Carrelli touched her hand. “They have faith. That’s what is important. It gives purpose to their lives and makes them what they are.”
“Isn’t that even sadder? They might be worshipping the empty casket of an advanced alien race.”
“Like I said, it gives their life meaning. It’s responsible for their being so good, being so anti-materialist. They live at one with their world.” Carrelli shrugged. “By comparison, what have we done, other than wreck our own planet?”
Kaluchek smiled. “You saying we should live like Buddhists and venerate the Builders?”
Carrelli laughed. “Of course not. We should live lives of conservation and venerate our eventual homeworld.”
“Sounds fine to me.”
Watcher Pharan advanced towards them between the lines of his acolytes. He paused before the great snuffling nose of the sharl and looked up at Carrelli with his blinking pink eyes. He spoke quickly, gesturing with his thin arm towards the ship.
Carrelli replied, bowing her head.
She turned to Kaluchek and said, “Pharan says he will escort us as far as the ship. We will enter by ourselves. Protocol, apparently, does not allow for us to be accompanied when we approach the cask of the Sleeper.”
Kaluchek dismounted, sliding down the toughened hide of the sharl and landing on the golden moss. With Carrelli beside her, she followed Watcher Pharan towards the stairway leading up to the ship, passing down the aisle of twittering acolytes.
Pharan stopped at the foot of the stairs, turned and gestured for them to proceed. Carrelli spoke to him quickly, nodded and climbed. Kaluchek followed, the timber stairs creaking beneath their weight.
Behind them, Pharan and the acolytes started up a piccolo piping, filling the forest with its joyous sound.
As they reached the top of the stairway, they were dwarfed by the ship’s great curving flank rising above them, its fire-blackened panels skeined with vines. The arched entrance hatch, three times their size, gave on to a great cavernous hall, which might have been the cargo hold.
They paused on the threshold, overcome with the size of the ship and its cathedral silence. The baroque design of its exterior was repeated within, with no straight lines in evidence, all angles rounded. It was not what Kaluchek had expected from a spaceship, after the starkly functional architecture of the Lovelock. Here the lavish whorls that decorated the bulkheads, the tubular design of the corridors leading off, struck her as excessive, the product of an aesthetic entirely alien.
She wished Joe were with her to experience this incredible place. She could fully understand why the Caliquans considered it so hallowed.
Carrelli glanced at her. “This way?” the medic suggested, gesturing down a corridor that led in the direction of the nose-cone.
They moved across the floor of the hold, their steps echoing around them, and entered the tubular passage. There was something intestinal in its refusal to adhere to straight lines; it seemed to meander through the ship, rising and falling on its way forward. After ten metres the light from outside gave way to shadow, and Carrelli illuminated their way with the flashlight of her atmosphere suit.
The curving walls of the corridor were decorated with the same whorls and curlicues as the hold, less a series of deliberate patterns than what appeared to be an accidental arrangement or natural designs, like frost patterns.
Ahead, the corridor lightened. Carrelli stopped abruptly, and Kaluchek almost collided with her. “What?”
“I think this is it,” Carrelli said in a whisper, switching off her wrist-mounted flashlight and pointing ahead.
They were on the lip of what appeared to be a great sunken amphitheatre, illuminated by the slanting rays of the setting sun, which poured in through a 180-degree arrangement of viewscreens.
Cradles hung from the domed ceiling, their material frayed and rotted with the passage of centuries. What might have been banks of com-terminals, more like the dusty grey cases of giant beetles, circled the flight-deck beneath the viewscreens. An absolute silence hung over the place, almost forbidding them to defile it. Kaluchek was aware of the rasp of her breathing.
Carrelli pointed, as if not wanting to spoil the perfection of the silence.
In the centre of the flight-deck, below them as they stood on the threshold, was a raised plinth and upon it a long cask or catafalque. It was, as Kaluchek had expected, nothing like their own cold sleep units. As if intended as the centrepiece of some alien cathedral, it was bulbous and decorated with a bas-relief of abstract design, like Mandelbrot fractals made three-dimensional.
Carrelli stepped down into the well of the amphitheatre. Kaluchek followed.
Like pilgrims they approached the cask and climbed the steps of the plinth. At the top they paused and gazed down at the catafalque. Carrelli reached out, traced the patterns with long fingers. Kaluchek did the same, the rococo metal surprisingly warm beneath her fingertips.
Carrelli moved around the cask, trailing fingers as if searching for some mechanism whereby to open it. Kaluchek looked for anything that might indicate an operating interface, technology she might recognise. There seemed to be no heat-responsive sensors, nothing as crass as touchpads or verniers.
She looked around her, at the rearing domed ceiling of the flight-deck, and wondered at the creatures that had operated this bizarre craft.
Across the cask, Carrelli touched something. Kaluchek cried out as the lid of the cask cracked. She stepped back in alarm, almost losing her footing on the top step of the plinth and tumbling down.
