By trial and error they made their way to a place where, no question about it, many flippered feet had passed. The sand was packed down hard. There was a second row of dunes here, much more stable ones, tightly bound by low sprawling shrubs interwoven with gray clumps of tough, sharp-edged grass.
“Look here,” Thalarne said.
Three bare metal frameworks sat in a row at the foot of the dunes: mere shapes, the fragile outlines of things rather than the things themselves. But from those shapes it seemed clear that these were the remnants of three of the vehicles—“chariots,” Hresh had called them—by which the ancient Sea-Lords had traveled when ashore. The ghostly hints of levers, of wheels, of seats, all gave credence to that idea.
There was a sign, also, of a passageway into the dune, a tunnel roofed over by wooden arches. Nortekku and Thalarne exchanged glances. He saw her eagerness.
“No,” he said. “We mustn’t. Not without their permission.”
“Even though Kanibond Graysz and Siglondan will—”
“Let them. We can’t. This has to be a sacred place.”
He knew that Thalarne conceded the strength of that argument. But in any case the decision was taken from their hands, for a Sea-Lord had appeared from somewhere, an elderly one, it seemed, a male, stooped and bowed, with silvered fur and veiled, blinking eyes, who came shuffling up to them and took up a stance between them and the three chariots. The custodian of this place, perhaps—a priest, maybe. He had the sadness in his eyes too, and possibly also the anger that Nortekku believed lay behind it, but mainly they were tired eyes, very old, very weary. The Sea-Lord said something in a barely audible tone, low and husky, and, after a brief silence, said it again.
“He wants us to leave, I think,” Nortekku said. But of course the old Sea-Lord could have been saying almost anything else.
Thalarne agreed, all too readily. “Yes. Yes, that has to be it.”
She smiled at the Sea-Lord and turned her hands outward, apologetically, and the two of them moved away, back toward the encampment by the water. The Sea-Lord remained where he was, watching them go.
“Will you tell the Bornigrayans about this?” Nortekku asked.
“I have to,” said Thalarne. “We’re not here as competitors. They’ve shared a lot of things with me. They’ll find it by themselves before long, anyway. You know that.”
“Yes,” he said. “I imagine they will.”
The eyes of that old Sea-Lord haunted him as they picked their way back over the outer dune. Thinking of him, Nortekku felt again a sense of the great age of the world into which his own people had erupted so recently. His world was new and young, only two centuries old, bursting with the vigor that came with having been let free of the cocoons after seven hundred thousand years in hiding. But now he saw more clearly than ever that the world of the New Springtime was but a thin overlay masking the dead, used-up world that had preceded it—masking a whole succession of dead, used-up worlds, going back to who knew what pre-human mysteries.
So you are back to that, he thought. The transience of everything, the eternal cycle of decay and extinction. That is a grim and cheerless way of looking at things, he told himself. It is a vision devoid of all hope.
But in that same bleak moment came once again the opposite thought, the compensating and comforting one, the thought that the world is a place of constant renewal through billions of years, and that that renewal was a never-ending process that held out the promise of eternal life. World after world, world without end.
I will cling to that idea, Nortekku told himself. I must. I must.
The next morning Thalarne led the two Bornigrayan archaeologists to the site on the far side of the dunes. Nortekku was still displeased about that, but grudgingly he accepted her argument that it would be unethical for one member of the expedition to conceal an important find from the others. He had to bear in mind, she reminded him, that she was here—and he as well—only because they had invited her along.
There was something wrong with that line of reasoning, but Nortekku did not feel like taking the matter up with her. She was here, in fact, because her husband had wanted to send her somewhere far away, someplace where her lover wouldn’t be able to find her: it was for that reason, and no other, that Hamiruld had arranged to have her included in what was fundamentally an expedition designed to produce new plunder for those wealthy highborn collectors of antiquities who were paying the venture’s expenses. Whatever scientific information might be gathered was strictly incidental. And so, even though it struck Nortekku as folly to be worrying about ethical issues when dealing with such people as Siglondan and Kanibond Graysz, he wasn’t in a good position to be urging her to conceal finds from them. The truth of the situation was, he conceded, that he and Thalarne were fundamentally helpless here.
Helplessly, therefore, they accompanied the Bornigrayans to the place of the chariots. The old Sea-Lord custodian was nowhere in sight. That was a blessing, Nortekku thought. Helplessly they looked on as Kanibond Graysz, using a power torch, went slithering into the tunnel that entered the dune. Helplessly they watched him emerge with objects: a rusted helmet that had an air of immense age about it, a knobby-tipped rod of scabby yellow metal that might have been a scepter, a battered bronze box inscribed with curvilinear writing of a Great World sort.
“Nothing else in there,” Kanibond Graysz reported. “Just these three things, scattered about at random. But it’s a start. We’ll need to excavate to see if other things are buried beneath the floor. Tomorrow, perhaps.”
Little was said by anybody as they returned to camp. But once Nortekku and Thalarne were back in the tent that they shared—the pretense that they were brother and sister had long since been abandoned—he found, to his horror, that he could not keep himself from raising the issue that he knew he must not raise with her.
