Danaquil Lu nodded. “We’ll work with whatever data you manage to bring up, and your observations. It will be a start.” He smiled; Sparks felt some of his own anticipation come back as he saw the hunger for new knowledge fill the other man’s eyes.
Ngenet pulled Jerusha into his arms and kissed her with sudden, unexpected passion, before he moved to the hatchway, the first one to enter. Jerusha smiled crookedly, smoothing the collar of her shirt.
Sparks gestured Tammis ahead of him, watched the boy climb down after Ngenet and disappear. He glanced again at the empty stairway; looked down, avoiding Jerusha’s gaze. He went to the hatch and started down the ladder, seeing the faces of Ngenet and his son look up at him expectantly.
Hesitating in that last moment, he could not help looking up, one last time. And he saw her appear suddenly at the limit of his sight, at the far side of the hall, looking on. He lifted his hand; thought she raised hers in response. He went on down the ladder, heard the door seal shut above him. He glanced up. It had merged so perfectly into the ceiling that he could no longer see it.
There was standing room only inside the car. The surfaces around them were smooth and deceptively simple, almost austere. The proportions felt right to his senses, reminding him that this space had been designed by and for human beings, even while the subtle alienness of its forms nagged at his brain. He moved to the control panel below the wide window, glancing out at the Pit’s darkly gleaming walls.
He looked down again at the arrays of symbols before him—ideographic illustrations of available functions, intended to be clear enough in form so that anyone could operate this car, no matter what language they spoke. He had questioned the occasional offworld research teams that had been sent by Arienrhod to study the city’s operating system during her reign; learning from them how to operate the access car. He touched a symbol on the board, and another; a new sequence lit up, and he made more choices, aware of Tammis and Ngenet watching intently over his shoulder. Ngenet made no comments or suggestions. Even though they had agreed about the need for this experiment, the best thing he could call their working relationship was a truce. There was no room in it for small talk.
The car began to move downward. The knowledge that they were actually descending filled him with a giddy vertigo that was equal parts elation and fear. “We’re underway,” he murmured into the speaker of his headset. “Are you receiving us all right?”
“We hear you fine.” Jerusha’s voice answered him, abruptly and clearly. “Take it easy down there. The first step is a long one.”
“Right,” he said, seeing his ghostly image in the darklit glass smile faintly. He looked through himself, gazing out in fascination as they descended into the ancient, human-made neverland, the axis of Carbuncle, the access to unimaginable secrets of Old Empire technology. The car circled the inner wall of the Pit, spiraling slowly downward, just as somewhere outside the Street spiraled down through Carbuncle’s shellform city, the real-world avatar of this inner mystery. Tammis and Ngenet stood beside him now, their hands clutching the shining rail at the edge of the control panel, their own eyes mirroring the wonder of their descent.
After a time that seemed measureless to him—although it registered with meticulous precision on the ancient instruments before him—the car whispered softly to a stop, at the first checkpoint on its programmed rounds.
The rear wall of the car opened almost silently behind them this time, giving them access to what lay outside. They turned, all of them staring in wonder at the sudden opening. Sparks had the uneasy thought that the entire car might somehow be malleable, an artifice; that it might open wherever it chose, wherever was required. It occurred to him that this entire capsule had been extraneous, even an afterthought, to the original builders of this place; put here for the benefit of their less-blessed descendants, intended for times like these….
“We’ve made our first stop.” Ngenet spoke into his headset, reporting to Jerusha and the others up above as he started toward the open door. Sparks glanced at Tammis, who still stood at the window, gaping as if he were hypnotized. Sparks left him standing there, and followed Ngenet out.
A narrow catwalk waited for them, curving away from the car in either direction, rimmed by a low rail of what appeared to be pure light. He touched it—tried to—as he moved away from the capsule’s protective solidness. There was nothing, under his touch … and yet his hand would not move through or past that point. He tried the pressure of his body against the barrier, holding his breath—to find that it held him.
“Gods, this is incredible,” Ngenet murmured, looking up and up along the wall’s impassive, glowing face. He turned, looking down over the rail of light with casual unconcern, as if the vertiginous drop did not affect him at all. “Come on, Dawntreader,” he said, half eager and half impatient. “It doesn’t bite.” He went back to his murmured commentary over the comm link, describing his view to the listeners at the other end of their lifeline.
Sparks let himself become preoccupied with adjusting the jury-rigged recording equipment he carried slung over his shoulder, granting himself a few more stolen moments to get his vertigo under control. They both earned monitors that recorded not just video images but also as much of the EM spectrum as they could capture, stretching their erratic technological expertise to its limits. What they would actually get, and what they would be able to make of it, remained to be seen.
He looked up, as Ngenet had, seeing the lip of the Pit limned by the cold glow of lights, his view of its perfect silhouette broken by dark outcroppings of unidentifiable machinery. It was one of those outcroppings that had broken the fall of Arienrhod’s lover Herne, in their combat on the bridge—and broken Herne’s back.
And yet in the end, at the Change, Herne had reclaimed his place by her side; had willingly put on the black executioner’s mask of Starbuck one final time and gone to his death with Arienrhod, in the ultimate act of love and revenge. Arienrhod had that effect on people … and so did Moon. It had been Moon’s idea, her own revenge of a kind to save him from Arienrhod by using Herne … Moon had convinced Herne to do it.
Sparks looked down, feeling dizziness overwhelm him again as the past and the present collided inside his memory. He stared at the incomprehensible instrumentation before him, forcing himself to concentrate … noting that here the lights were not actually green, as they appeared from above, but various colors and shades, making him think of star maps; the sum total of their spectra only struck the eyes from a distance as green.
He looked cautiously over the rail. The dizzying whorls of light spiraled downward toward a point of blackness at the bottom of the shaft: the dark eye of the Sea observing their intrusion, coronaed in unnatural light. He could smell the sea here, much more strongly that he could up above. He thought he could even hear it; or maybe it was only his imagination, or the rush of blood inside his head.
Sparks glanced back at the car. Tammis was still inside. Both disappointed and relieved that he had only himself to look out for, Sparks went on along the catwalk, following Ngenet, who had stopped up ahead to study a portion of the wall.
“Gods, where do you begin?” Ngenet murmured, muscles in his face twitching with frustration and incredulity. There were symbols on a smooth, narrow stretch of the wall, among sinuous tendrils of equipment, none of it resembling anything that he remotely knew the function of, any more than he could be sure the symbols actually stood for something in an Old Empire language. He reached out toward the shining, inviting surface, wondering what would happen if he touched this the way he had touched the instrument panel in the car; if one sequence would lead to another—