ONE
Rhea is an insignificant chunk of lunar material orbiting Saturn at a distance of about 327,000 miles. It is not as negligible as glorified asteroids like Atlas or Telesto, mere fugitives of the solar system captured by Saturn's immense gravity. Still, Rhea has nothing like the glory of spectacular Titan, the next moon out.
All this was on Derek Kuroda's mind as he exited his solo explorer craft, Cyrano. He was nineteen years old, one year out of the Ciano Academy, and he felt he deserved something better. He had applied for Titan. He had applied for Ganymede and Callisto, where serious terraforming projects were in the works. He had not applied for Rhea. Rhea he got, nonetheless.
"Ethelred," he said, stepping onto the Rhean surface, "I want it on record that this mission is a waste of the time and talents of Derek Kuroda, who is destined for better things."
"Recorded," said Ethelred, his ship's computer, who had heard many such complaints.
Like the other Saturnian satellites, Rhea had one sterling quality: its view. The sight of Saturn at close range was a spectacle that stole the breath from hardened spacers. The impact of the thousandth viewing was no less powerful than the first as the eye was drawn into futile analysis of the dazzling bands of color, their interfaces twisted into patterns of infinite complexity. Settlers of the Jovian moons claimed that the swirling colors of Jupiter were even more beautiful, but no other body in the system had anything to compare with the majesty of Saturn's rings. If the big move comes in my lifetime, Derek thought, this is the only thing I'll regret leaving behind.
"You need the experience," the man back at Crater Station on Mimas had told him. "You're a kid just out of school Nobody gets the big, demanding jobs first time out. Pull a few of these routine surveys, survive and don't screw up too bad, and we'll see about giving you something more important." Straight out of the academy, Derek had signed on with McNaughton Enterprises, in the exploration department. When he found out what he was expected to do, he would have chucked the job and looked elsewhere, but he needed the money to keep up payments on Cyrano.
With such thoughts, it was more pleasant to look up at Saturn than down at where he was stepping. Thus it was that, when he made the greatest discovery in the history of man in space, he stubbed his toe on it. Had Rhea had any gravity worthy of the name, he might have literally tripped over it. When he looked down to see what had made him stumble, he froze. It was not a natural object.
It was egg-shaped. Derek had seen pictures of eggs and he knew that degenerate Earthies actually ate the horrid stuff inside them. He lowered himself for a closer look. It was perhaps ten inches on its longer axis and half that in diameter. The material appeared to be glassy, a transparent green shading to opacity at its center.
Who had made it and why had it been left here? Was it man-made or might it be some freakish but natural object? Glass produced by a meteor impact, flung upward and cooled into this oddly regular shape? He had never heard of such a thing, but crazy things were always turning up in remote corners of the solar system. It hadn't moved when his toe had struck it, so it had to be fastened to the ground in some fashion. He grasped its narrow ends and tugged at it. It came up, but reluctantly. It was not fastened to the ground, but he had to exert himself to lift it.
Sweat sprang out on his scalp when he realized how much this thing had to weigh. Rhea's gravity was infinitesimal, and this thing was barely a double handful, yet he had to strain to lift it. He ran his hands over it to get a reading from his palm-sensors. The instruments in his transparent helmet took a quick visual scan.
"Ethelred," he said, his voice a little shaky, "what do we have here?"
"An object of tremendous density," the computer said. "In Earth gravity it would weigh a few tons."
He looked up at Saturn, hoping for inspiration and finding none. "Only matter at the center of collapsars has that kind of density!"
"So it has always been thought."
"You can't just pick up a hunk of collapsar and hold it in your hands, Ethelred."
"It is not possible at our current stage of technology," the computer agreed.
"Ohmigod!" Derek closed his eyes and swallowed hard. "You know what we have here, don't you? What we have here is an alien artifact."
"Not proven, but that seems to be the most likely hypothesis."
"For around two hundred years people have been looking for alien artifacts. Nobody's found any. Until now." Since it wasn't a question, Ethelred didn't bother to answer. Derek set the thing down and made a quick scan of the area. A few yards away, he found a second egg. It took two arduous walks to carry them back to his ship. He gave their readings to a robot probe and sent it in a widening spiral, searching for more.
Derek stripped off his EVA suit and went straight to the ship's tiny food synthesizer. He punched in a double tequila and it delivered the icy bulb in two seconds. With its straw clamped in his teeth like a cigar, he stared at the two objects on his deck. The moonlet barely had gravity sufficient to give him up-and-down orientation, but the two eggs sat there as if they were welded to the substructure. On Earth, they might have sunk through the crust.
"X-ray analysis?" he asked.
