CHAPTER
FIVE
In the morning, despite having exhausted themselves in the swimming pool, the girls were up before the sun, awake and bouncing on the couch when John returned from a short jog in the hotel’s fitness center.
“Still on Oberon time,” Ruth grumbled over scrambled eggs and fruit at the buffet in the hotel lobby.
“How far away are the Stone Gardens?” Ellie asked.
John tapped his multi. “The app says it’s a twenty-minute drive, let’s see . . . twenty-two kilometers.”
“I’m glad we decided not to walk,” Ruth said.
“Well, it might rain.”
Sunitha swallowed the last of her cocoa. “And how long until the cab gets here?”
“Should be about thirty seconds.” John threw his plate and utensils in the disposal, where they’d be sterilized, ground up, melted down, spun out again as new thread, and reprinted as something else. He picked up the blue-and-buff grip bag and slung it over his shoulder; inside were the energy pistol, several liters of water, and snacks. They all wore their own jackets.
“We could swim again,” Sunitha said. “There will probably be hiking at Arrowhawk.”
“But there won’t be the Stone Gardens,” John said.
“What are the Stone Gardens?” Sunitha asked.
“They’re magnificent,” John said. “And they’re a surprise.”
“You have no idea what they are,” Ruth said.
“I have no idea what they are. But someone told me last night we should go see them, and I think he was a pretty reliable source.”
The cabbie who picked them up was the same one who had driven them to the hotel. The minute the family was sitting down, Sunitha whipped her multi out of her pocket.
“Hey,” Ruth said. “I told you I would take the pictures, and you could leave your multitool at the hotel.”
“Only you take pictures of all the wrong things, Mom,” Sunitha said. “I don’t need more pictures of Ellie or Dad—I know what they look like. I want pictures of the things we’re going to see.”
“Okay, but you don’t need a picture of the inside of the cab,” John said, trying to head off Ruth’s ire.
Sunitha put on her aristocrat voice. “Obviously, I’m looking up the Stone Gardens.”
Four minutes’ drive was enough to get them out of Henry Hudson Post. The streets he had walked the previous evening were pale and tame by morning light, with a few shop owners sweeping up cigarette butts and throwing absorbent powder onto puddles of urine and vomit. Drones still zipped by overhead, but the larger vehicles were few and far between.
John sat facing backward, his arm around Sunitha as she banged away at the screen of her multitool. John himself scanned the list of Sedjem words in the orientation packet on his multi, trying to commit the strange words to memory. There were also notes on syntax, which made no sense to him at all. At their first turn, John chanced to look behind them and saw a white groundcar on their trail, several blocks away.
“First of all, they’re not gardens,” Sunitha said.
“Right,” John said. “They’re actually a lake.”
“No,” Sunitha said.
“A pool of lava,” John guessed. “A prison. A hole in the ground.”
“Ruins.” Sunitha shoved her multitool back into her pocket.
“I feel like I was close,” John said.
Ruth kicked him softly.
“What else?” John asked.
“That’s it. They’re ruins, and we don’t know who built them.”
“Could be the early surveyors?” John suggested. “Or the Weavers?”
“Do the Weavers build anything?” Ruth said. “I know people say they’re intelligent, but I always had the sense that they were only semi-sentient. Like, really smart dogs. And the smartest dogs aren’t going to build . . . whatever it was that turned into the ruins.”
“Maybe the ruins are all three-sided buildings,” Sunitha suggested. “Radiating out from the center. And then we’ll know.”
“Ooh,” Ellie said. “Gross.”
“Why would that be gross?” Sunitha asked.
“It just sounds disgusting. Like a cow pat.”
“What? Have you ever even seen a cow pat? Besides, it sounds like a sunflower or a daisy to me.”
“I haven’t heard that they build,” John said. “Is there a longer article on the Weavers in Doctor Doctor now? Or rather, Factor Doctor?”
“Yes,” Sunitha said, “and it says they live in the forest, and possibly in caves. It doesn’t say anything about buildings, one way or the other.”
“Humans,” the cabbie called from the front of the car.
John turned around to look at the driver. They rolled along a road that was still paved with asphalt, but now cut through a patchwork of green fields and thin forest. “You’ve seen them, then?”
“Yes, mar. I don’t know about the Weavers building, but since they don’t have hands, I don’t think so. But these were built by someone with hands, had to be. So I say it was the first settlers, the first human settlers, back before the Company took control of everything.”
“I didn’t think those numbers were very big,” John said. “Were there really enough early settlers to leave ruins?”
“Bigger than you’d think, mar,” the cabbie said. “There are whole towns out there where the Company doesn’t control the trade or the courts. They hack into the Company’s satellites, but they usually set up their own power. They farm. They raise animals. They colonize.”
