Simon jumped down through the open hatchway and hit the dirt. He knelt down and felt the vegetation slowly, reverently with his hands. Marko and Elaine watched, Elaine slightly bemused, Marko impassive. After about a minute, he stood up, sighed, and climbed back into the ship. Without a word to either of them, he led Marko and Elaine into the cockpit. Marko sat down and prepared for takeoff. Had twenty minutes passed? thought Elaine. She didn't think so. Wally... you'd better get Guybrush quick, because I haven't a clue where we're going.
"But how can this be your homeworld?" Elaine asked Simon. "We looked at it from orbit. No signs of any technology."
"We were a very advanced race," said Simon. "Far more advanced than you. We didn't use non-degradable materials, and most of our buildings were actually reinforced by electrical fields. When they came, it didn't take long before everything was gone."
"Who are they?" asked Elaine.
"They were - look, I'll have to pause here a moment. Marko? Are we ready for takeoff?"
"We are," Marko grunted.
"Okay. Here's what you do. Get up to one hundred metres or so, and head for whatever hills or mountains you can find. When you get there, slow down. Look for whatever cave openings you can find - really big ones. At least twenty metres diameter. They don't have to look like natural caves, probably because they won't be. Got it?"
"Yeah."
The ship rocked under their feet, and then they were airborne. Simon looked back at Elaine. "Okay. Let's begin at the start...
They'd found the stones in a steep canyon on an outer moon many millions of
kilometres from their home planet, Yssildron. (Our word for the land, said
Simon). The lone traveller who'd found them - Simon left his name blank,
saying "You'd have trouble with it" - brought them back to Yssildron, and
the study began.
At this point in time, the Ysilldrons were a technologically advanced, quiescent race. They lived lightly, leaving no lasting structure on the land. Space travel was, for them, more recreation than anything else. The arrival of the portal stones was to change all that.
Not that anyone knew this at the start. At first, the mood among the scientific community was one of genial bemusement, as the portal stones defied all attempts at scientific study. Then, came the breakthrough. An energy blast delivered to one of the stones, held in isolation from the rest, transported a large proportion of the laboratory into orbit around Yssildron. Fortunately for the scientists inside, the rooms were completely sealed and they were rescued after a few hours. More importantly, they immediately knew how these portal stones worked.
It all had to with where the energy blast struck the stone. Imagine a line, starting in the centre of the stone. Draw it out so that it left the surface at the exact point where the energy blast had struck. Extrapolate indefinitely in the same direction - this was where the portal stone would transport its surrounding material.
This wasn't just a lucky guess on the part of the scientists. The astronautical navigation systems of Yssildron used polar coordinates, unlike Earth's Cartesian grid of reference. The operation of the portal stones fitted their exising mindset like a glove.
More subtleties rapidly followed on the heels of the initial discovery. It was found that varying the energy of the blast varied the distance the portal stones would teleport - within certain barriers. It was found that two portal stones would transport a ship much, much further; and here the calculations were a lot harder, involving the centre of mass of the two stones.
With this knowledge, the Yssildrons began to roam the galaxy.
And they found other civilisations.
"How many?" asked Elaine. By now they were heading into the hills, the land below harder and more jagged.
"About two hundred," said Simon. "Including yours."
Elaine could barely believe this. Two hundred planetary civilisations, just in the one galaxy? She'd never look at the night sky the same way again.
"Yours was nothing special," said Simon.
Those were heady, intoxicating days to be living on Yssildron, as the boundaries of the known universe, both physical and mental, blew out around them. There was so much to learn, so many places to go, so much to do. Simon, a pilot of one of the Interplanetary Trader Ships, was in the thick of the revolution.
"We learnt more in five years than we had in the preceding five thousand," Simon. "But we didn't know the most important thing of all. You see, the portal stones weren't stones."
He looked at Elaine, a look of bitter regret. "They were eggs."