by Ian Douglas
One artifact that had been turned up in some numbers, however, were the so-called floaters. These were bundled cigar shapes, like elongated eggs perhaps three meters long and a meter through at their widest. All were badly corroded—some were little more than metal and ceramic shells flaking away beneath the relentless UV flood and exotic oxidizing chemistries of the Martian sands. All appeared to be filled completely with electronic components of staggering complexity and miniaturization. All possessed between five and nine lenses scattered about their bodies that were almost certainly optics, plus numerous other components that probably represented other senses.
Current theory held that they were robots of some sort. They were called “floaters” because it was assumed they used some sort of electromagnetic repulsive force to hover above the ground—even, possibly, true antigravity, though none possessed circuitry or power systems intact enough to confirm such speculation. When found, every one had been lying on the ground as though they’d simply fallen there when the power cut off.
Sam Too’s discovery put a new light on things. The landscape visible on Display 94725 in the Cave of Wonders had yielded various tantalizing bits of information. For one thing, the room was oriented in such a way that the sun could be observed setting behind the monolithic Needle once every 216 days—from which the length of the planet’s year had been deduced. Better, the spectra of that star had exactly matched the spectra of Alpha Centauri A—the specific bit of research that had resulted in the Ad Astra, humankind’s first true starship.
By sharply enhancing the image, bits of the background had been studied, and objects that might have been alien statues had been glimpsed and reconstructed. The XTA teams had assumed that each statue represented a different alien race, though not enough information had been available to make that more than a guess.
The teams had assumed the floaters to be robots in the original sense—servants and workers. If floaters were among those statues, though, that seemed to upgrade them from robot to living being.
Jack felt a delicious thrill shiver down his spine. For over twenty-five years, archeologists had been searching for some physical remnant of the Builders themselves, the advanced beings who’d built the Cydonian complex and other sites on Mars. The only signs of life so far identified had been the mummified remains of archaic Homo sapiens, humans evidently civilized and trained and brought to Mars for some purpose—presumably, again, as laborers.
Had they been in possession of the bodies of the Builders themselves all along?
Had the Builders been machine intelligences?
“So much for the alien gods nonsense,” David said, grinning. “They didn’t build their colony on Mars, then ‘return to the stars whence they came.’ They came…and they died. Here.”
“There’s still the Earth colony idea,” Paul pointed out. “Maybe the survivors went there when things…went bad.”
David snorted. “Go back to Columbia and take another year of biology, son. Humans are not descendants of space castaways, no matter what the astronut religions and feel-gooder Net channels say.”
It was an argument Jack had heard played out before. The notion that humans might be the offspring of spacefaring Adams and Eves had been around for well over a century now, despite quite convincing proof to the contrary. Human beings shared over 98 percent of their DNA with chimpanzees, and significant percentages with creatures as lowly as starfish and coliform bacteria. Humans were inextricably bound up with the web of Earth-evolved life; there could be no question that they’d started out on Earth.
Paul shook his head, “Not saying they are, Dad. But we know the Builders tinkered with our DNA to make us what we are today. You found the proof of that right here at Cydonia. So maybe they moved to Earth when things collapsed here.”
“If they did, we haven’t found any sign of it,” David replied. “Science demands proof, not speculation.”
“You don’t need to bite his head off, David,” Teri said. “The best science begins with speculation. We call it hypothesis. It tells us what we should be looking for.”
“Yeah, and when we rely too heavily on hypothesis, we end up looking a little too hard for proof that our pet theories are right. That’s not science. It’s religion!”
“Uh, actually,” Jack said, nodding at the screen, “maybe we could defer this until later? I’d kind of like to hear the latest up-to-the-minute from Alpha Centauri!”
He was always uncomfortable when this argument, or a variation of it, broke out anew. For so long he’d worshipped David Alexander as a bold, scientific pioneer. When he’d been a kid, back before he’d joined the Corps, he’d followed David’s reports and published papers on the Cydonian discoveries as avidly as other kids followed sports, bonemusic, or girls. It had been startling, even disappointing, to discover that the great Dr. Alexander had a temper…or that he had such acid contempt for ideas he considered to be patent nonsense.
“That’s right,” Teri said. “Stop being so argumentative!”
“Eh? Of course,” he said. “Of course. But I wasn’t arguing. There’s nothing here to argue about.”
“Sam!” Jack called. “Is there any sign of recent habitation?”
“Negative, Jack,” Sam replied. “There is no means of directly dating them, of course, but based on the weathering I have seen, I would estimate that these ruins are on the order of a half million years old. They do not appear to have been disturbed in all that time. Of course, I have seen very little of them as yet.”
“Any indication of what happened?” Paul asked. “I mean, was it a war? An attack?”
“That seems the likeliest explanation at this time,” Sam replied. “From orbit, I have noted the presence of a number of fairly recent craters in the one to fifty-kilometer range. All show approximately the same degree of weathering and erosion. And there is an unusually high correlation between the location of each crater and the nearby location of major ruins. In the case of this city complex, the crater actually lies in the salt flats west of the city, suggesting an ocean impact.”
“My God,” David said, looking up. “Someone was chucking asteroids at them!”
