A Star Wheeled Sky

by Brad R Torgersen

  Beginning at roughly the middle of the side which faced the far off wreck, a jumbled heap of disused brick buildings rose out of the sand. This collection of dilapidated structures ran all the way from the pyramid to the wreck itself, and appeared to be composed of mostly one-story and two-story structures, the majority of which had slumped in on themselves. Without forests, there had been no trees from which to harvest wood—which would have been the most natural choice for early construction materials. The brick itself did not appear to have been fired, but rather dried and cured in the light of Cheops home star. Which explained why it had so poorly survived the time since their original occupants disappeared.

  “Now that we’re here,” Colonel Jun said, “it’s all somewhat depressing, don’t you think? No people. Not even bodies or skeletons. Though I am sure if we did a detailed archeological examination, we’d find those eventually. Whatever happened here, it wasn’t sudden. The settlers had time to evacuate. Or clean up after themselves. Before the weather began its ceaseless work, season after season.”

  “You sympathize with the men and women of the ark?” Vex asked.

  “Of course I do,” Jun said. “You’d have to be a machine not to! Think about it. They had abandoned the only home in the galaxy humanity ever knew. Spent hundreds of years crossing interstellar space at slower-than-light conventional velocity. Finally arrived here, at this planet, which seems to offer so much potential, and then…the whole thing went to hell. Something very, very wrong happened. We don’t know what. Yet. But we may find out soon.”

  “Could the Waymakers have returned to this place, and extinguished the human settlers the way we might fumigate a housing block for roaches?”

  “It’s possible,” Jun said. “Human life might not have even registered as intelligent on their scale. Though it’s difficult to know for sure. We’ve never found anything that could be described as a Waymaker fossil. Nothing to suggest the shape or size of their craniums—assuming they had those. Which they may not have. We know intelligent Earth life comes in a variety of shapes and sizes. How does an octopus perceive the sea through which it swims? Is everything else that swims around it just food, or a threat? Or are their more subtle thoughts lurking in that complex—for an animal—mind?”

  “Madam Kosmarch,” the battle sergeant said, approaching respectfully. “I believe we’ve identified a potential entry point.”

  He handed her his binoculars, then pointed to a spot at the pyramid’s base, not far from where the brick human buildings began.

  Vex looked. There seemed to be something akin to a portico, made from the same material as the pyramid, but partially obstructed by crumbling brick from the human settlement.

  “Very good,” she said. “Instruct the pilot to take off as soon as we clear the perimeter. Battle Sergeant, bring half your men with us, and leave the other half to handle the camp. I don’t want to waste any more time speculating.”

  The battle sergeant saluted, then relayed her instructions to his team, and to the pilot. When they were three hundred meters along the base of the pyramid—sweating, now that the sun was high in the sky, and the wet sand beneath their feet proved particularly arduous to traverse—the roar of the aerospace plane’s engines pounded off the pyramid’s surface. Vex did not turn to watch the craft take off, but it thundered over their heads and out across the face of the sea, before climbing sharply for orbit. Vex knew it was a risk to use the plane as a cargo taxi, but it was the only means they had for putting men and equipment on the ground in a reasonable amount of time. Destroyers—as a matter of Nautilan military doctrine—did not have the capability for drop modules as the Constellar expedition had used.

  Which reminded Vex. Once a sufficient amount of Nautilan materials and equipment were on the surface, to sustain life for several days, she wanted the general to send one of his destroyers to reconnoiter the big jovian planet at the center of the Cheops system. Those civilian starliners were still out there, and theoretically, still armed with some form of Constellar military weaponry. She didn’t want to directly engage. Rather, she wanted at least one of her ships to do a flyby. To confirm that the starliners were in fact still there. Versus trying to execute a maneuver which might put them on course back to the Waypoint, to rendezvous with the picket ship still waiting out there. If that happened, Ekk would have to intervene. But as long as the starliners stayed put, Vex could afford to be hands off about it. Nautilan reinforcements would arrive soon enough. And when they did, Vex intended to have seized the power of the pyramid for herself.

