by Bill Adams
“ ‘What, frighted with false fire?’ ” the old woman quoted, not quite knocking over Ariel’s glass with one sleeve of her elaborate safari costume. “And then there’s the ‘cold fire’ of the glowworm. ‘Pale and ineffectual,’ as the same poet says.”
“Romeo and Juliet,” I noted. “Act One?”
“A fellow classicist—what splendid luck! The current generation,” she said darkly, “recognizes nothing but song lyrics and Larkspur.”
Polite laughter and objections went around the table, adding to the dinner-party atmosphere. The archaeologists must have turned out of bed earlier than we had, to lay on such a feast for their sub-commissioner.
The camp had come into view as soon as we’d flown over the ridge. Just beyond the crest—a tiny plateau crowned with a weird balancing-rock formation—paths led down to a flat break in the wooded hillside overlooking the prairie. There a few prefabricated canvas buildings with metal frames, ugly but serviceable, stood next to a landing pad sketched out with flares. Nothing on the outside had prepared me for the dim but well-stocked cookhouse, its trestle table dolled up with a linen cloth, real glasses, and candles.
Citizen Hogg-Smythe—the surname pronounced, perversely, as if it were a synonym for “pork”—took credit for the bird’s mushroom stuffing, the fruit salad, and the sauce for the quail’s eggs on rice, all excellent. She apparently considered herself old enough to indulge a penchant for prosiness and eccentric dress. One hundred twenty-odd, I guessed, despite her wiry energy—perhaps the final decade left to her. But it was clear that she remained good at whatever she put her hand to, and retained keener wits than most of the younger members of the party.
There were six of these, five males and Foyle, mostly academics in fields other than archaeology. The one who had baked the breads, a short, fat sociologist named Ruy Lagado, had brought along his adolescent son Harry; otherwise the ages appeared to range between thirty and sixty—no one save Hogg-Smythe much older than I might be, with the dyed streaks in my hair. This made their constant deference feel less unnatural, though I still quashed the ‘Excellency’ business in favor of ‘Commissioner’ or ‘Sir.’
I’d managed to keep the small talk away from archaeology, though the threat couldn’t be warded off much longer.
“But the flare I saw in the marsh was so bright,” I said. “I would expect gas discharges to be, as you say, wisps. Like this.”
I made a fluttering conjuror’s pass above one of the candles, and a half-dozen tiny ghost flames danced in midair beneath my fingers, to disappear as suddenly.
“How did you do that, sir?” gawky young Harry Lagado asked, surprised out of boredom. He wasn’t the only one. Ariel applauded lightly, tongue in cheek, and Foyle aimed a narrow-eyed stare that caught me up short.
“Just a trick,” I said, and shrugged. “We’re all amateurs at something.”
I can’t resist table magic. It’s so easy, for one thing, with everyone distracted and no one expecting it. Props are always at hand—in this case, a pinch of fine flour from one of the storage cans stacked under the table; the trick is to release it thinly enough to be both invisible and flammable. And I’d wanted to further my designs on Ariel. Card tricks bore women, but sleight-of-hand suggests a certain useful dexterity.
“Well. The marsh is a magician, too,” said Citizen Piet Wongama. Dark-haired and heavily freckled, he was so tall that his athletic body looked skinny. He was on sabbatical from teaching one of the physical sciences, and spoke with the dogmatic assurance of a full professor. “We shall have to let it keep its secrets.”
“But I wouldn’t want the commissioner to think we’ve ignored it,” Foyle said. She looked earnestly at me. “We’ve glanced over all the territory adjoining our site.
“Those wetlands fan westward from that lifeless lake just over the ridge. The water chemistry is poisonously alkaline, making the area an unlikely campsite for any past visitor. That’s why we’ve concentrated our efforts on this side of the ridge.”
That was good news. Condé had not entrusted me with the exact location of his precious “barrow,” but the two areas he wanted me to steer the archaeologists away from were the marsh and the intervening ridge—especially the balancing rocks on the summit, which he’d called “an important clue.”
