The night was full of stars.
'She came up here before she cut the ice,' said Hutch.
'Very good. But why did she come here at all?'
Hutch looked out across the plain, luminous in Saturn's pale light. It curved away from her, giddily.
The stars were hard and cold, and the spaces between them pressed on her. The planet, locked in place, had not moved since she stood here. 'The image on the plain,' she said, 'is terrifying, not because it has wings and claws, but because it is alone.'
She was beginning to feel the cold, and it was a long way back to the ship. (The Flickinger fields do cool off, in time. They're not supposed to, and there are all kinds of tests to demonstrate they don't. But there you are.) Half a dozen moons were in the sky: Titan, with its thin methane atmosphere; Rhea and Hyperion and some of the smaller satellites: frozen, spinning rocks like this one, sterile, immeasurably old, no more capable of supporting a thinking creature than the bloated gasbag they circle.
Richard followed her gaze. 'She must have been very much like us.' His lined features softened.
Hutch stood unmoving.
The universe is a drafty, precarious haven for anything that thinks. There are damned few of us, and it is a wide world, and long. Hutch wondered about her. What had brought her so far from home? Why had she traveled alone? Long since gone to dust, no doubt. Nevertheless, I wish you well.
PART ONE
MOONRISE
1
Quraqua. 28th Year of Mission, 211th Day. Thursday, April 29, 2202; 0630 hours local time
Almost overnight, every civilization on this globe had died. It had happened twice: somewhere around 9000 B.C., and again eight thousand years later. On a world filled with curiosities, this fact particularly disturbed Henry's sleep.
He lay awake, thinking how they were running out of time, thinking how the Quraquat had known after all about the anomaly on their moon. They were unaware of the two discontinuities, had lost sight of them toward the end, and remembered them only in myth. But they knew about Oz. Art had found a coin which left no doubt, whose obverse revealed a tiny square on a crescent, at the latitude of the Western Mare. Precisely where Oz was located.
He wondered whether Linda's surmise that the Lower Temple era had possessed optical instruments would prove correct. Or whether the natives had simply had good eyes.
What had they made of the thing? Henry buried his head in his pillow. If the Quraquat had looked at their moon through a telescope, they would have seen a city occupying the center of a vast plain. They would have seen long airless avenues and rows of buildings and broad squares. And a massive defensive wall.
He turned over. Eventually Oz would surface in Quraquat mythology and literature. When we've collected enough of it. And mastered the languages.
His stomach tightened. There would not be time.
The anomaly was only rock, cunningly hewn to create the illusion of the city. There was the real puzzle. And the explanation for Oz lay somehow with the race that had inhabited this world. This was a race that had built complex cultures and developed philosophical systems that had endured for tens of thousands of years. But its genius did not extend to technology, which had never risen much beyond a nineteenth-century level.
The door chimed. 'Henry?' The voice in the speaker was tense with excitement. 'Are you asleep?'
'No.' He opened the door. 'Did we get in?'
'Yes—'
Henry threw back his sheet. 'Give me two minutes. I didn't think it would be this quick.'
Frank Carson stood in the corridor. 'You have a good crew down there.' In the half-light, he looked pleased. 'We think it's intact.'
'Good. That's goddam good.' He turned on his table lamp. Beyond the window, sunlight filtered down from the surface. 'Did you see it?'
'Just a peek. We're saving it for you.'
'Yeah. Thanks.' The traditional lie amused Henry. He knew they had all stuck their heads in. And now they would pretend that the boss would make the grand entrance.
If there was anyone with the Academy's archeological teams homelier than Henry Jacobi, he would have been a sorry sight. In Linda Thomas' memorable phrase, he always looked as if a load of scrap metal had fallen on him. His face was rumpled and creased, and his anatomy sagged everywhere. He had slate-colored hair, and a permanent squint which might have derived from trying to make out too many ideographs. Nevertheless, he was a master of social graces: everyone liked him, women married him (he had four ex-wives), and people who knew him well would have followed him into combat.
He was a consummate professional. Much like those paleontologists who could assemble a complete brontosaur from a knee bone, Henry seemed able to construct an entire society from an urn.
He followed Carson through the empty community room, and down the stairway into Operations. Janet Allegri, manning the main console, gave them an encouraging thumbs-up.
Creepers and stingfish moved past the wraparound view-panel. Beyond, the sea bottom was crisscrossed by trail marker lamps. The sunlight was fading from the water, and the Temple was lost in the general gloom. They passed into the sea chamber, and put on Flickinger harnesses and jetpacks. Henry rubbed his hands together in pure pleasure.
Carson straightened his shoulders in his best military bearing. He was a big man with a square jaw and intense eyes that saw the world in sharp colors. That he was a retired colonel in the army of the North American Union would surprise no one. 'This is just the beginning, Henry. I still say we should hang on here. What are they going to do if we refuse to leave?'
Henry sighed. Carson didn't understand politics. 'They would put a lot of heat on the Academy, Frank. And when you and I went home, we would find ourselves back in classrooms. And possibly defending ourselves in court.'
'You have to be willing to take risks for what you believe, Henry.'
He had actually considered it. Beyond Earth, they knew of three worlds that had given birth to civilizations. One of the civilizations, the Noks on Inakademeri, still survived. The inhabitants of Pinnacle had been dead three- quarters of a million years.
And Quraqua.
Quraqua, of course, was the gold mine. Pinnacle was too far gone, and since the Noks were still in the neighborhood, the opportunities for investigation were limited. Nonetheless, there was hardly a graduate student who hadn't found a buried city, uncovered the key to a mass migration, tracked down a previously unknown civilization. It was the golden age of archeology. Henry Jacobi understood the importance of saving this world. But he had no inclination to risk anyone's life in the effort. He was too old for that sort of thing.
'Does Maggie know we're in?'
'They're getting her now. The poor woman never gets any rest, Henry.'
'She can rest when we're out of here.' Maggie was his chief philologist. Code-breaker, really. Reader of Impossible Inscriptions. The lamp on his left wrist flashed green. He activated the energy field.
Carson punched the go pad, and the lock cycled open. Water sloshed in over the deck.
Outside, visibility was poor. They were too close inshore: the marker lights always blurred, the water was always full of sand, and one could seldom see the entire Temple.
The Temple of the Winds.
A bitter joke, that. It had been submerged since an earthquake somewhere around Thomas Jefferson's time
