In a Suspect Universe

Part I: Homeworld-3

“I don’t like the Federals either.”

“But you can see why I’m concerned.”

“And you’re right to stay that way—but not because of me.” He tried to move to a more comfortable position but he was stopped by the restraints. “Will you please cut these off? I can’t even sit up.”

She considered.

“Have I tried to hurt you?” he said.

“You’re not able to.”

“You probably saved my life in the storm. I owe you.”

She still considered. Then, after a sizable delay, she stepped toward the couch.

Before she reached it, the braces fell off and he sat up abruptly.

She jumped out of his reach, whipped out her pistol and pointed it at him.

He opened his right hand. A round plate sat in his palm. She recognized it as a laser device commonly used as a cutting tool, portable heater, light source, and weapon. He had severed the bracelets as she moved toward him. He now aimed the lethal instrument at her.

She could sense the red indicator beam on her face.

Neither of them moved.

“So, here we are,” he said, “untrustworthy as hell. The typical post-Clip couple.”

She didn’t laugh.

“When you walked toward me I could have grabbed your arm after freeing myself, burned your eyes and taken anything I wanted. But—know!—I didn’t do that.”

Between her shallow breaths, she said, “That you could have done it is why I had to bind you.”

“Let’s not quibble. One of us will be hurt if we don’t stop this. I made no move against you when I could have broken free. I’m not a Homeworld or Federal agent. I don’t want to make a claim on your site. And I’m not after Clips. Besides this disk, I have no firearms or surveillance devices. I carry a Swiss Army knife in my left pocket, which I’ll gladly give to you if you want it. So I’m not a threat.”

That’s not what your notebook said!

But she asked one more question. “How did you get that bullet wound?”

“I won’t talk about that. You have to take me on faith. It’s from nothing illegal.”

He said this with such a calm firmness that she believed she’d get no more from him.

Not for now, at least.

“Can we respect each other?” he asked.

“I want to be left alone, free to do my work. Just your being here disturbs that. And I don’t want your problems becoming mine.”

“I’ll be here just a few days,” he repeated. “I feel sore and I want this wound to heal. But after that, I’ll be gone.”

“I’ll still ask you questions.”

“You can ask all you want but I choose how to answer them.” He lowered his disk and placed it on the table before him. “You can keep that if you want.”

She dropped the gun to her side but she didn’t put it in her holster yet. “A few days only. Then I’ll take you out of here.”

“Fine. Thank you.” And once again he collapsed onto the couch. Sweat beaded his face and his breath came short and tense. He must have been hurting more than he showed.

“I’m getting something to eat,” she said. “I might even share it.”

“I’d love that. And I’ll reimburse you for everything when I get to my cache.”

“We’re not eating together.”

“Are we that bad a pair?”

“You found a Clip. You made our lives into what they are.”

“I never expected that to happen.”

“Maybe you should have.” She stepped into the kitchen area.

But there she stopped. An overwhelming impulse boiled in her. She marched back to him and declared, to his startled eyes, “Maybe you’re not a government agent. Maybe you’re not after Clips—but only because you already found one. And maybe aircars do crash in dust-storms. But I know you’re hiding something. I know you didn’t come here because of any silly accident. I saw your face when you arrived and it showed more pain than that from a minor bullet wound. You know something. You fear something. And—” And you want someone so badly you thought that even I might be her. But she didn’t say that.

He was too stunned to respond.

“There, how’s that for powers of observation?”

She left him before he could react.

And before she was tempted to reveal any more of what she had learned from his notebook.

She yelled to him but didn’t look back, “If you feel well enough, I’ll take you up to the stonework tomorrow. We can compare notes, maybe get some mutual insights.” She did want to learn from his reactions—and thus maybe find out more about him.

I’m an archaeologist, after all, she said to herself, to bolster her confidence. I know how to excavate a ruin.

But a part of her thought she was being cruel.

Chapter 3: Ruins in a Landscape

She awoke in darkness and thought she’d get up before her visitor had a chance to awake. She felt it best to let him sleep and then they’d both leave for the stonework after sun-up.

But he already was gone.

She was furious—he had “snuck off” without her.

She threw on her jacket, checked her pistol and hurried into the gulley that led to the plateau.

Lights hung along the trail. She restrung them yesterday after most were downed by the storm. He must have found the switch that powered them. They were just lamps to mark the path and they ran mostly on solar power, but still—what arrogance!

She should have left the zip-ties on him.

In the pre-dawn darkness she approached the ruins. Though hidden in a side canyon they still could be seen because of larger lamps she had set up there. He had lit these also, though they were not strong enough for night work. They showed off the mystery of the place more than its details.

Ranglen stood before the tumbled walls like a new conqueror, his feet spread, his shoulders straight as if wanting to dominate—or become—the scene.

She strode up beside him. “You couldn’t wait? You had to come alone?”

He looked too engrossed to hear her anger. “Did you discover anything different?”

“No. Did you expect me to?”

“The site’s beautiful. I remember its colors in the early sunlight.”

“I have rights of exploration for two years. Sole rights.”

“You’re lucky. Keep the place secret. Once the word’s out…”

“I know, I know. Someone will bribe an official and buy up the claim.”

“If the government gets it they’ll thank you generously, but then take over and say it’s for your safety. They’d be right.”

She reluctantly agreed but didn’t want to show it, annoyed at his smugness as much as the government’s.

