“Suit yourself,” Jeph said. “Dutch, where’s Ian? I wanted him to join us.”
“He will meet you in the airlock,” it said. “I assumed you would want him to accompany you so I called him back to the ship.”
“Before we go inside, you will need to let Admiral Nakamiru know you’ll be out of contact for two to three hours,” he said. “He should know if you’re wearing biometric trackers, he won’t be able to read them either, so he shouldn’t panic.”
“The admiral doesn’t panic,” Jeffers said.
“But he will react.” Roja nodded at the captain. “Pass the word we’re off the com and I’ll report in when we get back to the Waltz.”
Jeffers stepped across the deck and lowered her voice as she talked with the Armstrong. While she was talking, the chancellor looked around the galley and crew deck. Her eyes fell on the viewscreen and their diagram of the facility below.
“Is that it?” she asked.
“I assume you scanned the structure below the surface?” Jeph said.
“We detected an impenetrable subsurface,” Jameson said. “It is too big to be an artificial structure so we’ve been exploring other ideas.”
“It’s artificial,” he said. “We haven’t been able to scan beyond the local horizon because of our position here, but we assume it covers most of the interior of L-4 Prime. If we are correct, then what you’re looking at on the screen is maybe a five-hundred-thousandth of the total area of the Tacra Un. Of that first chamber, we’ve unlocked about forty percent so far.”
“Tacra Un?” Roja asked.
“The Tacra Un, is what the facility is called,” Jeph said. “The language matrix is our name for this first chamber. It’s the gateway to the other things down there.”
“Do you know what’s down there?” she asked.
“Only conceptually,” he admitted. “But that’s why we brought you here.”
Jeffers walked back up and nodded. “He said he’ll wait to hear from you.”
“Then let’s go,” Jeph said, choosing to ignore that something in her expression said the admiral was indeed planning a response. “The entrance gangways are attached to the airlocks just above engineering.”
Ian met them inside the inner airlock door, nodding as they approached. “Nu cata Tacra Un ahn shada-Un-Shan-Takhu. Da-nu un,” he said winking at Jeph.
“Literally that means, ‘You below archive equals message star-Takhu. Me greater,’” Jeph said. “It’s the language of the ones who built this place.”
“Or, ‘I will be honored to take you below to the archive so you can understand the message of the Old Ones of the Star Takhu,’” Chei said.
“I resist your … words in my brain,” Ian said. “Is da-ahn easy for me to remind speaking in old way.” He frowned and shook his head.
“Dr. Whitewind I presume?” Roja said, offering her hand and clearly forcing a smile onto her face.
“Chancellor Roja, ahn da-nu … many years ago,” he said shaking her hand awkwardly. “We met.”
“When the Hector crashed here eleven years ago, Dr. Whitewind survived,” Jeph explained. “Along the way the Tacra Un overwrote his ship’s AI and started teaching him the Shan Takhu language. Dr. Soresh thinks the trauma of surviving the crash, followed by the years of isolation has given him a case of TSD that hardwired his brain to the new language. He speaks it more fluently than any of us.”
“You all speak this language?”
“Da-nu che Ian,” Jeph said. “To some extent. Let’s keep going though. We don’t want Admiral Nakamiru to get impatient.”
They got only another few meters when Jeph realized they needed a primer on how to enter the access tunnel safely. “You have to watch the sudden gravity shelf.” He pointed to the seam in the floor and walls where the exterior of the Waltz met the gray of the gangway. “Slide your foot slowly over the line where the ship ends and the Shan Takhu technology starts. Your body will go from the near weightlessness in the ship to full gravity and your muscles will need to acclimate or you will collapse. Since none of you is wearing an exosuit, you’ll also feel dizzy for a few moments until your blood vessels constrict. Step over and then stand still for a minute.” Ian had already walked several meters down the hall so Chei and Jeph stepped across the line and turned around to catch them if they dropped.
