Chindi

Chapter 18

HUTCH DEBATED PUTTING the sketch on the bridge, and had she not been in it, or maybe even had she looked a bit less like a deity, she’d have done it. But in the end she put it up in her quarters. And she luxuriated in it. Her image had come a long way in a short time, from the tomboyish character swinging bats in a Phillies uniform to this mantrap. He’s got your number, babe, she thought.

Meantime, they closed in on the oddball planetary system they had come to think of as the Twins.

The two giants were similar in size. Their equatorial diameters checked in at sixty-five thousand and sixty-three thousand kilometers. The smaller, the brighter one, flaunted belts of silver clouds with blue and gold tones.

The blue was the result of methane slurry and ice crystals on the outer shell of the atmosphere. Cyclonic storms floated deeper down, swirls of yellow and red with golden eyes. It was a jewel of a world.

Its darker companion, folded in October colors, was also sprinkled with storms. They appeared to be larger, less defined, more ominous than those on its companion. The names came automatically: The system would be Gemini; the bright world Cobalt, the dark, Autumn.

Each had its own rings. Cobalt’s was the more complex, threaded with shepherd moons and braiding effects. It had four Cassini divisions. Autumn’s rings were brighter, gold and burnt orange, with only two divisions. An observer could not resist being struck by the balance of light and dark at either end of the system.

Slightly more than 3 million kilometers separated them.

The entire system of worlds, rings, and central cloud was bounded by a vast outer ring, which was highly elliptical, rather like the track around a football field. It, too, had all the features of orthodox ring systems: Cassini divisions, shepherd moons, braiding effects. But it wasn’t as well defined as the other two. Rather than the sharp-edged appearance of the inner systems, it presented itself as a kind of luminous loop gradually dissipating into the night.

The satellites were cratered, frozen, sterile. No atmospheres there. They ranged in diameter from six thousand kilometers, the vertical moon, to twelve hundred kilometers.

The worlds, moons, and the big ring revolved around the center of mass, where the cloud had formed and the gravities of the two giants balanced. The Twins were high-speed bullets, roaring around each other in less than twenty-four hours. Both were considerably flattened by the centripetal forces, and Bill reported that he wasn’t certain, hadn’t been there long enough to get accurate measurements, but preliminary estimates suggested the two worlds were closing on each other. “Gradually,” he said. “The system isn’t stable.”

“They’ll collide?” asked George, already rubbing his hands at the prospect.

“It’s imminent.”

“When?”

“Less than a million years.”

“Your AI,” George told her, “has a vindictive sense of humor.”

The central cloud was lit from within by a constant infalling of dust and particles sucked from the ring systems on both sides. That was the activity causing the twisted necklace effect. The two streams collided within the cloud, exploding into a pyrotechnic display that sent jets millions of kilometers through the night before they were eventually dragged back down.

Bill continued posting real-time images on the various displays in mission control and throughout the ship. Hutch spent almost all her time on the bridge. Below, George and his people were glued to the screens.

They had moved inside the outermost moons when Bill reported another odd feature. “Autumn,” he said, “has a cyclonic white spot on the equator.”

“A white spot?” asked Hutch.

“A storm. But it doesn’t look like the other storms.”

“In what way?”

“Narrower. Longer. Slower wind velocities. Maybe it has something to do with being on the equator.”

They received a message from Outpost informing them that Captain Hutchins’s report on the loss of the Wendy Jay had been forwarded to the Academy. (Jerry sounded a bit severe, as if Captain Hutchins could expect to be called in, dressed down, and terminated.) Jerry was another one, she decided, who could look forward to a brilliant bureaucratic future.

THE MEMPHIS SPENT three days doing the survey. It was an extraordinary time. They saw the spectacle from every conceivable angle. The sky was at times full of light, of glowing planets and moons and rings. At other times it was dark and quiescent, when they were on the night side of the worlds, and the only illumination was provided by the necklace, which glowed softly against the background of stars.

