With Sluice-Gate Nine seated firmly upon its bedrock doorstep, the water upstream was transformed from a violent, roaring clouded eye into a still, black mirror.
Qiao Ming stood on the third terrace of Entry hall 166, looking out over the retention basin. The floodwaters, held back by the eighty-foot dark rock monolith, had risen to a depth of four deep-water lengths against the upstream face of the gate. Floating on the surface of the pool was a thick scum of dark grey foam-stone, rainbow-bright oil-sheens from dead void-vessels, and fragments of charred void-cedar drifting in sluggish eddies.
He carried his core-sampling kit. A five-foot hollow bronze tube with a sharpened case-hardened steel bit, an ash wood driving mallet, three oak extraction plugs, and his slate recording ledger.
To understand what the storm had brought into the safe hall, a land-mapper could not rely on surface watching. The truth of a deep-sea flood lay in its stratigraphy—the chronological layers of settled mud laid down as the heavy specks settled according to their specific gravity.
He stepped down the wet terrace steps to the water’s margin.
His bare feet sank into the fine, flour-soft silt that had settled upon the upper landing. The mud was cold, but it lacked the violent drag of the torrent. It was settling now, parting around his ankles like soft grease.
