A Darker Light, segment 1

The following is the first section of the first quarter of the first novel I’ve ever written.

This is set in Larry Niven’s Known Space universe. If you’re not familiar with that, well...I’m not sure what to tell you. Try reading Ringworld and Neutron Star for a start. That should get you going. Comments are welcome, as are spelling and grammar corrections. In case you’re wondering, Theemim is a GIII Class star in the constellation of Eridanus. I cannot find any information on exactly how far away it is. It’s a temporary name until I can find a suitable star which really exists and which is at least two hundred and fifty light years away from Earth. Known space at the time of Ringworld does not extend beyond 200ly in any one direction from Earth, hence my desire for something farther away.

Cheers!

An ancient tone and even older light. A flash, a flare, a flicker, a guttering gleam of madness, and the old man passed from darkness to light. His eyes rebelled at the glare of a thousand suns and automatic systems engaged to protect them before any actual damage occurred. “Too soon,” he thought. “Too soon. This isn’t Theemim.”

The stars outside his cellship blazed brightly, as if newly made, as if happy to be warming something other than themselves at last. They seemed to focus on the tiny sliver of ceramic and metal, plastic and flesh. Seemed to need it, to want it. Caressed its surface lovingly with billions of angstroms of raw energy as a lover caresses his beloved.

Inside the cellship Jeremiah Uchida pressed switches and read dials and tried to understand how a stellar formation this huge could have gone unnoticed by the hyperspace probes which preceded him. Wondered where they were. Their telemetry had failed when he was pulled from hyperspace.

A moment of panic was quelled by an injection of something cool and calming in his inner thigh from the autodoc. He longed to be able to simply walk around, but the cellship was not designed for such luxury. He was held upright and immobile in a cocoon of technology. His ship was moulded to his body, and not even an identical twin might have fit in his stead. The ship, an oblate spheroid with a dull silver matte finish, was perhaps thirty meters from stem to stern. Ninety-nine percent of the ship was equipment. The engines which moved the ship accounted for slightly more than two-thirds of its mass. The rest was made up by various other systems, including navigation, life support, the ship’s sensoria, protein resequencers, waste processing (which fed the resequencers, something about which no cellship pilot thought for long) and of course, the pilot.

The pilot wondered what exactly had happened. He knew why he’d been pulled out of hyperspace. He’d entered a collosal gravity well. He could pull out of it without any difficulties, but it would take him several days at relativistic speeds. He could pop back into hyperspace, head up out of the galactic plane and jump over the stellar cluster, then drop back down again and continue on his way. But what were these stars doing here, where all scans said nothing existed?

He shrugged, or rather thought about shrugging, and began to wheel the ship about to accelerate out of their collective gravity well. As he did so, he noticed something peculiar. The stars shifted with him. They should most definitely not have done that. How could a stellar mass, much less two thousand of them, have moved that quickly? He began scanning for ships and found none. Nothing out there but two thousand hot white suns clamoring for his attention. They were now set between him and Jinx. He wasn’t sure how to feel about that. He activated the hyperwave radio and tried sending a signal. There was no reply. The suns’ collective mass was warping the signal, it was the only answer. He turned himself around to look behind him and saw that he was engulfed. He was ensnared. The stars were completely surrounding him now in a globe.

How long would the ship hold out? Jeremiah Uchida would be able to last almost indefinitely. All his excreta were resequenced and converted to potable (if flat) water and edible (if tasteless) food. The ship carried a large variety of entertainment tapes, though in truth he’d already seen much of them. At three-hundred and fifty years old, there wasn’t much he hadn’t seen. The stars’ behaviour was new, and far more entertaining, so he set to the problem.

First was the problem of their mass and their acceleration. Clearly this was being solved somehow and being dealt with by an outside entity. He set the ship in motion, advancing back toward Jinx suddenly at 2/3c, his eyes on the scanners. It was a fraction of a second’s delay, but it was there. Something outside the sphere (he was tempted to call it a dai sun sphere) was controlling the suns. Something far, far away and yet close enough to read his movements? Or was it something inside the sphere using the intense radiation to hide from his own sensors?

He killed the engines. If he got underway today in roughly five hundred years he might reach Jinx. He himself would be long dead, of course, and there was no knowing what the sun sphere might do to the system, but whatever it it would not be pretty. He would run out of boosterspice, even with rationing, within twenty years, and after that no matter how much he had taken before, he’d be centuries dead before reaching Jinx.

