Jack Mcdeviit - Deepsix (v1)

by Emily

  They felt entitled to a rest and, once safely away from the river, they took it. Everyone fretted about losing time, but there was simply no help for it. Nightingale felt emotionally exhausted and would have liked to sleep, but as the only member of the group who hadn't been injured, he was assigned the watch.

  They rested for four hours. Then Hutch roused them and got them on the road again.

  The forest was filled with insects and blossoms and barbed bushes and creeper vines. Insects buzzed flowers, transferring pollen in the time-honored manner they'd found in every other biosphere. It was evidence once again that nature always took the simplest way. The external appearance of many of the creatures was different, but only in detail. Animals that resembled monkeys and wolves put in brief appearances. They were remarkably similar to kindred creatures elsewhere. The monkeys had long ears and hairless faces and looked very much like tiny humans. The wolves were bigger than their distant cousins, and were equipped with tusks. There was even an equine creature that came very close to qualifying as a unicorn.

  The differences weren't limited to appearance. They watched a group of wolves give wide berth to a long-necked pseudo-giraffe which was munching contentedly on a tree limb and paying them no attention. Was the animal's meat toxic? Did the creature possess a long-range sting? Or perhaps skunk scent? They didn't know and there was neither time nor (except for Nightingale) inclination to linger long enough to find out.

  Two more potential threats emerged. One was a python-sized serpent with green-and-gray coloring. It watched them with its black marble eyes. But it was not hungry, or it sensed that the oversized monkeys would not prove an easy quarry.

  The other was a duplicate of the feline they'd seen from the tower. This one walked casually out of the shrubbery and strolled up to them as if they were old friends. It must have expected them to run. When they didn't, it hesitated momentarily, then showed them a jaw full of incisors. That was enough, and they cut it down with little trouble or regret.

  Plants everywhere react to light, and a patient observer can watch them turning their petals toward the sun in its journey across the sky. There were occasional shadings here, structures, odd organs, that led Nightingale to suspect that this forest had eyes. That it was possibly aware, in some vegetative manner, of their passage. And that it followed them with a kind of divine equanimity.

  In another few centuries, give or take, Maleiva and its attendant worlds would be out of the cloud and conditions would return to normal. Or they would if the land was still going to be here. The woods felt timeless.

  He wondered if the forest, in some indefinable way, knew what was coming.

  And whether, if it did, it cared?

  "Hey, Hutch." Chiang's voice. "Look at this."

  Chiang and Kellie had gone out to gather firewood. Hutch was seated on a log, rotating her shoulder. She got up and disappeared into the woods. MacAllister, who was security, stayed nearby, but his eyes strayed toward Nightingale, and there was a weariness in them, suggesting he had little patience left for anyone's enthusiasm. They could find a brontosaurus out there, and he wasn't going to care. The only thing that mattered to him was getting home. Everything else was irrelevant.

  "It's a wall," said Kellie. Nightingale could see their lights moving out in the darkness.

  MacAllister looked at the time, as if it had any relation to the current progress of days and nights. It was almost twelve o'clock back in orbit, but whether noon or midnight, Nightingale had no idea. Nor probably had MacAllister.

  Nightingale was desperately weary. He sat with his eyes closed, letting the voices wash over him. A wall just did not seem all that significant.

  There was nothing more for several minutes, although he could hear them moving around. Finally, unable to restrain his curiosity, he asked what they'd found.

  "Just a wall," said Chiang. "Shoulder-high."

  "A building?"

  "A wall."

  There was a brief commotion in the trees. Animals fighting over something.

  "Lot of heavy growth around it," said Kellie. "It's been here a long time."

  Nightingale thought about getting to his feet. "Is it stone?"

  "More like bricks."

  "Anybody see the end of it?"

  "Over here. It turns a corner."

  "There's a gate. With an arch."

  For several minutes they clumped around in the underbrush with no sound other than an occasional grunt. Then Chiang spoke again, excited: "I think there's a building back there."

