Jack Mcdevitt - Engines of god

by David Geary

  PART ONE

  MOONRISE

  Quraqua. 28th Year of Mission, 211th Day. Thursday, April 29, 2202; 0630 hours local time.

  Almost overnight, every civilization on this globe had died. It had happened twice: somewhere around 9000 B.C., and again eight thousand years later. On a world filled with curi­osities, this fact particularly disturbed Henry's sleep.

  He lay awake, thinking how they were running out of time, thinking how the Quraquat had known after all about the anomaly on their moon. They were unaware of the two discontinuities, had lost sight of them toward the end, and remembered them only in myth. But they knew about Oz. Art had found a coin which left no doubt, whose obverse revealed a tiny square on a crescent, at the latitude of the Western Mare. Precisely where Oz was located

  He wondered whether Linda's surmise that the Lower Tem­ple era had possessed optical instruments would prove cor­rect. Or whether the natives had simply had good eyes.

  What had they made of the thing? Henry buried his head in his pillow. If the Quraquat had looked at their moon through a telescope, they would have seen a city occupying the center of a vast plain. They would have seen long airless avenues and rows of buildings and broad squares. And a massive defensive wall.

  He turned over. Eventually Oz would surface in Quraquat mythology and literature. When we've collected enough of it. And mastered the languages.

  His stomach tightened. There would not be time.

  The anomaly was only rock, cunningly hewn to create the illusion of the city. There was the real puzzle. And the expla­nation for Oz lay somehow with the race that had inhabited this world. This was a race that had built complex cultures

  and developed philosophical systems that had endured for tens of thousands of years. But its genius did not extend to technology, which had never risen much beyond a nine­teenth-century level.

  The door chimed. "Henry?" The voice in the speaker was tense with excitement. "Are you asleep?"

  "No." He opened the door. "Did we get in?"

  "Yes—"

  Henry threw back his sheet. "Give me two minutes. I didn't think it would be this quick."

  Frank Carson stood in the corridor. "You have a good crew down there." In the half-light, he looked pleased. "We think it's intact."

  "Good. That's goddam good." He turned on his table lamp. Beyond the window, sunlight filtered down from the surface. "Did you see it?"

  "Just a peek. We're saving it for you."

  "Yeah. Thanks." The traditional lie amused Henry. He knew they had all stuck their heads in. And now they would pretend that the boss would make the grand entrance.

  If there was anyone with the Academy's archeological teams homelier than Henry Jacobi, he would have been a sorry sight. In Linda Thomas' memorable phrase, he always looked as if a load of scrap metal had fallen on him. His face was rumpled and creased, and his anatomy sagged every­where. He had slate-colored hair, and a permanent squint which might have derived from trying to make out too many ideographs. Nevertheless, he was a master of social graces: everyone liked him, women married him (he had four ex-wives), and people who knew him well would have followed him into combat.

  He was a consummate professional. Much like those pale­ontologists who could assemble a complete brontosaur from a knee bone, Henry seemed able to construct an entire society from an urn.

  He followed Carson through the empty community room, and down the stairway into Operations. Janet Allegri, man­ning the main console, gave them an encouraging thumbs-up.

  Creepers and stingfish moved past the wraparound view-panel. Beyond, the sea bottom was crisscrossed by trail marker lamps. The sunlight was fading from the water, and the Tem­ple was lost in the general gloom. They passed into the sea

  chamber, and put on Flickinger harnesses and jetpacks. Henry rubbed his hands together in pure pleasure.

  Carson straightened his shoulders in his best military bear­ing. He was a big man with a square jaw and intense eyes that saw the world in sharp colors. That he was a retired colonel in the army of the North American Union would surprise no one. "This is just the beginning, Henry. I still say we should hang on here. What are they going to do if we refuse to leave?"

  Henry sighed. Carson didn't understand politics. "They would put a lot of heat on the Academy, Frank. And when you and I went home, we would find ourselves back in classrooms. And possibly defending ourselves in court."

  "You have to be willing to take risks for what you believe, Henry."

