Air of Silence

  The silicon-oxygen mask fogged at Deena's exhaling, but the archeologist felt breathless when she and her team beheld what they unearthed. Sediment-granite powder from the drilled opening drifted away from the clearing and when visibility returned her expectations of what this expedition would entail blew away with the dust. Deena didn't know what to prepare for, not on the other side of a smooth brick-red stone wall in an otherwise unsuspecting natural cave formation. She couldn't prepare for a discovery of a lifetime. An underground chamber in an uncolonized system that intelligent life definitely constructed.

The light towers the excavation team powered cast Deena's shadow onto the small chamber's glossy floor submerged in a heel-high layer of undisturbed and clean water. It looked so still that her eyes questioned whether she saw glass or ice. The water sloshed and rippled as Deena strode, but too quickly did the water still itself. Sweat began to add to the moisture within her mask as intrusive thoughts whispered that the chamber bode its will to her through the water, to leave whatever lay within its confides undisturbed.

Deena James wouldn't falter, not now. Not yet. She saw her name credited to the finding of the millennium - evidence of another intelligent species in the cosmos. And finding it at her young age and station? Incredible, absolutely unimaginable. Then she grinned, relishing not the glory but the unknown the discovery provided. 

Another civilization. But why would they build a structure buried deep within their planet's crust to hide its secrets? And where were they now? From a young age, Deena believed every artifact deserved a chance to escape extinction. For a culture's story to endure. 

Moving further in the chamber, Deena said aloud for her second behind her to hear, "Jason, please record everything." To her wonder, the chamber carried Deena's voice, astonishment and all. 

"Already am, Chief," Jason said; the chamber welcomed his voice too.

Holding up a light cube higher, the young excavator almost flinched and cried out when she saw dozens of bright eyes looking down at her. But as the light source fell from her hands, the eyes waned, and Deena realized that she mistook her light's reflection on metal arches as living things. The supports webbed archaically together like an ocean's coral reef, but she thought it purposeful as each arch looked like a perfect replica of its siblings. Behind her, the water sloshed, and she heard others approaching.

Hendricks, after insisting he join the ground team, appeared genuinely concerned at Deena's fright, "You all right? Reflections spooked me too." No one trusted Hendricks or his corporate background, and everyone assumed he wore another mask beneath the one giving him oxygen. He reached down, picked up Deena's glow cube, and handed it to her. "Huh. Looks like water..." His gloved fingers rubbed at the liquid, "But I thought it wasn't sustainable on this planet?"

"It's not," Jason affirmed, the data pad's light deepening the shadows of his scrunched face's creases. "But that is water... Somehow. And for whatever reason sustaining itself despite our opening this chamber to the atmosphere."

Angling a light cube to the walls enclosing them Deena remarked, "Something tells me water won't be our strangest finding." Below the curved ceilings meeting the walls, it appeared the material changed from a red-brick composition to a dull gray, almost as if an artist blended two colors together She marveled at the marbling. Two empty rectangles on either wall, but the latticework of swirls, protrusions, and grooves ringing each panel hinted at significance. But the significance of an unfinished design or a riddle for explorers to finish the design, Deena didn't know. Running a hand over the stone she shook her head, failing to find a crevice or hint of erosion. Not even the water concerned the base of the wall. 

Hendricks made his way further into the chamber, and Deena followed. At the end of the room, three rows of text greeted them at eye level. The wall looked startling out of place in comparison the intricacies with the rest of the chamber, devoid of any details besides the letters. Extending his cube, Hendricks brought the shadows to life to dance around the grooved text for a better look. The scrawl now illuminated, the two looked between one another, dumbfounded, finding they could not read the legible text of their own language.

Incredulous, Deena said, "English letters?" Impossible. Their presence on this planet was impossible.

"Looks that way," Hendricks shrugged, though his eyes would not rest and darted back and forth.

Pacing, Deena reasoned, "The Uranography Guild charted this system three months ago, let alone discovered it a month in a half." Overwhelmed with the familiar feeling of daunting distress at the beginning of a rigorous curriculum, she felt smaller but perhaps hunching her shoulders fooled her into thinking that. "There wasn't any record of a preliminary charting team exploring the planet, and if the Guild didn't find it until now, no one could have."

Hendricks added, ""The stonemasonry looks freshly fire fused," Hendricks accurately deduced. "And with how the seismic readings struggled, this place's owners knew how to build and bury this place in secret - their technology is just as advanced as ours. But that must have been ages ago..." He looked sheepish when he registered Deena's surprise, "What? I read your publishings when I was assigned to your team." Deena straightened her posture, reconsidering Hendricks' authenticity. And his jawline. 