He switched to gravitic sensors. Around him the suns’ well held him firmly grounded in reality. He scanned for any distortions, however subtle. He found the ship hiding from him in what might have been a blind spot with normal sensors. There was no hiding one’s gravity, not even when surrounded by thousands of stellar masses.

For the moment he was content to let them think they’d gone unnoticed. He began reviewing the list of enemies. Three centuries and change was a long time, and he had been bound to make more than one enemy in that time. The list grew long, and longer still once he decided to include ex-wives. But none of these people had anywhere near the resources to pull this off, not even collectively.

He looked at the scans of the ship again. He couldn’t tell much about its origins looking at it like this. He’d need data from the other sensors. All the gravitic sensors could show him was that it was there, and how much it massed. And it was massive. That is, the thing’s actual size was very small, but its mass was far greater than Earth’s. Idly, he wondered if it had a neutronium hull. Might be piloted by Jinxians. Had he done something to offend someone before he’d left? He thought he’d been a perfect gentleman. He was far too weak in the Jinxian gravity to be able to get into any fights, and the strain of walking up and down stairs was enough to exhaust him. He hadn’t gone out at all. So that wasn’t it either.

He was still thinking about the problem when the proximity alarm began to whine in his ear. He dialled it down to a tolerable volume (he would have preferred off, but a seasoned spacer values alarms and would sooner cut off a limb than silence a safety feature) and checked his sensors. The ship wasn’t a lot larger than his own, but its dense neutronium hull, fashioned at no doubt great expense from the surface of a neutron star, gave it a mass a thousand times greater than Earth’s. He wouldn’t even be able to jump to relativistic speeds. They had him trapped.

So who was it? Pirates? The ship looked too well kept to be pirates. Too new. Its lines and markings resembled those of an old puppeteer ship, but they’d been gone from known space since he was a young man of seventy. He figured he’d find out soon enough. The ship appeared to be controlled by a small pod, mounted on what was from his perspective the side of the ship, directly on the centre point between the nose and the stern. He found that at this range his regular sensoria were functional. There were three people in that pod. The ship was hollow. It would have to be, he reasoned. If it were a solid lump of neutronium it would be far too massive. It would overwhelm whatever gravitic plating and shielding the pod might possess and crush it and its contents to a smear of goo. He now knew for a certainty that if the pod’s occupants were human, they were from Jinx. No matter how excellent the gravitic shielding was inside the pod, they’d be feeling the neutronium’s pull.

The ship drew closer. He didn’t understand. Surely they wanted him alive, otherwise why go to all this trouble. Unless they’d been waiting for someone else, and they needed to clear the trap before resetting it.

On a whim he thumbed the hyperwave transmitter on and began to speak. “This is Jeremiah Uchida. You have interdicted a ship on official business. Please state your intentions”. He switched the transmitter off to let them respond.

To his amazement, they did. “Jeremiah Uchida,” said a gravelly voice. “State your business in this sector”.

“En route to Theemim on official, confidential business. Cannot elaborate further.” It was true, too.

“Jeremiah Uchida stand by to be towed.”

The ship approached him. They were going to use the ship’s enormous gravitc mass to tow him! He set his gravitic shielding to maximum. He didn’t want his internal organs gravied by tidal forces. “Understood. Standing by.”

He looked outside at the stars. To his utter amazement they were gone. Not just moved off, but actually gone. Like they’d never existed. Another puzzle. Clearly they used the neutronium hull as a control mechanism for the stars, at least for sending them hurtling through the cosmos as relativistic speeds. But where had they gone? He checked over his sensor logs. There was nothing unusual. The stars had been there one moment and not been there the next. “Just like they’d never existed,” he told himself again.

He felt the ship judder and quake and he knew he was being towed. He powered down his own engines and let the other ship do the work. With a sudden jolt they were in hyperspace. Something wasn’t right. He knew full well that this region of space was uninhabited. The intergalactic expanse here, starless and Bible-black was not the sort of place you’d want to put down roots and raise a family. So who were these people? Why were they here? So many questions he would have.

He considered his options. He could try talking to his captors. Surely if they were going to kill him they would have done that by now. The gravitic shielding in his ship would protect him from normal tidal forces, but a directed assault would be only slightly inconvenienced. He would be a smear of molecules (the entire ship would be, actually) before could even realise something was wrong. He decided that was what he would do.

