by Paul Preuss
“Maybe I can answer that,” Blake said to Van Kessel. “Gress is a signal analyst; it was probably easy for him to decode your power control signals. All he needed was a transmitter loaded with a preset code, set to go off when Leyland’s capsule reached the right point in its launch—a signal strong enough to override the capsule’s onboard transmitter. He could just as easily have put the capsule’s computers out of whack with a remote command, as soon as it left the track.”
“A remote transmitter…?” Van Kessel was skeptical.
“There’s one aimed at the track right now,” Sparta whispered. “The radiotelescopes. Every receiver can be used as a transmitter. Every transmitter can be a receiver.” She knew now, although she said nothing about it, that the source of the disorienting, queasy sensation she felt when she stood on the launcher track was a burst of test telemetry from the antennas, still under repair.
“Once Security gets around to it,” Blake said, “I’ll bet they’ll find Gress was feeding in a little extra programming. And that Katrina had a hand in the fine alignment of the telescopes. She had something to say about the target list, after all.”
Van Kessel shrugged. “We’ll see.” He looked at Sparta. “Do you think she deliberately picked Leyland after all?”
“That was as much her bad luck as it was his,” she said. “He just happened to be the next load down the track. He was in the right place at the wrong time.”
Time crept by. As Doppler readings from radar stations around the moon poured into the control room, the estimates of Gress’s trajectory became ever more refined.
Van Kessel was the first to put it in words. “Gress is not going to hit the moon.”
Gress could not know that, of course, since he apparently refused to believe what they told him and had stopped responding on the link. Sparta watched the bright lines on the graphic screens, the lines that diagrammed Gress’s rush toward the moon, and she tried to imagine what he must be thinking, what he must be feeling, as the bright backlit mountains of Farside rushed toward him. The man wanted to die, wanted the face of the moon to rush up and crush him…
Van Kessel was watching Sparta. She had shown no surprise, no emotion at all, at the news that Gress would miss the moon.
“You were bluffing—weren’t you?” Van Kessel asked.
“We must have been lucky,” she whispered.
“But if Gress could program Leyland’s capsule so precisely with a remote transmission,” Van Kessel demanded, “why couldn’t he program his own? He’s riding in the thing!”
Sparta looked at Blake’s round, handsome face and saw that eyebrow lift again. Why, indeed? Blake was wondering—and what exactly had Sparta been up to when she’d jumped out of the speeding moon buggy? It was not the sort of question Blake would ask her in public.
Coolly Sparta addressed Van Kessel. “Maybe with Leyland he had … beginner’s luck.”
Van Kessel grunted. “Are you saying there’s something about this that the Space Board doesn’t want known?”
“That’s an excellent way of putting it, Mr. Van Kessel,” she said.
“You should have said so in the first place,” he grumbled. He kept his questions to himself after that. Whatever it was the Space Board wasn’t telling him, he doubted he’d ever find out.
Once more the alarm went out to the base. This time the measure was strictly precautionary. A few people strolled to the deep shelters, but the bolder workers went out on the surface to watch as Gress’s capsule soared over the crest of the Mare Moscoviense rimwall.
When the capsule streaked soundlessly overhead, brilliantly floodlit by the sun that was still low in the east, it had a kilometer of altitude to spare.
Seconds later Gress was arcing back into space.
Sparta, at the edge of exhaustion, called him again. “We’ve calculated your orbit with a little better precision, Dr. Gress. You’ll go wider on each swing. Eventually you’ll end up in the spider web at L-1. Your rations probably won’t last that long.”
There was nothing but the vacant hiss of the aether. It went on so long that everyone but Sparta and Blake had given up, when lights flickered on the consoles, and the weary controllers stirred. Flatscreens unscrambled. Shortly Gress’s haggard voice came over the radiolink. “You have control of this capsule now,” he said. “Do what you want.”
“He’s taken the capsule’s maneuvering systems out of manual,” said Van Kessel.
