Empress of Eternity (2 page)

5 Quad 2471 R.E.

Tick, tick, patter, patter…

The grains of sand swept westward over the midcontinent canal and its walls like microlocusts, their silicon edges nipping futilely against the stone of the meteorological station. Sharpnesses blunted by the surface that had been designed to outlive eternity itself, each grain sighed and sleighed downward, creating miniature dunes against the land-side walls of the canal and the ancient structure.

Inside the first-level instrumentality and environmentality center that occupied the ancient station, Eltyn pulse-linked to the geosats. Before his eyes—virtie eyes rather than bio-orbs—appeared an amorphous not-quite-wedge-shape of orangish brown, a fantasy color whose wavelengths averaged somewhere around 630 nanometers, an approximation of a triangle that stretched back southward to the foothills of the Second South Range.

2SSR,
confirmed the link.

MetStation sole unit structure inhabitable south side MCC west of desert research station. Interrogative estimated habitation/equipment viability duration?
The query came from the geosat continent monitor chief, Laembah.

Drama excessive,
Eltyn return-pulsed.
Greater probability of solar flare instant-now than silicon inundation in 10
³
cycles.

Humor/sarcasm unappreciated.

A flash of superheated air washed over Eltyn, then diffused as the door closed as quickly as it had opened to let Faelyna enter. The sand granules picked up by her softboots clicked on the stone floor before they were absorbed into the soles, but others cascaded off her coverall as she peeled back the face shield and detached the hood to reveal short and curly brown hair, hazel eyes, and a slightly pointed chin too strong to be considered elf-like. Then she stripped off the coverall to reveal a dark gray formfitting singlesuit.

Stet
, he returned to the geosat.

Dubious humor
, Faelyna pulsed through private-link, the unmonitored local freq.

Dubious probabilities for serious and officious
⁵
chief.

Both Eltyn and Faelyna laughed.

He lives for weather ops,
added Eltyn.

He’s a Ruchocrat, scheduler, and grid-locker.
Faelyna projected a head-shake.
Bureaucracy ill serves the Ruche.

Ill serves any efficient society.

They both knew that TechOversight’s covert placement of their project under Meteorology had been the only way to hide its implications from RucheControl. That cover would not last the triad, Eltyn had calcjected—unless no one from The Fifty or the upper Ruche bureaucracy had looked beyond the project title: “Meteorological Endothermic Implications of the MCC.”

Routine summer met status-reps ready for Ruche-Centre?
she asked.

Sixday. 1000.
Eltyn opened the link and let her riffle through the past week’s observations.
Analysis incomplete.

Too many hotspots exceeding baseline projections. Met correlation will compare to reconstructed Searing data.

Probability of comparison exceeds point seven-three,
he agreed.
Reconstructed data more conjecture than solid
²
.

Irrelevant. Fear factors associated with Searing and post-Caelaarnan period over-rebound have excessive impact.
Her words held the over-hued crimson-green of cynicism.

Illogical
⁵
…
but likely.
Even The Fifty—the Administrative Council of the Ruche—veered toward emotion if the councilors perceived any possibility of Seared Earth or Iceberg Earth, remote as the second possibility might be in the near future.

Query. Structure survey probe status?
Cool urgency underlined her question.

Red
³
.
Electron probe negative. Fermion beam feedback fused focal assembly. Negative on all laser applications.
He follow-frequed his comments with a hint of frustration.

Equipment requisitions?

Submitted. Approval pending, likely.

Account subcategory deficiency?

Negative this triad. Next triad…???

Novel approach possible?

Approach(7) already attempted. Working on approach(8).
Eltyn snorted, knowing Faelyna was nanoneedling him. The equipment scheduled for arrival in six days had a special configuration. If it didn’t work…

Approach(9)…my shadow retrogression?
she pulsed.

More like retro-nonexistent imaginary future tech.
He shrugged. She could certainly try if his next discernment attempt failed. He’d have to re-tech radically and take another tack.

You have a better alternative?

He didn’t. Not yet. Not if his next effort failed.
Yours?

Shadow polariton retrogression [deep image] one ready to commence setup by fiveday next.

