Engines Of God

Hutch nodded. "Before the rise of civilization, right? Before anybody was there to record it."

"Not exactly. It would have passed through the solar system somewhere around 5000 B.C."

Hutch waited. The date meant nothing to her.

Janet shrugged. "It fits the most recent estimates for Sodom and Gomorrah."

ARCHIVE

(Transmitted via Laserbuoy)

TO: NCA GARY KNAPP ATT: DAVID EMORY

FROM: FRANK CARSON, BETA PAC MISSION

NCA ASHLEY TEE

SUBJECT: OPERATIONAL MOVEMENT DAVID. SORRY TO LEAVE BEFORE YOU GET HERE, BUT BUSINESS PRESSES. WE MAY BE ABLE TO FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENED AT ORIKON. NEXT STOP IS LCO4418. JOIN US THERE IF YOU CAN. CARSON.

27

On board NCA Ashley Tee, en route to LCO4418. Wednesday, April 27; 1930 hours

"I can't believe," said Drafts, frowning at his pair of deuces, "we're really doing this."

"Doing what?" asked Angela, looking up from a book.

"Chasing a dragon," said Hutch. She wasn't holding anything either.

"It's worth the trip," said Angela. "I don't believe a word of it. But I've been wrong before." She literally radiated vitality. Hutch had no trouble imagining her flying into a volcano.

"By me," said Drafts. He had been wi

"Maybe," said Janet, "it's not from the Void, but something out of the center of the galaxy." She was trying not to look pleased with her cards. "I'll open," she said. She pushed a coin into the pot. "It would come from the same direction."

Drafts glanced at Carson. "Forty-four eighteen's already been looked at. If there had been anything going on out there, we'd know about it."

"Maybe not," said Angela. "If this thing exists, it might not be easy to find unless you know what you're looking for."

"Well," said Drafts, still talking to Carson, "I don't want to offend anybody, but I doubt this dragon is likely to stand up to the light of day."

"Ah, Terry, will you never learn?" Angela delivered a sigh they could have heard in the shuttle bay. "You're right. But it's the wrongheaded types who make the big finds."

Carson smiled at her appreciatively.

Drafts shrugged. "Okay," he said.

Hutch folded, and watched Janet scare everyone out of the pot. Carson picked up the cards and began to shuffle. "The Monument-Maker as Death," he said. "Could they have built something that got away from them?"

Hutch tried to wave it away. "Why don't we wait until we get there? Meantime, we can't do anything except guess."

Angela was sitting with her feet doubled under her. She was reading Matama, the hundred-year-old Japanese tragedy. "If there is a wave," she said without looking up, "it would have to be pretty deep, on an order of a couple of light-years, for us to have a reasonable chance to locate it. What kind of mechanism could be that big?"

"If it exists," said Janet, "it stretches from Quraqua to Nok. That's a hundred light-years. At a minimum." She looked toward Carson. "That would have to be an effect beyond anybody's capability to manufacture."

"I just can't see that the evidence amounts to anything," said Drafts. "Look, these people, whoever they were, had a passion for leaving their signature everywhere they've been. They liked monuments. The Oz-structures and the cube moons were early efforts. They were getting their sea legs. No hidden meanings; just practice."

"Come on, Terry," said Carson.

"Why not? Why does there have to be some deep-seated significance? Maybe they're just what most other monuments are: somebody's idea of high art. And the eight-thousand-year cycle is hardly established as fact. Half of it's pure guess-work, and I bet the rest of it is going to turn out to be wishful thinking."

Carson and Janet looked at Hutch. Hell, she thought, I made no guarantees. But she felt forced to defend her speculations. "The dating wasn't mine," she said. "It was done by Henry Jacobi and David Emory and the data technicians on the Perth. I just put it together. If the numbers are a coincidence, they're a coincidence. But it's not wishful thinking. I have no interest in meeting a dragon out here."

The tension broke, and they all laughed.

If a cosmic hand were to move the red giant LCO4418 to the center of the solar system, Mercury and Venus would sink beneath its tides, and Earth would swim through its upper atmosphere. The surface simmered serenely at less than 2200 degrees Kelvin. It was an ancient star, far older than Sol. Its blood-colored light spilled across its family of worlds.

Terrestrial planets orbited at either end of the system, separated by four gas giants. The survey team which had visited the system ten years earlier had concluded that there had probably once been other planets, closer to the central luminary, but they had been absorbed as the sun expanded. LCO4418 was now thought to be close to the end of this phase of its cycle. Over the next several million years, it would recede.

Carson watched recordings of its image on the screens. Prominences did not erupt from its interior, nor did sunspots mar its placid surface. It had entered the final stage of its existence, and death would come quickly now. By cosmic standards.

For all that, it would still be here, and still look much the same, when the human race had long since met whatever fate awaited it. Or had evolved into something else.

The flight was somber. The festive mood and the enthusiasm of the days on the Winckelma

Late in the afternoon of May 7, they jumped back into real space, well south of the planetary plain.

On those occasions when Carson was honest with himself, he knew that he did not expect to find anything. He did not really believe in the wave. It was an intriguing concept, but this was not a phenomenon that he could credit. So he stood on Ashley's bridge, and surveyed the vast wastes, and wondered, not for the first time, why he was here.

The three surviving members of the original team found they could no longer hide their feelings from each other, and Carson was not surprised when Hutch, who had come up behind him, moved right into his mood. "Sometimes," she said, "you just have to take your chance, and let go."

They started by performing a system-wide survey for artificial objects. It showed negative, which did not mean there might not be something present, but only that any such object would be at considerable range, or quite small, or hidden behind a natural body.

In spite of themselves—they agreed, when pressed, that they were chasing ghosts—they were disappointed.

Angela pored over the records of the original mission to 4418. "A fairly typical system," she told Hutch. "What do we do now?"

The red giant dominated the viewscreens. "Verticals and perpendiculars," she said. "We are going to make some right angles."

Carson had been looking for a good construction site. He explained his strategy in detail, and Angela produced topographical maps from the survey. They decided to use an oversized moon orbiting the second planet: 4418-IID. Delta.

Drafts put it on the display. In the dim glow of the sun, it was an exotic worldlet, silver and gold by candlelight. Clouds drifted above orange snowfields and nitrogen seas, methane swamps and crooked mountain chains. It lay in the shadow of the big planet's wispy rings.