“If you like,” Hutch told Carson, “I’ll set up the line.”
He nodded, and she pushed through the door.
“Careful,” whispered Sill.
Hutch’s momentum carried her across to the station’s hull. She put both boots down on its metal skin, and looked for the hatch.
Above. About ten meters.
Sill clipped the cable to a magnetic clamp, secured the clamp to the hull of the shuttle. Then he passed the line and a second clamp to Hutch. She snapped the line to her belt and started toward the hatch. Her perspective shifted: the deck of the cargo hold, which had been “down,” rotated 90 degrees. Her stomach lurched, and she closed her eyes to let the feeling pass. The trick now was to focus on the derelict. Steady it. Make herself believe it was stationary. Forget the shuttle, which was now vertical. The sky moved around her, but she concentrated on the hatch.
The airlock was big enough to accommodate a small truck. The inner door was indeed open, but she could see nothing beyond except metal deck and bulkhead. She attached the clamp and waved to Maggie, who promptly drifted out of the shuttle.
Hutch warned her about keeping her eyes on the hull. She nodded, and tied onto the cable. But she had difficulty from the start, and Hutch had to go get her. When they got back to the airlock, she helped her inside, where the environment was less upsetting. “You okay?” she asked.
Maggie crumpled into a ball. In a weak voice she reassured her rescuer.
“I hope this is worth it,” Hutch said.
“It is,” Maggie said feebly.
They came over one by one. The sunlight was strong, and everyone used filters. They climbed rapidly into the lock, anxious to gain the security of an enclosed space.
The inner passageway beckoned. Maggie recovered quickly and claimed her privilege, stepping through into a bare, high-ceilinged chamber. Bilious orange walls were lined with empty bins. One was cluttered with debris, pinned by the motion of the station. There were instruments, and a giant boot, and plastic sheets and semiflexible material that might once have been clothing.
“Maybe they left the airlock open,” said George, “to preserve the interior. If they really wanted to maintain this as a memorial, I don’t know a better way. Let the vacuum in, and nothing will deteriorate.”
Janet was fascinated by the boot. “They were big, weren’t they?”
Carpeting still covered the deck. Passageways that dwarfed even George opened off either end of the chamber. They were lined by windows on one side and closed doors on the other. The doors were quite large, possibly four by two meters.
When Hutch, who was the last one through the airlock, caught up with them, they were examining the equipment. George thought he recognized some of it—“this is a recharger, no question”—and Maggie had already begun to collect symbols. Carson picked a passageway at random and moved into it.
None of the doors yielded to gentle pressure, and they would not of course break in, short of necessity. The outer bulkhead consisted mostly of windows. Outside, they could see the sun and the shuttle. One of the windows had been punctured, and they found a corresponding hole a couple of centimeters wide in the opposite deck. “Meteor,” said George.
They clicked along awkwardly in their magnetic shoes, staying together, not talking much, moving like a troop of children through strange territory. Hutch noted a vibration in the bulkhead. “Something’s going on,” she said.
It was like a slow pulse.
“Power?” asked Truscott.
George shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
More deliberately now, they advanced. The sun moved past the windows and out of sight. The corridor darkened.
Sill produced a lamp and switched it on.
The heartbeat persisted. Grew stronger.
The planet rose and flooded the passageway with reflected light. Its oceans were bright and cool beneath broad clouds.
Ahead, around the curve, something moved.
Rose. And fell.
A door. It was twisted on a lower hinge, but still connected to the jamb. As they watched, it struck the wall in time to the vibration, moved slowly down and bounced off the deck.
They looked through the doorway into another, smaller chamber. A crosspiece set at eye level resolved itself into a rectangular table, surrounded by eight chairs of gargantuan dimensions. The chairs were padded (or had been: everything was rock-hard now). Hutch entered, feeling like a four year old. She stood on tiptoe and directed her lamplight across the tabletop. It was bare.
George had a better angle. “There are insets,” he said. He tried to open one, but it stayed fast. “Don’t know,” he said.
The furniture was locked in place. “It looks like a conference room,” said Janet.
Cabinets lined the bulkheads. The doors would not open. But, more importantly, they were inscribed with symbols. Maggie made for them like a moth to a flame. “If it is the Monument-Makers,” she said, after a few moments, “they aren’t like any of the other characters we’ve seen.” She was wearing a headband TV camera, which was relaying everything back to the shuttle. “God, I love this,” she added.
There was another doorway at the rear of the room, and a second, identical suite beyond.
Hutch turned off the common channel, and retreated into her own thoughts. She watched the shifting shadows thrown by the lamps, and remembered the lonely ridge on Iapetus, and the single set of tracks. Who were these people? What had it been like when they gathered in this room? What had they talked about? What mattered to them?
Later, they found more open doors. They looked into a laboratory, and an area that had provided support functions to the station. There was a kitchen. And a room filled with basins and a long trough that might have had an excretory use. The trough was about as high as the table. They saw what might have been the remains of a showering facility.