The chancellor studied them and when it was her turn, she tried to follow their exact motion, but still her knees gave out as she eased over the threshold. Jeph reached out and grabbed her arm to steady her. “That is an incredible sensation,” she said looking back over her shoulder as Dr. Jameson stepped into the tunnel and collapsed into Chei’s arms.
“I broke my nose the first time,” Chei said as he propped the scientist against the wall and reached out to offer Captain Jeffers a hand. “After a few times you get used to it.”
“That’s impossible,” Jameson said eyes wide in shock.
“Obviously since you experienced it, your assertion is flawed,” Chei said, snagging the captain’s hand as she reached out toward him. “Careful, foot first. The gravity field will suck you in when your hand breaks the barrier. It pulls your arm toward the floor and because your muscles can’t react correctly you end up face down before you can catch yourself.”
“I think that alone would be enough to park the skeptic in anybody,” Roja said as Jeffers stumbled forward into the hallway.
Dr. Jameson nodded. “It does appear to break the laws of physics as I understand them.”
Jeph just smiled and gestured down the hall. “Shall we?”
The chancellor nodded, reaching out and dragging her fingers lightly along the surface of the wall. “It really isn’t human is it?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Inside the Tacra Un: L-4 Prime:
“Now we’re inside the Tacra Un,” Jeph said as they walked into the airlock. “This was where we entered the structure for the first time. We bored down a hundred meters through the ice and our TICS disappeared as it fell through the wall.”
“I followed it down and that’s where I learned the lesson on what a gravity shelf can do,” Chei said.
“Fell through the wall?” Jeffers asked.
“This one is selectively permeable,” he said gesturing to the wall on the right. “Organic matter passes through it like it wasn’t there. So do our tools and sensor gear and we haven’t figured that out yet.”
The gray surface they indicated was indistinguishable from the other walls in the chamber and Dr. Jameson walked up and reached out to touch it. “I wouldn’t do that,” Jeph warned. “You’ll end up sticking your hand into an ocean of liquid nitrogen and ammonia.”
The scientist looked skeptical, but pulled his hand back and put it in his pocket.
“Here,” Ian said. He stood in front of a shiny black section of the opposite wall. The entrance to the language matrix had been open since they’d begun word mining, but it was closed now. “Nu ahn oolawath.”
“He’s giving you the chance to open the door,” Jeph said nodding to the chancellor. “Nu—you, ahn—equal to, oolawath—a compound word made up of outside and inside. It’s actually what the Shan Takhu call the door.”
“How do I do that?” Roja said.
“Walk up next to it and you’ll see how it works,” Jeph said.
Captain Jeffers shook her head and stepped up in her place. Ian stepped back to give her room.
A symbol appeared on the wall in the center of the black area. A ring with three bars radiating from it. Next a voice said, “Oola.” Another pictograph appeared. Three vertical lines with the center one smaller. “Ahn,” it said and a third symbol appeared. Three nested rings and a single bar. “Wath.”
“Oola ahn wath,” the voice said as each corresponding symbol flashed white in sync. All three words faded. Then they flashed in sequence with no sound before the process began again.
This time when they flashed in silence, Roja smiled and repeated them. “Oola ahn wath.” The door
vanished and Captain Jeffers jumped back in surprise. Dr. Jameson gasped from across the room.
“Oola ahn oola, trana wath,” Ian said.
“He told it to stay open,” Jeph explained. “Otherwise it only stays open a few seconds.”
“Let me see if I understand this,” Roja said. “In order to open the door you have to speak the command. In their language?”
“Exactly,” Jeph said. “And you have to recognize the pictographs. After the first series of repetitions, it assumes you recognize the symbol without the audible cue.”
“So you’re reading and speaking their language just to get through the door. That doesn’t sound like they want to keep anyone out,” she said.
“They don’t,” Jeph said.
Ian and Chei stepped inside and to the side and he gestured for their guests to follow them in. When he came through behind them Jeffers and Roja stood like statues. “This is the language matrix,” he said stepping around them and walking over to the edge of the balcony.
