Echoes of an Alien Sky

by James P. Hogan

  "Care to join me?"

  Lorili summoned just the right touch of hesitation to be proper, but at the same time letting her eyes say she was glad he'd asked. "Sure," she replied simply.

  They left the cabin and headed toward the huddle of buildings at the end of the airstrip. Some loaders with a mobile platform lifter were working amid a litter of crates, bales, and pieces of machinery. The supply chopper that Kyal had traveled in from Rhombus was just lifting off to make its return trip. As they walked, a silver metal pendant hanging outside Lorili's sweater flashed in the sun and caught Kyal's attention. It was in the form of the Venusian "katek" character, also a traditional symbol of good luck.

  "I see you look on the optimistic side of life," he remarked, nodding toward it.

  Lorili glanced down and smiled. "Oh, my mother gave it to me just before I left. You know how mothers can be. It was so I wouldn't forget them, and to remind me to look forward to coming back. Nice, isn't it?" The katek was also associated with homecoming.

  "There's an old story about the katek," Kyal said. Do you know it?"

  "No . . . I can't say I've heard it. How does it go?"

  "I heard it from my father a long time ago, when I was a boy. I'll tell you inside. Let's get some of that food first."

  CHAPTER NINE

  Kyal watched intently across the table as his father tied a line from a mast to the bowsprit of the model sailing schooner they had been making intermittently together for the past two months or more, and snipped off the end. His mother had explained to him how his father was always busy and in demand somewhere or other with his work, which made it all the more significant that he made the effort to spend times like these with his. They were among the times that Kyal treasured the most. It still amazed him that a man's thick, strong fingers were able to perform such delicate tasks.

  "There," Jarnor pronounced. "Just tight enough t be tensioned. You did a neat job with the rigging while I was in Korbisan."

  "When are we going to paint the bow ornaments?" Kyal asked.

  "Oh, that comes later. Patience is one of the most important virtues for boys to work at, you know."

  Kyal moved a tray of cut parts that were still to be added, and inspected the drawing of the bow that was given in the plans. "A fish and a bird holding a katek between them," he said.

  "Yes. Do you want to use the colors it says, or shall we pick our own?"

  "I'd like more blue."

  "Very well." Jarnor began sorting out the pulley accessories.

  "And what do you think about gold for the katek?"

  "I think that would look very nice. . . . Have you heard the legend of the katek, Kyal?"

  "No. What is it?"

  "Oh, it goes back far into the past. It's supposed to hold an important secret. One of the great mysteries that we philosophers and scientists debate all day and write long books about that most people have better things to do than worry about is life and how it began, and where we come from."

  "Who? You mean humans?"

  "Yes. All of us. Supposedly the answer is there, contained in the katek. But nobody has ever been able to decode it."

  Kyal looked at the character with a new interest.

  But nothing obvious jumped out and hit him. "I thought it was just something that people hang on doors or write on labels when they wrap presents," Kyal said.

  "That too. It also stands for good luck. . . . Can you start painting these pulleys? They need to be matt black. It means be safe, and come home safely.

  "Is that's why there's one in the bow emblem of the boat?"

  "Yes, very likely that's the reason. It says something about life too, you know."

  "How?"

  "Oh, the importance of things that are trusted and familiar. You hear these people today who are in such a hurry to change things they don't understand. They think anything new and different is exciting and must be better. And sometimes it's true. But it's also true that things came to be the way they are for good reasons. You should judge people who try to sell you their ideas and theories the way you do a cook. It's what comes out of the pot that matters, not what he says he's going to put in."

  Kyal reflected on it while he unscrewed the cap of the paint bottle. "Is that the same legend as the Wanderers?" he asked.

  "Yes. According to the myth, it was supposed to have been the Wanderers who wrote the secret code into the katek. But then people forgot what it was."

  "How does it go, again?"

  Jarnor grunted and smiled despairingly. "The Wanderers were the earliest people, but they didn't like the ways of the world, so they went to live on the Sun. But the Sun was too hot, so they went to live on the stars. But the stars were either too cold, or too small, or too hard, or too bright. . . . Always there was something. Eventually they came to a Place of Death that was the worst of all, and so in the end they came back home."

  "Before there was a moon, " Kyal put in.

  "So the story says. Froile was born later, out of hurricanes and floods, when the sky fell, and the seas moved over the land. During their travels, the Wanderers had annoyed a lot of inhabitants of other places. On their way home, they frightened a dog so much that he ran away. But the people they had annoyed caught it again, and they sent it after them as a watchdog over the world to make sure they stayed home." Jarnor picked up the plans of the schooner and unfolded them to study the next part. "So perhaps that's all the katek really means, but everyone is looking for something profound and complicated," he said. "Maybe it just means that when you've been everywhere and seen it all, coming home to the things you know isn't so bad after all."

