Chindi

Chapter 19

NICK FOUND THE graves.

Maybe it was pure luck or maybe it was because everything in the house had been put away the way people do when they’re leaving town except that it seemed as if nobody had left because the lander was still out on the shelf. Or maybe it was a funeral director’s instincts. The courtyard, with its tract of earth, with the soil in which he suspected plants had once grown, would have been the only spot available for a burial.

But who had conducted the services?

He smiled, imagining a cosmic funeral director, not unlike himself but with better thrusters. Perhaps relaying to grieving relatives and friends in another part of the sky the assurances that everything was all right. That the appropriate honors had been rendered.

It had been a tribute. A final act of respect. He felt that in his soul, knew it to be true.

These people, whoever, whatever they were, did not mark their graves. That was odd, but who was to say what constituted strangeness in someone else’s cultural habits?

The plot of soil in the courtyard measured about twenty by twelve meters, and was ringed by a brick walkway. Brick. He wondered about the kind of entity that so respected its origins that it would haul brick across interstellar distances.

There were two oversize gray benches, one of which had partially collapsed. He stood on the walkway, between them, gazing at the disturbed ground. Right there, near a postlight that, of course, did not work.

“Recent,” he told George.

“How long ago?”

“To be honest, I hate to make a guess here, because it’s not like home, where things change pretty quickly—”

“How long ago?” George asked again.

“If we were home, I’d say within the last few days.”

George knelt down and looked at the earth. It was freshly disturbed. There seemed no question about that. He picked up a handful, rubbed it with his fingers, and glanced up at the sky. “Are they buried together?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Could be.”

The house had been unoccupied for years. Probably decades. The thick dust everywhere told him that.

George went looking for Hutch. When they returned, moments later, he was already upset. “I don’t think the Memphis has a spade in its gear locker,” she was saying, “but regardless, we should not dig them up.”

“Why not? Isn’t that what archeologists do?”

“We’re not archeologists, George. And that’s the reason why not. We need people here who know what they’re doing.”

He looked at Nick, who made it a point to study the cupola. Nice design, that. “Do you have an alternative?”

“Sure,” she said. “Let’s have Bill take a look with the sensors. That’ll tell us what’s down there. You won’t get the chance to unearth the bones, but you’ll preserve the site, and the Academy will thank you for it.”

“All right,” he said. “Do it.”

Nick watched while she sent instructions back to the Memphis. It was below the horizon, so they had to wait. Hutch went back inside, but he and George stayed near the grave. George kept talking about what might have happened had they arrived a few days earlier. “What are the odds,” he asked, “against actually meeting a third party at a place like this?”

“Whoever they were,” Nick said, “they must have known someone was here. I mean, you don’t wander into a place like this by accident.”

“We did.” He looked up at the rings. It took an act of will not to simply stand and stare at them.

“If it was recent,” Nick said. He pointed his lamp at the walkway and grumbled.

“What’s wrong?” asked George.

“We’ve been all over the place,” he said.

“So what are we concerned about here?”

“If the burial actually happened recently, there should be marks in the dust. Footprints. Some kind of indication.”

“Yeah.” George looked. “Oh.”

Everybody, by now, had gone round and round on the bricks. Any indication of who might have been there was probably gone. But maybe not. He saw scuff marks on the collapsed bench. A section of the seat was almost free of dust.

“What do you think?” asked George.

Had something been on the bench for an extended period? Was that the reason it had collapsed? It was too much for Nick. He shrugged and let it go. “I wish we’d stayed off the walkway,” he said. And he thought: That’s the point Hutch was trying to make.

He watched the lights prowling relentlessly through the house, one upstairs moving from room to room, hesitating in the empty chamber, the rest gathered in the living room. After a couple of minutes the upstairs light started down, headed for the others.

They seemed somewhat at a loss. Nick wasn’t sure why that was, but it almost seemed they were developing a sense of kinship with whoever had lived there. However threatening the image might look in the living room portrait, the subject was now in the grave, buried a few meters away, and they could relate to that.

Nick wondered what the creatures had been like, what they’d talked about while they sat in the chairs in the front room gazing out at that incredible sky. There was something very human about the house, a refuge in a place so remote from ordinary life. Nick had always talked about buying an island somewhere, preferably in the remote North Atlantic, where the ocean was cold and the weather terrible. That was what he’d wanted because he liked fireplaces. And fireplaces only came into their own when you had desperate weather. Well, this was a place built for fireplaces if there had ever been one. It was, most of all, a place he recognized.

One of the lamps broke away and came in his direction. Hutch. Quiet, graceful, always in command despite her size.

“There are two of them down there, Nick,” she said.