Though the morning wasn’t going the way she planned, the ruins still belonged to her, so she knew she occupied the emotional high ground. His coming here without her was not a defeat but a victory. It showed that not even he could resist the enigma, the fascination, the secrets that lay before them.

Arranged in a complex pattern of rooms, hallways, pits, and standing rubble, the rock walls lay dark, spotted with the tiny pools of light that did little to unveil the mystery in the shadows. The structure had no roofs, little design, few artifacts, and she had spoken truth when she said she discovered nothing different from the other Airafane sites scattered across planets.

Indeed, the ruins were always the same.

Exactly!

This impossible fact baffled scientists. Not only the original structures were similar, but the same amount of weathering, the same tumbled openings, the same half-standing walls, the same cave-ins of fallen material—all the sites were also similar in their amount, degree, and placement of ruination.

No one knew how this could be.

The only difference between them was that each structure was composed of the planet’s local stone. The design never varied but the building material did, and it always matched the surrounding strata. Here on Homeworld, the walls were made of the same banded sandstone as the plateau, with the colors just as strong—though they couldn’t be seen in this darkness and would become apparent only at dawn.

The sameness indicated the ruins had been planned. They were not “ruins.” They had to be something else—stage-sets, common artwork, special effects.

But what was their purpose?

And the rock of the walls was not the same age as the local rock around the structures. The Airafane stonework was always older (if it could be dated at all), as old as when the Clips were first placed into the subduction zones of the various planets—when most of the continents on Earth, for example, were in different locations, and when the landscape neighboring the structures didn’t exist yet.

So, though the ruins were made of local rock, they apparently were made long before the local rock even came into being.

Which made no sense.

Riley, like all amateur Airafanologists, hoped to find an answer, some new discovery at her own private site. But of course she didn’t succeed. No one did. All her surveys, cataloging, scaled plans, measurements, excavations, ditches, pits, soil samples, siftings of earth, classification of finds, cuts and fills, core samples, laser ranging, metal detection, thermography, magnetometry, electrical resistivity, stratigraphy—the work more descriptive than analytic—had shown nothing. Though anyone finding an explanation would become famous, humanity still waited for an answer. And apparently would keep right on waiting.

She asked, “Did you find anything when you were here?”

“No. Nothing.”

But maybe he said this a bit too quickly, or maybe she was just looking for it. “You did search, though.”

“Because of my own curiosity, not to challenge any theories.”

“Then why were you here?”

“I like empty landscapes.”

When she didn’t respond, he added, “As apparently you do too.”

She understood, but she wasn’t ready to talk about that yet.

“Look,” he said, “I’m sorry for coming here before you woke up. I couldn’t sleep. I needed one of your pain pills but I didn’t want to wake you.”

“Don’t do it again.”

“I promise.”

She felt she gained a slight advantage.

He nodded at the ruins resting in their ghost-light beneath the brightening sky. “Do I get the tour?”

“You’ve been here already.”

“We’ll compare notes, like you said.”

“Is your arm okay?”

“It aches, but I’m game.”

Resigned, she led him inward.

Though the walls looked “primitive,” the stones were held together by precision cuts, not by mortar, so the rock had a high degree of shaping. The number of stones was always the same from planet to planet, as well as the sizes. The round pits that appeared in the floor also never varied. They inevitably were called “kivas,” but they had no connection to terrestrial Native-American sites. Such imposition of pre-Columbian notions onto alien artifacts was a major problem in Airafane studies. Still, the structures “looked” ancient.

Riley and Ranglen walked by markings, carved petroglyphs or the streaks of pictograms (which, Riley knew, were made from local pigments that had the same dating contradictions as the rest of the rock). The faceless figures explained nothing. They came with varying numbers of limbs, in exterior coverings that could be flesh, hide, clothes, carapaces, shells, or spacesuits, and they were sometimes adorned with long strips of feathers, antennae, barbs, or knives. Other designs suggested “blueprints” with strangely Byzantine or Hindu patterns, at least according to some researchers. All these vague and random connections confounded attempts at identifying anything. Wall-openings contained cobble-like fused agglomerates that might be artifacts, melted sculpture, or just debris—all of them, of course, identical at every site, and in the same state of arranged decay.

“Such great technology comes in the Clips,” Ranglen said, “where the Airafane even included instructions. But you find none of that here.”

“Yet the same technology had to be responsible for planting all these ‘ruins’ in the first place. So what was the point?”

“Maybe the Airafane followed a big master plan they established in their past. Maybe all the sites were built at the same time and then flown to different planets and placed their simultaneously.”

“But simultaneity doesn’t work across light-year distances—Einstein’s relativity. And if all the ruins seem the same, then why is the building material made to look contemporary?”

“Maybe the ruins are monuments, constructed heirlooms to their lost civilization, packaged museums brought ‘on the road’—like traveling circuses, meant to entertain.”

“And baffle, confuse, distress and torment anyone who finds them.”

“Some people like galactic mysteries, the deeper the better.”

Riley snorted. She thought of other questions asked over and over. How did these identical constructions survive millions of years of continental drift? They weren’t all planted on stable cratons at the centers of tectonic plates, though they were situated away from the colliding edges (at least on the worlds today).

And how did the Airafane know of the environment so far in the future in order to make the stonework resemble local rock? Did the building material change over the centuries, “update” itself and reprogram its composition? Were the walls sensitive to the eras of the people who discovered them? Did the expectations of the visitors define how the rock should be composed, in some weird macrocosmic version of quantum probabilities? And if the stone changed for each world, then why were the shapes always consistent, the artifacts and markings identical?