  CHAPTER TEN

  The chow shack was a utilitarian affair of wooden tables and benches, where a cook deposited the offerings of the moment into warmed pots and dishes on a counter at one end, and the patrons served themselves. The fare was plain but appetizing, blending Terran with imported foods into concoctions which maybe one day would acquire names and be celebrated.

  "No, I never heard that story," Lorili said again. "I gather nobody has ever figured out how to decode it?"

  Kyal shrugged without looking up, the bulk of his attention, just for the moment, being taken up by the food. "Not as far as I know."

  Lorili looked at him for a second before commenting, "You talk about your father fondly. You and he must have been close."

  It took Kyal a moment to catch the implication. He hadn't said anything about Jarnor's passing on. So Lorili must have made the connection from his name—a reasonable inference, now that he thought about it, since Jarnor Reen had been known for his contributions to space electromagnetics. But she had refrained from saying anything, allowing Kyal the right to be himself, on his own merit, and not simply "Jarnor Reen's son." He accorded her the same respect by leaving it unsaid now.

  "We were," he replied. "But all things have their span. He had a constructive and rewarding life and was appreciated during his time. That's more than many could say. He was a friend of Director Sherven's, apparently. I only found that out myself yesterday. . . . But enough about me. Tell me more about you. What kinds of things are you finding out in microbio?"

  Lorili finished her mouthful of food while considering how to answer. "Well . . ." she said finally. "Earth is more diverse in climate and geology. And it's a much older planet. Yet there's a strange thing about it."

  Kyal completed it for her. "It only has quadribasic life."

  She looked surprised. "I thought you were electrons and amps."

  "Oh, somebody on the ship was talking about it."

  Life forms on Venus, as any reasonably well-read Venusian would have known, fell into two broad classes that were distinguished by the number of nitrogenous bases available for the structure of their DNA: quadribasic (four base, comparatively rare) and hexabasic (six bases, common). The six-base structure was more versatile, able to specify a more complex coding system and hence, in principle, to blueprint a greater and more complex variety of plant and animal for
ms.

  "So you know about the way things back home seem to be backward?" Lorili queried.

  "As far as I know, hexa forms are the most common and should theoretically have more potential. But it's the quadri forms that you don't find so much that are more varied and advanced." The gap between the two groups was quite marked—although it would have taken a biochemist to appreciate it—and had mystified biologists since they first began sequencing giant molecules. The Venusians themselves were quadri.

  "That's right," Lorili conrirmed.

  Kyal picked up her original point. "But it turns out that all Terran life is four-based. There are no six-base kinds at all."

  "Exactly," she confirmed.

  "Mm." Kyal tried to look businesslike about it, but the significance eluded him. As far as he could see, it was just one of those many apparently strange things that the universe turned up that could only be acknowledged and accepted. "Does anyone have any idea why, yet?" he asked.

  "There are a lot of speculations . . ." Lorili hesitated for the briefest of instants, "not all of them intellectually fashionable." She was testing him again. He decided to rise to it.

  "Well, what can you say? It's just the way things are. Vizek knows best, I suppose." He met her eyes over the top of his mug as he sat back to sip his drink, challenging her to make an issue of it. He wanted to know at this early if he was dealing with someone who couldn't let it go. Charming and intelligent, maybe. . . . But a fanatic was still a fanatic.

  But she opted for a tactful withdrawal. "Maybe. We'll see what more turns up. But anyway, that's the kind of thing we're into."

  Kyal was inwardly relieved. Yes, he would like to get to know her better if circumstances should move them in such a direction, he told himself. An obligation was also now on him to acknowledge the truce by changing the subject. "What are your plans from here?' he asked, returning to his meal.

  "The group I'm with is divided. Some want to get back to Rhombus. Others are talking about detouring via the Himalaya plateau first. I've seen enough of mountains. I'd like to see something of the European cities, but I think I'm outvoted."

  "That's exactly where I'm hoping to go . . ." Kyal started to answer automatically but fell silent as an implication of what he was saying became clear. He paused to wipe his mouth with a chow shack paper towel. No, it was too outrageous a thought. They had only just met.

  He looked up. Lorili's eyes had an impish light. "How long did you say you were down for?" she asked.

  "A week. A Terran week, that is."

  "I'm not due back in Rhombus until Tenday." Evidently some Venusians stuck to their own fourteen-day cycle. Back home, a longer working spell was preferred, followed by enough days off to go somewhere or do something useful. Lorili let things hang for a moment—just enough not to be indelicate. "What would you say to going our own way together?" She shrugged lightly. "Seems simplest to me. And eminently sensible."

  A woman putting a proposition to a man? And she hadn't even asked if there was a Mrs. Reen back home, or some such. That clinched his suspicion.

  For form's sake, Kyal made a pretense of having to mull over it, then grinned. "So long as I don't have to listen to any Progressive propaganda," he said. Better to be clear about that from the outset, he supposed.

