PART    1
BURBAGE POINT

I

November 2223

The impending collision out there somewhere in the great dark between a gas giant and a world very much like our own has some parallels to the eternal collision between religion and common sense. One is bloated and full of gas, and the other is measurable and solid. One engulfs everything around it, and the other simply provides a place to stand. One is a rogue destroyer that has come in out of the night, and the other is a warm well-lighted place vulnerable to the sainted mobs.

 —Gregory MacAllister, Have Your Money Ready

They came back to Maleiva III to watch the end of the world.

Researchers had been looking forward to it since its imminence was proclaimed almost twenty years earlier by Jeremy Benchwater Morgan, an ill-tempered combustible astrophysicist who, according to colleagues, had been born old. Even today Morgan is the subject of all kinds of dark rumors, that he had driven one child to tranks and another to suicide, that he’d forced his first wife into an early grave, that he’d relentlessly destroyed careers of persons less talented than he even though he gained nothing by doing so, that he’d consistently taken credit for the work of others. How much of this is true, no one really knows. What is on the record, however, is that Morgan had been both hated and feared by his colleagues and apparently by a deranged brother-in-law who made at least two attempts to kill him. When he’d died, finally, of heart failure, his onetime friend and longtime antagonist Gunther Beekman, commented privately that he had beaten his second wife to the punch. In accordance with his instructions, no memorial was conducted. It was, some said, his last act of vindictiveness, denying his family and associates the satisfaction of staying home.

Because he had done the orbital work and predicted the coming collision, the Academy had given his name to the rogue world that had invaded the Maleiva system. Although that was a gesture required by tradition in any case, many felt that the Academy directors had taken grim pleasure in their action.

Morgan’s World approached Jovian dimensions. Its mass was 296 times that of Earth. Diameter at the equator was 131,600 kilometers, at the poles about five percent less. This oblateness resulted from a rotational period of just over nine hours. It had a rocky core a dozen times as massive as the Earth. It was otherwise composed primarily of hydrogen and helium.

It was tilted almost ninety degrees to its own plane of movement, and half as much to the system plane. It was a gray-blue world, its atmosphere apparently placid and untroubled, with neither rings nor satellites.

“Do we know where it came from?” Marcel asked.

Gunther Beekman, small, bearded, overweight, was seated beside him on the bridge. He nodded and brought up a fuzzy patch on the auxiliary display, closed in on it, and enhanced. “Here’s the suspect,” he said. “It’s a section of the Chippewa Cloud, and if we’re right, Morgan’s been traveling half a billion years.”

In approximately three weeks, on Saturday, December 9, at 1756 hours GMT, the intruder would collide head-on with Maleiva III.

Maleiva was the infant daughter of the senator who’d chaired the science funding committee when the initial survey was done, two decades earlier. There were eleven planets in the system, but only the doomed third world had received a name to go with its Roman numeral: From the beginning they called it Deepsix. In the often malicious nature of things, it was also one of the very few worlds known to harbor life. Even though locked in a three-thousand-year-old ice age, it would have made, in time, an exquisite new outpost for the human race.

“The collision here is only the beginning of the process,” Beekman said. “We can’t predict precisely what’s going to happen afterward, but within a few thousand years Morgan will have made a complete shambles of this system.” He leaned back, folded his hands behind his head, and adopted an expression of complacency. “It’s going to be an interesting show to watch.”

Beekman was the head of the Morgan Project, a planetologist who had twice won the Nobel, a lifelong bachelor, and a onetime New York State chess champion. He routinely referred to the coming Event as “the collision,” but Marcel was struck by the relative sizes of the two worlds. It would most certainly not be a collision. Deepsix would fall into Morgan’s clouds, like a coin casually dropped into a pool.

“Why doesn’t it have any moons?” he asked Beekman.

Beekman considered the question. “Probably all part of the same catastrophe. Whatever ejected it from its home system would have taken off all the enhancements. We may see something like that here in a few centuries.”

“In what way?”

“Morgan’s going to stay in the neighborhood. At least for a while. It’s going into a highly unstable orbit.” He brought up a graphic of Maleiva and its planetary system. One gas giant was so close to the sun that it was actually skimming through the corona. The rest of the system resembled Earth’s own, terrestrial worlds in close, gas giants farther out. There was even an asteroid belt, where a world had failed to form because of the nearby presence of a jov-ian. “It’ll eventually mangle everything,” he said, sounding almost wistful. “Some of these worlds will get dragged out of their orbits into new ones, which will be irregular and probably unstable. One or two may spiral into the sun. Others will get ejected from the system altogether.”

“Not a place,” said Marcel, “where you’d want to invest in real estate.”

“I wouldn’t think,” agreed Beekman.

Marcel Clairveau was captain of the Wendy Jay, which was carrying the Morgan research team that would observe the collision, record its effects, and return to write papers on energy expansion, gravity waves, and God knew what else. There were forty-five of them, physicists, cosmologists, planetologists, climatologists, and a dozen other kinds of specialists. They were a picked group, the leading people in their respective fields.

“How long’s it going to take? Before things settle down again?”

“Oh, hell. I don’t know, Marcel. There are too many variables. It may never really stabilize. In the sense you’re thinking.”

A river of stars crossed the sky, expanding into the North American Nebula. Vast dust clouds were illuminated by far-off Deneb, a white supergiant sixty thousand times as luminous as Sol. More stars were forming in the dust clouds, but they would not ignite for another million years or so.

Marcel looked down on Deepsix.

It could have been an Earth.

They were on the daylight side, over the southern hemisphere. Snowfields covered the continents from the poles to within two or three hundred kilometers of the equator. The oceans were full of drifting ice.

Frigid conditions had prevailed for three thousand years, since Maleiva and its family of planets plowed into the Quiveras, one of the local dust clouds. They had not yet come out the other side, wouldn’t for another eight centuries. The dust filtered the sunlight, and the worlds had cooled. Had there been a civilization on Deepsix, it would not have lived.

The climatologists believed that below fifteen degrees south latitude, and above fifteen degrees north, the snow never melted. Had not melted in these thirty centuries. That wasn’t necessarily a long time, as such things went. Earth itself had gone through ice ages of similar duration.

Large land animals had survived. They sighted herds moving through the plains and forests of the equatorial area, which at present formed a green strip across two of the continents. There was also occasional movement out on the glaciers. But along the equatorial strip, a multitude of creatures had hung on.

Beekman got up, took a deep breath, rinsed his coffee cup, clapped Marcel on the shoulder, and beamed. “Have to get ready,” he said, starting for the door. “I believe the witching hour has arrived.”

When he was gone, Marcel allowed himself a long smile. The host of scientific leaders riding on Wendy had given way to unalloyed enthusiasm. On the way out they’d run and rerun simulations of the Event, discussed its potential for establishing this or that view of energy exchange or chronal consequences or gravity wave punctuation. They argued over what they might finally learn about the structure and composition of gas giants, and about the nature of collisions. They expected to get a better handle on long-standing puzzles, like the tilt of Uranus or the unexplained large iron content of worlds like Erasmus in the Vega system and Mercury at home. And the most important implication: It would be their only opportunity to see directly inside a terrestrial planet. They had special sensors for that, because the eruption of energy, during the final spasm, would be blinding.

“It’s going to begin to break up here,” they’d said, one or another, over and over, pointing at the time line, “and the core will be exposed here. My God, can you imagine what that’ll look like?”

The common wisdom was that one could not be a good researcher if one had completely outgrown childhood. If that was so, Marcel knew he had good people along. They were kids who’d come to watch a show. And however they tried to disguise the reality of that, pretending that this was first and foremost a fact-gathering mission, nobody was fooling anybody. They were off on a lark, cashing in the real reward that came from lives of accomplishment. They’d broken into the structure of space, mapped the outer limits of the universe, solved most of the enigmas associated with time, and now they were going to sit back and enjoy the biggest wreck of which anyone had ever heard.

And Marcel was pleased to be along. It was the assignment of a lifetime.

NCA Wendy Jay was the oldest operating vessel in the Academy fleet. Its keel had been laid almost a half century before, and its interior decor consequently possessed a quaintness that gave one a sense of stepping into another age.

Its passengers were watching Morgan through a battery of telescopes and sensors, some mounted on the ship’s hull, others on satellite. In every available space throughout the vessel, researchers were peering down into misty blue-gray depths that fell away forever. Gigantic lightning bolts flickered across the face of the world. Occasional meteors raced down the sky, trailing light, vanishing into the clouds.

They gauged its magnetic field, which was two-thirds as strong as Jupiter’s, and they recorded the squeals and shrieks of its radio output.

The mood remained festive, and the physicists and planetolo-gists wandered the passageways, visiting one another’s quarters, hanging out in the operations center, visiting the bridge, pouring drinks in the workout room. When Marcel strolled down to Wendy’s project control, he encountered half a dozen of them gathered around a screen, and when they saw him they raised their glasses to him.

It was a pleasant feeling, to be toasted by the creme de la creme. Not bad for a kid who’d resisted schools and books for years. One teacher had taken him aside when he was fourteen and suggested he might as well apply for the dole then. Get in line early, she’d advised.

When they’d finished the Morgan observations, they moved over to Maleiva III and began the process of inserting probes and positioning satellites. The intention, as Chiang Harmon explained it, was to “take the temperature of the victim, and to listen to its heartbeat, throughout its final days.” The team wanted to get every possible physical detail on file. They would establish Maleiva Hi’s density and record the fluctuations of its albedo. They would watch the shifting tides. They would examine the depth and composition of its core, analyze the atmospheric mix, and record the air pressure. They would chart its hurricanes and its tornadoes, and they would measure the increasing intensity of the quakes that would eventually shatter the planet.

At breakfast during their first full day in orbit around Deepsix, Beekman announced to everyone in the dining room, and by the PA to the rest, that the correlation of hydrogen to helium, 80.6 to 14.1, matched perfectly with that of Morgan’s suspected home star. So now they knew with near certainty where it had been born.

Everyone applauded, and somebody suggested in a deliberately slurred voice that the occasion called for another toast. The noise turned to laughter and Beekman passed around the apple juice. They were in fact a sober lot.

Marcel Clairveau wanted to get a job in management but expected to spend the rest of his life piloting superluminals for the Academy. Prior to that, he’d worked for Kosmik, Inc., shuttling personnel and supplies out to Quraqua, which Kosmik was terraforming. But he hadn’t liked the people running the organization, who were both autocratic and incompetent. When it reached a point at which he was embarrassed to reveal for whom he worked, he’d resigned, done a brief stint as an instructor at Overflight, had seen an opportunity with the Academy, and had taken it.

Marcel was a Parisian, although he’d begun life on Pinnacle. He had been the second child born on an extrasolar planet. The first, a girl, also born on Pinnacle, had received all kinds of gifts, up to and including a free education.

“Let it be a lesson,” his father had been fond of telling him. “Nobody remembers who Columbus’s first mate was. Always go for the top job.”

It had been a running joke between them, but Marcel had seen the wisdom in the remark, and now a variation of it hung over the desk in his quarters. Jump in or sit down. Not very poetic, but it reminded him to leave nothing to chance.

His father had been disappointed with the aimlessness of his adolescent years, and he’d died while Marcel was still adrift, undoubtedly convinced his wayward offspring would do nothing substantial with his life. He’d put Marcel into a small college at Lyon, where they specialized in recalcitrant students. And they’d introduced him to Voltaire.

It might have been his father’s unexpected death, or Voltaire, or a math instructor in his sophomore year who unfailingly believed in him (for reasons Marcel never understood), or Valeric Guischard, who had told him point-blank she would not allow herself to become involved with a man with no future. Whatever had caused it, Marcel had decided to conquer the world.

He hadn’t quite achieved that, but he was captain of a superlu-minal. He’d been too late to capture Valeric, but he knew no woman would ever again walk away from him because he had nothing to offer.

Starships, however, had turned out to be less romantic than he’d expected. His life, even with the Academy, had devolved into hauling passengers and freight from world to world with monotonous regularity. He’d hoped to pilot the survey ships that went out beyond the bubble, that went to places no one had ever seen before, like the Taliaferro, which had come out twenty-one years ago and found Morgan. That was the kind of life he wanted. But those were compact ships, and the pilots also tended to be part of the working crew. They were astrophysicists, exobiologists, climatologists, people who could carry their weight during a mission., Marcel could run the ship and in a pinch repair the coffeemaker. He was a skilled technician, one of the few pilots who could do major repairs under way. That skill counted for a great deal, but it was one more reason why the Academy liked him on flights that carried large numbers of passengers.

Marcel had found himself living a curiously uneventful life.

Until- Morgan.

Because the collision would be a head-on, a kind of cosmic train wreck, Maleiva III  was not yet feeling the gravitational effects of the approaching giant. Nor was it yet more than a bright star in her skies. “Nothing much will change down there,” Beekman predicted, “until the last forty hours or so. Then”—he rubbed his hands with anticipation—”Katie bar the door.”

They were over the night side. Filmy clouds floated below them, limned by starlight. Here and there they could see oceans or snow-covered landmasses.

The Wendy Jay was moving east in low orbit. It was early morning again aboard ship, but a substantial number of the researchers were up, crowded around the screens. They ate snacks and drank an endless supply of coffee in front of the displays, watching the sky brighten as the ship approached the terminator.

Marcel’s crew consisted of two people. Mira Amelia was his technical specialist, and Kellie Collier was copilot. Kellie had taken the bridge when he went to bed. But sleeping had been difficult. There was too much excitement on the ship, and he hadn’t dozed off until almost one. He woke again several hours later, tossed and turned for a while, gave it up, and decided to shower and dress. He’d developed a kind of morbid interest in the approaching fireworks. The realization irritated him because he’d always thought of himself as superior to those who gape at accidents.

He’d tried to convince himself that he was simply showing a scientific interest. But there was more to it than that. There was something that ran deep into the bone with the knowledge that an entire planetload of living things was going about their normal routines while disaster approached.

