A Voice in the Night

by Jack McDevitt

  Sylvie could not imagine why anyone would object. And she loved the idea of giving the Capellans a Christmas tree. “They never had one, Dad. Never even had a Christmas.”

  “We’ve got one over in the corner. Maybe you didn’t notice, love.”

  “That’s for us, Dad. There needs to be one up where everybody can see it. I don’t think the Capellans would have minded.”

  He got up, and his tone shifted to its end-of-discussion mode. “If they were around, we could ask them, Sylvie.”

  He went out to help with preparations for the evening party, and left her staring glumly at the tree, and at the towers.

  There were five of them, named, for reasons she wasn’t entirely clear about, the Queen, the Aerie, the Diamond, the Castle, and the Court. They were round buildings, and, when the light was right, they suggested chess pieces. The Queen was capped by a penthouse that someone must have thought resembled a crown; the walls of the Court formed a three-tiered enclosure. The Diamond was a faceted structure, a building with numerous faces and angles. The side of the Aerie that faced the town was marked by a wide open balcony. The shortest and broadest of the structures was the Castle: it was roughly three stories high, with turrets, parapets, and a crenelated roof.

  Sylvie went out onto the deck.

  She was entranced by Marik’s vision: she would have loved standing with the male Eagle on its perch. His perch. She wouldn’t tell anyone, not even her best friend Jaime, but it had occurred to her that boys would be far more interesting if they had wings. And the laser-blue glance of the Capellans which penetrated right to the soul.

  Her gaze fell on the balcony near the top of the Aerie. She pictured the Eagles from the print, standing casually at its lip, their wings touching, looking out across the city.

  The sky had clouded over; flakes were in the air.

  The five towers were stark and empty. Long abandoned. Occasional carols drifted through the night, and a few lights were visible. More than were usual. Some people were already moving toward the community center. She had noticed a few years back that the memory of her mother tended, during this happiest of seasons, to acquire a spiked edge. She was beginning to suspect there was something about Christmas that heightened all emotions, and not just the pleasurable ones. Something that spoke to her about more than simply an appreciation of others, but rather that seemed to penetrate to her deepest core. Here is what you are. Here is what is gone.

  She wanted, more than anything, to give credence to the Capellans. She wanted to connect her own existence with theirs.

  Behind the Aerie, low rolling hills receded into the gathering darkness.

  “Sylvie? Are you going?” Evan and Lana Culpepper were in the gateway. Both were wrapped tightly in thick jackets. It was cool tonight, but not that cool.

  “In a few minutes,” she called back. “I’ll see you there.”

  “Nice lights,” Lana chirped. Her father had strung a few in a gold bush, which looked garishly purple in their glow.

  “Thanks,” said Sylvie.

  They waved and trudged away.

  Across the street, the Stuarts had found a blow-up Santa Claus, who now stood in their yard. They were getting ready for the party. Sylvie could see them moving around inside.

  She felt lonely.

  The Aerie stood gray and somber.

  The balcony looked like a place that had been made for celebrations.

  She stared at it. The breeze died and the night was very still. Through the front window, her tree glowed.

  She reached into her pocket and withdrew the remote. There was a white star atop the tree. Little reindeer and blue globes and handmade Santas and gold vines dangled from its branches. Its lights were bright and cheerful. Some were glimmers, which could be made to blink; and others were globes, which burned with a fine steady glow. They would eventually be used to mark pathways through the dead city.

  She aimed the remote at the tree, and squeezed it. The lights went out.

  She went inside and stood looking at it. Without the illumination, it seemed almost forlorn. Odd that light should mean so much. She reached in through the branches, got hold of the stem, and lifted.

  It came off the floor.

  Not bad. It was heavy, but not so much that she couldn’t manage it.

  She set it back down. It scared her a little to realize that what she was thinking about could in fact be done. She probably wouldn’t get more than tonight out of the lights, but it would be enough.

  She went to the depot and collected about forty meters of line. Fortunately, theft was foreign to the little community, and no locks or security systems were needed. Then she returned home, catching quizzical glances enroute from the Yamotos and the Holmans.

  Her first task was to tie up the tree without damaging the decorations. She worked carefully and, when she was satisfied, laid it on its side. A reindeer fell out. She removed and collapsed the stand, and disconnected the battery. She picked up the reindeer and placed it with the stand, the battery, and the remote into a pouch. What was she forgetting? A lamp. She had to dig around a little but she found one in the wine cabinet. She strapped it to her wrist, pulled on her jacket, and slung the pouch over one shoulder.

  She wrestled the tree through the building, losing a few ornaments in the process. It was more awkward than heavy. Well, it was heavy too. She thought about getting help. This was the kind of thing Jaime would enjoy.

  But if it was worth doing, it was something to do alone. She hauled it out the rear door, and laid it on the back of the rover. The keys were in the vehicle. She started the engine to allow the cab time to heat up, and went back for her pouch and the fallen decorations.

  The snow had stopped, and a few stars were out. It was going to be a lovely night.

  She switched on the headlamps, lifted the rover off the pad, and swung out onto the plain.

