The word cage conjured images of prisons, of the bottles demons and djinn were captured in in ancient stories. Unbidden, one of the door-murals I had seen in the house of Kharn Sagara floated in my mind, the child Kharn enthroned, clutching Brethren in a flask upon his lap.
A cage.
“Why build a cage?” Alexander asked.
The boy was so slow. “Because something inside is still operational,” I said. Had Kharn Sagara known? Had Brethren? Had some ancient signal escaped Tor Aramini’s cage—or had some signal older still been transmitted before whatever lay beneath the Library was locked away? I imagined white hands on arms ten thousand light-years long reaching cross the stars to grasp long fingers together, like reaching for like. Elated as Valka was, I only felt a pit in my stomach open and yawn. “But where’s the door?” I asked again. “Because I’m sure us cutting our way in is precisely the kind of thing Aramini had in mind when he planted those bombs beneath the reservoir.” Valka was still smiling. “What?”
The smile widened. “ ’Tis the fun part,” she said. “I have no idea.”
* * *
To the chance observer, it must have seemed that we had lost our minds. Or it would have done, had there been any observers so deep in the bowels of Gabriel’s Archive. As it was, there were none to see the way Valka, the prince, and I scrambled over the shelves and alcoves and pulled tapestries out of arrases and examined the bare stone beneath.
There had been no sign of Valka’s secret chamber in Tor Aramini’s blueprints, only signs that pointed to its absence. We spent several days looking, and after the initial excitement wore down on the first day, we had Pallino, Siran, and our few remaining guards help us.
“ ’Twould have to be something mechanical,” Valka was saying, feeling along the edges of one alcove with her hands. “I would love to get a set of gravitometers down here. ’Twould have the matter settled in hours.”
“You’d never get them past the day gate,” Gibson said, sitting with Alexander beneath the portrait of Lord Washington.
The prince—who had lost almost all interest in searching once the soldiers joined us—asked, “Why would it be mechanical?”
Valka’s reply came strained as she felt her way along the back of one bank of consoles. “Because it can’t be something the machine could open from the inside.” She came away from the wall, pinching the bridge of her nose. “I thought ’twas going to be easier than this.”
“Well, we’ve been here for seven fucking years already,” Pallino said, coming round the bend. “Why would it be easy?” Doran appeared at his back, dark circles beneath his eyes. Pallino wasn’t looking much better. The chiliarch’s dark hair stood on end, and to judge by the way he gasped as he lowered himself against the wall, his feet hurt him nearly so bad as mine did me. Inspired by the chiliarch, I slid down the wall opposite and crossed my legs, half-contemplated removing my boots to massage the aching flesh beneath. Washington’s painting stood between columns half-sunk into the wall, beneath a rounded Roman arch like those on the exterior of the Library. The arches and columns marched on along the inner wall of the Archive, each holding the portrait of a different Mericanii lord. The ancient plaster had cracked in places, chips fallen away with the passing of so many thousand years. Hairline fractures ran behind Washington’s gold-leaf frame, marks of time as sure as the wrinkles on Gibson’s seamed face.
Seams . . .
“They might have just plastered over it . . .” I said, liking the idea more by the instant. Seven pairs of eyes turned toward me. I pointed at the wall beside Washington’s portrait. “These recesses are all plaster between the columns. See? Around the pictures.” I pointed. “Outer wall’s all masonry. They could have just covered up the door. There’d be no way any sensor equipment would get past the day gate, so it would be safe enough.”
Gibson was nodding along in his seat. “And no scholiast would take a mattock to the wall and destroy a precious site like this.”
“But they could get in if they wanted,” I said, and—feeling something like the ruin-lust that so often stirred Valka’s blood—I lurched to my feet. “May I borrow your cane?” I asked Gibson.
My tutor raised the stick flat in both hands like a knight offering his sword to the Emperor. I placed my hand between his and took the cane, realizing as I did so that I had never held it before. It was heavier than I expected, the ash wood petrified and hard as stone, the head and tip not plated but solid brass.
