Solaris Rising (40 page)

Now she had been here for a couple of weeks, Charli found herself faintly disappointed that Alpha-One appeared so normal. (She disliked that designation, with its arrogant implication that there would be other sites, that opening a portal into this impossible place wasn’t a fluke.) The cloudy sky could have been anywhere on Earth, the air composition was normal (that initial whiff not withstanding) and the buildings were human-scale. As Rory had said when the first probe went through, the city looked like it was made for, and presumably by, human-sized entities with bilateral symmetry. As for who, or where they were now, that was anyone’s guess.

The colours of the structures that spread out to the horizon ranged from sandy yellow to mid-green – again, ordinary enough - but the stone did have a disconcerting translucency. She kept thinking ‘alabaster’ – reaching for those comforting analogies again – but she was an administrator, not a geologist, and whatever the towers were made of, she doubted anyone back on Earth had a name for it.

She hated the silence though, and did her best to drown it out, either by playing her music or by talking to the others. At night, when the tears came, she turned her head into her pillow rather than have the sound of crying drift out of the open doorway. These people were her responsibility; such stupid weakness would damage the group.

Good Morning, Control. Frivolous news first: the chickens have started laying. We’re having an omelette for supper. Just the one so far; we’ll have the share it.

The drone sweeps are almost complete; Andresh has created a detailed map extending out from the portal in a two kilometre radius. Hassan still hasn’t found any evidence of life, at least nothing our instruments can detect; we’re glad we don’t have to worry about alien bugs, though Ranjit isn’t sure how this Earth-like atmosphere is being maintained without an obvious ecosystem. Perhaps we’ll find something further out.

Ranjit hasn’t had much luck analysing the portal from this end. There’s no loose material here to throw back, so he chipped off a sample from an internal wall. The result was the same as with the terrestrial stone: it simply bounced off.

“Why you let him do it?”

Charli tried not to mentally correct Andresh’s grammar. “Because we needed to know if local material could get back through the portal.”

“Is sacrilege, Charlotte.”

She knew Andresh used her full name out of respect; correcting him would be counter-productive. “I appreciate that you feel that way about the city, but no harm was done. And I’m sure you want to get home as much as the rest of us.”

“Of course I want to leave. We should not be here at all.” With that, the team’s archaeologist-cum-architect stalked off to his room, leaving Charli alone in the echoing space they had designated as the team’s ‘common room’.

Andresh had initially voiced his opinion that their presence broke some profound law of the universe over supper the previous evening. Ranjit had humoured him and Hassan had stayed silent but Shelley had appeared to take his side. ‘Appeared to’ because Shelley was beginning to step up her play for the men’s attentions; Charli knew her type and with three men and two women, Shelley needed to make sure she came out scoring on top in the relationship stakes. Unfortunately, so far none of the men had seen that as a priority.

Charli was tempted to tell her that she could have all three for all she cared, but she knew that wouldn’t help.

Control, we found the initial probe; the one that disappeared. Well, what was left of it. We think it malfunctioned and ran off the portal platform. It actually fell all the way to the ground. Interestingly, although the probe was smashed up completely, there was very little damage to the area where it came down. I suppose we should have expected as much given that the ground’s made of the same material as the towers are.

“I’m not saying someone actually
pushed
it!” This was the closest Charli had seen Ranjit come to losing his temper. She found herself increasingly empathising with him, possibly because he was the nearest they had to a scientist – to the role Rory should have had. But not that near: he was a physics teacher. He had only applied for the programme as a way to enthuse the kids in his class about science. Ranjit never expected to end up on another world.

“I’m sure that’s not what Shelley’s saying either,” said Charli, keeping her tone calm and conciliatory. “I think what she’s getting at is that my report back to Control included conclusions that aren’t entirely,” Charli smiled tightly, “foregone.”

Shelley said, “We all saw those marks on the edge. The probe was pushed.”

Charli continued, “I agree that that’s what it looks like. But the later probes were monitoring the platform and immediate area constantly after that and they saw nothing. We’ve found no evidence to indicate we aren’t alone here. So, until and unless we do, the only logical explanation is some sort of spontaneous mechanical fault. If anyone can suggest any other
plausible
explanation, then please, just say.”

No one did. The meal continued in silence, until Hassan, opening his dessert package, smiled and said, in his gentle, lilting voice, “Hey, these peaches taste of peach. Finally the boffins are getting it right!”

“Oh,” said Shelley, “that reminds me. We’ve got shoots!”

Andresh and Hassan, the non-native speakers, looked momentarily confused, until Shelley leaned forward slightly and said, “Lettuces! They’ve come up. In the garden.”

Everyone smiled at the news that they were one step closer to the self-sufficiency necessary for long-term survival. Shelley basked in their appreciation of her gardening skills. Charli felt a certain sympathy for the other woman: she was the only team member whose main function here had only been her hobby, not her career, back on Earth.

It was – nominally – midweek, so no after dinner games were scheduled. With the evening rain shower having passed, Charli decided to go for a walk. Shelley was flirting furiously; perhaps when she got back one of the men would have succumbed to her wiles, and everyone else could relax a little. Not for the first time, Charli thanked their good luck that the male contingent of the party didn’t contain any alpha-types who would feel the need to fight for what Shelley was happy to give freely.

