Huang III, Site A

by Brian Downes

In the middle of the common room deck of the starship Howard Carter I, an ape man stood tentatively erect, and swiveled its head anxiously back and forth, its big brown eyes alert for danger. Its toes were in the river.

“What’s this?” Grabowski asked, having just come in.

“This is Australopithicus,” Crenshaw said over his shoulder.

“This…is Australopithicus,” an unseen narrator announced in an African baritone.

“Well, I guess this must be Australopithicus,” Grabowski shrugged. “What’s he doing here?”

“He’s our earliest human ancestor,” Crenshaw said informatively.

“He is our earliest human ancestor,” the narrator reinforced.

“This is the second time I’ve watched this,” Crenshaw explained.

“I know who Australopithicus is,” Grabowski said.

“He evolved from earlier primates more than six million years ago,” the narrator told them.

Crenshaw said, “It came in off the relay beacon - it’s Mac’s new educational program. They finished the editing and it goes on sale next week.”

“Congratulations, Mac,” Grabowski said, although MacGruder wasn’t in the room. Grabowski went to the drink fountain and filled the cup with his name on it. “It’s for sixth graders, isn’t it?”

“It’s pretty interesting,” Crenshaw said.

“Millions of years before the first computers, the first hydrogen reactors, the first internal combustion engines, or even the first wheel, Australopithicus was there, roaming the grasslands of the African continent,” the narrator said. Australopithicus squatted and picked up a smooth river stone in his furry hand - but then dropped it. Tools weren’t really his thing. The primate straightened up, and then turned his eyes skyward, as the music swelled subtly, and the narrator went along. The view changed to the ape-man’s view of an evening sky with moon and stars.

“But millions of years before him, the jumpgates were already there, waiting.”

The program’s view zoomed toward the stars, penetrating into the black and taking a right so that it swept over the surface of Earth and drove straight for the center of the sun.

Klemper came into the room. “Shower is free,” he said. He went to the drink fountain and stood next to Grabowski while he filled his cup.

“We’re watching Mac’s new educational program,” Grabowski told him.

Klemper glanced at the holodisplay. “Mac doesn’t already know this?”

Grabowski laughed. “No, but he’s catching up quick, don’t you think?”

The narrator said, “We don’t know who built the jumpgates, or why. We don’t even know what the builders looked like. All we know is that the gates were there…long before the human race was even born.”

The narrator’s voice nagged Grabowski. “Didn’t this guy play the grandfather in that movie about the girl doing the lunar mining?”

Klemper mimicked, “Didn’t this guy do the voice of the girl who was in that movie about lunar mining?”

In the program, the Mercury gate was sweeping majestically into the foreground: a hard slate color, it was a square with one side longer than the others, so that two sides were angled out at twenty-two and a half degrees. Grabowski knew that the unusual properties of the material of the gate had helped to hide it from detection by Homo Sapiens. He also knew that the beams of the gate were 472.7 meters in diameter, and that the space inside the gate was nearly four kilometers across; big enough for even the biggest starships to pass with room to spare. In the program, the space inside the gate roiled slowly, like purple paint in warm water. No stars were visible through the thing.

“Hey,” Crenshaw turned around in his chair. “Any report on the mass, yet?”

“Yes,” Klemper said. “But we didn’t tell you because we don’t want to share the Nobel prize in xenoarchaeology.”

Crenshaw made a face and turned back to the program.

“Hey, Mac!” Grabowski hollered down the corridor to Lab Room 1.

“What?” Mac called back.

“Nice program!”

There was a distracted pause, then, “…thanks!”

“Shower 1 is free, Mac!” Klemper yelled.

Mac yelled back, “That’s odd, because you still stink!”

The narrator had explained about the discovery of the Mercury gate in 2101, and subsequently the Asteroid Belt gate twenty-five years later. The gates were, as well as was understood, tame wormholes that led to starsystems that contained Earth-type planets suitable for human habitation. In the Milky Way galaxy, planets like that were extremely rare, and their systems far apart - the most modern stardrives, capable of only 15% of the speed of light, would require centuries to reach systems that were twenty-three to fifty light years away from Earth. Those systems, which were named for the first explorers to see them - Pile and Morley - proved to contain jumpgates of their own, which led on to the Kittridge and Machtot systems. All of these solar systems contained Earth-type planets, spurring the greatest era of exploration and colonization in human history, spreading primate DNA across seventy-five light years of the Milky Way in little puddles one solar system big. It also killed the impetus for expanding the domed underground cities on the Jovian moons Callisto and Europa in the Terran system, consigning them to the backwaters of the galaxy. But the program didn’t mention that.

