Tinman

by Simon Fairhead

  Qwish went off down the tunnel and knelt by the object. It was dented, and rusted through in places, but it was clear that this object was: a metal bowl.

  Amidst great excitement, the ship's survey team set to work carefully excavating the tunnel entrance. They found the remains of a metallic floor of overlapping segments, and an odd trail across the floor: a path running from the tunnel entrance to the fence, worn smooth by much use. They resolved to dig along the line of the path.

  It was against the fence they found Tinman. Number Six had, for the most part, rusted into metal dust before the men who found him had evolved into their present form, but there were enough precious metals and advanced alloys in his brain cradle to identify him for what he had once been. His rubber treads had formed two faint, elongated black rectangles against the metal floor.

  "What society could have made this thing?" pondered Linsk, as he brushed cautiously at a fragment of glass that had once been part of Six's infra-red optical sensor lens.

  Uriff stood nearby, examining parts that had been labelled and cleaned and were now arranged in plastic trays on top of a folding table. He ran his finger over a curved section of cradle. "They must have had a limited intelligence," he said. He picked up a second fragment, and fitted it to the first. "See here. If a brain were to fit within this container, it would be little bigger than that of a chev."

  Linsk stood up, and went to stand beside him. "And yet they have made an automaton. We can fly to the stars, but we do not have this understanding. What great race has made this thing?"

  "Officer Linsk! Quickly, we have found something!"

  The cry came from near the tunnel entrance. Linsk and Uriff hurried over. One of the team pointed to a jumble of fragments at the edge of the tunnel. A jawbone.

  They dug carefully over the next week. The jawbone had become detached at some point soon after death and was some distance from the rest of the skeleton. The body was found laying on its face, its arms and legs poised as if it was preparing to crawl towards the fence. Specifically, it was poised to crawl towards Number Six.

  Linsk and the commander spent the best part of a month overseeing the examination, labelling and extraction of the fossilised skeleton. The bone was now only a mineral cast of the original material, but the jawbone had been partially buried, perhaps by some carrion feeder that had intended to return later to eat it. It had been buried in a fine mud, in an anaerobic environment. Flesh had been preserved, and the teeth.

  On the site one evening, after the survey team had retired for the night, Linsk and Uriff stood by the fossil remains, laid out on a large tray on a folding table, the bones positioned as they would have been in life. Uriff ran his fingers over the skull.

  "This is pre-flood human. I've seen remains from Earth. This is human."

  Linsk nodded. "We've dated the jawbone. It's around thirty million years old."

  Uriff frowned. "But men were not here thirty million years ago. We only discovered the Wascrow Tunnel, what, a thousand years ago?"

  Linsk nodded again. "I went to study surveying at Helb University in Serra Nev. In the data spheres in the library, there's a mostly corrupted drive written in a very archaic code that says mankind went to the stars before we found the Wascrow Tunnel, thirty five million years ago."

  Uriff waved a dismissive hand. "Linsk, it's a myth. We evolved from monkeys, we built a civilisation, we nearly destroyed our planet, and then we evolved into separate species, the humans and the chevs, one ruling the other."

  "Commander, you don't see it. This might mean the Mimo story is true."

  "I didn't study history. What do you mean?"

  "Thirty five million years ago, during the great flood, men escaped from Earth and went through the Wascrow Tunnel, that they called the 'Lummen Beck' or something similar. They set up colony worlds in what they called the Mimo system and lived there successfully until some disaster wiped them out."

  "When were they wiped out?"

  Linsk wiped his lips with his hand. "Around thirty five million years ago. They didn't have much time on their new colony worlds."

  Uriff picked up the skull and gazed into its eye sockets. "I've seen the survey data of all the known worlds beyond the Wascrow Tunnel. There is no Mimo system."

  "The last data on the sphere suggests a supernova event a few decades after colonisation took place. It wiped out everything."

  Uriff stared hard into the eyes of the skull. Art Parrish stared back.

  Qwish appeared, at the remains of the fallen fence. "Commander," he said, "We've detected a spacecraft, buried two kilometres away. There are lifeforms in stasis, and a being, calling itself Hiroto, trying to communicate in an old Earth dialect."

  Commander Uriff held up Art Parrish's skull and smiled at the blank features. "The dead will speak. Linsk, our funding is secured."

  THE END