by Alex Oliver
Up close, the scratch turned into a narrow gap just wide enough for Campos to fit when she squeezed in sideways. She had broad shoulders and a very fine set of breasts on her - which he watched with pleasure despite his ideological reservations about her character - so she was wider than him both ways. Any gap she could wriggle through, he could follow.
"It's deep," her voice came hollowly from inside, sounding pleased. "Come on in."
Actually, he didn't like this much either, but he'd shown enough weakness for one day. He pushed himself through the crack in the earth, feeling a cold clamminess that wasn't all due to the damp rock, found that it opened out within a few steps. There was just enough light to see an opening to his left, and then Campos twisted something on the scanner and its screen flared white, and yes that was definitely a passage further on, and something that looked like... it looked like steps.
"This is good," Campos turned in a circle, taking in the height of the roof, the space or lack thereof to fight. "If they're up in the air relying on scanners, they're not going to see us in here. We wait 'til the next lot come. We ambush them, take their sweeps, and we can be at the colony in days instead of months.
Horrified though he had been at their deaths, Bryant wasn't sure he'd liked the look of the convicts much alive either. "Or we could just stay here," he went over to look closer at those possible steps. "You know? Build a little house? Learn to farm? Call it a retirement plan."
Campos laughed. "They were talking about prisoners - prisoners who had told them about me. That sounds like Mboge managed to get the Froward down in one piece. Some of my people are still alive, and captive. My duty's clear."
There was still the possibility that he could somehow trade her for a ticket off world. In Snow City he could pick up his practice again with no interference. He could do what he had been born to do. He had certainly not been born to grub for a living in the soil.
"Fine," he conceded grudgingly. "Bring that light over here a minute?"
As she came closer she caught what he was looking at. "Are those stairs?"
After that, they both ducked under the low lintel into the further passage to investigate. "No it just looks like..."
The top riser was choked with scree from the jade-like greenish rock of this world, just a shallow, accidental scoop. The next was deeper, but looked just as accidental, covered with fracture faults and on one corner smoothed and bulged out as if the rock had melted into liquid and solidified again. The one beneath that looked sharper, but was choked with three boulders.
Bryant looked at Campos. She looked back. There wasn't really a question about it. Together they rocked, levered and manhandled the boulders apart, and yes, the stairs went on below them, even in depth, sharply edged and unmistakably artificial.
"Okay, some hand signals," said Campos brusquely, she demonstrated a gesture, a clenched fist raised in the air. "This is 'stop'. And this is 'retreat.' I'm guessing if there's anyone down here, they're going to have the lights on, so they won't see our light source approaching. It's a risk to go in with a torch, but in the absence of light vision gear there's not much we can do about that. We're certainly not going down blind. Follow me, be quiet, run if I tell you. All right?"
"Wait. What?"
"Two possibilities. One. This is an outpost made by the Governor that the convicts don't know about. We may find help. Two. This is an outpost made by or known to the criminals, in which case we may be walking into a trap. You're not going to defend us. You need to stay behind me so I can."
Bryant's masculine pride, such as it was, was beginning to be itched by all this competence. Instead of the "Why don't we just leave it alone and get out of here," he might have preferred, he nodded. She thrust the scanner into his hands so that she could prep one of the rifles and cradle it in both arms.
"Quiet till I say it's okay. Ready? Let's go."
He would not have believed the silence with which she eased down the dank green steps. No matter what he did, his own feet made a faint tap every time sole met solid, and his breathing sounded loud in his ears. Even his heart sounded loud to him.
Nothing came up from below, neither sound nor light, but the corridor's walls grew smoother as they went and carvings began to break up the monotony of green rock. Weird carvings.
'Weird' was as far as he could get for a long while, as he passed the narrow scratches that could have been random, could have been some artifact of rock expanding and contracting in winter and summer, they resolved, when he wasn't looking at them directly, into stylized representations of the tall trees outside, like water under which many limbed creatures a little like giant woodlice scuttled.
He put out a hand and touched Campos' jacket in the center of her back. When she turned he laid a hand on the wall and raised his eyebrows to mean 'what the hell is this?' She shrugged, and they went on.
Further down, so much further it was becoming warm, they passed from green rock to russet red. The scanner burst to life in his hand and he had made a squeaky sound before he could catch himself, because it was showing corridor upon corridor, room upon room, spread out under here like a wasp's nest.
The stairs ended in a tiny cubical with an ornately carved door. The thing carved on it looked a little like a Hindu many armed god, but he could not quite work out where the face or the eyes were. When he pushed, the slab of rock swung quietly inward and they came out together onto a high balcony.
Light funnels above their heads shone like huge stars onto wall upon wall of enclosures, some with trellises laid over the top, most roofless. Slender pillars rose thousands of feet from cavern base to its overarching ceiling, and a spiderweb of cables criss crossed the cavern in every direction, some smooth, some studded with what he assumed were unlit lights.
It was a city. A whole, magnificent, city, and it was empty of all but dust. And silence so deep he could hear his own blood thunder beneath his skin in awe and joy and disbelief.
