Jack Mcdevitt - Engines of god Read online

  THE ENGINES OF GOD

  Jack McDevitt

  In the streets of Hau-kai, we wait. Night comes, winter descends. The lights of the world grow cold. And, in this three-hundredth year From the ascendancy of Bilat, He will come who treads the dawn, Tramples the sun beneath his feet. And judges the souls of men. He will stride across the rooftops. And he will fire the engines of God.

  —Uranic Book of Prayer (Quraqua) (Translated by Margaret Tufu)

  PROLOGUE

  lapetus. Sunday, February 12, 2197; 0845 GMT.

  The thing was carved of ice and rock. It stood serenely on that bleak, snow-covered plain, a nightmare figure of gently curving claws, surreal eyes, and lean fluidity. The lips were parted, rounded, almost sexual. Priscilla Hutchins wasn't sure why it was so disquieting. It was more than the carnivorous aspect of the creature, the long slow menace of talons, the moonlight stealth of the lower limbs. It was more even than the vaguely aggressive stance, or the position of the figure in the center of an otherwise lifeless plain beneath the October light of Saturn's rings.

  Rather, it seemed to flow from its interest in the ringed world which was forever frozen above a tract of low hills and ridges in the west. Stamped on its icy features was an expres­sion she could only have described as philosophical ferocity.

  "I keep coming back." Richard's voice echoed in her earphones. It was filled with emotion. "Of all the Monuments, this was the first, and it is the centerpiece."

  They stood on a ramp, designed to preserve the tracks of the original expedition. Here was where Terri Case had stood; and there, Cathie Chung. The heavy bootprints circling the figure, up close, those belonged to Steinitz himself. (She knew because she'd seen the ancient video records countless times, had watched the astronauts clumping about in their awkward pressure suits.)

  She smiled at the memory, pushing her hands down into her pockets, watching Richard Wald in his rumpled gray jeans and white sweater, his Irish country hat pressed down on his head. (It didn't quite fit within the bubble of articulated energy that provided breathing space.) He was slightly out of focus, difficult to see, within the Flickinger field. Much as

  he was in ordinary life. Richard was one of the great names in archeology. He would be remembered as long as people were interested in where they'd come from, as long as they continued to send out explorers. Yet here he stood, as awed as she, momentarily a child, in the presence of this thing. Around them, the silence and the desolation crashed down.

  Hutchins, on first glance, might have been one of those diminutive women with finely chiseled features and a beguil­ing smile who seemed more akin to the drawing room than to a bleak moonscape. Her eyes were dark and good-humored, and an initial impression might suggest that they reflected empty conviviality. But they were capable of igniting.

  Her black hair was cut short. It peeked out from beneath a broad-brimmed safari hat. Everyone who knew her believed that it was her slight stature that had fueled her various ambi­tions; that she had chased men, and professional success, and eventually the stars, all out of the same drive to compensate. She knew it wasn't true, or believed it wasn't. The reality was far simpler, but not the sort of thing she would tell any­one: her father had taken her to Luna when she was eight, and she had felt the full force of the enormous age of the place. It had occupied her dreams and overwhelmed her waking hours. It had driven a sense of her own transience into her soul. Live while you can, indulge your passions. Make it count. The ancient storm stirred again while she looked into the frozen emotions of the ice creature. And recognized them.

  Richard Wald folded his arms and pressed them against his sweater, as if, inside his energy envelope, he was cold. He was tall, and embodied the kind of self-conscious dignity one finds in those who have achieved a degree of fame and never quite come to terms with it.

  Despite his sixty years, Richard was a man of remarkable vitality. And exuberance. He was known to like a good drink, and a good party; and he loved the company of women. He was careful, however, to maintain a purely professional demeanor with Hutchins, his pilot. There was something of the Old Testament prophet in his appearance. He had a thick silver mane and mustache, high cheekbones, and a preemptive blue gaze. But the stem appearance was a facade. He was, in Hutchins' amused view, a pussycat.

