Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

haunted. By the entire human race.”
    “Yes.” She shuddered. “It’s like our own graveyard. We’re supposed to be immortal. But so were they.”
    “That’s why it’s important to find answers here, Ame. And that’s your job.”
    She shook off the mood with an effort. “A job for more than me and Enry. We’re going to have to develop a real science of archaeology very quickly. We’ve never had the subject matter before. We don’t want to blunder about, destroying knowledge.”
    “How do we go about it?”
    “We’ll need a large labor force from the tree,” she said briskly. “We’ll have to establish a grid first, and a cataloging system. The librarians can help there, and everybody else will have to pitch in. Chemists, cultural scholars, everybody.” She challenged him with a direct gaze. “I can hardly wait to get a real team here and start the dig. How soon do you think that will be, Bram-tsu ?”
    “Right away, if everything looks all right. We’ll spend a few days here first—find a good place to set up a base camp, get an idea of the layout. Lydis ought to be able to move the ship a bit closer. That thing up ahead isn’t a danger now that we know where it is.”
    The walker was at the top of a leap, and as it drifted slowly down, both passengers looked ahead through the bubble. The elusive streak at the center of the compound still could not be seen with the naked eye, even from a few miles away. But a couple of stops during the approach and a look through the helmet telescopes had confirmed that it was still there.
    Bram had tried bouncing light off it from a hand laser, while Ame made photometer readings. Slashing back and forth with the beam, he had still obtained readings at what a rough triangulation told him was a height of over twenty miles.
    Whatever it was, it was indubitably solid matter, and it reached straight up.
    “Stop here,” Ame said. “I want to look at something.”
    Bram reined the walker in. It reared up in the low gravity, then its front legs settled into the dust. Bram made it kneel, then followed Ame out through the lips of the bubble.
    It made a primitive air lock, but it was the best that could be done within the limitations of the scrawny biomachine. Very little atmosphere was lost if you managed the egress properly. You learned the technique quickly— arms stretched out with your head tucked between them, as if you were diving, then squirm the rest of yourself through sidewise, while the fat inflated edges sealed themselves around you, and a quick pop as you drew your foot through. He and Ame had stayed in their suits with their helmets on even though the bubble was fully pressurized with a breathable atmosphere of fifty percent oxygen. Lydis had insisted on that for safety’s sake.
    Ame headed for one of the low ridges of rubble that crisscrossed the area, as she had done on previous stops. It looked no different from any of the other ridges of rubble as far as Bram could see.
    “What is it?” he asked.
    “Another rooftop,” she said. “Pretty intact under there, I should think. A warehouse or distribution center, maybe, from the size of it and from the way it’s situated—you can see how long that unbroken ridgeline goes on.”
    “But why—”
    “Come on. This way.” She had already planted a locater beacon in the debris for future reference, and now she scrambled up a low slope, sending up clouds of dust and chips that hung there in the inconsequential gravity.
    “Careful of your suit,” Bram cried, but she had already disappeared over the edge. With a sigh he leaped after, soared over the peak with his legs tucked up, and dragged a toe to put himself down just on the other side. Unexpectedly, he found himself standing next to Ame on a forty-five-degree slope that ended at the base of what was ummistakably an uncovered wall of stone one hundred feet away.
    “I thought I saw it when we were at the top of that last jump,” she said complacently. “Collapsed roof. Quake, maybe—we’ll have to ask Enry how quakes would work on a body with stresses like this one. Or maybe a meteorite strike. Look, it took four levels with it—it must be all tumbled down underneath there.”
    She pointed, and Bram saw the broken ledges on the wall opposite, each with its cap of dust.
    “And that will tell us how deep the regolith lies on a body like this one after we measure the slump,” she said. “You know, there must have been a lot of leftover