Echoes of an Alien Sky (29 page)

Thirty minutes later, the ship commenced its lift out of lunar orbit.

The Rear Annexe of Triagon contained its own airlock system and an access ramp up to the surface that emerged behind doors recessed into the crags of a broken crater wall on the far side of the ridge running behind the main base facility. Some damaged Terran vehicles had been found on and below the ramp, along with several more bodies that had died violently.

The sixty-eight undamaged corpses had been laid out in several of the rooms farther back. An interior set of locks connecting the Annexe to the Lower Complex had been found closed, and the Annexe open to the surface vacuum. The fluids had sublimed from their eyes and outer tissues, leaving the exteriors in a fragile state of dessication best described as natural "mummies." However, the deeper layers, fast-frozen, shielded from sunlight, radiation, and micrometeorites, and unaffected by any bacterial action, were amazingly well preserved. The best place for preparing and packing the specimens selected for shipment back to
Explorer 6
was right there, in the Annexe, maintaining the conditions under which they had been found.

Mirine was at the bottom of the ramp, helping the two technicians who had come with her from
Explorer 6
stretch a retaining net over the canisters containing the bodies and secure it to the trailer that would carry them to the pad area. The bodies had been sprayed with a protective laquer that set hard in the lunar cold, which would be removed by evaporation after arrival. Yorim had suited up and come through the internal lock from the Lower Complex to see how they were getting along. Mirine would be glad to get out of these foreboding, sepulchral vaults and back there, with its lights and people and life. Thinking about the macabre role that this place had played, cold and dark, preserving its rows of silent dead for untold millennia, was getting to her. The effect might have been purely psychological, but that didn't make it less real.

Kebrik, one of the technicians, tested the tautness of one of the net ties. "It's fine on this side," he said over the circuit.

"Here too," Dodra confirmed from the other.

Fenzial, the crew foreman who had been working with Yorim and Kyal since their arrival, was already in the tractor's driving seat. "Who's riding in the back?' his voice asked.

"I will," Mirine said. She looked at Yorim through her helmet while the other two clambered up in front, one either side of Fenzial. "Coming for the ride too?"

"Sure, why not?" He helped her hoist herself up onto the trailer, and she in turn lent a hand for him to join her. It wasn't a question of weight; climbing in suits and with packs was a clumsy business. They found themselves niches among the canisters, and secured safety lines from their belts to anchor points on the trailer's sides. Bumpy rides at a normal sixth body-weight could be eventful.

"All set," Mirine said. The tractor with its load moved away slowly and began ascending the ramp. She checked around again that they hadn't loosened the net in climbing aboard. Yorim had wedged himself into a corner with his arms spread on either side and one leg propped out in front of him, even managing to look comfortable as he presided over the bizarre hearse. He looked as if he could have dropped of to sleep. Mirine couldn't remember meeting anyone as capable of being instantly at ease in any circumstances. His non-judgmental way of accepting everyone as they were made others around him feel comfortable. He hadn't really bothered to disguise the fact that his main motive in taking a break and coming through to the Annexe had been to get to know her a little better. She felt flattered at the thought.

"Pad calling Fenzial." A voice came through from the lander waiting in the launch area.

"Reading."

"How are we doing?"

"We're finished loading and just coming up to the surface now. Be there in five to ten minutes."

"We'll see you then."

Mirine switched her suit's transmitter from the common circuit back to the channel that she and Yorim had been using to chat privately. "I may have had a stranger ride than this at some time in my life, but if so I can't remember it," she said.

He grinned behind his visor. "At least the gravity makes it easy on the bones where things stick out," he answered. "We've been doing a lot of work outside on the South Field and out at the pyramid. I guess I've gotten used to it."

"Do you have any ideas how long you'll be here for?" Mirine asked.

"At Triagon?"

"Out here generally—Earthside."

"Oh, we don't know yet. It depends on what we find. It's open-ended."

"What part of Gallenda are you from?" Mirine asked.

