They found the artifact by accident.
They were leaving Timos IV, where a preliminary robotic scouting report noting the presence of non-synthesizable rare earth deposits had proven fiscally unjustifiable, and making preparations for the next jump. Had they not chosen to depart the Timos system along the plane of the ecliptic, they would have missed the artifact. Had their wide-arc scanner not been directed at the system’s outermost planet at just the right moment, they would have missed the artifact. And had Bannerjee not decided to make a quick check of the last downloaded scanner files prior to their ship engaging jump, they most surely would have missed the artifact. But they did, it did, and he did, and so . . .
“I may have something interesting.”
Cooper looked over from her station. “You’d better have something interesting. I don’t like recalibrating a jump.”
Sasmita made a rude noise. “The ship does the recalibrating. You’re just another meatbag backup, like the rest of us.”
“Quiet.” Oldman, who wasn’t, swung around to peer across the projection-filled control room. “What is it, BJ?”
“It’s big, and the quick spectrographic scan is a bundle of interesting contradictions.”
“Like for instance, it’s maybe more than just rock or water ice?” Despite her initial disdain, Cooper was now mildly intrigued.
“There’s a lot of metal.” Bannerjee’s deft fingers sorted through floating projections like a card sharp in a history hotel.
Sasmita shrugged. “Nickel-iron asteroid?”
Bannerjee continued working without looking at her. “No nickel. No iron. Lot of combinations that are new to me. Could be alloys. Sophisticated alloys.” He had everyone’s attention now. “Exotic ceramics and glass states. No plastics that I can find. And it’s very, very big.” He froze a virtual, read the resultant number.
Oldman let out a long whistle. “Better go have a look.”
Up close, it was immediately apparent that the artifact was an artificial construct. Whether it was a ship or not, they could not tell. The gigantic jumble of dark projections, spheres, arches, and rhomboidal flows had no recognizable bow, stern, or middle. It hung in orbit above Timos IX, silent, brooding, and immense, an alien enigma of vast dimensions replete with a hundred unspoken possibilities.
“So,” Sasmita finally said into the silence, “when do we go in?” She and her companions watched Oldman, waiting on the commander’s decision.
“We have to go in.” Cooper was quietly emphatic in her support of the other woman.
“That is self-evident,” Bannerjee added.
“Nothing is self-evident,” Oldman finally said. “There are four of us. Our specialty is xenogeology. Not first contact.”
“You mean first contract.” Sasmita indicated the projection that showed the artifact. “So far, humankind has made contact with only two other sentient species, both lower on the intelligence scale than ourselves, neither having anything to offer other than reassurance that we are not alone in the big starry backyard. Here, we’ve finally got something whose builders might very well have advanced beyond us. It looks abandoned. No telling what we might be able to bring back. I’m tempted to open up a preliminary patent file right now.”
Oldman frowned at her. “The owners might not take kindly to visitors making off with souvenirs.”
“What owners?” Of the same mind as her crewmate, Cooper gestured at the hovering projection. “Whatever that thing is, it’s dead. I’m not reading enough energy to power a stylus. You know how this will work if we don’t take a look. We’ll make a report, government will get all over it, the grateful company will give us a month’s paid vacation, the media floats will momentarily be full of our individual images, and that will be it.” She nodded at Sasmita. “Let’s at least see what we can find, first. If there’s nothing we can pick up, nothing portable that might be worth claiming, then the government crabs can scuttle all over it to their hearts’ content.”
Outnumbered but never outvoted, Oldman considered. Eventually, the temptation was too much even for him. “All right. We go in, look around, make recordings, see what we can ascertain. If it’s full of alien doubloons, I suppose they’d have some collector value, and that wouldn’t be anything that would cause the xenologists to hyperventilate. Suit up.”
Initially, they were afraid they wouldn’t be able to find an opening. Oldman was about to order them back when Bannerjee happened to pass in front of a smooth section of what appeared to be solid olivine, only to have it iris open. His sharp intake of breath caused everyone else to look in his direction and then to mosey over.
