For Love and Glory

III

A shelter window let in the deceptively mellow sunlight. From where she sat, Lissa could see over the scarred ground to the edge of the canyon and, beyond, wanly sheening amidst the gleam of water, the thing.

“Fair enough,” Hebo was saying. “Yep, fair enough. We’re absolutely legitimate.”

She swung her gaze back to meet his. “Then why the stealth?”

Dzesi stirred. She touched her knife. “S-s-s,” she hissed. “That is not a pleasant word about this.”

Karl took a short step forward and loomed at her.

Lissa had experienced a multitude of situations in the course of—going on a hundred years, was it? she thought in sudden astonishment. That long? Already? She lifted her free hand and made a smile. “No offense, as you put it, Captain Hebo, nor to your honorable companion. Shall we say you’ve been remarkably discreet?”

The atmosphere eased. The man laughed once more. “We could spend the rest of this large economy-size day beating around the bush. I don’t want to, do you? Sure, Dzesi and I have been sneaky.”

Again he was likeable. In fact, Lissa admitted to herself, he had a good deal of raffish charm. “Would you care to explain? No, I don’t imagine I have any authority, but others do.”

“I’d argue about that. But put it aside for now.” Hebo leaned back in his chair, crossed his legs, and took a long swallow. “All right. To start with, I’m a free-lance entrepreneur, to give it a fancy name. I keep my senses and sensors open, and when I get wind of a possible profit to be made, I go there.”

Lissa half gasped. “On your own?”

“Yep, my little spaceship is mine free and clear, along with the assorted gear and such, including enough capital to keep me solvent till the next success. More ventures don’t work out than do.”

“But, but what government licenses you?”

“Oh, this one or that one, depending. I’ve been at it a long while. When some fly-by-night nation goes under, I find me another.” He saw her frown. “Yes, I know a spacecraft mishandled can do as much damage as a crashing asteroid. Mine hasn’t done any yet; and I’ve been flitting a long while, I said. With several tribes, countries, sovereignties, globalities, what-have-you, I’m kind of grandfathered.” He leaned forward and patted her knee. “Don’t worry, brighteyes.”

She drew back, also in her spirit, but was nevertheless gripped. “Why are you on Jonna?”

He nodded toward the river. “What else but yonder?”

“Which is—”

“That’s what Dzesi and I would like to find out. So far, between our tests and my database—I keep a whopping database, if I do say so myself; and I do—we’ve established that it wasn’t made by any beings we know of, and includes technology none of them have ever heard of.”

A fresh shiver passed through Lissa. “Forerunners?”

“I suppose so, whoever they were. Or are.”

“Yes-s-s,” breathed the anthropard.

“Let us make certain we understand each other,” said Karl. He was right, Lissa admitted to herself. If you didn’t trudge through the obvious at the outset, you might learn the hard way that an alien—even a member of your own species, come from another world, another society—meant something quite different from what you did. Language was often too subtle, too mutable for the capabilities of a translator program.

“I assume we refer to those mysterious beings whose ancient relics have infrequently been come upon,” the Gargantuan continued. “It is not known whether the creators are still extant, but certainly they are no longer present in such parts of the galaxy as any of today’s spacefaring societies have visited.”

Hebo nodded. “You’ve got it. Myself, I favor the notion that they weren’t interested in colonizing, for whatever reason, and just had a few scientific missions in these parts. But why they never came back for a later look—” He shrugged. “That’s another good question. They must know that geological time has gone by. If they’re alive yet.”

“One may well doubt that,” said Karl. “Surely, however few and fleeting have been the expeditions to remote parts of the galaxy, so mighty and long-established a civilization would indicate its existence somewhere in it—by radiation from power sources, for example, detectable across many parsecs.”

“But the galaxy’s so bloody goddamn big. Oh, yes, our ships can jump to anywhere in it, but what microfraction of the total volume have we even touched? Especially at much greater distances than our usual rounds go. Wouldn’t you at least expect that the Forerunners’ home region would show lingering signs of their influence? Instead, everyplace seems to be the same on average, a few planets where the sophonts have gotten into space themselves, and that’s it.”

Unless the Forerunners are something utterly other, thought Lissa, so strange that we can’t ever find them—or couldn’t recognize them for what they are if we did—maybe beings or machines that can survive at the core of the galaxy, maybe off in a whole different universe, maybe— It was not the first time she had wondered, nor was she the first one.

Hebo slapped his knee. “All right,” he said impatiently, “have we told each other enough of what everybody knows?”

“No, rather, of what no one knows,” answered Karl.

“What is this thing here?” Lissa whispered.

Hebo laughed. “I thought you’d never ask. Well, that’s what we’re trying to figure out. There could be one blue giant of a lot to learn from it. Including, maybe, a clue or three to the makers.”

The little she knew whirled in her head.

Found, almost always by purest chance—

A great field of rock on each of three airless worlds, fused by something not natural, optically flat save where meteorites had gouged craters.