  He had actually considered it. Beyond Earth, they knew of three worlds that had given birth to civilizations. One of the civilizations, the Noks on Inakademeri, still survived. The inhabitants of Pinnacle had been dead three-quarters of a million years.

  And Quraqua.

  Quraqua, of course, was the gold mine. Pinnacle was too far gone, and since the Noks were still in the neighborhood, the opportunities for investigation were limited. Nonetheless, there was hardly a graduate student who hadn't found a buried city, uncovered the key to a mass migration, tracked down a previously unknown civilization. It was the golden age of archeology. Henry Jacobi understood the importance of saving this world. But he had no inclination to risk anyone's life in the effort. He was too old for that sort of thing.

  "Does Maggie know we're in?"

  "They're getting her now. The poor woman never gets any rest, Henry."

  "She can rest when we're out of here." Maggie was his chief philologist. Code-breaker, really. Reader of Impossible Inscriptions. The lamp on his left wrist flashed green. He activated the energy field.

  Carson punched the go pad, and the lock cycled open. Water sloshed in over the deck.

  Outside, visibility was poor. They were too close inshore: the marker lights always blurred, the water was always full of sand, and one could seldom see the entire Temple.

  The Temple of the Winds.

  A bitter joke, that. It had been submerged since an earth­quake somewhere around Thomas Jefferson's time created a new shoreline. The Temple was a one-time military post, home for various deities, place of worship for travelers long before humans had laid bricks at Ur or Nineveh.

  Sic transit.

  Fish darted before him, accompanied him. Off to his left, something big moved through the water. Carson turned a lamp in its direction, and the light passed through it. It was a jelly. Quite harmless. It rippled, blossomed, and swam lei­surely on its way.

  A broad colonnade masked the front of the Temple. They settled onto the stone floor, beside a circular column. It was one of ten still standing. Of an original twelve. Not bad, for a place that had been through an earthquake.

  "Frank." Linda's voice broke in on his earphones. She sounded pleased. And with good reason; she had planned this aspect of the excavation. She'd taken a couple of chances, guessed right, and they'd broken in well ahead of schedule. Under the circumstances, the time gained was critical.

  "Henry's with me," said Carson. "We're on our way."

  "Henry," she said. "We're open as far back as we can see."

  "Good show, Linda. Congratulations."

  The Temple entrance gaped wide. They swam into the nave. Lines of colored lights trailed off through the dark. It always seemed to Henry that the lamps exaggerated the size of the place.

  "Blue," said Carson.

  "I know." They followed the blue lamps toward the rear. Only vestiges of the Temple roof remained. The gray light from the surface was oily and thick against the cheerful glow of the markers.

  Henry was in poor condition. Swimming tired him, but he had declared jets too dangerous to use inside the excavation. He had to live by his own rules.

  The glowing blue track angled abruptly off to the left, and plunged through a hole in the floor.

  He could hear Linda and Art Gibbs and some of the others on the common channel. They were laughing and cheering him on and congratulating one another on the find.

  He swam down the labyrinthine approach tunnel. Carson stayed to his
rear, advising him to take his time, until Henry

  finally lost patience and asked him to be quiet. He rounded the last bend and saw lights ahead.

  They stood aside for him. Trifon Pavlaevich, a husky Russian with a giant white mustache, bowed slightly; Karl Pickens beamed; and Art Gibbs floated proudly beside Linda.

  Linda Thomas was a redheaded dynamo who knew what she was doing and didn't mind sharing credit with her col­leagues. As a result, they loved her. She stood over a shaft, waving him forward. When he reached her, she shook his hand, and their fields glimmered. "All right," he said briskly. "Let's see what we've got." Someone pressed a lamp into his hand. He lowered it into the darkness, saw engravings and bas-reliefs, and descended into a chamber whose dimensions reached beyond the limits of the light. The walls were busy, filled with shelves and carvings. There were objects on the shelves. Hard to see precisely what. Maybe local sea life, accumulated before the room was sealed. Maybe artifacts.

  His team followed. Trifon warned them not to touch any thin. "Got to make a chart before anything gets moved." We know, Tri.

