by Bill Adams
But then Friar Francisco, passing through to check on Piet’s progress at the elevator door, discovered how to make the statues at the entrance talk. And when it became clear that they were programmed to relate the history of the city, the others were drawn back to listen. They were academics, after all—easily torn from fieldwork, when other people’s notes lay ready to hand.
Not that I wasn’t willing to rejoin them. Just a few hours of the vacant-eyed buildings, the looming false sky, had been more than enough. I’d embarked on this last foot tour mainly to keep restless young Harry from going alone, and to convince myself that the place was indeed deserted.
But any suspicion that Condé had a team of men hiding here, looting alien artifacts, had died when I’d grasped the size of the city. It was too much and too big; the only way to exploit the place was with all the privileges of recognized ownership, and surely Condé wouldn’t jeopardize his chance to acquire that by scattering men about. I was his agent, and he hadn’t trusted even me with the truth. There was no reason to expect others.
Harry met me at the entrance to the terminal, turned around, and called to someone inside. “Here he is!”
Ariel was waiting for us on the platform next to the accelerator tube. She’d agreed to be a runner for those of us who could read the language.
“They sent me for you,” she said.
“Does that mean Piet’s beaten the lock?”
She grimaced. “Well, he claims that’s imminent. And the rest of them want to show you what they’ve learned.”
Harry looked embarrassed for his father and the others. “They are discoverers,” he said. “They deserve some credit.”
“Of course they do,” I told him as we entered a car. Ariel punched the controls that would move us two stations, past the large stop overlooking the humans’ cemetery, to the main entrance. We watched through transparent panels as the city rolled beneath us.
“See what I meant before?” Harry said to me. “The little parks were all connected once, and they weren’t blocked off from that wilderness behind the big wall, either. The city and the countryside were supposed to, to—” He’d speeded up and jammed, like his father, but he brought his hands together, fingers meshing, to—
“Interpenetrate each other?” Ariel asked.
“That’s it,” he said. “A word like that.”
“And you think that’s the way the Titans liked it, that it was the humans who blocked off the larger park for some reason,” I said. He nodded.
“It’s more than just a park,” Ariel said. We looked at her. “But let them tell you—I’m not sure I believe it.”
◆◆◆
“All right,” I told them. “Astonish me. How big is this place?”
“It’s the heart, brain, and spine of the planet,” Helen Hogg-Smythe said with great satisfaction. “It’s tremendous!”
We’d made a circle within the ring of statues at the main entrance, some of us standing, some sitting. Friar Francisco had discovered why swivel chairs were bolted in front of the monuments. Their blue glass pedestals were actually library terminals, touch-activated, intended for the use of students. “It’s a good thing that they have text screens for older children,” the friar had noted. “Spoken Ur-Linguish would be beyond most of us.”
“Start at the beginning,” Harry begged. “Please.”
“Just a moment first,” I said. “Piet, shouldn’t you be working on the elevator door?”
Wongama was bent over the largest terminal, at the base of the great sack-the-snake monument. He just waved one hand around his ear, as if I were a mosquito pestering him.
“That terminal is linked to the main public library bank,” Friar Francisco explained. “Everything we need to know about the elevator exit will be there.”
“Very well,” I said. “From the beginning, then. The city was built and abandoned by aliens before any humans arrived on the scene; that I can see. Start with them.”
“The aliens?” said Foyle. “Undoubtedly Titans. That name had already been coined when the humans who left this library arrived here. Titans were the first extinct spacefarers whose artifacts humankind ever ran across, and they got a poetic name—the forerunners of the gods. They must have been about human-sized, and very similar to us biochemically, requiring much the same atmosphere and so forth. They came to this planet about a million years ago. They never tried to live aboveground; what we regard as normal surface radiation was probably too much for them. Instead they dug in and took control of the planet.”
“Took control?”
“I don’t know how else to put it. This is the only city, but it has taproots that run deeper than you would believe, and farther, too.”
