Experimental Archaeology, by Bogi Takács

“The way out is through”

—Nine Inch Nails

45 Earth years after Contact

We were sitting on soft grass, with our backs to a fallen tree trunk covered by lichen. We were weary and exhausted—we had been wandering around picturesque little paths for days, with our goal nowhere in sight.

We had come to this planet seeking answers to the largest mystery ever to grace Alliance space—why did the Old Empire simply disappear, leaving civilization scattered across myriad planets, floundering unconnected? It had taken thousands of years for sentients of the Imperial body type to find their way back to space, where the old jump points were still deserted but functional, waiting for passengers to shunt across the galaxy.

We were more akin to treasure hunters than archaeologists, but we were not after mythical riches—we simply lived off the thrill of the adventure. At least the two of us from Earth; what drove the Ereni forward I could not even begin to guess.

I glanced at Oyoyōmi sitting on my left, who was examining the grass with such intent it would’ve scared me if we hadn’t spent the past few weeks travelling together. Oyoyōmi constantly made me uneasy, and I wondered if it was the fact that the small pale Ereni had no discernable sex or gender. At this point I was still thinking in English, and I couldn’t make up my mind whether to refer to Oyoyōmi as a “he” or a “she”. There were such people back on Earth too, but I had never been close to one of them.

Kiburi yawned, interrupting the stream of my thoughts. “This is mind-numbing,” she said. “What was this planet back in the day, a holiday resort? Is there anything here besides this gigantic forest?” I turned to her, and she looked so dejected it well-nigh broke my heart.

“The Old Empire’s engineers built this forest out of lifeless rock,” Oyoyōmi said, as calm as ever. “Just because we can’t find buildings doesn’t mean this is a wilderness.”

A tree fell in the distance, almost as if for the purpose of demonstration. I was beginning to grow aggravated. “I’m still not sure I can believe that. It’s constantly changing.” Suddenly a chill passed through my body. “Wait, it’s much too orderly for that. Quaint, even. Everything is in its perfect location. We’ve been here for days and I have yet to trip over a single branch.” I waved my arms around.

Oyoyōmi nodded. “Constantly changing, and yet seemingly ideal in all its configurations. That does raise a few interesting questions.”

“I wonder if…” I wanted to stop myself. I wanted to but I couldn’t. “Are the paths also changing? Their locations, I mean? The connections?”

“Probably,” the Ereni agreed with me and I felt my blood run cold. “Let’s hope the rate of change is slow.”

“Otherwise we might be running around in circles,” Kiburi said.

“No. We are headed in the direction of increased complexity,” Oyoyōmi replied.

“You’ve said that before,” I grunted. “Where is the proof? We couldn’t find anything from orbit.” And we can’t contact our ship and the lander is broken, I wanted to add, but I tried to do my best to push that notion away from myself. No way out.

“We will find our proof when we reach a center of some sort,” Oyoyōmi said. “We can’t contact our ship anyway, and the lander is broken.”

I was at my breaking point. “Do you have to be telepathic?”

“Er… yes?”

“Stop it, Lara. Right now, Oyoyōmi is the only one who has any clue, so this direction is as good as any,” Kiburi said, putting emphasis on every word. She was beginning to get angry with me. One step up from despair, I thought. She got up to her feet and ran a hand through her hair, rustling the thick black coils. “Let’s move.”

“I’m just not comfortable with us putting our bets on something this vague,” I said, not moving.

“We wouldn’t have found this place without the māwal to begin with. We wouldn’t have found the planet and we wouldn’t have found a way in. It’s not ‘vague’.” Kiburi grimaced. “You just have to get used to the fact others perceive more of it than you do.”

“Do you want to turn this into a superiority rant? Count me out.” I jumped up. “Let’s just go.”

Oyoyōmi looked at the two of us, clearly confused, but not saying anything. A strange kind of satisfaction passed over me and I immediately felt the worse for it.

Kiburi frowned. “You perceive more of it than I do, last time I checked.”

“A small sum times two is still a small sum.” I sighed.

Oyoyōmi stood up, his turquoise overcoat swirling in the air. We walked along in single file.

Oyoyōmi stared at the thicket of vines in front of us at the end of the path, then at a large sprawling tree to our left, just one step removed from an oak to make Earth explorers like us uncomfortable.