"The centers are opaque to X-ray," Ethelred said.
"Give them the full battery: spectrographic, chemical, everything." Carefully, he lowered one of the ovoids into an analyzer. Within one minute, the instruments had adjusted themselves to the size and shape of the specimen and began busily testing it. For the next several minutes, while the tests were being run, he stood in deep thought. The moon's gravity was too low to bother with unfolding the little ship's only chair.
Derek would have been tall if spacers had bothered much about comparative height. In the mostly zero-gee environment of the Island Worlds, such considerations were irrelevant. His bronze-colored hair was tied in a neat samurai topknot, which was both fashionable and convenient for wear in an EV helmet. Despite the hairdo and his family name, there was little Asiatic about his looks. Only a very slight epicanthic fold in the inner corners of his green eyes revealed his Japanese ancestry. His body was beautifully proportioned—lean, but with far more muscle mass than most spacers had. Since childhood he had taken special treatments and performed special exercises so that he could function in planetary gravity up to Earth normal.
Idly, he tugged loose his hair-ribbon and his implanted static charge fanned his hair into a leonine mane, a style popular with his age group in recent years. On Derek it looked better than on most. His strong face, with its broad brow and wide cheekbones, was equally leonine. He tossed the white ribbon away, and it was attacked before it could settle to the deck. A furious furball shot through the air, squalling hatred of anything small, white and moving. The shipcat was nearly spherical, with a flat, wide tail that paddled the air for added velocity. It caught the ribbon with its forepaws and tore at it with needlelike fangs. The cat twisted in air and cushioned its impact against a wall with its hind paws.
"Good move, Carruthers," Derek said. The shipcat ignored him and batted the wadded ribbon across the chamber, giving it a tiny head start before setting out in pursuit. In the early days of Lunar settlement, white lab rats had escaped and infested first Luna, then all other settlements and ships. They were a mutated stock, unnaturally intelligent, and all attempts to eradicate them had failed. Cats, mankind's oldest ally in the war with rodents, became the third spacegoing species to spread from Earth. Much research had been devoted to developing a suitable cat box.
"Ethelred," Derek said, "you are to forget that I found two of these things. You will report that I found only one."
"As you instruct." The computer's tone was mildly reproving, but it would follow orders. "As soon as the probe returns, start plotting a course for the Academy. I need to pay a visit to Aunt Sieglinde."
Hours later the probe returned, having found nothing. It was possible that there were other artifacts somewhere on Rhea, but if so, they were beyond the probe's range. Derek spent part of the time arranging Ethelred's figures so that it would look as if Cyrano had been accelerating only the mass of one of the eggs. The automated tests turned up absolutely nothing. He had expected as much. Whatever these things were, they were totally outside all human experience. Turning them over to his instruments was like handing a computer to a medieval alchemist and asking him for an analysis.
Under his contract, anything he found on his explorations became the property of McNaughton. For an event of this magnitude, he was willing to bend the rules. Come to think of it, did the rules apply in this case?
"Ethelred, what are my contract obligations vis-a-vis alien artifacts?"
"The United Nations pact of 1997 stipulates that any alien artifact found by anyone automatically becomes the property of the U.N. Confederacy law likewise makes any and all such finds government property."
"Hmm, this could be tricky. Well, Aunt Sieglinde's sort of an institution. That's close enough." Actually, she was not his aunt. But, as a member of the extended Ciano-Kuroda-Taggart clan, Derek had access to the legendary Sieglinde, and the right to address her as his aunt. It had been her genius that had pulled the Confederacy's chestnuts out of the fire in the space war three decades before.
"Ethelred, what are chestnuts and why do they need to be pulled out of fires?"
The computer made an electronic sigh. Derek often asked such questions. "It is an archaic and largely meaningless metaphor indicating—"
"Never mind. Do we have the power to accelerate and brake one of those eggs all the way from here to the Academy?"
"Fuel level is insufficient, but the ship can make it within distress call range of Avalon."
"Not good enough," Derek said. "They'd send out a tug to take us in tow and they'd detect all the extra mass. Will my credit cover a fuel delivery and transfer?" He studied Saturn again. Through the curved square of his main viewport, it looked like a holographic projection.
"No. In fact, the emergency service will probably impound this vessel until you pay the towing bill."
"Probably. Sometimes I think we carry this free enterprise stuff too far." Immediate credit was the rule in the Belt, and the entrepreneurs of Avalon were more demanding than most others. Derek tossed the drink bulb into the recycler and punched in another. As he sipped the drink he told himself that, at this rate, he would be an old drunk before his time. The thought of old drunks gave him the much-needed inspiration.
