Juanita Coulson - [Children of the Stars 04]

by Past of Forever (epub)

  “Oh, they’re not tired,” Dan said. He couldn’t resist a jab at his kindred. “That yacht’s equipped with artificial grave and all the planetary comforts. Terra’s royalty always travels in that fashion, unlike us ordinary hardworking xenoarchs. I’m sure they and their pet news hounds are straining at the controls to see our dig—and sneer at it.” He touched his cap to Feo in mocking deference. “I’d love to tag along, but duty calls.”

  “Don’t be rude, Danny,” Hope scolded. “It won’t hurt you to be sociable and...”

  “Not possible. I’m the only xenomech here,” Dan said coldly. “And what I’m doing won’t wait. I don’t have an army of students and flunkeys who can take over my work in my absence,” he added in a final thrust. He spun on his heel and walked toward Dome Hill.

  Kat was standing near the dud pits. As he passed her, she said softly, “Lighten up.”

  “Why? If I hadn’t needed to get this orbital scan chip from their pilot, I wouldn’t have wasted time out at the landing strip at all,” Dan growled. “Don’t forget to read them the camp rules and tell them they’ve got to be out of here in forty-eight hours.”

  “Stop it!” Kat snapped. “Remember why we invited them here in the first place. And come to that, another visit by the robot, and we may be grateful that they—and their ship—are here. We might need a way to transport our injured and children offworld in a hurry.”

  A faint tremor punctuated her words and wiped away Dan’s petty concerns. “Yeah, I know,” he muttered. “I just.. .I just yielded to the temptation to kick them back.”

  She nodded. “You’ve had more provocation than the rest of us. The ship, your career...”

  Her pity made him uncomfortable. Dan hurried up the trail, determined to crack that lock. He’d spent too much time today in childish oneupmanship games.

  Inside the tunnel, he settled himself in between Armilly and Ruieb-An. The Lannon, coordinating frequently with Praedar, kept his constant scans of what lay beyond the barrier updated. The Vahnaj was amassing small mountains of translations from the walls. Ruieb complained that the writing here, close to the main dome, was a complicated dialect of the N’lac dictionary he’d painstakingly assembled. His work, like Dan’s, was going slowly.

  Dan read through the survey wafer the space yacht’s captain had given him. It was a good scan—and it told him nothing he didn’t know. Wherever that robot was hiding, it was well shielded and impervious to prying offworlders’ eyes and most of their tools.

  That check done, Dan got busy on the door mechanism. He’d made little progress so far. More and more, he was thinking in terms of brute force, either on the airlock or straight through the dome’s wall. He had made several plans along that line, and one proposal. Praedar had turned the alternative down flat. No destruction! It would wreck priceless data. Dan’s arguments that time pressures might demand they resort to blasting their way into the dome met with stem repetitions of that “No!”

  During the day, team members dropped in to see how the tunnel crew was doing. Each friend supplied a running commentary on the Saunders’ tour. Dan listened absently, preoccupied. “Won’t believe anything. It’s like talking to rocks!”

  “How can they just ignore our injured and scoff at those robot tracks we collected...”

  “... have to give them points for stamina. They didn’t get winded even when we went kilometers upstream to early dig sites...”

  “... if they patronize us one more time...!”

  In the hottest part of the day, Dan, Armilly, and Ruieb-An were alone. Other offworlders were in the insta-cells. The tunnel was a similar haven, musty but cool.

  Methodically Ruieb-An plowed through layers of inscriptions. He fussed over nuances within the writings, looking for clues, precious keys that could point the way to a solution of the dome’s mysteries.

  “...is Big Dark place... urr... to... world... thing... forever going ... urr... we came here... our... kindred... urr ... from other world thing came here... we were taken... urr... one, one, one, one... to the forever time room and... urr... urr... to the Big Dark... urr!”

  Dan and Armilly looked up from their fluidics elements and remote scanners now and then, listening worriedly to the Vahnaj’s droning recitation. The death of the N’lacs’ civilization was reduced to a handful of phrases on a tunnel wall.

  Did its account forecast the death of other humanoid cultures as well?

  By late afternoon, exterior temperatures had moderated enough that the stream of visitors resumed, with reports on the tour.

