Writers of the Future, Volume 28 (9 page)

“Jack!” I ran to him and started moving yard-wide pieces of stone I wouldn’t have been able to lift on Earth.

“Crap,” he muttered as I pulled the last piece off.

“Are you leaking
?
Are you hurt
?
”

“No leaks,” he said, but I could hear pain in his voice. “And I’m fine, just help me get up.”

I moved one more slab and couldn’t miss its obvious uniformity. Jack had been right again. The basalt covering had been designed to come apart easily. The shell’s inside face had been serrated in a grid pattern, the squares held together by a thin strip of surface stone that was easily broken once the interconnecting tensions and supporting soil had been removed.

I turned my attention to what lay beneath the shell. It appeared to be a solid block of diamond. I switched on my helmet light and looked inside. Prickles and chills crawled up my back, as I unwittingly uttered the phrase from the old science fiction classic. “My God, it’s full of stars.”

Jack grunted as he brushed off dust and checked his suit and harness equipment for damage. “Stop screwing around. What do you see
?
”

I opened my mouth, but words wouldn’t come. The interior of the block was filled with what looked like constellations of sparkling stars. It was as if someone had cut a block of the stunning Martian midnight and buried it for us to find.

“Malcolm
?
” Jack moved up next to me, leaning in to see.

The star-like points in the block only glowed when my light touched them. My scientific mind argued that they could be impurities or microfractures in the diamond block, but part of me knew I was looking at a three-dimensional celestial map.

“A map,” Jack whispered.

My comm link hissed and popped, then Courtney’s voice intruded on our discovery. “Come in, Malcolm, this is Mars Base One.”

I almost succumbed to training and long ingrained habit to answer her, but remained silent. I glanced at Jack, but he was totally focused on the block’s interior.

“Come in, Malcolm. We’ve had fliers all over the area since the storm ended. There are no communication anomalies. We don’t know what you two are doing out there, but the commander is pissed.” She paused for a second, then resumed. “He says Jack is going home no matter what, but considering the amazing find you reported he might consider letting you stay. If you call in now.”

The urge to respond with a long string of obscenity was nearly overwhelming. They were prepared to let me die in the storm, yet were now threatening to punish me
?
I bit my lip, made sure my frequency setting was set for local and Jack’s channel and told him.

“We’d better hurry. Base just called. I don’t think they know where we are yet, but they are sure looking.”

We started digging faster. When Nellie returned, I focused my efforts on getting video of the map from every exposed angle. By sundown the three of us had cleared two more sides, leaving only the bottom and one side still covered, but the light failed quickly in the canyon.

Base had tried to call me and Jack several more times during the day and at one point we saw a flier high in the east, over the area we’d been heading before killing my transponder.

“We’d better dig in for the night,” Jack said.

“If we’re going to uncover this, we’d better work through the night,” I said. “Now that the wind has died, they’ll eventually see Nellie’s fresh tracks and follow them back here.”

“Yeah, but if we’re lucky they won’t find the tracks until tomorrow, then it will take hours for them to get here by truck or blimp. But if they keep those fliers looking all night, they would see our work lights or even our IR signatures and be here before morning. I think we should get underground.”

I hated to leave the find for that long, but reluctantly agreed. Once out of our suits and settled in our burrow for the night, I linked my suit’s computer to Nellie so that we could both see the video on her foldout display screen. I instructed the computer to build a 3D map based on the footage and overlay the actual video with graphics. We both immediately noticed that among the thousands of points some were three to four times larger than the rest, looking more like embedded pearls than distant stars. Those pearl points were located in pairs, some almost touching and others separated by up to an inch. Each pearl was also connected to another, more distant, pearl by a hair-thin line.

“Weird,” Jack said in an almost whisper. “Those bolos or barbells are some kind of pattern, but . . .”

“Computer, overlay any existing star charts in the database with these patterns.”

“I have only rudimentary navigational aid star charts in my local database,” the computer said in its charming southern belle voice, causing Jack to look at me with a smile and raised eyebrows. “Do you want me to search the base archives or send a download request to Earth
?
”

“Does Nellie have star charts
?
” I asked the still grinning Jack.

“Malcolm
?
You must really . . .”

“Just answer the question.”

He shook his head. “No real need. Go ahead and tap base camp, it’s only a matter of hours until they find us anyway.”

“Check the base first, then send to Earth if they don’t have an all-inclusive chart.”

“I’m loading the 3D star chart from base camp data stores,” the computer said. “Please provide a relative scale for the newly constructed pattern.”

Jack and I looked at the slowly rotating pattern on the screen, then back at each other with shrugs.

“We have no scale. You’ll have to look for relational patterns, then adjust scales accordingly.”

“Understood,” the computer said.

“Inform us if you have any pattern match greater than seventy percent.”

“Understood.”

Radio calls from base camp increased after the computer’s download connection, but we ignored them. Jack started fixing a simple dinner, but I couldn’t stop looking at the pattern. I could see two exceptions to the pearls appearing in pairs. A single pearl resided in one corner of the block, but was connected to the nearest pair by a line nearly two feet long. The second exception was a line that ran to a large cluster in the diagonally opposite corner, but due to my shaky camera work, the computer just showed them as a slightly disc-shaped clump.

We took turns counting while we ate and agreed upon seventeen pearls excluding the clump.

The display changed abruptly, showing the original pattern in blue, overlaid with a new blinking red pattern. The legend at the bottom of the screen identified the red as “KNOWN STARS.” A little over half the points overlaid perfectly, but a few were shifted, all in the same direction, but by different amounts. About twenty percent of the stars in the blue pattern had no red counterpart and none of the red points aligned with the pearls.

