Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

Toward the end, as she grew desperate, she’d spoken to none of us. With Morgan’s encouragement, the men joked about her. It was odd: usually in such a situation, the women in a group would have been protective. But Chung and I only stood aside and watched. Maybe we were embarrassed that she didn’t just tell him to take a hike.

Maybe she did. One day she was simply no longer there.

Morgan hadn’t mentioned her on the long flight out. At least not to me. But he was right. Somehow the thing on the plain did suggest Jennifer. Not physically, of course. It resembled no human woman. But it was, I thought, so terribly alone.

“ You getting a good look at the inscription? ” asked Smitty.

“Yeah….” Steinitz waved at me and I went close with the camera. Three lines of sharp, white characters that might almost have been Cyrillic were stenciled within the icy coating. They looked vaguely Russian.

Steinitz’s breathing was harsh. He leaned over and peered at the symbols. Touched the artifact with his fingertips. Drew them across the surface as if the object were sacred. He moved his wrist lamp slowly from side to side. The letters brightened, lengthened, shifted.

“Nice piece of optics,” I said.

“Yeah. I wonder what it says.”

I turned and looked across the wide level plain. We were on Iapetus, one of the moons of Saturn, as remote a place as I ever care to be. It was of course absolutely still. During the time we were there, which was about four days, it was always a dark place with bright lights in the sky. Over a distant ridge we could see Saturn and its rings, and some other moons. Iapetus, of course, is well outside the ring system, so you get a magnificent view.

Other than whatever had made the statue, and occasional falling debris, nothing had moved on this dreary world for a million years. There’s no weather, and no seismic activity. Since Iapetus is in tidal lock, even Saturn doesn’t move. From our point of view at the foot of the artifact, the big planet was quite close to the horizon, a brilliant red-orange sphere, flattened at the poles, slightly larger than the Moon in Earth’s skies. The rings were tilted toward us, a brilliant panorama of greens and blues, sliced off sharply by the planetary shadow. Immediately beneath it, the landscape had erupted into broken towers of ice and rock, as though tidal forces had run wild. Saturn was in its first quarter.

“ How old is the thing, Jay? ” came the voice from the ship. “ Any ideas? ”

Steinitz walked around the base, and stopped on the far side. “No marks in the snow. And the snow’s probably untouched for what, thirty, forty thousand years? It’s been here a long time, Smitty. Fact is, the damned thing looks new.”

My feet were getting cold. The temperature outside the suit was in the area of three hundred below, and the pump was having trouble keeping up with it.

We poked and measured and speculated. But we took no samples. After awhile, Steinitz informed Smitty that we were ready to return to the landing site.

“ Okay, Jay, ” Smitty said. “ We’re starting Cathie down. ”

“All right.”

“ She’ll be coming down about fifty meters from your artifact. You’ve got about forty minutes. ”

“Fine. We’ll get the tarps up.”

“ Maybe it would be better if she didn’t try to get so close. I’d hate to have her fall on top of the goddamn thing. ”

They were talking about our operational center and living quarters, an Athena —one of five in the linkup—with its fuel storage tanks converted into crew space, and just enough propellant to get down. It would serve as our shelter and remain after we left, a new artifact for any other visitor who might wander by. It would, I suspected, one day be named for Steinitz.

“Do it the way we planned it, Smitty,” he said. “It’s cold down here.”

We’d used a sledge to haul a supply of canvas with us. It was clumsy, but we got it over the statue, over Jennifer as everyone was now calling her. We lashed it tight, and added a second tarp.

When we’d finished, we rested briefly, and started back to the lander to wait for Chung. Iapetus was in its long night. No sun would be visible for three weeks,

“Long way from home,” said Steinitz.

We spent the next few hours setting up our shelter. When it was done, I was glad to move in out of the cold and get the doors shut behind me and climb out of the suit.

Cathie Chung got the coffee going. There was a big central compartment to serve as command center and dining room. And a place to collapse. Blankets were stacked on a computer frame. I took one and pulled it over my shoulders.

Designers back home must have thought we’d want a place with a view. The bulkheads were, for the most part, transparent. Privacy wasn’t an issue, but something else about not being able to get away from that moonscape, that figure , was unsettling. The artifact remained hidden by its canvas wrapping. But I knew what was under it. I kept looking out at it, and past it at the plain beyond, and at a distant cluster of broken peaks.

Steinitz and Morgan were talking in whispers, discussing the composition of the snow. I got up and activated the filters. The plain, and Jennifer , vanished. Nobody seemed to mind. I wasn’t sure anybody even noticed.

The evening started to wind down. Morgan put the artifact on his viewer but I could tell his mind was elsewhere. (I wondered if he was thinking of Jennifer. The real one.) I pushed down into my blanket to keep warm. Steinitz closed his eyes and let his head sink back. His hair had silvered noticeably during the long flight out, and his skin was hard and pocked, not unlike the moons among which he was making his reputation. He’d left Earth with a mild case of asthma, too much weight, and probably too many years. There were some who felt he shouldn’t have come at all. But none among the crew. Except maybe Morgan, who didn’t like any kind of authority.

“Whoever made it,” Chung said, looking at the image over Morgan’s shoulder, “knew what they were doing.” She was tall, quiet, intense. Spoke English with a mild Chinese inflection. At twenty-four, she was the youngest crew member and, I suspected, the smartest. A support technician.

“Eventually,” Morgan said, “it’ll wind up in a museum back home.”

“It would look pretty good,” I said. “It amazes me they were able to get that kind of articulation out of a piece of ice.”

“It just looks like ice,” said Steinitz. “That’s just the surface. It’s really rock.”

Morgan looked around at us. “Or that kind of impact ,” he said. “How would you like to have something like that come down on you in a dark alley?”

Chung’s eyes flickered, and I felt it too. The remark was uncharacteristic of Morgan, who never admitted to human weakness, other than lust, and certainly not to timidity.

“You think that’s what they looked like?” I asked. It wasn’t the first time the question had come up. It had been a subject of heated discussion for years. Ever since the first probe had noticed it almost two decades earlier.

“Probably,” said Chung.

Steinitz frowned. “Anything’s possible. But I’d bet it’s purely symbolic. Someone’s equivalent of an American eagle. Or a Russian bear.”

Morgan shook his head. “It’s God,” he said.

That was a common notion among academics, although you didn’t hear it much on the media. Too many people got upset. Sponsors got boycotted. There were a lot of people who thought the creator of the universe was an old-looking guy with a white beard.