Parker Interstellar Travels 6: The Celaran Ruins

by Michael McCloskey

  Imanol shrugged. “Continue, my Paichler,” he patronized.

  “A big tower with vines all the way up,” Jason said, pointing upwards even though the tower was not directly visible. “Food from the vines. Those eel things. All this comes together. It’s clear to me, these aliens fly. They can fly out these doors, up to that tower and grab onto those ropes. They rest on these ropes in here. They eat that sap.”

  Jason finished and crossed his arms. It’s reasonable, Jason thought.

  Imanol cleared his throat and sighed.

  “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “Or maybe, just maybe, these guys just hung on the vines all day long like big fat slugs, sucking tasty sap all day long. Maybe they don’t move much at all. Later they built machines to cart them around like those robots we found in there. The machines can easily get in and out through the ceiling doors. Or maybe this place was built for robots only and the food maker produces their version of dog chow for their pets, or domestic animals they brought to feed on. The actual Celarans are six meters tall with fifty legs and have a triple proboscis apparatus to suck the internal fluids out of anything that moves.”

  Jason shuddered. The core worlds grew protein in vats to provide meat without the need to slaughter living animals, but Jason was familiar with the practices Imanol described. In fact many of the frontier worlds raised animals when the local environ could support them.

  “Well, okay, I admit that’s possible,” he said. “I assumed the doors were for Celarans to move in and out themselves. They could be ceiling vents. Or just for the robots.”

  Imanol smiled. “They probably are doors. We just don’t know. Let’s just find some bodies or records or something that just tells us what they looked like.”

  Jason nodded.

  A clacking sound came from the other room. Imanol and Jason turned to look.

  “My link isn’t showing anyone over there,” Jason said to Imanol through a link channel.

  “Weapons out,” Imanol said, already holding a pistol in each hand. Jason took out a stunner.

  I’d take out my rifle, but in these close confines, even that short barrel is a bit unwieldy.

  The sound came from above. Jason heard it twice again. He saw a shadow moving. Something was blocking out the light from one of the ceiling doors.

  Jason and Imanol advanced on the door side by side. Jason saw it.

  “One of the eel things,” Jason told Imanol through his link.

  “Do we have another of those things captured in here somewhere?” Imanol asked.

  “Not this time,” Jason transmitted. “Why can’t it get in? The doors have hardly no resistance to them.”

  “I don’t know.”

  The creature launched itself off the door. Jason could not spot it, until he caught a glimpse of it flying away from one of the scout robots outside. “What happened there?”

  Jason pulled the trapdoor open. “No resistance at all,” he said. He examined the door more closely. He saw slots in the building where the door rested when closed. They matched up to retractable flaps on the door.

  “The door has lock flaps, see?” Jason said. “They lock.”

  “We didn’t lock any of them, not on purpose at least. You just opened it,” Imanol noted.

  “That door locked the thing out! It’s keeping the critters out. Probably to protect the food?”

  Imanol nodded. “This time, I think I’ll agree with your guess. Maybe we can set an attendant to watch and catch this happening again.”

  “Those things make my skin crawl,” Imanol said. “Like the damn Trilisk on Earth.”

  Jason had heard the story from Imanol’s visit to the old Trilisk base on Earth. If there had been another Trilisk AI there, it now belonged to Shiny.

  “I don’t think we have much to fear from those things, just because they don’t seem to be advanced. They’re just wild animals. And not big enough to eat us, I think.”

  “You think. Maybe they’re predators. Maybe they sucked the Celarans dry like a bunch of vampires and that’s why there are no Celarans left here.”

  “They drink sap, supposedly. Did we get any footage of that? Anyway, I’m sure our physiology is incompatible.”

  “I’m glad you’re sure,” Imanol said. “Telisa said they were carbon based life.”

  I wonder what Telisa thinks about them.

  ***

  Telisa was still in the cargo bay late in the local afternoon.