  The portico—once they arrived—wasn’t much to look at. People had built an additional hall around the alien entrance, which had since disintegrated. But there seemed to be a fresh path cleared through the rubble, so that Vex, Colonel Jun, their Waypoint pilot, and the battle sergeant with ten of his men, were able to walk single file into the base of the pyramid.

  The interior wasn’t what Vex had expected. A long, hexagonally cut corridor stretched off into the distance, illuminated from both the floor and the ceiling by a repeating hexagonal pattern of what appeared to be glowing cracks in the surface of the pyramid material. The light cast was blue hued, but not bright. Giving everything a kind of indirect illumination which was not unpleasant on the eye. The air inside was also fresh, and seemed to be circulated according to principles of positive interior pressure—since a slight breeze flowed perpetually out of the hexagonal corridor into the air beyond.

  Walking on the pyramid material felt like walking on solid metal or stone. The hexagonal pattern in the floor did not change when you stepped on any of the lines. The light coming up from below was cold. Without any specific source point. Which seemed to be true of the ceiling—as if the pattern had been scratched into the pyramid material’s surface, allowing it to glow through the scratches from within.

  There was a bass droning in their ears. Not loud. In fact, after a few moments, they had to stop and specifically pay attention to hear it. But it was there.

  “Amazing,” Colonel Jun said as they slowly walked inside. The old man’s sickness fatigue seemed to desert him as he ran his hands appreciatively along one of the sloping corridor walls—like touching a lover.

  “What’s your first impression?” Vex asked, the heels of her expedition boots making a regular, sharp noise on the corridor’s floor.

  “The Waymakers clearly had a fondness for geometry,” he said. “Pyramids. Hexagons. Notice also that this corridor is much taller than would be necessary for an ordinary human. We can guess somewhat about their size, as creatures. I’d estimate they were at least half again as tall as an average man. Perhaps as much as double? They must have had eyes which perceived the world in the visual spectrum, as ours do, too.”

  “Why would it be otherwise?” Vex asked.

  “There are species of bats which perceive their surroundings almost entirely by reflected sound waves.”

  “But wouldn’t that make it difficult for a technological civilization to evolve?” Vex asked.

  “I’d say yes, but who knows what’s really possible? Part of my problem—as a man who’s studied the Waymakers for so long—is that we only have our one civilization to compare, against so little evidence left over from theirs. It’s been almost impossible to come to any definitive conclusions about who they were, what their lifestyle may have been like, what their physiology was, and so forth. Now, perhaps finally, we can get some solid answers.”

  They walked down the long corridor, carefully searching for anything that might look like a hatchway, a portal, a door, or a tool. But the smooth surface of the pyramid was unbroken by anything other than the hexagonal illumination both above and below.

  Reaching the corridor’s end, they stopped, and Vex ordered the Waypoint pilot to put her hands on the corridor’s slope-walled surface.

  “Can you detect anything?” Vex asked.

  “Madam Kosmarch, what is it I am attempting to do?” the young woman asked.

  “I think
she’s wanting you to try to see if the interior surface of the pyramid responds to you the way a Key would,” Colonel Jun said gently.

  “Yessir,” the young woman said, and placed her hands on the surface. Her eyes closed, and she breathed deeply for several seconds, then pulled her hands away.

  “Nothing,” the Waypoint pilot said.

  “Farther in, perhaps?” Colonel Jun suggested, pointing to the right angle the corridor took.

  Vex estimated they’d penetrated about half a kilometer into the interior.

  “Battle Sergeant,” she said. “Are you able to communicate with your troops back at camp?”

  “Negative, Madam Kosmarch,” he said. “There seems to be something interfering with our wireless.”

  “It’s this place,” Colonel Jun grunted. “I’d have been shocked if it didn’t interfere. In fact, I’d wager all our communications problems, since arriving in the atmosphere, can be traced to this structure.”

