Seen through the Dust

CL Anderson

The view from the other side is not always clear.

The insistent noise of his door chime hauled Jare McGowin out of his sleep. Swearing, he yanked the door open.

“I’ve got your chance at Mhyrra Phinees!” A woman’s silhouette shot out of the hallway light and into his room.

Jare fumbled for the light. The silhouette became Tam LaMaitre who worked with Central Tracking and Recording and provided Jare with help and gossip around Easter’s xeno-archeology colony.

“She’s checked out for a scheduled confirmation run, but she’s not supposed to be anywhere near the section she’s headed for.”

The news yanked Jare fully awake. “Any idea what she’s doing?”

Tam shrugged. “Who cares? You’ve got your story and when you get back I’ve got independent proof for Ferrand that she went out of bounds. He’ll kick her off-world so fast she’ll make escape velocity without a shuttle.”

Jare smiled. Tam had fumed for hours about how Ferrand refused to believe her reports on Mhyrra Phinees’ wanderings.

“Can you get me checked out without any fuss?”

“No problem.” She gave him a conspiratorial grin. “Hurry up though.”

Tam breezed back out. Jare threw on enough clothes to be decent. More carefully, he put on his clip-set, running a cursory check of the battery charge. Satisfied, hurried down the hall towards the Check-Out station. His thoughts raced ahead, outside the barracks and right behind Mhyrra Phinees.

Archeologists might still bicker across the nets about the mysteries of Easter’s scattered cities, but to journalists the place was old news. Mhyrra Phinees, on the other hand, was still fresh in the public mind. Murderers acquitted on technicalities had a long shelf life.

Jare tried not to feel his stomach knot up. He tried to keep his mind on the credit balance his family did not have any more because he’d gone freelance with plenty of drive but no business skills. He needed this story to turn a profit. To do that, he needed coverage no one else had gotten. He needed Mhyrra Phinees to talk to him.

Tam met him at the airlock carrying a prepped clean suit. With practised motions, Jare hooked his personal set into the suit systems and sealed himself inside the protein weave coverall. He worked on keeping his patience through the suit checks and the sterilization protocols in the airlock. Finally, Tam pronounced himsealed and clear and released him to the outside.

Sterile dirt and powered concrete crunched under his bootsoles. His suit’s automatic systems switched on light and the heat against Easter’s pre-dawn cold. Jare touched the chart key on his wrist controls. The lower quarter of his face plate clouded and the map Tam had loaded for him appeared. A green squiggle showed him his best route through the ruins. Blue monoliths showed him the buildings, black scrawls the canals and slowly moving yellow blobs indicated the rovers he needed to avoid.

Most of the actual field work of xeno-archeology was carried out by robots. The research engineers gave them recording gear and legs that could handle the terrain and turned them loose. The machines could map, count and video capture everything in a target area so the researchers could pore over their findings in safe, clean quarters. At scheduled times, a cataloger would go out and make sure the data coming back matched reality. That was what Mhyrra Phinees was supposed to be doing.

If one rover picks up the fact that I’m in an un-cataloged area, I’m the one Alto Ferrand will kick off-world.

Jogging when the way was clear and waiting impatiently when it wasn’t, Jare wove a halting path between hive shaped buildings. The Easterans, whatever else they might have been, had not been fond of right angles. They had connected house-sized silicate bubbles with arched tubes and webs of mustard yellow fullerene thread. The noise of running water reached Jare from every direction. Gravity still pulled water from the hills into rotting pipes and crumbling trenches that best guess said were once canals.

A stray wind blew a puff of grey-green dust over him. Jare’s throat went suddenly dry.

Calm down, McGowin. You’d think after a week you’d be used to this.

Along with canals and empty buildings, the Easterans had created a plague. The labs pronounced the sandy green substance to be manufactured. As Jare understood it, the stuff hopelessly confused the energy consumption and regulation functions of animal cells until they burnt out like overloaded circuits or starved to death. Without the animals and insects the plants could not survive. By the time Terrans found Easter, whatever life had been in the cities mixed its dust with the poison that killed it.

Jare tried not to remember the only thing between him and that poison was five centimeters protein weave and microscopic machinery.

The suit beeped for his attention. A red blob had appeared among the yellow on his chart. His quarry was in direct line of sight. Jare ducked into the knife-edged shadows the intense dawn created. He set the recorder controls for a telescope shot and touched the key that dropped the lenses over his eyes.

The camera’s enhancement showed him Mhyrra Phinees disappearing around the curve of a building wall. Even in a standard issue clean suit she was unmistakable. No other woman in the colony stood so close to two meters tall, or strode across the site with apermanent slump to her shoulders.

