and the planet, where the gravitational forces are in balance. You dump something there, it stays there, pretty much forever. Wrecked ships, dead probes—all sorts of space-worthy scrap—is placed there, so that indie traders and hobbyists can scavenge them for parts. It’s owned by the Port Authority, so they make money off the spread between what they pay for the salvage and what they sell it for out of the boneyard.”
“And I’m guessing that, once your shipmates gave up on it, you bought it straight back from the Port Authority?”
“Exactly. I stayed on with the captain for one more run, took it to Braym, and sold it to an antiquarian there. Made enough on the deal to retire here for life.”
“By selling it as Drekkar?”
“Yes. When you buy something from the boneyard, the documentation is real easy. I bought it as salvage but went to the trade guild to get it reclassified as a Drekkar artifact. The trade guild don’t care what you call it, they just need it to have a name and a registration number for transit tracking. They don’t weigh in on whether the name you give it is accurate, so long as the description of the goods is. So it was easy to call it a Drekkar artifact and then append a scan of the actual object as its description.”
“Why Drekkar?”
“Because it’s . . . well, Drekkar. Most people don’t understand how the trade guild labels things, so I knew I could get the attention of an antiquarian. I figured they’d bring in some archaeologist who would recognize it for what it truly was: a relic belonging to an undiscovered, long-dead, space-going civilization. Thing is, though, the archaeologists Mistress Seo called in decided it was from Drekkar; that it must have been lost in transit somewhere. Something about lines and angles and proportions. They were idiots.”
Cho found himself grinning.
“So, you made millions of jigu selling something from Drekkar instead of tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions for the remains of an undiscovered space-going civilization?”
“Ironic, eh? But once academics make up their minds, it’s almost impossible to change them. At least, not for years and years. Mistress Seo brokered a deal that was more money than I would have seen in a lifetime, so I took it, and here I am.”
“And do you know where your vessel picked it up?”
Ryo’s expression became guarded.
“Possibly.”
Cho smiled without rancor. He was, after all, a person of business.
“What would it take to persuade you to divulge the information?”
“A share of whatever profits you intend to reap from it.”
“There may be no profit at all. Wherever this place of yours is, it must be deep within the Reach. We would need a lot of assistance to get out there, pre-positioned fuel dumps, support vessels, things like that. We’d need the resources of a corporation. I doubt their assistance will come cheaply, particularly as it would be a rather, ah, speculative investment for them.”
“So long as I make what you make, I will be satisfied.”
Cho thought long and hard before replying. He was a broker of planets. And a broker of planets was nothing if not a person of his word.
“Agreed,” he said. “The notaries can draw up the details.”
“In that case, when I see the details, I will hand over a detailed location. In the meantime . . .” He wriggled his fingers. A holographic representation of a gold disk, with odd-looking markings carved into it, materialized above the table. “I removed this from the artifact as a keepsake. It was loosely attached to the main body. Meant to be removed, I think.”
“What is it?”
“I’m not an archaeologist, my lord, so I have no hesitation in telling you that I don’t know. It’s a protective cover for a crudely grooved metal disk. I think the disk contains a message, but I have no idea how to retrieve it. You see this?” A small cursor appeared next to a series of lines carved into the cover. The lines radiated outward from a single point, each line a different length. The overall effect was not unlike that of the artifact itself, with its ungainly collection of differently sized limbs. “This is a pulsar map.”
“A what?”
“A pulsar map. A pulsar is a very dense star, very dead, spinning very fast and blasting out radiation as it rotates. The radiation ‘pulses’ with each rotation. As the rotation rates differ from pulsar to pulsar, they are easy to identify, like beacons across the galaxy. If you can find three or more of them in your scopes, you can take bearings and know exactly where you are. An old technique, but invaluable when you are completely and utterly lost.”
Cho nodded solemnly. Ryo and his shipmates had been stranded in the Reach. Of course he would recognize a pulsar map. And understand its purpose.
“And this pulsar map tells you where the artifact originated?”
“Yes.”
“How can you be sure?”
“First, you can assume that, wherever this thing was going, there’d be little point in telling the recipients where they were. They’d know that already.”
“Makes sense. And second?”
“And second, the map correlates to the only star system in the Reach that we came close to on our way home.”
