Tholos, maze, wherever he was, the intercept really did seem to want an answer.
“Our culture is five hundred years after yours,” he said.
“Good. Yes?”
“But”-he hated saying it-“is debased by comparison. Technologically.”
“Such finesse, little hunter.”
“You belonged to a scientist caste.”
“Wrong.”
“A holy order. Priests. Sacerdotes.”
“No.”
“Criminals being punished.”
“Fool!” She said it with incredible fury. The black eyes glittered. “Don’t you know any history? What happened to our culture?”
Beni was stunned by her vehemence, the unconcealed contempt. It told him something he did not yet understand.
“You vanished,” he said, and then, to show he did know some history, what Ramirez had told him, added: “Like the Mayans. The Anasazi. Your cities were abandoned, allowed to run down; most were reduced to slag by housekeeping programs-”
“So where did we go? Our millions? Our millions, Beni?”
What did she want him to say? And millions. The Tastan millions.
“Into these tombs?” The certainty of it amazed him. “All coded in. Immortal. You’re the guardians of your race! Eighty-five repositories but housing millions.”
Arasty’s expression may have been the result of holistic psychonic printing or just some simulated response selected from a housekeeping menu, but Beni saw what looked like genuine scorn, genuine revulsion. If it were a deception then it was a subtle one, something naked, seeming spontaneous, well beyond the disapproval and impatience it resembled.
What am I missing? Beni asked himself, and with it felt a conviction. She needs me to guess. It really is important that I do. But what did she-it-want him to say? He wanted to shout the question. Didn’t dare now. All he could think of was to show humility, self-effacement, and hope for patience.
“Please, Arasty, help me more. This is important.” He hoped the compliment, his respectful tone, would do it.
The phantom watched him sidelong with her dark eyes just as a human would, as if in fact a discrete entity deciding, not a defence intercept scanning precedents, selecting options.
“You really have no idea, do you? A great culture, possibly the greatest the world has known, reaches a point where it dismantles itself, gives way to a simpler, let’s say impoverished, less sophisticated successor. Why would they do it?”
“I can only think of two answers,” he said quickly, honestly. “There was some enemy…”
“You could say that.” The intercept’s eyes flashed with interest. “Or?”
“You gained by it. It had to be progress. Something you saw as better.” And he remembered what she’d said-impoverished-and barely dared utter the words. “You became us!” Remembered what else she’d said: less sophisticated. “You simplified your culture, someone did, something, some ruling elite maybe, and became us-”
“Yes.” There was something like madness in the phantom’s darkling bits of eyes, something reckless and fervent, but Beni dared not suggest the tombs housed what remained of the Tastan’s dead insane. It was more. It had to be more. But he did not have to stumble over words to form a question. Arasty continued speaking.
“Some ruling elite, yes. An enemy, true, that culled our millions and our cultural heritage. Downgraded us all. To simple, immortal, happy folk like you-”
“Then-”
“Immortal. Happy ichneumon. But able to be maimed, killed by violence. With time to be curious, to ponder, to forget, to indulge. Happy, happy, happy ichneumon!”
“Then you’re here-”
“Go on!” Madness spun in the darkness of the eyes.
“To cull us! Prey on us! To give purpose to immortal lives! They planned ahead. Saw we would need-”
“No!” The intercept had halted in blazing fury, actually flickered, flashed off and back again. The face was rigid with a rage and suffering held in such perfect suspension that Beni was faint with the involuntary numbing terror he felt welling up. The eyes, the black false eyes, held him.
“No, little hunter. No. See it our way. To give purpose to our thwarted lives. Some kind of revenge for those few among the elite, eighty-five out of all those many, to whom the genetic treatments did not bestow immortality. Who had helped cull and simplify, then found themselves without the intended blessing, left to die in the agony of exclusion from that. From you.”
Beni saw the extent of the resolve, the old fierce hatred, that she would never let him go. He would never get to tell this story. Never even reach the central chamber. Or know he had.
“These aren’t tombs. They’re traps,” he said, understanding, remembering the other meaning to her name for him, the insect leaving behind its offspring to feed.
“Yes, Beni. Traps to lure immortals curious in their long lives. A way of striking back at time.”
And Beni felt the deep-down dread that Ramirez, some kind of Ramirez, tampered with, changed, or no-just allowed to go back unharmed-was acting as a lure out there in the bright summer days, giving hope, keeping the dream alive in others, but part of the trap, knowing or unknowing. Pray Destiny it was unknowing. Such a small shrewd price to pay, letting one or two go free, letting others go back maimed. Let the tombs have a bad day and so keep them coming.
“Be merciful, Dormeuse. Arasty.”
“I am, little hunter. With you I truly am. Normally I grant the beautiful lie, tell those I am about to rob of life, light and limb, beauty, eons of youth, of how normally death is what makes lives, cultures, ultimately defines civilization. I remind them that it’s right that immortals should reach a point of idle curiosity and need to be challenged, extended, tested. I tell them that whatever their fates individually, those I kill or hurt are helping maintain the tenor of life for all.”
“But you’re actually culling.”
“Avenging. It’s simpler.”
“Out of envy.”
“Bad enough in life. But when it’s all there is, all that’s left, it fills the largest cup, becomes a vast power. I phrase it so they think they will be spared somehow. That they are different and special. To some I even suggest that their personalities will join mine in the tomb matrix. Then, when there is hope, when vanity and optimism is there in hints and the absolute conviction of ego, then I cripple and kill, then I bring them to the worst of hells, to such terrible insurmountable despair. You I have spared this anguish, Beni.”
“Spared me! By telling me the truth?”
“Yes.”
“But I can’t believe you, can I? Not after what you’ve just said.”
“You really should. Look at your display.”
Beni did, saw how simply, elegantly, the tomb’s long-dead owner, this printing of her anyway, had expressed his dilemma.
A maze. He was in a maze. He did not know what to say.
Arasty, the ghost of her, smiled. “Well?”
“Never be importunate, I was always told. Never beg.”
“I’ve told you I’m being merciful. I might listen.”
“All right. Don’t kill me.”
“I won’t.”
“Don’t maim me.”
“I won’t.”
“Let me return.” As part of the trap, he didn’t say, refusing to go so far.
“Earn it.”
“I need to think. Concentrate.”
“Shall I leave?”
“You’d still be here. You’re in the walls.”
“True. The tomb.”
“The trap.”
“The trap, yes. My personality is coded through all this. But it would be easier for you to concentrate.”
And the intercept vanished, took away her glow, left only dim yellow lamplight, tunnelling, vitreous, intimate darkness without her darkling eyes.
Beni stopped, pretended to think, triggered his implant, saw again the plan of her tomb picked out in light, saw that he was at the central chamber, the structural heart of what this thwarted, predatory, former woman had become. Out of despair.