She didn’t trust them to do everything correctly, so she maintained a watchful eye. When the tanks were in place and they’d all gone slightly out of focus because of the energy fields, she conducted a brief inspection. Then she removed the air from the cabin and opened the air lock. “You’ll find ramps in a few places,” she said. “Wherever there is one, please use it. They’re trying to preserve the marks from the original mission.”
Devlin was first outside. He turned immediately to get pictures of McGruder coming through the air lock. Michael preceded Priscilla and Vesta. Cornelius remained inside.
Priscilla called him: “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said. “We figure there’s nobody here to create a problem and the biggest danger would be that the air lock jams or something, and we get locked out of the lander.”
“I left the hatches open, Cornelius.”
“That’s no guarantee it wouldn’t close on its own. Look, no sweat, Priscilla. I know nothing like that is very likely, but we have to take into account all the possibilities.”
* * *
MCGRUDER APPROACHED THE monument and stood looking up at it.
Carved from rock and ice, it stood serenely on that bleak plain, an unsettling figure of curving claws, alien eyes, and lean power. The lips were parted, rounded, almost sexual. Priscilla wasn’t sure why it was so disquieting. It was more than simply the talons, or the disproportionately long lower limbs. It was more even than the suggestion of philosophical ferocity stamped on those crystalline features. There was something—terrifying—bound up in the tension between its suggestive geometry and the wide plain on which it stood. It was scratched and clawed by micrometeors, the driving dust between the moons, but no serious damage had resulted. Its wings were half-folded, and its blind eyes stared at Saturn, frozen low in the hostile sky by its own relentless gravity just as it had been eons ago, when Iapetus received its visitors.
Most striking, the creature was female.
There was no obvious evidence to support that notion. Certainly, no anatomical clues were apparent through the plain garment covering the body. It was, perhaps, some delicacy of line or subtlety of expression. It reminded her vaguely of a stalking cat, and yet was somehow erotic.
“It is creepy, isn’t it?” said Devlin.
Vesta agreed. “Wouldn’t want to meet one of those in my backyard.”
It stood on a block of ice about as high as Priscilla’s shoulders. There was an inscription. Three lines of sharp white symbols, characterized by loops and crescents and curves, were stenciled in the ice, possessing an Arabic delicacy and elegance. And, as the tiny sun moved across the sky, the symbols embraced the light and came alive. No one knew what the inscription meant.
The ramp was designed to allow visitors to get close enough to touch the artifact without disturbing anything. McGruder stood close and gazed at the figure while Devlin took pictures. Despite the show business aspect, the governor looked as if the experience was having a genuine impact. “How old is it, Priscilla?”
“The estimates run from twenty-three thousand to twenty-eight thousand years.”
“We were still sitting around campfires.”
“Of course,” said Vesta, “we’re still active. Looks as if these things are gone.”
McGruder reached out and touched it. Pressed his fingertips against one of the legs. “You know,” he said, “if not for this, we probably would never have had a serious manned space program.”
He might have been right. At another time, when support for NASA had dried up, and the space industry was effectively closing down, a robot vehicle had detected the monument. The hard reality had been that interest in spaceflight had faded when Mars was ruled out as a potential home for life. Unfortunately, there was nowhere else to go. The United States had put men on the Moon to make a political point. Without the Cold War, there would probably not even have been an Apollo XI.
“I’m not sure we do have one,” said Priscilla. “A space program.”
McGruder could not take his eyes off the monument. “Economies go through ups and downs. This is the first dip since the development of the Hazeltine drive. We haven’t discovered anything out here except ruins. So we’re back where the public is bored and doesn’t want to pay the bills. What we need, Priscilla, is a major discovery.”
“You mean first contact.”
“That would be good.”
Maybe, she thought, we should give Talios some publicity. But she resisted the temptation to ask him if he knew about the missed opportunity. Maybe if he becomes president— “We’ve already had one of those. A couple, really, if you count the ruins.”
“Voters don’t get excited by ruins,” he said. “And the Noks are so dumb, nobody cares.” He chuckled. “That might be our future if we don’t get seriously off-world. No, what we need is somebody who can set an example for us. Show us what we might become. Inspire us.”
Well, what the hell? She didn’t want to be overheard, so she signaled him to switch to a private channel. Then: “It’s already happened, Governor.”
“How do you mean, Priscilla? What’s already happened?”
“They don’t want it released. But there was an encounter years ago at Talios. I’d appreciate it if it went no further. Or at least if you wouldn’t mention your source.”
She told him about Dave Simmons and the lander, and the Forscher. And about the message she and Jake had found.
He listened. Initial surprise morphed into disbelief. “That can’t be right, Priscilla.”
“I wouldn’t lie to you, Governor.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t guess you would.” He was silent for a moment. “Thank you. I appreciate your telling me.”
“I’d be grateful if you said nothing about it.”
“I won’t,” he said. “Unless I see a need. In any case, you’ll be protected. I’ll see to that.”
* * *
SO FAR, FOURTEEN monuments had been found. This one was unique because it was the only one that was arguably a self-portrait. The creature’s hands, each with six digits, reached for Saturn. That this was what the sculptor had looked like was established when the Steinitz expedition matched the prints on the ground with the statue’s feet.
“Governor,” said Devlin, “if you can move over a bit more and look up at the head, I’d like to get some more shots.”
McGruder waved him off. “We have plenty of time to take pictures, Al. Let it go for now.” He turned back to the monument. “It’s magnificent,” he said.
Priscilla looked away from the figure, out across the plain, frozen and white and scarred with a few small craters. The landscape ascended gradually toward a series of ridges, outlined in the pale light of the giant world. Saturn’s rings were tilted forward, a brilliant panorama of greens and blues, sliced off sharply by the planetary shadow.
Saturn was just above the hills. It would still be there when another twenty thousand years had passed, and Priscilla’s distant descendants were standing out here. She wondered where mankind would be then. Spread across the stars? Or would everybody instead be hanging out back on the home world watching talk shows? And maybe laughing at people who claimed we’d once walked on the Moon.