Across a Billion Years (19 page)

Dr. Horkkk slowly waved the inscription node from side to side, trying to catch the robot’s attention. That took courage. The robot might be easily annoyed. After a few minutes Dr. Horkkk began to copy the hieroglyphics from the inscription node onto his blackboard, keeping the blackboard turned so that the robot could see what was happening. The idea was to demonstrate to the robot that we are intelligent creatures, capable at least of copying High Ones writing even if unable to understand it.

“Suppose what he’s copying is obscene?” Mirrik murmured. “Or unfriendly? What if it makes the robot angry?”

Dr. Horkkk went on sketching hieroglyphics.

Gradually the robot started to show interest in him.

It lowered the globe to chest-height. It stared down at the small Thhhian, and the colors of its vision panel darkened; pale greens and yellows gave way to rich maroon, shot through with crimson threads. The equivalent of a frown, maybe? The colors of deep concentration? Dr. Horkkk’s inscription node suddenly went blank, and a new inscription appeared. Calmly Dr. Horkkk erased his blackboard and began to copy the current message. The robot seemed impressed. From somewhere within its cavernous chest there boomed sounds that our suit radios were able to pick up.

“Dihn ahm ruuu dihn korp!”

Who knows what it means? But we assume that it’s in the language of the High Ones.

Dr. Horkkk took another calculated risk. He put down his blackboard, stepped forward three paces, and said in clear tones,
“Dihn ahm ruuu dihn korp!”

It was an excellent imitation. But for all Dr. Horkkk knew, he was accepting a challenge to a duel, casting aspersions on the robot’s ancestry, or agreeing that he deserved to be obliterated on the spot. However, the robot’s reaction was mild. It flashed a stream of violet light along its vision panel, extended its leftmost arm in a kind of beckoning gesture, and said,
“Mirt ahm dihn ruuu korp.”

“Mirt ahm dihn ruuu korp,”
Dr. Horkkk repeated.

“Korp mirt hohm ahm dihn.”

“Korp mirt hohm ahm dihn.”

“Mirt ruuu chlook.”

“Mirt ruuu chlook.”

And so on for several minutes. After a while Dr. Horkkk ventured to mix up the now-familiar words, rearranging them into new patterns to give a pretense at conversation:
“Ruuu mirt dihn ahm”
and
“Korp ruuu chlook korp mirt,”
and so forth. This had the virtue of showing the robot that Dr. Horkkk was something other than some kind of recording machine, but it must have been puzzling to it to be getting these gibberish responses to its statements.

Then the robot turned on the globe. The scene that took form about us was the sequence of the construction of the vault, beginning as usual with the wide-angle view of the galaxy, then the close-up of the immediate stellar neighborhood. The robot pointed to the pattern of projected stars. Then it switched the globe off and pointed first to the very different pattern of stars in the present-day sky of the asteroid, then to the burned-out dwarf star.

That seemed intelligible enough. The robot was telling us that it realized, from the astronomical changes it observed, that a vast span of time must have elapsed since it had been sealed into the vault.

The robot now made some adjustment on the globe, and the scene of the High Ones’ city appeared. For several minutes we watched once more the High Ones moving solemnly and gracefully through their wonderland of cables and dangling structures. The robot cut it off, pointed again to the stars, pointed to Dr. Horkkk, pointed to itself, pointed to Dr. Horkkk.

Abruptly the robot turned and strode into the vault. It did something at one of the instrument panels in the rear; then it beckoned unmistakably to us. We hesitated. The robot beckoned again.

“Possibly it turned off the lightning field,” Pilazinool said.

“And possibly it didn’t,” said Dr. Horkkk. “This may be a trick designed to make us go to our deaths.”

“If the robot wanted to kill us,” I pointed out, “it wouldn’t need to trick us. It’s got weapon attachments in its arms.”

“Certainly,” said Pilazinool. “Tom’s right!”

Still, none of us went into the vault. The robot made its beckoning gesture a third time.

Dr. Horkkk found another pebble and pitched it across the threshold of the vault. No blast of lightning. That was reassuring.

