Deepsix

by Jack McDevitt

  Marcel was a Parisian, although he’d begun life on Pinnacle. He had been the second child born on an extrasolar planet. The first, a girl, also born on Pinnacle, had received all kinds of gifts, up to and including a free education.

  “Let it be a lesson,” his father had been fond of telling him. “Nobody remembers who Columbus’s first mate was. Always go for the top job.”

  It had been a running joke between them, but Marcel had seen the wisdom in the remark, and now a variation of it hung over the desk in his quarters. Jump in or sit down. Not very poetic, but it reminded him to leave nothing to chance.

  His father had been disappointed with the aimlessness of his adolescent years, and he’d died while Marcel was still adrift, undoubtedly convinced his wayward offspring would do nothing substantial with his life. He’d put Marcel into a small college at Lyon, where they specialized in recalcitrant students. And they’d introduced him to Voltaire.

  It might have been his father’s unexpected death, or Voltaire, or a math instructor in his sophomore year who unfailingly believed in him (for reasons Marcel never understood), or Valerié Guischard, who had told him point-blank she would not allow herself to become involved with a man with no future. Whatever had caused it, Marcel had decided to conquer the world.

  He hadn’t quite achieved that, but he was captain of a superluminal. He’d been too late to capture Valerié, but he knew no woman would ever again walk away from him because he had nothing to offer.

  Starships, however, had turned out to be less romantic than he’d expected. His life, even with the Academy, had devolved into hauling passengers and freight from world to world with monotonous regularity. He’d hoped to pilot the survey ships that went out beyond the bubble, that went to places no one had ever seen before, like the Taliaferro, which had come out twenty-one years ago and found Morgan. That was the kind of life he wanted. But those were compact ships, and the pilots also tended to be part of the working crew. They were astrophysicists, exobiologists, climatologists, people who could carry their weight during a mission., Marcel could run the ship and in a pinch repair the coffeemaker. He was a skilled technician, one of the few pilots who could do major repairs under way. That skill counted for a great deal, but it was one more reason why the Academy liked him on flights that carried large numbers of passengers.

  Marcel had found himself living a curiously uneventful life.

  Until Morgan.

  Because the collision would be a head-on, a kind of cosmic train wreck, Maleiva III was not yet feeling the gravitational effects of the approaching giant. Nor was it yet more than a bright star in her skies. “Nothing much will change down there,” Beekman predicted, “until the last forty hours or so. Then”—he rubbed his hands with anticipation—“Katie bar the door.”

  They were over the night side. Filmy clouds floated below them, limned by starlight. Here and there they could see oceans or snow-covered landmasses.

  The Wendy Jay was moving east in low orbit. It was early morning again aboard ship, but a substantial number of the researchers were up, crowded around the screens. They ate snacks and drank an endless supply of coffee in front of the displays, watching the sky brighten as the ship approached the terminator.

  Marcel’s crew consisted of two people. Mira Amelia was his technical specialist, and Kellie Collier was copilot. Kellie had taken the bridge when he went to bed. But sleeping had been difficult. There was too much excitement on the ship, and he hadn’t dozed off until almost one. He woke again several hours later, tossed and turned for a while, gave it up, and decided to shower and dress. He’d developed a kind of morbid interest in the approaching fireworks. The realization irritated him because he’d always thought of himself as superior to those who gape at accidents.

  He’d tried to convince himself that he was simply showing a scientific interest. But there was more to it than that. There was something that ran deep into the bone with the knowledge that an entire planetload of living things was going about their normal routines while disaster approached.

  He turned on his monitor and picked up one of the feeds from project control. The screen filled with the endless arc of the ocean. A snow squall floated uncertainly off one edge of the cloud cover.

  They were over snowcapped mountains, which in the distance subsided into an endless white plain.

  It wasn’t possible to see the Quiveras dust cloud. Even on the superluminal, they needed detectors to tell them it was there. Yet its effect had been profound. Take it away, and Maleiva III would have been a tropical world.

