"You look like Jack Hancock," said Kellie, referring to the popular adventurer-archeologist of the sims.
They opened up, and Hutch looked out, saw nothing but fog, and climbed down the ladder. Nightingale adjusted the temperature in his suit and followed. Kellie asked them not to fall off the mountain. Then she shut the airlock behind them.
The cold hardscrabble ground crackled underfoot. The air was absolutely still. Snow continued to fall.
Hutch felt alone. Nightingale had never been much company, and now he rambled on about the general gloominess of the place, how difficult it was to see anything, and how easy it would be to walk into a ditch. He was right about the visibility. The mist pressed down on her, squeezed her, forced her to look inward because she could not see out.
Kellie had asked at one point whether anyone believed in an immortal soul. Certainly Hutch didn't. The world was a cold mathematical machine that produced hydrogen, stars, mosquitoes, and superluminal pilots without showing the slightest concern for any of them. But now, as she stumbled through what might be her last hours, it was painful to think that if she got unlucky she could end in the bosom of that monster in the sky, her atoms floating in gray soup for the next few billion years. If you're there, she murmured to no one in particular, I'd love some help.
"There's a wall," said Nightingale.
"I see it." It was flat, plain, a little more than shoulder-high. The surface was rough against her fingertips. Probably granite.
They saw the steps Marcel had described and were surprised to discover they were close to human dimensions. Beyond, Hutch could see an entrance. If there'd been doors, they were missing. The entrance and the interior were piled high with snow and earth. Tough bristly shrubbery grew on both sides of the threshold.
Nightingale took the lead. His manner suggested it would be best if he were in position to confront any potential danger. In this environment, where vision was so limited, she doubted it would matter much who was standing where. She also thought it unlikely there'd be any large predators up here, for the simple reason there was probably no prey. And she guessed Nightingale had come to the same conclusion.
They passed through the entry into a wide corridor. The walls were plain, undecorated, unmarked in any way. The ceiling was comfortably high. They switched on their lamps in an effort to dispell the general gloom. But the fog reflected the light back into their eyes, so they shut them down again.
Small animals scattered before them. It was hard to get a good look at any of them, but Hutch heard wings and saw something that looked like a white chimp. A segmented creature with a lot of legs scuttled into a side corridor.
There were rooms off either side, partially illuminated by windows. The chambers were quite large. Most could have comfortably accommodated groups of fifteen or more. They were empty of any kind of furniture. Long paneled strips overhead might have been artificial lighting devices.
"It feels as if it's been here a long time," she told Marcel, showing him a picture.
The cross passages were equally devoid of special features.
Unlike the tower, which had seemed timeless, as if its builders had meant it for the ages, this structure, despite the granite, gave the impression of being a government make-do. A temporary construction.
They explored side corridors, passed more doorways and bare cubicles of varying sizes, filled only with whatever leaves and dirt had blown in. Most of the doors were missing. A few hung open; others were shut tight. No knobs or latches were visible. "Electronics," said Nightingale, examining one. "Looks like a sensor."
They crossed a room, passed through a door on the opposite side, and came out into a new passageway. One wall had been lined with windows, but whatever transparent material had sealed off the interior was gone, and the wind blew steadily into the building.
They went up a ramp.
Reluctantly, she began using her laser to mark the walls so they could find their way back.
They kept a channel open to Kellie and Marcel, recording their impressions, their sense of a structure that was part office building, part mall, part terminal. Commodious spaces in some areas. "Intended for large numbers of occupants."
"Large numbers?" asked Marcel.
"Wide corridors."
"How many people ride on a skyhook?"
"I don't know."
There were shelves and niches. All the surfaces were covered with thick dust, with centuries of accumulation, but whenever Hutch took time to wipe something clean, it looked as if it had been recently installed. Whatever it was, she decided, the construction material had resisted aging remarkably well.
They were in a passageway with a series of windows, all open to the outside.
"Hey." Nightingale dropped to one knee. "Look at this."
A sign. Hung in a wall mount. But the mount was low, down around her hips. It contained several rows of symbols. The symbols were faded, turned to gray, but not illegible. She made sure it became part of the visual record. Then she delightedly discovered she could lift the sign off the mount. It was a plaque, and it came out whole.
"Why is it down there?" she asked. "Why not put it at eye level?"
"It probably is at eye level," said Nightingale. "For the crickets."
She studied the symbols. "That's strange."
"What is?"
There were six lines. The style and formation of the characters varied extensively from one to another. But within each individual row they were quite similar. Some symbols were even repeated, but only in their own line.
"I'd guess we have six alphabets," she said.
"Is that significant?"
"What'll you bet it's the same message in six different languages?"
He shrugged. "I don't see why that's important."
"It's a Rosetta stone."
"Well, maybe. But I think that's overstating the case a bit. The message is too short to qualify as a Rosetta stone. It probably says only PASSENGERS past THIS point. Nobody's going to solve a language from that."
"It's a beginning, Randy. And the fact that we can put it in context might make it easier to translate. This place was a hub, for a while. A lot of the natives came through here."
"Going where?"
"You haven't figured it out?"
He looked at her. "You know what was going on here? What all this was about?"
"Sure," she said.
Hutch detected movement on the circuit and wasn't surprised to hear Marcel's voice: "It was a rescue mission, Randy."
Nightingale looked at her, and his brow creased.
Kellie broke in: "When they date this place, they'll discover it's three thousand years old."
"The ice age," said Nightingale. "The Quiveras Cloud."
"Sure." Mac speaking now. "Somebody tried to evacuate the locals."
"A whole planetary population?"
"No," said Hutch, "of course not. Couldn't have. Not with one skyhook. No matter how much time they had. I mean, the natives would have reproduced faster than they could be moved."
Nightingale nodded.
"We met some of the folks that got left," she added.
Outside, branches creaked in a sudden burst of wind.
"The hawks were the larger species."
"I'd think so."
"The rescuers."
"Yes."
"That's incredible. Did everybody know this except me?"
No one spoke.
She wrapped the plaque, but it was too large to put into her pack, so she hefted it under one arm.
Wall markings, most badly faded, began appearing with some regularity. She recorded what she could, started to put together a map to indicate where everything had been found, relied on her visual link to make a record of the place, and belatedly realized she hadn't been using her laser consistently and was lost. But that shouldn't be too much of a problem. They could follow the radio signals back in the correct general direction.