Diuturnity's Dawn

by Alan Dean Foster

  They were still here.

  Cullen remembered to breathe. “Next cylinder,” he ordered Dik. “We have to confirm similitude.”

  “Okay, but this isn’t easy going. We’re in pretty tight quarters here.” As he adjusted the controls and the aircar began to move again, he indicated the pulsating nimbus that seemed to float just above each cylinder. “There’s a hell of a lot of energy fluxing here, and I’d just as soon we don’t make contact with any of these filaments, or whatever they are. Nonconductive hull notwithstanding.”

  “We just need to be able to look into a few more,” Cullen assured him. “Then I think we can safely begin to hazard some preliminary extrapolations.”

  Each cylinder, or pod, held a single Sauun. They were instantly recognizable as such because their features were intimately familiar to the three awestruck exoarcheologists—familiar from the graven faces of the Mourners, visible to anyone who cared to gaze from the escarpment across the great valley. Here were their living likenesses, held immobile in some kind of deepsleep. The same narrowness of features, the same sorrowful countenance, the familiar long faces that had been cut out of an entire mountainside—all were replicated in multiples of individual detail within the cylindrical pods. Millions upon millions of pods.

  Pilwondepat had tried to count, multiply, and estimate, and had quickly given up. Without knowing the dimensions of the chamber, any guess would invariably fall short of the far more majestic reality. How many of the Sauun had sought slumber in this place? A quarter of the planetary population? Half? All of it?

  “This explains why they never expanded into space.” Holoness was staring down at the dignified, composed alien visage sealed behind the transparency below. “They were too busy expanding into this plateau. It must have taken the combined energy and output of their entire civilization. But why?”

  “Some kind of gel.” Cullen seemed not to hear her. “Probably heavily oxygenated, temperature and greatly reduced nutrient level sustained by all this machinery, which in turn has to be able to maintain itself.” He shook his head slowly. “Incredible, just incredible.” Blinking, he summoned up a delayed reaction to her question. “Why indeed? Perhaps they retreated here to escape some incurable plague that was ravaging the surface. Or maybe this was once a much wetter world. A long-term planetwide climate change could have threatened famine.” He gestured at the row upon row of pods and their dreaming occupants. “Put everyone in stasis, program appropriate instrumentation to awaken everyone when the rains return, and sleep until the planet is receptive to large-scale agriculture again.”

  “No.”

  Cullen frowned as he turned to regard the thranx. “No? Why ‘no’?”

  Pilwondepat’s head swiveled to meet the human’s stare. “The technology we see here exceeds the difficulties you hypothesize.” He gestured with both his right truhand and foothand. “Any civilization capable of constructing a sleeping sepulcher on this scale could surely have solved the problem of climate change and potential famine. Or of a devastating pandemic. The time and physical resources expended just do not resonate with your theorized causations.”

  Had not Cullen Karasi’s skills as a scientist exceeded the demands of his ego, he would never have been given charge of an expedition on a plum outpost like Comagrave. “Granted, for the moment, your reasoning: What would you propose as a motive?”

  “Some external threat. Something they could not have anticipated, and therefore not prepared for. Perhaps the spread and sweep of an interstellar conflict they wished to avoid. Not the AAnn. I am willing to venture that neither the AAnn nor for that matter the hives or your people had achieved even rudimentary space travel by the time this place was finished and sealed.” He glanced upward. “The chamber above us may be an airspace, intended to provide insulation—or a decoy area, to distract any curiosity seekers. Or probers with less altruistic motives.”

  “You sound like a paranoid Quillp.” Moving away from the canopy, Holoness turned her attention to the endless corridor that extended eastward into the unfathomable distance. “Still, any and all theories are open to investigation. What can’t be denied is the reality of this place, and the extraordinary effort that went into its construction.”

  “Certainly,” Cullen agreed, “something drove them to this. I find it hard to imagine that all this—” He gestured with one hand at the immense enclosed universe outside their craft. “—came about as the result of casual choice, or boredom, or a desire simply to pass a few eons without dying.”

