Starhawk (34 page)

He let go and stood staring at it.

He couldn't resist laughing. The life-form that Samantha had talked about was standing out there holding the hatch shut.
Hello, World Sentience. How are
you
?

All right. What had happened, of course, was that they'd had more snow than anticipated. It was up over the windows and now it was blocking the exit. He pushed on the hatch again, this time with a more determined effort. It moved, and some flakes fell into the air lock. Another shove produced still more flakes.

He tried to pull the hatch shut, but the snow blocked it. It was a bad moment: Until he could close up, he couldn't retreat back into the shelter.

He heard a woman's voice. It was muffled. Then his link activated.
“Who's in the air lock?”
It was Mary.

“I am,” he said.

“Jake, what are you doing in there?”

“I'm stuck.”

“
Stuck?
What happened?”

“Take a look at the windows.”

He scuffed more snow out of the way, kicked it into the chamber, and pulled on the hatch again. After a moment and some more tugging and kicking, it closed.
“Holy cats,”
said Mary.
“Are we buried?”

Jake began decompression. “I'd say so, yes?”

“Can you get out of there?”

“I'll be out in a minute.”

 * * * 

“TRAPPED IN AN
air lock,” said Tony as Jake came through the hatch. “Never heard of that happening to anyone before.” The comment created a painful echo.

“Okay,” said Samantha, “we have to get a sense of where we are. The snow is above every window in the place. Let's hope it was just a storm and not some sort of avalanche.”

“Couldn't very well be an avalanche,” said Brandon. “We're on flat ground.”

“We need a shovel,” Jake said.

Brandon shook his head. “We don't have one.”

“Sure we do.” Jake picked up a couple of the lids that had come with the plastic containers. “We'll go into the air lock, open the hatch as much as we can, and start dragging the snow inside until we clear some space. But there's only room for one person.” He glanced over at Brandon. “Can we decompress the entire cubicle so we can open both hatches together? That would make it a lot easier.”

“We can do that,” he said.

“Okay.” Samantha sounded exasperated. “Let's get to it.”

 * * * 

THEY TOOK TURNS
digging with the lids, dumped the snow into the containers, and hauled it to one of the showers. Eventually they got outside the cubicle, but they were still buried. When finally they broke through and saw stars again, everyone breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank God,” Mary said.

But it was Samantha, climbing out of the hole and in the effort pulling more snow in on top of them, who stopped dead when she got clear. “I don't believe this,” she said. Her voice shook.

They were standing on a mound of snow that covered the four cubicles but nothing else. The ground beyond it was as bare as it had been when they'd arrived. The grid was still clear. The lander, parked only meters away, showed only a light dusting of snow.

“What the hell's going on?” said Brandon.

Somebody was breathing hard.

“Not possible,” said Mary.

Jake slid down and went over to look at the lander. “Is it okay?” asked Brandon. “Any damage?”

“No,” Jake said. “At least nothing I can see.”

Tony was looking up at the sky. It was clear. No clouds. No sign of a storm. “Somebody doesn't like us,” he said.

Mary climbed down off the mound. “You were right, Samantha. There really
is
some sort of global force here.”

“You wanted to find a way to communicate,” Jake said. “I think we did.”

“What do we do now?” asked Mary.

Samantha delivered a sad smile. “Anybody here who didn't get the message?”

EVEN IF ONE
excludes the monument, Iapetus easily qualifies as the strangest moon in the solar system. One side of it is dark, the other light. It has a crunched appearance, as if something had squeezed it. It is the only one of Saturn's satellites that, because of its distance and the angle of its orbit, actually provides a decent view of the rings. But these elements shrink in contrast to its oddest feature: a ridge rising from the equator that almost completely circles the moon. It's fourteen hundred kilometers long and twenty wide. At its highest, it reaches an altitude of eleven and a half kilometers, making it the tallest mountain range in the solar system.

Even stranger, three parallel ridges run beside it.

“How did that happen?” asked Devlin.

“It's a bit much for me,” Priscilla said. She brought the explanation up on the display, but it was complicated, connected with a more rapid rotation millions of years ago.

Devlin looked at it and shook his head. “Incredible.”

As they drew closer, McGruder came onto the bridge and took the right-hand seat. He wore a pullover and shorts, dressed for a day on the boardwalk. “You know, Priscilla,” he said, “if I had my life to live over, I think I'd apply for pilot training. For interstellars.”

“As opposed,” she said, “to being president of the NAU?”

“Ah, yes,” he said. “I think so. In fact, to start with, I'm not sure any sane person would want to be president. I understand what you're saying. But the truth is I'd rather have
your
job. You run around, you get to see places like this, and you go where no one's ever been before.” He sat for a few seconds, simply breathing. “I envy you,” he said.

She thought of herself primarily as a staff assistant who checked maintenance records and conducted guided tours, but she let it go. Maybe she
should
stop feeling sorry for herself. If nothing else, she was on the Wheel, and she was getting some flight opportunities. “You know,” she said, “you may be right, Governor.”