“Shall we risk it?” Pilazinool asked.

He started forward.

“Wait,” I heard myself saying, as another fit of heroism rushed through my brain. “I’m less important than the rest of you. Let me go, and if I make it—”

Telling myself that at the worst it would be a quick, clean finish, I leaped up on the fallen door, stepped into the vault, and lived to tell the tale. Pilazinool followed me; then, somewhat more cautiously, Dr. Horkkk. Mirrik remained outside at Pilazinool’s suggestion; in case this did turn out to be a trap, we needed a survivor to explain what had happened to the others.

Instinctively we stayed close to the entrance of the vault and made no sudden moves that might alarm our huge host. We still didn’t know if the robot’s intentions were friendly. Much as we wanted a close look at those complex, cluttered instrument panels on the rear walls of the vault, we didn’t dare approach them, for that would have required us to get between the robot and its instruments. The robot might not have liked that.

It turned to the instruments itself and touched one of the controls. Instantly images burst forth: the same sort of screenless projection that came from our globe.

We watched a kind of travelog of the High Ones’ supercivilization. The scenes were different from those out of the globe, but similar in feeling, showing us all the magnificence and splendor of these people. We saw shots of High Ones cities that completely eclipsed the earlier one—cities that seemed to occupy whole planets, with patterns of aerial cables shifting and crossing and interlocking and apparently slipping in and out of dimensions. We saw grandees of the High Ones moving in stately procession through lofty, glittering halls, each being surrounded by dozens of robot servants of all sizes, shapes, and functions, catering to the smallest whim. We looked through tunnels in which vast machines of unfathomable purpose throbbed and revolved. We watched starships in flight, saw High Ones explorers landing on scores of worlds, stepping forth confidently equipped for every sort of environmental condition from dismal airlessness to lush tropical greenery. We received a dazzling view of this most incredible of civilizations, this true master race of the universe’s dawn. The globe had shown us only a fraction of it. Brilliant, vivid scenes poured from the vault wall for more than half an hour.

Temples and libraries, museums, computer halls, auditoriums—who knew the purposes to which those colossal structures had been put? When the High Ones gathered to watch a gyrating point of light, as we saw them do, what kind of beauty did they comprehend? How much information was stored in those glistening data banks, and information of what kind? The starships that moved so effortlessly, seemingly without expenditure of fuel—the elegance of the housefurnishings—the incomprehensible rituals—the dignity of the people as they went serenely through their day’s activities—all of this conveyed to us a sense of a race so far beyond the attainments of our era that our pride in our own petty accomplishments seemed to be the silly posturing of monkeys.

And yet … they are gone from the universe, these great beings, and we remain. And, little creatures that we are, we still have managed to find our way through the stars to this place and to set free the guardian of this ancient vault. Surely that is no small achievement for a species only a million years or so away from apehood. Surely the High Ones, whose time of greatness had lasted a century to each of our minutes, would agree that we have done well for ourselves thus far.

And there was irony in watching this humbling display of glittering greatness, and in knowing that the makers of that greatness had vanished into extinction hundreds of millions of years ago.

“
Ozymandias
,” said Mirrik gently, looking at the images from outside the cave.

Exactly so. Ozymandias. Shelley’s poem. The “traveler from an antique land” who finds “two vast and trunkless legs of stone” in the desert, and beside them, half sunk in sand, the shattered head of a statue, still wearing its “sneer of cold command”—

And on the pedestal these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Precisely so. Ozymandias. How could we tell this robot that its fantastic creators no longer existed? That a billion years of rock covered the ruins of their outposts on dozens of planets? That we had come seeking a mystery locked in a past so distant we could barely comprehend its remoteness? While this robot waited here, the patient, timeless servant, ready to show its movies and impress the casual wayfarer with the might of its masters … never dreaming that it alone was left to tell the tale and that all its pride in that great civilization was a waste.

