Highlander's Need: Winter Solestice (Against All Odds Series 4) Read online

  "The leading conjecture holds that aliens, ancient and powerful in the extreme, unknown and perhaps unknowable, visited one planet in its prehistory and delivered life from there to the other. Our most ancient mytho-history on Sarma tells us of ancient gods whom we call the Shapers, whom our most distant ancestors served. According to the tales of the dawn of our existence, 'twas truly the Shapers who made us the warriors we have always been; who bred us to battle in their own wars—until, for reasons and by means unknown, they disappeared, leaving us to our own devices. We have had no evidence of the reality of the Shapers save for texts, etchings, tapestries, and paintings that we have held for thousands of years—until now."

  "Artifacts have been discovered in the galaxy—objects created by technologies foreign to any known civilization. When the first was discovered on planet Sigma Cephei, unearthed by archaeologists thereon, it activated with an energy of unknown source—and on three other planets across space, similar energy signatures suddenly appeared, leading scientists to three similar artifacts, leading to the conclusion that the objects are of the same origin and are somehow linked across spacetime. One such object was found here on Sarma itself, and another upon the very planet Earth. It might have been found here far sooner than it was, but as you know, we of Sarma have until recently been too embroiled in our planetary conflicts to discover the unknown. You, the members of scientific disciplines from across known space, have been invited to my estate here on Sarma, on my property where the Sarmian segment was found, to witness the assembly of the parts of the single artifact to which these discoveries collectively belong. It is hoped that we shall then learn the function of the artifact—and perhaps know secrets of life on Sarma, on Earth, and even the galaxy, which no other generation before us has ever learned. And now, I present to you... the Sarmian segment."

  Norah smiled, containing her excitement. She watched as Vashar drew away the curtain and exposed the find. There, standing upright on a broad platform behind him, was an arc of metal resembling bronze, carved and etched with patterns that suggested circuitry. Parts of it shimmered with an inner glow, and other parts appeared encrusted with gleaming jewels. It was a thing as beautiful as it was mysterious. Had it been a vertical column it would have stood as tall as Vashar himself. Its shape suggested that it was one quarter of a circle. Either end of it had nooks and niches where another part would fit. When the three remaining parts were delivered to Sarma and the whole thing was assembled, it would be a large ring, twice as high as a man was tall. What was it for?

  Vashar echoed the question. "Is this object truly the work of the Shapers? If so, it is the only such work ever known to have been discovered. What is its purpose? What is its true power? If it is the work of minds completely alien to our own, is its purpose even knowable to us? When we gather here on my estate, we shall endeavor to seek the answers together."

  At this point the gentleman of Sarma looked directly into the lens of the recording device and sounded as if he were addressing Norah personally. He finished, "I await your coming."

  With that, the recording reached its end and vanished from the space above Norah's linker, leaving her with a distinct tingle in her chest and in other, more intimate regions.

  Sarma was still perhaps an hour and a half away, giving Norah plenty of time to dwell on the welcoming message of the hologram—and the equally inviting appearance of the Sarmian lord who created it. Sarma was a monarchy ruled by a king or queen, and like all such monarchies it had a hierarchy below the throne. At the lower end lay the leaders of the planet's thousands of individual tribes, who petitioned the needs of their tribes to the lords. It was the lords who drafted petitions to be presented to the throne, to be dismissed or enacted into laws as the ruler saw fit. Vashar, then, stood at the midpoint of the hierarchy. But the lords had other functions. They also presided over all of the planet's seats of higher learning. All the greatest and most important knowledge on the planet was collected and disseminated under their watch. A Lord of Sarma represented political power and education rolled into one package.

  And in her capacity as a university research engineer with government connections, Norah had been selected out of a very large pool of very eager candidates to be present to witness and record what happened when all the pieces of the possible Shaper artifact were brought together and, it was assumed, the artifact was fully activated.