“If you mean that it’s geothermally powered, I think we all assumed—”
“That’s just part of it,” Foyle said. “And the power system is more sophisticated than that. For instance, it gave the Titans control over the planetary magnetic field—and don’t ask me how. For all I know it has something to do with rechanneling convection currents in the molten core, it’s that big.”
“I remember you telling me something about a magnetic field surge a million years ago.”
She nodded. “They engineered that. Apparently the Titans were more sensitive than humans to their electromagnetic environment. Some aspect of it, anyway. Perhaps they wanted to create a stronger Van Allen belt between themselves and this sun—who knows? Then there’s the pulsing field at subsoil level, probably part of the stress-feedback system that maintains the cavern’s integrity. Whatever else it does, it screws up any scanners above, concealing the whole colony.”
“I told Piet, and I told you,” Lagado put in. “Anomalous field, I said, but no, you said clay strata!”
“Fantastic,” I said. “People have always been carving cities out of asteroids, but that’s dead rock. This is the crust of a living planet, and the size of the dome is unbelievable. That wilderness beyond the city wall must extend six or seven kilometers.”
“Go ahead,” Bunny told Foyle. “Astonish him.” And the other archaeologists smiled as she let me have it:
“Try six thousand.”
It didn’t seem to be a joke. But it was impossible, and I said so.
“Oh, rarely more than thirty or forty k across,” Helen Hogg-Smythe explained. “A tunnel, rather than a dome. But a tunnel all the way up the spine of the major continent, ending at the north pole.”
“Remember, I told you that the central mountain chain was recent, and weird.” Foyle’s eyes glittered. “But we rationalized that away, along with everything else. Commissioner, those great mountains were boiled up, or thrown up, or dug up only a million years ago, just to make space for the corridor beneath them. I think the Titans needed a baseline that long to obtain the sort of control their machines had—still have!—over fundamental planetary processes. Continental drift, volcanism, seismic waves. It’s all regulated, the whole planet has been tamed to protect this city.”
“Not just the city!” Lagado said. “The Hellway.”
“The what?”
“The wilderness park,” Foyle said. “Ruy is right, the park is the main thing. This city at one end, some control structures at the other, and the park fills in the vast corridor between. The Hellway—that’s what the human refugees called it later—was very important to the Titans, for reasons we can only guess at. It keeps the atmosphere down here going, of course, but it could be much smaller and still do that. It includes plants and animals that may have been native to the Titans’ planet, but it’s not just a nature preserve. According to these terminals, it also contains bizarre life-forms of the Titans’ own creation, genetically engineered for…well, what might be entertainment value.”
“I think it was a religious retreat,” Lagado said.
Wongama broke the surface long enough to groan, but Hogg-Smythe said firmly, “Quite possible. Look at that hideous black city. Imagine the psychic relief of escaping from that
into wild country. But, as Foyle says, there’s no way of reading the Titans’ minds now.”
“They lived here for hundreds of thousands of years,” Foyle continued. “Pretty amazing in itself, compared with human instability. But finally, about the time Neanderthal man died out on Old Earth, the aliens abandoned the colony. Total evacuation, every building emptied. But the park creatures were left, and the maintenance robots, and the engines that control the planet. Perhaps they intended to return someday. Perhaps they will. But that’s all we know about the Titans.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “What about the Stone Huts? Where do they fit in?”
“The Huts are a red herring,” she replied. “The Titans didn’t build them. But that’s another chapter of the story.”
And this was Helen Hogg-Smythe’s to tell. She stood up to speak, but patted the terminal next to her first, as if to give it fair credit for the information.
“The human refugees who left these plaques and statues originally lived on Avalon,” she said. “One of the first wave of colonies in the Blue Swathe, the so-called Arnheim group. The Arnheim colonies were financed and outfitted from Old Northern Europe, about fifteen hundred years ago. Their founders, British, German, Scandinavian, were social democrats who hoped to adapt their politics to high technology in ways that hadn’t been tried on Earth. Each colony was a separate experiment, the same basic charter modified from planet to planet by majority vote.
