Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt Read online

  So Harvey sees I’m not very impressed and he tells me we’ve got neighbors. He mentions someplace I never heard of. Al-Car or Al-Chop or something like that. He says it like it’s a big deal. And then it dawns on me what he’s talking about, that they’ve found the signal they’re always looking for.

  “How far away are they?” I ask.

  He laughs again and says, “A long way.”

  “So I say how far’s that?”

  “Mack,” he tells me, “you wouldn’t want to walk it.”

  For a minute I wonder if the people on the other end are going to come this way but he says no that could never happen. Don’t worry. Ha ha ha.

  Well, I say, tell them hello for me. Ha ha. And he offers me a three buck tip, which was kind of cheap considering how late it was and that I had to drive up and down that goofy road. I mean, I’m not going to take his money anyway. But three bucks?

  But that’s why I was late.

  Ran into Clay outside town, by the way. He was over at Howie’s getting his speed trap set up. Says he picks off a few every Friday. Says he had to go over to Ham’s place earlier because Ham was screaming at Dora again. I used to think she would pack up and leave one of these days but I guess not.

  Yeah.

  Anyway, that’s why I was late. I’m sorry it upset you. I’ll call next time, if you want. But you don’t need to worry. I mean, nothing ever happens in Rock City.

  TWEAK

  Civilizations, if they survive their nuclear age, seem always to follow the same path. “It is inevitable,” said the ship.

  Sikkur adjusted the picture with one mandible while supporting his snout with the other. Kayla nodded. “It’s good to know,” she said, “that everything has a happy ending.”

  Onscreen, thousands of the creatures labored on the Morgan Monument.

  Kayla brought up the BBC, where one of the anchors was going on endlessly about Mr. Morgan, the Prime Minister, how his thirty-two years in office had been a period of endless prosperity. A guest commented on his popularity, “Never had a leader like this.”

  “What are you thinking?” Sikkur asked.

  “I liked it better when it was called Trafalgar Square. It had a better ring.”

  “I agree,” Sikkur said. “But Trafalgar is undoubtedly dead.” She glanced through the viewport at the clouds. They were moving out over the ocean again, headed west. “It is incredible,” she added.

  “You do not mean the monument?”

  “No. Not the monument.” She gazed at him with deepset eyes, dark and intelligent, intended for use under a different sun. “I mean the consistency of it all.”

  He switched to another feed. This one from a satellite over Canada. Men and women worked contentedly on the Gulf of St. Lawrence Canal Project. And then to demonstrations on the streets of Toronto. People marched around a government building, bearing signs, MILLWORKERS FOR MYERS and MYERS IS THE MAN.

  Kayla’s chair squeaked as she changed position. “Whether we look at places like Bakyubah on the far side of the Galaxy, or the civilizations of the Parah Cloud, or Greater Wahkni near the Hole, wherever we go, it is always the same: If they survive the atom, soon after they begin tweaking their genes.”

  Below, in the western Atlantic, a few rain clouds drifted through the late afternoon.

  Sikkur fished a snack out of the ready box. A red gufer. It squirmed as he popped it onto his tongue and sucked it down. “It must be an intriguing period for everyone,” he said, “when they arrive at the stage where they can control evolution.” He listened to Kayla’s breathing. “Yes, I’d like to have been there when they first realized how to do some of these things. Increase intelligence by tweaking a gene. Grant musical genius. Provide a handsome brow.” He took a deep breath. “A godlike business.”

  “Which gene was it, dear?” She combined a smile with a flick of her eyes. Whenever she did it, the bridge brightened.

  “Which are you talking about, love?”

  “The brow. The brow. I’ve always been impressed by a stately brow.”

  He snorted. She did like to kid around. “As if I’d know,” he said. The sky below was growing brighter as they gained ground on the sun.

