Three Domes and a Tower

by James P. Hogan

  Archaeologist lifted the pad that he was holding. “You know, of course, how Scientist finally discovered the secret of human DNA coding in data that had been copied and passed down from Merkon's earliest machines?"

  Taya nodded. A long time had gone by since Kort first told her that story. She had repeated it many times since to the other Primaries when they were children.

  Archaeologist went on, “A lot of the program code that runs Merkon today can be traced back to the original machines of the Builders. Included in it are tables of control codes that generate characters on screens.” He gestured to indicate the lines carved in the marble slabs. “Three days ago, after we dissolved away the last layers that had been obscuring these, Scientist ran a search of those old tables again. This is what he found."

  The pad illuminated to show columns of symbols. The entries in one column were single characters that Archaeologist had highlighted in red. Taya looked at them, moved her eyes to scan the forms cut into the marble slabs again, then back. Although not all of the shapes on the screen were represented, there could be no doubt: The characters on the slabs were from the same set.

  Spak joined her and Eltry as the meaning sank slowly in. “It's the proof,” he said quietly from behind them. “Skeptic is convinced. We've returned to where we originated from, Taya. The Ancients were the Builders of Merkon."

  * * * *

  There were celebrations that evening back on land at Icebowl Base. Nobody talked about the work at Vrent or of theories concerning the Ancients. In the communal mess cabin at the center of the jumble of huts and dugouts, a fowl-and-venison dinner was organized in honor of the Star Mother, with liberal dispensation of Leorican wine thoughtfully brought up by Vaysi on the flyer for the occasion. Afterward, Eltry juggled and performed balancing acts, Spak entertained with stories from the year that had gone by, the Azureans sang songs and clapped to their traditional instruments, and Archaeologist Claws joined clumpingly in the dancing.

  Taya stayed through most of the evening, playing her part and showing appreciation. But although all her formative years had been spent in the confines of Merkon, after the closeness of the tunnels she needed air. As the time drew closer to midnight with no sign of any abatement or slackening of the pace, pleading a long day that had commenced with a flight from far away across Azure, she bade everyone to enjoy the rest of the party and took her leave to return to the quarters that she was sharing with Vaysi and Nyelise in one of the huts. Nyelise had left earlier and was asleep when Taya got there. Vaysi had still been going strong when Taya left, stamping and whirling through Azurean dances. Taya hung up her cloak, put on the set of furs that Spak had given her to try, and went back outside. She needed quiet and solitude.

  The sun had dipped below the horizon for the two-hour night, but to the south the moon stood full and white in a sky that had cleared during the day. Beyond the huts and their surrounding litter of vehicles, containers, equipment, and supply dumps, slopes of churned snow rose to a line of rocky bluffs in the inland direction, and more gently to a white ridge on the seaward side. Thrusting her hands deep into the pouches in the front of the fur jacket, Taya turned in the direction of the ridge and made her way through the outer parts of the base to the bottom of the snowfield. The snow beyond was firm, and she found she could move over it fairly easily. She stopped to breathe in the night and experience its intoxication. Then, setting a diagonal course across and up the slope, she resumed walking at a slow, easy pace toward the ridge line. As she walked, she went through the day's events again in her mind, fitting the new pieces in with things known and conjectured previously concerning the strange story that was coming together of Azure's past.

  It had been suspected for a long time, but now there could be no doubt: Azure had been the home of the race that built Merkon. The Azureans who existed today were descended from them. And yet, thrown back to a condition of primitiveness and divided into their tribes and nations as they might be, there were those among them who had known. They had known that children from those far-off aeons would one day return accompanied by silver beings from the stars. Scientist couldn't explain it. Skeptic couldn't deny it. How could it be?