  They were passing over a triangle-shaped continent, the largest on the planet. Vast mountain ranges dominated the northern and western coasts, and several chains of peaks formed an irregular central spine. The landmass stretched from about ten degrees north latitude almost to the south pole. Its southern limits were of course not visible to the naked eye because it simply connected with the mass of antarctic ice. Abel Kinder, one of the climatologists on board, had told him that even in normal times there was probably an ice bridge to the cap.

  He found Beekman sitting in his accustomed chair on the bridge, chatting with Kellie and drinking coffee. They were looking down as the last of the mountains passed out of the picture. A herd of animals moved deliberately across the plain.

  “What are they?” Marcel asked.

  Beekman shrugged. “Fur-bearing something-or-others,” he said. “The local equivalent of reindeer. Except with white fur. Did you want me to bring up the archives?”

  It wasn’t necessary. Marcel had just been making conversation. He knew that the animals on Deepsix were by and large variations on well-established forms. They had all the usual organs, brains, circulatory systems, a tendency toward symmetry. A lot of exoskeletons here. Heavy bone on both sides of the wrapper. Most plants used chlorophyll.

  Insects on Deepsix ranged all the way up to beasts the size of a German shepherd.

  Detail was lacking because, as the whole world knew, the Nightingale expedition nineteen years ago had been attacked by local wildlife on its first day. No one had been on the ground since. Research had been limited to satellite observations.

  “It’s a pleasant enough world,” said Beekman. “It would have made a good prospect for your old bosses.”

  He meant Kosmik, Inc., whose Planetary Construction Division selected and terraformed worlds for use as human outposts. “Too cold,” said Marcel. “The place is a refrigerator.”

  “Actually it’s not bad near the equator. And in any case it’s only temporary. Another few centuries and it would have been away from the dust and everything would have gone back to normal.”

  “I don’t think my old bosses were much at taking the long view.”

  Beekman shrugged. “There aren’t that many suitable worlds available, Marcel. Actually, I think Deepsix would have been rather a nice place to take over.”

  The plains turned to forest and then to more peaks. Then they were out over the sea again.

  Chiang Harmon called from project control to announce that the last of the general-purpose probes had been launched. In the background. Marcel heard laughter. And someone said, “Gloriamundi.”

  “What’s going on?” asked Beekman.

  “They’re naming the continents,” said Chiang.

  Marcel was puzzled. “Why bother? It isn’t going to be here that long.”

  “Maybe that’s why,” said Kellie. Kellie was dark-skinned, attractive, something of a scholar. She was the only person Marcel knew who actually read poetry for entertainment. “You’ll have a map when it’s over. Seems as if we ought to have some names to put on it.”

  Marcel and Beekman strolled over to project control to watch. Half the staff was there, shouting suggestions and arguing. One by one, Chiang was putting locations on-screen, not only continents but oceans and inland seas, mountain ranges and rivers, islands and capes.

  The triangular continent over which they’d just passed became Transitoria. The others had alre
ady been named. They were Endtime, Gloriamundi, and Northern and Southern Tempus.

  The great northern ocean they called the Coraggio. The others became the Nirvana, the Majestic, and the Arcane. The body-of water that separated Transitoria from the two Tempi (which were connected by a narrow neck of land) became the Misty Sea.

  They continued with Cape Farewell and Bad News Bay, which pushed far down into northwestern Transitoria; and with Lookout Rock and the Black Coast and the Mournful Mountains.

  In time they filled the map, lost interest, and drifted away. But not before Marcel had noticed a change in mood. It was difficult to single out precisely what had happened, even to be certain it wasn’t his imagination. But the researchers had grown more somber, the laughter more restrained, and they seemed more inclined to stay together.

