The Unwound Way

by Bill Adams

  “I still don’t see where the Stone Huts fit in,” Ariel said.

  “Well, once the Elitists had committed themselves to the planet, it began to seem less secure,” Hogg-Smythe went on. “The magnetic anomaly might attract attention, and then a world this hospitable would be carefully searched. But when an Avalonian search party finally did reach Newcount Two, what did they in fact find? The Stone Huts. An ancient Titan landing site, clearly visible from orbit. Avalonian archaeologists—the ones who dropped those shovels Foyle dug up—soon established how small and short-lived the alien camp had been, no reason to spend much time on it. They also turned up a few technological artifacts planted by the Elitists, carefully chosen from the city’s warehouses to support the scenario of an emergency repair stop. Do you see what else the artifacts seemed to prove? That the Elitists—technophiles—had never passed this way, since they would have picked any alien site clean if they had.

  “In short, as Foyle said, the Huts are a red herring. The Elitists had used the Titans’ own construction equipment to take apart the abandoned surface structure, to reassemble it into the mock ‘sawhorses’ we call Stone Huts, and to subject those to forces and stresses that fit the scenario—just in case the Avalonians analyzed them in depth.”

  “And the construction codes on the slabs?” Foyle asked. “The ones that didn’t match up?”

  “Additional ‘evidence’ that the sawhorses had been jury-rigged for emergency repairs,” Hogg-Smythe explained.

  “But why put the site so close to the real city entrance?” Ariel looked puzzled. “Wasn’t that asking for trouble?”

  “Tell me, Commissioner,” Hogg-Smythe said, “since it’s your hobby: don’t magicians usually hide things in plain sight?”

  “That’s one way to do it, yes,” I said. “In this case, I wouldn’t have taken the risk.”

  Hogg-Smythe shrugged and nodded. “The plan was audacious, even arrogant. Elitist, in other words. But we should also note that it worked. And that ends a chapter in the story, I think. Besides, my mouth is dry.”

  She sat down.

  “And thank you,” I said. “But what happened to the Elitists? The plaque says they arrived twelve hundred years ago, and left six hundred years later—I realize the record stops there, but…any idea what happened to them?”

  I was looking at Lagado as I said this, because he’d been twitching throughout Hogg-Smythe’s speech as if he had additions to make, but when everyone turned to him he just sputtered helplessly. “I have yet to finalize my sociological conclusions,” he said at last. “I’ll defer to the friar.”

  “Well, first of all,” Friar Francisco began, “they never did master the Titans’ technology. Only bits and pieces. They could work the Titans’ construction equipment, and even learned to use the devices that controlled the ecology and gene pool of the great park, or Hellway. But the Elitists could rarely grasp the underlying theory. And when they took the machines apart, they found almost nothing. Nothing comprehensible.”

  The Green monk pointed upward, at the heroic statue group. “This commemorates their greatest triumph. It meant to them what the first Moon landing must have meant to Old Earth. Just the beginning, they thought. But they never advanced beyond it.”

  I regarded the bizarre figures again. “Snake milking?” I asked.

  The archaeologists laughed.

  “That ‘snake’ is a cybernetic cable,” Friar Francisco said. “One element of the Titan control network that governs this planet’s magnetic field from the north pole. Those humans in the memorial have just lifted the cable from the original Titan coupling, and are plugging it into another, one they have built themselves. The Titans liked gigantism, that’s evident; they didn’t care how inefficient it was. This great control coupling was just a scaled-up version of the governor in one of the simple construction machines that the humans did understand. But it was still considered a great triumph.”

  “What was?” Ariel demanded. She sounded tired.

  “I’m sorry. The Elitists’ new coupling reduced the planetary magnetic field to Earthlike intensity again. Newcount Two’s disguise was now complete. There was no field anomaly to attract unwelcome attention. But it meant much more than that to the Elitists. Forging their own destiny, holding fast to their own history, was of great importance to them. Those heroic figures are making this planet a little Earth, you see. They are restoring the Garden.