  On Earth, Sarma, and every other civilized planet, the assembly of the Shaper artifact was greeted with as much anxiety and trepidation as excitement. No one could be sure what such an alien thing would do. Was it an elaborate bomb or booby trap? The possibility that it was a weapon had not been ruled out, given that the Shapers were thought to have bred the Sarmians as warriors. Perhaps it was a transport device, such as an artificial wormhole or spacetime conduit. It could be a signal device, designed to activate countless other hidden devices for whatever unguessable purposes. Or its function could be something completely unanticipated—perhaps wonderful, perhaps dire for all life. No one knew. In universities and seats of government across the known galaxy, the device was a subject of an inferno of debate. Many were the voices that cried out for keeping the pieces separate, of not turning the thing on at all. But curiosity, the need to know and understand, had finally won out—and Sarma, the last planet of the four where the pieces were found, was chosen as the site of the assembly. And it was this fateful moment that Norah Slattery would be there to see.

  ________________

  Arriving on Sarma, Norah was impressed with the courtesy shown her as a functionary of the government of Earth. The chauffeured vehicle that awaited her at the spaceport nearest her destination was not a common floater. It was a larger, more ornate-looking craft that reminded her somewhat of the chariot magically transformed from a pumpkin in an old Earth fairytale. The pilot of the floater removed her baggage from the ship and carried it to the fairytale craft. Norah did her best to look like a slender, graceful girl in a ball gown and glass slippers as she climbed inside and the floater went whizzing away over the ground. This, she guessed, must be one of Lord Vashar's official vehicles, which had surely transported nobles from other districts of the planet to meetings with Vashar. She was being treated as a Sarmian VIP, a gesture that she hoped was a good sign for the rest of her visit.

  The craft glided along the avenues of what Norah took to be one of Sarma's larger cities. She noted the lack of tall buildings in her surroundings. The Sarmians had a noticeably different architectural sense than on Earth. Where Earth cities were planned to grow upwards, Sarmian city planners seemed to favor an outward, lateral spread like the suburbs of Earth's 20th and 21st centuries. Norah guessed that none of the buildings she saw was any more than seven or eight stories in height, and their general style reminded her of pictures of southwestern pueblos that she had seen in old photo books. What most captivated her was the people, especially the men. Only the elders of Sarma had round, stout, soft bodies. Anyone under about the age of fifty-five Earth years was a lean, hard specimen. Moreover, the Sarmians seemed to have bypassed completely the body shame of Earth's history. Norah was bemused at how relatively little anyone, the men in particular, wore while out on the streets. Well, she figured, anyone built like these people had no reason at all to be ashamed; though it struck Norah that she might feel rather out of place here as a woman in her thirties with a body type like that of a Sarmian woman in her sixties. What would the Sarmians think of her? Would they treat her as the age she was, or as an elder?

  The estate of Lord Vashar was a place of manicured fields and hedge rows with groves of tall, spire-like trees whose bark, tinged with a golden hue, resembled fish scales. Norah noticed that the leaves on the vegetation here had a purplish color on the edges, reminding her further that she was nowhere on Earth. His Lordship's house was a domed structure with turrets that looked like the rooks of a chess set, all done in terra cotta and gold. It indeed looked like the dwelling of someone important. Norah noticed shapes skimming ab
out in the air over and around the house and across the grounds, and recognized them as floaters piloted by Sarmian warrior guards. No doubt the property, with a Sarmian Lord in residence, was routinely patrolled, but Norah guessed that the security presence had been increased for what awaited her inside the house.

  The pilot of the floater helped Norah out of the craft and escorted her up to the front entrance, opened the portal for her, and ushered her inside. The pilot then returned to the floater to fetch Norah's travel bags and take them to the guest quarters, while at the bottom of the broad and elegant staircase in the main hall, the very figure that Norah had watched in the hologram, dressed just as he was for the recording, awaited her with a smile.