He turned on his monitor and picked up one of the feeds from project control. The screen filled with the endless arc of the ocean. A snow squall floated uncertainly off one edge of the cloud cover.

They were over snowcapped mountains, which in the distance subsided into an endless white plain.

It wasn’t possible to see the Quiveras dust cloud. Even on the superluminal, they needed detectors to tell them it was there. Yet its effect had been profound. Take it away, and Maleiva III would have been a tropical world.

They were passing over a triangle-shaped continent, the largest on the planet. Vast mountain ranges dominated the northern and western coasts, and several chains of peaks formed an irregular central spine. The landmass stretched from about ten degrees north latitude almost to the south pole. Its southern limits were of course not visible to the naked eye because it simply connected with the mass of antarctic ice. Abel Kinder, one of the climatologists on board, had told him that even in normal times there was probably an ice bridge to the cap.

He found Beekman sitting in his accustomed chair on the bridge, charting with Kellie and drinking coffee. They were looking down as the last of the mountains passed out of the picture. A herd of animals moved deliberately across the plain.

“What are they?” Marcel asked.

Beekman shrugged. “Fur-bearing something-or-others,” he said. “The local equivalent of reindeer. Except with white fur. Did you want me to bring up the archives?”

It wasn’t necessary. Marcel had just been making conversation. He knew that the animals on Deepsix were by and large variations on well-established forms. They had all the usual organs, brains, circulatory systems, a tendency toward symmetry. A lot of exoskeletons here. Heavy bone on both sides of the wrapper. Most plants used chlorophyll.

Insects on Deepsix ranged all the way up to beasts the size of a German shepherd.

Detail was lacking because, as the whole world knew, the Nightingale expedition nineteen years ago had been attacked by local wildlife on its first day. No one had been on the ground since. Research had been limited to satellite observations.

“It’s a pleasant enough world,” said Beekman. “It would have made a good prospect for your old bosses.”

He meant Kosmik, Inc., whose Planetary Construction Division selected and terraformed worlds for use as human outposts. “Too cold,” said Marcel. “The place is a refrigerator.”

“Actually it’s not bad near the equator. And in any case it’s only temporary. Another few centuries and it would have been away from the dust and everything would have gone back to normal.”

“I don’t think my old bosses were much at taking the long view.”

Beekman shrugged. “There aren’t that many suitable worlds available, Marcel. Actually, I think Deepsix would have been rather a nice place to take over.”

The plains turned to forest and then to more peaks. Then they were out over the sea again.

Chiang Harmon called from project control to announce that the last of the general-purpose probes had been launched. In the background. Marcel heard laughter. And someone said, “Gloria-mundi.”

“What’s going on?” asked Beekman.

“They’re naming the continents,” said Chiang.

Marcel was puzzled. “Why bother? It isn’t going to be here that long.”

“Maybe that’s why,” said Kellie. Kellie was dark-skinned, attractive, something of a scholar. She was the only person Marcel knew who actually read poetry for entertainment. “You’ll have a map when it’s over. Seems as if we ought to have some names to put on it.”

Marcel and Beekman strolled over to project control to watch. Half the staff was there, shouting suggestions and arguing. One by one, Chiang was putting locations on-screen, not only continents but oceans and inland seas, mountain ranges and rivers, islands and capes.

The triangular continent over which they’d just passed became Transitoria. The others had already been named. They were Endtime, Gloriamundi, and Northern and Southern Tempus.

The great northern ocean they called the Coraggio. The others became the Nirvana, the Majestic, and the Arcane. The body-of water that separated Transitoria from the two Tempi (which were connected by a narrow neck of land) became the Misty Sea.

They continued with Cape Farewell and Bad News Bay, which pushed far down into northwestern Transitoria; and with Lookout Rock and the Black Coast and the Mournful Mountains.

In time they filled the map, lost interest, and drifted away. But not before Marcel had noticed a change in mood. It was difficult to single out precisely what had happened, even to be certain it wasn’t his imagination. But the researchers had grown more somber, the laughter more restrained, and they seemed more inclined to stay together.

Marcel usually wasn’t all that comfortable with Academy researchers. They tended to be caught up in their specialties, and they sometimes behaved as if anyone not interested in, say, the rate at which time runs in an intense gravity field is just not someone worth knowing. It wasn’t deliberate, and by and large they tried to be sociable. But few of them were capable of hiding their feelings. Even the women seemed generally parochial.

Consequently, most evenings he retired early to his quarters and wandered through the ship’s library. But this had been a riveting day, the first full day on station. The researchers were celebrating, and he did not want to miss any of it. Consequently he stayed until the last of them had put their dishes and glasses in the collector and gone, and then he sat studying Chiang’s map.

It was not difficult to imagine Maleiva III as a human world. Port Umbrage established at the tip of Gloriamundi. The Irresolute Canal piercing the Tempi.

Even then he was not sleepy. After a while he went back to the bridge. The ship’s AI was running things, and he got bored looking at the endless glaciers and oceans below, so he brought up a political thriller that he’d started the previous evening. He heard people moving about in the passageways. That was unusual, considering the hour, but he assigned it to the general electricity of the day.

He was a half hour into the book when his link chimed. “Marcel?” Beekman’s voice.

“Yes, Gunther?”

“I’m back in project control. If you’ve a moment, we have something on-screen you might want to see.”

There were about a dozen people gathered in front of several monitors. The same picture was on all of them: a forest with deep snow and something among the trees that looked like walls. It was hard to make out.

“We’re at full mag,” said Beekman.

Marcel made a face at the screen, as though it would clarify the image. “What is it?” he asked.

“We’re not sure. But it looks like—”

“—A building.” Mira Amelia moved in close. “Somebody’s down there.”

“It might just be filtered sunlight. An illusion.”

They all stared at the monitor.

“I think it’s artificial,” said Beekman.

II

Extraterrestrial archeology sounds glamorous because its perpetrators dig up transistor radios used by creatures who’ve been gone a quarter million years. Therefore, it carries an aura of mystery and romance. But if we ever succeed in outrunning the radio waves, so we can mine their broadcasts, we’ll undoubtedly discover that they, like ourselves, were a population of dunces. That melancholy probability tends to undercut the glamour.

 — Gregory MacAllister, Reflections of a Barefoot journalist

Inside the e-suit, Priscilla Hutchins caught her breath as she gazed around the interior of the reconstructed temple. Late-afternoon sunlight slanted through stained windows in the transepts, along the upper galleries, and in the central tower. A stone dais occupied the place where one might usually look for an altar.

Eight massive columns supported the stone roof. Benches far too high for Hutch to use comfortably were placed strategically throughout the nave for the benefit of worshipers. They were wooden and had no backs. The design was for creatures which lacked posteriors, in the human sense. The faithful would have used the benches by balancing their thoraxes on them, and gripping them with modified mandibles.

Hutch studied the image above the altar. It had six appendages and vaguely insectile features. But the eyes very much resembled those of a squid. Stone rays, representing beams of light radiated from its upper limbs.

This, the experts believed, was intended to be a depiction of the Almighty, the creator of the world. The Goddess.

The figure was female, although how the team had reached that conclusion escaped Hutch. It had a snout and fangs and antennas whose precise function still eluded the researchers. Each of its four upper limbs had six curved digits. The lower pair had evolved into feet, of a sort, and were enclosed in sandals.

The skull was bare save for a cap that covered the scalp and angled down over a pair of earholes. It wore a jacket secured with a sash, and trousers that looked like jodhpurs. The midlimbs were shrunken.

“Vestigial?” asked Hutch.

“Probably.” Mark Chernowski was sipping a cold beer. He took a long moment to taste it, then tapped an index finger against his lips. “Had evolution continued, they’d no doubt have lost them.”

Despite the odd features and the curious anatomy, the Almighty retained the customary splendor one always found in the inhabitants of the heavens. Each of the four intelligent species they’d encountered, as well as their own, had depicted its assorted deities in its own image, as well as in a few others. On Pinnacle, where for a long time the physical appearance of the inhabitants had not been known, it had been difficult to sort out which representation was also that of the dominant species. But inevitably everyone succeeded in capturing the dignity of divine power.

Hutch could not help noting that the more somber qualities and moods were somehow translatable in stone from one culture to another. Even when the representations were utterly alien.

They moved closer to the altar. There were several other carved figures, some of which were animals. Hutch could see, however, that the creatures were mythical, that they could never have developed on a terrestrial world. Some had wings inadequate to lifting the owner. Others had heads that did not match the trunks. But all were rendered in a manner that suggested religious significance. One bore a vague resemblance to a tortoise, and Chernowski explained that it symbolized sacred wisdom. A serpentine figure was believed to represent the divine presence throughout the world.

“How do we know these things?” she asked. “Plainfield told me that we still can’t read any of the script.”

Chernowski refilled his mug, glanced at her to see whether she’d changed her mind and would share some of the brew, and smiled politely when she declined. “We can deduce quite a lot from the context in which the images are traditionally placed. Although questions and doubts certainly remain. Does the turtle represent the god of wisdom? Or is it just a symbol of the divine attribute? Or, for that matter, is it just a piece of art from a previous era that no one took seriously in any other sense?”

“You mean this place might have been just an art museum?”

Chernowski laughed. “Possibly,” he said.

The reconstruction had been raised a few kilometers away from the site of the original structure, in order to preserve the ruins.

Some pieces were quite striking. Especially, she thought, the winged beings. “Yes.” He followed her gaze. “Flight capability does add a certain panache, does it not?” He looked up at a creature that bore a close resemblance to an eagle. It was carved of black stone. Its wings were spread and its talons extended. “This one is curious,” he said. “As far as we can determine, this world never had eagles. Or anything remotely like an eagle.”

She studied it for a long minute.

“It often appears on the shoulder of the Almighty,” he continued, “and is closely associated with her. Much as the dove is with the Christian deity.”

It was getting late, and they retreated to the rear of the nave. Hutch took a last look. It was the first time she’d seen the temple since its completion. “Magnificent,” she said.

The rover was waiting outside. She looked at it, looked up at the temple, compelling in its austerity and simplicity. “It’s several hundred thousand years ago, Mark,” she said. “A few things might have changed since then. Maybe they had eagles in the old days. How would you know?”

They climbed in and started back toward the hopelessly mundane mission headquarters, little more than a collection of beige panels just west of the original ruins.

“It’s possible,” he admitted. “Although we’ve got a pretty good fossil record. But it’s of no consequence. Better to agree with Plato that there are certain forms that nature prefers, even though we may not see them in the flesh.” He got up and stretched.

“What do you think happened to the natives?” she asked. “Why’d they die off?” Pinnacle’s dominant race was long gone. Almost three-quarters of a million years gone.

Chernowski shook his head. He was tall and angular, with white hair and dark eyes. He’d spent half his life on this world and had made arrangements to be buried here when the time came. If he was fortunate, he was fond of telling visitors, he’d be the first. “Who knows?” he said. “They got old, probably. Species get old, just like individuals. We know their population was failing drastically toward the end.”

“How do you know that?”

“We can date the cities. There were fewer of them during the later years.”

“I’m impressed,” she said.

Chernowski smiled and accepted the compliment as his due.

Hutch looked out the window at the handful of collapsed stones that comprised all that remained of the original temple. “How much of it was extrapolation?” she asked. “Of what we just saw?”

The vehicle settled to the ground and they climbed out. “We know pretty much what the temple looked like. We’re not exactly sure about all the details, but it’s close. As to the statuary, we’ve recovered enough bits and pieces here and elsewhere to make informed guesses. I suspect if the natives could return, they’d feel quite at home in our model.”

The archeological effort on Pinnacle was almost thirty years old. There were currently more than two thousand research and support personnel scattered across several dozen sites.

Pinnacle was still a living world, of course, but it was of minimal interest to exobiologists. Its various creatures had been cataloged, its pure electrical life-forms had been analyzed, and the only work that remained now was data collection. There would be no more surprises, and no more breakthroughs.

But there was still a great deal of fascination with the prime species. The temple-builders had spread to all five continents; the ruins of their cities had been found everywhere except in the extremes at the ice caps. But they were gone to oblivion. They were by far the earliest civilization known by humans. And despite Chernowski’s boasts, not one member of their species was known by name. Not even, she thought, the name of their prime deity.

Hutch thanked him for the tour and returned to the rover. She stood a few moments, half in and half out of the vehicle, gazing at the circle of antique stones, wondering how much of the temple she’d seen had come out of the imaginations of Chernowski’s designers.

The e-suit fitted itself to her like a garment, save at the face, where it formed a hard oval shell, allowing her to speak and breathe comfortably. It afforded protection against extremes of temperature and radiation, and also countered air pressure within the body so that she could function in a vacuum. It felt rather like wearing a bodysuit of loose-fitting soft cloth. Power was derived from weak-force particles, and consequently the suit could maintain itself indefinitely.

When the temple had stood on this spot, the climate had been far more hospitable, and the surrounding lands had supported a thriving agricultural society. Later, the town and the temple had been sacked and burned, but the place had risen again, had risen several times from assaults, and eventually became, according to the experts, a seat of empire.

And then it had gone down permanently into the dust.

Her commlink vibrated. “Hutch? We’re ready to go.” That was Toni Hamner, one of her passengers. At the moment Toni was directing the loading crew.

A couple of Chernowski’s people were lifting an engraved stone out of a pit. “On my way,” she said.

She set down minutes later beside the lander. Another rover was on the ground, from which packing cases were being loaded. The cases contained artifacts, almost exclusively pieces of the temple, protected by foam. “We’ve got some ceramics to take back,” said Toni. “Including a statue.”

“A statue? Of whom?”

She laughed. “No one has any idea. But it’s in good condition.”

There were two loaders. One was looking at the shipping labels. “Cups,” he said. “You believe that? After all this time?”

