Echoes of an Alien Sky (3 page)

"The Director can tell you about it himself when you meet him, if he wishes," Casselo said.

For Kyal, the assignment to the Earth Expedition carried more than just academic and professional significance. His father, Jarnor Reen, had been a prominent scientific and philosophical figure on Venus, who had played a major role in the development of space electromagnetics and been a driving force for mounting an Earth exploration program when probes sent back the first pictures telling of a former civilization there. Being a part of that exploration now was a fitting way of paying a tribute to his father's work.

Casselo turned toward Yorim. "Well, we've heard about the son of Jarnor Reen from Ulange. What about yourself, Fellow Zeestran? You are from Gallenda, I understand?" Gallenda was a nation in Venus's mid-temperate northern continent. The northern and southern oceans didn't connect.

Yorim nodded. Although he'd had the ship's barber trim his hair, he rather liked the look of his facial growth, he had confided to Kyal, and so had declined shaving. The sight of Casselo's luxuriant beard had probably put him at ease on that particular score. "From the southern part. A small town along the coast from Beaconcliff."

"I know that area," Casselo said. "I taught a course in nuclear generating at the National Engineering College in Beaconcliff years ago. You're from one of the places that's lucky enough to have a coast."

"The part that isn't swamp, anyway," Yorim agreed. "I captained the college first-league longball team at Beaconcliff. That was where I took electrogravitics."

"I'm well aware of your qualifications in electrogravitics," Casselo went on. "You wouldn't be here now if they weren't exceptional. We'll have to show you the
Explorer 6
's polarizing system while you're up here. Maybe after lunch, while Master Reen is talking administrative matters with the Director."

"I'd be interested to see it. If it's no imposition."

"None at all. A pleasure."

Casselo was referring to the layers of "hi-polar" material built into the floors of Venusian spacecraft and orbiting platforms. Gravity emerged as a residual effect of the electrical nature of matter. Although atoms were neutral as a whole, they deformed under stress to form electrostatic dipoles, in which the charges were not distributed uniformly but concentrated in distinct regions. Within a system of atomic dipoles—for instance, a piece of ordinary matter—the like parts repelled and the unlike parts attracted, but arranging themselves in such a way that the two effects didn't quite cancel. The mutual attraction ended up slightly greater than the mutual repulsion. Very slightly. The resultant force was forty orders of magnitude smaller than the unneutralized electrical force between the same particles. The effect was self-reinforcing, yielding a force that intensified with the amount of material present—in other words, its mass. On the basis of that principle, another branch of the same technology that had yielded electrical space propulsion had developed, enabling such forces to be induced artificially.

"
Explorer
has a free-fall gym here as well," Cassello informed them. "The G-polarizers switched off." He looked back at Yorim. "Perhaps you'd like to see that too?"

"Yes, I would," Yorim said. "We've seen videos of it. There wasn't room for anything like that on the ship. It looks like fun."

"Well, we'll see what we can do," Casselo promised.

Terran spacecraft and orbiting stations had been free-fall gyms everywhere, Kyal reflected. Sometimes it had taken months for them to recover normal muscle tone and bone strength after extended tours. They must have been a tough bunch.

"You don't waste very much time," Yorim commented to Casselo.

"Wasting time would be robbing the old man who will one day have my name." Casselo said.

Kyal smiled. "I see that my father wasn't the only philosopher."

Casselo thought about it for a second or two. "I don't know about that," he said finally. "Now is the only time in which anything gets done. Everything else is either already done, not done, or yet to do."

A philosopher and yet a pragmatist, Kyal thought to himself. He had the feeling they would all get along just fine.

