Empire of the East (44 page)

That day they spent mostly in the boat, tied up to the shore under a sheltering overhang of bushes. For the first time in days Rolf spotted a reptile; but the enemy was cruising deep in the remote southern sky, and there was no reason to think it had seen them. Toward evening Rolf took a couple of fish with a whittled spear, and at sunset Catherine cooked them over a small fire. The food in their packs was beginning to run low.

That night, drifting north again over moonlit water, Rolf felt the conviction begin to grow in him that he was nearing the end of his journey.

The river wound its way north among the grassy hills of a land that seemed utterly empty of intelligent life. Near the end of their second night on the water they drifted past the mouth of a tributary creek, and Rolf obeying a sudden powerful impulse turned the boat into it. Poling the boat upstream was difficult, and the creek soon became so shallow that the boat scraped bottom frequently. Rolf and Catherine emptied it of their belongings and let it drift free, back to the larger stream that would carry it away from their path.

By now it was light enough for reptiles to be out, but Rolf decided to push on. Brush growing along the watercourse offered some concealment, and he had the sense that some conclusion was imminent, the feeling that it would not greatly matter if some reptile saw them now. Suspiciously he tried to analyze this feeling, and decided that it came from Ardneh and was to be trusted.

The water offered a path in which they would leave no trail. They waded on up the stream, which was only four or five meters wide here and not much more than ankle-deep.

“Why should the water be so cold?” Catherine asked him. Rolf frowned, realizing that she was right; the land was deep in summer, and such a little stream did not have depths to hold a chill. Unless it was the outflow of some deep lake…

A final meandering of the stream between its gentle banks brought them round a little hill, and he understood. The creek vanished unexpectedly into a hillside hole, a tunnel-mouth with a ledge at one side just above the water level.

He stood with Catherine before the tunnel-mouth for a little time, and then said: “This is where we are to go.” He felt her shiver beside him; chill air emerging from some underground depth, flowed almost imperceptibly around them, and their breaths steamed despite the growing radiance of the rising sun. “Come,” he said, and loosened his sword in its scabbard and moved forward. Here the water narrowed and deepened quickly and he climbed out of it to take the dry ledge that emerged from the hillside beside the stream.

Clay and dank limestone folded them about, and as they proceeded the tunnel gradually grew darker. It was far too regular to be natural, and marks showed of the hand tools that had shaped its surface.

“A mine,” said Catherine. “I have never been in one before.”

“Nor I. But you are right, it must be a mine.” Perhaps, Rolf thought, diggers after some useful metal had by accident run into an underground vein of water, and had dug this channel for it to keep their works from being flooded. That must have been long ago, for the creek bed outside looked as old as any other on the prairie.

The passage curved, but not into the blinding darkness that Rolf had expected. Ahead, it was joined by a vertical shaft, letting in the light of day from what must be a hilltop some meters overhead. Looking up through the rough shaft when he reached it, Rolf beheld a small circle of blue sky, fringed with stirring grass.

“Look,” urged Catherine, pointing downward. Half-embedded in the undisturbed clay beneath their feet were rusted lumps of metal that must once have been tools.

Rolf started to say something, then fell silent. He waited, listening, then moved silently to look back down the passage in the direction they had come. It might have been a drop of water that he had heard, falling from the wet stone and clay of the tunnel's roof. After a moment he shook his head, returned to where Catherine stood with a nocked arrow in her bow, and beckoned her to follow him. Their journey's end was near, but they had not reached it yet.

“What are we do to here?” she whispered at his back, but he did not know and did not answer. Beyond the vertical shaft, the horizontal one continued, into truly growing darkness.

