Authors: Eric Brown
“Like
I said, it gives their life meaning. It’s responsible for their being so good,
being so anti-materialist. They live at one with their world.” Carrelli
shrugged. “By comparison, what have we done, other than wreck our own planet?”
Kaluchek
smiled. “You saying we should live like Buddhists and venerate the Builders?”
Carrelli
laughed. “Of course not. We should live lives of conservation and venerate our
eventual homeworld.”
“Sounds
fine to me.”
Watcher
Pharan advanced towards them between the lines of his acolytes. He paused
before the great snuffling nose of the sharl and looked up at Carrelli with his
blinking pink eyes. He spoke quickly, gesturing with his thin arm towards the
ship.
Carrelli
replied, bowing her head.
She
turned to Kaluchek and said, “Pharan says he will escort us as far as the ship.
We will enter by ourselves. Protocol, apparently, does not allow for us to be
accompanied when we approach the cask of the Sleeper.”
Kaluchek
dismounted, sliding down the toughened hide of the sharl and landing on the
golden moss. With Carrelli beside her, she followed Watcher Pharan towards the
stairway leading up to the ship, passing down the aisle of twittering acolytes.
Pharan
stopped at the foot of the stairs, turned and gestured for them to proceed.
Carrelli spoke to him quickly, nodded and climbed. Kaluchek followed, the
timber stairs creaking beneath their weight.
Behind
them, Pharan and the acolytes started up a piccolo piping, filling the forest
with its joyous sound.
As
they reached the top of the stairway, they were dwarfed by the ship’s great
curving flank rising above them, its fire-blackened panels skeined with vines.
The arched entrance hatch, three times their size, gave on to a great cavernous
hall, which might have been the cargo hold.
They
paused on the threshold, overcome with the size of the ship and its cathedral
silence. The baroque design of its exterior was repeated within, with no
straight lines in evidence, all angles rounded. It was not what Kaluchek had
expected from a spaceship, after the starkly functional architecture of the
Lovelock.
Here the lavish whorls that decorated the bulkheads, the tubular
design of the corridors leading off, struck her as excessive, the product of an
aesthetic entirely alien.
She
wished Joe were with her to experience this incredible place. She could fully
understand why the Caliquans considered it so hallowed.
Carrelli
glanced at her. “This way?” the medic suggested, gesturing down a corridor that
led in the direction of the nose-cone.
They
moved across the floor of the hold, their steps echoing around them, and
entered the tubular passage. There was something intestinal in its refusal to
adhere to straight lines; it seemed to meander through the ship, rising and
falling on its way forward. After ten metres the light from outside gave way to
shadow, and Carrelli illuminated their way with the flashlight of her
atmosphere suit.
The
curving walls of the corridor were decorated with the same whorls and curlicues
as the hold, less a series of deliberate patterns than what appeared to be an
accidental arrangement or natural designs, like frost patterns.
Ahead,
the corridor lightened. Carrelli stopped abruptly, and Kaluchek almost collided
with her. “What?”
“I
think this is it,” Carrelli said in a whisper, switching off her wrist-mounted
flashlight and pointing ahead.
They
were on the lip of what appeared to be a great sunken amphitheatre, illuminated
by the slanting rays of the setting sun, which poured in through a 180-degree
arrangement of viewscreens.
Cradles
hung from the domed ceiling, their material frayed and rotted with the passage
of centuries. What might have been banks of com-terminals, more like the dusty
grey cases of giant beetles, circled the flight-deck beneath the viewscreens.
An absolute silence hung over the place, almost forbidding them to defile it.
Kaluchek was aware of the rasp of her breathing.
Carrelli
pointed, as if not wanting to spoil the perfection of the silence.
In
the centre of the flight-deck, below them as they stood on the threshold, was a
raised plinth and upon it a long cask or catafalque. It was, as Kaluchek had
expected, nothing like their own cold sleep units. As if intended as the
centrepiece of some alien cathedral, it was bulbous and decorated with a
bas-relief of abstract design, like Mandelbrot fractals made three-dimensional.
Carrelli
stepped down into the well of the amphitheatre. Kaluchek followed.
Like
pilgrims they approached the cask and climbed the steps of the plinth. At the
top they paused and gazed down at the catafalque. Carrelli reached out, traced
the patterns with long fingers. Kaluchek did the same, the rococo metal
surprisingly warm beneath her fingertips.
Carrelli
moved around the cask, trailing fingers as if searching for some mechanism
whereby to open it. Kaluchek looked for anything that might indicate an
operating interface, technology she might recognise. There seemed to be no
heat-responsive sensors, nothing as crass as touchpads or verniers.
She
looked around her, at the rearing domed ceiling of the flight-deck, and
wondered at the creatures that had operated this bizarre craft.
Across
the cask, Carrelli touched something. Kaluchek cried out as the lid of the cask
cracked. She stepped back in alarm, almost losing her footing on the top step
of the plinth and tumbling down.
She
reached forward, gripped the rim of the cask, and stared into its interior as
the lid slid back along its length.
Carrelli
looked up and across at her. “That’s your answer,” she whispered. “That’s why
the Builders never came for the Sleeper.”
Kaluchek
stared down at the collapsed bones on a bed of dust, a neat configuration that
illustrated the shape of a tall biped, with more ribs than a human, thicker
limb bones and a great domed skull with a jutting nose and jaw-line.
“System
malfunction,” Carrelli said, “or perhaps it succumbed to its injuries, despite
the Caliquans’ ministrations.”
Kaluchek
shook her head. “What do we tell them? I mean, if they find out their revered
Sleeper is dead...”
“I
don’t know,” Carrelli said, surprising Kaluchek. The cool Italian medic usually
had an answer for everything.
