Echoes of an Alien Sky

by James P. Hogan

  "I think, if the truth were known, we're just being cowards and sneaking away at the right time," Kyal said.

  "How do you mean?" Lorili asked.

  "All kinds of people back home have found out about Providence already—museums of Terran artifacts, colleges, collectors. . . . We're being deluged with inquiries. Poor Filaeyus is going to have to deal with it."

  "I'm surprised he didn't decide to come along too," Yorim said. "Doesn't he ever get tired of being cooped up aboard Explorer?"

  "Oh, confidentially, I think that's being taken care of," Casselo said. "Pidrie, his wife, is down there at the moment—somewhere in southern Europe, I think. She's been touring around different parts for a while now."

  "What's going on?" Kyal asked.

  "Checking out likely areas for a home. From some of the things Fil's said, I wouldn't be surprised if they're thinking of retiring here. It's surprising how many people are. There are some fine little communities springing up all over. A lot of people who come out here just don't seem to want to go back to Venus once they're used to it. Families are moving out to join them."

  "Mellios Chown was saying there's going to be a huge migration this way over the next fifty years," Kyal remarked.

  "You know, I've sometimes thought the same thing," Lorili told them. She sighed."But I honestly couldn't see many of my folks uprooting. They sit in their foggy towns, breathing sulfur fumes and surrounded by swamps. You try to tell them about cool climates and clear skies, but they just can't picture it. Some of the images of Terran cities that I've seen were like . . . I don't know. Fairylands. Do you think Earth might be like that again one day?"

  "I don't know. It's a thought, isn't it?" Casselo agreed.

  "But then they had all those wars," Yorim put in.

  "I know," Lorili said. "Isn't it crazy? In a world filled with everything they could ask for. But there's not reason why that should have to be the same again."

  A call tone came from Casselo's jacket pocket. "Excuse me." He took out his phone. "Hello. Borgan Casselo here. . . ."

  Kyal moved closer to Lorili along the seat. They only had a few minutes left. What she had just said about Earth echoed a lot of his own sentiments that he hadn't realized he felt. He put a hand on hers reassuringly. She looked up at him and smiled.

  "It won't be long," he said in a voice not meant for carrying. "I'll call you tonight, after we get there."

  "I was hoping you would."

  He paused for an instant. "About living on Earth. . . . It wouldn't have to be a case of finding your way on your own, you know." Yorim did a superb job of leaving them to it by getting up and sauntering over to study the flight information displayed next to the boarding gate.

  It took Lorili a second or two to register what Kyal was saying. She looked at him disbelievingly. "You mean you too?"

  "Uh-huh. One day, maybe. Who knows?"

  "Us? . . . Are you saying? . . . You really mean it?"

  "It's something we could talk about, anyway."

  Lorili's eyes had brightened. "That would be . . . just wonderful." She emitted a short, spontaneous laugh, as if it were too much to believe. "Whereabouts would you have in mind?"

  Kyal affected a groan. "Now you're rushing me already. I've no idea. Maybe we should have sent you on the tour with Pidrie."

  "No chance. She's the Director's wife. I have a job to do."

  "There. And you expect me to know. As I said, it's something we can talk about. Okay?"

  She smiled happily and whispered. "Okay." Kyal gave her had a squeeze. Casselo had finished taking his call.

  "That was Amingas Quarles down at the Regional Base," he informed them as Yorim came wandering nonchalantly back. "They'll have a chopper waiting at the landing area to take us straight out to Providence. So we should be there some time this afternoon."

  "Not wasting any time," Yorim commented.

  "Word's out. It's generating a lot of interest," Casselo said.

  "Who's Quarles?" Kyal asked.

  "An old friend of mine who's based at Regional. Runs the geology section. You'll like him, Yorim. He's been getting some life into the place, turning it into more of a town. It's going to be another Rhombus. He's already been out to Providence.

  "What's the climate like there—in western North America?" Lorili asked.

  Casselo bunched his mouth. "Oh . . . dry and sunny, pleasantly mild. Everything from coast to high mountains in a couple of hundred miles. It was a thriving area with the Terrans."

  "And got bombed flat for it," Yorim said.

  "You're fishing already," Kyal murmured to Lorili out of the corner of his mouth. She bit her lip with a smile but didn't deny it. "What does Director Sherven's wife find to do with herself when she is here?" she asked Casselo instead.

  "Grows things, apparently. She's becoming an expert on Terran plants. Fil says their cabin over in Staff Quarters looks like a rain forest. She's got a domesticated feline there too."

  "What kind's that?" Yorim asked.

  "Like the one Mirine was telling you we had in the labs down in Rhombus," Lorili said. "Small and fluffy; big eyes and whiskers; claws; pointed ears."

  "Oh, Lucifer. Right."

  "Can we have one?" Lorili asked Kyal. He rolled his eyes.

