Considering we’re on another planet, I’m not that surprised. Jill reverently sets the shard back where she found it, too well taught to remove any sort of artifact before it’s been documented. She looks around the ruins. “Decay, do you think?”
I nod. I’d already decided that. I can’t see any obvious signs of breakage that would mean violence, flood, or any other kind of natural disaster, no charring from fire. No bones. At least not here. Everything I’m seeing smacks of slow death, a slide into disuse, the ecosystem eventually moving in to take back its own. And that would be half the theories about what happened to the lost colony of Canaan gone within the first five minutes of setting foot in the city.
A cautious step back through the door, and I tilt my head to look at the front wall, at a set of exterior steps climbing to nowhere on the other side of the window. It could still be disease that killed them off, like what’s been happening on Earth. Though I doubt the people of Canaan did it to themselves, not like we did, and the initial explorations of the planet showed no incompatible biology. Not that anyone could convince Jill of that. She’s been sanitizing twice a day since we landed. Or maybe the answer is simpler, and they didn’t have enough children. Maybe they just died out. Like we are.
I think how it would feel to be the last one. The only soul left in a rotting city. The final member of my race on an alien world. The thought makes me cold inside. But there’s something else here, too. Something wrong, and not just with the signal and the scans. It’s a wrongness I can feel deep in my gut. If I hadn’t been raised by scientists, I’d say this city was haunted. Which is stupid.
I don’t want to know what happened here. I need to know, like I need food and water and occasional sleep.
“Hey,” Jill says. “Remember me?” I look down and find Jill, a huge smile on her face, running her arms around my waist. She seems to have been trying to get my attention. “I was asking what kind of housing you think they’ll give us.”
“What?”
“Our housing!”
Not only have I never given this one thought, I’m a little thrown by her use of “us” and “our.” She means the whole team, right? Where will they put the housing complex for the team? Not a house for … us. Jill smacks my chest.
“I’m talking about Earth, Beck! When we get back! Don’t you get it? We found it first. You and me. The lost colony! The investors are going to give us anything we want. Los Angeles, New Canada, we could go anywhere!” She gives my chest another whack. “Our careers are made!”
I smile, because I don’t know what else to do, and I can see from Jill’s face that my expression is a little weak. “Let’s get a quick look at what we can before we go,” I say, turning a circle, like I’m taking in the view. Jill drops her arms. “We need to get back into communication, let them know what we’ve found. Your mom is probably telling off half the ship by now.”
“She’ll forget to be mad once she hears about the city.” Jill’s eyes go big and bright. “Our names will be in the history files!”
She kisses me once on the cheek, goes bouncing off to the next ruined house to check for pottery. She really is pretty, and I don’t know what she thinks she’s talking about. The investors aren’t going to be giving us anything. Not unless they put it on a ship. There’s years of work to be done just within the radius of my vision. A lifetime of it. Digging, interpreting, documenting. Solving the mysteries. That will be our life. My life. Here. Not on Earth.
I wonder if it will be enough. I think it will. But I’m not sure Jill is exactly in agreement with that. But she is right about one thing. Bringing the team this news is going to be fun, and might even smooth over a sin or two, like moving forward without supervision. Even the I’ve-never-smiled-and-never-could-have-been-a-child Admiral Commander Juniper Faye ought to be pleased, and she’s about as scary as they come.
No. Joanna Cho-Rodriguez is as scary as they come, and nothing is ever going to shut Mom up about moving forward on a scouting mission without supervision. This also makes me cold inside.
I start taking detailed mental notes, imagining the questions Dad will ask, so I can tell everything to the—and then I stop. Like I’ve been smacked again. Which I deserve to be. No one should have let me off Earth, much less the Centauri III. I stare at the control board in the corner of the lenses, watch as it brings up the functions list, and with the tiny, deliberate movement of my gaze, choose the settings that will enable visual documentation. I’ve never even used the visual recording function of the glasses. What I’m seeing is always being archived by signal at the base camp. But now, when we get back, I can do more than tell them. I can show them.
I get a wide, sweeping shot of the surroundings: Jill on the ground, staring at a bit of a broken pot, the row of ruined houses, back to the metal gates with the tree growing through one side, down at the white paving stones pushing up through the dirt. Then I start walking, over a small, shallow watercourse, still flowing in a formed aqueduct of stone, scanning the sides of the mountain of collapsed rubble.
If this was just one building, it was massive before it came down. The project had planned to build a Council Hall, for governing, and I wonder if …
I lift my head. Something changed in the quiet, something subtle, like an extra layer in the breeze. Jill is where I left her, oblivious, and the fullness of the silence comes back. It was probably only wind through stone, but we should go. Soon.
When I turn back to the rubble mound, the glasses focus on a huge chunk of white stone, jutting out from the pile four or five meters up, tree roots twined around it. I glance at the zoom icon and look closer. Flat, half-buried, and … Yes. There is writing.
I take off up the side of the rubble mountain, holding on to the trunks of trees, going from broken stone to broken stone, nearly falling before the glasses adjust back to normal vision. My chest is pounding. I don’t know what I think the writing is going to say. But it has to be a clue. A piece of the puzzle. Something Canaan wants to tell me about the perfect white city built by humans in another galaxy.
“Beck!” Jill calls. “What are you doing?”
Climbing something I shouldn’t be, obviously. I find a footing just below the carved writing, brushing away the dirt and leaves and clinging plants, digging out the words letter by letter. The carving is clear, the words in English, and I am reading a sign that hasn’t been seen since the last colonist died in Canaan.
“Remember Our Truth.”
I feel a smile break slow from my face. I don’t know the truth of Canaan yet. But I’m really, really sure I want to remember it.