Beyond the now-revealed opening, a corridor stretched inward. It had a flat floor, an arched ceiling, and walls that appeared to have been fashioned from a single continuous pour rather than having been seamed or welded. As they stared inward, light brightened within the corridor, though there were no visible appliances.
Now that the opportunity they had discussed had actually presented itself, Cooper found herself suddenly hesitant. She looked at Oldman. “We still go in?”
Before she had finished her query, Sasmita was already moving down the corridor. Rather than call her back, Oldman followed, as did Bannerjee and, eventually, Cooper.
The deeper they went, the stronger was the pull of internal artificial gravity. Soon, they were walking instead of floating. Oldman slowed their advance as the pull became greater than Earth-normal. But when the increase ceased, he indicated they could push on. Walking now took a bit of an effort, but not a threatening one.
After a considerable hike, the corridor opened into a dimly lit chamber with a soaring, domed ceiling. Elephant-size bubbles, opaque and rose-colored, bounced slowly against the ceiling. Each time they made contact, a portion of the dome emitted a brief but brilliant silent flash. The visitors worked their suits’ instruments. It was Bannerjee who spoke first.
“It’s an ozone generator of some kind. The ceiling material is permeable and there are static charges involved, but I don’t see how it works. Or why.”
Sasmita’s response was characteristically mercenary. “Anyone got any idea what the market might be for an alien ozone generator?”
“I’m more interested in what the ozone is used for.” Oldman was studying the several new, larger corridors that ran off in different directions from the one they had just traversed. Knowing that, if necessary, their suits could provide them with nourishment and drink for several days, he was not concerned about spending some sleep time within the artifact. “I’d still like to find out if we’re inside a ship, a cargo container, a museum, or what. Also some clue as to what the builders were like.”
“More walking. I’m up for it,” Sasmita declared. “As long as there’s no further increase in the gravity. Feels like walking in mud as it is.”
The gravitational drag did not increase as they made their way deeper into the artifact. Before long, the new corridor opened into another chamber. This one was filled with hundreds of floating, steel-gray ovoids. Each was enveloped in a pale green light. None made contact with another. They varied in size from no bigger than an egg to some large enough to contain one of the rose-colored ozone-generating spheres.
Sasmita immediately reached for one that was about half her size, only to have Bannerjee grab her arm. She shook him off and shot him a warning look.
“We came to look for stuff. Here it is.”
“Look,” Bannerjee reminded her. “Not necessarily touch.” He was passing his hand scanner over the gleaming mass. “Locus of supporting energy field appears to emanate from the surface of the object itself. It’s omnipresent and shows no source point. Interior is unreadable.”
“Maybe we should—” Before Cooper could finish, Sasmita had reached for the object a second time. Intent on his instrumentation, this time Bannerjee was unable to react quickly enough to intercept her. Nor did Oldman’s warning shout cause her to pause.
Her gloved hand made contact with the pale energy field, at which point it began to fade. The last hint of green glow winked out at precisely the same time as the ovoid touched down on the floor. The commander was not pleased and said so.
“We can’t just go grabbing and playing with everything we encounter, Alee.” He indicated their surroundings. “This isn’t an entertainment venue.”
She grinned up at him. “How do you know? For all we know, that might be exactly what it is.”
“Why am I not amused, then?” Cooper muttered.
Reaching down, Sasmita touched the ovoid again. When a seam suddenly and unexpectedly appeared along the top, she stepped back in momentary alarm. Like the two halves of an egg, the ovoid opened up. The walls of the gray container were scarcely thicker than a sheet of paper, though plainly far stronger. When nothing more happened, the quartet of explorers cautiously advanced.
