In the Shadow of the Towers

by Douglas Lain

  “True enough,” Leslie replied. “Ancient statues don’t bear plaques, but they always turn out to be of specific gods or individuals—never some generic woman or warrior.”

  “How about epic heroes?”

  “You mean like Gilgamesh and Enmerkar? They were probably historical figures.”

  “Enmerkar?” Trent said, startled.

  “Sounds like Earwicker?” asked Leslie, smiling. He was already going to his shelf, pulling down the Third Census and the Concordance. After a minute he reported, “No . . . no references to Enmerkar or Gilgamesh. Rather surprising, when you think of it. Isn’t the poem about the search for immortality, and bringing back the dead?”

  “No, not really. Is that what fantasy writers think?”

  Trent flushed at this, then sat down to consult one of his reference works. Leslie picked up the book on Sumer and tracked down the chapter on Gilgamesh (“First Case of Literary Borrowing”). Kramer’s precis did make the poem sound more about seeking immortality than Leslie remembered. As Trent was doubtless about to find corroboration of this, she decided to withdraw the remark.

  “Hey,” she said suddenly, “pause that.” She was pointing to the monitor, where the image of a desert landscape dominated by an enormous crumbling mound was undergoing digital transformation. By the time Trent had turned and clicked to freeze the image, the mound had risen into angular prominence, like an ice sculpture melting in reverse, and the surrounding wastes had sprouted small buildings. With a keystroke Trent restored the original photograph, and they gazed at the massive ruin, so decayed that the eye first saw it as a natural formation.

  “I’ve seen that picture,” said Leslie. “There’s a modern structure on top, built by archeologists. It looks like a Crusader’s castle.”

  “Really?” Trent drawled. “They must have edited it out.”

  Leslie explained that while the later Babylonians incorporated the various Gilgamesh poems into a single sequence that did include a quest for immortality, the Sumerian originals—composed during the period in which Trent’s game seemed to be set, around 2500 B.C.—told a different story, in which Enkidu is physically detained in the nether world and Gilgamesh merely seeks to get him back.

  “But it’s the Babylonian version that everyone knows, right?”

  “Well, yes.” Leslie thought irritably that Trent was crowing, but he looked back to his reference book—an encyclopedia of fantasy, she saw—and she got it.

  “That’s right, the great man wrote about immortality, didn’t he?”

  It came out sharper had intended, but Trent didn’t take offense. “He always said it wasn’t immortality, simply an extremely prolonged life span,” he said mildly. “He was far too obsessed with the end of things to preclude its eventuality.”

  And you had to be similarly obsessed to write his life, thought Leslie. Most of Trent’s enthusiasms—Finnegans Wake, the works of James Branch Cabell, Wagner’s Ring—were those of the great man, whom he was seeking, through a kind of literary archeology, to understand. That this required the intentness of the scholar rather than the enthusiasm of the dilettante was for Leslie its primary value.

  “He would have hated computer games,” Leslie pointed out.

  “Certainly these games,” Trent agreed. “He would have hated postmodernism’s embrace of pop culture and mass media; he still believed in great modernist masterpieces rising above a sea of trash. Yet look at his best work: commercial SF novels, his ‘serious’ efforts unpublished. And his narratives are fragmented and decentered, mixing prose with verse and embedding texts within texts like—” He looked at the monitor, where overlapping windows had opened atop one another, and laughed at the too-to-hand analogy.

  He had been gesturing unconsciously towards the top shelf, too close to the ceiling to hold any but small format paperbacks, and Leslie glanced up at their titles. “If you want to write about pomo sci-fi, why not the guy who wrote The Simulacra?”

  “He’s not as interesting,” Trent said in a conspiratorial whisper, as though broaching heresy. “My guy isn’t trendy; he’s still out in the margins.”

  Images were appearing one after the other on the screen: an ancient map of Nippur, an artist’s rendition of the walls of Uruk, a detailed relief of charioteers riding into battle. Scenes of war, which the city-states waged incessantly upon each other until they were conquered from without. Was this how players would busy themselves? An image of naked prisoners in a neck-stock was followed by a stele fragment of soldiers dumping earth over a mound of enemy dead.

