by Judith Tarr
13
At long last the invaders left, lifting off in a bright and windy morning. The expedition could finally get back to its real work, and life could settle to a sensible routine.
Khalida had had enough of cataloguing and archiving to last for a while. She was also, if she admitted it, avoiding the overload of messages from offworld. She attached herself to the team that was carrying on with last year’s excavation.
They had cleared the circular floor with its white stone paving and its remnants of mosaic tiles. Now they were working their way underneath it, opening up a complex of rooms that the sensors said were there.
No one expected much. Underground crypts and secret chambers on this world always proved to have been cleaned out thoroughly or else buried so deep there was no getting into them. But archaeologists were perpetual optimists, and insatiably curious. At the very least they might find an interesting floor, or a wall painting with all the people and animals scoured away.
The entrance was blocked with rubble that took three days to clear—most of it spent scanning every millimeter to make sure the blockage had nothing of value in it. Khalida dug in with a pick and shovel, helping to clear away the last of the bits of broken stone from a flight of stone-carved steps. Rashid sifted the most interesting remnants beside her, and Marina inched ahead of them with the scanner.
The scanner showed one large room below, and a smaller one leading off it. Nothing of any size lived there—a snake or two, the usual crowd of insects, but no cave bear or plains lion. Not that there would have been. Animals avoided the city as carefully as most of the tribes did.
There was no gold, either. Nothing metal; no tomb or treasury. Something did show up in a smaller chamber off the large one, but it was blurred and ambiguous.
The last few centimeters of rubble took forever to clear and carry off in baskets. Rashid’s eyes gleamed with excitement, but he had never rushed an excavation yet, no matter what the temptation.
The sun was straight overhead when one of the interns carried the last basket off to the rubble heap. The entry stood open. Like most of the others that they had found in this part of Nevermore, it was wider and higher than Earth standard, as if designed for people who were over two meters tall and proportionately broad—though if there ever had been such people, they were long gone. The tribes tended toward the shorter end of human norm.
This particular doorway was made of stone, and there was a carving over the lintel, a common motif: the disk of the sun with a halo of rays. Often it was gilded. Here it was carved simply out of the pale gold stone.
The steps went down into the dark. The air that wafted up was cool, almost cold, and smelled of old stone. It was clean: the scanner had found nothing toxic in it.
Rashid had a biolume ready, the white light with its faintest hint of green barely visible in the sunlight. Khalida fished hers out of her pocket and shook it to life.
Marina was already on the stair, going down slowly, testing each step. Rashid followed. So did Khalida. The others had to wait. If there were paintings or manuscripts or artifacts made of something other than metal or stone, they were much too fragile to withstand a sudden invasion of trampling, breathing, sweating humanity.
Caution first and always. That was Rashid’s mantra.
~~~
The room was huge and surprisingly high. It seemed to mirror the structure above: a circle of pillars in the same pale-gold stone as the rest, each pair framing an arch and an empty niche. Statues might have stood in the niches, but those were gone.
The walls were plain. If they had been painted, they were no longer. They might have been hung with tapestries once. The floor was a mosaic of pale gold and white and an occasional fleck of crimson, intricate in its way and pleasant to look at.
At the far end was a wider arch than the others. Rashid and Marina were determined to walk completely around the chamber, in case there was something hidden in a niche or carved on a pillar. Khalida let curiosity lead her straight to the next room.
It was much smaller, and square. When she amped up her biolume, she almost bolted back out again.
She caught herself up short. Of course there was no one sitting there. It was a statue, which must be life size, or near enough.
It sat against the wall in a stone chair. The chair was starkly simple, carved of pale grey stone, almost silver, with a translucent sheen. The back was as striking as the rest was plain: yet another gilded sun, with rays that stretched to the far walls and the ceiling.
The figure in the chair was male, and looked as if it was carved in obsidian. It was bare above the waist, dressed in a kilt below; the kilt was painted a vivid and beautiful shade of scarlet. There were gilded sandals on the feet, laced to the knee, and a massive gilded belt around the statue’s middle, and a golden torque around its throat. On its head was a golden lion’s head. It could have been a helmet, or it might have been a crown.
The statue’s arms were weighted with golden ornaments. Its left hand rested on its knee. The right was lifted, palm outward. Painted on it was yet another image of the sun in splendor.
Her eyes insisted on taking in the whole, because she was trained to do that. Finally they let her focus on the thing that was most truly improbable.
The statue had Rama’s face. It was a perfect likeness, right down to the fierce curve of the nose and the slight upward tilt to the corner of the mouth.
Khalida let her breath out slowly. Rashid and Marina were talking behind her, as excited a babble as she had heard from them. The niches, it seemed, had inscriptions. Not that anyone could read them, but they were rare, and they were there.
When it came to rarity, this thing in front of her trumped them all. She found she wanted to keep it to herself for a few moments more.
It really was remarkably lifelike. Maybe he had been a priest, if the building was a temple. More likely he was a king. It was possible he was both.