“What are you going to do?” Valka asked, unsteady strides closing half the distance between us. “Hadrian, don’t you dare!”
But I was hurrying on ahead of her, passing down the line of Mericanii lords until the paintings changed to photographs. I’d counted them all before. There were seventy-seven. Seventy-seven lords of the Mericanii from Washington to Felsenburgh. Nearly five hundred years they’d reigned, lords of the greatest empire Old Earth had ever seen, greater than Qin, or storied Egypt; greater than Spain or ancient Rome. It was the Mericanii who first left Earth’s lonely shores and set foot among the stars, they who sent the first colonist beyond the circles of the Sun and raised new cities by the light of strange stars.
JEFFERSON, GRANT, HOOVER, NIXON, HAWLEY . . .
I stopped again before Julian Felsenburgh’s saintly image. Plain black suit and white hair.
Me being me, I held the cane straight up in salute to the ancient dictator. Felsenburgh the Liberator. And like a fencer on his line, I lunged, thrusting the tip of Gibson’s cane through the inch or so of thick plaster just beneath the antique picture frame.
And struck . . . stone.
I felt the rock resist me, and the solid vibration that told me what I’d struck was solid as the hill above our heads.
“What the hell are you doing?” Valka grabbed my arm. “This place is priceless, you barbarian!”
Pallino undercut the moment’s tension, saying, “I thought for sure you were right, Had. I thought you had it.”
“I just have the wrong one!” I said, shaking free of Valka’s talons.
“You are not putting a hole in the wall underneath every one of these paintings, Hadrian!” she said.
Pushing past her, I replied, “You know the story about the bird who wore the diamond mountain down?”
“I said stop!”
Alexander chimed in, “Shouldn’t we talk to the primate? Tell him what we’re doing?”
“I am tired of waiting!” I said, and punched through the plaster beneath Felsenburgh’s neighbor, a grim-faced woman whose name I have since forgotten. Stone again. “We’ve come too far and taken too long to leave now empty-handed!”
Crunch.
Stone again. I jogged ahead of Valka, pausing just long enough to strike two more of the panels, crushing a thumb-sized hole in the plaster beneath each portrait.
Crunch. Crunch.
“You don’t know what you’re doing!” Valka protested. “Hadrian, the bombs!”
Crunch. I’d gone through ten of them already. Fifteen.
“We don’t even know what we’re looking for!”
“It’s only plaster!” I said. “It’s not the paintings!”
“You can’t just vandalize a fifth millennium library on a hunch!”
I raised the cane again and thrust at the wall.
Ping!
The brass tip struck metal and rang like a bell. I turned and looked at Valka.
“I hate you,” she said flatly.
Drawing Gibson’s cane back, I thrust it into the wall again. It pinged loudly, confirming the hollow sound of before was no random happenstance. “No, you don’t.”
I peered up at the image of the man in the painting. Black-suited like the others, round-faced, gray hair short and smile unassuming. He was as plebeian-looking as the rest, hair receding, dark eyes hid behind spectacles. A white dome stood behind him where he s
at in a plain wooden seat in lieu of a throne beneath a tawny sky.
“Truman,” I said, reading the name on the placard. Speaking to the painting, I asked, “Why you?” But it didn’t matter. I shook myself and—returning my attention to the doctor—said, “With your permission?”
* * *
In retrospect, we ought to have mentioned our discovery to the primate before we stripped the plaster from the walls. The stuff crumbled easily and fell almost to dust. Under Valka’s close eye, Pallino, Siran, and the soldiers removed Lord Truman’s image and set to work. It only took the better part of twenty minutes, and in time they revealed a simple hatch concealed behind a metal plate that folded outward when Siran pulled.
It had no key, no lock, only a wheel-lock handle, such as the bulkhead doors of a starship. A door requiring human hands to open.
