Halfway there and Malenfant suddenly noticed he was panting. ‘Jeez,’ he said. ‘It really is like I’m doing some military camp route march with a pack of rocks on my back.’
‘You’ll get used to it,’ Briggs murmured. ‘Or not. Anyhow it’s not far. We have returned to study this one Tower repeatedly – selected somewhat at random, one out of a population of sixty-five thousand around the equator – but we chose it—’
‘For safety reasons. I get it. It’s next to a nice broad plain for landing on.’
Behind his visor Guy Briggs grinned, as if proud. As if he had built the Towers himself. ‘What do you think, eh, Malenfant? Like something out of Blake, what? Dark satanic mills . . . And these are mills, or at least engines, we think. World-spanning engines.’ He stamped on the ground. ‘We haven’t dug down to see for ourselves, but we have seismometers that show us huge chambers under the Towers. Engines, giant themselves, enigmatic.
‘But, as to the basics – as you can see, somebody, or something, built this Tower. And its companions. They are clearly artificial. As indeed are the structures we have discovered inside Phobos. Simplest hypothesis is that those two occurrences of artifice are caused by the same agency – the same, umm, race, of whatever alien beings. But we don’t know that – indeed we know nothing of the engineers, save for the existence of their artefacts themselves. Perhaps they are long gone. Perhaps not.
‘Whatever they were, they evidently didn’t think like us. Never mind the scale of all this. Look around. On this planet, sixty-five thousand of these Towers in their orderly row. And aside from that – nothing. Nothing on the planet. No modifications we can see, no structures. No houses, factories, towns, no roads or mines. No sense of a hinterland, of a civilisation or even colony that might have built all this.’
Briggs was tall, elegant, his voice calm, yet somehow projecting wonder. Malenfant found himself unexpectedly impressed by this man. A quiet visionary.
‘So they didn’t live here,’ Nicola said. ‘They didn’t colonise, or develop a civilisation, whatever. They just – built this.’
‘Correct. Let’s move on.’
They walked.
Nearer the Tower there was clearer evidence of previous human visits. Malenfant recognised caches of emergency supplies: air tanks, water bottles, medical supplies, in one place what looked like an inflatable shelter. Instruments on stands, and set out on the rocky ground: seismometers, Geiger counters, cameras peering at the Tower. Close to the foot of the structure, there were small heaps of rubble where samples had evidently been drilled out of the rocky ground. The humans who had come here had left traces, if not the builders.
And, at last, the Tower itself.
If it was very tall, it was also very slim: Malenfant guessed a hundred paces wide, no more. And he was, he realised, now no more than a hundred paces from the Tower wall itself.
‘I’m guessing a hundred metres diameter?’
‘That’s about right,’ Briggs murmured. ‘Though I would record it as yards.’ He was walking around the instruments, checking their status. He paused at one camera, to extract what looked like a cassette of film. ‘The width, you know, is only half of one per cent of the height.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ Nicola murmured. ‘It’s like a conductor’s baton standing on one end. It ought to just topple over. And to think this thing has been standing here for – how long, Guy?’
‘Billions of years.’
Malenfant stared at him. ‘Billions of years. You serious about that?’
Briggs smirked. ‘Out of deference to you, Colonel, I employ the American usage of the word, meaning thousands of millions. But, yes, I am quite serious. As I said, you’ll see the evidence for yourself . . . Come. Walk with me. I think you have to apprehend this physically, as far as you can. We can’t climb the damn thing, but we can walk around it, at least, in a few minutes. Does the psychology good. Or not . . .’
So the three of them walked, more or less clumsily, in a loose circle around the Tower. This didn’t feel so strange to Malenfant. It was as if he were walking around some high-rise in a city somewhere. It was only if he looked up, to a structure whose upper limits he couldn’t even make out, or east and west to the giant companions of this Tower, that he felt disconcerted.
They came back to roughly where they had started.
And then Briggs walked boldly up to the Tower, reached up with a gloved hand, and slapped the wall.
