I’d really like to know.”
Arrogant? Beni stared down at the display and considered it. Overconfident perhaps. Optimistic. Determined to be among the best. But hardly arrogant. “What have others said? Ramirez managed it. What did he say?”
“He was courteous but wouldn’t talk to me as freely as you seem prepared to. He probably suspected a voice trap, some trance dislocation induced by word pattern, tone and timbre. You don’t seem to fear that.”
“There were others though, Dormeuse.” The maimed ones, he didn’t add. Barlow, Deckley, Kylow, Soont, the others, all skilled men and women, all souvenired. “What did they say?”
“Again, not too much,” the phantom answered. “Concentration does that, I suppose. And fear. I gather it is some emblematic thing, using the term ‘tomb-robber’ and all. You’re stealing the chance to do it, aren’t you? Stealing the privilege. The mystery of another age. Some said it’s rites of passage. The tombs are here, they said. Intact. Penetrable yet at the same time impenetrable ultimately. One age scorning another.”
“Scorning? They said that?” Beni found it hard to imagine any of those bluff or dour survivors back in town saying that. He was impressed anew. “But, Dormeuse, you’re the one who must feel something like that surely. Scorn.”
“A sentry profile can’t. I’m just a print of my original; my job is to represent my occupant’s self. Keep her safe. Or me, depending on how you view architectural psychonics.”
“But no body, I’m told. Just the stored personality index.”
“Ah, little hunter. I recognize a question when I hear it. One age does plunder another. You, too, would have my secrets. Perhaps that is what you come for, the chance to steal knowledge of my day, get the old sentry intercepts talking. Yet such a risk. Death and injury on the chance of just a little something more about the Tastan past.”
A stab of youthful defiance surged up, made Beni want to stay silent then, but, like countless others before him, he did want to know. He had to ask. “Your body is here?”
“Curious and stubborn, like all who come calling. Why should I tell? Perhaps the people of my day did preserve the body as well. Or the head. Who knows? We may have had cryonics long before we could code personality. The others you spoke to said what?”
“Dormeuse, I’m new to this. A lot of the veterans in town won’t talk to me. They only sell what they know. I can’t afford them.”
“But, little one, you’re in this far. I know you won’t believe me but you’re past the Stones. You’re very well prepared tech-wise, my systems show. You’ve accessed a third-level intercept response from me. I frankly didn’t expect that. You have to have the advice of others.”
Beni felt his heart pounding. Could it be true? In this far! Free of the Stones. Could it?
“Ramirez,” he said, deciding she’d probably guessed it already. “One day he stopped on the way past my family’s farm. I was in the orchard. I reminded him of a son he’d lost, he said. He told me things about the tombs. About your tomb. He was giving it up at last, he said, going away. But he told me of you, Dormeuse. Of all the tombs yours was the one, he said. He was an eidetic, as you probably guessed. Perfect recall. Helped him with variants in the tomb plans when there were some, but more with the characteristics of the intercepts, their features and mode changes. He drew your likeness for me. Your image’s likeness.”
“Why, Beni. Don’t tell me you’re infatuated? In love?”
“It’s not that! It’s complex. I was without a father. He was without a son. We just talked.”
“Oh stop! Stop! Don’t tell me. And I became mother and wife! I love it. Midwife to hunters.”
Beni clenched his jaws in anger. They walked in silence awhile down the ceramic corridor, him concentrating on his plan readings, glancing up at the passage ahead, glancing back down, up, down, she flowing beside him, a spindle of light with eyes like onyx.
“You said it was complex,” she said after a time, coaxing, sounding just contrite enough. Perhaps he had accessed a new mode from her.
“Then I don’t know why I’m here. All my life it was what the best of us did. The tombs were something you couldn’t ignore, how’s that? I’ve walked past yours probably a thousand times. More than a thousand over the years. Yesterday I finally decided to try. Today I came out here again.”
“Your point, little hunter?”
“Our own culture formed around the leavings of yours, Dormeuse, but yours keeps intruding. Your language has virtually replaced ours. Do you know how insufferable something like that is? Can you imagine how it’s become for us? Competing with our past?”
“You’re telling me, little one. I’m sure it’s happened before. I seem to recall something about the European Renaissance being in effect a rediscovery of the wisdoms of earlier civilizations in Greece and Egypt. Though I believe that was a very positive thing, probably nothing as desperate as this.”
Despite her disparaging words, Beni preferred this mode, this kind of directness. Ramirez had told him to push for it, that the host would treat him differently once he accessed it.
“My father died over in 37. Left our orchard one day, just upped and turned tomb-robber, tomb-visitor, whatever term covers it. It’s what more and more of us do. Spent all we had on maps, comp and the best sentry tech he could get. I didn’t find out till later! A neighbour came over and told me he hadn’t come out of 37. I didn’t even know he’d gone in, been planning it all those years. So I ask you: why would he do that? Why do any of us?”
“But I’m asking you that, little hunter.”
“Don’t call me that. I’m Beni.”
“ Beni. So as well as being in love you’re in hate and loss. Potent mixture. Think of it though. I’m five hundred years in your past, yet held accountable, made responsible somehow for a boy losing his father centuries later. And, marvellous paradox, without me, without the loss and envy, it seems your life, all your lives, would be lacking in purpose.”
“That’s not it.”
“Would be meaningless.”
“That’s not it!” The cry was swallowed in the ebbing, flowing, warm ceramic night. The thief had stopped walking at last, stood grimly silent. The ghost hovered, drifted, spoke.
“Maybe not. But perhaps you fear so. All your people. So you come here and test yourselves, steep yourselves in the mystery, could that be it? Plunder us from time to time. Carry out acts of astonishing vandalism.”
“I haven’t done that.” Beni started walking again, drew the phantom along with him.
“No, Beni. You haven’t yet. Thank you.”
“Ramirez didn’t.”
“No. I agree,” she said. “A lot don’t. You’re different to most. Ramirez was, both of you are, that curious blend of romantic and”-she said it very gently-“innocent. After something else.”
Doesn’t mean I won’t though, he almost said, felt he should say it, a young man scared and confused. But didn’t. “So what are we after then, Dormeuse?”
“Back to that, are we? Both wanting the same question answered.”
“I’m afraid so.” He continued walking, watching the scanner.
“All right. I allow you’re motivated by the quest, by envy and reprisals against the past, the need both to have the past mysterious yet know it. I allow disenchantment, rites of passage, because it’s there, all that. But we’re generalizing. It doesn’t tell me why you’re here, does it? Why Beni is here as an individual.”
Because I want to win, he could have said. Be up there among the greatest of them all: Ramirez, Callido, Asparan. But again didn’t, feared sounding arrogant, brash, deluded like so many who came here. He
“You’re being gentle with me, Dormeuse, so I’ll try to find an answer. A real answer.”
“Please do. And my name is Arasty. ‘Dormeuse’ means ‘sleeping woman’ in an ancient language. Which is what I am, just as you are ichneumon.”
“I’m what?”
“Ichneumon. Another very old word. Means ‘hunter’ or ‘tracker.’ A small animal that used to hunt along river banks. Ate the eggs of crocodiles.”
“Of what?”
“No matter. Beni and Arasty. We’re here now and, yes, I’m being gentle because you are.”
“But it’s a mode as well. Tactical.”
