“Heaped up to the ceilings, along with smashed up trees, all kinds of things. They must have been washed down in torrents."
Nyelise shuddered.
Taya frowned. “You mean domestic animals like the Azureans use? But if the Ancients’ cities were anything like Merkon, why would they have needed them."
Spak shook his head. “According to Biologist, bears, deer, buffalo—we're talking about all kinds. There are also kinds that we've never seen. And the Azureans don't recognize them either."
Taya's puzzlement increased. “Bears? Buffalo? ... But animals like those don't live anywhere near here. How could they? Nothing grows here. What would they live on?"
“Our guess is that the floods must have carried them here,” Spak said, shrugging.
Taya looked at him disbelievingly. “Halfway around the planet?” She turned her head toward Kort. “Surely not."
“And she's not even Skeptic,” Eltry said.
Kort rubbed his chin between a steel finger and thumb, and raised his head as if pondering. Lacking facial expression, the Mecs relied heavily on mannerism and gesture. “Well, as it so happens, Skeptic doesn't think so either,” he told them.
“So does he have any better ideas?” Spak invited.
“He says that's not his department,” Kort returned.
“All right, then. How about Thinker?"
There was another short delay. Then Kort said, “There is another possibility that Thinker and Skeptic have been debating. They weren't going to mention it until they'd explored it a bit more with Scientist. Thinker says maybe such animals once lived a lot closer to these regions. Then they wouldn't have to have been carried over improbable distances."
Spak didn't look convinced. “But how could they have lived closer? Taya's right. The climate could never support them. Nothing grows here."
Kort pointed upward. “And there's ice above us hundreds of feet thick. Who would want to build a city here either?"
Eltry frowned from one to the other. “So what are you saying?” he asked. “That the whole climate changed?"
Kort nodded. “Maybe just that. Scientist agrees that it fits the facts."
Eltry spread his hands. “But how could it?"
“The only thing that Thinker can think of is that the poles must have shifted somehow,” Kort replied.
* * * *
Vaysi and the others were waiting by the tractor and its two cars in a space where the main gallery ended. Several other passageways led away in different directions, and a shaft led up. Another Mec was standing with them, whose coveralls with their design of yellow and green circles signified to be one of the Archaeologists.
So far there had been little of the current activity to see. The workings they had traveled through went back to the earliest explorations, and nothing new was going on in them. Here, however, the sounds of running machinery and tools in use came from all sides. Another tractor was moving a car filled with rock off one of the hoists from above, while others came and went, hauling loads along the various tunnels. In an alcove housing what looked like water pumps and a compressor, some human figures sitting on a stack of timbers were eating lunch. Closer up, Taya saw from his arm patch that the Archaeologist was the one designated Spade.
“Shop talk,” Vaysi said to the arrivals as the two groups rejoined. “There's a lot being discovered about the rocks that interests me."
“The work going on down at this level and below is mainly archaeological,” Spak told Taya. “There were older cities on the site before Vrent was built. But now we go up from here, to where it gets more interesting."
The reunited group left Spade to return to whatever task he had been involved in, and ascended a succession of ramps and landings to another working chamber and intersection of more tunnels. Despite the huge fans, the place was oppressively humid and hot, as Spak had warned. Taya couldn't imagine what it would have been like had they kept their outer clothes on.
They crossed a bridge over a chasm with water below, to a cavern cut through rock and debris. Standing against the wall on the far side was what looked like an arch of smooth, white material. Spak told them it was a whale's jawbone that had been uncovered not ten yards away.
“How did it get down here?” Taya asked, mystified.
“Well, one thing's sure—it didn't swim,” Spak answered.
The cavern opened into a higher space bounded on two sides by plane surfaces that were clearly of artificial origin—old and crumbling walls, sometimes difficult to distinguish from rock that had been incompletely cut away. Glistening wet in parts, they extended upward past the lights into gloom, where the roof above was dark and formless. Holes had been bored at intervals, presumably for materials samples, some of them revealing parts of internal strengthening bars, rusted and corroded. A circular formation five feet or so across marked what had once been some kind of pipe, long rotted into the rock that filled it. Spak told them they were down among the foundations of the city, the roots from which the most recent version of Vrent had sprung.
“I don't see any stones,” Nyelise remarked, looking along the walls. All of the older Azurean constructions they had seen before were built from stone or brick.
“It was molded,” Engineer said. “The Ancients made a kind of pourable rock—like the mortar that Azureans use, but more liquid, yet it set harder. We're experimenting with the idea."
“How long have these walls been here?” Taya asked. Something about their mute, brooding solidity, towering above them into the darkness, made her apprehensive.
“From their carbon content, the bones and other organic substances are at least two thousand years old,” Engineer replied. “So the city goes back farther than that."
Two thousand. Taya could remember when she had thought ten years an eternity to wait. And in the layers below, there were remains of older cities still?
