Analog SFF, July-August 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Five days ago following the convoy from Site Safar,” Gordon answered, also in Arabic.

  "And you said nothing to me?"

  "They hadn't done anything, Captain. It could have been tourists heading down to Wadi Hamra."

  Mansouri raised a skeptical eyebrow. “When did you know they weren't tourists?"

  "I knew for certain last night. I watched a truck leave them off down in the wadi then go back the way it came. They were using night vision instrumentation."

  "You were here waiting for them?"

  "Yes."

  "So, how did you know they'd try an ambush here?"

  Gordon thought a moment. “Arguably it's the best spot on the route. They needed a choke point where they could stop the convoy and attack, no one able to get away. In my opinion this is the best place on the route. They apparently agreed."

  Mansouri held up a hand and pointed around. “From where were you firing?"

  Gordon raised an arm and pointed down to the ledge beneath which the scorpion was now most likely feasting upon its beetle.

  "The attackers. Where are they?"

  Gordon pointed down into the wadi. “Down by the narrows."

  "Narrows? What narrows?” Mansouri squinted and shielded his eyes from the rising sun, most of the wadi still in shadows.

  "Captain, do you see the second butte coming down to the road on the left?"

  "Ah ... I see it."

  "There, down at the bottom."

  "That far?” Captain Mansouri squinted, frowned, took a range-finding monocular from his belt, held it to his left eye, and looked through it. “There they are.” He muttered a curse and said, “According to this, that's over one and a half kilometers from here."

  "That's what I made it,” Gordon agreed.

  "And, for the record, you said nine of them."

  "Yes."

  "All dead?” The captain raised one eyebrow and looked at Gordon who didn't answer. “Silly question,” remarked the captain. “What about the truck that brought them? Should we expect it to return?"

  "Probably not. They were wired. The party with the truck would have a clear-code they'd need to receive before returning. The truck is probably tucked away in another wadi. When they don't get the clear-sign by a certain time, they'll probably dump anything incriminating and take off. Perhaps you can locate them through satellite."

  "Humph! By the time I could get clearance and access, that truck driver and his friends will be across the border making love to their camels.” He looked through his monocular again, his lips moving. “I count seven."

  "Look just above the bend on the slope,” said Gordon, “behind that reddish outcrop."

  "And two make nine.” Mansouri lowered the monocular, lifted his hat by the front of its crown, wiped nonexistent perspiration from his forehead with the back of his right forearm, and replaced the hat. Depositing the monocular in its holster, he took his handset from his belt and called in the preliminary action report to his Egyptian headquarters at Mut and to his Libyan headquarters at Al Kufrah. A chopper would be coming in from Mut to haul off the deceased. Once Mansouri was finished, he turned off the recorder and said, “I'd best have a look.” He glanced at the sky, a single hand held out. “May Allah let them be Egyptian."

  "Have something against your own countrymen, Captain?” asked Gordon.

  Mansouri snorted out a laugh. “If they are Libyan, it will take weeks to sort through the red tape. If they are bloody Iranian, Palestinian, or Saudi my grandchildren will have to file the final report.” He cocked his head toward the Land Rover with its driver. “Want to ride down and have a look?"

  "I already looked,” said Gordon as he began walking the trail toward camp.

  "Were they bandits?” called Captain Mansouri to his back. “Or was it tribal, political, or religious?"

  "Probably,” Gordon called over his shoulder.

  * * * *

  II

  Early that afternoon, after an uneventful run from Gilf Kebir, Dr. Hussein's expedition pulled into Site Safar deep in the sand sea north of the Kebira Crater and three hundred meters lower in elevation. After packing a few things, Dr. Hussein and his wife bid good-bye to Gordon and to a few colleagues, climbed on a waiting helicopter, and flew east. Afterward, Gordon secured his weapons in the ordinance truck, his leather pack and other gear in his own tent, and headed toward site headquarters.

