Futures Near and Far (29 page)

Neil leaned back, losing the sharp tone. “Never mind. I
wasn’t asking for official reasons,” he lied. “I’m sure you’ll come out of this
better prepared should anything like this develop in future.”

Vereshchagin did not seem consoled. Small wonder. Even if he
believed that Neil — and thus the Thwaa — had taken no note of him, Dimitri’s
report to the governor would call into question the Russian’s appointment to
lead the archaeological project. Neil vaguely recalled the man’s credentials
from the background check he had conducted for ark candidacy, in the sweet days
before Neil had been elevated from the governor’s security assessor to an
unlooked-for role as Thwaa consul. Vereshchagin was quite distinguished in his
specialty, but his dearth of administrative skills had now shown itself to be a
handicap. He might never be granted responsibilities of such magnitude again.

o0o

Neil spent a further two hours interrogating witnesses,
especially Christine Radner, who confirmed the infidelity. He learned nothing
really new, nor did he feel the need to do so. For minute details, the Thwaa
could turn to Dimitri’s official investigator’s file. After all, Bilyang was
the first human to die outside the realm of Sol’s gravity. If only for
posterity’s sake, the inspector was compiling an exhaustive record, a process
that would resume once past the interruption of Neil’s visit.

“That was ugly,” Dimitri told Neil as they walked among the
ruins, stretching their legs before the flight back to the capital. “When I
arrived yesterday I expected to uncover at worst a crime of passion — a
spur-of-the-moment collapse of judgment. But that man has no remorse, and he’s
a racist as well.”

Neil wished he could disagree. “I’m told the jail in
Landfall isn’t complete. Where will you keep him until the trial?”

“I’ll have a shuttle pick him up tomorrow. We’ll shove the
bastard in the brig aboard the ark. Until then, I’m leaving him in that pit in
the lakebed.”

“You’ll trust Vereshchagin’s people to stay away from him?”

“They’ve behaved themselves so far. Besides, there are no
Indonesians left on site, nor any Australians besides Radner. We can’t say that
about the capital.”

Neil grimaced. “No. We can’t.”

The conversation lapsed as they ambled more deeply into the
ruins. Here and there they passed diggers. Twenty-Second-Century classical
music drifted their way from a player near one of the trenches, but Neil felt
strikingly out of place. He was treading a street never marked by human feet
until a few weeks earlier.

The word “streets” didn’t quite apply. The space between the
buildings may have been used for traffic, vehicular or otherwise, but it bore
no resemblance to the gridlike arrangement of most Terran metropolitan cores.
In spots the gaps were barely wide enough for a single pedestrian, in other
places several trucks could have passed side by side. When Neil had seen the
city plan from the air, it had resembled the pebble-and-concrete patio of his
childhood home. Foundations were laid in circular, oval, or kidney configuration,
with the structures — so he gathered from the surviving examples — rising from
one to ten stories and coming to rounded tops. Some edifices were huge, others
small, in random sequence. The doorways were all low and wide, just the
opposite of what a human would require. In fact, the only thing reminiscent of
Earth architecture was the abundance of windows.

“Remarkable,” Neil said, contemplating the nearest upright
tower. In the fifteen thousand years since the Eridanin had abandoned their
colony, the roof had fallen in and weather, wind, and wildlife had erased most
surface features, but obviously the structure had been erected by a culture
that meant to stay. And had, until the Thwaa said otherwise.

“This was a rich world, Neil,” Dimitri said.

“Still is. Will be.”

“Will it?” Dimitri asked. “Is that faith I’m hearing, or do
you have some sort of insider knowledge?”

Neil knew what Dimitri was asking. “The Thwaa don’t let me
in on their councils, my friend. I just know what I see. They wouldn’t have
given us any sort of chance if they didn’t see some positive qualities in us,
not after they went to all the trouble of kicking the Eridanin out and leaving
the planet fallow ever since.”

Dimitri laughed, but it was bitter. “I’ve heard that logic
before. We both know the Thwaa can’t be predicted that way. I tell you,
sometimes I feel as though when it comes to guessing how the Thwaa want us to
behave, every human of this colony is dancing between raindrops in a storm,
trying not to get wet.”

