Penumbra (22 page)

He prepared for sleep, unrolling his mattress and lying down on his back. Mackendrick sat up, tipping a dozen small white pills into his shaking palm and swallowing them with a draught of water. There was something about watching someone taking their medication that filled Bennett with a sense of trespass. He recollected once or twice accidentally coming across Ella as she administered her own injections; he had always quickly retreated, as if the healing might in some way prove less efficacious if he was around to witness the ritual.

Surprisingly, he slept well that night. He awoke feeling refreshed and invigorated seven hours later. The milky light of Tenebrae filled the dome, along with the odour of freshly brewing coffee.

Mackendrick was kneeling before the microwave. ‘Breakfast’ll be ready in ten minutes.’

Bennett sat up and stretched, peering around. ‘Where’s Ten?’

Mackendrick pointed through the wall of the dome. Ten Lee was a childishly small figure standing on a hillside fifty metres away, silhouetted against the light of the rising gas giant.

He felt a sudden pang of alarm at the sight of her. He looked around and saw her rifle lying beside her mattress.

‘Is she safe out there alone?’

Without waiting for a reply he grabbed his rifle, found his boots and hurried from the dome. He was surprised at the quality of the air, how fresh it was despite the warmth, and scented with a perfume suggesting pine, but sharper. He jogged across the purple grass and climbed the hill to where Ten stood. The view was spectacular from the summit: the dwindling plain shimmered with haze in the light of Tenebrae, its girth straddling the entirety of the horizon.

‘Ten!’

She turned and glanced at his pulser.

Bennett shrugged. ‘I don’t think you should be out here without this.’

He held up the rifle, but she ignored the gesture, took a deep breath and swept her gaze around the view, suggesting without words that he was being needlessly apprehensive.

He smiled. ‘Beautiful morning.’

She ignored the observation and said, ‘Have you thought about the SIH disc, Joshua?’

The question surprised him. He had wanted to let it ride, maybe assess how he felt about things later, at the end of the mission.

‘I . . . no. That is, I know what I should do.’

She turned to him and stared. ‘Then do it.’

She opened her palm before him, and upon it was the small silver disc from the hologram module.

He regarded it for what seemed like minutes.

‘Joshua, you must let go. Accept what happened. In letting go we free ourselves, open ourselves and admit that new experience is possible.’

‘You don’t know what it is like to lose—’

She blinked at him. ‘Joshua, when I was eighteen I lost the man I loved. He was killed in the War of Independence. I know what it is like—’

‘Is that why you . . . why you turned to religion? To get over the loss?’

‘Of course not. I always believed in the Path. My belief helped me, when he died.’

‘Have you had anyone since?’

‘Not a lover,’ she said. ‘A few casual encounters . . .’ She smiled at him. ‘I am passing even beyond that, now. I need nothing, only the peace that meditation brings. Here, I feel as though I need only to meditate to be close to the essence.’

Bennett regarded her. She was still proffering the disc on the palm of her small hand. He thought of Ella, and then Julia, and then the other women he thought he had loved over the years.

‘I wish I could do without people, Ten. They seem only to bring me pain.’

She shook her head. ‘Perhaps you seek too much in others, Joshua. Perhaps you seek that which they are not, instead of that which they are. Accept them for themselves, not that which you wish them to be.’ She stared at him. ‘Now take the disc and throw it as far as you can.’

He realised that, if he hesitated any longer, he would disobey her command - and he knew that then he would hate himself.

On impulse he snatched the disc and drew back his arm. He launched the disc high, watched it go spinning through the air and catch the light once or twice, then fall on a long, slow arc into the valley bottom.

He thought of Ella, and felt a quick stab of guilt he knew to be irrational.

Briefly, in a gesture valuable because of its rarity, Ten Lee reached out and touched his hand. Then she left him and walked back down the hillside to the dome.

After a breakfast of coffee and fruit bread, taken outside the dome on the purple grass, they packed up and boarded the transporter on the final leg of the journey. Ten Lee drove and Bennett sat beside the open window next to Mackendrick.

They made good time as Tenebrae moved from west to east. It seemed less to rise than to roll with vast majesty across the valley. When Bennett tipped his head and stared through the roof of the vehicle, the giant filled his field of vision, blotting out the starfield and provoking a stifled sense of claustrophobia. Great flashes of lightning pulsed within the gaseous bands, sending floods of opal illumination across the plain before them.

They sighted more wildlife as the short day progressed. Ten Lee was the first to spot the flying creatures. She leaned forward, clasping the wheel in both hands, and peered through the windshield. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘There. Straight ahead.’

At first they appeared as a flock of jet specks in the air at the far end of the plain. Seconds later they were overhead and silhouetted against the belly of the gas giant, creatures with sickle wings and great scythe-like beaks, not unlike pteranodons from the Cretaceous period. So vast was the flock that they took fully minutes to pass overhead.

‘We can safely say it’s looking a viable habitat for fauna at the top end of the food chain,’ Mackendrick commented. ‘I wonder what’s at the very top?’

