The transition was abrupt. Within a few steps the boys went from the magnificence of the new to the squalor of the old. That was how things were done in the palace. Anything that didn't interest the guardians was neglected and allowed to fall into ruin.
There wasn't even a door between the old and the new. Just a line where the trolls had been told to stop cleaning. Crispin climbed over a collapsed display case and squeezed past a rusty door that once controlled access to the Seed Bank. Now it hung open on broken hinges.
The cavernous space on the other side was littered with corroded storage units. An invaluable treasure from the past had fallen into ruin. Crispin had given up trying to salvage any part of it. Nothing had survived.
He kept up the pretence. The palace computers were ticking away, recording his movements, putting ticks in boxes when his time was properly occupied and sending messages to the chancellor when he strayed from the straight and narrow path. It wasn't difficult to fool a computer and he had become very good at it. One way was to tell the computer that you were doing one thing when you were doing something entirely different.
The Seed Bank gave access to parts of the old building that were still being used by the guardians. The Invertebrate Gene Bank was one. It was where tissue samples from mammals and reptiles were kept alive in special units. The guardians relied on it for their bioengineering projects. The Gene Bank was the source of raw materials for the production of trolls and was heavily guarded.
Some of the storage units dated from before The Fall and were still in working order. They looked like jars and reminded Crispin of the aquariums in his marine research laboratory. The big difference was that aquariums housed fish swimming around in seawater. The units in the Gene Bank contained pieces of living flesh floating around in nourishing fluids.
Some of the living flesh was in the form of entire animals. One was a three-hundred-year-old platypus that could open its eyes and display other signs of brain activity. Another was a cat that had once belonged to a famous scientist. She died a long time ago but the cat survived as a living link with the famous lady.
The guardians took the cat idea further. They were obsessed with immortality and had gone some way to extending their lifespan. Spare parts enabled them to hang on for a couple of hundred years in their original bodies. After that, extreme measures were needed to keep them alive.