Tunnels 04, Closer

tiers, jumping up and down with excitement.
    "What is it?" Will asked disinterestedly as he reached his father.
    "See for yourself!" Dr. Burrows gushed, sweeping his hand vigorously over the wall before him.
    On the facing stones were the usual friezes and inscriptions, but there was something different about them. Will couldn't place what it was.
    Dr. Burrows jabbed a finger at a line of script carved at the base of the wall. "' To the garden of the second sun a warlike people came, with ...'" He stumbled slightly at this point. "I can't get that word, but it goes on to say 'like birds that fly and...'" He hesitated again, then continued, "' carts -- or wagons -- that drive themselves. The people took the life from our lands and made fire and smoke in its place .'" Dr. Burrows turned his head and fixed his eyes on Will. "Look at it! Look at the carving!"
    Picking up a piece of the meat from between his teeth, Will shrugged. "So your Ancients were running scared because someone, another tribe maybe, tried to move into their patch?"
    "No, you dullard," Dr. Burrows barked. "I said look at the carving ! See how the stone is hardly weathered at all."
    Will still wasn't getting the significance. "It's not old? This wasn't carved thousands of years ago?"
    "No, decades ago, more like," Dr. Burrows said. "We could be learning about the moment when the first aeroplanes and some other types of vehicles arrived." He began to whistle atonally, then stopped as if he'd remembered something. "There's more. Tell me what you make of this." He rushed further along the tier and, finding the place, gestured at the wall.
    Will contemplated the images, focusing in on one in particular. "No question that's meant to be an aeroplane," he said.
    "Yes -- and it bears a remarkable resemblance to a Stuka," Dr. Burrows announced, in an 'I-told-you-so' voice.
    Will had moved on to some of the other carvings -- crude depictions of odd-looking aircraft with twin-rotor blades. "And helicopters?" he added.
    "My thoughts entirely. And then look at the tier above us," Dr. Burrows directed him.
    "Wow!" Will exclaimed. "It's completely blank!"
    Some of the facing stones were cracked and pitted from the centuries of heat and rain, but there was nothing carved on them at all.
    "So we might assume that this pyramid is a work-in-progress, much like the empty pages in my journal that I have yet to fill." Dr. Burrows hypothesized. "Which means if these people were around to witness the appearance of Topsoil technology in their world... and document it on this pyramid... maybe they're still alive to this very day."
    "Wild!" Will said. "But if that's true, where are they now? And more to the point, where's this other lot with their Stuka plane... and helicopters ?"

    * * * * *

    Although she couldn't read the words that proclaimed 'Buttock & File', or appreciate what was on the sign above them -- a rather curious caricature of a red-skinned devil grinning to itself in the cabin of a steam engine -- Mrs. Burrows was left in no doubt as to what the place was. The empty tavern reeked overpoweringly of stale ale and old urine, and the pavement in front of its black-painted windows was sticky as she hurried along it.
    "Stay close, Colly," she urged as the cat hung back to sniff at the doors of the establishment. "We haven't got long."
    Since that very first time Mrs. Burrows had stepped outside the Second Officer's house and flexed her olfactory supersense, she had only dared to venture into the streets of the Colony on a handful of occasions. But just out of reach of her new ability she sensed a place that puzzled her. And the picture she'd formed of this place as she'd probed it had horrified her. Although it was quite some distance from the house and she'd be cutting it fine to get there and back before vespers ended, she felt driven to investigate it.
    It was large, that much she did know.
    And it smelt like the pit of hell.
    And now as she jogged down a succession of wide streets, easily avoiding the puddles and ducking to the side as sporadic gushes of water fell from the cavern roof high above, she was nearing her destination.
    She crossed the road, stopping before a tall wall -- from the smell of the lime mortar, she could tell it was newly built. She began to explore the surface of the wall, using her sense of touch. "Too high to climb," she said, and began to follow it along. Coming to a stretch that hadn't been completed yet, she ducked under a wooden