Bill put it all on the wall-length screen in the common room, and they took to eating their meals on their virtual veranda, while the light show danced and fountained before them. An endless series of meteors, ripped out of the rings by shifting gravities, plunged down the skies and exploded in the upper atmospheres of the big worlds.

If ever there is a place, thought Hutch, that cries out for the existence of a Designer, this is it.

THEY ARRIVED IN the neighborhood of the vertical moon during the late morning of Christmas Eve.

It was a forbidding place, a world of Martian dimensions. But it lacked the wisp of atmosphere and the broad flat plains of Earth’s neighbor. Great slags of landmass had been pushed up, and vast canyons had opened. Craters were everywhere. It was a place of needle peaks and jagged rock formations and scrambled canyons, of cliffs, crags, plateaus, and rills. Of craters and escarpments. Like the other moons, it was caught in tidal lock, always presenting the same face to the cloud.

Vertical was out near the edge of the system, 24 million kilometers from the center of mass. From its vantage point, the system of rings and giant worlds was tilted about fifteen degrees, maybe the width of Alyx’s hand from thumb to outstretched pinkie.

Its path gave it a unique perspective. Instead of looking through the big ring, as the other satellites did, the vertical moon moved over and under the entire system, so that its sky, if one was on the correct side, provided a magnificent display. Everything was up there, the cloud, the Twins, the three sets of rings.

Originally, no one had taken Tor’s idea, that the vertical moon might not be in a natural orbit, seriously. But when they glided through its skies and looked up, the idea that this world had been moved, had been placed, seemed not so implausible.

If I could move a world, Hutch thought, looking at a pair of needle peaks on the edge of a mountain range, this is where I’d put it.

She was alone on the bridge when Bill blinked on in front of her. He’d traded in the lab smock he’d been wearing during the last few days for a formal tie and jacket, and looked as if he were going to dinner at the Makepiece. “Hutch,” he said. His eyes sparkled and a mischievous smile played across his lips.

“What?” she asked.

“There’s a building down there.”

You’re kidding. She looked up at the screens, and there it was! Sheer joy surged through her, and she decided she’d been hanging around George too much.

A jagged mountain rose out of a series of ridges. Near the top, she could see a wide shelf. And there, on the shelf, rested a house.

Well, a structure.

It was an elongated oval, open in the center, running lengthwise along the face of the cliff. She could make out windows, but they were dark. There was no shell protecting it from the vacuum, suggesting it used, or had used, something like a Flickinger field. “Any power readings, Bill?”

“Negative.”

“So it’s empty.”

“I would say so.”

Poor George.

“I would point out that it’s on the equator,” said Bill. “Perfect for sight-seeing.” He showed her. Autumn was in the southern sky, Cobalt to the north. The cloud floated directly overhead.

The shelf was about a thousand meters up the wall. Hutch passed the word to George, and then went down to mission control to be with her passengers when Bill relayed the pictures.

“How about that?” said Tor, when the oval appeared on-screen. “What’d I tell you people?”

They went through yet another round of congratulations. Up and down, thought Hutch. We’re doing either celebrations or memorials.

George took her aside and thanked her. “You’re a wonderful warm human being, Hutchins.” He laughed.

“It was Tor,” she said. “He’s the one who thought the vertical moon was worth a closer look.”

The Memphis by then had gotten a better angle, and Bill’s telescopes were providing more detail.

The building was two stories high. It had a front door and lots of windows. The architecture was plain, without any attempt at ornamentation, unless you counted setbacks and abutments. (“Who’d try to put a fancy house in a place like this?” asked Alyx. “It would get overwhelmed by the scenery.”) A couple of benches had been placed in the open central section. There was a cupola, exactly the kind of cupola you might expect to find on one of those twenty-first-century Virginia country houses. It was made of gray stone, undoubtedly quarried out of the surrounding cliffs. It was achingly beautiful.

“That’s odd,” said Nick.

“What is?” asked George.

“Antennas. I don’t see any sign of a receiver.”

HUTCH SENT OFF the contact message to the Academy, as required by the regulations. She disliked doing it, because she knew they’d rip a copy for Mogambo at Outpost. And the news would bring Mogambo running.

