Toby could not understand why Walmsley, still naked, wasn’t getting chilled. The wind purred in his ears, crisp and insistent. “Where’d you get parts of this Library?”
“It was in the Lair when we arrived. So were other aliens.”
Toby recalled his wanderings. “I haven’t seen many.”
Walmsley chuckled, a curious rustling in his chest. “Are you sure you could recognize them?”
“They’d have cities, wouldn’t they? Machines, some—”
“Most don’t. A few not only don’t have cities, they don’t have clothes.”
“Like animals?”
“Like aliens. Anyway, we’ve all spread out. And many have different ecospheres. They breathe odd gases and we know next to nothing about them. Most aren’t talkative. It would seem that chatter is fundamentally a primate trait.”
Toby gazed around at the distant crumpled mountain range. Timestone simmered and flared with light. Shadows played across angled perspectives. Here the land misled the eye. Brilliant blades of rusty light lanced up through the timestone in the valley below, illuminating the cottony clouds. Denser masses embedded deep in the timestone cast shadows up, into the air and finally on the underbellies of clouds. The pyramid was pure stone, not timestone, and so squatted as a dark mass lit by smoldering glows beneath. Far above, the esty curved over, bounding the Lane. A high arch of timestone answered with its own beams and shimmers of reddish light. The esty seemed to smolder. “So this whole thing is a kind of . . . museum?”
“Museum?” Walmsley looked surprised, then covered it with a shrug. “I hope it isn’t merely that.”
“Sounds like it is. The Old Ones made it, didn’t they?”
“I believe so. They were close to the scene, the explosion.”
“Maybe they’re the museum keepers.”
Walmsley laughed in his clipped, reserved way. “And we’re the exhibits?”
“Could be.” Toby watched clouds come skimming down from the vault above. Descending blades of incandescent light were so strong they dissolved clouds that drifted under them. A high blue haze suggested an atmosphere as deep as a planet’s. “Do these Old Ones ever come around to visit the displays?”
“In a way.” Walmsley stiffened slightly, and it wasn’t the chill getting to him.
“What do they look at?”
“If it’s a museum, I suppose I’m the librarian.”
Well, Toby thought, if Walmsley had his reasons for sidestepping a question, it was his right. The geezer was fabulously old, though now Toby didn’t believe his story about being from Earth for a squeezed second. Best to play along with him. “Oh? How?”
He waved casually at the pyramid mountain. “This is it. The Galactic Library.”
Toby gaped. “You need this much room?”
“Ten billion years, the galaxy’s been whirling around.”
“But this is a whole mountain—”
“Four hundred billion stars, give or take a hundred billion. And don’t forget the smaller stars in the halo above and below the disk. They may have started spawning lukewarm planets first of all. There has been plenty of time and room for life to blossom.” Something bitter flickered in Walmsley’s face. “And to die.”
Rising winds moaned in Toby’s ears. “Did mechs kill ’em?”
“Not usually, I gather. The mechanicals obey biological logic, just as we do. They were first made by Naturals, just like our computers on Earth. Later they replaced their parent species, often on worlds made damn near unlivable by some stupidity of their parents. Fatal stupidity.”
“So you’ve got the Naturals’ . . .”
“Science. Literature. Recordings of art. Lore. And things I cannot fathom as belonging to any category.”
“The Old Ones come here to read?”
Walmsley nodded. “I can’t often tell when they’ve been, until they’re gone. Crafty buggers, they are.”
“And the mechs, they can’t find this place?”
“They know. So far they’ve been turned back.”
“By what?” The pyramid was impressive, but apparently undefended.
“Ingenuity, mostly. In the early days, just plain people. The mechs would break through the esty in some new fashion. Sometimes they would get onto that plain out there and after it was over we found bodies soaked with oil and lubricants from damaged mechs who had run people over before they could be killed. The people looked like brown cigars. Suredead as well. The mechs would pack in all they could of people’s running minds, straight out of the cerebral cortex.”
Toby nodded. “And when somebody finally killed the mech . . .”
“Right. You ended the people, too.”
“Damn.”
“That made you think twice about doing it. No choice, though, in the end.”
“My grandfather? He passed this way?”
“The Old Ones brought him. I spoke to him and then they took him away. Fine fellow. We got drunk once.”