“Hello there. Jeremiah Uchida here. You got a name?”

The gravelly voice spoke. “Milen.”

“Well, Milen, let me thank you for your assistence. I think we should be out of danger by now. Could you release my ship? I need to resume my mission.”

“Negative.” Whoever he was, he wasn’t going to give away any more information than necessary.

“Can you at least tell me where we’re going?”

“Negative” came the reply.

“How about...” he began, but Milen interrupted him.

“We’re going to be in hyperspace for another 103 hours. I need to pilot. Cease further communications.”

Further attempts at communications were ignored. Uchida’s coffin of a ship felt even more claustrophobic. He aimed the hyperwave back at Jinx, but found his communications jammed. Were these people pirates? He put the question off and set the autodoc to wake him when they re-entered normal space. He dropped off to sleep instantly.

The transition back into normal space took him by surprise. Milen had lied to him! One hundred and three hours had most definitely not elapsed. It was fewer than forty hours, according to the computer. Why the lie? Maybe they were pirates.

His sensors saw it long before he did. It was a slightly blacker patch against the interstellar black, so his humble human eyes would never have seen it. It wasn’t a black hole, he could tell that much, though it would not have surprised him. Anyone would could manipulate neutronium could probably manipulate a black hole. It wasn’t a black hole. It was a Dyson sphere. He couldn’t understand why it was riddled with holes. Were they vents for the solar winds? That seemed wrong somehow. Why were there so many of them?

The autodoc sensed his anxiety and gave him a calmant. Sometimes he resented the device, meant to keep him well adjusted and sane (as well as physically healthy) during his flight. It wasn’t enough that he had to remain almost completely immobile from the chest down for the duration of his flight. No, he also had to have a machine there doping and coking him at a whim. Worse, he couldn’t turn it off. He would continue to be subject to its medicational whims until such time as he was extracted from the cellship. Which wasn’t supposed to be until he reached Theemim.

In his new calm he suddenly understood who had taken him. He aimed the hyperwave at the tug and thumbed the switch. “OK Nessus, you can drop the act.”

The screen in front of him rippled and he was suddenly face to-faces with a Pierson’s Puppeteer. In a warm but flat contralto it said to him: “Took you long enough to guess.” It looked itself in the eyes. It was laughing at him!

“But I am not Nessus, as you can tell. If it helps you to call me Nessus, you may.” Two one-eyed heads mounted on long, ropy necks sprouted from the creature’s stout, powerfully muscled box-like body. The body held its brain and other vital organs. The body was supported by three legs, each tipped with a sharp hoof. Its overall colour was off-white, and the body was topped with shaggy brownish fur.

The Puppeteers had fled known space centuries earlier. Their reasons for doing so became abundantly clear as soon as Beowulf Schaeffer announced what he had found at the galaxy’s core.

Flying in an experimental ship Schaeffer had found that the galaxy’s core had exploded thousands of years ago. Within 20,000 years the galaxy would be uninhabitable, swept clean of life by the expanding wave of radiation from the core explosion. The Puppeteers, cowards at heart, ran.

The Puppeteer in the ship ahead of him was laughing at him because it had taken so long for Jeremiah to guess his identity. And who better than Nessus, the insane Puppeteer who had lead the expedition to the Ringworld, to go on an expedition to a Dyson sphere. Now that he thought back to the sphere of giant suns he realised the pun he had almost made, and realised also that whoever had taken him knew him well enough to give him the clue.

“Alright, then, if you’re not Nessus, what’s your name?” he demanded. He wasn’t upset, but he wasn’t going to let the Puppeteer known that.

“I have said you may call me Nessus. But the name I gave you earlier is my name: Milen.” Each word sounded as if it was coming from the most beautiful woman you’d ever laid eyes on. Beautiful, but ultimately very bored. There was no inflection, no stress placed on any syllable. Whoever this mythical beauty might be, her voice would not betray even a hint of human emotion.

“All right, Milen, why the subterfugue? And what was with those suns?” They had been real, hadn’t they?

“I am sorry for the deception, Jeremiah. There was no time to catch you on Jinx, and the decision was made to catch you mid-flight.” The matter-of-factness of the words was disturbing.

“Decided? By whom?” Jeremiah demanded angrily.

“By us, of course. Whom else?” There was that tone again.

