Echoes of an Alien Sky (39 page)

The phone clipped to Quarles's belt sounded. He answered it. "Hello, Emmis." In an aside he muttered, "Our man upstairs in the control room," and then louder, "What's up?"

"I'm told that you're back," a voice from the phone replied.

"Right. Have been for a while, in fact. I'm down in the warehouse with Borgan Casselo and his two friends from
Explorer
, showing them what we've got so far."

"I think you need to get up here," Emmis said.

"That sounds ominous."

"Not so much ominous. Impossible."

"We'd just about finished a quick, once-over tour." Quarles raised his eyebrows at the others and inclined his head to indicate the direction back out from the vault that they were in. "What is it?" he asked into the phone as they began moving.

"You'll have to come and see. I'm still not sure I believe it."

"Where do we find you, Emmis?"

"Take the stairs past the elevator on your left as you come out from the wide gallery. Two levels up from the entrance tunnel, there's an exit door with a Terran
E
on it. Go through, follow the corridor right, through some double doors, and it's one of the rooms to your left. The Terran characters
E-18
are painted on a column outside, but I'll have someone watching for you at the door."

"We're on our way now. . . ." They came out into the wide gallery, immediately flattening themselves against the wall as the latest novice driver hurtled by in the Terran agricultural tractor, followed by alarmed shouts from behind for him to slow down and steer away from the wall. "Just about," Casselo added shakily. They resumed walking.

"What happened?" Emiss's voice squawked from the phone.

"It doesn't matter—it's over now," Casselo answered shakily.

They passed by the group who had been experimenting with the tractor. "Sorry about that," one of them offered, looking a shade sheepish. "It was his first try." They were all fairly young looking—probably technicians and work-force helpers having fun.

"Well, it was very nearly our last," Casselo said. "You'd better leave any more of that until they've got the tunnel opened up and can have the whole of the outside to break your necks in."

"Er, yes . . . sir. Sorry. Hey, guys, we'd better cut it our for now. . . ."

Casselo resumed talking to Emmis. "Did they turn up anything new at the end of the main gallery? We didn't quite get to where the lights end."

"There's another elevator there. It looks as if it's for freight. I don't know yet where it goes to. We've located stairs leading down but left them for later. One thing at a time, eh, Amingas?"

"Try telling Sherven that sometimes," Casselo muttered as they walked.

Quarles went on, "Oh, and Master Reen here also wondered the same thing as you did and asked if we've found any trace of a ship, if one landed here."

"I don't think there's any mystery about that now," Emmis replied. "Yes, I'm pretty sure now that there was a ship. But no, we won't find any trace of it here now. In fact, I can tell you where it went. . . . Oh, excuse me, Amingas. I have to attend to something here. We'll see you in a few minutes."

They came to the end of the gallery and turned left, past an elevator door and some partitioned spaces. A door beyond gave access to a metal-railed staircase, and two flights up brought them to the door marked
E
. Going through into the corridor and turning right, they could already see a girl in coveralls waiting outside one of the doors farther along. She led them into a brightly lit room looking something like the Decoding Lab at Triagon with counter tops and display panels, and several desk-like work spaces along the far side, where Quarles introduced Emmis. He was ruddy faced with curly ginger hair, and was standing in front of a table at the far end, among a small mixed group of figures in coveralls and work smocks. On the table was a solidly constructed rectangular metal box about the size of an office file cabinet drawer. The lid, lying to one side, and the exposed seating around the top showed it had been designed to be sealed for a long, long time. At the back of the room, behind the table, a thick door in a concrete surround stood open, revealing more boxes, unopened, held in several vertical racks. Whereas the unopened boxes in the racks all looked the same the one on the table was of a different design, gray in color, while all the others were blue, and somewhat larger. It looked as if it didn't belong to the set—as if it had perhaps been added later.

Looking strangely bewildered, Emmis neglected the customary introductions of his companions, but instead indicated an assortment of documents, bound books, and charts lying on the table around the opened box. They were made of a smooth, shiny material that could have been foil or some kind of dense polymer. Their sheen in the light, and the wet streaks and drops over the table top showed they had been contained in a fluid.

"We opened the one that looked different," Emmis said. "It seems to be some kind of . . . 'time capsule,' records left for posterity." He looked over the items as if at a loss to know where to begin, then picked the top sheet off a small wad. Holding it up, he recited, "We have no way of knowing if these words will ever be read. We are the last humans left alive, as far as we can tell, anywhere. . . ."

While the arrivals stared at him in mute protest, he stopped reading and waved at another document. "They were struck by a sickness that broke out soon after they arrived. There are several dozen bodies buried somewhere around outside. The victims suffered some kind of madness accompanied by purple facial scars, and it was inevitably fatal. Their doctors had never seen it before."

Kyal stared at him incredulously. Those were the same symptoms that had afflicted Jenyn, due to a dormant virus carried by the corpses from Triagon. Its presence here would explain why whoever opened up Providence hadn't made full use of the machines and the provisions that it contained. Because they couldn't stay—and they could take only a small portion of it all with them.

The Place of Death
.

Emmis had said yes, there had been a ship. So they had returned. And he knew where they had gone.

Kyal drew across a bound folder lying beside the wad of sheets that Emmis had read from, and turned it over. On the cover was embossed the Terran icon for Providence: Two straight lines converging upward to the left, with a pair of bars bridging the angle between them. The Venusian symbol of good fortune and homecoming.

He turned his head toward Yorim, who was also staring at the icon with a strange look. "There's our katek, Yorim," Kyal murmured. Their eyes met disbelievingly. He knew that the same thought was going through Yorim's mind too.