MacGruder came into the common room.

“Nice program, Mac,” Crenshaw said.

“Crenshaw, shut up a minute. Gentlemen…it’s no longer “the mass”. Now it’s the Vault.”

“What? How? Which?” They all asked as Mac used his personal computer to order the holodisplay to shrink the educational program he’d helped write and shunt it to one side. Then he brought up the latest data from the probebots, a 3D computer construction of the latest scans of what they had come to call the mass.

“Is that…what I think it is?” Grabowski at first couldn’t grasp it.

“Fuck me with a nanohazard,” Crenshaw said, his eyes wide open.

The educational program went on at a lower volume as they all stared at MacGruder’s data. “The great mystery of space is the Huang system,” the African baritone said. “A dead end in the chain of jumpgates, its star long ago exhausted its fuel, burning down to a cinder called a black dwarf. No light or heat falls on the planets that orbit this dead star.”

The crew of the Howard Carter I were babbling excitedly, jumping from theory to theory, losing control of their forebrain functions. “It’s definitely 1,766 meters on every side? So it is a perfect cube?” “That’s a door. That’s definitely a fucking door. That structure is a door. That’s a 51.1 meter door.” “What was it for? Aircraft of some kind? Manufacturing?”

The African narrator spoke: “But recent xenoarchaeological expeditions to the Huang system have discovered on the third planet from the black dwarf what scientists are calling "the necropolis". Covering 642 square kilometers, it is far more significant than any pre-human ruins thus far discovered. Right now, scientists are trying to decipher the archaeological mystery of our century.”

“All right! All right! Shut up!” Klemper bellowed. “Whatever it was, it is certainly, now,” he pointed at the data on the display, “it is certainly, now, six degrees warmer than the ice around it. That’s it, gentlemen. That’s the discovery. Six degrees.”

Huang III Site A was the way it was catalogued. Aboard the Howard Carter I, they called it The City, or sometimes Ice Town. They also called it, during its spooky moments, of which there were not a few, the Necropolis.

The cyclopean buildings, hundreds of meters tall, had been built before the Huang star had burned the last of its primordial fuel and collapsed into the all-but invisible cinder that it was now. The buildings lay underneath the two kilometer thick sheet of ice that coated the entire surface of the system’s third planet. The presence of so much ice had attracted the attention of the first explorers of the entombed starsystem; where there was oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen ice now, when a small black star threw no heat, there might once have been life. And the eons-vanished gate builders must have connected this system to their network for a reason.

The Huang system had only been discovered forty-nine years ago, a dead end reached through an irregularly orbiting gate that had gone unnoticed for decades in the far debris of the Machtot system. The starship Howard Carter I was the first serious manned xenoarchaeological expedition to Huang III, and its stilled city.

Grabowski knew darkness now. He had not known it before. He had grown up in the lower levels of Manhattan Island, a borough that had been slagged to radioactive pulp during the jihads of the 21st century, more than four hundred years ago. Grabowski and his neighbors derided the idea, but the history programs proved Manhattan had been one of the great cities of the world before that. It had taken a hundred years for the city to grow back, and then it grew back as low cost high-rises for the people who commuted to the skyrakers of Brooklyn and New Jersey and to the Pennsylvania spaceport. In that steel maze and those concrete canyons, where law enforcement was for profit and hunger was as much a killer as gang rivalry, Grabowski had known shadow. He had known flickering darkness. He had known low-light vision enhancers and flashlights and more-and-less reliable electric grids, and thought that he was a hardened denizen of the black streets.

Now he knew what blackness was. It was something altogether different.

A curiosity about the millions who’d once been burned alive in his borough and a lot of time spelunking the abandoned tunnels underneath the island (his mother had abandoned herself to drug addiction) had led Grabowski to online studies of archaeology, history, and anthropology. The tame AIs that looked for special talent among online students found him, and Grabowski’s informal collection of artifacts labeled Dell, Honda, and DVD turned into a souvenir of his childhood. Now his PhD was two years old and he was onboard the Howard Carter I, in geosynchronous orbit over Huang III, making regular trips down to the Necropolis. In those streets there was no sun because there was no sun in the sky above. At the bottom of a four-thousand meter slit lased in the ice by their robots, among the pebbled gray walls of the extraterrestrials, with barely a stitching of stars above, Grabowski had, when he’d turned off his flashlights and his low light enhancers, found a blackness like thrusting his head into a tank of stygian fluid. A place where the space you occupied was only as big as your skull, and there was someone else inside there with you. He was that version of yourself that wanted to drink the tar. That version of you prone, mostly, to howling. That version of you who knew that all had been lost from the start.

