Jack Mcdevitt - Engines of god

by David Geary

  Except that there were holes punched in it. Long sec-tions had fallen away, and there were places where the wall appeared to have been hammered into the ground. Rubble lay along its base.

  "Look," Richard said. The structure was seared, scorched. "It does look as if somebody tried to knock the thing down."

  "One would almost think so." "What kind of fire would burn out here?" "Don't know." He folded his arms and canted his head. "I was wrong to neglect this place all these years. This is a fascinating site." "So what happened here?"

  "I have no idea." He sat looking for several minutes. "Frost," he said.

  "Say again?"

  "I keep thinking of Robert Frost. 'Something there is that doesn't love a wall—' " He sank back, placed his fingertips together, and let the moment wash over him. "Magnificent," he breathed. "An utterly sublime mystery. It is really no more than a rock sculpture in an airless place. Why was it built? And who would assault it?"

  It towered over them.

  The only reasonable explanation was that it had been hit by a swarm of meteors. There was indeed meteoric rock in the area. And a lot of craters. But there seemed something purposive in the assault.

  "It's probably an illusion," said Richard, who seemedalways able to read her thoughts. "It's the only artificial structure out here, so there's nothing to contrast it with except the random chaos of the moonscape. Still—" He shook his head. "It's hard to know how to read this."

  It had been built, Hutch knew, between eleven and twelve thousand years ago. "Its age matches the Tull set."

  "Yes," he said. "There may be a connection."

  It was eerie, and she found herself scouring the plain for oversized footprints.

  The wall was 41.63 meters high, and 8.32 kilometers on a side. It enclosed a perfect square. "The length of a side," she read off the display on the monitor, "is precisely two thousand times the height."

  "Base ten," said Richard.

  "How many fingers did the Quraquat have?"

  "They weren't exactly fingers. But four."

  "The Monument-Makers had five."

  The shuttle nosed up to the wall. It hovered a few meters away. "Do we want to land?"

  "No. Not out here."

  The wall had been old before there were pyramids in Egypt. Hutch floated before it, and felt the transience of her own mayfly existence as she never had on lapetus, or at the other ancient sites. She wondered what the difference was. Maybe it is bracing, encouraging to know that beauty somehow sur­vives. But to be outlived by such primal madness—

  "This thing," said Richard, "is so different from everything else they left. If it is indeed theirs. The Monuments are light, exquisite, elegant. The race that created them enjoyed being alive. This thing: it's grim. Irrational. Ugly. A fearful crea­tion." He pushed back in his chair the way people do during a simmy when the werewolf is approaching. "Take us up," he said.

  She complied, moving at a leisurely pace.

  Richard unrolled his chart again. "What've we got on the building materials? Where did the stone come from?"

  She dug out the engineers' report. "All local. Quarries were found in several places, but nowhere closer than six kilometers,"

  "They didn't want to spoil the appearance by chewing up the landscape. That's consistent, at least, with what we've seen elsewhere."

  "I guess. Anyway, they must have modified the rock. One theory is that they reworked it using nanotech. There's a lot of feldspar and quartz lying around. Apparently waste material. The wall itself is a kind of enhanced calcite."

  "Marble."

  "Yes. But better. More durable. More reflective."

  "They wanted it to be seen from Quraqua."

  "Apparently." They were near the top now.

  They closed in on a section that had been burned. "Hen­ry thinks," Richard said, "that the damage dates to around 9000 B.C."

  "That's when it was built," she said.

  "Somebody got right after it, didn't they?"

  "Maybe the builders had a falling out. Quarreled over their little amusement park."

  Richard held out his hands in supplication. "As good a guess as any."

  She went back to her screen. "There's a fair amount of trioxymethylene in the soil. Formaldehyde. But only around here. Near Oz."

  "That doesn't mean a damned thing to me. My chemistry's godawful. What are the implications?"

  "This thing"—she jabbed a finger at the screen—"offers no theories."

