Worlds Long Lost, page 28
I might only be a lowly geologist, but I did have to take a few classes in rocketry and orbital mechanics to do this job. What a lot of people don’t appreciate is just how perfectly balanced our lives on Earth are, and the ability to leave the planet is especially underappreciated. If Earth had just a little more mass, on the order of ten percent or so, we might never have been able to build rockets big enough to put anything useful into orbit. At least not with old-fashioned chemical fuels. Maybe an insane Orion drive, propelled by nuclear bombs, could’ve lobbed people into orbit. But who in their right mind would want to create that kind of environmental nightmare just to loft something off the planet?
No, a heavier Earth would’ve left us tied to the planet until someone figured out how to nullify gravity. Not saying they couldn’t have, we just haven’t found a way yet.
That’s why we’re thinking it’s the eighty-percent Earth. That actually puts them in the sweet spot for space exploration. It’s just enough to have made single-stage to orbit launchers feasible even with older technology, which could’ve enabled a spacefaring civilization to emerge sooner than ours.
So why are we not seeing any signs of it? I mean, other than the ancient structures here on Seven?
That’s what we can’t get our heads around—there are no EM emissions coming from anywhere in this system. Radio, visible light, infrared...a civilization that left this kind of archaeological evidence ought to be pretty active, right? You can’t stop the signal, to coin a phrase.
After making it all the way out here, now they’ve gone dark. Why?
Back to the creepiness factor.
There are plenty of theories, some more credible than others, but all of them point to a civilization-ending catastrophe. Nuclear war or some equivalent was the knee-jerk reaction, but I don’t necessarily subscribe to that. Not saying it isn’t possible, but we need a lot more evidence. A close-up look at their home planet, for one, because the radiation traces aren’t detectable from here. That means it either didn’t happen, or it was a very long time ago.
Same goes for runaway global warming. We don’t see enough greenhouse gases or other pollutants to assume an environmental collapse.
An extinction-level asteroid strike is another one, though a spacefaring society ought to have been able to avoid that.
Being a layman astronomer (another skill I had to learn for this job), my money’s on a gamma ray burst. Sirius B is the kind of star that could’ve burped one out on its way to white dwarf status, and that would’ve effectively sterilized any planet in its path. And if that is what happened, we Earthers should be grateful it wasn’t pointed in our direction at the time. A gamma burst can reach pretty damned far, and even eight light years isn’t a minimum safe distance. Think of them this way: a ten-second gamma ray burst releases more energy than our Sun would in its entire lifetime.
So, yeah—I learned just enough astronomy to scare the hell out of me. A gamma burst could be coming our way right now and we wouldn’t know it until we detected it. That is, when the light arrives at Earth it’s already too late.
Here comes the “but.” If that is what happened, and it was a surprise, it seems like we’d have found evidence of that as well. The alien structures on Seven are extensive. Whoever they were, they had a serious presence here. It might even have been a waystation to other places. I mean, what if that’s not the only wormhole out here?
Anyway, my point is if it had been that kind of sudden extinction event, it would’ve taken the folks out here by surprise too. They’d have been turned into microwave burritos just like everyone back on their home planet. We should have found remains.
So far, nothing. Not even bone fragments. Did I mention there’s hardly any atmosphere? If anyone croaked here, we’d have found them.
Here I should point out how difficult these kinds of digs can be in an EVA suit. It’s hard to overstate just how much your sense of touch can guide you when you’re down in the dirt. It demands light steps and a light touch, which isn’t easy when you’re encased in layers of neoprene rubber and Kevlar. The new mechanical-counterpressure outfits do make it easier, but there’s no getting around the gloves. Fingers still get cold faster than anything else, so the heating filaments are always going to add bulk. The ice here is almost all carbon dioxide, which begins to sublimate away at the slightest application of heat. So on top of not being able to feel texture, you’re constantly working through a haze of CO2 gas. Thank goodness it’s not nitrogen, like Pluto. That stuff tends to sublimate rather explosively.
Fortunately, we’re not talking about ancient stone ruins here. Almost everything we’ve found so far has been made of advanced alloys so pure that the metallurgists are having puppies trying to figure out how they refined it. Nothing exotic, just variations on aluminum and titanium, which makes sense—elements are what they are and the periodic table isn’t limited to what we find on Earth. It stands to reason an Earthlike planet in another star system would be composed of a lot the same stuff. What stands out is there are none of the traces of undesirable stuff like lithium or sodium.
That purity is one reason the structures have held up remarkably well. We don’t have to guess at much of it, not like visualizing a thousand-year-old building from what’s left of the excavated foundation. It’s all here: domes connected by tunnels, mostly made of these superalloys but a few outbuildings that look to have been formed from the native ice. That’s harder to tease out, and is more like what I’ve come to expect from a dig. Separating the “formed” ice from the naturally occurring stuff is a lot like digging the carved rocks out from under the surrounding sediment.
By now you’re wondering what we did find. And that takes us back to creepy town.
