“There were a few rebel scientists at the time who fought against the slaughterers. They found out how the creatures were made. They could not destroy them because the killing machines moved around too swiftly. So the rebels retreated to some secret redoubt and developed a way to reach the part of the whole system that did not move around: the maintenance devices. They found a way to change the routine of the maintenance devices so that when the slaughterers went to be maintained, they would be kept in perpetual maintenance. They were not dead, but they were immobilized. In the words of the men who did it, they were ‘stuck in the maintenance loop.’ If those rebel scientists had failed, or if there had been a few more of the slaughterers, all life on earth would have died except trees and grass.”
Justinian murmured, “Why doesn’t everyone know about this?”
Precious Wind said, “The few humans who were left knew how most of the race had died. They knew why. They probably wanted to forget it. In any case, it became taboo to speak of it on the theory that speaking of it might make it happen again. In a few generations, the truth was forgotten. The killers became the ogres of future fairy tales. The historic episode came to be called simply ‘the Big Kill,’ a terror that had happened at the end of the Before Time.”
“But you of Tingawa learned the specifics,” said Justinian. “When?”
Precious Wind sighed, turned her head from side to side, the cords of her neck standing out. Xulai reached out and massaged the drawn muscles. “Yes, Precious Wind. When?”
“A century or more ago, in Tingawa, our people discovered an ancient vault below one of the Ten Thousand Islands. It contained ease machines.”
Abasio barked laughter. “The wonderful subterranean vault of legend?”
She shook her head. “I know, I know. This is a story we have ridiculed for generations, though it persists in the public imagination. We ridicule it honestly now, for it is true that there are no more such vaults and the one we found is now empty. It was a cavern in a volcanic island, not a coral island. We believe it was the same cavern where the savior rebels worked, the ones who stopped the slaughterers, because that’s where we found the maps that gave the locations of scores of vaults around the world.”
“Around the world?” cried Abasio. “The whole world?”
“On every continent of the ancient world, Abasio. It took Tingawa a full century to find them all. We destroyed them all, along with most of the machines, devices, mechanisms we found with them. All the devices were originally made in the Before Time, when men flew to the moon, when they signaled other worlds around distant stars, when men could engineer the infinitely small in both genetics and electronics to affect even the monstrously large. Truly, they did marvels then, but none of these marvels profited the human race. All of them were for nothing. The earth had already collapsed under the ravenous appetites of too many humans; its ecosystems had been destroyed, its oceans were all but dead, its atmosphere dilapidated so that its sun bathed the surface with deadly radiation. It is hard to imagine, but the environmental situation was so desperate that the sea dwellers and even some land dwellers welcomed the Big Kill.”
“I was told the environmental situation actually caused the Big Kill,” said Abasio. “Men trying to get rid of other men to make room for their own kind.”
“Where did you learn that?” asked Precious Wind.
“Someone in the Edges, I think.” Actually it had been from the library helmet. It was all there. First the Big Fat epidemic, the mass starvation, the barking asthma, the lethal skin diseases, then the rich retreating to enclosed redoubts with filtered air, filtered water. And finally, the assault on the redoubts by those who had no redoubts. Air could not be filtered if the air intakes were blocked with bodies. Solar power did no good when millions laid themselves down on the grids. Not everywhere, not all at once, but enough, when added to the work done by the slaughterers, to make a very big kill indeed.
“That could be true. The Big Kill did leave the people who remained more room in which to breathe, though many of them moved near the poles, where the radiation was less severe. They ended up living mostly in caves, coming out only at night. Many groups lost the ability to read, write, or build. It was a darker age than any that had come before. Now we call it the Time When No One Moved Around. Indeed, men did not move around. There was nowhere to go.
“Here and there, mostly in caves or underground redoubts, an abbey survived. In Tingawa, certain monasteries survived, also underground. In such places, we lived like moles. From what Abasio has told us about the Edges, it is probable that some learning survived there. It is certain that in Abasio’s Place of Power there were deadly technological survivals. In abbey, or monastery, or Edge, learning was kept alive, ancient things were stored away, and people held the hope there might be an eventual enlightenment.
“When we discovered the ancient vault below the island—”
“How long ago?” Abasio interrupted, wondering vaguely if there were some alive who could be blamed for all this.
“Well before any now living were born, Abasio. The vault we found had monitors showing locations, scattered across the entire world. At first, we didn’t know what would be found at those locations.