A hole blasted through the base of one of the walls brought them to more foundations, this time burst by an ingress of what could have been mud or a finger of lava penetrating from above. Taya registered a series of impressions as they passed through: a massive supporting pier, canted and shifted off its base; everything the other side of it collapsed and compressed under weight bearing down from above; mecroids emerging from muddy tunnels like troglodytes of Azurean folk tales. Finally, a tube-frame staircase contained in the scaffolding erected around another hoist took them up another level.
Here, for the first time, were exposed portions of what had evidently been a floor. The space they had ascended into had been largely cleared to reveal a vault that was recognizably rectangular in all directions and had evidently been a hall of machines. The ones nearest were reduced to just the rusted and flaking shapes of what Taya could only think to describe as fossil machines, their original lines barely discernible, some not even fully dug out of the rock that had entombed them. The far end of the hall, however, seemed to have escaped being buried. The lines of the walls there were cleaner, and the machines, although disintegrating, were largely free of foreign encrustations. Several spaces told of some having been removed. Taya moved after the others, staring at these relics from a lost age, trying to picture this place as it once had been: humming, throbbing, and gleaming—like parts of Merkon.
She came to a stop, arrested by the image. Even without sharp lines and color, she was sure that she could make out the same general forms that she had known since childhood. Couldn't the corroded frames standing by the far wall almost have been bulkier versions of the racking inside electronic-photonics cabinets? And weren't those casings with the remains of shafts still protruding virtually the same shape as the motors that Engineer had contrived to propel the caloosh? Even as she looked, the strips and remnants of distorted metal laid out on the floor started to take on identifiable shapes as pieces of ducting, conduit, cable. She realized that Spak was watching her and smiling faintly.
“Yes, I know, what you're thinking,” he said. “Doesn't it show that the same people built Merkon? We though
t the same thing. But Skeptic says anyone would build machines the same basic way."
Taya's bubble popped into soap drops. “Sometimes I think I could happily delete Skeptic and all his backups,” she said with a sigh.
“You probably wouldn't be here without him,” Spak reminded her. “None of us would."
“That's true, I suppose,” she conceded. “Okay, I take it back"
“It's all right. I didn't pass it on,” Kort told her. “If it's any consolation, Mystic agrees with you."
Spak came back a few paces to stand by her. “But you're close,” he said. “There are other machines in better condition that we only found recently. They carry metal tags, which on X-ray examination show impressions that we think were numerals. The forms are uncannily like shapes that are found stamped into structural members in the original parts of Merkon. Even Skeptic agrees that those are not something that anyone would invent the same way.” He gave Taya a moment to absorb that; then he added in a tone that came through immediately as forced nonchalance, “As a matter of fact, that was what gave us the first real clue."
Taya caught the meaningful look in his eye. “First?” she repeated. Excitement seized her. “There's more? ... Are you saying you're sure?"
The twitching of Spak's mouth broadened into a smile that he could no longer contain. “Yes, of course, Taya. We have some big news! You don't think we'd bring you all this way just to show you a few walls and rusty pipes, do you?"
Taya turned accusingly to Kort. “You knew, didn't you! Even before we left Aranos."
“They made me promise,” Kort protested. He threw his hands up helplessly. “Human children.... What do you do?"
“We are not!” Vaysi told him.
“You're all impossible to argue with, anyway,” Kort said.
“Never mind all that,” Taya told them. Then, to Spak, “Tell me what you've found."
“Just a few more minutes, and we'll show you,” he replied.
They returned to the scaffolding and stairs, but boarded the hoist this time—larger than the one they had used back in the tunnel, able to hold several of the dump cars at a time. For perhaps thirty or forty feet it carried them up past galleries that had been opened to expose more sections of walls and floors. They were ascending through time, coming up from the ancient foundations deep below the city, through levels spanning indeterminable ages that had followed later, into remnants of the final living structure that had been Vrent. Then the hoist emerged suddenly into a high, open space, the largest they had seen so far, and stopped. Taya stepped off the platform with Kort, behind the others; a mecroid that had been waiting began trundling the first four of a line of loaded cars onto the vacated hoist.
Unlike the gray, stonelike floors below, the surface here had consisted of glazed mosaics—reminiscent of the ornamentation in some of the grander buildings around Azure today, such as Cyron's former palace at Aranos. Although much of the tiling was gone, patches remained where the rock had been carefully removed to reveal recognizable designs, in some places with vestiges of the original colors. As Taya took in more of the surroundings, the components came together in her mind's eye to recreate something of the scene as it must have existed.
The steps to the right had been part of a curving stairway to a terrace above, the overlooking balustrade of which still stood. To the left, the oval depression and piles of displaced blocks that looked as if they had formed a wall around it had been some kind of pool. The partly reconstructed sculpture on one side had stood on the pedestal island. Above and beyond the terrace, four square columns framed what had been a portico through the wall standing behind them. The immense rectangular openings through it had held windows.
She indicated the wall to Spak and looked up at it again. “We're on the outside of some kind of building, aren't we?” she said.
“That's right,” he confirmed. “We've come out from what were service levels below into some kind of ornamental plaza, maybe a garden or small park."
