Three Domes and a Tower Read online

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  Three Domes and a Tower

  by James P. Hogan

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  Science Fiction

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  Fictionwise, Inc.

  www.Fictionwise.com

  Copyright ©1998 by James P. Hogan

  First published in Star Child, 1998

  NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

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  Third story in the “Star Child” series. Series comprises:

  1. “Silver Shoes for a Princess"

  2. “Silver Gods from the Sky"

  3. “Three Domes and a Tower"

  4. “The Stillness Among the Stars"

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  THREE DOMES AND A TOWER

  The wind rose and fell in squalls, carrying sea spray and spatters of raindrops from the overcast sky. Taya gripped the rail with one hand and pulled the hood of her overjacket closer around her face. A mile behind the boat, crumbling ice cliffs brooded over waves tossing restlessly beneath banks of mist. The snowfield above the ice cliffs rose in smooth slopes and ridges toward the outcrops of the distant coastal range. Ahead, beyond the mouth of the bay, several smaller islands of the polar archipelago lay amid gray water flecked with floating ice and occasional larger bergs. The offshore platform, known simply as the “Rig,” stood closer in, on a bank forming an underwater continuation of the headland.

  The boat was known as a caloosh—a converted war galley stripped of its masts, sails, and benches for rowers, with a strengthened hull and plasma-electric propulsion system devised by Engineer. Taya stood on the raised prow, forgoing shelter to study the Rig better as they approached. With her were Spak, Engineer's local supervisor of operations, wrapped Azurean-style in a long coat of sealskin with fur trim, and Vaysi, wearing an orange one-piece thermsuit. Nyelise had stayed in the warmth of the aft cabin with its plastic-sheeted windows, in the company of the two Azureans and Kort. Although Kort's current body was ornamented in the same style of silver and blue points as the original, like the other mec-minds, he had taken to wearing clothes in Azure's more variable and extreme conditions. They protected against dust and abrasion, and were easily to clean and replace. Currently he was in a tan boiler suit with plastic boots to keep the salt water out of his joints.

  Taya and Kort, along with Nyelise and Vaysi, had flown overnight from Aranos to “Icebowl,” the arctic scientific base set up a year previously in a basin on the reverse side of a ridge about a mile inland from the cliff line. By local time it was mid-morning, although at that time of year darkness lasted little more than two hours. They had lunched with Spak and several others of the staff, who had updated them on the current state of the work. Afterward, two power sleds had brought them to the pontoon shore station beyond the cliffs, where a boat was waiting to take them out to the Rig.

  The Rig had the approximate shape of a truncated pyramid. Three steel piers, braced by girders and cross-ties, converged upward from the water to support the main platform fifty feet or so above the surface, which projected on one side to provide a landing pad for short-range flyers, of which Icebowl boasted a permanent complement of two. One, however, was undergoing maintenance and the other away ferrying supplies to an outpost on the ice sheet, which was why the visitors were coming out by boat. The main platform carried the superstructure, below which a central column containing twin elevator shafts, ventilation pipes, and supply lines descended to the lower workings on the seabed. On the far side from the approaching boat, four tethered barges lay below hoppers that discharged the rock and debris brought up from the excavations.

  “It's bigger than I expected,” Taya commented as the boat neared the floating dock attached to one of the piers, with stairs and a hoist connecting to the levels above. “Those legs look thick enough to shore up a mountain."

  “The seas here can get pretty heavy, especially in winter,” Spak said.

  The materials and components for constructing the base and its offshore extension had been supplied by extraction and fabrication plants that machine intelligences linked to Merkon had established at various places around Azure. So far there were only a few dozen of them, and their output was never enough to satisfy the demands of all the activities that had come into being. The last twenty years had been a time of ceaseless invention and discovery. The machines had had no knowledge, nor even any concept, of mining raw materials and refining metals out of ores; indeed, before Merkon's arrival at Azure, they hadn't even known what a rock was. In many ways they had learned as much from the natives as the Azureans had from them. Progressing from those beginnings to the development of planet-based methods to shape steel and other alloys into forms like those used in the construction of the Rig, or make parts such as those that the motors driving the boat were assembled from, had taken most of that time.

  “What would the people down there do if you did lose everything topside?” Taya asked.

  “Well, we always bring everyone up as a matter of routine when there's a bad forecast. Then they have an underwater lock that they could use as an escape chamber.” Spak shrugged and glanced at her with the confident grin that made him a natural organizer and leader. “I guess they'd just have to put on breathers and swim up, and trust us to get to them before the cold did."

  Spak was one of the original forty-six Merkon “Primaries,” or “Star Children,” as most Azureans still called them. Now aged thirty-one along with the rest of his generation, he had developed an early desire to know more of the story of the Azureans, who had somehow originated on a planet, and devoted himself to piecing together their history. The Azureans themselves had never applied systematic methods of inquiry either to this field or to any other—nor indeed formed any such concepts, although many of them had proved to be rapid learners.