Pity, but there was no help for it. Meanwhile, she was feeling pretty proud of herself. During the decades since humanity had first developed FTL travel, it had taken literally hundreds of missions to find a world that had been—or was still—home to an intelligent species. The Memphis, on this flight, was three for three.

They were paying for it in blood, but when they got home, she expected that the president herself would be on the Wheel to shake hands with George.

AT NO TIME had there been any doubt the place was empty.

Two large dishes were mounted on the roof. Solar collectors, although they weren’t aimed at the sun. Weren’t aimed anywhere, actually. They pointed in different directions, one out toward the big ring, the other directed down into a canyon. Nonfunctional.

The space in the center of the oval had once been a courtyard. She looked at the images, studied the benches, saw a walkway. And there was an open deck under the cupola.

“Look!” said Alyx. “Off to the left!”

Outside the building, along the shelf.

“Enhance, Bill,” Hutch said. “Left side.”

It was a spacecraft! Probably. Hard to tell for sure. It could as easily have been a grain storage shed with windows.

“Why would they leave a ship behind?” asked George.

Hutch didn’t know, but she wondered if the occupants hadn’t exactly left.

The grain storage shed, the ship, the lander, glittered in the uncertain light of that impossible sky.

“We’ll want to go down and take a look,” said George.

“Of course.” That was Tor. She could see him getting his easel out.

“Who wants to come?”

ALYX WASN’T SURPRISED when Hutch suggested caution, reminded them that they’d made assumptions before, and people had died.

“But surely,” George said, “this place is empty. It’s hard vacuum down there.”

It was hard to argue with that. It was like the moonbase at Safe Harbor, Nick pointed out. There’d been no danger there. This was perfectly safe.

Alyx thought so, too. She liked Hutch, but she seemed a tad reserved. Too cautious. Not at all the dashing sort of person one would expect to be piloting a superluminal. She’d been right about the angels, but this was surely different. Still…

They debated the issue for several hours. There was never a question about whether they would go, but rather who would go. George and Hutch to make sure everything was okay? George, Nick, and Tor because it was best to have guys out front when there was danger? Alyx suggested Hutch and herself because women were smarter.

The men laughed because they thought she was joking.

In the end, after it was clear everyone wanted to go, Hutch conceded, and they all piled down to the lander and strapped on e-suits. Alyx enjoyed the feel of the energy surge around her when she activated the Flickinger field. It was warm and clean, and it embraced her like a soft body garment.

Hutch set the rules while they waited for the air pressure outside the lander to go to zero. Nobody was to wander off without a partner. Don’t touch anything unless you poke it first with a stick. Keep in mind the gravity’s different. It’s low, but if you fall off the mountain, you’re just as dead. “And please keep in mind,” she added, “that everything in that place is of immense value. Try not to handle stuff. And don’t break anything.”

Nick sighed and wished everyone a Merry Christmas.

Hutch turned that penetrating blue gaze on him. “I know how it all sounds, Nick. But I really don’t want to lose anybody else.” The lights on the control board went green. “Okay, Bill,” she told the AI. “Launch at will.”

The vehicle rotated, the door opened, and they slipped out into the night.

Hutch did a single orbit, while Alyx watched the rugged terrain flow past. The surface was not dark, as she’d expected. Rather, there was a kind of musty half-light, like the interior of a church near sundown, lit only through its stained-glass windows. It was ominous and lovely and mystical and silent, and she wondered how she could capture its essence with lighting and choreography.

“You can’t,” Nick said, and she realized she must have been giving voice to her thoughts. “You need a holotank for this.”

But that wouldn’t do it either because you knew you were in a holotank and as long as you knew that, knew you were sitting in a safe warm place and that the images were only images and nothing else, the effect wasn’t quite complete. The audience had to be made to forget where it was. It had to be made to believe this was all real rock. The twin globes and that spectral cloud between them and the rings, those magnificent rings, had to be real. She’d never seen so much light in the sky, and yet it didn’t filter down onto the landscape. It only cast shadows, but they were God’s shadows, and when you were out here really out here cruising over them you knew that.

