“No, rather, of what no one knows,” answered Karl.
“What is this thing here?” Lissa whispered.
Hebo laughed. “I thought you’d never ask. Well, that’s what we’re trying to figure out. There could be one blue giant of a lot to learn from it. Including, maybe, a clue or three to the makers.”
The little she knew whirled in her head.
Found, almost always by purest chance—
A great field of rock on each of three airless worlds, fused by something not natural, optically flat save where meteorites had gouged craters.
Two nickel-iron asteroids that had been shaped into perfect spheres and set in the Trojan positions of the orbit of the planet humans called Xanadu.
On another living world, a single crystal the size of a high hill, which may have been the core of a huge machine or—or what?
Small metallic objects of peculiar shapes, brought to sight by erosion of the rock around them, conceivably tools or components that had been dropped and forgotten, as modern explorers might leave a hammer or some bolts behind, but the uses of these were unguessable, though when their perdurable alloys were finally analyzed it opened up a whole new field of materials science.
Six-meter bubbles of similar stuff afloat in the atmosphere of a Jupiter-sized planet, hollow, emptied of whatever they once contained, though maybe that had not been matter at all but a resonance of forces.
Fossilized traces of foundations removed and activities ended, like dinosaur tracks, and one maddening impression that might have been made by some kind of circuitry—
Where datable, perhaps ten million years old, but the probable error of those measurements might be up to fifty percent.
And few, few—
How much more waited undiscovered, at the half-million or so stars that spacefarers or their robots had come to, however briefly, and the three hundred billion or more in this one galaxy that none had yet reached?
Lissa stared back toward the river. “This may be… the best preserved Forerunner object… ever found.”
Hebo nodded. “As far as Dzesi and I can tell. We even suspect it’s in working order. Though we can’t tell what that would signify. It can’t be hyperbeaming, this far down in the gravity well. Maybe there was a relay satellite, or maybe a ship called now and then to collect the data.”
“But this is incredible. You can’t keep it hidden.” Anger flared. “You’ve no
She jumped, to her feet, spilling her drink. The Rikhan glided up, hand on knife, lips drawn off teeth. Karl whistled and stirred his bulk.
“Whoa, there!” Hebo rose too. A cloud passed over the sun, blown from the west. A wild creature screamed.
Hebo picked up Lissa’s beaker and busied himself with a fresh one. “Here, let me make you a refill,” he urged. “Come on, we’re friends. Just listen, will you?”
“Go ahead,” she agreed after a minute. She accepted the drink. He’d mixed it stiffer than before. She’d better be careful.
Hebo returned to his chair, outrageously relaxed. “Well, now, to start with, I told you I make my living where and how I can, as long as it’s more or less decently. Decency’s got a lot of different definitions, human and nonhuman.” His tone smoothed. “But I assure you, milady, I’m not a worse man than most.
“So a couple of years ago I caught word about the discovery of, uh, Jonna. Obscure, only another sort-of- Earthlike planet—‘only!’ ” he exclaimed. Calm again: “Sooner or later, somebody would try to learn more, but no telling who or why. Nobody can keep up with everything that everybody’s up to. Well, why not me? Nothing to forbid. No one’s laid any claim. No jurisdiction except the Covenant of Space, and you know how much that means.”
“A statement of pious intentions.” Did the Rikhan sound contemptuous?
“A basic common-sense agreement,” Karl reproved.
“Anyhow,” Hebo said, “we weren’t about to commit banditry, conquest, environmental destruction, or cruelty to politicians. We just intended a look-see. Dzesi’s partnered with me before, now and then.”
“For the fame and honor of the Ulas Trek,” said the anthropard.
And Dzesi’s own, Lissa thought. She isn’t altogether unlike us.
“How did you find the artifact when we didn’t?” the woman asked.
“Partly luck, no doubt,” Hebo conceded. “However, we did have our particular motives. You people are after basic scientific knowledge, planetology, biology, et cetera. The planet’s loaded with that, anywhere you go. We were looking for something that might pay off.”
“How?”
“Oh, maybe a region someone would like to try colonizing. These long days and nights, swings in the weather, and all—in some areas, at least, maybe they’d not be too much for, oh, possibly the Sklerons. Of course, they’d want very specific information before deciding it was worth their while to investigate further. So we were random-sampling, with a close eye out for anything unusual. When our optics spotted this from orbit, naturally we came down to see what it was.”
Indignation resumed. “And you haven’t considered reporting it!”
“We will, we will, and meanwhile we won’t have harmed it. We figured somebody—a news agency, a scientific institution, whatever—would pay well to be told about it. Contract drawn up beforehand, payment on proof of truthfulness. Same as selling any other information. Information’s really the one universal currency.”
Anger gave way to a certain sympathy. She wished it were not she who must dash his hopes to the ground. “I’m afraid we— can’t keep the secret for you. Not ethically.”
Dzesi snarled.
Hebo shushed her. Astonishingly good-humored, he responded: “Luck of the draw. Can’t win ’em all. Though I do already have a couple of notions about deals that could maybe be made—” He finished his drink. “Hey, let’s knock this off. Stay a while, why don’t you? We’ll help you set up your camp. We’ll show you around. And then you can decide what to tell them at your base, other than that you’re safe and sound and having a good time.”
IV
Dinner became jolly, at any rate for the humans. Hebo kept an excellent larder. He poured the wine with a liberal hand and did most of the talking. Lissa soon had nothing against that, even after it became rather boastful. If half what he told was true, he’d had some fabulous adventures. And he had also absorbed considerable culture. Much of what he quoted or mentioned in passing was unfamiliar to her—who were Machiavelli, Hiroshige, Buxtehude?—but she didn’t think he was making it up. The worlds and histories were simply too manifold.
“Yep,” he ended, “we’d’ve been rescued plenty sooner if it hadn’t been for the squabbles back on the satellite.”
“That
“Actually, that didn’t cause most of the trouble,” Hebo explained. “Sure, those two breeds don’t get along, and it was a big mistake including several of both in the expedition. But they’re too different for any real, deadly feuding, let alone war. Nope,” he said, turning a bit philosophical, “I don’t expect there’ll ever be an interstellar war. Between species, that is. Inside a species, though—races, religions, tribes, factions—in this case, two Susaian creeds. Not that we humans are saints. We may be the worst of the lot.”
You might almost call him handsome, in a rough-hewn fashion, Lissa thought. “You must have a wide basis for comparison,” she murmured, “with all the roving you’ve done for—how long?”
“I was born about nine hundred years ago, Earth count.”
“What? But that’s amazing!” Minor scars and the like suggested his latest rejuvenation had been about twenty years back, which would put him biologically in his forties. He didn’t look it. “Why have I never heard of you before, at home on Asborg or anywhere else?”
