Asimov's SF, April-May 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

“That you'd come in, stand guard, and let us get on with our work.”

  “We'll do that, ma'am,” he said. “Just as soon as we know what we're guarding, who we're guarding it from, and how much access we have.”

  She hadn't given it any thought at all. Did she want his people to guard the city itself or just the access routes? And what were the access routes?

  And then there was the question of her staff and crew. She didn't trust any of them. She never told them anything except what they needed to know.

  At the same time, she trusted them implicitly. She sent them to work on sites without supervision. She wasn't sure how to explain the contradiction to this man.

  “I take it your behavior is not unusual for your line of work,” she said to him.

  That thin smile rose on his lips. This time, he didn't try to hide the contempt.

  “If you want to hire someone else, go ahead,” he said. “Just remember, in your initial communique with Scholars, you asked for the best security team they could find.”

  She hadn't asked for that. All she had asked for were some guards. Obviously, someone in Scholars figured she needed more than simple guards.

  Dammit.

  He was saying, “They found us. Whoever they send next may not ask as many questions, may not be as annoying from the start, but they may not be as good, either.”

  She wasn't sure she cared about good. She wasn't sure she cared about any of this at all. But he was here. They were here. They'd do as she asked when the time came. Until then, she would stall. “I don't think of my people the way you want me to,” she said.

  He said, “Then maybe it's time you start.”

  * * * *

  7

  Navi finally forced herself to look at Zeigler's scholarly works. Since she and her team were orbiting Amnthra waiting for something to come out of the City of Denon—more communications, maybe items in transit, maybe the arrival of more security—she didn't have a lot to do except think.

  And she'd been thinking a great deal since her conversation with Zeigler.

  She kept staring at the holomap. She had brightened the Spires so that they looked almost blinding, although Zeigler said even that wasn't correct.

  Then she had two of her assistants look through geologic records to see if anyone had mapped caves in the Naramzin Mountain Range.

  The mountains, it turned out, were mostly unexplored—or at least, they hadn't been explored in the modern era. Only mountain climbers, adventurers, and extreme athletes had gone up there until the archeologists and scholars descended upon the Spires of Denon as if they were some kind of holy relic.

  She couldn't even tell what had caused the descent—whether it was some scholarly discovery or a meeting or something that happened in passing.

  Zeigler's research was meticulous. She had started with the works he'd published six years ago, and worked her way forward. She hadn't cared as much about his hypothesis about the City of Denon, the hypothesis that had turned out to be right. She probably should have, because if he'd used similar logic and proof to find the caverns, then she could really trust his conclusions.

  Only she somewhat trusted them now, and she barely had the patience to go through the six years of research. The idea of going over his entire life's work gave her the shudders.

  Zeigler made his presentations in lectures, holovids, actual documents, and at conferences where his words were recorded, as well as the question and answer sessions. All of his raw research was easily accessible, unlike some work she'd seen. Some scholars made it hard to dig through the raw materials, but Zeigler clearly wasn't afraid of someone stealing his positions.

  He obviously wanted his work to be transparent, so that the other scholars would realize how correct he was.

  It had taken her days to go through the material, and she still wasn't done. But she was convinced: there were caverns beneath the City of Denon.

  The problem was, she'd had her ship's sensors go over the mountain range. The area around the Spires was blocked. Every time a sensor touched the area, the stream got bounced back to her ship with a warning:

  Energy of any kind could destroy a valuable part of Amnthra. The Spires of Denon are a preserved monument to the ancient past. If your work destroys even a small portion of the Spires, you will be subject to the Monument Protection Arm of the Unified Governments of Amnthra....

  All of that, followed by legal codes and legal language. The upshot—years in an Amnthran prison or something equivalent in other parts of the sector, her ship's license removed, and her travel privileges permanently suspended. Even if she didn't get the prison sentence, the other items terrified her more.

  She stopped using the sensor. It hadn't compiled any information from the nearby mountains, either. They had come up blank on her data screen, which was odd. As if they were simply a holographic feature of the land, something she knew was not true.

  She had experienced sensor white-out on other jobs. Usually the sensors stopped functioning because of a protective field, but she couldn't believe one existed so close to the Spires.

  Although something had to exist, given the way her own beam had come back to her, along with a message. But she hadn't traced that message. It could have come from any part of Amnthra, activated when her sensor touched the protective barrier near the Spires.

  She would figure all of that out when she needed to. Right now, she was trying to customize one of the holomaps of the mountain range. She looked up when her assistant, Roye Bruget, came into the room.

  It wasn't really fair to call Roye an assistant. He was more like a part of her. They had worked together from her very first job, and he had saved her butt more times than she wanted to think about.

  Sometimes she felt that even though she was nominally in charge, Roye knew more about the way everything worked. Her team usually trusted him to be the voice of reason on her jobs. She could be snappish, short, and difficult on good days. Roye was always cheerful, always willing to help.

  Unless someone made him angry.

