Diuturnity's Dawn by Alan Dean Foster Read Free Book Online

the first to descry the secret of the Mourners.
    That was why a base camp had been set up near the edge of the great escarpment. Below him, the sheer sandstone wall fell away more than a thousand meters to the flat valley floor below. Only the narrow and intermittent River Failings meandered through this desiccated vale, an echo of the immense watercourse that had once dominated this part of the continent. Already, field teams had gathered ample evidence that Comagrave had once enjoyed a much wetter and greener past. Whether this was the reason, or one of the reasons, for the demise of the Comagravian civilization and the highly advanced people who had called themselves the Sauun had yet to be determined.
    Already, human exoarcheologists had accomplished much. Ruins of sizable cities were to be found on every continent. There was evidence of extensive agriculture, mining, and manufacturing—all the detritus of an advanced culture. And yet, tens of thousands of years ago, it had all perished. Nor was there any proof that the Sauun had achieved more than rudimentary space travel. Preliminary surveys of the planet’s three moons revealed the ruins of only automatic stations, with no provision for habitation or development.
    This did not jibe with the level of scientific achievement visible in their abandoned cities. There were gaps in technological evolvement where none ought to exist. It was the presence of such gaps in the Comagravian historical record and the desire to fill them in that drew researchers like Cullen to a world so distant.
    Behind him, portative digging equipment hummed softly as fellow team members and advanced students strove to bring to the light the answers that hopefully lay buried beneath the hard, rocky surface of the escarpment. A vanager cried as it dipped and soared above the valley floor. With a leathery wingspan equal to that of a small aircraft, the indigenous scavenger could stay aloft indefinitely, carrying its two offspring in a pouch beneath its neck. Vanagers lived in the clouds, mated while aloft, and raised their progeny without ever touching the ground. To feed, they dove and plucked what they could from the surface or snatched it out of the air. Long ago they had lost all but rudimentary evidence of legs and feet. A vanager caught on the ground could only flop about clumsily, its great wings useless until a gust of wind sent it aloft once more. Or so the biologists insisted.
    Far across the valley, the Mountain of the Mourners stared back at him. Literally. Hewn from the solid green-black diorite of the mountain from which they seemed to be emerging, the Twelve Mourners were at eye level with the top of the escarpment. Counting elaborate headdresses whose significance had yet to be interpreted, they averaged some fifteen hundred meters in height. How they had been carved, when and with what tools, was another of the many mysteries that Comagrave proffered in abundance.
    With such gigantic representations of their kind available for study, there was no wondering what the Sauun had looked like. Tall and slim, with long, humanoid faces and horizontally slitted eyes, the colossal carvings were clad in flowing robes embellished with elaborate decorations and intricate designs. Despite their immense size, the Twelve had been depicted with extraordinary care and detail. Who they had been, no one yet knew. Knowing that the Sauun had progressed beyond kingdoms to a modern, planetwide government, all manner of possibilities had been proposed. The Twelve could be famous artists, or scientists, or the carvers themselves. Or politicians, or criminals, or individuals chosen at random, or composites of a theoretical species ideal. Cullen and his colleagues did not know, and they burned to find out. On one verity they were pretty much agreed: It seemed unlikely any civilization would go to the trouble of chiseling fifteen-hundred-meter-high images out of solid rock, finishing and polishing them with