The wind was picking up,
chasing small particles of sand through the empty
streets. Hannigan quickly packed the last of his
equipment and prepared to join the exodus from Chime
City. He was just shouldering the backpack when Palliser
came by in his skimmer and leaned out to shout an
invitation. “Need a lift, Hannigan?”
He shook his head. “Not
today. My ride is parked on the other side of the
Harmonium. I’ll be right along.” The ringing tones were
already making communication difficult and he
unconsciously checked his pockets to make sure he’d
brought his earplugs. He hated wearing them but he
wasn’t stupid. If it got much louder, he’d put them in.
Palliser waved
acknowledgment and turned away. The other members of the
team were already streaming out into the desert, on foot
or aboard a motley collection of skimmers and fliers and
even a handful of surface vehicles, most headed for the
assembly point.
Hannigan had first come to
Conundrum as a technician with an archaeological
expedition much like this one. They’d had a grant to
study the ruins at Monolith City and when their funds
had run out and they’d left the planet with the job half
done, he’d stayed behind. It hadn’t been a completely
conscious decision on his part. As the preparations for
departure had gotten underway, he’d felt increasingly
divorced from his companions and had ignored the
instructions to pack up his personal possessions –
subject of course to the allocated mass limit. He
tentatively began looking around for a way to sustain
himself after they were gone. There was, after all,
nothing particularly important for him to go back to and
one place was just as good as another, pretty much. He
was used to Conundrum, rather liked it in fact, and had
spent all of his free time exploring the planet at large
rather than drinking, sexing, or jockeying for position
in the academic career game.
Conundrum was not a
conventionally appealing world. Most of its land area
consisted of deserts fringed with grasslands or
occasionally marshes. The landmass boasted no mountains
to speak of, no valleys either, and only a handful of
islands snuggled close to the two continents, Riddle and
Enigma. The icecaps were small and seasonal variations
in the weather, at least on Riddle, were barely
detectible. Life was limited to hardy plants, insects,
and a few small animals. Presently, there were no
predators dangerous to humankind, although the fossil
record showed that much larger animals had stalked the
planet earlier in its history. The air was breathable,
if you had good lungs. Some of the local plants were
edible, but provided no nourishment. Fortunately, human
compatible vegetation had no trouble establishing
itself. It was not on balance a particularly appealing
world, but a thousand years earlier Conundrum had been
inhabited by an intelligent, technologically advanced
race, and humans, who had reached the star only a few
generations earlier, wanted to unlock its secrets.
With a quick look around to
make sure that he hadn’t forgotten anything, Hannigan
began to jog down a wide path to the Harmonium, one of
the largest structures in Chime City. The city was
virtually intact although it had not been inhabited for
many centuries. The intricate mechanisms that gave rise
to its name had proven to be amazingly durable. They
came in a wide variety of sizes and shapes, and the
Connies had built them everywhere. Some dangled from
window ledges, others from the rooflines. They were
sheltered in pergolas, gazebos, and stadiums. Some were
set close to the ground; others adorned the pinnacles of
spectacular towers. They could be found inside and
outside, even below ground, shut up in closets, hanging
from ceilings, or sticking out from walls. In a gentle
breeze, they produced an ocean of soft sounds. In a
storm, they’d shatter your eardrums.
Hannigan found his skimmer
right where he’d left it. It was an older model that
he’d bought from another expedition when they’d broken
camp to return to their home world. It had consumed most
of his savings, and parts were increasingly difficult to
find, but he needed to be able to cover substantial
distances if he was to maintain his income by providing
labor to the various expeditions that visited Conundrum
each year. According to the Authority in Capital City –
which was barely a town – there were currently just over
one hundred separate groups on the planet, but given the
large number of ruins they were widely scattered.
