He withdrew the ring from the socket. Almost to his relief, the panel went out.
“Two calling birds,” he sang, and nodded to Butar Killomen. She inserted hers, and it lit up—yellow.
Hawks clenched his teeth. “And a partridge in a pear tree,” he said, and reinserted his ring.
The panel lit up—yellow.
“Remove both!” he ordered. “Now three French hens. Go, Ikira!”
She inserted her ring. The panel glowed light orange.
“Now two turtle doves! Bute! Keep that ring in, Ikira!”
Butar Killomen’s ring also produced an orange color, as did his.
“We’re right, we’re right,” Hawks muttered to himself. “By heaven, Chow Dai, we owe you another one. You just hold on!”
“Withdraw!” he called, his voice sounding hoarse in his throat. “Now four calling birds! Maria!”
Maria inserted her ring. The panel glowed crimson.
So did Ikira’s. So did Bute’s. And so did his.
“Last time! China! The five gold rings!”
She fumbled a bit, nervously, and Maria coaxed the blind girl gently. “That’s it. Feel it. Now—in!”
The color was azure blue.
“Four in!” Maria shouted. Blue again.
“Three in!” Ikira called next. “It is a pretty color!”
“Two in!” Butar Killomen watched the blue light come on.
Hawks took a deep breath, then inserted his ring for the fifth and final time. The panel glowed blue.
And nothing happened. No blast, no electrocution, and, unfortunately for their nerves, absolutely nothing else.
“Oh, please, god! Don’t tell me we haven’t got it all!” Maria moaned.
“Take out the rings,” Hawks croaked as best he could. “Maybe that’s all that’s supposed to happen.”
They removed their rings, and the panels stayed lit for a moment, then changed. They did not wink out, but all now became flashing emerald green.
The collective sigh of relief almost equaled the amount of hot air coming up through the vent screen.
Butar Killomen looked up. “The faces are asleep once more,” she noted. “They look almost:.. dead.”
“Is that it?” China asked. “Is that all there is?”
Hawks looked around. Except for the designs on the wall it looked perfectly smooth. He leaned back, and his head touched the ring plate interface.
There was a whine, and then he almost fell backward as the whole section seemed to collapse inward and then slide out of the way. He caught himself, barely managing not to fall on a rotted skeleton, then turned and looked inside. A light clicked on, and now he saw a whole inner structure of steel catwalks and stairways. They looked very old.
He turned and shouted up to Nagy. “Hey! If you’re still alive and in one piece again, get Chow Dai help! I think we’ve done the reset!”
For a moment there was no response, and then Nagy’s face appeared over the rim above the statuelike faces. “We’ll see what we can do. It’s been kind’a messy up here! Are you coming back up?”
“No. Not now anyway. I think we’re being invited in!”
They went down into the depths of the machine, and Hawks’ biggest regret was that they had come without so much as a canteen.
“This wasn’t part of the original structure,” Maria opined. “It’s different, too new. It was added as support for the relocated interface and the new venting. There are signs of machines once being clipped to the sides of these railings. Support for hoists, I would guess. Why they’d need stairs and such and not ramps and lifts I can’t imagine, though.”
“They might not have had many robots at the time,” Hawks pointed out. “It is entirely possible that this was done by forced human labor. Much of the destruction of the cities and towns and the reversions were done by people, not computers. I’d hate to think of what happened to the construction gangs who built this, though, after they were done.”
“There’s the bottom at last!” Ikira said, pointing. She bounded to it, then looked around. “Or is it?”
It was a dull polished floor all right, but it didn’t seem to lead anywhere. There were three doorways on one side and little else, and some sort of clear glassy plate next to the door on the far right. Over it was a sign saying, in English, “Hold Pass In Palm Against Plate.”
“Some sort of elevator or lift,” Hawks noted. “Everybody got their passes handy?”
Maria thought a moment. “Maybe we do.” She held her ring loosely, letting its design rest against the glass.
