Echo. Part 38

Transmission time between Echo and Rimway, in one direction, was just under six days. Our first messages insystem had gone out about four days earlier, so they hadn't heard from us yet.

I recorded a message for Robin. I showed him the lights, explained that we had no idea what was going on, that we were about to go down and look. "I'll let you know what we find," I said.

The sun was lost somewhere over the horizon when we arrived. Clouds were thick, and the sky was gray and gloomy.

We drifted over the town, surveying it, looking for signs of life. A couple of animals-four-legged creatures about the size of deer-stood at a street corner looking up at us. Otherwise, the streets were empty. A few carts and wagons had been abandoned. And, chillingly, we found occasional bones.

Up close, the place was deteriorating. Buildings needed paint. Shutters had fallen off houses. Front yards were submerged in weeds. One house had been smashed when a tree fell on it.

I eased us down into one of the parks and shut the engines off. We stayed in the c.o.c.kpit for a while, blinking our lights, waiting to see whether we might draw any attention. And, as usual, trying to get accustomed to the added weight. The city remained quiet.

After a while, Alex got out of his seat. "You sure you want to come?" he asked.

We were two blocks from the ocean. A wide street, lined with buildings, separated us from the sh.o.r.efront. They were short structures, no more than four or five stories. But lights burned in a couple of the windows in the upper floors. "Absolutely," I said.

There were shops at street level, and one of those was also illuminated.

I followed him outside and closed the hatch.

The park was a tangle of weeds and underbrush. There were benches, and sliding boards and swings. And a sculpture that had probably been a fountain: four stone fish erected in a circle around a pair of gaping serpents.

It wasn't as cold as it had been on our last trip down. But there was the same sense of desolation. More so in the town, I guess. Empty buildings are more oppressive than empty forests. And maybe it had something to do with the lights as well.

We took pictures, listened to the murmur of the ocean, and gazed at the serpents.

We walked toward the cl.u.s.ter of buildings, looked up and down the road, an avenue avenue, really, and listened to the sound of the surf and the echo of our footsteps. The streetlights were about twice as tall as we were. We stopped at the first one we came to, and Alex stood looking up at it. The light did not emanate from a bulb or a panel. Instead, it flickered and burned at the top of a tube. "Gas," he said.

There was a sidewalk, of sorts, covered with dirt and sand. We strolled past the faces of the buildings. The display windows were mostly broken. Those still intact carried a thick layer of dirt. Whatever had been in the windows was gone. One bedroom set had survived, and, at another place, several chairs and a footstool. We found a small furnace in the middle of the street, and a couple of corroded pots. "Maybe it was a plague," I said.

The buildings were lackl.u.s.ter in design, more or less like large blocks. Sometimes, the upper floor protruded a bit over the lower levels, but that seemed to be as much embellishment as the architects had attempted.

We picked a building with one of the lighted windows and broke in. We climbed staircases and looked down long hallways. Interior doors were all locked. We cut through a couple, into offices. The lighted one was on the top floor, so we broke into that one also. A desiccated corpse slumped behind a desk.

In a second building, we came across what appeared to have been a ma.s.sacre. It was hard to determine how many dead there were because animals had apparently gotten in and dragged the bodies around. But we found bloodstains in several rooms. Bones were scattered everywhere.

"Alex," I said, "there's a major creep factor here. This is not worth whatever money we might make out of it. Let's let it go. We're dredging up a nightmare."

I hadn't intended to insult him, but I did. We stood in that terrible place on a carpet that might have been made out of wire, and he fought to contain his anger. "Just for the record," he said, "this has nothing to do with profits. Or with Rainbow. I'm not sure it ever did." He took my arm and led me outside. "Something unimaginable happened here. And we have an obligation to these people to find out what it was."

We turned south. The buildings and shops were replaced by smaller buildings that had either housed offices or served as private homes. One place had a stone s.h.i.+ngle mounted beside the front door.

We stopped and examined it. Alex had a picture of the tablet on his link, and he compared the characters with those on the s.h.i.+ngle. They bore no resemblance to each other. "Just as well," he said.

"Why's that?"

"I don't think I'd want to discover we've been looking for a lawyer's office."

I laughed. We both did. The laughter echoed through the empty streets. "I wonder how long it's been," he said, "since a sound like that has been heard here?"

We peeked through a window into one of the lighted houses. There were chairs and a circular table. Curtains hung everywhere. And the light, the light that had drawn us across the world, was provided by a pair of lamps, one on the table, one standing alone in a corner. A connecting room that might have been a kitchen was also illuminated.

I saw a pair of legs jutting out from the other room. They were desiccated, shrunken, clothed in trousers whose original color was no longer discernible.

Alex took a deep breath and indicated the table lamp. "See the duct at the base?"

"Yes."

"It supplies the gas. There's a switch somewhere that allows you to turn it on and off."

"Then the lights were turned on and left left on?" on?"

"That's what it looks like."

There were other lights and other bodies in other houses. "There's a natural gas supply nearby," Alex said. "It's piped in. Everything in town, apparently, gets a share. The lights will stay on as long as it lasts."

Finally, we turned back toward the park. The wind was getting stronger. "How long do you think it's been like this?"

"I don't know. Awhile."

THIRTY-FOUR.

There is no more telling representation of the quality of a civilization than its art. Show me how it perceives beauty, what moves it to tears, and I will tell you who they are.

-Tulisofala, Mountain Pa.s.ses (Translated by Leisha Tanner) We found what had once been, as far as we could tell, a shoe store. We weren't sure because there were no shoes anywhere. But there were some boxes, and their dimensions seemed right. And a shoehorn.

