so intriguing. James Salomon and Tory Kildaire discovered the first buildings on the fourth moon of Beta Orianis Three, and there have never been any verifiable artifacts uncovered in what you and I would call 'normal' conditions. Virtually every find has been on airless or near-airless bodies. Pota and I have excavated over a dozen sites, doing the Class One studies, and they're all like this one.'
Tomas glanced out the viewport again. 'Surely that implies that they were,'
'Space-going, yes,' Pota supplied, nodding her head so that her gray-brown curls vibrated. 'I don't think there's any doubt of it. Although we've never found any trace of whatever it was they used to move them from colony to colony, but that isn't the real mystery.'
Braddon gestured agreement. 'The real mystery is that they never seem to have set up anything permanent. They never seem to have spent more than a few decades in any one place. No one knows why they left, or why they came here in the first place.'
Tomas laughed. 'They seem to have hopped planets as often as you two,' he said. 'Perhaps they were simply doing what you are doing, excavating an earlier culture and following it across the stars.'
Braddon exclaimed in mock horror. 'Please!' he said. 'Don't even think that!'
Pota only laughed. 'If they had been, we'd have found signs of that,' she told both of them, tapping Braddon's knee in playful admonition. 'After all, as bleak as these places are, they preserve things wonderfully. If the EsKays had been archeologists, we'd have found the standard tools of the trade. We break and wear out brushes and digging tools all the time, and just leave them in our discard piles. They would have done the same. No matter how you try to alter it, there are only so many ways you can make a brush or a trowel.'
'There would be bad castings,' Tia piped up. 'You throw out bad castings all the time, Mum; if they were archeologists, we'd find a pile of bad castings somewhere.'
'Bless me, Tia's right,' Braddon nodded. 'There you are, Tomas; irrefutable proof.'
'Good enough for me,' Tomas replied, good naturedly.
'And if that idea was true, there also ought to be signs of the earlier culture, shouldn't there?' Moira asked. 'And you've never found anything mixed in with the EsKay artifacts.'
'Exactly so,' Pota replied, and smiled. 'And so, Tomas, you see how easily an archeologist's theories can be disposed of.'
'Then I'm going to be thankful to be Moira's partner,' Tomas said gracefully, 'and leave all the theorizing to better heads than mine.'
After a while, the talk turned to the doings of the Institute, and both professional and personal news of Pota and Braddon's friends and rivals. Tia glanced at the clock again; it was long past time when her parents would have gone back to the dig. They must have decided to take the rest of the day off.
But these weren't subjects that interested her, especially not when the talk went into politics, both of the Institute and the Central Worlds government. She took her bear, politely excused herself, and went back to her room.
She hadn't had a chance to really look him over when Tomas gave him to her. The last time Moira had come to visit, she'd told Tia some stories about what going into the shell-person program had been like, for unlike most shell-persons, she hadn't been popped into her shell until she'd been nearly four. Until that time, there had been some hope that there would have been a palliative for her particular congenital condition, premature aging that had caused her body to resemble a sixty-year-old woman at the age of three. But there was no cure, and at four, her family finally admitted it. Into the shell she went, and since there was nothing wrong with her very fine brain, she soon caught up and passed by many of her classmates that had been in their shells since birth.
But one of the toys she'd had, her very favorite, in fact, had been a stuffed teddy bear. She'd made up adventures for Ivan the Bearable, sending him in a troika across the windswept steppes of Novi Gagarin, and she'd told Tia some of those stories. That, and the Zen of Pooh book Moira brought her, had solidified a longing she hadn't anticipated.
For Tia had been entranced by the tales and by Pooh, and had wanted a bear like Moira's. A simple toy that did nothing, with no intel-chips; a toy that couldn't talk, or teach, or walk. Something that was just there to be hugged and cuddled; something to listen when she didn't want anything else to overhear.
Moira had promised. Moira didn't forget
Tia closed the door to her room and paged the AI. 'Socrates, would you open a link to Moira in here for me, please?' she asked. Moira would be perfectly capable of following the conversation in the other room and still talk to her in here, too.
'Tia, do you really like your present?' Moira asked anxiously, as soon as the link had been established.
'He's wonderful,' Tia answered firmly. 'I've even got a name for him. Theodore Edward Bear.'
