Echo

by Jack McDevitt

  Whoever had sent Zakary had committed as vicious an act by dangling that light in front of Alex as by planting the bomb.

  We landed about a kilometer away. The sun had been down five hours and an overcast sky blocked off the starlight. I shut off the antigravs and the extra weight came back. I like low-gravity worlds. “Are you going to wear the pressure suits?” asked Belle.

  Alex looked at me. Shook his head no. “You, Chase?”

  “I don’t think we need them.”

  “I agree. But please keep a channel open so I can hear what’s happening.”

  Alex put his scrambler into his holster. I checked to make sure mine was set properly and tucked it into my belt.

  I’d brought the lander down in the middle of a glade. We pulled jackets on, Alex collected his shoulder pouch, and we went through the airlock. The air was cold. The jacket immediately began to warm up, but it did nothing for my nose and cheeks.

  We stepped down onto a light snow cover and turned on our lamps. The glade and the woods were quiet.

  The navigation lights lit the place up pretty well, but once we got away from them, got into the trees, the darkness closed in. And I mean seriously. This place felt different from the island. Maybe it had been that, on the island, I could hear the tide coming in, or going out, whatever it was doing. And there were some animals. Now all that was gone. The woods felt empty. There was a sense of utter solitude. No critters, no noises in the trees except branches creaking in the wind. Nothing other than the unchanging drone of the insects.

  There were a lot of thick bushes armed with spikes. We had to cut our way through. The ground was uneven and full of holes, and the holes were filled with snow. It was an ideal setup for breaking an ankle.

  We moved cautiously but still managed to stumble around a lot. It’s amazing how clumsy you become when you abruptly pack on a large chunk of extra weight.

  We found the cabin. No lights, of course, this time. And, when we peeked in the window, no alien. The door was locked. We circled the thing, looking for a way to get inside without breaking a window. I couldn’t tell you why, since everything on this world seemed to be returning to nature, but we didn’t want to disturb the place. We’d not had that problem with objects that had been thousands of years old. But the cabin was different: It felt as if someone still lived there.

  The windows were also locked, as was a door in the rear. Curtains were drawn across the glass, except for a room in front, where they were on the floor. We could see a fabric sofa and two armchairs. They looked as if they’d have been comfortable for us. An open book lay on a side table.

  We circled the cabin and stood again at the front door. “What do you think?” I asked.

  “Always play it safe.” Alex knocked. Softly at first. Then louder. Nothing stirred within. He picked up a rock, measured it against a window, and paused. “Damn,” he said. Then he broke the glass. The loud, dull bang echoed through the silence.

  I wondered what he’d have done had something come charging out of the bedroom.

  “Blame it on you, kid,” he said. I didn’t recall having spoken, but maybe he’d gotten to know me too well. He stuck his lamp inside, then climbed through. A moment later, the door swung open.

  The room had a fireplace and a stove. A pile of logs was stacked against one wall. I took a close look at them and saw only dust. A faded picture hung near the door. The dust on it was so thick that it clung to the glass and resisted all efforts to brush it off. I took it outside and washed it in the river. It was a sketch. Of the waterfall. Someone stood nearby, looking out across the falls. He wore a long blue coat, with a hood pulled up over his head. His back was to the viewer.

  The way it stood, the mode of contemplation, the upper limbs pushed into pockets, seemed very human.

  The chairs and the sofa were corroded. The fallen curtains were stiff and had become part of the floor. Alex examined the lamp that stood on one of the side tables. “Oil,” he said.

  In the kitchen, we found a metal container. An icebox. Dishes and glasses were neatly stacked in cabinets, though most were cracked. Alex found one in good condition, wrapped it in one of the protective cloths he routinely carried during a mission, and put it in his pouch.

  A staircase rose to the upper level. Two rooms opened onto the landing. Alex went up and disappeared into one of the rooms. Moments later, he came back out and looked into the second room. Then he stood at the top of the stairs, hesitating. “Chase,” he said. His voice sounded odd. Strained.

  I went to the foot of the stairs. “What’s wrong?”

  “They’re dead.”

  I went up. “Who’s dead?”

  “Everybody.” He seemed tired. Dismayed.

  “I’ll be back.” I looked at the open doors, picked one, and went in. Someone was in bed.

  Something.

  My God. There were two small, desiccated corpses.

  A couple of kids. “Yeah,” I said. They were human. Alex stood in the doorway, but he wouldn’t come any farther.

  “What the hell happened here?” he said, more to himself than to me.

  They’d been dead a long time. I couldn’t tell their gender. When I looked more closely, I wasn’t so sure about their humanity.

  The bed was cold. The blankets were stiff. Frozen.

  He took a deep breath. “There’s more.” He looked at the other doorway. I went in. There was another bed. And two more corpses. Gray and withered. Adults this time.

  One was holding a gun. Alex took it. Cracked it open. “Primitive. Fires eight rounds,” he said. “Four left.”

  “Murder-suicide.”

  “Yes.”

  “They killed their own kids.” I’d never seen anything remotely like it before.

