Enigma

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  “No. No, it’s all right,” Thackery said distractedly. “You were just doing what she wanted. You said someone else had made a request—”

  “She’s probably outside now. I told her I’d have an answer for her this morning.” It had to be Koi, and was. Ignoring Zamyatin at his heels, he guided her by the elbow out into the corridor. “What were you doing there?” she asked when they were alone. “The same thing you were. I didn’t do it to get you back,” he said.

  “I know,” she said.

  “But I do want you back.”

  “I want to come back—as long as you understand that it’s because of what you are, not because of what you did. It doesn’t matter what they decided. It matters that you tried.”

  “I understand,” he said.

  “So what did they decide?”

  He grinned. “They said yes.”

  She took his hand. “Then come on—let’s go see if we can find an appropriate way to celebrate.”

  “My preference will depend on which bit of good news we’re celebrating,” he said, starting them toward the lifts.

  “Let’s be creative and try to cover both.”

  Koi was in her shower and Thackery relaxing by the apartment’s greatport when the knock came. Reluctantly, he disengaged both eyes and mind from the star fields of Sagittarius and the heart of the Galaxy hidden therein, and went to the door.

  “Hey, Derrel,” Thackery said on seeing the caller.

  “Hey, yourself,” Guerrieri said, stepping inside. “Is this where the Merritt Thackery Travel and Tour Company hangs its hat nowadays? I couldn’t get an answer at your place or find you around the Planning Office, so I tried a long shot.”

  “Just visiting.”

  “I’ll bet.” He nodded toward the greatport. “Haven’t you seen enough of that for a while?”

  “I was doing some thinking.”

  “You’ve got a lot to do, from what I just heard—congratulations.”

  “Thanks.”

  “So where are we going?”

  “We?”

  “Were you planning to leave without me?”

  “You’re senior on the Munin survey team. You’re probably a lock to move over to Cygnus and become Concom.”

  “Too much responsibility,” Guerrieri said with a shrug as he settled in the upholstered pit by the greatport. “Besides, I told you once—you’re a lightning rod. I like to be around to see the fireworks. That is, if you’ll have me,” he added, with a raised eyebrow.

  “I could use a good dulcimer player.”

  “You forgot to list it in the Notice of Opportunity. So where are we going?”

  “I don’t know,” Thackery said, joining him in the pit.

  Guerrieri laughed in a friendly way. “I thought you’d have it all figured out.” Sighing and stretching out his legs, Thackery said, “The temptation is to go back to Sennifi.”

  “Sure. But Z’lin Ton Drull is long dead.”

  “More importantly, the D’shanna are finished there. They won’t be coming back.”

  “They didn’t succeed, though. The Sennifi are still holding on, even though they still refuse any help or contact.”

  “I’ve been wondering if maybe the D’shanna did accomplish what they wanted to. Maybe they didn’t need to completely wipe out the Sennifi.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Thackery frowned. “The Drull told me that they were on the verge of space travel—‘preparing to step beyond this planet’ was how he said it.”

  “And after the D’shanna came they gave it up.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So?”

  “So all three of the extinct colonies were technologically advanced. Every one of them grades out on the Jouma-Sennifi level—tech ratings over six.”

  “I’m no expert on FC analysis, but you can’t be the first one to make that discovery.” Thackery shook his head. “It’s one of the most elementary correlations.”

  “Is there an elementary explanation?”

  “A good one,” Koi said, appearing at the bathroom door wearing a fluffy torso wrap and nothing else. “There she is,” Guerrieri said. “Hello, Amy.”

  “Hello yourself.” She came and sat behind Thackery on the edge of the pit, keeping the wrap secure with one hand and playing with Thackery’s hair with the other. “About the extinct colonies being advanced—only a fairly advanced civilization leaves enough of a stamp on the environment. The 6.0’s and above build the large permanent structures that tell us a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand years later that they were there.”

  “So the assumption is that there probably were other extinct colonies on some of the planets we’ve surveyed?” Guerrieri asked.

  “Yes,” Thackery said.“Which will remain undiscovered until we put an archeological team down on every livable planet to look for middens and graveyards.”

  “That is a good explanation.”

  “I know. And probably the reason why nobody’s ever gotten very exercised over the fact that all the extinct colonies were advanced.”

  “There’s a ‘but’ or ‘until’ rattling around in there somewhere.”

  Thackery nodded. “If you don’t assume that we missed some extinct primitives, if you turn it around and think of it as all the advanced colonies are extinct—”

  “And then there’s room for another explanation.”

  “Like maybe the D’shanna picked off all the colonies on the verge of acquiring space technology.”

  “After having done the same thing to the FC civilization—,” Koi said slowly. “Why didn’t you mention this before?”

  “It came to me while we were making friendly,” he said, craning his head to the left to look up at her. “I didn’t think it was the right time to bring it up.”

  She gave the top of his head a sharp, playful slap while Guerrieri looked on, amused. “And I thought I had your full attention. You’re hell on a woman’s ego, Thackery.”

  “Just think of yourself as an inspiration to me.”

  “I’d give you my full attention,” Guerrieri volunteered.

