Book 1: Chapter 10

There hadn’t been any way to check for a reply from the car service. Linua spent all day feeling sick and worried about it. Maybe the car service had phoned Grandmother while Linua was at the Castle, and Grandmother would be waiting angrily for her at home. But when Linua came in, it was lunch as usual. All during the session with Mdm Patoni, she tried not to stare at Grandmother’s computer. Once again, Mdm Patoni found her attention wandering.

“Linua! Is there something wrong? Must I speak to your grandmother?”

“No! No, everything’s fine!” Linua said hastily, and did her best to concentrate. But she worried that the car service had sent a reply, or asked a question, and she wouldn’t be able to respond. Maybe she would get in the car and it would take her to the Observatory because no-one had seen the email.

So when the car arrived to take her to the Observatory that evening, her heart was in her mouth as she climbed into the back. Had the driver been told about the email from the car service office? She should double check.

“I’m going to the museum today,” she said to the driver, as calmly as possible. Her stomach gave a lurch as he twisted in his seat to look at her.

“Sorry, what’s that?”

“I’m going to the museum,” she repeated.

“The central museum? Town centre?”

“Yes please.”

He nodded, turned back around, and the car pulled away. It was apparently as simple as that.

The others were already in the museum, but Eret and Anith were waiting by the front door for her.

“Pickle said you should be coming,” Anith said with a smile. “Let’s get our tickets.”

“Tickets?” Linua blurted, suddenly alarmed. She hadn’t thought to bring any money. She didn’t have any money. Everything she was supposed to need was bought by Grandmother, or provided by the Yi family.

But luckily Anith said, “My treat” and paid for the tickets herself.

Linua wondered whether she was supposed to reciprocate at some point. Would she—she cringed at the idea—have to ask Grandmother for some pocket money? Grandmother would probably make Linua account for everything. Would Grandmother approve or disapprove of the museum? She’d only ever seemed to care about the Observatory.

“There,” Anith said, handing out the tickets and giving Eret an odd, triumphant glance. Eret, for some reason, made a face that was half why-do-I-have-to-put-up-with-you and half a smirk.

“I’ll show Linua around,” he said, immediately switching to his lofty, I’m-in-charge mode of talking. “We’ll check the Ancient Kāru section. Anith, you check the Kingdom of Kāru section.”

Anith, still smug, gave him a glance that Linua couldn’t interpret and walked off, leaving her with Eret.

“When did you last come to the museum?” Eret asked.

“I might have come once with Helged.”

They went through the ticket barrier and into the great hall where the Gargantua skeleton was displayed. Linua’s head went up and up and up. It was massive. She looked at the huge feet, and imagined standing next to a monster like this while it walked around.

Eret was smiling a little way off.

“Who’s Helged?”

“She…” Linua paused, remember Pickle’s comment from earlier. r u rich or someth ? She didn’t want to admit that Grandmother had a permanent housekeeper. “She looks after my Grandmother. I think she took me on her day off. But it was so long ago I don’t remember.”

“Really? We used to come every weekend with my dad. We came so often we got bored and didn’t come for ages. But it’s pretty mez. Here, the Ancient Kāru section is this way.”

Ancient Kāru had been the Golden Age of Inanna, back when it had first been settled and people had still had access to all the technology they had salvaged from the mothership. They’d had nanomachines, replicators, quantum computing, nuclear fission, and much more—all the holy grails that science nowadays couldn’t recreate. State-sponsored archaeologists and private treasure hunters scoured Ancient Kāruan sites for examples of such technologies, or information on how they worked, but many were covered with layers of sediment and hidden at the bottom of the ocean.

There were some scientists who maintained that humanity simply wasn’t clever enough ever to recreate such wonders, since the original colonists hadn’t invented them either. Somewhere, a long time ago—most estimates placed it between three thousand five hundred and three thousand eight hundred years previously—a powerful race of alien entities had come across the homeworld of a much younger and more primitive species: humans. The aliens—some argued they were gods—had invited members of that primitive species to join them in their own realm. Again, accounts disagreed as to exactly what that meant. Was it simply another planetary system? A galactic empire? A separate dimension entirely?

Whatever the truth, a selection of people had accepted the invitation. These had included, amongst others, a Priestess of the Babilim, a Prince of the Shang, and a warrior of the Keretu, each accompanied by their retinues of family members, soldiers, servants, slaves and general hangers on. They and their ancestors had dwelled with their hosts in this supposed Eden, whatever that might be, for centuries.

Approximately three thousand years ago, Lord Nimras, a noble descended from the original Babilim population, had launched a cruise ship of vast size, containing hundreds of thousands of passengers, the purpose of which had been to travel through a portal to a distant part of the galaxy, and observe various stellar and planetary phenomena that might be found there. Again, accounts disagreed as to which phenomena had been part of the planned itinerary. The voyage was supposed to last several years, during which the passengers would enjoy unimaginable luxury, but something had gone wrong. The ship had failed in some way, forcing the passengers to flee in lifeboats to the only viable planet within reach: Inanna.

The Herkow Museum had a small collection of artefacts purporting to be from the lost mothership. These were mostly melted bits of something that looked like glass but wasn’t, some pieces of platinum jewellery, a tunic said to be the uniform worn by a member of the cruise ship’s staff, and the case—but not the contents—of a handheld device resembling a tiny computer screen. The accompanying description postulated that the device had not run on electronics, but something else. The innards had long ago been scooped out by the military and borne away to some remote lab somewhere to be studied into oblivion, for all the good that seemed to have done. One day, the people of Inanna were hopeful that the secrets of Ancient Kāru—and of the lost alien Eden—would be re-discovered, but although a lot of modern technology nowadays had been based on artefacts retrieved from Ancient Kāruan dig sites, there was still a long way to go.

