Waking Olympus (The Singers of the Dark Book 1) (21 page)

Master Garun, the Head Librarian, was a thin gray haired main in his fifties, he looked unimpressed. “You cannot see all of the Records, there are simply too many of them. You have to refine your topic. Decide what you really want to know about. Do you want me to give you some examples?”

He seemed to take their indecision as a ‘yes’. “You could ask for: a summary of the history of Earth pre-interstellar travel, post interstellar travel, the discoveries on Term and Fortress, the first expedition to Neti, the discoveries of Helen Amaris on Neti, starship design in theory and practice, …”

Mikel knew that name. “Amaris. Helen Amaris. There was a legend told on the Plains about Amaris who talked to Zeus.”

“Yes. Helen Amaris was the first human to talk to the entity we now call Zeus. The entity resides in the structure called the Citadel of Zeus.”

Tei was curious. “Master Garun, I have seen the Citadel with my own eyes. It is beyond imagining. What is it?”

“We do not have detailed information beyond some of Helen Amaris’ field notes. We do not know what it is, who built it, or why it was built. We do know that it was not built by humans. It was here when we came to Neti from Earth. The records speak of a pact with Zeus, widely known, but no copy of the pact survives. So much was lost when the Great Battle was fought and later when the Cities fell.”

Mikel needed to clear something up. “The Great Battle destroyed civilization on Neti. Do you have any details on the Battle?”

“I too wish we had more on this. It appears people were too busy trying to survive to write a history. Or no history survived. There are some clues. It appears that the Battle occurred between 500 and 700 years ago. We were not the target, we were ‘innocent bystanders’, as the Records say. Somehow the battle also destroyed civilization on other human worlds but there is no explanation as to how such a thing could occur. The survivors expected help to arrive but no ships ever came. Except the
Raymond Tans,
of course.” He said.

“Master Garun, I cannot stay since I have urgent official business. You will give Wizard Mikel here full access to the Library.”

Garun’s eyes opened wide, almost glaring.

“Is there a problem?” Tei said.

“No, Councillor. It is up to the Council who gets privileged access. Come Master Mikel, let me introduce you to our catalog.”

Mikel found the catalog eerily similar to the library catalog in Lind. He was starting to see that so much of the similarity between the cultures that he knew was due to their common heritage, more and more he saw the similarities rather than the differences between all of the cultures he had experienced. Even the language differences were not that great. Certainly they all shared the same alphabet and numbering system. A highly sophisticated number and mathematical system that itself indicated an advanced origin. The Tanten Library had several sections marked off according to the level of privilege. But when Garun took him to the second floor he knew it was different. This floor was an area to itself and access was by a heavy, reinforced iron door that was locked. Garun opened the door for him. Inside he was introduced to Maria the librarian for this floor, then the door was locked behind him.

"Hello, I am Maria ya Irenni, the Curator of Library Antiquities."

Maria was a woman in her thirties but she did not dress in the usual manner of the Librarian and other officials, or even other Traders. She seemed casual but the clothes were odd.
 

Maria noticed him looking at her clothes. “Not what you are used to?” She smiled.

“I like to get into character. Try to understand the Ancients. This is typical clothing that they would have worn from what I have read. Though there are strange references that make it sound like their clothes were also machines. However, these clothes I am wearing were simpler but I still found them hard to reproduce, this is an approximation. I am wearing a ’white t-shirt’ and ‘jeans’. The inscription on the shirt is a mathematical equation. We do not understand why the creator of this apparel thought it worthy of showing to the world.”

Mikel laughed.

“They are Maxwell’s Equations of Electromagnetism, and the words underneath, ‘Let there be light’,” he said.

“Hmm. You not only understand it, you appreciate it. Interesting. Who was Maxwell?”

“No idea. At the Center we study many ideas which have names attributed to them but we do not know who most of the people were.”

“What about this one?” She reached over to a table where it appeared she had been inking in text on another ’t-shirt’. It also was a mathematical equation, he recognized it but didn’t understand it. He had intended on studying this as one of his tasks when he became a full Wizard.