Lying within the now-open ovoid was an irregular construct of bright yellow marked with black inscriptions and maroon highlights. The vivid colors were in striking contrast to everything they had seen thus far. Sasmita looked at Oldman, who looked at Bannerjee, who shrugged. The commander nodded at Sasmita before taking the precaution of retreating several steps. So did Cooper and Bannerjee.
Their companion made a face at them. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“You’re the one who wants to get rich off alien relics,” Cooper told her. “So—go ahead.” She nodded toward the revealed relic.
Thus challenged, the smaller woman had no choice but to pick up the now-exposed whatever-it-was. Bending, she gingerly lifted it with two hands. It was solid but not heavy. The black inscriptions, if that’s what they were, held no more meaning for her than the tea leaves left at the bottom of a cup. She ran a forefinger along the side of a twisting tube, the material of her suit preventing her from receiving any tactile response. One finger slid across one of the maroon-hued bands.
In response, the object began to reform itself. Startled, she dropped it and retreated. A moment later, the thing put out a single tubular leg and straightened. Pouring from a small curved orifice, a dark liquid began to fill a conical portion of the device. As in the chamber of the giant rose-tinted bubbles, there was no noise. As soon as the conical container was full, it detached itself from the rest of the mechanism and floated over to Sasmita, coming to a halt a few centimeters from her left hand.
At once awed and wary, Cooper gestured at the hovering container. “It’s a coffeemaker. Have a sip.”
Sasmita eyed the waiting cone uncertainly. “It could also be a synthesized machine lubricant, or a propulsive fuel, or a liquid explosive, or an industrial corrosive.”
“Whatever it is, it’s waiting for you to do something,” Bannerjee pointed out. Moving closer, he tentatively extended the business end of his scanner. The results were informative.
“The liquid is organic in nature, though the combination of amino acids and other components is new to the catalog.”
“Well, that resolves it, then,” she snapped at him. “It means it could be a synthesized lubricant, a fuel, an explosive, or an industrial corrosive. Thanks for that.”
“Or it could be coffee,” Cooper murmured thoughtfully. “Alien coffee.”
The conical container, finding itself ignored, returned to its point of origin and locked itself back in place on its home device. The dark liquid remained in the cone.
Turning, a speculative Oldman indicated a larger ovoid. “Let’s try another. That one there, since the only apparent distinguishing trait here seems to be size.” When Sasmita stepped forward, he put out a hand. “No, I’ll do it. A test to ensure that these things aren’t tuning to a single individual’s heartbeat, or something.” If only we had a xenobiologist on board, he thought. But no; they were all rock people. Rocks and minerals and metals.
He felt nothing through the suit as he pushed his right hand into the enveloping energy field. Gratifyingly, the procedure initiated by Sasmita was repeated. The field faded like a dispersing green fog, and as it did, the ovoid within lowered gently to the ground, split, and opened.
Within lay several dozen grungy, brown, blanket-sized, furry rugs. Oldman and his companions leaned close for a better look.
Four of the rugs rose into the air and came undulating toward them.
As they batted wildly at the swarm, a strange feeling of contentment came over Oldman. Looking around, he saw that arms were being lowered as his companions responded similarly to the proximity of the rug-things. Half-compliant, half-resistant, he found himself relaxing. Settling itself on his shoulders, his rug gently attached itself to his back by means he could neither see nor feel. The intervening presence of the suit did not matter.
What did matter was that he suddenly felt wonderful. Better than at any time since the start of the voyage. Whether the rugs generated some kind of beneficent field, or penetrated his suit with a gas, or injected something into him via a technique he could not imagine, didn’t matter either. He felt great.
So did the rest of the crew. Sasmita was positively buoyant.
“I don’t know about the coffee-fuel-explosive machine, but these things . . .”—and she reached back to finger one edge of the rug that had chosen her—“could generate income several times the cost of the voyage.”
“Doesn’t seem to be doing any harm,” Cooper observed guardedly.
Bannerjee nodded. “Quite the contrary. I don’t know how these things are doing this, but I am glad that they are.” He flexed his right hand. “My arthritis is gone too.” He started toward another ovoid. “This is a room full of marvels.”
