Vale of Stars (52 page)

“You don’t seem excited, Sirra,” Iede said, sidling up to her as the others took more readings of the deep soil. “Are you still skeptical?”

Sirra fought back anger. “No. But your explanation is still not the only one. Just because we have found what you said we would doesn’t mean your religion is correct.”

“I see that Occam’s Razor needs some sharpening to cut through your ideology,” Iede said, chuckling. “Yes: I could be a clairvoyant, gaining this knowledge through some supernatural, mystical source. Or I might simply be the luckiest person ever born, to have randomly picked a spot on this vast planet that happens to contain these artifacts. Or—”

“Don’t be so smug, Iede. You could quite simply have been given this information by some other scientists. Planet-bound ones, I mean.”

“But if that is so, what motivation would I have to drag all of you self-admitted non-experts out here to confirm something that is already known?”

“I don’t know. Don’t you always say that the gods work in mysterious ways?”

“Not at all. Their ways are not mysterious to those who watch.”

Sirra sighed and shook her head. “You’ve got an answer to everything. That’s why I am scared of your religion.”

“Because it provides answers?”

“Because it provides
all
the answers. Doubt and uncertainty are what drive us to learn more. If I thought I knew everything there was to know, I wouldn’t seek, I wouldn’t grow. That’s why religion is so dangerous.”

Iede seemed to think about that for a moment, and Sirra felt a faint twinge of hope. She had not realized until she felt the hope swelling in her that she had been, not just haranguing her ha’lyaunt, but trying to convert her away from her religion.

“You may be correct, Sirra, but you still should be willing to admit that I have done what I said I would. You have found the evidence. Can you still deny that I have been to Ship to visit with those within her?”

“No.”

“Then why do you still resist?”

“I’m angry at them.”

“Why?”

Sirra glanced up, as if to show everyone in Ship (yes, she admitted, she believed. She would not be a scientist if she simply denied the evidence. In the absence of a simpler, more compelling conclusion, she had to admit that there was a Ship and most likely it was still staffed) that she defied them even while acknowledging them. “Because I wanted us to find this ourselves. We would have, eventually. Why do your gods want to interfere?”

“You would rather they had left us to our own devices.”

“Of course. I don’t want to owe them anything.” Even as she said it, Sirra knew what Iede would say. Sirra turned away and looked pointedly at Fozzoli and Khadre, waiting the inevitable response.

“Anything
more
, you mean.”

Sirra closed her eyes and saw Viktur’s body being shredded by gunfire from the Dome flyer, heard his screams, the splashing of the waves, the relentless staccato sound of the drone’s guns.

Iede walked halfway around Sirra and said, “Why are we here, Sirra?”

Sirra opened her eyes and the nightmare almost faded. “What?”

“Why are we still here? Surely, we have enough to go back and report our findings. What do we wait for?”

“I…don’t know. There’s something still here. I want to find it.”

“How do you know?”

“The same way I know how to speak to the vix. I just know.”

“Now who is the mystical one?” Iede chided, and Sirra could not help but grin.

“All right, Dome you, I get it. Let’s see what the others have found.”

At the twelfth site two days later, Khadre and Fozzoli were still glued to their instruments, talking excitedly in the language of science. Iede had raised the prospect of returning to the city to restock, and Sirra had to agree with her. The party had not bothered to forage, even if they could, and their supplies were running low. The trip back would take a minimum of three days, and the group had almost exhausted its field supplies.

“Let us stay here, then,” Fozzoli said during their sparse dinner. “Khadre and I will keep working while you go back and get more food.”

“That’s six days, Foz,” Sirra said. “You’ve barely got enough for three as it is. You’re going to stay out here for three days without food or water?”

Fozzoli didn’t answer.

“And it’s more than the food and water. We need to find out what has been happening back home.”

“I think she’s right, Foz,” Khadre said softly. “We have to go back. But I want to be on the return team,” she said, looking at Sirra.

“Me, too,” Fozzoli insisted.

Sirra spread her hands. “I don’t make that decision. Besides, our place is in the water.”

Fozzoli considered that. “Sirra, I think….” He stopped, looking at Khadre for help.

“Foz and I have been thinking about that. We want to postpone our marine studies for a while. We think that this discovery takes precedence.”