Cho’s heart started to beat very, very fast.
“You are becoming a creature of habit, my lord,” said Ree Aba Jen with a smile. “Though I thought we might have seen you at the presentation.” She settled beside him, her legs dangling off the edge of the building.
What was left of the building. Most of the walls had crumbled away, but the denizens of this particular civilization had built to last. The structure’s recalcitrant spine refused to buckle. Seventy-five stories remained, scratching defiantly at the sky.
That the building was sturdy and stubborn seemed appropriate, given the appearance of its creators. The inhabitants of this place had been toweringly tall and built for strength. Their likenesses were everywhere: on statues, and friezes, and still-bright portraits in sheltered chambers. The expedition scientists had described them as aerobic, bipedal beings, more or less symmetrical (left to right) on a vertical axis, with binocular vision, and well-developed, many-fingered hands. They were probably warm-blooded with at least two sexes.
To everyone else, it was like looking in a strangely distorted mirror. Their faces, but for their massive size, were almost identical in structure; their arms and legs likewise: gigantic versions of Cho’s own limbs. They must have been incredibly strong, he thought.
And as stubborn as their buildings. It would have been almost impossible for these handsome, heavy creatures to ever leave the ground.
And yet they had somehow managed it.
The planet broker’s admiration was tinged with sadness.
Ree had joined him at the very top of the building. The remnants of the city’s other structures, many of them achingly familiar in appearance, stretched out beneath them. A strangely green jungle hugged the foundations, taking over what must once have been bustling avenues and plazas. Beyond the city limits, the greenery stretched almost uninterrupted to the shores of a distant, whitecapped ocean. Feathered animals flew between the alien treetops. Here and there, a wide circle had been blasted through the flora, where Abstract Reality and the much larger Naiyami Corporation vessels had come to rest. The invasive bulk of the intruders, sunlight gleaming on their hulls, didn’t seem to bother the flying animals at all. They perched carelessly on the A-Grav fins, watching the comings and goings of people and their machines with mild, otherworldly interest.
Having got no response from the broker of planets beyond an absentminded nod, Mistress Ree tried again.
“The city is magnificent, is it not? You can almost feel what it must have been like when the cousins were alive.”
Cho favored her with a wry smile.
“Even you, Mistress Ree?”
“I’m sorry?”
“I see you’ve taken to calling the former inhabitants of this world by their nickname. I don’t think the ‘Cousins’ civilization’ will sit well with the archaeologists.”
“But they were so like us, my lord. They had two arms and two legs . . .”
“Enormous arms and legs, mistress. I suspect even the young could have snapped my neck like a twig.”
“Well, not exactly like us, to be sure. But close enough that ‘cousins’ seems appropriate. And the buildings!” She patted the dusty floor with her hand. “If you showed anyone at home a hologram of this and told them it was one of our thousand-year-old ruins, no one would be any the wiser.”
“Perhaps not,” Cho conceded. Truth be told, the city’s very familiarity fascinated him. It was why he liked to sit up here, looking down at it, imagining the “cousins” going about their business in the same way his ancestors must have done. He took a deep, reflective breath.
Trying to lift his mood, Ree said, “This has got to be the greatest archaeological discovery of all time, my lord. These people may not have been close neighbors like the Drekkar, but the Drekkar died out ten-thousand years ago, while these people, who look like us, were still around maybe a few hundred years in the past. We were going into space at the same time. They’d started to settle other worlds in their system. We almost met each other.”
Cho made an effort to match her enthusiasm.
“Your lady Morota will be pleased, no doubt.”
“No doubt. This is a planet where everything is so . . . so recent, the archaeology is still on the surface. There are over a thousand cities like this one. You saw what it looked like from orbit: like it was still inhabited. Once we’ve built a station and a soliton generator, people will come from all over trafficked space to see it. The trade in artifacts alone will justify the cost of the expedition, and it is, as you can see, a beautiful world, in a system full of resources. People will settle here, and it will give us our first foothold in the Reach.”
“Today the Reach, tomorrow the spiral arm,” Cho said, quietly.
“Protector willing.” Ree looked at him curiously. “All this is thanks to you, you know. I suspect you will become one of the most famous people who ever lived, and certainly one of the richest. And yet, if you will forgive me for saying so, you look distinctly underwhelmed.”