  Marcel usually wasn’t all that comfortable with Academy researchers. They tended to be caught up in their specialties, and they sometimes behaved as if anyone not interested in, say, the rate at which time runs in an intense gravity field is just not someone worth knowing. It wasn’t deliberate, and by and large they tried to be sociable. But few of them were capable of hiding their feelings. Even the women seemed generally parochial.

  Consequently, most evenings he retired early to his quarters and wandered through the ship’s library. But this had been a riveting day, the first full day on station. The researchers were celebrating, and he did not want to miss any of it. Consequently he stayed until the last of them had put their dishes and glasses in the collector and gone, and then he sat studying Chiang’s map.

  It was not difficult to imagine Maleiva III as a human world. Port Umbrage established at the tip of Gloriamundi. The Irresolute Canal piercing the Tempi.

  Even then he was not sleepy. After a while he went back to the bridge. The ship’s AI was running things, and he got bored looking at the endless glaciers and oceans below, so he brought up a political thriller that he’d started the previous evening. He heard people moving about in the passageways. That was unusual, considering the hour, but he assigned it to the general electricity of the day.

  He was a half hour into the book when his link chimed. “Marcel?” Beekman’s voice.

  “Yes, Gunther?”

  “I’m back in project control. If you’ve a moment, we have something on-screen you might want to see.”

  There were about a dozen people gathered in front of several monitors. The same picture was on all of them: a forest with deep snow and something among the trees that looked like walls. It was hard to make out.

  “We’re at full mag,” said Beekman.

  Marcel made a face at the screen, as though it would clarify the image. “What is it?” he asked.

  “We’re not sure. But it looks like—”

  “—A building.” Mira Amelia moved in close. “Somebody’s down there.”

  “It might just be filtered sunlight. An illusion.”

  They all stared at the monitor.

  “I think it’s artificial,” said Beekman.

  II

  Extraterrestrial archeology sounds glamorous because its perpetrators dig up transistor radios used by creatures who’ve been gone a quarter million years. Therefore, it carries an aura of mystery and romance. But if we ever succeed in outrunning the radio waves, so we can mine their broadcasts, we’ll undoubtedly discover that they, like ourselves, were a population of dunces. That melancholy probability tends to undercut the glamour.

  —GREGORY MACALLISTER, Reflections of a Barefoot journalist

  Inside the e-suit, Priscilla Hutchins caught her breath as she gazed around the interior of the reconstructed temple. Late-afternoon sunlight slanted through stained windows in the transepts, along the upper galleries, and in the central tower. A stone dais occupied the place where one might usually look for an altar.

  Eight massive columns supported the stone roof. Benches far too high for Hutch to use comfortably were placed strategically throughout the nave for the benefit of worshipers. They were wooden and had no backs. The design was for creatures which lacked posteriors, in the human sense. The faithful would have used the benches by balancing their thoraxes on them, and gripping them with modified mandibles.

  Hutch studied the image above the altar. It had six appendages and vaguely insectile features. But the eyes very much resembled those of a squid. Stone rays, representing beams of light radiated from its upper limbs.

  This, the experts believed, was intended to be a depiction of the Almighty, the creator of the world. The Goddess.

  The figure was female, although how the team had reached that conclusion escaped Hutch. It had a snout and fangs and antennas whose precise function still eluded the researchers. Each of its four upper limbs had six curved digits. The lower pair had evolved into feet, of a sort, and were enclosed in sandals.

  The skull was bare save for a cap that covered the scalp and angled down over a pair of earholes. It wore a jacket secured with a sash, and trousers that looked like jodhpurs. The midlimbs were shrunken.

  “Vestigial?” asked Hutch.

  “Probably.” Mark Chernowski was sipping a cold beer. He took a long moment to taste it, then tapped an index finger against his lips. “Had evolution continued, they’d no doubt have lost them.”