  It could mean only one thing. In the final, Golden Age that must have represented the culmination of their achievements, before that final calamity, the Ancients had discovered, or had cultivated, or there had somehow arisen, a power of insight that even now none of the intelligences of Merkon could explain, that had been lost. But through traditions passed down through the few like Serephelio, some of the things revealed in such insights had been preserved. And now Taya, and to a lesser degree several younger ones of her kind, were experiencing these moments of detached perception that seemed to manifest themselves as strange affinities toward that same, mysterious epoch in the past. Was it possible that in a way nobody understood, the circumstances of their origins had recreated in the Star Children a germ of what had once existed, which the cataclysm that befell the home world had extinguished along with all else?

  Taya hadn't really been conscious of arriving at the top of the ridge. She became aware of the slope easing off, and then there was nowhere higher to go. The top was wide and rounded. She moved forward until she was looking down the reverse side, falling in a shallow slope toward the line marking the top of the ice cliffs. Beyond lay the sea, rippling silver in the moonlight. A dark finger of land to one side marked the edge of the bay. In the center of the bay, directly ahead as she looked, were the lights of the Rig. The tunnel below it would run back to very near where she was standing. She pictured again the city whose remains she had barely caught a glimpse of. How much more of it, even now as she stood there, lay waiting to be discovered, directly beneath her feet?

  She felt her mind slipping.... All at once it was as if the ice and the rock were not there, and she were looking down over the immensity of Vrent as it had existed. She saw that everything uncovered in a year of labor was as nothing—the twig confused with the forest; a pebble mistaken for a mountain. For just an instant, in some inversion that kaleidoscoped time and space, she saw the glass canyons of color and light, arches and towers, vehicles streaming on level upon level beneath the teeming terraces and soaring pinnacles ... And then a sudden intrusion upon her senses from without swept it away as if a light had been turned off.

  A mecroid running on sausage-shaped rollers was drawing to a halt behind her in the snow. She turned fully and saw Kort sitting in one of the four seats ahead of the flatbed rear section. “I wondered if your legs were getting stiff in the cold while you were standing up here looking at the sea,” he said. “Thought you might appreciate a ride back."

  “How did you know I was looking at the sea?” Taya asked.

  “I know everything,” Kort said.

  It was a private joke between them, echoed from long ago. Taya smiled tiredly. “Yes, I would—thanks. But not just yet. It's so quiet and peaceful after all that drilling and banging today. And then the party. How does Vaysi keep going like that? I wonder if growing up on a planet has anything to do with it."

  Kort got down from the truck and came around to stand beside her. He was wearing a stretch cap and coverall of dark oilskin. Taya chuckled. “What's funny?” the robot asked.

  “The Azureans used to think you were silver gods. You look more like a fisherman who's lost his boat."

  “Hm. And I could say that you look like a seal hunter with a cold nose.” He meant it literally. Kort could see in infra-red.

  A series of sharp cracks sounded from somewhere along the cliff line below, followed by muffled crashes of ice falling into the ocean. “The Rig looks like Cyron's old palace at night,” Taya said. “I wonder if the Ancients had ships like that—all lit up like floating cities.... Hasn't wreckage been found that Engineer says could have been from huge seagoing vessels?"

  “Some of it was a long way from any oceans,” Kort said. “It would be simpler to assume some specialized kind of land structures that we don't know anyt
hing about. Or even crashed flying vehicles."

  “The floods could have carried them there,” Taya said.

  “But some of them were found high up in the mountains. You'd need tidal waves miles high."

  “We'll, things like whales and tropical trees were found high up in mountains too. How did they get there?"

  Kort looked up unconsciously at the sky, which often meant he was communicating with Merkon. “Skeptic says he'll believe it when you show him a mechanism capable of producing waves that are miles high,” he said.

  Taya had no response to that, and fell silent for a while. When she spoke again, her voice was distant and reflective, as if she were half talking to herself. “I started to see it, Kort, just before you came—Vrent, the way it used to be. It was ... I don't know how you'd describe it. Imagine Merkon opened out and stretched toward the sky. There were bridges and towers, a traffic of people and machines flowing in rivers.... Glass mountains of light."

  “How can you know it was the way Vrent used to be?” Kort asked.

  “I just ... know."

