Echoes of an Alien Sky

by James P. Hogan

  "Well, it was very nearly our last," Casselo said. "You'd better leave any more of that until they've got the tunnel opened up and can have the whole of the outside to break your necks in."

  "Er, yes . . . sir. Sorry. Hey, guys, we'd better cut it our for now. . . ."

  Casselo resumed talking to Emmis. "Did they turn up anything new at the end of the main gallery? We didn't quite get to where the lights end."

  "There's another elevator there. It looks as if it's for freight. I don't know yet where it goes to. We've located stairs leading down but left them for later. One thing at a time, eh, Amingas?"

  "Try telling Sherven that sometimes," Casselo muttered as they walked.

  Quarles went on, "Oh, and Master Reen here also wondered the same thing as you did and asked if we've found any trace of a ship, if one landed here."

  "I don't think there's any mystery about that now," Emmis replied. "Yes, I'm pretty sure now that there was a ship. But no, we won't find any trace of it here now. In fact, I can tell you where it went. . . . Oh, excuse me, Amingas. I have to attend to something here. We'll see you in a few minutes."

  They came to the end of the gallery and turned left, past an elevator door and some partitioned spaces. A door beyond gave access to a metal-railed staircase, and two flights up brought them to the door marked E. Going through into the corridor and turning right, they could already see a girl in coveralls waiting outside one of the doors farther along. She led them into a brightly lit room looking something like the Decoding Lab at Triagon with counter tops and display panels, and several desk-like work spaces along the far side, where Quarles introduced Emmis. He was ruddy faced with curly ginger hair, and was standing in front of a table at the far end, among a small mixed group of figures in coveralls and work smocks. On the table was a solidly constructed rectangular metal box about the size of an office file cabinet drawer. The lid, lying to one side, and the exposed seating around the top showed it had been designed to be sealed for a long, long time. At the back of the room, behind the table, a thick door in a concrete surround stood open, revealing more boxes, unopened, held in several vertical racks. Whereas the unopened boxes in the racks all looked the same the one on the table was of a different design, gray in color, while all the others were blue, and somewhat larger. It looked as if it didn't belong to the set—as if it had perhaps been added later.

  Looking strangely bewildered, Emmis neglected the customary introductions of his companions, but instead indicated an assortment of documents, bound books, and charts lying on the table around the opened box. They were made of a smooth, shiny material that could have been foil or some kind of dense polymer. Their sheen in the light, and the wet streaks and drops over the table top showed they had been contained in a fluid.

  "We opened the one that looked different," Emmis said. "It seems to be some kind of . . . 'time capsule,' records left for posterity." He looked over the items as if at a loss to know where to begin, then picked the top sheet off a small wad. Holding it up, he recited, "We have no way of knowing if these words will ever be read. We are the last humans left alive, as far as we can tell, anywhere. . . ."

  While the arrivals stared at him in mute protest, he stopped reading and waved at another document. "They were struck by a sickness that broke out soon after they arrived. There are several dozen bodies buried somewhere around outside. The victims suffered some kind of madness accompanied by purple facial scars, and it was inevitably fatal. Their doctors had never seen it before."

  Kyal stared at him incredulously. Those were the same symptoms that had afflicted Jenyn, due to a dormant virus carried by the corpses from Triagon. Its presence here would explain why whoever opened up Providence hadn't made full use of the machines and the provisions that it contained. Because they couldn't stay—and they could take only a small portion of it all with them.

  The Place of Death.

  Emmis had said yes, there had been a ship. So they had returned. And he knew where they had gone.

  Kyal drew across a bound folder lying beside the wad of sheets that Emmis had read from, and turned it over. On the cover was embossed the Terran icon for Providence: Two straight lines converging upward to the left, with a pair of bars bridging the angle between them. The Venusian symbol of good fortune and homecoming.

  He turned his head toward Yorim, who was also staring at the icon with a strange look. "There's our katek, Yorim," Kyal murmured. Their eyes met disbelievingly. He knew that the same thought was going through Yorim's mind too.

  They had seen the same form only recently somewhere else. The two sides of a landing corridor converging on the mountain called Shasta, barred by two approach Markers. How could this ancient sign, preserved by the Terrans who had braved unknown trials and dangers to come home finally to Earth, have become a symbol dating back to the earliest times of Venusian history, standing for those same things? Not by coincidence, surely. There was only one way.

  Casselo was giving Emmis a puzzled look. "I thought you said on the phone that you've only just found this place," he said. "What are you reading? How could you have gotten that much translated already? I mean . . . who translated it?"

