“A telepath. More precisely, a precognitive or a psychometrician, I believe the term is. You have a sense the rest of us poor mortals don’t have?”
De la Cruz didn’t answer.
“Can you tell us without equivocation that there’s nothing worth finding at this site?”
“Nothing but foundations.”
“But they are big foundations. This building towered, Citizen de la Cruz. It might have been the largest building on the planet. Surely that indicates the natives placed great importance on it. Maybe it was a governmental headquarters-or a cathedral. What purpose did the building serve?”
De la Cruz shrugged.
“You don’t know, Citizen de la Cruz?” Ralston asked with mock surprise. “Neither do I. But we’re going to find out.” Ralston studied the younger man, then motioned. “Come over here for a moment.” He led de la Cruz away from the work site where the ultrasonic digger shook away more and more mud to reveal an interesting, but hardly unique, foundation.
“What is it, Doctor?”
“Your attitude, Citizen de la Cruz. Why are you on this dig? You barely do your share of the work. You display no interest at all concerning the natives that once lived here.”
“Why should I?” de la Cruz blurted. “They’re not important. There’s nothing important on this mudball. Muckup’s not going to get any of us the recognition we deserve.”
“And what recognition is that?” asked Ralston. “What have you done to deserve any notice?”
“You don’t like me because my family is rich. Richer than you’ll ever be.” A sneer crossed de la Cruz’s swarthy face like a dark wave. “Admit it, Ralston, you hate me because you envy all the money I control.”
“I may never be rich, but I have something you never will: satisfaction in my work. Even more to the point, I’m willing to work. You are lazy and willful and…”
De la Cruz’s face darkened even more. Ralston saw he had pushed the student beyond his limit. Something about being judged worthless had touched off intense anger. Ralston barely ducked and backed away when the student swung a hard fist at his face.
De la Cruz recovered and came at Ralston—a mistake. Ralston felt descend over him the curious calm that he’d experienced each time before battle. Gone were the automated Nex weapons he’d become so expert with. But their intense hypnotic training remained. He deflected de la Cruz’s fist, stepped inside, and slammed his fist down hard on the graduate assistant’s neck. In the same motion, his knee came up to jolt into de la Cruz’s groin.
Ralston blinked and came out of fighting mode. He hadn’t realized the training still held such power over him. The last thing he’d wanted was to strike his student. His breath returned to normal. Ralston knelt, helping de la Cruz to sit upright.
“Sorry. Don’t ever try anything like that again.” De la Cruz jerked away and got to shaky feet. Ralston let the man go. He hadn’t expected de la Cruz to physically assault him; he certainly hadn’t expected his own quick reactions to produce such an outcome.
He turned to see Asan staring at him with appreciation. The man’s eyes told Ralston that he approved.
“Why are you here?” Ralston asked, too loudly.
Asan shrugged. “Same as most of the others. Nowhere else to go.”
Ralston started to snap back that he hadn’t meant that. Before he spoke, he caught hold of his emotions, forced calm upon himself, and regained control.
“You are in a rehab program, aren’t you?”
Asan nodded. Ralston knew he violated Novo Terra law and ethics; he asked what crime Asan had committed.
“Killed a few people who got in my way during a robbery.”
Ralston barely understood. Killing for reasons of passion had never died out in any human culture, but thefts had become more and more automated over the centuries. To physically steal from another struck him as alien as the Nex. More so. They were supposed to be alien.
“Keep after the digger. Check to see if it hits anything its dig frequency might damage.”
“Got an estimate on the building’s height,” Asan said.
“Must’ve been damn near ten stories tall. A lot for the way the rest were built: low, near the ground.”
Ralston sat on the edge of the trench, feet dangling just above the muddy bottom. “That’s strange,” he said. “The natives were of avian descent. Flightless, possibly for most of their history, but very birdlike. Comes from the low gravity.”
“You find a photo of the natives? Haven’t found statues or any paintings. How do you know what they looked like?”
