The Mote in God's Eye - Larry Niven [154]
“Yah, it must have been part of another building. God knows how old that is.” The wall was over a meter thick, and ragged around the edges and the top. It was made of dressed stone blocks that must have massed five hundred kilos each. Some vinelike plant had invaded it, surrounded it, permeated it to the extent that by now it must be holding the wall together.
Whitbread leaned close and peered into the vines. “No cement, Gavin. They’ve fitted the blocks together. And still it supports the rest of the building—which is concrete. They built to last.”
“Do ye remember what Horst said about the Stone Beehive?”
“He said he could feel the age in it. Right. Right...”
“It must be of all different ages, this place. I think we’ll find that it’s a museum. A museum of architecture? And they’ve added to it, century after century. Finally they threw up that dome to protect it from the elements.”
“Yah...”
“Ye sound dubious.”
“That dome is two meters thick, and metal. What kind of elements...”
“Asteroid falls, it may be. No, that’s nonsense. The asteroids were moved away eons ago.”
“I think I want to have a look at that cathedral. It looks to be the oldest building here.”
The cathedral was a museum right enough. Any civilized man in the Empire would have recognized it. Museums are all alike.
There were cases faced in glass, and old things within, marked by plaques with dates and printing on them. “I can read the numbers,” said Potter. “Look, they’re in four and five figures. And this is base twelve!”
“My Motie asked me once how old our recorded civilization is. How old is theirs, Gavin?”
“Well, their year is shorter... Five figures. Dating backward from some event; that’s a minus sign in front of each of them. Let me see...” He took out his computer and scrawled quick, precise figures. “That number would be seventy-four thousand and some-odd. Jonathon, the plaques are almost new.”
“Languages change. They must translate the plaques every so often.”
“Yes . . . yes, I know this sign. ‘Approximately.’” Potter moved swiftly from exhibit to exhibit. “Here it is again. Not here . . . but here. Jonathon, come look at this one.”
It was a very old machine. Once iron, it must be rust now, all the way through. There was a sketch of what it must have looked like once. A howitzer cannon.
“Here on the plaque. This double-approximation sign means educated guesswork. I wonder how many times that legend has been translated.”
Room after room. They found a wide staircase leading up, the steps shallow but broad enough for human feet. Above, more rooms, more exhibits. The ceilings were low. The lighting came from lines of bulbs of incandescent filaments that came on when they entered, went out when they left. The bulbs were mounted carefully so they wouldn’t mar the ceiling. The museum itself must be an exhibit.
The plaques were all alike, but the cases were all different. Whitbread did not think it strange. No two Motie artifacts were ever precisely alike. But one . . . he almost laughed.
A bubble of glass several meters long and two meters wide rested on a free-form sculpted frame of almost beach-colored metal. Both looked brand-new. There was a plaque on the frame. Inside was an ornately carved wooden box, coffin sized, bleached white by age, its lid the remains of a rusted wire grille. It had a plaque. Under the rusted wire, a selection of wonderfully shaped, eggshell-thin pottery, some broken, some whole. Each piece in the set had a dated plaque. “It’s like nested exhibits,” he said.
Potter did not laugh. “That’s what it is. See here? The bubble case is about two thousand years old . . . that can’t be right, can it?”
“Not unless...” Whitbread rubbed his class ring along the glass bubble. “They’re both scratched. Artificial sapphire.” He tried it on the metal. The metal scratched the stone. “I’ll accept two thousand.”
“But the box is around twenty-four hundred, and the pottery goes from three thousand up. Look you how the style changes.