Kitabı oku: «The Complete Heritage Trilogy: Semper Mars, Luna Marine, Europa Strike», sayfa 6

Acceleration pressed him back against his thinly padded couch…building and building far beyond the meager three-tenths G he’d gotten used to over the past few weeks. He wasn’t sure how long they were under boost; he’d forgotten to check his wrist-top when the Bizarre’s nukes cut in. He only knew that the weight pressing down on his body, on his chest and lungs, was unendurable…and that it went on and on and on, forcing him to endure, whatever he thought about the matter.

Eventually, they were in free fall again, but by that time he felt too tired to note the time…or even to look out the window.

After a while, acceleration resumed, and the sky beyond his tiny porthole began to glow.

The point of cycler spacecraft like Polyakov was that they occupied solar orbits that touched Earth’s orbit on their inward swing and Mars’s orbit on their outer. With some judicious use of gravity wells during each planetary swing-by and occasional kicks from their ion-electric drives, they could arrange to meet the planetary orbits when the planets themselves were there. It was necessary, however, to ferry the personnel and equipment brought out from Earth down to the Martian surface…and that meant a hefty delta-v burn, followed by aerobraking in the Martian atmosphere. The ride down was long, rough, and excruciatingly uncomfortable.

Alexander spent much of reentry trying hard not to be sick.

“Hey, uh…sir?” the Marine seated next to him said after a long time. “You see anything out there?”

Vaguely, Alexander realized that the man talking to him was the Marine he’d shouldered aside earlier in order to get the spot by the window. The name FULBERT was stenciled in black on the gray-and-white mottling of his chest armor. “Not a lot,” he said.

Several more jolts slammed him in the back as Bizarre’s nuclear engines came up to full thrust. The shuttle was balancing down on its tail now. “Down” was aft, toward the rear of the ship, and Alexander was lying flat on his back with his knees braced above his chest.

“You’re the new head archeologist gonna see the Face, right?” Fulbert said.

Alexander shook his head. He’d not associated much with the Marines for the past months, understandably enough, and his official mission had not been widely advertised, but it was impossible to live that long inside a couple of large, sealed tin cans without everyone learning something about everyone else.

“I’m just going with some new sonic imaging gear,” he said, correcting the Marine. “Dr. Graves is head of the American team, and he’s already at Cydonia. Dr. Joubert is going as head of the UN team, though.”

Fulbert’s face split into a broad and knowing grin inside the confines of his open helmet. “Man, there’s a high-voltage outlet! I guess you two don’t let the international shit get in the way of your workin’ together, huh?”

Clearly, Fulbert was more interested in the salacious details of his relationship with Joubert than in the international situation. “She’s a good archeologist,” he replied, keeping his voice noncommittal. “She did some fine fieldwork in the Yucatán.”

“Ha! I wouldn’t mind doin’ some fieldwork with her. Is that where you met her? Down in Yucatán?”

Alexander shook his head. “My specialty is…my specialty was Egypt.” He found that the unfairness still hurt, even after three years. “In a way, I guess, we’re enemies.” He gave a wan smile. “Some folks with the UN don’t care much for me or my ideas.”

The Marine’s eyes widened. “Egypt? You mean like, the pyramids and the Sphinx and all that?”

“That’s right.”

“So…you think there’s some kind of connection? Between the Sphinx and the Face? Is that why you’re on the UN’s shit list?”

Alexander grimaced. The question always came up with the uninitiated. “The Sphinx at Giza and the Face at Cydonia have nothing, nothing whatsoever to do with one another.” He’d long since lost count of how many times he’d gone through this. “The Face, as near as we can tell, is something like five hundred thousand years old. That’s half a million years, okay? The Sphinx, I am convinced, is much, much older than the date traditionally assigned to it, but it is nowhere near that old. The idea that the same culture who made the Face also made the pyramids and the Sphinx is garbage…worse than trying to link the pyramids of Egypt with the pyramids of Mexico. Can’t be done.”

“Yeah? But I read that the UN was havin’ to call out troops to break up demonstrations…and lots of those demonstrations were over the idea of aliens colonizing the Earth thousands of years ago. Things like the Sphinx are supposed to be proof the aliens were here, but the UN government doesn’t like that.”