  In answer, Emmis turned around the sheet he was still holding and slid it across the table. Three pairs of eyes stared at it in mute befuddlement. Some of the letter forms and spellings were quaintly odd, and Emmis had cheated a little in his rendering of the wording. But it was readily recognizable for what it was, even to a non-scholar. Simply, the question of translation didn't arise. There was no need for any. The documents carefully stored and preserved by the last humans to depart from Earth were written in one of the earliest dialects of Venusian.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Earth was dead. At least, all human life had long ago ended. As far as could be ascertained from the conditions observed from the orbiting mother ship, it must have happened not long after the migrants from Terminus departed. And now their descendants had returned to find only that Earth was still lethal for humans. Many of the party who landed and opened up the cache of supplies at Providence that they thought would provide them a new beginning soon succumbed to the sickness before it was recognized as the same sickness that had prevented their ancestors from returning to Earth long before.

  Those down on the surface who were still unaffected couldn't remain there. But neither could any of them remain indefinitely in orbit. And there could be no going back to the world they had finally mustered their last reserves of strength and resourcefulness to get away from. They had already learned that it was impossible to grow and flourish there.

  But a strange quirk of fate gave them one other, slender chance. For whatever reason, it seemed that the time scales that their ancient Terran ancestors had based their geological and planetary sciences on had been in error. Long-range instrument measurements and observations from the mother ship showed that the planet Venus was already exhibiting recognizably Earth-like properties. It was still hot and inhospitable there, and if they could make it, life would surely be rough and perilous with few pleasures or comforts to relieve the hardships. But were they not all descendants of the ultimate in human survivability? In any case, they couldn't stay where they were, and there was nowhere else for them to go.

  Using materials from the stores at Providence and with special equipment and engineers sent down in a smaller, chemically driven shuttle, they improvised launch and recharging facilities for lifting the surface lander back to orbit. They took with them what they could from Providence that looked like being the most useful. The rest, they left behind to the winds and the sands, and to time. Xoll tried to joke wryly that somebody might find it and be able to use it one day. The others were too weary even to smile. How could such a thing ever be possible? But they left a record of their passing here, of who they were, and their story. So the universe wouldn't simply carry on evermore existing, as if they had never been.

  After burying the last of those who had died and lifting off successfully, th
ey remained separated in orbit for a quarantine period to make sure they were carrying no more incubating cases of the disease. Then, with all the survivors finally back together again aboard the mother ship, Zaam marshaled his followers and exhorted them to make the last, supreme effort.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  In what proved, with macabre appropriateness to be their ultimate achievement in more senses than one, the Terrans created genetically vectored viruses that could be targeted against specific ethnic and racial groups, and turned them loose. But something went wrong. The different strains somehow mutated and interacted—exactly how would probably never be known—and all human life on Earth perished as a consequence.

  And so, what had seemed to be Sherven's far-flung theory turned out correct after all: The Terrans had migrated to another star system. Their own account found at Providence confirmed it. They called their new world "Eden," after a mythical idyllic realm in early Terran fable, which perhaps told of the touching hopes they had for their future there. But the name was ill-chosen. The colony was not viable in the long term, and in the end their descendants came back.

  It was true that although tiny in numbers, the community created on lunar Farside in the form of the Terminus program had concentrated some of the most potent talents of the race. But even so, the revelation was stunning, adding a new order of magnitude to the picture the Venusians had already formed of what Terran resilience and tenacity had been capable of. Exactly how the migration had come to take the form it had was unclear, since the records left by the descendants who eventually made the voyage back were fragmentary in that respect. They gave the impression that conditions at Eden had been too arduous for the earlier generations to pay much attention to past matters, and much of the historical detail had been lost. It could have been that the technical enterprise evidenced by the structures on Farside had been conceived as a contingency escape plan of interstellar dimensions from the beginning, in case such a measure should become necessary. Possibly, it had been improvised in desperation as the only available expedient from the prior work on unmanned probes when it was realized that Earth was uninhabitable. Either way, there was nowhere else in the Solar System to go.

  But only for the time being, maybe.

  Perhaps the supreme irony was that if they had held out long enough where they were, they, or almost certainly their descendants of within a generation or two, could probably have returned to Earth safely. But the people selected for evacuation to Terminus had not been of a kind characteristically disposed to sitting and waiting. Impatience and an impulse to bring about some kind of action now had been a trait of the stronger-minded Terrans too.

  After further studies of the viral sequences obtained from the Triagon corpses, and post-mortem analysis of the agent that had infected Jenyn, the Venusian scientists concluded that without human hosts to perpetuate the strain, the population of synthetic viruses would have been reduced by natural biological processes and died out fairly rapidly. It was possible that a less virulent mutant strain might have found a lodgement in some Terran primate species, but unlike the original synthetic virus that had been targeted at humans it would have been susceptible to natural immunological suppression, and in the end the result would have been the same.

  But there was one place on Earth where a dormant residue of the original virulent form could remain and be unaffected. By opening up the sealed environment of Providence, the returnees had reactivated a remnant that had existed there ever since those earlier times, and been infected just as had Jenyn by the residue preserved in the freeze-fried corpses at Triagon. The rest of the world out there all around them had in all probability long ago eradicated all traces of it. After all, that Earth that they had returned to was the same one that Venusians were living on today, with the same kind of biosphere, and it was clean.

