Lemuria

Three weeks of steady deceleration passed uneventfully. The crew had taken to calling the destination Lemuria. It fit-a strange island, far from home, unbelievably ancient, and inhabited by mysterious creatures. A lower limit to the age of Lemurian civilization was established after the Intrepid approached a series of Kupier-like objects at the far reaches of the system. Several of the larger, Pluto-sized objects showed significant evidence of what could only be called “mining activity”. Broad, even cuts from millimeters to thousands of kilometers deep, they evidenced an energy beam of tremendous power, suggesting technology far in advance of anything Terrestrial civilization had so-far produced. Based on the micrometeorite damage to the once-perfectly-smooth surfaces, Tatiana estimated that some of them were in excess of 23 million years old.

Their purpose was hard to discern. Tunnels of tremendous size had been gouged directly through some of the smaller planetoids. Other cuts were parabolic sections or rosettes. Some planetoids were covered with a scalloped series of terraces. Helga’s working hypothesis was that much of the mass had been removed to build the ring systems.

The ship’s initial deceleration from sixty six percent light speed had depleted the fuel coils. Tat watched curiously as Kat deftly guided a refueling probe through a planetoid that had been completely cored.

“Hey Tat, what do you suppose these things do for fun?” Kat remarked, her face reflecting purplish light from the frozen planetoid. The inspiration for the question was obvious. The surface of the artificial tunnel had been chiseled and scored with a pattern of rosettes and spirals. “Looks like alien graffiti to me.” she suggested, spinning around in zero-g to look at the spectrograph reading.

“I’d say that fun is an anthropocentric concept” Tat replied, wondering exactly how long it would take her companion to get bored with life aboard the ship.

“C’mon, everything on Earth with half a brain plays somehow. Puppies, horses, even elephants did, back when there were elephants.”

To Tat, Kat’s remark was amazingly astute, and she turned around to regard the dark-haired Eurasian body of the ship’s navigator. It would be a mistake to underestimate her intellect. She had a good understanding of astronomy and 12 years experience in space. Tatiana wondered to herself what the purpose of the mission planners had been in placing aboard a woman whom she found physically attractive, but personally abrasive. “I’ll give you one thing, there is something whimsical about that pattern. I could never guess what it means.”

“Whaddya think?“, continued Kat as she landed the refueling probe on an icy expanse. A cloud of steam rose from where it penetrated the ice. “Maybe they make elaborately pheromone-scented marbles and roll em back and forth to each other.”

“They are so far ahead of us, I can’t begin to guess what they do. Our species has only possessed language and culture for a hundred fifty thousand years or so. They were blasting out these gouges with a million gigawatt laser long before that, when our ancestors were climbing in trees after figs.”

“What, do you think they just keep getting smarter forever?” Kat interjected. “Sooner or later even a super-being is gonna run outta heavy, deep thoughts.”

“I dunno Kat. Thoughts seem heavy and deep because they are far from the mundane. It would be hard to judge and alien thought as heavy or not, assuming we understood it at all.”

“Christ, I need a drink.” concluded Kat, her probe securely imbedded in a frozen the dark ice of the tunnel.

“Fuck, me too.” offered Tat. It was increasingly obvious that Kat had pegged her as uptight and she didn’t like being though of that way.