"Watch it with the cute conceits," Leslie warned. She wondered whether the map's density of crisscros sings (which seemed to include all the thirty or so Sumerian city-states, not just the Big Seven chosen for gaming purposes) was largely imaginative reconstruction. How many of those first distributaries could still be discerned beneath millennia of subsequent history, flooding, and war? Perhaps through satellite photography, of which the last decade must have seen a lot.
Trent, angling his head to regard the map northside up, seemed to be thinking along the same lines. "The entire region is now part of . . ." "Iraq, yes." Where children now perished for the imperial ambitions of their leaders, as had doubtless happened five thousand years ago.
Trent grimaced. "At least Great Games never pandered to the help-kill-Saddam market." He was reminding her that he had refused to get involved with a project called The Mother of All Battles nearly ten years ago, when turning down assignments was hard to do.
Leslie recognized that she was looking for a reason to dislike the game. "Ancient Sumer was such a strange culture, you're not going to gain an understanding of it by playing geopolitics."
"I don't think this is all war gaming," Trent replied as he clicked through a series of menus. "Here's a module on the economy of mud bricks. Look, you have to bake the ones that go into the bottom rows, or they will draw moisture out of the ground. And you need wooden frames to make them, which are expensive."
"That's not a mud brick," Leslie pointed out. "It's a clay tablet." "Whoa, you're right." Trent backed up to restore a rectangular image that had appeared as a sidebar. "That might be a bad link." He scribbled for a moment on a clipboard next to the monitor.
Leslie leaned forward as Trent, exploring the program's architecture, followed a series of links that brought up more cuneiform images: tablets, cylinders, a pieced-together stele. "Wait, stop," she cried. The clay square on the screen was evidently small, as it contained only five rows of text. "I remember that one from college. See the first characters of the top three registers? They are 'Day 1, Day 2, Day 3.'"
"Really?" Trent studied the pictograms—a pair of curved lines, suggesting sunrise over the saddle between two hills, with one, two, and three vertical slashes beneath—while Leslie explained that the tablets dated from 3000 B.C., the dawn of writing, and that these three characters were for a long time the only ones on the tablet whose meaning was known. She had seen a slide of it in a history lecture, and when the teacher asked the class to guess she felt a thrill at the unmediated transmission of meaning, like current, across five thousand years. "How many hash marks till the base number?"
"The Sumerians had a sexagesimal system, based on factors of sixty, but their place notation
progressed in alternating tens and sixes. It was very complicated."
"Hey!" Trent looked delighted. "So their system partook of both hex and decimal."
"Watch it," she repeated. "I didn't say hexadecimal." But Trent had already returned to the
computer and was searching the game's list of tables.
Any history game that gave an explanation of the Sumerian notation system had a good chance of positioning itself out of the market, Leslie reflected as she returned to the living room. This one would have a tough time in any event, with Civilization III, the industry's 900-pound gorilla, about (she remembered Trent saying) to burst onto the scene. She wondered whether games that big paid their beta-testers.
The living room window looked onto the front yard, away from the angled patterns of the condo complex behind them. Their lease allowed the owner to terminate on two months' notice if he sold the house to the developers, who evidently had plans to expand the complex next spring. This agreement reduced the rent but also, they learned, discouraged the owner from maintaining his
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property.
"History begins at Sumer." And ended, presumably, a few years ago, at least according to that silly book her dad sent her one Christmas. Leslie worried less about inhabiting a posthistorical world than a post-boom one, which seemed now to be fully upon them.
Trent was clicking rather than tapping, evidence he was venturing deeper into the game. Fair enough, late Friday afternoon in early September; it was anyway Leslie's turn for supper. She plugged in the laptop's phone jack and went online, and spent the next twenty minutes (the ingredients for salad were already prepared) browsing through the pages that a search on Sumer, Akhad, Mesopotamia brought up.
