Chindi

by Jack McDevitt

  He touched the rocky wall behind him. Although it was cold, frigid, none of that leaked through into the e-suit, in which he remained snug and warm. The miracle of the technology. But he knew that it was a couple of hundred degrees below zero out there, and he wondered whether anyone else had ever stood here. The original occupants must have come this way on occasion, strolling along the shelf as far as they could. It was a natural act for any creature that would want to live in such a place. He looked for prints, but, of course, had there been any other than his own, they were long since filled in.

  His light picked out something under the lander.

  An indentation. Running almost the length of the vehicle.

  It was just inside the tread, parallel to it. Maybe a half meter wide. And recent. It hadn’t even begun to fill in. He stared at it for a time, trying to puzzle out what might have made it, and then he bent down and looked underneath, and saw a second, parallel, line, identical, several meters over. It was half-obscured by the opposite tread.

  He got back up and returned to Hutch. She was still climbing around up near the windscreen. Too busy to notice him.

  The alien vehicle had treads, but they were farther apart than the tracks beneath the lander. And wider. Whatever had set down back there, it had been a different vehicle.

  The burial party.

  THEY ALL TROOPED out to look. Hutch took pictures. George repeated Nick’s observation: “Can’t have been here long ago.”

  They looked up at the sky. Nick saw the Memphis, a star moving slowly down the western rim. Then, subdued, they returned inside.

  IT WAS TIME to go get the pocket dome.

  A set of air tanks had a life of six hours. Alyx, George, and Nick refilled theirs, and Hutch left three extra pairs. Just in case. Then she and Tor climbed into the lander and returned to the Memphis.

  Hutch scanned the measurements from the windscreen for Bill and set him to work.

  They filled the dome’s water and air tanks, and loaded everything into the cargo space. They added some reddimeals and assorted snacks and a few bottles of wine.

  Tor was clearly enjoying himself. With his dome, he was becoming a central figure in the Contact Society effort. And he kept talking about the significance of the discovery. “It’ll be a merry Christmas on Vertical,” he said.

  While they were completing the work, she could not avoid being conscious of the fact that they were truly alone for the first time. But if Tor had any notions about taking advantage of the situation, he suppressed them. Once or twice he could not have helped catching her looking at him in what must have been an odd way. But he let it go.

  “Hutch.” Bill’s voice. “I have a tentative result.”

  “Already?” Tor’s eyebrows went up. “He’s only had the data a half hour.”

  “He’s pretty quick,” said Hutch. “What have you got, Bill?”

  “Did you want the details or simply the result?”

  “Just tell us how long the lander’s been on the shelf.”

  “The numbers are hardly definite, but I would say between three and four thousand years.”

  That was a shock. The place just didn’t feel that old. Nowhere close to it. “Bill, are you sure?”

  “Of course not. But the figure is correct if the current intensity of the solar wind is typical.”

  ON THE RETURN flight, Hutch maneuvered carefully, trying to avoid setting down on the tracks of the third lander. She didn’t entirely succeed. But they’d gotten pictures, and they could re-create them virtually.

  Alyx and George were waiting for them. They told Hutch they’d mistaken her for Santa, and did a couple of other lame jokes about not being sure whether the sleigh came this far out.

  It reminded Hutch that they had no gifts to distribute. In all probability, she thought, had they not encountered the house, the retreat—it was a retreat really, there was no way to deny that now—had they simply been sailing along in the Memphis, nobody would have thought about gifts. They’d have sung a few songs about mistletoe and sleigh bells and Christmas on Luna, raised some toasts, and that would have been it. But here, within this house overlooking the ultimate view, amid furnishings so large that they all felt once again like children—Where are my electric trains, Dad?—Hutch longed to give out some stuff, cologne for Alyx, and maybe a loud shirt, a red shirt with golden dragons on it for Tor, and a few good mysteries for George (who had a taste for whodunits), and something appropriately personal for Nick. She liked Nick and would have liked to signal her affection in some oblique way. But she wasn’t sure what would work. Not that it mattered here, where the nearest mall was a couple of hundred light-years off to the right.

  They set up the pocket dome in the courtyard, at the far end, away from the graves. It was simple enough, just a matter of pulling the trigger and watching it inflate itself, and then connecting water and air tanks, installing power cells, and turning it on. Unlike the e-suits, it couldn’t subsist on vacuum energy alone, but required a direct power source.

  Then they retreated inside, turned off their suits, and broke out the snacks and drinks. George announced that it was appropriate at this time of year to toast the captain at the beginning of festivities, and they did. Then they toasted George, their “beloved leader.” And Alyx, “the most beautiful woman in the sims.” And Nick, “who would be there to see them all off.” (Nick assured them he would do his best by them.) And finally Tor, “our own Rembrandt.” They sang a few carols, ate and drank and sang some more, and everyone had a good time.

  George offered a toast “to us.” “As long as the human race endures,” he said, raising his glass and struggling not to spill anything, “it will remember the voyage of the Memphis.”

  “Hear, hear.” Drink it down, refill, and let’s have another.

