Eager but restrained, Cullen was musing aloud as the craft began to descend slowly into the pit. "Usually, archeologists crawl into ancient monuments and mausoleums, or if they are lucky, walk. In all my experience I don't know of any expedition that uncovered an artifact large enough to fly into."
"Personally," Pilwondepat replied reflectively, "I happen to like crawling."
"If I had six legs, so might I." Cullen went quiet as the softly thrumming aircar approached the augmented cavity.
Their driver maneuvered the compact craft into the opening, fixed for vertical hover, and then dropped them through the cleft ceramic layer and down into the alien void itself. "Lights," an unintimidated Cullen snapped briskly. Instantly, their immediate surroundings were illuminated by the spray of high-intensity search beams that had been hastily attached to the vehicle. Recorders mounted within the body of the craft switched on. Around them, all was blackness save where the powerful beams penetrated.
Holoness activated the scanning laser. Utilizing its far greater throw range, she played it across the western wall, a task for which it was not designed. Beyond that bulwark of dark ceramic lay an unbroken rampart of metamorphic rock and eventually, the outer wall of the escarpment.
"Turn." Cullen was standing next to the driver. Everyone was too excited and nervous to make use of the aircar's available seats. Even had he wished to lie down, the design of the seats rendered them useless to Pilwondepat. "Let's have a look at the opposite wall." Dik complied, and the craft pivoted neatly on its axis. As they came about, Holoness kept the ranging laser aimed parallel to the vehicle's keel. The bright beam revealed - nothing. The opposite wall was so distant that even the laser's tuned coherent beam could not illuminate it.
There was, however, a floor. Dropping down, the driver tentatively tested its solidity. It appeared to be composed of the same cryptic ceramic material as the ceiling. Against all reason, the vast chamber, of still unknown dimensions, appeared to have been built to hold nothing but ancient air.
"This doesn't make any sense." So far apart were the walls that Cullen's voice produced no echo. The emptiness swallowed his emphasis. "There has to be something more to it than this. No species goes to this much trouble just to build an enormous empty box."
"Who can quantify alien intentions?" In the dim glow of the aircar's subdued internal lights, the multiple lenses of Pilwondepat's compound eyes sparkled like mirrors tinted gold. "There are still many things humans do that strike my people as having no basis in reason."
"Many humans would agree with you on that." Opening one of the two personnel hatches in the transparent cab, Holoness started down the integrated steps molded into the hull and put a tentative foot on the floor. It supported her weight easily. "It's solid enough."
"As solid as the ceiling?" Tilting back his head, Cullen was able to make out the narrow shaft of sunlight that marked the hole the digging team had drilled in the rugged material. "All right: We're in a big box with no visible internal landmarks. Where do we go from here?"
"Over there, perhaps?" Pilwondepat was pointing with all four hands. "Creellt - I think I see something."
Dik swung a search beam in the indicated direction. Sure enough, the glossy bulge of a small dome marred the otherwise perfect flatness of the floor. It was about four meters in diameter and completely isolated. "Looks a lot like all those decorative bulges we found on the outside of this roof." He grunted.
"So it does." Holoness was staring, shining her own hand beam in the direction of the unassuming protrusion. "But why only one?"
"Get back aboard and we'll go have a look," Cullen told her.
Smacking the ceramic underfoot with her heel, she shook him off. "It's solid as a rock here. I'm going to walk."
With the aircar paralleling her, she strolled over to the swelling protuberance. It was a dark brown, the exact color as the rest of the ceramic material. Its central apex rose no higher than her waist. Reaching down, she tapped it with her light beam. The muted plasticene-on-ceramic clacking that resulted was not nearly loud enough to produce an echo in the enormous chamber.
"Likewise solid." She straightened. "Maybe these isolated domes have some ceremonial significance. Let's see if we can find some more." She started to walk around the wide, low protrusion.
When she was halfway around, something hissed imperceptibly, and the entire dome began to slide in her direction.
