The Engines of God

by Jack McDevitt

  “Apparently.” The snow beyond the prints was untouched.

  The ramp circled the area, marking off a space about the size of a baseball diamond. Richard walked completely around the circle, stopping occasionally to examine the surface. “You can see holes,” he said, pointing them out. “The ship must have been mounted on stilts. The prints show us where the creature first appeared. It—she—walked off the way we’ve come, and went up into the hills. She cut a slab of rock and ice out of a wall up there. We’ll go take a look at the spot. She fashioned the figure, put it back on board, and flew it to the site.” He looked in the direction of the ice figure. “There are holes back there, too.”

  “Why haul it at all? Why not leave it up in the hills?”

  “Who knows? Why put something here and not there? Maybe it would have been too easy.” He tapped the ramp with his toe. “We’re in a valley. It’s hard to see, because the sides are low, and the curve of the land is so sharp. But it’s there. The ice figure is located precisely in the center.”

  After a while they went back the other way, and followed the tracks into the hills. The walkway plunged through deep snow and soared over ravines. The prints themselves twice went directly up to sheer walls and stopped. “They continue higher up,” said Richard.

  “Anti-gravity?”

  “Not supposed to be possible. But how else would you explain any of this?”

  Hutch shrugged.

  They entered the ravine from which the ice and stone for the figure had been taken. A block had been sliced cleanly out of one wall, leaving a cut three times the visitor’s height. The prints passed the place, continued upslope, and petered out on thick ice. They reappeared a little farther atop a ridge.

  The ground dropped sharply away on both sides. It was a long way down.

  Richard strode along the ramp, submerged in his thoughts, not speaking, gazing neither right nor left. Hutch tried to caution him that the energy field provided fair traction at best, that the light gravity was treacherous. “You could sail off without much effort. You’d fall kind of slow, but when you hit bottom, there would be a very big splash.” He grunted, and went a little easier, but not enough to satisfy her.

  They continued along the crest of the ridge until the tracks stopped. It was a narrow place. But with a rousing view of Saturn, and the breathless falling-off of the worldlet’s short horizon.

  Judging from the confusion of tracks, the creature might have been there for a time. And then of course she had doubled back.

  Richard gazed down at the prints.

  The night was full of stars.

  “She came up here before she cut the ice,” said Hutch.

  “Very good. But why did she come here at all?”

  Hutch looked out across the plain, luminous in Saturn’s pale light. It curved away from her, giddily.

  The stars were hard and cold, and the spaces between them pressed on her. The planet, locked in place, had not moved since she stood here. “The image on the plain,” she said, “is terrifying, not because it has wings and claws, but because it is alone.”

  She was beginning to feel the cold, and it was a long way back to the ship. (The Flickinger fields do cool off, in time. They’re not supposed to, and there are all kinds of tests to demonstrate they don’t. But there you are.) Half a dozen moons were in the sky: Titan, with its thin methane atmosphere; Rhea and Hyperion and some of the smaller satellites: frozen, spinning rocks like this one, sterile, immeasurably old, no more capable of supporting a thinking creature than the bloated gasbag they circle.

  Richard followed her gaze. “She must have been very much like us.” His lined features softened.

  Hutch stood unmoving.

  The universe is a drafty, precarious haven for anything that thinks. There are damned few of us, and it is a wide world, and long. Hutch wondered about her. What had brought her so far from home? Why had she traveled alone? Long since gone to dust, no doubt. Nevertheless, I wish you well.

  PART ONE

  MOONRISE

  1.

  Quraqua. 28th Year of Mission, 211th Day. Thursday, April 29, 2202; 0630 hours local time.

  Almost overnight, every civilization on this globe had died. It had happened twice: somewhere around 9000 B.C., and again eight thousand years later. On a world filled with curiosities, this fact particularly disturbed Henry’s sleep.

