“So why were the Archives closed?” I ask.
“The Council says that books clutter our minds.”
Which sounds like an excuse for controlling information. There’s another one of their creepy signs when we get to the bottom of the balcony, hanging over a doorway in the wall of the Archives shaft. “Knowing Is Our Weapon.” I don’t like the sound of that.
“We have just over two bells to go through the books before you have to go back to the storage room,” Sam says. So I can go Outside, and leave her here. I don’t think so. “The help will be coming to the kitchens not long after that. I’ll get as many books into my head as I can.”
I nod, and let the glasses make a picture for me, of a small room at the end of a short tunnel, with tables and chairs. Bookshelves. No people. But there is something close by. The green light in the corner of my eyes is blinking in a blur. The keys clink as Sam sorts through them, finding the right one. She puts the key to the lock and opens the door.
A few steps down a tunnel and we’re in something like a reading room, one or two lamps lit on the tables, a small fire slumbering in a covered brazier, giving off heat from the center of a thin floor matting. Samara locks the door behind us and goes straight for the books, running down each shelf methodically, looking for the one she found before, about the Forgetting.
But for once a room in New Canaan can’t hold my attention. The books aren’t even calling my name. It’s the door on the other side of the room I’m looking at. Or looking through. And what’s on the other side is not what I expected. Not in a million years.
Technology is to be shunned. It is for the common people’s good. But for the people of knowledge, of memory, the builders of the Superior Earth, technology will only enhance our rule, and speed us to the pinnacle of our evolution …
FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF JANIS ATAN
I have the book with the description of the Forgetting, and another that was shelved beside it, but Beckett is staring at the other door as if it might explode, like the door in the Cursed City.
“Sam,” he whispers. “Come here.” I hold the books to my chest, wend my way around the covered chairs to his side.
“Have you ever been through this door?” he asks.
“No. But it’s where Thorne Councilman came from.”
“Is it? Okay. Stay with me.”
I nod. We walk slowly to the door, and Beckett pushes it open. It isn’t even locked.
Probably Beckett’s behavior should have been warning enough. Prepared me for something that would shock even him. But I’m not sure that anything could have prepared me for light so bright it hurts. For rock walls that have been washed a blinding white. For white chairs, oddly formed white tables. Even the floor is white. And as strange as that is, that’s where the familiarity ends. The stone beneath my feet is humming in a way I’ve never felt. In a way I can almost hear. Cabinets of a pale, shining metal line one wall, blinking with tiny points of unnatural red and green, and there are eight thin, flat canvases, like pictures ready to be hung. Only these canvases have been painted with light. Bright, false light. Like Beckett’s technology.
And then I understand. I am looking at technology. Here. In the city. Which is impossible. Except that it isn’t. I feel like I opened a door and walked onto the wrong planet. Memory tugs at me, insistent, trying to yank me down. I fight it, and whisper, “What are they?”
“Other than what they seem to be, I’m not sure. This is a real hodgepodge … ” That made zero sense to me, but Beckett is concentrating on the square patches of light, just like when he saw the mural in the Forum, though this doesn’t seem like the same thing at all. He says, “Let’s wake them up and see what they say.”
I step back. He made it sound like there’s something alive in here. He turns to look at me.
“It’s all right,” he says, holding out a hand. “Come here and I’ll show you what they do.” I stand next to him, nervous. Then he takes off the glasses and stares at the nearest square of light.
Nothing happens.
“Okay,” he says, sliding the glasses back on. “Older than visual instruction.” Then he says, loudly, “Computer.”
Nothing.
“Command.”
Instantly the painted lights begin to change, images springing up out of nowhere. There’s noise, music that isn’t real. My breath catches, and there’s a hard yank inside my mind. I’m falling, plummeting, and it takes everything I have to stop my descent, to climb back into the present. I hang on to the back of a bizarre white chair while Beckett walks a step or two forward. Three of the light squares have remained blank. He reaches out, puts a finger to one.
It “wakes up,” little symbols flying upward on the background of four entwined letters. “NWSE.” He touches the next two, wakes them, and then sits hard in the chair next to mine, staring at the images.
“This is from the first Centauri. The ship that brought you here. And it’s working. Oh, what if the database is intact … ” Then he sits back, looking at the room. “But the rest of this is too advanced. It’s the Centauri II. Has to be … ” He tents his fingers again, whispering, “What happened to them?”
Memory is reaching up, winding itself around my mind. I break its hold, feel one moment of lightness before it pulls at me again. I don’t want to go away. I want to understand what’s happening now. Beckett looks around.
“Sam, sit next to me.”
I sit. The chair is soft, strangely fitted to my body. I’ve still got the two books in my arms, clutched to my chest.
“How long do we have before waking?” he asks.
“Two and seven-eighths bells,” I say. “But you’ll need to go Outside a bell before that.”
“Okay,” he says, thinking. “I have an alarm set. I’ll know if there are people near, but we may not have much warning. If it goes off, I have to shut this down and you have to be ready to run. There’s the way we came in, and another door back there.” I glance behind his head and see a white doorway. “It looks like there’s some kind of hallway behind it. Do you Know where it goes?”
I look back in my mind, fighting off the memory trying to drag me down, and see the layout of the city, measuring the distances, comparing. We’re very deep. But also close to the edge of the mountain, near the cliffs to the plain. “Does the way go up?”
“Yes.”
“Then I think it’s the caves.” Where Reddix came out, when Beckett’s technology was lifting me through the hole in the ceiling. Reddix, who Knew Beckett was from Earth.