The Engines of Dawn (19 page)

The group of students followed Professor Holcombe down the path that passed between the two buildings huddled in overgrowth, emerging in an open area that appeared to be a cul-de-sac with only narrow sidewalks-of cement or cobblestone, they couldn't yet tell-leading between each of the buildings.

"You think this might be a courtyard connecting family units on either side?" someone suggested.

"Hard to tell," Holcombe said, pondering the crumbled remains of the old buildings.

The students were itching to get into one of the ancient buildings, but Holcombe held up his hand, stopping them. "We'll do this by the book. Julia, you and Marji follow me," Holcombe said. "The rest of you stay here, shields up, and keep an eye out. Bobby, if the field kit peeps, raise a perimeter shield."

"How big?" Bobby Gessner asked.

Holcombe looked around. "A fifty-foot radius should do."

"Gotcha," the undergraduate student said happily.

With a collapsible handheld rod, Professor Holcombe began probing the strange ivy of a nearby wall. It looked like the most logical place to put a doorway or an entranceway into what seemed, from their angle, to be the largest of the buildings in the cluster. As he did, Julia, who was right behind him, made a slight adjustment-upward-in her personal shield. It was almost impossible
not
to fear that something with stingers or fangs or deadly breath might be lurking within the overhanging growth- because on Earth there
would
be. Her intuitions told her not to trust the assessments of their field kit, their scanners, or the land-sat photos.

"Found it," Holcombe announced. He disappeared into a curtain of lush green. "It's a open archway. Come on through," he called back to them.

Julia followed Holcombe and behind Julia Marji Koczan pushed her way through. Both women had shouldercams activated and following the tracks of their masters' eyes.

"If this were on the Earth," Julia whispered, "I'd say this region definitely experienced a war… some sort of major civil disruption."

Holcombe and Koczan nodded in agreement.

Whatever purpose the building may have served, it had but a single, very large room, and part of the ceiling had collapsed into it. Ceiling timbers were scorched from ancient fires and the ivy had insinuated itself into the bricks of the wall here and there with tendril fingers, loosening them.

Because of the large aperture in the ceiling, the ivy-grass flourished on the inside and covered everything inside the room. Whatever kind of furniture the Kiilmistians had used was now covered in soft, leafy green.

"A lot of Native American tribes had one-room structures like this," Julia said.

"The Norse and their longhouses," Holcombe added. "They were large, communal gathering places where whole extended families lived. Livestock included."

"But there are at least seven of these houses in this cul-de-sac," Julia observed. "If they lived communally, they must have numbered in the millions. The landsat photos show that the city to the north has tens of thousands of houses just like this, maybe hundreds of thousands."

"So where are all the people?" Marji Koczan asked.

The professor made his way through the ankle-deep ivy to where a heavy curtain of ivy obscured a wall near the rend in the ceiling. He pulled the ivy back.

"Here we go," he said.

To their surprise, the walls were covered with graffiti. Eerie pictoglyphs of strange, humanoid beings-and quite possibly larger animals-were carved in the wall or scrawled with charcoal from long-dead campfires. This could have been a wall in the Lascaux caverns in the south of France.

"Wow," Julia said, completely awed.

"Jesus Christ. We could be here for years studying this one wall," Marji Koczan said. "We wouldn't have to go anywhere else. It'll take decades to decipher this."

There were arrows pointing this way and that; there were etchings of what had to be animals. There were hieroglyphics and actual writing. Among the writing were numerals-or what appeared to be numerals-and all of it placed there over a long period of time.

"If it's graffiti," Julia said, "we might not be able to decipher it without a living language for idiomatic referents."

"We don't know if they are dead yet," Marji Koczan said. "This place could just be the victim of urban flight."

"Except," Julia countered, "these
are
the suburbs."

Professor Holcombe tugged away at the ivy, pulling down a large section of the green veil so that their cameras could take better pictures in better light. Marji Koczan, meanwhile, circled some of the ivy-covered remains of the broken "furniture" piled in the center of the room. She carefully pulled apart a section of the strange growth, exposing white stones and ash underneath.

