Thackery started. “Commander Higuchi of the Edmund Hillary?” he asked.
“How long were you in the craze?” Essinger demanded, squinting at him. “Of course that’s who I mean. Is this a surprise? Do you mean to say you don’t know about 16 Herculis?”
“We came from A-Cyg,” Thackery said. “We’re nineteen years out of sync.”
“Well, you could at least review your damned library updates when you come out,” Essinger muttered. “Yes, Hillary found another colony, on 16 Herculis, five years ago.”
“Extant?”
“No, extinct, like this one.”
“What’s the tech rating?”
“Six and a half, preliminary,” Essinger said grudgingly, then seemed to perk up. “You know, Hillary’s already moved on, and the 16 Herculis field team hasn’t been sent out yet. If you went out there now, you’d have the jump on everyone. It’s not even ten lights from here.”
“We appreciate the information,” Thackery said. But not the suggestion. “You can be sure we’ll go over the 16 Herculis contact report carefully. But we have things to take care of here before we go anywhere else.”
Essinger peered narrowly at Thackery. “What exactly is your status? How much help are you expecting from us?”
“We’re trying to establish criteria for a high-probability colony search program. Within that objective, we’ve been given a fairly free hand. As far as help from you, we’ll be doing our own field work. I don’t think we’re going to be in your way.”
“No digging,” Essinger warned. “You do any digging without my authorization and the supervision of our chief archaeologist and I don’t care who you are, we’ll bundle you back on your gig and send you home. We’ve got responsibilities here, you know. We’re the ones who’re accountable.”
“I doubt we’ll be doing any digging. We’re most interested in the last days of the Wenlock, so we’ll be working right here in the city.”
“What the hell are you looking for?”
“Evidence to support or refute a theory.”
“I’m not an idiot. I figured that much out. What kind of evidence?”
“We’ll know it when we find it,” he said.
“Wonderful,” Essinger said in a voice heavy with sarcasm. “You know, this is my third rotation here. I’ve seen all kinds of people come out from the Planning Office and the FC Committee who thought they just had to see it themselves, or had some pet idea that they just had to check out personally. Do you know what? They didn’t find a damn thing they couldn’t have gotten from our reports.”
“Are you trying to say that we’re not welcome?” Thackery asked, raising one eyebrow questioningly.
“Since you bring it up, that’s exactly what I mean,” Essinger said gruffly. “I can almost understand that the Analysis Office has trouble saying no to the Committee. But I don’t know why they can’t at least protect us from our own. Unless maybe this is actually some sort of inspection visit? If so, you’ll soon see we’re not out here partying. This is hard work, and we’re working hard.”
“We’re not here to check up on you.”
“No? Then, frankly, I don’t know why you just didn’t stay on A-Cyg and consult the Analysis Office. They know everything we know. We’re not holding anything back.”
“You’ve done nineteen years’ more work while we were in the craze,” Thackery said pleasantly. “That’s why we came.”
“You wouldn’t have had to come here to jump ahead. You could have gone to A-Boo, or even to Earth. No, you’re not telling me everything.”
“It’s not our job to tell you everything,” Thackery said calmly. “But as long as we’re here, it’s part of yours to tell us everything we want to know. So why don’t you put a lid on your professional pique, and tell me about this earthquake that supposedly finished off Wenlock.”
Thackery found Koi alone in a small room on the second level of the next house, sitting crosslegged on the floor with a portable netlink on her lap. She looked up and her face brightened as he entered.
“Where are the others?” he asked.
“Got an invitation to lunch. I decided to wait for you.”
“Thanks. Is this our workspace, or our quarters?” Thackery asked, surveying the bare walls and floor.
“Both. They’re going to try to dig up some spare foldaways and a table or two. Did you find out anything?”
“I found out the Universe didn’t stop while we were en route.”
“I know. I was just looking over the library update. Pull up a piece of floor,” she invited with a sideways jerk of her head.
There were, in fact, two new colonies. Three years before the 16 Herculis find, the Francis Bacon had discovered an active agricultural settlement on 66 Tauri-7C, a satellite of a brown dwarf orbiting an F-star in the Hyades. Though Essinger hadn’t thought it important enough to mention, Shinn was the first human habitation, FC or otherwise, to call a secondary satellite home. It was also the first find in the Perseus octant since Journa.
Thackery stretched out his legs and leaned back against the wall. “You know, considering that I’ve spent nine-tenths of the last two hundred years in the craze, it’s perfectly reasonable that every time I come back down to normal time a new colony’s been found—”
“Life goes on.”
“—but damned if it doesn’t make me feel like I’m always behind and never going to catch up. I thought you said the list was about complete.”
She shrugged. “Thought it was.”
“So now we have eight colonies in the northern hemisphere and five in the south.”
“Baker’s dozen.”
“What are you so cheerful about?”
“Just eager to get to work,” she said, kissing him on the ear. “Did Essinger have anything substantive to say?”
“I asked him about the earthquake. All the evidence is indirect. No firsthand accounts.”
“You sound relieved.”
“Maybe I am, a little.”
