For Love and Glory

XLVI

At hundred AU the giant sun cast a tenth the radiance that Sunniva did on Asborg, ample for human eyes; but it was discless, a point of blue-white blaze too brilliant to look anywhere near, drowning most other stars even in empty space.

Mars-sized, the planet shone wanly in that light, a motley of darkling rock, white ices, dull brownish reds and yellows where ultraviolet quanta had forced low-temperature chemistry. Those temperatures were low indeed, ranging around one hundred kelvin. A wisp of atmosphere, a few millibars of pressure at the surface, nitrogen with some methane and argon, scarcely hazed the limb. The axial tilt was small, the rotation period a bit under forty-nine hours.

Such were the facts gathered by the ship as she approached. The sight close by sent shivers along the nerves. Here was a whole world, with all its unforeseeable strangenesses. And here was Forerunner work at work. The instruments had caught enough enigmatic emissions to prove that. What more escaped them?

Otherwise there had been no message, no sign. “I can’t imagine them not having detectors, and equipment to react with,” Hebo muttered. “They couldn’t have predicted that no trouble would ever come in from outside. If nothing else, a comet strike.”

“Those may be only blind machines,” Dzesi suggested.

Lissa shook her head. “They’d have to include robots with at least as much capability as our ship,” she said. “Probably much more.” The thought was cold: that this could be so much more as to lie beyond the imagination of merely organic creatures. She mustered the resolution to add in everyday fashion: “Well, we’ve received no threats thus far. Let’s try for a look.”

Hulda slipped into a forty-five degree orbit, two thousand kilometers out. That was too close for hyperjump or hyperwave; in the near neighborhood of a substantial rotating mass, which drags slightly on the inertial frame, the function steepens from the smooth potential-well dropoff of astronomical distances. However, a hard boost would quickly bring her to an escape point. Meanwhile, here was a good altitude for observation, with a period neither inconveniently long nor short. And there had been no sign of hostility, opposition, anything other than those stray pulses she intercepted.

Acceleration ended. The three hung weightless in harness and silence.

After a long half minute, Hebo hunched his shoulders and growled, “All right, search.” The viewscreen display shifted from stars to planet, swept across desolation, steadied and magnified.

They were lucky, happening just then to be where a site was in daylit view. Seen slantwise, three slim helices reared gleaming against a broad ice-field, a horizon rimmed with murky cliffs, and a cloudless blue-black sky. Spread around and among them were several delicate, intricate three-dimensional webs. Lesser shapes moved over bare rock which had been rendered mirror-flat. Sun-glare made vision difficult. When the optics filtered that out, a subtle, shifting veil seemed to remain; the scene was almost dreamlike.

“I think,” Lissa whispered, “what we see is framework and, and attendants, and—yes, that thing yonder looks half finished, with activity on it—construction, preparing for the wave front.… I think most must be not matter but forces, maybe subatomic, maybe the energy of the vacuum itself—” She was no physicist, but this epiphany wakened learning that had lain half forgotten.

“When did it start?” Hebo asked. “Yeah, three million years ago or more. I should guess that’d be a von Neumann type operation. A kind of seed left, with a clock that germinated it at the right time, to begin making the machines that’d make the machines—but maybe ‘grow’ is a better word than ‘make.’ Or ‘generate’ or—”

“Probably it began before the black holes met,” Lissa ventured, faintly amazed to hear how calm her tone had become. “Building probes to be present at the event and afterward. I suspect they’re there yet. Expeditions of ours wouldn’t spot them except by super-unlikely accident. Meanwhile, newer machines have been making ready to conduct long-range studies in these nonviolent surroundings.”

Again they were repeating ideas they had uttered before, back and forth, apes reassuring each other with chatter, a need that was not in Dzesi—but not entirely so. Reality stimulated a certain hardheadedness that abstract speculation never could.

It spoke through Hebo: “Whatever knowledge can be had here, whatever power, has goddamn got to be kept out of the wrong hands.”

Lissa shuddered a bit. “Whose are the right hands? And how long will they stay clean?”

“I dunno. But I remember reading a historian on Earth, writing way before I was born. ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.’ We can hope we’re more or less amongst the good.” Hebo’s hand sought hers and closed on it. His voice went warm. “You are, for sure.”

The eeriness below neared the edge of sight as Hulda swung on toward the night ahead.

“We’d better send these data straight home,” said Lissa. While we still can, said her mind.

“Uh-huh. You’re smart, too. And beautiful, I might add.”

