“We’re going down there?” Hunter asked Xara once he’d shaken off the effects of the sudden transplanetary pop-in.
She nodded eagerly. Somehow during their transport, Xara had managed a complete wardrobe change.
Gone was the long, flowing white gown. She was now dressed for action: tight-fitting black jumpsuit, boots, gloves, and helmet. Hunter was still dressed in his ancient flight suit. Lucky for him he was not a slave to fashion.
“Many answers to your questions might be found down there,” she told him now as a brisk icy gale blew across the rugged plain.
Hunter fought off a chill.
“At this point I’ll do anything, to get out of this wind,” he said.
They walked about two hundred feet nearly straight down, to a rickety hoverlift. This brought them down even deeper into the hole; the temperature drop was so drastic, Hunter could soon see his breath.
Finally they reached a chamber that was made entirely of ice. Two dull lamps illuminated this place, casting eerie reflections off the clear, glasslike glacier.
Xara pointed to the far end of the ice chamber. “Down there,” she said. “Take a look.”
Hunter walked farther into chamber and soon discovered what she was talking about. Imbedded in the thick ice, perfectly preserved, was a very small, very ancient-looking spacecraft.
“Only a handful of people know of this object’s existence,” Xara told him, moving closer in an effort to keep warm. “We have no idea when it came down here or who sent it here. All we can speculate is that the people on Earth — and I mean in very ancient times — sent it here, maybe to study the polar ice cap.
Our scientists believe it was damaged on landing and never really fulfilled its mission.”
Hunter studied the spacecraft. It was obviously damaged. Its sides were crumpled, as were what appeared to be its landing struts. A large orange piece of material with many slim pieces of rope was draped over nearly half the object, hiding various attachments from view.
“Does anyone have a guess how old this thing is?” he asked her.
Xara shook her head no.
“The best estimate I’ve heard was also the most outlandish — approximately five thousand years ago,” she said. “As far as we can tell, that’s just about the same time the Ancients began spaceflight. But we know nothing about the people who built it.”
She shivered a bit — and got a bit closer.
“But what does this have to do with me?” he asked her.
She led him around the block of ice, to a point where they could just see under the orange shroud. One of the spacecraft’s panels had partially come loose and was poking out from under the orange covering.
Hunter took one look at this panel and felt a chill go through that had nothing to do with the conditions inside the chamber. Painted onto the side of this panel was a series of long red and white stripes, a block of blue, and a collection of white designs within.
Hunter was stunned. He took the piece of cloth from his breast pocket and held it up against the ice. He and Xara both nodded at once. There was no mistaking this.
It was the same design.
“I think that might have been a flag of the Ancients,” Xara said. “But just like our flags today indicate what planet someone is from, this flag might have indicated a particular region of the Earth. Apparently the people back then were actually proud of what part of the world they lived in. They called them nations. Not like these days, when entire planets present themselves as one nation.
“So we are pretty sure we know where this machine came from and what that symbol painted on its side means. The question is, why do you have the same kind of symbol in your pocket?”
Hunter was nearly speechless. He had no idea.
“This only deepens the mystery,” he whispered.
Xara smiled. She liked surprising him — and she had one more in store.
She pointed to a slight blemish on the side of the ice case just above the part of the spacecraft that bore the red, white and blue symbol.
“Can you see that? It’s the result of a VLR/VSA hit…”
“VL-RV… S… A?” Hunter stuttered.
“It stands for ‘very-long-range visual sensing array,’ ” she explained. “It’s a technology that has not been used for centuries. However, I’ve been told that it was a way to get a visual reading from just about anyplace in the Galaxy, like a very-long-range camera lens, I guess you could say. Primitive by our standards. But when our scientists returned to Mars after the last Dark Age, they were fascinated with this spacecraft but also this evidence of a long-range sensor scan. They discovered that someone at the other end of the Galaxy had scanned this planet — indeed, had scanned this very piece of ice, possibly looking for that symbol.
“Our scientists theorize that a VLR/VSA, located way out on the Fringe, might have been set on unlimited search — a simple device with a simple mission. Go right across the Galaxy looking for this symbol and beam back the information, no matter where it could be found. Well, they found it here. Many, many years ago…”
Hunter was quiet for a very long time. There was something very emotional about a faint light crisscrossing the Galaxy on its lonely mission to find a symbol long-ago forgotten.
“The scanning signal that painted this site aeons ago came from someone way, way out there,” Xara went on after a while. “My guess is that they wanted to know the same thing you do. They wanted to know what that design on your piece of cloth means.”
She nuzzled up very close to him.
“I think we can deduce that the symbol is from Earth. But it was from an Earth of many centuries ago, a civilization that could have spanned a millennium, for all we know. So now maybe we know where you’re from. You’re from Earth — eventually just like everyone else. But that still doesn’t answer the bigger question: Who are you?”
She paused and looked deep into his eyes.
“I think the best way to find that out,” she said, pointing to the scan burn on the ice, “is to find them first…”
Hunter could only nod in agreement.
“But how?” he asked. “There are trillions of planets out there that we know about. And probably a trillion or so we don’t know about. It would take about that many lifetimes to search them all — even if I could get out to the Fringe.”
That’s when Xara smiled maybe her widest smile. Then she hugged him, tightly, unexpectedly.
“I was hoping you’d say that,” she said.
“Really?” he asked, not letting go of her. “Why?”
“Because,” she replied, “I have a plan…”
19
The trip up to the floating palace known as Number One took less than the blink of an eye.
One moment Hunter was in his new living quarters, having just climbed into the white ceremonial uniform that had been left for him, and … flash! … he was standing at one end of an immense hall.
Like much of that associated with the Specials, the predominant color here was green, or more accurately, emerald. The walls of this chamber seemed to shimmer like jewels. The ceiling was so high, Hunter imagined he could see clouds forming at the top, due in part to the fact that they were riding on a cloud.
There were as many as ten thousand spectators on hand. Some were on the floor, or more accurately, hovering a bit above it. Others were perched in galleries that lined the sides of the hall. All of them were Specials or high military officers.