Jack Mcdevitt - Engines of god

by David Geary

  "How unsafe is this place?" she asked.

  The passageway was too small for him. He changed his position, trying to get comfortable. "Normally, we'd have taken time to buttress everything, but we're on the run. We're violating all kinds of regulations being in here at all. If some­thing goes, somebody may get killed." He frowned. "And I'll be responsible."

  "You?"

  "Yes."

  "Then close the place down."

  "It's not that easy, Hutch. I probably should do that. But Henry is desperate."

  Eddie Juliana had no time to waste. "Red tags first," he said. Hutch glanced around at stacks of cases, most of them empty; and at rows of artifacts: clay vessels, tools, machines, chunks of engraved stone. Some cases were sealed. These were labeled in red, yellow, and blue.

  "Okay," she said, not certain what she was to do with the red tags.

  Eddie moved around the storeroom with the energy of a rabbit in heat. He ducked behind crates, gave anxious directions to someone over his commlink, hurried in and out checking items on his inventory.

  He stopped and gazed at Hutch. "You were planning on helping, right?"

  Hutch sighed. "Tell me what you want done."

  He was thin and narrow with red hair and a high-pitched voice. More than any of the others, he seemed driven by events. Hutch never saw him smile, never saw him relax. He struck her as one of those unfortunate people who see the downside of everything. He was young, and she could not imagine his taking a moment to enjoy himself. "Sub's waiting," he said. "There's a cart by the door, ready to go. Take it over. Carson'11 be there to unload. You come back. I need you here."

  "Okay."

  "You really did come in the Wink, right?"

  "Yes."

  "That's good. I didn't trust them not to change their minds, try to save a buck, and send a packet for the evacuation."

  She looked around at the rows of artifacts. "Is this every­thing?"

  "There are three more storerooms. All full."

  "Okay," she said. "We've got plenty of space. But I'm not sure there's going to be time."

  "You think I don't know that?" He stared morosely at a cylindrical lump of corrosion. "You know what that is?"

  "No."

  "It's a ten-thousand-year-old radio receiver." His fingers hovered over it, but did not touch it. "This is the case. Speaker here. Vacuum tubes back here, we think. It was a console." He swung toward her, and his brown, washed-out eyes grew hard. "It's priceless." His breast heaved, and he sounded very much like a man who was confronting ultimate stupidity. "These cases are filled with artifacts like this. They are care­fully packed. Please be gentle with them."

  Hutch did not bother to take offense. She drove the cart to the submarine bay, turned it over to Carson and a muscular graduate student whose name was Tommy Loughery, got Carson's opinion that Eddie was a basket case, and came back. "We have room on the sub for two more loads," she said.

  "How much can your shuttle carry?"

  "About two and a half times the capacity of the sub."

  "And ours will carry about half that much." He looked around in dismay. "We're going to have to make a few trips. I'd hoped you'd have more capacity."

  "Sorry."

  Stacks of tablets piled on a tabletop caught her eye. They were filled with symbols, drawn with an artistic flair. "Can we read them?" she asked.

  "No," he said.

  "How old are they?"

  "Six thousand years. They were good-luck talismans. Made by mixing animal fat with clay, and baking the result. As you can see, they last a long time."

  Hutch would have liked to ask for a souvenir. But that was against the rules, and Eddie looked as if he took rules very seriously.

  "And this?" She indicated a gray ceramic figurine depict­ing a two-legged barrel-shaped land animal that resembled a Buddha with fangs. It had large round eyes and flat ears pressed back on its skull like an elephant's. The body was badly chipped.

  Eddie glared at her, angered that she could not see the need for haste. But it was also true that he loved to talk about his artifacts. "It's roughly eight hundred years old." The object was intricately executed. He held it out to her. It was heavy. "The owner was probably one of the last priests." A shadow crossed his pinched features. "Think about it: the Temple, or some form of it, had been there since time immemorial. But somewhere toward the end of the fourteenth century, they closed it up. Locked the doors, and turned out the lights. Can you imagine what that must have meant to that last group of priests?" The ventilators hummed in the background. Eddie studied the figurine. "This is not a sacred object. It had some personal significance. We found several of these in one of the apartments. This one was left near the main altar."