"A small town you'd never have heard of, originally. It's along the coast from Beaconcliff."

"I know where Beaconcliff is. Lorili's has a younger brother who plays the polychord. His teacher was from there."

"How long have you known Lorili?" Yorim asked. "Did you grow up together?"

"Only since college in Korbisan. We got to be close friends then. When she accepted the offer from the State Institute to come out here, I thought it sounded like a great adventure and applied for a posting too."

They emerged onto the surface. Fenzial nosed the tractor around, its headlamp beams following the tracks leading out of the gully in the crater wall where the Annexe doors were situated, around the ridge, and toward the pad area. Farside was away from the Sun, and the only light was from the stars, reducing the surroundings to ghostly highlights of crags and detached parts of ridges floating above black slabs of shadow.

"Kyal says she was mixed up with the Progressives back then," Yorim said. "Were you involved in that too?"

"No. It was never my kind of thing. What about you? Dodra thinks you're a Prog. She says she can tell because you're irreverent."

Yorim laughed. "Is that what she said?"

"She says you don't show the right sense of awe and respect toward the revered ways and hallowed customs."

"Oh, a lot of people seem to think that. But politics is all about telling people what they should think and how they ought to be. I guess I'm too lazy. I just let 'em be how they want to be." He thought for a second. "I don't think people ever really change much underneath anyway."

Mirine looked across at him curiously. His face was invisible now that they had come out from the light below in the Annexe. "Do you have anyone waiting for you back there—you know, anyone special?"

"I hang around with a bunch of people . . . but no, not really."

"Oh, I'm surprised. I'd have thought you'd have lots of girlfriends."

Yorim snorted audibly. "It's hard work. I just said, I'm too lazy. And you?"

"No." A short silence followed that needed filling. They were coming out from among the crags and shadows. The boxy form of the lander with its struts and tanks stood white in the pool of light bathing the pad area ahead. "How about Kyal?" Mirine asked. She was fishing on Lorili's behalf and made her voice casual.

"Kyal? No. He's too much like his father—always up to his neck in his work. I was as surprised as anyone by this thing with Lorili. Never seen it happen with him before." Yorim answered matter-of-factly without trying to hide that he knew what she was doing. It singled him out as someone she could be frank with. Mirine felt reassured.

"His father was quite a well-known name in Ulange, wasn't he?" she said.

"That's right. Jarnor Reen. He was one of the big movers behind the Earth exploration effort. A pioneer in electromagnetic propulsion technology too. That's where Kyal's own work follows on from, of course."

"And is that what you do too?"

"Me? Not exactly. I'm more electrogravitics—related, but a different area. It's to do with how gravity emerges as a residual effect of electrical forces. How we go about synthesizing it. That kind of thing."

"I've never really understood it," Mirine confessed. "Somebody told me it's what stops the Sun from collapsing."

"That's right."

"How come?"

"The atomic nuclei distort under the pressure as you get deeper inside. That causes their electric charges to a polarize, creating internal repulsion forces. The Terrans thought it was due to nuclear fusion photon pressure—that the reactions going on in the photosphere happen deep in the interior."

"They seem to have gotten a lot of things wrong," Mirine said. "The main reason Lorili wants to do the sequencing studies on these corpses is to see if she can make more sense out of the time scales. There's just too much in common between us and them biologically. She says they refused to see the evidence for the earlier unstable period in the Solar System—because of what they went through. Admitting it would have been too traumatic."

"Yes, Kyal and Bryskek are looking at all that too. There's a guy called Frazin who has a theory that what was repressed came out as their religions, and maybe helps explain why Terrans were so compulsively warlike." Yorim fell silent for a moment. Then he went on, "They were obsessed by bombs. I never thought about it that way before. They had to resort to wild quantum improbabilities to convince themselves it could work. But maybe that was why they made the Sun into one."

