The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

The Message

The alien city was a perfect circle about ten kilometers in diameter. From the air, the buildings—cubes around the edge of the city, cones, pyramids, tetrahedra in the middle—were forbidding spikes. Ring-shaped streets divided the city into concentric sections.

James Bell banked the two-person shuttle, the Arthur Evans, into a U-turn to pass over the ruins a second time. The thin but powerful man was in his forties, just beginning to lose his hair and showing some white in his beard. He pushed the joystick forward to bring the vehicle lower, staring intently out of the cockpit with his blue eyes.

Next to him was thirteen-year old Maggie, thin and awkward like a newborn colt. She gasped and grabbed onto the handholds above her seat as the ship suddenly dipped.

“Sorry,” James said. Maggie’s mother, Lauren, had hated the way he flew too, with all the sudden drops and sharp swerves. A memory of Lauren grabbing onto his arms as he dragged her onto a roller coaster came to him, and he smiled for a moment before a mixture of regret and resentment replaced the memory.

He shook away the feeling and leveled the ship. “Julia,” he said to the ship’s AI, “take over. Keep it smooth and slow.” The AI beeped in acknowledgment.

“I tend to fly a little recklessly on a planet with a working atmosphere and magnetic field.” He rambled on, mostly to fill the silence. “Since they keep out the harmful solar and cosmic radiation, I leave the heavy shell with all the radiation shields and monitors up in orbit and just bring the core of the shuttle down. The ship maneuvers so much better this way.”

Maggie brushed strands of long red hair out of her face and resolutely refused to look at him, keeping her gaze on the alien buildings passing beneath the ship.

She had been like this ever since she came aboard two days ago, giving him only one- or two-word answers or saying nothing at all. He had no shared history with her, no background against which to interpret her gestures, no context in which to fill her silences with meaning. He felt awkward in her presence, unsure how to converse. His daughter was more mysterious to him than the many dead civilizations he had studied.

Six months ago, just as he was rushing to complete the survey of Pi Baeo ahead of the terraformers’ planned obliteration of the surface of the planet with their asteroids and comets, he received a message from Lauren, the first time he had heard from her in ten years. She was sick, she said, and she was going to die. Maggie needed him.

Maggie was born after he and Lauren had split up. Indeed, he hadn’t even known about her until Lauren sent him a picture a year after the birth. He had stared at that picture of the bundle of pink flesh without knowing how to react. He wasn’t ready to be a father, and Lauren must have known that, which was why she had said nothing to him as they parted. She had accepted his offer to pay child support without demanding anything more, and he had been relieved.

The surprise message from Lauren had caused him to reluctantly drop everything on Pi Baeo to go to her world. The trip took three months in real time, but only two days in the shuttle with relativistic dilation. By the time he finally got there, Lauren was dead, and Maggie had been on her own for two months, mourning her mother and imagining an uncertain future with a father she had never met.

With little fanfare and no instructions, he was granted custody of the sullen and grieving teenager. How was I supposed to learn to be a father in the two days it took to come back to Pi Baeo?

James sighed. He didn’t like complications in his life. Now that they were back on Pi Baeo, he had less than a week to complete the survey before the arrival of the comets and asteroids.

“There’s some writing,” Maggie said quietly. Inscriptions and images covered the alien buildings, which appeared to be carved out of massive, solid stone. There were no windows or doors.

James was surprised but glad that Maggie seemed to take an interest in the ruins. He was comfortable lecturing to curious students.

“That’s one of the reasons I’m interested in this place. Most cultures that get past the Kuny-MacLean boundary plunge into a digital dark age and stop producing analog writing. All their information becomes locked in fragile digital artifacts that don’t survive well and are difficult to decipher. They went digital here too, but these samples—”

The ship accelerated, lurched, and dropped precipitously. Maggie screamed.

“James,” Julia’s voice was urgent, “there seem to be errors in the stabilization routines beyond my ability to correct. You have to take over with analog controls.”

James grabbed the joystick and pulled back sharply. The engines groaned. But it was too late. The ship was falling too fast.

“Prepare for impact,” Julia’s voice said.

James instinctively reached out to hold Maggie against her seat, as if the strength of his arm was enough to save her from the ground rushing up at them.

The robots, mechanical spiders as big as house cats, skittered all over the exterior of the Arthur Evans and examined the surface for damage. Sparks flew as they welded and applied sealant.

“Well, that should do it,” James said as he finished bandaging the cut on Maggie’s forehead. “Julia saved us by deforming the ship’s hull as we crashed to absorb most of the energy. It’ll take the robots a few days to repair the ship, but that still gives us plenty of time to leave before the first comets get here.”