“The marvels will have to wait.” Much as he wanted to see what was in the next ovoid, and the next, and the one after that, Oldman knew it was incumbent on him to keep the others focused. “We can come back here. We still need to find out if we’re on a ship or some other kind of apparatus, and hopefully where it may have originated.”
They argued with him but not vociferously. The commander was right, as he usually was. But all were careful to note the location of the room on their own instrumentation.
Chosen at random, another corridor led to a chamber that, as Cooper put it, looked like it was badly in need of a haircut. The same dim, sourceless light revealed an endless field of tightly packed-together four-meter-high jet-black strands. There did not appear to be a path through them to the other side of the chamber. Unlike previous rooms, this one boasted a domed ceiling of softly pulsing, fluctuating colors. When Oldman put out a hand to touch the nearest of the black strands, each of which was exactly the same diameter as its neighbor, it flexed and moaned. He drew his fingers back sharply.
That would have been the end of it, save for the ever-audacious Sasmita. Crouching, she lightly gripped a strand and ran her hand slowly up the thick black filament. The higher her hand rose, the higher in pitch the moan the strand generated. Other filaments nearby began moaning in concert.
“Too weird.” Cooper started retreating the way they had come. “I don’t know what this room’s function is and I’m not sure I care to know, but I do know that I’m not going to try and push my way across it. Let’s go back.” Not even Sasmita argued with her recommendation.
Once more in the chamber of the ovoids, they selected another corridor and started down it. Glancing at his chronometer readout, Oldman figured that they could check out another chamber or two before they would have to stop for food and sleep. He would post a rotating watch. Just because nothing inimical had manifested itself did not mean that nothing ever would. As there was no precedent for their exploratory trek, he would have to make one up as they went along.
On the second day, they found a chamber filled with globs of floating golden oil that were in constant motion, another whose scalloped walls heaved disconcertingly like a giant bellows, and another in which a cluster of thousands of fist-sized devices constantly formed and re-formed machines that flared to life for a few moments before collapsing beneath the significance of their own exertions.
Then they found the chamber whose contents intimidated Oldman and put a damper even on Sasmita’s nonstop stream of jokes and sarcasm.
Looming above them, tapering at one end but not to a point as it penetrated the far wall, the massive structure was wrapped in bands and tubes of dark metal interwoven with glistening bolts of metallic glass. A somber Bannerjee scanned the intimidating mass.
“More strange alloys. A lot of beryllium.” His gaze rose from his scanner. “It looks like a gun,” he said softly.
“A really big gun,” added Sasmita, without the slightest suggestion of humor.
They walked around it, a walk that took some time. There might have been places for several individuals to sit within the device, or they might simply have been odd-shaped depressions. Oldman didn’t wish to experiment by trying one out. The technology on display was far more multifaceted than anything they had encountered in any of the other chambers, and far more threatening in appearance. He struggled to be positive.
“It might not be a weapon. Based on what we’ve encountered and interacted with here so far, its purpose might be something else entirely. Something we can’t even imagine.”
“Yeah,” Cooper muttered. “Like blowing up entire worlds.”
“A civilized species wouldn’t go around blowing up habitable worlds.” Bannerjee spoke with the confidence of necessity. “They’re not that common.”
“How do we know?” she shot back. The delight, even amusement, they had experienced in the course of their previous discoveries within the artifact now vanished in the face of this enormous implied threat. “We don’t know anything about what a sentience longer-lived than ours might think, or want, or believe.” Her gaze rose upward, tracking the long, tapering, ominous-looking apparatus. “What if this isn’t the only one on this artifact? What if it is a gun and there are more?” Her eyes met Oldman’s as she voiced what everyone was now thinking. “What—if this is a warship?”
He swallowed tightly. “Whatever it is, except for the activation of automated entry and internal illumination, the artifact itself has been thoroughly quiescent.”