“John’s new,” said Toni. “It’s fired clay,” she told him. “Do it right, and it’ll last forever.” She was lithe, olive-skinned, happy-go-lucky. Hutch had brought her out from Sol four years before, with her husband. Rumor had it that she’d been maybe a bit too happy-go-lucky. He gave it up and wanted to go home, while Toni made it clear she intended to stay indefinitely. She was a power-flow expert, with an opportunity to show what she could do. Her time at Pinnacle, where she had an opportunity to design and implement her own systems without undue supervision, was priceless.

Apparently Toni had considered the husband expendable.

The cases were heavy, and it was essential to balance the load.

Hutch showed them where she wanted everything, and then climbed into the cabin. Her other three passengers were already seated.

One of them was Tom Scolari, an ADP specialist whom she’d known for years. Scolari introduced her to Embry Desjardain, a physician ending her tour, and Randy Nightingale, with whom she had a passing acquaintance. Nightingale had been a surprise, a late addition to her manifest. The flight home, she explained, would last thirty-one days. Not that they didn’t already know.

She sat down, pressed the commlink, and informed the transport officer that she was ready to go.

His voice crackled over the circuit. “You’re clear,” he said. “It was nice having you here, Hutch. Will you be coming back this way soon?”

“Next two trips are to Nok.” Nok was the only world they’d found with a functioning civilization. Its inhabitants had just begun to put electricity to work. But they were constantly waging major wars. They were a quarrelsome lot, given to repression, intolerant of original ideas. They believed they were alone in the universe (when they thought about it at all), and even their scientific community refused to credit the possibility that other worlds might be inhabited. It was a curious business, because humans walked among them, clothed in lightbenders, which rendered them invisible.

Hutch wondered why the civilization on Pinnacle, dead these hundreds of thousands of years, should be so much more interesting than the Noks.

Toni took a last look at the artifacts to be sure they were secured. Then she said good-bye to the two loaders and took her seat.

Hutch started the spike, and while the system built energy she recited the safety procedures for them. Spike technology allowed her to manipulate the weight of the lander in a relatively light (i.e., planetary) gravity field from its actual value down to about two percent. She instructed her passengers to remain in their seats until advised otherwise, make no effort to release the harness until the harness itself disengaged, attempt no sudden movements once the red light went on, and so forth.

“All right,” she said. “Here we go.”

The harnesses settled around their shoulders and locked them in. She rotated the thrusters to a down angle and fired them. The vehicle began to rise. She eased back on the yoke, and the lander lifted gently into the air.

She turned it over to the AI, informed her passengers they could switch off their e-suits if they desired, and shut her own down.

The excavation site had already become indistinguishable from the brown sands surrounding it.

The Harold Wildside had exquisite accommodations. Hutch had seen several major changes during the twenty-odd years she’d been piloting the Academy’s superluminals, the most significant of which had been the development of artificial gravity. But it was also true that Academy people now traveled well. Not in luxury, perhaps, but current accommodations had come a long way since the early days, when everything had been bargain-basement.

The extra infusion of money into the space sciences had largely resulted from the discovery of the Omega clouds, those curious and lethal objects that drifted out of galactic center in eight-thousand-year cycles and which seemed programmed to assault technological civilizations. What they really assaulted, of course, was straight lines and right angles on structures large enough to draw their attention. Which was to say, shapes that did not appear in nature. Since their discovery two decades before, architectural styles had changed dramatically. The curve was now a basic feature everywhere. Bridges, buildings, spaceports, whatever an architect put his hand to, were designed with sweep and arc. When the Omega clouds arrived in the vicinity of Earth—they were expected in about a thousand years—they would find little to trigger them.

The entities had ignited a long debate: Were they natural objects, an evolutionary form perhaps that the galaxy used to protect itself against sentient life? Or were they the product of a diabolical intelligence of incredible engineering capability? No one knew, but the notion that the universe might be out to get the human race had caused some rethinking among the various major religions.

The temple in the desert had been rounded, without any architectural right angles. Hutch wondered whether it signified that the problem was ancient.

The lander settled into its bay on board Wildside. Hutch waited for her panel to turn green. When it did, she opened the airlock. “Nice to have you folks along,” she said. “Quarters are on the top deck. Look for your name. Kitchen’s at the rear. If you want to change, shower, whatever, before we leave, you have time. We won’t be getting under way for another hour.”

Embry Desjardain had long dark hair and chiseled cheekbones. There was something in her eyes that made it easy to believe she was a surgeon. She’d done three years at Pinnacle, which was one more than a standard tour for medical personnel. “I enjoyed myself,” she explained to Hutch. “No hypochondriacs out here.”

Tom Scolari was medium height, redheaded, laughed a lot, and told Hutch he was going home because his father had become ill, his mother was already disabled, and they just needed somebody around the house. “Just as well,” he continued with a straight face, “there’s a shortage of women on Pinnacle.”

He made it a point to shake Nightingale’s hand. “Aren’t you,” he said, “the same Nightingale who was out to Deepsix a few years ago?”

Nightingale confessed that he was, commented that it would be good to get home, and opened a book.

While waiting for Wildside’s orbit to bring it into alignment with her departure vector, Hutch ran her preflight check, talked to an old friend on Skyhawk, Pinnacle’s space station, and read through the incoming traffic.

There were some interesting items: the TransGalactic cruise ship Evening Star was on its way to Maleiva with fifteen hundred tourists to watch the big collision. The Event would also be broadcast live by Universal News Network, although the transmission would be a few days late arriving on Earth. Separatists in Wyoming had gone on another shooting spree, and another round of violence had broken out in Jerusalem.

The Star was the biggest in a proposed series of cruise vessels. A couple of years ago a smaller ship had taken passengers out to the black hole at Golem Point. They’d not expected much interest. As the joke went, there’s not much to see at a black hole. But subscriptions had overwhelmed the ticket office, and suddenly deep-space marvels had become big business and a new industry was born.

The Maleiva story reminded her of Randy Nightingale’s connection with that system. He’d lost his future and his reputation during the ill-fated mission nineteen years ago. Now the place was in the news again, and he wondered whether that had anything to do with his sudden decision to go home.

Bill asked permission to fire up the engines. “It’s time,” he added. The onboard AI for all Academy superluminals was named for William R. Dolbry, who was not the designer, but the first captain to be brought home by the onboard system. Dolbry had suffered a cardiac arrest while ferrying an executive yacht and four frightened passengers on a self-reliance voyage eighty light-years out.

Bill’s image (which was not Dolbry’s) revealed a man who would have been right out of central casting for a president or chairman. His face was rounded, his eyes quite serious, and he wore a well-manicured gray beard. His designers had been careful not to allow him to establish too great a degree of presence, because they didn’t want captains automatically resigning their judgment to him. Illusions could be overwhelming, and AIs still lacked the human capacity to make decisions in real-world situations.

“Go ahead, Bill,” she said.

Wildside was carrying a substantial cargo of ceramics and clay tablets. Altogether, they’d brought up eleven loads, and if the ship was a trifle light on passengers, the cargo more than compensated.

Replicas of the cups and bowls, she knew, would turn up later in the Academy gift shop. She would have liked very much to have an original. But the stuff was worth its mass in titanium. And then some.

Pity.

“Okay, folks,” she told the PA, “we’re going to start accelerating in three minutes. Please be sure you’re locked down somewhere. And check in when it’s done.”

It would be a long haul back to Earth, but Hutch was used to it. She’d discovered that most of her passengers inevitably found they shared a community of interests. There was an endless supply of entertainment available, and the voyages invariably became vacations. She knew of cases in which people who had made this kind of flight together were still holding annual reunions years later. She recalled instances in which passengers had fallen in love, marriages had disintegrated, a scientific breakthrough had been made, and a nearly nonstop orgy had been conducted.

Marcel was amused. “I understood there was nothing intelligent down there. Didn’t they specify that on the profile?”

They were back in project control, surrounded by Beekman’s technicians and analysts. Beekman himself heaved a long sigh. “You know how surveys are,” he said. “And keep in mind that this survey team got run off pretty quick.”

“Okay.” Marcel grinned. He’d have enjoyed being there to watch the reaction of top management when this news came in. I say, we seem to have had a bit of an oversight on Deepsix. “When you’re ready to transmit your report, Gunny, let me know.”

Beekman went below and, within twenty minutes, was on the circuit. “We went back over the recordings, Marcel,” he said. “Take a look at this”

A snowfield clicked onto his display. Taken by the satellites, it seemed ordinary enough, a landscape of rolling hills and occasional patches of forest. On the desolate side, but the whole world was desolate. “What am I looking for?”

“There,” said one of the researchers, a blond young man whose name was Arvin, or Ervin, or something like that.

A shadow.

A building. No doubt this time.

“Where is this?” he asked.

“Northern Transitoria. A few hundred kilometers south of the coast.”

It was a spire. A tower.

They magnified it for him. It appeared to be made from stone blocks. He saw a scattering of windows. “How high is it?”

“About three stories. Probably another three below the snow line.”

He stared at it. The tower and the snow. It looked like a cold, solitary, forbidding place.

“It doesn’t look lived in,” said Arvin.

Marcel agreed with the assessment. It looked old, and the surrounding snow was undisturbed.

“I don’t think there’s any glass in the windows,” said someone else.

A map appeared with the location marked. It was south of the ocean they’d called Coraggio. Not far from Bad News Bay.

Well named, he thought. “What’s under the snow?”

Beekman nodded to someone off-screen. A network of lines appeared. Houses. Streets. Central parks, maybe. An avenue or possibly a onetime watercourse curving through the middle of the pattern. Watercourse probably, because it was possible to make out a couple of straight lines that looked like bridges. “It’s big,” he said.

Beekman nodded. “It would have supported a population of probably twenty thousand. But it’s small in the sense that the roads and buildings are scaled down. We figure the streets are only a couple of meters wide. That’s narrow by anybody’s standards. And here’s something else.” He used a marker to indicate a thick line that seemed to circle the network. “This looks like a wall.”

“Fortifications,” said Marcel.

“I’d think so. And that kind of fortification means pretechnological.” He looked uncomfortable. “I wish we had an expert here.”

The tower appeared to be connected to the wall. “Nothing else visible above the snow?”

“No. Everything else is buried.”

He’d suspected the wall they’d found yesterday to be a freak of nature, an illusion perhaps. But this— “It makes five of us now,” said Marcel. Five places where sentience had appeared. “Any structures anywhere else on the planet, Gunther?”

“Nothing other than the wall, so far. We’ve started looking. I’m sure there will be.” He tugged distractedly at his beard. “Marcel, we’ll have to send a team down. Find out who they are. Or were.”

“Can’t,” said Marcel.

The project director met his eyes. Beekman lowered his voice so that there would not appear to be a disagreement. “This is a special circumstance. I’ll sign a release from any instructions or policies that preclude you from acting. But we have to go down and take a closer look.”

“I’d love to help, Gunny,” said Marcel, “but I meant can’t. We don’t have a lander.”

Beekman’s jaw literally dropped. “That can’t be right,” he said. “You have three of them down in the shuttle bay.”

“Those are shuttles. Ship to ship. But they can’t operate in an atmosphere.”

“You’re sure?” He was visibly dismayed. “We’ve got to be able to do something.”

“I don’t know what,” said Marcel. “Report it. Let Gomez worry about it.”

“How could we not have a lander?”

“We don’t carry dead mass. Landers are heavy. This operation, we weren’t supposed to have any use for one.”

Beekman snorted. “Who decided that? Well, never mind. I guess we’ve all learned something about preparedness.”

“You don’t have anyone qualified to conduct an investigation anyhow,” said Marcel.

“Qualified?” Beekman looked like a man facing a world of idiots. “You’re talking about poking around in an old building. Look for writing on the wall and take some pictures. Maybe find a couple of pots. What kind of qualifications do you need?”

Marcel grinned. “You’d break all the pots.”

“Okay, let the Academy know. Tell them to send out another ship, if they want. But they’ll have to hurry.”

“They will that” said Marcel. He knew there wouldn’t be time for a second mission to reach them from Earth. They’d have to divert somebody.

III

 It surprises me that courage and valor have not been bred out of the human race. These are qualities that traditionally led to an early demise. They are therefore not conducive to passing one’s genes along. Rather it is the people who faint under pressure who tend to father the next generation.

—Gregory MacAllister, “Straight and Narrow,” Reminiscences

Hutch was not looking forward to spending the next few weeks locked up inside Wildside with Randall Nightingale. He took his meals with the other passengers, and occasionally wandered into the common room. But he had little to say, and he inevitably looked ill at ease. He was small in stature, thin, gray, only a couple of centimeters taller than the diminutive Hutch.

It was an unfortunate circumstance for a reclusive man. The run between Quraqua and Earth usually carried upward of twenty passengers. Had that been the present situation, he could have retreated easily into his cabin and no one would have noticed. But they only had four. Five, counting the pilot And so he’d felt pressure and was doing his best to participate.

But his best served only to create an atmosphere that was both tentative and cautious. Laughter flowed out of the room when he appeared and everyone struggled to find things to talk about.

The biosystem on Pinnacle was, after six billion years, far and away the oldest one known. Nightingale had been there for the better part of a decade, reconstructing its history. Most of the theoretical work was said to be done, and therefore she understood why Nightingale would be going home. But nevertheless it seemed coincidental that he should choose just this moment.

In an effort to satisfy her curiosity, she’d looked for an opportunity to speak with him alone. When it arose, she casually wondered whether someone in his family had taken ill.

“No,” he’d said. “Everyone’s doing fine.” But he volunteered nothing more. Didn’t even ask why she’d inquired.

Hutch smiled and suggested she’d been concerned because his name had appeared unexpectedly on the passenger manifest. She hadn’t realized he was coming until just a few hours before departure.

He replied with a shrug. “It was a last-minute decision.”

