Echoes of an Alien Sky (27 page)

The provosts must have been staking the place and waiting for him. The car drew up from behind him when he was a few yards from Tyarla's door. An officer and two troopers emerged. The officer confronted him, while the troopers stood by, one at his shoulder, the other a yard or two behind Jenyn.

"Mister Jenyn Thorgan?

"Yes."

"I have a warrant and must ask you to accompany us, sir."

"What am I supposed to have I done? Are you saying I'm under arrest for some reason?"

"Not arrest, sir. But you are required to attend a hearing that is to be held up in
Explorer 6
. The warrant is signed by the mission Provost Marshal, and has been issued on the express instruction of Director Sherven."

"So I'm not under arrest. What if I refuse?"

The officer gave him a look that said he ought to know better. "Then I'm afraid that we would have to insist," he replied.

If he was going to be under this kind of scrutiny, there could be no question of settling any scores for the time being, Jenyn realized. "When is this due to take place?" he asked.

"It isn't exactly fixed yet," the officer answered. "Within the next few days."

"So are you telling me I'm being apprehended?"

"My instructions are to detain you until transportation is arranged for you to
Explorer 6
."

"And what about after I get there?"

"That's not for me to say, sir."

Jenyn thought rapidly. He would achieve nothing being cooped up somewhere down here. At least he might have freedom of movement up on
E6
. It wouldn't be as if he were likely to go very far. "Then let's get on with it now," he said. "I take it I can pick up a few things from my place?"

"We can stop there on the way." The officer stepped back, and the trooper who had been standing by him opened the rear door of the car

Kyal and Yorim were in what had become known as the "Decoding Lab"—the room in the Lower Complex where Brysek had demonstrated the first reactivations of Terran electronic files. The text being displayed on the screen they were looking at was a translation from more Terran records that the engineers managed to access. The Terran entry had been scanned from a hand-transcribed original that appeared to have been part of an aircraft pilot's log. There was no obvious reason why it should have been stored in equipment at Triagon, since there wasn't any air to fly an aircraft in, and it clearly described coastlines. But electronic storage was cheap, and Venusians were used to finding their own computers accumulating peculiar assortments of information from collections of jokes to family pictures and birthday lists. There was no reason to suppose it had been much different for Terrans, and so nobody attached any great significance to such notes being found in a computer on Luna.

The reason why the item had attracted attention was that its header line contained the word "Providence." The header graphic incorporated another interesting feature too. Besides having a code-word designation, the materials stockpiling program, or whatever it was that "Providence" signified, was also represented by a symbolic icon that appeared on documents and designs relating to it—like a logo. It could only be coincidental, of course, but the icon bore a close resemblance to the Venusian katek character.

All work going on at Triagon that required inputs from the various translation groups scattered around Earth and back on Venus was now centralized in the Decoding Lab. The surroundings were more spacious and less cluttered than the original labs in the surface huts, and Brysek's restoration crews were making them more comfortable all the time. The lighting was up to laboratory standards now, and a canteen had been installed farther along the corridor outside. As the surface huts became steadily more crowded with the continuing influx of new people from
Explorer 6
, some of the staff, including Kyal and Yorim, had moved their sleeping quarters down into the original Terran complex. With the latest improvements to the air circulation system, it was cooler and less stuffy than the huts.

Strictly speaking, being drawn into unraveling precisely what "Providence" had signified was a sidetracking from the principal job that Kyal and Yorim had come here to do. But the urge to find out was starting to affect everybody. It was now generally accepted that "Terminus" had meant not just the physical location that the Venusians called Triagon, but was a more general term covering also the whole operation of spiriting away selected people and getting them there.