“How can we be sure of that?” Bannerjee said quietly. “While we’re studying and learning about its contents, maybe it’s studying and learning about us.”
Oldman chose to ignore a question he couldn’t answer. “We’ll finish up today’s twelve hours, sleep again, and start back. Maybe we’ll find some answers.”
They didn’t find any answers. But they did find the crew.
They were in the last chamber they had time to explore. Had Oldman opted for an earlier start back, they would have missed them. But they had time to visit one more room. What they found stopped them cold.
In the center of the weakly lit chamber loomed a bulky, softly glowing cylinder. Dozens of conduits filled with light lines, intermittent cables that were half-solid and half composed of pure, tightly focused light, and strands of solid material fanned out from its base like colorful tentacles. At the tip of each tentacle was a teardrop-shaped pod: the bottom half opaque, the top half transparent. Within each pod was an alien.
They were neither ugly nor attractive as much as they were bizarre. Gazing at the nearest, Oldman could not decide if the lower half of the three-meter-long being was reflective attire of some kind or part of the creature’s body. The upper portion was more straightforward. Five flexible limbs indicating a decidedly non-symmetrical body design lay flat against the creature’s rounded, rubbery-looking flanks. There was no neck. The body tapered slightly before expanding into a smooth, triangular skull marked by several dark depressions that might be ears. Several larger ones might be eyes, Bannerjee opined, though there was no suggestion of lids, irises, corneas, or anything resembling a human eye. The function of a trio of odd appendages that protruded from the crest of the triangle could not be ascertained.
“Our first contact with a true higher intelligence,” Cooper whispered, “and they’re all asleep.”
“For now.” Sasmita was studying the lower half of the pod. “What if we wake one of them up?”
“Are you insane?” Cooper gaped at her, wide-eyed. “Why the hell would we want to do that?”
“Because,” her colleague persisted, “it’s first contact. Forget the money to be made from exploiting what we’ve already discovered.” She gave the rug that covered her back a meaningful tug. “As first contactees, we’d be famous beyond imagining. Rich and famous.” Her sarcasm returned. “Tell me that possibility doesn’t appeal to you.”
“Of course it’s appealing,” Oldman replied, his attention still riveted on the alien. “If not for the gun.”
Sasmita pleaded. “We don’t know it’s a gun. For all we know, it might be a device for manufacturing and distributing alien candy!”
Bannerjee was shaking his head slowly. “It didn’t have the look of a candy machine.”
“How the hell do you know what an alien candy-manufacturing device might look like? We don’t know anything!”
“That’s exactly right.” Oldman nodded in sober agreement. “We don’t know anything. The big question is: do we keep it that way?” He eyed each of them in turn. “We’re not contact specialists. We’re geologists. We should head straight home, report what we’ve seen, and let the experts take over. Money or no money.”
“That’s a phrase that’ll never pass my lips.” Sasmita was in full combative mode now. “What if this relic moves, automatically or otherwise, before an expedition of exploration can return? Chances of encountering it again would likely be nil. No, I’m at least going to take a few things with me. This make-you-feel-good rug, for sure.”
Oldman demurred. “No souvenirs. No matter how harmless they seem. Maybe the rugs are as benign as they appear. But maybe they’re dangerous, or the ozone generator is dangerous, and the gun-edifice is the benevolent component of this ship. I do think we can call it a ship now. As to its purpose, its true function, none of us can say. It might be a storage vessel, parked here until it needs recalling. It might be an uncomplicated transport in sleep mode. It might have a main function we can’t descry.” His attention fell on Bannerjee. “And yes, it might be a warship. One constructed and placed here for defense, against what we also cannot imagine. Or for offense, should the opportunity present itself.”
It was silent for a long moment until Sasmita spoke again. “I still say we should wake up one of the crew and ask it.”