“Dammit, Milen, you can’t just go abducting people in interstellar space! I’ve got a very important mission to fulfill!” He activated his engines. “Release me or I’m going to accelerate to .99c right now.” He poised his thumb over the button which would execute the order. Both ships would be torn to pieces. Well, the cellship and the control pod would be. The neutronium hull, which would do most of the pulling, would be just fine until it ran into a star or a black hole.

Milen’s heads wobbled nervously. “You would not truly do such a thing, would you Jeremiah?” On head hovered over the control panel. The other stared at him anxiously.

Uchida began to nod when he felt the cool numbness of the autodoc’s hypospray against his thigh. The world went black and his hand never touched the button.

He awoke in a large room. He was clean and freshly shaven. Should he be angry? He probed the question gently. No, he decided. He had not really wanted to die. But neither was he a happy man. He would have answers or there would be trouble. The door to his room hissed open, and Milen walked in.

The insane puppeteer (no human will ever see a sane puppeteer-they are too sane to be in the same room with any other life form) looked nervously at him. Chances are he had needed a shot of Bravery Buzz before walking in. Uchida looked on passively as Milen walked up to him and sat, just out of easy reach. Insane but not stupid.

“Don’t worry, Milen,” said Uchida. “I’m not angry. I won’t harm you.” In truth he was rather glad to be here. He’d been looking at another two weeks in that cellship of his, and was grateful for the chance to move about freely. “What’s the big idea?”

The puppeteer spoke. “Jeremiah Uchida, we need your help.”

“You could have asked me first,” he replied, a little coldly. The alien most likely wouldn’t catch that nuance.

“You might have said, ‘No’, which would be unacceptable to us. We require your assistance.” His heads bobbed together in a reasonable imitation of a human nod. “We find ourselves in a conundrum.”

“Which involves the Dyson sphere I saw out there?” The puppeteer nodded again. “Why was it riddled with holes?”

“That is something I cannot say at this time. When you have agreed to this expedition all will be revealed.”

Jeremiah mulled this over. Something was going on here. Something the puppeteer wasn’t willing to admit to. He was hiding something, but what? He considered the sphere. It had looked almost as if it were unfinished.

“The sphere’s not finished, is it?” he asked and smiled as the puppeteer’s eyes widened in astonishment.

Milen quickly recovered. “I cannot say I know what you mean,” he said evenly. “What have you decided?”

“I thought you weren’t going to take no for an answer.”

“Now you have seen. Now you believe that such a thing exists. Now you can answer the question correctly. Will you assist us?”

He wondered if they’d gotten the location of the sphere from the Outsiders. They seemed to know pretty much everything that went on, and where all the bodies were buried. He thought again of the sphere outside, and of the promise it contained. He had no need for money, but he was never one to turn down an opportunity to make a profit. He had only one question:

“What’s in this for me?”

The puppeteer had anticipated this question, of course. It had been many centuries since puppeteers were last seen in human space but they remembered us well. “Full ownership rights to the sphere,” said Milen. “Though assuming it is habitable we will reserve the right to one tenth of its surface area.”

Uchida snorted. His vaguely almond eyes crinkled as he laughed. “That’s whole thing’s more that all of known space put together, Milen. In even one tenth of the thing you could very easily hide the entire puppeteer population and never see each other for the rest of your lives.” He considered this. “How long do your people live, anyway?”

“Really, such an impudent question!” replied Milen. He looked at himself again. Whoever said puppeteers don’t have a sense of humor never actually met one.

Suddenly serious, Uchida stood. “OK. I’m all yours. What do you want me to do?” He didn’t figure they wanted him for a pilot, and if they were willing to cede control of the sphere to him it must be important.

Milen stood. “We would like you to explore the structure. Determine what has happened to it, who built it, and if indeed it is still habitable.”

Uchida considered this. Even an insane puppeteer wouldn’t risk going to the sphere’s inner surface. At least not alone. “When do we leave,” he asked.

“A ship has been prepared for you. Your cellship will remain here aboard this station until such time as you return.” So he was on a space station. Must be a durable one, unless it wasn’t crewed by puppeteers. “When will you be ready to depart?”

“I can leave as soon as the ship is ready.”

“Then you may depart immediately.”

