Resurgence

CHAPTER TWELVE To Iceworld

The Savior leaving the dead world was not the ship that had arrived two days before. Within an hour of lift-off Darya could feel the change in every person on board. It was not hard to guess the reasons.

Before their arrival, Hans Rebka had been fidgety and preoccupied. He knew that he had his own agenda in going there, but he was reluctant to tell others until he could offer proof. Ben Blesh and Lara Quistner had felt the nervousness of anyone about to undergo a first practical test. Now, Rebka’s dark suspicions had been confirmed, while Ben and Lara had performed well—no, make that brilliantly. Darya could not imagine a more competent performance.

As for Darya herself, her full confidence in Hans Rebka was restored. She was ashamed for doubting him, when he had never in the past acted out of ego or the need to prove that he was in charge.

The result of all this was a great decrease in tension. The cramped quarters of the Savior no longer felt like an overcrowded box, too small for its crew. Rebka, Blesh, and Quistner were off by the communications console, and although she could not hear their conversation, an occasional laugh suggested that it was friendly and relaxed. If some of the laughter was a reaction to the sight of ugly death, that was no more than natural. The fact that they were talking together at all suggested a major adjustment. And it was no huge surprise when Lara Quistner wandered over to Darya and sat down by her side.

“Professor Lang, I’ve been thinking.” She sounded tentative. “I want to bounce an idea off you. We’ve all heard a lot about the Builders, ever since we were kids, but it was always secondhand information. Everybody says that you are the ultimate authority on the Builders.”

“If there is any such thing. And it’s Darya, please, not Professor Lang. When you get right down to it there is no such thing as an authority on the Builders. What we know is simple. Something built and left behind a set of structures that we label as artifacts. All of them were very old—at least three million years—and most of them employed technology that we still do not understand. A few years ago, one new artifact appeared. Soon after that every one of them vanished. That’s it. There you have our complete knowledge of the Builders. Everything else is speculation.”

“But Professor Lang—Darya—surely there must be theories?”

“You’ve got it exactly right. Theories, not theory. You name it, someone had it. Maybe the Builders were entities whose consciousness extended over a finite dimension in time, so that they could literally see through time the way we can see through space. They could examine possible futures and direct the course of the spiral arm. That idea was mine, but I don’t believe it anymore. Or the Builders are still alive, lying idle on the deep gravity slope that surrounds the giant black hole at the center of our galaxy, where time slows so that an hour there is a century or a millennium for us. That was Professor Carmina Gold’s, at the Research Institute on Sentinel Gate, and she keeps looking for a way to travel to the center of the galaxy and back in a human lifetime. Maybe this expedition will help—we came to the Sag Arm in just a few days; there could be a chain of Bose nodes leading all the way to the galactic center. Or another theory: the Builders are actually human beings from our own future, coming back to direct the course of spiral arm development, including their own. That was Quintus Bloom’s idea, and it made the embodied computer E.C. Tally go into a logical loop so bad we had to cold-start him.”

“Quintus Bloom?”

“He was a big name at the Institute a few years ago. He stayed on Labyrinth when it disappeared, and no one to this day knows what happened to him. Then there was the theory that nothing cataclysmic happened to the Builders. They were just like any other species, they grew old, and since they didn’t change they slowly died out. That idea was a kind of orphan, no one knows who had it first. Most people attribute it to Captain Alonzo Sloane, an old space wanderer who went off looking for the Lost Worlds, Jesteen and Skyfall and Petra and Primrose and Paladin and Midas and Rainbow Reef. He never came back, though we did find his ship near Labyrinth.”

“People with ideas about the Builders seem to disappear rather often.”

“Oh, most of them don’t—we just remember the ones who did. I’ve had a dozen ideas of my own to explain who the Builders were and what happened to them, and I’m still here. And I must have read a hundred or a thousand papers by other people. Only one of them could be right, and chances are, all of them are wrong. If you have thoughts of your own, don’t be ashamed of them. Maybe they are new, and maybe they are better than anyone else’s.”

“If you don’t mind listening?”

“As I said, I’ve listened a thousand times, but I’m ready to listen ten thousand more. Hans Rebka tells me that the Builders are an obsession with me. I won’t go quite that far, but I will admit they have been my life’s consuming interest. Go ahead.”

“Well.” Lara glanced across at the two men, making sure that they were still deep in conversation. “I knew that the Builders were around for a very long time, and a few million years ago they disappeared. That never seemed to make much sense to me. If they died out, wouldn’t you expect to see evidence of where and how they died? When I heard about this expedition, and found out where we were going, it occurred to me that perhaps the Builders didn’t die out at all. Perhaps they just moved. Perhaps they decided to make a home in the Sag Arm, instead of in the Orion Arm. I know that they have some way of moving across great distances, because one of the artifacts is supposed to be far out of the galactic plane.”

