Venturi Page 11

  They were disappointed, but nobody argued and it was at least some consolation that they were able to launch shuttles heading up into space. There would be, Alex had said, an opportunity for first footing and they’d throw up a shoreleave facility, too, at a suitably scenic site. Trilopharus had promised, laughing, that no, he wouldn’t take the ship away again without making sure they were ready. So everyone would get some time off the ship before they moved on.

  And in the meantime, they were watching the progress of Jim, the Holy Moley, with the keenest of interest and anticipation.

  A Holy Moley was a three-stage probe, starting with the surface excavator which was the size of a large dog and covered in rotating tracks. That only went as far as the subsoil, however, before opening up and releasing a smaller, beetle-shaped tunneller which burrowed downwards by moving the subsoil from in front to behind itself, analysing scrupulously as it went. It took four days to go down five hundred metres, at which point it sat there assessing for several hours before releasing a metallic worm. And that, every metre, stopped to do a series of tests including broadcasting signals, electrical and gravity pulses and a sequence of vibrations, observing minutely for any kind of response from the artefact. As it continued to sit there behaving exactly like a slab of rock, the probe kept creeping closer and closer.

  It was forty two metres away when it became clear that there were indeed some kind of markings on the stone. It hadn’t been carved – that would have been obvious even from surface scans and anything like a layer of paint would have shown up earlier, too. But there were subtle differences emerging in the albedo of the artefact as the probe got close enough to measure that with laser scans. Some parts of its surface were lighter than others. And the first images, tantalisingly, showed shadows like curved lines, though what kind of writing, symbols or drawing it might be could only be guessed at.

  ‘I think the next time will give us enough,’ Davie said.

  And it did. Three quarters of an hour later, with the crew all on tenterhooks, Jim the Holy Moley reached its next scan point, stopped and went through the long series of tests, pausing each time to watch for reaction.

  Finally, it got to the laser scan; light penetrating the sodden ground.

  And there it was. An image was building on the screens in front of them. It showed an upright slab, 4.32 Chartsey metres tall, half that width and half again that depth. They were looking at the north-facing side of it. And they were looking at pictures.

  The details were still indistinct, but the outline was there. Alex’s first impression was that it was some kind of stick-figure cartoon. But he’d hardly even started to look at it before he realised that what was emerging at the bottom of the image were words.

  And they were words, too, which would need no kind of exo-linguist to translate. Alex could read them and understand them as easily as if they had been written in League Standard.

  Cartash Mementor.

  Remember the Cartash. It was in the alphabetic script used on ancient Cartasay – not something routinely taught today since most people used datacoding. But Alex had studied lareen as a personal interest course, getting familiar enough with the script to read simple documents in the original.

  Cartash Mementor. It didn’t get much more simple than that.

  ‘It’s a memorial.’ Davie said and Alex turned to look at him. He’d never heard Davie sound like that before, that tight, choked voice. And he’d never seen Davie welling up with tears, either.

  But Davie, as it turned out, was only the first. As the image was cleaned up and details emerged, everyone else started to see what he had seen and already understood.

  It took the rest of them a little while. The stylised nature of the pictures didn’t make them immediately obvious and it was some minutes before they realised that the sequence moved from right to left, then left to right on the next row, then right to left again.

  It began with what Davie interpreted for them as a symbolic star chart, locating Cartasay. The next image indicated people on a planet, apparently all holding hands. In the next image, some of the figures were shown lying flat on the ground. In the next, more were down. The one after that was complex, with two things going on – two much smaller figures had appeared and the remaining larger figures appeared to be separating. Two of them were being given something by the others, though precisely what was difficult to tell.

  They then moved away and two concurrent stories were shown in scenes which ran one above the other. In one, the larger figures were continuing to fall and growing fewer, while more of the small ones were emerging. Below, there was another stylised star chart, this time, Davie said, indicating the system they were in right now – it would take a while for the rest of them to catch up with him on that, but they would find that he was right. On this new world, the two figures appeared to be laying the things they’d brought with them on the ground and were next standing, arms raised, looking up at the other image of what was happening on the world they’d left behind.