Once, a straight-backed, dynamic Dr. Phinees had the scholarly world and half the public access nets at her feet. Her work in Intangible Recoveries had opened up the data caches of a half a dozen of the Old Worlds; the scattering of planets that cradled remnants of alien civilization. For two decades, Mhyrra Phinees pored over their chips or plates or puddles of silicon or cuprates and laid out secrets that had been locked away for thousands of years. Only the ruins on Easter had proven to be younger than five thousand years, giving rise to the theory that a galaxy’s cycle allowed only one species to attain advanced sentience status at a time.

Jare had devoured endless hours of biographical playback about Dr. Phinees. His recorder carried a swirl of images; Dr. Phinees bent over ancient hardware on abandoned worlds, Dr. Phinees receiving every prize academia could hand out and taking her bows on stage and on screen. In every image, her husband, Halden Isidoros, stood at her side and in her shadow.

Finally, Isidoros had had enough of being married to the legendary woman. He took their two children and tried to start over.

His new life and new marriage lasted six months. The entire family drowned on an sail boat outing off the San Diego coast. The rented boat’s autopilot had failed to bring the boat in when storm winds began blowing. The initial investigation pronounced it systems crash.

Jare had covered the funeral. Watching the impassive archeologist place her children’s ashes in their niche had started him thinking. When Dr. Phinees was arrested for murder, the police reports credited him for discovering that the computer wizard who could make alien machines sing for her, had been online and hooked into the California public net, to an untraced address, at the exact hour the storm rose and the computer failed.

Audiences had jammed the networks calling for his coverage of the trial that acquitted her on a technicality during the arrest. For the first and last time Jare’s freelance efforts had turned a profit.

Then, the news came in that Dr. Phinees had been hired onto the publicly funded Easter site as a cataloger and clerk. As a registered freelancer, Jare could not be denied reasonable access to a public site to record what he found there.

The first thing he found was that Director Ferrand did not want him around.

“The board has approved your request, Mr. McGowin. I haven’t.” Ferrand had leaned forward, chin quivering. “Set one foot out of the public areas, or make one move towards Mhyrra Phinees, and there are a dozen regulations I can use to get you thrown out and your material erased. This is a research facility.” He stabbed one finger on the desk-top. “Not a freak show.”

oOo

So why do you let Phinees stay? Jare pursed his lips. What’s she got on you, Ferrand? Or what’s she got for you? Jare made a mental note to pursue that question as soon as hemade it back in.

Dawn’s grey began to fade into full daylight. Jare kept Dr. Phinees’ on the edge of his recorder’s range. Wherever she was going, the archeologist was ready for work. A heavy tool-belt circled her waist and a carry-all weighted down her hunched shoulders.

A new shadow drifted over Jare and he glanced up. Between the tops of the bubbles and the sky loomed the twisting network of an Easteran silo. Jare looked back at the map, then at the figure in the lenses. Dr. Phinees was heading straight for the silo.

I should’ve known.

The Easteran silos were mammoth series of ceramic tubes filled with the poisonous dust and old bones that bore no resemblance to the few representations of Easterans the researchers had found, or anything else on the planet. Each of Easter’s cities boasted at least one of the things. A decade of inconclusive research and argument surrounded them.

Naturally, they would interest Mhyrra Phinees.

Jare skirted the line of bubbles that fenced in the silo’s clearing. The wind drew plumes of poison out of jagged tears in the its sides. If Dr. Phinees noticed, she did not allow it to break her stride. The silo dwarfed her as she approached. The strut she dropped her pack next to was twice as thick as her waist. The tube casting its shadow over her was three times as thick as the strut.

Jare set his lenses for a tighter shot. The magnification showed him that the ceramic was not a continuous sheet. Ruler straight lines ran along it. At first he thought they just marked the places where tiles had been joined together but Dr. Phinees unhitched a crow bar from her belt. She applied the tip to one of the silo’s cracks and heaved.

A panel slid back. The wind whisked a cloud of dust away from the square hole. Jare fell back on his heels. She was going inside. In there with the dust.

What in the name of all things holy is she after?

Even during a suicidal venture, she was a methodical worker. Jare wasn’t surprised. The woman had not won either her acclaim or her infamy by being sloppy. She pulled a pair of rovers out of the carry-all and hitched up their cables. First, she sent in the “canary” to determine that there was enough oxygen inside the silo for her suit filters to make breathable air out of. Then, she hitched the other rover to her wrist on a leash cable. The leash would allow the machine to trundle along about three meters ahead of her and feed her suit information about conditions before she actually walked into them.

