The journey from Ararat had certainly been long and hard. Xaia had had two ships track the coast, while rotating parties hiked along the shore, and sometimes further inland. The country was mostly arid right down to the sea, but incised with huge, ancient valleys through which diminished rivers trickled. Every valley was a challenge to cross. Further inland the plain was broken by peculiar outcroppings of rock, layered and twisted, thrust out of the ground by some antique geological violence and then eroded to fantastic forms.
The crews on land and sea shared the provisions they collected, fish and crustaceans from the sea, fresh water from the land. At first there were towns or villages where they could buy food—Xaia, not wishing to leave a trail of resentment along a track that she would have to retrace, had forbidden looting. But as they headed steadily north, the density of human settlements had grown sparser, and that option soon evaporated. Soon you barely even saw the glint of Earth green amid the ubiquitous purple. Xaia had grown up on a relatively small, relatively crowded island. Now she started to understand how few humans were on this planet, even after four centuries of expansion.
Meanwhile the crew, all islanders more used to the sea than the ways of the land, were poor at hunting. Increasingly hungry, already exhausted from years of warfare, the crews had tired quickly, and progress had been doggedly slow.
All the way Teif had kept up a slow barrage of complaints. “Over and over again I've said this. It's already August, Xaia. Already the sun is setting again, the coolsummer ending—"
"Oh, shut up, Teif. You pour the utterly obvious into my ear, day after day."
"This jaunt could kill us all if we're not careful, Lady. You don't like what I say because it's the voice of your own conscience."
"The return trip will be easier,” she insisted. “Down the long river.” For many days they had tracked a mighty river that had flowed down the spine of the continent, before turning to wash through a huge delta system and out to sea. “We'll raft!"
"Not through those rapids—not me."
Exasperated, frustrated, Xaia turned again on Chan. “Well, if this addled boy hadn't got his coordinates wrong we wouldn't be having this argument in the first place."
"He didn't get it wrong.” Manda had come back from the ridge, breathing hard, her spyglass folded up in her hand. “It's just over there. Come see."
Following Manda, Xaia, Teif, and Chan hiked to the crest of the ridge. Here Manda pointed to a ledge of some blackish rock that protruded from worn, folded strata—and a cluster of lights that grew brighter as the daylight faded. Xaia snatched the spyglass from Manda's hand to see better.
Manda said, “It's just a bunch of shacks and tents. As dusty and rust-colored as the ground and the rocks. Hard to see in the daylight, until the lamps started glowing in the dusk."
Chan, growing excited, pointed at the black stratum. “That is the Reef, I think ... Is that a fence around it?"
Xaia, through the glass, saw something suspended over the village, glimmering in the last light of the sun, a square panel on a kind of stalk. “I can see where they get their power from."
Manda nodded. “A solar panel."
"Founder technology.” Xaia lowered the glass, looking out over the darkling plain, the huddle of lights. “Well, it will keep until morning.” Which was only a few hours away, so short were the nights this soon after the solstice.
Teif nodded. “I'll post a guard."
After a few hours’ sleep Xaia prepared to cross the last couple of kilometers to the Reef. She was accompanied by Chan, Manda, Teif, and a dozen warriors. Teif, never trustful, had them watched by scouts positioned behind the ridge by the oasis.
As they neared the village, a man came out to meet them, riding high on a massive, slow-walking horse. Peering beyond him, Xaia saw a few people in the village itself, a woman standing with her arms defiantly folded, ragged-looking children peeking from behind doors. Fields had been cut into the dusty ground, and pigs and scrawny goats wandered, untethered. Judging from the number of shacks and lean-tos there could be no more than a hundred people living here.
Teif said, “I wonder how they overwinter. Cellars, I imagine.” He growled at Chan, “Why didn't you tell us this lot was here?"
"I didn't know,” Chan insisted. “I told you. Nobody from Ararat has been here as long as I've been alive, longer."
"Give thanks for the idleness of Ararat, Teif,” Xaia said, grinning. “If the secrets of this place had been picked bare by generations of scholars, there would be nothing left for us to discover, would there?"
