Starship Spring (4 page)

His aquiline pirate’s face mimed concentration. “Well, it wasn’t human. I seem to recall it was greenish, reptilian, and extraordinarily thin…” He shrugged. “Like no alien I’ve ever seen.”

I lay back and stared into the swaying foliage overhead, my heart loud in my ears. He had described, pretty accurately, the same apparition that had spoken to me that night aboard the
Mantis
…

The Yall.

“So here you all are,” a voice called out. Maddie climbed the steps from the patio and squatted beside us. “Look at you all. What a collection of lazybones. I was up at the crack of dawn, exploring.”

“And what did you find, virtuous one?” I said.

“I walked for miles along the jungle walkway.”

“Miles? After all you drank last night?”

She stuck her tongue out at me. “You know I never suffer, David. Anyway, I found a few old shrines, predating the first stone-working Ashentay, apparently.” She waved the paper map she was holding.

“Predating?” I said. “I thought there was no one here before the Ashentay.”

Hawk laughed. “Where have you been, David? You don’t recall all the fuss in the news a few years ago: the discovery of ancient monuments in the vicinity of Tamara Falls? It’s what led to the excavations and discovery of the caverns.”

I shrugged. “Must have been on Earth at the time,” I said, to excuse my aberrant memory.

“We’ll find out more about that this afternoon,” Maddie said. “Ella, I have something for you.”

“Where’s Matt?” Hawk asked.

“Still snoring,” Maddie said,
ooph
ing as Ella landed in her lap.

She extricated a small box from beneath my daughter and held it up on the palm of her hand. “For you, Ella, all the way from Sirius II.”

“What do you say, Ella?” Hannah prompted.

“Thank you,” Ella said, taking the box and hastily tearing off the wrapping paper. She set the small silver box on the edge of my lounger, knelt and opened the lid.

A small golden cone, the length of Ella’s hand, sat in a plush velvet nest. “It’s… beautiful,” Ella gasped, lifting it carefully from the box. “What is it?”

Maddie laughed. “An ancient alien artefact,” she said. “Now a necklace.”

The cone was on a chain, and Ella looped it around her neck. The golden cone sat against her bathing suit, coruscating in the sunlight.

I pulled Ella to me and examined the necklace. The cone was engraved with a spiral, like a helter-skelter, the thread inscribed with what might have been alien hieroglyphs.

Hannah said, “It is beautiful, Maddie. Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me,” she said. “Thank an alien art patron called Dr Petronious.” She explained to Hannah who Petronious was.

“Petronious gave it to you?” I said.

Maddie nodded. “The odd thing was, he knew all about us. He’d read the book, seen the movie—he said he was very interested in our story. He’d even kept up with how we were doing: he knew you had a daughter, David, and insisted that I give this to Ella.”

“That’s incredibly kind of him,” Hannah said.

Maddie went on, “He said it was ancient, an artefact from a race of beings now extinct.”

“Christ,” I said, “it must be priceless.”

Maddie frowned. “I doubt it, but it was a nice gesture, whatever its value.”

Ella danced around the pool, holding up the cone so that it glittered in the sunlight.

“Anyway,” Maddie concluded, “I came here to see if any of you had worked up an appetite for lunch before we hie ourselves off to the dig?”

“Food!” Hawk said, unfolding his bulk from the lounger. “Lead the way.”

I watched my daughter as we left the pool, and it struck me that she was mesmerised by the ancient alien artefact.

FIVE

Maria Da Souza led us away from our villa and down a series of switchback stairways that descended alongside the surging torrent of the waterfall. The aural baffles were less effective here, and the roar of the fall was like a jet engine. I brought up the rear, clutching Ella’s hand and squeezing it from time to time. Her excitement at the expedition communicated itself to me through her tight grip and impatient, skipping steps.

The stairway turned left, leaving the solidity of the rock and U-turning to double back on itself, even closer now to the waterfall. The walkway was horizontal here and covered in a protective crystalline tube running with water. We were walking towards the rock face over which the Falls tipped, through the mass of water itself. The pounding roar was so loud it seemed to transcend any definition of sound to become something more physical. I was relieved when we passed under the torrent and came to the area between the rippling sheet of water and the rock itself.

