The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [228]
"If it is—" Dian was at the telescope, but I heard the awed words she murmured almost to herself. "A new world ready to welcome us!"
"Maybe." Waiting uneasily for a turn at the telescope, Arne shook his head. "We haven't met them yet."
"Maybe?" Pepe mocked him. "We came to meet them, and I think they'll have enough to show us. I see bright lines across the ancient delta. Some run all the way to the river. Canals, I imagine. And—"
His voice caught.
"A grid! There on the western edge. A pattern of closer lines. Could be the streets of a city." He was silent as Earth rolled under us. "Buildings!" His voice lifted suddenly. "It is a city. With the sun shifting, I can make out a tower at the center. A new Alexandria!"
"Try for contact," Tanya told him. "Ask for permission for us to set down."
"Down to what?" Arne drowned. "They didn't ask us here."
"What's the risk?" Dian asked him. "What have we got to lose?"
Pepe tried when we came around again.
"Squeals." Frowning in the headphones, he made a face of wry frustration. "Whistles. Scraps of eerie music. Finally voices, but nothing I could understand."
"There!" Tanya was at the telescope.
"Out in the edge of the desert, west of the city. A pattern like a wheel."
He studied it.
"I wonder—" His voice paused and quickened. "An airport! The wheel spokes are runways. And there's a wide white streak that could be a road into the city. If we knew how to ask—"
"No matter," she told him. "We've no fuel to search much farther. Put us down, but out where we won't make a problem."
On the next pass, we glided down. The city roofs raced beneath us. Red tile, yellow tile and blue, aligned along stately avenues. The airport rushed beneath us. We were low above the tall control tower when I felt the heavy thrust of the retrorockets.
We tipped down for a vertical landing. The thundering cushion of fire and steam hid everything till I felt the jolt of landing. The rocket thrust gone, we could breathe again. Tanya opened the cabin door to let us look out.
The steam was gone, though I caught its hot scent. I rubbed the sun dazzle out of my eyes and found clumps of spiny yellow-green desert brush around us. The terminal building towered far off in the east. We stayed aboard, uneasily waiting. At the radio, Pepe got hums and squawks and shouting voices.
"Probably yelling at us." He twirled his knobs, listened, tried to echo the voices he heard, shook his head again. "Could be English," he mustered. "Angry English, from the sound of it, but I can't make anything out."
We sat there under the desert blaze till the plane got too hot for comfort.
"Will they know?" Arne shrunk back from the door. "Know we brought their forefathers here?"
"If they don't," Tanya said, "we'll find a way to tell them."
"How?" Sweating from more than the heat, he asked Pepe if we could take off again.
"Not for the Moon," Pepe said. "Not till we must."
Tanya and I climbed down to the ground. Spaceman came with us, running out to sniff and growl at something in the brush and slinking back to tremble against my knee. Arne followed a few minutes later, standing in the shade of the plane and staring across the brush at the distant tower. A bright red light began flashing there.
"Flashing to warn us off," he muttered.
I had brought my videocam, Tanya had me shoot clumps of the thorny brush and then a rock matted over with something like red moss.
"Data on the crimson symbiote reported by the last expedition." She spoke crisply into my mike. "Apparently surviving now in a mutant Bryophyte—" "Hear that?" Arne cupped his hand to his ear. "Something hooting."
What I heard was a pulsing mechanical scream. Spaceman growled and cowered closer to my leg till we saw an ungainly vehicle lurching over a hill and rolling toward us on tall wheels, flashing colored lights.
"Now's our chance," Tanya said, "to give them the gifts we've brought. Show them we mean no harm."
Clumsy