The Long Sunset Read online

  They all turned on their wristlamps.

  Derek moved one foot over the windowsill, set it on the floor, and pushed down. Nothing gave way, so he swung the other leg in and eased into a standing position. “It feels okay.”

  Chairs and a desk and a broken metal base that might once have been part of a watercooler had turned dark, probably from long-gone mold. There was little more than a grotesque pile of rubble spread across the floor. Every flat surface was covered with a frozen layer of smudge. All four of the desk’s legs were broken. There were drawers on both sides but they were frozen shut. Derek used the cutter to get through one of them. They found a package inside, but it couldn’t be freed from the drawer. “Looks like sheets of paper,” Ken said. “We’d never be able to separate these.”

  There was printing on the top sheet. Derek took a picture and, just in case, Ken put the package in his backpack.

  “Careful,” Hutch said. Ken had been about to trip over a wire connecting a device on a side table to an outlet in the wall.

  “That’s an old-fashioned telephone, isn’t it?” said Beth. It had a rotor and push-buttons.

  Ken took a long look. “Yeah. Right out of the twentieth century.”

  Hutch couldn’t resist attempting to pick up the handset. She expected it to be frozen to the cradle, but it broke loose when she pulled on it. She pushed it against her helmet and then pushed down on the cradle. It didn’t move.

  “If somebody answers,” said Derek, “you’ll have a heart attack.”

  She wasn’t sure she’d have been able to hear a voice at all through the helmet. In any case, there was of course nothing. “I doubt,” she said, “these people, whoever they were, could have evacuated the planet. If the technology in these rooms is typical of what they had, I’d say nobody was going anywhere.”

  They found what appeared to be a picture frame on the floor. But it lay face down. It was a breathless moment. Derek stood for a minute staring at it while they all waited. Finally, he reached for it. The frame stuck to the floor. “Damn,” he said.

  He used the laser again. Eventually, after they’d cut around it and to some extent under it, they were able to free the thing. Surprisingly, the glass frame was intact, save for a couple of cracks. But it had turned to something dark and impenetrable. Whatever had been behind it was hopelessly out of reach. Wally spoke from orbit. “Probably nothing more than a smudge anyhow.”

  “Pity,” said Beth.

  There were two doors in the room. One had fallen off its hinges and lay on the floor, revealing another, smaller office. They found another framed picture, this one frozen to the wall. They could make nothing out of the artwork. Or photo. Whatever it had been.

  There was a door in the smaller office, but it wouldn’t move either. They returned to the main room where its other door was also frozen. They used the cutters to open it and emerged in a passageway. It was lined with doors, but none of them could be moved. The only way through them was to use the cutters. “It makes me uncomfortable,” said Derek. “I can’t give you a reasonable explanation why, but I don’t like destroying stuff, even out here, that’s been in place probably thousands of years.”

  Most of the offices were basically the same. The corridor itself started to tilt downward. “That’s far enough,” said Derek, extending an arm to halt his companions.

  They retreated past the office through which they’d entered and continued along the corridor in the opposite direction, past more doors, until they arrived at a pile of broken furniture and collapsed walls. The wreckage included two metal doors that had broken loose from a frame. They stopped and looked down a shaft. Derek dropped to one knee, leaned over, and aimed his lamp into it. Up and down. “It’s an elevator,” he said. “Or it was.”

  Hutch reached for him and grabbed his belt. “Careful.” She inched forward. The shaft overhead was clear for several floors. Below, she could see only a short distance before the shaft walls appeared to squeeze together.

  Ken climbed across the fallen doors, continuing along the passageway. “Where you going?” asked Derek, who wanted everyone to stay in line.

  “Looking for a stairway. There’s usually one near elevators.”

  “Don’t forget we’re dealing with aliens here,” said Wally, from the ship.

  “It probably doesn’t matter. The laws of physics are the same everywhere. And it looks as if—yes. There it is.”