“Well, I’m glad everybody’s okay.”

After the conversation, if one could call it that, she’d gone to the bridge and pulled up the files on the Nightingale mission.

The Maleiva system had been initially surveyed by the James P. Taliaferro twenty-one years ago. Its results had excited the scientific community for two reasons: Maleiva III was a living world, and it was going to collide with a rogue gas giant. The expedition under Nightingale had been assembled and dispatched with fanfare and some controversy.

Others, seemingly better qualified, had competed for the opportunity to lead the mission. Nightingale was chosen because he was energetic, the Academy said. A man of exquisite judgment. If he had no experience in exploring a biosystem whose outlines were only vaguely understood, neither had any of the other candidates. And if he was younger than some that the establishment would have preferred to see nominated, he was also, as it happened, married to the commissioner’s daughter.

But the mission had been a disaster, and the responsibility had been laid directly on Nightingale’s shoulders.

It was possible that what happened to him at Maleiva III might have happened to anyone. But as she read some of the attacks made on his judgment and on his leadership, on thinly veiled suggestions that he was a coward, she wondered that he hadn’t retreated to a mountaintop and dropped out of sight.

No one ever got used to the gray mists of the hyper lanes, where superluminals seemed only to drift forward at a remarkably casual rate. Travelers watching from the scopes felt as if they were moving through heavy fog at a few kilometers per hour.

Wildside slid quietly through the haze, and Hutch could easily imagine that she was somewhere northeast of, say, Newfoundland, gliding over the Atlantic, waiting for foghorns to sound. She’d set the ship’s screens, which masqueraded as windows, to display a series of mountain vistas, urban views, or whatever the passengers thought they’d like. Seated in the common room, she was looking out over London, as if from an airship cabin. It was broad daylight, early afternoon, midwinter. Snow was falling.

They were in the sixth day of passage.

“What’s really out there?” asked Scolari, who had joined her for lunch.

“Nothing,” she said.

He canted his head. “Must be something.”

“Not a thing. Other than the fog.”

“Where’s the fog come from?”

“Hydrogen and helium. A few assorted gases. It’s our universe in a disorganized, and cold, state.”

“How’d it happen?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Nothing big ever formed. It has something to do with the gravity differential. Physicists will tell you the real question is why we have planets and stars.”

“Gravity’s different here?”

They were both eating fruit dishes. Hutch’s was pineapple and banana with a slice of cheese on rye. She munched at it, took a moment to contemplate the taste, and nodded. “The setting’s lower, much weaker, than in our universe. So nothing forms. You want to see what it looks like?”

“Sure.”

Hutch directed Bill to put the outside view from the forward scope on the screen.

London blinked off and was replaced by the mist.

Scolari watched it for a minute or so and shook his head. “It almost looks as if you could get out and walk faster than this.”

“If you had something to walk on.”

“Hutch,” he said, “I understand sensors don’t work here either.”

“That’s true.”

“So you really don’t know that there’s nothing out there. Nothing in front of us.”

“It’s not supposed to be possible,” she said. “Solid objects don’t form here.”

“What about other ships?”

She could see he wasn’t worried. Scolari didn’t seem to worry much about anything. But everyone was mystified by hyper travel. Especially by the perceived slowness. And by the illusion of shadows in the mist. Those came from the ship’s own lights. “According to theory,” she said, delivering the answer she’d given many times before, “we have our own unique route. We create a fold when we enter, and the fold goes away when we leave. A collision with another ship, or even a meeting with one, isn’t supposed to be possible.”

Nightingale came in, ordered something from the autoserver, and sat down with them. “Interesting view,” he said.

“We can change it.”

“No, please.” He looked fascinated. “It’s fine.”

She glanced at Scolari, who bit into an apple. “I love gothic stuff,” he said.

But the conversation more or less died right there.

“Do you plan to return to Pinnacle, Randy?” Hutch eventually asked. “Or will you be going on another assignment?”

“I’m retiring,” he said, in a tone that suggested it should have been obvious.

They both congratulated him.

“I’ve bought a seaside place in Scotland,” he continued.

“Scotland.” Hutch was impressed. “What will you be doing there?”

“It’s tucked away on a remote coastline,” he said. “Very remote.”

“What will you do with your time?” persisted Scolari.

He poured himself a cup of coffee. “I think, for the first year, absolutely nothing.”

Scolari nodded. “Must be nice.” He commented that he’d lined up a teaching post at the University of Texas, went on for a bit about how good it would be to see his folks again after all these years. And then asked a question that made Hutch wince: “Randy, do you have any plans to write your memoirs?”

It was of course a minefield. Scolari undoubtedly knew that Nightingale was a celebrity of sorts, but probably didn’t have the details.

“No.” Nightingale stiffened. “I don’t think many people would find my life very exciting.”

Hutch knew from experience that she and her passengers would form a tight bond. Or they’d come to dislike one another intensely.

Small groups in long flights always developed one of those two behavior patterns. Some years ago, a sociologist had been aboard to study the phenomenon and had given his name to it. The Cable Effect. She expected to see this one divide in two, with Nightingale on one side and everyone else bonded on the other.

The voyage so far had been short on entertainment and long on conversation. They’d forgone the games and VR’s with which passengers usually entertained themselves, and instead had simply talked a lot.

There’d already been some personal admissions. That was always an indication that passengers were coming together, but it usually took several weeks. Embry confessed the third night out that she was seriously considering giving up medicine. Couldn’t stand people constantly complaining to her about how they felt. “The world is full of hypochondriacs,” she’d said. “Being a doctor isn’t at all the way most people think it is.”

“My mother was a hypochondriac,” said Toni.

“So was mine. So I should have known before I went to medical school.”

“Why’d you go?” asked Hutch.

“My father was a doctor. And my grandmother. It was sort of expected.”

“So what’ll you do if you give it up?”

“There’s always research,” suggested Scolari.

“No. Truth is, I’m just not interested. I’m bored with it.”

Toni Hamner, despite Hutch’s initial impressions, turned out to be a romantic. “I went to Pinnacle because it was so different. I wanted to travel.”

“You did that,” said Embry.

“And I loved it. Walking through places built by something that wasn’t human. Built hundreds of thousands of years ago. That’s archeology.”

“So why are you going home?” asked Scolari.

“My tour was up.”

“You could have renewed,” said Hutch. “They’re paying bonuses to have people stay on.”

“I know. I’d already done a one-year extension. I’m ready to do something else.”

“Uh-huh,” said Embry. ‘That sounds like a family.”

Toni laughed. “At least checking out the prospects.”

Scolari nodded. “None on Pinnacle?”

She thought it over. “It isn’t that there aren’t some interesting men out there. In fact, there were a lot of guys. But they tend to be married to the business. Women are more or less perceived as strictly entertainment value.”

She never mentioned her ex.

Only Nightingale had not revealed himself, and now they sat, gazing at the eternal fog while he said, yes, he wished his life was interesting enough that people would want to read about it. And he said it with such conviction that she wondered whether he actually believed it.

Scolari went back to the foggy outdoors. “Does anyone,” he asked, “have any idea about the architecture of this place? How big is it out there?”

“As I understand it,” Hutch said, “that question has no—”

Bill’s message light began to blink.

“... no relevance,” she finished. “Go ahead, Bill.”

“Hutch,” he said, “we have a transmission from the Academy.”

“On-screen, Bill.”

Embry walked in as the fog blinked off and the message appeared:

TO: NCA HAROLD WILDSIDE

FROM: DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS

SUBJECT: COURSE CHANGE

HUTC IIINS, WENDY HAS FOUND RUINS ON DEEPSIX. DIVERT IMMEDIATELY. GET PICTURES, ARTIFACTS, WHATEVER YOU CAN. ESSENTIAL WE HAVE DETAILS ON ORIGINAL INHABITANTS. NO ONE ELSE WIT IIIN RANGE. YOU ARE APPOINTED ARCHEOLOGIST FOR THE DURATION. COLLISION WITH MORGAN IMMINENT, AS YOU KNOW. TAKE NO CHANCES.

GOMEZ

It had been a mistake. Hutch should have taken the transmission privately. She stole a glance at Nightingale but could read nothing in his face.

“Uh,” said Scolari, “how far out of the way is that?”

“About five days, Tom. One way.”

The chime sounded for Nightingale’s meal. “I don’t think I’m anxious to go,” Nightingale said.

Hell. She didn’t really have a choice. They’d sent her a directive. She couldn’t argue it, if only because a round-trip transmission would take several days. She’d been around long enough to know that ruins on a world thought uninhabited was a major find. And they were handing it to her. Had she been alone, she’d have been delighted. “I’m going to have to do this,” she said, finally. “I’m sorry for the inconvenience. In the past, when something like this has happened, the Academy has compensated passengers for lost time.”

Nightingale closed his eyes and she heard him exhale. “I assume they’ll charter another ship for us.”

“I don’t think there’d be much point unless there’s something nearby. If they have to send one from home, it’ll take almost five weeks to arrive. By then, the project will be long over, and we’ll be on our way back anyway.”

“I’m tempted to sue,” Nightingale persisted.

That was an empty threat. Potential travel diversions and inconveniences were written into everyone’s contract. “Do whatever you think best,” she said quietly. “My best estimate for the total delay is about three weeks.”

Nightingale put down his knife and fork with great deliberation. “Outstanding.” He got up and left the room.

Embry wasn’t happy either. “It’s ridiculous,” she said.

“I’m sorry.” Hutch tried a smile. “These things happen.”

Scolari rolled his eyes and slumped back in his chair. “Hutch,” he said, “you can’t do this to me. I’ve got a week booked in the Swiss Alps. With old friends.”

“Tom.” She allowed herself to look uncomfortable. “I’m sorry, but I think you’re going to have to reschedule.”

He stared right through her.

Hutch was by now striving to control her own temper. “Look,” she said, “you’ve both been around the organization long enough. You know what this kind of discovery means. And you also know that they haven’t given me an option. Please complain where it’ll do some good. Write it, and I’ll be happy to send it.”

Toni, when she was told, sighed. “Not my idea of a fun time,” she said. “But I can live with it.”

Within an hour Hutch had realigned their flight path, and they were bound for Maleiva.

She kept out of the way for the balance of the day. If it couldn’t be said that the congenial mood of the first few days returned, it was also true that the anger and resentment dissipated quickly. By morning, everyone had more or less made peace with the new situation. Embry admitted that the opportunity to watch a planetary collision might be worth the inconvenience. As to Scolari, he might have begun to realize that he was, after all, the lone young male with two attractive passengers.

Hutch judged the time was right to take the next step.

All except Nightingale were in the common room during the late morning. Toni and Embry were playing chess while Scolari and Hutch debated ethical problems served to them by Bill. The immediate issue was whether it was proper to pass on to others as certain a doubtful religious stance on the grounds that belief made for a more secure psychological existence. Hutch watched for the chess game to finish, then called for everyone’s attention.

“Usually,” she told her passengers, “there’s a boatload of people on these flights, and half of them are archeologists. Does anyone have an archeological background?”

Nobody did.

“When we get to Deepsix,” she said, “I’ll be going down to the surface. Just to look around, see what can be seen, and maybe collect some artifacts. If anyone else would like to go, I could use some volunteers. The work’s easy enough.” She drew herself up to her full height. They looked at one another, then gazed at the ceiling or the walls.

Embry shook her head no. “Thanks anyhow,” she said. “I’ll watch from here. Hutch, that’s the place where they lost a landing party back near the turn of the century. Eaten, as I recall.” She picked up her queen and studied it. “I’m sorry. I really am. But I have no stake in this. If there was something here they wanted to look at, they had twenty years to do it. Now at the last minute they want us to go down and take care of their business. Typical.”

“I’m sorry, Hutch,” said Scolari, “but I feel the same way. Bureaucratic screwup, and they expect us to run out there and put our lives on the line.” He looked past her, not wanting to meet her eyes. “It’s just not reasonable.”

“Okay,” she said. “I understand. I’d probably feel the same way.”

“You’re supposed to take pictures,” Toni said. “Do you have a scan?”

Hutch had a case of them, stocked in the supply compartment. That at least wouldn’t be a problem.

Toni pushed back in her chair. She was watching Hutch carefully, but keeping her expression blank. Finally, she smiled. “I’ll go,” she said.

Hutch suspected that, had one of the others volunteered, she would have found a reason to stay behind. “There’s no pressure, Toni.”

“Doesn’t matter. My grandkids’ll ask me about this one day. I wouldn’t want to have to say I stayed up here and watched it from the dining room.”

The remark earned her a pointed glance from Embry.

As was his custom, Nightingale retired early to his quarters. He knew that the others were more comfortable in his absence, and he was sorry about that. But the truth was that the small talk bored him. He spent his days working on the book that he hoped would one day be perceived as his magnum opus: Quraqua and Earth: The Evolution of Intelligence. It was one of the supreme ironies that humans had traced the forces that had produced extraterrestrial intelligence in the known instances, but had not yet satisfactorily applied the lessons to their own species. At least until he had appeared on the scene.

He was content to spend his evenings with Harcourt and DiAlva, his great predecessors, rather than listen to the endless chatter that passed for conversation in the common room.

The people he was traveling with were simply not bright, and time was precious. He was coming to a fuller appreciation of that melancholy reality as the years slipped by. One doesn’t live forever.

Tonight, though, he was too distracted to think of anything other than Deepsix. Maleiva III. The world with no future. Do you have any plans to write your memoirs? Scolari’s intent had been uncertain. Had he been laughing at Nightingale? It was the sort of question asked of him again and again, with increasing regularity, as the Event approached, and people remembered. Aren’t you the Nightingale who lost six people?

He would have liked some rum. But he knew from hard experience that when he got like this, he’d drink too much.

Soon it would be over. Once back on solid ground, he’d retire to the villa his agent had bought for him. It was situated on a promontory, out of the way, off a private road. No visitors. No neighbors. No one left to answer to.

