Echo

THIRTY-NINE

Alex had also noticed the winged statue in the director’s office. He was hoping they might be induced to offer it to us. So he decided to provide the opportunity when he next saw Viscenda, which was outside on the deck. We were sitting out with a couple of the herdsmen and a teen worker, enjoying an unseasonably warm afternoon, when she came in from a tour of the greenhouses. He commented on how beautiful it was. And that the figure appeared to be a goddess. “I’ve noticed that most of the rooms have a sketch of her.”

Viscenda glanced at the teen, inviting him to answer. “She is Allyra,” he said. “Not a goddess.”

“At least,” added Turam, who’d just come out behind us, “not in the usual sense.”

“Who is she, then?”

Turam explained that she represented free thought. Free inquiry.

“In her presence,” said Viscenda, “no dogma is safe. In her time, she stood almost alone against those who claimed to know how we should behave, how we should live, and who should be running things. She is the relentless enemy of certainty.”

“She’s a mythical figure, of course,” said Turam. “But she represents what the community stands for.”

Nobody suggested that we could keep her, but when we were alone, Alex commented that he thought the seed had been planted.

It wasn’t easy to sleep on Echo III. The planet turned too slowly, so the nights and days were too long, and we never really made the adjustment. I was falling asleep after dinner, and wide-awake before the sun came up. The following day I was asleep by midafternoon, and awake a couple of hours after midnight. The community had a system for keeping time, and they had windup clocks, but I was never sure what time it was.

We were both asleep in the middle of the afternoon when Belle called. “I didn’t want to take a chance on waking Alex,” she told me, “because I know he’s still in some pain.”

“Thanks, Belle. What do you have?”

“The crater Alex asked about?”

“Yes. You found it?”

“It’s almost halfway around the world from your present location. It is at thirty-five degrees north latitude, in a jungle area. It looks recent. Probably made within the last half century.”

“How big?”

“Its diameter is approximately five and a half kilometers. And it’s deep. Impact must have been severe. The surrounding jungle shows the effects for hundreds of kilometers.”

“Okay. Thanks, Belle.”

“You think Rachel was responsible?”

“One way or another.”

“Do you wish me to resume my prior orbit?”

“Yes. Please.”

I told Alex when he woke. He made no effort to sit up but simply lay there, staring at the ceiling. “Poor woman,” he said.

I never really became accustomed to the food. I couldn’t forget that the staples had once been part of a living animal. One night they served something akin to a pork-and-beef mix with a choice of vegetables and fruit. And some bread, which, mixed with their jam, was excellent. So I filled up on bread and desserts, which consisted of a variety of baked goods, with flavors I couldn’t identify. I think I put on three pounds the first full day we were there. Which, on top of the other seventeen, was just what I needed.

We’d seen some suspicion among the community members when we first arrived, as if we were dangerous in some unspecified way, and I don’t think the talking jewelry helped negate that. But by the end of the fourth day, most of them seemed to have decided we could be trusted. If we spoke a language nobody knew, we were nonetheless obviously human. And if we rode a ship that floated on air, it was at least no longer in the skies. In fact, it had crashed. And that, too, maybe, helped get us accepted. We were vulnerable. The young ones no longer hid behind their mothers. The adults said hello and even occasionally stopped to talk.

“How long,” we asked Turam, “have you been on this world?”

He seemed confused by the question. So we tried again. “When did humans first arrive here?”

“Here?” He looked around. “You mean in Kamarasco?”

“What’s Kamarasco?”

“It’s this area. Where we are now.”

“No, no. When did you first arrive on this world?”

He smiled, as if we were playing a joke. “Is that a religious question?”

“I’m serious.”

“Alex, we’ve always been on this world. What are we talking about?”

Alex looked delighted. They’d been here so long they’d lost track of who they really were. “I wonder if there’s a possibility,” I asked Alex, “that they really are aliens?”

“What do you mean?”

“That they did originate here. Is there any reason there couldn’t be a second human race? Independent of us?”

“Probably not.” And he lit up at the suggestion. “What a discovery that would be.”

