Nigel’s elation at their negotiation trickled away as he looked at the pale, emaciated corpse of a middle-aged man, kept suspended somehow. A mass of tiny magnetic readers crowned the head. They could “read him” quite well, a technician told them. “Isotope analysis shows he’s from one point three million years uptime.”
“What did he die of?” asked Nikka, ever the tech type.
“Radiation burns.”
“Any memories?”
The young man blinked owlishly. “Some. Missing the short-term recall, of course.”
Memories, indeed. Fractured pictures. The same hazy sky, mapped in the 0.511 million electron Volt line. Only far more developed, with ornate structures corkscrewing across a mottled ruby sky.
More: a bleak landscape marked off by boxy monuments. Among these crawled three-wheeled things that appeared to be not vehicles but living creatures.
“Or mechs,” Nigel said crisply.
“Who was he?” Nikka asked pensively.
“We cannot really understand that. He does not have the personality signatures we know. All I can unscramble be images. What these pictures mean, we can say not.”
“Why not?”
“He haved different cerebral organization. Internal organs be altered, too. He be another species.”
Angelina was shocked. “He looks like us!”
The pale young man shrugged. “Tinker with the insides all you want, but keep the outside looking the same. Otherwise, people beed nervous.”
“That’s why you can’t get much from their minds?” Angelina pressed him.
“That, and cultural differences. This fellow did not look at the world the way we do. It shows up in how he stored memories.”
Nigel found all this depressing. More bodies, but still no one, not even pale pedants, understood why.
When they went to sign off on the arrangements, the Chairwoman herself appeared. “You’re going into mech-dominated territory, you know,” she said severely.
Nigel guessed that she was having second thoughts about the deal. Or maybe her ego was getting in the way again. Not uncommon, he thought wanly. “You’re sure?”
“We receive no dead mechs coming back through the esty Vors. Only humans.”
“You’re sure?” Nikka asked pointedly.
“We pay close attention. The Old Ones make sure of that.” She snorted with frustration.
“Why?” Nigel persisted.
“The old questions. You have them even in your time, um?” A speculative look, then she recited as if from memory. “First, they want to know what the mechs want up there in the far future. Plenty of mechs goed into the future one-way, using Vors.”
“To carry information forward?” Nikka asked.
“Possibly. The Old Ones want to find out why.”
“And stop it?” Nigel asked.
“I suppose. Or at least understand.”
Nikka nodded. “So do we.”
The Chairwoman plainly could see no percentage in such foolhardiness. “Why? The esty’s trouble enough if you just sit still in it.”
“Carnivorous curiosity,” Nigel said.
She snorted. “A child’s reasoning. If you could see the things I do just to keep us tipped up—”
“Yes?” Angelina asked. Nigel was happy to see her speak up, for she had been cowed by this place. “Why do you tilt your city?”
The Chairwoman said scornfully, “Why, it be beautiful. Only barbarians would even think of asking.”
FOURTEEN
Grey Mech
The mecurial Chairwoman invited them to sleep on her personal estate as they arranged details for their esty transit. This proved to be the same ornate, almost satirically baroque villa where they had met her. They had entered by the back door, amid thronged streets; the true entrance gave onto a cantilevered view of the cupped city, from the uppermost rim of it.
Large birds, some with shiny teeth and even lips, hung on the winds off the Chairwoman’s balcony. One swooped near and eyed them, as if sizing up a meal. It was half the size of a man. Here gravity eased, lending everything an airy lightness that reminded Nigel of getting drunk but suffering no consequences. Still, the toothy birds smiled at them with unnerving assurance. They went back inside.
The next waning lasted quite long. Somehow the city could influence the pulses of brilliant glow emitted by the timestone, shaping them to a roughly regular schedule: dark about a third of the time, enough to sleep if you were not too tired.
Nobody here seemed to get tired. Noisy, chaotically colorful, they rushed about a lot. Nikka wondered aloud if this was just their Old Fart bewilderment at the pointless energy of the young. Nigel shook his head. He had harbored that notion for so long that he had passed through to another state, in which he ceased grasping for the fullness of life and let it come to him instead. It had taken him centuries to realize that joy and pain were equally biting and rewarded close inspection equally little. They were just there, like flowers. Better to take them for their flavors than their metaphors.