“Are they politically organized?” John wondered. “It seems like sooner or later there must be a conflict.”
“There’s plenty of room. They stay out of the Company’s way, and just come into the posts when they need a replacement machine part, or want a bowl of noodles. It’s a bit like the Amish back on Earth—they want to be left alone, in their own towns. You might work here twenty years for the Company and never see them. I know they exist because they hire me for rides, sometimes.”
“And you think the ruins are theirs?”
“You’ll see what I mean.”
John turned back around, and saw again a plain white groundcar.
It might not be the same one; it looked very nondistinct, a sedan with soft, rounded edges, one of the nearly identical models that every manufacturer offered. And if it was the same car, that might be coincidence; there just couldn’t be that many roads, and so it must often happen that drivers imagined themselves to be followed.
“You’re seeing the car,” the cabbie said.
“I figure there just aren’t that many roads,” John said. “So it feels like we’re being followed, when really we aren’t.”
“I’m pretty sure he’s following us,” the cabbie said. “That’s Sarovar Company Security Services.”
“You mean . . . police?” Ruth turned to look out the back window.
“You work for the Company, don’t you? I’m pretty sure they’re just taking care of you while you’re in town. It would be a shame if you went to the Stone Gardens on your first day here and something ate you. And here we are.”
The cabbie parked his car in a flat meadow. The sward beneath the cab’s wheels rolled down and around two small knots of trees to a series of tall rock fins erupting from the grass.
The groundcar behind them pulled over and stopped, a hundred meters distant.
“The last thing we have to worry about,” John said, “is Company security. I work for Director English, and I’m sure he just wants to make sure we don’t run into any unpleasant surprises.”
Had he been followed into town, the night before? He didn’t remember seeing the white groundcar; had he been observed via drone?
Or was Bangerter Cheapside, for instance, in the employ of Company Security Services?
John stepped out of the cab. As his family climbed out to join him, he checked the multitool to make sure he was getting reception, then waved as the cabbie drove away.
They drifted down the grass toward the gray stone. He and Ruth held hands and walked slowly; Sunitha raced from tree to tree to inspect their leaves and bark and occasionally take pictures; Ellie somersaulted, literally rolling down the hill in spurts, punctuated by stretches of rising to her feet and running with all limbs flailing. Ani ran back and forth between the girls, barking and hurling herself beneath their feet.
“As soon as we get to Arrowhawk,” John said, “I’ll look into how to buy Weave and how to transport it back to Central Transit. There will be other factors and traders who can show me the ropes.”
It was a new evolution of a promise he had made to her many times.
She nodded.
“I can buy back your jewels,” he said. “The pawnbroker can’t sell them for twelve months, so all we have to do is make enough profit in twelve months, and I’ll buy the jewels right back.”
“At what interest rate?” she asked.
“Technically, the interest rate will depend on the moment when I buy them back,” John said. “I’ll pay him twelve thousand dollars.”
“So,” she recapitulated, “you need to take our ten thousand dollars and turn it into twelve thousand dollars plus enough additional capital to continue buying and reselling Weave. How much do you estimate that is?”
“The more, the better,” he said. “I’ll have a better idea of what reasonable numbers are once we get to Arrowhawk and I can talk to the factors and traders.”
“Dad-setty! Dad-setty! Look at this!”
But John didn’t immediately look at Ellie; his gaze stretched back up the green meadow, to where the white groundcar waited. Two persons had emerged from the car; men, probably, though they wore heavy blue-and-buff coats, and it was hard to be certain. They leaned against the car, watching John and his family, while one of them smoked.
John scanned the air for drones, and didn’t see anyway.
“Dad-setty! Dad-setty!”
“John,” Ruth asked, “what do those guys want?”
“This is the Company’s planet. We’re going to have to get used to seeing Company security forces around.”
“John, you’re an entry-level accountant. Why on Earth would the Company send two security guards to protect you?”
John mumbled wordlessly, asking himself the same question.
“Dad!” Sunitha called. “Pay attention to Ellie, before she explodes!”
John shook off his feelings of unease and turned to face his girls. The fins of gray rock, he now saw, were not ridges all running in one direction, but the walls of buildings. The walls had been constructed of stones, shaped to rectangular pieces of varying size and shape, and then slotted together.
John stopped at the first to run his fingers over the stone. There was no mortar cementing each stone to its neighbors, and no space between the stones; they simply slotted together, as if they had been cast for the purpose in precise molds.
Ruth whistled.
Some of the walls must have been two or three stories tall, at least, to judge from their height. Moving between them, John began to see floors connecting some of them, and the remains of floors that had long since collapsed.
It did indeed seem likely that human hands had shaped these walls.
