ROCKING THE CRADLE
Patrick Chiles
If you’ve read his novels Frozen Orbit or Frontier—and you should have read them both, they’re fantastic—stories of strange objects discovered in space is familiar ground to Patrick Chiles. Yet just because it’s familiar ground doesn’t mean there aren’t still some wild directions to explore, daring questions to ask, and strange adventures to be told. With this story of a dig by an aspiring Indiana Jones on Sirius A, Chiles adds some of his own twists to perhaps the oldest question genre authors have asked since they started telling tales of ancient aliens, and ruins on other worlds:
By exploring the pasts of other worlds and other lifeforms, what might we learn about our own?
***
My name is Michael Alvarez, and I’m a geologist. Geology may be the most practical of all physical sciences, being that the study of our planet’s evolution involves a lot of digging around in the dirt and thinking about how it all got there. Literally a “down to Earth” profession.
Yes, I like rocks. A lot. Enough to have joined an expedition to a planet in an entirely different solar system just for a chance to dig up their rocks. Having established that I’m otherwise a fairly well-grounded guy (geology pun intended), you’d think that willfully allowing myself to be sucked into a wormhole and spat out the other side, eight and a half light years from home, would be the weirdest experience of my life.
You would be wrong.
Don’t misunderstand me—it was supremely weird. The fastest ships we have took almost two years just reach the wormhole’s Hill sphere, the area of dominant gravitational influence. As we approached, it didn’t look like anything was there for the longest time and even from orbit it was hard to see anything.
Of course, this is why nobody knew it was out at the edge of our Solar System up until a few years ago. The only reason anyone found it was because they were in the vicinity looking for something else. The gravity well was unmistakably present, so imagine their surprise when they didn’t find a planet at the center of it. Instead, they found a hole in the middle of space.
Fortunately for us, the survey team parked a transponder beacon in synchronous orbit along the event horizon so we wouldn’t lose track of the thing. Apparently it’s easy to do, gravity field or not. It certainly helped navigation, or at least that’s what the rocket jockeys tell me. And it helps with comms from the other side, which is one more aspect of the supreme weirdness that rules this place.
I mean, the light delay ought to be on the order of eight years but thanks to The Hole, we can get a signal to Earth in about twelve hours. I guess that makes sense, I mean if humans and our machines can make it through in one piece, then EM radiation ought to behave the same way.
Going through it after spending two years in the proverbial Vastness O’ Space was like having your entire world, your whole life experience, compressed and sucked through a soda straw. It seems to go on forever but at the same time is over almost instantaneously.
Have you ever thought about what infinite really means? As far as we know, space and time go on forever without end. I mean, one day there’ll be the heat death of the universe so it’ll eventually end, but work with me here. Try to imagine something so vast it has no observable limits, then all of a sudden the boundaries are blindingly obvious. The entire expanse of your universe becomes naked-eye visible, a narrowly defined existence that you best not stray from. It’s like pouring spacetime through a funnel; you feel like you can wrap your arms around infinity, as if you can reach out and touch everything that’s ever been or ever will be.
If that’s a God’s-eye view of the universe, then He can keep it.
When I was a kid, I remember my parents driving us through the West Virginia mountains on our way to the beach. The first time was terrifying. I couldn’t escape feeling the whole of that mountain surrounding us, and I just knew it was going to cave in on us at any moment (which, oddly enough, is what got me interested in geology but that’s a story for another day).
Going through a wormhole is like that except you can’t really see it until you’re in the middle of it and then it feels like the whole damned universe is waiting to cave in on you. And it is kind of the same concept, a tunnel through spacetime.
The ship’s chronometer said it took eight seconds to transit. That approximates one second for each light year but I have no idea if that’s significant. I couldn’t even tell you if the astrophysicists know, but I can tell you it didn’t feel like eight seconds. And with the whole relativistic time dilation thing, I don’t try to understand too much. It bakes my noodle. You go fast, time slows down in your frame of reference. That’s all I need to know.
Honestly, I don’t understand how anything behaves in there. If that strikes you as odd for an astronaut, remember I’m actually a geologist by profession. I only got pulled into the space program because they all of a sudden needed lots more people like me.
The space program already had a lot of geologists, in fact there’s a whole subspeciality of planetary geology that sprang up once we started landing probes on other planets. Exobiology was even a thing before anyone found evidence of life elsewhere, just because we fully expected to find it. What we haven’t had is exo-archaeology or paleontology, for reasons which were obvious until recently.