  He lay awake, thinking how they were running out of time, thinking how the Quraquat had known after all about the anomaly on their moon. They were unaware of the two discontinuities, had lost sight of them toward the end, and remembered them only in myth. But they knew about Oz. Art had found a coin which left no doubt, whose obverse revealed a tiny square on a crescent, at the latitude of the Western Mare. Precisely where Oz was located.

  He wondered whether Linda’s surmise that the Lower Temple era had possessed optical instruments would prove correct. Or whether the natives had simply had good eyes.

  What had they made of the thing? Henry buried his head in his pillow. If the Quraquat had looked at their moon through a telescope, they would have seen a city occupying the center of a vast plain. They would have seen long airless avenues and rows of buildings and broad squares. And a massive defensive wall.

  He turned over. Eventually Oz would surface in Quraquat mythology and literature. When we’ve collected enough of it. And mastered the languages.

  His stomach tightened. There would not be time.

  The anomaly was only rock, cunningly hewn to create the illusion of the city. There was the real puzzle. And the explanation for Oz lay somehow with the race that had inhabited this world. This was a race that had built complex cultures and developed philosophical systems that had endured for tens of thousands of years. But its genius did not extend to technology, which had never risen much beyond a nineteenth-century level.

  The door chimed. “Henry?” The voice in the speaker was tense with excitement. “Are you asleep?”

  “No.” He opened the door. “Did we get in?”

  “Yes—”

  Henry threw back his sheet. “Give me two minutes. I didn’t think it would be this quick.”

  Frank Carson stood in the corridor. “You have a good crew down there.” In the half-light, he looked pleased. “We think it’s intact.”

  “Good. That’s goddam good.” He turned on his table lamp. Beyond the window, sunlight filtered down from the surface. “Did you see it?”

  “Just a peek. We’re saving it for you.”

  “Yeah. Thanks.” The traditional lie amused Henry. He knew they had all stuck their heads in. And now they would pretend that the boss would make the grand entrance.

  If there was anyone with the Academy’s archeological teams homelier than Henry Jacobi, he would have been a sorry sight. In Linda Thomas’ memorable phrase, he always looked as if a load of scrap metal had fallen on him. His face was rumpled and creased, and his anatomy sagged everywhere. He had slate-colored hair, and a permanent squint which might have derived from trying to make out too many ideographs. Nevertheless, he was a master of social graces: everyone liked him, women married him (he had four ex-wives), and people who knew him well would have followed him into combat.

  He was a consummate professional. Much like those paleontologists who could assemble a complete brontosaur from a knee bone, Henry seemed able to construct an entire society from an urn.

  He followed Carson through the empty community room, and down the stairway into Operations. Janet Allegri, manning the main console, gave them an encouraging thumbs-up.

  Creepers and stingfish moved past the wraparound view-panel. Beyond, the sea bottom was crisscrossed by trail marker lamps. The sunlight was fading from the water, and the Temple was lost in the general gloom. They passed into the sea chamber, and put on Flickinger harnesses and jetpacks. Henry rubbed his hands together in pure pleasure.

  Carson straightened his shoulders in his best military bearing. He was a big man with a square jaw and intense eyes
that saw the world in sharp colors. That he was a retired colonel in the army of the North American Union would surprise no one. “This is just the beginning, Henry. I still say we should hang on here. What are they going to do if we refuse to leave?”

  Henry sighed. Carson didn’t understand politics. “They would put a lot of heat on the Academy, Frank. And when you and I went home, we would find ourselves back in classrooms. And possibly defending ourselves in court.”

  “You have to be willing to take risks for what you believe, Henry.”

  He had actually considered it. Beyond Earth, they knew of three worlds that had given birth to civilizations. One of the civilizations, the Noks on Inakademeri, still survived. The inhabitants of Pinnacle had been dead three-quarters of a million years.

  And Quraqua.

  Quraqua, of course, was the gold mine. Pinnacle was too far gone, and since the Noks were still in the neighborhood, the opportunities for investigation were limited. Nonetheless, there was hardly a graduate student who hadn’t found a buried city, uncovered the key to a mass migration, tracked down a previously unknown civilization. It was the golden age of archeology. Henry Jacobi understood the importance of saving this world. But he had no inclination to risk anyone’s life in the effort. He was too old for that sort of thing.