  They had not seen any kind of structure since leaving the tower. Nightingale gave up and reached for his staff. MacAllister saw that he was having difficulty and started over to help. "It's okay, Gregory," he said. "I can manage."

  MacAllister stopped midway. "My friends call me Mac."

  "I didn't know you had any friends." He collected a lamp and turned it on.

  Mac looked at him with a half smile, but there was no sign of anger.

  "What kind of arch?" Nightingale asked Kellie.

  "Curved. Over a pair of iron gates. Small ones. Pretty much rusted away. But there are some symbols carved into it. Into the arch."

  Nightingale, leaning on his staff, started for the woods. "Do they look like the ones back at the tower?"

  "Could be," said Hutch. "Hard to tell."

  Metal squealed. Somebody had opened the gate. "Why don't we see what's inside?" said Chiang.

  It hurt to walk. MacAllister sighed loudly. "You ought to just take it easy. They find anything important, they'll let us know."

  "They already found something important, Gregory. Maybe this thing was a country estate of some sort. Who knows what's inside?"

  "Why do you care? It's not your field."

  "I'd like very much to know who the original inhabitants were. Wouldn't you?"

  "You want an honest answer?"

  "I can guess."

  "I'm sure you can. I know who the original inhabitants were. They were very likely little hawk-faced guys with blowguns. They murdered one another in wars, and, judging from that tower back there, they were right out of our Middle Ages. Hutch would like to know what gods they worshiped and what their alphabet looked like. I say, who gives a damn? They were just another pack of savages."

  Nightingale arrived at the wall, and it was indeed brickwork. It was low, plain, worn, buried in shrubbery and vines. He wondered what kind of hands had constructed it.

  He advanced until he'd reached the gates. They were made of iron, originally painted black, he thought, although now they were heavily corroded and it was hard to be sure. Nevertheless, one of them still moved on its hinges.

  They were designed for ornamentation rather than security. Individual bars were molded in the shape of leaves and branches. The artwork seemed mundane, something Nightingale's grandmother might have appreciated. Still, it was decorative, and he supposed that told them something more about the inhabitants.

  He heard MacAllister coming up behind him. He sounded like an elephant in deep grass. The light from his lamp fell across the arch.

  It was curved brickwork. The symbols that Kellie had mentioned were engraved on a flat piece of stone mounted on the front. Nightingale thought it was probably the name of the estate. "Abandon hope," he said.

  "Keep out," offered MacAllister.

  The ground was completely overgrown. If there'd ever been a trail or pathway, nothing was left of it now.

  They passed through the gate and saw the others inspecting a small intact building, not much larger, Nightingale thought, than a children's playhouse. It was wheel-shaped, constructed entirely of gray stone, with a roof that angled down from a raised center.

  He could see a doorway and a window. Both were thick with vegetation.

  Chiang cut his way through to the entrance. He cleared away some of the shrubbery, and they filed in, under the usual low ceiling. First the women, then Chiang, and then Nightingale.

  The interior consisted of a single chamber
and an alcove. In both, vegetative emblems, flowers and branches and blossoms, were carved into baked clay panels that covered the walls. A stone table dominated the far end of the chamber.

  The place smelled of decay. MacAllister finally squeezed through the door and squatted so he wouldn't have to stand bent over. "It doesn't look all that old," he said. He put one hand on the floor to steady himself.

  Chiang stood by the table. "What do you think?" he asked, pressing his fingers against it. "Is it an altar?"

  The other races of whom humans had knowledge had all established religions early in their history. Nightingale recalled reading Barashko's classic treatise, Aspects of Intelligence, in which he'd argued that certain types of iconography were wired into all of the known in-telligent species. Sun-symbols and stars, for example, inevitably showed up, as did wings and blood-symbols. There was often a martyred god. and almost everyone seemed to have developed the altar. "Yes," Hutch said. "I don't think there's any question that's what it is." It was rough-hewn, a pair of solid blocks fastened together with bolts. Hutch played her lamp on it, wiped down the surface, and studied it.

  "What are you looking for?" asked Nightingale.

