Jack McDevitt - Eternity Road

“The underground lake,” said Flojian.

“So far,” said Chaka, “Knobby seems to be accurate.”

The surface of the lake lay several feet below floor level. The lake itself stretched into the dark. Chaka looked up at the ceiling. It was quite smooth and flat, only a few feet above the water. “This is a chamber,” she said, “not a cave.”

“Look at this.” Flojian directed the beam from his lamp to a stairway. The stairway descended into the water.

Chaka stared at it a long time. “I don’t think this area’s supposed to be under water,* she said.

Claver by now had joined them. “The doors are hatches,” he said. “They wanted to seal off the lake.”

“Why?” asked Flojian.

“Maybe there’s something that comes out of the water,” suggested Chaka.

Claver’s brow furrowed. “I just don’t understand what happened here,” he said.

The tall corridor was lined with open rooms, all resembling the one that Chaka had looked into. They entered the nearest one and played their lantern beams across ancient tables, benches, cabinets. Everything was wet and cold.

“Must be water in the walls,” said Claver.

Many of the cabinets were standardized. They were made of Roadmaker materials, neither wood nor metal, and most had four or five drawers of varying thicknesses. Some of the drawers were empty. Most contained a kind of brown sludge.

Quait knelt beside one and held his lamp close. He dug into the sludge and drew out a piece of shriveled material. Several threads hung from it.

“Might be a book binding,” said Claver.

Flojian nodded. “I think that’s right. I think that’s exactly what it is. That’s what they all are. They put the volumes into individual drawers. You wanted to see something, you pulled it out, took it over to one of the tables, read it at your leisure.”

Chaka surveyed the sludge and said nothing.

Each drawer had been fixed with a metal plate, possibly identifying the book within. But the plates were no longer legible.

Because of the poor light, they were slow to appreciate the size of the chamber. The ceiling was high, about twenty feet. And the room was quite extensive, probably a hundred feet long and half as wide. It was circled by a gallery, which was connected to the lower level by a staircase at either end. Two hundred cabinets, at a rough guess, were scattered across the floor.

They walked through the debris with sinking spirits, and climbed to the gallery hoping that, somehow, miraculously, the upper levels might have escaped the general destruction. They had not.

What had happened?

“We know there was stuff here,” said Chaka. “Karik and his people found some books intact. Somewhere.”

“Let’s see what else there is,” said Quait.

There were three more such rooms located in that wing. But all were in identical condition. They trooped listlessly through the wreckage, trying to read plates, to find something that had survived.

The opposite wing, however, gave reason to hope. It too had four storage areas. Three were ruined. But at the end of the corridor, a door was still closed. “Maybe,” said Chaka.

“These doors look watertight, too,” said Claver.

The locking mechanism was operated by a ringbolt. Quait lifted it, and the others withdrew to a safe distance, taking the lamps with them.

But the door would not open. “Give me a bar,” he said.

They worked almost half an hour, forcing the door away from the jamb. When they were satisfied it was ready, they reassumed their positions, Quait inserted the bar at a strategic point, looked at them hopefully, and pulled.

The door creaked. He tried again and it came open a few inches. Quait sniffed at the air. “I think it’s okay,” he said.

“Wait,” cautioned Claver.

But Quait’s blood was up. He ignored the warning and threw his weight behind the effort. Hinges popped and metal creaked. He got his fingers into the opening and pulled. The door came.

They tied a lamp to a line and dragged it across the threshold from a respectful distance. When nothing untoward occurred, they entered the room.

It was identical to the others, two stories high, circled by a gallery. But it was dry. The furniture, the cabinets and chairs and tables were all standing. And bound volumes gleamed inside the cabinets.

Chaka shrieked with joy. Her cry echoed through the chamber.

“I don’t understand it,” said Claver. “What happened here?”

“Who cares?” Quait strode into the room, went to the nearest cabinet, and opened the top drawer. “Look at this,” he said.

Black leather. Gold script. The Annals. By lacitus.

The cover was held shut by snaps. He wiped off a tabletop and lifted the book out. The others gathered behind him while he set it down and opened it.

They turned the pages, past the titles into the text:

He was given sway over the more important provinces, not because he was exceptionally talented, but because he was a good businessman, and neither his ambitions nor his talent reached any higher….

The cabinets were arranged methodically, usually in groups of four, backed against each other, with angled reading boards and writing tables nearby. Chairs were arranged in convenient locations. A long elliptical counter dominated the center of the chamber. .

Flojian selected a cabinet, deliberately averted his eyes from the identifying plate and, while the others watched, opened the top drawer and removed the book. Its title was written across the cover in silver script:

<&ai(teia

by

ls)erner Soeyer Volume 9

He opened the cover gently, almost tenderly. Title and author appeared again. And a date: 1939.

Turn a page. Lines of script in shining black ink filled the vast Whiteness Of the paper.

Gtiuca/mna/Jlejuvcessfyai&cAacommu-nt’ y jwserues am /nuuau/s //r pjfyjrca/ and’ai/efiec/uaJc/farac/er. S%ir £r nmo/m/afpasses taoay, oa//ne fype remains.

“Voices from another world,” Chaka whispered.

They embraced in the flickering light. For a few moments the shadows drew back. All the tension amd frustration of the preceding months drained away. Claver, pumping Quait’s hand, gave way to tears. “I’m glad I came,” he said again and again. “I’m glad I came.”

These were substantial volumes, not books as another age might have understood the term. They were written by hand, thousands of lines of carefully produced script on large sheets of paper, the whole bound into gilt-edged leather covers. They were of the same family as Connecticut Yankee.

It must have been the history section. They found works they’d heard of, like Gibbon’s The Decline and fall of the Roman Empire (in numerous volumes), and books they hadn’t, like The Anabasis . They paged through McMurtrie’s The American Presidency in Crisis and Ingel Kyatawa’s Japan in the Modern Age and Thomas More’s The History of King Richard III . There was Voltaire’s The Age of King Louis XIV and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Josephus’s The Jewish War . There were copies of The American Century , Kissinger’s Diplomacy , and America and the Pacific, 1914-2011 .

“These are relatively recent transcriptions,” said Quait. “Look at the condition of the paper. They can’t be more than a couple of centuries old.”

The gallery was also filled with volumes. Chaka went up the staircase and plunged into the upper level treasures.

They almost forgot where they were. Like children, they gamboled among the ancient texts, calling one another over to look at this or that, carrying their lamps from place to place, opening everything.

Chaka was paging through a copy of Manchester’s The Last Lion. Suddenly her eyes brightened and she shook Quait. “I think we’ve found Winston,” she laughed.