‘Twenty million tonnes,’ Eunice said, with a touch of pride. ‘All of it shipped up from the main belt under the pretence that it was for normal mining operations. Would have been impossible if we didn’t already have a massive system-wide manufacturing and transportation network in place. A few thousand tonnes diverted from this facility, a few more from that . . . over time, it added up. But books still had to be cooked. One thing to keep a commercial secret from our competitors; another to run a secret project
‘So that’s two people who knew, other than yourself,’ Jumai said.
Eunice smiled tersely. ‘I made the initial discovery. But – as Geoffrey so kindly pointed out – I’m no physicist. Never was. I could be guided into a kind of understanding, but it was never more than a shallow approximation of the real thing.’
Geoffrey asked, ‘How could you make a discovery, without being a physicist?’
‘By luck. Luck and the wit to know that what I’d found might be useful, and that I should speak to someone who might be better informed than me.’ She touched a control and the shutters slammed back into place with the sound of a dozen rivet-guns firing simultaneously. ‘The experiment’s powered down now,’ she said, ‘but it still gives me the flutters, seeing that thing out there.’
‘You needed the solar grid on Mercury to run the first experiment,’ Jumai said. ‘Sun’s colder than a witch’s tit out here. How did you find the energy?’
Eunice laughed – not because it was a stupid question, Geoffrey decided, but rather one she liked. ‘That’s simple. I ran the second experiment off a small reactor derived from the first.’
She moved to the black tableau on the right-hand wall and detached one of the fist-sized fragments. It came off easily, leaving no trace of a hook or adhesive.
‘A piece of Chakra’s Folly,’ she said, tossing the item to Geoffrey. In Lionheart’s low gravity, he had ample time to catch it. ‘The Phobos Monolith. Your sister would have seen it, I think – on her way to the Indian settlement where I spent some time before descending to Mars.’
Geoffrey caressed the black fragment, convinced that he’d already handled it. ‘This is a piece of Phobos?’
‘Something that ended up there. People have known about the Monolith for at least a hundred and fifty years – they saw the shadow it cast long before they got a good close-up look at the thing itself. For a while, there were cranks who thought it might be an alien artefact – a ship, a sentinel, something like that. But when we got there we found that it was exactly what all reasonable people had always expected: a very big boulder, jammed into Phobos like a splinter. Impressive, hard to miss – a viable tourist attraction. But not an alien machine.’
‘Then why am I holding this?’
‘I wasn’t the first to see it up close. Not even the fiftieth. By the time I got there, nearly a hundred people had already come through Phobos on their way to Mars – I was the ninety-eighth. And countless robot eyes had already scanned and photographed the Monolith. They’d seen it for what it was: a clearly natural feature, the result of some ancient collisional process.’ Eunice waited a breath, then added, ‘But they’d all missed something.’
‘Something you didn’t,’ Jumai said.
‘I found debris,’ Eunice said, ‘near the base of the Monolith, loosely scattered over the Phobos surface material – bound there only weakly, due to the low gravity. That thing had been sticking up from the crust like a target in a shooting gallery for countless millions of years. Eventually something had hit it, some speck of cosmic dirt, and chipped off an entire face. I was looking at the debris, the shards of that high-velocity impact. Others must have realised what had happened, I suppose. But it had never occurred to any of them to pay attention to the debris.’
Geoffrey was still studying the piece in his hand. ‘You realised there was more to it than just debris.’
‘You can’t have missed those fine surface markings. On the face of it, they could be anything: spallation tracks from cosmic rays, crystalline defects . . . but something about them held my eye. I picked up another piece, lying close by. Then another. Eventually – and my suit air was running low by then – I found a matching pair. I fitted them together and saw that the scratches connected, and that they appeared to form part of some larger . . . diagram.’
‘I’d laugh if there was any possibility you might be joking,’ Geoffrey said.
‘I went back out there many times over the following weeks. I gathered as many of the fallen shards as I could find, bringing them back to the encampment. It was easy enough to keep the pieces hidden in my personal effects, and since we were going into a gravity well, not crawling out of one, there was no mass restriction for the trip down to Mars.’
‘Did Jonathan know?’ Geoffrey asked.
‘I saw no reason to keep it from him. He was my husband, after all. And I didn’t have any notion of what the scratches would actually turn out to symbolise. Obviously, their mere existence was astonishing. But beyond that . . . even if I went public, I couldn’t see it being more than a seven-day wonder. So what if the scratches appeared to point to an alien presence on Phobos? It couldn’t be proved, not rigorously. Someone could always claim that the shards had been faked by one of the first hundred. And if aliens had been there, a million or a billion years ago, they’d done nothing beyond leave that one set of scratches. Like someone stopping to take a piss at the roadside before carrying on.’
‘Graffiti. Scratched on the Monolith,’ Jumai said. ‘The kind of thing someone might do if they were stuck somewhere, bored, with nothing else to occupy them.’
‘Jonathan had studied electrical engineering before making his fortune in telecomms,’ Eunice said. ‘As part of his studies, he’d taken modules in modern physics. When I showed him the pieces, arranged as well as I was able, he said that the scratched forms reminded him of something. They look like little men, don’t they, or demons?’
‘That’s what I thought,’ Geoffrey said.
‘To Jonathan they were reminiscent of Feynman diagrams: little conceptual drawings encoding the interaction histories of subatomic particles. They weren’t Feynman diagrams, clearly – that would be as unlikely as finding inscriptions in our own alphabets or number systems. But they were analogous. The lines are the trajectories of particles. The squiggles are the forces mediating the reactions between them. The spirals are by-products of those reactions – other particles, packets of energy. That was just intuition, though. It would take a working physicist to say more than that. A good one, too. And someone I could trust.’