Friar Francisco cleared his throat to speak. On leave from his order’s seminary, where he taught biology and zoology, he wore the robe and cowl of the Green Church in an olive-drab shade matched to his personality. “I know what you’re thinking,” he told me. His eyes shone in his dark brown face.
“Indeed?”
“We know our aliens landed here roughly nine hundred thousand years ago. You are thinking, climates change in such a period; perhaps there was no poisonous marsh then. Perhaps we should check that area for artifacts after all.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I began.
“And of course you’re right! One would normally expect all sorts of shifts and changes in that length of time. But not here.”
“No?” I said.
There were rueful smiles around the table.
“We call it the sleeping planet,” said Helen Hogg-Smythe.
“Newcount Two is pretty dense to hold an Earthlike atmosphere despite its size,” Foyle said. “Which suggests plenty of heavy metals and a hot core. And if you go back far enough—say, a million point two years—you see evidence of all the volcanism and tectonic activity you’d expect.
“The whole central mountain chain of this continent is that recent, or even younger; it’s so anomalous, geologically, that I wish I could doubt the rock dates. And there was a lot of magnetic field activity at about the same time they were formed, a bizarre upswing in intensity.”
“If we can trust the sedimentary evidence, since the life bombing,” Hogg-Smythe pointed out.
“There’s room for doubt,” Foyle agreed. “But the picture we have shows a period of anomalous field strength beginning about a million years ago, accompanied by just as dramatic a decline in the rate of geologic and climatic change. Overnight, this became an old, tired planet. Within the last thousand years even the magnetic field has settled down, currently about Terran strength, and unusual only for its regularity.”
“Don’t forget your clays,” Lagado senior said with his usual trailing gasp. His delivery was that of a man who had to get his remarks in before people started ignoring him again.
“And the clays,” Foyle continued. “Even normal clay has some surprising electromagnetic properties, you know, but here the strata interactions have our subsoil scanners baffled. That leaves us no way to check the other things that puzzle us. Some of the seismological echoes, for instance…”
“And as I keep reminding my less experienced friends, Commissioner,” Wongama said, “none of this is really unusual. Because geology, when you come right down to it, is just the science of pretending that other planets are like Old Earth. And that’s the one thing they never are.”
“True,” I said.
“But that’s why I agree with you, Commissioner,” Foyle said. “We shouldn’t neglect the marsh. Planetary differences may be confusing the climate record. We’ll never know unless we look.”
“Oh, I don’t—” I began, and Wongama interrupted obliviously.
“This is an old argument with us, sir. I contend that even if there were antiquities beyond the ridge, they’d have been lost when the lake appeared. It looks to be a large sinkhole, of relatively recent origin.”
I put down my coffee—which, like the food, was first-rate; if you have to rough it, rough it with amateurs—and did my best to drag them out of the marsh and back to generalities. “Is all this data from the original survey record?”
Hogg-Smythe snorted. “Hardly. The terraformers don’t memorialize what they mean to destroy.”
“You blame them?” came a quiet voice from the other end of the table. “Creation has imperatives, and killing clears the way. To bend a world to your will,
you must stand outside history.” But the speaker, Freeman Ken Mishima, had been introduced as a lecturer on history, military and diplomatic; a latecomer to the dig, I’d been told, arriving with a letter of introduction from Mehta only a week or two before.
“You can also bend your will to a world,” Hogg-Smythe said. “Enter in, and understand it.”
“Stand down, you mean,” Mishima said. “The weaker must give way. That is the nature of the dance, and all war.” A big, soft-spoken man in his late fifties, he carried a slight paunch with the powerful unconcern of a tiger. His straight black hair was close-cropped, shaven away above his ears; his jet-black eyes were watchful but expressionless. Tan work clothes hung on him like the uniform I was sure he’d once worn. I couldn’t trace his plonking catchphrases to any of the usual mystical sources—Sufism, Kanalism, Zen—but it would be something militant, from one of the desert places; the dogs of war have hot dry breath. “You talk about entering in, but you are too respectful to do so,” he continued. “You stick to our campfire at night. I love nature better; I go sleep with her.”
