As their eyes grew accustomed to the unearthly scene, Alvin and Theon realized that the blackness of the bowl was not as absolute as they had thought. Here and there, so fugitive that they could only see them indirectly, tiny explosions of light were flickering in the ebon walls. They came at random, vanishing as soon as they were born, like the reflections of stars on a broken sea.
“It’s wonderful!” gasped Alvin. “But what is it?”
“It looks like a reflector of some kind.”
“I can’t imagine that black stuff reflecting anything.”
“It’s only black to our eyes, remember. We don’t know what radiations they used.”
“But surely there’s more than this! Where is the fortress?”
Theon pointed to the level floor of the crater, where lay what Alvin had taken to be a pile of jumbled stones. As he looked again, he could make out an almost obliterated plan behind the grouping of the great blocks. Yes, there lay the ruins of once mighty buildings, overthrown by time.
For the first few hundred yards the walls were too smooth and steep for the boys to stand upright, but after a little while they reached the gentler slopes and could walk without difficulty. Near the bottom of the crater the smooth ebony of its surface ended in a thin layer of soil, which the winds of Lys must have brought here through the ages.
A quarter of a mile away, titanic blocks of stone were piled one upon the other, like the discarded toys of an infant giant. Here, a section of a massive wall was still recognizable: there, two carven obelisks marked what had once been a mighty entrance. Everywhere grew mosses and creeping plants, and tiny stunted trees. Even the wind was hushed.
So Alvin and Theon came to the ruins of Shalmirane. Against those walls, if legend spoke the truth, forces that could shatter a world to dust had flamed and thundered and been utterly defeated. Once these peaceful skies had blazed with fires torn from the hearts of suns, and the mountains of Lys must have quailed like living things beneath the fury of their masters.
No one had ever captured Shalmirane. But now the fortress, the impregnable fortress, had fallen at last-captured and destroyed by the patient tendrils of the ivy and the generations of blindly burrowing worms.
Overawed by its majesty, the two boys walked in silence towards the colossal wreck. They passed into the shadow of a broken wall, and entered a canyon where the mountains of stone had split asunder.
Before them lay a great amphitheater, crossed and crisscrossed with long mounds of rubble that must mark the graves of buried machines. Once the whole of this tremendous space had been vaulted, but the roof had long since collapsed. Yet life must still exist somewhere among the desolation, and Alvin realized that even this ruin might be no more than superficial. The greater part of the fortress would be far underground, beyond the reach of Time.
“We’ll have to turn back by noon,” said Theon, “so we mustn’t stay too long. It would be quicker if we separated. I’ll take the eastern half and you can explore this side. Shout if you find anything interesting-but don’t get too far away.”
So they separated, and Alvin began to climb over the rubble, skirting the larger mounds of stone. Near the center of the arena he came suddenly upon a small circular clearing, thirty or forty feet in diameter. It had been covered with weeds, but they were now blackened and charred by tremendous heat, so that they crumbled to ashes at his approach. At the center of the clearing stood a tripod supporting a polished metal bowl, not unlike a model of Shalmirane itself. It was capable of movement in altitude and azimuth, and a spiral of some transparent substance was supported at its center. Beneath the reflector was welded a black box from which a thin cable wandered away across the ground.
It was clear to Alvin that this machine must be the source of the light, and he began to trace the cable. It was not too easy to follow the slender wire, which had a habit of diving into crevasses and reappearing at unexpected places. Finally he lost it altogether and shouted to Theon to come and help him.
He was crawling under an overhanging rock when a shadow suddenly blotted out the light. Thinking it was his friend, Alvin emerged from the cave and turned to speak. But the words died abruptly on his lips.
Hanging in the air before him was a great dark eye surrounded by a satellite system of smaller eyes. That, at least, was Alvin’s first impression: then he realized that he was looking at a complex machine-and it was looking at him.
Alvin broke the painful silence. All his life he had given orders to machines, and although he had never seen anything quite like this creature, he decided that it was probably intelligent.
“Reverse,” he ordered experimentally.
Nothing happened.
“Go. Come. Rise. Fall. Advance.”
None of the conventional control thought produced any effect. The machine remained contemptuously inactive.
Alvin took a step forward, and the eyes retreated in some haste. Unfortunately their angle of vision seemed somewhat limited, for the machine came to a sudden halt against Theon, who for the last minute had been an interested spectator. With a perfectly human ejaculation, the whole apparatus shot twenty feet into the air, revealing a set of tentacles and jointed limbs clustering round a stubby cylindrical body.
“Come down-we won’t hurt you!” called Theon, rubbing a bruise on his chest.
Something spoke: not the passionless, crystal-clear voice of a machine, but the quavering speech of a very old and very tired man.
“Who are you? What are you doing in Shalmirane?”
“My name is Theon, and this is my friend, Alvin of Loronei. We’re exploring Southern Lys.”
There was a brief pause. When the machine spoke again its voice held an unmistakable note of petulance and annoyance.
“Why can’t you leave me in peace? You know how often I’ve asked to be left alone!”
Theon, usually good-natured, bristled visibly.
“We’re from Airlee, and we don’t know anything about Shalmirane.”
“Besides,” Alvin added reproachfully, “we saw your light and thought you might be signalling for help.”
It was strange to hear so human a sigh from the coldly impersonal machine.
“A million times I must have signalled now, and all I have ever done is to draw the inquisitive from Lys. But I see you meant no harm. Follow me.”
The machine floated slowly away over the broken stones, coming to rest before a dark opening in the ruined wall of the amphitheater. In the shadow of the cave something moved, and a human figure stepped into the sunlight. He was the first physically old man Alvin had ever seen. His head was completely bald, but a thick growth of pure white hair covered all the lower part of his face. A cloak of woven glass was thrown carelessly over his shoulders, and on either side of him floated two more of the strange, many-eyed machines.
8
THE STORY OF SHALMIRANE
There was a brief silence while each side regarded the other. Then the old man spoke-and the three machines echoed his voice for a moment until something switched them off.
“So you are from the North, and your people have already forgotten Shalmirane.”
“Oh, no!” said Theon quickly. “We’ve not forgotten. But we weren’t sure that anyone still lived here, and we certainly didn’t know that you wished to be left alone.”
The old man did not reply. Moving with a slowness that was painful to watch, he hobbled through the doorway and disappeared, the three machines floating silently after him. Alvin and Theon looked at each other in surprise: they did not like to follow, but their dismissal- if dismissal it was-had certainly been brusque. They were starting to argue the matter when one of the machines suddenly reappeared.