  As he passed the red sandstone escarpment that served as the site's visual centerpiece, the unusual color of it reminded him of cliffs in the Jemez Mountains, a lifetime and another world away. He watched them digging at the base of the escarpment for a moment, thinking of the pueblo and Iron Eyes. The old man had spent his life within two hundred kilometers of Jemez Pueblo, yet he had carried the wisdom of the universe. If there had been more time. If he had opened himself to the old man sooner. If Nascha hadn't been so crazy-sick. If: a Bilagana head-game word.

  Men laughing interrupted Gordon's thoughts. A few of the diggers were taking a break with tea and conversation. When Gordon had been on site and not needed he would sometimes join the midday majlis as the workmen gathered to eat lunch and offer their biting critiques of the archeological effort.

  "Salaam ‘aleikum, he would say to them all and they would stand and wish him 'aleikum asslaam. Once the new faces were introduced and everyone settled, conversation would turn to the wondrous things they had seen at the dig that day. Stone-faced, they would sip their tea and talk gravely of fantastically important finds. “Pieces of pottery and glassware in great abundance,” they would say, citing important period names such as Bakelite, Marmite, and Smuckers, rivaling even the great Corning find of the previous week. “Fine jelly glass, chicken bones, and Coca-Cola bottles—the ancient glass ones!" And they would all ooh and aah at the wonder of it all—then laugh.

  Said one, “It was obviously an ancient nest of the rare hundred-winged buffalo chickens of the Kentucky period."

  Added another, “They look as though they had been attacked by a tribe of the equally rare hundred-legged extra crispies.” More laughter, and they would spin archeological send-ups about the Paleo-chicken-cola Culture and the fine museum they would build one day in Cairo to house their valuable finds.

  The big discovery one day was a worn-out tire from a WWII German truck. One of Rommel's Afrika Korps Fritzies had really taken a wrong turn back in WWII. The big fear had been that they would also find Fritz, which would have shut down operations and cost the expedition more precious time and resources to repatriate the deceased veteran's remains. Fortunately the Afrika Korps driver managed to change his flat, drive off, and die elsewhere.

  Hundreds of meters to go, though, before they got down to the important layer. Said one, “The sands will take this hole and refill it before the consortium finds enough money to empty all of it.” Meanwhile, it was a gig. “Smoke, drink coffee and tea, move the desert from here to there, send some money home, and no one is shooting at you,” said one fellow, who immediately grinned toothlessly at Gordon. “Forgive me,” he said, “no one is shooting at me." More laughter.

  Purposes and dreams, thought Gordon. Getting through the day alive is a noble purpose—putting bread on the table. In his own mind he had a curiosity to see what happens next. Gordon nodded once thinking again of Hosteen Ahiga. Perhaps if he had gotten more time with the old man Gordon's purpose might have been more noble.

  If this. If that. As another teacher, Sergeant Grubbs at Fort Benning, had said, “If a frog had wings he wouldn't bump his ass every time he jumped."

  Bilagana wisdom.

  Someone at the dig recognized him and waved him to join them. Gordon paused only to wave back. He turned and looked toward the processing shelter. An aged Egyptian in western clothes was pacing back and forth nervously in front of the large reflective environmental shelter, the fabric blinding beneath the unrelenting sun. As Gordon approached, the man stopped and with only the briefest nod of his head, waved him beneath the cover of the shelter
.

  "Thank you for coming so promptly, Mr. Redcliff. Dr. Hussein said you are comfortable in Arabic."

  "Yes,” answered Gordon. There was a hardboard floor beneath his feet, gritty with sand. It was a few degrees cooler beneath the shelter, which meant that it was almost hotter than Hell.

  "Excellent. I am Dr. Taleghani.” The man walked to the desk in the tent being used for the dig's headquarters. The desk was heaped with files, loose papers, and odd bits of pottery and bone. The archeologist began sorting through the mess, obviously searching for something. Taleghani was as dried and supple as an old bowstring. As did most Egyptian academics, he favored western dress in the field, from hikers and jeans to a white cotton shirt, blue denim vest, and bleached straw hat.

