The Avatar (44 page)

Brodersen started to say that this guess jumped far beyond the available facts, but decided not to. The Betans did have knowledge of a variety of worlds—nothing like Pandora, of course, but a couple were included which had some resemblances. Besides, at present his own interest in the local ecology was quite incidental to—

There the goal was!

Caitlín cried out, Brodersen and Dozsa muttered astounded oaths, Rueda crossed himself, Fidelio stirred and his iodine smell sharpened. Photographs taken from space conveyed little of the reality which was here.

A city certainly had existed, long and long ago. Remnants of walls still lifted in a few places above crowding wild wood, their vivid primary hues and soft pastels undimmed. Where turf
decked glades, great blurry-edged blocks lay tilted, only half buried.

North of the ruins stood a complex of several buildings, seemingly intact. Dozsa swung the jets down and hovered to let his companions observe. At first the structures were hard to see as anything but gaudy masses; then the eye began to track the design and found a solemn kind of beauty. Hexahedrons upbearing colonnades fitted harmoniously into each other, around a central tower made of arches and spirals, crowned by a three-dimensional golden sunburst. An enclosed bridge soared between the outermost eastern and western edifices in an arc of bird’s-wing delicacy that somehow also belonged.

Two kilometers farther north, wilderness stopped, debarred, forced to grow around what must be a base for spacecraft (and for what else?). Impressive though it was, and in spite of being the lure which had brought the voyagers here, this offered much less to vision. Mostly they saw a sweep of turquoise-tinted paving, close to four kilometers square. Hemicylinders (sheds? barracks?) fenced it, the same color, their curves elaborated by what might be entrances and scanners. Near the remote end of the field was a large, dove-gray dome. Lesser bubbles clustered about it. A complex metal web rose and spread above, doubtless pertaining to the radio transmitter and possibly to other equipment. Squinting at the flat surface, they made out broad circles traced in it by grooves. Were those hatches, leading to silos wherein ships might safely rest?

That fine detail was barely discernible, for a slight waveriness enclosed the whole ensemble, like a hemispherical heat-shimmer.

Tears ran quietly down Caitlín’s cheek. “Glory be to Creation,” she faltered, “another race in the universe that knows, thinks… and they not dead.”

“What?” Rueda asked absently. He was at work trying to raise
Chinook,
which ought to be stationed in synch by now. “What do you mean?”

“Is it not clear, man? The countryside lies desolate, the cities fallen, save here where we see a bit of restoration—in the ancient style; for look, the port before us is not of the same architecture at all, at all. Who but the Pandorans themselves would come back and erect such a memorial, after they went through the gate to a young world?”

She had spoken in English. Brodersen put the question in
Spanish to Fidelio, who opined, ‘That seems reasonable, fellow swimmer, though a fang remains caught in its flesh. Why should they go to so much trouble for mere—
ang’gh k’hrai
—basking? Sentiment? Yes, for mere sentiment. Data storage can preserve every memory of the mother planet, for hologrammic re-creation at will, better than a few unused houses on this crumbling reef.”

Dozsa took the boat out of hover mode and started her circling. “The answer to that,” he suggested meanwhile, “is that the houses are not unused. They get visitors.”

“Why?” Rueda asked. “What visitors? Tourists? Hardly, when nothing but fragments are left, aside from yonder bit of copywork. Fidelio’s right, electronics can give more of Old Pandora. Scientists, then, keeping track of what’s happening? They wouldn’t need facilities this big and elaborate, I’m sure, especially with an astronautical technology that must be equal or superior to Beta’s.”

“Earlier I proposed a few thoughts on life cycles here,” Fidelio said softly. “They were reasonable, yet they may well be afloat with no roots in truth. Dogmatizing about sophonts we have never met is whirlpool unreason. If ever we find out what these are like, the single certainty is that we will be surprised.”

“To be alive is to be forever surprised,” Caitlín said. “How good that is.”

“Never mind now,” Brodersen interrupted. “Let’s first see whether we can make contact…. God damn it, Carlos, are theyasleep up in orbit?”

As if summoned, the lean features of Weisenberg, acting captain, sprang into the screen. His usual calm snapped apart. “How are you?” he almost yelled. “Are you safe?” He relaxed a bit when he heard the report and saw the pictures, both direct and off tape. Joelle, enmeshed in holothesis, took everything straight into her brain. The rest of the crew watched at their posts.

