Enigma (35 page)

Guerrieri raised his hands over his head. “I’ll get my E-suit.”

The 241 artifacts were together in one storage crib, the smaller ones individually bagged and filed, the larger ones individually boxed and stacked. Each object and container bore a glittery scanstrip, on which its file number and the location in which it had been found were encoded.

Inside the containers, Guerrieri and Koi found an array of metallic objects which might have come from an exotic hardware shop. Nearly all had moving parts—bits of tubing with integral flutter valves, variable-angle Y-connectors, pinless shear hinges, interlocking mushroom-shaped anchors. Yet the artifacts bore little evidence of use or wear, and their surfaces gleamed the same burnished blue-silver as the larger pieces still at Site 241. Guerrieri shook his head as he turned one over in his hand.

“Barbrice would be a lot more use to you with these than me,” he said, wearing an almost comic expression of befuddlement.

“She’s with the boss,” Koi said with calculated offhandness. But her mind was busy.
You know Thackery in a way she doesn’t—better maybe even than I do. You share a survivors’ bond, from
Descartes
and Gnivi—it’s why you came on this tour, whether you realize it or not. You knew him before the D’shanna took hold. You may be the only one who knows whether he’ll be able to give them up
.

“Lucky her,” Guerrieri said, returning the object he held to its envelope and reaching for another. With Koi looking on but saying little, he continued that process for more than an hour, even to uncrating the larger objects, though they proved no more illuminating than the small ones.

“I’ve seen enough if you have,” Guerrieri said when he had repacked the last case.

“I’m done,” she said agreeably. She did not mention that she had visited the storage crib electronically that morning, using the archival recordings of each object which Jankowski had mentioned.
It’s different when you hold them in your hand. More real—more convincing—I hope
.

“Can we head back now?” Guerrieri asked.

“Sure, if you promise to spill your thoughts on the way.”

“I was afraid you’d expect that.”

“Why?”

Guerrieri closed the warehouse door behind them, then stopped to turn up his suit ventilation and thereby dispel the fog that had formed on the inside of his faceplate. “There’s not much question that they go with the big artifact, and with each other,” he said as they started off down the street toward the Annex. “And they’re mechanical, structural—they were clearly meant to do things. But they don’t
make
anything. I don’t know what else I can say.”

“That may be enough.”

Guerrieri shook his head. “Don’t you understand? It’s still just bits and pieces. Where’s the rest of it? Unless your picture of what happened here includes street thieves and chop shops?”

“Hardly.”

“Then what happened to the structural material? The control surfaces, the spars, the stringers, the skin?”

Inwardly, Koi smiled.
That’s the first step—now you want to know what happened to something that two hours ago you said didn’t exist
. “It’s gone.”

“Gone where?”

“Into the ground.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The artifact was buried in basaltic lava. Even three miles from the nearest vent, that lava had to be a thousand degrees Celsius. The heat destroyed everything except what we’ve seen—everything that wasn’t made of tantalum-niobium.”

“You’re saying it survived the heat of a free-fall reentry and then was destroyed by the lava? That’s nuts.”

“Not at all. The nose cap and wing leading edges are the only areas which experience temperatures in the thousand to fifteen hundred degree range. All the other surfaces see less than a thousand degrees—most less then five hundred, and that only for a few minutes. But the lava would have taken days to cool. I ran the numbers.”

“And by the time it does, the rest of the spacecraft is gone—leaving the cavity the dig crew found,” Guerrieri said slowly. “So what did they use, then? What was the magic material?”

For an answer, Koi bent down, picked up a fragment of plaz, and handed it to him.

He ignored it and stared at her. “A glass spacecraft?”

“I wish it were that simple,” she said with a shake of her head. “That isn’t glass. It isn’t even almost-glass. There’s almost no silicon, almost no calcium, almost no sodium.”

“So what
is
in it?”.

“Oxygen and hydrogen, in a ratio of 8 to 1 by molecular weight and 1 to 2 by molecular count. And a few minor impurities—”

“Oxygen and hydrogen—that’s water.”

“Arranged in a long-chain tetrahedal crystal structure, with each oxygen atom bound to four hydrogen atoms.”

