Echoes of an Alien Sky (13 page)

She turned her head. "Well . . . I'm glad. What else should I say?"

He leaned closer, still looking at her. His voice fell. "This needs to be a full-time thing. I can't afford any divided loyalty."

"What are you talking about?"

"Birds fly when they're ready. You have to move way from that house. Let's set up together. I'll show you the person you really are, and make you everything you can be. But it won't happen while half of you is still in that old world."

"I've never heard anything so outrageous!" Lorili's tone was jocularly reproachful. Inwardly, she was thrilled. But it would have been unbecoming for a lady to seem too eager. "We'll just have to wait and see," she said. But she could read in his eyes that he knew already he had won. "Shall I get us some more drinks?"

The central complex of the original Terran facility at Triagon consisted of several interconnected domes and superstructures hiding among a jumble of broken crags and dusty ridges. Some blobs of color had been added to the scene in the form of the huddle of portable domes and huts that the Venusians had set up adjacent to house their operations. In addition, there were a number of outlying lattice-works and dishes, which had first given rise to the idea of its having been some kind of Farside astronomical observatory. The constructions that Kyal and Yorim had been brought in to investigate were spread over a more open area designated the "South Field," extending for roughly four miles on one side of the central complex.

After the hours that Kyal had spent studying ground and overhead shots, close-ups, and measurements, they were easily recognizable as the lander from the orbiting transport braked into the final stage of its descent. The nearest took the form of a cluster of bunkers sprouting pylons supporting finned housings and pylons capped with dome, suggestive of a large electrical research facility. Beyond, partly sunken in the surface like immense donuts surrounding towers of curious metallic contours, were two toroids braided with helically wound bands of guides and conductors that looked suspiciously like variable-phase launch boost resonators. And further out were an assortment of shapes that could have been approach guide retro arrays and point attractors. For Kyal it was like seeing some of his own speculative design sketches come to life.

"It's like that pyramid I was on when you called," Yorim said, leaning forward to peer through on of the ports—a lunar transport surface lander didn't boast the luxury of cabin wall screens. "Parts of it look as if they could be from Dakon." That was the test ground on Venus where they had worked on experimental models of some advanced space propulsion ideas.

"Why would they come all this way to do it?" Kyal asked.

"Secrecy?" Casselo offered. "We know they were obsessed with it. Very likely it had some military connection. Everything did."

Watching the large toroidal radiators flatten out as the expanse of gray desolation outside rose toward the lander put Kyal in mind of the difficulties the Terrans had caused themselves by taking the fundamental entities of physics to be point particles. Any communications physics engineer knew that an antenna has to have some physical extent in space to radiate energy. Elementary particles were ring-structured.

Luna was substantially larger than Froile, and far closer to spherical than Froile's peculiarly elongated, knobby shape. Its surface features, pattern of deep-running cracks and fissures, and evidence of residual heat—which would have been even more when the Terrans existed—all spoke of its having been involved in the catastrophic encounters that had affected Earth. Nevertheless, the Terrans managed to see it as having been a dead body for billions of years.

One of the attractions that had brought Venusian researchers to Luna when it was discovered that there had been a Terran presence there—mainly on Nearside—had been the prospect of its yielding artifacts and structures better preserved than anything to be found on Earth itself. And sure enough it turned out to be so. Some items were so unchanged as to look as if they had been made practically yesterday. Triagon possessed the all the facilities that would be expected for a remote research and engineering facility: accommodation and living areas; an administrative and control center, workshops and storage space; a launch area and depot building for local ground and short-range surface-hopping vehicles. Abandoned vehicles and equipment, and the nature of damage evident on some of the structures, testified to violence in the final days of whoever had occupied the place, and a hasty departure.

That much had been known since the preliminary visit by the ISA survey team, and since then the existence of deeper levels as Kyal had inferred from the sonar scans had been confirmed—which was what Casselo had called him about. It turned out that more had come to light more recently still—in fact, while they were on their way from Earth and
Explorer 6
. Aluam Brysek, the head of the ISA crew left to carry out a more detailed exploration, updated them over hot drinks inside the largest of the huts when they had completed the greetings and introductions.

"There are Terran corpses out on the South Field. We've found twelve so far, a few together, the others strewn out over a wider area. There are more in some of the vehicles." He had an athletic build, with sharp, clean features, dark curly hair, alert eyes, and a lively yet economic style of speech and manner that gave Kyal confidence. The kind of person who knew his job and would get things done with a minimum of talk and fuss, he thought to himself. That would be Yorim's kind of person too.

"Corpses?" Casselo repeated. The three arrivals from the crawler still connected to the hut's air lock exchanged questioning looks. This added a new dimension to the job, which would probably call for some new expertise to be brought in.

"How come they weren't spotted sooner?" Yorim asked.

"They're a fair distance out," Brysek replied. "We've been concentrating mainly here, around the base. Their suits are the same gray as the dust, which doesn't help. You'd think they were meant as camouflage."

"Military," Casselo said.

"What kind of condition are they in?" Kyal asked.

"Shot to pieces," one of the technicians threw over his shoulder from a table by the wall, where he was reading something. Brysek nodded confirmation.

"We've got some clips. Here, I'll show you a few." He got up and led the way across to a bank of communications gear. The others closed up around as he activated one of the screens and brought up a series of indexed frames showing the remains. They made his point about the difficulty of spotting them. Even from what must have been tens of yards, the twisted gray forms lying amid the dust and boulders could easily have been mistaken for rocks and shadows. Close-ups showed the damage as ranging from lacerated suits and shattered helmets to scattered body parts and fully dismembered torsos. The corpses themselves were not reduced to skeletons, as was universally true of human remains found on Earth, but still possessed their solid softer tissues a dried, shriveled husks covering the bones. All the same, this would make them prize trophies for the biologists.