  “How do you win?” she asked. “Conquer everyone else, or just stay on top of your own small heap until you die of old age?”

  “I’ll let you know,” he said. The screen was once more displaying the entire region, and Trent leaned forward to study it. “Why do they call it a river valley? The land between the rivers is wide and flat, with mountains on one side only.”

  “It’s an alluvial plain.” Except for the levées that gradually build up along the banks of the river and any canals, the land appears perfectly flat. But the basins defined by these ridges, too wide and shallow for the eye to discern, would determine the flow of water as it floods, an issue of gravest consequence.

  “Annalivia, Annaluvia,” Trent mused.

  “Yes, dear.” Outside, Megan’s shout echoed off the tier of condo balconies across the grass, and she looked out the window. “Beta testers play with the product, right? They don’t work at it.”

  “Not exactly, but I take your point.” Leslie was already heading for the door, where Ursuline was blocking the threshold, evidently to alert her to anyone coming or going. She stepped over the sleeping labrador and padded quietly down the hall, leaving her book on the table outside their bedroom. Through the back screen she could hear the children’s shouts, none pitched to the pain or alarm she was always listening for.

  Four kids were visible or audible through the dining room window, circling each other on the trimmed lawn. Their game seemed improvised yet intuitively understood, and even the fluid shifting of rules that Leslie observed provoked neither confusion nor protest. What games did children play in the ancient world, without structures dedicated to their edification? Would the diversions of ancient Greece be more familiar to us than those of early Sumer, a culture twice as old and incomparably stranger?

  Leslie took chilled coffee from the refrigerator, added ice, and stood watching out the kitchen window, a few degrees’ different perspective. Without a ball or demarcated spaces, their game seemed the frolic of will in a field of limitless play, the impulse to sportiveness before it has touched a limit.

  At one point the four children were all facing one direction, paused before a prospect invisible to Leslie. Something in their hesitancy immediately reminded her of the scene, shown earlier in this Kubrick’s year on living room DVD, of the killer apes crouched warily before the slim featureless monolith. “It looks like the World Trade Center!” cried Megan, still weeks shy of her eighth birthday. “Where’s the other one?” Trent had laughed, anticipating the coming scenes depicting life in 2001. “You’ll see,” he said.

  The sun retained the brightness of midafternoon, though it was after five and Leslie, had she not taken a half-day from work, would be on the train home by now. The resumption of school still left what seemed an entire play day for Megan, who would go back outside for more than an hour after dinner. This plenitude, possible only in the first weeks of the school year, possessed the transient glamour of enchantment: one layer of time folded onto another. Partake while the feast is before you, she wanted to tell her daughter, who consumed her good fortune with youth’s grassfire prodigality.

  She brought a glass in for Trent, who had called up another map of Mesopotamia, this one showing the network of canals running between rivers and cities. “It’s all connect-the-dots on a flat surface,” he said in mild surprise. “I bet news travelled by boat and canal path, along these lines. Like a computer chip,” he added after a mom
ent.

  “Watch it with the cute conceits,” Leslie warned. She wondered whether the map’s density of crisscrossings (which seemed to include all the thirty or so Sumerian city-states, not the just Big Seven chosen for gaming purposes) was largely imaginative reconstruction. How many of those first distributaries could still be discerned beneath millennia of subsequent history, flooding, and war? Perhaps through satellite photography, of which the last decade must have seen a lot.

  Trent, angling his head to regard the map northside up, seemed to be thinking along the same lines. “The entire region is now part of . . .”

  “Iraq, yes.” Where children now perished for the imperial ambitions of their leaders, as had doubtless happened five thousand years ago.

  Trent grimaced. “At least Great Games never pandered to the help-kill-Saddam market.” He was reminding her that he had refused to get involved with a project called The Mother of All Battles nearly ten years ago, when turning down assignments was hard to do.

