Edward L. Ferman by The Best From Fantasy & Science Fiction 23

Author:The Best From Fantasy & Science Fiction 23 [Fantasy, The Best From & 23, Science Fiction]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The new marvel was a simple affair in the middle of that living petrochemical complex. It was a short plant that sprouted up half a meter, then extruded two stalks parallel to the ground. At the end of each stalk was a perfect globe, one gray, one blue. The blue one was much larger than the gray one.

Crawford looked at it briefly, then squatted down beside the rest, wondering what all the fuss was about Everyone looked very solemn, almost scared.

“You called me over to see this?”

Lang looked over at him, and something in her face made him nervous.

“Look at it, Matt. Really look at it.” So he did, feeling foolish, wondering what the joke was. He noticed a white patch near the top of the largest globe. It was streaked, like a glass marble with swirls of opaque material hi it. It looked very familiar, he realized, with the hair on the back of his neck starting to stand up.

“It turns,” Lang said quietly. “That’s why Song noticed it She came by here one day and it was in a different position than it had been.”

“Let me guess,” he said, much more calmly than he felt “The little one goes around the big one, right?”

“Right. And the little one keeps one face turned to the big one. The big one rotates once in twenty-four hours. It has an axial tilt of twenty-three degrees.”

“It’s a … what’s the word? Orrery. It’s an orrery.” Crawford had to stand up and shake his head to clear it.

“It’s funny,” Lang said, quietly. “I always thought it would be something flashy, or at least obvious. An alien artifact mixed in with caveman bones, or a spaceship entering the system. I guess I was thinking hi terms of pottery shards and atom bombs.”

“Well, that all sounds pretty ho-hum to me up against this,” Song said. “Do you … do you realize … what are we talking about here? Evolution, or … or engineering? Is it the plants themselves that did this, or were they made to do it by whatever built them? Do you see what I’m talking about? I’ve felt funny about-those wheels for a long time. I just won’t believe they’d evolve naturally.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I think these plants we’ve been seeing were designed to be the way they are. They’re too perfectly adapted, too ingenious to have just sprung up hi response to the environment” Her eyes seemed to wander, and she stood up and gazed into the valley below them. It was as barren as anything that could be imagined: red and yellow and brown rock outcroppings and tumbled boulders. And in the foreground, the twirling colors of the whirligigs.

“But why this thing?” Crawford asked, pointing to the impossible artifact-plant. “Why a model of the Earth and Moon? And why right here, in the graveyard?”

“Because we were expected,” Song said, still looking away from them. “They must have watched the Earth, during the last summer season. I don’t know; maybe they even went there.

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