  "Welcome to Sarma, Dr. Slattery, and to my home," Vashar greeted her. He approached her with his right hand extended, palm up, in the customary Sarmian greeting. Norah, smiling back, placed her hand in his palm and rested it there for a moment.

  "Thank you, Your Lordship," said Norah. "Your home and your planet are lovely."

  "And may you know much loveliness during your stay," Vashar replied, gently withdrawing his hand. "Our hospitality is yours. The functionaries of other planets are being quartered elsewhere in the city. It is my honor to host you, who come from Earth, as a visiting relation from far away. In fact it was my insistence that you stay here with me."

  "So I heard," said Norah. "And I'm sure the honor is mine."

  "I've had the pantry stocked with Earth delicacies, on which my staff has done much research for just such occasions as this," said Vashar. "An Earth repast awaits us in the dining hall even now, and I shall admit that I've had much curiosity about your planet's cuisine. Shall we adjourn?"

  "I'd love to!" Norah replied. "Spaceship food is good, but there's nothing like a meal out of a kitchen in a real home."

  Vashar beckoned her through a portal to the left and said cordially, "I hope you'll find the skills of my staff equal to the chefs of your planet. Let us see..."

  And with that, His Lordship and the engineer from Earth made their way to one of the finest luncheons that Norah ever had.

  _______________

  At the end of a meal of prime rib of beef that the finest restaurants of Earth could not have surpassed, with wine transported to Sarma from Earth's most prestigious vintners, Vashar, seated at the head of the table with Norah immediately to his left, said with a satisfied exhale, "Now, if you will, tell me more of your work on Earth and how it is that you were chosen to honor us with your presence for the activation of the device."

  "Well," Norah began, "I hold a doctorate in Engineering and I have a seat on Earth's president's Council on Comparative Technologies. Our work is about the study of the technologies of other planets in relation to our own. While other planets may be on the same level as Earth, technologically speaking, not all mechanical and operating systems are necessarily compatible with every system. Considering that not all systems made on Earth work in exactly the same way everywhere on the planet, we have to assume there would be differences in operation and function between technologies made to do the same things but manufactured on different planets. Where biology and body structures are different, technologies can differ too. What we do is try to ensure that all technologies that users from Earth and users from other planets share are as friendly as possible to all users. Since I'm familiar with the design and engineering specifications of a variety of planets, I was selected to come and help oversee the assembly of the Shaper device."

  "Your familiarity with technological forms and functions across different species," ventured Vashar, "was thought to be of help in ascertaining the functions of the device, then."

  "Yes, exactly," said Norah. "Though, if I'm really honest, this may be a pretty big challenge. I'm used to the technological differences between Earth and the sentient species that we actually know. The Shapers, if that's who actually made this thing, have been gone for thousands of years. No one even knows what these beings looked like. We're only assuming that they were semi- or even quasi-humanoid. This is a mysterious thing, and no one can say how much more mysterious it's going to get."

  Vashar was deeply fascinated now. "What do you think," he asked, "of those who say that the thing—if a Shaper device it truly is—should have been left alone and never assembled at all?"

  "Honestly," answered Norah in a measured and considered tone, "in a way I can see their point, and in another way I don't agree."

  "You are ambivalent," he said. "How so?"

  "You must know there's been a certain amount of anxiety—I'd even say a certain amount of fear—around this whole thing. This is supposedly the work of the Shapers. Whoever or whatever they were, we have to assume the Shapers were extremely powerful, probably capable of doing things we can't imagine. The parts of this device have been signaling each other—calling out to each other, if you want to think of it that way—across interstellar distances, something that no technology of any planet we know can do. There's a suspicion out there that what we've found is a weapon; a suspicion reinforced by... well, frankly, by what the Shapers did with the humans they supposedly took from prehistoric Earth..."

