Echoes of an Alien Sky (6 page)

"Involved with those Terran constructions that were discovered on Farside?" one of her companions guessed.

"Exactly right," Kyal said.

"I've read about them." The speaker was stocky and rounded, wearing a padded work vest over a red shirt, with white hair showing beneath a flat peaked cap. "And I'm curious. Any ideas yet?"

"The place is a lot bigger than it looks," Kyal said. "We've had some sonar scans done."

"Already?"

"While we were on our way out. It goes a lot farther down below the surface."

"Really? Now I'm
really
curious."

Naseena sighed. "Oh dear, I'm doing this all the wrong way round. This is Mowrak, the person I'll be working with. I've only just met him today too." The white-haired man tilted his head. Naseena gestured to the a younger man next to him. "Whylen is an excavation engineer, soon to go back to digging up cities in . . . Where was it, Whylen?"

"China." Whylen was dark-haired and sinewy, his face shadowed by several days of stubble. He rose briefly from his chair. "My privilege, I'm sure."

The man who had sat down next to him was about the same age, thirtyish, muscular and lithe, with a florid countenance that complemented a head crowned by a thicket of copper-red hair. His features were drawn in intense, angular planes about a sharp nose, thin but firm mouth, and a pointy, determined chin. He was wearing an open black shirt and a brushed leather jacket that was at the same time stylish and durable.

"And this is Jenyn," Naseena completed. "Just back from being in the Americas for a while. He's next door in the hostel too, waiting for permanent quarters. That's right, isn't it? . . . I'm not sure what he does, though? What do you do here Jenyn?

"Linguist." Jenyn answered. He didn't concede to any courtesies, but regarded Kyal and Yorim unsmilingly with pale blue eyes. Kyal had the discomforting feeling of being evaluated for some prospective purpose. Jenyn cocked his head to one side. "Where are you people from back home?"

"I'm a Ulangean," Kyal replied. "Fellow Zeestran is from Gallenda."

Jenyn nodded. The coolness and distancing implied by Kyal's use of the titular form didn't make any visible impact on him. "How were things there when you left?' he inquired.

Yorim's brow furrowed. "What kind of things?"

Jenyn answered in a careless drawl. "Oh, life in general. The usual things people talk about. Prices and taxes. Who makes the rules. Are they happy with the way things are being run?"

Naseena threw in, "He's becoming the local Progressive organizer in Rhombus already. You're running for the leadership nomination among the Terran bases, Jenyn, yes?" She looked back at Kyal and Yorim. "I suspect that probably had more to do with what he was doing in the Americas."

Mowrak had registered that Kyal and Yorim were not responding warmly to the turn of conversation. "There's a workshop where they clean up pieces of Terran machinery and things," he said. "We were going there after we've eaten. Want to join us?"

"We had exactly the same idea," Kyal said, happy to move the subject along.

"Great," Mowrak said. "They've got a Terran war tank that's just been brought in, dug up out of the desert not far from here. It's going to be sent back home as a museum exhibit."

Kyal and Yorim looked at each other and exchanged nods. "Sounds good," Yorim said for both of them.

It stood in an open yard behind one of the workshops. The angled planes of its squat, heavy bulk seemed sinister and menacing—which was hardly surprising, considering the purpose for which it had been built. Though little more than a corroded hulk, it was better preserved than most similar vehicles from its times, thanks to the dry desert conditions. Fastened to a board on a nearby wall carried was a print of an engineering isometric drawing reconstructed from various sources of how it had originally looked.

The mobile steel burial vault had run on belt tracks similar to those found on heavy construction machinery, and been powered by a hydrocarbon-fueled engine. It carried a crew of four. A somehow ghoulish swiveling turret with sloping sides like a truncated pyramid carried an enormous cannon fired by chemical explosives, along with a lighter secondary weapon. It had been destroyed by a projectile that melted a hole through its armor on impact and spewed white-hot metal liquid into the interior.