Stumbling backward, she nearly fell as the massive convexity slid silently toward her. The blast of incredibly frigid air that erupted from the opening the dome had been covering might reasonably have been expected. The pale light that accompanied it could not.
"Therese, get back in here!" Cullen was shouting at her through the open hatch.
His anxious urging was superfluous. She all but flew back aboard. As soon as she was safely back inside, the exoarcheologist shut the hatch behind her. The icy atmospheric swirl that accompanied her retreat did little more than briefly chill the humans, but it threatened to freeze the moisture in Pilwondepat's less tolerant and unprotected lungs. Fortunately, the craft's heater quickly brought the internal temperature back up to human normal and thranx tolerable.
"What the hell happened there?" Cullen found himself gazing out through the transparent cowl at a perfectly circular opening in the ceramic floor. The dome that had blocked it lay to one side, apparently disinclined to move any farther.
"Maybe her walking on the floor has annoyed the gods." Dik kept his hands on the aircar's controls, ready to boost ceilingward and take them out of the murky chamber at an instant's notice.
"Very funny." As her breathing steadied, Holoness moved next to the cowl to stare out at the aperture. It was perfectly round, with walls as sleek as the floor beneath them. "Cold air I can understand - though maybe not that cold. But not light. Where can it be coming from, down here?"
"I expect," Cullen responded, "we'd better go and see. Dik? Take it slow."
The pilot nodded as he edged them toward the opening. The glow emerging from the passage Holoness had inadvertently brought to light was not intense. It dissipated long before reaching the ceiling of the vast, empty chamber. Gingerly, Dik eased the aircar forward, positioned it carefully over the opening, and then commenced a controlled descent.
The gap in the floor was wide enough to admit the craft, but with little margin for error on any side. They descended five meters, ten, thirty, with no sign of the walls surrounding them either opening up or contracting. As near as Cullen could tell, the perfectly vertical shaft had been formed to tolerances of less than a millimeter. Then, as abruptly as they had entered, they found themselves floating free in another open chamber. According to the console instrumentation, the temperature outside the aircar's canopy was well below freezing. No one paid much attention to the external temperature readout, or for that matter, any of the others. They were too entranced by the light.
Tinted a pale green, it seemed to emanate from the floor overhead that had now become another ceiling. Below, revealed by the ethereal yet extensive illumination, was . . .
Pilwondepat uttered something in High Thranx that was incomprehensible to his human companions. Dik cursed under his breath. Holoness just stared. Cullen, their leader, mouthed the inaudible human equivalent of Pilwondepat's whistling and clicking.
They were in another room. Except thatroom was so inadequate a designation to describe their surroundings that it did not bear audiblizing. Below them, rank on rank, tier on tier, row on row, were thousands upon thousands of teardrop-shaped cylinders. These stretched as far as the eye could see to north, to south, and to the east. Only to the west could the possibility of a boundary be faintly discerned. In that direction, Pilwondepat realized, lay the outside wall of the escarpment.
Below the hovering aircar, the endless tiers of cylinders dropped away to infinity. Searching for an end, for the bottom, brought only tears to the eyes of straining observers, and no closure. Lying between each level of cylinders were strips
of gleaming metal and of plastic, and conduits of the ever-present ceramic. Only here, the latter was present in a veritable rainbow array of hues. The tiers were wrapped, crisscrossed, enveloped, in a web of lines and connectors and ducts that looked to have been spun by the mad mother of all spiders.
Gently swathing each cylinder, seemingly supported only by their flimsy, deceptively fragile selves, were halos of filaments and fibers that pulsed with a soft golden glow like the breath of babies become glass. So delicate were they that they might have been spun instead of wired. A narrow strip of some transparent substance ran the length of each cylinder, which themselves appeared to be fashioned from some dark purple metallic substructure.
"What can they be?" Holoness was standing as close to the canopy as possible, her nose pressed against the transparent plexalloy. "There must be millions of them." She waved a benumbed hand in the pilot's direction. "Dik, you've got to let them know about this up top!"