Taya looked up. The space above narrowed as it got higher, like an inverted canyon, one side formed by the exposed facade of the building, the other cut away into terraces and ramps by the exploratory teams. Horizontal struts had been thrown across the gap to shore up the exposed wall as more of its supporting matrix was dug away. Amid scaffolding to one side, the shape of what could have been a bridge or arch was beginning to emerge. Mixed groups of human figures and both wheeled and legged mecroids were busy at varied tasks, shoveling, scraping, washing down exposed surfaces with water. A crew higher up were positioning a drill. On an improvised table, a mec-form that looked like another version of Archaeologist was drawing on a chart.
Taya turned to look in the other direction.
The upside-down canyon ended at a cliff of exposed rock layers showing the sequence of Vrent's engulfment, which Taya was already familiar with from the accounts she had studied. First were the darker bands below, like those they had been ascending through, formed from compacted sediments and mud. Above them, a thinner layer, ten feet or so thick, of sand and clays. Finally, above that, the lighter grays of lava that extended to the surface. There had been extensive lava flows all over Azure following the flooding. Some connection with the Conflagration seemed to be implied.
Taya shielded her eyes with a hand against the glare from the lights, trying vainly to make out the roof. “How high does this go?” she asked Vaysi.
“Let's see ... the last time I was here, the excavation itself went up about fifty or sixty feet, with pilot shafts above that following the building for about the same distance again.” Vaysi called to Spak. “Hey, Spak. How far up have you gone with the pilot tubes now?"
“We broke through to the ice about two days ago,” he replied.
“To the ice?” Vaysi looked surprised. “But that has to be over four hundred feet."
“Right.” Spak gave a satisfied nod, as if she ought to be impressed. He added, before she could ask, “Yep, the building's still there, all the way. It just keeps going."
“Four hundred feet!” Taya repeated, astonished. No Azurean architecture came near to such a height.
“And there was more to it above that,” Spak said.
Moon, who had been surveying the various works in progress and saying little, explained, “What didn't get washed away in the flooding was set solid in the lava. Then the top parts were sliced off and carried away by the ice—which is how the things in the bergs came to be there. We'll possibly never know for sure how high Vrent was built."
News of the Star Mother's coming had evidently been telegraphed ahead. As Taya and the others climbed the wooden stairs that had been erected over the partly missing original flight, and emerged into view on the terrace, figures all around stopped what they were doing to turn and look at her. Here and there some raised a hand. She waved back in acknowledgment. Between the square columns, the entrance into the building could now be seen, shored up by steel props. In front of it was a collection of articles recovered from the workings. More Azureans approached and stood watching curiously as Spak, Moon, and others from the party described some of the exhibits to Taya.
There were several human skeletons, assembled on wire supports. An array of items set out in trays included metal clasps and buckles from clothing, assorted pieces of jewelry, hammers, saws, handles, as well as bits and rods that Moon said came from other tools. There were eating and kitchen implements; more remains of mechanisms and electronics devices, purposes not identified; shards of ornaments and glassware. Moon said that the Ancients used glass extensively in their buildings, the weight of the structure being carried by internal piers. That was why so much of the wall was missing, and the remains of the entrance just a shell. One of the skeletons was intriguing. It was fitted with an artificially constructed hip joint, beautifully fashioned from metal. Replacing parts in that way was something that had never occurred to Medic. But that could have been just because he had only dealt with bio-people who were young. Many Azureans com
plained of painful and stiffening joints as they got older.
By the time the group moved on into the building itself, a small entourage had collected and was following them. A partly opened arch beyond the vestibule led to a roughly circular space with borings extending away in several directions from the far side, like fingers probing to find the limits of the space they were in. Nothing extensive had been uncovered or connected up. Part of an exposed wall lay one way; something high and horizontal was being uncovered in another; off to one side was an opening into a shaft that Engineer thought might have been an elevator. This was evidently where some of the most recent work had been done.
Spak and Vaysi, with Moon, led the way into one of the passages and along toward a brightly lit working area. Eltry drew ahead with them, while Nyelise stayed with Taya and Kort. Gorso and Karthel dropped back among the Azureans still following. More figures were standing in a roughly hewn chamber ahead. They seemed to have been waiting. Another version of Archaeologist was among them. Taya identified him as Archaeologist Claws, holding a screenpad. Tools and other instruments lay all around and on a work table rigged from planks and trestles. The roof props still looked temporary, and air was delivered via a hose lying along the floor. Clearly, this was one of the newest places to be dug out. The figures that had been waiting opened to admit the newcomers, and then closed to join them in a semicircle before what had been found there.
It was a sculpture, three feet or so high, of the head and shoulders of a man, set on a plinth in a partly uncovered recess. But the main objects of attention were the two marble slabs set into the wall on either side of the plinth, and another forming the floor in front of it. They had been cleaned and polished, surely almost to their original condition. The shapes carved into them, set in groups along straight, equispaced lines, were bold and decisive. After studying them for a while, Taya began picking out similarities and repetitions. Eltry moved up to stand beside her. She looked at him, asking an unvoiced question.
“Writing of the Ancients,” Eltry confirmed. “Maybe some kind of ceremonial script. They probably had many.” Taya was not sure what she was supposed to say.
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