There were scrapers and cutters and rakeheads and spearpoints. Obviously, the Belarians had been more substantial than they looked. There were figures of animals and dwellings, and fantastic creatures that might have been real or mythical. One case contained several hundred tablets, all engraved with rows of ideographs. A plate placed them quite early in Belarian history. They had not yet been translated. But they resembled the somewhat later materials from which the Book of Life, with its immortal accounts of Cordelet and the pillars of the world, had been derived.
“They had paper,” said a voice behind me. “It’s ironic that only the earliest written materials have survived. Only the tablets.” It was the old man. He was about my size, clean-shaven except for a neatly-trimmed white mustache. (That was not then the style on Fishbowl, and marked him as a helpless relic.) “Even the inscriptions on their buildings are from early religious or ethical texts. The books are all gone.”
“I’m Tiel Chadwick,” I said, offering my hand.
He took it in a firm grasp. “M’Kay Alexander. You may call me Alex.”
I described myself as a student from Rimway, and we talked for a while about Belarian art. Which meant primarily architecture, since little else remained.
“How did they produce anything?” I asked. “I mean, they had no hands.”
“They had a highly flexible sheath,” he replied. “Pseudopodal extensions. If you look closely, you can see them on some of the artifacts. Here—” He indicated a pair of figures in an adjoining case. They did indeed seem to have limbs. They emerged however from disconcerting sites, from abdominal and head areas. I had the overall sense that I was looking at a creature wrapped in a sheet.
Okay: that seemed reasonable enough. But what about the buildings? You can’t move a boulder with a pseudopod. “They must have had heavy equipment of some kind.”
“Not that we could find, Tiel. You, uh, don’t mind if I call you Tiel?”
“Of course not.”
“Good.” His gaze swept over the display cases and carved blocks. “No,” he said, “it’s difficult to sort things out; there’s so little left. But I don’t think they ever had the sort of machines that would be required to haul these stones around.”
“How do you know?”
“Their psychology. They were simply not a technological race. Did you know their culture was twenty thousand years old when they died off? And they never got past a medieval stage.”
“What happened to them?”
“Nobody knows. Maybe the competition became too severe. Some of the local experts think they couldn’t unite politically. Who knows?” He was turning the pages of his sketch pad, holding it so I could see. It was filled with renderings of the objects in the cases, or the altar, and of the Field Museum itself. “It’s a puzzle, how they moved these rocks around. It’s one of the things Survey was trying to find out when they were driven off.”
I blinked at the old man: I hadn’t heard it put in quite those terms before. “What drove them off?”
Alexander placed his fingertips against the altar, as though to read something in the cold stone. “I’d love to know,” he said.
“Wasn’t it ever made public?”
“In a way, Tiel. They released a fairly detailed description of conditions on Belarius after the second expedition. It’s an old world. There’s been a lot of time for evolution. So the carnivores are very efficient. They have a lot of teeth, and they move very quickly, and some of them fly, and most of them are hard to see coming.” I’d seen pictures of a few. The one that stuck in my mind was a kind of jet-propelled airborne shark. “And they are reasonably intelligent. Which, by the way, has been a factor in keeping their numbers down, so that they don’t eliminate the food supply.”
“How do you mean?” We had wandered close to a diorama of the Ysdril West excavation.
“They made war on one another. The species did.”
“Why?”
“For the same reason animals fight on Rimway. Water. Hunting rights. Whatever. But on Belarius, it was organized warfare. The species there seem to have more than their share of intelligence and administrative capacity. In any case, though, I can’t imagine why a well-armed force—and, at least in the case of the second expedition, forewarned as well—couldn’t hold their own against local predators.”
“Alex, you seem to know quite a lot about Belarius. Have you worked for Survey?”
He looked around for a place to sit, and found a stone bench. “I’m in the food business,” he said. “Or was. I’m retired now.”
I couldn’t suppress a smile. “How does somebody in the food business come to be involved in all this?” I waved an arm around.
“We have a little group on Rimway,” he said. “Mostly people like me, who are just interested in the Belarian story.” He leaned forward, his voice intent. “Listen, Tiel. Survey’s not telling the truth about what happened on Belarius. Moreover, it’s been years now since they officially announced that they would not go back there. But look—.” Through the front entrance we could see the pool, and the cluster of Survey buildings beyond. They were silver and green in the late afternoon light. “Why have they stayed on Fishbowl? God knows it’s not near anything else.”
I shrugged. I certainly didn’t know.
“Because,” he said, “they’re going back. Tiel, there is no possibility that they’re going to walk off and leave what they’ve found. But there’s something out there that scares them.”
He’d raised his voice and drawn the attention of the attendant.
The diorama was mostly sand: a collection of partly excavated blocks and columns, earth-moving machines, temporary shelters, and people. A lander stood on the edge of the display. No single indigenous structure was intact. “Alex,” I said, “I take it you’ve not been to Belarius?”
“No,” he said with regret. “When we heard about the second mission, we pooled our money, and offered Survey a substantial sum to allow passage to one of our members. If they’d gone along with it, we were going to cut cards to determine the winner.”
