Revealed by the play of three flashights, almost filling a chamber behind the door, was a statue made of dark stone. The drone swooped in to inspect the massive, complex shape. To Mercury, it looked very vaguely horselike with a massive head, wide shoulders, and eight legs.
“Holy mothers of the gods,” Tai said reverently. “Nothing like this has ever been found on this world.”
Haze knelt beside Rusty. “Good boy!” Rusty’s tufted tail wagged.
Rusty, being a robot, probably wasn’t a he or she, but since bonded with Haze, could probably be considered a boy and thought of as a he anyway. . . . Mercury’s thoughts skewed to a new idea. “Could this statue be a robot too?”
“If so, it’s thrice priceless,” Tai breathed. “I want it.”
Mercury recognized Tai’s lust for archaeological treasure going to full throttle. At a very inconvenient time. “There’s no way we could pull it up the way we came,” Mercury reminded her. “The passages are just big enough, but there’s that chasm at the top, and the flood is coming!”
“Gaudy true. It’ll have to be pictures, measurements, microscopic sampling, done before this level can flood.”
Mercury could imagine how much work that would entail. She could also imagine the flood putting an unpleasant, and possibly unsafe, end to the effort.
Haze shone his flashlight down the hallway. “What about this ramp?”
“Ramp?” Tai whirled.
He showed Tai and Mercury a wide, smooth ramp that ran up at an angle. “This is the direction of the valley,” he said. “It may reach that higher formation, the one Ria put her instrument on. Hopper’s hill. In fact, this slope is the same as that,” he said thoughtfully.
“Maybe we could pull it up the ramp, get it close to the surface.” Tai said. “Blow open a way to get it out.”
To Mercury, that sounded little more practical than dragging that statue up the narrow passageways they’d traversed. If it was made of any kind of stone, it was very heavy. She turned back toward it.
There was a ledge inside the chamber. The ledge had open compartments, still recognizable, though cracked. Under the ledge, Rusty sat on his haunches and reached up above his head with a forepaw, feeling along the ledge in a way that looked eerily human.
Mercury elbowed Tai. “Look.”
Rusty’s paw found something and closed around it. Dropping down to three legs, Rusty trotted toward Tai, carrying whatever it was—something long and round, a rod, with the dull gleam of old metal—with toes prehensile enough to securely grasp it.
Rusty offered it to Tai.
Tai knelt down closer to Rusty’s eye level. Rusty placed the object in her outstretched hand. “Thank you.” Tai stood up and all of them looked at the rod. It shed fine dust, some kind of precipitate from ten thousand years in a dark cryogenic place. It had buttons. Even without pressing a button, though, it was clear that whatever it was meant to do, it wouldn’t work. The metal case was corroded and cracked.
Tai said, “Something similar was found in another Site years ago and thought to be a sound controller. That one was reconstructed from shards since it came from under an ancient rockfall. I faked it in the sandbox with a toy piccolo. Describe and bag it.” Tai handed the rod to Mercury.
Mercury had seen Tai before at the scene of a discovery, just never one this major. Tai was going to be obsessed with taking the stone statue out or at least measuring it ahead of the flood. Surprisingly, though, instead of wheeling back toward the statue, Tai gave Rusty a long and thoughtful look. “We’ve no idea what the Old Tellans looked like. The installations of theirs we’ve found haven’t included pictures of them. I’m starting to think this is no service animal.”
Mercury was baffled. “Not a service animal?”
“No. A service doll.”
Mercury gasped, “The Old Tellans—?”
“Yes. I suspect Rusty looks like his makers.”
Three days ago, he was a bureaucrat interrupting his dull routine for a larkish field trip. In retrospect, maybe he’d had clipped emotions, the amplitude of his feelings artificially limited, without realizing it, for years—ever since coming home from the Fall on Strata. Now Haze found himself in the bowels of an Old Tellan fortress, in the way of a colossal flood, with terrible memories that could rake his nerves over the coals, but with a compassionate robotic companion, and in love with Mercury. He felt terror and hope and curiosity with intensity such as he hadn’t felt since Strata.
Whatever happened, he didn’t want to go back to artificial amnesia. It took away too much of who he was.
Tai wanted to see where the ramp led, whether there might be a way out at the top. As they all walked upward, with the drone darting left and right to take in details of the passageway, Tai said, “That statue would fit in our Great Crate, the one on its way to Wendis. The up side of that is that Tellan customs won’t inspect it.”
Haze was still trying to find factual footing in a flood of feelings. “They won’t?”
“No. The Crate is sanctioned by an elaborate legal agreement engineered by an interstellar lawyer at Avend University in Wendis. She’s old Azurean, just as you’re old Tellan.”
“From one of the early astronaut families on Azure.” Haze nodded.
“And you’ll never meet a more precious, sanctimonious rule-head than Nia Az-Courant.” Evidently Tai disliked the lawyer in question. “But she knows how to cut an interstellar legal deal. The downside is that the Great Crate will go straight to the Museum of Antiquities in Wendis.”
“That should put us back in good graces with the Museum,” Mercury pointed out. Haze wondered what the Pastfinders had done to fall out of good graces with a respectable museum. “But just getting the crate to E-Prime could be hard. It may be too heavy to lift with the copter.”
“True, true. Maybe we can raft it.”
Mercury grimaced, probably visualizing a makeshift raft bobbing on a colossal flood.
Haze deduced that Svetlana Tai very badly wanted to get this statue off of Tellus and into her professional possession. Oddly, he didn’t mind. Planetary Protection had to do with biota, not statuary.
The passageway abruptly stopped at a blank wall.
“Is this just a wall?” Tai muttered. “Or another door?”
“For what it’s worth, I think we’re above the level of the plain and we’re inside Hopper’s Hill.” Haze had always had good situational sense in the field. Until the Fall on Strata. But now his field sense might be back. He hoped it was so.
The drone carefully examined the wall and found a faintly traced square.
Mercury and Tai walked closer.
Without warning, the door began to move aside. Mercury yelped in surprise.
“Pressure sensors,” said Tai. “Everybody out, but stop just outside the door.”
The stone door let in a widening shaft of bright sunlight then stopped. On the other side of the door, they found themselves at the top of the formation that Hopper drove up yesterday, with its long view of the Rift. Tai ordered them to stay close to the door. Probably in response to their weights on its ancient sensors, the door remained open.
Gratified that his field sense had been unerring, Haze blinked at the strong light of a nearly setting sun. He looked around. A thin column of smoke rose in the blue sky in the east. “Are you OK seeing that?” Mercury murmured.