Halvorsen has never seen anything like it. He has never so much as imagined anything like it. It is Rome and Babylon and Byzantium and Thebes all at once, raised to the fiftieth power. In this single crushing vision Halvorsen feels that he has experienced an entire great civilization, that he has been buried beneath the totality of its immensity.
Then it is gone. As suddenly as it erupted from the ground, the great building subsides into it again, not with a crash but a sigh, a gentle cadence of descent. It falls like a feather on the wind, shrinking down on itself, and within moments Halvorsen sees nothing but the gray field of rubble again.
After a time he says, “Very impressive. I didn’t know I had such powers of invention.”
—They are not inventions. They are the reality of our age, which I freely make available to you.
“And who are you, may I ask?”
—I will tell you. I am an inhabitant of the Fifth Mandala, which is the last epoch of the world you call Earth, very close to the end of all things.
Halvorsen shivers. The lunacy deepens and deepens.
“You live in the future and are reaching back across time to talk to me?”
—The very distant future, yes.
Halvorsen contemplates that for a moment.
Then he says, “Why? What do you want from me?”
—Simply to give you an opportunity to see my world. And to beg you to allow me to see yours. A trade, my time for your time: your body for mine, our minds to change places. I want that very much. I want it more than life itself.
By day none of what he has heard or seen in the night seems real. There is only the brown sandy site, and the unrelenting red blaze of the sun, and the blue sea, and the different blue of the sky’s rigid vault. From the white tents come his young assistants. The workmen have already breakfasted and are waiting for their assignments. “Gün aydin,” they say, grinning, showing big white crooked teeth. “Good morning.” For them this job is a bonanza, the best pay they will ever see. They love it. “Gün aydin, gün aydin, gün aydin.”
The morning’s work begins. Sunscreen, bug repellent, sweat, dust. Picks, shovels, brushes, tape-measures.
So the madness seems to overtake him, he thinks, only by night. Halvorsen wonders about that. Perhaps the power of his quest for understanding the buried past, here in the remorseless brightness of the day, drives off these phantoms of the imaginary future. Or perhaps it is that the monkish solitude and close atmosphere of his dark, stifling little tent invite hallucinations, especially to a tired man who tends to drink too much raki when he is alone. Either way, he is grateful to leave it behind, the craziness, as he stomps toward this new day’s work.
He believes passionately in archaeology as metaphysics. Without true knowledge of the past, how can one comprehend the present, how can one begin to triangulate the future? Of course true true knowledge is impossible, but we can attempt partial truths: we can skin the earth’s surface looking for clues, we can sift and sort, we can postulate. Halvorsen has spent most of his life doing this. What has it gained him? He can recognize the varying soils of differing layers of occupation. He can name the Emperors of Rome from Augustus to Romulus Augustulus, remembering even to include Quintillus and Florianus. He has—what? Five years left? Ten?—to master all the rest of it, to solve all the pieces of the riddle that he has arrogated to himself. Then he will be gone. He will join the vastness of the past, and the work will belong to others. But for the moment it is his responsibility. And so the work goes on, today for him, tomorrow for the Jane Sparmanns, the Bruce Felds. Will they see it as he does? Or will it merely be a job for them, a highway toward the comforts of tenure? How can you be an archaeologist at all, except out of love, an insatiable desire for the truth, the willingness to give yourself up to quests that may all too easily become obsessions?
Halvorsen’s obsessive notion is that Asia Minor and not Mesopotamia was the cradle of civilization. Fertile, with easy access to the Mediterranean, rich in mineral ores, forests, grasslands for grazing, a reasonably benign climate, the peninsula seems to him to have been an ideal site for the transition from Neolithic life to the splendors of the Bronze Age. The flow of conceptualization could only have been down out of Anatolia’s rocky spine, he is convinced: to Sumerian Iraq on one side of the cultural watershed, to proto-Minoan Crete on the other, and onward also to Egypt in the south. But there is no proof. There is no proof. Mere smudges and traces remain, where he needs walls and pillars, inscribed tablets, potsherds, idols, weapons. Time has erased it all here in Anatolia, or at least has erased what he needs to provide a foundation for his bold thesis, leaving only confusion and conjecture.
