Red Planet Run (24 page)

“Well, thank you.” I think. “Who am I speaking to?”

“I beg your pardon a second time, I’m sure. This is Maximilian Woolley.”

“Mr. Woolley—”

“Dr. Woolley, please.”

“Sorry, Dr. Woolley. Dr. Woolley, I’ve just come from Vernadsky, the Russian settlement down on the equator. Four months ago they were attacked by a group armed with laser weapons. No one was killed, but three months prior to that we landed in Valles Marineris and found another, smaller colony destroyed and all its inhabitants killed, also by laser weapons. Have you had any trouble?”

For the second time, everyone tried to talk at once. Dr. Woolley prevailed. “Quiet, please, ladies and gentlemen. No, Ms. Svensdotter, I am delighted to report that we have not had trouble of any kind. Since we landed, the only moving thing on this benighted landscape we have seen is yourself.”

“Selves,” I said. “My son and daughter are with me. Good. I’m glad things have been peaceful for you. But as a precautionary measure, are you armed?”

“I’m afraid so; Ms. Ricadonna insisted.”

“I am delighted to hear it,” I said. Paddy elbowed me and I said, “Where’s your camp?”

“We have a temporary camp set up on the north rim.” The white arm pointed.

Sean handed me the binoculars and I surveyed the site. “All right, we’ll park on the crater floor below it.” I let out a jib and caught a passing breeze, and an hour later we were down and anchored. It took another thirty minutes worth of housekeeping before I gave the okay for EVA. As we suited up, Sean said, “They weren’t wearing any.”

“Any what?”

“Pistols, rifles, fragmentation grenades, shoulder-fired rocket launchers, anything. They weren’t armed.”

I locked down his helmet. “I noticed. Probably left them back at camp.”

Even through the visor, his snort was audible. I gave his helmet a light slap with my open palm. “Behave. These are scientists, not soldiers. There haven’t been a lot of shots fired in anger over whether Crete was Plato’s Atlantis. Make allowances.”

He didn’t snort this time, but from his skeptical expression he might as well have. Buy them guns, send them to battle, this is what you get.

On the ground we were surrounded, excited faces peering at us through visors that were pockmarked and scored, as if they’d spent a lot of time pressed up against a rough surface trying to peer inside.

“Excuse me, please. Excuse me, pardon me, thank you very much.” I caught a glimpse of a luxuriant white handlebar mustache as the stocky figure pushed his way forward. “Ms. Svensdotter. I’m Dr. Woolley.” He paused. I wondered if he expected applause. “Welcome to Mars.”

I smiled with all my teeth. “Thank you, Dr. Woolley, but we’ve been on Mars for over seven months.”

Rich chuckle. “Of course you have, of course you have. Well, then, I may welcome you to Cydonia, may I not?” He waved a hand in a proprietary gesture which included most of the northern hemisphere of the planet.

“Certainly you may, and I thank you.” I can be as pompous as the next guy when the occasion calls for it. “May I introduce my son and daughter. Patricia, Sean, this is Dr. Woolley.”

“How do you do,” Paddy said.

“How do you do,” Sean echoed.

“And how do you do,” Dr. Woolley said jovially. “Welcome to Cydonia, children. How nice it will be to have some little people about the place for a change.”

Suddenly I felt like the mother of leprechauns, a neat trick since both twins stood just five centimeters short of my own one ninety-three. Sean, spine stiff with outrage at being called a child, a stage he considered to have left behind him a minimum of ten years before, was about to rip Dr. Woolley a new bodily orifice when I stepped between them. “Thank you, Dr. Woolley, how kind of you to say so. Where exactly in Cydonia are we?”

We turned in a body to regard the tall, slender structure standing alone and fragile in the center of the splosh crater. By now it was noon, and the structure cast very little shadow, so that if you weren’t looking right at it, it barely registered on your peripheral vision. From the air at this time of day it might not have been visible at all.

“We are at the Tholus, dear lady,” Dr. Woolley said.

“Yes, we know that, at the splosh crater at the lower right-hand corner of the Cydonia complex,” Paddy said.

Woolley drew back, no doubt surprised my leprechaun could speak in complete sentences. “Why, yes.”

“So what’s that thing in the middle of it?”

Third rich chuckle. I was counting. “That, my dear, is what we were about to discover when you, ah, hove into view.”

