The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur C. Clarke

“I think the fewer who are privy to them the better.” Meklos’s tone made it sound like what he had just said was the opening salvo in a conversation, not a cue to dismiss Yusef.

  She had to give it a second of consideration. Normally, she would include Yusef in any conversation. But Yusef seemed to make the guard uncomfortable. It was just easier to do what the guard wanted. Then they could be done with this conversation.

  She let go of Yusef’s arm. “It’s all right. I’ll join everyone for lunch in about an hour.”

  Yusef flushed. He gave Meklos a furtive glance, frowned, and then scurried off.

  Gabrielle had never seen Yusef move like that. It took her a few moments to realize that Meklos actually scared him.

  “You scared him,” she said in wonder.

  Meklos’s eyes moved slightly. She had a feeling she had surprised him.

  “Very good,” he said. “Most people wouldn’t have noticed.”

  “It was pretty obvious,” she said. “I’ve never seen him react like that.”

  “Hm,” Meklos said. It wasn’t an answer. It wasn’t even really a word. It was, however, a dismissal, as if her opinion didn’t count for much.

  “Are you going to do that all the time?” she asked.

  “Scare your people?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  He shrugged. “Depends on if it’s part of my job.”

  “Your job is to guard the dig,” she said.

  “That’s what it said on the hire.” He shifted his weight slightly, without moving his feet. “But I’m not sure what that means. Or who I’m guarding it from.”

  She frowned. She hadn’t expected to have to talk to him. She had expected him and his team to get to work the moment they arrived.

  Clearly the Scholars hadn’t explained this job to them. Of course, how hard could a guard job be?

  She mentally shrugged. People with Meklos’s job were, by definition, not that bright. So she would explain it.

  “All right,” she said. “Here’s what we need. You need to protect us from anyone who wants to see the city. At the moment, anyone can view the Spires—from a safe distance. We—”

  “Which is?” he asked.

  He had derailed her train of thought. “Excuse me?”

  “What’s the safe distance?”

  She frowned at him. “You were told the distances when you arrived. The protected area begins at the base of the mountain. No one can climb it and no one can come near the Spires. They’re fragile.”

  “They don’t look fragile,” he said. “Up close they look amazingly sturdy.”

  “They’re fragile,” she repeated. He was irritating her. She didn’t like her statements questioned.

  He opened his hands in a conciliatory gesture. “All right,” he said. “They’re fragile.”

  She crossed her arms.

  “Go on,” he said.

  She had lost her place. He had asked what the rules for protection were. She sighed deeply, then nodded once.

  “No one comes up the mountainside without our permission. No one gets into the city without our permission.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Got that. What else?”

  “Soon we’ll be taking some items from the city to another site for cleaning, grading and inspection. We’re going to need protection for those operations.”

  “Another site,” he said. “On Amnthra?”

  Her cheeks had grown warm. “Where that site is doesn’t matter right now.”

  “Oh, but it does,” he said. “Because if we’re making a land trip, we’ll need the right equipment. It’ll probably take longer. If we’re using some kind of jumper to get across the planet, then we’ll need to know weight limits. We may need an extra jumper or two so that we have the correct amount of personnel and equipment going with the items. Honestly, the more I know, the better job I’ll do.”

  She didn’t want him to know. She didn’t want him in the middle of her work.

  She would wait to tell him details like until the time came. Maybe by then, she would know how to control him.

  “We’ll make the plans for item removal later,” she said. “It’s not something we need to think about now.”

  “Well,” he said. “We might want to, because if we require help or additional equipment—”

  “I said, we don’t need to think about it now.”

  He stared at her for a moment. His entire expression had gone flat. “All right.”

  “We’re done now,” she snapped.

  He shook his head just once. “I’m sorry, Ms. Reese—Dr. Reese? Gabrielle?”

  “Dr. Reese,” she said, even though everyone on her team called her Gabrielle.

  “Dr. Reese,” he said. “I still have a lot of questions.”

  “I don’t have time for them,” she said.

  “Then who do I talk to? Because we’re not starting work until these questions are answered.”

  She bit her lower lip so hard she could taste blood, something she hadn’t done in a long time. “I think you’ve forgotten, Meklos, that you work for me.”

  “Actually, no, I don’t, Dr. Reese.” His voice was calm. That galled her. While she was furious at him, he didn’t seem to have any emotions concerning her at all. “If you check the agreement—”

  “I didn’t see the agreement. That’s between you and Scholars.”

  “It’s about you and how our operations run,” he said. “Once security understands its job, we take precedence. If we tell you the area needs to be evacuated immediately, you evacuate immediately. If we tell you that we have proof someone is a threat, that someone—no matter how valuable they appear—will leave the premises. If you would like a copy of the agreement, I can have it sent directly to you. I’m not sure exactly where you’d like it—”

  “I’ll get a copy from the Scholars.” Her cheeks were hot now, and had to be bright red. There was no way to hide how angry he had made her.

  “Good,” he said. “You’ll see that I’m right. So, in the spirit of cooperation, let me ask a few more questions.”

