But I and my species are predictably ethnocentric. We would have missed us, even if nobody else would. And thus: primitive space arks.
I was struck again, as we explored, that this particular primitive space ark showed signs of long habitation before its current state of abandonment. It was spotlessly clean—I wondered if there were more bots devoted to scrubbing—but the surfaces were worn, the finish on the walls buffed to a matte shine with layers of polishing scratches.
Tsosie said, “On the bright side, we haven’t found any more cadavers.”
Or even any skeletons. The giant ship we were searching seemed to be not just spotless and not full of dead people, but perfectly functional. Those side doors had led us to endless low-moisture farms full of food plants. The air that we weren’t breathing was heady with oxygen, and the hardsuits were filtering it out of the environment to recharge their own tanks.
So who was doing the maintenance? Was the crew… hiding?
We found bunk spaces, cabins, and apartments. We found dining halls and science labs. We found recreational facilities, kitchens, and parks. We found what looked like a running trail around what seemed to be the entire exterior rim of the wheel, in case anyone wanted to run a marathon in .37 gravity. We found absolutely nobody using any of those things.
We found a lot of indications that the ancient hull was under stress, and that material had been scavenged from it for… mysterious purposes. It was still intact, but it was thin. And I wouldn’t have wanted to rely on it for my life and well-being.
Big Rock Candy Mountain was not the sort of place where you took a nap without a space suit on. Not if you were me.
“Want to chase that thermal signature?” Tsosie sounded as frustrated as I felt.
“Point me at it.”
Sally uses a magnetic resonance imager built into the hardsuit helmets to stimulate our visual cortexes and induce controlled hallucinations. They’re vivid, and you can’t ignore them. She makes them look a little cartoony, to be sure you know they’re not real. Linden, the Core General wheelmind, can pull the same trick.
In the absence of AIs, Tsosie tapped into the same functionality and used dramatic shades of magenta to outline a distant blotch and give me an idea of the path of hatches and corridors that would take us there.
“This ghost ship stuff is starting to creep me out,” Tsosie said. “I didn’t sign on to recon the Flying Dutchman.”
“Even if everybody is gone, this is a valuable source of archinformation,” I reminded him.
“Well, I didn’t sign on to excavate the Flying Dutchman then.”
“Worse things happen at sea,” I joked.
He reached back—he was a half step ahead of me at that point—and rapped me on the hardsuit pauldron with his fingertips.
I waved at the structures still rearranging themselves in waves around us. “What if everybody got disassembled and made into tinkertoys?”
“Then we’re next,” he grumbled. “This ought to be the hatch we’re looking for.”
It irised open as we approached, which none of the previous hatches had done. They’d all worked when we asked, but this one seemed to be anticipating us. Beyond it, we could glimpse an even more colorful thicket of pegs and keepers, and behind that fretwork… something moving. Something that seemed to be replicating the pieces.
It was glittery and holographic and refractive, like the tinkertoys, and caught the light like them. It seemed to be curved, though it was hard to tell through the lattice.
We stepped up to the hatchway. I called, “Hello?”
The lattice furled itself up like a series of stage curtains being drawn open, and we found ourselves face-to-facelessness with a humanoid form like a shaped bubble of inexplicably golden mercury.
CHAPTER 3
AS IT STARED AT US, and we stared back, I realized that my first impression had not been perfectly correct. The shape had a face, or at least the suggestion of a face. Hollows where the eyes would be; a smooth tapered bulge for a nose; the tilt of cheekbones and the shadows beneath. A pointed chin.
The shape of the body was stereotypically human and feminine, despite having no actual external genitalia or nipples. The torso swelled and tapered into enticing curves and valleys, flaring into breasts and hips that could serve no biological purpose. The figure stood and seemed to watch us approach. It—she?—did not move except for a curious little tilt of the head like a cat tracking prey up a wall.
I wished I hadn’t thought of that particular comparison. I also wanted to roll my eyes violently at the engineer who had designed her.
Sally was still nowhere in the senso. I pinged Tsosie to let me deal with the contact, and stepped around him. He stood very still. I turned my suit speakers on and stopped myself halfway through asking Sally to translate my words into language from about a millennian before.
We’d seen signs in archaic English and Spanish and Chinese, so I was extrapolating. I spoke some English—I’d taken a course back home, when I’d had a lot of time to kill and couldn’t get around very well—so it seemed worth giving it a try. I didn’t know all the words. Rescue specialist and lead trauma specialist were mysteries, for example.
But I knew some. And maybe—
“Hello,” I said. “I’m Dr. Brookllyn Jens. This is Dr. Paul Tsosie. We’re crew from the… the ambulance ship that has matched velocities with your ship. We are friends. We come from a hospital called Core General. We’re responding to your distress signal. Do you have casualties?”
There was a pause, and I swear it blinked, though there were no eyes and no eyelids to blink with. Its gestures reminded me of techniques I’d been shown in school by a friend studying