At first, we found nothing. No furniture, no equipment, no clothing or dishes or books or tools or photo collages full of alien family members. For reasons we still haven’t determined, this site was abandoned. A long time ago, too. From what we can judge by the rate of ice accumulation on Seven, our best guess is five thousand years. If that seems like a lot—and it is—remember that this place has hardly any atmosphere. Five millennia’s worth of ice on Earth gets you a glacier. Here, it’s more like a northeast blizzard, and that’s how we spotted it in the first place after the radar returns showed something funny. We could see the tops of the domes beneath the ice pack.
The first time I entered the main dome, I was shocked to find it in such pristine condition. Empty, but clean. Frost clung to the sloped walls and dim light filtered in from a row of translucent octagonal panels (again, some kind of alloy we haven’t discovered yet), but it all looked like it was just waiting for someone to move back in and give the place some TLC. If I’d been able to take my helmet off, I’ll bet it would’ve had that empty-house smell. Funny how the absence of humans leaves a particular odor.
We found them inside the central core of a structure we labeled Alpha-2, for nothing more endearing than being in the grid square we marked off. Letters for one axis, numbers for the other. Second box from the top left.
The dome’s floor space was around three thousand square feet, comparable to a good-sized house. An outer corridor encircled a warren of inner rooms clustered around an open center. We think they were like dorms and this was the central meeting space.
The meeting room was where we found the one artifact. Two panels embedded in one wall, each about two feet square and covered with indented markings, like they’d been pressed into the alloy. Or the alloy had been formed around them. We haven’t been able to determine for sure either way; suffice to say it’s really clean. Not etched or carved. It’s like the tablets just appeared perfectly formed.
Yes, I called them tablets. I’m welcome to better analogies but damned if anyone’s been able to think of anything better.
Everyone on our team had a crash course in linguistics (credit the Agency for stuffing as many disciplines into a six-person crew as they could manage), which seemed like a smart play given the fact we were going to be exploring alien ruins. Still, it was startling.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised that they used written language. After all, what advanced society hasn’t? It’s kind of a necessary condition unless they’re telepathic or something. After seeing nothing but empty spaces, it was too easy to fall into the delusion that this was just other humans. Finding alien writing shouldn’t have been so much of a shock.
Yet there it was. As if domes and tunnels eight light years from home wasn’t enough evidence, seeing something with alien writing on it chilled me to the core. What did it say? Was it an account of whatever outpost had been here and why it was abandoned? Or was it something mundane, like the latest redundant policy from HR (and if it’s aliens, shouldn’t it be “AR”)?
At first I left the panels in place and photographed them in detail to transmit back to Earth. Figured I could study them back in my quarters that way too.
What a joke. I’m no linguist and I was way out of my depth. The writing appears based on intricate symbols, like Asian languages. I can distinguish between Mandarin Chinese, Korean or Japanese, but understanding them is entirely different. Once I got past the shock of having something in an alien language in front of me, I was able to identify the most commonly repeated symbols. That might have been nothing more than an exercise in pattern recognition, but it was a start. Every written language is just a collection of symbols that represent a sound or a thing or an idea, right? Why should theirs be any different?
So I pointed out some repetitions in the jumble of unintelligible symbols—big whoop. Without context, they might as well have been Egyptian hieroglyphics.
And that, friends, is where things got really weird.
Our survey on Seven was coming to an end. A month spent in pressurized tents that weren’t much better than the EVA suits we had to wear outside was enough to have everyone on the survey team climbing the walls. After measuring, imaging, and electronically scanning every nook and cranny of the dome network it was finally time to start taking physical samples. It would’ve been nice to just grab anything that looked interesting—which we might have done, had there been anything that stood out.
The tablets, of course, stood out like sore thumbs. They were coming with us back to Earth. There were also some panels in the walls and flooring that the metallurgists wanted to study, so we took our time figuring out the best way to pry all this stuff free without trashing the place. We couldn’t find any bolts, rivets or latches to release. There were seams between panels, but nothing else.
It was finally decided that in absence any better ideas that we’d just blast away with a laser. Because why not?
Okay, there are a lot of reasons why not. What I’m talking about isn’t as crude as it sounds, either. Remember, this place is insanely cold. A little application of heat could go a long way, and that’s what we did. We started with a panel in the floor of the Great Hall (that’s what we took to calling the big dome), tracing the outline of a recessed seam until it was uniformly heated to something like fifty degrees C above ambient. As the panel expanded with heat, it eventually popped loose.
That’s when we hit paydirt. The panels weren’t just flooring, they were covers. Lids. We were walking on top of a massive alien storage container.
As part of the team dug into the subflooring, I turned my attention to the inscribed sections. Now that we could pry things free with a little heat, getting them out of the wall was straightforward.
I don’t know what I expected to find on their reverse, but it was nothing like what I did find: More symbols, of a completely different character. If the obverse was reminiscent of Asian language, the reverse was...something else. Almost familiar.