  “Mind your fantasies,” Koi said good-naturedly, and directed her attention back to Thackery. “And you, you mind your thoughts.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Don’t call me ma’am,” she said, slapping his head again. “We’ll need to find proof—evidence they interfered with the other colonies.”

  “I’d rather find them.”

  “To do that, we’ll have to find an advanced colony before they do,” Guerrieri said. “We were only a hundred years behind them at Sennifi,” said Thackery.

  Guerrieri’s expression darkened. “Slow down a moment—I thought the D’shanna knew everything. What chance do we have to find a colony ahead of them?”

  Koi shook her head. “All they had to do is be able to make the Sennifi believe they knew everything—and I don’t have to remind you how gullible even Galactic Age humans are. If the D’shanna were everything the Sennifi said they were, the name for them would be God.”

  “More aptly Satan, when you remember what they’ve done to us,” Thackery said with an edge to his voice. Koi began to rub his shoulders soothingly. “The nearest extinct Colony is 7 Herculis, in the Bootes octant.” Reaching up to clasp her hands, Thackery said, “I was just thinking that very thought,”

  “So when do we leave?” Guerrieri asked.

  “As soon as Shinault has Munin ready and I have a complete crew.”

  “Good,” Guerrieri said as he stood. “Then I’ve got some time to see to some business. Watching you two is hell on a single man.”

  Chapter 14

  * * *

  Antinomy

  Munin’s new crew shaped up much as Thackery had projected. The strategy team was composed entirely of Munin veterans: Koi, Guerrieri, and Barbrice Mueller. Challenged by Thackery to make good on her boasts that Munin could be made safe, Gwen Shinault accepted the Exec position, and brought with her two Munin tech
s—astrographer Joel Nunn and gravigator Elena Ryttn. The remaining five slots, four awks and one tech, were filled from the base’s QCAN list.

  Within three months, Munin was orbiting 7 Herculis-5 and the strategy team on its way to the planet’s surface. As Guerrieri guided the gig down to the landing site Thackery and the others could see that the dome of the city had collapsed and lay in the streets with the rubble of the buildings on which it had fallen. Both suns were in the sky, the yellow subgiant high in the southwest and the small reddish dwarf low to the eastern horizon. Their rays created overlapping and discordant shadows on the manscape.

  Twin air skiffs, small agile craft with the Analysis Office logo on their V-tails, sat at the north end of the tarmacadam. A reception committee of one waited for the visitors at the edge of the field, wearing an E-suit against the Sulfurous smog which now tainted a once-breathable atmosphere. Inside the suit was a young research aide with a shock of almost white hair, an affable grin, and the name Kevin Jankowski.

  “Welcome to 7 Herculis-5, Commander Thackery,” Jankowski said, almost shouting as though he needed to be heard through the E-suits without benefit of the transducers.

  “Thanks for coming out to meet us.”

  “Well, you almost have to have a guide to find your way through the city to our hidey-hole. I’m afraid we haven’t put very much effort into making things ready for visitors. Which reminds me—I hope you don’t have any heavy gear that you need transferred to the Annex. Our only ground transportation is a crane-and-cargo wagon we use for excavations, and it’s out of action until our mechtech can nurse it back to life.”

  “Just a couple of portable netlinks for now,” Thackery said, nodding at the small cases being carried by Koi and Mueller.

  “Okay, then—let’s head on in.”

  The steel ribs of the dome still arched over the city, but most of the material which had spanned between them was gone, like an umbrella stripped of its fabric. Only near the ground, where the curvature of the dome approached vertical, did the clear panels and their supporting structures still stand.

  “The dome was added after the city was built?”

  “That’s right—sometime during the early phases of the volcanic episode that transformed the atmosphere. It isn’t completely over, by the way. We get a little quake about once a month, and there’ve been two sizable eruptions in the midlatitudes in the last year.”

  “How long ago was the dome built?” asked Mueller from behind.

  “About six thousand years. But our surveys have turned up earlier habitations all over this area. They were here a long time before that.”

  “Anticlinal valley,” Guerrieri said, craning his head to look at the parallel ridges a few kilometres to the northwest and southeast. “Probably pretty fertile at one time. Topography doesn’t seem to have been much influenced by the volcanism.”

  “That’s right, too,” Jankowski said. “This region never got more than a bit of a dusting of ash. But going by the Wenlock—that’s the name of this city—going by the Wenlock records, we’ve found and excavated parts of three other cities that were hit a lot harder.”

  “If they’d known how to make synglas, that’d still be standing,” Koi said with a nod toward the dome.

  “Probably so,” said Jankowski. “Still, their plaz wasn’t bad. We think it took a pretty good earthquake to bring the dome down.”

  Jankowski led them into the city by means of a hundred-metre long tunnel through the base wall of the dome. The tile-like floor of the tunnel was masked by a thick coating of windblown and foot-tracked dust and ash. Grooves five centimetres wide and equally deep encircled the passageway at three points, marking where airseal doors, now permanently retracted, had once separated the city’s atmosphere from the planet’s.

