They all turned and looked around, but the Mycohl agent was nowhere to be seen.
THE EYE OF GOD
THERE WAS THE URGE TO LEAP INTO ACTION AND run all over, dispersing the group, searching for her, but Krisha immediately realized that Manya was still there and that it was unlikely Kalia was up to mischief yet for that reason alone. Dismissing Josef’s unspoken fear that the Mycohl woman was out hunting for a demon prince to sell out to on the evidence that she’d had ample prior opportunity to do so and had not, Krisha threw out a mental net and tried to locate Kalia that way.
“No good,” she said. “My range is curiously limited here.”
“Mine, too,” Jimmy McCray responded worriedly. Tobrush didn’t make a comment but they could tell it was universal. “There’s some kind of instability here that’s interfering with anything not line of sight.”
“Possibly because this whole place is made of transmuted energy from the other plane,” the captain suggested. “Or, we might be getting jammed.”
“Kalia!” Josef belted at the top of his lungs, an impressive volume that caused equally impressive echoes.
He repeated his call twice more, but there was still no response.
“Now what do we do?” Krisha asked worriedly. “We can remain here, and wait, but for how long? Or, we can go on—but if she’s just following some side street, how will she find us with this interference?”
“We’ll give her a few minutes,” Jimmy suggested. “After that, it’s her problem, not ours. I’d say continue on when we get frustrated or bored and head towards the center of town. The one building that really sticks out, literally and otherwise, is that giant pyramid up there. It’s got to be the center of things, not only because of its location but because it’s different than any of the other structures. That’s ” where we all knew we were headed anyway.”
There was general agreement on the plan. Gun Roh Chin took the few minutes they would allow to walk over to the closest building. “Smooth as glass,” he commented, looking at himself reflected in the opaque surface of the building itself. “My! I look worse than I thought!”
McCray came over and joined him. “I think I look exactly as bad as I thought, which is too bad,” he commented on his own reflection. “Still, I wonder how they got in and out of the bloody things? The other structures, from the stations to the palace ruins in the fire world, all had doors, at least. Perhaps you have to go to ground level, or the entrances are on different levels to distribute traffic.”
“I think not. Otherwise, why build a cut-in from the street over to it here?”
McCray touched the surface. Smooth and cool. He turned again to the captain and said, “Well, maybe you wish yourself inside. I’d half expected some kind of markings in this stuff as guides, but I haven’t seen any yet.” He shifted, and went to lean his back against the building wall, and fell right through.
They all came running. “What happened?” Modra called out to the captain.
“He was just leaning here”—Chin rapped on the wall and it was solid to the touch—”and, suddenly, he went through. You don’t suppose that this is what happened to the Mycohl woman?”
Suddenly, Jimmy McCray stepped out of the wall, as if going through solid matter. “That’s the damnedest thing, isn’t it?” he commented, frowning. “Took me a minute or two to figure out how to make it let me out.”
“Well? How do you do it?”
“You sort of pretend it isn’t there and just walk through. I could see you, by the way, from inside, although dimly. The exit’s marked with some yellow lighting, but you can’t tell that on this side.”.
Chin rapped on the area where Jimmy had just emerged and it gave off a solid if very dull knocking sound. Jimmy smiled, turned, and walked back through the wall.
“If this did indeed happen to Kalia, it must be quite disconcerting if she can see this,” Tobrush noted. “Perhaps she’s trying to get out and it would be most frustrating to watch McCray walk easily through.”
Jimmy was soon back. “Just walk through like there’s nothing there. That’s all there is to it. Bloody chilly inside, though. Worse than out here.”
Of course, they all had to try it then. Gun Roh Chin shrugged, walked through, and had no problems, but Modra and several others struck the wall when they tried.
“It’s hard to ignore your own senses,” Jimmy noted. “If you think you’re going to hit the wall, you do. If you think you’re going to casually walk through, you will.”
