The Pearl Crucible - A Dardana Fenek Mystery - MEISJE - (Part 1)
(Chapter 13, part 1)
“The excavation of Zoan is a triumph,” he said. “It was lost for centuries. It was built in the Wastes beyond Birzeta Deme—though Birzeta did not exist then. There’s a dry lakebed, a bit of the old ocean that was isolated there, and when humans landed on Iphigenia, it still existed, a sort of sterile salt marsh and seasonal lake. North of it is a region known as the Calepegosan Dunes, which is also north of Merkato Birzeta and blocks the savano at the northeast end. There’s settlements and towns at the far north of that, fading out to the east and north.”
“I’ve heard of it.” My geographic knowledge is limited to the interior of a square you could draw from Helioshad to Argoshaan to Calypso to Aulis and back—but I’ve heard of these other places. “Kind of remote for a city back then?”
“Rare earth minerals,” he said. “The lake was full of them, runoff from the Montara Sierpento, so it was worth it to settle there. In the early first century, a technopole was founded to exploit this. For circuits, electronics, what have you,” he explained. “There was a crèche there, too, to provide labor for the mining and the manufacturing.”
“Mining?” I said. “Lambdas?”
I’d heard of them, too, though I’d never spoken to anyone who’d seen one. You have tank-girls, yah, all petite and quiet and busy of hand and neat of foot, and then you had the men, near three meters tall, I’ve heard, gray-blue and stupid and violent, if they get out of hand, and they keep them all in the far corners of the planet, mining deep where the world’s blood is all toxic, I hear. They don’t make anywhere near as many of them as they do tank-girls, and their contracts never end. They die all young. And what would they do anyway? They’re hardly more intelligent than apes.
But he shook his head. “They made men back then, too. Normal ones. No lambdas. They stopped tank-birthing boys after the Provisional government fell. The lambdas came later.”
This I did not know, and it took me aback. I tried to imagine a crèche full of boys and girls both, and tried to not let my jaw drop.
He did not notice my face. “It was one of the most advanced cities on the planet. It was taken by the Caballardo early in the war and was responsible for the movement’s survival and its ultimate victory. There was talk of making it the capital.
“But after the war, a couple of decades later, the lake began drying up, possibly because of industrial pumping, restricting the ability to process the minerals, and Zoan began declining. Then the storm came. It is recorded as a monster simoom, which lasted a day and a night, and when it stopped, Zoan was nowhere above the dunes. No recovery was attempted. The lake was partially filled with sand and was destroyed. It took centuries for the new dunes to move off of it and reveal the lakebed surface. Zoan was still the world’s third or fourth largest city at the time, so it has the distinction of being the largest natural disaster ever to strike Iphigenia, other than the Famine. Its exact location was eventually lost. Substantial treasures were rumored to be buried there—artistic, technological, and historical. Attempts were made, every century or two, to find them.”
“You were the first to succeed?” I hazarded.
He smiled quietly. “I alone,” he said. “And my team. I had an idea where the failures had been; I’d read descriptions and found a chart made from orbit preserved from the decades after it disappeared.
“When we found it almost by accident. The lake’s edge still passes under the dunes, which move yearly, so maps and surveys from past expeditions are worthless. But crossing one final dune, it was revealed like a thunderbolt: a broken tower of stone and concrete block, jutting out of the sand, and eroded bits of column thrusting from the dune beyond like bones. We stopped the scramblers and got out. We knew it couldn’t be anything else but Zoan.
“Well, we all danced there on the dune and hugged, and Izenna even kissed me.” He touched his lips. “We set up camp and dug test trenches where the dunes were thinnest and found incontrovertible evidence that it was Zoan. There’s a lot more to a city than the important buildings, so we had to map the thing out, and that took months before we could say where the richest sites would be for our backers. Zoan was much like the Old City is here—straight avenues and streets left and right. Very old-fashioned, Settlement-era planning.”
I nodded. Not a place I’d like. “Did you know what you were looking for?”
“We knew there was a deposit of treasures from the Settlement era—some from Earth. Things the Caballardo took from museums, galleries, and private owners all over the world to protect them from being destroyed in the fighting with the Provisionals. Some of them … most of them were returned to where they came from afterward, or to loyal figures. Some of them weren’t, and then the storm came. There was a vault … deep in the ground, with a wide avenue plunging into it. Oh, you should have seen it.” He mused. “Blast-proof doors, but we got into the mechanism and cranked it slowly open, vacuuming out the sand to keep the gears from jamming. And then—then the door was open.”
“What did you see?”
“Many things,” he replied. “Many wonderful things.” He took a pouch of tobacco out and began to fill a pipe slowly. “Gold, black-tarnished silver, ivory, artwork framed and unframed, statues, pools of gems in fine glass jars, jewelry, furniture, everything in a state of marvelous preservation, piled or tipped or tumbled where it had been left over five hundred and fifty years ago. A round room, our torchlight flashed this way and that. My backers were with me, my team, my students, and bright-eyed Izenna, who could hardly restrain herself from going in. A hot, dead air rushed out: we had respirators on against foul fumes from beneath the city. But it was dry and clean and breathable, and soon we could carefully walk in with electric torches and look at the marvels.”
“Including?”
“Ah, yes,” he said. “Including Meisje.”
“Did you know the painting was there?”
“We didn’t know,” he said. “But that was the last place it was known to be. Do you mind if I—?”
“Go ahead.” He lit his pipe as I turned to the color plates in the book and thumbed over the lumos of the vault after it was opened. There she was—the picture leaned against the curved wall, looking back over her shoulder at us. “Miss Scyros knew about her?”
“Yes, yes she did,” Doctor Professor Mullinax said, taking a puff. “Yes, she did.”
( … This way to Chapter Twelve part 3 … ) ( … This way to Chapter Thirteen part 2 … )
Interesting. We return again to the question of whether Hermé is simply possessed of rare knowledge, possibly as a direct descendant of some key figure, or a Lich of sorts bred of science.