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And even with all this, in this day and age, it s a hell of a lot safer than
robbing banks. Still, I wish we had an archaeologist on the team. Going blind
into ancient graves is what they get off on, and they re never happier than
when they re digging up and carting off some old graveyard. Come on, let s see
what s what.
Finally, they made the cliff. At this point the complex ceased being a
greenhouse or processing area and instead became a small self-contained city
built inside the protective rock.
As they expected, the amount of clothing absent owners increased with every
step now, and often was so dense you couldn t help but walk on them even
though both salvagers felt, somehow, that they were stepping on bodies.
Now they were on instruments, using the You Are Here signs only as
confirmation, as they followed the dark halls and walkways towards the central
energy core.
There were, at least, some pictures along the wide hallways and in many of the
large offices and stores that were built, multilevel, around the control
center. Both Queson and Nagel had expected to see exotic faces in some kind of
ancient-looking cultural garb, but the fact was, the folks looked pretty
ordinary. Beaming faces, mostly dark complected but with Oriental cheeks and
eye structure rather than Indo-European, making it likely that the original
guess was right. Something like Laotian, Thai, Vietnamese, or perhaps Malayan
was at the root of these people s ancestry. They certainly had a sameness
about their racial features that made it clear that they were either picked to
a standard or had remained cohesive when having children long before these
people had come here.
Vegetarian, most likely, and not enamored of synthetic foods, Nagel guessed
from the three-dimensional photos that seemed so real. That would explain the
huge greenhouses. Funny, most of these racial-purity-type colonial projects
were also selectively technophobic; I don t see any signs of that here.
Queson nodded. A couple of the pictures show they had babies the
old-fashioned way, and I don t see much attention to livestock. You re
probably right. Some form of Buddhist sect, I would suspect. Affluent, well
educated, setting up a colony so they could practice their specific faith,
whatever offshoot it was, and keep away from the culture polluters while
enjoying the benefits of modern life where it didn t conflict. Makes sense.
Except they chose this hole. As you say, they clearly had money, so what the
hell were they doing picking a cold, rotten desert like this?
Oh, I don t know, Queson replied. They were here for the long haul, and for
religious and cultural reasons.
They probably took it because nobody else wanted it, and it had enough
underground water and a heavy enough atmosphere to sustain them. Their
ancestors way back not only lived in dense jungles but in valleys carved by
glaciers from mountains eight or more kilometers high. If they indeed had any
Laotian blood in them, then their
distant ancestors picked up and walked ten thousand or so kilometers from
ancient southeast Asia on Old Earth up to the frozen Arctic, across frozen ice
bridges eighty kilometers across, and down another two continents back when
they were hunting prehistoric mammals with spears. These people were
technological enough to grow fat and lazy without a challenge. This was it.
Yeah, I ll take fat and happy to dead and consumed, Nagel commented. Look
at where their faith and high dreams took em. What a waste.
Maybe. I m reading fifty-two percent power, though. If we can t find the
light switch and get going, we re going to wind up a kilometer short and with
no protection.
Nagel nodded and stepped up his pace. It was getting easier and easier to just
ignore the density of empty clothes and just make sure you didn t slip on
them.
They d had this discussion before, and would again. Nagel believed in nothing
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but the moment, and attaining by any means available the wealth to indulge
every pleasure; he thought it was stupid to do anything else. The universe,
after all, was going to end someday, going to go out and die, and then
everything, everybody, and the sum total of all human achievement would be
absolutely meaningless. To him, and many of the others, such a philosophy was
the easy way to justify just about anything they felt like doing.
Scavenging dead worlds was a way to accumulate great wealth without having to
dig mines or commit more daring robbery against the living. It could be
dangerous, as now, but never once in his experience in the salvage business
had a dead man ever shot him.
Randi Queson stopped and shined her light at a doorway that was, like almost
all of them, wide open. It had been standard procedure when the power went
down for all the locks to spring open and all the doors to slide open unless
tagged specifically for security. That way, you could always get out. It was a
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