Finding evidence of an advanced civilization on the other side of The Hole changed all that. Entire scientific disciplines began to emerge almost overnight, though at the beginning most of them were wildly speculative. How else could it have gone, really? Nobody seriously thought anything like this would ever happen in our lifetimes.
I mentioned I’m a geologist by profession, and that’s true. It’s what I did for a living. Archaeology was a passion I indulged on the side, occasionally for pay as a consultant on digs (they are extracting ancient ruins from the dirt, after all, and dirt is kind of my thing). I spent a lot of my time off volunteering on digs all over the world—not too many people know this, but you can plan entire vacations around it. It’s painstaking work and they’re always looking for help. Anyway, I guess I was always fascinated by what came before us and how the Earth covered it up over the millennia. Also I wanted to be Indiana Jones when I grew up.
This dig was like nothing I’d ever experienced, only partly because it was in space, eight light years from home.
The sky looks different here, for starters. The main star in this system, Sirius A, is almost twice as big as Sol (that’s our Sun) and twenty-five times as bright. If you look up in the night sky in winter, you can’t miss it. It’s the brightest star in the sky, the head of Orion’s faithful hunting dog. It’s big and pumping out a lot of energy, so the “goldilocks zone” of habitable planets around it is pretty far afield.
We’re way outside the habitable zone, and Sirius A is still agonizingly bright. We’re at the edge of the system, poking around a distant planetoid in a belt of shards roughly analogous to our Kuiper Belt. The same crew that found precursors of Earthly life there are the ones who found The Hole, and had a hunch they’d find similar evidence here. They turned out to be right. Hopefully one day we’ll be able to thank them, but that’s yet another story for later.
For now we’re calling this place Sirius 7, meaning it’s the seventh planet located around the main star (there’s a companion white dwarf, Sirius B, but it’s too small to be concerned with). Seven is where the action is in the Sirius system for a couple of reasons:
One, it’s the closest planet to the wormhole and it’s a pretty long hike to the others. Its orbital period is a good couple of thousand years and we’re lucky it’s in proximity to The Hole right now. If it were on the other end of its orbit, the next closest planet would be a year away. We’ve sent probes down the well but it’ll be a while before any cross the inner planet’s orbits. Best to send some drones ahead of us to scout the place. Wormholes are great for crossing interstellar distances, but interplanetary hops are still slaves to Isaac Newton.
That’s another important property of wormholes: they by necessity have a pretty strong gravity gradient, so they seem to naturally occur at a healthy distance from the nearest star system. Otherwise, it’d be another gravity well that could keep a system from forming in the first place. Almost like they were designed that way, which is a little too weird for me to dwell on.
The second reason is we found more of the same kinds of biological precursors Templeton’s crew found in the Kuiper Belt. And this time, there was evidence of more. Much more.
Structures, for starters. Some formed from the ice, some from materials that clearly came from somewhere else. And they’ve all been here a long time.
If you’re like me and watched too much Indiana Jones as a kid, you’re no doubt waiting to hear the creepy part. There’s always a creepy part. So here it is:
The inner planets, the ones in the Goldilocks Zone, are all dead-assed quiet. Spectroscopy shows two of them have oxygen-rich atmospheres and liquid water, similar to Earth. Whereas we might not have been able to tease out their EM signatures from Earth, what with Sirius essentially blinding us, now we’re in the neighborhood and able to see better. In a sense, we can put up a sunshade (starshade?) and block the worst interference. Especially when the planets are at elongation (that is, farthest angular separation from Sirius), we should be able to pick up signs of civilizations.
Note that I didn’t say “life.” That’s different. With atmospheric O2 concentrations around twenty percent and liquid water, we’d be shocked if life hadn’t emerged on both. In fact the other chemical markers are all there, like methane. Whether from decomposing vegetation or animal farts, it’s almost a sure-fire sign of biological activity.
What we haven’t detected are the markers a technologically advanced civilization would be expected to leave. Higher concentrations of carbon, for instance. Whether dioxide or monoxide, one would tell us there’s internal combustion going on down there, and as far as I know nobody’s seen them in high enough concentrations to suggest industrial activity.
That in itself isn’t especially concerning. If they’re sufficiently advanced—and finding ancient structures this far out in their system argues they would be—then we should assume they moved away from fossil fuels just like we’re doing. Nuke plants are cleaner, and who doesn’t want clean?
We’re assuming they have nuclear power only because that’s the only way to explain this much structure this far out in the system. Doesn’t matter where in the galaxy you’re from, chemical rockets just can’t bring living beings this far in a reasonable amount of time. Even if their life span was measured in centuries, it’s a stupidly long trip.
