by Allen Wold
The treasure was too vast for them to take it all in. But even Rikard's quickest glances were recorded, and could produce a few good still images of each object.
The corridor ended at last, in a broad but simple double door. Beyond was a gallery, very long but not much wider than the corridor. At first Rikard thought that it was empty, but he soon realized that the irregular pattern on the walls was in fact the remains of frames. This had been a picture gallery, but at this end at least most of the pictures had crumbled away. A hostile environment for fifty thousand years had destroyed every canvas, leaving only the frames, and sometimes not even those.
A few pictures did remain, but the first three they passed were so darkened that they were black. Rikard paused for a few seconds by each to get a broad-spectrum recording, in case something could be made of it later.
The fourth intact picture was different. It was indeed a painting, rather than a photograph, and very dark, but something of the subject could be told. There were trees, or perhaps clouds, and some kind of ruined structure, and several Ahmear standing around talking with some humanoid race, with animals like large dogs and featherless birds standing near, as if pets. Rikard almost touched the canvas, but Grayshard stopped him. "I can smell it from here," he said. "If you sneeze on it, it will shatter." Rikard backed away, took a few more seconds of recording, and they passed on.
About one percent of what had once hung in this gallery remained, four out of five as merely black patches within crumbling frames, the remainder as barely visible pictures. Rikard recorded what he could, and even Droagn was excited, but Grayshard reminded them that they were not at liberty to dawdle. "Where we have come in," he said, "others can follow."
"But nobody has," Rikard said, "in all this time."
"They had no reason to. But when Kath Harin and his crew get to the surface, if they haven't done so already, they'll have reason, if only to get paid after all."
The gallery came to an end at last, but instead of passing into the next chamber, Droagn paused in the archway connecting and put his hand on the side panel. "A service door, I think." He pushed. Nothing happened.
"Here it is," Rikard said. He touched a small raised plate at one side. The door opened, and they went through.
On the other side was a narrow and rather steep ramp going down. The surface was more strongly corrugated to accommodate the steeper pitch, but even so it was tricky for Rikard and Grayshard. They went down what might have been two levels, and at the bottom was another door, with a much more obvious latch plate. Beyond that were the cellars.
These were similar to the below-level areas they'd been through before, but were much better preserved. They had been more strongly built in the first place, and being farther from the volcanic heat had suffered less thermal damage.
It was a maze. In any living city this would have been of little or no interest to Rikard and his companions, but down here were surviving mechanisms from the Ahmear's time, technology that, though perhaps in large part not different except in detail from that now used by one or more other peoples in the Federation, was in some cases unique. More prosaic, perhaps, than the Prime, a sophisticated communications device once intended to link individuals and coordinate their actions in time of conflict. But Ahmear, nonetheless. And almost all of it valuable in a historical if not a technological sense. Rikard recorded on the fly as they went.
Droagn found another ramp, and they descended another level. Now they were well below the original ground, where power, water, waste, and air-conditioning equipment were kept. Below this, if there were anything at all, it would be deep wells, or geothermal systems. And if that were all, then Rikard's job was done. He could just start back up, record what he could, pick up a few trophies, and go home and start writing his monographs.
They had traversed nearly the whole of this subcellar when they came to an alcove in which was set a much heavier door than any they had encountered before. Droagn probed beyond it with the psychic enhancement of the Prime.
"There's a ramp going down, but I can't tell much more than that. The walls are too dense."
"Then this is what we want," Rikard said. "Let me have that green case."
Rikard opened the case, and from it took tools that resembled the cutting torches the Kelarins had used, but more compact, and heavier, and without connecting cables. The power was an integral part. He attached a triggering device, the cutting points with an optic shield at the end, shoulder strap and hand grips, and last a fuel cell of nearly eight liters capacity. When he triggered the mechanism there was a crack, and a spark of light that was bearable only when seen through the nearly opaque shield and that reflected brilliantly off the wall in front of them.
To get the same power legally would have required a generator the size of a truck. The police usually assumed, if they found one in private hands, that it could only be used for cutting open safes and the like.
Rikard set the torch to the latch plate, but ten minutes of concentrated burning produced not even a mark. He tried the hinge side of the door, but accomplished nothing there either.
"What the hell did they make this out of?" he snapped as he turned off the torch.
"I think they call it multicollapsed alloy," Droagn said. "If it's any consolation, that means this is the right place."
"So how do we get through? Can you work the lock?" Droagn lowered himself so that his dome eyes were level with the latch plate. He ran his fingers lightly over it. It was cool to the touch in spite of the torch. He put his ear to it and tapped near it with a knuckle. Then he put his face in his hands and tilted his head so that the horns of the Prime nearly touched the latch, and concentrated for a long moment. "It's mechanical," he said at last, "but I have no idea how it works." Grayshard said, "May I try?"
"Be my guest." Droagn moved back from the door. Grayshard stepped up to it and held out his left hand, palm raised, just inches from the latch plate. He did not touch the door with his gloved hand. Instead, a thin bundle of red-tipped white fibers extended from between the glove and the sleeve of his jacket, the end dividing and redividing until the individual fibers were too small to be seen. So small that they could penetrate between the dqor and the jamb. There was a pause. The bundle of off-white fibers twitched. Then there was a click, and the door swung open. Rikard packed away his useless cutting torch. Droagn gripped the latch of the now unlocked door with all four hands and pulled back. The muscles on his shoulders bunched as he braced himself on his semi-extended lower body, and with the faintest of raspings the door swung outward toward him.
The blue-red lamp illuminated a small antechamber beyond, from which a ramp descended in a straight line instead of a spiral. They gathered up their equipment and went down.
After about fifty meters the ramp came to a landing, turned one hundred eighty degrees, then descended farther. A little later they emerged from the wall of a broad, high corridor, three meters above the floor. The corridor extended to right and left beyond the reach of the light, but on either side as far as they could see were large doorways, spaced maybe twenty meters apart, heavily framed, and closed with very solid-looking doors.
Grayshard went to the nearest door opposite the ramp. He brought his hand up to within a few centimeters of the latch plate, and once again the bundle of red-tipped fibers extruded from between his glove and sleeve and penetrated the lock. There was a soft click. He gripped the latch handle, and even under bis feeble pulling, the door swung open.
The room beyond was spacious by Human standards, even considering the Ahmear proportions. Past an entrance-way was no museum display, but an actual Ahmear residence, abandoned intact. Couches similar to those they had seen outside the museum stood on the floor. There were low tables, shelves against the walls, a console that looked like nothing so much as a home entertainment center. There were what might have been magazines on one of the tables, a cup of some kind on another.
Adjacent to the living room was a dining room/kitchen comb
ination. Scaled to Humans, it would have been considered too large for efficient use. Droagn opened several cabinets. Those holding utensils, dinnerware, appliances, were all but unchanged by time. Where food had been kept were now only piles of dust, though here and there a container stood intact. There was no bad smell. Beyond the kitchen was a laundry.
They went back through the living room to a large bedroom with a bathing alcove. Ahmear beds were low to the floor, and this one, big enough for maybe three adults, looked like it had once held a fluid-filled mattress. There were smaller "chairs," a thing that might have served as a dresser, but no clothes. A light harness hung on one of the chairs. There was no art. The bathing alcove, besides a closable shower/tub arrangement, contained typical Ahmear sanitary facilities—a trench in the floor that had once been padded—and what Droagn said was a polishing and coloring cabinet.
There were few personal possessions. 'But then, there wouldn't be," Droagn said. 'This is a tiny place, for emergency use only. And it was being used. And then they left, all of a sudden.' He fingered the harness, which crumbled to the floor.
"I don't get the feeling of panicked flight," Rikard said. "I don't either. It feels more like they just left and never came back. Caught outside when the volcano hit. Something like that.'
The next apartment was not identical with the first. The living area was smaller, the dining area was larger, and there were two bedrooms sharing a single bath. There were books here—electronic devices now dead—and the remains of a meal on the table. In the second, smaller bedroom were what Droagn identified as toys, for a child equivalent to a Human of about six years of age. Not having had any children, he didn't know for sure.
They left the apartment and Droagn turned his attention to the Prime. After a moment he pointed to the right, back the way they had come.
All the doors had symbols on them, the equivalent of room numbers. There were three symbols in each case, which looked to Rikard like base sixteen—which made sense, since an Ahmear had three fingers and a thumb on each of -four hands. When the nature of these symbol sets changed, from three digits to two digits and a third symbol of a different type, Droagn had Grayshard open the door.
This was not another residence, but a room full of machinery. They walked to the back of the chamber. Some of the machinery was out in the open on shelves, brackets, or pedestals, some of it was behind transparent or louvered or opaque panels. Droagn touched buttons and flipped switches, which made Rikard nervous, though nothing happened.
As they came back toward the entrance Droagn opened a panel on the right, which proved to be a cover for an access hatch, which opened into the next chamber. It was just big enough for Droagn to fit through. Rikard and Grayshard followed.
If the first chamber had seemed mechanical in nature, this one seemed more electronic, and yet that wasn't exactly right either. Some of the devices were freestanding, some were enclosed. Some were in clear view, others concealed. Some were connected to others, or to a kind of network, others appeared to be isolated. And set down casually on a console, the purpose of which nobody cared to guess, they found a black metal circlet, similar to the Prime that Droagn wore, but with shorter spikes that were tipped with knobs instead of being pointed.
"It's a Subordinate," Droagn said. He took off the Prime and put on the other circlet. 'It doesn't work—no, wait a minute..." He looked at the Prime in his lower right hand.
"It would work, if I could wear the Prime at the same time." He handed the Subordinate device to Rikard.
Rikard had worn the Prime once, but had not been able to make any use of it. Still, he tried on the Sub while Droagn put the Prime back on his own head. That is, he held the Sub in place at the top of his head, to keep it from slipping down onto his shoulders. He could just barely feel, in the back of his head—or maybe in his sinuses—a tiny tickle, and Droagn's words, as if spoken from a great distance away, Can you hear me?
"Sort of," Rikard said. He took the device off and handed it back. Droagn slipped it up on his upper left arm, where it fit almost like a bracelet around his equivalent of biceps.
They went back out to the main corridor. Droagn concentrated through the Prime, scratched at the Sub where it encircled his arm, and looked first to the right, up the corridor in the way they were going, then left, the way they had come. "The residences are that way, the mechanical is this way. Administrative should be back there, and the place we're looking for should be at this end of the corridor."
They could just see the end wall in the light of his red-blue lamp. The last room on the right proved to hold plumbing, but the one on the left opened onto a small lobby, and beyond that what appeared to be a miniature version of the museum above. The room was only two hundred by two hundred meters, though there were arches at the back and to the right that led to other chambers.
It held furniture, sculptures, sample machinery, paintings, bits of everything. Only here, instead of a dais for each object, everything stood on benches and tables, close together, with only the narrowest—in Ahmear terms—of aisles between.
Some of the objects seemed to be broken. Others were obviously very fragile. There were a few duplicates, as well, and there were glassed-in cases, which were locked, which contained a few small sculptures and devices that Rikard guessed were just too valuable to leave upstairs.
And here, unlike everywhere else, the climate was controlled, or at least once had been. Here was no dust, paper and fabric were still intact. There was an antiseptic if dead scent to the air.
There were statues, paintings, strange devices that might still have been operational. Here were the objects that the citizens of this lost city wanted to make sure would survive an emergency.
Droagn put down the case he'd been carrying and Rikard knelt to open it. He thumbed the catches on either side and it split in half. He raised the top half and let it open all the way back to the floor.
The inside appeared to be solid, but in the middle of each of the two newly exposed surfaces was another catch, recessed into the interior cover. Rikard thumbed them simultaneously and the case split in two once more, in the other direction this time. Rikard opened the two sides away from each other, so that now the case was twice as wide and twice as long and a quarter as deep as it had originally been.
And again, the inside was covered by panels. Rikard undid four more recessed latches, in the middle corners of the panels, and one by one opened them. The space beneath them was very dark, and something about it made his eyes dance, though he'd opened this case many times before.
"All right," he said, "you hand the stuff to me."
Droagn had put everything else down by this time, and Grayshard had already gone off to select a few of the smaller items. The two of them worked as if they had rehearsed, picking out those pieces that were intact, strong enough to be carried, and unique.
They brought sculptures, crystalware, silver objects, mechanical devices, small paintings removed from their frames, booklike things. Rikard remained kneeling in front of the case, took each object in turn, and put it down into the darkness of the case, leaning forward as if it projected down through the floor for half a meter or more, and reaching back under the edges.
The case was a lot bigger inside than it was outside, and could contain up to ten times its normal closed volume. It was, in fact, the outer frame of a four-dimensional storage device. They were hard to come by, very expensive, and one as small as this was illegal, since it could so easily be used for smuggling—as indeed this one had been used on numerous occasions.
Rikard packed the art objects away as methodically as his two companions selected them. Droagn also picked out a few items, pieces of jewelry mostly, such as pendants on chains and finger rings and buckles for his harness, that he could just wear.
The case was beginning to fill up, but by now Grayshard and Droagn were selecting items from the far sides of this large room. And then Droagn called out, "Kah-ta'yahh!"
"We've got someth
ing here," he projected.
"What is it?" Rikard called back.
Droagn was holding a small sculpture of an Ahmear, a boxlike shape in black and gold, and a coil of chain, but his fourth hand was gingerly touching the Prime on his head. Tower," he said. "Not too far from here."
Rikard got to his feet. "We have visitors?"
"No, it's in the walls." Grayshard, carrying a crystal dagger shape in one hand and his micropulse laser in the other, moved in his flowing, clumsy way toward Droagn. "Emergency backup power."
"Probably," Droagn said.
"So where is it coming from?" Rikard asked.
"The other side of this wall."
"There's a door over that way," Grayshard pointed. They put the artworks down and went to it.
It was a small service exit. It opened easily and beyond was a corridor, narrow and featureless except for a few cryptic symbols on the wall. There were no other doors until the other end, perhaps a hundred meters away, where there were more of the strange symbols.
They entered a chamber, lined with strange panels, each with a dimly glowing dot or bar or other symbol. Opposite the door was an arch, and through that they could see another, similar chamber. There was another chamber beyond that, and another, as far as Droagn's light could reach. Each of the chambers was more or less the same, sometimes slightly larger or smaller, or more square or more rectangular, but all of them with the panels with their glowing telltales.
They went through four chambers, slowly, and stopped at the fifth. There were at least as many more beyond.
"I think this is a library,' Droagn said. "Rather primitive, but still under power."
Grayshard reached up to one of the panels. His gloved fingers brushed lightly along the edges. "Nuclear batteries," he said. "They're almost dead, maybe another ten or fifteen thousand years of life left."
Droagn looked closely at one of the panels. Then he touched the glowing spot in the middle of it. A concealed aperture opened and something very much like one of the electronic books they'd seen in the outer room slid out. He held it in one hand and touched the spot again. Nothing happened.