Going slowly to let his eyes adjust to deepening gloom, Rolf edged forward, his feet just above the steady murmur of the stream. Here was where the stream gushed into the tunnel, from an indistinguishable crevice at one side. Not a dozen meters farther on, with the floor of the tunnel now completely dry, the miners' ancient work abruptly broke off. More crumbling tools lay, as if dropped while in use, against the tunnel's deepest face, and high in that face a hole remained, leading to a deeper darkness. The ancient diggers might have broken through, but had not entered whatever chamber lay beyond, for the hole was not big enough…

The aperture flamed abruptly, with cold, clear light. Catherine let out a little cry and raised her bow. Rolf started, but in the next moment felt relief. He knew Old World illumination when he saw it, hard and bright and steadier than any flame. He had seen it before, and then as now Ardneh had been his guide.

He reassured Catherine, and together they peered into the hole. It opened into a simple room about five meters square, with gray smooth walls and flat panels in the ceiling from which the cold light flowed tirelessly. A closed door stood in the opposite wall.

Groping among the fallen miners' tools, Rolf found the head of a pickaxe that was not too corroded to be effective, and with it he worked at enlarging the hole the miners had abandoned. Maybe the Old World lights had flashed for them as well, and they had chosen to drop their tools and run, not coming back.

Catherine worked at his side, clearing away lumps of rock and clay and smooth gray paneling as he broke them loose. The hole was soon enlarged enough for them to squeeze through. The floor was of the same gray stuff as the walls. Scattered on the floor and on a few shelves along one wall were a number of metallic-looking boxes, neatly marked with words in a language neither Rolf nor Catherine could read. The room and its contents were vastly better-preserved than the less ancient miners' tools had been, but even here Time had begun to have his way. From one spot on the ceiling a waxy-looking icicle depended, and Rolf on touching it found that it was rock, with a slow drop of ground water gathering on its tip, and a small rocky stalagmite building on the floor beneath. He shivered suddenly in the chill cave air, with a sudden sense of what time might mean.

The door leading out of the room tried to stay shut when he twisted at its handle and shoved against it with a shoulder, but then it yielded with a sudden rasp. The passage beyond the door was revealed abruptly as its ceiling panels sprang to glowing life.

“Come,” said Rolf, as Catherine hung back again. “I tell you it is all right. This is where we are to be.”

They moved on through the new passage in the direction that seemed right to Rolf, passing through other corridors and chambers. The sound of the stream in the tunnel was lost somewhere behind them. In time they reached a room where the air was warm and their breath no longer steamed.

Time had hardly entered here as yet. There were many metal cabinets and racks, seeming perfectly preserved, filled with equipment Rolf could not begin to guess the purpose of, but which yet gave him an impression of a high degree of organization.

On the most prominent panel at one end of the room stood bold symbols that he could not read, but which he recognized as having the look of certain Old World writings that he had seen before:

 

AUTOMATIC RESTORATION DIRECTOR— NATIONAL EXECUTIVE HEADQUARTERS

 

“Rolf.”

The voice was pleasant, masculine but not heavily so. It came from somewhere in the cabinetry behind the lettering. Rolf did not even start at the sound, but only raised his eyes; he knew at once that it was Ardneh calling him. Catherine had almost literally jumped with surprise, and now stood poised as if to flee; but she waited with her eyes on Rolf.

Rolf said: “Ardneh?”, half expecting a figure to materialize. But there were only the metallic-looking cabinets, from one of which the voice of Ardneh issued again.

“Do not fear me, Catherine. Do not fear, Rolf; for years you and I have known each other, dimly, but in trust.”

“I do not fear you, Ardneh, no,” said Rolf. He held out a hand, and Catherine came slowly to his side. “You can show yourself, Ardneh, and we will not be afraid.”

“I have no flesh to show you, Rolf. Nor am I of pure energy, like an elemental or a djinn. But I am of the West, and I need your help.”

“That is why we are here.” Rolf paused. “Are you then like Elephant that I once knew, some war machine of the Old World? But no, you have life and thought, where Elephant was mindless as a sword.”

“You are partly right,” said Ardneh's voice. “I am, or was, what you call a machine, and made by men of the Old World. But I was not made to fight a war, I was made to restore a peace. And for a long time I have, as you say, had life and thought.”