They had seen the same form only recently somewhere else. The two sides of a landing corridor converging on the mountain called Shasta, barred by two approach Markers. How could this ancient sign, preserved by the Terrans who had braved unknown trials and dangers to come home finally to Earth, have become a symbol dating back to the earliest times of Venusian history, standing for those same things? Not by coincidence, surely. There was only one way.

Casselo was giving Emmis a puzzled look. "I thought you said on the phone that you've only just found this place," he said. "What are you reading? How could you have gotten that much translated already? I mean . . . who translated it?"

In answer, Emmis turned around the sheet he was still holding and slid it across the table. Three pairs of eyes stared at it in mute befuddlement. Some of the letter forms and spellings were quaintly odd, and Emmis had cheated a little in his rendering of the wording. But it was readily recognizable for what it was, even to a non-scholar. Simply, the question of translation didn't arise. There was no need for any. The documents carefully stored and preserved by the last humans to depart from Earth were written in one of the earliest dialects of Venusian.

Earth was dead. At least, all human life had long ago ended. As far as could be ascertained from the conditions observed from the orbiting mother ship, it must have happened not long after the migrants from Terminus departed. And now their descendants had returned to find only that Earth was still lethal for humans. Many of the party who landed and opened up the cache of supplies at Providence that they thought would provide them a new beginning soon succumbed to the sickness before it was recognized as the same sickness that had prevented their ancestors from returning to Earth long before.

Those down on the surface who were still unaffected couldn't remain there. But neither could any of them remain indefinitely in orbit. And there could be no going back to the world they had finally mustered their last reserves of strength and resourcefulness to get away from. They had already learned that it was impossible to grow and flourish there.

But a strange quirk of fate gave them one other, slender chance. For whatever reason, it seemed that the time scales that their ancient Terran ancestors had based their geological and planetary sciences on had been in error. Long-range instrument measurements and observations from the mother ship showed that the planet Venus was already exhibiting recognizably Earth-like properties. It was still hot and inhospitable there, and if they could make it, life would surely be rough and perilous with few pleasures or comforts to relieve the hardships. But were they not all descendants of the ultimate in human survivability? In any case, they couldn't stay where they were, and there was nowhere else for them to go.

Using materials from the stores at Providence and with special equipment and engineers sent down in a smaller, chemically driven shuttle, they improvised launch and recharging facilities for lifting the surface lander back to orbit. They took with them what they could from Providence that looked like being the most useful. The rest, they left behind to the winds and the sands, and to time. Xoll tried to joke wryly that somebody might find it and be able to use it one day. The others were too weary even to smile. How could such a thing ever be possible? But they left a record of their passing here, of who they were, and their story. So the universe wouldn't simply carry on evermore existing, as if they had never been.

After burying the last of those who had died and lifting off successfully, they remained separated in orbit for a quarantine period to make sure they were carrying no more incubating cases of the disease. Then, with all the survivors finally back together again aboard the mother ship, Zaam marshaled his followers and exhorted them to make the last, supreme effort.

In what proved, with macabre appropriateness to be their ultimate achievement in more senses than one, the Terrans created genetically vectored viruses that could be targeted against specific ethnic and racial groups, and turned them loose. But something went wrong. The different strains somehow mutated and interacted—exactly how would probably never be known—and all human life on Earth perished as a consequence.

And so, what had seemed to be Sherven's far-flung theory turned out correct after all: The Terrans
had
migrated to another star system. Their own account found at Providence confirmed it. They called their new world "Eden," after a mythical idyllic realm in early Terran fable, which perhaps told of the touching hopes they had for their future there. But the name was ill-chosen. The colony was not viable in the long term, and in the end their descendants came back.

It was true that although tiny in numbers, the community created on lunar Farside in the form of the Terminus program had concentrated some of the most potent talents of the race. But even so, the revelation was stunning, adding a new order of magnitude to the picture the Venusians had already formed of what Terran resilience and tenacity had been capable of. Exactly how the migration had come to take the form it had was unclear, since the records left by the descendants who eventually made the voyage back were fragmentary in that respect. They gave the impression that conditions at Eden had been too arduous for the earlier generations to pay much attention to past matters, and much of the historical detail had been lost. It could have been that the technical enterprise evidenced by the structures on Farside had been conceived as a contingency escape plan of interstellar dimensions from the beginning, in case such a measure should become necessary. Possibly, it had been improvised in desperation as the only available expedient from the prior work on unmanned probes when it was realized that Earth was uninhabitable. Either way, there was nowhere else in the Solar System to go.

But only for the time being, maybe.

Perhaps the supreme irony was that if they had held out long enough where they were, they, or almost certainly their descendants of within a generation or two, could probably have returned to Earth safely. But the people selected for evacuation to Terminus had not been of a kind characteristically disposed to sitting and waiting. Impatience and an impulse to bring about some kind of action
now
had been a trait of the stronger-minded Terrans too.

After further studies of the viral sequences obtained from the Triagon corpses, and post-mortem analysis of the agent that had infected Jenyn, the Venusian scientists concluded that without human hosts to perpetuate the strain, the population of synthetic viruses would have been reduced by natural biological processes and died out fairly rapidly. It was possible that a less virulent mutant strain might have found a lodgement in some Terran primate species, but unlike the original synthetic virus that had been targeted at humans it would have been susceptible to natural immunological suppression, and in the end the result would have been the same.

But there was one place on Earth where a dormant residue of the original virulent form could remain and be unaffected. By opening up the sealed environment of Providence, the returnees had reactivated a remnant that had existed there ever since those earlier times, and been infected just as had Jenyn by the residue preserved in the freeze-fried corpses at Triagon. The rest of the world out there all around them had in all probability long ago eradicated all traces of it. After all, that Earth that they had returned to was the same one that Venusians were living on today, with the same kind of biosphere, and it was clean.