Atlantis Endgame (10 page)

Distracted, Eveleen watched the girls tossing aside black-spotted, withered beans, their gestures expressive of reluctance, of worry: clearly a poor harvest. The older women watched, one singing. Another was getting the shelled seeds ready for sun drying, her lips pressed together in a tight line. Others ground dried beans with round stone mills, their song soft and soothing.

What else was there to notice? Eveleen looked more closely at the people as she and Linnea moved slowly along. Linnea stooped to examine bronze tools being made, then straightened up, shaking her head. The artisan, seeing her, turned his shoulder, and Linnea breathed, "House. Next to the monkeys."

Eveleen did another casual sweep, this time scanning behind the people and along the buildings. The primary building near them was a house with three low windows and one door around which were painted dancing monkeys in a graceful pattern. Above each window there was a long-tailed swallow painted, bright blue, each bird flying upward.

The front of the house looked intact, but one could see through the gaping windows that the roof had fallen in, and no one was inside.

Those swallows definitely caught the eye, Eveleen thought, glancing at the women going in and out of a smaller jury-rigged building adjacent. Next to that was a smaller house, somewhat tucked back, very plain—like so many along the streets. No one went in, no one came out, and there was no one visible in the one window.

Linnea walked on and examined fabric draped over a low window adjacent to the two houses. Eveleen bent over the rough cloth, brightly dyed blue and red in lovely patterns that would appeal to people in modern times, but she forced herself to observe beyond the heads of the spinners sitting inside the window. Now she was looking across the little court.

Then she saw it: people walked in and out of all the few whole buildings along the street, in and out of shacks, lean-tos, tents draped from old walls, and mat-covered awnings— every structure, in short, except that one.

As she watched, one of the pebbles from the children's game bounced in the direction of the mystery house. A child ran to get it, his steps faltered, though there was no apparent barrier, then he reached down and snatched up his stone and retreated in haste.

"Force field?" Eveleen whispered. And, with an inward pang, "I should have seen that."

Linnea turned away from the fabric and murmured as she rummaged in her basket, "You were watching the people, as is right. But we archaeologists ... we are trained to observe the negative spaces, you might say."

Such as no one going in and out of a specific building— something Eveleen had not considered.

"What now?" Linnea asked, bending to look at urns full of dried lentils, all dusted with ash.

"Mark the place, report to the others. Keep looking."

"How do we mark it?" Linnea asked.

Eveleen fingered a rug. "Make a mental map. I'll do that."

They kept moving, Eveleen itching to get back and investigate that mysterious little house. But she forced herself to keep moving along the narrow little streets, though now her observations were at best perfunctory.

Nothing. Nothing. No sign of Baldies ... no signs at all.

At the very top, they stood in a faint breeze and looked down at the jumble of ruins, hide and reed-mat roofs, and rubble piles below them. "All right, now we try it, just to see how far we get, and what happens," Eveleen whispered.

Linnea nodded once, swallowing visibly.

They bought more cheese on the way down, and fresh bread, all piled into Linnea's basket. Eveleen led the way to their little court. The children were all eating now, except for two of them asleep on rugs next to walls that cast a bit of shade. The women with the fava beans still worked. The spinner leaned out a window, talking in a low voice to a man who held a donkey by a rope, the animal still except for the switching of its tail to chase flies away.

No one was near the plain building.

Eveleen rummaged at her pouch, closed her hands round lapis rocks, pretended to stumble, and cast the blue stones that way. Only one rolled in the right direction. She gave a cry of dismay and chased after them, Linnea with her.

One, two, three, and there was the fourth, over by that empty door. She started over and faltered when danger prickled down the back of her neck, tightening her shoulder blades. She glanced behind her: no one there. No one paid her the least attention.

A step, another, and her fingers closed around the stone.

It wasn't a force field, then; it was some kind of mental impulse or even just subsonics. She permitted herself one glance inside that open door.

Nothing.

She turned away, put her lapis lazuli into her pouch, and fought the instinct to look back.

"All right, we know there's something weird there," she murmured.

Linnea nodded once. "And now we have to find a market spot or at least an apartment. Do you want to negotiate or shall I?"

Her tone of voice, so polite, indicated she wanted to try. From what Eveleen had seen, the older women commanded the most authority, if not respect. So she shook her head. "You do it. I want to watch some more."

They continued on, Linnea now seeking the best vantage. Eveleen's mind was back on that strange room.

The place Linnea chose was next to the building that evidently belonged to the Priestesses of the Serpent, which showed the most signs of repair of any. Not just young women about to embark on religious duties stayed there, but it seemed to be a kind of hotel, or hostel, for women from the harbor. Linnea successfully negotiated a little room, and no one gave them any false reaction, any strange questions, any sign of trouble. Eveleen stood at the one window and looked down at the sweep of market and the edge of the harbor. It was a prime spot for observation.

Yet her shoulder blades stayed tight all the rest of the day.

CHAPTER 8

"IT WASN'T THERE. At least, that's what our instruments tell us now."

Silence.

Ross braced himself for the stupid questions. They didn't come. Linnea Edel, who had been with Ashe when they had discovered the alien tech in the vent, looked surprised, but then she sat back, folded her hands, and waited.

"So we tested again, with Ross's equipment, and it came up as negative as mine."

Silence again. Eveleen rubbed her thumbnail along her bottom lip, then said, "So, what, they have detectors on their device that registers pings?"

"It would appear so," Ashe said.

"Then they definitely know we're here," Linnea murmured, looking about in question.

"That makes it more convincing that it was a Baldy welcome committee that tossed our camp," Ross stated.