  A few seconds passed—enough to convey that Kort had considered the proposition and not seem impolite. “Subjective impressions of bio-minds are noted for their inventiveness,” he pointed out. Taya couldn't suppress a smile. At times the machines’ concessions to delicacy could be touching. “The Azurean proclivity for deliberately inducing chemically assisted hallucinations is well known."

  “Kort, I haven't been drinking too much, or smoking any of their awful pipes."

  “Long, stressful day. Powerful emotional stimuli. Extended period deprived of sleep.... All notorious enhancers of autosuggestion,” Kort pointed out.

  Taya sighed and stared up at the moon. “What about the old prophecies that seers like Serephelio kept alive?” she asked. “Were they autosuggestion? Skeptic has been through the records like a cat picking apart a dead fish, and even he can't deny them. Mystic has just about accepted all the Azurean gods."

  “Yes, and we all know Mystic,” Kort said. He looked at her and shook his head. “That the Ancients could know things in ways that we don't understand appears to be fact. You and some of the others have occasional experiences that you believe might be related. But that is entirely conjecture. You say you saw the city that was. Well, maybe so, but there's no way it can be verified. It could be pure invention—unconscious and unintentional, maybe, but an invention nevertheless. Now, if any of you could do what the Ancients did and tell us something that will be...” Kort stopped, seeing that Taya was giving him a reproachful look. “What?"

  “Is that you talking, Kort, or Skeptic?” she asked.

  “Oh, well, yes, I suppose it was. But he's got a point, you know."

  Taya could see that this wasn't going anywhere. “We need to talk with Serephelio again,” she declared. “I want to learn more about what he knows.... And in the meantime, you're right. It's starting to get cold. Let's get back.” Kort nodded. They turned back toward the truck. Taya paused and looked across at him as she was about to climb up. “Don't machine minds ever feel anything like that?” she asked him. “Not even the most tiny, fleeting glimmer?"

  “No, never,” Kort replied.

  * * * *

  Vaysi would be staying on at Icebowl for a while. Taya and Nyelise, with Kort, remained through the following day to meet others from the base whose schedules had kept them away earlier. It was late evening, though still daylight, when the flyer finally lifted off the pad with a return flight plan for Aranos. Eltry accompanied them, having spent long enough amid the ice and the remoteness, along with several Azureans and a cargo of samples recovered from Vrent. Fast transportation was still rare and precious; never a square foot was wasted.

  Night came as their course took them southward. After talking for a while, Eltry produced his pad and a sheaf of notes to catch up on some work, while Nyelise settled down with a book of epics from a faraway region east of Leorica. The Azureans, luxuriating in the unaccustomed comfort of the cabin and still suffering from the effects of the previous night's party, fell asleep one by one. Kort would respond if addressed but was otherwise not initiating conversation, which meant he was interacting with other mec-minds up in Merkon. Taya was left with her own thoughts, staring down at the clouds sailing like ghostly swans in the darkness on Azure's black ocean below. Samir had told her how he'd thought the first lander to come down from Merkon was a giant swan, she remembered.

  Twenty years. It seemed as if that had all been a different world. Well, in a real sense of things that mattered to her, it had been a different world. She remembered her bewilderment at the senseless cruelty they had found in the world of the Azureans, and how it had turned to horror and revulsion as the picture unfolded in all its diseased ugliness of whole societies organized for war and the systematic plundering of others, of the infliction of torture and imprisonment, and control exercised through persecution and fear.... For a long time after that she had known just numbness. But the news was carried from nation to nation of Cyron's return from the dead, and the miracle of how he who had been known the “Vengeful” of Leorica had become the “Mericful” and the “Forgiving.” None could deny the invincible silver gods who had descended from the sky, and as time went by, more came to meet the children from the stars, who knew no word for “death,” showed the way of gentleness, and had spared even those who had mistreated them. And slowly the peoples of Azure were learning. Much, indeed, had changed.

