A Parting Gift

A Parting Gift

The unmanned probe had been found drifting out near Sector A122 only three weeks ago, and already it had caused quite a stir on-board the trading vessel Rigg. The assortment of mercenaries, traders and, in a fate of coincidence, at least one historian had spent the weeks since its capture poring over every last detail of the probe's inner workings and outer markings.  One thing had become almost immediately clear; this probe was of alien origin.

Captain Agur Melni had patiently waited for some answers, but had now finally snapped and called for a meeting of the crew and passengers in the lower cargo bay, away from where the probe was being stored.  He had so far made the decision to keep the discovery from his superiors in the Directorate, so the ship had been on restricted radio transmissions since.  He sensed that some of the crew were going to burst having to keep such a secret to themselves, but like most traders servicing the outer systems, trust was in short supply.

Whatever this probe turned out to represent, the second thing of absolute certainty was that it was worth more than he could ever dream possible.  The wealth this thing could bring, to all of them, was unfathomable.  There was no way he was going to let the Directorate get their hands on it now.

He was stood now upon the walkway overlooking the cargo bay, stacked high with crates of food, materials and medicine bound for the frontier.  In front of him were gathered twenty-seven men and women; nineteen of them crew under his command, the rest passengers who had bartered transport for purposes that were of no concern to Melni.  At the head of the group was his first mate Jessa Lore and his chief trader Anton Dosah ; stood beside them was the insufferable historian passenger, Keve Sones.

Melni didn't like most of the passengers who paid their crooked way onto his ship, but he disliked Sones even more.  There was something unnerving about him – his soft, reedy voice, his small, ruddy face and those pitiful lenses perched on his long nose.  Melni had spent his life among dumb, bawdy space traders, and in truth it was partly the man's intelligence that caused the problem.  Plus there was the fact that he seemed to appear out of nowhere.

Jessa Lore was first to talk.  “I say we need to get rid of the thing, and fast,” she said dourly, as was her way.  “Toss it out of the escape hatch and leave it for someone else to find.”

She had been saying the same thing for weeks and there were audible groans from the gathered crowd.  There she goes again, Melni thought.  Jessa was an able mate, and an attractive coupling partner at that, but she was prone to worry and thoughts of disaster.

“Think about what I'm saying,” she yelled above the gathering noise of dissent.  “I implore you.  Can you imagine the trouble we're going to have trying to make any money out of this thing? As soon as word gets out we'll be targets for everyone from the frontier soldiers to the Directorate themselves and every mercenary minded soul in between.  We'll be bodies on the floor of this bay while someone sails away with the most precious cargo ever known.  Its not worth the hassle or the expense and no good can come of it.”

Keve Sones scoffed loudly, and Melni noticed that Jessa was visibly restraining herself from reaching out and throttling the irritating little man.  Dosah stood between them chuckling quietly.

Sones said, quietly, “You're being paranoid.  This is an artefact of immense historical and political value; the monetary price is completely irrelevant.  If there truly are those out there with thoughts of destroying or defacing such a thing for material gain, then I despair at our species.”

The quiet chuckle of Dosah now turned to uproarious laughter, and many behind within the crowd joined in quickly.  “Remarkable!” Dosah cried out, turning to Sones.  “Tell me, have you actually met our species?  Do you even know what kind of ship you're aboard?”

Melni cut him off before he could launch fully into one of his infamous verbal assaults.  “What do you think of the probe, Dosah,” the captain asked.  “From a trader's perspective?”

The trader flicked a lock of his lank, blonde hair away from his eyes and shrugged his broad shoulders.  “I've had people studying it around the clock; its components, its metals and alloys.  The technology is extraordinarily crude, but that's not to say there's no value in it, and not just as a museum piece.  Some of its smaller working parts are worth more than this ship alone.  While I wouldn't deign to disagree with Jessa's expert analysis-” the word hung in the air like an insult.  “At the same time, if handled correctly, this transaction could see us living in luxury for the rest of our natural lives.”

