Echoes of an Alien Sky

by James P. Hogan

  She was just trying to keep up a brave front, Kyal could see as her smile faded. Even as he thought it, she said, "I do hope Lorii will be all right."

  "Master Reen, I do believe," a voice declared behind them. Kyal looked around and up.

  "Ari!"

  Arissen, the zoologist who been one of the party on the trip out, had detached himself from the group by the wall and come over. "I've been ignored in better places than this, you know," he said.

  "I had no idea you were even up here."

  "Up on some staff business for a few days. I thought you and Yorim were going to Luna."

  "We're just back from there today. Ari, this is Mirine, who was there too recently. Arissen was with us on the voyage out."

  "Charmed," Arissen said, bowing his head.

  "A pleasure."

  Kyal looked across to the bar. "Here's Yorim coming now. Hey, Yorim, look who's here."

  "Say, Arissen! And you don't look any older. How's life with the animals?"

  Arissen shook his head. "This planet! . . . It's unbelievable."

  One of the group that Arissen had left called over. "Arissen, it's your shot. Are you still playing?"

  "Oh. . . . Take my turn, will you? I've just run into a couple of friends from the ship."

  "Okay."

  "What's going on over there?" Kyal asked.

  "An old Terran game that somebody's discovered. Something more to feed the Terrabilia mania back home, no doubt. Anyhow, how are you two doing? I've been following some of it in the net posts. So those things out there on Farside really turned out to be interesting, eh?"

  "It looks as if they were into space electromotives all right," Kyal said. "In fact there was a big meeting about it here today. That's what we're back for."

  "Yes, I saw you on the news with Sherven this afternoon. Sounds like a new job. Congratulations."

  "Thanks."

  "You too." Arissen looked at Yorim. "Were the Terrans into electrogravitics as well?"

  "Not as far as we know. Kyal and I just stick together."

  "Have you managed to get down to the surface yet?"

  "We had the regular week after arrival. I got in with some people who were touring some parts along northern Africa. Got to climb a pyramid. Kyal preferred old bombed Terran cities. How about you?"

  "I''ve been farther south. The rain forests. Talk about diversity."

  Kyal saw that Mirine was looking distant and only partly listening. The affair in the lab was still troubling her. Probably it was because she had left Lorili only minutes before it happened. "Ari, why don't you show us this Terran game?" he suggested. "Mirine looks as if she could use some livening up." He ushered her to her feet and waved her over behind Arissen before she could object. Yorim picked up his glass from the ones he had set down, and followed.

  "Three new recruits," Arissen informed the rest of the company as they arrived.

  "Come and join in the fun," one of them invited.

  They were taking turns to throw short, fat-bodied darts fitted with tail flights at a circular board divided into numbered sectors. Arissen explained that the game was believed to have been derived from early target practice with bows and arrows. The original Terran scoring rules were not known, so the players had invented their own. Eventually the game in progress ended, and the newcomers were given a chance to try their hand. Mirine went first, squealing with surprise and frustration when her first two darts missed the board completely. But at least she was brightening up a little, Kyal saw.

  "It's not as easy as it looks," Arissen commented. "You need a double to start. That's the outside ring. We know that was one of the Terran rules. Go for one of the big ones. Twenty's the best."

  "Where's that?" Mirine asked, searching around the board.

  "Twelve o'clock."

  "What?"

  Arissen grinned. "Another Terran-ism. Right at the top. It's from their clock dial. They used it to indicate directions."

  Mirine considered the prospect. "A double? You mean that little tiny rectangle right at the top there? I can't even hit the board."

  "Just try for the number," a girl to the side suggested. She looked around at the group. "That's all right for first-timers, okay? A new rule."

  "Can I start if I just hit the board?" Mirine joked.

  "As long as it's somewhere in the numbers," someone answered. Mirine threw the dart.

  "Eight. And a treble!"

  "Is that good?"

  Kyal was staring hard at the board, replaying in his mind what Arissen had said. He shifted his gaze to Yorim, who was watching the next player. Yorim saw him from the corner of his eye and turned his head.

  "What?"

  "Did you hear what Ari said? They used their clock dial to indicate directions." He waited a moment for Yorim to make the connection, then said, "Eleven 'o clock?"

  Yorim turned to face him, the game forgotten suddenly. "The pilot's notes! It wasn't the time of day at all."

  Kyal was shaking his head. "We should have known. Terran pilots and military people used a twenty-four-hour system. It would have said eleven hundred or twenty-one hundred if it had anything to do with time."

  Curiosity equal to Kyal's own was written all over Yorim's face. "Want to go and check it out?" he said.

  "Right now?"

  "Why not? We can use the net booths that we came past back there across the Concourse. And wouldn't it be something to show Sherven in the morning."

  Mirine had come over and was looking at them. "Did you see that? I got a treble. This could be fun. . . . Hey, what's up?"

