Resurgence (14 page)

He was starting to climb down, but Darya again put a hand on his suited arm. "Hans, do we really need to go through with this?"

"I'm afraid we do. What we find inside will probably be unpleasant, but Julian Graves will ask for every scrap of detail that we can give him. Come on. This world is one giant cemetery, and maybe we are desecrating graves. But I think whoever is buried in there would agree that what we're doing is in a good cause."

"Good, perhaps, but too late to be useful." Darya Lang did not argue anymore. They watched in silence as Ben Blesh ordered the digger to dismount from the car, and gave it the instructions needed so that it could perform its task.

Hans Rebka had visited a hundred worlds and experienced most things that the Orion Arm had to offer. Even so, the digger was like nothing that he had ever seen. Before it started into action he imagined it tunneling its way forward, perhaps extruding a variety of shovels and picks to hold in its multiple jointed limbs, then carving a way through the hard-packed frozen drift.

The machine was smarter than that—smarter it seemed than Hans, at least when it came to its own specialized skills. The digger crept forward, crouched low, and poked thin antennalike sensors deep into the drift. After what seemed like a moment of meditation, it said in a clear female voice, "The material to be cleared is ninety-nine point seven percent solid carbon dioxide, with a little water-ice and trace elements. Beyond it lies stone, baked clay, and a combination of iron and a softer fibrous material. A large working area will be needed. Organic beings, please retreat until you are no closer than sixty meters."

When Hans hesitated, Ben Blesh said, "We'd better get a move on. The digger knows what it's talking about, and it won't start until we're at a safe distance."

A large working area sounded like a bad idea to Hans. "Is it proposing to use explosives? That could destroy exactly the things we are hoping to find."

"It has orders to operate in a non-destructive mode." For once, Ben apparently didn't have all the answers. The four of them climbed back onto the car and it retreated on a path at right angles to the saw-tooth line of the wall. Then it was watch and wait for a long while. To Hans Rebka's eyes nothing at all was happening. But at last Lara Quistner said, "It's really moving. I didn't realize it could go so fast."

Hans realized that a broad tunnel was appearing in the body of the drift. The digger was creeping forward into the cleared space. Hans saw what was perhaps a slight fog in the air above the digger's broad back, but otherwise there was no sign of cleared materials. After a few more seconds he exclaimed, "It's applying heat to the solid carbon oxide. Of course. Sublimation, straight to gas with no liquid phase. Does the digger have a fusion engine inside it?"

"A substantial one." Ben Blesh was measuring the rate of progress. "Don't worry, the digger will turn the heat off as soon as it is near a wall or a door or anything else that it recognizes. After that it will be up to us. If we want the door to remain intact, we can't rely on the digger. It knows fabricated objects when it sees them, but it doesn't know what to do with them."

The tunnel was deepening, at the same time as the drift above it was vanishing. After twenty more minutes, the digger halted. It extruded its limbs and retreated. The female voice said, "We have reached a boundary. Beyond this we cannot proceed without material damage."

Hans and the others approached the end of the newly created valley. They scraped at the white surface, gently at first and then more vigorously as their lamps revealed a brown facing. Ben scraped a path in several directions, to determine the outline of the flat surface. "It's some type of door all right. But it's
tiny
. They must have been very small. Do you think we will be able to squeeze through?"

"I hope so." Hans came close and directed his light onto the right-hand edge. "No kind of hinges. It would waste a lot of time if we tried to go over the wall. I don't think anyone will object if we do a little breaking-in."

The entry went easier than expected. If this had once indeed been a fortified gate, age and extreme temperature had rendered the construction materials weak and brittle. The facing caved in at one blow from Hans Rebka's gloved fist. Within half a minute, the whole door was gone and the way inside clear. Ben Blesh pushed forward eagerly, and Rebka allowed the other man to go first. He could not imagine finding anything pleasant, and at this point he did not expect danger.

