The Triple Stars Trilogy

Chapter 8-2

“I"ll go in first,” said Lilith.

“Why you?”

“Because then I"ll be the first.”

“Fine, if it"s that important to you.”

This time, the doorway responded as they neared. Instead of an empty frame, it was a solid sheet of white, nothing visible through it. Symbols appeared upon it, becoming clearer they nearer they got. They formed a familiar motif: three circles arranged in a triangle. It felt a little like the face of Surtr was staring back at her – so much so that she almost expected it to triple-blink. Beneath the three, the pattern was repeated, although in the second version the circles intersected each other. This she also recognized: it resembled closely the solarkey that Toruk had given her.

She carried that object with her in her EVA suit pocket, thinking it might prove useful during a foray into a star. She handed it to Lilith. “Try this on the doorway and perhaps it will open.”

Lilith needed no encouragement. She took the key and, holding the bead in her other hand, approached the door. It clearly responded, one of the three separate circles deepening in colour. When she put the solarkey to the door, the same thing happened. The key was a perfect fit, but the door did not open.

“Looks like it needs three beads to function,” said Lilith. “I wonder why?”

Selene thought she knew: the Tok carried the beads in their brains, and presumably each was unique. The designers of the Heliolith had ensured that three individuals were needed to gain access. Perhaps they"d grown concerned that a single renegade like Toruk could open the door alone, whereas they"d maybe decided that the Depository was sufficiently well-defended by the Warden entity to allow an individual access.

“It"s a good job we have two others,” Selene said. “It"s almost like we"re following a trail.” She wondered whether other people had reached this point over the millennia, but hadn"t possessed the objects required to allow them to proceed. Holding both beads, she walked forwards to stand beside Lilith. This time, all three circles reacted. When Lilith touched the key to the door again, it responded immediately, vanishing to be replaced by a rectangle of darkness. A way inside. Selene scanned it, bounced electromagnetic waves at various frequencies off it, but got nothing.

“Looks like we have to step through,” said Lilith.

“Looks like it.”

Lilith strode in. Immediately, she disappeared. Selene waited for her to return, but nothing happened. Was she trapped? Had she been killed? The obvious thing to do was to wait as long as she could, then leave. No point them both dying.

But she couldn"t just leave Lilith. Couldn"t leave without knowing. Feeling like she was following Lilith over a cliff, Selene stepped through the frame as well.

She found herself on a round platform. Lilith waited a few metres away, unharmed, the look of wonder on her face clear through her helmet visor.

“Look at this place.”

More pearly light suffused the scene, giving it an artificial, almost dreamlike quality. The rock was clearly hollow: pathways spiralled away to the centre, twisting round and running at crazy angles, intersecting and looping to fill the whole of the interior. Five of them led off at various angles from the platform. None had any apparent means of support, nor any obvious pattern to their arrangement. The parallels with the observation dome on Surtr"s ship were obvious.

Selene checked her comms access to the lander. The ship was still there, responding when she called, although the signal was fuzzed and distorted. They weren"t cut off, at least.

All along the edges of the paths were set stalk-like tubes, a pace apart and constructed from the same material as the surface they sprouted from. There had to be many, many thousands of them. She counted rapidly. Millions. The top of each swelled into a bud-like structure. Selene walked to the nearest one and touched it. It unfurled silently to reveal one of the beads held within it, light glowing through its glass to reveal its iridescence. She picked it up, wondering who had been the last person to touch it, how long ago that had been. The bead was apparently hers to take if she wanted it. She returned it and moved her hand away. The bud sealed up again, protecting its treasure. There didn"t appear to be a Warden entity protecting the objects as there had been at the Depository.

“It has to be another Recorder archive. Like the Depository but for data rather than objects.”

“It"s incredible,” said Lilith. “The size of it. It"s just … incredible.”

There was something in the centre of the hollow rock. Zooming in, Selene picked out the structure she was expecting: a central platform. She pointed it out to Lilith. “We need to go there.”

“Which pathway?”

There was no clue about which one to take; the twists and loops were impossible to follow. Trying to sound like she knew what she was doing, Selene picked one at random. “This one.”

She stepped forwards, half-expecting some defensive system to react and attack her. Once again, she was allowed to proceed. As with Surtr"s ship, it was dizzying to creep along the ribbon pathways; they twisted as they wound round so that the right way up became upside-down a few moments later. Lilith experimented with putting a foot over the edge and found she couldn"t step off. Some force was keeping them on the level.

At each step there was another stalk housing another glass sphere. The amount of data stored was unimaginable; there were hundreds of kilometres of passageway wrapped up inside the rock. What had prompted the Tok to go to so much trouble? Toruk had said his people had spent their time collecting and cataloguing knowledge until the day they encountered the Morn. This might be a copy of everything they had learned. She had to resist the temptation to take some of the beads. She could only carry a tiny fraction of them, and there was no way of knowing which were important.

She had to bring Ondo back with her, though. He"d be in heaven. She let her embedded, inner Ondo see everything she was seeing.

“How long is it since someone else came here?” asked Lilith.

“Like Ondo said, it might be millions of years.”

“Everything looks so immaculate, like it was put here yesterday.”

“Yeah.”

Once again, she felt like she was inside the nucleus of a cell, the strands of twisting DNA all around her – except that it wasn"t the DNA of an individual, it was the coded information of the whole galaxy.

Finally, they reached the round platform at the centre of the rock. A large orb hovered in the air in front of her, again with no means of support. The Recorders really seemed to like their spheres, just as they"d adored their triple-circle motif. It bore a clear resemblance to the visualization system she"d used at the Depository down to the bead-sized slot within it, although that had been a hemisphere and this was a full, floating orb.

“This is a reading device,” said Lilith. “That must be it, right? This is how they looked at all the recorded data.”

“Yeah,” said Selene. “I"ve seen one like it before.”

“The question is, which bead do we read? Looking at them all would take several lifetimes.”

Selene hesitated, calculating. She plucked the nearest bead from its stalk. It came away without resistance. The light beneath it extinguished, but no alarms sounded and no attacks came. She slipped the bead into the slot on the sphere.

Lights flickered in the orb, then images began to appear.