She used the crow bar to jam the panel open and anchored a life line to a distress beacon. If the bar slipped and the panel shut, pressure on the life line would set the beacon off.

Finally, she set her leashed rover inside the hole, clambered up behind it, and vanished.

“Jare!” Tam’s voice exploded from the suit’s receiver. Jare’s whole body jerked and his gloved hand smacked against his helmet, trying to reach his ear. “You got trouble, Jare. Ferrand’s onto you.”

“What? How?” Jare opened the microphone, and turned the receiver volume down.

“He just called me to check out which part of the site you were on.”

Jare’s heart sank. “Anything you can do to slow him up?”

“Already done. Part of the tracking system’s had a software hiccough, but I can’t leave it down long. There’s a lot of people out and about this morning. You got about twenty minutes to get back where you belong.”

“Thanks, Tam. I’m moving now.”

He shut the mike down and hoisted himself to his feet.

You’ve got what you need. He tried to reassure himself. Mhyrra Phinees is not where she’s supposed to be either, and you’ve got the proof. If she decides not to help out, you can threaten to hand her over to Ferrand. Never mind that you promised Tam that you’re going to do that anyway.

Jare forced his attention back his immediate problems. He had come ten minutes, at a quick jog, past the edge of the public areas. He keyed up the survey schedule Tam had given him. A neat line of department titles and digits covered the upper edge of his map.

Intangible Recoveries had decided to run an extra current burst through the section to trace the fullerene web. That did not concern him. The section rovers were being called in for cleaning and downloading, though, and that did. If he held still for seven more minutes, he’d have a direct path back to the public areas. He set the suit’s alarm clock and pictured Ferrand’s complexion purpling as Tam pushed keys in an imitation of frantic diligence and hid her smile.

Jare’s humor faded. Tam. The woman was interested in a lot more than his ability to help her get Mhyrra Phinees thrown off Easter. He’d have to face that sooner or later. Hopefully, she’d understand he did not have an open marriage agreement and he was not interested in telling his wife lies.

Clarice has enough to put up with.

The suit’s alarm interrupted his brooding. Jare checked his map and made as close to a bee-line as he could for the public boundaries. The clock display measured his progress and the map tracked it. He planted both feet firmly inside the public area with four minutes to spare.

Jare tapped out a key sequence Tam had taught him. The suit’s chart memory shut down and erased the entire trip. Footsteps hit the dirt behind him. Reflex yanked Jare’s head up and around to stare straight into Mhyrra Phinees’ startled eyes.

“Holy Mother of us all,” she groaned. “I thought you’d decided to leave me alone.”

“Good morning, Dr. Phinees.” Jare pitched his voice to carry through the suit filters. “Don’t you find confirmation runs for rover data boring after unraveling the insides of alien computers?”

The wind swirled tendrils of dust around their ankles.

“Dr. Phinees,” he tried again. “I’m working on an anniversary release about you and your trial. I’ve come here to give you a chance to tell your side of it.”

“You’ve come here to get extra coverage.” She swung her long legs into motion and marched away. Jare swore under his breath and ran to catch up.

“Dr. Phinees.” He dodged into her path so she had to pull up short. “I am going to do this piece whether you talk to me or not, but, if you were willing to fill in a few gaps, my story might clear your name, at least in the public mind.”

That got to her. The archeologist drew her shoulders all the way back under the pack straps. “McGowin, why are you doing this?”

Jare had prepared this speech in advance. “Because up until your trial, Doctor, you were a respected researcher. People have a right to know the story behind the authority. Besides,” he spread his hands, “both my parents need Alzheimer’s therapy and all three of my kids are going to need university tuition within the next five years. I’ve sunk some heavy resources into site time and production and I need to make it back.”

There. I’ve just laid it all on the line. All the psych studies say that’s supposed to encourage you to do the same.

“What if I tell you to get away from me?”

“Then you can access your story on any of the public nets in two months and find out what my research turned up.” Jare shrugged and held his breath. What she said next would determine whether he needed to play the ace his recorder held.

Before she had a chance to speak, Jare’s intercom opened.

“Jare McGowin, you will return to your quarters, now.” Ferrand’s icy voice ordered. “You’ve violated the terms of your site permit and you’re confined to quarters until the shuttle gets here for you. You have twenty minutes before I send somebody out to drag you back bodily.”

The connection shut down so abruptly, Jare’s eardrum flinched.

