"Deepsix" - читать интересную книгу автора (Макдевитт Джек)

II

Extraterrestrial archeology sounds glamorous because its perpetrators dig up transistor radios used by creatures who've been gone a quarter million years. Therefore, it carries an aura of mystery and romance. But if we ever succeed in outrunning the radio waves, so we can mine their broadcasts, we'll undoubtedly discover that they, like ourselves, were a population of dunces. That melancholy probability tends to undercut the glamour. -Gregory MacAllister, Reflections of a Barefoot journalist

Inside the e-suit, Priscilla Hutchins caught her breath as she gazed around the interior of the reconstructed temple. Late-afternoon sunlight slanted through stained windows in the transepts, along the upper galleries, and in the central tower. A stone dais occupied the place where one might usually look for an altar.

Eight massive columns supported the stone roof. Benches far too high for Hutch to use comfortably were placed strategically throughout the nave for the benefit of worshipers. They were wooden and had no backs. The design was for creatures which lacked posteriors, in the human sense. The faithful would have used the benches by balancing their thoraxes on them, and gripping them with modified mandibles.

Hutch studied the image above the altar. It had six appendages and vaguely insectile features. But the eyes very much resembled those of a squid. Stone rays, representing beams of light radiated from its upper limbs.

This, the experts believed, was intended to be a depiction of the Almighty, the creator of the world. The Goddess.

The figure was female, although how the team had reached that conclusion escaped Hutch. It had a snout and fangs and antennas whose precise function still eluded the researchers. Each of its four upper limbs had six curved digits. The lower pair had evolved into feet, of a sort, and were enclosed in sandals.

The skull was bare save for a cap that covered the scalp and angled down over a pair of earholes. It wore a jacket secured with a sash, and trousers that looked like jodhpurs. The midlimbs were shrunken.

"Vestigial?" asked Hutch.

"Probably." Mark Chernowski was sipping a cold beer. He took a long moment to taste it, then tapped an index finger against his lips. "Had evolution continued, they'd no doubt have lost them."

Despite the odd features and the curious anatomy, the Almighty retained the customary splendor one always found in the inhabitants of the heavens. Each of the four intelligent species they'd encountered, as well as their own, had depicted its assorted deities in its own image, as well as in a few others. On Pinnacle, where for a long time the physical appearance of the inhabitants had not been known, it had been difficult to sort out which representation was also that of the dominant species. But inevitably everyone succeeded in capturing the dignity of divine power.

Hutch could not help noting that the more somber qualities and moods were somehow translatable in stone from one culture to another. Even when the representations were utterly alien.

They moved closer to the altar. There were several other carved figures, some of which were animals. Hutch could see, however, that the creatures were mythical, that they could never have developed on a terrestrial world. Some had wings inadequate to lifting the owner. Others had heads that did not match the trunks. But all were rendered in a manner that suggested religious significance. One bore a vague resemblance to a tortoise, and Chernowski explained that it symbolized sacred wisdom. A serpentine figure was believed to represent the divine presence throughout the world.

"How do we know these things?" she asked. "Plainfield told me that we still can't read any of the script."

Chernowski refilled his mug, glanced at her to see whether she'd changed her mind and would share some of the brew, and smiled politely when she declined. "We can deduce quite a lot from the context in which the images are traditionally placed. Although questions and doubts certainly remain. Does the turtle represent the god of wisdom? Or is it just a symbol of the divine attribute? Or, for that matter, is it just a piece of art from a previous era that no one took seriously in any other sense?"

"You mean this place might have been just an art museum?"

Chernowski laughed. "Possibly," he said.

The reconstruction had been raised a few kilometers away from the site of the original structure, in order to preserve the ruins.

Some pieces were quite striking. Especially, she thought, the winged beings. "Yes." He followed her gaze. "Flight capability does add a certain panache, does it not?" He looked up at a creature that bore a close resemblance to an eagle. It was carved of black stone. Its wings were spread and its talons extended. "This one is curious," he said. "As far as we can determine, this world never had eagles. Or anything remotely like an eagle."

She studied it for a long minute.

