Page 16 of Kavan

"Kavan," she says, and it's no kind of question, and the gutter isn't the subject.

Down the tunnel, Neris says, "Marshal? Head count's twenty-one. Everybody's up."

"Understood," I say, and I don't look away from Sophie, and I keep hold of her hand another three seconds, and I'll think about those three seconds more than I think about the bridge.

CHAPTER 11

SOPHIE

The archive is on the ninth terrace and it's the size of a cathedral and it's entirely empty.

That's what breaks my heart for a full minute before I understand it. Racks and racks of them, honeycombed into the walls forty meters up, every cell a hand's width across and every cell vacant. Two hundred centuries of looting, I think, and I sit down on a step and breathe.

Then Zuri says, "Sophie, this floor is warm," and everything changes.

The cells aren't storage. They're emitters. The archive isn't a library that was robbed; it's a projector, and it has been running on trickle power for two hundred centuries waiting for someone to step onto the center of the floor, and when I do, the room fills with people.

Not people. Recordings of them, tall and narrow and translucent, going about a day that ended before humans built cities. They walk through the racks. They stop and confer at a table that no longer exists. One of them, near the east wall, keeps turning to say something to a figure that the projector has lost, so she speaks and waits and speaks again into a gap.

I put both hands over my mouth and I don't care who sees me.

It takes six hours to find the index. The recordings are keyed to floor positions, and the pattern is a spiral, and once I have that I can walk the room like a catalog and pull the fragments in the order they were meant to be pulled.

Most of it is administrative. Rations. Rotations. A dispute about water allocation that runs to four separate entries and is, in its own way, the most human thing I have ever recovered from any dig.

Then, thirty-one positions in, a figure appears alone at the center and speaks at length, and the glyph string that runs beside her while she speaks contains a construction I have met exactly once before, and it stops me cold.

The word is a compound. The first element means keep, as in preserve. The second means gate. Together, in every convention I know, they render as one who keeps the gate.

They mean a warden.

"She's talking about a mind," I say. Kavan has come to stand at the edge of the projection, careful not to walk through anyone, which I notice and file away with all the other things I file away about him now. "Not a system. She's using the personal register. Kavan, they built something to hold this planet, and they talked about it the way you'd talk about a colleague you were slightly afraid of."

"Does she say what it does?"

"She says what it can't do." I follow the string with my stylus. "It can't distinguish. That's the whole entry. It holds the gate and it cannot tell a returning ship from an arriving one, so the protocol is that a returning fleet has to announce itself with something the Warden will accept, and the something is—" The glyphs run out. "The next four positions are dead. The emitters are gone."

"Then we find where they went."

"There's a second problem." I turn around. "The index puts the master record at the spire. Everything here is a copy. If we want the authorization, we go to the command spire."

He absorbs that without any visible reaction, which after nine days I know means he's running distances.

"Ask me your question," I say.

"Which one?"

"The one you've been not asking for two hours."

He almost smiles. "How many days."

"Six days, if the waymarks stay honest. Four if we find live rail."

Around us, a woman twenty thousand years dead keeps turning to speak to somebody the light has forgotten.

"My turn," I say. "One question."

"You will anyway."