Juanita Coulson - Children of the Stars 04

by Past of Forever

  Anelen’s lips peeled back in a frightening leer. “You are McKelvey. Feo Saunder your kinsman. You opposed.” Dan could almost hear wheels turning in the alien’s white-crested head.

  “I support Praedar Effan Juxury,” Dan said, “in his search for ethical truth, Irast."

  The Whimed’s nasty grin widened. It wasn’t reassuring.

  Contest! We witness. Tomorrow!” Anelen’s chin jerked down hard into his chest in a curt nod. “Is all. Bring next persons.”

  His Terran counterpart didn’t soften that blunt dismissal. In moments, Praedar’s team was outside the room and another group of wary applicants was filing in.

  “Just like that,” Dan muttered, irked.

  Joe gripped his shoulder. “It was a fairly friendly sizing up, compared to some of our previous appeals for funds. You and Praedar were very effective.”

  ^ Are you sure?’

  “As sure as one can be,” Praedar said, “when Anelen Usru is involved.” His gaze was remote and angry.

  rheir schedule had slipped still further by now. Terran members of the team grabbed a fast lunch. Then they rendezvoused with Ruieb-An and hurried to collect their passes for the Saunders’ dig tour. They were admitted to the passageway connecting the Assembly building with the enclosed site south of the complex. Other beings were making that short trek, as well. The weatherproof arcade was crowded with scientists and the media.

  Coming out into the sheltered excavation was a shock. Dan looked up at the ultra-expensive, arcing roof that covered the entire dig. This was an ostentatious display of wealth—with a vengeance! Saunder staffers were on hand to play tour guides. They greeted Assembly attendees emerging from the passageway and separated the mass into manageable segments. Praedar’s group rated special treatment. A top aide paged his bosses as soon as he saw the T-W 593 team. Almost immediately a scooter car buzzed up one of the dig’s paved paths and Feo and Hope stepped down to welcome their guests.

  “We were beginning to wonder if you were coming,” Feo said. “Caucusing with your sponsors, I suppose?” He knew damned well they had been! With all the staffers—also known as spies—he had running around the complex, Feo had to be in touch with everything that was going on at all times.

  “Anelen is a strange person, isn’t he?” Hope asked with a syrupy smile. “Most difficult. But one must deal with those types, when one is dependent on their largesse.”

  “Most xenoarchs have to go that route,” Dan jabbed back. “You wouldn’t be expected to appreciate that tradition, though, not with your elitist advantages.”

  “What would you know about traditions?” Feo snapped. “You arrogant young—•”

  Praedar said, “We are here. Let us begin.”

  Nearby, Greg Tavares was escorting a group of reporters, warning them, “When we stop at excavations, don’t step on string markers or stand on the backfills.” Several of the news hounds scowled at him. Rei Ito was particularly annoyed. Plainly the Pan Terran rep didn’t like being patronized any more than Dan had when Kat had treated him to the same lecture, weeks ago.

  The Saunders led their guests to the scooter car and helped them aboard the back-to-back bench seats. Feo drove, moving slowly along kilometers of neatly engineered lanes, parking at key points. There, Praedar’s team alighted and were shown the dig’s fine details.

  From the air, the sheltered dig had seemed immense. Up close, it was overwhelming.

  This was Saunder wealth, running riot: the great sun-filtering roof; on-site labs; refreshment canteens and creature comforts galore; excavating equipment polished to a sheen; and a superb clime-control system.

  The dig was also a museum. There were neatly presented showcase excavations, with stacked tools nearby and striations labeled. Other exhibits were a partially opened trench, a cleared one containing numerous artifacts in situ, and a precisely cataloged array of extracted finds, cleaned and restored.

  Gaggles of scientists and reporters wandered through the maze like tourists. Saunder aides hovered proudly, boasting, discussing field strategies, context surveys, topographical data, urban placement extrapolations, ecodisruptive factors, and standards for a crisis-free dig environment. The xenoarchs had little trouble keeping up with the docents’ pace. The media reps were made of weaker stuff; they had to stop frequently at the canteens along the trails and soak up restoratives.