  "I think maybe we've hit more than a treble," Kyal told her.

  "To do with directions on Terran maps," Yorim said.

  "Are you two at work again?"

  "It's important," Kyal said. "There are some net booths back across the Concourse that we just passed. We need to use them to check something. Do you want to come too, or stay here with these people and learn the game? We can stop back for you later."

  "After the things I've heard, it could be all night," Mirine said. "I'd better come with you."

  "We have to leave," Kyal told Arissen.

  "Already? You've only just arrived."

  "Something came up that we want to look into. All your fault, Ari."

  "Me? What did I do?"

  "You can be such an inspiration at times. Don't give up on us. We might be back later."

  CHAPTER FORTY

  The fit was perfect. Superposing a line oriented with respect to north at an angle corresponding to eleven o' clock on the conventional Terran clock dial matched the direction of the long Californian Gulf. Rereading the pilot's notes in this context produced a course right up the center of it.

  The next morning, Kyal and Yorim presented their finding to the members of the previous day's meeting who had decided to stay on—which meant most of them. But it was in a general library and conference facility on a lower level of the superstructure. Sherven had ended the occupation by evicting them from his office. Casselo disappeared for a while, leaving the others in the throes of shifting their attention to the Californian Gulf area. One of the new facts to emerge was that there had indeed been another Santa Cruz on the western coast of the northern continent, six hundred miles farther north from the head of the Gulf. If they were on the right track, it followed that Providence would be somewhere inland from it. However, the terrain in that direction was a rugged region of high mountains giving way to canyons and deserts on the far side, and the population centers had been virtually annihilated in the final war. How to pinpoint a location that had in all likelihood been picked for concealment and then camouflaged was a daunting prospect.

  When Casselo returned later in the day, he called them together around one of the display consoles. "This has only just been filed," he informed them. "I didn't know about it myself until earlier today, when I checked for anything new from the region."

  The screen showed a selection of shots of excavations in a dry, rocky l
ocation, although some of the views showed water in the background. The excavations were centered around a rising feature forming part of a ridge, and had uncovered portions of smooth, sloping surfaces that looked decidedly unnatural. They were evidently parts of a pyramid form. The apex had been uncovered.

  Casselo went on, "It's at a geological site known as Camp 27, on the eastern shore of that gulf about halfway up." He looked toward Kyal and Yorim in the semicircle. "It has a laminated, metal-ribbed structure. Doesn't that sound familiar?"

  They glanced at each other. The similarity to the discharge attractor found near Triagon was obvious. There had to be a connection. "Some kind of test prototype that they tried on Earth, before they built the one on Farside?" Kyal ventured.

  "Could be," Yorim agreed.

  "Now look at this," Casselo said. He activated another screen to show the map of the Californian Gulf that Kyal and Yorim had introduced that morning. The pilot's notes appeared in an inset. Casselo recited them as he entered commands to add the details in sequence. "Eleven o'clock approach." A red line appeared to one side of the map, oriented at the same inclination as the lie of the Gulf. "Midway between La Paz . . ." A circle appeared, showing where the town had once stood on the eastern side near the tip of the peninsula, "and the coast." He moved the line horizontally across until it was centered in the position indicated. The Gulf narrowed toward the north. About halfway up, the coastline closing from the east fell more-or-less into alignment with the red vector.

  "Following the right-hand shore," Chown, who was among those present from yesterday, read from the notes in the inset box.

  "Yes," Casselo confirmed. "But now watch this. Here's the pyramid at Camp 27." A triangular icon appeared. The red line slanting upward at eleven o'clock from the midpoint of the Gulf's mouth passed right over it. "Coincidence?" Casselo asked. Murmurs of interest came from all sides.

  Yorim turned to Kyal with an astounded expression. They had probably seen the implication before most of those present. It meant that the Camp 27 pyramid probably hadn't been some kind of prototype at all. The facts were more likely the other way around: The construction on Luna had been the prototype, to develop the technology before building the final version down on Earth.

  Casselo read the expressions on their faces. "Does it mean what I think it means?" he asked. The voices subsided as one by one the others realized there was more to this than everyone appreciated. "Care to spell it out for us, Kyal?" Casselo invited.

  "A discharge attractor right on the flight path." Kyal glanced questioningly at Yorim. Yorim nodded. Kyal explained, "It wasn't a simulator program to help local supply pilots find Providence. It was for training the crew who would bring everyone back. That's the descent path for a returning spacecraft."

  "Which helps explain what it was doing at Triagon," Casselo said, nodding.

  "The wording starts to make more sense that way," Yorim said, reading the screen again. "Nobody could have known who would be piloting the craft when it was time to come back. It would probably be somebody who had never been there. You wouldn't use place names or arbitrary conventions that might change. You'd base the directions on things that would be more permanent, like cardinal directions, major terrain features.. . ."