The reality was more pathetic than threatening. The tunnel through the thick wall led not back into the open air, but to a large closed chamber. Within it, huddled in some kind of sacking intended to keep in warmth, they found five small bodies. The aliens resembled no species known to Rebka, and he had seen many on many worlds. But all had been in the Orion Arm. It should be no surprise that Sag Arm inhabitants had developed along different physical patterns.

Darya Lang cut open one of the sleeping bags. She worked carefully, afraid that the tiny frozen body would crumble to dust at her touch. The creature resembled a cross between insectoid and reptilian forms. Large compound eyes, clouded in death, stared up from a narrow muzzled face. Thin lips had shrunk back to show teeth like triangular knives. Four limbs, protected at their ends by a shiny chitinous covering, wrapped across the segmented body as though making a final effort to hold in warmth and life.

"How long do think they had?" Lara Quistner asked. "Many generations, or just one or two?"

"Unless someone returns for a thorough investigation, we don't know and we never will." Hans Rebka turned away. "You have to wish that it could have been quicker. I'll take the flash of a supernova any time over long, drawn-out cold."

Darya Lang stood up. She had been making a visual recording of the corpses and their surroundings. "I think it was fairly quick. I examined the images taken from orbit, too. I didn't notice these walled towns, but everything went too quickly for glaciation to creep down from the poles."

"Quick, but not quick enough. Does anyone want to see more?"

"What about the other sites, Captain Rebka?" Ben Blesh was commanding the digger to return to its position on the cargo rack. Having objected to visiting this world, he now seemed reluctant to leave. "Might we learn something there?"

"I don't think so. I didn't see much variation in the towns. It will be the same sad story, repeated a thousand or ten thousand times. Starvation, cold, death." As Hans Rebka led the way back to the car, he added to Darya Lang, "Even if it lasted only one lifetime, that was much too long. I'm inclined to agree with you, Darya, this isn't the handiwork of the Builders. Something more inhuman, something more indifferent to organic suffering, has been at work in this system. Let's get back to the
Savior
, file our report with Julian Graves—and take a look at Iceworld. It may prove more dangerous, but I can't imagine anything more depressing than what we found here."

The
Savior
leaving the dead world was not the ship that had arrived two days before. Within an hour of lift-off Darya could feel the change in every person on board. It was not hard to guess the reasons.

Before their arrival, Hans Rebka had been fidgety and preoccupied. He knew that he had his own agenda in going there, but he was reluctant to tell others until he could offer proof. Ben Blesh and Lara Quistner had felt the nervousness of anyone about to undergo a first practical test. Now, Rebka's dark suspicions had been confirmed, while Ben and Lara had performed well—no, make that brilliantly. Darya could not imagine a more competent performance.

As for Darya herself, her full confidence in Hans Rebka was restored. She was ashamed for doubting him, when he had never in the past acted out of ego or the need to prove that he was in charge.

The result of all this was a great decrease in tension. The cramped quarters of the
Savior
no longer felt like an overcrowded box, too small for its crew. Rebka, Blesh, and Quistner were off by the communications console, and although she could not hear their conversation, an occasional laugh suggested that it was friendly and relaxed. If some of the laughter was a reaction to the sight of ugly death, that was no more than natural. The fact that they were talking together at all suggested a major adjustment. And it was no huge surprise when Lara Quistner wandered over to Darya and sat down by her side.

"Professor Lang, I've been thinking." She sounded tentative. "I want to bounce an idea off you. We've all heard a lot about the Builders, ever since we were kids, but it was always secondhand information. Everybody says that you are the ultimate authority on the Builders."

"If there is any such thing. And it's Darya, please, not Professor Lang. When you get right down to it there is no such thing as an authority on the Builders. What we
know
is simple. Something built and left behind a set of structures that we label as artifacts. All of them were very old—at least three million years—and most of them employed technology that we still do not understand. A few years ago, one new artifact appeared. Soon after that every one of them vanished. That's it. There you have our complete knowledge of the Builders. Everything else is speculation."

"But Professor Lang—Darya—surely there must be theories?"

