"What the hell do these represent?" she asked. "I don't see anything on here, no storage places, no controls, no patterns, no heat, nothing but the smooth surface."
David gestured back toward the door they had just come through. On either side of the door stood two tall megaliths. "Rajiv is pretty certain that those are transmitters of some kind. Maybe this is a power source."
"Damned chameleons," said Maggie cheerfully. She hopped back over the counters to return to David. They went on.
They no longer exclaimed over the palace. They had been here forty-three days and were as used to it as they ever would be. But still, for sheer size and the elegance and profusion of its detailing, it was magnificent. And it was theirs, the only Chapalii palace where humans had ever run free, unobstructed by protocol officers, by stewards, by the simple presence of any Chapalii at all. That it was thousands of years old did not lessen their victory. For all they knew, and from what little they had been permitted to see in Chapalii precincts now, Chapaliian architecture had scarcely changed at all in the last millennium.
Jo Singh had taken samples from every surface she could get a molecular flake off of, and Maggie had covered the same ground David had in his survey, recording every detail in three media for Earth's databanks. Charles walked the palace incessantly, as if by becoming intimately familiar with it he could somehow divine the intricacies of the Chapalii mind. After all, why should they have ennobled him? Why should they have rewarded him for his failed rebellion against them rather than simply killing him for the trouble he caused them?
"It's damned impressive," said Maggie. David started, feeling that she echoed his thoughts.
"Do you ever think," he said slowly, "that we might just be better off as subjects in their Empire?''
"They don't bear grudges, you know, or at least, not that I've ever noticed. Not that I'm much among them, of course."
"Not that any of us are," David said.
"Sometimes I think they're better than us. Less prone to emotional decisions. More concerned about peace, and peaceable living. About stability. They must think we're savages, the way we go on."
David grinned. "Yes, rather like we look at the natives of Rhui and pride ourselves on being better than them, because we've grown out of their primitive state. We live well. All of us, I mean, all humans, not just you and I and the rest of Charles's retinue."
Maggie paused as they went through an archway. She lifted a hand to trace a translucent spire of a glasslike substance that bordered the opening, lending its shadow to the pattern of tiles on the floor. At its core, fainter patterns mirrored the walls. "But it's a moot point, isn't it? Charles has already decided for all of us."
"Now, Mags, you know very well that the League Parliament voted full confidence in him. That is to say, that they'd follow wherever he led, knowing that he's got his eye on freeing us from the Empire somewhere down the line."
"Look. Here comes an escort."
Down the dimly lit hall came a white-robed priest-the ancient woman called Mother Avdotya-and a figure now intimately familiar to David. He hesitated and then walked forward beside Maggie, one hand tapping the modeler nervously. It looked like a plain black tablet of polished ebony, and he always carried parchment and quill pen and ink in the pouch at his belt, so that he might be thought to be using such instruments to conduct his survey and the tablet merely as a surface to write on, but it still made him anxious to meet any of the jaran when it was visible. Nadine, especially. Nadine always wanted to see the maps and architectural drawings he made. She had a clear grasp of maps and distances; she had just last night drawn him an astonishingly accurate-for its type-map of the coastline from Jeds up to the inland sea to the port of Abala. She had a fierce, impatient personality, overwhelming and breathlessly attractive to him, and he could not help but think longingly, for an instant, of Tess's more supple temperament. But Tess was as far out of his reach now as was the Chapalii control room. And Dina was here.
"What have you done for me today?" Nadine asked him, falling into step beside him. She spoke Rhuian precisely and without a trace of accent, as if she had learned the language through Tess's matrix and not by the laborious process of one word at a time. Even her uncle spoke with an accent, although his command of the language was equally impressive.
"A lintel," he replied, "from the southwest transept." He withdrew a rolled-up square of parchment from his belt-pouch and halted to smooth it open on the modeler.
Nadine studied it, frowning. "This pattern, here… isn't that repeated, but backward, on the northeast transept? And reversed, too." She stared as if she could puzzle out some vital information from the drawing. "You have a fine hand," she added.
"No doubt," said Maggie, with a smirk. David cast her a glare.
Nadine stepped back. Her lips quirked up, but she did not smile. "I want to add to my uncle's maps on the way back. We'll probably be riding far into Habakar territory, and eventually, riding south, the land route must come to Jeds. Someday I'd like to map both routes to Jeds, by ship and by horse."
"Would you, indeed?" said Maggie under her breath in Anglais. "No doubt your uncle would as well."
"If you will," said the old priestess, who had waited patiently through this exchange. "The prince and the other priests are waiting only for your presence to begin the meal."
''Of course.'' David rolled up the parchment and stuck it back into his pouch. They had to match their stride to the priestess's limping walk, so it took some time to wend their way through the maze of the palace and into the back rooms where the jaran priests lived. "How long have the jaran sent priests here?" he asked Nadine as she sat down next to him on a bench in the dining hall.
"Since we found it here. Surely you can see that the gods have touched this place, so we honor it."
"How long ago was that?"
She shrugged. "Perhaps Mother Avdotya knows. Perhaps my uncle guesses. A long time ago, in any case. But my uncle says that these zayinu from over the sea built this shrine, the zayinu called khepelli. Do you think this as well?"
"Yes, I do. But surely you know that, if you've spoken with Tess."
' 'There are many things Tess does not speak of,'' said Nadine cryptically. "And many things she speaks of without saying much. I will come to your bed tonight, if you wish it."
David felt heat burn in his cheeks and hoped that Nadine was still unfamiliar enough with his coloring that she could not tell he was blushing. "Yes." He managed to force out the syllable through a suddenly choked throat. Although the word was barely audible, Nadine smiled and returned her attention to her food.
Later, as they finished eating, Charles signaled to his crew, and they left together to go meet in the tiny room allotted to him. He sat on the edge of the narrow bed. Rajiv sat in the one chair, a hemi-slate resting on his knees, and Maggie on the edge of the wooden table. Jo sank down onto the floor with catlike grace. David remained standing with his back to the door.
Charles regarded them one by one. "What progress today?"
"I've got a tentative date on a ceramic sample," said Jo. "Ten thousand years, minimum. It's got to be that old. Ten to fifteen, by my best estimate. I incline to the later date."
"Does that surprise any of you?" Charles asked. He, of course, did not look surprised, but then Charles had become as adept at maintaining a blank expression as his Chapalii counterparts in the high nobility.
"Yes," said Maggie emphatically. "A thousand years, perhaps. But look at this place. Not here, but the rest of it. How could it have survived in such good condition? What does humanity have left from fifteen thousand years ago? That's Paleolithic times. Some obsidian blades and a few cave paintings?"