  The pseudo-city appeared beyond the wall: a dark cross-hatch of wide boulevards and blunt, broad buildings and long malls. A city of the void, a specter, a thing of rock and shadow. Hutch's instincts demanded lights and movement.

  "Incredible." Richard barely breathed the word.

  It was immense. She took them higher, and simultaneously switched the cabin heater to manual, moving the setting up a notch. The city, like the wall, lay in ruins.

  "Look at the streets," he whispered.

  They were designed in exact squares. Kilometer after kilometer. All the way out and around the curve of the horizon. Oz was a place of numbing mathematical exactitude, overwhelming even in its state of general destruction. Avenues and cross streets intersected at precise 90-degree angles. She saw no forks, no gently curving roads, no merge lanes. City blocks had been laid out to the same rigorous geometry.

  "Not much imagination here," she said.

  Richard's breathing was audible. "If there is anything more at war with the spirit of the Great Monuments than this place, I can't imagine what it would be." No burst of inventiveness appeared anywhere. No hint of spontaneity. They called it Oz. But that was a misnomer. If Oz, the original Oz, was a land of wonder and magic, this place was pure stone. Right to the soul.

  Hutch disconnected from the vision, and withdrew into the cockpit. The gauges and keyboards and status lamps were all familiar and warm. The aroma of coffee floated in the still air.

  Oz had never been intended to shelter anyone. The struc­tures that from a distance resembled houses and public build­ings and towers, were solid rock, without even the suggestion of door or window. No bubble, of either plastene or energy, had ever protected the artifact. Henry's teams had found no machinery, no devices or equipment of any kind.

  They drifted down the long avenues. Across the tops of marble block-buildings. Many of the blocks were perfect cubes. Others were oblongs. All were cut from flat polished rock, unmarked by any ripple or projection. They came in a multiplicity of sizes.

  Hutch looked out over the network of streets. In its original form, before whatever destruction had come on it, the stones had stood straight. No arc curved through the parallels and perpendiculars. No avenue sliced abruptly right or left. No rooftop sloped. No decorative molding or door knob existed anywhere.

  They floated down the streets at ground level. The blocks rose above them, ominous and brooding. They passed through an intersection. For the first time, Hutch understood the mean­ing of the term alien.

  "The dimensions of the blocks are multiples of each other,"

  she said. She brought up the numbers. Every block in the con­struct was divisible into cubes that measured 4.34 meters on a side. Thus, the various calcite forms that lined the squares and avenues could be perceived as so many units high by so many wide. Streets and open areas were divisible in the same way and by the same dimensions.

  The commlink chimed. "Dr. Wald, are you there?"

  "I'm here, Frank. Hello, Henry."

  Hutch activated the video. Only one man appeared, and it was not Henry Jacobi. Frank Carson was about fifty, a trifle beefy, with an open, congenial countenance. He leveled a steady blue gaze at them, appraised Hutch without reaction, and spoke to Richard. "Henry's not here, sir. Things have got a little hectic, and we couldn't spare him."

  Richard nodded. "Anything new on the Monument-Makers? New images?"

  "Negative."

  Richard seemed almost entranced. "Anybody have any ideas what all this means?" />
  "No, sir. We were hoping you could tell us."

  Richard brought up the scheduling for Project Hope on his monitor. They were to blow the icecaps sometime Friday. "I don't suppose Kosmik has changed anything?"

  "The deadline? No." Carson's expression showed disgust. "They're on the circuit every day with a fresh warning and countdown status."

  Hutch glanced reflexively at the ship's clocks. Not a lot of time.

  "Henry asked me to express his regrets. He would have liked to meet you here, but we just have too much happen­ing." He spoke with military crispness. "What would you like to see?"

  "How about the center of this place, for a start? And I'm open to suggestion."

  "Okay. I assume your pilot has me on her scope?"

  Hutch nodded.

  "Why don't you follow me?"

  She acknowledged, signed off, and fell in behind. "Tell me about Carson," she said.

