Tor and George were right behind her. And a moment later, Hutch. They all hesitated at the doorway before coming in.
Nick continued to play his lamp around the bare walls. Some spaces were discolored. “There were pictures up here,” he said. “At one time.”
Alyx imagined where the furniture would have been. Sofa against that wall, chair over there. Maybe a desk. It looked as if it might have been a workroom of one kind or another. The back wall had been home to a pair of shelves.
“You know what it reminds me of?” said Nick. “The empty chamber at the moonbase.”
Chapter 19
Remote places soothe the soul, and give fire to the creative enterprise.
NICK FOUND THE graves.
Maybe it was pure luck or maybe it was because everything in the house had been put away the way people do when they’re leaving town except that it seemed as if nobody had left because the lander was still out on the shelf. Or maybe it was a funeral director’s instincts. The courtyard, with its tract of earth, with the soil in which he suspected plants had once grown, would have been the only spot available for a burial.
But who had conducted the services?
He smiled, imagining a cosmic funeral director, not unlike himself but with better thrusters. Perhaps relaying to grieving relatives and friends in another part of the sky the assurances that everything was all right. That the appropriate honors had been rendered.
It had been a tribute. A final act of respect. He felt that in his soul, knew it to be true.
These people, whoever, whatever they were, did not mark their graves. That was odd, but who was to say what constituted strangeness in someone else’s cultural habits?
The plot of soil in the courtyard measured about twenty by twelve meters, and was ringed by a brick walkway. Brick. He wondered about the kind of entity that so respected its origins that it would haul brick across interstellar distances.
There were two oversize gray benches, one of which had partially collapsed. He stood on the walkway, between them, gazing at the disturbed ground. Right there, near a postlight that, of course, did not work.
“Recent,” he told George.
“How long ago?”
“To be honest, I hate to make a guess here, because it’s not like home, where things change pretty quickly—”
“How long ago?” George asked again.
“If we were home, I’d say within the last few days.”
George knelt down and looked at the earth. It was freshly disturbed. There seemed no question about that. He picked up a handful, rubbed it with his fingers, and glanced up at the sky. “Are they buried together?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Could be.”
The house had been unoccupied for years. Probably decades. The thick dust everywhere told him that.
George went looking for Hutch. When they returned, moments later, he was already upset. “I don’t think the Memphis has a spade in its gear locker,” she was saying, “but regardless, we should not dig them up.”
“Why not? Isn’t that what archeologists do?”
“We’re not archeologists, George. And that’s the reason why not. We need people here who know what they’re doing.”
He looked at Nick, who made it a point to study the cupola. Nice design, that. “Do you have an alternative?”
“Sure,” she said. “Let’s have Bill take a look with the sensors. That’ll tell us what’s down there. You won’t get the chance to unearth the bones, but you’ll preserve the site, and the Academy will thank you for it.”
“All right,” he said. “Do it.”
Nick watched while she sent instructions back to the Memphis. It was below the horizon, so they had to wait. Hutch went back inside, but he and George stayed near the grave. George kept talking about what might have happened had they arrived a few days earlier. “What are the odds,” he asked, “against actually meeting a third party at a place like this?”
“Whoever they were,” Nick said, “they must have known someone was here. I mean, you don’t wander into a place like this by accident.”
“We did.” He looked up at the rings. It took an act of will not to simply stand and stare at them.
“If it was recent,” Nick said. He pointed his lamp at the walkway and grumbled.
“What’s wrong?” asked George.
“We’ve been all over the place,” he said.
“So what are we concerned about here?”
“If the burial actually happened recently, there should be marks in the dust. Footprints. Some kind of indication.”
“Yeah.” George looked. “Oh.”
Everybody, by now, had gone round and round on the bricks. Any indication of who might have been there was probably gone. But maybe not. He saw scuff marks on the collapsed bench. A section of the seat was almost free of dust.
“What do you think?” asked George.
Had something been on the bench for an extended period? Was that the reason it had collapsed? It was too much for Nick. He shrugged and let it go. “I wish we’d stayed off the walkway,” he said. And he thought: That’s the point Hutch was trying to make.
He watched the lights prowling relentlessly through the house, one upstairs moving from room to room, hesitating in the empty chamber, the rest gathered in the living room. After a couple of minutes the upstairs light started down, headed for the others.
They seemed somewhat at a loss. Nick wasn’t sure why that was, but it almost seemed they were developing a sense of kinship with whoever had lived there. However threatening the image might look in the living room portrait, the subject was now in the grave, buried a few meters away, and they could relate to that.
Nick wondered what the creatures had been like, what they’d talked about while they sat in the chairs in the front room gazing out at that incredible sky. There was something very human about the house, a refuge in a place so remote from ordinary life. Nick had always talked about buying an island somewhere, preferably in the remote North Atlantic, where the ocean was cold and the weather terrible. That was what he’d wanted because he liked fireplaces. And fireplaces only came into their own when you had desperate weather. Well, this was a place built for fireplaces if there had ever been one. It was, most of all, a place he recognized.
One of the lamps broke away and came in his direction. Hutch. Quiet, graceful, always in command despite her size.
“There are two of them down there, Nick,” she said.
HUTCH LOOKED AT her notebook, at George, at Nick, and then at the ground. “Bill says they’re side by side, two meters apart. Both sets of remains are mummified. As one would expect under these conditions.” She slid the notebook into her vest.
“Side by side,” said Nick. It didn’t look wide enough.
“You can’t see them both,” she said. “The second grave is here.” A few meters to one side. “It contains the smaller set of remains. Probably a female.”
But there were no marks. No indication. “They weren’t buried at the same time,” he said.
“Bill,” said Hutch, “have you been listening?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell us anything more?”
“It looks as if they were interred in robes.”
“Anything else?”
“I would say they died during the same epoch.”
“Can you determine the age of the remains? Roughly? Ballpark figure?”
“It would require exhumation and analysis.”
Nick could see she didn’t think much of that idea. George, though, was all for it.
“I’m sorry. That’s the best I can do.”