“Why that one?”
“I got a strange echo-answer from it when I did an immediate area survey.”
She glanced at him. “This another hunch?”
“That’s all I ever have.”
“A solid mass, good shielding. But there are closer ones.”
“Something about it. A memory.” He did not himself know what made him choose the tumbling stone. Its answer had made him think of the Snark, that old shambling representative of the mechs, long ago. But why should that be a good sign?
She studied the bewildering array of information on the mech-made panel. He admired how she had puzzled out the mech diagnostics, jimmied them into yielding up the quantities humans liked to use. Brilliant, she was, and could flit among them as if they were perfectly natural, when at base they were skewed, alien. The underlying point, he supposed, was that the laws of mechanics and fields have an internal logic of their own. Any intelligence shapes itself to that blunt fact. In the end, the universe molded its children. Mind, as crusty old Wittgenstein would no doubt have remarked, was cut like a suit of clothes, into contours not born in the cloth itself.
The thought brought fretful memories. Why, then, did life, in its myriad mortal forms, spend so much of itself in clashes with its fellows?
“You’re sure?” Nikka’s face was a study in skepticism.
He laughed. “Bloody hell, of course not.”
FOUR
Alexandria
The others—younger, a shade more foolish—went in first. The slowly revolving chunk was oddly black for the center of the galaxy, where fire and fury prevailed, garish and showy. A cinder from some earlier catastrophe, perhaps. The black hole further in—still unseeable, behind the outrushing violence about to smash into them all—had left many hulks orbiting, burnished and stripped by scouring bursts of intense radiation.
Dry astrophysics, rendered forth as casual violences.
In his skinsuit, Nigel edged into the deep crevasse they had found. The crew had elected to moor their ship over the crevasse mouth. Then they wormed further in, to escape the shock waves that were now mere minutes away. The ship had balked, trying to restart its engines, resume its programmed course. Nikka had defeated its executive functions, perhaps even silenced its alarms. But she could not be sure . . .
Suited up and in zero gravities again, Nigel felt his old self returning. He had once been an astronaut, after all—a word now ancient beyond comprehension. Was Earth still there?
A certain springy youth returned. He bristled with energy.
It was difficult to feel the impact of desiccated physics, he reflected. The combination of the coldsleep slots and the stretched time of special relativity, all catapulting him into a far future of distant, glowing vistas. He had arrived at this far time and place armed with only the training and culture of a society now gone to dust. Yet he still sent quick bursts of data homeward, the latest just an hour ago. Message in a cosmic bottle.
He flitted, giddy and light, down a long tube of chipped rock. Away from the rest.
He took a sample, just like the old NASA days. Dear, dead acronym. At least that was one American habit he would not miss, the compression of jawbreaker agency names into nonsense words that one nonetheless could at least remember. Across thirty thousand years.
He studied the rock. Volcanic origin? He tried to remember his geology. Something strange about its grainy flecks.
Further in, a vault. Gray walls.
Coasting. Space infused even a stiff old carcass with birdlike grace.
Stretched lines . . . up . . . through . . . rock eagerly shaping into swells. Should he go farther, or regain the crew, back there? Shadows swung with each motion of his hand torch, like an audience following every movement.
Patterns in the walls.
Should he? Caution, old fart. Behind each smile, sharp teeth wait.
Down. In. Gliding. Legs dangling
soft, soft
into cotton clouds
shadows melting
telescoping him into fresh cubes of space, geometries aslant. A spherical room now, glowing an answering red where his torch touched. A trick of the eyes?
No, messages—racing across the walls, a blur of symbols. Mind trying to wrap the universe around itself?
He had trouble focusing somehow, probably just loss of local vertical his old NASA training spoke to him, just a turn of the head could perhaps fix it—
Worn stone steps leading impossibly up, spiraling away. Into a cupped ceiling now spattered with orange drops . . . eyes winking back at him.
An old film, memories. The Tutankhamen tomb. The jackal god Anubis rampant above defeated foes.
Opening the tomb.
Stepping inside.
One small step for a man, across endless churning millennia.
Oozing up from the Valley of old dead Kings, the first to rise triumphant here, from Karnak and Luxor, winding downstream slow and snaky, to Alexandria, the library dry with scrolls, Alexandria a woman, ancient now, wrists rouged and legs numb—
He shook his head.
