Chapter 42: The City, Read Properly

The city looked different on the second visit, and the difference was entirely in him.

The first time he had walked into it under a deadline with sixty-one hungry people at his back and had read it as a landmark.

This time he came in with six, no schedule, and read it as a document, and it took less than an hour to find the first thing he had missed.

The chambers off the sides were not living quarters.

Or not only — some were, but the ones nearest the central low point had been cleared, deliberately, of everything including their floors, scraped down to bare substrate and then left.

Sacha crawled three of them before he understood, and when he did, he had to sit down.

They had been emptied by the people who lived here.

Not looted.

Packed.

They didn't die, he thought. They moved. They took the floors up.

He made the party sweep them all, which took the rest of the day and turned up the second thing he had missed.

In one of the unemptied chambers, in a corner, a mass of shed carapace sat —molts, dozens of them, the ordinary debris of a species that grows by discarding. It had been swept into a pile.

Not scattered where it fell.

Sacha stood over it and did an arithmetic he did not want to finish.

A settlement this size, occupied for generations, produces molts continuously.

What he was looking at was perhaps two seasons' worth.

Which meant the city had not been abandoned by a population at its height.

It had been abandoned by whatever was left at the end of a long decline, and the decline had been slow enough that somebody had gone on sweeping up.

The wall took two days.

He had four Cerci-memorized copies of it and the original in front of him and no key, and for most of the first day he got nowhere at all, because he was doing what he had done the first time:

trying to read it as language.

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It was the fifth-place Cerci who broke it, and she did it by accident, and Sacha would come back to that later as an argument for bringing people who weren't him.

She had been laying her memorized copy on the floor to compare it against the wall — checking her own accuracy, which was the entire reason she was here — and she laid it in the wrong orientation.

Rotated.

Sacha glanced at it and saw a shape he recognized.

Not a word.

A map.

The dense band was not writing at all, or not only.

It was the fracture network, laid flat, with the passages as lines and the maintained corners as thickenings and the cisterns as closed loops.

He had been staring at a written language for two days while standing in front of a wall-sized route diagram, drawn by people whose entire civilization was two thousand lengths of passage.

Of course, he thought, with something close to vertigo. What would they write about?

He sat back from it and let the size of that land properly, because it was not a small thing.

A species that never surfaced, for generations, in a network of cracks — its entire world was topology.

Not seasons, not weather, not the movement of enemies across open ground.

Passages, widths, connections, which corner had been taken down and which had not.

The wall was not their history or their literature.

It was their understanding, written out in full, in the only subject that had ever mattered to them.

And Sacha, who had spent three months learning that his species' single unique asset was its ability to go where nothing else could go, had walked past it once with a schedule in his head.

Once he had the orientation, the rest came fast and never got better.

The map showed the network he had walked.

It showed the fold, marked with a thickening exactly where the scallop had been cut.

It showed the city, and four cisterns, and the western fracture mouth he had brought a column through.

And it showed the whole thing continuing down.

There was a second network beneath the one he knew.

It ran from three points in the city — the three cleared chambers —, and it went deeper than the flat map could represent, indicated by a convention Sacha only recognized because it repeated:

each of the three descents was drawn as a passage that narrowed to nothing, ending in a single heavy mark.

The last block, the hurried one, was on this section.

He could not read it.

But it had been added after the rest, in a different hand, and it consisted of the same heavy mark repeated at all three descent points with a line struck through it.

Sealed, he thought. Or closed. Or do not use.

He tested that reading three separate ways before allowing it, because he had learned what a convenient conclusion cost.

He checked whether the struck mark appeared anywhere else on the wall in a context that ruled the meaning out — it did not.

He had the memorized copies checked against the original for that section specifically, twice, by two different Cerci.

He looked for a fourth descent that had not been struck through, on the theory that a do not use implies a use this one instead.

There wasn't one.

All three, struck, in the same hurried hand.

Whatever the last people to write on this wall had wanted the next reader to know, it was not a redirection.

It was a full stop.

He sat with a wall-sized instruction he was 60 percent confident he had understood correctly and did the arithmetic he had been avoiding since the delegation.

Something had come up out of the gaps to take Khrr.

The gaps had a downward network.

The downward network had been marked shut, in a hurry, by the last people to write on this wall.

And then, at some point in however many seasons since, it had been opened again from below.