Джек Макдевитт - A Voice in the Night

Hutch saw only a very slight difference in the color.

“You get something like that,” Abel continued, directing his remarks primarily to Eddington, “and you know there’s an abnormality.”

Eddington nodded.

“A disease,” said Larry.

“As a matter of fact, it was a parasite. But that’s not the point. It’s simply the reason we got interested. We sent a team out to look. And they found this—”

The image shifted. The foliage receded and grew swampy. A hilltop emerged. “There’s a bay beneath all this,” Abel said. “And the hilltop you’re looking at is an island. Or would be if the cover were to disappear.”

“So where are we going with this?” asked Eddington.

“Let’s make some of the cover go away.” It vanished, and they confronted a harbor opening into the ocean.

“My God,” said Larry.

A round building, about eight feet in diameter, stood at the highest point on the island. It was an open-air structure, made of stone, its roof supported by five circular columns. Its base was raised a few feet above ground level, with steps providing access on opposite sides.

“You’re saying,” said Eddington, “it’s been there all the time?”

“There’s a city beneath the growth. But it’s limited to the coastline. It’s big, though. Probably supported a population of twenty, thirty thousand.”

“How long ago?” Eddington leaned forward, peering.

“A thousand years or more. We don’t have the capability to make a determination.”

“What else,” asked Larry, “is on the island?”

“Nothing. That’s the only thing we found.” The round building.

Eddington shook his head. “I wouldn’t have believed this world could produce a sentient life form.”

Abel nodded. “Since then we’ve discovered two more cities. One smaller, and one capable of supporting probably a hundred thousand. They’re both on this continent. Nothing anywhere else that we could find.”

“What’s the technology look like?” asked Larry.

“Ancient Rome, probably.”

Eddington just sat there, breathing heavily.

Larry was visibly overwhelmed. “You have any idea what they look like? Are any of them still around?”

“If there are, we haven’t seen any. And so far we don’t know much about them. We’re pretty sure they were taller than we are. But we haven’t really had a chance to do any serious investigation.”

Eddington cleared his throat. “Does the Academy know?”

“We haven’t notified them yet, no.”

“Probably just as well. You’ll want to have a few more answers before you say anything. As soon as they learn about this, they’ll send some specialists out. In the end, they’ll take the mission from us, and we’ll be closed down.”

Larry was peering at the building. “What is it, Ted? You have any idea?”

“We think there was a table in it at one time. We found what was left of it.” He shrugged. “Maybe it was a bait shop.”

“It was probably an altar,” said Hutch. Her tone drew a few glances.

Abel frowned at her. “I was kidding,” he said.

“What sort of condition are they in?” asked Eddington. “The cities?”

“They’re wrecked. The vegetation was thinner out on the water. Along the coast line, everything got strangled.”

“Okay.” Eddington took a deep breath. “I want to go take a look. As soon as you can arrange it.” He was giving orders.

Abel frowned again, but let it go. “If you’re interested, Michael,” he said, “we can go out there now.”

“What do you mean?”

He got up. “Come with me.” They followed him out of the conference room and down another long corridor until they arrived at a set of double doors. He pressed a pad, the doors opened, and lights came on. It was a storage area. The walls were lined with shelves. Spare parts were stacked around the room. And some building materials. And—

—In a corner, pieces of stone. Hutch recognized them immediately, slices of the columns, the rounded roof cut in half, pieces of the steps—

It was the island building. “Eventually, we’ll take it home,” said Abel. “We’ll reassemble it and put it on the front lawn of the Tolliver Building.” At the Academy.

“My thought exactly,” said Eddington.

Forty-three hours after departing the Complex, Jake and Hutch rode the Copperhead ’s shuttle down to Lyla’s surface. The Flower was unquestionably one of the Great Monuments. It had been erected in the middle of a flat rocky plain. Protected from the void by their pressure suits, they stood in front of it, and looked up. It towered over them, its long golden-red petals soaring into the night. The design was similar to the others in the series, the style, the general sense of ethereal beauty defying a boundless, uncaring universe. It was not, however, a depiction of a flowering plant, as Hutch had thought at first, but rather of solar flares, a tribute to the local sun. The flares, eight of them, lifted out of an engraved base and rose toward the unforgiving sky. They were of different sizes and textures. One was broken. Hutch looked up at it. No. Not broken. Unfinished.

Neither Groombridge nor Hibachi’s World was in the sky. The monument was on the back side of Lyla, so the planet was never visible, since the satellite was in tidal lock. But the stars were bright, and the monument caught and reflected the illumination.

“It’s magnificent, Jake.” She’d never actually been in the presence of one before.

The base was engraved with two lines of symbols unlike anything she’d seen. Theory held that the reason the engraved symbols never matched each other was because they came from different eras, the most recent ending at about 19,000 B.C.E. “I would like to have met them,” she said. “The builders.”

“You’re a bit late.”

“I have that impression, Jake.”

“And you can’t be sure they’d be friendly.”

“Jake, there’s no way I could be afraid of whoever put this here.”

Benny broke in: “There’s something else. Off to the left of the monument. Your left.”

There was a stone marker. Oval-shaped. Engraved with the same type of characters that were on the base of the monument. Two lines. Jake looked at the engraving, then walked back and looked at the base of the monument. “Different messages,” he said.

Hutch opened her channel to the AI. “Benny, scan the ground. Where we’re standing.”

“Scanning.”

Jake looked puzzled. “You think something’s buried here?”

“Someone.”

“Jake,” said Benny. “There’s a box. With something inside. A skeleton. But it is not human. And I would guess from its condition that it has been here a long time.”

They climbed back into the shuttle and the AI forwarded the images. Details were difficult to make out. It was a biped. Hutch counted six digits on each limb. And she saw a cluster of thin bones underneath that didn’t seem to fit. Wings, maybe? If so, it might be a match for the creature depicted on the Iapetus monument.

“I wonder what happened?” said Jake.

“Best guess?” she said.

“Go ahead.”

“This one died while they were working. While they were putting the thing together. Maybe they got caught off guard by a flare. Maybe it simply fell off a ladder. There’s no way to know. And it doesn’t matter. But they decided to pay tribute to it.”

“By burying it here?”

“That, too.”

“What else?”

“They left the monument incomplete. Maybe for them it constituted the ultimate recognition.”