“Not unless you want to wear a full decon suit.”
“You left them that way?”
“If we hadn’t, who would believe that so much idiocy once existed? It’d become a story, then a fable, and would already be forgotten and dismissed.” For a moment, I recalled my mother’s stories—and that I’d forgotten many, demi training or not.
“Not if you kept it on your nets.”
“Nets aren’t the same thing. Some experiences require full-body reality.”
She raised those eyebrows again.
I blushed. Morgen could do that to me so easily. “That’s not what I meant.”
Her face turned professional. “I’ll try to remember that.”
Did she have to alternate between being a good cyb and a flirt? Or was that the idea, to keep me off-balance? Was there any question?
So I just waited as the dead silence continued, broken only by the chill wind that blew across the open electrocart.
“There must have been more people here than on some entire worlds,” the cyb navigator finally ventured.
“The peak population for the entire complex was around five million, in an area that ran two hundred fifty klicks north-south and about one hundred and fifty east and west.”
She frowned, and I could sense the mental calculations. “That’s over a hundred and twenty-five people per square klick.”
“Say a hundred meter square for each one.”
She shivered. “That’s hard to imagine.”
“That was spacious compared to some of the ancient cities, places like Newyrk or Mexity. The towers of Newyrk were the biggest in the world.”
“Why didn’t you save them?”
“It was too dangerous ecologically. Too many rivers, and with the rise in the ocean levels, the poisons were having too great a negative impact on the marine ecosystem. Cherkrik is ecologically isolated, at least comparatively.”
“How long does this go on?” she asked.
“We’re a bit north of the middle of the ruins. So we could travel another hundred and twenty-five klicks south, and it would look pretty much the same—except for the towers there.”
“Oh … .”
I eased the four-wheeler downhill, and we traveled on through stillness broken only by the whispers of the cold wind and the whining of the cart. A klick south of the rise where we had stopped, I turned west, in the direction of the Barrier.
Blackened swathes of vitrified material began to appear at irregular intervals through the ruins we were traversing, lines of black glass barely higher than the old secondary road the cart followed.
Finally, Kemra gestured without speaking.
“Orbital laser, powered by a sun tap.”
I could sense her noting that bit of information for her records. Would she would ask whether we retained that technology or just assume that we did? There was one such system, stored at the depot on Luna, but we had no intention of reactivating it. It wouldn’t cut adiamante.
The instances of black glass finally disappeared after another klick of whining westward. We entered the area where the buildings—built just before the Time of Troubles—were strong enough to resist time’s erosion.
“These look much newer,” Kemra observed.
“They’re still millennia old—one of the last achievements of the ancients.”
I eased the cart up beside a square structure comprised of gray building blocks, stopping on the south side in the sunlight. Each block bore a tracery of fine lines. At irregular intervals, holes had been punched through the synthetic stone, even though the hollows in the centers of the blocks had been filled with a cement that solidified as hard as the blocks themselves. Some of the holes were fist-sized, others almost large enough to walk through.
I flicked off the cart’s power.
“Why are we stopping?”
“To give you a close look at the ruins.”
“Isn’t a ruin a ruin?” The words were not quite playful.
“Sometimes.” I rummaged under the seat until I found the standard rock hammer, then laid it on the flat console top between us. After that I unstrapped the rifle, though I could sense nothing nearby. Most of the time the ruins were empty, since nothing grew in the center areas, and probably nothing ever would. Beyond the Barrier was another question, but I preferred being careful to being dead.
“Do I need one?” Kemra asked.
“One’s enough here.” With the rifle in one hand and the rock hammer in the other, I stepped up to the battered wall.
Kemra followed, and her gloved fingers ran across the stones of the wall.
“Take off a glove and touch it. The stone.”
“It’s just a synthstone.”
“Not just. This building was built in the Time of Troubles before The Flight.” I gestured around.
She peeled off a glove and touched the stone. “It’s just stone.”