“Why is there always another door?” I asked no one in particular.
No one answered.
Valka moved forward with me, and together we forced that ancient wheel to turn. Metal groaned and at last gave way so that Valka fell against me as the door opened. If the air in Gabriel’s Archive had been dry and stale as an old tomb, the air in that final chamber was worse still. It stank of spent gunpowder and smoke, as if the fumes of whatever burning had sealed the rock in place yet lingered there.
“We need light!” I said.
Siran answered, “Where are those glowspheres?” Two of the men began moving.
The men returned with torches, and despite my objections, Pallino went first, casting the beam of his torch ahead. I followed soon on, clutching Valka’s hand in mine. The floor beneath us rattled, and looking down I saw abyssal dark looming through latticed steel. The path ran on ahead and vanished, lost in shadow.
“Can you see?” I asked Valka.
“Probably only a little farther than you,” she said. “What is that smell?”
“Sulfur,” Siran added. “Ozone, maybe?”
“Smells like shit you bring in from space. Like when you’re skinning out of a suit in the airlock.” Pallino stopped. “This goes on a way. Looks like there’s a gate ahead.”
I wished I’d brought my sword. On Vorgossos at least I’d been armed.
Valka spoke from just behind me. “This metal lattice is a Faraday shield. Aramini wasn’t taking any chances.” She hissed, “What I wouldn’t give for a better light.”
The gate, too, was a metal lattice, though like the hatch outside it had neither lock nor key, only another wheel requiring human hands to turn it. This we did, and advancing, saw a sign with letters painted in English and in Galstani alike.
WARNING: CLOSE OUTER DOOR BEFORE PROCEEDING
“Siran,” I said, “close the door, please.”
“But if we need to get out fast . . .”
“Do it,” I said, and moved forward, following Pallino.
Another gate stood ahead, twin to the last. This we opened and closed behind us, seeing an identical sign. There were no lights. No switches. No hardware of any kind. There were sconces bracketed to the lattice walls of the cage-like catwalk along which we moved, but we had no torches save the little glowspheres, and so moved on.
“I see something!” Valka said, her machine eyes seeing what ours could not.
I saw a moment later.
A pale gleam shone at the end of the gangway—for gangway it was. A hatch, white-tiled and black-trimmed, with a tiny porthole in its center.
As we drew nearer, I could make out the name stenciled on the surface there, and read aloud. “U.S.S. Horizon,” I said, coming to a halt beside Pallino.
“It is a ship, then?” Alexander’s voice came from the rear of the line, bracketed between two of our guardsmen. “A Mericanii ship?”
“ ’Twould seem so,” Valka answered, peering out the side of the gangway. “ ’Tis a long way down yet. No telling how far. I’d guess we’re dead center.”
Moving to stand by Pallino, I held my glowsphere high enough to shine pale light across the door and the stenciled name. “Can we open it?” Gibson asked. The old man had come with us, but hung near the rear with the prince.
I ran a hand over the smooth surface, almost as if I could sense the impossible span of years that lay beneath it. Like the relics in the hall, the portraits, the banners, and the documents, the vessel was more ancient than my merely human mind could grasp, had been old even when Kharn Sagara was young.
But the latch gave when I forced it, and the door folded out with a groan.
CHAPTER 62
COMPUTER GOD
WHERE THE AIR OUTSIDE was acrid, the air within was only stale. The light of our glowspheres washed across sanitary white surfaces, silver panels, and black glass. Nothing stirred, not even the dust.
“It’s quiet,” Siran said.
“I don’t like this,” Pallino added.
I was surprised to find the floor beneath us, the decks of the rocket stacked like the floors of a tower. I had somehow imagined them sideways, so that a man might stand at its prow and look out as from a sailing ship or from one of our own spacefaring vessels. Such stacked rockets were still flown, most often as in-system freight haulers, but I had never ridden one. The design harked back to a day before the warp drive—before Royse’s field theory—when the only ways to achieve gravitation aboard a starship were spin and thrust.
