Terry pointed an index finger at the image on the screen. “This thing is loaded with right angles. That’s what it is: An oversize complex of right angles.”
They looked at one another. “Is it designed to be a target?” Jane asked. “Or are the clouds intended specifically to kill these things?”
“IT IS UNDER power, ” said Bill. “There’s only a trace, but we’re getting an electronic signature.” It was rotating. The spines caught and manipulated light from the Bumblebee. “Once every seven minutes and twelve seconds,” Bill continued helpfully.
They had drawn within a hundred meters of the object. The spines turned slowly past them. Bill switched on the navigation lights so they could see better. Terry was reminded of the puzzles he used to do as a boy, enter here, find your way through the labyrinth, come out over there.
There were no sharp points anywhere. The tops of all the spines were flat. Ninety degrees.
Jane submitted a report to Serenity. While she talked, Terry studied the object. It had no thrusters, no visible communication devices, no sign of a hatch. It had enough dents and chips to suggest it was old. A couple of the spines had been broken off. Otherwise, the surface was smooth, as if it had come out of a mold. “Bill,” he said, “train the lights into the notches. Let’s see what it looks like down there.”
It was a long way. No central surface was visible; the spines seemed simply to rise out of each other. Jane took them in almost close enough to touch.
The Quagmor was dwarfed.
“Still no reaction of any kind, Bill?”
“Negative, Terry.”
They approached the top of one of the spines. It was rectangular, about the dimensions of a basketball court, perfectly smooth save for a couple of chunks gouged out by collisions. The Quagmor passed over it, the ship’s navigation lights sliding across the surface, over the edge and into a chasm. Then he was looking down the slanted side until the lights lost themselves in the depths, to reappear moments later coming back up another wall, wider and shorter and angled differently.
“Bill,” he asked, “do you see any more of these things in the neighborhood?”
“Negative. I haven’t been able to do a complete sweep, but I do not see anything else.”
Jane finished recording and sent her message on to Serenity. Then she got up and stood beside him, her hand on his shoulder. “I’ve always assumed the universe made sense, Terry,” she said. “I’m beginning to wonder.”
“I’ve been looking for a hatch.”
“See anything?”
“Nope.”
“Just as well. I don’t think I’d want to go calling. Maybe we should try talking to it.”
“You serious? From the looks of it, there hasn’t been anything alive in there for the last few million years.”
“That’s an interesting estimate. It’s derived from—?”
“It looks old.”
“Good. In the end, I can always count on you to fall back on hardheaded logic.” Her eyes sparkled. “You know, it might be programmed to respond to a signal.”
“It’s a thought.” He swung around in his chair and gazed up at the AI’s image. “Bill, we’ll use the multichannel. Audio only.”
“Ready when you are, Terry. The circuit is open.”
“Okay.” He leaned forward, feeling foolish, and allowed a glib tone to creep into his voice. “Hello out there. Is anybody home?”
Another spine rotated past.
“Hello. This is us out here talking to you over there.” He looked at Jane. “Why are you laughing?”
“I was just thinking how you’d react if somebody answered.”
He hadn’t even considered the possibility. “We getting anything, Bill?”
“There is no response. No reaction of any kind.”
He stayed with it a few minutes before giving up. The hedgehog sparkled and glowed in the lights of the Quagmor. His own interstellar artifact. “Going to have to break in,” he said.
She shook her head. “Not a good idea. Serenity will have the information in a few hours, and they’ll be sending somebody right out. Let’s wait for them.”
There was no way he was going to be sitting on his rear end when they got there, and have to confess he didn’t know any more than he and Jane put in the report. “I want to see what’s inside.”
“We don’t know what it is.”
“That’s why I’d like to see the inside.”
“Let’s let the experts do it.”
“You know any experts on interstellar artifacts? Jane, nobody knows anything about this stuff. Nobody’s better qualified to open it than you and I.”
She made a face. Don’t like the idea. Not a good move. “You know,” she said, transparently trying to change the subject, “it’s one of the loveliest things I’ve ever seen.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. I mean it.”
“Jane, it has all the lines of a porcupine.”
“No.” She was looking past him, out the viewport at the bizarre landscape passing by. “It’s a rhombi-whatever. It’s magnificent.” She turned a sympathetic smile on him. “You really don’t see it, do you?”
