Echo (46 page)

Read Echo Online

Authors: Jack McDevitt

Tags: #Science Fiction, #General, #Adventure, #Fiction

“What happened?”
That brought laughter. “It got dark,” said Seepah. “And cold.”
“When?”
“Do you
really
not know?”
“Humor us.”
Belle complained she had no phrase for “humor us.” Alex said, “Just ask them to assume we’ve been asleep a long time and to tell us what happened.”
“Twenty-four years ago,” Turam said, “the skies grew dark, and the world became cold.” I did a quick calculation: Echo III needed fourteen months to complete an orbit. So twenty-eight years had passed on Rimway.
“Crops wouldn’t grow. Whole species of animals died off. We got storms more severe than anything anyone had ever seen. Shortages led to struggles over resources. In the end, people died by the millions.
“It went on for eighteen years. In fact, it never really went away. It’s still colder here than it used to be. But the skies have cleared. More or less.”
For a long moment no one spoke. Then we prompted Belle again: “Why? What caused this to happen?”
“We don’t know. Maybe the Horgans are right. Maybe it was a divine judgment. I have no idea.”
Somebody who had stopped to listen said that it
was
, and a woman standing off to one side remarked that the notion was crazy.
“How did
you
survive?” we asked.
Seepah answered: “We were lucky. We were here. At
Akaiyo
.”
“Akaiyo?”
“It means,” said Turam, “the sacred place. It was designed as a place where you could escape, for a time, the outside pressures. Ironic, isn’t it?”
“So this is a religious community?” I said.
“No. Think of it, rather, as a place of contemplation. Where the only thing barred is a closed mind.”
“Good,” I said. “If we had to crash, this was the place.”
Turam smiled. “We’re reasonably well isolated here. When the troubles began, most of the people who were here went home. And probably died. A few made it back. With terrible accounts of life on the outside. Others arrived during the years, and stayed.”
“It was the greenhouses that saved us,” said Seepah. “We already had two when the Dark Times began. Kaska—he was the director at the time—knew immediately that greenhouses were essential for survival, and they built several others and began to utilize them.”
The room was still.
“We have a hard life here,” said Turam. “But it
is
a life.”
 
“The Dark Times,” said Alex, when we were alone. “That’s the connection.”
“I’ve been thinking the same thing. It began about the time the
Silver Comet
was here.”
“Yes.”
“It sounds like an asteroid strike.”
“I suspect that’s exactly what happened, Chase.”
“So maybe she saw it. And couldn’t help. She saw millions die. And never really recovered from the experience.”
“If that had happened,” Alex said, “wouldn’t her passengers have said something?”
“Not necessarily. They might not have known. They wouldn’t have had access to the images from the scopes. To them, it would just have been a matter of watching the asteroid go down.”
Alex shook his head. “I think there’s more to it.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t
feel
right.”
And suddenly I saw what had happened. “There’s another possibility, Alex. We know Cavallero didn’t do his job properly. He never found the civilization that was here. Probably never looked. So Rachel came out here on a tour. Probably because Cavallero
had
noticed an asteroid on a course toward Echo III. It was close enough that they could steer it into a collision. And that’s what they did. Give the customers a real thrill. Nobody ever knew there were people here. There was no electronic signature, so Rachel didn’t see them either. Until it was too late.”
Alex pressed his fingertips against his forehead and closed his eyes. “You think she dropped a rock on them?”
“Yeah. The more I think about it—They set the asteroid on a collision course, then sat back and watched it happen. When it hit, it threw up a lot of dust. The weather got cold. Crops failed. When she realized what she’d done, she went back and screamed at Cavallero.”
“But what about the Amicus Society?”
“The Amicus Society? What do they have to do with it?”
“And Winnie.”
When he saw I didn’t know what he was talking about, he sighed. A man of infinite patience. “Rachel’s pet
gorfa
. We saw two of them, remember? And she said she had a third. All strays.”
“I’m sorry, but I—?”
“Chase, do you think for a minute that a woman who took in strays and worked for at least one animal-rights group would drop an asteroid on a green world?”
 
We waited twenty minutes until Belle was in range again. Then Alex called her. “Belle, I want you to go off course for a while.”
“Okay. Why?”
“Look for a crater. One that was formed recently.”
THIRTY-NINE
Allyra is the goddess of the mind. She is the antithesis of faith, as the word is usually understood. She does not say to us, believe in this or that dogma. Rather, she tells us, show me. If you have a proposition, a theory, a concept, bring the evidence forward. If you have none, be cautious. If it is suspect, be honest. In any case, remember your own fallibility.
—Timothy Zhin-Po,
Night Thoughts
 
 
 
 
 
