Scott Buchanan’s brows rode halfway up to his receding hairline. “A fake stone? What’s he thinking—that this is a hoax? That the Leguini have been hoaxing us?”
“He’s thinking...” She shrugged. “I don’t know what he’s thinking. But the stone is a hunk of very hardy glass which dates to about five thousand Before Present.”
Rhys expelled a rush of air. “Can the Etsatat have found a way to foil our dating techniques?”
“Who knows? Maybe the ancients had junk jewelry.”
“Look, I’m going to take this assemblage in to Professor Burton. Maybe I can help him make sense of this.”
Rhys tucked the canister under his arm and entered the Finds tent warily, his eyes on Burton’s back. As he moved to lay the canister down on the sorting table, Burton glanced up at him, sweating even in the well-ventilated cabin.
“What’ve you got there, Rhys?”
“More jewelry. A couple of figurines—wood and stone.” He unpacked the canister as he spoke.
Burton was at his side in a second, poring over the finds. “This is more like it! Yes, this clarifies the situation considerably. What we’re looking at here, my boy, is a single cremation. There may be no significant Etsatat DNA because the cremation involves only that one individual. These —” He held up a corroding brooch and the stone figure. “— are tribute, as I theorized previously. I predict that if we continue to dig, we will find the remains of one man—Ets-eket, himself—or his mortal proxy.”
“What’s your evaluation of the brooch?”
“Ah, well, originally I thought it a rather poor specimen. The metal is sturdy but hardly precious, the stone is, em , rather an enigma. But the style!” He put the thoroughly cleaned piece into the photonic bath and switched the perfect 3-D image to the holopad. “See the intricate detail, the precision of the scroll work? The Leguini haven’t produced anything this fine since.”
“What?”
“Well, you’ve seen their primitive-looking ornamentation. Ye gods, the shops are full of it, even on Earth!”
“Professor, that’s a current fashion, like art deco on early twentieth century Earth, or the turn of the century trend toward aboriginal art. There are no grounds upon which to compare it to this.”
Burton’s face turned to stone. “Llewellyn, you have argued every single find with me since you arrived. Where do you get the gall?”
“From you, I’d like to think, Professor.”
“You were my favorite student, you know. When I brought you here, I thought you’d be appreciative.”
“I am, sir, I —”
“Then why are you playing dog in the manger?”
“Sir, I’m not. I just happen to have formed some opinions about these sites that don’t cozy with your own.”
Burton went white and red in swift turns. “What makes you think your opinions are worth anything, Llewellyn? I’ve been in this field for decades. You’ve been out of the field since you left that classroom in Sophia to go commercial. Corporate anthropologist!” he snorted. “Corporate toady is more like it! How can you presume to think your opinion carries more weight than mine?”
Reeling from the verbal lashing, Rhys struggled to right himself. “I’m not presuming anything of the sort, Professor. But I have had a good many years of training and experience, and regardless of what you think about my association with Tanaka Corp, it’s given me experience you haven’t had. Your decades have been spent in Terran archaeology. My few years has been spent out here, on other worlds. When it comes to xenoanthropology, I think the playing field is much more even.”
“Do you?”
“Yes sir, I do. And I think...” He paused, losing the will to continue.
“Well, whatever it is, Llewellyn, say it. Don’t add cowardice to your arrogance.”
Rhys sighed, feeling wretched. “I think you may be culturally biased.”
“Culturally biased?” Burton’s white hair looked shockingly bright against the near purple of his face.
Rhys lowered his voice, trying to keep his tone gentle. “This isn’t Caracol, Professor. It’s Sper-ets. Hell, it may not even be that, really. The fact is, you can’t know. You can’t know whether a thing is a coin or a... a punch card unless and until you have some sort of cultural context to put it in. We don’t have that context yet for these sites because we haven’t built one.”
“The context is a wide-spread cult dedicated to the worship of the moon. That is the context.”
“On the surface, a reasonable conclusion. But we’re supposed to get below the surface to the details. And the details here don’t support many of your conclusions.”