  Despite the odd features and the curious anatomy, the Almighty retained the customary splendor one always found in the inhabitants of the heavens. Each of the four intelligent species they’d encountered, as well as their own, had depicted its assorted deities in its own image, as well as in a few others. On Pinnacle, where for a long time the physical appearance of the inhabitants had not been known, it had been difficult to sort out which representation was also that of the dominant species. But inevitably everyone succeeded in capturing the dignity of divine power.

  Hutch could not help noting that the more somber qualities and moods were somehow translatable in stone from one culture to another. Even when the representations were utterly alien.

  They moved closer to the altar. There were several other carved figures, some of which were animals. Hutch could see, however, that the creatures were mythical, that they could never have developed on a terrestrial world. Some had wings inadequate to lifting the owner. Others had heads that did not match the trunks. But all were rendered in a manner that suggested religious significance. One bore a vague resemblance to a tortoise, and Chernowski explained that it symbolized sacred wisdom. A serpentine figure was believed to represent the divine presence throughout the world.

  “How do we know these things?” she asked. “Plainfield told me that we still can’t read any of the script.”

  Chernowski refilled his mug, glanced at her to see whether she’d changed her mind and would share some of the brew, and smiled politely when she declined. “We can deduce quite a lot from the context in which the images are traditionally placed. Although questions and doubts certainly remain. Does the turtle represent the god of wisdom? Or is it just a symbol of the divine attribute? Or, for that matter, is it just a piece of art from a previous era that no one took seriously in any other sense?”

  “You mean this place might have been just an art museum?”

  Chernowski laughed. “Possibly,” he said.

  The reconstruction had been raised a few kilometers away from the site of the original structure, in order to preserve the ruins.

  Some pieces were quite striking. Especially, she thought, the winged beings. “Yes.” He followed her gaze. “Flight capability does add a certain panache, does it not?” He looked up at a creature that bore a close resemblance to an eagle. It was carved of black stone. Its wings were spread and its talons extended. “This one is curious,” he said. “As far as we can determine, this world never had eagles. Or anything remotely like an eagle.”

  She studied it for a long minute.

  “It often appears on the shoulder of the Almighty,” he continued, “and is closely associated with her. Much as the dove is with the Christian deity.”

 
; It was getting late, and they retreated to the rear of the nave. Hutch took a last look. It was the first time she’d seen the temple since its completion. “Magnificent,” she said.

  The rover was waiting outside. She looked at it, looked up at the temple, compelling in its austerity and simplicity. “It’s several hundred thousand years ago, Mark,” she said. “A few things might have changed since then. Maybe they had eagles in the old days. How would you know?”

  They climbed in and started back toward the hopelessly mundane mission headquarters, little more than a collection of beige panels just west of the original ruins.

  “It’s possible,” he admitted. “Although we’ve got a pretty good fossil record. But it’s of no consequence. Better to agree with Plato that there are certain forms that nature prefers, even though we may not see them in the flesh.” He got up and stretched.

  “What do you think happened to the natives?” she asked. “Why’d they die off?” Pinnacle’s dominant race was long gone. Almost three-quarters of a million years gone.

  Chernowski shook his head. He was tall and angular, with white hair and dark eyes. He’d spent half his life on this world and had made arrangements to be buried here when the time came. If he was fortunate, he was fond of telling visitors, he’d be the first. “Who knows?” he said. “They got old, probably. Species get old, just like individuals. We know their population was failing drastically toward the end.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “We can date the cities. There were fewer of them during the later years.”

  “I’m impressed,” she said.

  Chernowski smiled and accepted the compliment as his due.

  Hutch looked out the window at the handful of collapsed stones that comprised all that remained of the original temple. “How much of it was extrapolation?” she asked. “Of what we just saw?”

  The vehicle settled to the ground and they climbed out. “We know pretty much what the temple looked like. We’re not exactly sure about all the details, but it’s close. As to the statuary, we’ve recovered enough bits and pieces here and elsewhere to make informed guesses. I suspect if the natives could return, they’d feel quite at home in our model.”