progress, as though the assignment he had sought were a ditch to be measured in linear feet dug. He should have been writing books all along—books that encompassed history and literature, like the biography he had begun, rather than novelizations, mixing non-history with non-literature as though he was afraid to pull free of this world well lost. Could that last tug hurt as much as Trent seemed to fear?
She spoke of Trent when reluctant to speak of herself, her therapist had once noted, but wasn't she supposed to voice her cares? Trent had moved on, getting tech work and even a small grant, but privately raged, rejected (at least in his own mind) by a profession he should have rejected. It was only after tearing free, Leslie explained, that the wound could begin to heal.
"Do you think he is still suffering from that 'wound'?" her therapist asked.
"I'm sure he does." Leslie shifted slightly in the armchair, away from the view of Long Island Sound, and let her gaze rest on the pottery lining the book case. "It gnaws at him, that some people believe it, and that others won't declare they don't."
"Do you believe it?"
"No." This time she spoke firmly. "I've met her, remember? The whole industry is full of misshapen people who design games because they don't have the social skills to work in other environments. I mean—" she laughed— "I've got computer nerds reporting to me; I know about badly socialized people. But my guys don't claim creative temperaments. He shouldn't have been working for someone who lived with her boss, however stable she seemed."
"Does the fact that you believe him offer some solace?"
"You'd think it would." Leslie thought. "I guess it does, but not enough. He wanted to write a book called Complicity, a study of why people side with their peers' oppressors. I told him to stop it."
"And this was when Tobias was ill?" "Right before he was born. It was still going on, afterward. Maybe that's . . ." She shrugged, her eyes suddenly stinging.
"That was four years ago," her therapist observed delicately. "This dispute may have exacerbated matters for Trent, since it struck directly at his role as a family man." She was reminding Leslie that she is not Trent's therapist. "That might explain his continued anger over professional problems that, by now, are ancient history." Four years ago Leslie had been in bad shape, and the return of what she now recognized as clinical depression threatened to wash away the ground gained since. She began doing things only when she had to, and didn't pick up Ancient Mesopotamia at the library until they threatened to send it back. Trent made oblique comments on her list-lessness, and even word that a Florida newspaper office had been contaminated by a rare form of anthrax—another grotesque intrusion from the world of techno-thrillers—failed to jar her out of numbed and ringing stillness.
Was everybody hurting? Leslie supposed so: the avidity with which her coworkers followed the war news smacked of self-medication. Updates rarely came during the workday, but she knew they checked regularly. Trent glared at the TV news, bitter and conflicted, while Megan, unselfconsciously mimicking the familiar Texas accent, asked about "the War Against Terra." Afghanis, caught in the erruption of renewed warfare as winter began to close the passes to their underprovisioned villages, experienced a brief rain of brightly colored food packets.
She sat on the couch, the household still after Trent had gone sullenly to bed, and considered her new book, whose full title proved to be Ancient Mesopotamia: The Eden That Never Was. It compared favorably with Sumer: Cities of Eden, the pretty Time-Life volume that the library already had on its shelves. History Begins at Sumer was unaccountably absent, but Kramer had contributed the text for another Time-Life title, Cradle of Civilization. Leslie was annoyed with Kramer for his tendency to make judgmental distinctions between "conquerors in search of booty" and "peaceful immigrants eager to better their lot," as though migrating populations' worthiness to move into a land depended on their adherence to some United Nations-like ideal of peaceful coexistence. Did that notion represent the spirit of the mid-sixties, or the spirit of Time-Life Books?
In the absence of Kramer's own tome, the earliest volume in Leslie's modest collection was A. Leo Oppenheim's Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization. Its forthright subtitle intimated
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Oppenheim's contention that Sumerian-Akkadian-Assyrian civilization was extinct and should be studied for its own sake rather than for its supposed value as the seedbed of human progress. Leslie found she preferred this austere honesty to the pious melioration that saw Gilgamesh, cuneiform, and the Code of Hammurabi as the first toddling steps of mankind's march.