  “We call this the Anjur Gate,” Jankowski advised them. “There’s twenty-six gates in all, spaced about a third of a kilometre apart. The whole area enclosed by the dome is just a shade over seven square kilometres.”

  When they emerged and looked back, they saw that the tunnel had brought them through a terraced earthen bank which climbed at least fifty metres up the inside wall of the dome.

  “That was apparently their last major engineering job, moving their agriculture indoors,” Jankowski said as he followed their gaze. “They took the base material from the western cliff and the topsoil from the river’s flood plain.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Mueller. “There’s a fair amount of flora in the valley even now—”

  “All native. Their basic food crops—”

  “Do you know what they were?” interrupted Thackery.

  “Artificially selected variants of Triticum, as on the other colonies. Actually, they had bred the parent material into four distinct subspecies, one of which apparently could be raised in aquaculture. The terraces were just part of the agricultural system. There’s a square klick of tanks one level down.”

  “Down? That’d be some engineering job.”

  Jankowski’s grin was clearly visible through the Synglas faceplate. “Just because they’re dead doesn’t mean they weren’t smart. Sir, could we keep moving? Dr. Essinger instructed me to bring you in directly. I’m sure there’ll be plenty of time to see everything later—”

  “Of course.”

  Jankowski led them through a maze of short streets lined with low buildings. The streets branched diagonally from one circular courtyard to another, and the view down almost every street was blocked off by the three—and four-story structures which occupied the center of the courts. The structures were as different from each other as a slender spire of steel, a marble colonnade, and a great bronze sculpture of a beclawed bird of prey.

  “They made very good use of their space,” Mueller commented as they passed through one court. “This street plan makes the city seem much larger. Every major artery has a focal point, every vista terminates in the foreground instead of running to the horizon. That reduces the confining impact of the dome.”

  But for all its praise worthiness, the Wenlock handiwork bore everywhere the stamp of decay: the spire corroded and listing, two columns from the colonnade lying on their sides in pieces, the thin wings of the bird eaten through in a hundred places. The streets they took were littered with debris. Many others were blocked by twisted metal and tumbledown masonry.

  “This isn’t what I think of when I hear the word ‘ruins,’ ” Koi said to Thackery. “I think of the Acropolis, or Stonehenge, or Chichln Itza. Not rusting girders and shattered glass and broken concrete. This is what I think of when I think of war.”

  “The only war here was the one they fought against the planet itself,” Jankowski said, overhearing and dropping back beside them.

  “Are you people confident that that’s what killed off the Wenlock?” Thackery asked. Koi caught the faint hint of worry in his voice.

  “Just look around you,” Jankowski invited as an answer. “Look at what they were up against. I’m continually amazed that they lasted as long as they did.”

  The 7 Herculis Research Annex occupied four contiguous homes on the Avenue of Flames, in a section of the city left virtually untouched by the travails of the rest. The entrances to the Annex had been replaced with lock chambers and the outer walls and windows coated with a sealant, together rendering the buildings a controlled environment.

  But inside, the Wenlock presence remained strong. Ramps, which the Wenlock seemed to have preferred over stairs, linked the lower level with the upper. The architecture was open and flexible, the interior screen walls little more than columns, the doorways wide Tudor arches spanned by tautly stretched panels of patterned fabric. Thackery was brought up short by the sight, set into the masonry floor of the entryway, of the imprints, of five human hands.

  “They’re in all the homes,” Jankowski said, placing his helmet on a nearby rack and beginning to strip off his E-suit. The others removed their helmets and tucked them under their arms. “Since in most of the homes t
he prints were all made at the same time, we think it was part of a ceremony associated with moving in. Sometimes you find a print filled in, or a new print added. Whatever other meaning they may have had, they sure make taking a census easy.”

  “How many lived here?” Thackery asked.

  “About eighty-five thousand, peak. That may sound like a lot, considering how small Wenlock is, but there are lots of urban areas on Earth with higher population densities. And as your aide there noted, they did know how to make good use of space.”

  “Barbrice Mueller,” Thackery said, realizing that he had been deficient about introductions. “Where to now?”

  Jankowski stepped out of his suit and hung it beneath his helmet. “If you’ll go up that ramp, you should And Dr. Essinger in the first alcove to the right at the top. I’ll take the others to the room that’s been cleared for you.”

  “That’s fine.”

  The rampwell had been turned into a small gallery, hung with framed faxes of Wenlock portraits labeled with the grid numbers specifying where they had been found in the city. As Thackery climbed, he lingered briefly to study each. The Wenlock had clearly disdained artistic license, even in the service of self-flattery: The faces that stared out at Thackery bore the lines, flaws, and scars which made them unique, and made them human.

  Dr. Essinger made no effort to hide his unhappiness with Munin’s presence. His greeting to Thackery was polite at best, and his mouth was puckered by annoyance.

  “I really don’t see why we should be expected to put up with a continuous stream of sightseers, and not get any work done. It’s bad enough dealing with the ones who come on the packets. Now the sightseers have their own ships,” the research director complained as they sat down on the woven bench facing him. “I thought for sure when Higuchi found his second colony that we’d be rid of the interruptions.”