And yet… they are gone from the universe, these great beings, and we remain. And, little creatures that we are, we still have managed to find our way through the stars to this place and to set free the guardian of this ancient vault. Surely that is no small achievement for a species only a million years or so away from apehood. Surely the High Ones, whose time of greatness had lasted a century to each of our minutes, would agree that we have done well for ourselves thus far.
And there was irony in watching this humbling display of glittering greatness, and in knowing that the makers of that greatness had vanished into extinction hundreds of millions of years ago.
“Ozymandias,” said Mirrik gently, looking at the images from outside the cave.
Exactly so. Ozymandias. Shelley’s poem. The “traveler from an antique land” who finds “two vast and trunkless legs of stone” in the desert, and beside them, half sunk in sand, the shattered head of a statue, still wearing its “sneer of cold command” —
And on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Precisely so. Ozymandias. How could we tell this robot that its fantastic creators no longer existed? That a billion years of rock covered the ruins of their outposts on dozens of planets? That we had come seeking a mystery locked in a past so distant we could barely comprehend its remoteness? While this robot waited here, the patient, timeless servant, ready to show its movies and impress the casual wayfarer with the might of its masters… never dreaming that it alone was left to tell the tale and that all its pride in that great civilization was a waste.
The projections ended. We blinked as our eyes adjusted to the sudden dimming of that brightness in the vault. The robot began to speak again, slowly, enunciating clearly, using the same sort of tone we would use in speaking to a foreigner or someone who is slightly deaf or a little dull in the skull. “Dihn ruuu… mirt korp ahm… mirt chlook… ruuu ahm… hohm mirt korp zort…” As before, Dr. Horkkk patched together some sentences in reply, with random combinations of dihns and ruuus and ahms. The robot listened to this in what struck me as an interested and approving way. Then it pointed several times to the inscription node Dr. Horkkk was carrying and spoke in an apparently urgent manner. Of course there was no hope of real communication. But at least the robot seems to think we’re worth trying to reach. Coming from a machine of the High Ones, that’s a compliment.
January 4
Dr. Horkkk has spent most of the last two days running tapes of his “conversation” with the robot through his linguistic computer, trying to wring some meaning out. Zero results. The robot spoke only about two dozen different words, arranging them in various ways, and that’s not enough to allow the finding of a meaningful pattern.
The rest of us have constantly been going back and forth between the ship and the vault, taking full advantage of the robot’s hospitality. By now it’s quite clear that the robot isn’t hostile. The death of 408b was a tragic mistake; the vault evidently was designed not to admit anything without the robot’s permission, and if 408b hadn’t impulsively rushed in the moment the door came loose, it wouldn’t have been killed. Once we established that we were friendly organisms, the robot turned the lightning field off, and we now are welcome to enter the vault as often as we please.
We are getting bolder. The first day we stood around edgily as if expecting the robot to change its mind and zap us any minute, but now we’ve made ourselves at home to the extent of making a full tridim record of the machinery and taking plenty of shots of the robot itself. What we don’t dare do is touch any of the machinery, since the robot is plainly the custodian of the vault and might very well destroy anyone who even seemed to threaten its contents. Besides, with 408b gone we have only the flimsiest notions of what that machinery is all about.
The robot has run its travelog several more times for us, and we’ve filmed it in its entirety. This is catching your archaeology on the hoof, all right: instead of digging up broken bits and rusty scraps of the High Ones’ civilization, we have glossy tridims of the actual cities and people. Looking at them gives us an uncanny sensation. It’s something like having a time machine. We’ve learned more than we ever dreamed was possible about the High Ones, thanks to the globe and what the robot has showed us. We know more about these people of a billion years ago, suddenly, than archaeologists have ever managed to find out about the Egyptians or Sumerians or Etruscans of the very recent past.
The robot goes through the same curious pantomime routine whenever we visit it. It points to us, points to itself, points to the stars. Over and over. Pilazinool argues that the robot is telling us that it would like to lead us somewhere — to some other vault, maybe, or even to a planet once inhabited by the High Ones. Dr. Horkkk, as usual, disagrees. “The robot is merely discussing origins,” Dr. Horkkk says. “It is indicating that both itself and ourselves come from worlds outside the solar system of GGC 1145591. Nothing more than that.”
I like to think Pilazinool is right. But I don’t know, and I doubt that we’ll ever know.
Communicating by pantomime isn’t terribly satisfying.
Three hours have gone by since the foregoing, and everything has turned upside down again. Now the robot is talking to us. In Anglic.
Steen Steen and I were sent across to the vault to get some stereo shots of one instrument panel, because we had botched the calibration on the first try. We found the robot busy in one corner with its back to us. Since it was taking no notice of us, we quietly went about our business.
Five minutes later the robot turned and came clanking over. It extended one arm and aimed an intricate little gadget at us. I thought it was a gun and I was too scared to move.
The robot said, slowly, with great effort:
“Speak… words … to … this.”
I did a quick spectrum trip of astonishment. So did Steen, whose mantle fluttered within his/her breathing-suit.
“It was speaking Anglic?” I said to Steen.
“It was. Yes.”
The robot said again, more smoothly, “Speak words to this.”
I took a close look at the gadget in its hand. It wasn’t a gun. It consisted of an inscription node with a tesseract-shaped puzzle-box mounted at one end. Within the struts of the puzzle-box glowed a deep crimson radiance.
“Words of you,” the robot said. “More. To this.”
The situation began to acquire some spin for me. The robot had been listening to us speak — recording our words, prying into them for meanings — and had taught itself Anglic. And now it wanted to increase its vocabulary. Perhaps, I thought, an inscription node with a puzzle-box attached is a kind of recorder. (I was wrong about that.)
Steen figured this out a fraction of a second ahead of me. He/she nudged me aside, put the voice-output of his/her breathing-suit close to the glowing end of the puzzle-box, and began rapidly to speak — in Calamorian! He/she spewed forth at least a dozen sentences in his/her native tongue before I woke up, grabbed him/her, and pulled him/her away from the robot.