Empyrion I: The Search for Fierra (29 page)

Jamrog's lips twitched in a thin, ruthless smile. “It seems to me he has shown less than a healthy interest in Threl unity of late. I think Tvrdy's kraam could bear additional watching.”

“An excellent idea. I will see to it.”

“Use Invisibles—this is no reflection on your security forces, but the fewer people who know about this the better. Agreed? I will see that Sirin sends his authorization at once.”

Hladik nodded, pulling his chin thoughtfully. “If Tvrdy and his little enclave are up to something, we'll soon know it.”

As Treet stood peering
into the gathering gloom, wondering how and where to start searching for his lost guide, he saw what appeared to be a faint glimmer of light reflecting off the metallic surface of a large cylindrical object which rose up from behind the foremost rank of a series of stacked ventilator louver frames. He stared at the glow and it did not go away. So, tapping for the ledge's edge, he made his way toward the place, waving his hands in front of him like a blind man.

Ducking around a pile of motor housings, Treet lost sight of the light momentarily and spent a panicky few seconds trying to gain his bearings. When he found it again, the dull, yellow radiance was much closer than he had expected. He crept carefully around a pile of filthy hydroponic seeder tubes and stepped into a little circle of light cast by a yellow globe lamp on a stand. Beneath the lamp was what appeared to be an open, oval manhole in the floor.

Treet knelt down and hollered into the manhole. “Calin! Are you down there? Calin?”

He waited, received no answer, and cautiously placed his hand into the void while his mind constructed grisly pictures of Calin's broken body lying crumpled at the bottom far below. Dangling his arm just inside the hole, Treet found what he was looking for: the rungs of a metal ladder attached to the side of the hole just beneath the rim. He eased himself down into the hole, placing his feet gingerly on the unseen rungs.

If she had fallen in, wouldn't he have heard a scream or something? And who had turned on the globe? Maybe she hadn't fallen, he thought as he went down slowly, placing his feet securely on one rung after another. Perhaps she had climbed down—as he was doing—in order to check out what was hidden below. Then again, perhaps she was nowhere near the manhole in the first place.

He touched the floor and looked up to see the bright oval above him—a good five meters. He squatted on his haunches and touched the floor: dry, but not dusty. As far as he could tell, it was perfectly clean. There was no body huddled beneath the rungs, so he straightened and stretched out his arms. Fingertips brushing the walls on either side, he began to walk. The passage led down a fairly steady incline, and the walls were seamed at intervals, which made Treet think of pipe rather than a corridor. Perhaps this tube was part of a disused drainage system. If so, there was no real point in continuing the search—there was no telling where the pipeline led.

Just as Treet had made up his mind to turn around and go back, he came to a junction box. Two other large pipes converged to join into one enormous conduit, which showed a light a little further along. Treet entered the conduit and felt his way toward the light.

In a moment he stood blinking in the entrance to a large underground gallery lit with vapor tubes in long parallel lines above row upon row of metal shelving stacked with lightprint disks and holoreader cartridges. Amidst an untidy mound of disks sat Calin, her nose in a blue plastic-bound notebook.

“Comfortable?” Treet stepped into the room, gazing along the shelves and at the dark-haired magician engrossed with the book in her lap.

Calin smiled and looked up. “I have found a find,” she said proudly, holding out the notebook to him.

Treet stooped to retrieve the book and closed its brittle cover to read the label:
Interpretive Chronicles—1270 to 1485.

“Indeed you have, dear sorceress,” said Treet softly. “You've found the granddaddy find.”

“Banzai jackpot!” she shouted, beaming.

“Quadruple banzai jackpot!” He raised his eyes to look at the long rows of neatly arranged materials. It was all here—everything he needed, at his fingertips. “Do you have any idea what this means? It means that you have saved us both a carking fat lot of work, among other things.”

He held the notebook in his hands and flipped it open at random. The pages were acid-free printout paper—thank the gods of small favors for that—written in a crisp hand, clear and readable in black ink. The margins were wide all around, allowing for the notes which had been added and initialed at a later date and in a different hand.

The dates caught Treet's attention. They were all wrong— unless, of course, the colony had simply begun its own reckoning. Even then, could they be right? He turned back to the title on the cover. 1485? Nearly fifteen hundred years?

He was convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt that the time displacement or compression or whatever involved probably several hundred years at least. But a millennium and a half? Judging from the amount of material gathered on the long ranks of gray metal shelves, fifteen hundred years was just the beginning.

“Where did you get this notebook?” he asked, handing it back.

Calin pointed to a nearby shelf where a row of orange, blue, and green notebooks stood in an orderly row. “There are many more of these,” she said.

“So I see.” Treet stepped up to the shelf and scanned the dates on the spines of the notebooks. He called them out. “Foundation to 98, 110 to 543, 586 to 833, 860 to 1157 …” He ran his fingers along the row of notebooks as he moved to the end. “Incredible!” he cried as he came to the end. “It goes all the way to 2273!”

His head snapped around. “Calin, what year is this?” Why had he never asked her before?

The magician's face scrunched in thought. “It is the year 1481, I think. So say the priests.”

That's why I never asked her before—they're dating from something other than the foundation of the colony. Think! There must be a key here somewhere. He scanned the orderly row of books. “If I go back 1,481 years—” He ran his finger along the spines of the notebooks, stopped, and frowned. “No, that's no good. I don't know how much time has elapsed since these books were placed here.” His frown deepened.

At least he knew that the colony was 2,273 years old, and probably a whole lot older. The key to this mystery lay somewhere in these books, but finding it would take time.