Tam, you were supposed to keep him off me! What the hell happened? Jare knotted his fists.

The tilt of Dr. Phinees’ head and her rigid stance told him she was listening to her own set. Gradually, her face fell into lines carved by old fury and exhaustion.

“I think,” she said into her mike. “We had better discuss this in your office. I’m on my way in now.” She touched the shut off key and leveled her eyes on Jare. He swallowed, abruptly remembering he was not just facing a story, but an accused murderer who topped him by six centimeters and eight kilos.

“You really must hate me, McGowin.”

“I don’t hate you. I need you.” Jare’s own words surprised him.

The anger in her eyes did not soften. “You’d better hope I never need you.”

oOo

Behind his sealed door, Jare collapsed on the bed. Tam had apologised to him for half an hour before he’d been able to get her to leave. He glanced at the double clock display above the room’s keyboard. The left half showed the time on Easter. The right half showed the time and date at his home on Earth. Two in the afternoon on Saturday. Clarice would just be getting up, checking on the kids and getting ready for her shift.

Jare sat down at the keyboard and checked his travel account. Enough credit remained to board him in the barracks for the next two days, and to make one more brief audio call home.

He keyed up a request for a channel and had to wait fifteen minutes before one opened. At last, Clarice’s voice reached him.

“Good morning, Hon. How’s the hunt going?”

Jare worked his jaw back and forth for a moment before he told her.

Clarice blew out a sigh. “I wish I could tell you I was sorry, Love, but I don’t like what this story is doing to you. You’ve spent too many hours with old deaths in strange places. It’s shoving your priorities all out of proportion.

“Come home, Jare. We’ll figure out what to do next.”

If you have to hire onto the news services again, maybe it’ll only be for a couple of years this time.

Clarice did not say that. Jare wasn’t even sure she was thinking it, but in his mind, he heard her voice speaking the words.

“I’ve still got two days before the shuttle comes, Clarice and they haven’t revoked my network privileges. I’m going to do some extra research. There’s things going...” The door chime sounded over his words.

“Answer it, Jare,” Clarice told him. “I’ve got to get going. Try to keep your head above the water, Love, please.”

Jare licked his lips. “I’ll try, Clarice.”

They said their good-byes and closed the channel. The door chime rang again. Jare hit the request key to signal an acknowledgement to Central Tracking. The staffer on duty released the lock from there and Jare pulled the door back.

On the other side of the threshold stood Mhyrra Phinees.

“I’ve considered your proposal,” she announced. “I’d like to discuss it further.”

In part of Jare’s mind, a triumphant choir sang. In another part, he wondered what had changed her mind.

“Thank you, Doctor. Please, come in.” Jare stood up. Her sideways glance as she took the spare chair told him how little the courtesy meant to her.

Jare did not even attempt small talk. Under her gaze, he shut the keyboard down and put on his full recording headset which looked like an old fashioned set of yellow-tinted saftey goggles. Dr. Phinees sat stonliy while he ran through the checks and adjusted for the room’s light and acoustics before he opened his mouth.

But when he did, Dr. Phinees beat him to the punch.

“Mr. McGowin, I have worked out the purpose of the Easteran silos, and the dust. I can give you an exclusive release on it now. In one week I’ll have enough lab work finished to give you the proof.”

Jare sat back, his voice gone.

“Is this a bribe for a favorable story about your trial?” he asked at last.

The corner of her mouth twitched. “That wouldn’t hurt my assertions’ credibility, but, frankly, I don’t care about credibility right now. I care about distribution.”

“Why aren’t you talking to Ferrand?”

“Ferrand has given me eighty hours notice,” she said flatly.

Jare took a deep breath, and made a decision. “That’s an interesting offer, Dr. Phinees, but I can’t guarantee a story about your work on Easter would be worth my while until I’vegot all the facts about you.”

Dr. Phinees closed her eyes. Her lips moved silently. In the back of Jare’s mind, Clarice said; I don’t like what this story is doing to you. He shoved the thought aside.

“All right.” Phinees opened her eyes and spread her raw-boned hands. “What do you want to hear?”

No choir sounded for him this time, just a sigh of relief.

“I’d like to start with the reasons Mr. Isidoros left you.” Jare angled the desk chair to get a better view of his subject.

Her face creased. “Halden decided he did not like the monster he created.”

Jare had been a journalist too long to let his face react to her statement. “Could you please elaborate on that, Dr. Phinees?”

She spoke, but she addressed the wall over his shoulder. “I met Halden when the furore over the discovery of microchips on Atlantis was just starting up. I was a firebrand researcher and he was a small scale network manager. I fell in love and Halden told me he returned the sentiment.

