“And what do you think happened next?” he asked.
“That’s easy,” answered Tessa. “She was overcome by her own curiosity and she opened the box.”
Zeus threw up his index finger like a professor scoring a metaphysical point. “No! A common misconception, passed along through the ages. She did not open the box, although she attempted to. But by that time, Brother Number One had grown very suspicious of the warning and entered her chambers just as she was about to throw back the lid. He swept in, pulled the box from her grasp, and secreted it off in a far corner of the earth where he hoped that it would never be found. . . .”
“But . . .” Tessa pointed to the box.
“But, here it is!” said Zeus. “The fact is that the box was found quite soon after Brother Number One had hidden it, but it was kept in the possession of wise men and women throughout the ages and, in fact, it has never been opened. You might not be surprised to learn that it has been deemed a great honor to be whomever is selected as keeper of the box, when it is time to be passed along.”
“Don’t tell me,” said Tessa. “It is now I who have been selected to accept responsibility for the box.”
Zeus snapped his fingers. “How did you guess?”
Tessa shrugged, growing suspicious at the glibness of the strange man. “It was easy. But, tell me, do you know what’s in the box?”
“That’s against the rules. You can’t ask that.”
“Why not?”
Zeus shrugged. “I don’t know. No one else has ever asked before.”
“And you want me to accept responsibility for the box, is that right?” Tessa eyed the object again. It was a compellingly beautiful piece of art, and she felt naturally attracted to it.
Zeus smiled. “Ah . . . I’m afraid you have no choice in the matter.”
What?”
“I mean it’s yours,” he said, stepping back from the desktop. “Good-bye,” he said as he started to fade away like morning mist.
Tessa was startled by the sudden display of magic, or whatever it was. She hesitated for a moment, fearful, before advancing to the place where the man had vanished. The air, she noticed, felt disturbingly warm where he had been, but other than that there was no trace.
Except for the box.
Turning she bent to examine it, being careful not to touch it. Her first thought was to leave it where it lay and seek out Varian, or even old Stoor. Perhaps their combined experiences would help determine what to do with the strange box.
But then another thought occurred to her: that the entire thing might be an illusion, a trick of the mind, a dream, even. Although the box looked real, looked substantial, it might prove to be not so. After all, she thought, Zeus had seemed very real, but apparently he was not.
There was only one thing to do, and that was to touch the box . . . for reasons of pure scientific curiosity, she told herself.
And so Tessa extended a delicate hand and stroked the top of the ornately worked surface. She was almost shocked to feel its hardness, its realness, and yet a part of her was relieved that it was indeed real.
Then another sensation came to her. It was the utter pleasure that she experienced in touching this object. It was as though the elements of the chest exuded a hypnotic influence that was passed along by tactile stimulation. There was a definite unwillingness to pull her hand away from its finely detailed lid. The details, she noticed almost in passing, were in the now-familiar five-sided motif.
Suddenly she forced her hand away from the object, as if breaking the spell which seemingly had overtaken her. What was happening here? Tessa of Prend was not a person who could lightly accept any situation that was out of the ordinary. There was, she had learned, many marvels of technology, including the lost sciences of the First Age. In fact, it was nearly impossible to distinguish many of the Citadel’s services and operations from that of magic or plain trickery. Who was it who had said that for the common man science required as much faith as religion? She could not recall, but she knew now what he had meant.
The man called Zeus. If he had been a real man, his presence could have been due to science or magic. If he was an illusion, his origin was probably the Citadel . . . but what did it all matter? What did it mean?
There were no answers which made sense. She did not trust the words of Zeus, and she wished that Varian had been with her. Together, she felt confident they could have understood what the encounter had meant. Alone, Tessa struggled to know what to do, what to think.
She looked cautiously about the room and saw nothing but the smooth, polished, and seamless lines of the machines, the consoles, the data screens. The illumination softened the harsh aesthetics, but failed to soothe her troubled mind. For the first time since their arrival, since their imprisonment, she realized how alien, how utterly different the Citadel and the Guardian were from anything she or her World had ever known. She wondered if perhaps this place had been better off buried and forgotten, never found by any man from the current age. Whoever the builders of places such as the Citadel had been, Tessa thought, they were surely a race of foreigners, a long-dead parallel species of strangelings. More than millennia, Tessa thought, separated her race from theirs.
Her gaze drifted back to the artful chest,
