Echoes of an Alien Sky (23 page)

Elundi met Iwon near the ISA complex later that day. "No good," he announced. "It's just the way Lorili said it would be. Jenyn isn't going to admit anything. And he wouldn't back down, even if he did. It's his idea of astute politics."

Iwon didn't look especially surprise. "It had to be tried," he said.

"Then we have to approach Tyarla directly ourselves," Elundi said. It was what they had agreed as the next step. "I've been thinking, it would probably be better if we had Lorili in on this. Is she still here?"

"Yes—they're still waiting for approval from
E6
," Iwon said. "But it could come at any time, and then she'll be up to her neck. Best to get this out of the way now, while we still have the time."

"Will you talk to her—if I set things up with Tyarla?"

Iwon nodded. "Of course. No problem."

"I'd better call her right now," Elundi said, reaching for his phone. He had obtained Tyarla's call code from Derlen. He flagged and activated it while Iwon waited. A moment later Tyarla's face appeared on the screen.

"Yes?"

"Tyarla. Do you remember me? Elundi. We met at the Magic Carpet not long ago. You were with Derlen."

"Right. And you two are going out together now. She told me."

"I need to talk to you."

"What about?"

"It's kind of personal. I'd rather not go into it now."

"Is it about this Lornod thing?"

"Yes, as a matter of fact. I have a couple of friends, too, who would like to ask you some questions. One of them is a former campaign associate of Jenyn's from Venus."

"What does Jenyn have to do with it?"

"We think he has a lot to do with it."

Tyarla's manner became defensive. "I'm not answering any more questions about it," she said. "I'm already tired of people poking and questioning."

"Tyarla, you've already set yourself up," Elundi persisted. "You're going to be asked a lot of questions now anyway. Would you rather it was by us, in private, who just want to straighten a few things out? Or wait until it gets really tough with people who'll do it in public?"

Tyarla started to object, but then faltered and shook her head, looking cornered. She really didn't seem to have thought the thing through. "When?" she asked in a sullen voice.

Elundi glanced at Iwon. "Soon as you can," Iwon murmured. "Lorili could be gone at any time."

"It's going to have to be tonight," Elundi told Tyarla.

Brysek stepped aside, grinning, and gestured for Kyal to go first. "Take it easy," he warned. "The floor's not polarized." Kyal stepped through into the elevator, moving gingerly in response to the feeling of sudden lightness. Brysek followed. He pressed one of the buttons on the panel, and the doors closed. "We think they were automatic, but that part's still dead," he said. He pressed another button, and Kyal felt the car start to descend.

It was uncanny. After it had remained idle and unattended for unknown millennia, Brysek's engineers had cleaned up the workings of the Terran elevator, rigged a connection to the Venusian power system up on the surface, and managed to get it working again. It was plain and utilitarian as elevators went—little more than a metal-walled box that the paint had powdered and fallen from long ago. But then, this was hardly a commercial hotel or one of the more stylish residential complexes on Venus either. The walls were scarred and gouged to the rear on one side, and part way along the back. "What do you think happened here?" Kyal asked, gesturing.

"Damage by firearms," Brysek answered. "Have the translators come up with any leads on what the trouble was about here?"

Kyal shook his head. "Nothing that I've heard."

The car halted at one of the intermediate levels of the Lower Complex. A technician who was in the process of taking a couple of the newly arrived biologists on an introductory tour stared in amazement as the doors opened, and Kyal and Brysek emerged.

"How long has that been working?"

"Only since today," Brysek told him. "Kyal was the first guest passenger."

"I
wondered
what they were doing up on the roof, with panels opened up and all those cables," the technician said to his charges.

"We'll have the kitchens and the showers going by tomorrow," Brysek informed them cheerfully. "It'll be the spot of choice on Luna—just the way the Terrans had it."

"Not
totally
, I hope," Kyal said, remembering the bullet scars.