Da Souza turned to us and shouted, “The entrance to the subterranean system of caves is on the other side of the Falls. There is a longer way round, but this way is more spectacular.”

We turned right and walked along the rock face for perhaps two hundred metres. When we reached the far side of the Falls, Da Souza paused before a ragged rent in the rock. Set into the aperture was a solid steel door, which she unlocked. She stood aside while the others, led by Hawk, squeezed through. Hannah went before me, and I brought up the rear with Ella.

As we were passing Da Souza, she lay a hand on Ella’s shoulder and said, “That’s a pretty necklace. May I?”

Ella nodded, and Da Souza knelt and lifted the cone. She examined it minutely, turning it in her hand. She wore an odd expression, as if she’d seen the cone before but could not recall where.

She looked up at me. “Do you mind if I ask you where you got this, Mr Conway?”

I shrugged. “It was a gift,” I said, and added as if that were not sufficient, “from an alien art dealer. Why?”

She shook her head, stood quickly, and gestured for me to descend the timber staircase that followed the precipitous natural funnel through the rock. As we walked, movement-sensitive lighting came on ahead, revealing hewn rock marked with the striations of chisels and larger cutting equipment. Behind us the roar of the waterfall diminished until it could no longer be heard. As we descended, clean, cool air enveloped us, refreshing after the rainforest humidity.

I asked Da Souza, “These cutting marks, are they alien, or—”

She shook her head. “Human. Made by the initial investigation team. I’ll explain when we reach the bottom.”

We descended for perhaps ten minutes and the temperature plummeted: I was glad I’d taken Da Souza’s recommendation to wear a jacket.

We came to the end of the timber stairway and stood on the edge of a swelling cavern. Spotlights illuminated stalactites and stalagmites, hundreds of them stretching away into the shadows. The walls nearby were wan and flesh-coloured, and reminded me of tripe, striped here and there with rust-coloured ulcerations. It was as if we were in the gut of some gargantuan bovine creature.

Da Souza took her tour-guide stance before us.

“The caverns were discovered five years ago after a botanist uncovered the standing stones and statues in the rainforest above us. A team from the University of Mackinley searched the area for more statuary, and found the entrance through which we’ve just passed. It was a narrow defile then, and it’s since been widened. We think the race responsible for the lower chambers had another, as yet undiscovered, entrance.

“As I was telling Maddie earlier, at first scientists thought the standing stones were of Ashentay provenance, but subsequent investigations discounted this theory.”

“But there were no native peoples on the planet
before
the Ashentay,” Hawk said.

Da Souza smiled. “Quite. That led researchers to speculate that the stones were of extraterrestrial origin. What archaeologists discovered down here bore out that idea. If you would care to follow me.”

She set off and, intrigued, we followed.

We walked for a hundred metres and came to the end of the cavern. The walls closed in, the stalactite-spiked roof descended, and ahead I made out a dark opening, through which our guide now ducked.

Ella could walk upright through the narrow corridor, but the rest of us were forced to bend double. A sharp, dry, salty smell filled the air.

After fifty metres the corridor gave way to another chamber, this one quite different from the last.

We stood up, stretched, and let out exclamations of surprise.

In complete contrast to the natural contours of the first chamber, this one was so obviously manufactured that it was as if we’d been teleported from one locale to another. But what was even more staggering about what opened up before us was the nature of the work done down here. For some reason I had been expecting statues and carvings hewn from the rock, perhaps crude figures, effigies… I should have known better, of course: if a star-faring race had left vestiges of their civilisation here, then it was not likely to resemble something out of Terran antiquity.

For a start, the cavern was triangular: two great sloping walls rose to meet at a sharp point a hundred metres overhead, and the walls were fashioned not from rock but from metal, smooth and seamless. If the very shape of the cavern confounded my expectations, then so did its contents.

Hundreds of thousands of silver columns, each perhaps three centimetres in diameter and as high as a man, rose from the flat metal decking. They stood a metre from each other, like some enigmatic extraterrestrial work of art.

“But what are they?” Hawk asked.

