Echoes of an Alien Sky

  ECHOES OF AN ALIEN SKY

  James P. Hogan

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are

  fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright 2007 by James P. Hogan

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN 10: 1-4165-2108-9

  ISBN 13: 978-1-4165-2108-2

  Cover art by Bob Eggleton

  First printing, February 2006

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: t/k

  Printed in the United States of America

  By James P. Hogan

  Inherit the Stars

  The Genesis Machine

  The Gentle Giants of Ganymede

  The Two Faces of Tomorrow

  Thrice Upon a Time

  Giants' Star

  Voyage from Yesteryear

  Code of the Lifemaker

  The Proteus Operation

  Endgame Enigma

  The Mirror Maze

  The Infinity Gambit

  Entoverse

  The Multiplex Man

  Realtime Interrupt

  Minds, Machines & Evolution

  The Immortality Option

  Paths to Otherwhere

  Bug Park

  Star Child

  Rockets, Redheads & Revolution

  Cradle of Saturn

  The Legend That Was Earth

  Martian Knightlife

  The Anguished Dawn

  Kicking the Sacred Cow (nonfiction)

  Mission to Minerva

  The Two Moons

  Echoes of an Alien Sky

  CHAPTER ONE

  The long-range supply ship Melther Jorg was named after a deceased Venusian statesman from the island state of Korbisan, who had been a pioneer figure in marshaling political support for space exploration. Twelve weeks after lifting out from orbit above Venus, it entered the terrestrial magnetosphere at a distance of 90,000 miles from Earth, where the interplanetary plasma of charged particles organizes itself spontaneously into the form of an enveloping sheath that isolates the charged body of the Earth from its electrical environment. As the vessel shed the artificially sustained charge that its engines had maintained to ride the electric field gradient extending from the Sun to the periphery of the Solar System, magnetic decelerators braked it into a descent path that would bring it into a matching orbit standing ten miles off from Earth Expedition Headquarters. The orbiting HQ was still referred to as Explorer 6, although structural extensions and additions had greatly increased its size and altered its appearance beyond recognition from the Scientific Operations Command ship that had been on station for half a year now.

  Half an Earth year, that is, Kyal Reen reminded himself—an Earth year being equal to a little over one and a half Venusian years. The local system of reckoning was used here. It was one of the things he was going to have to get used to.

  He sat with a mixed group of newcomers in the midships cabin on C-Deck, used by crew and passengers as a general dayroom and mess hall, staring in fascination at the slowly enlarging view of Earth being presented on the large screen dominating the end wall. The world of blue, broken by brown and green coastlines showing through curdled whorls of white, with its fantastic geography and astounding climates so different from the juddering lava plains and steaming swamps of Venus, was familiar to all of them, of course. They had read the volumes of exploration reports, followed popular news features, and seen pictures going all the way back to the views captured by the earliest unmanned probes. But the image they were looking at now instilled awe in a way that was different from any previous experience. Right now as they contemplated it, beyond the thin walls of the hull containing them and the bubble of air that had carried them across millions of miles of space, the world that it represented was really out there.

  Yorim Zeestran, Kyal's junior colleague from the International Academy of Space Sciences, took in the view, sprawled untidily in an easy chair next to him. He had a lean but broad-shouldered, loose-limbed frame, and his chin had sprouted a fringe of yellow growth in the latter part of the voyage. "Imagine, a planet five-sixths water," he murmured. "Who'd ever have believed so much water? It amazes me that the Terrans weren't fish."

  Yorim had a casual attitude toward protocol and custom that sometimes raised eyebrows with strangers, but he and Kyal had worked together long enough for informality to be natural between them. For all of those present except Kyal, this was their first time off-planet apart from the short training flights that had formed part of the mission preparation program. Kyal's work in electrical space propulsion research had sometimes involved him in protracted space trips, but never before over interplanetary distances. Hence, all of them were first-timers to Earth.

  "Look, over to the left," Emur Frazin said, gesturing. "That thin, curving shape showing through. I think it's part of the double American continent that extends almost from pole to pole. The spine of mountains running all the way down has peaks miles high, and fissures that could swallow a city. What kind of violence did it take to do things like that?" It was on a scale that our world has never known, Kyal completed mentally. After a twelve-week voyage, they all knew each other's standard lines. But this time Frazin didn't voice it.

