hundred years. That’s why the lights don’t work;
the current got shut off a long time ago, and the switches that did
the shutting are someplace we haven’t found so far.
We haven’t found the place where Anna was
born and her parents lived, not yet, but we found something else
almost as important. There’s a big corridor on fourth level, wide
as a road, that runs most of the way from one end of the complex to
the other. All the stairways either open onto it or connect to
corridors that do, and the boxes the ancients used to go up and
down from floor to floor when they didn’t want to use the
stairs—there’s a word for those, but I forget what it is—those are
all close to that corridor too. It’s close to five kloms long, and
it’s big and dark and full of echoes, especially when the only
people in it are two ruinmen with a little electric lamp, and the
layer of dust on the floor pretty clearly hasn’t been bothered in a
good long time.
The first time Berry and I found that
corridor, we walked all the way to the end of it, and didn’t notice
much of anything except the doors and corridors that opened off it.
We must have walked down it again half a dozen times, doing a rough
search of the fourth level and looking for signs that people had
been there recently. It wasn’t until Berry and I were coming back
from the last of those that he noticed that a long blank wall
toward the middle of the complex, had a little black screen on the
middle of the wall, just sitting there doing nothing in
particular.
He stopped and looked at it, and called me
back to it, and it wasn’t until then that we noticed that the long
blank wall had seams in it. I guessed what it was, about half a
minute after Berry did, and so he ran to get old Anna while I
looked over the fingerprint lock. Those are common enough in old
ruins, but I’d never heard of anybody who managed to open one
except with pry bars and saws, or maybe a keg of gunpowder.
Berry brought everyone else with him, too,
which I’d expected, but Anna was ahead of the others. She walked up
to the screen, studied it for a few moments, and gave me one of her
sidelong looks. “Do you want me to open it?” she asked, as though
there was any question.
I nodded. “If you think it’ll recognize
you.”
That got me a smile that didn’t have the
least bit of humor in it. “Of course it will,” she said. “All the
children had their prints entered as soon as they were born.” She
put one of her fingers flat against the screen and rolled it back
and forth a bit, and damn if the screen didn’t suddenly light up
and turn from black to green.
Then the rumbling started. I thought for just
a moment that it might be an earthquake, and it certainly shook the
corridor like one, but it was just old gears that hadn’t moved for
something like a century. All of us but Anna watched with our
mouths hanging open as a section of the blank wall slid back a good
half meeda, split in the middle, and slid away to either side.
Inside was pitch black, and then we raised our lamps and walked
forward into one of the secret places of Star’s Reach.
The ancients had a lot of places like the one
we entered, and no one, not even Plummer, has ever been able to
tell me why. They’re like mazes, with flimsy shoulder-high walls of
some kind of plastic foam and fabric, all rotted by the time we get
to them, held up with metal posts; in every nook of the maze
there’s a desk, and usually a chair, and if you’re lucky there’s an
old computer sitting on or under each desk, or at least some pieces
of one that can be stripped for metal and parts. Sometimes there
are other things too. Ruinmen love finding places like that,
because you can break up the flimsy walls and take apart the desks
and chairs and things without any risk of bringing the ceiling down
on you, and the metal’s worth quite a bit even if there aren’t any
computers left. What made so many of the ancients spend their days
in
the current got shut off a long time ago, and the switches that did
the shutting are someplace we haven’t found so far.
We haven’t found the place where Anna was
born and her parents lived, not yet, but we found something else
almost as important. There’s a big corridor on fourth level, wide
as a road, that runs most of the way from one end of the complex to
the other. All the stairways either open onto it or connect to
corridors that do, and the boxes the ancients used to go up and
down from floor to floor when they didn’t want to use the
stairs—there’s a word for those, but I forget what it is—those are
all close to that corridor too. It’s close to five kloms long, and
it’s big and dark and full of echoes, especially when the only
people in it are two ruinmen with a little electric lamp, and the
layer of dust on the floor pretty clearly hasn’t been bothered in a
good long time.
The first time Berry and I found that
corridor, we walked all the way to the end of it, and didn’t notice
much of anything except the doors and corridors that opened off it.
We must have walked down it again half a dozen times, doing a rough
search of the fourth level and looking for signs that people had
been there recently. It wasn’t until Berry and I were coming back
from the last of those that he noticed that a long blank wall
toward the middle of the complex, had a little black screen on the
middle of the wall, just sitting there doing nothing in
particular.
He stopped and looked at it, and called me
back to it, and it wasn’t until then that we noticed that the long
blank wall had seams in it. I guessed what it was, about half a
minute after Berry did, and so he ran to get old Anna while I
looked over the fingerprint lock. Those are common enough in old
ruins, but I’d never heard of anybody who managed to open one
except with pry bars and saws, or maybe a keg of gunpowder.
Berry brought everyone else with him, too,
which I’d expected, but Anna was ahead of the others. She walked up
to the screen, studied it for a few moments, and gave me one of her
sidelong looks. “Do you want me to open it?” she asked, as though
there was any question.
I nodded. “If you think it’ll recognize
you.”
That got me a smile that didn’t have the
least bit of humor in it. “Of course it will,” she said. “All the
children had their prints entered as soon as they were born.” She
put one of her fingers flat against the screen and rolled it back
and forth a bit, and damn if the screen didn’t suddenly light up
and turn from black to green.
Then the rumbling started. I thought for just
a moment that it might be an earthquake, and it certainly shook the
corridor like one, but it was just old gears that hadn’t moved for
something like a century. All of us but Anna watched with our
mouths hanging open as a section of the blank wall slid back a good
half meeda, split in the middle, and slid away to either side.
Inside was pitch black, and then we raised our lamps and walked
forward into one of the secret places of Star’s Reach.
The ancients had a lot of places like the one
we entered, and no one, not even Plummer, has ever been able to
tell me why. They’re like mazes, with flimsy shoulder-high walls of
some kind of plastic foam and fabric, all rotted by the time we get
to them, held up with metal posts; in every nook of the maze
there’s a desk, and usually a chair, and if you’re lucky there’s an
old computer sitting on or under each desk, or at least some pieces
of one that can be stripped for metal and parts. Sometimes there
are other things too. Ruinmen love finding places like that,
because you can break up the flimsy walls and take apart the desks
and chairs and things without any risk of bringing the ceiling down
on you, and the metal’s worth quite a bit even if there aren’t any
computers left. What made so many of the ancients spend their days
in
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