Echoes of an Alien Sky (7 page)

"The Central Asian War," Jenyn supplied. He looked around as if he were lecturing. "I have studied it. The democratic Western nations were defending the world against international lawlessness and aggression instigated by backward-looking tyrannies who were losing their control over people who wanted Western freedoms for themselves."

The technician paused politely for a second or two, but seemed obliged to make some comment. "Well, that was what they told the people, anyway," he agreed. There was a moment of silence. "Let me show you what one of their computers looked like. Or what's left of one, anyway. This way, over here. . . ."

As the group moved away, Kyal turned to look again at the relic from a lost world, a lost age. What kind of sounds, he wondered, had once been evoked from it? Decoding and reproducing Terran music had so far defied all attempts. He stared at it in fascination, trying to picture in his mind the place to the north that it had come from, among the mountains between the central Asian inland seas. Who was the long-dead Terran whose hands had played it? he wondered. What events, now forgotten forever, had been taking shape then? What story could this strange, alien instrument have told of those times?

The somber chords of a Rachmaninov concerto tumbled through a the rooms and out through the open windows into the gardens of a large house nestled in a fold among the hills overlooking the town. In the distance, the peaks of the Caucasus mountains shone white in the early summer sun. But the mind of the player, Leon Ivanovitch Borakov, brooded on things that were far from the music. The wars the south and east that had followed America's latest bid to control the oil regions were spreading. Some saw a deeper motive and interpreted the moves as furthering a strategic encirclement in preparation for an inevitable clash with China.

The tragedy was that there was no need for any of it. Borakov and a few others like him who knew but were unable to make themselves heard, could give the world all the energy it needed—indefinitely. The potential was there, in catalyzed nuclear reactions that he had analyzed and seen demonstrated repeatedly. Fusion and all that it promised, without the brute force approach that had been failing for half a century. But oil-focused global financial interests and academic politics had caused the research to be ridiculed or suppressed. Greed, paranoia, suspicion, and the disastrous combination of mediocrity in possession of authority were in control everywhere. Humanity had the knowledge, the ability, and the resources to solve its problems at a fraction of the cost it would expend fighting over them, which would solve nothing. But all efforts to stop the madness were in vain against the ignorance and ambitions of deluded egos leading compliant masses who delivered families to their nightly electronic brainwashing just as surely as their ancestors of earlier centuries had marched theirs to be harangued from pulpits. "Fanatics are the cause of every evil," a British member of the House of Lords had once observed to Borakov. "They should be ruthlessly hunted down and exterminated."

The phone rang on a side table. Borakov stopped his playing and reached to take the call. He would not have been disturbed without some good reason. His secretary spoke from the office downstairs in the house. "Greganin is asking to talk to you. He says it is urgent." Josef Greganin was a presidential aide in Moscow.

"Put him through," Borakov said.

"Leon?"

"Yes. Hello, Josef."

"Have you heard the news?"

"What?" There was a hollowness in Borakov's voice. A premonition told him it was something he had been expecting but refused to acknowledge consciously.

"The Chinese are landing on Taiwan." The situation had been escalating two weeks. They had threatened to dismantle the new missile installation there themselves if their demands for removal were not met.

"The talks?" Borakov said. Negotiations had been going on behind the scenes that the public in saw.

"It sounds as if they've given up," Greganin told him. "The word is that the Chinese were rebuffed. The Americans were never not serious. They went through the motions for the historical record. But China won't let itself be seen as being cowed in the eyes of the world."

Borakov was horrified. "But this is exactly what the Americans want, Josef! We both know that those missiles were only put there as a provocation."

"But the West doesn't know. Their media are already shouting about naked aggression. President Rafton was on fifteen minutes ago, spouting the usual claptrap about defending freedom and values. The naval battle group that they've got in the area is moving in. There are unconfirmed reports of aircraft engagements already."

Borakov felt his mouth going dry. "This is it, then?"

"It looks like it. I would advise you to get out, my friend. The first place it will spread is across into central Asia from the Gulf. You'll be in a prime war zone there. It could be in a matter of days."

Borakov and his family evacuated their home when American bombers begin attacking local targets. The town below was pummeled in the fighting that followed when the southern battle lines drew nearer, and the house was reduced to rubble by artillery fire. Later, when a counter-attack came, the pocket that the ruin stood in was inundated by an emptying lake when a cruise missile carrying a tactical nuclear warhead destroyed the dam in the valley above.

It was as well that Kyal had thought to find a general store and equip himself with some warm clothing and sturdy boots before leaving Rhombus. His twinge of agoraphobia had passed, and the feeling of openness and freedom when he emerged from a twin-rotor chopper at Foothills Camp was exhilarating after the enclosed, artificial worlds of the
Melther Jorg
and
Explorer 6
, and the concentrated bustle of Rhombus. The only human habitation to be seen was the scattering of shacks and tents fringing the archeological excavations beginning a short distance away on one side of the airstrip. On the other, rolling wooded hills rose toward the distant peaks of the Caucasus, white with snow against a clear sky. Kyal had never seen snow before. The freshness of the breeze coming from the east was intoxicating. After consulting with the site office at the airstrip and obtaining a photocopy of a crude map of the area, he decided to postpone looking at the diggings until later and get some exercise for legs that hadn't been used enough for a while by hiking a few miles up into the hills. The sun-baked soil and rocks, and tall, slender Terran trees with their strange needle-like leaves were unlike any scenery on Venus. As he gained height and the vista below expanded, he began to think that perhaps he would stay on here until tomorrow. It was already becoming obvious that a week would be hopelessly inadequate for the kind of plans that he had envisaged.