  Kayla was a glorious creature, the exquisite curve of her fangs, the way her eyes lit up when sudden movement caught her attention. Of course, she lived in a society where everyone was physically appealing. When everybody was beautiful, were they all just average? Was the cumulative effect no greater than it had ever been? It was a question for philosophers. However that might be, Kayla’s charms ensured there were no long evenings on the Stardust.

  The scientists had virtually stopped the ageing process. Had granted Sikkur and Kayla endless courage. And of course they had social skills par excellence.

  “It is where the manipulation should have stopped.” Baranka had said that. Had said it again and again. A few others had taken up the cry. But they were old. Many hadn’t had the benefit of the various enhancements, and never understood that the point of being alive was to be happy. “Unlimited happiness will make us slaves,” some had said. Foolish notion. Was Sikkur a slave? Was Kayla?

  Fortunately, like the humans, the home race had had excellent leaders. Each one better than the last. It would be a joy to go back and report that, from one end of the galaxy to the other, wherever one found an advanced species, happiness and good times reigned.

  The Stardust was approaching the United States now. Sikkur picked up images of workers in the capital city taking down an obelisk which was, according to CNN, going to be replaced by a temple dedicated to the current president, Mark Ramsay Howard.

  The satellite zeroed in on the project. It was apparently lunchtime, a warm, pleasant day. A crowd of women were moving into the work area, carrying thermos containers and bags of food. Somewhere a band played, and people sang the praises of the president.

  “No question about it,” said Kayla. “They’ve found their happiness gene.”

  He tapped his scaled breast. “Gives me a warm feeling right here.”

  “It is indeed exhilarating.” said the ship.

  She treated herself to one of the gufers and stared contentedly at the screen. “I envy them. Why don’t we go down, and help? Tote that barge? Maybe make some points with their boss. It would do us good to haul a little masonry around.”

  “Kayla,” he said, “you know we’re not supposed to do that. As much as I’d like to.”

  She did that thing again where she lit up the bridge. “I won’t tell anybody.”

  MELVILLE ON IAPETUS

  The thing was carved of rock and covered with ice. It stood serenely on that bleak, snow-covered plain, a nightmare figure of curving claws, surreal eyes, and lean fluidity. The lips were parted, rounded, almost sexual. I 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, but no serious damage had resulted.

  We stood before it, staring.

  The wings were half-folded. Ray Morgan, on my right, used the toe of his boot to dig small circles in the orange-tinted snow.

  The creature’s blind eyes were aimed at Saturn, frozen low in the hostile sky by its own relentless gravity.

  Static crackled in my receiver. “Nice view of the horizon, Terri.” It was Smitty in the command module, somewhere overhead. I mumbled an apology: my primary function at this moment was to keep the camera on-target. “Jay,” Smitty continued, “how’s it look?”

  The figure was set on a block about a third its own height. Steinitz approached it, his big boots pushing into the granular stuff underfoot, which was more like sand than snow. His shoulders were on a line with the top of the base. “Looks like granite,” he said. “There’s somethi
ng written here.” He switched on his lamp. The light penetrated the reddish-brown ice and crept up into the lower body.

  The inscription hadn’t been visible to the probes, one of which lay in the snow forty meters behind us.

  “It’s female,” said Morgan.

  Yes, I thought, not knowing precisely how I knew. Some delicacy of line perhaps, or subtlety of expression. Certainly, no anatomical clues were apparent through the plain garment covering the trunk. Yet it was most decidedly female: it reached out to Steinitz, arms open, legs braced, weight slightly forward. “It reminds me,” Morgan continued, “of my wife.”

  That almost broke the mood. Steinitz laughed, and someone giggled over the link, Jennifer had been pensive, sullen, with eyes that were lovely only by candlelight. She’d never really been Morgan’s wife, other than by some mad informal agreement, but they’d maintained the facade at her insistence, and she’d thereby made herself ridiculous. During that last year before departure, when we were gradually reducing our world to the five people who would make the four-and-a-half year flight, Jennifer, always an outsider, had hung on. She really loved him, apparently, and she knew that the mission was too long, that their relationship, such as it was, could not survive it. So she did what she could to persuade him to abandon the project. To find a quiet job and settle down with her in Tampa. Or wherever.