  Taya hadn't noticed its appearance, but she became conscious suddenly of an eerie orange glow filling the sky outside. And yet, even as her awareness expanded to take in the source of the light, another part of her mind knew that she was not turning her head, nor had she even moved in her seat toward the window. A cloud of incandescence extended across half the sky, solid white and yellow at one end, breaking and widening along its length into a flail of twisting filaments lit up with orange, violet, and red. As if in a dream, she found herself perceiving it from different perspectives simultaneously. She could see it flaming against stars in a black sky from a place where three silver domes and a tower stood amid plains of gray dust and rocks. At the same time, she could see it as an apparition in the day skies of what she knew was Azure, even as she knew and felt the terror of those who had watched it. The walls of the cabin that she was in, the aircraft around, the moment of time that they occupied, dissolved out of existence as she beheld not just the part of Azure below but its whole surface combined in a superposition of images. She saw from above, green plateaus of water advancing across continents; yet at the same time she was able to stare up, petrified, from the cities being washed away and disappearing under surging white walls of water miles high. She beheld the earth opening in rifts that consumed mountains and ocean, vomiting fire and lavas, landscapes upended, seas emptied and boiling. She felt the winds that tore forests from the ground, the white-hot stones that fell like rain, while lightning crashed in sheets that burned and scarred entire landscapes. And then came the dark that lasted years, broken only by the death glow of a world aflame. The darkness became the black sky of stars again. The gray rock beneath had become a molten river pouring over, inside, and around, covering the ruins of the three silver domes and the fallen tower.

  She realized that the sound of the engines had stopped. They were on the ground. Taya blinked, shook her head, and looked out. It was daylight at the landing ground behind the building that had once been one of the prisons at Aranos.

  “Kort, I think Taya is waking up,” Nyelise's voice called out from somewhere near. She was sitting across the cabin, eating a snack of bread with cheese and pickles, and drinking tea. She had set another dish aside for Taya. The sound came of feet clambering up the flyer's outside steps, and Kort appeared in the doorway moments later.

  “So you're back with us?” he said. Taya nodded, still struggling to rejoin the present. In some ways the vision she had experienced still felt more real. “How do you feel?” Kort asked.

  Ta
ya shook away the last wisps of what she had seen, and sat up. “Hungry,” she answered. Nyelise handed her the dish and turned to fill another mug from the tea jug.

  “I never saw you so enraptured before,” Kort said. “We thought it best to leave you be."

  * * * *

  It was three days later when they arrived at Serephelio's cottage. Taya rode a gray mare. Kort strode alongside her, keeping up easily at walking pace. Nobody had ever been able to persuade Serephelio to keep a screenpad in his house. Mecroids and electricity were too much to adjust to, he decided. After Cyron died—permanently this time—having become Serephelio's steady companion for philosophic discussions and card playing far into the night, Serephelio had left the city and found a less complicated place to live on the edge of a forest just outside a village to the south of Aranos.

  Kort helped him prepare a dinner of vegetables from his garden, fish caught in the lake a mile through the forest, and a leg of lamb left by one of the villagers as a gift. Then Serephelio opened a bottle of cognac and settled down with his pipe, while his dog, Narzin, named after the king's champion of old, dozed in front of the hearth. Taya and Kort told him of the latest findings at Vrent. They summarized their discussions since and gave Skeptic's views. Finally, Taya described her most recent experience during the flight back to Aranos.

  Serephelio listened attentively, studying her face from time to time but interrupting little while he puffed clouds of blue smoke into the air. Although his face seemed shriveled with lines now, and his hair and beard were white, his gray eyes were still alert and bright. In his presence, Taya always got the feeling that he knew more than he admitted to.

  “In truth, ‘tis all as was written long ago, before any of the nations that exist today were known or their tongues even spoke,” Serephelio told them when she had finished. He quoted a translation that she had heard many times. “Medila, the goddess with many arms, who brings retribution, descended in wrath upon the world. Could not this burning object in the sky of which you speak have appeared as a many-armed creature wielding swords, which legends of many peoples relate?"