“I think it’s broken. The bleeding was nothing, though: you should see yourself. You were so tattered and bloody when you came in that I hardly knew you. Knights should come in more properly shining armor.”
He grinned wearily. “Wait till next time.”
“Lee, where are we?” she said abruptly. Their eyes were becoming adjusted to the darkness, and they could see rising around them a complexity of machine relays, connectives, and pieces which did not seem to make sense.
Rynason looked more closely at the complex. It was definitely Outsiders work, but what was it? Part of the Altar of Kor, obviously, but the Outsiders telecommunicators had never used such extensive machinery. Yet it did look familiar. He tried to remember the different types of Outsiders machinery which had been found and partially reconstructed by the advancing Earthmen in the centuries past. There weren’t many….
Then, suddenly, he had it, and it was so simple that he was surprised he hadn’t thought of it before.
“This is Kor,” he said. “It’s not a communicator—it’s a computer. An Outsiders computer.”
NINE
Mara’s frown deepened; she looked around them in the dimness, her eyes taking in the complexity and extent of the circuitry. It faded into the darkness behind them; lines ran into the walls and floor.
“They built their computers in the grand manner, didn’t they?” she said softly.
“I’ve seen fragments of them before,” Rynason said. “This is a big one—no telling how much area the total complex takes up. One thing’s certain, though: it’s no ordinary computer of theirs. Not for plain math-work, nor even for specialized computations, like the one on Rigel II—that was apparently used for astrogation, but it wasn’t half the size of this. And navigation between stars, even with the kind of drive they must have had, is no simple problem.”