For an Earthlike world, Carson decided, this probably meant a G-type star. He filed that away. “Sorry, go on.”
“This caste built up a priesthood around the secrets of the pyramids. They monitored your homeworld, Carson. The pyramids of Egypt were probably part of their influence.”
Carson felt his world shift. That had been argued back and forth for decades, but the evidence always came back to purely terrestrial construction.
“But . . .”
“Not that Kesh built them, or even helped. It may have been something like your South Seas cargo cults. Build it and perhaps they will come.”
“Cargo cults?” asked Jackie from the commscreen.
“The short version,” Carson began, “is that after Earth’s mid twentieth-century war, natives on remote Pacific islands which had been used as military staging areas built replicas of aircraft out of twigs and branches, hoping to attract the real thing which had—to them—magically brought cargo to the islands before. Egyptian pyramids make about as good starships as tree branches do airplanes.”
“Copy. Please go on.”
“Later,” Ketzshanass continued, “when a small group discovered faster than light warp travel and —”
“Wait, what?” gasped Jackie. “You didn’t have FTL?”
Ketz looked at her image on the screen, apparently startled at the reaction. “Surely you know that our pyramid ships are far too large for a superluminal warp bubble?”
“Yes, but —”
“We use a sublight warp. It gets us almost up to lightspeed, and the ships are big enough to have all the comforts of home. Surely that was obvious?”
“I, . . . sublight warp?”
“Oh dear. You seem have some gaps in your knowledge of folded space.”
Jackie’s image nodded. “We do. Brenke, our pioneer in the field, died too young in a field test gone wrong,” she said. “Something about gravity fluctuations. Nobody since has had quite his insight, and most of the research has been toward FTL warp improvements.”
Ketzshanass made a facial expression that might have been a wince. “Yes, there are things that can go wrong.” He paused, then continued. “We have FTL ships, of course, but they’re small, like your Sophie.”
“They’re not saucer- or disk-shaped by any chance, are they?” Carson asked.
“That would not be an optimal shape for an FTL warp bubble. Some of our in-atmosphere scout craft are that configuration, however. Why?”
“Just a thought. When was the last time you—the Kesh—visited Earth?”
“We’ve stayed clear since you developed spaceflight. We don’t think you’re ready for official contact yet.”
“So the Betty Hill incident . . . ” Carson paused, wondering the best way to raise the subject.
“Where is Betty Hill?”
“Not a where, a who.” Carson quickly described the incident, and the Zeta Reticuli star map. Ketzshanass’s crest feathers kept twitching as Carson spoke.
“Fascinating,” Ketzshanass said when Carson had finished. “What you describe, making allowances for embellishment and misinterpretation, could have been a Kesh survey, but that’s not the procedure we would have followed, and so far as I know there is no record of such a contact on our side.”
“When will you be ready to make formal contact?”
“A better question would be when will you be ready. Your Velkaryans are not a good example.” Ketzshanass’ crest lowered. “Unfortunately all our hands may be forced by events. If the degkhidesh return, we would consider an alliance.”
“Just how dangerous are these,” Carson hesitated at the word, “these degkhidesh?”
“You’ve seen the destruction on the planet below. We did part of that in our civil war—the ruling caste was not willing to just step down—but most of the damage was inflicted later, by them.
“There was a gap of many decades, so with any luck it will be many more decades, perhaps centuries before they show up again. With even more luck they’ll wipe themselves out before that happens. Meanwhile we think it best to keep a low profile.”
“You don’t want revenge?”
“We just want the problem to go away, permanently. That is a kind of revenge, if you like.” Ketz’s communicator chimed and he looked at it. What Carson could see of the text reminded him of ancient cuneiform, almost Sumerian, stylized and simplified as it might be if you weren’t pressing the symbols into clay with a cut reed. But Ketz was talking again—
“— afraid that’s all we have time for,” Ketz said. “Please depart this system as promptly as possible. Do not return to the planet. Aside from being dangerous, we consider it a memorial or shrine; it would be disrespectful.” He rose and made his way to the pressure tent’s airlock.
