The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “What’s all this?” the Warder asked.

  “An unauthorized excavation. Some treasure-hunters have been at work back here.”

  The Warder’s eyes opened wide. “Trying to tunnel into the temple, you mean?”

  “Apparently so,” said Mericalis. “Looking for a back way into the vaults.” He stepped down a little way into the pit, paused, and looked back, beckoning impatiently to the Warder. “Come on, Diriente. You need to see what’s here.”

  The Warder stayed where he was.

  “You seriously want me to go down there? The two of us crawling around in an underground tunnel in the dark?”

  “Yes. Absolutely.”

  “I’m an old man, Mericalis.”

  “Not all that old. And it’s a very capably built little passageway. You can manage it.”

  Still the Warder held back. “And what if the men who dug it come back and find us while we’re in there?”

  “They won’t,” said Mericalis. “I promise you that.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Trust me, Diriente.”

  “I’d feel better if we had a couple of the younger priests with us, all the same.”

  The custodian shook his head. “Once you’ve seen what I’m going to show you, you’ll be glad that there’s no one here but you and me to see it. Come on, now. Are you going to follow me or aren’t you?”

  * * *

  Uneasily the Warder entered the opening. The newly broken ground was soft and moist beneath his sandaled feet. The smell of the earth rose to his nostrils, rich, loamy, powerful. Mericalis was five or six paces ahead of him and moving quickly along without glancing back. The Warder found that he had to crouch and shuffle to keep from hitting his head on the narrow tunnel’s low roof. And yet the tunnel was well made, just as the custodian had said. It descended at a sharp angle until it was perhaps twice the height of a man below the ground, and then leveled out. It was nicely squared off at the sides and bolstered every ten paces by timbers. Months of painstaking work must have been required for all this. The Warder felt a sickly sense of violation. To think that thieves had managed to work back here undisturbed all this time! And had they reached the vaults? The temple wasn’t actually a single building, but many, of different eras, each built upon the foundation of its predecessor. Layer beneath layer of inaccessible chambers, some of them thousands of years old, were believed to occupy the area underneath the main ceremonial hall of the present-day temple. The temple possessed considerable treasure, precious stones, ingots of rare metals, works of art: gifts of forgotten monarchs, hidden away down there in those old vaults long ago and scarcely if ever looked at since. It was believed that there were tombs in the building’s depths, too, the burial places of ancient kings, priests, heroes. But no one ever tried to explore the deeper vaults. The stairs leading down to them were hopelessly blocked with debris, so that not even Mericalis could distinguish between what might once have been a staircase and what was part of the building’s foundation. Getting down to the lower strata would be impossible without ripping up the present-day floors and driving broad shafts through the upper basements, and no one dared to try that: such excavation might weaken the entire structure and bring the building crashing down. As for tunneling into the deep levels from outside—well, no one in the Warder’s memory had ever proposed doing that, either, and he doubted that the Grand Assize of the Temple would permit such a project to be carried out even if application were made. There was no imaginable spiritual benefit to be gained from rooting about in the foundations of the holy building, and not much scientific value in it either, considering how many other relicts of Earth’s former civilizations, still unexcavated after all this time, were on hand everywhere to keep the archaeologists busy.

  But if the diggers had been thieves, not archaeologists—

  No wonder Mericalis had come running up to him in the midst of the invocation!

  “How did you find this?” the Warder asked, as they moved farther in. The air here was dank and close, and the going was very slow.

  “It was one of the priests that found it, actually. One of the younger ones, and no, I won’t tell you his name, Diriente. He came around back here a few days ago with a certain young priestess to enjoy a little moment or two of privacy and they practically fell right into it. They explored it to a point about as far as we are now and realized it was something highly suspicious, and they came and told me about it.”

  “But you didn’t tell me.”

  “No,” Mericalis said. “I didn’t. It seemed purely a custodial affair then. There was no need to get you involved in it. Someone had been digging around behind the temple, yes. Very likely for quite some time. Coming in by night, maybe, working very, very patiently, hauling away the tailings and dumping them in the woods, pushing closer and closer to the wall of the building, no doubt with the intent of smashing through into one of the deep chambers and carrying off the vast wealth that’s supposedly stored down there. My plan was to investigate the tunnel myself, find out just what had been going on here, and then to bring the city police in to deal with it. You would have been notified at that point, of course.”

  “So you haven’t taken it to the police yet, then?”

  “No,” said Mericalis. “I haven’t.”

  “But why not?”

  “I don’t think there’s anyone for them to arrest, that’s why. Look here, Diriente.”

  He took the Warder by the arm and tugged him forward so that the Warder was standing in front of him. Then he reached his arm under the Warder’s and flashed the torch into the passageway just ahead of them.

  The Warder gasped.

  Two men in rough work clothes were sprawled on the tunnel floor, half buried beneath debris that had fallen from overhead. The Warder could see shovels and picks jutting out from the mound of fallen earth beside them. A third man—no, this one was a woman—lay a short distance away. A sickening odor of decay rose from the scene.

  “Are they dead?” the Warder asked quietly.

  “Do you need to ask?”