Finally, Modra managed it, and found herself inside a large entry hall, complete with a huge wing-shaped desk that seemed grown out of the floor, and behind it a very large chair on a pedestal built for a large biped, but definitely not for a human. There seemed no way in or out of the hall, but markings at about the three-meter level glowed from embedded rods within the wall material— horizontal and vertical lines, in fact, in a variety of colors and color combinations.
Gun Roh Chin walked through a wall and back into the entry chamber from one with a horizontal green and blue indicator.
“Their version of universal signage,” he said as she gaped at him. “The horizontal ones let you walk through to various—well, I suppose they are some sort of offices. The vertical ones, I assume, take you between levels. Like the stations, there’s no sense of being transported or such,
but considering that the parallel-lined entrances are all in a row to your right and the horizontal to your left, I assume some sort of instant transport is accomplished. It certainly makes all sorts of stairs and lifts unnecessary.” He walked over to the massive desk and examined the top of it from just beside the chair. “Fascinating.” He put his hand on a particular point of the desk, and Modra was startled to see a whole different combination of lights appear over the doors.
“A simple system, if you know how to build it,” the captain commented. “The receptionist sits here, you tell him, her, or it who you want to see, and they push one of the color combinations inside the desk and whatever door is free is switched to the desired location. Ingenious, so long as you are not in the habit of leaning on your elbows.”
Several of them had made it through now, but Modra had joined the captain and was staring down at, or more properly through, the desktop. “Do you think all their machines are like this?”
“Most likely,” he responded. “The more complex ones could be voice- or even thought-activated, the actions all continuously recorded somewhere in the building foundation. This was certainly some sort of business office with many, many workers and lots of in and out traffic. What sort of business was done here, however, I wouldn’t hazard to guess. Even if we could somehow call up the records, they would almost certainly be incomprehensible to us.”
“It’s fascinating, but I’m freezing,” she told him. “I’m going back outside—if I can.”
He nodded, and eventually everyone was out. “We’ll all be dead of exposure if we stay inside any of these buildings too long,” Jimmy noted.
“The Quintara appeared to have thick hides,” the captain said. “Contrary to their reputation, they appear to have liked things a bit cooler than we.”
“They also dressed for the occasion,” Krisha noted. “If I had even the cape of that prince, let alone normal domes, this wouldn’t really be that uncomfortable.”
Josef looked up and down the street and sighed. “Well, if we each take an entrance, we might yet find Kalia,” he said.
“At least, we might find her if she hasn’t tried one of the other ways out.”
“I’ll not look for the likes of her,” Manya grumbled. “She’d die happy if I walked in and we were stuck inside one of those areas for a while.”
Krisha nodded. “You stay with me, Manya. I think the two of us are a match for her temper.”
“Molly, you stick with me,” Jimmy told the syn. “Everybody else, pick a door if you can find it.”
It didn’t take long. In fact, Gun Roh Chin found her in the second place he tried, and she was mad as hell. That, in fact, caused a problem in getting her out, and Chin easily exiting and calling to Josef and Tobrush to help her through didn’t make her any less furious. Like Jimmy, she’d leaned back idly and fell through; unlike Jimmy, she had no idea how she’d gotten there and hadn’t been able to get past seeing a solid wall. She’d banged, kicked, or tapped on practically every square centimeter trying to find the secret control, never suspecting it was mental.
“We’re getting a picture of the culture that once lived here now, at least on the basic level of how things work,” the captain noted. “Let’s not wander about from the group from this point until there’s some decision to do so.”
They headed on downtown on broad streets obviously intended for walking and not any sort of vehicular traffic, as if in the bottom of a deep canyon surrounded by glass-like walls.
“No traffic roundabouts or public squares or commons,” Jimmy McCray noted. “No vegetation, either, after that lush garden up there. Odd.”
“Not so odd, perhaps,” Krisha responded. “If they had no weather and no dirt or rock foundations here, they might have dispensed with it within the city. That would make a level of green even more important, and it’s not that much for a walk. Don’t forget, too, that beyond the mazes are forests, groves, and fields.”
