Omega к-4

by Джек Макдевитт

  “Actually,” he said, “I doubt it. Place like this will probably turn out to be run by a strongman of some sort.” Around him, the shops seemed prosperous, the Goompahs content. Other than the one uniform, there was no sign of armed guards. “Still, you never know.”

  They peeked through the windows of a two-story building and saw rows of Goompahs sitting on stools, copying manuscripts.

  They visited a blacksmith, watched an artisan crafting a bracelet, and got stranded in a physician’s quarters when someone unexpectedly closed a door. They tried to abide by Jack’s dictum that the natives not be allowed to see unexplainable events. So they sat down in the presence of the physician and his patient, and waited for their opportunity.

  The patient was a male with a bright blue shirt. He was apparently suffering from a digestive problem. It was then that Digger first noticed the ability of the natives to bend their ears forward. While the patient answered questions, his doctor did precisely that. They left a pickup.

  Later, they wandered through the markets near the waterfront. This was the same area that Digger had visited on that first night, when he’d placed the original set of pickups. The shops were decorated with brightly colored linens and tapestries. Pennants flew from rooftops. There were quarrels, beggars, some pushing and shoving, and once they saw a thief get away with what looked like a side of beef. So maybe Athens needed some policing after all.

  Barter was in effect, as well as the monetary system.

  Several times, Digger brushed up against the creatures. It was hard to avoid. What was significant was that the Goompahs, after they’d bounced off empty space, stared at it in surprise, moved their jaws up and down and muttered the same word. It was always the same. Kay-lo. The same thing the Goompah in the quarrel had said. He filed it away as an expletive, or as strange.

  Two buildings on opposite sides of an avenue each contained a raised platform, centered among rising rows of benches. Concert halls? Places for political debate? Theaters in the round? They were empty at the moment.

  “I’d like to see the show,” he told Kellie.

  “We can come back this evening,” she said, “and take a look.”

  IT WAS TIME to go see the temple.

  It stood atop a crest of hills on the southern edge of the city, gold now in the approaching sunset. They climbed a road and finally a wide wooden staircase to get to it.

  It was bigger up close than Digger had expected, round and polished, without ornamentation other than an inscription over the front entrance. Doric columns. A winged deity guarding the approaches, and watching over an ornate and lovely sundial, as though she were keeper of the seasons.

  Walkways curved around the building and arced out to the highest point of the promontory, overlooking the sea. There were a goodly number of Goompahs, some simply strolling along the paths, others wandering among the columns and through the temple itself. There was no mistaking the sacred tone of the place. Voices were lowered, heads bowed, eyes distant. It was there that Digger first felt a serious kinship with the Goompahs.

  A young one was being taken to task by a parent for breaking into a run and making a loud noise. A pair, male and female, approached the front entrance hand in hand, drawing closer together. Digger saw one bent with age struggle to kneel on the grass, lift a hinged piece of stone (by a ring installed for the purpose), and put something beneath it. Money, Digger thought.

  An offering?

  Moments later, a child who’d been with him retrieved the object. Or retrieved part of it.

  “What do you think?” Digger asked.

  Kellie’s hand was on his arm. “Don’t know. Passing the torch, maybe. Bury in sacred ground and recover. Pass it on beneath the eyes of the gods. Probably leave part of it for the religious establishment.”

  The winged deity was about three-times life-size, and, unlike the ones in the park, this one was clothed. The wings were larger, sweeping, regal. She—there was no question it was female—carried a torch which she held straight out from her body. Save the wings, the figure shared all the physical characteristics of the natives, but Digger would never have considered calling her a Goompah.

  They mounted the steps. Digger counted twelve. And he thought immediately of twelve months, twelve Olympians, twelve Apostles. Was all this stuff hardwired into sentient creatures everywhere?

  The columns were wide, maybe twice as far around as he could have reached. The stone felt like marble.