Grabowski kept his lights on. Except for small doses of the darkness that he fed himself when he had the off chance. They all did it. Any member of the expedition who had a moment alone, a few meters away from the group, would be seen to shut off his illuminators for five or ten seconds. After the second day, the joking and the remarks about it stopped.

Klemper was the pipeline to the money. The expense of sending a 20,000 ton starship to a system full of uninhabitable, even unterraformable planets, when there were millions of kilometers of territory with Earth-like atmosphere still waiting to be developed on Kittridge’s World, on Abraham, or in the Machtot system, disposed commercial investors to recommend psychiatric modifications to the people who suggested it. The discovery of a new jumpgate would be worth some dollars, but jumpgates were not located on the surfaces of planets.

Archaeology had recently gone into a craze for the 21st century jihads; Grabowski, in the old tunnels of Manhattan, carrying a pump shotgun against the mutant roaches and metaspiders, had been a second generation member of it when he was twelve years old. Xenoarchaeology required long jumpgate trips and training in specialized, dangerous skills. It was not a popular field.

But luckily, Klemper liked it. Also, Klemper’s great, great uncle Milos Beavoir Klemper III liked it, and they were of the Numbered Klempers, Family 3,110.

There were 4,999 of the Numbered families in human space, and their various branches and intertwinings were recorded in the Numbered Families Index, the Who’s Who of those interstellar corporate clans and their unimaginable riches. Milos Beavoir Klemper III was two hundred and seventy-five years old, his life extended by the genetic technologies that were restricted to the Numbered by law. He was a second generation corporate Klemper; the family had made its first billions in the Genesis Commodities Market on Abraham, the first extrasolar planet to be colonized by humans, when the colony was less than a century old. Now he shared a 62,000 square kilometer estate with his brother and sister in Abraham’s temperate zone, summered onboard their private orbital habitat, and practiced xenoarchaeology at one remove through his grand nephew, Reinhold Klemper, who was only forty-one.

Right now, Crenshaw was telling Reinhold Klemper he was wrong.

“It can’t be six degrees hotter.”

Klemper asked him what one number subtracted from another equaled.

“Six,” Crenshaw admitted, trying not to admit anything.

“Six towering degrees!” Klemper cried.

“But, I mean, like, what is it? Geothermal activity?” Crenshaw peered at the holodisplay, hoping the numbers would explain themselves.

“Very limited and localized,” MacGruder said, scratching his head. He wanted to hang on to Crenshaw’s geothermal theory, and his voice showed his disappointment that he couldn’t make it work. They all stood staring at the holodisplay, trying to make the numbers work.

“Maybe it was so well insulated that it’s retained…its heat for the billions of years since…huh. That doesn’t make any sense.” Grabowski put his chin in his hand.

“Ongoing automated industrial process,” MacGruder proposed, not even him taking it seriously.

“If something is actually still happening in there, then it’s out of our field, isn’t it? It’s not archaeology if it’s happening today.” Crenshaw looked around.

Klemper said, “If something is still happening in there, I want to know what it is. This is an historic moment, gentlemen. We have an opportunity here and now without parallel in human history. We stand on the cusp of a new age of understanding. We have the chance to make over the human race, and its place among the stars.”

Grabowski wasn’t sure if he wanted to believe all of that, but he knew it was true.

Crenshaw asked the room, “I guess we’re going to have to go down there, huh?”

The sun that shines in the skies of Earth splashes its light around promiscuously. It cooks Mercury without mercy. It makes life possible on Earth, it stirs the atmosphere of the behemoth, Jupiter. It even provides a small bright spot in the sky of the dwarf planet Pluto, in the rubble of snowballs that orbits beyond Neptune. It throws light around in such abundance that the impression for centuries was that the moon gave off its own.

The Huang star gave off no light. The two moons in the skies of Huang III therefore reflected none; they were detectable to the naked eye only by the small disks of stars that they blotted out. There was no weather on Huang III; the oxygen and nitrogen that had made up the bulk of the Earth-like atmosphere had long ago fallen to the surface in torrents of freezing rain that had come straight down in the absence of all wind - and would have killed a human being in an instant, at -450 degrees Fahrenheit. It become the smothering blue ice that coated the planet now, like concrete on a murder victim.

Grabowski and the others watched layers and layers of the blue ice go by, appearing to zoom upwards and upwards outside their shuttle for four consecutive minutes as their shuttle lowered itself to the surface of the city at sixty kilometers an hour; towering walls of ice with the wavering marks of the laser cutters in it, starkly illumed by the shuttle’s floodlights, shadows behind that wall of ice flashing into and then out of their view. It was thirty hours since they had examined the new scans.