"Oh, excuse me." Brysek said to the newcomers, and gestured. "Master Kyal Reen. He's the man that IASS sent out to look at the electrical constructions on South Field." The technician introduced the two biologists. They were with the group just in from
Explorer 6
to assess the Terran biological facilities and conduct further tests on some of the bodies, along with animal and plant remains been found in the section with the pens and cages.

"We heard they were to do with an experimental space propulsion program that the Terrans were running here," one of the biologists said.

"It seems that way," Kyal confirmed.

"Nothing more on what it was about?" the other inquired.

"Just that it seemed to have involved heavy-lift, long-range vessels," Kyal said. Actually, there was more, which was what Brysek was taking him to see, but he didn't want to go into it just now.

"Sounds intriguing," the first said. "I hope you post it when you find out more."

"You'll know as soon as we do,' Kyal promised.

He and Brysek carried on along the main corridor from the elevator vestibule to a room that contained Terran electronic hardware and a power conditioning and distribution panel fed from the surface supply. Irg, the communications specialist, was standing with a couple of the engineers in front of a counter top on which tools lay scattered in front of a pile of boxes comprising a couple of oscilloscope, a waveform generator, a signal analyzer, and other instruments. Beside it all, a pieces of Terran equipment stood connected by a tangle of wires. The screen on the front of it was glowing and showing lines of text.

"It's amazing," Irg said as Kyal stepped forward to look more closely at the blockish, upright Terran characters. He recognized them as English—which was to be expected, of course, if Triagon had been an American installation. "You could almost think it came out from the assembly shop yesterday."

"What have we got here?" Kyal asked.

"Just rudimentary stuff so far," Brysek said. "But there could be volumes of information in there. Some of the devices look like storage crystal recirculators."

"If we can unravel the coding," Irg added.

"How that going?" Kyal asked curiously. The possibilities he could imagine were tantalizing.

"We're working with a hookup to Sherven's people on
E6
, and they've got some high-power crackers and crunchers at the other end of the laser link to home," Brysek said. He indicated a Venusian monitor standing on a portable work table to the side. "Some of what they've managed to extract is here." Kyal moved across. The monitor was displaying a split screen showing a copy of the original Terran text above, and the corresponding translators' renderings below. "That seems to be some kind of an inventory list," Brysek commented.

"Can we scroll it?" Irg said to the engineers. One of them dragged a scroll bar on a control screen, causing the lines of text in the two windows being displayed on the monitor to roll off the top. Irg stopped them in places to point out and remark on some of the curiosities. Many of the lines of the translation were still blank. A table of line entries and numbers appeared. A translator's comment noted that it seemed to be a list of machinery and parts. Something in the Terran original caught Kyal's eye. A line near the top carried the characters: MASSEY MODEL 236-B TRACTOR. Something about it was familiar. The last string, TRACTOR, had appeared on a label he'd seen at the refurbishing shop in Rhombus, where they had looked at the Terran machinery. "I've seen that word before," he said, pointing.

Irg located the matching entry in the translation below. "It's showing a generic. Some kind of mover," he said.

"I think that word means something more specific," Kyal said. "An agricultural engine."

Another of the engineers looked surprised. "Agricultural? Out here at Luna? Were they planning on planting trees?"

"Some of us are beginning to think this might have been a staging base for onward migration to somewhere else," Brysek told him.

"Oh, I hadn't heard that."

"That's my point," Kyal said. "It was driven by chemical combustion. Or at least, the 'tractor' that I saw down on Earth was. What use would that be on Luna?"

The theory was arousing astronomers' attention, since if true it could point to the existence of other parts of the Solar System having once been habitable. Mars was generally held to be the most likely candidate. The trouble was that the Terrans had sent robots and a couple of small manned missions there, and everything pointed to its having been as dead then as it was now.

Kyal had noticed was that all the screens carried headers that included a word in a large font that the translations gave as PROVIDENCE. "It looks like a general name for the whole set of lists," he remarked to Brysek. "Could it be a catalog title or something?"

"Kyal doesn't miss much," Irg commented.