  Around the right angle of the corridor they discovered two sets of ramps which proceeded gradually through a series of switchbacks, one going up and one going down. When the battle sergeant and the colonel eyed each other, then their boss, Golsubril Vex, chose up. Down is where she reasoned the “plumbing” of the pyramid might be. Control centers or other places of power would surely be up. When she explained her thought process to the colonel, he tsked and shook his head.

  “We can’t be sure they think as we do,” he said.

  “But you’ve already deduced some aspects of their physical character,” she said. “What sane species puts their control rooms in the basement?”

  “A species seeking to protect their leadership from orbital bombardment? Or perhaps they have a hierarchical instinct we can’t begin to guess at. For us, notions of up have always held significance. A man climbs to power. He sits on top of his chain-of-command. We rise through the ranks. The Waymakers may have looked at the universe through very different eyes.”

  “Nevertheless, we have to choose one direction or the other, and I choose to ascend,” Vex said smartly.

  Jun merely shrugged, and followed her. As did the rest.

  The ramps had a hexagonal cross section and hexagonal floor-and-ceiling lighting pattern, just as the entry corridor did. After having risen perhaps fifty meters, Vex and her entire group were huffing and puffing.

  “Surely the Waymakers thought of a lift!” Colonel Jun lamented, while sponging at his brow with a sleeve. Like all of them, the old man had adopted a field uniform made from tough fabrics, with minimal insignia or rank. Dark spots were forming at his armpits and around his neck.

  “You were the one lecturing me about how we shouldn’t judge their mentality based purely on our own human perspective,” Vex scolded, enjoying the old man’s annoyance.

  After over a hundred meters of switchbacks, the ramp emptied out into a large hall which stretched over one hundred meters in either direction. Like the corridor and the ramp, the cross section of the hall was hexagonal. Unlike the corridor and the ramp, which had been featureless saving for the lighting pattern, which also repeated in the hall, there were numerous floor-to-ceiling hexagonal columns, and artifacts at some of the bases.

  Colonel Jun forgot all about his physical fatigue, coughing spastically into a handkerchief while he ran to the base of what appeared to be a statue.

  “Look at it!” the old man exclaimed, then took a knee and choked out several long, wretched, lung-wringing gagging fits. When one of the battle sergeant’s troops took a knee alongside the colonel, to see if she could assist, the colonel gently waved her off, took many deep breaths, then slowly got back to his feet.

  The artifact was roughly three meters high, and columnar in build. But with something like a ribbed beetle’s carapace, from which sprouted various insect-segmented limbs which dangled from irregularly placed shoulder joints. There was nothing like a face any human would have recognized. Rather, the head seemed to be nothing but a curved shield with a grill in the center. The very top of the shield was open, with a span of metal rounding up and over the grill, almost like an arch. And there were several more artifacts just like it spaced at regular intervals around the hall.

  Jun reached out to gently touch one of the limbs on the artifact before which he stood.

  “It’s made of the same thing as the pyramid,” he said. “And seems about as lifeless too.”

  “Could this be what the Waymakers looked like?” asked the battle sergeant, who surprised Vex with his curiosity.

  “Maybe,” Colonel Jun said, stepping back a few paces, and looking back and forth between two of the artifacts. “Each one is similar, but still a bit different. Not all of them have the same number of limbs. And not all of the limbs are segmented in the same way. Also, some of them have differently sized thoraxes, though I am sure ‘thorax’ is a bad way to look at it. Notice also that the sound we’ve been hearing, ever since we entered? It’s gotten louder.”

  Vex inclined her head, and closed her eyes. He was right, the drone in the background had gotten louder.

  “Obviously, the pyramid has power,” she said. “But drawn from what source? A reactor, like we would use?”

  “It would need to be refueled with hydrogen extracted from the sea,” Colonel Jun said. “I somehow think the Waymakers wouldn’t resort to using a power source as pedestrian as ours.”

  “But nuclear fusion is a supremely reliable source of energy,” Vex said.