  He had been here before. This was, in a sense, where he had been born.

  This was the First Monument, the unlikely pseudo-contact that had alerted the human race two hundred years ago to the fact they were not alone. Explorers had found thirteen others, of varying design, among the stars. Richard believed there were several thousand more,

  The Great Monuments were his overriding passion. Their images decorated the walls of his home in Maine: a cloudy pyramid orbiting a rocky world off blue-white Sinus, a black cluster of crystal spheres and cones mounted in a snowfield near the south pole of lifeless Amis V, a transparent wedge orbiting Arcturus. (Hutchins' throat mike was a cunningly executed reproduction of the Arcturian Wedge.) Most spectacular among the relics was an object that resembled a cir­cular pavilion complete with columns and steps, cut from the side of a mountain on a misshapen asteroid in the Procyon system. ("It looked," Richard had told her, "as if it were awaiting the arrival of the orchestra.") Hutchins had only seen the pictures, had not yet visited these magic places. But the was going. She would stand one day in their presence, and she would feel the hand of their creators as she did here, Itwould have been difficult to do on her own; there were many pilots and few missions. But Richard had recognized a kindred spirit. He wanted her to see the Monuments, because in her reactions he could relive his own. Besides, she was

  damned good.

  Of all the artifacts, only the lapetus figure could be interpreted as a self-portrait. The wings were half-folded. The creature's taloned hands, each with six digits, reached toward Saturn. Clearly female, it looked past Richard, arms open, legs braced, weight slightly forward. It was almost erotic. Its blind eyes stared across the plain. It was set on a block of ice about a third its own height. Three lines of sharp, white symbols were stenciled within the ice. To Hutchins' mind, the script possessed an Arabic delicacy and elegance. It was characterized by loops and crescents and curves. And, as the sun moved across the sky, the symbols embraced the light, and came alive. No one knew what the inscription meant. The base was half again as wide as Hutchins with arms out-spread. The creature itself was three and a half meters high, That it was a self-portrait was known because the Steinitz expedition had found on the plain prints that matched the creatures's feet.

  The ramp was designed to allow visitors to get close enough to touch the artifact without disturbing anything. Richard stood thoughtfully before it. He pressed Jus fingertips against the base, nodded, and unhooked a lamp from his belt He switched it on and played it across the inscription. The symbols bright­ened, lengthened, shifted.

  "Nice effect," Hutchins said.

  Each of the Monuments had an inscription. But no two seemed to be derived from the same writing system. Theory held that the objects were indeed monuments, but that they had been constructed during different epochs.

  Hutchins stared into its blind eyes. "Kilroy was here," she said.

  She knew that all the Monuments were believed to date to a five-thousand-year period ending roughly at 19,000 B.C. This was thought to be one of the earlier figures. "I wonder why they stopped," she said.

  Richard looked up at the stars. "Who knows? Five thousand years is a long time. Maybe they got bored." He came over and stood by her. "Cultures change. We can't expect them to do it forever."

  The unspoken question: Did they still exist?

  What a pity we missed them. Everyone who came here
shared the same reaction. So close. A few millennia, a bare whisper of cosmic time.

  One of the landers from the Steinitz expedition had been left behind. A gray, clumsy vehicle, with an old U.S. flag painted near an open cargo-bay door, it lay two hundred meters away, at the far end of the ramp. Lost piece of a lost world. Lights glowed cheerily in the pilot's cabin, and a sign invited visitors to tour.

  Richard had turned back to the inscription.

  "What do you think it says?" she asked.

  "Name and a date." He stepped back. "You had it right, I think. Kilroy was here."

  She glanced away from the figure, out across the plain, sterile and white and scarred with craters. It ascended gradu­ally toward a series of ridges, pale in the ghastly light of the giant planet, (lapetus was so small that one was acutely conpious of standing on a sphere. The sensation did not bother her, but she knew that when Richard's excitement died away, it would affect him.)