He looked out at the approaching moon. At the dark-tinted surface. It would have been easy to conclude that the sunlight was being blocked by a black cloud. Except, of course, there was no cloud. “You know where it is?” he asked.

“You mean the monument?”

“Yes.”

“It's in a flat plain near the Persechetti Crater.”

“The Persechetti Crater?”

“It's named for the person who did the bulk of the theoretical work about the moon. She more or less locked down why it has the two color tones and why it has an angled orbit.”

“You're pretty knowledgeable, Priscilla.”

She smiled. “Actually, I've been reading about it all morning.”

“And you're honest, besides. May I suggest you not seek a career in politics.”

 * * * 

DEVLIN AND THE
Secret Service guys had worn Flickinger units before. (That, obviously, was why Cornelius and Michael had gotten the assignment.) Priscilla ran over the basics with Vesta and McGruder. When she was satisfied they wouldn't kill themselves, they got into the lander and waited for the optimum launch time. Vesta appeared uncomfortable. She denied having a problem but finally admitted that the lander seemed very small. “Is it really reliable?” she asked.

“It's fine, Vesta,” said Priscilla. “We never have problems with landers.”

The campaign manager looked skeptical. Pale. “Wasn't that the problem at Teegarden?” she asked. “Their lander wouldn't start?”

Priscilla managed a smile. “Well, almost never. But we're close to home, just in case.”

“It's all right,” said the governor. “We wouldn't be doing this if there were any danger. But, if you want, Vesta, you can stay with the ship.”

“No.” She was pulling herself together. “I wouldn't want to miss this. Anyhow, if something happens to you, the rest of us better not even think about going home.”

Devlin climbed back outside the vehicle and began taking shots of the lander and of Priscilla at the controls and of the governor seated beside her. As launch time approached, he got back in, and she started to depressurize the cargo bay.

When the process was complete, the launch doors opened, and the lander slipped out into the night. Vesta breathed a long
ohhhhh
, then held her breath as Priscilla took them down.

 * * * 

IAPETUS LIVES IN
perpetual twilight. The distant sun is little more than an extremely bright star. The moon is riddled with crags and mountains and impact craters. Pole to pole, the terrain is rugged. There's not much flat ground anywhere, but whoever created the monument found some by the Persechetti Crater. The monument is set in the exact center of a plain bordered by clusters of broken ridges. Nearby, Priscilla could see one of the landers from the Steinitz expedition, a century and a half earlier.

It lay about two hundred meters from the monument. It was a gray, clumsy vehicle. An old US flag imprint was still visible near an open cargo door. She circled the area once, descending slowly, and finally touched down. “Okay,” she said. “Get your air tanks and activate your suit. Let me know when you're ready, and we'll depressurize the cabin.”

She didn't trust them to do everything correctly, so she maintained a watchful eye. When the tanks were in place and they'd all gone slightly out of focus because of the energy fields, she conducted a brief inspection. Then she removed the air from the cabin and opened the air lock. “You'll find ramps in a few places,” she said. “Wherever there is one, please use it. They're trying to preserve the marks from the original mission.”

Devlin was first outside. He turned immediately to get pictures of McGruder coming through the air lock. Michael preceded Priscilla and Vesta. Cornelius remained inside.

Priscilla called him: “You okay?”

“I'm fine,” he said. “We figure there's nobody here to create a problem and the biggest danger would be that the air lock jams or something, and we get locked out of the lander.”

“I left the hatches open, Cornelius.”

“That's no guarantee it wouldn't close on its own. Look, no sweat, Priscilla. I know nothing like that is very likely, but we have to take into account all the possibilities.”

 * * * 

MCGRUDER APPROACHED THE
monument and stood looking up at it.

Carved from rock and ice, it stood serenely on that bleak plain, an unsettling figure of curving claws, alien eyes, and lean power. The lips were parted, rounded, almost sexual. Priscilla wasn't sure why it was so disquieting. It was more than simply the talons, or the disproportionately long lower limbs. It was more even than the suggestion of philosophical ferocity stamped on those crystalline features. There was something—terrifying—bound up in the tension between its suggestive geometry and the wide plain on which it stood. It was scratched and clawed by micrometeors, the driving dust between the moons, but no serious damage had resulted. Its wings were half-folded, and its blind eyes stared at Saturn, frozen low in the hostile sky by its own relentless gravity just as it had been eons ago, when Iapetus received its visitors.

Most striking, the creature was female.

There was no obvious evidence to support that notion. Certainly, no anatomical clues were apparent through the plain garment covering the body. It was, perhaps, some delicacy of line or subtlety of expression. It reminded her vaguely of a stalking cat, and yet was somehow erotic.

“It
is
creepy, isn't it?” said Devlin.

Vesta agreed. “Wouldn't want to meet one of those in my backyard.”