“He started talking about us as a couple, about what was best for us. He didn’t have a lot of money, but he had expensive dreams about setting up his own network.

“He encouraged me to look into old mysteries, things no one had been able to solve before. He told me I was brilliant, that I could do what no one else had...He told me that the income the net pieces on my discoveries brought in would help buy the life we deserved.

“So, I resolved to plunge myself into my work. It was Halden’s pushing that got me on the Atlantis intangibles team.

“The exposure after Atlantis paid for him to get his master’s degree. The consulting and writing I did on Babel and Xanadu bought him a stake in a minor network. The interviews and biography after deciphering the code on Cibola paid for multi-year contracts from six major sites.

“By then, I had two children I barely knew, and a husband who would see me just long enough to tell me about the next project he wanted me to go after. Not that he ever put it like that and I certainly never saw it that way. I kept telling myself, one more dig, one more release and we’ll have enough. I’ll come home for good and get to know my family.

“Then, I did come home, and Halden told me he was leaving because we grown apart. The fact was, he had all the money he needed and I didn’t have the social skills to secure the tenuous sort of connections that keep an executive’s success.

“He took Kelly and Louis with him, on the basis that I had never been around long enough to be a good mother.

“They went willingly. I can’t blame them. I was never there when they might have needed me. In fact, I was being interviewed at Cibola when I was told they were dead.”

Jare leaned forward, smoothly, carefully. Dr. Phinees might be making this up out of thin air, but it didn’t matter. These few moments would pay for all the struggles, emotional and financial, his family had endured.

The intercom buzzed itself open and both of them jumped.

Director Ferrand’s voice sounded through the room.

“Phinees,” he spat. “If you don’t get out of there now, I’ll have you confined to quarters as well.”

Dr. Phinees was across the room to the keyboard before Jare could take in what happened. She undid the catches on its sides and lifted the cover back. Muttering under her breath, she dug her fingers into the works.

“What’re you...” Jare started to his feet.

Dr. Phinees held up a sliver of silicate.

“You’ve been bugged. This is a patch chip. It keeps the intercom open even when you think you’ve shut the board’s power down. It probably sent every conversation you’ve had in here straight to Ferrand’s office.” She dropped the object to the floor and with one vicious motion slammed her heel on top of it.

She walked out without a backwards glance.

Jare’s knees buckled. He collapsed back onto the desk chair.

What in the name of all that’s holy is going on around here?

His paralysis only lasted for a few seconds. One hand pulled off his recorder and the other shut the keyboard cover back down on the board and accessed his account. Clarice hadn’t even needed for him to ask. She’d transferred extra credit in. Jare smiled despite his grim humor and got himself an open channel to the UPI Research Services.

Questions flew through his mind even faster than his fingers flew across the keys. Why did Ferrand hire Phinees in the first place? Why did he waste her as a cataloger? Why did she agree to come?

What’s he afraid she’ll tell me?

The questions he shot across the net bore little resemblance to his thoughts. Most of the answers he wanted would not be hard data, but the pointers to them could be.

The further Jare dug, the slower the answers came back. His apprenticeship on the news sites had taught him a handful of cracker tricks and now he used them all.

He found several university deans had circulated memos to bar quietly but effectively Dr. Phinees from the academic networks. That meant no university work, and damn little private foundation work. Whatever else she had done in her career, Mhyrra Phinees had made no firm friends.

If even half of what she told me was true, Isidoros probably did not encourage that.

Ferrand was not fool enough to leave anything incriminating on the nets. Jare found the acceptance of Dr. Phinees’ application and the contract in which she agreed to do nothing during her tenure to call any attention to herself.

Ferrand’s administration reports read like a textbook on mediocrity. They did not always match the piles of data his staffers fed to him. The rotation schedule for Easter was only half as long as those for the other Old World sites and contained a heavier than average load of graduate and immediate post-doctorate researchers.

Jare fired off another round of questions and paced the floor while the answers dribbled back to him. Managing a publicly funded site seemed to be all a matter of timing. As soon as the big, dramatic discoveries had been picked over, the news sites got bored.

As soon as the news sites got bored, the research budgets got slashed. Atlantis was little more than a national park with a director who pulled down half of what Ferrand did.

