do, working out of one camp in—how long a stay?”
She sighed. “Two years. Asborgan, that is; twenty-one months Earth standard. The most the consortium can afford at this stage.” Too many worlds, she thought, too full of unknownness, and we sophonts too few. “But a beginning. There’s no such thing as useless information, insight, is there?” Enthusiasm surged. “Who knows? We could make a discovery important enough that major institutions on several planets will mount a real effort.” She curbed it. “You may have made one, Captain Hebo.”
“Torben, Lissa. Formality doesn’t belong hereabouts.”
The Rikhan surprised her by taking her side. “Tradition is not a shield to lower lightly.”
“Speak for your own folk, partner. Uh, not to get forward, Lissa, or m’lady Windholm if you’d rather. How did you find us?”
“A monitor satellite of ours captured a view.” Happenstance, as enormous as the region was, but not too improbable, given the capabilities.
“I reckoned so. We’d figured it was lucky for us your base is on the next continent. Well, our luck didn’t hold out. Not that any harm’s necessarily been done. For sure, none was intended.”
“You didn’t respond to our calls,” she accused.
“Is that compulsory? They weren’t distress signals.”
Her amity dimmed. “You hoped we didn’t receive more than an inadequate image that could be misleading, and we’d be too busy to investigate just on the strength of it. Didn’t you?”
He laughed again. “That was sort of what we hoped. At least, we were buying a little time. But, say, if you wanted to check, why not send a flyer directly?”
“We are busy,” she admitted. “Undermanned, underequipped, under a deadline because of supplies—” She stiffened her backbone. “It chanced that Karl and I were in this vicinity. Base asked us to go have a look.”
He raised beaker and brows together. “On foot?”
“Our flyer is parked about fifty hours’ journey away by the most direct route,” Karl put in. “Our mission is to conduct a random-sampling investigation of nature in these parts, on the ground, for comparison with data from elsewhere. Brief, superficial, inadequate in itself, granted; but trained observers may conceivably come upon a clue that causes research to redirect itself. Since, in our ignorance, one direction was as good as another, we readily agreed to make for this point.”
Hebo kept his attention on the woman. “So you’re a xenobiologist, Lissa?”
“No, Captain Hebo,” she said. “I’m a—generalist. I’ve simply done a fair amount of wilderness exploration on more than one planet, and the forest here is not too unlike others for scouts afoot to cope with.” The joy of it! “Karl’s the scientist.”
“And the muscle, I see. Not that you don’t have mighty good-looking muscles yourself,” Hebo purred.
She felt herself flush, and snapped, “Very well, here we are. Now it’s the turn of you two to explain what you’re at.”
III
A shelter window let in the deceptively mellow sunlight. From where she sat, Lissa could see over the scarred ground to the edge of the canyon and, beyond, wanly sheening amidst the gleam of water, the thing.
“Fair enough,” Hebo was saying. “Yep, fair enough. We’re absolutely legitimate.”
She swung her gaze back to meet his. “Then why the stealth?”
Dzesi stirred. She touched her knife. “S-s-s,” she hissed. “That is not a pleasant word about this.”
Karl took a short step forward and loomed at her.
Lissa had experienced a multitude of situations in the course of—going on a hundred years, was it? she thought in sudden astonishment. That long? Already? She lifted her free hand and made a smile. “No offense, as you put it, Captain Hebo, nor to your honorable companion. Shall we say you’ve been remarkably discreet?”
The atmosphere eased. The man laughed once more. “We could spend the rest of this large economy-size day beating around the bush. I don’t want to, do you? Sure, Dzesi and I have been sneaky.”
Again he was likeable. In fact, Lissa admitted to herself, he had a good deal of raffish charm. “Would you care to explain? No, I don’t imagine I have any authority, but others do.”
“I’d argue about that. But put it aside for now.” Hebo leaned back in his chair, crossed his legs, and took a long swallow. “All right. To start with, I’m a free-lance entrepreneur, to give it a fancy name. I keep my senses and sensors open, and when I get wind of a possible profit to be made, I go there.”
Lissa half gasped. “On your own?”
“Yep, my little spaceship is mine free and clear, along with the assorted gear and such, including enough capital to keep me solvent till the next success. More ventures don’t work out than do.”
“But, but what government
“Oh, this one or that one, depending. I’ve been at it a long while. When some fly-by-night nation goes under, I find me another.” He saw her frown. “Yes, I know a spacecraft mishandled can do as much damage as a crashing asteroid. Mine hasn’t done any yet; and I’ve been flitting a long while, I said. With several tribes, countries, sovereignties, globalities, what-have-you, I’m kind of grandfathered.” He leaned forward and patted her knee. “Don’t worry, brighteyes.”
She drew back, also in her spirit, but was nevertheless gripped. “Why are you on Jonna?”
He nodded toward the river. “What else but yonder?”
“Which is—”
“That’s what Dzesi and I would like to find out. So far, between our tests and my database—I keep a whopping database, if I do say so myself; and I do—we’ve established that it wasn’t made by any beings we know of, and includes technology none of them have ever heard of.”
A fresh shiver passed through Lissa. “Forerunners?”
“I suppose so, whoever they were. Or are.”
“Yes-s-s,” breathed the anthropard.
“Let us make certain we understand each other,” said Karl. He was right, Lissa admitted to herself. If you didn’t trudge through the obvious at the outset, you might learn the hard way that an alien—even a member of your own species, come from another world, another society—meant something quite different from what you did. Language was often too subtle, too mutable for the capabilities of a translator program.
“I assume we refer to those mysterious beings whose ancient relics have infrequently been come upon,” the Gargantuan continued. “It is not known whether the creators are still extant, but certainly they are no longer present in such parts of the galaxy as any of today’s spacefaring societies have visited.”
Hebo nodded. “You’ve got it. Myself, I favor the notion that they weren’t interested in colonizing, for whatever reason, and just had a few scientific missions in these parts. But why they never came back for a later look—” He shrugged. “That’s another good question. They must know that geological time has gone by. If they’re alive yet.”
“One may well doubt that,” said Karl. “Surely, however few and fleeting have been the expeditions to remote parts of the galaxy, so mighty and long-established a civilization would indicate its existence somewhere in it—by radiation from power sources, for example, detectable across many parsecs.”
“But the galaxy’s so bloody goddamn big. Oh, yes, our ships can jump to anywhere in it, but what microfraction of the total volume have we even touched? Especially at much greater distances than our usual rounds go. Wouldn’t you at least expect that the Forerunners’ home region would show lingering signs of their influence? Instead, everyplace seems to be the same on average, a few planets where the sophonts have gotten into space themselves, and that’s
Unless the Forerunners are something utterly other, thought Lissa, so strange that we can’t ever find them —or couldn’t recognize them for what they are if we did—maybe beings or machines that can survive at the core of the galaxy, maybe off in a whole different universe, maybe— It was not the first time she had wondered, nor was she the first one.
Hebo slapped his knee. “All right,” he said impatiently, “have we told each other enough of what everybody knows?”