  The interior was a single space, a rotunda. The ceiling was high, possibly three stories, and vaulted. A stone platform, perhaps an altar, stood in the central section. Other statues gazed down at them. None had wings, but all shared a sublime majesty. They wore the same leggings and pullovers and sandals as the locals, but in the hands of the sculptors they’d become divine effects. One male divinity looked past Digger with a quiet smile, a female watched him with studied compassion. Another, more matronly, female cradled a child; a large warrior type was in the act of drawing a sword.

  Not entirely without conflict, were they?

  An older deity, with a lined face and weary eyes, bent over a scroll. A girl played a stringed instrument. And a male, overweight even for a Goompah, was transfixed in the act of laughing. He seemed somehow most dominant of all, and he set the mood for the place.

  “Are you thinking what I am?” Kellie whispered.

  That all this was going to be destroyed? That the circular shape of the temple was unlikely to save it because it was much too close to the city? “You know,” he said, “I’m beginning to get annoyed.”

  The floor was constructed from ornately carved tiles. There were geometric designs, but he could also see depictions of the rays of the sun and images of branches and leaves. There were more columns in the interior. These were narrower, and they were decorated by the now-familiar symbols of the Goompah language. They moved through the temple, taking pictures of everything.

  The worshipers walked quietly. No one spoke; the only sounds came from the wind and the sea and the periodic scream of a seabird. In the west, the sun was sinking toward the horizon.

  An attendant passed through, lighting oil lamps. “It’s getting late,” Kellie said. “You ready to go back?”

  Digger nodded. He removed a pickup from his vest, kept it carefully hidden in his hands, until he’d inserted it in the shadows between a column and a wall. “Last one,” he said.

  “You think there’s much point, Dig? I don’t think anybody here says anything.”

  “It’s okay. The atmosphere of this place is worth recording and sending back.”

  But he knew they wouldn’t capture the atmosphere on disk. Hutchins, sitting in her office three thousand light-years away, would never understand what this place felt like.

  They stood a moment between two columns and watched a ship pass. Digger tried to remember what the ocean looked like to the east. How far was the next major landfall?

  “Traffic must all be up and down the isthmus,” said Kellie. “North and south.”

  Not east and west. There was no evidence the Goompahs had been around the world. Strictly terra incognita out there.

  The visitors to the temple were filing away; Digger and Kellie were almost alone. The lamps burned cheerfully, but their locations seemed primarily designed to accent the statuary.

  Digger looked at the flickering lights, at the figure of the woman and child. What was the story behind that? The images were aspects, he knew, of the local mythology. Of the things that the Goompahs thought important. This was information that Collingdale would want to have.

  The place was different in some ineffable way from houses of worship at home. Or even from pagan temples.

  They paused again before the winged figure at the entrance. “Somebody here studied under Phidias,” said Kellie.

  Digger nodded. Creature from another world that he was, he could still read dignity and power and compassion in those features. And the torch that she held spoke to him.

&
nbsp; He looked back into the rotunda. At the laughing god.

  THE ISTHMUS ROAD seemed unduly long on the return, and Digger was weary by the time they reached the lander. Night had fallen, and he was glad to shut off the lightbender and the e-suit and collapse into his seat.

  Kellie gave a destination to Bill, and they lifted off and turned seaward. “How we doing?” she asked, reminding him that his bleak mood was still showing.

  “Good,” he said. “We’re doing fine.”

  For a long moment he could hear only the power flow. “You going to be all right?” she asked.

  He looked out at scudding clouds, bright in the double moonlight. “Sure.” Don’t do it, Digger. He was okay. A little down, but he was okay. “Where are we going?”

  “There’s an island. Safe place to spend the night.”

  “Alone with Collier on an island,” he said. “Sounds like a dream.”

  “You don’t sound as if you mean it.”

  “I’m all right,” he insisted. “This island. Does it have a name?”

  She thought a moment. “Utopia,” she said.

