by Emily
The e-suit fitted itself to her like a garment, save at the face, where it formed a hard oval shell, allowing her to speak and breathe comfortably. It afforded protection against extremes of temperature and radiation, and also countered air pressure within the body so that she could function in a vacuum. It felt rather like wearing a bodysuit of loose-fitting soft cloth. Power was derived from weak-force particles, and consequently the suit could maintain itself indefinitely.
When the temple had stood on this spot, the climate had been far more hospitable, and the surrounding lands had supported a thriving agricultural society. Later, the town and the temple had been sacked and burned, but the place had risen again, had risen several times from assaults, and eventually became, according to the experts, a seat of empire.
And then it had gone down permanently into the dust.
Her commlink vibrated. "Hutch? We're ready to go." That was Toni Hamner, one of her passengers. At the moment Toni was directing the loading crew.
A couple of Chernowski's peopk were lifting an engraved stone out of a pit. "On my way," she said.
She set down minutes later beside the lander. Another rover was on the ground, from which packing cases were being loaded. The cases contained artifacts, almost exclusively pieces of the temple, protected by foam. "We've got some ceramics to take back," said Toni. "Including a statue."
"A statue? Of whom?"
She laughed. "No one has any idea. But it's in good condition."
There were two loaders. One was looking at the shipping labels. "Cups," he said. "You believe that? After all this time?"
"John's new," said Toni. "It's fired clay," she told him. "Do it right, and it'll last forever." She was lithe, olive-skinned, happy-go-lucky. Hutch had brought her out from Sol four years before, with her husband. Rumor had it that she'd been maybe a bit too happy-go-lucky. He gave it up and wanted to go home, while Toni made it clear she intended to stay indefinitely. She was a power-flow expert, with an opportunity to show what she could do. Her time at Pinnacle, where she had an opportunity to design and implement her own systems without undue supervision, was priceless.
Apparently Toni had considered the husband expendable.
The cases were heavy, and it was essential to balance the load.
Hutch showed them where she wanted everything, and then climbed into the cabin. Her other three passengers were already seated.
One of them was Tom Scolari, an ADP specialist whom she'd known for years. Scolari introduced her to Embry Desjardain, a physician ending her tour, and Randy Nightingale, with whom she had a passing acquaintance. Nightingale had been a surprise, a late addition to her manifest. The flight home, she explained, would last thirty-one days. Not that they didn't already know.
She sat down, pressed the commlink, and informed the transport officer that she was ready to go.
His voice crackled over the circuit. "You're clear," he said. "It was nice having you here, Hutch. Will you be coming back this way soon?"
"Next two trips are to Nok." Nok was the only world they'd found with a functioning civilization. Its inhabitants had just begun to put electricity to work. But they were constantly waging major wars. They were a quarrelsome lot, given to repression, intolerant of original ideas. They believed they were alone in the universe (when they thought about it at all), and even their scientific community refused to credit the possibility that other worlds might be inhabited. It was a curious business, because humans walked among them, clothed in lightbenders, which rendered them invisible.
Hutch wondered why the civilization on Pinnacle, dead these hundreds of thousands of years, should be so much more interesting than the Noks.
Toni took a last look at the artifacts to be sure they were secured. Then she said good-bye to the two loaders and took her seat.
Hutch started the spike, and while the system built energy she recited the safety procedures for them. Spike technology allowed her to manipulate the weight of the lander in a relatively light (i.e., planetary) gravity field from its actual value down to about two percent. She instructed her passengers to remain in their seats until advised otherwise, make no effort to release the harness until the harness itself disengaged, attempt no sudden movements once the red light went on, and so forth.
"All right," she said. "Here we go."
The harnesses settled around their shoulders and locked them in. She rotated the thrusters to a down angle and fired them. The vehicle began to rise. She eased back on the yoke, and the lander lifted gently into the air.
She turned it over to the AI, informed her passengers they could switch off their e-suits if they desired, and shut her own down.
The excavation site had already become indistinguishable from the brown sands surrounding it.
The Harold Wildside had exquisite accommodations. Hutch had seen several major changes during the twenty-odd years she'd been piloting the Academy's superluminals, the most significant of which had been the development of artificial gravity. Bttt it was also true that Academy people now traveled well. Not in luxury, perhaps, but current accommodations had come a long way since the early days, when everything had been bargain-basement.
The extra infusion of money into the space sciences had largely resulted from the discovery of the Omega clouds, those curious and lethal objects that drifted out of galactic center in eight-thousand-year cycles and which seemed programmed to assault technological civilizations. What they really assaulted, of course, was straight lines and right angles on structures large enough to draw their attention. Which was to say, shapes that did not appear in nature. Since their discovery two decades before, architectural styles had changed dramatically. The curve was now a basic feature everywhere. Bridges, buildings, spaceports, whatever an architect put his hand to, were designed with sweep and arc. When the Omega clouds arrived in the vicinity of Earth—they were expected in about a thousand years—they would find little to trigger them.