  Having a Trilisk host body is a huge boost. We need this technology on Earth, Telisa thought. She had been up for days. Though she had to eat a lot, her brain was able to replenish its chemical supplies and solidify her memories without any sleep cycles. Between no sleep and a constant energy supply, she felt at least twice as effective as her old self. It was only when she started thinking about Magnus and the past that she lost focus and stopped making progress.

  It was a lot more comfortable to work in the bay since the watchdog machine had moved outside to guard the ship. Telisa found herself thinking about that machine way too often compared to her mission of finding tech for Shiny to get Magnus back.

  Telisa stared at the intricate robot on the table before her. She had scanned the entire structure into the computer and performed an analysis of every mechanical feature of the robot. The results were staggering. The machine had four times the mechanical configurations of anything she had on her ship of the same relative size.

  “What have you learned?” Cilreth asked aloud. Telisa looked up and saw Cilreth walking into the bay.

  “It’s a Swiss army knife of robots,” Telisa said. “This machine can walk, fly, roll into a ball, dig, swim, do all sorts of things. It has a reservoir to collect the sap, but it can also convert it into other substances and spray it. It can launch projectiles. I’m not sure what else it can do but it’s a lot.”

  “Sensible, especially for a colony world,” Cilreth said. “You would want versatile equipment when industrial capacity is limited.”

  “I followed up on a hunch. It’s not just the robot. The clues have been right in front of us. They used food containers for walls. Turns out it’s also a temperature regulation system. Even the doors in that place are like this.”

  “What?”

  “Those trap doors. They do more than we ever realized. Those doors move air into and out of the building, and also around inside the building. They keep animals out. They adjust the light inside, charge dust particles and route them back outside, and even remove tiny organisms from things moving through them.”

  “Delousing doors? Nice,” Cilreth said. “But I guess the big picture is, these aliens focused on things with multiple uses.”

  “Yes. And they made tough tradeoffs for it. This robot could fly a lot better if they had not designed it to do so much. The doors would be stronger doors if they did not do all those other things. This race does not believe in the elegant design of an object to perform just one function very efficiently.”

  “They must be lousy race car builders.”

  Telisa connected to Siobhan in a channel. She included Cilreth in the conversation.

  “Siobhan, are you out there?”

  “Yes? We’re scouting around. We think the eel things communicate with light flashes. Those stripes on their body flicker in ways associated with their actions.”

  “That’s good progress. When you head back in I want you to take another look at the scan of that machine in the building,” she said. “You identified its function. I think there will be more than one function.”

  “Okay, I can do that in just a few minutes,” Siobhan said. Telisa could hear her curiosity in her voice. She closed the connection.

  Telisa looked at Cilreth. “There’s more than meets the eye to this place. But I still haven’t figured out the whole Blackvine angle.”

  “Can this be Blackvine tech?” Cilreth asked.

  “Well, it might be. But it would be just one family of it. It’s not the hodgepodge we found on the station
.”

  “Maybe the Leonardo da Vinci of Blackvines came here and did all this on his own.”

  “We can’t know from this place, I think,” Telisa said.

  “Then there may be answers in the other ruins. Those houses. I want to see if they’re full of strange collections of junk, or more sweet stuff like this.”

  Telisa nodded. “I’m anxious to find out the exact same thing.”

  Chapter 8

  “They look empty from here,” Telisa announced. She was using her new eye to scan the second ruins site from atop one of the artificial spires. Attendants broke away to fly ahead and take a closer look.

  Cilreth waited amid the rest of the team below. Everyone was eager to take a look at the collection of alien structures they suspected were dwellings. They had landed far from the houses, aware that the battle sphere might burn the nearby jungle clear. No one wanted it to destroy anything, much less the very ruins they were here to investigate. As it turned out, the battle sphere did not burn the forest away again, though it did emerge from the ship to patrol the vicinity.