  LIBRARY ENTRY

  The great tragedy confronting us here is not that the Goompahs, to use the common terminology, face massive destruction, although that is surely cause enough for sorrow. But what makes me sad is that they may pass from existence without ever having understood the supreme joy that accompanies the life of the spirit. They have lived their lives, and they have missed the heart of the matter.

  — Rev. George Christopher

  The Monica Albright Show

  Wednesday, May 7

  PART THREE

  molly kalottuls

  chapter 20

  On board the al-Jahani, in hyperflight.

  Tuesday, June 10.

  THE NEWS OF Markover’s death had delivered a jolt, reminding everyone on board that the operation on which they were embarked had its unique dangers.

  A few members of the research team had known him. Peggy Malachy had worked with him years earlier, and Jason Holder recollected signing a petition that Markover had sent around, though he could not recall the issue. Jean Dionne remembered him from a joint mission years before. “Good man,” she told Collingdale. “A bit stuffy, but you could depend on him.”

  Collingdale had been on a weeklong flight with him once. He remembered Markover as aggressive, arrogant, irritating. Although he wouldn’t have admitted it even to himself, he was relieved he wouldn’t have to deal with him at Lookout.

  THE LINGUISTS WERE getting torrents of raw data from the Jenkins. They’d broken into the language, and were in the process of constructing a vocabulary that by then numbered several hundred nouns and verbs. They understood the syntactical structure, which resembled Latin, verb first, noun/subject deeper in the sentence. They had the numeric system and most of its terms down. (Base twelve, undoubtedly a reflection of the fact that Goompahs had twelve digits.) They knew the names of about forty individuals.

  The city that Markover had called Athens was Brackel in the language of its inhabitants.

  Brackel.

  Whatever else you could say for the Goompahs, they had tin ears.

  The residents of Brackel were Brackum. Well, Collingdale thought, there you are.

  Two other cities for which they had names were Roka and Sakmarung. The planet, their word for Earth, was Korbikkan, which (as at home) also meant ground. They lived in it, and not on it, implying they had no sense of the structure of things. Their name for the sea was bakka, which also meant that which is without limit.

  They had a complex conjugal system of shared spouses, which Collingdale and his team of specialists hadn’t quite figured out yet. Brackel seemed to be home to approximately twenty-eight community groups. Spouses within a group had free access to each other, although it appeared they settled on a favorite or two, and only had relations with others to keep up appearances or morale or some such thing. It wasn’t an area in which Collingdale was interested, but some of his experts were already making lascivious jokes.

  Offspring from one group could, on maturity, become a member by marriage of specified other groups. But the choices were limited to prevent genetic damage. It was a cumbersome system, which would, he suspected, eventually give way to monogamy. Holder wasn’t so sure, pointing out that similar systems were still in use in remote places at home.

  They had not established whether the same system was in use in the other cities, although preliminary evidence suggested it was.

  Life among the Goompahs seemed to be pretty good. Apparently, the crops all but grew themselves. Digger Dunn was still dithering about getting a reliable climate analysis, but it looked as if the temperatures ranged from cool to balmy.

  The Goompahs talked a lot about politics, leading Holder to conclude that the general population participated in government. Whether the city was an aristocracy or a democracy, or some variant, was still impossible to say. Although some of Collingdale’s people were entranced at the prospect of finding out, it was not a detail that particularly concerned the director.

  And that fact puzzled him. He’d thought that his reason for coming, aside from managing a rescue, was to learn about the Goompahs. But he’d lost interest. In fact, he’d begun to suspect that he’d never really cared all that much. He gradually began to realize that he’d come because of the cloud.

  His xenologists had insisted from the beginning that he warn the Jenkins people not to establish contact with the natives under any circumstances. They all seemed to think nobody else should say hello, but that it was okay for them to do it because only they knew how to do it correctly.