He projected a nod as she made her way to the antique ramp leading to the upper level and her laboratory and equipment. He watched her, admiring her walk, and her assurance. To have said more, or pulsed more…that would have been improper…most unRuchelike.

Yet…

Tick, tick…patter…patter.
…

Outside the all-too-ancient structure, the sand flailed futilely at the smooth unblemished surface of the gray stone, and to the north other granules drifted across the waters of the canal before sinking, their surfaces wetted, into the unchanging depths.

9 Siebmonat 3123, Vaniran Hegemony

Kavn Duhyle glanced northward across the canal. His eyes studied the thin line of silvery white that marked the ice less than twenty kays to the north, beyond the swampy green and scattered trees. Nearer, but on the far side of the canal, he noted that the icy runoff from the all-too-brief summer had dwindled to three narrow waterfalls over the blue-gray stone canal wall. The canal was a massive engineering work that stretched two thousand kays, almost precisely. It predated the Old Ones of legend who had survived the second time of Iceberg Earth by close to half a million years. The precision of the canal’s engineering never failed to impress him, day after day. Its permanence emphasized, in his mind, their greatness far more than their scattered records that referenced civilizations yet even older—and much more than the fragmentary and decayed ruins of more recent civilizations.

At times, strange artifacts washed up on the sandy shores of the Jainoran Ocean south of the canal along the coast, fragments of fossilized animals wearing equally fragmented and fossilized collars. More intriguing were the strangely designed artifacts that appeared to be replacement parts. Most appeared unchanged by age. Some had what passed for circuits on the nanetic level. Some even channeled energy flows, but for what function and at what levels of current and amperage it was impossible to determine without larger assemblies.

In the late afternoon, Duhyle stood behind the wall that topped the canal near its western end. Ten yards to the east stood the ancient structure that was an integral part of the canal and now served as Helkyria’s laboratory. To his left, beyond the shadows, the summer sun warmed the air above the pale blue-gray stone, but not the stone itself, that anomalous adamantine synthstone that formed the walls of the canal and the building. The material was impervious to weather, and even to nucleonic cutters. The canal walls extended down four point three kays, widening as they did. Duhyle’s own observations confirmed the few studies that suggested it had been engineered on the fermionic level. That technology had vanished with the Old Ones. Over the years, structures had been built on the wide canal walls, but none had lasted. Records stated that more than one light house had been built where the ocean side of the wall met with the canal side. Now there was not a trace of any structure. A solar filament collector, integrated with the landscape over more than five square kays south of the canal, as well as a small tidal pump, provided power to the lab and to the extensive backup battery/capacitors.

In places, land had formed inside the canal. There were more than a few lakes or swamps behind the canal walls, especially on the north side. Nowhere had the walls broken. In some locales, the walls appeared to curve, but surveys and satellite images had indicated that the canal remained unbowed. The surveys also indicated a semicircular depression—an underwater meteor impact crater one point seven kays across—that extended seaward from the underwater end of the canal. That crater, now mostly filled with sediment, and the fact that the impact had not had any effect on the canal itself, confirmed the canal’s indestructibility.

To Duhyle’s right appeared Helkyria, also looking out over the canal. He glanced toward her. “What are you thinking?”

“About the ostensible purpose of the canal.”

“Ostensible purpose?”

“It’s obvious that it was designed to stop glaciation from spreading farther south on the continent…or extreme desertification from spreading northward. But why would the Old Ones really have bothered? That couldn’t have been its only purpose.”

“You’ve said that before. Besides, in full glaciation, the water would freeze the entire way across the canal.”

“If we had had a recurrence of Iceberg Earth, that would have been true, but for periodic ice ages it should have worked. It apparently did. It also slowed desertification from the south side more than once, and certainly during the time of the Hu-Ruche.” She glanced across the dark gray-blue waters. “The canal walls go down kays and then rejoin. In almost no place is the water in the center less than a kay and a half deep. It’s wide enough that it’s effectively as salty as the Jainoran Ocean and the Great Eastern Sea, and the walls are impervious so that the salt water doesn’t penetrate the water table. It’s almost, but not quite, an ecological barrier. Why just almost?
They
had to have known that.”

