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“You did.” Her hands return to the console. “Just checking.”

CHAPTER 23

CLARA

My uncle's last four lines are not a location and never were, and once you see it you cannot unsee it, and I expect to be angry about the five weeks for years.

Here is how it breaks.

Every other entry in every other journal follows the same grammar: a place, then a value, then a bearing to the next place. Eleven sites, one chain. I learned that grammar in my first week and I read everything through it afterward, which is exactly the mistake I warn eight-year-olds about in September.

Those final lines have no place in them. They have a value and then a direction, and I read direction as bearing because bearing was the only direction I'd ever seen him use.

It isn't a compass direction. It's an instruction to a machine.

The value is a scope: everything, all chambers, complete. And the direction is outward.

He found a console built for a species three meters tall, and he worked out over four visits and thirty-one years that the archive was never designed to be guarded, because its makers had no concept of anyone wanting to own it. It was designed to be asked. And if you asked it correctly, in the right format, with the right scope, it would do the one thing it had waited all that time for somebody to request.

It would give itself away. To everyone. At once. Continuously, until told otherwise, on every band the makers ever used and several nobody has invented yet.

And Garrick Marlow sat on that for nine years, on the eastern walk, eating Edda's stew, because the day he pressed it the whole sector would arrive.

He was waiting for someone to arrive first who could be trusted with what came next.

There's no time to be sentimental about it. I've got thirty-two minutes and a console designed for hands twice the size of mine.

The input surface is a shallow trough four meters long, and the marks in it are a script I can only read in fragments, and Selka is beside me translating faster than she can be certain of, which is not how she likes to work and she is doing it anyway.

“Scope block first,” she says. “Then qualifier. The verb goes last — it's a suffixing language, everything else is preamble.”

“If I enter the verb early?”

“Then you publish an empty set and I don't know whether it lets you try again.”

“Lovely.”

Behind us, where the stair comes up, Draeven is having a conversation with people I can't see, in the sense that eleven men have come up that approach in six minutes and not one has come further, and I've stopped letting myself listen.

The scope takes eleven minutes.

The qualifier takes nine, and I get it wrong twice, and the second time the trough goes dark for a moment and I rock back onto my heels and discover I have said something out loud that I'd rather not have said within earshot of an archaeologist.

“It's forgiving,” Selka says, with the specific calm of a person concealing an enormous amount. “That's good. Forgiving means iterative. Go to the recursive form.”

I try the recursive form.

The trough fills with light from underneath, all four meters of it, and holds.

“Oh,” says Selka.

“Is that⁠—”

“That's an acknowledgment. It's an acknowledgment, Clara, it just told you it understood the question.”

“Then it's the verb next.”

“We're at the verb.”