Hannigan climbed up into the
pilot’s seat, slipped out of his pack, and pressed his
thumb to the ignition. The power came on promptly, to
his great relief. As he negotiated the constantly
twisting roadways of Chime City – whose patterns were
not replicated in any of the other mapped sites – he
called up his credit statement and noted that he’d
received the final payment from the Noyes Group right on
time. Until and unless he was hired to return, this
might well be the last time he visited Chime City. It
was not one of his favorite sites, although it was very
popular with offworlders. Occasionally there might even
be a tourist group. He switched to messaging, but there
were no icons. Officially unemployed, he programmed a
course for Capital City and relaxed.
###
The Connies had sprinkled
their cities all over both land masses. They had
established just over two hundred major settlements and
an untabulated number of lesser ones, at least a few
dozen, almost all in surprisingly good condition.
Despite this, virtually nothing was known about the
Connies themselves. No bodies had been found, not even a
random bone. There were no representations of them
anywhere, no paintings, statues, carvings, or written
descriptions. Such evidence might have existed at one
time, but it had long since vanished. It was impossible
to theorize effectively even from their architecture,
because each and every city was different, sometimes
radically so. Doorways, for example, could be
rectangular, round, narrow, or freeform, and they varied
wildly in size. Geologists had found no traces of
earlier civilizations, but there were indications that a
small unstable moon or possibly a wandering asteroid had
wiped out most of the original ecology. The land masses
had become patchily forested again by the time the
cities were being built, but subsequent changes in the
planet’s sun had since altered the climate dramatically.
Conundrum had had a hard life.
The diversity of
construction was a source of constant wonder. The chimes
of Chime City were found nowhere else. Grid City
consisted of blocky buildings laid out in regular,
parallel rows. Tortoise Town was enclosed in an opaque
shell and had been lighted exclusively from within, at
least until parts of the dome had collapsed a few
hundred years ago. There were no straight lines anywhere
in Sphere City, Cavern was built into the side of one of
the rare hills on Enigma, Chain City consisted of one
meandering row of buildings, twenty kilometers in
length. New Persia could have been built by humans and
had a distinctly Mideastern style with minarets and what
might have been a large central park. The structures in
Colossal City were of Brobdingnabian proportions and the
ones in Transylvania looked like crumbling gothic
castles. Novo Venice was crosshatched with canals, Aerie
crouched atop the highest hill – it really wasn’t a
mountain – on Riddle, and Marsh City was supported by
massive stone pillars.
###
Hannigan had begun to doze
off when his com unit beeped at him. Even as he reached
for the toggle, he saw that he was no longer alone.
Another skimmer was approaching on a converging course,
though still distant enough to be unidentifiable.
“Hey, Hannigan! You awake in
there?” He recognized the voice immediately. Maggie
Baines was another freelancer and they’d crossed paths
more than once in the past. They’d slept together a few
times as well, but neither was interested in making it a
regular habit.
“More or less,” he replied.
“I didn’t know you were at Chime City.”
“That’s because I wasn’t.
I’ve been up at Onion Town measuring wall thicknesses
and running perk tests. Where are you headed?”
“Layover at the trading post
at Culvert City, then into Capital, I guess.”
“Want some company? I’ll
chip in for a bed and bath.”
Hannigan had planned to
sleep in the back of his skimmer, but the prospect of an
actual shower was even more appealing than a night in
bed with Maggie. They fell into formation and made their
way together into Culvert City, entering through one of
the enormous circular tunnels.
In the morning, when Maggie
tried to fire up her engine, a muted explosion followed
by flames and very black smoke curled up into the sky.
Hannigan helped extinguish the blaze but it was obvious
that the skimmer – even more ancient than his own – had
just become another ruin on a planet filled with them.
“I can give you a lift into
Capital City,” he offered, glancing at her cargo space.
“I think your stuff will all fit.”
Maggie had been stalking
back and forth, swearing profusely. She finally nodded,
accepted grumpily, and started unloading her gear. An
hour later, they were on their way.
Hannigan felt uncomfortable.
He liked Maggie but he also liked his privacy and had no
intention of asking her to partner with him. It was
possible that she had enough savings to buy a new
vehicle. It was more likely that she’d have to find
something to do in Capital City and haunt the spaceport
until she found an expedition that hadn’t already hired
its full complement. It was a distinct advantage to have
your own skimmer because passenger space was hard to
come by. Hangers on in the Capital were at the bottom of
the social and employment ladders.