The entities had ignited a long debate: Were they natural objects, an evolutionary form perhaps that the galaxy used to protect itself against sentient life? Or were they the product of a diabolical intelligence of incredible engineering capability? No one knew, but the notion that the universe might be out to get the human race had caused some rethinking among the various major religions.
The temple in the desert had been rounded, without any architectural right angles. Hutch wondered whether it signified that the problem was ancient.
The lander settled into its bay on board Wildside. Hutch waited for her panel to turn green. When it did, she opened the airlock. "Nice to have you folks along," she said. "Quarters are on the top deck. Look for your name. Kitchen's at the rear. If you want to change, shower, whatever, before we leave, you have time. We won't be getting under way for another hour."
Embry Desjardain had long dark hair and chiseled cheekbones. There was something in her eyes that made it easy to believe she was a surgeon. She'd done three years at Pinnacle, which was one more than a standard tour for medical personnel. "I enjoyed myself," she explained to Hutch. "No hypochondriacs out here."
Tom Scolari was medium height, redheaded, laughed a lot, and told Hutch he was going home because his father had become ill, his mother was already disabled, and they just needed somebody around the'house. "Just as well," he continued with a straight face, "there's a shortage of women on Pinnacle."
He made it a point to shake Nightingale's hand. "Aren't you," he said, "the same Nightingale who was out to Deepsix a few years ago?"
Nightingale confessed that he was, commented that it would be good to get home, and opened a book.
While waiting for Wildside's orbit to bring it into alignment with her departure vector, Hutch ran her preflight check, talked to an old friend on Skyhawk, Pinnacle's space station, and read through the incoming traffic.
There were some interesting items: the TransGalactic cruise ship Evening Star was on its way to Maleiva with fifteen hundred tourists to watch the big collision. Th
e Event would also be broadcast live by Universal News Network, although the transmission would be a few days late arriving on Earth. Separatists in Wyoming had gone on another shooting spree, and another round of violence had broken out in Jerusalem.
The Star was the biggest in a proposed series of cruise vessels. A couple of years ago a smaller ship had taken passengers out to the black hole at Golem Point. They'd not expected much interest. As the joke went, there's not much to see at a black hole. But subscriptions had overwhelmed the ticket office, and suddenly deep-space marvels had become big business and a new industry was born.
The Maleiva story reminded her of Randy Nightingale's connection with that system. He'd lost his future and his reputation during the ill-fated mission nineteen years ago. Now the place was in the news again, and he wondered whether that had anything to do with his sudden decision to go home.
Bill asked permission to fire up the engines. "It's time,"he added. The onboard AI for all Academy superluminals was named for William R. Dolbry, who was not the designer, but the first captain to be brought home by the onboard system. Dolbry had suffered a cardiac arrest while ferrying an executive yacht and four frightened passengers on a self-reliance voyage eighty light-years out.
Bill's image (which was not Dolbry's) revealed a man who would have been right out of central casting for a president or chairman. His face was rounded, his eyes quite serious, and he wore a well-manicured gray beard. His designers had been careful not to allow him to establish too great a degree of presence, because they didn't want captains automatically resigning their judgment to him. Illusions could be overwhelming, and AIs still lacked the human capacity to make decisions in real-world situations.
"Go ahead, Bill," she said.
Wildside was carrying a substantial cargo of ceramics and clay tablets. Altogether, they'd brought up eleven loads, and if the ship was a trifle light on passengers, the cargo more than compensated.
Replicas of the cups and bowls, she knew, would turn up later in the Academy gift shop. She would have liked very much to have an original. But the stuff was worth its mass in titanium. And then some.
Pity.
"Okay, folks," she told the PA, "we're going to start accelerating in three minutes. Please be sure you're locked down somewhere. And check in when it's done."
It would be a long haul back to Earth, but Hutch was used to it. She'd discovered that most of her passengers inevitably found they shared a community of interests. There was an endless supply of entertainment available, and the voyages invariably became vacations. She knew of cases in which people who had made this kind of flight together were still holding annual reunions years later. She recalled instances in which passengers had fallen in love, marriages had disintegrated, a scientific breakthrough had been made, and a nearly nonstop orgy had been conducted.
Marcel was amused. "I understood there was nothing intelligent down there. Didn't they specify that on the profile?"
They were back in project control, surrounded by Beekman's technicians and analysts. Beekman himself heaved a long sigh. "You know how surveys are," he said. "And keep in mind that this survey team got run off pretty quick."
"Okay." Marcel grinned. He'd have enjoyed being there to watch the reaction of top management when this news came in. I say, we seem to have had a bit of an oversight on Deepsix. "When you're ready to transmit your report, Gunny, let me know."
Beekman went below and, within twenty minutes, was on the circuit. "We went back over the recordings, Marcel," he said. "Take a look at this"
A snowfield clicked onto his display. Taken by the satellites, it seemed ordinary enough, a landscape of rolling hills and occasional patches of forest. On the desolate side, but the whole world was desolate. "What am I looking for?"
"There," said one of the researchers, a blond young man whose name was Arvin, or Ervin, or something like that.
A shadow.
A building. No doubt this time.
