Jack Chalker - Priam's Lens

“Who are you?” the colonel called. “Where are you? Show yourself!”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, as I’m not really much of anywhere at all,” the voice, a rather mild, almost bland man’s baritone, responded. “However, I do believe I should turn on illumination. I apologize that it is only emergency lighting, but I dare not risk anything more powerful.”

The tube did not illuminate, but at the far end a pale yellow glow turned on, showing an entry into a larger area beyond.

“What do you think?” Kat asked nervously.

“A trick!” N’Gana hissed. “I don’t know what this is, but it’s not possible!”

“We have a choice?” Gene Harker put in, considering their position. “Come on! If we’ve got light, let’s use it.”

“Ghosts! I will not go down to where the ghosts live!” Littlefeet said firmly. “Anything living I will take on, even the demons themselves, but you can not fight a ghost!”

“That’s no ghost, Littlefeet!” Kat tried to calm him.

“I’m afraid that’s about what I am,” the voice responded. “But I will not harm you. I will not harm any of you. I cannot. I was built by your kind to serve and protect, and that is what I continue to do.”

Both N’Gana and Harker started to breathe again. “You’re a computer?” the colonel asked.

“I am a mentat. I was supervisor of this installation until the Fall. Please—come down, all of you. You cannot know how happy I am to see you. I began to fear that my message had not gotten out with Jastrow.”

“It’s okay,” Harker told Littlefeet and Spotty, who still seemed more frightened of the voice than of what they’d just come through. “It’s a friend. We know who it is now and it is on our side. Please—you trusted us this far, trust us now.”

They made their way carefully down toward the yellow glow, and finally reached a point where the great tube had a section broken out of one side. Looking through the break, the first underground level of the old complex showed in eerie indirect light.

It was huge. It was also, astonishingly, pretty much intact. Robot arms and huge control cabs were all over, and sheets of various fabricated parts of some great machines were stacked up here and there.

Just below was a catwalk, intact except for one section immediately below that had been more or less dissolved. The remaining section was only a couple of meters away, though, and easy enough to reach.

“The breach in the pipe was quite recent—about five years ago,” the mentat told them. “When the water rushes down the pipe, a little more goes, but it’s not that serious. Only a small amount reaches here now.”

One by one, they lowered themselves down onto the catwalk, each helping the next. Harker decided to be last, to ensure that Littlefeet and Spotty would go in as well. He not only didn’t want them to run, he particularly didn’t want them to go back up and outside and fall into the data stream of the Titans. Not now. Not after all this.

The two natives managed, although they were transfixed by the vast scene in front of them. Neither had ever even been inside a building before, and certainly neither had seen the ancient places when they were still whole.

“How are you getting power?” N’Gana asked the century-old machine. “Surely nothing is still running.”

“No, the Titans absorb all our power like a sponge. It is only in the security areas with the low-level trickle charges just a few amps, really—that any of the original stored power is still used or even exists. It is too low-level for their mechanisms to pick up. In truth, I was as surprised as anyone to get even this power. It is Titan power.”

“Titan power!”

“When their installation was fully constructed and turned on, the grounded base intersected one of my old power plates. So long as I do not vary the flow and simply use what seeps in, I have been able to maintain this level and my own existence. Of course, I am mostly shut down unless someone is here, and you are only the second in almost ninety years.”

“Nobody was left trapped here when they took over?” Harker asked.

“Yes, some were, but as I lost all power for a period of almost two years except trickle from batteries, this place was uninhabitable. No power, no food, and even the water turned off—well, they had to evacuate, those who could. I went dormant due to lack of power then and did not revive until Jastrow showed up a few years ago. Since then I have remained awake, in a standby setting. Unfortunately, I have been unable to do very much, since I cannot draw more power than seeps through and I dare not use it for any mechanical purposes lest they detect it and eliminate this place and me. They are capable of doing so, but do not bother unless there is some threat. I have detected several security stations and some places that were almost certainly old refuges for survivors that appear to have been subjected to sufficient energy to turn them and everything inside into molten rock. It is a delicate balancing act. I have, however, managed to recharge virtually all the security and backup power supplies over the period.”

“Where to from here?” N’Gana asked.

“Down the catwalk, then use the ladders to go down to the floor. From that point, I will direct you to where the problem lay for Jastrow. I see that you have brought a Quadulan per my recommendations.”

“That was your message? I thought it was that poor fellow’s,” Kat commented as they made their way along the very cold metallic catwalk.

“Oh, Jastrow sent it. It was the only way. He was quite a brave man. He had the morals of a thief and the qualities of a devil, but I provided him with the only thing he could do that he found satisfying—revenge. He wasn’t afraid to die, I can tell you that, if in so doing he felt he could get the Titans. I was quite afraid that he wouldn’t make it to one of the only three remaining monitoring stations with sufficient reserve power to send a message. He couldn’t send it from here, obviously. The moment he did, there would have been a rather rapid and interested investigation and that would have given up the game.”

They reached the old factory floor now, covered in fine dust. Harker noted that there were other prints there, those of a single barefoot individual coming and going. Although they were almost certainly those of the unfortunate Jastrow and years old, they looked as if they had been made yesterday.

“Follow the footprints,” the mentat instructed. “You will come to it.”

They walked across the ghostly floor, the huge machinery all around making it an eerie place. Every voice, every cough, was magnified and echoed back and forth in the place. Only the mentat’s voice was devoid of any acoustical naturalness; it seemed to come from a closed and baffled chamber.

“What are these things in here?” Kat asked the computer. “What was it that was made here?”

“Caps and plates for genholes,” the mentat responded. “The device works by capturing the stringlike pulses from the temporal discontinuity in the lens. It cannot, however, be truly capped or controlled. The only way to handle it is to capture a string and put it through a genhole and out somewhere else. Right now the junction caps direct it into an area of space where it can do no real harm. It is the junction that is the key to the operation. In relays, you can redirect it so that it emerges out of any genhole you determine. After that you have no control. You can, however, see the possibilities. If you can switch genholes at various junctions, then you can direct it to specific targets. There are countless genholes out there now, each a potential exit point. After that, though, it is wild. That is why they could not test it against anything planetary. Nobody knows what will happen. Nobody knows what the strings are, or if they are strings or energy spikes or temporal discontinuities or something else. Once you have an object generating these energy spikes by virtue of a temporal loop in which it is always trying to fall out of our universe, well, you can see we are in uncharted waters. That was why The Confederacy abandoned the idea even though it had no alternatives. Early tests were inconclusive. The trick was getting a burst short enough to keep from tearing apart everything.”