“You guys might as well come on back too,” Jackie said over the commscreen. “I’ll be glad to get out of here.”
43: Leaving Z
Aboard Sophie
“I think the Kesh are afraid of us,” Carson said as he came aboard.
“Us? I thought they were afraid of whoever bombed Z1R III? Not that I would blame them for that,” said Jackie. “But they’ve got technology beyond ours, why would they be afraid of us?”
“We’ve developed too fast. Sure, they beat us to technology and star travel, but they had a head start. They exploited their ‘teaching museum’, when there’s no evidence Earth ever had one.”
“Nor Taprobane,” Marten said. “Although it’s possible that the early Kesh destroyed or buried our Spacefarer pyramid, as well as Earth’s.”
“If they were willing to do that, why just observe Earth’s early civilizations at all, why not just destroy them?” asked Carson.
“What if they thought there was something special about Earth?” Jackie said.
“Like what?”
“It’s the ancestral home of all terraform life, so presumably of the Kesh too.”
“Is it? We don’t know about the origin of the Kesh. They resemble something that might be descended from dinosaurs, but we’ve never found the like anywhere else. Just birds.”
“Including birds with teeth,” Jackie said. “Perhaps their ancestral species survived the K-T extinction. Perhaps it was a primitive bird that reverted. Atavism happens.”
“Perhaps,” Carson said. “On the other hand if they’re not Earth-descended, that might be more reason for Kesh to interfere.”
“I don’t know,” said Marten. “Would you want to mess with a planet which might be the home world of the Terraformers?”
“What, Earth?” Carson turned toward him. “The dinosaurs? Surely you don’t think they were the Terraformers? Yes, some people do, despite the complete lack of evidence for it on or off Earth, just because of the timing. But that’s ridiculous.”
“It doesn’t matter if it was or not, it’s the potential that it was.” Marten grinned, he was just playing devil's advocate. “Would you be willing to risk annoying someone capable of that technology 65 million years ago?”
“Perhaps not. But if there was already a pyramid on Earth, built by the Spacefarers, that might indicate the original Terraformers no longer cared.”
“Then why wouldn’t the Kesh have hidden the pyramids on Chara, or Verdigris?” Jackie protested.
“Probably because the indigenous intelligent species had already died out by the time they showed up,” said Carson. “They were no longer competition.”
“Could the Kesh . . .” Jackie’s voice trailed off.
“What?”
“Could they be responsible for eliminating those species? It would be more of a sure thing than just destroying the pyramids. It might not even be deliberate, if they’d inadvertently introduced a disease the natives had no resistance to.”
“Marten suggested the same thing back on the planet,” Carson said. “I don’t think so. We don’t know enough about when the Chara natives died out—if indeed they all have—but indications are that on Verdigris at least they died out before the Kesh had star
travel. ”
“Do we know that for sure?” asked Jackie. “The Kesh could be lying about how long they’ve had that.”
“You’re getting as paranoid as Ducayne. But yes, there’s a gap of at least five thousand years. As for your second point, about disease, the Kesh are dinosaurian or avian, not mammalian. The chances of a disease hopping from them to an alien mammal species is infinitesimal, let alone of a disease hopping to two independent alien mammal species.”
“Diseases hop from birds to mammals on Earth. The flu, for example.”
“Yes, where the domesticated birds and mammals in question have been living in proximity for thousands of years, not where they’ve been isolated for tens of millions. And there’s still the time gap.”
“Okay, that aside. Again why would they be afraid of us, just because we developed faster? They’re still ahead of us.”
“For now,” Carson said.
“But we only developed faster because they were under the yoke of a monolithic religious government. By its nature any group in power will oppose anything that changes the status quo, and outside of a narrow range almost any major technological change will upset that status quo. We have the same thing in our history, but we managed to get out from under, at least the societies which succeeded did. It goes for bureaucratic democracies and republics as well as theocracies, although surprisingly not necessarily monarchies.”
