Maelstrom (29 page)

 

“Why would he let us send him to L-1?” Blake asked.

 

“To spite us. To let us know he died on purpose.”

 

“God, Ellen, I hope this time you’re wrong.”

 

She wasn’t, but neither of them would know that until late the following day. . . .

That night they found a nondescript room in the visitor’s quarters, with brocaded walls and a carpeted floor and ceiling. The furniture was square and modern, soulless, but they didn’t look at it. They didn’t even bother to turn on the light.

Her armor came off slowly. She did not make it easy for him, but neither did she resist. And when both of them were without protection, they held each other close a long time, hardly moving, not speaking. Her breathing became deeper, slower, and he helped her lie down on the bed. As he settled beside her, he realized she was already asleep.

He kissed the fine down at the back of her neck. Almost before he realized it, he was sleeping too.
XVIII

A third of the distance sunward of Farside Base, and more, Port Hesperus swung above the clouds of Venus on its ceaseless round. A tall, sad-eyed man sat in a dark room, pondering a flatscreen full of strange symbols, symbols that were old friends to him. His contemplation was suddenly interrupted.

“Merck, I’m afraid I have very bad news for you,” J. Q. R. Forster said, his voice sticky with glee. He was working at a similar screen at the opposite end of the big room, an empty gallery in the Hesperian Museum. Although the museum was valuable property, located on the busy thoroughfare that belted Port Hesperus’s garden sphere, it was temporarily unused except by Forster and Merck.

“Bad news?” Albers Merck looked up from the glowing flatscreen, a vague smile on his face. He swiped at the lick of blond hair that fell into his eyes each time he moved his head.

 

“I’ve identified the terminal signs that puzzled us so much.”

 

“Oh, have you really?”

 

“Yes, just this very moment. It was the sort of thing that should have been obvious.”

 

“Mmm?”

 

“Had it not seemed impossible.”

 

“Impossible?”

 

“We’ve assumed that the tablets are a billion years old.” How silly of us, Forster implied by his tone–

 

–but Merck nodded solemnly. “The only reasonable assumption. So long has Venus been uninhabitable, as the dating of the cave strata confirms.”

Forster abruptly stood and began to pace the length of the room, which itself resembled a cave. It was roofed with a gaudy stained-glass dome, though many of the panes were broken and it was covered with opaque black plastic. Once the gallery had been filled with rococo bricabrac of the sort favored by the museum’s founder. The man was dead now, and the place had acquired a gloomy reputation. The museum’s trustees, who were among the backers of the Venus expedition, had let the archaeologists use the empty structure to house their research.
“The
cave
is a billion years old, certainly,” Forster said. “There are caves in the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River that old. It doesn’t mean no one has visited them since they were formed.” Forster raised his hand. “No, don’t bother to say it–I will grant, for the sake of argument, that perhaps some of the artifacts in the cave could be a billion years old, although we have no means of dating what we had no time to sample. But late last night it occurred to me–why was it not obvious
sooner?
–that the beings of Culture X could have used this site over a very long period of time. . . .”

The long-suffering Merck expelled an exasperated sigh. “Really, Forster, you are surely the only archaeologist in the inhabited worlds who could believe such a possibility. A civilization lasting a billion years! Dropping in on us from time to time. My dear friend . . .”

Forster had stopped pacing. “The signs, Merck, the signs. In each section of writing, the signs to the left are the mirror image of the signs on the right. Perfect copies in every detail–
except
for the terminal signs in the last line of the left section. . . .”

“The last line in every left-hand section has a different terminal sign, occurring nowhere else,” Merck finished for him. “Clearly these are rare honorifics.”

 

“Yes!” said Forster eagerly. “And I venture that the mirror-writing itself is honorific–a way of copying texts deemed worthy of preservation. Surely it is not standard; the Mars plaque is not mirror-writing.”

 

Merck smiled diffidently. “Forgive me for turning your argument against you, but in a billion years, or a hundred–or even ten-customs could change.”

 

“Yes, yes,” said Forster, nettled. Merck had a point, but now was not the time to admit it. “Merck, I’m saying we can
decipher
these texts. That we already
know
the terminal signs!”