Before anyone else in the room could respond, Sparta had tapped coordinates into the launch director’s console. “In a few seconds you will experience some acceleration, Dr. Gress. Please be sure you are secured.” She had rewritten the capsule’s program and locked it off before Van Kessel could confirm her calculations.
“We could have done that,” Van Kessel grumbled.
“I didn’t want to give him time to change his mind.”
The consoles indicated that somewhere above the moon the engines of Gress’s capsule spurted flame—
—and aimed him toward an early recovery at L-1.
Sparta was bruised with fatigue.
“Do you need to be here any longer?” Blake asked.
“No, Blake. I need to be with you.”
There was one more stop to make before the long day was over. Katrina Balakian was being held in the tiny detention facility at Base Security under the maintenance dome. Sparta and Blake looked at Katrina’s image on the guard’s flatscreen. The astronomer sat quietly in an armchair in the locked room, staring down at her clenched hands.
“Catherine?” Sparta asked Blake.
He nodded.
“We’ll go in now,” Sparta said to the guard.
The guard keyed the combination into the pad on the wall, and the door swung open. Katrina did not move or look at them. The smell that wafted out of the room was oddly traditional, instantly recognizable. It was the smell of bitter almonds.
Seconds later Sparta had confirmed that Katrina Balakian had died of cyanide poisoning, self-administered from that most ancient of cloak-and-dagger devices, a hollow plastic tooth. Her features were frozen with the wide-eyed blue shock of one whose breath has suddenly, irrevocably been cut off.
“She smiled at Gress the last time she saw him,” Sparta said to Blake. “I thought it was because she loved him. Maybe she did, but she also knew he was marching out to die for the cause.”
“She was braver than he was, then, in the end,” Blake said.
Sparta shook her head. “I don’t think so. I think when they open that capsule at L-1, they’ll find a dead man in it.”
“Why would he let us send him to L-1?” Blake asked.
“To spite us. To let us know he died on purpose.”
“God, Ellen, I hope this time you’re wrong.”
She wasn’t, but neither of them would know that until late the following day…
That night they found a nondescript room in the visitor’s quarters, with brocaded walls and a carpeted floor and ceiling. The furniture was square and modern, soulless, but they didn’t look at it. They didn’t even bother to turn on the light.
Her armor came off slowly. She did not make it easy for him, but neither did she resist. And when both of them were without protection, they held each other close a long time, hardly moving, not speaking. Her breathing became deeper, slower, and he helped her lie down on the bed. As he settled beside her, he realized she was already asleep.
He kissed the fine down at the back of her neck. Almost before he realized it, he was sleeping too.
18
A third of the distance sunward of Farside Base, and more, Port Hesperus swung above the clouds of Venus on its ceaseless round. A tall, sad-eyed man sat in a dark room, pondering a flatscreen full of strange symbols, symbols that were old friends to him. His contemplation was suddenly interrupted.
“Merck, I’m afraid I have very bad news for you,” J. Q. R. Forster said, his voice sticky with glee. He was working at a similar screen at the opposite end of
the big room, an empty gallery in the Hesperian Museum. Although the museum was valuable property, located on the busy thoroughfare that belted Port Hesperus’s garden sphere, it was temporarily unused except by Forster and Merck.
“Bad news?” Albers Merck looked up from the glowing flatscreen, a vague smile on his face. He swiped at the lick of blond hair that fell into his eyes each time he moved his head.
“I’ve identified the terminal signs that puzzled us so much.”
“Oh, have you really?”
“Yes, just this very moment. It was the sort of thing that should have been obvious.”
“Mmm?”
“Had it not seemed impossible.”
“Impossible?”
“We’ve assumed that the tablets are a billion years old.” How silly of us, Forster implied by his tone—
—but Merck nodded solemnly. “The only reasonable assumption. So long has Venus been uninhabitable, as the dating of the cave strata confirms.”