She reached forward, gripped the rim of the cask, and stared into its interior as the lid slid back along its length.
Carrelli looked up and across at her. “That’s your answer,” she whispered. “That’s why the Builders never came for the Sleeper.”
Kaluchek stared down at the collapsed bones on a bed of dust, a neat configuration that illustrated the shape of a tall biped, with more ribs than a human, thicker limb bones and a great domed skull with a jutting nose and jaw-line.
“System malfunction,” Carrelli said, “or perhaps it succumbed to its injuries, despite the Caliquans’ ministrations.”
Kaluchek shook her head. “What do we tell them? I mean, if they find out their revered Sleeper is dead...”
“I don’t know,” Carrelli said, surprising Kaluchek. The cool Italian medic usually had an answer for everything.
Carrelli stepped down from the plinth and moved around the perimeter of the flight-deck, examining the hunched arrangement of the com-terminals.
Kaluchek joined her. “What are you looking for?”
Carrelli glanced up. “I’m not sure. Some means of accessing information, however that might be achieved. It might be a case of touching everything and hoping—as I did up there.”
Kaluchek nodded. “Aliens do things differently,” she murmured.
Carrelli smiled and continued her search.
Kaluchek moved around the flight-deck in the opposite direction from Carrelli, counter-clockwise. She ran her hand over the bulging surfaces, furred with centuries of dust. She recognised nothing similar to any smartware systems she had worked with; for all she knew, the globular consoles might have been examples of extraterrestrial art.
She paused to look out over the forest. The sun had gone down, and the light was aqueous now, golden green. She could see Watcher Pharan and his acolytes seated around the foot of the stairway in a semicircle, heads bowed.
She wondered suddenly what Joe was doing, and desperately wanted to be with him.
She reached out to touch a protuberance on the surface of a console—which looked like a toad on a rock, she thought—and immediately pulled her hand away, shrieking with alarm and examining her tingling fingertips.
“Sissy, what did you do?”
Kaluchek turned to Carrelli, and was amazed to see something hanging in the air between them. She could see Carrelli through it, the Italian’s expression mirroring her own, open-mouthed with surprise.
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br /> The image was indistinct, like a poor holovision, but Kaluchek could make out what appeared to be a three-dimensional representation of the helix, perhaps as tall as a human, floating in the air. It turned as she watched, a complex rosary of worlds spiralling around a central, burning sun.
Involuntarily, she stepped forward and reached out. As expected, her fingers passed through the fourth tier. She told herself that she felt a slight tingle, but nothing more.
As if in a daze, Carrelli moved around the rotating helix. “Some kind of... map,” Carrelli said. She stepped forward, reached out.
Instantly, her head snapped back and she cried out as if in pain. Instead of retreating, however, she took another step forward, then another, passing through the tiers until she was standing inside the spiralling helix. Her torso took the place of the sun, which continued to burn, filling her with radiance.
“Gina!” Kaluchek called out.
Carrelli opened her eyes. She seemed to be in rapture. She reached out, touching the tiers, her fingers playing an arpeggio across the span of worlds. “Magnifico” she sang.
She turned, her fingers running up and down the spiral, her head flung back.
Kaluchek retreated, fetched up against the console with a start and stared. “Gina?”
As if from a great distance, Carrelli replied, “I’m fine, Sissy. More than fine. I’m... I’m accessing information... it’s random, patchy. Corrupted. The ship crash-landed here three thousand years ago. I can’t control what I’m finding out—I just accept what I receive! Oh, the wonder...”
“How come you...?” Kaluchek began. “I felt a jolt, nothing more.”
Rapturously, Carrelli shook her head. “My augments... I seem to be picking things up through my smartware implants.” She closed her eyes, flung back her head.
When she opened her eyes again, she was staring at Kaluchek. “Enough, Sissy! I’ve had enough. Can you... whatever you did to activate it, turn it off...”
Kaluchek found the reptilian protuberance, reached out and once more felt the jolt. She turned quickly. The image of the helix flickered out of existence, and Carrelli, suddenly divested of the wondrous image, slumped to the deck.
Kaluchek rushed over to her, cradled Carrelli in her arms and checked her pulse. She was alive, breathing normally. Kaluchek’s panic subsided. She wondered what she had felt, then: alarm for Carrelli that she might be dead, or fear of being left alone aboard an alien ship in an alien rainforest. As Carrelli’s eyes flickered open and she smiled up at her, Kaluchek felt a quick hot flush of shame.
“You okay?” she asked redundantly.
“Fine. I’m fine. God, the... sensation. I don’t know... I’ve never felt anything like it before. I was... I was flooded with information. Much of it...” she shook her head. “It was meaningless, just beyond the threshold of my comprehension. But some of it...” She shook her head and laughed aloud.
“Some of it...?”
Carrelli moved away from her, sat cross-legged on the deck and hung her head, as if recovering from shock. She looked up suddenly, smiling. “Sissy, the image of the helix is a kind of registry, an index.”
