Spear of Light (53 page)

She contemplated turning on her flashlight but decided that saving it made far more sense. Still, her hand roamed the casing and the on-off switch.

It took a long time.

The elevator stopped gently.

The door slid open, and all three of the soulbots turned toward them. As much as Chrystal drew her, the Colorima fascinated her. She was more beautiful than any human, ethereal, and her eyes were windows to something vaster than all of the Glittering, something ineffable and frightening and comforting all at once. She nodded at Nona and gestured both her and Neil to follow them through a series of doors into a wide vestibule, and then over to a windowed wall.

She realized she was still holding Neil's hand. She let go, her cheeks warm. Neil beat her to the glass, staring inside. “It's medical,” he whispered. “Something medical.” He paused. “Repeatable. A place for something they can do to a lot of people at once.”

“Or soulbots,” Chrystal added.

Rows of beds lined wide aisles, each paired with unrecognizable machinery that hunched over them. Belts and hoses attached to each machine. Others hung from the high ceiling. The low light used the same color frequency that farmers used in the garden bubbles on the Deep, as if whoever designed this was trying to bring sunshine far inside the mountain. A few large boxes in the back had been shrouded with draped material, which had since disintegrated and fallen to the floor, revealing a sort of large dresser and a box with no obvious features.

“There are human-sized chairs,” she said. “And tables.”

Chrystal pointed. “I see a sink.”

“It's so . . . sterile looking.” Neil turned toward Yi, who had come up just behind them. “How old is this? What makes you think it's from
after
the age of exploration?”

The Colorima answered. “We're not sure.”

Yi frowned. “But would they—would we—have had so much technology before that?”

“I don't think so,” Neil said. “But history is never truth. Don't confuse anything you've heard about the past with what might have actually happened.”

Chrystal laughed, her laugh infecting Nona, lightening the serious mood in the cave.

The Colorima said, “Please gather around. I have a few questions to ask you.”

Yi looked puzzled, but he turned toward the Colorima. Nona found herself between Neil and Chrystal, all of them facing the strange and beautiful robot in a half circle. “Go ahead,” the Colorima said. “Sit down. This will take a few moments.”

Everyone sat, clearly for the sake of the humans. Next could stand forever or run forever or sit forever. “Thank you,” Nona said.

The Colorima flicked her fingers and a see-through display sprang to life between her and the others, its edges shimmering in the air. Inside, three symbols hovered. One was a circle with a ring around it, a circle with no ring, and a crescent combined together. Another was a set of interlocking circles with a bar through them, and the third was a three-dimensional rendering of a box with what looked like a cloud trapped inside it. After she gave them a few moments to look at the symbols, the Colorima asked, “Do you have any idea what those might be?”

Nona had certainly never seen anything like them.

“Language?” Neil asked.

“We don't know,” the Colorima said. “Have you seen them before?”

Neil leaned forward, his face so near the symbols that it looked like he might blow them away. “I might have,” he said. His hand went to his slate.

The Colorima shook her head. “We have been very careful they do not end up on human networks. I will tell you what we know so far.”

Neil settled back, a look of pure happiness on his face. Nona realized she didn't feel much different. The mysteries of the caves had the tang of adventure that showed up in vids, so real it felt surreal, special.

The Colorima bent her beautiful head toward the images. “We have found these symbols in a variety of unexpected places. Not always together. Sometimes singly, sometimes in pairs, sometimes all three together. The things we have found them stamped or painted or etched upon have all been old.”

She pointed toward the rendering of the box with cloud in it. “The first time we saw this symbol, it was here on Lym, but not here in this cave, which we have no previous record of whatsoever. We found all three hand carved on rocks near Neville. Small rocks. Nothing that has been noticed, even though the rocks are still there. They are fist-sized and a little bigger, and they occur from time to time, as if they were buried and are working themselves up from some archaeological midden.

“We suspect the symbols are in other places here, as well.

“We've found them on Mammot, deep in caverns as they have been mined.”

Neil interrupted. “Meaning that the miners put them there?”

“No. The humans found them in deep places while mining.”

Neil said it first. “You don't think humans put them on Mammot.”

The Colorima looked pleased. “Not historically current humans, anyway. We are trying to discover who put them there.”

“Aliens?” Yi leaned in as he asked it, his eyes wide. “Aliens?”

The Colorima shrugged. “We have also found the symbols on asteroids far beyond the habitable belt, out in the wild places where only we can live.”

For a long moment the only sound Nona heard was her breath and Neil's breath. She shivered.

“We're looking for more instances of these symbols. I'm hoping we find them in these caves.” The Colorima glanced at Yi. “We may have glimpsed one in the video stream that you sent us. I'm not sure. But we decided it was worth looking here. We plan to leave sometime soon.” She glanced at Neil. “On our terms, and not necessarily in weeks or months. But we are not staying on Lym for long. We want to understand these symbols before we go. They have become a defining mystery for us.”

“Did you come here
because
of the symbols?” Yi asked.

So Yi didn't know why the Next came either? They were that secretive?

The Colorima closed down the display window with a slight, audible snap of two fingers. “We came here to learn more about our past,” she said.

“Funny,” Neil said. “I came here to learn about our future.”

“They might be the same,” the Colorima said. She stood up, fluid, so that one moment she sat and the next moment she stood. Neil and Nona also stood, although with far more difficulty and less grace. The Colorima added, “Let's explore.” She looked at Yi again. “Have you gone further than this?”

“I thought we should wait for you.”

“Excellent. I'll lead.”

Yi didn't react, even though Nona got the impression he had expected to lead the group.

Out here in this room there was only the elevator, the long windowed wall, and a corridor that stretched away, the thinnest lacework of virgin dust proving Yi's claim that they hadn't ventured any farther.

