The Devil's Heart - Carmen Carter [13]
The next generation was not so complacent.
Children born to this world saw more clearly than their elders; young eyes were not so easily fooled by the appearance of tranquillity. There were shadows on this landscape that had not been charted, subtle intimations of a darker geographic history that no one had bothered to read. The children still called themselves Iconians, but they restored the planet’s name to Ikkabar as a reminder that they were strangers to this place.
Over the following centuries, vague fears of lurking danger began to harden into grim knowledge. The temperate climate that had greeted the early settlers was only a brief respite in a pendulum swing from one harsh extreme to another.
The planet’s orbit was irregular in the extreme, and its climate equally so; there came a time when the warm seas dried entirely in the heat of summer, leaving nothing but sucking mud flats that stretched to the far horizon; in winter, torrential rains washed away the mud and flooded the plains. Growing seasons contracted, bringing famine to a people who had never wanted for food. The foundations of their buildings began to shift and slide in the softened ground, then harden at angles with their walls cracked open and lofty spirals splintered.
Old traditions were abandoned as each succeeding generation desperately searched for new ways to grow food and to build structures that could safely house their families. Nevertheless, their offworld heritage was still treasured. When Ikkabar cycled back to a temperate climate and the halcyon days of legend returned, the Iconians rejoiced. There was talk of a cultural renaissance, and ancient tomes, carefully preserved, were opened and read by those who still retained some measure of that dying skill.
The joy was short-lived. Bitter disappointment took its place as the weather began to grow colder, and the seas turned to ice rather than mud.
Much of the knowledge brought from Iconia was lost forever as precious books were burned as fuel. A few of the elders fought to save those relics; they were burned as well.
The hardy survivors of ancient Iconia now called themselves the Ikkabar. They moved from their ice-block fortresses to grass huts and back again with greater ease and fewer deaths, but even so, their numbers continued to dwindle.
Few remembered the sprawling cities that had been their first home; however, the buried remnants of these ancient settlements served as a beacon to space-faring races. The sensors of a passing Federation starship traced the record of past grandeur hidden beneath layers of ice and mud, and a discreet probe gathered data on the people who lived on this harsh planet. Little was done with the knowledge until an ethnographer at the Vulcan Academy of Science happened to read the field report.
Each year after that, T’Sara petitioned the Federation for a more extensive survey of Ikkabar, and each year she was refused, but her constant pressure pushed its name higher and higher on the list of projects waiting for funding and personnel. At last, eight years after its first visit, the USS Galeone returned to the planet.
There were even fewer people alive on the surface now.
The census results unleashed a storm of controversy among the members of the survey team.
T’Sara led a faction that favored First Contact so the Federation could provide aid to the scattered hunting tribes scrabbling for food. The Vulcan argued that these were the descendants of a people dependant on a highly developed technological culture. They were ill-matched to this primitive world and its demands; and just as one rescued the crew of a wrecked ship, these people were in dire need of assistance.
Unfortunately, her evidence for this theory was weak. Memories of Iconia and the Gateway had degenerated into a vague creation myth of a lost paradise, and the similarities to real places and events were impossible to corroborate. The