“Not surprising at all. In a hereditary monarchy or even hereditary aristocracy, at least, succession and thus power isn’t going to be affected by technological change, not in the short run.”
“Not always,” Jackie said. “Came the Revolution, the French aristocracy found out differently. So did the Russian.” Carson had long ceased to be surprised at the random snippets of information that she sometimes came up with.
“Their aristocracies had other problems,” he said.
“We can discuss that on the way back. It’s a long trip, and I want to get started. As soon as I get us underway I can hit the traumapod for a few hours to get my shoulder fixed.”
Carson felt a sudden pang of guilt. Not only had he forgotten her injury, but she’d received it helping him escape the Velkaryans. “Aye, aye, Captain.”
She turned to him with a stern look in her eye but also with a half grin. “And don’t you forget it. Make ready for departure.”
44: Home
Sawyers World
“No, Carson, I don’t think we can reveal the existence of the Kesh,” Ducayne said, returning Carson’s glare. “Especially since they’re not ready to make open contact.” The two of them were seated at the conference table in one of Ducayne’s briefing rooms. Roberts was in another, going over her observations and the Sophie’s sensor logs with Jones and Brown to see what, if anything, they could make of the Kesh’s antigravity and tractor beam technologies.
“Damn it, Ducayne,,” Carson said, thumping his fist on the table for emphasis. “This is exactly what I’ve spent the last five years of my life trying to prove, that there were recent spacefaring aliens.”
“Recent as in fifteen thousand years ago, not recent as in they’re still around now. These aren’t the aliens you were looking for, Carson. Humans—on Earth, anyway, which is all but at most two percent of us—aren’t ready for contemporary spacefaring aliens. Come on; remember what happened when we realized the nearer planets had been terraformed?”
That was before Carson’s time, but he knew the history. There’d been a lot of near-hysteria before it finally sunk in that sixty-five million years was a long time, and that the Terraformers were probably as extinct as the dinosaurs. As he'd told Marten, some people even believed, despite a complete lack of evidence, that the Terraformers were dinosaurs, which somehow made them feel better. Apparently Earth dinosaurs weren’t as scary as extraterrestrial aliens. But that cultural hysteria had also helped spawn the Velkaryans. “Do you think it will make the Velkaryans stronger?” he asked.
“Of course it will. You don’t see it much out on the fringe, but there’s a level of fear of the alien back on Earth, and even here on the older settled planets.” Ducayne swiveled his seat and turned to stare at the blank wall for a moment, as though it were a window, then turned back. “No, we have to keep it quiet for now.”
Carson tightened his fists and took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “Then I suppose saying anything about the degkhidesh is right out.”
Ducayne reddened. “You’re damned right.”
“But we’re going to need to work with the Kesh to be ready in case the degkhidesh show up again.”
“Do you think I don’t know that?” Ducayne pushed his chair back and stood to begin pacing the room. “What happened to Zeta Reticuli is my worst nightmare. Of course we need to find out everything we can from the Kesh . . . including whether or not we can trust them.”
“They’ve been watching us for a long time. If they meant us harm they could have done that a while ago.”
“You said they fought a civil war—”
“A thousand years ago!”
“But ‘they’ is not a homogenous group, any more than humans are. What if they have an equivalent of the Velkaryans?”
Carson didn’t have an answer to that.
“And there’s something else,” Ducayne said. “The Kesh have had space travel for what, five thousand years, is that right?”
Carson wondered where Ducayne was going with this. He nodded. “That’s an upper bound. It’s most likely less, but at least two to three thousand.”
“And they’re from Zeta Reticuli?”
“They carefully avoided answering questions about their home planet, but they admitted to having lived there. It fits the evidence, the buildings would have worked for them.” As he said that he got the sudden feeling he was missing something important, something he should have realized himself.
Ducayne put his fists on the table and leaned forward. “Then why does a 15,000-year old talisman have a star chart on it drawn from the point of view of Zeta Reticuli?” he said, the words coming out almost as a growl.
