The ground-floor windows had been broken here, as well. No signs or maps were evident within, but it had the definite feel of a library—though once again, it seemed artificially quaint. The interior was dark and deserted.

"The outside guards can't enter the library, only special security—black-and-gray uniforms. There's one person on duty inside at all times, with a video monitor—the voice we heard."

"Very fancy," Patricia said.

"Necessary."

A strip of fluorescent lighting hanging from the ceiling on a bolted track flashed on. More strips glowed in sequence, making a path of light across the ground floor and up a flight of steps near the center of the building.

"We have portable generators at four locations in Alexandria," Lanier said as they walked down the path. The floor was bare and dusty, with a few well-cleared tracks in the dust. "Most of the city's power nets aren't functioning. We haven't tracked down the power supplies yet, but they're probably not discrete plants. The Stone itself seems to carry a reserve of power, with concentrations in supercooled batteries."

Patricia's brow wrinkled. "Batteries?"

"Like the hundred-meter cells in Arizona and the Greater African Conservatory."

"Oh." She wasn't much on practical physics, but she didn't want Lanier to know that.

"The electrical system is pretty conventional, otherwise. Control and information channels are optical, more so than back on Earth. The buildings are dark because most of the circuit breakers—or whatever served that function—have been tripped, and nobody's going to reset them until we know more about fire hazards."

"Why are the windows broken?" Patricia asked as they continued climbing.

"Glass gets brittle with age, slumps. Pressure surges in the atmosphere crack the windows."

"Weather?"

"Of a sort. There are high- and low-pressure systems in the chambers, updrafts and coriolis, downdrafts near the caps. Even storms. Snow in some of the chambers, infrequently. Most of it seems controlled, but we don't know whether the controls are built-in, static, or whether machines are still hard at work someplace."

In the shadowy halls beyond the light strips on the second floor, she saw man-sized metallic cylinders arranged in rows, marching off into obscurity.

"We've been pulling data out of these storage banks for a year," Lanier said. "The programming languages weren't familiar to us, so we've only had success producing readable copy and useful images for about six months. As it turns out, the library in the next chamber is even larger, so we're concentrating on it, now. But. . . I still prefer this. There's an extensive hard-copy center on the fourth floor. That's where I did my early research, and where you'll be doing some of yours."

"I feel like I'm on the Mary Celeste."

"The comparison's been made," Lanier said. "At any rate, here or anywhere else, the rule is, Don't disturb anything you can't put back exactly the way it was. The archaeologists are just finishing their gross surveys and they're still touchy. We have to break the rule now and then—repairing necessary equipment, tinkering with the computers—but no excess meddling is allowed. If the Stone is a Mary Celeste, we can't afford not to know why."