“No.” Terry followed her gaze, watched the shadows from the navigation lights creep up, down, and across the artifact’s planes and angles. “I don’t like the clouds. And I don’t like these things.” He got out of his chair and headed for the storage locker. “You want to come along?”
THEY STRAPPED ON e-suits, which would project a Flickinger field around them, protecting them from the void. The field was flexible, molded to the body except for a hard shell that arced over the face, providing breathing space.
They went down to the launch bay, picked up laser cutters and air tanks, and turned on the suits. While the bay depressurized, they did a radio check and strapped on wristlamps.
There was no launch vehicle in the bay, but it didn’t matter because it wouldn’t have been useful anyhow in the current situation. They pulled go-packs over their shoulders, and Terry hung an imager around his neck. “Bill,” he said, “I’ll record everything. Transmit live to Serenity.”
“Do you really think it’s that dangerous, Terry? Maybe we should reconsider what we’re doing,” said Bill.
“Just a precaution,” he said.
Bill opened the airlock and admonished them to be careful.
They had left Serenity seven months earlier and had spent the entire time studying the omega. It had a numerical designation, as all the clouds did. But they’d gotten into the habit of referring to this one as George. George was apparently a onetime boyfriend of Jane’s, although she refused to provide details. But it amused her to ridicule him. The cloud, she’d said, was inflexible, windy, and took up a lot of space. And it kept coming. No matter what you said or did, it kept coming.
George hung ominously in the background as Terry picked out a spine and directed Bill to match rotation with it, so that it became a stable fixture a few meters from the airlock.
The Quagmor, which was affectionately referred to by almost everyone as the Quagmire, was the first research vessel designed specifically to operate near the clouds without fear of drawing the lightning. Unlike the polygon object it was inspecting, it had no right angles. The ship’s hull, her engine mounts, her antennas, sensing, and navigation equipment, everything, was curved.
They’d even penetrated George’s surface mists, gone a few hundred meters into the cloud, taken samples, and tried to listen for the heart of the beast. That was a joke between them, a reaction to the insistence of one school of thought that the clouds were alive. It was not a view that Terry took seriously. Yet plunging into it had given him the eerie sensation that there might be some truth to the notion. It was a view easily dismissed when they’d emerged. Like laughing at ghosts when the sun was high.
“Ready?” asked Jane.
“All set.” He was standing at the edge of the airlock trying to decide on a trajectory. This was the first time they’d been outside the ship on this run, except for a brief repair job on the forward sensor pods; Terry nevertheless had long experience working in the void. “There,” he said, pointing.
One of the higher spines. Nice broad top for them to land on. Easy spot to start. Jane shook her head, signifying that she’d done dumber things but was having trouble remembering when. They exchanged looks that were supposed to register confidence, and he pushed out of the lock, floated across the few meters of space that separated the ship and the spine, and touched down on his target. But the stone surface was slippery, slippery even for the grip shoes, and momentum carried him forward. He slid off the edge, blipped the go-pack, did a 360, and came down smoothly atop the crest.
“Nice maneuver, Flash,” said Jane.
“Be careful,” he said.
She floated over and drifted gently onto the surface, letting him haul her down. “It’s all technique,” she said.
Terry rapped on the stone with the handle of the cutter. “Feels solid,” he said. “See any way in?”
She shook her head. No.
He looked into the canyon. Smooth rock all the way down, until the beam faded out. The spine widened as it descended. It looked as if they all did.
“Shall we see what’s below?” he asked.
She was wearing a dark green pullover and light gray slacks. A bit dressy for the work. “Sure,” she said. “Lead the way.”
He stepped into the chasm and used the go-pack to start down. Jane followed, and they descended slowly, examining the sheer wall as they went.
Plain rock. Smoother than on the roof, because the lower areas took fewer hits. But there was nothing exceptional, all the way to the bottom.
BILL MANEUVERED THE Quagmire directly overhead, leaving the spotlights off because they would have been a distraction. But the navigation lights were on.
There was nothing in Terry’s experience to which he could compare the place. The spines did indeed grow out of one another. There was no flat or curved surface at the center of the object that could have been described as housing the core. It was dark, surreal, the Quagmire no more than a few lights overhead, and the rest of the world walled out.
Terry felt light-headed. Even in the vacuum, he was accustomed to having a flat space underfoot, a moonscape, a ship’s hull, something. Something to relate to. Here, there was no up or down, and everything was at an angle. “You okay?” she asked.