  "What does Lucifer mean?" Casselo inquired.

  "One of the old Terran gods, or something," Lorili said. "It was all Nostreny's fault. It used to hang around the trash cans at the back of the kitchens, and he started feeding it. Then it adopted us."

  A man wearing a crew tunic emerged from the gate and came over to them. "Ready to board at your leisure, gentlemen," he informed them. "We'll be closing the door in fifteen minutes."

  "Well, might as well get comfortable," Casselo said, rising. The others did likewise.

  "And I've got things to be getting back to," Lorili said. Then, to Kyal, "Talk to you soon?"

  "You've got it."

  "Any news on the weather at Regional?" Casselo asked the crewman.

  "Dry, sunny, and mild, I believe."

  Casselo spread his hands appealingly at the others as if he were waiting for applause.

  Lorili's phone sounded just as they began to move. Kyal hung back while she stopped to answer, leaving Casselo and Yorim to follow the crewman through the gate. He stayed out of her personal space while she talked, letting his gaze wander casually over the surroundings, but noticed her expression growing more grave.

  "What?" he asked, when she finally snapped the unit shut and looked back at him.

  "That was Mirine calling from the lab. The doctor from the Medical Wing has just been on. Jenyn is deteriorating rapidly. They don't think he's going to make it."

  "I see." Kyal kept his voice neutral. From what he knew, Lorili should have no real reason to shed tears over it. But on the other hand, he supposed, it was a person that she had known and been close to once. It said a lot for her humanity that she should show some concern.

  "And there's more," Lorili said. "Mirine has been comparing some odd DNA sequences that the lab sent over with ones we obtained from the Terran corpses. She says they match."

  Kyal frowned. It had caught him when his mind was on other things, and the significance wasn't immediately apparent.

  "This has never been found in Venusians before," Lorili explained. "The structure suggests some kind of virus. But if so, it's an extremely unusual kind of virus that somehow gets transcribed into the host DNA."

  "You mean like a retrovirus?" Kyal said. He was familiar with that much at least.

  "Similar genetics. But retroviruses are passengers. They're not cytopathic like lytic viruses—cell killers. They're mode of reproduction is from mother to child, which means the host has to live to reproductive maturity. If a virus like that killed its host, it wouldn't be viable." Lorili shook her head. Her face had a look of disbelieving horror. "But this one is highly lethal. What that says is that it couldn't have arisen naturally. It had to have been manufactured deliberately. Do you s
een what that means? . . ."

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Amingas Quarles was a big man with ragged, graying, hair, his face weathered and tanned from years of field work under the Terran sun. But his stride was still robust as he led the way from where the helicopter had landed on the open ground above the south side of the canyon. The area was already cluttered with a miscellany of STOL aircraft and vehicles that had arrived overland, alongside which portable cabins and tents were springing up along the canyon rim. Preliminary digging here and there had turned up a few remnants of vehicles, machinery and structures that seemed to indicate it as having been the scene of some kind of activity. Whether it had been due to survivors from the war or returning evacuees wouldn't be know without more detailed studies and dating tests.

  "Was there any trace of a ship anywhere?" Kyal asked curiously, as they stood looking around before moving on down.

  "No, nothing like that," Quarles told him. "Not so far, anyway."

  They followed a trail between rocks and parked vehicles to the canyon rim. Work parties with picks and shovels were widening a path down to the floor, where a small earth-moving machine had penetrated and was clear away more of the mounds of debris and sand filling the tunnel entrance. "If this place is going to be properly explored and opened up, the next thing we'll need will be a decent access road up to the south-side rim," Quarles told them as they made their way carefully down. "Makes me wonder how they got all that stuff down there in the first place. Maybe there's another way in someplace."

  "They'd have erased any pointers to it," Kyal said. "Its location was secret."

  As the first views from the drone had showed, there were also remains of machinery and equipment scattered about the canyon floor, some of which had been further uncovered by exploratory digging. There was little evidence of the site being developed into a working center for further expansion in the way that would be expected of returning migrants—or at least returning migrants who had stayed any length of time. On the other had, if it had been war survivors who found the place, why hadn't they cleaned it out? Either way, a riddle remained.

  As they approached the entrance, Quarles halted in front of a niche in the rock formed beneath a protruding sill above, and gestured. Carved in a recess, worn and smoothed by the winds of ages, but still recognizable, was the katek-like Terran icon that stood for Providence.

  What was left of the two massive steel doors that had once closed the tunnel entrance were now lying partly unearthed outside, twisted and corroded. The entrance itself was framed by beams of concrete, tilted and broken on one side to reveal heavy internal reinforcement bars. The steel frame that had held the doors was recessed back ten feet or so from the line of the canyon wall, which suggested that originally they might have been concealed by an outer covering of natural rock. Like the doors, the frame was torn and buckled, the rock surround in front of it gouged into irregular hollows.