No. Simulations would be inadequate. She glanced over at Tor, who smiled at her. He understood that. It needed expression. It needed to be captured and made to live for an audience in the way only a theater troupe could do.

She saw a wisp of smoke down among the crags, as if somebody was tending a campfire, and pointed it out to Nick. “Trick of the light?” she wondered.

“Maybe. Or maybe it’s volcanic activity. Maybe old Vertical is geologically alive.”

She sat back and let the gentle vibrations of the engines enfold her while she visualized dancers performing under the Twins. While she began to put together a musical score.

Hutch announced that they were beginning their descent. Alyx looked outside again, looked for the house, the oval, with its courtyard and its cupola, but she could see only the tortured landscape and the Halloween glow.

But they were going down. The seat was falling away from her, the harness tugging on her shoulders and legs, restraining her. Then she heard George say, “There it is,” but she still couldn’t see it, had to be up front looking out through the windscreen. (Did they call it a windscreen when the vehicle moved through vacuum?)

A solid sheet of rock appeared out the window, gray, craggy, gaunt, moving steadily upward. It was close enough that she could almost have reached out and touched it if she could have gotten her hand through the window. She wanted to tell Hutch to be careful but she knew how that would be received so she kept quiet but couldn’t suppress a smile when George delivered the fatal phrase.

“Look out,” he said. “We’re pretty close.”

Hutch assured him in a flat voice that everything was okay. George stiffened and turned away to stare out at the cliff. Then he made a show of shrinking down in his seat and cowering with one hand drawn over his head.

Hutch laughed, but Alyx held her breath, hung on, gripping the arms of her chair, squeezing them tight. The upward movement of the cliffs slowed and almost stopped. Then she felt the jar of the landing treads. Hutch held it briefly aloft, gradually transferring weight to the vehicle, allowing it to settle slowly, probably wanting to assure herself the shelf would support them before she committed. Then they were down, and the drone of the engines changed, softened, and cut off.

She released her harness and stood up so she could see out the front. And there it was! It looked like an abandoned skating rink, a train terminal, maybe, the hind end of a mall, sitting out here as part of the spectacle.

The place where God comes when he needs a break.

They switched over to their air tanks, and Alyx looked out the right side, the starboard side, that was the correct way to say it, and she couldn’t see whatever it was they’d landed on. Instead she was looking down into a chasm, hundreds of meters down, where everything got dark and she couldn’t see bottom.

Hutch was standing in the airlock, watching to see that nobody tripped getting out. “Stay away from the edge,” she was saying, as each of them climbed down the short ladder and moved out across the barren ground.

The short stubby wing of the lander was a finger length from the rock wall. She looked up and caught her breath. The face of the cliff rose as far as she could see, maybe a couple of kilometers, maybe ten. It looked like Kilimanjaro up there except it didn’t have the snow, just smooth gray rock going up forever.

And the sky, my God, the sky. Autumn on one side and Cobalt on the other, each with its family of rings, and the big cloud between them like a Chinese globe. And the rim of the big ring, a misty highway arcing through the night.

She stared at it for several minutes. They all did. And then, finally, they began to talk again. Alyx slipped around in front of the lander, moving behind Nick, still watching the sky, and bumped into him when he stopped without warning. He was looking at the other vehicle, the one they’d seen on the Memphis’s screens, safe and mundane and ordinary from far away. But up close it was gray and black and different. There was something in its lines, in the way the hull curved back on itself, that their lamplight burrowed into the row of dark windows and seemed to get lost, that suggested a manufacturer they would not have recognized.

A coat of dust covered it, the roof, the hull, and the wings. It looked as if it had been there a long time. It looked part of the landscape, as solid and permanent as the rock wall. The wings were wider, rounder than those on the lander.

Nick took some pictures, and Hutch looked curiously up at the hatch. Alyx could see Tor considering angles and guessed that he’d be out there without much delay to start a new canvas. She herself visualized it as a prop, and tried to imagine the songs that could be written about this first encounter with a ship from another civilization, running one of the tunes through her head already. It was pure starlight. She wasn’t the ideal composer, and she wished Ben Halver could be there to see it, or Amy Bissell. She couldn’t do anything about that, but she’d do the next best thing, sit with them and tell them what it had been like.