Alexander sighed. As was often the case, the layman’s view mingled a little fact with a great deal of fancy. “There were definitely aliens in the solar system half a million years ago,” he explained. “They left traces at Cydonia…though you might be surprised to hear that there are still quite a few scientists who argue that the Face and the so-called pyramids on Mars are natural features.”

“No shit?”

“Most of us think the Face, at least, was carved by someone…something, and the Fortress-Ship complex is obviously artificial, though after half a million years of dust storms and weathering, there’s not much left of it. But there is room for debate. That’s what science is all about, after all, testing hypotheses.”

“How come some scientists still think that Face-thing is natural? I’ve seen three-vids of that thing, and it gives me the crawlies.”

“Well, we still can’t find a decent reason for a sculpture of an essentially human face to be carved into a mesa on Mars at a time when Homo sapiens was just appearing on Earth. The aliens, whoever or whatever they were, were not human. I guess it’s easier to believe that the Face is a wind-carved freak of nature than it is to believe it could be a deliberately sculpted likeness of us.”

“Well, that’s what all the nutcase new religions and shit are all about, ain’t it? That the aliens tinkered with apes and turned ’em into people? Like in that old movie that everybody’s talkin’ about now, 2000.”

“2001: A Space Odyssey,” he said, correcting the Marine again. “And it wouldn’t have been apes, not unless you count humans as a kind of ape. Homo erectus was the dominant hominid line on Earth half a million years ago.”

“Sure, whatever. But, like I was sayin’, everybody on Earth, it seems like, either thinks the aliens were gods or thinks that we’re tryin’ to slip one over on ’em to take away their religion, or whatever, and the UN johnnies all seem dead sure that all the stuff about aliens visiting Earth back then is crap. Like it couldn’t possibly happen, y’know?”

Alexander smiled. “I know.” He’d been in the eye of that particular storm for a long time. In fact, he had his own opinions about some of the more improbable sites on Earth…not that aliens had built them, necessarily, but the possibility of alien inspiration and technical help was not unthinkable.

Still, it was dangerous territory to tread upon. The discoveries of the past few decades had transformed traditional science…but they’d also caused an explosion in the pseudosciences. The old “ancient astronaut” theories had come back with a vengeance, spawning volume upon volume of crackpot ramblings, pop-science gibberish, and even a horde of new religions.

Hoping to end the conversation, he deliberately checked his wrist-top, calling up the time. Before the MSL rendezvous, everyone’s personal computers had been updated to Mars time. The planet’s rotation was slightly longer than Earth’s and, therefore, could not be brought into synch with the GMT used aboard all spacecraft. A Martian day was called a sol; it was divided into traditional hours and minutes, as on Earth, but had an extra thirty-seven-minute catch-up period, called soltime, added after local midnight. The young Mars colony counted sols instead of days, beginning with the official establishment of the first permanently manned settlement—the base at Candor Chasma, now known as Mars Prime. Sol 1 was July 20, 2024, fifty-five years to the day after Armstrong had set foot on the moon. The current sol was 5621.

All of which meant that Mars Mean Time, or MMT, had nothing whatsoever in common with GMT. It was now, he saw, 1740 hours at Cydonia—late afternoon—and 2126 hours in Greenwich. Of course, for the next fifteen months or so, his only interest in what time…or day…it was on Earth would be when he had to calculate the arrival or departure time of another report.

“So,” Fulbert said, still clinging to the conversation thread, “you don’t think aliens did stuff on Earth? You know, the pyramids? Easter Island? All that shit?”

He decided not to mention his own reservations about the Giza pyramids, at least. “Easter Island? Certainly not! We know how the local population built and raised those great stone heads, because they showed us. No mystery there at all.”

Turning away in another attempt to end the conversation, he pressed his face against the tiny port. He could see sky above—still a dark, purplish color at the horizon turning to jet-black overhead. Below, the Martian surface spread out beneath a curved horizon, a dusty, dusky ocher color tinted with streaks of rust and gray-brown. They were still too high up for the smaller details of the surface to be visible, but he could see scattered, shadow-edged shapes that must be mountains or the jumble of chaotic terrain. He tried to orient himself. If it was late afternoon here, then north would be that way…but he didn’t know if they were even descending in an attitude that would let him see the Face or the attendant structures. It was frustratingly like trying to recognize buildings or landmarks from the air while approaching a city’s airport on Earth. For all he knew, the Cydonian ruins were on the other side of the—

He saw it.

