by Vernor Vinge
Vinh’s head snapped up and he peered into the gloom. Maybe not a light, but a sound.
“The walker?”—Diem.
“Maybe it’s just the building settling?”—Benny.
“No, no. This was impulsive, like a click. Now we’re getting a regular beat, some damping. Frequency analysis…sounds like mechanical equipment, moving parts and such…Okay, it’s mainly stopped, just some residual ringing. Crewleader Diem, we’ve got a very good position on this racket. It was on the far corner, four meters up from street level. Here’s a guide marker.”
Vinh and the others moved forward thirty meters, following the marker glyph that floated in their head-up displays. It was almost funny, the furtiveness of their movements now, even though they would be in plain sight of anyone in the building.
The marker took them around the corner.
“The building doesn’t look special,” said Diem. Like the others, this appeared to be mortarless stonework, the higher floors slightly outset from the lower. “Wait, I see where you’re pointing. There’s some kind of…a ceramic box bolted to the second overhang. Vinh, you’re closest. Climb up there and take a look.”
Ezr started toward the building, then noticed that someone had helpfully killed the marker. “Where?” All he could see were shadows and the grays of stonework.
“Vinh,” Diem’s voice carried more than its usual snap. “Wake up, huh?”
“Sorry.” Ezr felt himself blushing; he got into this sort of trouble far too often. He enabled multispec imagery, and his view burst into color, a composite of what the suit was seeing across several spectral regions. Where there had been a pit of shadow, he now saw the box Diem was talking about. It was mounted a couple of meters above his head. “Just a second; I’ll get closer.” He walked over to the wall. Like most of the buildings, this one was festooned with wide, stony slats. The analysts thought they were steps. They suited Vinh’s purpose, though he used them more like a ladder than like stairs. In a few seconds he was right next to the gadget.
And it was a machine; there were rivets on the sides, like something out of a medieval romance. He pulled a sensor baton from his coveralls and held it near the box. “Do you want me to touch it?”
Diem didn’t reply. This was really a question for those higher up. Vinh heard several voices conferring. “Pan around a little. Aren’t there markings on the side of that box?” Trixia! He knew she would be one of the watchers, but it was a very pleasant surprise to hear her voice. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and swept the baton back and forth across the box. There was something along the sides; he couldn’t tell whether it was writing or an artifact of overly tricky multiscan algorithms. If it was writing, this would be a minor coup.
“Okay, you can fasten the baton to the box now”—another voice, the acoustics fellow. Ezr did as he was told.
Some seconds passed. The Spider stairs were so steep he had to lean back against the risers. Airsnow haze streamed out from the steps, and downward; he could feel his jacket heaters compensating for the chill of the steps’ edges.
Then, “That’s interesting. This thing is a sensor right out of the dark ages.”
“Electrical? Is it reporting to a remote site?” Vinh started. The last words were spoken by a woman with an Emergent accent.
“Ah, Director Reynolt, hello. No, that’s the extraordinary thing about this device. It is self-contained. The ‘power source’ appears to be an array of metal springs. A mechanical clock mechanism—are you familiar with the idea?—provides both timing and motive power. Actually, I suppose this is about the only unsophisticated method that would work over long periods of cold.”
“So what all is it observing?” That was Diem, and a good question. Vinh’s imagination took off again. Maybe the Spiders were a lot more clever than anyone thought. Maybe his own hooded figure would show up in their recon reports. For that matter, what if this box was hooked up to some kind of weapon?
“We don’t see any camera equipment, Crewleader. We have a pretty good image of the box’s interior now. A gear mechanism drags a stripchart under four recording styluses.” The terms were straight out of a Fallen Civ text. “My guess is, every day or so it advances the strip a little and notes the temperature, pressure…and two other scalars I’m not sure of yet.” Every day for more than two hundred years. Human primitives would have had a hard time making a moving-parts mechanism that could work so long, much less do it at low temperatures. “It was our good luck to be walking by when it went off.”