The projections ended. We blinked as our eyes adjusted to the sudden dimming of that brightness in the vault. The robot began to speak again, slowly, enunciating clearly, using the same sort of tone we would use in speaking to a foreigner or someone who is slightly deaf or a little dull in the skull.
“Dihn ruuu … mirt korp ahm
…
mirt chlook
…
ruuu ahm … hohm mirt korp zort …”
As before, Dr. Horkkk patched together some sentences in reply, with random combinations of dihns and ruuus and ahms. The robot listened to this in what struck me as an interested and approving way. Then it pointed several times to the inscription node Dr. Horkkk was carrying and spoke in an apparently urgent manner. Of course there was no hope of real communication. But at least the robot seems to think we’re worth trying to reach. Coming from a machine of the High Ones, that’s a compliment.

January 4

Dr. Horkkk has spent most of the last two days running tapes of his “conversation” with the robot through his linguistic computer, trying to wring some meaning out. Zero results. The robot spoke only about two dozen different words, arranging them in various ways, and that’s not enough to allow the finding of a meaningful pattern.

The rest of us have constantly been going back and forth between the ship and the vault, taking full advantage of the robot’s hospitality. By now it’s quite clear that the robot isn’t hostile. The death of 408b was a tragic mistake; the vault evidently was designed not to admit anything without the robot’s permission, and if 408b hadn’t impulsively rushed in the moment the door came loose, it wouldn’t have been killed. Once we established that we were friendly organisms, the robot turned the lightning field off, and we now are welcome to enter the vault as often as we please.

We are getting bolder. The first day we stood around edgily as if expecting the robot to change its mind and zap us any minute, but now we’ve made ourselves at home to the extent of making a full tridim record of the machinery and taking plenty of shots of the robot itself. What we don’t dare do is
touch
any of the machinery, since the robot is plainly the custodian of the vault and might very well destroy anyone who even seemed to threaten its contents. Besides, with 408b gone we have only the flimsiest notions of what that machinery is all about.

The robot has run its travelog several more times for us, and we’ve filmed it in its entirety. This is catching your archaeology on the hoof, all right: instead of digging up broken bits and rusty scraps of the High Ones’ civilization, we have glossy tridims of the actual cities and people. Looking at them gives us an uncanny sensation. It’s something like having a time machine. We’ve learned more than we ever dreamed was possible about the High Ones, thanks to the globe and what the robot has showed us. We know more about these people of a billion years ago, suddenly, than archaeologists have ever managed to find out about the Egyptians or Sumerians or Etruscans of the very recent past.

The robot goes through the same curious pantomime routine whenever we visit it. It points to us, points to itself, points to the stars. Over and over. Pilazinool argues that the robot is telling us that it would like to lead us somewhere—to some other vault, maybe, or even to a planet once inhabited by the High Ones. Dr. Horkkk, as usual, disagrees. “The robot is merely discussing origins,” Dr. Horkkk says. “It is indicating that both itself and ourselves come from worlds outside the solar system of GGC 1145591. Nothing more than that.”

I like to think Pilazinool is right. But I don’t know, and I doubt that we’ll ever know.

Communicating by pantomime isn’t terribly satisfying.

Three hours have gone by since the foregoing, and everything has turned upside down again. Now the robot is talking to us. In Anglic.

Steen Steen and I were sent across to the vault to get some stereo shots of one instrument panel, because we had botched the calibration on the first try. We found the robot busy in one corner with its back to us. Since it was taking no notice of us, we. quietly went about our business.

Five minutes later the robot turned and came clanking over. It extended one arm and aimed an intricate little gadget at us. I thought it was a gun and I was too scared to move.

The robot said, slowly, with great effort:

“Speak … words … to … this.”

I did a quick spectrum trip of astonishment. So did Steen, whose mantle fluttered within his/her breathing-suit.

“It
was
speaking Anglic?” I said to Steen.

“It was. Yes.”

The robot said again, more smoothly, “Speak words to this.”

I took a close look at the gadget in its hand. It wasn’t a gun. It consisted of an inscription node with a tesseract-shaped puzzle-box mounted at one end. Within the struts of the puzzle-box glowed a deep crimson radiance.

“Words of you,” the robot said. “More. To this.”