The vehicle had a ladder. Big thick rungs, as thick as George’s forearms, and only three of them, spaced too far apart to be comfortable for a human.

“You’re too close to the edge,” Nick told somebody. “Get back.”

“How long you guess it’s been here?” Hutch asked her.

She shrugged. How would she know? A while, though. It had gathered a lot of dust in a place with no discernible atmosphere. A couple of years? A thousand years?

Nobody was talking. Nick was standing near the ladder, and he reached out tentatively and touched it, thereby making a piece of history. Tor had picked up a chunk of loose rock, had pulled it loose from the cliff, actually, and as she watched he dropped it over the edge. There was still a lot of little boy in Tor. Hutch and George just stood gazing up at those windows that stared back past them all, looking out over the rockscape, watching Autumn, which was framed between a saddle-shaped mountain and a peak that was thin and spindly and looked as if it might break off.

There were windows on both levels of the house, one rounded into an oculus, and a deck ran along the front, angling past abutments and setbacks. The cupola towered over her, larger from this angle than it had appeared in the onboard images. And at ground level, directly in front of her, she saw the front door.

It was a big front door.

IT WAS TRANSPARENT. Or had been at one time, Alyx thought. Now it was under a heavy coat of dust. But when she wiped it with the heel of her hand, and turned her lamp on it, the light penetrated. She saw chairs. And tables and shelves. And pictures on the walls.

And books!

“I don’t believe it,” said George. “This is incredible!” He pressed his face against the glass.

She pushed on the door, but George wasn’t going to allow anyone else to take any chances, so he gently nudged her out of the way and assumed the lead.

It occurred to Alyx that they looked like a group doing a Sunday outing. George wore old jeans and a shirt with University of Michigan emblazoned across it, a pair of white canvas shoes, and a battered hat that might have been all the rage on campus forty years ago.

Nick wore a hunter’s shirt, with lots of pockets (although they were all inaccessible because they were inside the energy field), and camouflage pants. Tor had a blue blazer with a police shield stitched on the left breast and an imprint on back that read Los Angeles Police Dept. When she asked where he’d gotten it, he explained that his brother was a homicide detective.

Alyx, who prided herself on knowing how to dress for any occasion, had been taken aback by this one, which did have its unique features. She’d settled for a white blouse open at the throat, green slacks, and white gym shoes. The gym shoes didn’t quite work, but they were good for scrambling over rock and gravel. She’d added a red-and-green ribbon in honor of the season.

Only Hutch, who wore a Memphis jumpsuit, seemed out of tune with the general holiday spirit.

Like the spacecraft and the front door, the walls and windows of the house were buried under a thick coating of debris, which had drifted down from the mountaintop or the rings, or been kicked up by eruptions. Who knew?

George hesitated in front of the door, looking for a way to open it.

“Maybe we should knock first,” said Nick.

Alyx stepped back and directed her lamp at the upper windows. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought curtains were drawn across them. And she saw a chair on the deck.

It was big, by human dimensions, something that would have swallowed even George’s bulk. But the proportions were right. It appeared to be a casual chair, made from what might have been reeds strung together. Something like rattan, maybe. Dark green, almost black.

“The place feels homey,” said Tor.

It did. And for that reason, it seemed all the more alien.

They milled about in front of the door while George looked for a way in. He finally acceded to Nick’s suggestion, and knocked. Dust fell from the grainy surface and floated to the ground.

It was a strange feeling, standing out there as if they actually believed someone, or something, might come to the door. Hello, we were in the neighborhood and we thought we’d pop by. How’s it going?

George knocked again, this time with a big grin. When nothing happened, he leaned against the door and pushed.

Nick turned to Hutch. “Do you have your cutter?”

“Not unless we have to,” she said.

Tor stepped up to help. They pulled. Pushed.

“It’s probably electronic,” said Hutch. “There should be a sensor here somewhere.”