"You've got it exactly right.
Theories
, not theory. You name it, someone had it. Maybe the Builders were entities whose consciousness extended over a finite dimension in time, so that they could literally
see
through time the way we can see through space. They could examine possible futures and direct the course of the spiral arm. That idea was mine, but I don't believe it anymore. Or the Builders are still alive, lying idle on the deep gravity slope that surrounds the giant black hole at the center of our galaxy, where time slows so that an hour there is a century or a millennium for us. That was Professor Carmina Gold's, at the Research Institute on Sentinel Gate, and she keeps looking for a way to travel to the center of the galaxy and back in a human lifetime. Maybe this expedition will help—we came to the Sag Arm in just a few days; there could be a chain of Bose nodes leading all the way to the galactic center. Or another theory: the Builders are actually human beings from our own future, coming back to direct the course of spiral arm development, including their own. That was Quintus Bloom's idea, and it made the embodied computer E.C. Tally go into a logical loop so bad we had to cold-start him."

"Quintus Bloom?"

"He was a big name at the Institute a few years ago. He stayed on Labyrinth when it disappeared, and no one to this day knows what happened to him. Then there was the theory that nothing cataclysmic happened to the Builders. They were just like any other species, they grew old, and since they didn't change they slowly died out. That idea was a kind of orphan, no one knows who had it first. Most people attribute it to Captain Alonzo Sloane, an old space wanderer who went off looking for the Lost Worlds, Jesteen and Skyfall and Petra and Primrose and Paladin and Midas and Rainbow Reef. He never came back, though we did find his ship near Labyrinth."

"People with ideas about the Builders seem to disappear rather often."

"Oh, most of them don't—we just remember the ones who did. I've had a dozen ideas of my own to explain who the Builders were and what happened to them, and I'm still here. And I must have read a hundred or a thousand papers by other people. Only one of them could be right, and chances are, all of them are wrong. If you have thoughts of your own, don't be ashamed of them. Maybe they are new, and maybe they are better than anyone else's."

"If you don't mind listening?"

"As I said, I've listened a thousand times, but I'm ready to listen ten thousand more. Hans Rebka tells me that the Builders are an obsession with me. I won't go quite that far, but I will admit they have been my life's consuming interest. Go ahead."

"Well." Lara glanced across at the two men, making sure that they were still deep in conversation. "I knew that the Builders were around for a very long time, and a few million years ago they disappeared. That never seemed to make much sense to me. If they died out, wouldn't you expect to see evidence of where and how they died? When I heard about this expedition, and found out where we were going, it occurred to me that perhaps the Builders didn't die out at all. Perhaps they just moved. Perhaps they decided to make a home in the Sag Arm, instead of in the Orion Arm. I know that they have some way of moving across great distances, because one of the artifacts is supposed to be far out of the galactic plane."

"Thirty thousand lightyears out of it. Lara, I was there. We called it—or the beings that inhabited it, who claimed to be servants of the Builders, called it—
Serenity
. Our party included Julian Graves. We were not sure what carried us out there, or what carried us back. We called them transportation vortices, but that was just a name. How a vortex worked was a total mystery. They seemed to appear anywhere, and carry you hundreds or thousands of lightyears instantly without involving Bose nodes at all."

"Then if they wanted to, they could easily have moved here."

"Without a doubt. The Builders have—or had—enormous powers, able to do things that still look like magic to us. We're millennia behind them in our most advanced technology, if not millions of years. But I'm convinced of one thing, Lara. I can't prove this, but I feel it in my bones: whoever and whatever killed this star system and all the life within it was not the Builders. For that to be true, they would have had to change much more than their location. They would have had to change their whole attitude toward other living creatures. It's not generally accepted, but I believe that the Builders guided the development of our own local arm. It's thanks to them that we have a stable civilization involving many species and three major clades. If Captain Rebka were listening, I would say four major clades in deference to his feelings. Even though everyone outside the Phemus Circle regards it as a backward place of no great importance."