The Colorima's feet left thin, clear tracks as they started down the hallway. She led, Nona and Neil following her, Jason and Chrystal behind them, and Yi in the far back.

Nona coughed a few times as the dust tickled her throat. Neil slapped her gently on the back. “Breathe through your nose.”

“Oh. Of course.” The dust coated her nostrils, but she stopped coughing. It smelled metallic and sharp, like rock and crystal and science.

The Colorima came to a door on the left, opened it, and walked on. As they passed it, Nona looked in the open door and identified a privy. Another sign this was a place built for humans.

The next room held what had to be computing infrastructure—squares and rectangles of various sizes grouped together, some soft and flexible and others hard-surfaced. This room had been closed up clean; almost no dust rested on the soft surfaces, and the air smelled empty.

The Colorima walked over to the boxes and bent down to peer at them. Nona had the impression she was using her eyes to take pictures. She didn't touch anything, and no one else actually went into the room.

Next, they found a room similar to the one behind the viewing wall, only instead of beds, row on row of variously sized clear boxes sat beside the machinery. The room was as big, maybe bigger, than most labs from the university where Nona had taught. Twenty people could work in here and hardly ever come across one another. There must be thirty or forty boxes, with wide aisles between them all. The floor was hard stone. Here and there, small cracks had appeared in the sealed boxes, spilling streams and droplets of liquid across the floor. She nearly slipped on one.

The Colorima walked into the middle of the room, waving the others inside as well. “What do you think?”

“I don't know,” Neil said.

“If you were making us,” Yi mused, “You might also be making other shapes and sizes of bodies.”

“Please don't touch anything yet, but let's look here for about five minutes before we keep going. Watch for the symbols I showed you.”

Nona followed Neil, watching him as much as what he was looking at. He seemed genuinely puzzled and delighted as he knelt and looked under the boxes, tracking down connections between objects as if he could comprehend them merely by being able to diagram out physical connections. “It looks like a nursery,” he whispered. “But if they were making robots, would they really need all of these hoses and the like?”

Yi overheard him even though he was a few aisles away. “To make a being like me, you need to feed in raw materials and programming, liquids, and ways to monitor movement and life. In some ways, it's not that different from making a human. You should drop by the House of Transformation sometime.”

Neil laughed. “I plan to.”

“I don't see any written instructions,” Chrystal said.

“No,” the Colorima said. “None at all.”

“We found some,” Jason said, “Outside of the ships you saw in that corridor. They look like manuals, although we couldn't read them. But there are pictures, and they looked helpful. If we can have a few more days up there, we can probably decode the language.”

Yi added, “I think this is an even older place.”

“Why?” the Colorima asked. “They are all connected.”

“I don't know,” Yi said. “But this place is friendly to humans, and the caverns up above are not. Maybe this was here, and a path to and from the surface from here, and the rest of the caverns were created afterward.”

Neil popped up from where he had been flat on the floor looking underneath a table. “That could have happened. That might also explain why there's writing in one place and not in the other.”

The Colorima stood in the doorway. “We should keep exploring. After we know more, we can stop and discuss what we saw.”

Yi spoke gently, as if he were a little nervous of the striking, old robot. “Neil and Nona will have to sleep.”

She smiled. “So we'll look for a bedroom or two.”

For the second time, Nona and Chrystal laughed together. The Colorima looked amused, and gestured for them to follow her.

They walked deeper and lower into the mountain. The Colorima pushed open one door after another, leaving them ajar so that the others could look in as they passed. One room was open and empty, another looked like a galley of some kind, although the machinery was unrecognizable and still. Another held small machines with no obvious use, but when Neil saw them, he said, “Maybe cleaners? This size of a place would need that, and repairs. If it were in use.”

The next time she opened a door, the Colorima waved them all to her. She slid inside a smallish room—compared to most of the others they'd seen. She pointed.

All three symbols had been etched into the top of the wall. They were high, so that Nona's head just came to the bottom of them. She stared at them, trying to figure out what they could possibly mean.

The Colorima wore a broad smile. She and the three soulbots went silent, clearly communing together. The practice irritated Nona, so she stepped back and contemplated the symbols quietly. Neil went up and touched them, running the tips of his fingers as high as he could reach, his face a study in awe.

If these same symbols existed beyond the Ring, what did it mean? Most of human history had been lost. They had arrived as colonists, although the ship they arrived on had never been found, in spite of multiple searches for it. Theories ranged from the colony ship being designed to become a habitat, to the original ship being destroyed by some of the first humans to go into space. She'd never really been interested, although Neil probably knew all of the different legends.

So, were the symbols planted by humans on the way in? Were they left by the first Next, the early adopters of mechanical bodies who had then been banished? Perhaps they were a sort of breadcrumb trail back to this cave, and maybe, based on what the Colorima said, to other places on Lym?

CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

CHARLIE

The fire in Manna Springs had guttered out into thin red lines, with only the occasional flicker of yellow-orange flame. It had taken a long time, hours at least. Charlie had even slept for an indeterminate time, right there in the chair Yi had led them to, sitting up. His back ached now as a result, and he needed the privy.

He glanced at Manny, who sat completely still, arms folded over his stomach, staring straight ahead. “Are you okay?”

Manny shrugged. “We should get up and get busy.”

“We should sleep.”

“We need to set watches in case anything happens.”

Charlie grunted. “You sound like a ranger.”

“Come on.” Manny stood, still staring at what had been his town.

At one point, Yi Two had counted and told them there were three hundred seventeen people in the camp, and that five of them were children. Then he'd cocked his head and added, “And one tongat.”

Cricket hadn't even stirred. But now she stood and stretched, rump up in the air. As Charlie followed Manny, she followed close to his side with her head up and her nose high.