Jacqueline Lichtenberg [Lifewave 01] Molt Brother

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opened, running north and south as far as she could see. It revealed a few
bluish stones, indicating that this had been a cluster of buildings. But
nothing iden-tifiable had been left from that occupation.
"Our best estimate of the age," said Dorsan, "is plus or minus twenty
thousand years. It could have been any time from the end of the First Lifewave
onward as much as forty thousand years."
She had been at the conference in Nunin's office because Dennis was there.
She'd been most puzzled when Madlain had replied to the Interface's guess
peevishly: "You've not been very much help lately!"
The Interface had said smoothly, "I'm simply reporting the machine
correlations."
Arshel had never liked Interfaces, and something about Dorsan's remoteness
made her shrink from him now.
Nunin said in measured tones, "If all we wanted was machine correlation, we
could use hand programmers.
We're paying for an Interface; we expect an Interface's services."
The human Interface did not answer. Nunin made a strangled sound and
dismissed them all with a gesture.
Arshel spent the next few days surveying the monolith that stood in the
middle of the remains of the village. It was several times her height and
seemed to be made of a single, huge quartz crystal.
Somehow, Dennis got Dorsan to show them around. At one point she asked, after
gazing up at the white, sharp-edged monolith, "How could such a thing have
survived from the First Lifewave?"
"If it were really quartz crystal," answered the Inter-face, "it would have
been ground to powder when this con-tinent was folded and submerged. But it's
not crystal in any usual sense. We're not sure what it is."
A voice drifted down to them from the edge of the pit. "Hold that pose,
please!"
Dorsan froze obediently, though his eyes were fixed on Dennis as he said,
"Ever since we uncovered this object, Lantern has had that documentary crew
crawling all over."
"It was this monolith," said Dennis, "that led you to the Crystal Crown,
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wasn't it?"
"Yes. We got some odd instrument readings from this one and sent crews up in
fliers to search for other such anom-alies. It isn't exactly like the other
crowns."
The voice drifted back: "Thank you!"
"Let's go see the Crystal Crown," said Dennis. "I've only seen it from the
river. I want to get down onto the site."
"This way," replied the Interface, and led them off at right angles from the
approaching documentary crew.
They slopped through the muck that covered the bottom of the pit it was below
river level and had to be pumped constantly and then climbed a metal stair at
the edge of the pit. At the shore, they climbed into a red-painted cable car
strung out over the river on big orange pylons. The documentary crew had to
take the next car.
In the river, a force-field cylinder all but invisible, but making a faint
buzzing sound had been thrust into the river bed, and the water inside it
pumped out, making a hole in the river to expose the bed, which now steamed
foul odors at them in the sunlight. The otherwise placid waters rushed by this
obstruction with an angry roar. Atthe bottom of the cylinder, where layers of
rock and sand-stone had been removed carefully, a circle of standing stones
like the crystal monolith now stood exposed to the air.
She could see where the stone that stood in the ruined village had been
removed from the top of the arch that formed the entryway. But otherwise, not
a capstone was missing, not a monolith had fallen.
They spent the afternoon sliding through the mud, ex-amining every aspect of
the Crystal Crown. Over dinner that night, Arshel, Dennis, and his parents
discussed the find.
"There's a lot of excitement now: best stone circle ever found, that sort of
thing," said Nunin. "But Dennis, if we can't get some sort of information out
of this thing, it's going to be the biggest embarrassment in the whole field.
Withthose cameras looking over our shoulders all the time "
"Worse," Madlain interrupted. "Our article on the dating of the crown was
rejected today for insufficient documen-tation! And Dorsan says he can't
help!"
"Can't or won't," added his father. "The Guild won't give us a renewal or an
extension on his contract. I even, offered them a 50 percent increase in fee,
but they just say there aren't enough Interfaces to go around!"
"The Wild Interface battle was over four years ago," said Madlain. "Surely by
now "
"It takes about five years to make an Interface," said Dennis. "But I don't
think that's it. Mom, I used to know Dorsan pretty well. He's not the same.
Oh, he's helpful enough, but he's notinterested the way he was on Vra-shin."
"Interfaces can't be interested in anything," Nunin said, correcting him.
"They can only be curious, and I always thought that was spontaneous curiosity
about anything you stuck in front of them. Now it's as if the Guild had
adopted a policy against us."
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"There's no point in becoming paranoid," said Madlain.
"I'm not. I took this whole thing to Selig this morning." Selig Ernske was
the Lantern representative who'd brought in the documentary crews and now
acted as if he owned everything. "He said none of Lantern's archeology
con-tracts with the Guild were being renewed. But he told me
not to worry. When our contract is out, they'll send in twenty programmers
and a construction crew to put up a building and install terminals."
She sat back, her shock evident even to Arshel. "Nunin, our funds will run
out before we can crack this thing un-less " [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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