Maggie also seemed
disinclined to talk, lost in her own thoughts so
completely that from time to time Hannigan forgot that
she was there. Nothing much happened en route except a
mild sandstorm that sent grit slithering up the
windscreen. Hannigan cursed under his breath because
that meant he’d have to disassemble and clean the power
units when they reached Capital. Just after it died
down, Maggie broke the silence.
“Got a new contract yet?”
Hannigan shook his head.
“Lines are out. No bites yet.”
“Ever think of prospecting?”
There were estimated to be
scores, perhaps hundreds of small sites scattered across
Conundrum. Most of those already visited were
uninteresting, although a few repeated patterns found in
the major cities. The most popular theory was that these
latter were of more recent vintage than the cities
because most of them were pretty obviously incomplete,
as though whatever disaster had overtaken the planet had
interrupted and terminated their construction.
The only surviving portable
artifacts found so far had been buried in these smaller
ruins, a couple of hand tools, a translucent globe made
of some kind of plastic, and an odd looking piece of
machinery whose purpose was unknown. Some of the
permanent residents on Conundrum devoted their time to
digging through these largely untouched settlements.
Although prospectors received only a small mapping fee
from the Authority, they were entitled to a much larger
reward if they found actual artifacts.
“Not really. If I was
desperate, I suppose.”
“I found a site. Looks
promising. I could cut you in for a percent.”
Hannigan grimaced. A
fraction of a pittance did not excite him. He had enough
credit to last a couple of seasons. “Thanks, but I’m not
interested.” His brow furrowed. “Why are you here if you
found something?”
Maggie glanced away. “Ran
low on food. It’s pretty barren out there. Not even
bristlefruit.” Humans could eat bristlefruit, if they
didn’t gag on it, but the pulp was almost indigestible.
“I can’t get back out there without transport.”
Hannigan squirmed. He really
didn’t want to prospect. The return on time invested was
minimal. When he was employed by a research team, he
worked the same hours they did. On his own time, he’d
feel compelled to start early and end when the sun went
down, if then. Researchers paid him by the hour;
prospecting paid a flat and inadequate fee. “I can’t
help you, Maggie. Sorry.”
But in the end, he agreed.
Capital City was full of tourists and the price of
everything had been jacked up accordingly. And Maggie
provided additional inducements in bed.
###
Her find was so far off the
beaten track that he asked her how she’d stumbled onto
it.
“Bum compass. By the time I
noticed, it seemed smarter to stay on course for Chime
City than to double back. Then I ran into some bad dunes
and diverted around them because my skimmer was having
trouble staying clear and the next thing I knew there
was this dome sticking out of the sand right in front of
me. Damn near hit it.”
She’d stayed long enough to
take some readings and dig around a little. “It’s only
about fifty meters across, but it goes deep. Real deep
according to my sonar probe. If it’s sealed, stuff might
have survived.”
“And if the sand and wind
and ground water got in, it might be a deathtrap.” The
smaller ruins weren’t nearly as stable as the big ones.
Maggie shrugged her
shoulders. “Nothing easy is worth having.”
“Nothing a thousand years
old is worth dying for.”
###
It took just over two days
to find the site. It would have been easy to overlook,
even from the air, because the dome – the only structure
not more or less completely buried – was constructed of
fused sand and mimicked the colors of its surroundings.
The small exploratory excavation Maggie had made had
been filled in by drifting sand, so they unlimbered four
sand shifters and set them up with their solar
generators. All four began to hum as they sucked in
loose sand and expelled it in a fan shaped cloud.
Hannigan sprayed the immediate area with a sealant to
prevent more sand from drifting in.
The shifters were limited
and he and Maggie had to stand by and watch for
problems, then intervene with shovels and muscle power
when they inevitably occurred. The equipment itself had
to be relocated periodically. With a full crew, they
could have let them operate most of the night on stored
power with shifts of attendants to watch over the
operation, but that was impossible with just the two of
them. They were even too tired for sex.