  “Fear,” Pilwondepat observed quietly, “can drive people to greater heights than aspiration.”

  “Easy enough to find out.” Holoness turned to the senior scientist. “All we have to do is wake one of them up and put the question to it.” She made no attempt to mask her eagerness.

  “In good time, that is precisely what we will try to do.” Cullen’s tone was carefully neutral. “But killing a few of the Sauun would not be a good way to endear ourselves to the rest of the survivors. We must be sure of what we’re doing before we commence. That means study, plenty of preliminary work.” His voice softened as he moved closer to her. Not for the first time, Pilwondepat thought there might be something more to their relationship than supervisor to subordinate.

  “There’s work here for a thousand researchers for a dozen lifetimes. Much as I’d like to know the answers to all the big questions, this is still a traditional dig, and we have to proceed in accordance with traditional procedure. That means measure and record, record and measure. Extrapolation with models will follow. Only when we’re sure we know what we’re doing, or as sure as anyone can ever be when something like this is encountered, will we advance to more dramatic steps.” He pondered a new thought.

  “If Pilwondepat is right, or even half right, and these people withdrew to this place to escape some unknown threat, there might be more overt defenses in place to deal with intruders than simply an empty decoy of a room. Maybe we should count ourselves not only fortunate in making this discovery, but lucky that no such devices have taken an interest in us—yet.” He turned back to the pilot.

  “Dik, let’s take a look around. Keep it straight and simple. We don’t want to get lost down here.”

  Nodding, the pilot manipulated controls. Gingerly, he backed the craft away from the row of pods they had been examining, pivoted the aircar on its axis, and accelerated slowly, heading east and down. Pilwondepat stopped counting levels at four hundred. No one tried to count the number of pods. The actual figure was beyond casual estimation. Cullen had used the word millions when they had first dropped into the deepsleep chamber. As they dove ever deeper into the dreaming vastness, that began to seem a quaint underassessment.

  “I’d like to know where the power to sustain all this comes from.” Away from the rows of closely ranked tiers, Dik had time for musings of his own. The open corridors between banks of pods were far more expansive than the narrow walkways that linked them would have suggested. Support vehicles larger than their aircar would have required access to every row, to each individual pod. “Sure as hell there’s more than one central support facility. Wouldn’t make sense to concentrate everything in one place. Me, I’d disperse backup capacity throughout the project.”

  Cullen was in agreement. “There are some clues in the abandoned Sauun cities on the surface. That’s one of the reasons why nobody thus far has been able to explain their failure to achieve space travel. They appeared to have all the necessary technological capability. They simply chose not to develop it.”

  “Maybe Pilwondepat’s right.” Holoness glanced over at the awestruck thranx. “Maybe they didn’t have a choice.”

  “What would impel an entire species to burrow underground and place themselves in deepsleep, at the mercy of machines, to awaken at some far future time to unfamiliar surroundings and an unpredictable fate?” Pilwondepat gestured with both antennae. “With time to examine and reflect, we may find the answer.” He looked back at her, his ma
ndibles working. “Perhaps we may even be able to do so without having to wake the Sauun.” Walking on only his four trulegs, he ambled over to stand alongside Dik. The vacant seat next to the pilot was useless to him. “We spoke earlier of defenses. Now I think there may be none.”

  “Why not?” Unlike some humans, the pilot did not shy away from proximity to the thranx.

  “Any danger sufficiently profound to force the Sauun to resort to racial deepsleep as a means of avoiding it would likely not be discouraged or deflected by what weapons their technology suggests they were capable of constructing.”

  “Certainly wouldn’t be of any use against plague or famine.” Cullen refused to surrender so quickly his initial theses. “Take us back up, Dik. Everett, Bajji, and the others will be in an agony of impatience wondering what’s happened to us. Besides—” He smiled. “—I think we’ve accomplished quite enough for one afternoon.”

