Flies from the Amber Read online

  FLIES FROM THE AMBER

  by

  WIL McCARTHY

  Produced by ReAnimus Press

  Forty light years from earth, the colonists on the world of Unua have somehow managed to keep civilization struggling on, despite twice daily earthquakes and technology lagging far behind that of the mother planet. But now an Unuan mining expedition has discovered an alien mineral they name centrokrist—a stone of incomparable beauty. Yet when the Earth scientists at last arrive to investigate, they find a phenomenon eclipsing this discovery. For this double-sunned solar system is nestled right next to a black hole, and waiting for them on the verge of the black hole's event horizon is an alien artifact that can't possibly exist!

  REVIEWS

  “Wil McCarthy demonstrates that he has a sharp intelligence, a galaxy-spanning imagination, and the solid scientific background to make it all work.”

  —Connie Willis

  “Easily the best book about the implications of relativity since Robert Forward's classic THE DRAGON'S EGG. FLIES FROM THE AMBER has a sense of wonder, fascinating realistic science, a wonderfully inventive background, charming characters you can root for, and a fast paced plot that keeps you reading. Read FLIES FROM THE AMBER now.”

  —Eric Baker, Science Fiction Age

  ~~~

  © 2011, 1995 by Wil McCarthy. All rights reserved.

  http://ReAnimus.com/authors/wilmccarthy

  Cover Art © 2001 by Tom Weihill

  Smashwords Edition License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

  ~~~

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This novel would not exist in anything like its current form without the patience and assistance of a great many people, including: Steve Bell, Shawna McCarthy, Cathy Polk, Gary Snyder, John Stith, Amy Stout, Connie Willis, and the members of the Northern Colorado Writers' Workshop. Thanks, guys!

  ~~~

  For Cathy

  ~~~

  COLONY SYSTEM:MALHELA

  1ST OCC:PISCES 4th WAVE

  PRIMARY TYPE:BROWN DWARF

  PRIMARY NAME: MALHELA (VANO)

  BODY TYPE:NATURAL FORMATION, TERRESTRIAL PLANET

  BODY NAME:UNUA

  ATMOSPHERE:

  N2 89%

  O2 8%

  Other 3%

  AVG SFC PRES :1733 mb

  AVG SFC TEMP :310 K

  AVG SFC GRAV1.16 g

  CURRENT POP : 2.7 M

  PROLOGUE

  “Exalted Creature, they flee directly into the nebula.”

  White frills expanding in anger. “Pursue them.”

  This place had been a stellar creche, a coming together of gasses, a birthing place of new suns. But as the ages raced by, as Fleet pursued the Enemy at the very edge of lightspeed, things had changed. One of the young stars exploded, touching off neighbors. Now, within the cloud hung stars gone prematurely ancient, withered dwarfs and collapsars among the newly born. The result was not beautiful, nor safe to travel through.

  “Particulate matter in the nebula, Exalted Creature. We dare not.”

  “Also collapsed matter, vermin, and they have the Shield! If they brave the time fields to graze a collapsed body, and they do not emerge for an age of ages? No! We have come too far to give them up.”

  “We risk the Fleet, Exalted Creature.”

  “Pursue them!”

  Tight, angry silence. And obedience.

  Fleet changes course yet again. The nebula looms large, shifting colors as timespace contracts ahead. Soon, Fleet screams through a sleet of tiny particles, and then larger particles, and larger ones still.

  “Great danger ahead!” Warns a lesser being.

  Exalted Creature raises frills again. “We do not curl back when—”

  Words uncompleted.

  The glittering Shield does not easily lose integrity, but when a flake of matter strikes... Exalted Vessel, in its beak-point position ahead of Fleet, becomes a splatter of radiant liquid.

  Death strikes with suddenness.

  But Death, like all things, must yield in the presence of superior force—Exalted Vessel is destroyed, but its vector has scarcely altered. It roars still toward the heart of the nebula, in timespace-contracted pursuit of its ancient Enemy.

  All Fleet's beings are privy to the sight, and they are made brave by it.

  PART ONE

  ELTROVADO

  To the open ear it sings

  Sweet the genesis of things

  Of tendency through endless ages,

  Of star-dust, and star-pligrimages,

  Of rounded worlds, of space and time,

  Of the old flood's subsiding slime,

  Of chemic matter, force and form,

  Of poles and powers, cold, wet, and warm:

  The rushing metamorphosis,

  Dissolving all that fixture is,

  Melts things that be to things that seem,

  And solid nature to a dream.

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson, Woodnotes II, 1837

  Chapter One

  “Pay dirt,” said Troy. He leaned in his harness, brushed his gauntleted hand against the gravel, scraping it aside. Something white and faceted glittered beneath.

  Myk Poole leaned closer, cursing silently as his arm caught on one of the harness bungies. He tugged it free, jerked at his harness until it let him move the way he wanted to. Damn the thing anyway, weren't the spacesuits clumsy and clowny enough?