Resisting the impulse to pull them all out at once, Treet went back to the beginning and gently tugged out the first notebook. The paper fluttered in his shaking hands as he read the first page. It was a personal note from the author, framed in the same steady, precise handwriting:

TO ALL WHO COME AFTER:

These books are the work of one man's life. Treat them with respect. This record of Empyrion has been assembled from many diverse sources, some of which were not completely reliable. It will be hard for anyone of a more enlightened age to understand the repression under which I have labored.

Where there are errors, know that they could not be avoided. I leave them for you to correct. But know, too, that what you hold in your hands is the truth—as far as can be told. I have told everything in the books.

Feodr Rumon

After Arrival 2273

Treet reread the short note and felt the uncanny sensation that the words had been written to him personally. He wondered how many others had read them. At least one other, judging from the margin notes he'd seen.

This was a find, all right. The one and only genuine original find of a lifetime. Trouble was, he was the only person in the whole wide universe who knew its significance. Not that certain others wouldn't be interested—Rohee for one, Chairman Neviss for another.

The Chairman's name triggered a chain reaction in his mind. Of course! It all fit. What a pinhead I've been, he thought. I should have guessed what was going on long ago. Of course Neviss knew what had happened—or had a Harvard-educated hunch—knew that the time distortion factor had royally screwed up the works. What was it that Neviss had said in their too-brief interview? Treet closed his eyes and remembered the words exactly: “The proposition I have in mind has to do with this colony. I want your help in solving a problem there.”

So
this
was the "problem" Neviss had alluded to but never explained: a trifling matter of a few thousand lost years to be accounted for. Nothing to it. Send up a starving historian who'd sell his eldest daughter (if he had one) to the United Arab Emirates for a chance at the most significant historical discovery of the last several centuries and you could rest easy. Orion Tiberias Treet—bless his simple, hoodwinked heart—was on the job. He'd die kicking and screaming bloody murder before he'd let anyone deflect him from the trail once he got the scent.

And it had worked. Treet cursed the scheming Chairman and his smarmy assistant Varro and all of Cynetics' vast holdings and chattels. Yet, he admired the beauty of it. Despite himself, his historian's soul luxuriated in the golden glow of discovery. Although he had a good mind to call down the fates of economic failure upon Neviss and company, he also felt gratitude for being chosen to make the trip.

“That devious old scoundrel,” murmured Treet, closing the notebook and placing it carefully back on the shelf, “trapped me with honey. He knew all along I wouldn't be able to help myself.”

He turned to see Calin watching him closely. “Something is wrong?” she asked.

He grabbed her, gave her a big, sloppy kiss on the side of the mouth, and roared, “Nothing is right, my fine magician, but nothing is wrong.” He released her and whirled back to the shelves. “Now then, let's see what other goodies are here, shall we?”

He scanned the ordered ranks of disks and cartridges, each and every one containing some piece to the Empyrion puzzle. Where to start, he wondered. At the beginning, like a good schoolboy? Or work back from the end, which might be quicker in some respects? Treet sighed. Why rush? He had nothing but time on his hands.

Starwatch
level was nearly deserted as Hladik and his guide moved along the upper terraces and rimwalks. “Stay here and wait for me,” he told the guide as he entered the physicians' cluster and walked among the beds there. Most were empty, but he wasted no time searching the others—he knew where to find the one he was looking for.

In a separate chamber two third-order physicians bent over the inert body in the suspension bed. As Hladik appeared, both straightened. “Good evening, Hage Leader,” they said in unison, bowing at the waist. The physician nearest him added, “We were just about to—”

“Leave us. I wish to see the patient alone.”

“Of course, Hage Leader.” The physician took his instrument in his hands and nodded to his colleague; both backed from Director Hladik's presence.

Hladik approached the bed and peered down at the sleeping man. Although the slack features were pasty and deep blue circles swelled beneath the eyes, on the whole the patient's color had improved since the last time he'd seen him. Good, he was out of danger. “Kolari,” Hladik whispered, using the postconditioning trigger name, “this is your Director. Do you hear me? Wake up.”

The eyelids fluttered and opened, revealing dull, listless eyes beneath. “I am glad to see you are feeling better.” He paused and glanced around. “Do you remember your theta key?”

The head bobbed once, then again. Excellent! The conditioning has succeeded, thought Hladik. “Good. I want to hear it. Repeat the theta key now.”

Crocker spoke, his voice hollow, wasted. “The Fieri are our enemies. If they try to contact me, I go with them. I remain alert so that I may return and tell you where they hide. If anyone interferes …”

“Yes?”

“I kill them.”

“Very good. Rest now. Close your eyes and sleep. You will forget that I was here. But you will remember your theta key.”

Asquith Pizzle blinked his
eyes and rolled out of bed. For the third night in a row he had been awakened by a feeling of suffocation. It started as a pressure in his chest which grew so great that his heart thumped wildly against his rib cage until his breathing stopped. In his sleep-sodden consciousness, it felt as though some dark malevolent being straddled him, pressing giant splayed thumbs against his windpipe, tighter and tighter, choking him until he awoke, panting and out of breath.

The feeling of immense oppression dwindled as Pizzle pulled on his yos, leaving only a quivery sensation through his midsection. Dressed, he sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the ceiling of the bare room, wondering for the nine billionth time in the last three days why he was here.

The man—Tvrdy, was his name—had helped him. He was sure of that. He could trust Tvrdy, even if he could not trust his own memory. And this was the mystery: where had he come from, why was he here, and where were the others who had come with him?

Each day he remembered more—as if the thick sheet of glacial ice which had frozen his memory melted a little more, uncovering a few more precious acres of once-hidden terrain.

He now remembered, imperfectly, faces of others whom he felt certain had come to this place with him. He remembered, too, that he had not always been in this room of Tvrdy's. He had been with someone else, had done something before coming here. But it was all fuzzy in his mind; he could have imagined it. Certainly most of what he remembered had an ethereal, dreamlike quality.