“They didn’t know enough to preserve what they learned.”

She smiled faintly, and the tips of her short-cut silver-blond curls shimmered golden for a moment above the creamy brown skin of her neck and forehead. Duhyle wondered what he’d said that amused her so. He had enough sense to wait for her to speak again.

“That’s not necessarily true. All we know is that we haven’t found or recognized any repository of high-tech knowledge, except for the canal itself.”

“Those of the lost times did?” He shook his head. “We’ve found the artifacts and ruins of two differing cultures on Mars and on some of the asteroids. There’s no hint of the Old Ones, or any technology that could have built the canal.” He glanced skyward, his eyes avoiding the glare of the midday sun and settling momentarily on the Mist Ring, a silver line that arched from horizon to horizon, like a bridge across the sky.

“That makes my point.”

Duhyle had no idea what her point even was.

“Don’t you understand, Kavn? If you were one of the Old Ones, would you have wanted us to know all that now? How many times have technological civilizations arisen and fallen?”

“All the more reason to leave the knowledge,” he pointed out.

“With odds at a thousand to one against me, I’d still bet that no preceding civilization, even that of the Old Ones itself, collapsed for lack of technology.” She offered a broad smile.

“The Tech Paradox?”

“It makes sense. You can see it at work in our own culture. More technology requires greater interdependence. Greater interdependence creates greater vulnerability, which in turn requires the greater application of technology and more concentrated energy sources—”

“Now,” he interrupted, “is when we could use help. The ice is advancing an average of four-fifths a kay a year. That rate is projected to increase. We’re losing forests, and the lands that support our biologics. Directed solar energy is too concentrated for effective climatic balance. No one trusts us engineers to deploy green house gases and other large-scale geo-engineering.”

“Not after the Searing. Besides, I’m not certain knowledge always provides an answer.”

“Then why are you trying so hard to find it?”

“Because the alternatives appear worse. The Aesyr are pressing for building breeder reactors and filling the atmosphere with green house gases—anything to stop the glaciation in the short term. We’re here in a desperate attempt to find another alternative before the political unrest turns into chaos and possible revolution.” Her voice held an edged humor. “Even so, I worry. What if the ancients knew their technology wouldn’t be good for us? Technologies don’t always graft to the cultures that didn’t develop them. We don’t even understand some of the biologic records from the Caelaarnan Unity, and they never advanced beyond near-space and a few out-system remote sensing stations.” Her silver irises darkened to almost black, and Duhyle could have sworn that chill radiated from her. “The Hu-Ruche Technocracy rose and almost fell before it rebuilt itself. Along the way they measured everything and left incredible records of those measurements on anomalous permaplate, but almost nothing of their technology, and what little remains is so condensed and cryptic that no one yet has made sense of it, except that after that near fall, there are continuing and puzzling references to what appears to be the rainbow. Neither the Amberian Anarchists or the Saenlyn Federation even attempted colonization or out-system planetary modifications, not so far as we can tell.”

“You think the Old Ones meant to doom everyone who followed them, unless any successors were bright enough to duplicate what they did? Or did they expect us to find the mysterious technology trove that no one has discovered in millions of years? That assumes it exists.”

“Then why did they build the canal—the only indestructible canal on Earth?”

“Maybe that’s all they could do, and the effort wrecked their civilization.”

“Or maybe the canal itself is the key. Perhaps it’s a bridge.”

Duhyle laughed. “Don’t you think thousands of other scients have had the same idea over all the millennia? They must have tested every possible approach to determine if there is a key. If it even exists.”

“Then I’ll have to find another way.” Her curls glittered silver from root to end, if only for a moment.

“What do you want for dinner?” he asked.

“Whatever you’re cooking,” she replied, straightening so that her eyes looked down on his. “How long will it be?”

“Tell me when you want it. Redgrass soup, and fowl with cream pasta and shrooms.”

“Give me a stan and a half. I’m deep-linked to Vestalte, with a side link to Vaena.”

He nodded, then watched as she reentered the ancient structure. It now held the most advanced technology that the Vanir had yet developed. His eyes returned to the canal and its deep waters.