CHAPTER NINE
Philosophy by flower-light
Aurora caught sight of the scanner in Jones' hand. A whole map of the complex was showing up there now. She guessed the green rock must have blocked the beam and this browner stuff didn't. The whole city must be capped with anti-scanning material. Which explained why the survey team had marked this planet fine for colonization. They must not have seen this. They must not have known this was here.
"You get any life signs on there?"
Jones tweaked the controls with delicate fingers. Really everything about him was slight and neat and delicate except for his explosive corkscrew hair. He looked implausibly better than he had the previous day, like concussion was something you could shed as easily as a headache, and the fist-sized swelling that had risen on his forehead when they first arrived was gone without even a bruise.
Enhancements, he'd said. He had enhancements to tell when food was poisoned, and presumably enhancements to heal himself fast.
How many of my people over the years would have lived if they'd had the same?
It was an unsettling thought. Why would God disapprove of healing anyway? He had been a healer himself, on Earth. He had healed injuries well beyond help by the medical profession of the time - that was in scripture, could not be disputed. He had healed Lazarus's death.
What then was so wrong about man bending his God-given intelligence to do the same? If she'd had the power to save any of her comrades over the years, she wouldn't have let them die. She didn't see that anyone could blame her for that.
"I'm not picking up anything above small rodent size," Jones said, freckled face twisted with puzzlement. "And not much of that. Whoever built this, they don't seem to be around any more."
"Let's go look."
The walkway they had entered on circled the cavern wall clockwise, sending out descending ramps approximately every one and a half degrees. She headed for the first, but Jones put a hand on her arm and stopped her. "That one."
He pointed to the third, which descended in
a sweep into a cluster of buildings with closed off woven roofs.
"Why?"
"Wiring diagram," he grinned at her and proffered the scanner again. It now showed - to her eye - an incomprehensible tangle of different colored wavy lines. She must have looked as skeptical as she felt because he grinned. "There are a plethora of pipes embedded in the floor. Some of them are carrying water to and from each building - that's indoor plumbing. Some of them are metallic and some are a kind of obsidian-like glassy stone. My guess is that they carry power and information. Down there," he indicated the third walkway again, "there's a concentration of glass that indicates some kind of information hub. A library perhaps, or government offices. If we're looking to find out what happened here, that seems the best place to start."
"They're really that advanced?"
She'd caught pictures on the way down. Once Jones had drawn her attention to the carvings it had become clear that the impressions you caught out of the corner of your eye were full of information. She'd seen trees and then water, and beneath that she'd seen these buildings, imagined as taller and narrower than they were. In the buildings and around them there had been figures. Many armed, many legged figures that sometimes scuttled like woodlice, sometimes walked upright, sometimes crawled along the narrow rope bridges above their heads.
She'd seen that and she'd remembered the thing she drew out of the lake on the end of a hook made out of one of her hairpins. It had looked like a huge woodlouse, and it had tried to scuttle away.
Jones's vegetarianism wasn't looking so funny now.
"Oh yes," he was saying. "This technology... well, I need a closer look, but I think it's every bit as advanced as our own, maybe more so." His face glowed with a kind of awe and joy that she couldn't see in any other way than innocent, than admirable.
It was pretty certain that if Jones had been the first human ever to be in a first contact situation with an intelligent alien he wouldn't have killed and eaten it without a moment's thought.
Now she wanted to throw up too, but her stomach didn't have the decency to oblige.
Dear God, I didn't mean to. I didn't know!
Had she heard the whisper of a small voice telling her not to? She didn't think so, but she also didn't think she'd been listening very hard. She didn't think she'd been listening hard for months.
"Come on," Jones beamed at her and almost skipped forward, long legged like a delighted stork. She followed him down into the deserted city with a cavern in her chest that was quieter and darker and more desolate by far. I didn't know. God, forgive me.
He picked a building. She ducked inside the fibrous ceiling cover to check it out of reflex, saw an ornate floor covered with scratched symbols, some inlaid with metals and colored rock. The walls by contrast were rough, except for a band of more symbols just above her head hight.
Jones seemed to be cross-checking the floor with the scanner, making some sense of it all. A brittleness she'd barely been conscious of had faded from him. Fearless, his face was transformed. She’d thought it was pinched, mean, aggressive, like the face of a hungry rat, but she couldn't see that now. His lively, engaged curiosity made his eyes shine and gave his oval face a softness, a gentleness she couldn't deny.
"I'm not a murderer!" He'd said it like he meant it, like he was outraged. He'd broken down like a man who was genuinely overcome by the horror of death. As she watched him kneel and then crawl on all fours across the symbolic floor, it all untwisted inside her suddenly, like her hair did at night when the tie came off her braid. It untwisted and unraveled and left her disheveled. Loose and soft and confused.
"Aha," Jones - oblivious to all of this - tugged his sleeve down and pressed his metallic cuff button into a depression on the floor. There was a grumbling shudder underfoot and then above their heads the woven roof began to shine softly gold and green. "Geothermal power," he said, jerking his chin to one side in what looked like a gesture of satisfaction. "Still working. Let me see if I can get the computer on line."