Carson felt gut-punched. How had he missed that discrepancy? And what did it mean?
“We have no idea what became of the original pyramid builders,” Ducayne added. “Did the Kesh take over their home planet? They’re not telling us their whole story, and now I would really like to know more about who built those first pyramids, your Spacefarers.”
“So would I. I’d like to continue to pursue that.” It was what Carson had been investigating in the first place.
“Good,” Ducayne said, and smiled. There was something unsettling about his smile.
“Why do I suddenly have the feeling that I’ve just been manipulated?” Carson said.
Ducayne shook his head. “No. That investigation is more up your alley anyway; we have other people who can work—carefully—with the Kesh. Maybe they’re just naturally cautious, and from your description of their planet I wouldn’t blame them, but they’re hiding something. In the meantime I think we need to thoroughly bury any hint that space-going aliens ever visited Earth in the past.”
“Oh, there are plenty of hints,” Carson said. “Take the Von Däniken stuff as an example. But almost all of that is bogus.”
“Exactly. The real story is concealed by the noise. And it needs to stay that way for a while.”
“So much for my academic career.”
“Come work for me full time. I could use another archeologist, especially one with your field skills.”
“But my academic background, which by the way makes a great cover, what happens to that?”
Ducayne didn’t answer immediately, but instead looked over Carson appraisingly. He appeared to come to a decision. “You know, I think Drake University deserves an endowment for outstanding field archeologists. How does the Queen Diana Chair for Xenoarcheology sound?”
“Queen Di—? Oh. Change the initials and you have a deal.”
Postlude
Nort
h of Cay Caulker, Belize, 2123 CE
The dive boat Esmerelda cruised the turquoise waters above the reef a hundred meters inside the breakers. “Sorry, folks, the water’s running too high to get out to the drop-off today. We’re still getting some wave action from the hurricane.”
Hurricane Flora had swept across the islands and the tip of the Yucatan three days earlier and was now twisting its way across the Gulf of Mexico. It had battered Cays Caulker and Ambergris, and the dive tourists who hadn’t managed to reschedule their trips were all anxious to get into the water.
“What about inside the reef? Is there anything worth seeing?”
“For the most part it’s shallow and plain, the hurricane will have stirred everything up and broken the surface coral.” He pointed off the port bow, to a section of choppy water. “See how the elk-horn is up at funny angles? Normally you wouldn’t even see it except at low tide. That stuff is loose coral that the waves have piled up. Tell you what, though,” the captain said as he turned the boat westward, “let’s go toward the mainland some. It gets deeper inside the barrier reef. Nothing like the drop off outside, but we should see something.”
The Esmerelda motored along for about a mile, the captain keeping one eye on the bottom profiler, before reaching an area where it sloped away to a depth of thirty feet or so. He slowed it down, then hit a switch on the panel. “Okay, I’ve turned on the underwater camera. I’m afraid the visibility isn’t the best after the storm, only forty or so feet.”
“Not the best?” Dave, one of the tourists, exclaimed. “Heck, some of the lakes I’ve dived in you’re lucky to get four or five.”
“Son, that’s not diving, that’s mudding. On a good day here it’s a hundred.”
Dave didn’t respond, he was looking at the screen. “What’s that?” He pointed to where something with a straight edge protruded from the white sand near a coral head.
“Beats me. I’m not aware of any wrecks around here, they tend to be out on the edge of the reef. Doesn’t seem to have anything growing on it, so it must have been uncovered by the hurricane.” Since it was partially buried, it didn’t look like it had sunk recently. He slowed the boat and circled around the coral outcrop. A school of striped sergeant-majors darted across the camera’s field of view, and past them he could make out a parrotfish nibbling on the coral. “Shall we anchor here and you can check it out? Looks like a nice little bit of coral, there’s plenty of fish.”
The Reticuli Deception (Adventures of Hannibal Carson Book 2) Page 22