“What did they say?”
“Too dangerous. They couldn’t take the responsibility.” His eyes narrowed. “I can’t quarrel with that. They lost almost half their landing team on the first effort. The second try wasn’t much better.” He stared at Ysdril West. “But I would have liked to go.”
I’d been wondering whether Durell might have made the trip, but it seemed unlikely. “Alex,” I said, “there were several excavation sites on Belarius. Is there a tower anywhere among them?”
“Intact?”
I hesitated over that one. “Not necessarily. Anything sticking up out of the rubble that one could describe as a tower.”
He closed his eyes, and I could see him mentally inspecting the various digs. “No,” he said finally. “I don’t think so. If there is, they’re keeping it quiet.”
“Do you know anything about Reuben Uxbridge?”
“He was an expert on ideographic structure.” He glanced at his watch, and shrugged. “I have to be going.” He stood up. “Uxbridge worked for Casmir Moss, who was the on-site director of the mission when they closed it down.”
“Was he ever involved in any sort of unusual incident?”
“Tiel, I would say they were all involved in unusual incidents of one kind or another. I just don’t know. If you want to talk to someone about Uxbridge, see Moss.”
“Where would I find him?”
“He’s here somewhere. He’s one of the reasons I’m sure they’re going back. Moss would have more important things to do than hang around Fishbowl if something weren’t about to happen.”
Two middle-aged women and a boy came through the front entrance. The boy made immediately for the diorama.
“Alex,” I asked, “are you here alone?”
“Yes. Three of us were supposed to make the trip, but things came up. You know how it is.”
“How about dinner?” I said. “My treat.”
7.
That night, I looked up everything the Library had on the two missions. The official stuff wasn’t very informative, and the dozen or so books written on the subject were neither consistent with each other nor helpful. Eggleston’s Bureaucrats in the Field mercilessly flayed security procedures that “couldn’t hold off a few wild animals with modern weapons.” Adrian Hunt, in Survey and Belarius: A Study in the Exercise of Power, charged that the political appointees who control Survey’s funding wished to put an end to the program because it cost too much, and the feudal civilization that had developed on Belarius could make no conceivable contribution to Confederate technology. Other volumes hinted darkly at a demonic presence on Belarius.
There was no mention of Uxbridge anywhere, but Eggleston excoriated Moss as an incompetent paper-shuffler who’d been more concerned with arcane languages than with the practical hazards faced by his teams. (Moss’s division of philologists and archeologists had taken the heaviest losses, and he was charged with providing inadequate security training for himself and his subordinates.)
Like Uxbridge, Moss was a philologist, though of somewhat more advanced reputation. He’d won most of the major awards, declined at least two university presidencies, and written The Dawn of Language, the definitive study of proto-Sumerian ideography. Eggleston remarked that, for Moss, the Belarian discovery was a kind of fresh virgin after the long line of ancients so thoroughly worked over by everybody else.
But this had apparently been a virgin with a bite.
The evening after my conversation with M’Kay Alexander, I contrived to be at Arnhof’s, a small restaurant overlooking a shopping quadrangle, when Moss came in for his evening meal. He was a man of quite ordinary appearance, with dull blue eyes, and defensive lines drawn about his mouth. It would have been no surprise to learn that he made his living from dead languages.
I maneuvered into a table adjacent his, ordered some seafood (what else?), and awaited an opportunity. Moss took some papers from a case, spread them out in front of him, and sank immediately into a reverie.
About the time the wine came, his and mine, he looked up to catch me staring at him. That was my cue. “Pardon me,” I said, leaning toward him, “but aren’t you Casmir Moss?”
“I am.” He was not displeased at being recognized.
“I’m Tiel Chadwick. I’ve read your book.” That was a gamble. The truth was, of course, that I’d read of it.
He smiled back uncertainly, inviting me to say something else. I did. I told him that it had sparked my interest in ancient civilizations, and that I thought he’d made difficult concepts quite lucid. Fortunately, he did not ask for specifics.
Within a few minutes, we were drinking from the same carafe. He loved to talk about ancient Babylonian politics, and I encouraged him, asking a few safe questions and, later in the evening, found myself strolling with him along the beachfront. Abruptly, he turned and faced me. “Who are you, really?”
The question caught me by surprise. “A friend of Ux’s,” I said.
He was silent for a time. The moon drifted low on the ocean, limning the incoming waves with silver. Eventually gripping the safety rail, he nodded, as if we shared some dark secret.
We walked out past the Oceanographic Institute, saying little and, at my suggestion, stopped at a little bar on the edge of a park. “Reuben Uxbridge,” he said, as we entered, “was one of the most difficult people I’ve ever worked with. He didn’t like to take directions, thought anyone disputing his views was misinformed, and generally behaved abrasively toward everyone. I’m almost surprised to hear he had a friend.” He blinked at me. “I hope I haven’t offended you.” We found a table near the window. Soft music drifted through the place. “But my God, I would give a lot to have him with us tonight…”
That didn’t sound much like the Uxbridge the chessplayers knew. Of course, the circumstances were different.