Alex asked how far back their history went.

“Several thousand years,” Turam said.

“What kind of world do the earliest records describe?”

“It’s hard to be certain. To separate myth from history. The ancient accounts talk about a golden age. People living for centuries. Living in palaces. Food was plentiful. Some of it seems to be true. There are still ruins nobody can explain.”

“So what happened?”

“There really is no reliable historical account. The world fell apart. Some of the religious groups will tell you that we offended God. People got away from Him and He simply shut us down. See then how well you survive without Me.”

“Is that a quote?”

“From the Vanova.” He saw that we had no idea what the Vanova was. “The sacred scriptures. And I can see the doubt in your eyes. A lot of people think we had a higher level of technology in ancient times. Who knows what the truth was? But, however that might have been, whatever the level of technology we might have possessed in earlier eras, we had a good life until recently. I don’t think we appreciated how well off we were until the Dark Times came. Now—” Turam sighed. “Today we are only an echo of what we were.”

Alex told me that Seepah came by the room while I was out. “He wanted to take my temperature again.”

“Why?”

“He says I was running a fever when they brought me in. And that my pulse was too high.”

“Okay.”

“He checked everything again. Says I’m still warm. And my pulse is still out of whack.”

“How do you feel?”

“Fine.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it. The equipment here’s a bit primitive.”

Later, in the dining hall, with seven or eight sitting at the table or standing by watching, Alex broke the news: “This will come as something of a shock,” we told them through Belle’s translations, “but you should know anyhow. You’re not native to this world.”

“That’s crazy,” one of them said. An attractive young mother with two kids. “Are you one of those crazy Horgans?”

“Of course not,” Alex said. “But where do you think you came from?”

“The first men and women,” the woman said, “were brought here from Mornava.”

I looked at Turam. “Paradise,” he explained. “God’s home.”

“Why were they brought here?”

“According to the Vanova, it was to give them a chance to demonstrate their virtue. To show they were worthy to keep company with the Almighty.”

“What kind of civilization,” Seepah asked, evidently hoping to change the tone, “is on Rimway? How did you get there?”

We explained about Earth, and the technological breakthroughs, the explorations, and ultimately the deployment of human societies in a great many places along the Orion Arm.

They weren’t sure what the Orion Arm was, but they got the idea, although many of those present denied the possibility, some laughed, and one or two walked out. “Humans originated here,” one of the older spectators said. “I don’t want to offend anybody, but these other ideas are lunacy.”

Alex looked my way. We seldom spoke in Standard anymore. It wasn’t especially polite. But we made exceptions, and this was one. “So much for Allyra and the open mind.” Then, after a pause, “It’s funny how we named the system.”

“What are we talking about, Alex?”

“Echo. It’s all that’s left.”

They had a library, of sorts. It was located in a small room at the rear of the building. They’d furnished it with two tables and four or five chairs. Seventeen books lined the shelf. We couldn’t make anything of them, of course. But Turam went through them with us, looking at each one and explaining its contents. This one was a history of Kalaan, which had been an organized nation three thousand years before and had left stone monuments of breathtaking grandeur. That one was a novel, about a man who never learned his limitations and blamed all his problems on others. Another was a book of poetry. Then there was an analysis of one of the religions. And another novel, about “people traveling to places in outer space.” Belle struggled to translate Turam’s term for the category, finally settling on grandioso. There were two collections of plays, several histories, and three books “about scientific inquiry.”

“I suspect,” Turam said, “there will be a book written one day about your visit. If everything really is as you say, your arrival will constitute one of the historic moments.”

In the evenings, we had constant visitors. Curiosity seekers. People who wanted us to talk to their kids. Some who wanted us to accept their worldview and stop being such ninnies. And some who just wanted to say hello.

Alex sat through the conversations, propped up on the sofa, at first fascinated, but gradually, as he realized that our hosts didn’t know much about the history of their own world, disappointed. He had trouble concealing his feelings, at least to me. The exchanges, even with those who simply wanted to wish us well, tended to be, as you would expect, superficial. Glad to meet you. No, it doesn’t hurt that much. We’re very grateful to Turam and Seepah. Sometimes we were asked whether we had children. Were we spouses? A few, after learning we had been traveling alone, were shocked that we were not married.