The museum displays had been arranged so that the viewer found themselves wandering forwards in time. The Ancient Kāruan museum exhibits got clunkier and cruder as the initial technology the colonists had brought with them failed, and were replaced by items made from an industrial base they had had to put together from scratch.

Linua didn’t like to think too much about Ancient Kāru, or Nimras and his stupid mothership.

“I don’t think this is where we’ll find strange nets full of holes,” Linua said.

“Yeah, maybe the next section.”

The next section was the First Intermediate period. This was three hundred years or so after the initial landing, long after the first rebellion, and well after Nimras himself had been slain by treachery. The sudden end of the ice age had caused water levels to rise very quickly, flooding the great coastal cities as well as vast swathes of low-lying fertile farmland. The survivors had had to pick up what they could and move into the hills, but it had destroyed their industrial base. The human race had been knocked back to subsistence farming.

Linua found looking at the displays with Eret quite companionable. They moseyed through the exhibits, pointing out things they liked, or descriptions they thought were interesting. Eret did most of the talking—his dad was an astronomer at the Observatory, and his mum was a librarian, but not the kind that reshelved books and sent out overdue letters. She was a researcher in her own right.

“An archivist,” said Eret.

Linua didn’t have much to offer in return.

“My parents are gone,” she said, getting out of the way quickly, before he asked. She saw his face change.

“Oh… sorry…”

“It’s okay, it happened when I was very little. I don’t remember.”

She distracted him with a question about school and he talked about the subjects he was doing. Eret was the opposite of Linua. Linua knew a lot about one thing, but Eret seemed to know a little bit about everything. He had the kind of mind that Mdm Patoni talked about and admired and tried to encourage in Linua—one that could make intuitive leaps based on insufficient data. Mdm Patoni often tried to give Linua a little bit of information, and then prompt her to make educated guesses, but it just made her feel nervous, because if she got the wrong conclusion Grandmother would be disappointed.

Eret didn’t seem to feel nervous about that at all.

They stopped in front of an exhibit showing a replica of a straw basket with a braid attached which the carrier could loop around their forehead in order to carry a heavy load.

“They didn’t even have wheels after Ancient Kāru disappeared,” Linua said, reading the explanatory text. “I get that they lost of lot of technology, but how is it possible to lose wheels? It’s just a circle.”

Eret was idly pressing buttons on an interactive exhibit which showed how the land changed with rising water levels.

“Wheels are probably a lot easier to make with metal tools and they wouldn’t have had a lot of those when they first had to re-locate after the seas rose.” He stuck his hands in his pockets and wandered back to where Linua stood in front of the straw basket. “The ones they did have probably wore out very fast.”

Linua scanned to the bottom of the explanatory text.

“Oh,” she said. “You’re right.”

She didn’t think it was something Eret had known. He’d just been guessing, but he sounded so confident about it.

The next exhibit was a 3D computer animated reconstruction of a First Intermediate period village, with tiny huts and little people working the fields.

“This is like what you did.” Linua touched the glass of the display. “Except without gargantua.”

It turned out that Eret hoped to study computer graphics at university. Computer graphics sounded a lot more interesting than astronomy.

“Doesn’t your dad want you to be an astronomer?” Linua asked.

Eret made a face.

“Of course he would like that, he was very pleased when I asked him if we could have an Astronomy Club, but he’s not going to force me to do something if I don’t want to.”

Linua was overtaken by envy. It would be nice if Grandmother had ever thought to ask Linua if she wanted to study at university. It would be nice if the Yi family asked her whether she wanted to turn up for wushu training for four hours every day.

She moved from the displays showing the early agricultural implements, and onto the next, which showed a tiny child’s spinning top made out of bone, with six little pictures carved in the top. Involuntarily she put a hand on the display case. It was just like a toy she had owned when she was younger. The sigils were a little different, but she remembered the game. You had to spin the top, and ask a question, and the answer would be whatever side the spinning top landed on.

She felt a sudden awe. The spinning top in the case was nearly three thousand years old, but the child who had owned it had played probably a similar game to Linua. She or he had crouched in the dirt and asked a question and spun the top and looked for the answer. She felt a curious, light-headed connection to that long ago, unknown child.

These people had lost everything when the waters rose, and they’d had to start again. They’d had no control over their lives, all they could do was put their heads down and do the work, and hope they survived. These people were no different from her. Or anyone she knew. Eret. Helged. Grandmother. Her aunts and uncles and cousins at Castle Yi.

“What are you thinking?” Eret asked.

She tried to explain her sudden epiphany, but it sounded thin and weak to her ears. Luckily, there was a distraction in the form of Pickle’s voice, coming from around the corner.

Pickle had managed to find a curator or museum guide, and had proceeded to corner her against a display case so he could pepper her with questions. When Linua and Eret wandered up, none of the questions seemed to be remotely related to bits of net made out of string, but then Pickle caught sight of them out of the corner of his eye, coughed, and brought out a crumpled piece of paper from one of his copious pockets.

“And also we were wondering about this,” he said.

The curator obligingly peered at it.

“Oh goodness me,” she said. “I haven’t seen one of those in a while!”