But the initial settlers from Earth had come here less than a century ago. If the very first members of Homo sapiens to land on Sarovar Alpha had built these buildings, and then immediately abandoned them . . . surely the floors would be intact, and the buildings in their entirety would still be standing.
Perhaps the buildings had been destroyed early, and immediately abandoned.
Did something dangerous live in these woods and fields? The taxi driver had as much as said that there were things in the woods that could eat humans. John looked back at the Company security agents. What were they really doing here?
“This was some kind of complex,” Ruth said. “A small settlement, maybe.”
“Most people build their own houses out of mud and straw and things that don’t need to last a thousand years,” John said. “Building from stone is a lot more work. It suggests . . . what? Wealth? Social organization?”
“A desire for permanence,” Ruth suggested. “This looks like a ruined monastery or a temple complex.”
“Look, there are ditches lined with stone.” John pointed. “Water flowed beneath these buildings. Bringing fresh water in? Washing out sewage?”
“Both?” Ruth suggested.
They still had not reached Ellie, who stood on the other side of a wall from them. They heard her voice get louder as they drew close, and then they rounded the edge of the wall and could see what she saw.
And it took John’s breath away.
Murals.
The space where they stood must once have been the inside of a building, and the wall before them had been covered with murals. White plaster had been painted with a series of images that rose ten meters in the air, and that still existed because stone slabs that had once been ceiling, or perhaps the floor of a fourth story, leaned upon the wall and upon three nearby stone columns, sheltering the murals from the wind, sun, and rain.
Big chunks were scarred black—burned, John guessed, by something like the energy pistol he carried in his grip bag. No single scene in the complex and fragmentary collection of scenes was unmarred, and as he looked at the murals, it seemed to him that they had been deliberately edited. Bowdlerized. Redacted.
What he could see of the murals was astonishing. Creatures, with spiderlike eyes and six crab-like legs and six crab-like claws were pictured, in a strict two-dimensional view from the side. They each had two legs and claws pointing left and right, and then a third set that pointed legs down and claws up. They interacted in groups. In some scenes, small creatures surrounded a large one. In other scenes, they seemed to march in parade, or dance in circles, or act out scenes in painted forests or on painted mountaintops.
“Those crab-things,” Ruth said. “Are they . . . four-sided?”
“Or is that a two-dimensional way to show a three-sided creature?” John asked.
“They’re Weavers,” Sunitha said. She showed her parents her multitool, which had an image of one of the mural scenes. Beneath, a caption read: Sarovari Weavers congregate in a damaged scene.
“Every scene,” John said. “Every single scene has had something big burned out of it.”
“But what?” Ruth asked.
A roar erupted from the trees below the ruins. John clutched the grip bag tightly, but didn’t pull out the pistol. “Girls!” he called.
Sunitha pressed herself against her mother’s side.
Ellie . . . where was Ellie?
John heard barking and ran toward it. He didn’t pull out the gun because he didn’t want to startle the girls if he didn’t need to. At the edge of the trees, Ani stood, muscles tensed, barking at something unseen in the forest. Ellie tried to drag Ani away by her collar, but the dog was resisting. John could see the pit bull in Ani’s thick chest and narrow hips and snarling jaws.
“Dad.” Ellie’s voice trembled. “Ani won’t come.”
“She’s protecting you,” John said. “You come away from the trees and she will, too.”
But Ellie stood as if glued to the ground.
Another roar echoed from the woods, and tree branches shook. John’s heart pounded. “Ellie, let’s go.” He held out a hand, trying to act calm.
She stared into the trees. “Daddy, I see something.”
Time was up. John scooped his daughter up onto his shoulder and turned to jog up the hill. “Heel, Ani!”
Ani snarled and barked but didn’t heel. She was loyal to her pack, but not always the most obedient dog.
John broke into a run. Behind him he heard another roar, and as he reached the fins of crumbled masonry, he turned to look back. A bearlike creature covered in shaggy gray fur emerged from the trees and swiped at Ani. The dog dodged once, and then again, and nipped at the bear’s flanks.
Then the bear stood up, and John saw that it had six legs.
“Ani!” John whistled, and finally the dog disengaged and came trotting up to meet him. John put his right hand into the grip bag and felt the cool butt of the energy pistol. Ruth gathered up the two girls and pulled them behind him, and Ani stood beside him, barking.
The bearlike thing roared again. It stood on four legs, flailing its front two limbs. Then it rose briefly onto his hind pair of legs and raked the air with four claws at once, simultaneously emitting an industrial bellow that made the hair on the back of John’s neck stand up.
Then finally it turned and slunk into the woods.
“Time to call the cab back,” John said.
When he turned, the white groundcar and the two men in Company jackets were gone.