  He was a slight, precise man. He wore casual clothes—a shirt and light pants with some slipper-like shoes. The clothes themselves looked pressed, and his hair was so manicured it looked like it had been glued to his head.

  “You might want to see this,” he said without greeting her.

  He moved in front of her to the in-room control panel. He saved her work, moved the holomap to one side, and then did some light touchwork on the panel.

  She looked at the translation running across the screen in front of her. “You broke the Scholars’ encryption,” she said.

  “This wasn't Scholars,” he said. “It came from outside their system. The request is direct from the folks in the City of Denon.”

  She read the request twice. Her heart was pounding. “They want divers?”

  “Not any divers,” he said. “Cave divers.”

  “You're sure this isn't a translation error?” she asked. “They don't want spelunkers? They want divers? People who'll go into water in darkness, in caves?”

  “Divers,” he said.

  She let out a small breath. This opened up a wealth of possibilities. It meant that caves and water existed below the ancient city. Maybe a river. Which would explain how the ancients lived there through countless sieges without massive deaths.

  It also gave her a lot of opportunities. If she had the right equipment, she might be able to map the caves using sensors on the ground.

  The Unified Governments of Amnthra expected sensors from above, but did they expect them from ground level? Probably not. And then there was the other possibility.

  She looked at Roye, her eyes shining. “Did you bring our diving equipment?”

  He grinned. “I'm prepared for any emergency, my friend.”

  She grinned in response.

  “This isn't an emergency, Roye,” she said. “This is an opportunity.”

  “One of the best we've ever had,” he said.

  *
* * *

  8

  Meklos sat on the hard floor of his tent. The tent was elaborate—nicer, in fact, than the way the academics were living in the city below. His tent had three separate rooms—the main room, where he was now and where he often held meetings; a smaller room to the side that he used as a bedroom; and a fully functional bathroom, complete with sonic or water shower depending on the conditions on the ground.

  He had opted for a sonic shower, since it looked like water was scarce here. But no one on the academic team acted like water was scarce, so he might have to reassess that opinion.

  He had sent Phineas to get maps from Dr. Reese's assistant, and to remain until he had the latest maps of all the areas, complete with the listings of treasures and protected items. Meklos had a hunch Phin might be gone for a while.

  Meklos knew that Dr. Reese was holding something back from him. He just couldn't figure out what it was.

  At least she had finally told him what she needed—protection against thieves, just like he had suspected. Now that the city of Denon was mostly dug out, the academics would set about finding the valuable items, marking them, and figuring out what to do with them. Amnthra had no laws protecting individual artifacts, meaning the kind that could be moved from one place to another. The Monuments Protection Arm of the Unified Governments of Amnthra hadn't been formed that long ago, and so far, it only applied to things that were defined as part of the land of Amnthra. Their legislation did specifically mention the Spires of Denon and the City of Denon as protected. But the word “city” wasn't really defined, and that already presented a problem, at least to Meklos. Because the definition of city in most Amnthran languages was the same as it was in Meklos's language—a densely populated center.

  Which meant that the City of Denon wasn't a city at all. If someone tried to get picky about the legal definitions, he had a hunch they would be able to argue that the City of Denon, as a location, was protected, but movable items within that city, like paintings or jewelry, were not. Even that marvelous inlaid floor he had walked across that morning didn't belong to the city. Because if the floor were removed, the city would remain.

  He needed a definition because he needed to know what could remain in this part of Amnthra and what could be removed. He documented everything—his assumptions, his ideas, and his worries—in case Dr. Reese or, worse, the Scholars disagreed with him. If they disagreed with him, it would probably mean that he had let someone walk off with a part of the city proper.

  At least he hoped that was what it would mean. Because the other option was that he had to protect the City from the academics themselves.

  Dr. Reese had finally conceded that some of the academics couldn't be trusted. The interns, the post-docs, the guest experts—anyone who wasn't part of her initial team—had to be searched coming in and going out of the area.

  As for her initial team, she'd said she would consider searching them as well, but that sounded dismissive, as if she hoped Meklos would forget he had asked.

  He wouldn't forget.

  Dr. Reese would soon learn that Meklos rarely forgot anything.

  * * * *

  9

  Gabrielle had finally finished laying out the temple. She had marked off areas, and set up shifts so that the interns (at least the well-trained ones) could begin cleaning off artifacts.

  She knew which artifacts she wanted out of the City first. Not the most valuable ones—she would save those until later. First, she wanted some tiny but valuable objects to go to the Scholars, with the message that yes, there was more, and no, she really didn't care which institutions got what pieces.

  In truth, she did care, which was why she was sending the less valuable items. However, most of her team did not know which items were extremely valuable and which weren't. Certain items, like statues in one of the houses not far from here, were too big to carry out, at least at the moment.

  She was sitting on the temple steps, drinking purified water. The water had a chalky taste that no amount of filtering could get rid of. The water had come from the caverns below. She had known that the ground water was safe to drink since they'd discovered a small spring not far from the city itself.