Two nickel-iron asteroids that had been shaped into perfect spheres and set in the Trojan positions of the orbit of the planet humans called Xanadu.

On another living world, a single crystal the size of a high hill, which may have been the core of a huge machine or—or what?

Small metallic objects of peculiar shapes, brought to sight by erosion of the rock around them, conceivably tools or components that had been dropped and forgotten, as modern explorers might leave a hammer or some bolts behind, but the uses of these were unguessable, though when their perdurable alloys were finally analyzed it opened up a whole new field of materials science.

Six-meter bubbles of similar stuff afloat in the atmosphere of a Jupiter-sized planet, hollow, emptied of whatever they once contained, though maybe that had not been matter at all but a resonance of forces.

Fossilized traces of foundations removed and activities ended, like dinosaur tracks, and one maddening impression that might have been made by some kind of circuitry—

Where datable, perhaps ten million years old, but the probable error of those measurements might be up to fifty percent.

And few, few—

How much more waited undiscovered, at the half-million or so stars that spacefarers or their robots had come to, however briefly, and the three hundred billion or more in this one galaxy that none had yet reached?

Lissa stared back toward the river. “This may be… the best preserved Forerunner object… ever found.”

Hebo nodded. “As far as Dzesi and I can tell. We even suspect it’s in working order. Though we can’t tell what that would signify. It can’t be hyperbeaming, this far down in the gravity well. Maybe there was a relay satellite, or maybe a ship called now and then to collect the data.”

“But this is incredible. You can’t keep it hidden.” Anger flared. “You’ve no right to!”

She jumped, to her feet, spilling her drink. The Rikhan glided up, hand on knife, lips drawn off teeth. Karl whistled and stirred his bulk.

“Whoa, there!” Hebo rose too. A cloud passed over the sun, blown from the west. A wild creature screamed.

Hebo picked up Lissa’s beaker and busied himself with a fresh one. “Here, let me make you a refill,” he urged. “Come on, we’re friends. Just listen, will you?”

“Go ahead,” she agreed after a minute. She accepted the drink. He’d mixed it stiffer than before. She’d better be careful.

Hebo returned to his chair, outrageously relaxed. “Well, now, to start with, I told you I make my living where and how I can, as long as it’s more or less decently. Decency’s got a lot of different definitions, human and nonhuman.” His tone smoothed. “But I assure you, milady, I’m not a worse man than most.

“So a couple of years ago I caught word about the discovery of, uh, Jonna. Obscure, only another sort-of-Earthlike planet—‘only!’ ” he exclaimed. Calm again: “Sooner or later, somebody would try to learn more, but no telling who or why. Nobody can keep up with everything that everybody’s up to. Well, why not me? Nothing to forbid. No one’s laid any claim. No jurisdiction except the Covenant of Space, and you know how much that means.”

“A statement of pious intentions.” Did the Rikhan sound contemptuous?

“A basic common-sense agreement,” Karl reproved.

“Anyhow,” Hebo said, “we weren’t about to commit banditry, conquest, environmental destruction, or cruelty to politicians. We just intended a look-see. Dzesi’s partnered with me before, now and then.”

“For the fame and honor of the Ulas Trek,” said the anthropard.

And Dzesi’s own, Lissa thought. She isn’t altogether unlike us.

“How did you find the artifact when we didn’t?” the woman asked.

“Partly luck, no doubt,” Hebo conceded. “However, we did have our particular motives. You people are after basic scientific knowledge, planetology, biology, et cetera. The planet’s loaded with that, anywhere you go. We were looking for something that might pay off.”

“How?”

“Oh, maybe a region someone would like to try colonizing. These long days and nights, swings in the weather, and all—in some areas, at least, maybe they’d not be too much for, oh, possibly the Sklerons. Of course, they’d want very specific information before deciding it was worth their while to investigate further. So we were random-sampling, with a close eye out for anything unusual. When our optics spotted this from orbit, naturally we came down to see what it was.”

Indignation resumed. “And you haven’t considered reporting it!”

“We will, we will, and meanwhile we won’t have harmed it. We figured somebody—a news agency, a scientific institution, whatever—would pay well to be told about it. Contract drawn up beforehand, payment on proof of truthfulness. Same as selling any other information. Information’s really the one universal currency.”

Anger gave way to a certain sympathy. She wished it were not she who must dash his hopes to the ground. “I’m afraid we— can’t keep the secret for you. Not ethically.”

Dzesi snarled.

Hebo shushed her. Astonishingly good-humored, he responded: “Luck of the draw. Can’t win ’em all. Though I do already have a couple of notions about deals that could maybe be made—” He finished his drink. “Hey, let’s knock this off. Stay a while, why don’t you? We’ll help you set up your camp. We’ll show you around. And then you can decide what to tell them at your base, other than that you’re safe and sound and having a good time.”