Chapter 10. Visitors
Xandarga Station, Earth, c. 55,680,000 years ago
But full of fire and greedy hardiment
The youthfull knight could not for ought be staide
Edmund Spenser—The Faerie Queene
Ruxie rode waves of pleasure and frustration. He didn’t mind letting his gradepoint averages slip a little if he could see Xalomé. At first they would meet in the same bar in the harbor district and go on long walks through the nighted City. Apart from that one kiss, they’d done nothing more intimate than hold hands. Ruxie’s attempts at anything bolder were met with gentle but firm reproof, always unspoken. Ruxie didn’t dare say anything for fear of breaking the spell. On free days, when Ruxie would normally be studying or working with the new Higgs projectors on the weapons range, Xalomé showed him the wonders of Xandarga Station he’d only read about.
One morning she met him with an urgency in her eyes he hadn’t seen. It was time, she said, to visit the Institute of Galactic History. She ran before him like a ghost into the Institute’s mazy galleries until they arrived at its center, the Gharaan Collection, and the three gray scraps that were all that remained of the earliest-known civilization in the Universe.
“I’ve been coming here for years,” Xalomé said, “and it always gets me. A whole civilization, that old... that early. And nobody knows anything much about them at all.”
Ruxie peered at the dusty label. He tried to quell a rising vertigo sparked by this confrontation between unbelievably remote antiquity and the scale of their own ignorance.
“Is that all there is? Just what’s in this case?”
“Yes. Amazing, isn’t it?”
They stood together, looking at the triptych of silvery slag that formed the entire testament to an unknown number of births, lives, hopes raised, dreams dashed, and deaths, of an extinct species that had lived in what was now the Fomalhaut sector, more than eleven billion years earlier. Xalomé’s hand crept into his. They were two sparks against eternity.
“Doesn’t anyone have a clue about... them? How they lived? How they died?” Ruxie was surprised by the anguish in his voice, as if the history of these inaccessible lives really mattered to him. He flushed a little, expecting some of Xalomé’s gentle teasing. He was surprised, instead, by her seriousness. But before she answered, she smiled. As if she was a teacher, and he’d passed a test. Puzzled, he looked more closely at her as she spoke. There was a hint of tears in her eyes, behind the smile. He remembered his Ma smiling like that, with relief, when she’d just found some vital object—her keys, or a family photo—which she’d convinced herself she’d lost.
“Almost nothing, Ruxie. But there’s a lot in that ‘almost’. They’ve—that’s the Institute—have analyzed the fragments. Or tried to. They're made of no kind of matter we know about here and now. The closest description they can reach is that it’s a metallic form of—well, ice. Frozen water. But that's really only a kind of analogy, something to help us make sense of something we've never seen before. A better approximation is macroscopic quantum foam.”
“That’s...”
“Yes, I know. Impossible. It's as if they're fossil fragments of space-time itself, frozen, left over from when the Universe was young, perhaps obeyed different laws. But really, what the fragments are made of is not as important as what happened to them. The material is riddled with all kinds of imperfections that signal incredible stresses. Like it brushed against something that mashed it to a dimensionless pulp and then reassembled it. So perhaps the material started off as something more ordinary. Or, at least, different from what it is now. Well, that’s what one group of scientists thinks.”
“One group? There are others?”
“Oh, c’mon, Ruxie! You’d never expect any kind of consensus with artifacts as enigmatic—and as important—as these. Now, would you do something for me? Go round the other side of the cabinet, look at the smallest artifact—the rectangular one, in the center—and tell me what you see.”
“A game?”
“Indulge me.” She pecked him on the cheek and sent him on his way. What he saw stopped him, like his feet had been glued to the floor. Everything in the room blurred but for the specimen before his eyes. Carved onto the far side of the fragment, filling its whole area, was an inscription. He swallowed. “Just tell me what you see, Ruxie.”
He tried his best to get the words out, but their sharp edges snagged the inside of his mouth.
“The object. An inscription. Rectangular, like the object. It’s about—I don’t know, maybe nine or ten centimeters from side to side, and maybe two or three tall... hard to be sure… it’s shifting…”
“Keep going, Ruxie, you’re doing fine.”
“... but that’s just the frame. Inside there are three circles, inscribed, and they’re… they’re… they’re… so beautiful. So perfect. Like... like...” He looked up.
“Ruxie, keep going... don’t stop now!” Her voice was jagged with anxiety. Ruxie was puzzled but did what he was told. He looked down at the specimen once again. It looked like something seen from a great distance.
“... and in between the circles are two crescents, horns pointing outwards... and... and... lines, a lot of lines, all radiating from the circle in the middle... and... Xalomé, help me, I feel very strange.”
The Earth flew upwards and over his head. The next thing he knew he was lying on a bench in a shadowed corner of the gallery, his head in her lap, her cool hand on his forehead. He startled.
“Hush now, everything’s going to be fine,” she said. He remembered the last thing he saw.
“Xalomé, it glowed.”
He remembered now: the lines, the circles, the crescents, had all shone at him with a deep, ultraviolet pulse, just before he winked out. He sat up, and Xalomé, holding him, looked at him again, half in cool appraisal, half with some expression Ruxie felt he couldn’t quite place.
