A Deepness in the Sky (51 page)

This bus wouldn't have been crowded—except that the other passengers gave the children a wide berth.Well, they can all shrivel. I don't care. She stopped watching the other passengers, and studied the cross streets streaming past.

With all the work going on underground, there were places where street repairs had been neglected. Every bump and pothole set the rope netting asway—kind of fun. Then things smoothed out. They were entering the poshest section of the new downtown. She recognized some of the insignias on the towers above them, corporations like Under Power and Regency Radionics. Some of the largest companies in the Accord wouldn't even exist if it weren't for her father. It made her proud to see all the people going in and out of those buildings. Dad was important in a good way to many people.

Brent swayed out from the rope netting, his head coming close to hers. "You know, I think we're being followed."

Jirlib heard the quiet words too, and stiffened on the ropes. "Huh? Where?"

"Those two Roadmasters. They were parked near the bus stop."

For a second, Viki felt a little thrill of fear—and then relief. She laughed. "I bet we didn't fool anyone this morning. Dad let us go, and Captain Downing's people are following along the way they always like to do."

Brent said, "These cars don't look like any of the usual ones."

TWENTY-EIGHT

The Royal Museum was at the City Center express stop. Viki and her siblings were deposited on the very steps of the place.

For a moment Viki and Gokna were speechless, staring upward at the curving stone arch. They had done a show about this place, but they had never been here. The Royal Museum was only three stories tall, dwarfed by the buildings of modern times. But the smaller building was something more than all the skyscrapers. Except for fortifications, the museum was the oldest intact surface structure in Princeton. In fact, it had been the Royals' principal museum for the last five cycles of the sun. There had been some rebuilding, and some extensions, but one of the traditions of the place was that it should remain true to King Longarms's vision. The outside sloped in a curving arch, almost like an inverted section of aircraft wing. The wind-run arch was the invention of architects two generations before the scientific era. The ancient buildings at Lands Command were nothing compared with this; they had the protection of deep valley walls. For a moment, Viki tried to imagine what it must be like here in the days right after the sun came to life: the building hunkered low beneath winds blasting at near sound-speed, the sun blazing hell-bright in all the colors from ultra to farthest red. So why did King Longarms build right on the surface? To dare the Dark and the Sun, of course. To rise above the deep little hidey-holes andrule.

"Hey you two! Are you asleep, or what?" Jirlib's voice jabbed at them. He and Brent were looking back from the entrance. The girls scrambled up the steps, and for once didn't have any smart reply.

Jirlib continued on, mumbling to himself about daydreaming twits. Brent dropped behind the other three, but followed close.

They passed into the shade of the entryway, and the sounds of the city faded behind. A ceremonial guard of two King's troopers perched silently in ambush niches on either side of the entrance. Up ahead was the real guardian—the ticket clerk. The ancient walls behind his stand were hung with announcements of the current exhibits. Jirlib was grumbling no more. He jittered around a twelve-color "artist's conception" of a Distort of Khelm. And now Viki could see how such foolishness had made it into the Royal Museum. It wasn't just the Distorts. This season's museum theme was "Crank Science in All Its Aspects." The posters advertised exhibits on deepness-witching, autocombustion, videomancy, and—ta-da!—the Distorts of Khelm. But Jirlib seemed oblivious of the company his hobby was keeping. It was enough for him that a museum finally honored it.

The current-theme exhibits were in the new wing. Here the ceilings were high, and mirrored pipes showered sunlight in misty cones upon the marble floors. The four of them were almost alone, and the place had an eerie quality of sound about it, not quite echoing, but magnifying. When they weren't talking, even the tick of their feet seemed loud. It worked better than any "Quiet Please" signs. Viki was awed by all the incredible quackery. Daddy thought such things were amusing—"like religion but not so deadly." Unfortunately, Jirlib had eyes only for his own quackery. Never mind that Gokna was engrossed by the autocombustion exhibit to the point of active scheming. Never mind that Viki wanted to see the glowing picture tubes in the videomancy hall. Jirlib was going straight to the Distorts exhibit, and he and Brent made sure their sisters stayed right with them.