Deena knew she wouldn't get answers in her own head and motioned Hendricks' attention back to the text. She read it to herself once. Twice. She huffed halfway through her third reading. 

Hendricks read aloud, "When granit endurs, grits hearing not, hints intertwine unto." 

Silence entombed the room. Deena's feet shifted her weight each time she came close to understanding the riddle - presuming it was a riddle - but anyone would think her dancing to a tune with how she perpetually swayed back and forth.

"It sounds forced," Hendricks said.

"It sounds wrong, even without the misspelling," Deena replied. She muttered, "What the hell does that mean..?" Hendricks turned to her and smiled impishly. Leaning away from him, she asked, "What's with the look?"

"Never thought I'd hear you admit you didn't know everything is all," Hendricks replied.

"Wha- I whispered that; how did you hear me?" Deena sputtered. 

As if speaking directly in front of Deena, Jason said, "Actually, I could hear you from back here, too, Chief." Deena whirled to find Jason fifteen feet away, waving at her.

Hendricks momentarily forgot about the oxygen mask and went to scratch at his recent beard and ended up dislocating the apparatus ever so slightly. Noting the novice's straps in disarray, Deena shooed his hands away from his mask and adjusted them. She appreciated that he trusted her enough to remain still. He nodded his thanks.

When granit endurs.

Jason spoke, again at a resting volume but carrying throughout the room, "The acoustics in here are wild," he gestured to his datapad and waved to the ceiling, "Soundwaves, somehow, hit every corner in here without an echo." 

"Soundwaves don't work that way, even in an enclosed sound cubicle," Hendricks pointed to the ugly entrance they smashed open.

"That is true," Jason said.

"So that's impossible," Hendricks asserted.

"Again true," Deena nodded to herself. She pondered how quickly she accepted that this humble chamber broke millennia of accepted physics. "Jason? Is this message flagging anything in our database?"

Jason remained quiet for a moment, save for the flurry of his fingers against the datapad. "Mm... It'll take a while to sift through everything." Deena nodded, not expecting too much. Not without any filtering keywords to help limit the scope.

Grits hearing not.

Then Deena blinked, a thought hatching, "Jason? Sift through by mediating keywords that relate to sound: 'Soundwaves', 'Audio', 'Voice', 'Speech'-"

Hendricks chimed in, "'Echo' maybe?"

"Right, anything relating to those themes."

Jason hummed, moving to join them in the back of the room, "That shortens the search significantly." He paused to input a few more commands, "Just a moment and - Eh. Nothing. Sorry, Chief."

Deena cursed to herself, this time in the sanctity of her head. Still, Hendricks supported, "It was a good idea. Maybe if we code in the right keywords we'll-" he stopped when Deena began incessantly shushing him.

Hints intertwine unto.

Hints.

"Wait-wait-wait..." Deena reread the lines. "'Hint..?' What hint?" She wouldn't believe a civilization so developed with physical knowledge to forget two letters. Hoping for a eureka, Deena settled with a small step forward, "It's a code. I'm not sure what kind but I'm sure that our 'hint' will intertwine with the purpose of this room. And that first word is our first hint."

Jason sighed, "You're asking for a miracle, Chief. Even with keywords, I can't crack a code that our database hasn't seen before." Deena let that sink in, accepting that whenever she called for assistance when they got aboveground there would be a dozen more experienced archeologists, hand-picked by the Guild. that would take over her first finding.

And then, almost casually, Hendricks posited, "It could be an anagram."

"A what?" Deena asked.

"An anagram, it's a sentence or two where the letters are supposed to be rearranged to reveal the true message. And sometimes they'll purposefully leave in an odd letter or two out of place as a hint." Hendricks looked between his counterparts, "What? I know things." 

Deena's voice rose, "Why didn't you tell us about this sooner?"

Hendricks found his boots interesting when he replied, "I didn't know that mysterious, underground chambers could have anagrams. I just didn't think about it." Again Deena thought to herself that she and her crew misjudged this man too hastily. 

"All right, can your pad rearrange our puzzle into something comprehensible?" Deena asked Jason.

"Just a moment," Jason nodded. He handled awkward silences well when engulfed in his programming and analyses, but Deena found them suffocating.

Ignoring the lack of privacy, Deena leaned to Hendricks and said, "Thank you. Regardless of your theory, thank you." He smiled at her, and she could tell his warmth was real.

"Got it - wow, uh, well I got a bunch of different possibilities," Jason said. He cocked his head to the side, "I took the liberty of using your keywords from earlier, Chief, and while that helped it looks like I got a few contenders. Give me a second." He took his time, carefully reading over them all before continuing, "I think this might be our winner." He tapped the pad several times and projected the rearranged letters over the stone text.