Rolf turned around. “Where are you, then?”

“All around you. Each shelf and cabinet contains some part of me. As you see, I depend heavily on Old World technology, and it is because of your natural talent in such matters that I chose you and brought you here. The object you have brought me is important, but your own presence, Rolf and Catherine, is equally so.”

Rolf put his hand on the pouch he carried. Ardneh said: “Bring what you call the gem along the path I will now show you. There is a test that must be made before my plans go further.”

The lights in the room dimmed abruptly, but brightened beyond a doorway, in one external corridor. As Rolf and Catherine entered this corridor and followed it, the brightening of the lights moved on ahead of them, from one ceiling panel to another. After many winding passages, interspersed here and there with descending stairs, they entered another room, larger than that where Ardneh had first spoken and crowded with a number of strange devices. Into one of these, a simple-looking crystalline case surrounded by a number of heavy metal rings, Ardneh told Rolf to drop the gem.

“And now leave this room,” said Ardneh's voice, this time from a wall. “The test had better be made without human beings present.” Leaving the chamber with Catherine, Rolf noticed doors as thick as castle walls, sliding from concealment to seal the passage behind them. Once more the overhead light danced on, leading them back to the room in which Ardneh had first spoken.

“Sit down, if you wish,” Ardneh said when they were there again; and they seated themselves on the floor. “There is much I must tell you, for it is going to be necessary for you to tell others the truth about me; more than I dare now explain in the world outside these chambers, but which must be explained before many more days have passed.

“I was built by war-planners of the Old World, as part of a system of defense. But not as a destructive device. My oldest purpose is to defend mankind, and so I am of the West today, though there was no East or West when I was built. My basic nature is peaceful, so it has taken me long to develop weapons of my own to enter battle. The object you have brought me will add to the physical strength I can exert, if the test I am now conducting has a favorable result. More of that later.

“My builders meant their defense system to save the world, and in a sense it did. But they called on powers they did not fully understand and could not wholly control, and in saving the world they changed it, so drastically that their civilization could not survive. This was the great Change of which humans still speak, and it divided the Old World from the new.

“As I will show you soon, the world was changed by another machine, or rather by a part of me that has long since done its work and been dismantled. The part of me that still exists, was created to end the Change when the time was ripe. The builders did not really expect that the changes in the world wrought by their defenses would be so great that I would be needed, but they doubted and feared enough to make me and to put the powers of restoration under my control if they should be needed. They thought that fifty thousand years must pass before the proper time for restoration came. But only now has it arrived. The odds for the survival of mankind, if the restoration is accomplished in this year, in this month, are better than they have been at any time since the Change, or are likely to be in the estimable future.”

Rolf asked: “And when this restoration you speak of is made, will it destroy the East?”

“I hope it will.”

“Then let us restore the Old World, if you think that we of the West can live in it.”

Ardneh seemed to ignore his advice, and Rolf had the uncomfortable feeling that he had been talking of things he knew nothing about.

Silently the overhead lights once more began their dance, leading them back to the room wherein they had left the mysterious gem. The heavy doors had reopened, and Rolf and Catherine entered to stare at the case in which they had left the ebon sphere. The sphere had been replaced by, or transformed into, a pearly, weightless-looking ball of light of about the same size. Looking at it, Rolf had the impression of effortless, tremendous power.

“It is what I thought it was,” Ardneh's voice explained. “And my plans can now go forward.”

“What?” Catherine whispered, staring in fascination.

“What a technologist of the Old World would have called the magnetohydrodynamic core of a hydrogen-fusion power lamp. From it I can draw renewed power, which is very important. Also important is what it shows. The fact that I have been able to change it from a gem back into what it was in the Old World, is a sure proof that the Change is weakening; that the restoration can be made.”

Rolf sighed. “Ardneh, there is still much of this we do not understand. And you say it is necessary that we do so.”