Alex had also noticed the winged statue in the director’s office. He was hoping they might be induced to offer it to us. So he decided to provide the opportunity when he next saw Viscenda, which was outside on the deck. We were sitting out with a couple of the herdsmen and a teen worker, enjoying an unseasonably warm afternoon, when she came in from a tour of the greenhouses. He commented on how beautiful it was. And that the figure appeared to be a goddess. “I’ve noticed that most of the rooms have a sketch of her.”
Viscenda glanced at the teen, inviting him to answer. “She is Allyra,” he said. “Not a goddess.”
“At least,” added Turam, who’d just come out behind us, “not in the usual sense.”
“Who is she, then?”
Turam explained that she represented free thought. Free inquiry.
“In her presence,” said Viscenda, “no dogma is safe. In her time, she stood almost alone against those who claimed to know how we should behave, how we should live, and who should be running things. She is the relentless enemy of certainty.”
“She’s a mythical figure, of course,” said Turam. “But she represents what the community stands for.”
Nobody suggested that we could keep her, but when we were alone, Alex commented that he thought the seed had been planted.
 
It wasn’t easy to sleep on Echo III. The planet turned too slowly, so the nights and days were too long, and we never really made the adjustment. I was falling asleep after dinner, and wide-awake before the sun came up. The following day I was asleep by midafternoon, and awake a couple of hours after midnight. The community had a system for keeping time, and they had windup clocks, but I was never sure what time it was.
We were both asleep in the middle of the afternoon when Belle called.
“I didn’t want to take a chance on waking Alex,”
she told me,
“because I know he’s still in some pain.”
“Thanks, Belle. What do you have?”
“The crater Alex asked about?”
“Yes. You found it?”
“It’s almost halfway around the world from your present location. It is at thirty-five degrees north latitude, in a jungle area. It looks recent. Probably made within the last half century.”
“How big?”
“Its diameter is approximately five and a half kilometers. And it’s deep. Impact must have been severe. The surrounding jungle shows the effects for hundreds of kilometers.”
“Okay. Thanks, Belle.”
“You think Rachel was responsible?”
“One way or another.”
“Do you wish me to resume my prior orbit?”
“Yes. Please.”
I told Alex when he woke. He made no effort to sit up but simply lay there, staring at the ceiling. “Poor woman,” he said.
I never really became accustomed to the food. I couldn’t forget that the staples had once been part of a living animal. One night they served something akin to a pork-and-beef mix with a choice of vegetables and fruit. And some bread, which, mixed with their jam, was excellent. So I filled up on bread and desserts, which consisted of a variety of baked goods, with flavors I couldn’t identify. I think I put on three pounds the first full day we were there. Which, on top of the other seventeen, was just what I needed.
We’d seen some suspicion among the community members when we first arrived, as if we were dangerous in some unspecified way, and I don’t think the talking jewelry helped negate that. But by the end of the fourth day, most of them seemed to have decided we could be trusted. If we spoke a language nobody knew, we were nonetheless obviously human. And if we rode a ship that floated on air, it was at least no longer in the skies. In fact, it had crashed. And that, too, maybe, helped get us accepted. We were vulnerable. The young ones no longer hid behind their mothers. The adults said hello and even occasionally stopped to talk.
 
“How long,” we asked Turam, “have you been on this world?”
He seemed confused by the question. So we tried again. “When did humans first arrive here?”
“Here?”
He looked around. “You mean in Kamarasco?”
“What’s Kamarasco?”
“It’s
this
area. Where we are now.”
“No, no. When did you first arrive on this world?”
He smiled, as if we were playing a joke. “Is that a religious question?”
“I’m serious.”
“Alex, we’ve always been on this world. What are we talking about?”
Alex looked delighted. They’d been here so long they’d lost track of who they really were. “I wonder if there’s a possibility,” I asked Alex, “that they really
are
aliens?”
“What do you mean?”
“That they
did
originate here. Is there any reason there couldn’t be a second human race? Independent of us?”
“Probably not.” And he lit up at the suggestion. “What a discovery
that
would be.”
Alex asked how far back their history went.
“Several thousand years,” Turam said.
“What kind of world do the earliest records describe?”
“It’s hard to be certain. To separate myth from history. The ancient accounts talk about a golden age. People living for centuries. Living in palaces. Food was plentiful. Some of it seems to be true. There are still ruins nobody can explain.”
“So what happened?”
“There really
is
no reliable historical account. The world fell apart. Some of the religious groups will tell you that we offended God. People got away from Him and He simply shut us down.
See then how well you survive without Me.
”
“Is that a quote?”
“From the
Vanova
.” He saw that we had no idea what the
Vanova
was. “The sacred scriptures. And I can see the doubt in your eyes. A lot of people think we had a higher level of technology in ancient times. Who knows what the truth was? But, however that might have been, whatever the level of technology we might have possessed in earlier eras, we had a good life until recently. I don’t think we appreciated how well off we were until the Dark Times came. Now—” Turam sighed. “Today we are only an echo of what we were.”

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