  Lights played across the wall-carvings. He could make out animals, but no likenesses of the Quraquat. Sculptures of the intelligent species were rare, except in holy places. In any age. And among most of their cultures. There seemed to be an imperative that prohibited capturing their own image in stone. There would be a reason, of course, but they had not yet found it.

  The floor was covered with a half-meter of silt. Other chambers opened beyond. And voices echoed happily in his phones:

  "This used to be a table." "The symbols are Casumel series. Right?" "Art, look at this." "I think there's more in back." "Here. Over here."

  And Linda, in the room on the north side, held a lamp up to a relief which depicted three Quraquat figures. Trifon delicately touched the face of one of the images, trailing his fingers across its jaw, along the thrust of its mouth. The Quraquat had been warm-blooded, bipedal, furred creatures with a vaguely reptilian cast. Alligators with faces rather than long jaws and mindless grins. These were robed. A four-legged beast stood with them.

  "Henry?" She motioned him over.

  The figures were majestic. They radiated power and dig­nity. "Are they gods?" he asked.

  "What else?" said Tri.

  "Not strictly," said Linda. "This is Telmon, the Creator." She indicated the central figure, which was dominant. "She is the Great Mother. And these are her two aspects: Reason and Passion."

  "The Great Mother?" Henry sounded surprised. The Quraquat at the time of their demise had worshipped a supreme male deity.

  "Matriarchal societies have been common here," she said. Tri was taking pictures, and Linda posed beside the figure. For perspective, more or less. "If we ever get a decent analy­sis on the Lower Temple," she said, "we'll discover that was a matriarchy. I'll bet on it. Moreover, we'll probably find Telmon in that era as well."

  Carson's voice came in on Jacobi's personal channel. "Hen­ry, there's something here you'll want to see."

  It was in the largest of the chambers, where Carson waited before another bas-relief. He waved Henry nearer, and raised his lamp. More Quraquat figures. These seemed to be set in individual tableaus. "There are twelve of them," he said in a significant voice. "Like the Christian stations."

  "Mystical number."

  Henry moved quietly around the room. The figures were exquisitely wrought. Pieces had broken away, others were eroded by time. But they were still there, frame after frame of the Quraquat in that same godlike dignity. They carried rakes and spears and scrolls. And, near the end, a fearsome creature with partially hooded features appeared.

  "Death" said Linda.

  Always the same, thought Henry. Here or Babylon or New York. Everybody has the same image.

  "What is this? Do you know?"

  Linda was glowing. "It's the story of Tull, the Deliverer. Here—" She pointed at the first tableau. "Tull accepts the wine of mortality from Telmon. And here he is behind a plow."

  Quraquat mythology wasn't Henry's specialty. But he knew Tull. "Christ figure," he said. "Osiris. Prometheus."

  "Yes. Look, here's the visit to the armorer." She drifted along the friezes, pausing before each. "And the battle sequences."

  "There's a problem here somewhere," said Carson. "The myth is later than this period, isn't it?"

  "We're not sure of very much yet, Frank," said Linda. "And maybe this place isn't as old as we think. But that doesn't matter as much as the fact that we have a complete set of tableaus."

  "Marvelous," said Henry. "They'll put these in the West Wing and hang our name on them."

  Someone asked what they represented.

  "Here," said Linda. "It begins here. Tull is an infant, and he's looking down at the world."

  "It's a globe," said Art. "They knew the world was round."

  "That knowledge was lost and recovered several times during their history. Anyway, Tull envied the people on the world."

  "The Quraquat."

  "Yes."

  "Why?"

  "It's not clear. The Quraquat apparently thought it was obvious why an immortal would behave this way, but they didn't explain it. At least not in any of the records we've been able to find.

  "Over here, he's assumed a devotional attitude. He is requesting the gift of mortality from his mother. Look at the universal outstretched hands.

  "And here"—she moved past Henry, pointing—"here, he is a teacher."

