FIFTEEN

 

 

PASCAL RAN HIS hand over the ceramic. The triangular wing was three hundred and seventy centimeters from the lens at its nose to the row of little jet nozzles along its trailing edge. From tip to tip, its trailing edge was two and a half meters across, but it was only forty centimeters from dorsal to ventral surfaces, and these were flat, not aerodynamic. He sprayed compressed carbon dioxide to clean out pock-marks or dents that had collected silt. Some of the divots looked like fresh burns, artifacts of sulfuric acid exposure on the way up to the habitat. Other marks looked more like the scouring of wind erosion. Others were completely foreign to him: tiny burn marks or chipped hollows all along the leading edge of the wings that were absent on the trailing edges. What had it flown through?

“This is some pretty advanced material science,” he said. “It survived atmospheric entry, the descent from one atmosphere of pressure to ninety, and all the chemical attacks. And somehow it maneuvered through the cave, in that wind, without getting smashed to pieces. We have a lot to learn about whatever this is. Maybe it’s a good building material for la colonie.”

But it was more than building materials. Pascal had gone to George-Étienne with his discovery before breakfast.

“It’s not a message, Pa,” he’d said. “It’s a pulsar.”

George-Étienne had paused with one sock on and one sock off. Maybe all his arguing for a wormhole last night had been just words. Or maybe it was too strange. Pascal sat beside him on the hammock and showed the encyclopedia entry on neutron stars that emitted radio waves and x-rays. There weren’t any nearby; the nearest one was almost 200 light-years away, and had a different period. This signal had to be coming from far away.

Faced with support for his wormhole theory, Pa had grown pale, like they’d found a magical doorway in a wardrobe instead of a powerful, tightly-repeating radio signal.

“It’ll make your children rich for sure,” George-Étienne had said, “but I’ve got to think about giving my children food right now. I want to see what’s inside the probe. That at least we can sell.”

And so they came out this morning to examine their treasure.

“Do you still have the Geiger counter?” Pascal asked.

“Somewhere, I guess.”

Wrapped in thick clouds, solar radiation wasn’t a problem for the coureurs, but at flotilla altitude, they had to be careful of solar radiation. Pa found their counter in one of the sealed tool boxes on the gantry. He dusted it with compressed carbon dioxide and handed it to Pascal. When he switched on the counter, it started registering little ticks. At the access port, the ticking shot up.

“Ha!” George-Étienne said. “Fissionables! Jackpot!”

It was a fair bit of radiation, enough that whatever was inside would eventually make them sick. The difference in ticking from inside to outside hinted that the ceramic was a strong radiation shield.

“We’re going to need put the fissionables under the storage trawler so we don’t get sick,” Pascal said.

He would look up radiation in his textbooks later. With a bit of work, he put a rod-mounted mirror through the narrow port and into the low, hollow interior. He shone his light in and stared in stunned silence.

“What is it?” George-Étienne demanded.

Pascal handed him the light and held the mirror for him. His father shone the light on the mirror and moved his head around.

“Sapristi,” he swore. “Do you see gold?”

“I think I saw gold, copper, what could be platinum, silver or iridium,” Pascal said.

Fine lines of bright metals had been laid into the ceramic in curving, overlapping lines.

“What is it?”

“It’s like a circuit board, one big computer chip,” Pascal said.

“It doesn’t look anything like a circuit board. It looks like art.”

Pascal took a deep breath, tried to collect his thoughts. The vastness of what he was thinking was like a piece of food too big to swallow.

“We make circuit boards with straight lines and angles so we don’t get mixed up,” Pascal said. “But there’s nothing to say that solid state circuits can’t be built with curving lines of conductors. It’s the connections that matter. The makers of this thing deposited layers of ceramic, then layers of wiring with different materials, and then more non-conducting ceramic, then more circuit pathways. It might be one big chip.”

“Calvaire,” George-Étienne swore, peering closer. “Who the hell built like this fifty or eighty years ago? It doesn’t look American. Or Russian. Maybe it’s Chinese?”

“I don’t think any human built this, Pa.”

His father started, looked at him strangely. “What?”

“I may have grown up sheltered on Venus, but I know that no one on Earth or the colonies could build this thing. This isn’t the way anyone on Earth builds circuits. There’s a different kind of thinking behind this. It’s all one piece. I think it’s sintered, which means it was probably made in space, someplace like the moon or an asteroid.”

“Little green men making probes?”

“Pa, I don’t think this thing ever saw the upper cloud decks. It isn’t shaped like an airfoil to generate lift by moving through the air.” Pascal breathed. “I think it came from the other side. It came through that... wormhole… and found itself in an environment it wasn’t built for—the Venusian atmosphere.”

Pascal had to lean in to see his father’s expression through the two faceplates. It was pensive. Calculating. His father had been poor all his life. That was part of why he’d come to Venus; on Earth, he had nothing to lose. And here, circumstance had forced him to choose between descending into subsistence in the lower cloud decks, or changing the kind of person he was. He’d worked all of Pascal’s life, all of Jean-Eudes’s life, looking for the lucky strike that might give his family some ease, to not be scrambling for their next meal. He’d lost a wife, a daughter and a son-in-law.

The wormhole—if it was a wormhole—was part of that lucky strike. This probe was part of that lucky strike. If this ceramic triangular thing was alien rather than human, its value was incalculable. And all those parts together made a strike too big for one man. Pascal had never seen a dog or a car, but his Pa’s story of the chasing dog who catches the car was not lost on him. What could they do that wouldn’t mean losing their one and only stroke of luck?

“Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” George-Étienne said. “Doesn’t change our choices.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, we cut this thing up and sell the pieces, including the radioactives.”

“Pa! You can’t scrap it! This is world-historical.”

“Maybe so. I don’t fault your idealism, cher, but I’ll tell you one thing: the government is weak. They’ll sell out to anyone with two dollars to wave around. And the Bank of Pallas has a branch manager up in our clouds who’s looking to build her career. If word of this gets out, do you really believe that any real scientists will come down here, excavating and studying for the benefit of all humanity, much less compensating the D’Aquillons? Gaschel will sell access to any bidder, at under market cost, for a kickback no doubt, and our independent Venus suddenly becomes an armed protectorate or territory of the Americans or the Chinese or even the Bank of Pallas.”

“Pa, we don’t know what this is,” Pascal said. “It looks like one big circuit. If we cut it up, it won’t work anymore. This discovery might be one of the most important ones in human history!”

“It doesn’t work now, Pascal,” his father said, putting his hand on Pascal’s shoulder. “Look, family comes first. Always. In forty years, do we really want Alexis to be riding around in trawlers like I did, or do we give him something better? I hope to hell that in ten years, you’re doing something better than me. But we’re never going to get any better, la colonie isn’t going to get any better, without some sort of boost. This might be it. We’ll never get confused or lost if we stick to what’s important, Pascal. Family first.”

Pascal huffed a sigh in his helmet, briefly fogging the area in front of his mouth. George-Étienne understood la colonie and its politics and where the D’Aquillons fit. “Family first,” Pascal repeated.

“Take it apart. Photograph everything you can. Be a real scientist. And then we’ll trade the pieces. If this is what we think it is, I’ve got buyers for this now. Tomorrow. After, we’ll go back for more of these. And then we’ll figure out what to do.”