Speaking of that, I should explain our thinking on which of the two planets is most likely to have sprung forth a spacefaring civilization. Our money’s on the smaller one. It seems likely that chemical rockets are a natural step in technological evolution. Same way we moved from rowboats to sails to steamships, ending with nuclear plants and gas turbines. Maybe that’s too human-centric, but the physics is what it is.
I might only be a lowly geologist, but I did have to take a few classes in rocketry and orbital mechanics to do this job. What a lot of people don’t appreciate is just how perfectly balanced our lives on Earth are, and the ability to leave the planet is especially underappreciated. If Earth had just a little more mass, on the order of ten percent or so, we might never have been able to build rockets big enough to put anything useful into orbit. At least not with old-fashioned chemical fuels. Maybe an insane Orion drive, propelled by nuclear bombs, could’ve lobbed people into orbit. But who in their right mind would want to create that kind of environmental nightmare just to loft something off the planet?
No, a heavier Earth would’ve left us tied to the planet until someone figured out how to nullify gravity. Not saying they couldn’t have, we just haven’t found a way yet.
That’s why we’re thinking it’s the eighty-percent Earth. That actually puts them in the sweet spot for space exploration. It’s just enough to have made single-stage to orbit launchers feasible even with older technology, which could’ve enabled a spacefaring civilization to emerge sooner than ours.
So why are we not seeing any signs of it? I mean, other than the ancient structures here on Seven?
That’s what we can’t get our heads around—there are no EM emissions coming from anywhere in this system. Radio, visible light, infrared . . . a civilization that left this kind of archaeological evidence ought to be pretty active, right? You can’t stop the signal, to coin a phrase.
After making it all the way out here, now they’ve gone dark. Why?
Back to the creepiness factor.
There are plenty of theories, some more credible than others, but all of them point to a civilization-ending catastrophe. Nuclear war or some equivalent was the knee-jerk reaction, but I don’t necessarily subscribe to that. Not saying it isn’t possible, but we need a lot more evidence. A close-up look at their home planet, for one, because the radiation traces aren’t detectable from here. That means it either didn’t happen, or it was very long time ago.
Same goes for runaway global warming. We don’t see enough greenhouse gases or other pollutants to assume an environmental collapse.
An extinction-level asteroid strike is another one, though a spacefaring society ought to have been able to avoid that.
Being a layman astronomer (another skill I had to learn for this job), my money’s on a gamma ray burst. Sirius B is the kind of star that could’ve burped one out on its way to white dwarf status, and that would’ve effectively sterilized any planet in its path. And if that is what happened, we Earthers should be grateful it wasn’t pointed in our direction at the time. A gamma burst can reach pretty damned far, and even eight light years isn’t a minimum safe distance. Think of them this way: a ten-second gamma ray burst releases more energy than our Sun would in its entire lifetime.
So, yeah—I learned just enough astronomy to scare the hell out of me. A gamma burst could be coming our way right now and we wouldn’t know it until we detected it. That is, when the light arrives at Earth it’s already too late.
Here comes the “but.” If that is what happened, and it was a surprise, it seems like we’d have found evidence of that as well. The alien structures on Seven are extensive. Whoever they were, they had a serious presence here. It might even have been a waystation to other places. I mean, what if that’s not the only wormhole out here?
Anyway, my point is if it had been that kind of sudden extinction event, it would’ve taken the folks out here by surprise too. They’d have been turned into microwave burritos just like everyone back on their home planet. We should have found remains.
So far, nothing. Not even bone fragments. Did I mention there’s hardly any atmosphere? If anyone croaked here, we’d have found them.
Here I should point out how difficult these kinds of digs can be in an EVA suit. It’s hard to overstate just how much your sense of touch can guide you when you’re down in the dirt. It demands light steps and a light touch, which isn’t easy when you’re encased in layers of neoprene rubber and Kevlar. The new mechanical-counterpressure outfits do make it easier, but there’s no getting around the gloves. Fingers still get cold faster than anything else, so the heating filaments are always going to add bulk. The ice here is almost all carbon dioxide, which begins to sublimate away at the slightest application of heat. So on top of not being able to feel texture, you’re constantly working through a haze of CO2 gas. Thank goodness it’s not nitrogen, like Pluto. That stuff tends to sublimate rather explosively.