"It often appears on the shoulder of the Almighty," he continued, "and is closely associated with her. Much as the dove is with the Christian deity."

It was getting late, and they retreated to the rear of the nave. Hutch took a last look. It was the first time she'd seen the temple since its completion. "Magnificent," she said.

The rover was waiting outside. She looked at it, looked up at the temple, compelling in its austerity and simplicity. "It's several hundred thousand years ago, Mark," she said. "A few things might have changed since then. Maybe they had eagles in the old days. How would you know?"

They climbed in and started back toward the hopelessly mundane mission headquarters, little more than a collection of beige panels just west of the original ruins.

"It's possible," he admitted. "Although we've got a pretty good fossil record. But it's of no consequence. Better to agree with Plato that there are certain forms that nature prefers, even though we may not see them in the flesh." He got up and stretched.

"What do you think happened to the natives?" she asked. "Why'd they die off?" Pinnacle's dominant race was long gone. Almost three-quarters of a million years gone.

Chernowski shook his head. He was tall and angular, with white hair and dark eyes. He'd spent half his life on this world and had made arrangements to be buried here when the time came. If he was fortunate, he was fond of telling visitors, he'd be the first. "Who knows?" he said. "They got old, probably. Species get old, just like individuals. We know their population was failing drastically toward the end."

"How do you know that?"

"We can date the cities. There were fewer of them during the later years."

"I'm impressed," she said.

Chernowski smiled and accepted the compliment as his due.

Hutch looked out the window at the handful of collapsed stones that comprised all that remained of the original temple. "How much of it was extrapolation?" she asked. "Of what we just saw?"

The vehicle settled to the ground and they climbed out. "We know pretty much what the temple looked like. We're not exactly sure about all the details, but it's close. As to the statuary, we've recovered enough bits and pieces here and elsewhere to make informed guesses. I suspect if the natives could return, they'd feel quite at home in our model."

The archeological effort on Pinnacle was almost thirty years old. There were currently more than two thousand research and support personnel scattered across several dozen sites.

Pinnacle was still a living world, of course, but it was of minimal interest to exobiologists. Its various creatures had been cataloged, its pure electrical life-forms had been analyzed, and the only work that remained now was data collection. There would be no more surprises, and no more breakthroughs.

But there was still a great deal of fascination with the prime species. The temple-builders had spread to all five continents; the ruins of their cities had been found everywhere except in the extremes at the ice caps. But they were gone to oblivion. They were by far the earliest civilization known by humans. And despite Chernowski's boasts, not one member of their species was known by name. Not even, she thought, the name of their prime deity.

Hutch thanked him for the tour and returned to the rover. She stood a few moments, half in and half out of the vehicle, gazing at the circle of antique stones, wondering how much of the temple she'd seen had come out of the imaginations of Chernowski's designers.

The e-suit fitted itself to her like a garment, save at the face, where it formed a hard oval shell, allowing her to speak and breathe comfortably. It afforded protection against extremes of temperature and radiation, and also countered air pressure within the body so that she could function in a vacuum. It felt rather like wearing a bodysuit of loose-fitting soft cloth. Power was derived from weak-force particles, and consequently the suit could maintain itself indefinitely.

When the temple had stood on this spot, the climate had been far more hospitable, and the surrounding lands had supported a thriving agricultural society. Later, the town and the temple had been sacked and burned, but the place had risen again, had risen several times from assaults, and eventually became, according to the experts, a seat of empire.

And then it had gone down permanently into the dust.

Her commlink vibrated. "Hutch? We're ready to go." That was Toni Hamner, one of her passengers. At the moment Toni was directing the loading crew.

A couple of Chernowski's peopk were lifting an engraved stone out of a pit. "On my way," she said.

She set down minutes later beside the lander. Another rover was on the ground, from which packing cases were being loaded. The cases contained artifacts, almost exclusively pieces of the temple, protected by foam. "We've got some ceramics to take back," said Toni. "Including a statue."

"A statue? Of whom?"

She laughed. "No one has any idea. But it's in good condition."

