The Rosetta Codex (12 page)

He walked along the canal in the damp heat of early afternoon, waiting for a cooling breeze to wash up from the water. As usual, it didn't come. Market stalls lined both sides of the road, which was blocked off to vehicle traffic, but now, at the hottest time of the day, customers were few, and many of the vendors napped in the shade of their stalls or sipped at iced drinks, tiny solar fans directed at their faces. The sweet aroma of local spices and fermented brews hung in the air, laced with the occasional scent of harsh, inferior starweed smoke—most of the premium grade starweed was exported offworld. Cale wondered if
he
would ever go offworld. Everything seemed both possible and impossible to him right now; he could imagine himself aimlessly
wandering the city streets for months, even leaving Morningstar and eventually ending up back at the Divide. Then . . . ? He might just cross back over and lose himself again. Despair welled up in him at the thought, at the recognition that it was even possible.

Karimah fell in beside him, on the side of his good eye, and matched his languid pace. They were a long way from the Resurrectionists' encampment, but this was where Karimah had told him to wait for her. She nodded toward a fishmonger's stall as they walked past. “Don't ever buy from him,” she said. “That sign
always
says ‘River Fish,' but he nets those stinkin' things from the canals.” Then, glancing at Cale, she said, “You've been asking about us for some time now.”

He nodded, mouth drying and pulse quickening. He knew that they had saved him from drowning, that they had saved his eyes and his life, but he had no idea what to expect from them or her.

“I'd guess we both have a lot of questions,” she said to Cale. “Let's get something cold to drink.”

 

They sat alone on the second-floor balcony of a café overlooking the road, shaded by a roof of cross-hatched strips of bark, and drank iced coffee sweetened with heavy cream. Below them a one-legged woman in filthy rags crouched against the wall, calling out to passersby, begging for coins and chits; the cloying smell of unwashed flesh and infection was intensified by the heat, and wafted up to the balcony.

Across the canal and a half-hour walk to the south rose the lofty towers of The Island, tall and elegant edifices he had yet to see up close, as inaccessible to him today as they
had been all those years ago when the
Kestrel
had emerged from the clouds out of control and plummeted to earth on the other side of the Divide—he still had a vivid memory of the gleaming Morningstar towers receding from them as Sidonie had struggled to keep them aloft.

“How's the eye?” Karimah asked.

“Bandage comes off in a couple of days, it'll be fine.”

“Why are you looking for us?” She sat back in her chair, her gaze steady on him.

“I thought I might want to join you,” he said.

“Join us.” And made a quiet sound that might have been a laugh. She produced a strip of pale green cigarettes, popped one off, and lit it without offering one to Cale. “What do you know about us?”

“Not a lot. Speculation and rumor.” When she didn't respond, Cale went on. “I've heard that Morningstar was built on the ruins of an ancient alien city, and that you've been digging underneath Morningstar for years, trying to find alien artifacts. No one knows what you've found, and most people don't really seem to care. Word is all you've found, if you've found anything, are the ruins of an earlier human settlement.”

“And what do
you
think?”

Cale hesitated, afraid to go on. The cigarette smoke made him queasy—or something did. He felt he was at a crucial juncture, that it was his last chance to back away and resume his own, normal way of life. Yet what was that? He
had
no normal way of life. No place to go. His pulse rate elevated, and he felt a strange pressure behind his eyes.

“I think you
have
found the remnants of an alien civilization,” he finally said.

“What makes you think that?”

“Because I think I've seen alien artifacts myself.”

Karimah slowly sat up, regarding him intently. “Where?”

“On the other side of the Divide.”

A brief, intense silence followed. When Karimah spoke, her voice was quiet and steady. “Tell me what you saw.”

Cale had gone too far now to hold back. He told Karimah about the deserted village he'd stumbled across, about the main building and the disturbing painting above the doorway, and finally about the strange glyphs on the wall behind the altar. He did not mention Sproul, nor the blue gemstones, nor the book now buried with Sproul's body. It seemed important to hold that secret, like the secret of his last name.

Karimah stubbed out her cigarette, took a pen from her shirt pocket, rummaged in other pockets until she found a blank scrap of paper, then handed both to Cale. “Draw what you saw on the wall,” she said. “I know it won't be the same thing, but show me what the characters looked like.”

Cale closed his eye for a moment, envisioning first the building interior, light slashing in through holes in the roof, the floor as he walked toward the altar, then finally, as he climbed the steps, the etched figures in the wall. Like patterned blades of grass, he remembered thinking. Then they were in his mind, solid and distinct, just as he had seen them that day. Once again, even over all that distance and time, he felt the power in the glyphs.

Shaken, he opened his eye and scratched out a few random groupings of the marks, deliberately
not
re-creating exactly what he remembered. He pushed the pen and paper back across the table and looked at Karimah, who was staring at Cale's drawing.

She nodded slowly, then with deliberate movements pocketed the paper and pen. “We've heard rumors of that place, just as you describe it. Over the years a few of us have gone across the Divide to try to find it. Always failed.” She eyed Cale. “Would you be willing to guide one of us there?”

Cale shook his head. “I'm never going back across the Divide.”

Karimah shrugged as if it was of no consequence. “Maybe you'll change your mind someday.”

“So what is it?”

She finished her iced coffee and stared at him. “Come with me.”

 

Two hours later they stood before a skin parlor in one of the busiest and most congested districts of Morningstar. The skin parlor was wedged between a bar and a stunner arcade, the trio of businesses in turn flanked by a music store and a shock shop. Above ground level, the concrete building rose another four stories with what appeared to be apartments.

