He tightened his hand around hers and looked at Rusty, who calmly circled around the area with alert eyes and ears. Rusty didn’t see any immediate danger. “Yes.”
“Well, I am not OK seeing that.” Tai pointed down.
The river plain, dry yesterday, had the gleam of water on it, the first trickles of the flood already here.
Tai exploded, “Flutter the dam coming down now! How the gaudy hell are we going to get that statue up the ramp in time?”
“We aren’t,” Mercury told Haze. “But we can measure it, and even protect it with a wrapping in case the underground floods.”
“That isn’t biologically dynamic water,” Haze said. “It would be more like deep ocean. Shipwrecks on Earth turned out remarkably well preserved in water like that.”
“But if the ‘statue’ is a robot, it’ll be ruined,” Tai grumbled. She pulled out her communicator, calling Hopper to come with the copter.
They sat down just outside the ancient door, which stayed open. It seemed peaceful here. Haze held Mercury’s hand and let his other hand rest on Rusty’s back.
But the river was coming. The gleaming trickles on the plain plainly warned of that.
And Haze had had more memories than just the falling tower flooding through his mind. He was glad he hadn’t frozen to death alone underground. But with a cold, sinking dread in the pit of his stomach, he knew that he was doomed anyway.
8 Skance
In the back seat of the copter, Mercury and Haze sat close together. Rusty lay across both their laps. Haze had a hand on Rusty’s back, but his eyes on Mercury, and he smiled at her. She smiled back, even though she could see lines of pain engraved in his face and a shadow behind his eyes. She could barely imagine what it was like to have survived a disaster like the Fall in Strata and not remember it until now, without warning.
He’d been thrown into a dangerous panic by a line of light in the sky. But the rough copter ride back to the station didn’t faze him at all. He was better bonded to Rusty now and Rusty calmed him. That was good. But it left her with a painful sense of incompleteness. She and Haze had a potential bond of their own to explore. Important questions to ask and answer. It would have been nice to do so at a calm, quiet and uninterrupted time. Which the next day or so was not going to be.
When the copter landed, everyone tumbled out. The Pastfinders were happy to have Haze back. Silk opened her medical supplies for numb-spray for his new bruises. Rusty twined around his ankles. Nobody gave Rusty suspicious glances: the news about the statue in the underground was too exciting and distracting.
Silk fed Haze a light supper and Mercury led him to his tent. Rusty curled up against the outside of the tent. “He’ll wake you up if there’s any danger,” Mercury told Haze. He nodded and let himself be tucked into his sleeping bag already more than half asleep.
Mercury went to the Station’s clean room to study the rod that Rusty had found in the statue’s chamber and given to Tai. The rod looked like nothing quite so much as an electronic musical instrument, something that could make sound. But damage had rendered it inoperative. She did a quick search of the literature about Old Tellan artifacts. She thought about a tone opening the hole in the ventilation shaft, another tone opening the door to the underground, and Rusty’s warble that opened the door to the statue’s cold chamber.
At the same time, with the side of her mind that was emotional, not logical, she thought about Haze. In Strata, he’d been lucky—with a kind of luck that was immense and far outside of the sphere where Skance reigned. He’d come down the space elevator just before it fell. Then the falling pieces hadn’t killed or impaired or trapped him: he’d witnessed the Fall like few others. That luck at Strata might make Haze a special kind of man—singled out by luck, saved by it, and tormented for it. In fact, Haze fit the description of a kind of holy person in the religion of Mercury’s people.
Insistent sex drive aside, did she want to become entangled with someone like that? Before now she would not have thought so. She wasn’t particularly religious and had no inclination to meddle with hard and holy things.
However, she had become involved with Haze. Her psychalchemy had entangled his life. She’d unwittingly made the scaffold fall on him and triggered the first trickle of his memories of the Fall. The falling scaffold made a sound that made the ventilation shaft intake open. Investigating that with another touch of her psychalchemic luck made the door to the underground passageways open. Far down there, Rusty had sensed Haze’s distress and came to Haze last night. (Could Rusty really jump that far? Or was there another way up other than the vertical ventilation shaft?) Today when Haze had been triggered by the falling meteor and ran underground, it was Rusty who found him.
It was all a chain of luck. There was an ancient poem, reverently remembered by Mercury’s people, about a consequential luck chain: a war being lost because of a string of consequences starting with the loss of a nail in a horse’s shoe. The lesson of that poem was that a small amount of luck might not have a small outcome at all.
Her thinking skewed in a different direction. She could understand the utility of horses in ancient battles, she’d seen a few living horses, impressive and attractive animals whether they were used in war or not. Maybe the statue represented a Tellan kind of horse. Why, though, put it in a cryogenic chamber, the kind of chamber that had kept Rusty functional for ten thousand years? Could it be not just a statue, but a robot after all? And what did this instrument do, damaged beyond functioning, yet intact enough that its shape urgently insisted that it did something?
She finished her meticulous description and found padding and triple-protective bagging for the rod. She didn’t bag and seal it yet though. Ideas in the back of her mind fused with insistent impulses in her body.
Visiting her sleeping niche, she put her figurine of Skance into her inside pocket. At the front door of the storeroom, she listened to the busy activity in the station’s main room. The idea of dragging the massive statue up the ramp had been abandoned, to Tai’s intense disappointment. To her credit, though, Tai did listen to her crew when they had good reasons to veto one of her audacious plans. Obtaining a winch and the material for a skid or cart was not feasible on very short notice with a flood coming and authorities watching the Rift. Instead, the Pastfinders were planning to measure the Tellan statue and then bag and seal it up, to keep it safe even if the underground passages and chambers flooded, until they could come back to pull it out.
Any better outcome hinged on luck. And luck hinged on her.
She left through the back door of the storeroom. The river of stars flowed across the sky in the banks formed by the walls of the Rift. Mercury looked up, her hand finding Skance in her pocket. He felt warm. She remembered that he was made of a kind of material that warmed easily with luck around, atoms easily stirred up—the right kind of stuff for the god, convincing to those of her people whose religion needed shoring up with special effects.
Where she had never been particularly religious, her favorite uncle had. She remembered him saying Skance was a trickster but not a cruel one.
Skance had certainly been busy, not to mention tricky, lately. I need you to stay busy and help me, Skance! Then she remembered what her uncle said about petitioning Skance and rephrased the thought into a slightly better prayer. Thank you for what you’ve done. All of it amazes me. Please help me tonight.