A woman who might have been a grandmother asked where Rimway was. Later, Viscenda showed up with what she described as a star chart. She gave it to Alex. He looked at it and passed it to me.

She came over and stood beside me as I spread the chart out on a tabletop. It was hand-drawn.

I needed time to figure out what was represented, because the chart was trying to reproduce a section of sky on a piece of paper, so Viscenda had lost a dimension. But she had most of the local stars within about eight light-years.

She was expecting me to circle one of the stars. Instead, I drew a line out from their sun, continued it through the depicted stars to the edge of the paper, and placed the paper so the line was aimed toward a window. I went over, simulated opening the window, and pointed toward some distant trees. Alex, speaking in Standard, commented that yes, Rimway was certainly in the trees.

But Viscenda understood what I was trying to say, and her eyes got very wide. She raised both hands over her head, said something so quickly and with so much emotion that neither I nor Belle could pick it up. I should explain that, by that point, Alex and I had both learned to handle the language on a basic scale. It was enough. We were using Belle by then simply to step in where needed.

Of all the people present, it was Viscenda who seemed most interested in who we were, where we’d come from, and why we were there. “Be careful,” Turam warned us, “she’ll never stop asking about your travels.”

I spent hours with her during those few days. And much of what I learned of their language and their history came from her.

Turam and Viscenda took us into the school and let us talk with the students. Most of them knew us already, but they seemed excited to have us more or less to themselves.

We began the day with an assembly in the auditorium, timing it for when Belle was overhead, so she could talk to everyone. They loved hearing her voice coming out of the jewelry, they were excited to talk with her, and it was there that she finally found an audience willing to credit her explanation of who and what she was.

Turam remained skeptical. He clung to the notion that two arcane spirits lived within the bracelet and the chain. Though he confessed that it was hard to understand how it was that the same spirit seemed to speak from both pieces.

“I can accept long-distance speaking,” he told us later, away from the students. “There are myths that we once possessed that kind of capability. But a machine that can think like you or me? That’s just asking too much.” And he laughed. “But I’m willing to play along.”

The students were entranced. We’d come from the stars, we explained, from a place so far that if we placed a giant lantern out there and turned it on, everyone in the room would be older than their grandparents before they’d be able to see the light. (In fact, of course, none would live long enough, but we didn’t want to get morbid.) Moreover, we told them, the ship we’d come in was circling the world and would do so three or four more times before they completed their school day.

At the end, we returned to the auditorium, where the principal presented us with a book that he said consisted of the speculations of generations of scientists over one of the most compelling questions they faced: Were they alone in the universe?

“It has been the dream of generations,” he told us, “to have breakfast with the Other. We’d expected someone with a beak and green skin and possibly wings. But it turns out you look just like us. Who would have thought?” The kids applauded, and there was some talk about how silly it had been to think that aliens would look, well, alien.

Alex was not having an easy time on his crutches, so we were glad to get back to our room. Viscenda met us there to thank us for our contribution to the school day, which she said, “Judging from what I’ve heard, went pretty well. How fast does light travel anyway?”

It turned out they thought it moved at an infinite velocity.

“Very fast,” Alex said. “Around the world ten times in a second. And there’s something else you should be aware of, Viscenda. Another ship will be coming for us. In several days.”

“Good. I was going to ask about that. Your friends know then that you are in difficulty?”

“Yes. They know.”

“How is that possible?”

“We were able to send them a message.”

Her brow wrinkled. “But you said you were very far from home. How could you send such a message? When it takes so many years even to see a beam of light?”

That led to another complicated conversation.

On her next pass, Belle forwarded more transmissions from Audree and Robin. Robin explained how it had been raining all day along the Melony. And he’d tried out for a part with the Seaside Players’ production of All Aboard! If he got it, he’d be the main character’s goofy buddy.