“B has four,” said Amy. “But there’s no life anywhere.”
“Not in either system,” said Bill. “A is so cool that a planet would have to be right on top of it to have liquid water.”
“How close would that be?” asked MacAllister.
“Closer than Mercury is to the sun,” said Amy.
MacAllister loved listening to a know-it-all kid trying to outdo a know-it-all AI. He resisted saying anything, contenting himself with looking out at Cygni A. And at the firmament of stars surrounding it. “Where’s the monument?” he asked.
SITTING ON THEIR front porch in Baltimore, he and Jenny had contemplated how exhilarating it would be to do an interstellar tour. Jenny had talked of seeing the four stars at Capella. (Was that right, she’d asked? Was it four? Or five?) And she’d wanted to see a living world. The nearest was at 36 Ophiuchi. But she’d had something more dramatic in mind. She wanted Quraqua, where a civilization had once thrived. She’d talked about visiting the ruins. But there was no easy way to get there. The tour services didn’t exist then. Even now nobody went out that far.
Most of all she’d wanted to see the monuments, those magnificent works of art scattered through the Orion Arm ten thousand years ago by a race that had since gone out of existence, leaving only a few savage descendants who possessed no technology and had no memory of their great days.
The first monument had been found in the solar system, on Iapetus. It was a statue, a self-portrait of its creator. A lone female standing on that bleak moonscape, its eyes turned toward Saturn, which remained permanently fixed above a nearby ridge. It was, in fact, the discovery of the Iapetus statue at a time much like the present one, during which the space effort was losing momentum, that had led to the suspicion that somebody had FTL, that it was possible to build an interstellar drive.
He’d promised Jenny they would go to Iapetus. And they’d eventually visit two or three of the other monuments. (That was a time when there seemed no limit to what they could do together.) But the illness had struck shortly after, and they never got beyond Baltimore.
“The Cygni monument,” said Amy, apparently in answer to a question, “was discovered in 2195 by Shia Kanana.”
“It was a follow-up mission,” said Bill.
“The first mission missed it?” asked Eric.
“Passed right by it and never noticed.” Amy seemed delighted that adults could be such buffoons.
“Of course,” said Eric, “there was no Academy then.” MacAllister’s eyelids sagged. The guy was breathtakingly loyal. “The way they were operating in those days,” he continued, “everything was hit-or-miss. And the truth is, despite what they said, they were really only looking for two things: habitable worlds and aliens.”
“There’s something I never really understood,” said MacAllister.
“What? Habitable worlds? For settlement.”
“Right. I understand that. What I don’t understand is why? You know the damned places won’t be comfortable. What sort of idiot wants to live on a frontier? Would you, Amy?”
“Not really,” she said. “I just want to ride around out here.”
Eric smiled benignly. “There are a lot of people who’d like to get away from the cities,” he said. “Away from all the fuss at home.”
“Well, my God, Eric, move to the country.”
“You’re so narrow-minded, Mac. You know, eventually we’ll terraform a lot of these places, turn them into garden worlds.”
“That’s something else that could cost an arm and a leg. And it’s typical. We tried to terraform Quraqua, and all we did was destroy an archeological treasure house.”
“Mac, you’re a cynical cuss.”
“You can’t really deny that it’s true.” MacAllister sighed. “So where’s the monument?” he asked.
Bill responded: “The second planet. It’s just a large piece of ice and rock. There’s a moon, about a third the size of Luna. The monument’s in orbit around the moon.”
“The monuments were usually put in orbit,” said Amy.
Bill had the last word: “There are only four on the ground.”
TWO OF THE seventeen known monuments were images of their makers. Five others were depictions of creatures that might have been either biological or mythical. (One was known definitely to be mythical.) The rest were geometric designs.
The one at 61 Cygni fell into the latter category.
Valya was feeding images from the ship’s telescopes to the two displays mounted in the common room. One was centered on the sun; the other gave them a picture of the target world, Alpha II, and its moon. Alpha II constituted as sorry-looking a piece of real estate as MacAllister had ever seen. He knew there’d be no green areas. There were also no seas, no deserts, nothing but a gray-black mantle of what appeared to be solid rock. In some areas there’d been eruptions and lava flows. But the surface was, for the most part, smooth and featureless. No craters, no ridges, no mountains, no river valleys. It was as if the planet were simply one oversized boulder.
Its moon was a pale crescent, and lay at a considerable distance, half again as far as Luna was from Earth. It, too, seemed composed of the same featureless rock.
“They’ve seen moonriders out here?” asked Eric.
Valya nodded. “Three tour flights have reported them in the last month.”
“Where were they?” asked Amy. “Were they here? Near the monument?”
Valya needed a moment to consult her screen. “Yes,” she said. “This is the area.”
“Maybe,” Amy continued, “they were just sightseeing. I mean, they’ve been at all the places along the tour route, right?”
“It could also mean,” said MacAllister, “that they’re only seen close to the tour sights because that’s where the ships are. They could have an entire invasion fleet sitting over at the other star. What’s its name again?”
“Cygni B,” said Amy.
“Beta. Okay. There could be a fleet there, and we’d never know it because nobody ever goes there.”
Amy looked at him, not sure whether to laugh. “An invasion fleet? I’ve seen that in sims.”
MacAllister chuckled and did his best private eye impersonation. “Just kidding, Sweetheart. No, I don’t think we need to worry about invaders.”
“Why not, Mac?” she persisted. “Just for the sake of argument, how would we know? It’s possible.” He got the impression she would welcome an invasion.
“Sure it’s possible, Amy. Anything’s possible. But ask yourself why anybody would bother.”
“How do you mean?”
“We don’t have anything that anybody would want.”
“How about real estate?” asked Eric.
MacAllister shrugged. “Plenty of places out here if anybody wants one. Truth is, I think the one thing we can be sure of is that the moonriders, whatever they are, do not pose a threat.” He looked over at Valya. “By the way, are we watching out for them? Just in case?”
“Bill’s doing a complete sweep in all directions. He’ll give us a yell if he sees something.”
THE CYGNI MONUMENT was the largest known. It reminded MacAllister, from a distance, of a temple, complete with Doric columns. It stood (if that was the correct term for an object in orbit) atop a platform, and was accessible on all sides by stone steps. It was polished and graceful, unmarked by fluting, or sculpture, or triglyphs. It did not look like a structure that had been assembled so much as one that had been poured. It possessed a power and majesty that was stunning.
It was believed to be about eleven thousand years old, making it slightly older than the self-portrait on Iapetus. It had picked up a couple of dents where it had been hit by pieces of debris.
Temples all seemed to be alike, regardless of the culture from which they sprang, regardless of the sweep of the roof, or the general design of molding rings and parapets. Whether a temple was from one of the various terrestrial eras, or whether it had been built by Noks, or by the long-gone inhabitants of Quraqua, or by the Monument-Makers themselves: They were always large and spacious with high overheads, everything oversized to ensure that the visitor understood at the deepest levels how insignificant and utterly inconsequential he was, except that the powers that ran the universe gave him meaning by allowing him into their sanctuary.