Sirra fought to keep her face free from emotion. “We’re not specialists, Khadre. We don’t know much more than Iede here,” she said. She looked at her ha’lyaunt and added awkwardly, “no offense.”

Iede just nodded.

“Besides, I was on the verge of something with Vogel. I want to get back to that.”

“The interdiction is still on,” Fozzoli said.

Sirra snorted. “Not after this. You think the Coordinator will keep his ban on research after we bring back this data?”

Khadre shrugged. “Who knows? But Foz and I are agreed. We want to come back here.”

Sirra looked at Fozzoli. “I won’t stop you, Foz.”

“Look, Sirra, it’s just for a little while. I’ll be back with you before you—”

“It’s all right, Foz,” she said, trying to conceal her pain. He wasn’t really betraying her personally.

But she was not quite able to believe that.

Three hours before the four of them had agreed to leave the survey site and return to civilization, the core sampler sounded a tone it had not used before. Fozzoli and Khadre exchanged worried glances. “That better not be the ‘I’m broken’ sound.” Fozzoli stopped the drill and examined the display. He fell silent.

“What?” Khadre said, moving towards him.

“I’m not sure,” Fozzoli said slowly. “I think it’s telling me there is a…pocket, or something.”

“Like natural gas? Or water?”

Now Sirra and Iede moved closer.

“Uh…” Fozzoli manipulated the readout controls. “No. There’s nothing. Just air.”

Iede asked, “Do air pockets occur naturally underground?”

The three marine biologists looked helplessly at one another. Sirra chuckled under her breath. “We finally find something worthwhile and none of us knows enough to verify it.” She glanced at the readout. “Ninety meters down, give or take. Anyone want to start digging?” She chuckled again. “Ninety meters. Might as well be on Ship itself, eh, Iede?”

“No. I’ve been to Ship.”

“You don’t think they can help us, do you?” Sirra asked, surprised at herself. She had meant the question to come out dripping with sarcasm, but she found herself waiting for an answer.

“They don’t work that way,” was Iede’s brief reply.

“Wait a second. I think this thing has a camera feature. We might be able to get some pictures of what’s down there,” Fozzoli said, reading the technical file on the sampler’s help program. He gingerly made some adjustments to the sampler settings. The holodata vanished, to be replaced by a blinking question mark cursor.

“I think the camera is just a flat pic. Not a holo. I’ll display it here,” Fozzoli said, pointing at the sampler’s tiny video screen. The four crowded around as Fozzoli manipulated the low-resolution camera hub around, the dedicated floodlight casting a fuzzy white circle of light on jagged rock.

“Can you clean this up at all?” Sirra asked. Khadre examined the controls and made a few changes. The image instantly cleared but showed nothing discernible.

“The computer is recording all of this, I hope,” Fozzoli said.

Khadre coughed. “Foz, I have a small amount of experience with these kinds of machines.”

“Core drilling samplers?” Fozzoli said, not taking his eyes off the screen.

“No, but I do know how to operate a few remote cameras. Since my diving days are long over, that’s about all I can do. If you don’t mind….”

Fozzoli hastily moved out of the way. Khadre took over and after a moment’s study, touched a single button. “I’ve set the camera on automatic sweep. The computer will build up a holo representation of the camera’s findings as soon as it can, and we’ll be able to see what’s down there. I’ve also keyed in infrared, but I doubt that’ll help.”

Sirra shivered. Something had occurred to her, but she was not altogether sure she wanted to act on her instinct. She suppressed the thought, but it continued to gnaw at her.

The camera made short work of whatever it was scanning, and Khadre announced half an hour later, “Done. Here’s what it found.” A holo image sprang into view amongst the four surveyors.

The chamber was, as far as Sirra could tell, part of a tunnel. The walls were too smooth to be natural, and appeared to be reinforced by beams or pylons. A straight track, with regularly spaced plates of unidentifiable material, lay on the bottom of the chamber. All in all, the tunnel segment was roughly fifteen meters in diameter.

“It’s a subway system,” Khadre whispered.

Fozzoli nodded. “What kind of propulsion, do you think?”

“I’ve no idea. Maglev, maybe. Those plates.”

Iede spoke. Although her voice was as soft as ever, her sudden involvement in the conversation make the others start. “Why would you assume that?”

