All the Colors of Time

by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

  “Denominations.”

  Rhys shook his head. “The number is totally random. Anywhere from zero scores to a complete circuit of the edge. Like a punch card. Then there’s the relief on the gate lintel. You interpret as prisoners and sacrificial victims, people who are in no way bound. You ascribe warrior status to men without weapons or armor. You make moon crescents out of shapes that bear only passing resemblance to any stage of Etsat’s moon. And the village—your massive sacrificial altar could just as easily be a place where people went to be entertained, not ritually murdered. Think about it, Professor, assume for a moment that we stumbled across the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with no cultural context. We knew nothing of the Renaissance—we’d never heard of Michelangelo. Without that context, you and I would very likely interpret the Last Judgment as depicting a warrior-priest in god’s clothing surveying his sacrificial victims.”

  “You mean I’d interpret it that way. I’m sure you’d draw other conclusions.”

  “I don’t have conclusions, Doctor. I have theories. Day’s too young for conclusions. I talked about building a context and I meant it. The present day Etsatat hold the key to this place, whether they realize it or not. Look at their culture if you want to advance toward conclusions.”

  “Preposterous. I hadn’t realized you’d become such an iconoclast.”

  “I’m not an iconoclast. I simply suggest that if you’d try to envision the village ruins as a living Etsatat town, you’ll see some of these artifacts in a different light.”

  “What I see, Dr. Llewellyn, is that you and your associates are disrupting my dig and undermining my authority. I request that you leave. In fact, I demand it.”

  Rhys felt the blood drain from his face. He suspected that if he looked in a mirror, he’d find the color had drained from his hair, as well. “I … wish you’d reconsider.”

  “I don’t think so, Doctor. Now, if you’d kindly let me get back to my work?” He gave Rhys a curt nod and returned to his study of the display of his holopad.

  oOo

  Back aboard the TAS schooner Ceilidh, Rhys tried to banish his black mood without success. He’d just blown a huge hole in his personal history and, glancing backward, saw a void where there had once been a professional relationship, a wall of regret where there had once been pleasant and important memories. His mental landscape was Scotland in winter—bleak, gray, cold. Neither Yoshi nor Rick could pierce the veil of sorrow that hung over him like a mountain-topping cloud.

  “I’ll get over it,” he told Yoshi when he felt her eyes on him for the thousandth time since they’d left the surface of Etsat. “You were right, you know. I did idolize the man. I suppose … I suppose it’s best that I’ve been reminded painfully of his humanity … and mine.” He shook his head ruefully. “I couldn’t believe he could be so biased. I assumed that whatever expertise he applied so successfully to the Terran field, he’d apply to the broader field of xenoarchaeology and become the authority there, as well.”

  Yoshi looked down at her tea cup. “You’re the authority in xenoarchaeology, Rhys. And I think that bothers Dr. Burton more than he’ll admit.”

  “Rhys?” Rick’s voice floated over to them from the intercom. “You’ve got a communication from Dr. Burton. I’ll patch it through to the mess comlink.”

  Rhys made a face, his eyes meeting Yoshi’s through the steam of tea. “I guess he hadn’t quite finished flaying me.”

  But Burton apparently was no longer in a flaying mood. His face, filling the comlink’s flat screen, wore a shining cloak of joviality.

  “Rhys! I’m glad I caught you before you left. I, em, I’d like to apologize for losing my temper earlier. It was unprofessional in the extreme. Unforgivable, really. I’d like to have you to a bit of a send-off party aboard our cutter—a bit more plush than the cabins at the dig.”

  Caught completely off guard by the older man’s conciliatory tone, Rhys could only stammer out his acceptance. Several hours later he, Yoshi and Rick ferried over to the Feathered Serpent for the send-off. Burton greeted them in the docking bay with Wayne Bell at his side. He seemed cordial enough, but Rhys caught an undercurrent of nervousness and found it impossible to relax. The slightest misstep, he feared, would bring on another fit of professional vituperation.

