Empress of Eternity Read Free

replacement parts. Most appeared unchanged by age. Some had what passed for circuits on the nanetic level. Some even channeled energy flows, but for what function and at what levels of current and amperage it was impossible to determine without larger assemblies.
    In the late afternoon, Duhyle stood behind the wall that topped the canal near its western end. Ten yards to the east stood the ancient structure that was an integral part of the canal and now served as Helkyria’s laboratory. To his left, beyond the shadows, the summer sun warmed the air above the pale blue-gray stone, but not the stone itself, that anomalous adamantine synthstone that formed the walls of the canal and the building. The material was impervious to weather, and even to nucleonic cutters. The canal walls extended down four point three kays, widening as they did. Duhyle’s own observations confirmed the few studies that suggested it had been engineered on the fermionic level. That technology had vanished with the Old Ones. Over the years, structures had been built on the wide canal walls, but none had lasted. Records stated that more than one light house had been built where the ocean side of the wall met with the canal side. Now there was not a trace of any structure. A solar filament collector, integrated with the landscape over more than five square kays south of the canal, as well as a small tidal pump, provided power to the lab and to the extensive backup battery/capacitors.
    In places, land had formed inside the canal. There were more than a few lakes or swamps behind the canal walls, especially on the north side. Nowhere had the walls broken. In some locales, the walls appeared to curve, but surveys and satellite images had indicated that the canal remained unbowed. The surveys also indicated a semicircular depression—an underwater meteor impact crater one point seven kays across—that extended seaward from the underwater end of the canal. That crater, now mostly filled with sediment, and the fact that the impact had not had any effect on the canal itself, confirmed the canal’s indestructibility.
    To Duhyle’s right appeared Helkyria, also looking out over the canal. He glanced toward her. “What are you thinking?”
    “About the ostensible purpose of the canal.”
    “Ostensible purpose?”
    “It’s obvious that it was designed to stop glaciation from spreading farther south on the continent…or extreme desertification from spreading northward. But why would the Old Ones really have bothered? That couldn’t have been its only purpose.”
    “You’ve said that before. Besides, in full glaciation, the water would freeze the entire way across the canal.”
    “If we had had a recurrence of Iceberg Earth, that would have been true, but for periodic ice ages it should have worked. It apparently did. It also slowed desertification from the south side more than once, and certainly during the time of the Hu-Ruche.” She glanced across the dark gray-blue waters. “The canal walls go down kays and then rejoin. In almost no place is the water in the center less than a kay and a half deep. It’s wide enough that it’s effectively as salty as the Jainoran Ocean and the Great Eastern Sea, and the walls are impervious so that the salt water doesn’t penetrate the water table. It’s almost, but not quite, an ecological barrier. Why just almost? They had to have known that.”
    “They didn’t know enough to preserve what they learned.”
    She smiled faintly, and the tips of her short-cut silver-blond curls shimmered golden for a moment above the creamy brown skin of her neck and forehead. Duhyle wondered what he’d said that amused her so. He had enough sense to wait for her to speak again.
    “That’s not necessarily true. All we know is that we haven’t found or recognized any repository of high-tech knowledge, except for the canal itself.”
    “Those of the lost times did?” He shook his head. “We’ve found the artifacts and