  “I hope you’re enjoying the tour,” Feo said. “I think you’ll agree we haven’t done too badly in a mere six years here. You did get the jump on us, Juxury. We both saw those Explorer reports from Fleet’s mapping division, back in ’42. But you filed first. Besides, back then, Hope and I were deeply involved in our dig on the Eta Gamma Ulisorian worlds. We simply couldn’t start our operations on T-S 31I right then...”

  These busy, filthy rich xenoarchs were able to select at leisure where they’d excavate next—and muscle in on rivals with less power and funding.

  Dan was tom between exasperation and awe. The dig was too fancy, too immaculate. It was also stunning.

  If only Praedar had this kind of money! He, too, could free his people from dust drift, heat, cold, and equipment breakdowns. He, too, could attract armies of staffers and eager investors.

  Money alone couldn’t do it all, though. Feo and Hope had worked their tails off to create these results. Dan had to concede them that.

  “This bulk demonstrates local construction techniques,” Hope said, gesturing to a dirt wall extending the length of a large excavated plaza.

  “And that building was their administrative center,” Feo added.

  Dan was elsewhere, elsewhen, seeing through the eyes of a being yet unborn—of a species yet unborn. He was on Earth or any one of dozens of Terran planets, digging, probing into mankind’s forever time. Homo sapiens, whose sphere of influence had spanned parsecs, was gone. Its traces now were being uncovered by another race.

  Would those future xenoarchaeologists be able to re-create the history of a stellar civilization from such pitiful scraps? Would some of them develop mistaken theories and fiercely debate colleagues who differed with them?

  Another daunting idea flashed through Dan’s mind. Did non-anthropomorphic species share that humanoid hunger to know? Not even all humanoids obeyed that drive. But they all had a portion of that seemingly universal push to investigate the past and speculate about the future. Dan tried to imagine the Evil Old Ones within that framework and failed. Praedar probably could envision such a concept. The newest member of his team couldn’t—yet.

  The Saunders led on, explaining the obvious. “.. . and these materials are firm-dated to two thousand years before present...”

  “Right on the dateline when the N’lac culture fell,” Kat said.

  “Presuming the inhabitants called themselves N’lacs,” Feo commented with a smirk. “We’ve found little evidence that this civilization was related in any way to those primitive creatures on T-W 593 ...”

  Dan ignored the byplay, thinking hard. Was it significant that certain features common at Praedar’s dig were missing from this one—domed structures, jerry-rigged solar furnaces, glass elements, and windmills? Only the last could be excused, on the basis that this wasn’t a desert world and water supplies weren’t a problem. The other absences tended to support Praedar’s theories and the N’lacs’ legends.

  There were remarkable correspondences between the dig on T-W 593 and T-S 311’s—plazas, structures with inward-curving walls, and the same public paintings and writings. Ruieb-An pored over the squiggles, while the rest admired familiar parades of golden-eyed, elegantly robed star rovers, marching into oblivion.

  Feo was saying “Hope and I got our quota of calluses here, but it’s been worth it. I don’t suppose you’ve been able to excavate such a large area or have done as much reconstruction as we have, mmm? One must accept limitations, when one operates under handicaps. Particularly given unpredictable aspects, as with your... mm... eclectic team. Judging by poor Bill Getz.. .Whatever are you going t
o do with those so-called effigies he was allegedly cataloging?”

  “His collection is useful,” Praedar said. “Alternative interpretations are being developed.” He didn’t elaborate.

  Behind the Saunders’ backs, Kat smiled at Dan and mouthed, “Fluidics!”

  One of the tour’s highlights was Hope’s “baby”—a fully reconstructed N’lac colonial dwelling. Dan felt like an intruder there. He half expected to turn a comer and come face to face with Chuss’ ancestors. The scientists were poking about dead aliens’ property, pawing through their middens and ferreting out secrets the N’lacs might have preferred left in limbo.

  The next stop was a cemetery. There were graves, grave goods, attendant ritual objects, and carefully preserved N’lac corpses, in excavated three-meter-deep mausoleums. The bodies were stacked in tiers of transparent cubicles.

