IGMS Issue 22 by IGMS

Author:IGMS [IGMS]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hatrack River Enterprises
Published: 2011-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

The system of Eden -- circling the yellow dwarf sun we'd named Edenstar -- proved remarkably pedestrian. Twelve major planetary bodies, most of them small and rocky, three of them big and gaseous, as well as two thin asteroid belts, and the previously mentioned -- and entirely predictable -- Kuiper and Oort cometary regions. I spent weeks pulsing across the system, doing detailed examinations of the moons of the big Jovian worlds, poking through the corrosive clouds of two of the smaller terrestrials, and generally growing both bored and discouraged. If the Transplanters -- as we'd come to call them -- had left any record or sign of their existence, it didn't show. No staging posts, no warning or sensory networks. Not even industrial trash.

Wanda caught up with me as I surveyed Eden from a distance of 100,000 kilometers, our mile-long ships locked in co-orbit. Her data core Linked with mine and she said, "Penny for your thoughts?"

"God is the only answer," I said across the Link.

"God?"

"Yes, because I can't find a damned thing which would tell us anything otherwise. These people, these Edenites, might have been formed from Adam's rib, for all the good my research has done."

I Linked over my latest findings, and after a few minutes, Wanda Linked back.

"Maybe it is God," she said.

"Getting religion in your old age?" I teased.

"No. But like Sherlock Holmes said, when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

"Doesn't help us a bit," I said.

"No, but have you spent any time on the surface of Eden itself?"

"I thought anthropological studies had been assigned to Kaman and Jorge?"

"Not the Edenites themselves, dummy, their ruins. Old villages and camps, long abandoned. They go back thousands of years. There are glyphs and markings in the caves."

"Think it's worth a shot?" I said.

She linked me a smiley face.

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