L Modesitt - Empress of Eternity

Yet…

Tick, tick…patter…patter…

Outside the all-too-ancient structure, the sand flailed futilely at the smooth unblemished surface of the gray stone, and to the north other granules drifted across the waters of the canal before sinking, their surfaces wetted, into the unchanging depths.

Kavn Duhyle glanced northward across the canal. His eyes studied the thin line of silvery white that marked the ice less than twenty kays to the north, beyond the swampy green and scattered trees. Nearer, but on the far side of the canal, he noted that the icy runoff from the all-too-brief summer had dwindled to three narrow waterfalls over the blue-gray stone canal wall. The canal was a massive engineering work that stretched two thousand kays, almost precisely. It predated the Old Ones of legend who had survived the second time of Iceberg Earth by close to half a million years. The precision of the canal?s engineering never failed to impress him, day after day. Its permanence emphasized, in his mind, their greatness far more than their scattered records that referenced civilizations yet even older-and much more than the fragmentary and decayed ruins of more recent civilizations.

At times, strange artifacts washed up on the sandy shores of the Jainoran Ocean south of the canal along the coast, fragments of fossilized animals wearing equally fragmented and fossilized collars. More intriguing were the strangely designed artifacts that appeared to be replacement parts. Most appeared unchanged by age. Some had what passed for circuits on the nanetic level. Some even channeled energy flows, but for what function and at what levels of current and amperage it was impossible to determine without larger assemblies.

In the late afternoon, Duhyle stood behind the wall that topped the canal near its western end. Ten yards to the east stood the ancient structure that was an integral part of the canal and now served as Helkyria?s laboratory. To his left, beyond the shadows, the summer sun warmed the air above the pale blue-gray stone, but not the stone itself, that anomalous adamantine synthstone that formed the walls of the canal and the building. The material was impervious to weather, and even to nucleonic cutters. The canal walls extended down four point three kays, widening as they did. Duhyle?s own observations confirmed the few studies that suggested it had been engineered on the fermionic level. That technology had vanished with the Old Ones. Over the years, structures had been built on the wide canal walls, but none had lasted. Records stated that more than one light house had been built where the ocean side of the wall met with the canal side. Now there was not a trace of any structure. A solar filament collector, integrated with the landscape over more than five square kays south of the canal, as well as a small tidal pump, provided power to the lab and to the extensive backup battery/capacitors.

In places, land had formed inside the canal. There were more than a few lakes or swamps behind the canal walls, especially on the north side. Nowhere had the walls broken. In some locales, the walls appeared to curve, but surveys and satellite images had indicated that the canal remained unbowed. The surveys also indicated a semicircular depression-an underwater meteor impact crater one point seven kays across-that extended seaward from the underwater end of the canal. That crater, now mostly filled with sediment, and the fact that the impact had not had any effect on the canal itself, confirmed the canal?s indestructibility.

To Duhyle?s right appeared Helkyria, also looking out over the canal. He glanced toward her. "What are you thinking?"

"About the ostensible purpose of the canal."

"Ostensible purpose?"

"It?s obvious that it was designed to stop glaciation from spreading farther south on the continent…or extreme desertification from spreading northward. But why would the Old Ones really have bothered? That couldn?t have been its only purpose."

"You?ve said that before. Besides, in full glaciation, the water would freeze the entire way across the canal."

"If we had had a recurrence of Iceberg Earth, that would have been true, but for periodic ice ages it should have worked. It apparently did. It also slowed desertification from the south side more than once, and certainly during the time of the Hu-Ruche." She glanced across the dark gray-blue waters. "The canal walls go down kays and then rejoin. In almost no place is the water in the center less than a kay and a half deep. It?s wide enough that it?s effectively as salty as the Jainoran Ocean and the Great Eastern Sea, and the walls are impervious so that the salt water doesn?t penetrate the water table. It?s almost, but not quite, an ecological barrier. Why just almost? They had to have known that."

"They didn?t know enough to preserve what they learned."

She smiled faintly, and the tips of her short-cut silver-blond curls shimmered golden for a moment above the creamy brown skin of her neck and forehead. Duhyle wondered what he?d said that amused her so. He had enough sense to wait for her to speak again.

"That?s not necessarily true. All we know is that we haven?t found or recognized any repository of high-tech knowledge, except for the canal itself."

"Those of the lost times did?" He shook his head. "We?ve found the artifacts and ruins of two differing cultures on Mars and on some of the asteroids. There?s no hint of the Old Ones, or any technology that could have built the canal." He glanced skyward, his eyes avoiding the glare of the midday sun and settling momentarily on the Mist Ring, a silver line that arched from horizon to horizon, like a bridge across the sky.

"That makes my point."

Duhyle had no idea what her point even was.

"Don?t you understand, Kavn? If you were one of the Old Ones, would you have wanted us to know all that now? How many times have technological civilizations arisen and fallen?"

"All the more reason to leave the knowledge," he pointed out.

"With odds at a thousand to one against me, I?d still bet that no preceding civilization, even that of the Old Ones itself, collapsed for lack of technology." She offered a broad smile.

"The Tech Paradox?"

"It makes sense. You can see it at work in our own culture. More technology requires greater interdependence. Greater interdependence creates greater vulnerability, which in turn requires the greater application of technology and more concentrated energy sources-"

"Now," he interrupted, "is when we could use help. The ice is advancing an average of four-fifths a kay a year. That rate is projected to increase. We?re losing forests, and the lands that support our biologics. Directed solar energy is too concentrated for effective climatic balance. No one trusts us engineers to deploy green house gases and other large-scale geo-engineering."

"Not after the Searing. Besides, I?m not certain knowledge always provides an answer."

"Then why are you trying so hard to find it?"

"Because the alternatives appear worse. The Aesyr are pressing for building breeder reactors and filling the atmosphere with green house gases-anything to stop the glaciation in the short term. We?re here in a desperate attempt to find another alternative before the political unrest turns into chaos and possible revolution." Her voice held an edged humor. "Even so, I worry. What if the ancients knew their technology wouldn?t be good for us? Technologies don?t always graft to the cultures that didn?t develop them. We don?t even understand some of the biologic records from the Caelaarnan Unity, and they never advanced beyond near-space and a few out-system remote sensing stations." Her silver irises darkened to almost black, and Duhyle could have sworn that chill radiated from her. "The Hu-Ruche Technocracy rose and almost fell before it rebuilt itself. Along the way they measured everything and left incredible records of those measurements on anomalous permaplate, but almost nothing of their technology, and what little remains is so condensed and cryptic that no one yet has made sense of it, except that after that near fall, there are continuing and puzzling references to what appears to be the rainbow. Neither the Amberian Anarchists or the Saenlyn Federation even attempted colonization or out-system planetary modifications, not so far as we can tell."