  Toward the end, as she grew desperate, she’d spoken to none of us. With Morgan’s encouragement, the men joked about her. It was odd: usually in such a situation, the women in a group would have been protective. But Chung and I only stood aside and watched. Maybe we were embarrassed that she didn’t just tell him to take a hike.

  Maybe she did. One day she was simply no longer there.

  Morgan hadn’t mentioned her on the long flight out. At least not to me. But he was right. Somehow the thing on the plain did suggest Jennifer. Not physically, of course. It resembled no human woman. But it was, I thought, so terribly alone.

  “You getting a good look at the inscription?” asked Smitty.

  “Yeah…” Steinitz waved at me and I went close with the camera. Three lines of sharp, white characters that might almost have been Cyrillic were stenciled within the icy coating. They looked vaguely Russian.

  Steinitz’s breathing was harsh. He leaned over and peered at the symbols. Touched the artifact with his fingertips. Drew them across the surface as if the object were sacred. He moved his wrist lamp slowly from side to side. The letters brightened, lengthened, shifted.

  “Nice piece of optics,” I said.

  “Yeah. I wonder what it says.”

  I turned and looked across the wide level plain. We were on Iapetus, one of the moons of Saturn, as remote a place as I ever care to be. It was of course absolutely still. During the time we were there, which was about four days, it was always a dark place with bright lights in the sky. Over a distant ridge we could see Saturn and its rings, and some other moons. Iapetus, of course, is well outside the ring system, so you get a magnificent view.

  Other than whatever had made the statue, and occasional falling debris, nothing had moved on this dreary world for a million years. There’s no weather, and no seismic activity. Since Iapetus is in tidal lock, even Saturn doesn’t move. From our point of view at the foot of the artifact, the big planet was quite close to the horizon, a brilliant red-orange sphere, flattened at the poles, slightly larger than the Moon in Earth’s skies. The rings were tilted toward us, a brilliant panorama of greens and blues, sliced off sharply by the planetary shadow. Immediately beneath it, the landscape had erupted into broken towers of ice and rock, as though tidal forces had run wild. Saturn was in its first quarter.

  “How old is the thing, Jay?” came the voice from the ship. “Any ideas?”

  Steinitz walked around the base, and stopped on the far side. “No marks in the snow. And the snow’s probably untouched for what, thirty, forty thousand years? It’s been here a long time, Smitty. Fact is, the damned thing looks new.”

  My feet were getting cold. The temperature outside the suit was in the area of three hundred below, and the pump was having trouble keeping up with it.

  We poked and measured and speculated. But we took no samples. After awhile, Steinitz informed Smitty that we were ready to return to the landing site.

  “Okay, Jay,” Smitty said. “We’re starting Cathie down.”

  “All right.”

  “She’ll be coming down about fifty meters from your artifact. You’ve got about forty minutes.”

  “Fine. Well get the tarps up.”

  “Maybe it would be better if she didn’t try to get so close. I’d hate to have her fall on top of the goddamn thing.”

  They were talking about our operational center and living quarters, an Athena—one of five in the linkup—with its fuel storage tanks converted into crew space, and just enough propellant to get down. It would serve as our shelter and remain after we left, a new artifact for any other visitor who might wander by. It would, I suspected, one day be named for Steinitz.

  “Do it the way we planned it, Smitty,” he said. “It’s cold down here.”

  We’d used a sledge to haul a supply of canvas with us. It was clumsy, but we got it over the statue, over Jennifer as everyone was now calling her. We lashed it tight, and added a second tarp.

  When we’d finished, we rested briefly, and started back to the lander to wait for Chung. Iapetus was in its long night. No sun would be visible for three weeks,

  “Long way from home,” said Steinitz.

