“We’re not currently seeking new collaborators.”
“May I have a look around at least?”
The woman paused, apparently lost in thought. Her AI was asking someone for guidance.
“All right,” she nodded. “We’re looking forward to meeting you, Erin.” She vanished.
The rover drove me the rest of the way in silence. I gazed out at the dream-like landscape of van Maanen B. Sharp spikes of obsidian rose from the curving ridges. The outermost surface, already cooked, had vaporized in the shedding of the red giant’s shell, and had left behind a land Dalí would have longed to paint. But, as I understood, that wasn’t the end; the equally strange land I was seeing originated rather recently when a giant impact stripped the planet of its remaining crust and most of the mantle. That’s why so few impact craters could be seen. This eerie land was young.
Castello’s Castle, finally rising over the horizon, did not live up to its name. The base was barely visible above the surface, save for a small observatory tower. An airlock opened for my vehicle and let me into the subterranean complex. The virtual woman appeared by its inner door. “Come in. We’re expecting you in the hall.”
I followed her through the labyrinthine corridors lined with austere printed regolith walls. The room hardly seemed more hospitable. There were three people inside. One a short pale person of androgynous features, the second a black woman with sparse clothes revealing silvery tattoos.
And Louis Castello.
He hadn’t changed much since the last records Bellugi had possessed. He’d scarcely aged. Though physically not resembling the original Antonio Arienti much, he’d stayed true to the type. His olive skin and dark eyes sported no obvious augments. In his plain shirt and trousers, he could have fit any period. He had lived through many.
“Hello, Erin,” he said casually. “We’re all pleased to meet you. Welcome to our humble station.”
Manu Virtanen. Ike Oladapo. Louis Castello. During our conversation over lunch, Virtanen almost never spoke; most of the discussion was supplied by Oladapo, on whom the agent I’d encountered was modeled, and Castello himself.
Searching for chemical peculiarities on the planet and in the debris disk… High-res radar and lidar imaging to reveal possible strange shapes… It all made sense together, even the strange attitude of the Olympians toward Castello’s Castle: the mixture of curiosity and derision.
“You’re trying to find some signs of the Ramakhi, aren’t you?”
“Of course.” Castello regarded me calmly. “Had you not understood that, we’d have nothing to talk about.”
“The others, at Olympus, probably think you’re fools.”
“Do you?”
Why? I wanted to ask. Why do you of all people pursue this? What’s in it for you?
“No,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean I think we’ve got odds on our side.”
“We? You’re not a part of our team yet.”
“We as humanity. This is something that should interest everybody. Pity that some can’t see that.”
Castello smiled, and so did Oladapo; only Virtanen still regarded me with her stony face.
“You can stay here for now,” Castello announced. “Let’s see how you fare.”
Three weeks later, I started suspecting that I was Floriana Bellugi’s only asset from aboard Chrysalis. But what should I do? I had found Castello but still had no idea what she wanted from him.
Nothing in his manner suggested his long and violent past. Yet when I tried to look beyond the innocent distracted smile, I could perhaps imagine the master puppeteer inside. There was something against-all-common-sense alluring about chameleons like Arienti, and something deeply chilling. He’d been the most perfect shape-shifter. He would seem to belong anywhere, be it a prestigious charity ball, a system-wide corporate board meeting, a scientific conference, a middle-class home, an impoverished slum, a seedy bar, a street gang, a mercenary squad, or a simple fishermen’s village on the shores of a long-forgotten island.
I could only imagine his life back on Earth. Something about the style of that life intrigued me despite myself. I could not lay my finger on it. How could I, a youngster who’d grown up in a totally different world, ever understand it? I suppose it bore the same sense of excitement and raw adventure that people of Arienti’s generation derived from tales of brave knights, seamen, or frontier settlers.
Even with my substantial augmented knowledge, I could hardly fathom the thrill of old Earth. Who would I have been in such a world, and what would I have seen? Such terrors and wonders…
I continued working with him. It was actually quite fascinating. On one of our walks outside to corroborate our robotic probes’ data, I interrupted the quiet white noise in our speakers and asked: “Why are you doing this in particular? You could go to any populated world, live a comfortable life…. Why go through so much trouble?”
“You’re here, so you know the answer already, no? If you can live forever, trying to find out what enabled that is just as good a way of spending your time as any,” he shrugged visibly even in his suit. “It satisfies curiosity and is sufficiently long-term to entertain me for quite a while. Maybe I’ll get tired of it if I encounter another dead end. Maybe not. You can plan only for a certain time ahead.”
“But we know so little about the Ramakhi from their messenger probe! It refused to tell us anything specific about its creators. There’s nowhere to start.”
The probe already spoke several human languages when we encountered it. It knew a lot about Earth-based life, our own biology and culture. It understood many figures of speech and conversed fluently. It must have been observing us for decades, but it never told us that. It managed to steer the first contact scenario into one that had been peaceful and relatively non-shattering for us.
“There’s plenty to start,” Arienti said dryly. “The isotopic composition of the probe’s alloys suggests it hadn’t assembled itself in our solar system. It was rather peculiar, in fact. The problem is, we don’t have precise enough measurements for other systems to make a comparison. We’re trying to supplement this data. Also, the age of the probe had been estimated at less than a hundred thousand years. It may have been assembled when the first modern humans started leaving Africa. We should be able to find many traces of the Ramakhi had they been around so recently. I’ve been tracking them for the better part of two centuries. I believe I’m getting closer.”
His words resonated in my ears. I had a strange sense of déja vu.
Two centuries? That must have been since his arrival in the Tau Ceti system already. Tau Ceti…
I felt like I was missing something important. I could go on like this for months and learn nothing more than the shallow image he’d shown to me. I had to get deeper.
It took two weeks’ planning, but finally I was sure I could do it. I waited for a moment when Arienti and Oladapo were outside, while Virtanen worked in the lab. The security systems were different from what I knew but compatible. I got in.
Arienti’s rooms seemed as inconspicuous and timeless as the man himself. Unlike him, they even lacked personality. You could see that someone lived here yet still learn little about him. I passed a small stack of spare clothes, the only ones to be seen. More could be printed easily.
No books; no such luxury to be brought here by a small expedition. None even printed here, though that would be considerably less luxurious.
No pictures on the walls, physical or projected. No physical mirrors. Nothing expendable at all.