At the end of the second
day, they had cleared a slit window into the structure.
It was blocked on the inside by a glasslike substance,
which lifted their spirits. It was entirely possible
that the structure, if not the entire site, was sealed.
Unfortunately the opening was not large enough for
either of them to slither through and they had to move
more sand out of the ever deepening pit. On the third
day, they reached the lintel of a door. On the fourth
day, they reached its threshold.
“How do we get in?” The door
appeared to disappear into the walls along all four
sides and presented a featureless, unblemished surface.
No doorknob, no keyhole, no retinal scanner, no hinges,
no house number, nothing. Maggie kicked it impatiently.
“Force, I guess.” Hannigan
always preferred subtle solutions, but sometimes there
wasn’t one available.
He didn’t carry explosives,
but he had cutting tools, a pickaxe, and an inertial
ram. “Let’s try the ram.”
“That’ll take forever.”
“But it’s safest, for us and
for whatever’s inside.”
It didn’t take long to set
the ram in place with its padded horn flat against the
lower portion of the door. Hannigan activated it and
stepped back instinctively although the only sign that
it was working was a low hum and the ever so slight
rotation of the horn. “What are we going to do for the
next couple of hours?” Maggie looked around. “I suppose
we could start digging up one of these other buildings.”
Hannigan shook his head.
“I’ve got a better idea.”
She glanced around. “I’m
open to suggestion.”
“I was thinking about over
there.” He gestured toward where they’d set up the field
tent and sleeping gear.
“Oh,” she said. “Good
thinking.”
The ram was still humming
away when they checked back after a couple of hours. The
lower third of the door was quite obviously distorted
now, although it showed no signs of rupture. “Amazing
elasticity,” Hannigan observed. As if on cue, there was
a low, not quite metallic sound and the bottom left
corner of the door came loose. “Won’t be long now.”
They ate sparingly from
their rations and by the time they’d finished, the
second corner had been pried out of its frame. This
provided enough space that they could crawl underneath
by the time they had to raise the horn to get a better
purchase. Maggie glanced at the sky. “It’s going to get
dark soon.”
“I’ll get the flashers.”
It was dusk before the
entire lower half of the door was forced out of its
grooves with a groan of defeat. Hannigan killed the ram
and moved it out of the way, crouched and used his
flasher to look inside.
“What do you see?” Maggie’s
voice was more animated than he’d ever heard it.
“Empty room. Some shadows.
No sand to speak of. It looks intact.”
“Great! Move aside.”
It was her find, so Hannigan
backed away to allow her to make the initial entry. She
crouched and ducked her head and disappeared. He waited
a few seconds so she could enjoy her triumph. “Okay for
me to come in?”
“Sure. Watch your head.”
The inner chamber was
disappointing, not much more than a landing surrounding
a shadow wrapped stairwell. No furnishings. No skeletons
in the corner. No travel posters on the walls. Maggie
was leaning over the stairwell, which had no handrail,
probing with her flasher. “See anything?”
“Steps. Lots of steps.”
The stairway might have been
designed for humans, except that they were so large that
Hannigan and Maggie had to jump down onto each with both
feet before proceeding to the next. They spiraled down a
tube that was broken occasionally by narrow landings
with openings that led into invariably empty rooms,
lacking even doors to secure them.
It was hard to judge
distance because of the peculiarities of the steps and
the inky darkness outside the range of their flashers,
but Hannigan estimated they were about six stories down
before they reached the bottom. There they found the
control room.
Hannigan thought of it that
way immediately. The surprisingly large open space was
dominated by a table or dais upon which were two large
scale models, one of Enigma and one of Riddle. As soon
as they walked inside, a pale bluish light came on and
they turned off their flashers. “Heat or motion
detectors,” suggested Maggie. The fact that the lights
were still working sent a thrill through both of them.
A map was superimposed over
the model. The labels and features were a kind of
holographic image through which Hannigan could pass his
hand, but there was no sign of projectors. Possibly the
entire dais served that function, with an internal power
source based on temperature changes, or magnetism, or
some other force. It was still working after a
millennium, so it obviously didn’t require fuel. They
both had more than a passing familiarity with the local
geography and it only took seconds to confirm what they
already suspected.