“That means it needs power,” said Nick.

“Right.”

“How about the upper deck?” asked Tor.

“It’s a possibility.”

It was high. It would have been almost at the third story in a human building. Tor backed off a few paces, set himself, and jumped. In the light gravity, he soared. Alyx thought yes! that’s going to look great in the show, music up and drum roll. Marvelous stuff.

There was a handrail around the edge of the deck. Tor caught the bottom of it, swung awkwardly back and forth, and hauled himself up. Not very graceful. Not at all the way they’d do it in the show. But moments later he reported that he had a window open.

He disappeared inside, to lots of advice about be careful and don’t break anything and watch your step. Alyx counted off the time, imagining all the terrible things that could happen to him, even if no hideous thing lurked inside, no angel, no bloodthirsty whatzis waiting out here for the first humans to arrive so it could have one for dinner. A stair could be loose, floorboards could be decayed after who knew how many years. The house could collapse on him. Or despite what they thought, there might still be power inside, something dangling from the ceiling that he wouldn’t notice in his excitement. Or there might even be an antiburglar device. Something to pursue him through the house.

“What are you laughing about?” Hutch asked her.

“Just wondering why anybody out here would need to worry about burglars.”

She saw the light from his lamp coming down a staircase. Then he was at the door.

“No good,” he said. “I can’t open it from this side either.”

“You’re right about the burglars,” said Hutch, who was moving along the front testing windows. She found one that must have been loose, fumbled with it for a few moments, then pulled the window out and laid it on the ground.

They climbed through, one by one, into a living room. There were upholstered chairs and side tables made of something that looked like wood and probably was wood. And a sofa and curtains and bookshelves crowded with books! Everything was on a scale about half again as large as Alyx was accustomed to.

Behind the sofa, a large framed picture hung on the wall, but she couldn’t see what its subject was. Tor took off his vest and used it to wipe the dust away. It was hard to make out, but it looked like a landscape. “It’ll need enhancement,” said Nick, smiling at the understatement.

“That’s probably not a good idea,” Hutch cautioned him.

“I’ll be gentle,” he said.

It was a big room, the walls far apart, the ceiling quite high. She gazed up at the shelves. And across at the curtains. There was even something that might have been a desk. The walls were paneled in a bilious gray-green, but Alyx thought it wasn’t that the occupants had possessed egregious taste as that the years had attacked whatever color scheme they’d used. Tor was methodically trying to wipe down other pictures. She was able to make out a waterfall in one, but nothing more, and even that was uncertain. While he continued, she touched one of the drapes with her fingertips, very carefully, she thought, only to see it disintegrate and turn to powder.

“Here’s one,” said Tor. He’d found a picture that wasn’t completely faded. But maybe it should have been. It was a portrait of something vaguely human, wearing a cowl, and staring directly out of the frame with an alligator smile and baleful eyes that retained the personality of the subject despite the apparent age of the work.

“Self-portrait,” Nick joked uneasily. Alyx shivered and told herself it was the condition of the portrait that rendered its subject so demonic. It lacked only a scythe.

In fact it seemed unlikely that a painting in the living room—which this seemed to be—would be of anything other than one of the occupants. They all gathered around it, and Alyx found herself afterward staying close to the others.

They were transfixed by the books. Thick, heavy tomes, mostly stacked on shelves, some lying on tabletops. The bindings were stiff with age, but might once have been soft and pliable. One lay open.

“Magnificent,” said Hutch.

They were in a vacuum, so things like books would probably last indefinitely, unless the paper contained its own acids. Nevertheless, they kept a respectful distance from the open volume, careful not to touch it, fearful lest it crumble. The open pages were thick with dust. Hutch tried to brush it away with her hand, but it was useless. Alyx didn’t think anyone would ever read what was on those pages.

Here and there she could make out a squiggle, a line of print. And there was even a notation, apparently entered by hand. (Or by claw or tentacle or who knew what?) It was halfway down the left page, and consisted of a few characters, a couple of words, maybe. This guy is full of it, Alyx interpreted liberally. Doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Hutch took pictures, and then tried turning to a new page. But the book was like a piece of rock. “They’re frozen together,” she said.