Dr. Phinees got them their answers but those answers cost them their comfortable lives. What if Ferrand wasn’t taking any chances on that? What if he told Phinees she could do her work under the table when no one else would allow her to work at all. Maybe she agreed because he promised if she came up with something solid, he’d let her go public with it? What if she’s given him all he needs to start with, and now he’d going to kick her out to let other researchers, slower researchers take over? He’s spent his entire career learning how to keep his job, so why not dole out the answers on a schedule? He’d get a medal for brilliant management because he’d always know which way to steer his people.

Now Ferrand has fired her, and Dr. Phinees has guessed why. She’d going for revenge by trying to get the whole story released to a major audience. That’s why she came to me and that’s why she was willing to talk about her husband. The bribe didn’t work so she’s offering direct payment.

Jare remembered Phinees’s eyes when she said; you’d better hope I never need you. He stared at his recorder where it lay on the desk.

What if she decides not to trust me?

Jare moved so fast he couldn’t see clearly. He shoved his recorder onto his face, hooked it into the board and keyed up for a transmission to his holding account at Marinus station. The board copied the files as the recorder processed and stored them and shot them across to his account for professionally secured storage. He considered making extra net copies and discarded the idea. The more copies, the more chance they’d be sniffed out and pirated and somebody else would put out the story, dropping the worth of his down to nothing. He did copy them all to his thumb drive, just to be safe.

Feeling over-dramatic, Jare tucked the thumb drive under his pillow when he finally went to bed. Sleep claimed him while he was still telling himself the coverage was perfectly safe.

oOo

When morning came, the drive was gone.

His recorder lay in neatly carved pieces on the desk top. His holding service reported that there was no data in his account at all. Jare stared at the blank directory and felt the floor cave in beneath his feet.

She got scared. Decided she couldn’t count on me working things the way she wanted, so she opted for silence. She broke in. Probably used that crow bar to get through the door, and wiped me clean.

“I’ll kill her,” he murmured. “I’m going to kill her.”

Jare shut his account down and locked it. Maybe there was something left a retrieval shop could find, but he doubted it. Whatever that woman did it was not something a rent-a-wizard would be able to find without help. She had probably destroyed the thumb drive. Which meant the only hope was for him to make her tell him exactly how she had wiped his account.

Jare keyed up the intercom to Dr. Phinees’ room. The occupancy indicator said she was not there. She wasn’t in the catalog facility, or any of the labs. Ferrand sat alone in his office.

She’s out on the dig. Probably in that silo, doing whatever it is she needs to to get her evidence. She’ll go off world and sell it to someone even hungrier than I am and I’ll go home to try to explain to Clarice, try to explain...

Jare checked the time and with shaking hands put a call through to Central Tracking. Tam’s business-like voice answered.

“Tam, I need a clean suit and I need out.”

“Jare...”

He didn’t let her get any further. “If you don’t, I swear I’ll tell Ferrand every regulation you’ve broken helping me out.”

He waited, knowing on the other end of the line her expression shifted from incredulity, to understanding, to outrage.

“Soon as you’re through the door, you’re on your own,” she hissed. “I hope the dust gets you.”

Tam shut the channel down. Jare tore open his locker and grabbed a random collection of clothing. He stood at the door until the red light on the lock turned to green and he could bolt into the hall.

Through the abbreviated check-out, a tiny part of Jare’s mind tried to tell him he was being irrational to the point of insanity. He did not listen because the rest of him was thinking about his accounts, about Clarice and about his future that was now gone. Wiped away.

Murdered.

His anger moved him across the site at a run. He had no survey schedule from a helpful Tam today and it still mattered whether or not the rovers saw him. Ferrand could only have him thrown out for violating site protocol, but taking the clean suit amounted to theft. For that, Ferrand could have Jare arrested and barred from the nets.

Jare followed the suit’s chart and his own footsteps through the ruins until he stood in the silo’s shadow. The square, black hole gaped in its side, telling him he had guessed right.

Jare set his tracking systems to home in on the nearest operating suit. The chart memory carried no map for the silo’s insides, but it could still give him distance and direction to Dr. Phinees’ suit.

The readings came up thirty-eight meters northwest and twenty-four meters overhead. Jare swallowed, grasped the edges of the hole and climbed through.

The suit’s light flashed on to show him an unending tapestry of fullerene threads behind slow moving clouds of the dust. Wafers of some clear substance heaped on the tube’s floor clicked under his boots.

A dozen alarm lights flashed for his attention. Too little air, the suit screamed. Too much heat. All life support functions shoved into the danger zones. Jare forced himself to stay calm and keyed up precise information. Half an hour before total life support failure, the readout on his face plate informed him.

It’ll be enough time. Jare used Tam’s override commands to shut the alarms down one by one. It will.