  What had begun as simply an interest in the Azureans and their past became Spak's dedication as the arrivals from space learned of the widespread evidence that existed of a long gone civilization, referred to by the Azureans simply as the “Ancients,” that had once existed on the planet. Although widely distributed, the traces were all but obliterated: the remains of a structure of some kind, uncovered by erosion in a river canyon; a rusted implement turned up by a plow; fragments of what were undoubtedly mechanical and electrical parts brought up from a quarry. None of it meant anything to the Azureans. Evidently, a culture with knowledge of technologies far beyond the understanding of the present inhabitants had once flourished across the planet. Thinker had been the first to voice the obvious question of whether the Ancients and the “Builders"—the unknown creators of Merkon—had been one and the same. Spak had spent much of the years since then trying to find the answer. His interests made him an obvious choice for coordinating the operations at Icebowl, and he had been there since its inception.

  Not all of the original forty-six who had arrived with Merkon had survived. There was no way that Scientist could have known about pathogenic microbes and the existence of hostile life forms. Sickness had swept through the children with every group that ventured out into the planetary environment, which by the time it became apparent that something was very wrong meant practically all of them. Eleven died in the first six weeks. Little Cariette, Taya's walking echo from that first group to land on the surface, had been one of the earliest. Bron another. The two isolated failures that had occurred long ago when Merkon was st
ill years from the end of its voyage had not been sufficient for anyone to draw the general inference. Only on Azure did the newcomers learn that mortality was the inescapable price of biological life. That realization had been almost as much of a shock to them as the losses.

  Three more—a number that could easily have been far worse, considering their naivete in a world filled with predators and all manner of hazards that nothing had prepared them for—had been lost in accidents since.

  But then, as if it were Nature's way of compensating, they had reached the age of discovering life's miraculous process for renewing itself and producing fresh, impressionable minds, untrammeled by a lifetime's accumulated habits and prejudices, free to absorb new ideas. For the most part, “Merkonians” had adopted the practically universal Azurean custom of pairing, and being young and zesty they tended to be prolific. Vaysi, just turned eighteen now, was among the first of the second generation to be born, both her parents Primaries. She was a child both of space and of the planet, as much at home riding through forests with a hunting party of Azureans as conversing with machines up in Merkon. Her family of seven siblings lived among the Azureans in what had been a rival kingdom to the south of Leorica, practicing and seeking ways to improve the Azurean arts of cultivation. Vaysi had studied soils and how they were formed, which led to a curiosity about rocks and hence trying to understand the processes that had shaped the planetary surface generally. The Azureans had tended to apply themselves little to physical geography, focusing their attention on mapmaking and other arts more relevant to the advancement of war and conquest—of which the inhabitants of Merkon had no concept. But with Cyron's conversion and the continuing spread, after his death, of Leorica's new creed of peace and tolerance into the adjoining lands and beyond, such practices and the misery they created were disappearing. Instead, the world was discovering cooperation, trust, and the value of learning. In twenty years, partly through the analytical powers of the machines but due also to curiosity inspired among the Azureans themselves, more had been pieced together concerning the planet's past than had been contained in all the myths, legends, superstitions, and half-truths in circulation at the time of Merkon's arrival.

  Whatever fate had overtaken the Ancients had been sudden and cataclysmic, involving upheavals of unimaginable violence and planet-wide in extent. Remains of buildings and other constructions were found piled in gorges and rock fissures, or crushed beyond recognition under rock and compacted mud sometimes hundreds of feet deep. However, there were scattered coastal areas where fishermen had been dredging up samples of advanced artifacts in a relatively undamaged condition from the seabed for generations. Sailors told tales of similar objects being found frozen into the ice of drifting bergs, but most Azureans discounted them. Historian—extending his role to take in Azure's past as well as that of Merkon—had been curious all the same, and persuaded Scientist to mount several expeditions to investigate, in which Spak and some of the others had participated. Some icebergs had indeed turned out to contain machined artifacts, along with pieces of alloys, plastics, and other advanced materials. The currents that bore those bergs were plotted and traced back to their northerly origins.... And Icebowl Base had been established as a result.

  Taya had kept to a solitary path over those years, refraining from emotional attachment or commitment to any one person. As had been the case since their earliest days in Merkon, Kort was her constant companion. Her uniqueness in Merkon had created a surrogate mother relationship directed equally toward all her charges, which would not be displaced. On top of that, the traumatic discovery of violence and death, and their deliberate infliction, all in rapid succession and which none of her experience had prepared her for, then culminating in the brutal ending before it had barely begun of the first hint of intimate affection that she had ever known, had been too much for her psyche not to react against self-protectively. The children had been resilient enough to absorb the shock and adapt to the new terms that life demanded. Just the few years separating them from her had been enough to make the difference.