“I admit, however, to being puzzled by the groves of fruit,” Jimmy McCray said. “Everything we’ve seen or learned or been told about the Quintara is that they’re carnivores, yet we’ve seen no signs that animals of any sort were raised anywhere around. A city this size would consume a massive amount of meat daily. From where? And why have intensive automated farms up there to grow vegetable matter they couldn’t digest?”
The captain sighed. “If you add the rather effective automated security system in the groves, the enforcement of a ‘take nothing inside’ policy to extremes, and the maze with the nasty idol creatures to what you’ve said, it paints a disturbing picture.”
“Huh? Like what?”
“Live prey. Imported here, perhaps even bred up there, or on other levels that could be connected to it. Not a garden, or a park, my comrades. Rather, I fear, a kind of idyllic holding pen for evening dinner. One can almost see Madam Demon trotting up there to pick out the day’s catch. Some, perhaps of inferior quality, would be delivered to the maze entities in exchange for favors. Note that when poor Morok was killed, it was referred to as an ‘acceptable sacrifice.'”
“That sized area? To feed the tens of thousands at least who must have lived and worked here? Absurd!” Josef commented.
The captain shrugged. “Oh, I suspect that what was kept up there was just for the upper classes—royalty, the bosses, special rewards, and the like. The masses would probably get dead, rather than live, prey, and nothing like that sort of quality, butchered and stored and shopped for in the usual manner somewhere here. Still, one suspects they had a rather effective supply. Almost limitless for a stable population, I’d say, and barely noticed, I suspect, until their population, as the demon said to one of you at least, began to grow.”
“Wait a minute!” Jimmy McCray exclaimed, the light dawning. “You’re talking about us, aren’t you? Terrans and maybe lots of other races as well. Their motive wasn’t just love of power; we were the food.”
They were all shocked, and Modra said, “Jimmy, that’s disgusting.”
“Disgusting, yes,” the captain agreed, “but I think it’s true. Oh, not that they didn’t also eat animals—I suspect that the basic worker got just that—but we were the plums, the gourmet meals. Why? I can only make wild guesses, since it’s certain that any carbon-based animal life would do. Possibly tied in with some sort of mysticism or religious belief that they really did enslave and gain the souls of those they ate. Possibly, they just loved the empathic feel of fear and horror in a prey that knows its fate. And, of course, they could get the natives to do much of the dirty work for them. The tradition of blood sacrifice to demons, or ancient gods, is well known in most primitive societies. If memory serves, there was even a later Terran religion that practiced regular symbolic cannibalism.”
Jimmy decided that now was not the time to bring up the practice of Holy Communion in his old Church.
Even Josef was appalled, although he was getting the conversation secondhand, translated with difficulty through another’s mind. <Does he mean that all of the races with demon legends were once mere breeding farms?>
Jimmy nodded. “I think he does. And to primitive societies faced with this sort of technology, it must have seemed a reasonable trade. The gods could reward, and, every time they improved the lot of the people so they lived longer and had more kids, the better the Quintara harvest. If they took only a given percentage of the population, then the whole would think themselves better off.”
“The priests and priestesses, though, would have all the power they wanted and needed, wouldn’t they?” Kalia mused.
Josef nodded. “They wouldn’t be the sacrifices, they’d be the favored pets.” He gave a long sigh. “Well, it is certainly easy to see the set-up for all this now. If there was more than one first race, older than we are, getting out into space, and they came together with equal power and technology, they’d try and make a deal, a peace, such as the Three Empires have now. And if the Quintara fattened, and bred, and outgrew the ability of their area to feed their growing population, there might well be warfare at last. They broke the pact—rebelled, in their term. Tried for a large slice of the pie, perhaps primacy. But the reason the Three Empires have never done this in spite of their enmity for one another is because they are equally matched, more or less. Any one that attacked another would leave the third with the spoils. Any two could stop the other one. Surely that must have happened here. What made them think they could win?”