"It's more than just the catalog title," Brysek said, moving forward. "The same word appears in other related contexts as well. It seems to be more of a code word for the program that these lists relate to."

"Program? You mean the evacuation program from Earth?"

"Not exactly.'Terminus' covered that. This seems to relate to a specific part of Terminus—a program for collecting together a comprehensive stockpile of equipment and supplies. It seems to have been a large operation."

"Hm." Kyal looked back as the monitor screen scrolled some more. The next frame listed tools and implements. "The kinds of thing you'd take with you if you were planning on moving on someplace," he mused.

"It's looking like it, isn't it?" Brysek agreed.

Korili called later, when Kyal was back in the surface huts, pondering over the day's developments. Yorim was on the far side of the room with some others who were watching a movie from home telling a story cast in a Terran war setting. Although the thought of mass killings and destruction was abhorrent to most Venusians, the subject nevertheless held a macabre fascination that drew large audiences.

"Live?" Kyal said, surprised, when she appeared on the screen of his phone. They usually communicated in text. "I was just thinking about—"

"Well I've got something special to tell you, so I decided— Oh. What? . . ."

"What's special?"

"What were you—"

"You said you had something to tell me." They were out of synch already. Kyal grinned. "We'll have to do this the formal way. Over."

"I didn't want to— Oh, yes, okay. . . . Look I didn't want to load this on you before, but I've been having some personal problems down here." She stopped. He waited. "Oh, er over."

"Yes, I had kind of gathered there might be something like that from some of the things you said. . . ."

"Well, it's going to . . . No, wrong. Go ahead."

"So what's the latest? Over."

"It looks as if it's going to get worse. Well, no, it already has. Do you remember that person I told you a little bit about when we were at . . . Paris, I think it was. Over."

"The control freak? The one you had the hard time with on Venus? Over."

"Yes, him. He's here in Rhombus and thinks he can turn the clock back. That might sound trivial, but it's a major hassle already. And it's not going to stop."

"There's no reason you have to put up with—"

"He's been at the apartment causing disturbances and— What?
Over
!"

"Sorry, my fault. I started to say, there's no reason why you should have to put up with it. It's a public nuisance. Call the provosts in. Over."

"I would but there might not be any need. This is the big news. It's looking as if I might be moving up to
Explorer 6
. I've been talking to our chief here, Garki Nostreny, about setting up a sequencing lab in
E6
to look at some of those Terran bodies you've found there. The frozen deep tissues are practically intact. No decay or bacterial action. We've never found anything like it before. It's a biochemist's dream. It will give me a big chance to test a genetic theory I've been working on. Nostreny is for it, and he's proposed it to Sherven. The whisper from
E6
is that it's looking as if it will go through. So I'll be that much closer to Luna and Triagon. Over."

It sounded like good news indeed. "Does it mean you'll be coming out here to collect them, then?" he asked. "Over."

"I was hoping I might be able to, but it won't really work out. I'm going to be too tied up with equipment and administration and getting things organized on
E6
. Mirine—you know, my assistant—will be moving up with me too. She'll be going on to Triagon to take care of that. Although I might be able to find some excuses later to take a trip or two out there myself. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know. Over."

"It might be quite a surprising home from home if you do make it. They just got one of the Terran elevators working today. And it's looking as if there might be a chance of getting into some of their computers too. The way everything's preserved here is amazing. It isn't just your dead bodies. So you don't have an actual date yet? Over."

"Not until it's official from Sherven. But Nostreny knows about the situation—the personal problems, I mean. So things should move quickly when they do. Over."

"Well, let's hope Sherven feels the same way as your chief does. Keep me posted. How's everything otherwise? Over."

"Oh, much the same routine. We had an interesting thing happen today in the graphics section One of the—" Lorili paused. "Oh. Look, Kyal, I've just got a priority one incoming alert from Iwon. He doesn't do things like this lightly. I'd better take it. I'll text you more later. You've heard the exciting news anyway. Okay? Over."