"We haven't attempted moving any of them," Brysek said. "They look pretty fragile. Probably best preserved out there, anyway. I figured we'd leave that to the specialists."

Casselo nodded approval. "Good man." He sent an inquiring look at Kyal. "What do you want to do? Go and see them now, while we've still got the crawler attached outside? Or get settled in and have a look around here first?"

Kyal couldn't see that it would make much difference either way."Whatever you prefer," he replied. "You're the boss."

Casselo shook his head. "Not here, Master Reen. This will be your patch now. You might as well get used to it from the beginning."

It took Kyal a few seconds to adjust to the feeling—like trying on a new coat. Yorim was looking at him with a mixture of amusement and curiosity. "Let's get our bearings here inside the base first," he decided. "A day more won't make any difference to the time the corpses been lying out there." He licked his lips pensively and looked at Brysek. "The last thing we had to eat was a quick snack in the docking bays on the
Explorer
when we changed ships. "How about starting with the canteen, after we've stowed our things?"

"We can eat first, right here," Brysek said.

"I was hoping you'd say something like that," Casselo told Kyal.

Although the interior of the Terran structures had been pressurized to a comfortably breathable level and seemed to be holding, they put on back harnesses with air bottles, and respirator masks close at hand clipped to the straps, before proceeding through the surface tube and connecting lock. Full suits would have been too cumbersome. In the event of any failure short of explosive—which was hard to visualize as likely—the respirators would get them back to the huts on the safe side of the lock. The precaution would be relaxed once the structure had been fully examined and pronounced safe.

Walking on the one-sixth-normal-gravity lunar surface was unaffected inside the huts and the Terran sectors, which had been"carpeted" with strips of Venusian G-polarizer panels. Power came from a small fission reactor sunk in a silo by the landing area, which also supplied the rest of the base. They followed Brysek and Irg, a communications specialist who had joined them at lunch in the hut, through into the first of the Terran domes. Somebody called Fenzial, the foreman of the excavating crew below, was due to meet them farther down, where the way had been opened through to the lower levels.

It was a very different feeling from that of walking among the ruins of ancient Terran cities. There, the effects of time had faded and blurred the once-sharp images, distancing the events that they spoke of and the people who had lived them to remote ciphers. The reality of their having existed was something that was merely acknowledged without any sense of being apprehended directly. It was not so in the rooms and corridors of the buildings that constituted Triagon. With no breeze even to carry in dust, no atmosphere to bring corrosion, and not a microbe to initiate any process of decay or decomposition, the surroundings were as clean and unchanged as if they had been lived in yesterday. Brysek pointed out more instances of damage as they passed: a door broken off its hinges in one place; holes and gouges in the inner walls in several others. There had been further signs of unrest in the form of upturned furniture, abandoned utility items such as tools and kitchen ware, and clothes and other personal effects scattered over the floors. These had since been catalogued, and either stored or shipped away for further study by archeologists who had been here earlier.

They came out from the bottom of a stair well into the vault that the original survey team had found to be relatively bare of much that was interesting, taken to be a storage cellar, and shown on their drawings as the lowermost level of the complex. However, when Brysek, on receiving Kyal's directions based on the sonar scans, had his people cut through some heavy steel shutters at the far end that the survey people had decided probably wouldn't justify the labor of tackling at that early stage, they found the connection a whole deeper extension of Triagon which up until then nobody had suspected existed.

The formerly bare outer vault had become something of a staging area for exploration of the lower levels, with boxes of hardware and materials, switch panels controlling bundles of cables snaking over the floor and into the opening where the cut away shutters stood propped against the walls on either side. A couple of technicians were busy at work table littered with tools. Brysek and Irg picked up hand flashlamps from a rack as the party came to the entrance between the shutters. "It's huge down there," Brysek explained. "We don't have permanent lighting fixed up everywhere yet. Still a lot of shadows and dark areas. It's easy to trip over things." Kyal, Yorim, and Casselo followed suit and picked up a lamp each.

"Is this the only way down to the whole lower section?" Casselo asked, looking puzzled.

"As far as we know," Brysek said.

"Seems odd."

"No other way in, at the back, maybe?" Kyal suggested. "If it's that big, you'd think there would be some kind of emergency exit somewhere."

"Maybe there is," Brysek answered. We haven't gone all the way through yet." They moved on into a corridor lined by doors and strung with overhead lamps, converging away for what must have been hundreds of feet. Even Kyal, who had been the first to study and measure the sonar scans, was surprised by the sudden feeling of roominess.

Fenzial, the excavating foreman, was waiting as arranged. The introductory formalities were completed, and he took the lead from there. Everything here was more spacious and lavishly fitted than the levels they had passed through above —not anything that would have qualified as luxury, to be sure, but a definite step up from utilitarian concrete floors and painted walls. First were what had obviously been offices, and then beyond them, larger rooms that appeared to have been for day use or sitting areas, with large chairs, tables, and collections of books—another priceless find for the linguists—and cupboards containing things like games, household oddments, and children's toys. Next was a large communal dining area and kitchens. Unlike the levels above, which had been primarily functional, with limited living space to accommodate the occupants, the space here seemed to have been devoted mainly to habitation. All very strange.

A difficulty in exploring the lower complex, which had slowed things down considerably, was that stairs from the surface only extended down as far as the vault on the far side of the steel shutters. Below the level they were on, the only access was by means of elevators, and the elevators were not working. Hence, Brysek's workers had been obliged to rig up a system of makeshift stairs in one of the shafts. The next level down contained various workshops, a pharmacy and medical center, and a section at one end containing communications and computing equipment. This was Irg's specialty, and where he had been spending most of his time since the lower complex was opened up.