“Thirty thousand lightyears out of it. Lara, I was there. We called it—or the beings that inhabited it, who claimed to be servants of the Builders, called it—Serenity. Our party included Julian Graves. We were not sure what carried us out there, or what carried us back. We called them transportation vortices, but that was just a name. How a vortex worked was a total mystery. They seemed to appear anywhere, and carry you hundreds or thousands of lightyears instantly without involving Bose nodes at all.”

“Then if they wanted to, they could easily have moved here.”

“Without a doubt. The Builders have—or had—enormous powers, able to do things that still look like magic to us. We’re millennia behind them in our most advanced technology, if not millions of years. But I’m convinced of one thing, Lara. I can’t prove this, but I feel it in my bones: whoever and whatever killed this star system and all the life within it was not the Builders. For that to be true, they would have had to change much more than their location. They would have had to change their whole attitude toward other living creatures. It’s not generally accepted, but I believe that the Builders guided the development of our own local arm. It’s thanks to them that we have a stable civilization involving many species and three major clades. If Captain Rebka were listening, I would say four major clades in deference to his feelings. Even though everyone outside the Phemus Circle regards it as a backward place of no great importance.”

“I’ve heard something about that.” Lara Quistner glanced across to Hans Rebka and lowered her voice. “They say that all the planets of the Phemus Circle are poor and primitive, and all the men are totally sex-mad. Is it true?”

If you’re asking about my recent experience, forget it. Hans and I haven’t looked each other in the eye for weeks. And if you have ideas about him, get in line. “The worlds I’ve seen in the Phemus Circle were certainly poverty-stricken compared with some rich planet like Miranda.” It was a good, neutral answer. Darya wondered what rumors Lara Quistner might have heard. “As for the men, you’d have to find out for yourself. Someday, maybe you will. In my experience, they are sex-mad—and so are the women of the Phemus Circle. On some of the planets they have to reproduce whenever and however they can, in order to maintain a population at all. But at the same time the men can be prudish. Sometimes the slightest detail will turn off their interest in sex.”

Which was quite as far as Darya intended to go on that particular subject, regardless of her personal data base. She had been keeping an eye on the two men, and saw that they had wrapped up their conversation and were over by the autochef. They were poking at the controls. Darya winced. Maybe Ben Blesh knew what he was doing, but Hans Rebka’s attempts at food programming were disastrous. Being raised on Teufel a man couldn’t afford to be picky. She went on, “I think that the big planet, Iceworld, proves that the Builders were once here in the Sag Arm. It has all the earmarks of a Builder artifact—too light for its size, far too cold to be natural. What you are proposing, that the Builders might still be here and still be active, is another matter. This star system suggests to me that some other group—the ones I called the Voiders—came along after the Builders and did their own dirty work.”

“But that doesn’t mean the Builders must be gone completely. Maybe they are still around in other parts of this arm.”

“They might be. I’m quite willing to admit the possibility of two races of super-beings. But you know how Julian Graves reacted. He talked about the ‘undesirability of concatenating implausibilities.’ As if we were not sure of the existence of the Builders themselves, when we have seen evidence of their existence all over our own spiral arm. I’m hoping that what we find on Iceworld will persuade Julian Graves to change his mind.”

“My idea wasn’t new, was it? You had the same thought yourself, long ago.”

“Possibly something very like it. But keep thinking. It could be that the Builders became extinct when they stopped thinking.”

“You don’t really believe that, do you?”

“No, I don’t. On the other hand, I’ve been wrong about the Builders so many times in the past, you shouldn’t accept my views—or anyone else’s—as gospel.” Darya saw that Rebka and Blesh were examining something in the autochef, and Ben Blesh was laughing. She concluded, “If you have more ideas when we reach Iceworld, I’d like to discuss them.”

It was intended to be an easy way to end the talk and hurry over to protect her own stomach, but it produced a surprising response. Lara lowered her voice and said, “There is something else I’d like to talk you about. But not right now. I want to speak privately.”

It didn’t sound as though Lara wanted another conversation about the Builders. That was a pity. Darya herself would be more than ready for that, especially after they’d had a chance to examine Iceworld.

Maybe Hans was right after all. Maybe “obsession” was the best word for it.

They had traveled to an alien arm of the galaxy where humans had never been before. They were within an alien star system, and only a day ago they had left a dead and alien world. But alien was relative. There were degrees of alienation. The planet they had come from, with its air and oceans and mountains and what had once been a thriving civilization of intelligent beings, felt like home compared with Iceworld.

Darya sat by Hans Rebka’s side and alternated her attention between the displays of the ship’s sensors and the planet around which the Savior now orbited. She had to think of it as alternating attention, because they could not see the world in any conventional sense. To human eyes, Iceworld was no more than darkness visible, a black disk revealed by the absence of the stars that it occulted.