The weeks that followed pulled Leslie in opposite directions: toward the fixity of the past and the lunacy of a fantasy future. She read with disbelief the mornings' news of anthrax spores mailed to TV studios and the nation's capital, with senators' offices contaminated and postal employees dead. The conclusion was inescapable: the United States was under attack by biological agents. The twenty-first century was turning out just as her teenaged sci-fi reading had predicted.
"They say it's Saddam." Trent was following the links from news reports on the spores' surprising sophistication to declarations by "fellows" at right-wing institutions that Iraqi responsibility was certain.
"Well, it certainly isn't the Taliban." The medieval theocrats who were regrouping in disarray under assaults from their warlord adversaries and miles-high bombers seemed poor candidates for the invisible attack that sent the world's superpower into panic, though perhaps (pundits mused) al Qaeda's penchant for low-tech operations staged within the target country had led them to obtain a cache of Soviet-era war germs. Such a theory did not require the hand of Saddam, but Leslie found it hard to push the reasoning further. The idea of pestilence blooming in the nation's nerve centers like sparks falling on straw left her disoriented. She did not fear for her own safety, but felt the axis of her being tilt vertiginously, a slow tipping into boundless freef all.
There were no further attacks, although a Manhattan woman with no traceable connection with the contaminated mails died of inhaled anthrax in Manhattan, and then another—a ninety-four-year-old widow named Ottilie—in central Connecticut. Midway geographically, Leslie wondered if she should feel her family was in the crosshairs. She didn't, taking comfort in statistics. Word that spores might cling to letters that came through New Jersey moved Leslie to discard all junk mail at the curb.
A week later a letter was delivered sealed in a plastic wrapper containing a notice that the U.S. government had discovered traces of anthrax on the envelope and had subjected it to irradiation: it should be discarded unopened if it was believed to contain food or camera film. Leslie and Trent stared, unwilling to tear through the wrapper (the letter within was indeed junk mail) or to throw it away. It was an undoubted historical document, but to save the thing would make it a relic. Trent carefully photographed both sides with their digital camera and sold it on eBay for $85.
Cries for retaliation rose, angrier for being balked. Since Afghanistan could not be attacked twice, other targets were deemed plausible, usually Iraq. "Look at this," said Trent angrily, gesturing at his screen. "They're all so sure of themselves."
"I don't know why you're reading that at all," Leslie replied. "The chat boards of wargame fans isn't a place for political insight." "These are my potential readers; I should know what they're thinking."
"I don't even believe that's true." Trent was clawing for a toehold, anxious for demographics that
the Web couldn't give him. He showed more self-confidence with work that he respected.
Later she glanced at her screen and found a window open to the posts that had enraged him. Vaunting and aggressive, they bore the signature of angry, powerless guys desperate to be knowledgeable. Let's do it right this time and Next time we nuke the K'abah and It's time we revisited The Land Between the Rivers.
By this point Trent was convinced that the anthrax attacks had not been the work of Islamic militants at all. He suspected rogue forces within the
American "bioweapons community," which had secretly developed the strain of anthrax. "Even the administration has admitted that the spores belong to the 'Ames strain,'" he argued, link-clicking deeper toward the documentation he sought. Leslie found his explanations painful to listen to, and she shrank without looking at those windows he left on her screen: laparoscopic images of warblog, like lab reports of current pathology.
Had Sumer suffered from pestilence? Though Leslie recalled no references to the plague, or even to disease as something contagious, it seemed incredible that cities of thirty thousand people, which created standing bodies of water and relied upon wells for drinking, were not periodically ravaged by
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pandemics, especially during wars. Perhaps Nanshe loses much of her family to cholera during a siege; it was a more plausible involvement than engaging her somehow in the business of battle.
