Engines Of God

The grass was high. It came almost to her knees. They got out, checked their weapons, and picked out an opening in the trees. Carson moved into the lead, and George drifted to the rear. They crossed the clearing and plunged into the woods.

They immediately faced an uphill climb. The vegetation was thick. They picked their way between trees and spiked bushes, and occasionally used the pulsers to clear obstacles.

They topped a ridge and paused. Tall shrubbery blocked their view. Janet was trying to look back the way they'd come. "I think it's a mound," she said. "There's something buried here." She tried using her sca

George produced a lightpad, and started a map.

They worked their way down the other side, past an array of thick walls. They ranged in height up to treetop level, and were often broken, or leveled. "This is not high-tech stuff," said George. "They've used some plastics, and some stuff I don't recognize, but most of this is just concrete and steel. That fits with the space station, but not with the telescope."

"It doesn't follow," said Janet. "The more advanced stuff should be on the surface. A low-tech city should be long-buried."

Animals chittered and leaped through the foliage. Insects sang, and green light filtered through the overhead canopy. The trees were predominantly gnarled hardwoods, with branches concentrated at the top. Lower trunks were bare. They were quite tall, topping out at about five stories. The effect was to create a vast leafy cathedral.

They forded a brook, walked beside a buckled stone wall, and started up another mound. The area was thick with flowering bushes. "Thorns," warned Maggie. "The same defenses evolve everywhere."

The similarity of life forms on various worlds had been one of the great discoveries that followed the development of FTL. There were exotic creatures, to be sure; but it was now clear, if there had ever been much doubt, that nature takes the simplest way. The wing, the thorn, and the fin could be found wherever there were living creatures.

They explored without real purpose or direction, following whims. They poked into a concrete cylinder that might once have been a storage bin or an elevator shaft. And paused before a complex of plastic beams, too light to have supported anything. "Sculpture," suggested Maggie.

Carson asked Janet whether she would be able to date the city.

"If we still had Wink," she said.

"Okay. Good." He was thinking that they could send the Ashley Tee to find the ship, and recover what she needed.

At the end of the first hour, Carson checked in with Jake. Everything was quiet at the shuttle. "Here too," he said.

"Glad to hear it. You haven't gone very far." Jake seemed intrigued. "What's out there?"

"Treasure," said Carson.

Jake signed off. He had never before been first down on an unknown world. It was a little scary. But he was glad he'd come.

Jake had been piloting Kosmik shuttles for the better part of his life. It was a prestigious job, and it paid well. It hadn't turned out to be as exciting as he'd thought, but all jobs become dull in time. He flew from skydock to ground station to starship. And back. He did it over and over, and he transported people whose interests were limited to their jobs, who never looked out through the shuttle ports. This bunch was different.

He liked them. He'd enjoyed following their trek through the space station, although he'd been careful to keep his interest to himself. It was more his nature to play the hard-headed cynic. And this: he knew about the Monument-Makers, knew they too had roamed the stars. Now he was in one of their cities.

The heavy green foliage at the edge of the clearing gleamed in the bright midday sun. He leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head. And saw something. A glimmer of light in the trees.

It looked like a reflection.

He poked his head through the hatch and leaned forward and watched it for several minutes. Something white. A piece of marble, maybe. The warm harbor air washed over him.

They stopped by a crystal stream and gazed at the fish. The filtered sunlight lent an air of unreality and i

The stream ran beneath a tapered blue-gray arch. The arch was old, and the elements had had their way with it. Symbols had been carved into the stone, but they were long past deciphering. Maggie tried to read with her fingertips what lay beyond the capability of her eyes.

She was preoccupied, and did not hear a sudden burst of clicking, like the sound of castanets. The others didn't miss it, however, and looked toward a patch of thick briar in time to see a small crablike creature pull swiftly back out of sight.

Beyond the arch, they found a statue of one of the natives. It was tipped over, and half-buried, but they took time to dig it up. Erect, it would have been twice George's height. They tried to clean it with water from a nearby stream, and were impressed with the abilities of the sculptor: they thought they could read character in the stone features. Nobility. And intelligence.

They measured and mapped and paced. George seemed more interested in what they couldn't see. In what lay hidden in the forest floor. He wondered aloud how long it would take to mount a full-scale mission.

There was no easy answer to that question. If it were up to the commissioner, they would be here in a few months. But it would not be that simple. This world, after all, could be settled immediately. And there would be the possibility of technological advantage. Hutch thought it would be years before anyone would be allowed near the place, other than the NAU military.

Jake climbed out onto the shuttle's wing, dropped to the ground, and peered into the trees. He could still see it. The clearing was lined with flowering bushes, whose lush milky blooms swung rhythmically in a crisp wind off the harbor. They were bright and moist in the sunlight. Jake's experience with forests was limited to the belt of trees in his suburban Kansas City neighborhood, where he had played as a kid. You could never get in so deep that you couldn't see out onto Rolway Road on one side, or the Pike on the other.

He understood that despite its peaceful appearance, the woodland was potentially dangerous. But he wore a pulser, and he knew the weapon could bum a hole in anything that tried to get close.

The day was marked by a sky so blue and lovely that it hurt his eyes. White clouds floated over the harbor. And sea birds wheeled overhead, screaming.

He touched the stock of his weapon to reassure himself, and walked toward the edge of the clearing.

They were fairy-tale trees, of the sort often portrayed in children's books with grimaces and smiles. They looked very old. Some grew out of the mounds, enveloped the mounds in their root systems, as if clutching whatever secrets might be left. The city had been dead a long time.

"Hundreds of years," said Maggie.

The underbrush now was sparse, and the trees were far apart. It was a forest cast in summer sunlight, a vista that seemed to lose itself far away among the living columns.

They came over the crest of a hill and caught their collective breath.

The land dropped gradually away into a wooded gully, and then rose toward another ridge. Ahead, a wall emerged from the downslope, from thick, tangled brush, and soared out over the ravine. It was wide and heavy, like a dam. Like a rampart. It extended somewhat more than halfway across the valley. And then it stopped. Five stories high, it simply came to an end. Hutch could see metal ribs and cables. A skeletal stairway rose above the wall, ending in midair. There had been crosswalls, but only the co