“By and large, they were successful experiments, too. Stable, prosperous worlds like Myrdal, for instance…Weren’t you born there, Ariel?”
Ariel nodded. “A little dull,” she said. “But people have done a lot worse.”
“Some of the Arnheim worlds departed from their charters over time,” Hogg-Smythe went on. “Catharensis Five, for instance, is now a capitalist bazaar, wealthy but without a cultural character of its own. Others went the opposite way, turned insular and puritanical. That, we are told, is what happened to Avalon.”
She smiled and patted the terminal again. “Bear in mind that we are hearing only one side of the story. The version that the descendants of refugees chose to tell their schoolchildren, centuries after the fact.
“Once upon a time, then, on Avalon. During the colony’s first century, morale was high. But then it lost its way. The Distributors, the civil servants charged with minimizing class differences, became a hereditary ruling class in their own right. They couldn’t publicly enjoy luxuries denied to others, but they could aggrandize themselves in another way, with power. They passed new regulations, zealously enforced, against everyone else’s ‘class crimes.’
“The petty-minded rules extended from wage controls and employment quotas down to tiny details of dress. High achievers in any field were handicapped like racehorses, and ostracized if they still managed to distinguish themselves. The only permissible competition for rank was in the civil service exams—for which the children of Distributors were secretly coached.
“After a few decades of this, many citizens came to believe that Avalon’s social equality was not just a sham, but unnatural and wrong from the beginning. They formed the Meritocratic party in opposition to the Distributorship.
“The government branded these dissidents as ‘Elitists’ and outlawed their party. But as so often happens, the rebels defiantly adopted their enemies’ label, and it became the banner of a more and more radical movement. Questioning every leveling principle in Avalon’s charter, the Elitists attracted not only the disaffected found in any society, but the clever and the talented and the daring. The natural elite, in short. They came to be feared by their fellows, despite their idealistic goals.”
“Idealistic?” Foyle said with surprising bitterness. “I suppose. If you’re fond of cant. All their propaganda about pursuing excellence and realizing individual potential seems queasily familiar. The First Columnards were fond of the same catchphrases—I guess they got them from the Kanalist lodges they subverted—but what do those ideals mean in practice? ‘Let the better man rule, so long as it’s me.’ ”
Bunny looked outraged; Lagado, for one, averted his eyes from my Column uniform. But Hogg-Smythe stuck to cases.
“I don’t think you’re being fair,” she said. “You have to judge the, um, Elitists in the context of their history, not ours.”
“Helen’s right,” Ariel said. Like Foyle, she seemed to be taking the discussion personally. “I haven’t read this stuff, but—”
“You haven’t lived among the ‘Renaissance men’ of our own era, either,” Foyle said. “You haven’t seen how much damage their ideals and high standards can do—even the best of them, intending the best.”
Ariel, flushed, was beginning to stammer. “And you—you don’t know what it’s like to—to have a whole righteous planet, all the good people…tell you every day how evil you are, for just trying to be your best, to be yourself. None of you knows.”
She was wrong about that—although I’d been on Foyle’s side until Ariel’s words struck a chord. Wayback. The old country. Much as she’d said, though not socialist. That would have been too la-di-da for salt-of-the-earth types like us. Cheat, steal, and sue for more grazing-land all your life, that’s business, but don’t pull the uppity on us when you get it, mate, we know where you came from, and did you see the fancy dress Ferguson’s old lady was wearing in church? Already putting on airs, thinks her piss is perfume. And as for you, boy: A lying smooth-tongued slacker like your Larkspur father, curse the day my sister ever fell for his so-called family name. Raised you like our own, but you’re too good for us now, ain’t you, with your book learning and your poofter card tricks and your snotty jokes. But proud as Satan and always in fights, I wish your respectable ancestors could see the poncing dribbet of a no-good their trust fund is sending to Nexus bloody ’Varsity… A mouthful of sour milk from the past, and no choice but to swallow it.