If he’d been smart, he’d have gotten off Pinnacle years ago, before it all came front and center again. But he’d let it go, thinking that since he was no longer involved, people would have forgotten him. Forgotten he was ever there.

Aren’t you the Nightingale who botched the first mission so thoroughly that we never went back?

He had no close friends, but he was not sure why that was. Consequently, there’d never been anyone with whom to share his considerable professional success. And now, in this increasingly sterile environment, he found himself reflecting more intensely on his life, and sensing that if indeed it was a journey he hadn’t gone anywhere.

Now, with the return of Maleiva  III to the news, with the increase of public interest in everything that had to do with the doomed world, his situation was proceeding rapidly downhill. He had even considered changing his name when he got home. But there were serious complications to doing that. The paperwork involved was daunting. No, it should be sufficient just to keep himself out of the directories. He’d already made one mistake, telling these people where he was going, that he was headed for Scotland.

He’d established a code. Any money due him, any formal transactions, anyone trying to reach him for any reason, would get filed in the code box. Then he could respond, or not, as he pleased. No one would know where he was. And if he was careful, no one near Banff, where he proposed to settle, would know who he was.

Aren’t you the Nightingale who fainted?

On that terrible day, the creatures had ripped into him. The e-suit had been of limited protection, had not stopped the attack, but had prevented the little sons of bitches from injecting their poison. Nevertheless, the beaks had gone into soft flesh. His neck, though physically all right, had never really healed. Some psychic scar that wouldn’t go away and the doctors couldn’t cure.

Anyone would have done the same thing he did.

Well, maybe not anyone. But he hadn’t been afraid, any more than anybody else. And he hadn’t run, hadn’t abandoned anyone. He had tried.

The luxury liner Evening Star was carrying fifteen hundred passengers who expected to party through the collision. One of these was the internationally famous Gregory MacAllister, editor, commentator, observer of the human condition. MacAllister prided himself on maintaining a sense of proper humility. On hunting expeditions, he carried his own weapons. He always made it a point with his associates to behave as if they were equals. He was unfailingly polite to the waves of ordinary persons with whom he came in contact, the waiters and physicians and ship captains of the world. Occasionally he made joking references to peasants, but everyone understood they were indeed only jokes.

He was a major political force, and the discoverer of a dozen of the brightest lights on the literary scene. He was ex-officio director of the Chicago Society, a political and literary think tank. He was also on the board of governors of the Baltimore Lexicography Institute, and the editor emeritus of Premier. He was an influential member of several philanthropic societies, although he persisted in describing poor people publicly as incompetent and lazy. He had played a major role in hiring the lawyers who’d taken the Brantley School Board to court in the Genesis Trial. He liked to think of himself as the world’s only practicing destroyer of mountebanks, frauds, college professors, and bishops.

He had reluctantly agreed to travel on the Evening Star. Not that he wasn’t excited by the prospect of watching entire worlds collide, but that the whole activity seemed somehow a trifle proletarian. It was the sort of thing done by people who lacked a set of substantive values. Like going to a public beach. Or a football game.

But he had consented, admitting finally to his own curiosity and to an opportunity to be able to say that he’d been there when this particular piece of history was made. Furthermore, it allowed him to demonstrate his solidarity with ordinary folks. Even if these ordinary folks tended to own large tracts of real estate along the Cape and inshore on the Hudson.

After all, a little planet-smashing might be fun, and might even provide material for a few rambles about the transience of life and the uncertainty of material advantage. Not that he was against material advantage. The only people he knew of who would have leveled material advantage so that no one had any were of course those who had none to start with.

His decision to attend had also been influenced by the passenger list, which included many of the political and industrial leaders of the period.

Although he would never have admitted it, MacAllister was impressed by the amenities of the giant ship. His stateroom was more cramped than he would have preferred. But that was to be expected. It was nonetheless comfortable, and the decor suggested a restrained good taste rather than the polished superficial luxury one usually found aboard the big superluminal liners.

He enjoyed wandering through the maze of dining rooms, bars, and lounges. Several areas had been converted into virtual verandas, from which when the time came, the passengers would be able to watch the Event.

Although MacAllister had originally planned to spend much of his time working, he took instead to holding court in a bistro called The Navigator on the starboard side, upper deck. It overflowed each evening with notables and admirers, usually second-level political types, their advisers, journalists, a few CEOs, and some writers. All were anxious to be associated with him, to be seen as his friends. On his first night out, he’d been invited to dine at the captain’s table. Not quite settled in yet, he’d declined.

If MacAllister had enemies who would not have been sad to see him left somewhere in the Maleiva system, preferably on the doomed planet, he knew that the world at large perceived him as a knight-errant, righting wrongs, puncturing buffooneries, and generally enlisted in the front rank of those who were striving to keep the planet safe for common sense.

He enjoyed a reputation as a brilliant analyst and, even more important, as a model of integrity. He sided neither with progressive nor conservative. He could not be bought. And he could not be fooled.

Women offered themselves to him. He took some, although he acted with discretion, assuring himself first that there was no possibility of an enraged husband turning up. He harbored a great affection for the opposite sex, although he understood, during an age of weak males, that women belonged in kitchens and in beds. That they were happiest in those locations, and that once everyone got around to recognizing that simple truth, life would become better for all.

Midway through the voyage, he heard the report that artificial structures had been found on Deepsix and commented on it in the journal he’d kept all his life:

We’ve known about Maleiva III and the coming collision for twenty-odd years, he wrote, and suddenly, with a few weeks left, they discover that unfortunate world has had a history. Now, of course, there will be some advanced finger-pointing to determine which rascals are responsible for having overlooked the detail. It will, of course, turn out to be the fault of the pilot of the Taliaferro, who is safely dead. And they’ll find that the failure to check the satellite data at home can be laid to a grade-three clerk. It’ll be an entertaining show to watch.

There is now no time to inspect this culture, which is about to be lost. An entire species will be wiped out, and there will be no one alive who knows anything about them other than that several meters of stone once stuck out of a snowbank.

Maybe in the end it’s all any of us can expect.

ARC IIIVE

TO: NCA HAROLD WILDSIDE FROM:           DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS SUBJECT:       DEEPSIX PROJECT

HUTC IIINS, BE ADVISED PRESENCE OF PREDATORS ON DEEPSIX. ORIGINAL PROJECT RECORDS SUGGESTS EXTREME CAUTION. I AM INFORMED THAT THE REIGNING EXPERT ON THE SUBJECT, RANDALL NIGHTINGALE, IS ON BOARD YOUR S IIIP. TAKE  IIIM WITH YOU WHEN YOU GO DOWN.

GOMEZ

TO: NCA WENDY JAY

FROM: DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS

SUBJECT: ARCHEOLOGICAL SITES

ATTN: GUNTHER BEEKMAN. WE HAVE DIVERTED WILDSIDE TO ESTABLISH ARCHEOLOGICAL INSPECTION T€AM ON DEEPSIX PRISCILLA HUTC IIINS WILL LEAD EFFORT. REQUEST YOU AND CAPT. CLAIRVEAU RENDER EVERY ASSISTANCE.

GOMEZ

IV

At the critical moment of a critical mission, when his people most needed him, Randall Nightingale fainted dead away. He was rescued by Sabina Coldfield, and dragged to safety by that estimable woman at the cost of her own life. Everyone now seems shocked that the mission failed, and that no further attempt will be made to examine the mosquitoes and marsh grass ofMalena III. They say it costs too much, but they’re talking about money. It does cost too much. It costs people like Cold field, who was worth a dozen Nightingales.

 — Gregory MacAllister, “Straight and Narrow,” Reminiscences

Marcel no longer believed the inhabitants of Deepsix were long dead. Or maybe dead at all.

“I think you might be right,” said Kellie. She buried her chin in her palm and stared at the screen. They were examining visuals taken earlier in the day.

When this mission was completed, Marcel would certify Kellie Collier as fully qualified for her own command. She was only twenty-eight, young for that kind of responsibility, but she was all business, and he saw no point requiring her to sit second seat anymore. Especially with star travel beginning to boom. There were a multitude of superluminals out there begging for command officers, commercial carriers and private yachts and executive and corporate vessels. Not to mention the recent expansion of the Patrol, which had been fueled by the losses last year of the Marigold and the Rancocas, with their crews. The former had simply disintegrated as it prepared to jump into hyperspace; its crew had made it into the lifepods but had exhausted their air supply while waiting for a dilatory Patrol to respond.

The Rancocas had suffered a power failure and gone adrift. Communications had failed, and no one had noticed until it was too late.

As people moved out to the newly terraformed worlds, where land was unlimited, the public was demanding a commitment to safety. Consequently the Patrol had entered an era of expansion. It was hard to know how far a young hotshot like Collier might go.

Kellie was studying the foothills of one of the mountain ranges in central Transitoria. “I don’t think there’s any question about it,” she said. “It’s a road. Or it used to be.”

Marcel thought she was seeing what she wanted to see. “It’s overgrown.” He sat down beside her. “Hard to tell. It might be an old riverbed.”

“Look over here. It goes uphill. That was never a watercourse.” She squinted at the screen. “But I’d say it’s been a long time since anyone used it.”

They had, during the five days that had passed since the first discovery, seen widely scattered evidence of habitation. More than that, they’d seen the remnants of cities on three continents. The cities were long dead, buried, crushed beneath glaciers. It also appeared they had been preindustrial. Further elucidation would have to wait until Hutchins arrived and took her team down for a close look. But there were no structures that could be said to dominate the surrounding landscape, and the snow wasn’t so deep as to bury major engineering work. There were no bridges, no dams, no skyscrapers, no signs of construction on a large scale. Just here and there a fragment in the snow. A rooftop, a post, a pier.

On an island they’d named Freezover, there was a ring of stones. A cart waited in the middle of a barren field near Bad News Bay, near the place at which Nightingale’s mission had come to grief; and an object that might have been a plow had been sighted at Cape Chagrin in the Tempis.

But the road—

It was approximately thirty kilometers long, and they could trace it from its beginnings in a river valley, cross-country along the boundary of a small lake, onto a rise at the foot of one of the mountains. (Kellie was right: It could not be a watercourse.) It disappeared briefly into a tangle of forest before emerging again near the ocean.

The road ran past the base of one of the taller mountains. It towered almost seven thousand meters over the forest. Its northern side was sheared away, creating an unbroken drop from the cloud-shrouded summit down onto a gradual slope. When the sunlight hit the rock wall at dawn, they detected a cobalt tint, and so they called it Mt. Blue.

“The sightseer route,” said Marcel. Kellie shrugged. “Maybe. I wish we could go down and look.”

“The Wildside should be able to settle things when it gets here.”

She folded her arms and let him see she was about to ask for something. Instead: “It’s lucky there was an archeologist within range.”

“Hutch?” Marcel allowed himself a smile. “She’s no archeologist. Actually, she’s in our line of work.”

“A pilot?”

“Yeah. I guess she’s all they had. But she’s been down on some sites.”

Kellie nodded, stood, and looked at him carefully. “You think she’d let me go down with her?”

“If you asked, she probably would. Probably be glad to get the help. The real question is whether I’d allow it.”

Kellie was attractive, tall, with dark bedroom eyes, sleek black skin, and soft shoulder-length hair. Marcel knew that she found no difficulty having her way with men, and that she tried not to use her charms on him. Bad form, she’d told him once. But it came as natural to her as breathing. Her eyelids fluttered and she contrived to gaze-up at him even though he was still seated. “Marcel, they said we should render all assistance.”

“I don’t think they meant personnel.”

She held him in her gaze. “I’d like very much to go. You don’t really need me here.”

Marcel considered it. “The lander’s probably going to fill up with the science people,” he said. “We’ll have to give them priority.”

“Okay.” She nodded. “That’s not unreasonable. But if there’s room ...”

Marcel was uneasy. He knew Hutch, not well, but enough to trust her. The experts weren’t sure when Deepsix would start coming apart. And there was dangerous animal life down there. Still, Kellie was a grown woman, and he could see no reason to refuse the request. “I’ll check with her, see what she says.”

Beekman was lost in thought when Marcel took a seat beside him. He was frowning, his gaze turned inward, his brow wrinkled. Then he jerked into awareness and looked unsteadily at the captain. “Marcel,” he said, “I have a question for you.”

“All right.” They were in project control.

“If there’s really something, somebody, down there capable of building a house or laying a road, should we be thinking about a rescue operation?”

Marcel had been thinking about little else, but he could see no practical way to approach the problem. How did one rescue aliens? “Wildside only has one lander,” he said. “That’s it. How many do you think we could bring off? Where would we put them? How do you think they’d react to a bunch of cowboys rolling in and trying to round them up?”

“But if there are intelligent creatures down there, it seems as if we’d have a moral obligation to try to save a few. Don’t you think?”

“How much experience have you with ET life-forms?” asked Marcel.

Beekman shook his head. “Not much, really.”

“They might be people-eaters.”

“That’s unlikely. We’re talking about something that makes roads.” Beekman looked seriously uncomfortable. “I know the lander’s small, and we’ve got only one. But we could take a few. It’s what the Academy would want us to do.” He was wearing a gray vest, which he pulled tightly about him as if he were cold. “How many does it hold? The Wildside lander?”

Marcel asked Bill. The numbers popped up on the screen. Eleven plus a pilot. “Maybe we should wait until we’re confronted by the problem,” he said.

Beekman nodded slowly. “I suppose.”

“Taking off a handful,” pursued Marcel, “might not be a kind act. We’d be rescuing them so they could watch their world die.” He shook his head. “It would be dangerous. We’d have no way of knowing what they would do when we walked up and said hello. We wouldn’t be able to communicate. And then there’s the gene pool.”

Beekman heaved himself out of his chair and went over to the wallscreen, which looked down on towering cumulus and cold blue seas. “We could probably synthesize the genes. Give them a chance to continue.” He stared at Deepsix.