Kyal found himself disturbed and unsettled as he stood staring at it in a silent semicircle with the others. He was thinking of the lives that had begun somewhere in some unknown alien mothers' arms, grown and flowered through all joys, pains and dreams to become those miracles of creation called persons . . . all to be vaporized in an instant, for what? From the stained silence and somber looks on their faces, it seemed to be having a similar effect on others.

"There's something . . . I don't know, something horrible about it," Naseena whispered finally. "Can you imagine what it would be like shut up in a machine like that?"

"Especially with people trying to destroy it," Whylen said. "Imagine being trapped and incinerated in there."

"Oh, don't!"

"How old would you say that is?" Yorim asked, addressing the words to no one in particular. There was controversy over dating the sequences of the events that had taken place on Earth. Estimates made by Venusian scientists based on the methods they employed back home disagreed with reconstructions based on the Terrans' own records.

Mowrak, the geologist that Naseena would be working with in the Himalayas, shook his head. "I don't think anyone can be sure yet. Our own estimates give results orders of magnitude different from what the Terrans believed. Where we infer tens of thousands of years, they claimed millions." He shrugged. "It's difficult to argue too much. They were on their own planet longer. Maybe rates change more than we think as planets get older. That's one of the lines we're investigating." He turned and called to a technician from the shop, who was carefully removing encrusted sand and rock from a corroded object at a bench outside the workshop door. "Excuse me. Do you have any kind of date for the tank here?"

"The experts are still arguing about it. Some say thousands of years, others say tens of thousands. If you extrapolate the system that the Terrans used, it comes out at a lot more than that. Take your pick."

Mowrak gave the others a look which said that made his point. "You see? What more can I tell you?"

"You sound as if you're involved in that kind of thing yourself," the technician remarked.

"Yes, a geologist. Back at Rhombus briefly, but working out east. I'm the tour guide today. We have some people here new to Earth, just down from orbit."

"I hear the
Melther Jorg
is back in."

"That is where we're from," Naseena said.

"Welcome to Earth. I hope it treats you all well." They returned short nods. The technician took them all in with a glance. "We've got some more interesting things inside. Come on, I'll show you."

"I've got another question . . ." Yorim moved up alongside the technician as he turned to lead the way through the doors. As the others began following, Kyal stayed back to look once more over the drawing of the Terran war tank mounted on the wall. The heat and noise in such confinement, hemmed in by machinery above, below, and on every side, must have been fearsome. He wondered if they actually found volunteers for such tasks, or if the crews had to be forced to accept them. All in all, he decided he'd take agoraphobia.

A movement nearby made him turn his head. Jenyn had also stayed back and was standing beside him. He regarded Kyal questioningly, then half- turned to look back at the Terran tank. After a moment or two, he said, "They were a violent and destructive breed, yes. But couldn't that have been a manifestation of other qualities too, Master Reen? They understood the power to effect change that comes from having order and discipline. They stood together to bring about the things they believed in, instead of letting themselves be carried along by the herd. And yes, hey would fight to the death if they had too. They didn't just passively accept whatever lot fell to them by other people's whims and preferences, the way Venusians would. It could cause grief in the short term; but there was something magnificent and stirring about it that perhaps we could use a little more of at times. Don't you think so?"

Jenyn's tone was soft and exhorting, but at the same time his pale blue eyes had a challenging light in them. Kyal recognized the Progressive line and shook his head. "Save it for the language students. Politics isn't what I do."

"It's the future, the way things are going to be. You won't change it. Why be left behind?" Jenyn didn't expect any instant conversion, Kyal knew. He was trying to plant seeds.

Kyal resisted the impulse to be blunt. "Well, we are being left behind, aren't we?" he answered. "I think it's time to catch up with our friends."

Inside, they found the others clustered around a large wooden table, where pieces from the tank's engine had been laid out after painstaking etching and cutting to separate what was left of them from masses of corrosion like others lying on a bench by the wall. There were also parts of its instruments and control gear, along with several conical objects that the technician said were tips of the projectiles fired by the cannon. Yorim was examining a plate from one of the tracks. Looking around at the rest of the shop, Kyal picked out the hub and rim of a large wheel that looked amazingly like one from a Venusian agricultural tractor; a couple of shelves of electrical devices and components; an assortment of helmets, belt buckles, other oddments of clothing; knives, cutlery, and various hand tools. The technician was showing Whylen some long objects that could have been firearms.