They sat in the boat, under cover of truly inky darkness. Thick clouds, mixed with smoke, obscured the sky. The water was fretful, with little shivering rows of choppy waves—the result of several minor quakes all through the evening. There was a sharp smell in the air, a combination of hot rock, ozone, and sulfur that mixed unpleasantly with brine.

Ashe finally stretched out his feet tiredly and said, "Yet we still haven't seen them. Well, to the rest of our report. We put on the flame suits and our breathing masks and went down as far as we could, doing infrared scans as well as Baldy-tech pings, but of course we had no idea what to expect. We didn't know if it had been moved, turned off, or cloaked; whether or not it would be buried or in plain sight; how big it would be." He sat back and reached for one of the disguised flagons of pure water.

Ross said, "What looking around' really means is we slipped and sweated in the darkness until it was too damn hot to do anything but broil. The coolers on those suits don't have enough capacity for really long searches; they need a lot more. I wish we could score a few of the Baldy suits."

Their suits used the same technique as space suits: tubes running throughout the thick insulated fabric carried cooling fluid all over the body. He recalled that shimmering blue-green fabric that the Baldies used not just as clothing but also as insulation, filters, and conduits for their mysterious mental radar. Its insulation function actually included refrigeration, preventing heat from entering while exhausting heat from the interior as needed, operating on the same strange power source as all the Baldy tech. Which was why they couldn't bring the stuff they'd captured: the Baldies would have known they were there the moment they pushed through the time-gate.

Ashe said, "So what did you women find, besides a base for observation?"

Linnea opened her hand in a little gesture toward Eveleen, who said, "A house, seems to be empty, with some kind of mental repulsion field or subsonics. No other sign."

Ross frowned. "Could be a trap. To see who pokes around."

Eveleen nodded once. "I thought of that while we were waiting for you. In any case, we only checked it once, and didn't go back."

Ashe said, "Why don't we investigate the buildings around it, then, and see what we find?" He nodded at Linnea. "Eveleen can take one of the suits and my gear and help Ross up on the mountain."

Ross knew what that meant: a long, dreary day of trudging up, searching for vents, and checking them, in case the mysterious device had been put into another vent. Having Eveleen come along was his way of acknowledging a spectacularly dangerous and tiring day's work.

"Oh, thanks," Eveleen said, and the others chuckled. She turned Linnea's way. "At least one of us will get a thrill, eh?"

"Oh, it seems to me that there might be potential thrills enough in exploring volcanic vents," Linnea said, smiling. "But I confess: to see the spectacular frescoes inside those buildings still standing when the paintings are still relatively fresh and new, and not crumbled and age-ruined, would be a joy I'd never forget."

Ashe nodded and then turned to Stavros. "Any suspicious activity to report on the waterfront?"

"No sign of Baldies—no attempted attacks, overt or covert. The fishermen are upset about the numbers of dead fish," Stavros said. "The water temperature is several degrees higher than it ought to be, which would be devastating for many types of fish. It's apparently worse closer to the pre-Kameni Island."

The pre-Kameni Island did not even exist up the timeline. Ross mentally examined the map of the island complex: Kalliste and its appendages looked, to him, like nothing so much as a blob of dough floating in the middle of a donut with a bite out of it. The mountain up behind them was, of course, only a small part of the biggest, crescent-shaped island on which they now stood. The caldera would be about eighty miles in diameter; its center—the dough blob—was, according to the scientists' models, the island that Ross could see lying north of them. This little island, which would be blasted into nothingness during the Big Blow, had been termed
pre-Kameni
by the scientists.

Ross remembered watching it earlier, through field glasses, from one of the western cliffs. They could just make out buildings there, most of them ruins, with some little boats plying round it. Squatters there, too, but very few of them.

Kosta said, in his heavy accent, "The people are worried that the oracle does not speak. The harvest is worse than anyone remembers, the quakes worse, the biggest one three months ago sending up serpents of fire-spewing smoke and bringing down a rain of pumice. Abruptly the quakes have eased since then, but the smoke is worse. Fish dead. They are afraid the gods are angry and won't talk to them through their oracle anymore."

Ashe looked over at Linnea. "Can we become a new oracle, as a last resort, to save lives? There are far too many people here. I do not want to see them incinerated without at least trying to get them to flee."

She shook her head. "You cannot just 'be' a new oracle, not here where there is only one, and that one sanctioned by the local governing body. Perhaps we could come down the mountain wailing about the oracle speaking at last and trust to the grapevine to spread the news."

"Will they listen?" Ross asked, skeptical.

Linnea's considering gaze turned his way. "They have no reason not to believe. The question involves community, though. People might want to question more closely who we are."

"That's right," Ashe said. "We are known as Egyptian traders, but we still are not identified with any kinship group. I don't know if that will suffice to get them to evacuate their homes."

Ross said with grim humor, "Right. There is no Red Cross waiting to help them, no friendly government wanting to aid refugees."

Ashe turned back to Linnea. "You or Eveleen might have to try to get inside the oracle caves, if the priestesses will talk to you."

"Better than the alternative," Ross muttered, but under his breath.

"Let's keep that as a backup plan, then," Ashe said, and no one disagreed.

They finished eating dinner, and as everyone was tired, their heads slightly aching from the oppressive heat and the polluted air, the men camped out on the deck of the ship under the stars, and Eveleen and Linnea used oil-soaked torches to light their way back to their rented room, Eveleen sleeping near the open window, where the slightest sound would waken her instantly.

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JUST BEFORE DAWN the women hiked back down to the boat.