Seveneves - Страница 145

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A few emotions were competing for the mental energies of the Seven: utter confusion about who had dug this hole, and why. Empathy for the deeply embarrassed Einstein, who had promised them an entire truck. Disappointment that the only things left of it were a rust stain and a radiator hose. A mild sense of alarm at the idea that inexplicable persons with shovels were somewhere about. Swamping all of these, however, like a tsunami cresting over the mountains, was the awareness that they were in the presence of a real artifact from before Zero. As they had established on the flight up here, Doc had seen such things three times in his life, not counting museum exhibits. None of the others had ever seen one at all.

And so they all stood there in silence for several minutes, passing it from hand to hand, thinking about it: the factory where it had been manufactured, the engineers who had designed it, the workers who had assembled the vehicle, the driver who had piloted it around, and the day that the Hard Rain had begun. As it turned out, imagining the fate of seven billion people was far less emotionally affecting than imagining the fate of one.

Beled, after handling the ’fact for a minute and gazing at it inscrutably, handed it off to Kath Two. He withdrew from the edge of the pit and began circling it restlessly. After a minute he called out to the others, but not in a voice of alarm.

About ten meters away, at a break in the slope that afforded a bit of a view down the valley, a sort of totem had been erected: a length of aluminum tubing, white with oxidation, projecting vertically out of the ground to a height about equal to that of a person. At its top, lashed on with a few scraps of copper wire, a circular object: a steel hoop mostly obscured by marred and pitted black stuff, a crossbar through its middle with loose wires dangling from orifices.

“Steering wheel,” Ty said. “The plastic coating burned but the steel rim held it together.”

“Who put it here?” Ariane asked. She was the last to arrive, and had to insinuate herself among taller members of the Seven in order to get a clear view. As a result she nearly tripped over a long, low mound of disturbed earth. The steering wheel totem had been erected at one end of it.

“Whoever buried the driver,” Ty answered.

Doc looked at Einstein. “Were you aware of the existence of human remains?”

Einstein held his hands up. “You have to understand, the truck came down like a dart. Nose first.”

“Naturally,” Doc said. “All the weight was in the engine block. The box, as we have established, was filled with something light.”

“The only part that was sticking out was maybe this much of the bumper, and some of the box.” Einstein was holding his hands about a meter apart. “The place where the human was—”

“The cab,” Ty said.

“—was deep underground. You have to understand, all this digging—”

“Came as a complete surprise to you. Yes, we understand that,” Doc said.

“When were you last here?” Langobard asked.

“Two years ago,” Einstein said. “But you have to understand: if someone from my RIZ had gone up here with shovels and dug up a whole truck, I’d have heard about it.”

“Where’s the incentive?” Ariane asked.

Everyone looked at her.

“As it was — in situ — the truck was priceless. Legally or not, tourists would have paid any amount of money to come and view it. To dig it up makes sense — so that tourists could get a full view of it. But—”

“But instead it has been completely dismantled,” Doc said, “and everything of value taken away.”

“Of value?! I don’t understand what you mean by that word,” Ariane said.

“The Diggers were after the engine block,” Doc said, as if this would answer her question — which it by no means did. But after a few moments she had a thought.

“Ah,” Ariane said, “you think it was looters.”

Bard was right with her. “You think,” he supposed, “that the engine block is now sitting in a display case in the private gallery of some wealthy collector on Cradle.”

“That is not an unreasonable supposition,” Doc admitted, in a tone that, however, made it clear that no such idea had actually crossed his mind. “But it strikes me as unusual for looters to go to so much trouble to give a ceremonial burial to the driver.”

“If it was not valuable as loot — as a collector’s item — then what possible value could the engine block have had?” Kath Two asked.

“It was valuable,” Doc said, “as iron. As a several-hundred-kilogram sample of pure metal that could be melted down and cast into other shapes.”

“Is there anything in the universe less valuable than iron?” Bard scoffed. “We have been living inside of giant chunks of it for five thousand years.”