  But the discovery of the larger caverns made her feel even better about drinking the water. Now she knew there was enough to support her people for a long time to come, she had no qualms about using the recycled water for showers and artifact cleansing.

  The sun had reached its zenith. She'd learned to recognize it by the way the light fell around the temple. Actually, the light didn't fall as much as it blazed. The entire area became so bright that she wore extra eye protection out here.

  Even then the brightness was the most amazing thing she'd ever seen. The Spires reflected the sun in all directions, acting like some kind of beacon, sending light cascading down the white part of the mountainside. Then the light hit the white buildings, which reflected it all back to the Spires.

  She'd first experienced the blazing whiteness after the tops of the first buildings were uncovered. She had cleaned the tops, just to see what the original buildings looked like. Then the sun reached its zenith, the Spires flared and the light cascaded down. She felt as if she were inside a sunlight machine. Her skin—her assistants’ skin, everyone's skin—burned. They'd had to put the dirt back on the buildings until they'd figured out how to deal with the flare of whiteness.

  Now, years later, she was no longer frightened of the light and its power. Now, she sat outside and ate her mid-afternoon snack, watching the light reflect, bounce, and reflect again.

  The light was her favorite part of this dig—indeed, her favorite part of any dig—and ironically enough (at least to her) she couldn't take it with her. This light phenomenon would remain part of Amnthra forever.

  She sighed and turned her face upward. She had skin protectors now, as well as the eye protections. Still, she believed that there was an addictive aspect to the light. When she spent a few of her days in the caves below, she had had a palpable mood shift, one that didn't get corrected until an afternoon in the light bath. Sometimes that feeling of addiction worried her, made her wonder if she could survive away from this place. Fortunately, that problem was far in her future. She had so much work to do here that she doubted she'd leave for a long time.

  “Gabrielle?”

  Yusef.

  She tilted her face away from the Spires, blinked several times to clear her eyes, and then looked at him.

  He handed her a small communications pad, but her eyes were so sunblinded that she couldn't see the screen. Or maybe it just wasn't visible in this light.

  She handed it back to him. “I can't see it.”

  “Come inside.” He climbed up the stairs to the inside of the temple.

  She sighed, glanced up at the Spires, and watched the shifting light for just a moment. Then she stood—slowly, she'd learned not to stand quickly after a light bath—and went into the temple.

  It was at least fifteen degrees cooler inside, maybe more. The dim light, which seemed perfect when she was working here, seemed like the dark of night after the light bath.

  She stood in place until her eyes adjusted.

  “What is it?” she asked as she took the pad.

  “We have divers,” he said. “If we want them.”

  His voice had that odd tone again. She frowned, then tapped the screen. The notification had come back in her personal code: two cave divers nearby, willing to work for a lower price than she had expected, so long as their expenses and insurance costs got met.

  “They're not bonded,” he said, “and they're not on any approved list of divers. But they're the closest.”

  “Did you vet them?” she asked.

  He nodded. He'd clearly been working in the old Command Center at the base of the mountain rather than with the communications equipment here. The equipment in the city itself wasn't that powerful, and wouldn't have allowed much more than a quick search of nearby archives.

  �
��They seem clean enough. Their records go way back,” he said.

  “But?”

  “No real references,” he said.

  She clutched the pad. The guards wouldn't like the lack of references. Or, more clearly, that Meklos Verr wouldn't like it.

  But she wasn't working for him. He was working for her.

  “I'm not sure it matters,” she said. “We need them to see how deep the water runs, if there are any artifacts in the caverns underwater, and where the water actually came from—if they can find that. What else?”

  “Nothing,” Yusef said.

  “They wouldn't even really know what they're seeing, right?” Her heart was pounding. She and Yusef had only had a handful of conversations like this one over the years. The conversations made her uncomfortable, but they'd been necessary.

  “Not if we do it right, no, they wouldn't,” he said.

  “And if they reported only to us...?”

  “Then we should be all right,” he said.

  She bit her lower lip. The second time that day. She was more nervous than she realized.

  “And if we're not all right,” Yusef said, “then we ... I don't know...”

  “It's a risk,” she said. “We're hiring them for risky work. Can we afford the insurance payout if it fails?”

  He blanched. He always blanched when she asked questions like this.

  “Only if it's a one-time payout,” he whispered.

  No injuries, then. Nothing that would last or linger.

  “Do they have families?” she asked.

  “Not according to the records. But lots of people in odd jobs never record their families. They're usually running from their families.”

  “Check on that,” she said. “Because if there are no families, then there's probably no one to even pay the insurance to if something goes wrong. If they have no obvious families, then I think we take the risk. Just you and I. You do know something about diving equipment, right?”

  “Enough,” he said. His voice shook.

  She stared at him. He stared back. Sixteen times they'd had this conversation. Sixteen. And out of those sixteen times, they'd only had to take the hard action four times.