After an hour or maybe more, he stopped to rest on the trunk of a fallen tree. Sitting there, he could make out the general form of the town that had stood in the valley below from the lines of the archeological cuttings and trenches. According to the notes that he had pulled from the net and read during the flight up, it had been attacked first by one side and then by the other in the Central Asian War, and the ruins that were left were submerged when a dam higher up in the valley that Kyal had followed was destroyed. The ensuing geological conditions proved unusually conducive to preservation, which was what had attracted the archeologists. Although the particular town that had stood here was abandoned because of the flooding, other towns destroyed in the Central Asian War had been rebuilt, only to be razed again in the even greater war that came later. Seemingly a continuation after a period of recovery, with some shifting of alliances, it had gone to even greater extremes, involving weaponry and combat in space. There were even some indications of its spreading to the Moon.

Kyal was beginning to feel cooler now that he had stopped climbing. He pulled the hooded parka closer around him over his sweater and stared down over the bare valley where a town had been, trying to picture in his mind the things that had happened here long ago. Large white birds with black markings were wheeling lazily over a stream winding a rocky course between deep banks of green. It was all so quiet and peaceful and tranquil now. Yet how many lives had ended horribly in this very place, screaming in terror and agony amid carnage, flames, noise, and violence that he was probably incapable of imagining? The folly and the waste of it all still sickened him.

The Terran Western civilization had emerged out of a confused pattern of rivalries and wars that the exo-historians were still far from being able to agree over. After being weakened by endless strife among themselves, the original core nations of Europe were invaded from the east by Russia, which had come to dominate a large part of Asia, and by America from across the ocean to the west. An enigma here was that America's principal partners in this were the same British whom the Americans had rebelled against and evicted not long before; but the British seemed to have had a history of fighting either against or alongside just about everybody at some time or another, so their far-flung empire probably expired from exhaustion.

Another conundrum was the Japanese, who while overrunning the Europeans' possessions in Asia were fighting the Americans, while the Americans were at the same time invading Europe in the west. Whatever the explanation of that was, the overall situation appeared to make the Americans and the Russians allies. However, they turned out at the end of it all to be ferociously opposed to one another, and world's main fear for some time became that of a major nuclear conflict between them, with the Europeans now aligned with America.

And the confusion didn't end there. After a series of escalating local conflicts, the big clash when it came was with a late but rapidly developing China—which had previously sided with the Americans and the Europeans against Japan.

By now, Kyal was not only chilly but getting hungry. In the last-minute rush to make the morning flight, he hadn't eaten anything yet that day. He stood up, waved his arms and stamped to get some circulation moving, took a last look around at the serenity where he had rested, and began the easier trek down. He was intrigued to see his breath condensing into a white stream of vapor. That never happened on Venus either.

Back down at the site of the town, he spent some time as he had intended, touring the archeological excavations and talking with some of the workers. One sector consisted of practically a whole street of unearthed shops that had yielded collections of items ranging from electronics devices and kitchen appliances to clothing, shoes, and children's toys. One of the walls had a door still attached, with several panes of glass intact.

From there, he followed a track to a repository back near the airstrip where items were sorted and catalogued, and saw some examples of Terran jewelry and decorative art. The Terrans seemed to have been able to devote more of their lives to such things than was possible on Venus, where the harsher conditions made eking the essentials to staying alive a constant struggle. By comparison, the Terrans had been endowed with a garden capable of providing everything they needed in abundance. So did people compete and fight when they could have plenty for all, but work together and share in the face of scarcity? It seemed paradoxical.

Alongside the repository was a cabin next door was devoted to classifying and copying written material, and treating precious originals for preservation. Although it was a trove of books and other documents, translation was not performed here, and Kyal had to content himself with browsing through some of the images of pictures that skillful electronic manipulation had extracted from the fragile ancient sheets.

He found some views of the town as it had been, with high square buildings and streets busy with people and amazingly many cars. It was bright and colorful compared to typical towns on Venus, and had evidently been laid out with more consideration given to space and aesthetics. Another consequence of having unlimited habitable land and the luxury of more time to spare for leisure, Kyal supposed. There were other images of the Terrans themselves: groups posing; children laughing; heads and shoulders; faces smiling, frowning, looking solemn; what appeared to be prominent figures making speeches, shaking hands in the Terran custom. Kyal found that by being here, seeing the land they had lived in, contemplating things they had made and used, and now gazing at their likenesses, he was developing a growing fascination for this strange, lost race. On the one hand so impulsive, cruel, violent, irrational. On the other, so ordinary. Would it be possible, ever, to really understand them? Why did he care?

He realized suddenly that he was no alone. A woman was standing at one of the other tables across the room, like him, poring over some of the sets of pictures. He wasn't sure if she had been there all along or had come in after he. He hadn't noticed anyone when he entered—but she could have been there and moved around from one of the other sections. If so, she moved quietly. She seemed to notice him at the same time as he did her. It was hardly a situation in which they could comfortably ignore each other. Kyal bowed his head by the correct amount. She inclined hers a fraction less—the female's privilege. They held each other's eye questioningly for a moment. "Kyal Reen," he said. "A pleasure, I'm sure."

"Lorili Hilivar. Full of 'i's." Her manner was immediately easy and direct. The hint of a smile played on the corners of her mouth as her eyes interrogated him silently. "You don't waste very much time, Mr. Reen. Just down from orbit, and traveling the surface already. I'm suitably impressed."

Kyal reciprocated by permitting a grin. "We used the tanning booths on the ship. How can you tell?"

"Oh, the sweater and parka are new. The shirt is the floppy ship's fatigue kind that they issue on the trips out. The collar has a little
MJ
motif on it, and the
Melther Jorg
docked at
Explorer 6
yesterday."