Maggie sat up and felt the bandage with her hand. She flexed her legs and looked over her arms.

“What am I supposed to do while you work? Just sit here?”

At least she’s talking now, James thought.

“You can come with me. But I have to work, so I can’t watch you every minute.”

Maggie’s lips narrowed. “I can take care of myself. I’m not five.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“I wish I was in our old house on my own, instead of almost getting killed here with you.” Tears welled in her blue eyes. “That stupid judge! He had no clue—”

“That’s enough!” Maybe it was easier when she didn’t talk. The only sound in the shuttle was the intermittent beeping from the diagnostic console as Julia continued to run tests. Maggie glared at her father defiantly.

He tried to lower his voice. “The court was going to send you to a foster home unless I assumed custody, all right? I’m doing this because your mother wrote—”

The anger and sorrow that she had bottled up for so long could no longer be contained. Now that she was talking, she was going to let him have it. “Oh, it’s so noble of you to take up the burden of your child. I hate you—”

“Shut up and listen!” he growled. She seemed to him an unreasonable ball of pure fury and hatred. “Now, I know I haven’t been in your life for all these years. Your mother and I—” He wondered if she would understand. He wondered if he himself understood how things turned out. “It’s complicated.”

“Yes, ‘complicated.’ You prefer communing with dead aliens to taking care of a flesh-and-blood family. That is difficult to explain.”

The words punched him hard, and in them he heard an echo of his dead ex-wife.

He waited until his breathing was even again.

“You don’t have to like me. But I am responsible for you until you’re no longer a minor. I’ll leave you alone as much as possible, and you don’t even have to talk to me. But you can make this easier for both of us by at least trying to be civil.”

The diagnostic console beeped loudly. Julia spoke, “I’ve discovered the cause of the crash. The navigation system suffered an unusual number of single-bit hardware memory errors during the flyover. In fact, similar hardware errors are showing in all the systems.”

“Bad memory chips?”

“That’s a possibility. I suspect it’s related to your attempt to economize by using cheaper components during the last retrofitting.”

Maggie shook her head exaggeratedly. “Right, and you’ll take care of me just as well as you do your ship.”

The atmosphere of Pi Baeo contained little oxygen and was devoid of moisture. While there was no need for full environmental suits, James and Maggie had to wear oxygen masks and overalls to keep in the moisture.

They gazed at the gargantuan ruins. Even the cubes forming the outer ring, much smaller than the megaliths inside, rose almost fifty meters into the air. The two humans were ants crawling about a giant’s playground.

Keeping his pledge to leave Maggie alone, James hiked towards the city without glancing at her. After a moment, she followed, staying a few meters back.

Secretly, James was relieved that he no longer had to strive to imitate some idealized vision of a good father. He couldn’t do it, always knew he couldn’t do it. Lauren had been right about him, and he didn’t want to playact anymore.

The ring of cubes formed a solid wall. James aimed for a break where one of the cubes had crumbled. Up close, they could see that it was made from smaller blocks, held together by gravity and friction through an intricate mortise-and-tenon system.

They climbed over the rubble. Maggie was athletic and nimble, scrambling over the broken stones like a mountain goat. James refrained from offering to help her.

Beyond the break, the monumental pyramids loomed over the flat ground like towering mountains casting long and oppressive shadows. The city felt claustrophobic, despite the immense empty space between the pyramids.

James took pictures of the large-scale writing on the smooth faces of the pyramids. There were several distinct scripts, indicative of multiple languages. However, the inscriptions on every visible surface seemed identical. It was as if the same few sentences were repeated over and over.

“This isn’t giving me much linguistic data to work with,” James muttered to himself.

Shouting at her father and the strenuous hike that followed had drained some of Maggie’s anger. Her curiosity and a desire to show off got the better of her.

“They must have thought that whatever they wanted to say was really important to repeat it so many times,” she said. “Crude but effective data redundancy.”

She sounded like she was reciting from a book. James was amused, but he liked this version of Maggie better. He was more comfortable talking about work. “You like information theory and that sort of thing?”

“Yeah. I’m good with computers and… when I was little, I used to beg Mom to buy me books on xenoarchaeology and data preservation. And I went to archaeology camp. I knew all that stuff you said about the digital dark age.”

James pictured the young Maggie reading xenoarchaeology books. That must have driven Lauren crazy. He smiled. Then he wondered why a child who had never met her father nevertheless wanted to study the same thing she thought he studied. His nose tingled and felt itchy.

