“Have you ever been to see Persepolis?”
“No.” She shook her head, loosened her stiffening neck muscles. “I wish I’d had the chance to ...” She went on, determinedly, “I will see it, the next time I work in the Near East. I want to climb those magnificent stairs.”
“And see those columns standing like sentinels above the past, against a blue sky—” He stared out at the glaring red-black dome above them. Petra saw a handful of tiny clouds, very high up, their whiteness tinted faintly pink by the haze of dust. “Did you know that some of the beliefs in the Old Testament were influenced by the teachings of Zoroaster?’’
She smiled, nodding. “The name of the Pharisees probably came from the word for ‘Persian.’”
“How far do you think we’re going?”
“I don’t know either.”
“If you get tired of driving, let me know, and I’ll change with you.”
“All right. Thanks.” She realized, with a selfish possessiveness, that she was grateful to have even the driving to help keep her mind occupied.
They reached the end of the gigantic slope of fallen cliff-face at last, and she angled their track across the canyon floor again, closing with the northern wall. She watched the wall come at them, inexorably, rising and rising, a rippling tidal wave of stone; she imagined herself drowning. Hours had passed already, and continued to pass. The sun rose to its zenith behind them and began to drop forward, getting into her eyes, as she followed their unchosen course along the foot of the canyon wall. They had brought no food with them, but she was not hungry or thirsty, not even tired. Mitradati said little and she said less; her self-awareness ebbed. She felt herself slipping further into a kind of fatalistic boredom, her thoughts almost formless, meaningless.
She could not remember anything she had been thinking, when at last she was able to realize it. They were passing the point of a protruding arm of the red-stained cliff; she began to see another of the endless side canyons that crenelated the heights. But a sudden emotion, utterly unexpected, filled her as the new subcanyon emerged before them: Anticipation? Excitement? Recognition…Inexplicable knowledge that they were reaching the journey’s end at last.
Shiraz stirred in his seat, leaning forward, peering out with what looked like eagerness. “We’re almost there!”
“Yes—” And the alien emotion, or lack of emotion, within her became recognizable longing again. The shapeless fears that had dulled her desire to reach this goal fell away and were forgotten. This canyon was broader and deeper than most; she studied it for a way up into its network of dry channels and tumbled rock. The canyon became a sheer cleft about a kilometer above them, above an outcropping of resistant strata; but below that point the wall had been undercut, when water, and later windblown sand, had eaten away the weaker rock beneath it to form a natural shelter. Her eyes lingered on that hollow in the rock, a memory of the cliff-dwellings of the American Southwest moving across it like a cloud shadow. She could see nothing up there, yet…And yet she was certain now that something was there, something more important than anything a human being had ever discovered—
“Can’t you get up there any faster?” Shiraz’s voice was sharp with frustration.
She got them up there, as fast as she could, over terrain and past obstacles that she would never have dared if she had had any freedom to make a judgment. She stopped the buggy at last, twenty meters below the final ledge that was their destination. “I can’t get us any closer than this. We’ll have to climb from here.”
“All right.”
Shiraz picked his helmet up from the floor, and she picked up her own, catching it on the steering wheel in her haste. She settled it on, barely latching it in place in time before they were unsealing the doors and leaping down into the thick, talc-fine, cloying dust. The red-stained dust was darker and duller where it had been disturbed, making her think of midden soil. Making her realize that they were about to unearth a greater mystery, and gaze on the future/past…She saw Shiraz haul the drab, rectangular container that was the bomb out of the back seat, and felt dark doubt gnaw at the edges of her desire. “Do you think anyone will come after us? Maybe they’re already searching—they must wonder where we’ve gone.” She realized for the first time that she had never switched on the radio, never even thought to try. An unfamiliar heaviness clogged her chest.
“Probably. They know something is wrong by now. But we must have a big lead on them, whatever they decide to do. It won’t make any difference.” Doubt clouded his own face again.
They struggled up the final slope, pushing and lifting and dragging the metal box and each other; until they stood finally on the wide ledge below the overhang of ancient basalt. Petra turned slowly, breathing hard, her heart pounding with exertion and excitement.
The compulsion that had drawn them here by an invisible thread intensified stunningly inside her; as though she had passed through a doorway, letting the psychic pull she had known only as a deep, formless vibration burst over her, reverberate through her. She was dimly aware of a human sound, a grunt of astonishment, had no idea whether it had come from Shiraz’s throat or her own. She was frozen in the moment, utterly absorbed in the awareness of what was happening to her, a thing that no human being had ever experienced before: the communication of an alien mind. The presence grew and grew inside her own mind, taking form, focusing. She strained toward it with all her will, straining to understand—
And suddenly she did understand, as the swollen presence clogged her brain and paralyzed her synapses: a cold, unfeeling radiation, without meaning, without—life. Like a machine ... a machine programmed to lie in wait for centuries; but not in order to share with humankind the secrets of an interstellar society. There was no intelligence here, there would be no answer, no revelation, just—
A pile of ruins. Across the plateau, a jumble of red native stone, a warren of broken circles and irregularities filled with rubble, reaching back and back into the russet shadows below the overhang. A ruin. A cypher, empty of meaning, long since empty of life. Still she did not know—and she realized that she would never know; never feel illumination break the heavy clouds of compulsion…The Unknown held her in bondage, and she meant less than nothing to it. The emotion that swelled in her, straining at her bonds, was not alien any longer—it was not even fear, but anger. Her eyes burned with fierce disappointment, and fiercer determination: She would know, she would find out! She moved forward, unexpectedly free to move, taking easy, unresisted bounds across the level surface. Shiraz called after her and she felt him follow. She reached the ruins ahead of him, found that they were even more immense than she had realized. The broken walls were twice her height, wearing deep skirts of dust, and they stretched away for hundreds of meters. She ran her gloved hands over the dust-filmed wall, along the line that age was etching between perfectly-matched precision-cut surfaces of stone. The ruining of this place had taken a long time. She was suddenly, totally certain that it was an ancient thing; that it had been waiting, waiting for millennia. But not for her ...