  What actually happened was much stranger. They were passing through the row of crew’s cabins with Burton leading and Bell bringing up the rear, when the Professor stopped in mid-corridor and slid back one of the cabin doors.

  “Dr. Llewellyn, if you and your associates would kindly enter and prepare for transport?”

  A terrible shaft of cold shot up Rhys’s back. “Excuse me?”

  “I fibbed a little about the send-off. This is more in the nature of an educational field trip. I’m going to prove to you, beyond any doubt, that my theories about this dig are correct.”

  “I don’t understand—” Rhys started to say, but suddenly he did understand. “You’re taking us back in time.”

  “I am, indeed.”

  “This ship must have temporal grid limiters—”

  Burton shrugged. “Which can be disabled by someone who knows what they’re doing. Did I mention that Wayne here worked his way through his first three years of college as a temporal engineer at QuestLabs?”

  Rhys glanced back over his shoulder. Yoshi’s eyes were big as saucers, Rick was looking positively ill, and Wayne was holding a fuzz gun. He jerked back around to face Burton.

  “Doctor, what you’re contemplating is illegal, not to mention unethical.”

  “Ah, for the casual time traveler, perhaps. This is far from casual. We’re on a mission of sorts—a search for truth.”

  “Professor, I protest. You can’t do this.”

  Burton chuckled. “Watch me. I can play Indiana Jones as well as the next man.” He leaned closer to Rhys, pinned him with over-bright eyes. “This is important to me, Rhys. I have to prove this to you. To myself. Now, if you’ll kindly enter your cabin . . .”

  “Professor?” Rick was looking at Rhys with panic in his eyes and sweat beading on his upper lip.

  Rhys swung back to Burton. “Roddy has severe Temporal Displacement syndrome. If we time shift, he’ll become critically ill.”

  “Ah, so I should abandon this crazy idea, eh? Or send the young man back to the Ceilidh? I think not. Several of my crew have TDS. I know the precautions. Trust me—Roddy will be suitably sedated.”

  “I can’t talk you out of this?”

  “No, young man, you cannot.”

  Rhys glanced at Bell. “And you? How can you allow him to do this?”

  “The professor taught me everything I know. Unlike some, I’m not likely to forget that. You impugned his integrity. I think he deserves the chance to vindicate himself.”

  They shifted within the hour, moving millennia in time, but infinitesimally in space. It was a long shift, one which required every human aboard to be sedated against the displacing effects, though none so deeply as Rick. In the darkened cabin, wearing shift goggles and respirators, Rhys and his two companions slept while ages rolled back around them.

  oOo

  Rhys woke to total darkness and thought, for the briefest moment, that he was dreaming rather than conscious (or dead rather than alive). But Yoshi stirred and murmured on the bunk opposite his, and he came completely awake on a surge of memory and adrenaline. If Burton’s disabling of the ship’s temporal grid limiters had worked, he was now orbiting a younger Etsat. About 5,000 years younger, if their dating was correct.

  He had called on the lights and was helping Yoshi to sit up when Burton appeared, his eyes bright with exhilaration.

  “We’re here. We’ll shuttle down when the site is in darkness. That will mean turning off the running lights, but there shouldn’t be any other airships to collide with, should there?”

  He chuckled, obviously enjoying the extraordinary situation. Leaving the deeply sleeping Rick in the darkened cabin, he led Rhys and Yoshi to the mes
s for a pre-descent meal.

  oOo

  The squat, boxy, little shuttle carried four people—Rhys, Yoshi, Burton and Bell, who acted as pilot. In the deepest part of the local night, they brought the craft in on instruments. A clearing in the comparatively sparse forest of a younger world afforded them a landing site with adequate cover between the village and the Ets-eket complex. Or so Rhys hoped. The thought of bumping into the Etsatat’s ancestors filled him with mortal dread. Whatever else they did during this madcap adventure, they absolutely must avoid changing Etsatat history.