The robots had cut a slice out of the ice one hundred meters wide and three kilometers long, exposing, at the bottom, the faces of buildings on either side of a broad avenue. The buildings themselves ranged in size from fifty or sixty meters to hundreds of meters in height. Their construction wasn’t remarkable - modern architecture produced buildings that would withstand the pressures of the ice, and, in theory at least, last as long as these had, especially in conditions of preservation like these. It wasn’t how they were built; it was that they had been built at all, and built to last - the city site had been selected for the fact that it would be least affected by plate tectonics over the eons (one sector had been devastated by a meteorite, though).

The xenoarchaeologists called this great slice Main Street.

The shuttle landed on Main Street, and they launched the rover, with Crenshaw at the controls. The rover was an open-topped hydrogen fuel cell car with rollbars, big enough to seat the four of them in their space suits and tow a two-wheeled enclosed trailer for their extra gear. It shot down the time-numbed thoroughfare at a jaunty speed on its big knobby tires; Crenshaw liked driving. Grabowski craned his neck to look up, straining his suit’s light enhancers to pick out the ribbon of blackness between the ice walls, four thousand meters above their heads. He wanted to remember that there was a way out of here, out of this city at the bottom of a frozen pit, so incalculably far from home that even the light from the star under which Grabowski had been born would be ancient by the time it arrived, if it arrived at all.

What they were now calling the Vault had been detected with long-range scans six days ago, and the robots had bored a tunnel to it so that further scans could be made, and then expanded the tunnel so that the rover could fit through it. The men were zooming toward this long tube of ice now. Klemper kept talking to them as they shot along.

“Our dedication has paid off now, gentlemen. Whatever is on the other side of that titanic door, one thing I know. Human history will turn on those giant hinges. Our existence in this universe comes under a new and amazing spotlight today.”

For one of the Numbered, Klemper was very intimate with them. He ate at the same table, and he ate the same food. He used the same showers and had the same kind of bunk, except with Chinese silk sheets. He didn’t keep himself apart, but he did like to make speeches. The service Klemper required was attention. This was very reasonable.

Except that Grabowski had started to feel a squeezing at the joint between his shoulders and his neck when the shuttle was only the first fifty meters into the Main Street cut. His breath was coming harder, and it felt like there wasn’t enough air in the sliver of self-contained environment held inside his spacesuit, which was now fastened into this rover, which was at the bottom of a trench of ice four thousand meters deep in the liquid stygian night of this long damned solar system. Klemper’s impromptu and lengthy speech on history, the cosmos, space, careers, scholarship, and Crenshaw’s driving, which was apparently inspired by a virtual reality racing game, was making the anxiety worse.

Everything is fine, Grabowski said to himself. Everything is fine. This equipment has been tested and retested. This equipment has proved itself in the field. You have been nanosurgically modified to be immune to claustrophobia.

Thinking the word claustrophobia made his heart race faster. The rover bounced over a fallen chunk of solid oxygen and Grabowski grabbed for the edges of his seat.

Why are we here, anyway? What’s the purpose? The star died, the planets froze, even the original builders abandoned this city. What do we think we’re going to find here? Why don’t we have the sense to stay at home?

“At last, gentlemen!” Klemper raised his voice as they were swallowed by the tunnel, so narrow that the outward-curving walls were only two meters from the shoulder of Grabowski’s suit. “Now do we ride into the record books! The last, greatest find of humankind’s ages old quest to understand its own past!”

They raced into the ice.

The only noise was the vibration of their travel transmitted through the seat and soles of their spacesuits.

Grabowski fought his fear. He tried to concentrate on the struggling sound of his own breathing, as a way to prove to himself that time hadn’t come to a stop in this place so madly far from home. That home where Australopithicus had stood at the river and decided, wisely, that tools were not for him. What had ever gone wrong for Australopithicus? He’d led a happy, five million year long existence hunting and gathering, drinking pure spring water, mating all day long, keeping one eye out for anything that might have a mind to eat an ape-like creature. He’d turned his back on everything above him, and he’d done very well for himself. He did not think about the past…the past, which, to Grabowski, seemed now like a sort of jelly, a jelly heavy with fibrous chunks. A jelly that could squirt and glop against the laws of fluid dynamics, as if it had a mind of its own. The sort of thing that might emit a sensation like a small electrical shock while in flowed up between the outer hard shell of a spacesuit and the soft, clinging fabric of the insulating suit you wore underneath…

This was not a place for the puny intruding minds of men.

That was when he reached for one of the excavators. He squeezed the grip that activated the business end and sawed down with it into the back of Crenshaw’s helmet.

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