  THE ALIEN LANDER had made its last flight onto the ledge a thousand years or so before the birth of Christ. What had been happening in the world at the time?

  Rome was a distant dream.

  Egypt must have been building pyramids, although Hutch thought it had passed through that phase by then.

  Sumer was already pretty old, but Homer wouldn’t be born for another two or three centuries. Athens hadn’t shown up yet on the radar.

  Because the retreat had been erected in the timeless environment of a sterile moon, it was subject to almost no change. Occasional dust thrown up by a ground tremor, perhaps, or by the arrival in the neighborhood of a meteor. A few particles thrown out by the sun. By cosmic standards, the system in which it existed was unstable, and the platform on which it rode more unstable yet. But nevertheless here it was after almost the whole of human history had passed. The lander still waited for its pilot, and a book lay open all this time on the worktable in the main room.

  What had the occupant been reading when he stepped away? Had something unexpected happened that he had not come back?

  What was his name?

  The party died down. Hutch and Alyx wandered out to the lander, where they’d spend the night. More room that way for everyone. And more privacy.

  She was almost asleep before she fell into her chair. Her last conscious thought was that, though the retreat had been here several millennia, this was its first Christmas.

  chapter 20

  When the barbarian is at the door, when the flood grows near, when the cemetery is restless, people always behave the same way. They deal with it. But first they party.

  —JAMES CLARK,

  DIVIDE AND CONQUER, 2202

  IN THE MORNING, which was of course lit in the same ethereal way as the previous night, they ate in the dome. It was a trifle crowded for five people, but they made do.

  Afterward, Hutch prowled through the retreat. George took her aside for pictures. He was taking pictures of everyone, he explained, mementos of the occasion. So he walked her around and she posed in the main room, in the cupola, and in the dining area, standing beside a table that rose past her shoulders. And on the upper deck, looking pen
sively down at the courtyard. She posed with Tor and Nick, with Alyx, and of course they took several group pictures. And eventually she stood beside George himself.

  She returned to the alien lander in the afternoon for a closer look at the power plant, which clearly had a dual capacity. It encompassed a device that appeared to be a fusion reactor, but there was an additional unit that she didn’t recognize, except that it provided a housing for the Gymsum coils that signaled Hazeltine technology. That implied this wasn’t a lander at all, but was instead a self-contained superluminal. The common wisdom was that a Hazeltine engine, necessary for the space-twisting capabilities of interstellar propulsion systems, had certain minimum size constraints, and that no such system could possibly be installed inside a vehicle the size of a lander. Still, one never knew.

  Somebody had posted signs on the clothes closets saying PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH. It looked like George’s printing, and she was glad to see he was taking preservation seriously.

  She stood looking at the clothing, thinking, there had only been two of them. Did the magnificence of the spectacle create an illusion, suggesting that this had been a retreat, a vacation home? A week at the shore? It was possible, after all, that the occupants had been exiled, marooned out here because they were someone’s political enemies. Or undesirables of another sort. Maybe the ship parked on their front lawn was disabled. Something to remind them of what they’d lost.

  Tor came into the room and motioned to the window. “Something you’ll want to see,” he said.

  The two planets were rising in the east.

  “It happens every night. I was talking to Bill. He says, seen from here, they’ll come up, circle each other, and set at around sunrise.”

  THE WONDER OF it all wore off quickly. They couldn’t read the books, couldn’t see the paintings, couldn’t even sit on the furniture. They were beginning to talk about what they should do next when Bill announced a message from Outpost. “Dr. Mogambo,” he said.

  She knew what that would be about. Move over, George. “Okay, Bill. Let’s see what he has to say for himself.”

  The Academy seal with the Outpost designator blinked on, followed by Mogambo’s serene features. “Hutch.” He flashed a smile, a smile that told her he was pleased with what they’d been doing, that he was in fact delighted, and that he knew an opportunity when he saw one. “You and Gerald have been doing excellent work.”

  Gerald? He meant George, knew that George was in charge. But he was sending a message that they were in fact small potatoes, little people of minor consequence. “I’ve forwarded the latest news to the director, and recommended that your efforts on the mission be suitably acknowledged.” He was wearing a light brown jacket, with a mission patch on his left shoulder. She couldn’t quite make it out. “You’ll be happy to know that you won’t be on your own any longer.” He re-arranged himself, slid a hand into the jacket pocket. “Help is on the way.”

  “Good,” she said to no one in particular, wishing someone else were coming. Anyone else.

  “We’ve commandeered the Longworth, and expect to be there in about seventeen days. Until then, I know you’ll make sure nothing gets manhandled.” Not mishandled. Not dropped. Manhandled. “Hutch, I’m sure you realize that the less amateurs have to do with a find of this nature, the better off we all are.”

  He was about to sign off when he remembered something. “By the way, be advised the media are on their way, too. There’s been a UNN ship at Outpost doing a series of some sort. I don’t know what it was about. But when word about the retreat started to spread, they left immediately. Broke a leg getting out of here.” He tried to look annoyed but didn’t quite succeed. “I guess we’ll just have to tolerate them. Anyhow, well done, Hutch.”