  “What is it? Is it diamond?”

  “No,” Troy said. He scraped again at the gravel, sending handfuls of it spinning away in the light gravity. The fingers of his hand closed on something pea-sized, some kind of crystal, something gray-white and lustrous. “It isn't diamond.”

  But they had known that anyway. The neutrino detector had gone wild on them, the echoes showing veins inside the planetoid, veins of something dense and strange through which the ghost particles refracted and reflected like light in mazed mirrors. Neutrinos, the antisocial problem children of the subatomic world, could zip through whole planets without touching or interacting, could pierce unstable atoms, pierce the nuclei themselves and keep right on going, forever, unaffected and unaffecting.

  “Perfect crystals can trap some tiny fraction of the neutrinos as they pass through,” Dao Vitter had said. “Particularly when the crystals are large. That's how our detectors work. I'd say we're looking at one very large, very perfect crystal.”

  Myk had snorted at Dao's suggestion. The echoes were of something large, yes, something nearly half-kilometer across. The veins reached through the core of the planetessimal like gigantic, spidery fingers that were caught in the act of curling in, of trying to clench. And yes, diamonds were not unheard of in the Aurelo debris ring or here in the Centromo, where carbonaceous rocks sometimes collided at tens of kilometers per second, heating and fusing and squeezing until the carbon assumed its densest possible structure.

  But the diamonds were found in small pockets, near the surfaces of shattered boulders. Their neutrino echoes were localized and shallow and very, very faint. They did not form large, perfect crystals. Nothing did.

  “Let me see,” Myk said now to Troy Biandi.

  “Here,” said Troy, handing the crystal over to him. “Don't drop it.”

  Myk reached out and took the cry
stal between the glove-caps of his thumb and forefinger.

  His fingers cast many shadows in the brown-orange light of Vano, in the blue-white of the Milky Way and the starlike radiance of Lacigo. Not bright even now, with the dwarf no more distant than Vano, no more distant than his home and his wife and his tiny daughter who had probably already begun to expand her vocabulary beyond “gawawa.”

  The object in his hand was... beautiful.

  The color was like brandied milk, like vanilla icing with sprinklings of sugar to make it glitter, hints of oil to make almost-rainbows of its surface. Lustrous gray-white, said the dull and ordered part of his mind. Opaque, crystalline mineral of unknown composition.

  Parallelogram facets glinted out at him, flashing in the light of the many suns. The faces interlocked to form little starbursts which interlocked to form tented hexagons. The whole thing, perfectly symmetric and practically spherical, was no larger than Myk's smallest fingernail. Thirty facets, fifty, one hundred, he had no idea how many.

  Minerals weren't found this way. He had never heard of mineral that was found this way. Crystalline, yes. Faceted, sometimes spherical. He had once seen octahedral pyrite that looked for all the world like children's draedles, or gems cut for large and gaudy earring. But the pyrite's surface had been rough, its edges and corners ragged on close inspection. Not like this, not at all like this.

  The corners of this new crystal looked sharp, well-defined, like the edges of well-cut diamond. Myk wondered what would happen if he reached up and drew the thing hard against his helmet visor. Would it leave marks, would it scratch? Would it cut right through the ceramalloy like one of Troy Biandi's digging tools?

  “Dao was wrong,” Troy said.

  “What?”

  “Dao was wrong.” Troy leaned over the pit he'd made, peering in, reaching in with his hand. His boots were off the planetoid's surface, his low-gravity digger's harness making him look like some failed acrobat tangled up in the equipment. “There are more crystals in here. It isn't all one piece.”

  Myk huffed cynical breath. “Did you really believe it was?”

  “No. No. But the neutrino echoes...”

  “Dao thinks everything works in the perfect theoretical way. He hasn't spent enough time with his hands dirty.”

  Troy pulled out another crystal, held it up in the light and looked at it. “This is something new. This is something very important. He was right about that.”

  Myk pressed the raised square of ceramalloy on the neck of his suit, somewhere near where his adam's apple would be. “Grailseeker, this is team one. Come in.”

  There was pause. Then: “Jafre here. Go ahead, team one.”

  “We found it.”

  “Great! That's great. What does it look like?”

  “It's unbelievable. It's nothing we've seen before.”

  “What does it look like?” Jafre repeated.

  “It looks,” Troy cut in, pressing his own SHIPKOM toggle, “like we're all quaking rich.”

  There was another pause.

  “Return to the ship right away,” Jafre said. “Bring samples back with you.”

  “Will do,” said Troy. “Team one out.”

  Chapter Two

  Jafre hated docking. It reminded him, every time, of how ancillary his function aboard Grailseeker truly was, reminded him that he was neither pilot nor navigator to the ship but rather the administrator to her crew. He might as well be their astrologer, for all the good he was during dock ops.

  He sat in his chair quietly and looked out the window.