No wonder Ariel had tried to whisk me off the planet without meeting this crew. An eccentric oldster, an academic know-it-all, a shirttail boy and his ineffectual father, a monk, a mystic warrior, and a misanthropic redhead. A good break for my patron Condé: they couldn’t even coordinate table talk, much less a scientific inquiry.
“The commissioner is still waiting for a reply,” Foyle finally broke in, irritated as usual. “We are not wholly dependent on the original survey, sir. My freighter can scan the planet from orbit. I have specialized equipment. Particle detectors, magnetic-resonance and gravity-flux analyzers, and so forth.” When she mentioned her ship, she began to finger a fine gold chain around her neck. A pendant, enameled in swirls of aqua and turquoise, bobbed up to the throat of her gray jumpsuit, then retreated beneath it again.
“An impressive package,” I said.
“Which would do us a lot more good in rotosynchronism, directly overhead,” she said, after an unreadable glance at Ariel. “Unfortunately, the satellite construction crew has port authority here, and they’ve assigned my vessel a low circumpolar orbit. ‘To keep it out of the way,’ they claim, which is ridiculous. I think their security honchos prefer that it behave like a defense satellite—a prominent decoy, in case someone should attack the planet. The usual paranoid—”
Ariel stepped in, gentle but firm. “As a matter of fact, this is a time of real danger for the senator. I can’t go into details, but if Security is playing it very safe, it’s because I’ve told them to. You should know that, Foyle.”
“Oh, you take responsibility,” Foyle said. “But what do you give?”
Ariel turned her face to me and poured on the charm. “Sympathetic as I am to what our friends are doing here, I was not authorized to divert one munit’s worth of construction equipment or worker time to this project. You know what building is like in the fringes, sir, on an uninhabited world. Machine-intensive, despite shipping charges that make you cut spare parts and backups to the bone. I have fewer than sixty workers, including those in orbit. Every one of them is a specialist, every man-hour counts. I help this dig when I can. I’ve kept their batteries in constant relay to the main camp; I’ve sent two of their vehicles through our motor pool for repairs; I’ve—”
“You’re careful not to replace the radio, though,” Foyle observed. “So you don’t have to hear from us for a week at a time.”
“And look at the Otis system!” Lagado said as if the words had been choking him.
Foyle looked thoughtful. “Yes, I think the commissioner would like to see the Otis system.”
“The…Otis system,” I repeated.
“I have to admit that I’d find another expert opinion helpful there,” Wongama said.
“Time to adjourn to the site anyway,” Hogg-Smythe decided. “I’m sure the commissioner can’t wait to get at it.”
◆◆◆
Seen close-up, the Stone Huts looked less like card houses, but no more like anything else. The disproportionate thickness of the black slabs was more impressive, as was their matte finish, marred only by occasional patches of lichen and a few sequences of engraved characters. Although most of the walls were slanted, Wongama had assured me that this was due to the shifting ground, the uneven way the Huts had sunk and resurfaced over the millennia; the constituent slabs still joined at perfect right angles.
“I can’t get over the way they join,” I said.
“That’s what ‘alien’ means,” Foyle agreed. “The material itself is a ceramic smelted from local stone, stronger than any stone you’d find in nature. I don’t know how much of the original survey report you’ve read yourself, sir—”
“Actually, there’s been so little time,” I said in a confidential tone. “Just taken over the post, and, uh…”
She looked unsurprised and almost sympathetic; she glanced over at the others to see if they’d heard. They were still rehashing the dispute they’d tried to draw me into as soon as our convoy of terrain buggies had reached the prairie floor. The acres under excavation were marked out with laser-reflector stakes into a grid pattern, only a few squares of which showed signs of actual digging. These “test pits” were connected with “test trenches” across grid lines, and the big debate was whether, in view of the negative results, the baseline had been ill-chosen. Quickly gathering from the faces of Foyle and Hogg-Smythe that one alignment of the grid would serve as well as another, I’d refused to take sides.