“It’s not our call,” said Marcel. “The Academy knows what we’ve found. If they want us to do a rescue operation, let them tell us so.”

During the next couple of days, there were other discoveries: a collapsed structure that might have been a storage building along a river in Northern Tempus, a wooden palisade hidden in a forest, an abandoned boat frozen in the ice at Port Umbrage. The boat, lying on its side, was about twelve meters long, and it had masts. But its proportions suggested the mariners had been considerably smaller than humans. “Looks like a galley,” said Mira. “You can even see a cabin in the rear.”

Chiang Harmon agreed. “It would be small for one of us, but it’s there. How old’s the ice?”

“Probably been there since the beginning.” She was referring to the system’s encounter with the Quiveras Cloud. Port Umbrage, they believed, had been frozen solid three thousand years ago, and had never thawed. It was in the far northern latitudes on the east coast of Gloriamundi.

“What else can we conclude about the boat?” Beekman asked.

“Prow looks like a sea serpent,” said Chiang. “Little bit of a Viking flavor.”

“You know,” said Mira, “I hadn’t noticed that. But you’re right. They have art.”

Art was important to Mira. Working on an Academy vessel, she understood that a civilization’s art was what defined it. In more personal terms, it was why one lived at all. One worked in order to make the time to enjoy the finer pleasures. She’d confided to Marcel that Beekman’s people, with few exceptions, were “quite parochial,” and were so consumed chasing down the details of the physical world that most had never learned to enjoy themselves. She considered herself a Sybarite in the highest sense of the word.

She was one of the older persons on board. Mira had, in her own phrase, crashed through middle age and come out the other side. She was nevertheless willowy, attractive, precise. One of those very fortunate women who seem unaffected by passing years.

“They had art,” Beekman corrected.

“If we could get a close look at it,” said Chiang, “we might be able to figure out what they looked like. What we really need is to see it up close.”

Mira nodded. “Next time,” she said, “we need to make sure we have a lander with us.” She sounded as if she thought somebody had blundered, and she was looking directly at Beekman.

Later, Pete Reshevsky, a mathematician from Oslo, complained that he couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. “There’s nothing down there except ruins,” he said. “And it’s pretty obvious that whatever was here, they were pretty primitive. So we don’t really have anything to learn from them.” Reshevsky was small, sharp-nosed, muscular. A man who spent about half his time in the gym. His smile seldom reached his dark eyes. “We’d be better off,” he continued, “if everyone would stick to business and try to keep in mind why we’re here.”

In the morning Wildside arrived. “Its captain wants to speak with you,” Bill told Marcel.

Marcel liked Priscilla Hutchins. He’d worked with her on occasion, and had found her competent and easygoing. She’d become something of a legend twenty years ago when she’d piloted the expedition that discovered the omega clouds.

Marcel had envied her that mission. He’d been working for Kos-mik. Inc., at the time, making the long run out to Quraqua every few months. That had been a spirit-killing experience. The money was good, and he’d been ambitious, looking for promotion into the hierarchy. Hutchins had been little more than a kid when it all happened, but the incident had glamorized piloting for the general public and persuaded Marcel that he’d had enough posting back and forth to nowhere. Within months, he’d resigned from Kosmik and signed on with the Academy.

He was pleased to have Hutch in the neighborhood. It was a curious coincidence that the woman who’d played a major, if indirect, role in shaping his own career, should arrive at this moment. If he was going to be called upon to make decisions regarding the possible existence of aliens, it would be helpful to have her input.

“Put her through,” he said.

She was just barely tall enough to have met the minimum standards for a license. She had dark eyes, black hair cut short, animated features that were capable of lighting up a room when she chose. She greeted him with a broad smile. “Marcel,” she said, “good to see you again. I understand you’ve hit the jackpot.”

“More or less. Do you think they’ll give me a bonus?”

“The usual, I suspect.”

“How much do you know?”

“Only that there’s evidence of habitation. A tower. Are any of them still alive down there?”

“We haven’t seen anybody.” He brought her up to date. “The cities we know about are here and over here; there’ve been indications of inhabitants in these half dozen places.” He used graphics to specify. “Biggest of the cities is in Southern Tempus.” He showed her. It was deep under a glacier. He didn’t think she’d be able to cut through to it in the time available.

How much time was available?

“The actual collision will occur around dinnertime, December 9. We expect the planet itself will begin breaking apart about forty hours earlier.” It was late Saturday evening, November 25. “But we can’t really be certain. You won’t want to push your luck.”

“What do we know about the natives?”

“Not much. They were small. About the size of five-year-olds, looks like. And we have evidence they were on four of the continents.”

“Where do you suggest we set down?”

“The tower’s as good as anyplace. It looks as if you can get right in with a minimum of digging. But there is a downside: The area’s directly on a fault line.”

She hesitated. “You think it’ll be all right for a few days?”

“Don’t know. Nobody here wants to take responsibility for that kind of guess.”

“Show me where it is.”

“It’s in northern Transitoria—”

“Where?”

Marcel directed Bill to post a chart.

She looked at it, nodded, and asked about the Event. “What precisely is going to happen? And when?”

“All right. Gunther—that’s Gunther Beekman, the head of mission—tells me conditions should remain relatively stable until the breakup begins. Once that starts, though, the end will come quickly. So you’ll want to get out early. I’d suggest a week early. Don’t monkey around with this. Get in, get your artifacts, get out.

“You’ll probably experience quakes, major storms, stuff like that, early on. When Deepsix gets inside something called the Turner Horizon, the atmosphere will be ripped off, the oceans torn out, and the crust will turn to oatmeal. All pretty much within a few hours. The core will be all that’s left by the time it plunks into the soup. Just a chunk of iron.”

Her eyes came back to him. “Okay. I guess we won’t want to dawdle.”

“Do you expect to stay and watch it? The collision?”

“Now that I’m here? Sure. If my passengers don’t scream too loudly.”

For a long moment neither spoke. “It’s good to see you again, Hutch,” he said. It had been almost two years. She’d been coming in from Pinnacle, about to dock, and he was on his way out with a survey team. They’d talked a few minutes over the system, as they were doing now.

But they hadn’t been physically in the same room for twice as long. They’d attended a navigation seminar at home on the Wheel. He’d been drawn to her, had spent part of an evening at a dinner party with her. But conditions had never been right. They’d always been going in opposite directions.

She was looking at pictures. “It’s not much of a tower, is it?” It was circular, made of stone, with eight windows, each at a different level, facing a different direction. It stood twelve meters high. But the sensors had indicated another fifteen meters down to its base below ground, where it appeared to be connected to the interior of the city wall. There was a possibility they could use it to get directly into the city.

Marcel had propped two pictures of it on his console. One was a close-up. The other depicted the tower in all its isolation.

“When are you planning to start?” he asked.

She canted her head. “Soon as we can pack the sandwiches.”

“Hutch, my number one would like to go down with you.”

She looked pleased. “Sure. If he wants, we’ll be glad to have him.”

“He’s a she. Name’s Kellie Collier. She’s good. Be a big help if you run into trouble.”

“I can use her. You don’t have any archeologists on board, I don’t guess?”

“No. I’ve got a boatload of mathematicians, physicists, climatologists.”

Hutch nodded. “How about an industrial-sized laser?”

He laughed. “Wish I did.”

“Okay. It was worth a try.”

“Hutch, one other thing.”

“Yes?”

“As I’m sure you know, we don’t have a lander. If you get in trouble, I can’t come after you.”

“I know. Have no fear, I plan to be very careful.”

“Good. And do me a favor while you’re down there?”

“Sure.”

“Keep a channel open. So I can listen to what’s going on.”

Hutch had put off informing Nightingale that Gomez thought it would be a good idea if he accompanied the landing party. She doubted he’d want to go, and was even less persuaded he’d be of use if he did. But at the moment she, Toni, and Kellie Collier were the entire team. She was going to need a couple of volunteers to stand guard and help carry out the artifacts. If they were able to find any artifacts.

She thoroughly disliked this part of her job. They were calling on her to do something she knew little about, and she’d been around Academy politics long enough to know that Gomez would get credit for anything that came off successfully, and Hutch’s name would be forever blackened by any failure.

Like the loss of Richard Wald twenty years ago.

Wald had been a preeminent archeologist whom Hutch had piloted to Quraqua. During a long test of wills with a group of terraformers, Wald had been lost to a tidal wave. That episode had become legendary. Wald had stayed too long at an underwater site on that world, had stayed even while the wave approached, and in the end Hutch had been unable to lift him safely away. Some people had blamed her for the misfortune, claiming that she was the only one who had a clear view of events, and that she’d waited too long to warn him.

She wondered whether Nightingale was another instance of the Academy’s tendency to find scapegoats.

It was time to get it over with. She finished talking with Marcel, stopped by the common room for a sandwich, and then strolled down to Nightingale’s quarters and knocked on the door.

He opened up and looked surprised. “Hello, Hutch,” he said. “Come in.” He’d been working at his computer. An image of Deepsix floated on the wallscreen. She glanced at it, at its blue seas, its cloud masses, its vast ice-covered continents. “Beautiful world,” she said.

He nodded. “Cold world. They all look good from orbit.”

“Randy, I’m sorry about the delay getting home.”

“Hutch.” His eyes fixed hers. “You didn’t come here to go on about flight schedules. What can I do for you?”

She handed him a copy of the transmission. He read it, looked at her, dropped his eyes again to the paper, looked up. “This is what Gomez wants,” he said. “What do you want?”

She’d expected him to decline without hesitation. “I’d be pleased if you came. I can use some help.”

“Who else is going?”

“First officer from Wendy.”

“That’s it?”

“And Toni.”

“You understand, despite what Gomez thinks, I have no special knowledge. I know the place is dangerous, but any living world is dangerous. You don’t need me to tell you that. And I’m not an archeologist.”

“I know.”

“If anyone were to ask my advice, Hutch, I’d say forget it. Stay away from the place.”

“I don’t have that option.”

“I know. You still want me?”

“Yes. If you’ll come, I’d like very much to have you.”

Marcel was surprised to discover how little interest in going down to the surface existed among his passengers. The general consensus seemed to be that if it were true there were natives of one sort or another on Deepsix, it was hard to see the significance of the fact. Nobody really cared. The culture was clearly primitive, and therefore there would be nothing to learn.

He understood that exocology, that branch of the sciences which concerned itself with the social structures of alien societies, wasn’t part of their specialty, but he thought nonetheless they’d want to be on the ground for a major scientific find. A few came forward, commented that they wished they could go down, but then, when he offered to ask Hutch, backed off. Just too much to do. Experiments to set up. Otherwise, I’d go in a minute. You understand.

Only Chiang Harmon volunteered. And Marcel suspected he wanted to go because Kellie was going.

Theoretically, the ground mission should be simple. Just land, get pictures and samples, and come back. If natives show up, get pictures of them, too. Hutch hadn’t brought up the thorny issue of attempting to rescue any inhabitants, so he was going to let it lie. He decided that if locals appeared, and they indicated they wanted help, then he would try to provide it. Otherwise, he would simply let it go. It was a decision that kept him awake at night, but it seemed the only practical approach.

There was another aspect to the mission that worried him. He knew how the scientific mind worked. Hutch’s team would get down there, they’d be looking at a new marvel, and they’d inevitably discover things that would be hard to explain. And they’d want to get the last possible artifact, the last possible answer, and he had no trouble imagining Deepsix gliding toward its unhappy conclusion while he pleaded with Hutch to get off the surface, and she continually reassured him that she would. That she needed only another hour.

Of course Hutch didn’t officially possess a scientific mind. And she’d stated she planned to be away with time to spare. So why not take her at her word?

On the Evening Star, Gregory MacAllister had just excused himself for the evening and left The Navigator, headed for his quarters, when a young woman approached and asked if she might speak with him briefly. He recognized her as having been present in the bistro during the evening’s discussion on the postmodernist movement in Russian theater. She’d been seated toward the rear, and had contributed nothing, but had remained attentive throughout.

That the woman was extraordinarily attractive cut no ice with him. MacAllister never had trouble collecting beautiful women. But he could be impressed by a person’s ability to concentrate, which always implied talent.

He was no respecter of money or position, nor could he be won over by charm or by that series of affectations known as charisma. During his sixty-odd years, he had found there were as many louts in the patrician classes as there were ignoramuses farther down the social spectrum. He liked to believe that only intellect engaged him, although he was inclined to assess intellect as a direct corollary of an individual’s regard for MacAllister’s opinions.

“My name is Casey Hayes,” she said. She fumbled in a jacket pocket and produced a press card. “I’m with Interweb.”

MacAllister allowed his eyes to drift momentarily shut. A journalist.

She was tall, with fashion-model features, and lush brown hair brushed back in the current style. She wore gray slacks and a dark jacket with a diamond stud. No ordinary journalist, this one, he decided.

“What can I do for you?” he asked, noncommittally.

“Mr. MacAllister, have you been listening to the reports out of the Maleiva system?”

“Regarding the ruins? Yes, I’ve been keeping up with them. Of course.”

He had slowed his pace but not stopped. She fell into step beside him. “It occurred to me,” she said, “that this is precisely the sort of event that would interest you. A solitary tower in a faraway place.”

“Really?” Journalists always saw in him a potential story, and they were perfectly willing to fabricate whatever circumstance might dictate to get him to talk. There was just no knowing when MacAllister might say something outrageous and shock the public sensibility, or perhaps offend a whole bloc of people. Like last year’s remark at Notre Dame, where he was receiving an award, that anyone who truly wished to develop tolerance toward other human beings should start by casting aside any and all religious affiliation. When challenged by one of the other guests, he had asked innocently whether anyone could name a single person put to death or driven from his home by an atheist over theological matters. Had the individual been fully functional, MacAllister had thought, he would have questioned the editor’s own celebrated intolerance.

