Apes and Angels Page 28

  Felicia worked with the bio team, of course, which kept her separated from Brad most of each day. They scoured the meadows outside the village’s hollow for the remains of the egg-shaped spacecraft that had transported the big cats from planet Beta.

  Over dinner, Felicia told Brad, “The eggshell material is decomposing rapidly. We’ve had to place samples in a vacuum chamber to keep them from disintegrating entirely.”

  Brad looked up from the soup he was spooning. “Like they’re programmed to crumble and fall apart,” he mused. “Just like the cats themselves were programmed to die once they’ve killed off the Gammans.”

  “The engineers up in the ship are stumped,” Felicia said. “They can’t find any trace of controls or mechanical devices in the pieces we’ve recovered.”

  “Yet those eggs flew from one planet to the other. They were designed to make the crossing.”

  “Designed by whom?” Felicia asked, her face looking troubled. “And why?”

  Brad shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to find out.”

  “It’s spooky.”

  Reaching for his glass of water, Brad agreed, “It’s weird. Scary, really.”

  * * *

  Late one afternoon, as Brad and Mnnx surveyed the progress on the new village, Brad asked the Gamman, “You said that once there were many villages?”

  “Long ago,” said Mnnx. “Big villages. Much bigger than ours. Even bigger than ours with the new village added.”

  “Where were they?”

  Mnnx raised an arm and swept the horizon. “Everywhere. The land was filled with them.” He hesitated, then added, “But the Sky Masters destroyed them all.”

  Squinting through the bright sunshine at the ridgeline circling the hollow, Brad pressed, “Do you know where one of these large villages stood? Were any of them near here?”

  Mnnx was silent for several heartbeats. Then, “The largest was where two rivers met at a waterfall.”

  “Really?”

  “That is what Drrm told us when he was our Rememberer: two rivers met at a waterfall.”

  DISCOVERIES

  In the single room he shared with his wife, Brad sat at the built-in desk and stared at the 3-D map. The image moved slowly, tracing a river as it weaved through forests and grassland.

  “Mnnx said the city was located where two rivers met at a waterfall,” he murmured.

  Emcee’s voice replied, “We’re coming to that point.”

  Sizeable rivers were rare on Gamma, Brad had discovered. The surveillance satellites orbiting the planet had found only a handful.

  “There,” said Emcee. “There is where the two rivers join.”

  Pointing, Brad said, “And there’s the waterfall! Just below their juncture.”

  “But no trace of a city,” Emcee said.

  The area on both sides of the newly joined river was a strip of grassy plain. Farther back from the river’s edge a thick forest covered the ground.

  “Ground-penetrating radar hasn’t detected anything?” Brad asked.

  “Nothing,” Emcee replied. “And this is the only place on the planet where two rivers join, with a waterfall just after their juncture.”

  Felicia burst into the room. “We found it! We found the control system for the eggs. It’s fantastic!”

  Looking up, Brad saw that she was all smiles. Felicia practically danced across the little room and sat herself on Brad’s lap.

  “It’s incredible!” she said, her voice brimming with excitement. “The whole system is microscopic, built right into the eggshell itself. The entire shell is laced with nanometer-sized control units!”

  She kissed Brad soundly, then jumped to her feet again and tugged on his arm. “Come on, the whole bio team is celebrating over in the dining hall.”

  Brad rose slowly, turned back to the holographic display, and instructed Emcee, “Scan the area again. Highest power with the ground-penetrating radar.” With a glance at Felicia’s happy face, he added, “I’ll be back in a couple of hours, I guess.”

  Emcee’s image took form in the holotank. “Very well.” Brad thought of the line from A Thousand and One Nights: “Hearkening and obedience.”

  * * *

  Even the normally cool Dr. Steiner was beaming happily as she sat at the head of a table filled with nearly a dozen of the people of her biology team. They had pushed two ordinary tables together and were celebrating with fruit juices from the dining hall’s galley. Brad thought that perhaps the juice glasses had been reinforced with something stronger, but he quickly realized that the biologists didn’t need alcohol; they were high on their discovery.