“How cold is it outside? How cold is the stone?” I asked.
She nodded as she pulled her glove back on. “Almost a total nonconductor?”
“Pretty close.” I pointed to a protrusion, a rough and almost needle-like triangle of stone jutting into one of the larger holes in the wall. Then I handed her the hammer. “Hit that. Knock it loose.”
“I probably can’t.” She gave a hoarse laugh. “Not if you’re asking me to.”
I couldn’t help grinning. “Go ahead and try.”
She took a firm but not overpowering swing. The hammer bounced off the fragile-looking stone fragment without leaving a scratch behind. With a nod, she returned the implement. “What are the blocks made from?”
“It’s called bortbloc. Call it an early and cheaper relative of adiamante.” I stepped into the interior, dimly lit from the dozens of gaps in the wall, and red dust rose as I walked down a narrow corridor.
Kkcchhewwww!
“I’m sorry,” apologized the cybnav. “It’s dusty.”
I bent down and picked up an irregular chunk of bortbloc. “Here. You were interested in it.”
Kemra frowned but took it, slipping it into her jacket pocket. We walked back to the cart. The whole way I kept scanning for signs of predators, but didn’t sense a thing. That was fine with me.
After replacing the rifle in its stand, I guided the four-wheeler back onto the ancient secondary road, still heading westward, past endless battered and holed structures, roofless and more widely and irregularly separated than those to the east.
Ahead of us, over the mainly roofless bortbloc dwellings, loomed the Barrier, its black surface smooth yet unreflecting.
“What’s that?” Kemra finally asked.
“We call it the Barrier. It’s the only visible adiamante structure left on Old Earth. The only intact one above ground.”
“You have some installations below ground?” Kemra probed.
“There were some ancient installations that were covered by lava, and it wasn’t worth the trouble to break them apart. They may give some far-future geologist great pause, assuming there are any geologists in the far, far future.” That wasn’t the whole truth, and I wasn’t required to offer that, since, again, it would have been close to a threat.
I eased the cart to a halt in the open space east of the Barrier, that long unbroken black wall that stretched for klicks. I couldn’t sense anything living within at least a klick. Most predators avoided the Barrier—the stones still emanated death, although the systems had been depowered and removed millennia earlier.
“I’m hungry. How about you?” My question was rhetorical. The change in her circulation and skin color indicated a precipitous drop in blood sugar.
“Ah … something might taste good.”
Dienate had been as good as her word about provisions. Besides the sandwiches, crackers, cheese, and winter apples, there was even a bottle of Springfire with two mugs.
“Elegant for a ruins tour,” Kemra said after swallowing some of the Springfire and munching through half a bison and cheese sandwich. “Tasty, too. Wha
t’s the meat?”
“Bison. Even with the vorpals and the cougars, they tend toward overpopulation. So we can cull quite a few without upsetting the balance much. Originally, or semi-originally, hunters were part of the natural balance. I asked for the cheese because some people find the bison too strong without the moderating influence of the cheese.”
“You sound like a net engineer.”
I’d done that, too, but admitting it wasn’t wise. “Coordinators pick up things from everywhere.”
“Including off-planet.”
I shrugged, hoping the semi-flirtatious phrase was just gentle flattery. Rather than answer, I ate the other half of my sandwich in four bites. The cyb hadn’t been the only hungry one.
“How did you get to be a navigator?” I asked, sipping Springfire kept chill by the wind and the ambient temperature.
“I always wanted to be one, and I was good with astrophysics. I qualified as a pilot, and, after a long time, here I am.” She finished the crackers and the cheese I’d offered her.
“You’re the most senior woman in the Vereal Fleet, aren’t you?”
“Someone has to be. Most women don’t like to specialize in abstract concepts and calculations. I do.”
“We do tend to have fewer female rat-comps,” I admitted, “but not nearly so few as the ancient theorists predicted.” After a sip of Springfire, I asked, “What prompted the mission to Old Earth?”