There were inscriptions everywhere that the statue and the sun were not: up and down all the walls, over and around the door, even marching across the floor. Rashid would be beside himself. Khalida would rather have something she could read.
She backed out of the room—shrine, archive, hiding place, whatever it was. It felt right to do that. Kings in Earth’s history had not been fond of subjects who turned their backs. Kings here might have been different; she tended to think not.
~~~
The statue and its storeroom made Rashid ecstatic. If he recognized the statue’s face, he said nothing about it. His mind was so full, it was possible he never made the connection between Vikram’s assistant and the alien king.
Marina had to be dragged off at sundown and forced to eat and, Khalida hoped, sleep. Rashid might have camped in the room himself if he had not had Marina and the Brats to think about.
Khalida lent him a hand, and made sure he ate and slept, too. The house quieted down slowly. A buzz vibrated through them all, a thrum of excitement.
As everyone else fell asleep or tried to, she lay in her room, staring at the ceiling. On an ordinary night she would have fled to the computer. Tonight she pulled on boots and jacket and stuffed an extra biolume into her pocket, and went for a walk.
The temple’s site was dark and completely silent. With the excavation gone underground, there was nothing to see except the sealed door.
She had the code for that. She keyed it, waited for the door to phase off and let her through, then carefully rekeyed it behind her.
Nothing had changed down here. It had been night underground for several thousand years.
Rashid or Marina must have left a biolume in the smaller chamber. It was amped down to a dim glow, gold rather than green.
There were two statues in there. The new one stood upright, turned toward the left-hand wall.
Then he moved. His hand ran down the written lines. He murmured words, as if he were reading. They were not in a language she knew.
A shiver ran under her skin. What
she had spent most of the day trying to convince herself was not so, what had brought her here tonight because she had to make sure she was wrong, was alive and breathing and standing in front of her.
It was not just the face. Those ornaments, or ones remarkably like them, were locked in a box in the vault, all but the armlet with the herd of antelope running in a skein around and around it, the gold ring with the rayed sun carved on it that looked like a signet, and the torque that was gleaming now, as if generating its own light.
The person they called Rama never had worn the other two things while she could see him, but he seemed sincerely attached to the torque. It must mean something. Rank, prowess—whatever large, heavy, ridiculously expensive ornaments could mean in a culture.
“Priesthood,” he said, turning toward her.
His voice was soft in the dim golden light. Usually he spoke without identifiable accent. Now there was a distinct lilt to his speech, which reminded her of the words he had been reading off the wall.
In the day she might have scoffed, mocked, denied. Tonight she let it simply be. “Sun cult?”
He nodded.
She tilted her head toward the statue. “That’s your high priest?”
“No.”
“King?”
His head bent slightly.
“Ancestor?”
That he did not answer.
Physiological age: thirty to forty-five years. Chronological age...
Stasis, she thought.
There had been no such technology on this world. Before they all vanished, its people had reached the age of steel and simple mechanical devices. They never discovered gunpowder or steam or internal combustion. They never got that far.
Had they needed to?
“What were you?” she asked. “The captain who went down with his ship?”
“The threat that had to be contained.”
His voice was bleak but his face was calm. “All this is your fault?” she asked him.
“Do you know,” he said, and that seemed to bemuse him, “I don’t think it was. No one was abandoning the world on my account.”
“What did you do?”
“Too much, and not enough. Your king who wept because he had no more worlds to conquer? For me, it was rage.”
Psychically powered rage. Magic, they probably called it. “They couldn’t neuter you. They wouldn’t kill you. So they shut you off.”
“I think you would say they reset my programming.”
Khalida bit down on laughter. There was nothing humorous about it, but thinking of what she was doing here, and what she was talking to, and how preposterous it was—what other reaction could she have? “I gather you’re not mad any more.”
“Oh,” he said, “I am as thoroughly devoid of sanity as I ever was. But angry? No. That faded away in the long dream.”
“So you know what happened. Where they all went.”
“No,” he said.
Khalida blinked. “But you said—”
“Whatever happened, it happened long after I paid for my sins.”
“You can read the writing,” she said. “There must be something there.”
“Not here,” he said. “Not in your archive, either.”
“So what is this?” She swept her hand around the room with its treasury of alien words. “What does it say?”
“It’s a king list,” he said. “A chronicle. It stops before the end.”
“Just stops.”
“History generally does, on the day you write it.”
“How far does it go?”
“A thousand years, more or less.”
“Then it stops.”
“Then it was written. And someone carved a statue.”
“A portrait.”
He stood in front of it. His head tilted as he studied it. “You think it’s a clue.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Maybe they blamed me after all.”
“Or else they expected you to come out of stasis, look for answers, and end up here. It’s the only statue left intact on this planet.”
“And it leads me straight to myself.”
“I agree,” said Khalida, “a map would have made more sense. I don’t suppose you’ve found one anywhere around here?”