  "...to create my people," Vashar finished for her. "If they used proto-humans from Earth to create a warrior race, who is to say what other dangerous things they might have done? We have such talk here on Sarma as well. To which I ask, what if the reverse is true? The prevailing thought is that the Shapers used proto-humans to create the Sarmians. What if instead the Shapers were to have used proto-Sarmians to create humans? The device could be an instrument of a completely different sort than what is feared."

  "People have been around and around on Earth about this ever since the theories came up," said Norah. "Were you made from us or were we made from you? There's this nagging old wish on Earth to believe that the universe is about us, somehow. Our politics and our old religions used to be full of it, and it still hangs on a bit. Some of my people don't like the idea that you might have come first."

  "I have heard these things," Vashar said, taking a sip of wine. "They are not unlike some things that are said in the temples and governing halls of Sarma. When the universe changes, it does not care in whose favor. This causes unrest."

  Norah almost laughed at that. "On Earth it used to cause a lot more than unrest!"

  "But please, continue," Vashar said. "Tell me more of what you think."

  "Basically," said Norah, "the argument has been that since it could be a weapon, the pieces should be kept separate for the simple reason that we don't know what it will do when the whole thing is together. And I understand why people argue that, but... I find it cowardly."

  "Cowardly?" he echoed, raising an eyebrow at her bluntness.

  "Yes, cowardly," Norah said, confident in her choice of words. "This is an unknown; there's no question about that. We don't know what it is or what it will do; there's no question about that either. But it's the fact that we don't know that's the reason we should go ahead and assemble it. We could study the separate parts and maybe even figure out how they're able to signal each other across thousands of light years, and there are all kinds of things we might learn from that. But that could be only a fraction of what we might learn from having the whole thing together in one piece, one unit. Not going through with it because we're afraid of what it might be—to me, that shows a lack of courage. It's against everything that science is meant to be about. It's the kind of thing that used to make my people the prisoners of fear and superstition, and—"

  All at once, as if startled at herself, Norah fell silent and looked off, abruptly seeming self-conscious.

  With a gentle concern, Vashar reached across the table and touched her hand. His touch seemed to startle her as much as whatever was suddenly on her mind. She looked back at him through widened eyes. She looked at his hand on hers, then back up at him, still oddly speechless. "What is it?" Vashar asked.

  Summoning back her voice, Norah replied, "I'm sorry, it's just... I'm speechifying no
w and I must sound very pompous. When I do that, I get myself into trouble sometimes. I went into a speech like that on the Council Board, right in front of the president, chewing out the dissenters on the Council, practically calling them cowards to their faces. I was so mortified, but I couldn't help myself. I think it's wrong for people of science to fear what's strange and unknown. I was afraid the president wouldn't agree with me, that she'd have me removed."

  Subtly grinning, Vashar asked, "And what did the president do?"

  "She ordered me to pack my bags—and come here."

  Vashar gave a small warm chuckle at that and gave Norah's hand a squeeze. She almost gasped, but stifled her reaction. "Ah, you see," he said. "Courage in the face of the unknown brings rewards."

  Norah's self-consciousness melted at his lingering touch, at the warmth of his smile and his little laugh. "I hope a reward is really what we get."

  "For me," said Vashar, "the reward has already come. I have known the company of a most charming and intelligent woman from a distant world."

  Vashar pulled his hand away, but Norah would not have minded at all if he had kept it right where it was. "You wouldn't be so charmed," she said, "if you knew everything they've been saying on Earth."

  Swirling the wine in his goblet before taking another sip, Vashar asked, "What have they been saying?"

  Norah returned to her carefully measured tone and replied, "Some of us—the ones I think are cowards—have been saying that if the device is a weapon, it's all to the good that it's being activated on Sarma, where you're all warriors. Let the Sarmians deal with it, they say; it's what they were bred for. If it starts killing and destroying—" And she stopped herself again, wanting to look away once more, this time in embarrassment and dismay. But something about the sparkle in Vashar's eyes held her gaze on him.