Free Her Scales Shine Like Music by Rajnar Vajra Page A

levels of atmospheric oxygen might be, he speculated, generated by organisms too small, too cold, or too buried for his instruments to detect; or, more likely, by volcanic processes.
    One anomaly registered. Slightly north of the equator—“north” being an assigned direction—Artist had pinpointed a tiny area of highly refined metals. Hardly a spectacular find, but worthy of a close-up. A science team headed by Cards, High Priest of Geology, flew Mighty Moose down to do so and took Archer and me along, out of habit, I suppose, since the planet’s only apparent danger was tripping and falling.
    I remember the way we joked as we spiraled down. Any number of natural events could’ve resulted in a minuscule patch of pure metals, none of which amounted to anything profitable by RE standards.
    But instead of discovering a pool or two of shiny congealed irrelevance, we found the incredible.
    Six days later, something far more incredible found me.
    *   *   *
    I’m doing some jumping and push-ups to stay warm. Light keeps leaching from the sky, and she still hasn’t appeared. Maybe tonight she won’t. Restlessness invades me like an emotional species of cold, but I can’t bring myself to leave. No oversize bubbles arise, no telltale bulge of water disturbs the lake’s surface. Soon, it will become too dark to know if she’s on the way.
    She? When and why had I begun thinking of her as female? Oh, now I remember: when I began writing that poem about her.
    *   *   *
    Flute set Moose down on a conveniently flat shelf of rock, conveniently close to the site none of us took seriously. Gardener did a just-to-be-sure air sample test, and a minute later Archer and I led our merry band of insulated scientists toward a lake that was three drops shy of being a sea. Can’t speak for Archer, but despite ER’s commandments, I felt two kinds of fool for toting a wave rifle along. Soon, all jokes ceased, along with conversation, because we’d gotten close enough to our goal to see what had to be an abandoned campsite.
    We stopped several meters from it, and spread out into a fog-exhaling semicircle. For a full minute, no one said a word. Finding this evidence would’ve had Cards—even-tempered only by being perpetually peeved—screaming obscenities at the pearly sky, poorly aimed at whichever corporation had mounted an unauthorized expedition here. But the collection of incomprehensible artifacts strewn around had clearly not been made by or for humans. Weaver, our tactile sensor specialist, finally broke our joint stunned silence.
    â€œAnyone doubt that intelligent ETs left all this?” She glanced around at us. Even her Kenyan face appeared somewhat bleached by more than the cold. “Yeah. Me neither. But here’s a little trivia for your consideration, children. They scrambled so recently that my sensors can pick up a touch of residual heat.”
    Quite the aftershock. We looked in each other’s eyes and I’m sure everyone had the same two thoughts.
    Cards wondered out loud for all of us. “You mean we just missed them? Christ! You don’t suppose they took off so suddenly because we’d arrived?”
    Weaver didn’t quite roll her eyes. “By ‘recently’ I meant sometime in the last few local days. You people do know how sensitive my equipment is?” By her tone, we’d have to study hard to attain the level of ignoramus.
    Cards made a firing-back sort of target, but he got distracted.
    â€œHey, you! Archer! Don’t you take another step. We so much as touch that, uh, equipment right now, we could be out millions.”
    No one spoke, but I saw a brightness dawning in everyone else’s face. Yes. We’d landed the jackpot of jackpots. A discovery like this would be worth more than a dozen rare earth or precious jewel mines. We’d each be getting astronomical bonuses! I