  “But as decades passed, it became evident that the humans would not prevail after all, would never truly make this place their own. Their morale suffered.

  “The scout ships still came and went. But new generations knew nothing except their own form of government…whatever that was—the details are obscured by slogans and shibboleths. Only a certifiable Utopia would have tempted them to emigrate. At the same time, the dead city oppressed them, its unfathomable technology mocking the cleverness that had once set their forefathers apart.

  “They desperately needed spiritual reaffirmation. And at last they found it. They created⁠…⁠” The friar paused, his lips pursed. “But it had to be more spontaneous than that, no matter what deliberate synthesis went into it, too…There arose, let us say, a cult. A mystery religion, with a mystery religion’s emphasis on individual enlightenment. At the same time, though, an established church, not as wild and mystical as, say, the Orphism of the ancient Greeks. More like the Freemasonry of Enlightenment times, or the Kanalism of our own era. The ritual through which every boy and girl entered adulthood and citizenship. It seems to have bound Elitist society together again, restored some sense of shared purpose. And the actual rite of passage was another symbolic triumph of humanity over alienness.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “The humans used the only Titan machines they had mastered to shape the Titan park. They restructured it into a series of sub-environments, testing grounds for their children. The rite of passage was literally that: the young candidates for adulthood had to traverse the Hellway from the city to the pole, learning small secrets of life along the way.”

  “They’d hike six thousand k?” Ariel objected.

  “Oh, no, there are means of transportation within the Hellway. I gather most candidates made the passage in a week or so.”

  “So they found some adventure and purpose in this gloomy place,” Ariel said. “I think that’s great.”

  “Why Hellway, though?” Harry asked.

  “That’s the exasperating thing about skimming a history,” the friar said. “Details drop out. And translation is a problem, too. But in a mystery religion, you know, the candidate is often taken through a symbolic death and hell, only to be born again at the end of his journey.”

  “Furthermore,” Foyle said darkly, “if your social goal is to bind people into a Folk, under the leadership of the hardy and the few, and you can’t use the traditional method—wars of conquest—maybe you’d put them through another kind of hell instead.”

  “There are cults of fear and cults of joy,” Friar Francisco said. “We have only the Elitists’ own description, which is of course biased. Anyway, let’s finish the story.

  “After five centuries in the Titan city, their morale restored through religion, the Elitists were struck down with plague. A family of chameleonlike mutant viruses—the descriptions recall the dread immunosuppressant epidemics of late classical times. The Elitists would defeat one strain only to be faced, in the next generation, with another. Their population dwindled. By the time they finally wiped out the disease, too few of them were left to maintain their traditional way of life. They reexamined the reports of the scout ships, and decided that after six hundred years, one of the Arnheim worlds had become tolerant enough to accept them.

  “Spiritually they were no longer the same Elitists who’d intended to trade the Titan technology for wealth, rank, and immortality. The years of struggling for life itself may have made them more rigid and steadfast in their religious belief; all they wanted to bring away from the plane
t now was their cult. Like all zealots, they thought they would transform the universe. They compiled what they called the White Codex—hundreds of years’ worth of investigation into the Titan technology, distilled. This treasure they took. And they left behind these files on their history, brought up to date at the end, as a time capsule. And so they reentered the human sphere.”

  “They didn’t, though,” Foyle put in. “Maybe they didn’t master the Titan technology, but from the hints they left behind we can be sure that what they did learn would have revolutionized some of our human sciences. Not to mention our knowledge of the Titans themselves. I say they didn’t make it.”

  “An accident in space?” the friar suggested. “There’s an even uglier possibility. The Elitists could not know, as we do, of other ‘lost’ colonies who have tried to rejoin the mainstream worlds with the aftermarks of exotic viruses in their genes. The Elitists may have been recognized, quarantined, and sterilized—or worse. That’s how populations drop out of history. Their extreme religious views would have made it that much easier on their executioners’ consciences.