It was the first time any of them had touched the Tower. Malenfant found himself flinching reflexively.
Briggs went on, ‘Would it comfort you if I said this thing is hollow? The top is open. Like some giant chimney stack. And the walls are wafer-thin. We proved that by flying over it in Charon – over this beast and a few of its companions – and also by dropping camera drones down deep inside. Plucky little gadgets made it all the way down. Rocket-powered, of course.’
‘Down to what?’
‘Don’t make me give away all my secrets at once.’
Now Malenfant reached out with a gloved hand, and touched the surface himself. He was hesitant, but felt nothing as his gloved palm pressed against the wall. ‘Can’t feel a damn thing. Not even a temperature difference. I wish I could take my glove off and feel it directly.’
Briggs nodded. ‘That’s an impulse I understand. Impossible, of course.’
‘What’s it made of, though?’
Briggs shrugged. ‘There we are stumped. Something tough enough to have lasted aeons, that’s for sure. I mean, none of the Towers show any damage from meteorite strikes, for instance, and statistically, over such an interval, some of them ought to have been smashed just from that cause alone. Certainly our sampling has been unsuccessful; we have tried everything from geological hammers to laser drills.
‘Oh, we have various theories, and the less you know about science the wilder the theory. Maybe the wall material is some variant of more or less normal material we have yet to encounter. An exotic kind of diamond, for instance. Maybe it is protected, somehow, from our tools, by some kind of energy field. But it doesn’t feel like that, does it? It feels like a hard surface, not as if you are being pushed back by some field of force.
‘Another possibility is that it is some variant of the stuff we found at Phobos – the quantum-crystalline sheeting they used there to line the walls of the shafts – I believe you were briefed? That is an economical hypothesis at least – the same agency using the same technology.
‘And Josh Morris once opined that a Tower wall might not be material at all. Suppose it is some artefact of twisted spacetime? Well, old Einstein did show us that that kind of distortion was theoretically possible. The energies involved would be huge, though.’
Malenfant shook his head. ‘That kid has a fine imagination.’
Nicola gazed up at the Tower. ‘Somehow I doubt that energy budgets were a primary concern for whoever built this thing, and its siblings.’
‘There I tend to agree with you. But as to how it was done . . . My own guess? I think it may be some kind of self-replicating material. Almost like a living thing, like a tree trunk, just gathering material and energy from the environment, and growing up and up. After all a tree is a far more complex structure than this, and that needs no conscious engineering. And there are forests on Earth with far more than sixty-five thousand trees, all alike.
‘Pity, really, that we’ve got no further. I mean, we are out here for the good of the Empire. And a material as light and durable as this stuff seems to be – imagine it as hull plate for shipping, or aircraft fuselages! That’s even before you get on to space applications. Why, our manufacturers would suddenly be as far advanced over our German and American rivals as were the Romans with their concrete, lording it over the Ancient Britons with their wooden roundhouses. By the way, we may not be able to retrieve a sample of the wall material, but we have safely patented it.’
Malenfant snorted. ‘That doesn’t surprise me.’
Emma whis
pered in his ear, from the Harmonia. ‘Private line. Aside from the miraculous wall material, doesn’t all this strike you as – well, as crude, Malenfant? A row of big chimney flues . . . Think of the engineering we found in Phobos. Or thought we found.’
‘The Sculpture Garden,’ he murmured. ‘The spacetime subway.’
‘It’s hard to believe that the same culture who built that – or even the Phobos time-crystal material – can have been responsible for this.’
‘Umm. You have a point. So maybe they weren’t the same culture. Maybe the Tower engineers . . . borrowed that other stuff? Or just used it to get to places, the way the British are now.’
Briggs was saying now, ‘Most frustrating of all, of course, is not knowing the purpose of all this. The problem is we have so little evidence. We know what the Phobos Sculpture Garden can be used for. We don’t even know that much of the Towers. And we know still less about what it was all intended for. Which is a different thing, if you think about it.’