Fortunately, we’re not talking about ancient stone ruins here. Almost everything we’ve found so far has been made of advanced alloys so pure that the metallurgists are having puppies trying to figure out how they refined it. Nothing exotic, just variations on aluminum and titanium, which makes sense—elements are what they are and the periodic table isn’t limited to what we find on Earth. It stands to reason an Earthlike planet in another star system would be composed of a lot the same stuff. What stood out is there are none of the traces of undesirable stuff like lithium or sodium.
That purity is one reason the structures have held up remarkably well. We don’t have to guess at much of it, not like visualizing a thousand-year-old building from what’s left of the excavated foundation. It’s all here: domes connected by tunnels, mostly made of these superalloys but a few outbuildings that look to have been formed from the native ice. That’s harder to tease out, and is more like what I’ve come to expect from a dig. Separating the “formed” ice from the naturally occurring stuff is a lot like digging the carved rocks out from under the surrounding sediment.
By now you’re wondering what we did find. And that takes us back to creepy town.
Nothing. At first, we found nothing. No furniture, no equipment, no clothing or dishes or books or tools or photo collages full of alien family members. For reasons we still haven’t determined, this site was abandoned. A long time ago, too. From what we can judge by the rate of ice accumulation on Seven, our best guess is five thousand years. If that seems like a lot—and it is—remember that this place has hardly any atmosphere. Five millennia’s worth of ice on Earth gets you a glacier. Here, it’s more like a northeast blizzard, and that’s how we spotted it in the first place after the radar returns showed something funny. We could see the tops of the domes beneath the ice pack.
The first time I entered the main dome, I was shocked to find it in such pristine condition. Empty, but clean. Frost clung to the sloped walls and dim light filtered in from a row of translucent octagonal panels (again, some kind of alloy we haven’t discovered yet), but it all looked like it was just waiting for someone to move back in and give the place some TLC. If I’d been able to take my helmet off, I’ll bet it would’ve had that empty-house smell. Funny how the absence of humans leads to a particular odor.
We found them inside the central core of a structure labeled Alpha-2, for nothing more endearing than being in the grid square we marked off. Letters for one axis, numbers for the other. Second box from the top left.
The dome’s floor space was around three thousand square feet, comparable to a good sized house. An outer corridor encircled a warren of inner rooms clustered around an open center. We think they were like dorms and this was the central meeting space.
The meeting room was where we found the one artifact. Two panels embedded in one wall, each about two feet square and covered with indented markings, like they’d been pressed into the alloy. Or the alloy had been formed around them. We haven’t been able to determine for sure either way; suffice to say it’s really clean. Not etched or carved. It’s like the tablets just appeared perfectly formed.
Yes, I called them tablets. I’m welcome to better analogies but damned if anyone’s been able to think of anything better.
Everyone on our team had a crash course in linguistics (credit the Agency for stuffing as many disciplines into a six-person crew as they could manage), which seemed like a smart play given the fact we were going to be exploring alien ruins. Still, it was startling.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised that they used written language. After all, what advanced society hasn’t? It’s kind of a necessary condition unless they’re telepathic or something. After seeing nothing but empty spaces, it was too easy to fall into the delusion that this was just other humans. Finding alien writing shouldn’t have been so much of a shock.
Yet there it was. As if domes and tunnels eight light years from home wasn’t enough evidence, seeing something with alien writing on it chilled me to the core. What did it say? Was it an account of whatever outpost had been here and why it was abandoned? Or was it something mundane, like the latest redundant policy from HR (and if it’s aliens, shouldn’t it be “AR”)?
At first I left the panels in place and photographed them in detail to transmit back to Earth. Figured I could study them back in my quarters that way too.
What a joke. I’m no linguist and I was way out of my depth. The writing appears based on intricate symbols, like Asian languages. I can distinguish between Mandarin Chinese, Korean or Japanese, but understanding them is entirely different. Once I got past the shock of having something in an alien language in front of me, I was able to identify the most commonly repeated symbols. That might have been nothing more than an exercise in pattern recognition, but it was a start. Every written language is just a collection of symbols that represent a sound or a thing or an idea, right? Why should theirs be any different?
So I pointed out some repetitions in the jumble of unintelligible symbols—big whoop. Without context, they might as well have been Egyptian hieroglyphics.
And that, friends, is where things got really weird.
Our survey on Seven was coming to an end. A month spent in pressurized tents that weren’t much better than the EVA suits we had to wear outside was enough to have everyone on the survey team climbing the walls. After measuring, imaging, and electronically scanning every nook and cranny of the dome network it was finally time to start taking physical samples. It would’ve been nice to just grab anything that looked interesting—which we might have done, had there been anything that stood out.
