THE WRONG SHAPE TO FLY
Adam Oyebanji
Few questions in science fiction have been asked and answered more times and by more authors than “Are we alone in the universe?” or “Is there other intelligent life among the stars?” Many of the stories that fill the subgenre of tales about ancient aliens, ruins on other worlds, long dead progenitor races offer a grim answer to those questions: Yes, but you just missed them on the way out. Yet in a way, finding those ruins or remnants are almost as miraculous as first contact, perhaps not the answer you wanted, but an answer all the same.
This story from Adam Oyebanji explores some of the biggest things that need to occur for that miracle to happen at all. The dozens of things that can wipe out life before it can spread from the planet that spawned it. The matter of perfect timing across the vast distance of space. Recognizing something as result of an alien intelligence at all, and not just a bit of space junk or cosmic coincidence. The tragedy of had things gone just slightly differently, you might have found a civilization rather than a tomb...and the reflection that you just as easily could have never known they’d existed at all.
***
Perhaps it had been birthed from the nightmares of a child. A profusion of spindly, asymmetric limbs, sprouting in every direction from a gold-sheathed, polyhedral torso. A vast, blind eye protruded from its front.
There was no mouth.
“What is it?” asked Cho Abi Sorocaba, broker of planets.
His host, Ree Aba Jen, tried hard to hide her amusement, and failed.
“An embarrassment, my lord. Hiding in plain sight for many years.”
“It doesn’t look like an embarrassment, mistress. It looks...intriguing.”
The object of the planet broker’s attention was surrounded by a small army of construction bots. Or, more accurately, de-construction bots. The sculpture, trapped inside a transparent dodecahedron like an arthropod in amber, was being removed from a plinth. A truck waited nearby to take it away, engine idling under the soft light of the local sun, the name of which Cho always struggled to remember. He was a broker of planets after all, not stars.
The object was like nothing Cho had ever seen. Its ungainly dimensions were far from auspicious. The transparent casing, while no doubt necessary to protect the sculpture from the ravages of weather, also served to conform the installation’s shape to the harmonious requirements of Maidagan. Dodecahedrons were always propitious. Combined with the elegant shape and size of the plinth, the overall presentation amounted to a powerful token of good fortune.
The bots broke the connection between dodecahedron and plinth. There was a sharp hiss of collapsing vacuum. Or perhaps it was the sound of escaping luck. Unable to stop himself, Cho made the sign of the Protector, cursing himself for his superstition. He turned away, hiding the gesture from his escort, and strode purposefully toward the gilded commercial headquarters that was his destination. He didn’t have to look back to know that the object was being swung smoothly onto the bed of the truck, or that the truck would be extending the necessary arms and straps to secure it in place.
“How can a work of art be such an embarrassment as to be removed from the grounds?”
Ree chuckled.
“Because it’s not merely a work of art, my lord. At least, that is not what it was sold as. My Lady Morota and the board paid several million jigu for an archeological artifact. An abstract representation of the Drekkar Supreme Deity.”
Cho’s response was an incredulous guffaw.
“Any fool can see that this is nothing like a Drekkar deity—or anything Drekkar, for that matter.”
“Hence the embarrassment, my lord.” Ree ushered him into the building.
It was unfortunate for Cho that his business that day required him to meet Morota face to face. He spent far too much energy fighting the urge to ask her—in front of a number of functionaries—how she could have been so foolish in her acquisition of ancient artifacts. In the end, he brokered the sale of three planets to Naiyami Corporation for rather less than he had hoped.
“Come,” Morota said, clearly pleased with the day’s business, “join me for a drink on the ledge. You too, Ree.”
“Yes, my lady.”
“And less of the ‘my lady,’ Ree. We are done with work for the day.”
“Yes, my lady.” Ree grinned. Morota made a sound of mock exasperation.
The ledge was a broad terrace that ran along the outside of the building. Cho knew better than to look over the edge. It was a long way down and there was no railing. He knew that if he stared too long, the urge to jump would become irresistible.
“I feel,” Morota said, after drinks had arrived, “that you have been distracted all day. Any particular reason?” There was a twinkle in the chair’s eye. Cho realized, with a sudden and crushing certainty, that he’d been played.
“The artifact,” he confessed. “The one that was being removed from the grounds this morning. I couldn’t understand how it could ever have been mistaken for a Drekkar.”
“I thought that might be it.” Morota didn’t insult his intelligence by trying to hide her satisfaction. “You should have been an antiquarian rather than a broker of planets. It is, I feel, your true passion—as I have told you many times.”
Cho smiled ruefully.
“Perhaps. But it does not pay the bills.”
Morota laughed at that. But she, too, turned rueful.
“An appalling mistake, truly. I have already had to apologize to our people on behalf of the board. The profits of their labor should not have been wasted in such a fashion. The local media have not been kind.”
“But how? I know I only saw the object briefly on my way in....”
“But for long enough,” Ree chuckled.
