by Bill Adams
Wongama began to mutter about that. “Air pumps, or free flow to the outside shaft?…Free flow. You know, that may be why the lake is kept poisonous, the water-pumping problem would be bad enough without organic congestion…”
I noticed that Lagado was whispering, “Yes. No. Yes,” as if keeping up with the argument.
Spinning their wheels. What was I reminded of? The Barbarossa, but never think about that, just know it’s you, it’s you they’re waiting on.
“…all these reservoir systems, must be tempting to use hydraulics,” Wongama was telling himself, “but—”
“Piet!” I called out. Everyone jumped.
“Yes?” Wongama said.
“We’re going to have to risk the controls. Just an elevator, can’t be too dangerous. I want you to go through those touchpoints, try them all, try combinations, any consistent system that occurs to you. Foyle?”
“Yes, sir?” A rare “sir” from her.
“I want you to keep a record of everything Piet tries, in case he loses his place or wants to take back some moves. If you get a good idea of your own, tell him, but don’t argue.”
She took a step forward, then stopped, nervously fingering the pendant chain around her neck. “I could use a watch,” she said.
Helen Hogg-Smythe removed her wristcomp. “Here, take mine.”
“Ken?” I said next.
“Sir?”
“You know something about antique military hardware?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why don’t you observe, then? The abbreviations on the touchpoints may begin to make sense as Piet proceeds.”
He bowed his head, one sharp chop, and joined the others inside.
“There’s not much more room in there,” I said. “We’ll have to leave it to them.”
But the change in morale was striking. It was coming back to me, the feel for command. Commands themselves, that’s all. It’s nice if you also have special knowledge, experience, judgment. But if you don’t, you can free those who do, clear away the distracting options, ask them by telling them. Once the initiative has been taken, it can be distributed.
“After all,” Helen Hogg-Smythe said, “we started this thing, somehow; we should be able to stop it.”
“I’m not so sure we did start it,” Ariel said in a small but thoughtful voice. “The platform didn’t move until we were all on it. Friar, you went for your camera just as the commissioner and I stepped on. When you returned, Harry had gone for Helen’s stick. But the very first moment all ten of us were finally on deck—that was when it returned to the shaft. And now this place is a secret again. No one will know where we’ve gone. No one will even miss us for a week.”
“What are you saying?” asked Lagado. “Someone…below, controlling us? Firstly, they’d have to have sensors up here—”
“How about these ugly ornaments on top of the booth?” Ariel suggested.
I borrowed Hogg-Smythe’s staff and tapped one of the black glass protrusions. It shattered, and Lagado picked up one of the pieces.
“A lens. Yes.” He took a deep breath and spoke almost too rapidly to follow. “But secondly, how could they be sure that we ten were all? They’d have no way of knowing there weren’t others nearby. I think the platform is withdrawn automatically after a brief time, in order to protect the secret of its existence.”
“Anything’s possible,” I said. “But I think it’s worth killing all these cameras. If a machine is running them, it’ll become less certain of us, and more careful. And if it’s people, they’ll have to come face us.”
I had the others step back, smashed the rest of the lenses, and returned the staff to Hogg-Smythe.
The circular wall still streamed up beyond the rim, but suddenly there was a change, an extra push against our boots.
“Something!” Wongama called out from within the booth. I stuck my head in.
The touchpoints were lit from within. Wongama tapped one tentatively, and there was no additional change.
“That’s it,” he said. “We’re locked in.”
“Or locked out,” said Foyle.
“Do you think so?” he asked her, the first uncertainty I’d ever seen from him.
And she was declining further into humanity, too, putting a hand on his arm. “No, I think you did right. That last series registered a command. And we’re slowing down.”
“When it stops, the panel will probably be free again,” Wongama told me. “Then we should be able to find an ‘up’ option. It’s a little more complicated than an elevator—there’s a safety sequence you have to go through to get a response—but no serious security passwords.”
“We’re definitely slowing down.” Lagado’s voice.
Everyone moved outside. That’s when the banshees attacked.
A half dozen high-pitched voices shrieked among us in the semidarkness. My companions shouted and flailed about desperately as brightly-lit fireflies followed the movements of their arms—shrieking and burning.
Helen Hogg-Smythe cried out and let her metal staff jump from her hand, and as it fell a weird blue ball of Saint Elmo’s fire shot along its length and boiled away up the shaft. Harry Lagado had a hand in front of his face, and the glowing image of a naked girl, about twenty centimeters tall, stood on his knuckles, while on Friar Francisco’s wrist was a blazing red spider of equal size—which vanished—as did the fireflies and the maniacal shrieking voices, gone as mysteriously as they had come, leaving us milling and shouting in confusion as we felt the weight of additional deceleration, slowing over a few hundred meters. I bent down and carefully touched the staff. No shock. I picked it up.
“My watch burned out,” Ruy Lagado said.
“They all burned out.” Mishima’s voice was flat and impersonal.
“Look!” Harry pointed. A lit open space in the shaft wall was rising nearby, aligned with the control turret. A corridor became dimly visible beyond it. If we’d had a moment to think—but we didn’t. The platform came to a definite halt.