  “Should have heard the debate in the cook shack. Hope almost got a box of Chen’s museum relics dumped on her head!”

  “Feo made a crack about us wasting credits on costly vehicles, until Praedar set him straight. The Saunders didn’t want to admit that our trucks and tools are wrecks, and that you’re the reason they run so well, Dan...”

  . . seeing the N’lac village really shook them. The Saunders dug in their heels, still trying to claim Chuss’ people are subhumanoid, but it’s getting tough for them to do that...”

  Between those reports, Dan cleaned fluidics elements, studied Armilly’s probes of what lay behind the door panels, and installed the elements. He noted each failure, recorded what had functioned, retested, checked probes, and tried again.

  There was a disturbing aspect of his effort. At times, parts of the long-unused mechanism appeared to heal themselves, without any contact. Increasingly he had a feeling that he was an ignorant participant in a mutual repair line. What or who was his partner? Why were those elements—different from fluidics—suddenly coming back into the alien circuit? It certainly wasn’t because of anything he’d done.

  The Saunders arrived at the domes. The commotion in the mural room distracted Dan, though Armilly and Ruieb-An seemed to blot it out. Dan secured his gear temporarily and went back along the tunnel.

  A confused scene awaited him. N’lacs were kneeling in fearful adoration before the painting. Sheila and some of Getz’s students were describing the intricacies of the ancient glass oven to Kimball and some of Hope’s aides. Rei Ito was recording, while Praedar, Kat, and Joe pointed out implications in the mural to Feo and his wife.

  Chuss divided his focus between the painting and the off-worlders’ conversation. “Is old time. See? Here. Many-fathers-ago. Here come Evil Old Ones.” Chuss sidled below the images, waving to particular sections of the pictorial history. “Bad time. They take us away through Big Dark to Old Ones’ world. Change us. Make us into hands.”

  The Saunders listened courteously. Did Dan detect a crack in their facade? At least they weren’t being rudely scornful, as they had often been at the Xenoarchaeological Assembly. Chuss’ intelligence and fluency was kicking hard at their long-held preju-

  dices, though Dan had little optimism that any breach there would be permanent.

  The N’lacs’ young leader patted his chest. “Many-fathers-ago escape. Look there. Much danger in the forever time. They come back through Big Dark.” With a broad sweep of his arm, he traced that flight. “Many far aways. Many strangers. N’lacs not see. Not smell. Not feel. Is nowhere. Go there-here blink blink. ..”

  The tale interlaced with the one Ruieb-An was compiling from ancient N’lac writings. There were connotations between Chuss’ words and the lines of Ruieb-An’s dictionary. A startling concept stirred in Dan’s mind—an idea he’d toyed with for weeks, subconsciously, and refused to meet squarely.

  Matter transmission!

  No! It couldn’t be! That theory had been tested again and again and again, by Terra, by the Whimeds, Vahnajes, Lannon, the Rigotians, and the Ulisorians. It simply did not work. Impossible!

  How would Praedar counter that? “Impossible in humanoid technology. We do not deal with humanoids.”

  Voices droned on. Dan didn’t hear them.

  What if there was no spacecraft? What if there had never been a spacecraft? Praedar had pointed out that the expedition might have made incorrect g
uesses about the demons of N’lac legends and about this site’s having been a capital city. They’d all made assumptions as well about the legends of the slaves’ escape.

  Dan had ignored logic—because the obvious conclusions ran counter to every technological law humanoids were taught and believed.

  He envisioned a desperate handful of frightened N’lacs, plotting how they’d break free from their monstrous captors. For the first time, Dan saw all the objections to that theory.

  They were not the objections the Saunders had thrown at Praedar.

  This had nothing to do with claims and counterclaims of which dig world had been the colony and the N’lacs’ planet of origin or with differing schools of xenoarchaeological evidence collection and interpretation.

  The concept was so shocking, so radical, that it threatened to upend a lot more than the opposing ideas of the scientific teams.

  And if Dan was right, considerably more was at stake here than the survival or failure of his expedition.

  Voices were arguing about trivial details. “You’ve observed the N’lacs in their home habitat. You must admit they’re humanoids ...”