  When only one tall figure remained at Cartasay, the two here were shown rising up from the surface. And in the next image of Cartasay, now back as the sole-thread picture, there were three tall figures along with a cluster of the little ones.

  Then, in the final image, all three of the tall figures were down, leaving only the little ones standing.

  ‘That’s us,’ Buzz murmured. ‘That’s the birth of humanity… the children of the plague.’ He wiped a tear from his own eyes, ‘Sorry, dear boy.’ He was surprised, himself, by the intensity of his emotions.

  Alex didn’t say anything. His throat was tight and there was a physical ache in his chest.

  Ten thousand years and it might have happened yesterday. Ten thousand years and here they were, the voices of the Cartash speaking to them, showing them their own extinction and the gift of life they’d bestowed on those who were to follow them.

  It was Shion who found the words.

  ‘Nes memenori Cartash,’ she said, quietly. We remember the Cartash.

  ‘Nes memenori Cartash,’ Alex repeated, with a sombre nod. ‘Nes enori.’ We honour them.

  ‘There’s a very odd mood here today,’ Trilopharus observed, popping in the following day. ‘Has something happened?’ He looked around, picking up on the different clothing that people were wearing and the self-conscious formality.

  ‘We are about,’ Alex explained, ‘to hold a memorial service. We found evidence last night that this is the Lost Library of Cartasay, with a memorial stone left by the Cartash who came here. In our culture, we feel it important to pay our respects with a short ceremony and we wondered if perhaps you would like to be…’

  ‘No, thanks,’ Trilopharus interrupted cheerfully. ‘Not our kind of thing at all. But we’ll leave you to it, give us a shout when you’re ready for a chat.’

  So the memorial ceremony went ahead without them. Alex had asked all the Chartseyan members of the Venturi’s crew to parade on the command deck, as this find was of particular significance to them.

  And for Simmy, at least, it was life changing. She was moved to tears by the memorial ceremony. Alex said a few words – the obvious ones about the nobility of the Cartash as they faced their own end, the generosity with which they had bequeathed their world to a genome which would survive them, the honour with which the descendants of that genome would always remember them. Then everyone stood to attention in silence while a minute-bell tolled through the ship.

  But they had put, on the command deck and on every big screen across the ship, a life-sized holo of the Cartash Stone. And standing there looking at it while the bell tolled sonorously, Simmy was not only weeping, but shivering.

  ‘It’s like – people have said, like, that we were made by these aliens who were dying out cos of a plague,’ She told Alex, later, when he asked if she was all right. She seemed a little dazed still and carried herself with an odd, queenly gait. ‘But you don’t think its real, do you? I mean, obvious it’s real, but i
t don’t feel like it is. And you watch the flicks, you know, Cartasay and all that, people in kilts stabbing one another and that’s like so way back in the dark ages, that don’t seem real, neither. But now there’s this stone and its real, it’s something they touched and they were beautiful.’

  They had fine detail images, now, as the Holy Moley had worked its way closer. This had revealed that the images weren’t stick figures at all, but exquisitely detailed. The tall figures, the Cartash, were indeed beautiful – willowy in form, the epitome of human concepts of beauty. The nearest humans came to it, usually, were the highly artificial forms of supermodels. The small figures, when they emerged, were recognisably human, with the proportions and features now recognised as a typical Chartseyan genome.

  Alex nodded. He had seen an image of the Olaret and had found that deeply moving, too, looking at the face of the species who had created his people as their own race dwindled and died. Nobody could have called the Olaret beautiful, though. They had borrowed the Cartash design for their colonies and Alex would always be grateful to them for that. If the Olaret had based their design on their own appearance, Novaterrans would be stick-insect thin, with arms set low on their bodies and large flat eyes set almost on the sides of their little oval heads.