‘Yeah.’ Malenfant peered at the line of Towers. ‘A monument designed to last billions of years? The Pharaohs would have loved it . . .’
No, that wasn’t right, he thought. This was no monument, it was too functional for that. What, then?
And, even as he posed the question, he thought he saw an answer. He stayed silent, thinking.
Briggs turned briskly back towards the lander. ‘I think that’s enough for now. Come back to Charon and I’ll show off my homework. How we found all this out, and deduced the structure . . . And then we can all indulge in wild speculation.’
Malenfant just stood there. Unwilling to move. As if he feared breaking the fragile chain of logic in his head.
Nicola stayed with him. ‘Malenfant? Are you OK?’
‘Independent verification.’
‘What?’
He turned to look at her. At that strange yet familiar face, visible through her visor. ‘I need somebody else to come up with the idea, independently.’
‘What idea?’
He grinned. ‘The craziest idea I ever had, that’s all. Or the best. Come on, let’s get back to the lander.’
But as she turned away, still he hesitated. Then he dug into a suit pocket, and produced his battered Shit Cola can. ‘Souvenir of London, England.’ He bent, stiffly, and, his gloved hands awkward, put the can down on the rocky ground. Because, why the hell not? He had the feeling he was never going to come so far as this again. ‘My personal high-water mark.’
‘Malenfant?’
‘Coming, Nicola.’ He turned around and walked clumsily back to the lander, leaving the can behind.
65
It turned out that Briggs wasn’t lying about showing off his work. But then, as Malenfant conceded to Nicola, he evidently had a lot to show off about.
And as he described his investigations and results, the words and images he produced at the lander were relayed up to Melinoe and Harmonia, to Deirdra, Emma and the rest. Relayed both by the British radio gear and, more subtly, by Malenfant’s companions’ bangles.
‘We have been scientific about this, I’ll have you know,’ Briggs said now. ‘Good enough for the Ministry science bods anyhow, if not to Royal Society standard. We’ve studied the Towers every which way we can, we’ve taken ground samples, we’ve dropped drones down the flues, we’ve done various soundings to get a sense of the underground structure . . . We even set off a hand grenade next to one of those Towers, to get some decent seismology signals.’
‘It was Bill McLaurin did that,’ said Lighthill mildly. ‘You were bloody miles away. He told me.’
‘All right, we don’t need to go into that, thanks, Wing Commander. At any rate there are underground structures – cavities, perhaps mechanisms of some kind.’
Nicola murmured to Malenfant, ‘Incidentally this is all new to me too. As a newcomer here. Well, most of it. Even though I’m in the military.’
Malenfant smiled. ‘National security again?’
‘Quite so.’
‘Well, I shouldn’t be surprised. Given you fly in a spaceship equipped with hand grenades.’
‘To begin with,’ Briggs said, ‘I think we can be confident that this planet, Persephone, did not form where we find it now, out in the comet cloud. This is a rocky, more or less Earthlike world, which must, therefore, have formed roughly in the same part of the Solar System as Earth. As previously discussed. And we are pretty confident that we can show that these Towers were built in that epoch. When Persephone was young and hot and warm.’
‘How can you know that?’ Nicola asked.
‘From the rock cores we have taken – and we’re confident about that, for this continent, Iscariot, does seem to be pretty stable, geologically speaking.
‘For example, we found that some of the Towers we examined had been set up on the beds of shallow seas. Seas of still-liquid water. You can tell from trapped sediments and so forth, right at the base of the structure – well, the base before you reach the foundations that dive deep down into the crust. There are even traces of life in these deep layers. Life like our own biochemically – life like the other forms we have encountered, here, even on Melinoe – but very primitive. No photosynthesis for example, no oxygenation of the air.
‘And we think that this world was moved – however that was done – or maybe it migrated naturally, out of the inner Solar System, very soon after the building of the Towers.’ He dragged out rolls of paper, photographic images of some kind of cores, the strata hand-labelled. ‘These cores of ice and rock are like records of what became of the planet subsequently. You see, if you detach a world from its sun, especially if it’s a slow process – well, the world’s systems react slowly too. They leave traces, easily distinguishable layers, as stuff rains out or sinks, as living things die off. You see a gradual diminution of the biological content, and the rock structures are increasingly disrupted by ice formations . . .’
