Echoes of an Alien Sky

by James P. Hogan

  "There are Terran corpses out on the South Field. We've found twelve so far, a few together, the others strewn out over a wider area. There are more in some of the vehicles." He had an athletic build, with sharp, clean features, dark curly hair, alert eyes, and a lively yet economic style of speech and manner that gave Kyal confidence. The kind of person who knew his job and would get things done with a minimum of talk and fuss, he thought to himself. That would be Yorim's kind of person too.

  "Corpses?" Casselo repeated. The three arrivals from the crawler still connected to the hut's air lock exchanged questioning looks. This added a new dimension to the job, which would probably call for some new expertise to be brought in.

  "How come they weren't spotted sooner?" Yorim asked.

  "They're a fair distance out," Brysek replied. "We've been concentrating mainly here, around the base. Their suits are the same gray as the dust, which doesn't help. You'd think they were meant as camouflage."

  "Military," Casselo said.

  "What kind of condition are they in?" Kyal asked.

  "Shot to pieces," one of the technicians threw over his shoulder from a table by the wall, where he was reading something. Brysek nodded confirmation.

  "We've got some clips. Here, I'll show you a few." He got up and led the way across to a bank of communications gear. The others closed up around as he activated one of the screens and brought up a series of indexed frames showing the remains. They made his point about the difficulty of spotting them. Even from what must have been tens of yards, the twisted gray forms lying amid the dust and boulders could easily have been mistaken for rocks and shadows. Close-ups showed the damage as ranging from lacerated suits and shattered helmets to scattered body parts and fully dismembered torsos. The corpses themselves were not reduced to skeletons, as was universally true of human remains found on Earth, but still possessed their solid softer tissues a dried, shriveled husks covering the bones. All the same, this would make them prize trophies for the biologists.

  "We haven't attempted moving any of them," Brysek said. "They look pretty fragile. Probably best preserved out there, anyway. I figured we'd leave that to the specialists."

  Casselo nodded approval. "Good man." He sent an inquiring look at Kyal. "What do you want to do? Go and see them now, while we've still got the crawler attached outside? Or get settled in and have a look around here first?"

  Kyal couldn't see that it would make much difference either way."Whatever you prefer," he replied. "You're the boss."

  Casselo shook his head. "Not here, Master Reen. This will be your patch now. You might as well get used to it from the beginning."

  It took Kyal a few seconds to adjust to the feeling—like trying on a new coat. Yorim was looking at him with a mixture of amusement and curiosity. "Let's get our bearings here inside the base first," he decided. "A day more won't make any difference to the time the corpses been lying out there." He licked his lips pensively and looked at Brysek. "The last thing we had to eat was a quick snack in the docking bays on the Explorer when we changed ships. "How about starting with the canteen, after we've stowed our things?"

  "We can eat first, right here," Brysek said.

  "I was hoping you'd say something like that," Casselo told Kyal.

  Although the interior of the Terran structures had been pressurized to a comfortably breathable level and seemed to be holding, they put on back harnesses with air bottles, and respirator masks close at hand clipped to the straps, before proceeding through the surface tube and connecting lock. Full suits would have been too cumbersome. In the event of any failure short of explosive—which was hard to visualize as likely—the respirators would get them back to the huts on the safe side of the lock. The precaution would be relaxed once the structure had been fully examined and pronounced safe.

  Walking on the one-sixth-normal-gravity lunar surface was unaffected inside the huts and the Terran sectors, which had been"carpeted" with strips of Venusian G-polarizer panels. Power came from a small fission reactor sunk in a silo by the landing area, which also supplied the rest of the base. They followed Brysek and Irg, a communications specialist who had joined them at lunch in the hut, through into the first of the Terran domes. Somebody called Fenzial, the foreman of the excavating crew below, was due to meet them farther down, where the way had been opened through to the lower levels.

  It was a very different feeling from that of walking among the ruins of ancient Terran cities. There, the effects of time had faded and blurred the once-sharp images, distancing the events that they spoke of and the people who had lived them to remote ciphers. The reality of their having existed was something that was merely acknowledged without any sense of being apprehended directly. It was not so in the rooms and corridors of the buildings that constituted Triagon. With no breeze even to carry in dust, no atmosphere to bring corrosion, and not a microbe to initiate any process of decay or decomposition, the surroundings were as clean and unchanged as if they had been lived in yesterday. Brysek pointed out more instances of damage as they passed: a door broken off its hinges in one place; holes and gouges in the inner walls in several others. There had been further signs of unrest in the form of upturned furniture, abandoned utility items such as tools and kitchen ware, and clothes and other personal effects scattered over the floors. These had since been catalogued, and either stored or shipped away for further study by archeologists who had been here earlier.

