Dsicovery Pt VIII (standard:science fiction, 1132 words) [8/8] show all parts
Author: Goreripper	Added: Dec 11 2001	Views/Reads: 2309/1723	Part vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Mission accomplished, and the narrator returns home, but not without one final revelation.

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

begin to speculate, but it had left behind a powerful monument to the 
achievements of this long gone race. From all the data we had collected 
about these people, we had never found any conclusive proof that they 
had ever developed the capacity to travel beyond the speed of light, 
and indeed it appeared that they had believed it an impossibility. But 
their desire to explore had sent them beyond the arc of their own 
planet, to the small red desert world where we had discovered the 
forlorn settlement of subterranean domes. Yet here, to this small, grey 
moon, here it was that they had, of course, first come. 

For it was evident that this forgotten structure had once been used as
some primitive launch pad for a spacecraft, perhaps some shuttle 
between the satellite and the blue-green planet below. Attached to its 
network of bars and rods which formed its structure there was a small 
engraved plate of polished steel, still bearing the alien inscriptions 
and diagrammatic map of the world we now know as Arcana, untouched for 
thousands of years. Untouched and unread, waiting for us to find it. It 
has taken almost forty years for the languages and dialects of that 
lost species to be revealed to us, even longer for the mysteries of 
their writing to be revealed, especially as so little of it exists. Yet 
that plaque remains as it was when it was first set there, and only 
last week the immeasurably ancient alphabet was deciphered and its 
message revealed to us. Part of it is an unrecognisable word and 
character sequence, possibly a date, but the rest is now quite 
apparent. It is a message of pure simplicity and poignancy, a statement 
of opulent idealism, marking perhaps the most significant scientific 
achievement in the long and turbulent history of this alien species. 
And this is what it says: 

“Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon We came in
peace for all mankind”. 


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