  But they hadn't known. The chronicles from Providence described how they saw the same sickness that had wiped out everyone on Earth and found its way to Luna breaking out among those who had landed. It wasn't a situation that permitted the luxury of time for extensive testing and deliberation in the way the Venusians could afford. They had to assume the worst, that it was still out there, everywhere. So they took what they could and got themselves back up off the surface before everyone was infected.

  And what were they to do then? By rights there should have been nothing left open to them.

  Yet through a fluke that none of them had expected, there was one possibility. The final entry in the records recovered at Providence told as much as had been known and decided when the craft that had landed there lifted off to rejoin its orbiting mother ship. The conditions that long-range observation and measurements from the ship had detected on Venus did not seem to be as the models handed down from the sciences of former days predicted. It was cooler, with atmospheric characteristics and chemistry that appeared compatible with a livable environment, and it had acquired a respectable axial spin. There was no mention of the presence of Froile—which answered the question of how much its capture had contributed: effectively none. It was the result of electrical effects, as Yorim and most of the Venusian astronomers had maintained.

  What it must have taken for that last remaining handful to make the effort after all they had been through, most Venusians were thankful they would probably never know. But that side of Terrans that inspired awe had still been there. Whatever it had taken, they had risen to it, and had made that effort. And the result was Venusians reading their story today, still speaking a language that was closer to the words it had been written in than theirs was to that of their distant ancestors who had migrated to Eden.

  As well as minimal stocks from Providence, they took with them livestock and plants from Earth that they hoped they would be able to introduce. This explained the presence on Venus of organisms with the quadribasic form of DNA, and the paradox of why they seemed to be more advanced as a group than the hexabasic types, which were more widespread and should have afforded a greater potential for flexibility and complexity. In a way that Lorili's hypothesis had anticipated, the hexabasics were native, and had evolved to a degree that was appropriate to the present conditions on Venus; the quadribasics—which included Venusians—were imported Terran varieties and their descendants, from an older, more mature world.

  What happened after then had to be filled in by conjecture, but it seemed that their travails had still not yet ended. Even the chance to rebuild from such slender beginnings amid the harshness of Venus's swamps and lava fields was denied. Before the exhausted and bewildered arrivals could even consolidate in their new, hostile environment, Froile appeared in the sky above them, bringing convulsions and climatic upheaval to complete the ruin of the last shreds of their civilization that they had managed to save. They reverted to a primitiveness from which it had taken centuries to recover, losing all traces and memory of their origins in the process. Only versions of those events enshrined in mythical form had survived to be passed down from what present-day Venusians had thought were the earliest days of their race. The parallel to the far more devastating catastrophes reconstructed as having taken place in the Terrans' own early history was obvious and sombering. What set the two epochs of happenings apart, other than the difference in severity, was that the forefathers of the Venusians—being products of an advanced scientific culture themselves, whatever else they might have lost—hadn't taken recourse in the vengeance and judgment of supernatural gods to explain them.

  The first inclination among the Venusian researchers was to accept the capture of Froile at just such a moment as one of those unfortunate coincidences that nature seems to come up with from time to time to test the mettle of its creations. However, further calculations on long-range spacecraft electromagnetics by Kyal and Yorim, in conjunction with information gained from the Providence records about the craft that had made the voyage from Eden, suggested that there might have been rather more to it than just coincidence. Kyal was always suspicious of coincidences an
yway.

  An incoming vessel from another star system could acquire an enormous electrical potential difference with respect to anything local in the Solar System. The builders of Providence had provided a primary discharge attractor at Camp 27 and downrange backup at Yuma, but such provisions could only be based on guesses of what would be required, not on whatever the returning ship had actually experienced. And even if the guesses had been close, after all that time there could have been no guarantee that the constructions built in response to them still existed.

  A copy of the narrative from the craft that had made the landing at Providence talked about "dumping" the residual charge when they were on their final approach. Searching back further turned up the log of the mother ship that had made the voyage back from Eden. Its course into the Solar System had been on the far side of the Sun from where Earth was at the time, crossing the interior of Earth's orbit. On the way, it had tracked and course-matched to an orbiting minor body that it had coupled to electrically and shed a large part of the extraneous charge accumulated in the interstellar medium. The interaction would also involve transferring much of the ship's incoming momentum, which would have perturbed the receiving body's path. Sensitive nonlinear dynamics were involved, meaning that its new direction could have been just about anything, and for the likely ranges of velocity and mass that such an body would possess, the imparted velocity change came out in the order of several hundred to maybe a couple of thousand miles per hour—modest enough, and with the possibility of added electrical effects arising from its acquired charge, to make a capture scenario by Venus plausible. The ship's log described the object as "elongated and knobby."