“That made me sick, what happened today. It’s theft, Thalarne. You said yourself, back in Bornigrayal, that it’s one thing to collect objects from a site that’s been abandoned for a million years, and something very different to steal them from living people.”
“Yes. That’s true.”
“And yet you just stood there while he went in and took those things. Even leaving the ethical issues out of the question, I ask you, Thalarne: is that good archaeological technique, just to walk in and pick up objects, without recording stratification or anything else?—But then there are the ethical issues too.”
She made no attempt to hide her anguish. “Let me be, Nortekku. I don’t have any answers for you.”
He pressed onward anyway. “Is it your position that since these people don’t care a hoot whether they live or die, it doesn’t matter what we do with the things that belong to them? We aren’t sure that that’s how they feel, you know. It’s just a speculation.”
“A very likely one, though.”
“Well, then—granting that you’re right—can we really feel free to help ourselves to their possessions while they’re still alive?”
“Let me be, Nortekku,” Thalarne said again, tonelessly. “Can’t you see that I’m caught between all sorts of conflicting forces, and there’s nothing I can do? Nothing.”
He saw that it was dangerous to push her any further. There was nothing she could do, nor he, for that matter. Nor would she allow any further debate about this. It was as though she had pulled an impenetrable curtain down around herself.
The days went by. Nortekku stayed away, most of the time, when the Bornigrayans went over the dunes to poke in the caches of hidden artifacts back there. Usually Thalarne went with them, sometimes not, but when she did go she had little to report to Nortekku about anything they might have found there. It couldn’t have been much, he knew: Kanibond Graysz said something about that, one night at dinner, remarking on how scrappy and insignificant most of their finds had been. The sponsors of the expedition were going to be disappointed. Too bad, Nortekku thought, but he kept his opinions to himself.
He still cou
ld not bring himself to go near the Sea-Lords. They spent much of their time in the water, often far out from shore where it would not have been possible to go, but when they returned to the beach he kept his distance from them. The unhappiness that they emanated was too contagious: being near them plunged him into gloom. Now and then he would see one of them looking toward him with that poignant, yearning stare of theirs. He would always look away.
His estrangement from Thalarne saddened him as much as what the archaeologists were doing in the dunes. They still shared a tent, they still would couple from time to time, but there was no lifting of the invisible barrier that had fallen between them. Since he was unable to discuss anything with her involving the Sea-Lords, about all that was left to talk about was the weather, and the weather was unchanging, warm and sunny and calm day after day.
It surprised him not at all when the two Bornigrayans returned from a trip to the inner dune one morning, accompanied by their two Hjjks, who were carrying one of the Great World Sea-Lord chariots on an improvised litter of planks that had been brought from the ship. Of course they would take one of the chariots: of course. There had been so little else of any note to bring back. The chariot was a major prize, worthy of the finest collection.
The Sea-Lords who were nearby didn’t seem to be in any way upset as the chariot was stowed aboard the dinghy and transported to the ship. Shouldn’t they be protesting this flagrant theft of one of their most sacred objects? Apparently they didn’t care. They looked on in the same uninvolved, passive way they had greeted everything else since the landing of the expedition on their shore. Either the chariot wasn’t really sacred to them, or, as Thalarne believed, they had so thoroughly divested themselves of all will to live that its removal couldn’t possibly make any difference to them. If so, then he had been wrong to berate Thalarne after the Bornigrayans’ initial intrusion into the artifact cache, and he needed to tell her that. Even if the Sea-Lords didn’t care, though, he did, and it saddened him greatly to watch what was happening.
Siglondan herself admitted to some vestigial guilt over the removal of the chariot. In a rare moment of openness she said to Nortekku, as they stood together by the shore watching the dinghy return, “I can’t help feeling that this is hurting them. That chariot is practically all that they have left to remember their ancestors by. We haven’t ever excavated a site that still has living descendants of the ancients on it before. But Kanibond Graysz thinks it’s such an important object that we simply have to take it. It’s not as though it’s their only one.”
It was the first sign Nortekku had seen of any compassion for the Sea-Lords in her, or of the slightest disagreement on a policy issue between Siglondan and her mate. Kanibond Graysz seemed all greed, all ice. Siglondan, at least, had revealed some flickerings of conscience just now.
He said, feeling some elusive need to reassure her, “Well, if they just don’t care about anything, if they even regret that they’re alive at all—”
It was the wrong thing to say. The Bornigrayan woman shot him a peculiar look. “That wild fantasy of Thalarne’s, eh? That they want to die? That they’re a bitter people who think their gods have forgotten them? That they’re looking for a way to get us to put them out of their misery? You believe it too, do you?”
“I don’t know what I believe. I have no evidence to work with.”
“Neither does she.”
“So you think she’s wrong?”
“Of course I do. Kanibond Graysz and I have had conversations with them, you know.”
“But everything gets filtered through the Hjjks, and who knows what distortions the things that they’re saying pick up along the way?”