 

Merck peered at Forster with an expression that hovered between amusement and apprehension. “Do we?”

 

“This one–from the third set of panels. This is an Egyptian hieroglyph, a sun disc, the sound
kh
. . . .”

 

“Forster, it’s a plain circle,” said Merck.

 

“And this one, from the fifth set. Sumerian cuneiform for heaven . . .”

 

“Which perfectly resembles an asterisk.”

“From the second set, the Chinese ideogram for horse–you think that’s universal? From the ninth set, the Minoan Linear A character for wine. Did they drink wine? From the second set, the Hebrew letter aleph, which stands for ox. From the seventh set, a sign in the form of a fish from the undeciphered script of Mohenjo-daro . . .”
“Please, my friend,” Merck said gently, “this is too much for me to absorb. Are you really proposing that Culture X dropped in on Earth during the Bronze Age, then flew to Venus to leave a memo of their trip?”

“Your polite way of saying I’m crazy,” said Forster, “but I’m not. Merck, we have found the Rosetta Stone.”

 

“On
Venus?
”

 

“Perhaps we weren’t meant to find it–not without aid. But it is the Rosetta Stone nonetheless.”

 

“Putting aside the question of
who
was to aid us,” Merck said, “there is not a scrap of language we can recognize–except, possibly, these few scattered signs.”

 

“Those signs are meant to say that they knew humans then, respected us enough to record our symbols–that someday they wanted us to understand them. The means is here in these tablets.”

 

“How wonderful if you were right,” said Merck. “But how can we possibly do that, with a single dubious correspondence in each block of . . . ?”

 

“It’s an alphabet, Merck. There are forty-two signs, alphanumerics. . . .”

 

“I don’t accept . . .”

“I don’t care, just listen. We were able to recover thirty paired blocks of text, and each left-hand block ends with a sign from Earth’s earliest written languages. Each terminal sign on the left corresponds to a Culture X sign in the righthand text. Those are
sounds
. The Egyptian for
kh
. The Minoan for
we
. The Hebrew, voiceless but surely
ah
. Originally there must have been one of our signs for every one of theirs. Some from languages we no longer know. Many pieces lost. But we can put it together. We can extract the meaning, we can fill in the gaps.” Forster paused in his restless pacing. “When we do, we can read what they wrote.”

Faced with Forster’s enthusiasm, Merck threw up his hands in disgust and turned back to his flatscreen.

Forster too returned to his computer. In an hour he had what he thought was a good approximation of the sounds of the Culture X alphabet. In another hour he had used it to derive the meanings of several blocks of text. He stared in excitement as the first translations unscrolled on his flatscreen.

A kind of terrible excitement overcame him. He did not wait for the computer to finish spewing out translations before confronting Merck. “Merck!” he shouted, rousting him from his gloomy meditation.

 

Merck peered at him, unfailing in his struggle to be polite, but the sense of sadness–of tragedy, even–that hung about him caused the ebullient Forster momentary pause.

“We’ll go into the uncertainties later. . . .” He pressed on. “Here’s an appropriate place to start: the text tagged with aleph. Steady, man . . . ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth. . . .’ ” Merck, expressionless in the shadows, gazed at Forster, leaping and cavorting as he read from the slip of plastic.

“Another, the third text, tagged with the hieroglyphic sun disk. It begins, ‘How beautiful art thou, upon the eastern horizon . . .’ An Egyptian hymn to the sun. Another, from China: ‘The way that is known is not the way . . .’ ”

“Please stop,” said Merck, rising from his chair. “I cannot deal with this now.”

 

“You’ll have to deal with it soon, my friend,” Forster exulted, almost cruelly. “I see no reason why we cannot make an announcement tomorrow.”

 

“Tomorrow, then. Excuse me, Forster. I must go.”

 

Forster watched the tall, sad archaeologist slouch out of the darkened gallery. He had not even bothered to turn off his flatscreen.

Forster went to Merck’s flatscreen and reached for the SAVE key. His eye was caught by the graphic signs on Merck’s display, Culture X signs with Merck’s notation beside them. Merck persisted in treating the signs as ideographs, not alphabetic letters. He persisted in finding arcane meanings for the texts that to Forster had suddenly become transparent.