Cho said nothing for a while, staring instead at the distant ocean. The planet turned a little quicker than he was used to, and its sun was already starting to slide from blue sky toward bluer water. Ree was right: it was a beautiful, beautiful world.
“Have you ever heard of Chuda’s Paradox?” he asked.
“No, my lord.”
“Meom Abi Chuda was a philosopher who lived about twelve hundred years ago, just about the time we first started to reach into space, and long after we’d been studying the stars for signs of intelligent life. People in Chuda’s time knew that there were more stars in the galaxy than grains of sand on a beach, that most stars had planetary systems, that untold numbers of planets would be able to support life, and that the galaxy must be full of intelligent beings who had been around for millions, if not billions of years before our world was even born. And yet, none of these beings had ever made contact with us. None of the stars we looked at day after day, year after year, produced any signal, any sign of intelligent life. One day, chewing this over in his mind, just before he was about to give a lecture on a completely different subject, he startled his students by blurting out the following words: “Where is everybody?”
“But, my lord, there is no paradox. At least, not in this day and age. We know what happens. The universe is capricious, and intelligence is deeply unstable. The Drekkar civilization was wiped out by its own sun, the Bren-C cultures committed suicide by nuclear holocaust, and the inhabitants of Sadako Prime succumbed to a lethal pandemic. Planets have tilted in their orbits, civilizations have boiled themselves alive through global heating, meteors have leveled entire worlds. Intelligent beings don’t survive long enough to reach space or contact others. We are the oddity, my lord. Thank the Protector that we exist at all, with our solitons and our A-Grav engines and our multiplicity of star systems. That is a genuine miracle. The odds of it happening once, never mind twice, are incalculably small.”
“And yet here we are. Thank the Protector, as you say.” Cho continued to look out toward the ocean. Pristine: devoid of vessels, or settlements, or power stations, but otherwise shockingly similar to the seas of his home world. “This presentation that I missed. Did we learn anything of interest?”
“Very much, my lord. The archaeologists have finally managed to decode the grooved disk: something to do with the mathematics of hydrogen, apparently. In any event, we now know that the cousins had hundreds of cultures, and a similar number of languages, but their favored name for this place appears to have been ‘Earth.’ It means soil, or ground, or something similar.”
“And the artifact we found?”
“They called it Voyager Two. As you surmised, they cast it into space deliberately. It was a probe, once, and reported back here with its findings. But it died and drifted on, as the cousins knew it would. The disk was a message to anyone in their distant future who might find it.”
“Odds about as likely as a sentient civilization making it into space, I suppose. Any clue as to how the cousins went extinct?”
“No, my lord. The grooved disk describes a civilization incapable of settling the local moon, or the fourth planet, so whatever happened took place after the Voyager Two artifact was cast adrift. From our preliminary surveys, there’s no obvious physical reason, which suggests they somehow managed to do it to themselves. Or maybe the planet killed them and has since recovered. It may be years before we know for sure.”
Cho couldn’t stop himself from sighing.
“I apologize for being such poor company, Mistress Ree. This is, as you say, a momentous discovery. But ever since you told me that this . . . Voyager Two was only a thousand years old, I had hoped, I had really, really hoped that its makers were still here. That we would be hailed by their ships as we crossed the Reach. Or that we could maybe help them with their first steps into the galaxy. That we wouldn’t be forever alone in the universe. That we’d have someone else to . . . to talk to.”
“Ah,” Ree said, as kindly as she could. “I grieve for your dashed dreams.” She laid a consoling hand on his wrist. “Maybe, my lord, you will be right one day. We missed the cousins by a few hundred to a thousand years at most. Maybe next time, we’ll arrive before it’s too late.”
“Maybe.” He pried himself off the floor, stretching arms that the cousins would have found to be laughably insubstantial. “Shall we go down, mistress? I may have missed the presentation, but I have no desire to miss the evening meal.”
And with that, he stood on the edge of the building and hurled himself off. Broad, delicate wings, not so different in design from those of the feathered animals in the treetops, unfurled from his back, guiding him in a graceful spiral down to . . . What had Ree called it?
Down to Earth.