With regard to "Providence," first impressions had been that it referred to the stockpiling of equipment and supplies as part of the Terminus operation—as preparation for the migration elsewhere. But from later findings it was now beginning to look as if "Providence" had carried a broader meaning too. In a number of references, the word was used in a sense that seemed to indicate a particular place. This led to the suspicion that perhaps "Providence" had not been the code word for just the inventory lists but for the operation that the lists had been a part of—in other words, the migration program itself. Such a grander meaning of the term made it easier to understand, too, why it should have been accorded it own graphic symbol—hardly to be expected for a mere set of inventory lists. But the main allure of Providence having a meaning that meant "place" was that if it could be interpreted, it might reveal the destination that the migrants had left for. Hence, anything pertaining to Providence was of interest.

The snippet from the pilot's log described the descent to a landing approach. A tentative guess was that the flight had been to one of the equipment suppliers or consolidation centers back on Earth that had been involved in the Providence supply operation.

"So what Gulf is it talking about here?" Yorim pointed to a line on the screen. He was more thinking aloud than expecting Kyal to have an answer. A note at the top of the page carried the reference
Simulator Test P37-G. Gulf Map
,
Sheet 172
.

"It has to be the local area—a sheet from a regional set," Kyal replied absently. "There were inlets and bays called gulfs all over the place. Since Terminus was an American project, if I had to guess I'd say somewhere around there."

Yorim rummaged among a stack of map hardcopies lying to one side. "What about the 'Simulator' reference?"

"Who knows?"

"Here." Yorim puled out a sheet and checked over it. "The Americas. A gulf called Mexico looks like the most prominent one in that region."

"Could be."

"What else have we got?" Yorim turned back toward the screen.

The text read:

11 o'clock approach midway between La Paz and coast
,
homing peak bearing checks at 5.778

Following right-hand shore

Landfall 0
.
384

1
^st
marker 0
.
577

2nd marker 0
.
715

GZ on visual at 0
.
838
.
Approach too steep
.
Almost overshot into High Lake
.

"La Paz," Yorim read.

"Something geographical," Kyal murmured. "I'm not sure if it was the name of somewhere specific, or a generic word like 'town.' That's something we'll need to check."

"Coast . . . right-hand shore . . . landfall. We're definitely talking about water," Yorim said.

Kyal turned to refresh his memory from another screen showing a list of Terran signs and abbreviations."Homing peak and markers sound like navigational beacons. I don't know what GZ is. It's a Terran abbreviation for something."

"Do we know anything about this High Lake?"

"There were mountains all the way down the Americas. They had lakes up in them everywhere."

"Yes, but look at the way the translators have written it. It reads more like the proper name of a particular one."

"True. . . ." Kyal tilted his head to one side and then the other, as if changing the angle might cause the screen to present its content in a different light. "I don't think this is going to get us anywhere," he said. "It could have to do with anything. There must have been a whole web of locations down on Earth involved with a project of this size."

Yorim rubbed the side of his nose. "Providence could also have been used as a cover word when dealing with them," he commented.

"A good point." Kyal stretched his arms and sighed. It was just another of the pieces that they had played with but hadn't found a fit for.

At that moment Brysek appeared through the double doors from the corridor. With him was a young woman in light gray ship fatigues of the kind worn on lunar transports. "Ah, this looks like Mirine now," Kyal said, unfolding from his chair. She was small in stature but with a bouncy gait that radiated liveliness and energy. Her face was bright and quite pretty, and her hair neat and bubbly in a style that seemed to go with her personality. She had landed an hour or so previously from the transport that had arrived recently in parking orbit. They stood up as she and Brysek came over. Brysek introduced everyone. The two bio technicians who had come with Mirine from
Explorer 6
were attending to some equipment that had been unloaded and would join the group later.

"Lorili sends her love," she told Kyal. "And she said to tell you it's a big relief to be out of Rhombus. She knows you'll understand." Mirine was obviously referring to Lorili's personal situation, which Kyal imagined Mirine would know something about. That was something they could talk about privately later.

"How is she doing?" Kyal asked. "Is the lab on
E6
getting set up okay?"