Ah, well. In truth, Viki had always been intrigued by the Distorts. Jirlib had been stuck on them for as long as she could remember; here, finally, they would get to see the real thing.

The entrance to the hall was a floor-to-ceiling exhibit of diamond foraminifera. How many tons of fuel sludge had been sifted to find such perfect specimens? The different types were carefully labeled according to the best scientific theories, but the tiny crystal skeletons had been artfully positioned in their trays behind magnifying lenses: in the piped sunlight, the forams glittered in crystal constellations like jeweled tiaras and bracelets and backdrapes. It reduced Jirlib's collection to in significance. On a central table, a bank of microscopes gave the interested visitor a closer look. Viki stared through the lenses. She had seen this sort of thing often enough before, but these forams were undamaged and the variety was boggling. Most were six-way symmetric, yet there were many that had the little hooks and wands that the living creatures must have used to move around in their microscopic environment. Not a single diamond skeleton creature lived in the world anymore, and none had for more than fifty million years. But in some sedimentary rock, the diamond foram layer was hundreds of feet thick; out east, it was a cheaper fuel than coal. The largest of the critters was barely flea-sized, but there had been a time when they were the most common animal in the world. Then, about fifty million years ago—poof. All that was left was their skeletons. Uncle Hrunkner said that was something to think about when Daddy's ideas went over the top.

"C'mon, c'mon." Jirlib could spend hours at a time with his own foram collection. But today, he gave the ranked glitter of the King's Own Exhibit barely thirty seconds; the signs on the far doors proclaimed the Distorts of Khelm. The four of them ticktoed to the darkened entrance, scarcely whispering to one another now. In the hall beyond, a single cone of piped sunlight shone down on the central tables. The walls were drowned in shadow, lit here and there by lamps of the extreme colors.

The four eased quietly into the room. Gokna gave a little squeak of surprise. There were figures in the dark...and they were taller than the average adult was long. They wavered on three spindly legs and their forelegs and arms rose almost like the branches of a Reaching Frondeur. It was everything Chundra Khelm had ever claimed for his Distorts—and in the dark, it promised more detail to anyone who would come closer.

Viki read the words that glowed beneath the figures, and smiled to herself. "Hot stuff, huh?" she said to her sister.

"Yeah—I never imagined—" Then she read the description, too. "Oh, more crapping fakes."

"Not a fake," said Jirlib, "an admitted reconstruction." But she could hear the disappointment in his voice. They walked slowly down the darkened hall, peering at ambiguous glimmers. And for a few minutes, the shapes were a tantalizing mystery that floated just beyond their grasp. There were all fifty of the racial types that Khelm described. But these were crude models, probably from some masquerade supplier. Jirlib seemed to wilt as he walked from display to display, and read the writeup under each. The descriptions were expansive: "The elder races that preceded ours...the creatures who haunted the Arachnans of ancient times...Darkest deepnesses may still contain their spawn, waiting to take back their world." This last sign was beside a reconstruction that looked a lot like a monster tarant, poised to bite off the viewer's head. It was all tripe, and even Viki's little brother and sister would have known it. Chundra Khelm admitted that his "lost site" was beneath foram strata. If the Distorts were anything, they had been extinct atleast fifty million years—extinct millions of years before even the earliest proto-Arachnan ever lived.

"I think they're just making fun of it, Jirl," said Viki. For once she didn't tease about it. She didn't like it when outsiders mocked her family, even unknowingly.

Jirlib shrugged agreement. "Yeah, you're right. The farther we walk, the funnier they get. Ha. Ha." He stopped by the last display. "They even admit it! Here's the last description: ‘If you have reached here, you understand how foolish are the claims of Chundra Khelm. But what are the Distorts then? Fakery from a conveniently misplaced digging site? Or some rare natural feature of metamorphic rock? You be the judge...' " His voice trailed off as his attention shifted to the brightly lit pile of rocks in the center of the room, hidden from earlier view by a partition.

Jirlib did a rolling hop, bounding to the bright-lit exhibit. He was practically jittering with excitement as he peered down into the pile. Each rock was separately displayed. Each rock was clearly visible in all the colors of the sunlight. They looked like nothing more than unpolished marble. Jirlib sighed, but in awe. "These are real Distorts, the best that anyone besides Chundra Khelm has ever found."

