"Jerry Oltion - Artifacts" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oltion Jerry)

with only a mild annoyance at her presumption and an uncomfortable feeling that he'd glimpsed something
a bit too personal. Who would guess that Julie had an urge toward megalomania? "It's polite to warn a
person before you switch their gender," he said, handing the alien device back to her.
She didn't apologize. "Wasn't it great?" she asked. "The bandwidth is better than anything we've seen
before. I think it engages the entire nervous system."
"How did you record it?" he asked. She obviously hadn't been on Rockaway recently.
"That's the amazing part. That was a memory. I just remembered it while the VR wedge was running,
and it picked up all that detail."
He wondered what aliens from the distant past were doing with virtual reality equipment tuned to the
human nervous system. He wondered how distant this particular station's past might be. All the others
they'd found had been millions, if not billions, of years old, but people had always suspected that newer
ones existed. Earth history was full of circumstantial evidence. "Have you established an age for any of
this yet?" he asked.
Julie shook her head. "Not for sure, but it can't be very old. Most of the gadgetry still works."
"Then don't push any buttons while I'm here," he said. She laughed; obviously she thought he was
kidding.
***


They formed a pass-it-on line from the ship to the Artifact living quarters. It wasn't as easy as on a
human-built station. Normally you only needed to put one person at every corner and float things down
the corridors from person to person, but here it was all curves so they needed people every few dozen
feet. But they managed it, even pulling the new scientists out of their cubbies and stacking them in the
on-site med freezer to await thawing. That would be a long process, and the warm bodies had already
worked up a good appetite, so they left the others frozen for the moment and had their big welcome
dinner.
"So what else have you found here?" Brian asked as they sat down in the half-gee section of the
rotating lifesystem. Most of the long tubes that made up the Artifact could rotate; they spun longitudinally,
flexing like something alive so they could maintain their curved topology even while in motion, and they
had frictionless collar-joints so different sections could spin at different rates. The investigators had only
run a couple of them up to speed to use as a cafeteria. Humanity had adapted pretty well to zero gee in
the hundred years or so they'd been out in it, but people still liked a little gravity to hold down their food
while they ate, and one thing they'd never discovered among all of the alien gadgets littering the Solar
System was an artificial gravity generator. Nor a faster-than-light starship. The more they looked at the
way the various aliens had lived and traveled, the less likely either one seemed.
Julie ticked off on her fingers the discoveries her team had made. "Yet another high-temperature
superconductor, this one good up to twelve hundred degrees. An airgel packing foam stronger than solid
steel. A polymer that we think was food when they brought it here, but it makes a great glue now. And
the VR device I showed you. We think they're actually external memories."
"Not religious artifacts?" Brian asked.
She rolled her eyes and he grinned to show her he was kidding. Archaeologists used to claim
everything from figurines to soup bowls were religious artifacts. It evidently sounded more interesting than
the mundane truth. But when dealing with alien races, even the mundane could be pretty exciting, so
they'd quit using the religious interpretation to mean "we don't know."
Besides, there were plenty of artifacts that obviously were of religious origin. Aliens were no different
from humans in that regard. But if Julie had stumbled across any of those, Brian's ship would have carried
a theologian this trip.
So he asked, "Were there any alien memories left in any of them?"
 She glanced at one of the other scientists, and a flicker of communication passed between them.
"Nothing comprehensible," she said.