Carrelli
stepped down from the plinth and moved around the perimeter of the flight-deck,
examining the hunched arrangement of the com-terminals.
Kaluchek
joined her. “What are you looking for?”
Carrelli
glanced up. “I’m not sure. Some means of accessing information, however that
might be achieved. It might be a case of touching everything and hoping—as I
did up there.”
Kaluchek
nodded. “Aliens do things differently,” she murmured.
Carrelli
smiled and continued her search.
Kaluchek
moved around the flight-deck in the opposite direction from Carrelli,
counter-clockwise. She ran her hand over the bulging surfaces, furred with
centuries of dust. She recognised nothing similar to any smartware systems she
had worked with; for all she knew, the globular consoles might have been
examples of extraterrestrial art.
She
paused to look out over the forest. The sun had gone down, and the light was
aqueous now, golden green. She could see Watcher Pharan and his acolytes seated
around the foot of the stairway in a semicircle, heads bowed.
She
wondered suddenly what Joe was doing, and desperately wanted to be with him.
She
reached out to touch a protuberance on the surface of a console—which looked
like a toad on a rock, she thought—and immediately pulled her hand away,
shrieking with alarm and examining her tingling fingertips.
“Sissy,
what did you do?”
Kaluchek
turned to Carrelli, and was amazed to see something hanging in the air between
them. She could see Carrelli through it, the Italian’s expression mirroring her
own, open-mouthed with surprise.
The
image was indistinct, like a poor holovision, but Kaluchek could make out what
appeared to be a three-dimensional representation of the helix, perhaps as tall
as a human, floating in the air. It turned as she watched, a complex rosary of
worlds spiralling around a central, burning sun.
Involuntarily,
she stepped forward and reached out. As expected, her fingers passed through
the fourth tier. She told herself that she felt a slight tingle, but nothing
more.
As
if in a daze, Carrelli moved around the rotating helix. “Some kind of... map,” Carrelli
said. She stepped forward, reached out.
Instantly,
her head snapped back and she cried out as if in pain. Instead of retreating,
however, she took another step forward, then another, passing through the tiers
until she was standing inside the spiralling helix. Her torso took the place of
the sun, which continued to burn, filling her with radiance.
“Gina!”
Kaluchek called out.
Carrelli
opened her eyes. She seemed to be in rapture. She reached out, touching the
tiers, her fingers playing an arpeggio across the span of worlds.
“Magnifico”
she sang.
She
turned, her fingers running up and down the spiral, her head flung back.
Kaluchek
retreated, fetched up against the console with a start and stared. “Gina?”
As
if from a great distance, Carrelli replied, “I’m fine, Sissy. More than fine.
I’m... I’m accessing information... it’s random, patchy. Corrupted. The ship
crash-landed here three thousand years ago. I can’t control what I’m finding
out—I just accept what I receive! Oh, the wonder...”
“How
come you...?” Kaluchek began. “I felt a jolt, nothing more.”
Rapturously,
Carrelli shook her head. “My augments... I seem to be picking things up through
my smartware implants.” She closed her eyes, flung back her head.
When
she opened her eyes again, she was staring at Kaluchek. “Enough, Sissy! I’ve
had enough. Can you... whatever you did to activate it, turn it off...”
Kaluchek
found the reptilian protuberance, reached out and once more felt the jolt. She
turned quickly. The image of the helix flickered out of existence, and
Carrelli, suddenly divested of the wondrous image, slumped to the deck.
Kaluchek
rushed over to her, cradled Carrelli in her arms and checked her pulse. She was
alive, breathing normally. Kaluchek’s panic subsided. She wondered what she had
felt, then: alarm for Carrelli that she might be dead, or fear of being left
alone aboard an alien ship in an alien rainforest. As Carrelli’s eyes flickered
open and she smiled up at her, Kaluchek felt a quick hot flush of shame.
“You
okay?” she asked redundantly.
“Fine.
I’m fine. God, the... sensation. I don’t know... I’ve never felt anything like
it before. I was... I was
flooded
with information. Much of it...” she
shook her head. “It was meaningless, just beyond the threshold of my
comprehension. But some of it...” She shook her head and laughed aloud.
“Some
of it...?”
Carrelli
moved away from her, sat cross-legged on the deck and hung her head, as if
recovering from shock. She looked up suddenly, smiling. “Sissy, the image of
the helix is a kind of registry, an index.”
Kaluchek
echoed the word.
“When
I touched each world...” Carrelli went on, “I don’t know how, but I could
access information about it, technical information, its status—things like its
atmospheric constituents, mass, gravity... I even,” she laughed “in some cases
I even knew what beings inhabited the worlds, but the knowledge was like a
dream, the information fleeting, elusive. Then there was more...” She stopped
speaking, hung her head and touched her temples with graceful fingers.
When
she looked up again, she seemed to have calmed herself, controlled her
breathing. She said, “Towards the end, I learned about the ship itself, its
pilot. The Sleeper was an engineer, one of a team whose job it was to service
the helix.” She screwed up her eyes, as if fighting for recall. “They were... I
can’t recall their names, this race of engineers, but they weren’t the
Builders. They were... sub-contractors, if you like. They worked for the
Builders.”
“And
the Builders?” Kaluchek asked. “Did you learn anything about the Builders?”
“I...
I learned that they still inhabit a world on the helix,” she said in little
more than a whisper. “The Builders... that’s not what they call themselves, but
that’s how my smartware translated their name... they inhabit a world on the
fourth tier. That is, on the tier above this one. They are an ancient race, the
oldest of all the known races in the galaxy. They are... I received the
impression that they are... perhaps dormant, or suspended, or in some form of
hibernation. They are so old that their flesh is...” She shook her head in
frustration, “I didn’t understand what I was receiving, but I had the
impression that they were in hibernation because their flesh was weak, whatever
that might mean.”