He recognized nothing. If any of the museum exhibits were duplicated here, they lay buried beyond his range of vision. There were corners and corridors he was hesitant to visit, where the light from the walls and floor hardly penetrated. A number of particularly impressive containers were large enough to hold objects the size of the Atlantis. If only he cold find a way of deciphering the glyphs etched into their flanks, he might be able to descry their contents. Failing that, he could only guess and imagine.
Directly beneath the cusp of the spire and dominating the room was a massive triangular edifice. There were enough elusive twists to the walls, sufficient bends in the angles, to prove it had been designed by other than human hands. Low searched his memory for a terrestrial reference, gave up in disgust. It was a pyramid, and it wasn’t; an obelisk, yet not.
Erected of the wonderful metallic glass that seemed to have been a favorite building material of the Cocytans, it cast a golden glow over its surroundings. Tiffany had once made glass like that, Low mused. He’d seen examples of it at the Met, of glistening vases and bowls fashioned of what appeared to be spun gold shot through with the most delicate reds and greens, pinks and blues. Except that he knew this stuff would support a train.
Curious to know what precious artifacts it had been built to hold, he methodically walked around the entire edifice. His hike took less time than he’d expected and left him midway between the singular structure and the archway that opened onto the tunnel station.
While circling the structure, he’d kept an eye out for and found not a single window or door. More puzzling was the complete absence on the sloping walls of the familiar glyphs and engravings. Everything else he’d encountered, from the walls in the main chamber to the containers that filled the rest of the spire, was covered with them. Their total omission here posed a conundrum.
He considered possible explanations. Perhaps it was a solid block of material that the Cocytans considered valuable for some unknown reason. Maybe it was a sculpture, albeit on a vast scale. Or it might be a place of worship, which engravings would only defile, a sort of interstellar menhir or altar.
He was on his way out when a weight in his pocket gave him pause. His fingers curled around the portable alien mapping device he had borrowed from the second spire. Why not give it a try and see what it could really do?
Removing it from his pants, he passed his fingers over the engravings as he had done before. A projected globe of Cocytus promptly appeared in front of him. Increasing the magnification and reducing the scale shrank the image until only the six islands and their portion of sea floated in front of him.
With careful adjustment he was able to eliminate the other islands to focus on the islet on which he stood. As he’d hoped, the incredible map reduced his point of view still farther until he found himself looking at a projection of the pyramidal structure in front of him. The double view was mildly disconcerting. At least, he mused, the device didn’t show him looking at himself. It was a map, not a real-time imager.
Despite his best efforts he could not realize a view of the pyramid’s deep interior. That was apparently asking too much of the marvelous device’s powers of resolution. But careful manipulation did reveal a tunnel leading inward. He was pleased both with his intuition and with the mechanism’s performance.
Moving around to one side of the structure, he paused before the tunnel’s location. The sloping, gleaming piece of wall before him looked exactly like every other section of wall. There was nothing to indicate it concealed an entrance. Of one thing he was certain: He would never have found it without the mapping device.
He searched in vain for a door-opening robot similar to those he had utilized so successfully on the main island. In lieu of robots, he found a number of other devices sitting near the concealed entryway. Time passed while he struggled to find the right combination of devices to employ. He was about to give up when his last effort caused a portion of the wall to shimmer as if it had suddenly been doused in running water, and an opening appeared in the surface.
It was several times his width and about twice his height. Whether that reflected ceremonial proportions or a tight squeeze for the builders he had no way of knowing. He still had no idea what the founders of this lost civilization had looked like. Taking a deep breath, he entered.
Several paces in he paused to look back and was gratified to see that the portal remained open. He could clearly see out into the spire’s main chamber. Thus reassured, he continued on, moving deeper into the heart of the pyramid. As he advanced, light flowed from the floor, ceiling and walls around him, illuminating the way forward even as it dimmed behind him. What hidden automatic implement tracked his progress he didn’t know, but he resolved to try to find out.
Unless they found a way home, he was going to have plenty of time for such diversions.
The floor of the passageway led down at a slight angle, eventually depositing him in a small chamber filled with other devices. He had to spend more time analyzing their possible purpose, until he recognized several from previous encounters. Combining these opened a second door, allowing him to proceed farther.
Unlike the exterior of the pyramid, the chamber and doorway were magnificently ornamented with inlaid etchings and glyph work. While they appeared at first glance to be abstract in tone, closer inspection revealed plants and animals, minerals and stars: a splendid panoply of life on Cocytus. A few of the lowlier creatures he recognized from their brief sojourn on the surface of the central island.
Nowhere in the elaborate renderings, however, did he find anything that might have been a Cocytan.
“He looks directly at us and does not recognize,” declaimed a hundred critics.
“How is he to distinguish us from the other life-forms?” The first was not at all discouraged. “The mural is an idyllic pastoral.
We are depicted at natural play, not operating instrumentalities or erecting tall buildings. The necessary reference points are not present.”
“Would he recognize us even if they were?” argued eleven others. They were emphatic to the point where Low turned sharply. Looking over his shoulder, he saw nothing, even though the eleven were hovering somewhere in the vicinity of his collar. He had felt their query without hearing it.
Having sensed movement, he blinked. There was nothing, only the dimly lit internal chamber and the new passage ahead. Frowning, he started forward.
Like the chamber, the new tunnel was elaborately embellished. The pyramid seemed larger on the inside than it had appeared to be from without. Some trick of alien optics, he marveled. Given what he had seen already, he was able to accept more distortions of light and space without pausing to wonder how the effect was accomplished.
Instead of glyphs and engravings, the decoration took the form of projected bas-reliefs that hovered barely a fingernail’s thickness above the actual wall. The wealth of material, of potential knowledge, overwhelmed him.
Brink should be here, he knew. The passageway was an archaeologist’s paradise. He studied the decorations as he advanced, trying to memorize what he could. More detailed analysis would have to wait.
Brink was preoccupied with the life crystals. Low wasn’t quite ready to label it an obsession. When the scientist had finished “attending” to them, surely he would be ready to go back to work. Low felt the couple of crystals resting in his own back pocket. Their gentle warmth was comforting, but hardly seemed the stuff of madness.
An opening loomed ahead and he quickened his pace, making sure to keep a careful eye on the floor. There was no guarantee a gap wouldn’t appear unexpectedly in the surface underfoot. Perhaps he also unwittingly touched the wrong section of wall, or passed through an invisible beam. He never knew what had triggered the sequence of events that followed.
“It is the end,” declared a cluster of perceivers. “He is mesmerized by the beauty and mystery that surrounds him. So much so that a necessary portion of his thought-process has been neglected.”
“It would not matter.” A thousand flowed back and forth through the solid matter of the pyramid, the air within, the decorations Boston Low found so intriguing. “The end would be the same.”
“A worthy effort,” affirmed one million. “The best in a century. Perhaps those who come after will do as well.” The presences were already thinking of Low in the past tense, as if he were already dead.