  Alex dropped the weapon on the floor. He tried to pull the blankets up to hide the corpses. But they were frozen in place. “Let’s go,” he said.

  THIRTY-THREE

  I arrived at last on the street where once I’d lived, and found it full of ghosts.

  —Walford Candles, “The Long Road Home”

  “I have news.” Belle let it hang, as if enjoying drawing out the suspense.

  “I’m listening,” said Alex.

  “We have a city.”

  “Another one—?”

  “This one has lights.”

  The lights were in rows. Streetlights. Others appeared to be inside houses! And we could see an area that might have been a mall or park.

  It was a glowing diamond, accentuated by the vast darkness surrounding it.

  Alex threw his head back in the chair. “How about that!” he said. “Chase, we’ve hit the jackpot.” He was out of his chair, bouncing around the cabin like a kid. “Belle, are there any radio transmissions?”

  “Negative, Alex. There’s no activity.”

  “All right, let’s try to provoke some. Open a broadcast channel for Chase.” He smiled benignly. “Once again, the honor is yours, beautiful.”

  “Alex, I think you should be the one who—”

  He raised a hand to silence all protest. “A second chance to make history, Chase. How often does that happen?”

  “Channel’s open,” said Belle.

  I cleared my throat and tried to think of something compelling to say. “Hello. Anybody out there? This is us, up here. Hello on the ground. How’s it going?” I think, by then, I’d become skeptical of a good outcome.

  We got nothing back except static.

  “Belle,” Alex said, “is there any movement in the streets? Any sign of life?”

  “No, Alex. I thought I saw something minutes ago, but I did not have time to ascertain what it was. Possibly canines of some sort.”

  It was another port city. The town itself was laid out in squares and rectangles, stone buildings with columns, statues, and colonnades clustered in the center, surrounded by wood and brick structures. The statues depicted humans. There were two overgrown areas that might once have been parks. A few carts were visible, most
ly in sheds, a few out on the streets. “Belle, what time is it down there?”

  “The sun disappeared below the horizon two hours and six minutes ago.”

  Alex sat and watched the screens. I sent Belle looking for anything that might tell us who’d come out here, constructed a world, and gotten lost. There was nothing on the record. But that was no surprise. Over thousands of years, you tend to lose track of things.

  We passed over the area a couple of times, and I must finally have fallen asleep. Then Alex was leaning over, pushing my shoulder, asking whether I was awake.

  “Sure,” I said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. But I want to show you something.” He looked discouraged.

  Several views of the town were on the displays. “Something’s wrong,” he said.

  I was surprised to see that I’d been asleep almost five hours. “How do you mean?”

  He pointed at one of the images. “This is the first set of pictures. The way it looked when Belle first saw it. In the early evening.” Then he tapped the auxiliary screen. “This is the way it looks now.”

  “It looks the same to me.”

  He sat back in his chair. “That’s precisely the problem.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Chase, there’s no change in the lights.”

  The streetlights were still on, and the lights at the park, but that was to be expected.

  “Look at the houses.”

  Again, I saw no difference. Lights burned everywhere. “What are we talking about?”

  “Belle, what time is it down there?”

  “Dawn will occur in about three hours.”

  “And—?”

  “Look at this group of houses. Lights are on in all of them. They form a U shape.”

  “Oh.” I compared the two pictures. The same U shape was there in both. I checked other areas. A long line of lights along the perimeter had been on two hours after sunset. Now, in the middle of the night, they were still on.

  Alex tapped his fingers on the edge of the display. “I don’t think there’s anyone down there.”

  “Belle,” I said, “how long’s a day on this world?”

  “Thirty-one hours, eleven minutes, and forty-seven seconds, Chase.”

  “There’s your explanation, Alex. The day here is much longer than at home, and the inhabitants have adapted. Instead of nine or ten hours of darkness, they have roughly twelve. So they have a longer sleep cycle. They go to bed later.”

  “Maybe,” he said. His tone suggested he didn’t buy it.

  “Why not?”

  “We’re looking at a town in which, over more than seven hours, no light that had not been on when we first saw it has been turned on. And no light has been turned off. Not one.”

  “You checked them all?”

  “Belle?” he said.

  “That is correct, Chase. The town looks exactly as it did during the first sighting.”

  “We’re going to go down to find out why?”

  “Would you prefer to pass on this?”

  It seemed advisable to wait until daylight before paying a visit. Meantime, we took more pictures. The light pattern did not change. Nobody turned one off; nobody turned one on. It was impossible to be certain once the sun came up, but it looked as if, even then, everything stayed the same.

  We were munching toast and drinking orange juice, getting ready to go, when Belle announced that she’d received a transmission from Audree. I excused myself and went up onto the bridge. A few minutes later, Alex joined me. “She was wondering how we’re doing.”

  “I’d say not so well.”

  “She asked me to say hello to you, Chase.”

  Transmission time between Echo and Rimway, in one direction, was just under six days. Our first messages insystem had gone out about four days earlier, so they hadn’t heard from us yet.