“Nothing but lists of kings and priests, and chronicles of reigns.”
“Well,” she said, “now we know you can read all this, you can teach the rest of us. We can help you look.”
His face shut down. “There is no we.”
“Why? We’re all commoners, so we’re not good enough for you?”
“You are all archaeologists.”
Khalida’s fit of temper evaporated. She was not an archaeologist. Her mind had a different slant.
She had had questions. This, however improbable, was an answer.
That was not what an archaeologist would see. Rashid and the rest had been praying for a stone, a dictionary, a translator, something, anything to open this world to them. That would allow them to continue their work in a universe of fading funding and bureaucratic idiocy.
A living relic, a being who had lived in that world, spoken some of its languages, read the writing that recorded them, known its history and culture not just as an observer but as a participant, was their fondest and most impossible dream. They would want to wring every scrap of knowledge out of him, and study him down to the subatomic particles that he was made of.
Right up until the moment when Centrum came to take him.
A discovery of this magnitude would never be allowed to remain in the hands of an already struggling expedition. Once United Planets discovered his particular talents, that would be the end of any hope of freedom that he might have had. They would never let him go.
“You see,” he said.
“Yes.”
He did not plead with her. He left her to think about what she should do, and whether, when she had discovered what that was, she could bring herself to do it.
14
It was amazing what people saw and didn’t see. The ancient statue and Vikram’s assistant didn’t connect in their minds at all.
Rama kept his head down and his mouth shut, which didn’t hurt. As far as anyone took the trouble to notice, he was just the Dreamtimer who lived in the stable and looked after the animals.
Aisha had the hardest time keeping quiet. This was the treasure she’d been looking for, and she couldn’t talk about it to anyone without causing all kinds of complications. Even Jamal would want more explanations than Aisha could come up with.
What could she say? That she’d blown open some kind of stasis chamber and let out Nevermore’s version of Alexander the Great? She wouldn’t believe it, either, if she hadn’t been in the middle of it.
It didn’t matter, anyway. Mother and Pater had the statue. That was all they needed to keep the expedition going.
Life wanted to go on in its normal way. The schoolbot was back up and running, and Pater had upped the difficulty level. There were horses to ride; Rama was still training antelope in the increasingly cooler mornings.
She went down once to look at the statue. It was a beautiful thing, and whoever made it had caught the expression perfectly. The ancient king had been proud and happy and full of himself, and absolutely sure that he was meant to rule the world. She could see people bowing in front of him and being glad to do it.
The Rama she knew was all damped down. The old king was still in there; she could feel it, and sometimes he showed flashes of it: when he rode a horse or an antelope, or when he had an audience he wanted to play to. But the long stasis and whatever had happened right before it had broken him inside. It was taking him a while to heal.
She tried to help. Most of that involved grooming antelope and learning how to saddle and bridle the stallion properly, and cleaning stalls and paddocks and feeding horses and patching them up when they got hurt, and when there was no one around, showing him how to navigate the computer system.
He
didn’t have any implants or uplinks. He didn’t need them. He could go right in and do what he wanted.
“It’s easier than reading minds,” he said. “It’s simpler. Trails are easier to follow.”
“This is just the house computer,” Aisha warned. “The worldsweb is ’way bigger and ’way more complicated.”
“Can you show me how to get to it?”
“I don’t have that implant yet,” she said. “I’m supposed to get it after my birthday. If I don’t—if Psycorps doesn’t—”
She couldn’t get any further than that, and he didn’t ask her to. He pulled up the expedition archive instead, and got her to teach him how to run search strings through the database. New scans came in every day now: they were recording the inscriptions under the temple.
He wasn’t interested in those. He could go down and read them for himself. He wanted the older ones, and the scans from other sites. Anything with words on it that they had in the database, he wanted to see.
He was looking at other things, too, mostly from Jamal’s files that Aisha wasn’t supposed to know about. Star maps. Ship’s schematics. He ran through Jamal’s collection of space-pirate stories in two days, swallowing them in one huge, mind-boggling gulp.
That might not have been a good idea, but by the time Aisha realized he was doing it, it was too late. Then he went off and had Vikram teach him to drive a rover, and repair one, too.
He had a plan. Aisha was fairly sure she knew what it was. She knew what she would do if she were Rama.
She couldn’t do anything about it, even if she’d had any idea how to begin. She had to get through her birthday, and the thing that was coming with it.
Maybe Psycorps would lose the record that said she existed. Maybe everybody else would forget she was turning thirteen Earthyears in six days, then three, and then it was tomorrow. They were all caught up in the new find. Aisha barely pinged their radar.
That night Pater cooked dinner, and he had all her favorites: tagine made with woolbeast meat, which was better than Earth lamb, and a huge platter of roasted vegetables from Mother’s garden, and most special of all, a pie made with real apples from Earth, and real cinnamon. He had that particular look when he brought it out, half mischievous, half excited.