  Leslie recognized that she was looking for a reason to dislike the game. “Ancient Sumer was such a strange culture, you’re not going to gain a understanding of it by playing geopolitics.”

  “I don’t think this is all wargaming,” Trent replied as he clicked through a series of menus. “Here’s a module on the economy of mud bricks. Look, you have to bake the ones that go into the bottom rows, or they will draw moisture out of the ground. And you need wooden frames to make them, which are expensive.”

  “That’s not a mud brick,” Leslie pointed out. “It’s a clay tablet.”

  “Whoa, you’re right.” Trent backed up to restore a rectangular image that had appeared as a sidebar. “That might be a bad link.” He scribbled for a moment on a clipboard next to the monitor.

  Leslie leaned forward as Trent, exploring the program’s architecture, followed a series of links that brought up more cuneiform images: tablets, cylinders, a pieced-together stele. “Wait, stop,” she cried. The clay square on the screen was evidently small, as it contained only five rows of text. “I remember that one from college. See the first characters of the top three registers? They are ‘Day 1, Day 2, Day 3.’”

  “Really?” Trent studied the pictograms—a pair of curved lines, suggesting sunrise over the saddle between two hills, with one, two, and three vertical slashes beneath—while Leslie explained that the tablets dated from 3000 B.C., the dawn of writing, and that these three characters were for a long time the only ones on the tablet whose meaning was known. She had seen a slide of it in a history lecture, and when the teacher asked the class to guess she felt a thrill at the unmediated transmission of meaning, like current, across five thousand years. “How many hash marks till the base number?”

  “The Sumerians had a sexagesimal system, based on factors of sixty, but their place notation progressed in alternating tens and sixes. It was very complicated.”

  “Hey!” Trent looked delighted. “So their system partook of both hex and decimal.”

  “Watch it,” she repeated. “I didn’t say hexadecimal.” But Trent had already returned to the computer and was searching the game’s list of tables.

  Any history game that gave an explanation of the Sumerian notation system had a good chance of positioning itself out of the market, Leslie reflected as she returned to the living room. This one would have a tough time in any event, with Civilization III, the industry’s 900-lb. gorilla, about (she remembered Trent saying) to burst onto the scene. She wondered whether games that big paid their beta-testers.

  The living room window looked onto the front yard, away from the angled patterns of the condo complex behind them. Their lease allowed the owner to terminate on two months’ notice if he sold the house to the developers, who evidently had plans to expand the complex next spring. This agreement reduced the rent but also, they learned, discouraged the owner from maintaining his property.

  “History begins at Sumer.” And ended, presumably, a few years ago, at least according to that silly book her Dad sent her one Christmas. Leslie worried less about inhabiting a post-historical world than a post-boom one, which seemed now to be fully upon them.

  Trent was clicking rather than tapping, evidence he was venturing deeper into the game. Fair enough, late Friday afternoon in early September; it was anyway Leslie’s turn for supper. The DSL being free, she plugged in the laptop’s phone jack and went online, and spent the next twenty minutes (the ingredients for salad were already prepared) browsing through the pages that a search on Sumer, Akkad, Mesopotamia brought up.

  Gamespace isn’t textspace, which tilts the plane to create page, tablet, screen: upright to the eye like the drawings that words once were. Gamespace models the earth, a field of play for agents, not the gaze, to move through. Battlefield means battleground, its participants grounded as text never is. Sumer was a plain, even as its texts, lying forgotten beneath the successive accumulations of history, eventually become. You may claim equivalence, each plane perpendicular to its opposite, but the fallen tablets make clear which one subsumes the other.

  Perhaps the computer game holds out the promise of genuine space, the three dimensions produced by intersecting planes. A surface isn’t space at all, though references to “the white space” between words or “floor space” underfoot may seduce us into thinking otherwise. Leslie is undressing for bed, whose flat cotton expanse (it’s too hot for blankets) extends unbroken almost to fill the room. Pulling a fitted corner back over the mattress, she causes a spray of rills—converging on an adjacent corner like improbably straight ridges—to widen and disappear. Every bedsheet is a landscape.