  Obediently, the pilot pirouetted the craft and began to retrace their course. Endless rows of shimmering purple pods sped past on either side, rising to imposing heights above and majestic depths below. Millions upon millions of sentient beings, suspended in silence, each of them heir to a great and tantalizing secret, silently tracked their progress. And across the great valley, the statues of the Mourners stood gazing eternally in this direction, the reason for their melancholy expressions now perfectly clear.

  Did the Sauun raise this immense mausoleum first and then surround it with masquerading stone, Pilwondepat wondered, or did they burrow into an already existing plateau? If the former, it would explain why the edge of the escarpment was so near to the entrance they had found. He tried to envision an entire race striving mightily to prepare a vault of almost incalculable proportions, to receive every one of them before something happened. Instead of choosing to fight whatever it was that threatened them, they had elected to go into hiding. Whatever that something might be, the Sauun had decided they could neither confront it, nor negotiate with it, nor appease it. They had fled into deepsleep, hoping to awaken to find that the threat, whatever it was, had gone, had passed them by.

  Plague, Cullen had suggested. Famine. To Pilwondepat such explanations seemed wholly inadequate to the Sauun’s response. Even his own hypothesis, that some as-yet-undocumented interstellar conflict had threatened them, was already beginning to sound incommensurate. Whatever had driven an accomplished, intelligent species to hide itself away like an estivating hrulg grub surely was of greater consequence than that.

  While his human associates chattered around him, he tilted back his head to gaze up and out through the skimmer’s transparent roof. Two hundred levels surpassed, two hundred more to go. He found himself suddenly longing to be out of that boundless, brooding place, away from those millions and millions of living corpses. Checking the ascending craft’s chronometer, he saw that less time had passed since they’d left the surface than he thought. They would emerge into daylight. That meant he would not have to look up at the grim immensity of the night sky and wonder at what might lie in hiding behind the stars.

  16

  When she awoke the next morning, Fanielle saw that she had overslept. The last thing she wanted, after the menacing encounter of the night before, was to be late for the rendezvous with Haflunormet and their mutual friend. As she dressed, she found herself looking sharply in directions and at places that would never have previously engaged her attention. With each mercifully unrequited glance, she relaxed a little more. The Baron Preed NNXV was, as he might have put it, truly gone. From her lodgings, if not from her thoughts.

  She waited for Haflunormet at an eating establishment he favored, resting her bifurcated behind on a padded bench designed for thranx to straddle. As the only human in the underground insectoid bistro, her presence drew stares and remarks. The looks were less direct than the comments, given the thranx mastery of peripheral vision. Other patrons were quite capable of staring at her without actually turning in her direction. After a while, the novelty of her silent presence wore off, and they returned to their own conversations. The air around her was filled with a harmonious cacophony of clicks, whistles, and words.

  She was sucking on a domestic fruit juice blend that was more than palatable to her digestive system when Haflunormet arrived. A prearranged glance and gesture told her all she needed to know for the moment. “He’s here.” One of the few humans on Hivehom with access to local methods of reimbursement, she paid for her half-finished drink and followed the diplomat out into the bustling corridor.

  Roof over a New New York street to a height of ten meters or so and you would have a good analog for the principal burrows of Daret. Still, it was not a place for the claustrophobic, or for those who were uncomfortable in crowds.

  From the burrow, they took public transport to an outer suburb. Yet again, Fanielle was grateful for her petite frame. It allowed her to ride thranx transportation without having to bend uncomfortably at the waist. Twenty minutes later they exited the transport system and took a lift to the surface, where Haflunormet had a private vehicle waiting. Following a preprogrammed course, the small aircar rose and headed westward, flying above untouched savanna and low-lying jungle. Several hours later it slowed as it approached a clearing at the base of rolling, verdure-covered hills. Not far from this easily visible landing site, enormous bulk carriers wound in procession past triple loaders, grinding their ponderous way along the base of the nearest hill with cargoes of recently extracted ore.