Eyes straight ahead, both hands steadying him against the sides of the tube, Jare started forward. Each step crunched more of the scraps and kicked up more dust. He moved in a permanent fog. The fullerene thread under his feet gave him enough traction to climb the slopes, but side tunnels opened under his fingers at random moments and cost him his balance. Finally, he gave up and began to crawl, ignoring aching knees and the imagined echo of Clarice’s concern. The gap between him and the murderer was closing. He would get his future back.

When the readouts said she was two meters around a bend, Jare got back onto his feet. She had to have heard him. There was no way for him to be silent climbing through the clattering scrap piles, but the readout said she had not moved.

Where would she go? I’m between her and the exit and she has less time left than I do.

Jare rounded the bend one cautious step at a time. Dust crackled as it settled back into place.

His light dropped across Mhyrra Phinees. She crouched with her back against the tube wall. Specimen bags full of the clear scraps lay around her knees.

Jare had no words or time to waste. “What did you do to my account!”

Dr. Phinees set the shard in her hands down with exaggerated care.

“Nothing I can undo, McGowin, but I can offer you an exchange for the information I wiped, if you’ll listen to me.”

She squatted in the middle of the dust and the scraps of the lost world, all human contours shrouded by her clean suit, except for her eyes.

Her murderer’s eyes.

Everything had taken on a knife’s edge. Jare’s feet carried him forward. A voice in the back of his mind shouted at him to stop, pull back, think! Fear collected in Dr. Phinees’ eyes. She scrambled backwards, fingers scrabbling in the dust. Jare took another step and watched her knot her fist.

Grey-green fog blinded him. Something slammed dead center against his chest and the world spun. Back, head and shoulders hit the floor, then the wall. The fog swirled, and flashed gold. Every nerve ending in him burned for one panicked heartbeat and he screamed.

Silence, darkness, a hard surface under him. One sense at a time, Jare’s mind reoriented itself. Stale air. Warm stale air.

His hand darted to his wrist controls for the light. Nothing happened.

“McGowin! Jare McGowin!” Dr. Phinees’ muffled shout accompanied the pressure of a hand on his arm.

He jerked away and tried to get to his feet. A whole drift of scraps skittered out from under his bootsoles, crashing him to the floor again.

“It was a power surge!” Dr. Phinees sounded like she was hollering from a kilometer away. “It overloaded your suit! It wasn’t me, McGowin! Hold still damn you! You’ll just stir up more dust!”

Overloaded his suit. Jare froze. No light. No life support. A dry, crawling itch began to shrivel his skin and he realized there was no way to tell if there was really dust under his suit, or if it was all in his mind.

“I think my beacon’s gone,” Dr. Phinees’ voice rose in pitch with every word. “Intangibles must have really been pumping the current through. Listen, they’ll be running another burst in about...”

“You’re trying to kill me.” Jare’s whisper was husky and devoid of reason. “You killed your husband and your children and now you’re going to kill me!”

“I did not kill my children!” she screamed.

Jare wanted to run, to move, to do something, anything, but he couldn’t even hear where her voice was coming from. Furious tears squeezed themselves out of the corners of his eyes.

A strange crunkling noise squeezed through his filters.

Flash! Gold light blinded him. Flash! It wasn’t until the blackness fell that he resolved the image on his dazzled retinas as Dr. Phinees leaning against the wall with her naked hand pressed against the fibers.

Uneven patches of light and darkness allowed him to stare at the hunched figure and gradually realize she was beating her bare hand against the wall in time with the flashes of sight and blindness.

Crazy. Jare’s hands and feet found purchase on the floor. She’s really gone crazy!

Flash!

“McGowin! Stay here!”

Flash!

Jare wheeled around.

Jare never saw the blow. The wall slammed against his body. His head snapped back and forward. His skull cracked against the face plate. A familiar darkness blotted out the pain.

oOo

When Jare woke again, cool air, clean sheets and florescent lights surrounded him.

“Welcome back, Mr. McGowin.” A round woman in a med-tech’s lab coat leaned into his line of sight. “How’s the head?”

Gradually, the details of the barracks infirmary filled themselves in.

“Sore.” Jare fingered the bandaged patch on his forehead.

“None of that.” The med-tech moved his hand gently back to his side. “You’re damn lucky, Mr. McGowin. You were in that crucible for almost an hour after your suit went.”

“What about...” Jare pushed himself into a sitting position. His new vantage point answered his question. Dr. Phinees lay blinking at the ceiling under an isolation tent in the next bed. The only color left in her face was in the black rings under her eyes.