He tried to keep the conversation going. “What do you think of the pictures?” He nodded at the many diagrams among the inscriptions, most still legible despite years of erosion.

“Maps of the city?”

The pictures depicted concentric circles with small squares, triangles, pentagons, and circles in the spaces between the circles. Then Maggie frowned. “But that doesn’t make sense. They all look different.”

James took a few zoomed-in pictures of the drawings and compared them with the layout of the buildings generated from aerial photographs. Maggie was right. The drawings didn’t match the real layout and didn’t match each other.

“And how could people—aliens—live in a city with only circular streets? I didn’t see any roads coming out the center.”

James looked at her, impressed. “That’s very perceptive.”

Maggie rolled her eyes. The way she tilted her head was almost a carbon copy of Lauren’s gesture. He felt a wave of tenderness.

“Actually, I don’t think the people of Pi Baeo ever lived here. Aerial surveys showed no signs of burial sites or trash heaps nearby. I also scanned the buildings with ground-penetrating radar. They’re completely solid, no space inside at all. It’s probably not accurate to call this place a ‘city.’”

“So what is it?”

“I have no idea. Hopefully, I can figure it out before it’s gone forever in a week.”

“How old is it?”

“Best I can tell, Pi Baeo lost almost all its water about twenty thousand years ago. Though I don’t know exactly what happened, the process seemed to take only a few centuries. As the water ran out, the inhabitants fought over the diminishing supply. Every settlement I’ve found was destroyed by warfare. The destruction was so complete that the robots recovered very few intact artifacts.”

“But this place looks untouched.”

“That’s right. Thousands of kilometers from the nearest population centers, this place was left alone as Pi Baeo died. I want to know why.”

“But they were aliens. Why do you care about them so much? They didn’t even know about us.” Resentment had crept back into her voice. She remembered again how he had never even tried to reach out to her, to know her even a little.

“That’s true,” he said. The change in her tone made him nervous; he did not want the furious, unreasoning child to return. Her question also saddened him. He had never been good at articulating why his work meant so much to him, but he wanted to try.

Maybe his daughter would understand him where his wife couldn’t.

“The human race has explored the stars for a long time. Yet we’re still alone. All the alien civilizations we’ve found are dead.

“Most civilizations are very self-centered and focus only on the present. They don’t think much about preserving a legacy for those who might come long after they’re gone. Their art and poetry, their rise and fall, their brief time in this universe: most of that is beyond recovery. And in a week, the icy comets and asteroids sent by the terraformers will bombard this planet and bring water back to it. Even the last traces of their existence will be gone.

“But I always feel that there is a message that the people I study want to pass on. Whatever I discover will be the last testament and whisper of the people of Pi Baeo. In studying them, I become connected to them, and in passing on their message, the human race is no longer so alone.”

Maggie looked thoughtful and chewed her lips.

James let out a held breath; he felt inexplicably happy as he watched his daughter nod, almost imperceptibly.

The sun was sinking below the wall of cubes. “It’s getting late,” James said. “Let’s come back tomorrow.”

While James prepared dinner in the galley, Julia tutored Maggie. As a holographic projection of the periodic table of elements floated in the air, the AI droned on about the properties of the lanthanides. Having spent so many years with James Bell, the AI had acquired a taste for holding forth professorially. Gradually, Maggie’s eyelids drooped and her head dipped forward.

Julia stopped. “You’re not even trying! You’ve been out of school for two months already. How do you expect to catch up without putting in the effort?”

“Don’t yell at me! It’s not like I wanted to be out of school.”

Julia modulated her voice to be gentler. “I’m sorry. It must have been difficult, losing your mother like that.”

“What would you know about it?” Maggie said angrily.

“I may be a machine, but I’ve been with Dr. Bell many years…. I also knew your mother.”

Maggie’s head snapped up. “Tell me about my parents…. What happened between them?”

“I can’t. That’s personal.”

Maggie glanced at her father’s figure moving in the galley. She would have to wait.

“Can’t you move to a topic that’s more interesting than chemistry?”

“What do you consider interesting?”

“How about some archaeology? Can we try to translate some of the text we found on the pyramids today?”

This was not on the recommended standard curriculum, but Julia decided to indulge her. “All right. As you know, there’s no possibility of a Rosetta stone here. So guesses at meanings must rely on non-linguistic—”

“Yes, yes. I know all that. Just show me pictures of other writing you’ve found that match anything we saw on the pyramids.”