Daylight came again. Forty minutes after it had passed out of the windows, the sun was back. At about the same time, they came to an up-ramp which split off the passageway.
“Okay,” said Carson. “Looks like time to divide. Everybody be careful.” He looked at Maggie. “Do you have a preference where you want to go?”
“I’ll stay down here,” she said.
He started up. “We’ll meet back here in an hour. Or sooner, if anybody finds anything interesting.” Truscott and Sill fell in behind him, and the plan to have Hutch watch them collapsed. Carson grinned, and signaled for her to forget it. Hutch, delighted to be rid of what had promised to be onerous duty, rejoined George and Maggie.
They continued along the lower level, and almost immediately found a room filled with displays and consoles half-hidden by lush, high-back chairs. “Computers,” breathed Maggie.
There were photos on the walls. Faded. But maybe still discernible.
Maggie was trying to get a look at a keyboard, but the consoles were too high. She glowed with pleasure. “You don’t think they’d still work, do you—?” she wondered.
“Not after a few thousand years,” said Hutch. “If it’s really been that long.”
“Well, even if they don’t, the keyboard will give us their alphanumerics. That alone is priceless.”
Then George got excited. He’d found a picture of the vehicle they’d seen in the shuttle bay. It was in flight, and the space station was in the background. “Glory days,” he said.
A second photo depicted Beta Pac III, blue and white and very terrestrial.
Eager to have a look at the consoles, Maggie moved in front of a chair and pulled off one of her magnetic shoes, planning to float up onto the equipment. But she became suddenly aware of something in the chair. She half-turned, and screamed. Had she been successful in removing both shoes, she would probably have launched. As it was, one foot remained locked in place, and the rest of her anatomy careened off at a sharp angle. She pitched over, and crashed into the deck.
The chair was occupied.
Carson’s voice erupted from th
e commlink. “What’s happening? Hutch—?”
Maggie stared up at the thing in the seat, color draining from her face.
“We’ve got a corpse,” Hutch said into the common channel.
“On our way,” said Carson.
The occupant of the chair was a glowering, mummified thing.
“This one, too,” said George, trying to steady his voice, and indicating the next chair.
Two of them.
Maggie, embarrassed, stared up at the corpse. Hutch walked over and stood beside her. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” she said. “It just startled me. I wasn’t expecting it.”
Its eyes were closed. The skin had shriveled to dry parchment. The skull was dust-brown, lean, narrow. Ridged. Long arms ended in large hands that retained a taloned appearance. The gray-black remains of a garment hung around its waist and clung to its legs.
“There must have been air here for a while,” said George. “Or the bodies wouldn’t have decomposed.”
“I don’t think that’s so,” said Maggie. “Organisms are full of chemicals. They’d cause a general breakdown whether the corpse is in a vacuum or not. It would just take longer.”
It was belted into its chair.
Had been belted in when the airlocks were opened.
Its dying agony was still imprinted on its face.
What had happened here?
Maggie gingerly touched its knee.
Hutch stood in front of it, and knew the thing. Recognized it.
Carson and the others filed in.
They spread around the room, moving quietly. “Is it them?” Truscott asked. “The creatures from Iapetus?”
“Yes,” said Carson. He looked around. “Anybody disagree?”
No one did.
“Sad,” Maggie said. “This is not the way we should have met.”
Sill was just tall enough to be able to see the work stations. “It’s their operations center, I think,” he said.
George turned back to the photos. They were encased and mounted within the bulkhead. Most were too blurred to make out. But he saw a cluster of buildings in one. He found another that appeared to be a seascape. “That could be Maine,” said Sill, looking over his shoulder.
Hutch could not look away from the corpses.
Strapped down.
Had they been murdered? Unlikely. The restraining belt did not look capable of holding anyone who didn’t want to be held. Rather, they had stayed here while someone opened the airlocks and let the void in.
The station was a mausoleum.
They found more corpses in spaces that seemed to have been living quarters on the upper level. They counted thirty-six before they stopped. There would undoubtedly be more. The bodies, without exception, were belted down. They understood the implication almost from the start, and it chilled them. It was a mass suicide. They didn’t want to get thrown around or sucked out by decompression, so they overrode whatever safety features they had, tied themselves in, and opened the doors.
“But why!” asked Truscott. Carson knew the director to be tough and unyielding. But she was shaken by this.
Maggie also seemed daunted. “Maybe suicide was implicit in their culture. Maybe they did something wrong on this station, and took the appropriate way out.”
In the aftermath of their discovery, they roamed aimlessly through the station. Adhering to the spirit of Carson’s safety concerns, or maybe for other reasons, no one traveled alone.
Maggie commandeered Sill and stayed close to the operations area. They prowled among the computers, and took some of the hardware apart, with a view to salvaging data banks, if they still existed.
George and Hutch went looking for more photos. They found them in the living quarters. They were faded almost to oblivion, but they could make out figures wearing robes and cloaks. And more structures: exotic upswept buildings that reminded Carson of churches. And there were two photos that might have been scenes from a launch site, a circle that resembled a radio dish and something else that looked like a gantry. And a group photo. “No question about that one,” said George. “They’re posing.”
