Echo

by Jack McDevitt

  “It’s the gravity,” I said. “They’re used to it.”

  “I wonder,” said Alex, “what the average life span is here.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but I can tell you there’ll never be a move to take over their real estate.”

  “That reminds me,” said Alex. “Belle, have you asked them what happened here? What went wrong?”

  “No. I’ve been reluctant. It might seem like bad manners. If I may suggest, Alex, it might be best if we wait until you and Chase have enough command of the language to put the question to them.”

  Alex nodded. “Makes sense,” he said.

  Turam and a couple of women showed up with clothes for us, shirts and leggings, made of heavy linen of a sort I’d not seen before. And socks and undergarments. They didn’t look especially comfortable, but I was grateful to be able to get cleaned up and change.

  The really good news was that they had indoor plumbing and a water-purification system. They had soap, although they hadn’t figured out how to pipe in hot water. Unfortunately, I didn’t notice the shower had only one faucet until I was out of my clothes. Two buckets had been placed in a corner of the washroom for the convenience of the user. The kitchen, I learned later, kept a fire going round the clock, and always had hot water available. But even had I known, there was no way I was going to climb back into my clothes. So I had a memorable shower.

  Alex could not, of course, manage a shower. When he heard about the hot water, he thought it was funny. But he was taking a chance since he would have had a problem getting washed down without my help.

  Our new garments fit tolerably well although they had a dull, rumpled look even after being pressed. Alex commented that they had clearly been around the block. But we were happy to have them.

  I brought hot water in and washed the clothes we’d been wearing during the crash and hung them on a line outside. They might have been a bit demonstrative for the compound, though. We were concerned that putting them back on would have amounted to rejecting the generosity of our hosts. So we stayed with the contributions.

  After we were washed and dressed, we headed down to the dining room, Alex hobbling along on his crutches. Every time Belle passed over, we switched her on for eleven minutes so she could absorb as much of the conversation as possible.

  Everyone was fascinated. They all wanted to talk to her and, secondarily, to us. Alex had a quick feel for languages, so he wasted no time picking up the basics. We’d already learned to say “hello” and “good-bye.” And “I’m fine.” During our first full day, we added comments like “It’s nice to meet you,” “I’m thirsty,” “It’s nice weather,” and “How did you sleep?” Alex worked out how to say “The river is beautiful in the moonlight.” And we learned to reply to questions about his neck chain and my bracelet. “Yes, they do speak but only at certain times.” I always did that with a smile, and it inevitably provoked a laugh. But by then almost everyone had heard the magic voice.

  We took turns stationing ourselves in the dining room during the first few days. Turam spent a lot of time with us, doing everything he could to help us learn the language although it was clear he didn’t really understand what was going on. He had no concept of a radio, so the notion of someone speaking from a distant place was as remote to him as the possibility that the jewelry was talking.

  By the end of each day, we were both tired and hurting. The day was several hours longer than we were accustomed to. As was the night. So our sleep cycle got derailed pretty quickly.

  Belle passed on some information about Turam. “Seepah informed me,” she said, “that Turam’s wife died recently from a disease that Seepah was unable to treat. He called it simply the Sickness, and said the community had been suffering from it for several years. Victims start with a fever, their skin turns yellow, heart palpitations ensue, and most are dead within two weeks. It’s become a recurring problem, and it’s one of the factors in a gradually decreasing population.”

  “Are they in fact losing population?” Alex asked.

  “I do not have numbers, but I suspect we can trust Seepah’s perspective.

  “Turam, by the way, has no family to fall back on. Seepah says he responded to the loss by putting emotional distance between himself and his friends. He no longer hangs out in the dining room after hours. Or at least he had stopped doing that until you two came on the scene. But he’d been sitting in his room alone, or going for long, solitary walks. That’s why he happened to be nearby when you came down.”

  We’d been there about three days when Viscenda called us into her office to ask how we were doing. Did we need anything? Was the food satisfactory? If in fact we were from another world, why had we come to Bakar? (It was their name for their home world.)

  “We’re simply explorers,” Alex said.

  A table stood in a corner of the room, partially shaded by a potted plant with broad leaves. Glittering in the filtered sunlight was a silvery statuette. The same figure that was depicted in the sketch in our quarters. An angel, or perhaps a goddess, with wings spread, about to take flight. With one breast uncovered. She was carrying a lantern. Viscenda’s manner suggested this was how she thought of herself.

  Later that afternoon we were sitting in the dining hall with the director, and with Turam and Seepah. At Alex’s prompting, Belle put a question to them: “We landed and tried to speak with some fishermen. Far from here. But they attacked us. Without provocation. Can you explain why that might have happened?”

  Conversation was still difficult. We told Belle what to say, and she translated their answers for us. We described the entire event, the man in the robe, the staff, the guys blasting away for no apparent reason.

  “They saw the lander? In the air?” asked Seepah.

  “Yes. They saw it.”