"Ethelred, how about the Ciano Museum? Will our fuel get us that far?" This might work out better, if he could pull it off.
"If we leave within twenty-four hours."
"Then let's button up and head for the base vessel." He strapped himself into his acceleration couch while all loose objects were automatically secured. His head was swimming with thoughts, plans, schemes, counter-schemes and just plain fear. A few hours before, he had been despairing over his boring, dead-end job. Now, he was in the middle of the biggest drama he could have imagined. Life in the Belt, he reflected, never stayed dull for long.
The base vessel, "mamaship" to its dependents, was a cluttered complex of modules and engines, constantly changing in configuration. Ships usually had names, but larger ones could be broken down into a number of smaller vessels, limited only by the number of engines available. Only the smallest vessels, like Derek's Cyrano, retained their identity throughout the vessel's lifetime.
Derek's mamaship was the Jardine, named for an illustrious nineteenth-century opium smuggler to whom the McNaughtons claimed kinship. Jardine orbited Titan, occasionally firing canisters of gene-engineered bacteria into the giant moon's murky atmosphere. The bacteria were transforming the atmosphere and surface of Titan into something inhabitable by humans. Real colonization was slated to begin within the next generation. Already, it was possible to see the surface from orbit. When Derek was born, the atmosphere had still been opaque, resembling thin tomato soup.
After a tricky braking maneuver, Derek left one of his finds in Titan orbit with a locator, to be picked up later. With the other, he proceeded to Jardine. When he was still a few minutes out, the face of his first-line supervisor appeared in the holo tank.
"Kuroda, why are you back so soon? Are you having mechanical difficulties? I remind you that the company accepts only limited responsibility for the repair of vessels personally owned by employees."
"Oh, blow it out your—" He took a deep breath and started over. "Solo explorer craft Cyrano, Derek Kuroda commanding, returning to base vessel Jardine with alien artifact aboard."
The supervisor didn't seem to hear him. "State your reason for returning early, Kuroda."
There was no talking to a company man. "I said I have an alien artifact aboard, goddamn it! Get me the base director right now!"
"You have a what?" Obviously, the supervisor wasn't equipped to handle anything unexpected. Abruptly, a new face appeared in the holo tank, this one broad and black.
"Base Director Helen Jackson here. What's this about an alien artifact?" He knew her by reputation. Jackson had been a Marine in the Earth forces during the war. Taken as a POW, she had opted to stay in the Confederacy after cessation of hostilities. She was probably somebody he could deal with.
"Just what I said. I picked it up on Rhea. All the tests I could make say it's not of human origin. It's a bit massive, so I have to brake easy."
"Can you make it into the Emergency Dock?" She was all business, as if she had handled this sort of thing before.
"Sure. No difficulty there."
"I'll have it cleared. When you're secured, stay right where you are and I'll meet you with a research team. Does this thing look in any way dangerous?"
"It seems to be inert." He sent her a holo of the ovoid in its actual size. "Look at the rough readings."
Her brow became a mass of wrinkles as she read the figures. "Never seen anything like that. Nothin's that dense!"
An hour later, she came aboard with her team. The group crowded Cyrano's tiny interior space. Two wore some sort of protective clothing and carried between them a container that looked like a baby bank vault. They all looked at the egg with awe. In zero-gee it floated like everything else, but their instruments proclaimed its utter alienness.
"I want this kept secret," said a man who wore blue collar tabs. The Confederacy made little use of uniforms or insignia, but Derek figured he was some kind of official.
"Whaffor?" Jackson said. "The Confederacy has no Official Secrets Act that I ever heard of."
"There must be an exception for this," the man insisted stuffily. "This is an event of the first magnitude and it may be of vital strategic significance to the Confederacy."
"Are we at war?" Derek asked. "I hadn't heard."
"Of course we aren't at war!" snapped blue-tabs. "But scientific data constitute vital intelligence which may be crucial in any future conflict."
"That true, Ethelred?" Derek asked.
"Truth of the statement is immaterial," the computer answered. "Free exchange of scientific information is one of the bedrocks of Confederate policy and any infringement of it is quite illegal."
"The law was never intended to extend to such events as this!" blue-tabs insisted. "To noise this about would be totally irresponsible. It will draw every Earthie agent in the solar system!"
"Nonetheless, that's how policy stands," Jackson said. "I just looked up state policy for this kind of discovery. It says any such objects are to be transferred to Aeaea for analysis." She turned to a subordinate. "Cut loose the Carnegie, sober up her skipper, and send her to Aeaea with this thing immediately."
"I shall protest," said blue-tabs.