  “Killed by a rockfall, you think?”

  “That’s how it looks, doesn’t it? These two were the diggers. The girl was their lookout, I suspect, posted at the mouth of the tunnel. She’s armed: you see? Two guns and a dagger. They must have called her in here to see something unusual, and just then the roof fell in on them all.” Mericalis stepped over the slender body and picked his way through the rubble beyond it, going a few paces deeper into the passageway.

  “Come over here and I’ll show you what I think happened.”

  “What if the roof collapses again?”

  “I don’t think it will,” Mericalis said.

  “If it can collapse once, it can collapse again,” said the Warder, shivering a little now despite the muggy warmth of the tunnel. “Right on our heads. Shouldn’t we get out of here while we can?”

  The custodian ignored him. “Look here, now: what do you make of this?” He aimed the torch to one side, holding it at a ninety-degree angle to the direction of the tunnel. The Warder squinted into the darkness. He saw what looked like a thick stone lintel which had fallen from the tunnel vault and was lying tipped up on end. There were archaic-looking inscriptions carved in it, runes of some sort. Behind it was an opening, a gaping oval of darkness in the darkness, that appeared to be the mouth of a second tunnel running crosswise to the one they were in. Mericalis leaned over the fallen lintel and flashed his beam beyond it. A tunnel, yes. But constructed in a manner very different from that of the one they had been following. The walls were of narrow stone blocks, carefully laid edge to edge; the roof of the tunnel was a long stone vault, supported by pointed arches. The craftsmanship was very fine. The joints had an archaic look.

  “How old is this?” the Warder asked.

  “Old. Do you recognize those runes on the lintel? They’re proterohistoric stuff. This tunnel’s as ancient as the temple itself, most likely. Part of the original
sacred complex. The thieves couldn’t have known it was here. As they were digging their way toward the temple they intersected it by accident. They yelled for the girl to come in and look—or maybe they wanted her to help them pull the lintel loose. Which they proceeded to do, and the weak place where the two tunnels met gave way, and the roof of their own tunnel came crashing down on them. For which I for one feel no great sorrow, I have to admit.”

  “Do you have any idea where this other tunnel goes?”

  “To the temple,” said Mericalis. “Or under it, rather, into the earliest foundation. It leads straight toward the deepest vaults.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’ve been inside already. Come.”

  * * *

  There was no question now of retreating. The Warder, following close along behind Mericalis, stared at the finely crafted masonry of the tunnel in awe. Now and again he saw runic inscriptions, unreadable, mysterious, carved in the stone floor. When they had gone about twenty paces yet another stone-vaulted passageway presented itself, forking off to the left. The custodian went past it without a glance. “There are all sorts of tunnels down here,” Mericalis said. “But this is the one we want. So far as I’ve been able to determine at this point, it’s the only one that enters the temple.” The Warder saw that Mericalis had left a marker that glowed by the reflected light of his torch, high up on the wall of the passage they were following, and he supposed that there were other markers farther on to serve as guides for them. “We’re in a processional hypogeum,” the custodian explained. “Probably it was just about at ground level, ten thousand years ago, but over the centuries it was buried by construction debris from the later temples, and other trash of various sorts. There was a whole maze of other stone-walled processional chambers around it, leading originally to sacrificial sites and open-air altars. The tunnel we just passed was one of them. It’s blocked a little way onward. I spent two days in here going down one false trail after another. Until I came through this way, and—behold, Diriente!”

  Mericalis waved his torch grandly about. By the pale splash of light that came from its tip the Warder saw that the sides of the tunnel expanded outward here, spreading to the right and the left to form a great looming wall of superbly dressed stone, with one small dark aperture down at the lower left side. They had reached the rear face of the temple. The Warder trembled. He had an oppressive sense of the thickness of the soil above him, the vast weight pressing down, the temple itself rising in all its intricacy of strata above him. He was at the foundation of foundations. Once all this had been in the open: ten thousand years ago, when the Visitants still walked the Earth.

  “You’ve been inside?” the Warder asked hoarsely.

  “Of course,” said Mericalis. “You have to crawl the first part of the way. Take care to breathe shallowly: there’s plenty of dust.”

  The air here was hot and musty and dry, ancient air, lifeless air. The Warder choked and gagged on it. On hands and knees, head down, he crept along behind Mericalis. Several times, overcome by he knew not what, he closed his eyes and waited until a spasm of dizziness had passed.

  “You can stand now,” the custodian told him.

  They were in a large square stone chamber. The walls were rough-hewn and totally without ornament. The room was empty except for three long, narrow coffers of unpolished white marble side by side at the far end.

  “Steady yourself, old friend,” Mericalis said. “And then come and see who we have here.”

  They crossed the room. The coffers were covered with a thick sheet of some transparent yellowish material that looked much like glass, but in fact was some other substance that the Warder could not identify.

  An icy shiver ran through the Warder as he peered through the coverings.

  There was a skeleton in each coffer, lying face upward: the glistening fleshless bones of some strange long-shanked creature, manlike in size and general outline, but different in every detail. Their heads bore curving bony crests; their shoulders were crested also; their knees were double ones; they had spikelike protrusions at their ankles. Ribs, pelvises, fingers, toes—everything strange, everything unfamiliar. These were the bodies of alien beings.

