Kaspar's Box

"Ah, that's what I thought you might be thinkin' of," Captain Murphy responded, already begi

"Well," A

"I'm just wondering if these little people built all this, or are the natives here?" Nagel said. "They don't look like planet builders."

"Looks can be deceiving," A

"Any progress?" Queson asked, curious, but also pleased to have something to take her mind off the fact that they were rapidly descending into a place that might not allow them out.

"He has them very worried," A

"The question there is to what end?" Maslovic noted.

Fu

They reached, if not bottom, at least the bottom of the passage after a few minutes and looked out on a vast cave complex that seemed to stretch and branch in so many directions it was hard to understand how the surface of the moon kept itself from caving in. There was little wonder why the surface had resembled Swiss cheese in the survey scans. The odd-shaped pillars seemed too thin and flimsy to support the whole structure, yet they had to be doing so.

The caverns certainly weren't dark, either. The whole place had a kind of fluid texture, as if it were wet and glistening, yet to the touch it was merely cool and somewhat smooth in feel. Randi thought of it as "soapy," although she couldn't quite say why.

It was, however, a radiator of ghostly light, mostly a dull yellow but occasionally almost lime green or light red. There were spots where the light seemed to run in threads, or veins, creating eerie abstract patterns on the walls, floor, and ceiling, yet visibility was never poor.

They encountered large numbers of the gnomes now, off on some mysterious errand or another; it wasn't clear what they did, or why. They moved with little sound in the caverns even though noise tended to amplify and echo, and not once had any of them uttered a word or so much as a sound.

Once they came upon one of their villages, and it seemed like something out of an old human fairy story; gumdrop houses, not a consistent straight line or quite identical building, yet all made out of the same kind of rock as the caves and either mined or carved from them. There were small rivers through the area, leading into fresh water pools in some cases, and, for the first time, there was vegetation as well-growths of some sort of plants that resembled mosses and lichen but which also echoed the colors of the minerals in the walls, often contrasting with whatever they were against. Seas of yellow clung to walls of strawberry red, and light blue growths seemed to crawl up or down lime-green or lemon-yellow walls. Now and then one of the little people would go up to some of the growths, tear off a small strip, and stuff it into its tiny mouth nearly hidden behind the huge nose. Clearly this was the food source, although it didn't seem to need much if any care; there were at times a lot of the gnomes around yet little sign of large gaps in the surrounding growths.

"Constant temperature down here, plenty of food and water, lots of easy building materials," Maslovic noted. "Looks like a pretty comfortable life for such a bleak world."

"Yes, but what do they do?" A

As they went through chamber after chamber the mystery didn't seem ready to be solved. Still, now they came across monstrous side caverns in which were sitting what had to be monstrous machines of unknown purpose and design.

"They do somethin' " the old captain noted, impressed by the sheer scale of the things.

"Or they did, or somebody did," Nagel responded. "They're mostly overgrown with the mosses and there's little sign they've moved in ages. They were used once, but not in a long, long time I don't think. I wonder if these little people were the operators, or the descendants of the operators? Hard to say." There were what looked like mounds covered in blue and purple lichen all around, and, on impulse, he reached down into one of them and brought up a handful of what at first looked like gravel.

"I'll be damned," he said, looking at the material as he continued the slow walking pace behind the lead gnome. "Take a look, Randi. Familiar?"

She took some of it and looked it over. It wasn't gravel at all, but a mass of those mysterious little shavings and small remnants they'd found in concentrations all over their area on Melchior. A

"Those are some of the holy artifacts of the Macouris," Joshua said, breaking what had been a long silence. "They were brought back along with the Magi stones by the ship of the First Emissary. No one could divine what they were."

"Machine poop," Captain Murphy commented. "I'll be damned! It's the leftovers from the i

"Probably some kind of byproduct," Nagel agreed. "The stuff was formed by the ton, that's for sure. They probably used it to help shape and maintain certain essential land features. Over time, it would have been eroded and show up, even in a volcanic hell like Melchior. We may never know for sure, but apparently the machines just can't not make something out of anything they have on hand, even if it's just miniatures of whatever they were doing. In a way you're right, Captain. Giant machine shit." He chuckled. "And so are the icons of the gods exposed."

"I have a feeling that we're at the end of this journey," Maslovic said, looking ahead. "You feel it?"

He didn't have to elaborate; they could all feel it. That horrible eerie sense of uncaring power that the Magi stones exuded, magnified now over and over again. And, too, a sense of something, perhaps someone else, waiting just ahead.

"It's a bit colder," Randi Queson pointed out. "And there's a bit of movement in the air. There's something pretty big just around that bend."

"That's an odd sound, too," Maslovic added.

It was impossible to describe; an alien thing, yet a pulsing tone that seemed to go very deep and wash in a steady series of waves right through them, body and mind, in a machinelike rhythmic perfection. It got no louder as they entered the final chamber, but it seemed all around them, all pervasive.

"Oh, my god!" Randi Queson breathed.

"I believe we are here," Maslovic said simply, looking around in a mixture of awe and fascination as they walked out onto a bridge that seemed to go on forever, spa