“Name a few.”
“All right. What you call coins are identical because they were smelted and molded. That’s not stone they’re made of, but a clever native composite of malleable ores. They’re molded, yet they all have obviously handmade scoring along the edges.”
“Denominations.”
Rhys shook his head. “The number is totally random. Anywhere from zero scores to a complete circuit of the edge. Like a punch card. Then there’s the relief on the gate lintel. You interpret as prisoners and sacrificial victims people who are in no way bound. You ascribe warrior status to men without weapons or armor. You make moon crescents out of shapes that bear only passing resemblance to any stage of Etsat’s moon. And the village—your massive sacrificial altar could just as easily be a place where people went to be entertained, not ritually murdered. Think about it, Professor, assume for a moment that we stumbled across... the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with no cultural context. We knew nothing of the Renaissance—we’d never heard of Michelangelo. Without that context, you and I would very likely interpret the Last Judgment as depicting a warrior-priest in god’s clothing surveying his sacrificial victims.”
“You mean I’d interpret it that way. I’m sure you’d draw other conclusions.”
“I don’t have conclusions, Doctor. I have theories. Day’s too young for conclusions. I talked about building a context and I meant it. The present day Etsatat hold the key to this place, whether they realize it or not. Look at their culture if you want to advance toward conclusions.”
“Preposterous. I hadn’t realized you’d become such an iconoclast.”
“I’m not an iconoclast. I simply suggest that if you’d try to envision the village ruins as a living Etsatat town, you’ll see some of these artifacts in a different light.”
“What I see, Dr. Llewellyn, is that you and your associates are disrupting my dig and undermining my authority. I request that you leave. In fact, I demand it.”
Rhys felt the blood drain from his face. He suspected that if he looked in a mirror, he’d find the color had drained from his hair, as well. “I... wish you’d reconsider.”
“I don’t think so, Doctor. Now, if you’d kindly let me get back to my work?” He gave Rhys a curt nod and returned to his study of the display of his holopad.
o0o
Back aboard the TAS schooner Ceilidh, Rhys tried to banish his black mood without success. He’d just blown a huge hole in his personal history and, glancing backward, saw a void where there had once been a professional relationship, a wall of regret where there had once been pleasant and important memories. His mental landscape was Scotland in winter—bleak, gray, cold. Neither Yoshi nor Rick could pierce the veil of sorrow that hung over him like a mountain-topping cloud.
“I’ll get over it,” he told Yoshi when he felt her eyes on him for the thousandth time since they’d left the surface of Etsat. “You were right, you know. I did idolize the man. I suppose... I suppose it’s best that I’ve been reminded painfully of his humanity... and mine.” He shook his head ruefully. “I couldn’t believe he could be so... biased. I assumed that whatever expertise he applied so successfully to the Terran field, he’d apply to the broader field of xenoarchaeology and become the authority there, as well.”
Yoshi looked down at her tea cup. “You’re the authority in x
enoarchaeology, Rhys. And I think that bothers Dr. Burton more than he’ll admit.”
“Rhys?” Rick’s voice floated over to them from the intercom. “You’ve got a communication from Dr. Burton. I’ll patch it through to the mess comlink.”
Rhys made a face, his eyes meeting Yoshi’s through the steam of tea. “I guess he hadn’t quite finished flaying me.”
But Burton apparently was no longer in a flaying mood. His face, filling the comlink’s flat screen, wore a shining cloak of joviality.
“Rhys! I’m glad I caught you before you left. I, em, I’d like to apologize for losing my temper earlier. It was unprofessional in the extreme. Unforgivable, really. I’d like to have you to a bit of a send-off party aboard our cutter—a bit more plush than the cabins at the dig.”
Caught completely off guard by the older man’s conciliatory tone, Rhys could only stammer out his acceptance. Several hours later he, Yoshi and Rick ferried over to the Feathered Serpent for the send-off. Burton greeted them in the docking bay with Wayne Bell at his side. He seemed cordial enough, but Rhys caught an undercurrent of nervousness and found it impossible to relax. The slightest misstep, he feared, would bring on another fit of professional vituperation.