"Knock yourself out," said Jackson, affably. When the others were gone she turned to Derek. "Just in the thirty-odd years I been out here, we got bureaucrats, functionaries, all that stuff. The business kind are bad enough. The government kind are worse."
"I don't know what the procedure is," Derek said, "but I'm quitting. I'm heading back toward Avalon as soon as I get clearance."
She cocked an eyebrow at him. It was an Earthie gesture that the spaceborn didn't have. "Wanna get there ahead of the artifact? Figure you can snag all the glory, have all the holorecorders on you when it gets unveiled?"
He bristled but restrained himself. "Sure, why not? How many people get a chance like this? I'd be a fool to pass it up."
She shrugged, another piece of Earthie body language. "Nothin' to me. Seein's you didn't make it to your first payday, I don't have to worry about paying you. Law says any man wants to quit his job he's free to do it." She began to leave, then turned at the hatch. "You figure on dropping in on old Sieglinde?"
He hadn't expected that. "Why do you mention her?"
"Because I know how tight your clan is. And I think you're holding something back. Now, was we back on Earth, you might be under arrest right now, answering some hard questions. As it is, you're free to go. When you see her, tell her Helen Jackson says hello."
"You know Sieglinde?" he asked, realizing as he said it how stupid the question sounded.
"Sure, I known Linde since I first come out here. She got me my first job with McNaughton, after I got out of the POW pen. You take care now." She drifted out through the hatch, a bulky, gray-haired woman who would never look like anything but an Earthie.
Within the hour he was on his way to artifact number two.
The Ciano Museum was a featureless hunk of rock drifting in a solar orbit not far from Avalon, as distances were calculated in the Belt. Fortunately for Derek, it was, at this time, somewhat closer to the termination of his route from Rhea than was Avalon. He knew his luck was holding when he saw that there were no ships parked near the museum. It was a popular site for school outings. He hit the museum frequency.
"Roseberry? Are you there?" He waited a few minutes, then an incredibly ancient face appeared in his holo tank. It was extravagantly wrinkled and surrounded by wispy white hair and whiskers. Roseberry, who had only one name, was believed to be the oldest human in existence. He was nearly two centuries old and living proof that longevity and hard drinking were not mutually exclusive.
''Well, if it ain't young Dmitri! How you doing, boy?"
"Dmitri was my uncle, Roseberry," Derek said. "He's been dead for twenty years. "
"Wait a minute, I'll get it in a minute! Derek! That's it, ain't it? Ivan and Mitsuko's boy?"
He grinned. "That's right. How's it going, Roseberry?"
"Dull, just like always. Since the war, it's all been dull. Hardly anybody ever comes by. Even the kids. They don't bother to teach young folks about the past anymore." He sighed heavily.
Derek knew better than to contradict him. The old man had probably conducted about a thousand schoolchildren through the museum in the last ten days, but to mention it was to invite an hour-long harangue on the neglect of the younger generation.
"What brings you by, Derek? I know you seen this place plenty of times."
"Well, I thought we'd have a drink," he saw how the old man's eyes lit up, "and I wanted to talk to you about something exciting. It's the most exciting news since the war. I knew there was only one man to come to with this.''
The old man began to cackle. "Well, you come to the right place, all right! Dock your ship and come aboard and tell old Roseberry all about it."
Twenty minutes later, Derek exited Cyrano. The museum had a spin sufficient to create a faint artificial gravity. With the gliding, low-grav walk of the spacer he passed the holographic image of Ugo Ciano and threw the tiny man a respectful salute. Ciano looked like a miniature King Lear, with his swirling white hair and beard and his perpetual furious glare. Ugo Ciano had been the Newton of the space age, and never shy about admitting the fact.
"Come on in, Derek," Roseberry called. "I got the sake all heated up."
Derek went to the old man's quarters, just off the dock. Even seeing the old derelict so close, Derek still felt a sense of awe. Roseberry had lived through the entire span of man's expansion into space. He had known all the giants: Sam Taggart and Ugo Ciano, Martin Shaw, Thor Taggart and Sieglinde Kornfeld. It was even rumored that, as an infant, he had sat on the lap of Wernher von Braun. Even Derek didn't believe he was that old. They sipped sake for a few minutes before Roseberry, unable to contain his curiosity, broke the silence.
"Come on, what you got for me?"
This was touchy, but Derek knew that Thor and Sieglinde had put the museum, once Ugo's personal lab, under Roseberry's care because they considered the old drunk to be absolutely trustworthy.
"Rosesberry, I've found it. What everybody's been searching for. Out there in my ship I have an alien artifact."