“We need to climb up there,” the Ereni said.

“If this is the path we’re supposed to take, there has to be an easy way up,” I wondered.

“True.” Oyoyōmi looked at the vines again, eyes unfocusing, mind concentrating on some unknown property. “No—”

“What’s wrong?” I instinctively latched onto the direction of his thought, followed it and came upon something gigantic. I shuddered and recoiled. It was just a faint impression, but the immensity of the intangible structure was staggering.

The Ereni blinked, smooth features breaking apart. “It’s—it’s so close—”

Oyoyōmi jumped up in the air, flew straight upward, and disappeared among the tangled mass of branches.

Kiburi coughed. “Well, now we know how we’re supposed to go up…”

I blinked, and then tentatively tried a little jump. Gravity still pulled me down—I could feel a faint decrease of my weight, maybe, or it could have been my imagination. Anyway, it did not bring me any closer to our goal. “I guess we need to climb…”

I mentally cursed the māwal and the ones who could direct its flow a hundred times as I scrambled up the tree. At least it kept my thoughts far from the mental structure lying in wait, ready to pounce on our unsuspecting minds like a catlike carnivore.

There was a room up there, where the branches intertwined. A chamber of sorts. It looked like a living-room and I said so.

Kiburi chuckled. “Any sufficiently advanced human habitat is indistinguishable from a forest, I guess.”

“I thought we evolved on a savannah. And what’s up with the Clarke reference?”

She shrugged and grinned, her mood suddenly elevated. I was waiting for Oyoyōmi to interrupt us and launch into a monologue about the mysterious origin of humans and the Asankewu Hypothesis that posited a large-scale Imperial experiment on the effects of low māwal on evolution, to explain their own origins… but the lecture did not arrive. Oyoyōmi was not paying attention to us.

Kiburi yanked at the sleeve of my coveralls. “Hey. What’s up with the Ereni?” she whispered.

“Can’t you feel it?” I made a vague hand gesture.

“Feel what?”

I rubbed my face. I had no idea how to explain.

I began haltingly. “It’s a… I think, I’m not sure anyway because I’m just not as good at this stuff as Oyoyōmi is… but I think there is some māwal structure here, and Oyoyōmi is trying to interface with it.”

Her eyebrows arced. “A database of some sort?”

“Could be. It’s not trying to force anything on me. Alhamdulillah! I would go crazy. It’s huge! So I haven’t tried to check.”

She looked hopeful. “Maybe we can find out something…?”

I glanced up at the ceiling of branches. “As long as it’s not me doing the finding out.”

She sat down on a bed – a puffy slab of some organic substance that looked like mashed leaves mixed with some kind of glue. On the sides, small twigs protruded here and there. Oyoyōmi was sitting on the floor, back to the strong branches that formed the side of the chamber, eyes closed.

We waited.

Kiburi broke the silence first. “I think they lived in these rooms,” she said and nodded toward a windowlike hole in the thatch, opposite the entrance we had used – there were trees housing similar chambers farther out.

“Yeah. And what did they do?”

“I don’t know. Think, take walks in the forest, have fun?” She grinned.

“If there is a network of some kind here, then they could’ve done anything from their beds.”

“Still, a walk never hurts,” she said.

I stifled a laugh as I imagined the mysterious Imperial inhabitants of Asonre as little Greek philosophers, peacefully ambling along the paths. Then a much more sinister thought occurred to me. “Maybe this was a prison.”

“Why would they need a prison? We know for a fact they had advanced capabilities with the māwal. They could’ve just modified the minds of offenders,” I said.

“Who knows, they had a different concept of civil rights, possibly? Or some religious taboo?”

“Now you sound like an archaeologist.”

We laughed. Knowledge was lying in wait.

Oyoyōmi stood up and staggered, off-balance for a moment.

“There is no way out.” The proclamation of an oracle. Oyoyōmi was expressionless, face calm and static, eyes slowly beginning to focus and come alive.

We stared.

“Asonre was a research station. But the inhabitants were kept from leaving.”

“No distractions,” Kiburi whispered, awestruck as if from coming face to face with prophecy itself. There was no reaction.