  Short in stature, balding, and sporting a short beard, Frazin was probably the oldest among them. He was a psychobiologist, come to join a team at one of the surface bases who were investigating evidence for planetwide calamities early in the Terran's history, and the effects the experiences may have had on their enigmatic psychology. He was one of those fussy but meticulous workers whose refusal to commit to a conclusion until he had satisfied himself three times over could be irritating at times to some—especially those like Yorim, who had never managed to cultivate the art of patience as a principal virtue. But then again, people like Frazin could save a lot of time and money back home to somebody who was, say, contemplating buying a car or deciding where to look for a home. If Frazin had done the research, it was as good as a foregone conclusion that the option he had come up with couldn't be bettered, and one could proceed to follow it with confidence. From what Kyal had gathered, Frazin was also a family man and something of a creature of habit and fixed routine. Kyal marveled at the dedication to work, or maybe it was the fascination with new discovery, that could induce such a person to come on a mission like this, over such an immense distance, and probably of indeterminate duration. Yorim had offered the more pragmatic opinion that perhaps life could sometimes get to be too much a matter of families and routine.

  "And that's the way it is now, after thousands of years of wear and erosion. Imagine what things must have looked like when it was all newly formed," Drekker added. Drekker was a climatologist, pursuing what had emerged as something of a new science, since the ever-turbulent squalls of Venus, driven by the hot equatorial belt with its permanent pall of smog and fumes, produced little in the way of a structured "climate" to be studied. He was young and independent, happy to let domestic considerations wait until he had satisfied his curiosity and appetite for adventure a little more, and was ready to go back to them.

  "Ice," Quelaya said, staring at the view dreamily. "Natural ice. . . . Caps of it miles thick. A white fantasy world with floating islands. Have you seen pictures of the polar regions? And animals live there. They will be the first places on my list to visit, if I ever get enough time off." Born an Altian, trim and petite, with c
ropped red hair, dark eyes, and swarthy skin, she was the archeologist among them, and as such faced the prospect of more than enough work for a hundred lifetimes. She and Yorim had developed a friendliness that could hardly be disguised in the confined conditions of a long voyage, and somehow managed to disappear for periods that politeness and discretion precluded comment on. Kyal made it his business not to notice.

  He let his gaze drift over the others as they sat spellbound and oblivious of his staring. Arissen, the zoologist, like Kyal himself, a Ulangean, and as with Quelaya, looking ahead to no end of work to be done. Ooster, an entomologist, drawn to the source of Terran insect specimens he had examined that had been brought back to Venus. Naseena, a geologist, her face mirroring Frazin's awe at the panorama of Earth's surface. Sartzow, the microbiologist. And besides scientists, already a flow of early colonists had begun from among the more adventuresome, drawn by the cleaner, clearer climate, by the opportunities presented by the industries and farms springing up to support the scientific influx, or simply by the excitement of starting anew, somewhere among the astounding variety of environments that Earth had to offer, each a world in itself.

  It had dense equatorial forests, where the huge trees created a shadowy underworld beneath a green canopy that effectively became a false surface supporting animal forms that lived their entire spans without ever descending to the ground. The more temperate belts contained vast grasslands—arid seas of windblown waves that in turn gave way to dry deserts, hot and cold, and the towering ranges of snowy mountains. Most awesome of all were the oceans, contiguous over the whole planet and extending all the way north and south to Quelaya's fantasy realms of white fairylands and floating mountains.

  Every region, even the deserts, teemed with its own fascinating, uncannily adapted mix of life. There was not one among the excited scientists arriving with the Melther Jorg who had not seen at some time or other some of the specimens transported back to Venus, or at least been captivated by the documentaries and studies that had been produced of just about every form of Terran life, recorded in their natural habitats.

  Every form of Terran life, that was, except one.

  Besides researchers of natural phenomena, the teams aboard the orbiting Explorer 6 and down on the surface also included engineers, architects, historians, scholars of sociology and the humanities, and other specialists like Kyal and Yorim, whose interests lay in artifacts, structures, art forms, and languages. The new arrivals in those categories were eager to get down to the surface of Earth too, and play a part in reconstructing a picture of the world and history of the vanished humanlike race that had once lived there.

  The image on the screen changed to show a telescopic preview of Explorer 6. As the Melther Jorg drew nearer, the lines of the original ship became vaguely discernible amid the clutter of communications antennas and instrument housings, bulbous projections housing astronomical and surface observatories, and surface lander and supply craft docking ports, that had transformed it into what would now be a permanently orbiting command center for Earth-centered activities. An announcement sounded from the room's address system. "Attention, please. We are about to commence our final approach and closing. Docking in thirty minutes."