  As he and Felicia pulled up a pair of chairs from one of the unoccupied tables, Brad saw that Professor Kosoff’s image filled the dining hall’s display screen, hovering above all the others, twice as large as life, smiling benignly through his beard.

  “Nanomachines built into the shell of the vehicles,” Kosoff was saying. “Incredible.”

  “But true,” said Steiner. Her blond hair, usually tied into a prim coil, hung loosely past her shoulders. “We only have a fragment of the shell, of course, but it’s indisputable: the shell structure is laced with nanometer-sized electronic units.”

  Beaming like a proud father, Kosoff said, “The engineering staff up here is trying to understand how the system works.”

  Steiner stiffened slightly. “I doubt that we have a large enough sample to provide enough evidence for that.”

  Kosoff waved a hand in the air. “You know engineers. They’ll chew on what you’ve provided them like dogs gnawing on a bone.”

  “Maybe we can find more fragments of the shells,” Felicia said, “before they disintegrate entirely.”

  Kosoff nodded; Steiner looked doubtful.

  The celebration lasted through the normal dinner hour and well into the night. Littlejohn and several of the anthropologists joined the festivities, as well as a handful of the planetologists. Brad tried to get into the happy mood of it all, but the fact that Emcee couldn’t find any trace of a city kept nagging at him.

  It’s got to be there, he kept telling himself. If it’s not, then everything that Mnnx and his people believe is nothing but a fairy tale.

  The rest of the ground crew trickled in and joined the festivities. Laughter and increasingly raucous jokes filled the dining hall. Brad sat through it all, feeling like an outsider, but happy for Felicia. This is her night, he told himself, time and again.

  At last the party started to break up, and he and Felicia said good night to Steiner and the others. It was deep night outside; the camp was lit only by low-intensity lamps on the ground outside each building. They could see the stars crowding the black sky above.

  “Which one is the Sun?” Felicia asked, her voice suddenly wistful.

  Brad shook his head. “Too dim to make out from here.”

  “It’s far away.”

  “Two hundred and some light-years,” said Brad.

  “Far away,” she repeated.

  Unbidden, the lines from an old poem popped into Brad’s consciousness. He recited:

  Ah love, let us be true

  To one another! for the world, which seems

  To lie before us like a land of dreams,

  So various, so beautiful, so new,

  Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

  And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  Felicia stared at him. “Ignorant armies. That’s what we are, aren’t we?”

  “Our job is to beat back the ignorance,” said Brad. “To learn. To understand.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “It is,” he said with absolute certainty.

  But Felicia whispered again, “We’re a long way from home, aren’t we?”

  Brad slid his arms around her
. “Wherever you are is home, Fil.”

  She nestled her head against his shoulder. “That’s very sweet of you.”

  Arms wrapped around each other, they headed for their quarters. Neither of them noticed a meteor streak across the sky and disappear in an eyeblink.

  EXCAVATION

  When they entered their room, Emcee’s image was smiling in the holographic display. Somehow the computer’s avatar looked pleased.

  Brad felt weary, depressed after the high spirits of the bio team’s long celebration. “Found anything?” he asked, steeling himself against a negative reply.

  Instead, Emcee said, “Not much.”

  Every nerve in Brad’s body quivered like a violin’s strings. “Something?”

  The 3-D viewer showed a black-and-white radar return. Brad saw the faint outline of a square structure in the middle of the display, a corner jutting out from the edge of the forest.

  “At the highest resolving power,” Emcee answered, “the ground-penetrating radar obtained this image. It appears to be a structure of some sort, buried under twenty meters of alluvial silt.”

  Staring at the display, Brad asked, “A structure?”

  “Apparently,” was Emcee’s bland reply.