The tablets, of course, stood out like sore thumbs. They were coming with us back to Earth. There were also some panels in the walls and flooring that the metallurgists wanted to study, so we took our time figuring out the best way to pry all this stuff free without trashing the place. We couldn’t find any bolts, rivets or latches to release. There were seams between panels, but nothing else.
It was finally decided that in absence any better ideas that we’d just blast away with a laser. Because why not?
Okay, there are a lot of reasons why not. What I’m talking about isn’t as crude as it sounds, either. Remember, this place is insanely cold. A little application of heat could go a long way, and that’s what we did. We started with a panel in the floor of the Great Hall (that’s what we took to calling the big dome), tracing the outline of a recessed seam until it was uniformly heated to something like fifty degrees C above ambient. As the panel expanded with heat, it eventually popped loose.
That’s when we hit paydirt. The panels weren’t just flooring, they were covers. Lids. We were walking on top of a massive alien storage container.
As part of the team dug into the subflooring, I turned my attention to the inscribed sections. Now that we could pry things free with a little heat, getting them out of the wall was straightforward.
I don’t know what I expected to find on their reverse, but it was nothing like what I did find: More symbols, of a completely different character. If the obverse was reminiscent of Asian language, the reverse was . . . something else. Almost familiar.
I carefully laid the tablets (I couldn’t help but call them that now) flat, set up the camera above them, and started taking pictures. First I got both together in full frame, then individually, then closeups. I didn’t want to miss a detail, which was a good thing that I’ll get to in a minute.
I couldn’t exactly take them back to my quarters to examine more closely; they were going to end up in hermetically sealed containers for the trip home. We had a rudimentary lab back aboard ship, but it was more for chemical and biological analysis. And I was not going to be content spending the trip home with them left in a box, unexamined. Every linguist on Earth would be poring over these images, eagerly awaiting our return with the physical items. While I had a duty to preserve them for scientific inquiry, that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to get a head start on deciphering them. What else was I going to occupy my time with for the next two years?
My bunkmate back aboard ship, a biochemist named Ricardo, spoke about a half-dozen different languages as a result of growing up in a multiethnic family: Portuguese mother, French Canadian father, living in a largely Korean neighborhood in Quebec with his adopted Ukrainian siblings . . . it was the proverbial melting pot in which multiple languages had to be mastered as a matter of social survival.
They never said so, but that’s surely one of the reasons he was selected for the survey crew. The expedition masters must have figured we’d find some form of written language here, but they weren’t about to give up a seat to someone who wasn’t steeped in multiple disciplines. Until somebody comes up with Star Trek-level antimatter power and food replicators, mass is always going to be a harsh master in space.
“Why would they inscribe two different languages on opposite sides of the plate?” I wondered as we studied the images on a trio of monitors in the lab.
It had been Ricardo’s first look at them, and he was mesmerized. “I wouldn’t call this ‘inscribed.’ That implies etching or carving. This looks cleanly formed, like it just appeared this way. Maybe laser etched.”
“Well, we know it didn’t just appear out of thin air.”
Ricardo regarded me silently, with one eyebrow arched like Mister freaking Spock.
“Okay.” I sighed in surrender. This was why the snobby highbrow research scientists made fun of us rockhounds. “We don’t know that. Still, you have to admit it’s awful unlikely.”
“Improbable to the point of impossibility. Except our experience here has challenged many of our notions of improbable,” he said, again channeling his inner Vulcan as he hovered over one of the closeups. “It’s in remarkably pristine condition. Hardly any erosion for how long it must have been here.”
Based on our first-pass carbon dating, that had been a long time indeed. Assuming these plates had been placed with the original structure, they’d been on Seven at least five thousand years.
“The symbols are reminiscent of some Asian languages,” he continued, “even though I don’t see a direct comparison.”
“Asian? Seriously?”
He backtracked a bit. “What I mean is they don’t appear to be grouped into words. See how evenly spaced each character is? They’re not grouped into words, so each one may represent a single idea or phrase. What’s interesting is that there are some variations between the inscriptions on each plate.”
“I noticed that too. The same way you can spot the difference between Korean and Japanese, even if you can’t read the languages?” I didn’t have his exposure to languages, but I could recognize patterns well enough.
“Exactly. These are probably the same instructions in different dialects.” He pointed to a line of six symbols with a small subscript block in the middle. “And look here. I think these are numbers, judging by the arrangement and typography.”