The office of Filaeyus Sherven, Scientific Director of the Earth Exploration Expedition, was located on the highest of several administrative decks contained in a prominent superstructure on the main section of
Explorer 6
, termed the Directorate. Kyal's first impressions on being shown in after he had left Yorim and Casselo to go their own way were more of a control room—which, he supposed, in many ways it was. The walls in front and to the right of the immense concave desk seemed to consist mainly of panels and screens, with the section of the right-hand wall immediately opposite the desk opening through as an arch to a small private conference area. The wall along the left side was practically all glass. Beyond it was the Earth and its moon partly obscured behind, both half-lit, and a starfield of density and brilliance that after twelve weeks in space were now familiar. In the foreground, a craft that looked like a surface shuttle had just detached from the docking port section protruding below the Directorate and was coasting to distance itself before accelerating away.

Sherven was tall, probably in his 60s, but still holding himself upright, Kyal saw as the Director rose to greet him. He had steel-gray hair, receding at the temples above hollowed but firm-lined features with high cheeks and a prominent chin. His bearing and manner as they went through the formalities conveyed self-assurance and the composure that comes from a long and successful career, an established social position, and solid reputation. He would hardly have been made scientific head of the Earth Exploration Expedition had things been otherwise. After they sat down, he opened in a way that sounded a bit set-piece, either because he had rehearsed it or it was his standard line for welcoming newcomers.

"I'm very happy to have you join us, Master Reen. I expect both of us to benefit from your stay here. You will find it a unique opportunity to play a key part in what is undoubtedly the most exciting scientific venture of our times. There is a whole new world to be opened up, immeasurably rich, varied, and vibrant in itself, and yet with the added fascination of a lost race and its history to reconstruct. We have lots of work ahead of us. Let me add my personal thanks to you for being willing to take a share of it."

"The thanks are all mine for being permitted to," Kyal answered.

Sherven tossed out a hand in the general direction of one of the groups of screens vaguely, and his manner lost a little of its stiffness. "Something new turns up every day here. A report came in only this morning of a part of a library that's been uncovered in a city of the large southern continent—Australia. The linguists there and up here are all excited. Were already getting requests for some of the material from translators back home on Venus. It's ironic that Terran paper records are among the most sought-after. Isn't it strange? With the right spectral analysis, all kinds of invisible things can be made to appear. Electronic media turn out to be all but useless. Degradation has wiped most of them clean. And in the few cases where there is anything detectable, it's impossible to decode. You'd need the original equipment. The things that were carved in stone by earlier cultures thousands of years before actually lasted the best. Maybe they weren't so backward."

Kyal smiled and acknowledged with a nod.

"Anyhow . . ." Sherven sat forward, bringing his elbows onto the desk, "to more immediate matters. Deputy Director Casselo moves around a lot. He's nominally based here, but also spends a lot of his time down at Rhombus." Rhombus was one of the main surface bases, in the center of the main Euro-Asian-African land mass. "You'll be running your own operation out at Luna, alongside the ISA people there who conducted the preliminary diggings and survey. They'll provide whatever support and services you need. At present they're headed by somebody called Brysek, a good man I'm told. Any questions on any of that?"

Apart from naming Brysek, it was a reiteration of the arrangement that Kyal was already familiar with, and he had nothing to add. The International Space Authority was the umbrella organization under whose auspices the entire Earth Exploration Expedition was coordinated. It had been formed primarily for that purpose. Several months before, a reconnaissance survey team had landed at a site known as Triagon on the lunar Farside to investigate some strange constructions showing in pictures obtained from orbit. At first, the facility was thought to have been some kind of an observatory, perhaps located there because of the radio screening from Earth. But on closer examination, some of the forms suggested power focusing guides and concentrators of the kind used in space propulsion, which the Terrans were not supposed to have possessed. Kyal had long been looking for an excuse for an Earth trip, and although his name would certainly have carried weight had he chosen to push, his line of specialization had given little reason to justify it; on the contrary, it provided plenty of pressing commitments to keep him on Venus. But the Triagon findings changed all that, and suddenly made him an obvious choice. Yorim had needed no second asking, and they had concluded the bureaucratic procedures barely in time to join the next ship heading out. Since then, the original ISA survey team had been moved on to other things, leaving the group that Sherven had described to carry out exploratory excavations and generally prepare things for Kyal and Yorim's arrival.