“The Empire had monitoring posts outside. On different planets, in different systems. I know their locations now, but the Alliance hasn’t discovered them yet.”

“They might find us,” I risked a comment. Again there was no response from the Ereni.

“The system contains the sum total of Imperial scientific knowledge.” For a moment I thought I could see an expression of reverence cross Oyoyōmi’s face. “We might find out why the Empire disappeared.”

Then Oyoyōmi collapsed.

It was hard going. The three of us moved into a larger treehouse. The Ereni was trying to gain as much from the network as it was possible, but in the process grew more and more distant from us Earth humans, and more exhausted with each passing day.

We hauled our lander to the bottom of the treehouse where it sat, empty. Its navigational systems were not functioning, but for a while we thought we might coax them back to life with “the sum total of Imperial scientific knowledge”. Eventually it was proven useless—we found out that there was a barrier preventing any vehicle from leaving, at a surprisingly low height. You could touch it from the tallest treetops.

I conquered my fear and made attempts to connect to the structure. Oyoyōmi tried to buffer the impact. I found the information close to impossible to navigate at first—it was nothing like our usual interfaces and I had little skill with the māwal.

We focused on finding a means of escape, and when that proved fruitless, a way to get a message to Alliance space so that someone could come to our aid. The history of the Old Empire had taken a backseat.

We worked hard. Lying on our beds. We took walks in the forest to keep ourselves grounded.

Kiburi had very little to do, beyond reading classic novels using her old-fashioned computer interface and coming up with crazy magical schemes to make her perceive the māwal (none of which actually worked), and it was probably because of this why she chanced upon a solution first.

“Listen,” she sought out Oyoyōmi, who was still dazed after a long session. “I don’t care about an escape route. Let’s just assume there really is none. Why did the Empire collapse?”

The Ereni stared at her, dumbfounded. “Did it collapse?”

Kiburi thought ‘Idiot‘ so hard I had to wince. My ability with the māwal was definitely improving—small consolation. Oyoyōmi seemed to ignore her immediate reaction, out of courtesy, I assumed.

Kiburi grunted. “It did, that’s why we’re here!”

Oyoyōmi frowned. “That’s certainly true, but… maybe I should say that we used to assume the Empire had collapsed, but now I am no longer sure. I haven’t seen any signs of such decay in the system. But I haven’t really looked at the historical records, it’s hard enough to navigate the rest.”

For a moment I felt vindicated—I was not the only one who had difficulty. I knew that, of course—but hearing an explicit admittance of the fact made my spirits lift.

Oyoyōmi was sitting on my bed and playing with the fringes of the overcoat—I knew the Ereni, all or most of them, tended to engage in repetitive behavior when they were anxious, it supposedly had a calming effect on them. I was suddenly worried, very worried.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

“Yes. I found out the answer to Kiburi’s question. The Empire did not collapse. They left.”

“‘The way out is through‘,” Kiburi whispered.

“What?” I saw the details but could not construct the entire picture. The forest and the trees. Charming. And Kiburi saw it before me, even though she couldn’t—I felt anger rise within me and pushed it down. No time to be envious.

“They left this universe,” Oyoyōmi said. “Most of them, anyway. And the people here invented the means of escape.”

“How?” I demanded, close to screaming.

“I don’t know. That’s not in the records. They must have erased it, preserving the planet as a riddle to future sentients.”

“But we have their knowledge,” Kiburi said. “We could make the same discovery. It’s only the last step.”

“And then?” I asked.

“Then we leave.” She stated this matter-of-factly. “Or do you see any other option?”

From the memories of the Ereni Planetmind at Mogōra, EYC 347 (all chronological measurements have been converted to Earth equivalents):

In the thousands of years between the first and second Exodus Waves, there were 37 cases of confirmed Exodus. Kiburi Mosely, Oyoyōmi ta Esenīwu and Lara Grace Mubarak made Exodus in EYC 68, twenty-three Earth years after their arrival on Asonre. They never reached any of the migration waypoints and they were never heard from again.

Bogi Takács is a Hungarian Jewish woman currently studying clinical neuroscience in Austria. Her speculative fiction and nonfiction have been published in various Hungarian print and online magazines, most recently in the 200th volume of Galaktika Fantastic Books, a short story collection featuring Hungarian and international authors.