Charles Sheffield - Transcendence

“I know a good bit about odds.” Nenda’s voice was an expressionless growl. “This just don’t happen.”

“You know what it means?”

“It means we found Genizee. An’ it means you oughta get us the hell out of here. Fast. I hate welcomes.”

Rebka was ahead of him. He had taken the controls of the seedship even before Louis Nenda spoke, to send them farther away from the planet. As the ship responded to Rebka’s command, high-resolution images of both planet and moon filled the screen.

“Habitable.” Nenda’s curiosity was competing with his uneasiness. He was flanked by Kallik and J’merlia. Only Atvar H’sial, unable to see any of the displays, remained at the rear of the ship. “Five-thousand-kilometer radius. Spectrometers say plenty of oxygen, classifiers say eighteen percent land cover, forty percent water, forty-two percent swamps, imagers say three main continents, four mountain ranges but nothin’ higher than a kilometer, no polar caps. Wet world, warm world, flat world, plenty of vegetation. Looks like it could be rich.” His acquisitive instincts were awakening. “Wonder what it’s like down there.”

Hans Rebka did not reply. For some reason his attention had been drawn not to the parent planet, but to the images of its captive moon. The view that Darya Lang and Kallik had provided on the Erebus was from a long distance, so that all he had seen then was a small round ball, gleaming like a matte sphere of pitted steel. Now that same ball filled the screen.

His mind flew back to focus on Darya’s accelerated-time display, with the moon whirling around and the planet steady against a fixed background. And he realized what had been puzzling him then, below his threshold of awareness: any two freely-moving bodies — binary stars, or planet and moon, or anything else — revolved around their common center of gravity. For so large a satellite as this, that center of gravity would lie well outside the planet. So both bodies should have been moving against the more distant background, unless the moon had negligible mass, which would have to mean—

He stared at the image filling the screen, and now he could see that the pits and nodules on its surface were regularly spaced, its curvature perfectly uniform.

“Artificial! And negligible mass. Must be hollow !” The words burst out of him, though he knew that they would be meaningless to the others.

No matter. Soon they would learn it for themselves. Part of the moon’s surface was beginning to open. A saffron beam of light speared from it to illuminate the seedship. Suddenly their direction of motion was changing.

“What the hell’s going on here?” Nenda was pushing forward, grabbing at the controls.

Hans Rebka did not bother to stop him. It would make no difference. The ship’s drive was already at its maximum setting, and still they were going in the wrong direction. He stared out of the rear port. Instead of moving away from the moon and planet, they were being drawn toward it. And soon it was clear that this was more than a simple tractor beam, drawing them in to a rendezvous with the gleaming moon. Instead their trajectory was turning, under the combined force vector of the beam and the drive, taking them to a different direction in space.

Rebka looked and extrapolated, with the unconscious skill of a longtime pilot. There was no doubt about the result.

Wonder what it’s like down there, Louis Nenda had said. They were going to find out, and very soon. Like it or not, the seedship was heading for a rendezvous with Genizee. All they could do was sit tight and pray for the long shot of a soft landing.

Soft landing, or good-bye, life.

He thought of Darya Lang and felt sorrow. If he had known that this was coming, he would have said a decent farewell to her before he left the Erebus .

While Hans Rebka was remembering Darya and imagining their last good-bye, she was thinking of him and Louis Nenda in much less favorable terms.

They were self-centered, overbearing bastards, both of them. She had tried to tell them that she might be on the brink of a major discovery. And what had they done? Brushed her aside as though she were nothing, then at the first chance dashed off in search of Genizee — which she and Kallik had found for them — leaving her behind to fester on the Erebus and endure the babbling of E.C. Tally and the groveling of Dulcimer.

The Chism Polypheme was desperate to have another go at the power kernel. Julian Graves had ordered E.C. Tally not to release another radiation beam, so Darya was Dulcimer’s only hope. He pestered her constantly, ogling and smirking and offering her the unimaginable sexual delights that according to him only a mature Chism Polypheme could provide. If she would just crack open a kernel for him and let him soak in the beam for a few hours — a few minutes…

Darya retreated to the observation bubble and locked herself in. All she sought was solitude, but once that was achieved her old instincts took over. She went back to her interrupted study of the Anfract.

And once started, again she could not stop. With no Kallik to interrupt her work, she entered her own version of Dulcimer’s radiation high.

Call it research addiction.

There was nothing else remotely like it in the whole universe. The first long hours of learning, all apparently futile and unproductive. Then the inexplicable conviction that there was something hidden away in what you were studying, some unperceived reality just beyond reach. Then the creeping-skin sensation at the back of the neck — the lightning flash as a thousand isolated facts flew to arrange themselves into a pattern — the coherent picture that sprang into sharp focus. The bone-deep pleasure of other ideas, apparently unrelated, hurrying into position and becoming parts of the same whole.

She had felt that satisfaction a dozen times in as many years, in her work on the ancient Builder artifacts. One year earlier she had lost touch with that life, consumed by the excitement of pursuing evidence of the Builders themselves across the spiral arm and beyond. And less than a month ago, sure that her cerebral contentment was gone forever, she had gladly agreed to go with Hans Rebka.

Well, she had been wrong. Once a research worker, always a research worker. She didn’t have a hundredth the interest in the Zardalu that she was finding in the study of the Torvil Anfract. It was the most fascinating object in the universe.

And then, the paradox: as Darya tried to focus harder and harder on the Anfract, she found her mind turning away from it, again and again, back to her old studies of the Builders. It seemed like a lack of control, an irritating mental foil. The Builders were a distraction, just when she did not need one.

And then it hit her. The revelation.

The Anfract was a Builder artifact.

It was of a scale that dwarfed any other artificial structure in the spiral arm. The Anfract was a bigger project than the reconstruction of the Mandel system, bigger than the Builders’ out-of-galaxy creation of Serenity itself. Improbably big, impossibly big.

But the analogies with other artifacts, once seen, became undeniable. The light-focusing properties of Lens were here. So was the multiply-connected nature of Paradox. She recalled the Builder-made singularity in the Winch of the Dobelle Umbilical, and the knotted topology of Sentinel. They all had a correspondence with the structure of the Anfract.

And that meant—

Darya’s mind made the intuitive leap that reached beyond hard evidence. If the Anfract was a Builder construct, then the “natural” set of nested singularities around which the Erebus was orbiting was surely an artifact, too. But within it, according to Darya’s own analysis, lay the original Zardalu homeworld. If that was true, it could not be coincidence. There must be a far closer relationship than anyone had ever realized between the vanished Builders and the hated Zardalu.