There followed a technical dispute about just how sophisticated such recorders might be. Diem had Benny and the others ping the area with picosecond light flashes. Nothing glinted back; no lensed optics were in a line of sight.
Meanwhile, Vinh remained leaning against the stair ramp. The cold was beginning to seep past his jacket and through his full-pressure coveralls. The gear was not designed for extended contact with such a heat sink. He shifted about awkwardly on the narrow steps. In a one-gee field, this sort of acrobatics got old fast…But his new position gave him a view around the corner of the building. And on this side, some of the covering panels had fallen from the windows. Vinh leaned precariously out from the stairs, trying to make sense of what he saw within the room. Everything was covered with a patina of airsnow. Waist-high racks or cabinets were set in long rows. Above them were a metal framework and still more cabinets. Spider stairs connected one level to the other. Of course, to a Spider those cabinets would not be “waist-high.” Hmm. There were loose objects piled on top, each a collection of flat plates hinged at one end. Some were folded all together, others were carelessly spread out, like vanity fans.
His sudden understanding was like an electric shock, and he spoke on the public frequency without thinking. “Excuse me, Crewleader Diem?”
The conversation with those above came to a surprised halt.
“What is it, Vinh?” said Diem.
“Take a look through my pov. I think we’ve found a library.”
Somebody up above yelped with pleasure. It really sounded like Trixia.
Thumper analysis would have brought them to the library eventually, but Ezr’s find was a significant shortcut.
There was a large door in back; getting the walker in was easy. The walker contained a high-speed scanning manipulator. It took a while for it to adapt to the strange shape of these “books,” but now the robot was moving at breakneck speed down the shelves—one or two centimeters per second—two of Diem’s crew feeding a steady stream of books into its maw. There was a polite argument audible from on high. This landing was part of the joint plan, all on a negotiated schedule that was to end in just under 100Ksec. In that time they might not be done with this library, much less with the other buildings and the cave entrance. The Emergents didn’t want to make an exception for this one landing. Instead, they suggested bringing one of their larger vehicles right to the valley floor and scooping up artifacts en masse.
“And still a lurking strategy can be maintained,” came a male Emergent voice. “We can blow out the valley walls, make it look like massive rockfalls destroyed the village at the bottom.”
“Hey, these fellows really have the light touch,” Benny Wen’s voice came into his ear on their private channel. Ezr didn’t reply. The Emergent suggestion wasn’t exactly irrational, just…foreign. The Qeng Ho traded. The more sadistic of them might enjoy pauperizing the competition, but almost all wanted customers who would look forward to the next fleecing. Simply wrecking or stealing was…gross. And why do it when they could come back again to probe around?
High above, the Emergent proposal was politely rejected and a follow-on mission to this glorious valley was put at the head of the list for future joint adventures.
Diem sent Benny and Ezr Vinh to scout out the shelves. This library might hold one hundred thousand volumes, only a few hundred gigabytes, but that was far too much for the time remaining. Ultimately, they might have to pick and choose, hopefully finding the holy grai
l of such an operation—a children’s illustrated reader.
As the Ksecs passed, Diem rotated his crewmembers between feeding the scanner, bringing books down from the upper stories to be read, and returning books to their original places.
By the time Vinh’s meal break came, the OnOff star had swung down from its position near the zenith. Now it hung just above the crags at the far end of the valley and cast shadows from the buildings down the length of the street. He found a snow-free patch of ground, dropped an insulating blanket on it, and took the weight off his feet. Oh, that felt good. Diem had given him fifteen hundred seconds for this break. He fiddled with his feeder, and munched slowly on a couple of fruit bars. He could hear Trixia, but she was very busy. There was still no “children’s illustrated reader,” but they had found the next best thing, a bunch of physics and chemistry texts. Trixia seemed to think that this was a technical library of some sort. Right now they were debating about speeding up the scan. Trixia thought she had a correct graphemic analysis on the writing, and so now they could switch to smarter reading.