"I think they had a hearth here," she said. The ash and plant debris underneath had long since become mulch.

Julia had extensive experience with kivas of the American Southwest. She pointed at the ceiling. An ugly smudge blossomed like an dark flower there.

Julia said, "This building wasn't built with a hearth in mind. There would need to be a ventilation hole and there is none. The roof over there collapsed because of the rain."

Holcombe inspected the fire. "Different fires at different times. This has been used as a bivouac by wandering groups."

"After the people who built it were killed or were run off," Julia said.

"Could be," Holcombe said.

Bobby Gessner appeared in the doorway, his personal shield glowing. "Dr. Holcombe," he said, breathing excitedly, "I think we've got something important out here."

They retreated back through the leafy canopy, stepping into the bright morning light. Across the peculiar quad, the rest of the students had gathered behind a building whose whole north side had completely fallen in. That side faced a broad field of the ivy-grass. Beyond the ivy was the "city," the goal of the expedition.

"We were looking for a communal garbage dump," Gessner said. "We thought it might be out here, away from the dwellings. We came across this."

They had found a body.

The desiccated remains of a clearly humanoid creature lay sunk partway in the field grass. Julia guessed that the being, when it stood, probably stood over seven feet. It had multi-jointed arms, and while its hands had five fingers, there were no opposable thumbs. It had two eyes and a nose in the right place, but its ears were small flaps. Its mouth was a very wide slit and probably was fairly gruesome when eating.

The creature, dried to a pale gray color, also wore a bodice of brownish rawhide and boots that concealed long, narrow feet. It looked as if every ounce of moisture had been sucked from it by years of lying in the field.

"Can I turn it over?" Bobby Gessner asked. Cameras clicked and shouldercams whirred.

Holcombe nodded. "Be careful. I want this thing intact."

"Are we taking it back?" a young woman asked.

"If at all possible," Holcombe said.

They carefully rolled the creature over. It was remarkably light. Underneath it, they saw, were no insects or worms in the soil. Just more ivy. Layers of it.

"It looks like he died right here," Marji Koczan said. "It looks like it was crawling away from the buildings."

Julia glanced into the sky. "No predators. This person should have been consumed by the ecosystem here. But all he did was mummify."

"Unless the summers are fierce," Bobby Gessner said. "You know, drying everything out?"

"But
how
did he die?" another student asked. "It doesn't look like he had a wound or anything."

"Poisoning? Disease?" Julia speculated. "That might have stricken him suddenly."

"What about a heart attack?" Marji Koczan said.

"If they
had
hearts," Holcombe told them.

The other students had begun to fan out over the large field, with some moving off toward the north where a single, gigantic "tree" stood. The tree was at least ninety feet tall.

Someone shouted out. "Hey! Over here! We've got another one!"

"Keep your shields up," Holcombe advised. "And stay together."

The group walked across the meadow, their feet hissing through the ivy.

Beside the flesh-colored tree lay a body almost identical to the first one. This one, however, had been wearing a clothlike toga that had long since frazzled into dry threads. This creature had rolled itself into a fetal position and died that way.

Holcombe lifted the folds of the creature's toga with his extended probe. A small, leatherlike pouch fell out.

"Maybe it's his lunch," said one of the younger students.

Using his probe, Professor Holcombe gently lifted back the pouch's ragged flap. Inside they found globes about three inches in diameter made of some sort of shell-like material.

"Ix!" a student said.

"Eggs, you think?" Julia asked. The students gathered around.

"They might be," Holcombe admitted.

"You think they could have been his lunch?" asked another.

Julia stood up and stepped away from the giant pink-barked tree and the toga-clad being beneath its boughs. There were no roads or sidewalks or fences to mark out territory, and the communal houses seemed to be random constructions, arranged haphazardly.

But then, these people
were
alien. They didn't
have
to make sense.

Julia, on her own, started walking north.