HUTCH LOOKED AT her notebook, at George, at Nick, and then at the ground. “Bill says they’re side by side, two meters apart. Both sets of remains are mummified. As one would expect under these conditions.” She slid the notebook into her vest.

“Side by side,” said Nick. It didn’t look wide enough.

“You can’t see them both,” she said. “The second grave is here.” A few meters to one side. “It contains the smaller set of remains. Probably a female.”

But there were no marks. No indication. “They weren’t buried at the same time,” he said.

“Bill,” said Hutch, “have you been listening?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell us anything more?”

“It looks as if they were interred in robes.”

“Anything else?”

“I would say they died during the same epoch.”

“Can you determine the age of the remains? Roughly? Ballpark figure?”

“It would require exhumation and analysis.”

Nick could see she didn’t think much of that idea. George, though, was all for it.

“I’m sorry. That’s the best I can do.”

“Epochs. You’re suggesting that the remains are old.”

“Oh, yes. There’s no doubt about that. How old, though, I do not know.”

“Now let me be sure I understand this,” said Nick. “We have two sets of remains, both mummified. So they’re both dead a long time.”

“That seems fairly obvious,” said George.

“But one’s in a relatively fresh grave.”

“That also seems to be correct.”

Hutch’s eyes were dark and unreadable in the half-light.

Nick thought about it. “Both died a long time ago. Same era. We know that much. But they didn’t die at the same time.”

George nodded. “The female, the smaller one, if we can assume that, died first. Right? I mean, she must have, because she was buried first.”

“Makes sense to me,” said Nick.

“Presumably, she was buried by her mate,” George continued. “Who died later.”

“And later still, a lot later,” said Hutch, “somebody else came by and buried him.”

THEY WENT OUT to take a closer look at the alien vehicle, Hutch and Nick and George. But it was sealed, and they couldn’t get past the airlock.

“You think anybody would object,” said George, “if we cut our way in?”

He was talking about Hutch, of course. But maybe she was getting worn down. Or maybe she wanted to see the interior of the vehicle herself. In either case, she produced her laser without a word, and pretty soon they were slipping through the hole she’d made in the hatch—

— into a big cabin, with big windows and a big windscreen. And a door in the rear wall. The outside of the windows were covered with dust, so they needed their lamps. But the interior was clean. There were four chairs, including the pilot’s, two each front and back. The seats were hard, of course, slabs of stone, but they looked as if they’d once been soft and accommodating. Behind them, along the back wall, there were storage cabinets, but Nick couldn’t get them open. A long time closed, he guessed.

Hutch was talking to someone on her link, but Nick couldn’t hear anything. That probably meant it was Bill. She nodded a couple of times, and stood so that the imager clipped to her vest provided good pictures of the controls for the bridge monitors.

Nick climbed onto one of the front seats, sitting on it rather than in it, a child in an adult’s chair, legs straight out, console hopelessly out of reach. Hutch finished her conversation and smiled at him. “You won’t touch anything, right, Nick?”

He looked at a board of gauges, press pads, and lamps. “I couldn’t touch anything with a stick,” he said. “Would you know how to take this thing up? Assuming it worked.”

She shook her head. “I haven’t even figured out what kind of power source it uses.”

“I don’t see a wheel,” said George. “Or a yoke.”

Hutch nodded. “Maybe it was operated strictly by AI. Or by voice command.”

“Wouldn’t that be too slow?”

“For a human, yes.”

Nick climbed back down—it was a long way from the seat to the deck—and made a second effort to open one of the storage compartments. This time he succeeded, and he found a bag inside. It, too, might have been made of pliable material at one time, something polished and leather-soft, but like everything else around the complex, it had frozen solid. He pulled it out, but couldn’t get it open. “Clothes, probably,” Hutch said with a smile. “Overnight bag.”

“Overnight bag to where?” Nick looked up at the sky.

“A beach house, maybe.” Her expression suggested anybody’s guess was good. She tried the door in the rear bulkhead. Surprisingly, it opened, and she pushed through. “How about that?” she said.

She began talking to Bill again. Nick looked in and saw half a dozen racked black cylinders, three on either side of the spacecraft. And a series of metal boxes of varying shapes, tied together by cables and ducts.

“The engine?” George asked Nick.

Nick shrugged. “I guess.”

“And some power cells,” said Hutch.

“Vacuum energy?”

“I don’t know. The technology is different from ours. At least, I think it is.”

“Better?”

“I can’t say. Different.”

George had worked his way around in front of the pilot’s seat and was trying to get a look at the controls. “How long has it been here, do you think?”

There was the big question. An airless moon made it hard to figure. It might have been parked a few weeks earlier. Or maybe a hundred thousand years ago.