“Doesn’t seem like anybody’s home,” Brodersen finished with a sigh. “Well, we’ll explore, and maybe get a clue to when the next ship is scheduled in, or figure a way to leave a note, or—I dunno.”

Weisenberg frowned. “Someone’s minding the store,” he warned. “Or something is. Else that field would be covered by wind-blown dirt and brush taking root, not to mention animals making messes. Have a care how you approach.”

“M-m-m, yeah, good point. We’d better keep ourselves in gear, though. Stay tuned for another thrilling episode.”

After a conference inboard,
Williwaw
swung about and neared the base from above. She had a machine gun in either wing. Dozsa sent a burst. Nobody was present to be hurt or angered, and it was a simple, handy kind of probe. Rueda tracked it; Brodersen monitored a camera for slow-motion playback under magnification.

The bullets struck the diaphanous canopy. The tracers among them skittered fierily aside. Dozsa brought the boat around in a grab of swiftness and snarl of jets, and headed for clear sky.

No person spoke until they had examined Brodersen’s record. Not a slug had penetrated more than a few centimeters before rebounding, flattened by the impact. “Hoo-ha,” he muttered. “If we’d come sailing cheerily into that—Fidelio, have you any notion what it might be?”

The Betan made an indescribable gesture. “Conceivably hypersonic waves of ultra-high amplitude, heterodyned to form a quasi-solid shell. Conceivably a more subtle and efficient type of field, unknown to my people. Pandoran ships, descending, must transmit a signal that turns it off for them, but I disbelieve the signal is one we could hit upon by trial and error.”

“Me too. Okay, what’s next?”

Brodersen’s question was rhetorical. From the beginning, they had expected to go out on foot—were determined to. Dozsa brought the flyer back down, low and slow. Midway between the base and the handsome complex, an opening in the forest seemed to offer a spot for a vertical landing and later takeoff. Dozsa descended ultra-cautiously, jets loud at their labor. Close scanning showed the ground did not yield under that pressure, save for the low ruddy growth on it. Nonetheless he kept wheels retracted and extended skids, which he could drop off if they got mired or otherwise trapped.

Williwaw
came to a firm, level halt. The engines whined into a silence that rang in the ears. A popping in them followed, and a hiss, as air was bled out to equalize with the lower Pandoran pressure. Folk unbuckled. Caitlín beat Brodersen to the kiss he had promised himself.

“Well,” he said after shaking hands all around elsewhere, “let’s commence. Get your firearms ready.” Taking an automatic rifle, he writhed past seats in the cabin, went down a
ladder to the belly of the vessel, and operated the airlock. Through that he cycled as if into poison… which might be the case, no matter what spectroscopes related.

He didn’t expect it. Chichao Yuan had died on Beta from a lethal dose of naturally produced gas, but that was a most unlikely happenstance, unprecedented in the Betans’ own experience. Still less plausible was catching a native disease, fungal, microbial, viral, anything, when the two most similar biologies known to Fidelio did not even base their heredities on the same nucleotides. Ordinarily the expedition would nonetheless have proceeded more deliberately than this, sending remote-controlled machines out to collect samples for analysis in a segregated chamber before the first member ventured forth, and maybe quarantining him afterward.
Chinook,
however, lacked trained personnel. Therefore the skipper claimed the proud privilege of being guinea pig.

He swung himself out, to the ground, and stood as if in a dream.
Me, old Dan Brodersen, I have betrod a new world, the first man ever
. Feeling almost giddy, he stooped to touch the soil, grub some up, roll it between his fingers. It was warm and dry and smelled like… charcoal?

Heat smote him, savage as in the Sahara Desert. Parched, the air sucked moisture from nostrils till they stung, lips till they cracked. Though its rarity dulled hearing somewhat, a wind boomed loud, making branches creak and fronds rustle. He felt it like a breath from a furnace. Tarry odors filled it.

He peered around. Now that he was outdoors, the green glare changed colors more than he had awaited: on springy dull-red turf, murky boles and limbs rising three or four man-heights, deep-hued serrations that grew from them, shadowy reaches beyond where bushes cast back sun-flecks in mica-like glints, the skin on the back of his hand. The sky brooded Tyrian. A dozen winged creatures flapped across, bronze-bright. Midget flyers that could not be insects, returned, after the alarm of the landing, to buzz about.