  “Stairs?” asked Derek. He got back up on his feet.

  “Yes.”

  Ken disappeared around a corner and Derek hurried after him.

  “Holy cats,” Ken said. “You should see this.”

  “What is it?” asked Wally.

  Beth was climbing across the broken doors. But she lost her footing in the dark and crashed into Hutch. Hutch was pushed forward into the shaft, grabbing frantically for something to hold on to. But nothing was there, and the extra weight didn’t help. She teetered on the edge and would have fallen into the shaft had Beth, or someone, not grabbed her ankle. Her shin took a blow, and she was hanging head down as Beth screamed for help.

  Then they had her other leg too. “I’ve got you,” said Derek. “Easy.”

  They hauled her back up onto the broken doors, and she discovered she’d stopped breathing.

  “I’m sorry,” Beth was saying. “Thank God.”

  “You okay?” asked Derek. He was shining his lamp in her eyes.

  “Yeah. I’m good.”

  They dragged her farther from the shaft. “You’re the one,” Derek said, “who’s always telling everybody to be careful.”

  “It was my fault,” said Beth. She’d worked her way past Hutch and was looking down over the edge. “My God, that wouldn’t have been good.”

  “Would you please get away from there?” said Derek, grabbing her and hauling her back. “Are you people trying to get yourselves killed?”

  “Hutch.” It was Wally again. “Try to be careful.” He paused. “Ken, could you please stand so I can see what’s the big deal about the stairway?”

  Ken got out of the way so Wally could see all the way to the bottom. Or at least as far down as the light went. “That must be at least twenty floors down there,” he said. “There’s an entire city buried beneath the ice.”

  Hutch was getting to her feet with a helping hand from Derek. Her shin still hurt. “You sure you’re okay?” he said.

  “I’m fine.”

  Derek stayed with her until she’d gotten down off the doors.

  “You should get back to the lander,” Beth said.

  “Sounds like a good idea. I feel as if I weigh a ton.” Beth accompanied her. A few minutes later, Derek and Ken followed.

  • • •

  When they were all back inside the lander, they began debating whether they should attempt to go down the staircase. “I’d be interested in seeing what’s at the bottom,” said Derek.

  Beth was rubbing a salve on Hutch’s leg. “You’ll be fine,” she said. “It’s just a bruise.” Then she turned to Derek. “I don’t see any point in going down there. I’m not sure what you hope to gain. And it’ll be dangerous. This place has been in the ice for a long time, maybe thousands of years. We don’t know how much support that stairway has. If it gives out, it will be bye-bye, baby.”

  “More to the point,” said Wally, “it seems like a pretty routine office building. What can you find that might matter?”

  “Maybe a picture that has survived. I’d like at least to find out what they looked like.”

  “Why don’t we just do it?” said Ken. “Archeology’s never completely safe. If we don’t go down to look, we’ll always wonder what we missed.”

  “You’ve got a better option,” said Beth.

  Ken grinned at her. His wife always had a better idea. “What?” he asked.

  “The problem is the ice. Everything’s buried in ice. Which is frozen water, right?”

  Derek and Ken both looked puzzled.

  “There shoul
d be a place here somewhere that was at one time fairly dry. Maybe a desert. Chances are pretty good if we look around a bit more, we could find something that’s not completely frozen and buried.”

  • • •

  Hutch thought about what it had been like for the occupants. Some had watched their sun being torn apart as the lights went out. For others, it might have been that the sun had merely set and never rose again.

  ARCHIVE

  Beth Squires’s Notes

  Thank God Hutch did not go into that pit. If that had happened I’d never have had a moment of peace again. Ever.

  —Saturday, April 5, 2256

  16.

  Time shall every grief remove,

  With life, with memory, and with love.

  —Thomas Gray, Epitaph for Mrs. Jane Clarke, 1758

  They found what Wally laughingly called the city in the desert at around noon the following day. There was no way to know what the ground had been like in that world’s happier years. But the city had obviously been part of those better times. And that was what mattered.