The ship was a GP #2 hull with wings. It looked similar to the Lying Bastard, a ship he’d never actually seen, but about which Louis Wu had told him more than once. The transparent hull showed the ship’s innards. There was ample living space for two, and room enough for four if you didn’t mind cramped quarters. The body of the ship was comprised of a cylinder three hundred feet long and twenty feet wide, tapered at both ends and with a slight wasp-waisted constriction near the tail. Jeremiah stepped into the airlock and turned to say his goodbyes. There wasn’t another soul in sight. He sealed the door and waited for the airlock to cycle.

He had no gear to stow, and so went straight for the cockpit. After checking with the station’s flight control for clearance, the ship lifted off and slipped easily from the landing bay.

For all its apparent size, the sphere was still nearly a light month away. He dropped into hyperspace and waited for the sphere’s gravity well to bring him back out. Which reminded him: he had never pressed Milen for the answer to the question of the stars. It would keep.

The trip was a short one. It had taken two hours to go this far. He engaged the reactionless drive and was brought to 1/4c instantly. The sphere grew larger. It already filled his view to fore. At this distance he could see unfinished bits of infrastructure. What had looked like holes earlier were now more clearly defined as ragged patches. There was no sign of life within or without. No ships rushed out to greet him, and the hyperwave remained silent except for an occasional question from the puppeteers about his impressions of the artifact.

This really was an artifact. He directed his ship through a gap which would have admitted Jupiter. The interior of the sphere was completely unfinished. Whoever had built it, they’d left in a hurry. The sphere was dead. They’d brought him out here, promised him control of the artifact, and it was dead. All but worthless to him. He’d have Milen’s hide.

He wheeled the ship about and set a course for the puppeteer station. And discovered that the hyperdrive was non-operational. It would take him nearly three months to get back to the station at sublight speeds. He swore, using words which hadn’t been used in centuries.

They’d known it would be empty. He got up and went to get something to eat. If the kitchen wasn’t stocked, he was in serious trouble. Thankfully it was stocked with an assortment of fruits and vegetables he could eat, and a processor which could make him anything else he might desire, up to and including meat. As he fiddled with its settings in an attempt to create a turkey sandwich, he heard movement behind him. Three sharp hooves marked a trinary beat on the floor. Milen snaked one head through the door, anxious to determine Jeremiah’s mood. He withdrew it quickly as a plate flew across the room.

“Jeremiah,” he began, but Jeremiah wasn’t going to listen to him. The angry human charged the stunned alien. “Please,” he stammered, “If you’ll just let me explain!”

Uchida had backed the puppeteer into a...well, there were no corners on the cylindrical spacecraft, and certainly no sharp edges in this one, designed by safty-first puppeteers, but leave us call it a corner. Milen, terrified, made a sound like a dozen bagpipes deflating at once, tucked his heads under his body and curled into a ball. The human made a sound of disgust at the puppeteer’s cowardice and stalked back to the kitchen to finish his sandwich.

He ate quickly and washed his meal down with a bulb of beer. He was surprised the machine was programmed with human foods like these. He didn’t expect them to be so considerate of him. Jeremiah sighed and dropped his waste in the ‘cycler. Most of his anger had drained away. The puppeteer could be catatonic for days, and he was tired. Time to get some sleep.

He disrobed and slipped between the zero gee sleeping plates in the one large crew chamber. His slumber was undisturbed for eighteen hours, and when he awoke, he felt completely refreshed. He felt a small pang of annoyance at his treatment, and a large pang of guilt and regret at the way he’d treated Milen. After all, it wasn’t as if they’d sent him out here alone.

As he dressed, he heard a noise from the main chamber. Milen had roused himself and was calling meekly to Jeremiah. Jeremiah walked into the main cabin and sat down near the puppeteer, but far enough away that he wouldn’t seem too threatening.

“Well, Milen?” he demanded. “You said you could explain.” He tried to look cross, but decided the alien didn’t know cross from orgasmic, and so just let himself relax. “I’m waiting to hear this one.”

“First, Jeremiah, a promise.” He raised his heads to look directly into Jeremiah’s eyes. “Please promise me you will never do that again, no matter how badly I deserve it. I don’t think I could handle the shock a second time.”

Uchida hung his head. He really did feel bad about that. He’d thought he had more self-control than that, and said so. “I didn’t mean to hurt you, but your people stranded me out here with no hyperdrive!” He’d not realised that Milen would even be on the ship with him. There had been no discussion of it at all. Milen adopted a stance which Jeremiah thought meant contrition. “I apologise for my barbaric behaviour, Milen. I promise you I will never do that again.”