  Dan tried to maintain a scientific detachment. But he kept seeing his own forebears, disinterred and put on display for curious e.t.s. This topic had been argued loudly and often in the xenoarchaeological journals. Was it moral to disturb the dead, even in the name of knowledge? Earth’s researchers had debated the point long before her first interstellar ship reached toward space.

  If only the bones could speak and tell their finders whether or not they resented this exhumation.

  “You haven’t excavated any graves, have you?” Hope asked with her mock-matemal smile.

  Joe flared, “You know we can’t.”

  Feo was amused. “Oh, yes. Afraid of trampling on the sensitivities of those little primitives. I assure you, if such a nonhumanoid species existed here, it wouldn’t deter us..

  “Would it not?” Praedar’s stare lanced at the Saunders, taking their breath away for a moment. “Then you would make an erroneous assumption.”

  Dan picked up the ball. “Would you risk being proved wrong, decades in the future? We admire your conceit. Some of our ancestors, Feo, made some bad mistakes, counting on that same sort of conceit to carry them through. And a few of those mistakes cost thousands of lives. They also earned the Saunder-McKelvey s big black marks in the history vids.”

  His cousin’s color had become very high. “Don’t preach to me, you—”

  The Saunders’ tour was being crossed by that of Tavares. Rei Ito stepped aside from the rest of the reporters and tuned her lens pendant to peak function, listening to the Assembly’s hosts and Praedar’s team.

  “What about Varenka’s cloning of Jael Hartman Saunder?” Dan demanded. “Your aunt refers to Jael as our noble ancestress. Hut what if Jael’s critics were right? Varenka may be fostering a monster...”

  “I will excuse your impertinence on the grounds that it’s misplaced loyalty,” Feo snapped. “Since we’re posing difficult questions, I have one for you and luxury. In your own published data, you admit you haven’t discovered a spacecraft used by those ‘escaped slaves.’ Doesn’t that suggest—strongly!—that you are the ones making erroneous assumptions?”

  “The means of transport will be found,” Praedar said, yielding nothing.

  Hope simpered. “Could it be that such a vehicle never existed except in imagination? If there was no escape ship, and no link between those subhumanoids and this glorious civilization,” she said, waving to the re-created grandeur around them, “where does that leave your theories?”

  Her husband scraped at the wound she’d made. “A dig is meaningless, Juxury, unless it fits into a cogent, general scheme and sense-making arrangements. The dictum we all learned in our first institutional lectures ...”

  “We are also taught to avoid bias,” Praedar reminded his host. “One strives to avoid the trap of presumption and overconfidence. Obvious answers are often illusions. At times, a solution must be found by approaching the material at an angle, employing new techniques and breakthrough concepts.”

  Spluttering, Feo exclaimed, “That’s the sort of hazy reasoning that cracked Getz. He couldn’t deal with the fact that he’d been working himself into a dead end by espousing your theories ...” “That’s right,” Hope chimed in, her voice abnormally shrill. “When will you see you’re chasing phantoms!”

  Suddenly it was as if Praedar’s merciless gaze had burned away the Saunders’ shells. Dan saw clearly the fear within them. Dead end. A go-nowhere project.

  Snide gossip, in Assembly session rooms and the exhibit areas, whispered that the Saunders were buying their way to their professional reputation, capitalizing on other xenoarchaeologists’ discoveries, and using money to steal others’ dig territories, as they had Praedar’s rights to this stellar region.

  And yearning, all the while, for their peer’s respect—not their staffers’ fawning praise, or bought and paid-for congratulations, but honest respect for hard work and solid findings.

  What if Praedar was proved right? Disaster.

  There would be hidden laughter, and mutterings throughout this scientific community that the Saunders had reaped what they had sown.

  Everything Feo and Hope had fought and plotted for and spent their fortunes achieving would go dribbling through their fingers like dust drifting through a N’lac’s paws.

  A tinny sound jolted Dan out of his reverie. He grabbed at his wrist min-vid as Kat asked, “What’s that?”

  “Alarm! Someone’s trying to get into the starhopper!”

  Greg Tavares, conducting his guided tour for the news hounds nearby, turned and sneered. “Trouble, McKelvey? What are you concerned about? Supposedly it’s luxury’s ship, not yours.” The Saunders frowned at their protege, disturbed by his comment.