  And he was gone.

  Mogambo was the last guy they needed. Where were the archeologists?

  But there was a comic aspect to it. The Longworth was an enormous cargo vessel, used principally to haul supplies and capital equipment for the ongoing construction efforts on Quraqua. It was old, cramped, solid, without the relative opulence that Mogambo would prefer.

  “It must have been all they had available,” said Tor, reading her mind.

  “WHAT I’D LIKE to do,” George said, on their third day at the retreat, “is to get the energy shield up again. And restore life support. That should be our first priority, to put everything back the way it was.”

  “How do you plan to do that?” she asked.

  His eyebrows rose. “I assumed you could do it. You can, can’t you?”

  She looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. I’m just a little old country girl. “It’s not possible,” she said. “Even if we could figure out how the equipment works, expecting stuff that’s three thousand years old to function is not reasonable.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. Where he came from, nothing was impossible. It was a matter of will and ingenuity. There was no such thing as being unable to accomplish a specific task. George liked Hutch, but she gave up too easily. She’d never have made it, he knew, in the business world.

  He went outside, turned his back to the precipice and the sky, and studied the long oval building, its oculus window, its decks, the dish antennas, and he thought nothing in the world would give him more pleasure than seeing the lights come on. He wanted to be able to strip off the e-suit, to wander through the courtyard, to make dinner in the kitchen, to sleep unencumbered in the cupola, to live a few days in the house as it had been. When he expressed those sentiments to Alyx, she was sympathetic, but she, too, thought it could not be done. At least not until a lot of help arrived.

  But then it would be too late. There’d be technicians running all over the place, and this Mogambo would be taking charge, and it wouldn’t be at all the way it had been in the old days. “We owe it to the Beings that lived here.”

  They had wandered outside, because it was only from out there, where the retreat tended to withdraw into the shadows, that he could make his point. Overhead, the big ring and the Twins were bright and hard. “The Beings are asleep in the courtyard,” she said, capitalizing the noun as he had. “You’re talking about a major project. We don’t have the people here to do it.”

  He knew. He’d probably known before he’d asked Hutch. But he’d been hoping because he wanted so desperately to be able to make it happen.

  He was in the position he’d dreamed about all his life, camped out in a living room that had served an alien intelligence. But it wasn’t turning out the way it was supposed to. The shelves were filled with books no one could read, or even take down. The walls were hung with pictures no one could make out. Down the back staircase, there was a power plant no one could understand. Outside, on the shelf, stood a lander that might be a great deal more than a lander, but no one could make anything out of that either.

  When Mogambo got here, everything would change.

  But Mogambo was the enemy.

  “Isn’t there a law,” he asked Hutch, “that says the discovery belongs to us? To the first people on the spot?”

  “Unfortunately,” she replied, “there were a series of bad experiences on Nok, Quraqua, and Pinnacle. In each case, the first people on the spot looted pretty much at will. When the researchers arrived, the original discoverers continued to make off with priceless artifacts, and in several cases did some serious vandalism. The result was the Exoarcheological Protection Act, which governs in these cases now. When the Academy shows up, they have jurisdiction.”

  “So he can just walk right in—”

  “—And make himself at home. Yes, that’s exactly what he can do.”

  It wasn’t that George was demanding credit for the discovery, although that would be nice, and probably would be his, in any case. And it wasn’t that he would have denied the discovery to the Academy. But he wanted to do the investigation himself. He wanted to bring out experts, his own people, translate the books, solve the riddle of who had buried whom, figure out what kind of technology h
ad run the place. It was the dream of his life, come true in a way he could never have hoped. And they were going to take it from him.

  “I’m sorry we let them know what we’d found,” he said. He turned a baleful eye on Hutch. “This isn’t your fault. But we’d have been better off with Preacher Brawley as our captain. Somebody not wedded to Academy regulations.”

  “It’s not Academy regulations, George,” she said. Her eyes sparkled angrily. “It’s the law.”

  “Oh, Hutch, for God’s sake, take a look around you. Do you see where you are? What makes you think any kind of human law applies out here?”

  “If it doesn’t,” she said, “then why not just vandalize the place? Take everything. Who’s to stop you?”

  “That’s enough, Hutch.”

  “Just be aware that I’m tired of taking the blame every time you can’t get what you want. You hired me, you might want to consider taking my advice.” She was going to say more, to bring up Pete and Herman, but she caught herself. “I was required to make the report,” she added. They were up in the cupola, watching the Twins set. They were still living on a twenty-four-hour clock, paying no attention to day and night, such as they were, on Vertical. “All evidence of alien contact has to be reported. When it happens.”

  He must have scowled at her because he was thinking how easy it would have been just to forget what they’d found, report nothing until they’d had a chance at it. And if she lost her license, so what? He’d have more than made it worth her while. But he didn’t say anything, and she just stood gazing back at him, not giving anything away, and finally she said, “It’s not an administrative issue, George. It’s a criminal matter. Criminal. Which means by the way, if it happens again, I’ll have to do it again.”