What actually happened was much stranger. They were passing through the row of crew’s cabins with Burton leading and Bell bringing up the rear, when the Professor stopped in mid-corridor and slid back one of the cabin doors.
“Dr. Llewellyn, if you and your associates would kindly enter and prepare for transport?”
A terrible shaft of cold shot up Rhys’s back. “Excuse me?”
“I fibbed a little about the send-off. This is more in the nature of an educational field trip. I’m going to prove to you, beyond any doubt, that my theories about this dig are correct.”
“I don’t understand —” Rhys started to say, but suddenly he did understand. “You’re taking us back in time.”
“I am indeed.”
“But this ship must have temporal grid limiters —”
Burton shrugged. “Which can be disabled by someone who knows what they’re doing. Did I mention that Wayne here worked his way through his first three years of college as a temporal engineer at QuestLabs?”
Rhys glanced back over his shoulder. Yoshi’s eyes were big as saucers, Rick was looking positively ill, and Wayne was holding a fuzz gun. He jerked back around to face Burton.
“Doctor, what you’re contemplating is illegal, not to mention unethical.”
“Ah, for the casual time traveler, perhaps. But this is far from casual. We’re on a mission of sorts—a search for truth.”
“Professor, I protest. You can’t do this.”
Burton chuckled. “Watch me. I can play Indiana Jones as well as the next man.” He leaned closer to Rhys, pinned him with over-bright eyes. “This is important to me, Rhys. I have to prove this to you. To myself. Now, if you’ll kindly enter your cabin...”
“Professor?” Rick was looking at Rhys with panic in his eyes and sweat beading on his upper lip.
Rhys swung back to Burton. “Roddy has severe temporal displacement syndrome. If we time shift, he’ll become critically ill.”
“Ah, so I should abandon this crazy idea, eh? Or send the young man back to the Ceilidh? I think not. Several of my crew have TDS. I know the precautions. Trust me—Roddy will be suitably sedated.”
“I can’t talk you out of this?”
“No, young man, you cannot.”
Rhys glanced at Bell. “And you? How can you allow him to do this?”
“The professor taught me everything I know. Unlike some, I’m not likely to forget that. You impugned his integrity. I think he deserves the chance to vindicate himself.”
They shifted within the hour, moving millennia in time, but infinitesimally in space. It was a long shift, one which required every human aboard to be sedated against the displacing effects, though none so deeply as Rick. In the darkened cabin, wearing shift goggles and respirators, Rhys and his two companions slept while ages rolled back around them.
o0o
Rhys woke to total darkness and thought, for the briefest moment, that he was dreaming rather than conscious (or dead rather than alive). But Yoshi stirred and murmured on the bunk opposite his, and he came completely awake on a surge of memory and adrenaline. If Burton’s disabling of the ship’s temporal grid limiters had worked, he was now orbiting a younger Etsat. About 5,000 years younger, if their dating was correct.
He had called on the lights and was helping Yoshi to sit up when Burton appeared, his eyes bright with exhilaration.
“We’re here. We’ll shuttle down when the site is in darkness. That will mean turning off the running lights, but there shouldn’t be any other airships to collide with, should there?”
He chuckled, obviously enjoying the extraordinary situation. Leaving the deeply sleeping Rick in the darkened cabin, he led Rhys and Yoshi to the mess for a pre-descent meal.
o0o
The squat, boxy, little shuttle carried four people—Rhys, Yoshi, Burton and Bell, who acted as pilot. In the deepest part of the local night, they brought the craft in on instruments. A clearing in the comparatively sparse forest of a younger world afforded them a landing site with adequate cover between the village and the Ets-eket complex. Or so Rhys hoped. The thought of bumping into the Etsatat’s ancestors filled him with mortal dread. Whatever else they did during this madcap adventure, they absolutely must avoid changing Etsatat history.