  Felicia came up beside Brad. “The city?”

  Trying to rein in his hopes, Brad said, “Maybe. Maybe not. Let’s see what Littlejohn thinks.”

  He put a call through to Littlejohn, but the head of the anthropology team refused to let himself be seen; he replied to Brad’s call with audio only.

  “It’s awfully late,” the anthropologist’s voice complained.

  Trying to keep his enthusiasm under control, Brad said, “I think we might have found the ancient city the Gammans have told me about.”

  “Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”

  “But this could prove that the Gammans’ story about their past isn’t mythology! It’s real!”

  “That would be fine, Brad.” Littlejohn’s voice sounded guarded, rather than tired. “Come to my office first thing tomorrow … or, rather, at ten hundred hours. It’s already past midnight.”

  “Ten hundred hours,” Brad repeated, feeling sour, almost angry.

  “Good night,” said Littlejohn.

  Brad turned to Felicia. “You’d think he’d be more excited. After all—”

  Smiling knowingly, Felicia interrupted, “Brad, hasn’t it occurred to you that he might not be alone?”

  “Littlejohn?”

  “He’s still celebrating,” said Felicia.

  “But this is important!” Brad insisted.

  With a shake of her head, Felicia said, “If what you’ve found is a city, it’s been waiting there for more than a hundred thousand years. A few more hours won’t hurt anything.”

  “Maybe,” Brad agreed. Very reluctantly.

  * * *

  Precisely at ten hundred hours Brad rapped impatiently on Littlejohn’s office door. Within half an hour the anthropologist had called in the rest of the anthro team and put through a call to Kosoff.

  “It does look artificial,” Kosoff’s 3-D image admitted cautiously.

  “It’s buried under twenty meters of silt,” said Brad.

  “We’ll have to build some digging equipment and send it down to you.”

  “Good.”

  Littlejohn said, “If it is the remains of a city buried there, it means that the Gammans’ story about the Sky Masters isn’t entirely mythological.”

  Nodding soberly, Kosoff said, “One step at a time. First let’s see what’s under all that mud.”

  * * *

  “The old village,” Mnnx breathed. Brad thought his tone sounded reverent, even through the computer’s translation.

  The two of them were standing on the edge of a sizeable pit that had been dug by the excavating machines that stood bulky and idle—for the moment—on the far side of the hole.

  In the middle of the man-made crater stood the broken remains of a square stone chimney. At least, Brad thought of it as a chimney, poking straight up into the air about four meters, leading farther underground.

  The engineer in charge of the machines came up to Brad. “We can start to dig around the edges of the pit, make it wider, deeper.”

  “Not yet,” Brad replied, pointing toward the chimney. “I want to see where it leads first.”

  The engineer—square-jawed, grizzled, broad shouldered—looked askance. “You intend to go down inside that shaft?”

  Nodding, Brad answered, “At least a little bit.”

  “I don’t think that’s wise. The safety people will—”

  Brad stopped him with an upraised hand. “I want to see where it leads.”

  The engineer shrugged. “You’re the boss,” he muttered. But it was clear he didn’t agree.

  That’s right, Brad thought. I’m the boss.

  * * *

  With a buckyball cable tied snugly under his shoulders and a high-intensity lamp clamped to his head, Brad sank slowly down the inside of the shaft. He had offered Mnnx the chance to go down with him, but the Gamman had refused, clearly awed and fearful.

  Glancing up as he descended, Brad saw the narrow square of sky getting smaller and smaller. The inside of the shaft had been reamed out with a rotating scrubber, the accumulated dried mud sucked up by a vacuum attachment. The walls looked smooth, despite bits of mud still clinging to the adobe-like bricks.

  He flashed his lamp downward. His feet dangled in midair. The lamp’s glow was swallowed in darkness.

  No telling how far down this shaft goes, Brad thought.