“You’ve done well, Ruxie. Really well. I’m so pleased I found you,” and she came to him and kissed him, with determined firmness. Ruxie was numb before the wave. She pulled away, looked directly in his eyes, but seemed to be looking through him, as if she’d just picked up a signal from space. Ruxie wasn’t as surprised by this as he’d thought he might be. After several weeks, he’d become used to strange, instant summonses which, she said, were relayed to her in-ear comms port. Special Ops.
He remembered the first, jarring occasion, when they’d been in the Natural History Museum, standing beneath the alien that dominated its main hall. The Taniquetilian tesseractrix was built like a sea spider from the oceans of Earth, with many legs fused to a tiny body, but on a gigantic scale. Each leg was eighty meters long, curving from a car-sized chitinous claw through a succession of blue-gray joints to terminate in the body in the blue haze far above their heads. Opera glasses, thoughtfully supplied by the Museum, were required to see the body itself, a mysterious structure augmented with a bewildering variety of stalactitic protrusions and polyhedral blobs. Ruxie remembered gazing at it, open mouthed, unable to take it all in.
“Go on, I dare you,” Xalomé giggled. “Count its legs.”
Ruxie brought his head down with nauseous recoil. He refocused his eyes and turned around, carefully, to count each one of the teetering columns. This was harder to do than it seemed. He was never sure if he’d counted the first leg twice. After three attempts he linked the first leg to the scene behind it—the Museum gift shop—and started again. The task was easier, but only marginally.
“Twenty-three. No, twenty-four. No, twenty-three. No… no, I’m sure it’s twenty-three.”
“Actually, it’s twenty-seven. And now I have to go.” And with that she disappeared, leaving him with a sense of having been short-changed. Twenty-seven? No way. How could she have been so certain? The museum guide book reported that the number of the legs on the Taniquetilian tesseractrix was formally unknown.
; This time, it was different. She continued to face him, on the bench just off the Gharaan Gallery in the Institute, and took both his hands in his.
“I’m wanted. I think you should come with me.”
Dusk was falling as they hurried down the Institute steps and on to the street. Funny—it had been only mid-morning when they’d come in. Had they been in there—what—eight hours? How long had he been out for the count? Xalomé was in too much of a distracted rush to allow him to ask her. She hailed a cab kerbside, and within twenty minutes they were back in the harbor district. Xalomé paid off the driver, exchanging a few words with him that Ruxie couldn’t catch.
The familiar tavern was deserted but for a pool of light illuminating a table at the back. On one side was a familiar figure, seated, stein in hand, looking down at something that couldn’t be seen from the shadowed doorway.
“I promised Mr Spektor that I’d settle,” said the man. “Promised. I’ll pay my dues, I really will… but I can’t do it without money. After my next bout—should be a formality—I’ll have enough. Really. You gotta believe me. Tell Mr Spektor that I’m a man of my word.”
A voice came from the direction of the man’s feet. It was well modulated, surprisingly sweet, dangerous with menace.
“That is for Mr Spektor to decide. Not you. Especially as you’ve lost your last two bouts. You run a great risk, Mr Raelle. Not of death: that is an occupational hazard in Uqbar Rules, as you are aware. No, the risk you run, Mr Raelle, is of shaming Mr Spektor, your hitherto unwavering sponsor. The consequences of that will be very much worse than death. Do not fail him again.”
“I won’t. Don’t worry.” Even from this distance, Ruxie could see the beads of perspiration start on Ko’s forehead.
“I shall be back to collect. After the bout. Perhaps not us in person. It might be one of our… associates.”
“Very good. I’ll be waiting.” Ko looked up, then, and smiled at Ruxie and Xalomé in greeting. His unseen companion must have taken that as the cue to leave. There was a puffing noise, a wheeze, and an almost inaudible clanking as the mysterious companion made its way to where Ruxie and Xalomé stood. They looked down as the stranger approached. It was not so much a person as a contraption. A sphere of black glass the size of a large grapefruit, chased in silvery metal filigree and mounted on a chassis sprouting four wire-frame balloon wheels. Pulling this arrangement were two insectoid shapes, each no more than thirty centimeters long, made of plate metal intricately linked together. Steam puffed from their joints as they moved. They looked like praying mantids in armor. It was the fairy-tale carriage that creaks along the edges of robot dreams. It stopped at Ruxie’s feet, and the mantids looked up.
“Sulfavillains,” said Xalomé, a catch in her voice. The mantid on the right raised itself on its rear four legs, gesticulated with its long, anterior talons, rustled its wing-covers and turned its beady-eyed head to one side. Ruxie could see tiny points of malicious red in the centre of each jeweled facet. Its mouthparts moved.
“Please, Miss, allow me to pass. Thank-you,” it said, and trundled off into the night. Ruxie was nonplussed, but Xalomé seemed to be shaking with rage.
“Ko Handor Raelle!” she hissed, bending down at him. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, country boy? Dealing with these slime?” Ko turned his face away as if she’d slapped him. “You know as well as I do—or if you don’t, then you should—that if there’s anything mean in this city, anything dirty, then the Sulfas are in it up to their metaphorical necks. They stink!”
“Xalomé, I… well, when no-one else would back me for a prize fight, they were there. They gave me… good terms.” He looked down, shamefaced.
“Oh, really? I’ll bet they did. So when you fuck it up again—when is it, next Friday night?—they’ll be here to blow you to atoms. Can’t wait. Perhaps I can sell tickets.”
“Well, sweetheart,” said Ko, then, looking up, smiling with his mouth, but his eyes two hard points reflecting the foam slithering down the inside of his glass: “I’d better not fuck it up, then, had I?”