“Crystal structure—,” Guerrieri gaped at her. “That’s ice, goddamnit. What the hell are you trying to tell me? That’s ice, goddamnit all.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

Guerrieri’s protests ceased then, and he took a seat in the doorway of a ruined Wenlock home. “You choreographed this all very nicely,” he said in a subdued voice.

“Thank you.”

He looked hard at the piece of plaz in his hand. “I assume you ran through all my immediate objections yourself.”

“I went through a lot. I probably have you covered.”

“Not conventional Ice-1, of course. You’re talking about a metastable polymorphic form.”

She nodded. “Just like diamond is a metastable form of carbon—and as unlike the parent material as you could ask for. I’m glad I don’t have to give you a course in chemical polymorphism.”

“Oh, no—I spent a long night sweating over the phase diagram for water back in my Institute days.” He turned the plaz over and over in his hand slowly. “I can tell you this, nothing like this was on it.”

“Call it Ice X. Or maybe the impurities are important, and we should call it an alloy instead. We need to put a good X-ray crystallographer to work finding out.”

“It’s just possible. Just barely possible. Which means that maybe the Wenlock did build spacecraft after all—at least one.”

“No,” she said firmly. “This is not a Wenlock artifact.”

“Then what?”

“You know what it has to be.”

Guerrieri let the plaz slide from his hand to the pavement, and cocked his head to stare at her. “Please be gentle with me. My head hurts already.”

She smiled at his joke. “I’m trying, but it isn’t easy.”

“You’re going to make me say it, aren’t you? That this is an FC spacecraft?”

She came and crouched before him, at his eye level. “What if Mannheim were just just a little bit wrong? What if the FC civilization existed not during an interglacial stade, but during one of the glaciations? Couldn’t an inventive culture deprived of what we consider the crucial metals develop an entire technology based on what
was
available to them?”.

“A technology of ice?”

“That’s one pretty remarkable product of it lying there by your feet.”

“It’s a long way from a city dome to a starship.”

“It’s a long way from a DC-3 to an orbital shuttle—but it’s a straight line. Earth only has knowledge of one kind of technological society. That makes it hard to judge the limits and capabilities of other kinds.”

“A ship this size couldn’t carry enough fuel to go from planet to planet, much less star to star. It couldn’t even carry consumables for the six or eight people who could fit in it.”

“It wouldn’t have to, any more than the Munin’s gig has to. Not if the 241 was a parasite lander attached to a much larger starship.”

Guerrieri just looked down at his feet and kept shaking his head.

“The point is, we don’t know what’s possible, because we’ve never thought like this.”

“And the crew—or should we call them passengers?”

“Call them colonists,” she said. “They could have been dropped off in small groups as the mother ship flashed through each system at five or eight or ten percent of c.”

Guerrieri pulled himself to his feet. “Let’s walk,” he said, and started down the street.

They went several blocks before Guerrieri spoke again. “I’ll say this, you’ve certainly managed to break out of the straightjacket of conventional FC theory.”

“Why, thank you,” she said, answering his wry flattery with false gratitude. “You’ve also connected a very few facts with a great deal of speculation.”

“I know. But that’s the way I’ve been trained to think—to see what isn’t there from what is.”

“True enough. I’m just not used to hearing it on this scale.”

“I’m not used to doing it on this scale.”

“I suppose not. So you’re not claiming to have solved the riddle of the Sphinx—”

“No, of course not. I’m saying it bears looking into—especially since conventional theory has been at a dead end for two hundred years.”

“You’ll get no argument from me on that,” Guerrieri said. He took the next few steps more slowly, then stopped. “Do you know what happens if you’re right?”

“Yes.”

“You have a lot of questions to answer. But you may also have answered a lot of questions. Why the FC civilization disappeared. Why the colonies don’t reflect their founding technology. Why their populations are still relatively small. Why some colonies are on less-than-desirable worlds. Even why they forgot their origins. And you’ve done it all without resort to the D’shanna.”

“You sound more amenable to the idea than you did a little while ago.”

“I sound that way because I feel that way. But, Amelia—I’m not the one you have to convince. And I don’t much want to have to be the one to tell him.”

“You won’t be.”

“I never knew exactly how it was we were supposed to find the D’shanna. But this I know how to check. There are things we can do to either prove or disprove your scenario. We have something tangible to look for.”

