Hallahan settled the boat leaf-gentle on the landing deck, feeling for it with the skids. “No gravity,” he announced. “Gotta lash her down. Wrathrock, DeRoche, come with me.”
Skinsuit hoods stiffened into helmets when powered up. Donovan, Méarana, and Sofwari deployed theirs and disembarked. Second Officer Franq went to examine the flier, and the pilot and technicians joined him.
“Tao!” he heard Wild Bill exclaim. “The pilot’s still in it!”
That brought Méarana and Sofwari on the double. But Donovan stayed by the boat and stepped behind the ladder and waited.
“No rush,” he heard Franq say. “Just a skeleton wrapped in tin foil. That foil must be their space suit. I wonder if it generates a force field of some sort, because he’s sure not dressed for a space walk.”
“What was the gun for?” asked Méarana.
“Suicide,” said Wild Bill. “He came back up after what happened happened and…lost hope. Don’t know why he didn’t rejoin the others on the ground. Maybe he was out’a fuel. Maybe his lover had been on board. We’ll never know.”
“There is a song in him, though,” said the harper.
Donovan’s patience was finally satisfied as first one pair of boots, then another, climbed down the ladder. He poked a gloved finger into the back of the first man. “I didn’t think you could stay away, Billy.”
The Confederate turned and smiled. “Of course not.”
“Let me guess: you hid in the engine compartment? How did you evade your guard?”
Paulie was in the other suit. “I was the guard.”
“This does raise some rather delicate questions.”
“Donovan,” said Billy Chins, “I have watched your back and you have watched mine for many weeks. I saved your life in the Roaring Gorge, and Méarana’s during the storm surge on the Aríidnuxr. What more can I do to prove myself? I have been on this quest longer than anyone but you and the harper herself. Do I not deserve at least to look upon the end of it?”
Donovan sighed. “Stick with me, and don’t get out of my sight.”
Billy spread his hands. “Sahb! Where Billy-fella go?”
Méarana strode the ruined decks of the Vessel like the queen of High Tara. This was where Mother had meant to be, and she had come to walk those footsteps instead. She wondered if her footprints were big enough. When her mother’s ship had been hulled, the air pressure had blown everything loose out into space, and that included Francine Thompson of Dangchao Waypoint, d.b.a. Bridget ban, Hound of the Kennel, R.Mh., S.hÓ., etc. There would be no funeraclass="underline" no burial. Only a memorial service, with ancient words spoken over an empty box.
Their suit lamps cast a halo of soft, subtly tinted light about them. It created an eerie effect in the dark interior: broken and twisted walls and decks, cables and conduits, gaping chasms in which shadows seemed to move. Once, Méarana thought she saw another suit weirdly following them: perhaps an ancient crewman, wrapped in foil like a bonbon, drifting through the empty spaces of the Vessel until he should find his way accidentally to the void and freedom. But when she shone her spotlight on the apparition, she could not find it, and perhaps it had not been there at all.
Another time, they found a floating machine, tangled in cables like a skin-diver caught in seaweed. It had wheels and extensors that resembled arms and two lenses that gave the appearance of eyes; but the carapace was blackened and the unit dead.
Their lamps found an inscription on one of the bulkheads. It was in the Tantamiž, and Donovan puzzled over it some before declaring that, if he guessed the sound-shifts correctly, it meant something like “Amphitheater” and the number five. Five decks from here? Amphitheater 5? Five paces this way? But the rest of the meaning had gone with the rest of the bulkhead.
Blankets and Beads tracked them and kept them informed of their position relative to the large pressurized sector. “When we find it,” Donovan wondered, “how will we enter without losing the pressure?”
“Why worry?” said Billy. “You can’t imagine there are people inside! Not after thousands of years.”
Méarana entertained the sudden image of survivors of this ancient catastrophe; huddled in a redoubt, a civilization in a box. Would such a people commit mass suicide one day when the futility of it all came home to them, when they finally realized that they would never leave their box, that there was nowhere else they could possibly go? Or would they forget that they were even in a box and forget that universes might not have walls?
Méarana told herself it was absurd; but the notion of a spaceship the size of a small moon was just as absurd. So who could say where the line of fantasy ought to be drawn?
As they worked deeper into the Vessel, they found intact rooms and corridors, machines dead but undamaged. There was no air or power or gravity, but whatever had wrecked the Vessel’s outer hull and torn up ordinary quarters and corridors had failed to penetrate this far into the ark.
Finally, they came to a door beside which small lights glimmered green and yellow and blue. What the colors meant was not clear. The Tantamiž consisted of cryptic abbreviations. But that there were lights at all meant everything.
There was a button labeled 
and another labeled 
. Beside them the symbol 
glowed green. Donovan studied all closely.
Billy coughed impatiently. “This means ‘close’ and that means ‘open.’ The symbols are universal.”
“That does seem obvious,” Donovan admitted. “I’m trying to decide if means ‘pi.’ Pirāņam means air, life, vitality, strength, power, so it might be the abbreviation for ‘air.’”
Sofari said, “So the green light might mean there is air on the other side, or it may mean that the power for the door is on.”
“Or there is life within,” said Méarana with thumping heart.
Donovan shrugged. “Or all the above. They had words that cut crosswise through ours.”
“One way to find out,” suggested Sofwari.
“Maybe the rest of us should get out of the way,” said Méarana. “In case pressing the button means something more serious than ‘open.’”
“Umm.”
“What, Debly? What!”
“If there is air under pressure in there, and the door opens, everyone standing in front of it gets blown away.”
“It must be an airlock. What’s the point of airtight doors with no way through them?”
“Aah,” said Paulie, “enough O’ this shit!” And he reached past everyone’s shoulder and pressed the button.
Everyone flinched. The door split down its center—there had been no sign of a crack before—and they found themselves staring down a broad, brightly-lit corridor.
Donovan had a moment to register the sight. Then he braced himself.
But there was no hurricane of outpouring air.
“Magicians,” he muttered. He stepped through the doorway and felt as if passing through a thick layer of gelatin. Then he was inside, and suit sensors activated. There was air around him. His helmet display read off temperature, pressure, and composition—well within the range of human atmospheres.
It occurred to him that, however long recycled, this was the atmosphere of Old Earth herself, that these very molecules had once blown in soft breezes on a free Earth.
His fingers fumbled at his helmet seals. By the time he had pulled the hood off, the others were around him and wondering at the tears that ran down his cheeks.