“Harrun’s Standard Model of Superspace. But I couldn’t explain it like I could Maxwell’s, I’ve done some basic M-Theory but nothing above that yet.”

Maria looked at him oddly as if he had temporarily gone insane.

“Maria, what exactly is here?” He waved his hand to indicate everything.

“These are original records of the Ancients, we make copies of course but these are the originals. We also have some devices. Some still working, though just barely. Some of the diagrams and images here we cannot duplicate, we can only produce poor copies. The printing presses are always running to produce enough copies of selected texts to duplicate most of this library in other Trader cities. We cannot risk losing so much again.”

He wanted to see some of the devices. So she brought him to a special room. A faded blue box about the size of his two fists together sat on a table in front of him. The room was quite dark.

“Now listen.” Maria leaned past him and touched a small white rectangle on the top of the cube.

After a few seconds a soft woman’s voice came out of the thing.

AvrOS 7.9 Started. Insufficient power for holographic video. Input/Output devices not found, using inbuilt audio only. Internal battery minimal. Errors in hardware checks. Grid not available. Network not available. No direct neural link found. What do you want to do?

The words were strangely lilted, he could understand them individually but they didn’t seem to make sense as sentences.

“Speak towards the box but speak slowly and simply so you don’t confuse it. You can only use it for a few minutes, after that it will need to ‘recharge’ itself. Whatever that means.”

Mikel tried to think of something clever to ask but nothing popped into his head. “What is the
Ray Tans
?”

Raymond Tans, one time director of Special Contracts, was a celebrated investigator and entrepreneur. He is most famous for his recovery of the Ashan Association Starship buried under a frozen sea on the world known as Reshox where the High Noon beacon is situated. The starship Raymond Tans was commissioned in 2355 and was used as a flagship for the support fleet for the colony of Neti.

Mikel was amazed. He had been taking notes but had stopped midway because his mind just needed to consider all of this. He jotted some more things down.

“What was the Great Battle about?”

Sorry, I don’t have any information on that.

He tried to think of something related. “In relation to Neti, what is the Pact?”

The Pact or Neti-Terran Pact is an agreement between the Human Nexus and the planetary intelligence often referred to as Neti, the same as the name of the planet. In human mythology Neti was a Sumerian god who was the gatekeeper of the underworld. The intelligence discovered on Neti has been given the codename Zeus and the site of its massive main access area in western Arva has the codename Olympus. Zeus has agreed to terraform the planet to suit human life. In exchange humans will aid in the defense.

“If civilization on Neti was destroyed would the Pact require Zeus to intervene to assist?”

Power level critical. Shutting down.

If Olympus was built for
defense
, perhaps there were weapons at the Citadel. That seemed crazy and desperate; a perfect fit for their situation, but right now crazy expeditions would not be high priority.

Mikel turned to Maria. “When can I use it again?”

It takes a very long time to
recharge
. It uses the ‘ambient EM waves’ or something, it seems there were once more efficient ways to
recharge
but only this method is available now. It is also very old, and failing. It will probably be usable in about 6 months.

“Oh! That's unfortunate." He felt like kicking himself for not planning his questions.

"All right, can you show me the books now?”

"You asked about Ray Tans, you should have asked me. I have studied him quite a bit. Had a bit of a crush on him at one stage. Not the great remote hero they talk about but a very human person." She giggled.

Much later, his eyes tired from reading by candlelight, he got up to move around. His mind was saturated with things stranger than any fiction. It threatened to flood and reset his skeptical sense so that he would start believing in everything from fairies to the man in the moon.

Maria was still in the Library collecting some of her personal things to take home with her.

“Maria, I've been reading quite a bit but there is something I still don’t understand. I mean, I should understand it because it is part of our history not belonging to the Ancients. Why did the Cities fall?”

Maria put her bag down on her desk, still clinging to the cloth strap, she leaned to one side against the desk. Thinking, her right hand massaging the cloth strap like prayer beads.
 

