“What’re you guys talkin’ about?” Lucky asked, already breathing hard from the long walk, carrying, as they all were except An Li, supplies for several days on their otherwise bare backs. “All them names nobody can pronounce. They sound like those names a Hindu guy once spouted trying to explain his charms to me when we was offloading freighters back in the old days. Never got that right, either.”
“Well, they’re from a religion,” Randi Queson responded. “Judaism and Christianity, mostly. But the places were real, and historical.”
“You study all that shit?”
“Some of it,” she replied. “A lot more I picked up, and some was from my own family. Mostly, I think I just looked into things because I found them interesting and I got curious.”
“And I’m pretty much the same,” Nagel told her. “Not much on the family side—they were about as religious as you are—but from other people I worked with or got to know. You weren’t curious about the Hindu fellow’s beliefs?”
“Not really. Sounded pretty silly to me. So does all this shit. Fancy names from folks too long dead talkin’ about places that probably don’t exist no more if they ever did and old fairy stories. What good does it do to know any of that? Does it fill your belly or get you a job or make you well when you’re sick? Just stories, that’s all. We’re all the way out here in the middle of who knows where, a zillion light-years from anything or anybody ’cept the others stuck here, too, and we ain’t bumped into no gods yet.”
“I wonder,” Randi muttered.
“Huh?”
“Somebody once said that if we ever ran into a race so advanced that they were as far ahead of us as we were of bugs and germs they’d be supernatural to us. Maybe that’s what God and the angels really are.” She paused a moment, liking the idea. “And maybe Satan and his demons, too. A lot of our myths and legends and core beliefs came from real events and real people at some point, even if they got twisted or misinterpreted. Certainly those monks who scouted the known and unknown universe were devoted to looking for God. That’s how we got these names for these moons.”
Lucky Cross looked over the blasted volcanic landscape and coughed some dust and sulphur from her lungs. “And you think God’s hiding around here playing with us now or something?”
Randi Queson looked around at the same landscape and shook her head. “No, not God. Definitely not God…”
There was a darkening above and the sounds of rumblings in the distance.
“Going to rain soon,” Jerry Nagel noted. “We ought to find some shelter while we have time.”
“Great!” grumped Cross, in a singularly bad mood this day. “So we’ll be stuck in mud and wrapped in mud and slip-sliding the rest of the day.”
“It’ll cool things off for a bit,” Queson noted hopefully.
“Make us human mud-pies, that’s all,” Cross responded.
“Where’s An Li?” Jerry asked them, looking around. “Li!An Li!” he shouted.
“You two go find us a shelter,” Randi told them. “I’ll find An Li.”
The former leader of the salvage team that employed them all wasn’t far away; she’d simply gotten distracted by something and that became the only thought in her mind. She was sitting there, dusty and stark naked, staring at something she’d found in the volcanic ash and humming a little tune from some distant point in her childhood.
“Li, honey, you can’t go off by yourself like this,” Randi scolded. “You have to stay with us.”
An Li didn’t seem to hear, but she was certainly aware that the older woman was there. She turned, looked up at Randi Queson, and smiled a vacant, little child’s smile, and held out whatever she had to show the team geologist what she’d found. “Pretty,” she said.
Randi squatted down and took an object from An Li’s hand and looked at it. It wasn’t very large, but it was definitely no volcanic oddity. It was a bright, shiny, golden color, so polished that it reflected a distorted vision of whatever image it captured. It was certainly not heavy enough to be pure gold—a hundred and fifty grams, no more. It had a pentagonal base no more than fifty or sixty millimeters long with a series of pentagonal brackets, a half dozen or so, running down its length. Why it wasn’t sandblasted or bent and twisted was as much a mystery as what it was or whose it might be. The only thing she was sure of was that it couldn’t have been dropped very long ago from the looks of it, and whoever lost it just might come back looking for it.
They were in strange territory now, and needed to tread softly and carefully. She wasn’t sure whether to take it or leave it, but An Li made up her mind for her by grabbing it out of her hands and clutching it to her. “Mine!” she said. “Pretty!”
Randi sighed. “All right, you can keep it, but we have to go and find the others. It’s going to rain. Get very wet. Can you hear it?”
As if on cue, loud rumblings of thunder sounded far too close to ignore.
An Li got up and took Randi’s hand, clutching the strange artifact in the other, and kept pace as much as she could with the larger woman striding off towards where the other two had vanished.
The golden artifact wasn’t the first such strange, small, manufactured alien object they’d come across on Melchior, and such things had been reported even in the original scouting reports. It seemed at times as if some alien machine was shedding parts, but it was more likely some minor tool of one of the stranded alien creatures they’d spent time avoiding. No two that they’d found had ever been alike, almost as if each were from a different creature or civilization, but that meant little. It was why the term alien had been invented.
They often had wondered if Doc Woodward up on the paradise-seeming moon of Balshazzar stumbled over these things. Maybe he even found out from his alien friends what they were and why they were scattered all over the place. Still, it would make more sense if he found them on the relatively static garden moon than them finding such things here, on volcanic Melchior, where everything was constantly in motion from dust, quakes, volcanism just under the surface and sometimes on top of it, and violent rainstorms. Things like these should be mostly melted or worn away by now. Most instead looked almost new, like this thing. Even the aliens shipwrecked along the coast had been here long enough to have pretty much exhausted what they’d salvaged and they surely didn’t have the kind of technology to make whatever this stuff was. It made no sense at all.
Rocks that stimulated your emotional centers and maybe spied on you and exquisitely manufactured pieces of junk that did nothing. Parts of the puzzle that they’d all love to solve, but which they had about as much chance of solving as they had of flying off this hellish world. Still, they occupied the mind, even Li’s.
They came up over a rise and looked for Jerry and Lucky. A fumarole nearby spouted loud white noise and steam from venting the result of rainwater hitting something far too hot and not very far below. All of them had learned not to go too near those roaring holes in the rock.
The storm was really coming towards them now; you could see its darkness creeping towards their position, blotting out the sky and landscape. If they didn’t spot the others quickly, it would be necessary to find someplace else to ride out the fury that was clearly unavoidable.
Randi spotted an oval opening about a meter high and perhaps two wide that looked promising. Hoping that it opened out a bit, she headed for it, letting Li get down and back in, then doing the same, but the childlike woman got to the edge of it and suddenly shouted “No!” over the noise of the storm.