“The unidentified ships.”
“Yes.”
“What precisely did he say?”
“Alex, it's been almost half a century. Or has it been longer? The years pass so quickly.” He was hurting. Whether it was physical or not, I couldn't tell. “I remember asking Robin later, after Bill had been lost, what it had been about. He wouldn't say. Still wouldn't tell me, damn him. I lost a good friend. But he just shook his head, told me I wouldn't believe it anyway, and walked away.” He looked exhausted. “There was something else, though, now that I think of it. Something Bill said before they left.”
“What was that, Professor?”
“He said that, with luck, they'd find it in the churches.”
“Find what?”
“I don't know.” He sank back exhausted in his chair. “When I asked him to explain, he just laughed and said there'd be plenty of time for that later. Sure there was.” His teeth clamped together, and he sucked in air. “I told him not to go. I kept telling him what might happen. But he was determined to do it.”
“Churches.” Alex tasted the word. Frowned. “He said churches. Not church.”
“That's correct.” He shook his head. “God knows what he was talking about.” Lisle never cracked a smile.
Villanueva was reportedly a beautiful world, stable climate, gravity index almost exactly that of the home world, fertile land, a biosystem that was quick to adapt to human needs. According to legend, it was where the first off-world lemon tree sprouted. It had served as a home to human pets. Cats and dogs and parrots all did well there. The planet had a moon even lovelier than Earth's because it had an atmosphere and consequently emitted a softer, more luxuriant glow than Luna. Its broad oceans and deep forests and snowcapped mountains reportedly won the hearts of visitors. It was an ideal outpost. But its prospects as a colony world were dim.
When the first survey ships arrived, during the third millennium, they were probably already aware of the dust cloud. Tradition denies it, though, picturing a scenario in which the explorers landed in a peaceful green valley, bathed in its crystal springs, listened to the wind in the trees, and partied under its luminous moon, only to discover, later, that the world was moving toward destruction at a rate of about twenty million kilometers per day. It would be a long time before it arrived in the danger zone. Centuries. But eventually the bright skies would darken, and the flowers and shrubs would freeze into stumps. Meanwhile, though, the world was an Eden. And it must have seemed to a few early adventurers that there was more than time enough. Time to live out their lives, time for their children, and their grandchildren. They needed only avoid creating a permanent presence.
They named the place Villanueva because it was Earth as everybody had always dreamed it should be. A magnificent garden world, where the day was always cool, and the birds always sang. So they did what anyone would have done: Despite the cloud, they built homes. Villanueva became the place where you stopped if you were headed out along the Orion Arm, where people climbed out of the crowded spartan ships of that primitive era for a few days in the tropical breezes of the world that everybody loved.
They set a space station in place and named it Felicity. It became a haven for casinos and sex clubs. The support facilities on the ground expanded. And expanded again. People moved in. The cloud was too far down the road to worry about.
Towns took root. The towns became cities. Population soared. Young families saw it as an opportunity to get in on a ground floor, or as an adventure, or as an ideal place to raise kids. A thousand years, eight hundred years, whatever, it was a long time. Somebody else's problem.
Estimates range widely as to what the global population was when it finally happened. Most historians put it at about a billion. By then, Villanueva had become fully independent, and prosperous beyond anyone's dreams. Even when the outer planets began to drift into the cloud, the population, which everyone had expected would shrink dramatically at that point, continued to increase. The skies grew dark, and the days became cooler, but there was still no concerted effort to leave. The reports indicated that people thought they could ride it out. Stay with their homes and just wait for the passage to end. Trust in the Lord. This, even though Villanueva's time in the cloud would be in excess of three hundred years.
Today, the word itself, Villanueva, is shorthand for catastrophe.
Felicity, encountering too much resistance from the dust, lost her orbital velocity and went into a death spiral. It plunged into one of the oceans. People at that time still depended on farming, but the farms didn't survive. Eventually, they tried to escape, but it was much too late. Emergency supplies and equipment were shipped in. When, three centuries later, the world came out of the cloud-a small one, by cosmic standards-no one was left.
And something odd had happened: Civilization on the world had been high-tech, of course, by the standards of the time. It had been powered by the most advanced kinds of automated systems then known. From today's point of view, of course, they were primitive. But that may have played in their favor. They were simpler, and therefore more resistant to the pressures imposed by deteriorating climatic conditions. So that it's not entirely correct to say that no one was alive when the world emerged from the far side of the cloud.
The technology was still in place and still functioning. The maintenance systems had, according to contemporary accounts, upgraded themselves. The problem, as Marcy Lee observes in Last Days, was that nobody thought to turn off the lights.
I know that doesn't sound like a problem. But a salvage team, sent in after the event, encountered resistance of an unexpected kind. The technology, apparently, didn't want to be shut down. Several people were electrocuted, and a technician died when a power train broke loose and fell on him. The “accident” was reportedly accompanied by a spoken warning, over the comm links belonging to the team, that they were trespassing and should leave immediately.
Later efforts met with similar results. Stories surfaced of would-be scavengers landing on Villanueva and either becoming the victims of seeming accidents or disappearing altogether. A team sent in to destroy the data-control system was locked in an underground chamber. When they attempted to blow a hole in the door, the place collapsed on them. It was all straight out of one of Vicki Greene's horror novels. Eventually, the authorities decided the rational course was to cordon the place off, and they did just that. Villanueva was declared out of bounds, and satellites were established warning travelers that any who went groundside did so at their own risk.
Even Alex, though he had no doubt that the right Villanuevan artifacts would bring good money, had never considered a salvage attempt.
When David Lisle signed off, Alex remained motionless in his chair, his arms folded, his eyes half-closed, lost in thought.
“Alex,” I said, “we have no idea what we'd be looking for.”
“The churches, Chase.”
“Which means what? We're talking about a civilization which, from its very beginning, knew the end times were coming. Knew when they were coming. When the place finally collapsed, they had a billion people. I wonder how many churches there were?”
He got up and walked over to the window. Lovely day. “Chase, I don't expect you to get involved with this one. In fact, I won't allow you to. I'm going to hire somebody for this. I'll find somebody who's got a little combat experience.”
I laughed. There might have been a touch of bitterness there. If so, I'm not sure where it came from. That he was including me out, or that we were going to go off and do something crazy. “And who would that be?” I said. “Marko Banner?” The big devil-may-care leading man who specialized in whacking his way out of impossible situations.
“It's out of the question, Chase. Sorry.”