They arrived at the pads and switched back into the common circuit while the canisters were loaded aboard the lander. When the last one had been hoisted into the cargo bay and was being fastened down, Mirine moved to the edge of the lighted zone around the pads to look once more over the chilling desolation of the lunar surface by starlight. She and the two technicians would be returning to
Explorer 6
with the load. In her mind, she tried to imagine the last Terrans who had left this very place long ago, heading for where? What story did the mutilated corpses, destroyed vehicles, and other signs of violence tell of? Probably no-one would ever know.

A shadow darkened the light coming from behind. She realized that Yorim had joined her. "Bleak and lonely out there," he said.

"That's just what I was thinking. And about the things that went on right here, all that time back. . . . Do you think they ever got there—to Providence, wherever it was?"

"Who can say? We only know that they left. If any ship that all this hardware was for were still here on Luna, we'd have found it by now."

Mirine looked up at the shining canopy of stars. In the clarity of the lunar night, their different colors and shades were easily discernible, embedded in places in patches of wispy nebulas, crimson and violet. "Just imagine, their descendants could be out there somewhere right now," she said. We have Venus to return to—a world with people, towns, a civilization, security. . . . They had nothing, did they? They were heading into a complete unknown. And even if they came back, what kind of prospect would they have faced to come back to? The aftermath of a worldwide war. And if it had been later still, their race extinct. Or was it the war that wiped them out, do you think? Nobody knows for sure, do they? . . . Yorim?" He had moved around so that the light from the pad illuminated his face through his visor, and was staring at her with a strange, fixed expression. "What's the matter?" Mirine asked him.

"Say that again." His voice was odd, distant, as if his mind were racing over something.

"What?"

"About them coming back."

"I said that if they came back, it would have been just to the survivors of a war. Or maybe to nobody at all. . . . Why?"

"Before that. You said we have security and things to return to. . . . It's so obvious, isn't it? The same thoughts would have occurred to them too. They would have known that when the time came for them to return, it might be to a world that had been destroyed. So they'd leave behind some means to ensure their own survival, wouldn't they. That huge inventory of equipment and materials! It makes sense now."

"Yorim, what are you talking about?"

"Providence. Maybe it wasn't a stockpile to take with them—or even anything ever brought to Luna at all. Now it all makes sense. It was a survival cache that they
left behind
, to draw on if they needed it, and get them started again when they came back! Especially with a major war breaking out. All of a sudden I think those navigational directions that Kyal and I were looking at might be a lot more significant than we thought. They're not talking about any supplier's location or forwarding consolidation point. They point to Providence itself. Providence is somewhere
Earth
!"

Yorim sought out Kyal as soon as he was back inside, and put the idea to him. Kyal was immediately convinced, and together they began reviewing other outstanding questions in this new light. A lot of things seemed to fit. Kyal called Casselo, who was still at
Explorer 6
, and went through it again. Casselo took the matter to Sherven, who agreed that it represented a breakthrough. After discussing it further, Sherven decided to call the principal scientific section leaders and department heads together up on
Explorer 6
for Kyal and Yorim to present their new theory. Casselo set things up accordingly, and Kyal and Yorim booked themselves onto the next transport due to leave Luna."

Amingas Quarles had read an article somewhere by a biologist who thought the climate of Earth was better suited to Venusians than that of Venus itself, and predicted mass migrations, the founding of cities and nations, and a general population explosion over the next fifty years. He felt he could believe it too, as he and the pilot who had brought him made their way up the short but steep trail from the sandy flat where the helicopter had landed to the jumble of tents and trucks beyond the scarp of rock above them that was designated Camp 27. The air was bracing and clean, coming in as a breeze over the blue waters visible below to the west. The views had been as clear all the way from the Regional Base two hundred miles to the north, where the office for coordinating geological surveys of the western side of northern America was located.

Uzef, who had been supervising the diggings, was waiting at the top of the trail, with a broad grin showing strong white teeth, which he emphasized with an exaggerated welcoming bow. He was wearing a floppy brimmed hat, stained bush shirt, shorts, and heavy work boots, and had acquired a deep tan from the Terran sun. Quarles exchanged greetings and introduced the pilot.