She drew a breath to order the ship back to hyperwaving distance.

Dzesi yowled. Hulda sang an alert. “What the hell!” roared Hebo.

A gleam lifted from darkside into sunlight. It arrowed at them. In seconds it had waxed to a complex of coils and strands, half the size of their vessel, shimmering like the constructs down on the planet. At the center pulsed an iridescent sphere: a heart, a brain? With no trace of jets, of any propulsive force, maneuvering as deftly as a barracuda in the sea, and with no sign of deceleration stress, it glided to a relative halt and poised three hundred meters away.

Dzesi crouched a-bristle, right hand gripping the arm of her chair, left hand on her knife. Both humans kept still, staring, shocked into that coolness and clarity, that weird detachment, which sudden extremity can throw upon their kind. The compartment, the control board, the huge day-crescent of the planet were blade-sharp in their eyes; they heard each murmur of the air; they smelled its fragrance of summery meadows and the observers in their heads noted how inappropriate that was—but meaningless, meaningless; they waited for whatever would befall.

Set for broad-band reception—though how did the thing know which band?—the radio said forth in a calm human contralto and unaccented Anglay: “Outsiders are forbidden access. You shall depart immediately. There is no wish to harm you. However, in token of what can be brought to bear against intruders, your hyperwave communicator is now disabled. Bring the warning home, and broadcast it to all your societies. Make known that further attempts will suffer penalties more severe, up to and including destruction. But make known, also, that otherwise no one has anything to fear from this quarter. The prohibition is in large part for their own sake. Think about this.”

After a moment the voice changed to flutings and rumbles that shaded off into the humanly subsonic. Lissa recognized the principal Gargantuan language. She had acquired few words of it, but grasped that the message was the same.

“How about that hypercom?” Hebo demanded.

“Ruined,” Hulda replied. “Circuit elements burnt out, quantum superpositions decohered, programs wiped. My systems registered nothing while it occurred.”

No, Lissa thought, the Forerunners would have means more subtle than an energy blast. But I’ll bet they—their robots, or whatever these are—can call up as much energy as they want, any time they want.

The voice became Rikhan. Dzesi snarled.

“Yep, everybody,” Hebo said.

“We haven’t much choice but to obey, do we?” Lissa asked needlessly.

“Reckon not. Still, I expect we’ve got a grace period, at least till it’s run through its repertoire. Plain to see, it doesn’t know just who or what we are. And since it wants us to take the news back, if we’re still here when it’s done talking, logically it ought to say, ‘Scram, I mean it,’ maybe with some extra token that doesn’t really hurt us either, like turning our food stock to charcoal. Then of course we’ll say, ‘Sorry, honorable sir,’ and skedaddle. Meanwhile, though, we’re up against heap big medicine, but not God Almighty. How about we collect any more information we can?”

Recklessness? No, Lissa thought, boldness. Taking a risk, yes, but you can’t cross a street without taking a risk. He’s my kind of man. “Keep scanning,” she ordered the ship.

Susaian turned into clicks, while an Arzethian image appeared on the visiscreen and went through the body language that was most of its converse.

Hulda and the alien were not precisely co-orbital. They drifted slowly apart. The alien kept sending. The sun slipped behind the planet, which became a circle of blackness, very faintly edged with light, and stars sprang into heaven.

“Another site,” Hulda reported, displaying and amplifying— not quite the same as the first, though it was hard to distinguish between such foreignnesses.

Having run through every known spacefaring race, and three or four that Lissa couldn’t identify, the radio returned to human. Han, this time. How many important languages would the sentry try before it—lost patience—and struck again? Already it had dwindled to a small, exquisite piece of jewelry.

Something high caught sunlight and flashed.

“Hoy!” Hebo exclaimed. “Give us that!”

The optics locked on and magnified. The thing hurtled inward. Plasma jets made ambient atoms fluoresce, ghostly sparkles. Velocity already closely matched, the vessel needed little adjustment to lay her nearby, in adjacent orbit. She must have emerged from hyperspace about as far down the gravitational well as possible.

“Jesus Christ, what a piece of navigation!” blurted Hebo.

Lissa knew that lean body, those flat turrets from which projectors reached out like snakes. A Susaian—no, a Confederacy warship.

Hulda’s receiver continued dispassionately. But the Forerunner machine must have observed too. Was it transmitting the same command, backed by the same disablement?

A streak leaped from the newcomer. The viewscreen muffled a fireball to a flare. Then incandescent gases dissipated into space, and the sentry was gone.