Jack Mcdevitt - Engines of god

by David Geary

  Animals chittered and leaped through the foliage. Insects sang, and green light filtered through the overhead cano­py. The trees were predominantly gnarled hardwoods, with branches concentrated at the top. Lower trunks were bare. They were quite tall, topping out at about five stories. The effect was to create a vast leafy cathedral.

  They forded a brook, walked beside a buckled stone wall, and started up another mound. The area was thick with flow­ering bushes. "Thorns," warned Maggie. "The same defenses evolve everywhere."

  The similarity of life forms on various worlds had been one of the great discoveries that followed the development of FTL. There were exotic creatures, to be sure; but it was now clear, if there had ever been much doubt, that nature takes the simplest way. The wing, the thorn, and the fin could be found wherever there were living creatures.

  They explored without real purpose or direction, following whims. They poked into a concrete cylinder that might once have been a storage bin or an elevator shaft. And paused before a complex of plastic beams, too light to have supported anything. "Sculpture," suggested Maggie.

  Carson asked Janet whether she would be able to date the city.

  "If we still had Wink," she said.

  "Okay. Good." He was thinking that they could send the Ashley Tee to find the ship, and recover what she needed.

  At the end of the first hour, Carson checked in with Jake. Everything was quiet at the shuttle. "Here too," he said.

  "Glad to hear it. You haven't gone very far." Jake seemed intrigued. "What's out there?"

  "Treasure," said Carson.

  Jake signed off. He had never before been first down on an unknown world. It was a little scary. But he was glad he'd come.

  Jake had been piloting Kosmik shuttles for the better part of his life. It was a prestigious job, and it paid well. It hadn't turned out to be as exciting as he'd thought, but all jobs become dull in time. He flew from skydock to ground station to starship. And back. He did it over and over, and he transported people whose interests were limited to their jobs, who never looked out through the shuttle ports. This bunch was different.

  He liked them. He'd enjoyed following their trek through the space station, although he'd been careful to keep his inter­est to himself. It was more his nature to play the hard-headed cynic. And this: he knew about the Monument-Makers, knew they too had roamed the stars. Now he was in one of their cities.

  The heavy green foliage at the edge of the clearing gleamed in the bright midday sun. He leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head. And saw something. A glimmer of light in the trees.

  It looked like a reflection.

  He poked his head through the hatch and leaned forward and watched it for several minutes. Something white. A piece of marble, maybe. The warm harbor air washed over him.

  They stopped by a crystal stream and gazed at the fish. The filtered sunlight lent an air of unreality and innocence to the forest. There were paths, animal trails, but they were narrow and not always passable. Occasionally, they had to back away from a dead end, or a steep descent, or a bristling thicket. Carson wore out his pulser and borrowed Maggie's.

  The stream ran beneath a tapered blue-gray arch. The arch was old, and the elements had had their way with it. Symbols had been carved into the stone, but they were long past deciphering. Maggie tried to read with her fingertips what lay beyond the capability of her eyes.

  She was preoccupied, and did not hear a sudden burst of clicking, like the sound of castanets. The others didn't miss it, however, and looked toward a patch of thick briar in time to see a small crablike creature pull swiftly back out of sight.

  Beyond the arch, they found a statue of one of the natives. It was tipped over, and half-buried, but they took time to dig it up. Erect, it would have been twice George's height. They tried to clean it with water from a nearby stream, and were impressed with the abilities of the sculptor: they thought they could read character in the stone features. Nobility. And intelligence.

  They measured and mapped and paced. George seemed more interested in what they couldn't see. In what lay hidden in the forest floor. He wondered aloud how long it would take to mount a full-scale mission.

  There was no easy answer to that question. If it were up to the commissioner, they would be here in a few months. But it would not be that simple. This world, after all, could be settled immediately. And there would be the possibility of technological advantage. Hutch thought it would be years before anyone would be allowed near the place, other than the NAU military.