“Good,” said the puppeteer, a little too sharply. “The next time might be to your peril as well as my own. Jeremiah had heard Louis Wu’s theories about puppeteers’ defensive mechanisms. That hind hoof was supposed to pack a whallop. He didn’t want to find out if it did, at least not first-hand.

Milen continued. “As you have noticed, the sphere is dead, completely deserted. We need to investigate it, to understand why its builders deserted it.” He was more relaxed now. “There is evidence to suggest it was built by the Ringworld engineers.”

Pak. Of course it was the Pak. Perhaps this sphere predated the Ringworld. “How old is it, Milen?” The answer surprised him.

Milen explained that the sphere was no more than two centuries old. Not the work of the Pac Protectors then. But whose? “The Outsiders who sold us the location of the sphere mention nothing of who might have built it, but it is recent, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.” And it looked old. Inutterably old.

Jeremiah was put in mind of his first wife, Ecta. She’d taken boosterspice since she was a girl and it hadn’t helped her much. At the age of one hundred years she looked every minute of it. Physically she was fit as a girl a third her age, but her looks had gone. She was dead at one hundred and twenty. The boosterspice had kept her physically strong, but eventually her body had simply aged and died. The doctors tried to explain to him that some people didn’t get the extended lifespan boosterspice granted.

The sphere, he decided, needed a name, and Ecta deserved a better memorial than a place in his memory. He said as much to his companion, who looked himself in the eyes again, and then at Jeremiah. “Agreed,” he piped.

“Speaking of names,” said Uchida, “This ship needs one too.” He looked through the clear hull to the universe outside. “At the moment I’m partial to ‘The Fool’s Errand’. You?”

The heads looked at each other again. “Damn him and his alien mannerisms too,” thought Uchida.

Milen looked at him again. “Agreed,” it replied.

“Is that all you can say? ‘Agreed’?” He mocked the puppeteer’s tone with the last word.

“Both ship and sphere are yours to name as you will, Jeremiah,” replied Milen.

He considered this for a moment. So they had been serious about that. He wondered why, considering what Milen had told him. Outsider information never came cheaply. He wondered how many millions of stars they’d paid for the knowlege. They would not give that away without good cause.

The fact that the Puppeteer Entire was on its way at near light speed to the Magellanic clouds would have little do to with it. Their hyperdrive enabled ships could fly as quickly as the humans’. Once the Hyperdrive mark II had been perfected that would change, but for now there was a parity there. They would be able to maintain a presence in this galaxy until a few years before the wavefront of the core explosion reached known space, then flee like the cowards they are. No, there had to be more to it than he’d been told, he was sure of it.

“Milen,” he said with a start. “How did you do that trick with the stars?”

“Trick? That was no trick,” said the alien. “That, my friend, was science.” And that was all he would say on the subject. He pretended to be hurt, but Jeremiah knew there was more to it. He suspected that this information would have cost him more money than he’d make on selling the raw materials of Ecta. He let it drop, and stopped asking.

The duo spent several days orbiting Ecta’s central star. Ecta’s shell stood out from the star at one hundred and sixteen miles, about one and a quarter AUs. The interior terraforming had never begun because the sphere itself was abandoned prior to its completion. To their great surprise, they found storehouses, still packed with the materials for terraforming the sphere. The first of them was in a massive slaver stasis field, nearly ten kilometres on a side. The stasis field made sense only if the work had been unexpectedly interrupted. Otherwise the builders would surely have taken their materials with them.

They found five more of them, each one the size of the one before it. Jeremiah was trying to understand how everything fit together. What had happened here? The interior was scarred with craters. He’d visited the Ringworld and seen the substrate of material which comprised the foundation. He knew it wasn’t anywhere near the same quality. The sphere would have been very susceptible to damage from without, even with a fully operational defensive system. All it would take was one solid hit from an asteroid the size of the moon and the entire system would eventually destablise.

On day seventy six they found the bodies. They had been exploring a more developed section of the surface. There were actual buildings, and some terraforming equipment in place to begin atmospheric conversion. The bodies were frozen solid in their pressure suits, in various poses which suggested a less than dignified death. The first room had all the earmarks of a major struggle. Dark black scoring on the walls indicated some sort of firefight. The vacuum had preserved the scene as it had been...when? When had this taken place?

