“What happened? Your books get burned, or something?”
Jorn smiled gently and shook his head. “We have very few books, in the sense that I think you mean. Information is stored digitally in centralized servers.”
Plavitz shrugged. “Too rich for my blood.”
“A long time ago we learned how to store information electronically,” Jorn explained. “It takes up almost no physical space, and it can be duplicated or accessed with very little effort. But the system crashed in the first decades of the Dome and the data archive was lost. They managed to retrieve half of it, but—” he spread his hands
“—the damage still affects us. So much information gone. Engineering. Science. History. Almost all literature and entertainment.” He shook his head. “The power fluctuates, a conductor overheats, a memory card fails at exactly the wrong time, and half of what your race has fought and sacrificed for a hundred thousand years to learn is simply gone. And the only way to get it back is to learn it all over again.”
“I can’t imagine,” Plavitz said, largely because he had no idea what the man was talking about.
Jorn nodded. “That absence is so much a part of our lives that it’s become invisible to most of us, but I stumble over it every day.” He shook his head. “My apologies. I’m complaining about my work and keeping you from yours.” His smile was a little sad. “I’m alone here quite often, and I tend to save up conversation. And a new person, well—it’s very exciting.”
“Likewise, I’m sure.” Plavitz swiveled back to the desk, where a solid-looking model of the crater occupied half the desktop. “Man, if we had maps like this I could put us over Hitler’s kiddie pool and Boney could drop an egg on his moustache.” He gave a descending whistle and drummed the table. “Bam—war’s over, here’s your medal and your ticker-tape parade, everybody pack up and go home.”
“I’m delighted you find it so useful.”
“It’s so useful it’s spooky.”
Plavitz went back to looking for routes on foot to and from the Redoubt, best routes to elevation above the crater rim, ground they could use for landing fields, even places to stash the bomber, if it came to that.
At one point he halted the scrolling landscape and frowned. The scene on the table looked directly down on the well at the center of the crater. Most of it was in shadow. What walls he could see were not a smooth bore. There were faint concentric lines and sloping diagonals, large rectangular panels, and a speck that might have been a light.
Plavitz looked back at Jorn. “What’s the story with this well?” he asked. “It doesn’t look like any bomb crater I ever saw.”
Jorn peered at the com table. “We’re fairly sure it’s the central shaft of an underground complex,” he said. “What remains of a complex, anyway.”
“They would have had to dig down for miles.”
“It’s clear they were trying to protect something from enemy attack. Possibly whatever the Typhon is still guarding.”
Plavitz frowned and turned back to the hole that seemed to sink below the table. Absently he drummed patterns on his chair.
A few minutes he turned back again. “Say, how come I can’t find the Aquarium on this thing?” he asked.
Jorn looked up from his handheld com panel. “Aquarium?” he said.
“The whatsit, you know. The Redoubt.”
“Ah.” Jorn smiled. “Aquarium, that’s very good. Quite funny, really. I doubt anyone here has ever seen an actual aquarium, you know. Or a fish, for that matter.”
“You’re joking, right?”
“We used to have fish in the ocean, but they died out long ago.” He missed Plavitz’s incredulous expression as he touched his com panel to the table, then dragged a finger across the handheld device. On the table the well slid out of sight and the landscape blurred by until they were looking down at one of the vast fissures. Jorn pointed to where it tapered to a halt. “That’s where your Aquarium is,” he said.
Plavitz leaned forward. “I don’t see it.”
“It hadn’t been built yet when this image was taken.” Jorn spread two fingers on his com panel and the image on the table enlarged.
Plavitz gaped as he appeared to dive headlong into the fissure. “You can make it bigger? I’ve just been going back and forth.”
“Of course. You can zoom in and out.” He demonstrated.
“Holy jeez. I could read a newspaper on the ground.”
“I believe the resolution is ten centimeters,” said Jorn.
“Wait, the whatsit wasn’t built yet? The Redoubt?” said Plavitz. “This map’s a couple hundred years old?”
“Like everything else here, I’m afraid.”
Plavitz touched the control pane with thumb and forefinger. He pinched. The landscape on the table rushed away from him. He pinched again. Now he was looking down on the gaping fissure. He zoomed again, and there was the vast crater on the left side of the panel. Once more, and he was looking down on a scene that belonged on the Moon: An enormous divot torn out of the world and radiating cracks so long and deep that entire cities could be hidden within them. From this vantage point the crater floor looked smooth as a lake. Faint concentric rings marked where spreading lava waves had cooled and hardened, a shock wave frozen in place as it had spread from an unimaginable explosion hundreds of years ago. The land around the crater and its radiating fissures was flat and featureless. Not even a ruin.
“What’s the scale here?” asked Plavitz. He indicated the panel. “How big am I looking at?”
“I should think it’s a fifty-kilometer field of view,” said Jorn. “We can find out exactly, if you like.”
“Fifty kilometers.” Plavitz squinted, calculating. He sat up straight and pointed at the crater and its radiating cracks. “This thing is thirty miles wide?”
“Well, the initial explosion was comparable to an asteroid strike,” said Jorn. “Literally extinction-level.”
“It cracked this ball like an egg! I can’t even picture—” Plavitz frowned. “Hey, wait a minute,” he said. He leaned forward and stared at the massive scar before him. “I’m looking at thirty miles? Fifty kilometers?” He swiveled back to Jorn. “Nothing on earth could get a shot that wide. It’d have to be up in—”
He stopped. Turned back to the panel and reached toward the devastation spread across the glass-topped desk. Hesitated. And pinched. And pinched. And pinched. And sat looking in wonder and in fear at a broken world floating in the air before him, the whole scarred ball a murk of muddy browns, ochre yellow, burnt rust.
“You took this picture from outer space?” said Plavitz.
“From a reconnaissance satellite in geosynchronous orbit,” Jorn affirmed. “They’re all offline by now. But for some time they transmitted—”
“This is all just one big picture?” Plavitz interrupted, staring at the dead globe floating in the empty before him.
“It’s an ultra-high resolution composite,” Jorn said behind him. “That’s why you can navigate it to that degree.”
Plavitz watched his own arm reach out to the panel once again. Watched himself enlarge the image. Saw the broken world expand as if he plummeted toward the crater. He stopped the rush still very high above the world. He frowned and felt something akin to the awful thing that clawed its way up from deep down whenever he flew into a flak field and the 88s were thudding off outside the insubstantial hull.
Plavitz’s chair shot back as he bolted to his feet. “We’re still here,” he heard himself say. His own voice sounded very far away. A frayed signal breaking up. Coming in from over some horizon. From an isolated outpost. From unknown space.