were the structures the probe had filmed on its fly-by. There were perhaps thirty constructions, small square cabins built of timber, in two orderly lines in the centre of the valley. To one side, overlooking the settlement, was a peculiar rise in the plain, an irregular hump like a low earthwork or tumulus.
“There doesn’t seem to be anyone at home,” Bennett said. “Unless they retire early.”
“We’ll go in with the transporter,” Mackendrick said. “As a precaution, keep your rifles at the ready.”
Bennett raised his pulser as Mackendrick powered up the transporter. They moved slowly down the incline, passing the earthwork and approaching the first of the cabins at a crawl. Mackendrick cut the engine and, in the sudden silence, they sat without a word and stared down at the settlement of crudely built huts.
It occurred to Bennett that the aliens, if they were also responsible for the settlement, had certainly devolved from the mighty race which had constructed the columned temple or museum.
“Okay,” Mackendrick said in a hushed voice. “We’ll get out and walk in together.”
Bennett jumped from the cab and clutched his rifle, apprehension creating a tightness in his chest. With Ten Lee and Mackendrick he walked slowly towards the first timber cabin. It appeared, he thought, little different from a crude shack in backwoods Oregon.
The first cabin was clearly derelict. The door hung on one hinge, and likewise the shutters on the glassless window. Purple grass and a form of bind-weed had climbed the outer walls. Bennett kicked open the hanging door and peered into the dim interior. The little light cast by the setting gas giant revealed bare boards and a broken chair; the sound of scurrying suggested that the cabin’s only occupants were small animals.
Bennett backed out, shaking his head. “No one at home, Mack.”
They moved to the next cabin in line, identical in design to the first and, it seemed, all the others. This one was empty even of broken furniture. They conferred outside the door.
“How long do you think they’ve been deserted?” Mackendrick asked. “Fifteen, twenty years?”
“Or fifty, a hundred?” Bennett added. “Much of the timber’s rotting, but we’re on an alien world. How long does wood take to rot on Penumbra? It’s hard to tell how long they’ve been empty.”
“Do you think the same beings built the columned structure and these shacks?” Ten Lee asked.
“If the ruins are at least ten thousand years old,” Bennett said, “a race can go a long way downhill in that time. They entered a dark age, lost their collective ability to design great architecture—or their need to build it—and resorted to these.”
“Okay,” Mackendrick said. “Let’s split up and search each cabin. If you find anything, shout.”
Bennett moved to the third shack, ducking past what remained of the door. He looked around the single room. The skeleton of a bunk bed occupied one corner. There was no sign of personal effects or possessions of any kind, no tools or utensils that might have been left behind when their erstwhile owners moved on.
He walked from cabin to cabin along the row, finding much the same in each: the odd scrap of broken furniture, or nothing at all. In the last cabin he recognised the shape of an infant’s cot, made from the same timber as was used on the huts, rotted through and lying on its side. It spoke to him more eloquently of a lost race than had the statues in the ruin, carved with care and skill for posterity. He considered the similarities in such diverse races. He had travelled thousands of light years to the Rim, and here was something constructed for an alien infant, recognisably a cot.
He was stepping from the cabin, about to find Mackendrick and suggest they pitch camp for the night, when Ten Lee’s muffled voice sounded from the second row of cabins. He walked around the shack and looked up and down the length of what once might have been the main street. Ten Lee was a tiny figure standing outside the last cabin in the row, waving frantically.
“Joshua! In here!”
Mackendrick appeared from a nearby hut and hurried over to Ten Lee. She was leaning against the jamb of the door, wearing an expression of shock.
“Ten?” Bennett took her shoulder. “Ten, are you okay?”
She shook her head. “I honestly don’t know.”
“What is it?” Mackendrick snapped.
She indicated over her shoulder. “In there. On the far wall. I don’t
Bennett hurried into the shack, Mackendrick behind him. The last light of Tenebrae sent a pale searchlight through the window and illuminated a square patch on the wall, and in the illuminated square was a picture, an old pix crudely framed with four lengths of the ubiquitous timber.
“I don’t believe it,” Mackendrick whispered.
Bennett reached out, lifted the pix from the wall and carried it outside so that the brighter light might confirm what he was seeing. He sat on the step, Ten Lee and Mackendrick beside him. He understood, now, Ten’s strange reaction. He was experiencing it himself. The pix showed a view, faded with time, of the Eiffel Tower.
“Paris,” Mackendrick said, needlessly. “Paris, France.”
Bennett turned the pix over, as if looking for something to confirm its authenticity. He laughed. What confirmation did he need? He was holding—there was no doubt about it—a pix of the Eiffel Tower.
Even though he knew it was impossible.
Ten Lee, sharper-eyed than Bennett, pointed to a detail in the pix, a tiny automobile beneath the tower. “Look, isn’t that an electric Volvo? That model went out with the ark. It must be a hundred years old.”
Speechless, they stared at the pix of Paris a century old.
“Okay,” Bennett said. “Silly question: how the hell did it get here?”
Mackendrick said, “Let’s go through the cabins again. Check everything. There must be something else that might explain what the hell’s going on here.”
For the second time they searched the deserted settlement.
Bennett had no idea what made him look up, back towards the transporter and beyond. He stepped from the first cabin, having found nothing other than the broken chair, and glanced at the distant mountains, then the transporter reflecting warped highlights of the gas giant. Behind the vehicle was the long, low rise of the earthwork. His heart hammering, hardly daring to hope that he was right, he set off up the hillside. Mackendrick and Ten Lee were going through the second row, and he didn’t want to alert them in case he was mistaken.
He passed the transporter and ran the last fifty metres. The ground underfoot became soft, waterlogged. The hill rose before him, the purple grass covering the shape of something long and low, and strangely familiar.
He knelt and tore away a handful of purple grass, revealing a section of silver metal.
He stood and walked along the length of the sunken structure. He pulled at the vegetation, which came away easily, and peered down. This section of the upper bodywork had been removed, no doubt in the process of cannibalisation, and only the struts and spars of the framework remained. He climbed down, using the frame of the skeletal ship as a ladder, and found himself in the hold of a colony liner, a vast central chamber like the nave of a cathedral, illuminated by the pale light of Tenebrae falling through the rent he had made high above.
He stepped forward, moving down the length of the ship. He imagined its final descent, the inability of this cumbersome, clumsy craft to negotiate the storms that lashed the planet. He saw it ploughing into the plain, nosing up a bow wave of soil. He considered the terror of the thousands of colonists as they imagined death on an alien world so far from home.
There was very little of the ship left other than its shell and framework, and much of that had been removed, no doubt taken to help with the construction of a more permanent settlement elsewhere. The settlement of cabins had been a temporary measure, makeshift accommodation for colonists while they dismantled and transported parts of the ship to a more viable site. This completed, they had departed the cabins, leaving only broken furniture, and the tantalising pix of the Eiffel Tower. And over the years the starship had slowly submerged into the bog, and the vegetation of Penumbra had gone to work and reclaimed the land ploughed by the starship.
He paused beside a flange of outer panelling that had come loose from the framework of the flank and fallen. On the panel, excoriated by its transit through the void and faded by the storms, he could just make out the red, white and blue logo of the Francois Aeronautics Line.
He wondered how it had found itself so far off course, on the Rim of the galaxy instead of in the safe cone of inhabited space known as the Expansion. Unless, of course, they had set out deliberately to explore this far afield. It would be just like the French, with a gesture combining bravery and bravura, to flout convention and head for the Rim.
He considered the events of the short day, the discovery of the ruins and the wreck of the liner. It was ironic