“Well, those plates look a little like….” Khadre said, then laughed at herself. “I see what you mean. No, Iede, I should have kept to my original statement. I have no idea what the propulsion system is.”

“Or even if it is a subway system.”

“Correct. Thank you for being a pure scientist.”.

Sirra ignored the exchange. Ordinarily, she would have snapped at Iede for imagining herself to be a scientist, but the same instinct she had felt earlier had risen in her again. She did not want to succumb to it, for fear of what she might discover. A picture was forming itself in her mind, and she did not understand how. She knew she was prone to flashes of intuition, but this was the strongest and most unsettling one yet.

“Sirra? Something wrong?” Iede had moved closer.

“No. But we’ve got to get back. Now. I’ve got to ask Vogel something.”

“Vogel?” Fozzoli almost shouted. “Now? We’ve just found—”

“Dome it, Foz, I’ll leave the three of you here to starve! Get in the airfoil!”

Fozzoli did not move. “What could you possibly want to ask Vogel that has anything to do with—”

“He knows about this place. So help me, they all do. Foz, please. I need your help in talking to him and getting him up to the lab. I can’t ask any of the others to join me in violating the interdiction, and I’ll need you there. You can come back here when we finish, I promise.”

Fozzoli looked at her for a moment, then smiled his familiar half-smile. “
You
need
me
? You’ve never said that before. How can I refuse?” 

The laboratory was cold when Khadre, Sirra, and Fozzoli entered it five days later. They had mutually agreed not to even try to contact the Coordinator and ask him for permission to reestablish contact with the vix. Iede had returned to Yallia City with an impressive letter of explanation from the three scientists, to round up more qualified surveyors and return to the survey site. Sirra still wondered at her halfonlyaunt’s parting words: “May you find what you do not even know you are looking for.” Metaphysical claptrap, she had decided, but the words still haunted her.

Fozzoli had spent the last thirty-six hours building a “lifting box” (as Sirra mentally called it) to bring Vogel to the surface. The result was a coffin-like rectangular container that would keep the internal pressure at twenty atmospheres and allow Fozzoli to hook up pumps once the box was brought back to the lab to increase the oxygen level of the water. He even had included a built-in vixvox.

“I’ll get the heat up,” Fozzoli said, striding to the lab’s environmental controls. “It’ll take a few minutes or so.”

Sirra nodded absently. “I’ll go and get Vogel, if he’s still around. Or alive. I told him to wait for me, but it’s been…about ten days, I think. He’s probably given up.”

“I’ll go with you,” Khadre said.

“On a dive?” Sirra knew the remark was foolish as soon as she made it.

“I can still handle myself in water,” Khadre said. “Just show me the suits.”

Sirra caught Fozzoli’s look of concern, and walked to the suit rack. “Foz, can you handle things here while we go get Vogel?”

“Gimme some time to get the essential systems up again. Maybe half an hour.”

“That’ll give me enough time to get acquainted with Sirra’s new theory,” Khadre said, turning to face her.

“What?”

“You thought of something. Back at the survey site. That’s why you suddenly wanted to come back here. What was it?”

Sirra did not speak. She looked away from Khadre, afraid of the old scientist.
What
she suspected was not the problem; it was
how
she came to her suspicions.

Khadre said, “I assume you wanted to keep something from Iede. Well, she’s gone now.”

Sirra took a breath before answering. “I…it’s not a theory. Just a feeling. I get them sometimes.”

“Yes, I remember,” Khadre said. “I remember thirty-six years ago. You got a feeling then, when the vix came up to us. What feeling do you have now?”

“I’m not sure,” Sirra said, looking pointedly at Fozzoli, who was making every effort to appear busy with the lab computer.

“Does it make you uncomfortable, this feeling?”

“No.”

“Is that why you are so hard on your ha’lyaunt?”

Sirra swung her head around to stare at Khadre. “What? What does that have to do with anything?” The respect she felt towards the aged scientist held her back somewhat, as she had wanted to bluntly tell her to mind her own domed business.

“You hate her. You hate that she deals with feelings and prayer and other unscientific practices. But your own intuition is just that—it’s like a religion with you.” Khadre smiled softly. “Are you honestly telling me that you never considered the possibility that your intuition, your peculiar feelings of rightness, might be a genetic talent? And that Iede might share it?”