  “Our ancestors on Earth once thought wood was an extremely reliable source of energy,” Jun said, making a scoffing sound. “No. The Waymakers would have used something different. Something which could survive half a million years, or more, of isolation. Without need of refueling or repair. Something that couldn’t wear down, or wear out.”

  “Madam Kosmarch, what if these are robots?” the Waypoint pilot—a lieutenant whose name Vex hadn’t bothered to learn—asked. She stepped gingerly to one of the statues, and ran a hand over one of its dangling, spindly limbs.

  “What do you mean?” the colonel asked.

  “Somebody has to be keeping up the place, sir,” the Waypoint pilot said. “Haven’t you both noticed that there is no dust nor dirt anywhere in here? The minute we crossed the threshold back at the entrance, the interior of the pyramid became immaculately clean. There are not fractures in any of the surfaces. None of the lights are out, nor blinking irregularly, like you find in a standard housing block back home. If the Waymakers themselves are no longer here, maybe they created these mechanical servants to maintain the building?”

  Colonel Jun laughed, and patted the young woman’s shoulder, tapping a finger to the side of his nose.

  “When you retire from Waypoint duty,” he said with a smile, “you’re being assigned directly to the Nautilan bureau for Waymaker study and expertise.”

  The Waypoint pilot blushed.

  “Thank you, sir,” she said. “I never thought of myself as a xeno scholar.”

  “The best xeno scholars seldom do,” he said. “Where do you think I got my start? I was a ship’s surgeon before I became interested in Waymaker artifacts. Sometimes it takes a fresh set of eyes—seeing the same thing as yourself—to give you a new perspective. So, let’s go with your idea. The Waymakers are gone, but these are something they created and left behind. For tending the pyramid. Obviously they’re not active now. I wonder when—or if—they do become active? From what source are they controlled? Or are they independently minded?”

  “How can a machine have an independent mind?” Vex asked.

  “It’s not hard to imagine,” Jun replied.

  “Just impossible to program,” Vex said. “Humans have been trying to build an artificial person since before the Exodus. We’ve gotten good at making computers which can fake being human, but only to a point. Because sooner or later, computers lack the ability to adapt quickly enough to changing situations, changing data, and so forth. If you were a surgeon in your youth, I cut my teeth on coding problems. The e
ntire Waywork relies on automation for a multitude of routine, monotonous, and dangerous jobs. But those machines rely on an army of programmers, technicians, engineers, and manufacturers to keep the automation working. Are you suggesting the Waymakers developed an automation system capable of doing all of that, for itself?”

  “I am,” Jun said. “So, the system is self-repairing as well as self-sustaining. But when nothing is out of sorts—parameters of one type or another have not been exceeded—the automation remains dormant. These artifacts could slumber for years before getting called to perform a task.”

  The lieutenant had wandered while Vex and Jun speculated. Then the young woman shouted for their attention, practically jumping up and down while she pointed to something much farther down the hall.

  Vex rushed to where the Waypoint pilot stood.

  “It’s a Key,” Vex said.

  “It’s many Keys,” Colonel Jun corrected her. “Of many sizes.”

  A gallery of spheres lay before them, each one half-submerged into a small platform. The biggest was taller than a man in diameter, while the smallest was approximately the size of a grapefruit. Having seen and used Keys all her professional life, the Waypoint pilot had no doubt what she was looking at.

  “Can you use them?” Vex demanded.

  “Madam Kosmarch, I am not sure what I’d use them for, this far from a Waypoint.”

  “Within the confines of this pyramid, the Keys may do much more than simply allow travel across Slipways,” Colonel Jun said. “I too would like to know if they can be used. But you are the only one with the gift. It’s why I suggested we bring you with us.”

  Again, the Waypoint pilot blushed.

  “Which one should I try first?” she asked.

  “This one,” Vex said. She’d stepped a few paces through the gallery, until she stood before a particularly large sphere, perhaps twice the size of an ordinary Key. It also had a slightly different metallic hue compared to the rest. Even in the strange, blue-white light given off by the floor and ceiling.