Sherven sat back in his chair and rubbed the center of his forehead with a fingertip, as if giving Kyal a moment longer to consider any further business details. Then he resumed in a different tone, "As I said, it's going to get busy. But before we plunge you in, you're due some time out to acclimatize and relax after the voyage. Most new arrivals here are eager to get down to the surface and see something of Earth. I assume that would be the case with you also, yes?"

Although Kyal was more than curious to see what was at Triagon, the pull to set foot on the world that had captivated his imagination all these years was stronger. "What did you have in mind?" he asked.

"A week before you go on to Luna. That's a local Terran week, measured their way as seven days. We use local time cycles, so you might as well get used to them. I'd recommend going down to Rhombus. It's a good location for getting to anywhere else that takes your fancy."

Kyal had no problem with that. "Sure," he agreed. "If we can afford the time."

A thin smile warmed Sherven's features. "Oh, that moon has been there for a while now. I can't see that a week is going to make much difference."

"Then . . . fine. When?"

Sherven bunched his mouth briefly. "Why not later today—if that's agreeable? A week isn't that long a time. Why waste any of it?"

Kyal gestured to show that he could find no fault with that.

"I didn't go ahead and set anything up beforehand, because I wasn't sure how you would want to play it," Sherven said. "Would you like us to find someone to show you around down there? Or would you rather make your own way? Communications are good everywhere these days."

Kyal got the feeling that Sherven was probably operating with his staff and resources stretched to the limit, and that the offer was made as a courtesy. "There's no need to go to the trouble," he replied. "Fellow Zeestran and I are old friends. We'll manage fine on our own. As you say, there's plenty of help available if we find we need it." This time it was Sherven's turn not to be inclined to argue.

"If I could just ask one thing in the meantime," Kyal said.

Sherven spread his hands. "Please."

"The forms of some of the Farside structures suggest functions that should require significant generating capacity. There wasn't any mention of the kinds of thing I'd have expected in the survey report, so during the voyage, out, I sent a request ahead to Deputy Director Casselo to have the ISA people carry out some deep sonar scans of the site while they were still there. He did so and beamed the results back to me. They show some interesting things." Kyal took his phone from his pocket and indicated one of the blank screens on the section of wall by the arch. "May I?"

"Go ahead."

Kyal used the phone to access a file in his work area on the general net and directed it onto the screen. It listed a set of images. Kyal selected several of the early ones and stepped through them. They showed a lunar landscape of gray dust and ridges under a black sky, with the cluster of domes, pylons, and other Terran constructions viewed from different directions. "Surface shots of Triagon," he commented. Sherven nodded. Damage was evident in certain places, but in the absence of weather or erosion, everything was preserved virtually unchanged.

The next view was a schematic of a vertical cross section of the ground, with the forms of the constructions depicted recognizably on the surface. "Here's a vertical slice of the subsurface," Kyal said, although there was no need to. He entered some codes to superpose the results of the sonar scans, which he had analyzed while aboard the
Melther Jorg
. They appeared in reversed color as green patches indicating hollow spaces. Although the details were indistinct in places, the general pattern of rectangular forms in a regular array was unmistakable.

"There is indeed a lot more to Triagon than what you see on the surface," Kyal said. "A whole complex of deeper levels that the ISA team never suspected."

Sherven's eyes danced alertly over the image, taking in the details. "Interesting indeed," he pronounced. "Does it look like the kind of thing you'd expect?"

Kyal frowned. "I'm not sure. It seems to consist of too many small spaces. And why so many levels? It doesn't look right. And it seems strange that the ISA people didn't find it. Why would a large power generating installation be hidden?

"Hm. I see your point. It does seem odd, doesn't it?" Sherven agreed.

"Maybe Brysek's people can do some deeper digging while they're waiting for us to arrive," Kyal suggested. "I can give them the precise locations. In fact, here they are." He added a second layer of superposition giving the details in red. "A week might not be so long. But as you yourself just said, Director Sherven, why waste it?"