No Sumerian myths mention plague; none of the images of piled dead picture it, nor is it mentioned in legal records. Mortality is ubiquitous, but the index entries for DEATH in Kramer's Cradle show an exclusive interest in the Sumerian afterlife, while those for The Eden That Never Was focus on the archeology of grave sites. Gilgamesh showed no fear of catching Enkidu's fever, nor Enmerkar of Lugal-banda's. Death did not leap from victim to victim like a flea; each mortal possessed his own, patient and implacable. Whatever the hero's achievements in life, in the Land of No Return he wandered naked, like all the other dead, hot and eternally thirsty.
It was stifling on the second floor, the day's unseasonable warmth undispersed by the mild evening, and Leslie kicked away the damp sheets to rise and open windows. She continued through Megan's room and the baby room, now choked with books, opened the bathroom window (the tiles were barely cool beneath her soles and the toilet seat actually warm, as though someone had preceded her on it) and thence to the end of the hall, where the far window would allow a cross breeze. From there it seemed natural to descend the stairs, for the screened patio doors admitted the night air and she could walk around freely in the unlit rooms.
Opening the refrigerator would illuminate the uncurtained kitchen, and an attempt to fill a cup in the dark clattered the stacked dishes so loudly that she jumped back. Leslie wandered instead toward the front of the house, slowly—she sank her bare foot into the warm furry side of Ursuline, too torpid even to stir—but guided by the faint light coming from the office. Her own computer adjoined an open window so she sat at Trent's, where the monitor's low setting cast just enough light to see by. Trent never kept loose papers on his desk, but she could make out a page of his handwriting lying between Odile and History Begins at Sumer. She turned the light up slightly, and saw the journal Megan had given him for his birthday, blank sheets bound in dyed silk, held open between the two volumes. He had written in it with his fountain pen—another gift—and weighted the pages flat to dry.
If it had been a paragraph, manifest Dear Diary prose, Leslie would not have bent forward to read, but the two lines were centered like aphorisms, and there was something odd in the lettering. The monitor brightened slightly as the screen saver turned some corner in its workings, and the words leaped up at her.
Beta-testing for Beta males? And underneath: Real men write their own books.
The Mont Blanc rested in the gutter, a third object to disturb if she wished to turn back the page. Leslie sat back, feeling her face redden in the cool air. Seeking refuge for her gaze, she smacked lightly at the mouse, and the saver vanished, presented her a vista, dim in the darkness, on a burning city. Only the flames actually moved, the fleeing populace and spear-waving invaders caught as in a frieze, but the central building, one side lit by the conflagration, was a recognizable stepped tower, which its builders called "unir" and the successors to Sumer knew as "ziggurat."
Leslie moved her hands to the keyboard, hesitant lest she disrupt the game in progress. Within a minute, however, she had slipped past the undisturbed scenario and was reviewing Trent's interaction with the program, which proved to be the only one open. She checked the system documentation and saw, with a start, that the game had been running for days.
It was the work of a moment to settle in front of her own screen and search its flotilla of icons for Trent's preferred word-processing program. She ran it and found a list of text files: research on Sumer, downloaded online data, and Ramparts.txt, which proved to contain The Ramparts of Uruk, 56,917 words, last revised that afternoon. Trent had moved his work files onto her computer, presumably (it seemed obvious after a second) to allow Ziggurat to run unimpeded on his older machine. She had forgotten what gluttons for RAM these new games were.
The image was poignant: Trent keeping his writing files in a crevice between her hard drive's
enormous programs—nothing takes up less room than text—while abandoning his own machine
to the demands of Ziggurat. Doing his work at Leslie's desk, getting his e-mail through the laptop,
returning at intervals to his own computer where Ziggurat flourished, like a cowbird's chick, to
consult with the creature to ensure that his own work not exceed it in grace or wit: this was austere to
the point of penitential. Was Trent setting burnt offerings before the thing?
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She clicked on another file, BookTwo.txt. It appeared to be mostly outline, but there was a title,
Wheels for Warring. Leslie shook her head. It was just like Trent, to start with a safe title and have
a better one ready for the next book.