Da Souza smiled. “The 64-million-dollar question, Mr Hawksworth. If the scientists could work that one out…”

I gestured towards the closest of the columns. “Can we…?” I asked.

“Be my guest.”

We stepped forward and touched the spears. I pulled my hand away quickly. “They’re…
warm
…”

“Thirty degrees Celsius, Mr Conway. All of them.”

I laid my hand on the column again, feeling its comforting heat.

Ella, with the audacity of childhood, embraced a column. “I know what they are!” she piped up. “They’re alien heaters. It’s cold down here!”

Da Souza laughed. “They might well be, Ella. I’ll tell the scientists about your theory.”

“I suppose you don’t know how they’re powered?” Matt asked.

“Again, we don’t know. As with all alien technology, we have to be very, very circumspect… not only in our interpretation of what objects might be, but on a more practical level, in terms of our physical address of the objects. We don’t know what we’re dealing with here. For all we know, it might be as potentially dangerous as a nuclear power station.”

Matt stood before the array of columns, arms folded across his chest, frowning.

I mooted my alien-work-of-art theory.

He grunted. “Too… too ordered, David. Too schematic.” Then he laughed. “But by saying that I fall into a trap. How can I begin to interpret an alien aesthetic? It might be an art installation, for all I know, but I have a hunch it’s something more… more mechanical.”

Maddie came up to him and slipped an arm around his ample waist. “Just think, Matt, in thousands of years, aliens might be trying to interpret
your
art.”

He pulled an expressive face. “Now that’s an utterly depressing thought, on many levels.”

“Speaking of timescales…” Hawk said, then addressed Da Souza, “Do the archaeologists know how old all this is? You say it predates the Ashentay.”

Da Souza nodded. “Estimates range from eight hundred thousand years to a million, give or take a few thousand.”

Maddie whistled.

“But whoever made this, you say they weren’t native to the planet?”

“That’s right, Mr Conway. No evidence of a technological civilisation has been found anywhere else on Chalcedony, not the slightest trace. That would lead one to surmise an extraterrestrial source for all this.”

“But you’ve no hard evidence of that?” Hawk asked.

Da Souza smiled. “If you’d care to accompany me through to the next chamber…”

Dutifully, we followed. I caught Hannah’s eye and smiled. This was far better a guided tour than I’d dare hope for.

We passed through a triangular portal, which mirrored the architecture of the chamber we were leaving, and entered an even vaster chamber.

Maddie whistled again. “This is… amazing.”

“Daddy!” Ella cried. “What are they? They look like… like spaceships.”

Da Souza winked at me. “You have a budding scientist there, Mr Conway. That’s what we’re pretty sure they are, Ella.”

Hawk laughed. “An underground car park for starships!”

The vessels—if indeed they were vessels—were racked one above the other, three high: sleek silver wedges about the size of the
Mantis
. They bore no exterior markings, no seams to indicate exits or viewscreens. Even their sterns, where you might expect to see evidence of some form of propulsion, rockets or at least exhaust flarings, were without any sign of these.

I estimated there were about a hundred craft stacked in the chamber.

“Hard to credit that they might be a million years old,” Maddie said.

“The dictates of aerodynamics were the same back then,” Hawk replied.

“But they can’t be spaceships,” Ella frowned, “because they don’t have doors.”

I squeezed her hand. “Perhaps the aliens were very small,” I said, “and they squeezed in through tiny holes?”

“Let’s go and look!” she cried.

For the next ten minutes we moved around the stacked ships, examining them closely for evidence of miniature apertures.

Scattered about the ships were more prosaic items: the tables and com-terminals of the archaeologists, lending a welcome, familiar air to this wholly alien environment.

I noticed another triangular portal at the far end of the chamber, this one sealed by a makeshift wooden hatch, marked with a red and black hazard symbol.

I pointed. “What’s through there?”

“Ah… that’s strictly off limits, Mr Conway,” Da Souza said.

Before I could enquire further, she looked at her watch and said, “Now, the next shift of scientists is due down here in less than an hour, so perhaps we’d better be making tracks. I trust the tour, if brief, was edifying.”