  I recorded a message for Robin. I showed him the lights, explained that we had no idea what was going on, that we were about to go down and look. “I’ll let you know what we find,” I said.

  The sun was lost somewhere over the horizon when we arrived. Clouds were thick, and the sky was gray and gloomy.

  We drifted over the town, surveying it, looking for signs of life. A couple of animals—four-legged creatures about the size of deer—stood at a street corner looking up at us. Otherwise, the streets were empty. A few carts and wagons had been abandoned. And, chillingly, we found occasional bones.

  Up close, the place was deteriorating. Buildings needed paint. Shutters had fallen off houses. Front yards were submerged in weeds. One house had been smashed when a tree fell on it.

  I eased us down into one of the parks and shut the engines off. We stayed in the cockpit for a while, blinking our lights, waiting to see whether we might draw any attention. And, as usual, trying to get accustomed to the added weight. The city remained quiet.

  After a while, Alex got out of his seat. “You sure you want to come?” he asked.

  We were two blocks from the ocean. A wide street, lined with buildings, separated us from the shorefront. They were short structures, no more than four or five stories. But lights burned in a couple of the windows in the upper floors. “Absolutely,” I said.

  There were shops at street level, and one of those was also illuminated.

  I followed him outside and closed the hatch.

  The park was a tangle of weeds and underbrush. There were benches, and sliding boards and swings. And a sculpture that had probably been a fountain: four stone fish erected in a circle around a pair of gaping serpents.

  It wasn’t as cold as it had been on our last trip down. But there was the same sense of desolation. More so in the town, I guess. Empty buildings are more oppressive than empty forests. And maybe it had something to do with the lights as well.

  We took pictures, listened to the murmur of the ocean, and gazed at the serpents.

  We walked toward the cluster of buildings, looked up and down the road, an avenue, really, and listened to the sound of the surf and the echo of our footsteps. The streetlights were about twice as tall as we were. We stopped at the first one we came to, and Alex stood looking up at it. The light did not emanate from a bulb or a panel. Instead, it flickered and burned at the top of a tube. “Gas,” he said.

  There was a sidewalk, of sorts, covered with dirt and sand. We strolled past the faces of the buildings. The display windows were mostly broken. Those still intact carried a thick layer of dirt. Whatever had been in the windows was gone. One bedroom set had survived, and, at another place, several chairs and a footstool. We found a small furnace in the middle of the street, and a couple of corroded pots. “Maybe it was a plague,” I said.

  The buildings were lackluster in design, more or less like large blocks. Sometimes, the upper floor protruded a bit over the lower levels, but that seemed to be as much embellishment as the architects had attempted.

  We picked a building with one of the lighted windows and broke in. We climbed staircases and looked down long hallways. Interior doors were all locked. We cut through a couple, into offices. The lighted one was on the top floor, so we broke into that one also. A desiccated corpse slumped behind a desk.

  In a second building, we came across what appeared to have been a massacre. It was hard to determine how many dead there were because animals had apparently gotten in and dragged the bodies around. But we found bloodstains in several rooms. Bones were scattered everywhere.

  “Alex,” I said, “there’s a major creep factor here. This is not worth whatever money we might make out of it. Let’s let it go. We’re dredging up a nightmare.”

  I hadn’t intended to insult him, but I did. We stood in that terrible place on a carpet that might have been made out of wire, and he fought to contain his anger. “Just for the record,” he said, “this has nothing to do with profits. Or with Rainbow. I’m not sure it ever did.” He took my arm and led me outside. “Something unimaginable happened here. And we have an obligation to these
people to find out what it was.”

  We turned south. The buildings and shops were replaced by smaller buildings that had either housed offices or served as private homes. One place had a stone shingle mounted beside the front door.

  We stopped and examined it. Alex had a picture of the tablet on his link, and he compared the characters with those on the shingle. They bore no resemblance to each other. “Just as well,” he said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “I don’t think I’d want to discover we’ve been looking for a lawyer’s office.”

  I laughed. We both did. The laughter echoed through the empty streets. “I wonder how long it’s been,” he said, “since a sound like that has been heard here?”

  We peeked through a window into one of the lighted houses. There were chairs and a circular table. Curtains hung everywhere. And the light, the light that had drawn us across the world, was provided by a pair of lamps, one on the table, one standing alone in a corner. A connecting room that might have been a kitchen was also illuminated.

  I saw a pair of legs jutting out from the other room. They were desiccated, shrunken, clothed in trousers whose original color was no longer discernible.

  Alex took a deep breath and indicated the table lamp. “See the duct at the base?”

  “Yes.”

  “It supplies the gas. There’s a switch somewhere that allows you to turn it on and off.”

  “Then the lights were turned on and left on?”

  “That’s what it looks like.”

  There were other lights and other bodies in other houses. “There’s a natural gas supply nearby,” Alex said. “It’s piped in. Everything in town, apparently, gets a share. The lights will stay on as long as it lasts.”

  Finally, we turned back toward the park. The wind was getting stronger. “How long do you think it’s been like this?”

  “I don’t know. Awhile.”