  As the shuttle descended into the trees, Rhys saw a few points of firelight in the direction of the village and sighed deeply. He was torn about this “mission,” and knew he shouldn’t be. He should be outraged at Burton, but the thought of seeing firsthand what he before could only theorize about made his heart hammer with pure excitement and his breath come quick and shallow.

  He often daydreamed about what it must have been like during those brief halcyon days when scientists could, and did, use QuestLab’s Temporal Grid technology to study the past. He had read the field notes of those early time travelers. He had seen the video journals. He had, in his personal library, the private diaries and logs of one Arthur Llewellyn, the man directly responsible for the ban on what his great-great-grandnephew was presently doing. It would be painful irony, indeed, if ill came of this.

  “Rhys, look.”

  Rhys tugged his thoughts back to the surface and followed Yoshi’s gaze through the starboard canopy of the shuttle. There was light in the direction of Sper-ets, too, a ruddy volcanic glow that lit the low clouds and smoke that lay like sleeping sheep above it. The tower, Rhys suspected, and felt a guilty tingle of anticipation. He felt eyes on him and glanced forward to find Professor Burton watching him with an odd little smile on his lips.

  “You wouldn’t stop this now if you could, would you?”

  Rhys declined to answer that, but knew in his heart of hearts that Burton was right.

  oOo

  Dressed in forest camouflage and packing a proximity scanner, they used the still, predawn hours to set up an observation post upslope from the village in the branches of a massive, gnarled tree. Sunrise gave them a clear view down the main avenue from almost directly above the amphitheater. What was only marginally apparent in the ruin was highly visible in the living town. There was one main street; all other avenues—there were ten of them—crossed it at a precise ninety degree angle. As the sun climbed, the denizens of those streets came out and began their daily routines, unaware of the alien presence watching from the east through long-range optics.

  As expected, the market plaza was soon aswarm with buyers and sellers of produce. Traffic sprouted in the streets; carts and wagons appeared, most pulled by domestic animals called tirzen. Contraptions that looked like rickshas and handled like bicycles wove in and round larger conveyances. People wandered the avenues, popping in and out of buildings.

  Rhys barely knew where to look first among such visual riches. Finally, he opted for a systematic survey of each street, beginning with those nearest his vantage point. He was focusing on the side of a large building adjacent to the amphitheater when Yoshi interrupted him.

  “Sir, look at the stelae. They’re painted.”

  They were, indeed. Rhys brought his own field optics to bear on the grouping they’d surveyed only four or five days ago. (Or was that 5,005 days ago?) The “Water Goddess” was done up in shades of turquoise and blue. The building she fronted was, likewise, awash in aquatic tones. Rhys supposed it could be either temple or bath house; the only evidence either way was that some of the people entering seemed to be carrying clothing draped over their arms or carried in baskets or bundles.

  “Now scanning building 1A,” murmured Burton.

  Rhys turned to find the elder archaeologist had mounted a holocam on his optics visor and was recording the street scenes. Or rather, he was recording the buildings—the people seemed to be of little interest to him.

  “What are you doing, Professor? You’ll never be able to show that to anyone.”

  “Ah, but you and I will know, Rhys. You and I will know. Now, building 1A has before it a stele depicting a merchant goddess and her pack—”

  “It’s a weaver’s shop!” Yoshi broke into the narrative.

  “What?” Wayne Bell glanced from the display that showed a Burton’s-eye-view to the view through his own optics.

  “Look. That woman in the red halter went in empty-handed and came out with a little rug or something draped over her arm. And there goes someone with a basket of yarn.”

  Sure enough, a female Etsatat bearing a basket of brightly colored yarn walked up to the doorstep of the equally colorful building and spoke to someone just inside the door. She then set the basket in a sunny spot on the patio behind the stele where the colors of her wares shone like jewels.

  A moment later, a second woman joined her from inside the building and began to pick through the jumble of richly hued spools. In the end, she wagged her head and made a series of intricate hand gestures. Then she pulled several rings of bright metal from her necklace and handed them to the other woman who bobbed, turned, and left the yarns, basket and all, in the six fingered hands of their newcomer.