  "You'll like him. He's retired army. One of those gift­ed amateurs who are a tradition in archaeology. Like your­self." His tone was light, but she understood he was quite

  serious. "He's Henry's administrator and executive officer." He looked squarely at her. "And his pilot. If Frank weren't around, Henry would have to behave like a manager. As it is, Frank does all the routine stuff, and Henry gets to be an archeologist."

  "Carson doesn't object to that?"

  "Frank likes the arrangement. He's a little rough around the edges, and he has a tendency to overreact. But he's easygoing, and he can get things done without ruffling egos. He enjoys the work. The organization could do a lot worse."

  Carson's vehicle was starting to descend. "Downtown Oz," said Hutch. The blocks were a little higher here than they were out near the wall. Other than that, the sameness was deadening.

  There was a central square, anchored on each corner by a squat tower, or by the ruins of one. The square was about a half-kilometer on a side. A fifth tower, a unit shorter than the others, had been raised in the exact center. Each was as quadrilateral as everything else in Oz.

  Richard was half out of his seat, trying to get a better look. "Tilt this thing a little, will you? My way—"

  Hutch complied.

  Two towers were piles of rubble. A third, on the southwest, was scorched. Burned black from the base up. The fourth was almost untouched. "There," Richard said, pointing to the black one. "Tell him to land there."

  She relayed the message, and Carson acknowledged. "What are we looking for?" she asked.

  He looked pleased. "How much do you know about the symmetry of this place, Hutch?"

  "Not much. Just that it's there. What's to know?"

  "Put a few square kilometers on the screen."

  "Sure." She brought up a view centered on the middle tower.

  "Now. Pick a target. Anywhere."

  "Okay." She zeroed in on a cluster of oblongs forming a letter H. They were approximately two kilometers north.

  "Draw a line from the group directly through the central tower. And keep going."

  On the opposite side of the screen, the line touched another H. At the same range. "It's a reverse image," she said.

  "Surprised?" Richard couldn't suppress a smirk.

  Yes. The records she'd examined hadn't mentioned it. "Maybe it all has religious significance. Some high-tech species doing penance. That make sense?"

  "Not to me."

  Carson's shuttle was almost down.

  Hutch turned the short-range scanners on the complex. "The central tower is nine units high, defining a unit as our basic block, four point three four meters on a side. The outer towers are ten. Like everything else here, they're solid. There's no evidence of any interior space." Carson landed, and she started her own descent. "Funny: you'd expect the central tower to be the tallest of the group. Not the shortest. They just don't think the way we do."

  Carson had parked close to the edge. Hutch's lights touched the Temple shuttle. It was streamlined, intended for heavy atmospheric use. That meant a sacrifice in payload capacity. It was flashier than Alpha in another way too: the Academy had begun painting its spacecraft and CATs in an effort to shore up morale at remote field sites. The vehicle on the rooftop was a bright blue and gold. The Academy's colors. Probably another one of Adrian Hart's decisions.

  She rotated the shuttle to bring the passenger's hatch inboard, toward the center of the roof. Give her preoccupied boss as little opportunity as possible to fall over the side. Carson climbed out and waved. She blinked her lights, and sliced down with easy skill, tread to tread.

  Richard released his restraints, and reached back for his Flickinger harness. Hutch struggled into her own, pulled it over her flight jacket. Air tanks were okay. She activated the energy field, and helped Richard with his. When they were ready, she decompressed the cockpit.

  Carson's military background showed. He wore crisply pressed khakis and a baseball cap, stenciled Cobra II, with a coiled serpent and lightning-bolt logo. His name was promi­nently displayed over the left breast of his jacket. He was a big man, broad in the shoulder, waist beginning to thicken. In the style of the time, he was clean-shaven, with black hair cut short and just beginning to gray. He stood waiting, legs spread, hands clasped behind his back.

  Pressure went to zero, and both hatches swung open. Richard was not precisely clumsy, but Alpha seemed to have been designed with athletes in mind. To debark, it was necessary to climb out onto a stubby wing, and descend via handholds in the fuselage. Variations in gravity tend to confuse any passenger, but particularly someone like Richard, who was well along in years, and had never been light on his feet to begin with.