Ezr had known from the moment he’d met Trixia that she was smart. But she was just a Customer specializing in linguistics, a field that Qeng Ho academics excelled in. What could she really contribute? Now…well, he could hear the conversation above. Trixia was constantly deferred to by the other language specialists. Maybe that was not so surprising. The entire Trilander civilization had competed for the limited number of berths on the expedition. Out of five hundred million people, if you chose the best in some specialty…those chosen would be pretty damn good indeed. Vinh’s pride in knowing her faltered for an instant: in fact, it was he who was overreaching his station in life by wanting her. Yes, Ezr was a major heir of the Vinh.23 Family, but he himself…wasn’t all that bright. Worse, he seemed to spend all his time dreaming about other places and other times.
This discouraging line of thought turned in a familiar direction: Maybe here he would prove that he wasn’t so impractical. The Spiders might be a long time from their original civilization. Their present era could be a lot like the Dawn Age. Maybe he would have some insight that would make the fleet’s treasure—and earn him Trixia Bonsol. His mind slid off into happy possibilities, never quite descending to gritty detail…
Vinh glanced at his chron. Aha, he still had five hundred seconds! He stood, looked through the lengthening shadows to where the avenue climbed into the side of the mountain. All day, they had concentrated so much on mission priorities that they’d never really gotten to sightsee. In fact, they had stopped just short of a widening in the road, almost a plaza.
During the bright time, there had been plenty of vegetation. The hills were covered with the twisted remains of things that might have been trees. Down here, nature had been carefully trimmed; at regular intervals along the avenue there was the organic rubble of some ornamental plant. A dozen such mounds edged the plaza.
Four hundred seconds. He had time. He walked quickly to the edge of the plaza, then started round it. In the middle of the circle was a little hill, the snow covering odd shapes. When he reached the far side he was looking into the light. The work in the library had heated the place up so much that a fog of temporary, local atmosphere seeped out of the building. It flowed across the street, condensing and settling back to the ground. The light of OnOff shone through it in reddish shafts. Leaving the color aside, it might almost have been ground fog on the main floor of his parents’ temp on a summer night. And the valley walls might have been temp partitions. For an instant Vinh was overcome by the image, that a place so alien could suddenly seem familiar, so peaceful.
His attention came back to the center of the plaza. This side was almost free of snow. There were odd shapes ahead, half-hidden by the darkness. Scarcely thinking, he walked toward them. The ground was clear of snow, and it crunched like frozen moss. He stopped, sucked in a breath. The dark things at the center—they were statues. Of Spiders! A few more seconds and he’d report the find, but for the moment he wondered at the scene alone and in silence. Of course, they already knew the natives’ approximate form; there had been some crude pictures found by the earlier landings. But—Vinh stepped up the image scan—these were lifelike statues, molded in exquisite detail out of some dark metal. There were three of the creatures, life-sized he guessed. The word “spider” is common language, the sort of term that dissolves to near uselessness in the light of specific examination. In the temps of Ezr’s childhood there had been several types of critter called “spiders.” Some had six legs, some eight, some ten or twelve. Some were fat and hairy. Some were slender, black, and venomous. These creatures looked a lot like the slender, ten-legged kind. But either they were wearing clothes, or they were spinier than their tiny namesakes. Their legs were wrapped around each other, all reaching for something hidden beneath them. Making war, making love, what? Even Vinh’s imagination floundered.
What had it been like here, when last the sun shone bright?
FOUR
It is an edged cliché that the world is most pleasant in the years of a Waning Sun. It is true that the weather is not so driven, that everywhere there is a sense of slowing down, and most places experience a few years where the summers do not burn and the winters are not yet overly fierce. It is the classic time of romance. It’s a time that seductively beckons higher creatures to relax, postpone. It’s the last chance to prepare for the end of the world.
By blind good fortune, Sherkaner Underhill chose the most beautiful days in the years of the Waning for his first trip to Lands Command. He soon realized his good luck was doubled: The winding coastal roads had not been designed for automobiles, and Sherkaner was not nearly so skilled an automobilist as he had thought. More than once he came careening into a hairpin turn with the auto’s drive belt improperly applied, and nothing but steering and brakes to keep him from flying into the misty blue of the Great Sea (though no doubt he’d fall short, to the forest below, but still with deadly effect).