There was a long pause before she answered. “A number of things. Curiosity. Wanting to know if the demis survived. And we were visited by a ship from one of the former colonies of the Rebuilt Hegemony.”
In short, they’d reclaimed their technological heritage and discovered that the bogeymen of the far past had apparently crumbled. Yet they’d still sent twelve adiamante hulls. That alone showed how deep the fear and hatred ran.
I gathered the remains of our meal back into the bag, corked the half bottle of Springfire and put everything back in the locker. “Ready?”
“For what?” she asked.
“The interesting part of the ruins tour.”
The cart rolled forward and eased through the gate. The gate: ten meters tall, imperishable and enduring, still glittering black and untouched except for the thin coating of white dust. From the guardhouse above pointed dual barrels of Sasaki cannon, and the cracked ceramic sleeve of an antipersonnel laser. The early demis had coated them with preservatives to maintain their legacy of menace. Those particular weapons were the only part of the ruins we had preserved, but I still felt the Consensus had been right in choosing to do so. I still supported it, although the bitterness over preserving just those few weapons had lasted for generations.
Beyond the gates were the plastic trees, now nearly eighty meters tall, their twenty-meter-plus trunks elbowing aside the curbs of the ancient parkways where they had been planted. They weren’t real plastic, but I felt that way about them. They were firs genetically modified to manufacture a lignin-based plastic composite as part of their trunk and limb structure, and to extract water from the air. The original idea had been to provide an organic source of composite armor fibres, but the cost proved too high, and there was no practical way to harvest them. Each had cost the equivalent of three ground-to-orbit shuttles to create. They were virtually indestructible except to heavy weapons, direct fission explosions, or similar catastrophic applications of force. They continued to grow, if glacially, and were projected to be able to reach heights in excess of two hundred meters with roots twice that deep locked into the very depths of Old Earth.
The tips of their limbs quivered in the heavier wind gusts, and their natural appearance belied their unnatural birth. Of the old evergreens once growing in the ruins area, none were left, not even the trunks, except for one withered out-of-place bristlecone in the single park up the hill.
Kemra was silent as the electrocart whined past an intact and full-scale replica of an ancient castle, complete with four round turrets at each corner, and a dry moat.
Another half klick up the winding and smooth drive was a replica mosque.
As we neared the mosque, Kemra turned in her seat. “This is … different from the other ruins. They look like they were just abandoned. Why are these still complete? Who lived here?”
“I’ll answer that after we tour the next dwelling, if you don’t mind.” I knew she did, but I was feeling difficult. She’d kept looking, but I wasn’t sure she’d really seen anything except more ruined buildings than she’d ever thought about.
Past the mosque-like dwelling was the temple house. A long winding strip of adiamante-like pavement led toward the three-winged structure built of a light green stone that shimmered in the midday light, although in the shade, snow bleached whiter by the omnipresent dust lay piled against the north walls.
The cart whined to a stop opposite the short walk leading to the double stone doors.
Kemra took in the graceful columns and the transparent and indestructible armaglass between them. “This was a private dwelling?” she asked.
“All of them on this side of the Barrier were.”
I climbed out of the cart seat and set the brake, then lifted one of the rifles. “I’d like you to look at this one.”
“It’s like a temple, or something from Hzjana.”
“More likely, the one on Hzjana came from here.” Not that I knew that for certain, but architecture on the former Colony Planets had to have some origin in Old Earth.
The carved stone doors, synthetic jade depicting a man kneeling before a blazing bush in the middle of hillside, opened at my touch. They always did, a testimony to the engineering and the balance. I’d also cleaned the tracks several years back, and that helped.
The polish of the entry hall’s stone floor was muted by the dust, but remained as smooth and hard as it had for its builder millennia earlier.
Kemra glanced up at the ten-meter fluted columns. “A replica temple? From where?”
