Chapter 2

Norm Spellman sat with his mouth hanging open. "Could… could you say that again, Max?"

Max grinned a humorless grin. "Yeah, that's about the way I reacted when Rhada told me. But it appears to be true: there was an earlier—more advanced—civilization on Pandora and they built a massive structure underneath where the Tree of Souls is now. We'd like to investigate it, but we realize how sensitive this all might be to the Na'vi."

Norm looked around at the other people in the room: Jake, Grace, Rhada and Ivan. They were in one of the Heaven's Gate avatar labs. The atmosphere was Earth standard, which allowed the humans to breathe normally. The mix would not harm a Na'vi unless the exposure was in terms of days rather than hours. Even so, Norm felt like all the air had just been sucked out of the room. "You… you've got data to back this up, I assume," he choked out.

"Yup. Rhada, will you give them your little presentation?"

"Sure." Rhada got up and activated a display. "Now, as you know, I started out trying to determine how the great stone arches around the Tree of Soul were formed…"

Fifteen minutes later Rhada sat down again and Norm let out the breath it felt like he'd been holding the entire time. "Holy shit!" he gasped. Grace looked similarly gobsmacked. Jake just looked puzzled. "This is… is… unbelievable!"

"The implications are… staggering," said Grace, a deep frown on her face.

"You didn't get any inkling of this from Eywa?" asked Rhada.

"No. Nothing."

"Do you think perhaps she deliberately didn't tell you? I mean, I would think that she would know something about this."

"Not necessarily," said Max. "We have to assume that Eywa came into existence over a long period of time and evolved along the way rather than suddenly springing into existence full-grown. We have no way of knowing how long that took or when she reached a state of what we'd call consciousness. It's possible she didn't reach her current state until after the arches were built and this theorized civilization fell."

Grace made a non-committal grunting noise and her hand passed in front of her mouth as if reaching for a phantom cigarette.

"So why all the long faces?" asked Jake. "I mean this is all very interesting, I guess, but is it really that big a deal?"

"We are hoping that it's not," said Rhada. "But to be safe we are proceeding as if it is. We have no idea how the Na'vi will react if they learn about this. Hopefully they'll react just as you are doing: 'Hey, that's cool, but so what?' But what if this undermines some fundamental belief of theirs? What if it conflicts with their whole view of the world? It could do damage that we can't foresee."

"Yeah," said Norm. "Imagine if something like this happened back on Earth. The uproar, the crackpot religions that would rise up…"

"The Na'vi are a lot more rational than that," said Jake.

"Yeah, they probably are. But do you want to take the risk?" Jake frowned.

"Jake," said Rhada, "has Neytiri ever said anything to you about what the Na'vi know about the distant past? Has she ever said anything that might indicate they know something about a prior civilization?"

"No, not really. When she's talked about really long ago, she just calls it 'the time of the first songs'. Apparently that was when the first Toruk Macto lived. But I have no idea how long ago that was, a thousand years or… fifty thousand."

"The answers may lie inside the structure beneath the Tree of Souls," said Max. "We'd like your permission to take a look."

A nervous feeling passed through Norm. The scientist in him screamed 'yes'. But he had thrown in his lot with the Na'vi. He'd transferred himself into his avatar, married a Na'vi woman, had children… What might this discovery do to all their futures? "All you have to do is say 'no', Jake," he said. "That would be the end of it."

"Well, not exactly," said Rhada, looking uncomfortable. "I've asked the RDA orbital station to do some deep-scan radar surveys of this continent and I've identified several sites which might contain ruins of this earlier civilization. If you refuse us permission to look here, we could try those other sites."

"The RDA knows about this?" asked Jake in alarm.

"No. I just told them we wanted the scans to look for fault-lines to help in earthquake prediction. They know I'm a geologist and it's a perfectly normal request. Unless you knew what to look for, you'd never notice anything out of the ordinary. I'm a loyal citizen of Pandora, Jake, I won't do anything to jeopardize our home. That's why we're having this meeting."

"Damn," growled Jake. "But you're telling me that if I do say 'no' you'll go dig up those other sites?"

"I don't know," sighed Rhada. "None of them are close by and we'd have to negotiate with the clans who live there and I really don't want to go against your wishes. It's just that…

"You need to know."

"It's what we do, Jake. To be a scientist is an uncompromising search for the truth. I can't just pretend I don't know about this."

"No matter how many people it might hurt."