There were also a few other items that didn't fall into the category of "equipment and machinery" but had ended up here anyway, including some surprisingly well preserved pieces of wooden furniture. Kyal stopped to inspect a sitting, cross-legged figure about a foot high, carved out of stone, on a shelf to one side. Mowrak saw him looking at it and came over, at the same time gesturing to Naseena, who was watching. "You'll see a lot of these farther east, where we're going," he told her.

She moved over to join them. "Who is he?"

"Some kind of religious deity from an earlier culture—earlier than the one that produced the tank." Mowrak looked at Kyal. "How would you and Yorim like to come and see them too, while you've got the chance?"

"The sculptures?"

"No, I meant the mountains—the Himalayas. Five miles high, summits of ice. We were planning a few days of hiking around and showing Naseena some of the sights there before getting back to work. Whylen and Jenyn and some others are coming too. Why not make a party of it?"

"When did you plan on leaving?" Kyal asked him

"Later on tonight."

Yorim had sauntered over and been listening. "What do you think?" he asked Kyal. The expression on his face said he could go for it.

"I thought you were set on sunshine and beaches?"

Yorim shrugged. "That was just a thought. I could live with this too."

"What's the problem?" Mowrak asked, seeing Kyal's hesitation.

"Oh . . . Kyal was thinking about seeing places to the north and west from here," Yorim told him. "Where the Terran Western civilization originated."

"The European cities," Kyal said.

"Wasn't that where Terran science finally came together?" Nassena put in. "Is that what you're more interested in?"

"That. And the history," Kyal said.

The technician and Whylen had come over and were following. "There'll be a supply flight going up to Foothills Camp first thing in the morning," the technician said to Kyal. "That's in the mountains north from here, between the two big inland seas. They're doing a lot of excavating at one of the Russian cities up there." He patted one of the pieces of wooden furniture and indicated some other objects that looked like household pieces. "That's where these pieces came from. I could probably get you a place on it. You shouldn't have much problem getting a connections west from there. The colonists are starting farms in Europe, and a lot of the traffic from Rhombus uses that route."

Kyal considered the option. It sounded just what he had wanted. There probably wouldn't be another chance like it in the week that they were here. And there was no way of telling what kind of time he might have to spare the next time he was back from Luna and found himself in this vicinity—whenever that might be.

"Look, why don't you go with these people tonight?" he said to Yorim. "I can meet up with you back here in Rhombus before we shuttle back up to the
Explorer
. That way neither of us will be a drag on the other. After twelve weeks we could probably both use a change of company anyway."

Yorim gave him a dubious look.

"Hey, I like being on my own sometimes," Kyal said. "It's when I do my best thinking."

Yorim took in a breath and raised his eyebrows, which Kyal new was the nearest he would come to making a fuss over it. "Okay," he agreed.

"You're sure?" Mowrak asked Kyal.

Kyal nodded. "Sure." And to Yorim, "You go ahead. I'll be okay."

"Well, I guess you can count me in," Yorim, said, looking around to take in the rest of the company.

"Great," Naseena said enthusiastically. "But we'll miss you, Kyal. Are you sure we can't twist your arm?"

"Be quiet," Kyal told her.

Jenyn had drifted a short distance away, where he was looking over one of the wooden objects. It was of a peculiar construction, giving the impression of having been a flat, rounded cabinet of some kind. The remains of a metal frame and tatters of strings lay among the splintered woodwork, along with numerous long, rectangular, white objects. "What's this?" Jenyn asked, looking up and turning to the technician.

The technician moved closer to join him. "It was a kind of keyboard musical instrument, from what the Terrans dated as their early twenty-first century. All these pieces were unearthed from ruins covered by a layer of dried anaerobic bog. It seems to have been formed by sediments from a temporary lake or flood. A big war that took place around those times is believed to have begun in that region.