The chancellor blinked several times and walked up beside him, holding her hand out and feeling the floor with each movement of her foot.
“It’s alright there’s a barrier.” He rapped his knuckle against the clear membrane to make his point.
“It’s a little disconcerting,” she said, her voice almost a whisper.
“It’s about a kilometer in diameter,” Jeph explained. “There are over 1600 nodes and the one we’re heading for is barely visible from here.” He pointed to the amphitheater and she cocked her head to try to pick it out.
“So what are these things?” Jeffers asked.
“Language training modules,” Chei said. “Each one is interconnected to fourteen others and you can only move from one to the next by mastering the word combinations presented at each door. Once we’ve finished with all of them, we will have mastered a phrase vocabulary of something over 22,000 word groups.”
“You’re saying they want us to learn their language so that we can communicate with them?” Dr. Jameson asked.
“There’s a lot more to it than that,” Jeph said, grinning.
Ian had opened the first door and was walking along in front of them opening each node so that they didn’t have to go through the repetition of the door cycles. He left them open and moved forward quickly. Jeph and Chei stopped in the first few and pointed out how the doors and floor operated.
“You learned fourteen words per chamber?” Roja asked.
“Actually thirteen because the door we enter through is already open,” Jeph said. “After we branched off this main line, instead of single words, they were based on expanding complexity of word combinations.”
“At about the sixth node we discovered that there was a pattern to the arrangement of the word groups,” Chei explained. “Mathematical concepts are to the right, and biological forms to the left. Hard physics is above and words relating to the mind and social concepts are below.”
“We didn’t explore any of the divergent pathways until we came back in for a second visit. At first we remained focused on the idea that the center node was critical,” Jeph said as they walked along.
“What made you think that?” she asked.
“We could see from the entrance platform that it’s much larger than the rest of the language nodes. It also has a different appearance in that it seemed to be opaque rather than transparent,” he said. “You might have noticed that yourself, but we’ve been pushing you along at a faster pace than we took the first time.”
“A difference in appearance was enough to make you focus on it?” she asked.
“When we got here, we were grasping at straws,” Jeph said. “The quantum quicksand had us trapped with no way out. Under the assumption that it was artificial, we were looking for some kind of control center so we could cut it off. The amphitheater was the first likely place since everything else in here was identical.”
“That’s logical,” Jameson said.
“It’s also what I would have done,” Jeffers conceded. “As soon as you got inside, I don’t think you had any option other than to dig in.”
“We considered everything we could think of beforehand and other than waiting for help that would end up stuck with us, there wasn’t much else to do,” he said.
“So we became word miners,” Chei said. “Hoping to strike it rich and get away from here.”
“If you’d arrived on your original schedule, we’d have been close to completed with the language matrix,” Jeph said. “At our present rate of progress we’re over a month from done.”
“What happens when you finish?” Roja asked.
“We suspect that it will give us access to the rest of the facility,” he said. “Even though we can’t leave now, we still hope to find a control center and shut down the quicksand.”
Jeph stopped and held up his hand. “The next node is the amphitheater. By the time we’d made it this far, we’d learned the words in each node along this path and had a collective vocabulary of close to 600 words. Because you don’t have that, we’ll let Ian translate things for you. Once the Shada Shan Takhu starts, it does not pause.”
He looked at Jameson pointedly. “I know you’ve been recording since you got down here, but you might as well shut it down. You won’t be able to record the shada. We don’t know why, but all recording and com gear goes offline once it starts.”
Jameson pulled his thinpad out and tapped the screen to kill it. “Thank you for not preventing me before,” he said. “I figured it was prudent to document everything for the record.”
“Of course. We’re not trying to keep this a secret,” Jeph said.
Jeffers snorted. “Not keeping it a secret? Pardon my cynicism, but if you weren’t, we’d have done this on the Armstrong.”