"Where is this?" he asked.
"Northern Transitoria. A few hundred kilometers south of the coast."
It was a spire. A tower.
They magnified it for him. It appeared to be made from stone blocks. He saw a scattering of windows. "How high is it?"
"About three stories. Probably another three below the snow line."
He stared at it. The tower and the snow. It looked like a cold, solitary, forbidding place.
"It doesn't look lived in," said Arvin.
Marcel agreed with the assessment. It looked old, and the surrounding snow was undisturbed.
"I don't think there's any glass in the windows," said someone else.
A map appeared with the location marked. It was south of the ocean they'd called Coraggio. Not far from Bad News Bay.
Well named, he thought. "What's under the snow?"
Beekman nodded to someone off-screen. A network of lines appeared. Houses. Streets. Central parks, maybe. An avenue or possibly a onetime watercourse curving through the middle of the pattern. Watercourse probably, because it was possible to make out a couple of straight lines that looked like bridges. "It's big," he said.
Beekman nodded. "It would have supported a population of probably twenty thousand. But it's small in the sense that the roads and buildings are scaled down. We figure the streets are only a couple of meters wide. That's narrow by anybody's standards. And here's something else." He used a marker to indicate a thick line that seemed to circle the network. "This looks like a wall."
"Fortifications," said Marcel.
"I'd think so. And that kind of fortification means pretechnologi-cal." He looked uncomfortable. "I wish we had an expert here."
The tower appeared to be connected to the wall. "Nothing else visible above the snow?"
"No. Everything else is buried."
He'd suspected the wall they'd found yesterday to be a freak of nature, an illusion perhaps. But this— "It makes five of us now," said Marcel. Five places where sentience had appeared. "Any structures anywhere else on the planet, Gunther?"
"Nothing other than the wall, so far. We've started looking. I'm sure there will be." He tugged distractedly at his beard. "Marcel, we'll have to send a team down. Find out who they are. Or were."
"Can't," said Marcel.
The project director met his eyes. Beekman lowered his voice so that there would not appear to be a disagreement. "This is a special circumstance. I'll sign a release from any instructions or policies that preclude you from acting. But we have to go down and take a closer look."
"I'd love to help, Gunny," said Marcel, "but I meant can't. We don't have a lander."
Beekman's jaw literally dropped. "That can't be right," he said. "You have three of them down in the shuttle bay."
"Those are shuttles. Ship to ship. But they can't operate in an atmosphere."
"You're sure?" He was visibly dismayed. "We've got to be able to do something."
"I don't know what," said Marcel. "Report it. Let Gomez worry about it."
"How could we not have a lander?"
"We don't carry dead mass. Landers are heavy. This operation, we weren't supposed to have any use for one."
Beekman snorted. "Who decided that? Well, never mind. I guess we've all learned something about preparedness."
"You don't have anyone qualified to conduct an investigation anyhow," said Marcel.
"Qualified?" Beekman looked like a man facing a world of idiots. "You're talking about poking around in an old building. Look for writing on the wall and take some pictures. Maybe find a couple of pots. What kind of qualifications do you need?"
Marcel grinned. "You'd break all the pots."
"Okay, let the Academy know. Tell them to send out another ship, if they want. But they'll have to hurry."
"They will that" said Marcel. He knew there wouldn't be time for a second mission to reach them from Earth. They'd have to divert somebody.
III
It surprises me that courage and valor have not been bred
out of the human race. These are qualities that traditionally had to an early demise. They are therefore not conducive to passing one's genes along. Rather it is the people who faint under pressure who tend to father the next generation. —gregory MACALLISTER, "Straight and Narrow," Reminiscences
Hutch was not looking forward to spending the next few weeks locked up inside Wildside with Randall Nightingale. He took his meals with the other passengers, and occasionally wandered into the common room. But he had little to say, and he inevitably looked ill at ease. He was small in stature, thin, gray, only a couple of centimeters taller than the diminutive Hutch.
It was an unfortunate circumstance for a reclusive man. The run between Quraqua and Earth usually carried upward of twenty passengers. Had that been the present situation, he could have retreated easily into his cabin and no one would have noticed. But they only had four. Five, counting the pilot And so he'd felt pressure and was doing his best to participate.
But his best served only to create an atmosphere that was both tentative and cautious. Laughter flowed out of the room when he appeared and everyone struggled to find things to talk about.
The biosystem on Pinnacle was, after six billion years, far and away the oldest one known. Nightingale had been there for the better part of a decade, reconstructing its history. Most of the theoretical work was said to be done, and therefore she understood why Nightingale
would be going home. But nevertheless it seemed coincidental that he should choose just this moment.
In an effort to satisfy her curiosity, she'd looked for an opportunity to speak with him alone. When it arose, she casually wondered whether someone in his family had taken ill.
"No," he'd said. "Everyone's doing fine." But he volunteered nothing more. Didn't even ask why she'd inquired.
Hutch smiled and suggested she'd been concerned because his name had appeared unexpectedly on the passenger manifest. She hadn't realized he was coming until just a few hours before departure.