  She sighed heavily so that he understood what an inconvenience this all was.

  “I need to know how much access we get to the site.” He waited as if he expected an answer to that immediately.

  “What do you mean, access?”

  “Are we allowed in the dig sites? Can we get off the paths near the Spires without damaging something important?”

  She waved a hand. She had no idea, and she wasn’t about to tell him that. So she said, “Just list your questions. I’ll answer the ones I can right now, and I’ll send you to the right people for the others.”

  “All right.” His back straightened, as if she had finally upset him. “I need to know whether we protect from the air as well as the ground. I need to know if we pay attention to ships in orbit. I need to know if we monitor communications—”

  “My god,” she said. “It’ll take half my life to direct you people. I just wanted some guards.”

  He ignored that and continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “I need to know who you think wants to get onto this site, and if those people have theft or sabotage in mind. I need to know if anyone’s life has been threatened.”

  “Sabotage?” she asked, feeling cold. “You think someone might come in here and ruin this?”

  “I don’t think anything, Dr. Reese. I need to know what your concerns are. Most importantly, I need to know which members of your staff and crew we can trust, which ones we need to monitor, and which ones we need to watch zealously.”

  She felt a little woozy. She must have been holding her breath.

  “This is not what I expected when I told Scholars to hire you,” she said.

  “What did you expect?” he asked.

  “That you’d come in, stand guard, and let us get on with our work.”

  “We’ll do that, ma’am,” he said. “Just as soon as we know what we’re guarding, who we’re guarding it from, and how much access we have.�
�

  She hadn’t given it any thought at all. Did she want his people to guard the city itself or just the access routes? And what were the access routes?

  And then there was the question of her staff and crew. She didn’t trust any of them. She never told them anything except what they needed to know.

  At the same time, she trusted them implicitly. She sent them to work on sites without supervision. She wasn’t sure how to explain the contradiction to this man.

  “I take it your behavior is not unusual for your line of work,” she said to him.

  That thin smile rose on his lips. This time, he didn’t try to hide the contempt.

  “If you want to hire someone else, go ahead,” he said. “Just remember, in your initial communiqué with Scholars, you asked for the best security team they could find.”

  She didn’t ask for that. All she had asked for were some guards. Obviously, someone in Scholars figured she needed more than simple guards.

  Dammit.

  He was saying, “They found us. Whoever they send next may not ask as many questions, may not be as annoying from the start, but they may not be as good either.”

  She wasn’t sure she cared about good. She wasn’t sure she cared about any of this at all.

  But he was here. They were here. They’d do as she asked when the time came. Until then, she would stall.

  “I don’t think of my people the way you want me to,” she said.

  He said, “Then maybe it’s time you start.”

  7

  Navi finally forced herself to look at Zeigler’s scholarly works. Since she and her team were orbiting Amnthra waiting for something to come out of the City of Denon—more communications, maybe items in transit, maybe the arrival of more security—she didn’t have a lot to do except think.

  And she’d been thinking a great deal since her conversation with Zeigler.

  She kept staring at the holomap. She had brightened the Spires so that they looked almost blinding, although Zeigler said even that wasn’t correct.

  Then she had two of her assistants look through geologic records to see if anyone had mapped caves in the Naramzin Mountain Range.

  The mountains, it turned out, were mostly unexplored—or at least, they hadn’t been explored in the modern era. Only mountain climbers, adventurers, and extreme athletes had gone up there until the archeologists and scholars descended upon the Spires of Denon as if they were some kind of holy relic.

  She couldn’t even tell what caused the descent—whether it was some scholarly discovery or a meeting or something that happened in passing.

  Zeigler’s research was meticulous. She had started with the works he’d published six years ago, and worked her way forward. She didn’t care as much about his hypothesis about the City of Denon, the hypothesis that had turned out to be right, although she probably should have. Because if he used similar logic and proof to find the caverns, then she could really trust his conclusions.

  Only she somewhat trusted them now, and she barely had the patience to go through the six years of research. The idea of going over his entire life’s work gave her the shudders.

  Zeigler made his presentations in lectures, holovids, actual documents, and at conferences where his words were recorded, as well as the question and answer sessions. All of his raw research was easily accessible, unlike some she’d seen. Some scholars made it hard to dig through the raw materials, but Zeigler clearly wasn’t afraid of someone stealing his positions.

  He obviously wanted his work to be transparent, so that the other scholars would realize how correct he was.

  It took her days to go through the material, and she still wasn’t done. But she was convinced: there were caverns beneath the City of Denon.

  The problem was, she had her ship’s sensors go over the mountain range. The area around the Spires was blocked. Every time a sensor touched the area, the stream got bounced back to her ship with a warning:

  Energy of any kind could destroy a valuable part of Amnthra. The Spires of Denon are a preserved monument to the ancient past. If your work destroys even a small portion of the Spires, you will be subject to the Monument Protection Arm of the Unified Governments of Amnthra…

  All of that, followed by legal codes, and legal language. The upshot—years in an Amnthran prison or something equivalent in other parts of the sector, her ship’s license removed, and her travel privileges permanently suspended. Even if she didn’t get the prison sentence, the other items terrified her more.