In the blink of an eye, the old man sobered. "You wait right here. I got a couple of things I gotta do."
"I need to talk to Sieglinde," Derek said, "secretly."
"That's one of the things I gotta do," Roseberry said. "I have to set up a meet between you and her. Other thing is, you gotta talk to Ugo."
Derek groaned. Ugo had been dead for almost a century. He had left behind numerous holographs of himself, dispensing advice and orders. All of his descendants had to endure them.
"This is one nobody ever seen before," Roseberry insisted, "not even me. It's for when one of you finds the alien artifact. He always knew it'd be someone of his blood."
"That's because he was crazy!" Derek protested. "It was pure chance I stumbled across this."
"Ugo had him some theories about chance," Roseberry said. "He always held there was rules to chance that most of us didn't understand. Must've been something to it. Man played a mean crap game. Couldn't play poker worth a damn, not like old Sam could. Too much skill and what Sam called human interaction to that, but Ugo could always ace 'em at craps and blackjack, because it was all chance, you see. He—"
"Okay," Derek said. "Go warm up Ugo's holo. It'll be something to see a new one." He thought for a moment. "And tell Sieglinde I'm out of fuel."
"You know what old Ugo used to say about his kids when they called up from all over out of fuel and credit?"
"I can imagine."
"Well, lemme go make my calls. I'll send Ugo in. Then I want to see that artifact. It got any writing on it? Anything like that?"
"Nothing like that, but it's plenty weird."
"Hot Damn!" Chuckling, Roseberry hurried off on his errands.
Without preamble, Ugo Ciano was in the room with him. The tiny man was, as always, ebullient and manic, positively erupting with energy. "So you done it! Congratulation! Jesus, I envy you, kid!" How did he know the discoverer would be young? Derek wondered. "Now, lissen up. You just found out we ain't alone. Philosophically, that's the greatest discovery ever made. See, all the big discoveries are the ones that change how we see the universe. Mostly, they're made by big geniuses like Newton and Darwin and me, but sometimes an ordinary jerk will find something that changes everything. That's what happened to you." The grating Brooklynese dialect still sounded awful after a hundred years.
"We useta live in a cozy little world," Ugo lectured on. "It only stretched as far as the horizon and we was right in the middle of it, with the sun going around us. Copernicus theorized, and Kepler and Galileo further demonstrated, that we wasn't the center of anything, that the universe didn't revolve around us. Other astronomers showed that we was just riding on a dirtball way the bleedin' hell out on the edge of a second-rate galaxy." He punctuated his speech with explosive, extravagant gestures that set him spinning in zero-gee.
"Darwin came along and showed that the universe wasn't created for us, that we just evolved right along with everything else. That was some blow to the collective ego right there. Then along came Freud, and he hypothesized that there was whole big chunks of our own minds we had no knowledge of, that we just had an imperfect understanding of the conscious part." He stopped spinning and held up a cautionary finger. "Now, what you gotta remember is, all these people got their butts kicked for demonstrating these unwelcome facts. You just found out that we ain't alone in the universe, that God or nature or whatever don't consider humanity to be the ultimate product. So prepare to get your butt kicked.
"Now, don't get too alarmed," he said, conspiratorially. "After the initial butt-kick period, you can make a pretty good deal outa this. Freud did. And look at me!" He threw his arms wide, as if inviting inspection. "All my dumb but highly placed colleagues said I was crazy. But I'm richer than all of 'em put together and I've already outlived all but a few!" He went into convulsions of chortling, then shut it off abruptly and went dead serious.
"The next part's for if you was alone when you found whatever it was. Keep it to yourself for as long as you can until you got some real understanding of what it is. It's gonna be a real power for human motivation, even if it's just a piece of rock with alien writing or something. If it's real evidence of a technology superior to ours, it can be truly explosive. But, above all," he waggled the admonitory finger again, "publish it all over hell and die doing it before you let it become a government or corporate secret. That kind of thing can be a death sentence for all humanity."
"Be careful who you trust. If you trust nobody, you might as well be dead, but there's no sense overdoing it. Trust your close family, except for the ones you can't stand. In-laws don't count. You can trust Roseberry, if he's still alive. If you go public right away, it goes to everybody: Earth, the planets, the orbiting colonies. I don't care what your political situation is. One last thing." He glared into empty space as if trying to project his will into the far future. Which, in a sense, he was doing.
"If you're already in other solar systems and you found your alien artifact there, no sweat. But, if you found it somewhere in ours, remember this: They can come back someday." The image winked out. Derek let out a long-pent breath. Listening to a Ciano lecture was as strenuous as a bout of zero-gee wrestling.