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above after all, all that gravel and loose rock had come from somewhere. But
since we had no choice, we were edging along next to the cliff when Robert
very calmly said, "Stop a minute."
I did, thinking he'd seen some safety hazard; instead, he said "Look at that.
What is it?"
I had had eyes only for the road, but now that he pointed I was startled
myself. We had been running along a palisade of jumbled and broken rock,
perhaps four times the height of the cat, that roughly paralleled the main
wall of the canyon, and if I thought about it at all I simply assumed that it
was the edge of a huge rock step.
But to the left, in front of us, there was an opening, and two astonishing
sights. First of all, there was no mistaking the way that opening had been
made laser-cut rock simply looks different from anything that occurs
naturally, even after time and the elements have had their way with it.
Someone had cut a straight path through the meters-thick rock to the
depression it enclosed.
And down that sharp-edged channel, there was a stone wall, twice the height of
the cat, with a large arch at its center and a tower on either side of the
arch, for all the world like a castle in an old picture book.
Robert and I looked at each other, trying to decide what to say. I saw his
fingers dance over the keyboard as he made sure the location was
recorded the cat's inertial navigation was hardly perfect but it would at
least get anyone who found the records back to somewhere near this site.
"What's going on? Why are we stopped?" Susan was coming forward from her bunk,
rubbing sleep from her eyes. When she saw what was visible through
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the cat's front window, she gave a little gasp.
"We have a lot of distance to make yet today," I started to point out,
but she and
Robert were already grabbing up cameras and recorders, and clearly I wasn't
going to win this argument. Besides, it would be a chance for me to
uncramp a couple of muscles, and it looked like the stone was probably
warmed enough by the sun for this little spot to be pleasant, at least more
pleasant than where we'd been the past couple of days.
On the other side of the arch, we found the city really no more than a small
town, but something about it made you call it a city anyway. Most of the
buildings clung to the walls of the natural depression, something like
pictures I'd seen of Cliff Dweller
houses on Old Earth, but there were a couple of long stone buildings, their
roofs long since fallen in, in the middle, and a wide round basin that I
suspected must have been a fountain. Susan systematically scanned the whole
thing once and then turned back to me and said, "Sorry, but this was something
we couldn't afford to lose. We can go now I
just had to make sure there was enough of a record to get someone back here."
We hurried back to the cat; it had only been a matter of minutes, but no
matter how justified the delay, it had still been a delay. Once again, we
began to pick our way down the slope as fast as possible.
"What do you suppose it is?" Robert asked.
"Maybe some crazed hermits from St. Michael?" Susan didn't sound
convinced. "It seems uncomfortable enough for them. But why would
they be trespassing on our continent? They've got plenty of bare rock in
their own. And the way those stones had fallen in from the roof that wasn't
originally vaulted or domed. There must have been timber supports or something
like that in there, and I didn't see anything."
"Which would mean?" I asked, never taking my eyes from the track ahead, but
glad enough to have some distractions from the thoughts I had been alone with
for hours.
"Well, maybe the supports were too valuable to leave behind, so whoever took
them along. Or maybe they were made of something that decayed before
we happened along."
"Nothing there has decayed for millennia," Robert objected. "It's all been
frozen. The
Pessimals have been losing ice since the asteroid strike, but only from high
peaks and surfaces that get a lot of sun. Nothing in that little pocket valley
was warmed up enough to even start to decay, especially nothing like
timber. If there were clothes, or even bodies, in those houses, or
caves, or whatever you call 'em, at the time of the asteroid strike, they'd
still be in there, probably in decent shape."
Gravel skittered under the treads and both of them fell silent, watching as I
jockeyed the machine slowly around a corner. Surely both of them had
been handling cats longer
But probably not over anything like Sodom Gap, I realized. Oh, well, if I
wanted an excuse to not drive for a while I would have to say I was tired and
I wasn't.
"Of course if the supports had decayed before the planet froze..." Susan said,
and let it hang there in the air.
"But Nansen has been frozen since well, we think it's been frozen since
it cooled down after the Faju Fakutoru Effect formed it out of the bones of a
gas giant," Robert objected. "But I suppose if it wasn't always frozen "
"You two are hinting at something," I said, "and my brain doesn't
have room for puzzles right now."
"Maybe the site was old before it froze. Maybe we've found out what the source
was for the bugs that pre-terraformed Nansen."
On any other occasion I might have jumped or started or something; as it
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