“That’s what I hope to make Thack see.”

Guerrieri nodded thoughtfully. “What if he won’t listen?”

“Is that what you expect?”

“I don’t know what he’ll do.”

“I think he’ll listen,” Koi said without conviction.

“I hope so. But if he won’t?”

Eyes downcast, she did not answer immediately. “I’ll have to think about that,” she said, and turned away toward what passed for home.

Jankowski, Thackery, and Mueller returned from Werno in late afternoon. Though burning to unburden herself, Koi waited until after the evening meal, when the team returned en masse to their quarters.

“I found out some things today that I think we need to deal with, as a group and in terms of our objectives on this tour.” she said, pulling the fabric wall over the entry arch to provide a privacy that was more illusory than real. “Is this a good time, or should we schedule a team meeting for sometime tomorrow?”

Thackery stretched out on one of the foldaways. “Now is fine with me. Anyone else have any firm plans? Derrel, you didn’t plan any erotic assignations for tonight, did you?”

“No,” Guerrieri answered with a crooked grin.

“Go ahead, then, Amy. The floor is yours.”

It took Koi the better part of an hour to lay out the facts, the inferences, and the speculations for Thackery and Mueller. Guerrieri concentrated on watching Thackery, his expression, his body language, the little eyebrow flicks and absent-minded finger play that might provide the cues to his thoughts. He was less concerned about Mueller: after the first few minutes, she had pulled a netlink onto her lap and from that point on divided her attention between the display’s images and Koi’s words.

When Koi finished, there was silence as everyone looked to Thackery for his response. Staring down at the middle of the floor, and thereby avoiding their eyes, he swung himself up to a sitting position, and then shook his right arm and grimaced.

“Damn thing fell asleep,” he said. The uneasy laughter emphasized the tension rather than dissipating it. Thackery grinned ruefully and looked to Mueller. “Barbrice, you’ve been busy there. Any thoughts?”

“While I was listening I skimmed the 241 archives. The artifacts are definitely anomalous.” She pursed her lips, then shook her head. “I can’t comment on the rest.”

“Derrel? Are you up on this? You have an opinion?”

Guerrieri pursed his lips and thought a moment. “About all I can say with confidence is that we wouldn’t have done it this way. But then, we didn’t do it.”

Thackery turned to Koi. “I guess we know what you think.”

“We’ve discovered some very exciting evidence that could lead to a final solution of the colony problem,” Koi said. “On the other hand, we’ve found nothing to support the notion that the D’shanna have been here or had anything to do with the loss of this colony.”

“Tell me, why didn’t the permanent staff pick up on this?”

“I can answer that,” Mueller said. “The technoanalysts finished their work here more than a decade ago, before the 241 dig took place. The staff now is composed almost exclusively of ethnologists.”

“Besides which. Dr. Essinger’s handling of the find shows he knew there was something different about it,” Koi added.

Thackery scratched the crown of his head, then clapped his hands together once and interlaced his fingers one at a time. “I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I can’t go along with that.”

On hearing that, Koi hooked her hands behind her neck and bowed her head, missing a sideways glance of sympathy from Guerrieri.

“I’m absolutely delighted by what you’ve found out about the 241 artifacts,” Thackery went on. “I have no doubt that the plaz material could be used structurally in a winged vehicle, be it aircraft or spacecraft. And whether the plaz is Ice-X or some other metastable polymorph doesn’t really matter in that context. The fact is, you’ve made a very plausible connection between Wenlock technology and a set of anomalous artifacts. But the rest of what you say is positively Byzantine. I don’t really know why you went to the trouble.”

That brought Koi’s head up and a cross expression to her face. “The Service spent a lot of time and money training me to think synthetically. That’s what interpolation is all about.”

“And you’re good at it, no doubt about that. Amy. But you’re a long way out on a very skinny limb here. On the other hand, you
have
convinced me of two things—that the D’shanna
were
here, just as we expected them to have been. And that it’s pointless for us to stay on 7 Herculis any longer. They were here, but it’s been six thousand years, and the trail is too cold to be of any use to us. But we now know where to look for them—on a world rich in refractory metals. We know their signature—tantalum.”