23

Making certain they weren't dogged by campus security, the Bombardiers went in search of a place where they could conduct their experiment without attracting too much attention. They found an unoccupied suite in nearby Peterson Hall where they lugged Jim Vees's nexus locator. Next, they borrowed a small data-bullet compressor unit from physics, a model designed for fractal-compression studies. Ben then installed his own software-the process that his dissertation detailed-whose algorithms allowed for a more efficient compression of data with virtually no corruption in the de-fragmentation process.

Ben then dug up the design schematics for Anira-class vessels, of which Eos was the last. There was no way to know how extensively the Enamorati had reconfigured their living area over time, but they wouldn't have fooled with the major support structures of the ship itself. Those would be their guide.

This effort had taken the Bombardiers several hours, and sometime after dinner they were ready.

"Okay, where to first?" Ben asked.

"What about that 'dynamo' room you guys saw?" Tommy Rosales suggested. "You said there was blood all over the place. We could move aft from there."

Ben shook his head. "Anyone in the Inner Temple can see right into the 'dynamo' room."

"It's not going to be around for long," Rosales said.

"I don't want to risk it," Ben said.

The probe they chose to use was the size of a pearl, a standard video "bug." With Ben's fractal-compression unit, the probe would be compressed to the size of a large molecule, then "repositioned" elsewhere in the ship, via trans-space, using Jim Vees's nexus locator. The probe would then return to its default configuration, take forty pictures, and be yanked back. If done right, the whole thing should take only a few seconds.

"You know," George Clock offered, "the Enamorati might have the means to detect the trans-space transfer."

Ben said, "But if they're fighting a war in there, they could be too occupied to go looking for the projection source of our probe. And that's assuming that they would have the means to trace it in the first place."

"And," Jim Vees said, "they would only be able to trace it
if
a detector was in the room itself to measure its appearance."

"Campus security could have given them something," Tommy Rosales pointed out.

"Why would they?" Jim Vees said. "We just now thought of this. You're paranoid."

"Tommy's good at being paranoid," George Clock said, standing off to one side, arms crossed.

"Blow me," Rosales quipped.

Ben said. "Our little guy will be gone before anybody can register its appearance. Even if they do detect it, they still won't know who sent it. I think we can get away with it."

"Easy for you," Rosales countered. "You've got the weight of BennettCorp behind you. Your family will send a liner full of lawyers to defend you."

Ben smiled. "We're in this together. And I've got an aunt who sits on the Rights Advocacy Council in Geneva. She'd sue God if she thought she'd get a hearing."

Tommy Rosales raised his hands, giving in. "Okay. But I still think we'll spend the rest of our lives in that prison on the surface of Tau Ceti. What's it called?"

"Hyperion Station," Clock said.

"Right," Rosales acknowledged. "Where the H.C. keeps all its malcontents."

"If we're careful," Ben said, "it won't come to that."

Jim Vees pointed to a location on their map to a position just aft of the "dynamo" room. "What about here?" he asked.

The area Jim had suggested was in a hallway that, according to the schematics, was near an airlock.

"Look," Clock said, "if we're going to go to jail for this, I think we should go as far in there as we can."

"Fine with me," Ben said. "Let's do it."

They calibrated a nexus point where their map-and their best guess-said there were no walls or bulkheads. Then, a narrow, trans-spatial tube extending to the nexus point was created. Once that was stabilized, they were ready. George Clock stood guard at the door as Ben pressed the "engage" button.

The probe went POP!, disappearing from the space above its antigravity plate. A slight puff of air took its place.

Just a few seconds slid by, and then the probe reappeared.

"Let's see what we've got," Ben said as he took the probe and downloaded its visual scan data into their small computer. The Bombardiers gathered about as images began appearing on their monitor screen.

The probe's camera and massive storage capacities allowed for amazingly clear photographs. The probe had appeared in a hallway filled with an eerie, yellowish fog. This may have been the normal Enamorati atmosphere or it may have even have been smoke. But the hallway was littered with all kinds of debris. Parts of the wall and some decorative ceiling tiles had apparently been blown from their positions. Strange scimitar-scythe-crescent decorations were everywhere underfoot.