Asimov's SF, January 2012 by Dell Magazine Authors

with shelves. Spare parts were stacked around the room. And some building materials. And—
    —In a corner, pieces of stone. Hutch recognized them immediately, slices of the columns, the rounded roof cut in half, pieces of the steps—
    It was the island building.
    "Eventually, we'll take it home,” said Abel. “We'll reassemble it and put it on the front lawn of the Tolliver Building.” At the Academy.
    "My thought exactly,” said Eddington.
    * * * *
    Lyla had been, apparently, someone's girlfriend. Forty-three hours after departing the Complex, Jake and Hutch rode the Copperhead's shuttle down to Lyla's surface.
    It was one of the Great Monuments. It had been erected in the middle of a flat rocky plain. Protected from the void by e-suits, they stood in front of it, and looked up. It towered over them, long golden-red petals, soaring into the night. The design was similar to the others in the series, the style, the general sense of ethereal beauty defying a boundless, uncaring universe.
    It was not, however, a depiction of a flowering plant, as Hutch had thought at first, but rather of solar flares, a tribute to the local sun. The flares, eight of them, lifted out of an engraved base and rose toward the unforgiving sky. They were of different sizes and textures. One was broken. Hutch looked up at it. No. Not broken. Unfinished.
    Neither Groombridge nor Hibachi's World was in the sky. The monument was on the back side of Lyla, so the planet was never visible, since the satellite was in tidal lock. But the stars were bright, and the monument caught and reflected the illumination.
    "It's magnificent, Jake.” She'd never actually been in the presence of one before.
    The base was engraved. Two lines of characters unlike anything she'd seen. The symbols that appeared on the Grand Monuments never matched each other. Theory held that each of the monuments came from a different era, the most recent ending at about 19,000 b.c. “I would have liked to have met them,” she said. “The builders."
    "You're a few thousand years late."
    "I know."
    "And you can't be sure they'd be friendly."
    "Jake,” she said, “there's no way I could be afraid of whoever put this here."
    "Jake.” Benny's voice. AIs were supposed to be detached. But he was so excited he'd fogotten that Hutch was theoretically in charge. “There's something else. Off to the left of the monument. Your left."
    * * * *
    There was a stone marker. Oval-shaped. Engraved with the same type of characters that were on the base of the monument. Two lines.
    Jake looked at the engraving, then walked back and looked at the one at the base of the monument. “Different messages,” he said.
    Hutch opened her channel to the AI. “Benny, scan the ground. Where we're standing."
    "Scanning."
    "You think something's buried here?"
    "Some one."
    "Jake."Benny again. “There's a box. With something inside. A skeleton. But not human. I would guess from its condition that it has been here a long time."
    They climbed back into the shuttle and the AI forwarded the images. Details were difficult to make out. It was a biped. Hutch counted six digits on each limb. And she saw a cluster of thin bones underneath that didn't seem to fit. Wings, maybe? If so, it might be a match for the creature depicted on the Iapetus monument.
    "I wonder what happened?"said Jake.
    "Best guess?” she said.
    "Go ahead."
    "This one died while they were working. While they were putting this thing together. Maybe they got caught off guard by a flare. Maybe it simply fell off a ladder. No way to know. And it doesn't matter. But they decided to pay tribute to it."
    "By burying it here?"
    "That, too."
    "What else?"
    "They left the monument incomplete. Maybe for them it constituted the ultimate recognition."
    "Okay,” he said. “Makes sense to me.” Big smile. “Hutch, I can't imagine a better way for you to launch your career. Find one of these? They'll put our pictures on the Wall of Fame."
    "I'll settle for my