The Crystal Spheres

6

Pelenor was hardly up to the task of exploring this system by herself. We spent a year recovering and modifying several of the ancient ships we found drifting over our planet, so that teams could spread out, investigating every farcorner of this system.

By our second anniversary, a hundred biologists were quickscampering over the surface of Quest. They genescanned the local flora and fauna excitedly, and already were modifying Earthplants to fit into the ecosystem without causing imbalance. Soon they would start on animals from our genetanks.

Engineers exploring the smallbodies excitedly declared that they could get the lifemachines left behind by the prior race to work. There was room for a billion colonists out there, straight from the start.

But the archaeologists were the ones whose report we awaited most anxiously. Between my ferrying runs, they were the ones I helped. I joined them in the dusty ruins of Oldcity, at the edge of Longvalley, putting together piles of artifacts to be catalogued and slowly analyzed.

We learned that the inhabitants had called themselves the Nataral. They were about as similar to us as we might have expected—bipedal, ninefingered, weirdlooking.

Still, one got used to their faces after staring at their statues and pictures long enough. I even began to perceive subtle facial cues, and delicate, sensitive nuances of expression. When the language was cracked, we learned their race name and some of their story.

Unlike the few other alien intelligences we had observed from afar, the Natarals were individuals, and explorers. They too had spread into their planetary system after a worldbound history fully as colorful and goodbad as our own.

Like us, they had two conflicting dreams. They longed for the stars, for room to grow. And they also wished for other faces, for neighbors.

By the time they built a starship—their first—they had given up on the idea of neighbors. There was no sign anybody had ever visited their world. They heard nothing but silence from the stars.

Still, when they were ready, they launched their firstship toward their other dream—Room.

And within weeks of the launching, their sun’s crystalsphere shattered.

For two weeks we double-checked the translations. We triple-checked.

For millennia we had been searching for a way to destroy these deadly barriers around goodstars… trying to duplicate on purpose what Seeker had accomplished by accident. And now we had the answer.

The Nataral, like us, had managed to destroy one and only one crystalsphere. Their own. And the pattern was exactly the same, down to the CometWar that subsequently almost wrecked their high civilization.

The conclusion was obvious. The deathbarriers were destructible, but only from the inside!

And just when that idea was starting to sink in, the archaeologists dug up the Obelisk.