There were two loaders. One was looking at the shipping labels. "Cups," he said. "You believe that? After all this time?"

"John's new," said Toni. "It's fired clay," she told him. "Do it right, and it'll last forever." She was lithe, olive-skinned, happy-go-lucky. Hutch had brought her out from Sol four years before, with her husband. Rumor had it that she'd been maybe a bit too happy-go-lucky. He gave it up and wanted to go home, while Toni made it clear she intended to stay indefinitely. She was a power-flow expert, with an opportunity to show what she could do. Her time at Pinnacle, where she had an opportunity to design and implement her own systems without undue supervision, was priceless.

Apparently Toni had considered the husband expendable.

The cases were heavy, and it was essential to balance the load.

Hutch showed them where she wanted everything, and then climbed into the cabin. Her other three passengers were already seated.

One of them was Tom Scolari, an ADP specialist whom she'd known for years. Scolari introduced her to Embry Desjardain, a physician ending her tour, and Randy Nightingale, with whom she had a passing acquaintance. Nightingale had been a surprise, a late addition to her manifest. The flight home, she explained, would last thirty-one days. Not that they didn't already know.

She sat down, pressed the commlink, and informed the transport officer that she was ready to go.

His voice crackled over the circuit. "You're clear," he said. "It was nice having you here, Hutch. Will you be coming back this way soon?"

"Next two trips are to Nok." Nok was the only world they'd found with a functioning civilization. Its inhabitants had just begun to put electricity to work. But they were constantly waging major wars. They were a quarrelsome lot, given to repression, intolerant of original ideas. They believed they were alone in the universe (when they thought about it at all), and even their scientific community refused to credit the possibility that other worlds might be inhabited. It was a curious business, because humans walked among them, clothed in lightbenders, which rendered them invisible.

Hutch wondered why the civilization on Pinnacle, dead these hundreds of thousands of years, should be so much more interesting than the Noks.

Toni took a last look at the artifacts to be sure they were secured. Then she said good-bye to the two loaders and took her seat.

Hutch started the spike, and while the system built energy she recited the safety procedures for them. Spike technology allowed her to manipulate the weight of the lander in a relatively light (i.e., planetary) gravity field from its actual value down to about two percent. She instructed her passengers to remain in their seats until advised otherwise, make no effort to release the harness until the harness itself disengaged, attempt no sudden movements once the red light went on, and so forth.

"All right," she said. "Here we go."

The harnesses settled around their shoulders and locked them in. She rotated the thrusters to a down angle and fired them. The vehicle began to rise. She eased back on the yoke, and the lander lifted gently into the air.

She turned it over to the AI, informed her passengers they could switch off their e-suits if they desired, and shut her own down.

The excavation site had already become indistinguishable from the brown sands surrounding it.

The Harold Wildside had exquisite accommodations. Hutch had seen several major changes during the twenty-odd years she'd been piloting the Academy's superluminals, the most significant of which had been the development of artificial gravity. Bttt it was also true that Academy people now traveled well. Not in luxury, perhaps, but current accommodations had come a long way since the early days, when everything had been bargain-basement.

The extra infusion of money into the space sciences had largely resulted from the discovery of the Omega clouds, those curious and lethal objects that drifted out of galactic center in eight-thousand-year cycles and which seemed programmed to assault technological civilizations. What they really assaulted, of course, was straight lines and right angles on structures large enough to draw their attention. Which was to say, shapes that did not appear in nature. Since their discovery two decades before, architectural styles had changed dramatically. The curve was now a basic feature everywhere. Bridges, buildings, spaceports, whatever an architect put his hand to, were designed with sweep and arc. When the Omega clouds arrived in the vicinity of Earth-they were expected in about a thousand years-they would find little to trigger them.

The entities had ignited a long debate: Were they natural objects, an evolutionary form perhaps that the galaxy used to protect itself against sentient life? Or were they the product of a diabolical intelligence of incredible engineering capability? No one knew, but the notion that the universe might be out to get the human race had caused some rethinking among the various major religions.

The temple in the desert had been rounded, without any architectural right angles. Hutch wondered whether it signified that the problem was ancient.