  She stopped using the sensor. It hadn’t compiled any information from the nearby mountains either. They had come up blank on her data screen, which was odd. As if they were simply a holographic feature of the land, something she knew was not true.

  She had experienced sensor white-out on other jobs. Usually the sensors stopped functioning because of a protective field, but she couldn’t believe one existed so close to the Spires.

  Although something had to exist, given the way her own beam had come back to her, along with a message.

  But she hadn’t traced that message. It could have come from any part of Amnthra, activated when her sensor touched the protective barrier near the Spires.

  She would figure all of that out when she needed to. Right now, she was trying to customize one of the holomaps of the mountain range when her assistant, Roye Bruget, came into the room.

  It wasn’t really fair to call Roye an assistant. He was more like a part of her. They had worked together from her very first job, and he had saved her butt more times than she wanted to think about.

  Sometimes she felt that even though she was nominally in charge, Roye knew more about the way everything worked. Her team usually trusted him to be the voice of reason on all of her jobs. She could be snappish, short, and difficult on good days. Roye was always cheerful, always willing to help.

  Unless someone made him angry.

  He was a slight, precise man. He wore casual clothes—a shirt and light pants with some slipper-like shoes. The clothes themselves looked pressed, and his hair was so manicured it looked like it had been glued to his head.

  “You might want to see this,” he said without greeting her.

  He moved in front of her to the in-room control panel. He saved her work, moved the holomap to one side, and then did some light touchwork on the panel.

  She looked at the translation running across the screen in front of her.

  “You broke the Scholars’ encryption,” she said.

  “This wasn’t Scholars,” he said. “It came from outside their system. The request is direct from the folks in the City of Denon.”

  She read the request twice. Her heart was pounding. “They want divers?”

  “Not any divers,” he said. “Cave divers.”

  “You’re sure this isn’t a translation error?” she asked. “They don’t want spelunkers? They want divers? People who’ll go into water in darkness, in caves?”

  “Divers,” he said.

  She let out a small breath. This opened up a wealth of possibilities.

  It meant that caves and water existed below the ancient city. Maybe a river. Which would explain how the ancients lived there through countless sieges without massive deaths.

  It also gave her a lot of opportunities. If she had the right equipment, she might be able to map the caves using sensors on the ground.

  The Unified Government of Amnthra expected sensors from above, but did they expect them from ground level? Probably not.

  And then there was the other possibility.

  She looked at Roye, her eyes shining. “Did you bring our diving equipment?”

  He grinned. “I’m prepared for any emergency, my friend.”

  She grinned in response.

  “This isn’t an emergency, Roye,” she said. “This is an opportunity.”

  “One of the best we’ve ever had,” he said.

  8

  Meklos sat on the hard floor of his tent. The tent was elaborate—nicer,
in fact, than the way the academics were living in the city below. His tent had three separate rooms—the main room, where he was now and where he often held meetings; a smaller room to the side that he used as a bedroom; and a fully functional bathroom, complete with sonic or water shower depending on the conditions on the ground.

  He had opted for a sonic shower, since it looked like water was scarce here. But no one on the academic team acted like water was scarce, so he might have to reassess that opinion.

  He had sent Phineas to get maps from Dr. Reese’s assistant, and to remain until he had the latest maps of all the areas, complete with the listings of treasures and protected items. Meklos had a hunch Phin might be gone for a while.

  Meklos knew that Dr. Reese was holding something back from him. He just couldn’t figure out what it was.

  At least she had finally told him what she needed.

  She needed protection against thieves, just like he had suspected. Now that the city of Denon was mostly dug out, the academics would set about finding the valuable items, marking them, and figuring out what to do with them.

  Amnthra had no laws protecting individual artifacts, meaning the kind that could be moved from one place to another. The Monuments Protection Arm of the Unified Governments of Amnthra hadn’t been formed that long ago, and so far, it only applied to things that were defined as part of the land of Amnthra.

  The Monuments Protection Arm legislation did specifically mention the Spires of Denon and the City of Denon as protected. But, the word “city” wasn’t really defined, and that already presented a problem, at least to Meklos.

  Because the definition of city in most Amnthran languages was the same as it was in Meklos’s language—a densely populated center.

  Which meant that the City of Denon wasn’t a city at all by Amnthra’s definition. If someone tried to get picky about the legal definitions, he had a hunch they would be able to argue that the City of Denon, as a location, was protected, but movable items within that city, like paintings or jewelry, were not. Even that marvelous inlay floor he had walked across that morning didn’t belong to the city.

  Because if the floor were removed, the city would remain.

  He needed a definition because he needed to know what could remain in this part of Amnthra and what could be removed. He documented everything—his assumptions, his ideas, and his worries—in case Dr. Reese or, worse, the Scholars disagreed with him.