“Guesswork, right now. In a few weeks, we’ll know for certain. Leonore found a skeleton—the first, actually. The natives were taller than we are. I suspect they had larger ears to compensate for the thinner atmosphere. Their bones were more fragile, more birdlike. Shoulders lead me to think they were birdlike, at any rate.”
Asan gave his shrug and turned to clear the digger’s sonic head of small twigs and rocky debris. Ralston heaved himself erect and began pacing through the city. Here and there the automated diggers worked to reveal the ruins of what must have been the largest city on Alpha 3. But it seemed wrong. Ralston had spent a good deal of his life wandering through burned-out cities, across plains hiding the secrets of the ages, and never had he gotten the feeling of such wrongness.
“Getting crazy,” he said to himself. “Muckup’s dead.” He considered this. Archaeologists were hardly more than grave robbers, inspecting the dead and the belongings of the dead. Such a feeling of being surrounded by natives long gone ought to be normal.
It was natural to him after ten years of intense training as a scientist.
Alpha 3 held something more than a deceased race. Eyes unfocused, Ralston returned to his shelter, hardly noticing the rain pelting down harder and harder.
“Are you all right?” Leonore Disa asked.
“Hmm? What?” Ralston turned to stare at her. He hadn’t heard the woman enter his shelter. Ralston looked past her and saw that the rain had stopped. For the time being, at least. He took a long drink from a flask, then silently offered her some.
Leonore made a face when she sampled it. She handed ,it back, asking, “What is that? Liquid lithium?”
“Bourbon.”
“Why do you drink it? Tastes terrible.”
“Maybe that’s why. You must have some vices of your own. If not alcohol, then something else. It gives some limit to your existence, lets you put things into perspective. When you’re stuck on a mudball like we are for at least a couple more months, this helps.” He tipped the flask back and took another burning drink.
She pulled back her poncho and unfastened her blouse, exposing her midriff. A small silver plate gleamed.
“Oh,” said Ralston, disappointed. “You’re one of those.”
“There’s nothing wrong with recreational drugs,” she said primly. “And the med-port makes it easier for a doctor if anything happens to me. I hate the idea of putting a needle into my arm.”
“Use the air injectors.”
“And leave a bruise?”
Ralston smiled at this. Bruises for someone with subcutaneously implanted jewelry plates would be an anathema.
“So you leak drugs into your system through that thing.” He reached out and tapped the med-port. Leonore pulled away. “What do you use?”
“My privilege to use anything I want. I’ve been a citizen since I was eleven years old.”
While this was several years younger than most who became full members of society—those that did at all—Ralston didn’t think she was lying. There wasn’t any reason to.
“You’re hovering near the edge of ethanol poisoning for some reason,” Leonore said. “Self-pity? You have a full measure of it. At least, when I ’port my drugs, I don’t wallow in hating myself. They make me feel happy.”
“Feel happy, not be happy,” he said. Ralston knew better than to argue. Especially since she came too close to describing his state o
f mind. “I don’t like being shunted off to this mudball—Muckup’s such a fine name for it—but I intend to do the best I can.”
Ralston frowned and took another drink. The bourbon burned his throat and puddled warmly in his belly, but he didn’t taste it.
“Something’s wrong with Alpha 3’s archaeology,” he said. “Just a sense. Everything we’ve uncovered so far indicates this city was destroyed by fires. Civil disorder is my guess. Riots. To see an entire city of almost a million in flames!”
“You wish you’d been there?”
“Of course I do!” Ralston dropped the flask to the table and paced, hands locked behind his back. He studied her on every return of his nervous orbit. “There’s no other way we can determine what really happened. All we do now is guess. We have only our intellect to piece the puzzle together.”
“What do you think caused the rioting? War?”
