Uvarov strove to shift in his chair, vainly trying to find a more comfortable posture — a prize he’d been seeking for the best part of a thousand years, with as much assiduousness as Jason had once sought his Fleece, he thought. How pathetic, how limited he was!
He tried to ignore his body, to fix his analytical abilities — his imagination — on the concept of an intelligence within the Sun…
But it was so difficult.
His mind wandered once more. He thought of his forest colony. He thought of Spinner-of-Rope.
Sometimes Uvarov wondered how much better young people might have fared, if they’d been given this opportunity to study and learn, with this strange, battered Universe as an intellectual playground. How much more might youth have unearthed, with its fresh eyes and minds, than he could!
It had already been fifty years since — in his misguided, temporary lunacy — he had inspired his forest children to undertake their hazardous journey out of the lifedome. Fifty years: once most of a human lifetime, he thought — and yet, now, scarcely an interlude in his own, absurdly long life, stuck as he was in this moldering cocoon of a body.
So even Spinner-of-Rope, Arrow Maker’s wise-ass daughter, must be — what, sixty five chronological? Seventy, maybe? An old woman already. But still, thanks to AS-freezing, she’d retained the features — and much of the outlook, as far as he could tell — of a child.
He felt a great sorrow weigh upon him. Of course his experiment was lost, now; his carefully developed gene pool was already polluted by interbreeding, no doubt, between the forest folk and the Superet-controlled Decks, and his immortal strain was overwhelmed by AS treatments.
But the progress he had made was still there, he thought; the genes were there, dormant, ready. And when — if — the inhabitants of the Northern got through this time of trouble, when they reached whatever new world waited for them, then the great experiment could begin anew.
But in the meantime…
He thought again of Spinner-of-Rope, a girl-woman who had grown up among trees and leaves, now walking through the wreckage of the Solar System.
Uvarov had made many mistakes. Well, he’d had time to. But he could be proud of this, if nothing else: that to this era of universal desolation and ruin, he Garry Uvarov — had restored at least a semblance of the freshness of youth.
“…Uvarov,” Mark said.
Uvarov turned. The AI’s synthesized voice sounded different — oddly flat, devoid of expression. None of that damn fake intonation, then, Uvarov thought with faint triumph. It was as if the Virtual’s processing power had, briefly, been diverted somewhere else. Something had happened.
“Well? What is it?”
“I’ve done it. I’ve resolved the signal — the information in the maser pulses. There’s an image, forming in the data desk…”
“An image? Tell me, damn you.”
It was a woman’s face (Mark said), crudely sketched in pixels of color. A human face. The woman was aged about sixty-five physical; she had short-cropped, sandy hair, a strong nose, a wide, upturned mouth, and large, vulnerable eyes.
Her lips were moving.
“A woman’s face — after five million years, transmitted out on maser signals from the heart of a Sun rendered into a red giant? I don’t believe it.”
Mark was silent for a moment. “Believe what you want. I think she’s trying to say something. But we don’t have sound yet.”
“How very inconvenient.”
“Wait… Ah. Here it comes.”
Now Uvarov heard it, heard the voice of the impossible image from the past. At first the timbre was broken up, the words virtually indecipherable, and, so Mark informed him, badly out of synchronization with the moving lips.
Then, after a few minutes — and with considerable signal enhancement from the data desk processors — the message cleared.
“Lethe,” Mark said. “I even recognize the language…”
My name is Lieserl. Welcome home, whoever you are. I expect you’re wondering why I’ve asked you here tonight…
Against the dull red backdrop of the ruined, inflated Sun, the accretion disc of the Jovian black hole sparkled, huge and threatening.
Once more a pod from the Northern carried Spinner-of-Rope — alone, this time down to the surface of Callisto. Spinner twisted to look down through the glass walls of the little pod; as she moved, biomedical sensors within her suit slid over her skin, disconcerting.
The craft from within the ice, dug up and splayed out against the surface by a team of autonomous ’bots, was like a bird, with night-dark wings a hundred yards long trailing back from a small central body. The wing material looked fragile, insubstantial. The ice of Callisto seemed to show through the wings’ trailing edges.
Louise and Mark had told her that the craft was alien technology. And it had a hyperdrive, they thought…
She scratched at her shoulder, where one of Mark’s damned biosensors was digging particularly uncomfortably into her flesh. When she landed, Louise was damn well going to have to tell her why she’d been buttoned up like this.
The craft was more like some immense, black-winged insect, resting on a sheet of glass, Spinner thought. Its elegant curves were surrounded by the stumpy, glistening forms of the Northern’s pods, and by other pieces of equipment. Spinner could see a small drone ’bot crawling across the surface of one nightdark wing, trailing twisted cable strands and scrutinizing the alien material with clusters of sensors. The Callisto ice around the craft was scarred and broken, pitted by the landing jets of the pods and criss-crossed by vehicle tracks.
The craft was immense. The activities of the humans and their machines looked utterly inadequate to contain the power of this artificial beast… if it were to awake from its centuries-long slumber.
Spinner’s fear seemed to rise in inverse proportion to her nearness to the craft. It was as if the sinister insectile form, pinned against the ice, radiated threat.
She shivered, pulling the fabric of her environment suit close around her.
The streets and houses around Morrow were empty. The endless, ululating cries of the klaxon echoed from the bare walls of the ruined buildings and the steel underbelly of the sky.
A grappling hook — a crude thing of sharpened, twisted partition-metal — sailed past Morrow’s face, making him flinch. The hook caught in some irregularity in the floor of the Deck, and the rope it trailed stiffened, jerking. Within a few seconds Trapper-of-Frogs had come swarming along the rope, across the Deck floor; her brown limbs, glistening with sweat, were flashes of color against the gray drabness of the Decks’ sourceless light, and her blowpipe and pouch of darts bounced against her back as she moved.
Morrow sighed and dropped his face. In zero-gee, they were abseiling across the floor of Deck Two. The metal surface before his face was bland, incongruously familiar, worn smooth by countless generations of feet, including his own. He twisted his neck and took a glance back. His other companions were strung out across the surface of the Deck behind him, their faces turned to him like so many flowers: there was Constancy-of-Purpose with her powerful arms working steadily, and her dangling, attenuated legs, the Virtual Mark Wu, a handful of forest folk. The Virtual was trying to protect their sensibilities. Morrow saw, by making a show of climbing along the ropes with the rest of them.
The Temple of the Planners was a brooding bulk, outlined in electric blue, still hundreds of yards ahead, across the Deck.
Many of the houses, factories and other buildings were damaged — several quite badly. In one corner of Deck Two there was evidence of a major fire, a scorching which had even licked at the gray metal ceiling above.