“We just want to make sure you understand before we let Pandora out of the box. Once we get back to the Waltz, we’ll share the records of our first exploration with you.”
“Then let’s do it, shall we?” the chancellor said.
“Wath un oola,” the voice of the Tacra Un said as they walked in.
“You will want to stand there,” Jeph gestured for them to take up a position in the middle of the open space.
Ian stepped up behind them to translate. “Ready?” he asked.
Roja nodded.
“Oola ahn wath, shada Un Shan Takhu,” he said. “Make open the message of the old ones of the star Takhu.”
The light dimmed. A blanket of stars covered the walls and the four gas giants filled the center of the room above their heads. The ringless Saturn grabbed Jameson’s attention, “Saturn’s had rings for several hundred million years.”
“You could say this message is a little out of date,” Jeph whispered.
The giant planets pulled back toward the wall and the inner worlds materialized in their place. Word symbols floated over each one. The sun then appeared and two symbols appeared above it. “Shan Tarah,” the voice of the Tacra Un said.
“The Star Tarah,” Ian said.
“Dra che Shan Tarah,” it said flashing the image of Mercury and dimming the symbols to near invisibility.
“One child of Tarah,” he said.
“Oka che Shan Tarah,” it said. Venus brightened and then the words above it faded as well.
“Two child of Tarah,” he said shaking his head. “Second world,” he corrected.
“Para che Shan Tarah,” it said. This time rather than fading, the symbols grew brighter.
“Third child of Tarah. Earth,” he said.
“Lor che shan Tarah,” it said, fading the symbols but not darkening them to black like it had with the inner two worlds.
“Fourth world,” Roja said. “Mars.”
Ian nodded. “Brightness is life amount ahn each.”
A line appeared between Earth and Mars and then shot out past the gas giants to the Trojan cluster. “Nu wath Tacra Un.”
“You are inside the Tacra Un … here,” he said. As he spoke the
solar system shrunk to insignificance with only the words and a faint speck of light to identify the sun from the other stars. A line stretched from the solar system across the galaxy until it reached a dim red star.
“Oola Un Shan Takhu,” the voice said.
“Space of the Old Ones of the star Takhu,” Ian said.
As they watched, the symbol for Earth slid along the line until it reached the Shan Takhu star system. “Para che Shan Tarah ahn che Takhu Un. Tarah.”
“Third child of Tarah is a child of the old ones of Takhu.”
Chancellor Roja drew in a sharp breath. “They’re our parents,” she whispered. Jeph could see even in the dim light of the galaxy that she’d covered her mouth and stared wide eyed at the images around her.
The line from Earth dimmed and another one arced from Takhu and connected to bright white star in the same general part of the galaxy as the sun. A new pictograph appeared above the star. “Shan Utar,” the voice said. The symbol for Utar also slipped up the line to Takhu. “Lor che Shan Utar ahn che Takhu Un. Utar.”
“The fourth child of Utar is a child of the old ones of Takhu,” Ian said as the symbols for our world and Utar moved together and the symbol for ahn appeared between them. He paraphrased the meaning for them. “We are the same.”
The process repeated, with a line growing out of Takhu and reaching another star. And then another one appeared, and another one, until there were dozens. Each naming a world and claiming them as children of Shan Takhu.
“We’re not alone?” she asked, after watching the process for several minutes. Her voice sounded heavy and Jeph remembered how it felt when they stood here the first time.
He nodded, reaching out to hold on to her elbow. “We’re most definitely not alone,” he said. “Let me show you the space of the children of the old ones. Oola shan ahn che Un Takhu.”
Above them thousands of lines exploded out from the old one’s home system, each connecting to another star.
She and the captain both gasped at the same moment that Dr. Jameson’s knees buckled. Fortunately, Chei was watching the scientist and he eased him down to a sitting position on the floor. After several seconds of silence, the images faded and the lights came up.
Fulcrum of Odysseus Page 22