Julia beeped in annoyance at being interrupted. But she made the periodic table disappear and projected in its place photographs of inscriptions found in other ruins on Pi Baeo. “These symbols appear to match a substring in the inscriptions on the pyramids.”

Maggie examined the photographs. “Zoom out a bit. I want to see where you found them.”

Julia complied. Maggie furrowed her brows in puzzlement. The photographs were much harder to interpret than the neat drawings in archaeology books. She couldn’t tell what she was looking at. Everything seemed to be piles of rubble.

Julia remained silent, still miffed at Maggie.

“It’s easier if you look at a three-D reconstruction,” James said as he stepped out of the galley. “Julia, put up the models and show Maggie where these symbols were found.”

The holographic projection now changed to reconstructions of tall, graceful alien buildings honeycombed with windows and doors. Julia highlighted the areas where the matched symbols were found.

“See any pattern?” James asked.

“They’re always found near doorways,” Maggie said.

“Possible translation?”

“Enter?”

“Or exit.”

“So, after all that work, we still can’t figure out the most significant bit of the message?” Maggie laughed. “We still don’t know if the inscriptions are saying ‘Come in. Welcome!’ or ‘Get out, and stay out!’”

It was the first time that James had heard her laugh, and he marveled at how he could hear echoes of Lauren as well as himself in it. A wave of affection, tinged with regret, washed over him.

Maggie tiptoed past her father’s cabin and into the cockpit of the shuttle. Through the window she could see hundreds of bright streaks in the eastern sky. Promising destruction along with rebirth, the comets bathed the alien landscape in a silvery glow.

She fumbled around for her father’s headset, put it on, and whispered into the quiet dark, “Julia.”

The AI answered in her earpiece. “Yes?”

“Tell me about my parents.”

Julia said nothing.

“Okay, we’ll do this the hard way.” Maggie slid forward and pulled out the keyboard from beneath the console. She punched some keys and watched as the head-up display on the cockpit window flashed into life. A blinking cursor appeared in the upper left-hand corner.

She typed at the prompt:

>(DEFINE ACKERMANN-HEAP-FILL (LAMBDA () (

“All right!” Julia broke the silence. Maggie smiled at the hint of a hiss in the AI’s voice. “No need to drop down into code like that. I’ll grant you access, but I will inform Dr. Bell—”

“You’ll do no such thing.” Maggie leaned forward and began to type again.

“Okay! Okay!”

“Don’t be so glum. This isn’t a real security breach. He won’t be really mad if he finds out. And you can always blame it on the cheap memory chips that are generating all those hardware errors.”

Julia muttered incomprehensibly.

Digging through her father’s electronic archives, Maggie thought, was a lot like archaeology. For years she had studied the subject to feel closer to him, to maintain a sense of connection. For so long she had yearned to uncover the man her mother never talked about, to dig out the man who had abandoned her before she was born.

Pictures, electronic messages, recordings, and videos were the artifacts of a lost past, created by two people who did not have in mind a future viewer and who wrote and laughed and glanced at the camera only for themselves. Yet, somehow she felt that she was their intended audience. They had a message for her, a message maybe even they did not know they wanted to send.

Maggie put the pieces in context, built a chronology. She excavated and reconstructed the mystery that was her father.

The video showed the inside of a tiny studio apartment. Maggie gazed at the younger, smooth-shaven version of her father speaking into the camera. He was nervously playing with a small box in his hand.

“Julia, can you run the numbers again?”

The AI sounded exasperated. “The numbers aren’t going to change. I can search for a comparable ring that’s cheaper—”

“No! I don’t want a cheaper ring. She deserves this one.”

“Then I see no choice but for you to give up on that shuttle. You can’t afford both.”

Now Maggie was looking at the younger version of her mother, alone in the same studio apartment from the previous video. Young Lauren was full of the glow of hope and youth. Maggie allowed herself to cry. She missed her mother so damn much.

“Thanks for letting me know, Julia,” Lauren said. “Sometimes we have to save James from himself.”

(“You have a history of spilling his secrets to the women in his life,” Maggie whispered into the headset. Julia beeped once in protest and then went silent.)

Lauren admired the ring on her hand. “It is beautiful.” She twisted it around her finger. “But heavy.”

“I tried to stop him from dragging you onto that roller coaster,” Julia said. “I know how much you hate those things. But he thought he had the best chance of you saying yes if he proposed just when you were scared and clinging to him.”

“His chances were always one hundred percent.”

“It will make a good story for the children someday.”