Gamespace isn't textspace, which tilts the plane to create page, tablet, screen: upright to the eye like the drawings that words once were. Game-space models the earth, a field of play for agents, not the gaze, to move through. Battlefield means battleground, its participants grounded as text never is. Sumer was a plain, even as its texts, lying forgotten beneath the successive accumulations of history, eventually became. You may claim equivalence, each plane perpendicular to its opposite, but the fallen tablets make clear which one subsumes the other.
Perhaps the computer game holds out the promise of genuine space, the three dimensions produced by intersecting planes. A surface isn't space at all, t hough references to "the white space" between words or "floor space" underfoot may seduce us into thinking otherwise. Leslie is undressing for bed, whose flat cotton expanse (it's too hot for blankets) extends unbroken almost to fill the room. Pulling a fitted corner back over the mattress, she causes a spray of rills—converging on an adjacent corner like improbably straight ridges—to widen and disappear. Every bedsheet is a landscape.
Sumerian scribes held their tablets at an angle while writing, as an old stele shows. So the act of writing takes place in space, even if it is read flat? Leslie plans to be asleep before Trent joins her; she is halfway there already. She can hear him in Megan's room reading about Greeks besieging Troy, with occasional glosses. There are probably also excisions of repeated lines, although Leslie can't hear them.
Scribes excised lines with a wet finger, rubbing the clay to blankness. Dried clay couldn't be altered, but fresh material was plentiful; Mesopotamia left no palimpsests like the scraped parchments of the West, too precious to discard. Leslie blanked texts at a stroke, words with no physical fixity dispersed even from the dance of forces that had briefly held them. Drawing the mouse across its pad, its faint drag pacing the highlighting she extended across the page, Leslie unworded the clumsy locution, restored the soothing emptiness, ready for words better chosen, as a child might smooth the surface she had scored. Scribes prepare their own tablets, but merchants are too busy, and Nanshe could push the set clay into the frame's corners with stronger fingers than her brothers, who preferred to scoop mud and hurl. She was not allowed to cut reeds but could bring them to her father, who let her lift the damp fabric and make marks on the pristine square so long as she smoothed them before he needed it.
A female scribe would be laughable, but women in merchant families were often taught to read. Nanshe plied needle, dowel, and chopping knife—awkwardly, but she could still hold a reed better than either brother. Carefully she positioned it between her fingers so that the nib was angled correctly, then sank it cleanly into the surface. The tactile pleasure of its yielding was intensified when she lifted the stylus to see the sharp wedge she had made. Twisting her fingers slowly, she added diagonal and perpendicular strokes: syllables, a word. She yearned to match her father's fluency, but the pride she took in producing a recognizable "wheat" swelled her heart, and she drew the cover back over the tablet without effacing it, a secret message for him to find.
Dampness fled swiftly in the midday heat, and Nanshe stood up with the two frames in her arms and began to pick her way to the upper bank. Enannatum could bear them faster, but he and his friends were busy diverting a stream past their walled mud city, which would soon suffer attack from rival fortifications. Atop the rise, where a footpath paralleled the straight-ruled canal, Nanshe could see across leagues of fields, orchards, and low shaded houses. It seemed readily plausible that if she set down her frames
and climbed the nearest tree she would see, wavering on the horizon, the
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walls of the enemy.
Writing, trade, and a premonition of the consequence: endless warfare and eventual destruction. Ineluctable modality of the geographical, the scribe thought as he rolled a fresh sheet into the platen; at least that if no more.
He was a half dozen pages into a science fiction story, about a nuclear war fought with long-range bombers. Given time, the Soviet Union would doubtless be able to fire rockets halfway round the world, children of the V-2 with H-bombs as warheads. At the moment it didn't seem the world would wait that long.
"There's panic buying in the streets," called Cyril from the front hall. The scribe heard the clink of bottles in the paper bag, and the sound of the door being kicked shut. He realized that he had been unconsciously listening to the elevator ascending, and had set down the book and returned to his story in anticipation of Cyril's entrance.
"Just closing time for the liquor stores," he said calmly. "They're not open Sunday."