As he approached Xaia saw that the man wore a uniform of some black cloth laced with silver—but the uniform was shabby and patched, and didn't quite fit his lanky frame. And the horse, huge though it was, was no warhorse like Xaia's party's but a draught animal, heavy-set and plodding. Still he came alone, Xaia noted with some respect, facing a party escorted by several heavily armed warriors.
The man unrolled a kind of rope ladder and climbed down from his huge horse. He patted its muzzle, reaching up to do it, and left it grazing at a sparse stand of grass. He walked up to Xaia, clearly identifying her as the leader. “Welcome. My name is Ossay Lange. I am the leader of this place, this scientific colony devoted to the study of the Reef, which we call Reeftown."
Xaia thought she recognized his accent as a distorted form of the dialect spoken in Ararat. He was perhaps fifty, though his face was so weather-beaten it was hard to tell; he wore his greying hair long and tied back in a bun. He was missing an eye, she saw; a ball of what looked like steel, grey and moist, sat in one ruined socket. Xaia introduced herself as a leader of Zeeland.
Chan challenged Lange. “What scientific colony? I'm from Ararat. I work in the Shuttle Shrine. I know the curators, the scholars. There's no record of such a colony, or even a recent expedition to the Reef."
"Boy, my grandfather led that expedition. His name was Heyney Fredrik Lange. Look it up when you go back home. This was his uniform. Surely you recognize it."
Xaia glanced at Chan, who shrugged.
"Heyney Fredrik was, in fact, the first to discover the Reef, or rather to rediscover it after the Founders’ initial survey with their automatic flying machines."
"But he never came back to report it."
"He suffered vicissitudes. Several of his companions died. When he arrived he found a small settlement, a forerunner of Reeftown here. The people were drawn by the aquifer. What they were doing so far north, nobody knows. He settled with them, intending to stay and survey the Reef for a season or two."
"But he never left."
Lange shrugged. “He found happiness here. Formed a family. He wasn't sure he could bring his children back across the wastes to Ararat.” He glanced across at the broken strata. “Besides, the Reef is here, not back at Ararat. He was a scholar. He devoted his life to a study of the Reef. And when he died his son continued the work—my father. And when he died—"
"And in all these years,” Manda said skeptically, “nobody came to visit. And none of you tried to get back to Ararat to report on whatever it is you have learned."
"Some have come,” Lange said defiantly. “Explorers, merchants blown off course in their ships, wrecked and looking for water—and bandits.” His face set hard, and that eerie steel eye glinted. “Most paid their tolls, however."
"Tolls?” Teif shook his great head. “You set tolls? Your grandfather must have had the genes of one of those Shuttle keepers back at Ararat. And, having come here, proved just as grasping and indolent."
Xaia touched his arm. “He's just a fool, Teif,” she murmured. “Him and his fathers. Look at this place. Perhaps he's got a heap of obsolete money piled up in some hole in the ground, from all the tolls he's collected. What can he spend it on? Don't waste your anger."
Lange didn't seem to have noticed Teif's insults. “My grandfather was the first scholar ever to have come here. Even the Founders never set foot here, only sent their flying drones over, and they never trav
eled further to the north."
Xaia frowned. “Are you sure? Does nobody live north of here?"
"Of course not. The seasons are too harsh. And there is other evidence.” He glanced over his shoulder at the village. “Sometimes we have—disputes. Fallings-out between brothers. You know the sort of thing. Then one or the other will walk off into exile.” He waved a hand at the dusty panorama. “East, west, south—if they go that way, generally we hear from them again, even if it's just a groveling apology and a plea to be let back. But of those who went north, no trace has ever been seen again. Nobody lives up there—nobody can live there."
Xaia glared at him. “If the Founders never came this way, how can there be stories about a City of the Living Dead to the far north?"
Lange said dismissively, “Whatever you've heard, it's all a legend—lies spun out for the credulous in inns and taverns. Travelers’ tales. This is the farthest north any human can travel. And this,” he said, waving a hand at the Reef, “is the only trace left by the Dead on all this world, save for those ramshackle ruins on Little Jamaica."