Lauren took off the ring. “I’ll tell him that my skin is allergic to the ring, and he has to return it. I’d rather he buy that shuttle, and we’ll wander the stars together, weighed down by nothing.”

The video now showed the cockpit of a two-person shuttle, which Maggie recognized as the Arthur Evans, but a lot cleaner and newer looking. James and Lauren sat in the two chairs.

James sighed. “I thought you wanted this.”

“I did.”

“Then what changed?”

Lauren bit her lip. “We’ve been flying around the galaxy for five years. What exactly do we have to show for it? Twenty storage containers of broken artifacts. A few monographs that no one reads. Dead aliens don’t have descendants lobbying for cultural preservation, and all the civilizations we’ve studied collapsed before they made it off their home planets so there’s no technological payoff. Face it, people just don’t care about dead aliens.”

“I care. It matters to me that they be remembered and understood. A man wants to leave behind his name, and a civilization wants to leave behind its stories. I’m the only thing standing between them and oblivion.”

“James, we aren’t so young anymore. We can’t wander the stars forever. We have to think about the future, about us.”

James’s face hardened and his lips fused into a thin line. “I’m not going to sit in an office at a desk just so we can buy a picket-fenced house on some freshly developed planet and pop out children. The terraformers move fast, and I have to save whatever I can before they erase these mysteries forever.”

“We can always come back to this life, be on the move again, when the children are older.”

“If we put down roots anywhere, we’ll never leave again. Weight leads to more weight.”

“You won’t even give it a chance? Try it for a few years?”

“I don’t understand what’s changed.”

“You empathize so deeply with vanished aliens, but you can’t feel what I want?”

“This discussion is over.” He got up and left the cockpit.

Lauren sat still, alone. After a while, she sighed and caressed her belly.

“Why didn’t you tell him?” It was Julia.

Lauren shook her head. “If I tell him, he’ll give in because he’ll try to do the responsible thing, but he’ll always resent me and the baby. I’d rather not have him at all than have him believe we weighed him down.”

“I would have tried, you know.”

In the video, her father hadn’t shaved for a few days. The cockpit was messy, unkempt, with food wrappers everywhere and dirty clothes draped on chairs. He had been drinking.

“She didn’t want to force you to pick between what you wanted to do and what you felt you had to do,” Julia said.

“She thought I wasn’t ready,” he shot back. “She didn’t trust me. Maybe she was right.”

After breakfast, James prepared the hover bike.

He looked at Maggie, concerned. “You have dark circles around your eyes. You didn’t sleep well, did you? Maybe you should just stay in the ship today and rest.”

But Maggie would not be dissuaded. She sat on the bike behind her father and put her arms around his waist. Then, she leaned forward and put her face against his back.

James couldn’t move for a moment, overwhelmed by this gesture of trust. His mind flashed to the picture of baby Maggie, and suddenly he felt an overwhelming sense of tenderness towards that helpless bundle of pink, the tightly clutched fists and squeezed-shut eyes.

They covered ground quickly on the hover bike, zooming towards the heart of the ruins.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” James said, as he brought the bike to a sudden halt.

In front of them was the first of the many concentric, circular streets that they had seen from the air. Only now did it become clear that the circle was not a street at all. It was a ditch with smooth walls that dropped straight down, over fifty meters deep and twice as wide.

“Moats inside the city?” Maggie was amused.

“I’m beginning to think that the message here is pretty simple: we don’t want you to go to the center.”

“Then we really have to go.” Maggie’s expression was mischievous, childish. “The secret must be a good one.”

James chuckled, but he shared Maggie’s excitement. He folded the hover bike into its compact storage form—like an old-fashioned suitcase. He tossed it down to the bottom of the ditch, where it clattered loudly before coming to rest. Then he took out the rappelling hooks and cables and showed Maggie how to use them. She was a quick learner, and the two quickly descended to the bottom of the ditch, walked across, and climbed up the other side.

A few minutes later, they stopped again at the foot of one of the giant pentagonal pyramids.

“Look at that,” James said. “New pictures.”

Besides the familiar, repetitive inscriptions, there was a series of new picture panels along the bottom of the pyramid, like a comic strip.

“Which end do we start with?” Maggie asked.

James shrugged. “No idea. You saw how all I’ve been able to do so far is pattern matching sign groups, like ideographs. I don’t know if the reading convention here is left-to-right, right-to-left, or something non-linear.”

Maggie decided to try left to right first.

There were five panels. The first one contained the familiar “map” of the city. The next panel added two egg-shaped figures, each with eight radiating legs. One egg, in the center of the city, had curled legs and a body crosshatched with thin lines. The other egg was far outside the city.