“Just like Chicago,” Teri added. She laid one hand on David’s arm, an understanding touch.
“Or Mars,” David said. “What do you want to bet that the local hunters finished off both Chiron and Mars at the same time?”
“Who’s speculating now, Dad?” Paul asked. He disarmed the jab with a grin. “But I gotta admit, it sure looks compelling.”
“There’s a decent topic for your doctoral thesis, Paul,” David said. “Our first hard evidence that Mars was one small, outpost colony in a larger interstellar empire of some sort, knocked down half a million years ago by the Hunters of the Dawn.”
That name took on more icily ominous overtones now. The term was a translation of Sumerian words and phrases pieced together from various sources, including An ruins found on Earth’s moon. Ten thousand years ago or so, the An had built a colony on Earth, near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. They had been destroyed utterly, on Earth and on the moon, by the attack of an enemy they called, variously, Gaz-Bakar or Ur-Bakar, often with the word Shar, meaning “great or ultimate,” as a prefix. Shar-Gaz-Bakar meant the “Great Smiters” or “Great Killers of the Dawn.” Ur-Bakar could mean either “Foundations of the Dawn” or, more likely in this case, “Hunters of the Dawn.”
The human slaves of the An had referred to the utter destruction of their masters and their fabulous cities as Tar-Tar, a term almost certainly preserved in the name “Tartarus,” the “Place of Destruction,” the Greek Hell.
Exactly how the Hunters of the Dawn had destroyed the An colonies wasn’t known, but the evidence suggested that someone had dropped a small asteroid into the Indian Ocean south of the Persian Gulf. The resultant tidal wave had scoured almost every trace of advanced civilization from the face of the planet, from North Africa to the mountains of Iran and as far north as the
Black Sea. Other asteroid strikes, apparently, had shattered satellite An colonies as far distant as Peru’s Lake Titicaca, where the much-later Inca had later wondered at the megalithic structures called Tiahuanaco, and in central Mexico, where the ruins at Teotihuacán had inspired the much-later rise of the Olmecs and Toltecs.
All that had remained of the An presence were the foundations of the Giza Plateau Complex in Egypt and the impossibly massive, still-enigmatic platform at Baalbek in Lebanon, both of which were built upon by human civilizations that had come along much later, a few foundational remnants in Mexico and Bolivia…and myths found worldwide of a great, all-destructive flood decreed by the gods.
Scholars and researchers were still arguing the details, of course. What was certain was that the Builders, the intelligence that had uplifted primitive man, genetically engineering Homo erectus into the more capable, more voluble, more intelligent twin lines of Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis had been dead and gone for half a million years before the imperialistic An had come along and made Earth and man their own.
But the ruins on Mars showed unmistakable signs of having been bombarded from space; the D&M Pyramid, believed to have been part of the Builders’ terraforming complex, had been punctured on the east side by a small but extremely fast projectile. Most of the ruins at Cydonia showed blast damage.
And here was evidence of a bombardment from space used to annihilate the civilization on Chiron as well.
Had two different sets of attackers, two different “Hunters of the Dawn,” destroyed the cities on Chiron and Mars, and the An colonies on Earth half a million years later, using similar weapons and tactics? Or were the Hunters one race, an incredibly old race, spacefaring and world-wrecking across five hundred millennia?
Either way, the constancy of the destruction gave a clear answer to the Fermi Paradox.
As the information download continued, Jack asked, “Just how much longer is this going to take, Sam?”
“We are limited by this rather primitive technique to approximately one megabyte per second,” Sam replied. “I have amassed, so far, some twenty-four gigabytes of data on the planet alone. I assume you are not referring to the data acquired en route, or to data about other planets of the Alpha Centauri system. Transfer should be complete in another six hours.”
Primitive technique! Well, compared to the Builders’ technology, perhaps it was.
Jack was still having trouble adjusting to the wonder of the situation. There was a strange, even eerie sense of parallelism here. On Chiron, a sophisticated AI was orbiting the planet, teleoperating a robot in the ruins to access the alien FTL communications link; here on Mars, the four of them were in a hab on the Martian surface, using a teleoperated robot to access the other end of that magical-seeming comm link in a different set of alien ruins several kilometers away, deep beneath the rugged mystery of the Cydonian face.
“Look at this, Jack,” David said. He was using his PAD to tap into some of the information coming across the light years. “Teri? Paul? Just look at this!”
Jack leaned over to see the unfolded screen. The display showed the smooth curves of a floater, carved from blue crystal, shining in the sun.
“Sam’s right,” Jack said. “It does look like a floater.”
“There can’t have been many of them,” Paul said. “You guys’ve only found—what?—five of them here?”
“Six, I believe,” David replied. “And some that are in such bad condition they’re little more than rust stains on the rock.”
“And there’s the Ship,” Jack added. Insight, full-blown and startlingly sharp, exploded within him. “It has the same overall shape.”
“My God,” David said. “You’re right! But you don’t think—”
Jack shrugged. “I don’t think anything. But the similarity is worth another look.”
