by Isaac Asimov
In Sagikan, every drop of water was enormously precious. You calculated its use with the greatest precision and recycled whatever was recyclable. Now here it was, pouring down out of the heavens as though from a gigantic reservoir that could never run dry. Siferra felt a powerful urge to strip her clothes off and sprint across the great green lawns of the campus, letting the rainfall flow down her body in an unending delicious stream to wash her clean at last of the infernal desert dust.
That was all they’d need to see. That cool, aloof, unromantic professor of archaeology, Siferra 89, running naked in the rain! It would be worth doing if only to enjoy the sight of their astounded faces peering out of every window of the university as she went flying past.
Not very likely, though, Siferra thought.
Not my style at all.
And there was too much to do, really. She hadn’t wasted any time getting down to work. Most of the artifacts she had excavated at the Beklimot site were following along by cargo ship and wouldn’t be here for many weeks. But there were charts to arrange, sketches to finish, Balik’s stratigraphic photographs to analyze, the soil samples to prepare for the radiography lab, a million and one things to do. —And then, too, there were the Thombo tablets to discuss with Mudrin 505 of the Department of Paleography.
The Thombo tablets! The find of finds, the premier discovery of the entire year and a half! Or so she felt. Of course, it all depended on whether anyone could make any sense out of them. At any rate, she would waste no time getting Mudrin working on them. At the least, the tablets were fascinating things; but they might be much more than that. There was the possibility that they might revolutionize the entire study of the prehistoric world. That was why she hadn’t entrusted them to the freight shippers, but had carried them back from Sagikan in her own hands.
A knock at the dour.
“Siferra? Siferra, are you there?”
“Come on in, Balik.”
The broad-shouldered stratigrapher was soaking wet. “This foul abominable rain,” he muttered, shaking himself off. “You wouldn’t believe how drenched I got just crossing the quad from Uland Library to here!”
“I love the rain,” Siferra said. “I hope it never stops. After all those months baking out in the desert—the sand in your eyes all the time, the dust in your throat, the heat, the dryness—no, let it rain, Balik!”
“But I see you’re keeping yourself indoors. It’s a whole lot easier to appreciate rain when you’re looking at it from a nice dry office. —Playing with your tablets again, are you?”
He indicated the six ragged, battered slabs of hard red clay that Siferra had arranged atop her desk in two groups of three, the square ones in one row and the oblong ones below them.
“Aren’t they beautiful?” Siferra said exultantly. “I can’t leave them alone. I keep staring at them as if they’ll suddenly become intelligible if only I look at them long enough.”
Balik leaned forward and shook his head. “Chickenscratches. That’s all it looks like to me.”
“Come on! I’ve already identified distinct word-patterns,” Siferra said. “And I’m no paleographer. Here—look—you see this group of six characters here? It repeats over here. And these three, with the wedges setting them off—”
“Has Mudrin seen them yet?”
“Not yet. I’ve asked him to stop by a little later.”
“You know that word has gotten out about what we’ve found, don’t you? The successive Thombo town-sites?”
Siferra looked at him in amazement. “What? Who—?”
“One of the students,” Balik said. “I don’t know who it was —Veloran, is my guess, though Eilis thinks it was Sten. I suppose it was unavoidable, don’t you?”
“I warned them not to say anything to—”
“Yes, but they’re kids, Siferra, only kids, nineteen years old and on their first important dig! And the expedition stumbles on something utterly astounding—seven previously unknown prehistoric cities one on top of the next, going back the gods only know how many thousands of years—”
“Nine cities, Balik.”
“Seven, nine, it’s colossal either way. And I think it’s seven.” Balik smiled.
“I know you do. You’re wrong. —But who’s been talking about it? In the department, I mean.”
“Hilliko. And Brangin. I heard them this morning, in the faculty lounge. They’re extremely skeptical, I have to tell you. Passionately skeptical. Neither one of them thinks it’s even remotely possible for there to be even one settlement older than Beklimot at that site, let alone nine, or seven, or however many there are.”