It stood on a block of ice about as high as Priscilla's shoulders. There was an inscription. Three lines of sharp white symbols, characterized by loops and crescents and curves, were stenciled in the ice, possessing an Arabic delicacy and elegance. And, as the tiny sun moved across the sky, the symbols embraced the light and came alive. No one knew what the inscription meant.

The ramp was designed to allow visitors to get close enough to touch the artifact without disturbing anything. McGruder stood close and gazed at the figure while Devlin took pictures. Despite the show business aspect, the governor looked as if the experience was having a genuine impact. “How old is it, Priscilla?”

“The estimates run from twenty-three thousand to twenty-eight thousand years.”

“We were still sitting around campfires.”

“Of course,” said Vesta, “we're still active. Looks as if these things are gone.”

McGruder reached out and
touched
it. Pressed his fingertips against one of the legs. “You know,” he said, “if not for this, we probably would never have had a serious manned space program.”

He might have been right. At another time, when support for NASA had dried up, and the space industry was effectively closing down, a robot vehicle had detected the monument. The hard reality had been that interest in spaceflight had faded when Mars was ruled out as a potential home for life. Unfortunately, there was nowhere else to go. The United States had put men on the Moon to make a political point. Without the Cold War, there would probably not even have been an Apollo XI.

“I'm not sure we do have one,” said Priscilla. “A space program.”

McGruder could not take his eyes off the monument. “Economies go through ups and downs. This is the first dip since the development of the Hazeltine drive. We haven't discovered anything out here except ruins. So we're back where the public is bored and doesn't want to pay the bills. What we need, Priscilla, is a major discovery.”

“You mean first contact.”

“That would be good.”

Maybe,
she thought,
we should give Talios some publicity.
But she resisted the temptation to ask him if he knew about the missed opportunity.
Maybe if he becomes president—
“We've already had one of those. A couple, really, if you count the ruins.”

“Voters don't get excited by ruins,” he said. “And the Noks are so dumb, nobody cares.” He chuckled. “That might be
our
future if we don't get seriously off-world. No, what we need is somebody who can set an example for us. Show us what we might become. Inspire us.”

Well, what the hell?
She didn't want to be overheard, so she signaled him to switch to a private channel. Then: “It's already happened, Governor.”

“How do you mean, Priscilla? What's already happened?”

“They don't want it released. But there was an encounter years ago at Talios. I'd appreciate it if it went no further. Or at least if you wouldn't mention your source.”

She told him about Dave Simmons and the lander, and the
Forscher
. And about the message she and Jake had found.

He listened. Initial surprise morphed into disbelief. “That can't be right, Priscilla.”

“I wouldn't lie to you, Governor.”

“No,” he said. “I don't guess you would.” He was silent for a moment. “Thank you. I appreciate your telling me.”

“I'd be grateful if you said nothing about it.”

“I won't,” he said. “Unless I see a need. In any case, you'll be protected. I'll see to that.”

 * * * 

SO FAR, FOURTEEN
monuments had been found. This one was unique because it was the only one that was arguably a self-portrait. The creature's hands, each with six digits, reached for Saturn. That this was what the sculptor had looked like was established when the Steinitz expedition matched the prints on the ground with the statue's feet.

“Governor,” said Devlin, “if you can move over a bit more and look up at the head, I'd like to get some more shots.”

McGruder waved him off. “We have plenty of time to take pictures, Al. Let it go for now.” He turned back to the monument. “It's magnificent,” he said.

Priscilla looked away from the figure, out across the plain, frozen and white and scarred with a few small craters. The landscape ascended gradually toward a series of ridges, outlined in the pale light of the giant world. Saturn's rings were tilted forward, a brilliant panorama of greens and blues, sliced off sharply by the planetary shadow.

Saturn was just above the hills. It would still be there when another twenty thousand years had passed, and Priscilla's distant descendants were standing out here. She wondered where mankind would be then. Spread across the stars? Or would everybody instead be hanging out back on the home world watching talk shows? And maybe laughing at people who claimed we'd once walked on the Moon.

 * * * 

THEY WERE STILL
taking pictures when Michael pressed a hand to his ear, listening to something. He nodded a couple of times. Then she heard his voice: “Governor, we're being ordered home. Immediately.”

McGruder turned and stared at the agent. “Why?” he demanded.

“There's a threat.”

“How the hell can anybody threaten us out here?”

“Not here, sir. Apparently there's a credible threat to destroy the Wheel. They want us to start back without delay. To go directly to Reagan. They're evacuating the space station.”

“Okay,” said Vesta, “let's move.”

McGruder laughed. “Hold on. We come all the way out to Saturn, and we get ten minutes? Let's just relax. I'm not finished yet.”

Priscilla's link chimed. Yoshie's voice:
“Priscilla, we're evacuating the Wheel. Bomb threat. We need the
Thompson
to help. Please get back here as quickly as you can. But take your passengers to Reagan first. Make all possible haste.”
The message was, of course, already well over an hour old.

She acknowledged, then switched back to Michael. “You have any details?”

“Negative, Priscilla.”

“Okay,” she said. “Governor, I guess we're ready when you are.”