Jack McDevitt: Cauldron

“Daddy, are you going to send a message back?” she’d asked. He was home by then, exhausted, but planning to change clothes and return to the Center.

“No,” he said. “They’re too far away, love.”

“Even to just talk to them? They sent us a message. Why can’t we send one back?”

“Do you know about the pharaohs?” he asked.

“In Egypt?” Her dark eyes clouded with puzzlement. What did pharaohs have to do with anything? She was a beautiful child. Armed with her mother’s looks. But she had his brain. She’d be a heartbreaker one day.

“Yes. Do you know how long ago that was? King Tut and all that?”

She thought about it. “A long time,” she said.

“Thousands of years.”

“Yes. Why can’t we talk to the Sigmas?”

“Because they’re not there anymore,” he said. “They’re dead a long time ago. They were dead long before there were pharaohs.”

She looked baffled. “The people who sent the message died before there were pharaohs?”

“Yes. I don’t think there’s much question about that. But they weren’t really people.”

“I don’t understand. If they died that long ago, how could they send us a message?”

“It took a long time for the message to get here.”

Her dark eyes got very round. “I think it’s sad that we can’t say hello back to them.”

“I do, too, sweetheart,” he said. He looked at her and thought how she had touched ultimate truth. “They’re starting to build very fast ships. Maybe one day you’ll be able to go look.”

François St. John did not like the omega. It lay beneath him, dark and misty and gray. And ominous, like an approaching thunderstorm in summer. It was a vast cloudscape, illuminated by internal lightning. It seemed to go on forever.

They’d measured it, estimated its mass, taken its temperature, gleaned samples from deeper inside than anyone had been able to penetrate before, and they were ready to start for home.

The omega, despite appearances, was by no means adrift. It was racing through the night at a velocity far exceeding anything possible for an ordinary dust cloud, running behind the hedgehog, its trigger, closing on it at a rate of about thirteen kilometers per day. In approximately three thousand years it would overtake the object and hit it with a lightning strike. When it did, the trigger would explode, igniting the cloud, and the cloud would erupt in an enormous fireball.

The omegas were the great enigma of the age. Purpose unknown. Once thought to be natural objects, but no more. Not since the discovery of the hedgehogs twenty years earlier. Nobody knew what they were or why they existed. There wasn’t even a decent theory, so far as François was aware. The lightning was drawn by the right angles incorporated into the design of the hedgehogs. The problem was that anything with a right angle, if it got in the path of the cloud, had better look out.

He was surprised by the voice behind him. “Almost done, François. Another hour or so, and we can be on our way.”

It was Benjamin Langston. The team leader. He was more than a hundred years old, but he still played tennis on weekends. There had been a time when people at that age routinely contemplated retirement. “You got anything new, Ben?”

Ben ducked his head to get through the hatch onto the bridge. It was an exaggerated gesture, designed to show off. He enjoyed being the tallest guy on the ship. Or the most put-upon. Or the guy whose equipment was least reliable. Whenever anyone had a story about women, or alcohol, or close calls, Ben always went one better. But he knew how to speak plain English, which set him apart from most of the physicists François had been hauling around these last few years.

“Not really,” he said. “We’ll know more when we get home. When we can do some analysis.” He had red hair and a crooked smile. He’d probably injured his jaw at some point.

“I have to admit, Ben,” François said, “that I’ll be happy to be away from the thing. I don’t like going anywhere near it.” The Jenkins was supposed to be safe for working around an omega. The Prometheus Foundation, its owner, had rebuilt her several years ago, taking away the outer shell and replacing it with a rounded hull. No right angles anywhere. Nothing to stir the monster. But he’d seen the holos, had watched the massive lightning bolts reach out and strike target objects left in its path. The thing was scary.

He looked down at the cloudscape. It felt as if there were something solid immediately beneath the gray mist, as if they were gliding over a planetary surface. But people who’d done work around omegas said that was always the impression. One of the uncanny features of the omega was its ability to hang together. You would have expected it to dissipate, to blur at the edges. But the clouds weren’t like that. Ben had commented that they had nearly the cohesion of a solid object.

In fact, Ben admired the damned things. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” he said. He sounded awed.

That wasn’t the way François would have described it. But he pretended to agree. “Yes,” he said. “Beautiful.” Dead ahead, and deep within the cloud, a red glow appeared, expanded, brightened, and finally faded. It lasted only a few moments, then it was gone, and they saw nothing except their own navigation lights, captured and blurred in the mist.

It happened all the time, silent flowerings of ruby light.

They talked about incidentals, about the long ride home, which would take approximately three weeks, and how good it would be to get out of their cramped quarters. Ben admitted that he missed his classes. He was one of those very occasional academic types who seemed to enjoy the give-and-take of a seminar. His colleagues usually talked about it as if it were a menial task imposed by an unthinking university interested only in making money.

“ François. ” The AI’s voice.

“Yes, Bill, what have you got?”

“ Cloud’s changing course. ”

“What?” That wasn’t possible.

“ I’ve been watching it for several minutes. There’s no question. It’s moving to port, and below the plane. ”

It couldn’t happen. The clouds stayed relentlessly in pursuit of their triggers unless they were distracted by something else. The lines of a city, perhaps. But there were certainly no cities anywhere nearby. And no gravity fields to distract it.

“It’s picked up a geometric pattern here somewhere,” said Ben. He peered at the images on the monitors. “Has to be.” But there was nothing in any direction save empty space. For light-years. “François, ask Bill to do a sweep of the area.”

François nodded. “Bill?”

“ We need to get out in front of it. ”

Ben made a face. “We’ll lose contact with the probe if we do that.”

François wasn’t sure what kind of data the probe was collecting. The only thing that had mattered to him was that it was the last one. He looked at Ben. “What do you want to do?”

“Are we sure the cloud’s really changing course?”

“ Yes. ”

“Then let’s find out why.”

“Okay,” François said. He gave instructions to the AI, and the sound of the engines began to intensify. He switched on the allcom. “Leah, Eagle, Tolya, strap down. We’re going to be executing a maneuver in a minute.”

Leah was Mrs. Langston. Like Ben, she was a specialist in various aspects of the clouds, physical structure, nanotech systems, propulsion. The objective of the mission was to learn something about their makers, who they were, what their capabilities were, why they sent the damned things out into the Orion Arm. Into the entire galaxy for all anyone knew.