  And here, caught up in war. Arm raised. Expression fierce. His right hand was broken off. "He would have been holding a weapon," she said. "He was at a disadvantage, because when they gave him mortality, they did not deprive him of all his divine attributes. He understood the suffering of his enemies. And he could see the future. He knew that death in battle awaited him. And he knew the manner of its coming."

  The crocodilian image of the god-hero was not without its nobility. In one frieze, he contemplates mortality in the presence of dark-robed Death.

  "Eventually," said Linda, "he asks that his godhood be restored. Here, look at the supplicating hands."

  Henry nodded. "I assume it was restored?"

  "Telmon left the decision to him. / will comply with your wish. But you have chosen by far the better part. Continue in your present course, and you will be loved so long as men walk in the world. She didn't say 'men,' of course, but used the Quraquat equivalent." Linda illuminated the final tableau. Here, he has made his decision, and puts on his armor for the last time.

  "After his death, his mother placed him among the stars." She turned toward Henry. "That's the point of the myth. Death is inevitable. Even the gods are ultimately subject to it. Like the Norse deities. To embrace it voluntarily, for others, is the true measure of divinity."

  The dark, robed figure was disturbing. "Something familiar about it," said Henry.

  Carson shook his head. "It just looks like your basic Grim Reaper to me."

  "No." He had seen the thing before. Somewhere. "It isn't Quraquat, is it?"

  Art pointed a lamp at it. "Say again?"

  "It isn't Quraquat. Look at it."

  "No, it isn't," said Linda. "Does it matter?"

  "Maybe not," he said. "But take a close look. What does it remind you of?"

  Carson took a deep breath. "The thing on lapetus," he said. "It's one of the Monuments."

  Dear Phil,

  We got a complete set of the Seasons of Tull today. I have attached details of the design, and tracings of eight wedges with inscriptions in Casumel Linear C. We are exceedingly fortunate: the place is in excellent condition, considering that it was close to sea water for most of its existence, and in the water for the last few centuries.

  Time was, we would have had a major celebration. But we are getting close to the end here. We'll be turning everything over to the terraformers in a few weeks. In fact, we are the last team left on Quraqua. Everybody else has gone home. Henry, bless him, won't leave until they push the button.

/>   Anyway, your wunderkind has struck gold. Henry thinks they'll name the new Academy library for me.

  Linda

  —Linda Thomas

  Letter to her mentor, Dr. Philip Berthold, University of Antioch. Dated the 211th day of the 28th year of the Quraqua Mission. Received in Yellow Springs, Ohio, May 28, 2202.

  2.

  Princeton. Thursday, May 6, 2202; 1730 hours.

  Hutch killed the engine and the lights, and watched the first wave of office workers spread out through the storm. Most headed for the train station, an elevated platform lost in the hard rain. Some huddled in the shelter of the Tarpley Building, and a few—the more prosperous—dashed for their cars. The sky sagged into the parking lot, its underside illu­minated by streetlights and traffic.

  His lights were still on, but the blinds were down. It was a corner office on the top floor of a squat utilitarian building, a block of concrete and glass, housing law firms, insurance agents, and jobbers reps. Not the sort of place one would associate with romance. But for her, just being here again, just seeing it, set her internal tides rolling.

  People were piling up at the main doors, pulling their collars tight, wrestling with umbrellas. Two or three energy fields blinked on. Cars swung into the approaches, headlamps blurred, wipers moving rhythmically.

  Hutch sat unmoving, waiting for the lights to go out, wait­ing for Cal Hartlett to appear out on the street, wondering what she would do when he did. That she was here at all angered her. It was time to let go, but instead she was hanging around like a lovesick adolescent, hoping something would happen. Hoping he would change his mind when he saw her, as though everything they'd had would come rushing back. But if she didn't try, she would have to live with that knowledge, and she would always wonder.

  She shrank down into the front seat, and drew the rain and the night around her.

  He had first confessed his love to her in that office. She'd sat in as a systems technician for him one memorable evening, and they'd stayed until dawn.

  How long ago all that seemed now. She had been between flights, and when it all ended everything had seemed possible. We'll find a way.