Still, he is certain that this is where it all began. The Çatal Hüyük findings tell him that, the engraved pebbles in the Karain Cave, the rock paintings of Beldibi: this is where the first canto of the great epic was written. But where is the proof? He knows that he is working from a priori hypotheses, always a great peril for a scientist. This sort of thing is the antithesis of the scientific method. He has allowed himself to seem to be a fanatic, a nut, a Schliemann, an Evans, obsessed with obfuscatory special pleading in defense of his idée fixe. Schliemann and Evans, at least, eventually delivered the goods. But he has nothing to show, and soon they will be laughing at him in the halls of academe, if that has not begun already.
Still, he digs on. What else can he do?
It’s a long day. The new trench gets deeper and longer and it’s still absolutely virgin. Thinking incorrectly that he has spotted something significant jutting from its side, Halvorsen jumps eagerly down into it and wrenches his bad leg so severely that he almost bursts into tears, though they are tears of rage rather than pain. Halvorsen is a big, strapping man whose physical endurance was legendary in the profession, and now he is little more than a cripple. If he could, he would have the leg cut off and replaced with something made of steel and plastic.
The raki helps a little. But only a little.
Lying on his back and massaging the throbbing leg with his left hand with the raki bottle in his right one, Halvorsen says into the dense clinging darkness, “How did you find me? And why?” He is somewhat tipsy. More than somewhat, maybe.
There is no answer.
“Come on, speak up! Have you been in touch with others before me? Twenty, fifty, a hundred, a hundred thousand different minds, every era from First Dynasty Egypt to the fortieth century? Looking for someone, anyone, who would go for your deal?”
Silence, still.
“Sure you did. You’ve got a million-year lifespan, right? All the time in the world to cast your line. This fish, that one, this. And now you have me on the hook. You play me. Trade bodies with me, you say, come see the marvels of the far future. You think I’m tempted, don’t you? Don’t you? But I’m not. Why should I be? Don’t I have enough on my plate right here? You think I want to start over, at my age, learning a whole new archaeology? You suppose I need to worry about identifying the strata that signify the fucking Second Mandala?”
No answer. He knows that he is losing control. He never uses obscenities except under extreme stress.
“Well, go fish somewhere else,” Halvorsen says. “I reject your deal. I piss on your crazy deal. I stay here, you stay there, the way God intended it to be. I go on digging in the dirt of Turkey until my brains are completely fried and you sit there amidst all your fucking post-historic apocalyptic miracles, okay? Costa Stambool! You can take Costa Stambool and—”
At last the voice out of distant time breaks its silence.
—Is your refusal a final one?
And, almost in the same moment, another voice from closer at hand, from just outside his tent, in fact:
“Dr. Halvorsen? Are you all right, Dr. Halvorsen?”
Bruce Feld’s voice.
My God, Halvorsen thinks. I’m bellowing and ranting at the top of my lungs, and now they all finally know that I’ve gone nuts.
“I’m—fine,” he says. “Just singing,
a little. Am I too loud?”
“If you need anything, Dr. Halvorsen—”
“Maybe another bottle of raki, that’s all.” He laughs raucously. “No, no, just joking. I’m fine, really. Sorry if I disturbed you.” Let them think I’m drunk; better than thinking I’m crazy. “Good night, Bruce. I’ll try to keep it down.”
And then, again:
—Is your refusal final?
“Yes! No. Wait. I have to consider this thing a little, all right? All right?”
Silence.
“God damn it, I need some time to think!—Hey, are you still there?”
Silence.
Gone, Halvorsen thinks. He has given his answer, and the being from the far end of time has broken off the contact, and that is that. Even at this moment the offer is being made to someone of the thirtieth century A.D., or perhaps the thirtieth century B.C., or any of a million other years along the time-line between prehistory and the Fifth Mandala of Costa Stambool. A trade, my time for your time: your body for mine, our minds to change places.