“But for long enough,” Cho agreed, smiling. “Long enough to see that it was constructed from a number of ductile alloys. It is primitive to be sure—and intriguing. But not so primitive as to be Drekkar. Ten thousand years ago, when their own sun killed them, they had only recently learned to work iron. Ductile alloys—apart from bronze—were well beyond their abilities.”
“You noticed its proportions?” Ree asked. “Of the object alone, I mean, rather than the final installation?”
“Horrifying. But oddly compelling. You can’t stop looking at it. Its irregularity, its unbalanced nature, its...aggressiveness.” He hesitated before adding, “It was like looking at the heart of a demon.”
“Exactly. The thing is, though, there are apparently many objects on Drekkar that share similar proportions. Two, twochartered archaeologists certified that the ratios were so matched to other renditions of the Drekkar Supreme Deity as to be beyond coincidence.”
“But the technology, mistress. How could the archaeologists have failed to notice such a thing?”
“Oh, they noticed,” Morota intervened. “Not that it stopped them.” She stared morosely at her empty drink; signaled the service bot for another.
“Drekkar is, as you know, a desert world, and, even now, only partially explored,” Ree said. “There are subcultures and nations that still await to be discovered. The archaeologists—”
“Charlatans, more like.”
“—belonged to a school of thought that argues Drekkar was turned to desert by artificial forces, rather than a brightening sun.”
“We’ve seen that elsewhere,” Cho agreed. “Runaway heating caused by industrial pollution. On Xakas Sei, for example. But there’s usually some massive chemical footprint: generally in the form of ridiculous amounts of carbon dioxide, either still in the atmosphere, or trapped in the fossil record somehow. There’s none of that on Drekkar.”
“This school of thought asserted that we’ll find the footprint eventually, that the brightening of the Drekkar sun alone cannot account for the scale of the damage, and that there must be, somewhere on the planet, a Drekkar civilization far more advanced than any yet discovered. This object, they said, was proof of that.” Ree allowed herself a wry smile. “Scholarly papers were written. Obscure academic arguments ensued.”
“So, what changed your mind? Why remove a certified, one-of-a-kind Drekkar artifact from the campus?”
“Drekkar scholars, by definition, I suppose, are skilled in the analysis of extremely primitive artifacts, in iron and bronze and stone. Their arguments revolve around shape, and proportion, the Drekkar historical record, and the planetology of Drekkar itself. But then someone had the bright idea of bringing in archeologists specializing in the Bren C cultures.”
“Bren C? Why? They have no connection to the Drekkar, either in time or space. They were in their heyday before the Drekkar people even evolved. They were around, what, a million-and-a-half years ago? And their sun didn’t kill them, as I recall. They did that to themselves. A devastating nuclear war.”
“True, my lord. But, given that they wiped themselves out with fusion bombs, they had technology. The sort of technology that was more than familiar with ductile alloys. They had machines, the remnants of which survive to this day, even if we have no idea what many of them were for. Bren C archaeologists spend a lot of time with machinery. If this artifact was as advanced as its proponents claimed, someone had the bright idea that it might not be a deity at all, but a machine. And who better to investigate a machine than a Bren C archaeologist?”
“And these Bren C specialists somehow settled the argument?”
“And then some,” Morota said. “They reanalyzed all the original scans. Apparently, it took them less than a day to deduce that the artifact had never been anywhere near Drekkar.”
“Really?”
“Really. The object’s ‘torso,’ the gold-sheathed polyhedron in the middle of all those arms and legs, isn’t solid. There are a number of devices inside. Some of which are little more than pellets of uranium two-three-eight.”
“Odd.”
“It gets odder. The pellets are uranium two-three-eight now, but they also contain trace amounts of plutonium two-three-nine. Everyone—everyone—agrees that the pellets must once have been pure plutonium, but they’ve decayed into uranium over a period of about a thousand years.”
“So, too young to be Drekkar?”
“Precisely. About nine thousand years too young.”
“And did these new archaeologists hazard a guess as to what this thing is?”
Morota smiled into her drink.
“They don’t know. But one of the team thought it might be a spacecraft, or the remains of one.”
Had Cho been drinking at the time he would have choked.
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“A tiny, ill-balanced collection of appendages with no room for passengers or cargo, no fuel tanks, no A-Grav engines, no soliton generator, with the aerodynamics of a...a rock, is a spacecraft?”
“In fairness,” Ree jumped in, “the archaeologist said it was the best he could offer. The Bren C cultures made copious use of something called rockets. Giant tubes of explosives. The explosive force is channeled out of one end and the resultant thrust pushes the object high into the atmosphere—even to the edge of space if it’s big enough.”
“And these...rockets, really worked?”
“Apparently. In any event, our ‘Drekkar deity’ has a number of devices that look like tiny rockets. The problem is, they’re so tiny that they’re useless. And, as you’ve pointed out, the object is the wrong shape to fly, anyway. In the end, the new team came up blank as to what it is. But they are very certain as to what it is not. Our certifying archaeologists had no answer to the radioactive decay problem. The Drekkar civilization is ten thousand years old, and this object is barely a thousand. They were forced to concede their error. The certificate was withdrawn, and my lady Morota had to consume large quantities of humble pie.”