No wonder Merck didn’t want to think about anything until tomorrow. His life’s work had just been destroyed.

 

For Merck there was to be no shred of relief; worse news was already traveling through space at the speed of light.

All night Port Hesperus hummed with revelations of the latest launch disaster at Farside Base. Artificial morning arrived, and Forster put any thoughts of a press conference out of his mind–partly out of respect for his colleague, partly out of simple practicality. So spectacular were the grisly developments on the moon that no announcement of an archaeological breakthrough could possibly compete for the public’s attention.

More than twenty-four hours passed. Forster was having dinner alone in his cabin when he heard the last bit of horrible news–Piet Gress’s capsule had arrived at L-1 with his corpse inside. Forster left his dinner cooling and went back in search of his colleague. . . .

A bright and featureless flatscreen was the gallery’s sole source of light. Albers Merck sat at the long table, staring not at the blank screen but through it.

 

“Albers . . .” J. Q. R. Forster’s voice echoed through the dark gallery, uncharacteristically soft. “I’ve just heard. Were you close to the boy?”

 

“My sister’s son,” Merck whispered. “I’ve seen little of either of them since he was very small.”

 

“Do you believe what they are saying? That he tried to destroy the Farside antennas?”

Merck turned slowly to look at Forster. The gingery little professor was standing at the door with his hands hanging limp at his sides, looking oddly helpless. He had come to comfort his old friend and rival, but he had little practice in such matters.

“Yes, certainly,” Merck said simply.

 

“What could he have been thinking? Why would he try to destroy that magnificent instrument?”

 

“That must be very difficult for you to understand.”

 

“For
me
to understand! He killed himself!” In his indignation, Forster almost forgot that he was here to console Merck. “He tried to kill that other man. He could have killed a great many people.”

 

Merck’s distracted, otherworldly expression was unchanged.

 

Forster coughed. “Please forgive me, I . . . Perhaps I should leave you alone.”

“No, stay.” Merck said sharply and slowly got to his feet. In his right hand he was carrying something black and shiny, barely bigger than his palm. “Really, Forster, Gress’s fate is of no interest to me. He had his assignment. He failed. I pray that I have not already failed mine.”

“
Your
assignment. What’s that mean?”

Merck walked to the far end of the gallery, past rows of display cases. Some of the cases housed real fossils, scraps of natural sculpture collected by Venus-roving mining robots over the years. Others contained duplicates, recently completed, of the creatures Merck and Forster had seen preserved in the cave, painstakingly reconstructed from their recordings.

Merck bent over a case holding a replica of the tablets. He stared at the rows upon rows of signs, incised in a polished metallic surface that looked uncannily like the real thing, although it was only metallized plastic. The real thing was buried beneath the Venusian rock. It would wait there as long as it had waited already; its metal was as hard as diamond.

Merck murmured words that Forster could not hear. He seemed to be talking directly to the tablets.

 

“Speak up, man,” Forster said, moving closer. “I can’t understand you.”

 

“I said, our tradition did not prepare us for these events. The Pancreator was to speak to those of us who had accepted and preserved the Knowledge. Only to us. But these”–he stared at the tablets–“are accessible to any philologist.” “What are you talking about, Merck? Who or what is the
Pancreator?
”

Merck placed the thing in his hand on top of the display case. It was a flat plastic disk. He turned toward Forster then, raising himself to his full imposing height in the shadows. “I grew to like you, Forster, despite our differences. Despite how often you have frustrated my efforts.”

“You need a rest, Merck,” said Forster. “It’s obvious you’ve taken all this very hard. I regret it was I who proved you wrong about the translations, but that was inevitable.”

 

Merck went on, ignoring him. “Sometimes I have even been tempted to help you with the truth, even though it has been my lifelong mission to steer you–and everyone else–away from it.”

 

“You’re speaking nonsense,” Forster said bluntly.

 

“Unhappily for you, you’ve come to the truth on your own. So I have had to destroy your work . . .”

“What?” Forster turned to the blank flatscreen on Merck’s worktable. He lunged at the mounded keyboard and stroked the keys, but the flatscreen showed him empty files. “I can’t . . . What does this mean? What have you
done
, Merck?”