Tor reached for a volume on one of the shelves. It wouldn’t come. Wouldn’t move.

There were candles in candlestick holders. Nick found a panel on one of the side tables and opened it. It only came partway, but beneath it were a set of punch buttons, a press pad, and a gauge. He looked at Alyx and shrugged. Sound system? Climate control? Window opener?

She found herself looking up the stairway Tor had used. Another descended to a lower level.

Everything was eerily familiar. It could almost have been her uncle’s den in Wichita Falls, except that the room and the furniture were too big. And, of course, that it was frozen solid. She pushed on the seat of one of the armchairs. It seemed secure enough, and she was tempted to climb up on it, try it out, but it was too dusty. When they did the show, she decided, they’d have to eliminate the dust.

The carpet had lost whatever color and texture it might once have had. It was hard now, frozen, whiskery. Pieces of it broke underfoot.

Cushions and pads were scattered about the furniture, and a quilt was thrown casually over one of the chairs. But they were all like rocks.

The front wall, in better times, would have presented a magnificent view. The door itself, on the left side of the wall, was transparent. It had flanking windows. A large oculus dominated the center of the wall, and still another long window was at the far end on the right. The room had clearly been designed to take advantage of the sky show. Alyx looked again at the image in the portrait and wondered whether, despite its terrifying appearance, she would not have found some areas of common ground with the subject. Then she remembered the angels.

The chairs were angled toward each other, and, as one would have expected, pointed out so that their occupants could take advantage of the view. The fabric was hard, frozen, decorated with a rising (or setting) sun.

They found more electronic controls concealed in other tabletops and in cabinets. But there was no easy way to determine their purpose.

Alyx wondered whether there might be computer records somewhere, a diary perhaps, or a journal. When she suggested the possibility to Nick he shook his head. “If the occupants kept any kind of log or record, we’ll have to hope they did it with pen and ink.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Lasts longer.”

THE ROOM LACKED only a fireplace.

They spread out, everyone speaking quietly, whispering, as if they were in a sacred site. Alyx wandered through several rooms and found two more books that had been left open. “It must have been nice here,” she told Hutch. “When the systems were working.”

Hutch nodded. “We go looking for aliens, but it seems to be our own face looking back at us.”

George was ecstatic. “We didn’t get here in time to talk to them,” he said, “but we’ve done the next best thing.” He reached up carefully and touched a thick discolored volume that had fallen over. He tried to lift it but it wouldn’t come free, so he settled for pressing his index finger against the spine, and drawing it down the length of the cover. “What an ideal Christmas present for us.”

Nick nodded. “Once we figure how to thaw them out. You think we can do that without damaging them, George?” That was directed at least partly at Hutch, who was standing off to one side.

“I’m pretty sure they can do it,” said Hutch. “Though I’ve never seen a case like this before.”

“You don’t think we could try it, do you? Maybe just take a few back to the Memphis and leave them at room temperature for a while?”

“It’s not a good idea, Nick.”

“Why not?”

“Because the people who come after us are going to want to know who the occupants were, how long they were here, where they came from. They’ll need all the evidence they can scrape together. Think of this place as a murder scene. Right now, we’re mucking up the footprints.”

“But it’s really hard to see what harm we can do.”

“Nick,” said George, “let it go.”

“Do things the right way now,” said Hutch, “and we’ll preserve whatever can be preserved.” She gazed around at the lines of books. “Eventually this will get rescued. And maybe translated and put into some kind of context. You’ll have as much access to it as you could want. On the other hand…”

“Okay,” he said. “But I hate to wait years to find out what this is about. And that’s what it’ll take, you know.”

“So what do we do with the books?” asked Tor.

“Leave them as they are. For whoever comes after us.”

THE SITE SEEMED safe enough, so neither Hutch nor George raised an objection when they wandered off to more distant parts of the building. Just be careful. Don’t break anything. The place projected a warmth against the vast desolation outside. To Alyx, it felt like home, like a chapel, like the warm kind of refuge one only knows in childhood. It might be that the larger gauge, the big sofas and tables, the shelves filled with books, were summoning memories long forgotten. She felt like a little girl again.