  Sumerian scribes held their tablets at an angle while writing, as an old stele shows. So the act of writing takes place in space, even if it is read flat? Leslie plans to be asleep before Trent joins her; she is halfway there already. She can hear him in Megan’s room reading about Greeks besieging Troy, with occasional glosses. There are probably also excisions of repeated lines, although Leslie can’t hear them.

  Scribes excised lines with a wet finger, smoothing the clay to blankness. Dried clay couldn’t be altered, but fresh material was plentiful; Mesopotamia left no palimpsests like the scraped parchments of the West, too precious to discard. Leslie blanked texts at a stroke, words with no physical fixity dispersed even from the dance of forces that had briefly held them. Drawing the mouse across its pad, its faint drag pacing the ribbon she extended across the page, Leslie unworded the clumsy locution, restored the soothing emptiness, ready for words better chosen, as a child might fill in the surface she had scored. Scribes prepare their own tablets, but merchants are too busy, and Nanshe could push the set clay into the frame’s corners with stronger fingers than her brothers, who preferred to scoop mud and hurl. She was not allowed to cut reeds but could bring them to her father, who let her lift the damp fabric and make marks on the pristine square so long as she smoothed them before he needed it.

  A female scribe would be laughable, but women in merchant families were often taught to read. Nanshe plied needle, dowel, and chopping knife—awkwardly, but she could still hold a reed better than either brother. Carefully she positioned it between her fingers so that the nib was angled correctly, then sank it cleanly into the surface. The tactile pleasure of its yielding was intensified when she lifted the stylus to see the sharp wedge she had made. Twisting her fingers slowly, she added diagonal and perpendicular strokes: syllables, a word. She yearned to match her father’s fluency, but the pride she took in producing a recognizable “wheat” swelled her heart, and she drew the cover back over the tablet without effacing it, a secret message for her father to find.

  Dampness fled swiftly in the midday heat, and Nanshe stood up with the two frames in her arms and began to pick her way to the upper bank. Enannatum could bear them faster, but he and his friends were busy diverting a stream past their walled mud city, which would soon suffer attack from rival fortifications. Atop the rise, where a footpath paralleled the straight-ruled canal, Nanshe could
see across leagues of fields, orchards, and low shaded houses. It seemed readily plausible that if she set down her frames and climbed the nearest tree she would see, wavering on the horizon, the walls of the enemy.

  Writing, trade, and a premonition of the consequence: endless warfare and eventual destruction. Ineluctable modality of the geographical, the scribe thought as he rolled a fresh sheet into the platen; at least that if no more.

  He was a half dozen pages into a science-fiction story, about a nuclear war fought with long-range bombers. Given time, the Soviet Union would doubtless be able to fire rockets half-way round the world, children of the V-2 with H-bombs as warheads. At the moment it didn’t seem the world would wait that long.

  “There’s panic buying in the streets,” called Cyril from the front hall. The scribe heard the clink of bottles in the paper bag, and the sound of the door being kicked shut. He realized that he had been unconsciously listening to the elevator ascending, and had set down the book and returned to his story in anticipation of Cyril’s entrance.

  “Just closing time for the liquor stores,” he said calmly. “They’re not open Sunday.”

  “I know panic when I see it.” Cyril came in with a pair of bottles and an opener. “There will be fistfights in the grocer’s, old ladies trampled in the crush.”

  “Well, we’ll be sure not to hoard.” He flipped off the bottle cap and took a deep drink.

  “Whoever imagined Armageddon would arrive through the Suez? Hungary was galling enough. What’s this?” Cyril lifted the book off the chair and read the cover. “From the Tablets of Sumer. A subsidiary of Pfizer?”

  “You know very well what Sumer is,” the scribe retorted. “And the tablets are dried clay.”

  “My people used stone. Actually, we took whatever God handed out.”

  “And look where that got—” said both men together. Cyril grinned blackly and tossed the book onto the desk. “Not a great title,” he remarked.