Once again, the historian scoffed.  Melni hated the man, but he must admit to enjoying the way he was riling up his crew, not that such a feat was difficult.  It was the ease with which he managed it, and the absolute lack of intent behind it, that caused so much amusement.  Sones was simply standing his ground and it was annoying the crew like nothing else.  And, as much as he hated to admit it, the captain knew that his historical insight might prove useful.

Melni said, “Sones, you have studied the probe at some length.  What do you make of it?”

Sones looked flustered to have been asked directly by the captain, and struggled a moment to regain some composure.  “We know its of alien origin,” he said.  “But what we don't yet know is where it came from, and that raises questions of its own. Who was the civilisation who launched it, and why? What are they like as a species? The very presence of a probe such as this suggests a benign force rather than a benevolent one, but how can we be sure?”

“What are you driving at, Sones?” Dosah interrupted.  “Do get on with it, man.”

“Allow me to put it into language you might understand,” Sones said.  “The probe itself is valuable beyond your wildest dreams, but the discovery of its origin would be far greater a prize.  Find where it came from, and you men and women here can buy whole star systems.”

Sones let the words hang in the air for a moment.  Jessa broke the tense silence.  “So how do we found out where it came from?” she asked, tersely.  “I'm not sure if you've noticed but space is pretty big.”

The historian smiled his thin smile, creasing the corners of his large eyes through the lenses.  “That,” he said, “turns out to be pretty easy.”

*          *          *

Sones had wondered quietly about the nature of other life within the universe.  They had launched their own probes in the early days, similar to the one they had found, sent out into the wilderness in search of life and universal answers. Much had been discovered on moons and small inner planets, but not until after centuries of exploration.  Even after they had mastered the stars and colonised worlds, intelligent life was absent. 

Now it turned out that not only was there other life out there, intelligent enough at least to launch a probe deep into space, but similar to themselves in their desire to not just explore, but to make contact.  Perhaps it was a universal trait of intelligent life to look up to the stars and wonder.

Soon he would find out for himself.  They had entered into orbit around the planet a few short hours ago, and Sones had been pacing the floor of his ship apartment ever since.  He couldn't understand the delay – it was a simple matter to land a ship on a planet, so why sit here in orbit.  There was nothing they could learn up here that they couldn't learn better down on the ground.

Something was clearly wrong, and he made his way to the control room.  It was a restricted area, and he knew that if Jessa caught him herself she would have him pinned up against the bulkhead before he even knew she was near.  She was a formidable woman, so he was pleased to note on his approach that the main crew were all gathered around a stack of computer controls and monitors and hadn't noticed his approach.

He coughed gently, and the three of them turned quickly, startled.  Captain Melni eyed him suspiciously, then grunted and returned to the monitor.  Dosah and Jessa simply stared at him, their deep blue eyes piercing.

“What do you want, little man?” Jessa snapped.  “Can't you see we're busy?”

“Forgive me,” Sones said.  “I was wondering as to the delay.  Is everything okay?  When do we make contact.”

Melni snorted.  “We don't,” he grumbled.  “We've been studying the planet since we entered the system, and things don't look good.”

Sones frowned.  “What do you mean by that?”

“He means,” Dosah carried on, “that there's no one to make contact with.  The whole planet is empty – there's not a trace of meaningful life down there.  You've led us a merry chase, you Perukan smog worm...”

Sones was stunned.  “But the probe, the metal plate and the markings... they all point here, to this planet.  Are you sure you're not mistaken?”

The captain turned silently and stared at the historian with deep set eyes.  He reminded Sones of the farm boys back home, rugged and bruised, uncultured.  Sones preferred the solace of academia; Melni just looked like he was in constant need of a good fight.  It was perhaps best not to rile him further right now.

