took the field pack from his shoulders, lit a cigarette, and considered the mountain face before him. The stones around him appeared to be largely metamorphic – their elongated grain speaking to Ramon of the unthinkable pressure and heat near São Paulo’s mantle. The glaciers, when they passed, would have carved this ground, strewing parts of any given field far from their origin. Still, the underlying stone was certainly igneous or metamorphic. The sedimentary layers, if there were any, would be higher up, where the ground was newest. It was the sort of place where a man might find the strike he’d hoped for. Uranium ore, possibly. Tungsten or tantalum if he were lucky. And even if he only found gold or silver or copper, there were places he could still sell the data. The information would be worth more than the metals themselves.
The sad irony of his profession had not escaped Ramon. He would never willingly have moved off São Paulo. Its emptiness was the thing that made it a haven for him. In a more developed colony, the global satellites and ground-level networked particulates would have made solitude impossible. São Paulo still had frontiers, limits beyond which little or nothing was known. He and the others like him were the hands and eyes of the colony’s industry; his love of the unknown corners and niches of the world was unimportant. His experience of them, the data and surveys and knowledge: those had value. And so he made his money by destroying the things that gave him solace. It was an evil scheme, but typical, Ramon thought, of humanity’s genetic destiny of contradiction. He stubbed out his cigarette, took a hand pick from the field pack, and began the long, slow process of scouting out a good place for a coring charge.
The sun shone down benevolently, and Ramon stripped off his shirt, tucking it into the back of his pistol belt. Between hand pick and his small field shovel, he cleared away the thin covering of plants and soil, finding hard, solid rock not more than a foot and a half below the surface. If it had been much more, he’d have gone back for the tools in the van – powered for minor excavations, but expensive, prone to breaking down, and with the whining electrical sound of civilization to argue against their use. Looking along the mountainside, there would likely be other places that would require the more extensive labor. All the better, then, that he begin here.
The coring charge was designed to carve a sample out of the living rock the length of an arm. Longer if it was a particularly soft stone. In the next week, Ramon would gather a dozen or so such cores from sites up and down the valley. After that, there would be three or four days while the equipment in the van sifted through the debris for trace elements and ores too slight to identify simply by looking. Once Ramon had that in hand, he could devise a strategy for garnering the most useful information in the cheapest possible way. Even as he set the first charge, he found himself fantasizing about those long, slow, lazy days while the tests ran. He could go hunting. Or explore the lakes. Or find a warm place in the sun and sleep while the breeze set the grasses to singing. His fingers danced across the explosives, tugging at wires and timing chips with the ease and autonomous grace of long practice. Many prospectors lost careers and hands – sometimes lives – by being too careless with their tools. Ramon was careful, but he was also practiced. Once the site was chosen and cleared, placing the charge took less than an hour.
He found himself, strangely, procrastinating about setting it off. It was so quiet here, so still, so peaceful! From up here, the forested slopes fell away in swaths of black and dead blue and orange, the trees rippling like a carpet of moss as the wind blew across them – except for the white egg of his bubbletent on the mountain shoulder below, it was a scene that might not have changed since the beginning of time. For a moment, he was almost tempted to forget about prospecting, and just relax and unwind on this trip, as long as he was being forced to hide out in the hills anyway, but he shrugged the temptation away – once the fuss over the European had blown over, once he went back, he would still need money, the van wouldn’t hold together forever, and Elena’s scorn if he returned empty-handed again was something he wasn’t anxious to face. Perhaps there will be no ore here anyway, he told himself almost wishing it, and then wondered at the tenor of his thoughts. Surely it could not be a bad thing to be rich? His stomach was beginning to hurt again.
He looked up at the mountain face. It was beautiful; rugged and untouched. Once he was done with it, it would never be the same.
‘All apologies,’ he said to the view he was about to mar. ‘But a man has to make his money somehow. Hills don’t have to eat.’
Ramon took one last cigarette from its silver case and smoked it like a man at an execution. He walked down to the boulders he’d chosen for shelter stringing the powder-primed fuse cord, hunkered down behind the rocks, and lit the fuse with the last ember.
There was the expected blast; but while the sound should have been a single report echoing against the mountains and then fading, it grew louder and longer instead. The hillside shifted greasily under him, like a giant shrugging in uneasy sleep, and he heard the express-train rumble of sliding rock. He could tell from the sound alone that something had gone very wrong.
A great cloud of dust enveloped him, white as fog and tasting like plaster and stone. A landslide. Somehow Ramon’s little coring charge had set off a landslide. Coughing, he cursed himself, thinking back to what he’d seen. How could he have missed a rock face that unstable? It was the kind of mistake that killed prospectors. If he had chosen shelter a little nearer than he had, he could have been crushed to death. Or worse, crippled and buried here where no man would ever find him – trapped until the redjackets came and stripped the flesh off his bones.
The angry, thundering roar quieted, faded. Ramon rose from behind the boulders, waving his hand before his face as if stirring the air would somehow put more oxygen in it or lessen the thick coating of stone dust that was no doubt forming in his nose and lungs. He walked slowly forward, his footing uncertain on the newly-made scree. The stones smelled curiously hot.
A metal wall stood where the façade of stone had fallen away; half a mountain high and something between twenty and twenty-five meters wide.
It was, of course, impossible. It had to be some bizarre natural formation. He stepped forward, and his own reflection – pale as the ghost of a ghost – moved toward him. When he reached out, his blurred twin reached out as well, pausing when he paused. He stopped the motion before hand and ghostly hand could touch, noticing the stunned and bewildered expression on the face of his reflection in the metal, one no doubt matched by the expression on his own face. Then, gingerly, he touched the wall.
The metal was cool against his fingertips. The blast had not even scarred it. And though his mind rebelled at the thought, it was clearly unnatural. It was a made thing. Made by somebody and hidden by somebody, behind the rock of the mountain, though he couldn’t imagine by whom.
It took a moment more for the full implication to register. Something was buried here under the hill, something big, perhaps a building of some sort, a bunker. Perhaps the whole mountain was hollow.
This was the big one, just the way he’d told Manuel it would be. But the find wasn’t ore; it was this massive artifact. It couldn’t be a human artifact, the human colony here wasn’t old enough to have left ruins behind. It had to be alien; perhaps it was millions of years old. Scientists and archeologists would go insane over this find; perhaps even the Enye would be interested in it. If he couldn’t parlay this discovery into an immense fortune, he wasn’t anywhere near as smart as he thought he was …
He flattened his palm against the metal, matching hands with his reflection. The cool metal vibrated under his hand, and, even as he waited, a deeper vibration went through the wall, boom, boom, low and rhythmic, like the beating of some great hidden heart, like the heart of the mountain itself, vast and stony and old.
A warning bell began to sound in the back of Ramon’s mind, and he looked uneasily around him. Another man might not have reacted to this strange discovery with suspicion, but Ramon’s people had been persecuted for hundreds of years, and he himself well remembered living on the grudging sufferance of the mejicanos, never knowing when they would find some pretext to wipe out his village.
Whatever this wall was, whatever reason it had for existing here in the twice-forsaken ass end of a half-known planet, it was no dead ruin – something was at work beneath this mountain. If this was hidden, it was because someone didn’t want it