432: A Sea of Darkness

Ziggurat #347

"After all that trouble," Constance growled bitterly, "we let you take us back to where we started. The joke's on us, I reckon."

Lamont frowned. "We've learned one thing: There's nothing physically stopping the lifts from going all the way down to the bottom."

"Nor is there any reason why you should wish to visit it," the specter insisted, wandering out of the shuttle. "It is a reliquary, nothing more."

"And if we stay here, that's what we'll become," Constance replied coldly. "Relics. All your fancy tricks and visions of a grand empire. It was all a thing of the past when our folks were living in caves. An empire of bones."

"But it doesn't have to be, don't you see?" The specter pleaded. "Now that you're here, we might be all that again and more!"

"How do you mean?" Lamont asked.

"You're humans," the specter explained. "The first new humans to arrive here in over fifty millennia. After all this time, you have been sent as a sign—a sign that she is listening, that she is waking!"

"You've got us wrong, mate," Lamont replied. "We just stumbled into this. We came to this system following Martian maps older than the tower—maybe older than the moon it's built from! We had no idea you lot were here."

"She works in mysterious ways. What you have conceived for one purpose, she may have contrived for another. Her mind is higher than ours. Look!"

The shadowy form was clearly contrasted against the white central pillar, but from every other angle in the vast circular space, it was difficult to see against the canvas of stars. Constance and Lamont's eyes followed the ghostly finger of the apparition with some difficulty as it pointed directly upward. They were looking up at the domed ceiling, high overhead, where the starry canopy was interrupted by a shape like flower petals in a kaleidoscopic array of colors.

"When she left," the apparition explained, "we did not yet know why she had gone, but we knew where. An empty expanse, a sea of darkness. We built this tower so that we could call after her. Millions of voices, raised in eternal devotion, supplicating for her return." It turned its monochromatic eyes downward again until its gaze was fixed on Lamont, though its finger was still pointed up. "If we were to follow the voices of the chorus for, say, three thousand years, where do you suppose it would lead?"

Lamont and Constance exchanged uncertain expressions. "Surely you can't mean Earth," Lamont mumbled without conviction.

The specter gazed at him wordlessly, slowly lowering its finger.

"I don't understand," Constance interjected. "Why send a radio signal when you could just follow her and see where she went? Surely you had the technology. If you could build this, you could do anything."

The apparition shook its head slowly. "The control of such a power—to disregard all physical laws of time and space—is beyond any human ability or contrivance. Only she had that power. And yet, here you are."