Rhada looked really unhappy and Norm knew what she was feeling. A new thought struck him. "Jake, one thing to consider is that if we let Rhada go ahead, then we are in control of it—to whatever extent anyone can be in control of it. As part of the treaty we've agreed to allow more human researchers to come to Pandora. What if ten or twenty years down the road one of them stumbles across this? The cat would be completely out of the bag and we'd have a hell of a time putting it back in. At least this way we can decide what information is released and who gets to see it. Scientific knowledge can be suppressed—but only for a while. Sooner or later it will come out."

"So you think we should do this?" asked Jake.

Norm held up his hands. "It's your call, boss."

"Well, no it's not and there's the real problem for you. This is 'Eywa Business', too, and that means Mo'at has at least as big a say as I do. Somehow I can't see her agreeing to this."

"No… but isn't she scheduled to go visit the Lutapawnis and check out your potential future son-in-law pretty soon? She'll be gone for what? A month? Two?"

"Wait a second," said Jake, an appalled look on his face. "Are you suggesting we try to sneak this past her while she's away?"

"It would be an option…"

"Not a very good one! And I'd still have to tell Neytiri."

"Would you?"

"Norm, I tried holding information back from her twenty-two years ago and you remember how well that turned out, don't you? No! No way!"

"What do you think, Grace?" The woman had said virtually nothing and that wasn't like her.

Grace shook her head. "I don't know."

A gloomy, awkward silence fell on the room, but suddenly Rhada stood up.

"Neytiri is the most truthful person I've ever met, Jake. She's like a scientist in that regard. Talk to her about this and see how she feels. I'll accept whatever she says."

[Scene Break]

"I never thought she'd agree," said Ivan, Tossing a shovel of dirt over his shoulder.

"To tell you the truth, neither did I," said Rhada, smiling at her husband. "Part of me was hoping she wouldn't."

"Really?"

"It would have given me a legitimate excuse not to pursue this. I mean I'm incredibly excited about this, it could be one of the biggest discoveries ever. But at the same time, I feel like I'm walking into a minefield. What if what we find really does screw things up for the Na'vi?"

"Well, maybe we won't find anything at all," said Ivan. "Don't start planning your trip to Stockholm to pick up your Nobel Prize yet, girl!"

Rhada laughed and pushed her own shovel into the dirt. The dig had started that morning with the arrival of the avatars from Heaven's Gate. None of them had ikrans, so they had to travel by horse—a two day journey. They were trying to be as unobtrusive as possible: no helicopters, no big power tools, just good old muscles. Big muscles, avatar muscles. The location was in a gully on the north side of the structure. It was over two hundred meters away from the Tree of Souls and well-concealed by the ground and vegetation. They were hoping that if anyone did come by the area they wouldn't notice them. Jake was doing all he could to send his hunting parties in other directions. The fewer people who knew about this the better.

They worked steadily until midday and then took a break. They had moved a lot of dirt, but there was still a long way to go. "How long do you think this will take?" asked Pablo Desante.

"Based on the scans, we will have to move around a thousand cubic meters of earth and rock to uncover the entrance," said Rhada. "With eight or ten of us working and each of us moving three or four meters a day it ought to take about four weeks."

"Oh joy. What fun."

"Well, just be glad you can do this as an avatar. In our human bodies it would take four times as long."

"So, about a month," said Ivan. "How long will Mo'at be gone?"

"Jake says that it will take her four weeks just to get to the Lupatawni Hometree by horse—she's making a couple of side trips to visit other clans. She'll be expected to remain there at least a couple of weeks."

"And another three or four weeks back. So, two months maybe. That doesn't give us a lot of time inside in there if you expect us to get the hole filled in before she returns."

"No, we'll have to be ready to take scans and holos of everything we can while we have the opportunity."

"So, back to work," he said, standing up and grabbing a shovel.

They worked steadily for four days. On the fifth day Jake flew out to take a look. "How's it going?" he asked Rhada.

"Good!" she replied. "Better than I'd hoped. When I did the calculations for the digging I used standard reference sources for civil engineering and I forgot to allow for the lesser gravity on Pandora. Not only can we move more in a day, but the sides of the excavation can be steeper without risk of collapse so we don't have to remove quite so much earth. Still, we've got another two weeks at least."

"Aren't you going to be hitting some big rocks as you get deeper?"

"Yeah, but one of the power tools we did bring is an ultra-sonic jackhammer. It can slice through rock like a knife through butter. We can chop any big rocks into small rocks very quickly and carry them out."

"Sounds good. But aren't you missing part of your work force?" he looked around.

"Some of them are sleeping. Since we have to keep a watch at night for safety anyway, we decided to work round the clock in shifts."

"Makes sense," he said nodding.

"So… So Neytiri didn't come out with you today?" asked Rhada.