  "The way in seems to have been jammed," Quarles said, waving as they passed through. "Maybe by geological distortion. Whoever opened the place up had to use explosives."

  "It sounds like people who knew what they were looking for, and exactly where to look," Casselo commented.

  The tunnel beyond, lit by temporary lamps strung along the roof, was wide enough and high enough to allow the passage of fairly large vehicles, and had a raised walkway running behind a rail on one side. An air pipeline that the Venusian engineers had brought in for ventilation farther inside ran along the floor. Despite its regularly spaced buttresses of thick metal ribbing, the tunnel was visibly canted in places. At one point it had suffered a fall that had been dug through and shored with props and cross-members sufficiently to walk through, but the passage would have to be enlarged before anything sizeable could be brought out.

  They emerged from the tunnel through another set of doors into a space that had corridors leading off to the sides and an even broader gallery extending away ahead of them with large doors spaced at intervals along both sides. "Where do you want to start?" Quarles asked them.

  "What is there?" Casselo asked back in turn.

  "Those doors going away in front there are the storage vaults," Quarles answered. "They were the most readily accessible from the entrance tunnel. But clearing a way through the caved-in part of the tunnel back there took time, so we haven't gotten around to exploring all of the place yet. There are elevators in those side chambers—not working yet, but there are stairs too. We've got a couple of levels below where we are now fitted out and supplied for accommodation. So whoever it was who found the place had a guest house ready for them on arrival. I guess that's what it was designed that way for."

  "Sounds like Triagon all over again," Yorim commented.

  Kyal was thinking the same thing. "A lot bigger, though" he replied.

  Quarles went on, "And then up above, we've got what seem to be control rooms for services and so on, and admin offices. That's the most recent part to be found—we didn't know there were any stairs going up until this morning. Everybody thought it was just mountain. They were still fitting lights up there when I left for Regional to come and pick you people up."

  "Let's have a look at the stuff in the vaults first," Casselo decided. "Then we can go up and see what you're people are finding in the control rooms. I've seen dormitories and canteens before."

  "Fine."

  It was all far vaster than Triagon. Most of the contents of the vaults by far were still packed away in crates and canisters for preservation. But after the fragmented oddments that until now had been all there was to try and build a picture from of the lost world, the small part that had been opened up was enough to cause amazement. There were engines and generators, pumps, lifting gear taken out of grease packing in sealed containers, all cleaned, gleaming, and looking as if they had just been manufactured. Along with them were all manner of tools, agricultural implements, accessories, and fastenings.

  The hall adjoining contained construction machinery, well-drilling equipment, earth diggers and scrapers, along with bays of fuel drums, maintenance fluids, and parts. Some technicians had even managed to get a land tractor started and were taking turns at gingerly trying to figure out how to drive it in a clear section of the service gallery outside the vault. "There's a small fleet of trucks and all-terrain cars farther along that way," Quarles said, waving an arm. "We could make good use of them ourselves if we can get them going. There are never enough vehicles at Regional for what you want." The whole place was a trove of Terran culture that would keep the archeologists and techno-historians busy for years.

  The phone clipped to Quarles's belt sounded. He answered it. "Hello, Emmis." In an aside he muttered, "Our man upstairs in the control room," and then louder, "What's up?"

  "I'm told that you're back," a voice from the phone replied.

  "Right. Have been for a while, in fact. I'm down in the warehouse with Borgan Casselo and his two friends from Explorer, showing them what we've got so far."

  "I think you need to get up here," Emmis said.

  "That sounds ominous."

  "Not so much ominous. Impossible."

  "We'd just about finished a quick, once-over tour." Quarles raised his eyebrows at the others and inclined his head to indicate the direction back out from the vault that they were in. "What is it?" he asked into the phone as they began moving.

  "You'll have to come and see. I'm still not sure I believe it."

  "Where do we find you, Emmis?"

  "Take the stairs past the elevator on your left as you come out from the wide gallery. Two levels up from the entrance tunnel, there's an exit door with a Terran E on it. Go through, follow the corridor right, through some double doors, and it's one of the rooms to your left. The Terran characters E-18 are painted on a column outside, but I'll have someone watching for you at the door."

  "We're on our way now. . . ." They came out into the wide gallery, immediately flattening themselves against the wall as the latest novice driver hurtled b
y in the Terran agricultural tractor, followed by alarmed shouts from behind for him to slow down and steer away from the wall. "Just about," Casselo added shakily. They resumed walking.

  "What happened?" Emiss's voice squawked from the phone.

  "It doesn't matter—it's over now," Casselo answered shakily.

  They passed by the group who had been experimenting with the tractor. "Sorry about that," one of them offered, looking a shade sheepish. "It was his first try." They were all fairly young looking—probably technicians and work-force helpers having fun.