Oldman smiled thinly. “If only it were that simple. Assuming we can find a way to rouse one of the aliens, what’s to ensure that we don’t simultaneously awaken all the others? We can’t begin to imagine their response. They might be grateful. They might prove hostile. They might be utterly indifferent to our presence.”
“We’ll never know if we don’t ask,” she replied impatiently.
“And we’re not going to ask, even if we knew how.” He turned. “Back to the ship. Now. Touch nothing, take nothing.”
Sasmita rushed to block his path. “Will, you can’t do this! It’s the discovery of the millennium, of the age! If it’s not here when a follow-up team comes looking for it and all we take back with us are recordings, we’ll be vilified!”
“Not necessarily,” Bannerjee argued. “Many will agree with the commander’s point of view. Quite likely even the majority.”
She whirled on him. “You don’t care? You’re willing to forgo this, all this, and return to the life of a paid flunky, scanning stratigraphy and boiling pebbles to see if they’re worth anything?”
Bannerjee drew himself up. “I am content with my flunkiness, thank you, and more than willing to give up one very possible consequence.” His own gaze narrowed as he glared back at her. “That of being one of the quartet that revealed the existence of humankind to an advanced and hostile alien species.”
“But we don’t know,” she insisted. “And if this artifact shifts its location after we leave, we’ll never know! The promise, the prospects, can’t simply be ignored in favor of . . .” Whirling, she threw herself at the nearby pod, hands outstretched, reaching for a pair of grooves that ran along one side. Mere physical contact might be enough, but the grooves were the nearest thing to a visible control and . . .
Oldman didn’t have time enough to yell “Stop her!” before Cooper made a flying tackle. Before Sasmita could break free, the two men had joined Cooper in restraining the smallest member of the crew. That didn’t keep Sasmita from continuing to struggle as they wrestled her out of the chamber and back up the nearest corridor. As they did so, her rug fluttered and twisted, clearly upset that it was unable to calm her.
The rugs left them near the entrance to the chamber of the ozone-generating bubbles, dropping away one by one to flutter back in the direction of the ovoid room. When Oldman’s detached from his shoulders, he experienced a moment of nausea whose aftereffects lingered. Then he realized what he was feeling was not a consequence of the rug’s departure but his normal state of being. The pang of regret at having to leave the benevolent rug behind was greatly multiplied by the realization that he likely would never experience such a feeling of general physical well-being ever again. He forced himself to march on, helping to control the still-objecting Sasmita.
Once back on the ship, she settled down, but she wouldn’t speak to any of them, wouldn’t even ladle epithets on Cooper, her favorite target. Sasmita slumped, and pouted, and finally gave in, returning to her station as soon as they made the jump. That programmed distortion of the cosmos added a thump of finality to Oldman’s decision. They were on their way home.
Had he made the right choice? The uncertainty troubled him all the way through the jump. He knew it would haunt him for the rest of his life. What if Sasmita’s concerns were correct and the alien vessel moved before qualified explorers could return to deal with it? And if it was still there, what would be their own decisions? Surely, they would weigh on them no less than they had on him. Would establishing contact with the aliens result in a flood of miraculous shared technology and social development . . . or the initiation of hostilities possibly ending in one species’ extinction?
Waking the aliens might propagate paradise.
Waking the aliens might result in war.
He did not know about the aliens, could not begin to imagine their thought processes, but he knew that for a human, at least, the hardest thing to do was to confront a question and fear never being able to learn the answer.
When it came to decisions of cosmic import, he knew, to questions of war and peace, deciding not to know was the toughest decision of all.
ALAN DEAN FOSTER is the best-selling author of more than a hundred and twenty novels, and is perhaps most famous for his Commonwealth series, which began in 1971 with the novel The Tar-Aiym Krang. His most recent series is the transhumanism trilogy The Tipping Point. Foster’s work has been translated into more than fifty languages and has won awards in Spain and Russia in addition to the US. He is also well known for his film novelizations, the most recent of which is Star Trek Into Darkness. He is currently at work on several new novels and film projects.