  He’d warned them that policy had not changed to the degree that they should expect to sit down over dinner with the natives. (They still hadn’t agreed on an appropriate term of reference for the aliens. Goompahs set his teeth on edge. Brackum was limited to the inhabitants of Brackel. Peggy Malachy liked to call them Wobblies. Collingdale began trying to encourage the use of Korbs.)

  Shelley Baker invariably looked amused when they talked about limiting or barring communication. She said nothing in front of the others, but she’d told him privately that the omega made all the difference. “We’re going to have to talk with them,” she said. “If nothing else, we have to be able to tell them to get out of the cities.”

  MARY SENT A message every couple of days. She kept them short, well within Academy guidelines. She’d tell him about a show she’d seen, or how she’d run into some old school friends downtown. Or how she still went to Chubby’s, but the sandwiches had tasted better when he was there.

  He replied in kind. He was busy, and sometimes couldn’t think what he wanted to say. But he enjoyed switching on the system and imagining she was in the room with him. He told her about the work they were doing, how he’d been tweaking the visuals they were going to use to get rid of the cloud. And that he was trying to learn the Goompah language. “We can make the sounds,” he said. “Judy says we got lucky. Now it’s just a matter of doing the work.”

  Seeing her, listening to her voice, sometimes happy, sometimes wistful, fed his hatred for the omega. He took to spending time in the VR tank, where he conjured up the view from Lookout, as it would be in late November, when the cloud would be prominent in the skies. Vast and ugly, torn by its own gee forces, it would be coming in over the western ocean, visible only at night, rising shortly after the sun went down, growing larger and more terrifying with the passage of time.

  It was obvious Judy was worrying about him. She occasionally joined him in the tank, when she thought he was getting too moody. “The clouds aren’t personal,” she insisted. “Whoever, whatever, did this, it happened a long time ago. Who knows what the purpose was? But I’ll bet, when we find out, if we ever find out, we’ll discover it’s more stupidity than venom.”

  “You’re kidding,” he told her, as they stood together on the shore near Brackel and looked up at the omega. He saw it as pure malice. And while he was not a violent man
by nature, he would happily have taken the lives of the engineers that had put these things together.

  But she was serious. “Whatever it was, it’s long dead. The machinery keeps working, keeps pumping them out, but the intelligence behind them is gone. And it couldn’t have hated us. It didn’t know us. It just—” She stopped. “I’m not sure I’m making sense.”

  He gazed up at the cloud, quietly unfolding across the star fields. “Judy,” he said, “I don’t know how else to explain these things other than as an act of pure evil.”

  “Well,” she said. “Maybe.” She shrugged and looked out to sea, and he thought how attractive she was. More so there on the beach than in the confines of the ship. He wondered at the capability of women to take on part of the beauty of their surroundings.

  But he could not keep his eyes long off the cloud. He yearned to be able to reach up and strike the thing out of the sky.

  JUDY WAS BARELY out of her twenties. She had a Ph.D. in anthropology, specializing in primitive religions, from the University of Jerusalem. Her reputation for linguistic capabilities had brought her to Hutch’s attention. Collingdale had heard she was also a pretty good equestrienne.

  Her parents, she told him, had been horrified when she volunteered for the mission. Nobody else crazy enough to go. Get yourself killed. There’d been a pretty big blow-up, apparently.

  At her worksite she’d mounted pictures of several of the Goompahs for which they had names. Goompahs used a string of names, of which two defined the conjugal group and the region of birth. The others appeared to be individual and arbitrary.

  To Collingdale they all looked alike. But Judy laughed and said there were clear differences. This one had a large chin, that one a weak mouth. She even claimed she could distinguish personality traits and moods: Kolgar was gruff, while Bruk was amiable.

  She’d mastered enough of the language to be able to carry on a respectable conversation, though not with Collingdale, who’d fallen far behind. He could commit some of the words to memory, and knew how to say hello, fish, cold, night, home, and another dozen or so terms. If he were stranded he might even have been able to ask for the local equivalent of coffee, which was a brewed hot drink called basho. Sounded Japanese to his ears.