  “Maybe I’m wrong, maybe they foresaw that danger and infiltrated some world without proclaiming themselves. But I don’t believe it; I can’t see them accepting total assimilation and obscurity. If we have never heard of them, it can only be because they did not survive.”

  He looked around sadly. “This is their only immortality—a few tiny additions to something quite inhuman.”

  A long silence followed this speech. Finally, Ariel spoke. “I think I’ll stick to building new cities. The old ones are too sad.”

  “I’m sorry for them, too,” Foyle admitted. “For what their ideology brought them to.”

  Piet Wongama cleared his throat. “Their numbers must have been very small at the end, if that matters. They left virtually all their spacecraft behind. Valuable property. I’m sure they would have taken as many as they could crew.”

  “Ah, the quantifier resurfaces,” I said, to polite laughter. “And how do you know this?”

  He pointed at some cryptic flashing on the screen in front of him. “This indicates Level Null, the lowest floor of the Elitist’s elevator complex, where scout ships and transports were offloaded. The readout says that most of the hangars are still full.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “Level Null is where the elevator has been all this time, too,” he went on. “I’ve figured out everything except what started us down in the first place; that’s beyond me. But the elevator’s stuck at the bottom. I’m afraid my confused button-pushing—and your smashing of the control-turret sensors, Commissioner—triggered a safety shutdown: one stop at every level and a power-off at the bottom until the command stack is cleared.”

  He smiled. “The good news is that we can clear it from that panel at the door. As I thought, security was never a big concern here, just safety checks. The sequences weren’t meant to be confusing, and it wasn’t too hard to look them up.”

  “Then, it’s time to go,” I said. There were murmurs of protest, but I quashed them. “I’ll let you return after we’ve filed a report, and to hell with regulations. In fact, I’ll commandeer the next boat to stop at Newcount and report the find personally—and I’ll insist you be allowed continued access as discoverers. But the five or six hours we’ve already spent here without taking official action will count against me; let’s not drag it out any longer.”

  This went over well, even raising a satirical smile from Bunny, who had been sunk in gloom all afternoon, probably trying to figure out how to pay his gambling debts once Condé heard of our failure. Hogg-Smythe hefted her staff, Foyle strapped her huge backpack on again, and Wongama led us back through the curving corridor to the elevator door.

  With his wristwatch out of commission, Wongama had been reduced to rolling up his sleeve and writing control sequences on his forearm with a wax specimen marker of Friar Francisco’s. But at least he’d gotten them right. When he hit the last touchpoint the whole panel lit up, and we could feel the vibration as the great platform rose to meet us from far below.

  The door slid up and open. Wongama stepped backward in surprise.

  A tall, hardfaced man was standing on the elevator, not far away. He wore simple clothes of Lincoln green and a soft hat with a feather in it, and he carried a wooden crossbow. “Here they are!” he called out to the score of similarly dressed men in the distance, shook his head at us, and said, “Decided to let us out of our bottle, did you?”

  Smiling genially, he raised the crossbow to his chin, aimed in our direction, and fired.

  Chapter Twelve

  The man on the platform must have aimed to pick off Wongama at the panel—keeping the door open until his companions could join him. But Bunny Velasquez had darted forward as soon as the bowman appeared, oblivious to anything except his own convenience, saying to the men in green, “There you are—finally!” as he crossed the line of fire.

  The crossbow bolt caught Bunny at the base of the throat. He collapsed backward in a grotesque limbo step, his spine severed. A single bright spurt of arterial blood fell with him and wrapped across his white tunic like a red sash when he hit the floor.

  Now it was the bowman’s turn to freeze, amid confused cries on all sides, as Wongama hit a few touchpoints on his panel and the door came down, cutting off the last few words of another man in green: “⁠—⁠fucking moron, you’ve killed our contact!”