  In keeping with the role of guide and counselor that she had always filled, she had stood apart and watched while a new generation appeared and grew, some of pure Primary parentage, others from Azurean intermingling. The Azureans referred to the mixed offspring as “sky-blooded.” It both astonished and delighted them that the Star Children who found unions beyond their own kind did not restrict themselves to the Azurean nobility and high-born, but followed their own instincts in judging what qualities constituted human worth. The Azureans were eagerly learning and adopting these new scales of values. To have one of the sky-blooded added to its numbers came to be one of a family's greatest sources of pride, and esteem among others. Most Azureans didn't comprehend Taya's relationship to her younger kin. To them she was simply the “Star Mother."

  The two Azureans emerged from the cabin at the aft end of the boat, one of them coming forward to uncoil a line in preparation for docking. Taya watched him, his face leathery from the sun and weather, trying to picture how he and the generations before him had lived over the years, without machines or power, here in this land of frozen mountains and windswept snow. How much had those dark, narrow eyes seen that she would never know? Did the mind that looked out from behind them even perceive reality in the same terms as she? Scientist had been intriguing her with accounts of how the “true” reality of the physical world was nothing more than dancing patterns of energy quanta; all the impressions which together made up the reality experienced by consciousness—of bio-life and machines alike—were somehow created by its own internal processes. Taya had been amazed that any two minds managed to see anything similar at all.

  Spak pointed suddenly past the mouth of the bay, in the direction of the open sea. “Look. Whales!” Taya and Vaysi followed his extended finger. Two black, rounded shapes were coasting among the whitecaps beyond the headland. “They probably picked up the sound of the boat and came to investigate,” Spak said. “Chel says they make strange sounds of their own. He thinks they might communicate that way."

  Chel was another of the surviving Primaries, working most of his time with Biologist at trying to explain the diversity of Azurean life forms. Evolutionist had long ago conjectured that chemical life originating on a planet might progress from the simple to the complex. But whatever scheme was devised for arranging and categorizing them, the forms that existed on Azure showed no persuasive evidence of any progression. Even at the level of their molecular chemistry, all were equally complex. Thinker was baffled, and Mystic had gone back to claims of creation by Supermind. For the time being, none of the minds had a constructive suggestion to offer.

  “Did you ever see whales before, Taya?” Spak asked.

  Taya shook her head. “Not for real. Only pictures.” As she watched, one of the whales vanished for a few seconds, then surfaced again, spouting water. “Chel told me that they're not really fish,” she said.

  Spak nodded. “I heard that too."

  “What makes Chel say that?” Vaysi asked curiously.

  “Apparently there's an Azurean he knows who's spent his life trying to find a system for classifying animals,” Spak replied. “That was what he said, and when Chel checked it out, he was right."

  “So what are they?” Vaysi asked. Spak shrugged and shook his head.

  “I know that air-breathing was part of it,” Taya said. She drew a pad from her coat pocket and spoke into it. “Kort, why does Chel say that whales aren't fish? Tell me the reasons again."

  “Because they're air-breathing and maintain warm blood,” Kort answered from the rear of the boat. “They bear their young live and nurse them the same way that most large land animals do. Biologist says that relates them more closely than to fish."

  “Thanks.” Taya glanced inquiringly at Vaysi.

  Vaysi still didn't look happy with it. “Why should something that looks like a fish and swims like a fish be more closely related to pigs and tigers,” she chall
enged. Taya shook her head in a way that said she couldn't add anything to what Kort had told them.

  “Does it make sense to you?” Vaysi asked Spak.

  “How do molecules assemble into brains and feathers? If the Ancients could build Merkon, what happened to them? There isn't much about Azure that does make a lot of sense right now,” Spak answered with a sigh.

  Two more Azureans, wearing hooded furs, were waiting on the floating jetty at the bottom of the steps leading up to the platform. The caloosh came around, slowed to a bobbing crawl through the waves, and docked with a mild bump. The Azurean at the bow threw the line. One of the two who were waiting caught it and made fast to a mooring stanchion, while the other tied a second tossed by the Azurean at the stern. Kort and Nyelise came out from the cabin onto the deck. Taya, Vaysi, and Spak descended from the prow and went back to the midships section, where the hull ran against the jetty. The steel mesh of the landing stage was crusted with ice, and the Azureans who had tied the lines helped the arrivals as they clambered down the boat's side. “Careful, Kort,” Taya cautioned. “You know that swimming is one thing that you people aren't exactly best at."

  “Hmph."

  Seven mec-bodies had been lost so far in accidents of one kind or another involving deep water. With things to attend to everywhere, most of the mec-minds possessed multiple bodies which they controlled simultaneously, generally scattered all over Azure and up in Merkon. To begin with, the different versions had been distinguished by numbers, but that had quickly become too impersonal and drab. So now they used their generic names along with individual identifiers chosen to be displayable as emblems that they carried on their shoulders for easy recognition. One of the Engineers—"Engineer Wrench"—had gone down in this very bay in Spring, when an Azurean barge came apart after being squeezed between two ice floes. Mec-bodies had not been designed to be watertight.