“These spider-like things are stylized drawings of the inhabitants of Pi Baeo,” James said.

“Why is one of them all cracked?”

“Not sure. But it could be a way to indicate that the figure is dead, sick, or not real. Something’s wrong with it.”

In the third panel, both figures were drawn with smooth exteriors and straight legs. The one initially at the center had moved some distance toward the edge of the city, while the other one had moved closer to the city.

“Could be a resurrection or rebirth myth,” James said.

In the fourth panel, both eggs moved even closer to each other, and in the last panel the two eggs were united at the edge of the city. Their legs entwined.

Excited, Maggie picked up the theme. “So this place is like a magical cave, where you get to meet your loved ones as they return from death.” She laughed.

James laughed with her. He hadn’t realized how much he missed having someone he loved with him as he explored these desolate ruins.

He walked back from the last panel, his brows furrowed. “But if you go from right to left, the story is very different: two friends arrive at the city, and one decides to go in while the other decides to leave. The adventurous one dies at the center.”

“Then the title for your version would be: ‘The Curse of the Pharaoh of Pi Baeo.’ Treasure hunters and future archaeologists beware! A horrible fate awaits if you don’t leave right now!” Maggie clapped her father on the back. “This is too funny. We’ve got to prove the curse wrong!”

She’s just like me, James thought. Fearless, curious. And so like her. That laugh.

For a second he seemed to see Lauren standing where Maggie was standing, looking as young as the day they said goodbye to each other.

“Lucky you. You missed the diapers and ear infections and sleep tantrums and the terrible twos and threes and fives,” Lauren said. But she was smiling at him. “But you’ll have to deal with the teenage years.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I wish—” He couldn’t finish.

“She’s really something, isn’t she?” She lifted her hand to brush away her hair. Her finger still wore the plain plastic ring that she used to replace the ring he had given her. His heart seemed to skip a beat, and his eyes became blurry and he could not see her anymore.

“Dad! Dad! What’s wrong?”

He discreetly wiped his eyes. It was the first time she had called him Dad. He looked at Maggie, and the feeling of being responsible for her was not heavy at all. It felt like a pair of wings. “Nothing. The wind.”

“Let’s go to the center.”

He put his arm around her shoulder. “I saw signs of very powerful weapons being used at the other sites on Pi Baeo. The people who built this place were technologically advanced, and I don’t think these warnings were just superstition. I think they were trying to warn intruders away from some real danger.”

“What danger could last twenty thousand years?”

“I don’t know. But I believe this is a situation that calls for caution.”

Maggie looked at her father, wide-eyed. “I thought you wanted to understand their message.”

James felt the pull of the mystery at the center. Hints of danger had always only made it more interesting for him. And he yearned to give in to it, to do as Maggie suggested.

He remembered the feeling of Maggie leaning her head against his back on the bike. There are more important things than dead aliens and their messages.

“Things are… different now,” he said. Slowly, a bit reluctantly, he turned the bike around. “It’s too risky.”

“I don’t understand. What’s changed?”

He looked at her, and instead of answering, he pulled her into a hug. She stiffened for a second and then yielded to his embrace.

Maggie tossed and turned, unable to sleep.

She had suggested that some of the robots be sent to investigate the center of the city. It would have been safer than going themselves. But James had said no. The robots were needed to complete the repair on the Arthur Evans before the comets arrived.

The more Maggie thought about it, the more she was convinced that there was no real danger. Her father claimed that the civilization here had reached a high level of technology, but this place was built with stones and had cartoons carved into them! That sounded like a temple of superstition, not an advanced military installation with booby traps that still functioned after twenty thousand years.

Things are… different now, he had said. She remembered the wistful look on his face as he gave up their exploration.

Her father believed that dead aliens had stories worth telling. But he also loved her mother, and he would have, was beginning to, would, love her.

I’d rather not have him at all than have him believe we weighed him down.

She got dressed.

“Julia,” James called from his bunk.

“You can’t sleep?”

“I can’t seem to let the puzzle go.”

“I thought so.”

Julia turned on the light. James sat up.

“Scan through those ‘maps’ of the city. There must be a pattern in them.”

Julia spoke up after a few minutes. “I think I have something. The seven ditches divide the city into seven concentric bands, with a small circle in the middle. While the locations of the pyramids change in each picture, the numbers and shapes of the pyramids within the bands are constant.”

Julia projected a table onto the wall of James’s cabin:

“Good. But what’s their meaning?” James asked.