  "Stains. Altars imply sacrifices."

  "Oh."

  "Like here."

  Everyone moved forward to look. Nightingale walked into a hole, but Kellie caught him before he fell. There were stains. "Could be water," he said.

  Hutch scraped off a sample, bagged it, and put it in her vest.

  MacAllister shifted his weight uncomfortably and looked around. He was bored.

  "It's on a dais," said Kellie. Three very small steps led up to the altar.

  MacAllister stood, more or less, and walked closer. "The chapel in the woods," he said. "What do you suppose became of the god-in-residence?"

  Hutch flashed her light into a corner. "Over here." She got down on a knee, scooped at the debris and dirt, and lifted a fragment of blue stone. "Looks like part of a statue."

  "Here's more," said Chiang.

  A score of pieces were scattered about. They set them on the altar and took pictures from a variety of angles, which would allow Bill to put them together.

  "The fragments are from several distinct figures," the AI reported back a few minutes later. "We have one that's approximately complete."

  "Okay," said Hutch. "Can we take a look?"

  Marcel sent the image through Kellie s link and it blinked on.

  Nightingale had seen right away that the statuary had not depicted the hawk-image they'd seen back at the tower. In fact the figure that appeared could hardly have been more different: it had no feathers. It did have stalked eyes. A long throat. Long narrow hands ending in claws. Four digits. Eggshell skull. Ridged forehead. No ears or nostrils. Lipless mouth. Green skin texture, if the coloring had not faded. And a blue robe.

  It looked somewhat like a cricket.

  "What happened to the hawks?" asked Nightingale.

  "One or the other is probably mythical," said Hutch.

  "Which? Which is mythical and which represents the locals?"

  She frowned at the image. "I'd say the hawk is mythical."

  "Why?" asked Chiang.

  "Because," said MacAllister, "the hawk has some grandeur. You wouldn't catch hawks imagining heroes or gods who looked like crickets"

  Nightingale exhaled audibly. "Isn't that a cultural prejudice?"

  "Doesn't make it any less valid. Prejudices aren't always invalid, Randy."

  The robe was cinctured down the middle, open at the breast. Its owner wore sandals, and it carried a rod whose top was broken off. A staff. The right arm was also broken, at the elbow. Had it been there, Nightingale was certain, it would have been lifted toward the sky. In prayer. In an effort to invoke divine aid. In a signal to carry on.

  Among the missing pieces were an antenna, a leg, a chunk of what could only have been a thorax. But the head was intact. And it struck Nightingale that, despite MacAllister's comment, the creature did possess a certain dignity.

  "What do you think?" asked Hutch.

  The question was directed at him, but MacAllister answered it. "It's not bad workmanship," he said.

  There was much in the image that spoke to Nightingale. The creature had endured loss and was making its appeal, or perhaps was simply resigning itself. To what? he wondered. To the common death, which is the starting point for all religions? To the everlasting cold, which had become part of the natural order?

  "They would have been worth knowing," said Hutch.

  Nightingale agreed.

  He was the last to leave.

  They'd put a couple of the pieces into artifact bags, taken a final look around, and filed out. Hutch paused at the doorway and turned back toward him. "Coming?" she asked.

  "They've probably been dead a few centuries," he said.

  She gazed at him and seemed worried. He suspected he looked pale and gray. "There may be a few survivors left. Out in the hills somewhere."

  Nightingale nodded. "But their civilization's gone. Everything of consequence that they ever did is lost. Every piece of knowledge. Every act of generosity or courage. Every philosophical debate. It's as if none of it ever happened."

  "Does it matter?" she asked.

  He had no answer. He walked slowly out of the chapel and paused in the doorway. "I guess not. But I'd prefer to think it's only a pile of rock and water that's going to get swallowed next week by Jerry. And not a history."

  Hutch nodded. "I know."

  He looked at the artifact bag. "The god. Who's here to rescue the god?"

  She gazed at him and he saw a sad, pensive smile. "We are," she said. "We're taking him home with us."

