The Engines of God

by Jack McDevitt

  Was the entire continent like this? One vast wreck?

  Jake touched his earphones. “Ops says the Ashley Tee has arrived. Rendezvous in about forty hours.”

  “Marvelous!” said Maggie. Maybe they would be able to stay now, and inspect this world of the Monument-Makers at their leisure.

  Jake congratulated them, but Hutch saw that he was not pleased. When she asked, he said that he did not want to get pulled out now.

  The forest overflowed a wide, sun-dappled harbor. Great broad-leafed trees crowded the shoreline. The shuttle sailed out over the open sea, and curved back. A narrow, grassy island divided the harbor mouth into twin channels. Both were partially blocked by a collapsed bridge.

  Hutch saw truncated squares in the water, massive concrete foundations (she thought), and piles of rubble.

  “There used to be big buildings down there,” said Janet. “Maybe something on the order of skyscrapers.”

  “There are more in the woods,” said George.

  “Anybody got a suggestion,” asked Carson, “where we should set down?”

  “Don’t get too close to the shoreline,” advised Hutch. “If there are predators, that’s where they’re most likely to be.”

  They picked out a clearing about a half-kilometer from the harbor. Jake took them down and they landed among wet leaves and bright green thickets.

  Hutch heard the cockpit hatch open. “Hold it a minute,” said Carson. “We need to talk a little before we go out there.” Good, she thought. For all their experience on the Quraqua mission, these were not people who necessarily understood the potential for danger on a new world. The old fear of contamination by extraterrestrial disease had been discarded: microorganisms tended not to attack creatures evolved from alien biosystems. But that didn’t mean they might not attract local predators. Hutch had gotten an object lesson on that subject.

  Carson assumed his best military tone. “We don’t really know anything about this place, so we’ll stay together. Everybody take a pulser. But please make sure you’ve got a clear field of fire if you feel you have to use it.”

  They would not need energy shields here; but they would wear heavy clothing and thick boots to afford some protection against bristles, poison plants, stinging insects, and whatever other surprises the forest might have for them. “Which way do we go?” asked Maggie, zipping her jacket.

  Carson looked around. “There are heavy ruins to the north. Let’s try that way first.” He turned to Jake. “We’ll be back before sundown.”

  “Okay,” said the pilot.

  “Stay inside, okay? Let’s play it safe.”

  “Sure,” he said. “I’m not interested in going anywhere.”

  The air was cool and sweet and smelled of mint. They gathered at the foot of the ladder and looked around in silent appreciation. Bushes swayed in a light breeze off the sea; insects burbled and birds fluttered overhead. To Hutch, it felt like the lost Pennsylvania, the one you read about in old books.

  The grass was high. It came almost to her knees. They got out, checked their weapons, and picked out an opening in the trees. Carson moved into the lead, and George drifted to the rear. They crossed the clearing and plunged into the woods.

  They immediately faced an uphill climb. The vegetation was thick. They picked their way between trees and spiked bushes, and occasionally used the pulsers to clear obstacles.

  They topped a ridge and paused. Tall shrubbery blocked their view. Janet was trying to look back the way they’d come. “I think it’s a mound,” she said. “There’s something buried here.” She tried using her scanner, but she was too close, literally on top of the hill, to make out anything. “Something,” she said again. “Part of a structure. It goes deep.”

  George produced a lightpad, and started a map.

  They worked their way down the other side, past an array of thick walls. They ranged in height up to treetop level, and were often broken, or leveled. “This is not high-tech stuff,” said George. “They’ve used some plastics, and some stuff I don’t recognize, but most of this is just concrete and steel. That fits with the space station, but not with the telescope.”

  “It doesn’t follow,” said Janet. “The more advanced stuff should be on the surface. A low-tech city should be long-buried.”

  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.

  I 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.