The Engines of Dawn (28 page)

"It was not an attempt on your life, this second time," the Avatka said. "You needed to be free."

Ben noticed how weak the creature had become from the chase … or it could have been from the humans' regular atmosphere.

"You want to explain that?" Ben demanded. He was keeping an eye out for any movement from the alien's hands. There wasn't an object clinging to the creature's belt that couldn't be a weapon and he had no idea what a
vehenta
was.

The creature said, "The Engine's breakdown propelled certain forces among the Enamorati to turn against each other. Those who are now emerging as the victors have allied themselves with your president and his allies."

"We know that," Ben told the Avatka.

"What you don't know … is that
all
of you are in danger. I was hoping that the … nonaligned humans of the ship would have seen the real struggle before now."

"We have seen the inside of your chamber," George Clock said, pushing forward. "So you people are fighting among yourselves? All that wreckage we saw, it was recent?"

The Avatka's face was unexpressive, but veins were now beginning to appear on his forehead. "We are … and it is."

"Why
are you fighting?" Ben asked.

The creature said, "We are fighting over… something I did, a most deplorable act."

"What was that?"

"I am the one who destroyed the Engine."

"You
destroyed the Engine?" Tommy Rosales burst out. "Why?"

"Because a little white bear died and I knew that it was time," the Avatka told them.

The group of students looked to one another, uncomprehending. Even Ben was taken aback. "You did this because Julia's pet bear died?" . .

The Avatka's breathing now was coming in uneasy gasps. He started to wobble where he stood-he was very close to fainting.

"A vast deception is being played out on the ship and it would have led to your death. The little bear was just another casualty in a horrible war which must now come to an end."

"A war?" Mark Innella asked, his shouldercam peering close.

But the Avatka collapsed before he could add any more to his cryptic pronouncement.

33

The protective shield generated by the archaeology team's field kit hunkering just inside the entrance to the tunnel seemed to be holding up against the storm outside. At the very least, the Mound seemed solid enough to take just about anything the planet had to throw at it. It would probably last through this particular storm. Or so Julia hoped.

The semidarkness of the tunnel, the terror of the storm outside, and the sheer eeriness of being trapped in an alien-dug tunnel begun to get to a few of the younger students, making them nervous in ways they had never experienced on any of their other ports of call. But Julia had done a great deal of spelunking when she was younger-caves had always been vital to the native cultures of the Desert Southwest in America-so she didn't feel as claustrophobic as the rest of the students.

Instead, she considered Dr. Holcombe, who stood at the rear of the group. His shoulders hunched as if he felt the gravity of their situation and his face, lit eerily by the floaters scattered in a line about fifteen yards into the tunnel, seemed haggard and drawn. Much was on the man's mind.

"Do you know what this is about, Dr. Holcombe?" Julia asked as thunder walked the world outside the Mound. The other students looked on.

"I have an idea," he admitted.

"That lightstorm outside," Julia said. "Is it responsible for killing off the higher life-forms in this region?"

"Not at first," he said. "But it would have eventually."

The undergraduates looked at one another, mystified.

Holcombe paused for a moment, taking a long, hard look to the darkness at the end of the tunnel. He then said, "I think you ought to see what's in there."

Most of the students remained huddled on the floor, their personal shields aglow. Only Marji Koczan and Bobby Gessner had any interest in doing any more exploration. The rest only wanted to go home.

Holcombe led the way with Marji Koczan and Julia right behind him. Bobby Gessner brought up the rear, dropping the occasional floater to light the way for the others, if they chose to follow.

"So, tell me," Holcombe said to Julia as they edged along. The tunnel now seemed to be narrowing. "Do you believe in fate?"

"Fate?" she asked. "I haven't given it much thought. Why do you ask?"

Holcombe shrugged, flashlight held forward like a bright crystal lance.

Julia responded almost cavalierly, "You couldn't have any kind of legal system if our lives were fated. No one would be responsible for anything they did. We'd be creatures of our desire."

"I'm talking about the way things happen in our lives," Holcombe said. "Outside factors. What some people might call 'acts of God.' You know, a lightning bolt out of nowhere. That sort of thing."

Julia couldn't quite read the expression on his face and couldn't see where he wanted to go with this train of thought. So she said, "Well, if God plans everything or at least knows how things are going to turn out, then I would say, yes, our lives are fated." This was an old Calvinist saw that few humans held to anymore. Certainly fate had no place in Ainge theology. They believed that once a person "hears" God in an Auditor box, he knows what to do for the rest of his life.

Holcombe paused as they seemed to be near the end of the tunnel. Just behind him, beyond the range of light, appeared to be some sort of obstruction on the floor.

"Let me ask you this," he then proposed. "What are the odds that Eos would suffer an Engine breakdown just a few light-hours from a star system with a human-habitable planet?"

Marji Koczan and young Gessner paused right behind them.

Several of the other students had, by then, also decided to follow. They listened raptly to the unusual philosophical discourse.

Koczan said, "If pure randomness governed the universe, then the odds would be astronomical that we'd be anywhere near an Earth-like world."

Julia looked at Professor Holcombe. "Are you trying to suggest that our Engine was destroyed just so we could find this particular planet?"

It took Holcombe a few long seconds to say so, but in the end he said: "Yes."

"Then what's all this talk about God and fate?" Julia asked.

"Because humans have gotten lazy," Holcombe said. "We've taken too much for granted, we've gotten used to asking far too few questions. We've lived too long on faith alone, trusting that everything will turn out for the best because it always seems to."

"The Highest Auditor says that faith is what holds life together," young Gessner said.

Professor Holcombe nodded slowly. "The Ainge will tell you that God speaks only to those who listen. But if the Auditors are the only people who can hear God, what does that say about the rest of us?"

"We don't have Auditor boxes," Marji Koczan said.

