Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

“What happened to them?”

“Nobody knows. Maybe the competition became too severe. Some of the local experts think they couldn’t unite politically. Who knows?” He was turning the pages of his sketch pad, holding it so I could see. It was filled with renderings of the objects in the cases, or the altar, and of the Field Museum itself. “It’s a puzzle, how they moved these rocks around. It’s one of the things Survey was trying to find out when they were driven off.”

I blinked at the old man: I hadn’t heard it put in quite those terms before. “What drove them off?”

Alexander placed his fingertips against the altar, as though to read something in the cold stone. “I’d love to know,” he said.

“Wasn’t it ever made public?”

“In a way, Tiel. They released a fairly detailed description of conditions on Belarius after the second expedition. It’s an old world. There’s been a lot of time for evolution. So the carnivores are very efficient. They have a lot of teeth, and they move very quickly, and some of them fly, and most of them are hard to see coming.” I’d seen pictures of a few. The one that stuck in my mind was a kind of jet-propelled airborne shark. “And they are reasonably intelligent. Which, by the way, has been a factor in keeping their numbers down, so that they don’t eliminate the food supply.”

“How do you mean?” We had wandered close to a diorama of the Ysdril West excavation.

“They made war on one another. The species did.”

“Why?”

“For the same reason animals fight on Rimway. Water. Hunting rights. Whatever. But on Belarius, it was organized warfare. The species there seem to have more than their share of intelligence and administrative capacity. In any case, though, I can’t imagine why a well-armed force—and, at least in the case of the second expedition, forewarned as well—couldn’t hold their own against local predators.”

“Alex, you seem to know quite a lot about Belarius. Have you worked for Survey?”

He looked around for a place to sit, and found a stone bench. “I’m in the food business,” he said. “Or was. I’m retired now.”

I couldn’t suppress a smile. “How does somebody in the food business come to be involved in all this?” I waved an arm around.

“We have a little group on Rimway,” he said. “Mostly people like me, who are just interested in the Belarian story.” He leaned forward, his voice intent. “Listen, Tiel. Survey’s not telling the truth about what happened on Belarius. Moreover, it’s been years now since they officially announced that they would not go back there. But look—.” Through the front entrance we could see the pool, and the cluster of Survey buildings beyond. They were silver and green in the late afternoon light. “Why have they stayed on Fishbowl? God knows it’s not near anything else.”

I shrugged. I certainly didn’t know.

“Because,” he said, “they’re going back. Tiel, there is no possibility that they’re going to walk off and leave what they’ve found. But there’s something out there that scares them.”

He’d raised his voice and drawn the attention of the attendant.

The diorama was mostly sand: a collection of partly excavated blocks and columns, earth-moving machines, temporary shelters, and people. A lander stood on the edge of the display. No single indigenous structure was intact. “Alex,” I said, “I take it you’ve not been to Belarius?”

“No,” he said with regret. “When we heard about the second mission, we pooled our money, and offered Survey a substantial sum to allow passage to one of our members. If they’d gone along with it, we were going to cut cards to determine the winner.”

“What did they say?”

“Too dangerous. They couldn’t take the responsibility.” His eyes narrowed. “I can’t quarrel with that. They lost almost half their landing team on the first effort. The second try wasn’t much better.” He stared at Ysdril West. “But I would have liked to go.”

I’d been wondering whether Durell might have made the trip, but it seemed unlikely. “Alex,” I said, “there were several excavation sites on Belarius. Is there a tower anywhere among them?”

“Intact?”

I hesitated over that one. “Not necessarily. Anything sticking up out of the rubble that one could describe as a tower.”

He closed his eyes, and I could see him mentally inspecting the various digs. “No,” he said finally. “I don’t think so. If there is, they’re keeping it quiet.”

“Do you know anything about Reuben Uxbridge?”

“He was an expert on ideographic structure.” He glanced at his watch, and shrugged. “I have to be going.” He stood up. “Uxbridge worked for Casmir Moss, who was the on-site director of the mission when they closed it down.”

“Was he ever involved in any sort of unusual incident?”

“Tiel, I would say they were all involved in unusual incidents of one kind or another. I just don’t know. If you want to talk to someone about Uxbridge, see Moss.”

“Where would I find him?”

“He’s here somewhere. He’s one of the reasons I’m sure they’re going back. Moss would have more important things to do than hang around Fishbowl if something weren’t about to happen.”

Two middle-aged women and a boy came through the front entrance. The boy made immediately for the diorama.

“Alex,” I asked, “are you here alone?”

“Yes. Three of us were supposed to make the trip, but things came up. You know how it is.”

“How about dinner?” I said. “My treat.”

That night, I looked up everything the Library had on the two missions. The official stuff wasn’t very informative, and the dozen or so books written on the subject were neither consistent with each other nor helpful. Eggleston’s Bureaucrats in the Field mercilessly flayed security procedures that “couldn’t hold off a few wild animals with modern weapons.” Adrian Hunt, in Survey and Belarius: A Study in the Exercise of Power , charged that the political appointees who control Survey’s funding wished to put an end to the program because it cost too much, and the feudal civilization that had developed on Belarius could make no conceivable contribution to Confederate technology. Other volumes hinted darkly at a demonic presence on Belarius.

There was no mention of Uxbridge anywhere, but Eggleston excoriated Moss as an incompetent paper-shuffler who’d been more concerned with arcane languages than with the practical hazards faced by his teams. (Moss’s division of philologists and archeologists had taken the heaviest losses, and he was charged with providing inadequate security training for himself and his subordinates.)

Like Uxbridge, Moss was a philologist, though of somewhat more advanced reputation. He’d won most of the major awards, declined at least two university presidencies, and written The Dawn of Language , the definitive study of proto-Sumerian ideography. Eggleston remarked that, for Moss, the Belarian discovery was a kind of fresh virgin after the long line of ancients so thoroughly worked over by everybody else.

But this had apparently been a virgin with a bite.

The evening after my conversation with M’Kay Alexander, I contrived to be at Arnhof’s, a small restaurant overlooking a shopping quadrangle, when Moss came in for his evening meal. He was a man of quite ordinary appearance, with dull blue eyes, and defensive lines drawn about his mouth. It would have been no surprise to learn that he made his living from dead languages.

I maneuvered into a table adjacent his, ordered some seafood (what else?), and awaited an opportunity. Moss took some papers from a case, spread them out in front of him, and sank immediately into a reverie.