My God! It’s just like they all said…but so…so unexpected….

It was smaller than he’d thought it would be, which was why he’d overlooked it at first. Bizarre must still be twenty or thirty kilometers up. He looked down on the Cydonian Face, and it returned his wondering stare with the same enigmatic and Sphinx-like skyward gaze it had worn for half a million years.

First captured by chance on two frames shot by the Viking 1 orbiter spacecraft in 1976, the Face hadn’t even been noticed until the early 1980s…and then the image had been dismissed as a trick of the light and of the remarkable persistence of the human mind in imposing order and facial features on random shapes, be they ink-blots on a paper, or a mile-long landform in the desert. By the turn of the century, space probes had returned better images, and NASA had—with some reluctance—acknowledged at last that there might be something there worth investigating after all. That revelation, that intelligence had carved a mile-long face into a mesa in the Cydonian region of Mars, was the last in a rapid-fire barrage of discoveries that had completed at last the long-fought Copernican Revolution. Since the 1990s, it had been known that planet-bearing stars were common, and evidence of fossilized bacteria had been discovered on a meteorite gouged from the Martian surface eons before.

Humankind was not alone in the universe.

Those discoveries had spurred a long-awaited renaissance in space exploration. The first manned landing on Mars, a joint US-Russian venture, had taken place in 2019 at Candor Chasma; it wasn’t until the second landing five years later that Geoffrey Cox, Anatol Kryukov, and Roberta Anders had stood at last in the shadow of that alien-carved enigma and wondered….

Bizarre was lower now and starting to swing slightly in a clockwise turn. The Face drifted off toward the left; the “City” and the pyramids came into view to the right.

Alexander’s heart was beating faster. There were mysteries enough here to keep ten thousand archeologists busy for millennia, mysteries still unopened, untapped, unknown. The beings who’d built this place were known variously as the Ancients or the Builders…but who they’d been, where they’d come from, what they’d looked like, all was still a frustrating puzzle. All that could be said with certainty was that they’d wielded powers that seemed like magic to the humans who’d investigated the ruins…and that they’d not been human.

When the Face was being built, humankind was in the process of evolving from Homo erectus into a primitive form of Homo sapiens. The knowledge of any power source more potent than fire was still half a million years in the future.

The “City”—its true purpose was yet unknown—consisted of four pyramids each the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza arranged in a perfect diamond pattern, surrounded by five titanic, mile-wide pyramids apparently carved from basaltic mountains. Six miles to the southeast, another pyramid, known as the D&M Pyramid after the initials of its twentieth-century discoverers, rose a full mile into the sky, almost two miles across, five-sided, buttressed…and apparently shattered on its eastern face by what might have been a meteorite impact…but which many now thought had been hostile action.

He glanced at Fulbert, squeezed into the seat to his left, and smiled. Hostile action? Human Marines would be no match for whatever had smashed a mile-high pyramid carved from solid rock. Their assault rifles seemed pathetically toylike in the face of a weapon like that.

Of course, the Marines weren’t here to fight aliens….

“All right, Marines!” Lloyd’s voice snapped. “Stand by for grounding! Helmet visors down and locked! Weapons ready!”

A clatter of snaps and clicks sounded through the passenger compartment, as the Marines locked their visors down and worked the actions on their rifles. If someone started shooting from the surface, the shuttle’s hull might be breached and pressure lost, but the Marines might still survive the landing. Briefly, Alexander wondered what might be happening at the Cydonia base. Would the UN be stupid enough to try shooting them down? It seemed ridiculous.

Even so, he was glad he was wearing a pressure suit, just in case. Involuntarily, he glanced up at the overhead compartment where his emergency helmet was stored.

They continued their descent. Alexander could see nothing of the Ancients’ complex now. Nearby mountaintops and mesas were rising swiftly, and the ground below was taking on a rocky, pocked-looking texture. His seat kicked him hard from below as the Bizarre’s main engines switched on. For several minutes more, he was aware only of the pounding of those nuclear thermal rockets as the MSL lowered itself toward the Martian surface. Dust, brick red except where the touch of low-slanting sunlight kissed it golden, swirled up past the window. There was the slightest of jars…

…and then the engine thunder was dwindling away.