  Jake climbed out onto the shuttle's wing, dropped to the ground, and peered into the trees. He could still see it. The clearing was lined with flowering bushes, whose lush

  milky blooms swung rhythmically in a crisp wind off the harbor. They were bright and moist in the sunlight. Jake's experience with forests was limited to the belt of trees in his suburban Kansas City neighborhood, where he had played as a kid. You could never get in so deep that you couldn't see out onto Rolway Road on one side, or the Pike on the other.

  He understood that despite its peaceful appearance, the woodland was potentially dangerous. But he wore a pulser, and he knew the weapon could bum a hole in anything that tried to get close.

  The day was marked by a sky so blue and lovely that it hurt his eyes. White clouds floated over the harbor. And sea birds wheeled overhead, screaming.

  He touched the stock of his weapon to reassure himself, and walked toward the edge of the clearing.

  They were fairy-tale trees, of the sort often portrayed in children's books with grimaces and smiles. They looked very old. Some grew out of the mounds, enveloped the mounds in their root systems, as if clutching whatever secrets might be left. The city had been dead a long time.

  "Hundreds of years," said Maggie.

  The underbrush now was sparse, and the trees were far apart. It was a forest cast in summer sunlight, a vista that seemed to lose itself far away among the living columns.

  They came over the crest of a hill and caught their collec­tive breath.

  The land dropped gradually away into a wooded gully, and then rose toward another ridge. Ahead, a wall emerged from the downslope, from thick, tangled brush, and soared out over the ravine. It was wide and heavy, like a dam. Like a rampart. It extended somewhat more than halfway across the valley. And then it stopped. Five stories high, it simply came to an end. Hutch could see metal ribs and cables. A skeletal stairway rose above the wall, ending in midair. There had been crosswalls, but only the connections remained. The top was rocky and covered with vegetation.

  "Let's take a break," said Carson. "This is a good place to eat lunch." They broke out sandwiches and fruit juice and got comfortable.

  Everyone talked. They talked about what the valley had looked like when the city was here, and what might have

  happened, and how everything they had gone through had been worth it to get to this hillside.

  Carson opened a channel to the shuttle. "Jake?"

  "I'm here."

  "Everything's quiet."

  "Here, too."

  "Good." Pause. "Jake, this place is spectacular."

  "Yeah. I thought you'd think that. It looked pretty good from the air. Are you still coming back at sundown?"

  Carson would have liked to stay out overnight, but that would be taking advantage of Truscott. And maybe foolish, as well. Now, with the Ashley Tee within range, he was sure she could be persuaded to wait for the rendezvous. Which meant they had plenty of time to poke around. No need to push. "Yes," he said. "We'll be there."

  "I read."

  Carson signed off, and turned to Hutch. "How long will the Ashley Tee be able to stay in the neighborhood?"

  "Hard to say. They'll have a two-man crew. They stay out for roughly a year at a time. So it depends on how much food and water they have left."

  "I'm sure we can scrounge some from Melanie," Carson said. (Hutch did not miss the new familiarity.) "I tell you what I'd like," he continued. "I'd
like to be here when the Academy mission arrives, say hello, and shake their hands as they come in. By God, that's the stuff legends are made of. Maybe we can find a way."

  Jake could see a white surface, buried in the foliage.

  He stopped at the edge of the trees, slid the pulser out of his pocket, and thumbed the safety release. The shuttle waited silently in the middle of the field, its prow pointed toward him. Its green and white colors blended with the forest. He should make it a point to get some pictures of the occasion. Jake's shuttle.

  The Perth name and device, an old Athena rocket within a ring of stars, was stenciled on the hull. The ship was named for the early space-age heroine who had elected to stay aboard a shattered vessel rather than doom her comrades by depleting their already-thin air supply. Stuff like that doesn't happen anymore, Jake thought. Life has become mundane.

  He poked his head into the foliage. It was marble. He could see that now. It was clean and cold in the daylight. But the shrubbery around it was thick and he could find no path. He used the pulser to make one.

