Kavan waved his own hand over where the other had indicated, near the door jamb. He felt iron underneath.
‘Could be the latch?’ he wondered aloud. He concentrated hard, sent his lifeforce down into the metal of his hand, felt at the iron there, felt it click into place.
‘Got it,’ he said. He pushed at the door, and it swung open easily.
‘I’ll go first,’ he said. ‘Eleanor, you keep watch out here.’
‘I want to go in.’
‘Later.’
‘What about the symbols? Can you be sure you will understand what you see?’
‘Later,’ repeated Kavan.
There was a crowd of people standing in the depths of the building, frozen in a dim half-light that filtered down from the roof to part-fill the single room. Kavan closed the door and turned up his eyes, waited for them to adjust.
The roof was sea-green and translucent: a thick old plastic faded by the elements. Not the original roof, reckoned Kavan, but something added much later by… who? It now looked so worn and weathered. A muted light filtered through it, illuminating the crowd that waited in patient silence below.
So many robots, arranged in rows, all facing the door, sightless eyes gazing into eternity. All of them dead, the lifeforce long drained from their minds, the current long gone from their electromuscle.
Slowly, carefully, Kavan moved up to the nearest, his own eyes adjusting to the gloom.
The robot body that stood immediately before him was old. It wore iron panelling, red rust bubbling up among the faded remnants of what little paint had not flaked away from its body. It was a little shorter than Kavan, the curve of the arms and the legs not as graceful as his own. Everything about the body was a little straighter, a little squarer, a little less elegant.
He moved past this robot to the next one in the line. It looked older still. Shorter again, the panelling that covered its body was punctured by holes where the rust had eaten it away.
Kavan continued down the line. What was the purpose of this display? Had someone come to this land and collected specimens of local life to be exhibited here? Had the robots at the top of the world come to Shull, explored the land, made this exhibit, and then left? Why?
Down the line, past the robots, walking backwards through time. The bodies on display became smaller and more primitive the further he went. Realization dawned: This was a depiction of evolution on Shull laid out before him.
He moved even further back along the line, pleased by his deduction. Now the robots looked less like robots and more like animals. He passed four-legged crabs in thick iron shells. Something a little like a six-legged spider. Now the bodies had no legs: he saw a fish and something like a tiny whale, its metal body snub and rounded. And then there was nothing but the shells of organic life. He came to the end of the line and looked back along the exhibit.
Now he understood what he was looking at.
This building was testament, proof and warning all in one. There was no Book of Robots, there never had been. There was nothing but the evolution of robots.
But Kavan understood this: that if he wanted to rule the world, then the Book of Robots would be a useful tool. Particularly if he had a say in what went in the book. Just look at how the North Kingdom robots had fought, all because they had believed…
So who had erected this display, and why? So close to the northern coast of Shull…
He looked up to the faded green plastic of the roof. It was old, of course, but plastic did not last that long. That roof had been constructed in the last hundred years or so. The building would be older than that. Much older…
He looked closer at the walls further up by the roof. He saw slots there, spaces for beams and supports to be plugged in. This building wasn’t originally a museum, he decided. Had the robot display come later?
He turned around, scanning the walls for more clues, and then he noticed the patterns carved into the wall, opposite the door by which he had entered. They had been there all along, but he had been too taken by the display of robots to notice it. Now he moved back to take in the huge diagram that filled one whole interior wall of the building.
He gazed up at it, trying to make sense of what he saw. Circles, lines, dots, all in a half swirl, engraved into the smooth metal. For a moment, he considered going outside and summoning Eleanor for help, wondered if she might understand, just as she had with the patterns engraved on the building’s exterior, but then, just like that, it all made sense. The pattern revealed itself.
It was an astronomical map. Here, at the side, was the Sun, then the first planet, Siecle, and then Penrose with its two moons, Zuse and Neel. And further out, Bohm with its single ring. All drawn to a larger scale, their position in the galactic map clearly marked. And over here, almost at the centre of the map, another system was marked. This system sat at the centre of a large circle. The Penrose system lay on the circumference of that circle.
Other systems were also marked. Some well within the circle, some beyond. Kavan gazed at them, not recognizing any of them.
Maybe he would return here later with an astronomer.
An astronomer? He gazed back up at the slots incorporated in the facing walls of the building. Now he knew what this building had been originally: an observatory. Those slots had held the mechanism that supported the telescope.
So, the robots at the top of the world had come here to Shull to look at the stars. And this is what they had seen, engraved on one wall of the building. What then? Had they taken down their telescope and installed this exhibit instead? Why? What could they have seen in the stars that would have caused them to do that?
Kavan looked at that plastic roof again. The exhibit had come much later, he was sure of that. This building reminded him of a battleground. A battle between two competing philosophies. Perhaps the robots at the top of the world had built it to perpetuate the myth of the Book of Robots. Perhaps other robots had built it to destroy that myth.
Kavan thought about Eleanor again. He should summon her to the building. Maybe she would spot something that he had missed? But he was unwilling to do so. Eleanor was already too unpredictable. What if she were to see something important and not tell him? Then he noticed something else written on the map wall. Something not so carefully engraved as the galactic map, but something written in a different style, carelessly scratched into the wall at robot height.
The Story of Nicolas the Coward, he read. And then:
The Story of the Four Blind Horses.
The Story of Eric and the Mountain.
And then, finally, in much larger letters:
Zuse! The Night Moon! The robots at the top of the world said it was the proof! Treason! But perhaps the Book exists, after all!
He gazed at the words. He had heard the first story, of course. Everyone had. The second sounded vaguely familiar, too. But the third one, Eric and the Mountain. He was sure that he had never heard of that before.
And as for the last words. The night moon? The robots at the top of the world had come here and had looked at the stars, and had found that Zuse was the proof.
Proof of what? Kavan had looked at the night moon nearly every night of his life. It was just a moon, a perfectly normal part of his existence. What could the robots at the top of the world have seen in the stars that led them to believe that their moon was proof of anything?
Slowly, Kavan looked around the room, taking in the map, the display of the bodies, trying to understand what he was looking at.
For the first time in a life built on certainty, he wondered if there were other answers written before him, answers that he had walked past without noticing their presence.
Eleanor
‘What do you think is over there?’ Eleanor asked Karel, gesturing to the northernmost part of the island. ‘Shall we go and have a look?’
