He was not worried about radiation. This was not a nuke: It was a meteor strike. A big one.
There were ruins crumbling at the edge of the crater walls above: broken walls in burial shrouds of ice, blind with unglassed windows and doorless thresholds, or stumps of chimneys helmeted in snow. Now Menelaus saw a regularity in the cracks and discolorations in the crater floor: squares and rectangles. Old streets, old foundations, something had been here once.
This had been a large installation. Not a city: Some of the ruins were shaped like pillboxes or hemi-cylinders. A military installation. A fortress built high in the mountains? There was a break in the treeline, and all the trees in a row, for over a mile, were younger than those surrounding. He guessed that this was where the launchrail once rested, and broken lumps regularly spaced along the path may have been the energy system. That square break in the treeline was where the vehicle building might have stood: That broken eggshell in the distance, if it were not a mosque, was the remnant of a reactor dome. Of the acceleration rings there was no sign.
So—not just any fortress. A fortified spaceport. There had been no such installations anywhere on Earth in his day.
And now a second fortress had been built atop the first, no doubt replacing the old one when it was pasted. That implied even more years had passed. Seventy-five? A hundred? How long had it been? More importantly, had any radio messages been received from the Hermetic? The original expedition provisions would have allowed the vessel to stay at the Diamond Star for seven years, before powering up to begin the astronomical voyage back, with another possible two years if crewmen died, or very strict rationing were practiced. The results would arrive before the ship. If all went as planned, if there were results to send. If the Monument had been translated …
Back inside the chamber, there were images of fire painted on the ceilings, images of birds and beasts and maidens and conquering kings on the walls. Everything was deep red, dark blue, blue-black, with tints of gold and mahogany to bring a richness out of the textures. Framing the doors and windows and arches of dark wood carved in pattern of Celtic dragons coiled in knots. Underfoot were Persian carpets like nothing he’d ever seen. On either hand, and every which way he turned his eyes, everything was either gold, or crystal, or polished wood, or fine china, or substances he could not put a name to. There was a black paneled bowl of red roses on the nightstand, and some sort of candelabra in the ceiling, surrounded by painted babies with pink wings.
It all looked like something from an old European mansion. He had been expecting something else. Rooms made of force fields and streamlined steel with tailfins. Sliding doors that opened by themselves and made a shush-shush noise or something. Moving walkways. Atom-powered lightbulbs. Talking sinks, preferably that had a third tap for beer.
It was damn pretty, though, he had to give them that. The place even smelled nice, applewood logs burning on the fire.
He craned his head back and looked at the ceiling again. Images of fire? These were battle scenes.
4. Portrait of War
High up on the wall, his eye first fell upon an image of a burnt city under a mushroom cloud. The artist had painted streaks and streams of odd color, green and indigo, issuing like a lighting bolt high in the air. There was a tiny silver dot high up in the corner of the image: no doubt this was the aircraft spotting for the incoming missile strike. So the fools had actually done it. The Burning of New York the Beautiful had not been enough to warn the world. World War, this time with atomics. Or some weapon even more deadly: if the artist’s design was accurate, the bolt was wider at the top than at the bottom, unlike a detonation or mass-driver strike.
The cityscape was photographically accurate. Montrose recognized some of the buildings. The Temple Mount; the Dome of the Rock; the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. The artist had even included part of the Wailing Wall, and showed a mother with her arms across her face twisting in agony as she fell across the two screaming children she protected with her body even as she died.
To either side were more images of fire: skeletons of skyscrapers toppling; sleek semi-wingless ultrahigh-atmosphere craft being scattered in a whirlwind of flame, like the finger of the Wrath of God; a submarine in the midst of a tidal wave being flung out of the sea by the violence of some unimaginable force, like a salmon leaping to its death.
No wonder they had not woke him up when he returned. War had broken out.
Painted on the ceiling were other images. Ships in space were exchanging directed-energy fire, shown here as fanciful threads of gold wire. No beams would be actually visible in real vacuum, of course. And the burning ships were drawn with yellow fire flowers with red petals, long licking tongues. The artist had obviously never seen a fire in zero-gee, which looked like a ball of half-invisible indigo gas, because in microgravity the hottest part of the flame tended to spread outward evenly in all directions, as a sphere, or rush along ruptured oxygen lines. The teardrop shape of candle flame was something gravity produced.
One war, or two? There was no way to tell.
Below them, at eye level, were stiff and ceremonial images: A figure with shoulder-length silver hair in a sleek black silk uniform was stepping on sabers dashed under his feet by half a dozen bowing figures; a kneeling president in the sober coat-and-tie uniform no one but presidents since the First Space Age had worn; a king in ermine cloak with medieval crown in hand; a military man in a high-necked Chinese jacket with pistol presented butt-foremost; a supine chieftain in a gaudy feather bonnet; and, oddly enough, a Pharaoh in a gold and blue pshent. The man in black held up an olive branch. At a guess, this picture was about the peace that followed the war. The figures perhaps represented the continents.
On one wall was a full-sized portrait showing a bishop lowering a coronet onto the head of the conqueror. The coronation of the white-haired figure in black showed his face more clearly. It was Ximen Del Azarchel. He looked to be about sixty years of age. No telling when these paintings had been done.
The monogram on the robe was his initials.
Menelaus looked overhead again. The ships on fire were all linked cylindrical punts, with maneuvering nozzles fore and aft. Interplanetary ships; space vessels. Tin cans cocooned in iron skeletons: functional, ugly, utilitarian. Their enemy ship was a work of art, a combination of ion drive and light-pressuresail. The sail tissue was like a second sky, holding crescent moons, and the blazing disk of the sun, in its reflections. The slender hull gleamed like a silvery sword. An interstellar ship; a vessel of stars.
The NTL Hermetic.
Montrose stepped around the bed on which he’d woke, and studied the paintings on the opposite wall.
One portrait particularly well done showed a European countryside, perhaps in Germany or France, with old-fashioned solar-paneled cottages with high-peaked roofs, and green fields under quaint hothouse tarp. The cottages dated from the time of the Japanese Winter. In the foreground were four maidens bending a spear into a ploughshare.
The sunset behind them was red, and rising above it, not far from the evening star, was the gleam of the starship Hermetic. The artist had merely suggested the ship’s slender silhouette with a stroke of the brush, adumbrated with miles-wide sail with an oval of silver. The silver silhouette looked like a scepter, or perhaps a flower.
The ship was rising in the east like the morning star, and beneath her sails, was peace.
Montrose thought: The starship had returned, and found a world burned and torn with war, fighting a war in space, and somehow put a stop to it.
The date in Roman numerals was printed on one of the images: Astromachia MMCCCXCIX.