Jake frowned and shook his head. "She's been acting… strangely about this whole thing. I was surprised when she said yes, but it's like you said: she has this unstoppable drive to know the truth about things. But I think maybe she's afraid to know the truth about this. So she'd hedging her bets. She's letting you investigate, but she's not coming to see for herself. At least not yet."

"Plausible deniability?" asked Rhada.

"I don't think that's it. She's going to tell Mo'at what she's done when she gets back. But she was definitely surprised by this whole thing. She says there's nothing that she knows that could explain it, but perhaps Mo'at has some shared memories from earlier Tsahik's that could shed some light. I asked her if she thought this discovery might disrupt Na'vi society but her answer was pretty noncommittal."

"Sounds like she's as baffled and worried about this as we are."

"Yeah. But on the bright side at least she didn't suddenly fly into a frenzy and scream: 'Oh no! You've uncovered the prison of the Dark One! You fools have doomed us all!'" Jake quirked up his mouth in a crooked smile.

Rhada laughed. "No, I don't think we'll find anything alive or undead in there."

"What do you think we'll find in there?"

Rhada sighed. "I keep thinking about that all the time I'm digging. Based on similar structures seen on Earth it could be a tomb, a temple, a fortress or a really big monument to impress the neighbors or maybe to honor Eywa."

"Which do you think is the most likely?"

"There seems to be way too much open space inside to be a tomb. At least not one like the Egyptian pyramids. I suppose it could be some sort of crypt for a royal family that kept getting used generation after generation. But it still seems awfully large for that. As for a fortress, I'm no expert on military engineering, but this doesn't seem to be constructed in a way to have much military value. So I guess I'm tending more towards a temple or a monument of some sort—although I can't see a reason for all the space inside if it's a monument. I wish we had a real archeologist, or even an historian in the clan. I'm out of my depth here."

"So, a temple maybe. Huh. The Na'vi revere Eywa deeply, but to build a huge thing like this just seems out of character for them."

"Well, we're talking about a different civilization, Jake. No telling what they were like compared to modern Na'vi."

"Yeah. I've gotta admit that I'm getting pretty curious about this myself. Got an extra shovel?"

[Scene Break]

Silwanin carefully pushed a leaf aside and peered through the gap. Yes, there was Father's ikran, this was definitely where he'd been going to secretly for all these days. But who were all these other people? And why were all those horses here? What were they doing? There were big piles of dirt everywhere. Were they digging? Yes, she could see people with tools for digging and others carrying away dirt in baskets. Oh, there was Rhada!

She must have found something with the probes!

After they had finished with all the scanning Rhada had simply said that it was going to take her quite a while to study all the information. Silwanin had not heard anything from her since then, many, many days ago. But it was clear that she must have found something. Something very interesting.

And she hadn't told her.

She felt hurt. She had done a lot of work, provided a lot of help. She had been made to feel like part of a team. But apparently she wasn't part of the team. But her father was. And there was Grace, too. And UncleNorm. A much shorter figure caught her attention and she recognized Maxpatel. Everyone seems to know about this but me! Her hurt was turning to anger. But then she realized that all of the other people there were dreamwalkers from Heaven's Gate. There wasn't a single native-born Na'vi present. What is going on?

Most of the activity was behind one of the big dirt piles and she couldn't see from where she was. Slowly and silently she began to shift her position to get a better look. It wouldn't do to get caught now. Not after all the trouble she'd gone to to slip away from Hometree—and Mother—unseen. Clearly she wasn't supposed to know about this and she didn't think Father would be too happy to find her here.

She'd left her horse on the other side of the hill and worked her way here unseen. Moving into a position where she could see would be a little tricky, but she thought she could do it. Fortunately of all the people she was trying to avoid, only Father and Grace had any hunting skills and their attention was on the hillside, not in her direction.

She reached a position where she could see a little better. There was a long trench dug into the hill and a dark opening at the end. But what was it? If she moved a little further to her left she might be able to see more. She slowly crawled around a small tree…

…and found herself looking at a blue foot…

…attached to a blue leg…

…attached to…

"H-hello, Mother. I see you."

"And I see you!" said her mother. "What are you doing, child?" She reached down and took hold of her queue and gently but irresistibly hauled her upright.

"I… I was curious."

"Really? Your father once told me a Sky People expression about curiosity killing a cat. I don't know what a cat is, but I could certainly see curiosity killing you someday!" She turned her toward where all the people were working and marched her forward.

"How did you find me?" asked Silwanin.

"I'm your mother," she replied, as if that answered everything. As they approached the dig site, people began to turn in their direction. Father was facing away from them, but when UncleNorm saw them he looked at him and pointed over his shoulder with an amused look on his face. Father spun around and his eyes got very wide.

"Oh crap," he said.

To Be Continued