Emerging from the same daydream into which all of them had been plunged, the pilot nodded. After a couple of tries, he looked up and shook his head. "No can do. Something in this ceramic sucks up even long-wave transmissions like a sponge. I've lost the outpost's carrier wave, too."
Cullen swallowed hard, aware he was in the presence of something as exalted as it was alien. "Can you get us any closer? We can't go outside here without environment suits."
"No kidding." The pilot manipulated controls. "At these temperatures I'm surprised there's no frost on anything."
"No moisture." Everyone turned to look in Pilwondepat's direction. "Hot desert above, cold desert below. No moisture. This place must be absolutely dry." He gesticulated irony seasoned with aversion even though he knew that his companions would not be able to properly interpret the entire gesture. "Temperature excepted, Riimadu would probably like it down here."
Under Dik's circumspect guidance, the aircar drifted over to the nearest rank of cylinders. In the process, it passed above a narrow strip of metal, one of uncounted thousands that crisscrossed the chamber like steel silk. They might be walkways, Cullen reflected. If so, they had been designed for beings with far more slender builds than humans or thranx. Beings who were also utterly unafraid of heights. Despite omnipresent drops that could only be measured in the hundreds of meters, there were no railings.
With practiced hands, Dik drew the skimmer closer to the uppermost row of cylinders than Pilwondepat would have thought possible. While the pilot remained in his seat and at the controls, everyone else moved to stand next to the portside. From there they could look out and down at the first cylinder in the row. It lay directly below the edge of their vehicle's hull. The vitreous band that ran down the center of the artifact was perfectly clear. Gazing through it, they could see the cylinder's contents clearly. These immediately and unexpectedly supplied the answer to the main question that had plagued exoarcheologists ever since they had first begun to explore the wilds of Comagrave.
What had happened to the Sauun?
They had not expired of loneliness due to a failure to achieve space travel. They had not perished of racial melancholia. They had not obliterated one another in some undetected, undeclared war for which no evidence had yet been found.
They were still here.
Cullen remembered to breathe. "Next cylinder," he ordered Dik. "We have to confirm similitude."
"Okay, but this isn't easy going. We're in pretty tight quarters here." As he adjusted the controls and the aircar began to move again, he indicated the pulsating nimbus that seemed to float just above each cylinder. "There's a hell of a lot of energy fluxing here, and I'd just as soon we don't make contact with any of these filaments, or whatever they are. Nonconductive hull notwithstanding."
"We just need to be able to look into a few more," Cullen assured him. "Then I think we can safely begin to hazard some preliminary extrapolations."
Each cylinder, or pod, held a single Sauun. They were instantly recognizable as such because their features were intimately familiar to the three awestruck exoarcheologists - familiar from the graven faces of the Mourners, visible to anyone who cared to gaze from the escarpment across the great valley. Here were their living likenesses, held immobile in some kind of deepsleep. The same narrowness of features, the same sorrowful countenance, the familiar long faces that had been cut out of an entire mountainside - all were replicated in multiples of individual detail within the cylindrical pods. Millions upon millions of pods.
Pilwondepat had tried to count, multiply, and estimate, and had quickly given up. Without knowing the dimensions of the chamber, any guess would invariably fall short of the far more majestic reality. How many of the Sauun had sought slumber in this place? A quarter of the planetary population? Half? All of it?
"This explains why they never expanded into space." Holoness was staring down at the dignified, composed alien visage sealed behind the transparency below. "They were too busy expanding into this plateau. It must have taken the combined energy and output of their entire civilization. But why?"
