“Let me go topside and see if there’s anything different from what’s here,” S’reee said. She angled her body up and swam upward through the darkness toward the zenith of the bubble-dome, her little school of lightfish darting upward with her.
Carmela leaned against the wall, gazing into the darkness, thinking. “Maybe they wouldn’t put an index out at the edges,” she said, “but in the middle?”
“Makes sense to run with your hunches on this one,” Nita said. Together they walked across the great expanse of dark floor. Nita pulled out her manual, holding the wand underneath it to light the floor where they were walking, and started paging through the book in search of “steganography.”
Carmela craned her neck up to see where S’reee was headed. “How high do you think that is?”
Nita paused, glanced up. “Two hundred feet?”
“Might be.”
Nita shook her head and kept walking, her attention on the manual. “Well,” Carmela said, “I guess the shopping can wait a while longer.”
Nita snickered. “You sure? Don’t let us keep you. We’ve only stumbled into some kind of alien library thousands of years old. You really sure you wouldn’t rather be trying on designer exoskeletons or something at the Crossings?”
“Oh, Juanita Louise…” Carmela said, shaking her head as they made their way through the darkness. “You are mean to tease me.”
“Carmela, you just keep on saying that word!”
“Yup. And I’ll say it again unless you appease me,” Carmela said, peering through the dimness at the floor ahead of them.
Nita rolled her eyes. “Okay, fine. Every time you say my middle name, I’ll say yours!”
“Like I care!” Carmela laughed, glancing around them. “Go on! I’ll help you. Emeda! Emeda, Emeda, Emeda!”
Nita shook her head, the irritation passing; it was hard to think petty, mundane thoughts for long when surrounded by such massive and ancient strangeness. “Mine’s just a pain, but yours is weird,” Nita said.
“Why did they hang that on you?”
“It’s my aunts’ and uncle’s fault,” Carmela said. “Mama said they were fighting so much over which one was going to be my middle name, she took all their initials and made a new name out of them.”
Nita cracked up. “I bet that shut them up.”
“Nope,” Carmela said. “Auntie Emma and Tante Elle are still arguing over which of them is the first E. And I won’t tell them, because it’s too much fun listening to them fight.” She paused, looking ahead. “Neets, you see that?”
“What?”
“Look at the floor over there. Is something shining?”
Nita looked where Carmela pointed. “Something green,” she said. “Come on—”
They broke into a trot, heading for the center of the huge floor space. It took a while to get there, but as they drew closer, the glint of green grew stronger and stronger in the light of Nita’s upheld wand, spreading more widely across the floor. By the time they were still a hundred feet or so away, they could see that they were heading into a circle of green designs nearly that wide— a tangle of broad curves or ribbons of verdant color against the paler stone. Some of these green ribbons arced away from the central design, ending in sharp points: some of them seemed to twist back on themselves, narrowing, broadening out again, dividing and sharpening to points again.
At the edge of the design they stopped, Nita holding her wand out over it. The color wasn’t flat: it gleamed, metallic. And there were subtle changes in its color and in the way it reflected the light when Nita moved the wand slightly. “Mela,” she said, “it’s not solid.”
They both got down on their knees to look at one of the broad strokes of the design. “It’s all inlaid,” Nita said. “Little thin pieces of metal…” They bent over it together. It was surprising to Nita how closely she had to look to see the separate elements in the delicate tangle of inlaid metal. “How in the worlds did they do this?”
“Wizardry?” Carmela said. “Are there wizards who’re artists?”
“Sure. And if a wizard did this, no question, he or she or it was an artist.” Nita looked more closely at the end of the nearest ribbon, a sharp point. “But look how this line starts, and then it starts weaving back and forth in the main design …It’s like the letters on the walls.”
“But curved, not straight,” Carmela said, putting out a finger to touch one long, curving letter or character. “A different font. Don’t know if it’s more formal or less. But this is soooo detailed…” She bent close, squinting at the long, delicate thin-and-thick strokes of the alien lettering as they tangled among many others, all making their way like twining plant fronds toward the center of the design. “This part is— I think it’s just names. Nouns, but no verbs.”
After a moment Carmela shook her head, got up, and stood with her hands on her hips, looking over the design. Nita realized that Carmela was trying to get to grips with the whole pattern. But it was hard, from way over at one side like this: and if you ventured into the design, it made even less sense, or you got caught up in the fine detail—
Hmm, Nita thought. Bobo?
You rang?
Got the stair-making routine on tap?
Right here.
Nita watched the air beside her harden into an almost invisible flight of steps up over the design. She felt for the first one, found it, made sure of the width and the depth of the treads, and then trotted steadily up about two storeys into the air. Carmela watched her go. This high enough? the peridexis said.
Just fine, Nita said, looking down at the great design. From up here, her sudden suspicion was instantly confirmed. The design wasn’t random. Up here you could see the larger shapes—the four uplifted claws, the six rear legs, the long tail with its fierce spine. Is it really a sting, or something else? But the whole creature had been designed as if in calligraphic pen strokes, thicks and thins, and was bent back on itself almost into a spiraclass="underline" the head and foremost claws in the middle of the design, the rear legs and finally the tail defining the outside of a circle or disc. “Mela,” Nita said, “it’s one of our scorpion guards. The design’s stylized, but you couldn’t miss it.”
“Okay. Where’s the head, and where’s the tail?”
“The head’s near the middle. No, more to your right. The tail’s at the edge, on your left.”
Carmela headed for the center of the design. From above, more light came dropping slowly down in S’reee’s wake, her near eye glinting in the silver light of Nita’s wand. “Nothing different,” S’reee said. “More words that I can’t read, all the way up.” She cocked that eye down at what lay below her and Nita. “But you two seem to have found something.”
Together they made their way down to floor level. Carmela had come to the scorpion’s head and was kneeling on the densely inlaid metal. As Nita walked over, Carmela looked up with an expression of absolute excitement. “This is it!” she said.
“What?” Nita said.
“Where it starts,” Carmela said. “Not an index. It’s the start of a story. The words are simpler here. I can see them like I couldn’t right away on the walls.”
Nita went down on one knee again and touched the green metal of the design. From within it she got a faint, faint sense of some power stirring. “It may be helping you,” she said.
“I can use some help,” Carmela said, without looking up. “This isn’t easy…” She put a finger on a spot that was a shade of green darker than the rest of the design, in the right position to be an eye.
“‘First there is the Old World,’” Carmela read. She leaned in to look more closely at the long, twisting line of alien charactery. “The tenses in this are all present tense, as if it’s happening now for them. Does that make sense?”
Nita shrugged. S’reee flipped her tail. “There are any number of species who see the present and past as one. Go on.”