“Some of us are passable dancers,” Neil argued, remembering
a certain night back in Athens, at the wedding of Dimitri’s cousin, when his
classmate demonstrated the depth of his skill luring his countrywomen onto the
floor.

“Better than the Eridanin, I suppose,” Dimitri said.

“Yes. Perhaps they had too many legs to trip over.”

Suddenly, as if Neil’s comment had reminded him of
something, Dimitri checked his watch. “Ah. Good. We have time. There is a
special relic Vereshchagin mentioned. I would be honored if you and I were to
see it together.”

Dimitri’s invitation was flavored with the tone of
inclusiveness that harkened back to long-held fellowship. Neil realized how
much he had missed hearing that quality in his friend’s voice. “Okay. I’m in no
hurry. Lead on.”

The inspector excused himself to consult with the nearest
digger. When he returned, he led Neil a few blocks to the west. The ruins ended
abruptly at the former shoreline. They continued along what had once been a
boardwalk of sorts. Neil rejected the terms “wharf” or “docks” or “quay,”
tempted as he was to apply those labels. The Eridanin might have sailed vast
oceans of space, but as Vereshchagin had so recently mentioned, they didn’t
travel on the waters of their worlds if they could avoid it. That
characteristic helped confirm which planets they inhabited. The images of their
worlds in the Hershel scans showed urban areas clustered along rivers and
lakeshores — the Eridanin needed water to drink as much as humans did — but
none of any great extent along sea coasts, breaking the pattern shown by so
many other sentient races. In that regard Bjornssen, with its abundant oceans
and coastlines, must have served them poorly.

Neil was surprised, then, when — after obtaining flashlights
from the shed — they headed out across the lakebed toward what had, in Eridanin
times, been an island. Their destination was a crag near the extant pool of
brine. The stratified marks of erosion proved the upper portion had been above
the waterline even when the lake was at its
greatest extent. Above the highest scars left by the ancient waves, but
below the point where the incline became too sharp for climbing, a dimple of
shadow indicated the opening of a cave or tunnel.

Out in the flat they were buffeted by a dry but temperate
wind. Neil found it necessary to step around several prairie wrigglers, native
herbivores that resembled fist-sized balls of earthworms. Somewhere in each
bundle of serpentine digits hid a mouth; he knew this because the creatures
tumbled and rolled between the clumps of desert vegetation, gnawing at the
fleshy parts like rodents and spitting out spines and burrs. For their sake, he
hoped they would not be too voracious. If they ate the plants entirely they
would have little shelter from predators.

He had probably seen images of this salt flat, taken by the
Hershel. In twenty-seven years, some Earthbound astronomer might download the
latest update and see the shed where he had interrogated Radner. He and Dimitri
wouldn’t show up. Too small, and in any case their presence would be invisible.
The Hershel gathered its information by taking snapshots once every planetary
rotation and combining multiple exposures; anything mobile would not be
recorded. And yet, out in the open, he felt exposed. The sky was aqua, not
cerulean. Alien. It provided no buffer between him and the Thwaa escort vessel
he knew to be up there in orbit. Perhaps over that very spot, at that very
minute.

Something
was
watching them. A creature was hopping about the rocky summit ahead. Neil
studied its elongated black shape, yellow beak, and membranous, batlike wings.
When it settled down and folded those wings, it strongly resembled a crow,
rather than one of Bjornssen’s native avians.

Why wasn’t it hunting on this fine, clear day? Already had
its fill of prairie wrigglers?

It opened its mouth and screeched, dashing further
comparisons to its Earth counterpart. A real crow’s voice would have been
dulcet compared to that nails-on-chalkboard cacophony.

“What the hell is
that
?”
Neil asked.

“That, my friend, is the most intelligent lifeform
indigenous to the planet. It’s called a hugin. You’ve met Gudrun Olafsdottir?
She named the species after one of Odin’s ravens.” Dimitri coughed. “Now
I
would have preferred a name from Greek
mythology, but I’m not the head of the xenobiology task force.”

“Many of them around?”

“Fairly rare, actually.”

“He gives me the creeps,” Neil said.