  “Possibly a backward remnant of the former ruling species on T-W 593. Rather like a pocket of Neanderthalers, on Earth ...” “How can you ...?”

  “This mythos won’t do, my dear Kat. You’re a trained socio. You know how isolated primitives—and even civilized peoples under stress—sometimes adopt and pervert facts and artifacts. The South Pacific cargo cults of the twentieth century, those metal-poisoned Mars Colony miners and their tales of canyon critters existing along the Valles Marineris..

  “You can’t argue away an entire social legend by...”

  “Oh, there are potentials here, Juxury. Perhaps we could work out a cooperative arrangement to assist you. A small grant from our Foundation? I’m sure Anelen is giving you trouble. He’s notorious for credit-pinching Whimed scientists who work with nonfelinoids. But we suffer from no such chauvinism. And Eckard will be no problem. He’s fawned at the Saunder-McKelveys’ heels for years..

  “Don’t listen to them, Praedar. They’re trying to muscle in, take over our dig, make us their flunkeys...”

  “You would alter? Select to accommodate your own theories? Is the price of truth so small, Feo?” Praedar demanded.

  “Of course not. We suggest a pooling of resources...”

  Sheila cut in with withering scorn. “And who will get the final credit? You and Hope! Surprise, surprise. T-W 593 and T-S 31I become a joint project—under the magnanimous control of the oh-so-benign Saunders. No, thanks!”

  “That accusation is completely unjustified...”

  Rei Ito approached Dan. “While they’re debating these fine points, could you fill me in on the N’lac slaves’ technology? This fluidics stuff? In pop science layman’s terms, naturally..

  When he didn’t respond, other conversations faltered, then began to die. He didn’t rouse himself from his trance, though, until Praedar gripped his shoulder. “The door? You have its secrets?”

  “Huh? Oh. Maybe. Or it has mine. It’s repairing itself, in a way.” The xenomech frowned and shook his head. “I don’t like it. But I’m even more worried about what Ruieb-An’s translations and Armilly’s probes are turning up. Something’s going on in the dome’s interior. I think it involves the N’lacs’ forever time. It’s machinery, gradually coming back on line after centuries.”

  “What function does this machinery serve?” Praedar asked.

  “Transportation.”

  “The pieces of the spacecraft the slaves used...”

  “No.”

  Praedar’s crest rose. The alien plainly was startled and intrigued. He gestured for Dan to continue.

  “Everything we’ve found confirms the N’lac tales that the Old Ones are nonanthropomorphic, exoskeletoned, totally nonhumanoid. We humanoids have been thinking down similar vectors— because our technologies are basically very similar. Our inventors all followed remarkably parallel routes to high civilizations and the stars. The Old Ones may have taken some of the identical paths—discovering fluidics, for example. But nothing says they had to match us, step for step. In fact, it’s damned sure they didn’t. They could have found things we missed—or gave up on because we thought they were impossible.

  “Kat says the majority of folktales are based on reality. Forget cargo cults and canyon critters. Look at the mural. What do we see?”

  “The history of the N’lacs,” Praedar said. “Development, stellar expansion, conquest, enslavement, escape.. .”

  Dan pounced. “Escape. How? In a spaceship? Piloting such a craft is complicated. Where did slaves acquire the knowledge? Where did they get the freedom and the open hours to launch and plot a course for a world none of them had seen? They lacked all the skills. And in a spaceship technology, it would have been easy to capture them and cut them off cold. Forget that FTL ship we postulated. You’re not going to find it.”

  Aggrieved, Rosie said, “I can reconstruct from even the tiniest ...”

  Dan shook his head. “It never existed. Trust me. This is my field of expertise. I blinded myself to the truth. Chuss’ ancestors escaped via the same route the Old Ones used to take them into slavery...”

  Feo frowned impatiently. “Which is? Quit spouting tech-mech mumbo jumbo. If you have a hypothesis, let’s hear it.”

  “How about it, McKelvey?” Kimball, Ito’s assistant, said with a smirk. “I can see where you’re headed. And you’re crazy.”

  “Quick judgment, for someone who just landed here and knows nothing about the N’lac culture and their history,” Dan retorted.

  “Never mind,” Hope said. “Feo’s right. What are you hinting at?”

