Dyson Sphere - Charles R. Pellegrino [28]
“Captain Dalen!” Troi shouted into the dust. “Is everything all right?”
For a long time, no one answered from inside. Then the dust storm abated unexpectedly and the Horta shrieked, “Look at it! Look at it!”
“Picard here,” the captain chimed in. “What do you see?”
Geordi peered inside. The Horta-flung dust was warm, thwarting his infrared sensors. He had to wait for the cloud to settle, letting daylight in through the open windows.” It’s all right, Captain,” Geordi said. “I suppose we’ve just learned that Hortas can’t speak and dig at the same time.”
Shadows materialized out of the settling dust, becoming less misty and less vague with each passing second. Geordi stepped inside. And then he saw.
Columns of compressed rock supported the weight of the upper floors. Like everything else in the room, the Horta had restored them with astonishing rapidity, yet with seemingly impossible attention to detail. Had the owner of this house returned today, he would have found his chair and his table, and his single glass upon the table, exactly where he had left them a hundred thousand years ago.
But what impressed Geordi the most about the room, and made him sigh with surprise and a deep aesthetic pleasure, was his first glimpse of the frescoes on its walls. As with everything else in the city, time had stolen their beauty hardly at all, and the sudden vision of very humanlike figures, arm in arm before a great ocean, took his breath away.
“Sublime,” Troi said.
Captain Dalen motioned toward a pair of body-like mounds, heaped in a corner. Scanning, Geordi saw that they were indeed what they looked like: the remains of living humanoids. He scanned for more detail and was surprised to find, in arrays of hydrogen atoms, the intact skeletons of blood proteins remarkably similar to his own. The history written on the Homeworld’ goblin genes was more human than the Dooglasse.
“Look at this,” he said, showing his recordings to Troi.
She leaned forward. “Provocative,” she said. “It may be that the Dooglasse diverged further from our ancestral type than we did.”
“Mitochondrial Eve,” Picard murmured.
Captain Dalen directed them toward a back door that opened into a Horta tunnel. Geordi saw a narrow cobblestone road, leading downward. It formed the tunnel floor, and on either side, ancient kiln-fired brick formed the tunnel walls. Geordi followed Dalen and Troi along the alleyway and came to what seemed to be a dry canal bed. Moving to the edge of the stone dock, the three looked down and saw the perfectly preserved remains of a wooden ship, its keel pitched up to face the tunnel roof.
La Forge was delighted by what his scan revealed: “Buried in its hold—what’s left of a mechanically operated analogue computer! Gears. And multiple gear shifts.”
“For navigation,” Troi said.
“Yes!” Geordi said excitedly.
It was easy to forget, in this portal to Dyson’s Bronze Age, that in the world outside, an navigable sea wider than Mercury’s orbit was rising on the eastern horizon, and that the land on its northern shore curved upward and upward over Dyson’s homeworld, and actually formed the homeworld’s sky.
Nightfall came on with all the suddenness of a thunderbolt. But it was not so much a true nightfall as it was a change of lighting. Picard stood with Troi, La Forge, and the Dooglasse officer in the middle of the square and watched the strange twilight that now came to the planet. There would be no stars, Picard knew.
A very wide searchlight beam seemed to be tracking slowly down the western rim of the excavation, as if a second sun were rising in the east. At first, the light startled Picard. It was not a sister star. He knew this in a second; and a second later he wondered