“Well?” Sean demanded. “What’re we waiting for?” Without waiting for a reply, he set off, churning up red dust in a straight line for the structure. Paddy fell in behind him.

“Well, um, uh, yes, of course,” Woolley said. “Children, please, slow down. Please, slow down! Don’t touch anything when you get there, please!” He lit out after them, a short, stubby little figure in dogged pursuit.

If pressure suits can look amused, these did. A soft drawl came over my headset. “Howdo, Star Svensdotter. This here’s Art Evans, photographer, speaking.” One of the suits waggled the fingers of his gauntlet. “Also present is Howard Carter, project artist, and Evie Carter, conservation expert.” Two other figures raised their hands. “Over there’s Claudia Sestieri, epigrapher extraordinaire, Irene Sukenik, surveyor of all she beholds, and Amedeo de Caro, geochronologist, have carbon, will time-travel. Not present and unaccounted for are Tom and Jeannie Champollion. They’re the team leaders. Also the team’s physicist and astronomer, respectively.”

“I know, I’ve seen the crew roster. Why aren’t they here?” I said bluntly. “There aren’t enough of you to split up like this.”

“Well, ma’am, we had us a dust storm the other day and they got stuck up at the Pyramid. We suspect they’ll be back this evening sometime.”

“Good, I look forward to meeting them.” I gestured at the rapidly retreating figures between us and the structure. “Looks like you hit the jackpot.”

“We’ve been pinned down by storms for the last four months,” an unidentified voice said. “This was our first project, after the initial survey.”

“Did you do a fly-by?” I said, starting out.

A figure fell in next to me and the rest brought up the rear. “Yeah, one. We’re trying to conserve fuel.”

“Why? I’ve read your mission specs. Your supplies were well above mission parameters to facilitate aerial recon and mapping. You should have had fuel to spare.”

“We should have,” Evans agreed, “and we would have, if we hadn’t had to make three course corrections in the half hour before entering the atmosphere.”

Without willing it, my voice sharpened. “You had problems with entry?”

“No shit we had problems with entry,” a new voice said. “We near as damn it wound up on a heading for the Oort Cloud. If Jeannie wasn’t the pilot she is, we’d be on our way there now. As it was, she said it was the Great Galactic Ghoul messing with our minds. Why?”

I was saved a response by our approach to the structure in the center of the crater. “You’ve done a lot of work here.”

“No shit we’ve done a lot of work here,” the same voice said with feeling. “I should have majored in ditch-digging instead of epigraphy—I would have been better off.”

“Quit bitching, Sestieri,” Evans said good-naturedly. “At least we’re in.”

“In?”

Evans grinned at me. “Uh-huh. We’d just located what looks like a door when y’all popped up on the horizon.”

I admit it, I was excited. “Then what are we waiting for? Let’s see what there is to see.”

“Sean was right, Mom!” Paddy yelled over the headset. “It is an air foil!”

“Yup,” Evans said laconically. “We figure they measured the prevailing winds and built it to minimize drifting.”

He didn’t say who he thought ‘they’ were.

The piles of red sand to either side attested to the efficiency of the design. The marks on the side of the slender, rectangular pillar were tiles, 10-centimeter squares made of some hard substance that did not reflect light, as I discovered when I pressed my visor up against one, trying to peer inside. It was opaque, impervious.

“Somebody really did build this, Mom,” Sean said.

“Somebody sure as hell did, Sean. The question is who, and when. Especially when. How old is this place, Art? Has your dating expert been able to run any tests?”

“Nope. We hope to get to it shortly. For now, would y’all like a look-see inside?”

My heart beating so hard and so high up in my throat I felt like I was going to choke, I allowed as how we might find that educational, and Evans led us around the base. On the fourth side we found an entrance, framed in freshly dug piles of red sand. It was a rectangle cut into the face of the pillar, and if we ever got it open, it was going to be a tight fit for me. I didn’t see hinges, or more importantly, a knob. “It don’t seem to want to open,” Evans confirmed. “We’ve done everything but ring the doorbell. Would y’all like to take a shot at it?”

