Clarion

CLARION 81

"The deacons live down there?" Paul asked.

"Yeah. High Elder Brill lives in that first building just behind the temple. Hit the zoom—you may be lucky enough to see him on the porch. He likes to sit out there and lord over his flock." Paul touched the control and the image expanded until he could clearly see the building Selmer meant. It was sturdy, made of sawed planks, from the look of it. In the front was a wide, covered porch bordered by hedges and flower beds. A paved walkway led up to it. A white-robed sentry stood on each side of the set of dark-stained doors. As Paul watched, a man emerged from the door and stopped to speak to one of the sentries. He, too, wore a white robe, but this one was trimmed in scarlet. Paul described the man.

"That's Elder Jacowicz," Selmer said. "He spends a lot of time with the High Elder." Jacowicz was scarecrow-thin. His eyes were lost in the shadow cast by the porch's roof, but the rest of his face was clear—long, thin nose, high cheekbones, straight slash of a mouth. He stepped down from the porch, then made his way slowly along the walkway to another building farther back. After he had gone inside, Paul turned the binoculars to the temple again. Beyond it was a large area where the vegetation was thinner, and Paul could see more of the domed structures. He studied several of them. The Tal Tahir obviously hadn't gone in for elaborate architecture. What he could see of the city was boringly monotonous. Then he realized he was seeing something he hadn't noticed before. He took the binoculars away for an overall view.

"It's laid out in a pattern," he said.

"What?" Selmer's thoughts had been elsewhere.

"Oh—you mean the circles."

The basis for the city's design seemed to be the tubeways. Many had fallen, but enough remained 82 William Greenleaf

for Paul to see that they had been laid out in straight lines to form a grid across the city. He counted seven tubes running in each direction, spaced about two kilometers apart. Each square formed by the intersecting tubes was divided into quarter sections. A circular pattern of domed structures occupied each quadrant, and in the center of each circle was a large space given over to vegetation. Presumably, the domed structures had been the primary dwelling buildings of the Tal Tahir. By moving the binoculars across the areas that were relatively free of vegetation, Paul made a rough count of about a hundred domes in each outer circle, and that many more in the two inner circles. He calculated the rest in his head: say two hundred domes per quadrant, making eight hundred in a square, times thirty-six squares came to ... close to twenty-nine thousand domes in the city. A lot more than he would have guessed.

"Do you know how many of the Tal Tahir lived down there?"

Selmer pursed his lips. "About two hundred thousand, I think. Karyn says that's what the Vanguard archaeologists came up with." Paul made another rough calculation. If the arkies were right, that meant each dome housed about seven individuals. Big families.

Then Paul moved the binoculars over the temple again and realized something else. The temple was situated in the center of one of the quadrants. "Are you sure the temple was a Tal Tahir building?"

"That's what Karyn says."

Paul looked more closely at the adjoining

squares. None of the other clusters had a building with the white spire. That seemed odd: the Tal Tahir had obviously placed a lot of emphasis on symmetry when they built their city. Why would only one of the quadrant sections have a building