"Some kind of gel." Cullen seemed not to hear her. "Probably heavily oxygenated, temperature and greatly reduced nutrient level sustained by all this machinery, which in turn has to be able to maintain itself." He shook his head slowly. "Incredible, just incredible." Blinking, he summoned up a delayed reaction to her question. "Why indeed? Perhaps they retreated here to escape some incurable plague that was ravaging the surface. Or maybe this was once a much wetter world. A long-term planetwide climate change could have threatened famine." He gestured at the row upon row of pods and their dreaming occupants. "Put everyone in stasis, program appropriate instrumentation to awaken everyone when the rains return, and sleep until the planet is receptive to large-scale agriculture again."
"No."
Cullen frowned as he turned to regard the thranx. "No? Why 'no'?"
Pilwondepat's head swiveled to meet the human's stare. "The technology we see here exceeds the difficulties you hypothesize." He gestured with both his right truhand and foothand. "Any civilization capable of constructing a sleeping sepulcher on this scale could surely have solved the problem of climate change and potential famine. Or of a devastating pandemic. The time and physical resources expended just do not resonate with your theorized causations."
Had not Cullen Karasi's skills as a scientist exceeded the demands of his ego, he would never have been given charge of an expedition on a plum outpost like Comagrave. "Granted, for the moment, your reasoning: What would you propose as a motive?"
"Some external threat. Something they could not have anticipated, and therefore not prepared for. Perhaps the spread and sweep of an interstellar conflict they wished to avoid. Not the AAnn. I am willing to venture that neither the AAnn nor for that matter the hives or your people had achieved even rudimentary space travel by the time this place was finished and sealed." He glanced upward. "The chamber above us may be an airspace, intended to provide insulation - or a decoy area, to distract any curiosity seekers. Or probers with less altruistic motives."
"You sound like a paranoid Quillp." Moving away from the canopy, Holoness turned her attention to the endless corridor that extended eastward into the unfathomable distance. "Still, any and all theories are open to investigation. What can't be denied is the reality of this place, and the extraordinary effort that went into its construction."
"Certainly," Cullen agreed, "something drove them to this. I find it hard to imagine that all this - " He gestured with one hand at the immense enclosed universe outside their craft. " - came about as the result of casual choice, or boredom, or a desire simply to pass a few eons without dying."
"Fear," Pilwondepat observed quietly, "can drive people to greater heights than aspiration."
"Easy enough to find out." Holoness turned to the senior scientist. "All we have to do is wake one of them up and put the question to it." She made no attempt to mask her eagerness.
"In good time, that is precisely what we will try to do." Cullen's tone was care
fully neutral. "But killing a few of the Sauun would not be a good way to endear ourselves to the rest of the survivors. We must be sure of what we're doing before we commence. That means study, plenty of preliminary work." His voice softened as he moved closer to her. Not for the first time, Pilwondepat thought there might be something more to their relationship than supervisor to subordinate.
"There's work here for a thousand researchers for a dozen lifetimes. Much as I'd like to know the answers to all the big questions, this is still a traditional dig, and we have to proceed in accordance with traditional procedure. That means measure and record, record and measure. Extrapolation with models will follow. Only when we're sure we know what we're doing, or as sure as anyone can ever be when something like this is encountered, will we advance to more dramatic steps." He pondered a new thought.
"If Pilwondepat is right, or even half right, and these people withdrew to this place to escape some unknown threat, there might be more overt defenses in place to deal with intruders than simply an empty decoy of a room. Maybe we should count ourselves not only fortunate in making this discovery, but lucky that no such devices have taken an interest in us - yet." He turned back to the pilot.
"Dik, let's take a look around. Keep it straight and simple. We don't want to get lost down here."
Nodding, the pilot manipulated controls. Gingerly, he backed the craft away from the row of pods they had been examining, pivoted the aircar on its axis, and accelerated slowly, heading east and down. Pilwondepat stopped counting levels at four hundred. No one tried to count the number of pods. The actual figure was beyond casual estimation. Cullen had used the word millions when they had first dropped into the deepsleep chamber. As they dove ever deeper into the dreaming vastness, that began to seem a quaint underassessment.
Diuturnity's Dawn Page 23