There was a small bell chime that startled them, and the door on the far left slid open.
Hawks sighed. “Well, the elevators still work. I wonder if the plumbing does, too?”
“Do we get in or what?” Butar asked.
Hawks shrugged. “We came this far—why not?”
They all got in, China holding Maria’s hand as a guide, and the door shut.
“Level, please,” said an electronic voice. “Please remember that proper clearances are required on all levels. Have your clearance ready.”
Hawks thought a moment. “Computer center,” he said at last. “Doctor Menzelbaum.”
“Any other levels?” asked the computerized voice. “Very well.”
A visual plate came on to the side of the door showing a crude diagram of a fantastic complex, with color-codes for the levels that probably indicated the passes required. There were small tags as well, but what “GEN-PAC” was or “SITRM” or “BCMDR” meant was unknown to them. There was a lit tube showing the elevator path down, and it slowly shrank as they descended.
“It’s been kept in amazingly good repair,” Ikira noted. “I hope,” she added.
Hawks couldn’t help but reflect on the strangeness of the occupants of the car. What might the builders, the original humans who created this place, have thought of such a crew? A gorgeous, sexy, stark-naked goddess about a hundred and twenty centimeters high; another virtually naked woman, this one tall and dark-skinned with a body of a female weight lifter; a creature standing like a human but looking awkward as a bipedal sea otter might; a blind, very pregnant Chinese girl with silver tattoos on her cheeks in buckskins and moccasins; and a middle-aged, gray-haired, classical Amerind with lined face dressed in ancient buckskins and wrapped leather boots.
It was a long way down; about seventy percent of the tube had vanished on the journey and their ears had popped more than once. Finally, though, there was another bell, and the electronic voice said, “Computer R & D, Level Sixty-four. Please have gold passes or higher to exit on this level.” The door then opened, revealing a musty-smelling hallway leading to a guard station and a set of metal double doors that looked formidable.
Butar Killomen looked around. “At least somebody left the lights on.”
“I doubt it,” he replied. “This is being done just for us. In fact, you can just now feel tremendous airflow, like a breeze in here, sweeping away centuries of stale-ness. We are getting new air just for us. This place is ours now, and the one running it recognizes us as the new tenants.”
Maria went over to the guard station. “Nobody here to check passes. Now what?” She tried the double doors. “We’d need a cannon to blast through that.”
Killomen looked around, then pointed near the ceiling. “Optical sensors. I bet that’s a camera of some kind, primitive as it looks. Let’s hold up the rings and let it see us.”
They did so, and the big double doors rolled back with a roar and a rumble, revealing a seemingly endless hallway beyond. Just inside there was a large, colorful sign with an exotic design. Hawks examined it. “Strategic Air Command,” he read. “Sounds exotic. Air force, from the looks. The rest is a warning of all the awful things that might happen to you if you so much as cough in here. ‘By authority, Base Commander, Cheyenne Mountain Facility.’ Well, at least we know where we are, more or less.” He looked down the hall. “And that strange-looking thing appears to be something to give water.”
He went up and stared at it, frowning. How the hell?
There was a button on the faucet, so he pressed it. Very brown, ugly-smelling stuff came out.
“Shit. So much for that.”
“It’s been stuck in those pipes for a thousand years,” Ikira noted. “You probably would have to let it run for quite a while.”
“Yeah, but we’re supposed to be gods, right?” Maria asked disgustedly. “That’s what Chen said. So what good does it do if you can’t get a drink?”
Hawks sighed. “Fan out or we’ll be forever scouting around here. Meet back in the center of the hall.” He found a folding chair, luckily extended, in the first office and brought it out. “China, just sit here. You’ll be our point of reference if we need to find you. You are not looking too good right now.” He sighed. “Now, let’s see just what might be here.”
He went through a series of rooms. Offices, really, mostly cleaned out. He studied the various objects that were left, and couldn’t quite figure out the omnipresent artifacts with buttons that plugged into the wall by wires. There seemed to be a lot of them, though.