Sherkaner loved it. Inside of a few hours he had gotten the hang of operating the machine. Now when he tipped up on two wheels it was almost on purpose. It was a beautiful drive. The locals called this route the Pride of Accord, and the Royal Family had never dared complain. This was the height of a summer. The forest was fully thirty years old, about as old as trees could ever get. They reached straight and high and green, and grew right up to the edge of the highway. The scent of flowers and forest resin drifted cool past his perch on the auto.
He didn’t see many other civilian autos. There were plenty of osprechs pulling carts, some trucks, and an inconvenient number of army convoys. The reactions he got from the civilians were a wonderful mix: irritated, amused, envious. Even more than around Princeton, he saw wenches who looked pregnant and guys with dozens of baby welts on their backs. Some of their waves seemed envious of more than Sherk’s automobile. And sometimes I’m a little envious of them. For a while, he played with the thought, not trying to rationalize it. Instinct was such a fascinating thing, especially when you saw it from the inside.
The miles passed by. While his body and senses reveled in the drive, the back of Sherkaner’s mind was ticking away: grad school, how to sell Lands Command on his scheme, the truly multitudinous ways this automobile could be improved. He pulled into a little forest town late the first afternoon. NIGH’T’DEEPNESS, the antique sign said; Sherkaner wasn’t sure if that was a place name or a simple description.
He stopped at the local blacksmith’s. The smith had the same odd smile as some of the people on the road. “Nice auto-mobile you have there, mister.” Actually it was a very nice and expensive automobile, a brand-new Relmeitch. It was totally beyond the means of the average college student. Sherkaner had won it at an off-campus casino two days earlier. That had been a chancy thing. Sherkaner’s aspect was well known at all the gambling houses around Princeton. The owners’ guild had told him they’d break every one of his arms if they ever caught him gambling in the city again. Still,
he’d been ready to leave Princeton anyway—and he really wanted to experiment with automobiles. The smith sidled around the automobile, pretending to admire the silver trim and the three rotating power cylinders. “So. Kinda far from home, ain’tcha? Whatcha going to do when it stops working?”
“Buy some kerosene?”
“Aha, we got that. Some farm machinery needs it. No, I mean, what about when your contraption breaks? They all do, you know. They’re kinda fragile things, not like draft animals.”
Sherkaner grinned. He could see the shells of several autos in the forest behind the smith’s. This was the right place. “That could be a problem. But you see, I have some ideas. It’s leather and metal work that might interest you.” He sketched out two of the ideas he’d had that afternoon, things that should be easy to do. The smith was agreeable; always happy to do business with madmen. But Sherkaner had to pay him up front; fortunately, Bank of Princeton currency was acceptable.
Afterward, Underhill drove through the little town, looking for an inn. At first glance this was a peaceful, timeless place to live. There was a traditionalist church of the Dark, as plain and weathered as it should be in these years. The newspapers on sale by the post office were three days old. The headlines might be large and red, shrieking of war and invasion, but even when a convoy for Lands Command rumbled through, it got no special attention.
It turned out Nigh’t’Deepness was too small for inns. The owner of the post office gave him directions to a couple of bed-and-breakfast homes. As the sun slid down toward the ocean, Sherkaner tooled around the countryside, lost and exploring. The forest was beautiful, but it didn’t leave much room for farming. The locals made some of their living by outside trade, but they worked hard on their mountain garden…and they had at most three years of good growing seasons before the frosts would become deadly. The local harvest yards looked full, and there was a steady stream of carts shuttling back and forth into the hills. The parish deepness was up that way about fifteen miles. It wasn’t a large deepness, but it served most of the outback folk. If these people didn’t save enough now, they would surely starve in the first, hard years of the Great Dark; even in a modern civilization, there was precious little charity for able-bodied persons who didn’t provide for those years.