  Unua, the planet where almost everybody in Malhela system actually lived, and to which Grailseeker was now returning, was beautiful sight for Jafre's sore and weary eyes. Much more alive in appearance than Dua, Vano's airless outer planet. Much, much better than the vast, empty spaces between the system's stars, or the dark smudges of dust and rock that were the Aurelo and the thrice-damned Centromo. Grailseeker had been away too long.

  Below, Unua was all red and gray and dusty orange, expanses of desert cut through by spiky mountain ranges and the occasional forests of dark brown.

  Unua was the second ugliest planet in all the universe, Jafre was convinced. Only Dua was darker, more empty. In his spare time Jafre watched the holies, he consumed the holies, drank in images of Earth and Mbali and Grove and all the other wonderful planets occupied by humans luckier than he was, and he wished he could go and see these places with his own two eyes.

  But the distant stars were not for Malhelans, not until they got their industrial surplus high enough to make starships plausible luxury. Meanwhile, Jafre the would-be explorer made his living digging up rocks. No, he reminded himself. Not even digging, not even that much.

  Jafre had struggled and manipulated his way to Captaincy, but no amount of scheming could get him off this tiny canvas on which he was painted. Nothing in all the world...

  Chrysanthemum, the starship of his forebears, hung like bright-ish star above the gloomy limb of his planet. Chrysanthemum, which had not moved from its current orbit in one hundred and fifty years. Chrysanthemum, the one and only spaceport the Malhelan economy could support.

  “This is not ordinary matter,” Dao Vitter had said of the crystals they'd found, practically screaming with excitement. He'd said a lot of other things, too, about “strange quarks” and “unusual gravitic and inertial properties” and “a natural origin for this material is extremely unlikely.”

  With two black holes and two dwarf stars dancing the Malhela for billion years, you'd expect to find some exotic substances kicking around. “But not this exotic,” Dao had said. “This find is very important. We mustn't disturb it any further.”

  “No?” Jafre had replied with naked avarice. And so, over Dao's strenuous objections, they had shoveled the stuff into Grailseeker's hold, several tons of it, and lit out for home once again. Damn the consequences; they'd had no other luck, and Jafre did have to turn a profit on this voyage.

  Scientists would be invited from Earth to study these crystals. He would invite them himself if he had to. He would build great antennae and scream at the stars that he had found something worthy of their attention, that he had earned his rightful place among them. The scientists might come, and if they did they might, just maybe, take Jafre with them when they left.

  Meanwhile, he was going to get darkly, stinkingly rich selling his crystals to the highest bidder. The thought cheered him up somewhat.

  “Ten minutes to contact,” said Guelo, his navigator.

  “Very good,” Jafre said in his best official tone.

  Chrysanthemum was swelling visibly now, its rounded shape coming clear in the window. In the wan, brown-dwarf light of Vano, it looked mottled in the same red-gray manner as the world it circled. It looked like planet, really. Probably, Jafre thought, the third ugliest planet in the universe.

  ~~~

  “Let me see what you've brought, son,” said the white-haired man who had detached himself from the crowd of gawkers, who had come up the gangway to block the exit of Grailseeker's crew.

  “Get out of our way,” Jafre snarled at him.

  “I beg your pardon,” said the man. “Don't you know who I am? You have to listen to me, you have to humor me; I'm the oldest man in the world!”

  “I know who you are,” Jafre said.

  Jack-Jack Snyder had been, in the dim past, the third President of Unua, and founder of the Library of Trust and the Bank of Forever and handful of other useless institutions. And yeah, he was supposed to be seventeen gazillion years old, like from the twenty-second century or something. What did that actually make him, five hundred?

  All the more reason, Jafre thought, to keep him at arm's length. The Originals were still around, most of them, but they were small in numbers, lost in the shuffle of their three million or so descendants. Most times they were easily ignored.

  Today, alas, was not one of those times. Jack-Jack not only didn't get out of the way, he strode forward with his arms s
pread wide, as if he meant to embrace Jafre and the other men like long lost sons. Which, Jafre supposed, they probably were. As the saying went, everybody was related to everybody in colony this small.

  “Darkness,” he cursed, as Jack-Jack's arms closed around him.

  “I'm so proud,” Jack-Jack said. “I am so proud of you all.” His voice was light, as if with barely suppressed laughter.

  ~~~

  “Thank you, Captain Shem,” Asia Gill said after Jafre had sat back down. Her gaze swept the room, the long table and its twenty inhabitants. “Will there be any further rhetoric?”

  Uncomfortable silence.

  “Okay, then, the matter is settled. Excavation at the discovery site is suspended until further notice.”

  Jafre's fingernails dug painfully into his palms. Knowing it would come down this way did not mean he was resigned to it. It did not mean he had to like it. He cleared his throat loudly. “Madame director, I object.”

  “Of course you do.” Asia smiled. She pulled out one of the stones, let it sparkle and roll in the pit of her hand. “But I haven't impounded your cargo or your mineral rights. Not yet.”