“Hawks!” he heard Killomen shout. “Over here!”
He made his way out and down the hall once more, then found her about twenty doorways in. It was a big laboratorylike room that went off in all directions, but it wasn’t the room that caught Killomen’s eye but rather an area with a security door in the back. There was a substantial hissing noise in and around it.
“It started just when I got to the outer door,” she told him. “What do you think it is?”
“Sounds like air being fed in to there. I hope it’s not gas or something. Let’s see. Old, worn letters here. Can’t quite make it out but there were very few English words the old ones ever spelled with two consecutive u’s and I’d guess this one is vacuum. I suppose those burnt-out lights up there must have shown the status.”
The hissing stopped and there was a tremendous venting sound, like perhaps an airlock when its seal is first cracked. Yes, of course—that’s what it had to be. An airlock. But why activate now?
“That wheel there. Turn it,” he said, and they both tried. It was stuck and hard to move, but eventually they got it going. When it reached its stop he could feel the door give way and pulled on the wheel. The door swung open, revealing a chamber inside filled with all sorts of strange containers.
“You know how to read this stuff,” Butar Killomen said. “What is it?”
He stooped down and tried to catch the light. “Emergency ration storage. Siege storage, in effect! It’s food! And perhaps drink as well!”
She looked at him skeptically. “Yeah, a thousand years old, right?”
He nodded. “Probably. And under vacuum seal the whole time. If nothing interrupted it, then it’s probably still good.”
“You aren’t really gonna eat and drink that stuff.”
“If it looks and smells all right, and if we can get it open, yes. You have a better idea? If we’re going to be here a long while, we’d better have something.”
They had to use crude methods to open the various containers, but they managed. There were juices and high-vitamin tonics, and all sorts of stuff, as well as cakes, biscuits, and pressed rolls of some meat and vegetable pate.
“You sure this is okay?” Maria asked him. “It smells odd and tastes odd.”
“I’m pretty sure. Nothing’s certain, but without it I’m a dead dehydrated duck. This is food for this level in case they were cut off and couldn’t leave for any length of time due to a war or emergency, I bet. There is probably more on the other levels and maybe lots more below. It was never intended, I suspect, as high cuisine. It might not have tasted any better to them than to us. It was just, well, survival food and drink. And, then again, it might be that our tastes in processed food are quite different these days.”
All but Ikira finally ate from it. Clayben had done his job well, and she required only light to charge the energy system she had, although she did require water and there was both water and other things in there in primitive hard-to-open cans.
Nobody got sick from it, and they all felt a little better after eating and drinking, although China had to go to the bathroom. Maria had found one—ugly-looking and unused for over nine centuries. Toilets looked vaguely like toilets, but they were quite surprised that there was no automatic chemical wipe and flush.
Ikira was done by that point and went back out exploring, this time as far down the hall as she could go. There were branch halls, of course, and now she took a turn and went down to the end where there was another set of those double doors. These, however, were not the security type, and even had small windows in them. She peered in, gasped, and ran back to the group as fast as she could.
“You have to see this,” she told them. “I—I can’t explain, but I think you ought to see it.”
They went with her, China, although feeling very tired, insisting on coming along. Hawks approached the double doors and looked inside, then gave a heavy, sad sigh. “I asked for Menzelbaum,” he said at last, “and that’s who I got.”
“What is it?” China asked, as each looked in.
“A control room,” Ikira told her. “Something like the bridge of a small ship, really, with comfortable, padded chairs and viewing screens of some kind and lots of consoles. There are about twenty stations in four tiers, but the five up at the top still have people in them.”
“Huh? What?…”
“Human remains. Ugly. This is where it happened, China. This is where it all began.”
After getting his courage up, Hawks walked into the room. The ventilation system had cleared the air, although the remains here were long reduced as much as they would be under these conditions. The preservation, such as it was, was quite complete. Of course, it was impossible to tell much about the people from these dehydrated and ancient husks, but even much of the clothing remained. It was possible that enough effects remained in those clothes to identify the wearers, but none of them felt quite like doing that right now.