"I know panic when I see it." Cyril came in with a pair of bottles and an opener. "There will be fistfights in the grocer's, old ladies trampled in the crush." "Well, we'll be sure not to hoard." He flipped off the bottle cap and took a deep swig. "Whoever imagined Armageddon would arrive through the Suez? Hungary was galling enough.
What's this?" Cyril lifted the book off the chair and read the cover. "From the Tablets of Sumer. A subsidiary of Pfizer?"
"You know very well what Sumer is," the scribe retorted. "And the tablets are dried clay."
"My people used stone. Actually, we took whatever God handed out."
"And look where that got—" said both men together. Cyril grinned blackly and tossed the book onto the desk. "Not a great title," he remarked.
"They'll probably change it for the paperback." The scribe typed the rest of his sentence, a brief rattle, and pushed his chair back.
The elevator began to descend back to the lobby, a rickety hum that did not register when he was typing or listening to music, but would start up during a lull to remind him that he lived in a hive. He had moved his family to Milford expressly to get outside the blast radius, and here they were back again, just across the river from Manhattan as Western Civilization seemed to be entering its death throes.
The basement shelter in Milford, with its blankets, chemical toilet, and emergency provisions, seemed in his imagination to lie still underwater. The image, literary and unreal, could not be contemplated in the intolerable present: it belonged to some other category of time. He imagined the occupants of a New York apartment building crowding down into the basement in the minutes before attack.
Cyril was leafing through the book. "Firsts?" he asked curiously. "Sumer was the beginning of civilization?"
"As we are its end. Great cities whose literate class is kept busy producing official documents, and so don't distract their masters. They found the Gilgamesh epic among thousands of temple inventories and official genealogies."
"First tame writers, eh?" Cyril commented. "Guess that's why they also had to invent beer." His own bottle, the scribe noticed, appeared to be bourbon.
"In their beginning is our end," he murmured.
"It's a cute idea," said Cyril, meaning that's all it was. "Is there a story in it?"
"I don't really feel like mining it for story potential," the scribe replied, a bit waspishly. Which wasn't really true, he realized: without thinking about it, he had been doing exactly that. "I suppose you've been digging for references to Sumer in that damned thick square book," Cyril continued.
"It's not square; it's circular," he protested mildly.
"Found some already, I'll bet. Care to read me one? Go on; you know you want to."
With only a show show of reluctance, he pulled out the big book, supple-spined as a dictionary from frequent opening, and found the marked passage. "Behailed His Gross the Ondt, prostrandvorous upon his dhrone, in his Papylonian babooshkees,
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smolking a spatial brunt of Hosana cigals, with unshrinkables farfalling from his unthinkables, swarming of himself in his sunnyroom, sated before his comfortumble phullup-suppy of a plate o'monkynous and a confucion of minthe . . ."
"A bigshot," Cyril commented. The scribe blinked at this, and jotted lugal = bigshot on a pad beside his typewriter. "Lots of bug imagery: drone, cigals, papillon—this is the ant and the grasshopper story, right?"
The scribe nodded. Cyril would love the Wake if he allowed himself. "Dhrone also meaning throne, meaning the crapper. The great man's preoccupations never recede far, do they? I can bet what the 'un-thinkables' are, but what about the 'unshrinkables'?"
"Pajamas, I think," the scribe replied. His mind flinched away from unthinkable. "There's a later passage, which contrasts 'Sum-merian sunshine' with 'Cimmerian shudders.'" Cyril looked about to smirk, and he added sharply, "Not Robert E. Howard's, but the land of shadows."
Cyril nodded wisely. "Sumer is igoin out," he said. "Lhude sing Goddamn."
There was nothing the scribe could add to that. The faint whine of an overhead jet, some 707 bound for Idlewild, reached them faintly through the window. The scribe looked at the pane, thinking about shutters. Flying glass; blast sites in the financial district, the naval shipyards. Apartments with a view of the Manhattan skyline might prove less of a premium.