  “Does Maggie know we’re in?”

  “They’re getting her now. The poor woman never gets any rest, Henry.”

  “She can rest when we’re out of here.” Maggie was his chief philologist. Code-breaker, really. Reader of Impossible Inscriptions. The lamp on his left wrist flashed green. He activated the energy field.

  Carson punched the go pad, and the lock cycled open. Water sloshed in over the deck.

  Outside, visibility was poor. They were too close inshore: the marker lights always blurred, the water was always full of sand, and one could seldom see the entire Temple.

  The Temple of the Winds.

  A bitter joke, that. It had been submerged since an earthquake somewhere around Thomas Jefferson’s time created a new shoreline. The Temple was a one-time military post, home for various deities, place of worship for travelers long before humans had laid bricks at Ur or Nineveh.

  Sic transit.

  Fish darted before him, accompanied him. Off to his left, something big moved through the water. Carson turned a lamp in its direction, and the light passed through it. It was a jelly. Quite harmless. It rippled, blossomed, and swam leisurely on its way.

  A broad colonnade masked the front of the Temple. They settled onto the stone floor, beside a circular column. It was one of ten still standing. Of an original twelve. Not bad, for a place that had been through an earthquake.

  “Frank.” Linda’s voice broke in on his earphones. She sounded pleased. And with good reason; she had planned this aspect of the excavation. She’d taken a couple of chances, guessed right, and they’d broken in well ahead of schedule. Under the circumstances, the time gained was critical.

  “Henry’s with me,” said Carson. “We’re on our way.”

  “Henry,” she said. “We’re open as far back as we can see.”

  “Good show, Linda. Congratulations.”

  The Temple entrance gaped wide. They swam into the nave. Lines of colored lights trailed off through the dark. It always seemed to Henry that the lamps exaggerated the size of the place.

  “Blue,” said Carson.

  “I know.” They followed the blue lamps toward the rear. Only vestiges of the Temple roof remained. The gray light from the surface was oily and thick against the cheerful glow of the markers.

  Henry was in poor condition. Swimming tired him, but he had declared jets too dangerous to use inside the excavation. He had to live by his own rules.

  The glowing blue track angled abruptly off to the left, and plunged through a hole in the floor.

  He could hear Linda and Art Gibbs and some of the others on the common channel. They were laughing and cheering him on and congratulating one another on the find.

  He swam down the labyrinthine approach tunnel. Carson stayed to his rear, advising him to take his time, until Henry finally lost patience and asked him to be quiet. He rounded the last bend and saw lights ahead.

  They stood aside for him. Trifon Pavlaevich, a husky Russian with a giant white mustache, bowed slightly; Karl Pickens beamed; and Art Gibbs floated proudly beside Linda.

  Linda Thomas was a redheaded dynamo who knew what she was doing and didn’t mind sharing credit with her colleagues. As a result, they loved her. She stood over a shaft, waving him forward. When he reached her, she shook his hand, and their fields glimmered.

  “All right,” he said briskly. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  Someone pressed a lamp into his hand.

  He lowered it into the darkness, saw engravings and bas-reliefs, and descended into a chamber whose dimensions reached beyond the limits of the light. The walls were busy, filled with shelves and carvings. There were objects on the shelves. Hard to see precisely what. Maybe local sea life, accumulated before the room was sealed. Maybe artifacts.

  His team followed. Trifon warned them not to touch anything. “Got to make a chart before anything gets moved.”

  We know, Tri.

  Lights played across the wall-carvings. He could make out animals, but no likenesses of the Quraquat. Sculptures of the intelligent species were rare, except in holy places. In any age. And among most of their cultures. There seemed to be an imperative that prohibited capturing their own image in stone. There would be a reason, of course, but they had not yet found it.

  The floor was covered with a half-meter of silt.