“The bottom of each of their consoles is open,” Maria noted. “Look. The circuit boards are exposed, and there are wires of all things! This puts a whole new stamp on the word ‘primitive.’ Still, damned if some of it doesn’t look almost—familiar.”
“Maria, Ikira—whoever is most technical-minded. Describe exactly what you see there, and I mean exactly,” China urged.
They knew she meant the entire technical layout, and Ikira tried her best. She got way in over Hawks’s head, but then, suddenly, China interrupted her. “Don’t you see what those are? That fourth board with the small receptor plate that is slightly pulled out from each console—that’s the original ring interface! It jumps the circuit and forces a reset! That must be why they have wires all over. This wasn’t a main control center, it was their research area. This is where they programmed the computer and where they tested out new designs, new ideas. That ninth board—is it on a slider or in a socket? Will it come out?”
“I don’t know,” Ikira replied. “Why?”
“If you can get one out, I’d like to touch it. Feel it. Please—I know how unpleasant this must be, but humor me!”
Two tries on two boards were unsuccessful, but Ikira got in, trying not to touch the grisly occupant of the seat, and pulled the board China wanted from the second console in on the left. Ikira handed it to the blind girl, who immediately started playing her fingers over it, front and back. She followed the traces on one side, then turned it over, doing the same with the electronics, and asked for a reading of any numbers and letters off the top of the vast array of computer chips there.
The board was huge, maybe twenty by twenty-five centimeters, and there were complex connectors leading off its edges.
“Tell me—quickly,” China asked. “Were there any connectors attached to these two sockets? Look at one that’s still hooked up.”
Ikira saw where she indicated and then checked one inside. “No. Not this one.”
“Not the one on this end, either,” Maria told her.
China nodded. “That’s what they were working on! Whatever cruel gods there might be really did it to us all.”
Hawks was puzzled, only slightly more so than the others. “What in hell are you talking about?”
“Primitive, basic, but it’s all there. I could feel the traces where these connectors and the bank of circuitry below them were added to the existing board, probably right here. You said they looked primitive but somehow familiar, Maria, and you’re right. Ours are modules, not obsolete printed circuit boards, but it’s the principle that counts. These are connectors for the human-to-machine interface! Our electronics are radically different, but the connectors are virtually identical!”
Hawks looked around. “I don’t see any helmets, primitive or not, or any connector cords, and those chairs might have been comfortable but they don’t recline or adjust much.”
“No, no. You wouldn’t! Don’t you see? That was the next step. That was the very project that the computer and they were working on when it all fell apart, when they had to prematurely activate the system. Six months, perhaps a year, from that point they’d have had it down pat. They would have been able to merge with their computer—with Master System itself! Master System was at work on the project, so it completed it as far as it went. Completed it and obediently installed the circuitry into every self-aware device beyond a certain size that it built, just as its old orders told it to. That’s why there’s a human interface on each ship it built!”
Hawks shook his head. “But what difference would it have made if they could mate with it like you do with Star Eagle and the captains do with their ships?”
“Because they would have been part of the system in a crisis! They would have been in there with Master System all the way, continuing to guide and teach it and giving it the human perspective. It would have become one with its parents and its gods. There would have been no need to kill them because they would be a part of it, helping guide and direct it. Don’t you see? All this would never have happened! It would not have gone mad. The solution would not have been so draconian. A year! A lousy year at most, and almost a thousand years of all this would have been wiped out. What a millennium we might have had! One more year of research and we wouldn’t have been master and slaves! One more year and we would have been partners!”
Hawks looked around at the lights, the air conditioning, all the rest.
“The machine lives,” he said softly. “Maybe, just maybe, we still can.” He looked around. The tableau was the same, the grisly bodies were the same, yet somehow the place seemed a bit more cheery than it had before.
