He waves his hand towards a side chamber and we duck into there. The lights inside are of a lower luminescence than those outside. They don’t want the light damaging things, apparently.
‘Doubt that. Hundred thousand years and we’ll know all we need to know about this place. We’ll let them sleep in peace then.’
I study him and try to figure the tone of his voice. It is too difficult to read his expression through his coldsuit mask, though.
The sarcophagi are metallic chrysalids averaging three metres in length. I say metallic because they appear to be made of brass. I am told that they were made of something very complex that does have as its basis some copper compounds. I ask if it is organic. I am told no, it is manufactured — it isn’t complex enough to be organic.
There are two sarcophagi in the chamber. One off alone, untouched and easily viewed, the other so shrouded in scanning equipment, I don’t know it is there until Duren tells me I can look inside.
No one has yet opened a sarcophagus, simply because there is not a lot more to be learned that has not already been learned by scanning. Inside each sarcophagus, suspended in water ice that is thick with organic chemicals, is an alien. These aliens are frightening. What is most frightening about them is how closely they resemble us. They have arms and legs much in proportion to our own. Their bodies are longer and wasp-waisted, their feet strange hooked two-toed things, and their hands equally strange, with six fingers protruding from all sorts of odd points, and no palms. Their heads. . how best to describe their heads? Take an almond and rest it on its side, expand it only where the neck joins it, hang two sharp barbs at the nose end and back from that punch a hole straight through for eyes … It is theorized that they had used some kind of sonar sense. This is one of the theories.
When the first sarcophagus was found people started to bandy about phrases like
‘parallel evolution’ while others claimed credence for their own pet theories. Those of a religious bent called the discovery proof of the existence of God, though the selfsame people had heretofore claimed that the discovery of no humanlike races had also been proof of the existence of God. Some claimed the discovery evidenced ancient alien visitations of Earth, whilst still others talked of interstellar seeding. How so very personal, human and petty is each theory.
Coming to make my documentary about the catacombs of Orbus and the passing destruction of the moonlet Corlis I have not thought which of them to give credence.
‘Do you think it’s parallel evolution?’ I ask Duren as I peer through the scanner.
‘Does a scorpion look like a human? It evolved under the same conditions and even on the same planet,’ he says, and totally destroys the parallel evolution argument.
‘What about interstellar seeding?’
‘Same arguments apply,’ he replies, and of course they do.
‘God?’ I ask.
He laughs in my face then says, ‘I try to understand it. I don’t try to cram it in to fit my understanding.’
He definitely has the essence of it there.
I hesitate to call this my first night here as there is little to mark the change from day to night.
You could go outside and spot the sun in the sky, but as Orbus revolves about it once every three solstan centuries that wouldn’t be much help. The personnel at the base work a shift system. My waking period concurs with that of Duren, Jap, and about five hundred others who I have yet to meet. After a night of mares in which I am chased down Victorian sewers by subzero rats I wake to a day of subterfuge and obfuscation. Something has happened and people either don’t know or don’t want to tell the nosy bastard from the Netpress. I use the most powerful weapon in my armoury to get to the bottom of it. Jap takes my bribe.
We don coldsuits in the ball-shrinking coldlock and step on out. Jap leads me to one of the tracked surface cars they call a crawler and we motor over to the nearby excavation. I still find it difficult to take in that the treads of the vehicle we ride in are made of doped water ice.
The whole idea of using such a substance makes me see our civilization as so delicate, so temporary. I guess my objection is that this is the truth.
The excavation is a tunnel that cuts at thirty degrees through rock and ice into the side of one of the Victorian sewers. This is the way I had come yesterday with Duren to view the body, so to speak. We climb out of the crawler and Jap approaches a suited figure who is walking up from the slope.
‘What’s happening, Jerry?’ Jap asks over the com. He’d told me to keep my mouth shut and my ears open for the present.
The woman who replies sounds tired and irritated.
‘Duren flipped. He cut open the sarc in B27 and started to thaw out the chicken. Security got on to him and he took his crawler into the system.’
Jap says, ‘Always thought he was a bit too close to ‘em. He was on it from the start wasn’t he?’
‘You know he was,’ says the woman, her irritation increasing. I wince: Jap isn’t very good at subterfuge.
‘What’s happening now?’ he quickly asks.
‘They still haven’t found him and the computer quite competently tells us that for every hour that passes our chances of finding him halve. Ain’t technology wonderful?’
‘What about the sarcophagus and the corpse?’
‘Linser says waste not want not or some such ancient bullshit. He’s having them moved inside for intensive study. . Here they come now.’
I stare down the slope and see one of the crawlers towing something up the slope. I glance round at Jap and make the hand signal he had only recently taught me. We both switch our com units to private mode.
‘The Corlis intersection is in two solstan days. Would this Duren survive that?’ I ask.
Jap replies, ‘Depends where he is, but yeah, most likely, though not much beyond it. His suit would have to go onto CO conversion after a day and that drains the power pack.’
2
‘So he’d freeze and join the rest of them here.’
‘That about sums it up, yeah.’
Corlis is hammering towards us at fifty thousand kilometres per hour; pretty slow in cosmological terms. It is the size of Earth’s moon and not much different in appearance. Its major differences are its huge elliptical orbit and the smattering of ices on its surface. It will pass close enough to Orbus to perturb both their orbits. Orbus’s orbit by only a fraction, Corlis’s orbit will wind in a completely different spirograph shape round the sun. This has been happening for about three quarters of a million years and is set to change in a hundred thousand years, when Corlis will finally be captured by Orbus. It’s funny, but I find most of the scientific staff rather reluctant to discuss the coincidence of dates: the aliens have been frozen for the same length of time that Corlis has been on its erratic orbit. Only Linser has anything useful to offer.
‘These tunnels, chambers and sarcophagi are all that survived the disaster that sent Corlis on its way, or maybe they are all that survived Corlis’s arrival in this system. The tunnels survived because they are so deep. There was probably a surface civilization but it’s all gone now.’
It doesn’t ring true.
‘When Corlis passes here tomorrow, will we be safe?’ I ask.
‘Oh yes. The nearest disturbance will be five hundred kilometres away at a fault line,’