“There might be a way,” Hutch said. She climbed onto one of the rear seats and peered at the side window. “Hold on.” She crossed the cabin, leaned out through the airlock, and signaled Nick over. “Give me a boost.”

“Where are you going?”

“The roof.”

She climbed onto Nick’s shoulders. He stood at the lip of the airlock while she reached up, found an antenna mount, and hoisted herself atop the cabin. The roof was covered with several centimeters of dust.

“What are we doing?” asked George, not trying to conceal a note of exasperation.

“Cleaning the windows.” She removed her vest and walked toward the front of the spacecraft until she could reach the windscreen. She was looking out over the precipice, and it must have been a giddy moment. Nick thought how the low gravity created the illusion that he could fly.

She went down on one knee, got hold of an antenna to make sure she didn’t slip, and began wiping the windows. When the worst was off, she pressed her fingers against the surface. It was pitted, etched, where grains of dust had buried themselves.

She climbed back down. “The solar wind blows across the moon constantly,” she said. “It probably doesn’t vary very much, so we’re going to assume that it’s a constant. That introduces a degree of unreliability into the test, but I think it’s one we can safely overlook.”

“Good,” said Nick, who thought he saw where she was headed.

“We need close-up pictures for analysis. Of every window in the vehicle. While we’re doing that, I’ll have Bill put together an analysis to determine how much solar wind exists here. When that’s done, he’ll be able to sort out details like composition and velocity. And that will allow us to determine the rate of etching.”

“Etching?” asked George.

“Particle inclusions in the windows. Particles from the solar wind are constantly driven into the plastic. We measure them, we look at flux and quantity, and we ask how long it would take to get that way. The answer tells us how long our lander’s been sitting on the ledge.”

WHILE HUTCH AND George took pictures, Nick descended from the vehicle, strolled past the Memphis lander, and wandered to the far end of the shelf, where it dwindled until it became sufficiently narrow that he had no interest going any farther. The ledge continued indefinitely, eventually curving out of sight.

He looked back at the house. The lights in it were steady. Alyx and Tor had set up lamps, and the sense of burglars moving through a darkened property had been traded off for a warm, half-lit domicile that might have been found along a country road.

Christmas Eve at the most remote place in creation.

After a while, he turned back toward the Memphis lander. It waited like an oversized bullpup with its stubby wings, a homely craft, with ACADEMY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY stenciled across its hull even though it did not yet belong to the Academy. Somebody had placed a lighted wreath in one of the windows, and it glowed, green and warm and familiar. He’d come to dislike the holidays, perhaps because he’d lost whatever religious convictions he’d had as a child. Or perhaps because of his profession. Burying people at Christmastime had always been a strain. The survivors were inevitably more emotional, the grief always more intense. The families were forever asking him why, and he never understood whether they wanted to know why loved ones die, or why they die at Christmas. As if it mattered.

But that night, he was pleased that the holiday had arrived at just this time. Delighted. Almost ecstatic. He was out there with his friends and was becoming aware that he loved the moment, and he loved them. Of them all, no one knew better than he that life was not forever. What he had learned through all the years of watching the dead and their survivors was to enjoy the moment. Not carpe diem, seize the day. That meant something different. Something about making the day pay off. Moving up the food chain. Nick stood on the shelf and simply luxuriated in the experience, in being alive, in this far place, with George and Alyx and the others. It was a Christmas that would not come again. He knew that, and that knowledge made it priceless.

He touched the rocky wall behind him. Although it was cold, frigid, none of that leaked through into the e-suit, in which he remained snug and warm. The miracle of the technology. But he knew that it was a couple of hundred degrees below zero out there, and he wondered whether anyone else had ever stood here. The original occupants must have come this way on occasion, strolling along the shelf as far as they could. It was a natural act for any creature that would want to live in such a place. He looked for prints, but, of course, had there been any other than his own, they were long since filled in.

His light picked out something under the lander.

An indentation. Running almost the length of the vehicle.

It was just inside the tread, parallel to it. Maybe a half meter wide. And recent. It hadn’t even begun to fill in. He stared at it for a time, trying to puzzle out what might have made it, and then he bent down and looked underneath, and saw a second, parallel, line, identical, several meters over. It was half-obscured by the opposite tread.

He got back up and returned to Hutch. She was still climbing around up near the windscreen. Too busy to notice him.

The alien vehicle had treads, but they were farther apart than the tracks beneath the lander. And wider. Whatever had set down back there, it had been a different vehicle.

The burial party.

THEY ALL TROOPED out to look. Hutch took pictures. George repeated Nick’s observation: “Can’t have been here long ago.”

They looked up at the sky. Nick saw the Memphis, a star moving slowly down the western rim. Then, subdued, they returned inside.

IT WAS TIME to go get the pocket dome.