“The power of gods,” Hawks added. “That’s what Lazlo Chen called it. The papers must have indicated the interface project. I wonder if what I’m seeing is a potential brightness in humanity, or just hope?” He sighed. “Well, hope, at least, was a start.”
Ikira looked around and shook her head. “So much cost just for hope. Still, I kind’a wish Raven was here to see this. We all make a lot of dumb decisions and I guess I made one.”
Hawks grinned. “Raven,” he said, “would have hated this.”
“We’ll need a lot of hands and heads for a long time to really make anything of this,” she noted. “Star Eagle is a start. If I could patch his core into here…”
Maria Santiago chuckled. “Don’t you think the first thing us new masters of the universe ought to do is see just how long it will take us to get the hell out of here?”
Epilogue:
Two Characters Meet In Different Seasons
THE VILLAGE SITE LOOKED GOOD, AND THE WOMEN and children poured out of the Four Families’ lodge to greet the first arrivals.
The tall, middle-aged, gray-haired man in weathered buckskins eased himself carefully off his horse and groaned as he stood and touched the ground. It was good that he had spent this season with the people, for he was getting too damned old and worn to do this any more.
He tended to his horse, then made his way, slowly and creakily, over to the lodge area. A figure sat there in front of the lodge, leaning back on an old wooden chair. He wore a cotton shirt and jeans and had fancy leather boots on that looked a bit too new for the character, and on his head was a broad, cream-color new-looking cowboy hat. He was smoking a cigar and he did not get up as the old man approached, but watched him.
When the Hyiakutt elder was almost to him, the man with the hat said, “It’s about time. I been stuck here a week waiting for you.”
Runs With the Night Hawks stood there and stared at the other. “Where the hell did you come from?” he asked. “And what gave you the idea to dress up like that?”
The cowboy shrugged. “I couldn’t exactly be one of your people, so I figured I’d come as close to character as I could. I kind’a like it, but I ain’t too sure the world is ready for a half-human Hungarian cowboy.”
Hawks settled down on the edge of the boardwalk porch. “And to what do I owe this visit?”
“Just checking in. You know. I figured I’d catch you up on the gossip and see just how you were doin’ and what you were thinkin’ of doin’ next.”
“It’s my first and only season on the southern plains, I promise you.” Hawks groaned. “I may well die from it, or, perhaps, more frightening considering how I feel, I may not die from it. At least now I’ve had the time to work out my own history and an account of the whole rings quest. It was very difficult, you know, to do that. It sounds so damned mythic, and so heroic. It is difficult not to sound self-serving.”
Arnold Nagy laughed. “Well, I wouldn’t worry about that. From what I hear, all autobiography is self-serving. Can’t be otherwise. Isn’t that what guys in your business do? Compare all the evidence and then separate the ego from the meat?”
Hawks shrugged. “That’s one way to look at it, I suppose.”
“Where are Cloud Dancer and the kids?”
“A bit back, with the main body. They’ll be here in a day or two. When we got back up into this area I just decided I needed a little time alone, out there. That’s what Raven said he used to do to regain his humanity. Just go out alone for a while, camp out in the bush under the stars, try to sort things out.”
“And did it work?”
Hawks snorted. “Rained on me the last three days solid. This is the first decent weather since I left. I was born to this kind of life, Nagy, but I was snatched away young. Too young. I can’t do it any more. Oh, the kids had one hell of a time. We took nine of China’s children out there, too, you know. Adopted them into the tribe. Some of them now speak Hyiakutt better than I do. Now it’s time to go back, with all the records and recordings at hand, and write all this up for whatever posterity we may have.”
“And then what?” Nagy asked him. “Back here for good?”
“No. As much as my spirit is here, my flesh is beyond redemption. And there is something else, too. Not the electronic toilets and computer data and all the rest of so-called modern civilization, but something basic. We’ve changed, and the people here have not. A loss of innocence, Cloud Dancer called it once.”