Malenfant nodded, imagining it. ‘The sunlight is dying. The seas are cooling, and quickly – they are pretty shallow, aren’t they? Soon enough they start to freeze. And then, eventually, the air snows out.’
‘Right,’ said Briggs. ‘There are other indicators of time passing. As the water rains out, so the erosion rate slows, you see. The land, the mountains wearing away, the rivers washing sediment into the oceans – all that slows down. You can see that in the cores.’ He traced features of his core charts. ‘Thinning layers of sediment, you see, down here near the base – soon after the displacement itself.
‘And finally, when it gets colder than Pluto because you are that far out, you get a one-off wave of frost-shattering. After that, there is nothing left but the silent rocks, and the ice.
‘As for the geology bods who have tried to interpret all this – well, it’s complicated, their models differ. After all, nobody has ever observed this kind of process directly, this descent into a permanent Ice Age. But they seem to agree that it took about a million years to deliver the planet to its current orbit – out here, in the comet cloud. As you can tell from the cores, and other evidence.’
‘A million years,’ Malenfant mused. ‘Wow. A million years, for a thousand astronomical units of displacement.’
Malenfant heard a gasp that he knew had to be Deirdra, up on Harmonia. He heard it, deep inside his own skull. She whispered, unnecessarily, ‘A million years for a thousand AU. I think I have an idea.’
Malenfant muttered under his breath, ‘What idea?’
‘Let me think about it.’
Briggs was grinning, a little self-satisfied, Malenfant thought. Briggs went on, ‘Impressed? A million years? In any other circumstances that would be a big number – and an impressive result. But, you see, we have records of events that must have occurred after the displacement too. I mean, after Persephone was dumped out here, billions of years ago. Even without the Sun, even without air and oceans, the geological wheels of this big old world have continued to grind on. The continents washing back and forth like lily
pads on a pond. Volcanoes leaving layers of ash and lava all over the place. And all these events leave traces on the ground, which the geologists can sequence and date. The most direct evidence we have that the Towers were built before the displacement are layers of volcanic lava and ash that have solidified around the Towers’ feet. And under those layers, we find those traces of a million years of steadily thinning life – evidence of the cooling.
‘Thus we can say confidently that more than four billion years have passed, since the displacement.’
Malenfant shook his head. He’d had hints that such a conclusion was coming. Even so that was a stunning result. ‘As the Solar System was born, then,’ he said. ‘All this happened as the Solar System was still being created, the planets congealing and colliding – and even though life was here already – while all that was still under way, some process moved this world out here, across a thousand astronomical units, to the comet cloud. And here it has stayed ever since.’
‘That’s about the size of it.’
‘OK. So much for the setting. Now tell me about the Towers themselves. Sixty-five thousand, you say?’
‘Pretty much girdling the planet,’ Briggs said. ‘Each thirteen miles tall. A picket fence marching right along the equator, regular as a line on a map.’
‘Hmm. All of them on Iscariot, most on dry land?’
‘A couple still stand in shallow, frozen seas. Doesn’t make that much difference if you are thirteen miles high. But, yes, they are all very close to the equator.’
Malenfant chewed on that. ‘OK, but you’ve just been lecturing me about all the fancy geological activity on this world. Correct? The continents drift around, they crash and draw apart, just as on Earth. So even if the . . . engineers . . . who built those Towers had got them lined up nicely, on a continent that happened to sprawl along the equator back then, wouldn’t they have drifted off by now? I mean, I could see it for myself, from space: one continent swimming down from the north, two more receding in the south. And that big bulge on Caina ought to make a difference too. How come that straggly continent hasn’t drifted and twisted and broken up? How come, in fact, at least some of those Towers haven’t been knocked over by quakes and landslips – even a volcano going off under one of them?’
World Engine Page 41