  "La Paz is a place name," Chown pointed out.

  "Yes, but it also says 'Testing,'" Kyal said. "I think Yorim could be right. If this is from when they were still developing the program, it could just be a bit of loose terminology by somebody involved in trying it out."

  Chown mulled, then rocked his head from side to side. "Mm, well, okay, maybe."

  "'Homing peak bearing' seems clearer now," Hiok, the planetary physicist said as he read over the text. "It says it checks as a directional pointer. What does 5.778 mean?"

  "The Terrans used a three-hundred-sixty-division circle," Chown murmured, half to himself. Venusians did too, as it so happened. The number offered such a convenient choice of divisors as to make it an obvious circular measure.

  "To four significant figures?" Casselo queried dubiously.

  "Can we be sure it means degrees?" Acilla Jyt asked. A short silence fell. Hiok pulled a sheet of paper from a pile on the work top by where he was standing and leaned over it to begin scribbling something.

  Finally, Yorim said thoughtfully, "A more universal circular measure would be radians—independent of anyone's system of units."

  "That's a possibility," someone agreed.

  "What are they?" Acilla Jyt asked.

  "Two pi of them make a circle," Yorim said. "Engineer's unit. More convenient for lots of things. Fifty seven point three degrees."

  "Oh."

  Casselo took out his phone and flipped it to compute mode. "Five point seven, seven eight. . . . Fifty-seven point three. . . . " He recited. "It works out at three hundred thirty-one degrees. Where would they start from? North, rotating to the right?"

  "Try it," Yorim said.

  Hiok did the subtraction mentally. "That would put you twenty-nine degrees west of north." Even as he said it, Casselo added a blue vector to the screen, starting from the same center point at the bottom of the Gulf and angling up at twenty-nine degrees west of north. The divergence from the red line already there was barely discernible. Murmurs of astonishment came from around the group, with a low whistle from somebody.

  "What do we have along it?" Chown asked.

  Casselo composed an input to access the survey files of physical terrain data and display the major peaks. Although the chain running to the west of the flight line, called the Sierras, contained many, the line, surprisingly missed all of them. The eyes gathered around the screen searched up and down its length in bafflement. Then Kyal said, "Up there, right at the top." He had to step forward and point. At the very top of the map, right on Casselo's line just before it ran off the edge, an isolated peak stood out conspicuously from the relatively flat surrounding terrain. The Terran name for it was Shasta.

  Hiok blinked. "But that's got to be, what? . . ." He checked the scale. "It's something like thirteen hundred miles north from the mouth of the Gulf."

  "Nowhere near Santa Cruz," Chown said.

  Yorim came in. "It doesn't have to be if it's just a directional beacon." He thought for a second longer. "In fact, it could strengthen the case for this not being something they put together for local supply pilots. I agree, you'd never see it from an aircraft anywhere around Santa Cruz. But from long distance at the altitude of an incoming spacecraft, it would be an ideal marker. Short of a radio beacon, you couldn't ask for anything better." Silence from all round greeted his words.

  "There's your homing peak," Casselo said.

  A number of lakes lay along the path, along with the sites of others identified as having dried up. None stood out as being of any great significance. Of course, there was also the possibility that more had vanished without trace.

  As to the two "Markers" that the notes referred to, the general feeling was that these were probably peaks too, marking progress along the descent path. But until the numbers associated with them could be interpreted, little more could be said. Almost certainly they denoted distances, but there was no indication of the units they were expressed in. Unlike the case with circular measure, there was no common standard that immediately suggested itself.

  Acilla checked in dictionaries of Terran terms and discovered that "GZ" stood for Ground Zero. Almost certainly, it meant the location of Providence itself. It seemed unlikely that any prominent terrain feature would be associated with a survival cache that was intended to be kept secret. But it was somewhere along that line. If they could only make sense of the distances, they would have it.

  The next day, Casselo and Kyal discussed the findings with Sherven. Sherven contacted the scientific director of the Western North America Regional Base and requested a low-altitude aerial survey to be carried out along a fifty-mile-wide corridor centered on a line running twenty-nine degree west of north from the eastern edge of the California Gulf, to w
here it intersected the coastline far to the north.

  The first significant result came in a couple of days later: another partly buried pyramid. It was right on the approach path near a place that had been called Yuma, on the Colorado River. From descriptions and pictures sent through by a hastily despatched ground team, Kyal identified it tentatively as a secondary, backup attractor, a little under two hundred miles downrange from the one at Camp 27. The dimensions and general scale of the setup suggested an incoming craft that was extremely large, arriving from a great distance, or both. This didn't sound like something making the relatively short hop back from Luna. So maybe there had been somewhere else in the Solar System that had changed beyond recognition since the time of the Terrans after all.