Mercifully, the confrontation was brief, and Melni returned to his monitors with yet another grunt.  “There is life down there, but nothing intelligent like us,” the captain muttered.  “It looks like the atmosphere down there is too dense and hot to be of any comfort to civilised beings.  There were some trace remnants on a couple of the Moons and other planets as we passed through the system, but without landing its difficult to say with any certainty what they are without further analysis.  I think its best if we just-”

“Do not turn the ship around!” Sones yelled.  “The absence of intelligent life now doesn't exclude the possibility of there having been life on the planet in the distant past.  The probe had to have come from here, this planet, but we don't know how long ago it was launched.  We could be talking thousands, maybe even millions of years.  Captain, I implore you, you have brought the ship all this way for the promise of treasure – why give up at the first minor set-back?

“Give me a week,” Sones pleaded.  “Send out some sentinel grunts to investigate the findings on those other planets, and land the ship down there, on that planet.  If I find nothing, we've wasted little time, and you still have the probe and its riches.  If I'm right, however...”

Once again, Sones spoke the language of Melni and Dohsa – money, power and privilege.  Jessa remained unconvinced but it was Captain Melni's ship and his alone, and Sones knew that he had pierced that seemingly impenetrable barrier of the captain's curiosity.

*          *          *

The atmosphere was too dense to leave the ship without a pressure suit.  The sky was clouded a dirty orange, and the ground a scorched, barren mess of rock.  Here and there, scattered around, hardy grasses and mosses poked between the cracks in the lichen-stained rocks, but there were no trees, no flowers and certainly no animals.

Sones had left the ship under the guard of Jessa and a few more volunteers from the crew. Locked tight in their pressure suits, struggling to move in its bulk, they surveyed the landscape.  It reminded Sones of the dead moon around their own world, barren and featureless to the naked eye, but hosting a marvellous splendour of detail within.  He was giddy with excitement, but the mood of his companions was growing dimmer by the day.

I had been their third foray onto the surface since they had landed, and they were headed out east from the landing site, towards a low rim of hills Sones had seen from the air.  Water was so abundant on this world, it was staggering.  It pooled in every crack and dip and crater as far as the eye could see, marching its relentless way from sky to surface and back again.  The others grumbled at the mess it made of their suits, but Sones didn't mind one bit.  It reminded him of home, within the rain-soaked valleys.

So far they had found very little in the way of tangible evidence for intelligent life, past or present, but today was full of promise.  Sones had spent the previous evening studying images taken on the descent, covering a range of imagery; x-ray, radar, sonar, thermal, and more.  Just a few kilometres from the ship he had seen a series of long, straight lines buried deep beneath the rock and soil. The vaguest sign, if anything, but it was a start, and it gave him hope.  They descended upon the site armed with laser cutters and the more delicate hand-held tools of the archaeologist.

Jessa and the others from the ship had grumbled and cursed their way through back-breaking toil, digging a trench metres into the hard, dark soil.  It was some hours before they broke through to the first stone castings, and some hours more before they realised what they had uncovered.  As they broke through into the first chamber, even Jessa had found it difficult to contain a whimper of excitement.

*          *          *

The party had begun almost immediately.  Drinks and food and wanton behaviour swept across the ship like a plague.  Wealth was coming their way; extraordinary wealth, like none of them had ever dreamed.  Captain Melni had briefly wondered if he should call a halt to proceedings before they got out of hand, but Jessa's luxuriant appearance at his cabin door had quickly changed his mind.  The ship was on course for home, and the crew of the Rigg were headed for a heroes welcome.

Intelligent life; alien intelligent life.  For millennia they had wondered if they were alone in the universe, and now they had found the answer, there on that strange and silent world.  It wasn't just the vast network of buildings and roads, long buried, that they had mapped in just a few weeks.  Their grunts had also detected undisturbed remains of civilisation on at least two moons and another planet within the system alone.  There was no time to investigate further, but all that remained now was details.  The find was theirs, and so was the glory.

Sones described it to the captain in some detail.  “For this world, everything happened relatively quickly,” he said over dinner that evening.  We took core samples from various sites across the vast landmass on which we set down, and have been able to reconstruct quite a lot so far...”