Woolley uttered an inarticulate protest, but Paddy and Sean didn’t need to be asked twice. They were all over it, visors pressed to the crack, hands sliding over the surface, fighting to stand on each other’s shoulders to examine the top of the frame; crouching on the ground on reddened hands and knees to scrutinize the sill. Before Sean remembered where he was, he nearly ripped off a gauntlet to see if he couldn’t fit a fingernail in the crack where wall met door.

They were at it an hour before they gave up. We stood around in thoughtful silence for a few moments longer.

“I’m very much afraid we’ll have to wait for the team leaders to return,” Woolley said regretfully. There was a chorus of protest, not least from the leprechauns, and he said firmly, “I’m sorry, really I am, but we cannot simply break in.”

“Why not?” someone demanded hotly, I hoped not Sean.

“Because,” Woolley said, still firm, “we are not here to destroy, we are here to learn. There must be a method to our madness or we may inadvertently and irretrievably ruin something of value. We were extremely careful in our excavation,” he explained in an aside to me, “not to impact the wall in any way.”

Evans’ crack about ringing the doorbell stuck in my mind. Maybe the doorbell wasn’t working. What do you do in that case? I stepped up to the rectangle and gave three sharp raps with a clenched fist. “Yoo-hoo, anybody home?”

Somebody laughed. I didn’t blame them.

Of course nothing happened.

Or nothing happened for ten of the longest seconds of my life.

“Look! Mom, look!” Paddy caught my arm as I was about to turn away.

The frame of the door lit up, the beam of light beginning with a single glow on the sill, splitting into two to crawl slowly and steadily across the sill, around the corners and up the edges of the door and around the corners again to meet at the precise center of the top of the frame. I expected a flash of light, a starburst, something. Instead, the completed line of light glowed brighter for an instant, and went out.

The rectangle of the door popped inwards.

As easy as that. It recessed into the structure and slid into the left wall. I braced myself but there was no corresponding expulsion of air, no sign the building had been holding its breath for this moment. The door opened and the entrance sat there, waiting. I’d never been propositioned so shamelessly or so irresistibly before in my life, not even by Caleb. Whoever had built the place had known a lot about human nature.

I saw a halogen torch hanging from someone’s belt and appropriated it without asking permission. I shined the light inside the doorway and found a staircase leading up. It was a tight squeeze; I had to hunch over like Quasimodo to walk at all. Sean and Paddy tried to shove by me. “No. We stay together.” They grumbled but obeyed.

I didn’t feel anyone behind us, and managed to screw my neck around to see all seven archaeologists still standing outside. “Well? What are you waiting for?”

They didn’t move. “How do we know what’s in there? Or who?”

“What if the air is poison in there? Remember the pyramids at Giza.”

And then the real reason: “What if the door closes and we can’t get out again?”

“If there’s somebody in here, they’ve been buried alive an awfully long time, you’re breathing off tanks, and put a rock on the sill. Come on!”

My impatience galvanized them, and to his credit the short, stocky figure of Dr. Maximilian Woolley was first in, followed, more or less enthusiastically, by the rest of the team.

The staircase led directly to the top floor, no exits to the floors we must have been passing. During our ascent the light grew inside the stairwell. At first I thought it was my eyes adjusting to the available light; when we were halfway up I realized it had to be some kind of indirect lighting system kicking in as we climbed. I remembered the latch on the front door and wasn’t surprised. I extinguished the halogen torch and went on.

There were no windows and no other way to determine our rate of ascent or how far we’d climbed. After an eternity (five hundred steps, I counted), we emerged onto what turned out to be the top floor. It was a single room, as if the building had no cause to exist but for this purpose. The ceiling and walls were one enormous, transparent dome that looked as if it had been cast in one piece. It had much the same texture as the paneling on the exterior walls, and although we could see through it, I saw no reflection in it when I looked closer.

The view was stupendous, all pink sky and red earth as far as the eye could see. “Y’all look yonder,” Evans said. “Ain’t that there the Pyramid? Reckon we could see Tom and Jeannie to wave to?” They lined up along the window’s north face and guessed at the identity of the various lumps and bumps on the horizon.

I went exploring, which didn’t take long. The only thing in the room was a circular pit of some smooth dark material, a bowl ten meters across placed in the exact center of the room, looking like a recessed antenna dish. At the bottom of the bowl was a faceted bubble, five meters across, made of what looked like the same material as the tiles that covered the outside of the structure.