“Yes. They like to observe. Natural curiosity. Wouldn’t it
be nice if they could tell us what they’ve seen? They watched the Eridanin come
and go. I’ve half a mind to bring one in for questioning.”

They arrived at the knees of the little mountain. A hundred
meters of hard clambering brought them to the cave mouth. It appeared to be a
natural opening, but Neil knew better. Its walls seemed to be made of the same
rock as the rest of the formation, but the floor was unusually level, the
passageways smooth.

His suspicions were confirmed when Dimitri urged him past
the first bend. Their flashlights revealed a whorllike chamber with a ceiling
barely as high as their heads — tall enough that the Eridanin would have
considered the space roomy. Along the walls images rested in an array much like
an art gallery.

Neil had once toured caves in France and witnessed firsthand
the scenes left there by Paleolithic hunters. This presentation stirred those
memories, but the detail here was too fine to have been applied by the strokes
of brushes or by the spitting of pigment down hollow reeds. The spectrum of
colors was wider than could be assembled from mixtures of charcoal, plant dyes,
and saliva. They weren’t paintings at all. His fingertips could not tell a
difference between the texture of the image areas and the rest of the walls.
The pictures were
part
of the walls,
made up of minerals, ores, and tiny gemstones that had evidently been
manipulated into place at a microscopic level.

“We’ve found five of these shrines so far,” Dimitri said.
“All the sites contain identical artwork, though the chambers themselves vary
in size and shape. They date from early in the Eridanin occupation.”

Neil counted. “Ten scenes.”

“Yes.” The sacred number of the Eridanin, if Terran theories
were correct. “This must have been quite a holy place to them.”

Neil gave all ten a thorough look. Every view contained
dozens or hundreds of Eridanin. They truly were crablike, an impression only
lightly conveyed in the paltry data the Thwaa had supplied. They had ten limbs.
Their central bodies were low and squat. Their locomotion appeared to consist
of scuttling, though only the rear three pairs of limbs were jointed in the
manner of arthropods. Their extraterrestrial nature was emphasized chiefly by
their centaurlike upper bodies, their huge eyes, and their long, coiled
tongues.

The first scene was the most distinctive. It was an overview
of a river valley. In the background two species of grazing animals — one
vaguely mammalian, the other evoking comparison to duckbill dinosaurs — nibbled
at meadow grass. Clouds wandered across a sky untouched by industrial haze. In
the foreground, a spaceship rested in the meadow loam. Gangplank down, a party
of Eridanin were emerging into the sunlight. The tongues of the aliens were
extruded and swaying in the breeze. Most individuals had their four arms
upraised. Neil could almost hear the cheers and see the grins.

The other nine views portrayed a freshly settled planet.
Parks, bridges, bright new cities — including a mountain-ringed metropolis
beside a lake that could have belonged to the ruins outside. The gallery was
not unlike the sort of tribute humans would erect to their own civilization,
save for the sheer density of urban life. Eridanin seemed to crawl right over
each other to get to where they were going. In one scene, an immense brood of
young slept three and four deep inside a vast hall, apparently in comfort,
while adults played with the handful still awake.

“Quite a memorial,” Neil said.

“The other one I’ve personally seen was more eroded, but
none of the sites suffered vandalism, not even at the end of the occupation.
Ten thousand years they maintained the shrines. Doesn’t sound like a culture
that failed to appreciate what they had, does it?”

Neil shook his head. “If I were the judge, I would say they
cherished their tenancy.”

“Indeed. I presume the Thwaa knew that.”

“It’s likely. Your guess is as good as mine.”

Dimitri muttered, clearly unhappy with the opaque answer. He
checked his watch again. “We’d better go. By the time you get back to Landfall,
the governor should be ready for your meeting.”

Ah, yes. The governor,
Neil thought sadly.
Another person who
won’t like having to see me.

o0o

“Are you feeling well?” inquired Dimitri as the transport
started its approach toward the capital. The high desert around the caldera was
long behind them, having given way to a landscape of rolling hills, woodlands,
streams, and brushy rubble-fields where Eridanin towns had not quite fully
decayed. Dusk was falling, hastened by their eastward flight.