“Well, crap,” muttered Jack. “That wasn’t much help.”

“Computer
?
If you take known movement into account and project backwards, would some of those stars from our database have matched the new pattern at some time in the past
?
”

At first the computer didn’t understand the request, but after I explained it in simpler terms a counter appeared at the bottom of the screen and the red stars started creeping toward the blue points. When they stopped moving the number on the counter read “4372 BCE.” Aside from six that blinked a label of “track unknown” all of the shifted red stars now matched. There were still no points at the pearl locations.

“Damn! Over six thousand years ago,” I said.

“They’re still not as old as I expected,” Jack said.

“Computer
?
Have you displayed all the stellar information you have
?
Please show quasars, pulsars, brown dwarfs, comets, asteroids and galaxies, any objects that would show up within this pattern.”

“And black holes,” Jack included.

The red star pattern density nearly doubled. Now six dots matched locations with the pearls.

“Computer. Show black holes or singularities as green.”

Dozens of points flashed green, including all six that were coincident with the pearls.

“So,” Jack said and sat back with a wide grin. “They travel using black holes.”

“Or maybe just use them to communicate
?
Computer
?
Label the Sol system if it is on this map.”

SOL appeared next to the star nearest the lone corner pearl.

“Oh, wow!” Jack said and crawled up next to the screen. He pointed at the pearl nearest Earth. “We enter a black hole here . . .” He moved his finger along the line to the next pearl. “And exit here, then move in normal space to this black hole . . .”

“These are too conveniently placed,” I said. “I bet they’re artificially constructed worm holes.”

He nodded and continued tracing the path, big jumps between black holes with the lines, and small trips to the next black hole, then another jump. The path led all the way to the big clump at the opposite corner.

“Grand Central Station,” he said tapping the clump.

“Well, there isn’t anything really new about that idea,” I said.

“Except this time it’s real!”

Once again my scientific mind refused to see the obvious as a real possibility, but I shoved those thoughts aside and laughed. “Yeah, there is that. Maybe.”

We stared at the display for a few minutes, neither of us talking. Then I tapped the cluster on the screen, stood up and started donning my suit. “I need to see this clump again.”

“Dawn is still five hours away,” Jack said.

“Does it matter
?
We have to assume they know where we are now.”

Twenty minutes later we stood atop the diamond cube and beneath a brilliant Martian night. Somewhere out in that thick star mass lived other sentient beings. It was now fact, not speculation. We looked down, switched on our helmet lights and dropped to hands and knees.

The pearl clump was near a top corner and when our lights revealed it, we both gasped, then laughed. When viewed from the correct angle, the thirty-five pearls formed a ring around a central point or star. The last line in the “path” connected to a pearl in that ring.

D
aylight still hadn’t penetrated the canyon when we took one last look at the cube.

Jack fidgeted, looking from me to his wrist computer, then back at me. “This still makes me nervous, Malcolm. What if there’s another storm or radiation alert
?
”

“It’s a risk, but I can override communication security with voice recognition and you can’t. And if we all go, they will find us for sure. Nellie’s tracks are just too easy to see from the air.”

He still looked uneasy. In order to insure that MarsCorp didn’t hide the find for years while they tried to think up a way to exploit it, we’d decided to break the news to Earth ourselves. Jack would go east, then call base telling them he was looking for me. That would hopefully make them focus their search east of the canyon while I went west to the uplink antenna on the crater wall a mile from the base camp.

“You’re just pissed that you have to provide the diversion this time.”

He didn’t laugh or even smile. “If you run most of the day, you should be back at the base camp just after sunset. You have the extra tank and water
?
”

“Yes, Mom.”

He gripped my arms and squeezed. “Call if you get in trouble. And I’ll come and rescue your sorry tail again.”

“Get moving!” I said.

He started south, to exit the canyon from that end, and his graceful, gazelle-like stride took him out of sight in seconds. My gait was awkward as I started for the canyon’s north end, but it soon smoothed out. Jack was still definitely the best Martian, but I was getting better.

The Paradise Aperture

written by

David Carani

illustrated by

PAUL PEDERSON

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Carani was born and raised in Illinois, where he became familiar with both cities and cornfields. Despite his love of corn and tall buildings, he found he prefers neither. Instead, he lives in a place that is a wondrous combination of the two, called a suburb.

The oldest of eight, David grew up wandering the acres of forest behind his home. A heavy rainfall or snowstorm could transform those woods into another world, and he often spent his days exploring and creating stories.

After earning a degree in economics from the University of Illinois (hence the cornfields), he returned home and married the girl of his dreams. Like any good editor, when she isn’t diligently working to improve his stories, his wife gives him all the encouragement he could ever need.

Beyond writing, David works in sales, reads submissions for the Hugo-nominated
Lightspeed Magazine
and writes articles for the website Fantasy Faction. This is his first published work.

ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

Paul Pederson was born August 11, 1980, in Bessemer, Alabama. He was raised in St. Augustine, Florida (the oldest city in the nation). Art and history were prominent features in the small tourist town and this had a tremendous influence on him. At an early age, he loved to draw and paint. Paul and his older brothers were always fascinated with works of fantasy and science fiction. Subsequently he leaned more toward fantasy illustrations. Paul’s parents established a private school known as Taldeve (Talent Development) School of the Arts that Paul attended through middle school and high school. This gave him the rare opportunity to study one-on-one under professional artists in the north Florida area. After high school, Paul moved to Australia for two years, spending much of his time learning the Aboriginal culture and doing freelance art. He later studied art and design at Dixie State College in Utah, and has worked for over ten years as a graphic designer, painting murals and illustrations. He currently resides in St. George, Utah, where he works as an illustrator and hopes to take full advantage of his talents.