I peeked over his shoulder and spotted a few more similar groupings, arranged in a column along the left margin. Each one was separated by that same subscript character. “If you’re right, then that might be a decimal point.”
“It would make sense.” He leaned back from the workstation and folded his arms behind his head. “What kind of numbers would you post in a pressure dome on a remote planet?”
“Depends on what the space was used for, I suppose. We think the big dome was some kind of common area, right? It’s like the central hub for whatever this place was. Might be instructions for the airlock, for instance.”
Ricardo stared at the text and shook his head after a time. “Too long for that, I think. Too involved. What kinds of numbers do we post in our own facilities?”
I hadn’t thought about it that way. “Simple but important stuff everyone needs to know. Emergency procedures. Evacuation protocols. Communications.”
He sat upright. “I think you’re on to something. Comms. For all we know, those might be phone numbers.” He pointed at the patterns again, again raising an eyebrow. “Or radio frequencies.”
Now that made sense. “Six digits, separated in the middle by a decimal point,” I said, “assuming we’re right about what they represent.”
“Radio frequency bands are what they are,” Ricardo said. “The difference is going to be in deciphering what kind of numbering system they used. If it’s base-10 math, we’re in business.”
That’s when my enthusiasm faltered—we might not be any closer to figuring this out if they didn’t use a common system. “How would we know?”
Ricardo kept staring at the screen, as if it might eventually reveal some hidden clues. “We have to make some baseline assumptions and work with them until we’re proven wrong.”
“Then let’s do that. Humans invented the decimal point for base-10 math, so I think it’s a safe assumption. Like you said, the frequency ranges are what they are. If those are numbers, then to my eyes they look like VHF or UHF.”
“Six digits?” he asked. “Probably UHF.”
A few of the assumed numbers looked obvious. “So let’s start with one. That line right there looks likely.” It was just a dash by itself: —.
“Old Chinese numbering systems worked that way,” Ricardo said. “Look here, that’s probably a two.” It was, in fact, two dashes stacked horizontally: =.
“Looks like an equal sign,” I said, though he was probably right. “How much you want to bet three is just one more dash?”
Now that we had a clue, it didn’t take long to find three stacked dashes. Ricardo pointed it out in a couple of different locations. “That would make sense,” he said, highlighting each numeral onscreen as we identified them.. “A simple tally system that could have carried over into more advanced languages. Easy to write, until you get to higher numbers. Think Roman numerals.”
“I try not to. Can you imagine doing math with that system?”
“I don’t think anyone could. Probably why our ancestors converted to Arabic numerals.”
“Which one of these represents zero, then? That’s kind of a big deal.”
Ricardo frowned. “Hard to tell from this. If we’re correct that these are radio frequencies, then it’s entirely possible there’s no zero represented here. Think about the freqs we use—how often do you see a zero?”
I hadn’t thought about that, but he had a point. “Hardly ever.”
“We’d have to see more.” He pointed at the images. “You said there’s a reverse?”
“There is. Hang on.” I swiped the obverse sides of the plates away and pulled up the reverse. The screen was filled with what appeared to be hash marks, each character in a different arrangement, but each constructed of similar strokes.
“Now that’s different,” Ricardo said. “Nothing like the other plates.” After he’d pointed out the difference, I could see these characters were arranged differently. Not evenly spaced like the others, they were grouped in a manner that suggested words.
As he leaned in for a closer look, Ricardo’s stoic demeanor disappeared.
“You’re shitting me,” he said, and turned to me wide-eyed. “This is a joke, right? Are you pranking me, Mike?”
I spread my hands in a “who, me?” gesture, downplaying the ominous weirdness for myself as much as for him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
His finger shook as he traced each line. “This isn’t alien. I mean, it’s obviously alien just because of where we found it,” he stammered, which was not normal for him. If anything, he too often carried an annoying air of undeserved superiority. “But this is . . . this is human.”
It was my turn to stammer. “Human?” Was that why this scribbling had looked so familiar? “What kind of human language is that?” It was an elegant if comparatively primitive wedge-shaped script, yet remarkably clean like the obverse side.
As the team’s layman archeologist, at this point I was kicking myself. I’d seen this before, on a dig in Jordan. It just goes to show how our preconceptions can blind us to the obvious. I was looking for something completely different, and couldn’t see what was clearly there. “That’s a type of Cuneiform.”
Ricardo adjusted his glasses and pressed in as close as he dared, regaining his composure. “It certainly appears so. I know some Latin, but . . .” he trailed off.