  Wongama and I stared at each other. Ariel was crouching next to Bunny’s body, in my shadow, whispering, “OhGodOhGodOhGod.” Ken Mishima stood back, flattened almost casually against the wall. The others had retreated around the curve of the corridor; only Foyle was still in sight and unpanicked. A long moment.

  Then lights danced on the panel and Wongama’s face snapped back to it. He hit a few more points; they all lit up, then went dark. “They know how to use the panel in the control turret, anyway,” he said.

  “Can you keep them out?” I asked.

  “They’re blocked out for one full-dress safety check, that’s all.”

  “How long⁠—⁠”

  “Maybe ten minutes. Long enough to recycle the air in the basement hangars. But it’s nonrepeatable, Commissioner. Anything more confusing will just set off an emergency shutdown like the one we caused before—and remember, that opens every door on the way to the bottom, starting with this one.”

  “Ten minutes, then,” Foyle said. “Two to plan, eight more for a head start. To somewhere.” Her voice didn’t sound as cool as her words.

  “Who are those people?” Ariel asked. “Why those outfits, bows and arrows⁠…⁠” Her voice still echoed the spell of the talking statues, the dead past, ghosts.

  Foyle was quick to reply. “I recognize the green outfits,” she said, in her commonsense voice. “Forest fatigues issued to the Iron Brotherhood—one of the bigger mercenaries’ unions. They only kill on commission. Somebody must have hired them to guard this place, keep it secret.”

  Wongama could think fast, too. “If they really were bottled up when the elevator was shut down, then their headquarters must be Level Null. It’s the best place to watch the elevator from, but it has no other exits. And if they are just guarding the shaft, that would explain why they know so little about the controls.”

  “They knew enough to bring us down here, when they saw us on the platform cameras,” Foyle said.

  “But not enough to disarm the balancing-rock trigger in the first place,” Wongama pointed out. “Or free the platform, these past—what, five?—five hours. With luck, they may know even less about the city proper.”

  Helen Hogg-Smythe had returned, along with Harry Lagado. The others crept behind. “But why such primitive weapons?” she asked, and we all looked down on Bunny’s body with a sudden awkwardness. The chance for a decent observance had passed, though; the few shudders were furtive and meaningless, as if customers had been fooled by a mannequin in a store: so human a shape, but not alive.
/>   “Waste of time to guess,” I told them. “We’ve got to clear out.”

  “Couldn’t this just be…some sort of mistake?” Lagado said.

  I looked at the ring of white faces; even Brother Francisco had lost color. “I don’t think so,” I said, starting back toward the city entrance, using words to drag them after me. “Only the target was a mistake. They called Velasquez their contact. That would explain his strange behavior, all right. Flashing a signal when we flew over the marsh, slipping out at night, trying to keep Foyle away from the balancing rock. He must have linked up with these people the first time he visited Newcount, months ago. So the mercenaries have conspired with a Column official to conceal the city, and now they’ve blundered and killed him. They’ve got a lot to cover up, and they wouldn’t have pulled us down here on the elevator in the first place if they weren’t willing to make us disappear. We have to stay out of their hands somehow.”

  We passed by the busts, and beneath the great bronze cable-couplers, which, like most patriotic statues, were placed too high to see well, to believe in, to take inspiration from. Then the ceramic city looked back from the picture window.

  “Split up from here, and regroup elsewhere, that’s basic,” Foyle said briskly.

  “I think we’d better follow one leader,” Hogg-Smythe countered.

  “It’s a classic guerrilla retreat problem,” Foyle said. “Unless you’ve managed a guerrilla campaign yourself, Commissioner, you should take it from me.”

  “I really must dig up that police record of yours someday.” I looked to Mishima, sure he’d announce military expertise of his own, but his pensive face was unreadable. I asked Foyle what she’d suggest.

  “Use the transport tubes. One car for each of us, and program them to keep hitting stops after the passenger gets out—false trails. Every car to hit every major station, where lines cross, leaving no clue to the one we actually regroup at.”