“They haven’t seen the photographs. They haven’t seen the charts. They haven’t seen the tablets. They haven’t seen anything. And already they have an opinion.” Siferra’s eyes blazed with rage. “What do they know? Have they ever so much as set foot on the Sagikan Peninsula? Have they been to Beklimot even as tourists? And they dare to have an opinion on a dig that hasn’t been published, that hasn’t even been informally discussed within the department—!”
“Siferra—”
“I’d like to flay them both! And Veloran and Sten also. They knew they weren’t supposed to shoot their mouths off! Where do those two come off breaking priority, even verbally? I’ll show them. I’ll get them both in here and find out which one of them’s responsible for leaking the story to Hilliko and Brangin, and if that one thinks he’s ever going to get a doctorate in this university, or she, whichever one it was—”
“Please, Siferra,” Balik said soothingly. “You’re getting all worked up over nothing.”
“Nothing! My priority blown, and—”
“Nobody’s blown anything for you. It all remains just a rumor until you make your own preliminary statement. As for Veloran and Sten, we don’t really know that either of them is the one that let the story get out, and if one of them did, well, remember that you were young once too.”
“Yes,” Siferra said. “Three geological epochs ago.”
“Don’t be silly. You’re younger than I am, and I’m hardly ancient, you know.”
Siferra nodded indifferently. She looked toward the window. Suddenly the rain didn’t seem so pleasing. Everything was dark outside, disturbingly dark.
“Still, to hear that our findings are already controversial, and not even published yet—”
“They have to be controversial, Siferra. Everybody’s wagons are going to be upset by what we found in that hill—not just in our department, but History, Philosophy, even Theology, they’ll all be affected. And you can bet they’ll fight to defend their established notions of the way civilization developed. Wouldn’t you, if somebody came along with a radical new idea that threatened everything you believe? —Be realistic, Siferra. We’ve known from the start that there’d be a storm over this.”
“I suppose. I wasn’t ready for it to begin so soon. I’ve hardly begun unpacking.”
“That’s the real problem. You’ve plunged back into the thick of things so fast, without taking any time to decompress. —Look, I’ve got an idea. We’re entitled to a little time off before we get back to full-time academic loads. Why don’t you and I run away from the rain and take a little holiday together? Up to Jonglor, say, to see the Exposition? I was talking to Sheerin yesterday—he was just there, you know, and he says—”
She stared at Balik in disbelief. “What?”
“A holiday, I said. You and me.”
“You’re making a pass at me, Balik?”
“You could call it that, I suppose. But is that so incredible? We aren’t exactly strangers. We’ve known each other since we were graduate students. We’ve just come back from a year and a half spent in the desert together.”
“Together? We were at the same dig, yes. You had your tent, I had mine. There’s never been anything between us. And now, out of the blue—”
Balik’s stolid features showed dismay and annoyance. “It’s not as though I asked you to marry me, Siferra. I just s
uggested a quick little trip to the Jonglor Exposition, five or six days, some sunshine, a decent resort hotel instead of a tent pegged out in the middle of the desert, a few quiet dinners, some good wine—” He turned his palms outward in a gesture of irritation. “You’re making me feel like a silly schoolboy, Siferra.”
“You’re acting like one,” she said. “Our relationship has always been purely professional, Balik. Let’s keep it that way, shall we?”
He began to reply, evidently thought better of it, clamped his lips tight shut.
They looked at each other uncomfortably for a long moment.
Siferra’s head was pounding. All this was unexpected and disagreeable—the news that the other members of the department were already taking positions on the Thombo finds, and Balik’s clumsy attempt at seducing her as well. Seducing? Well, at establishing some sort of romantic rapport with her, anyway. How utterly astonished he looked at being rejected, too.
She wondered if she had ever accidentally seemed to be leading him on in some way, to give him a hint of feelings that had never existed.