My early exposure to this ancient script came rushing back. “Trust me, it is. But why would they not put it out front like the others?” I wondered. “It’s like they were hiding it.”
Ricardo tugged at his chin. “Perhaps we’re overthinking it. It may be simple, like prefabricated instructions. They placed whichever language is most needed outward.”
I had a hard time getting my head around that. “But why, if it was still in use?” I wasn’t ready to confront the question of how an ancient proto-language from Earth came to be used in an entirely different star system.
“A convenience,” he surmised, “or a courtesy.” His eyes met mine. “For visitors. Guests.”
A chill went up my spine. “Like us.”
Our survey ship boasted an extensive research library, befitting an expedition to an extinct civilization in another star system. Comsats positioned in halo orbits on either side of The Hole could relay data by laser, taking advantage of the shortcut through spacetime just as we did to get here. But there was still a lot of fidelity lost along the way, limiting us to only the briefest transmissions with the barest data. And there was still the issue of distance between The Hole and Earth, which besides the light delay seriously limited comms bandwidth.
Put simply, we had to rely on whatever resources had been uploaded to our servers before we left. There was no Googling “ancient proto-languages” here at Seven. We could search our ship’s intranet, but you get my point—we didn’t have access to the whole world’s storehouse of knowledge. All we had was what we brought with us, which was a lot in terms of the physical sciences. Ancient languages? Not so much.
We were forced to improvise, which involved making ourselves into monumental pains in the asses of our teammates by convincing them to hand over their personal tablets. We scoured hundreds of eBook files for anything that might help us.
It ended up being a more fruitful search than you might imagine. Our resident physicist had some old college texts on ancient Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic buried deep in his collection. Before Seven, they’d have seemed like odd choices. Did he expect to find the missing Dead Sea Scrolls out here? Though I doubt he even realized they were still there. The guy’s a digital packrat.
Anyway, they turned out to be more helpful than not. It gave us some useful clues on syntax and grammar. There weren’t going to be any direct correlations, but if we could identify patterns and frequently used letters (or what passes for letters in Alien Cuneiform) then we could start piecing this puzzle together.
We both furiously dove into those texts, but I have to admit Ricardo’s was the more productive research. I’d seen this before in the field, but for Ricardo it all seemed to come naturally.
Not long after we pirated those texts, Ricardo was comparing notes against the tablets from Seven. “You know what this is?” he asked, excitably (which I feel like I have to add—remember, this guy doesn’t get excited about anything). “It’s their Rosetta Stone.”
As you may have guessed, that’s when we started calling this the Rosetta Project.
“You’re right,” I said, once again arriving late at what should have been an obvious correlation for a guy who spends his free time studying exactly this kind of stuff. “Nobody had been able to figure out Egyptian hieroglyphics until Napoleon’s army dug it up out of the desert. Once they saw it side-by-side with ancient Greek and another Egyptian script called Demotic, they could finally start piecing together the glyphs.”
“They had a distinct advantage,” Ricardo pointed out. “They at least understood Greek.”
“Right again,” I said. “What the hell are we supposed to make of this without a Cuneiform primer—assuming that’s what it actually is?”
Ricardo took off his glasses and rubbed at his nose. I could see he was getting bleary-eyed from all the reading. “We start by process of elimination,” he said, and pointed at a couple of columns of similar-looking characters. “But if this ends up being something more than a casual resemblance, then it begs the question: How did two civilizations, light years apart, develop similar root languages?”
That was the creep factor I’d tried to ignore, focusing instead on the mechanics of solving this particular puzzle. It was a mental exercise that kept me from dwelling on the bigger mystery. “What if this isn’t really an ‘alien’ base?” There. I finally said it.
Ricardo was already there. “The wormhole,” he said, then lowered his voice to a whisper. “These were ancient humans. Maybe a little more advanced than we are right now, just five thousand years earlier.”
Out of all the weird revelations we uncovered on Seven, I haven’t even talked about the weirdest. Once we started prying up panels, we expected to find stuff all over the complex. Which we did.
I wish I could say we found all sorts of advanced civilization-changing technology. A cold fusion reactor or phaser or a grand unified theory of everything would’ve been neat, but I’m afraid it was none of that.
The main dome wasn’t a laboratory or common area for a research outpost—maybe that’s how it had begun, but in the end it had become more of a memorial. A temple, maybe. Or mausoleum.
