And then she had turned her back on everything they had worked to achieve, all these years; buried herself in this sudden obsession with the mers. He had long since reached the conclusion that without the use of a computer network at least as sophisticated as the one the offworlders had had in Carbuncle during their time here, it would be virtually impossible to integrate all the diverse data they had collected, or to reconstruct what he was sure were critical missing segments of the mersong. Without a complex analysis program, it would take far more time than they had left, if what Moon believed about the offworlders’ return was true.
The sibyl net should have been able to give them the data—even manipulate it for them. But it seemed … incapable … of helping them. He would almost have said “unwilling,” because of its eerie, utter absence of any response. Jerusha had told him the system had been notoriously eccentric for as long as she could remember. She had heard claims that it had grown worse over time, although she said no one was really sure that it had. But even she shook her head in exasperation lately at the number of incoherencies it generated. And for all the precise guidance it had given them, he had still seen enough examples of its flaws to feel both confounded by and suspicious of its function. Only last week a sibyl at the College had been seized by a fit as he attempted to go into Transfer; he still was not fully himself. Ngenet had said it was a coincidence, but the evidence suggested otherwise.
He had pushed the whole subject of the mers to the back of his mind as futile, even as Moon had made it the center of her ambitions. He had done what he could to continue the progress of their technological development, working with the others at the College and on the Council who felt the same way, because whether the Hegemony came back in a matter of years, or never in his lifetime, he could not see any point in giving up now on what they had begun. The further they progressed, the harder it would be for the Hegemony to dismantle and dismiss their work, if that was what it intended. And if not—if the gods, or the Goddess, chose to smile on this benighted world for once—then all the better.
But recently, even the slow-but-steady progress they had been making in their production and manufacturing had hit a snag. They had tapped into Carbuncle’s independent power supply early on in their development. The city’s self perpetuating, seemingly endless supply of power came from a system of immense turbines located in caves cut from the rock below the city, that turned the massive, relentless energy of the tides into light and warmth, into survival for Carbuncle’s systems and its inhabitants. By their own estimates there should have been power to spare for the new needs they were generating locally.
And yet they had been experiencing power outages, brownouts, lapses and lags that were causing critical complications in their productivity. And he had been able to think of only one possible way to determine where the problem lay in that ancient, unexplored system.
“What is it?” Moon said, with a flicker of impatience. “What is it we need to discuss so badly that it can’t wait until—” She broke off, as if she had realized that whatever she had been going to say was meaningless. He wondered what nonexistent moment in the day she had been thinking of; what time they had once reliably shared, and no longer did. There was none that he could think of. “What is it?”
“It’s about the Pit,” he said. She looked at him uncomprehendingly. “I want to go down into it—to explore it. If there’s any way to work around the power problems we’ve been having lately, the key has to be there.”
Moon put her hand up to her face, blinking, as if what he had just said was somehow appalling, or terrifying, to her. Her hand dropped away, as coherence came back into her eyes. She touched the sibyl pendant hanging against the drab cloth of her shirt. “No,” she murmured. “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”
“Why not?” he snapped, in reflexive anger; unable to stop it, because his angei had so little to do with what she had just said, and so much to do with something that ran much deeper. “The Pit is the access shaft to Carbuncle’s operating system— there’s no other way to affect or change it. That’s what the Pit is there for—to give access for repairs and adjustments.” While he had been at the palace with Arienrhod, researchers from offworld had come there many times; they had gone down into the access well to study its function, apparently without any noticeable success. The system had never required any adjustment that he knew of—until now. But while the offworlders had been here the storm walls had still stood open in the Hall of the Winds, causing tremendous updrafts to form inside the shaft. Anyone who descended into the Pit would have had to stay sealed in the system’s elevator capsules or be swept to their deaths. Maybe that had even been the reason for the whole bizarre setup—a kind of perpetual security, to protect the system from tampering.
But Moon had sealed the Hall of the Winds. The Pit was still the Pit, a green-lit well dropping down and down until it met the sea. But without the treacherous winds, it should be possible to actually explore the catwalks and ledges, the outcroppings of display and hardware visible down there.
”But you don’t know anything about how the Old Empire’s technology functions,” Moon said.
He shrugged, an abrupt, barely controlled gesture. “And how will we ever ^learn, unless we study it? There are certain basic rules which everything that I functions obeys, on one level or another. But until we can get a closer look at the system, we can’t even begin to study it.”
She shook her head, and he saw something unnamable come into her eyes. “It’s too dangerous. I don’t want you to try it. I don’t want you to go down there. I don’t want it to … want you to get hurt.”
“It’s not dangerous, without the wind. Nothing will happen to me. It’s an access well—”
“You don’t know how dangerous it is.”
He frowned, his exasperation growing. “Do you know something about this you en’t telling me?” He remembered again how she had stopped the winds.
She looked at him with anguish and frustration, but she only shook her head
“Even Ngenet agrees with me about this. He wants to go down with me.”
Moon turned in surprise to Jerusha. Jerusha nodded her confirmation. “And do you agree too?” Moon asked.
Jerusha shrugged. “I think Miroe’s too old for this kind of thing,” she said. “But I expect I’d let him break his neck before I’d say that to his face.” A weary half smile of resignation showed on her own face. “As to whether I actually believe that what they want to do is necessary and useful … yes, I do.” She glanced down, looked up again. “Protecting the mers has become more important to me than anything else, too, Moon. But everything else hasn’t ceased to be as important as it ever was. We need to do more than we’ve been doing for the people who’ve followed you this far. The problems they’ve been experiencing are too important to ignore.”
“Yes. Yes, I suppose … I …” Moon lifted her hands in a gesture that looked almost helpless, hopeless. She glanced back at him, her face pinched as if she were in pain; but her eyes showed him something like understanding at last.
“Danaquil Lu Wayaways said he would go too; we can ask questions—”
“No!” Moon caught his arm, suddenly white-faced with anger, or terror. “With his back—?”
His frown deepened. “Well, someone else then, another sibyl—”
“No.” She stood face to face with him, clutching her elbows. “No sibyls are to try a descent into the Pit.”
He stared at her. “By’r Lady, why not?”
“It isn’t safe. There are … I’ve felt … there’s something there. …” She looked away, her lips pressed together. “Not a sibyl. No sibyls. I forbid it.”