Manda glared at him. “He's the liar. Talking up this place, his own importance."
Lange watched them, expectant, calculating. “You would be welcome in my home, Lady. My wife makes a fine cactus tea which—"
"No,” Xaia said briskly, growing angry. “We came to see yon Reef. The sooner we do that the sooner we can move on.” She strode that way.
Abandoning his horse, Lange hurried after her. “Madam, the question of the toll—"
"Teif, make him rich beyond his grandfather's dreams. We can afford it."
Glowering his reluctance, Teif took fistfuls of Brythonic jewelery from his pouch and ladled it into Lange's grasping hands.
Lange led them through the straggling wire that fenced off the Reef from non-payers of the toll.
The Reef itself was a shelf, protruding from a layered wall of rock that towered above their heads. The day was hot, and it was a relief to step underneath, and into its shade.
You could see at a glance that this particular stratum was different from the familiar crimson sandstone above and below it. Maybe a meter thick, it was a mottled black and grey, and seemed to be made of some harder material, for it protruded where the softer sandstone had worn away. Xaia could see where the sandstone had been cut away above one part of the black shelf, leaving a kind of shallow cave only maybe half a meter high; a crude wooden ladder led up to it. Some of the black ledge had broken off, and a thin scree of pebbles, flakes, and sheets lay at the foot of the cliff. Xaia inspected this rubble. She picked up one fragment, like a slate the size of her palm, with a strange, almost regular pentagonal pattern pressed into it.
Teif looked around, dissatisfied. “We busted our balls for this? This is a City of the Dead?"
Lange, daring or foolhardy, laughed at him. “My friend—what did you expect to find after half a billion years? Buildings and streets preserved as if frozen in ice? No—this is all that time leaves behind, thousands of years of history squashed down as if crushed between the pages of a book. And if not for a fortuitous flood, none of this might have been preserved at all."
"A flood?” Teif glanced around skeptically at the arid sandstone plain. “Here?"
"Oh, yes. My friend, the spot on which you stand has lain deep beneath the surface of a sea—not once, but many times..."
Xaia struggled to follow.
On Earth II, as on Earth, if rock was above water it eroded away, turning to pebbles and sand that washed down the sluggish rivers. But below water rock formed. On the beds of seas and lakes, all that silt piled up, compressing under its own weight until the sand solidified to sandstone. Layers set down in different epochs showed as strata, subtly different bands in the depth of the rock.
"The sedimentary rocks are laid down as flat as the oceans that bear them,” Lange said. “But with time there are quakes and volcanic uplifts, and even the shifting of continents, though that's not a significant factor on Earth II. The layers may be raised up above the air again, broken, buckled, and bent.” Lange walked around, miming these processes. Xaia imagined he had waited all this life for this moment, to show off the family knowledge to passing strangers.
"And somewhere in that process,” Xaia said, studying the sample in her hand, “between the setting down of one sandstone layer and the next—this occurred."
"We think there was a river delta,” Lange said. “Right here. Oh, the river itself has long since shifted its course, but you can still see traces of its valley in the oldest rocks. And on that delta, in its fertile soils, they built a city. We can't imagine how it looked. But it was a city of buildings of stone and metal, and must have been not entirely unlike human cities on Earth II, or Earth. All this in a flash—geologically speaking, in just millennia, after aeons of emptiness.
"But the city was flooded. Inundated, suddenly."
"How?” Manda snapped. “By its river?"
"No,” Lange said. “By the sea. Just as on Earth—the sea level rose, suddenly and catastrophically, and covered the tallest buildings. Whoever lived here had to flee or die. But, thanks to the sudden flooding, the city was more or less preserved, sitting there on what had suddenly become a sea bed. The river silt still sifted down, covering the streets and buildings, piling up until it caved in roofs and collapsed cellars. But the city was entombed, you see. And when in the aeons that followed more sandstone formed above, billions and billions of tons of it pressing down, the city layer was compressed, from hundreds of meters thick, perhaps, to—well, to what you see today. Millions of years are recorded in these mighty layers—and a mere few millennia compresses to less than the height of a human child. As the planet convulsed in later ages, that vast coffin was lifted up into the light and broken open."
