I ran a finger along the scribing on the hilt. I could not read the words because they were in gadi script but it suddenly occurred to me that I could make a rubbing of the markings and show them to Fian. The young teknoguilder had already translated the words from Cassy’s clue on the original doors to Obernewtyn, which had also been in gadi. I took a sheet of parchment and used some charcoal from the fire to make the rubbing, thinking that knowing what the words meant might enable me to understand why I had been given the sword. I laid the rubbing on the sill, reached into the shelf again and drew out the Beforetime device that had been inside the small computermachine Cassy had left for me. This was the last sign she had devised, and by some process I could not understand, the device had swallowed my voice and Maruman’s. Thus armed, it was supposed to enable me to enter all levels of the Sentinel Complex. I had been tempted to show it to Garth when I had first got back to Obernewtyn in the hope that the Teknoguildmaster would be able to explain how it might be used, but I would have been obliged to explain how I had obtained it.

Instead, I had interrogated Reul about the workings of computermachines whenever I got the chance, hoping the subject of memory seeds would come up. It was not hard to initiate such talk among the teknoguilders for they had all been fascinated to learn that a computermachine containing a program named Ines had been wakened by the futureteller Dell, and now spoke to her in the dulcet tones of a woman. Ines had restored operation to most of the lesser computermachines in the vast Beforetime shelter beneath the ruins of an ancient library on the west coast, and this had led the teknoguilders to dream of locating and waking a similarly powerful computermachine in the ruins under the Teknoguild caves.

Garth had been disappointed to learn that the teknoguilder Jak had no plans to return to Obernewtyn, for he had been hoping to make use of Jak’s experience with Ines. I understood why Jak had elected to remain on the west coast, having myself experienced the wondrous strangeness of conversing with a computermachine that responded almost as if it were sentient. For a teknoguilder, there was also the fascination of the many levels of the complex full of Beforetime artefacts to be investigated, not to mention the vast amount of knowledge of the Beforetime that reposed in Ines’s memory.