The lander settled into its bay on board Wildside. Hutch waited for her panel to turn green. When it did, she opened the airlock. "Nice to have you folks along," she said. "Quarters are on the top deck. Look for your name. Kitchen's at the rear. If you want to change, shower, whatever, before we leave, you have time. We won't be getting under way for another hour."

Embry Desjardain had long dark hair and chiseled cheekbones. There was something in her eyes that made it easy to believe she was a surgeon. She'd done three years at Pinnacle, which was one more than a standard tour for medical personnel. "I enjoyed myself," she explained to Hutch. "No hypochondriacs out here."

Tom Scolari was medium height, redheaded, laughed a lot, and told Hutch he was going home because his father had become ill, his mother was already disabled, and they just needed somebody around the'house. "Just as well," he continued with a straight face, "there's a shortage of women on Pinnacle."

He made it a point to shake Nightingale's hand. "Aren't you," he said, "the same Nightingale who was out to Deepsix a few years ago?"

Nightingale confessed that he was, commented that it would be good to get home, and opened a book.

While waiting for Wildside's orbit to bring it into alignment with her departure vector, Hutch ran her preflight check, talked to an old friend on Skyhawk, Pinnacle's space station, and read through the incoming traffic.

There were some interesting items: the TransGalactic cruise ship Evening Star was on its way to Maleiva with fifteen hundred tourists to watch the big collision. The Event would also be broadcast live by Universal News Network, although the transmission would be a few days late arriving on Earth. Separatists in Wyoming had gone on another shooting spree, and another round of violence had broken out in Jerusalem.

The Star was the biggest in a proposed series of cruise vessels. A couple of years ago a smaller ship had taken passengers out to the black hole at Golem Point. They'd not expected much interest. As the joke went, there's not much to see at a black hole. But subscriptions had overwhelmed the ticket office, and suddenly deep-space marvels had become big business and a new industry was born.

The Maleiva story reminded her of Randy Nightingale's connection with that system. He'd lost his future and his reputation during the ill-fated mission nineteen years ago. Now the place was in the news again, and he wondered whether that had anything to do with his sudden decision to go home.

Bill asked permission to fire up the engines. "It's time,"he added. The onboard AI for all Academy superluminals was named for William R. Dolbry, who was not the designer, but the first captain to be brought home by the onboard system. Dolbry had suffered a cardiac arrest while ferrying an executive yacht and four frightened passengers on a self-reliance voyage eighty light-years out.

Bill's image (which was not Dolbry's) revealed a man who would have been right out of central casting for a president or chairman. His face was rounded, his eyes quite serious, and he wore a well-manicured gray beard. His designers had been careful not to allow him to establish too great a degree of presence, because they didn't want captains automatically resigning their judgment to him. Illusions could be overwhelming, and AIs still lacked the human capacity to make decisions in real-world situations.

"Go ahead, Bill," she said.

Wildside was carrying a substantial cargo of ceramics and clay tablets. Altogether, they'd brought up eleven loads, and if the ship was a trifle light on passengers, the cargo more than compensated.

Replicas of the cups and bowls, she knew, would turn up later in the Academy gift shop. She would have liked very much to have an original. But the stuff was worth its mass in titanium. And then some.

Pity.

"Okay, folks," she told the PA, "we're going to start accelerating in three minutes. Please be sure you're locked down somewhere. And check in when it's done."

It would be a long haul back to Earth, but Hutch was used to it. She'd discovered that most of her passengers inevitably found they shared a community of interests. There was an endless supply of entertainment available, and the voyages invariably became vacations. She knew of cases in which people who had made this kind of flight together were still holding annual reunions years later. She recalled instances in which passengers had fallen in love, marriages had disintegrated, a scientific breakthrough had been made, and a nearly nonstop orgy had been conducted.

Marcel was amused. "I understood there was nothing intelligent down there. Didn't they specify that on the profile?"

They were back in project control, surrounded by Beekman's technicians and analysts. Beekman himself heaved a long sigh. "You know how surveys are," he said. "And keep in mind that this survey team got run off pretty quick."

