Wasteland of flint

particles. Almost imperceptibly, the satellite began to slow, dragged by an invisible fringe of the ocean of air surrounding the planet. Responding to the commands arriving over the telemetry link, the peapod made a series of minute adjustments to its orientation.

'Synch six to seven…' Maggie began to grin, foreteeth and sidemolars showing in a fierce display. '…and stabilize image.' She tapped another patiently waiting glyph. The video displays from all seven peapods collapsed into one single image. Palenque-side comp picked up the dataflows and began to fuse them into one high-resolution feed. Magdalena waited anxiously, a fully extended striking claw clicking against the front of her cutting teeth.

The comp interped and interped again, trying to adjust for differences in the rate of flow caused by the angular distance between the ship and the peapods scattered around Ephesus. Hating the concession, Maggie stepped down the level of resulting detail an order of magnitude. Palenque comp chirped happily in response.

'Now,' Magdalena growled happily, 'let's look in on the crash site.'

The multilensed eye in the sky shifted, concentrating on a barren valley near the northern ice cap. Magdalena was grudgingly satisfied with the resolution coming back out of the cribbed-together system, but the satellites were responding far too slowly to satisfy her impatient nature.

'Stupid tree-climbing machines…' When all seven peapods had focused on the crash area, Magdalena realized both Gretchen and the old crow had left the area. 'Now where did they go?' She cleared the peapod documentation out of the secondary panes and brought up Russovsky's transmission logs and a plot of her flight path. 'Hmm…'

The heaters continued to glow, surrounding the Hesht in a warm cocoon. Her face shimmered in the constantly changing light from the panels as she worked, long into shipsnight. By shipsdawn, the tired Hesht was staring at a grainy picture of a mountainside. The upper wings of two ultralights gleamed in late-afternoon sunlight and Maggie could make out the blurry shapes of Gretchen and the Mйxica talking as they loaded gear into their Midge s.

Mons Prion, Northern Hemisphere, Ephesus III

Hummingbird fiddled with his breather and goggles, trying to get them to lie comfortably over his nose and ears. Gretchen, passing by with the last of her personal gear, threw the comp and sensor pad into the front seat of the Gagarin.

'Hold still,' she said over the comm, her own face mostly masked by the tail of her kaffiyeh. 'There's a trick to it…there. How is that? Better?'

The nauallis nodded, finding the new arrangement suitable. For a moment, Gretchen thought he might actually thank her, but he did not. She was not surprised.

'So – you feel comfortable leaving this place now?'

'Yes.' Hummingbird had spent the day sitting cross-legged in the cave, watching the passage down into the cavern. 'We will follow the course of Russovsky's last flight.'

'Sure.' Gretchen peered at the nauallis curiously. 'You haven't seen anything? Felt anything?'

Hummingbird shook his head. 'We have a long way to go, Anderssen. We shouldn't waste any more time here.'

'Really.' Gretchen felt a cold, sharp anger boiling up in her stomach. With an almost physical effort, she forced her voice to remain level. 'Aren't you going to ask me how I could find Russovsky's stone – when you couldn't? Or do you know already?' Her eyes narrowed. 'You do know. You even know why these things are happening!'

Hummingbird laughed in relief, an abrupt, unexpected sound. 'Know? I know many things, Anderssen, but I've not the slightest idea why the cave made a copy of Russovsky or kept repeating itself!'

Oddly, as the nauallis was speaking, Gretchen became aware of a queer flutter in his voice, as if two voices were speaking at once – different voices – and they were contradicting each other.

'You're lying.' Hummingbird became very still. Gretchen looked around, entirely startled by her own statement and then she advanced on him. 'You are lying and I…I can tell.'

'Could you?' Hummingbird stirred, regarding her with a fierce, sudden intensity. 'Very well – how did you find the stone in the dust?'

Faced with the question she'd wanted to hear all day, Gretchen felt entirely deflated. She was sure the nauallis already had some esoteric answer for her, and she realized she didn't care. 'Never mind. Our real problem is what happened in the cave. There is no reason for an organism in this environment to waste energy making copies of things. At least – no reason I can think of.' She drew back her hood, so the Nбhuatl could see the fierce expression on her face. 'Why don't you fill me in? Before we stumble into the next situation, and one of us is hurt, or killed, by my ignorance.'

Hummingbird's lips had compressed to a tight line and his eyes grew dark and guarded. 'There are secrets which cannot be revealed…'

Gretchen's face contorted into a snarl. A hand groped at her belt for a wrench, a hammer, a gun…

'…so I will not tell you everything I know.' Hummingbird said firmly. 'But I will tell you enough. But first, think about what you did in the cavern. You've had a certain kind of training – from school, from university, from your parents, from the work of your hands – and you're skilled in a way of seeing.' He paused, regarding her. 'Did those skills show you the stone in the dust?'

Gretchen became aware her mouth was very dry. She licked her lips and took a drink from the recycler tube in her mask. Hummingbird's gaze did not waver or look away. Gretchen started to become nervous. 'I…no, no I don't think they did. I didn't see the stone, not with my eyes. There was only an itch. Just…something was out of place.'

The nauallis nodded minutely. He seemed to gather himself, jaw tightening, brow creasing. For a very long time, Hummingbird said nothing, staring at her with an unwavering expression. Just as Anderssen – tired of standing on a windy ledge while the day inexorably passed – was about to speak, he blinked and said:

'Think of a river, broad and running swift. The bottom is smooth sand, the banks thick with algae. There is nothing to disturb the current, the surface is placid. If you hover above the clear water, you can see into the depths, pick out details of patterns in the sand. Perhaps there is seagrass waving in the current. Put your hand in the water and you are surprised by the strength of the water – but now the surface is distorted, confused. A wake trails behind your hand and suddenly the water is no longer clear. Such an effect is obvious, even to the unwary.

'Consider a boulder, submerged and invisible to a man standing on the bank. The river may seem placid, but the current is distorted. A boat on the river may strike the rock before anyone notices anything amiss. The current may twist across the stone, eddying, rushing faster or slower. Now, in the constrained universe beneath the glassy surface, there may be places where the seagrass cannot hold, or places where an eddy falls, leaving a thick stand of growth.'

Hummingbird made a motion with his hand, indicating the landscape around them.

'What you see here – the ruined surface, tortured mountains, desolate plains – is not the whole of this world. There are submerged currents. There is something here, something hidden. There is an influence, like my hidden boulder, which directs, confines, shapes all that happens on this poor, broken orb. We felt an echo in the cave -'

Gretchen felt her pulse trip a little faster. She blurted, 'The First Sun people! Something interrupted their labors! They fled, didn't they? What…what did they leave behind?'

'Do not presume they fled,' Hummingbird replied, raising his eyes to the sky. His goggles polarized into a shining mirror, reducing the sun to two blazing points. 'Have you thought about the power of the First Sun people? They bestrode the stars as gods – we have seen the scraps and ruins they leave behind – and we are ants creeping across the floor of a deserted house. Our ships have visited six hundred worlds, only the tiniest fraction of the suns we can see with the unaided eye. Yet there are wonders which beggar our knowledge and skill even in such a tiny space. Have you thought what might lie beyond the rim of our domain?'

'Hasn't everyone? Every undergraduate class debates this in first-term xenoarcheology!' Gretchen began to feel the excitement of curiosity stir and tried to keep her voice level. 'Where did they come from, the giants of the First Sun? Where did they go? Why aren't they here now?'