As the shuttle descended into the trees, Rhys saw a few points of firelight in the direction of the village and sighed deeply. He was torn about this “mission,” and knew he shouldn’t be. He should be outraged at Burton, but the thought of seeing firsthand what he before could only theorize about made his heart hammer with pure excitement and his breath come quick and shallow.
He often daydreamed about what it must have been like during those brief halcyon days when scientists could, and did, use QuestLab’s Temporal Grid technology to study the past. He had read the field notes of those early time travelers. He had seen the video journals. He had, in his personal library, the private diaries and logs of one Arthur Llewellyn, the man directly responsible for the ban on what his great-great-grandnephew was presently doing. It would be painful irony, indeed, if ill came of this.
“Rhys, look.”
Rhys tugged his thoughts back to the surface and followed Yoshi’s gaze through the starboard canopy of the shuttle. There was light in the direction of Sper-ets, too, a ruddy volcanic glow that lit the low clouds and smoke that lay like sleeping sheep above it. The tower, Rhys suspected, and felt a guilty tingle of anticipation. He felt eyes on him and glanced forward to find Professor Burton watching him with an odd little smile on his lips.
“You wouldn’t stop this now if you could, would you?”
Rhys declined to answer that, but knew in his heart of hearts that Burton was right.
o0o
Dressed in forest camouflage and packing a proximity scanner, they used the still pre-dawn hours to set up an observation post upslope from the village in the branches of a massive, gnarled tree. Sunrise gave them a clear view down the main avenue from almost directly above the amphitheater. What was only marginally apparent in the ruin was highly visible in the living town. There was one main street; all other avenues—there were ten of them—crossed it at a precise ninety degree angle. As the sun climbed, the denizens of those streets came out and began their daily routines, unaware of the alien presence watching from the east through long-range optics.
As expected, the market plaza was soon aswarm with buyers and sellers of produce. Traffic sprouted in the streets; carts and wagons appeared, most pulled by domestic animals called tirzen. Contraptions that looked like rickshas and handled like bicycles wove in and round larger conveyances. People wandered the avenues, popping in and out of buildings.
Rhys barely knew where to look first among such visual riches. Finally, he opted for a systematic surve
y of each street, beginning with those nearest his vantage point. He was focusing on the side of a large building adjacent to the amphitheater when Yoshi interrupted him.
“Sir, look at the stelae. They’re painted.”
They were, indeed. Rhys brought his own field optics to bear on the grouping they’d surveyed only four or five days ago. (Or was that 5,005 days ago?) The “Water Goddess” was done up in shades of turquoise and blue. The building she fronted was, likewise, awash in aquatic tones. Rhys supposed it could be either temple or bath house; the only evidence either way was that some of the people entering seemed to be carrying clothing draped over their arms or carried in baskets or bundles.
“Now scanning building 1A,” murmured Burton.
Rhys turned to find the elder archaeologist had mounted a holocam on his optics visor and was recording the street scenes. Or rather, he was recording the buildings—the people seemed to be of little interest to him.
“What are you doing, Professor? You’ll never be able to show that to anyone.”
“Ah, but you and I will know, Rhys. You and I will know. Now, building 1A has before it a stele depicting a merchant goddess and her pack —”
“It’s a weaver’s shop!” Yoshi broke into the narrative.
“What?” Wayne Bell glanced from the display that showed a Burton’s-eye-view to the view through his own optics.
“See. That woman in the red halter went in empty-handed and came out with a little rug or something draped over her arm. And there goes someone with a basket of yarn.”
Sure enough, a female Etsatat bearing a basket of brightly colored yarn walked up to the doorstep of the equally colorful building and spoke to someone just inside the door. She then set the basket in a sunny spot on the patio behind the stele where the colors of her wares shone like jewels.
A moment later, a second woman joined her from inside the building and began to pick through the jumble of richly hued spools. In the end, she wagged her head and made a series of intricate hand gestures. Then she pulled several rings of bright metal from her necklace and handed them to the other woman who bobbed, turned, and left the yarns, basket and all, in the six fingered hands of their newcomer.
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