A Deepness in the Sky

The Podmaster took a small case out of his shirt. He opened it, and held something that glittered in the lowering sun. It was a small square, a tile. There were flecks of light that might have been cheap mica, except that the colors swept in coordinated iridescence. "This is one of the cladding tiles from the satellite. There was also a layer of low-power LEDs, but we've stripped those off. Chemically, what is left is diamond fragments bound in epoxy. Watch." He set the square down on the table and shined a hand light on it. And they all watched....And after a moment the little square of iridescence floated upward. At first, the motion looked like a commonplace of the microgravity environment, a loose paperweight wafting on an air current. But the air in the room was still. And as the seconds passed, the tile moved faster, tumbling, falling...straight up. It hit the ceiling with an audible clink—and remained there.

No one said anything for several seconds.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we came to the OnOff star hoping for treasure. So far we've learned some new astrophysics, developed a slightly better ramdrive. The biologicals of the Spider world are another treasure, also enough to finance our coming. But originally, we expected more. We expected to find the remains of a starfaring race—well, after forty years, it looks like we have succeeded. Spectacularly."

Maybe it was just as well that Nau had not scheduled this as a general meeting. Everyone was suddenly talking at once. Lord only knew what it was like over at Benny's. Ezr Vinh finally got a question on the floor. "You think the Spiders made this stuff?"

Nau shook his head. "No. The Kindred had to mine thousands of tonnes of low-grade ore to get this much magic."

Trinli said, "We've known for years that the Spiders evolved here, that they never had a higher tech."

"Quite so. And their own archeologists have no solid evidence of visitations. But this...this stuffis an artifact, even if only we can see it as such. Anne's automation has spent several days on this. It's a coordinated processing matrix."

"I thought you said it was refined from native ores."

"Yes. It makes the conclusion all the more fantastic. For forty years we've thought the diamond powders of Arachna were either infalls or biological skeletons. Now it looks like they are fossil processing devices. And at least some of them reassert their mission when brought close together. Like localizers, but much much smaller, and with a special purpose...to manipulate physical laws in ways we don't begin to understand."

Trinli looked as if someone had punched him in the face, as if decades of bombast had been beaten out of him. He said softly, "Nanotech. The dream."

"What? Yes, the Failed Dream. Till now." The Podmaster looked up at the tile lying on the ceiling. He smiled. "Whoever visited here, it was millions or billions of years ago. I doubt we'll ever find any camp tents or garbage middens...but the signs of their technology are everywhere."

Vinh: "We were looking for starfarers, but we were too small and all we saw were their ankles." He tore his gaze down from the ceiling. "Maybe even these—" He waved at the window, and Gonle realized that he was talking about the big diamonds of L1. "Maybe even these are artifacts."

Brughel moved forward in his chair. "Nonsense. They are simple diamond rocks." But there was an edge of uncertainty in the aggressive look he flashed around the table.

Nau hesitated an instant, then gave an easy chuckle, waving his thug silent. "We're all beginning to sound like some Dawn Age fantasy. The hard facts are extraordinary, without adding superstitious mumbo-jumbo. With what we already have, this expedition may be the most important in human history."

And the most profitable, too.Gonle shifted back on her chair, and tried to catalogue all the things they might do with the glittering material that was lying on the ceiling.What's the best way to sell something like that?How many centuries of monopoly might be wrung out of it?

But the Podmaster had returned to more practical matters. "So that's the fantastic news. In the long term, it is good beyond our wildest dreams. In the short term—well, it puts a real knot in the Schedule. Qiwi?"

"Yes. As you know, the Spiders are about five years from having a mature planetary computer network, something we can reliably act through."

Something advanced enough that we can use.Until today, that had been the biggest treasure that Gonle Fong had envisioned coming out of these years of exile. Forget about marginal advances in ramdrives or even biologicals. There was a whole industrialized world down there, with a culture guaranteed to be alien from other markets. If they controlled that, or even had a dominant bargaining position, they would rank with the legends of the Qeng Ho marketing. Gonle understood that. Surely Nau did. Qiwi did too, though right now she was talking simple idealism: