by Allen Wold
"Let's do it now," Gawin said. A servant came in at that moment, and Gawin instructed him, with Rikard's permission, to go to Rikard's rooms for the recorder. Then they all left the breakfast room.
As they went to his private study, Gawin took Rikard aside and said, "This is the biggest thing anybody has ever discovered, but there's a chance we could lose it."
"How so?"
"I know now," Gawin said as they entered the study, "how Karyl Toerson has been able to wield such influence as to get planetary government assistance in her depredations on Tsikashka. She and Father are still lovers."
"What are you talking about?" Gwineth demanded, surprised. "Who is Karyl Toerson, and when were they ever lovers before?"
Gawin filled her in quickly. "And so," he finished, "Father is protecting her, and letting her get away with what she's doing. I'm pretty sure Mother doesn't know about it."
"How did you find out?" Rikard asked.
"One of my agents found herself involved in the sale of a cyclopean artifact. It was just an accident, she helps me keep track of the shadier parts of the black market. Toerson was selling, and someone we don't need to name was buying, but there was someone else behind the scenes."
"Grandfather."
"Exactly. It was just ten days before the party last night."
"Does he know about my involvement with that stuff?" Rikard asked.
"If he did," Gawin said, "you would never have been allowed in last night. Whatever Father may feel about Toerson, he feels even more strongly about his reputation. If you do anything to jeopardize that, he will defend himself and seek retribution.
"Remember what he did to your mother. I finally figured out that part of the problem there was that Father hadn't been able to rescue her himself, and when Arin did, it put Father in a bad light, and he couldn't stand it, or the fact that Sigra loved Arin more than she did Father."
"So it looks like I've got to stay out of Toerson's way," Rikard said.
"At the very least. But let's see what we can find out from the recordings you've brought."
Gawin set up his database and computer, and Rikard took his recording helmet from the servant who discreetly appeared just then, and got out the disks. He put them into Gawin's player, which would also input to the computer, and showed the geological and the labeled political maps.
"This is fantastic. Those symbols there"—Gawin pointed to several on the map, which Rikard and his companions had figured meant city and capital—"correspond nicely with some we've been working on here," and he showed some of the translation work he'd had done, on a separate screen. "And now, the map symbols make some of these other things make sense."
They examined the polychrome text files next, but there was no way they could interpret them yet, though Gawin had hopes about one or two of his contacts eventually being able to make some progress. They knew they had them transliterated correctly, however, since some of the pictures could be compared with some of the texts, so they knew they had the colors right and so on. But it was important that some of the map symbols, which could be interpreted in context, were identical with some of the text symbols. "And there you have the start of it," Gawin said.
"Exactly," Rikard echoed, "a kind of fragmentary Rosetta stone."
For the next part of their analysis Gawin displayed anything with any graphic element at all. There was a lot of stuff that was trivial, or symbolic, or otherwise uninterpretable, but there was plenty that was truly graphic and intended to convey meaning by picture alone, and this had been separated by those whom Gawin had hired to work on the project.
Now, with the new clues from the maps, they did another sort, and found other maps that they had not at first recognized as such, and other graphics in which the symbols appeared as superimposed text. At the same time Gawin set his program to similarly analyze the pictures relative to his own database.
It turned out that there were a number of relationships and correspondences between what was known about the space in which the Federation existed and the existence of the cyclopeans. There were the cone ruins, as they had previously discovered. There were other places where reports of colored marble of a particular nature might actually have been cyclopean inscriptions, though no ruins were associated with them. There was a strong association between the cyclopean ruins and the known centers of Lambeza activity between one and a half and two million years ago, although their knowledge of other Ahmear sites was very limited. There was also new evidence that DRG-17.iv was in fact the world of origin of the cyclopeans, and their dispersal from there corresponded with the presence of the Lambeza culture.
There were no hints as to who destroyed DRG-17.iv, and the question still remained, to where did the lunar colony flee to find refuge?
Gawin still had the Ahmear archaeology text that Rikard had brought back from Trokarion, and he loaded it into the program. After it had assimilated it, the computer identified some of the pictures as having been taken on Trokarion itself, by a simple comparison of vegetation, distant mountains, sky patterns, and other labels too subtle for the untrained to appreciate. But there were no cones on Trokarion as far as the database showed.
Nonetheless, Gawin was intrigued, and Rikard was too, and together they instituted a new analysis of the archaeological book, fitting it in with the cyclopean records, and found that it was more recent by some short but unspecified time after the destruction of the home world one and a half million years ago.
Which meant that the cyclopeans pictured in the Ahmear text were survivors after the scorching of DRG-17.iv, and were the refugees from the moon colony. All other cyclopean activity had ceased when the home world was destroyed, but this group had continued for at least a few thousand years longer, and maybe a lot more, and then had disappeared from the record without any evidence of having been destroyed. Leaving no cone.
Rikard compared the dimensions of a typical cone with the size of the Ahmear ruin he had uncovered. It was much smaller. But one of the pictures in the Ahmear text showed a small cone next to a gigantic structure with towers at the four corners.
"I think," Droagn said, "that this might be the Ahmear city we explored on Trokarion."
"And if it is," Rikard said, "then the cyclopean cone in that picture is buried under the volcano along with that city."
"It makes perfect sense to me," Grayshard said. "It seems we might like to make a return trip to Trokarion."
Trokarion
1
The Federation, taken as a whole, is a Utopia. There has been no large-scale internal conflict for as long as there is unbroken history, since long before the advent of the M'Kade more than a thousand standard years ago. The star nations that surround, such as the Anarchy of Raas, the Segorian Union, or the Melagid Empire, are far more interesting places to live.
Not only do local governments there, as even in the Federation, sometimes undergo upheaval, but the star nation itself sometimes must go through trying times. Indeed the Crescent was once known as the Benevolent League before the dictatorship was put down some three thousand years ago.
Scholars in the Federation and out of it have all remarked on the stability of those worlds that are known as the Federation, on the continuity of its government, even through the time of troubles when the M'Kade came into power. His advent caused only a return to stability, not a revolution, and though his power is great, his influence is seldom felt. The stability is not his doing, and existed far back into history, even before the dispersal from Home-Space, the time when Humankind, after an interregnum of unknown duration, formed its first alliance from among the star systems they had once previously populated.
But this nearly ideal state is not caused by Humankind either, for the other nearby star nations are also predominantly Human, though in the Coryanth Cluster, so-called, they are a bare majority, and they do not share the enduring culture of the Federation. Scholars have long suspected some other cause, something to do with the stars, with that regi
on of space, some vector transmitted from world to world. There are other evidences, though sometimes they conflict.
But even in the Federation, not all places are Utopian. By its very nature, the Federation allows its member worlds considerable freedom, even if the exercise of that freedom involves civil war and bloodshed. Hence they did not interfere with Trokarion's troubles, though they kept them from spilling out into other worlds where the Kelarins of that world traveled. Keep your troubles at home was one rule the Federation enforced. And at the same time, if someone wanted to visit such a world and got caught up with its toils, no one was liable for any undue consequences other than the visitor himself.
Rikard knew that when he returned to Trokarion, to the country of Elsepreth that had been in bloody conflict with itself for two centuries, to the city of New Darkon, where there were deaths every day. His previous presence was a matter of record, his precipitous and unauthorized departure similarly. He was liable to arrest, and if not trial, at least punishment. And he could expect no outside help if he were caught. He knew that. So did Endark Droagn and Grayshard. Which was why they were so cautious.
It was night. Rikard sat at the controls of a special vehicle, which resembled a rubble clearance truck. Grayshard was beside him, Droagn was in back, along with their equipment. They moved slowly along the streets of the once-quiet Wildercroft area, and stopped now and then when they came to a damaged building. There scoopers came out from the sides of the truck and moved the rubble around a bit, but never actually cleared anything away. From outside, the truck looked as though it were nearly full. Inside, it was Droagn's compartment covered by a false top, though the rubble above it was real enough.
They passed an intersection. Suddenly armed Kelarins started shooting at each other from either side of the street. The truck hunkered down. The rebels used it for cover, but were not otherwise interested in it. After all, the rubble had to be cleared away, and those who did the job were left alone by both sides, for the most part.
Then uniformed soldiers broke into the intersection, and the rebels fled. The soldiers, too, paid the truck no attention, except as opportune cover.
The battle moved on, and after a while the truck started to move again. It turned a corner two blocks from the place where Rikard and his companions had come out of the cellars the last time they had been here.
The truck moved on, slowly. A group of civilians came out of a building, saw the truck, and quickly passed it by. A vehicle crossed the intersection but did not slow.
They crossed the intersection and saw an armored vehicle, half a block away, ready lights on, facing toward them. They drove on straight toward it, but when they came to a side street they turned up it. It was where they wanted to go anyway. Halfway up the block they came to the entrance with the double glass door by which they had exited when they had fled the Ahmear ruins. The truck pulled up to the curb, paused, then part of its top tipped and the rubble piled there spilled out on either side of the doorway. The top settled back and waited a long moment. Then robotic scoopers came out from the front and back end of the truck, as if to retrieve the rubble, but a side shaft on one of the scoopers broke out of line. The truck shut down, with only its ready lights glowing, and looked as though it were interrupted in its business and the crew had gone off for repairs. The truck sat silent for five minutes, then Rikard got out, heavily laden, went to the double glass door, and opened it. Then Grayshard, followed by Droagn, who was also carrying a lot of stuff, came out of the truck and went through the door. Rikard closed the door behind them.
He paused to put on and adjust his recording helmet, then they turned into a side corridor and went through it to a back foyer. There they took the stairs down, to another corridor with branches right and left and along it to a cellar with windows high in the walls. From there they went down a shaft sunk in the floor to a plastic composite serviceway where lights still burned, along several branches of this serviceway to a manhole and down the ladder mere to concrete sewers even farther below. They went along them to sewers made of brick, and to ancient underground serviceways lined with stone, to a room where stone stairs led down to ancient stone chambers with barrel arches. The floor was covered with half-damp muck, there were rotting crates and barrels in the corners and along some of the walls. The doorways were rotting and sagging. They went on to a new hole broken through the wall that opened into a narrow lava tube, which slanted down, rather steeply at first but soon more gently, rather narrow at first but soon more broadly, until they came to a bubble.
But as they went along the tube they noticed signs of Elsepreth government presence. There were lots of foot marks, and claw marks, and the sharp points on the sides of the tube had been broken off, and now and then they found bits of long Kelarine fur. As they worked deeper into the lava tubes and began to see signs of neo-Ahmear workings, the Elsepreth presence diminished. Still they were cautious. Who knew how the neo-Ahmear now felt about things, especially if they had been shot at by the government.
Then Droagn paused, and peered around in the darkness, as if he expected to see in the light of their lamps something other than black volcanic glass. The Prime, its sharp points glinting in Rikard's lamp, rested on his head as always, and it was with this that he detected the presence of the neo-Ahmear, not that far off in the tunnels, and knew, by their cautious movements, that they in turn were aware of the three of them.
"Shall I call them?" he projected to Rikard alone.
"By all means," Rikard said.
And so, using his special form of telepathy, augmented by the Prime, Endark Droagn did his best to get those decadent descendants of his own people to come to him. It took a while, but eventually they came.
If they were the same serpent men with whom they had dealt before, even Droagn could not tell, but one of them wore the Subordinate that he had left with them.
With guidance and suggestions from Rikard and Grayshard, Droagn tried to establish communications with these most distant cousins, but their behavior was, as before, always somewhat off the mark, not what Droagn expected, and seemingly arbitrary. He had no real control of the situation.
After a bit Rikard tried to get them to communicate with him vocally, and used a translator to help. This was only partially successful, since it appeared that the neo-Ahmear seldom used their voices except to call through the caves at long distance.
But eventually they began to make some progress. They learned that the neo-Ahmear called themselves the RoTakhh, that they had seen the Kelarine soldiers but didn't confuse them with Rikard's party, that the RoTakhh were confused instead by their discovery of an aboveground world about which they had only myths. And yes, Toerson's people had gotten away, by the simple expedient of laying down a barrage of automatic weapon fire which the RoTakhh just couldn't withstand.
Rikard had come prepared with simple pictures of a mummified cyclopean, one of their cone cities, and of a wall with its colored writing. He had also brought a small cyclopean sculpture. He showed these to the RoTakhh, who conferred among themselves before answering that the cyclopeans were mythical beings in whom they did not believe.
They had never seen a cone from the outside, of course, but they recognized the color-smeared walls as being in a space they knew underground, adjacent to but on the other side of the Ahmear ruins. But that place was cursed, taboo, blessed, or haunted—it was impossible to tell exactly which concept they had in mind or more closely described how they felt about it—and they refused to go there or discuss it further. Even though they thought of Droagn as some kind of special person, or perhaps a demi-god, or maybe a demon from the past, they wouldn't be swayed, and the more Rikard pressed, the more they threatened to become dangerous.
"I think it's about time for me to take a hand in this," Grayshard said. Rikard drew a veil of protective material across the parts of his face that were exposed by the recording helmet. Then Grayshard, one of the warrior class of the Vaashka, began to exert his peculiar influence,
half-psychic, half-chemical.
The RoTakhh were not as susceptible as other people to this form of attack. They did not fall down on the floor screaming, or thrash around with their four arms wrapped around their heads. But they were not immune, either, and began to slightly sway from side to side, though one or two rose up and down on their coils instead.
Droagn projected at them too. They wove and now and then one of them dipped, but they did not turn away to lead them anywhere. "A little more," Droagn said to Grayshard.
"I'll try."
Droagn winced, as if he could feel Grayshard's projection. He turned to face first one of the now-quivering RoTakhh, then another, but they resisted his silent importunings.
"Don't just push them," Rikard said after a moment. "Tell them you're their boss, play on their myths and superstitions."
"Might as well." Droagn's thought was a bit strained. They're not going to give in to threats."
Whatever it was he was saying to the RoTakhh, it seemed to be working, for after a moment they all began to weave and bob in unison, and raised their arms as if in supplication. One of them began suddenly to swipe at something invisible in the air beside him, and another curled up and put his arms over his face, but the others were making gestures and postures of acceptance.
"Looks like they'll do what we want," Rikard said. "They will. For a while."
"Let them off," Rikard said to Grayshard. And though the Vaashka had no bones, Rikard could see him visibly relax.
"The air should be clear now," Grayshard said after a moment. Rikard undid the veil across his face, and felt none of the Vaashka combat effect.
"Let's go see what their home looks like," Rikard suggested, "and we can move on from there."
Droagn nodded, gestured imperiously with his upper right hand, and the RoTakhh, drunk and hallucinating, turned away and led them through the lava tubes deep into their own realms.
When they came to the center of the neo-Ahmear caverns, worked and built and excavated from the volcanic tuff and lava, they realized that they had misjudged the snake men, or had been duped by them, because the cavern was bright, clean, well designed, well ventilated, and extensive. The warriors had no clothing, but the civilian snake men here wore harnesses similar to Droagn's, decorated with stones and with well-worked pieces of their lost technology. Though cut off for fifty thousand years and buried underground, they were a well-established culture. There were children, who had toys, and the people they saw were engaged in meaningful tasks, though most of them stopped to watch the procession with obvious apprehension.