  The figure looked directly at Saturn. The planet, low on the horizon, was in its third quarter, It had been in that exact position when she was here, and it would be there when another twenty thousand years bad passed, It was flattened at the poles, with a somewhat larger aspect than the Moon. The rings were tilted forward, a brilliant panorama of greens and blues, sliced off sharply by the planet's shadow.

  Richard disappeared behind the figure. His voice crackled in her earphones: "She's magnificent. Hatch."

  When they'd finished their inspection, they retreated inside the Steinitz lander. She was glad to get in off the moonscape, to kill the energy field (which always induced an unpleasant tingling sensation), to dispose of her weights, and to savor the reassurance of wails and interior lighting. The vessel was maintained by the Park Service more or less as it had been two centuries earlier, complete with photos of the members of the Steinitz team.

  Richard, buoyed by his excitement, passed before the pho­tos one by one. Hutch filled their cups with coffee, and lifted hers in toast. 'To Frank Steinitz," she said. "And his crew."

  Steinitz: there was a name, as they say, to conjure with. His had been the first deep-space mission, five Athenas to Saturn. It was an attempt to capture the public imagination for a dying space program: an investigation of a peculiar object photographed by a Voyager on lapetus two decades earlier. They'd returned with no answers, and only a carved figure that no one could explain, and film of strange footprints on the frozen surface of the moon. The mission had been inordinately expensive; political cartoonists had loved it, and an American presidency had been destroyed. The Steinitz group had borne permanent scars from the flight: they had demonstrated beyond all further quibble the devasting effects of prolonged weightlessness. Ligaments and tendons had loosened, and muscles turned to slush. Several of the astronauts had developed heart problems. All had suffered from assorted neuroses. It was the first indication that humans would not adjust easily to living off-Earth. Steinitz' photo was mounted in the center. The image was similiar; he'd been overweight, aggressive, utterly dedicated, a man who had lied about his age while NASA looked the other way. "The bitch of it," Richard said solemnly, turning toward the windows and gazing out at the ice figure, "is that we'll never meet them."

  She understood he was referring to the Monument-Makers.

  "It was," he continued, "Steinitz' comment when he first saw her. And he was right."

  "Right for his age. Not necessarily for ours." She didn't exactly believe that, since the Monument-Makers seemed to have vanished. Nevertheless it was the right thing to say. She examined her coffee mug. "I'm amazed that they were able to get that kind of articulation and detail into a block of ice."

  "What do you think of it?" he asked.

  "I don't know. It is disquieting. Almost oppressive. I don't really know how to describe it." She swung the chair around, turning her back to the plain. "Maybe it's the desolation."

  "I'll tell you what it is for me," he said. "It's her footprints. There's only one set."

  Hutch didn't quite understand.

  "She was alone."

  The figure was idealized. It watched Saturn with unmistak­able interest, and there was nobility and grace in its lines.

  Hutch read something else at the juncture of beak and jaw, and in the corners of the eyes: an amalgam of arrogance and distrust laced with stoicism. Tenacity. Perhaps even fear.

  "The inscription," she said. "It's probably the thing's name."

  "That's the position Muncie takes. If in fact it's a work of art and nothing else, it could be the title of the work. "The Watcher.' 'Outpost.' Something like that."

  "Or," said Hutch, "maybe the name of a goddess."

  "Possibly. One of the members of the original mission suggested it might be a claim marker."

  "If so," she said, "they're welcome to this rock."

  "They were thinking more of the solar system." The plain lay flat and sterile. The rings were knife-edge bright. "Are you ready to take a walk?"

  They followed the ramp out onto the plain. Off to one side they could see the booted tracks of the astronauts. Approxi­mately a kilometer and a half west, her prints appeared.

  There were two sets, going in opposite directions. She wore no shoes, and the length of both the foot and the stride,

  measured against the anatomy of the ice figure, suggested a creature about three meters tail. They could distinguish six toes on each foot, which was also consistent. "Almost as if," Hutch said, "the thing climbed down and went for a walk."

