Readyworld

fiction by michael werneburg

I'd been seeing the alien builders out of the corner of my eyes with greater and greater frequency in the past couple of weeks.

But the noises continued. Then I heard them more clearly; human voices. Someone was coming down the ramp. I pulled up my map of the site, and quickly zoomed in one my position. It was a party of three tourists. They were doubtless taking in all the sights. I wondered if that meant they'd seen me all alone on the map and hoped to twist me for the real scoop on exotic destinations; those hidden sites that never made the guide books. They always asked for that kind of stuff, like this planet owed them a unique experience.

Looking at the artificial mud on my hands I made a decision. I'd already gotten a reprimand for sending some twits off on a wild goose chase. My employers had tracked back some bad tourist advice to me and Lena not long after we'd arrived. The tourists in question had gotten themselves lost in a crevasse complex at the pole, and there had been insurance questions. Nowadays, I used other tactics.

I moved to intercept the tourists, seething. Just because they were rich didn't mean they had the right to interfere in my chance to make my fortune!

I'd learned that all I had to do was start to talk about my work. They always lost interest in a hurry when I did that. I started to climb the ramp, when another thought occurred. If any of the tourists posted images of the Big Room back to the nets, someone—or more likely some automated program—would probably pick up on the changes to the floor in a hurry. And that might spoil my chances to come up with a finder's bonus! I sprinted up the ramp, hoping to head them off.

About two spins of the ramp from the top, I caught up with the party. One man, two women, all clearly of that exclusive caste that followed fashions in body form much as they did in clothing. This season, the fashion apparently called for jet black skin inset with photo-active cells for highlights. All three of them flashed twinkles of light at me in surprise as I emerged from the gloom below.

They'd been drifting along on a sled at maybe a couple of dozen meters per minute. The male was spouting off about everything he'd learned about the Big Room. The other two—the kind of women who hung around with men—were indulging him.

"Good morning, ah, sir," he said at me, after a significant hesitation. He glanced archly at one of his companions, and I knew they were sneering at my mid-gender-change. Only poor peeps made such changes slowly.

"Hi folks," I said brightly as I could while short on breath. No point in beating about the bush; I wanted these three gone. "What can I tell you about the Big Room?"

"Ah, well, I'm actually something of an expert on the matter," the man informed me.

The younger of the two women—well, the one who looked younger, anyway—gasped in an exaggerate fashion, and said, "Machiel, really, she is clearly a researcher, there's nothing you could teach her!" I caught her glancing at my muddy hands. Exactly as I'd hoped!

I prompted him with some well-known facts and quickly learned that his "expertise" ended with stuff he'd picked up in popular media videos. He'd probably gotten bored on the endless flight here. "So, you know it's a hollow sphere the size of Mercury that has a gravity field similar to Earth's. Its orbit is perfectly circular. Perfectly. It's orbiting a red dwarf star that's strangely stable - you know how red dwarf stars usually are! And the reason we humans found the planet in the first place was that the star's location didn't fit a model that an amateur astronomer developed to explain the position of stars in the galaxy. How's that for an inspired guess!"

"Get a lot of visitors down here," the man asked me, his tone amused.

"Not as many as I like. You know, sometimes people ask me about fishing or something like that. I don't know what to tell them, the largest fish are the size of your hand and don't taste good. But as I was saying, the atmosphere is crazily thick for a planet this size, and there are four large jets placed equidistantly around the planet producing more air in a balance that's quite close to Earth standard. It's simply amazing. The architecture and engineering required for such a feat!"

"Ah."