Lemuria

Over the next six days, the Intrepid broadcast the signal on a narrow bandwidth, at ingenious array of frequencies ranging from long wave radio, to microwave, to optical and ultraviolet lasers. The members of the crew had taken to eating lunch together between shifts and sharing news.

“Hey Helga, recognize this? Tap. TapTap. TapTapTap. TapTapTapTapTap.” Kat teased as the members of the crew floated weightless in the conference room. She grinned broadly as continued to work out prime numbers on the titanium bulkhead with a spoon.

Kat was wearing coal black face powder above her eyes and interlaced with the pattern of lines under her chin. She motioned with a tattooed hand at the images on the monitor. “The fourth probe just returned from Lemuria. This one’s got pretty good AI, so I instructed it to fly down between the buildings and take a good look. Since the radio delay is pretty short at this distance, I acted on a hunch and had it land on a ledge and take a motion picture sequence of the same buildings for about six hours. Check this out.”

The lights dimmed and translucent walls lit up with an eerie vista of lacy black buildings set against a deep blue sky flecked with wispy white clouds. The image sped forward into and among the buildings; parabolic arches and helical towers, strangely filamentous buttresses joining each other in midair, inverted cones and ovoids joined at odd angles, cylindrical masses rolled lazily in a radial pattern suggesting giant wheels buried beneath the ground. Colors were obsidian and umber punctuated by sheets and walls of translucent crystal. Near the summits, everything was covered in frocks and garlands of riotous red material suggesting vegetation. Below, the buildings receded into a cavernous darkness. Suddenly, the probe halted and settled onto a ledge of obsidian.

“Here it is speeded up for a while” remarked the astrogator as the white sun rose quickly in the sky. Towers climbed visibly skyward. Arches grew from below and joined each other to form systems of flying buttresses. In the foreground, a cylinder sprouted from a nearby building like a pseudopod and lazily tapered into a pointed vertical spire. As the sequence progressed, a viscous red liquid resembling an oil slick oozed in front of the camera and shot out tendrils suggesting the fiddleheads of a fern, but the arrangement of “leaves” was cubic and boxy. The probe leapt into the air and departed before becoming covered in spiny, red, inflorescence.

“That’s all I got. Neat, huh?”

The crew was speechless.