  They went down in the lander and slowly circled it. It was a dazzling contrast to the surrounding environment, a configuration of geometrical shapes, polygons, cones, pyramids, cylindrical towers, cubes, and other profiles for which there was no descriptive term. They were laid out in symmetrical patterns. “It’s beautiful!” said Beth.

  Derek grunted. “Yeah. It was.”

  It was unlike any city Hutch had seen, ever, a place that might have been designed and created by artists. Every conceivable sort of style was manifested, yet somehow there was a unity to it all. It rose above a layer of combined ice and rock, a magnificent collection of edifices, still resplendent in starlight.

  The city was surrounded by flat land that seemed composed of giant claws rising out of the ice. “What the hell are those?” asked Ken.

  Derek needed a moment. “I’d guess it used to be a forest. The trees froze, most of the branches fell off and got buried. This is what’s left.”

  “Incredible,” said Ken.

  And Beth: “They had some serious architects.”

  Ken could not stop staring. “The symmetry is completely different.”

  “How do you mean?” asked Wally, who was still on the Eiferman.

  “Put it in a normal landscape. Imagine it the way it must have been. The buildings don’t line up. There’s no Central Avenue or Broadway or any indication that any single street ran through the place. At least not in a straight line.”

  “You’re right,” said Derek, as they passed over, turned and came back. “It wouldn’t have been a place where I’d have wanted to be in a hurry to get to work.”

  “Still,” said Hutch, “it seems to have perfect balance.”

  “Blows my mind,” said Wally.

  “It is an incredible piece of work.” Derek was, as usual, seated beside her. “Slow down a bit,” he said.

  She complied and he leaned forward as they approached. There were several open areas inside the city, sections that possessed only occasional small structures. They had probably been parks. She picked one and set down in the middle of it.

  They got into their suits, turned on wristlamps, and climbed out onto the frozen ground. Most of the buildings had visible front doors. But the structures that had looked so pristine from the sky were now revealed as crumbling piles of stone and, probably, metal and plastic.

  Derek looked momentarily lost, but then he made up his mind and led the way toward a six-story building with a sloping roof and Greek columns, though two lay on the ground. At home it would have been a courthouse.

  They took pictures and climbed a few steps onto a portico. It had large front doors with handles, but, as everyone expected, none of them moved. So, they had to climb through window frames again.

  Inside, they tried to be careful. Hutch could imagine future archeologists arriving on the scene with nothing but criticism for Blanchard and those other nitwits who tore everything apart. She wasn’t alone. They were all more careful than they had been in the skyscraper.

  They filed into a large room with a long, broken counter lining one wall. And more doors. Considerably smaller than the ones at the front entrance. They were permanently shut too, of course.

  Hutch brought out her cutter, looked at Derek for approval, got it, and removed one door from its frame. They aimed their wristlamps into darkness. It was an auditorium of some sort. The floor had lines of chairs, scattered and broken by a partial ceiling collapse.

  “Look,” said Hutch. “Up there.” More wreckage was visible at the far end of the auditorium. “It used to be a stage.” It had no screen or display.

  Beth started forward but stopped after only a few steps. “Careful. There are holes in the floor.”

  They climbed carefully over the rubble and eventually stood in front of what remained of the stage. “It looks as if they did live theater,” said Beth. “I’d love to find a copy of one of their plays. That would be something to take home.”

  • • •

  They came out of the theater, and Ken noticed a building that would have been easy to overlook in that once-exotic place except that a statue occupied the ground off to one side of the front door. The building was only four stories high, a simple rectangular structure, with a few tall windows.

  The statue depicted something that was not remotely human other than that it wore clothes. It had long, sharp ears and the eyes of an eagle. The face suggested the presence of fangs, and it wore a hat that might have been out of a Robin Hood illustration, save that there was no feather. Its jacket was unfastened, and it had trousers that would have been perfect for a hunting trip. If it could be compared to anything, it would have been a lizard. Despite all that, the creature projected a sense of dignity and courage.