  CHAPTER TWO

  The first manned mission to Earth had arrived fifteen years previously. Before that, the tantalizing neighbor world had long been an object of intermittent study from the few parts of Venus that enjoyed clear skies long enough to allow astronomy to emerge as a serious science, and eventually of exploratory visits by robot probes. Explorer 6 was largest and latest in a series of manned craft built specially for Earth research following the initial explorations and establishment of surface bases. Of its predecessors, Explorer 1 was now based above Venus as a training facility—in fact, it was the one that the arrivals aboard the Melther Jorg had been introduced to before their departure. Explorer 2 had been cannibalized at the end of its final voyage to Earth to provide most of the extensions to Explorer 6. Explorer 3 had been diverted from Earth operations and sent on a survey of Mercury and the closer solar vicinity to test theories of the electric field configuration and plasma discharge phenomena. Explorer 4 was back home undergoing a refit, while Explorer 5 had been subjected to major design changes to bring it up to the standard of 6, which had actually put 6 ahead in construction, and as a consequence it had been able to depart first.

  The Terrans, too, had ventured into space, establishing a presence on their enormous moon, and—if the plans contained in some fragmentary translations that had come to light had been carried through—sending at least one and probably two manned reconnaissance mission to Mars. However, although their civilization had spread to become planetwide, in contrast to the relatively patchy distribution of habitable areas on Venus, and their technology was for the most part at least as advanced—if not more so in areas of military applications—their ambitions for expanding more vigorously into space had been hampered by a curious deficiency in scientific knowledge that had persisted into the latter days of time for which their culture had existed.

  The theories of astronomy that they promulgated were based on models restricted to electrically neutral bodies moving only under the influence of gravity. It was true that this did accurately describe the motions of the Solar System during a quiescent period, when the planets had found stable orbits sufficiently circularized and separated to keep their magnetospheres from coming into contact. Under such conditions, the sheaths that formed at the boundaries of the interplanetary plasma and shielded bodies from electrical effects were never broached, and gravity was left as the sole effective force to influence them. So although practical enough in the shorter term, the theory was flawed in that it obscured a more complete understanding of the nature of celestial events.

  Ironically, a major reason for this seemed to have been Earth's clearer skies, which had made possible the detailed study of the motions of heavenly objects from the earliest historical times, when only a primitive understanding of mechanical dynamics had been available to explain them. By the time more advanced knowledge became available of the nature of matter and how it interacted, traditional ideas had become too entrenched to be superseded. On Venus, by contrast, astronomy hadn't really started coming together as a comprehensive science until the advent of balloons, rockets, and other means of basing observations above the all-but-ubiquitous clouds, with the result that the later findings in physics and electrical sciences found ready application naturally.

  As a consequence of their gravity-only celestial dynamics, the Terrans were led to believe that the stability they saw in planetary motions represented a permanent state of affairs that could be extrapolated back indefinitely. It produced a myopia that made them unable to recognize the evidence for the role that events of cosmic violence had played in shaping their own early history—evidence that was clear to Venusians, even with their limited knowledge of things the Terrans had found records of and not understood.

  The other major consequence of this deficiency in Terran science was that through most of their time as a spacegoing culture, they had concentrated on reaction-mass methods of propulsion, depending on hopelessly inefficient chemical rockets in its formative years, and progressing later—in typically Terran fashion, only when military demands so dictated—to nuclear. To a Venusian propulsion scientist like Kyal, such an approach was akin to tackling the problem of flight with gliders and ground-based catapults and cannons, instead of realizing that you can use onboard power. The Terrans had never, until they were in their final days, grasped that the Solar System is a vast plasma discharge circuit focused on the Sun, and that by suppressing its isolation sheath a craft carrying an artificially sustained charge could harness the unshielded electric field for interplanetary travel.

  However, recent discoveries at what had been some kind of Terran base or research facility on the far side of Earth's moon seemed to indicate that in the time running up to whatever calamity finally overcame them, some elements
at least among the Terrans had started to appreciate and explore the electrical possibilities for space travel that the nature of the universe offered. Some of the outlying structures that had been found there looked suggestively similar to launch and test facilities familiar to Venusian propulsion engineers. These were what Kyal and Yorim had been brought out to investigate.

  Explorer 6 seemed even bigger inside than it had looked from the viewing port when its metal booms and surfaces loomed out of sight all around in the final moments before the Melther Jorg docked. Plans of the layout had been made available during the voyage, along with all kinds of other information that newcomers might need, but like most, Kyal and Yorim had continually put off studying them until they were closer to arrival, until eventually they never got around to it at all.

  The first item on their agenda was to meet for lunch with Borgan Casselo, who ran the physics side of the Earth Exploration Expedition, of which they were now to become part. After that, Kyal was due to meet Director Sherven, the overall scientific head. Casselo had hoped to meet them off the ship personally as would have befitted someone of Kyal's seniority, but just as they were disembarking he had called to apologize and say that one of those "things" had come up that was unavoidable and would detain him slightly.

  "You would hardly have been sent to Earth if you weren't the kind of person to be busy and in demand," Kyal replied.

  "The Master is too generous." As the occasion demanded, referring to Kyal's professional title: Master of Engineering. "One of our people here can stand in for me. But she will be a few minutes."