  Gordon slowly looked around the shelter's interior, noting the lights illuminating the worktables to his right. The sides of the shelter were rolled up to allow the furnace-hot air from Egypt's Western Desert to drift languidly beneath one side of the enclosure and out another. A dozen or more archeology students—mostly Europeans in various states of dress among a forest of water bottles—were at the tables, cleaning, sorting, and studying the detritus gleaned from the dig's upper scrapings. They appeared to notice neither heat nor anyone else's presence. Some brushed, some picked, some probed, some sketched, and some tapped furiously upon keyboards. There was a very old, very worn-out truck tire leaning up against one of the tent poles. Someone had scribbled some English on it in yellow chalk: Eat out your heart, Heinrich Schliemann!

  "What a muddle,” said the archeologist. “My assistant pinched a nerve in his back and is in terrible pain,” he explained. “Everything is a mess."

  Gordon glanced past the busy worktables to the base of the escarpment where the small legion of diggers and sorters toiled still beneath the unrelenting hammer of the sun, gathering up existence's litter a layer at a time. Over Taleghani's left shoulder, however, was something new. Just over a kilometer southwest of the escarpment there was what appeared to be a timespanner and next to it three large generators mounted on truck beds. The generators were quiet, the site's modest power requirements being handled by a small portable generator near the cook tent.

  The timespanner looked like a large turquoise blue can stuck in a cylindrical black metal spiderweb. As only a former military sniper could, Gordon admired patience. The T-span being there, though, was evidence of something other than patience. Someone didn't want to wait years for his peek at the past. He looked to the man who had asked Dr. Hussein for his services. Dr. Ibrahim Taleghani was searching a second time through the same stack of files.

  Not a patient man. Curious trait for an archeologist. Gordon shifted his gaze to the timespanner. He had been a young boy when the excited announcements came of the first successful experiments at spanning time. Time travel: someone had actually done it. The excitement and wonder, though, had been immediately swallowed by the overwhelming tide of scientific, political, environmental, and especially religious hysteria against this form of transportation and investigation.

  What if this? What if that? Was man really meant to? Was this really what God had in mind? What kind of pollution were we spreading by these edges into other dimensions? What might we be bringing back? Timespanning became every nation's favorite political football, every religion's evidence of the existence of faithlessness, every criminal's nightmare, and almost every scientist's harbinger of the end of life as we know it. To young Gordon, timespanning became like space travel and genetics: rich dreams, exciting possibilities, and grand promise buried beneath oppressive restrictions, narrow-minded regulations, and prohibitive costs. Timespanning was wrung dry of anything resembling adventure or even useful results.

  "What Christ meant here was that to be not a Christian was to be denied Heaven."

  "Oh yeah? Well, let's ask him."

  "Oh, no, no, no."

  "Why not?"

  "Oh, no, no, NO."

  But what about these issues tearing humanity to pieces? Who's right? Who's holy? Who really was chosen? What did God really say to Abraham? What were the Ten Commandments before they were edited, or did Moses just make them up? Did that bush really burn? As the weight of his own body pulled the spikes through his wrists, what exactly did that carpenter say to God before he died, and who was he talking to if he, indeed, was himself God? Was he even there?

  "Let's go find him and ask."

  "Oh, no. No, no, no."

  Well, what about the uncountable versions of the Prophet's revelations collected by Zayd? What were those truly revealed by Muhammad? What did he really mean by them?

  "Why not go and ask the guy?"

  "Forget it."

  Can printed texts, interpretations, temples, and rituals stand up to a real-time examination? Would our actions today be condoned by those whose names we use to justify them?

  "Hey, there's one sure way to find out."

  "Absolutely not. N-O-T."

  Timespanning control was internationalized, priorities rearranged. Licensing was taken over by a commission controlled by the United Nations, overseen by committees of the world's religious, environmental, and scientific communities, and relegated to a highly restricted long-distance sightseeing enterprise. Countless forbidden areas, in addition to the religious ones. It was still a point of Egyptian national pride, for example, that Cleopatra should resemble an Egyptian and not a Greek, the Ptolemys notwithstanding. Until they could get a stand-in back there, no one was going to do any looking at Queen Cleopatra. Until the real past could be made to conform to the accepted histories and beliefs, investigation would not be allowed.