It was a good spot to spend Christmas Eve.

A PASSAGEWAY INTO the back of the house opened into a dining area. Table and chairs were of the same scale as the rest of the furnishings. The table was carved. Leaves and vegetation and fruit decorated the side panels.

Tor had opened a cabinet that was stacked with plates the size of serving dishes. And a fork you could have used to bring down a steer. There were cups and bowls and knives. “Everything cleaned and put away,” he said.

Alyx looked around the big pantry. “As if they knew they weren’t coming back.”

“Or they were serious about being neat.”

There was another stairway in back, descending. Tor threw his light down it. “Food came from here.”

“Is there some still there?” she asked.

“Packed away. But it looks a trifle dry.”

“I guess it would.”

Sleeping quarters were on the second level. Alyx and Hutch went upstairs, circled the landing, and entered a room on the eastern side. She caught her breath. A big bed stood in the center of the chamber. A big bed. Large enough for eight people. It had been made, pillows plumped up, a blanket drawn carefully over the linen. But it was stiff and pale with age. The bed looked, not exactly collapsed, but folded in on itself. There were shelves at its head, on either side. Each shelf had a lamp. There were also a couple of books, a notebook, and a writing instrument. A pen.

Around the perimeter of the room, she saw cabinets, a desk, a couple of side tables. A door opened off to a washroom. And she found the biggest walk-in closet she’d ever seen. But only a few rags remained hanging.

Hutch looked, but did not touch. Alyx could make out a robe and a pair of leggings. Two different sizes, she thought.

“The correct number of limbs,” said Hutch.

There was one more bedroom, and another closet with fragments of apparel.

“I think we’ve settled one issue,” she told Hutch.

“What’s that?”

“There were two of them here.”

One large, one small. One male, one female. Alyx had a good imagination, and she could visualize the garments in better times, red and gold robes, say, and leggings that were summer green.

They also found several pairs of shoes. More like moccasins, actually. Size thirties, she thought. And a couple of hats. Not in very good condition, of course, but recognizable for what they were. One looked like a cap that Robin Hood might have worn. It even had a place to put a feather.

Alyx had half expected to find remains on the upper level. She kept wondering about the lander waiting outside for someone who never showed up. “I think they’re here somewhere, Hutch,” she said. Maybe up in the cupola. But even when they climbed a spiral staircase up to that highest point in the house, it was only another room, a kind of den, windows on all sides, chairs that looked lush but were rock hard, a display screen, and more books.

Downstairs, they found more closets, and more garments.

George’s voice broke in over the circuit. “Hutch, we’re going to want to establish a base here for a while. Is that feasible? Is there any way we can do it?”

“Sure,” she said. “Provided you don’t mind operating out of the lander.”

“I might have a better idea,” said Tor. “The pocket dome is down in storage somewhere. If you can refill the air tanks, and recharge it, we could move that down here. Put it in the courtyard.”

“That would work,” said Hutch.

“Hey!” Nick’s voice. “This is strange.”

“Where are you, Nick?” asked George.

“Downstairs back room. Take a look at this.”

Alyx left Hutch and hurried back down out of the cupola to the ground level, walked to the back of the house, and bumped into Nick for the second time that night. He was standing just inside the doorway.

The room was utterly empty. No tables, no chairs, no curtains, no pictures on the wall. No books. There was another cavernous walk-in closet, but nothing hung in it.

Tor and George were right behind her. And a moment later, Hutch. They all hesitated at the doorway before coming in.

Nick continued to play his lamp around the bare walls. Some spaces were discolored. “There were pictures up here,” he said. “At one time.”

Alyx imagined where the furniture would have been. Sofa against that wall, chair over there. Maybe a desk. It looked as if it might have been a workroom of one kind or another. The back wall had been home to a pair of shelves.

“You know what it reminds me of?” said Nick. “The empty chamber at the moonbase.”