  They looked at one another. “The lander floats,” Turam said. “In the air. Even when it was coming down, it wasn’t really falling.”

  “It’s called antigravity,” we said.

  “Some would have called it magic.”

  “Do you believe in magic?”

  “There are demons. The man with the robe, you said he had a staff. What did it look like?”

  “It was just a staff.”

  “Was it decorated in any way?” This came from Turam.

  “There was a symbol on the top.”

  “Describe it.”

  “An ‘X’ inside a circle.” I drew a picture.

  They turned and looked at one another, nodding. I’d picked up enough of the language to catch the comment from Seepah: “I thought so.”

  “I think,” said Viscenda, “that you ran into some true believers.”

  Turam commented: “They’re religious fanatics. Horgans. They think the Dark Times were brought on because a lot of people weren’t living according to their theology.”

  “The Horgans?”

  “They’d been preaching for centuries that the final days were coming.” He made a strange noise in his throat. “Now they’ve come and gone, and the Horgans are still here. Left behind. I wonder what they make of that.”

  Belle faded out of range, but we stayed where we were, trying to talk to one another without her help, relying instead on a combination of laughter and patience. We drank the local hot brews, and eventually Viscenda gave up and left, saying that she had work to do. Or something like that. I had never realized that so much communication was non-verbal. That language was a kind of refinement of information passed by other means. We discovered that, with the most limited vocabulary, a half dozen words, you could still cover a lot of ground. And eventually, Belle came back.

  We asked her to get an explanation about “the Dark Times.”

  When she asked for details, they all looked surprised. “Well,” said Turam, “it was, in fact, the end of the world.”

  “What happened?”

  That brought laughter. “It got dark,” said Seepah. “And cold.”

  “When?”

  �
��Do you really not know?”

  “Humor us.”

  Belle complained she had no phrase for “humor us.” Alex said, “Just ask them to assume we’ve been asleep a long time and to tell us what happened.”

  “Twenty-four years ago,” Turam said, “the skies grew dark, and the world became cold.” I did a quick calculation: Echo III needed fourteen months to complete an orbit. So twenty-eight years had passed on Rimway.

  “Crops wouldn’t grow. Whole species of animals died off. We got storms more severe than anything anyone had ever seen. Shortages led to struggles over resources. In the end, people died by the millions.

  “It went on for eighteen years. In fact, it never really went away. It’s still colder here than it used to be. But the skies have cleared. More or less.”

  For a long moment no one spoke. Then we prompted Belle again: “Why? What caused this to happen?”

  “We don’t know. Maybe the Horgans are right. Maybe it was a divine judgment. I have no idea.”

  Somebody who had stopped to listen said that it was, and a woman standing off to one side remarked that the notion was crazy.

  “How did you survive?” we asked.

  Seepah answered: “We were lucky. We were here. At Akaiyo.”

  “Akaiyo?”

  “It means,” said Turam, “the sacred place. It was designed as a place where you could escape, for a time, the outside pressures. Ironic, isn’t it?”

  “So this is a religious community?” I said.

  “No. Think of it, rather, as a place of contemplation. Where the only thing barred is a closed mind.”

  “Good,” I said. “If we had to crash, this was the place.”

  Turam smiled. “We’re reasonably well isolated here. When the troubles began, most of the people who were here went home. And probably died. A few made it back. With terrible accounts of life on the outside. Others arrived during the years, and stayed.”

  “It was the greenhouses that saved us,” said Seepah. “We already had two when the Dark Times began. Kaska—he was the director at the time—knew immediately that greenhouses were essential for survival, and they built several others and began to utilize them.”

  The room was still.

  “We have a hard life here,” said Turam. “But it is a life.”

  “The Dark Times,” said Alex, when we were alone. “That’s the connection.”

  “I’ve been thinking the same thing. It began about the time the Silver Comet was here.”

  “Yes.”

  “It sounds like an asteroid strike.”

  “I suspect that’s exactly what happened, Chase.”

  “So maybe she saw it. And couldn’t help. She saw millions die. And never really recovered from the experience.”

  “If that had happened,” Alex said, “wouldn’t her passengers have said something?”

  “Not necessarily. They might not have known. They wouldn’t have had access to the images from the scopes. To them, it would just have been a matter of watching the asteroid go down.”

  Alex shook his head. “I think there’s more to it.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t feel right.”

  And suddenly I saw what had happened. “There’s another possibility, Alex. We know Cavallero didn’t do his job properly. He never found the civilization that was here. Probably never looked. So Rachel came out here on a tour. Probably because Cavallero had noticed an asteroid on a course toward Echo III. It was close enough that they could steer it into a collision. And that’s what they did. Give the customers a real thrill. Nobody ever knew there were people here. There was no electronic signature, so Rachel didn’t see them either. Until it was too late.”

  Alex pressed his fingertips against his forehead and closed his eyes. “You think she dropped a rock on them?”