But thank God these people were never quick on their feet.

“Yes,” she continued. “I’ve been a reader of yours ever since college.” She launched into a short dissertation on the wonderfulness of his work, and he was inclined to let her go on. But it was late and he was tired. So he encouraged her to come to the point.

“On Maleiva  III,” she said, “we’re looking at a lost civilization. Maybe some of them are even still alive.” She beamed a smile intended to sweep his resistance into the night. “What were they like, do you think? How long had they been there? Does this kind of climax suggest that their entire history, everything they’ve ever accomplished, is really of no consequence?”

“Young lady,” he began.

“Casey.”

“Young lady, how on earth would I know? For that matter, why would I care?”

“Mr. MacAllister, I’ve read Reflections of a Barefoot Journalist.”

He was surprised. Barefoot was a collection of essays from his early days, jabbing every social stupidity from breast worship to the timorousness of husbands. But it also contained a long essay defending the bizarre notion, originally promulgated by Rousseau, that there was much to be learned from those untouched by the decadent influence of civilization. That of course was before he’d grasped the truth, that decadence was rather an appealing state. “None of it applies,” he said. “The fact that somebody lived on Deepsix who knew how to pile stones on top of one another scarcely seems to be of any significance. Especially since they and the stones are about to go to a happier world.”

She looked at him and he saw determination in her eyes. “Mr. MacAllister, you must be wondering why I stopped you.”

“Not really.”

“I’d like very much—”

“To do an interview with me.”

“Yes. As a matter of fact, I would. If you could spare the time.”

He’d been a young journalist himself once. Long ago. And it was hard to refuse this particular woman. Why was that? Was he being compromised by his wiring? “About what?” he asked.

“I’d just like to do a general conversation. You can talk about whatever pleases you. Although since we’re both here for the Event, that would undoubtedly come up.”

He thought about demanding the questions in advance. But he wouldn’t want to have it get about that one of the world’s most spontaneous thinkers had to have everything up front. “Tell me, uh ...” He hesitated, his mind blank. “What did you say your name was, again?”

“Casey Hayes.”

“Tell me, Casey, how do you happen to be on this flight? Did you have some sort of foreknowledge about this?”

She tilted her head and gazed steadily back at him. He decided he liked her. She seemed intelligent for a woman journalist.

“Why, no,” she said. “In fact, I’m not supposed to be working at all. The ticket was a birthday gift from my parents.”

“Congratulations,” he said. “You’re very lucky to have such parents.”

“Thank you. I’ll confess I thought that the prospect of watching worlds crash into one another had considerable possibility for a story. If I could get the right angle.”

“Let us see if you’ve done so, Casey. How did you plan to approach the matter?”

“By finding one of the world’s most brilliant editors and presenting his reactions to the public.”

The woman had no shame.

She gazed steadily at him. He thought he saw the glitter of a promise, of a suggestion for a reward down the road, but ascribed it to the same male software that rooted him in place, that prevented his precipitate retreat to his quarters. “Maybe,” she continued, “we could talk over lunch tomorrow, if you’re free? The Topdeck is quite nice.”

The Topdeck was the most posh eating spot on the vessel. Leather and silver. Candles. Bach on the piano. Very baroque. “Doesn’t seem quite right,” he said.

“All right” She was all compliance. “Where would you suggest?”

“I put it to you, as an alert journalist. If you were going to interview someone on the significance of the Titanic, or the Rancocas, where would you propose to hold the conversation?”

She looked blank. “I’m not sure,” she said.

“Since both have been recovered and, to a degree, reconstructed, surely nothing would serve as effectively as one of the forward staterooms.”

“Oh,” she said. And again: “Oh! You mean go down to the surface.”

Did he mean that? But yes, why not? History of a sort was about to be made. It wouldn’t hurt his reputation to be present at the nexus. He might be able to put the appropriate interpretation to events. The world’s uplifters, sentimentalists, and moralists would be in rare form during these next few days, drawing what lessons they could from the death of a sentient species. (How sentient, of course, would never become an issue.) There would be the usual references to the event as a warning from the Almighty. It occurred to him that if any of these unfortunate creatures were actually found, there would be a heart-wrenching outcry for some sort of desperate rescue effort, presumably from the decks of the Evening Star.

Why not indeed?

“Yes,” he said. “If we want to talk about Deepsix, then Deepsix is the place we should go.”

She was hesitant. “I don’t see how we can arrange it,” she said. “Are they sending any tours down?”

He laughed. “No. But I’m sure it can be managed. We have a couple of days yet. I’ll see what I can do.”

When he got back to his stateroom, MacAllister locked the door and sank into a chair.

The journalist reminded him of Sara.

Not physically. The angles of Sara’s face were softer, Sara’s hair was several shades darker, Sara’s bearing not quite so imperial. They were both about the same size and weight, but once you got beyond that, it was hard to see a physical similarity.

Yet it was there.

The eyes, maybe. But Sara’s were green, Casey’s blue. Nonetheless, he recognized the steady gaze, and maybe something in her expression, in the way her smile played at the corners of her mouth or the way her voice softened when she thought she could work her will no other way.

Or maybe his imagination had simply run wild, because he was on a flight that was going to become memorable, and he would have liked very much to share it with Sara.

After spending twenty years relentlessly attacking marriage as an institution for the mentally deficient of both sexes, an evolutionary trap, he had met her one evening during a presentation to a group of young journalists. She’d invited him to dinner because she was working on an assignment and it required an interview with him. He was at the time perhaps America’s best-known misogynist. The grand passion always wears out, he’d maintained. He’d set its maximum limit at one year, three months, eleven days.

With Sara, he never got a chance to test his figures. Eight months after he’d met her, three weeks after the wedding, she’d died in a freak boating accident. He hadn’t been there, had been in his office working on Premier when it happened.

It was a long time ago now. Yet no day ever passed that he did not think of her.

Sara had lived in many moods, somber and delighted, pensive and full of laughter. Her last name had been Dingle, and she used to tell people that the only reason she’d consented to marry him was to effect the name change. It had, she said, always been an embarrassment.

He couldn’t have said why, but that was the Sara whose spirit occupied his stateroom at the moment. Stupid. He was getting old.

He collected a strawberry clipper from the autobar and called up the library catalog. There was a new novel by Ramsey Taggart that he’d been wanting to look at. Taggart was one of his discoveries, but he’d begun coasting. MacAllister had spoken with him, shown him where he was going wrong. Nevertheless the last book, a dreary adultery-in-the-mountains melodrama, had shown no improvement. If the trend continued in this latest book, MacAllister would have no choice but to take him to task more formally. In public.

He thought through the conversation with Casey, because it seemed to him he was missing something. He was not one to put himself to trouble on behalf of others, and yet he’d volunteered to do an on-site interview that would seriously inconvenience him. Why had he done that?

Gradually, it occurred to him that he wanted to go down to the surface of Maleiva III. To walk among its ruins and let its great age surround him. To soak the sense of oncoming disaster into his blood, What would it be like to stand on the surface of that doomed world and watch the giant rushing down?

To manage things, he would have to win over the assistance of Erik Nicholson.

Nicholson was the captain of the Evening Star, a small man, both in physical stature and in spirit. He was, for example, quite proud of his position, and strutted about like a turkey. He spoke in a manner that was simultaneously distant and weak, as if he were delivering divine instructions from the mountaintop and hoping you’d believe

MacAllister was scheduled to join the captain for dinner next evening. That would serve as an opportunity to draw him into a private conversation and get the ball rolling. The trick would be to find a reason strong enough to persuade him it would be in his interest to send the ship’s lander to the surface. With MacAllister in it.

The book came up and he started on it. Once or twice, though, he glanced around the room to reassure himself he was really alone.

V

All the important things that ever happened to me occurred while I was going someplace else.

—Gregory MacAllister, Notes from Babylon

Wendy’s shuttle delivered two passengers, the additions to the ground survey team, to Wildside. Hutch met them in the bay, where they traded introductions.

Kellie Collier was a head taller than Hutch and wore a standard blue-trimmed white Wendy Jay jumpsuit She shook Hutch’s hand warmly and said how pleased she was to be included.

Chiang Harmon’s Asian ancestors revealed themselves in the shape of his eyes but nowhere else that she could see. His hair was brown, he was big-boned and broad-shouldered, and he seemed a trifle clumsy. Hutch decided on the spot she liked him. She also recognized that he had more than a professional interest in Kellie.

“Either of you ever been down on a frontier world before?” she asked.

Kellie had. Although she confessed she’d never traveled anywhere beyond the bases and outposts. “No place where there might have been trouble,” she admitted.

On the other hand, she knew how to use a stinger.

“We don’t have any stingers on board,” said Hutch.

Her eyebrows rose. “You’re going down onto a potentially lethal world without weapons?”

Hutch showed her a cutter.

“What is it?” she asked.

Hutch turned it on. A blade of white light appeared. “Laser,” she said. “Cut through anything.”

“I don’t think I’d want to let the local gators get that close.”

“Sorry,” said Hutch. “They’re all we have. We have to make do.”

They had half a dozen on board. They were probably a notch or two more efficient than the cutter Biney Coldfield had used to fight off the cardinals. They were a basic tool for archeologists, but in the right hands they also made an effective weapon. But Hutch was unsure whether her volunteers were people to whom she was willing to entrust the weapons. If they weren’t, she decided, she shouldn’t take them along.

She’d given long consideration to the wildlife hazards on Deepsix. There’d be no repetition of the earlier mistakes. She’d put together a set of operational requirements that everyone would adhere to without exception. She gave each of them a copy, and insisted they read and sign it before the discussion went any farther. Any deviation, she explained, would result in the offender’s being shipped back into orbit. Posthaste.

Did everyone understand?

Everyone did.

She showed them around Wildside. They found Scolari and Embry in the common room, where Chiang asked whether they were going down to the surface, too. When they replied that they weren’t, both looking uncomfortable and a shade indignant, Kellie glanced at Hutch, and it was impossible to miss the judgment she’d just made.

“Why not?” Kellie asked innocently. “It’s the chance of a lifetime.”

“I’m not an archeologist,” said Scolari defensively. “And to be honest, I think it’s a damn-fool thing to do. That place down there is full of wild animals, and it’s going to start breaking up at any time. I don’t plan to be there when it happens. Not for the sake of a few pots.”

Embry smiled coolly and let it go.

Hutch would have preferred more young males in the group, because she hoped they would be cutting engraved stones out of walls and hauling them back to the lander. Gravity on Deepsix was .92 Earth normal, and .89 Pinnacle, which was the level to which Toni was accustomed. It would help somewhat, but they might still have use for some muscle.

Nightingale joined them, and they did another round of introductions, and then took time for a training session. Hutch explained the importance of getting pictures of whatever they might find, and of taking measurements and mapping where everything was. “We do all that,” she said, “before we touch anything.”

She described the hazards, not only from predators, but simply from moving around in an ancient building. “Be careful. Floors will give way; overheads will cave in. Sharp objects won’t penetrate your suit, but they can still punch holes in you.” She invited Nightingale to speak about his experience. He was understandably reticent, but he advised them not to underestimate anything. “The predators on Deepsix have had an extra couple of billion years to evolve. They have very sharp teeth and some of them look innocuous. Trust nothing.”

She handed out the cutters and talked about how they would be used and where things could go wrong. She watched while they practiced, and required each to demonstrate proficiency. “Be careful in close quarters, if it comes to it. The cutter is almost certainly more dangerous than anything we’re going to meet.”

Nightingale met that remark with a frown. But he said nothing.

She dismissed the rest of the team and ran a short course for Chiang in wearing the e-suit. The others were experienced with working inside a Flickinger field.

They joined Scolari and Embry for dinner. Whatever tension might have existed seemed to have dissolved. Embry even made a point of taking Hutch aside and apologizing. “I hope you don’t think this is personal,” she said. “My objection is to management. If they hadn’t had a chance to do this earlier and get it right—”

“I understand,” Hutch said.

The lander was loaded and ready to go. Hutch opened the cargo hatch and turned to face her four passengers. “We’ve stowed rations for ten days,” she said. “That’s more than we’ll need. Temperature is a few degrees below zero Celsius at noon near the tower. Atmosphere is breathable, but the mix has a little more nitrogen than you’re used to. Breathe enough of it and you’ll start feeling detached and lazy. So we’ll leave the e-suits on when we’re outside. There’s no known problem with biohazards.

“I want to reemphasize that nobody wanders off on his or her own.” She looked around, made eye contact with each of them to make sure her meaning was clear, and to assure herself they would comply. She was prepared to refuse passage to anyone who looked amused. But they all nodded.

“A day on Deepsix is a bit over nineteen hours long. We’ll be landing near the tower in the middle of the night, and we’ll stay with the lander until sunrise. After that we’ll play it by ear.

“Incidentally, we’ll be going down on snow. We don’t think it’s very deep because it’s close to the equator, but there’s no way to know for sure.” She looked at Nightingale. “Randy, anything to add?”

He stood up. “I just want to underline what Hutch said. Be careful. Protect one another’s backs. We don’t want to leave anybody down there.” His voice sounded a bit strained.

“I tend to ask people to do things,” Hutch continued, “rather than tell them. Habits are hard to break. But I’ll expect immediate compliance with any request.

“You’ll have a vest that you should put on after you activate the e-suit. You can put tools, sandwiches, anything you like, in the vest. Keep the cutter in the vest and never put it in a trouser or shirt pocket. The reason is simple: If you need it and it’s inside the suit, you won’t be able to get to it. Furthermore, if you figure out a way to get your fingers around it, and you activate it inside the suit, you’ll be limping for a long time to come.

“Any questions?”

There were none.

Hutch checked the time. “We’re going to launch in eight minutes. In case anybody wants to use the washroom.”

If the experts were right, they had twelve standard days before breakup would begin, which meant they really had about a week before conditions would become unduly dangerous on the surface. So her intention was to move with dispatch.