  Other chambers opened beyond. And voices echoed happily in his phones:

  “This used to be a table.”

  “The symbols are Casumel series. Right?”

  “Art, look at this.”

  “I think there’s more in back.”

  “Here. Over here.”

  And Linda, in the room on the north side, held a lamp up to a relief which depicted three Quraquat figures. Trifon delicately touched the face of one of the images, trailing his fingers across its jaw, along the thrust of its mouth. The Quraquat had been warm-blooded, bipedal, furred creatures with a vaguely reptilian cast. Alligators with faces rather than long jaws and mindless grins. These were robed. A four-legged beast stood with them.

  “Henry?” She motioned him over.

  The figures were majestic. They radiated power and dignity. “Are they gods?” he asked.

  “What else?” said Tri.

  “Not strictly,” said Linda. “This is Telmon, the Creator.” She indicated the central figure, which was dominant. “She is the Great Mother. And these are her two aspects: Reason and Passion.”

  “The Great Mother?” Henry sounded surprised. The Quraquat at the time of their demise had worshipped a supreme male deity.

  “Matriarchal societies have been common here,” she said. Tri was taking pictures, and Linda posed beside the figure. For perspective, more or less. “If we ever get a decent analysis on the Lower Temple,” she said, “we’ll discover that was a matriarchy. I’ll bet on it. Moreover, we’ll probably find Telmon in that era as well.”

  Carson’s voice came in on Jacobi’s personal channel. “Henry, there’s something here you’ll want to see.”

  It was in the largest of the chambers, where Carson waited before another bas-relief. He waved Henry nearer, and raised his lamp. More Quraquat figures. These seemed to be set in individual tableaus. “There are twelve of them,” he said in a significant voice. “Like the Christian stations.”

  “Mystical number.”

  Henry moved quietly around the room. The figures were exquisitely wrought. Pieces had broken away, others were eroded by time. But they were still there, frame after frame of the Quraquat in that same godlike dignity. They carried rakes and spears and scrolls. And, near the end, a fearsome creature with partially hooded features appeared.

  “Death” said Linda. />
  Always the same, thought Henry. Here or Babylon or New York. Everybody has the same image.

  “What is this? Do you know?”

  Linda was glowing. “It’s the story of Tull, the Deliverer. Here—” She pointed at the first tableau. “Tull accepts the wine of mortality from Telmon. And here he is behind a plow.”

  Quraquat mythology wasn’t Henry’s specialty. But he knew Tull. “Christ figure,” he said. “Osiris. Prometheus.”

  “Yes. Look, here’s the visit to the armorer.” She drifted along the friezes, pausing before each. “And the battle sequences.”

  “There’s a problem here somewhere,” said Carson. “The myth is later than this period, isn’t it?”

  “We’re not sure of very much yet, Frank,” said Linda. “And maybe this place isn’t as old as we think. But that doesn’t matter as much as the fact that we have a complete set of tableaus.”

  “Marvelous,” said Henry. “They’ll put these in the West Wing and hang our name on them.”

  Someone asked what they represented.

  “Here,” said Linda. “It begins here. Tull is an infant, and he’s looking down at the world.”

  “It’s a globe,” said Art. “They knew the world was round.”

  “That knowledge was lost and recovered several times during their history. Anyway, Tull envied the people on the world.”

  “The Quraquat.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s not clear. The Quraquat apparently thought it was obvious why an immortal would behave this way, but they didn’t explain it. At least not in any of the records we’ve been able to find.

  “Over here, he’s assumed a devotional attitude. He is requesting the gift of mortality from his mother. Look at the universal outstretched hands.

  “And here”—she moved past Henry, pointing—“here, he is a teacher.”

  And here, caught up in war. Arm raised. Expression fierce. His right hand was broken off. “He would have been holding a weapon,” she said. “He was at a disadvantage, because when they gave him mortality, they did not deprive him of all his divine attributes. He understood the suffering of his enemies. And he could see the future. He knew that death in battle awaited him. And he knew the manner of its coming.”