“Okay, jarheads,” Captain Elliott, the MSL’s skipper, announced happily, “welcome to Mars!”

Throughout the compartment, armored Marines unbuckled harnesses and struggled to their feet. A ladder set into what on an airliner would have been the floor was now a series of steps going down the wall to the cargo lock below, and the Marines were swinging out of their seats and clambering down the ladder in surprisingly good order. Alexander stayed where he was, safely out of the way. He imagined that Lloyd must be shouting orders at them or counting them off by the numbers, but the Marines were all sealed up and their conversations restricted to their suit radios.

In seconds, the last of them had vanished down the ladder into the cargo hold and the hatch sealed shut with a bang. Alexander turned to try to see out the port, but little was visible except for dust, sand, and rock beneath an eerie pink sky. He could hear the throb of compressors as the cargo hold’s atmosphere was tanked for later use and the compartment brought down to the near vacuum of the Martian surface. If somebody wanted to attack them, this would be a hell of a good time….

“Looks like they have the welcome mat out for us, Dr. Alexander,” Captain Elliott called down. “The natives are friendly. A little bent out of shape, maybe, but friendly.”

Alexander hadn’t realized how nervous he’d been. With a sigh of relief he began unbuckling, eager to get outside and see this place for himself, a place he’d been dreaming of for years.

Outside, as it had for millennia, the Face stared skyward with quiet and enigmatic aplomb.

SEVEN

THURSDAY, 17 MAY: 0315 HOURS GMT

United Orient Flight 372

95,000 feet above the Pacific

Ocean

1215 hours Tokyo time

Kaitlin Garroway peered out the cabin window at a sky so blue it was almost black. A smattering of stars was visible above a curved horizon. Each time she traveled on an HST she felt the same sense of mingled awe and longing. Hypersonic transports didn’t reach into space, but it looked as though they were on the edge. “Have you ever flown at this altitude?” she asked her companion.

Yukio leaned over her shoulder to share the view. “Yes, and a little higher. But still not into space. The Inaduma fighter can reach orbit only with a very large booster. So far I have only flown above thirty-five thousand meters in a simulator. Now if we’d taken the suborbital as I’d suggested…”

“My internal clock is gonna be no less scrambled from this flight than from a forty-five-minute hop, thank you very much, so what’s the advantage? Besides, you know I couldn’t afford it. Those suborbs are for businessmen on expense accounts, not for college students.”

“And you wouldn’t let me pay your way.”

“Certainly not. It’s my vacation, and I’m going to enjoy knowing that my money paid for it.”

“Independent-minded gaijin.”

She turned quickly to see if he was serious. Gaijin was the word used to refer to a foreigner, but the connotation was more that of barbarian. Nihonjin, more than any other people she knew of, divided the world into two categories: people…and outsiders. Yukio’s face was somber, but his eyes were twinkling, so she knew he was teasing her again. Still she wondered…

“Is it going to be a problem, Yukio?” she asked. “That I am my own person, that I have my own ideas and express them?”

“In other words, that you are not…a proper Japanese woman?”

She nodded.

Yukio leaned back in his seat and stared at the overhead light. “We have spoken of this before, and you know how I feel. We are part of a new generation, you and I, citizens of Earth.”

“And yet there is gimu.” The word meant duty, obligation.

“Yes. I have obligations, to my family, to my country. My military duty is just one part of this. I…I am having difficulty reconciling these duties with our vision of the world, of what the world is becoming, what it must become if the human race is to survive.”

Kaitlin was silent for a while, considering her own duties. She had grown up assuming that she would enter the Marine Corps after college. After all, what better way to emulate her adored father? But during the last few years, and especially since she’d come to CMU, she’d begun seeing things in a different light. Exposed for the first time to the ideas of the Internationalist Party, she’d started to see her country as an obstacle to world peace and nationalism as an outmoded concept, notions that, understandably, horrified her father. It hurt her to realize that she was hurting him, but she couldn’t not-think just to please his old-fashioned patriotism.

Things got further complicated when she realized that her father no longer had the same devotion to duty and to the Corps that he’d had when she was young. It worried her that he seemed to be just marking time until he could retire. She’d prefer a good, loud argument to the apathy she saw in him now. Occasionally things still ticked him off, like that incident with the two archaeologists last week, but most of the time he seemed content simply to put in his time. She wondered what he thought of the Mexico business.