She shrugged. “This isn’t a matter of translation. This is a matter of understanding the realities that are right here around us. The notion Thalarne is trying to put forth is crazy, Nortekku, completely crazy. The Sea-Lords have given us no indication whatever of a death-wish. If she tries to propose such an idea publicly, we’ll oppose her at every step.” He could feel Siglondan drawing back, closing down. The openness of a few moments before was gone now. Her voice had taken on a cold, formal intonation. She was angry and defensive. “Has your—sister—told you that she not only believes they want to die, she’s willing to help them achieve it?”
“She told me that we mustn’t even consider it.”
“Well, she is considering it, regardless of anything she might have told you. I know that she is. But even if her theory about them is right, and there’s no reason to think that it is, we couldn’t possibly allow any such thing to happen. You understand that, I hope. These beings are infinitely precious. They’re the last few of their kind, so far as we know, the only survivors of a great ancient culture. We have to protect their lives at all cost. We’re preservers of the past, Nortekku, not destroyers.” And with a barren little smile she moved on toward her tent.
He stood looking after her, bewildered. He had no idea where he stood in any of this. After hearing Siglondan’s scornful dismissal, Thalarne’s theory did indeed seem wild, fantastic, almost frightening in its arbitrary assumptions. And yet, when you studied a Sea-Lord’s eyes, when you saw that terrible look that could only be an expression of intolerable grief and rage and longing and despair, it didn’t seem all that arbitrary. But as for enabling the Sea-Lords to die, as an act of compassion, if that was what Thalarne was advocating—and she had denied that, had she not?—the concept was too absurd even to consider. To kill the very creatures they had come here to find—no—no—
As he struggled with these matters Nortekku became aware of figures moving up the beach toward him—a couple of Sea-Lords, females, by the size of them, and one of the Hjjks trailing along a few paces behind. Automatically he turned to go. Even less than ever, now, did he want to be in any sort of proximity to a Sea-Lord.
But before he could take more than a few steps the bigger of the two Sea-Lords, moving with surprising swiftness, closed the distance between them in a few long sliding strides. One of its flippers shot out and grabbed his arm. The webbed fingers tightened around his wrist. Grunting, barking, it pulled him roughly toward it, swinging him around so that they stood face to face.
He was too amazed even to feel afraid. For a moment he was conscious only of the fishy reek of the creature, and of the great shining bristles that jutted from its muzzle, and—yes—of its huge glistening eyes, close to his own, staring at him with a frightful intensity. There was no way he could break its grip. The Sea-Lord was as big as he was, and much stronger. He leaned away as far as he could, holding himself rigid, averting his head. A further series of low barking grunts came from it.
“Tell it to let go of me,” Nortekku said to the Hjjk, who was standing by in utter unconcern.
“It will release you when it is ready to release you,” said the Hjjk in that dispassionate Hjjk way of theirs. “First it will finish what it is saying.”
Saying? Yes. Nortekku observed now that those grunts had a structured rhythm to them, the balance and even the audible punctuation of what must surely be a language. It was indeed trying to say something to him. But what?
“I can’t understand you,” Nortekku told the Sea-Lord futilely. “Let me go! Let go!” And, to the Hjjk: “What’s it saying, then?”
The Hjjk replied, evasively, in the clickings and chitterings of its own tongue, which Nortekku had never mastered.
He glared at the insect-man’s great-beaked face. “No,” he said. “Tell it so I can understand.”
“What it is is the usual thing,” said the Hjjk, after a moment. “It is asking for your help.”
“My—help?” Nortekku said, and a monstrous realization began to dawn in him. “What kind of help?”
The Sea-Lord was finished with its oration, now. It loosed its hold on Nortekku’s wrist and stepped back, watching him expectantly. Nortekku turned once more to the Hjjk.
“What kind of help?” he demanded again.
Once again the Hjjk answered him, m
addeningly, in Hjjk.
Nortekku snatched up a driftwood log that was lying near his right foot and brandished it under the Hjjk’s jutting beak. “Tell it the right way, or by all the gods, I’ll pull you apart and feed your fragments to the fishes!”
The Hjjk showed no sign of alarm. Crossing its uppermost arms across its thorax in what might have been a gesture of self-protection, but which had more of an aura of unconcern, it said blandly, “It would like to end its life. It wishes that you would teach it how to die. This is the thing that they always are saying, you know.”
Yes. Yes, of course. Teach it how to die. Precisely what he had not wanted to hear, precisely what he would prefer not to face. Precisely what Thalarne had already guessed. It is the thing that they are always saying.
Thalarne did not seem surprised at all, when he told her of his encounter with the Sea-Lord. It was as if she had been expecting vindication of this kind to come at any moment.
“It had to be, Nortekku. I felt it from my first glimpse of them.” Wonderingly she said, “It wants us to teach it how to die! Which means they can’t achieve it on their own—they probably don’t even have the concept of suicide. So they’ve been asking and asking, ever since we got here. And of course those two have been suppressing it. The Sea-Lords are their big asset, their key to fame and fortune and scientific glory. They’d never permit anything to happen to them.”
The Millennium Express - 1995-2009 - The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg Volume Nine Page 43