“From what I’ve been able to discover, it’s an idealized version of something called Minoan, except the religious motif got confused.”
Kemra paused. The mosaic on the wall facing the door depicted a naked, blond-haired, and beardless young man vaulting through the wide-spread horns of a bull in the middle of a banner-clad arena. There aren’t many cattle left these days, but Wienstan told me they thought they had the bovine cleft-gene virus pinned down. So there might be a chance for them.
“The detail is amazing.” Kemra leaned close to the minute colored stones, none larger than a half centimeter.
A wind gust swirled snow outside the north-facing stone doors, but not the hint of a sound entered the temple-like house, and the powdered dust by the doors didn’t move a millimeter.
Kemra turned and scanned the entire lower entry hall.
When she seemed almost finished, I shrugged and started up the left-hand set of stairs to the upper level. A landing nearly five meters deep overlooked and encircled the entry hall on three sides. There were wide squared lintels framing openings to each of the three wings on the upper level.
At the top, I waited for Kemra, shifting the rifle. I couldn’t believe I’d need it inside, but in the ruins beyond the Barrier, you never quite knew. Besides, we’d have to return to the cart.
She paused and turned, looking down again, before giving the smallest of headshakes. “Where next?”
“The wings are similar. Each provided living space for an individual, or a couple, at most. The center wing is the most interesting.” I stepped into the entry room, something once called a sitting room, although, eons ago, someone had removed all the furnishings in the house, or they had turned to dust and sifted away, or both. “According to what the researchers have been able to discover, this was just a room designed for sitting and talking.”
The room was fully fifteen meters wide and ten deep, with recessed alcoves that had held artwork on each side. The floor was pale green and white polished marble, flat and smooth, with a repeating design of tria
ngles.
Beyond the sitting room, past the square arch that had once held double doors, was a corridor leading to the bedchamber. On each side of the corridor was a bath chamber. I waited as Kemra inspected each. The one on the left held an oval marble tub large enough for four people, included a space the size of my kitchen just for a commode, and had enough closet space for a marcyb regiment. The bathing chamber on the right was similar, except that in place of the tub was an armaglass enclosed shower of equally heroic proportions.
Kemra looked through each, then rejoined me in the corridor. “You read about these, but … seeing something like this …”
“It gives you a different perspective.”
I walked forward into the bedchamber, fifteen meters wide and twice as deep, a space almost blindingly bright. The side walls were comprised of fluted pale green stone columns joined by lightly tinted armaglass that ran from floor to ceiling. The end wall continued the same pattern, except for the set of carved stone doors centered there.
Kemra glanced around the empty chamber, saying nothing.
The right hand outer door groaned slightly but opened, and we stepped out onto the covered south-facing balcony, rimmed by a stone balustrade supported by miniature columns. From the balcony, the outline of the departed gardens that had encircled the forty-meter pool was clear. The pool was empty, the pale green marble-like sides still shimmering in the cold light, but snow and white dust covered the mosaics that had floored it. Once, from the balcony, the white-tipped mountain giants would have been reflected in the water.
“It’s still beautiful.” Kemra’s voice was even more hoarse. “I can’t imagine what it must have been like.”
I could theoretically conceive of it, but the emotional impact was too much to dwell on, especially with my background. I looked toward the mountains instead.
“Why don’t you live … I mean, with only ten million of you—couldn’t everyone live like this?”
“This dwelling used more electrical energy in a week than I use in a standard year.” I forced a laugh. “And I don’t lack for conveniences.”
Her face tightened. “Has it gotten that bad … here?”
“We’re cautious.” I turned to look at her face, still bearing a quizzical expression. “Although we have a lot of hydrocarbon reserves, we try to restrict hydrocarb consumption to our renewable sources—things like the joba plants, the propylene harvests. For some things, you need more concentrated energy, and we still use fusactors, but we try to keep their usage to where it’s appropriate.” Like powering the satellite station systems.
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