The panels had been covering hermetically sealed chambers, each filled with fine dust. At first we thought they might be soil samples from deep beneath Seven’s ice, because at first glance it looked an awful lot like lunar dust from our own Moon. It was only when one of the survey team noticed some larger fragments among the dust that we recognized them for what they were: cremated remains.
That’s when the biological sciences team went into high gear. Ricardo had to ditch his translator duties and dive into sequencing the DNA from a dozen or so piles of ash. And what they found left us all shaken. I wish I could say they found genetic code of some improbable life form, but in the end, the alien civilization we’d found hadn’t been alien at all. More like distant cousins.
They’ve only managed to sequence three so far, but they’ve all turned out to be uniformly human. And when I say “uniformly,” know that there’s always uncertainty in science. When CERN built that big particle accelerator in Switzerland, there was a lot of buzz in popular media that there was a chance it could create a black hole that would devour Earth like something out of a bad movie. What most people don’t understand was that actually meant there was a non-zero chance. In other words, they couldn’t say with absolute certainty that it wouldn’t happen. The probability of it happening was insanely small, something like ten to the minus twelve, which in practical terms means its pretty much impossible. That “non-zero” chance had as much to do with our incomplete understanding of black holes than any realistic chance we could create one in the lab.
Same goes with DNA sequencing. If you get one of those popular tests to trace your ancestry, it’ll come back with some small percentage being Neanderthal. So when I say “uniformly human,” I mean mostly human. Like you or me. Because even if you’re .001 percent Neanderthal, that means you’re not one hundred percent Homo Sapiens.
Hopefully that puts some things into context, because here’s the kicker: out of the genomes Ricardo’s team examined, not a single one had any Neanderthal in them. That wasn’t surprising, but in a sense, whoever lived and worked here five millennia ago were more purely human than we are. Let that sink into your caveman brain.
Fortunately, my experience in Jordan had given me enough of a head start to work through more translations of the Rosetta plates. Once we started finding the remains, it didn’t take long to figure out those number sequences weren’t frequencies, they were local coordinates. A directory of who was interred where.
This strange place was finally beginning to make sense, and I’m itching to get this all back to Earth where it can get the proper attention. Also, I don’t want to leave it all up to government-funded labs so I’m putting my story out for public consumption to keep it from getting buried by eggheads who are convinced they know better. Because what little bit I’ve been able to translate so far has only amped up the creepiness factor.
Assuming the characters are in fact a version of Cuneiform, then the translations become both easier and more troubling. You see, each one of those coordinates marked a sealed burial chamber.
As I worked through each marker (that is, deciphering the names associated with each set of coordinates), I found repetitive syllabic patterns and realized I was looking at names. But being ancient and “alien” for lack of a better word, none of them made sense by any naming convention I’m familiar with. They were all separated by syllables, and I halfway expected to find an “Obi-Wan” in there. And then I came across one in particular: Gil-Gah-Mech.
Gilgamesh. As in, The Epic of. The ancient text about a Mesopotamian king that contains parallels to the creation story and great flood from the Bible. At first I wrote it off as coincidence until I found another: En-Ki-Du. By my recollection of the Epic, Enkidu was an adversary who eventually became his closest companion. His death prompted Gilgamesh to embark on an odyssey to find the secret of eternal life, encountering mystical godlike beings who showed him the path to the underworld.
It’s been said that, depending on your point of view, a sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic. The Hole certainly fills the bill, even for us “modern” humans.
Archaeology is the study of human culture through the recovery and scientific analysis of artifacts and other remains, and human culture was the last thing I expected to find on Seven. Whoever built this outpost weren’t aliens. They were our ancestors.
And that, friends, is not even the creepiest aspect of this expedition. Thinking it through, why is there no evidence whatsoever of a currently functioning civilization? They were clearly advanced, enough to have come this far and used The Hole to find their way to ancient Earth. All of a sudden, all the crackpot theories of ancient astronauts guiding early humans just became a lot more credible.
But now, five thousand years later, the whole system seems to have gone dark. And that’s what’s really baking my noodle: Why? Is human civilization doomed to a cycle of creation and destruction? Is that what happened here, and enough of them escaped through The Hole to set up a new breeding colony on Earth? I’ll admit that I don’t like thinking about that very much.
Archeology has been my avocation for most of my adult life. I’ve been driven to uncover hidden knowledge about our ancestors, sifting through digs in jungles and deserts. We always assumed Africa and the Middle East was the cradle of humanity, when it turns out it was more like the playpen at our cousin’s house.
The cradle is here.