I’d intended to wait until we’d gone through two or three rounds. But the moment had clearly arrived. We ordered drinks, and I could see that he was consumed by his own thoughts. “Casmir,” I said, “what happened in the tower room?”
His eyes widened perceptibly. “I did not think he would tell anyone. How much do you know?”
“Very little. I know there was a problem. I know he was never the same afterward.”
The drinks came. He drew his index finger through the frost on the glass, then lifted it and studied the liquid in the wavering candlelight. “I assume you are aware of conditions on Belarius?”
“I know they’re difficult.”
“I would say violent.” He smiled, as at some private joke. “But the prize was well worth the risks. Did Ux tell you why we were so interested in Ysdril West? No? Then let me: it is not one city, but seven, built over ten thousand years on the same site. It was a strategic location. No matter how often the city died, later generations returned and built a new one. In ancient times, it stood on a narrow neck of land dividing two continents. But climatic changes pushed the oceans back, the land dropped and dried out, and the place sank into a desert.
“We’ve been able to follow the development of their languages over much of the history of the culture. Let me tell you what that means, Tiel: it means that we can begin, finally, to separate those perceptions that are induced by environment, including ones own physical form, from those that are of the essence of a thinking species.”
I could see that he was warming to his subject, so I tried to steer him back. “The tower, Casmir. Where was the tower?”
“On the eastern edge of the city. It was probably a beacon of some sort at one time, to warn off vessels approaching too close to the coast. We couldn’t be sure because the top of the thing was gone.”
That explained why there was no tower in the diorama. It extended down, rather than up. “Casmir, did you know Durell Coll?”
He looked puzzled. “No,” he said. “Who was he?”
I shrugged. “Not important. Please go on.”
“The tower was a Level III structure, which is merely to assign it to an era. Two more recent cities had been built atop the layer of ruins to which it belonged. We know the Belarians of the later settlements maintained it as a monument and museum.” He looked at me over the top of his glass, and his eyes were luminous. “They had a historical sense, Tiel. You will understand we were anxious to get into the lower levels.
“The upper compartments were filled with sand and, in some places, blocked by collapsed walls. So the work was slow. To make things more difficult, Belarius has a wide variety of exotic predators, and they are hard to discourage. We must have killed hundreds of one kind and another, but there were limits to what we could do.” His voice had grown hollow. “Sometimes people disappeared. Or were devoured in full view of a work crew. Or were carried off. It was like living in an Arabian Nights scenario where rocs flapped in, seized someone, and were gone before we could react. Gradually, we learned to cope, but we had to devote more and more of our people to the defenses.
“We’d originally assumed that it would be necessary to excavate the entire structure, but about a quarter of the way down, the amount of sand in succeeding apartments began to decline, until it had nearly ended altogether. In time, it became merely a matter of opening heavy doors.
“There were inscriptions on the walls, mostly of a religious nature. Quite sophisticated, by the way.” He began an analysis of Belarian syntax. This time I let him go, and tried to show some enthusiasm. Another round of drinks came. And I began to suspect he didn’t want to continue his story.
“Was Ux directing the excavation?” I asked. “At the tower?”
“Oh no,” he said. “We had an archeologist to do that, the detail work. Chellic Oberrif. We brought her in especially for the tower operation. She’d done something similar at the excavations of the early settlements on Mogambo. She was good.”
I thought his eyes misted a little, and his voice caught. He needed a few moments to regroup.
Then he continued: “There was a place at the hundred and thirty meter level, about two-thirds of the way down, that blocked us for days. Whole chambers and connecting corridors had collapsed. The danger was that an attempt to cut through might bring down the entire structure. God knows it was shaky enough. But she looped a tunnel around the obstruction, and reentered further down.
“When we did manage later to excavate those sections, we found weapons and remains. A battle of some sort had been fought in there, and somebody had tripped a mechanism that buried the contending parties. We have no idea what the argument was about.
“What was important, however, was that the vandals and robbers of the period immediately following that era, before the upper tower filled with sand, were unable to penetrate below the battle site. In the lower compartments, we found furniture, religious regalia, the stuff of daily life. It had been there a long time, and most of it was dust. But it was there.
“At the base of the tower, we descended a ramp into a wide oval room with an altar raised in its center. A big one, maybe three times the size of the one in the Field Museum. It had several adjoining compartments that were still in decent condition. And the far end of the chamber opened through an archway into a tunnel. Chellic hurried immediately over to it, barely glancing at anything else. “This might give us access,” she said. She meant a way into the heart of Level III.
“We were at the end of a long workday I proposed that we continue in the morning, but Uxbridge wouldn’t have it. He wanted to see where the tunnel went, whether indeed it did penetrate the ruins. Chellic supported him. So I gave in, reluctantly. That was my mistake, Tiel. I should have held to my instincts.” He sighed. “We sent the work crew back up and pressed on.
“Chellic was even more obsessed with the possibilities of the place than Ux. She’d made it a point to acquaint herself with the various ideographic systems in use, and had become a valuable contributor to our ongoing analysis. She was also a good shot. On one occasion, I watched her cooly stand her ground during a general assault and kill four or five pickeyes.”
Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt Page 16