“Here’s Long Tooth City and
Bubbletown,” said Maggie excitedly.
“I’ve got Herringbone and
Laddertown and Twisty City over here.”
They worked their way around
the map, picking out familiar landmarks. Every city they
knew of was represented by tiny miniatures of the
originals, each accompanied by a unique glyph, but none
of the smaller ruins were shown. It was Hannigan who
found the icons, a large bar, a smaller bar, a crossed
bar, and a circle. They seemed to be inscribed within
rather than upon the surface of the dais. He touched the
circle and jumped as all of the tiny holograms
disappeared. A single, fist sized ball of light hovered
in the air above the dais.
“What did you do?” asked
Maggie querulously.
“Just a second.” He touched
the large bar and the tiny replicas of the cities were
back. “I found some kind of control.” As Maggie came
around the far end of the dais, he touched the smaller
bar. The cities disappeared again, replaced by hundreds,
perhaps thousands of tiny points of light.
“What’s that supposed to
be?” Maggie was at his side.
“I don’t know. The smaller
settlements maybe.” He made a quick search and found a
tiny light marking their present location. It was the
only one that blinked on and off. “Bingo.” He turned and
called back to Maggie. “Press the one that has the
crossed bars.”
She didn’t answer, but the
models blinked again and now the cities were back,
distinctly larger than the myriad smaller ones, which
remained alight.
“Do you know what we have
here, Maggie my love?”
“One humongous alien
artifact that’s going to set us up for life?”
He joined her, threw his
arms around her, and squeezed her tightly. “More than
that. We have a map to every ruin on Conundrum. Look at
the lights. There are hundreds of them, ten times the
number the Authority knows about.”
She was silent a moment,
absorbing the thought. “So where are we? I mean, what is
this place? The planetary capital?”
“I don’t know. But whatever
it is, the Connies thought it was important.”
They found doors leading
outside and realized that the building had not been dug
into the ground, as they originally believed, but had
been buried over a period of time. They could not find a
way of opening them, and didn’t try very hard. The last
thing they wanted was to provide ingress for thousands
of tons of compressed sand.
Maggie discovered the
selection function completely by chance. She was idly
playing with the various displays, then cut them all off
leaving just the single ball of light. When she pressed
both hands on the edge of the dais in order to raise her
body and peer down its length, the globe began to move
slowly toward her. She backed away and it stopped, but
did not return to its original position.
“How did you do that?” asked
Hannigan.
“I haven’t the foggiest
idea.” She returned to the dais, tentatively touched the
large bar. The cities lit up again, but the globe
remained visible and immovable. “I’m going to try
something.” Very tentatively she touched one fingertip
to the perimeter of one of the controls. As she did so,
the globe began to move again. It passed over one of the
cities, which immediately flashed and expanded.
“It’s some kind of pointing
device,” she said excitedly.
They identified the enlarged
image as Boulderfall, one of the more remote cities on
the planet, reproduced in astonishing detail. They also
noticed several thin lines of light that extended from
the sides of the hovering shape, connecting it to
several of the smaller, amorphous lights. “What are we
looking at?” asked Hannigan.
“Beats me. Some kind of
network.”
Eventually, reluctantly,
they climbed back to the surface, ate a quick meal, and
collapsed into their bedding. It was almost dawn. At
midmorning, they were up again, carrying a day’s
provisions as they re-entered the buried tower and
descended to the control room. Nothing had changed since
they had left it.
They spent the day exploring
by proxy, taking occasional breaks to eat, climb to the
surface for sanitary reasons, and make perfunctory
explorations of the rest of the interior, finding
nothing of interest. Except for the dais, everything had
been removed from the building. Like all the other
ruins, it appeared to have been abandoned by its
inhabitants in an orderly fashion. But where had
everyone gone? No trace of the inhabitants or their
personal possessions had yet been found in any of the
settlements, large or small. Had they gone lemminglike
into the ocean carrying their belongings with them? One
small cult believed that a Rapture had come to
Conundrum, but if all the inhabitants had been carried
off to some alien Heaven, why had they taken their
clothing and furniture with them?
