Gallen looked at Felph suspiciously. The hair rose on the back of Gallen’s neck. On Tremonthin, the Inhuman had downloaded memories of past lives into Gallen. And somewhere, Gallen felt he had lost a bit of himself in a sea of otherness. He dared not put on the mask.
“What do the masks do?” Gallen said.
Felph frowned in thought. “The methods for making a spirit mask are kept secret from humans, so it is difficult to explain precisely how they work. The means for producing them is taught by the `ancestors,’ the Qualeewoohs’ word for gods. I cannot explain it any better than to say this: you and I would say that these masks are receivers. The masks let the Qualeewoohs’ dead ancestors speak to them.”
Gallen said, “But earlier tonight, Herm said that wearing the masks drives you insane.”
Felph smiled secretively. “Some would say that it drives you divine. It is true that long-term exposure to alien thoughts might … confuse some. But there is little harm in short-term exposure. Please. You said you wanted proof of the Waters. This is part of the evidence.”
Gallen immediately stiffened. Felph seemed more than a bit mad himself. He had worn the masks, of that Gallen felt certain. Perhaps the mask had made him insane. Certainly a normal man would not have howled for his guests to leave his party, would not have bayed like a wounded hound almost as soon as they entered his home. Felph was insane, and possibly dangerous. Gallen didn’t trust his judgment, didn’t want to don the mask. Yet a certain morbid fascination gripped him. Gallen wanted to know for certain that Felph spoke the truth.
Gallen went to the case, pulled out the mask that Felph had indicated-a mask of deep purples with threads of red among the silver writing. He took a deep breath, then held the strange birdlike mask up to his face with both hands. Almost immediately he stiffened, as if bracing himself for a blow. Wearing the mask somehow seemed suffocating-though Gallen could breathe easily enough. It was an odd sensation. He felt as if-his head had elongated, as if it were pulled into a far place.
Almost immediately he saw something-a vision one might call it, and the oddity of it repelled him. At first, his mind could not make sense of what he saw. A world as flat and featureless as a sea of molten lead, skies in banded shades of yellow and crimson, and green birds of light wheeling through the skies. One of the birds was flying toward him, growing larger and larger in his field of vision, and its thoughts seemed to pummel Gallen. Half-formed questions formed in Gallen’s mind-questions that he felt, curiously, must be answered once posed.
He choked back a sob, then drew the mask away, shoving it toward Felph. He found that he had dropped protectively to one knee.
He blinked rapidly and shook his head, as if trying to wake from a disturbing dream, then said weakly. “All right. I believe you.”
“What, what did you see?” Orick nearly shouted.
“It is not so much what you see,” Felph said. “It was what you think and feel. The ancestors speak to your whole soul-your hopes and desires and dreams.”
Orick asked, “What did they say?”
Gallen shook his head. “They asked me …” he struggled for words, “if I could seek for the Waters of Strength. To seek with my whole being. They told me to find … peace?” He frowned, as if uncertain of the message.
Maggie looked to Gallen, then to Felph, incredulous.
Felph said, “Would you like to try it, Maggie, Orick? Do you want to hear the voices of the ancestors?”
Maggie shook her head vigorously. Orick and Tallea declined the offer.
“Such a shame,” Felph said. “Perhaps you’ll change your mind. Here: this mask is for you, Gallen, since you had the courage to wear it. It’s quite valuable. It dates to the thirty-third ascendancy, a historical period that ended about three thousand years ago. The finest masks were made then.” He presented the mask to Gallen with a bow. Gallen took it, gingerly, put it under his arm.
“I–I don’t get it,” Orick said. “You said that the Qualeewoohs had conquered time and space. If that’s true, why don’t you bring us one?”
Felph smiled broadly. “Well, Orick, that is hard to explain, and I don’t know the answer for sure myself. The Qualeewoohs say that the ancestors are `flying between the stars.’ I think that phrase means, quite frankly, that they do not exist in the physical universe. They have been transformed into something else, something that travels to another dimension, where time and space as we know them no longer exist.”
Maggie seemed astonished at this. She pushed up at her mantle, as if to shove it from her head. She did that at times when it was downloading too much information to her. “That would require a more sophisticated level of technology than even we have!” she said. “We’ve never crossed dimensional boundaries.”
Felph shrugged. “Qualeewooh technology differs from ours, yet I doubt it is ‘more sophisticated.’ “
Maggie said, “This is incredible. My mantle has no information on these masks; as a Lord of Technology, I should know something of them.”
Gallen’s own mantle whispered to him. “The nature of the artifacts discovered here has been classified as secret. It is vital that such technology not fall into dronon hands.”
Until now, Gallen had thought it exceedingly odd that the government would conspire to hide an entire world. Now he got an uneasy feeling that they had stumbled onto something darker and more important than he ever would have imagined.
Softly, Maggie asked, “What proof do you have of such a level of technology?”
“Ah,” Felph smiled. “I see your reservations. A technologist doesn’t want dreams and alien voices whispering in her ear. She wants hardware.” He bent his head. “Unfortunately, not much has survived the past twenty thousand years. You can search the aeries-the Qualeewoohs call them cloo holes, but all you will find are cave paintings. But some evidence exists. Come back here, into this passage.”
Felph hobbled to a hole that had been excavated in the back of the chamber, then led them through a corridor that sloped down, then suddenly opened into a far larger chamber, an almost perfect oval.
Here, things were far different from the room above. Felph had installed a very dim continual light on one wall. Mounted on the wall opposite from the light was bolted a metal panel with graceful lines etched deeply into it. Whereas the previous walls had all been covered with exotic pictographs, these loops and whorls were clearly different. They didn’t seem to be writing. They didn’t represent anything.
“Can you guess what this is?” Felph asked.
Maggie drew close and studied the metal panel. “This isn’t the low-quality silver we’ve seen on Qualeewooh spirit masks. This is a solid sheet of platinum.” The panel was nearly two meters tall and ten long. “Something this big had to have been milled in a foundry.” She studied the grooves in the metal. They followed two separate tracks, mirror images of one another, that led from the floor to the ceiling and back down again in graceful sweeps. “It looks like writing etched into the metal,” Maggie said, uncertain.
But even Gallen guessed that these weren’t pictographs, not representational characters at all. “These etched tracks are so narrow and deep: the grooves must have been cut with a laser.” When she examined the etchings closely, she suddenly bolted backward in surprise.