Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

junk in this system after Original Man got through with his construction project. We’ve got seventy million years’ worth of impact debris and dustfall. Lot of digging to do. Small bodies tend to lose mass because of high-energy impacts. The gravity doesn’t hold on to the stuff that fountains up. But on a body like this, even though the surface gravity is low because of rotation, there’s still the attraction of all that mass. The impact debris has no place to go, really, and over the eons it settles down in a slow rain and stays.”
    “You’ve been studying your astronomy.”
    She gave a pleased laugh. “It’s the same as geology in a place like this, isn’t it?”
    “What do you expect to find under all that rubble?” He gestured at the tipped slope they stood on.
    Her eyes shone. “Fossils, if we’re lucky. There’d be organic material if this was a food depot—or even if people lived or worked here, away from the operational center. People leave garbage. And garbage means mold, bacteria, microfossils. Maybe even the bones of vermin. Original Man must have had vermin.”
    Bram remembered a childhood tale: The Dappled Piper of Shu-shih.
    “Yes, indeed,” he said. “They called them rats.”
    “Member of the order Rodentia, ” she said with a frown. “They’re in the mammal list, but Original Man doesn’t have much to say about them.”
    “I’ll settle for a few dessicated bacteria. Would there be any DNA left after seventy million years?”
    “Maybe. This place isn’t cold. But it’s airless and dry. Original Man ressurected something called Tyrannosaurus rex from a bone fragment after a similar period. In his twenty-first century. They kept them in zoos.”
    He caught something of her excitement. “What a find a few bone fragments of Original Man would be! If we could do some DNA sequencing on a big enough sample, we could find out if he edited us before broadcasting our genetic code.”
    “We don’t know his burial customs. But millions of people must have lived here over a period of time to operate the beacon. There would have been accidents … illnesses that got out of hand … the rare individual who was immune to the immortality virus—” She broke off, abruptly aware that Jao would be listening through the radio link.
    “We’d better get going,” Bram said. “You’ve left a marker; we can send an excavation team later.”
    But Ame was unclipping a folding shovel from her belt. She flexed the stub of a handle once to activate the memory plastic and an instant later had a proper shovel. “Let’s see how deep the regolith is where it’s slid down here,” she said. “Help me clear some of this away.”
    Bram worked with his gloved hands while Ame shoveled, and within a tenth of an hour they had uncovered a smooth, hard gray surface.
    “No miracle materials, those,” Ame said. “They made the walls and roof of ordinary melted and poured stone. They could afford to mold it thick enough to cover expanses like this. There was plenty of stone, and power to spare before they switched on the transmitter.”
    “Twenty-three sextillion kilowatts, Jao figured,” Bram said. “Trillions of times as much energy as the entire Nar civilization had at its disposal. It’s a little disappointing to find that their building construction was so prosaic.”
    “Sophisticated megaliths,” Ame said. “That’s what they are. Great slabs meant to outlast eternity. Only this one didn’t.”
    She rapped the end of her shovel sharply; hydrogen atoms spilled from the reservoir they had fled to, preempted bonds again, and once more the shovel handle shrank to fit into her belt. She occupied herself for a moment chipping a rock sample from the slab. “I’ll take this back to Enry for analysis,” she said.
    She bobbed to her feet a little too quickly, and Bram pulled her out of the air. “Ready?” he asked. He was anxious to return to the walker and continue toward the apparent center of the complex.
    “Just a minute,” Ame said.
    She looked down the rubble-strewn slope of where its edge abutted the vertical wall and studied the V-shaped trench it made. “There’s broken rock in places along the edge,” she said. “If any of them correspond to broken sections of the underside of the slab, we could get underground without digging.”
    “No,” he said. “We’re not going to crawl through caves without any backup. It’s too dangerous. This place will still be here when we