“Stronger than stone, you say?”
“Yes. We humans only discovered this form of ceramic sixty or seventy years ago. We know enough about it to be able to date these slabs, and to state that some of them have been exposed to great pressure and great heat since they were forged. They’re not huts for living in, of course, though some of them may have been used as tool lockers or temporary radiation shelters. What they mainly are—incredibly—is sawhorses.”
“What?”
“It’s the only hypothesis we have, aside from Lagado’s ‘religious shrine’ nonsense. The overall layout of the Huts, the pressure marks on their tops, and the patterns of heat stress all seem to indicate that the central ring of structures was used to prop up something huge and heavy while it was being worked on with high-energy tools. A spacecraft, or part of one, during an emergency stop.”
“Who would do that sort of repair on a planetary surface?”
“Not humans, that’s for sure. It’s the same totally alien idea of practicality you noticed in the slab joins.”
The huge slabs were not welded or riveted together, but fitted like antique woodworks.
“That’s a dovetail, and the open-sided ones employ what is called a mortise-and-tenon joint,” Foyle said. “The fit is so perfect it’s unreal.”
“And those characters inscribed near the join?”
“Probably alphabetic, rather than ideographs. Thus far, they’re the only design motifs we’ve been able to give Senator Mehta’s people. To decorate his palace, you know.”
“No way of figuring out what they said, I suppose.”
“ ‘This side up,’ ” replied Wongama, rejoining us. “Or ‘Put tab A into slot B.’ ”
“Really?”
“Piet believes they’re just reference marks for the robots that assembled the structures,” Foyle explained. “Plausible enough. Unfortunately—”
“As Foyle will delight in telling you,” Wongama interrupted, “my analysis of the construction code is contradicted by a few of the Huts, as though they’d been put together incorrectly. And of course we don’t believe that.”
“The true, religious nature of the glyphs has yet to be revealed,” Lagado suddenly insisted at my side.
Time to change the subject and touch on the only point I felt genuine curiosity about. I gestured at the scores of brooding black fins, arches, and boxes, some of them jutting as high as thirty meters from the grassy
plain. “You know, I can’t help thinking how surprised a layman would be to hear that we archaeologists consider…all this…a minor, almost insignificant find.”
“Yes, it’s visually impressive, isn’t it?” Hogg-Smythe said. “Like everything left behind by the so-called Titans…” As if her epaulet-festooned safari jacket weren’t colorful enough, she was carrying a man-high crook for a walking stick. “I wonder if they were as lonely as we are? Are starfaring races so rare, so short-lived, that they never share the same time and place? Do they always give up, as so many of our own species have, on interpreting the few epoch-old shards their predecessors have left behind?”
“Is there nothing at all here except the Huts themselves?” I asked.
“We’ve discovered artifacts,” Foyle said guardedly. “But they aren’t good news. Here, I’ll show you.”
She led me a hundred yards to a small field shelter, carefully pinning back both entrance flaps before we went in. “I try to keep it ventilated during the day,” she said. “These celluloid solutions can be explosive.”
She was referring to a glass tank on the table inside; it contained something brown in a clear fluid that emitted a pungent chemical smell. “It’s a shovel handle,” she explained. “Here’s another.” The pitted shaft of wood she handed me had a hard transparent coating. I hefted it. “I found that one a month ago, in wet clay three meters down.”
Wongama’s tall frame hovered outside the shelter entrance. He wrinkled his nose at the acetone smell. “Foyle is best at preserving ancient methods of archaeology.”
I tried not to look baffled.
“I always travel with the old chemical preparations, just in case,” Foyle explained. “Petroleum jelly for leather, ammonia for gold, and so forth. I’ve babied these handles. Kept them from drying out, moved them through eight stages of solution—water to alcohol, then xylene, and two days in acetone before I started adding the celluloid. And meanwhile, everyone kept telling me to wait for a crystal restoration, the Otis system would be fixed any day now. It wasn’t, though, was it, Piet? If not for this field expedient, both specimens would have split and rotted away the moment they dried.”