Several blocks away, across the ring of canals that served as a kind of moat, rose the gleaming edifices of The Island. Up close, the buildings appeared to rise into and above the clouds.

“You seem confused,” Karimah said.

Cale nodded, blinking at the glare of sunlight reflecting off the polished metal and glass, then turned back to the skin parlor. The door opened and a fleshy woman emerged, hardly able to walk. Her cheeks twitched spastically, and her lips trembled as if she were silently mumbling some prayer or
other incantation. Long thin scars striped both of her arms. She eyed Cale, gave him a ghastly smile, then winked at him before turning and staggering down the street.

Cale turned to Karimah. “We're nowhere near where we've been staying, where you pulled me out of the canal.”

“That's where we live,” Karimah said. “We keep to ourselves, for lots of reasons. But the ruins are
here.
Beneath us. Morningstar was built right on top of them.” She shrugged. “
This
is where we dig.”

She led the way into the skin parlor, and Cale followed.

 

They began their descent from the third floor, in a wide central stairwell secured from the skin parlor and the building's other establishments by two doors and three key codes. The stairwell was bare and cool and quiet, the echoes of their footsteps strangely hushed and distant; the air smelled of damp clean earth. Three floors down they emerged into a vast concrete-walled chamber with a large freight lift, several loaders propped against the walls, and dozens of crates stacked or scattered about, some empty and some filled with chunks of stone or bits of metal or strips of ragged and rotted wood. An older woman squatted before a pile of rock and dirt that had been dumped from one of the crates, poking through it with long thin tweezers; she looked up and nodded at Cale and Karimah, then returned to her task without a word.

Karimah led the way to a narrow stairwell in one corner and they climbed down to the next level, which was unoccupied. Here the lights were dim and tinged blue, and the cooler air smelled of oil and rusted metal and a hint of
scorched rubber. Cages marked the two shafts that led to the lower levels, and Karimah pointed out the emergency shaft across the room, the top of a metal ladder visible in its outlet. She opened one of the cages and they stepped inside, then she closed the interior gate, pressed a button, and they resumed their descent with a clunking jolt.

The cage elevator shuddered as it dropped, like some ancient mechanism kept functioning with makeshift parts and constant repairs. The shaft walls were shored with metal and wood scarred by the repeated passage of the cage, lit with moving patterns by the elevator's overhead lamp.

They hadn't descended more than thirty feet when the cage stopped before a wide opening in the dirt and rock; the gate opened and Karimah led the way into a long passage lit by strings of gold and silver angel lights. The air was warmer and drier than he expected, and a hot breeze moved past them carrying with it the smell of cinnamon.

The passage angled off to the right and pale light washed over them. They stepped into an antechamber carved out of the earth, the ceiling close to twenty feet above ground level. On the other side of the antechamber was a glass wall and a doorway twelve feet high and three or feet wide leading into a room with more glass walls. Cale and Karimah crossed the antechamber and entered.

Glass walls surrounded them, and a ceiling of paneled glass curved overhead. Floor lamps illuminated the large room, the soft white light penetrating the glass and revealing a sky of rock and earth only inches beyond the glass. Not a single pane of glass was cracked or otherwise marked.

Without a word Karimah led Cale to a spiral staircase
that wound down from the center of the room, and they continued their descent.

On the next level down they walked through a series of empty rooms faintly helical in appearance, as if upon completion the polished stone walls had been slightly twisted by the hand of some great beast. The high ceilings were faceted as though inlaid with enormous dark crystals, and an eerie glow reflected in bluish hues from the facets, the glow punctuated by tiny pockets of darkness. Their boots trod upon large tiles etched with diagrams of circles and arrowed lines linking one tile to another.

As they exited the last room, they emerged from the building and stood on a bridge of wooden planks laid across a deep fissure. Broken walls of stone and a large network of scaffolding were visible in the crevice below. The bridge led to an opening in another partially excavated building, its upper reaches disappearing into the earth above.

Cale followed her across the planks. He craned his neck and gazed up as he walked through the doorway, which was twelve or thirteen feet high like all the other doorways they'd passed through.

They entered a vast gallery lit by angel lamps, the golden lights mounted in the corners of the high ceiling, illuminating complex spirals carved into dozens of stone wall panels, lighting shiny maroon disks affixed to the floor.

“All this,” Karimah said as they moved through the gallery, “and hardly anyone cares. An entire civilization—a civilization of intelligent aliens—extinct for reasons we'll probably never know. But there's so much they left behind, here and on other worlds, and most of it's like this, buried
beneath our own cities, neglected, forgotten, dismissed.” She shook her head in disgust. “Nobody gives a shit.” She stopped and turned to him. “That's why we're here, to unearth as much as we can, save as much as we can, learn as much as we can. It probably sounds crazy, but some of us feel we owe it to them.”

Cale shook his head. “It doesn't sound crazy.”

Karimah snorted. “Then you're just as crazy as we are.” She tilted her head and gazed up at the ceiling, which was painted a deep indigo so dark that gauging its height was impossible. “This is just the beginning.”

 

He spent the next several hours in a state of overstimulation, at times hardly aware of himself. The Resurrectionists had strung all the rooms and chambers and passages with angel lamps, clusters of luminous gossamer that cast a clean warm light and diminished the shadows so that the details within were clear and visible if often incomprehensible. As they encountered people along the way, Karimah introduced Cale to them, and them to him, but their names slipped from his memory as soon as they moved on.

. . . Doorways and ceilings all so much higher than expected, and Cale became certain that the aliens must have been at least two or three feet taller than human beings . . .