Accidental Gods

by Andrew Busey

  “Yeah. We’ll certainly have to do some manual sorting. But that will be fun, too. Imagine what we’ll discover from children’s mnemonic poetry. Intentional rhyme, assonance, alliteration, and meter can all be huge helps in separating words.”

  “What about the written language?”

  “We’re going to need to find scribes or laborers who are inscribing things and attempt to match up the spoken words or combinations of words with the graphemes. This will probably be the hardest part. We might be able to use a human Rosetta Stone to do this as well.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, if we can find someone learning their graphemes, then—”

  Thomas laughed.

  “What?” Mike asked.

  “I’m sorry. It’s just…” He waved them on. “It sounds like ‘eat your veggies.’” He affected a stern parent’s voice. “Learn your graphemes.” He snickered again.

  Mike continued, “If we can find that, we can translate them.” He glanced at Thomas, who had settled down, and then turned back to Stephen. “Especially if we see them voicing words as they write.”

  “Ah,” Stephen said.

  Mike scratched his ear. “But that’s going to depend on whether their graphemes are actually an alphabet or if they’re a syllabary, logograms, or—”

  “Oh, good God,” Stephen said, “cut it out!”

  “I think they’re at least ideographs, from what we’ve already seen. But I guess that distinction and analyzing its repercussions will be my job.”

  “That will definitely require human intervention,” Stephen said and turned to Thomas. “We’re going to need to retask a lot of people to this.”

  Thomas said, “Just let me know how you want to do it.”

  “I think for the next two weeks we should have everyone mapping speech to language.”

  Mike nodded.

  Stephen went on, “That will be what requires human matching. Mike and I will focus on finding his so-called ‘human Rosetta Stone,’ and he’ll have to spend some time priming people on what to look for.”

  Thomas asked, “Mike, you’re going to train people on that, right? Who will set the video feeds to build the spoken words and phrases glossary?”

  “I’d say Mike and I, along with Jenn and Ross.”

  “Done. I’ll call a meeting to get everyone teed up. This needs to be our top priority.”

  Chapter 27

  God enters by a private door into every individual.

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson

  While he knew the desert was near, there was almost no sign of it here along the lush bank of the river. He could smell the water and a hint of mud from its fertile, claylike shore, murkiness so subtle it was sweet. He walked along a stone-tiled path with grass on both sides. It was quiet in this area of the palace—since few were authorized to visit it.

  The path led to a small opening in a massive thirty-foot-tall wall made of cut limestone. The entrance was dwarfed by the wall, which disappeared into the larger palace complex to the west. To the east, the wall continued only briefly before seeming to join with the river. Two large men, eunuchs, he knew, stood guard, grasping giant axes with four-foot-long handles—pole-arms, he had guessed on his second visit—crossed to bar the entrance. He knew, from walking this area many times, that more guards, probably a full company, were concealed in small underground bunkers cleverly blended into the wall’s structure.

  The guards paid him no heed as he strolled past. He walked by, underneath the pole-arms’ crossed shafts. The smells of the river and grass were replaced almost instantly with a floral scent. It was a far sweeter and far cleaner scent than the fertile riverbank. The crushed petals of a purple flower were spread on the edges of the hall he walked down. He strode with purpose and wished he could feel the silkiness of the petals beneath his toes.

  He passed through a sleeping area, populated with many simple, identical beds—basic in many ways but covered in extravagant fabrics: tightly handwoven of fine threads dyed brilliant ochre, vermillion, and lapis. There must have been twenty beds. Women still slept in four or five of them.

  Crossing a small courtyard, exposed to the warm heat of the day again, he realized how cool these massive stone palaces stayed despite the lack of modern luxuries, such as air conditioning. Of course, some of the occupants had other means of combating the heat, he thought, noting two women stretched out on large flat deck chairs with eunuch servants cooling them with fans made from giant leaves.

  As he crossed into the next corridor on the other side of the courtyard, the smells changed again, this time to a mingling of incense and steam. The steam didn’t have a discernable smell so much as a feel, more of an olfactory texture. He neared the end of the corridor and saw dancing shadows and light in the room beyond. He walked into the room itself, an intimate bath chamber. Candles provided a subtle light. Incense burned in two corners, and flower petals floated on the steaming water.

  It appeared he was not too late, though he could never predict who might show up—He hoped it was her. This was her usual time.

  He sat and waited.

  It wasn’t long before he heard footsteps from the hall. Three women walked in, one clearly dominant. The other two flanked her, slowing when she slowed and stopping when she stopped, just before a set of steps leading down into the steaming water. She raised her arms out to her sides, and the other two women slowly untied her robe.

  It was her, and he watched. He didn’t know her real name, but he called her Cleo, short for Cleopatra. She conjured up everything he associated with that name: power, beauty, dignity, and other things—less-pure, forbidden things like conflict, war. All were aphrodisiacs in the context of her.

  He watched as the maidservants peeled off her robe, slowly exposing her deeply tanned and finely toned body, her breasts supple and pert. She stretched, reaching up and arching her back with feline grace, and took a slow step into the steaming water. The two women led her to the center of the steaming pool, where the water came up to her chest, the waterline teasing her erect nipples.

