Saw where he was going, and I didn’t like it at all. “Danann’s out here in the middle of nowhere.”
“And in a few years no one will be able to reach it at all,” Morgan pointed out. “If the expedition doesn’t return…”
And I’d thought he was worried about holding his rank.
Now I’d be looking at every tech cross-eyed.
“Thanks, Commander” Tried to make the words light and ironic.
“You’re most welcome, Lieutenant.”
Almost wished we hadn’t talked. But Morgan wasn’t glaring at me anymore.
34
Fitzhugh
Professors of historical trends were neither necessary nor invited to be among the first of those descending to Danann on the shuttlecraft. While I awaited my turn in the scholarly queue, so to speak, I passed the hours in scrutiny of the images and preliminary reports sent up from the world below, breaking the monotony with ever-more-strenuous workouts, if undertaken at times when few were present, especially in the high-gee section. After a week, I was finally summoned to the boat deck—or whatever it was called—and was fitted for space armor, most necessary because Danann had no atmosphere, other than what was solidified and exceedingly chill, from which protruded the metallic towers, and elsewhere low peaks of a singularly rounded and worn appearance. I was not told when I might actually be required to wear the armor. I was no geologist, but the worn nature of the peaks suggested erosion and antiquity. Since Danann had no atmosphere, however, I doubted that any measurable erosion had occurred for eons, if not longer. Paradoxically, the precise and preserved rounded architecture of the towers and the other structures implied a less ancient origin or great powers of endurance and preservation, if not both, and that, in turn, implied a stable political system. That degree of stability could most likely only have come from either great power or a unique degree of social consensus, if not both.
None of the Danannian structures had yet been opened. According to the briefing messages posted on the expedition net, all the entrances were buried under the ice of ages, and none of the structures had discernible windows or means of entrance or egress. Cleon Lazar—one of the physicists—noted that the seeming lack of upper-level access might be deceiving because the outer walls appeared to be a material with the most adamantine features of anomalous metals and the temperature indifference of the best structural composites. Such a material could be transparent from the inside and opaque from the outside. It would also be a perfect material for interstellar vessels—if anyone could ever figure out how the Danan-nians had created it.
Because the towers appeared featureless to the imaging technology used to penetrate the ice and frozen atmosphere, the technical crews supporting the archeologists and scientists on site had decided to pick one tower and just melt their way down to ground level, but progress was slow because of the cold—water refroze instantly, and gases turned into atmospheric snow inside the tubing designed to vent and carry the melted material away. At the same time, no one wanted to destroy anything in the process.
To me, the towers themselves seemed… low. Their comparative lack of height, given the vastness of the city, if that was what it was, and their failure to soar skyward, suggested alienness to me far more than did their silvered-bluish metallic surface, a surface, the scientists had also reported, reflected light and all other forms of radiation in a nonimaging, almost inchoate waveform. No matter what was placed before the surface and how it was lighted, the surface appeared silvered blue without any images being reflected.
If the Danannians had observed the universe around them as we do, brilliant image-radiation-reflective exterior surfaces would have made perceptions outside the structures difficult under any sun, if that world had once been within a solar habitable zone. Conversely, if their perceptual senses were radically different, they would not have needed to employ such a modified-reflective material, unless, of course, the level of reflectivity happened to be irrelevant, and that would have seemed highly unlikely for a city—or a gathering of structures—that extended across an oval three hundred kays at its narrowest point.
The initial images and reports had not revealed any sort of internal mass transportation system other than the radial “boulevards” on each side of the “canals” that linked the perfectly oval “lakes.” Depth imaging suggested that the “lakes” and “canals” had indeed been designed so that they would hold water. Whether they had or not remained to be determined.
Then there was the putative connection with Chronos, suggested in the briefing materials. I liked the name “Chronos” to the same degree as “Dannan,” that is, not at all. Chronos meant time, and a planet was not “time.” I suspected that someone had meant “Cronus,” after one of the ancient old Earth gods who had predated another ancient deistic tyrant, and, thus, Cronus would have made more sense… but most obviously it had been named by a scientific type, because mythology was one of the few nonmilitary subjects with which space officers had a more than nodding understanding, as opposed to the scientists, all too many of whom dismissed mythology as part and parcel of irrational superstition.
“Liam?” Tomas had eased the doorway open.
I turned from the console. “Yes?”
“Have you been told when you might—”
“Have an opportunity to actually see what lies on the orb beneath us? Why would a mere professor of human historical trends, particularly one duped into believing he was on a magnificent Diplomatic Corps fellowship, think that such an opportunity might be afforded to him?” As soon as I’d spoken, I wished I hadn’t. “I’m sorry, Tomas.”
He laughed. “The words were well-spoken, Liam. You’re as frustrated as anyone else still up here, but there’s only so much space below. You’ll get a chance, and before long. The gravity’s twenty percent heavier, and some of the physical scientists will need a break.”
“You’re right. Besides, my presence would be superfluous at least until I could peruse the insides of the towers.” I might not be able to learn anything from the interior, either. While the building shells had been preserved, had anything besides the structures themselves endured? For all that, I still wanted to observe and touch actual alien construction.
“They haven’t even called me to fit me for space armor,” Tomas said.
“I’m sorry. We will be here for a while.”
“That’s if me Sunnis or someone else doesn’t track us,” he pointed out.
“They can’t use Comity Gates, and they don’t know where we are. It took years for the Comity to locate Danann.”
“All they have to do is find the right person to pay off with the appropriate spy technology, and they’ll have the location.”
“They’ll still need to build Gates and get them into position.”
“That’s a matter of months if they want to cannibalize existing Gates. It could be less.”
“You’re such an optimist, Tomas. If their spy systems are good enough to find where Danann is, why don’t they just wait and steal what we find out.”
“Pandora’s box. I doubt that the Sunnis or the Covenanters want it opened.”
“Oh?” I had my own thoughts on that, but I wanted to hear what he had to say.
“All theocracies are based on limited truths—political, technological, and spiritual. The very existence of this planet widens human horizons and threatens those limits. The evolution of secular human governments is based on finding ways to increase individual freedoms while maintaining societal order. On balance, technology widens freedoms. Wider freedoms threaten the limits required by theocracies.”