And the hidden klaxon sounded again, too close, deafening. It was too much; inevitably, someone bolted, and the rest of us followed.
Perched in a heap within the revealed corridor, we watched our only transportation drop away. It stopped again a dozen meters down, rotated to bring the control booth around to another corridor opposite us, paused, blew its klaxon, and dropped again. Out of sight.
Ariel gave a little cry and jumped up. She’d seen a small control panel next to the doorway. One touchpoint, at the top and larger than the others, might have been a call button. She pushed it and looked down the shaft.
Instantly a metal door slid downward across the opening to meet the floor with a locking sound.
Ariel threw herself at the metal facing, pounding on it with her fists, shouting, “Piss on it, piss on it, piss on it!”
When she finally turned around, pale and shamefaced, she said only, “Well, that was silly.”
“On the contrary,” said Ken Mishima. “It’s only good form, to use anger against fear. Both are then spent.”
I had other things to worry about, but the man was getting me down. One phrasemaker is enough for any party.
“What…happened back there?” asked Helen Hogg-Smythe.
“Electromagnetic pulse,” Wongama said in a tragic voice, cradling his watch as though the wrist itself were broken; some wristcomp users become totally dependent. “EMP. Caused by our movement through a powerful field, or perhaps by its internal pulsations. Took the form of a power overload. Lit up the wristwatch screens, set the speakers screaming, and burnt them out entirely.”
“I even picked up a charge along my staff,” Hogg-Smythe said. “But what were those images in the air? The spider, and so forth?”
“The watches again. Previously stored holograms forced through the projectors. Isn’t that right, gentlemen?”
Friar Francisco nodded. Harry blushed.
“I guess that explains it,” Hogg
-Smythe agreed.
“And more,” Wongama said. “We were wondering why this place had never been picked up on scanners. The veil of energy we just passed through could be the key.” He looked down the empty, curving corridor. “Which in turn means that this complex…doesn’t have to be particularly small.”
“No more exploring!” Ariel said. “We’ve got to get the elevator back. We have a panel.”
Wongama straightened up and looked at the small metal plate and its array of touchpoints. “Similar, but different,” he said. “I don’t like the look of that lower keypad. This is the logical place to require a password.”
“I don’t know anyone who’s going to figure it out but you,” I told him.
“At least we established the difference between prefixes and root codes…” He propped himself against the wall and leaned over the panel.
“What’s back here, do you suppose?” Harry asked, farthest down the corridor. His father seized his arm.
“No more running ahead of us, Harry.”—and in this sentence, mysteriously, it was decided that we would explore a little after all—“No more running without thinking. The commissioner is in charge.”
“My legal authority is pretty tenuous here,” I said. “But I’m willing to coordinate things as long as it’s useful.”
“That suits,” Foyle said, and the only other permission I seemed to need—Mishima’s nod—followed.
I told Wongama that we would just poke our noses around the corner, but that someone would stay within earshot. He nodded absently.
The corridor curved away to the left, featureless except for the ceiling lights, only one in five of them lit. The way was wide, but we took Mishima’s advice and proceeded in single file.
“If the place is abandoned,” Harry asked, “why the lights?”
“You leave self-maintaining installations running,” Mishima answered, “to last longer. Especially a hiding place like this—just in case you might need it again sometime.”
Within a hundred meters, the corridor straightened out and opened into a large, high-ceilinged chamber. It was almost spherical, with an impressive circle of statues or monuments filling the center of the sunken floor and a number of closed doors and access panels lining the sides.
“Looking bigger all the time,” Ariel said.
“Yes, isn’t it splendid?” said Helen Hogg-Smythe, but she sounded uncertain.
We were clearly standing in the room’s main entrance. While most of the statues faced inward, toward each other, the foremost—a dart-shaped memorial stela—bore a plaque angled at our position. The farthest, a group of heroic figures, was spread across a base tall enough to raise it above the rest, into our view. The tall group did not quite block sight of a diorama or holographic representation set into the far wall, behind dusty glass: a fanciful landscape. But the stela had captured my attention.
The plaque bore two messages, the higher of which looked as if it had been carved long before the lower. I walked closer.
The higher message was inscribed in the quaint sans-serif style once called Modern, the same lines in three versions—Ur-Linguish, Deutsch, and Svenska:
HERE WE FIRST ENTERED
THE PLACE OF THE TITANS,
1 MAY 2470.
HERE WE FOUND SANCTUARY.
The lower message was in a more elaborate font, and translated only once, no Svenska:
WE DEPARTED ON 1 SEPTEMBER 3068.
TO THE TITANS WE LEAVE THE GRATITUDE
OF TWENTY-FIVE GENERATIONS.
TO ALL REFUGEES WE LEAVE THE PLACE ITSELF,
AND A WARNING:
YOU MAY FIND YOURSELF HERE,
BUT DO NOT LOSE YOURSELF.
The exploration party drifted about in small groups. Ariel, who probably couldn’t read Ur-Linguish, tagged along with me. I entered the main circle of statues.