  They came out from the bottom of a stair well into the vault that the original survey team had found to be relatively bare of much that was interesting, taken to be a storage cellar, and shown on their drawings as the lowermost level of the complex. However, when Brysek, on receiving Kyal's directions based on the sonar scans, had his people cut through some heavy steel shutters at the far end that the survey people had decided probably wouldn't justify the labor of tackling at that early stage, they found the connection a whole deeper extension of Triagon which up until then nobody had suspected existed.

  The formerly bare outer vault had become something of a staging area for exploration of the lower levels, with boxes of hardware and materials, switch panels controlling bundles of cables snaking over the floor and into the opening where the cut away shutters stood propped against the walls on either side. A couple of technicians were busy at work table littered with tools. Brysek and Irg picked up hand flashlamps from a rack as the party came to the entrance between the shutters. "It's huge down there," Brysek explained. "We don't have permanent lighting fixed up everywhere yet. Still a lot of shadows and dark areas. It's easy to trip over things." Kyal, Yorim, and Casselo followed suit and picked up a lamp each.

  "Is this the only way down to the whole lower section?" Casselo asked, looking puzzled.

  "As far as we know," Brysek said.

  "Seems odd."

  "No other way in, at the back, maybe?" Kyal suggested. "If it's that big, you'd think there would be some kind of emergency exit somewhere."

  "Maybe there is," Brysek answered. We haven't gone all the way through yet." They moved on into a corridor lined by doors and strung with overhead lamps, converging away for what must have been hundreds of feet. Even Kyal, who had been the first to study and measure the sonar scans, was surprised by the sudden feeling of roominess.

  Fenzial, the excavating foreman, was waiting as arranged. The introductory formalities were completed, and he took the lead from there. Everything here was more spacious and lavishly fitted than the levels they had passed through above —not anything that would have qualified as luxury, to be sure, but a definite step up from utilitarian concrete floors and painted walls. First were what had obviously been offices, and then beyond them, larger rooms that appeared to have been for day use or sitting areas, with large chairs, tables, and collections of books—another priceless find for the linguists—and cupboards containing things like games, household oddments, and children's toys. Next was a large communal dining area and kitchens. Unlike the levels above, which had been primarily fu
nctional, with limited living space to accommodate the occupants, the space here seemed to have been devoted mainly to habitation. All very strange.

  A difficulty in exploring the lower complex, which had slowed things down considerably, was that stairs from the surface only extended down as far as the vault on the far side of the steel shutters. Below the level they were on, the only access was by means of elevators, and the elevators were not working. Hence, Brysek's workers had been obliged to rig up a system of makeshift stairs in one of the shafts. The next level down contained various workshops, a pharmacy and medical center, and a section at one end containing communications and computing equipment. This was Irg's specialty, and where he had been spending most of his time since the lower complex was opened up.

  Despite their lag in space technology, Terran electronics was astoundingly advanced. If anything, it had been ahead of the state of the art of Venus. The technical historians attributed it to the combined effects of the subordination of just about everything else to military demands and the ferocious competitiveness of Terran economics. Ironically in some ways, the greater lifting power and on-board cosmic supply tapping of Venusian spacecraft had made the need for extreme miniaturization less pressing. The Terrans' ultra-dense and fast circuitry had also given them computers of phenomenal power and complexity, but none of the remnants discovered on Earth were in a condition that would allow much to be learned from them. But here was equipment that had been preserved in a deep-lying, radiation-protected, sterile environment, and if the intricacies could only be unraveled and decoded, looked as if it might well still be functional.

  Irg patted the side of a cabinet that had been opened up to reveal rows of tightly packed racks and assemblies. More similar parts were strewn across several of the counter tops, connected to tangles of Venusian instruments and monitoring screens. "If we can work out the powering and operating protocols, I'm certain we can get this working," he declared. "It's like new."

  "You mean we might get to hear some of that Terran music finally?" Yorim said.

  "And more. I'd say there's a good chance of accessing bulk storage media that hasn't deteriorated. Think what that could mean! Whole libraries of information at once, instead of things having to be reconstructed from fragments scattered all over the place."

  Kyal thought about the still images that he and Lorili had looked at in the collection at Foothills Camp. "You might even be able to bring some Terran movie clips back to life," he mused to Irg.

  "Exactly."

  The next two levels they clambered down to were all sleeping accommodation—both small private rooms and dormitories. That was as far as they had penetrated, Fenzial told them as they came back out into the corridor from another of several identical rooms. The lighting here was sparse, and they were having to use their hand lamps to move around. There was more below, but the stairs down were still being constructed. Fenzial waved a hand to indicate the direction into the shadows and darkness ahead of them. "We've only just got to the end that way. "Well, we think it's the end."

  "More of the same?" Brysek asked.

  "And a couple of bigger rooms. They look like a play room and a gym. Showers and baths, and what probably a laundry," Fenzial told him. Brysek scratched his head, looking baffled, and looked at Casselo. Casselo looked from Kyal to Yorim.