“Charlatans,” Morota muttered again. “If they’d just thoughtabout what was inside the object, this would never have happened. But they were so wedded to their advanced Drekkar subculture theory, they ignored what was right in front of them.”
“And that,” said Cho, smiling, “is archaeology in a nutshell: wild guesses, based mostly on personal prejudice, mutate into equally wild theories. Theories into which the guessers have poured so many hopes and dreams that they will not let them go until the evidence against becomes overwhelming. At which point the academy moves on to a slightly less wild theory, which gives way in turn to something even less wild until, after many, many years, and many, many shattered egos, something close to the truth is finally arrived at.”
“Well, I wish these people’s personal growth had not come at the expense of my company’s balance sheet,” Morota grumbled.
It was at this point that an idea, an idea as persistent as it was ridiculous, lodged itself in Cho’s head. He was careful to keep his face devoid of anything beyond an expression of mild curiosity.
“What will become of the object?” he asked.
“Don’t know,” Morota said. “Don’t care, either.”
“It’s being taken to a storage vault in Chosungdal City,” Ree offered. “It’s where we keep the items in our collection that aren’t on display or loan.”
“And it still has its title papers, I presume?”
“Yes, my lord. Although, obviously, the Drekkar claim is no longer valid.”
“In that case, let me make you an offer for it.”
And so, for considerably less than the price paid by Naiyami Corporation, Cho Abi Sorocaba, broker of planets, acquired an ill-proportioned object of no known purpose, and no known provenance, on the basis of an idea that was, he had to admit, about as unlikely as an iron-age civilization manufacturing plutonium.
Cho hated the cold. Unluckily for him, Braym’s southern hemisphere was in deep midwinter by the time his ship, Abstract Existence, nestled into a berth on the outskirts of Gaiyo, the planet’s largest city. Not that that was saying much. Braym, lying on the edge of trafficked space, and close to the daunting voids of the Rimward Reach, was something of a backwater. If its owners ever approached him with a view to selling, there would have to be some very hard conversations about its value.
Unless, of course, he turned out to be right.
Leaving the crew to do whatever it was the crew did in the aftermath of a landing, Cho hurried into town, mildly worried that he would be late for his appointment, but rather more concerned that he would freeze to death before he got there.
“Come in, my lord, come in.”
Seo Aba Mai welcomed him across the threshold herself. She personally removed his snow-crusted cloak and handed it off to a subordinate before escorting him across the showroom to her office.
“You took a ground car, my lord?”
“I did. I didn’t much fancy flying in this weather.”
“A wise choice, I’m sure.”
Seo’s office was almost as large as her showroom. Like the showroom, it was full of carefully curated antiquities and objets d’art. For an out-of-the-way place like Braym, it was an impressive collection. Cho took time to compliment the antiquarian on her taste.
“Coming from you, my lord, those are words to treasure.”
A warm beverage, delivered by a person, not a bot, materialized at Cho’s side. He accepted it gratefully, taking up Seo’s invitation to perch on a luxuriously upholstered bench. He didn’t recognize the material. Local, presumably.
“And now, my lord, how may we be of service?” Seo didn’t bother to hide her puzzlement. “What brings a collector of your stature to my humble premises? I cannot imagine what we have to offer, that you would journey so far to visit us.”
“I have other business to accomplish here, mistress. But now that I am planetside, I thought it would be remiss of me not to visit.” Cho’s eyes flitted around the room, alighting on one of the shelves. “I have a number of first era steles from the Moan subculture of Sadako Prime. But they are large and, if I may say so, vulgar. Fine as outdoor decoration, but no more than that. I am looking for something of similar provenance, but smaller. More personal, if you understand my meaning. They are harder to find than you might think. So many antiquarians want to sell only the big, flashy pieces.”
Seo followed his gaze and smiled.
“You have a good eye, my lord. I personally feel that, of all the many civilizations we have come across, those of Sadako Prime were the most artistic. Who knows what they might have achieved had they not succumbed to disease.” She rose from her stool and removed the subject of their discussions from its shelf. “This is a late first era statuette of the Moan god-king, Tallamok the Second. It’s fully provenanced with the title documents in order. Hard to believe it’s almost half a million years old. Would you like to examine it more closely?”
“Later, perhaps. I shall most certainly want to purchase it. Assuming suitable terms, of course.”
“Of course, my lord.”
“But while I am here and enjoying your hospitality, I wonder if we might discuss another matter?”
“Anything you wish to discuss, my lord, would be an honor.”
Cho wriggled his fingers, causing a 3-D image to materialize in the center of the room. There was a sharp breath of recognition from his host.
“Several years ago, now, you sold this object to a representative of Naiyami Corporation: an abstract representation of the Drekkar civilization’s Supreme Deity.”
“I did indeed, my lord. Though, as I’m sure you’re aware, it now seems unlikely that this piece was from Drekkar at all. But it was certified as such by highly respected experts in the field, and we sold it to Naiyami on that basis. There was no intention to mislead.”
“Of course not, mistress. I know that the archaeologists in question had a good faith, ...
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
