S’reee blew softly, a sound of sorrow and disgust. “And when it all came out in the open and both sides started accusing each other of attempted genocide,” Nita said, “gee, I wonder what happened then?”
Carmela merely raised her eyebrows as the image of those ancient jagged mountains erupted in unprecedented violence. “They all got right to work reducing the number of people their enemies would be moving off the planet…”
Nita scowled. “And these were the first intelligent life forms in our solar system? Theoretically intelligent, more like! They’re embarrassing me.”
“Hard to believe they wasted precious time on more slaughter,” S’reee said sadly. “And their wizardly talent probably didn’t have power enough to move the planet. Or maybe there were too few of them.”
“It says here they did try to push the incoming planet off course,” Carmela said, walking along and reading more of the inlay of the central pattern. “But they failed. A whole lot of their wizards died trying. Finally some people on each side realized that whether they liked it or not, they had to help each other get out and resettle closer to the Sun. They’d also have to change themselves physically to fit into whatever world they wound up on. So…”
Glints of movement above the dark peaks caught all their eyes: small shapes, leaping upward. One glittering round shape came closer to their point of view, closer yet, swelled until it seemed to fill half the huge dome: then flashed past them, gone. But it didn’t move so quickly that they couldn’t see the glitter of interior lights stellated all over some more complex shape, spiky, angular. “Cities,” Nita said. “They got a few whole cities off the world—”
But very few of those tiny desperate city-seeds escaped as the terrible wanderer from outside the Solar System plunged in, growing in the First World’s sky, a terrible pale shadow. As it filled the sky, the upward-jutting needles and precipices of the ancient mountains trembled as the two planets’ interacting tidal forces strove together, and the First World started to shatter—
They saw only a few moments of that massive destruction. The incoming rogue planet, so much bigger and more massive than Shamask-Eilith, stayed in one piece. But Shamask-Eilith simply tore itself apart in the intruder’s gravitational field. Vast yawning crevasses stitched themselves along Shamask’s surface, ripping open the crust. The planet’s molten mantle burst outward through the tears in all directions, fountaining countless millions of tons of magma into space. The suddenly exposed planetary core plunged away through the no-longer-confining mass of the rest of the planet like a bullet through flesh, tumbling into the darkness of space as the planet disintegrated—
In the dome, the shadows faded, the imagery failed; the dome dimmed down again. The wizardry failed, Bobo said in the back of Nita’s mind. It couldn’t cope with the extra power feed from outside.
Carmela and Nita and S’reee were gazing at one another in silent horror. After a moment, Carmela said, “You know, I was watching some documentary about the Moon the other day. It said a lot of scientists think the Moon was formed by some big piece of a planet or something hitting the Earth while it was still molten and splashing a lot of stuff out. Was this it, I wonder? Did the rogue planet do it? Or maybe Shamask’s core…”
Nita considered. “That was a real long time ago that happened, Mela. Four billion years and change.” She looked around. “And however old this place is, it’s not anything like billions of years.”
Carmela sighed. “I take it the playback’s broken?”
“Yeah. My manual will have a copy of what we saw, though.”
“And I’ve kept a copy in the Telling,” S’reee said. “We may want to compare them later for perceptual differences.”
Nita nodded. “But for the moment,” she said to Carmela, “looks like you’ve got a lot of reading ahead of you.”
“Well, yeah, because what happened next?” Carmela said, waving her arms. “Where were they going to go? Not Mercury: it was way too hot. And not Venus or Earth, if they were still molten. Nobody could change themselves enough to cope with that—”
“With wizardry,” S’reee said, “maybe they could have, if everyone involved in the change was sufficiently committed. But that kind of complete agreement is rare. That’s one of the reasons the Troptic Stipulation is in the Oath— the part about not changing a creature that doesn’t desire the change. The rule goes double, triple, for a whole species.”
“Then it has to be Mars,” Carmela said. “Why else would all this be here for us to find?” She waved an arm at the dome full of writing around them. “I really doubt anybody said, ‘Oh, let’s spend weeks and months writing the whole history of our species in here, and then go off somewhere else …!’ So where are they?”
Nita shook her head. Carmela was plainly fascinated by the mystery of where the inhabitants of the lost planet had gone: but Nita was thinking, And what if this is the species that Kit and his team are so excited about waking up? These people, who went thousands of years without having any time they weren’t having a war, might wind up being our new next-door neighbors?
Oh, boy.
“Mela,” Nita said after a moment, “you saw how they were with each other on their original world. Maybe the ones who made it here didn’t learn the lesson. Maybe they finally wiped each other out… and this is all that’s left.” But as soon as she said it, Nita somehow knew right down in her bones that this was not the case, and the situation wasn’t going to be anything like that simple. She frowned. I hate feelings like this, Nita thought. Even though they’re going to be useful later…
“There’s something else that strikes me as strange,” S’reee said. “All through that, we never saw an image of what they looked like, the people of the First World.” She swung her tail. “It’s true enough that there are species that don’t or won’t make images of themselves. But they’re in the minority.” Her voice went wry. “Most species can’t get enough of looking at themselves.”
Carmela shook her head. “Maybe they were making a clean break?” she said. “If they did actually change themselves to suit another planet— this planet— maybe they didn’t want to be reminded of what they had to abandon? Seems like they thought it was a failure to have to change at all.”
She stood there with her hands on her hips, looking around her at the dome, at all that unread writing. Then Carmela turned back to Nita and S’reee. “I’ve got to work on this,” she said. “It’s gonna drive me nuts. I need to go get a notebook. Do you want me to give you guys a lift back home?”
“You might take me back with you,” S’reee said. “But does this mean that you’re not going shopping?”
“It can wait.” Carmela turned back to gaze around the dome with an odd look on her face. “There’s something going on here.”
Another one gets bit by the bug! Nita thought. She glanced at S’reee. “You just may have heard history in the making,” she said, “whatever kind’s recorded here. Carmela said she was not going shopping somewhere.”
S’reee whistled with laughter. Carmela ignored them both as she looked down at the design under their feet, following one long, tangled thread of writing. She pointed at it. “That bit,” Carmela said, “that’s a poem. Can you see it?”
Nita and S’reee looked at each other. “No,” they said in unison.
“Well, I can. And I want to see what it says!”
Nita sighed. So much for getting her safely out of here and off to the Crossings! “I’m not sure I’m wild about you being by yourself up here…”
Carmela gave Nita a look. “Even Mamvish said there was no reason I should be excluded from this stuff. What’re you worried about— our little scorpion buddies? They let me alone before when they came through. If they were interested in chewing on me, they’d have done it then. And they haven’t been back.”