If they had been polished, some of the rocks would have been kind of pretty. There were swirls that were more the color of elemental carbon than marble. If you used your imagination, they looked a little bit like regular shapes that had been stretched and twisted. They still didn't look like anything that had ever been alive. On the far side of the pile was one rock that had been carefully sliced into tenth-inch sheets, so thin that the sunlight glowed right through. The stack of one hundred slices was mounted on a steel frame, with a gap between each slice. If you got really close and moved your head up and down, you had sort of a three-dimensional view of how the pattern was spread through the rock. There was a glittering swirl of diamond dust, almost like forams, but all smudged out. And around the diamond, a sort of webbery of dark-filled cracks. It was beautiful. Jirlib just stood there, his head pressed closed to the steel frame, tilting back and forth to see the light through all the slices. "This was alive once. I know it, I know it," he said. "A million times bigger than any foram, but based on the same principles. If we could just see what it was like before it got all smeared apart." It was the old, Khelmic refrain—but this thingwas real. Even Gokna seemed to be entranced by it; it was going to be a little while before Viki got a closer look. She walked slowly around the central pile, looked at some of the microscopic views, read the rest of the explanations. Leave aside the laughs, the junk statues—this was supposed to be the best example of Distorts around. In a way, that should discourage poor Jirlib as much as anything. Even if these had once been living things, there was certainly no evidence of intelligence. If the Distorts were what Jirlib really wanted, their creations should have been awesome. So where were their machines, their cities?

Sigh. Viki quietly moved away from Gokna and Jirlib. She was in plain sight behind them, but they were so caught by the translucent distort that neither seemed to notice her. Maybe she could sneak into the next hall, the videomancy thing. Then she saw Brent.He was not distracted by the exhibit. Her brother had hunkered down behind a table in one of the darkest corners of the room—and right next to the exit she was heading for. She might not have noticed him except that his eye surfaces gleamed in the extreme-colorlamps. From where he sat, Brent could lurk on both entrances and still see everything they were doing at the central tables.

Viki gave him a wave that was also a grin and drifted toward the exit. Brent didn't move or call her back. Maybe he was in an ambush mood, or just daydreaming about his buildertoys. As long as she stayed in sight, maybe he wouldn't squawk. She moved through the high-arched exit, into the videomancy hall.

The exhibit began with paintings and mosaics, generations old. The idea behind videomancy went back long before modern times, to the superstition that if you could only picture your enemies perfectly, you would have power over them. The notion had inspired a lot of art, the invention of new dyes and mixing formulas. Even now, the best pictures were only a shadow of what the Spider eye could see. Modern videomancy claimed that science could produce the perfect picture, and the ancient dreams would be realized. Daddy thought the whole thing was hilarious.

Viki walked between tall racks of glowing video tubes. A hundred still landscapes, fuzzy and blurred...but the most advanced tubes showed colors you never saw except in extreme lamps and sunlight. Every year, the video tubes got better. People were talking about picture radio even. That idea fascinated Little Victory—forget the mind-control quackery.

From somewhere beyond the far end of the hall there were voices, frolicsome jabber that sounded like Rhapsa and Little Hrunk. Viki froze in startlement. A few seconds passed...and two babies came bounding through the far entrance. Viki remembered Jirlib's sarcastic prediction that Rhapsa and Hrunk would show up, too. For an instant she thought he'd been right. But no, two strangers followed them into the hall, and the children were younger than her little sister and brother.

Viki squeaked something excited and raced down the hall toward the children. The adults—the parents?—froze for an instant, then swept up their children and turned in retreat.

"Wait! Wait, please! I just want to talk." Viki forced her legs down to a casual walking gait and lifted her hands in a friendly smile. Behind her, Viki could see that Gokna and Jirlib had left the Distort display, and were staring after her with expressions of stark surprise.

The parents stopped, came slowly back. Both Gokna and Viki were clearly out-of-phase. That seemed to encourage the strangers more than anything.