I carefully laid the tablets (I couldn’t help but call them that now) flat, set up the camera above them, and started taking pictures. First I got both together in full frame, then individually, then closeups. I didn’t want to miss a detail, which was a good thing that I’ll get to in a minute.
I couldn’t exactly take them back to my quarters to examine more closely; they were going to end up in hermetically sealed containers for the trip home. We had a rudimentary lab back aboard ship, but it was more for chemical and biological analysis. And I was not going to be content spending the trip home with them left in a box, unexamined. Every linguist on Earth would be poring over these images, eagerly awaiting our return with the physical items. While I had a duty to preserve them for scientific inquiry, that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to get a head start on deciphering them. What else was I going to occupy my time with for the next two years?
***
My bunkmate back aboard ship, a biochemist named Ricardo, spoke about a half-dozen different languages as a result of growing up in a multiethnic family: Portuguese mother, French Canadian father, living in a largely Korean neighborhood in Quebec with his adopted Ukrainian siblings...it was the proverbial melting pot in which multiple languages had to be mastered as a matter of social survival.
They never said so, but that’s surely one of the reasons he was selected for the survey crew. The expedition masters must have figured we’d find some form of written language here, but they weren’t about to give up a seat to someone who wasn’t steeped in multiple disciplines. Until somebody comes up with Star Trek-level antimatter power and food replicators, mass is always going to be a harsh master in space.
“Why would they inscribe two different languages on opposite sides of the plate?” I wondered as we studied the images on a trio of monitors in the lab.
It had been Ricardo’s first look at them, and he was mesmerized. “I wouldn’t call this ‘inscribed.’ That implies etching or carving. This looks cleanly formed, like it just appeared this way. Maybe laser etched.”
“Well, we know it didn’t just appear out of thin air.”
Ricardo regarded me silently, with one eyebrow arched like Mister freaking Spock.
“Okay.” I sighed in surrender. This was why the snobby highbrow research scientists made fun of us rockhounds. “We don’t know that. Still, you have to admit it’s awful unlikely.”
“Improbable to the point of impossibility. Except our experience here has challenged many of our notions of improbable,” he said, again channeling his inner Vulcan as he hovered over one of the closeups. “It’s in remarkably pristine condition. Hardly any erosion for how long it must have been here.”
Based on our first-pass carbon dating, that had been a long time indeed. Assuming these plates had been placed with the original structure, they’d been on Seven at least five thousand years.
“The symbols are reminiscent of some Asian languages,” he continued, “though I don’t see a direct correlation.”
“Asian? Seriously?”
He backtracked a bit. “What I mean is they don’t appear to form words. See how evenly spaced each character is? They’re not grouped into words, so each one may represent a single idea or phrase. What’s interesting is that there are some variations between the inscriptions on each plate.”
“I noticed that too. The same way you can spot the difference between Korean and Japanese, even if you can’t read them?” I didn’t have his exposure to languages, but I could recognize patterns well enough.
“Exactly. These are probably the same instructions in different dialects.” He pointed to a line of six symbols with a small subscript block in the middle. “And look here. I think these are numbers, judging by the arrangement and typography.”
I peeked over his shoulder and spotted a few more similar groupings, arranged in a column along the left margin. Each one was separated by that same subscript character. “If you’re right, then that might be a decimal point.”
“It would make sense.” He leaned back from the workstation and folded his arms behind his head. “What kind of numbers would you post in a pressure dome on a remote planet?”
“Depends on what the space was used for, I suppose. We think the big dome was some kind of common area, right? It’s like the central hub for whatever this place was. Might be instructions for the airlock, for instance.”
Ricardo stared at the text and shook his head after a time. “Too long for that, I think. Too involved. What kinds of numbers do we post in our own facilities?”
I hadn’t thought about it that way. “Simple but important stuff everyone needs to know. Emergency procedures. Evacuation protocols. Communications.”
He sat upright. “I think you’re on to something. Comms. For all we know, those might be phone numbers.” He pointed at the patterns again raising an eyebrow. “Or radio frequencies.”
Now that made sense. “Six digits, separated in the middle by a decimal point,” I said, “assuming we’re right about what they represent.”
“Radio frequency bands are what they are,” Ricardo said. “The difference is going to be in deciphering what kind of numbering system they used. If it’s base-ten math, we’re in business.”
That’s when my enthusiasm faltered—we might not be any closer to figuring this out if they didn’t use a common system. “How would we know?”
Ricardo kept staring at the screen, as if it might eventually reveal some hidden clues. “We have to make some baseline assumptions and work with them until we’re proven wrong.”
“Then let’s do that. Humans invented the decimal point for base-ten math, so I think it’s a safe assumption. Like you said, the frequency ranges are what they are. If those are numbers, then to my eyes they look like VHF or UHF.”
“Six digits?” he asked. “Probably UHF.”
A few of the assumed numbers looked obvious. “So let’s start with one. That line right there looks likely.” It was just a dash by itself: —.