No. No. She couldn’t believe that she had. She had no interest in going to north-country resorts and sipping wine in romantically lit restaurants with Balik or anyone else. She had her work. That was enough. For twenty-odd years, ever since her teens, men had been offering themselves to her, telling her how beautiful, how wonderful, how fascinating she was. It was flattering, she supposed. Better that they think her beautiful and fascinating than ugly and boring. But she wasn’t interested. Never had been. Didn’t want to be. How tiresome of Balik to have created this awkwardness between them now, when they still had all the labor of organizing the Beklimot material ahead of them—the two of them, working side by side—
There was another knock at the door. She was immensely grateful for the interruption.
“Who’s there?”
“Mudrin 505,” a quavering voice replied.
“Come in. Please.”
“I’ll leave now,” Balik said.
“No. He’s here to see the tablets. They’re your tablets as much as mine, aren’t they?”
“Siferra, I’m sorry if—”
“Forget it. Forget it!”
Mudrin came doddering in. He was a frail, desiccated-looking man in his late seventies, well past retirement age, but still retained as a member of the faculty in a nonteaching post so that he could continue his paleographic studies. His mild graygreen eyes, watery from a lifetime of poring over old faded manuscripts, peered out from behind thick spectacles. Yet Siferra knew that their watery appearance was deceptive: those were the sharpest eyes she had ever known, at least where ancient inscriptions were concerned.
“So these are the famous tablets,” Mudrin said. “You know I’ve thought about nothing else since you told me.” But he made no immediate move to examine them. —“Can you give me a little information about the context, the matrix?”
“Here’s Balik’s master photo,” Siferra said, handing him the huge glossy enlargement. “The Hill of Thombo, the old midden-heap south of Beklimot Major. When the sandstorm slit it open, this was the view we had. And then we ran our trench down here—and down to here, next—we laid the whole thing open. Can you make out this dark line here?”
“Charcoal?” Mudrin asked.
“Exactly. A fire line here, the whole town burned. Now we skip down to here and we see a second batch of foundations, and a second fire line. And if you look here—and here—”
Mudrin studied the photograph a long while. “What do you have here? Eight successive settlement sites?”
“Seven,” Balik blurted.
“Nine, I think,” said Siferra curtly. “But I agree it gets pretty difficult to tell, down toward the base of the hill. We’ll need chemical analysis to clear it up, and radiographic testing. But obviously there was a whole series of conflagrations here. And the Thombo people went on building and rebuilding, time after time.”
“But this site must be incredibly ancient, if that’s the case!” Mudrin said.
“My guess is that the occupation period was a span of at least five thousand years. Perhaps much more. Perhaps ten or fifteen. We won’t know until we’ve fully uncovered the lowest level, and that’ll have to wait for the next expedition. Or the one after that.”
“Five thousand years, you say? Can it be?”
“To build and rebuild and rebuild again? Five thousand at a minimum.”
“But no site we’ve ever excavated anywhere in the world is remotely as old as that,” Mudrin said, looking startled. “Beklimot itself is less than two thousand years old, isn’t that so? And we regard it as the oldest known human settlement on Kalgash.”
“The oldest known settlement,” Siferra said. “But what’s to say that there aren’t older ones? Much older ones? Mudrin, this photo gives you your own answer. Here’s a site that has to be older than Beklimot—there are Beklimot-style artifacts in its highest level, and it goes down a long way from there. Beklimot must be a very recent settlement as human history goes. The Thombo settlement, which was ancient before Beklimot ever existed, must have burned and burned and burned again, and was rebuilt every time, down through what must have been hundreds of generations.”
“A very unlucky place, then,” Mudrin observed. “Hardly beloved of the gods, was it?”
“Eventually that must have occurred to them,” Balik said.