Carson laughed.
“What’s funny?” asked George.
“I’m not sure.” He had to think about it before he recognized consciously the absurdity of such intimidating creatures lining up for a team picture.
In another photo, two of them stood beside something that might have been a car, and waved.
Carson was moved. “How long ago, do you think?” he asked.
George looked at the picture. “A long time.”
Yet the place did not evoke the weight of centuries, the way the Temple of the Winds had. The operations spaces might have been occupied yesterday. Things were a little dusty, but the station was full of sunlight. It was hard to believe that the sound of footsteps had not echoed recently through the long corridors. But there was an easy explanation for that: the elements had not been able to work their will.
George found a photo of the four moons strung out in a straight line. “Spectacular,” he said.
“Maybe more than that,” said Carson. “It might give us the age of this place.”
Maggie found the central processing unit. It appeared to be intact. “Maybe,” she said.
Sill folded his arms. “Not a chance.”
Well, they would see. Stranger things had happened. She would remove it, if she could figure out how to do it, and send it back to the Academy. They might get lucky.
Three hours after their entry, they regrouped and started back to the shuttle. Maggie had her CPU, and they carried the photo of the four moons. They also had taken a couple of computers.
Hutch was preoccupied. She watched the shifting light and said little as they clicked back through the passageways.
“What’s wrong?” Carson asked at last.
“Why did they kill themselves?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you even imagine how it might happen?”
“Maybe they got stuck up here. Things went to hell planetside.”
“But there’s a shuttle on board.”
“It might not have been working.”
“So you’d have to have a situation in which, simultaneously, your external support broke down, and the onboard shuttle also broke down. That sound likely to you?”
“No.”
“Me, neither.”
Priscilla Hutchins, Journal
Tonight, I feel as if someone took an axe to the Ice Lady. The Monument-Makers seem to have vanished, to be replaced by pathetic creatures who build primitive space stations and kill themselves when things go wrong. Where are the beings who built the Great Monuments? They are not here.
I wonder if they ever were.
0115, April 12,2203
23.
Beta Pacifica III. Tuesday, April 12; 0830 GMT.
The shuttle glided through the still afternoon above a rolling plain. The windows were drawn halfway back, and fresh air flowed freely through the vehicle. The smell of the prairie and the nearby sea stirred memories of Earth. Strange, really: Carson had spent all those years on Quraqua, on the southern coastline, and he’d never once felt the sting of salt air in his nostrils. This was also the first time he’d ever ridden a shuttle without being sealed off from the outside environment.
First time with my face out the window.
There were occasional signs of former habitation below: crumbling walls, punctured dams, collapsed dock facilities. They were down low, close to the ground, moving at a hundred fifty klicks. The sky was filled with birds.
They came up on a river. It was broad, and mud-colored, with sandy banks, and giant shrubs pushing above the surface close to shore. Lizardlike creatures lay in the sun.
And more ruins: stone buildings in the water, worn smooth; a discolored track through forest, marking an ancient road.
“They’ve been gone a long time,” said George.
“Want to go down and take a cl
oser look?” asked Jake, their pilot.
“No,” Carson said. Hutch could see that he wanted to do precisely that, but Truscott had given them thirty-six hours. “Mark the place so we can find it again.”
The prairie rolled on. They listened to the rush of air against the shuttle, watched the golden grass ripple in the wind.
“Something ahead,” said Maggie.
It was little more than a twisted pile of corroded metal. Carson thought it might once have been a vehicle, or a machine. Impossible to tell from the air.
They left the river and flew over a patch of desert, passing over walls, and occasional storage tanks sinking into the dunes like abandoned ships.
Prairie came again, the land rose and narrowed, and ocean closed in on both sides. In this area, rock walls were everywhere, like pieces of an enormous jigsaw puzzle.
They picked up another river, and followed it south into forest. Mountains framed the land, and the river disappeared occasionally underground, surfacing again to roll through picturesque valleys.
Carson had a map on his display. “Seems to me,” he said, “that the towns are located in the wrong places.”
“What do you mean?” asked Hutch.
“Look at this one.” He tapped the screen. A set of ruins were well out on the plain, several kilometers from the ocean, and fifteen from a river junction. “It should be here, at the confluence.”
“Probably was, at one time,” said Maggie. “But rivers move. In fact, if we can figure out when the city was on the confluence, we might get a date for all this.”
“They shared the human taste for living by water,” said Hutch.
Carson nodded. “Or they relied heavily on water transportation.” He shook his head. “Not very rational, for a civilization that had anti-gravity thousands of years ago. What happened? Did they have it, and then lose it?”
“Why don’t we go down and look?” suggested Janet.
Ahead, the river drained into a bay. “Up there,” Carson said. “Looks like a city. And a natural harbor. We’ll land there.”
The forest took on a jumbled, confused appearance. Mounds and towers and walls broke through the foliage. It was possible, with a little imagination, to make out the shape of streets and thoroughfares.
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