“Although there are few records of the Great Battle, there are records in later years that talk about the problems that arose. It is hard for us to understand, I have tried and I think I have an inkling. You know that the Ancients used a technology called
neural links
that allowed them to transfer information directly into their minds? They constantly exchanged information. Soon they came to believe not that, ‘knowledge is power,’ but that, ‘information is money’. Being permanently linked they no longer knew how to ponder their inner selves or the outer world, even the old Global Civilization before them had not fallen into that trap. As individuals and as a society they lost their way. Even as they came to know what the problem was, they had embraced the notion that ‘information is money’ and that therefore anyone who chose to disconnect, even briefly, from the net was a freeloader. A burden on society. I gather that it was also considered painful, unbearable to disconnect. After the Great Battle, the network was shattered,
electromagnetic pulse events
had disabled almost all of the neural links. They were all disconnected, they had all become the pariahs they loathed. Worse they did not know how to live this new restricted life. They had only been focused on the link, an internal dialogue that had nothing to do with introspection or self-understanding, and so had no capacity for fully appreciating the world they lived in. When the links failed, they were alone, they succumbed to a depression that was as much psychological as it was sociological. They never recovered; the dysfunctional way of life was passed on to their children who in time started to outgrow it but whose knowledge of the technology that maintained that way of life was diminished. When Bethor assailed the Cities they collapsed like a rotten piece of wood. Not everyone was like that however, enough always had different priorities and adaptability; so some met or communicated and seeing the dire situation decided on founding the Center and Tanten. They had lost family, spouses and friends in the Battle, either in space or in vaporized cities, then they lost more by choosing a different path. It was a time of relentless tragedy, sadness, and loss.”

She looked down, as if absorbing strength from the ghosts buried in the earth. She paused, took a breath, then looked up at him again.

“The legacy of those times haunts us still. You can find it in the legends of the Plains and the casual attitudes here in Tanten. There is a sense of loss, as if we are clinging still to something long gone. Perhaps it is time to let go. You are the harbinger of such a change, a herald, if you like, of a new age. Many won't like that.”

"That won't stop me. If things don't change I fear that all of civilization may fall. You seem different. Have all these books changed you?"

"Obviously, but also I am a stranger to Tanten. My parents were killed in a raid by Lindin forces. I survived and finally found a home here. I always loved books, so this is my heaven." She smiled like an angel in complete peace.

She nodded and picked up her bag.

"Maria, before you go, I would like to see the field notes of Helen Amaris."

Dawn, a faint blue light in the east. The cold seeping over from the black desert beneath the stars. A few beacon lights always burned at the top of the Mouth of the Snake, as the gates of Castle were called, but they shed no light on the company immediately below and outside the gate. He was ready to go, he had all of his gear, but he was not ready to leave the Library, maybe he would never be ready to leave it; it was amazing, his body felt as if he had consumed some powerful stimulant just from reading, he was so excited. He had just scratched the surface. None of the information was as stunning as that little blue box but all of it was new and revealing about their world and history. Yet there were so many major blank spots. He felt like a young student just entering college at the Center, brash and confident, and then discovering in that first week how little he really knew.

He was sitting on his horse surrounded by the shadows of several dozen or more Traders. The sound of horses breathing and huffing, a hoof on cobble stones now and then, echoing, the riders silent. Just vague shadows; the smell of horses, leather, and a complex elusive mix of scents that simply said, ‘travel companions’. He fought a temptation to yawn, inevitably losing.

Although he had not seen everyone, he was told the numbers would be between 40 and 50. No more could be spared before the riders from the other towns came in. This was a small advanced force whose central attribute was the speed of its response. A very early response to a problem may not need very much force, timing can often be crucial. This was their role, to render aid before events required that those greater forces would be needed. They were, apparently, fully armed, that meant more armor than he was used to seeing on Traders, but not as much as the Castle Guards who seemed to prefer impressive but heavy looking gear. He was starting to see more than outlines now; gray phantoms. They looked tough but he couldn’t say why he thought that. He prayed to whatever deity there was that he would not be expected to lead these men in any capacity, they’d know in an instant he had no idea about tactics or fighting. He was a Reformed Pantheist, no personal god, but he prayed to the Universe anyway. Well, you never know, they would need all the help they could get.