"You're thinking story ideas." Cyril became very acute, not to say accusing, when he got drunk.
The scribe flushed. "The greatest temptation is the final treason," he began, then stopped: he seemed to have no more control over his words than his thoughts. "I was thinking about shutters." Cyril laughed, then finished the bottle and set it on the floor. "Well, tell me what you decide." The scribe's bottle was also empty, and it occurred to him that when Virginia took the kids to a
movie so he could entertain in the tiny apartment, he should be quicker in realizing that he had to go to the kitchen himself. Indurate though he was to alcoholic remorse, the scribe felt a stab of grief, that he had brought his family back to the targeted city, now near the endpoint of history.
And Cyril, who sometimes seemed to read minds (but likelier knew to follow one's stream of consciousness to where it pooled), said, "There's your title: Last and First Gravamen."
The scribe found he could not bear to contemplate the word gravamen. He was standing in front of the refrigerator, looking at containers of the juice, whole milk, condiments that he usually saw only at table. The quart bottle was cool in his hand, its heft comforting, but the hum of electricity and wisps of Freon-cooled vapor seemed fragile to evanescence, and the emanating chill breathed a message that he hoped not to hear.
Leslie was halfway through an aggravating Monday afternoon when Trent called with his proposal.
"That game?" she said distractedly, waving away a colleague who had poked his head into her
cubicle. Trent had fooled around with it all weekend, reasonable behavior for someone who spends
his workdays editing documentation, but was expected to set it aside for Monday.
"I have been exchanging e-mail with the developers, and they're planning a series of novel
tie-ins."
"Novels? You mean, like Dungeons & Dragons books?" Leslie had seen such paperbacks in
Barnes and Noble.
"Not gaming novels, but novels set in the game's era. They would be packaged to tie in with Ziggurat but wouldn't follow its storyline or anything—it doesn't have one, of course. Three novels, each one long enough for a slim book, and historically authentic, which is a selling point. But dealing with wars, trade conflicts, dynastic succession: just like the game."
Leslie didn't like the sound of this. She had met friends of Trent who had worked on such
projects, which seemed a good way to earn six thousand dollars in four months rather than four
weeks.
"What are they offering you?" she asked.
"They want to see a propo
sal, maybe two or three outlines. I told them about your history background, and said you would be involved." "In writing a novel?" Leslie was sure she was misunderstanding something. "I'll do the work, I just need input for the outlines." "Trent, this makes no sense." Her phone began blinking, a call routed to voicemail. "Isn't this
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game coming out in November? There isn't time for all this."
"It's been pushed back till spring; they're afraid of the competition from You-know-what. This repackaging is kind of desperate, and they need the books fast. I can do that, I just need to get the contract."
Leslie sighed. "We'll talk tonight, okay?" A second coworker appeared, and Leslie waved her in. Another light went on, and she jabbed at the button, too late. "Sit down, I just need to check my messages."
On the way home Leslie returned the weekend video rental to the library, where she checked the 930s shelf for books on Mesopotamia. She brought back several, which Megan studied curiously while Trent made supper.
"These must be very old people," she remarked. Then she added confidingly: "Daddy is reading me the oldest story in the world." "The Sumerians were around long before the Trojan War. They probably invented the wheel."
Can something so obvious be startling? Megan evidently pondered the matter until dinner, when her parents' conversation brought it to the fore.
"Their civilization was stranger than those game designers realize. You can't write a popular novel about it without distorting everything."
"Oh, come on—how strange can their motivations be? The cities fight over resources and influence, their churches slowly turn into bureaucracies, and individuals pray for solutions to their personal problems and worry about dying. Sounds familiar to me."
"That's a gamer's-eye view. A novel would have to go inside the heads of one of these characters, and their value system—it's as far from the Greeks' as they are from us." "They invented the wheel, so they wanted to be like us. The Pequots didn't have wheels, and Ms.
Turtledove, Harry - Anthology 07 - New Tales Of The Bronze Age - The First Heroes (with Doyle, Noreen) Page 29