  Rhys glanced at Burton. He had stopped recording and had moved his holocam to another target. Rhys glanced at the locational grid on Burton’s display frame then adjusted his optics to find the building visually.

  There was the wall relief Rick had found so amusing. It was part and parcel of a shoulder-height stone wall that enclosed a paved piazza. Wall and building were glazed in succulent colors overlaid on gleaming, white granitic rock. A woven awning stretched over the patio, undulating gently in the breeze. Beneath it sat five rows of low wooden platforms, two of which were already populated by kneeling and squatting Etsatat who seemed to be engaged in lively conversation. They used their hands much as they talked, all the while dipping into bowls and baskets of food spread before them.

  All in all, Rhys thought, they looked very much like the quartet of brightly painted fellows in the relief on the encircling wall.

  “Four guys selling pizza,” murmured Yoshi, hiding a giggle beneath her whisper. “I wish Rick were here.”

  Burton moved his focus yet again.

  Wayne Bell frowned at the blur on the holopad. “Do you want me to do that, Professor?”

  There was no response.

  “I realize we’re not supposed to be here, but I really think we should be recording this.”

  “It’s only a bistro,” muttered Burton. “A stupid, mundane bistro.”

  “Professor,” breathed Bell. “With all due respect—it’s a five thousand-year-old alien bistro.”

  The day continued in much the same way. Wayne Bell eventually took over the recording, Rhys and Yoshi catalogued buildings and cultural features and Burton pouted, insisting that he’d never been as interested in the village as Nyami had been and grumbling about not having gone straight to the Sper-ets complex. By late afternoon, they had located two metallurgists or smiths, a spinner, a dyer, two mercantiles, an apothecary, two doctors or shaman, a wagon wright, a second bath house, and two smaller eateries. There was also a building Rhys thought was an inn and a place south of the amphitheater that seemed to be a school.

  There were homes as well, none over two stories tall. The only edifice taller than that sat just north of the amphitheater. It was different than the other buildings in town from the height of its facade to its shape and the character of its ornamentation. The curved face was taller than the roof behind it, giving the impression that the building wore a crown or tiara. The roofing was a tile of such deep indigo that it seemed to suck sunlight from the sky. Unlike other buildings, it had no paint upon either face and visible sides or around its many round windows.

  Into this building people did not go … until the sun began to set. But as the light mellowed and washed the white walls rose-amber, it seemed to becom
e a magnet to the people of the little city. They came from every direction, many of the shop keepers carrying colorful baskets, which they set, one and all, in a corner of the market plaza before crossing the street to the blue-roofed building.

  Burton perked up. “What’s this? They seem to be leaving offerings.” He glanced at Rhys. “At sunset. Need I remind you what will follow the Etsat sunset by approximately fifteen minutes?”

  “Moon rise,” Rhys observed.

  “You don’t suppose we’ll see a worship ceremony of some sort, do you?”

  “Professor, I’ve never denied that these people may have a nature-based religion. In fact, I’d be dumbfounded if they didn’t have ritualized beliefs of some sort. What I doubted was that they consumed the entire culture, dominated every event, and produced every artifact from clothing to art.”

  In the dying light of day, the crowned building filled with Etsatats; the sun set; the moon rose, huge and white in the indigo sky. When it came over the top of the mountain due east of the watchers’ tree, it struck a round patch of reflective material in the roof of the building and came face to face with its mirror image.

  “It’s a window!” breathed Yoshi, and at that exact moment, there arose from the building below a great ululating song of rapture. It was tunefully alien and did not stop until the orb of the moon had moved completely from the reflective round. Then the temple erupted from within with a blaze of pale light. Almost immediately, the worshipers began to emerge. Many of them carried torches or lamps that gave off a lunar gleam.

  “Bio-luminescence?” Rhys wondered aloud.

  “Look, they’re filing into the amphitheater,” murmured Bell.

  Indeed they were. In an atmosphere of festival, the crowd took seats on the terraced stone benches while torchbearers formed a corridor. Down it passed a small group of their fellows dressed in vivid costume.