"It's exactly what we needed. She wants some samples of the bodies sent there as soon as possible so that she can begin working. And you probably know what she can be like when she gets impatient. So I don't think we're going to get much rest for a while."

"You've joined the right club," Bryskek commented.

"We saw those structures that you're studying—on the way down," Mirine said to Kyal. "Lorili told me about them. It all sounds so fascinating. Are you getting any further?" She looked at the screen that Kyal and Yorim had been working on. "What's this? Is it anything to do with them?"

"No, that's about Providence," Kyal replied. "Our side line that we've taken up."

"Just about everybody has," Brysek said.

Kyal grinned tiredly. "I don't think this particular item means a lot," He told Mirine. "It's an aircraft pilot's log. It looks like directions to a place down on the surface somewhere that was connected with Providence somehow."

"I'm wondering if Providence might have been used as a cover word down there," Yorim said. "That would maybe mean it was associated with all kinds of places."

Bysek nodded thoughtfully. "Could be, I suppose. If so, it could complicate things a lot, couldn't it?"

"Terrans," Yorim said, shrugging in a way that could have meant anything.

"Some people on the transport were talking about it meaning a destination," Mirine said. "Where they migrated to. Could it have been Venus?"

Kyal shook his head. "It was too long ago. Venus was still uninhabitable when the Terrans became extinct. We don't know where it referred to. That's one of the big mysteries to be resolved."

"Have you heard Sherven's starship theory?" Yorim asked Brysek. He and Kyal had gotten it from Casselo.

"Starship?" Brysek looked surprised.

"The Terrans were working on it," Yorim said. "Sherven has got hold of some of their design studies."

Brysek made a so-so face. "Anyone can do design studies." He gestured at Kyal. "Kyal here has produced a few. I've read them, and they're mind boggling." As an aside he told Mirine, "They talk about harnessing galactic currents to achieve continual boost over interstellar distances." And then back to Yorim,"But it's not exactly the same thing as flying one, is it?"

"Oh, I agree," Kyal said. It was always good to have someone around with a skeptical side to their nature, like Brysek. It provided a healthy ballast that prevented speculations floating too far from solid ground. Brysek had also expressed reservations that the lists of inventory compiled under "Providence" referred to a stockpile amassed at Triagon at all. He thought that the amounts they had by now established records of were too large to be believable. So what else could they be? A production schedule planned to get a colony started after arrival, Brysek had suggested. If he thought that introducing an interstellar dimension strengthened such a case, he didn't say so.

"Sherven was only speculating," Yorim said. "But he wanted Kyal's opinion."

"What did you tell him?" Brysek asked Kyal curiously.

"Pretty much what you just said youself. Dreaming up studies is a long way from delivering the actuality." Kyal paused and then added, "But they were doing some surprisingly advanced things here at Triagon. And you know, that pyramid we found out there is uncannily like some of the discharge attractor designs that I played with. I have to say that. . . . And right now, that's all I'm going to say."

"Anyway, Mirine's technicians will be joining us along the corridor when they've unpacked their stuff," Brysek said. He meant the new canteen. "We thought you and Yorim might want to come along too and meet them. One's a Ulangean. Another face from home for you, Kyal."

Kyal extinguished the screen, and they all began moving toward the door. "So it sounds as if you'll be getting started straight away," he said to Mirine as they walked.

"As soon as we can, anyway," Mirine said. "I don't know about the techs, but I'm going to need a refresher on working in suits first. I haven't been in one since EVA training before the trip out." The Terran corpses in the Rear Annexe had been kept in hard lunar vacuum conditions for preservation.

"How long ago was that?" Kyal asked.

"I came out from Venus with Lorili."

"Oh, I didn't know. No wonder you two decided to stick together."

"She's great to work with."

"Do you have a specialty field."

"Pathology."

"Hear that?" Kyal looked at Yorim. "Mirine's a pathologist. The right person to be looking at corpses."