“Dan, darling love, how do you fare?” Caitlín’s dread ripped from his walkie-talkie.

“Fine,” he answered. “Honest. Calm down. Sit back, remember our doctrine of caution, wait till I’m sure.”

I
won’t he sure, of course,
he thought.
Never can he. Might be inhaling death at this minute
. He found that the idea didn’t worry him, far-fetched as it was.
Then why do I hate the notion of letting Pegeen come out?

I
can’t postpone that much longer
.

Stumping around, he noticed for the first time how he weighed a little more; Pandora’s gravity exceeded Earth’s by a few percent. On a log inside the woods, he spied a cat-sized animal, and froze while he stared. It was a tailless quadruped with glabrous, pale-blue, shiny skin, a beak, three eyes—the third on back of the head—and a fanlike dorsal fin. Noticing him in turn, it folded that member and bounded off.

“Too fast for a reptile or lower-grade critter like that,” Brodersen said when he had given a description over the radio. “Equivalent of a Terrestrial mammal? I dunno, but I expect I’d never have seen it if my shape and smell weren’t too outlandish for instant recognition. My guess is, therefore, that’s the basic animal shape here, four-limbed, three-eyed, beaked. The sail may be a cooling device; could have a sense organ built in too, I suppose.”

The miracle of that small beast struck home in him. A whole evolution, an entire face of life itself. And Ira Quick wanted to keep humankind stanchioned in his sociological cattle stalls.

Brodersen continued. Partway around the glade, he stopped once more. This time, what he saw was a trail.

Underbrush was scant and presented no real obstacle. Yet a meter-wide strip of bare, hard-beaten loam ran straight into the forest: as nearly as he could gauge, straight toward the buildings that were his next goal. He stood thoughtful, in the blistering wind, before he continued his round. On the opposite verge, he found the same trail, equally linear, likewise vanishing from his view into the depths.

Game on Earth and Demeter didn’t make that kind. When asked, Fidelio said the same was true on Beta. Well, Pandora could be different.

Brodersen led the way down the path, followed Indian file by Caitlín, Dozsa, and Fidelio. The party bore weapons, walkie-talkies, canteens from which they often swigged, light backpacks of assorted gear. Rueda stayed behind in the boat; he had objected strenuously, but such a reserve was essential and he was the logical choice. Save for wind-sough and an occasional croak or trill, the forest was quiet. “Trees”—they looked more like giant succulents of varied species—and “canebrakes” grew well apart, probably for lack of water, but their widespread foliage made a roof, so that shadows speckled by green
sunbeams turned the surroundings just a little cooler than the open was. Now and then a creature droned or fluttered or scurried by; once the party glimpsed at a distance an animal as big as a pony, likewise bearing a dorsal fin; but on the whole, this was an unfruitful wilderness.

“Life swims upstream, until overwhelmed and sunk,” Fidelio had philosophized. “When the sun of Pandora began to betray it, higher species must have died, unless the sapients took a few along when they fled. There remained lesser, simpler breeds; and evolution started over. The sun did not change too fast for them in the next few million years.” He had drooped his whiskers, a sign of regret or pain. “It will. Another massive extinction; another rally; another and another, though I think each is more weak and starveling: until the end. When will Pandora lie wholly bare? In a billion years, perhaps.”

A billion years,
Brodersen remembered as he walked.
Counting to a billion, at a standard rate of four numbers per second, would take
—he had checked a minicomp—
almost eight years. A billion real-time years
—
that’s a mighty long rearguard action to fight against the Norns
.

Though does any race of being ever fight anything else?

The walk was brief, through an afternoon that would linger for Earthdays. They came out beneath brazen heaven and saw the houses of unknownness.

Only turf, brush, and younglings of larger plants grew right around them. Clifflike, rainbowlike, walls lifted sheer until they became intricately recessed, colonnaded, intermingled. No doors or windows broke their smoothness. A portal did give on a courtyard. Brodersen took his followers through. Here also nature strove to return. Roots had not split paving or siding (yet) but low vegetation decked corners where dust had gathered and tendrils crawled up convoluted pilasters. A creature flew from a gallery; had it a nest there?