  "Company for the dying god," suggested Hutch.

  He nodded, and she realized at that moment that whatever else he might be, Eddie Juliana was a hopeless romantic.

  Two hours later, she was in the air, enroute to Wink.

  "Janet, are you there? This is Hutch."

  "Negative, Hutch. Janet's asleep. This is Art Gibbs."

  "Pleased to meet you, Art."

  "What can I do for you?"

  "Uh, nothing. I was just bored."

  "Where are you now?"

  "Chasing my ship. But I won't catch her for another few hours." Pause. "What do you do with this outfit, Art?"

  "Dig, mostly. I'm sorry I missed you today. I hear you're a knockout."

  Hutch smiled and switched to video. "Dispel all illusions," she said. "But it's nice to hear."

  Art beamed at her. "The rumors are short of the mark," he said gallantly. Art Gibbs was in his fifties, hair gone, a roll of flab around his middle. He asked whether she had been to Quraqua before, what she had done that had so impressed Richard Wald, what her reactions were to the Temple of the Winds. Like the others, he seemed stricken by the impending evacuation.

  "Maybe it'll survive," she said. "It's underwater. And the Knothic Towers look pretty solid."

  "No chance. A few hours after they knock the icecap into the ocean, we'll get huge tidal waves here—"

  She had lost the sun now, was gliding through the dark. Her left-hand window looked out on the Void. She caught a glimpse of the Kosmik space station, a lone brilliant star.

  "Somebody else," continued Art, "will be along in a few thousand years to try again. Be an interesting puzzle, I'd think: hi-tech wreckage on a low-tech world."

  "Art, have you been to Oz?"

  "Yes."

  "What did you think of it?"

  "I don't think we'll ever know what it's about."

  "Doesn't it strike you as odd that it got burned at the same time that the military post was destroyed?"

  "It burned during the same era" he said gently. "Don't forget that the fort disappeared during an epoch of worldwide destruction."

  "That's my point. I think. Doesn't it seem likely there's a connection?"

  "I don't see how there could be." He stuck his tongue in the side of his cheek and frowned. "I really don't."

  "Frank Carson mentioned the connection between the events at Oz and widespread destruction on Quraqua."

  "What could it be? There's only a connection in very general terms, Hutch. The discontinuities occurred over long stretches of time. For all we know, so did the damage inflicted on Oz. But they didn't necessarily happen at the same time. Only during the same era. There's a difference, and I think we fall into a trap when we confuse the two." He paused. "Are you interested in the discontinuities?"

  "Yes."

  "Then I'll tell you something else. It's coincidence, of course."

  "What is?"

  "There's a poem that we have in translation. Wait a minute, let me find it."

  Art walked off-screen. "Have you ever heard of the Scrive­ners?"

  "No."

  "They dominated this area between approximately 1400 B.C., and the collapse of the Eastern Empire, about four hun­dred years later."

  "Scriveners?" />
  "So named because they kept records of everything. Detailed commercial accounts, inventories, medical records, vital statistics. They were quite advanced." He grinned. "In a bureaucratic way. They were a lot like us. They even seem to have had insurance policies. Now, their demise, the fall of the Eastern Empire, and the Second Discontinuity all seem to have occurred around 1000 B.C."

  "Okay." Ten lines of text had appeared on Hutch's monitor.

  "Judging from the commercial nature of the writings they left behind, the Scriveners appear to have been neither philo­sophical nor religious. The Temple was relegated to a his­torical curiosity during their period of ascendancy. But we did find a book of devotions in one of their cities. Valdipaa. Not far from here. Next stop on the trade route west. The verse on your screen is from the book."

  In the streets of Hau-kai, we wait. Night comes, winter descends, The lights of the world grow cold. And, in this three-hundredth year From the ascendancy of Bilat, He will come who treads the dawn.

  Tramples the sun beneath his feet, And judges the souls of men. He will stride across the rooftops, And he will fire the engines of God.