Forster abruptly stood and began to pace the length of the room, which itself resembled a cave. It was roofed with a gaudy stained-glass dome, though many of the panes were broken and it was covered with opaque black plastic. Once the gallery had been filled with rococo bricabrac of the sort favored by the museum’s founder. The man was dead now, and the place had acquired a gloomy reputation. The museum’s trustees, who were among the backers of the Venus expedition, had let the archaeologists use the empty structure to house their research.
“The cave is a billion years old, certainly,” Forster said. “There are caves in the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River that old. It doesn’t mean no one has visited them since they were formed.” Forster raised his hand. “No, don’t bother to say it—I will grant, for the sake of argument, that perhaps some of the artifacts in the cave could be a billion years old, although we have no means of dating what we had no time to sample. But late last night it occurred to me—why was it not obvious sooner?—that the beings of Culture X could have used this site over a very long period of time…”
The long-suffering Merck expelled an exasperated sigh. “Really, Forster, you are surely the only archaeologist in the inhabited worlds who could believe such a possibility. A civilization lasting a billion years! Dropping in on us from time to time. My dear friend…”
Forster had stopped pacing. “The signs, Merck, the signs. In each section of writing, the signs to the left are the mirror image of the signs on the right. Perfect copies in every detail—except for the terminal signs in the last line of the left section…”
“The last line in every left-hand section has a different terminal sign, occurring nowhere else,” Merck finished for him. “Clearly these are rare honorifics.”
“Yes!” said Forster eagerly. “And I venture that the mirror-writing itself is honorific—a way of copying texts deemed worthy of preservation. Surely it is not standard; the Mars plaque is not mirror-writing.”
Merck smiled diffidently. “Forgive me for turning your argument against you, but in a billion years, or a hundred—or even ten-customs could change.”
“Yes, yes,” said Forster, nettled. Merck had a point, but now was not the time to admit it. “Merck, I’m saying we can decipher these texts. That we already know the terminal signs!”
Merck peered at Forster with an expression that hovered between amusement and apprehension. “Do we?”
“This one—from the third set of panels. This is an Egyptian hieroglyph, a sun disc, the sound kh…”
“Forster, it’s a plain circle,” said Merck.
“And this one, from the fifth set. Sumerian cuneiform for heaven…”
“Which perfectly resembles an asterisk.”
“From the second set, the Chinese ideogram for horse—you think that’s universal? From the ninth set, the Minoan Linear A character for wine. Did they drink wine? From the second set, the Hebrew letter aleph, which stands for ox. From the seventh set, a sign in the form of a fish from the undeciphered script of Mohenjo-daro…”
“Please, my friend,” Merck said gently, “this is too much for me to absorb. Are you really proposing that Culture X dropped in on Earth during the Bronze Age, then flew to Venus to leave a memo of their trip?”
“Your polite way of saying I’m crazy,” said Forster, “but I’m not. Merck, we have found the Rosetta Stone.”
“On Venus?”
“Perhaps we weren’t meant to find it—not without aid. But it is the Rosetta Stone nonetheless.”
“Putting aside the question of who was to aid us,” Merck said, “there is not a scrap of language we can recognize—except, possibly, these few scattered signs.”
“Those signs are meant to say that they knew humans then, respected us enough to record our symbols—that someday they wanted us to understand them. The means is here in these tablets.”
“How wonderful if you were right,” said Merck. “But how can we possibly do that, with a single dubious correspondence in each block of…?”
“It’s an alphabet, Merck. There are forty-two signs, alphanumerics…”
“I don’t accept…”
“I don’t care, just listen. We were able to recover thirty paired blocks of text, and each left-hand block ends with a sign from Earth’s earliest written languages. Each terminal sign on the left corresponds to a Culture X sign in the right-hand text. Those are sounds. The Egyptian for kh. The Minoan for we. The Hebrew, voiceless but surely ah. Originally there must have been one of our signs for every one of theirs. Some from languages we no longer know. Many pieces lost. But we can put it together. We can extract the meaning, we can fill in the gaps.” Forster paused in his restless pacing. “When we do, we can read what they wrote.”
