Kit and Ronan got up: Darryl did, too, without help. “Better,” he said. “See, I just needed a second. You guys gotta stop treating me like I’m Fragile Boy.” He reached up to put a hand on each of their shoulders. “You ready?”
Ronan picked up his long rod of light and laid it over his shoulder: it blazed, then died down, subdued but ready. Kit glanced at him, reached for his little silvery sphere and juggled it in one hand.
“Hit it,” he said.
They vanished.
8: Shamask-Eilith
In the great dark dome under Arsia Mons, Nita watched the giant green metal scorpions pour toward her, claws uplifted. On one side, S’reee drifted closer, a hard-to-see fire dancing about her fins; on the other, Carmela moved in until she was touching shoulders with Nita, her “hot curler” ready. “What are they?” Carmela said. “Are they alive?”
S’reee cocked an ear, listening to the distant whisper of another planet’s Sea. “No. Not the way we think of life, anyway. They’re recordings, reconstructions of something that was alive before.”
Nita gulped as they kept coming. The foremost of the scorpions were only ten feet away now, and right back to the dark doorway the whole space was filling with more and more. Where are they all coming from? Even if we start blowing them up, we won’t be able to deal with them all before they deal with us.
Nita stopped, blinked, suddenly blind in the darkness. Or not blind. As if it was happening to someone else, she saw herself step hesitantly forward, go down on one knee, look into the head scorpion’s cold, dark eyes. And the scorpion just looked back at her, and then after a moment walked around her, passed her by. But the image flickered. Once again she walked up to the scorpion, went down on one knee. And the claws flashed out—
Nita shook her head. The tide of scorpions was scurrying closer. I have to do something! But there was nothing to choose between the two moments she’d glimpsed, no way to tell how to make one happen or keep the other from happening.
Except that one of them turned out okay, she thought. I’ve got at least two chances that I’ve seen. If I just stand here, something different is going to happen that I won’t have had time to see—
She stepped forward.
“Neets?!” Carmela whispered in shock. Behind Nita, S’reee started to surge forward. With her free hand, Nita waved her back, went down on one knee as the foremost scorpion came up to meet her. It stopped, and stared up into her eyes.
The strangest sensation followed, like little tickly feet walking around on the surface of her brain. Nita shivered one big shiver all over, but didn’t move otherwise.
And the scorpion swung its eyes and its body away from Nita— walked around her and then off past Carmela. Carmela swiveled with a panicky expression as the scorpions headed after their leader, back the way she and Nita and S’reee had come.
S’reee turned in the air, watching the scorpions pour past. “Now, what was that?” she said. “hNii’t? Did you speak to them? Or they to you?”
Nita was still down on one knee as the scorpions kept pouring past her and into the chamber previous to the one they were in now. “They might have listened to me somehow. But I didn’t say anything.”
“You did,” Carmela said. “You got down on their level. That’s saying ‘hi.’ Actually, you said ‘hi’ first.”
Nita slowly stood up, pausing to rub her knee: it was sore. “Maybe. But I just saw myself doing that, and it seemed like the thing to do.” Better than the other thing, anyway!
“You’ve been doing envisioning work with T’hom, haven’t you?” S’reee said, turning all the way around to watch the last of the scorpions vanish into the next chamber. “I’d say it’s paying off.”
“I don’t know. What if there was something else I was supposed to do?”
“Like what?” Carmela said.
Nita shook her head. She was sweating, but feeling less panic-stricken as the last scorpions passed out of the chamber, the sound of metallic feet tapping on the stone now ticking away into silence. “Ree, where are they going?”
S’reee drifted up to the door, peered through. “That I can’t tell you,” she said, “because they’re gone. Vanished.”
Carmela turned and went to the doorway to join S’reee. “Just passing through?”
“I don’t think so,” Nita said, lifting her wand again and heading toward the next chamber. “They were guarding something. And they decided we were okay. That was their whole job, and when it was done, they went away.” She looked over her shoulder at the other two. “S’reee, can you feel it? That hot-spot wizardry’s shut down.”
S’reee turned, finned back through the air toward Nita and Carmela. “You’re right,” she sang. “And if they were guarding something…”
Nita was heading toward the next chamber, holding the wand high. The rowan wood, soaked in moonlight from fifty million miles away, made a sphere of silver radiance around her as she stepped through the wide, round portal into the next chamber.
For several seconds she saw nothing at all in the darkness. Nita turned leftward to see what was inside the chamber near the left edge of the portal. At first it seemed to be a straight wall. She went to it, holding up the wand for a better view. On closer inspection, she found that the wall wasn’t straight after all, but curved like all the others. The curve was just very, very slight, because this was by far the biggest room they had come to as yet. And as far as the halo of light from the rowan wand spread, from side to side and high up into where the light was lost in the gloom, nearly every inch of the wall was covered with writing.
Nita reached out and touched the wall. The writing was engraved in long, thin columns in the stone, not very deeply, the characters just a few shades paler than the darker, redder surface. “It’s warm,” Nita said. “How can it be warm? The volcano here hasn’t been live for thousands of years.”
Nita turned to look out across the chamber. It was massive, easily a thousand feet across. S’reee and Carmela came in behind her, Carmela with a flashlight and S’reee bringing her own wizard-light with her— several sources of it hovering around her like a little school of pilot fish. The three of them gazed across the huge space.
“One about us,” S’reee sang softly, waving her fins gently to turn and look at the vast expanse of the dome, “what have we found here? This must fill half the mountain.” She tilted all of herself back at an angle, gazing up into the dark; her wizard-lights swam up through the dark above as if through water, looking for something like a surface and for a long time not finding it. It was many moments before their radiance made several small diffuse circles against the uppermost curve of that immense bubble.
“I don’t think this is natural,” Nita said, walking along the wall. “It might have started out as a bubble in the stone once. But this—” She touched the writing again. It was nothing like the graceful curvatures and ligatures of the Speech, but angular and sharp, line after line of strung-together structures like little trees with branches growing out of them at strange angles. “This has all been smoothed down. And isn’t this weird?”
She moved on, puzzled, for she wasn’t able to make anything of the writing. “What?” Carmela said, leaning over Nita’s shoulder to gaze at the engraved characters.
“They were running up and down before. Now they’re going side to side.”
Carmela reached out past Nita to touch the letters, the light of the rowan wand catching in her eyes. “Look, the characters flip. Mirror images.” She peered at them more closely. “Boustrophedon…”
It wasn’t a word in the Speech. “What?”
“Boustrophedon,” Carmela said, tracing the characters with one finger. “When the words in a sentence go in one direction to the end of the line, and then the next line goes back in the direction it came from. You read from right to left, then left to right. Or up to down, then down to up.” Carmela walked along to the next section of writing. There were panels of it, separated by thin engraved borders or sometimes just by empty space. “People used to plow their fields that way. That’s where the word comes from.”