  Everyone still had a lot of questions about the odd creatures that flitted through the vine forest. A day’s study of the video of the night under the tower hinted that the things possessed a modest intelligence. Though the glider-eels did not seem to use tools, they did communicate with each other, either through calls or flashes of their striping, which had some form of bioluminescence. The things fed upon sap from the vines, apparently drawn in from a sharp proboscis at either end of their bodies, inside the “palm” of the three fingers at each end. No one had seen any of them excrete any waste, leading to theories ranging from waste emitted as gas to removal via the oils that protected their skin.

  Cilreth kept a sharp eye out for trouble. The gliding creatures creeped her out severely. She often found herself shivering at the thought of one of the things landing on her and drinking her blood like sap from a neck artery, or attaching to her back like a giant leech.

  Cilreth scanned the vines around them yet again.

  I can’t shake the memory of that awful thing trying to kill me.

  It had been a narrow escape on Chigran Callnir Four. The nasty denizen there had almost succeeded in making her a snack. Even after all this time, returning to a strange planet made her jumpy.

  Cilreth decided to try out her new link’s capabilities. She set it up to suppress her fear on a three hour cycle. The emotion slipped away to be replaced by a calm acceptance of the danger. Cilreth found that she still wanted to remain alert, but no longer felt nervous about it.

  Telisa leaped down from the height of the hollow spire, flipping twice on the way down as she snagged vines to slow her fall. She landed with superhuman grace, coiling up her body to absorb the impact. It reminded Cilreth of the advantage Telisa enjoyed. Cilreth admitted to herself she felt jealous of the amazing abilities, but she chose to focus on the positive side: she wasn’t a ready-made Trilisk slave.

  “Teams. I think you all know the divisions,” Telisa said.

  Telisa referred to the de facto teams they had been using during training. Once everyone picked up on Caden and Siobhan’s obvious closeness, they let them train together. Imanol was Jason’s mentor, which left Telisa and Cilreth as the last pair. Though Telisa had forced drills with larger teams and other partners, for the most part she did not fight it. It was fine with her as long as everyone kept learning and improving.

  Cilreth received a module from Telisa. She opened it in her PV. The houses had been divided into three zones, one for each team. There was a small fourth zone directly ahead of them.

  “We’ll check out this starter zone as one big group,” Telisa said. “If we don’t see any immediate threats, we’ll split up to hit these three zones. I’ve sent some attendants ahead as forward observers.”

  Cilreth added the scouts to her feeds. She saw deep green houses, rising above the vine forest floor on the huge tusk-shaped spires. Each one could hold one of the houses. She saw familiar trap doors and circular windows. Platforms ran around each house, with an orange rail around the edge. The houses tended to blend in with the forest except the rails made them easy to spot. The rails looked just like human balcony rails, except they lacked vertical support struts. Each rail was supported at only two spots on opposite sides of the house it surrounded. In many places the vines from the forest had grown around the house rails, twisting every which way and obscuring a lot of the platforms.

  Those are not really guardrails like we would use them. Children or pets would go under the rail and step right off the edge.

  Siobhan made the same observation and remarked on it through the group channel. “Whatever these things were, they evolved among the vines. They use them. These rails are not to hold things on the platforms, they’re like metal vines ringing each house.”

  “Not so much a vine itself, I think, as a place for the vines to attach up to the houses,” Imanol said. “That’s how they get in and out. There’s no way up from the ground.”

  The explorers followed Telisa through the overgrown vines toward the shared zone. Cilreth saw in the attendant vid feeds exactly what she had seen from their previous scouts and from orbit: the second ruins site was deserted. The vines had moved in and covered many of the houses.

  These things flew. Or they were arboreal. Maybe like birds, maybe like snakes? Sloths? Chameleons? Monkeys?

  Telisa cut a path toward the first cluster of three houses. The nearest one became visible, ten meters overhead, resting on one of the artificial trunks.

  “Smart ropes?” Caden asked.