Faced with Forster’s enthusiasm, Merck threw up his hands in disgust and turned back to his flatscreen.
Forster too returned to his computer. In an hour he had what he thought was a good approximation of the sounds of the Culture X alphabet. In another hour he had used it to derive the meanings of several blocks of text. He stared in excitement as the first translations unscrolled on his flatscreen.
A kind of terrible excitement overcame him. He did not wait for the computer to finish spewing out translations before confronting Merck. “Merck!” he shouted, rousting him from his gloomy meditation.
Merck peered at him, unfailing in his struggle to be polite, but the sense of sadness—of tragedy, even—that hung about him caused the ebullient Forster momentary pause.
“We’ll go into the uncertainties later…” He pressed on. “Here’s an appropriate place to start: the text tagged with aleph. Steady, man… ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth…’”
Merck, expressionless in the shadows, gazed at Forster, leaping and cavorting as he read from the slip of plastic.
“Another, the third text, tagged with the hieroglyphic sun disk. It begins, ‘How beautiful art thou, upon the eastern horizon…’ An Egyptian hymn to the sun. Another, from China: ‘The way that is known is not the way…’”
“Please stop,” said Merck, rising from his chair. “I cannot deal with this now.”
“You’ll have to deal with it soon, my friend,” Forster exulted, almost cruelly. “I see no reason why we cannot make an announcement tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow, then. Excuse me, Forster. I must go.”
Forster watched the tall, sad archaeologist slouch out of the darkened gallery. He had not even bothered to turn off his flatscreen.
Forster went to Merck’s flatscreen and reached for the SAVE key. His eye was caught by the graphic signs on Merck’s display, Culture X signs with Merck’s notation beside them. Merck persisted in treating the signs as ideographs, not alphabetic letters. He persisted in finding arcane meanings for the texts that to Forster had suddenly become transparent.
No wonder Merck didn’t want to think about anything until tomorrow. His life’s work had just been destroyed.
For Merck there was to be no shred of relief; worse
news was already traveling through space at the speed of light.
All night Port Hesperus hummed with revelations of the latest launch disaster at Farside Base. Artificial morning arrived, and Forster put any thoughts of a press conference out of his mind—partly out of respect for his colleague, partly out of simple practicality. So spectacular were the grisly developments on the moon that no announcement of an archaeological breakthrough could possibly compete for the public’s attention.
More than twenty-four hours passed. Forster was having dinner alone in his cabin when he heard the last bit of horrible news—Piet Gress’s capsule had arrived at L-1 with his corpse inside. Forster left his dinner cooling and went back in search of his colleague…
A bright and featureless flatscreen was the gallery’s sole source of light. Albers Merck sat at the long table, staring not at the blank screen but through it.
“Albers…” J. Q. R. Forster’s voice echoed through the dark gallery, uncharacteristically soft. “I’ve just heard. Were you close to the boy?”
“My sister’s son,” Merck whispered. “I’ve seen little of either of them since he was very small.”
“Do you believe what they are saying? That he tried to destroy the Farside antennas?”
Merck turned slowly to look at Forster. The gingery little professor was standing at the door with his hands hanging limp at his sides, looking oddly helpless. He had come to comfort his old friend and rival, but he had little practice in such matters.
“Yes, certainly,” Merck said simply.
“What could he have been thinking? Why would he try to destroy that magnificent instrument?”
“That must be very difficult for you to understand.”
“For me to understand! He killed himself!” In his indignation, Forster almost forgot that he was here to console Merck. “He tried to kill that other man. He could have killed a great many people.”
Merck’s distracted, otherworldly expression was unchanged.
Forster coughed. “Please forgive me, I… Perhaps I should leave you alone.”