  Chilling thought, that. They both glanced reflexively behind them.

  One set of tracks proceeded west into the uplands.

  The other wheeled out across the plain, on a course well north of the artifact. Astronaut prints, and ramps, followed in both directions. Richard and Hutch turned north.

  "The bare feet shook them up," said Richard. "Now, you and I could match the trick, if we wanted."

  After about a quarter-kilometer, the prints stopped dead in the middle of the snow. Both sets, coming and going. "There must have been a ship here," Hutch said.

  "Apparently." The snow beyond the prints was untouched.

  The ramp circled the area, marking off a space about the size of a baseball diamond. Richard walked completely around the circle, stopping occasionally to examine the surface. "You can see holes," he said, pointing them out. "The ship must have been mounted on stilts. The prints show us where the creature first appeared. It—she—walked off the way we've come, and went up into the hills. She cut a slab of rock and ice out of a wall up there. We'll go take a look at the spot. She fashioned the figure, put it back on board, and flew it to the site." He looked in the direction of the ice figure. "There are holes back there, too."

  "Why haul it at all? Why not leave it up in the hills?"

  "Who knows? Why put something here and not there? Maybe it would have been too easy." He tapped the ramp with his toe. "We're in a valley. It's hard to see, because the sides are low, and the curve of the land is so sharp. But it's there. The ice figure is located precisely in the center."

  After a while they went back the other way, and followed the tracks into the hills. The walkway plunged through deep snow and soared over ravines. The prints themselves twice went directly up to sheer walls and stopped. "They continue higher up," said Richard.

  "Anti-gravity?"

  "Not supposed to be possible. But how else would you explain any of this?"

  Hutch shrugged.

  They entered the ravine from which the ice and stone for the figure had been taken. A block had been sliced cleanly out of one wall, leaving a cut three times the visitor's height. The prints passed the place, continued upslope, and petered out on thick ice. They reappeared a little farther atop a ridge.

  The ground dropped sharply away on both sides. It was a long way down.

  Richard strode along the ramp, submerged in his thoughts, not speaking, gazing neither right nor left. Hutch tried to caution him that the energy field provided fair traction at best, that the l
ight gravity was treacherous. "You could sail off without much effort. You'd fall kind of slow, but when you hit bottom, there would be a very big splash." He grunted, and went a little easier, but not enough to satisfy her.

  They continued along the crest of the ridge until the tracks stopped. It was a narrow place. But with a rousing view of Saturn, and the breathless falling-off of the worldlet's short horizon.

  Judging from the confusion of tracks, the creature might have been there for a time. And then of course she had doubled back.

  Richard gazed down at the prints.

  The night was full of stars.

  "She came up here before she cut the ice," said Hutch.

  "Very good. But why did she come here at all?"

  Hutch looked out across the plain, luminous in Saturn's pale light. It curved away from her, giddily.

  The stars were hard and cold, and the spaces between them pressed on her. The planet, locked in place, had not moved since she stood here. "The image on the plain," she said, "is terrifying, not because it has wings and claws, but because it is alone."

  She was beginning to feel the cold, and it was a long way back to the ship. (The Flickinger fields do cool off, in time. They're not supposed to, and there are all kinds of tests to demonstrate they don't. But there you are.) Half a dozen moons were in the sky: Titan, with its thin methane atmos­phere; Rhea and Hyperion and some of the smaller satellites: frozen, spinning rocks like this one, sterile, immeasurably old, no more capable of supporting a thinking creature than the bloated gasbag they circle.

  Richard followed her gaze. "She must have been very much like us." His lined features softened.

  Hutch stood unmoving.

  The universe is a drafty, precarious haven for anything that thinks. There are damned few of us, and it is a wide world, and long. Hutch wondered about her. What had brought her so far from home? Why had she traveled alone? Long since gone to dust, no doubt. Nevertheless, I wish you well.