“We need to let the
Authority know about this. They can bring in people a
lot brighter than we are.” Maggie had become convinced
that there was nothing further they could learn and she
wanted to cash in her chips.
“Let’s hold off a little
longer.” Hannigan thought he might be on the brink of
grasping at least part of the explanation. “We need to
know as much as possible when we negotiate our finder’s
fee.”
He had trouble sleeping that
night. He dreamed that he was back on Wellington,
attending a beach party with some of the kids he’d gone
to school with. He’d grown up on the coast and beach
parties were a regular event, but one which he had
neither thought nor dreamed about during his three years
on Conundrum. But when he woke up in the morning, he was
pretty sure he had the key to the buried tower and a
great deal more, and he woke Maggie up with a fit of
irresistible laughter.
“What’s so funny?” Maggie
was not a morning person and found nothing amusing until
she’d eaten.
Hannigan managed to control
himself, mostly. “It’s your turn to cook today, isn’t
it? I’ll tell you while you’re making breakfast.” Maggie
hated cooking and Hannigan loved it, would have done it
all himself except that he knew it would insert an
imbalance into their otherwise stable relationship.
He waited until she’d pulled
herself together and taken bacon and bread from the cryo
unit. “I know why there’s no furniture in any of the
cities.”
Maggie was not impressed.
“They took everything with them when they went wherever
it is that they went.”
He shook his head. “Nope. I
doubt there was any furniture to begin with.”
She paused and turned to him
holding a handful of raw meat she’d just thawed. “I
suppose they slept on the floors and ate out a lot.”
Hannigan suppressed the urge
to laugh, knowing she would be offended. “There’s no
furniture because no one ever lived there. The Connies
aren’t from around here. They weren’t native to
Conundrum any more than we were. Maybe less. They
probably lived on the ships that brought them here.”
Maggie started to gesture,
realized that she was waving bacon at him, and set it on
the Quikcook unit before answering. In the interim, her
own sluggish thought processes had begun to move. “That
would explain a lot, admittedly. But are you suggesting
that two hundred or so alien races each came to
Conundrum to build one of their cities as a showpiece of
some sort? We haven’t found one intelligent race yet,
Hannigan, let alone two hundred.”
“No, I think the same people
built all the cities. Different groups probably, but all
the same race. I imagine it was some kind of competition
and this, he gestured toward the buried tower, was where
things were coordinated. Maybe it was the judges’
booth.”
“And the smaller ruins?”
He shrugged. “False starts? Engineering models? Rough
drafts? I don’t know. But I’ll bet if we visited the
lesser sites that are linked to the cities on that
model, we’ll find that that all of the connected ones
have physical similarities. Each individual, or team
more likely, was assigned certain locations as working
spaces. Maybe each of them started several different
versions and only completed the one that was the most
promising.”
The bacon had progressed
from sizzle to burn and Maggie was preoccupied for a
moment or two. While she split the bacon up onto two
plates with freshly heated bread, Hannigan drew two cups
of coffee.
“It makes sense,” she
admitted. “They chose a planet with no indigenous
intelligence, in fact, a planet where catastrophic
events have pretty much wiped out the ecology. Then they
set up a gigantic Worlds’ Fair. It makes our
interplanetary corporate conventions look pretty
insignificant.”
Hannigan finished chewing a
hunk of bread. “Not really. I don’t think it was a
business meeting at all. I think it was a party. A beach
party, in fact. Lots of water. Lots of sand. A little
hot and dry for human tastes maybe, but it might have
been paradise for them.”
Maggie frowned. “But if it
was just a party, why build the cities?”
Hannigan smiled. “I told
you. They’re not real cities. They were never meant to
be lived in. No one could live in most of them. They’re
sandcastles, Maggie, and they’ve been left here to be
washed away by the tides of time.”
A playful breeze sprayed
them both with fine sand.
The End