  The Olaret, though, had considered it more important to preserve the most important aspect of who they were as a people; the core values which all of their Nestings had shared. And still did share. However varied their cultures had become over the millennia, there was still a fundamental principle evident in all of them, that the welfare of society as a whole was more important than the freedom of the individual.

  ‘An’ I thought,’ Simmy told him, her face alight still with the epiphany she had experienced, ‘That’s me, that is. Well, my great-great times a million or whatever, but you know, me, they made us – I’m a Daughter of the Cartash,’ she declared, proudly. ‘And that’s something to live up to, innit?’

  ‘It is,’ Alex agreed, privately enjoying Simmy’s cavalier approach to history, with her description of three thousand years of the ancient Cartasayan Empire as ‘people in kilts stabbing one another’ and her rather exaggerated idea, too, of how many generations there had been in ten thousand years. In the League, a generation was reckoned at just under forty five years, for the purpose of counting, so it was more like two hundred than a million. But it was touching, really, to see the girl who’d grown up in the most deprived class on Chartsey, holding up her head like that. I’m a Daughter of the Cartash.

  ‘I’m gonna learn some of the words,’ she told him and as he was wondering quite what she meant by that, she struck a pose, perhaps half-remembered from a movie, an Imperatus with one hand raised, making a public address.

  ‘Niz meminny Cartash!’ she declaimed.

  Well, at least she’d got their name right.

  ‘Saluté,’ Alex said, straight faced, ‘Cartash femix.’ And as her mouth fell open he translated for her, ‘I salute the daughter of the Cartash.’

  ‘Hey!’ She crowed with delight at that and drew herself to attention, snapping off a textbook salute. ‘Saluté!’ she said and then, having a creative bash at his rank, ‘Commodorus!’

  Alex didn’t laugh until she’d gone. And he didn’t laugh at all at the debriefing, later, when Mister LIA made a far from humorous resurgence.

  He’d been keeping a low profile since that memorable clash with Silvie. He hadn’t even, as Alex had expected him to, challenged the alarming decision to go to Pirrell and take their ambassador to Lundane. Whatever he thought of that, he had, so far at least, kept his opinion to himself. It would only be later – when it was far too late – that they would realise that he was counting on the authorities at X-Base Sentinel to put a stop to the obvious lunacy of taking the Pirrellothian to Lundane. He had, indeed, been comforted by his certainty that the LIA, Diplomatic Corps and Fleet authorities at the X-Base would never allow that to happen, not in a million years.

  And he had, in the meantime, been focussing on the biodiversity survey. So far, he had not been able to find any evidence that they were endangering humanity with any wild, reckless behaviour and as far as he could tell they were following Excorps protocols meticulously. This had not, however, gone any way towards reconciling him to the utter insanity of what the Fourth was doing here. And he was, now, attempting to get them to do what he considered to be the responsible thing.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Alex said, having heard what Mister had to say at the ‘any questions’ phase of the debriefing. ‘You want to do what?’

  Mister could see the same incredulity on faces all around, but he ignored them.

  ‘I believe,’ he said, ‘that it is imperative that we acquire the artefact for preservation and further study.’

  ‘You want to dig it up,’ Alex said. ‘And take it back with us.’

  ‘And put it in a secret lab,’ a voice at the back of the room muttered, at which Mister bridled and looked even more obstinate.

  ‘Remind me,’ said Alex, ‘You were, last week, objecting to us going anywhere near it at all. And objecting very strongly, too, as I recall.’

  Mister glowered at him. ‘But now it has been identified,’ he said. ‘It is an artefact of immeasurable historical significance – the first evidence we have that Chartsey was once home to an alien species. We have to take it back with us for preservation and further study.’

  Alex looked steadily at him. ‘You do understand,’ he said, ‘that it is a memorial, yes?’