  “Matter transmission. That’s what that gigantic shape inside the main dome is—a transmitting chamber. The N’lacs’ door into the forever time,” Dan replied.

  He got no further. The Saunders were snickering at him. Kimball was laughing out loud. Most of Dan’s teammates, however, weren’t. They mulled over this new, shocking theory.

  “That is the most absurd...” Feo broke off, scratching frantically.

  So was everyone else. The torment had hit them hard and so suddenly that the N’lacs hadn’t given the scientists and news hounds any warning. Just as suddenly as the itching had started, it stopped.

  Simultaneously, the ground shook. Somewhere outside the domes there was a muffled “whump!”

  Baines loped for the door. “That wasn’t a quake. I’m going to get my seismo gear...”

  Offworlders and N’lacs left the domes, the complex, the village. Puzzled and uneasy, they stood in the warm, late-aftemoon sunlight, gazing about. “There!” Dan yelled, pointing east.

  On the mesa, a fireball and smoke column spiraled upward. Indistinct, misshapen, and blasted objects tumbled in the seething cloud, arcing and falling.

  Dan felt sick.

  Baines emerged from the cook shack. He said, “Not a fault acting up, but one hell of a surface shaker...” He froze, gawking at the hideous smear in the sky.

  “Get rovers,” Praedar ordered. “We will see...”

  “No,” Dan warned. “There’ll be lingering radiation for a while. Besides, we can’t help them. The yacht crew’s dead.” He was the focus of attention as he said, “That sort of fireball is unique. It’s the result of a deliberate power feed overload in a starhopper’s propulsion system. The same thing killed Geoff Saunder and the other passengers in the ’47 Ad Astra disaster. I saw a similar blowup on Morgan Settlement a few years ago, when the rebels committed suicide, rather than surrender. Tie down a ship’s main circuit, boost her oscillator to the top, and she’ll take out everything within at least a kilometer’s radius— including whoever pushed her trigger.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Death Song

  Joe, Sheila, and the Saunder team’s biologists insisted on riding up to the plateau in hopes of finding survivors. Baines, toting radiation detectors, accompanied the
m.

  Silence blanketed those awaiting their return. By now the valley was pretematurally quiet. The only obvious sound was the faint hum of the reporters’ vid lenses. Dan glared at them. He didn’t get a chance to tell them what to do with their recording gear. The samaritans were coming back.

  It was much too soon for them to have gone very far. As they climbed down from the rover, their faces told the grim story. Dan’s expert guess as to what had happened was right on target.

  Joe’s sorrowful confirmation sent the Saunders and their aides into grief-stricken moans. Hope, sobbing, leaned on Feo. “Not Topwe! No! They couldn’t be... no, no!"

  “Hush, love,” Feo soothed, his own eyes full. He looked pleadingly at his cousin. “I-I’m sure they didn’t suffer.”

  Dan put rivalries aside. His voice husky, he said, “No, it was quick. Nanoseconds. They never knew what hit them.”

  He hoped it was true. There was a doubt, a horrible vision. The crew, dimly aware of their fatal actions, yet helpless to halt their trip to death.

  Rei Ito was trying to maintain a detached, professional attitude. She didn’t succeed. Kimball was more cold-blooded. He zoomed his lenses at the mourners. Everything was grist for him, including tragedy.

  Dan grabbed the man’s jumper, pulling him off balance. The news hound shouted angrily. Dan tightened his grip, choking the protest. “Shut that thing off, or I’ll make you eat Cam Saunder’s expensive vidder gear.”

  “This... this is news,” Kimball squeaked. “You can’t...”

  Ito stopped the fight before it got any worse. “McKelvey’s right. Shut it off. At least for now.”

  Dan was saluting her sardonically when Praedar bored in on him. “You have said the crew did not know what hit them. Chen made me acquainted with that Terran colloquial phrase. I wish elaboration. What did hit them?”

  Feo and Hope chimed in. “Yes! Tell us! Are you insinuating that Topwe and his people are... were... suicidal maniacs, like those Morgan Settlement rebels? Then why? How?” Hope channeled her emotions into gestures. She wiped fiercely at her tear-stained cheeks with the backs of her hands.