Friar Francisco’s voice was low and gentle. “Surely we don’t have to refight the Elitist rebellion now?”
Foyle’s tone conceded nothing. “Sorry to have interrupted, Helen. Do go on.”
“It wasn’t the usual sort of civil war,” Hogg-Smythe said, frowning. “The Elitists didn’t want to rule, they just wanted to emigrate. But Avalon couldn’t afford to lose so many of its best scientists and engineers and managers—couldn’t even afford to jail them. The rumor spread that the Distributors intended to ‘reeducate’ the Elitists’ children—in fact, confiscate them and hold them hostage for their parents’ good behavior. True or not, it turned the Elitists from a party into a conspiracy.
“It wasn’t hard for them to make their break. Brains and will and audacity, they had. When the time came, they hijacked the finest vessels of Avalon’s merchant spacefleet and scuttled the rest. A crime, their historians emphasize with glee, made possible only by the Distributorship’s overcentralized economy. And so the Elitists—ten thousand strong—reached freedom.
“But freedom, if you’ll forgive the observation, is not a place; you cannot settle there. The word was out. The other Arnheim worlds had heard nothing but evil of these people who called themselves Elitists, and in any event would be treaty-bound to extradite them back to Avalon. Other colonies were as yet few, and while this fringe is unusually rich in Terroid planets, the Elitists did not want to start a society from scratch. Then they ran across what we call Newcount Two.
“A somewhat Earthlike world, its intense magnetic field mysterious but harmless. A place, they had thought from a distance, that they could farm for a few decades until scout ships could find a more congenial society for them to join. Not an idle wish, in those days, when colonies were sprouting everywhere like mushrooms. Of course, Avalon would be searching for them in the meanwhile, for political reasons and to regain their stolen ships; but there was nothing the refugees could do about that.
“Once in orbit, however, they quickly spotted the entrance to the abandoned city of the Titans. It’s the only entrance, except for a tiny outlet at t
he pole, but at that time it was not concealed or disguised; in fact, there was a large half-buried structure around it. When they discovered what was beneath it—and scannerproof, too—the Elitists knew they’d never find a better hiding place.
“A few of the city’s park extensions could be converted to farming. And if decades had to be spent here, they could be spent profitably, learning the secrets of an advanced, exotic technology. The refugees put it to a vote, made the commitment, and moved in en masse.
“It was they who built the elevator and the lake reservoir. A big job, but they had the engineers, and as we have noted, the technology was a known quantity, common to asteroid bases of that era. When the elevator is retracted, nothing scannable is left aboveground. The balancing rock, for instance, triggers the lake door via simple mechanics, a pull cable threaded through ridge and bedrock; no electromagnetic signal is transmitted.”
“But why build it so big?” I asked. “And why have any trigger at all, topside?”
“You’re forgetting about the scout ships,” Hogg-Smythe said. “They would be gone for years at a stretch, and there was no way to predict the exact times of their return. And you certainly wouldn’t want them transmitting the fact of their arrival. No, the scouts needed their own door handle, something they could count on finding quickly, no matter what season of the year, no matter how many years had passed. Since it had to be prominent anyway, why not make a virtue of that?” She looked roguishly at Foyle. “After all, no one ever disturbs a balancing rock formation.”
Foyle didn’t quite smile. “I can imagine the system working while the Elitists were here to maintain it,” she said. “I’m surprised to find the lake’s pumps running so smoothly after six hundred years, though.”
But I thought: maybe they hadn’t been. Otherwise Condé would never have found the place. What had he told me? The entrance was well disguised, once, and I restored that. I wondered if his work crews had left anything behind. But it wasn’t my worry, or wouldn’t be much longer.