  "Mr. Redcliff?"

  Gordon shifted his gaze to Dr. Taleghani. “Doctor."

  "You were looking at the timespanner."

  "I was."

  Dr. Taleghani drummed his fingers on his desktop for a moment, then removed his reading glasses and looked up from Gordon's file. “When I talked to Dr. Hussein, I wasn't aware you were an American."

  Gordon returned the statement with a steady gaze.

  Taleghani nodded and pursed his lips. “Dr. Hussein says you gave quite a good account of yourself when those bandits attempted to ambush his party coming back from the Kebira Crater. There have been other attacks, as well, I understand.” He fixed his gaze on Gordon. “I can't imagine what you must feel having to kill that many men."

  "It's called recoil."

  Taleghani's eyebrows arched. “Are you just trying to sound cold-blooded?"

  "Stating a fact, Doctor."

  "You feel nothing about them?"

  "Doctor, empathizing or identifying with someone who is trying to kill someone I am protecting changes nothing except my reaction time."

  "Still, they are human beings."

  "Who were prepared to kill Dr. Hussein and his party, including myself.” He shrugged and held out a hand. “Doctor, I accept that everyone had a mom, once laughed at Mickey Mouse cartoons, had pimples, needs love, toyed with religion, and wants a better life. Everyone also has choices."

  "And if the choice is between killing you or seeing a child go hungry?” demanded the archeologist.

  Gordon lowered his hand. “It's still a choice."

  After a pause, Taleghani said, “Dr. Hussein recommends you very highly."

  "A live client on his way home to retirement is a bodyguard's best reference."

  The archeologist glanced down at a record form, and back up at Gordon. “You fought in Iran—for the American Allies."

  "Yes."

  "Why?"

  "Orders.” Gordon smiled. “I'm an American. I was in the United States Army. The Army was ordered in to support the Septemberist Student Movement."

  "You were a sniper."

  "I also peeled potatoes, cleaned grease traps, and picked up cigarette butts."

  "The point is, you killed Arabs during your tour of duty."

  "Persians, too, Doctor."

  Taleghani frowned. “Did you kill many?"

  "Not
as many as the Iranians and the Arabs killed,” responded Gordon. “Forgive me for being blunt, Doctor, but does this conversation have a point?"

  Despite the archeologist's dark complexion, a touch of redness came to his cheeks. “I thought you should know, Mr. Redcliff, I fought on the other side in that war. I opposed American intervention in Iran's—"

  "I don't care,” Gordon interrupted. “That war is done. As I understand it, Doctor, the job you want me for is to keep you safe on an expedition. If you also want to argue past American foreign policy you'll need to take on extra help. It is not an interest of mine."

  The archeologist appeared to be having a debate with himself. Gordon waited with no discernable expression of emotion until the man's internal conversation came to an end. At last Dr. Taleghani said, “Your Arabic is excellent."

  "So is yours."

  Taleghani's eyebrows went up. “Your manners are atrocious!"

  Gordon cracked a brief smile. “I am, after all, an American."

  The archeologist laughed against a desire to remain very severe, which made the laugh louder. “Very well, Mr. Redcliff,” he said as he got his laughter under control. “Very well, tell me this: How long did it take you to learn Arabic?"

  "Why?"

  "Indulge me, please."

  Gordon shrugged and thought. “Once I got to Kuwait and among people speaking the language, one or two days to get around on my own. In two weeks I was working with Iraqi regulars without an interpreter and without getting any unintentional giggles. I eventually bought a grammar and speller and taught myself to read and write the language."

  "You also worked with the Septemberists, training their snipers. You must speak Farsi."

  "Yes, and Spanish, German, French, English, eleven Native American languages, and all four dialects spoken by your excavation crew at the site. I can get around in Japanese and Mandarin, but I'm not fluent."

  "It is curious the American army didn't make you a translator or put you in intelligence."

  "It was tried, Doctor.” He thought a moment then shrugged. It had been difficult enough getting the US Army to understand that an eighteen-year-old warrior needed to do war, and that war to a mind that young and angry had nothing to do with talking, listening, or interpreting.