Everything is ground down here by age, even the land. Everything. Leaving nothing but finely ground dust. What I'll be, soon enough… Anderssen felt terribly sad – not for the Haraphans, so obviously wiped away by the inexorable progress of history – but for herself, knowing Duncan, Tristan and Isabelle would be unrecognizable when she saw them again. And how much longer will my mother live? She's not young, not anymore… Is this artifact worth anything?
Parker continued to snore, his mouth slightly open. Gretchen hugged the jacket tighter. She had a sinking feeling the kalpataru would be nothing more than a can full of rust.
"Here isss room." The Jehanan rental agent inserted a cross-shaped key into a lock at the center of a hexagonal portal. Gretchen stepped through the opened door, duffel bag dragging from her shoulder, and stared around at a long, empty chamber. Soot-stained windows lined the northern wall, looking out over the jumble of Takshila and its seventeen hills. The floors had once been lacquered wooden parquet, but years of wear had left some sections black and others an eroded white.
"There isss cleaning deposit," hissed the rental agent's voice through Magdalena's translator. The slick showed a mouth full of pinlike teeth. "For asuchau. Very dirty."
Magdalena nodded dolefully in agreement and pressed a stack of Parusian shatamanu – trade coins – into his claw.
When the agent had yielded up the key and a stack of paperwork with colored stamps, waxed sigils and handwritten signatures affixed, the Hesht spun the door closed and coughed in amusement. "See, Parker? He agrees!" Mockingly, she chanted: "If we lose deposit, your hide will pay me back!"
"Sure…" Parker stuck his head in the nearest door opening off of the main room. "Toilet? Filled with sand…just like Maggie likes it!"
"That's the bathing room," Gretchen said absently, staring out one of the window panes. "The toilet will have urea crystals in the cracks between the floor tiles."
Her calves hurt and her hip was throbbing. The apartment tower – a khus in the local dialect – stood among a cluster of equally tall buildings just to the east of the city center. As in Parus, there were no working elevators. The steam-powered express train had left them at a station on the southern fringe of Takshila. Getting a taxi had proved impossible – where Parus had benefited from an influx of imported Imperial vehicles, the northern city seemed almost untouched by the signs of Mйxica commercialism so apparent in the south.
Having no way to identify an honest porter from a thief, they had carried their bags through the streets to the apartment tower themselves. A seemingly short distance on their one map had become several miles of pushing through strange-smelling crowds and dodging carts and wagons drawn by lizardlike beasts of burden. That had been unpleasant.
Maggie slunk in and out of all the rooms, before testing the windows. Each opened along a grooved track, but years of pollution had jammed them shut. The Hesht grunted, running an extended fore-claw through the black gum sticking the window panes closed. "Den needs a good scrubbing – but Parker would be welcomed among his gods by smoking this…"
Takshila was strewn with seventeen famous hills, and circumscribed to the south and east by a tributary of the Phison. The largest of the hills – a stolid limestone outcropping rising above neighborhoods of tightly packed buildings – stood in full view, bathed russet by the late afternoon sun. At first glance, the massif seemed untenanted and empty, but as Gretchen let her eyes rove over the whitened cliffs and straggling trees clinging to the rocks, she realized the entire top half of the hill was a single enormous building.
So this is the House of Reeds. Anderssen slid the work goggles down from her forehead and clicked up a magnification mode. Now, without the grayish-yellow haze permeating the city air softening edges and obscuring vertical walls, she could see dark windows piercing the hill, staircases climbing shoulders of barren rock, arcades of pillars, and the ornamental trees filling terraced gardens. Quite large…doesn't seem so old, though.
Puzzled a little – her first impression of the city was of relative newness, particularly in comparison to Parus, which had fairly reeked of hoary age – Gretchen began scanning the rest of the city within her line of sight. Skyscrapers, more of those odd curved boulevards, wide streets…hmmm…each hill is circled by radial roads…ceramacrete buildings…
"Ha!" She laughed aloud and pushed her goggles back up. Turning around, she found Parker watching his self-inflating floor pad deploy itself. Maggie was banging around in what had to be the kitchen, though Gretchen wasn't sure she wanted to see what passed as a Jehanan kitchen. "Mags – this big hill to our north is the House of Reeds, right?"
"Yarrrrr," responded the Hesht. She emerged from the kitchen with a hooked steel blade as long as her forearm. Parker's eyebrows rose in alarm and he backed quietly away to stand near the front door of the apartment. "You wanted a hunting lie close to the prey, yes? Well, there it is. All rocky and grim-looking as any citadel of the slave-lords of Magdag…"
Gretchen made a face. "Slave-lords? What have you been reading? Is that a cutlass? Why do the Jehanan have…never mind."
Magdalena sniffed ostentatiously, whiskers twitching and went to the nearest window. The hooked blade proved to be near enoughin size to allow her to pick out the gummy debris clogging the window tracks without getting her claws dirty. The Hesht began rattling the window back and forth, trying to make it open properly. Making a face at being so ostentatiously ignored, Anderssen turned to the pilot.
"Parker – would you say this is an older city than Parus?"
"This place?" Parker had a tabac out, but seemed wary of lighting up while the windows were still closed. "Not as old, I guess. Kind of funny, since Parus is so filled with the comforts of home – buses, aerocars, three-d sets, personal comm, six kinds of Imperial beer… – didn't see any of that here."
Gretchen nodded brightly, running her hand across the nearest wall – smooth ceramacrete – just like the dorm buildings at university. "We have to be careful," she said, considering the material. The layers of bonded polycarbonate were almost imperceptibly flaking away. "According to Petrel's guidebook, Takshila has some of the oldest buildings on the planet. More than just the monastery over there. I think this apartment building is one of them."
"This place?" Parker looked around. "But -"
"You thought the buildings in Parus looked old because they were made of crumbling brick, and not more than five, six stories high. Crowded together, blackened with soot from wood-fired stoves – all those things say old to us. To humans. Right?" She gave him an expectant look.
Parker spread his hands questioningly. "Hey – not an archaeologist! Pilot. Pilot. I fly aerocars, shuttles, old-style air-breathing jets, drink too much, smoke too much, always ready with the clever quip. Figuring out historical strata or long-term habitation chronologies is not in my job packet!"
"Hah!" Magdalena jiggled the wooden window-frame and the panel moved smoothly in the newly cleaned track. Once open, the window allowed a gust of cold, bitter-tasting air into the apartment. "Eeeww…an entire planet of leaf-smoking herbivores…" She slammed the window shut again, looking aggrieved. "I wear a breathing mask from now on. We'll need one of these windows open for cameras and aerials."
Gretchen ignored the Hesht muttering to herself. "Think about the societal-crash, Parker – some of the cities, like Parus, were obliterated by atomics. They've been rebuilt new but with the materials at hand; fired brick and wood and ceramic tile. This building is ancient – I'd guess Takshila wasn't hit with a nuke during the collapse – so it's built from materials the old civilization had mastered. The cues we're used to following? They're reversed here!"