The med-tech shook her head. “Needs more DNA level treatment than I can give her. Shuttle’s on its way, though.”

The med-tech fussed over him, taking readings and administering hypos full of unnamed substances. Finally, she seemed satisfied with the cryptic messages the bedside screen gave her and left to take care of her paperwork.

When the infirmary door shut, Dr. Phinees turned her head towards Jare.

“You won’t beleive this,” a microphone projected her voice through the bedside computer, “but I’m glad you’re well.”

“Why?” his voice broke the word into two syllables.

“Because if you died, and I lived, it’d start all over again; accusations, crowds, nightmares. And I was fresh out of tricks. You were my last. No one would listen to me about Easter, but they’d listen to you, particularly if you could spice it up with lurid details about life and death struggles in an alien environment.”

Disbelief flooded Jare. “How much of this did you plan?”

“Most of it.” Even under the blanket, he could see her chest fighting to draw breath. “Including my suicide, although that didn’t get added until after our suits went out.”

“Well, the best laid plans of mice and Mhyrra...” Jare fell back on his pillows. “So tell me,” he said to the world at large. “What is this great secret that is going to be worth so much that it is going to buy back my future and keep me from handing you in for attempted murder?”

“When the Easterans lived here, the dust they stored in those silos wasn’t poison. It wasn’t even dust. It was a suspension of DNA, probably similar to whatever was in the Easterans, but redesigned to carry and store information carried to it in photon packages through the fullerene thread. The so-called bones in there are from the mechanisms they grew or bred to handle the data flow and channel switching.

“Albertson, the Intangibles’ Chief reported a long time ago that flesh contact with the bare fullerene thread would disrupt current flow. He also is an antiquities hobbiest. For the record, I bet your life on his ability to recognize an SOS.” She stopped and spent the next few moments trying to get her breath back.

“The Easterans’ silos were their computers. Massive, delicate, organic computers. Probably needed constant tending. Ten or twelve years after they left, I estimate, some of the genes in there went bad, and turned the suspension into a virus culture. Age cracked the ceramic, and let the poison into the eco-system.

“How’s that for irony, Mr. McGowin?” Her eyes closed. “An eco-system killed by a computer virus.”

“You said before the Easteran’s left,” Jare prompted. “What do you mean left?”

“I mean gone back to where they came from, or onto where they were going. This was not their home. Look around you!” She tried to lift her hand but it dropped uselessly back onto the blanket. “Nine tiny settlements on two of ten continents and no roads between them. Tools and communications systems we can barely understand but sewage systems that would have been primitive by the standards of ancient Rome. And no graves, garbage dumps or memorial markers. This was a research colony, or a penal colony or a crash site. The Easterans built what they needed and left it behind.” As she spoke, her voice gained strength. A feverish light shone in her eyes.

“And I’ll tell you what’s more, Mr. McGowin. I used that dust to date this place. These ruins are only three hundred years old. Maybe not even that. Maybe only two. Do you see what that means? The Easterans might still be out there.

“If we can stimulate growth in the silos that aren’t cracked, if we can get the systems up and running again, we might be able to find a clue to where they came from or where they were going.”

“And Ferrand wasn’t going to move fast enough for you? Is that it?”

“Yes. I read your notes before I dumped them. You were right on all counts.

“Please understand this, Mr. McGowin,” with an effort that robbed her of her breath for a long moment, she rolled over onto her side. “I don’t care whether my name is ever associated with any of this. All I wanted was for someone outside to hear. Someone who would take a look at this place the way it deserves to be looked at. I wanted one more chance to find out whether I’d seen the truth.”

“And you couldn’t trust me to follow through for you?” Jare whispered.

Her gaze did not waver. “After everything that trust has brought down on me, how could I? My crimes fit my punishment, Mr. McGowin, that’s all.”

Jare watched her eyes for a long time.

“If I tell this story, I am going to tell all of it, including what you said to me in the silo.”

“I know, but, despite appearances right now, I don’t think I’m going to be in a position to care.”

Jare couldn’t stand it. He rolled over so his back was to her and screwed his eyes shut.

oOo

That night, despite what the med-tech swore were the infirmary’s best efforts, Mhyrra Phinees stopped breathing.

Jare called Clarice and she in return made two separate calls. The first was to the Xeno-Researches board recommending an investigation of Ferrand’s management strategies. The second was to an old friend of her mother’s with a professorship at Cambridge. Jare made the call to the network employment services himself.

Fifteen years later, his producer sent him to cover the formal face-to-face contact with the Easterans on a world known popularly as Phinees’ Last Find.