Kellie’s enthusiasm caught hold of the others, and they carried it into the lander. Everyone was excited, and even Nightingale seemed to have shed his dark mood.

Somebody applauded when she launched. A half hour later they dropped into a blizzard, and emerged finally into gloomy, overcast skies at an altitude of four thousand meters. The landscape below was utterly dark. The sensors provided glimpses of rolling hills and broad plains marked by occasional forest. Several large clearings might have been frozen lakes. The ocean, the Coraggio, lay a couple of hundred kilometers north, behind a wall of mountains.

The lander possessed dual-purpose jet/rocket engines, to enable it to maneuver in space, or to function as an aircraft. It was an exceedingly flexible vehicle, owing largely to its spike technology, which was the heart of its lift capability, allowing it to hover, to land in any reasonably flat space, and to leave the atmosphere without the necessity of hauling along vast amounts of its hydrogen fuel.

Power for all systems was supplied by a Bussard-Ligon direct-conversion reactor.

Hutch listened to her volunteers talking about how anxious they were to get into the tower, and she wondered about her own responsibility bringing them down. She couldn’t do the work alone, yet she had the sense that only Nightingale understood the dangers. She had never before led people into a hazardous situation. She had seen what Nightingale’s errors had cost, what they’d done to him personally, and she wondered why she was taking so large a risk. What the hell did she know about keeping people alive in what Kellie had accurately described as a lethal environment? She thought seriously about calling the whole thing off, returning to Wildside, and sending her resignation to Gomez.

But if she did that no one would ever know who had built the tower.

Hutch picked the structure up on her sensors and put it onscreen. It was a night-light image, brighter than it would be in normal optics. Nevertheless it looked old, dark, abandoned. Haunted.

She was descending almost vertically, using the spike and guide jets, coming in cautiously. Her instruments did not reveal whether the snow-covered surface would be firm enough to support the spacecraft.

She’d left the storm behind, but there were still a few flakes blowing past the windscreen. Otherwise, the night was calm, with only a breath of wind. Outside air temperature read -31° C. Here and there stars were visible through the partly cloudy skies.

Hutch turned on the landing lights.

Kellie was seated beside her, her dark features illuminated in the glow of the instrument panel. Watching her, Hutch became aware of a precaution left untaken. “Kellie’s our alternate pilot,” she said. “In the event something unexpected happens and I become ...” She hesitated. “... kaput, Kellie will take over. Will succeed to command.”

Kellie glanced in her direction, but said nothing.

“I’m sure nothing’ll happen,” Hutch added.

The ground surrounding the tower was flat, bleak, and empty. There was a scattering of hills on the western horizon, a patch of woods, and a couple of solitary trees.

“I’ll set down as close to it as I can,” she said.

The snow seemed to run on forever, losing itself finally in the dark. There was, she thought, a lot to be said for having a moon.

The lander rocked gently, and the tower, cold and dark, reached up toward them.

Hutch might have used the AI to make the landing, but she preferred to fly on her own in this type of circumstance. If something unexpected happened, she didn’t want to be at risk while the AI thought about an appropriate course of action.

She lowered the treads. The snow cover looked undisturbed.

It was hard to believe an entire city lay below that smooth white surface.

She took a moment to visualize its dimensions. The wall to which the tower might or might not be attached went off that way under the snow for a kilometer and a half, then turned north, angled back and forth a bit, and eventually returned to the tower, which was at the southwest corner of the fortification.

The city had apparently lain at the top of a low hill.

The lander sank through the night.

“Easy,” said Kellie, her voice so low that Hutch suspected she wasn’t supposed to hear it.

Hutch kept the nose up, cut back on the spike, and reached for the ground the way a person might descend into a dark room.

Wind blew up around them, and she could almost feel a draft come through the hull. She phased back the power, allowing the lander’s weight to ease down. The cabin was silent.

They touched the snow.

She let the vehicle settle and cut power. A few flakes fell on the windscreen.

“Good show,” said Nightingale.

“Hutch, you down?” It was Marcel’s voice.

“On target,” she said.

During her career, Hutch had walked on probably twenty worlds and moons. This was the fifth time she’d landed on a world about which little was known, the first during which she’d been in charge.

They were twenty meters from the tower.

Hutch turned the lander’s lights on it. Pocked and beaten by long winters, it was circular, not more than three stories high. Although she was thinking in human terms. It wasn’t wide: She could walk around it in a minute.

There were eight windows, all at different levels, each looking in a different direction. The lowest would permit easy access. The top of the tower was circled by twin ring cornices projecting just above the uppermost window. A convex roof capped the structure.

She activated her e-suit and felt the familiar push away from the seat and the back of the chair as if a cushion of air had formed around her. Kellie ran a radio check with her and nodded. Okay. She pulled on a utility vest and asked Toni to pass up the microscan from the backseat. She clipped it on and put a cutter into a pocket.

“What are you going to do?” asked Nightingale. He looked worried.

“Historic moment. It’s worth preserving.” She popped the inner airlock hatch, set the cabin air pressure to match the outside level, and got out of her seat. “Everybody please get into your e-suit. Set the breather for conversion mode.” That would allow the system to work off the environment so they didn’t have to wear air tanks.

Kellie passed out the Flickinger generators. They attached them to their belts and activated the suits. The converters kicked in and commenced moving air.

“Mine won’t work,” said Toni.

Kellie looked at it, made an adjustment, and reset it. “Try it now.”

The field whispered on and Toni held up a thumb. “Okay.”

“I thought,” said Chiang, “we were going to wait until morning.”

“We are. Chiang, I’d like you to come stand in the airlock.”

“Okay,” he said, joining her. And after a moment: “Why?”

“In case of screwups, surprises, whatever.” She checked the time. “We’re about two hours from sunup. Soon as we have light, we’ll go into the building.”

“Nothing’s going to sneak up on us out there,” Chiang said. “Why don’t we just take a look now?”

“When we have daylight.” She trained the sensors to do a sweep along a patch of forest. It was the only place she could see where a predator might hide. Other than the tower itself.

Green lights flashed, and the outer hatch opened. “Anything moves out there,” she said, “I want to know about it.” She climbed out onto the ladder.

Chiang produced a lantern and played its beam across the snow. “Looks like Christmas.”

Hutch climbed down, tested the ground, and sank in about halfway up her shins. The field kept her feet warm and dry. “Snow’s a bit soft,” she said.

“So I see.”

The tower loomed over her. Morgan was a bright green star in the western sky, where its brilliance washed out even Deneb. It was 84 million kilometers away, and the two worlds were rushing toward each other at a combined velocity of just under seventy kilometers per second.

The tower itself was singularly dull. A pile of stone blocks and not much more. She took its picture. Took it again.

She kept an eye on the line of trees. Somebody, Nightingale, she thought, undiplomatically asked whether Kellie knew how to fly the lander.

Hutch heard no response. Kellie, she suspected, had answered with a glance.

She faced the spacecraft, providing the scan with a good look, gave it a moment to adjust to the lighting, and took the lander’s picture also.

“That’s good,” said Kellie. “Come on back now.”

There was still a picture she wanted, one she would hang in whatever future quarters she might occupy. She moved to the far side of the vehicle, got far enough back until she had both the nose of the spacecraft, its Wildside designator, and the tower, all in the frame. “Perfect,” she said.

Dawn broke gray and listless.

The sun was larger than Sol. But it seemed dusty and not quite tangible, almost as if it were one of those solar illusions called sun dogs one sees from North America’s Great Plains.

Deepsix had a rotational period of nineteen hours, six minutes, eleven seconds. It was a few million kilometers closer to its sun than Earth was to Sol, but Maleiva was older and cooler.

There was snow on the tower roof. Hutch wondered who had lived in the building, how long ago, where they had gone.

It was possible that the tower marked the site of a climactic battle, or a place where opposing forces had come together to establish an alliance. A Plato might have conducted discussions on this hillside, in warmer times. Or a Solon laid out a system of laws.

Who knew? And no one ever would, except for what little she could salvage.

They descended from the lander, checked their gear, and began trudging through the snow toward the ground-floor window. The merest whisper of wind was audible around the tower. The snow was crusted, and it crunched loudly underfoot, breaking the general stillness.

Two birds appeared in the distance, well out to the northwest. Nightingale turned to look at Hutch, and a chill passed down her spine. But he said nothing.

The birds were flying in great slow circles, wings out, riding the air currents.

The ground-level window had a frame, in which remained a few shards of what might once have been glass. Inside the building they saw a room, utterly bare save for some wooden sticks and debris.

Through an open doorway, a narrow wooden staircase ascended between beams into the ceiling. The steps were close together, far too close to accommodate human feet.

Hutch set her scan to record everything, hung it around her neck, and climbed through the frame. There was just enough clearance for her head. The floor seemed solid. Beneath a layer of snow and earth, it was constructed of planks. She examined a plaster wall, stained and crumbling, punched full of holes. Several sets of shelves had been built into it.

The ceiling was low, not quite two meters. Not enough to allow even Hutch to stand up straight.

She looked into the other room, the one with the stairway, and saw a third chamber.

The stairway apparently rose to the top of the tower. And down several levels to the bottom. It was made of wood.

Hutch signaled the others to come in.

Chiang pushed on the ceiling. Dust drifted down.

The chambers above and below also had one window each. They appeared identical to the one at ground level, save that the windows were in different locations.

They climbed to the room above, and then to the level above that. They were all scrunching down to avoid hitting their heads. “Marcel was right about these folks,” grumbled Kellie. “They were a little on the short side.”

After the initial inspection they went back to the lander and Hutch distributed gear luminous cable and chalk to mark off areas where finds were made; bars and lamps, compressed air dusters, whatever else she’d been able to think of. Find anything unusual, she told them, call me. And almost anything you find will be unusual.

As the day brightened, they spread out through the tower. There were eight levels above ground. They counted six more going down. The topmost space consisted of a single chamber with a surprisingly high ceiling, enough to allow everyone except Chiang to stand upright. There was a hook up there, and they found two objects on the floor: one that might once have been a piece of chain, and a smashed wooden tripod.

“What do you think?” asked Toni.

“Maybe,” said Kellie, “it was used to sharpen axes. See, you could put a stone in here.”

They found at each level a charred niche that must have been a fireplace. In addition, at the bottom of the structure, a door opened out to the north. Into the interior of the city. It was closed, warped, and it wouldn’t budge. They decided to finish examining the building before taking it down.

The rooms were empty, save for a chair arm that one would have described as a child’s furnishing, a flat piece of wood that might once have been a tabletop, a few rags, a shoe, and some other debris so far corrupted that it was impossible to know what it might once have been.

The shoe was quite small, designed for the foot of an elf. But the tabletop became a discovery. “It’s engraved,” said Chiang.

The engravings were worn, so much so that little could be made out. Hutch couldn’t even be sure whether the symbols were intended to be representative of actual objects, whether they were geometrical figures, pictographs, or letters.

The tripod had also been carved. Decorated. But these, too, had faded beyond any hope of recovery. They were examining it when Marcel’s voice broke into her thoughts. “We just got a report back from the Academy. I thought you’d be interested in knowing they’ve named your city.”

“Really? What?”

“Burbage Point.”

“They named it for Burbage?” He was the senator who was eternally holding up the Academy as an example of mismanaged funds.

“I guess.”

“My God. Maybe they’re trying to send him a message.”

“Not that bunch. They think they’re ingratiating themselves.”

“Anything else, Marcel?”

“Yes. The analysts have been looking at the scans for the cities. We’ve located nine now, most under heavy ice, all under something. And they all have defensive ramparts, by the way. Walls.”

“That locks it.”

“Yep. Primitive civilization. There is one exception, one without a palisade, but that’s on an island. Incidentally, they’re naming all these places for people they think can give them money, or get money for them. We now have Blitzberg, Korman City, Campbellville ...”

“You’re not serious.”

He laughed. “You ever know me to kid around?”

Nightingale’s eyes caught hers, and she knew exactly what he was thinking: And these nitwits have us down here risking our necks.

“Marcel,” she said, “any more information about Burbage Point?”

“A little. It looks as if there were some wars. Somebody took the city at one point and pulled the walls down. Apparently left only the tower standing.”

“What’s our position vis-a-vis the city? We’ve got a door at the bottom of the building, leading out toward the north. Any idea what we’ll see when we go through it?”

“Probably just ice.”

“Okay. We’ll let you know how it turns out.”

“I’m listening to every word, Hutch. We’ve redirected a couple of the satellites, so we won’t lose you when we’re over the horizon.”

“All right.” Not that it would do the landing party any good if it got into serious trouble.

They’d brought the pieces of chain and the ax sharpener down to the lower levels to bag and tag. Kellie was writing the description of where the pieces had been found and was about to seal the wrapper on the tripod when Chiang asked to see it.

He studied it for a moment, held the bottom of the one complete leg against the floor, looked up the staircase to the top of the tower. “You know,” he said, “we might be in an observatory.”

“How do you mean?” asked Toni.

“I’d bet my foot the roof used to open.”

Kellie looked from the tripod to Chiang, puzzled. “You mean you think this thing supported a telescope?”

“It’s possible,” he said.

Toni grinned at Kellie. “And you said it was an axe sharpener.”

Kellie laughed and her eyes sparkled. “I could still be right. They might have opened the roof to man the battlements.”

Hutch looked at it. “It seems too small,” she said. “The eyepiece would be down at your hips.”

Chiang aimed a thumb at the ceiling. “Don’t forget who lived here.”

They trooped back up to the top level. There was a break down the middle of the ceiling. A separation. They dug around in the dirt and vegetable debris that covered the floor and found a small metal plate and an object that might have been a sidebar.

“You might be right,” said Hutch, trying to imagine a tiny astronomer with a tiny telescope peering through an open roof. “It would mean,” she said, “they had some knowledge of optics.”