There was nothing on the other side of the stela. The other pieces were mainly busts of stern-looking men and women, set on strangely shaped pedestals of blue glass. Dusty swivel chairs were bolted in front of several of them, which seemed odd.
The largest piece, the raised group study, was odder still. The towering figures, men and women in jumpsuits or coveralls, were molded in the heroic style and attitude of a familiar genre, “planting the flag.” But that’s not what they were doing.
They appeared to be stuffing a giant snake into a mail sack.
We had approached more closely to read the plaque on this monstrosity when Helen Hogg-Smythe appeared at the edge of the circle and said, too quietly, “I think you’d all better take a look at this.”
We followed her to the rear of the chamber, the inset glass case, and the diorama behind it. The glass front was some ten meters wide and nearly as high, heavily streaked with dust. Behind it was a three-dimensional rendering of a strange cityscape. On either side of the model stretched serried rows of ugly black buildings, with the suggestion that they went on and on, a great metropolis, the architecture itself monotonous and overpowering, but happily broken up by a series of green little parks with lakes and copses. Many blocks were connected in midair by slender transparent tubes of what was presumably meant to be a transportation system. In the foreground, one could look downward; a little cemetery appeared nearby, with crosses and other human symbols just visible. Just past its fence loomed a peculiar black wall, tall and oddly shaped. From the sharp angle that came forward to meet the cemetery, it extended far back in a narrow V that divided most of the city, then finally turned broadside left and right to form the city limits. Beyond this barrier one saw only wilderness, forest and plains rolling all the way to where the horizon met a strange sky, dull gray with fine silver lines tracing through it.
The meticulousness and credibility of detail was amazing, but as Hogg-Smythe cleared a larger area of dust this became less surprising. Because it wasn’t a diorama. It wasn’t even a hologram.
It was a window.
PART TWO
THE MAZE
Chapter Eleven
Postcards from a dead city:
◆◆◆
You are inside a magic cavern full of buildings and trees. But the cavern is too large to take in, the buildings appear fake or wrong, and the green clumps of trees look lost and unlikely—not oases, but mirages.
◆◆◆
Cramped plazas. Stretched-out high-rises topped with crenellated fortress walls. Terraces with insane overhangs that provide no view at all. Block after block the same, and then a break in the pattern that is even uglier, a ziggurat of squat modules seemingly fitted together at random. All clean and shiny, except in one roofed mall, where worn-out maintenance robots lie under centimeters of uncollected dust like cattle bones in snow.
◆◆◆
Most of the buildings are black, composed of the same ceramic slabs as the Stone Huts. There are no doors, only sliding panels to keep out the rain. And it should rain, for the ceiling—a silver-lined grid of luminous blue-gray panels, some blacked out—is kilometers above, and white clouds with oddly shadowed bellies can be seen, motionless, in the distance.
◆◆◆
Titans. A good name for the architects of this huge place. Even here, within walking distance of the abandoned city’s great elevator entrance, there are alien buildings that the human refugees of twelve hundred years ago never got around to colonizing. They are empty; the original inhabitants left nothing behind.
What were they like, these aliens? Their staircases, benches, and built-in shelves would seem to indicate a size and shape not unlike that of humans. But why then the vaulted ceilings—sometimes twenty meters high in rooms ten across? There are no paintings of them on the walls, no statues in the parks. No representational art at all. Where decorations are incised, here and there, they are cold, colorless, and abstract. Self-portraits of a different kind?
◆◆◆
But then there are the parks, so delicate by contrast that from a distance you expect bonsai trees and pocket-mirror ponds, and a
re surprised to find them life-sized. Above you spiral the glass arteries of the transport system, and these, too, seem creations of a radically different sensibility.
Could the humans have added these features later? But the human districts dispel this idea. The familiar wood panels of the colonial style line the great black boxes. The simple work of regular folk; it looks lost here.
◆◆◆
All ghost towns—all empty buildings—would rather you went away, but this city is something colder. Not malevolent, but devoid of the promise that sustains, like the eyes of a woman who loves another. There is nothing for you here, humans. A doorway to step into until the rain stops, some cold dark night when there’s no place else to go. Nothing more.
◆◆◆
I returned to the transport stop, careful of my feet on the transparent staircase up to the terminal. I’d sent Harry on ahead, to see if the others had left a message for us.
The transport system still worked. Its computers recognized that we were the only users, and routed us as if on private cars. The surviving maps of the system were of human origin, brass plates in Ur-Linguish, which most of our party could read; stops were color-coded to buttons on panels. Foyle had pointed out that these codes, too, would be human additions—the Titans didn’t appear to have had much color sense.
At first the archaeologists had been hell-bent on exploring. They assumed that since the builders of the cavern city had been aliens, “my” Commission would take over the site. As amateurs, they had only one day to make discoveries of interstellar importance.
We had visited a number of subway stops together, the major intersections of the system. We soon determined the limits of the district once recolonized by humans, and realized how empty the rest was, no alien possessions left behind.