  "What do you make of it?" he asked them.

  Yorim shrugged. "It beats me. How come all this living space and comfort? It feels more like a hotel than a moon base."

  Kyal stared at Casselo with an odd, thoughtful look on his face, then turned to take in the surroundings again. Finally, he brought his gaze back to the others. "How about a survival shelter?" he suggested.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  In the Molecular Biology section of the ISA Laboratories at Rhombus, Lorili checked through her incoming mail. A smile brightened her face when she saw Kyal's name among the list of senders. They had arrived on Luna without mishap, he informed her, and he was working with a good team there. The stillness and desolation made Moscow look like the center of Thagar—the principal city of Ulange back on Venus. The feeling of newness about everything in the Terran installations was eerie. You found yourself half expecting a live Terran to come around a corner or out of a door at any moment. The electrical constructions that he and Yorim had gone there to study were an enigma. There was much to do yet, but what they had seem so far seemed to reinforce the original impression of an experimental facility built to test a technology that the Terrans weren't supposed to posses. It was all very intriguing. Anyway, he hoped she was settled back in and being creative after her vacation. Oh yes, and there were hopes here of reactivating some of the Terran electronics; so they might actually see some of those cities that they visited brought to life before very much longer. Wouldn't that be something? He signed the message "Fondly."

  Lorili read it again. It was a warm and reassuring feeling that he had found time to remember her in the middle of all that seemed to be going on up there. She moved the file to her Reply queue and opened the next. It was from a research group on Venus that she contributed to, and contained the results of comparisons of a selection of Venusian bird DNAs with those from Terran species. All Venusian birds had quadribasic DNA. The similarities to the Terran types were uncanny. Lorili spent some time going over the details. Then she called Iwon, her colleague in the adjoining lab, who had been with the group that she split off from to go her own way with Kyal.

  "Are you busy, Iwon?"

  "I could use an excuse for a break. What's up?"

  "I've just got something in from Venus that I'd like to show you?"

  "Sure, come on over."

  Iwon inclined toward the traditionalist outlook, but he was easygoing about it in the same kind of way that Kyal had been. Lorili liked him for that reason. He made a good sounding board for her to bounce thoughts off and know she wasn't going to end up in an argument. Their current topic of amiable dispute was the Terran notion of unguided natural evolution, driven by chance mutations. Having little in the way of Progressive views that it would appeal to, Iwon was not attracted to it. His main objection echoed the conventional line that the time scales the Terrans had used to make it appear workable were vastly exaggerated. Whether it had been a result of genuine scientific error, their tendency to erect unquestionable dogmas, or a manifestation of some deeper psychological need was still being debated.

  But whatever the reason, the result was the same. In earlier days, the Venusians' first inclination had been to accept that maybe the enormous epochs that the Terran sciences talked about were a possibility. Venusians' only direct knowledge of such matters was that derived from their own planet, after all, which had a different history. Shouldn't the Terrans have been the better judges of the one they had actually lived on? But the evidence was piling up, and there no longer seemed any doubt. The Terrans had gotten it colossally wrong.

  She found Iwon sprawled at the desk at one end of his cramped lab, surrounded by bottles, glassware, analytical instruments and a centrifuge. The desktop was barely visible beneath a litter of papers, micrograph prints, and a monitor screen showing a table of protein folding parameters. He was tall and loose-limbed, with clear gray eyes, sandy hair, and a ragged mustache. Mustaches were something the Venusians had copied from Terrans. Early researchers returning from Earth had started sporting them to let people know where they had been, and it caught on as a fashion. Lorili had never seen him looking anything but at ease and relaxed; never tense or flustered. He was one of those enviable people who could sit talking for an afternoon at a table outside one of the cafes in Rhombus, managed to read the piles of books most people always had set aside but never seemed to get around to, had seen every movie that was talked about, and yet all the things that he needed to do got done.

  He pulled a stool from under the bench by his desk, cleared away a box of data disks balanced on some journals, and pushed it forward for her to sit down. "You never told me you read minds. The timi
ng's perfect. I'm wearing my brain into a rut." He gestured at the screen and the rest of the mess around him, then pushed back his own chair. "Did you ever try coffee? It's a Terran drink made out of crushed dried beans. One of their addictions."

  "Yes. They've started serving it at the Blue Planet. I heard somewhere it's one of the things they're trying to grow back home."

  "I've got some here. Want to try it?"

  "Okay."

  Iwon got up and moved to the bench, where a section of the shelf above was reserved for jars and mugs. "Sweet?"

  "You know I am."

  "When have you known me argue? What about your coffee?"

  "Please."

  "I think they put cream or something in it, didn't they? I've only got this powdered stuff you mix for dessert sauce."

  "That's fine. It's okay black too."

  "Really?" Iwon contemplated the mug he had been about to fill. "Maybe I'll give it a try."