tonnes of seamount and frozen ocean. No matter; Ezr had seen large-scale engineering before. This smaller landing could be the history maker….
The consensus imagery on the passenger deck was a natural view. The lands streaming silently past below were shades of gray, patches of white sometimes faintly glistening. Maybe it was just a trick of the imagination, but Ezr thought he could see faint shadows cast by OnOff. They conjured a topography of crags and mountain peaks, whiteness sliding off into dark pits. He thought he could see concentric arcs outlining some of the farther peaks: pressure ridges where the ocean froze around the rock?
“Hey, at least put an altimeter grid on it.” Benny Wen’s voice came from over his shoulder, and a faint reddish mesh overlaid the landscape. The grid pretty much matched his intuition about shadows and snow.
Ezr waved away the red tracery. “When the star is On, there’s millions of Spiders down there. You’d think there’d be some sign of civilization.”
Benny snickered. “What do you expect to see with a natural view? Most of what is sticking up is mountaintops. And farther down is covered by meters of oxy-nitrogen snow.” A full terrestrial atmosphere froze down to about ten meters of airsnow—if it was evenly distributed. Many of the most likely city sites—harbors, river joins—were under dozens of meters of the cold stuff. All their previous landings had been relatively high up, in what were probably mining towns or primitive settlements. It wasn’t until just before the Emergents arrived that their current destination had been properly understood.
The dark lands marched on below. There were even things like glacier streams. Ezr wondered how they had time to form. Maybe they were air-ice glaciers?
“Lord of All Trade, will you look at that!” Benny pointed off to the left: a reddish glow near the horizon. Benny did a zoom. The light was still small, sliding quickly out of their field of view. It really did look like a fire, though it changed shape rather slowly. Something was blocking the view now, and Ezr had the brief impression of opacity rising skyward from the light. “I’ve got a better view from high orbit,” came a voice from farther down the aisle, Crewleader Diem. He did not forward the picture. “It’s a volcano. It just lit off.”
Ezr followed the image as it fell behind their point of view. The rising darkness, that must be a geyser of lava—or perhaps just air and water—spewing into the spaces above it. “That’s a first,” said Ezr. The planet’s core was cold and dead, though there were several magma melts in what passed for a mantle. “Everyone seems so sure that the Spiders are all in corpsicle state; what if some of them are actually keeping warm near things like that?”
“Not likely. We’ve done really detailed IR surveys. We could spot any settlements around a hot spot. Besides, the Spiders just inventedradio before this latest dark. They’re in no position to be crawling around out-of- doors just yet.”
This conclusion was based on a few Msecs of recon and some plausible life-chemistry assumptions. “I guess.” He watched the reddish glow until it slipped beyond the horizon. Then there were more exciting things directly below and ahead. Their landing ellipse carried them smoothly downward, still weightless. This was a full- sized world, but there would be no flying around in atmosphere. They were moving at eight thousand meters per second, just a couple of thousand meters above the ground. He had an impression of mountains climbing toward them, reaching out. Ridgeline after ridgeline whipped past, nearer and nearer. Behind him, Benny was making little uncomfortable noises, his usual chitchat temporarily interrupted. Ezr gasped as the last ridgeline flashed by them, so close he wondered it didn’t clip the lander’s dorsum.Talk about the transfer ellipse tohell.
Then the main jet flared ahead of them.
It took them almost 30Ksec to climb down from the point that Jimmy Diem had selected for the lander. The inconvenience was not frivolous. Their perch was partway up a mountainside but quite free of ice and airsnow. Their goal was at the bottom of a narrow valley. By rights, the valley floor should have been under a hundred meters of airsnow. By some unexpected fluke of topography and climate, there was less than half a meter. And almost hidden beneath the overhang of the valley walls was the largest collection of intact buildings they had found so far. Chances were good that this was an entrance to one of the Spiders’ largest hibernation caves, and perhaps a city during OnOff’s warm time. Whatever was learned here should be important. Under the joint agreement, it was all being piped back to the Emergents….
Ezr hadn’t heard anything about the outcome of the Trading Committee meeting. Diem seemed to be doing everything possible to disguise this visit from the locals, just as the Emergents should expect. Their landing point would be covered with an avalanche shortly after they departed. Even their footprints were to be carefully erased (though that should scarcely be necessary).
By coincidence OnOff was hanging near the zenith when they reached the valley floor. In the “sunny season” this would be high noon. Now, well, the OnOff star looked like some dim reddish moon, half a degree across. The surface was mottled, like oil on a drop of water. Without display amplification, OnOff’s light was just bright enough to show their surroundings.
The landing party walked down some kind of central avenue, five suited figures and one come-along walking machine. Tiny puffs of vapor sputtered around their boots when they walked through drifts of airsnow and the volatiles came in contact with the less well insulated fabric of their coveralls. When they stopped for long, it was important not to be in deep snow, else they were quickly surrounded by sublimation mist. Every ten meters, they set down a seismo sensor or a thumper. When they got the whole pattern in place, they would have a good picture of any nearby caverns. More important for this landing, they would have a good idea what lay inside these buildings. Their big goal: written materials, pictures. Finding a children’s illustrated reader would mean certain promotion for Diem.
Shades of reddish grays on black. Ezr reveled in the unenhanced imagery. It was beautiful, eerie. This was a place where the Spiders hadlived . On either side of their path, the shadows climbed up the walls of Spider buildings. Most were only two or three stories, but even in the dim red light, even with their outline blurred by the snows and the darkness, they could not have been confused with something built by humans. The smallest doorways were generously wide, yet most were less than 150 centimeters high. The windows (carefully shuttered; this place had been abandoned in the methodical way of owners who intended to return) were similarly wide and low.
The windows were like hundreds of slitted eyes looking down on the party of five and their come-along walker. Vinh wondered what would happen if a light came on behind those windows, a crack of light showing between the shutters. His imagination ran with the possibility for a moment. What if their feelings of smug superiority were in error? These werealiens. It was very unlikely life could have originated on a world so bizarre as this; once upon a time they must have had interstellar flight. Qeng Ho’s trading territory was four hundred light- years across; they had maintained a continuous technological presence for thousands of years. The Qeng Ho had radio traces of nonhuman civilizations that were thousands—in most cases, millions—of light-years away, forever beyond direct contact or even conversation. The Spiders were only the third nonhuman intelligent race ever physically encountered: three in the eight thousand years of human space travel. One of those had been extinct for millions of years; the other had not achieved machine technology, much less spaceflight.
The five humans, walking between the shadowy buildings with slitted windows, were as close to making human history as Vinh could imagine. Armstrong on Luna, Pham Nuwen at Brisgo Gap—and now Vinh and Wen and Patil and Do and Diem pacing down this street of Spiders.
There was a pause in the background radio traffic, and for a moment the loudest sounds were the creak of his coveralls and his own breathing. Then the tiny voices resumed, directing them across an open space, toward the far end of the valley. Apparently, the analysts thought that narrow cleft might be the entrance to caves, where the local Spiders were presumedly holed up.
“That’s odd,” came an anonymous voice from on high. “Seismo heard something—is hearing something— from the building next on your right.”
Vinh’s head snapped up and he peered into the gloom. Maybe not a light, but asound.
“The walker?”—Diem.
“Maybe it’s just the building settling?”—Benny.
“No, no. This was impulsive, like a click. Now we’re getting a regular beat, some damping. Frequency analysis… sounds like mechanical equipment, moving parts and such…. Okay, it’s mainly stopped, just some residual ringing. Crewleader Diem, we’ve got a very good position on this racket. It was on the far corner, four meters up from street level. Here’s a guide marker.”