  Telisa jumped straight up, caught a vine, then pulled herself up with her arms. Cilreth shook her head.

  I should be used to it by now.

  Telisa landed on the platform above, then attached a smart rope and sent it down. Caden commanded his rope to stiffen as he pointed the end upwards, then raised it slowly like an ever-growing bamboo stick. Once the far end reached the rail, it curved around and anchored itself.

  “Feels pretty strong, Telisa said, testing the rail. She turned away and walked out of sight.

  “You should be more careful, Telisa,” Cilreth sent on a private channel.

  “We are being careful. We sent scouts ahead.”

  “Yes well, consider, within the last one hundred years or so, this place was full of Celarans. Now it’s not.”

  “Fair enough,” Telisa sent back.

  Caden had reached the top. He paused at the rail to wait for the others. Cilreth made her way up clumsily, even with the smart rope helping her by creating foot loops and gripping knobs. She looked down near the top and realized she felt uncomfortable even at this modest height.

  Get back in the saddle, old girl. Glad I got my twitch today.

  The others were already poring over the structure. Up close, the house was even more familiar to her even though she had spent most of her time on the ship instead of the Blackvine habitat. The outer surfaces had held up well. Everything looked watertight. Cilreth did a quick check with her link. According to their meteorological models, it had last rained here about nine or ten days ago.

  Cilreth followed Imanol in through one of the springy trap doors. The door was a hexagon, with six flaps. The walls inside were a confused collection of odd angles. Black cords criss crossed some of the walls.

  “Like the Blackvine habitat,” Cilreth said.

  Telisa shook her head. “These houses are different. Cleaner. You see it? These anchor points don’t make any sense for Blackvines. They moved around in boxes. These houses were made for something that jumps, or flies, either naturally or with mechanical assistance. These houses are not Blackvine.”

  “But the habitat—” Cilreth started.

  “The Blackvines lived in the habitat,” Telisa said. “But it wasn’t theirs. Think about the buildings in the habitat. They floated out in the air. They were inhabited by things that fly. Also, the farm we found under the tower. It would not be necessary for Blackvi
nes.”

  “Maybe they killed the original owners off,” Cilreth said. “Either by accident or on purpose. They could be conquerors. Maybe the Blackvines came here and got more of them.”

  “Maybe,” Telisa said. “Maxsym said the windows were matched to the wavelengths they wanted. These windows are different.”

  Cilreth looked at the nearest window. She tapped it experimentally.

  “Well, the star here is different,” she said. “And they may have had different materials to use here planetside than they had when making the space habitat.”

  Telisa did not look annoyed. She walked over.

  “I don’t think the Blackvines have the social coordination to conquer anyone. We need to find more clues about what the Celarans looked like. Like maybe some bodily remains. Did they die in these houses? Did they evacuate? I’m still mulling over the possibility those creatures that flocked around us in the night are Celarans.”

  “Over here,” Siobhan called. Everyone converged on her causing a small traffic jam.

  “What?” Imanol asked for everyone.

  “Behind this wall panel—a complex device. Most likely it controls the house,” Siobhan said.

  “Centralized control instead of distributed devices everywhere like a Terran home?” asked Cilreth. “That’s interesting.”

  “I found at least three more mechanical items inside this wall,” Jason said. “Two look like dispensers of some kind. Another might be a robot like the one we found at the farm tower.”

  “Wait. Siobhan, why do you think that controls the house?” Telisa asked.

  “A web of tiny conductors goes from here to every square meter of the structure.”

  “True enough,” Telisa said, sharing Siobhan’s scan of the wall. “But guess what? The house is made of mutable blocks each a little bigger than our hands. Each block is not only a structural component, it’s also insulation, a bidirectional heat pump, a solar cell, a computer processing component, and a sensor array. These conductors come here because that’s a big battery in the wall. It’s probably a centralized storage ring, harder to make that distributed like the rest of it.”