  Suddenly his communicator erupted with, “Just what do you think you’re doing?” Kosoff’s voice, angry, imperious.

  “Exploring,” Brad replied. “Seeing where this shaft leads.”

  “You get yourself back up to the surface. Right now! The safety people absolutely forbid you or anybody else going down until—”

  “Hold it!” Brad yelled.

  His descent abruptly stopped. Brad dangled in his makeshift harness.

  “Now get yourself up to safety,” Kosoff commanded.

  But Brad said, “No. Not yet.”

  “I gave you an order!”

  Brad laughed. His lamp was shining on what looked like a doorway cut into the shaft’s smooth interior. A dozen meters farther down the excavation stopped, and the shaft was choked with dried mud. But there was an unmistakable doorway just below Brad’s dangling feet. And to one side of the shaft were clearly carved symbols.

  Writing.

  THE CITY

  “It’s the find of a lifetime,” Littlejohn crowed.

  The anthropologist was standing at the edge of the growing pit, staring down into the complex of stone building foundations spreading across the floor of the excavation.

  Brad and Mnnx stood alongside him as the digging machines toiled away, carefully removing more of the silt that had accumulated over the city during the past thousand centuries. The caterpillar-tracked bulldozers and backhoes worked almost silently, their electrical motors humming quietly. They were remotely directed by a half-dozen engineers huddled at the lip of the growing excavation. Robots and smaller remotely directed machines carefully removed the last layers of dried mud from the structures.

  “The biggest discovery in the history of archeology,” Littlejohn added, smiling delightedly. “A whole alien city.”

  Turning to Mnnx, Brad said softly, “Your ancestors built this. You should be very proud.”

  But Mnnx replied, “The Sky Masters killed my ancestors. They covered the city so that we could not see it. They will be angry with you.”

  Brad had tried to get the Gammans to come and view the excavation. Most of them had refused, although a few—including Lnng, of course—had come and stared uneasily, fearfully. Brad thought that they were awed by the big digging machines.

  Brad tried to reassure Mnnx. “There’s nothing to fear. The Sky Masters have gone far from here.” If they ever truly existed, he added silently
.

  “They see us,” Mnnx replied stubbornly. “They will punish us.”

  * * *

  “So what do we have?” Kosoff asked.

  Brad stood at the head of the table, beside the professor. The display screens on the walls of the conference room showed views of the newly excavated city.

  After six weeks of careful digging, a good part of the long-buried city had been cleared, and Kosoff had summoned Brad back to the starship for a meeting of the department heads.

  “It’s a city,” Brad said, pointing to an aerial view of the dig. “You can see the foundations of buildings, and the rectilinear outlines of streets.”

  Olav Pedersen asked, “Have you recovered any artifacts from the city?”

  Brad knew the Scandinavian’s question was strictly pro forma. He had provided that information in the reports he’d submitted.

  “Unfortunately, no. All that exists are the remains of the building’s foundations. The buildings themselves were smashed flat.”

  “By the annual floods from the rivers that deposited all that silt, I should think,” said Quentin Abbott.

  “No,” Brad said. “From the analysis that Emcee’s done, it looks as if the buildings were destroyed before the river’s flooding started burying them.”

  “Destroyed by what?”

  Brad glanced at Kosoff, who seemed to be holding his breath, waiting for his reply.

  “According to the Gammans’ history, they were destroyed by the so-called Sky Masters.”

  “That’s poppycock,” said Pedersen. “Pure mythology.”

  “Is it?” Brad challenged. “Their mythology showed us where to find the city. And predicted that it would be flattened.” Before anyone could respond, he added, “Incidentally, there are some indications that the course of the river was altered, so that its annual flood would inundate the remains of the city.”

  Elizabeth Chang said mildly, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

  Pointing at the displays on the walls, Brad countered, “Isn’t that extraordinary enough for you? The city was destroyed, its inhabitants wiped out, and the nearby river diverted to drown the remains.”