“We have,” Doc agreed, and with a small movement of his hand caused his grabb-chair to withdraw from the grave site and begin picking its way back toward the excavation. Remembrance threw an unreadable look over her shoulder and followed him.

They reconvened and viewed the pit through fresh eyes. Ty pointed out a place where the gray ash was freckled with tiny red-brown spots, and guessed that someone had worked there with a hacksaw, sprinkling iron sawdust on the ground, and that the tiny flakes had rusted. Slipping the ash between his fingers he produced a few bright sparks of clean metal. Bard found a scarred wedge of dense wood, battered on its fat end with many hammer blows, and guessed it had been used to part the engine block into pieces that could be more easily carried. Beled, continuing to circle the perimeter, came up with a pole of hard wood somewhat more than a meter long, neatly rounded at one end, snapped off sharp at the other. “They broke one of their shovels,” he said. Holding the pole before him, he rotated it until he was able to see an inscription that had been stamped into the wood. “Srap Tasmaner,” he announced.

“Let me see that,” Doc said.

Beled handed it to him. Doc gazed at it for a while without speaking. The longer he looked at this seemingly trivial piece of debris, the more he drew attention to himself, until the others were all standing there silently watching him. His deeply hooded eyes were downcast and it was difficult to tell whether he was focusing all of his mental powers on the thing, or fast asleep.

Finally he rotated the pole until its sharp end was pointed downward, and used it to scratch a letter into the dirt.

“You read this, Beled, as a letter S, but as you probably learned in school, it was once used to represent a number of sounds including the one we write as K.”

He wrote a K beneath the C.

“The next few letters are familiar and we write them the same way in Anglisky.”

CRA

KRA

“You misread the fourth letter as a defective P. A natural mistake since we no longer use the old glyph F, which it resembles. Instead we use the Cyrillic phi.”

CRAF

KRAФ

“The next two letters are TS, for which we have a more wieldy one-letter substitute in Anglisky.”

CRAFTS

KRAФЦ

“The next three are the same in English and Anglisky.”

CRAFTSMAN

KRAФЦMAN

“Craftsman,” Beled said, reading the bottom row. “But what of the R at the end?”

CRAFTSMAN

“When it’s enclosed in a little circle, it’s not a letter to be pronounced at all, but a sign that this is a sort of commercial trademark. Or I should say ‘was.’ It was a trademark five thousand years ago, apparently.”

About halfway through this lecture on ancient and modern orthography, Ariane had become intensely focused, and for the last part of it had been holding one hand over her mouth. “I have seen its like in the Epic!” she exclaimed through her fingers. “New Caird’s landing on Ymir. Vyacheslav went out the airlock to clear ice from the docking port. He used a shovel just like this one.”

“You are saying—” Kath Two prompted Doc.

“I am saying that this shovel handle is itself a five-thousand-year-old ’fact that could fetch a high price on Cradle,” Doc said, lifting it up and brushing the dirt from its broken end. Ariane snapped a picture of it and thumbed at her tablet. “It was thrown away,” Doc continued, “because it was of no use to its owners, who knew that they could get wooden poles anywhere in Beringia just by cutting down a tree.”

“What sort of people think that iron is valuable and five-thousand-year-old artifacts are garbage?” Kath Two asked. She was interrupted by a faint high-pitched beeping sound that was emanating from all of them at once.

They had all been issued earpieces so that they could communicate if they became separated. Most had removed these and pocketed them, or simply draped them around their necks, but Beled still had his in. He pressed one hand to his ear and held the other in front of him, as if checking a timepiece. But he was actually looking at a small flat screen that was strapped to his wrist. He then pivoted to gaze up the valley in the direction from which they had come, but the view was blocked by foliage and terrain.

“Large animals moving in their vicinity have been detected by the buckies,” he said, “and one of them has gone silent.”

“Yesterday,” Doc said, “when young Einstein here proposed we make a junket into the mountains to have a look at an artifact, I was resistant to the idea at first. I saw it as a mere diversion, of a touristical nature. I gave my assent to the idea because I saw it as an opportunity to carry out a dry run for the procedures we would be using later, when we got started for real. I see now, however, that it is the main event.”

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