“The D’shanna don’t have to be responsible for all the extinctions. There can be colonies that failed without their help.”
“I know. But if the D’shanna weren’t involved, then we won’t find out any more about them here, or get any closer to finding them.”
“True enough. But from what I’ve seen already, we’re going to have to make a hell of a case for ourselves to convince anyone the earthquake wasn’t responsible.”
“But wouldn’t an earthquake strong enough to bring down the dome have damaged these buildings as well?”
Koi took a moment to consider before answering. “That depends. If the dome wasn’t designed to damp out harmonic oscillations, it could have been the first thing to go. Just like soldiers aren’t supposed to march in step while crossing bridges. It may have been checked out already. If it hasn’t, I’ll see to it. By the way, are you hungry? I know they’re not waiting on us, but we’re probably welcome anyway.”
“What I really want is to get a good picture of Wenlock in my mind. What do you think?”
She set the netlink aside and started to scramble to her feet. “I think we should go get Jankowski and have a look around.”
They found Jankowski sitting with Guerrieri and Mueller in the small dining room of the fourth house, laughing with them over some story Guerrieri had just finished telling. “Sure thing,” was Jankowski’s reply to their request. “Just let me clear it with Dr. Essinger, make sure I’m not needed anywhere else.”
While he was gone, Thackery and Koi had time to share one of the sugary wheatrolls sitting in a basket on one of the counters.
“Do you want us to come with you?” Guerrieri asked.
“No. Dr. Essinger isn’t too happy with our presence, so I want us to become as independent as possible. Spend the afternoon poking around here. I want to know where everything is and who to see about getting it. If you have time, you can change our ’links over to the local frequencies, too, so we can access their files dir
ectly.”
“Will do,” Guerrieri said with a nod as Jankowski returned. “Any problems?” Thackery said, twisting toward the young archaeologist.
Jankowski shook his head and grinned crookedly. “No. In fact, he was looking for me, to tell me that I’m assigned to you until further notice.”
“A combination guide and keeper?”
“I guess. You ready? We’ll lose the light of the primary before too long.”
“Then let’s get going.”
The dividing line between the relatively well-preserved buildings at the rim of the city and the ruins at the center was a sharp one. Jankowski led them down streets which had obviously been cleared of their rubble, for brightly colored, numbered stakes projected from the pavement at regular intervals, marking the corners of the excavation grids. The buildings on either side were battered-looking, with collapsed roofs and bulging walls.
“We’ve got two teams working, one here in Wenlock and one in Werno—that’s the city about two hundred klicks southwest,” he said. “I’ll take you to the local site first, and then over to the artifact warehouses.”
“How long have you been out here, Jankowski?” Thackery asked.
“I’m in the second year of a five-year rotation. I’m afraid that makes me about as junior as can be on the staff here—most of the others have been here at least two rotations. There isn’t much turnover in the colony Annexes, especially in Bootes—retirement or death, that’s about it. I replaced a senior archaeologist who was killed in a cave-in over in Wynea. Of course, there’ll be a lot of new faces if the Office ever gets around to putting together the 16 Herculis followup. I think five of the staff members have applied for it.”
“So where are you from?” Thackery asked.
“Oh, A-Bootes, of course. First generation native. My father was born on Earth.” He laughed. “My mother was born on a packet, during the craze. Called herself a ’tweener.”
Stopping at an intersection with an uncleared street, Koi picked up a palm-sized fragment of plaz and turned it over in her hands. Though the edges of the fragment were ragged, they were not sharp, and there were no fracture lines through the body of the fragment.
“What’s this made of?” she called to Jankowski.
He stopped and came toward her. “I’m not a chemist, so my answer may not satisfy you. If it contained more silicon and calcium and had a less ordered structure, we’d call it glass. There’s also a surface coat, a long-chain polymer coating a few tenths of a millimetre thick—like a plastic. That’s why we call it plaz—a slightly bastardized acronym for polymerized glass.”
Koi tried to flex the fragment, to no noticeable effect. “Ugly coinage—good engineering.”
“Good chemistry, actually,” said Jankowski with a grin. “The Wenlock were crummy engineers. Just try one of their flush toilets if you need proof.”
Since the archaeological work had begun nearly a half-century before, three of Wenlock’s seven square kilometres had been fully excavated, and the collection of artifacts had long ago reached the point of diminishing returns. There was a houseful of skeletons, bagged, tagged, and lying in stacks; thousands of 24-page pamphlets Jankowski called chapbooks, diligently sorted and cataloged but untranslated; an enormous variety of small machinery and housewares, from a wishbone-shaped razor missing its blade to a kitchen canister which still held several hundred grams of caked einkorn flour.
“We photograph everything with a pan camera, holo and high-res,” Jankowski explained, “and then there’s not much else we can do with it except store it in the event that somebody somewhere decides they have to see the original.”
“How often does that happen?”
“Not very. Considering the time problem, they just about have to come here. I understand we’ve had about one on every packet, and the packets come every six months. Most of them take care of their business during the two-week layover and go back on the same packet. This isn’t exactly Vacationland, as you may have noticed.”
“But you like it here?”