  "Where he'll have no believers."

  "Careful, Randy. Keep talking like that and people will think you're an archeologist."

  A few minutes later, as they walked under the arch, a temblor hit. They stopped and waited for it to pass.

  Beekman appeared on-screen wearing a triumphant smile. "We were right, Marcel," he said. "It's there."

  Marcel, wrapped in his own dark thoughts, had been staring down at the planetary surface. "What's where, Gunther?"

  "The skyhook base."

  "You found it!"

  "Yes. It was right where we thought."

  "On the west coast."

  "Mt. Blue. There's a large structure on top. Six-sided. About two hundred meters across. It's enormous."

  "How high is it?"

  "It's about six, seven stories. Looks as if it was broken off at the top."

  "And the rest of it?"

  "In the ocean. It's all over the sea bottom. Hundreds of square kilometers of wreckage." He brought up pictures.

  Marcel looked at the outline of the mountaintop structure, and then at vast agglomerations of underwater debris. Some pieces even jutted above the surface.

  "It's been a while since it happened," said Beekman. "The fragments that stick up out of the water look like rocky islands." That had in fact been the assessment during Wendy's original hasty survey. "We really don't have the right people or the equipment to do an analysis, but we think that if we reassembled the pieces on the bottom, we'd have a piece of the skyhook approximately a hundred kilometers high."

  "I wonder where the station itself is?" said Marcel.

  Beekman shrugged. "Who knows? We don't even know how long ago it broke up. But once we get through this, it would be worth the Academy's time to send another mission out here to look for it."

  Marcel studied the images. "I don't understand," he said, "how these people could build a skyhook, but not leave anything in the way of a skyscraper. Or any other kind of technological artifact. Is everything buried under the glaciers?"

  "Nobody has any idea," said Beekman. "And we have neither time nor equipment to conduct a survey. I suggest we just gather as much evidence as we can. And keep an open mind."

  "What you're telling me is that we may never get the answers to any of this."

&nb
sp; Beekman could not have agreed more completely. "That's exactly right," he said.

  Marcel sighed. "There should be something. Structures of some sort. I mean, you can't just have a lot of walled candlelit cities, and at the same time run equipment into orbit." He flipped a pen across his console. "They did check for that, right? The tower had no electrical capability? No real power source?"

  He meant Hutch and her team. "She was asked to look for technology," said Beekman. "But I think they assumed there was none. I think we all assumed it."

  "Well, there you go then. Maybe we were just not looking closely enough."

  "I don't think that could be. I mean, this was a blowgun culture."

  "Has it occurred to you," Marcel said, "that maybe the tower was a museum? Maybe our artifacts were somebody else's artifacts first."

  "That would require a fairly unlikely coincidence."

  "Gunther, when will we get back a reading on the skyhook's dates?"

  "Shouldn't take long. We scanned the samples and sent the results. The Academy will have them by now. We asked for a quick turnaround, so we should get them in a few days." He crossed his arms. "It's really sad. I know damned well there are people back at the Academy who'd do anything to get a look at the base of the skyhook."

  Marcel said nothing.

  "Maybe if the lander works okay," Beekman suggested, "we could ask Hutch to take a peek. Before they come back to orbit."

  "Not a chance," said Marcel. "If the lander works, we're bringing them home. No side stops."

  Captain Nicholson had carefully assigned full responsibility for the lander accident to Wetheral who, he'd reported, had taken the vehicile without permission. Probably, he suggested, the passengers had offered him a substantial sum for the service. He added that they were not likely to be aware that the flight was unauthorized. Because one of the passengers was the renowned editor and essayist Gregory MacAllister, he advised Corporate to find a way to overlook the incident. If he survives, Nicholson had argued, MacAllister would be a dangerous adversary should TransGalactic assume he was in some way responsible and try to take legal action against him. If he does not, there would be little advantage to pursuing him beyond the grave. Undoubtedly Corporate could collect damages from his estate, but the cost in public relations would be enormous. Best call it an unfortunate incident.