  He wondered if they had designed this pool with that purpose in mind. It would not have surprised him. The effect was arousing for participant and voyeur alike.

  The maidservants picked up sponges and bathed Cleo. She smiled as they rubbed the sponges over her entire body. She seemed ecstatic, and he knew if he could switch places, he would probably be in transcendent bliss—but he only watched.

  He closed his eyes, the smell of incense with a hint of the women now. She moaned softly. That was all it took for him to finish.

  Wow, he thought, eyes still closed.

  He heard splashing and opened his eyes in time to see her step out of the pool. He had missed this the first time. Never since.

  They patted her down with a lush towel but did not completely dry her. Then they sprinkled her with something he suspected might be powdered gold. They wrapped her waist in a small, revealing skirt—so small it was really a loincloth. A single piece of silk, wrapped once around her chest, minimally covered her still-aroused nipples.

  She walked forward, a golden goddess from another age, flanked by her servants, and left the room.

  He sat for a moment, cooling off in the steam-swathed room.

  Then he left the room as well. But it wasn’t the same room that she had left. The door he closed behind him read “Rendering Room 9.”

  Chapter 28

  Week 5: Wednesday

  All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

  —Galileo

  SU-N11 Time: 472 PC [+13,508,915,690 Years]

  Mike and Stephen sat in Rendering Room 2, the air conditioning on high and keeping them at a comfortable seventy-one degrees. Outside, the summer Texas heat was turned up to nearly record highs of around one hundred five degrees. Mike was happy to be inside. This summer was a shocking change from what he was used to in Illinois.

  The room rendered a small ci
ty. It looked even hotter than the Texas sun outside.

  Mike chuckled and broke Stephen’s reverie.

  “Sorry,” Mike said. “I was just thinking about how bad it would be if these rendering rooms matched temperatures to the scene. The smells are weird enough, by the way. Then it occurred to me that you had been rendering stuff in space and cataclysmic volcanic eruptions and such. That would be considerably more unpleasant than this.”

  Stephen laughed. “Yeah, it would. We tried to make it as realistic as possible. We even discussed adding wind.”

  Stephen liked that Mike brought a kind of naïve enthusiasm to the project. It was uplifting. Even though Mike was a linguist, Stephen sometimes thought he acted more like an anthropologist—there to study and understand the indigenous peoples. Furthermore, Mike seemed to care about them, to readily accept them as living, caring, intelligent beings. Stephen was internally conflicted on this point—it was both disturbing and exciting to think of these people as “real.” He assumed Mike had accepted the reality of it all because he hadn’t been working on the project from the beginning, when this other universe had been nothing more than hopeful imagination. Perhaps it was because Mike wasn’t a computer scientist or physicist—disciplines that encouraged analyzing things at a level far below that of actual people.

  Ross had just recently found this “city,” the first place they’d discovered that could realistically be called a city. They had pinpointed several villages, some of reasonable size along this river, but none had the organization that existed here. They all seemed to use the same language and definitely traded goods. Mike wondered if those other villages were vassals or subservient in some way to this larger city.

  They moved through the city, its people going about their business oblivious to the invisible observers. The area they were currently standing in consisted mostly of one- and two-story mud-brick buildings with simple construction, cloth doors, and thatched roofs.

  Mike and Stephen continued around the next dogleg in the street and saw a market. This area was particularly crowded and smelled of a potpourri of people and produce. In the market, vendors were hawking food, copper pans, knives and axes, bolts of cloth, and much more. Clearly, the city supported a thriving economy.

  Mike pointed at a woman. “Check it out. They’re using money already!” The woman handed half a dozen dice-sized clay items to a merchant, and the merchant handed her a chicken, two vegetables that resembled cucumbers, and a different clay piece of his own.

  “He gave her change!” The pitch of Mike’s voice rose with his excitement. “We have to get some images of this.”

  Stephen walked up to the vendor and took pictures of the clay pieces. He even zoomed right through the man’s pouch and took pictures of the ones inside.

  Stephen said, “Looks like several denominations.”

  Mike and Stephen milled about the market, taking pictures, and then continued their tour. In another setting, they might have appeared as simple foreign tourists.

  They turned the next corner and got their first view of the pyramids—one of the things that had attracted them to this site in the first place. The pyramids dotted the rise on the far side of the river, watchful guardians—tall and seemingly proud, proclaiming how powerful this city was and providing protection.

  His voice’s pitch rising again, Mike said, “We definitely have to check those out first.”

  Stephen nodded.

  Five completed pyramids and one half-finished one overlooked the city. Four were step pyramids; the fifth was smooth-sided. Mike guessed that when the sixth pyramid’s construction was complete, it would be the largest.

  Mike said in wonderment, “It’s fascinating that they build pyramids. You know all the major early Earth civilizations built them, too. These people are evolving just like the Egyptians. Most people don’t know it, but the original Egyptian pyramids, in Saqqara, were also step pyramids. The step pyramid of Djoser, the first major Egyptian pyramid, is less well-known probably because it’s more decayed, farther from Cairo, and not flanked by the Sphinx and other large pyramids.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Stephen said.

