Tiaan calculated. It had been two and a half weeks away when they left Itsipitsi, eleven days ago. 'It's not tomorrow, or the day after, or the three days after that, but the day after that. It's in six days' time.'
'Twenty-one.' Haani seemed to be weighing up the numbers.
'I could be your older sister.'
Haani considered that. 'I've always wanted a big sister.'
'Well, that's settled. I'll be your big sister.'
Tiaan gave her a sisterly hug; after a moment Haani pulled back, saying, 'I'm hungry.'
'So am I. Let's have our dinner. I don't suppose you found any water?'
'Way down there!' She pointed, then held out her hand. 'Come on! I'll show you.'
Tiaan took the hand. They ran and skipped across the chamber, where a room had implements recognisable as taps. Haani wound an S-shaped lever and water gushed from a spigot. She tried the other with the same result. Tiaan filled her pot. They sat on the floor, eating cheese, onion and very dry deer meat.
'I wish we had something different, for a change,' Tiaan said. 'We'll have to see if any food was left behind.' She was worried. They had enough for a week and a half, or two if they really stretched it, but what then? It was a long week's trek to Itsipitsi, and nothing to buy food with when they got there. If this place had been abandoned for years, perhaps centuries, there was probably nothing edible here either.
'I can look while you're doing your work,' the child said.
'All right, as long as you don't go too far. And don't do anything dangerous.'
'Of course I won't.' They slept in one of the few rooms with a window, so they'd know when it was morning. That seemed to matter, somehow. At first light they breakfasted, went exploring but failed to find any food. On the way back, Haani put her head in through a doorway and said, 'What's this place?'
'A bathroom, I'd say. Want to try it?'
'What is a bathroom?' Haani asked.
Tiaan explained. It was a curious one, for when Haani wound the taps water sprayed out of the walls and ceiling. 'I think you're meant to stand under the water and wash yourself,' Tiaan said.
The water was not unpleasantly cold; better than they were used to. Haani was about to get out when she said 'Hey!' and put her hands out against the spray.
'What's the matter?'
'It's… getting hot.'
Tiaan eventually got the flow adjusted so that it was just perfect. What a luxury! Not even the breeding factory had hot water coming out of a tap. It was the ultimate mark of civilisation as far as Tiaan was concerned, far more impressive than the architecture outside, or the extraordinary machines.
The following day Haani was busy on some project that she carefully kept secret. A birthday present, Tiaan guessed. She went back to the room with the three sentinels and began dismantling the machines. She could recall each of the images Minis had shown her, and how she was to put everything together. Remembering was the easy part.
She made a start. Without proper tools, it was abominably difficult. By the end of the day she had not taken apart the first machine. At this rate it would take weeks. Minis would be dead by then, and so would they; of starvation.
She sat down, wiping her brow, for the room was warmer than the rest of Tirthrax. Haani came running in. 'Look what I found!'
She had in her arms a good-sized ham off some unidentified animal, completely encased in black wax. Tiaan's mouth watered.
'Better let me try it first. It might be no good after all this time.'
'Of course it will be good,' said Haani.
'Well, maybe not, if it's five hundred years old…' Tiaan peeled back the wax with her knife and carved a strip of meat off. Almost as hard as wood, it was the colour of coal, with a hot, spicy flavour. She tried a small piece. It was delicious, though it burned the tip of the tongue. She had some more. She was used to hot spices, and so was Haani.
They sat companionably, eating the meat and cooling their mouths with draughts of water. 'If only I had some tools,' said Tiaan. 'This work is so slow.'
'What kind of tools?'
'All sorts. Like those in my little toolkit, only bigger.'
'I found a whole room full of tools the other day,' said Haani.
'Why didn't you say so?'
'I didn't know you wanted them.' With more tools at her disposal than she had names for, the work proceeded swiftly. Bored with her own company, Haani wanted to be part of the great project. The child proved to be surprisingly useful, fetching, carrying and steadying parts while Tiaan assembled them, or just being company, sometimes silent, sometimes chattering.
Tiaan now found that she missed Haani when she was out of the room. The child filled a void that had been there ever since Tiaan had left home. Haani had become family. A real family, like other people had. Soon Minis would complete it.
Her eyes rested on the child, who sat on the bench humming and swinging her legs as she screwed a tapered topaz crystal onto a threaded silver tube. Tiaan smiled. The child did feel like her little sister. Looking up, Haani caught her eye and smiled back. It warmed Tiaan from top to toe. They both deserved a little happiness. And Minis.
Within days the zyxibule was complete. Tiaan walked around the contraption. She could think of no words to describe it adequately. It was quite as bizarre as its name suggested. No, not bizarre – it had no symmetry at all, though when she stood back Tiaan could see a certain alien beauty in it. It rested on five slender legs made from a soft, lustrous rock that had the look of soapstone but the colour and translucency of amber. Each leg was carved in intricate, swirling patterns.
On the legs rested a thick plate, flat in the middle but dished at the perimeter, with a seven-lobed rim. It was made of no substance Tiaan had ever worked with before. It had the lustre of metal – a deep blue-black. It was light, hard and strong, but when she tapped it, it rang as if it was made of porcelain. An intensely blue glass, swirled with patterns that repeated at every scale, was fused to the underside.
She had constructed the zyxibule on top of that plate. It was framed by four doughnuts of clear glass, the largest two spans across, the smallest about half that. Wires ran through their walls here and there, terminating inside in little pieces of shiny foil. The doughnuts were arranged largest on the bottom, lying horizontally, up to smallest at the top, nearly two spans above. Each was set about with magnets so strong that when once Tiaan touched a spanner to one, she and Haani together could not pull it off. Tiaan had to set up a block and tackle to do so, and succeeded only after the most gruelling effort.
The third doughnut was fixed vertically, sitting inside the top and bottom ones and enclosing the smallest, which lay horizontally in the centre, not touching. Within that was another glass structure that Tiaan found difficult to describe, or even look at. It was a tube rolled and twisted back to join up with itself, but its inside seemed to become its outside then inside again. Tiaan could not see how it was made. Her eye found it hard to follow the curve of the thing, and kept sliding off it. Twisticon, Haani called it.
Within, around and above these structures was attached a profusion of wires, tightly wound metal coils, clusters of tubes and rods, mysterious constructions of wire and a host of the incomprehensible mechanisms she had spent so long studying on the third day. Everything was connected to everything else but nothing seemed to do anything.
'I'm sure that's it,' Tiaan said, stepping back. She had spent all day going through the test procedures. Each part worked as she had been told to expect. She had tried to contact Minis several times but there had been no response. She felt a chill of terror every time she thought about that.
'What is it for?' asked Haani, gnawing at a piece of green cheese.
'It is to bring my lover to me,' said Tiaan. 'Ah, but I'm tired. We'll begin in the morning.'
F IFTY -E IGHT
'Where the hell are we?' cried Nish, staring into the impenetrable darkness.