“Listen,” Halvorsen says piteously, “I’m still thinking it over, do you know what I mean? Although I have to tell you, in all honesty, you’d be getting a bum deal. I’m not in really good physical condition. But I want to discuss this proposition of yours a little further before I give you a definitive answer, anyway.”
Nothing. Nothing. An agony of regret.
But then, suddenly:
—Let us discuss, then. What else would you like to know?
The promised visit of the new superintendent of excavations does not occur on the second day after the receipt of the letter from the Ministry of Education, nor on the third. Halvorsen is unsurprised by that. Time moves differently in different cultures; he lives on the Turkish calendar here.
The work is now going so badly that he actually has begun to regard his nightly bouts of madness as comic relief. His leg has swollen, practically immobilizing him; it is so difficult for him to get around now that he is unable to reach his excavation site at the top of the hill, short of being hoisted up there with a sling and pulley. So he supervises fretfully from below. But that makes no difference, because Ibrahim, Ayhan, and Zeki are still digging through virgin soil. Elsewhere all around the site, nice little things are turning up for the others: Riley and Harris have found some bits of Byzantine mosaic in association with coins of the Emperor Heraclius, Feld and Altman have struck an interesting layer of early Minoan sherds, Jane Sparmann has found a cache of glass and terra-cotta beads that may indicate the presence of a previously unsuspected zone of late Greek occupation. The hilltop work, though, is plainly a bust. Hittites, or somebody who built walls in Hittite style, undoubtedly had had a fortress up there four or maybe five thousand years ago, but what Halvorsen is after is some sign of civilization two or three thousand years older than that—some deposit that will convincingly link this coastal outpost to the known Neolithic settlements far to the east at Çatal Hüyük—and he has not had the slightest luck. The three anomalous artifacts that that storm had laid bare remain perplexing enigmas, tantalizing, inexplicable.
He consoles himself with conversations in the darkness. The visions of the Fifth Mandala grow ever more baroquely detailed.
Halvorsen, who still believes that he is spinning these fantasies within the walls of his own tortured mind, is bemused by the discovery that he has such lavish qualities of imagination within himself. He has thought of himself all along as a prosaic drudge, a plodding digger in musty, dusty ancient realms. Evidently there is more to him than that, a rich vein of fabulist locked away somewhere. The realization makes him uneasy; it seems to call into question the integrity of his scholarly findings.
He wants to know about the inhabitants of the remote eon of which his informant is a denizen.
—There are very few of us. I may be the only one.
“You aren’t sure?”
—Contact is very difficult.
“It’s easier for you to speak with someone who lived a million years in your past than it is to pick up the phone and call someone who lives around the corner from you?”
Apparently so. There has been a great cataclysm, an invasion of some sort, a climactic battle: the last and ultimately futile stand of the human race, or rather the evolved and vastly superior successors to the human race, against an inexorable enemy so terrible that its nature seems beyond the abilities of Halvorsen’s informant to communicate. This, it seems, occurred as the closing act of the epoch known as the Fourth Mandala, when humanity, after having attained a supreme, essentially god-like height, was thrust down irreparably into the dust. Now only a few lurkers remain, scuttling through the heaped-up ruins of previous glorious civilizations, waiting for their final hours to arrive. Halvorsen gets the impression that they are not even creatures of flesh and blood, these last few humans, but some kind of metallic mechanisms, low spherical beetle-like housings, virtually indestructible, in which the souls of the remaining inhabitants of Earth have taken refuge.
Some resonant chord in Halvorsen’s Nordic soul is struck by the revelation that there will be a Ragnarok after all, a Götterdämmerung: that all gods must have their twilight, even the supernal beings of humanity’s final epoch. He is saddened and exalted by it all at once. They were beings of a magnificence and power beyond comprehension, a race of glorious heroes, demigods and more than demigods, and yet they fell, even they. Will fall. It is the myth of myths, the ultimate saga. Odin and Thor and Heimdall and Tyr and all the rest of the Aesir will die in the Fimbulwinter of the world, when Fenrir the Wolf breaks his chains and the Midgard Serpent rises and the fire-demons of Muspelheim come riding forth upon the world. So it has been, over and over, and so it must and will be, to the end of time, even into the days of the great Mandalas yet to come.