“Oh, sure. It’s—.” His gaze wandered as he searched for the right words. “I guess it’s the way everything these people did became intertwined with this planet that fascinates me. I’ll give you an example. There used to be a native plant—I say used to be because we haven’t been able to find any living specimens—which had bioluminescent nodules that it used as part of its reproduction strategy, the way Earth plants use flowers to attract insects. The Wenlock grew it in those long channels you’ve seen along the face of the buildings, like window boxes, to light the streets at night. And they copied the chemistry to use in their own homes in the cold-light lamps.”
“You don’t see that kind of synergy on an Advance Base,” Koi said with an understanding smile.
Jankowski nodded. “The last Wenlock died before the first pyramid was built. I can hold in my hand the skull of a man who lived before Greek culture named the constellations. I guess I feel more in touch with my human heritage here than I do anywhere else. Being here makes time real for me. Do I sound crazy?”
“No,” Koi said and patted his arm through the suit. “Not at all.”
Jankowski’s guided tour consumed nearly two hours. Toward the end, Thackery became less and less communicative, with fewer and fewer questions and less to say about the answers. By the time the trio started back toward the Annex, Thackery had withdrawn completely. Even the voluble Jankowski seemed to notice, and took the cue to be silent himself. Then, as they left the collapsed roofs and bulging walls and blocked streets of the center city behind, Jankowski came up alongside Thackery and touched his elbow.
“Did Wenlock bore you or disappoint you?” he asked.
The question recalled Thackery from his inner retreat. “I’ve insulted you somehow, haven’t I? Please don’t take my lack of enthusiasm personally, Kevin,” Thackery said. “It has nothing to do with Wenlock, and certainly nothing to do with you.”
“I’m not insulted. I’m just wondering if there isn’t some way I could have spent your time better.”
“You showed us exactly what I wanted you to. It’s not your fault if what we saw didn’t satisfy our need. You know what we’re here for?”
“Generally.”
“If you do, then you know that we’re looking for what no one else has seen, or what they saw and didn’t think important. We’re playing a guessing game, and we’re dealing with impressions. We can’t have them if we don’t go out and see things firsthand.”
For a time, no one said anything. Jankowski made a halfhearted game out of kicking a pebble-sized chunk of masonry ahead of him as they walked on.
“Kevin, you have a good feel for these people—,” Koi began.
“I think so.”
“Since you’ve arrived, have you seen any sign that they considered returning to space to avoid what happened? Any evidence that they had kept that capability or could have stretched themselves to reacquire it?”
Jankowski stared intently at the ground before him as he thought. “No. They were tip-top farmers. They were pretty good chemists. They were fair breeders—they created varieties of Canis for everything from food to draft animals to pets. But the kinds of technology required for space travel, the metallurgy, the electronics—no. They just hadn’t taken things in that direction very far at all. I don’t guess that’s what you wanted to hear,” Jankowski added apologetically.
“No, we want honesty above all,” Thackery said.
“I know. I just wish I could be more helpful to you.” Despite his helmet’s faceplate, Jankowski’s frown and furrowed brow were evident to both Koi and Thackery. “If it’s oddities you’re looking for, about the best I could do is take you out to see the delta-wing at Site 241.”
Thackery perked up noticeably at that. “Wing as in aircraft?”
“Sort of. It’s just a name, really, for about 300 kilos of metal—” Koi was frowning. “I’ve been over the archaeological reports pretty thoroughly—”
>
“You won’t find it there. Frankly, it’s a bit of an embarrassment, not being able to explain it. Every dig has its little mysteries, as Dr. Essinger says. But don’t let me lead you on—it’s not a real aircraft, just shaped like one—”
Thackery would not hear Jankowski’s qualifications. “I want to see it. Is it back at the warehouses?”
“No, it was left in situ.”
“Where?”
“North of Wynea. We’d have to take one of the skiffs—”
“What’s the problem, do we need a pilot?”
“Oh, no, I can fly it—”
“Then take us there.”
The primary sun had set by the time they reached Site 241, but the dwarf provided a bright twilight in the great pit. Thackery was out the door almost the moment the skiff landed on the barren volcanic plain, and Koi was not far behind.
“They found it about eight years ago, during an aerial scan,” Jankowski said as he joined them on the rim of the pit. “But you see what I was trying to tell you. It’s not really a plane. It’s just a skeleton of something that looked kind of like one.”
Thackery had already come to that unhappy conclusion. The artifact consisted of three S-shaped ribs of bluish-tinged metal, each a few centimetres across and perhaps thirty metres in length. All three ribs came together to form the “nose” of the plane. Two of the ribs, one reversed from the other, lay flat on the floor of the pit and formed the outline of the “wings.”
The third rib, partially supported now by a truss added by the excavators, swept up and back along the centerline of the “fuselage” to form the leading edge of the “tail.” A conical piece of the same bluish metal reinforced both the triple joint and the suggestion of an aircraft nose.
“This is all that was found?” Thackery asked, his disappointment evident.
“Oh, no. But all the small artifacts were removed and stored. I think there were over a hundred of them, all found within the area marked out by the boundaries of the wings.”
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