When they reached the tower, Mari paused to run her fingers across its surface. Up close, the material was just as smooth as from a distance, but also very hard and apparently unmarked by time. “What is this? Mari asked.
“We don’t know,” one of the male librarians admitted. They had all dropped their hoods and seemed just as eager to talk now as they had formerly been reticent. “It was something our ancestors could make, a material which could be poured like water, yet would hold a shape and then harden into something stronger and more enduring than stone.”
“Our ancestors.” Mari glanced at Alain. “Did they come from the stars?”
“Yes. Very few people are still aware of that.”
Mari felt her breath stop for a moment. “Our ancestors really did come from the stars?”
“Don’t the Mechanics still boast of their lineage from the stars?”
“Yes, but most of them don’t believe it anymore. It’s true?”
Coleen gave Mari a wry smile. “If you truly wish to know how our world came to be as it is, that is where you’ll have to start, with the ship that came from another star.”
The ground floor of the tower was a vast room, with stairs leading upward and down. The interior was illuminated by some kind of electrical lighting, though Mari noted that a lot of the lights had failed. “Where’s your power generator?” she asked.
A librarian waved around to encompass the tower. “The tower itself turns the sun’s rays into power for us to use. But the amount of power has been slowly dwindling for generations for reasons we do not understand, and when lights now go out, we have no more replacements for them.”
Coleen headed for one of the stairways down, leading Mari and Alain down three flights to what must be a level well beneath the surface. “It is very safe here,” she said. “The safest storage space in all of Dematr. Not just because it’s deeply buried in living rock, but because this part of the planet is very geologically stable. It is where we keep Original Equipment.” From the way she pronounced the words, it was easy for Mari to hear the capital letters in them.
Coleen paused at the door at the bottom of the stairs, manipulating a lock and then standing aside as she opened the door to allow Mari and Alain to enter.
Lights came on as Mari walked into the room, apparently triggered automatically. She came to a halt, staring around at an assemblage of equipment which surpassed anything she had ever imagined. Mari knew her mouth had fallen open as she gazed at the smooth panels, at the devices whose functions she could only guess at. As Mari slowly turned to take in everything, she felt moisture running down her cheeks, and reached up to wipe away tears of joy and wonder. “Stars above. So many things in the banned texts are right here, truly existing. Oh, this is awesome.” Her voice cracked and Mari had to close her eyes, more tears spilling out as she cried at the marvel of these devices which actually did exist, which were real and here in front of her. Things that the Mechanics Guild had kept from her world.
“Mari?” Alain’s voice was concerned as his hand touched her gently.
“Oh, Alain.” Mari shook her head, opening her eyes and turning around and around to look at everything over and over again. “This is so beyond belief. This is what the Mechanics Guild took from us. Am I right?” she asked Coleen, who had entered behind them and now watched Mari with shared joy.
“Yes,” the librarian said. “All of these things came from the great ship, which means all of them came from a world warmed by another star. They were all built an unimaginable distance away, many, many years ago. We have had to keep them hidden to protect them from your Guild.”
“Not my Guild,” Mari denied violently. “I am a Mechanic, but that is not my Guild any longer. I could never belong to any organization that forced the suppression of such wonders.”
Coleen had walked over to one wall, where a large diagram hung, the image on it faded but still legible. “This was the ship.”
Mari came close, staring at the drawing. “What’s the scale?”
“Here,” the librarian said, indicating a marker in one corner of the diagram. “Our ancestors used something called a metr. A metr was about half a lance in length.”
Checking that against the diagram, Mari felt her jaw drop again. “It was huge.”
“It had to be. The voyage took hundreds of years.” Coleen indicated a map on the wall next to the diagram of the ship. Even under its protective covering, the map had browned with age.
Mari and Alain studied the map, seeing huge continents of unfamiliar shape. “What does this show?” Alain asked.
“The home of our ancestors,” Coleen said, her voice now worshipful. “The place from which the great ship came. Another world. Urth is its name.”
Mari traced the outlines of the continents with her fingertip, carefully not touching even the covering of the map. “Urth. How far away is it?”
“We do not know anymore,” another librarian answered. “We know only that the distance is so great that light itself takes many years for the journey.” Her voice saddened. “One of the stars we see in the sky is the sun which warms Urth, but we no longer know which star that is.”
Coleen, plainly enjoying sharing this information, pointed to one part of the ship. “This was where the crew lived and worked. Because the trip was so long, the original crew aged and died along the way, and their children continued in their stead, and so on until this world was reached.”
Mari ran her finger under one large word, the text odd but readable. “Demeter. The name of our world. Just like on the texts. That’s how it was originally spelled and pronounced?”
“Yes. It was also the name of the ship.” The librarian indicated another portion of the diagram. “And this area was where the passengers were, along with all of the animals, fish, plants and other creatures the ship brought.”
“There couldn’t have been very many passengers,” Mari said. “That area is a lot smaller than the crew area.”
“There were thousands of passengers.” Coleen’s face lit with awe as she spoke. “Our ancestors knew how to take newly created children from the bodies of their mothers, then freeze them so that they would exist unchanging for many years, until thawed and allowed to grow into babies.”
Mari stared at the other woman, shocked. “They took children newly created from the mothers?” Mari became aware that her hands had dropped down of their own accord, covering her own lower abdomen protectively. Alain had noticed her gesture as well and seemed unusually startled by it. But why should he be? Perhaps because he was a man he couldn’t grasp why that would appall a woman. “That’s horrible.”
Coleen shook her head, speaking gently. “No. It harmed neither mother nor child, and every mother and father who gave their unborn children to this purpose did so by choice, so that their children could live here someday.” She gestured to the equipment around them. “The ship also carried devices which could serve as mothers to bring the children to term.”
“Machines?” Mari demanded. “Machines in which babies grew until they were birthed?” She had worked around machines most of her life, she loved machines in many ways, and yet the idea felt incredibly repulsive.
“Machines of a sort,” the librarian agreed. “It was necessary. Upon arrival here the devices brought to birth a first generation of passengers, and when those were old enough to care for babies another generation, and so on until every passenger had been born. Since then,” she added with a slight smile, “every birth has been in ways more familiar to us.”
“The animals, too?” Alain asked. “This is how the first animals came here?”