Milen told him that the scene they were witnessing now had taken place nearly fifty years earlier. Some of the bodies had died in vacuum. These inevitably had multiple pinholes in their suits. Their blood had boiled away through their wounds and into space. Others were victims of sabotaged suits. In these cases the bodies were still identifiable. There was little doubt that these were not humans. Neither were they Pak. Jeremiah didn’t recognise the species, but Milen seemed to. They were bipedal, with a double rib cage, each cage having a separate set of arms. they were binocular. the mouth was a lipless slit. One of them had its mouth open, and Jeremiah could see its tongue and teeth. The tongue might have been prehensile, and the teeth...they reminded him of a presessile Grog’s, a single, serrated curved plate. The helmets and suits hid any further features. Skin colour was impossible to determine. The bodies had turned black from exposure to the cold. Had they died from frostbite before starvation could do them in?

Jeremiah’s stomach lurched at the thought. Milen was making more detailled scans with a portable scanner pack. The portable pack interfaced with the sensoria on his flycycle. Milen’s flycycle carried a vastly superior sensoria than his. Clearly he was of paramount importance to this mission. He was just a taxi driver. Still, he knew intellectually that he was as important to Milen as Milen was to his masters. And Milen was important to him because...why? Jeremiah Uchida needed Milen because he was very old and very easily bored. He knew men half his age who’d committed suicide out of boredom. It was something new.

Well, if that was new, then what was this? This was newer than new. The sphere was exactly what he’d needed to energise him. He’d been considering stopping the boosterspice. He knew that even if he stopped take it he’d have another hundred years or so of “normal” life left to him. More, possibly, because he tended to more of the spice than most people did.

Jeremiah Michael Uchida had been born three hundred and fifty years earlier in what at one time had been identifiable as Japan. Today he looked not a day older than twenty-five. He was taller than many flatlanders at six feet five. The only thing which kept him from being mistaken for a Belter was his pigmentation. His skin was darker than most, and his hair jet black. These were not flatlander affectations. He didn’t enjoy the cosmetic hijinks in which so many of his fellows engaged. He prefered his own skin tone, his own eye colour-black, like his hair. His features were vaguely asiatic, though centuries of interbreeding had produced a human race which was increasingly less ethnic in its appearance.

He was particularly fond of his hands. They were strong, work-scarred and calloused. Many people would have had an autodoc repair their hands, but Jeremiah wanted some part of him to show something of his life. Breaks he’d had repaired, but his autodocs were all set to ignore dermal abrasions, contusions and lacerations. As a result, they were a network of scars, and the skin was thick and calloused.

Milen brought him back to the moment. “Jeremiah, I have concluded my scans. Will you join me?”

The puppeteer held in one mouth a delicate wand. It was connected to a panel in his suit, which was linked via hyperwave to the sensoria on his flycycle. The finger-like knobs of flesh surrounding the mouths gave the puppeteer a much finer degree of manual dexterity than any human. The sensor wand looked a little out of place, but Milen held it as expertly as anyone could. He slipped it back into its receptical in his pressure suit, and turned his attention to Jeremiah, who had joined him.

“These people are not human,” he began.

“Really?” said Jeremiah a little too sarcastically. “What gave you that impression? Was it the second set of arms?”

“There’s no need to be touchy, Jeremiah,” responded his companion. “We have encountered your people in the strangest of places, and your form seems to be infinitely flexible. This is a definite evolutionary possibility for your kind.” He gestured with one head. “Observe the gross similarities. Bipedal, binocular, binaural. Internally he’s rather different. Each rib cage houses a heart. The lower set has lungs, but the upper set seems to have something similar to gills. I’m not certain of its exact nature.” He paused to make sure Jeremiah was paying full attention. “The upper arms appear to have been stronger than the lower arms. There are four fingers plus an opposable thumb on the upper arms, but seven fingers and two thumbs, both opposable, on the lower hands. This suggests to me that the upper arms were used for lifting and the lower set was used for finer work. Tool use, or anything requiring a fine degree of manual dexterity.” He considered the point. “Indeed, this fellow would have rivalled the most skilled of puppeteers.”

Jeremiah scoffed. “Would he have? Easy praise when the guy’s dead.” He stepped away from the puppeteer. “Is it safe to bring this fellow aboard the Errand?”

“I don’t know why it wouldn’t be. He’s not carrying any infectious diseases, none that I can sense, and we can place him in stasis to be safe.” If the puppeteer had noticed Jeremiah’s insult he showed no sign. “Would you care to move him, or shall I?”