Michael Flynn: The January Dancer

But he was talking to the wind. O’Toole was already clambering down the ladder from the gig, and Tirasi had leaped into the pit to brush sand away from the buried object. “Big,” the system tech muttered. “Big.”

Too big, January noted of the portion thus far revealed. The boats would never lift it, not all of them combined. “Not every prehuman artifact,” January tried again, “has made money for its finders. House of Chan had the Ourobouros Circuit for most of a lifetime and could never make it do anything. After Chan Mirslaf died, they sold it as a curio for half what they spent experimenting on it.”

“Hey,” said Tirasi. “This thing’s translucent!”

“And the Cliffside Montage on Alabaster sits in the middle of a plain, visible for leagues, so the Planetary Council can’t even fence it off and charge an admission fee.” January sighed and crossed his arms.

“Well, Cap’n,” said Maggie B., proving someone had been listening, “we won’t know till we know what it is, will we?”

O’Toole arrived from the gig and paced round the circumference of the pit, whistling and exclaiming. A big, blocky, thick-fingered man, he always moved with unexpected grace and dexterity, even when—or especially when—he had hoisted a few pots of beer.

“So let’s not get our hopes up before we know what we have,” January said. “How many prehuman discoveries have been nothing more than empty chambers or the shells of buildings?”

“There was an entire city on Megranome,” Maggie recalled. “And near as we could figger, it was formed as a single structure, with no seams or joints. We used to go over there when I was a kid and play in the ruins, pertending the prehumans was still there, hidin’ ’round the next corner.” She laughed, then turned suddenly, as if startled, and her gaze swept the open desert. “Wonder where they all went to. The prehumans, I mean.”

January shrugged. “Who cares? No matter.”

“We usta call ’em ‘the folk of sand and iron.’ Nobody knew why. Makes our reason fer stoppin’ here a little weird, don’t ya think?”

“Stuff and nonsense,” said January. “They were gone long before humans went to space.”

O’Toole had finished his circuit of the pit and had returned to where they stood. “Don’t ye believe it, Cap’n,” he said. “They tell stories. On Die Bold, on Friesing’s World, specially on Old ’Saken. Hell, half the Old Planets have stories o’ th’ prehumans.”

Maggie B. nodded vigorously. “Some of them old legends are so old they been forgot.”

January snorted. “Myths, you mean. Legends, fables. I’ve heard them. If any two of them describe the same creatures—if any two stories even fit together logically—they’d be the first two. We don’t know when the prehumans were around, or for how long. We don’t know if they ruled this quarter of the galaxy or only roamed through it. There’s probably a tall tale to cover every possibility. People can’t tolerate the inexplicable. So they tell a story or sing a song. All we’ve ever found were their artifacts. No human ever saw them in life.”

“They mayn’t been even life as we know it,” said Maggie B. “Mebbe, they was fluorine life or silicon life or somethin’ we ain’t never figgered on.”

“Silicon, eh?” said O’Toole. “Now, I’m not after hearin’ that one. Hey, maybe they nivver disappeared. Maybe, they just crumbled into sand and”—he waved his arm over the surrounding desert—“and maybe that’s all what’s left o’ th’ fookin’ lot uv ’em.” The quickening wind stirred the sand, lifting and tumbling granules as if they were dancing.

“And maybe,” said Tirasi from the pit, “you can jump down here, Slug, and help me dig the bloody thing out!”

Tirasi always managed to slip under O’Toole’s skin, not least of all by abbreviating the man’s nickname. Physically opposite, they were much alike in spirit, and so repelled each other, as a man spying himself in a fun-house mirror might step backward in alarm. From time to time, they debated whether “Slugger” or “Fighting Bill” were the weightier epithet, with the question still undetermined. Slugger was a bull; Fighting Bill a terrier. The pilot leapt into the pit with the system tech, and they both dug and brushed the sand off the artifact using their hands.

January shook his head. “And Mgurk has the shovel, and he’s not about. Maggie, you dig some more around that thing. See how big it is and—maybe—you’ll find that ore body while you’re at it.” This last was intended sarcastically, to remind them why they were beached on this forsaken world in the first place. The artifact wasn’t going anywhere, and if they didn’t complete the repairs, New Angeles wasn’t either.

Maggie moved the backhoe a little farther off and began to probe for the edge of the artifact. Her digger came down too hard into the sand and struck a still-buried portion of it. It rang like a great bass bell, a little muffled, but loud enough that the two men in the pit clapped their hands to their ears. January, who had been searching for some sign of Mgurk’s dull red skinsuit, noticed the sand vibrate into ridges and waves half a league away.

About where the mass detector had located the “ore-body’s” closest approach to the surface.

January had a sudden vision of the artifact as a buried city, all of one piece, honeycombing the entire planet, and that Tirasi and O’Toole would grub about it forever, brushing the sand from it, inch by inch.

“We ought to go look for Johnny,” he began uneasily, and then stopped with his words in his throat, for three dull clangs reverberated from within the buried shell. Tirasi and O’Toole started and scrambled back from it. Maggie made the sign of the wheel across her body and muttered, “The Bood preserve us!” After a few moments, the clangs were repeated. “Ye turned it on somehow,” O’Toole told the system tech.

“Or you did,” Tirasi answered. He began to brush furiously at the sand that covered the thing, clearing a space. Then, shading his eyes with his hands, he pressed his face to the translucent surface. “I can see inside, a little. There are shapes, shadows. Irregular, ugly. Can’t quite make them…Aah!” He scrambled back in alarm. “One of ’em moved! It’s them! This is where they all went to! Holy Alfven help me!” He began to clamber out of the pit, but O’Toole grabbed his arm. “You were right about the ‘ugly,’” he said, pointing.

And there, with his face pressed to the inner surface of the shell, was Johnny Mgurk and the shovel with which he had been beating the walls.

The entrance was in the cleft, of course, obscured by the shadows in a fault in the southern face—a darker opening in the darkness.

New Angeles had come back over the horizon by then, and January informed Micmac Anne what had happened, cautioning her not to tell Hogan and Malone lest, transfixed by visions of easy wealth, they abandon ship and drop planetside in the lighter.

January thought at least one of his crew should stand guard outside the entrance. In case. In case of what, he couldn’t say, which did nothing to win their assent. The others thought he wanted to cut them out of a share in the treasure, which by now had in their minds achieved Midas-like proportions. All was decided when Mgurk appeared in the entry and said, in his execrable Terran argot, “Hey, alla come-come, you. Jildy, sahbs. Dekker alla cargo, here. We rich, us.” And so they all hurried after him.

January was the last to enter, and the clambering footsteps of the others had faded before he reached the point where the cave became a tunnel with a flattened footpath. He passed an enormous white stripe on the wall, three man-lengths high and a double arm’s-length wide. January had barely registered the peculiar dimensions when it struck him that it was the edge of a sliding door nestled into a slot in the rock. Yes, there was the matching slot on the other side of the passage. Pulled out, the door would seal off the entrance. January was impressed. That was one thick door.