  ‘I know that it was left there to be found and I know it’s ours,’ Mister said, squaring his jaw. ‘And as an archaeological relic…’

  He didn’t get any further, though Alex held up a hand after a few seconds to silence all the voices raised in condemnation.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said and as they fell silent, gave the LIA agent a look of frozen steel. ‘The Cartash Stone,’ he said, ‘is preserved perfectly well where it is. For study purposes, we are taking back every conceivable scan – no university in the League could obtain any more data from it than we have. And it will, so long as I have anything to say in the matter, be staying right there, as the memorial the Cartash intended it to be. It was their final act as they faced their extinction, Mister. Have some respect for that.’ He glanced around the room, sternly. ‘Briefing dismissed.’ Then, to the LIA man, gesturing to indicate that he wanted him to remain, ‘A word.’

  As the others went out, there were some hostile looks aimed at the man who wanted to dig up the gravestone of an entire species and take it away like a souvenir.

  ‘Perhaps he thinks he can interrogate it,’ said one of them and there was some unkind laughter as they left.

  Mister sat where he was, folded his arms and looked at Alex defiantly. He was obviously expecting to come under attack and was ready to defend himself.

  Alex, though, walked over and sat down a couple of places away as the door closed behind the last of those who’d been at debriefing.

  ‘We need to talk,’ he said. ‘And the first thing I need to say is that I’m sorry.’ He was sitting angled in his chair and Mister had moved around too, to face him. His expression betrayed shock, quickly morphing into suspicion. ‘I apologise,’ Alex said, ‘I know that you are already under a great deal of strain and I do wish that I didn’t have to add to that. But there is, I am afraid, a situation.’ He paused for a moment, looking at the other man with calm detachment. ‘Are you familiar with the Big Picture Briefing protocol, Mister?’

  The LIA man nodded, a touch indignant.

  ‘Naturally,’ he said. The LIA had analysed it every which way, observed it in action, considered it as a training tool for their own agents and concluded that it was only fit for civilian use.

  ‘Buzz and I,’ Alex told him, ‘devised it as a ten-point scale because we were finding it very difficult to judge situations when people were coming aboard and meeting Shion. We had to brief people on the fact that she’s not human far more often than you’d think a
nd if we got it wrong people could end up in sickbay, in shock. So we needed a way to evaluate where people are in their existing knowledge of exodiplomacy, with phased exposure so that we could bring them up to speed in a controlled manner and with ‘Stop’ indicators of anxiety or denial which would tell us people had taken in as much as they could cope with for now. It’s a method you can use for any high-impact information and it’s something that we’re in the process of preparing now. I will be, starting from tomorrow, giving a series of briefings to the Venturi’s company. And for most of them, the content of those briefings will be extremely high impact, challenging, difficult, something I will need to gauge very carefully and ensure that everyone gets the support that they need to process this and cope. We have already, as part of that process, evaluated everyone aboard the ship to determine where they are starting on that disclosure scale and how well, or otherwise, they will deal with that level of information over the five or six days we anticipate. And I am sorry, really am, but that evaluation has flagged you up as someone who really shouldn’t be exposed to that disclosure at all.’

  ‘Huh,’ said Mister, not at all impressed by this. ‘So what you’re saying is you’re going to brief the crew on aspects of the mission you don’t want me to know about!’

  ‘No, I do want you to know about it,’ Alex said. ‘I’d actually really value your opinion – very much your field of expertise, I feel. But there is a health and safety warning on your evaluation, see. Your entry level on this particular disclosure scale is actually quite high, but your resistance to any information challenging to what you already know and believe is pretty much absolute. You won’t believe it, won’t want to believe it and that will be extremely stressful – anger, denial, panic, clinical anxiety… all stop indicators telling us it isn’t fair, or safe, to push you into being confronted by things we know you won’t cope with. I have a duty of care and my responsibility to you, primarily, is to keep you safe. So I have to offer and advise an opportunity for you to step aside, accepting that this particular aspect of the mission would just be too much; information overload.’