There was a food market, with empty shelves. And a shop that we couldn't be sure about but which might have sold guns. Like the food store, it had been cleaned out. The same was true of a hardware store. "Whatever happened," Alex said, "they saw it coming."

Then there was the art gallery. The walls had been stripped, and the only reason we were able to identify it was that some printed leaflets were scattered across the floor. Everything else was gone.

"Maybe not everything," said Alex, standing near a door in a back room. The door was locked. It was large, heavy, and still standing, though it had been shot full of holes. A dried-out corpse, with a gun in one hand, lay nearby. Maybe it had been the owner; maybe one of the looters. Alex walked past it and used his cutter to take the door down.

Behind it lay a storage area. Oil paintings-they could be nothing else-covered with cloth, were propped against the walls. We looked at each other, switched on our lamps, picked one at random, and removed the wrapping.

It was an abstract, blue and silver bands of varying dimensions curving across a field of disconnected branches and flowers. It was dark in the room, and the floor was damp. As was the painting, whose colors had been debased by large gray splotches.

"Pity," said Alex.

We pulled the cloth from another.

A building that might have been a country church waited in double moonlight. A ghostly radiance emanated from it, and two deerlike animals stood off to one side.

It was lovely despite more damage from the damp environment.

Alex said nothing, but I could feel his frustration.

The next one was a portrait.

The subject was human human. An elderly man, he wore a dark jacket and a white s.h.i.+rt open at the neck. His beard was trimmed, and he looked out at us with congenial green eyes and the hint of a smile. Odd that we should meet like this.

"Alex," I said, "you think these are the people who put the polygon on Echo II? Their ancestors, that is?"

"Probably, Chase. Yes, I'd guess so. Sad that these later generations were reduced to using gas lamps."

"I wonder what happened."

The canvas was crumpled in places. Stained.

Alex stood silently, the beam from his lamp playing across the amiable features. I wondered who he had been. What had become of him.

One by one, we went through the entire stock, landscapes, abstracts, and more portraits. Young women laughing on a porch. A mother and child. A man standing with a large saddled animal that resembled an oversized bulldog. A house by a lake.

In each case, we reluctantly replaced the cover and set the painting back against the wall. Occasionally, Alex muttered something under his breath, now and then audible, more often not.

"The water got to this one, too."

"Looks like a Brankowski, but this one's also ruined."

"Apparently they had a taste for abstracts."

We were near the end when we found one that seemed not to have been damaged. It depicted a snowcapped mountain in a winter storm. Just visible on the lower slopes was something that resembled a dinosaur nibbling at a tree.

It was magnificent. Maybe it was just that it was unspoiled. In truth, everything in that place sent chills down my spine. Don't ask me why. I'd have loved to put that last landscape, the one with the dinosaur, on my living-room wall. In that somber place, on that night, it came very close to bringing tears.

Alex simply stood for several minutes admiring it. Then, finally, he asked the question I knew he'd been thinking about: "Chase, do you think we can get this into the lander?"

"No," I said. It was too big. We wouldn't even be able to get it through the airlock.

He examined the wrapping. Then we re-covered it and took it into the adjoining room, where we set it on a table. "We need to find a way."

"Alex-" I said.

"What?"

"It doesn't feel right, taking it."

"You think it makes more sense to leave it here?"

"I don't know."

"It's damp here, Chase. Leave it and lose it."

"I know. I just-I can't explain why. It feels like theft."

"Chase, ask yourself what the artist"-he glanced around the empty room-"what he would want us to do? Leave the painting in that wet room? Or-"

I wanted to say why didn't we go back and report the find? But if we did that, a bunch of treasure hunters would descend on the place and make off with everything everything. The painting would go. And the stone fish and the gaping serpents in the park. And probably the gas streetlights and anything else they could find. "If you insist," I said.

"Come on, Chase. If we found the Pearl of Korainya, would we leave it on a bedroom table?"

"It's not the same thing."

"What's the difference?"

I didn't know. "For one thing," I said, "the Pearl of Korainya would fit through the hatch."

"Yeah," he said. "You have a point." He touched the painting gently with his fingertips. "It's not canvas. Not flexible at all."

"So we can't roll it up?"

"No."

"Can we take it out of the frame?"

"I don't think so. Not without damaging it."

We'd need Belle to help. So I checked to make sure she was in range. She was.

The painting would have been heavy enough on Rimway. But on Echo III, its weight was not only substantially more, but so was ours. We were by then about a fifteen-minute walk from the lander. Hauling the thing to the vehicle would have been a serious struggle. So we decided to go the other way: bring the lander in and put it outside the front door. It would be a squeeze, but it was manageable. So we picked up the landscape and staggered out into the shop and set it down again.

"Let's go," I said.

"You get the lander. I'll wait here."

"Alex, there's n.o.body here to make off with it."

"I know," he said. "But old habits die hard."

"Okay. I'll be right back."

I know it sounds crazy. But I understood what he was feeling. It was more than simply a painting that, should we choose to sell it, would bring an enormous sum from a collector. It also provided us with a sense of who had lived on that world. Alex wasn't going to take even the remotest chance of letting it get away.

I dug some cable out of one of the storage lockers, lifted off, and squeezed down into the street just outside the art gallery. Alex came out of the display area and focused his attention on the hatch.

"You're right," he said. "It's not going to fit in there, is it?" Even if we could get it through the airlock, it would be too big for the cabin.

"We'll have to secure it to the hull," I said.

"Take it up on the outside outside?" He was horrified.

"It's the only way."

"Do you think we can get it back to the Belle-Marie Belle-Marie undamaged?" undamaged?"