“Are you looking for something in particular, sir?”
“I’d be interested in seeing what seems to be most common, then areas that differ from that baseline.”
After we checked helmet seals and comm links, I followed Nuovyl out through the main lock. The more traveled ways had been covered with insulating gray plastrene. At the edges, snowlike crystals, scuffed or kicked by boots, encroached.
When I turned to view the shuttle just visible down the ancient open canal/boulevard, harsh lights glared through the airlessness from where a crew loaded plastrene crates. The combination of the lights and their armor turned the three crewmen into white-edged stark shadows.
“What are they loading? Do you know?”
“Mostly samples of the materials the aliens used to build the towers. That’s what Dr. Henjsen said. Cutting even small pieces clear is a bitch. They had to beef up the lasers into something that’s half laser, half particle beam, and tighten the focal cutting edge into something like a hundred nanometers. Only the door catches cut easy.”
From what I remembered from the reports and my own scattered research and education in that area, Nuovyl’s statement suggested that the expedition scientists were being required to apply an inordinate amount of power to take the alien composite materials apart at the molecular level. I had read somewhere, though, that anomalous materials shouldn’t behave that way.
“The door catches?” That was a datum, although I couldn’t yet place its importance.
“Those oval or circular doors—they split in the middle. They’re held so tight by catches that you can’t even see where the two halves join, but they sort of ooze apart if you heat them with a broadbeam laser after you cut the catches.” Nuovyl turned toward a ramp carved into the ice, one that led to the entrance to the nearest tower.
I stopped and focused my suit light upward, letting the illumination diminish itself as the silvered surface of the tower absorbed the quanta that flowed over it Light doesn’t follow such a pattern, but that was the first impression that I gathered. The second was that, for all their apparent height against the darkness of the galactic void, the towers were… short… almost squat. So smooth and curved and without projections were they that they reminded me of the sand towers that Cheryssa had built to hold back the tide when we had vacationed so many years before at Bally tor Beach.
Why would anyone build such gracefully squat structures, particularly an alien species whose technology and engineering clearly had surpassed our own? Had they had a totally different concept of beauty? Or was their ideal of beauty tied more directly to functionality?
“Sir?” NuovyFs question intruded upon my silent contemplation of the washed-out silver megaliths among which I stood and marveled.
“Is there anything on top of the towers?”
“No, sir. They’re curved into a slight dome, and Dr. Henjsen and the scientists say that there’s no access to the top surface.”
Another datum. Humans had invariably built access to the top of their structures—or at least to the vast majority of them—from the time that we had begun to build anything other than hovels. Why would a culture avoid such? If the aliens had been acrophobic, they would not have built so many towers, especially with such wide windows. If they had been agoraphobic, their megaplex would not have been so open with such wide canal boulevards. With all the lakes and canals, they liked water, but their structures had not been designed to hold water, and that suggested that they were not aquatic.
Nuovyl led the way down the plastrene-covered ice ramp toward the half-open circular doorway with the flattened base.
While I had read about the deformation mechanism and viewed images, seeing so closely in person how the silvery material of the entry melded seamlessly into the casements was an emotional confirmation of the superb design and technology embodied in the structure. That it functioned, if not as well as originally, under the extreme adverse conditions of temperatures close to absolute zero and no atmosphere—after billions of years—was nothing short of breathtaking.
“Professor?”
“I wished to observe the deformation of the entry closely. Do they all deform in the same fashion?”
“Yes, sir. That’s what the science types say, anyway. I haven’t looked that close.”
I stepped through the half-open door. The ceiling in the entry foyer rose into a low dome, presumably in shape similar to those that capped the towers, since the Danannians repeated the same shapes and patterns, just arranged in seemingly endless differing combinations. I could easily touch the highest point of the foyer ceiling. The surface gave slightly, then stiffened against more pressure, demonstrating elasticity at temperatures that would have fragmented most human-developed elastic composites. Yet the material resisted cutting except by high-power, tightly focused lasers.
I had some ideas about the Danannians—or aliens, since it was all too obvious that Danann had been an outpost or colony—but I submerged them, letting the surroundings immerse me. I could only trust in my senses and reserve the analyses for later. Observation first, with interpretation and analysis only after far more lengthy familiarization with the structures.
“Ah… Professor.”
“I need to take my time, Nuovyl.”
As I proceeded, I also hoped that Nuovyl wouldn’t continue to prod me every time I stopped to observe some aspect of the structures, their design, or their architecture. Without inscriptions, written or oral histories, the only record of the aliens lay in the structures themselves, and, unless the other members of the expedition discovered more than they already had, the towers would have to speak for the Danannians—if I could but decipher what they had to tell.
42
Barna
The first day after I returned to the Magellan, I spent most of my time sleeping. That was sixday. Sevenday wasn’t that much better. I’d been so tired on sixday that I hadn’t realized how sore I was and how many bruises I had from the armor and my own clumsiness in higher gravity. The stiffness was worse on seven-day. I really didn’t begin to get down to serious work on sorting through the images and selecting possible composition subjects until oneday.
Twoday, I started in on a simple light-matrix image— one of two towers set in a halo of illumination. The source of the light had been the light-belt Nuovyl had worn, but I wasn’t showing that. I wanted to show the ali-enness of the setting, with the light just ending, except where it was held by the surface of the towers. At the base of the left-hand tower was the crudely melted ramp that led down through the dark gray ice. I was trying to contrast the rudeness of the cut with the alien perfection of the towers, while still attempting to convey a feel of just how long the ice and frozen atmosphere had been there.
After an hour or so, I stepped back and studied the image. It was simple enough, just a narrower section of one of the canal boulevards between two towers. I had a sense of what it might have looked like. That would have to wait. I first had to depict what I had seen, not what might have been.