ive thousand years in the future there are more than a thousand human worlds controlled by more than a dozen governments, but still no evidence of other sentient life. When a sunless planet with an ancient alien city is discovered moving away from the galaxy, the thousand-world Comity covertly assembles an interstellar armada with teams of experts to investigate. The planet, named Danann, is approaching an area of singularities that will make it impossible to reach in just a few years.
Among the disparate group of scientists and other experts recruited for the expedition are shuttle pilot Jiendra Chang, Earth artist Chendor Barna and Dr. Liam Fitzhugh, a history professor specializing in the analysis of historical trends. Also aboard the Comity ship is John Paul Goodman, an assassin for the Covenanters, who has killed one of the ship's techs and assumed his identity, with his supposed mission to assemble a signaler to identify the location of Danann. The Covenanters, extremist Christians, and the Sunnite Alliance, extremist Muslims, fear that Danann might provide the Comity with high-tech weaponry.
As soon as the Comity fleet is launched, it is attached by a small Sunnite fleet, which it is able to defeat while suffering minimal casualties. After numerous star gate transitions, they arrive at Danannand send down teams of experts to explore its single megaplex of metallic towers and curved canals and lakes, now frozen solid from sunless millennia. Danann is an artificial planet, and billions of years old, but the entire alien megaplex shows no signs of aging. Doorways can be dilated open by application of intense heat from lasers, but there are no artifacts inside these perfect buildings, just curved hallways and more doors leading to more rooms, all similar but none identical. There is no evidence of the aliens who built it. The only evidence that the city is not totally inert is that the lake on which they first landed is beginning to heat up. But Barna uses his artist's intuition to discover the one tower that does contain an artifact that may hold the secret to Danann's purpose and its builders' fate, and may validate the theories being developed by the mission's cosmologists.
To complete their mission, the Comity expedition must battle both saboteurs and enemy fleets to bring back the information they gained and an alien artifact that may provide a quantum leap in mankind's technological evolution.
A very traditional adventure
L.E. Modesitt has been a prolific writer of both fantasy and science-fiction adventure novels for more than two decades. The Eternity Artifact is in many respects superior science-fiction adventure writing. The plot moves compellingly, the characters are distinct and identifiable, and the ideas explored, while not truly cutting-edge new, are interesting and sufficient to make this a very readable science-fiction novel, but one that is very much from the traditional mold.
The problem with The Eternity Artifact is what might be called a distinct failure of extrapolative vision. The characters, cultures and technology are so similar to our early 21st century that it is hard to imagine that the novel is taking place even a century in our future, never mind 5,000 years. Modesitt's characters even mention their consternation that there have been no major technological breakthroughs for millennia. But Modesitt's world shows unbelievably minimal cultural and political evolution as well. Barna primarily uses oil paints. Fitzhugh lectures to students just like a 19th- or 20th-century professor. The major interplanetary governments are all based on current cultures or religions. The Comity is obviously today's secular West, the Covenanters the Christian right, the Sunnite Alliance a more united version of today's Muslim world, and the Middle Kingdom the inscrutable Chinese. (One can only wonder what the other, less important, interstellar empires might be—could there be an Amish interstellar empire out there?) In dozens of ways, both profound and trivial, Modesitt's vision of the future is unexcitedly conservative.
The Eternity Artifact closely resembles a 1940s science-fiction adventure, minimally informed by the events of the late 20th century and almost totally uninformed by the rapidly evolving extrapolative thought processes of current science-fiction literature. It is a science-fiction adventure novel that is more than adequate in many ways, but much too far away from the current cutting edge.