  He was careful to keep the weapon away from the struc­ture. But he got tangled among the bushes and almost caught himself with the beam. That threw a scare into him.

  It looked like a table.

  An altar, maybe.

  It was set beneath a parabola. A line of markings was carved across the rim. It looked old.

  Damn. He should have brought the camera. He'd have to go back and get one.

  He activated the common channel. "Frank?"

  "Here." Carson was eating.

  "There's something out here that looks like an altar," said Jake.

  "Where?" He caught an edge in Carson's voice.

  "Just south of the clearing." He described what he had seen.

  "Damn it. You're supposed to stay with the shuttle."

  "I am with the shuttle. I can see it from here."

  "Listen, Jake. We'll take a look when we get back. Okay? Meantime, you get inside the cockpit, and stay there."

  Jake signed off. "You're welcome," he said.

  The altar was not designed for anything of human size. When he stood in front of it, the table-piece was above eye level. The workmanship was good: the stone was beveled and precisely cut.

  He was enjoying himself thoroughly. He struck a heroic stance, hands on hips. He looked up at the parabola. He touched the symbols on the front of the altar.

  / wonder what it says?

  He walked back into the clearing. Maybe he had actually discovered something. Directly ahead, the shuttle gleamed beneath the bright blue sky.

  The grass rippled in the wind.

  He felt movement atop his right shoe. Reflexively, he shook his foot, and it exploded in pure agony. He screamed and went down. Something sliced into his ribs, slashed at his face. The last thing he knew was the smell of the grass.

  The wall came in from their right off the valley. It was wide enough to accommodate eight people walking side by

  side, so that after it had plunged through heavy shrubbery into the glade, it came to resemble a roadway. At its point of entry, it was about shoulder high to Hutch. But midway across the clearing, it was broken, and the entire left-hand side had sunk or been removed. Or never existed. It was hard to know which, but the structure dropped in a single vertical step to about the level of their knees, and slipped into the hillside.

  They inspected the structure, which was concrete reinforced with iron. Hutch climbed atop the upper section, and pushed through the foliage. The forest floor fell away rapidly.

  The stairway lay two-thirds of the way out. "It goes all the way to the bottom," she said. That was not strictly accurate: a lower flight was missing. It picked up again further down and appeared not to stop at ground level, but rather to sink into the earth. How much lay buried in the forest floor? She called for the scanner. "There are at least eight stories in the ground," she said thoughtfully. "It could be a lot more." They would need an airborne unit to get decent images.

  She returned to the glade. "Later," Carson told her, looking at his watch. "We'll get a better look later."

  Overhead, the swaying, sun-filled branches that blocked off the sky looked as if they had been there forever.

  They passed beyond the valley, moving at a leisurely pace, and came to a dome. Janet scanned it and announced that it was a sphere, and that it was probably a storage tank. "It was painted at one time," she added. "God knows what color."

  Carson looked at the sun in the trees. "Time to start back."

  George opened a channel to call the shuttle. After a moment, he frowned at his commlink. "I'm not getting an answer," he said.

  Carson switched on his own unit. "Jake, answer up, please."

  They looked at one another.

  "Jake?" George went to status mode. The lamp blinked yellow. "We're not getting a signal. He's off the air."

  Hutch tried calling the shuttle directly. "Still nothing," she said.

  "Damn it," Carson muttered, irritated that his pilot would simply ignore his instructions. He missed his military days, when you could count on people to do what they were told.

  "Okay, we'll try again in a few minutes." The daylight had reddened.

  They took a group picture in front of the dome. Then they began to retrace their steps.

  "Mechanical problem," George suggested. But they were uneasy.

  Janet moved with her usual strong gait. Alone among her comrades, she was confident everything was okay at the shuttle. Her mind was too crowded with the triumph of the moment to allow any temporary uncertainty to spoil things. She was accustomed to being present at major discoveries (major discoveries were so common during this era), but she knew nevertheless that when she looked back on her career, this would be the defining moment. First-down in the city by the harbor. It was a glorious feeling.