A long, narrow area of the floor beneath his knee went abruptly transparent and began displaying what she guessed was glowing words in birdscratch writing.
"There are regulations," she said, more to herself than to Jones, who was still delightedly romping about among technology he shouldn't be able to understand. "Regulations that say all habitable planets must be searched thoroughly and declared free of signs of intelligent life before they can be claimed as part of the Kingdom. These creatures would have been our brothers in the Lord. When did they leave?"
She scarcely believed herself that she was capable of thinking what she was thinking now. But they had ripped her daughter away from her as she pleaded with them, and it seemed the hole that had made in her devotion just kept on widening. Had the aliens left or had they been driven away? Had they gone of their own accord, or had they just been killed?
"Oh yes, I'll have no difficulties finding that out. Let me just read this entirely alien language, decipher the entirely different dating conventions and work that out for you, shall I?"
He was not a murderer, and she probably was. She didn't deserve to get snippy about a little, reasonable protest. "You do that," she agreed, feeling not for the first time that she would quite like to stop existing now. "And I'll light a fire."
She scouted the area by more conventional means, finding a smaller roofed space close by and piling their stash of stuff inside. Outside it, a rill of mirror smooth water slid silently along a gutter made of sapphire blue tile, emptied out into a small pond for two and a half feet and slid back out again. Public drinking fountain maybe. Unlikely to be sewage, lying open in the middle of the street, and anyway if it was, they were all gone, presumably taking their waste with them.
In case the convicts returned and spotted the cave mouth in their search of the area, she set up trip wires along the walkways, and propped a bucket of pottery shards on top of the door out to the world. If they came looking, pushed open the door, the pots would fall and smash, and she'd have time to get away from the fire and into cover before they came.
She dumped the leaf-wrapped remainder of the creature they'd eaten in the corner of a nearby building, and told herself not to over react. Lots of things that had been created together on Earth had two legs. Apes for example - legs, arms, head more or less in the same place as a man. If an alien of a different body-plan came to Earth, shot a monkey, they might have the same reaction when they met a human for the same time. One scuttling woodlouse creature wasn't necessarily the same as the next, and she might not... might not have...
But it was ration bars from now on regardless.
The day passed. The light faded from the light tunnels in the roof and instead all along the criss crossed web of lines above their heads multicoloured pinpricks of luminescence bloomed out in spectacular swathes of stars, as if they didn't know they were shining on no one.
We wouldn't have killed a whole alien race when there are millions of uninhabited planets we could have taken instead she thought, stirring a little fire to life in the center of the room, more for company than for warmth. But she wasn't as sure of that as she should have been. She looked up at Jones's approaching tread with something like relief.
"Anything?"
He settled next to her, as if he'd forgotten she was his enemy. She felt absurdly grateful for that, dwarfed by the emptiness around and inside her.
"The scanner's programmable," he took two days' rations and looked surprised but grateful not to be offered meat. "So I've written an adaptive translation program and left it running. I've also had a look at the ground plans and at some of the instruments in the adjacent buildings. I don't know but I feel like I might recognize them. We'll know for sure if the translation comes through."
There must have been a knot of resin in the wood. The fire leapt up briefly, and gold ran over his sherry colored eyes and his clever hands, and the slender brown forearms from which he had shoved back his sleeves. She wanted to say "I'm sorry. If
you were wrongly accused, wrongly arrested, ripped out of your life for no reason, I'm sorry," but wasn't ready to go that far.
"Pretty handy guy with technology," she said instead. "I know how to survive in the wilderness, but this stuff is," a shrug. "It's a closed book to me."
She expected something cutting, arrogant, about what happened when you thought with your muscles - couldn't even have resented it because it was true. But he just smiled, surprised, and said, "No one can do everything."
"Is it true that you can control people's thoughts if you touch them?" That, she hadn't actually meant to ask, though she badly wanted to know. Life would be a lot easier for both of them if it wasn't.
Jones looked at her sideways and shuffled along the wall until his clothed shoulder bumped against hers. She moved away and watched his wide mouth flatten itself in a cynical smile. "Sort of," he shrugged, casually. "It's no big deal. "On my planet it's ubiquitous. You can buy bots at the corner store that you swallow, and then when you touch someone, the bots adjust that person's dopamine levels so they like you more. The richer the person, the better the bots they can buy, so they get stronger, wider-ranging effects."
The thought of it made her skin crawl. "So no one ever likes anyone for real? It's a kind of perpetual, mechanical brain rape?" No wonder they had needed to be liberated from a government that had let that go on.
"It's not like that," he protested, squirming. "It's like your enhancements - you wanted to be stronger, so you're stronger. People want to be likable, so they make themselves likable."
"I'm not enhanced." Normally she'd be insulted by the suggestion, accused of cheating the laws of nature. But from his tone there seemed to be no insult intended.
"Oh please."
"I'm not. I come from a high gravity world. I look like a troll," she said, still girlish enough to feel a slight unhappiness at that thought, "because those who don't have heavy bones and strong muscles and fast reactions don't tend to survive to grow up."
He looked at her as though an egg had cracked in front of him and out had popped a dodo. Like he was taken aback and charmed but he still didn't quite believe it.