  • • •

  They took more pictures, and struggled again with the doors. “You want to cut through?” asked Hutch.

  Derek looked at the empty windows. There were a few crusted shards of glass caught in the frames. “It’s a church,” he said. Then: “No, let’s not do any breaking and entering here.” He glanced around to see what else might warrant a look. To the north, the taller buildings began to give way to more perfunctory construction. Derek again took the lead and they made for an ordinary-appearing structure about three stories high that rose above surrounding houses. The front doors, if they existed at all, were buried in rubble.

  They approached one of the windows and pointed their lamps inside, into a large room filled with chairs.

  They cleared the frame and climbed through. There were about twenty chairs, but they were small. For children. They saw cabinets under the windows. Derek used his cutter to open them. “I feel kind of guilty doing this,” he said. “God knows how long this stuff has been here. And we’re wrecking it.”

  “You’re thinking about it the wrong way,” Ken said. “It was left for us to find.”

  There were stuffed animals and building blocks and boxes that held, possibly, jigsaw puzzles. The pictures on the lids had faded to weak smears. There were also dolls and board games that could not be opened and a friendly looking octopus with too many tentacles.

  “It’s a kindergarten,” said Beth.

  They saw blankets and pillows and cups.

  Several of the dolls carried a vague resemblance to the statue outside the church. Except that the heroic aspect had been replaced by an amiable, cuddly attitude. “Maybe we’re going to find out,” said Hutch, “that intelligent species have a lot more in common than anything that separates them.” It was the same feeling she’d gotten years before when she first stood on Iapetus and looked up at the winged statue that seemed to be challenging Saturn.

  Beth Squires’s Notes

  One of the most emotional moments of my life. . . .

  —Sunday, April 6, 2256

  17.

  Our old mother nature has pleasant and cheery tones enough for us when she comes in her dress of blue and gold
over the eastern hilltops; but when she follows us upstairs to our beds in her suit of black velvet and diamonds, every creak of her sandals and every whisper of her lips is full of mystery and fear.

  —Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Professor at the Breakfast Table, 1860

  In the end, they were all glad to get away from it. Hutch had been to numerous extraterrestrial archeological sites, but there’d been something different about this one. Normally, they stoked her curiosity and left her with an admiration for the accomplishments of a species that she had never really known. Maybe it was because she’d never seen ruins before on a completely lifeless world. Maybe it was because she’d never before felt that she’d touched the lives of the lost occupants.

  Everyone had been shaken by the experience. “It may have been thousands of years since it happened,” said Beth, “but it doesn’t matter. Usually, you put something that far in the past, and you don’t get emotionally tangled in it. But this is different. Those little frozen teddy bears were tough to take.”

  Derek was simply staring out at the night as Hutch prepared to ease the Eiferman out of orbit. “There’ll be a lot of people who will want to put together another expedition. To come back here and take a long look at the place. Maybe this’ll be enough to get past the politicians.”

  “I doubt it,” said Hutch. She activated the allcomm. “Everybody belt down.”

  “Would you want to be with them when they come?” Ken’s voice came out of nowhere. She hadn’t realized he was still on the bridge.

  It wasn’t clear which of them he was asking. But Derek shook his head. “No. I’ve had enough. I’m not an archeologist, anyhow.” He looked over at her. “Would you want to come back, Hutch?”

  “Not really. I’ve seen enough.”

  Ken nodded. “I’m sorry it’s turning out this way, Priscilla.”

  “We knew this was a possibility before we started.” She glanced back at him. “We’ll be moving in a minute.”

  “Oh, sorry. I guess I wasn’t paying attention.” He disappeared into the passenger cabin.

  Derek watched him go. Then: “Do you want to start back?”