A few brave warships had chased the asteroid and opened fire after the tragedy on the space station. Their fire did nothing. If anything, each impact made the artifact’s mesh glow brighter.
“Ma’am… we have to stop it.”
Bunten was pacing again. “What if we give the location to a different Clave member?”
The Assistant was horrified. “Oh no, ma’am! I don’t think we can trust the Clave, not at all? I’ve been reading the files, and… those artifacts, they’re dangerous?”
Bunten snorted. She grabbed the glowing yellow tesseract and tossed it to the Assistant. “Hold it to your head, kid.”
Tentatively, the Assistant did as she was told. The yellow construct deformed around her horns and skull. It did sound like the ocean. In fact, there were whispers in the ocean. Susurrant whispers she could almost parse. She felt like a child who had her first glimpse of the worlds beyond the stars, and felt intensely curious. If she just listened more closely, the shadowy sibilance would senesce into silence and surface sense out of the sizzle and sassafras sassy syntaxy solubility salsa –
Bunten pulled the artifact from her head. She yearned for more, but Bunten set it down on the desk gently.
“That was…” The Assistant searched for words. “Beautiful. But also like drowning in very deep water?”
“Danger is relative,” Bunten said. “This is a level seven artifact. Most it’ll do is maybe persuade you that you have a direct channel to a higher level of reality, and that’ll fade after a day or two, though you might have lingering effects like an ayahuasca trip. The asteroid – it might be Stage V or even Stage VI by now, but it’s still only a level two. It’s big, but they probably have access to enough Old One tech to communicate with it or redirect it. The Clave might accidentally let it eat a starbase or something, but it can’t grow if they’re studying it somewhere out in empty space and they restrain it. Better contained than loose.”
“Only level two? But it’s singing… and maybe talking? Isn’t it aware?”
Bunten shrugged and pointed at her yellow tesseract. “This here is probably intelligent too. And it was talking to you just now – in a language we can’t quite understand. I’m much more worried about the alien artifacts we can’t understand than the ones that like show tunes.” She quirked a grin. “It’s a loathsome habit, but it’s one we humans understand.”
“You keep saying it’s Stage V…”
“Yes, it’s growing. That’s a stage of development. Once it reaches Stage X, it’ll probably converse just like the hunter-killer that just left. If it’s sane and not a berserker.”
The Assistant was thinking furiously. “So, it’s… it’s a hungry baby. And it’s moving intentionally, like it’s curious.” She thought about the sense of an endless ocean and how she had felt like wading into the tesseract and losing herself under its waves. “What if we can offer it an ocean to walk into?”
Bunten looked at her with sharp interest. “What are you thinking, Assistant?”
She reached for the datapad and the earbuds. “I was doing some research…”
Bunten gestured impatiently for her to go on.
“It’s a part of the job I really enjoy? And what you just said has me thinking… what if we give it something to be curious about?”
# # #
It took only a few hours to get the beacons lined up right. The Assistant programmed the playlists herself. She even spent the time to do some remixes, blending in Skwatchi slam poetry with “Hello Dolly!” She fired that last one on a trajectory that doomed it.
She felt uneasy about drowning a baby. But baby monsters are still monsters, right? And she was becoming aware that there were a lot more kinds of monsters in the world than she ever knew.
The whole Garden watched breathlessly as the asteroid diverted course to follow the novelty the beacons offered. Clave and Warden vessels chased it fruitlessly across the spaceways as it avoided Pyromycis altogether, chasing the signature songs from the second acts.
It was one day more before all that jazz lured the Artifact through the local sector, and across the event horizon of a black hole.
It went down burbling songs from Cats, defying gravity to the very end.
# # #
The Assistant watched Bunten sag back on the couch and wave at the NewsNet screen to turn it off. The reporters had moved on from saying anything positive about the asteroid’s demise, and instead were full of recriminations against the government for having failed to save enough lives.
Bunten looked over at the Assistant, apologetic. “I’m sorry. I know I was riding you hard today. It gets to me, sometimes.” She waved again, and suddenly show tunes were playing quietly on speakers in the room.
“That’s understandable, ma’am,” the Assistant said. She had kicked her shoes off, and was lounging on the other couch. She was indulging in a cold compress on her forehead, draped across her horns.
“No, listen. You did good today.” Bunten looked down. “And you had some fresh ideas.”
“Thank you, ma’am.” She still felt enervated, almost hollow, from the rush that her idea had worked. Now she felt drained, like a vessel ready to be filled. “Sorry about the musical theater.”
Bunten smiled tiredly. “I’ll never admit it in public, but I have loathsome habits myself sometimes.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I know today was hard. Our job. Our job is secrets. We learn secrets, and we keep secrets, and our job isn’t to save one planet,” Bunten said.
The Assistant slowly sat up, and looked into the eyes of her boss, a woman who bore many burdens.
“It’s not,” the Assistant said. She felt more sure of herself, and for once, it didn’t come out as a question.
“No,” Bunten said. “It’s to save all of them.”
“All the planets…” the Assistant breathed.
“No, girl.” Bunten smiled wistfully at her. “All the people. And we are going to fail every damn day at it.”
“We did okay today.” But even with her eyes closed, all the Assistant could see was that child’s drawing.
“You say that now. But you need to understand. We’re just bureaucrats, really. Armed with regulations and paperwork. Rules from on high that don’t make any sense, and long days averting catastrophes that you can only see by parsing spreadsheets. We do our jobs by stamping forms and approving line items, fining and horse-trading and favors. The days are long. Some are like today. Most aren’t. And the pay sucks. And no one will ever like you for it, because every single thing you do will be a trade-off.”
The Assistant thought about that, and for some reason she felt proud of that. “About that, ma’am? If I did really well today…”
“Shut up. No, you cannot have a fucking raise. You can’t even catch an escaped space otter.”
The Assistant grinned ruefully. “Had to ask!”
There came a pounding at the door, and frenetic buzzing. The door screen activated, and the Assistant saw a flustered group of Elioni. They were worked up about something. She could hear them shouting something about cultural insensitivity, memory, and cats. And how offensive it all was, and apologies were demanded!
Oh, she thought. Cats. Right.
“Back to work, I guess!” the Assistant said, and grinned at her boss.
Bunten grinned back.
“So, before we let them in,” Bunten said. “Faceless bureaucrat… tell me your name.”