A set of air tanks had a life of six hours. Alyx, George, and Nick refilled theirs, and Hutch left three extra pairs. Just in case. Then she and Tor climbed into the lander and returned to the Memphis.

Hutch scanned the measurements from the windscreen for Bill and set him to work.

They filled the dome’s water and air tanks, and loaded everything into the cargo space. They added some reddimeals and assorted snacks and a few bottles of wine.

Tor was clearly enjoying himself. With his dome, he was becoming a central figure in the Contact Society effort. And he kept talking about the significance of the discovery. “It’ll be a merry Christmas on Vertical,” he said.

While they were completing the work, she could not avoid being conscious of the fact that they were truly alone for the first time. But if Tor had any notions about taking advantage of the situation, he suppressed them. Once or twice he could not have helped catching her looking at him in what must have been an odd way. But he let it go.

“Hutch.” Bill’s voice. “I have a tentative result.”

“Already?” Tor’s eyebrows went up. “He’s only had the data a half hour.”

“He’s pretty quick,” said Hutch. “What have you got, Bill?”

“Did you want the details or simply the result?”

“Just tell us how long the lander’s been on the shelf.”

“The numbers are hardly definite, but I would say between three and four thousand years.”

That was a shock. The place just didn’t feel that old. Nowhere close to it. “Bill, are you sure?”

“Of course not. But the figure is correct if the current intensity of the solar wind is typical.”

ON THE RETURN flight, Hutch maneuvered carefully, trying to avoid setting down on the tracks of the third lander. She didn’t entirely succeed. But they’d gotten pictures, and they could re-create them virtually.

Alyx and George were waiting for them. They told Hutch they’d mistaken her for Santa, and did a couple of other lame jokes about not being sure whether the sleigh came this far out.

It reminded Hutch that they had no gifts to distribute. In all probability, she thought, had they not encountered the house, the retreat—it was a retreat really, there was no way to deny that now—had they simply been sailing along in the Memphis, nobody would have thought about gifts. They’d have sung a few songs about mistletoe and sleigh bells and Christmas on Luna, raised some toasts, and that would have been it. But here, within this house overlooking the ultimate view, amid furnishings so large that they all felt once again like children—Where are my electric trains, Dad? — Hutch longed to give out some stuff, cologne for Alyx, and maybe a loud shirt, a red shirt with golden dragons on it for Tor, and a few good mysteries for George (who had a taste for whodunits), and something appropriately personal for Nick. She liked Nick and would have liked to signal her affection in some oblique way. But she wasn’t sure what would work. Not that it mattered here, where the nearest mall was a couple of hundred light-years off to the right.

They set up the pocket dome in the courtyard, at the far end, away from the graves. It was simple enough, just a matter of pulling the trigger and watching it inflate itself, and then connecting water and air tanks, installing power cells, and turning it on. Unlike the e-suits, it couldn’t subsist on vacuum energy alone, but required a direct power source.

Then they retreated inside, turned off their suits, and broke out the snacks and drinks. George announced that it was appropriate at this time of year to toast the captain at the beginning of festivities, and they did. Then they toasted George, their “beloved leader.” And Alyx, “the most beautiful woman in the sims.” And Nick, “who would be there to see them all off.” (Nick assured them he would do his best by them.) And finally Tor, “our own Rembrandt.” They sang a few carols, ate and drank and sang some more, and everyone had a good time.

George offered a toast “to us.” “As long as the human race endures,” he said, raising his glass and struggling not to spill anything, “it will remember the voyage of the Memphis.”

“Hear, hear.” Drink it down, refill, and let’s have another.

THE ALIEN LANDER had made its last flight onto the ledge a thousand years or so before the birth of Christ. What had been happening in the world at the time?

Rome was a distant dream.

Egypt must have been building pyramids, although Hutch thought it had passed through that phase by then.

Sumer was already pretty old, but Homer wouldn’t be born for another two or three centuries. Athens hadn’t shown up yet on the radar.

Because the retreat had been erected in the timeless environment of a sterile moon, it was subject to almost no change. Occasional dust thrown up by a ground tremor, perhaps, or by the arrival in the neighborhood of a meteor. A few particles thrown out by the sun. By cosmic standards, the system in which it existed was unstable, and the platform on which it rode more unstable yet. But nevertheless here it was after almost the whole of human history had passed. The lander still waited for its pilot, and a book lay open all this time on the worktable in the main room.

What had the occupant been reading when he stepped away? Had something unexpected happened that he had not come back?

What was his name?

The party died down. Hutch and Alyx wandered out to the lander, where they’d spend the night. More room that way for everyone. And more privacy.

She was almost asleep before she fell into her chair. Her last conscious thought was that, though the retreat had been here several millennia, this was its first Christmas.