The outline was followed by notes, which Leslie scrolled through idly. Some comprised bits of research that she had passed to him; others surprised her. Only two types of personages are portrayed naked in Sumerian art: humiliated prisoners, and priests engaged in sacred ceremony. Why no sexual connotations? Leslie shifted her bottom on the wicker chair and smiled. For Trent all nudity held sexual connotations. The dogwalker outside, glimpsing screen light falling on her breasts, doubtless felt the same. Fragments of those statuettes of worshipers were found incorporated into the floors of the Inanna Temple. I.e., these objects remained sacred, even when no longer used?
That lone blue eye in the display at the Met: they often used lapis lazuli for eyes (look at the
blue-eyed ibex in the next case!), though they could never have seen such features. A legend of men
with blue eyes?
"No, Jurgen, you must see my palaces. In Babylon I have a palace where many abide with cords about them and burn bran for perfume, while they await that thing which is to befall them." Epigraph? (No.)
Afghanistan is the opposite of Mesopotamia: a land crumpled into inaccessibility. Geographical barriers everywhere, the bane of invaders; while Sumer was open to all armies, the "Kalam" as flat as a board game.
Title for Book 3: A Game Without a Name. Problematic because the Sumerians of course knew its name; we don't. The game as metaphor for war; if it was also used for divination, then a guide to the Sumerian cosmos & psyche. Historians call it the game "of Ur" since that is where the first boards were found; if I call it the Ur-game can I make allusions to the original FORTRAN "Adventure"? How many of Ziggurat's players were even alive in 1975?
Leslie created a new file, named it Book3.txt, and began to type. Trent, you don't want to construct one of your novels around that hoard game. You are appealing to an audience that won't spend its money on hooks.
You want to write about a female protagonist, preferably young and, though not herself powerful, able to glimpse its workings. If you must include that game, you can show her watching it played: it was laid out in the streets, remember? A little girl can watch almost anything unnoticed.
Women bring food, nurse the wounded, bury the dead. You want an aperture on war? Don't use the viewpoint of a young soldier; soldiers see almost nothing of the totality of war, they are brought in like a load of rocks and then hurled. Women see everything, and when it is over, they are often what is left.
The wind blew the smok
e roaring through the streets, blinding the fleeing villagers and lofting scraps of glowing reed to settle like fireflies on the roofs not already burning. Scattered soldiers came at them, whom Nanshe first saw terrifyingly as the enemy, then realized with a greater shock were the defenders of Lagash. One flung away his shield as he sprinted past.
They had sought to watch the battle from the rooftops, but the wheeling armies had raised a cloud of yellow dust, immense as those seen in the sky, which obscured everything. The city wall was lined with spectators, who enjoyed a better view of the action, although the settlement across the canal was closer. Perhaps they saw the flank of battle shift then spill into the barley fields, concealed from the village by stands of date palm and poplars; perhaps the waving cityfolk had been trying to warn them. Nanshe could remember little of that disordered hour, of anxious inquiry between adults who blocked her view, the surmises and cries, people swarming down the ladders to shout questions, to call for their families, and finally to run.
Nanshe had become separated almost immediately, buffeted by legs and swinging arms. She tried to head home, but a cry to make for the city gates sent the crowd rushing against her, and by the time she emerged from the side streets she could smell smoke. Someone lunged for her, not the person she later saw stabbed with a spear, though events seemed alike unreal save what was happening now, grit biting her legs where she crouched. She could see Sud lying in the road, and started repeatedly when a large scrap caught in the rubble waved like a sleeve.
Smoke spattered the sky, and when night fell she thought it another gout from the burning market, to recede after some minutes.
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At some point she found herself stumbling over littered ground, eyes stinging in the darkness. Unnatural sounds reached her, a loud snap or the crash of walls. A groan from somewhere, and for an instant she imagined the slave moving confidently through the blackness, eyeless and unsmarting, calling out in an accent the marauders would recognize.
Turtledove, Harry - Anthology 07 - New Tales Of The Bronze Age - The First Heroes (with Doyle, Noreen) Page 32