Siferra nodded. “Yes. Finally they must have decided there was a curse on the place. So instead of rebuilding it after the last fire in the series they moved a short distance away and built Beklimot. But before that they must have occupied Thombo a long, long time. We were able to recognize the architectural styles of the two topmost settlements—see, it’s cyclopean middle-Beklimot here, and proto-Beklimot crosshatch beneath. But the third town down, what there is left of it, is like nothing I can identify. The fourth is even stranger, and very crude. The fifth makes the fourth look sophisticated by comparison. Below that, everything’s such a primitive jumble that it’s not easy to tell which town is which. But each one is separated by a burn line from the one above it, or so we think. And the tablets—”
“Yes, the tablets,” Mudrin said, trembling with excitement.
“We found this set, the square ones, in the third level. The oblong ones came from the fifth one. I can’t even begin to make any sense out of them, of course, but I’m no paleographer.”
“How wonderful it would be,” Balik began, “if these tablets contained some kind of account of the destruction and rebuilding of the Thombo towns, and—”
Siferra shot him a poisonous glance. “How wonderful it would be, Balik, if you wouldn’t spin cozy little wish-fulfillment fantasies like that!”
“I’m sorry, Siferra,” he said icily. “Forgive me for breathing.”
Mudrin took no need of their bickering. He was at Siferra’s desk, head bent low over the square tablets for a long while, then over the oblong ones.
Finally the paleographer said, “Astonishing! Absolutely astonishing!”
“Can you read them?” Siferra asked.
The old man chuckled. “Read them? Of course not. Do you want miracles? But I see word-groups here.”
“Yes. So did I,” Siferra said.
“And I can almost recognize letters. Not on the older tablets—they’re done in a completely unfamiliar script, very likely a syllabic one, too many different characters for it to be alphabetic. But the square tablets seem to be written in a very primitive form of the Beklimot script. See, this is a quhas here, I’d almost be willing to wager on it, and this appears to be a somewhat distorted form of the letter tifjak—it is a tifjak, wouldn’t you say? —I need to work on these, Siferra. With my own lighting equipment, my cameras, my scanning screens. May I take them with me?”
“Take them?” she said, as if he had asked to borrow some of her fingers.
“It’s the only way I can begin to decipher them.”
“Do you think you can deciph
er them?” Balik asked.
“I offer no guarantees. But if this character is a tifjak and this a quhas, then I should be able to find other letters ancestral to the Beklimot ones, and at least produce a transliteration. Whether we can understand the language once we read the script, that’s hard to say. And I doubt I can get very far with the oblong tablets unless you’ve uncovered a bilingual that will give me some way of approaching this even older script. But let me try, Siferra. Let me try.”
“Yes. Here.”
Lovingly she gathered up the tablets and put them back in the container in which she had carried them all the way from Sagikan. It pained her to let them go out of her possession. But Mudrin was right. He couldn’t do anything with them at a quick glance; he had to subject them to laboratory analysis.
She watched ruefully until the paleographer had gone doddering from the room, his precious bundle clasped close against his hollow chesit. Now she and Balik were alone again.
“Siferra—about what I said before—”
“I told you to forget it. I already have. Do you mind if I get about my work now, Balik?”
[13]
“Well, how did he take it?” Theremon asked. “Better than you expected he would, is my guess.”
“He was completely marvelous,” said Beenay. They were on the terrace at the Six Suns Club. The rains had ended for the time being, and the evening was a splendid one, with the strange clarity of the atmosphere that always came after a prolonged period of rain: Tano and Sitha in the west, casting their hard white ghostly light with more than usual intensity, and red Dovim in the opposing sector of the dusky sky, burning like a tiny gem. “He hardly even seemed upset, except when I indicated that I’d almost been tempted to suppress the whole thing for the sake of protecting his feelings. Then he flew off the handle. He really chewed me out—as I deserved. But the funniest thing was— Waiter! Waiter! A Tano Special for me, please! And one for my friend. Make them doubles!”
“You’re really turning into a drinker, aren’t you?” Theremon remarked.
Beenay shrugged. “Only when I’m here. There’s something about this terrace, the view of the city, the whole atmosphere—”