  We spent the next few hours setting up our shelter. When it was done, I was glad to move in out of the cold and get the doors shut behind me and climb out of the suit.

  Cathie Chung got the coffee going. There was a big central compartment to serve as command center and dining room. And a place to collapse. Blankets were stacked on a computer frame. I took one and pulled it over my shoulders.

  Designers back home must have thought we’d want a place with a view. The bulkheads were, for the most part, transparent. Privacy wasn’t an issue, but something else about not being able to get away from that moonscape, that figure, was unsettling. The artifact remained hidden by its canvas wrapping. But I knew what was under it. I kept looking out at it, and past it at the plain beyond, and at a distant cluster of broken peaks.

  Steinitz and Morgan were talking in whispers, discussing the composition of the snow. I got up and activated the filters. The plain, and Jennifer, vanished. Nobody seemed to mind. I wasn’t sure anybody even noticed.

  The evening started to wind down. Morgan put the artifact on his viewer but I could tell his mind was elsewhere. (I wondered if he was thinking of Jennifer. The real one.) I pushed down into my blanket to keep warm. Steinitz closed his eyes and let his head sink back. His hair had silvered noticeably during the long flight out, and his skin was hard and pocked, not unlike the moons among which he was making his reputation. He’d left Earth with a mild case of asthma, too much weight, and probably too many years. There were some who felt he shouldn’t have come at all. But none among the crew. Except maybe Morgan, who didn’t like any kind of authority.

  “Whoever made it,” Chung said, looking at the image over Morgan’s shoulder, “knew what they were doing.” She was tall, quiet, intense. Spoke English with a mild Chinese inflection. At twenty-four, she was the youngest crew member and, I suspected, the smartest. A support technician.

  “Eventually,” Morgan said, “it’ll wind up in a museum back home.”

  “It would look pretty good,” I said. “It amazes me they were able to get that kind of articulation out of a piece of ice.”

  “It just looks like ice,” said Steinitz. “That’s just the surface. It’s really rock.”

  Morgan looked around at us. “Or that kind of impact,” he said. “How would you like to have something like that come down on you in a dark alley?”

  Chung’s eyes flickered, and I felt it too. The remark was uncharacteristic of Morgan, who never admitted
to human weakness, other than lust, and certainly not to timidity.

  “You think that’s what they looked like?” I asked. It wasn’t the first time the question had come up. It had been a subject of heated discussion for years. Ever since the first probe had noticed it almost two decades earlier.

  “Probably,” said Chung.

  Steinitz frowned. “Anything’s possible. But I’d bet it’s purely symbolic. Someone’s equivalent of an American eagle. Or a Russian bear.”

  Morgan shook his head. “It’s God,” he said.

  That was a common notion among academics, although you didn’t hear it much on the media. Too many people got upset. Sponsors got boycotted. There were a lot of people who thought the creator of the universe was an old-looking guy with a white beard.

  “It might be mythic,” said Chung. She smiled and brought her fingertips thoughtfully together in one of those porcelain movements that one associates with pagodas and silk screens. “But I doubt there’s any religious connotation.”

  “Oh.” Steinitz had been making toast. He buttered a piece and bit into it. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because I have a hard time imagining whatever created that thing beating a drum.”

  “You’re assuming a star-traveler,” I said.

  “Of course. What else? I think we can assume she’s not from Pluto.”

  Steinitz looked across at her, his eyes narrowed. “You’re assuming more than that. I take it you wouldn’t expect to find religious institutions in an advanced society?”

  Chung smiled defensively. Had she offended anyone? Sorry But of course not. “No,” she said. “Taking myths literally is not characteristic of an enlightened civilization.”

  “So what do you mean when you say it might be mythic?”

  “The thing wears clothes. So I think that lets out the eagle. It’s probably a cultural icon, something that represents the sculptor’s past in some way, but which she, he, whatever, would not have taken literally. The way we might think of Pegasus, for example. Or Lady Liberty.”