Madame said, “How can we read it? The Timmys took the Questioner’s people, her Earther aides went after them, then Questioner and two pressed men became third in line. Why the Timmys took the first ones … “ She shrugged invisibly. “Who knows?”
“I’ve been doing some research,” Calvy persisted. “Our records since we’ve been on Newholme show that episodes of vulcanism increase during lunar conjunctions. Multiple conjunctions are usually accompanied by some very big quakes. If the Timmys were here before we were (and I think we have to accept that they were), then they’ve evolved under conditions of periodic vulcanism and presumably would know how to deal with it … unless this time is really different from any former time.”
“As to that,” said Onsofruct, “we don’t know about all possible former times. We’ve only been here a few hundred years.”
Calvy said, “We don’t know, but the planet does. There’s a gravelly cliff west of Naibah that sheds a few feet of itself every time we have a quake. Each of the falls has time to weather and change color before it gets covered by the next layer. When you drill into the deposit, you get a nicely striped core, one you can read like tree rings. So, I had a few of my supernumes take some really deep core samples, as deep as we can get with the equipment we have.”
“And?” queried D’Jevier. “What did you find?”
“We got back about five thousand years. If we had better equipment, we could go deeper and probably read up to hundreds of thousands, but during those five thousand years, at least, we find thick deposits every seven or eight hundred years, but the gravel that’s falling now is already thicker than the thickest previous layer.”
“You didn’t tell us that?” said D’Jevier. “You didn’t say a word about it.”
“My people finished up the report last night,” Calvy responded mildly. “I’ve not had a chance to tell anyone. It does make me wonder whether we colonists have destroyed or weakened some vital link in this planet’s ecology.”
“But we haven’t!” Onsofruct objected.
Calvy gave her a grin over his shoulder, saying, “Well, that’s true to form. If we have, we could hardly admit it to ourselves if we had, could we? Or to anyone else?”
“But to allege such a thing … “ Her voice trailed away.
“It’s only an inference, Ma’am.” He paused in his paddling, then said firmly, “Still, it can’t be discounted without some proof to the contrary. How do we know what the first settlers did? Why were they wiped out, as we presume they were? Was it because they had committed some grave offense?”
Onsofruct opened her mouth to retort, more out of habitual response to any male criticism than from real conviction of the innocence of the first settlers. Her words were stopped by a sound they all heard in the same instant: a grating sound, quite distant, but coming nearer and growing louder.
They fell silent. Calvy, Simon, and the Haggers dipped their paddles, pushing the boat along a little faster than the water, then faster yet, as though to escape.
“Shhh,” said Madame, leaning forward. “If it already knows we’re here, we can’t outrun it. If it doesn’t know, paddling may attract it.”
“It?” demanded Simon, glancing at her over his shoulder, the whites of his eyes gleaming.
“The sound-maker. Let us go softly.”
The sound came from downriver, getting louder with each moment until it reached a screaming crescendo and abruptly stopped. The reverberations died away. Silence returned. The river curved slightly; they floated around the bend and abruptly bumped into a weir set across the river.
“What in the name of seven devils?” murmured Calvy.
D’Jevier turned on a light and examined the weir. Not rock. Something else. Something smooth and rubbery that gave slightly when she pressed it with her fist. To their right a pebbly beach had been deposited along a shelving recess in the tunnel wall, and it showed the mark of two boats and footprints that led back toward crevices in the tunnel wall.
“They were here,” said Onsofrunct. “There’s the treadmark of the Questioner, and the footprints of two people.”