  She neither questioned, confirmed, nor denied anything, but took a phone from her jacket pocket and punched in a code. Before Kyal had fully registered what she was doing, he heard her say, "Hello, Iwon. How's it going? . . . Did you get to the dam? . . . . Oh, just fine. . . . Yes, very interesting. Look, I've decided on a change of plan. We've all got different preferences, and there's only a few days left. I've met someone here who has the same agenda that I was hoping for. Why don't we go separate ways for now, and I'll see you back at Rhombus on Tenday? . . . Of course I'm sure. . . . Well, we can always call each other about that, can't we? . . . . Yes. . . . Not really. . . . I'm not sure yet. It depends on flights and things. I'll let you know. But if not, then I'll see you back in Rhombus. . . . Well, have fun there. . . . Whenever." She flipped the unit's cover shut and looked back at Kyal. "No problem," she announced.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Kyal had intended giving Moscow, the former Russian capital city, a miss. It had been obliterated by nuclear bombs in the Central Asian War and never rebuilt thereafter. Hence there was little to be seen there other than a small geological drilling and weather station, and some scattered excavating to probe the ruins. But a supply ferry on its way there from Rhombus and due to make a stop at Foothills Camp was less than an hour away when Kyal checked, and repair crew would be returning from Moscow to the central European region the following morning. Kyal called them, and yes they would have room for two extra. The ferry's stop at Foothills Camp was a brief one, and Kyal and Lorili left aboard it before Iwon and her other friends had returned.

  En route to Moscow, they put down again to drop somebody off at small settlement of colonists at the site of what had been another Russian city called Volgograd, situated by a wide river. Apparently it had been the scene of large battle in the worldwide conflagration the historians were still trying to make sense of, that had happened before the Central Asian War. There was little to see, since it was getting dark by then. Kyal was beginning to wonder if there was anywhere on Earth that didn't have a battle associated with it from some era or another. Killing each other seemed to have been the Terrans' main preoccupation. There was certainly no denying that they became very proficient at it.

  If Kyal was a VIP, the style of life that went with being a notable personage had changed markedly in the day that had elapsed since his coming aboard Explorer 6. The reception party at Moscow took the form of two site workers with a truck, and supper came as meat stew and bread in a prefab hut lit from a noisy motor-generator in an adjacent shed. But the chance to meet some of the field archeologists and geologists, and talk face-to-face with them around the stove until late in the night more than made up for the conditions. Kyal didn't particularly mind roughing it a little in any case. It felt like some of the expeditions to wilder parts of Venus in his student day. Lorili seemed to thrive on it.

  The drilling station was one of a chain strung across northern Asia and the top of the Americas. The huge deposits of graded sediment, silt, amorphous muck forming a band of hills, plains, and swamps around the polar regions, filled with the fossil remains of millions of animals, told of flooding on an immense scale, in which the oceans had surged poleward and then retreated. The most likely explanation seemed to be one or more close encounters between Earth and another massive object—and not too far distant in the past. Significant in this connection was the fact that legends and myths going back to the earliest period of recorded Terran history contained vivid descriptions of skies filled with fiery objects and spectacles of violence unlike anything seen in the present heavens that were consistent with just such happenings. There were even suggestions that the most terrifying and destructive encounters might have been primordial Venus! However, the Terrans of later times refused to accept what Venusians already had no trouble seeing, and wrote it all off as fanciful invention. It seemed to be another part of the Terran proclivity for denying whatever didn't fit with their preconceptions. One of the geologists preferred the simpler explanation that they were collectively crazy.

  Investigations into these and related matters indicated that the old Venusian myths about Froile appeared to have substance after all. Terran astronomic records showed that at the time of their presence on Earth, Venus had no moon. Also, its rotation had been slow and retrograde then, giving it a day that was longer than its orbital period—in contrast to the current rotation giving it a little over 75 days to its year.

  Such speeding up as a young planet aged was consistent with the accepted electrical model of Solar System dynamics. Since planets carried electrical charge, any small initial rotation would constitute a current that would produce a magnetic field, which according to calculation would interact with the solar
field in such a way as to enhance the effect and spin the planet faster. The general observation that planetary rotation rates correlated with magnetic field strengths seemed to support it —although Mars stood out as an anomaly. A newer proposition was that the capture of Froile some time after the Terrans became extinct was responsible, but it was hard to see how an object that small could have imparted the required angular momentum into a body the size of Venus, and the suggestion had not found many takers.

  What had come out of it all, however, was that Froile could have caused the kind of havoc that the old Venusian legends implied when they talked about a time of hurricanes and floods, the seas moving over the land, and the sky falling. If, then, the much earlier Terran catastrophe had indeed involved Venus, the scale of the devastation and the terror induced by it were probably beyond the powers of imagination. The wonder, surely, was that anyone could have survived it at all.