That news had shaken her, not so much because of what happened as because of her reaction to it. She wasn’t naive enough to believe everything she saw on Triple-N, so it hadn’t surprised her when she found that the military newsgroups had a very different slant on the embassy takeover, claiming that the Mexicans were the aggressors and that what was supposedly a spontaneous demonstration had really been orchestrated by the Mexican Army. What had surprised her was her reaction to the Internationalist newsgroups. All of a sudden the talk of American imperialist aggressors sounded raucous and hollow to her, and she found herself vigorously defending the Marines…and getting flamed for it.

Not that getting flamed was unusual for her—she seldom held back on expressing her own opinions, regardless of how unpopular they might be—but that the attacks seemed so unreasoned bothered her. She’d thought of the Internationalists as a group of rational intellectuals; now she was seeing just as much unthinking prejudice in them as in, say, those who claimed the Martian Ancients were demons.

The Ancients.

“Yukio, who do you think the Ancients really were?”

“The Ancients?” He laughed. “How can I even take a guess? We know so little about them. What does your father say? Have they turned up anything new?”

Kaitlin shrugged. “They’ve only been there five days. He seems to be getting friendly with one of the archeologists, a guy named Alexander, and he’s been filling him in on what the previous team had uncovered and where they’re starting from now, but I don’t think there’s anything new and startling.”

The thought of her latest vid from her father made her grimace. She had a job lined up for later in the summer, and she’d told him all about it without specifically saying that it didn’t start until the middle of July, so he assumed she was staying in Pittsburgh for the whole summer. If he knew she was going to Japan, he would have gotten all fatherly and protective, assuming that she couldn’t take care of herself, and she just didn’t want to have to deal with that. She always used her global.net account whenever she was outside of Pittsburgh, so he would be able to tell from her v-mail only that she was not at CMU.

“Anyway,” she continued, “from all I’ve read on archeology, it’s a long, involved, painstaking process. Alexander told Dad it might be years before they even knew the right questions to ask.”

“So why do you think I might be able to answer those questions, when we don’t even know what they are?”

“Well, of course we can’t know. But we can guess, can’t we? We can speculate. The idea of other intelligent beings, a whole other civilization, inhabiting this solar system long before modern humans even evolved…it’s mind-boggling. I want to know who they were, why they came here, where they went.”

Yukio grinned. “Then why aren’t you studying exo-paleoarchaeology instead of AI systems design?”

Kaitlin shook her head. “I don’t have the patience for archaeology. I want to go out there and find them, wherever they are. Even if that particular species is extinct, just the fact that they were there proves we’re not alone. There must be others, thousands of other races throughout the galaxy. And I don’t think we’re going to find them by sitting here waiting for them to come to us. We’ve got to go to them.”

Yukio gazed out into the deep blue of not-quite-space. “We’re just on the edge of exploring the solar system. It will be quite some time before we are able to reach the stars.”

“I don’t know. If we can work the bugs out of antimatter propulsion, we could be sending a ship to Alpha Centauri in, oh, twenty years or so.

“And I want to be on that ship.”

0507 HOURS GMT

Kansai International Airport

Osaka Bay, Japan

1407 hours Tokyo time

Yukio held his hands casually in his lap to keep from gripping the handrests as the Star Raker came into its approach to the huge man-made island that was Kansai International Airport. He always felt a little nervous flying when he didn’t have any electronic displays in front of him to follow course and speed and range. He didn’t know the man in the cockpit, didn’t know with certainty his competence and experience, the way he did with Taii Iijima, the Space Defense Force captain he usually flew with. For a veteran of thousands of hours of flight time, such nervousness seemed embarrassing, so he always tried to hide it. Usually he was successful.

A slight sound coming from his right made him turn his head to see Kaitlin looking at him as though she was trying hard not to laugh.

“Okay, now I really know you’re a flight officer!”

“Oh? And why is that?”

“Dad says all flyers are like that, though the actual pilots are usually worse than side-seaters like you. Can’t stand to have someone else in control.”

Yukio grinned ruefully. “You found me out. And I thought I was hiding it pretty well.”