  Dan was turning toward a scooter car, seeking fast transportation. But he detoured and iunged across the path, seizing Tavares’ jumper and shaking the man. Tavares was caught totally off guard.

  “I told you that if anyone messed with the ship, they’d be sorry,” Dan said. “I hope whoever you sent to do your dirty work has a strong set of neural channels.” Spitting a curse, he hurled the redhead to the ground and loped for the car.

  Praedar was waiting for him. Dan took the driver’s seat and warned, “Hang on! I’m going to bend some rules,” and they careened in the direction of the Assembly Complex.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Challenges

  At the Compiex, they traded the tour car for a much faster road scooter. Dan put readouts in the red. The little vehicle swept through curves, racing toward town. Praedar clung to the safety bar, a predatory grin splitting his face.

  Halfway to Saunder City, they ran into rain. Dan cued the scooter’s scan systems to max, maintaining his speed, risking a skid. The scooter’s bubble top didn’t keep out all the wet and the wind stream. The blasts flattened Praedar’s crest.

  Scanners showed they had a tail—another scooter, far to the rear. Without remote lens capability, Dan couldn’t tell who was pursuing them and he didn’t much care. Right now, getting to Port was all that mattered. The team’s ride home was in danger.

  The vehicle whined in agony as he tore along Saunder City’s sole main street, dodging pedestrians. The rain was slackening when they reached the Port’s tarmac. Dan roared through the gate and swerved sharply, aiming for the end of the line of parked shuttles. Bright sunshine lay over the landing strips, drying the puddles.

  A crowd was gathering near Praedar’s Project—port personnel, human and alien pilots, mechs, and civilians. As Dan slid the scooter to a stop just beyond the mob, the Port’s manager spotted him and yelled, “Clear a lane, boys! Let ’em through!” Praedar and Dan squirmed through the confusion to where the manager’s staff had cordoned off a space. They were keeping the curious well away from the expedition’s ship. A man was lying beside the debark ramp access panel. His hand was pinned inside the control cowling.

  Caught in the act!

  Parameds were kneeling over the victim. Dan disengaged his antitheft device and the would-be tamperer’s hand dropped limply. “How much juice was in that?” a medic asked.

  “Not enough to kill him. It packs big volts,
but not many amps.”

  “Cute!” a second paramed commented. “He’ll come out of this with a wowser of headache, though. Did you concoct that zapper?”

  “Yeah. I’m thinking of taking out a patent.”

  Praedar chuckled nastily. “Indeed! Did not your distant father, Ward Saunder, do so, and earn much wealth?”

  “And how!” Dan said. “That was the start of the whole Saunder-McKelvey fortune. Maybe I’m his reincarnation. Recreating my ancestors is in vogue nowadays ...”

  “Move, you cretins, move!” Greg Tavares bulled past the mob of spectators. So he had been the one riding that other scooter! The scientist slammed to a halt, staring in dismay at the unconscious thief.

  “Too bad,” Dan taunted. “Your man didn’t get the job done.” Another new arrival was at Tavares’ heels. “Kimball, Pan Terran Network,” he introduced himself curtly. The man was toting an ultrasophisticated remote link, focusing its lenses on the drama near the starhopper. Kimball spoke sotto voce into the audio tie-in, “Rei? You there?”

  “On line, with Saunder.” The woman reporter’s image—and Feo’s—appeared on the relay box’s tiny screen. “I knew posting you in Port would pay off. Nice work, Kimball.”

  “We’ve got a scoop. No other news hounds here.”

  Tavares stammered, “I... I can take care of this, Feo. No need for you to ...”

  “Be quiet, Greg.” The young man’s face stiffened as he heard the menace in Saunder’s words.

  The Port manager was looking very unhappy. All this was bad publicity for his division. Dan played to the manager’s fears. “This sort of crime might give a Settlement a rotten rep. Breaking ;ind entering visiting spacecraft. I think I ought to put in a call to my brother. One of his Fleet Inspectors could check out this local setup.” The manager paled.

  Parameds were lifting the zapped man into their emergency scooter. Tavares, on the defensive, pointed accusingly at Dan. “You assaulted my aide! I intend to bring charges!”