“I can do a brute-force search in the databases for these numbers to see if anything turns up.”

“Do it. I’ll keep on playing with them too to see if I can spot anything.”

The comets were much closer now. In their pale light, the ground seemed to be covered by frost. Maggie made good progress on the hover bike. She had cajoled Julia into releasing the equipment to her and swore the AI to secrecy.

“It’s just like with my mom. I don’t want him to resent me,” she had said to Julia. “I’ll prove that he won’t have to change because of me.”

It was difficult to climb up from the bottom of the first ditch with the hover bike strapped to her back.

“I won’t weigh you down,” she muttered, and pulled herself up another notch.

Each successive ditch was deeper and wider than the one before. She was covered in sweat after a while, and the night air no longer seemed so cold.

Finally, after crossing the last ditch, she saw in the center an immense rock column rising hundreds of meters into the sky like an accusatory finger.

James felt a bit nauseous and dizzy. Too many things were happening: the crash, memories of Lauren, dealing with Maggie. He hadn’t been eating or sleeping well.

He tried to clear his mind. Ninety-two pyramids arranged in concentric circles like crystalline shells.

An image from the evening before—Maggie falling asleep from boredom as Julia droned on about the periodic table—came unbidden to his mind. He smiled and imagined his daughter sleeping soundly in the cabin next to his. He wanted to get up and just go stare at her sleeping form….

“Julia, I got it!”

Julia chirped expectantly.

“The plan of this city is a model of the atom, but not a model that we are familiar with. The concentric circles are electron shells, and the structures represent electrons in different orbitals. Here, bring up one of the pictures so I can show you.”

Julia projected one of the diagrams onto the wall of the cabin. James pointed to it as he went on. “The tetrahedrons are electrons in s orbitals, and the squares p’s, the pentagons d’s, the cones f’s. This place is a uranium atom, atomic weight 92, with 92 electrons.”

“That would explain all the hardware errors.”

The chill running down his spine cut through James’s euphoria.

“I thought those were from the cheap memory chips.”

“That was my original theory, but a source of alpha particles nearby would explain the frequency of the errors much better. Since all the radiation shielding and monitors are still in orbit, I can’t be sure. But given that uranium is the most common naturally-occurring fissile material, a stylized representation of it is a good symbol to indicate the presence of radiation.”

James was stunned. “You think this place is a giant radiation warning sign? How long until we can take off?”

“I can rush the repairs and get them done in a few hours. But I have to tell you something about Maggie.”

Jagged rocks and what appeared to be glass shards covered the ground between the last ditch and the rock column. Maggie was glad that she was on a hover bike. On foot, this final stretch would be a nightmare. The builders really didn’t want anyone to get through.

She made it to the foot of the spike. This was it. She would uncover the mystery at the center of the ruins and prove to her father that she was not going to be a burden.

We could have been a family among the stars.

There was a cave at the foot of the spike. Maggie strapped the bright flashlight to her helmet and went in. The cave spiraled downwards. She felt flushed, and stopped for a moment to wipe the sweat from her forehead. This no-sleep thing is finally catching up to me, she thought.

At the bottom of the cave was a metallic barrier. Maggie cut a hole through it with the torch cutter on her excavation multi-tool.

She crawled through.

Inside, the cavern was full of glass spheres packed in layers. She picked one up. It was about half a meter in diameter. Tiny metallic beads were suspended inside, packed into a tight lattice. Illuminated by her flashlight, the beads threw off brilliant rainbows of color.

The sphere felt very heavy, and hot.

As he rushed into the alien ruins on his bike, James swore at Julia and himself.

“I thought it was best to let her go,” Julia had tried to defend herself. “I wanted to give her a chance to prove herself, the way you and Lauren never gave yourselves a chance.”

The people of Pi Baeo had nuclear power. Knowing that it would take eons for the spent fuel to decay to safe levels, they had buried the waste here, as far away from civilization as possible.

Maybe they knew that their planet was drying up or maybe they were just cautious, but they tried to build this place so that it would warn their descendants or future visitors from the stars. Even as they were dying, they thought to look outside themselves and speak to the future.

They tried to encode the message at different levels, in multiple ways. They built with stone, the only material that would last millions of years. They hoped that the message would be understood universally: There is nothing of value here. Danger! Stay away.

He had understood it only too late.

Recklessly, he hurried down the ditches and scrambled up the other side. His breathing became jagged and he turned up the oxygen feed to his mask. All the while he thought about the invisible particles speeding at him, streaming through him, tearing apart cells and tissues.

