IN THE MINUSCULE CITY
1541 4D
Fitting his viewer over his eyes, Arlen withdrew the fist-sized crystal rock from beneath the low tabletop in his great chamber. It shone with diamond intensity; the brilliant ceiling lights of Arlen‘s chamber coruscated through the honeycombed prisms of its minuscule pillars and halls and stairs, flashing colors onto the chamber’s ever-shifting wall panels, decorating the chamber’s wrought steel doors with splashes of starburst and rainbow.
The anthropology team had done well, removing all of the oxidation roughness to reveal this utterly transparent glory of light. Arlen, excited, took his viewer’s probe in hand, inserted it gently into the largest of the entries in the artifact, and triggered it. Before his eyes, a great room appeared, long and deep, its walls covered with shining writing.
Writing, maybe; his team had told him it gave away no secrets. Some thought it was merely artistic or narrative, like a tapestry of ancient Earth, but Arlen sensed something unusual about it. Ever since he had first seen this thing, he had felt snatches of intuition, like awakening from a dream to remember only a scrap of its meaning.
It frustrated him. He knew from his delvings that the City-builders had evolved within a few generations from microbe-sized beings lacking sentience all the way to humanoids of normal size. If this construct he now held in his hand had been made by the seed-creatures of the City-builders, it held important secrets. What had killed them all? How had they come to Tarnus in the first place? Had they simply abandoned the planet? The Archive offered nothing on these matters.
He called out, “Archive access.” He’d done this many times, but he always had another question to pursue.
“Yes, Arlen. Do you want City-builder context?” The female voice floated in the room.
“Yes.”
At the far end of the great room in Arlen‘s viewer, a figure appeared, clad in a tight-clinging black skinsuit. It walked toward Arlen; as it approached, it resolved into a tall woman, as bony as Arlen was robust, with long pale-red hair. An archive ainon: a sentient embodiment of the Archive‘s interface to the researcher.
She stopped before him, smiled, and said, “I suppose you want to try the inscriptions again.”
“I have a new idea. We will just walk past them, while I think.”
“Certainly.”
Side by side, Arlen and the archive ainon strolled along the left wall of the great hall. At his eye level, the inscriptions danced and shimmered, tantalizingly unreadable; above and below his eye level, fleeting movements tried to drag his vision away from the mutating symbols.
A glimpse of a face, a smile, a head with only eyes… a mouth forming soundless words… flash flash flutter.
“It’s trying to distract me,” he muttered, forcing his eyes to remain on the strokes and spaces shining at him, teasing him.
“What is?”
“The wall keeps flickering— damn!” Something came at him, and he flinched, losing his growing sense of connection. “What in the stars was that?”
“What did you see?” Her voice was calm.
“Something flew at me.”
“I saw nothing. The wall is undisturbed.”
“Then it was generated inside my mind. But by what?”
“The records indicate patterned sensory neurosystem stimulation of humans is a recognized component of the experience of City artifacts.”
“This isn’t a City artifact.”
“That is true. However, this experience also occurs during the viewing of artifacts outside the Cities, when those artifacts are identifiably contemporaneous with the era of City-building.”
Arlen became annoyed with the ainon‘s use of stilted language. “To put it more simply, then, the patterns in these walls make me think of… something. And so do artifacts in the Cities and elsewhere. Is that what you are telling me?”
“It isn’t quite that simple.”
“Oh?”
“The patterns do not coerce your thought. They appear to communicate directly with certain structures in the neocortex on humans, but they do so imperfectly. This implies that the neocortical structures in the City-builders may have differed significantly from yours.”
“So, what did the patterns do to the builders?”
“That is unknown. It could have been anything from entertainment to propaganda to education.”
“Let’s keep going.” They walked on, Arlen keeping his eyes fixed on the symbols to his left. “It feels as if missiles are flying at me, and I want to duck.”
The ainon reached in a pocket in her skinsuit and withdrew a finger-size white tube of paper wrapped around a shredded brown substance. She placed one end of the tube in her mouth and flicked a nail at the other end of the tube; a brief flare, and wisps of smoke rose from the tube’s end. She sucked at the tube; the lighted end glowed, and she exhaled a cloud of blue-gray smoke.
“What is that?” Arlen asked her, stopping.
“I am accessing the Colonist Archive itself,” the ainon said. “There is useful information deeply placed in that reservoir, but it requires significant time to get a response.” She took another drag, and blew rings of smoke that rose to form floating rows of words.
To his disappointment, Arlen could not read the smoke-displayed language. “Get me a cognator for this,” he said.
She raised a hand to touch the smoke; the letters writhed, danced, changed shape, and then vanished completely. “The archive refuses,” she said.
“What?”
“It declines the request for a cognator for this information.”
“Why? I have the highest level of access privilege.”
“It does not explain. I haven’t seen this happen before.”
“Is there any record of similar refusals?”
“No.”
“Has this information been accessed before?”
A pause. “It refuses to state.”
Arlen‘s frustration rose. “Show me the untranslated information again.” With a deep puff and a rapid shaping of her lips, the ainon recreated the smoke symbols; Arlen strobed his viewer, and stored a snapshot of the words. “Wait. Could andros read this?”
“The andro neurosystem is quite similar to that of humans like you, and andros may not access the Colonist Archive. Andros should therefore have the same limitations.”
“So the answer is no.”
“Correct, both for the artifact you are studying and for the records I retrieved.”
“Here is a hypothetical question: If I could develop an andro with a neurosystem similar to those of the City-builders, could it understand the wall writings we see here?”
“It would depend on the degree of similarity. How would you know what changes to make in the neurosystem?”
“That,” said Arlen, “is one of my trade secrets. Let’s continue our stroll.”
As he walked with the ainon past glittering words, Arlen relaxed. His andro vats had great capacity. Ten million eggs, ten million zygotes, and he would have the beginnings of a stochastic experiment. A few of ten million andros would show an improved ability to read the walls; he would generate another ten million from the few, discard the rest, and repeat the process. A purely natural operation, accelerated, of course.
It would have to wait for a few years; his delivery schedules, burdened by the demands of the aliens, taxed his farms’ capacities. But most of the time he was a patient man.
A flash of wings came at him from the wall, and he did not flinch, but held his gaze on the dancing letters that passed him. At that moment, an abyss of blue-black sorrow opened before him, and he balanced on a bridge the width of his finger. In sheer terror and anguish, he closed his eyes.
“What is wrong?” The ainon‘s voice touched him.
He stood motionless. “Are we still in the hall?”
“Yes. Nothing has changed since you stopped.”
“How long have I been standing still?”
“About half an hour.”
Time! The symbols had changed his time-awareness… or else he had been unconscious and rigid. Arlen opened his eyes again, and the hall was before him.
“Was I moving or saying anything during that time?”
“No, except for one word I didn’t understand.”
“Can you reproduce the sound?”
“Yes. It was ‘qaqanhialh'.” The word seemed half whisper.
“Repeat it.”
“Qaqanhialh. The first two consonantal sounds are unvoiced guttural plosives. The third is an unvoiced nasal. The last is an unvoiced lingual liquid.”
“Qaqanhialh.” The strange word felt dark to Arlen, almost threatening; the emotion was not from the word’s sound, but from the sensation of black emptiness he had just experienced. “It was as if time stopped, or twisted back on itself. Can you—" He stopped. The ainon had vanished.