Manda, to Xaia's surprise, seemed to be imaginatively caught by this. “And yet you can still see what it was like, can you?"
He winked at her, with his one good eye. “Come and see for yourself."
He led the way up the ladder, to the cave cut on the sandstone above the city stratum. They had to crawl to get inside. Xaia could see pick marks in the roof above her—and small pockmarks, deeper than the rest, where something appeared to be lodged. Lamps, perhaps? But if they were lamps they weren't lit.
Lange let them explore with hands and eyes, their sight adjusting to the cave's shadows. “We've found modified landscapes in other locations nearby. That was my grandfather's term for it. We think there are traces of something like farms, marked by something like plowing, but in a kind of criss-cross pattern. But this was the heart of the city itself..."
The stone had been chipped away to leave big chunks of a brownish rock set in a rough square, and more massive pieces of rubble further away—all this trapped in the lower stratum, an ossified ruin. It was obviously the remains of a wall. And Teif swore softly. He had found what looked like the mouth of a pipe, neatly circular—or the remains of it; it was a rusted trace in the rock.
Lange was grinning at them. “Can you see? This was once a substantial building. My grandfather found it by tracing foundations dug deep into the rock layers below—that's how to build on the soft ground of a delta, you know, by setting concrete rafts on deep foundations. When it came down it scattered big blocks of rubble all around. Dig up one of these blocks and it would crumble in your hand. With enough time the concrete rots, the cement leached away by acid in the water, but leaving the sand and gravel in place. You see the pipework? We've also found what look like wires and cables. Road surfaces. Rusted lumps that could be the remains of crushed iron vehicles. And so on.
"Here are the real treasures.” From a shelf in the wall behind him, he produced artifacts that he passed from hand to hand. Xaia became fascinated as she handled these things. A disc of what was clearly glass might have been the bottom of a bottle; it was opaque, milky. A light sheet felt like plastic, but it was discolored as if burned. Lange said that most plastics would have turned into blobs of oil,
and seeped away. Most precious of all was an intricate artifact like a mechanical clock, but wrought in a glittering yellow metal.
"That's fool's gold,” Lange said. “Which iron turns into, given time and the right conditions. What was this, a clock, an astronomical calculator? Whatever, it's now like a replica of itself...
"All of this, this high culture, is more than half a billion years old. So my father dated it from his stratigraphy. Intelligence blossomed here almost as soon as animals were crawling around in the mud—not like Earth! And then, within a few thousand years—sploosh, the ocean covered it, gone forever.” He glanced out of the cave at the bare plain. “We can't know what else was here. Maybe the plain was covered in cities ... Chance preserved only this one. And certainly my grandfather believed this was a planet-covering civilization. He said you could see changes in the biological structures below and above this stratum, changes in the atmospheric content. They changed everything about their planet, mixed it all up and moved it all around ... Just above the layers of the city, in fact, is a thin smear of ash, from a volcano. Perhaps that contributed to their downfall."
"Just a few thousand years,” Chan said. “But that was enough time for them to change the world forever—to empty out the lodes of fossil fuels and metal ores and the rest, natural treasures never renewed on this small, static world."
"But there's no trace of the people,” Xaia said. “The Dead. Whoever built this place."
"Nothing we can identify.” Lange took back the pieces reverently and stowed them back on their shelf. “Worth the price of admission, Lady?"
Xaia glanced at the others. “Enough for now. Let's get out of here."
Once they were outside Lange's fence she gathered her aides around her. “We need to decide what to do about this stuff, and where to go from here."
Teif snorted. “As to the last—home!"
Chan said, “This scholarly resource, this Reef, can't be allowed to molder away like this. It sounds as if only the grandfather did any substantial work. We must reclaim this for Ararat—on your behalf, Lady,” he said, stammering the addendum.
Asimov's SF, July 2009 Page 16