Stephen Dedman: Tour de Force

Illustration by Ron Chironna

The road to Kalbarri looked as though it hadn’t been improved since the turn of the century, and the Niva parked at the pump ahead of me was covered with dust the color of bad sunburn. I was sure it wasn’t Sergei—nothing would have persuaded him to drive a Russian car this far from a city, not even Ultra Secret—but I sat there and practiced pretending not to know him for a few seconds before opening the door. That was a mistake; I’d thought Perth was hot, but this was torture, and I almost wished I’d worn a skirt. At least they’d done something about the flies.

There was a youngish blond couple slumped in the snack bar when I went in to pay for the petrohol. The old woman behind the counter took my Visa card and stared—I almost expected her to bite it, to see if the gold was real—and then scuttled out the back to phone the bank; I guess she’d never seen a rich aborigine before. The blonds looked up, glanced through the window at my car, and the man asked, “Are you headed north?” He spoke English far better than any Australian I’d ever heard, with a very slight hint of an accent; Bavarian, if I’m any judge.

“Yeah. You on holiday?”

“Yes,” the woman replied. “Monkey Mia, to see the dolphins. Have you been there?”

“No.” I speak a few dozen words of Delphic, about as much as any human knows, but I’d never had a chance to use it; the dolphins are too busy smiling for tourists to have any time for linguists. I guess it pays better, and they need the money: suing the whaling industry must be costing them a fortune.

“You’re not—from around here?” asked the man. He only hesitated for an instant, but I’m sure he was about to say “a native.”

“No,” I replied. “My mother was from Sydney, but I was born in Vancouver, and I’ve lived most of my life in the US. Have you been here before?”

“No.”

“Look out for the grids across the road. Some of the local farmers aren’t fond of city people at the moment.” That was about as diplomatic as English can get. The stock market still hadn’t recovered from the impact of Lagva technology, and the badly burnt Australian banks were foreclosing on their loans and repossessing farms. The grids—ostensibly for keeping sheep in, not accountants out—and shotguns were among the milder measures being employed: some farmers preferred AK-47s, and one had been caught importing a 130mm Katyusha in a crate of farm machinery. A tourist who asked intelligent questions was recently mistaken for a plainclothes banker, and shot; fortunately, this sort of thing didn’t happen often.

The counterhand returned, her expression sour and skeptical. “Dr. van Elven?”

“Yes?” I replied, automatically. She handed my card back, rather reluctantly, and I glanced at my watch; twenty-seven hours in Australia, and I already hated the place. I turned to the tourists, and smiled. “Enjoy your holiday,” I said, before returning to my car.

Sergei was waiting at the campsite, incongruously attired in a dusty Akubra hat, wraparound shades, and khaki fatigues with more pockets than a troop of kangaroos. With him was a very tall, very thin man who resembled two large snakes looking for a caduceus, who Sergei introduced as Richard Barnes. I’d assumed he was Australian, but his accent was Houstonian with a twist of something vaguely familiar. “Okay,” I said, as we clambered into the air-conditioned cool of the hired RV. “You’ve dragged us all halfway around the world to one of the most forsaken spots on Earth at the worst possible time of year. So what’s the story?”

Barnes blinked. “You’re from the mainland too?”

“Yeah. Washington. This is my first time south of the equator; I was tromping through snow three days ago. I’m waiting, Sergei.”

He smiled. “I’m sorry, Sara; if it’d been up to me, I would’ve arranged for a private flight and a complete dossier, all this skulking around is a waste of time… but I wanted you on the team—”

“You haven’t told me anything yet.”

“We’ve found a spaceship in the rocks,” he said. “Not a Lagva ship, either. Our geologist—Kylie Chen, you’ll meet her at the site—thinks it’s been buried there for thirty thousand years, minimum.”

Sergei has been a spymaster for both the KGB and the CIA, in that order, and breaking things to people gently is not among his gifts. “Not Lagva?” I repeated, stupidly.

“No.”

“A Gahla’wat slave race?”

“I doubt it; they’re not wearing neckties.”

“They’re intact?”

“Very nearly so—and so’s the ship. It was found in a cave—an almost perfect sphere.” Barnes sniffed. “Okay, an oblate spheroid. A climber kicked through one of the walls by accident, and found the ship trapped inside, hardly a scratch on it. If I were a science fiction fan, I’d say that meant—” “A force field bubble,” I murmured, at the same moment, and whistled. Barnes began muttering in a creole of English and physics, but I ignored him: this was the biggest breakthrough since the Lagva started lending us their technical journals.

The Lagva have faster-than-light travel, artificial gravity (the two go together like tornadoes and trailer parks) and pocket antimatter power plants, but this was something they didn’t even have a word for. “Jesus. The climbers didn’t open it, did they?”

“No. It has windows.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No.” I glanced at Barnes, who nodded. “How big is this thing?”

“Tiny,” replied Sergei, before Barnes could answer. “Maybe twice the size of a Lagva singleship, not much bigger than an old Apollo Command-Supply Module. And the aliens are nearly three meters tall.”

“What happened to the guy who found it?” asked Barnes.

“Girls,” corrected Sergei. “A couple of Phys Ed majors from Perth. They just won an all-expenses-paid vacation on the moon.”

“ ‘In space,’ ” I muttered, “ ‘no one can hear you squeal.’ Why is this such a secret anyway?”

Sergei shook his head. ‘The next big breakthrough in physics? Look at the trade war the last one caused; you couldn’t walk down Wall Street without a stockbroker landing on you.”

“This isn’t tribal land, is it?” asked Barnes.

“No,” I replied. “It’s a National Park. No aborigine will go near the place.”

“Sacred?”

“No; just the opposite. Unlucky, tabu, bad medicine, cursed…Verboten. I don’t know the language well enough.”

“ You’re an aborigine,” Barnes pointed out.

“I’m three-sixteenths Koori. My ancestors came from Sydney; I doubt they ever traveled this far west. This is Yamidji land.”

He nodded. “Do you believe in sacred sites?”

“Hell, no,” I replied, smiling politely. “I always thought the Alamo would be a great place for a Taco Bell.”

Barnes flushed beneath his sunburn for a moment, and then looked out the window, pretending to be interested in the scenery. I suppose it wasn’t any more boring than Texas, at that. Or any more holy, or less Hellish.

There was a tiny Japanese 4WD and an even smaller Chinese woman waiting by the gorge. Sergei, who knows everyone who knows anything, introduced us: “Kylie Chen, Sara van Elven.” I shook her hand, admiring the calluses. Geologist, or paleontologist, or both. She had the almond-shaped eyes and serene smile of a statue of Buddha, the delicate beauty that Asian women seem to keep until they mysteriously fossilize overnight, and muscles like a T’ang bronze horse. A moment later, she showed us the way to the site, and I realized where the muscles had come from.