  “Sat!wi!t rare metals.” Haflunormet took manual control of the aircar and directed it toward a covered parking area. “The mine’s owners are sympathetic to our cause.” Multiple-lensed eyes looked over at her. “A more difficult place to eavesdrop on a conversation I could not find. I was determined to arrange one where after the unfortunate encounter in your room you would feel comfortable about speaking freely.”

  She gestured understanding and thanks, her two hands having to do the work of four. That they would be rendezvousing in a mine did not trouble her. Its interior could be no more confining than the side streets of Daret.

  After securing the aircar, Haflunormet led the way past busy workers and administrators. Fanielle drew more direct stares here than she had in the cosmopolitan capital. Not all of them bespoke affection. She might well, she reflected as she ignored some of the less-friendly gestures, be the first human to visit this place, the first one many of the miners had ever seen in the flesh.

  At the entrance Haflunormet made contact with Security. Conversations were exchanged via communicator, subsequent to which the two visitors were allowed to enter. From time to time Haflunormet would pause to check directions on his recorder. Unlike in the city, internal transportation here operated on an irregular schedule. Twice, they had to wait for an automated conveyance to arrive. A tall human, Fanielle reflected as they zoomed along one subterranean track deep within the mountain, might easily have lost his head in such a place. Within the tunnels and shafts there was very little overhead clearance.

  From time to time they passed a bore or passageway where active mining was in progress. Here was another justification for closer commercial, if not political, contact, Fanielle saw. No human miner could compete with an equally well-trained thranx, who was not only more comfortable beneath the surface than above it, but enjoyed a greater tolerance for the heat that often turned mine tunnels into sweltering saunas. A crew of these highly trained workers could find top-salaried gainful employment at any tunneling mine on Earth or any of its colonies.

  The transport they were riding began to slow. As it did so, the narrow corridor opened up to reveal a spacious underground rest area. Here miners could relax in comfort, waiting for assignment to the far-flung reaches of the diggings. There was illumination, and refreshment, and vit-style entertainment.

  Haflunormet led her to a distant corner, where a single middle-aged thranx was engrossed in the concealed readout of a personal recorder. Antennae rose in their direction as they approached. As Haflunormet made
the introduction, the other thranx slid off the bench he had been straddling and dipped both antennae forward. Fanielle brushed the feathery extremities with her fingertips, a gesture that in the past couple of years had become more familiar to her than the shaking of hands.

  “I am Lyrkenparmew. Before we begin, I would like to wish you painless deposition of your egg.”

  Taking a seat on an empty bench, Fanielle glanced wryly in Haflunormet’s direction. “Does everyone on this planet know that I’m pregnant?”

  Where a human might have responded with something like “Good news travels fast,” her fellow diplomat did not comment verbally. In place of words, Haflunormet gestured ambiguousness leavened with gentle humor.

  “Thank you,” she replied dryly. “However, I still feel compelled to point out that we are not here to discuss my maternal condition.” By now used to thranx benches that were devoid of back support, she found herself leaning forward automatically as she addressed the new arrival. “Haflunormet has apprised you of my recent difficulties here, and in Azerick?”

  Lyrkenparmew gestured acknowledgment. “I’ve been briefed. I am sorry for the many inconveniences you have suffered. I myself lost a close clan member three years ago to the gentle ministrations of the AAnn.” He added a series of rapid clicks that were shocking in their manifest obscenity. Fanielle decided she liked him right away.

  “What results can you report from your recent informal sojourn on Earth?” Haflunormet’s antennae were aquiver with eagerness. “Deliberation still burrows faithfully?”

  “More than faithfully. Beneath the surface turmoil there is a newly dug tunnel that runs straight to the light, with walls that have been burnished to an unfolding glow by truth.” He paused to check his own recorder, which at present was set not to record but to scan for others who might be recording. Assured that their conversation was being monitored neither in person nor electronically, he continued.