She considered fetching her lamp from the roof, where it had been charging all day ready to light her room at night, but decided against it; there was still an hour before night fell, and she wasn’t going to be long. Days here were just over twenty four hours, with eight hours of darkness, perfect for human circadian rhythms, something which Charli had initially found a little creepy but which she was now grateful for. A well-rested team was going to work better together.

She had several set walks, circular routes through the stairways and passages of the city, but this evening she just wandered. Not that she was covering new ground. All of them were intimately familiar with every room, every staircase, within easy walking distance of their camp.

She found the statuette in a dead-end room, just lying on the floor, as though someone had dropped it there. At first she thought she was imagining it; the room was lit by a single window, and the light wasn’t good. But when she looked closer she found a human figurine, only about ten centimetres high, made of the same material as the city.

She crouched down beside the object. Closer, she saw that it had more of a glow to it than the surrounding rock, although that might have been a trick of the light.

She reached out to pick it up.

It disappeared.

It didn’t crumble to dust, she didn’t drop it, it just... went away.

At the same moment, everything around her became crisper, sharper. Afterwards, the rush reminded her of her long-ago forays into recreational drug use, back when she was studying for her psychology degree. At the time, it caught her up utterly.

The next time she was aware enough to check, she found that three hours had passed. She straightened slowly – she had ended up sitting on the floor – and looked around. The room was dark, but not as dark as it should have been given that night had fallen. She could still see enough to take in the perfect beauty of the room, the way every angle, every wall, was correctly, perfectly proportioned.

She took her time getting back to camp. Despite the lack of light she felt no fear, merely a mild disappointment that she could not appreciate the view fully at night.

Hassan was still up. “We were going to send out searchers soon,” he said in his slow, calm way.

“Thanks, but I’m fine. Better than fine.” She almost told him what she had found; Hassam was the most likely to understand, with his air of peace hard won from his past as a child of war. But she was not sure how to begin to describe her experience, and so she said nothing, and went to her room where she fell asleep at once.

She never normally remembered her dreams but this one was vivid: in it, Rory was calling out to her from some sort of tower, trying to warn her about something. She struggled to get closer, to hear his warning, but whatever doom it was engulfed her then, and she woke up sweating and terrified.

Control, we have a medical emergency.

It’s Andresh. When he didn’t turn up for breakfast I went to his room and found him lying in bed just staring at the ceiling. We can’t find any sign of injury or illness. He just appears to have fallen into a coma.

Hassan has put him on a drip. We’re not sure what else we can do.

Everyone was scared. Each of them responded in their own way: Shelly with wild theories and demands for attention, Hassan with solicitous calm, Ranjit with an increasingly desperate search for the logical explanation. Charli observed their reactions, knowing full well that she should bring everyone together, should provide support and guidance in this time of crisis, but somehow disinclined to do so.

The suffusing beauty she had felt on picking up the statuette remained with her, though now tinged with unease. More than once, she found herself thinking:
this place is too much for us
. Had she believed in God, she might even have used words like ‘holy’ or ‘divine’.

Andresh died the next night. No one was with him, and when they checked in the morning he looked exactly as he had when they left him, only dead. Hassan, after examining his body as best he could, said sadly, “It is almost as if his life just ebbed away.”

“That’s crazy-talk, Hassan.” Shelley’s warm tone belied her words; Hassan was finally responding to her overtures. “But if that’s how it is, it’s our duty not to despair, isn’t it?”

Hassan nodded solemnly, taking Shelley’s last comment at face value.

There being no way of burying or cremating Andresh, they carried his body down to ground level and left him in one of the rooms there. Charli suggested each one of them spend a while alone in the room with him, to say their farewell. It was a manufactured ritual, and they all knew it. Shelley was in there for only a few seconds; Ranjit for slightly longer; Hassan longer still, no doubt praying for their comrade. When Charli’s turn came she reached for the gold crucifix Andresh wore. As she put it outside his shirt she whispered, “I think you were right about this place.” For all the good that did now.

Charli did not feel grief as such; she hadn’t known Andresh well enough for that. She did feel a kind of unfocused fear, because losing one of the group brought home the gravity of their situation. At the same time, she found herself increasingly disconnected from their small, mortal, problems. Being amongst such alien beauty gave her a strength she never knew she had. To walk on stone crafted by a powerful unknown race, to breathe the rich air – and it was rich, in every breath now – to hear that silence, which was more like distilled peace than an absence of sound: this was what truly mattered. She had been too busy worrying about who was happy and who wasn’t, and stressing about what would happen when the portal closed, to revel in the wonder of being here, in this amazing, impossible place.

She didn’t mention the figurine to the others. The time wasn’t right. They had enough to deal with.

Shelley and Hassan got together three days after Andresh’s death. Charli was distantly relieved that Shelley was being kept distracted.

Ranjit’s response to Andresh’s death was to throw himself into his work. He spent most of his time up at the portal platform, trying to find a way to get them home.

Ranjit’s come up with an idea about modifying the portal from this end and we reckon it’s worth a try. His theory is based on lasers, and will probably mean more to you than it does to the rest of us. I’m going to give him the headset now so he can describe what he needs…