  “Yeah. The more I think about it—They set the asteroid on a collision course, then sat back and watched it happen. When it hit, it threw up a lot of dust. The weather got cold. Crops failed. When she realized what she’d done, she went back and screamed at Cavallero.”

  “But what about the Amicus Society?”

  “The Amicus Society? What do they have to do with it?”

  “And Winnie.”

  When he saw I didn’t know what he was talking about, he sighed. A man of infinite patience. “Rachel’s pet gorfa. We saw two of them, remember? And she said she had a third. All strays.”

  “I’m sorry, but I—?”

  “Chase, do you think for a minute that a woman who took in strays and worked for at least one animal-rights group would drop an asteroid on a green world?”

  We waited twenty minutes until Belle was in range again. Then Alex called her. “Belle, I want you to go off course for a while.”

  “Okay. Why?”

  “Look for a crater. One that was formed recently.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  Allyra is the goddess of the mind. She is the antithesis of faith, as the word is usually understood. She does not say to us, believe in this or that dogma. Rather, she tells us, show me. If you have a proposition, a theory, a concept, bring the evidence forward. If you have none, be cautious. If it is suspect, be honest. In any case, remember your own fallibility.

  —Timothy Zhin-Po, Night Thoughts

  Alex had also noticed the winged statue in the director’s office. He was hoping they might be induced to offer it to us. So he decided to provide the opportunity when he next saw Viscenda, which was outside on the deck. We were sitting out with a couple of the herdsmen and a teen worker, enjoying an unseasonably warm afternoon, when she came in from a tour of the greenhouses. He commented on how beautiful it was. And that the figure appeared to be a goddess. “I’ve noticed that most of the rooms have a sketch of her.”

  Viscenda glanced at the teen, inviting him to answer. “She is Allyra,” he said. “Not a goddess.”

  “At least,” added Turam, who’d just come out behind us, “not in the usual sense.”

  “Who is she, then?”

  Turam explained that she represented free thought. Free inquiry.

  “In her presence,” said Viscenda, “no dogma is safe. In her time, she stood almost alone against those who claimed to know how we should behave, how we should live, and who should be running things. She is the relentless enemy of certainty.”

  “She’s a mythical figure, of course,” said Turam. “But she represents what the community stands for.”

  Nobody suggested that we could keep her, but when we were alone, Alex commented that he thought the seed had been planted.

  It wasn’t easy to sleep on Echo III. The planet turned too slowly, so the nights and days were too long, and we never really made the adjustment. I was falling asleep after dinner, and wide-awake before the sun came up. The following day I was asleep by midafternoon, and awake a couple of hours after midnight. The community had a system for keeping time, and they had windup clocks, but I was never sure what time it was.

  We were both asleep in the middle of the afternoon when Belle called. “I didn’t want to take a chance on waking Alex,” she told me, “because I know he’s still in some pain.”

  “Thanks, Belle. What do you have?”

  “The crater Alex asked about?”

  “Yes. You found it?”

  “It’s almost halfway around the world from your present location. It is at thirty-five degrees north latitude, in a jungle area. It looks recent. Probably made within the last half century.”

  “How big?”

  “Its diameter is approximately five and a half kilometers. And it’s deep. Impact must have been severe. The surrounding jungle shows the effects for hundreds of kilometers.”

  “Okay. Thanks, Belle.”

  “You think Rachel was responsible?”

  “One way or another.”

  “Do you wish me to resume my prior orbit?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  I told Alex when he woke. He made no effort to
sit up but simply lay there, staring at the ceiling. “Poor woman,” he said.

  I never really became accustomed to the food. I couldn’t forget that the staples had once been part of a living animal. One night they served something akin to a pork-and-beef mix with a choice of vegetables and fruit. And some bread, which, mixed with their jam, was excellent. So I filled up on bread and desserts, which consisted of a variety of baked goods, with flavors I couldn’t identify. I think I put on three pounds the first full day we were there. Which, on top of the other seventeen, was just what I needed.

  We’d seen some suspicion among the community members when we first arrived, as if we were dangerous in some unspecified way, and I don’t think the talking jewelry helped negate that. But by the end of the fourth day, most of them seemed to have decided we could be trusted. If we spoke a language nobody knew, we were nonetheless obviously human. And if we rode a ship that floated on air, it was at least no longer in the skies. In fact, it had crashed. And that, too, maybe, helped get us accepted. We were vulnerable. The young ones no longer hid behind their mothers. The adults said hello and even occasionally stopped to talk.

  “How long,” we asked Turam, “have you been on this world?”

  He seemed confused by the question. So we tried again. “When did humans first arrive here?”

  “Here?” He looked around. “You mean in Kamarasco?”

  “What’s Kamarasco?”

  “It’s this area. Where we are now.”

  “No, no. When did you first arrive on this world?”

  He smiled, as if we were playing a joke. “Is that a religious question?”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Alex, we’ve always been on this world. What are we talking about?”