The idea of Ondo sitting inside her own brain, thinking his own thoughts, continued to trouble her. “Have you been consuming my brain processing power by running your own analysis?”
“I did explain, Selene. The flecks containing my engrams do not interfere with your cognitive processing in any way, except when you allow them to do so. The amount of chemical energy I draw is tiny, the equivalent of you rising your little finger once every hour. Your additions have plenty of energy reserves to draw on.”
“Right, okay.” He also couldn't tell when she was mocking him. Maybe she needed to make it more obvious. “You haven't come to any conclusions?”
“Hypotheses only. Find out everything you can from the entity. It might give us some clues.”
“I'll try. It's not exactly being cooperative.” The shimmering alien hadn't moved, awaiting instruction like a good little automated greeting system.
“These objects,” she said out loud. “May I take them?”
The entity's reply was as frustratingly implacable as ever. “My work will be done when the locks are opened.”
“Okay, sure, so when will the locks be opened?”
“I do not have they key.”
“Who does have the key?”
“I do not have they key.”
She thought about persuading the mechanism to be more helpful by pointing her blaster at it, threatening to rewire it permanently. She held herself back; it wasn't going to respond to her threats, and she might destroy the one chance they had of activating whatever needed to be activated to recover the artefacts. For all she knew, if she attacked the entity the entire structure might collapse into cataclysmic ruin, entombing her inside it. Whatever the purpose of this place was, the mechanism had protected the objects it warded for some time. They would be safe a while longer.
She had the glass bead they'd recovered from the ice of Maes Far on a chain around her neck. She fished it out from her suit, and pressed the combination of microswitches that released the sphere from its clasp. She held it up for the flickering entity to see. As usual, the sphere refracted electromagnetic radiation across a wide spectrum in complex and shifting ways.
“Do you know what this is?” she asked.
The entity shimmered out of existence, and she thought it had vanished completely, finally succumbing to its age and damage. But then she saw it had reappeared two hundred metres down the gallery behind her. There was a distinct colour shift to its hues: now it glinted in purples and marine turquoises. Was that significant?
Selene muttered to herself, “Right, well, I'll follow you, shall I?” She weaved down the line of plinths. All were occupied, the objects in no order she could discern: a mechanism of cogs and rivets constructed from some black metal, a multifaceted crystal the size of her head, a book printed on some sort of paper analogue, gold symbols in an unknown alphabet across its blood-red cover. Works of art and artefacts of science, natural wonders and items she couldn't begin to identity.
She also passed side-doors leading off into chambers that housed larger objects: statues and carved columns, titanic skeletons and the façades of ornate temples. The scale of the place was dazzling, the twisting layout impossible to follow. Through one arched doorway she glimpsed an avenue of huge, stone beasts with six legs and snarling maws. There were hundreds of them, receding into the far distance of a chamber suffused with a golden, sunset light, its curved roof hundreds of metres high. Did the vaults fill the interior of the planet, or was something else going on here, some extra-dimensional effect she didn't understand? So close to the star, an energy supply wouldn't be a problem. The place was a museum, a repository, a treasure house. A catalogue of objects and wonders. What worlds had the objects come from? Who had brought them here? Had they been stolen or rescued from conflagrations and natural disasters for safe storage? If this was Concordance's work, what were they doing it for?
Ondo was making little whimpers in her head at each new sight, his delight at what he was seeing almost sexual in its fervour. She said nothing; no point spoiling his fun. And, in truth, she got it. She found herself wondering what her father would have made of the place. They could have explored it together, father and daughter.
She kept walking towards the entity, which was glinting beside a curved alcove in the walls. She'd thought it was another doorway, but instead she saw a pearl-white hemisphere embedded in the wall there, two metres in diameter. Some sort of artwork? But there was a tiny circular slot directly beneath the hemisphere which was, clearly, the right size for the glass bead.
“I put this in here?” she asked.
The entity didn't reply, but nor did it intervene when she moved her hand towards the slot. The bead slipped in effortlessly, seemingly sucked in by some mechanism. It was, as she'd imagined, a display port of some description. The hemisphere went crystal clear, and a representation of the entire galaxy appeared. Some of the stars blinked, and symbols appeared around the edges of the display.
“Can you make anything of those, Ondo?”
“I've recorded a few fragments of something similar, but never enough to translate. The script bears no correlation to any existing galactic calligraphic system that I'm aware of. One or two runes match those of known alphabets, but that appears to be random chance. There's only a fixed number of symbols cultures can use.”
So no, then. “What do you figure this thing is?”
“A data retrieval mechanism would be my best guess.”
“There doesn't seem to be much on it other than a pretty picture of the galaxy.”
“Or we don't know how to access the rest of the data.”
“I could try ripping the hemisphere off the wall and lugging it back to the Refuge for analysis.”
“I suspect that's beyond even your powers.”
“Maybe.” She took a step forwards, thinking she'd at least try. As she moved, the galaxy blinked out