She nodded. “You were. But don’t worry, I won’t let on I know your dreadful secret. It’s just nice to know that you have at least one flaw.”

The Star Raker came in for a textbook landing, and Yukio resumed his normal breathing pattern. The slidewalk in the International Terminal was bordered with gift shops, eating parlors, and communications stations; signs in French, English, and Nihongo welcomed visitors, and holoboard advertisements bombarded them with sights and sounds as they made their way toward the baggage area. Travelers from all over the world came through Kansai, but there was a predominance of Asian faces. As he got off the end of the slidewalk, Yukio almost gave a skip. It was good to be home.

They took the Jet Foil across Osaka Wan to the mainland and then traveled by maglev to Kyoto. One flaw, she said. How little she knows me, if she thinks I have only one. He stole a glance at the woman on the seat next to him, seeing her as though with new eyes. By American standards she was beautiful, with long auburn hair curving around a thin green-eyed face. By international standards she was stylishly and appropriately dressed for travel, in a sleeveless one-piece jumpsuit with hip belt. By Japanese standards, she was neither appropriately dressed nor beautiful.

He thought about his name. Yukio was a shortened form of Toshiyuki; the nickname meant Snow Boy and implied one who goes his own way. When, Yukio wondered, had he ever gone his own way? He’d entered the Space Defense Force to please his father. He’d enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University because he was ordered to by the SDF. He’d agreed to this trip because Kaitlin wanted it, and he’d been almost relieved when he’d thought his new orders would make it impossible. Then he’d allowed himself to be persuaded again.

Yukio considered himself quite cosmopolitan, not Westernized to the extent of rejecting his heritage, of course, but enough of an Internationalist to be open-minded about Western ideas, Western culture…even Western women. In Pittsburgh Kaitlin had seemed perfect, exotic in the way that all Western women were, and yet familiar because of her love of Japan and Japan’s culture. Now she seemed jarring, out of place…or was he the one who was out of place?

They took the subway from the maglev station and then walked the few blocks to the youth hostel where Kaitlin would be staying. She made a good impression on the clerk at the desk, bowing and addressing him in fluent and respectful Nihongo. Yukio had never stayed at a place like this, but he would guess that few Americans came here who would be able to converse with their host in the host’s language…or who would wish to.

“I’m going up to change,” she said. “I shouldn’t be more than a few minutes. Unless you’d like to come wash up also?”

“No. I am fine. Thank you.”

She gave him a strange look, then turned and walked up the stairs to her room. He mentally kicked himself. Ever since they’d landed at Kansai, he’d become more and more formal with Kaitlin. He knew that she felt it and was puzzled by it. The thing was, he was puzzled, too. He was well aware of the differences between American and Japanese customs. He was well aware that behavior that would be considered reprehensible in Kyoto was perfectly acceptable in Pittsburgh. But he’d thought of himself as a new Japanese, able to transcend his upbringing, to be a citizen of the world. He was finding that he was more tightly bound to tradition than he’d imagined possible.

He walked over to the comm station against one wall of the lobby. It was an old-fashioned one—audio only, no video, no net access—but sufficient for his purposes. He called home and arranged with Isoru Nabuko, his father’s secretary, for a car to be sent to pick them up. “Is my father at home, Hisho-san?” he asked.

“Oh, yes, Ishiwara-san,” the man replied. “Daijin Ishiwara returned from Tokyo two hours ago. He is eagerly awaiting your arrival and that of your honored guest.” Nabuko chuckled. “I’ve not seen him so excited since you received your well-deserved promotion to the rank of chu-i.”

Yukio asked that Nabuko convey his respects to his father, and then he hung up, wondering if the secretary knew that the honored guest in question was in fact a gaijin. He had not hidden the fact from his parents, but he didn’t know whether the information had been passed on. Perhaps it had. Perhaps he was worrying unnecessarily. Perhaps he was the only one who—

“Is there a problem?” It was Kaitlin.

“Oh. No, certainly not. I was just thinking.”

“Ah.”

She was conservatively dressed, he was relieved to see, and holding a large, oblong box in her hands. “Did you call home?” she asked.

He nodded. “A car will be here in…” He glanced at his wrist-top. “…about a half an hour. Perhaps we can find a place nearby to sit down and have a drink.”