  Clumps of fleshy golden plants and long irregular rows of wild hedge bent beneath the lift-fans. The plants were cactus-like. Their limbs reached out, much like persons frozen in startled attitudes.

  She crossed long excavation ditches. Her lights played against lone walls and arches and a strip of ancient roadway. Dust clouds rose behind her, obscuring the town.

  It was a relatively still night.

  The towers drew near. She passed the clutch of utility buildings atop the shaft which provided entry into the lower city, and rounded the base of the Castle.

  Up close, the towers lost their ethereal quality: starlight overwhelmed by stone.

  She glided past the Diamond. In the days when its polyhedral surface was polished and maintained, a multitude of stars would have glittered down at her from its thousand angles. Now, of course, it merely lay mute and dark.

  Beyond it rose the Aerie.

  Sylvie drifted in under the gray walls, and brought the hovercraft to ground.

  The balcony looked further up than she remembered.

  From her living room, a few minutes ago, it had seemed easy enough to reach. She had known it was on the fifth level, but she might have overestimated her own courage.

  She stepped down onto the grass, and thought it over. It would be a safe climb. All she had to do was keep her wits. And if it got too scary, she’d just quit. No big deal.

  A network of ladders surrounded the building. None was more than a story high, and they were connected by ramps, which were placed to break the fall of anyone who got careless. It reminded her of Gulliver, tied down by pygmies.

  Sylvie had seen drawings of the Aerie as it had looked during the days of the Capellans, when it had towered over the city. It had been a magnificent articulated obelisk, with doors and windows opening out everywhere. Gables and cornices projected from the surviving section, and crockets and spires and arches. At its top, the building narrowed to a broken shaft. The missing piece had not been recovered. Her father believed it had been an antenna, although Sylvie knew there were some who thought it had also functioned as an airship mooring. She li
ked that idea.

  She picked out the route she would follow. Up the ladder that was directly in front of her to the second level ramp, then go left a few paces and up to the third floor. Then left again. At the fourth level, she would have to go around the edge of the building. This was because the balcony that was her objective ran completely across the front (assuming this was the front; nobody really knew, and it was so named simply because it faced the town) and projected too far out. A ladder would have angled climbers over a very long drop.

  She laid the tree carefully at the foot of the ladder, and tied her cable to it, securing it at top and bottom. Satisfied, she laid out about six meters and coiled the rest over her shoulder. Then she started up.

  After the first few rungs she paused. The going was slow and awkward. She needed one hand to prevent the pouch from slipping off her shoulder, another to push the trailing cable away so she did not get entangled with it, and two to climb the ladder. She had expected to be on the balcony within ten minutes. But it wasn’t going to work out that way.

  At the second floor, she was above the tree line. The town, not quite a kilometer away, looked warm and inviting. Even at this distance, the wind carried bits and pieces of Christmas music to her. She suspected her father would be wondering where she was.

  The ramps were roughly two meters wide, enough to allow the passage of the carriers that the researchers used to move artifacts. Handrails were constructed along their edges.

  There was an open doorway. The door itself had long since fallen from its hinges. Like most of the building, it was constructed of a plastic polymer, and was almost indestructible. Someone had picked it up and leaned it against a wall. She extended her wrist and flashed a beam down the passageway.

  Despite the heaviness of the overall structure, and the fact that few decorations or pieces of furniture had survived, there was still an ethereal quality about the corridor. It was much wider than high, quite unlike the relative squareness of passageways in terrestrial buildings. Had it been so designed to allow its occupants to stretch their wings? The thought brought a smile, and a tremor of excitement. The floors had been carpeted, although no one could reconstruct the pattern or the weave. They were also curved, rising in the middle, which made for hard walking. Not designed for humans. She wondered whether these halls had ever echoed to footsteps.

  Sylvie peeked over the side at her tree, and uncoiled enough cable to get her to the next floor. Then she started up again. The outside wall was rough, corroded, scored. Her father had told her that the buildings would stand as long again as they had already stood. Had the people who erected this structure expected to be here so long? Had they wanted to leave something behind?

  Yes, she thought. It would be terrible to have lived and died. And to leave no sign of your passing. It seemed to her that someone among the Capellans, at some point, would have contemplated the ages and known that she would come.

  Greetings, young lady from London.

  She was getting quite high. And the ramp looked hopelessly narrow.

  The wind played in her hair, blew it in her eyes. At the ramp on the third level, she tied it back.

  Darkness poured out of windows and doorways. This time she did not cast her light into the building. The place felt like a church. Maybe her father was right; maybe it would not be a good setting for a Christmas party.

  At the fourth floor, she stood beneath the balcony. It was gently curved, relatively narrow near the sides, broader toward the center. It was wide enough to play tennis on, if one didn’t mind a precipitous drop along the fault line. A network of struts supported the structure. Some were almost low enough to touch.

  She walked to the corner, turned, and climbed the final ladder.

  Her hands and shoulders were beginning to ache. She puzzled about it as she ascended, grateful for any kind of distraction from the void over which she clung. Her breathing had become somewhat uneven, and she gripped the rungs tightly. Maybe that was the reason she was hurting.