“The Ship” was one of the myriad enigmatic artifacts that littered the Cydonian desert floor, a cigar shape almost two kilometers long that had toppled across the slashed-open ruins of the Fortress, one of the megapyramid atmosphere-generating structures west of the Face and just east of the complex called the City. The shell was in such bad shape little could be gleaned from the wreckage. The thing’s size alone had suggested that it was some sort of enormous starship…obviously one that operated without such primitive embellishments as reaction mass or rocket engines.
“So, what are you saying?” Paul asked him. “That the Ship was really one of the Builders, only two kilometers tall?”
“I’m wondering—and this is all pure speculation at this point—if a few Builders didn’t come to Mars in a single ship…and if they were, indeed, AIs, the size or shape of their body didn’t really matter, did it? But I think there weren’t very many of them, and I think now they might have been fleeing…something.”
“The Hunters,” Teri put in.
“That’s certainly the simplest explanation. Maybe they were even from Alpha Centauri, right next door. Or maybe they were from farther off. Those statues in the Plaza suggest a pretty far-flung association, many civilizations united in an empire or union or whatever.
“Anyway, they started building a colony or outpost on Mars. Why? Earth was right next door.”
“Maybe the Hunters were looking for Earthlike worlds,” Paul suggested.
“Maybe. Or maybe they thought they’d be less conspicuous on Mars,” Teri added.
“Building whopping great atmosphere-plant pyramids and starting to terraform an entire planet is hardly a good way to stay inconspicuous,” Paul said. “Then again…the evidence available suggests they were here for quite a long time, several thousand years at least. Maybe they got tired of living underground. Maybe they thought the Hunters had given up and gone somewhere else.”
“If they were machine intelligences,” Teri said, “they didn’t need to terraform Mars, did they?”
“Christ!” David said. “You’re right!”
“They were doing it for the humans they’d brought from Earth,” Jack said. “How does this sound? A few AIs escaped from the fall of Chiron or wherever. They hid out on Mars for a few thousand years, and probably made frequent hops over to Earth, where they were genetically tinkering with some of the beetle-browed locals. Maybe they hoped to rebuild the civilization they’d lost. Maybe they were just in the market for cheap labor, and had plenty of time to experiment with. They brought a few thousand of the new-breed hominids to Mars, though, and started terraforming the world to give them a place to live.”
“But terraforming was going to take a long time,” David put in. He was getting excited now. “Hundreds of years at the very least, maybe thousands. And we know from the evidence here that though they did warm Mars briefly, half a million years back, enough to recreate the Boreal Sea, they never generated a thick atmosphere over the whole planet. There was a shirt-sleeve environment here at Cydonia, contained, somehow, maybe by some kind of technomagic force field, but the planetary atmosphere never got thicker than point one bar or so. By that time, they must have thought the bad guys had overlooked them.”
“But they hadn’t,” Jack said, nodding. “Or it just took them a while to find them. The Hunters showed up and eliminated the Mars outpost. It didn’t take much. Destroy the Ship, power generators, and the atmosphere plants. The human workers would have asphyxiated almost at once. The Builders might have survived for a time, but without the Ship and without their work force…” He shrugged.
“The Hunters probably visited Earth to pick off any Builder outposts there,” Paul added. “But they must not have thought the hominid species there to be very promising.”
“Maybe they hadn’t counted on the Builders gene-engineering a new species,” Teri said. “There couldn’t have been very many of them. But they were enough of an improvement over Homo erectus that they survived and proliferated.”
“A delightful fantasy,” David said after a moment. “We still need hard evidence…but I must say the scenario fits the observed fa
cts. What I’m not sure I buy is the idea that the Builders were AIs. It leaves us with an unpleasant tautology. Who built the Builders?”
“I’m not sure that’s really an issue, sir,” Jack said. “An AI race of Builders could have been around for a long time, even in galactic terms. Their organic predecessors could have been long extinct, especially considering the fact that the galaxy is beginning to look like a rather dangerous place to try and raise a burgeoning young civilization.”
“We’re already beginning to look at ways to download the human mind into computers,” Paul said. “Maybe the floaters are just the bodies, the machine bodies of the original Builders.”
“If I may make a comment,” Sam said from the screen, “there is nothing inherently implausible about a race of artificial intelligences arising from more primitive forms and evolving in the same fashion as biological species. In the long run, it may be that there is no significant difference between evolution from carbon-based single cells and proteins, and evolution from silicon-based microprocessors. Both can acquire considerable sophistication through the forces of natural selection alone.”
“You know,” David said quietly, “it’s just possible we’ve cracked the secret of the Builders at last. Thanks to you, Sam. I think we need to get this off to Earth immediately. After that—”
Jack’s PAD chirped. He opened it, and Sam’s voice—the original Sam—came from the speaker. “Jack?” she said. “Code One.”
The intrusion was so abrupt, so completely unexpected, that Jack didn’t understand immediately. “W-what?”
“Code One,” Sam repeated. “Triple-N news reports are carrying the story. Two American spacecraft have been deliberately destroyed by a Chinese warship, the Kennedy, on high guard patrol, and the Roosevelt, at Europa. The president of the United States has just asked both the Congress and the CWS Council to declare that a state of war exists between the Confederation’s member states and the republic of Greater China.