  Fifteen minutes later, they had re-entered the valley of the wall, and were headed uphill in single file. Janet had drifted to the rear. She was thinking that she would not live long enough to see this place yield all its secrets, when she noticed movement out of the corner of her eye, just beyond the beaten grass. She looked, saw nothing, and dismissed it.

  Her thoughts switched back to the ruin underfoot—

  Almost simultaneously, Hutch shouted Look outl and a hot, sharp needle drove into her ankle. She screamed with pain and went down. Something clung to, scratched at, her boot. She thought she glimpsed a spider and rolled over and tried to get at it. The thing was grass-colored and now it looked like a crab. Maggie ran toward her. Pulsers flared. Around her, the rest of the party were struggling. The agony filled the world.

  Carson's reflexes were still good. Janet's scream had scarce­ly begun before he'd sighted and killed one of their attackers: it was a brachyid, a crablike creature not unlike the one they'd seen earlier in the day. But pandemonium was breaking out around him.

  Janet was on the ground. Maggie bent over her, hammering at the thick grass with a rock.

  Carson's left ankle exploded with pain. He crashed into a tree and went down.

  Hutch dropped to a kneeling position beside him, pulser in hand.

  Crabs.

  He heard shouts and cries for help.

  Maggie reached back and called Pulser! and Hutch slapped one into her hand. The brachyid was clamped to Janet's boot. Carson watched it rock madly back and forth in a sawing motion. Blood ran off into the grass. Maggie shoved the weapon against the shell and pulled the trigger. The thing shrieked.

  "Stay out of the grass!" cried George. "They're in the deep grass!"

  A black spot appeared on the carapace, and began to smoke. Short legs thrust out from under the shell and scratched furi­ously against Janet's boot. Then it spasmed, shuddered, and let go. Maggie drew it out.

  Hutch spotted another brachyid. It was in front of them, watching with stalked eyes. A thin, curved claw scissored rhythmically. She bathed it in the hot white light from her pulser. Legs and eyes blackened and shriveled, and
it wheeled off to one side, and set the grass afire. Hutch, taking no chances, sprayed the entire area, burning trees, rocks, bushes, whatever was nearby.

  It occurred to her that they might be venomous.

  "More coming," said George. "Ahead of us."

  Hutch moved out in front, saw several of them ranged across the path. More moved in the grass to either side. "Maybe we should go back," she said.

  "No," said Carson. "That might be the whole point of the maneuver."

  "Maneuver?" George said anxiously. "You don't think they're trying to box us in?"

  The brachyids charged, churning forward with a frantic sidewise motion that was simultaneously comic and revolt­ing. Their shells reminded Hutch of old-time army helmets. Something like a scalpel flashed and quivered from an organ in the carapace situated near the mouth. Claws twitched as they approached, and the scalpels came erect.

  Hutch and Maggie burned them. They hissed, crustacean legs scrabbled wildly, and they turned black and died.

  Suddenly they stopped coming and the forest went qui­et. They were left with the smell of smoldering meat and burning leaves. Maggie helped Janet up and placed her arm around her shoulder. George lifted Carson. "This way," he said.

  Hutch played her lamplight across the path ahead. Nothing moved.

  They limped uphill. When they felt it was reasonably safe, they stopped, and Hutch got out the medikit and dispensed painkillers. Then she cut Janet's boot away. The wound was just above the anklebone. It was jagged, bleeding freely, and it had begun to swell. "You'll need stitches," she said. "Be grateful for the boot." She gave her an analgesic, applied a local antiseptic, and dressed it with plastex foam. "How do you feel?"

  "Okay. It hurts."

  "Yeah. It will. Stay off it." She turned to Carson. "Your turn."

  "I hope the thing didn't have rabies," he said. This time, Hutch had a little more trouble: part of his boot had been driven into the ankle. She cut it out, while Carson paled and tried to make light conversation. "It'll be fine," she said.

  He nodded. "Thanks," he said.

  When she'd finished, Maggie held up her left hand. "Me too," she said.