  The fifth-level ramp did not have direct access to the balcony. It ended only a couple of meters away, but there was nothing to prevent her from jumping across. The only obstacle was the narrow rail around her own perch. It was a jump she could easily make. On the ground. But up here. No thanks.

  An entrance to the building was located just a few meters away. She intended to use it and come out onto the balcony. Safe and sane. Then she would haul up her tree. But there was a problem: there was not enough cable remaining for her to carry through the building.

  She considered lifting it to the ramp where she now stood. But the tree was around the corner and in the wrong position. It would get dragged about thirty meters.

  No: she had to get her remaining cable, about ten meters of it, across the open space.

  She could try throwing it. She took the loop from her shoulder and placed it on the ramp. It began to slide over the edge. Too much weight.

  She could jump.

  She could use her head. She needed a weight. There had to be something nearby that would serve. Maybe some loose rubble.

  She inspected the ramp, all the rooms that opened out on this side of the building, and a couple of passageways. The only movable object was another door laid against a wall. She couldn’t very well heave that across the space.

  What else?

  Her pouch. She took out its contents, and removed her jacket and shoes and stuffed them in. When she’d finished she wound several lengths of cable around it, and set it down. Satisfied, she walked to the railing, looked across at the graceful sweep of the ancient balcony, and made one or two practice motions with her right hand. Then she launched the pouch.

  It sailed across the abyss, trailing silver line, bounced, and skewed toward the edge while her heart fluttered. And rolled to a stop.

  Pleased with herself, Sylvie hurried into the passageway. It was cold. The air was cold, and the ground over which she moved chilled her stockinged feet. When the corridor turned away, she entered a suite of rooms, and spotted the balcony through a window.

  It spread before her, an esplanade, a courtyard without walls. The fine dust which had accumulated on it sparkled in the starlight. She could see no footprints, but there was enough wind during the day to erase any marks left by researchers.

  Fluted columns were scattered randomly through the area. The design of the columns was strange: they were not whole, but only fractions, slices, like pieces of pie, which appeared to have had their tops lopped off. Some were cut flat across, others were sharply angled. Only one was taller than Sylvie, and that by not much more than a hand’s-breadth. They supported nothing.

  She swung a foot over the sill.

  The edge of the ramp on which she’d stood was on her right. The pouch, and the cable, lay where it had fallen. She climbed out through the window, and retrieved them.

  Then she turned to face the Aerie.

  A high triple doorway anchored the balcony, but, in the unsymmetrical style of the Capellans, it was well to the right of center. The doors and windows all gaped at her now, black and exposed. There had once been glass.

  And light.

  And music? Had these people known music? What would it have sounded like? How sad to think that, whatever it might have been, it was gone now, lost forever.

  Yet the Aerie did not feel like a dead place. The way cemeteries felt, for example. Or the Antiqua, the alien starship orbiting Deneb, its origin unknown, its mummified crew still at their stations. No: maybe the Capellans were so long gone that no part of them remained, and so this was only a pile of rock and plastic. Or maybe this place had thoroughly served its purpose, and its builders had lived their lives and moved on and nothing more could be expected.

  She smiled. It was spooky up here. Hard not to keep her eyes on the silent openings, not to suspect that, the moment she turned away, there would be movement inside.

  The half-column she wanted was located ten paces from the edge. Its top was angled at about thirty d
egrees, and it was waist-high. She removed the cable from her shoulder, took in the slack, and secured it to the half-column. Then she began to reel in the tree. It was not as heavy as she had feared. She drew it in, hand over hand.

  Occasional gusts came close to blowing her off her feet. And brought occasional snatches of song to her. She could see lights and occasional movement in the streets.

  What had it been like when the Capellan city was spread across the plain, with rivers of light flowing through the nightscape, and the stars cold and bright? And the natives had stood on, or floated across, this balcony? This balcony with no protecting wall. Its floor in fact dipped slightly as it approached the edge, as if to provide a running start into the void.

  Launch pad.

  The tree broke a couple of branches coming in, and it lost a couple of ornaments. But otherwise it arrived in good condition. But when she released the restraining cords, the big yellow branches spread out, and the reindeer and blue globes looked reasonably intact. She straightened the star, and set it into its stand.

  A burst of wind almost took it out of her hand. Okay: she picked a spot where it would be visible from town, but which allowed her to secure it among three columns. She tied it carefully in place, fluffed out the branches and adjusted the ornaments. When she was satisfied, she attached the battery, and picked up the remote.

  Sylvie looked again at the dark face of the building.

  If anyone is watching, merry Christmas.

  She squeezed the unit, and the lights blazed on.

  The tree was magnificent: its soft glow spilled across the balcony.

  She climbed down out of the building and tested the remote. It shut the lights down. Beautiful. They should have the lights for several nights before the battery wore down. She switched them back on, clapped her hands and saw the alien city, incandescent in the moonless night, spread to the horizon. And she felt the wind suck at her, draw her forward. It whispered into her wings, and could have given her a lift toward the stars.