  Mericalis said, “My guess is that the very tall one in the center is Vonubius. That’s probably Aulimiath on the right and the other one has to be Oberith, then.”

  The Warder looked up at him sharply. “What are you saying?”

  “This is obviously a sepulcher. Those are sarcophagi. These are three skeletons of aliens that we’re looking at here. They’ve been very carefully preserved and buried in a large and obviously significant chamber on the deepest and therefore oldest level of the Temple of the Visitants, in a room that once was reached by a grand processional passageway. Who else do you think they would be?”

  “The Visitants went up into the heavens when their work on Earth was done,” said the Warder hollowly. “They ascended on a ship of fire and returned to their star.”

  “You believe that?” Mericalis asked, chuckling.

  “It says so in the Scriptures.”

  “I know that it does. Do you believe it, though?”

  “What does it matter what I believe?” The Warder stared again at the three elongated alien skeletons. “The historical outlines aren’t questioned by anybody. The world was in a crisis—in collapse. There was war everywhere. In the midst of it all, three ambassadors from another solar system arrived and saw what was going on, and they used their superior abilities to put things to rights. Once a stable new world order had emerged, they took off for the stars again. The story turns up in approximately the same form in every society’s myths and folk-tales, all over the Earth. There’s got to be some truth to it.”

  “I don’t doubt that there is,” said Mericalis. “And there they are, the three wise men from afar. The Scriptures have the story a little garbled, apparently. Instead of going back to their native star, promising to return and redeem us at some new time of trouble, they died while still on Earth and were buried underneath the temple of the cult that sprang up around them. So there isn’t going to be any Second Advent, I’d tend to think. And if there ever is, it may not be a friendly one. They didn’t die natural deaths, you’ll notice. If you’ll take a careful look you’ll see that the heads of all three were severed violently from their trunks.”

  “What?”

  “Look closely,” Mericalis said.

  “There’s a break in the vertebrae, yes. But that could have been—”

  “It’s the same sort of break in all three. I’ve seen the skeletons of executed men before, Diriente. We’ve dug up dozens of them around the old gibbet down the hill. These three were decapitated. Believe me.”

  “No.”

  “They were martyrs. They were put to death by their loving admirers and devoted worshipers, the citizens of Earth.”

  “No. No. No. No.”

  “Why are you so stunned, Diriente? Does it shock you, that such a dreadful thing could have happened on our lovely green planet? Have you been squirreled up in your nest on this hillside so long that you’ve forgotten everything you once knew about human nature? Or is it the unfortunate evidence that the Scriptural story is wrong that bothers you?

  You don’t believe in the Second Advent anyway, do you?”

  “How do you know I don’t?”

  “Please, Diriente.”

  The Warder was silent. His mind was aswirl with confusions.

  After a time he said, “These could be any three aliens at all.”

  “Yes. I suppose they could. But we know of only three beings from space that ever came to this planet: the ones who we call the Visitants. This is the temple of the faith that sprang up around them. Somebody went to great trouble to bury these three underneath it. I have difficulty believing that these would be three different alien beings.”

  Stubbornly the Warder said, “How do you know that these things are genuine skeletons? They might be idols of some sort.”r />
  “Idols in the form of skeletons? Decapitated skeletons, at that?” Mericalis laughed. “I suppose we could test them chemically to see if they’re real, if you like. But they look real enough to me.”

  “The Visitants were like gods. They were gods, compared with us. Certainly they were regarded as divine—or at least as the ministers and ambassadors of the Divine Being—when they were here. Why would they have been killed? Who would have dared to lay a hand on them?”

  “Who can say? Maybe they didn’t seem as divine as all that in the days when they walked among us,” Mericalis suggested.

  “But the Scriptures say—”

  “The Scriptures, yes. Written how long after the fact? The Visitants may not have been so readily recognized as holy beings originally. They might simply have seemed threatening, maybe—dangerous—tyrannical. A menace to free will, to man’s innate right to make trouble for himself. It was a time of anarchy, remember. Maybe there were those who didn’t want order restored. I don’t know. Even if they were seen as godly, Diriente: remember that there’s an ancient tradition on this planet of killing one’s gods. It goes back a long, long way. Study your prehistoric cults. You dig down deep enough, you find a murdered god somewhere at the bottom of almost all of them.”

  The Warder fell into silence again. He was unable to take his eyes from those bony-crested skulls, those strange-angled empty eye sockets.

  “Well,” Mericalis said, “there you have them, at any rate: three skeletons of what appear to be beings from another world that somebody just happened to bury underneath your temple a very long time ago. I thought you ought to know about them.”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  “You have to decide what to do about them, now.”

  “Yes,” the Warder said. “I know that.”

  “We could always seal the passageway up again, I suppose, and not say a word about this to anyone. Which would avoid all sorts of uncomfortable complications, wouldn’t it? It strikes me as a real crime against knowledge, doing something like that, but if you thought that we should—”