“Not war,” he said. “The destruction isn’t organized enough. There’s no systematic pattern as if an army marched through or aerial assaults took place. There didn’t even seem to be an effort to bury the dead. That indicates…”
“Mass hysteria,” cut in Leonore. “Or universal insanity.”
“Yes,” Ralston said, his mind abuzz with possibilities. “Mass insanity. As if they all went quite mad simultaneously.”
“What could cause it?” the brunette woman asked. “There’s never been a culture that declined worldwide for such a fantastic reason.”
Ralston didn’t answer. He turned back to the photo projected on the wall. The computer analysis had turned up nothing substantive, but his instincts told him that the neat rectangular patterns underground two kilometers south were important.
But why? What were they?
Muckup might provide a decent paper or two after all.
FOUR
“We do it,” Michael Ralston said. Leonore Disa looked up from the computer console, where she ran cross-checks on the architectural data they had uncovered using the ultrasonic digger.
“Do what?” The woman leaned back and pushed a vagrant strand of brown hair from her eyes. She hadn’t activated the jewelry plates in Ralston’s presence in almost a week. For his taste, that improved her looks, but he knew this was only a whimsical notion. They had all been in Alpha 3’s rain too long. Leonore might have been a drowned rat with her damp hair and completely formless, soaked clothing.
“It’s never good practice to jump about. Once you start excavation on one site, you make certain there’s nothing more to be found before you move on.” Ralston paced now, hands locked behind him. Every step he took rearranged the mud that had been tracked onto the floor of his shelter. A scant meter above his head, the fierce afternoon rain pounded harshly against the plastic roof and muffled his words. He might as well have been back aboard the University starship for the freedom of movement this planet afforded.
“You’re thinking about the ruins to the south. You don’t want to totally abandon this, do you?” She pointed to the photos with the superimposed grid pattern laid atop them. Each square carried its own identifying number. At the end of the day’s excavation, one of them would remove the memory block from the ultrasonic digger and directly transfer the data into their main computer. The smallest item registered; nothing was overlooked.
While the excavation of the primary site had gone well enough, it hadn’t revealed anything of real interest. Asan’s earliest estimates of the building’s original height had proven very accurate. Since then, only routine discoveries had been made.
Nothing worthy of a publication, much less a doctoral dissertation. No one in the camp had been happy over this, least of all Ralston.
“Never quit a project,” he said, more to himself than to his graduate assistant. “That’s when you’re likeliest to miss the one important clue to a culture.”
“But it wouldn’t be out of the question to do a quick survey. Maybe using a couple EM probes? We don’t have a proton magnetometer, but I might be able to jury-rig something.”
“Not that way,” he said, settling into a chair. He faced the woman. Only with Leonore did he feel any need to explain his thoughts. The others did their jobs in a desultory fashion—automatons putting in their hours and nothing more. Even Yago de la Cruz had become more machine than human. Ralston almost wished he would show that spark of anger again that had caused the outburst and the abortive fight. Anything out of the ordinary broke the monotony—and Muckup’s weather and former civilization had proven extremely tedious.
“Yeah, you’re right. It might interfere with the solar physics equipment.”
“What? Oh, them. I didn’t even think of that. You’re right.”
“Some other reason?” Leonore’s eyes unfocused as she thought. Ralston didn’t interrupt her. Given a thread, she had proven herself able to follow it toward a logical conclusion. “The electromagnetic pulses might interfere with whatever’s buried there. What do you think it is, Doctor?”
“I’m hoping it’s a burial ground. We don’t have any other spot marked off that is a more likely candidate for a cemetery. Hell, we’ve uncovered only a few decent skeletons. Most have decomposed badly, or were pretty much destroyed in death. Can’t figure out how the planet’s managed to keep up such steady rainstorms for so long. What analysis we’ve done doesn’t show this recurring wet pattern prior to the decline.”
“Sudden decline,” Leonore said. “Less than two hundred years is the best estimate so far.”