“Why come here, though?” Halvorsen asks. “We’re only smelly primitives, hardly more than apes. We live in ignoble times. Why not just stay where you are, up there in the grand and glorious final act of the human drama, and wait for the curtain to come down?”
—The curtain has already come down, and it happens that I have lived on beyond it. Where is the nobility in that? I want to close the circle; I want to return to the starting point. Come: take my body. Explore my world, which to you will be full of wonders beyond belief. There will be much for you to study here: our immense Past is your immeasurable future. Spend a million years, two million, as long as you like, roaming the ruins of Costa Stambool. And let me take your place in your own era.
“It won’t be a fair trade,” Halvorsen warns again. “You won’t be getting as good as you give.”
—Let me be the judge of that.
“No. Listen to me. I need to have you realize what you’d be getting. Not only are we mortal—do you really understand what that means, to be mortal?—but I’m not even an especially good specimen of my race. I’m getting to be old, as old goes among us, and I feel very tired and my leg, if you know what a leg is, was badly damaged in an accident last year and I can barely hobble around. Besides which, I’ve painted myself into a corner professionally and I’m about to become a laughing stock. You’d be walking into a miserable situation. The way I feel now, even the end of the world would be preferable to the mess I’m in.”
—Is this a refusal of my offer, or an acceptance?
Halvorsen is baffled for a moment by that. Then he understands, and he begins to laugh.
But of course he is aware that the game he is playing with himself, out there along the borders of sanity, is a dangerous one; and he is glad when sleep at last frees him of these fantastical colloquies. When morning comes, he knows, he must rid his mind of all such nonsense and turn his full attention to the trench on the hill. And either find in it the things that he hopes will be there, or else abandon this site at last, confess his defeat, and make his choice between letting himself be pensioned off and humbly petitioning the Turks to allow him to hunt for traces of extreme Anatolian antiquity someplace else. But he o
ught not to go on diverting himself with these wishful and fundamentally unhealthy dreams of an escape to the Fifth Mandala.
And eventually morning comes, bringing the usual blast of dry heat, the usual clouds of little black flies, and the usual breakfast of hard-boiled eggs, processed cheese, canned sardines, and powdered coffee. Morning also brings, a couple of hours later, the Department of Antiquities’ new superintendent of excavations for this district, Selim Erbek: Selim Bey, as Halvorsen calls him, since in Turkey it’s always a good idea to bestow formal honorific titles on anyone who holds any sort of power over you.
Not that Selim Bey seems particularly intimidating. He is very young, thirty at most, a slender man, almost slight, with sleek black hair. He is clean-shaven except for a narrow mustache and is wearing khaki slacks and a thin green shirt already stained with sweat. And—Halvorsen finds this very strange—Selim Bey’s demeanor, right from the start, is extraordinarily diffident, almost withdrawn. His voice is almost inaudible and he can barely bring himself to make contact with Halvorsen. The contrast with Hikmet Pasha, his big-bellied, swaggering predecessor, could not be more marked.
Halvorsen offers him breakfast. Selim Bey shakes him off.
“May we speak?” he asks softly, almost timidly.
What the hell is this? Halvorsen wonders. “Of course,” he says.
“The two of us, only. Man to man, apart from the others.”
Of his assistants, only Jane Sparmann is within hearing range. Does Selim Bey want privacy, or is he simply uncomfortable around women? Halvorsen shrugs and signals to Jane that she should return to her dig. Selim Bey smiles faintly, a quick crinkling of the corner of his mouth. This is all quite odd, Halvorsen thinks.
Hot Times in Magma City, 1990-95 Page 30