He was beyond the last ditch.

“Maggie!” he shouted.

At the foot of the monstrous spike of rock at the center, a tiny figure waved at him.

He twisted the handle on his hover bike and was by her in a minute.

Maggie was standing next to twenty, thirty glass spheres. Her face was flushed and full of sweat.

“Aren’t these beautiful?” she said. “Dad, there’re many more down there. I did it. I found their secret. We can do this together.” Then she collapsed, pulled off her mask, and vomited.

He picked her up and carried her to the bike, and rode as fast as he could away from the spheres until he had to stop by the ditch.

In Maggie’s weakened state, there was no way for her to rappel down the ditch or to climb up the other side by herself. He couldn’t carry her safely on a single cable either.

He prayed that Julia would be able to finish the repair of the ship in time to pick them up. Meanwhile, they were stuck here, exposed to the deadly waste of a bygone civilization.

He looked down at Maggie’s feverish face. She had been exposed for much longer than he and she was smaller. She might not make it until Julia arrived. He had to bury the spheres again to reduce her exposure. He had to approach the source of the deadly radiation.

Gently, he laid Maggie down on the ground, rode back to the spheres, and carried them one by one back down into the cave. He worked fast and tried to not think about what was happening to his body. There’s hope yet, he thought, Julia will be here with the ship soon. Maggie and I can both be put in stasis until we get to a hospital.

When he came back, Maggie struggled to sit up. “Dad, I don’t feel well,” she croaked.

“I know, baby. Those spheres made you sick. Just hold on a bit longer.” He shifted to place his own body between her and the spike at the center, as if his flesh would cushion her from the high-energy particles, would make a difference.

The loud whirring of propellers drowned out everything. Floodlights covered them. Julia had arrived with the Arthur Evans.

He carried Maggie, limp in his arms, onto the ship. His skin felt raw, burnt.

“Julia, get the stasis chamber ready. Maggie, don’t be scared. You’re just going to sleep for a bit.”

Maggie was safely inside the chamber, and she nodded as she closed her eyes.

James was thirsty, dizzy, and very tired. He took a last look at the navigation panel. He was about to give Julia the order to take off and step into the stasis chamber himself.

Red lights blinked on the panel. Hardware errors.

A launch into planetary orbit was a delicate operation. There would be no tolerance for single-bit errors.

For a moment, pure rage—at himself, at the builders of this site, at the dead civilization of Pi Baeo, at the universe—overwhelmed him. They were going to die, killed by an ancient riddle that he could not solve in time.

“I’m not scared,” Maggie, half-dreaming, whispered hoarsely.

He looked at her. There was a light smile on her sleeping face. She trusted him completely.

He knew what he had to do. He was ready, as he had always been without knowing it.

He leaned down into the stasis chamber. As she woke at his touch, he brushed the hair out of her eyes and kissed her on the forehead.

“Listen, Maggie, once I get the ship into orbit, Julia will send out a distress signal. The terraformers should pick it up and come to get you in a few months. Don’t worry. Julia will keep you in suspended animation until they can get you to a real hospital. They should be able to fix you up good as new.”

“I’m really sorry, Dad.”

“It’s all right, sweetheart. You’re impulsive and you want answers, the same as me.” He paused. “No, better than me. You’ve always known what really matters.”

“When I wake up, we’ll explore the universe together and tell everyone the stories of dead worlds.”

He took a deep breath and held it for a moment. She deserved to know the truth.

“I won’t see you again, baby. This is goodbye.”

“What?” She struggled to get up. He pushed her down.

“It’s too risky to let Julia fly the ship. The radiation is causing too many hardware errors. That’s what made us crash in the first place. I have to fly the ship manually on analog controls. By the time I get us into orbit, the radiation sickness will have progressed too far in my body for stasis to be effective. I won’t make it, Maggie. I’m sorry.”

“No, let Julia fly the ship! You need to be in here with me. I can’t lose both—”

He interrupted her, “You have been the best mystery I’ve ever worked on. I love you.”

Before she could speak again, he closed the chamber cover.

He felt feverish and delirious. He imagined the merciless rays cutting into him, the residual heat of a dead civilization. But he was not afraid or sad or angry. Even as they were dying, the people of Pi Baeo strove to save those who would come after them. He was doing the same now for his daughter. This was a story that would always mean something, a message worth passing on, even in a universe that was cold, dark, and dying.

The comets were so bright in the sky. Everything would start afresh again.

He pulled back on the joystick, and felt the planet fall away.