  Carson appeared below the wing, and stood by, but made no actual move to help the older man. That was prudent: Richard did not like being helped. But he was there if needed. Hutch approved.

  When her passenger was safely down, Hutch dropped light­ly beside him. She clipped a tether around her left wrist and attached it to the shuttle. Take no chances on a rooftop in this gravity.

  Richard was already on one knee, examining the charred stone. "What happened to this place?" he asked Carson. "Does anybody have any idea?"

  "None. Nobody has been able to put together even a rea­sonable hypothesis."

  "Maybe the construction ship blew up," Hutch suggested.

  Carson frowned. "Doesn't seem like the kind of damage that would come from a single blast."

  Richard got up and walked solemnly toward the edge of the roof. Carson moved as quickly to his side as the low gravity would permit. Hutch stayed a step behind.

  "Spooky place," she said.

  Carson smiled. His expression suggested he could see that someone might think so.

  Richard did what people always do in high places. He leaned out and looked down. A plunge into the street, even from this height, wouldn't be fatal, unless you landed on your head. But you would sure as hell develop a limp. "Careful," said Carson, staying close.

  "Is there a team currently working here?" Richard asked.

  "No. There hasn't been any kind of presence in Oz for months. We pulled everybody out after we got the Temple deadline."

  "There's not much traction up here," cautioned Hutch.

  Richard stared out over the city. "Did you ever find any wreckage? Any trace of whatever was here?"

  Carson shook his head. No.

  "Anything at all left behind? Footprints? Marks in the ground—?"

  The two spacecraft stood against the endless cubes and oblongs. Their fuselages and wings and pods were all rounded. A red guide lamp mounted between Alpha's treads blinked softly. Cabin lights in both vehicles spilled out onto the seared rock.

  "There's nothing. Wish there was, Doctor." Carson glanced at Hutch, and returned his attention to Richard. "Did you want to see the quarries? Where the rock came from?"

  "No. Thank you. What else here is worth seeing?"

  "There's an inscription."

  "Inscription?" Richard's interest soared. "Why didn't you say someth
ing before? The Abstracts don't mention it."

  "The Abstracts are a year old. We've been a little too busy to monkey with updates."

  Richard rubbed his hands together. An expression of be­atific pleasure lit his features, and he waved an arm, a gesture which was too sudden and sent him reeling sideways and over the edge. Hutch and Carson both grabbed for him. They weighed so little in the low gravity, which was about one-tenth standard, that they'd all have gone down had Hutch's tether not taken hold. Richard let out a whoop, and they scrambled for balance, but he never missed a beat. "Thanks, Frank," he said. And, after righting himself: "What does it say? Have you been able to read it?"

  "Not a word," said Carson, looking apologetic. "But you'll find it worth your time."

  Hutch decided Richard was right. She did like Carson. He had not hesitated to risk his neck. That impressed her.

  They flew west, using both shuttles.

  The height of individual blocks gradually decreased as they proceeded away from the center, although there was no regularity in the process. Near the wall, at the limits of the city (Hutch could not help thinking of it in those terms), single-unit pieces had come to dominate so thoroughly that anything higher stood out.

  They passed a section in which a chasm had opened. The land had dropped several meters. Avenues were broken off, blocks tossed about. "There are several craters within the walls," said Carson, speaking over the link. "Most of them came after the construction. In this case, the crater was already here, and they built over it. They filled it in, but the land eventually

  gave way. There are a few other places where the crust has simply collapsed under the weight of the blocks."

  "The meteors that struck the city: have you been able to determine when they hit?"

  "No. We can't date them with any degree of accuracy. We know that the craters in and around the anomaly are considerably younger, though, than they are anywhere else." "How much younger?"

  "Most of the cratering took place between one and two bil­lion years ago. But the local holes are, at most, fifty thousand years old. Of course, the ones in the city must have fallen after 9000 B.C. Incidentally, we don't understand where the burn marks came from, but we do know that whatever the nature of the fire, it came twice." "Twice?"