The Gabble

The water recedes from the sarcophagi and they are both whole and undamaged. It then proceeds to crawl up the walls and across the ceiling. The two aliens turn and observe us, or so it seems. They have no eyes.

‘What now?’ I ask Duren.

‘I have no idea,’ the scientist replies.

I see that the water on the floor, on the walls, and on the ceiling is dividing into liquid bricks — reforming to how it was before the earthquake. I point this out to Duren.

‘Just enough geothermal energy from the quakes to repair the damage they made. Neat,’

he says.

One of the aliens squats and places its appendage in the water again. A snake of water, like a rivulet in reverse, traverses Duren’s body. It seems to be probing all round his coldsuit.

When it tries to get into his mask he slaps at it and it drops away, suddenly only water again.

The aliens tilt their heads then abruptly stride to the entrance through ankle-deep water holding the shape of bricks. We follow. We follow them out into the tunnel and there see that the treads have melted away on both of the crawlers. We follow them through the water to a point where the water is suddenly ice again — a neat line round the circumference of the tunnel. We watch them climb back into their own sarcophagi — the water still liquid inside — and seal themselves in.

‘They didn’t do anything,’ I say.

‘They wanted to,’ said Duren, ‘but they probably didn’t have the energy to spare.’

As we walk back to the crawlers I ask him what will happen now that this is known.

‘The project won’t be shut down by accountants. We’ll get funding from Earth Central itself. Maybe, sometime, we’ll resurrect them all,’ he says.

‘It would be nice to see,’ I say, after we have made a call for help from the transmitter of my crawler. And I wonder if we will see it, because, of course, the warming of our coldsuits has damaged them, and they are already starting to malfunction. Perhaps you, who are experiencing this documentary, will see.

ALIEN ARCHAEOLOGY

The sifting machine had been working nonstop for twenty years. The technique, first introduced by the xeno- archaeologist Alexion Smith and frowned on by others in his profession as being too blunt an instrument, was in use here by a private concern. An Atheter artifact had been discovered on this desert planetoid: a species of plant that used a deep extended root system to mop up platinum grains from the green sands, which it accumulated in its seeds to drop on the surface. Comparative analysis of the plant’s genome-a short trihelical strand-proved it was a product of Atheter technology. The planet had been deep-scanned for other artifacts, then the whole project abandoned when nothing else major was found. The owners of the sifting machine came here afterward in the hope of picking up something the previous searchers had missed.

They had managed to scrape up a few minor finds, but reading between the lines of their most recent public reports, Jael knew they were concealing something and, breaking into the private reports from the man on the ground here, learned of a second big find.

Perched on a boulder, she stepped down the magnification of her eyes to human normal so that all she could see was the machine’s dust plume from the flat green plain. The Kobashi rested in the boulder’s shade behind her. The planetary base was some ten kilometers away and occupied by a sandapt called Rho. He had detected the U-space signature of her ship’s arrival and sent a terse query as to her reason for being here. She expressed her curiosity about what he was doing, to which he had replied that this was no tourist spot before shutting down communication. Obviously he was the kind who relished solitude, which was why he was suited for this assignment and was perfect for Jael’s purposes. She could have taken her ship directly to his base, but had brought it in low below the base’s horizon to land it. She was going to surprise the sandapt, and rather suspected he wouldn’t consider it a pleasant surprise.

This planet was hot enough to kill an unadapted human and the air too thin and noxious for her to breathe, but she wore a hotsuit with its own air supply, and, in the one-half gravity, could cover the intervening distance very quickly. She leapt down the five meters to the ground, bounced in a cloud of dust, and set out in a long lope-her every stride covering three meters.

Glimmering beads of metal caught Jael’s attention before she reached the base. She halted and turned to study something like a morel fungus-its wrinkled head an open skin of cubic holes. Small seeds glimmered in those holes, and as she drew closer some of them were ejected. Tracking their path, she saw that when they struck the loose dusty ground they sank out of sight. She pushed her hand into the ground and scooped up dust in which small objects glittered. She increased the sensitivity of her optic nerves and ramped up the magnification of her eyes. Each seed consisted of a teardrop of organic matter attached at its widest end to a dodecahedral crystal of platinum. Jael supposed the Atheter had used something like the sifting machine far to her left to collect the precious metal, separating it from the seeds and leaving them behind to germinate into more of these useful little plants. She pocketed the seeds-she knew people who would pay good money for them-though her aim here was to make a bigger killing than that.

She had expected Rho’s base to be the usual inflated dome with resin-bonded sand layered over it, but some other building technique had been employed here. Nestled below an escarpment that marked the edge of the dust bowl and the start of a deeply cracked plain of sun-baked clay, the building was a white-painted cone with a peaked roof. It looked something like an ancient windmill without vanes, but then there were three wind generators positioned along the top of the escarpment-their vanes wide to take into account the thin air down here.

Low structures spread out from either side of the building like wings, glimmering in the harsh white sun glare. Jael guessed these were greenhouses to protect growing food plants. A figure was making its way along the edge of these towing a gravsled. She squatted down and focused in.

Rho’s adaptation had given him skin of a deep reddish gold, a ridged bald head, and a nose that melded into his top lip. She glimpsed his eyes, which were sky blue and without pupils.

He wore no mask-his only clothing being boots, shorts, and a sun visor. Jael leapt upright and broke into a run for the nearest end of the escarpment, where it was little more than a mound.

Glancing back, she noticed the dust trail she’d left and hoped he wouldn’t see it. Eventually she arrived at the foot of one of the wind generators and from her belt pouch removed a skinjector and loaded it with a selection of drugs. The escarpment here dropped ten meters in a curve from which projected rough reddish slates. She used these as stepping stones to bring her down to the level of the base, then sprinted in toward the back wall. She could hear him now-he was whistling some ancient melody. A brief comparison search in the music library in her left-hand aug revealed the name: “Greensleeves.” She walked around the building as he approached.

“Who the hell are you?” he exclaimed.

She strode up to him. “I’ve seen your sifting machine; have you had any luck?”

He paused for a moment, then, in a tired voice, said, “Bugger off.”

But by then she was on him. Before he could react, she swung the skinjector round from behind her back and pressed it against his chest, triggered it.

“What the…!” His hand swung out and he caught her hard across the side of the face.