Ralston frowned. “Just a quick look at the southern site. A hand-held sonic cleaner, maybe some non-intrusive, devices, a camera. Also an IR scanner to determine the boundaries and some of the walls, and to see if there’re actually graves or not.” He reached over and began rummaging through his equipment, getting what he needed for the short trip.
“Are you going to wait for the rain to stop?”
“It never stops. Or hadn’t you noticed?” He smiled. “When’s there going to be a better time? Want to come along?”
“Verd.” Ralston winced at the slang. Leonore usually avoided such verbal bastardizations. She powered down the computer and peripherals, and then grabbed her poncho. With it on, she seemed even more formless. Ralston found himself wondering what she looked like when she went all out, dressed for a formal ball on Novo Terra.
He ducked out of the shelter and instantly regretted his decision to go exploring. The rain hammered at him with liquid, hard fists. Ralston blamed only himself for not being better prepared. The initial survey hadn’t said anything about the incessant rains; they might stop during some other season. He had been unlucky enough to land with his seven students in the midst of a wet season when he had been expecting less rain and more sun.
If there was a dry season, he thought. He wasn’t sure the original survey had been accurate. Even with the clouds, they were treated to more than expected solar radiation.
He and Leonore tramped southward for some time without conversation. Ralston finally asked, “Why are you here?”
“You said we were going to check out the ruins to the south.” She stopped and peered at him through the curtain of rain. “Or did you have something more in mind? If you did, why didn’t we stay in your shelter? It’s not as wet there.”
“That’s not what I meant. Not at all.” Ralston found himself tongue-tied in his confusion. His question had been directed toward an entirely different end, and Leonore had misinterpreted badly. Intentionally? He stopped, got his wits about him, then said, “Why did you come on the dig? What is it about this glamorous, fun-filled life that makes you want to be an archaeologist?” He wiped his forehead and sent a stream of cool water fanning out into the downpour. Droplet hit falling droplet, merged and tumbled to the muddy ground.
“Sorry, Doctor,” Leonore said, not in the least contrite. “I mistook your intentions.”
Had she? Ralston wondered. He pushed such thoughts from his mind. It was bad policy for a professor to become involved sexually with a student unde
r any circumstance. That they had been away from Novo Terra for almost nine standard weeks only added to his frustration. Leonore Disa wasn’t especially pretty, or even the type of woman he usually found attractive. But she was a woman. The only one on this ridiculous expedition.
“This isn’t the life a socialite enjoys,” he said.
“What makes you think I’m a socialite? The jewelry?” She shook her head. “I should have turned it off before the trip. Didn’t even think about it since it’s so much a part of me.” They splashed through another fifty meters of mud puddles before Leonore continued. “I wanted away from my family.”
“That’s all? A vacation off planet could have achieved the same end—and much more comfortably.”
“That’d be a temporary solution. I want something more permanent, a reason never to have to go back unless I choose.”
“That upsetting being around your family? I don’t have any. My parents died when I was young. They always told me to avoid the radiation zones. I did, they didn’t.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So you’re running away. Happy to run away to this?” Ralston made a sweeping motion. Rain fell in a steady stream off his arm. He quickly lowered it and shook free the water before it started soaking through. Even waterproofed, the material succeeded in becoming engorged with the rain.
“Actually, yes. I know the others don’t enjoy this much, but I do.”
“Asan and Lantalman are both rehabs. They’ve been so heavily hypno’d there’s no telling where they think they are—or maybe they can’t care.”
“I heard about them being with us before we left Novo Terra,” the woman said. “A shame to send them out like this. A shame to brain-burn anyone.”
“That’s the heart of the program, get felons into useful professions.”
Leonore snorted. In the humid weather, this sent tiny silvered plumes of steam from her nostrils. “There’s no spark of humanity left in them. They can go through the motions, do everything by rote, but how can they possibly be more than average? All their initiative has been stripped away by drugs and hypnosis.”
[Weapons of Chaos 01] - Echoes of Chaos Page 4