This time Deena read aloud, "'Wanderer then sing, Air on the G String, with true intentions.'" Essentially sing a song she didn't know with all of her heart. Still, it's calling for them to fill the granite room with noise did match with this message.

"Air on the G String?" Hendricks asked Jason.

"A song composed by someone named Bach, though it's spelled B-A-C-H, and it's the reason I choose this sentence out of the twenty - it was the only keyword that came back matching something in our databases," Jason said. He waved the datapad a little, "I have the song ready to play if you want?"

Deena nodded, "I've scarcely listened to anything from Earth itself." She turned to Hendricks, "You?" He shook his head but looked eager. "Then let's hear it, Jason." 

Tapping the pad a chorus of music, foreign to Deena's ears, greeted granite and she found herself helpless to sway with it. She didn't recognize some of the instruments as they likely fell out of use since abandoning Earth long ago but she could somehow tell that they were all handcrafted with devotion and utilized with passion. Nothing like the synthetic symposiums in the present. And despite the stark absence of voices, Deena let the strings hum a story. She didn't know what the story was, but she imagined it was about a dance between two friends under a shower of stars. The tune suggested they batted heads, clashed opinions, and had fights but the harmony. God, that harmony, it brought them back together. 

And then water began to glow, actually, illuminate around their boots. It swirled and rose in rhythm with the music. With each churn, the water discolored and pooled into smaller streams to churn and spin into the ceiling and into and through the holes of the brilliantly reflective metal. Deena watched in awe the magic before her eyes that began to mist. They certainly didn't teach or prepare you for this. She didn't know how much time passed listening to the song but the song and the water slowed and began to recede. But when the music faded, the water found its new home by spilling, somehow, onto the four panels in the room. 

The panels didn't resemble stone anymore, but fresh oil paintings on canvas like that of the oldest remaining artifacts of Earth. Detailed figures in outdated clothing, it seemed that many of the same figures appeared in each of the murals, traveled across green fields, glass cities resembling late-Earth architecture, and into stars. Residents of Earth, here, perhaps hundreds of years before any others. The discovery of a lifetime. But the last panel stole Hendricks' attention the most. He walked to it, his hand failing to reach for it before he fell to his knees.

"These were the Clairvoyants," his voice hollowed. "The Exiled Clairvoyants."

"You know who built this place?" Deena asked, unable to withhold the excitement in her voice.

"Yes, and I know that my corporation's predecessors were the ones who exiled them. Well, who tricked them into being the first to try interstellar flight." 

"What do you mean, try?" Jason asked, unable to withhold the venom in his voice. Deena grabbed him by the shoulder, hoping to defuse his anger with a gentle touch. 

Hendricks remained quiet but chuckled once, "They intended to send out a willing group and collect data, not expecting them to return home. What they didn't expect was that they were smart enough to survive well past the expected trial - I'm not sure where the name came from but maybe that's where it started. Then they seemed to just, up and leave. The company did not take kindly to that."

Deena breathed, "They lost them?" Her eyes darted to the final panel.

"Hendricks nodded, "Yeah, they did. And the embarrassment scarred them until they rebranded." He gestured to himself. "They always wondered where they went. Now I guess they'll know." The three of them looked at the final panel, a map of the stars with a waypoint shining. Presumably where the Clairvoyents went.

Without hesitation, Deena said, "Then we won't tell anyone."

Both men, in unison, cried, "What?!"

"We don't tell anyone we found this place," Deena reaffirmed, without any hint of bitterness. "We came down looking for whatever pinged our radar - we'll say it was a mineral deposit not worth our time - and we don't report it to the Guild or, by extension, your supervisors."

This time Jason grabbed her shoulder, "This is your first big discovery, it would probably be the biggest of the century." 

"I can't ask you to do that, Deena," Hendricks said. His voice indicated he knew what this meant to her. Perhaps he, indeed, was more than just a rich jawline.

"I'm not asking you to. My job is to preserve culture and if the Corporation found out that these Clairvoyants were still around I wouldn't be doing my job would I?" Hendricks slowly shook his head, his eyes welling with tears and gratitude. "Then let's go, and let's be sure to delete all of our footage." Before either man could reply she grabbed them by the arms to walk them all out. 

After shooing them out of the crevice they cracked not long ago, Deena James faltered and looked behind her. She didn't feel any bitterness, but she did acknowledge the sorrow in her chest. Reminding herself of the important takeaway she smiled beside herself knowing that she had discovered something. Though no one else would ever know, she relished knowing someone was out there, singing of old Earth and preserving their own bit of history.