Nita went after her, looking across the dome. “More light?” she said to the rowan wand.
It brightened until it was as blinding as an arc light, and Nita winced from the brilliance, looking away and across the great floor as she held up the wand. It took that much light to enable her to see all the way across the chamber and to be sure that there were no more visible entrances or exits: the portal they’d come in by, the one the scorpions had guarded, was the only way in. “This must have been important,” Nita said. “Could this be a history? Mars’s history?”
“Or the Martians’,” S’reee said. She drifted closer to one wall, peered at it. “No way to tell. I can’t make fin or fluke of it. You?”
Nita shook her head. “I don’t get it,” she said. “Usually knowing the Speech lets you understand any writing you see.”
“Not always,” S’reee said, drifting down the wall to look at another patch of writing. “That condition obtains when the manual can find live members of the species to contribute the underlying context from which content can be understood. But when a race has died out, you may only get content with no context, which isn’t a lot of use. And there are recensions of the Speech that have been completely lost over time, because all other information about the species for which they were intended has also been lost…”
“Even for the manual? Is that possible?” Nita said.
“Entropy’s running,” S’reee said. “And the medium it runs in is time. Even the manual’s subject to that, in its merely physical manifestations.” She let out a long, hissing breath.
“Neets,” Carmela said, “S’reee, look. Pictures—”
They came over to look at part of the wall in front of which Carmela stood, deeper into the chamber. Here, arranged in a column stretching up the curve toward the ceiling, there were images, mostly geometric shapes, precisely scribed into the dark red stone. But it was hard to be sure what their relationship was: some of them seemed to run into one another. Nita reached up to touch one, a series of concentric circles with a single small circle inside them. She took a long breath. “Is that supposed to be the Sun?”
S’reee, looking over Nita’s shoulder, leaned in very close, until her nose almost touched the stone. “If it is, we may have a problem,” she sang softly. “Because we’ve got a couple of extra planets.”
Nita, too, leaned in, looking closely at the diagram. Four smallish worlds, and then a slightly larger one, and beyond that, four great worlds, and five tiny planets out in the farthest orbits.
“It can’t be,” Nita said to herself. “Can’t be…”
Carmela was shaking her head as she peered at the smallest markings, furthest from the engraved Sun. “They keep finding these little bitty ones way out at the edge. I can never keep track of how many there are.”
“Dwarf planets,” Nita said. “Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, and Eris.”
Carmela glanced at Nita, picking up on something in her voice. “What’s the matter with them?”
Nita made a face. “Pluto’s still a planet to me,” she said. “Call me stubborn. But there’s another problem. Look at that fifth one. It’s further out than the others, and not in line. Like it doesn’t belong here…”
“There’s another diagram over here, in this next column,” Carmela said. “This one’s got twelve.”
Nita went over to look at the second diagram. This one showed an empty place where the fifth world’s orbit had been: a gap. “So that’s where the asteroid belt would be?” Carmela said.
“It looks like this gap would match their orbit…” Nita said.
“And the furthest worldlet is missing,” S’reee said. “A captured world that got lost again, perhaps?”
“It happens,” Nita said. “That far out in the system, the Sun’s gravity’s not so big a deal as it is closer in.” But her main attention was on the empty space between Mars and Jupiter.
Carmela was looking at that, too. “So the asteroids are actually from this fifth planet blowing up?”
Nita shook her head. “Mela, a lot of people have had that idea, but it doesn’t work, because all the stuff in the asteroid belt put together isn’t enough to make a planet, even a small one. Definitely not enough to make a planet the size of the one in that picture.”
Carmela glanced over to the right of the second image, where there was another column full of writing. After a second she shrugged and started to walk away— then paused and turned back, giving the column a strange look. “That was weird. Just out of the corner of my eye, I saw something.” She put up a hand to touch the characters, squinting.
“More light?” Nita said, lifting the wand.
Carmela waved her away. “Less might be better.”
Nita shook the rowan wand down to a fainter light. “Yeah,” Carmela said. She tilted her head to one side, looking at the characters. “Something— went, went to the—” She paused again. “It found the— something or other. I don’t know what that is. Then— but the sword—” Carmela grimaced in annoyance. “Dammit, it won’t hold still—”
“Can you actually read this stuff?” Nita said.
Carmela’s annoyance was fading into perplexity. “Some of it. Most of it looks like nonsense marks.” She shook her head. “Until it jumps, somehow, and parts make sense. I don’t get it.”
“I wonder,” S’reee said, drifting over to peer over Carmela’s shoulder. “K!aarmii’lha, you came to understand the Speech pretty quickly, didn’t you, for someone who’s not a wizard? Were you studying other languages first?”
“Yeah,” Carmela said, looking over her shoulder at her. “I did German in school, and then I started picking up Japanese, for manga and anime. And Italian, and some French. And when I started hearing Kit using the Speech, I started seeing it on the alien cable channels, and I don’t know, I just—” She shrugged. “Started picking it up.”
“You know,” S’reee said, “you may have some version of the steganographic gift.”
Nita glanced over at S’reee. “Is that good?”
“Possibly good for us,” S’reee said as Carmela worked her way down the graven wall, her lips moving as she traced the symbols with one finger. “Other linguistic gifts can come with it. But mostly it implies the ability to pull context out of writings when the writers’ culture has left no other trace. It’s an intuition rather than a skill. K!aarmii’lha, do you mind donating what you see to the manual system?”
“Huh?” She was peering more closely at some of the characters. “No, sure. What do I need to do?”
“Nothing,” S’reee said. “I’ll have a word with the Sea—”
Tell her there’s no need, the peridexis said in Nita’s head. I’ll have the data assumed into the system as she works.
“Bobo’s on it, S’reee,” Nita said. “He’ll handle it the same way the manuals pull in data off TV and the Web on demand.” She went over to stand by Carmela, reaching out to the incised characters again: but they had nothing to say to her.
“What do you see, K!aarmii’lha?” S’reee said.
“Weird stuff…”
S’reee made a long, bubbling moan of laughter. “More detail, please?”
Carmela stood with hands on hips, staring at the wall. “This part is something about food,” she said. “For all I know, I’m looking at somebody’s shopping list.” She turned away. “This thing needs an index. Or a table of contents. If I were an index, where would I be?”
“By the door?” Nita said.
Carmela headed back to the doorway, where she began studying its edges. After a moment, she said, “Nope. If there is an index, they’re not thinking about it the way we do.”