  She read through it twice. "What are the engines of God?"

  Art shrugged.

  "Then what's the point?"

  "Bilat. He was a hero. He was used for a time to mark the beginning of the Scrivener era. He seized power somewhere around 1350 B.C., our time. Hau-kai, by the way, was a kind of Jerusalem, a holy city, symbolic of the best that the faithful could hope for in this world."

  Hutch reread the verse. "Three hundred years later would take them close to the Second Discontinuity." She exited from the screen, and brought Art back. "You're suggesting somebody predicted the event?"

  "We've dated the book. It's one of the oldest we have. Can't read much of it. What we can read is mostly devo­tional."

  "Who did the translation?"

  "Maggie Tufu. Have you met her? Well, anyway, she con­verted the time references. The term that reads as men actually refers to all the inhabitants of the planet, male and female, past and present. And the verb that's rendered as judges seems to imply both judge and executioner." Art seemed simultaneously amused and perplexed. "And, yes—the pre­diction is right on the money."

  "Prophecy's a tricky game," said Hutch. "It's common for religious groups to predict catastrophic events. Get enough predictions, and somebody's bound to hit it right."

  Art nodded. "That would be my guess. But some people here have wondered whether the thing on the moon doesn't in some way mark this world for periodic destruction."

  By 1900 hours, the Temple shuttle was loaded and ready to follow Alpha. Carson checked everything to ensure that the containers wouldn't shift, and watched the sub draw away. Eddie sat stiffly in its bubble with his arms folded, staring straight ahead.

  Carson powered up, informed the watch officer he was on his way, and lifted off.

  The sun had moved behind the peaks, and a cold wind blew across the gathering darkness. The tide was out, and wide stretches of sand glittered in the failing light. Waves broke around the Towers. Carson would be glad to be away, to get to D.C. and to walk in the sun without needing a Flickinger harness.

  Still, he was angry. When he had first come here, six years ago, he had thought of the Temple, with its rock walls, as timeless. Long after he passed to a happier existence, it would be here, as it had been here for millennia. It was a symbol, for all of them, of stability. Of the idea that things that really matter live on.

  He drew back the yoke. The shuttle sailed through the clouds.

  Below, the Knothic Towers were already lost in twilight.

  LIBRARY ENTRY

  When, in the spring of 2187, Alexander LaPlante com­pleted the first phase of the excavation of Sodom, he concluded that the city had been burned, a fate not uncommon in Biblical times. But he offered two addi­tional opinions which created a storm of controversy:

  (1) that the site was far older than had been expected, dating to approximately 5000 B.C.; and

  (2) that a computerized reconstruction of the damage suggested the city had been shattered by something akin to modem weapons.

  LaPlante's grant was cut off in 2189. A second expedi­tion, led by Oliver Castle and Arian Adjani, examined both propositions. They confirmed the earlier date, but found no compelling evidence to support what had by then become known as the bomb thesis.

  LaPlante lost his tenure at the University of Pennsyl­vania in 2195, and is now teaching at Radison University in London.

  —Marjorie Gold

  Dead Sea Excavations

  Commonwealth, New York, 2199

  9.

  Quraqua. Tuesday; 2148 hours. (Twenty-eight minutes before midnight.)

  Both shuttles had unloaded their cargo on the Winckelmann, and were on their way back to the surface when the eleven-ton block of supercooled ice that was designated #171 in the Kosmik inventory crossed the equator into the southern hemisphere. With a whisper, it passed over moonlit tundra and pulpy forests, something not quite heard. Shining splinters fell away, and the arid landscape momentarily brightened.

  Snow blew against Alpha's windscreen. Hutch (who had waited for Carson at Wink, and then followed him down) could see the sub and the Temple shuttle, haloed by their lights, docked at the floatpier. The shuttle's cargo door was open; Carson and Loughery were working to move a stack of containers off the pier into the spacecraft.

  Janet Allegri blinked onto her overhead display. "Hello, Hutch," she said. Her hair was pressed down by an energy field. She was speaking from the sub. "We seem to have got a little behind with Plan A." They had intended to pile cases on the floatpier, and have two more complete shipments ready to go when the shuttles arrived. But not very much had made it topside.