“Yes, yes,” Melni waved away the technical details.  “All that can wait for the historical societies, or whatever it is you people do.  What about the people? Where did they go?”

Sones shrugged his shoulders.  “Hard to tell,” he said.  “We know that they made it into space, and not just the probe.  The remains sighted on the other bodies in the system show an advanced and sophisticated use of technology.  Those remains were probably bases, occupied as jumping off points to further out into the stars.”

“So they had all this fancy technology early on in their existence-”

“Relative to our own slow and steady progress, yes,” Sones corrected.

“Right.  So what, they all died out somehow?”

Sones frowned and shook his head mournfully.  “That's part of the problem, captain,” he said.  “While they were establishing these bases out in the system, it seems that they were letting their own world spiral out of all natural control at the same time.  It seems unthinkable, but at first appearances I would say that those bases aren't just points for which to launch themselves into the stars... they're built to help them escape their own planet. Forever.”

Dosah slapped him heartily on the back.  He was drunk.  “Brilliant story, little man,” he roared.  “Spacemen true and proper they are.  They screw up their own planet so they simply abandon ship, as it were, and head off to find another world.  Marvellous, just marvellous.”

“I don't know what you find so entertaining,” Sones said sourly.  “Don't any of you understand what this means?”  Blank expressions met his stern glare.  “If this civilisation abandoned their own world, then that means they're out there, somewhere.  They're not an ancient, extinct civilisation, but an advanced space-faring race like ourselves.  Don't you get it?”

Jessa laughed, pouring wine down her throat.  “Of course we get it,” she said.  “Finally, we have someone else to trade with.  Imagine the profits!”

*          *          *

None of the crew had seen Sones for the rest of the journey after that.  He had left the dining room angrily and confined himself to his apartment in a sulk.  In spite of the high spirits of his crew, Melni couldn't help but feel that the historian had had a point.  There was more to life than profit, and perhaps they had all forgotten that in their pursuit of the riches of the damned probe.

No doubt countless missions would be sent back to the planet and many scientists and historians would clammer to get their hands on their secrets, and Sones would be first among them for sure.  No doubt also he would receive a healthy sum for his work so far, so perhaps he had little to complain about after all.  He would get the riches, and the satisfaction of knowledge and a lifetime of work.  If the crew of this ship needed more than money to sate their desires, no one was admitting it any time soon.

Once they had landed, Sones had taken his leave without saying goodbye; he had paid his fare in advance.  For three days Melni and his crew reaped the rewards that their discovery brought them.  The Directorate paid them a veritable fortune just for signing the probe over to their immediate custody, with the promise of more to come.  This had been a most successful mission.

Melni returned to the Rigg weary and tired, kept awake by the buzz of excitement generated all around him.  Alone, he stumbled to his apartment to find a small package waiting for him.  Within he found a small, golden disc, marked with engravings on one side and cut with grooves on the opposite side, a small hole cut out from the middle.  Underneath, in the same box, was a small contraption that Melni did not recognise.

There was also a note; it was from Sones, scrawled scruffily by hand.

Captain Melni, read the note.  Please forgive my hasty departure. I'm afraid I am prone to moments of drama. But do not despair.  During my self-imposed confinement I took to studying the piece you hold in your hands, removed from the probe.  I enclose the means to decode it, along with further instructions.  This piece is invaluable, but it is my gift to you.  I hope it brings you as much joy and enlightenment as it has myself.

Melni grumbled but, intrigued, he followed the instructions and set the contraption up with the golden disc sitting atop a rotating table, a large metal needle hovering delicately above it.  He flicked the switch, and settled back into his most comfortable chair to await the so-called delights that it would bring him.

He closed his eyes and the disc brought forth a multitude of voices, in languages he did not understand.  Captain Melni let the voices wash over him and revelled in them.

“May all be very well.”... “Greetings to our friends in the stars.  We wish that we will meet you someday.”... “Hello, let there be peace everywhere.”... “Dear friends, we wish you the best.”...  “Hello from the children of planet Earth...”