Much of this must have been going through Gibson’s mind as well, for he said, “This is a sub-light ship for certain. Pre-warp drive.”
“I thought the Mericanii never had warp drive,” Alexander interjected.
“They didn’t,” Gibson said, and I heard the tapping of his cane on the deck plates. “This ship was designed for constant thrust, hugging the speed of light. I never thought to see its like! Do we have more light?” Siran passed her torch to the scholiast. Holding the beam near his eyes, Gibson squinted out a porthole slightly larger than his fist into the darkened chamber outside. “To think this has been sitting beneath the Library for nigh on ten thousand years . . .”
Wide-eyed, the prince made the sign of the sun disc. “Do you really think something is . . . alive in here?” His pale face had gone white and thin as fresh paper. “After all this time?”
I pushed round him, moving toward Valka and the inner door. “Why else build the Faraday cage?” I asked. Pausing, I leaned toward Valka and asked in Tavrosi Nordei, “You’re locked down, right?” Meaning her implants.
“Receiver’s off,” she said, replying in the same tongue. “Everything’s down. I swear.”
I nodded, and briefly considered sending her back to wait beyond the Faraday shields. But as I opened my mouth to say just that, I remembered the way Brethren had communicated with me on Vorgossos, speaking directly into my mind. If there was still a Mericanii daimon alive in the vessel, we were all at risk.
“You should all go back,” I said. “It isn’t safe here.”
“Like hell!” Pallino said. “Go back . . . and leave you, is that it?”
“You’re worried about contamination?” Valka put a hand on my arm.
I nodded. “Possession. Remember Brethren? The way it spoke to me?”
“Remember what?” Pallino and Alexander asked together.
Looking back as I stepped through the inner door, I answered them. “Vorgossos.” That was enough. Beyond, a hall ran round to either side, following the curve of the outer hull. The ship wasn’t large, a hundred feet in diameter, maybe a hundred fifty. I wondered how tall it was, passing a ladder that pierced the deck above. It felt cramped, the ceiling so low I did not even have to stretch out my hand to reach it. But then, men had been smaller in those days.
The inner door had no latch, no knob or handle. It was only a convex arc of aluminum and white plastic, the kind of simplistic, primitive design the ancients had called postmodern, as if they had occupied the end of history and
not its humble beginnings.
“Why is there always another door?” I swore and slapped the panel with my bare right hand. It slid open, grinding into a pocket in the wall. Cool light spasmed to life behind it, illuminating a scene no eyes had seen in at least ten thousand years. The Emperor Gabriel himself had perhaps been the last man to stand where we stood, accompanied by his scholiasts and his Martians on one last inspection of the Horizon before it was sealed away. The chamber beyond might have been the bridge. Sterile white walls and black windows. Yellowed rubber seals and cracked false leather upholstery. The Mericanii banner stood painted on the wall, red stripes and white radiating from a single white star inscribed on a blue circle in the center.
One star, not the several dozen I’d seen on the older flags in the archive.
If the Horizon had human passengers once upon a time, there was no sign of them. No scuff of boots or item left out of place. Everything was clean.
In the center of the room was a podium that looked not unlike a holography well, such as the one from which Corvo commanded the Tamerlane. Above it hung a half-sphere of black glass like the glossy egg sac of some unlikely insect queen, and about it hung limp several white metal arms slotted into tracks on the ceiling, claw hands and other components slack.
“Lights shouldn’t work after this long,” Pallino grumbled. “I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all.”
He was right. I tried to imagine what kind of power source could keep a ship operational without maintenance for ten thousand years. “Don’t touch anything!” I said, mindful of my performance with the door and a bit self-conscious. I seemed to feel the weight of Tor Aramini’s bombs hanging above our heads, and wondered if each step was the one that would finally bring them screaming down.
A Mericanii starship.
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