  "Weather been bad?"

  "It's been wet. But the problem is people. Everybody's hunting artifacts."

  Well to the south, lightning struck the ocean.

  Hutch understood. Under extreme pressure, Henry was willing to risk the artifacts he already possessed—which were after all duly recorded on hologram—to increase his

  chances of finding what he was really looking for. "Coming down," she said.

  She settled smoothly into the sea, and drifted into the magnetic couplers, which locked the shuttle against the pier. Carson was loading the last container, and his hold was still half-empty.

  Loughery smiled shyly. He was loading a dolly into the sub. The snow slid down his energy envelope.

  "How can I help?" she asked.

  Janet came out of the sub. "Just in time," she said lightly. "We were running short of peasants."

  The sea was calm, but the peaks along the shore, and the Towers, were lost in murk. Carson, who seemed to wear his feelings close to the surface, looked unhappy. "Good to see you," he said, cheering up. "Roll up your sleeves."

  Moments later, they submerged and headed at high speed for Seapoint

  If the skies had been clear, and if they'd been six minutes slower to leave, they would have seen a fireball glide si4ently out of the northeast. They would have seen it arc out to sea, and pass below the horizon. And anyone standing on the pier, even in the thick gloom, would have noticed a sudden brightening of the southern sky.

  She had slept during most of the flight down from Wink, so she was ready to work. Since she was too small to be of much assistance lugging containers around, she asked Eddie whether there wasn't something she could do. He directed her to a storeroom where she found Tommy Loughery.

  "Eddie asked me to get you started," he said. His black hair was in disarray, somewhat in the sloppy style common to graduate students in those times.

  "Okay," she said. "What do I do?"

  He pointed at a table loaded with artifacts. There were wedges, pieces of masonry, pottery. "Most of this just came down from Maggie's operation. They're all from the Lower Temple. And priceless. They get red-tagged. There'll be more later. All of this is high-priority, and should go up on the
next shuttle. We need to pack it."

  "Show me how," she said.

  He produced a stock of plastic cloth and dragged over two of the barrel-shaped containers, which he loaded onto a motorized cart. He held an artifact up to the light, turned it so she could read the four digits on the red tag. "That's the catalog number," he said. "Record it on the packing list." Then he wrapped the artifact in plastic, taped it, and placed it in the container.

  It was simple enough, and she proceeded to clear the table, while Tommy found other things to do. When she'd finished filling both containers, he returned.

  "What next?"

  "We seal them." He picked up a spray gun. It was fed by a short hose that connected to a pair of drums, labeled "A" and "B." He pulled the cart closer, and pointed the gun into one of the containers. "Stand back," he said. He pulled the trigger. A thick white stream slushed out and rolled over the packages.

  "It's poly-6, a low volume, expanding rigid urethane," he explained. "Great packing material. It's biodegradable. And it sets quickly. As you can see." He snapped off the flow.

  "You didn't put much in," said Hutch.

  "Only needs about five percent of volume." He threw the gun aside, clamped the lid down and locked it.

  "The merchandise is fragile. Won't it get crunched?"

  "No. The poly-6 doesn't apply pressure. When it meets resistance, it stops." He handed her the gun. "Just leave the containers on the cart. When you're finished, call me and we'll take them over to the sub."

  George Hackett removed the last of the petrified timbers, held his breath, and smiled with satisfaction when nothing happened. This was as deep as they'd penetrated into the Lower Temple. Beyond, a hole in the wall opened into a chamber that was three-quarters filled with silt. "We'll need to brace the roof, Tri," he said. "On both sides of the open­ing."

  "Okay. Hang on. Braces coming."

  While he waited, George thrust his lamp forward. This could be the inner sanctum of the military chapel, the cham­ber in which priests prepared to conduct services, where they perhaps stored their homilies and their sacred vessels.

  "Can you see anything?" Tri called.

  Yes. There was something, a piece of furniture probably, to his right, half-buried, just out of reach. It had been metal