His words set Bennett to seriously contemplating the possibility that a sentient alien lifeform might inhabit Penumbra. Certainly the aerial video of the so-called settlement seemed to indicate that some form of intelligence had been at work on the planet. The thought that, if this intelligence still existed, then sooner or later they would come across it . . . Bennett laughed to himself. It was one of those concepts - like the apprehension of infinity - just too vast to grasp.

Only three planets had been discovered to harbour sentient life from the hundreds so far explored on humankind’s expansion along the spiral arm. Bennett had seen the usual documentaries about the alien races, and read a couple of books and a few articles documenting the story of the first contact and subsequent relations.

One race was humanoid, the Phalaan of Arcturus V, who were at a stage of evolution comparable to that of Neolithic man. After the discovery of these Stone Age people, and initial mutually incomprehensible contact, it was considered best for the future development of the Phalaan if they were spared relations with their more technologically sophisticated neighbours. The planet had been designated out of bounds for all but authorised scientific investigation teams.

The Kreyn of Betelgeuse XVII were an ancient race of starfarers who discovered humankind when one of their ships landed on the colony world of Bethany. They were crab-like beings, and about as far in advance of humanity as humanity was in relation to the Phalaan. It was they, the Kreyn, who decided that for the good of humankind contact between the races should be kept to a minimum.

The dominant lifeforms on Sirius were great sea-living cetaceans, and the jury was still undecided as to whether these aliens were sentient or not.

Humankind had yet to discover a race with whom they were on an equal footing, beings with whom they might come to some understanding in the many realms of endeavour: cultural, scientific, philosophical. The chances were that such a race was unlikely to be found on Penumbra. The planet was not developed globally as was the Earth; there was no evidence of cities or roads or other signs of civilisation, as such. But, Bennett told himself, perhaps Penumbrians lived underground, and had no need of cities in the Terran sense. It would be rash to discount any possibility so early in their explorations. Still, the thought of encountering intelligent extraterrestrial life, at any stage of their evolution, seemed improbable to Bennett.

They halted at midday to take a meal break, and it was shortly after they had finished their food trays - when Ten Lee slipped from the cab to stretch her legs - that she made the discovery.

She was gone perhaps thirty seconds when Bennett heard a shout. ‘Joshua! Mack! Here!’

Something about her tone, an uncharacteristic urgency, alerted Bennett. He jumped from the cab and looked about for her. She was twenty metres from the transporter, kneeling and reaching out to touch something in the short grass.

She looked up as he approached at a run, an expression of surprise and delight on her face. ‘I’ve found something, Joshua, Mack. Look.’

Bennett knelt beside her, joined by Mackendrick, and stared at the square, grey stone object in the grass. It was perhaps twenty centimetres high and a metre square, a slab of stone as dark as iron. It was not the uniformity of the object that was surprising, however, but the fact that inscribed into the surface of the stone was a series of neatly chiselled hieroglyphs.

Mackendrick stood and hurried back to the transporter while Bennett ran a hand over the stone’s surface. The inscription was worn, and filled in places with lichen. A series of small circles, in various stages of completion, contained a number of dots, stars, squares and smaller circles. Each character was perhaps the size of a coin. Bennett counted a hundred such on the horizontal plane.

Mackendrick returned, burdened with equipment. He unstrapped an analyser from his neck and placed it on the stone plinth, kneeling to get a closer look.

Ten Lee was moving away, drawn like a somnambulist to something she had spotted a few metres away. Bennett watched her as she knelt, reached out and pushed aside the obscuring purple grass.

She looked up. ‘Over here, Josh. Another one.’

He ran across to her. This stone seemed identical to the first in dimensions, but instead bore a series of square hieroglyphs. The markings within these characters, so far as he could make out, were identical to those on the first stone: dots, stars, squares, small circles. He looked more closely at the stone, and noticed that it was not perfectly square. The top and bottom edges, as seen from above, sloped minimally towards the left. He returned to the first stone. The edges of this one, too, were angled in the same direction as the second.

‘A form of ironstone,’ Mackendrick told him. ‘Initial analysis measured the degree of wear of the various hieroglyphs - those in the middle and those at the southernmost edge, in the teeth of the prevailing winds. The read-out suggests they’ve been worn over a period of ten thousand years, so the stones in their chiselled state are that old at least.’

‘Measurements?’

Mackendrick nodded and read off the dimensions.

‘Could you do the same with the second?’ Bennett asked.

They made their way to where Ten Lee was kneeling, and placed the analyser on the face of the stone.

Mackendrick read out the results. ‘This one is smaller, but only slightly. It’s as if it’s cut out of the same length of receding block . . .’

Bennett was already on his feet and striding to an irregularity he’d spotted in the grass five metres away. There was another stone. He looked up, across the plain, and made out a series of similar slabs marching away across the grassland. He guessed, then, that each one would be smaller than the last, diminishing like the head of a giant arrow, as if pointing . . .

Only then did it occur to him to look up, all the way, to where the foothills began some two or three kilometres away.

What he saw there made him laugh out loud. They were like short-sighted ants wondering at the footprints of an elephant, when all along the elephant itself was just metres away.