Galey swore: the sound of the human irreverence grated On Duncan’s ears, and he looked to his left, where Galey stared. A huddled mass of bones and burned tatters of black cloth rested in a niche within the stone. It was the guardian of the shrine. Niun had paid him respect; Duncan felt moved to do so and did not know how.
“Don’t touch anything,” he said, and immediately recalled Melein’s similar words to him, a chilling echo in the deep well.
He tried to put his mind to other things knelt on the sand in the sunlight and opened up the gear that he had carried, photographic equipment, and most of all a signal device. He activated it, and knew from that moment that human presence in this place was inevitable. Searching aircraft would eventually find it.
Then with the camera he rose and recorded all that was about them, the writings, the guardian, the doorway with its broken seal, the marks of destroying fire.
And last of all he ventured into the dark, into the shrine that not even Niun had presumed to enter only Melein, with Niun to guard the door. Galey started to follow him, stepped within.
“Stay back,” Duncan ordered; his voice echoed terribly in the metal chamber, and Galey halted, uncertain, in the doorway retreated when Duncan stared at him. Duncan drew a careful breath then and activated the camera and its light, by that surveying the ruin about him.
Shrine: it was rather a place of fire-stained steel, ruined panels, banks of lifeless machinery, stark and unlovely. He had known what he would find here, had heard the sound of it, the working of machinery the night the place had died, destroyed by the mri.
And yet the mri, who well understood machines, revered it revered the artifact they had borne away from it.
Mistrust recurred in him, human mistrust, the remembrance that the mri had never offered assurances to him: they had only held their hand from him.
Banks of machinery, no trace of holiness. The thing that Niun had so lovingly carried hence, that now rested in Flower’s belly, suddenly seemed sinister and threatening… a weapon, perhaps, that could be triggered by probing. The mri penchant for taking enemies with them in their self-destruction made it entirely possible, made Niun’s treasuring of it still comprehensible. Yet Boaz and security evidently had some confidence that it was no weapon.
It had its origin here here, cradled in that rest, perhaps, that now was stripped and vacant. Duncan lifted the camera, completed his work among the dead, burned banks, explored recesses where the light pierced deep shadows, where yet the wind had not swept away the ash. Boaz’ people would come here next; some of the computer specialists would try the wreckage of the banks, with little hope. Melein had been thorough, protecting this place from humanity, whatever it once might have been.
He had all he needed, all he could obtain. He returned to the entry, and delayed yet again, taking in the place with a last glance, as if that could fix it all in his mind and pierce through the heart of what was mri.
“Sir?” Galey said from the well.
Duncan turned abruptly, joined Galey in the daylight, moved aside the breathing mask that suddenly seemed to restrict his oxygen glad to draw a breath of acrid, daylit air, wind-clean. Galey’s broad, anxious face seemed suddenly of another, a more welcome world.
“Let’s go,” he said then to Galey. “Let’s get out of here.”
The lower canyon was already deep in shadow when they reached the edee of the plateau, that path among the rocks that led down into Sil’athen. It was late afternoon where they stood, and twilight down in the canyon beneath them.
“Dark’s going to be on us again before we reach the ship,” Duncan said.
“We going to go all the way anyway?” Galey asked.
Duncan shook his head. “No. At dusk we sit down wherever we are.”
Galey did not look pleased. Likely whoever had given him his orders had not well prepared him for the possibilities of nights spent in the open. Duncan’s nose had started bleeding again on the return walk, irritated by the thin, dry air; Galey’s cough had worsened, and if they must spend another night in the open, Galey would be suffering the like.