  Encouraged, Mike continued, “Another intermediate pyramid, in Meidum, did have smooth sides, though it was not as perfectly formed as the Giza pyramids, but it’s more decayed as well. The pyramids in Giza soon followed. Did you know that the second-largest pyramid in Giza is only ten feet shorter than the Great Pyramid? Khafre, whose father, Khufu, constructed the Great Pyramid, made it slightly shorter out of respect for his father. He did, however, position it higher on the Giza plateau so that when you look at it, it appears taller.”

  “Are these pyramids burial chambers or something else?”

  “The Egyptian pyramids were all burial chambers. The Mayans used pyramids more as temples. I can’t tell with these yet. We need to be closer.”

  Stephen stepped on the accelerator, and they flew through the city at breakneck speed. Stephen imagined it was like driving a Ducati motorcycle through Hong Kong at one hundred miles per hour but without the risk. Buildings and people flew by, quickly turning into blurs in Stephen’s and Mike’s peripheral vision.

  As they approached the pyramids, they slowed.

  Mike noticed it first and pointed. “Look. It’s almost like the tops are hollowed out and opened.”

  They levitated in front of the largest pyramid and moved into the carved-out area.

  “Wow. Three hundred twenty feet,” Stephen said, reading the tiny amber numbers at the bottom of the screen. “That’s pretty high. Thirty stories or so?”

  “Sounds right but still far short of the Great Pyramid. It’s over four hundred and sixty feet high. Did you know it was the tallest building in the world until 1876?”

  “What happened in 1876?”

  “Notre Dame passed it at four hundred ninety-five feet. Some debate exists about other various cathedrals beating the pyramid’s height before that, but it isn’t clearly documented. Like the Lincoln Cathedral, whose central spire was supposedly five hundred forty-nine feet, but it was destroyed by a lightning strike in 1549. Upon being rebuilt, the Saint Nicholas’s Church in Hamburg clocks in slightly higher than the Great Pyramid as well and was completed in 1874.”

  “How do you know all this stuff?”

  “I guess you could call it a hobby? I’m a huge fan of architecture. A window into humanity’s soul, really.”

  “Hmm. A soul we step into instead of the other way around?”

  “Never thought of it literally like that before.”

  “Back to work,” Stephen said, turned, and studied their aerial view of the city.

  Mike said, “Buildings that reach for the sky are even more exhilarating. It’s fascinating that we are capable of such giant structures and even more amazing that some survive for more than four thousand years.”

  “Work,” Stephen said again.

  Mike smiled and replied, “Work? Pfft. This is the best job ever.”

  Stephen didn’t respond, though he did admit to himself that this had been a pretty exciting ride and that he really did enjoy the work.

  The chamber they were in atop the massive pyramid faced the river they had just crossed. On what was now the far shore, a palace marked the northern boundary of the city. They hadn’t reached the palace or even seen it before they had turned and crossed the river. An inner-city wall wrapped from the northern palace around most of the central city and back inward to touch the river near the southern end of the city. The wall did not, however, embrace the entire city. Instead, the city looked like it had broken out, spilling over and through the walls, and expanded outward as it had grown. Now the wall ran in a half-moon arc through the city from the palace and toward the south. Main roads radiated outward into the overgrowth part of the city from the original gates in the wall and, in a few cases, from new, less-architecturally-congruent gates cut through the walls by some enterprising citizens.

  A patchwork of farmland draped
the land beyond the sprawl of the city. The few farms to the north seemed minimally developed and sparse, but the patchwork of crops and grazing land spread to the south and beyond, as far as the eye could see.

  Mike turned away from the city and explored the platform, which was basically a room carved out near the top of the pyramid. Numerous pylons, though obviously a structural necessity, had not been aesthetically wasted. They were covered with writing. The image projected on the rendering room’s wall was so high-resolution that Mike had to fight the urge to reach out and touch a pylon. He wanted to feel the grooves carved in the stone.

  “Take pictures of all the petroglyphs on these pylons,” he said. “We’ll see what we can learn. Unfortunately, it won’t be much.” He sighed. “But once we do crack the language—”

  “Once you crack the language…”

  Mike chortled. “Yeah. Then…” He sighed again. “Then, all this will be a wealth of information.”

  The room was dominated by two large braziers carved from stone. They were each so large that they reminded Mike of the giant torch constructed and lit for every Olympics. The braziers were full of cinders and looked large enough to be seen from the city when lit. Between the braziers was an ornately carved block that appeared to be cut from a single piece of black granite and was roughly six feet long. A crusty film covered it, and a small army of flies buzzed diligently around it.

  “Is that blood?” Mike asked.

  “It’s hard to tell. Sure looks like it.”

  “Smell it.”

  Stephen did. “Nothing I can smell. The flies—or very fly-like things—sure like it, though. You think these people perform sacrifices up here?”

  “Probably just animals. This might also mean that these aren’t burial pyramids…but possibly temples?”

  The rest of the terrace was empty. On the other side, the view was dramatically different. A small patch of green reached out from the river, but it was stalled by rocky outcroppings only a few hundred yards beyond the pyramids.