"Lie in an Auditor box just once, and you'll see," a male student in the rear said. "Ixion Smith
was
hearing God move through the cosmos. I've heard Him. So has everyone else here."

"Speak for yourself," Marji Koczan said.

"Up until Ixion Smith built the first Auditor box, the only way we've ever learned anything about ourselves or the universe is through our mistakes, our failures," Holcombe told them. "I've been in an Auditor box three times in my life. But I'll tell you one thing Ixion Smith never knew and that is that success is a greater enemy than failure. Success can deceive you, but your failures will never lie to you."

"Dr. Holcombe, what's this all about?" Marji Koczan asked. Julia almost asked the same question.

"Come this way, children," Holcombe said.

The tunnel had narrowed to a width of three feet and a height of about six. Most of the lingering students had caught up with them by now, drawn to the resonance of his storytelling voice.

"Our first order of business," Holcombe said, stopping at the very end of the tunnel, "is to determine how this gentleman fits into the great scheme of things."

Professor Holcombe pointed to the desiccated remains of a humanoid being at their feet. Very old and very dead, this individual clutched a crude pick, and a blunted shovel lay beside him. This entity was not, however, a Kiilmistian.

"Oh, my God," Marji Koczan gasped. "This is an Enamorati!" Julia immediately recalled that some of the wall graffiti they had found at the first ruins had stick-figure-like images of short, squat humanoids-Enamorati?

Bobby Gessner knelt down and carefully turned the Enamorati over. He was as light and as brittle as papier-mâchè. A grimace of terror was his death mask. Some of the underclassmen backed off. "What is an Enamorati doing
here
?" Bobby Gessner asked. He looked up at Professor Holcombe. "Didn't the Kuulo say that the Enamorati had never explored this world?"

"He did," Holcombe said.

"Then, what-"

The students stared, awestruck, by the body before them and the myriad questions its very existence posed.

Holcombe then said, "It would also be an interesting question to ask why this character
isn't
wearing an environment suit. The atmosphere, even in this tunnel, should have killed him. Yet he made it in this far, digging and scraping."

"Maybe it
did
kill him," young Gessner suggested.

"No," Julia said. "He was digging when he died. It looks like he might have just broken through when he collapsed."

"Then," Gessner said slowly, "maybe this is an ancestor of the present-day Enamorati, someone who had come here long ago
before
their planet's environment went bad and they had to use esuits."

"Except," Julia said, "that the Enamorati destroyed their ecosystem centuries
before
the Onesci Lorii was even born. How could a civilization with slower-than-light technology have come this far from their home world? Virr is more than two thousand light-years from this planet."

"I think it's safe to say that this gentleman got here
after
the Enamorati invented trans-space travel and
after
they bred themselves to breathe their current atmospheric mix," Holcombe told them.

The children of the Ainge looked confused. Julia and Marji Koczan were as well.

"That can only mean that some of them
can
breathe our air," one of the male students in the rear said.

"Perhaps
all
of them can breathe our air," Holcombe responded. Upon further inspection, they found that this creature also had a pouch full of the same strange egglike objects they had come across in the grasp of the second Kiilmistian in the ivy-covered field. These, too, were dry and brittle and yielded nothing of their purposes.

"I think you people should see this," Holcombe said in the darkness beyond the end of the tunnel. He was now standing in what appeared to be an immense cavern-the goal of the hapless Enamorati grave robber.

Julia stepped over the Enamorati tunneler and entered the Mound's capacious interior. She dropped a floater behind her, just inside the Mound. Marji Koczan came in behind her, and behind Koczan came young Gessner. The other students followed.

They brought up their flashlights, filling the interior cavern with all manner of dancing beams. More floaters were thrown about and the contents of the Mound were finally revealed to them.

"Ixion Smith!"
young Gessner blurted out.
"Look at that!"

"It
is
a temple," Julia breathed.

"Or something," Holcombe added.

They had emerged onto a ledge about four feet wide that seemed to be made of the same cobblestones. It completely circled the interior of the Mound, which was a large pit perhaps thirty-five to forty feet deep. A large dome made of the same glassy cobblestones arched over them at a height of fifty feet.

However, it was the object
in
the pit that commanded their attention.

In the pit huddled a hemispherical structure like the giant shell of an Earth turtle. It was sleek, the size of two or three houses, and out of its sides, plunging into the ground below it, were numerous limbs bunched together, giving the impression of arms or legs, though it was far too massive to be a once-living thing.

The students aimed their flashlights at the imposing object.

"What
is
it?" Julia said in a barely audible whisper.

Professor Holcombe standing off to one side, said, "I don't think you want to know."

34

Someone once said that idle hands were the devil's playground. They must have had Jim Vees in mind.

As the university entered the slow hours of the evening shift, the halls became quiet and Jim became bored. Tommy and George had gone to the student commons while Ben had taken the probe photographs to his advisor in the physics department. Jim was left to his own devices, sitting in his dorm room in Babbitt Hall.

Jim had always admired Ben both for his sense of daring and his instinct for caution when caution was required. Ben seemed a natural leader that way. But Vees could not shake the images the probe captured of the mayhem inside the Enamorati compound. Nor could he shake the strange sense of trust the Auditors had for their alien neighbors-neighbors who had all manner of weapons disguised as wall decorations.

A very violent civil war was under way inside the Enamorati compound, but the Ainge refused to acknowledge it.
Why?

Vees had revised some of his thinking on his Auditor box locator that occupied the second suite of his dorm room. It occurred to him that not only could he pick up the brain waves of individual Auditors in their holy box, but he might even be able to duplicate them if he could maintain a strong enough lock on the Auditor box itself. The experiment with the probes showed that a nexus signal could be sent and returned at much higher power gradients than he'd thought possible.