"Okay." Marcel grinned. He'd have enjoyed being there to watch the reaction of top management when this news came in. I say, we seem to have had a bit of an oversight on Deepsix. "When you're ready to transmit your report, Gunny, let me know."

Beekman went below and, within twenty minutes, was on the circuit. "We went back over the recordings, Marcel," he said. "Take a look at this"

A snowfield clicked onto his display. Taken by the satellites, it seemed ordinary enough, a landscape of rolling hills and occasional patches of forest. On the desolate side, but the whole world was desolate. "What am I looking for?"

"There," said one of the researchers, a blond young man whose name was Arvin, or Ervin, or something like that.

A shadow.

A building. No doubt this time.

"Where is this?" he asked.

"Northern Transitoria. A few hundred kilometers south of the coast."

It was a spire. A tower.

They magnified it for him. It appeared to be made from stone blocks. He saw a scattering of windows. "How high is it?"

"About three stories. Probably another three below the snow line."

He stared at it. The tower and the snow. It looked like a cold, solitary, forbidding place.

"It doesn't look lived in," said Arvin.

Marcel agreed with the assessment. It looked old, and the surrounding snow was undisturbed.

"I don't think there's any glass in the windows," said someone else.

A map appeared with the location marked. It was south of the ocean they'd called Coraggio. Not far from Bad News Bay.

Well named, he thought. "What's under the snow?"

Beekman nodded to someone off-screen. A network of lines appeared. Houses. Streets. Central parks, maybe. An avenue or possibly a onetime watercourse curving through the middle of the pattern. Watercourse probably, because it was possible to make out a couple of straight lines that looked like bridges. "It's big," he said.

Beekman nodded. "It would have supported a population of probably twenty thousand. But it's small in the sense that the roads and buildings are scaled down. We figure the streets are only a couple of meters wide. That's narrow by anybody's standards. And here's something else." He used a marker to indicate a thick line that seemed to circle the network. "This looks like a wall."

"Fortifications," said Marcel.

"I'd think so. And that kind of fortification means pretechnologi-cal." He looked uncomfortable. "I wish we had an expert here."

The tower appeared to be connected to the wall. "Nothing else visible above the snow?"

"No. Everything else is buried."

He'd suspected the wall they'd found yesterday to be a freak of nature, an illusion perhaps. But this- "It makes five of us now," said Marcel. Five places where sentience had appeared. "Any structures anywhere else on the planet, Gunther?"

"Nothing other than the wall, so far. We've started looking. I'm sure there will be." He tugged distractedly at his beard. "Marcel, we'll have to send a team down. Find out who they are. Or were."

"Can't," said Marcel.

The project director met his eyes. Beekman lowered his voice so that there would not appear to be a disagreement. "This is a special circumstance. I'll sign a release from any instructions or policies that preclude you from acting. But we have to go down and take a closer look."

"I'd love to help, Gunny," said Marcel, "but I meant can't. We don't have a lander."

Beekman's jaw literally dropped. "That can't be right," he said. "You have three of them down in the shuttle bay."

"Those are shuttles. Ship to ship. But they can't operate in an atmosphere."

"You're sure?" He was visibly dismayed. "We've got to be able to do something."

"I don't know what," said Marcel. "Report it. Let Gomez worry about it."

"How could we not have a lander?"

"We don't carry dead mass. Landers are heavy. This operation, we weren't supposed to have any use for one."

Beekman snorted. "Who decided that? Well, never mind. I guess we've all learned something about preparedness."

"You don't have anyone qualified to conduct an investigation anyhow," said Marcel.

"Qualified?" Beekman looked like a man facing a world of idiots. "You're talking about poking around in an old building. Look for writing on the wall and take some pictures. Maybe find a couple of pots. What kind of qualifications do you need?"

Marcel grinned. "You'd break all the pots."

"Okay, let the Academy know. Tell them to send out another ship, if they want. But they'll have to hurry."

"They will that" said Marcel. He knew there wouldn't be time for a second mission to reach them from Earth. They'd have to divert somebody.