Every other imaging sensor, at every frequency from hard X-rays to long-wavelength radio, told the same story. They detected no emitted signal. The planet was simply not there. Only one seldom-used instrument, a low-resolution imaging device normally used to measure cosmic background radiation, admitted a presence. It reported a unique world where the maximum temperature was little more than one kelvin, and that only in isolated places. In many places the temperature was too small to register—which meant that it had to be less than one hundredth of a degree absolute.

Nothing in the universe was so cold, nothing in the universe could be so cold. Radiation falling onto a planet’s surface must warm it, raising it at the very least to the 2.7 kelvins of the cosmic microwave background.

“So it doesn’t exist,” Rebka said. “But there it is.”

“Will we be going down?” Ben Blesh was crowding Darya, pushing her aside in his eagerness to see everything.

“Eventually.” Rebka was in the command pilot’s seat. “Before that happens I’d like to learn as much as we can from orbit. It may take a day or two, but I want to fly over every square kilometer and tickle the ground with something a bit more active.”

The Savior was moving along a spiraling orbit that would in time cover Iceworld’s whole surface like wool being wound evenly onto a great ball. The ship was less than two hundred kilometers above the surface. Such a close orbit would normally decay rapidly because of air drag, but Iceworld lacked the faintest trace of an atmosphere. The planet also seemed perfectly spherical. The gravity field supported the idea of an equally symmetrical interior, and nothing perturbed the Savior’s flight. Only Rebka’s natural caution prevented them from flying lower yet, fifty kilometers or five kilometers up.

“What do you mean, tickle?” Darya asked. “Don’t damage anything down there, Hans. I want to see the place in its unspoiled condition.”

“It’s a big planet, Darya. Twenty times the surface area of Miranda. And we’ll only be using the laser in a pulse mode, one burst every five seconds. Don’t worry. We’ll get enough burn to give us an emission spectrum for the points of impact, but we’ll be touching less than a billionth of the total area.”

“We’ve never experienced anything so cold before. Can you be sure you won’t ruin anything?”

“Not completely sure. But if it’s a choice of risking a little local damage down there, versus risking our skins when we descend, which do you prefer? Hmm.” Rebka was peering at a screen that displayed a graph composed of sharp peaks and valleys. “Darya, this is the return spectrum—it looks the same for every laser pulse. But it seems your name for the planet wasn’t the greatest choice.”

“Iceworld?”

“Right. This is a spectrum of the raw return signal, and over there we have the results after the spectrum analyzer has done its work. It’s reporting not a trace of ice—any kind of ice. No water, no carbon dioxide, no methane, no oxygen, no nitrogen, no chlorine, no fluorine.”

“No condensed gases of any kind?”

“Worse than that. The spectrum doesn’t match any material in our spectral signature library, solid, liquid, or gas. You were right, Darya, this place wasn’t formed naturally. It’s not made of any known material.”

“Are you sure that our laser isn’t disturbing things below the surface?” Lara Quistner was watching another display, this one showing a larger area than the immediate vicinity of the illuminated spot.

“As I said, not so we should notice.” Hans Rebka checked a dial. “We’re at low power and long wavelength. The top tenth of a millimeter of the ground should account for all the return.”

“Maybe it does—or maybe low power means something different down there. Do you want to see what I think I’m seeing? Zoom in on a line that trails behind the laser beam, and wait.”

It took a while, because as long as the moving light of the laser was in the field of view it dominated what the eye could detect. Even when the image moved far enough to put the pulse out of sight, Darya was at first convinced that Lara was imagining things. At last she saw it, so faint that it was at the very limit of visibility. A blue glimmer like a dust devil spurted up at the place where the laser beam had hit. It seemed to boil out of the surface for a moment, then was gone.

Lara whispered, “They come about twenty seconds after the laser has moved on. What are they?”

“No idea.” Rebka was changing control settings. “Let’s try some signal enhancement, see if we can get a spectrum we recognize.”

Before he could finish, a flash of orange startled their eyes. It was bright enough to obliterate all signs of the blue dust devils, then at once it too had vanished. Darya was left with a zigzag afterimage like a bolt of lightning. She blinked, waiting for her retinas to adjust after the overload.

Rebka said suddenly, “Hey. We got one.”

“One what?”

“A spectrum from that flash, one that the analyzer can recognize. We’ll finally understand what part of the surface is made of. Uh-oh. Take that back. We won’t understand.”

Ben Blesh protested, “But you just said—”

“I know what I said.” Rebka leaned back in his chair. “I can’t imagine how you knew, Darya, but you were right. What’s down there isn’t just something made by a random alien technology of the Sag Arm. It’s an artifact—made by the Builders.”

“How can you be so sure, from only one reading?”