Kaluchek echoed the word.
“When I touched each world...” Carrelli went on, “I don’t know how, but I could access information about it, technical information, its status—things like its atmospheric constituents, mass, gravity... I even,” she laughed “in some cases I even knew what beings inhabited the worlds, but the knowledge was like a dream, the information fleeting, elusive. Then there was more...” She stopped speaking, hung her head and touched her temples with graceful fingers.
When she looked up again, she seemed to have calmed herself, controlled her breathing. She said, “Towards the end, I learned about the ship itself, its pilot. The Sleeper was an engineer, one of a team whose job it was to service the helix.” She screwed up her eyes, as if fighting for recall. “They were... I can’t recall their names, this race of engineers, but they weren’t the Builders. They were... sub-contractors, if you like. They worked for the Builders.”
“And the Builders?” Kaluchek asked. “Did you learn anything about the Builders?”
“I... I learned that they still inhabit a world on the helix,” she said in little more than a whisper. “The Builders... that’s not what they call themselves, but that’s how my smartware translated their name... they inhabit a world on the fourth tier. That is, on the tier above this one. They are an ancient race, the oldest of all the known races in the galaxy. They are... I received the impression that they are... perhaps dormant, or suspended, or in some form of hibernation. They are so old that their flesh is...” She shook her head in frustration, “I didn’t understand what I was receiving, but I had the impression that they were in hibernation because their flesh was weak, whatever that might mean.”
She smiled at Kaluchek and said, “Help me up. Then activate the image again.”
“You sure? I mean—”
“Do it. I’ll be fine.”
Kaluchek nodded. She assisted Carrelli to her feet, then moved to the console and hit the protuberance. Carrelli approached the helix, reached out and seemed to grasp a planet on the fourth tier. “This is their world,” she said in a hushed voice, and pointed to a world on the tier below, almost directly underneath the first. “And this is Calique.”
She moved into the middle of the helix, reached out and ran her hands across the tiers. She shook her head. “It’s strange, but the effect isn’t as powerful this time. I’m getting the same information, and the rapture is reduced.” She laughed. “But it’s still incredible...”
Kaluchek stepped forward cautiously and reached out, touching a world with her fingertips. Again she felt a slight, tingling sensation, like pins and needles, but nothing more.
She looked at Carrelli. “You don’t know why they built the helix and brought the extraterrestrials here?”
Carrelli dropped her arms and stepped from the helix. She crossed to the console and touched the control, and behind her the helix winked out of existence.
She shook her head. “That was what I wanted most to learn,” she said. “Why? But I couldn’t access that information, Sissy.”
She moved from the perimeter of the flight-deck and approached the plinth. As Kaluchek watched, the Italian climbed the steps and paused at the top.
Kaluchek hurried up the steps of the plinth and stood beside Carrelli, staring down at the remains of the dead engineer.
Then Carrelli reached into the cask. Her fingers gently moved aside what might have been a collarbone, then reached out and picked up something. As Carrelli withdrew her hand, Kaluchek saw a pendant glittering in her grip.
“What is it?”
Carrelli held it up before them. “Call it a badge of office,” she said, and Kaluchek saw that dangling on the chain was a miniature golden helix—with, incredibly, a small glowing sun somehow suspended at its centre.
Carrelli looked at her. “I’d like to keep it as a souvenir, but...”
“But?”
“I know someone who would appreciate it even more.”
Kaluchek smiled. “Watcher Pharan?”
“Who else?”
“But what will you tell him...?” She gestured towards the bones. “You can’t...”
Carrelli was shaking her head. “The Caliquans are a good people. I knew that before, but when I touched the facsimile of their world, that was confirmed. I’ll give him this memento, tell them that they must keep up their vigil until the day the Builders descend and reward them for their altruism. I’ll say that the Sleeper still sleeps, is not yet ready to awaken.”
The light from beyond the flight-deck was dying with the setting of the sun, and Carrelli activated her flashlight and said, “It’s time we were getting back.” She looked at Kaluchek. “We have a lot to talk about. Whether we remain on this tier and try to find a suitable world, or move up to the next one and locate the Builders.”
Kaluchek said, “We can’t
stay here, Gina... not when we know where the Builders are.” She shook her head. “That would be impossible. We need to know why, how...”
Carrelli smiled. “That’s what I think, too. Come on, let’s get back.”
They retraced their steps through the ship, following the elliptical disc of Carrelli’s flashlight until they came to the cargo hold, then paused at the top of the crude timber steps and gazed down.
Kaluchek wondered if she had ever seen a sight more beautiful. The clearing was bathed in dying sunlight, fringed by tall trees and scented by a million colourful blooms. In pride of place at the foot of the steps stood the tiny, expectant forms of the Caliquans, silvery and ethereal, staring up at them with huge pink eyes, their insectile arms raised as if in supplication.
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