“Because the signal analyzer is telling us. I said it recognized the return spectrum it just received, and it did. It can recognize the material, because there’s a match to a spectrum already in its library. But it can’t identify it. The part of the surface of Iceworld that produced the signal is of the same construction material used to make Phages. What is that material, Darya?”

“Hans Rebka, you know the answer to that question as well as I do.” Darya turned to face Ben Blesh and Lara Quistner. “We’ve been trying for thousands of years, and still we have no idea what the Phages—and now parts of Iceworld—are made of.”

Ben and Lara had heard about Phages—who in the local spiral arm had not?—but Darya Lang and Hans Rebka had actually seem them in action.

While the Savior flew its automated survey path over the surface of Iceworld and the ship’s computer recorded, sorted, and tried to organize all the sensor readings, Hans and Darya explained.

“As much as we know,” Darya said. “You have to remember, Phages have such a terrible reputation that you try not to go near one. The reason you will never encounter them during training is because every exploration vessel employs a Phage avoidance system. They are universal eaters. They don’t look dangerous, just a gray regular dodecahedron. Most of them are forty-eight meters on a side, but we have run across much smaller ones. The big ones can ingest something thirty meters across, and as long as you care to mention.”

“But where does it all go?” Lara’s wide-eyed gaze suggested that she and her companion were ignorant in certain important survival areas.

“No one knows. It sure doesn’t come out again, and mass detectors measure no change in the mass of the Phage. They seem able to digest anything.”

Hans added, “Or nearly everything. They can’t eat each other, or the structural hulls left behind by the Builders. We used to think that they were completely indestructible, until we saw smashed remains of some on an artificial moon called Glister in the Dobelle system. Now we know that they and some of the other Builder constructs are stabilized by powerful electromagnetic fields. If that field dies away, or you can impose a suitable counter-field, the material becomes weak. You can push your fist right through a wall of it. I know, because I did it on Labyrinth.”

Ben Blesh had been listening with the same total absorption as Lara Quistner. He looked away, to where the displays showed the laser beam from Savior steadily stitching its way across the surface of Iceworld. Every few minutes, a sensor observing the wake of the laser reported another flare of orange light. A new one had just occurred. Blesh pointed. “Do you think that if we were down there, we could penetrate below the surface by generating the right field?”

“The right field, in the right place.” Rebka had followed Blesh’s gesture. “Maybe at a place like that one. But remember, most of the surface isn’t Builder material—or if it is, it’s a type we never met before. But you are correct. Judging from our experience, if we land where we see one of the orange flashes, and generate a suitable field, we will drop through into the interior. We know how to set up such a cancellation field. I wonder if we can define one for an individual suit.”

“Of course we can.”

Ben’s answer was no surprise any more to Hans. The suits provided on the Pride of Orion were like everything else associated with that ship: miraculous, compared with anything that Hans had ever seen before. They would feed you, dispose of waste products, deal with wounds (though not the most severe kinds), and even permit a planetary return from orbit unassisted. They did everything but have sex with you, and Hans would not guarantee that.

Ben went on, “So we might as well set up cancellation fields, for our individual suits and for the whole ship. According to the sensors, they are seeing the same thing over and over again. We get either nothing at all, unless you count that weak blur of blue light, or we see a flash from a section of Builder material. If we’re going to learn anything new, we have to head down to the surface.”

It was tempting to agree at once with Ben. End the boring survey of an unchanging world from a cramped ship, and move on to where they might discover something that mattered. Hans had felt uneasy before their previous planetfall, because even prior to arrival he had feared the sight of a dead world and murdered inhabitants. Iceworld produced no such qualms. Any danger from Builder artifacts always stemmed from too much human curiosity or a total lack of common sense. He and half a dozen others, including Darya, had almost died on Quake during Summertide Maximum; but no rational creature should have been anywhere near Quake at such a time, after numerous indicators had warned of coming planet-wide violence.

Only years of experience made Hans shake his head. “We finish the survey, then if it still looks safe we go down.” He glanced at a display showing current progress, and knew his next words would not be popular. “That means two more days in orbit.”

“But—” “Two days!” “Why do—”

The response came at once from the other three. Hans cut them off. “I’m sorry. This isn’t negotiable. Ben and Lara, I know you’re impatient to have your turn and show what you can do; and Darya, I know you can’t wait for a chance to explore the interior of Iceworld. I feel the same way myself. But as long as I’m in charge, it’s going to be safety first.”

His face wore a mixture of uncertainty and bewilderment. Darya could guess the reason for that changing expression. Safety first, when there was no reason to expect any form of danger? Safety first, when Hans was as relaxed about descending to Iceworld as he ever was about anything? Why was he doing this?

But Hans was not ready to hear questions. He ducked his head, and repeated, “Two more days to complete the survey of Iceworld. Then we’ll see what else we’ve learned. And then we make a decision.”